Chapter 11

The Choice Model—Lewis, Walls, and the Freedom Defense

Hell Locked from the Inside

If you grew up in the church—or even if you just spent some time around Christians who think carefully about hard questions—you have probably heard some version of this idea: Nobody goes to hell against their will. Hell is a choice.

It sounds right, doesn’t it? It feels right. If God is love, then surely He would not drag anyone kicking and screaming into eternal torment. If He truly respects us as persons, then He must respect our freedom—even when we use that freedom to walk away from Him. On this view, hell is not something God does to people. Hell is something people do to themselves.

This idea has a name. Philosophers and theologians call it the choice model of hell.¹ And it has some of the finest minds in Christian history behind it. C. S. Lewis gave it its most famous expression. Jerry Walls developed it with philosophical rigor. Eleonore Stump and Richard Swinburne added their own careful versions. Even Søren Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, explored the psychology of how a person might choose damnation from the inside out.²

The choice model is, in many ways, the most humane-sounding alternative to eternal conscious torment. It protects God’s character. It honors human dignity. It explains why a loving God would allow anyone to be lost. And it has deeply shaped how millions of Christians think about hell today.

I respect this view. I really do. Some of the thinkers behind it are people whose work I admire enormously, people who have shaped my own thinking in lasting ways. And as we will see, the choice model gets several important things right—things that any good theology of hell must include. But the choice model also has serious problems. It struggles to account for some of what the Bible actually says about judgment. It overestimates human freedom in some ways and underestimates the power of self-deception in others. And it leaves a crucial question unanswered: What is it, exactly, that makes hell so terrible?

In this chapter, we are going to give the choice model a fair and thorough hearing. We owe it that much, given the caliber of the thinkers who have defended it. We will present it in its strongest form, acknowledge what it gets right, and then identify where it breaks down. And then we will see how the divine presence model takes the best insights of the choice model and builds something stronger—something that fits the biblical data better and explains the reality of hell more completely.

The Choice Model Presented Fairly

The heart of the choice model is a simple but powerful idea: hell is not imposed on anyone from the outside. Hell is the result of a person’s own free choices. God does not send people to hell. People send themselves.

Nobody said this more memorably than C. S. Lewis. In The Great Divorce, Lewis imagines a bus ride from hell to heaven, in which the inhabitants of hell are invited—even begged—to stay in paradise. Almost all of them refuse and choose to go back. Near the end of the book, Lewis puts this famous line in the mouth of his fictional George MacDonald: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it.”³

Think about what Lewis is saying here. He is not describing a God who punishes reluctant sinners. He is describing a God who, with infinite sadness, honors the decision of people who simply do not want Him. The doors of hell, as Lewis famously put it elsewhere, “are locked on the inside.”⁴ Nobody is trapped in hell by God. They are trapped by their own refusal to leave.

Jerry Walls, a philosopher at Houston Christian University, has developed this idea with more precision than anyone else writing today. For Walls, the key concept is what he calls a “decisive” choice. A decisive choice is not a snap decision. It is not a moment of weakness. It is a settled response made by someone who is fully aware of what they are choosing. As Walls puts it, a decisive response is one that is “not haphazard, superficial, or prone to change in shifting circumstances or with awareness of new information.” It is “a rooted disposition.”⁵

But Walls adds something important. He argues that a negative response to God is only truly decisive if it is made under conditions of what he calls “optimal grace.” This means that God gives every person the maximum amount of influence toward good that He can exercise without destroying their freedom.⁶ A person only rejects God decisively when they persist in that rejection even under the most favorable conditions possible. Only then can we say that their choice is truly final.

This is a sophisticated view. It means that nobody is lost because they never had a chance. Nobody is condemned because of bad luck, or bad parents, or being born in the wrong country. God gives everyone a genuine, fully-informed opportunity to say yes. Damnation happens only when a person says no with full knowledge and a settled heart.

Now, the choice model comes in two forms, and it is important to understand both.⁷

The first is the direct form. On this version, the damned explicitly and intentionally choose to reject God. They know what they are doing. They prefer rebellion over surrender, self-rule over submission. Along with Milton’s Satan, they judge it “better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.”⁸ Walls is the clearest defender of this version. He argues that a person’s evil can become so consistent, so woven into the fabric of who they are, that the choice of evil is truly decisive—“present through and through a personality” and “fully consistent,” with no inner conflict left at all.⁹

The second is the indirect form. On this version, the damned do not necessarily choose hell itself. They choose the sins that lead to hell. They choose selfishness, greed, pride, cruelty—and these choices, repeated over time, form a character that makes damnation the natural result. Richard Swinburne and Eleonore Stump are the most prominent defenders of this version.¹⁰ Stump, drawing on Dante, argues that the torments of hell “are not physical pains which God has chosen to add to the burden of hell’s inhabitants but the natural psychological state of those who have habitually made bad choices.”¹¹

