In brief#

Revelation 21:8 names the cowardly, the faithless and the rest, and says their portion is in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur. Revelation 22:15 says that dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters are outside. Both sentences fall after the New Jerusalem has come down. If they are a running report of who is where in the new creation, then the lost are still in existence long after the lake of fire of Revelation 20, and conditional immortality (CI) has a serious problem.

This page argues that both passages read most naturally as recapitulation: a summary of who inherits what, addressed to present readers about present conduct. It also argues that even a strictly sequential reading does not leave those outside alive indefinitely, because the thing they are shut out from is the tree of life.

The passages#

But for the cowardly, unbelieving, sinners, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their part is in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”
Revelation 21:8WEB, 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

Why this is read as continued existence#

The objection is a good one, and it deserves to be stated at full strength before anything is said in reply.

By Revelation 21:8 the vision has already announced a new heaven and a new earth and the passing of the former things. Revelation 21:8 is not a flashback tucked into the middle of that announcement; it comes as part of the same speech from the throne. Revelation 22:15 is stronger still. It does not say that certain people were destroyed. It says they are outside, and outside is a location. A location suggests occupants. The list that follows is a list of people, not of abstractions or of vices in the abstract.

Put those together with Revelation 20:10, where the lake of fire is described as a place of torment day and night forever and ever, and the traditional reading has a coherent shape: the lake of fire is a permanent condition rather than an event that ends, the second death names that condition, and Revelation 22:15 shows us the excluded still there once the city has descended. On this reading the burden falls on anyone who wants to say that the plainly sequential book is not sequential at exactly this point.

That is a real argument. No one should wave it away.

The recapitulation reading#

The tell is in the verse immediately before#

Revelation 22:14 pronounces a blessing on those who wash their robes. Washing robes is something a reader does now. It is not an act performed after the day of judgment, when the verdict has already been given. So verse 14 is addressing living people about their present conduct and telling them what that conduct leads to.

Verse 15 is the other half of the same sentence pattern. If verse 14 describes present people and their prospect, the most natural reading is that verse 15 describes present people and their prospect too. The passage is sorting the audience, not surveying the population of the new creation.

Revelation 21:8 answers Revelation 21:7#

The same pattern governs the earlier passage. Revelation 21:7 promises an inheritance to the one who conquers. Revelation 21:8 sets out the contrasting portion for those characterised by the opposite. It is a statement about two classes of present hearers and what each will receive. It is a recap of what people now described as cowardly and faithless are heading for, which the vision has already shown in Revelation 20: the second death in the lake of fire.

The eternal conscious torment reading

Revelation 21:8 and 22:15 come after the descent of the city, so they report the state of affairs in the new creation. The lost are outside it, consciously and permanently.

The conditionalist reading

Both verses address present readers about present conduct and name the portion that conduct leads to. They recapitulate the judgment already narrated in Revelation 20 rather than reporting a later moment.

Three further considerations#

The new creation is where righteousness dwells#

But, according to his promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.
2 Peter 3:13WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

The promise is not that righteousness will occupy one district of the new creation while the unrighteous occupy the surrounding country. The description is of the whole thing.

Even read literally, exclusion from the tree of life is fatal#

Suppose someone insists that Revelation 22:15 describes a literal moment at the opening of the coming kingdom. It still would not stay that way. The emphasis of the verse falls on the word outside, and what those people are outside of is a city with the tree of life in it.

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
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

Access to that tree is what the whole of Scripture treats as the condition of continuing life, from Genesis 3:22-24 onward. Anyone permanently cut off from it does not go on living permanently. On a literal reading of the geography, the literal consequence of standing outside is death. That argument is developed at length in the section on the tree of life.

A question about where everyone is standing#

There is also a picture problem worth naming lightly. If the unrighteous are simultaneously outside the city gates and in the lake of fire, we are being asked to imagine the heavenly city descending onto the new earth and coming to rest on lake-front property. The point is not that the imagery must be tidy. The point is that a strictly literal and strictly sequential reading of these verses is harder to hold together than it first appears.

Those who do not inherit the kingdom#

Paul says the same thing in plainer language in three places.

Or don’t you know that the unrighteous will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Don’t be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor extortionists, will inherit the Kingdom of God.
1 Corinthians 6:9-10WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain
Now the works of the flesh are obvious, which are: adultery, sexual immorality, uncleanness, lustfulness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, strife, jealousies, outbursts of anger, rivalries, divisions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these; of which I forewarn you, even as I also forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God.
Galatians 5:19-21WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain
Know this for sure, that no sexually immoral person, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and God.
Ephesians 5:5WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Each is a list of the kind of conduct that marks a person now, and each says what such people will not receive. That is the same move Revelation makes. It also raises a question worth asking of the traditional reading: is God's future kingdom bounded by the city walls, or does it cover the whole earth? If it covers the whole earth, there is no outside left to stand in.

What this argument establishes#

  • The verses immediately surrounding both lists address present readers about present conduct, which is what a recapitulation looks like.
  • Scripture describes the new creation as the place where righteousness dwells, without carving out a region for the unrighteous.
  • Even on a literal, sequential reading, those outside have no access to the tree of life, so the reading does not secure their indefinite survival.

What it does not establish by itself#

Recapitulation is not the only possible reading of these verses, and this page does not claim that it is. Revelation is a difficult book, and careful interpreters disagree about how much of it runs in sequence. What the argument does is remove Revelation 21:8 and 22:15 from the list of passages that settle the question against conditional immortality, and it leaves the weight of the case where the rest of this site puts it.

  • The tree of life and conditional life, for the argument that continuing life is granted rather than owned.
  • Revelation 20: the lake of fire and the second death.
  • No more death, mourning, crying, or pain, for the description of the new creation.

Sources and notes#

Joseph Dear's book-length treatment of annihilationism covers the Revelation material in much greater detail than this page does, from a conditionalist standpoint.

[Dear]