Chapter 1

The God I Almost Lost—Why This Book Exists

“Those who are suffering in hell are suffering in being scourged by love.”
—Isaac the Syrian, Homily 84

“For our God is a consuming fire.”
—Hebrews 12:29

A Summer That Changed Everything

I never planned to write this book.

In the spring of 2019, I was a seminary-educated pastor who believed, without any real doubt, that hell was a place of eternal conscious torment. I had multiple seminary degrees. I had studied theology for years. I had read my Bible cover to cover more times than I can count. And in all of those years—through all of those classes, all of those papers, all of those discussions with professors and fellow students—we had never once done an in-depth study of the doctrine of hell.¹

Think about that for a moment. I had spent years being trained to teach and preach the Bible, and the doctrine that is arguably the most troubling in all of Christian theology had never received serious, careful attention. I simply accepted what I had always been told: hell is eternal conscious torment, and anyone who says otherwise is either a liberal or has abandoned the authority of Scripture.

That spring, I decided to change that. I bought about half a dozen books on hell—all of them from an eternal conscious torment (ECT) perspective. My goal was simple: I wanted to understand hell as deeply as I possibly could. I wanted to be able to defend the traditional view with confidence and clarity. I believed that any other view of hell was either a rejection of the biblical text or some kind of theological liberalism.² I was not looking to change my mind. I was looking to strengthen what I already believed.

God had other plans.

One day that summer, I was watching a video on YouTube by Bill Wiese, the author of 23 Minutes in Hell.³ The video was one of many in a genre that has become incredibly popular in certain Christian circles—firsthand accounts of visions of hell, designed to terrify people into faith. In the middle of the video, there was a scene from a movie on hell spliced into the presentation. The scene showed a teenage girl getting into a car accident. She died. And then the camera followed her into hell.

What I saw in that video shook me to the core.

In the scene, the girl saw other human beings being tormented and burned alive by demons. She screamed. She begged for help. No help came. Then she was revived in the back of an ambulance, shrieking in terror.

The video was designed to frighten people into becoming Christians. It was designed to make the viewer think, “I need to get saved so that doesn’t happen to me.” But at that moment, sitting in front of my computer screen, the video had the exact opposite effect on me that its creator had intended. Something deep inside me—something I believe was the Holy Spirit—spoke clearly and simply:

A loving God would not do that.

That was it. No theological argument. No exegetical insight. No philosophical reasoning. Just a deep, unshakable conviction rising up from a place I could not ignore: the God I know—the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the God who is love—would not burn a teenage girl alive for eternity while demons laughed at her screaming.⁴

Now, I want to be honest with you. That moment did not change my theology overnight. I still believed the Bible was inspired. I still believed that hell was real. I still believed that any other view was unbiblical. But for the first time, I had a crack in the wall. For the first time, I was willing to consider the possibility that my theology of hell might be wrong—even though the Bible was right.

There is a difference. And that difference is the reason this book exists.

When the Wall Cracks Open

I did something I had never done before. I decided to actually read what the other side had to say.

I picked up some books on conditional immortality—the view that the final fate of the unrepentant is not eternal torment but destruction. Annihilation. The wicked do not burn forever; they are consumed by God’s judgment and cease to exist.⁵ A little later, I started reading about biblical universalism—the view that God’s love will eventually win every heart, that hell is real but not permanent, and that in the end, all will be reconciled to God through Christ.⁶

I want to stress something here. These were not books by people who had rejected the Bible. These were not the writings of theological liberals who had thrown out the authority of Scripture. These were works by conservative, Bible-believing followers of Jesus Christ who loved the Word of God every bit as much as I did. They just read it differently on this particular question.⁷

That was a revelation to me. And it changed the entire trajectory of my study.

I remember reading Edward Fudge’s arguments for conditional immortality and being struck by how carefully he handled the biblical text. This was not someone playing fast and loose with Scripture. He was examining every relevant passage in its original language and historical context, and he was making a case that the biblical language of “destruction,” “perishing,” and “death” means exactly what it sounds like it means—the end of existence, not the continuation of existence in torment. I did not agree with everything he wrote. But I could not dismiss him.⁵²

Then I started reading the universalists. Thomas Talbott made an argument that haunted me for weeks: if God truly loves every person and genuinely desires the salvation of all (1 Tim. 2:4), and if God is omnipotent and infinitely wise, then how can His love ultimately fail? Is human stubbornness really stronger than infinite Love?⁵³ I was not ready to become a universalist. But I could not pretend the argument had no force.

