Chapter 17

Razing Hell — Baker, God’s Image, and the Purifying Presence

A. Thesis and Context

In the last chapter, we walked through R. Zachary Manis’s philosophical case for the divine presence model of hell. Manis gave us the rigorous logical backbone—the careful arguments, the precise distinctions, the philosophical muscle that holds the model together. But philosophy, as important as it is, sometimes needs a partner. It needs a voice that speaks not just to the head but also to the heart. It needs someone who can take all those careful arguments and show us what they actually look like—what it would feel like to stand in the fire of God’s love and be judged, not by an angry tyrant, but by the most extravagant love the universe has ever known.

That partner is Sharon L. Baker.

Baker is a theologian, a professor, and a mother of four grown boys.¹ Her book Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught about God’s Wrath and Judgment approaches the divine presence model from a different angle than Manis. Where Manis is philosophical and precise, Baker is theological and pastoral. Where Manis builds airtight logical arguments, Baker tells stories. Where Manis asks, “Is this model logically consistent?” Baker asks, “What does this tell us about the character of God?”²

And both questions matter deeply.

The thesis of this chapter is simple: Baker’s work in Razing Hell provides the theological heart of the divine presence model. She shows us that before we can rethink hell, we must rethink three things about God: His image, His justice, and His forgiveness. Once we get those right—once we see God as He truly is, revealed in Jesus—then our view of hell changes not because we have gone soft on sin, but because we have gotten serious about love.

Baker brings the divine presence model down from the philosopher’s study and into the living room. She makes it personal. She makes it vivid. And in one unforgettable story about a fictional character named Otto, she shows us what it might actually look like when the worst of sinners stands face to face with the consuming fire of God’s love.

That story will stay with you long after you close this book.

B. The Case

The Problem Baker Saw

Baker’s journey started in the same place that many of ours do: with a growing sense that something was wrong. Not with God, but with what we had been taught about God.

She tells the story of a student named Lisa, who came to her with a troubled conscience. Lisa loved God. She read her Bible. She tried to live a faithful life. But she could not make the God of eternal torment fit together with the God she met in Jesus. “I want to maintain my theological integrity and present an accurate picture of God to my children and friends,” Lisa said. “How do I harmonize these two disparate images of God?”³

Another student, Brooke, put it more bluntly. After hearing about traditional depictions of hell, she said, with her usual humor, “It sounds like a bad horror flick, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with God as the one wielding the chainsaw! Even the government considers torture a criminal action! How can we condone it just because God is doing it?”⁴

Brooke has a way with words. But she also has a point.

Baker recognized that the traditional view of hell raises a massive problem—not just for skeptics, but for sincere Christians who care about the character of God. If God is the loving Father that Jesus revealed, how can He also be the eternal torturer that traditional hell requires? If we would rightly condemn a human parent who tortured a child for disobedience, how can we praise a divine parent who does infinitely worse?⁵

Baker’s answer was not to throw out hell. It was to look more carefully at three things: who God is, what His justice looks like, and how His forgiveness works. She believed that if we got those three things right, hell itself would come into focus—not as something softer, but as something truer.

Rethinking God’s Image: The Jesus Lens

Baker’s first step was to ask a deceptively simple question: What does God actually look like?

Most Christians, if you press them, will tell you that God is love. They know 1 John 4:8. They know the stories of Jesus feeding the hungry and healing the sick. But then they will also tell you that God tortures people forever in hell. They hold both ideas at the same time without seeing the contradiction. Baker wanted to bring that contradiction into the light.

She pointed out that in the Old Testament, we get a range of images of God—some violent, some loving.⁶ The Old Testament writers lived in a culture where everything that happened, good or bad, was attributed to the gods. If the army won a battle, God gave the victory. If a plague struck, God sent the plague. If enemies were slaughtered, God ordered the slaughter. That was simply how people in the ancient Near East understood the world.⁷

But then Jesus came. And Jesus changed everything.

Baker developed what she called “the Jesus lens”—the idea that we should read all of Scripture through the life, teachings, and example of Jesus.⁸ This is not something Baker invented. It goes back to Jesus himself. In Luke 4:16–21, Jesus walks into the synagogue at Nazareth, picks up the scroll of Isaiah, and reads: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

And then Jesus stops reading. He closes the book. He sits down.

Here is the remarkable thing: the very next line in Isaiah says, “and the day of vengeance of our God.” Jesus deliberately left that out. He omitted the vengeance. He closed the book right before it. Baker saw this as a massive clue. Jesus was showing us the lens through which He reads His own Bible—the lens of peace and redemption, not violence and vengeance.⁹

This matters for our view of hell because our view of hell depends entirely on our view of God. If we see God primarily as an angry judge whose honor has been offended, we will see hell as the place where that anger is poured out forever. But if we see God through the Jesus lens—as a loving Father who seeks to reconcile and restore—then we are forced to ask whether eternal torture really fits the picture.

