Chapter 20

Answering the Critics—Objections to the Divine Presence Model

A. Thesis and Context

If you have made it this far in the book, you have seen something remarkable. You have seen an understanding of hell that does not require God to be a torturer. You have seen a model that takes the fire of Scripture seriously—not as a weapon God wields against His enemies, but as the burning reality of who God is: love, truth, and holiness, unveiled in all its blazing fullness. You have seen how the divine presence model draws on the deepest wells of Christian theology—the Church Fathers, the Orthodox tradition, the careful philosophical work of R. Zachary Manis, and the pastoral vision of Sharon Baker. You have seen how this model explains what the traditional view never could: how a God who is love could also be the source of what the damned experience as judgment.

But I would be a poor guide if I pretended the model has no critics. It does. And some of their objections are sharp. Some are biblical. Some are philosophical. Some come from the gut—from that deep instinct many Christians have that hell must be worse than what I have described, not better. If the divine presence model is going to earn your trust, it needs to face the hardest questions head-on.

That is what this chapter is for.

I want to present at least eight of the strongest objections I have encountered—some from scholars, some from pastors, some from ordinary believers sitting in pews who heard this model and said, “Wait a minute.” I want to state each objection as fairly as I can, in the strongest form its defenders would recognize. And then I want to show you why, in every case, the divine presence model has a compelling answer—an answer that is more faithful to Scripture, more consistent with the character of God, and more theologically coherent than the alternatives.

I am not claiming the model is beyond criticism. Every theological model has edges that need refining. What I am claiming is that these objections, when examined carefully, actually end up strengthening the case for the divine presence model rather than weakening it. The very questions critics raise expose problems in the traditional view that the divine presence model is uniquely positioned to solve.

Before we begin, a word about method. For each objection, I will first state the criticism in its strongest possible form. I will try to present it the way its best defenders would present it—not as a straw man, but as a genuine intellectual challenge. Then I will respond, drawing on the resources of Scripture, the Church Fathers, and our three primary sources: Manis, Baker, and Kalomiros. I will be honest about where the objection has a point and where I think it ultimately falls short.

I have organized the objections roughly from the most commonly raised to the most philosophically deep. But they are all interconnected. An answer to one often sheds light on another. By the end, I hope you will see that the divine presence model is not a theological house of cards that collapses at the first strong gust of criticism. It is a fortress built on Scripture, sustained by the witness of the earliest church, and refined by the best philosophical thinking available.

So let us hear the critics. They deserve a fair hearing. And the truth has nothing to fear from honest questions.

B. The Objections and Responses

Objection 1: “Scripture says God will punish the wicked—that sounds retributive, not like a natural consequence.”

This may be the most common objection, and I understand exactly why. Open your Bible to almost any passage about divine judgment and you find language that sounds unmistakably retributive. God “repays” the wicked. He “inflicts vengeance.” He “punishes.” Paul tells the Thessalonians that God will “repay with affliction those who afflict you” (2 Thess. 1:6). Jesus himself speaks of “eternal punishment” (Matt. 25:46). How can we say the suffering of hell is a natural consequence of encountering God’s love when the Bible seems to describe it as something God actively does to the wicked?

This is a serious objection. It deserves a serious answer. And I want to give it one that does not sidestep the difficulty but meets it head-on.

The first thing to notice is that the divine presence model does not deny that hell involves punishment. It absolutely does. What the model denies is that the punishment of hell is purely retributive—that is, that God arbitrarily selects and imposes a penalty on the wicked the way a judge sentences a criminal to a prison term that bears no natural connection to the crime committed.¹ On a purely retributive view, God could have chosen a different punishment. He picked this one. And that is where the problems begin, because we are left asking: why would a loving God choose this? Why would He choose infinite suffering for finite sin?

Manis has shown with great care that the divine presence model occupies a space between pure retribution and pure natural consequence. On the model, the suffering of hell is not something God intends for the wicked in the way a retributive judge intends a sentence. It is, instead, the natural result of a sin-hardened soul encountering the fullness of divine love. God’s purpose in unveiling Himself at the end of the age is not to punish anyone. His purpose is to be fully present to all His creatures, to fill all things, to be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). The suffering of the damned is a consequence of who they have become in the presence of who God is.²

But here is the key insight: the fact that the suffering of hell functions as a punishment does not mean it is intended as one. Manis explains that on the divine presence model, the scriptural language of punishment is phenomenological—it describes the first-person, subjective experience of the damned.³ Being punished is what it feels like to be a sinner in the presence of a holy God. It feels like divine wrath. It feels like vengeance. And because this is a permanent condition after the final judgment, the experience of those in hell is that of an “eternal punishment.”

Think of it this way. Imagine a person who has lived his entire life in darkness, refusing light at every turn. He has built his identity around the darkness. He has grown to love it. Now imagine that the sun rises and there is nowhere to hide. The light does not intend to cause him pain. The light is simply being what light is. But for the man who has ruined his eyes by decades in the dark, the light is agony. If you asked that man to describe what was happening to him, he would say, “The sun is punishing me.” And from his perspective, he would be right. But the sun has not changed. The sun is not targeting him. The sun is doing what the sun does—shining.

