Chapter 1

The God I Almost Lost — Why This Book Exists

I was fourteen years old the first time I truly understood what my church was telling me about God.

I had grown up in the faith. I knew the songs, the stories, the Sunday-school answers. I could tell you that God so loved the world. I could recite John 3:16 from memory. I believed every word of it, the way a child believes—simply, without question, the way you believe the sun will come up tomorrow.

Then one Sunday evening, a visiting preacher came to our church. He was loud. He was passionate. And he painted a picture of hell that I have never been able to forget.

He described flames that never go out. He described bodies that burn but never die. He described screaming that echoes through caverns of darkness, where people who had the bad luck of being born in the wrong country or the wrong century or the wrong family would be roasted alive by God—forever. Not for a million years. Not for a billion. Forever. With no hope of escape. No possibility of mercy. No second chance. Just fire, and pain, and the laughter of a God who was finally getting what He was owed.

I sat in that pew and felt something crack inside me.

Not my faith—not yet. Something deeper. Something in the way I understood the God I had been taught to love. Because here was the thing: I did love God. I loved Jesus. I loved the stories of Him touching lepers and forgiving sinners and weeping at the tomb of His friend Lazarus. I loved the God who said, “Let the little children come to me.” I loved the Father who ran down the road to meet His prodigal son.

But the God that preacher described? That God was not running to embrace anyone. That God was stoking a furnace.

I remember walking to the car afterward, my stomach tight, my mind racing. I asked my dad a question that felt dangerous even to say out loud: “Dad, does God really burn people forever?”

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “That’s what the Bible teaches, son.”

I nodded. But something inside me whispered: Does it, though?

That whisper would not go away. It followed me through high school, through college, through seminary. It sat beside me in the pew every Sunday morning. It showed up uninvited when I read my Bible at night. Every time I came across a verse about God’s love—“The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love”⁵⁷—the whisper came back: How does this fit with a God who tortures people forever?

I tried to push it down. I tried to tell myself that smarter people than me had figured this out, that there must be an answer, that maybe I just was not spiritual enough to accept it. I read the defenders of eternal conscious torment. I read Jonathan Edwards and his famous sermon about sinners dangling over the pit of hell like a spider on a thread. I read the systematic theologians who explained, in careful logical steps, why infinite punishment was the just and necessary response to sin against an infinite God. I understood the arguments. I could have passed a test on them.

But I could not make them fit with the Jesus I met in the Gospels. The Jesus who healed the sick and fed the hungry and wept with the brokenhearted. The Jesus who told a thief on a cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”⁵⁸ The Jesus who looked at the city that was about to kill Him and cried, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”⁵⁹

That is not the voice of a God who is itching to throw people into a furnace. That is the voice of a Father whose heart is breaking.

A Quiet Crisis

I want to be honest with you from the very first page of this book. I am a conservative, Bible-believing, creed-affirming Christian. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that He died for our sins, that He rose from the dead, and that He is coming again. I affirm the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian Definition without crossing my fingers behind my back. I have a high view of Scripture. I take the Bible seriously—all of it, including the hard parts about judgment and fire and the wrath of God.

But I also take seriously the claim that God is love.¹

And for years—many years—I could not figure out how both of those things could be true at the same time. How could the God who is love also be the God who tortures people without end? How could the Father who tells us to love our enemies be the same Father who burns His enemies alive for all eternity? How could the Jesus who wept over Jerusalem also be the Jesus who lights the match and walks away?

I am not the only one who has wrestled with this. Not by a long shot.

Sharon Baker, a theologian who has written powerfully on this topic, tells her own story of hearing about hell for the first time at the age of twenty-six. A pastor described in horrific detail the flames, the worms, the total darkness. Baker did what many of us do—she took out “fire insurance” and asked Jesus to save her, mostly because she was terrified of the alternative.² She spent years after that never questioning what she had been told. But the questions were always there, simmering beneath the surface. And she was not alone. Friends, students, colleagues—all of them carrying the same quiet burden. As Baker puts it, hell should stir our hearts and plague our minds with questions about whether something has gone terribly wrong with the picture we have been given.³

R. Zachary Manis, a philosopher whose work has shaped this book more than almost anyone else’s, frames the problem with painful clarity: Why would a perfectly good and loving God consign anyone to eternal suffering in hell?⁴ That single question is the engine that drives everything in the pages that follow. It sounds simple. It is not. It is, in fact, one of the hardest questions in all of Christian theology. Manis calls it “the problem of hell,” and he argues—rightly, I think—that it is the most difficult version of the problem of evil that Christians face.⁵

Think about that. Of all the terrible things in the world that make people doubt whether God is good—disease, war, the suffering of innocent children—the doctrine of hell may be the worst. Because disease and war are things that happen to us. But hell, on the traditional view, is something God does to us. Deliberately. Forever.

