Chapter 12

Conditional Immortality—Strengths and the Missing Piece

A. The View Presented Fairly

If you have ever felt uneasy about the idea that God keeps people alive forever just to punish them, you are not alone. A growing number of serious, Bible-believing scholars share that unease. Their answer is called conditional immortality—or, as some prefer, annihilationism. And it deserves a fair hearing.

The core idea is simple: eternal life is a gift, not something we automatically have. God alone possesses immortality (1 Tim. 6:16). He offers that gift to those who trust in Christ. Those who finally refuse the gift do not live forever in torment. They perish. They are destroyed. They cease to exist. The fire does not burn forever; it consumes. The second death is a real death—not an endless dying.

This is not some fringe idea cooked up by people who want to make the Bible say something softer than it really says. Some of the finest evangelical minds of the last century have embraced it or leaned strongly in its direction. John Stott, one of the most respected evangelical leaders of the twentieth century, wrote that he found the idea of eternal conscious torment emotionally intolerable and questioned whether the traditional view could really be squared with the biblical evidence.¹ Clark Pinnock argued that the God Jesus called Abba—Father—could not be the God who tortures people without end.² Edward Fudge devoted an entire career to the question, producing The Fire That Consumes, the most thorough biblical case for conditional immortality ever written.³ And in recent years, Chris Date and the Rethinking Hell project have brought a new generation of scholars into the conversation.⁴

These are not theological lightweights. They are people who take the Bible seriously and who have looked hard at the evidence. As Fudge reminded us, J. I. Packer himself wrote that we are forbidden to become enslaved to human tradition, even evangelical tradition. We may never assume the complete rightness of our established ways of thought and excuse ourselves from the duty of testing them by Scripture.⁵ That is exactly what conditionalists are doing. They are testing the tradition—and finding it wanting.

The Biblical Case

So what does the biblical case for conditional immortality actually look like? It starts with Jesus himself. In Matthew 10:28, Jesus warns: “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.” Notice the word destroy. Not “torment forever.” Not “preserve in agony.” Destroy. The Greek word here is apollymi, and in many of its New Testament uses, it means exactly what it sounds like—to bring to ruin, to put an end to.⁶ Jesus says God is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. Conditional immortalists say we should take Jesus at his word.

Then there is John 3:16, probably the most famous verse in the Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” The contrast is clear. On one side: eternal life. On the other side: perishing. Not eternal torment. Not endless suffering. Perishing. If I told you that a ship perished at sea, you would not picture it floating forever in agony. You would picture it sinking. Gone.⁷

Paul uses similar language. In 2 Thessalonians 1:9, he writes that the wicked “will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord.” The phrase is olethros aiōnios—destruction that belongs to the age to come. Conditional immortalists read this as a destruction that is final and irreversible. It is not that the process of destroying goes on forever. It is that the result of the destruction lasts forever. Once destroyed, the wicked are never restored. The punishment is eternal in its effect, not in its duration.⁸

Now, I should note that this reading is contested. Traditionalists like Robert Peterson argue that “everlasting destruction” in context describes an ongoing state of ruin, especially given the phrase “shut out from the presence of the Lord” that follows. How, Peterson asks, can a person be “shut out” from anything if that person no longer exists?⁹ That is a fair point, and we will engage it further in our exegetical chapters. But even Peterson admits that the vocabulary of destruction is one of the strongest cards in the conditionalist hand.

Revelation adds more evidence. In Revelation 20:14, John writes that “death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death.” The second death. Not the second life-of-unending-pain. The second death. And Fudge points out that the imagery of fire throughout Scripture is consistently the imagery of consumption, not preservation. When fire burns chaff, it destroys it. When fire falls on Sodom and Gomorrah, it does not keep the cities alive forever. It turns them to ashes.¹⁰

The Old Testament fills out the picture further. Malachi 4:1–3 gives us one of the most vivid images in all of Scripture. The day of the Lord will come “burning like a furnace,” and all the arrogant and every evildoer “will be stubble.” The day “will set them on fire,” and “not a root or a branch will be left to them.” Then Malachi adds: “You will tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet.” Ashes. Not living, screaming people. Ashes. That is the language of consumption and destruction, not the language of preservation and torment.

The Psalms use similar language. Psalm 37:20 says the wicked “will perish; the enemies of the Lord are like the beauty of the fields—they vanish, like smoke they vanish away.” Psalm 68:2 says, “As wax melts before the fire, so the wicked perish before God.” The imagery is always the same: fire consumes, melts, turns things to nothing. It does not preserve them alive in agony.

And then there is Hebrews 10:26–27, which warns those who deliberately keep on sinning that “no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.” Notice: the fire consumes God’s enemies. It does not keep them alive forever. It consumes them.

