Chapter 12

Conditional Immortality—Strengths and the Missing Piece

If you have read this far, you already know that I have serious problems with the traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment. I have laid out those problems at length, and I believe the case against ECT is strong. But rejecting one view means you need a better one. And for a growing number of evangelical scholars, the better option is something called conditional immortality.

I want to be upfront: I have a lot of sympathy for this view. More than sympathy, actually. I think the conditionalists are right about several important things. They are right that the Bible speaks repeatedly about the destruction of the wicked. They are right that the soul is not naturally immortal. They are right that eternal life is a gift given in Christ, not something every human being automatically possesses. And they are right that the idea of God tormenting people forever and ever, without end, without purpose, is morally monstrous.

So why am I not simply a conditionalist and calling it a day? Why not stop here?

Because conditional immortality, as it is usually presented, gives us the what but not the how. It tells us that the wicked are destroyed. Good. But it leaves a gaping hole right in the middle of the picture: What, exactly, destroys them? Is God simply flipping a switch and snuffing them out? Is He withdrawing His sustaining power and letting them dissolve into nothingness? Is destruction a punishment He imposes from the outside, like a judge sentencing a criminal to execution? Or is something else going on—something deeper, something that has everything to do with who God is and what His fire actually does?

That is the question this chapter wrestles with. I want to present the strongest case for conditional immortality, give it the credit it deserves, and then show you where it needs help—and where the divine presence model supplies the missing piece.

Before we begin, a word about terminology. You will hear me use “conditional immortality,” “conditionalism,” and “annihilationism” in this chapter. Some scholars make sharp distinctions between these terms, and we will explore those distinctions briefly. But for our purposes, the central claim they share is what matters: the wicked will not suffer forever. They will be destroyed. Their existence will come to an end. The punishment of hell is real, but it is final, not eternal. That is the view we are examining.

The View Presented Fairly

Conditional immortality—sometimes called conditionalism or annihilationism—is the view that the wicked will not suffer forever in hell. Instead, after the final judgment, those who have finally rejected God will be destroyed. They will cease to exist. The punishment is real, but it is not eternal torment. It is eternal death—the permanent, irreversible end of the person.¹

The terms can be confusing, so let me sort them out. Annihilationism is the broader category: the view that the wicked will eventually cease to exist. Conditional immortality is a specific version of that view, which says the reason the wicked cease to exist is that immortality is not something we possess by nature. Immortality is a gift from God, given only to those who are in Christ. Those who reject Christ simply do not receive the gift. They perish.² As Robert Peterson helpfully notes, although the terms are technically not synonyms, in practice most theologians use them interchangeably, and I will do the same throughout this chapter.³

The conditionalist case rests on three main pillars: the biblical language of destruction, the nature of the soul, and the moral character of God. Each deserves careful attention.

The Biblical Language of Destruction

Open your Bible and look at how it talks about the fate of the wicked. The language is strikingly consistent—and strikingly different from what you might expect if ECT were true.

Jesus Himself said, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28, emphasis mine).⁴ Notice the word. Not “torment.” Not “preserve in suffering.” Destroy. And not just the body—the soul too. If the soul could be destroyed in Gehenna, that sounds a lot more like annihilation than like eternal conscious torment.

The most famous verse in the Bible uses the same kind of language: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).⁵ The contrast is not between eternal joy and eternal suffering. The contrast is between eternal life and perishing. One group lives forever. The other does not.

Paul writes that the fate of those who do not know God is “everlasting destruction” (2 Thess. 1:9).⁶ The book of Revelation calls it “the second death” (Rev. 20:14).⁷ And Malachi paints a vivid picture of the coming day of judgment: “Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire… Not a root or a branch will be left to them” (Mal. 4:1).⁸ The wicked are not described as being kept alive in the furnace. They are burned to ashes. Stubble consumed by fire does not go on burning forever. It is gone.

Clark Pinnock, one of the most respected evangelical advocates of conditionalism, put the point sharply. The Bible, he argued, leaves a strong general impression of final, irreversible destruction. The language and imagery of fire that consumes whatever is thrown into it, linked with the language of death and perishing, strongly suggests annihilation.⁹ Edward Fudge, whose massive study The Fire That Consumes remains the most thorough biblical case for conditionalism ever written, traced this destruction language through the entire canon—Old Testament and New—and concluded that it is far more natural to read these texts as teaching the end of the wicked than as teaching their endless torment.¹⁰

Fudge argued that from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible warns again and again that the wicked will die, perish, and be destroyed. Those who die this second death, he maintained, will never live again.¹¹ The actual process of destruction may involve conscious pain that differs in degree from person to person—Scripture does seem to indicate that. But the final result is the same: the wicked are no more.