No wonder so many people lose their faith over this.

The Damage Done

I need to tell you something that might surprise you, coming from someone who writes theology books. For a stretch of time in my twenties, I almost walked away from the whole thing.

Not from God, exactly. I never stopped believing God was real. But I came very close to deciding that the God who was real was not the God I wanted to worship. If the traditional picture of hell was true—if God really does consign billions of human beings to an eternity of conscious torment, most of them guilty of nothing more than being born in the wrong place at the wrong time—then I was not sure I could call that God “good.” I was not sure I could call that God “loving.” And I was very sure I could not look someone in the eye and tell them, with a straight face, that this God loved them.

I know I am not alone in this. Pastors have told me, in private, that they struggle to preach on hell because the traditional view makes God sound like a monster. Students have sat in my office and wept because they cannot reconcile the God they love with the God who supposedly tortures people forever. Parents have told me they lie awake at night wondering whether their child who died without making a profession of faith is being burned alive at this very moment by the God they are supposed to trust.

This is not a minor theological footnote. This is a crisis. A quiet, devastating crisis that is happening in churches all across the world.

I have a friend—I will call him Daniel—who grew up in a strict fundamentalist church. Every Sunday, the preacher hammered on hell. Fire and brimstone, screaming and agony, forever and ever, amen. Daniel told me that by the time he was twelve, he had nightmares about hell almost every night. He would lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to calculate eternity in his head. A million years. A billion years. A trillion years. And still no end in sight. The terror was paralyzing.

Daniel is in his forties now. He left the church in his twenties. He told me, with tears running down his face, that he did not leave because he stopped believing in God. He left because the God his church described was someone he could not love. “How can you love someone who would do that?” he asked me. “I mean really love them, not just obey them out of fear? You can’t. You can only be afraid of them. And I got tired of being afraid.”

Daniel’s story is not unusual. I have heard versions of it from dozens of people over the years. The details change, but the core is always the same: the traditional doctrine of hell made God into someone they could not love, could not trust, and eventually could not worship. And so they walked away—not from God, but from the terrifying caricature of God that their tradition had handed them.

Alexandre Kalomiros, a Greek Orthodox theologian whose essay The River of Fire shook me to my core when I first read it, makes a stunning claim: the version of God that Western Christianity has been preaching for centuries is actually responsible for producing atheism.⁶ Read that again. He is not saying that atheism arose because people are rebellious or hard-hearted. He is saying that the Western church painted such a terrifying, distorted picture of God that reasonable people looked at it and said, “If that is God, I want nothing to do with Him.”

Kalomiros is Orthodox, not evangelical. I am evangelical, not Orthodox. But when I read those words, I felt like someone had turned on a light in a room I had been stumbling around in for years. Because he was right. The picture of God as an angry judge who burns people alive forever is not just theologically problematic. It is evangelistically catastrophic. It has driven more people away from the faith than perhaps any other single doctrine in the history of Christianity.

Baker makes the same point from within the evangelical world. She writes about her aunt, who rejected Christianity largely because of the “mean and violent” God that the traditional doctrine of hell proclaims.⁷ How many aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and friends have made the same choice? How many people have looked at the God of eternal conscious torment and concluded that such a being, if He existed, would be the greatest villain in the history of the universe?

And here is the thing that kept me up at night: I could not tell them they were wrong. Not if the traditional picture was accurate. Because a being who burns people alive forever, for finite sins committed in a finite lifetime, is not good. Period. I do not care how many theological arguments you stack on top of each other. You cannot make eternal torture loving. You cannot make infinite suffering just. And you cannot make a God who does this to His own creatures—creatures He supposedly loves—into a good Father.

Something had to give.

The Discovery That Changed Everything

The change did not come all at once. It came in stages, over years of reading and praying and arguing with God and arguing with myself.

The first crack came when I discovered that the traditional view of hell—what theologians call eternal conscious torment, or ECT—was not the only game in town. I had been taught that ECT was the biblical view, the one that every serious Christian had always believed. Turns out, that is not true. Not even close.⁸

I stumbled onto this almost by accident. I was doing research on the early church for a class, and I kept running into statements from the Church Fathers that did not match what I had been taught. These were not fringe figures. These were some of the most important theologians in the history of Christianity—people whose writings shaped the creeds I recite every Sunday. And yet, when it came to hell, many of them held views that would get you kicked out of most evangelical churches today.

In the early church—the church closest to Jesus and the apostles, the church that spoke the same Greek language the New Testament was written in—there were multiple views of what happens to the wicked after death. Some fathers taught eternal punishment. Some taught that the wicked would eventually be destroyed. And some taught that God’s love would eventually win every heart and restore all things.⁹ The idea that ECT was the unanimous teaching of the church from the beginning is simply a myth. A persistent myth, but a myth nonetheless.

