Chapter 14

Introducing the Divine Presence Model—Hell Is God’s Presence

A. Thesis and Context

We have come a long way together. In the first thirteen chapters of this book, we built a careful foundation. We explored the nature of God as love. We examined what biblical justice really means. We looked at how the Western church inherited a picture of hell that owes more to pagan philosophy and medieval imagination than to the Bible itself. We gave eternal conscious torment its strongest possible hearing—and then we showed, passage by passage, why it cannot stand. We walked through the choice model, conditional immortality, and universalism, giving each its due while noting where each one falls short on its own.

All of that was groundwork. This chapter is where the building goes up.

I want to introduce you to what I believe is the most biblically faithful, theologically coherent, and historically grounded understanding of hell available to us today. Scholars call it the divine presence model. The name sounds academic, but the idea behind it is simple enough that a child can grasp it—and profound enough that it changes everything.

Here it is in one sentence: Hell is not a place of separation from God. Hell is the experience of God’s inescapable, all-consuming love by those who have hardened their hearts against Him.

Read that again. Let it sink in.

Paradise and hell are not two different places. They are two different experiences of the same overwhelming reality—the presence of the living God. The same fire, the same love, two different responses. The righteous experience God’s presence as unspeakable joy. The wicked experience it as unbearable torment. The difference is not in God. The difference is in us.¹

This is the heart of the book. Everything before this chapter built the foundation. Everything after it develops what this model means for how we read the Bible, how we think about judgment, and how we understand the character of God. If you understand this chapter, you understand the thesis of The Consuming Love.

I did not invent this idea. It is not new. In fact, as we will see, it is very, very old—older than Augustine, older than the medieval West, older than the fire-and-brimstone sermons that shaped so many of our assumptions about hell. The divine presence model is rooted in the writings of some of the earliest and most respected theologians in Christian history, preserved for centuries in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and now being rediscovered in the West by scholars like R. Zachary Manis and Sharon L. Baker.²

I want to show you where this model comes from, what it claims, and why I believe it is the best reading of what Scripture actually teaches about the fire of God. We will draw on three primary sources: the philosophical work of R. Zachary Manis, who has given the model its most careful development; the theological insights of Sharon L. Baker, who makes it accessible and personal; and the Eastern Orthodox tradition as presented by Alexandre Kalomiros and the Church Fathers, who have taught it for centuries.³

By the end of this chapter, I hope you will see what I see: that the God who is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29) is not a God to run from. He is a God to run toward. Because His fire is love.

B. The Case

The Core Idea: One Fire, Two Experiences

Think about sunlight for a moment. The sun does not change depending on who is looking at it. It shines the same way on everyone. But if you have healthy eyes, sunlight is a gift—it lets you see the world in all its beauty. If your eyes are diseased, that very same light is agony. It burns. It blinds. You want to hide from it. The light has not changed. Your eyes have.

Now scale that up to the infinite. God is love (1 John 4:8). His presence is the source of all light, all warmth, all life. For those who love Him—for those whose hearts are open and receptive to His love—being in His presence is the greatest possible joy. It is paradise. It is what we were made for.

But for those who hate God, who have spent their lives hardening their hearts against Him, who have twisted their inner selves into shapes that cannot receive love—that same presence is the worst possible suffering. Not because God has changed. Not because God is punishing them. But because love itself has become unbearable to them.⁴

This is the divine presence model in a nutshell. And it rests on a claim that should be obvious to anyone who takes the Bible seriously: in the new creation, there will be nowhere to hide from God.

The apostle Paul tells us that God’s plan for the ages is to be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). The book of Revelation promises a new heaven and a new earth where “God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them” (Revelation 21:3). The psalmist already knew this: “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).⁵

Do you see the problem this creates for the traditional view? If God is truly going to be “all in all”—if His presence will fill every corner of the new creation—then where, exactly, is the place of “separation from God” that so many preachers talk about? If God is omnipresent, if He fills the universe, if even Sheol cannot escape His reach—then the idea that hell is a place where God is absent makes no sense at all.⁶

Manis puts the point precisely. It is standard Christian teaching that God must actively sustain everything in existence. Nothing has the power to keep itself going without God’s sustaining hand. This is called the doctrine of divine conservation. It means that even the people in hell could not exist apart from God’s creative and sustaining power. If God were truly absent from them, they would simply stop existing.⁷

So when traditionalists and choice-model supporters say hell means “separation from God,” they have to mean something much more limited. They might mean that it feels like separation. They might mean that the damned have no fellowship with God. But they cannot mean that God is literally absent, because if He were, there would be no one left to suffer.⁸

The divine presence model takes the biblical data seriously in a way these other views do not. It says: in the age to come, God will be fully revealed. His presence will fill all things. There will be no more hiding. And that universal, inescapable revelation of divine love will be the best news in the universe for some people—and the worst news in the universe for others.