And it is not just the explicit destruction language. The broader pattern of biblical imagery supports the conditionalist reading. Think about the images Jesus and the prophets use. Chaff blown away by the wind (Ps. 1:4). Weeds gathered and burned (Matt. 13:40). A tree that does not bear good fruit cut down and thrown into the fire (Matt. 7:19). Branches that are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned (John 15:6). In every case, the fire consumes what is thrown into it. Chaff does not burn eternally. Weeds do not scream in the furnace forever. Dead branches do not endure endless torment. They are destroyed. They are gone. The fire does its work and the thing is no more.

Even the Old Testament imagery points in this direction. Sodom and Gomorrah, held up in Jude 7 as an example of those who undergo “the punishment of eternal fire,” were not tormented forever. They were incinerated. Reduced to ash and rubble. The fire was eternal in its effect—the destruction was permanent and irreversible—but not in its duration. Nobody standing in the smoking ruins of the Dead Sea valley would have said, “The fire is still burning.” The fire did its work. And what remained was nothing.⁵⁸

The Psalms are filled with this kind of language. “But the wicked will perish: Though the LORD’s enemies are like the flowers of the field, they will be consumed, they will go up in smoke” (Ps. 37:20). “As wax melts before the fire, may the wicked perish before God” (Ps. 68:2). Over and over, the imagery is of dissolution, disappearance, cessation. Not of ongoing, conscious torment.⁵⁹

Conditionalists also draw attention to the way Paul describes the contrast between the two destinies. In Romans 6:23, the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. The opposite of eternal life is not eternal suffering. It is death. In Philippians 3:19, Paul says of the enemies of the cross that “their destiny is destruction.” In Galatians 6:8, those who sow to the flesh will “from the flesh reap destruction.” The consistent Pauline pattern is to contrast life with death, not life with torment. The conditionalist hears this and says: the Bible means what it says. Destruction means destruction.⁶⁰

The Nature of the Soul

The second pillar of the conditionalist case concerns the nature of the soul. Traditional theology has often assumed that the soul is inherently immortal—that once God creates a human soul, it simply cannot stop existing. This assumption comes largely from Greek philosophy, especially Plato, rather than from the Bible itself.¹²

Conditionalists point out that the Bible never says the soul is immortal by nature. In fact, Paul explicitly says that God “alone is immortal” (1 Tim. 6:16).¹³ Immortality belongs to God. He shares it with those who are in Christ: “The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).¹⁴ Eternal life is a gift. It is not something we possess automatically. And if it is a gift given only to the redeemed, then those who reject Christ do not receive it. They do not live forever in torment. They simply do not live forever at all.

Now, I need to be clear about something here, because this is a place where I part ways with many conditionalists. I believe in substance dualism—the view that humans are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul, and that the soul can exist apart from the body between death and the resurrection.¹⁵ Many conditionalists are physicalists who deny that the soul is a separate substance. Some, like Fudge, have gone so far as to embrace what is called “mortalism”—the belief that when the body dies, the whole person ceases to exist until the resurrection.¹⁶

I do not share that view. I think the evidence for a conscious intermediate state is overwhelming—Jesus promised the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43); Paul said to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8); the souls of the martyrs are depicted as conscious under the altar in Revelation 6:9. We covered this ground in earlier chapters.¹⁷ But here is the important point: you do not need to be a physicalist to hold conditional immortality. You can believe the soul is a real, immaterial substance that survives death and believe that God can destroy it. That is exactly what Jesus said in Matthew 10:28. The soul is real. It is not naturally immortal. God sustains it in existence, and God can end its existence. Immortality is conditional, not because the soul is not real, but because the soul depends on God for its continued existence.¹⁸

R. Zachary Manis makes this point with philosophical precision. Given the orthodox doctrine of divine conservation—the teaching that nothing continues to exist from one moment to the next apart from God actively sustaining it—the difference between God actively destroying a thing and God passively allowing it to cease is, in a sense, a distinction without much practical difference.¹⁹ Everything that exists does so because God holds it in being. If God withdraws that sustaining power, the thing is no more. The soul is not self-existent. Only God is.

The Moral Argument

The third pillar is the moral argument, and this is where conditionalism hits hardest. Is it really consistent with the character of the God revealed in Jesus Christ to torment people without end? To keep them alive specifically so they can suffer forever? To inflict infinite punishment for finite sins?

Pinnock asked whether the “Abba” Father of Jesus could really torture people endlessly, and what we would think of a human being who behaved that way.²⁰ The question stings because it is honest. We would call any human father a monster if he tormented his children without end and without any hope of reform. Yet ECT asks us to believe that the perfectly loving God does exactly this—and that we should worship Him for it.

