Chapter 5

The Nature of Hell — God’s Purifying and Consuming Presence

I want you to forget almost everything you have ever been taught about hell. Just for a moment. Set aside the medieval paintings of demons poking sinners with pitchforks. Set aside the picture of a dark cavern far away from God, filled with screaming souls. Set aside the angry God who sends people to a torture chamber because He is offended. Set all of that aside, and let me show you something different. Something, I believe, that is more honest to what Scripture actually says—and far more challenging than the old cartoon version ever was.

Here is the starting point, and it may surprise you: hell is not a place where God is absent. Hell is the experience of standing in the unmediated, blazing presence of a holy God—and hating it. God’s love is like fire. For those who love Him, it is warmth and light and unspeakable joy. For those who have rejected everything He is, that same love is agony. Not because God has changed. Not because He has flipped a switch from “loving” to “wrathful.” The fire is the same fire. The difference is in us.

This is the understanding of hell shared by both the universalist and the conditionalist in this book. We both believe that hell is God’s purifying presence. We both believe the fire is real—not because God creates some special punishing substance, but because His very nature is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). Where we disagree—and it is a crucial disagreement—is on what happens to those who stand in that fire and refuse to let it purify them. The universalist says the fire always wins, always finds something worth saving, always brings every soul through to restoration. The conditionalist says something more sobering: that a creature can so thoroughly and freely reject the fire that it is consumed by it, and ceases to exist.

That is what this chapter is about. I want to walk you through the biblical picture of God as a consuming fire, show you why this framework is powerful and true, and then make the case that this very framework—when you follow it all the way through—leads more naturally to conditional immortality than to universal restoration.

The Universalist Vision: A Fire That Always Heals

I need to start by telling you honestly: the universalist reading of hell as purifying fire is beautiful. It is one of the most compelling aspects of the universalist case, and if you hold that view, I understand exactly why. I was drawn to it myself. So let me lay it out as fairly as I can, because I want you to feel that I truly get what you believe and why.

The universalist begins with a stunning insight that comes to us mainly from the Eastern Orthodox tradition. For much of Western church history, we have imagined hell as a place of God’s absence—a dark realm where God withdraws His presence and sinners are left in outer darkness. But the Eastern tradition, drawing on writers like Isaac of Nineveh, a seventh-century Syriac mystic, offers a radically different picture. Isaac wrote that those in Gehenna are “scourged by the scourge of love,” and that it would be wrong to think that sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love.¹ The pain of hell, Isaac insisted, is not the absence of love. It is the presence of love—experienced by those who have made themselves incapable of receiving it.

Alexandre Kalomiros, a twentieth-century Greek Orthodox thinker, took this idea even further in his famous lecture “The River of Fire.” Kalomiros argued that the Western church had fundamentally distorted God’s character by turning Him into a wrathful judge who sends people to a torture chamber. The real picture, Kalomiros insisted, is that God’s love is a river of fire that flows from the throne. For the saints, this river is paradise. For those who hate God, the same river is torment.² The fire does not change. We change. And for the universalist, this is precisely the point: the fire of God’s love will keep burning until every last trace of resistance is consumed, until every soul finally surrenders and enters the joy of God’s presence freely.

The universalist case rests on several key biblical texts. First, Malachi 3:2–3: “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.” The universalist reads this image and asks: What kind of refiner destroys the gold? A refiner who threw the precious metal into the fire and walked away would be a failed refiner. The whole point of refining is to save the gold and burn away the impurities.³ If God is a refiner, the universalist argues, then His fire must have restoration as its goal. A fire that destroys the very thing it is meant to purify has failed in its purpose.

Second, 1 Corinthians 3:12–15: “Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” The universalist finds the final clause decisive: “he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” The fire burns. The fire hurts. But in the end, the person comes through. The impurities are destroyed, but the person survives.⁴ Universalists like Robin Parry and David Bentley Hart extend this principle to all of humanity: everyone will pass through God’s purifying fire, and everyone will emerge on the other side, scarred perhaps, but saved.

Third, the universalist presses the image of God argument. Every person, no matter how wicked, bears the image of God. That image may be defaced, scarred, buried under layers of sin and rebellion. But it is still there. The image of God is not something humans earn—it is something they are. And the universalist insists that this image cannot be fully eradicated. If God’s fire is purifying, then it will always find something worth saving, because the image of God is always present, however faintly.⁵

Hart puts the point with characteristic force. He argues that if God created every human being as an image-bearer, and if God is truly sovereign over His creation, then the permanent destruction of any image-bearer represents a real defeat for God. It means a piece of God’s creation has been permanently lost to evil. The universalist finds this unthinkable. A God who allows even one of His image-bearers to be finally and irrevocably destroyed is a God whose purposes have been frustrated—a God who has, in some meaningful sense, lost.⁶

Finally, the universalist draws on the Triumph of Mercy tradition, which reads the biblical fire imagery consistently as purificatory. On this reading, even the apocalyptic “lake of fire” in Revelation is understood as the refiner’s crucible. The Greek word for brimstone, theion, is spelled identically to the adjective meaning “divine.” The ancients used sulfur for purification and temple cleansing.⁷ The lake of fire, on this reading, is the divine purification pool—the place where even God’s most stubborn enemies are finally, lovingly, and completely refined.