Fudge summarizes the overall biblical picture with a claim that is hard to argue against. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible repeatedly warns that the wicked will “die,” “perish,” or “be destroyed.” The actual process of destruction may involve conscious pain that differs in severity from case to case—Scripture seems to indicate that it will. But whatever the process looks like, it ends in death. Those who die this second death will never live again.¹¹

Pinnock drives the point home. He argues that the Bible does not teach the natural immortality of the soul. Instead, it teaches that God alone has immortality and graciously grants embodied life to his people through the resurrection. If a person finally rejects God, there is nothing in biblical teaching about human nature that prevents God from doing exactly what Jesus said he could do—destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.¹²

The Theological Case

Beyond the biblical texts, conditional immortality makes a strong theological argument. Several points stand out.

First, there is the problem of proportionality. Infinite punishment for finite sin strikes many thoughtful Christians as unjust. Even if sin against an infinite God is infinitely serious (an argument we examined in Chapter 10), it is hard to see how any finite creature’s rebellion could warrant an eternity of conscious suffering. Conditional immortality solves this by making the punishment final rather than endless. The wicked are destroyed—completely and permanently. Justice is served. But there is no ongoing torture that stretches into infinity.¹³

Second, there is the problem of God’s victory. If eternal conscious torment is true, then evil is never fully defeated. There is always a corner of reality where rebellion, suffering, and hatred persist—forever. That picture looks more like the dualism of ancient pagan religions than like the Christian hope that God will one day be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Conditional immortality resolves this tension. On this view, God’s final victory is complete. Evil is not merely quarantined. It is destroyed. Sin, death, and rebellion are wiped out entirely. As Fudge puts it: “Annihilation will be annihilated.”¹⁴

Third, there is the character of God. Conditional immortalists argue that a God who keeps people alive forever for the sole purpose of making them suffer is not the God revealed in Jesus. It would make God appear more like a vindictive tyrant than a loving Father.¹⁵ Conditional immortality preserves the seriousness of judgment while protecting the goodness and love of the God who executes it.

Fourth, there is the question of God’s purpose. What possible purpose could be served by tormenting someone forever? If the purpose is justice, then surely justice has a limit. If the purpose is deterrence, then deterrence requires an audience that can learn—but no one in hell can benefit from the lesson. If the purpose is retribution, then retribution that never ends becomes indistinguishable from sadism. Manis notes that many scholars find it “senseless” or “pointless” for God to sustain the wicked in existence beyond the point where they have decisively rejected him. It would be far more consistent with the divine character for God to mercifully end their existence than to sustain them in misery forever.¹⁶

Fifth, there is a powerful argument from the atonement. Fudge makes the point that if we want to understand what God’s wrath against sin actually looks like, we should look at the cross. The cross is the clearest picture we have of divine judgment, and what it shows is not unending torture but death. Jesus died. He did not suffer eternally. He bore the penalty of sin, and that penalty was death—real, actual death. If the penalty that Jesus bore on our behalf was death, then it stands to reason that the penalty for those who reject that sacrifice is also death—not endless torment but final, irreversible destruction. The cross, conditionalists argue, confirms that the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23), not an eternity of conscious suffering.^16b

Now, traditionalists push back on this point. Peterson argues that Jesus suffered the spiritual equivalent of hell on the cross—separation from the Father—and that his suffering was compressed into a finite period only because of the infinite value of his divine nature. A finite person, lacking that infinite worth, would require an infinite duration to suffer the same penalty. But conditionalists find this reasoning strained. If Jesus truly paid the penalty in full, and the penalty was death, then death is the penalty. Stretching it into eternity adds something the cross does not teach.^16c

The Anthropological Case

There is one more piece of the conditional immortality puzzle, and it has to do with what we are as human beings. The traditional view of hell depends heavily on the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul—the idea that every human soul, by its very nature, lives forever and cannot be destroyed. If that is true, then the soul has to go somewhere for eternity. But where did this idea come from?

Fudge traces it straight back to Plato. The Greek philosopher taught that the soul is an incorporeal, indestructible substance that has always existed and will always exist. Early Christian converts from Greek philosophy—people like Athenagoras, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria—carried this assumption with them into the church. Fudge argues that this was a case of the church absorbing a pagan idea and baptizing it with Christian language.¹⁷

Athenagoras, who lived around 127–190 AD, was one of the first Christians to expressly deny the final annihilation of the wicked. But notice the basis for his conclusion. It was not Scripture. It was the pagan doctrine that every person has a soul that is inherently immortal and can never die. Because the soul is immortal, Athenagoras argued, God did not make us “that we should perish and be annihilated.”¹⁸

Tertullian, who was born about 160 AD, took this further. He argued that the soul is naturally immortal and therefore cannot be destroyed. So when Jesus warned that God could “destroy both body and soul in hell,” Tertullian said Jesus did not really mean God would actually destroy the soul. He meant God would torment it forever.¹⁹ Think about that for a moment. Jesus says “destroy.” Tertullian says “not really.” That is not letting Scripture speak for itself. That is letting a Greek philosopher override the words of Jesus.