Baker’s student Eric put it well: “I think people will more likely want to ‘come to Jesus’ if I preach about God as love and compassion. Love rather than wrath attracts.”¹⁰ That is not wishful thinking. That is the heartbeat of the New Testament.

Through the Jesus lens, Baker drew a picture of God that is very different from the God of popular imagination. Instead of an angry deity determined to punish the world for every last shred of sin, she found a God who lovingly pours forth compassion on the earth. Instead of a God who comes swinging a divine sword, she found a God who comes spreading divine shalom (the Hebrew word for peace, wholeness, and well-being). Instead of a fitful God whose moods swing as violently as His sword, she found a faithful God whose steadfast love never ceases.¹¹

This is the God revealed in Jesus. And this is the God who matters for our understanding of hell.

Baker filled in the details of this portrait with great care. She walked through the Scriptures, gathering the threads of God’s character that we often overlook when we are focused on judgment and wrath. She reminded us that God is described in the Bible as compassionate, gracious, and slow to anger (Exod. 34:6). That God’s mercy is described as being over all His works (Ps. 145:9). That God delights in steadfast love (Mic. 7:18). That the prophet Jeremiah records God saying, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jer. 31:3). That the psalmist proclaims God’s faithfulness endures “to all generations” (Ps. 119:90). These are not minor themes hidden in the margins of the Bible. They are the dominant melody.⁶⁹

Baker also highlighted the Hebrew concept of shalom—a word that means far more than just “peace.” Shalom means wholeness, completeness, well-being, flourishing. It is the way things are supposed to be. And it is what God wants for every one of His creatures. When we understand that God’s goal is shalom—the restoration of all things to wholeness—then the idea that God would create a place of infinite suffering that never leads to restoration starts to look deeply out of place. Shalom is not compatible with eternal torture. It is compatible with purification, healing, and, ultimately, either restoration or a merciful end.⁷⁰

Baker made one more point that I think is essential. She pointed out that our image of God does not stay locked up in our theology books. It leaks out into our lives. If we worship a violent God, we become violent people. If we worship a God who tortures, we become people who justify torture. The history of Christianity, Baker argued, bears this out. The Crusades, the Inquisition, and centuries of religiously motivated violence all drew, at least in part, on an image of God as wrathful and retributive. Change the image of God, and you change everything—not just our theology, but our behavior.⁷¹

Rethinking God’s Justice: Restorative, Not Retributive

Once Baker had reframed the image of God, the next domino fell: justice.

Most of us, if we are honest, think of justice mainly in terms of punishment. Somebody does something wrong, and justice means they get what they deserve. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. The punishment fits the crime. This is called retributive justice, and it is deeply embedded in Western culture. Our entire legal system is built on it.¹²

And it is the kind of justice that stands behind the traditional view of hell. You sinned against an infinite God, so you deserve infinite punishment. That is the logic. That is what makes ECT seem like “justice” to many Christians.

Baker challenged this head-on. She argued that the Bible—especially the New Testament—presents a very different kind of justice: restorative justice.¹³ Restorative justice is not about making the guilty suffer. It is about making things right. It is about reconciling broken relationships. It is about healing the damage that sin has caused. Where retributive justice asks, “How can the guilty be punished?” restorative justice asks, “How can the broken be restored?”

Baker found this pattern throughout Scripture. The Old Testament prophets repeatedly connect justice with deliverance, rescue, and restoration rather than punishment. The prophet Isaiah proclaims that “justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field. The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever” (Isa. 32:16–20, NRSV).¹⁴ The prophet Amos calls for justice that “rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24)—a beautiful image of something life-giving, not destructive.

In the New Testament, the focus shifts even more clearly. Paul writes that God was “reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them” (2 Cor. 5:19). Notice: God is not counting sins. That is not the language of retribution. That is the language of restoration.¹⁵

Baker illustrated the difference with a powerful historical story about Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. A prisoner who had committed a serious offense against the Tsar expected harsh punishment. Instead, Peter showed him extravagant mercy. The result? The prisoner was overwhelmed by remorse—not because he had been beaten, but because he had been loved. He repented and was restored. Baker observed that “justice in harmony with love brought about redemption and restoration where punishment could not.”¹⁶

Think about that. The love of the Tsar did what punishment never could.

Baker asked whether God’s justice might work the same way. If unselfish love seeks to redeem and restore, while punishment typically seeks revenge and retribution, shouldn’t divine justice be redemptive and restorative? How does eternal damnation—burning forever in unquenchable fire—redeem and restore anyone?¹⁷

It doesn’t. And that was Baker’s point.