The Philosophical Framework: Manis and the Logic of Divine Presence

R. Zachary Manis is the philosopher who has given the divine presence model its most careful and rigorous development. His work in Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God and Thinking Through the Problem of Hell provides the philosophical backbone of the model. I want to walk you through his key insights because they are important, and because Manis makes the case in a way that is both intellectually honest and deeply biblical.⁹

Manis begins with a simple observation. In the Bible, the final event of history is not a sentencing hearing. It is an apocalypse—an unveiling. The Greek word apokalypsis (apocalypse) literally means “uncovering” or “revelation.” The Day of Judgment is the day when the glorified Christ is revealed to all the world. It is the definitive end of what Manis calls divine hiddenness—the period of history in which God has partially concealed Himself so that human beings can exercise genuine freedom.¹⁰

Right now, in this life, God is partially hidden. We see “through a glass, darkly,” as Paul put it (1 Corinthians 13:12, KJV). God reveals Himself enough for us to seek Him, but not so overwhelmingly that our freedom is crushed. This is an act of mercy. It gives us room to choose. It gives us time to grow. It gives us the chance to respond to His love freely, without being forced.¹¹

But one day, that hiddenness will end. Christ will return in glory. The full, unshielded reality of who God is will be revealed to every human being who has ever lived. And at that moment, Manis argues, everyone will experience the presence of God in a way that is both unmistakable and inescapable.¹²

For the righteous—for those who have spent their lives learning to love God and be shaped by His Spirit—this will be the fulfillment of their deepest longings. It will be the satisfaction of their very nature. It will be what has traditionally been called the beatific vision—the direct experience of God’s beauty and love, face to face. This is eternal life. This is heaven.¹³

But for those who have spent their lives hardening their hearts, who have persisted in rebellion and self-deception all the way up to the Day of Judgment, exposure to the unshielded presence of a holy God will be horrendous suffering. The very same event that is unsurpassable joy for the righteous will be the source of torment for the wicked.¹⁴

Think about that. The fire does not change. God does not switch from “love mode” to “wrath mode.” He does not have one face for the righteous and another for the wicked. The same God, the same presence, the same love—experienced in radically different ways depending on the condition of the human heart.

Manis is careful to point out three things about the divine presence model that set it apart from other views of hell.¹⁵

First, heaven and hell are not geographical locations. On the divine presence model, being sent to hell is not like being shipped off to a prison or a torture chamber or some far-off planet. In the new creation, all of humanity will inhabit this same earth, renewed and restored. Heaven and hell are different ways—radically different ways—of experiencing resurrection life in the new creation. The difference is not where you are. The difference is what you are.¹⁶

Second, the suffering of hell is in no way artificial or arbitrary. God does not invent special punishments for the wicked. He does not select tortures from some cosmic menu. The suffering of hell is the natural result of what happens when a sin-hardened heart encounters perfect Love. There is nothing God does, other than being fully revealed, that causes the damned to suffer. It is not the kind of punishment a judge imposes from the outside. It is the kind of pain that comes from the inside—from what you have become.¹⁷

Third, the purpose of hell is not retribution. On the divine presence model, God does not reveal Himself in glory in order to make the wicked suffer. He reveals Himself because the purpose of creation is heading toward its fulfillment: the glory of Christ, the restoration of all things, the dawn of the new creation. The suffering of the wicked is the foreseen but unintended consequence of Christ being revealed in His full glory. God knows it will happen, and He grieves over it. But He does not will it for its own sake.¹⁸

Do you see how different this is from the picture most of us grew up with? In the traditional view, God is an angry judge who sentences the wicked to a punishment He designed for them. In the divine presence model, God is a loving Father whose very love is the fire. The “punishment” is not something God does to the wicked. It is something the wicked experience because of what they have become in the presence of perfect goodness.

The Theological Vision: Baker and the Fire of Love

If Manis gives us the philosophical framework, Sharon L. Baker gives us the theological heart. In her book Razing Hell, Baker approaches the divine presence model from a different angle—more pastoral, more imaginative, more focused on the character of God as revealed in Jesus.¹⁹

Baker’s central claim is bold and beautiful: fire comes from God, surrounds God, and is God. She points to passage after passage in Scripture where God Himself is identified with fire—the burning bush that is not consumed (Exodus 3:2), the pillar of fire that leads Israel through the wilderness (Exodus 13:21), the fire that descends on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:18), the fire that fills Solomon’s temple (2 Chronicles 7:1–3), and the declaration of Hebrews 12:29: “Our God is a consuming fire.”²⁰

If God is the fire, Baker argues, then entering God’s presence is entering the fire. Standing before God at the judgment is standing in the flames. And the effect of those flames depends entirely on what they find in you. If they find gold—faith, love, righteousness—the fire refines you, makes you shine. If they find wood, hay, and stubble—sin, hatred, rebellion—the fire burns it all away.²¹

Baker illustrates this with a powerful story. She asks us to imagine a character named Otto—an international leader who has launched wars, terrorized nations, and caused the deaths of thousands. Otto is about as wicked as a human being can get. And on the Day of Judgment, Otto comes into the throne room of God.²²

What Otto expects is rage. He expects condemnation. He expects God to lash out at him with punishment and vengeance, because that is the only kind of power Otto understands.