The pattern continued with Clement of Alexandria, who also based his arguments on the supposed immortality of the soul. He wrote that even the souls of the impious are immortal, and that they endure without end the torments of eternal fire.²⁰ Once again, the reasoning is the same: the soul cannot die because it is immortal by nature. Therefore, hell must be eternal torment rather than destruction.

Fudge makes an important observation about all of these early writers. They acknowledged, when pressed, that since God created the soul, he also has the power to destroy it. But then, when they turned to discuss final punishment, they seemed to forget the concession they had already made. They used biblical words like “die,” “perish,” and “destroy”—and then denied that these words meant what they obviously say.²¹

As Fudge points out, the Bible never uses the phrase “immortality of the soul.” Paul says that God alone has immortality (1 Tim. 6:16) and that he grants it to believers through the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:21, 50–54; 2 Tim. 1:10). Immortality is not something we possess by nature. It is a gift. It is conditional. And if the soul is not naturally immortal, then there is nothing to stop God from destroying the wicked exactly as Jesus said he would.²²

Now, I want to be transparent about something here. In this book, I affirm substance dualism—the view that human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul. I believe the soul can exist apart from the body, and I believe in a conscious intermediate state. But none of that requires the natural immortality of the soul. You can believe the soul is real, immaterial, and conscious after death while also believing that God has the power to destroy it. In fact, Jesus explicitly says so in Matthew 10:28. The soul exists by God’s sustaining power, not by its own nature. God gives it life, and God can take that life away. This is conditional immortality, and it is fully compatible with substance dualism.²³

B. Strengths Acknowledged

I want to be clear about something before we go any further. Conditional immortality gets a great deal right. In this book, I lean toward CI as the most likely final outcome for those who reject God. The strengths of this view are real and substantial, and I hold them with conviction.

First, CI takes the destruction language of Scripture seriously. The Bible says the wicked will “perish,” be “destroyed,” suffer a “second death,” and be burned like “chaff.” CI reads these words at face value. It does not need to explain why “destroy” does not really mean destroy, or why “death” does not really mean death. That is a significant advantage.²⁵

Second, CI avoids the moral horror of eternal conscious torment. Whatever problems CI may have (and we will get to those shortly), it does not require us to believe that a loving God tortures people forever. And that matters. If your theology of hell makes God look worse than the worst human tyrant, something has gone wrong somewhere.²⁶

Third, CI takes the finality of judgment seriously. Unlike universalism, CI affirms that the choices we make have real, permanent consequences. Not everyone is saved. The second death is final. There is no coming back from it. This preserves the urgency of the gospel and the reality of judgment in a way that many find more faithful to the biblical picture than universalism can offer.

Fourth, CI is compatible with conditional immortality of the soul—a view that, as we just saw, has strong biblical support. If immortality is a gift given only to the redeemed, then the destruction of the wicked follows naturally. They simply do not receive the gift of eternal life.²⁷

Fifth, CI resolves the dualism problem. On the traditional view, good and evil coexist forever—heaven and hell running in parallel for all eternity. That is a strange picture for a faith that proclaims the total victory of God. CI offers something cleaner: in the end, evil is gone. Completely. God truly is “all in all.”²⁸

Sixth, and this often gets overlooked, CI is not some modern invention. The early apologists knew the view. Several early Christian writers, including Irenaeus, spoke of the wicked as losing their existence by turning away from the source of life. The view has a longer pedigree than most people realize. It was only after the Platonic doctrine of the soul’s natural immortality became dominant in Christian theology that CI was pushed to the margins. Now, as scholars like Fudge, Stott, and the Rethinking Hell movement have shown, it is making a comeback—and the comeback is built on Scripture, not on sentimentality.²⁹

So CI is strong. Very strong. It is far more faithful to the biblical evidence than eternal conscious torment. It is morally coherent. It takes both judgment and God’s love seriously. I believe it is the right answer to the question “What is the final outcome for the unrepentant?”—or at least, I lean that direction. But here is the thing. Even the strongest view can have a gap. And CI has one. It is not a fatal gap. But it is real. And filling it will make CI even stronger than it already is.

C. The Missing Piece—What CI Does Not Explain

Here is the question that conditional immortality, by itself, does not answer: What destroys the wicked?

CI tells us what happens. The wicked are destroyed. It tells us when it happens. After the final judgment. It tells us why it is just. Because God is holy and sin cannot endure in his presence forever. But it does not tell us how the destruction actually works. It does not explain the mechanism.

Think of it this way. If a doctor tells you, “The patient died,” that is important information. But it does not tell you what killed the patient. Was it a disease? An accident? A decision to stop treatment? The what is clear. The how is still a mystery.

