Chapter 14

Introducing the Divine Presence Model—Hell Is God’s Presence

A. Thesis and Context

We have come a long way together. Over the first thirteen chapters of this book, we laid a foundation. We established that God is love—not as a sentimental platitude, but as the deepest truth about who God is, the truth that defines everything else we can say about Him.¹ We saw how Western theology, beginning with Augustine and accelerating through Anselm and the Reformers, introduced a juridical framework foreign to Scripture and the early church—a framework that turned God into an offended judge demanding infinite satisfaction.² We discovered that the biblical word for “justice”—tsedaka (saving righteousness)—means something profoundly different from the Western courtroom model.³ We explored the fire of God as purifying love, not punitive torture.⁴ And we evaluated the four standard views of hell—eternal conscious torment, the choice model, conditional immortality, and universalism—showing where each succeeds and where each falls short.⁵

Now we arrive at the heart of the book.

Everything before this chapter was preparation. Everything after it is development and application. This is the chapter where we finally lay out, in full, the view of hell I believe is the most biblically faithful, theologically coherent, philosophically defensible, and historically grounded account available. It is a view that has deep roots in the earliest centuries of the church, was preserved in the Eastern Orthodox tradition for over a thousand years, and is now being rediscovered and developed in the West by philosophers and theologians who are determined to take both the reality of hell and the love of God with absolute seriousness.

I call it the divine presence model of hell.

Here is the claim, stated as plainly as I can: Hell is not a place of separation from God. Hell is the experience of God’s inescapable, all-consuming love by those who have hardened their hearts against Him. In the new creation, God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). There will be no corner of the universe hidden from His presence. The righteous will experience that presence as paradise—infinite joy, endless love, the fulfillment of every longing. The wicked will experience that same presence as hell—agony, shame, the unbearable exposure of everything they have become. Same fire. Same love. Two radically different experiences.

The difference is not in God. The difference is in us.

If that sounds strange—even shocking—I understand. It sounded strange to me the first time I encountered it. But as we work through this chapter, I believe you will see that this idea is not some modern invention cooked up by a philosopher to solve a puzzle. It is, I am convinced, the recovery of the earliest Christian understanding of hell—an understanding that was preserved in the East and lost in the West, and that is now being rediscovered by Western scholars who are willing to listen to the ancient voices of the church.

B. The Case for the Divine Presence Model

The Problem with “Separation from God”

Before we build the positive case, we need to clear one massive obstacle. The most common way Christians talk about hell is as “separation from God.” You have probably heard this a thousand times. It is so deeply embedded in the way we think about the afterlife that most of us have never stopped to ask a basic question: Does it actually make sense?

Think about it. We affirm that God is omnipresent—that He is everywhere, sustaining everything, holding all of creation in existence at every moment. The Apostle Paul told the Athenians, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Nothing that exists can exist apart from the continual, sustaining power of God. If God withdrew His presence from anything, that thing would simply cease to be.⁶ Even those in hell could not be separated from God’s creative and sustaining power; otherwise, as R. Zachary Manis observes, they would simply stop existing.⁷

So when traditionalists and defenders of the choice model say that hell is “eternal separation from God,” they have to mean something very specific. They cannot mean that God is literally absent from hell. They can only mean something like this: the people in hell have no fellowship with God, no experience of His love, no sense of His nearness. God is there—sustaining them in existence—but from their perspective, it is as if He is completely gone.⁸

But even that more careful version runs into trouble. Consider the words of the psalmist:

“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!” (Psalm 139:7–8, ESV)

Sheol is the Hebrew word for the realm of the dead. It is the precursor to our concept of hell. And the psalmist is crystal clear: even in Sheol, God is there.⁹ There is no escape from the divine presence. Not in heaven. Not in hell. Not anywhere.

Scripture goes even further. It tells us that at the end of the age, Christ will be revealed in all His majesty and splendor, that His glory will “fill the whole universe” (Eph. 4:10), and that God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). The Day of Judgment marks the definitive end of what theologians call divine hiddenness—the phenomenon by which God partially veils His presence during this life to preserve our genuine freedom to respond to Him.¹⁰

Here is the problem. On the traditional view, God finally reveals Himself in all His glory on the Day of Judgment—and then immediately turns around and hides Himself again from the damned, casting them into a place where they can never experience His presence. As Manis puts it, no sooner has God put an end to divine hiddenness than He imposes this very same condition upon the damned all over again—eternally separating them from Himself by casting them into hell.¹¹ Does that make sense? God removes the veil so that every eye can see Him, and then slams a new veil down on the condemned? That is not just puzzling. It is theologically incoherent.

The divine presence model does not have this problem. On the divine presence model, the removal of the veil on the Day of Judgment is permanent. God is revealed, and He stays revealed—to everyone. The righteous rejoice in that revelation. The wicked are tormented by it. But both are in the presence of the same God.

Defining the Model

So what exactly is the divine presence model? Let me state it carefully.