Isaac of Nineveh’s vision is worth dwelling on for a moment, because it is deeply moving. Isaac imagined the souls in Gehenna not as people abandoned by God, but as people overwhelmed by God. They are not in darkness. They are in too much light. The love of God presses in on them from every side, and because they have spent their lives resisting that love, the experience is excruciating. But for Isaac, the pain itself is the instrument of healing. The scourge of love stings—but it stings in the way a surgeon’s knife stings, cutting away disease so that health can return. Isaac believed that this process would continue until every last creature had been healed by God’s relentless, fiery, painful, glorious love.⁴⁸

Parry develops this line of thinking in The Evangelical Universalist by connecting it to the broader narrative of Scripture. He argues that the whole arc of the biblical story is one of redemption and restoration. Creation, fall, redemption, consummation—and at the consummation, everything is made new. Everything. Not most things. Not many things. Everything. The fire of God is the final chapter of this story, and it cannot end with some of God’s creatures being permanently destroyed. If it did, the story would end not with total restoration but with permanent loss—and that, Parry contends, is not the story Scripture tells.⁴⁹

I feel the weight of this argument. I really do. If you are a universalist reading this chapter, I want you to know: I understand why you believe what you believe. This vision of God’s fire as always-healing, always-restoring love has tremendous beauty and power. The picture of a God whose love is so relentless that it simply will not stop until every last creature is home—that is a vision that stirs the heart.

But I have come to believe it is not the whole picture. And I want to show you why.

The CI Response and Positive Case: A Fire That Purifies and Consumes

Let me begin with a confession. I agree with almost everything the universalist has just said—up to a point. I agree that hell is the experience of God’s unmediated presence. I agree that God’s love is like fire. I agree that this fire is genuinely purifying for those who submit to it. I agree that the Eastern Orthodox insight is profoundly important and far more biblical than the Western “torture chamber” picture. I agree that Isaac of Nineveh and Kalomiros were pointing at something real and essential about God’s character.

Where I part company is on one crucial question: What happens to those who will not submit?

The universalist assumes that the fire always wins. That no matter how long it takes, no matter how stubborn the resistance, every soul will eventually surrender and be purified. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if the same fire that purifies the willing also consumes the unwilling—not because God has changed His posture, but because that is simply what fire does when it meets something that refuses to be refined?

Our God Is a Consuming Fire

The single most important text for this chapter is Hebrews 12:29: “For our God is a consuming fire.” Not merely a refining fire. Not merely a purifying fire. A consuming fire. The writer of Hebrews chose this word deliberately. The Greek phrase is pyr katanaliskon—fire that devours completely, fire that uses up what it touches.⁸

This phrase is drawn directly from Deuteronomy, where it appears twice. Deuteronomy 4:24: “For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.” And Deuteronomy 9:3: “Know therefore today that he who goes over before you as a consuming fire is the LORD your God.” In the original Deuteronomy context, the consuming fire language is associated with God’s judgment against His enemies—the nations that oppose Israel are consumed by God’s fiery advance.⁹

Think carefully about what “consuming” means here. When fire consumes a piece of wood, the wood does not come out refined on the other side. It is gone. The fire has done its work, and there is nothing left. Now, the universalist will say: “But gold is not consumed by fire—it is purified.” True. That is exactly the point. Whether fire purifies or consumes depends entirely on the nature of the material. Gold survives the fire and comes out purer. Dross is consumed by it and ceases to exist. The question is not about the fire’s character. The fire is the same fire in both cases. The question is about what is placed in it.

Edward Fudge puts the matter clearly when discussing Hebrews 12:29 alongside the earlier warning in Hebrews 10:27, which speaks of “a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.” Fudge observes that the author of Hebrews explicitly connects God’s nature as a consuming fire with the destruction of those who oppose Him. The fire is God Himself—His holiness, His love, His very being. And that fire consumes what is set against it.¹⁰ As A. W. Pink once wrote, just as a fire consumes combustible matter that is cast into it, so God will destroy sinners who stand against His holiness.¹¹

Isaiah 33:14–16 — Who Can Dwell with the Consuming Fire?

One of the most striking passages in all of Scripture on this theme is Isaiah 33:14–16. The prophet writes: “The sinners in Zion are afraid; trembling has seized the godless: ‘Who among us can dwell with the consuming fire? Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?’ He who walks righteously and speaks uprightly, who despises the gain of oppression, who shakes his hands, lest they hold a bribe, who stops his ears from hearing of bloodshed and shuts his eyes from looking on evil—he will dwell on the heights.”

