Chapter 2

The Problem of Hell—Why Every View Must Answer to Love

A Question That Will Not Stay Quiet

There is a question that haunts the edges of almost every conversation about God, eternity, and the fate of human beings. It is a question that many Christians have felt but few have been willing to say out loud. It goes like this: Why would a perfectly good and loving God send anyone to eternal suffering in hell?

That question is not new. Philosophers, theologians, pastors, and everyday believers have wrestled with it for centuries. But the fact that it keeps coming back—generation after generation, in culture after culture—tells us something important. It tells us that this is not a question born of weak faith or rebellious hearts. It is a question born of a deep instinct about who God is. And that instinct, I believe, is right.

R. Zachary Manis, one of the most careful philosophers working on this topic today, puts the question in its classic form: “Why would a perfectly good and loving God consign anyone to eternal suffering in hell?”¹ That single sentence captures what scholars call the problem of hell. It is not a minor puzzle to be filed away in a dusty theology textbook. It is, as Marilyn McCord Adams has argued, arguably the most difficult version of the problem of evil that Christians face.² The general problem of evil asks why a good God allows suffering in the world. The problem of hell sharpens that question to a razor’s edge: not just why does God allow suffering, but why would God create or sustain a place of suffering that never ends?

In this chapter, I want to do three things. First, I want to define the problem of hell carefully, so we know exactly what we are dealing with. Second, I want to lay out the criteria—the standards—that any good solution to this problem must meet. And third, I want to introduce the four standard answers that Christians have offered over the centuries and preview why each of them, on its own, falls short in at least one important area. That preview will set the stage for the rest of this book, where we will examine each view in detail and then build the case for a fifth option—the divine presence model—that I believe handles the evidence better than any of the four.

But before we get into the details, I need to say something right up front. The problem of hell is not just a philosophical puzzle. It is personal. It is about real people—people you know and love, people who have lived and died without ever hearing the name of Jesus, people who grew up in other faiths or no faith at all, people who struggled with doubt and never found their way to belief. When we talk about hell, we are talking about them. We are talking about what God will do with the vast majority of human beings who have ever drawn breath on this planet. That is not abstract. That is as real as it gets.

And that is precisely why we cannot afford to get it wrong.

What Makes the Problem of Hell So Hard

The problem of hell is a specific version of the problem of evil. But it is harder than the general problem in at least one crucial way. Jonathan Kvanvig, in his important book The Problem of Hell, makes this point clearly.³ With most kinds of evil and suffering, we can at least tell ourselves that we do not fully understand God’s reasons. Maybe there is some greater good that comes from this particular suffering. Maybe God has purposes we cannot see. Philosophers call this the strategy of “skeptical theism,” and it has some real power when it comes to explaining things like natural disasters or childhood illness. We do not know why God allows those things, but maybe—just maybe—there is a reason we cannot grasp.

But that strategy does not work with hell. Here is why. The doctrine of hell does not come from our experience of the world. Nobody stumbles across hell by accident. We know about hell because it has been revealed—taught in Scripture and passed down through the church’s tradition.⁴ And the traditions that teach about hell typically claim to know its purpose. They tell us why God sends people there. That means we cannot hide behind ignorance. We cannot say, “Well, maybe God has a mysterious reason for hell that we just can’t understand.” The whole point of the doctrine is that the reason has been revealed. So we have to look at that reason and ask: Does it hold up? Is it consistent with everything else we know about God?

That is what makes the problem of hell so much harder than the general problem of evil. The escape route of mystery is closed off. We are forced to deal with the reasons that have actually been given.

Kvanvig goes even further. He argues that the problem of hell is not limited to Christianity. It arises for any worldview that believes in a God who is all-powerful and perfectly good, combined with a belief that human existence continues after death and eventually reaches some final state.⁵ If there is a highest good for human life, then it must be possible to miss it. And if that failure becomes permanent in the afterlife, then we have something that can rightly be called damnation. The question then becomes: How can a perfectly good God allow anyone to be permanently cut off from the highest good?

That question is powerful. It is powerful because it does not depend on any particular set of beliefs about fire and brimstone or medieval images of torture. Strip all of that away, and the core problem remains. If God is good, and if some people end up permanently separated from goodness, we have a problem.

And the problem is not just for theologians. It is for every Christian parent who has lain awake at night wondering what will happen to a wayward child. It is for every believer who has lost a friend or relative who died without professing faith. It is for every honest person who has looked at the sheer numbers—billions and billions of human beings across thousands of years, the overwhelming majority of whom never heard the name of Jesus—and wondered whether the God they worship really consigns all of them to endless agony. The problem of hell is not academic. It is the question that sits in the pit of your stomach when you let yourself think about it long enough.