God is doing what God does—loving. But for those who have made themselves into enemies of love, the experience of that love is torment.

Now, what about the specific biblical language? The Hebrew and Greek texts are more nuanced than many English translations suggest. When Jesus speaks of “eternal punishment” in Matthew 25:46, the Greek word for punishment is kolasis (correction, pruning), not timoria (retaliatory vengeance).⁴ As we discussed in Chapter 7, Aristotle himself distinguished these two words: kolasis is for the sake of the one corrected, while timoria is for the satisfaction of the one offended. Jesus chose kolasis. That matters.

And when Paul says God will “repay with affliction” (2 Thess. 1:6), the broader context is revealing. Just three verses later, Paul describes this affliction as “everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thess. 1:9). Notice: the destruction comes from the Lord’s presence, not away from it. This is exactly what the divine presence model predicts. The judgment is the presence itself. The “affliction” is the experience of divine glory by those who are unprepared to receive it.⁵

We should also consider the broader pattern of divine “punishment” in Scripture. Throughout the Old Testament, one of the most common descriptions of God’s judgment is that He “gives people over” to the consequences of their own choices. Romans 1:18–32 is the classic passage: God’s wrath is “revealed from heaven” not by hurling thunderbolts but by giving people over to their sinful desires. He lets them reap what they have sown. This is precisely the logic of the divine presence model: hell is what happens when God finally stops shielding us from the full consequences of what we have become, when the curtain of divine hiddenness is pulled back and we stand exposed—just as we are—before the blinding light of perfect Love.⁶

So yes, Scripture speaks of punishment. The divine presence model agrees. But the punishment is not arbitrary. It is not artificially imposed. It is the inescapable consequence of what happens when a sin-corrupted heart meets the unveiled glory of God. And that fits the biblical data far better than the image of a God who has designed a torture chamber and is waiting to throw people into it.

Manis offers a helpful analogy from ordinary life. Consider the case where parents intentionally allow their child to experience the painful consequences of disobedience in order to teach them a lesson. The parents could intervene and spare the child the pain. They choose not to, because they believe the child needs to learn from the natural consequences of their own foolishness. This is what Manis calls a “natural punishment”—the parents are not inventing a penalty; they are allowing the built-in consequences to take their course.³³

On the divine presence model, hell is something close to a natural punishment and close to a retributive punishment, without exactly being either. In terms of the way it is experienced by the damned, it is more like a retributive punishment. This helps explain the scriptural language. But in terms of its existence and objective function, the suffering of the damned is a natural consequence of their past evil choices and the vicious characters they have formed by those choices. God allows the wicked to fully reap what they have sown—and the harvest is devastating.³⁴

Objection 2: “If hell is God’s presence, why do some texts speak of being ‘cast out’ or ‘separated’ from God?”

This objection cuts right to the heart of the matter. If the divine presence model says hell is the experience of God’s presence, what do we do with the texts that seem to say the opposite? Jesus speaks of people being “thrown into the outer darkness” (Matt. 25:30). He tells the goats to “depart from me” (Matt. 25:41). And there is the contested verse that traditionalists lean on heavily: “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thess. 1:9 ESV).

If we are going to be honest, we have to deal with these texts. And we can.

The first and most important observation is that the idea of eternal separation from an omnipresent God is deeply problematic on any view. This is not just a challenge for the divine presence model—it is a challenge for traditionalism and the choice model as well. Where, exactly, is someone supposed to go to escape the presence of a God who is, by definition, everywhere? The psalmist put the question starkly: “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!” (Ps. 139:7–8).⁷

Manis drives this point home with force. According to the doctrine of divine conservation—a standard part of Christian orthodoxy going all the way back to the earliest centuries—God must actively sustain everything in existence from one moment to the next. Nothing has the power to sustain its own being. If God were truly absent from hell, the damned would simply cease to exist. They would not suffer; they would vanish.⁸ So even on the traditional view, “separation from God” cannot mean what it sounds like at first. Traditionalists themselves have always had to qualify this language, admitting that the separation is relational, not metaphysical. The damned are separated from God’s love and fellowship, not from God’s sustaining presence.

But once we admit that, the distance between the traditional view and the divine presence model shrinks considerably. Both views agree that God is, in some sense, present even in hell. The question is what that presence looks like from the inside.

Now let us look at the specific texts. Start with 2 Thessalonians 1:9. The ESV translates it “away from the presence of the Lord,” and many traditionalists read it as teaching separation from God. But this translation is debated. The Greek preposition apo can mean “away from,” but it can also mean “from” in the sense of “coming from”—indicating the source of the destruction. Several scholars have argued that the verse should be read: “everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” On this reading, it is the Lord’s presence itself that is the source of the destruction. The glory of God destroys those who cannot bear it.⁹ This is the divine presence model in a single verse.

