And now, who is responsible for this God-dishonoring doctrine? And what is his purpose? The promulgator of it is Satan himself; and his purpose in introducing it has been to frighten the people away from studying the Bible and to make them hate God.
— Joseph Franklin Rutherford, Watchtower Society's Second President [1]
How can Christians possibly project a deity of such cruelty and vindictiveness whose ways include inflicting everlasting torture upon his creatures, however sinful they may have been? Surely a God who would do such a thing is more nearly like Satan than like God, at least by any ordinary moral standards, and by the gospel itself.
— Clark Pinnock, Professor and Noted Evangelical Author [2]
Christians through the centuries have affirmed that those who do not accept God's offer of salvation in Christ will suffer conscious, everlasting torment. Denial of this teaching has, until recently, been limited almost exclusively to cultic or quasi-cultic groups. For example, the Jehovah's Witnesses vociferously reject the orthodox teaching on hell, denouncing it as an error of apostate Christendom. They teach that the wicked will be "annihilated" rather than suffer eternal torment. Likewise, Herbert Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God, Christian Science, Mormonism, and the New Age movement all repudiate the orthodox doctrine. Besides these undeniably cultic groups, the Seventh-day Adventists also reject the historic doctrine in favor of annihilation. [3] While Seventh-day Adventism may not be a cult in the technical theological sense of the term I am using here, [4] they nonetheless have been perceived commonly as a "fringe" group by orthodox Christians. [5] Read all the articles HERE
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