And it is precisely because this question is so personal, so urgent, and so weighty that we must refuse to settle for easy answers. We owe it to the people we love—and to the God we serve—to think this through with all the honesty and rigor we can muster.

Three Problems in One

The problem of hell may sound like one question, but it is actually a cluster of related problems. Following Manis, I find it helpful to break it down into three distinct challenges: the problem of justice, the problem of love, and the problem of coercion.⁶ Each one attacks the traditional doctrine from a different angle. Together, they create a web of difficulties that no simple answer can untangle.

The Problem of Justice

The problem of justice is probably the one you have heard most often. It goes like this: justice requires that the punishment fit the crime. We all know this intuitively. If a child steals a cookie, you do not sentence the child to life in prison. That would be wildly out of proportion. The punishment would be far worse than the offense, and we would rightly call it unjust.

Now apply that principle to hell. On the traditional view, human beings commit sins during a finite lifetime—seventy, eighty, maybe ninety years of wrongdoing at most. And for those finite sins, God sentences them to infinite suffering. Not a thousand years. Not a million. Forever. Without end. Without relief. Without hope.

Does the punishment fit the crime? Manis argues persuasively that it does not.⁷ The traditional response to this challenge is to say that sin against an infinite God is itself infinitely serious, and therefore infinite punishment is appropriate. But Manis shows that this answer has serious problems. For one thing, our level of guilt is tied to our level of understanding. Since no finite human being can fully understand an infinite God, no finite human being can be infinitely guilty of offending Him.⁸ For another, the greater the difference between the offender and the offended party, the less culpable the offender is—not more. A small child who insults a king is less guilty than a nobleman who does the same thing, because the child does not understand what he is doing. By the same logic, a finite human being who sins against an infinite God is less culpable, not more, precisely because the gap between creature and Creator is so vast.⁹

The traditional argument, in other words, gets things exactly backwards. It takes the infinite greatness of God—which should reduce our culpability—and uses it to increase our punishment. That is not justice. That is a distortion of justice.

Let me put it in everyday terms. Imagine a two-year-old who throws a toy at his mother and hits her in the face. Has the child done something wrong? Yes. Should there be consequences? Probably. But what if the mother responded by locking the child in a dark closet for the rest of his life? We would all recoil. We would say that the punishment has no relationship to the crime. The child is too young, too ignorant, too small to deserve anything close to that level of response. Now multiply that gap by infinity. The distance between a toddler and a grown woman is trivial compared to the distance between a finite human being and the infinite Creator of the universe. If anything, that staggering distance between us and God should make our offenses less deserving of extreme punishment, not more.

And consider something else. On the traditional view, the sins that send a person to hell are committed during a limited window of time—a few decades at most. Many of those sins are committed in ignorance, under pressure, in moments of weakness, or as the result of deep wounds and dysfunctional upbringing. Some are committed by people who never had a fair chance to hear the gospel or understand who God really is. To punish all of these people with exactly the same fate—infinite, unending, conscious torment—regardless of the nature or severity of their sins, regardless of their level of understanding, regardless of the circumstances of their lives, is not justice in any recognizable sense of the word. It is a blanket condemnation that erases all distinctions between degrees of guilt.⁵²

The Problem of Love

The problem of love cuts even deeper than the problem of justice. Even if we could somehow solve the justice problem—even if we could make the case that eternal punishment is perfectly fair—we would still have a devastating problem on our hands. Because the traditional view of hell is not just potentially unjust. It is unloving.

Here is why. On the traditional view, the purpose of hell is retribution—paying back the wicked for what they have done. It is punishment for punishment’s sake. It is not designed to reform the sinner. It is not aimed at making the person better. It is not intended to bring about reconciliation. It has no redemptive purpose whatsoever. The suffering of hell, on this view, accomplishes nothing for the one who suffers. It just is.¹⁰

Think about that for a moment. What kind of parent punishes a child with no intention of making the child better? We have a name for that kind of punishment. We call it abuse. A punishment that is not aimed at the good of the person being punished is, by definition, an unloving punishment.¹¹

Manis is crystal clear on this point. If to love someone means to desire and work toward their highest good, then a punishment that has no connection to the good of the person being punished is a punishment that is incompatible with love.¹² And if God’s love is perfect—if God loves every single person without exception and wills their highest good—then God simply cannot impose a punishment that is purely retributive, with no redemptive aim. To do so would mean that God does not, in fact, love the people He is punishing. And if God does not love them, then God’s love is not maximal. And if God’s love is not maximal, then God is not the greatest possible being.

Do you see the chain reaction? The problem of love threatens the very character of God. It does not just call the justice of hell into question. It calls God Himself into question.

