Chapter 5

The Western Distortion—How God Became the Enemy

“The love of God in an Eastern understanding is the very fire of hell.”

—Alexandre Kalomiros, The River of Fire

A Theology That Slandered God

Imagine you grew up hearing about a father who loved his children deeply. He would do anything for them—cross oceans, give up his own comfort, sacrifice his very life. Everyone who described this father used the word “love.” They told you that his love never failed, never gave up, never ran out.

But then, slowly, other details crept in. You learned that this same father had a dark side. If any of his children disobeyed him—even once, even in a small way—his love could turn to fury. And not just a temporary anger that would pass. An infinite fury. A rage so consuming that he would lock his disobedient child in a basement and set the child on fire. Not for a day. Not for a year. Forever. And he would keep that child alive through the burning, so the pain would never stop.

You would not call that father loving. You would call him a monster.

Yet this is almost exactly the picture of God that has dominated Western Christianity for over a thousand years. And the strangest part? The earliest Christians—the ones who actually spoke the language of the New Testament, who sat at the feet of the apostles’ own students—never taught it. The God-as-torturer portrait did not come from the Bible. It came from a slow theological drift that began with one brilliant but flawed North African bishop, picked up speed with a medieval archbishop, and reached full velocity in the Protestant Reformation.

This chapter tells the story of that drift. It is not a story about bad people. Augustine, Anselm, Luther, and Calvin were brilliant, devoted followers of Jesus. I have learned from all of them, and I honor their contributions to the faith. But even brilliant people can get things wrong—especially when they are reading Scripture through lenses borrowed from cultures that did not share the biblical worldview. And when what they got wrong was the character of God himself, the consequences were devastating.

The Eastern Orthodox theologian Alexandre Kalomiros put it bluntly in his famous 1980 lecture, The River of Fire: the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was not convincing people that God doesn’t exist. It was convincing them that God is a torturer.¹ The slander did not come through atheism. It came through theology. Through sermons and creeds and hymns, generation after generation of Western Christians were taught to believe that the God who is love is also the God who will burn billions of people alive for all eternity—not to heal them, not to correct them, but simply because his “justice” demands it.

That is the distortion we need to understand. Because until we see where it came from, we will never be free of it.

The Case: How the Distortion Happened

The God of the Early Church

To see how far Western theology drifted, we first need to know where it started. The earliest Christians—those who spoke Greek as their native language and read the New Testament without translation—had a strikingly different picture of God than the one most Western Christians hold today.

For these early believers, the most important truth about God was not his power. It was not his sovereignty. It was not even his holiness, though they took holiness very seriously. The most important truth was that God is love.² Not that God has love, or that God sometimes shows love, but that love is the very essence of what God is. Everything God does—creating, sustaining, judging, saving—flows from this one unchanging reality.

Anthony the Great, one of the desert fathers of the fourth century, put it in terms that still stun me every time I read them. In the Philokalia, he wrote that God is good, dispassionate, and unchangeable. If someone thinks that God changes, that God turns toward people in anger or turns away from them in displeasure, that person has it backwards. God does not change. The sun does not hide itself from the blind. The blind simply cannot see the sun.³

Think about how radical that is. Anthony was saying that God never turns wrathful. God never switches from a loving mode to a punishing mode. God is always, unchangingly, perfectly love. When Scripture speaks of God’s “anger,” it is using human language to describe what happens when a sinful heart encounters an all-holy, all-loving God. The fire is always love. The question is whether the person standing in the fire has a heart of gold or a heart of straw.

Isaac the Syrian, a seventh-century monk and bishop, said it even more directly. In his famous Homily 84, he asked how we could call God just if we believe he pays back evil for evil. The mercy of God, Isaac insisted, far surpasses any notion of retribution. God’s justice is not a courtroom verdict. It is a physician’s cure.⁴ Isaac went so far as to say that those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the whip of love. It is not hatred that torments them. It is love. The sorrow of realizing how much they have rejected love is sharper than any flame.⁵

This was not a fringe view. Basil the Great, one of the most respected theologians in all of Christian history, wrote an entire treatise called That God Is Not the Cause of Evils. The title says everything. God does not cause suffering. God does not author pain. Evil is the absence of good, just as darkness is the absence of light. When people suffer, it is because they have turned away from the source of life—not because God has punished them in anger.⁶

Gregory of Nyssa, Basil’s brother and one of the three great Cappadocian Fathers, took this even further. Gregory argued that all of God’s acts of judgment are ultimately aimed at healing and restoration. The fire of divine judgment is like a surgeon’s knife—painful, yes, but directed at removing the disease, not destroying the patient.⁷ For Gregory, even the most fearsome images of divine judgment in Scripture pointed toward a God whose deepest intention was always restoration.

