Chapter 32
I want to take you back to where this whole journey started.
Years ago, I sat in a church pew and listened to a sermon about hell. The preacher painted the picture you’ve probably heard a hundred times—a place of unending fire, ceaseless screaming, bodies that burn but never die, a God who watches the torment of billions and calls it justice. I remember my hands going cold. Not because I was afraid for myself, exactly, though I was. But because something deeper had cracked inside me. The God being described from that pulpit—the one who designed an eternal torture chamber and populated it with most of the human race—that God terrified me. And not in the holy, reverent way that Scripture speaks about fearing the Lord. This was a different kind of terror. It was the terror of a child who has just been told that his father is not safe.
I did what most people in my position do. I buried the doubt. I told myself that God’s ways are higher than our ways, that we can’t judge God by human standards, that the problem was with me and not with the theology. For years, I carried that weight. Every time the topic of hell came up, I felt the crack widen a little more. Every time a friend asked me how a loving God could do that, I recited the answers I had been taught. But the answers tasted like dust in my mouth.1
Sharon Baker knows exactly what I’m talking about. She wrote about her own experience at the beginning of Razing Hell—how, as a young woman of twenty-six, she sat in a church service and listened to a pastor describe in graphic detail the fires of hell, the worms, the darkness, and the utter hopelessness of the damned. She took out what she called “fire insurance” that day, praying a prayer born more of terror than of love.2 I suspect millions of Christians have had that same experience. The gospel they heard was not really good news. It was a threat dressed up in religious language: Love God or He will burn you forever.
That is not the gospel. That is not the God revealed in Jesus Christ. And this book has been my attempt to show you why.
I remember the day everything changed. I was reading a passage from Saint Isaac the Syrian, the seventh-century bishop of Nineveh. I had encountered his name before, but I had never really sat with his words. And then I read this:
“Those who find themselves in Gehenna will be chastised with the scourge of love. How cruel and bitter this torment of love will be! For those who understand that they have sinned against love undergo greater sufferings than those produced by the most fearful tortures. The sorrow which takes hold of the heart which has sinned against love is more piercing than any other pain.”3
I read that passage three times. Then I set down the book and stared at the wall for a long time.
The scourge of love. Not the scourge of vengeance. Not the scourge of wrath in the pagan sense. The scourge of love. Isaac was saying that the fire of hell is the love of God—and that the damned suffer not because God is hurting them, but because they have so hardened their hearts against love that love itself has become unbearable. The pain comes not from God but from within. It is the anguish of a soul that has sinned against the very thing it was made for.
That single paragraph cracked my world open. Not because it was new—I would later learn that this understanding has deep roots in the earliest centuries of the church. But because, for the first time, I could see a way to hold together everything I believed about God’s love, God’s justice, and the seriousness of hell without making God into a monster.4
That was the beginning. The rest of this book has been the outworking of that discovery.
We have covered a lot of ground together. Thirty-one chapters of biblical exegesis, philosophical argument, historical theology, patristic witness, and honest wrestling. I want to draw it all together now—not as a dry summary, but as a confession of what I believe and why I believe it matters more than almost anything else in the Christian faith.
We started here, and we must end here, because everything else flows from this single reality. “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). The apostle John did not say that God has love or that God shows love from time to time. He said God is love. This is not one attribute among many. It is the defining reality of who God is. It is the lens through which every other attribute must be understood.5
When we say God is just, we mean that His justice is a loving justice. When we say God is holy, we mean that His holiness burns with love. When we say God judges, we mean that His judgment is the judgment of a Father who loves His children too much to leave them in their brokenness. The Hebrew word tsedaka (righteousness, saving justice) is not the cold, retributive “justice” of Western legal tradition. It is the fierce, restorative, saving action of a God who will not rest until His creation is whole.6
We explored this at length in Chapters 4 through 8. We saw that the Eastern Fathers—Anthony the Great, Basil the Great, Isaac the Syrian, and many others—insisted that God is unchangingly good, that He never hates, never takes vengeance, never returns evil for evil. As Anthony wrote in the Philokalia: “God is good, dispassionate, and immutable. Now someone who thinks it reasonable and true to affirm that God does not change, may well wonder how, in that case, it is possible to say that God rejoices over those who are good and shows mercy to those who honor Him, while He turns away from the wicked and is angry with sinners.” Anthony’s answer was stunning: God does not change. We change. God is like the sun—He shines on all. Whether we experience that light as warmth or as blinding pain depends on the condition of our eyes, not on the sun.7
This is the foundation of everything. If God is love—really, truly, unfailingly, unchangeably love—then any doctrine of hell that makes God into something other than love is wrong. Not just mistaken. Wrong at the deepest level. Wrong in a way that distorts the gospel itself.
In Chapter 5, we traced how the Western church, beginning with Augustine and continuing through Anselm and the Reformers, slowly distorted the character of God by importing a juridical framework foreign to Scripture and the early church.8 Alexandre Kalomiros, in his landmark essay The River of Fire, put it bluntly: the greatest triumph of the devil was accomplished not through outright denial of God, but through theology—through convincing Christians that God Himself is the ultimate enemy, the angry judge whose honor must be satisfied, the cosmic executioner from whom we need to be saved.9
The result was a Christianity in which the real threat was not sin, not the devil, not death—but God Himself. Salvation became a legal transaction: Christ steps in to absorb the punishment that God would otherwise inflict on us. The cross became not the supreme act of divine love but a cosmic courtroom deal. And hell became the place where God inflicts the punishment that Christ’s sacrifice does not cover.