What struck me most of all was the tone of these writers. They were not angry at God. They were not throwing out the Bible. They were wrestling—honestly, carefully, prayerfully—with some of the hardest questions in all of Christian theology. And they were doing it with a deep love for Christ and a deep reverence for Scripture. They simply could not accept that the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth—the God who healed lepers, who wept at graves, who forgave His killers from the cross—was the same God who would burn people alive for all eternity. And honestly? Neither could I. Not anymore.

I also discovered something that my years of seminary education had never taught me: the Church Fathers in the earliest centuries of Christianity held to different views on hell. The idea that eternal conscious torment was the unanimous position of the early church is simply not true. Irenaeus, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and others all pushed back on the idea of God as an angry judge waiting to throw the wicked into an endless furnace.⁸ Some of them believed that the fire of God’s judgment was aimed at purification, not punishment. Some believed that God’s love would eventually conquer every heart. Some held that the wicked would ultimately be destroyed, not tormented forever.

Sharon Baker, in the introduction to her book Razing Hell, captures the experience many of us share. She writes about how questions about hell haunt us deep down inside, in places we are afraid to go, worried that if we voice our doubts, someone might think us less Christian and more heretic.⁹ Baker is right. Many of us have felt that fear. I certainly did. For years, I swallowed my discomfort and told myself that the traditional view must be correct because everyone I respected said so. The summer of 2019 was when I finally gave myself permission to ask the question I had been avoiding: What if the traditional view is wrong—not because the Bible is wrong, but because we have been reading the Bible through the wrong lens?

That summer changed everything for me. It changed how I read the Bible. It changed how I understood God’s justice. It changed how I thought about the fate of the billions of human beings who have lived and died without ever hearing the name of Jesus. And it led me, eventually, to a view of hell that I believe is more biblical, more theologically coherent, more historically grounded, and more consistent with the character of a God who is love than anything I had ever been taught.

That view is called the divine presence model. And it is what this book is about.

You Are Not Alone

Before I go any further, I want to speak directly to those of you who have felt what I felt that day in 2019.

Maybe you grew up in a church where hell was preached in graphic, terrifying detail. Maybe you heard sermons about flames that never go out and worms that never die and suffering that never ends. Maybe you watched as a pastor described—sometimes with what seemed like almost a strange satisfaction—the fate awaiting everyone who did not pray the right prayer or believe the right things. And maybe, deep down, something in your spirit recoiled.

I want you to know something: that recoil was not sin. It was not weakness. It was not a lack of faith. It was the image of God inside you recognizing that something was wrong with the picture being painted.¹⁰

For centuries, Christians have been told that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment is the clear, plain teaching of Scripture, and that questioning it is tantamount to rejecting the Bible itself. But that is not true. ECT is one reading of certain biblical texts. It is not the only reading, and it is not even the oldest reading. And the moral intuition that tells you something is wrong with the idea of God torturing people forever? That intuition is not a sign of spiritual immaturity. It is a sign that you are taking the character of God seriously.¹¹

Alexandre Kalomiros, a Greek Orthodox theologian, wrote a famous essay called The River of Fire in which he argued that the Western church’s distortion of God’s character is one of the primary reasons atheism took root in the West. When you present God as an eternal torturer—a being who will burn human beings alive forever because they committed finite sins in a finite lifetime—you create a God that reasonable, compassionate people cannot worship. And then you blame them for walking away.¹²

Kalomiros was right. The problem is not with those who struggle to worship the God of ECT. The problem is with the theology that turned the God of love into a monster.

Baker puts it powerfully in the opening pages of Razing Hell when she observes that traditional views of hell as a place of eternal, unending torture stand in direct contradiction to the image of God as a loving creator who desires to rescue us from sin and evil.¹³ She is not a theological rebel. She holds the Bible in the highest regard. But she refuses to let a theology of hell override what Scripture itself tells us about who God is. And neither should we.

If you have ever had that sinking feeling that the traditional doctrine of hell does not match the God you see revealed in Jesus, this book is for you. If you have ever looked at the face of your child and thought, “I would never burn my child forever—am I really supposed to believe that God would?”—this book is for you. If you have ever laid awake at night wondering about the billions of people who died without ever hearing the gospel, and asked, “Is there no hope for them?”—this book is for you.

You are not alone. And your questions are not a betrayal of faith. They are the beginning of a deeper one.

I have talked to hundreds of people over the years who have experienced exactly what I am describing. Pastors who preach ECT from the pulpit but privately admit they have doubts. College students who grew up in the church but walked away because they could not worship a God who tortures. Parents who lie awake at night wondering whether their child who died before making a profession of faith is being tormented right now in some cosmic furnace. Missionaries who have spent years on the field and cannot bring themselves to believe that the indigenous people they serve—people who have never heard the gospel through no fault of their own—are destined for eternal agony simply because of where they were born.