Maximus the Confessor, writing in the seventh century, echoed this same conviction. God’s love is unchanging and universal, poured out on all creatures equally. The difference between paradise and hell is not a difference in God. It is a difference in the creature’s capacity to receive love. Some open their hearts and experience that love as warmth, light, and joy. Others harden their hearts and experience the same love as burning, darkness, and torment.⁸

This is the world of the early Greek-speaking church. A world where God is unwaveringly good. Where evil is understood as a turning away from good. Where judgment is therapeutic, not vindictive. Where the same divine fire that warms the righteous burns the wicked—not because the fire changes, but because the hearts are different.

I need to say something important here. The picture I have just painted is not a romanticized version of the early church. The Greek Fathers disagreed with each other on many things. They debated the nature of Christ, the role of free will, the details of the resurrection, and much else. But on this one point—that God is unchangingly good, that God does not cause evil, and that God’s dealings with sinners are always aimed at restoration rather than vengeance—there was a remarkable consensus. This was not the view of one or two eccentric monks. It was the mainstream theological conviction of the church that gave us the Nicene Creed.

It was into this world that Augustine arrived. And everything began to shift.

Augustine and the Turn Toward the Courtroom

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was one of the most brilliant minds in the history of Christianity. His Confessions are still read and loved. His theological influence is so vast that it is almost impossible to overstate it. The entire Western church—Catholic, Reformed, evangelical—is built on foundations that Augustine laid.⁹

But Augustine was also a product of his time and place. He was trained in Roman law and rhetoric before his conversion. He thought in Latin, not Greek. And he was deeply shaped by the legal and political structures of the late Roman Empire—an empire where justice meant retribution, where authority meant dominion, and where the emperor’s honor had to be upheld at all costs.¹⁰

When Augustine read the Bible, he read it through these lenses. And the God he found there began to look less like the good physician of Isaac the Syrian and more like the magistrate of a Roman courtroom.

For Augustine, the central problem of the human condition was not that we had turned away from the source of life. It was that we had offended a holy God. Sin was not just a disease of the soul. It was a legal crime against an infinite Judge. And crimes demand punishment. The more exalted the one offended, the more severe the punishment must be. Since God is infinitely exalted, any offense against God is infinitely grave—and therefore demands an infinitely long punishment.¹¹

Do you see what happened? The question shifted. In the East, the question was: “How does a loving God heal broken creatures?” In Augustine’s West, the question became: “How does an offended Judge exact sufficient punishment for crimes against his honor?” That shift—from the physician’s office to the courtroom—changed everything.

Kalomiros saw this clearly. He argued that Western Christianity, beginning with Augustine, introduced a “juridical” framework into theology that was foreign to both Scripture and the earliest church. The juridical view treats God’s relationship to humanity as primarily legal: God is the Lawgiver, we are the lawbreakers, and justice means giving lawbreakers what they deserve.¹² Within this framework, death itself is understood not as the natural consequence of turning away from the source of Life (which is how the Eastern Fathers understood it) but as a punishment inflicted by God.¹³

Augustine also introduced another idea that would have far-reaching consequences: the doctrine of double predestination in its strongest form. Not only did God choose some for salvation, Augustine argued, but God also chose some for damnation. The massa damnata—the “mass of the damned”—was simply the portion of humanity that God, in his sovereign wisdom, decided not to save.¹⁴ Their eternal suffering in hell was not a failure of God’s love. It was a display of God’s justice.

I want to pause here, because this is where the distortion really cuts deep. In Augustine’s framework, God’s love and God’s justice are set against each other. Love saves some. Justice damns others. The two attributes pull in opposite directions, and justice wins for most of the human race. This is radically different from the Eastern view, where God’s love and justice are the same thing—where God’s justice is his saving, healing, restoring love.¹⁵

Baker sees this tension clearly. She writes about how the traditional Western image of God presents us with two conflicting portraits: one of a God who loves unconditionally and pursues us relentlessly, and another of a God who inflicts eternal torment on those who fail to respond. In one breath we tell people that God loves them enough to die for them. In the next breath we tell them that this same God will burn them alive forever if they don’t love him back.¹⁶ Baker’s students, Eric, Brooke, and Lisa, all felt this contradiction in their bones. They could not make the loving God and the tormenting God fit together in the same picture. And they were right. Because the portrait never was consistent. It was painted by mixing Eastern colors with Western legal categories that did not belong on the same canvas.

There is another consequence of Augustine’s framework that deserves attention. Once God’s relationship to humanity was understood in primarily legal terms, the entire emotional tenor of the faith shifted. In the Eastern tradition, the believer’s primary response to God is love and gratitude. You love a physician who heals you. You trust a father who rescues you. But in the juridical framework, the believer’s primary response is fear. You fear a judge who holds your eternal fate in his hands. You dread the courtroom. You live in constant anxiety about whether the verdict will go your way.