Kalomiros argued—and I believe he was right—that this distortion is the single greatest cause of atheism in the West. People rejected God not because they rejected love but because the “God” they were offered was not lovely. The God of eternal conscious torment is not a God anyone can truly love. He is a God one can only fear, placate, and hope to avoid.10
Baker made the same point from a different angle. If the God we preach is one who tortures His enemies forever, then we are not preaching good news. We are preaching a threat. And threats do not transform hearts—they only produce compliance born of terror.11
Throughout this book, we have returned again and again to one central image: fire. “Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). Fire appears at every critical moment in the biblical narrative. God appeared to Abraham in fire. He spoke to Moses from the burning bush. He led Israel through the wilderness as a pillar of fire. He descended on Mount Sinai in fire. The Holy Spirit fell at Pentecost as tongues of fire. Christ Himself said, “I came to cast fire on the earth” (Luke 12:49).12
What is this fire? The traditional Western answer is that God’s fire is punitive—it is the instrument of divine vengeance against the wicked. But that is not what Scripture says. And it is not what the earliest Christians believed.
Kalomiros showed us what the Orthodox tradition has always taught: the river of fire that flows from God’s throne in the icon of the Last Judgment is not a river of vengeance. It is the river of God’s love, the same river that flowed from Eden to water paradise.13 God is love. God is fire. Therefore God’s fire is His love. And this fire does two things at once: it purifies gold and it consumes wood. Precious metals shine in the furnace; rubbish burns with black smoke. The difference is not in the fire. The difference is in what the fire touches.14
Think about that. The same fire. The same love. The same God. But two utterly different experiences. For those who love God, the fire is paradise—the overwhelming joy of being fully embraced by perfect Love. For those who hate God, the same fire is hell—the unbearable agony of being exposed to a Love they have spent their entire existence resisting.
Paul told the Corinthians that on the Day of Judgment, each person’s work would be tested by fire. Those who built with gold, silver, and precious stones would see their work survive and shine. Those who built with wood, hay, and stubble would see their work consumed. “If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames” (1 Cor. 3:15).15 The fire in this passage is clearly purifying, not punitive. It does not destroy persons; it destroys what is unworthy. And the person who goes through it is saved, though barely, and with everything burned away except the soul itself.
This is the fire of God. Not torture. Not vengeance. Love.
At the heart of this book stands the model we have spent the most time developing: the divine presence model of hell. I owe this model primarily to three sources—the philosophical work of R. Zachary Manis, the theological synthesis of Sharon Baker, and the Orthodox tradition as articulated by Kalomiros and the Church Fathers.16
The model can be stated simply. Hell is not separation from God. Hell is the experience of God’s inescapable, all-consuming love by those whose hearts are hardened against Him.
In the new creation, God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). There will be no corner of reality hidden from His presence. The righteous will experience this as paradise—the infinite joy of dwelling in the full radiance of the God they love. The wicked will experience the same presence as torment—not because God is doing anything different to them, but because their hearts cannot receive what God is pouring out.17
Manis developed this model with careful philosophical precision. He showed that it meets all the criteria for an adequate solution to the problem of hell: it takes Scripture seriously, it is consistent with God’s character as love, it preserves human freedom, it accounts for the seriousness of divine judgment, and it does not require God to act as an active torturer.18 He showed that the suffering of hell, on this model, is a natural consequence of encountering perfect Love with a heart disposed toward hatred. God does not punish the wicked by imposing suffering from outside. The suffering flows naturally from within—from the collision between divine love and human rebellion.19
The analogy I keep coming back to is the sun. The sun does not punish the blind. But the person with diseased eyes cannot enjoy the sunlight that gives life to everyone else. The sun has not changed. The eye is damaged. In the same way, God does not change between the saved and the damned. He is the same toward all—pure, unrelenting, inescapable Love. Whether that love is experienced as warmth or as unbearable burning depends entirely on the condition of the human heart.20
Fr. Thomas Hopko, whose presentation is endorsed by the Orthodox Church in America, put it with remarkable clarity: “The final coming of Christ will be the judgment of all men. His very presence will be the judgment. . . . For those who love the Lord, His Presence will be infinite joy, paradise and eternal life. For those who hate the Lord, the same Presence will be infinite torture, hell and eternal death.”21
The reality is the same. The difference is in us.
No one has illustrated this more powerfully than Sharon Baker, through her unforgettable character Otto—a fictionalized Adolf Hitler. Baker imagined what would happen when someone like Otto, a man who had spent his entire life building an empire of hatred and violence, stands before God at the final judgment.22
What Otto encounters is not an angry judge screaming for vengeance. He encounters the fire of God’s love. And from within that fire, he hears God speak—not with threats, but with sorrow forged from love. God makes Otto go to each of his victims and lay his hand on their hearts. He feels all of their pain, all of their fear, all of their grief. And he knows he caused it all. The fire of God’s love burns away his wickedness. His heart breaks. He cries out in remorse.23
This is hell. Not a dungeon designed by a sadistic warden. Not a torture chamber operated by demons. Hell is what happens when a sin-hardened heart is laid bare before the blazing reality of perfect Love. And the fire that burns is not wrath in the pagan sense. It is love—the same love that warms the righteous, the same love that heals the repentant, the same love that shines like the sun on all of God’s creation.
Baker’s vision of Otto is, for me, one of the most powerful arguments for the divine presence model. It takes sin with devastating seriousness. It gives the victims of evil the vindication they deserve—the offender truly knows what he has done. And it does all of this without turning God into a torturer. God does not need to invent punishments. The encounter with Love is the punishment—for those who have spent their lives rejecting it.24
One of the most important things I have tried to show in this book is that the divine presence model is not a modern innovation. It is the recovery of the earliest Christian understanding of hell, preserved in the Eastern church for centuries and now being rediscovered in the West.25
Basil the Great, writing in the fourth century, spoke of the fire prepared for punishment being “divided by the voice of the Lord”—with the burning property reserved for those who deserve to burn and the illuminating warmth reserved for the enjoyment of the righteous.26 Maximus the Confessor taught that the same divine energy produces different effects depending on the disposition of the one who receives it. Peter the Damascene said that God’s fire makes some soft like beeswax and others hard like stone. Gregory of Nyssa spoke of how the divine attraction itself becomes painful for those whose hearts are weighed down by sin.27
This is not the fringe of Christian thought. These are some of the greatest theologians the church has ever produced. They read Scripture in the original Greek. They lived closer in time and language to the apostles than we do by more than a thousand years. And they consistently taught what this book has been arguing: that hell is not separation from God, but the experience of God’s presence by those who have made themselves unable to receive His love.28
I say this as an evangelical, not as an Orthodox apologist. I am not converting to Orthodoxy. But I am honest enough to admit that on this particular question, the Eastern church preserved something that the West lost. And it is past time for us to recover it.