What about “outer darkness” and “depart from me”? These are vivid images, and we should take them seriously. But notice what kind of language they are. They are the language of exclusion from blessing, not of spatial distance from God. The outer darkness is the experience of those who are shut out from the banquet, not from the universe. They are excluded from the joy of communion with God, not from the reach of His being. The elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son was standing right next to his father’s house—he could hear the music, see the lights—and yet he was in his own private hell, seething with resentment while surrounded by his father’s love.¹⁰

That is outer darkness. Not distance from God, but distance from the experience of God as good. The damned are in God’s presence. They just cannot enjoy it. Their hatred, their self-deception, their hardened hearts have turned the light into darkness and the warmth into fire. They experience God’s presence as absence, God’s love as wrath, God’s light as unbearable exposure.

Manis raises an additional point that I find particularly compelling. He notes that there is something deeply puzzling about the traditional view when we consider the timeline of the end of the age. According to Scripture, the return of Christ is a cosmic revelation—the apocalypse, the unveiling of God’s glory to all creation. God puts an end to divine hiddenness once and for all. His glory fills the earth as the waters cover the sea. Every eye sees Him. And yet, on the traditional view, no sooner has God ended His hiddenness than He turns around and re-imposes it on the damned, eternally separating them from Himself by casting them into a place where He is not present. This is puzzling, to say the least.³⁵

Is it not part of the very point of Christ’s return that it is witnessed by all creation? And would not this revelation be more momentous, more consequential, more glorifying to Christ, if it were witnessed by all creation for all eternity? On the divine presence model, the unveiling of Christ at the end of the age is final and permanent. There is no going back to hiddenness. God is fully present to all—and the response to that presence is what determines whether the experience is paradise or hell.

Far from undermining the divine presence model, the “separation” texts actually illustrate its central claim: the same God, experienced in radically different ways, depending on the condition of the heart.

Objection 3: “The divine presence model makes hell sound too mild.”

I hear this one a lot, and it always surprises me. Because the divine presence model, rightly understood, describes a hell that is not milder than the traditional picture but in many ways more terrible.

Think about it. On the traditional view, hell is a place where God sends the wicked to be tormented, often depicted as a dungeon of fire run by demons. It is awful, certainly. But it is the awfulness of an external punishment imposed from outside. The sufferer can at least say, “God is doing this to me.” There is a strange dignity in that—the dignity of the victim.

On the divine presence model, there is no such comfort. The suffering of hell comes from within. It is the torment of a soul that has made itself into the kind of thing that cannot receive love—and then being immersed in infinite love anyway. It is the agony of standing in the presence of the most beautiful, most good, most loving Being in the universe and hating every second of it. Not because God is doing anything cruel. Not because the fire is designed to hurt. But because you have become the kind of person for whom love itself is unbearable.

Can you imagine anything worse?

Isaac the Syrian, writing in the seventh century, understood this perfectly. He said that those who suffer in hell are “scourged by love.” And then he added something devastating: the sorrow that comes from having sinned against love is “more piercing than any torment.”¹¹ Torture, Isaac says, is nothing compared to the anguish of a soul that finally sees what love is and realizes it has spent an entire lifetime destroying its capacity to receive it.

Baker illustrates this powerfully through her character Otto, a man of extraordinary wickedness who stands before the unveiled presence of God at the judgment. Otto does not hear the words he expects—“I am going to get you now. Revenge, punishment, and torture forever!” Instead, he hears God say, “I have loved you with an everlasting love. But look at your life; what have you done?” And then, in the fire of God’s presence, Otto is made to see everything. Every victim. Every scream. Every life destroyed. He feels their pain. He knows his guilt. And the fire of God’s love burns away everything false in him, exposing the raw truth of what he has become.¹²

This is not mild. This is the most devastating judgment imaginable. Because it is not the judgment of an angry tyrant. It is the judgment of love—and love, when it exposes the full horror of what sin has done to a soul, is far more terrible than any external punishment could ever be.

Consider the phenomenology of religious experience that Rudolf Otto described—the mysterium tremendum, the overwhelming and terrifying encounter with the Holy.¹³ Even the most devout believers, when they have experienced God’s presence in unusually vivid ways, report feelings of awe, dread, unworthiness, and the sense of being utterly undone. Isaiah cried, “Woe is me! I am undone!” (Isa. 6:5). Peter fell to his knees and said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8). Moses was told he could not see God’s face and live (Exod. 33:20). And these were righteous people, people who loved God.

If the unveiled presence of God is overwhelming even to the saints, what would it be like for someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating hatred, selfishness, and cruelty? If Moses could not look at God’s face and survive, what happens to the soul that has made itself into the very opposite of everything God is?

Manis puts the philosophical point precisely. The divine presence model does not make hell milder; it makes hell intelligible. It explains why hell is terrible without making God the author of that terror. The terror comes from the gap between what the sinner has become and what God is. And that gap, for those who have hardened themselves utterly against love, would be infinite.¹⁴

If anything, the divine presence model should make us take hell more seriously, not less. Because it tells us that the fire of hell is not some alien, external punishment. It is the very love of God. And that love, for those who refuse it, is the most consuming fire in the universe.

Objection 4: “Doesn’t this model lead inevitably to universalism?”