Conditionalists insist that God is more just than that. His justice is real. His judgment is fearsome. The second death is terrible beyond our imagining. But it is not endless. It accomplishes its purpose and is done. The wicked are no more, and God’s creation is finally, fully free from evil. As Fudge passionately argued, the idea of God as an eternal torturer is a horrible doctrine, foreign to the Bible, and it deserves to be rejected.²¹

I should note that conditionalists are not soft on sin. This is a misconception that needs to be corrected. The conditionalist view does not minimize the seriousness of hell. Being permanently, irreversibly destroyed—ceasing to exist while God’s people enter eternal joy—is an unspeakably horrifying fate. Fudge himself acknowledged that the process of destruction may involve conscious suffering, perhaps even intense and prolonged suffering proportioned to the guilt of the individual. What conditionalism denies is not the reality of judgment but the infinity of torment. There is a vast difference between saying “God’s judgment is real and terrible and final” and saying “God keeps people alive in agony forever, without purpose, without hope of restoration, without end.” The first is consistent with biblical justice. The second, conditionalists argue, is not.⁶¹

The moral argument also connects to the problem of proportionality. How can a finite lifetime of sin justify an infinite duration of punishment? Even the worst human tyrant—a Hitler, a Stalin, a Pol Pot—committed crimes of finite scope. Terrible, unspeakable crimes, yes. But finite. And yet ECT says their punishment must be infinite. After ten billion years of torment, the suffering has not even begun. After ten trillion years, they are no closer to the end than they were at the start. Conditionalists argue that this is not justice. It is something else entirely. It is disproportionate in a way that would horrify any honest moral conscience. Conditional immortality, by contrast, allows for severe and proportionate punishment followed by the finality of destruction. The punishment fits the crime. And then it is over.⁶²

The Growing Movement

It is worth noting that conditionalism is no longer a fringe position. A growing list of respected evangelical scholars have publicly questioned the traditional view and endorsed some form of conditional immortality. These include F. F. Bruce, Michael Green, Philip Hughes, Clark Pinnock, John Stott, John Wenham, and more recently, Chris Date and the scholars associated with the Rethinking Hell project.²²

John Stott, arguably the most influential evangelical leader of the twentieth century, wrote that he found the concept of eternal conscious torment intolerable and that he believed the ultimately impenitent would be consumed by fire and cease to exist. He added the now-famous reminder that the hallmark of authentic evangelicalism is not the uncritical repetition of old traditions but the willingness to submit every tradition, however ancient, to fresh biblical scrutiny and, if necessary, reform.²³

Pinnock himself stated it plainly: he could not accept that God grants immortality to the wicked only to inflict endless pain upon them. Instead, he contended, God will allow the finally impenitent to perish.²⁴ The question, as he framed it, was whether hellfire torments or consumes. He believed it consumes.

Strengths Acknowledged

I want to be generous here, because I think conditionalism gets a lot right. In fact, I think it gets more right than most of its critics are willing to admit.

First, conditionalism takes the biblical language of destruction seriously. This is no small thing. The traditionalist view has to explain away a mountain of destruction language—perish, destroy, consume, burn up, second death—and the explanations are often strained. Conditionalism simply reads the texts at face value. When Jesus says God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna, conditionalists believe He means it.

Second, conditionalism rightly challenges the assumption that the soul is inherently immortal. This is one of the most important contributions the conditionalist movement has made to evangelical theology. The idea that the soul cannot die comes from Plato, not from Moses or Paul. Scripture teaches that immortality belongs to God alone and is given as a gift to those who are in Christ. Conditionalism has forced the church to reexamine an assumption that was never as biblical as people thought.

Third, conditionalism avoids the moral horror of ECT. I realize that calling ECT a “moral horror” will offend some readers, and I do not say it to be provocative. I say it because I believe it is true. The God who is love, the God who sent His Son to die for His enemies, the God who commands us to love even those who hate us—this God does not torment people endlessly. Conditionalism recognizes this. Whatever the fate of the finally impenitent, it cannot be infinite suffering imposed by a loving God.

Fourth, conditionalism provides a clear and satisfying end to the problem of evil. On the traditional view, evil is never fully eradicated from God’s creation. There is always a corner of reality where suffering continues, where sin persists, where creatures writhe in agony. On the conditionalist view, the day comes when God is truly “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), when every tear is wiped away, when death itself has been swallowed up in victory. Evil does not endure alongside the good forever. It is destroyed, utterly and completely.

Fifth, and this is often overlooked, conditionalism honors the biblical pattern of God’s dealings with sin throughout the story of Scripture. When God acts in judgment in the Old Testament—the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the conquest of Canaan—the result is destruction, not perpetual torment. The wicked are swept away, consumed, removed from the land of the living. They are not preserved alive in order to suffer endlessly. The God of the Bible, when He judges, brings things to an end. He does not create new, permanent realities of suffering. Conditionalism sees the final judgment as the ultimate expression of this same pattern: God’s definitive act of ending evil, not extending it forever in a new form.⁶³

Sixth, conditionalism takes the gospel seriously as genuinely good news for the whole world. If the alternative to faith in Christ is not infinite suffering but final destruction, the gospel remains urgent—devastatingly urgent, because what is at stake is existence itself—but it is not tainted by the implication that the God who loves us is also the God who will torture most of humanity forever. The God of conditionalism is still a God to be feared, because the loss of existence is an unimaginable tragedy. But He is not a God who inspires the kind of moral revulsion that ECT inevitably produces in any sensitive conscience. He is a God whose judgments, however terrible, are always just, always proportionate, and always aimed at an end.⁶⁴

Problems Identified

And yet, for all its strengths, conditional immortality in its standard forms has real problems. Not fatal problems. Not problems that send us running back to ECT. But problems that reveal a gap in the picture—a gap that needs to be filled.