We spent Chapters 9 and 10 engaging the traditional view of eternal conscious torment. I tried to be scrupulously fair. I presented ECT in its strongest form, named its best defenders—Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Edwards—and acknowledged the sincerity of those who hold it.29
But I also named the problems. Clearly and specifically.
ECT makes God the author and sustainer of infinite suffering for finite sins. It turns divine justice into something worse than any human court would tolerate. It requires us to believe that the God who tells us to love our enemies, to forgive seventy times seven, to overcome evil with good—this same God will torture His enemies forever, with no hope of mercy, no possibility of repentance, no chance of redemption. Ever.30
I do not believe that. I cannot believe that. Not because I am soft on sin, but because I take the character of God seriously. If God is love—and He is—then He cannot be the eternal torturer that ECT requires Him to be. The two images are incompatible. One of them must go.
And I believe it is ECT that must go. Not hell. Not judgment. Not the seriousness of sin. Just the idea that God designed an everlasting torture chamber and calls it justice. That idea is not biblical. It is not the teaching of the earliest church. And it makes God worse than the worst human tyrant who ever lived.31
If you came to this book holding the traditional view, I want you to hear me: I am not attacking you. I know that many of the finest believers in the history of the church have held ECT. I respect their sincerity, and I honor the tradition. But I believe there is a better way to understand what Scripture teaches about the fire of God’s judgment. And I believe that better way actually takes sin more seriously than ECT does—because it locates the problem where it truly belongs: not in God’s wrath but in the human heart.
In Chapter 11, we looked at the choice model—the view associated with C. S. Lewis, Jerry Walls, and others, which holds that the damned freely choose hell and that God simply respects their freedom.32 I have great sympathy for this view. Lewis’s famous line—“the doors of hell are locked on the inside”—contains a profound insight. Hell is not something God does to people. It is something people do to themselves.
But as Manis showed, the choice model by itself does not go far enough. It tells us that the damned choose hell, but it does not adequately explain what they are choosing or why that choice produces suffering. The divine presence model incorporates the best of the choice model—the emphasis on human freedom and responsibility—while providing the missing piece: the suffering comes from encountering God’s unveiled love with a heart that has freely chosen to reject it.33
In Chapter 12, we examined conditional immortality—the view that the wicked are not tormented forever but are eventually destroyed. I affirmed the biblical strength of this position. Jesus Himself said that God is able to “destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matt. 10:28). The language of destruction, perishing, and the “second death” runs throughout Scripture.34
But I also pointed out what CI by itself lacks: the mechanism. CI tells us what happens to the wicked—they are destroyed. But it does not tell us how or why. Is God actively killing them? Is He withdrawing His sustaining power? What, exactly, destroys them?
The divine presence model provides the answer. The wicked are destroyed because the fire of God’s love itself consumes those who have hardened against it. The same fire that refines gold also consumes wood. God does not need to do anything extra. His love is enough. For those who receive it, love gives life. For those who have made themselves unable to receive it, love becomes an all-consuming fire.35
CI and the divine presence model together form the strongest possible account of final destruction. It is not arbitrary divine violence. It is the natural and inevitable consequence of a sin-hardened heart encountering perfect Love.
In Chapter 13, and again in Chapters 30 and 31, we engaged the question of universal reconciliation. I tried to give it a fair hearing, and I want to say one more time why I take it seriously.
The universalist hope rests on texts that are hard to dismiss. Paul writes that God “desires all people to be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4). He writes that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). He writes that God was pleased “through him to reconcile to himself all things” (Col. 1:19–20). He writes that at the name of Jesus “every knee should bow . . . and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Phil. 2:10–11).36
If God’s love is truly infinite and inescapable, can any finite resistance hold out forever? That is the universalist’s question, and it is a devastating one. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the Cappadocian Fathers, argued for apokatastasis (the restoration of all things)—the view that God’s love will eventually win every heart.37 Thomas Talbott and David Bentley Hart have made powerful philosophical arguments in the same direction. Gerry Beauchemin has gathered the biblical evidence with passion and care.38
I take this hope seriously. I do not mock it. I do not dismiss it. And I freely confess that there are days when my heart is drawn powerfully toward it.
But I lean toward conditional immortality. Here is why.
I believe that genuine freedom must include the real possibility of final refusal. If God guarantees that every heart will eventually yield, then the choice is not really free—it is a foregone conclusion. Manis made this argument carefully: even when God’s presence is fully unveiled, even when the truth is laid bare, the self-deceived person may experience that presence as torment rather than invitation. The unveiling of truth does not guarantee a positive response.39
I also take seriously the biblical language of finality. Jesus spoke of “eternal punishment” (Matt. 25:46). John spoke of the “second death” (Rev. 20:14). These texts, at their most natural reading, seem to indicate a point of no return.40
And yet.