These are not people with weak faith. These are people whose faith is strong enough to ask hard questions. And the church owes them more than a pat answer. It owes them a serious, honest, biblical engagement with the doctrine of hell—one that does not shy away from the difficulties and does not dismiss the questioners as heretics.

I think of a conversation I had with a young woman who told me she had stopped going to church in college. She was raised in a loving Christian home. She loved Jesus. But when she got to college and started thinking seriously about what her church taught about hell—that the majority of the human race, including billions of people who had never heard of Jesus, would be tortured forever in fire—she simply could not live with it. “I still believe in God,” she told me. “I just can’t believe in that God.” She was not rejecting Christ. She was rejecting a caricature of Christ that no one had ever shown her was a caricature.

Stories like hers are everywhere. And they break my heart. Because the tragedy is not that these people walked away from God. The tragedy is that no one ever told them there was another way to read the Bible on this question—a way that takes hell seriously but refuses to turn God into a monster.

What This Book Is—And What It Is Not

I need to be very clear about what I am doing in this book, because misunderstandings about this subject run deep.

This is not a book that denies the reality of hell. Hell is real. Judgment is real. The stakes of eternity are as high as they have ever been. If you picked up this book expecting me to tell you that hell does not exist, or that sin does not matter, or that everyone gets a free pass regardless of how they live—you are going to be disappointed. This book takes hell more seriously, not less.¹⁴

This is not a book that denies the authority of Scripture. I hold the Bible in the highest regard. I believe it is the inspired Word of God. Every argument in this book is built on careful biblical exegesis, informed by the original Hebrew and Greek, and tested against the witness of the early church. I am not asking you to throw out your Bible. I am asking you to read it more carefully than you may have before.

This is not a book that attacks Christians who hold to ECT. Some of the finest believers in the history of the church have held that view, including people I love and respect deeply. I understand why they hold it. I honor their sincerity. But I believe they are wrong on this point, and I am going to make that case as clearly and honestly as I can.¹⁵

So what is this book?

This book is an argument—a thorough, careful, biblical, theological, and philosophical argument—that the traditional Western view of hell as eternal conscious torment is not the best reading of what Scripture teaches about judgment, fire, and the fate of the wicked. And it is a presentation of what I believe is a better view: one that is more faithful to Scripture, more consistent with the character of God, more coherent philosophically, and more deeply rooted in the earliest centuries of Christian tradition.

That view is called the divine presence model of hell.

The Heart of the Argument

Here is the core thesis of this book, stated as simply as I can state it:

Read that again slowly. It is the most important paragraph in this book.

The traditional Western view says that hell is a place where God is absent—or at least where His love and mercy are absent. The wicked are “cast out” from God’s presence and punished in a realm of darkness and fire. God is the judge who sentences them, and then, apparently, walks away and lets them burn.

The divine presence model says the opposite. Hell is not where God is absent. Hell is where God is overwhelmingly present. The fire of hell is not the fire of divine wrath poured out in vengeance. The fire of hell is the fire of divine love—the same love that warms the hearts of the redeemed, the same love that fills heaven with joy—experienced as unbearable torment by those who have made themselves enemies of love.¹⁶

Think of it this way. Imagine a man who has spent his entire life in hatred—hating God, hating other people, hating goodness itself. His heart has grown hard and cold and twisted. Now imagine that this man suddenly finds himself standing in the unfiltered, unveiled, blazing presence of perfect Love. What would that feel like?

It would feel like fire.

Not because God is punishing him. Not because God has designed some elaborate torture chamber. But because love itself—when it encounters a heart filled with hatred—is agonizing. The light that brings joy to healthy eyes brings pain to diseased ones. The warmth that comforts the cold burns the infected wound. The same sun that makes the garden grow scorches the desert.

The difference is not in the sun. The difference is in what the sun touches.

This is what the earliest Greek-speaking Christians understood. This is what the Church Fathers in the East taught for centuries. And this is what Western Christianity, somewhere along the way, forgot.

The great Orthodox Father Isaac the Syrian, writing in the seventh century, said that those who suffer in hell are suffering because they are being “scourged by love.”¹⁷ Not scourged by wrath. Not scourged by vengeance. Scourged by love. The fire that burns the wicked is the very same fire that illuminates the blessed. God does not change. God does not have two faces—one merciful and one cruel. God is love, always and everywhere, and His love is inescapable.