Baker traced this pattern of restorative justice deep into the Old Testament. She showed that the Hebrew word tsedaka (righteousness, often translated as “justice”) in the Old Testament is not primarily about punishment. It is about God setting things right. When the psalmist cries out for God’s justice, he is not asking God to punish people. He is asking God to deliver, to rescue, to restore. Psalm 146:7 says that God “executes justice for the oppressed” and “gives food to the hungry.” That is not retribution. That is rescue. Psalm 140:12 declares that God “maintains the cause of the afflicted and justice for the poor.” Again, God’s justice here means helping people, not hurting them.⁷²

Baker pointed out that restorative justice was not just an idea in the prophets. It was also a practical reality in the New Testament church. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians about a man who had committed a serious sin, he did not say, “Destroy him.” He said the goal of discipline was “that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” (1 Cor. 5:5). The purpose of correction was restoration, not annihilation. Even church discipline—the most severe form of justice in the early church—was aimed at bringing people back, not casting them out forever.⁷³

Baker connected this to a broader principle that I think is absolutely vital for how we think about hell. If divine justice is restorative—if God’s deepest goal is always to make things right, to reconcile, to heal—then what does that tell us about the final judgment? It tells us that the final judgment, too, must be aimed at restoration. Not that everyone will accept it. Not that there are no consequences for sin. But that the purpose of God’s fire is always purification, never pointless suffering. God does not inflict pain for the sake of inflicting pain. Every act of divine justice has a goal, and that goal is always redemptive.⁷⁴

Baker wasn’t saying that the wicked simply get a free pass. Not at all. She was saying that God’s justice is aimed at something better than endless suffering. It is aimed at reconciliation. It is aimed at making things right. And as we will see when we get to the story of Otto, the fire of God’s love is a far more terrifying and effective form of justice than any torture chamber could ever be.

Rethinking God’s Forgiveness: Unconditional and Universal

The third pillar of Baker’s argument was forgiveness. And here she said something that will surprise many Christians: God’s forgiveness is unconditional.

Now, let me be very careful here. Baker was not saying that everyone is automatically saved. She was not saying that repentance doesn’t matter. She was saying something more specific: that God has already forgiven all sin through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.¹⁸ The forgiveness is accomplished. It is offered. It is real. But it must be received in order for reconciliation to take place.

Baker drew from the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. The father does not wait for the son to grovel. The father does not demand a list of offenses. The father does not require payment. The moment the son appears on the horizon, the father runs to meet him.¹⁹ The forgiveness was already there. It was waiting. The only question was whether the son would receive it.

Paul confirmed this when he wrote that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Cor. 5:19). God has done the work. God has paid the price. God has extended the forgiveness. What remains is for us to accept it and be reconciled.²⁰

Baker made an important distinction here that I want to highlight. She distinguished between forgiveness and restoration. Forgiveness is what God offers freely and unconditionally. Restoration is what happens when we receive that forgiveness and reconcile with God. You can be forgiven without being restored—if you refuse to accept the forgiveness that is offered. The gift is on the table. But you still have to open it.²¹

This has enormous implications for our view of hell. If God’s forgiveness is already accomplished, then the people in hell are not there because God refuses to forgive them. They are there because they refuse to receive the forgiveness that God has already given. The door is unlocked. The Father is running toward them. But they are turning away.

Baker also explored the biblical meaning of forgiveness in the original languages. The Jewish concept of sin, she noted, pictures something that binds us—shackles that lock us in bondage. Forgiveness, then, is the opposite of retribution. It means to release, to break those shackles. When Jesus told the paralyzed man, “Your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5), He was saying that the prison doors were open. The chains were broken.²²

Forgiveness and restorative justice, Baker argued, work hand in hand. Where retributive justice demands payment, restorative justice extends mercy. Where retributive justice locks the guilty up, restorative justice sets them free. And where retributive justice says, “You must suffer first,” restorative justice says, “You are already forgiven—will you come home?”²³

The philosopher John Caputo called this the “mad economy” of the kingdom of God—a kingdom where forgiveness is offered without return, with no conditions attached, where reconciliation, renewal, and transformation flow freely from the heart of a God who refuses to keep score.²⁴

That is the God Baker saw in Scripture. And that is the God who stands at the center of her view of hell.

Into the Fire: What Baker Found in the Bible

With the image, justice, and forgiveness of God reframed, Baker turned to the fire.

Fire is everywhere in the Bible. And Baker made a discovery that changes everything: in Scripture, fire is not something separate from God. Fire is God.²⁵

Baker compiled a stunning list of passages that connect fire directly with God’s presence. God is a consuming or devouring fire (Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29). Fire flows out from God’s presence (Dan. 7:10). God appears as fire in a burning bush (Exod. 3:2–3). A pillar of fire symbolizes God’s presence (Exod. 13:21–22). God’s tongue, breath, and eyes are described as flames (Isa. 30:27; Rev. 2:18). Both Daniel and John envision God sitting on a throne of fire, with a face shining like lightning and eyes like flaming torches (Dan. 7:9–11; Rev. 1:14–15).²⁶

Baker summed it up with a phrase I love: “Where there’s God, there’s fire!”²⁷ Fire comes from God, surrounds God, and is God.