This is not an abstract theological point. It has shaped the lived experience of millions of Christians. I have met people who spent decades terrified of God—not because they didn’t believe in him, but precisely because they did. They believed in a God who could and would burn them forever if they stepped out of line. Their faith was not a relationship of love. It was a hostage negotiation. And the saddest part? They thought that was normal. They thought that was what faith was supposed to feel like.

It is not. The God of the early church inspired awe, certainly. He inspired wonder. But the early Christians ran toward God, not away from him. They sang hymns of gratitude, not whimpers of terror. Because they knew that the fire of God was the fire of love—and love, even when it pierces us with conviction, is never something to run from.

Augustine also gave the Western church its doctrine of original sin in a form that the East never fully accepted. For Augustine, every human being inherits not just a tendency toward sin but the guilt of Adam’s sin. We are born guilty, born condemned, born deserving of eternal punishment—even before we have committed a single conscious act. Babies who die unbaptized, in Augustine’s view, face damnation (though he hoped their suffering would be mild).⁵³ The Eastern church also recognized the devastating effects of the fall, but it did not go as far as Augustine. For the East, we inherit the consequences of Adam’s sin—mortality, a disordered nature, a tendency toward evil—but not the legal guilt itself.⁵⁴ Once again, the difference is between a medical model (we inherit a disease) and a legal model (we inherit a criminal record).

Augustine’s legacy was immense. He gave the Western church its theological vocabulary, its framework for understanding sin and salvation, and its assumption that justice means retribution. Virtually every Western theologian who came after him—Catholic and Protestant alike—built on this foundation. And the further they built, the more the original, Eastern picture of God as the Healer disappeared from Western sight.

Anselm and the Satisfaction Theory

If Augustine turned theology into a courtroom, Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) turned it into a feudal honor dispute.

Anselm was a medieval monk and archbishop who asked a question that has shaped Western Christianity ever since: Cur Deus Homo?—“Why did God become man?” His answer, laid out in his famous treatise by that name, was that human sin had offended God’s honor. In the feudal system of Anselm’s day, an insult to a lord required “satisfaction”—a payment to restore the lord’s honor. The greater the lord, the greater the satisfaction required. Since God is infinitely great, the offense of human sin against God’s honor is infinitely grave, and the satisfaction required is infinite.¹⁷

No mere human could pay an infinite debt. Only God himself could provide infinite satisfaction. And so God became man in Jesus Christ, and Jesus’ death on the cross was the infinite payment that satisfied God’s offended honor.¹⁸

Now, there is something beautiful in the idea that only God could bridge the gap between humanity and himself. The early church would have agreed with that. But look at what Anselm did to the reason for the incarnation. In the earlier view, God became man because love compelled him to rescue his beloved children from the death and destruction they had brought upon themselves. In Anselm’s view, God became man because honor required it—because God’s dignity had been insulted, and someone had to pay.¹⁹

Manis helps us see the deep problem here. In an honor-shame framework, a social subordinate gives offense to a superior when the subordinate fails to pay proper honor. The greater the difference in status, the greater the offense. And the superior must punish the offender to vindicate himself, to preserve or restore his honor.²⁰ Applied to theology, this means that God must punish sinners in order to preserve his own honor. If he fails to exact vengeance, he incurs shame. And since the difference between God and humanity is infinite, the punishment must be infinite as well.

Can you feel how far we have traveled from Anthony the Great’s portrait of a God who is good, dispassionate, and unchangeable? In Anthony’s view, God’s love never wavers. In Anselm’s view, God’s honor must be appeased. In Anthony’s view, God does not change. In Anselm’s view, sin creates a problem in God—a wounded honor, a disturbed dignity—that requires a payment to fix.

As Manis points out, the logic undergirding both Aquinas’s and Anselm’s defense of eternal punishment rests on a principle that is deeply troubling: the idea that the moral seriousness of a wrong depends on the status of the person wronged.²¹ In plain English, this means it is worse to insult a king than to insult a peasant. It is worse to wrong God than to wrong a human. And since God is infinitely great, any wrong against God is infinitely bad—deserving of infinite punishment.

But Manis exposes the fatal flaw in this reasoning. If the moral seriousness of a wrong depends on the status of the person wronged, then it also follows that wronging a human being is more serious than wronging an animal, and wronging a rich person is more serious than wronging a poor one. This principle—that moral worth is a function of social status—runs directly against the heart of Christian teaching, which insists that all human beings are of equal worth because all are made in the image of God.²² The honor code that Anselm and Aquinas relied on was borrowed from feudal culture, not from Scripture. And it has no place at the center of our understanding of God.

Furthermore, Manis argues that even if we grant the honor-code logic for the sake of argument, the conclusion still does not follow. For a person to be fully culpable for wronging someone, they would have to fully understand what they are doing. You cannot be held completely responsible for an offense you did not fully comprehend. But no finite human being can fully comprehend God—God is infinite, and our understanding is limited. So even on the honor-code framework, no human could ever incur truly infinite guilt, because no human could ever fully grasp the infinite greatness of the one they are offending.²³

This is a devastating critique. It means the entire foundation of the Western argument for eternal punishment—that sinning against an infinite God incurs infinite guilt—collapses under its own weight. And if the foundation collapses, so does the doctrine built upon it.