The problem of love is distinct from the problem of justice because it applies even to a hypothetically “just” punishment. Imagine, for a moment, that someone proves beyond all doubt that eternal punishment is perfectly fair and proportional. Even then, the problem of love would remain. A fair punishment can still be unloving if it serves no redemptive purpose. A father who locks his child in a room for precisely the right number of minutes—not too many, not too few—but does so with no intention of teaching the child anything, no hope of the child’s improvement, no desire for reconciliation, is not acting out of love. He is acting out of cold calculation. We would not admire such a father. We would pity him.

Manis notes that some defenders of traditionalism have tried to solve the problem of love by arguing that hell promotes certain goods other than the good of the person being punished. Perhaps hell promotes respect for human dignity. Perhaps it upholds the moral order of the universe. Perhaps it vindicates the honor of God.⁵³ But as Manis points out, none of these responses actually solves the problem. Even if hell promotes some other good, the fact remains that it does not promote the highest good of the person being punished. And as long as that is the case, hell remains an unloving punishment. You can stack as many secondary goods on top of the punishment as you want. As long as the person in hell is not being moved toward their own ultimate flourishing, the punishment fails the test of love.⁵⁴

Baker puts this more personally. She describes her friend Lisa, her student Brooke, and her student Eric—real people with real struggles about the doctrine of hell. They do not object to the idea that sin has consequences. They do not want to let the wicked off the hook. What troubles them is the idea that a God who is love could design a system where billions of human beings—human beings created in His own image, human beings He claims to love—are trapped in suffering that has no redemptive purpose, no hope of relief, and no end.⁵⁵ They cannot make that fit with the God they have met in Jesus Christ. And neither can I.

How much more should we be troubled by a theology that paints God in exactly those colors?

The Problem of Coercion

The third problem is one that many people have never considered, but it may be the most unsettling of all. Manis calls it the doxastic problem—from the Greek word doxa, meaning “belief.”¹³ I prefer to start with one of its most striking aspects: the problem of coercion.

Here is the basic idea. Christians believe that the doctrine of hell is revealed in Scripture. We also believe that Scripture is meant to be believed—genuinely, deeply, personally. And we believe that genuine belief in Scripture’s teachings should be spiritually edifying—it should make us better, draw us closer to God, and deepen our faith.¹⁴

But think about what happens when someone truly believes the traditional doctrine of hell. If you really, truly believe that rejecting God will result in the worst possible fate—eternal, unending, inescapable suffering—then how can your decision to follow God be genuinely free? The threat is so overwhelming, so total, so absolute, that any decision made in response to it is, in a meaningful sense, coerced.¹⁵

Manis offers a vivid analogy. Imagine a man who is so desperate for love that he kidnaps his beloved and holds a gun to her head, demanding that she love him in return. Even if she says “I love you” under those conditions, we would not call that love. We would call it survival. A declaration made under threat of death is not a free expression of the heart. It is a hostage negotiation.¹⁶

Now, I am not saying that God is a kidnapper. Of course not. But the analogy forces us to ask a hard question: If the traditional doctrine of hell is true, and if genuine belief in it makes hell feel like a maximally threatening reality, then how can anyone freely choose to love God? The threat of hell is, by definition, the greatest possible threat—what Manis calls a “maximal threat.”¹⁷ There is no greater danger a person can face. And when the stakes are that high, freedom evaporates.

This creates a painful irony. Christianity teaches that God wants us to love Him freely. That is the whole point of human freedom, according to most Christian theology. But the traditional doctrine of hell seems to undermine that very freedom by making the consequences of rejection so catastrophic that no rational person could refuse to comply. As Marilyn Adams writes, a disproportionate threat of hell can produce despair that shows up as skepticism, rebellion, and unbelief.¹⁸ If your father threatens to kill you for disobedience, you might cower in terrorized submission—but you also might, quite reasonably, run away from home.

The problem of coercion reveals something that the problems of justice and love only hint at: the traditional doctrine of hell does not merely describe what happens to the wicked. It shapes the entire relationship between God and humanity. If hell is a weapon held over our heads, then our response to God is not love. It is compliance. And compliance born of terror is not what the God of the Bible is after.

But the coercion problem is only one part of a larger web of difficulties that Manis calls “the doxastic problem.” He identifies several more. For instance, if you genuinely believe the traditional doctrine, it seems to poison the motive for accepting the gospel. You are not coming to God because you love Him. You are coming to God because you are terrified of what will happen if you do not. A faith built on that foundation is fragile, anxious, and self-serving—the very opposite of the joyful, self-giving love that Jesus calls us to.⁶¹

There is another dimension to the doxastic problem that is easy to overlook. Manis points out that most people who claim to believe in hell do not actually live as though they believe it. We go about our daily routines—eating, working, watching television—as if billions of people are not hurtling toward an eternity of unimaginable torment. If we truly believed that, we would be frantic. We would never sleep. We would spend every waking moment trying to save as many people as possible. The fact that we do not behave this way suggests either that we do not really believe the doctrine, or that we hold it in a way that is deeply irrational.⁶² Either way, there is a serious problem. A doctrine that can only be “believed” by being held at arm’s length—a doctrine that we must suppress and compartmentalize in order to function as normal human beings—is a doctrine that something has gone wrong with.