The Mechanism Problem

This is the big one. Conditionalism tells us what happens to the wicked: they are destroyed. But it is remarkably unclear about how that destruction happens and what brings it about.

Think about it for a moment. If God destroys the wicked, what exactly does that look like? There are several possible answers, and each one creates its own set of difficulties.

One option is retributive annihilationism: God actively destroys the wicked as a punishment for their sins. This is probably the most common version of conditionalism, and it is the one most often defended on exegetical grounds.²⁵ The wicked are raised from the dead at the final judgment, sentenced, and then destroyed by an act of God’s punitive will. But notice what this means. God is still the one doing the destroying. He is still actively ending the existence of conscious beings. Manis points out that retributive annihilationism faces a dilemma: it ventures far enough from tradition to inherit some of the fundamental problems of universalism—since it rejects the idea that the wicked must endure their punishment eternally—but it does not go far enough to actually solve the moral problem that drove people away from ECT in the first place.²⁶ If the problem with ECT is that God is actively inflicting suffering, how is it substantially better for God to be actively inflicting destruction? The suffering is shorter, yes. But the picture of God as executioner remains.

Another option is what Manis calls “natural consequence annihilationism”: the wicked are not destroyed by God but are destroyed by the natural consequences of their own sin. Sin, over time, degrades the human person so thoroughly that eventually the person simply ceases to exist. The idea goes something like this: sin is a kind of anti-being. The more you sin, the less human you become. Eventually, there is nothing left.²⁷

This sounds appealing, but it has serious philosophical problems. Manis walks through the classic version of this argument—the “privation argument” rooted in Thomas Aquinas’s idea that evil is a privation of good—and shows that it does not actually support the annihilationist conclusion. Aquinas uses “being” to refer to something that comes in degrees: the extent to which a thing fulfills its potential. A wicked person has failed to fulfill their human potential, but that failure does not make them literally not exist. Vice thwarts the human purpose. It does not erase the human substance.²⁸

A more sophisticated version of the natural consequence argument is what Manis calls the “corruption argument.” On this view, sin destroys certain capacities that are essential to personhood—free will, conscience, rationality. Once those capacities are gone, what remains is something subhuman. It is no longer a person. But even here, Manis notes, the argument does not actually get you to annihilation. It gets you to a degraded, subhuman remnant—“psychic detritus,” as he puts it—that lingers on but does not constitute a person. And now you have a new problem: what does God do with the remnant?²⁹ Presumably, God would mercifully destroy it. But that brings us right back to God taking an active role in the destruction, which means we have not really escaped the retributive picture after all.

A third option is what Manis calls “free will annihilationism”: the wicked freely choose their own destruction. Annihilation is not imposed by God. It is what the damned themselves want. They desire nonexistence. God simply respects their wish.³⁰ Jonathan Kvanvig has developed the most sophisticated version of this view, and it is closely tied to the choice model of hell that we examined in the previous chapter.³¹ It has a certain elegance: God does not execute anyone. The damned, in a sense, execute themselves. But it requires us to believe that a person would knowingly and deliberately choose to stop existing—a claim that is, at the very least, debatable.

Do you see the pattern? Every version of standard conditionalism struggles with the same basic question: What is the mechanism of destruction? Each answer creates new difficulties. And none of them connects the destruction of the wicked to what the Bible actually says about the nature of God’s fire.

The Internal Disputes

A second problem for conditionalism is that its advocates disagree about almost every important detail beyond the basic claim that the wicked are eventually destroyed.

Manis catalogues the disputes clearly. Conditionalists disagree about whether God’s destruction of the wicked is active or passive. They disagree about whether the wicked are resurrected at all, or only the righteous. They disagree about whether annihilation is preceded by a period of conscious suffering. They disagree about whether the reason for annihilation is punishment, natural consequence, or free choice.³²

These are not minor quibbles. They are not disagreements about footnotes or secondary details. They represent fundamentally different pictures of what God is doing at the final judgment. A God who actively destroys the wicked is very different from a God who passively allows them to fade away. A God who raises the wicked only to destroy them is very different from a God who simply never raises them at all. The fact that conditionalists cannot agree on these questions is a sign that the view, as typically formulated, is missing something at its core.