The divine presence model holds that heaven and hell are the different ways that the righteous and the wicked will experience the presence of God after the final judgment.¹² The core idea is simple, even though it takes a lot of unpacking: in the new creation, when God is fully revealed and His presence fills all things, those who love God will experience His presence as infinite joy, love, and fulfillment. Those who hate God—those who have hardened their hearts against Him through a lifetime of sin and self-deception—will experience that same presence as torment, shame, and anguish. The fire is the same. The love is the same. What differs is the condition of the human heart that receives it.

R. Zachary Manis, the philosopher whose work provides the most rigorous development of this model, puts it this way: on the divine presence model, it is the very being of God that the wicked experience as hell.¹³ This is not because God is cruel or vindictive. It is because there is something about perfect, all-consuming love that is unbearable to a heart that has set itself against love. The experience of the damned in the presence of a loving God is painful, excruciating, overwhelming—not because God intends to hurt them, but because that is what love feels like when you have spent a lifetime learning to hate it.

Think of it this way. Imagine you have spent your whole life in a dark room, and your eyes have adjusted to the darkness. Now imagine someone throws open the curtains and lets in the blazing noonday sun. The light that would fill a healthy person with warmth and joy would be agonizing to your damaged eyes. You would recoil. You would cover your face. You would cry out in pain. But the problem is not with the sun. The sun is doing what it always does—shining. The problem is with your eyes. They cannot handle the light.

That is what hell is on the divine presence model. God is the sun. He shines with the full blaze of His love on all His creatures. The righteous bask in that love. The wicked are scorched by it. The difference is not in the sun. The difference is in the eyes.

The Orthodox Tradition: An Ancient, Not a Modern, Idea

One of the most important things I want you to understand about the divine presence model is that it is not new. It is not something a clever philosopher dreamed up in a university office to get around a philosophical difficulty. Manis himself acknowledges this, noting that the core idea shows up in the writings of thinkers as diverse as the twentieth-century apologist C. S. Lewis, the sixteenth-century Reformer Martin Luther, and the seventh-century bishop and theologian Isaac of Nineveh—better known as Saint Isaac the Syrian.¹⁴ Even more significant, this idea is currently widely accepted within Eastern Orthodoxy, one of the three major branches of Christianity. That does not prove it is true, of course. But it does show that this is a theological insight with deep roots in the Christian tradition.

The work that has done the most to introduce Western Christians to this understanding of hell is Alexandre Kalomiros’s remarkable lecture, The River of Fire, delivered in 1980.¹⁵ Kalomiros was a Greek Orthodox theologian who set out to answer two questions: Is God really good? And did God create hell? His answers drew on the writings of the Church Fathers—the earliest teachers and leaders of the Christian church, many of whom spoke Greek as their native language and read the New Testament in the language it was written in. What Kalomiros showed is that the dominant view of hell among these Greek-speaking Fathers was not what most Western Christians assume.

The Fathers did not teach that paradise and hell are two different places. They taught that paradise and hell are two different states of the soul in the presence of the same God.

Let me share a few of the most important patristic voices.

Isaac the Syrian: “Scourged by Love”

Perhaps the most stunning statement of the divine presence model in all of Christian literature comes from Saint Isaac the Syrian, a seventh-century bishop and monk whose writings are revered in the Eastern church. In his famous Homily 84, Isaac writes that those who find themselves in Gehenna will be chastised with the scourge of love. He insists that the sorrow which takes hold of the heart that has sinned against love is more piercing than any other pain. And then he makes a statement that should stop every reader in their tracks: “It is not right to say that the sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God.”¹⁶

Read that again. The sinners in hell are not deprived of the love of God. They are being scorched by it. The love of God is present in hell. It is not absent. And it is that very love—not the absence of love, but its overwhelming presence—that constitutes their suffering.

Isaac goes on to say that love acts in two ways: as suffering in the condemned, and as joy in the blessed.¹⁷ The same love. Two different experiences. The difference is not in God. The difference is in the human heart.

This is exactly what the divine presence model claims. Isaac was saying it in the seventh century. The question is: Why did the Western church stop listening?

Basil the Great: The Fire That Burns and Illuminates

Saint Basil the Great, one of the most important Church Fathers of the fourth century, developed a similar idea using the image of fire. Basil wrote that the fire prepared for punishment is divided by the voice of the Lord: there are two capacities in fire—one of burning and the other of illuminating. The fierce and scorching property of the fire awaits those who deserve to burn, while the illuminating and radiant warmth is reserved for the enjoyment of those who rejoice.¹⁸

Notice what Basil is saying. There is one fire, not two. But this one fire does two things depending on who encounters it. For some, it illuminates. For others, it burns. The fire does not change. The people change.

Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, a contemporary Orthodox theologian, develops Basil’s insight with a vivid analogy. He says that light has two properties—illuminating and caustic. A person with healthy eyes enjoys the light and sees the beauty around them. A person with damaged eyes feels only pain from that same light. This will be true in the future life as well, Hierotheos says. God’s light will embrace everyone. But those who cannot see it will experience its caustic property rather than its illuminating one.¹⁹

Kalomiros and the Icon of the Last Judgment

Kalomiros brings these patristic insights together in what I find to be one of the most powerful images in all of Christian theology. He points to the traditional Orthodox icon of the Last Judgment. In this icon, the Lord Jesus Christ is seated on a throne. To His right are His friends—the blessed who lived by His love. To His left are His enemies—all those who passed their lives hating Him, even if they appeared to be pious and reverent. And there, in the center, springing from Christ’s throne, is a river of fire flowing toward all of them.²⁰

What is this river of fire? Is it a weapon? A torture device? An instrument of divine vengeance?

Not at all, says Kalomiros. This river of fire is the river that “came out from Eden to water the paradise” of old (Gen. 2:10). It is the river of the grace of God that has watered God’s saints from the beginning. In a word, it is the outpouring of God’s love for His creatures.²¹

And then Kalomiros writes one of the most important sentences in the entire River of Fire lecture: “Love is fire. Anyone who loves knows this. God is Love, so God is Fire. And fire consumes all those who are not fire themselves, and renders bright and shining all those who are fire themselves.”²²

This is the central image of our book. The fire that flows from the throne of God is the fire of love. It is the same fire that purifies the saints and torments the wicked. It is the same river that waters paradise and burns those who hate it. The difference is not in the fire. The difference is in what the fire touches.

Kalomiros then draws out the implications. In the new creation, after the resurrection, God will be everywhere and in everything. His light and love will embrace all. There will be no place hidden from God, as there was during our life under the reign of the prince of this world. Love will cover everything with its sacred fire, flowing like a river from the throne of God to irrigate paradise. But this same river of love will suffocate and burn those who have hate in their hearts.²³

And then comes the analogy that I keep coming back to, the one that has shaped my thinking more than almost any other:

“For our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). The very fire which purifies gold, also consumes wood. Precious metals shine in it like the sun, rubbish burns with black smoke. All are in the same fire of Love. Some shine and others become black and dark. In the same furnace steel shines like the sun, whereas clay turns dark and is hardened like stone.²⁴

The difference is in the person, not in God. The difference is conditioned by the free choice of the human heart, which God respects absolutely. God’s judgment is the revelation of the reality that is already in us.²⁵

Fr. Thomas Hopko: The Orthodox Faith

The view I am describing is not a minority opinion in Orthodox Christianity. It is presented as standard teaching in Fr. Thomas Hopko’s four-volume work The Orthodox Faith, endorsed by the Orthodox Church in America. Hopko writes that the final coming of Christ will be the judgment of all people, and that His very presence will be the judgment. All people will have to behold the face of the One whom they have crucified by their sins.²⁶

For those who love the Lord, Hopko continues, His presence will be infinite joy, paradise, and eternal life. For those who hate the Lord, the same presence will be infinite torture, hell, and eternal death. The reality for both the saved and the damned will be exactly the same when Christ comes in glory, so that God may be all in all.²⁷

Hopko then makes the crucial point. The fire that will consume sinners at the coming of the Kingdom of God is the same fire that will shine with splendor in the saints. It is the fire of God’s love—the fire of God Himself who is Love.²⁸

Hopko concludes with a statement that should be burned into the memory of every Christian who cares about the doctrine of hell: God does not punish by some material fire or physical torment. God simply reveals Himself in the risen Lord Jesus in such a glorious way that no one can fail to behold His glory. It is the presence of God’s splendid glory and love that is the scourge of those who reject its radiant power and light.²⁹

Think about what that means. God does not do anything different to the damned than He does to the saved. He does not switch from loving Father to angry torturer. He does not flip a switch from mercy to vengeance. He is the same God, revealing the same love, to everyone. The difference is entirely in the human heart that receives that revelation.

Symeon the New Theologian: No Escape from the Face of God

One more Eastern voice rounds out the patristic picture beautifully. Saint Symeon the New Theologian, writing in the tenth century, addresses his fellow believers with a bluntness that is startling even today. He asks where we could possibly go to escape the face of God, echoing Psalm 139. If we go up to heaven, He is there. If we go down to hell, He is present. If we go to the uttermost part of the sea, His right hand will encompass our souls and bodies. Since we cannot withstand the Lord or flee from His face, Symeon urges, let us give ourselves willingly to Him as servants—the One who for our sakes took on the form of a slave and died for us.⁶⁷

What is remarkable about Symeon’s exhortation is its logic. He does not say, “Turn to God because otherwise He will send you to a place where you cannot see Him.” He says the opposite: Turn to God because you will see Him no matter what. You cannot hide. You cannot flee. His presence fills everything, and you will encounter it whether you want to or not. The question is not whether you will stand in God’s presence. The question is what kind of heart you will bring to that encounter.

This is the consistent testimony of the Greek-speaking Fathers. They did not envision hell as banishment from the divine presence. They envisioned it as the overwhelming experience of that presence by souls that had made themselves incapable of receiving love. And they drew this vision not from philosophy but from the scriptures they read in their own language—the language in which the New Testament was written.