But what Otto encounters is love.

Blazing, overwhelming, incomprehensible love. A love so extravagant that it acts as judgment—not because it intends to hurt him, but because the sheer magnitude of that love reveals to Otto, for the first time, the full horror of what he has done. He does not hear God say, “You evil, vile murderer! I am going to get you now!” Instead, he hears God say with sorrow forged from love, “I have loved you with an everlasting love. But look at your life—what have you done?”²³

In Baker’s telling, Otto is utterly undone by this. His hatred is replaced by remorse. As his life flashes before him, he sees every victim, every mother crying for a lost son, every child begging for a murdered father. God makes him feel their pain. The fire of God’s love burns away his wickedness—and it is hell for him. He weeps. His teeth gnash. His heart breaks. But the fire is not destroying him for the sake of destruction. The fire is burning away everything in him that is not love.²⁴

In Baker’s story, Otto eventually responds to this overwhelming love. He accepts God’s offer of forgiveness and reconciliation. He enters the kingdom of God, “tested by fire, forgiven by grace.”²⁵

But Baker is honest about the other possibility. She writes that Otto might not accept God’s offer. The fire does not eliminate the gift of human freedom. Otto could stand in the blazing presence of God’s love, go through the purifying fire, and still say no. In that case, the fire would consume him entirely—not as an act of vengeance, but because there was nothing left in Otto that could receive love. Nothing good remained. The fire that would have saved him instead destroys him.²⁶

This is conditional immortality within the divine presence framework. And it is one of the most powerful illustrations I have ever encountered for how God’s love can be both the greatest mercy and the most fearful reality in the universe at the same time.

The Orthodox Witness: Kalomiros, the Fathers, and the River of Fire

We have the philosopher (Manis). We have the theologian (Baker). Now I want to show you that this idea is not a modern invention. It is an ancient recovery.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition—one of the three great branches of Christianity—the divine presence model is not a new theory. It is the standard teaching. And it has been the standard teaching for a very long time. The Orthodox have preserved something the Western church lost, and it is time we listened.²⁷

I say this as an evangelical. I am not converting to Orthodoxy. I disagree with the Orthodox Church on certain matters. But on the question of hell—on what the fire is, where it comes from, and why the wicked suffer in it—the Orthodox have been getting it right for centuries while the West has been getting it badly wrong.²⁸

The work that did the most to bring this teaching to English-speaking audiences is a lecture called The River of Fire by Alexandre Kalomiros, a Greek Orthodox layman who gave it in 1980. Kalomiros laid out the Orthodox understanding of hell with a clarity and passion that is hard to forget. His argument is built on the writings of the Church Fathers—the earliest and most respected teachers of the Christian faith.²⁹

Kalomiros begins with a simple question: What happens on the Day of Judgment? His answer, drawn from the Fathers, is stunning. God’s judgment, he says, is nothing other than “our coming into contact with truth and light.” On that great day, all people will appear naked before the penetrating light of God’s truth. The “books” spoken of in Revelation will be opened. And what are those books? They are our hearts.³⁰

The penetrating light of God will open our hearts and reveal what is truly inside. If there is love for God in those hearts, they will rejoice. If there is hatred for God, those hearts will suffer—not because God is punishing them, but because receiving the full blast of God’s truth is agony to a heart that has been running from truth its whole life.³¹

Then Kalomiros points to one of the most powerful images in all of Christian art: the icon of the Last Judgment. In this icon, Christ sits on a throne. On His right are the blessed—those who lived by His love. On His left are the condemned—those who spent their lives hating Him. And in the middle, flowing from Christ’s throne, is a river of fire.³²

What is this river? Is it an instrument of torture? Is it a weapon of vengeance?

No. Kalomiros says it is the river that “came out from Eden to water the paradise” of old (Genesis 2:10). It is the river of God’s grace. It is the outpouring of God’s love for His creatures. “Love is fire,” Kalomiros writes. “Anyone who loves knows this. God is Love, so God is Fire. And fire consumes all those who are not fire themselves, and renders bright and shining all those who are fire themselves.”³³

The same river of fire that irrigates paradise and fills the saints with joy is the river that burns the wicked. It is not two different fires. It is one fire. One love. Two responses.

Kalomiros then draws a picture that I find breathtaking in its simplicity:

“The very fire which purifies gold, also consumes wood. Precious metals shine in it like the sun, rubbish burns with black smoke. All are in the same fire of Love. Some shine and others become black and dark. In the same furnace steel shines like the sun, whereas clay turns dark and is hardened like stone.”³⁴

The difference, he insists, “is in man, not in God. The difference is conditioned by the free choice of man, which God respects absolutely. God’s judgment is the revelation of the reality which is in man.”³⁵

I want you to sit with that line for a moment. God’s judgment is the revelation of the reality which is in man. Judgment is not God deciding to hurt you. Judgment is God showing you—and everyone else—what you have truly become. The books of Revelation are not legal ledgers. They are human hearts, laid bare before the penetrating light of truth.