Both forms share a common logic. Hell is not a punishment that God cooks up and inflicts on sinners. It is the natural end of a road that sinners walk by their own free will. The indirect form is really an extension of what theologians call a “soul-making” framework: the idea that God designed the world as an environment for moral and spiritual growth, and hell is what happens when that growth goes terribly, permanently wrong.¹²

Swinburne paints a vivid picture of how this works. He describes how a person who repeatedly gives in to bad desires gradually loses the power to resist them. The range of choices available to the person slowly narrows. Good desires weaken. Bad desires strengthen. Eventually, the person has, as Swinburne puts it, “lost his soul”—he has eliminated himself as a moral agent and become nothing more than “a mere theatre of conflicting desires of which the strongest automatically dictates ‘his’ action.”¹³

Lewis illustrates this same idea in The Great Divorce with unforgettable characters. There is the woman so consumed with grumbling that she is becoming nothing but a grumble. There is the man so obsessed with his reputation that he cannot let go of it even in the presence of paradise. There is the bishop so enamored of intellectual respectability that he turns down heaven for the chance to read a paper at a theological discussion group.¹⁴ In every case, the person could stay in heaven. They are begged to stay. But they will not. They have become so attached to their particular sin that they would rather keep it than accept the joy being offered.

Perhaps the deepest psychological account of how this happens comes from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard argues that sin can become a source of identity. A person can reach the point where their rebellion against God is what defines them, what gives them a sense of self. At the upper limit, a person can sink so far into evil that they come to see “willing the good as a temptation to be resisted.”¹⁵ Kierkegaard calls this “demonic despair.” The person in demonic despair is so consumed with hatred—hatred of God, hatred of existence, hatred of the very possibility that God might be good—that they willingly embrace their own torment as a form of protest. They want to stand as a living witness against the goodness of God.¹⁶

Kierkegaard captures this with a striking image. He says it is as if an error in a book became conscious of itself and, instead of allowing the author to correct it, said in defiance: “No, I refuse to be erased; I will stand as a witness against you, a witness that you are a second-rate author.”¹⁷

That is the choice model at its most powerful. It gives us a God who is not a torturer but a heartbroken father. It gives us a hell that is not a dungeon but a self-imposed exile. And it gives us a picture of damnation that preserves the dignity of human freedom even in its most terrible misuse.

One more thinker deserves mention before we move on. Jonathan Kvanvig, in his influential book The Problem of Hell, offers a version of the choice model that leads ultimately to annihilation rather than eternal suffering. On Kvanvig’s view, the soul-making process continues after death. Those who persist in rejecting God are eventually given the option of self-annihilation—ceasing to exist entirely. They choose this freely, rationally, and with full awareness of what they are doing. God honors this choice because He honors freedom.⁶¹

Kvanvig’s version is important because it shows how the choice model can be combined with conditional immortality. He is not satisfied with the idea that God would sustain people in eternal misery just to respect their freedom. Instead, he argues that the truly free choice available to the damned is the choice to stop existing. This is a creative move, and we will see later that it actually points in the direction of the divine presence model—though Kvanvig himself does not take it quite that far.

Some defenders of the choice model have gone even further and suggested that hell might not be all that bad. Walls entertains the idea that hell is “a sort of distorted mirror image of heaven”—a place where the damned experience a diminished kind of existence, pursuing trivial pleasures, never truly happy but also never in the kind of unbearable torment that the traditional view describes.⁶² Swinburne imagines the damned continuing to exist, “perhaps pursuing trivial pursuits” and “perhaps not even realizing that the pursuits were trivial.”⁶³ Even Stump, drawing on Dante, describes limbo as a place with “beautiful, bright” meadows where the noblest of the ancients discuss philosophy—though she insists that what makes it awful is “the fact that the people there are separated from union with God and will always be so.”⁶⁴

This idea of a “mild hell” is not a fringe position within the choice model. It is, in some ways, the natural result of the model’s own logic. If hell is simply what the damned choose for themselves, and if God respects their freedom, then perhaps hell is just the kind of diminished, self-absorbed existence that people create when they turn away from love. It is miserable in the deepest sense—cut off from the source of all real joy—but it is not the screaming agony of the traditional picture.

This is an attractive idea. But as we will see, it raises its own set of serious problems.

What the Choice Model Gets Right

Before we identify the problems with this view, we need to give credit where it is due. The choice model is not just popular—it is popular because it captures some genuinely important truths.