The Philosophical Articulation: Manis

While the Orthodox tradition provides the theological and patristic backbone of the divine presence model, R. Zachary Manis has provided what I believe is the most rigorous philosophical development of the idea. In his major work Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God and his more accessible follow-up Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, Manis builds the case step by step.³⁰

Manis begins with the observation that the standard views of hell all suffer from a form of theological double-mindedness. Traditionalists explain heaven by reference to God’s love—the saved experience the joy of God’s presence forever. But they explain hell by reference to God’s justice—the damned are punished for their sins. This means that God has to operate in two fundamentally different modes: love mode for heaven, justice mode for hell. But on the divine presence model, heaven and hell share a common source. As Hopko puts it, it is the fire of God Himself who is Love. It is not that God fails to love the damned. Rather, it is the very love of God that induces suffering in them.³¹

The influential twentieth-century Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky captures this powerfully: “The love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves.”³² The damned experience the presence of the very One who is Love as something awful, excruciating, humiliating, and infuriating. And because of God’s omnipresence, this Love is inescapable. That is the torment of hell.

There is a certain irony, Manis notes, in the title of Thomas Talbott’s well-known defense of universalism: The Inescapable Love of God. From the perspective of the divine presence model, “the inescapable love of God” is a perfectly apt description of hell.³³

Manis also raises a point that I think deserves more attention than it usually gets. The divine presence model offers a far better explanation of divine hiddenness—the puzzling fact that God does not reveal Himself unambiguously to every person in this life—than the standard views do. On the standard views, divine hiddenness is an unsolved problem. Why would a loving God hide from creatures who need to know Him in order to avoid eternal destruction? The standard answer is usually a vague appeal to mystery or free will. But the divine presence model provides a principled answer: God remains hidden during this life precisely because the full unveiling of His presence is the judgment itself. If God revealed Himself in all His glory right now, the result for those not yet reconciled to Him would be devastating. Divine hiddenness is an act of mercy—a postponement of an encounter that would be constitutive of final judgment for the unprepared.⁶⁸ The current age is the time of grace—the time when God draws near gently, through Christ, through His Word, through His Spirit, giving us the opportunity to turn toward Him freely, without being overwhelmed by the full blaze of His unveiled presence.

Manis also shows that the core idea of the divine presence model—that heaven and hell are the different ways people experience the unveiled presence of God—lies squarely within the mainstream of Christian thought. It is not the invention of something new but the echo of something ancient in a contemporary discussion.³⁴ We find intimations of it in the earliest Fathers. We find it in Luther, who wrote that the fiery oven of hell is ignited merely by the unbearable appearance of God and endures eternally, and that the ungodly will feel the power of His presence, which they will not be able to bear, and yet will be forced to bear.³⁵ We find it in C. S. Lewis, who wrote that God is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies, and that the meeting of a sinful person with the gaze of absolute goodness would not be “fun” at all—that goodness is either the great safety or the great danger, depending on how you react to it.³⁶

This is not a marginal idea. It is a central thread in the tapestry of Christian thought about the afterlife. Contemporary Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, one of the most formidable theological minds of our generation, puts the point with characteristic directness. Writing about Isaac the Syrian and the larger Eastern Christian mystical tradition, Hart explains that what we call hell is nothing but the rage and remorse of the soul that will not yield itself to love. The natural will must return to God, no matter what, but if the freedom of the individual will refuses to open itself to the mercy and glory of God, the wrathful soul experiences the transfiguring and deifying fire of love not as bliss but as chastisement and despair.⁶⁹ Hart draws different conclusions from this than I do—he argues for universal reconciliation, while I lean toward conditional immortality—but his description of the mechanism of hell is exactly what the divine presence model teaches.

Andrew Louth, a respected scholar of Eastern Christianity, summarizes the Orthodox position concisely: the ultimate state of human beings after the final judgment is to behold the glory of God’s love. For those whose inmost desire is longing for God, this will be ultimate fulfillment and ultimate bliss. But for those whose inmost desire is opposition to God, their inmost longing will be eternally frustrated, and they will experience eternal torment.⁷⁰

Baker’s Theological Synthesis: God’s Fire and the Character of Otto

If Manis provides the philosophical architecture of the divine presence model and Kalomiros provides the patristic foundations, Sharon L. Baker provides something equally important: a vivid, imaginative, accessible picture of what the model actually looks like when a person encounters the living God.

In her book Razing Hell, Baker tells the story of a fictional character named Otto—a man of extraordinary wickedness, a tyrant responsible for the suffering and death of thousands.³⁷ Baker asks us to imagine what happens when Otto stands before God at the final judgment.

On the traditional view, the answer is simple: God condemns Otto and sends him to a place of eternal conscious torment. But Baker asks: What if the encounter looks completely different from what we expect?