Here is the concern in a nutshell: if hell is the experience of God’s love, and if God’s love is infinite and irresistible, then won’t everyone eventually give in? If the fire is purifying, won’t it purify everyone in the end? Doesn’t the divine presence model, if taken to its logical conclusion, guarantee that all will be saved?

This is a thoughtful objection, and I want to be honest about the tension. The divine presence model does sit closer to universalism than the traditional view does. It takes God’s love seriously enough that the question naturally arises: can any finite resistance hold out forever against infinite love?

But here is the crucial thing: the divine presence model does not lead inevitably to universalism. It is compatible with universalism, yes. But it is equally compatible with conditional immortality—the view that some who finally reject God are destroyed by the very love they refuse. Baker demonstrated this with her two possible endings for Otto: in one, the fire purifies him and he is restored; in the other, the fire consumes everything in him until nothing remains, and he is annihilated. The fire is the same in both endings. What differs is Otto’s response.¹⁵

The mistake the objector makes is assuming that infinite love must override finite resistance. But love, by its very nature, does not override. Love invites. Love pursues. Love burns. But love does not coerce. If God forcibly rewired a person’s will so that they could no longer resist Him, the resulting “conversion” would not be love—it would be a kind of divine brainwashing. And the God revealed in Scripture does not do that. He knocks. He waits. He woos. But He does not break down the door.¹⁶

Manis addresses this objection with great philosophical care. The universalist argument, developed most forcefully by Thomas Talbott, claims that no rational, fully informed person would freely reject God forever. Manis responds by drawing on the concept of self-deception. The problem is that the damned are not fully rational. They have spent a lifetime—or longer—building an identity around sin. Their very capacity to perceive reality has been distorted. They look at love and see a threat. They look at truth and see an enemy. Self-deception has not merely clouded their judgment; it has restructured their personality in a way that may be, for all we know, irreversible.¹⁷

Think of the addict. The addict knows, at some level, that the drug is destroying him. Knowledge alone does not produce change. The addict’s will has been so deeply corrupted by years of choices that even clear knowledge of the truth is not enough to set him free. Now multiply that by a lifetime—or an eternity—of willful rebellion against God. Is it really so hard to imagine that some hearts could harden to the point where even the unveiled presence of infinite love cannot soften them?

Manis puts it this way: even on the divine presence model, where God’s presence is fully unveiled and there is no more hiding, the self-deceived may experience that presence as torment rather than invitation. The unveiling of truth does not guarantee a positive response. The damned might see God clearly for the first time and still hate what they see—not because they lack information, but because they have become the kind of beings who cannot love what is good.¹⁸

I will be transparent about my own position. As I said in the introduction to this book, I lean toward conditional immortality—the view that those who finally refuse God, even in the full blaze of His love, are eventually destroyed. On this view, the fire of God’s love is so overwhelming that a soul in permanent rebellion cannot survive it indefinitely. The resistance crumbles not into surrender but into dissolution. The second death is real and final.

But I hold this position with genuine humility. I will not condemn those who hope for universal reconciliation. The divine presence model works with either outcome. What it does not allow is the idea that God tortures anyone forever. Whether the end is restoration or destruction, the fire is always love.

Objection 5: “Is this model truly biblical, or is it just Eastern philosophical speculation?”

This objection carries special weight for evangelical Christians, and rightly so. If the divine presence model is nothing more than a clever philosophical theory dressed up in theological language, it has no claim on our allegiance. We follow Scripture, not philosophy.

So let me be direct: the divine presence model is deeply, thoroughly, unmistakably biblical. And it is not a modern invention. It is, in fact, the recovery of the earliest Christian understanding of hell—an understanding preserved in the East for nearly two thousand years while the West took a different path under the influence of Augustine, Anselm, and the medieval juridical tradition.

The biblical evidence has been laid out in detail in earlier chapters of this book, so I will not repeat the full exegesis here (see especially Chapters 22–26). But let me highlight several key threads.

First, fire in the Bible is consistently associated with God’s presence, not with a torture chamber separate from God. “Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). “The LORD your God is a consuming fire” (Deut. 4:24). “Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire? Who of us can dwell with everlasting burning?” (Isa. 33:14). In Daniel’s vision, a “river of fire” flows from the throne of the Ancient of Days (Dan. 7:9–10). In Revelation, the same throne from which the river of fire flows also produces “the river of the water of life” (Rev. 22:1). The fire is God’s presence. The water of life is God’s presence. Same source. Two different experiences.¹⁹

Second, the passage that traditionalists often cite as their strongest text—Revelation 14:10—actually supports the divine presence model. It says the wicked will be “tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.” In the presence of the Lamb. Not away from Him. Not in some distant dungeon. In His presence. This is devastating to the traditional view and perfectly consistent with the divine presence model.²⁰

Third, Paul’s great vision of the end—that God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28)—makes the divine presence model almost inevitable. If God will truly fill all things, if there will be no corner of reality hidden from His presence, then there is no room for a hell that is defined by God’s absence. In the new creation, God is everywhere. The righteous experience this as paradise. The wicked experience it as fire. Same God. Same presence. Two utterly different responses.