The Patristic Witnesses

Kalomiros did not make this up. He was drawing on a long tradition of Christian teaching that goes back to the earliest centuries of the church. Let me introduce you to some of the key voices.

Saint Isaac the Syrian (seventh century) is one of the most beloved spiritual writers in the Eastern Christian world. His words on hell are among the most famous in all of Christian literature:

“Those who find themselves in Gehenna will be chastised with the scourge of love. How cruel and bitter this torment of love will be! For those who understand that they have sinned against love undergo greater sufferings than those produced by the most fearful tortures. The sorrow which takes hold of the heart which has sinned against love is more piercing than any other pain.”³⁶

Read that carefully. Isaac does not say the sinners in hell are tortured by God. He says they are scourged by love. The worst pain in hell is not physical. It is the realization that you have sinned against the very Love that made you, and that this Love is now inescapable. You cannot run from it. You cannot hide from it. You can only stand in it and feel the weight of what you have done.

Isaac goes even further. He says it is wrong to claim that sinners in hell are cut off from God’s love. Love, he says, acts in two different ways—as suffering in the condemned and as joy in the blessed.³⁷ God’s love does not stop at the gates of hell. It penetrates everywhere. But a heart that hates love experiences love as pain.

Saint Basil the Great (fourth century), one of the most important theologians in the history of the church, taught the same thing. He wrote that the fire prepared for judgment has two capacities: burning and illuminating. The fierce, scorching property of the fire awaits those who have hardened against God, while the illuminating, warm property is reserved for the enjoyment of the righteous.³⁸ One fire, two capacities. One God, two experiences.

Saint Symeon the New Theologian (tenth–eleventh century) asked a haunting rhetorical question: Where can we go to escape God’s face? If we go to heaven, He is there. If we go to hell, He is there. If we go to the farthest reaches of the sea, His hand will find us (Psalm 139:7–10). Since we cannot escape Him, Symeon urged, let us run toward Him rather than away.³⁹

Even Martin Luther—the great Protestant Reformer, not an Orthodox Christian at all—had a strikingly similar insight. He wrote that the fiery furnace of hell “is ignited merely by the unbearable appearance of God and endures eternally.” The ungodly will not see God as the godly see Him, Luther said, “but they will feel the power of His presence, which they will not be able to bear, and yet will be forced to bear.”⁴⁰

This is extraordinary. Luther—one of the pillars of the Protestant Reformation—described hell not as a place where God is absent, but as a place where God’s presence is unbearable. The punishment comes not from God’s rage but from God’s appearance—the mere revelation of who He is.

Fr. Thomas Hopko, in his four-volume work The Orthodox Faith, endorsed by the Orthodox Church in America, brings all of these threads together in a passage that is worth lingering over. He writes that at the final coming of Christ, His very presence will be the judgment. All people will behold the face of Him whom they crucified by their sins. For those who love the Lord, His presence will be infinite joy, paradise, and eternal life. For those who hate the Lord, the same presence will be infinite torture, hell, and eternal death.⁴¹

The fire that consumes sinners at the coming of the Kingdom, Hopko continues, is the same fire that shines with splendor in the saints. It is the fire of God’s love. For those who love God, it is radiant bliss. For those who do not love, it is weeping and gnashing of teeth. God does not punish people with material fire or physical torment. He simply reveals Himself in such a glorious way that no one can fail to see. And it is the splendor of that glory that scourges those who reject its radiant power and light.⁴²

Do you hear the consistency in these voices? Across centuries and cultures—from the Syrian desert to the Greek-speaking East to the German Reformation—the core insight keeps surfacing: God’s presence is the fire. The same fire. For everyone. The difference is in us, not in Him.

Gregory of Nyssa and the Vision of the New Creation

One more patristic voice deserves special attention. Gregory of Nyssa (fourth century) was one of the great Cappadocian Fathers—the three theologians who shaped the Nicene Creed and established the doctrine of the Trinity as we know it. Gregory is sometimes grouped with Origen as a universalist, but his vision of the new creation is relevant here whether one holds to universal reconciliation or conditional immortality.⁴³

Gregory wrote about what it would be like when God becomes “all in all.” In the new creation, God would become everything to His creatures—their light, their nourishment, their home. The Catholic theologian Zachary Hayes, summarizing Gregory’s thought, wrote that Gregory taught that God draws every human person into the divine presence. And it is the reality of sin and guilt in the person that makes the divine attraction itself painful. The soul suffers not because God takes pleasure in suffering but because the pain is built into the encounter between God’s holy love and the still-imperfect human being. The intensity of the pain matches the amount of evil that remains in the person.⁴⁴

This is the divine presence model stated in fourth-century language. The pain of hell is not an external punishment applied by an angry God. It is an internal response—built into the very nature of the encounter between holiness and sin. It is what must happen when a corrupted soul comes face to face with infinite purity.