Kalomiros captured this beautifully when he described the Orthodox icon of the Last Judgment. In the icon, Christ sits on His throne. On His right are the blessed. On His left are the damned. And flowing from the throne, right through the middle, is a river of fire. That river of fire is not an instrument of torture. It is the river of God’s love—the same river that flowed out of Eden to water paradise. The same fire. The same love. But those who love God experience it as paradise, and those who hate God experience it as hell.¹⁸

Kalomiros goes on: “The very fire which purifies gold, also consumes wood. Precious metals shine in it like the sun, rubbish burns with black smoke. All are in the same fire of Love.”¹⁹ The difference, he insists, is not in God. The difference is in the human heart. The difference is conditioned by the free choice of the person, which God respects absolutely.

Do you see what this means? It means that God does not torture anyone. God does not design punishments. God does not flip a switch from “merciful” to “wrathful” on the Day of Judgment. God is who God has always been—infinite, burning, all-consuming Love. And on the Last Day, when every veil is removed and every heart stands naked before that Love, the truth of what is inside each person will be revealed. Those who have learned to love will find themselves at home in the fire. Those who have chosen hatred will find the fire unbearable.

That is what the Bible means when it says, “Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). He is. But His fire is love. And that fire consumes everything that is not love.²⁰

If you have been taught that God’s fire is anger, let me invite you to reconsider. What if the fire is something far more powerful than anger? What if it is something more terrifying than wrath? What if the fire of God is the full, blazing, unshielded intensity of perfect Love—a Love so pure that no selfishness, no pride, no bitterness can survive in its presence? That is the fire this book is about. And understanding it will change how you read your Bible, how you pray, and how you think about the God who holds every human soul in His hands.

Why This Matters So Much

You might be thinking: “Okay, this is an interesting theological idea. But does it really matter? Isn’t this just academic debate?”

No. This is not academic. This is about the most important question in the universe: What is God really like?

The doctrine of hell is, at its core, a doctrine about God. Tell me what you believe about hell, and I will tell you what you believe about God. If you believe God tortures people forever, you believe in a God whose love has limits—a God who, at some point, stops being merciful and starts being cruel. If you believe God burns a teenager alive for all eternity while demons torment her, you believe in a God who is, at bottom, no better than the worst human tyrant.²¹

And that view of God has consequences.

It shapes how we preach. If hell is eternal torture, then the primary motivation for becoming a Christian is fear. Come to Jesus or burn. That is not good news. That is a threat. And threats do not produce love—they produce anxiety, guilt, and resentment.²² I have watched this play out in real lives. I have sat with people who said they “got saved” because they were terrified of hell—and years later, they still had no real relationship with God. They were not drawn to Him by love. They were driven to Him by terror. And a relationship built on terror is not a relationship at all. It is a hostage situation.

It shapes how we treat other people. If we believe God has the right to torture people forever, it becomes easier to justify our own cruelty toward those we deem enemies of God. History is full of examples: the Inquisition, the Crusades, the burning of heretics. When your theology says God burns people, it is a short step to thinking you have the right to burn people too. The logic is simple and devastating: if God can inflict infinite suffering on sinners, then surely we are justified in inflicting a little suffering on His behalf.²³

It shapes how people see Christianity. Kalomiros was not exaggerating when he argued that the Western distortion of God’s character produced atheism. How many people have walked away from the faith—not because they rejected Jesus, but because they could not worship the God described by ECT?²⁴ How many honest, thoughtful, morally sensitive people have looked at the traditional doctrine of hell and said, “If that is who God is, I want nothing to do with Him”? I cannot count how many conversations I have had with people—young people especially—who told me they left the church because they could not reconcile the idea of eternal torment with a God of love. They were not rejecting God. They were rejecting a caricature of God. And the tragedy is that no one ever told them there was an alternative.

Baker shares a similar concern in her introduction, noting that when we use hell as a tool for evangelism, we miss the point of the good news entirely. If we receive Jesus as Savior simply because we want to escape the eternal fires of hell, we have traded love for fear. And that, she argues, is not what the gospel is about.²⁵

This book exists because I believe there is a better way to understand the fire of God’s judgment. Not as vindictive punishment. Not as divine revenge. But as the purifying and consuming presence of divine love. The same fire that warms the willing burns those who resist. That is the thesis of this entire book. And I believe it changes everything.

The God We Almost Lost—And the God We Can Recover

I called this chapter “The God I Almost Lost.” Let me explain what I mean by that.

When I sat in front of that computer screen in 2019 and watched that video of a teenager being tormented in hell, I nearly lost God. Not because I stopped believing God existed. I never doubted that. But I came dangerously close to losing the God who is good. I came close to accepting, as so many Christians have, a God who is sovereign and powerful and just—but not truly, deeply, unfailingly loving.

ECT demands that we worship a God who has the power to save everyone but chooses not to. A God who creates billions of human beings knowing that most of them will end up in a furnace of unending agony. A God who could end the suffering with a word but instead sustains it for all eternity.²⁶ That is the God of ECT. And I almost let that theology steal from me the God I actually see in the pages of Scripture.