This passage is remarkable. The question is not “Who can escape the fire?” The question is “Who can dwell with it?” The answer: only the righteous. The fire is God Himself—His eternal holiness, His everlasting burnings. The righteous can live in His presence because they have been made fit for it. The sinners cannot, because the fire of God’s holiness is lethal to everything impure.¹²

Fudge notes that the “everlasting burning” in verse 14 parallels the “consuming fire” in verse 11, and both refer to God in His holiness. The passage pictures total destruction by fire in verses 11–12—the wicked ignite themselves by their own sins and burn “as if to lime,” blazing like “cut thorn bushes.” This is not refinement. This is incineration.¹³

Now, here is what I find so powerful about this passage for our discussion. Isaiah is not describing a fire separate from God. He is describing God Himself as the fire. And the question is binary: either you can dwell with this fire, or you cannot. There is no middle option where you refuse to be purified but the fire keeps working on you indefinitely. The fire is permanent. The question is whether you can survive it. The righteous can. The wicked cannot. That is Isaiah’s point, and it reads far more naturally as conditionalism than as universalism.

I want you to sit with this image for a moment. Picture a room filled with the white-hot glory of God. The righteous walk through it like the three young men walked through Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace in Daniel 3—untouched, unharmed, even joyful. The fire cannot hurt them because they are made of the right stuff. They have been clothed in the righteousness of Christ. They belong in the fire the way gold belongs in the crucible.

Now picture someone who has rejected God. Who has spent a lifetime—and perhaps the entire postmortem opportunity—saying no to every advance of divine love. That person walks into the same room. The same fire. But this person is made of different stuff. Not gold, but straw. Not silver, but chaff. What happens when chaff meets a consuming fire? It does not come out refined. It does not emerge on the other side purified. It is consumed. And there is nothing left.

The universalist will say: “But there is always something left. The image of God cannot be entirely burned away.” We will examine that claim shortly. But Isaiah’s vision does not support it. Isaiah’s vision is stark: those who walk righteously can dwell with the consuming fire. Those who do not, cannot. The fire does not discriminate between good parts and bad parts of the person. It simply consumes what is not fit to stand in God’s presence.

Sharon Baker’s Framework: The Fiery Final Choice

I want to introduce you to a thinker who has shaped my understanding of this topic more than almost anyone else. Sharon Baker was a religion and theology professor who wrote a provocative book called Razing Hell. Baker’s own sympathies lean toward universalism—she hopes all will be saved. But her framework, honestly followed, actually provides the strongest possible foundation for conditional immortality. Let me show you why.

Baker develops a vivid thought experiment about a character named Otto—a brutal dictator who has committed unspeakable atrocities during his lifetime. Otto dies and stands before God. What happens next, Baker argues, is not that Otto is shipped off to some far-away dungeon. Instead, Otto stands in the fiery presence of God Himself.¹⁴

In God’s presence, Otto experiences the fire of divine love. That love acts as judgment against the total excessiveness of his sin. He sees his victims. He feels their pain. The fire burns away his wickedness—and this process is agonizing. Baker describes it in unforgettable terms: Otto hears his victims’ screams, sees their battered bodies, feels their grief as if it were his own. The fire strips away every layer of self-deception. This is hell. With gnashing teeth and uncontrollable weeping, Otto’s heart breaks in utter remorse.¹⁵

But here is where Baker’s framework becomes decisive for our debate. Baker acknowledges that after the purifying fire has done its work, Otto faces a choice. God says to him, in effect: “I have loved you with an everlasting love. I forgive you. Will you be reconciled to me?” And Otto can say yes. Baker hopes that Otto does say yes. She hopes everyone does.

But Baker is too honest to stop there. She writes: “The possibility exists, however, that Otto does not accept God’s offer of restoration, or that after the testing by fire, nothing remains of him at all. Nothing.”¹⁶ In order to preserve human freedom, which God gave us at creation, we must allow for the possibility that some people will still reject God. The fire does not eliminate the gift of human freedom.

Baker then explores two scenarios. In one, Otto rejects God and is thrown into what she calls “the lake of fire,” where he is completely destroyed—annihilated. In the other, the lake of fire is God’s fiery presence, and after the purification process, there simply is nothing left of Otto at all. The fire has burned away the wickedness, and there was no gold underneath. Only dross. And when all the dross is consumed, Otto simply ceases to exist.¹⁷

Fudge, commenting on Baker’s framework, describes her position as a “fiery final choice”: those who enter God’s presence freely choose whether to be purified and redeemed, or to reject that purification and be consumed.¹⁸ This framework brilliantly holds together several truths that are often pulled apart: God’s love is real and relentless. The fire is genuinely purifying. Human freedom is genuinely honored. And destruction is genuinely possible.