CI faces the same kind of gap. The wicked are destroyed. But how? What is the fire? What is the force that actually brings about their end? And this is not just an academic question. The answer matters enormously, because it tells us something crucial about the character of God. Is God the one doing the destroying? If so, how does that square with the claim that God is love? Or is something else at work? The mechanism matters because it reveals the heart of the one behind the judgment.

Three Possible Mechanisms

R. Zachary Manis, in his careful philosophical work Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, lays out several ways that annihilationists have tried to answer this question. He devotes an entire chapter to the topic, and it is one of the most rigorous philosophical analyses of annihilationism in print. Each version he examines has significant problems.³⁰

The first option is retributive annihilationism. On this view, God actively destroys the wicked as a punishment for their sin. He judges them, finds them guilty, and then wipes them out of existence. The destruction is a judicial sentence, carried out by the sovereign Judge of the universe.

The problem with this is that it inherits many of the same difficulties that plague eternal conscious torment. If God actively destroys people as a punishment, then God is still the one doing the destroying. He is still the agent of their end. That may be better than torturing them forever, but it still raises troubling questions. Is the destruction proportional to the sin? How do we reconcile it with the claim that God desires all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9)? As Manis points out, retributive annihilationism holds on to the retribution thesis—the idea that hell’s primary purpose is punishment imposed by God—and that thesis is the root of many of the problems that make eternal conscious torment so difficult to defend.³¹

Manis makes a sharp observation here. Retributive annihilationism is a compromise view. It walks far enough from tradition to inherit the main problem of universalism—the question of why a loving God would harm his creatures at all—but it does not walk far enough to actually solve anything. It merely reduces the severity of the punishment from infinite to finite. That is an improvement. But it is not a solution.³²

There is also a deeper issue with retributive annihilationism that is easy to miss. The tradition—Augustine, Aquinas, the whole Western stream—is the main authority that retributive annihilationists rely on for the retribution thesis itself. But the tradition also clearly teaches eternal conscious torment, not annihilation. So the retributive annihilationist is in an awkward position: she accepts the tradition’s view of God as a punishing judge but rejects the tradition’s view of what the punishment looks like. If you are going to depart from the tradition on the duration of punishment, why not also question whether retribution is really the point of hell in the first place?³³

The second option is what Manis calls natural consequence annihilationism. On this view, the destruction of the wicked is not a punishment that God imposes. It is the natural result of sin itself. Sin corrupts the soul. The more a person sins, the more their soul is degraded. Eventually, the soul is so corrupted that it simply ceases to exist. It falls apart, like a body that decays after death.³⁴

This is more promising. It removes God from the role of executioner and makes the destruction self-inflicted. But it has its own problems. The biggest one is this: if the soul is gradually corrupted by sin until it disintegrates, what is left behind? Manis points out that defenders of this view have to imagine something very strange—that the process of corruption destroys personhood but leaves behind something called “psychic detritus” or “remains.” The person is gone, but something is still there—a kind of subhuman remnant that can still feel pain but is no longer really a person.³⁵

That is a deeply disturbing picture. If these remnants can still suffer, then we have not really solved the problem of eternal conscious torment. We have just moved it to a subhuman level. And if they cannot suffer, then what are they? The whole thing becomes very murky, very fast.

There is also a philosophical problem with this view. Claire Brown and Jerry Walls have argued that the corruption argument for annihilationism requires sin to destroy human capacities completely—not just damage them, but wipe them out entirely. And it is not clear that sin has that kind of power. Sin corrupts. Sin degrades. But does sin have the power to actually un-make a person? To reduce a being created in the image of God to nothing? That is a very strong claim, and it is not obvious that it is true.³⁶

Manis does note, however, that Paul Griffiths has developed an interesting Augustinian version of natural consequence annihilationism based on the metaphysics of participation. On this view, we exist only as participants in God. Sin is the attempt to extricate ourselves from that participation. And if there is nothing about us or about God that guarantees our failure at that attempt, then self-annihilation is at least possible.³⁷ The idea is elegant, but it raises as many questions as it answers.

C. S. Lewis, interestingly, seems to have held something like the corruption argument, at least in some of his writings. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis describes the damned as having so thoroughly destroyed their own humanity that what remains is “nearly nothing.” He writes about people who are no longer truly recognizable as persons—creatures who have shrunk themselves down through selfishness and self-enclosure until almost nothing is left. The soul that is damned has thwarted its potential for relationship by becoming, as Kierkegaard would say, shut up in itself. It is a retreat from reality, from goodness, from everything that makes a person a person.^37b

But even Lewis recognized the limits of this picture. “Nearly nothing” is not the same as nothing. And the question of whether what remains is still suffering—still conscious, still aware of its own misery—haunts the corruption argument like a ghost. If the remnant suffers, we are back to eternal conscious torment, just in a diminished form. If the remnant does not suffer, then what moral weight does hell actually carry? The corruption argument, for all its imaginative power, does not fully resolve the question.