The Problem of the Intermediate State

There is another problem that is particularly acute for those conditionalists who are also physicalists—those who deny the existence of an immaterial soul. If there is no soul that survives death, then what happens to the wicked between death and the resurrection? Are they simply gone? If so, what is the point of raising them only to destroy them again? And how do we account for the clear biblical evidence of a conscious intermediate state?³³

As Robert Peterson pointed out in his response to Fudge, the intermediate state and resurrection view demonstrates the continuity of personal identity. The same person who dies lives on without the body and will one day be reunited with the body in resurrection. But the physicalist version of annihilationism has serious difficulty maintaining personal identity at the resurrection, since on that view the person completely ceases to exist at death and must be entirely re-created at the resurrection.³⁴ Is the re-created person really the same person? Or is it a copy?

This is not a problem for all conditionalists—those of us who hold substance dualism can affirm both the conscious intermediate state and the eventual destruction of the finally impenitent. But it is a problem for the physicalist versions of conditionalism that have been most influential in recent evangelical theology, particularly those associated with Fudge and the broader mortalist tradition.

The Revelation 20:10 Problem

I would be dishonest if I did not mention the most difficult biblical text for conditionalism: Revelation 20:10. Here the devil, the beast, and the false prophet are thrown into the lake of fire, and they “will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”³⁵

Traditionalists point to this verse and ask: if the torment is forever and ever, how can it be annihilation? And if the beast and false prophet are still in the lake of fire after a thousand years (compare Rev. 19:20 with 20:10), how can we say the fire consumes them?³⁶

Conditionalists have responses to this argument. They point out that the beast and false prophet may be symbols, not individual people. They note that the phrase “forever and ever” in Revelation is sometimes used for finite periods elsewhere in Scripture. They argue that the emphasis is on the irreversibility of the judgment, not its duration.³⁷ These are legitimate exegetical moves. But I want to be honest: this text is genuinely difficult for conditionalism. It is not a slam dunk for the traditionalists either—Revelation is apocalyptic literature, and pressing its imagery into precise doctrinal formulations is always risky business. But the verse cannot simply be waved away. Any conditionalist theology of hell must deal with it seriously.

The Fire Question

And this brings us to the deepest problem of all. Throughout the Bible, the fire associated with God’s judgment is not described as an instrument of mere execution. It is not a tool that God picks up and uses to destroy people the way a judge might sentence someone to lethal injection. Biblical fire has a character. It has a nature. It is connected to the very being of God.

“Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). “The LORD your God is a consuming fire” (Deut. 4:24). The fire that burns on Mount Sinai, the fire in the burning bush, the fire that falls from heaven, the fire in Ezekiel’s vision of the throne of God—this fire is not something separate from God. It is an expression of who God is.³⁸

Standard conditionalism treats fire as a metaphor for destruction. And it is that. But it is more than that. The fire of God is the burning intensity of His love, His holiness, His truth. It is His presence. And this is the piece that conditionalism, by itself, is missing.

The Divine Presence Alternative

Imagine a different picture. Imagine that the fire which destroys the wicked is not an external force applied by God from the outside. Imagine instead that the fire is God—His love, His presence, His burning, all-consuming, inescapable reality. Imagine that on the day of judgment, every human being stands in the full, unveiled blaze of divine love. The righteous experience that love as paradise. The wicked experience that same love as torment. And those who have so hardened their hearts that they cannot bear it at all—those whose every fiber rebels against being loved, being known, being forgiven—are consumed by the very love they refuse.

That is the divine presence model. And when you combine it with conditional immortality, you get something far more powerful and coherent than either view can achieve on its own.

The Fire That Is God’s Love

Sharon Baker, in her book Razing Hell, makes the case beautifully. If God is the devouring fire, she writes, then standing in the presence of God is to stand in the fire. Every person will eventually stand before God to give an account of his or her life. To stand in God’s presence means standing in the flames. To stand in the flames means burning away chaff, wickedness, and sinfulness.³⁹

The fire of God is not something separate from God. It is not a weapon He wields. It is the natural, unavoidable effect of being in the presence of perfect holiness and perfect love when your heart is set against both. Baker’s view is that God’s love is the most grueling judgment possible—a judgment that breaks through defenses, that strips away pretenses, that confronts the sinner with the full weight of what they have done and who they have become.⁴⁰

This reframes the entire question. The destruction of the wicked is not arbitrary. It is not vindictive. It is not an executioner’s act. It is the inevitable result of what happens when a heart that has been permanently hardened against love is fully and finally exposed to it.

The Story of Otto

Baker illustrates this with one of the most memorable thought experiments in recent theology: the story of Otto.⁴¹

Otto is a fictional character—a tyrant, a murderer, a man who has spent his entire life dealing in cruelty and hatred. In Baker’s telling, Otto dies and approaches the throne of God. He expects condemnation. He expects God’s hatred. He expects the punishment he knows he deserves.

Instead, he encounters love.