All of these doxastic problems—coercion, poisoned motives, irrational detachment—point in the same direction. They suggest that the traditional version of the doctrine of hell is not just theologically problematic. It is spiritually problematic. It does not make us better Christians. It makes us more anxious, more fearful, and less capable of the free, joyful love that is supposed to be the hallmark of life in Christ. If a doctrine that is supposed to be revealed by God actually undermines the spiritual life it is supposed to support, then something has gone wrong with how we are understanding that doctrine.⁶³

What Must an Adequate Solution Look Like?

If the problem of hell is this serious, then we need a solution. But not just any solution will do. A good solution has to meet certain standards. It has to satisfy certain criteria. And it is worth being honest about what those criteria are, because different people bring different expectations to the table, and those expectations shape what they are willing to accept.

Manis is refreshingly transparent about this. He lays out his own criteria at the beginning of his study, inviting his readers to compare them with their own and to judge for themselves whether his proposed solution—the divine presence model—would satisfy their standards as well.¹⁹ I want to follow his lead and do the same thing here.

In my judgment, an adequate solution to the problem of hell must meet the following criteria. These are not arbitrary standards I have invented. They are drawn from the deep wells of Scripture, tradition, theology, philosophy, and moral reasoning. Any solution that fails to satisfy them is, in my view, inadequate—no matter how popular it might be.

Scriptural Support

First, an adequate solution must be rooted in and supported by Scripture. I hold a high view of the Bible as the inspired, authoritative Word of God. I believe that Scripture, rightly interpreted, is our ultimate authority on matters of faith and practice. That means any view of hell that cannot find solid footing in the biblical text is disqualified from the start.²⁰

But notice the phrase “rightly interpreted.” Simply quoting a verse is not enough. We have to ask what the verse means in its original language, in its original context, for its original audience. Some of the most popular proof texts for the traditional view of hell turn out to be far more complex than they first appear—a subject we will explore in great detail in later chapters. The point here is that scriptural support is not about proof-texting. It is about careful, honest engagement with the whole of Scripture.

Consistency with God’s Character

Second, an adequate solution must be fully consistent with the most central attributes of God—especially His love, His goodness, and His justice. This is where the rubber meets the road. Scripture tells us that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). That is not a throwaway line. It is an ontological claim—a statement about the very nature of God’s being. Love is not just something God does. It is something God is. And if God is love, then every doctrine we hold about God must be compatible with that reality.²¹

Manis frames this in terms of what philosophers call “perfect being theology.” God is the greatest possible being, and His goodness, justice, and love are maximal—as great as they can possibly be.²² An adequate solution to the problem of hell must not diminish any of these attributes. It must not make God less loving, less just, or less good than the greatest being we can conceive. If a view of hell requires us to dial back our understanding of God’s love—to say that God loves most people but not all, or that God’s love has limits that the best human love does not—then that view is inadequate.

I want to be blunt about this. Any doctrine of hell that makes God less loving than the best human father is not a doctrine worth defending. It is not a doctrine that honors God. It is a doctrine that diminishes Him. And I say that as someone who takes the reality of hell with deadly seriousness.

Coherence with the Christian Tradition

Third, an adequate solution should cohere with the best of the Christian tradition on the subject through the ages. Now, I want to be careful here. “Tradition” is not a monolith. The early church was far more diverse in its views of hell than most Western Christians realize. Gregory of Nyssa was a universalist. Isaac the Syrian taught that God’s love extended even to the demons. Origen held to the eventual restoration of all things. The idea that the church has always, unanimously, and without exception taught eternal conscious torment is simply false.²³

What I mean by coherence with tradition is this: an adequate solution should not be a total novelty. It should have roots in the history of Christian thought. It should be a view that, in its general form, is accepted by a significant portion of the church today. Manis stresses this point, and I agree with him.²⁴ We should be suspicious of any view that has no historical pedigree. And we should pay special attention to the views of the earliest Greek-speaking Christians, who understood the language of the New Testament from the inside, and whose theology was shaped by that language in ways that later Latin-speaking theologians sometimes missed.

Philosophical Defensibility

Fourth, an adequate solution must be philosophically coherent. It cannot involve logical contradictions. It cannot require us to believe things that are obviously absurd. And it should engage honestly with the strongest objections that can be raised against it.²⁵

This does not mean that every aspect of hell has to be fully explained by human reason. We are dealing with mysteries that go beyond our full comprehension. But there is a difference between mystery and contradiction. A mystery is something that surpasses our understanding. A contradiction is something that violates it. An adequate solution to the problem of hell must avoid the latter, even if it embraces the former.