Baker points this out with characteristic directness: some of the earliest and most respected church fathers—Irenaeus, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa—objected strenuously to any notion of hell that portrays God as an angry judge throwing the wicked into eternal torment for sins committed during a short earthly life.¹⁰ These were not liberals. These were not people who played fast and loose with Scripture. These were giants of the faith who knew their Bibles inside and out—and many of them read those Bibles in the original Greek. They simply could not square the idea of an eternal torture chamber with the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

That was the first crack.

The second came when I began to study what the Bible actually says about the nature of God’s judgment. Not what I had been told it says. What it actually says. And I found something I had not expected.

I found fire.

Not the fire of torture. The fire of love.

Hebrews 12:29 says, “Our God is a consuming fire.”¹¹ I had always read that verse as a threat. God is a consuming fire—so watch out, or He will burn you. But as I dug deeper into the Scriptures, and especially into the way the earliest Christians read them, I began to see something different. Fire in the Bible is not primarily an instrument of torture. It is a symbol of God’s own presence.¹²

God appeared to Abraham as a blazing torch. He appeared to Moses in a burning bush. He led Israel through the wilderness as a pillar of fire. He descended on Mount Sinai in flames. He filled the temple with His glory, which the prophets describe as fire. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came as tongues of fire resting on the heads of the disciples.¹³

Fire, in the Bible, is what God looks like when He shows up.

And then I read Kalomiros, and everything snapped into place.

The River of Fire

Kalomiros describes an icon—a sacred painting—of the Last Judgment that hangs in Orthodox churches all over the world. In the center of the icon sits Christ on His throne. On His right are the blessed, the saints, those who loved God with all their hearts. On His left are those who refused Him, those who spent their lives running from His love. And flowing from Christ’s throne, between the two groups, is a river of fire.¹⁴

Here is the question that changes everything: What is that river of fire?

Is it an instrument of torture? Is it some special energy of vengeance that God sends out to destroy His enemies?

No. Kalomiros says it is nothing of the sort. The river of fire is the river of God’s love. It is the same river that flowed out of Eden to water paradise. It is the outpouring of God’s grace, His kindness, His fierce and unrelenting love for everything He has made.¹⁵

Stop and let that sink in for a moment. The river that flows from God’s throne in the icon of the Last Judgment is not a river of punishment. It is a river of love. The same love that watered paradise from the beginning. The same love that sustains the universe right now. The same love that sent Jesus to the cross. That love flows over everyone—saints and sinners alike—because God does not stop loving anyone, ever. He cannot stop. Love is not something God decides to do. It is what He is.

But here is where it gets sobering.

Love is fire. Anyone who has ever loved deeply knows this. Love burns. It consumes. It will not let go. And God is love—so God is fire. And that fire does something different depending on what it touches. Precious metals shine in the fire. They become more beautiful, more pure, more radiant. But rubbish burns with black smoke and is reduced to ashes.¹⁶

Kalomiros presses the point further. He says that in the final state—what Scripture calls the new creation—there will no longer be any place to hide from God. During this life, people can run from Him. They can distract themselves. They can build little kingdoms of self where God is kept at arm’s length. But in the resurrection, all of that will be stripped away. God will be everywhere and in everything. His love will embrace all creation. There will be no corner of the universe where His presence does not penetrate.⁶⁶

For the saints, this is the greatest news in the universe. No more separation. No more longing. No more distance between them and the One they love. Face to face, forever.

But for those who have spent their lives hating God, running from Him, building walls against His love? The same inescapable presence that is paradise for the willing becomes a furnace for the resistant. Not because God turns against them. Because they have turned against love itself, and now love is everywhere, and there is no escape.

The difference is not in the fire. The fire is the same for everyone. The difference is in what the fire touches.

Fr. Thomas Hopko, an Orthodox theologian whose work Manis draws on, puts it this way: the final coming of Christ will be the judgment of all. His very presence will be the judgment. For those who love Him, that presence will be infinite joy—paradise and eternal life. For those who hate Him, that same presence will be infinite torment—hell and eternal death. The reality is the same for both. The difference is entirely in the human heart.¹⁷

When I read those words for the first time, I wept.

Not because they were sad. Because they were beautiful. Because for the first time in my life, I saw a picture of God’s judgment that did not require me to believe that God is a torturer. A picture where God’s fire is not aimed at destroying His children but at purifying them. Where the same love that fills heaven is the very reality that makes hell so terrible. Where the problem is not that God is angry but that we are broken.

This is the divine presence model of hell. And this book is my attempt to lay it out for you as clearly, as honestly, and as thoroughly as I can.