The fire of God’s presence blazes around him. But it is not the fire of vengeance. It is the fire of love—piercing, searching, relentless love. Otto hears God say, not “I am going to get you now,” but “I have loved you with an everlasting love. But look at your life; what have you done?”⁴²

Otto experiences a life review. He sees every victim. He hears every scream. He feels—not just knows about, but actually feels—the pain he has caused. God’s presence forces him to confront the full truth of what he has done. And in that confrontation, the fire burns. It devours his wickedness, his evil deeds, his hatred. Baker describes it vividly: the fire of God burns away the impurities as Otto draws closer and closer to God, until finally he stands before God, purified and free from sin.⁴³

In one version of the story, Otto responds with repentance. He accepts God’s forgiveness. He is reconciled to his victims and enters the kingdom—tested by fire, forgiven by grace.

But Baker is honest enough to tell the other version too.

“The possibility exists, however, that Otto does not accept God’s offer of restoration, or that after the testing by fire, nothing remains of him at all. Nothing.”⁴⁴ In order to preserve human freedom, we must allow for the possibility that some people will still reject God even after encountering the full blaze of His love. The fire does not eliminate the gift of human freedom. But those who say “no” to God’s “yes”—those who refuse love even when love stands before them in all its overwhelming power—are consumed by it.

This is conditional immortality within the divine presence framework. And it is a far richer, far more theologically satisfying picture than standard conditionalism can offer on its own.

Manis and the Hybrid Model

R. Zachary Manis provides the philosophical backbone for exactly this kind of synthesis. In Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, he explores what he calls “a hybrid of annihilationism and the divine presence model.” On this view, the unveiling of God in all His glory is an utterly destructive event for the unrighteous. It burns up the wicked, consuming and annihilating them completely.⁴⁵

Manis argues that this hybrid view is significantly better than standard versions of annihilationism in both their retributive and non-retributive forms. Against retributive annihilationism, it avoids the problems that come with making God an executioner. Against natural consequence annihilationism, it avoids the bizarre idea that sin gradually erodes a person into subhuman “psychic detritus.” On the hybrid view, the destruction of the wicked in the presence of God is complete, leaving no “remains.”⁴⁶

But here is what makes this view especially powerful. Remember the principle of double effect that philosophers use to distinguish between intending harm and foreseeing harm as an unavoidable side effect of pursuing a good end? Manis deploys this principle brilliantly. God does not intend the destruction of the wicked. He intends the full disclosure of His love and presence to all creation. But the destruction of those who have hardened themselves against that love is the metaphysically inevitable outcome of that disclosure. God foresees it. He grieves it. But He does not desire it.⁴⁷

This preserves the character of God as love in a way that standard conditionalism often struggles to do. God is not choosing to destroy anyone. He is choosing to be fully present—to be “all in all,” as Paul says. And those who cannot bear that presence are consumed by it. The fire is not aimed at them. The fire is simply who God is. And their destruction is the tragic, heartbreaking result of their own refusal to receive what God freely offers.

Manis also points out that the hybrid model has a ready explanation for divine hiddenness in the present life. Why does God not simply reveal Himself fully right now? Because His full revelation would destroy those who are not yet ready to receive it. God remains hidden, in part, to delay as long as possible the annihilation of the wicked—to give them every possible chance to repent, “not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9).⁴⁸

Baker’s Lake of Fire

Baker takes this further in her interpretation of the lake of fire in Revelation. She points out that the Greek word for “brimstone” (theion) is spelled the same as the Greek adjective meaning “divine.” The fire in the lake, she suggests, is fire from God—fire that is God’s very presence.⁴⁹

Baker also notes that in the ancient world, sulfur was used as a purifier, a cleanser, and a preservative. The ancient Greeks used it to purify and dedicate temples to the gods. They believed the purity of the fire came from the divine. So the earliest readers of Revelation would have naturally associated the lake of fire with divine purification—a lake of cleansing in which the purified person could be dedicated and restored to God.⁵⁰

This does not mean the lake of fire is pleasant. It does not mean it is not fearsome. But it reframes the lake of fire from a torture chamber designed by a sadistic God to a place where the full force of divine love and holiness is experienced without any veil, without any buffer. For the righteous, this is unspeakable joy. For the wicked who repent, it is agonizing but ultimately redemptive. And for those who cannot or will not repent—for the Ottos of the world who, even after standing in the fire of perfect love, still refuse it—the fire consumes them entirely.

Baker puts it this way: “If the second theory makes more sense to us, that the lake of fire is the same as God’s fiery presence at judgment, then the lake of fire tests, purifies, and puts death and evil to death.” So Otto stands in the fire. It burns away impurities. But what if Otto has no good in him? The fire would burn all of him. It would completely destroy him. There would be nothing left of him, which means that he would be annihilated.⁵¹

Think about what this means. The destruction of the wicked is not a separate event from the purification of the righteous. It is the same event. The same fire. The same love. The same overwhelming, all-consuming presence of God. The difference is not in the fire. The difference is in what the fire touches. Gold is purified. Wood is consumed. And the thing that determines whether you are gold or wood is not the fire’s intensity but the disposition of your heart.