The Reformers: Doubling Down

When Martin Luther and John Calvin launched the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, they challenged many aspects of medieval Catholicism. They fought against indulgences, against papal authority, against the sale of salvation. In many ways, they brought the church back to the Bible.

But on the question of God’s justice and the nature of hell, the Reformers did not reform. They doubled down.

Calvin, in particular, took Augustine’s ideas about predestination and carried them to their logical extreme. God sovereignly elects some for salvation and passes over others, consigning them to eternal damnation. This is not unjust, Calvin argued, because all humans deserve damnation. God is not obligated to save anyone. The fact that he saves some is pure grace. The fact that he damns the rest is pure justice.²⁴

Luther, similarly, affirmed that God’s justice required the eternal punishment of the wicked. His theory of atonement used the language of satisfaction: Christ takes our place in a transfer of punishment for sin.²⁵ The cross becomes a transaction. A debt is owed. A price is paid. The books are balanced. Those for whom the debt is not paid remain under God’s wrath forever.

Baker traces how these Reformation-era ideas continued to shape the Western understanding of the atonement—and, by extension, the understanding of hell. She notes that the traditional theories of atonement that dominate Western theology—Anselm’s satisfaction theory, Calvin’s penal substitution, Luther’s sacrificial transfer—all share one thing in common: God will not simply forgive sin. Someone has to pay. A debt must be settled. A punishment must be inflicted. These theories reduce the cross to a divine equation, a cosmic balancing of accounts rooted in retributive justice.²⁶

Baker puts a fine point on the problem: lurking behind these theories is the ghost of a punitive father—a cruel father who demands the blood of an innocent person in retribution for sin, who finds the death of his own son an acceptable way to save the world.²⁷ If that sounds harsh, it is meant to. Baker is not attacking the cross. She is attacking a particular interpretation of the cross—one that makes God the author of violence rather than the overcomer of it.

The results of this theological trajectory are exactly what you would expect. When God is primarily a Judge whose honor must be satisfied, hell becomes the place where unsatisfied debts are paid forever. When justice means retribution, eternal punishment becomes the logical consequence of finite sin against an infinite God. When the cross is a payment rather than a rescue, those for whom the payment was not made are left to face the full weight of divine wrath alone.

And so we arrived at Jonathan Edwards, who could write with a straight face that God holds sinners over the pit of hell like someone holding a loathsome spider over a fire, that God’s wrath burns like fire against them, and that the suffering of the damned would actually increase the bliss of the saints in heaven.²⁸ Edwards was not a cruel man. He was a deeply devout pastor and philosopher. But he was the product of a theological tradition that had, over a thousand years, gradually transformed the God of love into a God of wrath—a God whose justice demanded endless pain.

The effect on the average believer was profound. By the time of the Great Awakenings in the eighteenth century, the primary tool of evangelism in the West was fear. Preachers did not draw people to God by showing them the beauty of divine love. They stampeded people toward God by terrifying them with the threat of divine wrath. “Turn or burn” was not a fringe slogan. It was mainstream theology. And it worked—not because it was true, but because fear is a powerful motivator.

Baker captures this dynamic perfectly. She wonders how many pastors across the world have pounded their pulpits and scared their parishioners into the kingdom of God, treating the gospel like a fire insurance policy rather than a love letter.⁵⁵ She then asks the question that too few have thought to ask: Does God want people to come to him out of fear? Or does God want them to come freely, drawn by love? In the juridical framework, it does not matter much. What matters is the verdict, not the motivation. But in the Eastern, relational framework, motivation is everything. A love coerced by terror is not love at all. And a God who would use the threat of eternal torture to secure “love” from his creatures is not a God who understands what love means.

Here is what I find most heartbreaking about this trajectory. The Reformers genuinely cared about the gospel. Luther was driven by a desperate need to know that he was right with God. Calvin was motivated by a profound sense of God’s sovereignty and glory. They were not trying to make God into a monster. But because they inherited the juridical framework from Augustine and Anselm, the God they proclaimed sounded like a monster to anyone who listened carefully. The louder they proclaimed God’s sovereignty, the more God sounded like a tyrant. The more they emphasized God’s justice, the more God sounded like an executioner. The more they insisted on the seriousness of sin, the more it seemed like the real problem was not sin but God—the God who would not be satisfied until someone suffered.

The Eastern Preservation

While all of this was happening in the West, the Eastern church preserved a different understanding. Not a new understanding—the original understanding.