What Is the Divine Presence Model?

Let me give you the short version. We will spend the rest of this book filling in the details, but here is the big idea in a nutshell.

The traditional Western view of hell says that hell is a place of separation from God. God is in heaven; the damned are in hell; and between the two there is a great gulf fixed. Hell is terrible because God is absent—because the wicked are cut off from His presence, His love, and His goodness forever.

The divine presence model says the opposite.

Hell is not the absence of God. Hell is the presence of God—experienced as torment by those whose hearts are hardened against Him.¹⁸

Think of it this way. Imagine two people standing in front of a roaring fireplace on a freezing winter night. One of them has been outside in the cold for hours. She is shivering, exhausted, desperate for warmth. When she feels the heat of the fire, she sighs with relief. The fire is exactly what she needs. It thaws her frozen hands. It fills her with comfort and peace.

Now imagine the other person has a terrible sunburn. Every inch of his skin is raw and blistered. When he stands in front of that same fire, the heat is agony. The same warmth that brings the first person relief brings the second person pain.

Same fire. Same heat. Totally different experiences. The difference is not in the fire. The difference is in the person standing in front of it.

That, in the simplest terms I can find, is the divine presence model of hell. God is love. His love radiates from Him like heat from the sun. It is the same love for everyone, without exception. But how we experience that love depends entirely on the condition of our hearts. If our hearts are open to God—if we have learned to receive His love, to trust Him, to yield to Him—then His presence is heaven. Pure joy. But if our hearts are hardened against Him—if we have spent a lifetime building walls of pride and selfishness and hatred—then His presence is hell. Not because God is punishing us. Because love, when it encounters a heart that hates it, hurts.¹⁹

Here is another way to think about it. Imagine a man who has lived his entire life telling lies. He has lied to his wife, his children, his friends, his business partners. He has built his whole identity around deception. Now imagine that one day, every lie he has ever told is suddenly, completely, and permanently exposed. Everyone can see the truth. He cannot hide anymore. He cannot spin anymore. He is standing naked in the light of total honesty.

For a person who loves truth, that kind of exposure would be liberating. Finally, no more pretending. No more masks. Freedom. But for the liar? That same light of truth would be the most excruciating experience of his life. Not because the light is trying to hurt him. Because the light simply is—and he has built his whole existence on running from it.

That is what the divine presence model says happens when sinful human beings come face to face with God. God does not flip a switch and start tormenting them. He simply reveals Himself. He shows up, fully and completely, with all His love and all His truth and all His holiness on full display. And the human heart, depending on its condition, either opens like a flower in the sunlight or recoils like a creature that has lived its whole life in the dark.⁶⁰

The twentieth-century Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky says it with devastating simplicity: the love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have not learned to receive it.²⁰

Manis, whose philosophical work on this model is the most thorough ever published, puts it in more technical terms. On the divine presence model, heaven and hell share a common source: the fire of God Himself, who is Love. The damned do not suffer because God has stopped loving them. They suffer because God loves them—and they cannot bear it.²¹

Do you see what this means?

It means God never stops being love. Not even in hell. Especially not in hell. Hell is not a place where God’s love runs out. It is a place where God’s love is experienced as fire by those who have made themselves unable to receive it as anything else.

It means God does not torture anyone. Ever. The suffering of the damned is real—terribly real. But it is not inflicted by God. It is the natural consequence of what happens when a sinful, rebellious, self-deceived heart comes face to face with perfect, infinite, unrelenting Love.²²

It means the traditional view of hell got something deeply, terribly wrong. Not about the seriousness of sin. Not about the reality of judgment. Not about the horror of being on the wrong side of eternity. It got those things right. What it got wrong was the character of God. It made God the torturer when God is actually the Healer. It made God the enemy when God is actually the Lover. It confused the fire of divine love with the fire of divine rage—and in doing so, it slandered the most beautiful Being in the universe.

An Ancient View, Not a New Invention

I need to say something important here, because I know what some of you are thinking. You are thinking: “This sounds new. This sounds like some modern theologian trying to make God more palatable to a culture that does not like hard truths. This sounds like the kind of thing liberal scholars come up with when they do not want to deal with what the Bible actually says.”

I understand that reaction. I had it myself, at first.

But here is the truth: the divine presence model is not new. It is not modern. It is not liberal. It is, in fact, one of the oldest understandings of hell in the entire Christian tradition.²³

It was taught by some of the most revered saints in the history of the church. Isaac the Syrian, one of the great spiritual writers of early Christianity, wrote in the seventh century that those who suffer in hell are being “scourged by love.”²⁴ Not by whips. Not by demons. By love. He wrote that it would be wrong to think that sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. The power that stings the hearts of those in hell is the very same love that gives joy to those in paradise.²⁵

Think about the weight of that claim. This is not some twenty-first-century progressive trying to soften the gospel. This is a seventh-century monk, a saint of the church, telling us that the fire of hell is the love of God.