In Baker’s telling, Otto approaches the throne of God. He is terrified. He expects hatred, condemnation, and punishment. He braces himself for the wrath of an angry deity. But what he encounters instead is something far worse than anything he expected—and far better. He encounters divine love.³⁸

The fire of God’s presence envelops Otto. But this fire is not the fire of punishment. It is the fire of love. And that love is more painful to Otto than any torture chamber could be. Why? Because the fire of God’s love forces Otto to see his sin for what it truly is. He experiences a life review—he sees his victims, hears their screams, feels the weight of what he has done. The love of God does not let him hide. The love of God strips away every excuse, every justification, every self-deception. In the blazing light of divine love, Otto sees the full reality of who he has become.³⁹

Baker describes Otto’s experience in the fire as genuinely hellish. His teeth gnash together as his sin confronts him face-to-face and heart-to-heart. The severity of his grief serves as a kind of punishment—a punishment that tests, purifies, and transforms. God’s incomprehensible love faces off against Otto’s incomprehensible sin. And the love, in the sheer extravagance of its force, acts as judgment against the total excessiveness of Otto’s evil.⁴⁰

Baker quotes George MacDonald, one of her favorite theologians, who said that the fire of God—which is His essential being, His love, His creative power—is unlike earthly fire in one important way: it is only at a distance that it burns, and the further from God one stands, the worse the burning.⁴¹ The more the fire burns away Otto’s wickedness, the closer he gets to God, until finally he stands next to God, purified, free from sin, and ready to hear God’s words of forgiveness and restoration.⁴²

But here is where Baker is remarkably honest—and where the tension between conditional immortality and universal reconciliation becomes visible. Baker acknowledges that Otto might accept God’s offer and be restored. But she also acknowledges the possibility that Otto does not accept it—or that after the testing by fire, nothing remains of him at all. In order to preserve human freedom, Baker writes, we must allow for the possibility that some people will still reject God. The fire does not eliminate the gift of human freedom. Those who say no to God’s yes end up annihilated.⁴³

This is what I find so powerful about Baker’s work. She shows that the divine presence model is compatible with both conditional immortality and universal reconciliation. If Otto yields to the fire, he is purified and restored. If he hardens against it, the fire consumes him. Either way, the fire is the same—the fire of God’s love. And either way, God’s character is vindicated. God is not a torturer. God is not a cosmic sadist. God is love, and His fire is aimed at restoration. What happens to those who refuse restoration is a question this book will continue to wrestle with.⁴⁴

The Analogy of the Elder Brother

There is one analogy that, for me, brings the divine presence model to life more than any other. It comes from the most famous parable Jesus ever told: the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32).

We all know the story of the younger son. He takes his inheritance, squanders it in reckless living, ends up feeding pigs, comes to his senses, and returns home to a father who runs to meet him, embraces him, and throws a lavish party. That is the gospel in miniature. That is the good news of God’s extravagant, pursuing, forgiving love.

But there is a second character in this parable, and he is the one who matters most for our purposes. The elder brother has been home the whole time. He has been in his father’s house, surrounded by his father’s love, eating at his father’s table. And when the prodigal returns and the father throws a party, the elder brother refuses to go in. He stands outside, seething with resentment, burning with anger, consumed by self-righteousness.

Here is the point: the elder brother is in hell.

Not in some separate place of punishment. Not in a dungeon far from his father’s house. He is standing right outside the banquet hall, surrounded by music and laughter and the aroma of the feast. He is in the immediate proximity of his father’s love. And he hates it. The father’s love does not feel like love to him. It feels like injustice. It feels like betrayal. It feels like torture.⁴⁵

The father has not changed. The father’s love has not diminished. The party is real, the joy is real, the welcome is real. But the elder brother cannot receive it. His heart is hardened by pride, by envy, by a lifetime of keeping score. The father comes out to him—just as he ran to the prodigal—and pleads with him to come in. But the elder brother will not be moved.⁴⁶

That is the divine presence model in a single story. Paradise and hell are not two different places. They are two different experiences of the same father’s love. The prodigal, broken and repentant, enters the feast and finds paradise. The elder brother, proud and resentful, stands outside the same feast and finds hell. The father is the same toward both. The love is the same toward both. But the condition of the heart determines how that love is received.

Anthony the Great and the Unchanging God

One more patristic voice deserves special attention here. Saint Anthony the Great, the father of Christian monasticism, wrote in his chapter 150 of the Philokalia that God is good, dispassionate, and unchangeable. Anthony taught that God never changes, never hates, never takes revenge, and never returns evil for evil.⁴⁷ If we understand this—truly understand it—then the implications for our doctrine of hell are enormous.

If God never changes, then He does not switch from a mode of love to a mode of wrath. If God never hates, then He does not hate the damned. If God never takes revenge, then hell is not God’s vengeance. What, then, is hell? On Anthony’s view, hell can only be the experience of God’s unchanging love by those who have made themselves incapable of receiving it as love. God is always shining. Always loving. Always pouring out His goodness. But the blind cannot see the sun. That does not mean the sun has gone dark. It means the eyes are damaged.

This is the consistent witness of the Eastern Fathers. God does not inflict hell on anyone. The suffering of hell comes from within the human heart—from the collision between God’s unchanging love and a heart that has become incapable of receiving that love as anything other than torment.