The third option is free will annihilationism. On this view, the wicked freely choose nonexistence. They prefer to cease to exist rather than continue in the presence of a God they hate. And God, respecting their freedom, grants their wish.³⁸

This view has some appeal. It protects God’s character by making the destruction a free choice. But it runs into a strange difficulty: Can a person actually choose not to exist? We have no experience of nonexistence. We cannot imagine it. It is very hard to see how anyone could freely and knowingly choose it. And if the choice is made from a position of self-deception—if the person does not truly understand what they are choosing—then how free is the choice, really?³⁹

Manis himself is deeply aware of these problems. His verdict is not that annihilationism is wrong. His verdict is that annihilationism, by itself, is incomplete. It needs something more. It needs a mechanism—an explanation of what the fire actually is, what the destructive force actually is, and how it relates to the character of God.⁴⁰

CI gives us the destination. But it does not give us the road. It tells us where the wicked end up (destroyed), but not how they get there. And the “how” matters immensely, because the “how” tells us what kind of God we are dealing with.

Is God a judge who passes a sentence and then carries it out by force? Or is God a loving Father whose very love is the fire that both purifies and consumes? The answer to that question changes everything. And this is where the divine presence model comes in.

D. The Divine Presence Model as the Missing Piece

The divine presence model provides exactly what conditional immortality needs: the mechanism. It answers the question “What destroys the wicked?” with a stunning and deeply biblical answer: God’s love.

Let me say that again, because it is the heart of this chapter. On the divine presence model, the fire that destroys the wicked is not a punishment imposed by an angry God. It is not a natural process of spiritual decay. It is not a free choice to stop existing. It is the overwhelming, inescapable, all-consuming love of God experienced by a heart that has hardened against it.

The same fire. The same love. The same God. But two completely different experiences. For those who love God, his presence is paradise—warmth, light, joy beyond anything we can imagine. For those who hate God, that same presence is agony—a fire they cannot escape and cannot endure.

As we explored in the foundations of this book, the Eastern Church Fathers understood this long ago. Saint Isaac the Syrian wrote that those who are suffering in hell are suffering because they are being scourged by love.⁴¹ The fire of hell and the light of heaven are the same fire and the same light. The difference is not in God. The difference is in us. And as Kalomiros explains in The River of Fire, the same divine energy produces different effects depending on the disposition of the person receiving it. The light illuminates and the light burns. It all depends on the heart.⁴²

Now here is the crucial point for this chapter: when you combine this insight with conditional immortality, you get the strongest possible account of what happens to the unrepentant at the final judgment.

How It Works

Picture it like this. At the final judgment, God’s presence is fully unveiled. The hidden God becomes the revealed God. Christ returns in glory, and as Manis puts it, the divine presence fills all of creation.⁴³ There is nowhere to hide. Everywhere is the blazing light of God’s truth. Everywhere is the overwhelming warmth of God’s love. For the righteous, this is the moment they have been waiting for. It is homecoming. It is the Father’s embrace.

But for those whose hearts have hardened against God—those who have spent a lifetime or more building walls against love, feeding on self-deception, choosing hatred over humility—this same unveiled presence is unbearable. Not because God is angry. Not because God is punishing them. But because love itself is agony to a heart that has rejected it.

Think of someone who has spent years in a dark room. Their eyes have adjusted to the darkness. If you suddenly throw open the curtains and let the full blaze of the noonday sun pour in, that light will hurt. Badly. Not because the sun is malicious. Not because the light intends harm. But because eyes adjusted to darkness cannot handle brightness. The problem is not with the sun. The problem is with the eyes.⁴⁴

Now imagine that the darkness was not forced on the person. Imagine they chose it. They preferred it. They locked the shutters themselves. Over time, they grew to hate the light—to see it as a threat, an enemy, something to be feared and resisted. When the light finally breaks through (as it inevitably will when God is unveiled), the person does not say, “Oh, how beautiful!” They scream. They turn away. They try to hide. But there is nowhere left to hide.

That is the divine presence model of hell. And when we apply it to conditional immortality, the mechanism becomes clear. What destroys the wicked? The love of God. Not as a punishment. Not as an act of wrath in the pagan sense. But as the natural, inevitable consequence of what happens when a sin-hardened heart encounters the full blaze of infinite love.

The fire is real. The destruction is real. But the fire is love, and the destruction is what love does to everything that opposes it. Think about how this works even at a human level. Have you ever been in the presence of someone so kind, so genuinely good, that it made you painfully aware of your own selfishness? Have you ever received an act of grace that, instead of making you feel relieved, made you feel ashamed? That is a faint, faint echo of what the divine presence model describes. Goodness itself becomes a mirror, and what the mirror reveals to a sin-hardened soul is unbearable. Now multiply that experience by infinity. That is what it means to stand before the unveiled love of God with a heart set against him.