But here is the critical point: the fire of God serves a specific purpose. Upon close examination, Baker found that fire in Scripture burns up whatever is evil, wicked, or sinful. It devours and consumes what is impure. But it also cleanses and purifies what remains.²⁸ The prophet Malachi described God as “the fire that purifies and refines” (Mal. 3:2–3). The fire is not random destruction. It is targeted purification.

This led Baker to a conclusion that is at the very heart of her model: if God is the fire, then standing in the presence of God is standing in the fire. And standing in the fire means that everything impure gets burned away.²⁹ Baker wrote that every person will eventually stand before God to give an account of his or her life (1 Cor. 4:5; 2 Cor. 5:10–11). And to stand in God’s presence means standing in the flames. To stand in the flames means the burning away of chaff, wickedness, and sinfulness.³⁰

Notice what Baker has done here. She has not denied hell. She has not denied fire. She has not denied judgment. She has relocated them. The fire is not in some separate torture chamber far away from God. The fire is God. The judgment is not the act of an angry executioner. The judgment is what happens when a sinful heart encounters the overwhelming, inescapable reality of perfect Love.

The Story of Otto: What Hell Might Look Like

Baker knew that all of this theology needed to be made concrete. We needed to see it. So she told a story. And it is one of the most powerful passages I have ever read about the judgment of God.

She asked us to picture a man named Otto—a fictional international leader who has launched unjust wars, terrorized nations, and caused the deaths of thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children. A monster by any measure. Someone we would all like to see “get what’s coming to him.”³¹

It is judgment day. Otto prepares to face God. His attitude is full of rebellion, anger, and hatred. He knows the time for payback has arrived. He expects God to hate him, condemn him, and throw him into eternal torture. That is what he has always assumed God is like.

Otto enters the throne room of God. Glaring flames of fire, so bright and hot that he cannot see, confront him. His anger turns to sheer terror. As he moves closer to the flames, he realizes something staggering: the blazing fire is God. The closer he gets to God, the more deeply he feels—not God’s hatred, not God’s rage—but God’s love.³²

And that love is devastating.

Baker wrote that God’s love is of such magnitude that, by its very abundance, it acts as wrath—judging Otto for his failures. By its purity, it serves as a hell—exposing his depravity. God’s love and mercy, both acting as judgment, are so extravagant, so abundant, so incomprehensible that they completely overwhelm Otto.³³

Then Otto hears a voice from the fire. He does not hear, “You evil, vile murderer! I am going to get you now. Revenge, punishment, and torture forever and ever!” 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?”³⁴

Stop for a moment and feel the weight of that.

Otto expected a fist. He got an embrace. He expected condemnation. He got grief. He expected an executioner. He found a Father weeping over a lost child. And that is what destroyed him—not God’s anger, but God’s love.

Totally undone by this approach, Otto falls to his face. His hatred is replaced by remorse. His life flashes before his eyes. He sees all the victims—mothers crying for lost sons, children begging for murdered fathers, an eighteen-year-old boy dying alone on a battlefield, calling for his mother. Otto hears their screams. He sees their bloody and battered bodies. He listens as they cry out for mercy. And he knows he gave none. Yet here he stands, in the fire of God, receiving what he never gave.³⁵

Then God makes Otto go to each of his victims and place his hand on their hearts. As he touches them, he feels all of their pain, all of their disappointments, all of their fear. He knows that he caused it all. Last of all, he sees Jesus. When he places his hand on Jesus’s heart, he feels not only the pain and sorrow he has caused—but also the unconditional love that Jesus has for him, Otto.³⁶

All the while, the fire of God burns, devouring Otto’s wickedness. With gnashing teeth and uncontrollable weeping, his heart breaks. He cries out in utter remorse, in unmitigated repentance, knowing he can never undo the damage he has caused. And Baker tells us that seeing his repentance and feeling his unendurable pain, the victims are vindicated. The one thing victims most often wish for is that their offender feel genuine remorse and know the terrible pain he has caused them. Otto’s immense sorrow satisfies that need.³⁷

Baker quoted one of her favorite theologians, George MacDonald, who explained the pain of the fire like this: God’s fire, which is His essential being, His love, His creative power, is unlike earthly fire in this respect—it burns most intensely at a distance, and the farther a person stands from God, the more pain the fire causes as it burns away the impurities.³⁸

The more Otto burns, the closer he gets to God. Until finally he stands next to God, purified and free from sin. Then God speaks: “I forgive you. Will you be reconciled to me and to those you have wronged?” And Otto, barely able to answer, nods his head in utter disbelief.³⁹

God then asks Otto’s victims to draw near and place their hands on his heart. As they touch him, each one feels Otto’s pain, his fears, his disappointments. They can hear his cries as a child and know his shame as an adult. Themselves forgiven and embraced by the love of God, they extend that same grace to Otto, forgiving him his sins. At last Jesus stands before him, touches his heart, and says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love, and I forgive you. Will you enter into my kingdom and be restored to God?” And Otto accepts. He has been judged by the fire of love, purified by the fire of mercy, and restored by the fire of grace.⁴⁰

That is the divine presence model in living color.