What the Model Is—and What It Is Not

Before we go further, I want to clear up some things that the divine presence model does not say, because misunderstandings here can trip people up.

The divine presence model does not say that God takes pleasure in the suffering of the wicked. It says the opposite. God grieves over every soul that suffers. The suffering is a consequence that God foresees and permits, but it is never His goal.⁴⁵

The divine presence model does not say that hell is a mild discomfort. The suffering is real, intense, and terrible. Isaac the Syrian called it “more piercing than any other pain.” The torment of realizing you have sinned against infinite love is not a light thing. This model takes the biblical language of weeping, gnashing of teeth, and fire with complete seriousness. The fire is real. It simply has a different source than most people think.⁴⁶

The divine presence model does not say that sin does not matter. It says sin matters enormously—so enormously that it can twist a human heart to the point where love itself becomes agony. Sin is not a legal infraction that needs to be balanced on some cosmic ledger. Sin is a disease that corrupts the very capacity of the soul to receive what it was made for. That is far more serious than breaking a rule.⁴⁷

The divine presence model does not automatically commit you to universal reconciliation or to conditional immortality. The model is compatible with both. If all hearts eventually yield to the fire of love, then universal reconciliation is the result. If some hearts harden beyond the possibility of return, and the fire of love consumes them entirely, then conditional immortality is the result. Either way, the mechanism is the same: God’s love is the fire, and the human heart determines the outcome.⁴⁸

Manis himself leaves this question open. He has argued that the divine presence model provides the strongest available account of eternal conscious suffering (if one holds to that), of conditional immortality (if one holds to that), and of eventual restoration (if one holds to that). The model describes how hell works, not necessarily how long it lasts. It tells us what the fire is. It does not by itself settle what the fire finally accomplishes.⁴⁹

I find this honest. I also find it liberating. You do not have to resolve every question about the final state before you can accept the divine presence model. You just have to see that the fire of God is love, and that the human heart is what determines whether that love is experienced as paradise or as hell.

The Analogy of the Elder Brother

One of the best illustrations of the divine presence model is already sitting in your Bible. You just might not have noticed it.

In Luke 15, Jesus tells the parable of the prodigal son. We all know the story. The younger son takes his inheritance, goes off to a distant country, wastes it all, and eventually comes crawling back to his father. The father runs out to meet him, throws his arms around him, and throws a party.

But that is only half the story. The second half is about the elder brother.

When the elder brother hears the music and dancing, he refuses to go in. His father comes out to plead with him, but the elder brother is furious. He has been faithful all these years, he says, and he has never gotten a party. Now this wretch of a brother comes home, and the father is celebrating?

Notice where the elder brother is. He is in his father’s house. He is surrounded by his father’s love. The father comes out to him personally, speaks to him tenderly, and assures him that “everything I have is yours” (Luke 15:31). The feast is going on just inside the door. All the elder brother has to do is walk in.

But he will not. He stands outside, seething with resentment, surrounded by love that he refuses to receive. He is in paradise and experiencing it as hell.⁵⁰

That is the divine presence model in parable form. The elder brother is not in a distant dungeon. He is not being tortured by demons. He is in the immediate presence of a father who loves him passionately. And he is miserable—because the love that surrounds him exposes everything that is wrong in his heart. The father’s generosity reveals the elder brother’s selfishness. The father’s mercy reveals the elder brother’s pride. The father’s joy reveals the elder brother’s bitterness.

The father has not changed. The father is not punishing the elder brother. The father is being exactly who he has always been: generous, merciful, joyful. And it is precisely because the father is so good that the elder brother is so miserable.

This is hell on the divine presence model. Not a torture chamber designed by an angry judge. A father’s house, filled with the father’s love, experienced as torment by a heart that cannot receive it.

And notice what the father does not do. He does not drag the elder brother inside by force. He does not lock him outside as punishment. He does not stop the music to appease his anger. The father simply is who he is—generous, joyful, loving—and the elder brother’s response to that goodness reveals what is truly in his own heart. The judgment, if we want to call it that, is not something the father imposes. It is something the elder brother’s heart creates in the presence of a love it refuses to share.

I think Jesus told this parable precisely to show us what the final judgment looks like. Not a courtroom. Not a sentencing hearing. A father’s house. An open door. A feast in progress. And a son who stands outside in the dark, surrounded by everything he could ever want, unable to enjoy any of it because his heart has made love into an enemy.

The Light That Burns: Hierotheos and the Two Properties of Love

One more analogy from the Orthodox tradition deserves our attention, because it captures the divine presence model with striking simplicity. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, a contemporary Orthodox bishop and theologian, uses the image of light to explain how God’s presence can be both joy and torment at the same time.⁷⁰

Light, Hierotheos says, has two properties: illuminating and caustic. If a person has good eyesight, they benefit from the illuminating property of light. They can see the beauty of the world around them. They can enjoy color and shape and depth. Light is their friend. But if a person has damaged eyes—if their vision is diseased—then that very same light causes nothing but pain. It scorches. It burns. They want to hide from it.