Consider what ECT actually requires you to believe. It requires you to believe that God—the God who tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matt. 5:44)—does the opposite of what He commands us to do. It requires you to believe that the God who says “vengeance is mine” (Rom. 12:19) exercises that vengeance in the most horrific way imaginable, forever. It requires you to believe that the God who sent His Son to die for sinners (Rom. 5:8) then turns around and tortures those same sinners endlessly when they fail to respond to that sacrifice. It requires you to believe that the God whose mercies are “new every morning” (Lam. 3:23) runs out of mercy at the moment of death and never shows mercy again.

I cannot believe that anymore. Not because I have gone soft. Not because I have caved to cultural pressure. But because I have read my Bible more carefully than I ever did before, and I have discovered that the God of Scripture is far better than the God of ECT.

The God I see in Scripture is the God who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to go after the one that is lost (Luke 15:4). The God who runs to embrace the prodigal son before the son even finishes his apology (Luke 15:20). The God who died on a cross for His enemies (Rom. 5:8). The God who says, “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live” (Ezek. 33:11). The God who “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4).²⁷

Does that sound like a God who would build an eternal torture chamber?

I do not think so. And increasingly, I am discovering that many of the greatest minds in the history of the church did not think so either.

R. Zachary Manis, a philosopher who has written what is arguably the most rigorous academic defense of the divine presence model in the English language, sets out criteria for what counts as an adequate solution to the problem of hell. Among them: an adequate solution must find significant support in Scripture; it must be consistent with the best of Christian tradition through the ages; it must be consistent with the view of God as a perfect being whose goodness, justice, and love are without limit; and it must understand divine love in such a way that God genuinely wills the highest good of every person He loves.²⁸

Those are not easy criteria to meet. But I believe the divine presence model meets them. ECT does not. And over the course of this book, I intend to show you why.

A Word About Honesty

I want to be transparent with you about where I stand on a question that will come up repeatedly in this book: the question of the final fate of the unrepentant.

The divine presence model tells us what hell is—the experience of God’s consuming love by those who have made themselves enemies of love. But it does not, by itself, tell us how long hell lasts or what the final outcome is. Two possibilities remain open.

The first possibility is called conditional immortality (sometimes called annihilationism). On this view, the souls of those who ultimately and finally reject God—even after every possible opportunity to repent—are consumed by the fire of His love and cease to exist. They are destroyed, body and soul, just as Jesus said in Matthew 10:28. Hell is real. The suffering is real. But it is not eternal. The fire eventually does its work, and what refuses to yield to love is consumed by love.²⁹

The second possibility is called universal reconciliation (sometimes called biblical universalism). On this view, God’s love is so relentless, so patient, so overwhelming, that eventually every heart yields. Hell is real. The suffering is real. But it is not permanent. It is purgatorial—aimed at purification, not destruction. In the end, God wins every heart, and He becomes “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).³⁰

I lean toward conditional immortality. I take human freedom very seriously, and I believe that genuine freedom means a person can say “no” to God permanently. I also believe that the biblical language of destruction and the “second death” points toward a final end, not an endless continuation. But I hold this position with humility. I sometimes find myself drawn toward the hope of universal reconciliation, and I will not condemn those who hold that view. Some of the greatest theologians in church history—Gregory of Nyssa, among others—believed in the eventual restoration of all things, and they were not called heretics for it.³¹

Here is what I am sure of: the divine presence model works with either outcome. Whether the fire of God’s love eventually consumes the resistant or eventually melts the hardest heart, the character of God remains the same. God is love. His fire is love. And His fire is aimed at purification, not punishment.

That is the ground I am building on. And I think it is solid ground.

What About the Postmortem Opportunity?

There is one more piece of this puzzle that I want to put on the table right at the beginning, because it matters enormously.

I believe that God provides a genuine opportunity for salvation after death to those who did not have an adequate chance to respond to the gospel during their earthly lives.

This is not a novel idea. The Apostles’ Creed itself says that Jesus “descended into hell”—or, more accurately, into the realm of the dead. The apostle Peter writes that Christ “went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits” (1 Pet. 3:19) and that “the gospel was proclaimed even to those who are dead” (1 Pet. 4:6).³² The early church took these passages seriously. Many of the Fathers believed that Christ’s descent into the realm of the dead was not just a theological abstraction but a real rescue mission—that Jesus went to preach the good news to those who had never heard it in their earthly lives.

I believe that this postmortem opportunity extends all the way to the final judgment. The intermediate state—the period between death and the resurrection—is not the final state. People are conscious during this period (Luke 16:19–31; Luke 23:43; Phil. 1:23; 2 Cor. 5:8), and I believe God continues to offer the gift of salvation during this time.³³ The last chance to receive Christ comes at or during the final judgment itself, when every person stands in the unveiled presence of God and the truth about their own hearts is fully revealed.