I want to press this point a little further, because I think Baker’s framework deserves more attention than it usually gets in the CI/UR debate. Most people who encounter Baker read her as a universalist, because she hopes for universal salvation and clearly leans in that direction. But her intellectual honesty takes her somewhere more nuanced. Baker does not simply assert that everyone will be saved. She says: “Although the possibility exists that some may still reject God after walking through the divine fire, God never forsakes or abandons those God loves—ever.”⁵⁰ That word “possibility” is critical. Baker is telling us that her framework allows for conditionalism. She may not prefer it. But her own logic requires it.

Why? Because Baker takes human freedom seriously. She knows that if God’s fire automatically overwhelms every creature’s resistance, then freedom is an illusion. She writes: “If God truly respects Otto’s freedom to say no, God will not force reconciliation. After all, forced reconciliation does not bode well for the success of a relationship.”⁵¹ This is exactly the conditionalist’s point. The fire purifies. The fire offers. The fire invites. But the fire does not compel. And for those who refuse even the most generous offer imaginable—the overwhelming, face-to-face encounter with God’s own loving presence—the fire becomes consuming rather than refining. Not because God has changed. Because the creature has made its final choice.

The Real Question: What If There Is No Gold?

Let me come back to the refiner analogy, because I promised the universalist I would take it seriously. Malachi 3:2–3 compares God to a refiner of silver. The refiner sits patiently over the crucible, watching the fire do its work, waiting until the impurities are burned away and only pure metal remains. The universalist says: “See? The refiner does not destroy the silver. He purifies it. God’s fire always has restoration as its goal.”

I agree that the refiner’s goal is restoration. No one sits down at a refiner’s fire hoping to destroy the metal. The entire point is to save it. And I believe this is exactly what God does. His fire is aimed at purification. His heart is set on restoration. The postmortem opportunity that both CI and UR affirm is God’s expression of this refining love—every person, even after death, encounters the blazing reality of God’s love and is given the most generous possible chance to respond.

But here is the question the universalist must face: What if there is no gold?

What if, after God has patiently refined and purified and waited and offered every conceivable opportunity—including the overwhelming encounter of standing in His unmediated presence—the person before Him is entirely dross? What if the persistent rebel has spent a lifetime, and then the entire postmortem opportunity, building nothing but wood, hay, and straw? What if when the fire has done its work, there is simply nothing left?¹⁹

The universalist responds: “That can never happen, because the image of God cannot be fully destroyed.” But can it? Let me think through this carefully.

The Image of God — Indestructible or Not?

The universalist is right that every human being bears the image of God. Genesis 1:26–27 says God created humanity in His image. Genesis 9:6 treats the image of God as the basis for the sanctity of human life. James 3:9 says we should not curse people because they are made in God’s likeness. The image of God is real, it is universal, and it is the foundation of human dignity.

But here is what I notice: none of these texts say the image of God is indestructible. They say it exists. They say it matters. They say it demands respect. But they do not say it cannot be eradicated by persistent, free, fully-informed rebellion against the God whose image it is.

Think about it this way. A photograph bears the image of the person it depicts. But a photograph can be burned. A mirror reflects the face of the person standing before it. But a mirror can be shattered. The image is real, but the bearer of the image can be destroyed. The universalist treats the image of God as if it were an indestructible core that can never be lost, no matter what the creature does. But Scripture does not say that. Scripture says God created us in His image. And what God creates, God can also un-create, if the creature has so thoroughly rejected the Source of its existence that there is nothing left to sustain.²⁰

N. T. Wright, though not a conditionalist himself, has explored a related idea. Wright suggests that persistent idolatry—the ongoing refusal to live as an image-bearer of God—can result in a process of gradual dehumanization. A person who has spent a lifetime (and perhaps beyond) choosing self over God, hatred over love, rebellion over surrender, may eventually become, in Wright’s evocative phrase, a being “that once was human, but now is not.”²¹ Wright admits this is speculative, and I would not build a case on it alone. But the intuition is significant: persistent rejection of God has consequences for the creature’s very being.

The conditionalist does not need to claim that the image of God is routinely destroyed. We simply say: in the extreme case of a creature who has freely and finally rejected God after the fullest possible opportunity—including the overwhelming encounter of standing in God’s unmediated, loving, purifying presence—God’s withdrawal of sustaining life is both just and merciful. The creature has made itself entirely dross. And when the refiner’s fire meets nothing but dross, the dross is consumed.

1 Corinthians 3:12–15 — Saved Through Fire

Let me return to the universalist’s second key text: 1 Corinthians 3:12–15, where Paul says the person “will be saved, but only as through fire.” This is a passage the universalist reads as a universal principle—everyone passes through the fire, and everyone comes out the other side saved.