First, the choice model takes human freedom seriously. And it is right to do so. Freedom is not an add-on to the Christian story. It is at the heart of it. God created us as beings who can say yes or no to Him. That is what makes love possible. Love that is forced is not love at all. As Lewis put it, freedom “makes evil possible,” but it “is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”¹⁸ Any view of hell that does not take this seriously is missing something essential. And Lewis makes a further point that deserves our attention: if God takes our freedom seriously enough to give it to us in this life—even knowing that we might misuse it catastrophically—then there is good reason to think He continues to take our freedom seriously in the life to come. Freedom is not a temporary arrangement. It is woven into the very nature of what it means to be human.

Second, the choice model protects God’s character. On this view, God is not the one doing the damning. He is the one who does everything possible to save. He gives optimal grace. He pursues. He invites. He pleads. If someone is finally lost, it is not because God failed or because God was cruel. It is because the person freely and decisively refused the offer. This is a far more attractive picture of God than the one painted by traditional eternal conscious torment, in which God appears to be an angry judge who delights in punishment.¹⁹ Think about how this changes the way we talk to people who are struggling with the idea of hell. Instead of saying, “God will send you to hell if you don’t repent,” we can say, “God has done everything possible to bring you home. The only thing standing between you and paradise is your own willingness to receive what He offers.” That is a profoundly different message, and the choice model deserves credit for making it possible.

Third, the choice model rejects retribution as the purpose of hell. This is a major step in the right direction. As R. Zachary Manis shows in his careful philosophical analysis, the retribution thesis—the idea that hell exists primarily to punish sinners for what they did on earth—is the root cause of all the worst problems with the traditional view.²⁰ The choice model avoids these problems entirely. On this model, hell is not a punishment that God inflicts. It is a condition that the damned bring upon themselves. God is issuing a warning, not a threat. There is a world of difference between those two things.

Fourth, the choice model preserves the reality of hell without making God complicit in evil. The traditional view has to explain why a loving God would sustain people in existence for the sole purpose of tormenting them forever. The choice model sidesteps this entirely. God sustains the damned in existence because they want to exist—even in their misery, they prefer existence to non-existence. They prefer their rebellion to surrender. God is not tormenting them. He is honoring their freedom.

These are real strengths. They are not small things. And any view of hell that ignores them is weaker for it. The divine presence model, as we will see, does not throw these insights away. It keeps every one of them. But it also addresses the serious gaps that the choice model leaves unfilled.

Where the Choice Model Breaks Down

The problems with the choice model are not small, and they cut deep. Let me walk through them carefully.

Problem One: Can Anyone Truly Choose Eternal Misery?

The most basic challenge facing the choice model is this: is it really possible for anyone to freely choose eternal suffering? This is the question that will not go away, no matter how sophisticated the philosophical arguments become. Thomas Talbott, one of the strongest critics of this view, puts the objection bluntly. He argues that as long as any ignorance, deception, or bondage to desire remains, God can remove those obstacles without violating freedom. But once all those obstacles are removed—once a person is truly free—“there can no longer be any motive for choosing eternal misery for oneself.”²¹

Think about what Talbott is saying. If a person really understood, with perfect clarity, that God is love and that rejecting God means eternal agony, why on earth would they say no? The choice only makes sense if the person is confused, deceived, or in bondage to something. But if they are confused or deceived, then the choice is not truly free. And if it is not truly free, then God is not honoring their freedom by letting them be damned—He is letting them be destroyed by a choice they never fully understood. This is the deepest philosophical challenge the choice model faces, and no defender of the view has fully answered it.

Walls tries to answer this by drawing on Kierkegaard. He argues that sin can become so deeply woven into a person’s identity that they choose it decisively, even knowing it brings misery.²² But here is the tension: Kierkegaard himself says that this kind of “demonic despair” is extremely rare.²³ And even in the cases where it exists, the person is not making their choice from a position of perfect freedom and clarity. They are making it from a position of deep self-deception. Their vision is distorted. Their reasoning is twisted. Is that really a “free” choice in the way the choice model needs it to be?

Manis puts his finger on the real issue. The choice model, he argues, “underestimates the power of self-deception and overestimates human freedom.”²⁴ Self-deception is not just a minor factor in the psychology of damnation. It is the central factor. And the choice model does not have a good account of it.