Basil the Great, one of the most important theologians of the fourth century, wrote an entire treatise arguing that God is not the cause of evil. God does not inflict suffering on His creatures. When Scripture speaks of God “punishing” or “destroying,” it is using the kind of language that humans can understand to describe realities that go far beyond our ability to grasp.²⁶

Gregory of Nyssa, another giant of the fourth century and the brother of Basil the Great, went even further. He taught that God’s fire is aimed at restoration, not destruction. Its purpose is to purify, to heal, to burn away everything in us that is not fit for eternal life—and eventually, Gregory believed, that fire would succeed with every soul.²⁷

Manis surveys this tradition extensively and concludes that the divine presence model is best understood not as a modern invention but as the recovery of an ancient idea—one that was preserved in the Eastern church even as it was largely forgotten in the West.²⁸

This matters. It matters because if the divine presence model is new, you can dismiss it as a fad. But if it is old—if it goes all the way back to the earliest centuries of the church, to men and women who knew their Scriptures in the original languages and who gave their lives for the faith—then you have to take it seriously. You have to at least consider the possibility that the Western tradition made a wrong turn somewhere, and that the older, Eastern understanding of God’s fire might actually be closer to the truth.

And this is not just the opinion of a handful of obscure monks. The divine presence model is, in various forms, the mainstream understanding of hell within the Orthodox Church to this day. Fr. Thomas Hopko, whose presentation of the view we quoted earlier, wrote as an official representative of the Orthodox Church in America. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, one of the most respected living Orthodox theologians, teaches the same thing. This is not a fringe position in the East. It is the position.⁶⁷ The question is why the West forgot it—and whether it is time to remember.

What This Book Is — and What It Is Not

Let me be clear about what you are holding in your hands.

This is not a book that says hell is not real. Hell is real. The Bible teaches it, and I believe it.²⁹

This is not a book that says judgment is not real. Judgment is real. Every human being will stand before God and give an account of his or her life. The great white throne of Revelation 20 is not a metaphor.³⁰

This is not a book that says sin does not matter. Sin matters desperately. Sin is the disease that is killing us. It is the wall we have built between ourselves and the love of God. It is the thing that turns heaven into hell. If anything, the divine presence model reveals the horror of sin more starkly than the traditional view ever could. On the traditional view, sin is a legal offense that carries a legal penalty. On the divine presence model, sin is a spiritual disease that destroys our capacity to receive love—and in a universe where love is the fundamental reality, that is a fate more terrible than any courtroom sentence.

And this is not a book that is “soft on hell.” If anything, the divine presence model takes hell more seriously than the traditional view, because it locates the horror of hell not in some external torture chamber but in the depths of the human heart. On the traditional view, hell is terrible because God is angry. On the divine presence model, hell is terrible because God is love—and being loved when you hate love is the most agonizing experience imaginable.³¹

What this book is, is an argument. A careful, thorough, Bible-based argument that the traditional Western understanding of hell has gotten the character of God wrong—and that a better, older, more biblical understanding is available.

I am going to build this argument on three primary sources. The first is R. Zachary Manis, whose two books—Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God and Thinking Through the Problem of Hell—provide the most rigorous philosophical foundation for the divine presence model ever published.³² The second is Sharon L. Baker, whose book Razing Hell translates the divine presence model into accessible, everyday language and shows how it works in practice through her powerful fictional story of a character named Otto who encounters God’s judgment firsthand.³³ The third is the Eastern Orthodox tradition, especially as presented by Alexandre Kalomiros in The River of Fire and by the Church Fathers whose insights have been preserved in the East for centuries.³⁴

Together, these sources give us something remarkable: a view of hell that takes sin seriously, takes judgment seriously, takes the Bible seriously—and yet never requires us to believe that God is a torturer. A view that says the fire of God is real, and it is terrifying, but it is the fire of love, not the fire of hate.

The Road Ahead

Here is where we are going together.