But there is a critical problem with extending this text that far. When you read the passage in context, Paul is not talking about all humanity. He is not talking about unbelievers facing final judgment. He is talking about Christian workers whose ministry efforts will be tested by fire on the Day of the Lord. Paul says some believers have built on the foundation of Christ with gold, silver, and precious stones—work that survives the fire. Others have built with wood, hay, and straw—work that does not survive. The fire tests the quality of each person’s work. If the work survives, the builder receives a reward. If the work is burned up, the builder “will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.”²²

The “he” who is saved through fire is a believer whose works were poor. The person already has the foundation of Christ (verse 11). This passage says nothing about what happens to those who have no foundation at all—those who have rejected Christ entirely. Baker herself, despite her universalist sympathies, acknowledges that this passage “most likely refers to the judgment of Christians.”²³

The universalist extends a principle from this text to all of humanity: “If believers are saved through fire, surely unbelievers will be too.” But that extension is not warranted by the text itself. It is an inference, and the rest of Scripture does not support it. The Bible consistently draws a distinction between those who build on the foundation of Christ and those who do not. Both groups face the fire. But only one group has a foundation that survives it.

To be clear, I am not saying this passage is irrelevant to our discussion. It establishes a vital principle: God’s fire does purify. Believers who have been sloppy or unfaithful in their work will experience the burning away of their poor efforts—and that experience will be painful. But they will survive because they have a foundation. The question for the unbeliever is: What happens when there is no foundation? The conditionalist answer is: the fire consumes.

The Fire of God Throughout Scripture

The picture of God as a consuming fire is not limited to a few isolated texts. It runs like a thread through the entire Bible. Let me trace it briefly, because the cumulative weight matters.

At the burning bush, Moses encounters God in fire—and is told to remove his sandals because the ground is holy (Exod. 3:2–5). On Mount Sinai, God descends in fire, and the people are warned not to come too close lest they be destroyed (Exod. 19:18; 24:17). When Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu offer unauthorized fire before the Lord, fire comes out from the Lord’s presence and consumes them (Lev. 10:1–2). When Korah and his followers rebel against Moses, fire from the Lord consumes 250 of them (Num. 16:35). In Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal, fire falls from heaven and consumes the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust, and even the water (1 Kings 18:38).²⁴

Do you see the pattern? Fire in Scripture is consistently associated with God’s holy presence. And that fire does two things: it reveals what is true, and it destroys what cannot stand in God’s presence. The righteous pass through fire and are refined. The wicked are consumed by it. This is not a minor theme tucked away in obscure corners of the Bible. It is one of the most consistent and pervasive images in all of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. Wherever God shows up, fire shows up. And wherever fire shows up, the same dual outcome appears: purification for the righteous, destruction for the wicked. The universalist must explain why this pattern exists if the fire only ever purifies. The conditionalist takes the pattern at face value.

The prophets continue this theme. Isaiah 30:27–33 pictures God’s anger as a consuming fire that devours His enemies. Isaiah 66:15–16: “For behold, the LORD will come in fire, and his chariots like the whirlwind, to render his anger in fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire will the LORD enter into judgment, and by his sword, with all flesh; and those slain by the LORD shall be many.” Malachi 4:1: “For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.”²⁵

Fudge comments on Malachi 4:1–3 with characteristic precision. He notes that the text says the wicked will be set on fire, that the fire will leave them “neither root nor branch,” and that they will become “ashes under the soles of your feet.” Some traditionalist interpreters have tried to argue that “burn up” does not really mean burn up. But Fudge points out that the language could hardly be clearer: the wicked are depicted as stubble consumed by fire until nothing remains.²⁶

This is not the language of purification. This is the language of consumption. When Malachi says the fire will leave the wicked “neither root nor branch,” he is not describing a painful-but-temporary refinement after which the person emerges healed. He is describing total destruction. Ashes. Nothing left.

Hebrews 10:26–31 — The Raging Fire

The letter to the Hebrews deserves special attention, because it connects the consuming fire theme directly to the question of final judgment. In Hebrews 10:26–27, the author writes: “For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the enemies of God.”

Notice the language: “a fury of fire that will consume the enemies of God.” Not purify. Not refine. Consume. The author then draws the comparison to the old covenant: if those who violated the law of Moses died without mercy, “how much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God?” (10:29). The climax comes in 10:31: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”²⁷

Two chapters later, the same author writes: “For our God is a consuming fire” (12:29). The connection is deliberate. The raging fire that consumes the enemies of God (10:27) is God Himself (12:29). God’s very presence is the fire. His holiness is the flame. And for those who reject the sacrifice of Christ, there is no refuge from that flame. It consumes.