Fourth, the 1 Corinthians 3:12–15 passage about fire testing each person’s work is one of the clearest statements of the divine presence model in all of Scripture. Everyone passes through the fire. The fire does not destroy what is good—it only burns up what is worthless. Some pass through and are refined. Others lose everything. The fire is not a punishment imposed from outside; it is a test that reveals what is truly inside.²¹

As for the claim that this is “Eastern philosophical speculation,” the charge has it exactly backward. The Church Fathers who articulated this view—Isaac the Syrian, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor—were not philosophers borrowing ideas from pagan thought. They were biblical interpreters and pastors who read the Greek New Testament in their mother tongue. They understood the nuances of kolasis and aionios and apo in ways that Latin-speaking Western theologians often missed. If anything, it is the Western tradition of ECT that imported non-biblical concepts—particularly the Roman legal framework of retributive justice and the Augustinian assumption that God’s honor must be satisfied by punishment—into its reading of the biblical text.²²

Manis, who approaches the question primarily as a philosopher, nevertheless recognizes this. In his appendix on the biblical case for the divine presence model, he maps out an extensive scriptural foundation that includes the fire passages, the judgment passages, the omnipresence texts, the unveiling of Christ, and the Pauline vision of God filling all things. He concludes that while philosophical considerations may have prompted the model’s development, its roots are thoroughly scriptural.²³

The divine presence model is not a philosophical import into Scripture. It is what you get when you let Scripture speak for itself—especially when you listen to the voices of those who read it in its original language.

And the patristic witness is worth lingering over for a moment, because the breadth of support for the divine presence model in the early church is genuinely striking. It is not just one or two maverick thinkers. It is a wide stream. Isaac the Syrian taught that the damned are “scourged by love.” Basil the Great wrote that the flaming sword at the gate of paradise was “terrible and burning toward infidels, but kindly accessible toward the faithful.” Maximus the Confessor taught that the same divine energy produces different effects depending on the disposition of the receiver. Peter the Damascene compared God’s fire to the sun, which softens wax and hardens clay. Gregory of Nyssa envisioned the new creation as one in which God becomes everything to His creatures—their home, their food, their light. Fr. Thomas Hopko, endorsed by the Orthodox Church in America, taught that it is the Church’s spiritual understanding that God does not punish by material fire, but that His glory and love are the scourge of those who reject their radiant power.³⁶

This is not a fringe position in Eastern Christianity. It is, arguably, the mainstream position. And it was the position of the Greek-speaking church that was closest to the language and culture of the New Testament itself. When critics call the divine presence model “Eastern philosophical speculation,” they are inadvertently dismissing the theological tradition that has the strongest claim to continuity with the apostolic church. An evangelical need not agree with everything the Orthodox teach—I myself disagree with the Orthodox on several important matters—to recognize that on the specific question of how God’s presence relates to the experience of the damned, the Eastern tradition preserved something vital that the West lost under the weight of Latin juridical categories.

Objection 6: “What about the justice of God? Don’t the wicked deserve punishment?”

Absolutely they do. And on the divine presence model, they get it.

The objection assumes that the divine presence model eliminates justice by removing retributive punishment. But this rests on a mistaken equation: that justice means retribution and nothing else. In the Western legal tradition, justice often does mean retribution—paying a debt, balancing the scales, making the offender suffer in proportion to the offense. But the biblical concept of justice is much richer than this.

The Hebrew word most commonly translated “justice” or “righteousness” is tsedaka. And tsedaka in the Old Testament is not primarily about punishment. It is about putting things right. It is about restoration. It is about God’s faithfulness to His covenant, His commitment to making the world the way it was always supposed to be. When the prophets cry out for justice, they are not asking for more punishment. They are asking for God to intervene, to rescue the oppressed, to heal what is broken, to set the captives free.²⁴

Robin Parry makes this point effectively in Four Views on Hell. Biblical justice includes retribution, yes—but retribution is never the whole picture and never the final word. Throughout Scripture, the pattern of divine judgment is “judgment followed by restoration.” God judges Israel, and then He restores them. He judges the nations, and then He heals them. The judgment is real. The punishment is real. But the purpose of the punishment is always aimed at something beyond itself—at correction, at restoration, at the ultimate triumph of love over evil.²⁵

On the divine presence model, the wicked are not “let off the hook.” They face the most devastating judgment imaginable: the full, unfiltered truth about themselves, revealed in the blazing light of God’s holiness. Every lie they told themselves is stripped away. Every victim they harmed is acknowledged. Every act of cruelty is exposed. Baker’s Otto experiences this with devastating clarity—he is made to feel the pain of every person he ever destroyed. He suffers. He burns in the fire of God’s love. This is not the absence of justice. This is justice of the most penetrating and inescapable kind.²⁶

The question is not whether the divine presence model delivers justice. It does. The question is what kind of justice best reflects the character of the God revealed in Scripture. Is it the justice of a Roman executioner? Or is it the justice of a Father whose very being is love—a love so fierce that it exposes every hidden thing and burns away every trace of evil? I believe the answer is clear.