Moral Adequacy

Finally, an adequate solution must make moral sense. It must align with the deepest moral intuitions that Christians share—intuitions like the conviction that love means willing the good of another, that justice requires proportionality, that culpability is tied to understanding, and that freedom is essential for genuine moral choices.²⁶

Some people will object that our moral intuitions should not be trusted when they conflict with Scripture. I understand that concern. But I believe our moral intuitions are themselves a gift from God—part of the image of God in which we were made. When millions of Christians throughout history have felt, deep in their bones, that something about the traditional doctrine of hell is wrong, that feeling is not rebellion. It is the image of God within them crying out for a more faithful theology.²⁷ We should take those intuitions seriously, not suppress them.

The Four Standard Options—A First Look

Over the centuries, Christians have offered four main answers to the problem of hell. Manis calls these the “four standard options,” and the label fits.²⁹ Each has serious thinkers behind it. Each has real biblical support. And each, as we will see, has real problems.

I want to give you a quick overview of all four here, so you can see the lay of the land before we dive into the details in later chapters. Think of this section as a map of the territory we are about to explore. We will walk every inch of this ground in Chapters 9 through 13. For now, I just want you to see where the paths lead—and where each one runs into trouble.

Option One: Traditionalism (Eternal Conscious Torment)

The first and most familiar option is traditionalism, also known as eternal conscious torment, or ECT. On this view, hell is a place of conscious, unending suffering, and God sends the wicked there as a just punishment for their sins. The suffering never ends. There is no escape. There is no hope. The purpose of hell is retribution—paying back sinners for what they have done.³⁰

Traditionalism’s greatest strength is its deep roots in church tradition, particularly in the Western church since Augustine. It can also point to several biblical texts that seem to teach eternal punishment, such as Matthew 25:46 (“eternal punishment”), Revelation 14:11 (“the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever”), and Mark 9:48 (“where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched”).³¹

Traditionalism also captures something real about the gravity of sin. Sin is not trivial. Rebellion against God is not a small thing. The tradition has rightly insisted that the consequences of rejecting the Creator of the universe are serious and permanent. Any view that treats sin as a minor inconvenience fails to take the holiness of God seriously. Traditionalism is right to insist on the weight of eternity. What it gets wrong, as we will see, is the character of that eternity and the nature of the God who presides over it.

But traditionalism faces all three of the problems we just outlined. The problem of justice: infinite punishment for finite sin violates proportionality. The problem of love: a purely retributive punishment that has no redemptive purpose is incompatible with a God who loves every person. And the problem of coercion: the threat of ECT is so overwhelming that it undermines the very freedom God seeks to preserve. Manis identifies the retribution thesis—the claim that the purpose of hell is retribution—as the deep root from which all three problems grow.⁶⁴ We will examine these problems in full in Chapters 9 and 10.

Option Two: Annihilationism (Conditional Immortality)

The second option is annihilationism, or as many of its advocates prefer to call it, conditional immortality. On this view, the wicked are not tormented forever. Instead, they are eventually destroyed. They cease to exist. The soul is not inherently immortal—immortality is a gift from God, given only to those who are in Christ (2 Timothy 1:10). Those who finally reject God lose that gift. They perish. They are consumed. The “second death” (Revelation 20:14) is a real and final death.³²

Annihilationism has strong biblical support. Jesus Himself says that God can “destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). The famous John 3:16 says that those who do not believe will “perish.” Malachi 4:1–3 speaks of the wicked being burned to ashes. The language of destruction runs throughout Scripture.³³

Its defenders include serious scholars like Edward Fudge, John Stott, and Clark Pinnock.³⁴ And it avoids the most horrifying feature of ECT: the idea that God sustains the wicked in existence for the sole purpose of tormenting them forever. On the annihilationist view, the suffering ends. Death is final. There is a real and permanent consequence to sin, but it is not an eternity of conscious agony.

The problem with annihilationism, as I see it, is not that it is wrong about the outcome. I actually think conditional immortality may be correct about the final fate of the unrepentant. The problem is that annihilationism, by itself, does not explain the mechanism. It tells us what happens to the wicked—they are destroyed—but not how or why. What is the fire that destroys them? Is it a punitive act of God? A withdrawal of divine life? Some arbitrary cosmic process? Annihilationism, on its own, leaves that question unanswered. It needs something more. And the divine presence model, as I will argue in Chapter 12, supplies exactly what is missing.³⁵

Option Three: Universalism

The third option is universalism—the view that all human beings will eventually be saved. Hell is real, on this view, but it is not permanent. It is a temporary state of purification and correction. Eventually, every person—no matter how wicked—will be won over by the relentless, inescapable love of God.³⁶

Universalism has a distinguished pedigree. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great Cappadocian Fathers, taught it. Origen held a version of it. In our own time, theologians like David Bentley Hart and Thomas Talbott have made powerful cases for it.³⁷ And its appeal is obvious. If God is truly love, and if God’s love is truly infinite, then surely that love will eventually triumph over every finite resistance. Surely no creature can hold out against the Almighty forever.