Fudge draws the threads together carefully. He observes that an acceptable offering or the sinner himself—those are the only two options. Either the sacrifice of Christ stands between the person and the fire, or the person faces the fire unprotected. And unprotected exposure to the consuming fire of God’s holiness has only one result: destruction.²⁸

The Fire of God’s Presence — Source of Blessing and Destruction

There is a deeply important symmetry in the New Testament that I want you to see. Paul tells the Thessalonians that believers will be “always with the Lord” (1 Thess. 4:17)—and this is their comfort and joy. Then, in 2 Thessalonians 1:9, he says the wicked will be “punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” Scholars debate whether “from the presence of the Lord” means the destruction comes from God’s presence (the fire of His holiness destroys them) or that the destruction consists in exclusion from God’s presence.²⁹

Either way, the result is the same for the conditionalist. If the destruction issues from God’s presence, then the consuming fire of God’s holiness is the agent of destruction. If the destruction consists of exclusion from God’s presence, then the person is cut off from the only source of existence—and a creature totally separated from the ground of its being simply ceases to be. Gordon Fee observes that for Paul, the ultimate judgment is “total, irreparable exclusion from Christ.”³⁰ How can anyone continue to exist forever who is completely cut off from the only source of life?

Fudge notes that Paul’s phrase “from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power” appears verbatim three times in the Greek text of Isaiah 2, in a context that discusses both the Lord’s exaltation and the destruction of the wicked in the last days. The connection is intentional. Paul is drawing on Isaiah’s vision of a day when the glory of God’s presence will cause the wicked to flee—and ultimately to perish.³¹

Whether we think of hell as the fire of divine holiness emanating from the face of the Lord, or as the place where the finally impenitent are cut off from the divine presence that is the only source and ground of all created existence, the conclusion is the same. The wicked die, perish, and cease to be. And when the fire has consumed sinners and the earth has shaken from its place, there will be new heavens and a new earth—the unshakable kingdom of God in which righteousness will dwell forever.³²

Matt. 10:28 and the Destruction of the Soul

I want to bring in one passage that belongs primarily to another chapter (Chapter 8 will treat it in full detail) but is essential to mention here because it clinches the argument. Jesus said: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matt. 10:28).

Notice what Jesus does here. He distinguishes between body and soul—this is substance dualism, which both CI and UR affirm. And then He says God can destroy both in Gehenna. Not purify. Not refine. Destroy. The Greek word is apolesai, from apollymi—to destroy utterly, to bring to ruin, to put to death.³³

If hell is the experience of God’s fiery presence, as both CI and UR agree, and if Jesus says God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna, then the consuming fire of God’s presence is capable of destroying the whole person—not just the body, but the soul as well. This is precisely what conditional immortality teaches: the fire of God purifies those who submit, and it consumes—all the way down to the soul—those who do not.

Revelation 20:14–15 — The Second Death

The book of Revelation describes the final judgment in vivid imagery. After the great white throne judgment, “Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire” (Rev. 20:14–15).

The universalist wants to read the lake of fire as a purifying pool—the refiner’s crucible. And I understand the appeal. But notice what Revelation says happens to Death and Hades when they are thrown into this fire. They are destroyed. They cease to exist. The lake of fire is called “the second death”—not the second purification, not the second refinement, but the second death.³⁴

If the lake of fire is God’s purifying presence, and if Death itself is destroyed in that fire, then we have a clear picture of what the consuming fire of God does to that which is irredeemably opposed to Him: it ends it. Permanently. The conditionalist reads the lake of fire as the ultimate expression of Baker’s framework: those who stand in God’s fiery presence either submit and are purified, or refuse and are consumed. Death itself is consumed. And those whose names are not in the book of life are consumed with it.

George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and the Refusal of Joy

I want to bring in two voices that may surprise you, because both of them are often claimed by the universalist side—and rightly so in many respects. But I think they actually point toward conditionalism when read carefully.

George MacDonald, the great Scottish author whom C. S. Lewis called his “master,” wrote beautifully about God’s fire. MacDonald said that the fire of God “is His essential being, His love, His creative power”—and that this fire burns worse the further one stands from God.³⁵ Baker actually quotes MacDonald in her discussion of Otto’s experience in God’s fiery presence. MacDonald was indeed a universalist, and he believed the fire would eventually bring everyone home.

But Lewis, who learned so much from MacDonald, came to a different conclusion. In The Great Divorce, Lewis pictures hell as a grey, joyless town where people have chosen to isolate themselves from God and from each other. The gates of hell are locked from the inside.³⁶ When some residents of hell are given a chance to visit heaven, they find it unbearable—the grass is too real, the light too bright, the joy too intense for their shrunken, selfish souls. Most of them choose to go back to hell rather than submit to the overwhelming reality of heaven.

Lewis’s insight is devastating for the universalist position. If a person can stand in the presence of unbearable joy and refuse it—if the human will is capable of preferring its own misery to the bliss of God’s presence—then the universalist assumption that the fire always wins is not self-evident. Lewis saw what Baker also saw: that freedom is real, and that a free creature can say no even to God’s most overwhelming offer of love.