And here is the thing: the fire does not have to last forever for it to be real. On the CI reading, the fire consumes. It finishes its work. For the righteous, the fire finishes the work of purification, and they emerge on the other side refined and radiant. For the wicked, the fire finishes the work of destruction, and they are gone. The process may be agonizing. Scripture suggests that it is—there is weeping, there is gnashing of teeth, there is the fire itself. But the agony has an end. The second death is a death. It terminates.

Baker’s Otto—What It Looks Like

Sharon Baker, in her book Razing Hell, gives us one of the most powerful illustrations of how this actually works. She tells the story of a fictional character named Otto—an international leader who has launched wars, terrorized nations, and caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people. He is as wicked as they come. And he is about to stand before God.⁴⁵

Otto enters the throne room of God expecting hatred, condemnation, and punishment. Instead, what hits him is something far more devastating than any punishment he could have imagined. He encounters love. Overwhelming, incomprehensible, relentless love. Baker describes it vividly: the blazing fire of God’s presence confronts Otto, and the closer he gets to God, the more deeply he feels not God’s hatred or judgment, but God’s love. And that love, in the sheer force of its abundance, acts as judgment against the total excessiveness of his sin.⁴⁶

Otto falls on his face. His hatred is replaced by remorse. He sees his victims—mothers crying for lost sons, children begging for their murdered fathers, the eighteen-year-old boy dying alone on the battlefield. God makes Otto go to each one and lay his hand upon their hearts. He feels their pain, their fear, their disappointment. He knows he caused it all. The fire of God burns, devouring his wickedness and evil deeds. As Baker puts it, this is hell for him. He weeps. His teeth gnash. His heart breaks. He cries out in utter remorse, knowing he can never undo the damage he has caused.⁴⁷

In Baker’s first telling of the story, Otto repents. He accepts God’s offer of forgiveness and reconciliation. He enters the kingdom, tested by fire, forgiven by grace. But Baker is careful to note that this is not the only possible ending. She writes: “The possibility exists, however, that Otto does not accept God’s offer of restoration, or that after the testing by fire, nothing remains of him at all. Nothing.”⁴⁸

There it is. The conditional immortality ending, set squarely within the divine presence model. Otto stands in the fire of God’s love. If there is anything good in him—any spark of receptivity to grace—the fire purifies it. But if there is nothing good left? If Otto’s heart is so completely hardened, so thoroughly given over to rebellion, that there is nothing in him that can receive love? Then the fire consumes him entirely. Not because God wills his destruction. But because that is what happens when infinite love meets absolute resistance.

Baker develops this further in her discussion of the lake of fire. If the lake of fire is identical to the fire of God’s presence (and Baker argues that it is), then the lake of fire tests, purifies, and puts death and evil to death. For someone like Otto, if there is no good remaining in him at all, the fire burns all of him. It completely destroys him. Nothing is left. That is annihilation—the second death, the death of death.⁴⁹

Baker also makes an interesting observation about the Greek word for “brimstone” (theion) in Revelation’s descriptions of the lake of fire. The word is spelled the same as the Greek adjective meaning “divine.” And in the ancient world, sulfur was used as a purifier, a cleanser, and a preservative. The Greeks used it to purify and dedicate temples and people to the gods. So when the first-century reader encountered the “lake of fire and brimstone,” they would not automatically think “torture chamber.” They might well think “lake of divine purification”—a place where evil is burned away and what remains is consecrated to God. That is a very different picture from the medieval hell of pitchforks and screaming souls, and it fits the divine presence model far better than it fits eternal conscious torment.^49b

The beauty of Baker’s model is that it holds two things together that most views of hell pull apart. It holds together the justice of God and the love of God. It holds together the reality of judgment and the hope of mercy. It does not flinch from the seriousness of sin—Otto goes through hell, and it is agonizing. But it also does not flinch from the goodness of God—the fire that judges Otto is the fire of love, and it is aimed at his restoration, not his torture. If Otto can receive that love, he is saved. If he cannot, he is consumed. Either way, God is love. Either way, the fire is love. That is the consistent witness of the divine presence model, and it is what makes the hybrid of CI and the divine presence model so compelling.

Manis recognizes the importance of Baker’s contribution. Her view, he writes, is best classified as a hybrid of the divine presence model and annihilationism. Despite its speculative nature, Baker’s work is suggestive of the lines along which a rigorous hybrid model of this type might be constructed.⁵⁰

Why This Hybrid Is Stronger Than CI Alone

Manis argues that the hybrid of annihilationism and the divine presence model is significantly better than standard versions of annihilationism.⁵¹ Let me explain why.