After that, the fate of those who still refuse is sealed—whether that means destruction (on the CI view) or whether God’s love eventually prevails (on the UR view).

This matters because it means that the stakes of this life are real, but the grace of God is wider than many of us have been taught. The child who dies in infancy is not lost. The person born in a remote village who never heard the name of Jesus is not condemned by default. The mentally disabled person who could not understand a gospel presentation is not doomed. God is just. God is loving. And God does not finally condemn those who never had a fair chance to respond.³⁴

Baker captures this conviction when she notes that many of the early church fathers could not believe that God would limit the opportunity of salvation to our brief time on earth, especially if the possibility of repentance remains an option even after bodily death.³⁵ For these ancient believers, a God of love would not slam the door shut when someone had never been given a real chance to walk through it.

I agree. And the divine presence model provides the framework for understanding how this works. The intermediate state is a place of increasing encounter with God’s presence. The final judgment is the full unveiling of that presence. And in every stage, God’s love is at work, seeking to draw hearts toward Himself.

A Map of the Journey Ahead

This book is organized into eight parts, and I want to give you a quick overview so you know where we are heading.

In Part I (Chapters 1–3), we lay the groundwork. This chapter has introduced the book’s purpose and my personal journey. Chapter 2 will define the problem of hell precisely—what makes it such a difficult theological puzzle—and establish the criteria any adequate solution must meet. Chapter 3 will survey the four standard views of hell (ECT, annihilationism, universalism, and the choice model) and show where each falls short.³⁶

In Part II (Chapters 4–8), we build the theological foundation. We will look at what Scripture actually says about the nature of God as love, how Western theology distorted the character of God, what biblical justice really means, what the “wrath of God” actually refers to, and what the fire of God represents. This section is critical. The divine presence model does not start with hell. It starts with God. And if we get God right, everything else falls into place.³⁷

In Part III (Chapters 9–13), we evaluate each of the four standard views in depth. ECT gets two full chapters—one presenting its strongest case, one dismantling it. The choice model, conditional immortality, and universalism each get a chapter. I will be fair. I will present each view at its best before showing where it breaks down.³⁸

In Part IV (Chapters 14–20), we build the case for the divine presence model. This is the heart of the book. We will draw on the Orthodox tradition, the philosophical work of R. Zachary Manis, the theological synthesis of Sharon Baker, and the Church Fathers to construct a comprehensive case that hell is not separation from God but the experience of God’s overwhelming presence by those who have rejected Him. We will also address the strongest objections to the model.

In Part V (Chapters 21–25), we dig into the biblical text. We will do careful exegesis of every major passage about hell, fire, and judgment—Gehenna, the lake of fire, the sheep and the goats, the rich man and Lazarus, and more. We will look at the original Hebrew and Greek. And we will show that the divine presence model fits the biblical data better than its competitors.³⁹

In Part VI (Chapters 26–29), we turn to the intermediate state, the soul, the postmortem opportunity, and the final judgment. These chapters address some of the most frequently asked questions: What happens when we die? Is the soul real? Can people be saved after death? What does the final judgment actually look like?⁴⁰

In Part VII (Chapters 30–31), we face the hardest questions head-on: Is the final outcome conditional immortality or universal reconciliation? Can anyone truly choose hell forever? These are the questions I wrestle with most, and I will be honest about where I land and where I remain uncertain.

In Part VIII (Chapter 32), we wrap things up with a concluding essay that brings together everything we have learned and asks: So what? What difference does all of this make for how we live, how we worship, and how we share the good news?

An Invitation, Not a Lecture

I want this book to be a conversation, not a lecture. I am not standing at a podium talking down to you. I am sitting across the table from you, sharing what I have found and inviting you to examine it for yourself.

I know this is sensitive territory. I know that for many of you, the doctrine of hell is deeply connected to your understanding of salvation, evangelism, and the authority of Scripture. I also know that for some of you, questioning ECT feels dangerous—like pulling one thread from a sweater and watching the whole thing unravel. I understand that fear because I lived it. But here is what I discovered: when I pulled that thread, the sweater did not unravel. What unraveled was a set of assumptions I had never examined. Underneath those assumptions, I found a stronger, more beautiful, more biblically grounded faith than the one I started with. I found a God who is bigger than my theology. And that, I promise you, is not something to fear.

I am not asking you to throw anything away. I am asking you to come with me on a journey through the biblical text, through the history of the church, and through the most careful theological and philosophical thinking on this subject—and to see if, at the end, you find what I found: a view of hell that honors the Bible, honors the tradition, and above all, honors the character of the God who is love.