Here is a way to think about the problem. Kierkegaard describes two very different types of despair. There is the “despair of defiance”—the dramatic, conscious rebellion against God that we just discussed. But there is also what he calls “despair in weakness”—the quiet, unreflective kind of despair in which a person drifts through life without ever seriously engaging with the question of God at all. This person is the “man of immediacy,” the one to whom “life just happens.” He is happy when circumstances are good, unhappy when they are bad. He has no deep convictions, no settled character, no genuine sense of self.⁶⁵

Kierkegaard considers this second type of despair to be far more common than the first. Most people, he thinks, are not grand rebels. They are drifters. They are people who never made a dramatic decision to reject God but who also never made a genuine decision to embrace Him. They just… floated. And over time, their floating hardened into a pattern, and the pattern hardened into a character, and the character eventually became fixed.

Now here is the difficulty for the choice model. The direct form of the choice model—the version where the damned explicitly choose to reject God—might work for the small number of Kierkegaard’s “demonic desparers.” But what about the vast majority who are in despair in weakness? They did not choose hell directly. They did not shake their fist at God. They drifted into a condition from which they can no longer escape. At most, what the indirect form of the choice model can show is that, for these people, there is no alternative to damnation other than annihilation. Their character is so ruined that communion with God is no longer psychologically possible for them.⁶⁶

But is it really fair to say that these people “chose” hell? In what meaningful sense did they choose an outcome they never clearly envisioned, never explicitly intended, and arrived at through a long series of small compromises rather than one big decision? The choice model wants to say that God is honoring their freedom. But the freedom of a drifter who never understood where the current was taking him is a very different thing from the freedom of someone who stood at a crossroads, saw both paths clearly, and deliberately chose the wrong one.

Problem Two: The Choice Model Cannot Account for Punishment

Here is a problem that catches many people off guard. The Bible says that hell is a state of eternal punishment (Matthew 25:46). But the choice model has trouble making sense of this word.

Think about the parable of the prodigal son. The father respects his son’s freedom. He lets the son leave. He lets the son squander his inheritance. But nobody would say the father is punishing the son. He is simply allowing the son to experience the natural consequences of his choices. As Manis points out, the same logic applies on the choice model: “The parable doesn’t depict a father who’s punishing his son, especially insofar as the father stands ever ready to receive his son back again.”²⁵

But Scripture does not describe hell as merely the natural consequence of bad choices. It describes hell as punishment—something imposed, something inflicted, something that comes from God Himself. The choice model struggles to account for this language without quietly turning it into a metaphor for something much milder than what the Bible seems to describe.²⁶

Problem Three: The Bible Describes Damnation as Imposed, Not Chosen

This is closely related to the previous problem, but it deserves separate attention. Throughout the New Testament, the language used to describe final judgment suggests that the damned are sent to hell against their wills. Manis catalogs this language carefully: the wicked are “shut out” from the heavenly banquet, “cast” into outer darkness, “thrown” into the lake of fire.²⁷ This is not the language of self-chosen exile. This is the language of judgment imposed from above.

The choice model tells us that hell is locked from the inside. But the biblical descriptions make it sound like someone is being locked in, not locking themselves in. The language of casting, throwing, and shutting out does not fit well with a view that says the damned are simply getting what they want.

Problem Four: The Fear of the Lord

The Bible talks a lot about fearing God. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). Jesus Himself said, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).

The choice model can easily explain why we should fear sin. Sin has terrible consequences. It ruins us from the inside. We should be afraid of what sin does to our souls. But the fear of sin is not the same as the fear of the Lord. Scripture calls us to fear God Himself—not because He is cruel, but because He is overwhelmingly holy and powerful, and because standing in His presence with a sinful heart is a terrifying thing. As Manis observes, the choice model struggles to account for why we should fear the Lord rather than merely fearing the consequences of our own bad decisions.²⁹

Problem Five: Hell as Separation from God

The choice model typically describes hell as a state of eternal separation from God. The damned exile themselves from God’s presence. They go to a place where God is absent. This sounds plausible until you think about it theologically.

Where, exactly, can anyone go to escape the presence of an omnipresent God? The psalmist asked this question three thousand years ago: “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!” (Psalm 139:7–8). The doctrine of divine omnipresence—the teaching that God is everywhere present, always—is one of the most basic beliefs of the Christian faith. And it creates a serious problem for any view that describes hell as a place where God is absent.³⁰

Even more striking is Revelation 14:10, which says that the wicked “will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.”³¹ In the presence of the Lamb! The suffering of the wicked does not happen far away from Christ. It happens right in front of Him. As Walls himself acknowledges, this creates a genuine puzzle for the choice model: “The question is how the suffering of hell can take place in the presence of Christ if the essence of hell is being separated from God. Isn’t this contradictory?”³²

Yes. On the pure choice model, it is.