First, the hybrid avoids the problems of retributive annihilationism. God does not actively destroy the wicked as a judicial sentence. The destruction is the natural and inevitable consequence of encountering perfect Love with a heart that cannot receive it. God does not choose to destroy them. He foresees their destruction, and it grieves him. But his love, his very nature, is what does the consuming.⁵²

Second, the hybrid avoids the strange picture of “psychic detritus” that plagues natural consequence annihilationism. On the standard NCA view, sin gradually corrupts the soul until personhood is destroyed, but something subhuman remains. On the divine presence hybrid, the destruction is complete. The unveiling of God in all his glory consumes the wicked completely. There are no remains. There is no subhuman leftover still writhing in pain.⁵³

Third—and this is crucial—the hybrid allows us to use the doctrine of double effect to make sense of how a loving God can foresee the destruction of the wicked without that destruction undermining his love. The doctrine of double effect says that an action aimed at a good outcome is not made immoral by the fact that it also produces a foreseen but unintended bad outcome. A surgeon who removes a cancerous tumor intends to save the patient’s life. If the surgery is risky and the patient dies, the surgeon is not a murderer. The death was foreseen but not intended.⁵⁴

Apply this to the final judgment. God’s intention in unveiling his presence is not to destroy the wicked. His intention is to fill all of creation with his love, to bring about the new creation, to be “all in all.” The destruction of the wicked is a foreseen but unintended consequence of that good act. God grieves over it. He does not desire it. But he will not withhold his love from the entire creation just because some hearts have hardened against it. As Manis puts it, the destruction of the wicked “is an outcome that is foreseen by God, but it is not one that is desired or intended by Him.”⁵⁵

Fourth, the hybrid explains divine hiddenness in a way that standard CI cannot. Why does God remain hidden during this life? Why does he not just reveal himself now? On the divine presence model, the answer is heartbreaking: God remains hidden because he loves us. He knows that the full unveiling of his presence would destroy those who are not ready to receive it. He holds back, “not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9). The delay of the second coming is an act of mercy. God is giving people time. His hiddenness is not indifference. It is love buying time.⁵⁶

Hebrews 12:29—Our God Is a Consuming Fire

All of this comes together in one of the most important verses for our argument: Hebrews 12:29. “For our God is a consuming fire.” This verse is often read as a warning—and it is. But notice what it says. It does not say God sends fire. It does not say God uses fire as a weapon. It says God is fire. The fire is not something separate from God. The fire is God.⁵⁷

And what kind of fire is it? The context of Hebrews tells us. It is the fire of holiness. The fire of love. The fire of a God who cannot tolerate evil—not because he hates the sinner, but because his love is so fierce and so pure that nothing impure can survive in its presence. Gold goes through this fire and comes out refined. Straw goes through this fire and comes out as ash. Same fire. Different results. The difference is not in the fire. The difference is in the material.⁵⁸

This is the missing piece that conditional immortality has been looking for. The fire that consumes is not an external punishment. The fire that consumes is God himself—his love, his holiness, his blazing presence. And when a heart that has been fully and finally hardened against that love encounters it with nowhere to hide, the result is destruction. Not because God chose destruction. But because love and absolute resistance to love cannot coexist in the same space forever.

What About Manis’s Objection to Annihilation?

It is worth noting that Manis himself, in Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, develops an argument for why God would not annihilate the damned. His reasoning is interesting: if the presence of God is inherently life-giving, and if the new creation is defined by God’s presence filling all things, then annihilation would require God to withdraw his presence from the damned—which is precisely the opposite of what the new creation is about.⁶⁰

Manis writes that these two actions—God withdrawing his presence from some people in order to annihilate them, and God filling all of creation with his presence—are incompatible alternatives. You cannot have both.⁶¹

This is a serious argument, and I respect it deeply. But I am not fully persuaded. Here is why. Manis is right that God’s presence fills all things in the new creation. But “filling all things with his presence” and “destroying that which cannot endure his presence” are not necessarily incompatible. If the fire of God’s love consumes the wicked because his presence fills all things, then the destruction is not the result of God’s withdrawal. It is the result of his fullness. It is precisely because God’s presence is everywhere that the wicked cannot escape. And it is precisely because they cannot escape that the fire consumes them.

Baker’s model accounts for this. The lake of fire, on her reading, is not a place where God is absent. It is a place where God is overwhelmingly present—and that overwhelming presence is what destroys those who have nothing good left in them.⁶² On this reading, annihilation does not require God to withdraw. It is the ultimate consequence of his not withdrawing.

The Role of Freedom

One more point deserves attention here. Baker is careful to preserve human freedom throughout her model. The fire of God’s presence does not override the will. It does not force conversion. It purifies everything it touches—but if there is something in the person that freely receives the purification, the person is saved. If not, the person is consumed.⁶³

This matters because one of the strongest objections to universalism is that it seems to require God to override human freedom. CI + the divine presence model avoids this problem. It says: God’s love is the fire. The fire purifies the willing and consumes the resistant. Freedom is preserved. But the outcome is real, and it is final.