Moreover, there is an element of poetic justice in the divine presence model that is absent from the traditional view. On the traditional view, the punishment of hell is disconnected from the sin that put people there—it is an artificial consequence, arbitrarily selected by God. On the divine presence model, the punishment fits the crime with devastating precision. Those who built their lives on lies are exposed to perfect truth. Those who cultivated hatred are immersed in perfect love. Those who lived in the darkness are engulfed in perfect light. They suffer not because God has dreamed up some creative torture, but because what they have become is fundamentally incompatible with who God is. That is not the absence of justice. That is the deepest justice of all.

Kalomiros captured this beautifully when he wrote that God’s judgment is nothing other than our coming into contact with truth and light. The “books” that are opened at the judgment are not ledgers in some celestial courtroom. They are our hearts. The penetrating light of God reveals what is truly inside us. If there is love for God in our hearts, we rejoice in seeing His light. If there is hatred, we suffer—not because God is inflicting a punishment, but because the content of our own hearts, when exposed to the light, produces its own agony. As Kalomiros puts it, the reward and the punishment both come not from God but from the love or hate that reigns within us.³⁷

This is justice not as a cold legal transaction but as the revelation of reality. And reality, for those who have spent a lifetime fleeing from it, is the most fearsome judge of all.

Objection 7: “If God is omnipotent and loving, why doesn’t He simply prevent people from hardening their hearts?”

This is really a version of the problem of evil, and it is one of the hardest questions in all of theology. Why does God allow anyone to reach the point of final ruin? If He loves every person infinitely and possesses all power, why doesn’t He intervene before the damage becomes irreversible?

The short answer is: because love requires freedom, and freedom requires the genuine possibility of refusal.

The longer answer draws on the soul-making theodicy that Manis develops at length in both of his books.²⁷ God did not create human beings as finished products. He created us as beings-in-process—creatures who develop morally and spiritually through the exercise of genuine choice. The capacity to choose love over selfishness, truth over deception, humility over pride—this is what makes us human in the deepest sense. It is what makes us capable of the kind of relationship with God that constitutes our highest good.

But the same freedom that makes love possible also makes its rejection possible. God cannot create beings who are genuinely free to love Him and at the same time guarantee that all of them will love Him. If He could—if He rigged the process so that everyone would inevitably choose rightly—then the choosing would not be real. It would be a puppet show. And puppet love is no love at all.

Could God intervene at each point where a person is about to make a catastrophic moral choice? In theory, perhaps. But Manis shows why this would not accomplish what we hope. If God consistently prevented people from experiencing the consequences of their bad choices, they would never learn. They would remain moral infants forever. The parent who never lets a child face any difficulty, who shields them from every scraped knee and every hard consequence, does not produce a mature adult. They produce a person who has no idea what the world is really like or how their choices affect others.²⁸

Furthermore, the divine presence model includes a crucial insight about why God remains partially hidden during this life. It is precisely because of His love that God does not reveal Himself fully right now. If God unveiled Himself in all His glory to a person still mired in sin, the encounter would be devastating—potentially destructive. God shields us from His full presence during the process of soul-making, gradually revealing more of Himself as we grow in our capacity to receive Him. This is not divine neglect. It is divine mercy.²⁹

Manis explains that this is the logic behind divine hiddenness. God must take careful measures not to overwhelm our freedom by revealing Himself to a greater degree than what we are able to receive. The necessity of this hiddenness arises not merely from the conditions of soul-making but from our fallen state. God, out of love, actively shields us from His full presence during the time when we are being delivered from sin.³⁰

The objector is essentially asking: “Why doesn’t God override human freedom to prevent a terrible outcome?” But that question answers itself. A God who overrides freedom to prevent bad outcomes is a God who has destroyed the very thing that makes us capable of love. And a universe without the possibility of love is a universe not worth creating.

Consider the story of Pharaoh in Exodus. Here is a man who had every opportunity to soften. God sent plague after plague—not to destroy Pharaoh but to reveal the truth about his heart and to give him repeated chances to yield. Moses came to him again and again with the same message: “Let my people go.” And at each stage, Pharaoh could have relented. Some of the plagues even seemed to move him temporarily—he would promise to release the Israelites, and then, when the pressure lifted, he would reverse himself. The text says that sometimes God hardened Pharaoh’s heart and sometimes Pharaoh hardened his own heart. The Fathers read this not as God forcing Pharaoh to be stubborn but as God’s presence and commands revealing what was already in Pharaoh’s heart. Each encounter with God’s power was an occasion for either softening or hardening. Pharaoh, by his own choices, chose hardening at every turn.

That is the pattern. God does not harden hearts by forcing wickedness into them. God reveals Himself—and the revelation becomes the occasion for each person to respond. Some hearts melt. Some hearts calcify. The fire is the same. The response is different. And God, out of respect for the freedom He gave us at creation, allows the response to be real.