Problem Six: The Annihilation Question

Here is a problem that is easy to miss but hard to answer once you see it. If hell is simply a matter of God respecting human freedom, then what about those who would prefer to stop existing rather than continue in suffering? Kierkegaard himself recognizes this: he writes that for those in despair, “the sickness and its torment—and the death—are precisely this inability to die.”³³ Some of the damned do not want to keep existing in defiance. They want their suffering to end. They want annihilation.

If the purpose of hell is to honor human free choice, then why would God not honor the choice to stop existing? Walls tries to answer this by suggesting that divine respect for freedom requires that people live with the consequences of their decisive choices.³⁴ But Manis exposes the weakness of this argument. He points out that the whole logic of grace and forgiveness involves God not making us live with the full consequences of our choices. In the gospel, receiving grace means escaping the eternal consequences of our sins. So there is no principled reason, within the choice model itself, to deny that freedom could also be used to escape eternal consequences through annihilation.³⁵

The choice model, on its own terms, cannot explain why the only options are heaven or eternal conscious suffering. It needs something more to explain why annihilation is not available as a third option. And it is the divine presence model that supplies that missing piece, as we will see shortly.

Problem Seven: The Problem of Mild Hell

Earlier we noted that several defenders of the choice model have entertained the idea that hell might not be so bad. Walls speaks of a “distorted mirror image of heaven.” Swinburne imagines the damned pursuing trivial pleasures. Stump describes Dante’s limbo as a beautiful place with green meadows and philosophical discussions. The idea is that hell is not agony—it is just a diminished, unsatisfying existence that the damned prefer to the alternative of surrendering to God.

There is a certain internal logic to this. If the damned choose hell freely, and if they keep choosing it, then presumably hell must offer them something they want—or at least something they prefer to the alternative. It would be strange to say that someone freely and persistently chooses a state of utter, unrelieved agony. So the choice model has a natural tendency to soften the severity of hell in order to make the “choice” intelligible.

But here is the problem. The Bible does not describe hell in mild terms. It uses the language of fire, torment, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. Jesus warned people about hell in the strongest possible terms. Whatever hell is, it is not a quiet, philosophical afternoon in a meadow. If the choice model can only make sense of damnation by softening hell into something relatively tolerable, then the model has moved a long way from what Scripture actually teaches.⁶⁷

Manis highlights this tension clearly. He notes that the idea of a mild hell is actually in tension with the choice model’s own best feature: its ability to explain why God respects freedom. If hell is mild enough that the damned prefer it to heaven, then the seriousness of the biblical warnings about hell seems out of proportion to the reality. But if hell is as terrible as Scripture describes, then the claim that anyone would freely and persistently choose it becomes harder and harder to maintain. The choice model is caught between two unpalatable options: either hell is not so bad (which contradicts Scripture) or it is terrible (which makes the “free choice” of hell hard to believe).⁶⁸

The divine presence model resolves this tension completely. Hell is terrible—genuinely, overwhelmingly terrible—because being in the presence of perfect love with a heart full of hatred is an agonizing experience. But the damned do not “choose” hell in the sense that they calmly weigh their options and pick the worse one. They are driven to their condition by the progressive hardening of their own hearts. They cannot endure love. That is not a calm preference. It is a desperate, self-inflicted catastrophe.

The Divine Presence Model: A Better Way

Now we come to the critical question: is there a way to keep the best insights of the choice model—its emphasis on freedom, its rejection of retribution, its protection of God’s character—while also accounting for the biblical themes that the choice model struggles to accommodate?

There is. And it is the divine presence model.

As we explored in Chapter 3 and will develop at length in the chapters ahead, the divine presence model agrees with the choice model on many essential points. Both reject the retribution thesis. Both affirm that damnation is a natural consequence of persistence in sin, not an arbitrary punishment God invents. Both take human freedom seriously. Both insist that God wills the salvation of every person.³⁷

But the divine presence model adds a crucial insight that the choice model lacks. It answers the question that the choice model leaves hanging: What is it about hell that makes it so terrible?

On the choice model, hell is terrible because the damned are separated from God, and separation from the source of all goodness is inherently miserable. That sounds reasonable enough. But as we have just seen, the Bible does not actually describe hell as separation from God. It describes hell as taking place in God’s presence—in the presence of the Lamb. The psalmist tells us there is no place in all creation where God is not present. The Apostle Paul told the Athenians that “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and he was applying this truth even to people who had not yet found God.³⁸

The divine presence model takes this seriously. On this model, hell is not where God is absent. Hell is what it feels like to be in the presence of an all-loving, all-holy God with a heart that is hardened against Him. The same divine love that is paradise for the righteous is torment for the wicked—not because God changes, but because the human heart determines how that love is received.³⁹

Think about it this way. Imagine a man who has been unfaithful to his wife for decades. He has lied to her, cheated on her, and treated her with contempt. Now imagine that she is the most loving, forgiving, gracious person you have ever met. She genuinely loves him. She forgives him freely. She stands ready to receive him back.