In Part I, we will lay the foundations. After this chapter, we will look at the problem of hell in its sharpest form and establish what any good answer must do. Then we will take a quick tour of the four standard options—eternal conscious torment, annihilationism (also called conditional immortality), universalism, and the choice model—and see where each one falls short.³⁵

In Part II, we will build the theological foundation for everything that follows. We will dive deep into the nature of God as love, because that is where every theology of hell must begin. We will look at how the Western theological tradition distorted the character of God, turning Him from a loving Father into an angry judge. We will study what the Bible actually means by “justice,” “wrath,” and “fire”—and you will be surprised to discover that the biblical meaning of these words is very different from what most of us have been taught.³⁶

In Part III, we will evaluate each of the four standard views in detail. We will give eternal conscious torment its strongest hearing and then show, carefully and specifically, where it breaks down. We will do the same with the choice model, conditional immortality, and universalism. Each view has real strengths. Each has serious problems.³⁷

In Part IV, we will introduce and build the full case for the divine presence model. This is the heart of the book. We will draw on Manis’s philosophical work, Baker’s theological insights, Kalomiros’s Orthodox presentation, and the witness of the Church Fathers to show that hell is not separation from God but the experience of God’s inescapable love by those who have set their hearts against Him.³⁸

In Part V, we will open the Bible and work through every major passage about hell, fire, judgment, and the final state. We will look at what Jesus actually said about hell. We will study the original Greek and Hebrew words. We will examine the passages that defenders of ECT use most often and show that the divine presence model fits the biblical data better than its competitors.³⁹

In Part VI, we will tackle what I consider the most difficult questions in this whole discussion: What is the intermediate state—the period between death and the final resurrection? Is there a genuine postmortem opportunity for salvation—a chance for those who never heard the gospel to respond to Christ after death? And what is the relationship between the soul and the body?⁴⁰

In Part VII, we will face the hardest question of all, and I want to be upfront about the fact that I do not have a final answer. The question is this: What happens to those who, even after encountering God’s love in all its fullness, still refuse to yield? Are they eventually destroyed—consumed by the fire they cannot bear? That is the view called conditional immortality. Or does God’s love eventually win every heart, so that in the end, all are reconciled? That is the view called universal reconciliation.⁴¹

I lean toward conditional immortality. I think the biblical language of finality—the “second death,” the destruction of body and soul—suggests that some hearts may harden beyond the point of no return, and that God, in His love and His respect for human freedom, allows those who finally refuse Him to pass out of existence rather than suffer forever. But I hold this with open hands. The universalist hope is powerful, and I will not condemn those who hold it. Both views are compatible with the divine presence model, and both will get a fair hearing in this book.⁴²

In Part VIII, we will come back to where we started. Back to the God I almost lost. Back to the fire. And I will tell you what I have found on the other side of this long journey.

Why This Matters

I know what some of you are thinking. “This is an interesting academic exercise, but does it really matter? Does it change anything practical?”

Yes. It matters more than almost anything.

It matters because what you believe about hell shapes what you believe about God. And what you believe about God shapes everything else. It shapes how you pray. How you worship. How you raise your children. How you share your faith. How you treat the people you disagree with. How you face death.

If you believe God is a torturer, you will relate to Him as a tyrant. You will obey out of fear, not love. You will preach a gospel that is really just a threat: “Believe, or burn.” You will look at the lost not with compassion but with a grim sense of inevitability. And deep in your heart, in that place where your most honest thoughts live, you will wonder whether a God who burns people forever can really be trusted.

But if you believe that God is love—really, truly, all the way down, without exception, without qualification, without a secret dark side that comes out on Judgment Day—then everything changes. You relate to Him as a Father, not a tyrant. You obey out of love, not fear. You preach a gospel that is genuinely good news: not “Believe or burn,” but “Come home—your Father is waiting for you, and He will never stop loving you, and His fire is aimed at healing you, not destroying you.”⁴³

Baker puts it powerfully. She argues that our image of God matters, because the kind of God we worship shapes the kind of people we become. If we worship a violent God, we will become violent people. If we worship a God who destroys His enemies, we will find it easier to destroy ours. But if we worship a God who loves His enemies, who pursues even the worst sinner with relentless compassion, who would rather die on a cross than abandon a single one of His children—then we will become people of extravagant, reckless, world-changing love.⁴⁴

This is not just theology. This is life and death.

Think about how we share the gospel. For centuries, the primary tool of Western evangelism has been fear. “Turn or burn.” “Accept Jesus or spend eternity in flames.” Baker calls it “fire insurance”—the idea that the main reason to become a Christian is to avoid getting burned.⁶¹ And she asks a question that should haunt every evangelist: Does God really want people to come to Him out of terror? Is fear-driven conversion the kind of relationship a loving Father is looking for?

I do not think so. I think God wants something far better. He wants us to come to Him the way a child runs to a parent—not because the parent is threatening to hurt us, but because the parent is the safest, warmest, most loving person we know. Baker imagines God pursuing us like Francis Thompson’s famous “Hound of Heaven”—not with threats and punishments, but with patient, tireless, relentless love until we freely choose to come home.⁶²

Think about how we handle doubt. In many churches, questioning the doctrine of hell is treated as a sign of spiritual weakness—or worse, as the first step on the slippery slope to apostasy. “We don’t dare talk about it!” one of Baker’s friends told her.⁶³ But that silence is not faithfulness. It is fear. And it leaves countless believers trapped between a doctrine they cannot honestly affirm and a faith they are terrified to question.

