In brief#

Genesis does something unusual: it tells us why God barred the way back into the garden. The reason given is that otherwise the man would reach out, take from the tree of life, eat, and live for ever. Access to the tree is connected in the text itself to continuing to live.

The tree reappears at the end of Revelation. It stands inside the city, on either side of the river. Those who wash their robes have the right to it and enter by the gates. Others are outside, and the text names them.

Put together, the two scenes describe continued life as something granted and guarded rather than something possessed. That is the heart of conditional immortality (CI), the view that endless life is a gift given in Christ rather than a property every human being holds by nature. Eternal conscious torment (ECT) is the view that the finally unrighteous exist for ever in conscious suffering.

One step in the usual conditionalist presentation of this argument is a theological inference rather than something Scripture states, and this page marks it clearly. The main argument does not depend on it.

The tree in Genesis#

Out of the ground Yahweh God made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Genesis 2:9WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain
Yahweh God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand, and also take of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever...” Therefore Yahweh God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed cherubim/f + cherubim are powerful angelic creatures, messengers of God with wings. See Ezekiel 10./f* at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.
Genesis 3:22-24WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Two things stand in the garden: the tree, and the presence of the Lord. On the day the man and the woman ate from the other tree, they hid themselves, and the relationship they had enjoyed with God was broken. God then removed them from the garden and set a guard on the way to the tree of life.

The source document reads these as two kinds of sustenance, physical and spiritual, and reads the expulsion as a severing of both. That framing is a reading of the narrative rather than something Genesis states in those terms, and it should be held as such. What Genesis does state is the reason for the guard, and the reason is about living for ever.

The reason God gives#

This is the load-bearing point. Scripture rarely explains God's motives, and here it does. The concern is not that the man would enjoy the tree's benefits or its beauty. The concern named is that he would eat and live for ever.

That connects the tree to the continuation of life, not merely to the quality of life. And what follows in the narrative matches: outside the garden the man works the ground he was taken from, and in due course returns to it. Their bodies became mortal in the plain sense that they eventually died.

The tree in Revelation#

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the assemblies. To him who overcomes I will give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of my God.
Revelation 2:7WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain
He showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On this side of the river and on that was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruits, yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will be no curse any more. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no night, and they need no lamp light; for the Lord God will illuminate them. They will reign forever and ever.
Revelation 22:1-5WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain
Blessed are those who do his commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city. Outside are the dogs, the sorcerers, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
Revelation 22:14-15WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Three features of these texts matter for the argument. The tree is promised as a reward to the one who conquers. The tree is located inside the city, in the same place as the throne and the presence of God, exactly as it was located with God's presence in the garden. And access to it is stated as a right belonging to a defined group, with others described as outside.

Whether the people described as outside in Revelation 22:15 are actually present at that moment, or whether the verse is a recapitulation addressed to present readers, is disputed. That question is taken up in S28, on whether the wicked are still present after Revelation 20. The argument on this page works either way, because it turns on who has access to the tree rather than on who is standing where.

How ECT interpreters read the tree#

The traditional reading is not that the tree is unimportant. It is that the tree is about blessing rather than about bare existence.

On this reading, the tree of life signifies the fullness of life in God's presence: life in the qualitative, covenantal sense that runs through Scripture, where to live is to be in fellowship with God and to die is to be cut off from him. Exclusion from the tree is therefore exclusion from blessedness, not from being. Defenders of the traditional view can point out that Revelation 22:2 speaks of the leaves of the tree healing the nations, which is language about flourishing, and that Revelation itself describes the second death in terms of a state rather than a cessation. They can also point out that a symbol in an apocalyptic vision is a poor basis for a claim about the mechanics of created existence.

Many who hold ECT would add a further answer. God raises all the dead, righteous and unrighteous alike, for judgment. If God's own act of resurrection gives the unrighteous a body that endures, then their continued existence does not depend on the tree at all, and their exclusion from it says nothing about whether they persist.

The conditionalist response#

The conditionalist reply to the first point is short, and it is the reason this argument is made at all. Genesis supplies the reason for the exclusion, and the reason is stated in terms of living for ever. Scripture is not silent here and left to be filled in by a theory of what life language means elsewhere. The stated concern is continued life. That does not exclude the qualitative sense of life; it does mean the qualitative sense cannot be the whole of it.

The reply to the second point is that Scripture describes an imperishable resurrection body for those raised in Christ, and never says the unrighteous receive one. That case is made in S22, on conditional immortality, and it is the argument this page leans on rather than one it establishes.

The step that is inference, not exegesis#

The source document says that in the new creation we will apparently continue to eat from the tree in order to sustain our bodies. That word apparently is the right one, and it is preserved here.

This is a theological inference, not a statement Scripture makes. Revelation says the tree is there, that it bears fruit and that its leaves heal the nations. It does not say that resurrected bodies would fail without it, and it is entirely possible that the tree is an image of the life God gives rather than a mechanism by which he gives it.

The exclusion argument does not depend on that inference being correct. The argument is that God guarded the tree in Genesis for a stated reason connected with living for ever, and that in Revelation the tree stands inside a city from which some are excluded. Both of those are things the text says. Whether or not the redeemed are sustained by eating from it, the pattern of guarded access to unending life remains, and the unrighteous are on the wrong side of the guard.

The question the source presses#

The source document ends this section with a question. If God would not permit Adam and Eve to live for ever in their fallen condition, why would he grant the wicked unending existence in conscious torment?

It is a question rather than a demonstration, and the traditional view has answers to it, including the one noted above about resurrection. But it does put the matter in a useful light. On the conditionalist reading, God's action in Genesis and God's action at the end are the same action: unending life is his to give, it is bound up with his presence, and it is given in Christ.

What this argument establishes#

  • Genesis links access to the tree with living for ever, and gives that as the reason for the exclusion.
  • In Revelation the tree stands inside the city, access to it is a right belonging to a defined group, and others are described as outside it.
  • Continued life is presented across both scenes as something granted and guarded rather than something inherent.

What it does not establish by itself#

  • The mechanics of how resurrected bodies are sustained. That is inference and is labelled as such above.
  • That the tree is a literal tree rather than an image. The argument does not require an answer either way.
  • That the qualitative sense of life is absent from these texts. It is present; the claim is that it is not the whole of what is meant.

Sources and notes#

[Dear]

The two-kinds-of-sustenance reading of the garden and the inference about eating from the tree in the new creation are both the source document's, and both are labelled on this page as readings rather than as statements of Scripture.