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Quotations From the Early Church Fathers

Appendix 1

HELL / AFTERLIFE

8/5/2025

Ignatius (d. 107)

Let us not, therefore, be insensible to His kindness. For were He to reward us according to our works, we should cease to be.
The Doctrine of Eternal Torment Was Not Universal in the Early Church | Rethinking Hell

Second Clement (A.D. 100-140) (No purgatory)

Let us repent with our whole heart of the evil things that we have done in the flesh, in order that we may be saved by the Lord while we still have time for repentance. For after we have left the world, we are no longer able there either to confess or to repent any more.
The Apostolic Fathers, Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. Edited and translated by Michael W. Holmes, 8.2-3

Irenaeus (A.D. 130-200)

Now separation from God is Death; and separation from light is darkness, and separation from God is casting away all the good things which come from Him … For though God punish them not by express dispensation, yet … they are deprived of all good things: and the good things from God being eternal and endless, the privation of them also is, of course, eternal and endless. Just as light being perpetual, those who have blinded themselves or have been blinded by others, are in perpetuity deprived of the enjoyment of light.
Against Heresies, bk. 5, ch. 27
*Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp and Polycarp was a disciple of the Apostle John

Those who, in this brief temporal life, have shown themselves ungrateful to Him who bestowed life, they will justly not receive from Him length of days forever and ever.
A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, editor David W. Bercot, pg. 243

…he who shall preserve the life bestowed upon him, and give thanks to Him who imparted it, shall receive also length of days for ever and ever. But he who shall reject it, and prove himself ungrateful to his Maker, inasmuch as he has been created, and has not recognized Him who bestowed [the gift upon him], deprives himself of [the privilege of] continuance forever and ever…those who, in this brief temporal life, have shown themselves ungrateful to Him who bestowed it, shall justly not receive from Him length of days for ever and ever.
The Doctrine of Eternal Torment Was Not Universal in the Early Church | Rethinking Hell

Hermas (A.D. 150)

Sinners will be consumed because they sinned and did not repent.

Those who have not known God and do evil are condemned to death. However, those who have known God and have seen His mighty works, but still continue in evil, will be chastised doubly, and will die forever.
(A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, editor David W. Bercot, pg. 242)

Theophilus of Antioch (A.D. 190)

Man was neither mortal nor immortal by nature … but was able to receive both. If he [kept] … the command of God, he would receive immortality as a reward from Him and would become [like] God, but if he … [disobeyed] God, he would be responsible for his own death. … Everyone who performs [God’s commands] can be saved and, attaining to the resurrection, can “inherit imperishability”
Rethinking Hell, Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism, edited by Chris Date, Greg Stump, Josh Anderson, pg. 120

Arnobius (d. 330)

Do you dare to laugh at us when we speak of hell, and fires which cannot be quenched, into which we have learned that souls are cast by their foes and enemies? What, does not your Plato also, in the book which he wrote on the immortality of the soul, name the rivers Acheron, Styx, Cocytus, and Pyriphlegethon, and assert that in them souls are rolled along, engulfed, and burned up? But though a man of no little wisdom, and of accurate judgment and discernment, he essays a problem which cannot be solved; so that, while he says that the soul is immortal, everlasting, and without bodily substance, he yet says that they are punished, and makes them suffer pain.

But what man does not see that that which is immortal, which is simple, cannot be subject to any pain; that, on the contrary, cannot be immortal which does suffer pain?