What would it feel like for that man to be in her presence—to see her love, to know what he has done, to feel the weight of his betrayal? Her love would not comfort him. Her love would burn him. Not because she is punishing him. But because her goodness exposes his wickedness. Her faithfulness illuminates his unfaithfulness. Her love makes his hatred visible. And the more she loves him, the worse he feels—unless he repents.

That is the divine presence model in a nutshell. God does not change. God does not switch from love to wrath. God is always and only love. But love experienced by a rebellious heart feels like fire.⁴⁰

Sharon Baker illustrates this powerfully with her fictional character Otto. Otto is not a caricature of evil. He is a realistic portrait of what sustained selfishness and cruelty do to a human soul. In Baker’s telling, Otto encounters the full, unfiltered presence of God on the Day of Judgment. The fire of God’s love surrounds him. And what happens next depends on what is inside Otto’s heart. If there is anything good left in him, the fire purifies it. If there is something that can respond to love, the fire draws it out and heals it. But if Otto has hardened himself so completely that there is nothing left to purify—if his entire being has become opposition to love—then the fire consumes him. Not because God wants to destroy him. But because there is nothing left of him that can survive in the presence of love.⁶⁹

Baker writes that “the possibility exists that Otto does not accept God’s offer of restoration, or that after the testing by fire nothing remains of him at all. Nothing.” But she is careful to add: “In order to preserve human freedom, which God gave to us at creation, we must allow for the possibility that some people will still reject God. The fire does not eliminate the gift of human freedom.”⁷⁰

Do you see what Baker is doing here? She is keeping the choice model’s emphasis on freedom—Otto is free to the very end—but she has added the missing piece that the choice model lacks: the fire that tests Otto is not an abstract “separation from God.” It is the actual, overwhelming, burning presence of God. And that presence is what makes the difference between purification and destruction.

Now here is where this model fills in the gaps left by the choice model.

The choice model struggles with punishment language. The divine presence model handles it naturally. On this model, hell truly functions as a punishment for the wicked, even though it is not intended by God as a punishment. As Manis explains, the damned do not want to be subjected to God’s presence. It is a source of torment to them. From their perspective, it feels exactly like a retributive punishment—it feels like divine wrath, judgment, and vengeance.⁴¹ The biblical language of punishment is thus “phenomenologically apt”—it accurately describes the experience of the damned, even though the reality behind that experience is not punitive wrath but consuming love.⁴²

The choice model struggles with the imposed nature of damnation. The divine presence model accounts for it directly. On this model, the revelation of Christ in glory at the final judgment is something that happens to everyone, whether they want it or not. God has compelling reasons for revealing Himself fully—it is the culminating act of His plan to restore all things. The damned do not choose this exposure. They do not want it. But it happens anyway, because God is God. And when it happens, those with hardened hearts experience it as an overwhelming and unbearable torment—not because God is tormenting them, but because that is what divine love feels like to a heart consumed by hatred.⁴³

The choice model struggles with the fear of the Lord. On the divine presence model, the fear of the Lord makes perfect sense. We are called to fear God not merely because sin has bad consequences, but because God Himself is an overwhelming reality. His holiness is real. His love is consuming. The fire that purifies gold also consumes wood. We are called to prepare our hearts now, in this life, so that when we stand in that presence, we experience joy and not terror. The fear of the Lord is the recognition that the God we will meet is not a harmless abstraction but a living, burning, all-consuming love.⁴⁴

The choice model struggles with divine omnipresence. The divine presence model is built on it. Rather than trying to explain how anyone could be separated from an omnipresent God, the divine presence model starts with God’s omnipresence as a non-negotiable truth and asks: what would it be like for different kinds of people to be fully, permanently exposed to the presence of a God who is love? The answer is that those who love God experience paradise, and those who hate Him experience hell. Same God. Same love. Same fire. Two radically different experiences.⁴⁵

The choice model struggles with the annihilation question. The divine presence model resolves it. On this model, once the veil of divine hiddenness is removed at the final judgment, there is no escaping God’s presence. There is no “neutral zone” where the damned could simply be left alone. God is everywhere. His presence is inescapable. And this means that the only possible states for a conscious being in the new creation are communion with God (paradise) or suffering in the presence of God (hell). There is no third option—no quiet corner of the universe where someone could exist peacefully without either embracing God or being consumed by His presence. The divine presence model explains why the options are exhaustive in a way that the pure choice model cannot.⁴⁶

Self-Deception and the Heart’s Response

One of the areas where the divine presence model most clearly improves on the choice model is in its account of self-deception. The choice model knows that self-deception is part of the picture. Walls acknowledges that people deceive themselves about the goodness of God, and Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair is shot through with the language of self-deception.⁴⁹ But the choice model does not fully integrate self-deception into its explanation of how damnation works.