This book is an invitation to break that silence. Not by throwing out the Bible, but by reading it more carefully than ever before. Not by rejecting the hard truths of Scripture, but by asking whether we have actually understood what those truths are saying. Baker is right when she says that tinkering with a traditional doctrine does not have to mean sliding into heresy—not if the tinkering is grounded in sound biblical interpretation.⁶⁴ In fact, we may discover that what we have been calling “traditional” is not nearly as old or as biblical as we thought, and that the truly ancient view of God’s fire is far more beautiful, far more terrifying, and far more consistent with the character of God than anything the Western tradition has imagined.

Addressing the Fear

I know that some of you are nervous right now. I can feel it, because I felt the same thing when I first started down this road. The fear sounds something like this: “If I start questioning the traditional view of hell, where does it stop? If hell is not what I was taught, then maybe nothing is what I was taught. Maybe the whole thing falls apart.”

I understand that fear. But I want to gently push back on it.

Baker addresses this worry head-on. She acknowledges that many Christians feel that if they start tinkering with one traditional doctrine, their entire belief system might cave in around them. But she insists that as long as the tinkering is based on careful, honest biblical interpretation, it will not lead to heresy. It may actually lead to a deeper, more faithful understanding of who God is.⁶⁵

Questioning a particular interpretation of hell is not the same as questioning the authority of Scripture. It is not the same as questioning the reality of God or the truth of the gospel. It is simply asking: “Have we read these passages correctly? Is there another way to understand them that is equally faithful to the text and more consistent with the overall picture of God that Scripture gives us?”

Those are good questions. They are faithful questions. And they are exactly the kind of questions that the Church Fathers themselves were asking in the earliest centuries of the faith.

Here is what I can promise you: nothing in this book will ask you to lower your view of Scripture. Nothing will ask you to deny the reality of sin, judgment, or the final state. Nothing will ask you to give up any of the core doctrines of the Christian faith. What this book will ask you to do is raise your view of God. To take seriously the claim that God is love—not as a bumper sticker, but as the most important theological statement in the entire Bible. And to ask what that claim means for how we understand the fire of God’s judgment.

If that sounds dangerous to you, I would gently suggest that the real danger lies in the opposite direction. The real danger is worshipping a God whose character is worse than your own. The real danger is telling the world that the Creator of the universe is less compassionate, less merciful, and less loving than the average human parent. That is the doctrine that has driven millions of people away from the faith. That is the teaching that has turned the good news of Jesus Christ into a threat.

The divine presence model does not lower the bar. It raises it. It says that God is so holy, so loving, so overwhelmingly good that His very presence is unbearable to those who have chosen to live in darkness. That is not a soft view of hell. That is the most terrifying view of hell imaginable—because it means there is no escape from God. Not in life. Not in death. Not ever. His love will find you. And if you have spent your life running from it, that love will burn.

Who This Book Is For

If the doctrine of hell has ever kept you up at night, this book is for you.

If you have ever sat in a church service and felt something crack inside you when the preacher described God torturing people forever, this book is for you.

If you have ever been told that the only options are to accept eternal conscious torment or to stop believing the Bible, this book is for you. There is a third option. Actually, there are several. And they are grounded in Scripture, supported by the earliest Christian tradition, and far more consistent with the God revealed in Jesus Christ than the picture most of us were given growing up.

If you hold to ECT and you are willing to look at the evidence honestly, this book is for you too. I am not going to mock you or belittle your faith. I held that view myself for a long time. What I am going to do is invite you to look at the same Scriptures you have always looked at—but through a different lens. The lens of the earliest Christians. The lens of the Church Fathers. The lens of a God who is love, all the way through, without exception.⁴⁵

If you already believe in conditional immortality—the view that the wicked will eventually be destroyed rather than tormented forever—this book will give you a framework for understanding how that destruction happens. The divine presence model explains the mechanism of God’s judgment: it is not an angry God throwing people into a furnace but the fire of God’s love consuming those who cannot bear it.⁴⁶

If you are drawn to universalism—the hope that God’s love will eventually win every heart—this book will take your hope seriously. I will not dismiss it as wishful thinking. I will show you where the biblical evidence points and where the philosophical arguments lead, and I will let you make up your own mind.⁴⁷

If you are interested in Eastern Orthodox theology and have wondered why the Orthodox understand hell so differently from most Western Christians, this book will give you a clear, accessible introduction to that tradition and show you what evangelicals can learn from it.⁴⁸

Whatever your background, whatever your starting point, I ask only one thing: come with an open heart and an open Bible. I am going to make my case from Scripture. I am going to engage the best arguments on every side. And I am going to be honest with you when I do not have all the answers. Some of the questions in this book are questions I am still wrestling with myself. That is okay. Wrestling with God is an ancient and honorable tradition. Just ask Jacob.⁴⁹

The Question Behind the Question

Before we go any further, I want to name the real question that this book is trying to answer. It is not: “Is hell real?” Hell is real. It is not: “Does judgment matter?” Judgment matters eternally. The real question is this:

What kind of God are we dealing with?