Why This Matters for the Character of God

I cannot overstate how important this synthesis is. Standard conditionalism, for all its strengths, still leaves us with a picture of God as the one who does the destroying. Even if the destroying is justified, even if it is merciful compared to ECT, there is something unsettling about a God who stands over His fallen creatures and says, “Now I will end you.”

The divine presence model changes that picture entirely. God does not end anyone. God loves. God is present. God is “all in all.” And the consuming of the wicked is the tragic, grievous, heartbreaking consequence of what happens when infinite love meets a heart that has been permanently sealed against it. God is not the executioner. God is the lover whose love is so powerful that it cannot be ignored, cannot be diluted, cannot be escaped. Those who open themselves to it are transfigured. Those who refuse it are consumed. But God’s disposition toward them never changes. He is love. He was always love. Even the fire that consumes them is love.

This is what Isaac the Syrian meant when he wrote that those who suffer in hell are suffering in being scourged by love. It is what Kalomiros meant when he said that the fire which is God’s love becomes the very torment of those who have refused it.⁵² And it is what the divine presence model adds to conditionalism: not just the what of destruction, but the why and the how. The wicked are not destroyed by a vengeful God. They are destroyed by a loving God whose love they have made themselves unable to endure.

And notice how this changes the emotional and pastoral weight of the doctrine. Under ECT, when we talk about hell, we are talking about what God does to people. Under retributive annihilationism, we are still talking about what God does to people—He just does it faster. But under the divine presence model, we are talking about what love does when it encounters a heart sealed against it. The focus shifts from the wrath of God to the nature of God. From punishment to presence. From what God inflicts to what God is. And that shift changes everything—not just for theology, but for how we preach the gospel, how we comfort the grieving, and how we think about the lost.

Lewis and the Gradual Unmaking

C. S. Lewis, as so often, saw the edges of this truth even if he did not fully develop it. In Mere Christianity, Lewis made a remarkable observation about what it means to encounter the reality of God. “God is the only comfort,” he wrote, “He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies.”⁵³ Lewis understood that the goodness of God is not neutral. It is either the great safety or the great danger, depending on how you respond to it.

In The Problem of Pain, Lewis developed a version of what Manis calls the “corruption argument”—the idea that sin gradually unmakes the human person. Lewis imagined the possibility that someone could descend so far into evil that they are no longer really a person at all, just a “damned ghost” or a “remnant.”⁵⁴ Manis notes that Lewis was not always precise about which view of hell he was defending—his writings contain elements of the choice model, annihilationism, and the divine presence model all at once.⁵⁵ But this much is clear: Lewis understood that the encounter with God’s goodness is the decisive moment. Everything depends on the state of the heart when that encounter happens.

And that is exactly what the divine presence model says. The fire of God’s love is the great sorting. It purifies some and consumes others. Not because the fire is different, but because the hearts are different.

Freedom and the Final No

One of the most important features of Baker’s account is that she insists on the preservation of human freedom. Even in the full blaze of God’s presence, freedom is not overridden. The fire does not force repentance. It does not coerce love. It reveals the truth. It strips away the pretenses. It confronts the sinner with the full reality of what they have done and who God is. But the final response is still the sinner’s to make.⁵⁶

This is crucial, because it answers one of the most serious objections to universalism. If God’s love is truly irresistible, if it will inevitably break down every wall of resistance, then is it really love? Or is it a kind of divine coercion? The conditional immortality model, combined with the divine presence framework, takes freedom with absolute seriousness. God’s love is utterly overwhelming. It is completely truthful. It holds nothing back. But it does not force. And if a person, standing in the full blaze of that love, still says no—if they would rather be consumed than yield—God respects that choice. The fire consumes them. Not because God wills their destruction, but because that is what happens when an immovable refusal meets an irresistible love.

Think of it this way. Imagine standing in front of the sun with no protection. The sun does not intend to burn you. The sun is simply doing what the sun does—radiating heat and light. But if you insist on standing there, unshielded, the heat will destroy you. Now multiply that a millionfold. The fire of God’s love is infinitely more intense than any sun. In this life, God shields us from the full intensity of His presence. He meets us gently, gradually, through Christ, through the Spirit, through creation, through other people. But on the day of judgment, the veil is removed. Every heart stands naked before the blazing reality of who God is. And for those who have spent their lives building walls against that love—walls of hatred, walls of selfishness, walls of pride—the removal of the veil is not liberation. It is annihilation. Not because God wanted it. But because they made themselves unable to survive it.

Pinnock, though he did not develop the divine presence model explicitly, seems to have sensed this connection. He wrote that hell is proof of how seriously God takes human freedom. God does not cease to work for the salvation of the world, but He has to accept the outcome.⁵⁷ When we combine this insight with the divine presence model, we arrive at a picture that is both more loving and more terrifying than standard conditionalism imagines. God’s love pursues relentlessly. His presence is inescapable. But freedom is real, and the consequences of final refusal are devastating and permanent.