The Possibility of Final Refusal

But Baker did not stop there. She was honest enough to acknowledge that the story might not always end so well.

Immediately after telling the story of Otto’s redemption, Baker wrote something very important: “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.”⁴¹

In order to preserve human freedom—which God gave us at creation—we must allow for the possibility that some people will still reject God even after experiencing the full blaze of His love. The fire does not eliminate the gift of freedom. Those who say no to God’s yes, however, end up in what Scripture calls “the lake of fire,” which, in Baker’s view, annihilates them.⁴²

This is critical. Baker was not a universalist—she said so herself.⁴³ She believed in the reality of final loss. She just understood it differently. The person who is destroyed is not destroyed by God’s anger. The person is destroyed by his own refusal to receive love. If the fire of God burns away everything impure, and a person has nothing pure left—nothing of love, nothing of goodness, nothing that could respond to grace—then the fire consumes everything. There is nothing left. That is annihilation. That is the second death. And it is not something God does to the person. It is what happens to the person when there is nothing in them that can survive the fire of perfect Love.⁴⁴

Manis recognized this as a “hybrid view”—a combination of the divine presence model and annihilationism. He noted that Baker’s account contains all the central elements of the divine presence model: the identification of God with the fire, the experience of divine love as the source of suffering, and the purifying nature of the encounter.⁴⁵ But Baker added something that Manis himself left more open: the claim that for those who finally refuse, the fire ultimately destroys them. This is conditional immortality within the divine presence framework.

I find this deeply compelling. It holds together two things that matter enormously: the real possibility of final loss and the assurance that God never stops being love. Even the destruction of the wicked is not torture. It is the natural result of a totally hardened heart encountering a totally loving God. God does not change. His love does not become wrath. His fire does not become punishment. The person is consumed by love itself—because there is nothing left in them that love can save.

The Experience of the Redeemed

Baker did not spend all her time on the wicked. She also painted a beautiful picture of what the righteous experience when they stand in that same fire.

She told the story of a fictional woman named Anne, who lived a life of Christian love and virtue.⁴⁶ Anne, too, stands before God in the fire. But for Anne, the experience is radically different. Where Otto felt terror, Anne feels joy. Where Otto’s impurities burned, Anne’s few remaining faults are gently consumed, and what remains is pure gold.

Baker grounded this in Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 3:12–15, where Paul describes the final judgment as a fire that tests everyone’s work. Some have built with gold, silver, and precious stones. Others have built with wood, hay, and straw. The fire reveals which is which. Those who built with lasting materials pass through the fire and are rewarded. Those who built with flimsy materials suffer loss—but even they “will be saved, yet so as through fire.”⁴⁷

Baker saw this as the heart of the divine presence model’s understanding of judgment. In the final judgment, everyone goes through the fire. But the fire does not consume, devour, or even scorch the pure and the righteous. The prophet Isaiah declared, “When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Isa. 43:2, NRSV).⁴⁸ For the righteous, the fire is not punishment. It is purification. It is healing. It is the intense joy of divine love.

The same fire. Two completely different experiences. And the difference is not in God. The difference is in the human heart.

I want us to sit with this picture for a moment, because it is one of the most beautiful things in Baker’s entire book. Think about what it means for everyday believers. It means that every act of love you have done in your life is gold. Every time you fed the hungry, visited the sick, forgave someone who wronged you, prayed for your enemies—every one of those acts is a brick of gold built into the foundation of your character. And when you stand before God in the fire, those bricks will hold. They will not burn. They will shine. The fire of God’s love will not be something you endure. It will be something you celebrate.

That is the hope Baker offered to every Christian who has ever feared the judgment. If you are in Christ, the fire is your friend. It is not coming to destroy you. It is coming to complete you—to burn away the last traces of selfishness, pride, and fear, and to leave nothing behind but the pure gold of a life lived for love.

Baker on the Rich Man and Lazarus

Baker also brought her model to bear on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31. This is a passage that many people use to argue for eternal conscious torment. The rich man dies and is in Hades, in torment. Lazarus dies and is in “Abraham’s bosom,” comforted. There is a great gulf between them that cannot be crossed.