Gregory of Nyssa: God Becomes All Things to His Creatures

Saint Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century, adds another dimension to the picture. In his treatise On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory teaches that in the new creation, God becomes everything to His creatures—locality, home, clothing, food, drink, light.⁴⁸ God fills all things, and in Him all find their sustenance, their purpose, and their final home.

But Gregory also recognized that this encounter with the divine presence is not experienced the same way by everyone. Zachary Hayes, a Catholic theologian writing about Gregory’s teaching, explains it well: Gregory wrote of the way in which God draws the human person into the divine presence, and it is the reality of sin and guilt in the person that makes the divine attraction itself painful. The soul suffers not because God takes pleasure in suffering, but because the pain is intrinsic to the encounter between the holy love of God and the still imperfect human being. The intensity of the pain will be proportionate to the evil that remains in the person.⁴⁹

This is an extraordinary statement. The pain of hell is not arbitrary. It is not God “turning up the heat.” It is the natural result of a sinful soul meeting a holy God. The more deeply entrenched the sin, the more intense the suffering. The pain is proportionate—not because God is carefully calibrating punishment, but because the collision between love and hatred is more violent the greater the hatred.

What the Model Is NOT

Before we go further, I need to be clear about what the divine presence model is not. Clearing away misunderstandings now will save us from confusion later.

First, the divine presence model is not saying that hell is comfortable, trivial, or easy. When Kalomiros, Isaac the Syrian, and the other Fathers describe what the wicked experience in God’s unveiled presence, they describe something genuinely horrific. Being confronted with the full reality of one’s sin in the blazing light of perfect love is not a mild discomfort. It is agony. Baker’s story of Otto makes this clear: the experience of standing in the fire of God’s presence, having every self-deception stripped away, seeing the full weight of the damage one has caused, feeling the overwhelming intensity of a love one has spent a lifetime rejecting—this is hell in the truest sense of the word.⁵⁰

Second, the divine presence model is not saying that God does not judge. God judges. The judgment is real and terrifying. But the judgment is the unveiling of God’s presence. Kalomiros explains that God’s judgment is nothing other than our coming into contact with truth and light. In the Day of the Great Judgment, all people will appear naked before the penetrating light of truth. The “books” that are opened are our hearts. And what is in those hearts will be revealed.⁵¹ The judgment is not a courtroom verdict pronounced by an angry judge. It is the opening of the human heart in the presence of absolute truth. Everything hidden becomes visible. Everything pretended becomes exposed. That is judgment enough.

Third, the divine presence model is not saying that everyone ends up in the same place. The model does not collapse the distinction between heaven and hell. The experiences of the righteous and the wicked are radically, qualitatively different. One is infinite joy; the other is infinite anguish. What the model says is that both experiences occur in the same place—the unveiled presence of God—but that the human heart determines whether that presence is experienced as paradise or as hell.

Fourth, and crucially, the divine presence model does not by itself determine whether the final outcome is eternal suffering, annihilation, or eventual restoration. The model describes the mechanism of hell—how and why the wicked suffer. But it is compatible with different outcomes. If you hold to conditional immortality (as I am inclined to do), the divine presence model explains what destroys the wicked: the fire of God’s love consumes them because they cannot bear it. If you hold to universal reconciliation, the divine presence model explains how all might eventually be saved: the fire of God’s love eventually softens even the hardest heart. The model works with either view. What it does not work with is eternal conscious torment as traditionally conceived—because on this model, the suffering of hell is not imposed by God as punishment but is the natural consequence of a hardened heart encountering overwhelming love.⁵²

Scripture and the Divine Presence Model

I want to briefly sketch the biblical case for the divine presence model. We will return to these texts in much greater detail in Part V of this book, but even at this introductory stage, it is important to see that this model is not built on philosophical speculation alone. It is deeply rooted in Scripture.

We have already seen Psalm 139:7–8, where the psalmist declares that even in Sheol, God is present. We have seen 1 Corinthians 15:28, where Paul declares that God will be “all in all.” And we have seen Hebrews 12:29: “Our God is a consuming fire.” But there is much more.

Consider 2 Thessalonians 1:9, one of the most commonly cited texts in defense of the separation view. In most English translations, it reads something like: “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord.” But this translation is debatable. The Greek phrase apo prosopou tou kyriou can also be rendered “from the presence of the Lord”—meaning that the destruction comes from the Lord’s presence, not that the destroyed are taken away from it.⁵³ In fact, this is exactly how the divine presence model reads the text. The destruction of the wicked is not removal from God’s presence. It is a direct result of encountering God’s unveiled presence.