I hold this position with humility. I acknowledge that the universalist readings of Scripture are serious and cannot be easily dismissed. I will not condemn anyone who hopes for the restoration of all things. I believe the divine presence model works beautifully with either outcome. If CI is true, the fire of God’s love consumes those who finally refuse it. If UR is true, the fire of God’s love eventually softens every heart. In either case, the fire is love. In either case, God is good. In either case, God does not torture.41
We also devoted significant attention in this book to the nature of the human person. In Chapters 26 and 27, we made the case for substance dualism—the view that human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul that can exist consciously apart from the body by God’s sustaining power.42
This matters enormously for the divine presence model. If there is no soul, if the person simply ceases to exist at death, then there is no intermediate state, no conscious experience between death and resurrection, and no encounter with God’s presence until the body is raised. But Scripture consistently testifies that persons continue to exist after death. Jesus told the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Paul said that to depart is to “be with Christ” (Phil. 1:23). The souls under the altar in Revelation 6 cry out to God.43
The intermediate state is real. Believers are with the Lord. The unsaved are in Hades—a conscious state of waiting, not final judgment. The lake of fire comes later, after the resurrection and the great white throne judgment (Rev. 20:11–15).44 This distinction between Hades and Gehenna is critical, and we spent an entire chapter on it (Chapter 21).
The soul is not inherently immortal. That is a Greek idea, not a biblical one. God alone possesses immortality (1 Tim. 6:16), and He grants it to whom He wills. Immortality is a gift given in Christ (2 Tim. 1:10). This means that God can destroy the soul (Matt. 10:28). The wicked do not have an indestructible nature that forces God to keep them alive forever in torment. On the divine presence model combined with conditional immortality, the soul that finally rejects God’s love is consumed by the very fire of that love. The second death is real.45
One of the convictions that has shaped this entire book is the belief that God provides a genuine offer of salvation to all persons who did not have an adequate opportunity to respond to the gospel during their earthly lives.46 We grounded this in 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6, in the Descensus clause of the Apostles’ Creed (“He descended into hell”), and in the simple logic of divine love: a just and loving God would not finally condemn those who never had the chance to hear and respond.
On the divine presence model, this postmortem opportunity is the encounter with God’s unveiled love. For those in Hades who never heard the gospel, this encounter is an invitation. For those who heard and rejected during this life, it is a final confrontation—their hearts laid bare before the penetrating light of Truth. Manis calls this the “third unveiling”—the moment when God’s presence is no longer hidden or partially veiled but stands in full, inescapable glory.47
I believe the last chance to receive Christ comes at or during the final judgment. After that, the outcome is sealed. Whether that means destruction or eventual restoration is the open question we have acknowledged throughout.
You might be wondering: does any of this actually matter? Isn’t it all just theological speculation? Angels dancing on the head of a pin?
No. This matters more than almost anything else in the Christian faith. Here is why.
What you believe about hell reveals what you believe about God. If you believe that God designed an eternal torture chamber for most of the human race, that tells you something about the kind of God you serve. If you believe that God’s fire is His love—and that hell is the natural consequence of resisting that love—that tells you something very different.48
Kalomiros was right: the Western doctrine of eternal conscious torment has done more damage to the reputation of God than perhaps any other teaching in the history of the church. It has turned the Father of all into a monster. It has made people afraid of the very One who loves them most. It has driven millions away from faith—not because they rejected love, but because the “love” they were offered came with a threat of infinite torture attached.49
The divine presence model restores the character of God. It says that God is love—all the way down, all the way through, all the way to the end. He does not torture. He does not take vengeance. He does not design suffering. His fire is aimed at purification, not punishment. His justice is His saving love. His presence is both the greatest joy in the universe and the most fearful reality for those who have set themselves against it—not because God changes, but because sin distorts our capacity to receive what God is always giving.
Baker asked the question that haunts every honest evangelist: “If we receive Jesus as Savior because we want to escape the eternal fires of hell, we miss the entire point of the good news.”50
She was right. The gospel is not fire insurance. The good news is not, “Love God or He will burn you.” The good news is that God has acted in Christ to reconcile the world to Himself—that the Creator of the universe has entered into human suffering, borne the curse of sin and death, and risen victorious so that all who trust Him can share in His life. The goal of salvation is not escape from divine torture. The goal is the transformation of the world—the reconciliation of all things, the healing of all brokenness, the restoration of the image of God in human beings.51
When we lead with threats of hell, we produce converts motivated by terror. When we lead with the love of God, we produce disciples motivated by gratitude. The difference is everything.
Think about that Evangelism Explosion question Baker describes from her Baptist church days: “If you were to die tonight, would you go to heaven? Why or why not?” That question makes the afterlife the entire point of faith. It turns Christianity into a transaction—say the right prayer, check the right box, and you get your ticket to paradise. But the kingdom of God is not a ticket. The kingdom of God is a transformed life, a transformed community, a transformed world.
Baker was right when she said that even if eternal life did not exist, even if faith in Jesus benefited us nothing beyond this lifetime, it would still be worth it. Why? Because Jesus enables us to commune with God. Because living as Jesus lived makes us God’s partners in the work of healing a broken world. Because the only way to truly defeat evil is not to throw our enemies into a torture chamber but to love them into transformation. That is the gospel. That is the good news. It is not a threat. It is an invitation to a life so radically different, so overflowing with purpose and joy and love, that it changes everything it touches.
Baker said it beautifully, drawing on the words of Jesus: all people will know we are His disciples not by our threats, not by our hellfire sermons, but by our love for one another (John 13:35). The very nature of our reconciliation with God through Jesus makes us ministers of reconciliation—not so we can keep people out of hell, but so we can transform the world through forgiveness, mercy, and sacrificial love.52
I have lost count of the number of people who have told me that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment nearly destroyed their faith. Parents who lost children and were told those children might be burning in hell forever. Missionaries who worked among unreached peoples and were tormented by the thought that billions who never heard the name of Jesus were doomed. Abuse survivors who were told that the God who is supposed to be their refuge is the same God who tortures people for eternity.53
These are not weak Christians. These are people whose moral intuitions about God are actually right. They sense that something is wrong with a theology that makes God worse than the worst human tyrant. And they are right to be troubled.