The Orthodox East never adopted the juridical framework that came to dominate the West. For Eastern Christians, God’s relationship to humanity was never primarily legal. It was always relational, familial, and therapeutic. Sin is a disease, not a crime. Judgment is a diagnosis, not a verdict. And the goal of God’s dealing with sinners is always healing, not punishment.²⁹

Kalomiros makes this point with force. He argues that the Western understanding of God as a wrathful judge who demands satisfaction is not just theologically mistaken—it is the greatest slander ever committed against God. It has done more damage to the Christian faith than all the attacks of atheists combined, because it comes from within the church.³⁰

He is not exaggerating. Think about how many people have left Christianity precisely because they could not worship a God who would torture people forever. Baker reports that countless students and thoughtful adults tell her they are turned off by Christianity mainly because of the violent images of God embedded in the doctrine of eternal hell. In one breath, the church lures the unrepentant with tales of God’s forgiveness and love. In the next moment, it terrorizes them with threats of eternal torture.³¹

Kalomiros argued that this is why atheism was born in the West and not in the East. When you make God a torturer, you make God unbelievable. Thoughtful people reject such a God not because they are rebellious, but because their moral intuitions are sound. They know that a being who tortures people forever cannot be called loving. And they are right.³²

In the Eastern tradition, by contrast, God never stops being love. Even in judgment, even in hell, God is love. The fire of God is the fire of love. As we discussed in the last chapter, the same fire that warms the willing burns the resistant. The difference is not in God. It is in us. This is what the early Fathers taught, and it is what the Eastern church has preserved through the centuries while the West was building courtrooms and balancing scales.

John of Damascus, writing in the eighth century, explained that when Scripture uses language of God’s anger and wrath, it is using what theologians call “accommodated language.” God speaks our language so that we can begin to understand divine realities that exceed our nature. But we must not make the mistake of thinking that God actually experiences anger the way we do. God is impassible—not cold or unfeeling, but simply not subject to the changing emotions that dominate our lives.³³ When we read that God is “angry,” we are reading a description of how sinful creatures experience God’s unchanging love. The love does not change. The experience does.

This Eastern understanding was not limited to a few isolated voices. It was the mainstream view of the Greek-speaking church for centuries. Kalomiros draws on dozens of patristic sources to make his case, from Anthony the Great and Basil to Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor.³⁴ These were not marginal figures. They were the theological giants of the early church—the very people who hammered out the creeds, who defined the Trinity, who gave us the language we still use to talk about the incarnation. And they all shared a vision of God that was fundamentally different from the juridical picture that would later dominate the West.

Baker and the Distorted Image

Sharon Baker approaches the same problem from a different angle, but she arrives at the same destination. In the early chapters of Razing Hell, Baker walks through the traditional images of God that have been handed down through Western theology, and she shows how deeply violent they are.

Baker begins by cataloging the horrifying things that Western theologians have said about God and hell. Edwards declaring that God holds sinners over the pit of hell like loathsome spiders. Richard Baxter claiming that God would laugh at the suffering of the damned. Peter Lombard suggesting that the saints in heaven would be “satiated with joy” at the sight of the wicked being tortured. Samuel Hopkins arguing that if the fires of hell ever ceased, it would “obscure the light of heaven” and diminish the happiness of the blessed.³⁵

Stop and think about that. According to this tradition, the happiness of heaven actually depends on the torment of hell. The saints need the damned to be suffering in order to be fully happy. Heaven feeds on hell.

Baker then asks the obvious question: where does this image of God come from? Her answer is that it comes from reading the Bible through a retributive lens—a lens that was shaped not by Scripture itself but by the cultural and philosophical categories that Western theologians brought to Scripture.³⁶ When you start with the assumption that justice means retribution—that the scales must be balanced, that every wrong demands an equal and opposite punishment—you will read every passage about divine judgment as proof that God is a retributive God. And once you have a retributive God, eternal hell follows as naturally as night follows day.

But Baker shows that this reading is not the only one available—and not even the best one. The Bible, she argues, reveals a God whose justice is not retributive but restorative. The God of the Bible does not balance scales. He restores relationships. Rather than paying us back for our rebellion with eternal punishment, God reached out to reconcile us through Jesus.³⁷ This is the justice of the cross: not that someone had to pay, but that God himself entered our suffering to bring us home.

Baker also points to the practical damage done by the distorted image. One of her students, Eric, asked the question that haunts so many thoughtful Christians: “Where does the image of God as a violent tyrant come from? Why do we find it possible to believe such things of a God who, as we are also taught, loves every person who ever lived?”³⁸ Another student, Brooke, was even more direct: “It sounds like a bad horror movie, with God as the one wielding the chainsaw! Even the government considers torture a criminal action! How can we condone it just because God is doing it?”³⁹

These are not shallow questions. They are the cries of people whose moral intuitions about love and justice are bumping up against a theology that was built on the wrong foundation. And the foundation is not the Bible. The foundation is the juridical framework that Augustine, Anselm, and the Reformers imported into Christian theology from Roman law, feudal culture, and criminal justice.