Consider also the great apocalyptic visions. In Revelation 6:15–17, the wicked cry out to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!” The wicked do not fear being separated from God. They fear seeing His face. They want to hide from His presence, not because they are far from it but because they are exposed to it and cannot endure it.⁵⁴

Consider the prophets. Isaiah 33:14 asks, “Who among us can live with the consuming fire? Who among us can live with continual burning?” On the divine presence model, these are not threats from an angry God. They are warnings about the natural consequences of encountering perfect holiness with a sinful heart. Those who persist in evil are woefully unprepared for the encounter with the Lord on the day of judgment.⁵⁵

Consider Malachi 4:1–2, where the prophet describes the coming day as a furnace that will set the arrogant ablaze—but then immediately says, “For you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings.” The same rising of God produces destruction for some and healing for others. Same event. Same God. Different responses.⁵⁶

And consider 1 Corinthians 3:12–15, perhaps the most important Pauline text for the divine presence model. Paul speaks of a coming fire that will test each person’s work. Some will build with gold, silver, and precious stones; their work will survive the fire and they will receive a reward. Others will build with wood, hay, and straw; their work will be burned up, though the person may be saved, “yet so as through fire.” This is strikingly consistent with the divine presence model: the fire tests everything, purifying what is pure and consuming what is not. The same fire. Different outcomes depending on what it touches.⁵⁷

How the Model Solves the Problems

At the beginning of this book, in Chapters 2 and 3, we laid out the central problems that any adequate view of hell must solve. Following Manis, we identified the problem of justice, the problem of love, and the problem of coercion.⁵⁸ Let me briefly show how the divine presence model addresses each one.

The problem of love. How can a loving God condemn people to eternal suffering? On the divine presence model, God does not condemn anyone to suffering. God loves everyone—the righteous and the wicked alike. The suffering of the wicked is not caused by God’s anger or vengeance. It is caused by the collision between God’s love and the human heart that has set itself against love. God does not stop loving the damned. His love is what makes their experience hellish. This means that God’s love is not diminished or compromised by the existence of hell. On the contrary, hell is the experience of God’s love by those who cannot receive it.

The problem of justice. How can infinite punishment be a just response to finite sin? The divine presence model reframes this entirely. The suffering of hell is not a punishment that God imposes from outside. It is the natural result of the condition of the soul. The intensity of the suffering is proportionate to the depth of the soul’s rebellion, not arbitrarily assigned by a divine judge.⁵⁹ This is far closer to the biblical concept of tsedaka—God’s saving righteousness—than the Western courtroom model of retributive justice.

The problem of coercion. If God forces people into hell, where is their freedom? On the divine presence model, God does not force anyone into hell. The damned are in God’s presence—the same presence that the righteous enjoy. What they experience as hell is the result of their own freely chosen disposition toward God. God respects human freedom absolutely. He does not override the human will. He does not drag anyone kicking and screaming into a torture chamber. He simply reveals Himself as He truly is, and the human heart responds according to what it has become.

The divine presence model also solves the problem of theological double-mindedness that plagues the standard views. On the traditional view, heaven is explained by God’s love and hell is explained by God’s justice—as if God operates in two different modes. On the divine presence model, heaven and hell share a single source: the unveiled presence of the God who is love. There is no schizophrenia in God. There is no moment where love gives way to wrath. God is always and only love. What changes is the human heart that encounters that love.⁶⁰

C. Objections and Responses

No model worth defending can avoid hard questions. The divine presence model invites several, and I want to deal with the most important ones here. We will address additional objections in greater depth in Chapter 20, but these deserve attention now.

“This sounds like you’re making hell easier to swallow. Aren’t you just softening the doctrine?”

This is probably the most common reaction I get when I describe the divine presence model. And I understand why. If hell is not God torturing people, it might sound less severe. But I want to push back on this firmly.

Is it really “softer” to be confronted with the full, unveiled reality of your sin in the blazing light of perfect love—with no more hiding, no more excuses, no more self-deception? Is it really “easier” to stand face-to-face with the God you have rejected, knowing fully what you have done, feeling the weight of every person you have hurt, experiencing the overwhelming intensity of a love you are constitutionally incapable of receiving?

Baker’s Otto does not get off easy. He goes through hell—in the most literal sense. His teeth gnash. His heart breaks. He experiences agony that is, in Baker’s words, “no picnic in the park.”⁶¹ The divine presence model does not soften hell. It changes the source of the suffering. On the traditional view, the suffering comes from God’s wrath. On the divine presence model, the suffering comes from the human heart’s inability to endure divine love. The suffering is just as real. The agony is just as intense. But the character of God is vindicated: He is not a torturer. He is love.

“If hell is God’s presence, why do some texts speak of being ‘cast out’ or ‘separated’ from God?”

This is an important question. There are texts that use the language of separation—being “cast into outer darkness” (Matt. 25:30), being told “Depart from me” (Matt. 25:41), and the disputed 2 Thessalonians 1:9. These texts sound like the wicked are removed from God’s presence, not exposed to it.

But several things need to be said. First, the “separation” language may be describing the subjective experience of the damned rather than their objective metaphysical location. A person overwhelmed by shame and guilt in the presence of another person’s love can feel utterly alone even while standing right next to them. The elder brother is at his father’s feast and feels completely alienated. He is separated from his father’s love not by distance but by disposition.