The conditionalist takes Lewis’s insight one step further. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis wrote that the damned are those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and hear God say to them, “Thy will be done.”³⁷ The CI advocate adds: and for those who persist in that rejection even after every possible opportunity, God mercifully brings their existence to an end. The soul that permanently refuses the source of its life cannot be sustained indefinitely against its will. That would be a different kind of hell—a hell of forced existence, which would be its own form of torment.

R. Zachary Manis and the Logic of God’s Presence

The philosopher R. Zachary Manis has explored the question of what happens to sinners in God’s presence in careful, sustained detail in his book Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God. Manis argues that the experience of God’s unmediated presence is not neutral. For the person who loves God, it is ecstasy. For the person who hates God, it is agony. But—and this is key—it is not arbitrary agony. It is the natural consequence of what happens when a creature whose entire being is oriented against God encounters the full reality of God.³⁸

Imagine holding a block of ice under a blowtorch. The ice does not survive the encounter. It is not the torch’s fault. The torch is simply being what it is—intensely hot. The ice is simply being what it is—frozen. The two cannot coexist. Now, a piece of steel under the same torch will glow red-hot and be tempered, strengthened, refined. Same torch. Different material. Different outcome.

Manis’s point is that God does not decide to punish some and reward others. God is simply who He is—infinite love, infinite holiness, infinite reality. The person who has been transformed by Christ can endure that reality and find joy in it. The person who has rejected Christ cannot. And the conditionalist adds: the person who permanently rejects Christ will ultimately be consumed by the very reality they refuse to embrace. This is not vindictive. It is ontological. A creature that has cut itself off from the source of all being cannot continue to be.³⁹

The Postmortem Opportunity and the Patience of the Fire

Before I close, I need to address something that connects this chapter to the larger argument of the book. Both CI and UR affirm the postmortem opportunity—the belief that God provides a genuine, generous, overwhelming offer of salvation to every person after death. This is not a “second chance” in the casual sense. It is God giving each person the best possible chance to encounter His love and respond to it. Time may work differently in the afterlife. The encounter with God could encompass what feels like a months-long interaction—or longer. God gives each individual exactly what they personally need to make a fully informed, fully free decision.⁴⁰

The universalist says this encounter will eventually bring everyone around. The fire will keep burning until every last trace of resistance melts away. But the conditionalist asks: at what point does “patient purification” become “overriding the will”? If God spends ages upon ages upon ages breaking down someone’s resistance, is that person’s eventual “yes” truly free? Or has it been extracted by sheer relentless pressure?⁴¹

The CI advocate sees the postmortem opportunity as generous beyond measure. God does not give up easily. The fire burns, and it is truly purifying. Many—perhaps most—will respond. I believe the postmortem opportunity will be overwhelmingly effective. But the CI advocate insists that the possibility of genuine, permanent rejection must remain real. Not because God wants anyone to be destroyed. But because love that removes the possibility of “no” is not really love. It is control.

Think about it in human terms. Imagine a parent who desperately wants their adult child to come home. The parent writes letters. Makes phone calls. Sends gifts. Drives to the child’s doorstep and pleads. Offers every form of help, every kind of support, every expression of unconditional love. Year after year, decade after decade, the parent never stops reaching out. That parent’s love is fierce and relentless and beautiful. But now imagine that the parent, after a hundred years of pleading, physically drags the child home, locks the door, and says: “You will love me. You have no choice.” Has that parent’s love become greater? Or has it become something else entirely? The conditionalist believes that God’s love is like the first parent—relentless, generous beyond imagination, unwilling to give up without exhausting every possible means of rescue. But in the end, God respects the door that is locked from the inside.

And here is where conditional immortality offers something the universalist position struggles to provide: a genuine resolution. The universalist must believe that God’s purifying fire continues indefinitely for some souls—perhaps for ages upon ages. During that entire time, the creature is in agony, refusing to surrender, and God is persistently breaking down their defenses. Is that a picture of love? Or is it a picture of an irresistible force slowly crushing a finite will? The conditionalist says: God’s love provides the postmortem opportunity, which is overwhelmingly generous. But when that opportunity has been fully and finally refused, God does not keep the creature alive just to keep tormenting it with love it refuses to receive. He mercifully brings its existence to an end. This is not cruelty. It is the final act of a love that respects the creature even in the tragedy of its refusal.

Baker captures this perfectly when she writes about the moment of choice. Otto stands in the fire. The fire has burned away his wickedness. And then he faces God’s offer. If Otto accepts, he is restored. But “the possibility exists that Otto does not accept God’s offer of restoration.”⁴² Baker herself leans toward hoping that everyone will accept. I share that hope. But the conditionalist insists that Baker’s honesty about the possibility of refusal is not a loophole in the system—it is the foundation of the system. Without the real possibility of “no,” the “yes” means nothing.