Baker also raises an issue that deserves serious attention: the way our images of God shape our ethics. If God is a retributive judge who delights in punishing the wicked, then human beings made in God’s image might feel justified in being retributive too. If God tortures his enemies, then perhaps there is nothing wrong with torturing ours. If the saints in heaven can watch the suffering of the damned with joy, then perhaps compassion for evildoers is not really a Christian virtue.⁵⁶

The historical record bears this out. Throughout the centuries, Christians have used the image of a wrathful, punishing God to justify inquisitions, witch burnings, religious wars, and the persecution of heretics. They were not being inconsistent with their theology. They were being perfectly consistent with it. If God himself tortures people forever for the crime of unbelief, then surely his earthly representatives are justified in inflicting a bit of temporal punishment to save souls from that eternal fate. The logic is airtight—if you accept the premises. Change the premises, and the entire structure of religiously motivated violence loses its theological justification.

Baker goes further. She traces the connection between our images of God and how we read the Bible itself. We tend to read Scripture through the lens of whatever we already believe about God. If we believe God is primarily retributive, we will find retribution in every passage. If we believe God is primarily restorative, we will find restoration. The lens shapes what we see.⁵⁷ This is why the same Bible can be read to support both ECT and the divine presence model. The text does not change. But the interpretive framework makes all the difference. And the framework that has dominated the West for a millennium was shaped not by the Bible itself but by the cultural and philosophical commitments that Western theologians brought to the Bible.

Manis and the Retribution Thesis

The philosopher R. Zachary Manis gives us the most precise analysis of what went wrong. In Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, Manis identifies what he calls “the retribution thesis”—the claim that the purpose of hell is retribution, that consignment to hell is a punishment selected and imposed by God as payment for the evil deeds committed during a person’s earthly life.⁴⁰

Manis shows that the retribution thesis is the “hard core” of traditionalism.⁴¹ It is what makes the whole system work. If the purpose of hell is retribution, then hell must be proportional to the crime—and since sinning against an infinite God is supposedly an infinite crime, the punishment must be infinite. Eternal conscious torment follows logically from the retribution thesis combined with the honor-code argument.

But Manis systematically dismantles this logic. He begins by examining the most popular defense of the retribution thesis: the argument, developed by Aquinas and endorsed by many others, that sin is infinitely culpable because it is committed against an infinite God. As we saw earlier, this argument rests on the principle that the moral seriousness of a wrong depends on the greatness of the person wronged. Manis argues that this principle is “both intuitively implausible and squarely at odds with Christian morality,” because it implies that some human beings enjoy greater moral worth than others.²²

Manis also examines W. G. T. Shedd’s argument that guilt, once incurred, never ceases—and therefore retribution must be endless. Shedd reasoned that since the past cannot be changed, guilt becomes a permanent feature of the wrongdoer’s history, and punishment is justified at every moment from the time of the offense through all eternity.⁴² Manis calls this argument “self-defeating.” If punishment accomplishes nothing—if it does not change the guilt, does not balance the scales, does not right the wrong—then there is nothing good about it. The argument becomes a justification for eternal retribution that undercuts the very justification for retribution.⁴³

Even more damaging, Manis points out that Shedd’s argument “proves too much” from a Christian perspective. If even God cannot change the past, then God cannot remove a creature’s guilt. But if guilt can never be removed, then the saints in heaven are not holy and righteous. They are guilty sinners—and will remain so for all eternity. Most Christians would find that theologically unacceptable.⁴⁴

What Manis helps us see is that the entire Western defense of eternal punishment is built on sand. The honor-code argument fails because it borrows its key principle from feudal culture rather than from Scripture. Shedd’s argument fails because it destroys the very concept of justice it is trying to defend. And Aquinas’s argument fails because it implies a moral framework that contradicts the equality of all human beings before God.

Strip away the honor code, the feudal logic, and the Roman legal categories, and you are left with the question the Eastern Fathers asked all along: What does a God who is love actually do with sinful creatures? That question leads not to a courtroom, but to a cross. Not to retribution, but to restoration. Not to eternal conscious torment, but to the divine presence model.

Saved from God?

Here is perhaps the most telling symptom of the Western distortion: in much of Western Christianity, salvation has come to mean being saved from God.

Think about that. The gospel is supposed to be the good news that God loves us and has come to rescue us. But in the juridical framework, the biggest threat we face is not sin, not death, not the devil. It is God himself. God is the one who will burn us. God is the one who will condemn us. God is the one whose wrath we must escape. And Jesus is the one who steps in to shield us from the Father’s fury.