Universalism’s greatest strength is precisely here: it takes God’s love with absolute seriousness. It refuses to put limits on the power of divine love. It avoids the problems of justice and love entirely, because on this view, no one suffers forever, and the suffering that does occur serves a redemptive purpose.

But universalism faces its own challenges. The strongest challenge is biblical. The language of finality in Scripture—the “second death,” the “eternal punishment,” the door that is shut—is hard to square with the idea that everyone will eventually be saved.³⁸ There is also a philosophical challenge: if God overrides the free will of the wicked to bring about their eventual salvation, is that truly love? Or is it a kind of divine coercion? Can God make a person love Him without violating the very nature of love, which requires freedom? These are not easy questions. And the universalist must face them honestly, just as the defender of ECT must face the problems of justice, love, and coercion. We will wrestle with these questions at length in Chapter 13.

Option Four: The Choice Model

The fourth option is what Manis calls the choice model. On this view, hell is not something God imposes on anyone. Hell is something the damned choose for themselves. God, in His perfect respect for human freedom, allows people to reject Him—even forever. Hell, as C. S. Lewis famously put it, is locked from the inside.³⁹

The choice model has been developed with great sophistication by philosophers like Jerry Walls and, in more popular form, by Lewis in The Great Divorce.⁴⁰ Its great strength is that it protects God’s character beautifully. If hell is a human choice, then God is not the one imposing it. God is simply respecting freedom. And since love requires freedom—you cannot force someone to love you—God’s respect for human choice is itself an act of love.

The choice model also avoids the problems of justice and coercion. If hell is self-chosen, then the question of proportionality does not arise in the same way—the damned are not being punished by God but are experiencing the natural consequences of their own choices. And there is no coercion, because the doctrine describes a natural consequence, not an imposed threat.⁴¹

But the choice model has problems of its own. The most serious is this: Can anyone truly choose eternal misery with full knowledge of what they are choosing? Is such a choice truly free, or is it the product of self-deception so deep that the person no longer understands what they are doing?⁴² Manis raises a penetrating critique here. The choice model, he argues, overestimates human freedom and underestimates the power of self-deception. It assumes that the damned make a clear-eyed, rational choice to reject God. But self-deception does not work that way. The more deeply a person deceives themselves, the less capable they become of seeing reality clearly. A choice made in the grip of radical self-deception is not the kind of free, informed choice that the model requires.⁴³

The choice model also struggles to account for the full biblical picture of judgment. Scripture does not only describe hell as a human choice. It also describes it as a divine act—God “sending” people to judgment, God “destroying” body and soul, God pouring out wrath. The choice model captures one side of the biblical data but not the other. A complete model needs to hold both together.⁴⁴

Why a Fifth Option Is Needed

We have now surveyed the four standard options and identified the strengths and weaknesses of each. Traditionalism is deeply rooted in church tradition but faces devastating problems of justice, love, and coercion. Annihilationism takes the destruction language of Scripture seriously but leaves the mechanism of destruction unexplained. Universalism honors God’s love powerfully but struggles with the biblical language of finality and with the question of human freedom. The choice model protects God’s character but overestimates the quality of human free choice and underplays the active, judicial dimension of God’s judgment.

Now, here is the crucial insight. Manis identifies the single, common source of all the major problems for traditionalism: the retribution thesis.⁵⁶ This is the claim that the purpose of hell is retribution—that God sends people to hell as payback for their sins. The retribution thesis is the engine that generates all three problems. It generates the problem of justice because retributive justice requires proportionality, and infinite punishment for finite sin is wildly disproportionate. It generates the problem of love because a purely retributive punishment serves no redemptive purpose and therefore cannot be a loving act. And it generates the problem of coercion because a retributive punishment is an artificial consequence imposed by God—a threat designed to compel obedience—rather than a natural consequence of sin itself.⁵⁷

This diagnosis matters enormously, because it tells us what a successful model of hell needs to do. It needs to reject the retribution thesis—or at least transform it beyond recognition—while still accounting for the biblical language of judgment, wrath, and consequence. It needs to explain why the wicked suffer without making God the one who deliberately inflicts that suffering for its own sake. It needs to hold together both human responsibility and divine sovereignty, both the language of choice and the language of judgment, both the love of God and the seriousness of sin.

