Its character is ethical rather than mathematical. The deepest significance of the life beyond time lies, not in endlessness, but in the moral quality of the aeon into which the life passes. The principal, the tremendous fact, as Christ unmistakably puts it, was that, in the new aeon, the motives, the aims, the conditions, the successes and awards of time counted for nothing. In the new life the soul was first and everything, and the barns and storehouses nothing. The bliss of the sanctified does not consist primarily in its endlessness, but in the nobler moral conditions of the new aeon, the years of the holy and eternal God.
Duration is a secondary idea.
When it enters it enters as an accompaniment and outgrowth of moral conditions. In the present passage it is urged that olethron destruction points to an unchangeable, irremediable, and endless condition. If this be true, if olethros is extinction , then the passage teaches the annihilation of the wicked, in which case the adjective aionios is superfluous, since extinction is final, and excludes the idea of duration. But olethros does not always mean destruction or extinction . Take the kindred verb apollumi to destroy, put an end to , or in the middle voice, to be lost, to perish .