And yet his opinion is not very far from the truth. For although the gentle and kindly disposed man thought it inhuman cruelty to condemn souls to death, he yet not unreasonably supposed that they are cast into rivers blazing with masses of flame, and loathsome from their foul abysses. For they are cast in, and being annihilated, pass away vainly in everlasting destruction. For theirs is an intermediate state, as has been learned from Christ’s teaching; and they are such that they may on the one hand perish if they have not known God, and on the other be delivered from death if they have given heed to His threats and proffered favours. And to make manifest what is unknown, this is man’s real death, this which leaves nothing behind. For that which is seen by the eyes is only a separation of soul from body, not the last end—annihilation: this, I say, is man’s real death, when souls which know not God shall be consumed in long-protracted torment with raging fire, into which certain fiercely cruel beings shall cast them, who were unknown before Christ, and brought to light only by His wisdom.
History of Hell - Early Church Fathers on Hell Afterlife | Conditional Immortality

Athanasius (d. 373)

He brought them into His own garden, and gave them a law: so that, if they kept the grace and remained good, they might still keep the life in paradise without sorrow or pain or care besides having the promise of incorruption in heaven; but that if they transgressed and turned back, and became evil, they might know that they were incurring that corruption in death which was theirs by nature: no longer to live in paradise, but cast out of it from that time forth to die and to abide in death and in corruption.

For transgression of the commandment was turning them back to their natural state, so that just as they have had their being out of nothing, so also, as might be expected, they might look for corruption into nothing in the course of time. For if, out of a former normal state of non-existence, they were called into being by the Presence and loving-kindness of the Word, it followed naturally that when men were bereft of the knowledge of God and were turned back to what was not (for what is evil is not, but what is good is), they should, since they derive their being from God who IS, be everlastingly bereft even of being; in other words, that they should be disintegrated and abide in death and corruption.

The human race then was wasting, God’s image was being effaced, and His work ruined. Either, then, God must forego His spoken word by which man had incurred ruin; or that which had shared in the being of the Word must sink back again into destruction, in which case God’s design would be defeated. What then? Was God’s goodness to suffer this? But if so, why had man been made? It would have been weakness, not goodness on God’s part.

And thus taking from our bodies one of like nature, because all were under penalty of the corruption of death He gave it over to death in the stead of all, and offered it to the Father — doing this, moreover, of His loving-kindness, to the end that, firstly, all being held to have died in Him, the law involving the ruin of men might be undone (inasmuch as its power was fully spent in the Lord’s body, and had no longer holding-ground against men, his peers), and that, secondly, whereas men had turned toward corruption, He might turn them again toward incorruption, and quicken them from death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of the Resurrection, banishing death from them like straw from the fire.

For man dies, not by his own power, but by necessity of nature and against his will; but the Lord, being Himself immortal, but having a mortal flesh, had power, as God, to become separate from the body and to take it again, when He would. Concerning this too speaks David in the Psalm, ‘Thou shalt not leave My soul in hades, neither shalt Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption.’ For it beseemed that the flesh, corruptible as it was, should no longer after its own nature remain mortal, but because of the Word who had put it on, should abide incorruptible. For as He, having come in our body, was conformed to our condition, so we, receiving Him, partake of the immortality that is from Him.
History of Hell - Early Church Fathers on Hell Afterlife | Conditional Immortality

Resources:

This article explains the literal rather than metaphorical death interpretation of these passages:

Warned of Sin’s Wages: A Concise Explanation of Death in Genesis 2:17 and Romans 6:23 | Rethinking Hell

Here is the Rethinking Hell Website. Scroll down to the Bible verse you are curious about:

Explore Evangelical Conditionalism | Rethinking Hell

Here is a short YouTube playlist I made:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJPVnbhICSNlqGrSZ05y_aXIekA7OK9_I&si=cBq8TPSEwAiXVKix

This article explains the different stories and background information of the Rich Man and Lazarus story and how Jesus naming “Lazarus” is not necessarily indicative that Jesus was speaking about an actual historical event:

Hypocrisy, Not Hell: The Polemic Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man | Rethinking Hell

Here is a free book addressing Annihilationism which I have not read yet but was accessed through a link from the ReThinking Hell website:

The Bible Teaches Annihilationism by Joseph Dear

Bible translations used here:

All quotations taken from NASB 1995 unless otherwise specified.