The choice model gets partway there by rejecting retribution altogether. But it goes too far in the other direction, stripping out the active, judicial dimension of God’s judgment and leaving us with a picture that does not match the biblical data. What we need is a model that stands between traditionalism and the choice model—one that preserves the best of both while avoiding the worst of each. That is precisely where the divine presence model stands.⁵⁸

Is there a way to combine the strengths of all four while avoiding their weaknesses? I believe there is. And that is what this book is about.

The view I will be building throughout these chapters is called the divine presence model of hell. It is not my invention. It has deep roots in the theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church, going back to some of the earliest Church Fathers. It has been developed with philosophical rigor by R. Zachary Manis and with theological creativity by Sharon Baker. It has been presented with prophetic passion by Alexandre Kalomiros in his famous essay The River of Fire. What I am doing in this book is bringing all of these strands together, grounding them in Scripture, and presenting them in a way that ordinary Christians can understand and embrace.

The core claim of the divine presence model is startling: 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.⁴⁵ The same fire that purifies the willing torments the resistant. The difference between heaven and hell is not a difference in location or in what God is doing. The difference is in the human heart. God’s love is the same toward all. How we receive that love—whether we open ourselves to it or clench our fists against it—makes all the difference between paradise and perdition.

This model fits the criteria we laid out earlier. It finds significant scriptural support—a case we will build throughout Part V of this book. It is consistent with God’s character as love—in fact, it makes God’s love the very engine of both heaven and hell. It has deep roots in the Christian tradition, especially in the Eastern church. It is philosophically coherent. And it makes profound moral sense. The God of the divine presence model is not a God who tortures His enemies. He is a God whose love is so fierce, so consuming, so inescapable, that it becomes the very fire of judgment. As Kalomiros writes, quoting the Orthodox icon tradition: the river of fire that proceeds from the throne of God is not an instrument of torture. It is the outpouring of God’s love for His creatures. That same river is both the water that refreshes the saints and the fire that consumes the wicked.⁴⁶

We will build this case piece by piece, chapter by chapter, passage by passage. But I wanted you to see the destination before we begin the journey. The destination is not a watered-down doctrine of hell. It is a stronger doctrine of hell—one rooted not in divine vengeance but in divine love, one that takes sin more seriously, not less, and one that reveals the character of God more fully than any of the four standard options can do on their own.

Objections and Responses

“You’re Just Looking for an Easy Way Out”

Someone might object that the whole project of this book is misguided. “The problem of hell,” this person might say, “is only a problem if you refuse to accept what the Bible plainly teaches. God is sovereign. He can do whatever He wants. If He decides to punish sinners forever, who are we to question Him? The problem isn’t with God. It’s with our arrogance in thinking we know better.”

I hear this objection often, and I respect the reverence for God that lies behind it. But I have two responses.

First, the problem of hell is not the invention of skeptics and liberals. It has been recognized by some of the most devout, biblically committed thinkers in the history of the church. Manis is a serious philosopher who affirms the authority of Scripture. Kvanvig is a careful analytic thinker. Jerry Walls is a Methodist theologian who takes the reality of hell with utter seriousness. These are not people looking for an easy way out. They are people who have looked at the evidence honestly and found that the traditional answers have real problems.⁴⁷

Second, I am not questioning God. I am questioning a particular theology about God. Those are not the same thing. When I say that eternal conscious torment has problems, I am not saying that God has problems. I am saying that the way certain theologians have described God has problems. There is all the difference in the world between questioning God and questioning a doctrine about God. In fact, I would argue that questioning inadequate doctrines about God is one of the highest forms of reverence—because it insists that God is better than our worst theologies make Him out to be.

“The Bible Is Clear on Hell—Why Overcomplicate Things?”

Another objection goes like this: “The Bible is clear. Jesus talks about hell more than anyone else in the New Testament. He uses language like ‘eternal punishment’ and ‘unquenchable fire.’ You’re just trying to explain away what the text plainly says.”

I take this objection seriously because I take Scripture seriously. And I agree that Jesus spoke often and urgently about judgment, hell, and the consequences of sin. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is what those words mean.

Consider the Greek word aionios (eye-OH-nee-os), which is typically translated “eternal” in English Bibles. As we will explore in detail in later chapters, this word does not necessarily mean “lasting for infinite time.” It refers to something belonging to the age to come—something of a different quality, connected to the age of God’s final action.⁴⁸ Or consider the word kolasis (koh-LAH-sis), translated “punishment” in Matthew 25:46. In Greek, kolasis specifically refers to corrective punishment—punishment aimed at making the person better. The Greek word for purely retributive, vengeful punishment is timoria (tee-moh-REE-ah). Jesus chose kolasis, not timoria.⁴⁹ That choice matters enormously, and we will examine it closely in the exegetical chapters of this book.