Baker made several important observations. First, she pointed out that the rich man is in Hades—the intermediate state—not in Gehenna or the lake of fire. This is a critically important distinction that we will develop at length in Chapter 21. Hades is the waiting room before the final judgment. It is not the final state. The rich man’s situation is temporary, not eternal.⁷⁵

Second, Baker noted that the parable is a story with a theological point—it is not a systematic description of the afterlife. Jesus was using the parable to challenge the wealthy and powerful who ignored the suffering of the poor at their doorstep. The main message was not about the furniture of hell. It was about justice, compassion, and the danger of ignoring the needs of others. Baker argued that we should not build an entire doctrine of eternal punishment on a parable that was never intended to teach us the mechanics of the afterlife.⁷⁶

Third, and most importantly, even in this parable, the rich man is not being tortured by God. He is in agony, yes. But the text does not say that God is inflicting the agony. The rich man is separated from comfort, from love, from community. His suffering arises from his own condition—from a lifetime of selfish choices that left him unable to receive what Abraham and Lazarus enjoy. Even in this most traditional-sounding passage, the suffering looks more like the natural consequence of a hardened heart than the active punishment of a wrathful God. And that fits the divine presence model perfectly.

Baker on the Lake of Fire and Brimstone

Baker also tackled one of the most fearsome images in all of Scripture: the lake of fire in the book of Revelation.

Many Christians assume the lake of fire is a separate torture chamber where God sends the wicked. Baker offered a different reading. She pointed out that the lake of fire can be understood as the same reality as the fire of God’s presence. As the fire burns away the chaff—a metaphor for evil—it leaves only the pure behind. Revelation 20:14–15 tells us that “Death and Hades” are thrown into the lake of fire and destroyed. Death itself is put to death. And if death is destroyed, what is left? Life—eternally, in God, the only eternal one.⁴⁹

Baker made a fascinating observation about the Greek word for “brimstone” (or “sulfur”) that appears in Revelation 19:20, 20:10, and 21:8. The Greek noun theion is spelled the same as the Greek adjective meaning “divine.” Brimstone is fire from heaven. It is fire from God. The fire in the lake actually comes from God—it is the fire that surrounds God, the fire that is God’s very presence.⁵⁰

Even more striking, Baker noted that in the ancient Greek world, sulfur was used as a purifier, a cleanser, and a preservative. The Greeks used it to purify and dedicate temples. They burned it as purifying incense. And they believed that the purity of the fire came from God.⁵¹ So for the original readers of Revelation, the lake of fire and brimstone would not have meant a torture pit. It would have meant a lake of divine purification—a place of cleansing so that the purified person could be dedicated and restored to God.

This is not liberal wishful thinking. This is historical and linguistic evidence pointing toward a reading that the earliest Greek-speaking Christians would have recognized immediately.

Baker on the Sheep and the Goats

Baker also brought the divine presence model to bear on Jesus’s famous parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31–46. This passage is often used as the ultimate proof text for eternal conscious torment. But Baker read it differently.

She noted that in this parable, the nations come before the Son of Man for judgment. The sheep are placed at his right and the goats at his left. The sheep enter God’s kingdom. The goats are sent away into “eternal punishment.”⁵²

But Baker asked us to look more carefully at why the sheep are rewarded and the goats are punished. It has nothing to do with doctrinal correctness. It has nothing to do with saying the sinner’s prayer. The sheep are rewarded because they took care of the poor, the hungry, the naked, and the imprisoned. The goats are punished because they did not.⁵³

Baker placed this parable in the context of Jesus’s hyperbolic teaching style. Jesus was making a point about the radical importance of caring for the vulnerable. The parable is a call to kingdom living—a call to love others as God loves us. It is not, Baker argued, a blueprint for the mechanics of eternal torment. Read through the Jesus lens, it is a passionate plea for compassion, justice, and love—exactly the values that the divine presence model holds at its center.⁵⁴

The Wrath of God as the Love of God

One of Baker’s most important contributions was her treatment of God’s wrath. Many Christians assume that God’s wrath and God’s love are two opposing forces—as if God has a split personality, sometimes loving and sometimes wrathful.

Baker rejected this completely. She argued that God’s wrath is not something different from His love. God’s wrath is His love—experienced as pain by those who resist it.⁵⁵

She identified two aspects of divine wrath. The first occurs in this life: God “gives us over” to the earthly consequences of our sin (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). This can feel like hell on earth, but it is actually God respecting our freedom to choose badly while allowing those bad choices to teach us. The second aspect occurs at the final judgment, when those who have not received Jesus stand in the fiery presence of God and suffer the purifying flames of His love. This burning love feels like burning wrath to the one who experiences it.⁵⁶

Baker pointed out that one of the Hebrew words translated as “wrath” in the Bible literally means “to burn.” That is not a coincidence. God’s wrath is not cold anger. It is blazing love—love that burns away sin, purifying the sinner so that true reconciliation can take place.⁵⁷

Baker, the Cross, and Kippur

Baker also connected the divine presence model to the work of Jesus on the cross. She explored the Hebrew concept of kippur (atonement) and showed that its true meaning is not about punishment at all.