Hierotheos writes that the same will be true in the life to come. God’s love and presence will shine like the sun, and the righteous will bask in it the way healthy eyes enjoy a summer morning. But those whose spiritual sight has been ruined by sin will feel only the caustic property of that same light. The light has not changed. It is one and the same. But the condition of the receiver determines whether it brings joy or pain.⁷¹

Notice how perfectly this fits with the divine presence model. There is no second fire that God kindles for the purpose of punishing sinners. There is no torture chamber wired with a special kind of pain. There is only God. There is only love. There is only light. And whether that light is paradise or hell depends on the eyes you bring to it.

This is why the Orthodox icon of the Last Judgment shows a single river of fire flowing from Christ’s throne and reaching both the righteous and the wicked. It is not that God sends one stream of blessing to the right and another stream of punishment to the left. The same stream touches everyone. The saints are bathed in it. The damned are burned by it. The river has not split into two. The human heart has.⁷²

I find this image deeply moving. It tells me something about God that the traditional Western picture of hell simply cannot: that God never stops loving the people in hell. He does not switch off His compassion at some cosmic deadline. He does not become someone else when He puts on the judge’s robe. He is always, forever, unchangeably love. And it is that very unchangeability that makes hell possible—because a love that never gives up and never goes away is either the greatest comfort or the greatest agony, depending on what it finds in the one it touches.

The Presence of God as Truth

There is one more dimension of the divine presence model that I want to develop before we consider objections. Manis calls it the “first expansion” of the model: the claim that the presence of God reveals the inner truth about a person.⁵¹

We have already seen this in Kalomiros—the idea that the “books” opened on the Day of Judgment are our hearts, exposed by the light of truth. Manis develops this further. He argues that when the presence of God becomes inescapable, the voice of conscience that we spent our whole lives suppressing can no longer be silenced. For those in hell, the truths spoken by this inner voice are experienced as accusations, as personal rejections, as eternal judgments.⁵²

Think about the worst thing you have ever done. Now imagine being unable to stop thinking about it. Not for a day. Not for a year. Forever. Every excuse you ever made stripped away. Every rationalization exposed. Every lie you told yourself about why it was okay laid bare. That is what the presence of truth does to a sin-hardened heart.

But here is the tragic part. Even in this state, Manis argues, the damned do not repent. They do not stop their habitual patterns of denial and self-deception. They keep trying to justify themselves, even though the methods of self-deception no longer work as an escape from truth. They deploy their old defenses not because the defenses are effective anymore, but because they are all the damned know how to do. The light of Christ is actually blinding to them rather than illuminating. It intensifies their guilt and shame, which in turn drives them deeper into their desperate, self-deceived attempts to justify themselves.⁵³

This is what Jesus meant when He spoke of people being “thrown into the outer darkness” (Matthew 8:12). On the divine presence model, the “outer darkness” is not a physical location. It is a spiritual condition—the state of a soul so blinded by self-deception that even the full light of Christ cannot penetrate. The light is everywhere. But the soul has made itself incapable of receiving it.⁵⁴

The Presence of God as Life

There is one more piece to the puzzle, and it is important. Manis calls it the “second expansion” of the divine presence model: the claim that the very presence of God is life-giving.⁵⁵

We noted earlier that the presence of God can be manifested to greater or lesser degrees. In our present world, God is partially hidden. He is present enough to sustain all things, but not so fully manifested that His presence overwhelms human freedom. In the new creation, the divine presence will fill everything. God will be “all in all.”

Now, here is the key insight. On the divine presence model, death is absent to the degree that the divine presence is manifested. The presence of God is what gives life. In the new creation, where God’s presence fills the universe, the “curse of death” is abolished. That is why Revelation 21:4 promises that “there will be no more death.”⁵⁶

But this raises a pressing question. If the presence of God is life-giving, and the presence of God is inescapable in the new creation, then why does not God simply annihilate the damned and put them out of their misery?

Manis answers this by adding a further detail: the divine presence confers life to the extent that a being is capable of receiving it. A person is a soul-body composite. In the new creation, the bodies of the damned are sustained by the life-giving presence of God—they are animated, capable of sensation. But the souls of the damned are not fully open to the life-giving presence, because they have closed themselves to God through sin and self-deception. Their bodies are alive, but their souls are in a state of what we might call “living death.”⁵⁷

This is why the concept of the “second death” in Revelation (Revelation 20:14; 21:8) makes sense within this framework. The second death is not the cessation of all existence in the way that physical death ends bodily life. It is the final, permanent state of a soul that has cut itself off from the source of true life—even while the sustaining presence of God keeps it in existence. Whether this state is eternal or whether the soul eventually ceases to exist entirely (as conditional immortality would hold) is a question we will explore later in this book. For now, the important point is that the divine presence model has a coherent account of both continued existence and spiritual death in the age to come.⁵⁸

How the Model Unifies What Other Views Divide

One of the most impressive things about the divine presence model is how it holds together truths that other views of hell tear apart.