I will be honest where I am certain and honest where I am not. I will show you the evidence and let you weigh it. I will treat the views I disagree with fairly and the scholars I draw on with respect. And I will never ask you to believe something just because I say so. Every claim in this book will be grounded in Scripture, supported by the tradition, and argued on its merits.

Baker, in the preface to Razing Hell, assures her readers that she has no intention of doing away with hell. She cannot, she says, because she has too high a respect for the authority of the Bible as God’s Word.⁴¹ I feel the same way. Hell is real. But hell is not what most of us have been taught. And the God behind hell is far better than the theology of ECT has led us to believe.

Manis puts it differently, but the point is the same. His goal, as he states in the introduction to Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, is to expand the discussion of hell by developing an alternative to the standard options—one that fares better than its rivals at each of the points where they are weakest.⁴² That is my goal too. The divine presence model is not a concession to modern sensibility. It is a recovery of the oldest Christian understanding of hell, preserved in the Eastern church for nearly two thousand years and now being rediscovered in the West.

Is This “Soft on Hell”?

I can already hear the objection. Some of you are thinking: “This sounds like you’re going soft on hell. This sounds like you’re watering it down.”

I understand why it might sound that way. But the opposite is true.

The divine presence model does not make hell less serious. It makes hell more serious. Here is why.

On the traditional ECT view, hell is something that happens to you. God sentences you, and then some external punishment is applied. Fire burns your body. Darkness surrounds you. Demons torment you. It is horrible, but it is something being done to you from the outside.

On the divine presence model, hell is something that happens inside you. It is the revelation of what you have become. When the full, blazing, unfiltered presence of perfect Love hits a heart that has spent a lifetime cultivating hatred, selfishness, pride, and rebellion, the resulting agony is not imposed from without. It rises from within. Hell is what happens when a soul that has been running from God can no longer run, and the Love it has been fleeing catches up with it.⁴³

That is not soft. That is terrifying. It means that sin is not just a legal violation that God could choose to overlook. Sin is a disease of the soul—a corrosion of the very capacity to receive love. And if that disease is allowed to run its course unchecked, it destroys the person from the inside out. Not because God is punishing them. Because that is what sin does.⁴⁴

The divine presence model takes sin more seriously than ECT does, not less. ECT treats sin as a legal problem that requires legal punishment. The divine presence model treats sin as an existential catastrophe—a sickness of the soul that, if not healed, leads to destruction in the presence of perfect Love. On the ECT view, you can be saved by a legal transaction. On the divine presence model, salvation requires real transformation—a genuine change of heart, a turning toward Love, a willingness to let the fire do its purifying work.⁴⁵

Does that sound soft to you? It does not sound soft to me. It sounds like the most serious call to repentance and transformation I have ever heard.

Taking Sin Seriously—and Taking God Seriously

One of the deepest problems with ECT is that, ironically, it does not take sin seriously enough. ECT treats sin primarily as a legal offense—a violation of God’s law that demands legal punishment. On this view, the punishment is external: God applies fire, darkness, and torment as a sentence. The relationship between the sin and the punishment is arbitrary. God could have chosen a different punishment. He chose this one.

But the Bible paints a very different picture of sin. Sin is not primarily a legal violation. Sin is the corruption of the human heart. Sin is what happens when a creature made for love turns away from Love and begins to love itself above all else. Sin is the progressive hardening of the heart, the darkening of the mind, the twisting of desires until what is good looks evil and what is evil looks good.⁴⁶

And the consequences of sin are not arbitrary punishments imposed from the outside. They are the natural results of a heart that has turned away from the source of all life, all goodness, and all love. As the apostle Paul says in Romans 1, God’s “wrath” is not Him actively punishing people. It is Him “giving them over” to the consequences of their own choices (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). God does not need to invent punishments for sin. Sin is its own punishment. Hatred is its own hell.⁴⁷

Basil the Great, one of the most important Church Fathers of the fourth century, argued precisely this point in his homily That God Is Not the Cause of Evils. God does not cause evil. God does not inflict suffering. Evil is the absence of good, and suffering is the natural consequence of turning away from the One who is the source of all goodness.⁴⁸

On the divine presence model, hell is the ultimate expression of this truth. When a soul that has spent a lifetime cultivating hatred encounters the full presence of the God who is Love, the result is not a punishment imposed from outside. It is the natural, inevitable consequence of what that soul has become. The fire does not need to be created. The fire is God Himself. And the burning is the collision between perfect Love and a heart that has made itself Love’s enemy.⁴⁹

A God Worth Worshiping

Here is what I have come to believe, and what I want to share with you in the pages ahead.