The Strongest Possible Account

What we end up with, when we combine conditional immortality with the divine presence model, is the strongest possible account of the final destruction of the wicked. Stronger than retributive annihilationism, because God is not an executioner. Stronger than natural consequence annihilationism, because the destruction is complete and leaves no subhuman remnant. Stronger than free will annihilationism, because it does not require the implausible claim that people knowingly choose nonexistence for its own sake. And incomparably stronger than ECT, because it preserves the character of God as love from beginning to end.

On this view, the wicked are destroyed because God is love and because His love is a consuming fire. The same fire that purifies gold consumes wood. The same love that brings joy to the redeemed brings agony—and ultimately destruction—to those who have hardened themselves beyond all capacity to receive it. The fire does not change. God does not change. The human heart is what determines the outcome.

And this synthesis also explains something that has always troubled thoughtful Christians about the final judgment: how a loving God could preside over such a terrible scene. On the retributive picture—whether ECT or standard annihilationism—God is the active agent of suffering or destruction. He stands above the wicked and sentences them. He imposes their fate. But on the divine presence model, God does not impose anything. God simply is. He is present. He is love. He is holy. He is truth. And the very qualities that make Him the joy of heaven make Him the consuming fire that the wicked cannot endure. God’s posture toward the wicked has not changed. He loved them in life. He loves them at the judgment. He will love them into the moment of their destruction. But His love is not a soft, harmless thing. It is a fire. And fire does not ask permission before it burns.

Peter the Damascene, one of the great Eastern Christian writers, said something deeply relevant here: God’s fire makes some hearts soft like beeswax and others hard like stone. It is the same fire, the same warmth, the same intensity. The difference is in the material it touches.⁶⁵ That image captures perfectly what happens when we combine conditional immortality with the divine presence model. The fire of God’s love softens some hearts until they melt in worship and surrender. The same fire hardens others until they crack and crumble and are no more. And God weeps over both outcomes—rejoicing with those who are saved, grieving over those who are lost. Because the fire was always meant to warm, never to destroy. But when a heart has been turned to flint, even warmth becomes destruction.

Conclusion and Connection

Conditional immortality is a serious, biblically grounded alternative to the nightmare of eternal conscious torment. I want that to be crystal clear. If I had to choose between ECT and standard conditionalism, I would choose conditionalism without a moment’s hesitation. Its defenders—Fudge, Stott, Pinnock, Date, and many others—have done the church an enormous service by demonstrating that the destruction language of Scripture is real, that the soul is not naturally immortal, and that the God of love does not torture people forever.

But conditionalism by itself is an incomplete picture. It gives us the what without the how. It tells us the wicked are destroyed but leaves us guessing about the mechanism. And that gap matters, because the mechanism is directly tied to the character of God. How God destroys the wicked tells us something about who God is. And the divine presence model gives us an answer that is worthy of the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

The wicked are destroyed by love. Not by anger, not by vindictiveness, not by cold judicial calculation. By love. The same love that redeems the willing consumes the resistant. The fire of God is one fire. It is His presence, His holiness, His truth, His burning, relentless, all-consuming love. Paradise and hell are not two different fires. They are two different experiences of the same fire—and the difference is determined by the human heart.

Baker’s Otto stands in that fire. If he opens his heart, the fire purifies him, restores him, and brings him home to God. If he refuses, the fire consumes him. Not because God wanted to consume him. But because Otto could not endure being loved.

I want to pause here and speak directly to those of you who are conditionalists. I am not asking you to abandon your view. I am asking you to complete it. Everything you believe about the destruction of the wicked can remain intact. The biblical language of death, destruction, and perishing? Still valid. Still central. The conditional nature of immortality? Absolutely right. The rejection of the moral horror of eternal torment? Amen. All I am asking is that you take one more step and answer the question your view has always left open: What is the fire that destroys them? And the answer is not complicated. The fire is God. The fire is love. The fire is the blazing, inescapable reality of a holy God fully and finally present to all creation. That is the missing piece. And once you see it, everything else falls into place.

And I want to speak just as directly to those of you who are drawn to universalism. The divine presence model does not rule out the hope that all will eventually be saved. We will explore that possibility in the next chapter. But what conditional immortality reminds us is that freedom is real. Love that overrides freedom is not love. And if there are hearts so hardened, so sealed, so permanently closed to the love of God that they cannot be opened even by the full blaze of His unveiled presence—then the fire that was meant to purify them will consume them instead. That is a genuine possibility. It is a heartbreaking possibility. But it is one that takes both love and freedom seriously. And a theology that takes both love and freedom seriously is a theology worth having.

In the next chapter, we will turn to the other great alternative to ECT—universalism. The universalist asks: if God’s love is truly all-consuming and inescapable, can any heart hold out against it forever? Is it possible that the fire which purifies some and consumes others might, in the end, purify all? That is the hope, and the tension, we will explore next. But whatever the answer to that question, the foundation we have laid in this chapter will hold: God is love. His fire is His love. And that fire is the most fearsome and the most beautiful reality in the universe.