By Steve Willis
This is from a review of a review of their new publication: The Mystery of Salvation. The book has not been available to the reviewers at the time of writing, but this is based on interviews and reports from England:
“On the 11th day of January, Anno Domini MCMX- CVI, the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England published a 220-page report, The Mystery of Salvation. There the theologians of the ‘middle way’ declare there is indeed a Hell. But it’s not a place of suffering, physical or otherwise. It is ‘total non-being.’
“‘Total non-being,’ marvels a skeptical [sic] Peter Kreeft, a philosopher at Boston College and author of A Handbook on Christian Apologetics. ‘Hell exists, but if you’re there, you don’t. They endorse the existence of what isn’t, the being of non-being. How very inclusive.
“Two weeks after its publication, The Mystery of Salvation is still non-existent at the Anglican Church of Canada’s headquarters in Toronto. But according to media reports from London, the document treats the bare-bones existence of hell as a logical necessity. ‘No one can be compulsorily installed in heaven,’ it is quoted as saying. ‘The possibility remains for each human being of a final rejection of God’” (Alberta Report, “Hell hath no fury — at all” [Jan 29, 1996], 32).
Some of this doctrine seems similar to the Jehovah’s Witness teaching on hell, and not a lot different than that presented by Edward Fudge in his book The Fire that Consumes. Fudge is mentioned and answered in a book, Repent or Perish (With a Special Reference to the Conservative Attack on Hell) by John H Gerstner. (Note: Gerstner to holds the Calvinist doctrine that children are born in guilt and in sin and he denies baptismal regeneration.)