Kalomiros saw this with devastating clarity. He argued that in Western theology, the real enemy is God. Christianity was turned into a religion where God is the problem, and Jesus is the solution to the problem of God. Salvation means being rescued from the one who loves you—because his love has become indistinguishable from his wrath.⁴⁵

This is a catastrophic inversion of the gospel. In the New Testament, salvation is not rescue from God. It is rescue by God. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:19. The Father and the Son are not at odds. The Father is not the angry one and the Son the merciful one. The Father sent the Son because the Father loves the world (John 3:16). The cross is not Jesus protecting us from the Father. It is the Father and the Son, together, entering the depths of human suffering to rescue us from the power of sin and death.⁴⁶

Baker makes the same point from a slightly different direction. She notes that traditional theories of atonement—satisfaction, penal substitution—all assume that God cannot simply forgive sin. Someone must pay. A price must be extracted. But the Bible itself shows God forgiving freely, long before the cross. In the Old Testament, God forgave the sins of Israel again and again—not because a sufficient payment had been made, but because God is merciful.⁴⁷ The cross is not a payment that enables God to forgive. The cross is the supreme act of a God who has always been forgiving—a God who enters the very worst of human evil to absorb it, overcome it, and bring life out of death.

Objections and Responses

“Isn’t this just anti-Western bias?”

Someone might say: “This sounds like you’re just idealizing the East and demonizing the West. Every tradition has its problems. Why single out Western theology?”

That is a fair concern, and I take it seriously. I am not an Orthodox apologist. I am an evangelical Protestant who has learned something important from the Orthodox tradition. And what I have learned is not that the East is perfect and the West is terrible. It is that on this particular question—the character of God as it relates to judgment and hell—the East preserved an understanding that the West lost.

Every tradition has blind spots. The Orthodox tradition has its own. But when it comes to understanding God as unchangingly good, as always acting from love, and as never being the author of evil or suffering, the Eastern Fathers were right. And the fact that they were the ones who spoke the language of the New Testament gives their testimony special weight.⁴⁸

I also want to stress that I am not dismissing the entire Western tradition. The Reformers’ recovery of grace alone, faith alone, and Scripture alone were genuine gifts to the church. Augustine’s understanding of grace as unmerited favor is profoundly biblical. What I am challenging is one specific element of the Western tradition: the juridical framework that turned God into a courtroom judge whose honor demands infinite punishment. That element was not drawn from Scripture. It was drawn from Roman law and feudal culture. And it has done incalculable damage to the church’s witness.

“Doesn’t the Bible itself use legal language?”

Another objection goes like this: “The Bible uses plenty of legal language—judgment, condemnation, penalty, punishment. If the juridical framework is wrong, why does the Bible speak this way?”

This is an important question. And the answer is that the Bible does indeed use legal language. But it uses legal language among many other kinds of language—and the legal language is never the controlling metaphor.

Scripture also speaks of God as a shepherd, a mother hen, a physician, a husband, a father, a refiner, a potter. Each of these images captures something real about God’s relationship to us. The problem arises when one image—God as Judge—is allowed to swallow up all the others. When the courtroom becomes the controlling framework, every other image must be squeezed into it. The shepherd becomes a judge who decides which sheep to save and which to condemn. The physician becomes a prosecutor who decides which patients to heal and which to execute. The father becomes a warden who decides which children to release and which to torture.⁴⁹

The Eastern Fathers understood this. They used legal language when the text called for it, but they never allowed it to override the more fundamental truth that God is love. When they encountered passages that seemed to present God as angry or wrathful, they interpreted them in light of God’s unchanging goodness—as accommodated language that describes our experience of God, not God’s actual emotional state.⁵⁰

The Western tradition, by contrast, took the legal metaphors and made them the foundation. And once the foundation was juridical, everything built on top of it—including the doctrine of hell—took on a juridical character.

“But isn’t God really just? Don’t sinners really deserve punishment?”

Yes. God is just. The Bible says so, and I believe it. And yes, sin has real consequences. I am not arguing for a God who winks at evil or pretends sin doesn’t matter.

The question is not whether God is just, but what justice means. If justice means retribution—giving people exactly what they deserve, no more and no less—then eternal torment for finite sin is not just even by that standard, as Manis has shown. But if justice means something richer and deeper—if justice means making things right, restoring what is broken, healing what is diseased—then God’s justice and God’s love are not in tension. They are the same thing.⁵¹

We will explore this in much greater depth in the next chapter, where we will look at the Hebrew concept of tsedaka (righteousness/saving justice) and see how radically different it is from the Western courtroom model. For now, it is enough to say that the God of the Bible is not a judge who demands payment. He is a father who wants his children home. And his justice is the means by which he gets them there.

“Aren’t you just picking and choosing which Fathers to listen to?”

This is a serious charge, and it deserves an honest answer. It is true that not all Eastern Fathers agreed on the nature of hell. Some, like Gregory of Nyssa, were universalists who believed all would eventually be restored. Others, like John Chrysostom, used fiery language about the punishment of the wicked that sounds, at times, quite traditional. The Eastern tradition was not monolithic on this question.