The traditional view (ECT) emphasizes God’s justice but struggles to account for His love. How can a God of love sustain people in existence for the sole purpose of tormenting them forever?

The choice model emphasizes human freedom but struggles to explain how anyone could freely choose eternal misery with full knowledge of what they are doing.

Conditional immortality takes the destruction language of Scripture seriously but leaves a gap in explaining the mechanism of destruction. What, exactly, destroys the wicked?

Universalism takes God’s love to its logical conclusion but risks undermining genuine human freedom.

The divine presence model holds all of these concerns together.⁵⁹

It takes God’s love seriously: the fire of hell is God’s love. It takes God’s justice seriously: the “punishment” of hell is the natural, unavoidable consequence of sin encountering holiness. It takes human freedom seriously: the damned are in hell because of choices they made, not because God arbitrarily assigned them there. It takes the destruction language seriously: the fire that purifies the willing can consume the resistant. And it does all of this without making God into a monster.

The model also makes sense of two biblical themes that have always been awkward for those who emphasize God’s love: the fear of the Lord and the wrath of God. On the divine presence model, both of these are real. The fear of the Lord is the appropriate response of a finite creature who recognizes that standing before infinite holiness and love is the most serious thing that could ever happen. It is not the terror of a prisoner before a tyrant. It is the awe of a creature who knows that this God sees everything, knows everything, and loves with an intensity that can either heal or break you. The wrath of God, on this model, is not an emotion separate from love. It is what love looks like and feels like to those who have set themselves against it. Baker captures this perfectly when she writes that God’s love, in its sheer extravagance, “acts as wrath, judging him for his deficiency, and with its purity, it serves as a hell, punishing him for his depravity.”⁷³ Wrath is not the opposite of love. Wrath is the backside of love—what love burns like when you are made of the wrong material.

On the divine presence model, there is no theological double-mindedness—no need to explain heaven by reference to God’s love and hell by reference to God’s justice, as though love and justice are pulling in different directions. Heaven and hell share a common source. As Vladimir Lossky, the influential Orthodox theologian, put it: “The love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves.”⁶⁰

That is the irony of the title of Thomas Talbott’s famous book in defense of universalism: The Inescapable Love of God. On the divine presence model, that phrase is a perfectly apt description of hell.⁶¹

C. Objections and Responses

Objection 1: “Doesn’t the Bible say hell is separation from God?”

Someone might object that 2 Thessalonians 1:9 says the wicked will be “shut out from the presence of the Lord.” Does this not settle the matter?

It would, if the translation were that clear. But the Greek is ambiguous. The phrase apo prosōpou tou kyriou (from the face of the Lord) can mean “away from the presence of the Lord” or “from the presence of the Lord”—that is, the destruction itself comes from God’s presence. Many scholars have argued that the latter reading makes better sense in context and fits better with the rest of Paul’s theology.⁶² Manis notes in Thinking Through the Problem of Hell that the phrase can be read as indicating the source of the destruction rather than the destination. The wicked experience “eternal destruction that comes from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.”⁶³

Moreover, even if the traditional translation is correct, the passage would be describing the experience of the damned—what it feels like to them—rather than the metaphysical reality. The damned may feel shut out from God. But that feeling is the product of their own hardened hearts, not the reality of God’s absence. Psalm 139 has already told us: there is nowhere to flee from God’s presence, not even Sheol.

Objection 2: “This sounds like God is torturing people with His love. How is that better?”

This is a fair question, and it deserves a careful answer.

On the divine presence model, God is not torturing anyone. Torture is something you do to someone on purpose in order to make them suffer. That is exactly what the divine presence model rejects. God does not reveal Himself in glory for the purpose of making the wicked suffer. He reveals Himself because the purpose of creation is reaching its fulfillment. The suffering of the wicked is a consequence He foresees and grieves over, but it is not His intention.⁶⁴

Here is an analogy. Imagine a doctor turns on a bright light in a dark room so he can perform surgery to save a patient’s life. There is another person in the room who has a severe eye condition, and the light causes them intense pain. The doctor did not turn on the light to hurt that person. The light was necessary for a good purpose. The pain is real, but it is not the doctor’s goal.

Now, this analogy is imperfect—all analogies are. But it captures the key point. On the divine presence model, God’s revealing of Himself is not an act of cruelty. It is the fulfillment of His good purposes. The suffering it causes to the hardened is the natural result of their condition, not the goal of God’s action.

The difference between the divine presence model and ECT on this point is enormous. On ECT, God designs the punishment. He creates the torture. He sustains the wicked in existence specifically so they can suffer. On the divine presence model, God does not design the punishment. He does not create the torture. The suffering flows naturally from the collision between a sin-hardened heart and infinite holiness. God’s love is the fire—and fire does what fire does.⁶⁵

Objection 3: “Where does the Bible actually teach this?”