I do not pretend this fully answers the emotional weight of the question. It is one thing to understand intellectually why God permits the hardening of hearts. It is another thing entirely to sit with the grief of it—to know that some hearts may harden beyond recovery, and that the God who loves them will not force them open. But I trust that this grief is God’s grief, too. He is not watching from a distance with indifference. He is the Father running toward the prodigal. He is the shepherd leaving the ninety-nine to search for the one. He does everything love can do. But love cannot do the one thing that would destroy love itself: it cannot coerce.

Objection 8: “This sounds like you’re just making hell more comfortable.”

I understand why someone might hear the divine presence model and think I am trying to soften hell, to take the edge off, to make the hard doctrines of Scripture more palatable to modern sensibilities. If that were what I was doing, the objection would be devastating. We do not get to rewrite the Bible because we find parts of it uncomfortable.

But that is not what is happening here. Not even close.

The divine presence model does not make hell more comfortable. It makes hell more coherent. And in making it more coherent, it actually makes it more terrifying in the ways that matter most.

On the traditional view, the horror of hell is the horror of a torture chamber—fire, pain, darkness, demons. It is the horror of an external environment designed to inflict maximum suffering. And while that is certainly horrible, it is a horror that keeps God at arm’s length. The traditional hell is terrifying because of what God does. The divine presence hell is terrifying because of what God is.

Think about the difference. On the traditional view, you could at least comfort yourself with the thought that God is “over there” and you are “here,” and the fire between you is a tool He is using. On the divine presence model, there is no such distance. God is not over there. God is everywhere. The fire is not a tool. The fire is God. And there is nowhere to run.

Kalomiros, drawing on the Orthodox icon of the Last Judgment, describes this with unforgettable vividness. In the icon, a river of fire flows directly from the throne of Christ. It is not a river that God sends away from Himself to punish His enemies in some distant realm. It flows from Him. It is Him—His love, His grace, the same river that irrigated paradise from the beginning. For those who love God, this river is the water of life. For those who hate God, this same river is a river of fire that suffocates and burns.³¹

Does that sound comfortable?

Peter the Damascene, writing in the eighth century, used another image. He said that the effect of God’s fire is like the sun shining on two different substances: beeswax and clay. The same sun makes wax soft and clay hard. The difference is not in the sun. The difference is in the material.³² The divine presence model says exactly the same thing about hell. The fire of God’s love softens hearts that are willing and hardens hearts that are resistant. The same love that is paradise for the saints is hell for the damned.

I am not making hell comfortable. I am making hell personal. The traditional view locates the terror of hell in an environment—a place of fire and darkness. The divine presence model locates the terror of hell in a relationship—or rather, in the catastrophic failure of a relationship. The worst thing about hell is not the fire. The worst thing about hell is that you are standing in the presence of the most loving, most beautiful, most glorious Being who has ever existed, and you cannot stop hating Him. You cannot stop running. You cannot stop hiding. Not because He is cruel, but because you are broken. And in His presence, you know it with a clarity that no earthly experience could ever produce.

That is not a more comfortable hell. That is the most uncomfortable hell I can imagine. Because it means there is no one to blame but yourself.

C. Additional Considerations

The Cumulative Force of the Objections

Having worked through these eight objections, I want to step back and notice something. Each objection, when examined closely, actually reveals a weakness not in the divine presence model but in the traditional view.

The objection about retribution exposes the problem that purely retributive punishment is arbitrary and artificial—a problem the divine presence model avoids. The objection about separation reveals that even traditionalists cannot consistently maintain that hell involves the absence of God. The objection about mildness, when answered honestly, shows that the divine presence model takes the horror of hell more seriously, not less. The objection about universalism raises a genuine question about freedom—but it is a question that the divine presence model answers more carefully than the traditional view ever has. The objection about biblical grounding turns out to work in the divine presence model’s favor, since the fire texts, the omnipresence texts, and the judgment texts all fit the model better than the traditional reading. The objection about justice exposes the poverty of a purely retributive framework and points toward the richer biblical understanding of tsedaka. The objection about divine omnipotence turns out to be a version of the problem of evil that challenges every view of hell, but which the divine presence model’s emphasis on soul-making and freedom addresses more adequately than its competitors. And the objection about comfort dissolves entirely when we see what the divine presence model actually describes: not a more comfortable hell, but a more terrible one—because it is inescapable, personal, and rooted in the very nature of God.

None of this means the divine presence model is beyond criticism. It is a theological model, and all theological models are approximations of a reality that exceeds our grasp. But I hope you can see that the model is not fragile. It does not crumble under pressure. When challenged from Scripture, it draws on deeper biblical resources than the traditional view. When challenged philosophically, it provides more coherent answers. When challenged pastorally, it offers a vision of God that is simultaneously more loving and more fearsome than anything the medieval imagination produced.

A Word to Those Still Uncertain

If you have read through these objections and my responses and still feel uncertain, I want you to know something: that is okay. Theological certainty on a topic this deep is not something I expect or even think is healthy. The doctrine of hell touches on the deepest mysteries of God’s nature, human freedom, the power of sin, and the destiny of the soul. Honest people can look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions.