Is God the kind of being who tortures His own creatures—creatures He made, creatures He claims to love—for all eternity, without end, without mercy, without any possibility of relief? Is God the kind of father who burns his children alive because they disobeyed him?

Or is God the kind of being whose very nature is love, whose fire is always aimed at restoration, whose justice is not a cold legal calculation but the fierce, saving, healing work of a Father who will not rest until His children are either healed or have freely chosen to walk away forever?

Manis frames it with precision: the problem of hell is fundamentally a problem about God’s character.⁵⁰ It is not just about what happens to the wicked. It is about who God is. And the answer to that question changes everything.

I believe God is love. Not sometimes. Not mostly. Not with a scary asterisk. Love. All the way down. All the way through. Without exception. And I believe that His fire—the consuming fire of Hebrews 12:29—is the fire of that love.

That is the thesis of this book. And I intend to prove it.

A Word About How This Book Reads

One more thing before we dive in. I have written this book to be read by anyone. You do not need a seminary degree to follow the argument. You do not need to know Greek or Hebrew, though we will look at some Greek and Hebrew words along the way. When we do, I will always explain what they mean in plain English and why they matter.⁵¹

I have tried to write the way I talk. That means shorter sentences, everyday words, and a lot of personal stories and real-life examples. When the theology gets deep, I will slow down and use analogies to make it clear. When I quote a scholar, I will explain what they are saying in my own words so you never feel lost.

This book has footnotes. Lots of them. I include them for two reasons. First, because I want you to be able to check my work. If I claim that Manis says something, or Baker argues something, or the Bible teaches something, I want you to be able to look it up for yourself. Second, because I want to point you toward further reading. If a topic grabs you and you want to go deeper, the footnotes will show you where to look.

But you do not have to read the footnotes to follow the argument. Think of them as the bonus features on a DVD. The movie makes perfect sense without them. But if you are the kind of person who likes to peek behind the curtain, they are there for you.

Coming Home

I want to end this chapter where I began—with the God I almost lost.

I told you that I was fourteen when the doctrine of hell first cracked something inside me. What I did not tell you is that it took me almost twenty years to find my way back.

Twenty years of reading. Twenty years of praying. Twenty years of asking questions that felt dangerous and following evidence that felt scary and wondering whether I was losing my faith or finally finding it.

There were nights when I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, just like my friend Daniel, turning the problem over and over in my mind. There were Sunday mornings when I sat in the pew and could not sing, because the words of the hymn praised a God whose character I was no longer sure of. There were moments when I envied the people around me who seemed to have no trouble at all with the idea of eternal torment—who could nod along with the preacher and say “Amen” and never feel the floor shifting under their feet.

But there were also moments of grace. A sentence in a book that made something click. A conversation with a friend who had been wrestling with the same questions. A verse of Scripture that suddenly looked different in light of everything I had been learning. One step at a time, inch by inch, the picture came into focus.

What I found, at the end of that road, was not a smaller God. It was a bigger one.

The God I found is not less holy than the God of eternal conscious torment. He is more holy. His holiness is not the holiness of a judge who sentences people to torture. It is the holiness of a love so pure, so intense, so consuming that nothing impure can survive in its presence—not because God kills it, but because darkness cannot exist in the presence of light.⁵²

The God I found is not less just than the God of ECT. He is more just. His justice is not the cold calculation of a courtroom. It is the fierce, saving, restoring justice of a Father who will not rest until every wrong is made right and every wound is healed—the Hebrew word is tsedaka (saving justice), and we will explore it in depth in Chapter 6.⁵³

The God I found is not less serious about sin than the God of the traditional view. He is more serious. Because on the divine presence model, sin is not just a legal infraction that requires a punishment. It is a disease that destroys the soul’s ability to receive love. And that is far worse than any courtroom sentence.⁵⁴

And the God I found is not less loving than the God I grew up with. He is the same God. The one who so loved the world. The one who left the ninety-nine to go after the one. The one who hung on a cross and said, “Father, forgive them.”⁵⁵ But now, for the first time, I can believe that He meant it. All of it. Without reservation. Without a secret plan to torture the ones He came to save.

Our God is a consuming fire. But His fire is love.⁵⁶

That is the discovery that saved my faith. And I wrote this book because I believe it can save yours too.

Come. Let’s begin.