We serve a God whose fire is not wrath but love. A God whose justice is not vengeance but restoration. A God whose judgment is not a courtroom verdict but the opening of books—the revealing of what is truly in the human heart when it stands naked before the penetrating light of truth.⁵⁰ We serve a God who does not torture. A God who does not take pleasure in the suffering of the wicked. A God who desires all people to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4) and who will go to extraordinary lengths—even beyond death itself—to offer every person the chance to say yes to His love.

That is a God worth worshiping. That is a God worth trusting with the fate of every human being who has ever lived. That is a God who, when you really look at Him clearly, makes you want to run toward the fire, not away from it.

I think about the early Christians—the ones who actually knew the apostles, who spoke the Greek of the New Testament as their native language, who lived in the culture and context in which the Scriptures were written. Many of them understood hell in exactly the way I am describing. They did not see God as an eternal torturer. They saw Him as an eternal Lover whose love was so intense, so pure, so overwhelming, that it could purify the willing and consume the resistant. The fire was not a punishment. The fire was God Himself. And they did not run from it. They ran toward it. They embraced martyrdom. They sang hymns as they were led to their deaths. Why? Because they knew the fire of God was love, and they had nothing to fear from Love.⁵⁴

Somewhere along the way, the Western church lost that understanding. It replaced the God of burning Love with a God of burning Wrath. It replaced the fire that purifies with the fire that punishes. It replaced the consuming Love of an infinite God with the consuming anger of an offended judge. And the result has been catastrophic—for our theology, for our evangelism, for our witness to the world, and for the souls of millions of believers who have been taught to fear the very God who loves them most.

This book is an attempt to recover what was lost. Not to invent something new. Not to accommodate modern sensibilities. But to go back—back behind Augustine, back behind Anselm, back behind the medieval church’s torture chambers and the Reformers’ courtroom metaphors—and recover the understanding of God’s fire that the earliest Christians held. The divine presence model is not a twenty-first-century innovation. It is a first-century recovery.

Because the fire is love. And Love is the best possible news.

The Orthodox tradition speaks of the day when God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28)—when every corner of creation will be filled with His presence, and there will be no place hidden from His love. On that day, Fr. Thomas Hopko writes, the very presence of Christ will be the judgment. His face will be the test. For those who love the Lord, His presence will be infinite joy, paradise, and eternal life. For those who hate the Lord, the same presence will be infinite torment. The reality for both will be exactly the same. The difference will be entirely in the human heart.⁵¹

I believe that. And I believe it is the most faithful reading of what Scripture, the Fathers, and the best of the Christian tradition have always taught about hell, judgment, and the character of God.

Come and See

That day in 2019, watching a video of a girl being tormented in hell, something broke open inside me. It was not my faith that broke. It was the prison I had built around my faith—the theological framework that told me I had to believe God was a torturer in order to be a faithful Christian.

That framework crumbled. And what I found underneath it was not doubt. It was not liberalism. It was not a watered-down, anything-goes theology. What I found was a bigger, more beautiful, more terrifying, and more wonderful God than the God of ECT had ever allowed me to see.

I found the God who is a consuming fire. And I discovered that His fire is love.

I invite you to come with me and see for yourself. We have a lot of ground to cover—Scripture to dig into, Church Fathers to listen to, philosophical arguments to consider, and hard questions to wrestle with. I will not pretend the answers are always easy. Some of the questions in this book are among the hardest in all of theology, and I will tell you honestly when I do not have a final answer.

But I am convinced of this: the God revealed in Jesus Christ—the God who wept at the tomb of Lazarus, who healed the sick, who forgave His executioners from the cross, who pursued the lost sheep until He found it—that God is better than ECT says He is. Infinitely better. And the fire of His judgment is not the fire of cruelty. It is the fire of the most passionate, relentless, purifying love the universe has ever known.

I think back to that day in 2019, watching that video on my computer screen. I think about the fear I felt—not fear of hell, but fear of questioning what I had always been taught. I think about the years I spent swallowing my doubts, telling myself that a good Christian does not ask these questions. And I think about what I found when I finally had the courage to open those books and read with an open mind: not a weaker faith, but a stronger one. Not a smaller God, but a bigger one. Not a softer view of hell, but a more terrifying one—because the divine presence model tells me that what I should really fear is not some external fire. What I should fear is what sin does to my own heart. What I should fear is the possibility of standing in the full blaze of God’s love and not being able to receive it.

That fear is healthy. That fear drives me not away from God but toward Him. That fear makes me want to deal with my sin now—not to escape a punishment, but to prepare my heart for an encounter with a Love so overwhelming that nothing impure can survive it.

Our God is a consuming fire.

And His fire is love.

Turn the page. The journey begins.