The divine presence model does not eliminate hell. It does not make sin less serious. It does not promise that everyone gets a free pass. What it does is restore the character of God. It says: the God you love is actually as good as you hope He is. Better, in fact. His fire is not your enemy. His fire is His love. And that love, while it is the most wonderful thing in the universe, is also the most serious—because a heart that has hardened against love will find love itself unbearable.
If God is a torturer, then power and punishment are the ultimate realities. If God is love, then sacrifice and restoration are. The doctrine of hell you hold will shape how you treat your enemies, how you raise your children, how you preach the gospel, and how you think about justice in every area of life.54
A God who tortures His enemies gives us permission to dehumanize ours. A God whose fire is aimed at purification calls us to the same—to love our enemies, to seek restoration rather than revenge, to overcome evil with good. The divine presence model does not just change our theology. It changes our ethics. It changes the kind of people we become.
I want to close with a story. It is the most famous story Jesus ever told, and I believe it is the key that unlocks everything we have been discussing.
A man had two sons. The younger son took his inheritance and squandered it in a far country. When he came to his senses, he returned home, expecting to be treated as a servant. Instead, his father ran to meet him, embraced him, and threw a feast in his honor.
You know this story. The prodigal son. But the story does not end with the prodigal’s homecoming. There is a second son—the elder brother. And the elder brother is the one we need to pay attention to.55
When the elder brother hears the music and dancing, he is furious. He refuses to go inside. His father comes out and pleads with him. And the elder brother says something revealing: “All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15:29).
Do you hear what he is saying? He has been in his father’s house the whole time. He has been surrounded by his father’s love every single day. And yet he is miserable. He calls his service “slavery.” He sees his father not as a loving parent but as a demanding boss. He is in paradise—and he is experiencing it as hell.
That is the divine presence model in a single story. The elder brother is in the same house, at the same feast, loved by the same father. But his heart is hardened by resentment, self-righteousness, and refusal to extend the grace he has received. The father’s love is shining on him with the same warmth it shines on the repentant prodigal. And the elder brother cannot stand it.56
The father does not punish the elder brother. He does not lock him out. He does not send him to a torture chamber. He goes to him. He pleads with him. He says, “Everything I have is yours” (Luke 15:31). The door is open. The feast is ready. The father’s arms are wide.
And the story ends without telling us whether the elder brother went inside.
That open ending is deliberate. Jesus left it unresolved because He was speaking to the Pharisees—people who, like the elder brother, were in the Father’s house and could not see the Father’s love. The question Jesus was asking them is the same question He asks us: Will you come inside? Will you receive the love that is already being poured out on you? Or will you stand outside, in the cold, insisting that you deserve more—while the feast goes on without you?
That is the question of hell. It is not a question about God’s cruelty. It is a question about our capacity to receive love.
Kalomiros saw this with piercing clarity: “No, my brothers, unhappily for us, paradise or hell does not depend on God. It depends entirely upon us.” The father does not change. The feast does not change. The open door does not change. What changes is the heart of the one who stands outside, staring at the celebration through the window, too proud or too angry or too self-deceived to walk in.
I think about the elder brother often. I think about how easy it is to be in the Father’s house and still be miserable. How easy it is to serve God out of duty rather than delight, to obey His commandments while resenting His generosity, to show up every Sunday and sing the hymns and tithe the required amount and still be light-years away from the heart of the Father. The elder brother had access to everything the father owned. He could have feasted every day. But he never saw it. He never received it. Because his heart was closed.
That is the tragedy of hell. Not that God withholds His love. He never does. The tragedy is that the human heart can become so twisted, so hardened, so imprisoned by its own bitterness, that it cannot receive the love that is pouring over it like sunlight. And the very love that could heal it becomes the source of its torment—because to receive that love would mean letting go of everything the heart has clung to for so long: its pride, its self-sufficiency, its insistence on being right, its refusal to forgive.
I want to say this directly, because I know many of you have been carrying a weight of fear for years. Maybe decades.
You do not need to be afraid of God.
Read that again. Let it sink in.
You do not need to be afraid of God. God is not your enemy. God is not the threat. God is the One who loved you before you were born, who knit you together in your mother’s womb, who sent His Son to die for you while you were still a sinner, who is even now pursuing you with a love that will not let you go.57
The “fear of the Lord” that Scripture speaks of is not the terror of a prisoner before an executioner. It is the awe of a child who knows that her father is powerful beyond imagining—and that all that power is directed toward her good. It is the reverence of a creature who stands before the infinite and holy God and is overwhelmed not by dread but by wonder.58
What you should fear is what sin does to your heart. Fear the hardening. Fear the slow, creeping numbness that comes from choosing selfishness over love, pride over humility, resentment over forgiveness, day after day after day, until your capacity to receive love has been so damaged that love itself feels like fire. That is what we should fear. Not God. Never God.
Isaac the Syrian understood this with a depth that takes my breath away. He said that it is not right to say the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. The love is there. The love is always there. The love never stops. But the sinner’s heart cannot receive it, and so the very love of God becomes a source of torment.59
The fire never changes. Only we change.
If you picked up this book because the traditional view of hell was crushing your faith, I want you to know: you are not crazy. You are not weak. You are not “going soft on sin.” Your discomfort with eternal conscious torment is not a sign that you need more faith. It may be a sign that you understand the character of God better than you realized.
I have talked to pastors who whisper their doubts about ECT in private but would never say them from the pulpit. I have talked to missionaries who lie awake at night, tormented by the idea that the people they love and serve are destined for infinite suffering. I have talked to parents who buried children and were haunted for years by the possibility that their child is burning in hell right now, and will burn forever, without any hope of relief. The weight of those conversations is more than I can describe to you. These are not theological puzzles to be solved. These are human beings whose hearts are being crushed by a doctrine that makes the God they love into something monstrous.