The divine presence model does. On this model, self-deception is not just a stage on the road to damnation—it is the very mechanism by which God’s love becomes unbearable to the wicked. When a person deceives themselves about the nature of reality—when they convince themselves that selfishness is better than love, that rebellion is better than surrender, that they are right and God is wrong—they form a character that is fundamentally opposed to truth. And when that character is exposed to the full, unfiltered truth of God’s presence, the experience is devastating. It is not that God is punishing them for their self-deception. It is that the truth itself—God’s burning, radiant, inescapable truth—is the very thing that makes their condition so agonizing.⁵⁰

As Manis explains in Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, the divine presence model provides additional explanations for why repentance becomes psychologically impossible after the final judgment. The presence of God reveals the truth about everyone. For the damned, this is a source of deep humiliation and offense. And rather than driving them to repentance, this humiliation has the effect of entrenching them further in their hardness of heart and self-deception. The very thing that should set them free—the revelation of truth—instead drives them deeper into their rebellion, because they cannot bear what the truth says about them.⁵¹

This is something the choice model on its own cannot fully explain. The choice model says the damned choose hell. The divine presence model explains why they experience God’s loving presence as hell. The choice model says the doors are locked from the inside. The divine presence model explains what it is on the outside of those doors that makes the damned so desperate to keep them shut—and the answer is not punishment or abandonment. The answer is love. Overwhelming, all-consuming, inescapable love.

Freedom Preserved, Not Abandoned

I want to be very clear about something. The divine presence model does not abandon the choice model’s concern for human freedom. It honors it. The damned are not victims of divine cruelty. They are people whose own free choices, made over time and through the deepening spiral of self-deception, have formed them into the kind of people who cannot endure love. Their freedom is real. Their choices are genuine. And God’s respect for their freedom is absolute.

But the divine presence model adds a crucial qualification that the choice model needs. The damned are free, yes—but their freedom has been corrupted by their own misuse of it. They are free in the way an addict is free. They can see what they are doing. They may even know, at some level, that they are destroying themselves. But they cannot stop. Their character has been formed by their own choices into something that can no longer respond positively to love. As Manis writes, the decisions of the self-deceived are “free, up to the point that moral freedom is lost altogether. But even beyond this point, the individual is responsible both for the state they’re in and the decisions they make in this state, because both are natural consequences of their own past misuses of free will.”⁵²

This is a richer, more realistic account of human freedom than the one the choice model offers by itself. The choice model tends to picture freedom as a clean, uncomplicated thing: you are presented with the truth, and you say yes or no. The divine presence model recognizes that real human freedom is messier than that. Our choices shape our character, and our character shapes our ability to choose. Freedom can be used to destroy itself. That is the terrifying truth at the heart of the doctrine of hell.⁵³

And yet—and this is crucial—the divine presence model does not use the reality of self-deception as an excuse to let anyone off the hook. The choices that led to the hardening were free choices. The self-deception that blinds the damned is self-deception—something they did to themselves, not something that was done to them. Nobody forced them to harden their hearts. Nobody forced them to choose selfishness over love, pride over humility, rebellion over surrender. The trajectory of their lives was set by their own hands, even if they no longer have the power to reverse it. As Paul puts it, “They are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). The divine presence model takes both freedom and responsibility seriously. It does not soften the gravity of human choices. If anything, it makes those choices more weighty, more consequential, and more urgent than they are on the choice model alone.

Two Views Converging

Here is what I find most fascinating about this whole discussion. The choice model and the divine presence model are not enemies. They are not opposites. They are, in many ways, two halves of a single, more complete picture.

The choice model gives us the human side of damnation: the role of free will, the psychology of self-deception, the gradual hardening of the heart that makes a person incapable of communion with God. The divine presence model gives us the divine side: the overwhelming reality of God’s love, the inescapable nature of His presence, and the explanation of why that presence is experienced so differently by those who love Him and those who do not.

Put them together, and you have something far more powerful than either one alone. You have a model that takes human freedom as seriously as any Kierkegaardian could want, while also doing justice to the biblical picture of a God whose presence is both the greatest blessing and the most terrifying reality in the universe. You have a model that explains why people end up in hell (their own free choices), what hell actually is (the experience of God’s love by a hardened heart), and how the biblical language of punishment, wrath, and judgment fits into a picture of a God who is, above all, love.