Second, the language of being “cast out” and “departing” occurs in parables and apocalyptic imagery, genres that use vivid, dramatic language to make a point. We should be careful about building a rigid metaphysical geography of the afterlife on parabolic language.⁶²

Third, and most important, the “separation” texts must be read alongside the “presence” texts. Psalm 139:7–8 says God is in Sheol. Revelation 14:10 says the wicked will be tormented “in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.” That text explicitly places the wicked in the presence of Christ during their torment. First Corinthians 15:28 says God will be “all in all.” These texts cannot simply be wished away. Any complete account of the biblical teaching on hell must make room for both sets of texts, and the divine presence model does so more coherently than the alternatives.⁶³

“Doesn’t this model lead inevitably to universalism?”

Not necessarily. The divine presence model is compatible with universalism, but it does not require it. If God’s love is the fire, and the fire eventually softens every heart, then universalism follows. But if some hearts are so hardened that the fire cannot soften them—if some people cling to their hatred so fiercely that the fire consumes them entirely rather than purifying them—then conditional immortality follows. Baker’s story of Otto illustrates both possibilities: Otto might yield to the fire and be restored, or the fire might consume him entirely.⁶⁴

I lean toward conditional immortality, as I have said throughout this book. I take human freedom seriously. I believe that genuine love requires the genuine possibility of final refusal. But I hold this with humility, and I respect those who hope for the eventual reconciliation of all things. The divine presence model works with either outcome. What it does not work with is the idea that God tortures people forever out of retributive justice.

“Is this really a biblical view, or just Eastern philosophical speculation?”

We have already touched on this, but it is worth addressing directly. The divine presence model is not Eastern philosophical speculation. It is rooted in the exegesis of Greek-speaking Church Fathers who read the New Testament in its original language. It is supported by a substantial body of biblical texts, which we will examine in detail in Part V. And it has been affirmed by Christian thinkers from every major tradition—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant—from the earliest centuries to the present day.⁶⁵

The real question, I would gently suggest, is not whether the divine presence model is biblical, but whether the separation model is. As Manis observes, the standard views of hell require that God dramatically unveil His presence on the Day of Judgment and then immediately re-impose divine hiddenness on the damned for all eternity. Where is the biblical warrant for that?⁶⁶

D. Conclusion and Connection

Let me draw together what we have established in this chapter.

The divine presence model of hell holds that heaven and hell are two different experiences of the same reality: the unveiled, inescapable presence of God. In the new creation, when God is “all in all,” His love will fill all things. Those who love Him will experience that love as infinite joy. Those who have hardened their hearts against Him will experience that love as torment. The fire is the same. The love is the same. What differs is the condition of the human heart.

This model is not a modern innovation. It was taught by the earliest Greek-speaking Fathers—Isaac the Syrian, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Anthony the Great. It was preserved in the Eastern Orthodox tradition for over a thousand years. It was echoed by thinkers as diverse as Martin Luther and C. S. Lewis. And it has now been given rigorous philosophical development by R. Zachary Manis and warm theological expression by Sharon L. Baker.

The model solves the problems that plague the standard views. It resolves the tension between God’s love and the reality of hell by making God’s love the very source of hell’s suffering. It resolves the problem of separation from an omnipresent God by affirming that God is present everywhere, including in hell. It resolves the problem of theological double-mindedness by giving heaven and hell a single source: the unveiled presence of the God who is love. And it preserves human freedom by insisting that the difference between heaven and hell lies not in what God does to people, but in what people have done to themselves.

In the chapters ahead, we will explore this model in much greater depth. Chapter 15 will immerse us in the Orthodox tradition and walk through Kalomiros’s argument in detail. Chapter 16 will lay out the full philosophical case as Manis has developed it. Chapter 17 will present Baker’s theological synthesis. And the chapters that follow will explore the role of self-deception in the hardening of the heart, the model of hell as natural consequence rather than imposed punishment, and the responses to the strongest objections critics have raised.

But before we move on, I want to leave you with one thought. Actually, two.

First: the divine presence model does not ask you to believe less about hell. It asks you to believe more about God. It does not water down the seriousness of judgment. It amplifies the seriousness of love. On this view, the most dangerous thing in the universe is not God’s anger—it is God’s love. Because love, when it meets a heart that has made itself incapable of love, becomes the most terrible reality imaginable. The wicked do not need to fear God’s wrath. They need to fear His love. And we should tremble at the thought of what our sin does to our capacity to receive that love.

Second: the question of hell is, at its deepest level, a question about the character of God. Is God the kind of being who would torture His creatures forever? Or is God the kind of being whose love is so fierce, so pure, so consuming that it purifies everything that can be purified and destroys everything that cannot? Is God a torturer—or is God a consuming fire of love?

I believe the answer is clear. Our God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). And that fire is love.

The same fire that warms the willing burns those who resist. The same river that waters paradise scorches those who hate it. The same sun that gives sight to healthy eyes blinds the damaged ones. God does not change. God does not turn from love to wrath. God is love—always, everywhere, without exception. And it is that very love, inescapable and all-consuming, that makes hell what it is.

Not the absence of God. The presence of God. And the human heart’s refusal to receive Him.