The God revealed in Jesus Christ—the God who wept at Lazarus’s tomb, who touched lepers, who ate with sinners, who forgave His executioners from the cross, who told Peter to put away his sword—that God does not torture people forever. He cannot. It is not in His nature. He is love. All the way down.60
If you have been carrying the weight of a God who frightens you more than He comforts you, I want you to set that weight down. It does not belong to you. It was placed on your shoulders by a theological tradition that, with the best of intentions, distorted the character of the Father. The real God—the God of Isaac the Syrian, of Basil, of Paul, of John, of Jesus Himself—is better than the best thing you have ever hoped. His fire is not your punishment. His fire is His love. And His love, while it is severe toward sin, is endlessly tender toward sinners.
If you came to this book holding the traditional view, I know that some of what I’ve written may have troubled you. Maybe you’re worried that this view is “too soft” or that it makes hell less real. Let me address that directly.
The divine presence model does not soften hell. It makes hell worse, in a sense—because it locates the torment not in external punishment but in the deepest place of all: the human heart. There is no escape from this fire, because this fire is God Himself, and God is everywhere. On the traditional view, hell is a place where God sends you. On the divine presence model, hell is what happens to you when you stand before God and discover that you have spent your entire life destroying the very capacity that would have allowed you to enjoy Him forever.61
That is not soft. That is terrifying.
But it is terrifying in the right way. It is terrifying because it reveals the seriousness of sin—not as a legal offense that violates divine honor, but as a spiritual disease that destroys the soul’s ability to receive love. And it is terrifying because it tells us that the stakes of this life are infinitely high: what we do with our hearts now determines what we will be able to experience then, when the veil is lifted and God is all in all.
Manis called this the “natural consequence model.” The suffering of hell is not imposed arbitrarily by God. It flows naturally from the condition of the soul that encounters the blazing holiness of divine love.62 I believe this is both more biblical and more terrifying than the traditional view, because it means there is no one to blame but ourselves. God is not doing this to us. We are doing it to ourselves. And that is the real horror of hell.
We are almost at the end now. I want to leave you with one final thought.
Throughout this book, we have talked about fire. The fire of God. The fire of love. The consuming fire. And for thirty-one chapters, we have been circling one central question: what is the right response to a God who is fire?
The answer, I believe, is counterintuitive. We should run toward the fire, not away from it.
Most people, when they think of God’s fire, think of something to escape. That is what ECT taught us: hell is the fire you need to avoid. Salvation is getting out of the way of the flames. The entire structure of Western soteriology, for centuries, has been built around the idea that God’s fire is the danger, and the cross is the escape hatch.
But that gets it exactly backward. God’s fire is not the danger. Sin is the danger. God’s fire is the cure.63
Malachi called it the refiner’s fire (Mal. 3:2–3). A refiner does not put gold in the fire to destroy it. He puts it in the fire to purify it—to burn away the dross, the impurities, everything that is not gold. When the fire has done its work, what remains is pure and shining and beautiful.
That is what God’s fire does to the willing heart. It burns away everything that is not love. It strips us of our pretense, our pride, our self-deception. It lays us bare—and in that terrifying nakedness, it reveals the image of God that was always hidden beneath the rubble of sin. The fire does not destroy us. It reveals who we truly are.64
Peter knew this: “These trials have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Pet. 1:7).
Paul knew this: “If anyone’s work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames” (1 Cor. 3:15).
The saints knew this. Symeon the New Theologian wrote that God is fire and that when He came into the world, He sent fire on the earth.65 Isaac the Syrian wrote that the fire of love is the most piercing of all pains—and also the most healing. The early Christians did not run from the fire of God. They ran into it. They knew that the fire would burn, yes. But they also knew that what it burned was not them—it was everything in them that was not yet conformed to the image of Christ.
That is the invitation of the gospel. Not “escape the fire.” But “enter the fire.” Let God’s love strip away everything that prevents you from loving Him back. Let His presence expose every dark corner of your heart—not to condemn you, but to heal you. Let the consuming fire do its work, and what will remain is gold.
I think of it this way. Every act of genuine repentance is a small encounter with the refiner’s fire. Every time we confess a sin, every time we let go of a grudge, every time we forgive someone who hurt us, every time we choose humility over pride—we are stepping into the fire. And it hurts. Anyone who has ever truly repented knows that it hurts. The exposure of what we really are, the stripping away of our pretenses, the death of the false self we have built so carefully—these are painful. But they are the pain of healing, not the pain of destruction. They are the pain a patient feels when a surgeon removes a tumor. The pain is real, but it is saving your life.
The saints understood this. The whole of the Christian life is a process of learning to love the fire rather than flee from it. Learning to welcome God’s searching presence rather than hiding from it the way Adam hid in the garden. Learning to say, with the psalmist, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Ps. 139:23–24). That prayer is a prayer to be placed in the fire. And the psalmist prays it not with dread but with longing—because he knows that the fire is the path to life.
I began this book with a confession: the traditional doctrine of hell nearly destroyed my faith. I want to end with a different confession. The divine presence model restored it.
Not because it made hell less real. Hell is terrifyingly real on this model. But because it made God more real. The God I had been taught to fear was a God I could never truly love. The God of the divine presence model—the God of Isaac the Syrian, of Basil, of Kalomiros, of Manis, of Baker—is a God I can love with my whole heart. Because He is love. All the way down. All the way through. No exceptions. No fine print. No hidden anger behind the smile.66
His justice is not the opposite of His love. It is His love. Tsedaka—saving righteousness. Hesed—steadfast, covenant-keeping love. Emeth—faithfulness that will not let go. These are not three different things. They are three facets of the same blazing diamond that is the character of God.67
His fire is not the opposite of His love. It is His love. The river of fire that flows from His throne is the river of grace that watered paradise from the beginning. Love is fire. God is love. Therefore God is fire. And that fire consumes everything that is not fire itself—every lie, every pretense, every act of cruelty, every hidden darkness—until all that remains is what was always meant to be: creatures made in the image of God, shining like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.68
I do not know with certainty whether every heart will eventually yield to that fire. I hope so. I pray for it. But I cannot say for certain that it will happen, because I take human freedom seriously and I take the biblical language of finality seriously. What I can say with certainty is this: whatever happens at the end of all things, God will be good. He will be love. He will not have tortured anyone. He will not have taken vengeance. He will not have designed suffering for its own sake. Every flame will have been aimed at purification. Every judgment will have been an expression of saving love. And every tear—every single tear—will be wiped away (Rev. 21:4).