I have spoken with many Christians who were raised on the traditional view of hell and who feel a kind of loyalty to it—not because they find it intellectually satisfying, but because they have been taught that questioning it is tantamount to questioning Scripture itself. I want to address that feeling directly. You are not questioning Scripture. You are questioning a particular interpretation of Scripture—an interpretation that, as we have seen throughout this book, is neither the only one nor the earliest one. The Greek-speaking Church Fathers who read the New Testament in their mother tongue did not all read it the way Augustine did. Many of them read it in a way that aligns far more closely with the divine presence model than with eternal conscious torment. Questioning the traditional interpretation is not a sign of weak faith. It may be a sign of the opposite—a faith that is strong enough to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even when it leads to uncomfortable places.

I also want to speak to those who may be worried that the divine presence model somehow diminishes the urgency of the gospel. It does not. If anything, it increases that urgency. On the divine presence model, what is at stake in our lives is not whether we avoid a distant torture chamber. What is at stake is the very shape of our souls. Every choice we make—toward love or toward selfishness, toward truth or toward deception, toward God or away from Him—is forming us into the kind of beings who will either welcome God’s unveiled presence with joy or experience it as consuming fire. The call to repentance is not a threat about what God will do to us. It is a warning about what we are doing to ourselves—and an invitation to let God heal us while there is still time.

What I ask is not that you agree with every detail of the divine presence model. What I ask is that you consider the possibility that the traditional view of hell has been shaped by assumptions—about God’s justice, about the purpose of punishment, about the nature of divine fire—that are not as solidly biblical as we have been taught to believe. The divine presence model is an invitation to go deeper. To read the fire passages again with fresh eyes. To ask whether the God revealed in Jesus Christ—the God who wept over Jerusalem, who laid down His life for His enemies, who asked the Father to forgive those who were killing Him—is really the kind of God who would design an eternal torture chamber.

I do not think He is. And I believe the Bible, read carefully and in its fullness, points to a different picture: a God whose fire is His love, whose judgment is the revelation of truth, and whose presence is both the greatest joy and the most fearful reality in the universe.

D. Conclusion and Connection

We have now heard the strongest objections to the divine presence model and found that the model has compelling answers to each one. The language of punishment in Scripture is real—but it describes the phenomenological experience of sinners in God’s unveiled presence, not an arbitrary penalty imposed from outside. The separation texts, rightly understood, describe a relational distance within God’s inescapable presence, not a spatial distance from a God who is omnipresent. The model does not make hell mild—it makes hell intelligible, personal, and more devastating than any medieval torture fantasy. It does not inevitably lead to universalism, because love does not coerce and self-deception can reach depths that even the full revelation of truth may not reverse. It is thoroughly biblical, rooted in the fire passages, the omnipresence passages, and the judgment passages that traditionalists have struggled to explain coherently. It does not eliminate justice but deepens it, replacing the pale justice of retribution with the devastating justice of total exposure before the light of God. It does not override human freedom but takes it so seriously that it allows for the most terrible consequence imaginable: a soul that hardens beyond recovery even in the arms of infinite love. And it does not make hell comfortable. It makes hell inescapable.

I want to be clear about something as we close this chapter. Engaging with objections is not a defensive exercise. It is not about circling the wagons and protecting a fragile theory. The divine presence model is not fragile. When we push on it, it pushes back with the full weight of Scripture, tradition, and reason. But more than that, engaging with objections is an act of intellectual honesty. If we are going to ask people to rethink something as foundational as the doctrine of hell—a doctrine that has been taught in a certain way for centuries in the Western church—we owe them a thorough accounting. We owe them answers, not evasions. We owe them careful engagement with the best counterarguments, not dismissive hand-waving.

I have tried to provide that here. Where the objections revealed genuine tensions in the model, I have said so. Where they turned out to expose problems in the traditional view rather than in the divine presence model, I have pointed that out as well. And where the answers required nuance—as with the question of universalism, or the mystery of why God permits the hardening of hearts—I have tried to provide that nuance without pretending to have resolved every difficulty.

The God we are describing is not a simpler God than the God of the traditional view. He is a more complex God, a more mysterious God, and ultimately a more loving God. He does not stand at the entrance of hell with a whip. He stands at the center of all reality with arms outstretched—the same arms that were stretched out on the cross. And the fire that flows from His throne is the same fire that descended at Pentecost, the same fire that burned in the bush without consuming it, the same fire that led Israel through the wilderness by night. It is the fire of love. It is the fire of truth. It is the fire that purifies the willing and consumes the resistant.

With these objections addressed, we are now ready to turn to the biblical text directly. In the chapters that follow, we will walk through the major Scripture passages on hell, fire, and judgment—the passages that every theology of hell must account for. We will begin with the crucial distinction between Hades and Gehenna in Chapter 21, move to the fire passages in Chapter 22, the judgment passages in Chapter 23, the parables in Chapter 24, Paul’s letters in Chapter 25, and the book of Revelation in Chapter 26. We will see that the divine presence model does not merely survive the biblical test. It thrives on it. The texts that have long been used to support the traditional view turn out, on closer inspection, to support the divine presence model even more powerfully.

The fire is coming. It is time to look at it directly.