My point is not that the Bible is unclear about hell. My point is that the Bible may be saying something different from what the Western tradition has assumed it is saying. And the earliest Greek-speaking Christians—the people who actually spoke the language of the New Testament as their native tongue—often understood these texts in ways that do not support the traditional Western reading. The question is not whether the Bible teaches about judgment and consequence. It clearly does. The question is what kind of judgment and what kind of consequence.

“Isn’t This Just Wishful Thinking?”

A third objection: “Of course you want hell to be less terrible than the traditional view says. Everyone does. But wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true. You’re engaging in wishful thinking, not serious theology.”

This is a fair concern, and I want to address it head-on. Yes, I would prefer a view of hell that does not require God to be an eternal torturer. Who wouldn’t? But the fact that I prefer a view does not mean I have invented it to suit my preferences. The divine presence model is not a modern invention cooked up by squeamish liberals who cannot handle hard truths. It is the recovery of a view that has been held by significant portions of the church for nearly two thousand years. It is rooted in the theology of the Greek-speaking Fathers, the liturgy and iconography of the Eastern Church, and the careful philosophical work of contemporary scholars. It is not wishful thinking. It is serious theology with deep roots.⁵⁰

And I would gently turn the question around. Is it not equally possible that the defenders of ECT are engaged in a kind of wishful thinking of their own? There is a certain satisfaction in believing that the wicked will get what they deserve. There is a certain comfort in believing that God will balance the scales with an iron fist. But the desire for cosmic vengeance is not the same thing as the desire for divine justice. And the God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God who tells us to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us, and to forgive seventy times seven. If God demands that we show that kind of love, should we not expect God to show it as well?⁵¹

Where We Go from Here

We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter. We have defined the problem of hell in its three dimensions: justice, love, and coercion. We have established the criteria that any adequate solution must meet: scriptural support, consistency with God’s character, coherence with tradition, philosophical defensibility, and moral adequacy. We have surveyed the four standard options and identified both their strengths and their weaknesses. We have identified the retribution thesis as the common source of traditionalism’s most serious problems. And we have previewed the divine presence model as a fifth option that promises to bring together the best insights of all four while avoiding their most serious problems.

In the next chapter, we will go deeper into the four standard options, examining each in more detail. I want you to see each view at its strongest before we begin to evaluate them. Fairness demands nothing less. If the divine presence model is going to claim to be better than its competitors, it has to earn that claim by honestly engaging with the best that each competitor has to offer.

I want to be honest with you about something. When I first began studying the problem of hell, I expected to find clean answers. I expected the biblical data to line up neatly behind one view. It does not. I expected the philosophical arguments to settle the matter definitively. They do not. What I found, instead, is a question so layered and so difficult that no simple answer can do it justice. Manis is right that each major source of authority seems to lean in a different direction.⁵⁹ Tradition favors one view; the biblical destruction language favors another; moral reasoning favors yet another. The challenge is not to pick one source and ignore the rest. The challenge is to find a framework capacious enough to honor all of them. I believe the divine presence model is that framework. But I came to that conviction slowly, through years of study and prayer and honest wrestling. I am not asking you to take my word for it. I am asking you to walk through the evidence with me and judge for yourself.

But before we move on, I want to leave you with a thought. The problem of hell is not ultimately about hell. It is about God. Everything in this book flows from a single question: What is God like? If God is the kind of being who would sustain billions of people in conscious agony for all eternity with no hope of relief and no redemptive purpose, then that tells us something about God’s character. If God is the kind of being whose love is so fierce and so inescapable that it becomes both the fire of purification and the fire of judgment, that tells us something very different.

The stakes could not be higher. What we believe about hell reveals what we believe about God. And what we believe about God shapes everything—how we worship, how we pray, how we treat our neighbors, how we raise our children, how we face our own deaths. A God of love and a God of endless torture are not the same God, no matter how many theological gymnastics we perform to make them compatible.

Kalomiros, the Greek Orthodox lay theologian, argues that the Western distortion of God’s character is not just a theological mistake. It has had real-world consequences. He contends that atheism was born in the West precisely because Western theology turned God into a monster—a being who demands blood, tortures His enemies, and calls it justice.⁶⁰ If that is what God is like, Kalomiros says, then the atheists are right to reject Him. The problem is not with the atheists. The problem is with the theology. And the only cure is to recover the vision of God that the Eastern Fathers preserved—a God who is unchangeably good, dispassionate, and loving, a God who never returns evil for evil, a God whose fire is the fire of love.

That is the God we are looking for in this book. And the first step toward finding Him is to ask the hardest questions we can—honestly, fearlessly, and with open hearts.

So the question is not “How bad is hell?” The question is “How good is God?”

Let us find out together.