Kippur means “to wipe away,” “to cleanse,” or “to purify.”⁵⁸ When the Old Testament priests sprinkled blood on the altar, they were not punishing the animal in place of the people. They were performing an act of cleansing. The blood symbolized life, and the sprinkling of blood symbolized the giving of one’s life to God. Old Testament scholars make it clear that the shedding of blood to atone for sin was never punitive. It was always about purification.⁵⁹

Baker applied this to Jesus. As our high priest, Jesus came to the altar of God not with the blood of bulls or goats but with His own life. He sprinkled it on the altar for the forgiveness of sin. And the forgiveness that flows from Jesus’s sacrifice is a cleansing, purifying forgiveness—a forgiveness that washes us clean and makes us fit for the presence of God.⁶⁰

This connects directly to the fire. The fire of God’s presence and the blood of Christ are doing the same thing: purifying. One burns away impurity. The other washes it away. Both are expressions of the same consuming love.

For Baker, the cross was never about God punishing an innocent victim to satisfy His anger. It was the supreme act of divine love—God entering into our suffering to cleanse us, heal us, and bring us home.⁶¹ And the fire of the final judgment is the continuation of that same work. Those who have received Christ pass through the fire already purified. Those who have not will encounter the full, unshielded blaze of divine love—and either be purified by it or consumed by it.

C. Objections and Responses

“Baker’s Model Is Too Soft on Sin”

Someone might object that Baker makes hell sound too easy. Otto commits mass murder and then gets a hug? Where is the justice in that?

But this objection misunderstands Baker’s point completely. Otto does not get off easy. He is demolished. He is broken down to nothing by the overwhelming weight of perfect love. He feels every ounce of pain he ever caused. He stands face to face with every victim and experiences their suffering as his own. His pride, his defenses, his self-justifications—all of it is stripped away by the fire. Baker’s student Brooke asked the same question: “Doesn’t he get off too easily?” Baker responded by asking what would happen if Otto had made a deathbed confession and received Jesus a minute before he died. He would have been ushered into God’s kingdom with no purification at all. Christians are not traditionally troubled by that scenario. Why should they be more troubled by this one, where Otto actually does go through the fire?⁶²

The truth is that Baker’s model is far more terrifying than eternal torture, if we think about it honestly. Torture inflicts pain from the outside. Love exposes the soul from the inside. Which would be harder to endure: being beaten by an enemy, or standing naked before the person you have wronged most deeply, feeling every drop of their pain, while that person offers you nothing but love? The fire of God’s love is the most severe form of justice imaginable—because it does not just punish the act. It transforms the heart.

“Baker’s View Lacks Precision”

This is a fair criticism, and I want to be honest about it. Baker was writing for a popular audience, not a philosophy seminar. Her goal was accessibility, not technical precision. She told a powerful story and made a profound theological point. But she did not always spell out every logical implication the way Manis would.

That said, this is not a fatal flaw. It is the reason we need both Baker and Manis. Manis provides the philosophical precision. Baker provides the theological warmth. Together, they give us a model that is both rigorous and alive. The ambiguities in Baker’s account are real, but they are resolved by reading her alongside Manis—which is exactly what we are doing in this book.

The most natural reading of Baker’s account, in my view, is a non-retributive version of annihilationism within the divine presence framework. The fire of God’s love encounters the hardened heart. If there is anything in the person that can respond to love, the fire purifies and restores. If there is nothing—if the person is so thoroughly corrupted that no spark of goodness remains—then the fire consumes everything, and the person ceases to exist. God does not destroy the person as an act of punishment. The person is destroyed because there is nothing left to save. The fire is still love. It has not changed. But there is nothing left that love can hold on to.⁶⁴

“Doesn’t This Lead Inevitably to Universalism?”

Another common objection: if God’s love is that powerful and that persistent, wouldn’t everyone eventually give in? Doesn’t Baker’s model make universalism inevitable?

Baker herself said no. She explicitly denied being a universalist, precisely because she took human freedom seriously.⁶⁵ She insisted that the fire does not eliminate the gift of human freedom. God will not force anyone to love Him. Even in the full blaze of His unveiled presence, the human will remains intact.

Could that freedom produce a final “no”? Baker said yes, it could. And if it does, the consequence is annihilation—not eternal torture.

I think Baker’s instinct here is sound, even if the question remains genuinely open. The divine presence model does not force us into universalism. It simply says that the fire of God’s love is the mechanism of both purification and destruction. If a person yields to the fire, they are purified and restored. If they resist to the end, the fire consumes them. Either way, God is love. Either way, the fire is love. The question of whether anyone will actually resist that love forever is a separate question—an important one, but a separate one.