But here is what the Eastern Fathers did agree on: God is unchangingly good. God does not cause evil. God’s dealings with sinners are aimed at healing and restoration, not at retribution for its own sake. Even those Eastern Fathers who affirmed a harsh view of final punishment did not root it in the juridical framework. They rooted it in the reality of human freedom—the tragic possibility that some may harden their hearts so completely against love that they cannot be healed. That is a very different thing from saying that God requires eternal punishment to satisfy his offended honor.

The point of this chapter is not that every Eastern Father agreed with every other Eastern Father. It is that the framework within which they worked—the therapeutic, relational, love-centered framework—was fundamentally different from the juridical framework that came to dominate the West. And it is that earlier framework, not the later one, that gives us the truest picture of who God is.

“What about Jesus’s warnings about hell? Didn’t he take it very seriously?”

Absolutely. Jesus spoke about hell more than anyone else in the Bible. He warned people in the strongest possible terms about the reality of divine judgment. I take every one of those warnings with deadly seriousness, and I devote several later chapters to examining them in detail.⁵⁸

But here is what is so striking: when you read Jesus’s warnings about hell carefully, they do not sound like a judge pronouncing a sentence. They sound like a physician warning a patient. “If you keep living this way, it will destroy you.” “The fire is real, and it will consume everything that is not built on love.” Jesus wept over Jerusalem. He did not gloat. He did not say, “You deserve this.” He said, “How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling” (Matt. 23:37). That is the language of a heartbroken parent, not a satisfied judge.

The divine presence model takes Jesus’s warnings about hell more seriously than the traditional view does—not less. Because in the divine presence model, hell is not a distant dungeon where God sends his enemies to suffer out of sight. Hell is what happens when you stand in the presence of perfect love with a heart that hates love. That is more terrifying than any medieval torture chamber. And it is exactly what Jesus warned about.

Conclusion: Recovering What Was Lost

Here is what I want you to take away from this chapter. The doctrine of eternal conscious torment did not fall straight out of the Bible. It was the product of a long theological development—a development in which the character of God was progressively distorted by a juridical framework foreign to Scripture and to the earliest church.

Augustine introduced the courtroom. Anselm added the honor code. The Reformers cemented the whole structure with penal substitution. And by the time Jonathan Edwards stood in his pulpit in Enfield, Connecticut, in 1741, he could describe a God who dangled sinners over the flames with apparent delight—and his congregation did not question whether this was the God of Jesus Christ.

But the Eastern church never followed this path. The Eastern Fathers—the ones who read the New Testament in its original language, who preserved the faith through centuries of persecution, who defined the very creeds we confess today—always insisted that God is unchangingly good, that his fire is the fire of love, and that judgment is aimed at healing rather than destruction.

This is not new theology. It is the recovery of the oldest theology. The divine presence model that we are building in this book is not an innovation. It is a return to what the church taught before the Western distortion set in.⁵²

I want to be gentle with those who have always believed in ECT. I understand why they believe it. The juridical framework is so deeply embedded in Western Christianity that most people have never encountered any alternative. When your entire theological vocabulary is built around courtrooms, verdicts, and punishments, eternal torment seems like the only option. It takes a deliberate act of theological imagination to step outside that framework and ask: “What if the foundation is wrong? What if God is not primarily a judge? What if justice does not mean retribution? What if the fire is not punishment but love?”

I remember the first time I encountered the Eastern understanding of God. It was like stepping out of a dark room into sunlight. I had always believed that God loved me—but somewhere deep down, I was afraid of him too. Afraid that his love had limits. Afraid that if I sinned badly enough, or doubted deeply enough, or asked the wrong questions, the loving Father would become the angry Judge. The juridical framework had planted that fear in me, even though I could not have named it at the time.

When I read Kalomiros, and then Baker, and then Manis, something broke open inside me. I realized that the fear was not coming from God. It was coming from a theology about God that had been built on the wrong foundation. The real God—the God of Anthony the Great and Isaac the Syrian, the God revealed in Jesus Christ—was not a judge waiting to condemn me. He was a Father running toward me. He was a physician reaching for the wound. He was a fire—yes, a consuming fire—but the fire was love. And love, I discovered, is not something to be afraid of. Love is something to run toward, even when it burns. Especially when it burns.

Those are the questions the Eastern Fathers asked. Those are the questions Baker, Manis, and Kalomiros ask. And those are the questions that will guide us through the rest of this book.

In the next chapter, we will dig into the biblical concept of justice itself. We will look at the Hebrew words tsedaka (righteousness), hesed (steadfast love), and emeth (faithfulness), and we will discover that the God of the Bible does not balance scales. He saves. He heals. He restores. And his justice is not the opposite of his love. His justice is his love.

The courtroom was never the right metaphor. The hospital was. And the Physician has never stopped making house calls.