If he really believed that the alternative to life in Christ is eternal torment, it seems fairly careless of him to have omitted any mention of the fact. In every instance in which he names the stakes of our relation to Christ, he describes salvation as rescue from death, not from perpetual torture. I know it is traditional to take “death” here as meaning “spiritual death,” which really means not death in any obligingly literal and terminal sense, but instead endless agony in separation from God; but Paul would have had to be something of a cretin not to have made that absolutely clear if that
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