Baker herself seemed to lean toward a hope that most, if not all, would eventually say yes. She wrote that since the fire destroys everything impure, a person who has been purified—who has had all their sin, selfishness, and rebellion burned away—would naturally choose God. Only something impure could reject God. A purified heart would naturally choose life and love. This led Baker to suggest that, under the second interpretation of the lake of fire (where it is the same as God’s fiery presence), the fire would purify the person until only goodness remained, and that remaining goodness would freely choose reconciliation with God.⁷⁷ On this reading, as Baker noted, “every knee will choose to bow and every tongue will choose to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (cf. Phil. 2:10–11).⁷⁸

But Baker also left room for the possibility that some hearts contain nothing worth saving—that the fire might burn everything away and leave nothing at all. That is annihilation, and it is a real possibility on her model. The beauty of the divine presence framework is that it does not require us to settle this question in advance. It works either way.

I will note here—and we will explore this at greater length in Chapters 30 and 31—that I am not entirely sure Baker is right on this point. It is possible that God’s love is so overwhelming that no finite resistance can hold out forever. The universalist hope is a real and serious option. But Baker’s model works whether the final outcome is conditional immortality or universal reconciliation. The divine presence model does not require you to choose between them in advance. It simply says that hell is God’s love, experienced as fire by the resistant. Whether that fire eventually purifies every heart or ultimately consumes some hearts forever is an open question—and a question this book will not pretend to have settled.⁶⁶

“Is This Really Biblical, or Just Nice-Sounding Theology?”

Someone might object that Baker’s model sounds lovely but is not actually rooted in Scripture. The answer is that Baker grounded every major point in specific biblical texts. Her list of fire-and-God connections fills several pages and draws from Genesis through Revelation. Her reading of the lake of fire is based on careful attention to the Greek words involved. Her understanding of justice as restorative draws on the prophets, the Psalms, and the Gospels. Her view of forgiveness as unconditional is rooted in the teachings and actions of Jesus.⁶⁷

Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 15, Baker’s core insight—that hell is the experience of God’s love by those who hate Him—is not a modern invention. It is the oldest view of hell in the Christian tradition, preserved by the Greek-speaking Fathers of the Eastern church for nearly two thousand years. Baker arrived at many of the same conclusions as Isaac the Syrian, Basil the Great, and the other Fathers we explored earlier. She did so through independent study of Scripture, which is itself a powerful confirmation of the model’s biblical roots.

D. Conclusion and Connection

Baker’s Razing Hell gives us something indispensable. Where Manis gave us the philosophical architecture of the divine presence model, Baker gave us its beating heart. She showed us that the model flows naturally from three biblical convictions: that God’s true image is revealed in Jesus, that God’s justice is aimed at restoration rather than retribution, and that God’s forgiveness is unconditional and universal in scope even though it must be received to be effective.

She gave us the story of Otto—a story that makes the abstract concrete and the theological personal. She showed us that the same fire that purifies the willing consumes the resistant, and that the difference is not in God but in the human heart. She showed us that hell, rightly understood, is not God’s cruelty but God’s love—a love so pure and so powerful that it cannot leave sin untouched.

And she gave us hope. Hope that God’s final judgment is not the end of love but its fullest expression. Hope that the fire of God is aimed at healing, not destruction. Hope that even the worst of sinners—even an Otto—may one day stand purified in the presence of the God who loved them all along.

Baker also gave us honesty. She did not pretend that everyone will be saved. She acknowledged the terrible possibility that some hearts may be so hardened that nothing pure remains, and that the fire of God’s love will consume them entirely. That is a sobering thought. But it is a far cry from the image of God as an eternal torturer. Even in destruction, God’s love does not become something else. The fire never stops being love. It is simply that love, when it encounters a heart made entirely of wood and straw, does what fire always does.

In the next chapter, we will go deeper into the psychology and theology of how hearts harden. We will explore Manis’s treatment of self-deception—the process by which sin distorts the soul’s capacity to receive love. We will see how the Pharaoh of the Exodus, the elder brother of the prodigal son, and Judas Iscariot all illustrate the terrifying possibility of standing in the presence of perfect love and walking away. But we will also see how the divine presence model offers a framework for understanding even the hardest of hearts—a framework that takes sin seriously while never, ever losing sight of the God whose fire is love.

Baker closed her book with a vision of the final state that I find deeply moving. At the end of all things, she wrote, we will all dwell in the eternal fiery presence of God and be consumed by God’s love. At one, at last.⁶⁸

I want to close this chapter with a personal reflection. When I first read Baker’s story of Otto, something shifted inside me. I had always believed, in the abstract, that God is love. But Baker made me feel it. She made me see what it would look like for that love to confront the worst evil the human heart can produce—and to win. Not by force. Not by torture. Not by breaking the person against his will. But by being so unbearably, relentlessly, devastatingly loving that the walls of hatred crumble from the inside out.

That is a God I can worship without reservation. That is a God I can preach to my children and my neighbors without embarrassment. That is a God whose judgment I can affirm without flinching, because I know that His judgment is always, at its root, an act of love.

Baker did not have all the answers. No one does. But she asked the right questions, and she pointed us in the right direction. Toward the fire. Toward the love. Toward the God who is both.

That is the consuming love. That is the fire. That is our God.