Manis sees this clearly. He describes the divine presence model as standing “between traditionalism and the choice model,” sharing key features with each but avoiding their respective weaknesses. The divine presence model overlaps the choice model in rejecting retribution and affirming natural consequences, but it has “the further advantage of being able to accomplish all of this without downplaying such prominent scriptural themes as divine wrath, final judgment, and the fear of the Lord.”⁵⁴

And it is not just Manis who sees the convergence. As we noted earlier, Lewis, Kvanvig, and Walls have all incorporated elements of the divine presence model into their versions of the choice model. Walls, in particular, has moved significantly in this direction. In Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, he grapples honestly with the puzzle of Revelation 14:10—the fact that suffering happens in the presence of the Lamb—and he offers an analogy that sounds remarkably like the divine presence model: a son alienated from a father who deeply loves him, forced to live under the same roof, hating his father and resenting his dependence, unable to escape the presence of the one whose love he refuses to receive.⁵⁵

Walls then goes further. He notes that fire in the Bible is an image of God’s presence, not His absence, and he explicitly recognizes the “long theological tradition” of this idea in Eastern Orthodoxy. He even endorses the Orthodox idea that the lake of fire and the river of the water of life flow from the same source—the throne of the Lamb.⁵⁶ This is the divine presence model. Walls may not use that label, but the substance is unmistakable.

Even Eleonore Stump, in her more recent work on the atonement, has written that “the fire of God’s love can be experienced as wild and exhilarating or harsh and hateful, depending on the love or lack of love on the part of a human person experiencing it.”⁵⁷ That is the divine presence model in a single sentence.

What all of this suggests is that the best thinkers working on the choice model are already moving toward the divine presence model—whether they realize it or not. The choice model, at its best, is an incomplete version of the divine presence model. It gets the human side right but leaves out the divine side. The divine presence model completes the picture.

Conclusion: Gratitude and a Step Forward

The choice model of hell is one of the most important contributions to the theology of hell in the last century. Lewis, Walls, Stump, Swinburne, and Kierkegaard have each brought genuine insight to a question that has troubled Christians for two thousand years. They have shown us that hell need not be a horror imposed by an angry God. They have demonstrated that human freedom is central to any honest account of damnation. They have pushed back against the idea that God is a divine torturer, and they have done so with intellectual honesty and moral seriousness.

I am grateful for their work. This book builds on it.

But the choice model, for all its strengths, is not the final word. It cannot account for the biblical language of punishment. It cannot explain why damnation is described as imposed rather than chosen. It struggles with the theme of the fear of the Lord. It sits uneasily with divine omnipresence. It cannot explain why annihilation is not available as a third option for those who would prefer non-existence to eternal suffering. And its tendency toward a “mild hell” brings it into tension with the severity of the biblical warnings.

The divine presence model answers all of these questions. It does so not by rejecting the choice model but by completing it. It keeps every insight the choice model offers—freedom, natural consequences, the rejection of retribution, the protection of God’s character—and adds the one thing the choice model lacks: a clear explanation of what makes hell hell.

The answer is not the absence of God. The answer is the presence of God. The inescapable, all-consuming, burning love of a God who is everywhere, who fills all things, and whose fire is the same toward all—purifying the willing and consuming the resistant.

I want to be honest about something as we close this chapter. When I first encountered the choice model years ago, it was a lifeline. I had been struggling with the traditional picture of hell—the one in which God is the torturer and the wicked are His helpless victims. The choice model freed me from that picture. It showed me a God who respects us enough to let us say no. And I will always be grateful for that.

But the choice model left me with a nagging question I could not shake. If hell is just a self-chosen exile, then why does the Bible describe it in such terrifying terms? Why does Jesus warn about it so urgently? Why does Paul speak of the “wrath of God” and the “fear of the Lord”? The choice model had softened hell to the point where it no longer matched the biblical descriptions. Something was missing.

The divine presence model supplied what was missing. It told me that hell is terrifying not because God is cruel, but because God is love—and love, when it meets a heart that has hardened against it, is the most overwhelming and unbearable reality in the universe. The fire is real. The judgment is real. The urgency is real. But the fire is love. The judgment is the revelation of truth. And the urgency comes not from the threat of an angry God, but from the reality that every day we spend hardening our hearts is a day that makes us less able to endure the love that is coming for us whether we want it or not.⁷¹

That is the vision that the choice model points toward but never quite reaches. The divine presence model completes the journey.

In the next chapter, we will turn to conditional immortality and ask a parallel question: CI tells us what happens to the wicked (they are destroyed), but does it tell us how and why? And once again, we will find that the divine presence model supplies the missing piece.⁶⁰