Baker puts it beautifully. A purified Otto would naturally choose life with God. Only something impure could reject God. If the fire destroys everything impure, and something good remains, that remaining thing would never reject God’s offer. But if nothing remains? Then the person is gone. Not because God forced the outcome. But because there was nothing left in the person to receive love.⁶⁴

This brings us full circle to the question of human freedom that we explored in Chapter 11 on the choice model. The choice model says the damned freely choose hell. The divine presence model agrees—but adds a crucial insight. They choose hell not because they clearly see both options and prefer misery, but because sin has so blinded them that they cannot see the love that is being offered. And when that love is finally unveiled in all its fullness, they still cannot receive it—not because they are being punished, but because they have become incapable of receiving what they were made for. The fire that could have saved them is the very fire that destroys them.

And this is why the divine presence model is so important for the CI position. Without it, CI can sound clinical—a simple transaction where God stamps “denied” on a soul and flips the switch to nonexistence. That picture is not much better than the courtroom God of eternal conscious torment. But with the divine presence model, CI becomes something altogether different. It becomes a tragedy of the deepest kind—the tragedy of a love so great that it would rather let the beloved be consumed than withdraw itself from creation. It is the story of a Father who never stops reaching out, even when the child’s heart has turned to stone. And it is the story of a fire that never stops burning—not because God is angry, but because God is love, and love cannot be anything other than what it is.

E. Conclusion and Connection

So where does this leave us?

Conditional immortality is a strong, biblically grounded alternative to eternal conscious torment. It takes the destruction language of Scripture seriously. It avoids the moral horror of a God who tortures people forever. It affirms the finality of judgment and the reality of the second death. Its advocates—Fudge, Stott, Pinnock, Date—have made a powerful case that deserves the respect of every Christian who cares about getting the Bible right.

But CI by itself has a gap. It tells us what happens to the wicked (destruction) but not how it happens or why it happens in a way that fully protects the character of God. Standard versions of annihilationism either make God the active destroyer (retributive), require sin to have the power to un-make a person (natural consequence), or stretch the concept of free choice past its limits (free will annihilationism). Each version has serious problems.

The divine presence model fills the gap. It provides the mechanism: the fire of God’s love. The wicked are not destroyed by a God who chooses to punish them. They are consumed by a God whose love they cannot endure. The fire is not something separate from God. The fire is who God is. And when a heart that has been fully and finally hardened against love encounters love with nowhere to hide, the result is destruction—not because God intended it, but because love and absolute resistance to love cannot coexist.

CI + the divine presence model = the strongest possible account of final destruction. It preserves the strengths of conditional immortality while solving its most serious philosophical problem. It protects the character of God more thoroughly than any standard version of annihilationism can do on its own. And it grounds the entire discussion in the most fundamental truth of the Christian faith: God is love. His fire is his love. And his love is the most fearful and the most beautiful reality in the universe.⁶⁵

I want to be honest with you about where I stand. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I lean toward CI as the final outcome for those who reject God even in the full blaze of his revealed love. I take seriously the biblical language of destruction, of perishing, of the second death. I take seriously the argument that infinite punishment for finite sin is unjust. And I take seriously the picture of a God whose final victory means the total eradication of evil—not its eternal perpetuation in some dark corner of the universe.

But I hold this position with humility. The Bible is not as clear-cut on this question as we might wish. There are texts that seem to point toward finality and destruction. There are other texts that seem to point toward an ongoing state. And there are still other texts—the great universalist hope passages like Colossians 1:19–20 and 1 Corinthians 15:28—that seem to point toward something even more extraordinary: the eventual reconciliation of all things. I will not pretend the question is settled. What I am confident about is not the precise final outcome but the character of God. He is love. He does not torture. His fire is always aimed at purification, not at vengeance. And whatever happens at the end—whether the resistant are consumed or eventually restored—the fire is the same fire: the inescapable, all-consuming, relentless love of the God who made us and who will not stop loving us even when we cannot bear to be loved.

That is what matters most. Not the precise mechanism of the final state, but the character of the God who presides over it. And the divine presence model gives us a picture of that God that is both fearsome and beautiful—a God whose love is so fierce that it purifies everything it touches, and so complete that nothing can stand against it. The question is not whether God will love us. He will. The question is whether we will let that love in—or whether we will harden ourselves against it until there is nothing left to save.

In the next chapter, we will turn to the other side of the coin. If the divine presence model can ground conditional immortality, can it also ground universal reconciliation? Is it possible that the fire of God’s love will eventually soften every heart? That is the question of universalism—the hope, the tension, and the question that will not go away.⁶⁶

But before we get there, let me leave you with this. Whatever the final outcome turns out to be—whether the resistant are destroyed or eventually restored—the character of God remains the same. He is love. His fire is love. His judgment is love. He does not torture. He does not take revenge. The worst thing that can happen to a human being is not to fall into the hands of an angry God. The worst thing that can happen is to stand in the presence of infinite love with a heart that has been so twisted by sin that it cannot receive what it was made for.

That is the tragedy of hell. And that is the missing piece that conditional immortality has been looking for.