Why This Framework Supports CI More Naturally Than UR

Let me pull the threads together. We have been exploring the shared understanding that hell is the experience of God’s fiery presence. Both CI and UR agree on this. But I have been arguing that this framework, when fully developed, leads more naturally to conditional immortality than to universal restoration. Here is why.

First, the biblical language about God’s fire is not exclusively purifying. It is also—and frequently—consuming. Hebrews 12:29 calls God a consuming fire. Hebrews 10:27 speaks of fire that will consume the enemies of God. Deuteronomy 4:24 and 9:3 use the same consuming fire language. Isaiah 33:14 asks who can dwell with the consuming fire, and the answer is: only the righteous. Malachi 4:1 says the wicked will be burned up like stubble until nothing remains. The Bible does not limit God’s fire to purification. It consistently teaches that the same fire that refines the righteous destroys the wicked.⁴³

Second, Baker’s own framework—which is the most careful development of the “hell as God’s presence” idea—explicitly includes the possibility of consumption. Baker is honest enough to acknowledge that some who stand in God’s fire may have nothing left after purification. If there is no gold, only dross, the fire consumes everything. This is exactly what CI teaches.⁴⁴

Third, the universalist must explain why Scripture consistently uses destruction language—“perish,” “destroy,” “consume,” “death”—if the fire of God’s presence actually saves everyone. If the fire only purifies, why does the Bible say it consumes? The universalist answer is that these terms describe the destruction of sin within the person, not the destruction of the person themselves. But that interpretation requires reading against the natural meaning of the texts. When Malachi says the fire will leave the wicked “neither root nor branch” and they will become “ashes,” the most natural reading is that the person is destroyed, not that their sin is destroyed while they survive.⁴⁵

Fourth, the conditionalist framework honors human freedom in a way that the universalist framework struggles to. If the fire always wins—if no one can ultimately resist God’s purifying love—then what becomes of freedom? The universalist responds that the fire does not override freedom; it restores it. But this is circular. It assumes that the only truly “free” choice is the choice to say yes to God. Any “no” is evidence of bondage, not freedom. The conditionalist disagrees. A “no” spoken in full knowledge, face to face with the living God, after every possible opportunity—that is a genuinely free choice, however tragic and irrational it may be.⁴⁶

An Honest Acknowledgment

I want to close this chapter with honesty. The universalist vision of God’s fire is beautiful, and I understand its appeal. The idea that God’s love is so relentless, so patient, so all-encompassing that it will eventually bring every creature home—that idea makes the heart sing. And I genuinely hope that the number of souls who permanently reject God is very small. Perhaps vanishingly small.

I also want to be honest about a tension in the conditionalist position. When we say that God’s fire consumes those who refuse to be purified, we are saying something tragic. We are saying that some creatures made in God’s image will cease to exist. We are saying that God, who delights in life and created all things for His glory, will allow some of His creatures to pass into nothingness. That is not a happy ending. It is a sad one. And any conditionalist who speaks of the destruction of the wicked without grief has, I think, misunderstood their own position.

But grief is not the same as doubt. And tragedy is not the same as injustice. I grieve that anyone might permanently reject God. But I do not believe it is unjust for God to honor that rejection. A God who exhausts every means of rescue—including the staggering generosity of the postmortem opportunity, including the overwhelming encounter of His own fiery presence—and who then allows the creature to go, permanently and finally, into non-existence: that God has not failed. He has loved, and loved, and loved again. And in the end, He has respected the creature’s “no.”

But hope is not the same as certainty. And the biblical witness, taken as a whole, consistently includes both elements: fire that purifies and fire that consumes. The refiner sits over the crucible with patience and love. But the refiner’s fire does not create gold where none exists. It can only save what is there to save.⁴⁷

The consuming fire of God’s presence is not a problem to be solved. It is a reality to be faced. For those who come to God through Christ—whether in this life or through the postmortem opportunity—the fire is warmth and welcome and the joy of being made clean. For those who refuse the fire’s purifying work, even after every conceivable chance to surrender, the fire does what fire does to that which will not be refined.

It consumes.

Our God is a consuming fire. The question, for each of us, is not whether we will face the fire. We will. The question is what the fire will find when it reaches us. Gold? Or dross? The answer to that question depends on a choice—a choice that God, in His extravagant love, gives us every possible opportunity to make. He gives that opportunity in this life through the gospel. He gives it after death through the postmortem encounter. He gives it in the very flames of His presence at the final judgment. Again and again, the invitation goes out: be purified, be restored, be made new.

But the invitation is an invitation. Not a compulsion. And for those who permanently decline, the fire is not less loving. It is simply final.

In the next chapter, we will turn to one of the most contested words in the entire debate—the Greek word aionios, typically translated “eternal”—and ask what it actually means when Scripture speaks of “eternal punishment,” “eternal fire,” and “eternal life.” As you will see, CI and UR actually share a surprising amount of common ground on this question. But the conclusions they draw from that common ground are very different.