Baker asked the right questions at the end of Razing Hell: Which vision of hell coheres most faithfully with the God revealed in Jesus? Which view takes the cross most seriously? Which vision most completely conquers evil? She answered her own questions with words I want to echo: “After all is said and done, only faith, hope, and love remain . . . but the greatest of all is love.”69
If all else is burned away—every doctrine of wrath, every theology of vengeance, every system of retribution—and only love remains, then love is the final word. Hell is not eternal. Only love is.
Phillips, in What If Hell Is God’s, Not the Devil’s?, painted a vision of the river of fire that I find myself returning to again and again—a great Heart of Fire pulsating with the life of the Father and the Son, pouring out a torrent of love that flows across the ages and into the lake of fire itself. And in that vision, men and women were plunging into the fire and rising up out of it, their faces not contorted with torment but radiant with wonder. Their bodies were of gold, and the lake of fire could not touch them.70
That is the vision I want to leave you with. Not a God who burns His enemies. A God whose fire makes them gold.
We serve a God whose fire is aimed at restoration. A God whose justice is His saving love. A God whose presence is both the greatest joy and the most fearful reality in the universe—not because He is dangerous, but because He is inescapably, relentlessly, unimaginably good.
For our God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29).
And His fire is love.
Run toward it.
↑ 1. This opening narrative reflects the experience described in Chapter 1 of this book, “The God I Almost Lost.” Baker recounts a strikingly similar experience at the opening of Razing Hell (Baker, Razing Hell, pp. xi–xii). For many Christians, the doctrine of eternal conscious torment has been a source of spiritual anguish rather than motivation for holiness.
↑ 2. Baker, Razing Hell, p. xi.
↑ 3. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 84. This passage is widely quoted by proponents of the divine presence model. See Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 254; Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XIV. Available at https://glory2godforallthings.com/the-river-of-fire-kalomiros/.
↑ 4. The divine presence model, as developed throughout this book, holds that hell is not separation from God but the experience of God’s inescapable love by those who have hardened their hearts against Him. See Chapters 14–17 for the full presentation.
↑ 5. See Chapter 4, “God Is Love—The Foundation of Everything,” for the full exegetical treatment of 1 John 4:8, 16.
↑ 6. See Chapter 6, “The Justice of God—Tsedaka, Hesed, and the Love That Saves,” for detailed exegesis of the Hebrew terms. Baker, Razing Hell, chaps. 3 and 7; Kalomiros, The River of Fire, sections IV–V.
↑ 7. Anthony the Great, Philokalia, chap. 150. Cited in Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section III.
↑ 8. See Chapter 5, “The Western Distortion—How God Became the Enemy.” Kalomiros, The River of Fire, sections II–IX; Baker, Razing Hell, chaps. 2–4.
↑ 9. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, sections I–II. Available at https://glory2godforallthings.com/the-river-of-fire-kalomiros/.
↑ 10. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section II. Baker makes a related argument in Razing Hell, pp. xiii–xiv.
↑ 11. Baker, Razing Hell, pp. 175–177.
↑ 12. See Chapter 8, “The Fire of God—Purifying Love, Not Punitive Torture,” for the full development of the fire motif in Scripture.
↑ 13. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XVII: “This river of fire is the river which ‘came out from Eden to water the paradise’ of old (Gen. 2:10). It is the river of the grace of God which irrigated God’s saints from the beginning. In a word, it is the out-pouring of God’s love for His creatures.” Cited in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 252.
↑ 14. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XVII. Cited in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 253–254.
↑ 15. See Chapter 25, “Paul and the Purifying Fire,” for the full exegesis of 1 Corinthians 3:12–15.
↑ 16. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); R. Zachary Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell: The Divine Presence Model (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010); Alexandre Kalomiros, The River of Fire (Seattle: St. Nectarios, 1980).
↑ 17. See Chapter 14, “Introducing the Divine Presence Model—Hell Is God’s Presence.” Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, Part III; Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Heaven and hell on the divine presence model.”
↑ 18. See Chapter 16, “The Philosophical Case—Manis and the Logic of Divine Presence.” Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 247–260.
↑ 19. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Developing a natural consequence model of hell.” See also Chapter 19 of this book, “The Natural Consequence of Sin.”
↑ 20. This analogy draws on both Manis’s philosophical articulation and the patristic tradition. See Basil the Great, That God Is Not the Cause of Evils; Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XII.
↑ 21. Fr. Thomas Hopko, The Orthodox Faith: An Elementary Handbook on the Orthodox Church, Vol. IV: Spirituality (New York: Department of Religious Education, Orthodox Church in America, 1976), pp. 196–197. Cited in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 251–252. The full passage is available at https://oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/the-kingdom-of-heaven/heaven-and-hell.
↑ 22. Baker, Razing Hell, pp. 115–117.
↑ 23. Baker, Razing Hell, pp. 116–117. See also Chapter 17 of this book, “Razing Hell—Baker, God’s Image, and the Purifying Presence.”
↑ 24. Baker, Razing Hell, p. 117. George MacDonald, whom Baker quotes, described the fire of God as burning worse the farther one stands from God—a powerful image of how resistance to love intensifies the pain of encountering it.