We will spend multiple chapters on the biblical evidence (Chapters 20–26 will provide detailed exegesis of the major hell, fire, and judgment passages). But even here, at the introductory stage, it is worth noting that the biblical support is substantial.

The divine presence model draws on: Psalm 139:7–8 (God is present even in Sheol); 1 Corinthians 15:28 (God will be “all in all”); Revelation 21:1–3 (God will dwell with humanity in the new creation); Hebrews 12:29 (“our God is a consuming fire”); Isaiah 33:14 (“who of us can dwell with the consuming fire?”); 1 Corinthians 3:13–15 (the fire tests each person’s work); Revelation 14:10 (the wicked are tormented “in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb”); 2 Thessalonians 1:9 (destruction “from the presence of the Lord”); and many more.⁶⁶

Revelation 14:10 is worth pausing on. It says that the wicked will be “tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb.” In the presence. Not away from the presence. Not in a separate location. In the very presence of Christ Himself. This is exactly what the divine presence model predicts. The torment does not happen far from God. It happens in front of Him.⁶⁷

We will develop the full biblical case in later chapters. For now, the point is that the divine presence model is not reading something into the Bible that is not there. It is reading what is there more carefully than we have been taught to do.

Objection 4: “If this is so obvious, why hasn’t the Western church taught it?”

The short answer is: some in the West have taught it. We already saw that Luther had intimations of it. C. S. Lewis, the most influential Christian writer of the twentieth century, hinted at it in multiple places. In Mere Christianity, Lewis wrote that God is both the only comfort and the supreme terror: “the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies.”⁶⁸

But the longer answer is that the Western church took a wrong turn. As we traced in earlier chapters, the influence of Augustine’s juridical theology, combined with medieval developments in the doctrine of hell, pushed the West toward a retributive, punitive understanding of God’s judgment. The Eastern church did not take that turn. They preserved the patristic insight that God’s fire is His love—and that the same fire warms the willing and burns the resistant. What Manis and Baker have done, each in their own way, is recover that insight for a Western audience and give it careful philosophical and theological grounding.⁶⁹

The divine presence model is not a modern innovation. It is a modern recovery of the earliest Christian understanding of hell. And it is long overdue.

If you have been told your whole life that hell means God’s absence, I understand how strange this might sound at first. I was in the same place once. But the more I studied Scripture, the more I read the Church Fathers, and the more I followed the arguments of careful scholars like Manis and Baker, the more I became convinced that the tradition I inherited had gotten something deeply wrong. Not about the reality of hell—hell is terrifyingly real. But about what the fire is. The fire is not God’s absence. The fire is God’s presence. And that changes everything.

D. Conclusion and Connection

Let me sum up what we have established in this chapter.

The divine presence model of hell says that hell is not a place of separation from God. It is the experience of God’s inescapable, all-consuming love by those who have hardened their hearts against Him. In the new creation, God will be “all in all.” There will be no place hidden from His presence. The righteous will experience this as paradise—the fulfillment of everything they were made for. The wicked will experience it as hell—because love itself has become unbearable to them.

The fire of God is not retributive punishment. It is not designed to inflict pain. It is the natural consequence of a sin-hardened heart encountering perfect Love. The suffering is real and terrible—but it is not God’s goal. It is the tragic byproduct of a soul that has made itself incapable of receiving the very thing it was made to enjoy.

This model is built on the work of R. Zachary Manis, who provided the philosophical framework; Sharon L. Baker, who provided the theological heart and the powerful illustration of Otto; and the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which has preserved the patristic understanding of hell as God’s presence for centuries. It is supported by the writings of saints like Isaac the Syrian, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Symeon the New Theologian. It even has echoes in the writings of Martin Luther and C. S. Lewis.

The divine presence model does not automatically settle the question of whether the final outcome is conditional immortality or universal reconciliation. It is compatible with both. What it does is provide the mechanism—the “how” of hell. It tells us what the fire is, where it comes from, and why the wicked suffer in it. And it does all of this without making God into a torturer, a sadist, or a cosmic executioner.

In the chapters that follow, we will develop this model further. In Chapter 15, we will dive deep into the Orthodox tradition and the Church Fathers. In Chapter 16, we will explore Manis’s philosophical arguments in greater detail. In Chapter 17, we will look at Baker’s theological contributions and the character of Otto. In the exegetical chapters (20–26), we will walk through every major hell, fire, and judgment passage in the Bible and show how the divine presence model fits the biblical data better than its competitors.

But for now, I want to leave you with the image that started it all: a river of fire, flowing from the throne of Christ. The same river that waters paradise. The same fire that makes the saints shine like the sun. The same love that created you, sustains you, and calls to you even now.

The question is not whether you will stand in that fire. Everyone will. The question is what the fire will find in you when it comes.

Our God is a consuming fire. And His fire is love.