↑ 25. See Chapter 15, “The River of Fire—The Orthodox Tradition on Hell.” The divine presence model is attested in the writings of Basil the Great (fourth century), Isaac the Syrian (seventh century), Symeon the New Theologian (tenth/eleventh century), Maximus the Confessor (seventh century), and many others.
↑ 26. Basil the Great, Homily 13.2. Cited in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 254.
↑ 27. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection. See Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 255, noting Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos’s interpretation of Gregory in Life After Death, chap. 8.
↑ 28. Andrew Louth, “Eastern Orthodox Eschatology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 242. See also Wendy Paula Nicholson, “Judgment,” in The Concise Encyclopedia of Orthodox Christianity, ed. John Anthony McGuckin (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), p. 290.
↑ 29. See Chapters 9 and 10. The strongest defenses of ECT include John F. Walvoord, “The Literal View,” in Four Views on Hell; Robert A. Peterson, “The Case for Traditionalism,” in Two Views of Hell.
↑ 30. See Chapter 10, “Eternal Conscious Torment—Where It Breaks Down,” for the detailed critique. Baker, Razing Hell, chaps. 2–4; Kalomiros, The River of Fire, sections I–IX.
↑ 31. Kvanvig makes a similar point: a just God cannot inflict infinite suffering for finite offenses. See Kvanvig, The Problem of Hell, chap. 2.
↑ 32. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (1945; repr., New York: HarperOne, 2001); Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation, chaps. 5–7. See Chapter 11 of this book.
↑ 33. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 247–250. Manis describes the divine presence model as a “middle way” between traditionalism and the choice model, sharing features of both but avoiding their weaknesses.
↑ 34. See Chapter 12, “Conditional Immortality—The Case and the Missing Piece.” Edward William Fudge, The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011); Fudge, “The Case for Conditionalism,” in Two Views of Hell.
↑ 35. Baker, Razing Hell, chaps. 9–11. The Otto narrative (pp. 115–117) illustrates how CI works within the divine presence framework.
↑ 36. See Chapter 13, “Universalism—The Hope, the Tension, and the Question That Won’t Go Away,” and Chapter 30, “Conditional Immortality or Universal Reconciliation?”
↑ 37. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection. For a recent philosophical defense, see Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).
↑ 38. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Gerry Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell: The Righteous Purpose of God’s Judgment (Olmito, TX: Malista, 2007).
↑ 39. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, Parts III–IV. See also Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Answering the universalist’s objection, parts I and II.” See Chapter 31 of this book.
↑ 40. The meaning of aionios (typically translated “eternal”) is debated. See Chapter 22 for a discussion. Even if aionios refers to the quality or finality of punishment rather than its duration, the overall biblical picture suggests a point of no return. See Fudge, “The Case for Conditionalism,” in Two Views of Hell.
↑ 41. See Chapter 30, “Conditional Immortality or Universal Reconciliation?—The Open Question.”
↑ 42. See Chapters 26 and 27. John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000); J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014).
↑ 43. See Chapter 27, “The Conscious Intermediate State.”
↑ 44. See Chapter 21, “Hades, Gehenna, and the Lake of Fire.”
↑ 45. On the conditional nature of immortality, see 1 Timothy 6:16; 2 Timothy 1:10. See also Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, and Chapter 26 of this book.
↑ 46. See Chapter 28, “The Postmortem Opportunity—God’s Love Beyond the Grave.”
↑ 47. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The first and second unveilings” and “The third unveiling.”
↑ 48. Phillips makes this point powerfully throughout What If Hell Is God’s, Not the Devil’s?
↑ 49. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, sections I–II.
↑ 50. Baker, Razing Hell, p. xiv.
↑ 51. Baker, Razing Hell, pp. 175–178. Baker argues that the purpose of salvation is the transformation of the world, not the procurement of “fire insurance.”
↑ 52. Baker, Razing Hell, p. 177, drawing on John 13:35.
↑ 53. Walls recounts the harrowing case of Suzi Holliman, murdered at sixteen, and the theological questions raised by her killer’s subsequent conversion. See Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 6.
↑ 54. On the ethical implications of our doctrine of hell, see Baker, Razing Hell, chap. 12; Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, chap. 9.
↑ 55. Luke 15:11–32. Kalomiros reads the elder brother as a picture of hell within the Father’s house. See Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XVIII. See also Chapter 24 of this book.
↑ 56. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XVIII. The parable of the prodigal son is perhaps the single most powerful illustration of the divine presence model in all of Scripture.
↑ 57. Romans 5:8; Psalm 139:13–16; Romans 8:38–39.
↑ 58. The “fear of the Lord” in Proverbs (Prov. 1:7; 9:10) is better understood as reverence and awe than as terror. See Chapter 7, “The Wrath of God—What Scripture Actually Means.”
↑ 59. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 84. See also Chapter 14 and Chapter 15 of this book.
↑ 60. See Chapter 4, “God Is Love—The Foundation of Everything.”
↑ 61. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Heaven and hell on the divine presence model.”
↑ 62. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, Part III; Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Developing a natural consequence model of hell.”
↑ 63. Malachi 3:2–3; 1 Peter 1:7. See Chapter 22, “The Fire Passages.”
↑ 64. See Chapter 8, “The Fire of God—Purifying Love, Not Punitive Torture.”
↑ 65. Symeon the New Theologian, Discourse 78. Cited in Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XV.
↑ 66. 1 John 4:8, 16, 18: “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”
↑ 67. See Chapter 6, “The Justice of God—Tsedaka, Hesed, and the Love That Saves.”
↑ 68. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XVII. Matthew 13:43: “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” See also Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Separation of the righteous and the wicked.”
↑ 69. Baker, Razing Hell, p. 124, drawing on 1 Corinthians 13:13.
↑ 70. Phillips, What If Hell Is God’s, Not the Devil’s?, “The River of Fire” vision.