Chapter 31

Can Anyone Choose Hell Forever?—The Problem of Eternal Rejection

A. Thesis and Context

We have come a long way together. Over the last thirty chapters, we have built a case for the divine presence model of hell—the view that hell is not separation from God but the painful experience of God’s inescapable love by those who have hardened their hearts against Him. We have seen that the same fire that purifies the willing consumes the resistant. We have looked at what Scripture actually says about judgment, fire, and the final state. We have explored both conditional immortality and universal reconciliation as possible outcomes within this model.

Now we come to what may be the hardest question of all. It is certainly the question that keeps me awake at night more than any other. Can anyone really choose hell forever? Is it possible for a human soul, standing in the full blaze of God’s revealed love, to keep on saying “no”—not just for a moment, not just for a long time, but permanently?

This is the question that sits right at the dividing line between conditional immortality and universal reconciliation. If a person can resist God forever, then CI may be right: some hearts harden to the point of no return, and those people are eventually consumed by the very love they refuse. If no one can hold out against God’s love indefinitely, then UR may be right: every knee will eventually bow, every tongue will eventually confess, and every heart will eventually yield.

I am not going to pretend I have solved this question. Honest scholars have wrestled with it for centuries, and the greatest minds in the church have come down on both sides. What I will do in this chapter is lay out the strongest arguments on each side, engage them carefully, and share where I land—and why. But I want you to know from the start that I hold my conclusion with open hands. This is one of those places where humility is not optional. It is required.¹

The question matters because it is really a question about two things we all care about deeply: the power of God’s love and the reality of human freedom. If God’s love is truly infinite and inescapable, can any created being hold out against it forever? And if human freedom is genuine—if our choices really mean something—then can God guarantee that everyone will eventually say yes? These two convictions pull in opposite directions, and the tension between them is exactly what makes this question so hard.²

B. The Case

The Psychology of Damnation: How Self-Deception Works

To understand whether anyone can choose hell forever, we first need to understand how anyone could choose hell at all. This seems like an impossible choice. Why would anyone, standing before a God of perfect love, choose torment over joy? Why would anyone say “no” to the very thing their heart was made for?

Thomas Talbott, one of the strongest voices for universal reconciliation, says they wouldn’t. He argues that no rational person would ever choose eternal misery if they truly understood what they were choosing. In his view, every rejection of God happens because the person is deceived, ignorant, or in bondage to some desire they cannot control. Remove those barriers, and no one would resist God. The choice for hell, Talbott insists, is always made under conditions that take away genuine freedom. Once those conditions are removed, there can no longer be any motive for choosing eternal misery.³

At first glance, this sounds completely right. Who would choose fire over paradise? Who would pick agony over joy? It seems crazy. And Talbott uses a vivid example to make his point: imagine someone thrusting their hand into a raging fire. No sane person would keep doing it, once they felt the pain. The experience itself shatters the illusion that the action is a good idea.⁴

But R. Zachary Manis, whose work on the divine presence model has been our guide throughout this book, shows that Talbott’s argument has a serious problem. And the problem is this: Talbott himself admits that there can be overriding motives. In a footnote, Talbott concedes that a person might keep thrusting their hand into a fire if they believed it was the only way to stop someone from torturing their child. The motive is strong enough to override the pain.⁵ This is a crucial admission. It shows that if the motive is powerful enough, a person can endure even extreme suffering without giving in. And Manis argues that for the self-deceived sinner, the motive is indeed powerful enough: they believe they are right to oppose God.⁶

To see how this works, we need to understand what self-deception actually is and what it can do. Self-deception is not just making a mistake. It is not simple ignorance. Self-deception is the ability to hide from yourself something that, on a deeper level, you know to be true—because it conflicts with something you desperately want to be true.⁷ We all know what this looks like. Think of the person who believes, against all evidence, that they are the smartest person in the room. Or the spouse who convinces themselves that their partner isn’t cheating, even when the signs are obvious. These are everyday examples. But Manis points out that the most dangerous examples involve a person’s relationship with God, because here the damage can be literally infinite.⁸

The Bible’s most common word for this is “hardening the heart.” Scripture teaches that self-deception is the single most destructive thing a human being can do, because it cuts a person off from the conviction and correction of God. It is the tool people use to defend themselves against truths they do not want to face—especially moral and spiritual truths revealed through the Holy Spirit.⁹

Here is the really important part. The attempt to deflect hard truths is not always about avoiding pain. As we noted earlier, people willingly endure extreme pain and danger all the time, if they believe they have a good enough reason. And one of the most powerful reasons is the belief that you are in the right—that a certain action, even an extremely painful one, is necessary to prove it. Self-deception plays a crucial role in this, because it allows a person to maintain the belief that they are morally justified in their rebellion.¹⁰

The Cumulative Effect: Character That Hardens Like Stone

If self-deception happened only once or twice, it might not matter much. We all deceive ourselves from time to time, and we recover. The danger comes when self-deception becomes a habit. And this is exactly what Manis warns about.

When a person engages in self-deception on a regular basis, it becomes the most dangerous kind of habitual lying—lying to yourself. Over time, this habit shapes a person’s character. The descent into evil has a corrupting effect on a person’s intellectual abilities. The wicked person becomes increasingly unable to tell right from wrong because, by repeatedly hardening their heart, they have cauterized their conscience. In rejecting the Holy Spirit’s conviction, they have cut themselves off from the only truly reliable source of moral and spiritual knowledge.¹¹

Think of it this way. Imagine someone who starts telling small lies. At first, it bothers them. Their conscience speaks up. But they push it down. Over time, the lies get bigger, and the conscience gets quieter. Eventually, the person can lie without feeling anything at all. Their moral sense has been deadened—not because it was taken from them, but because they silenced it, one choice at a time.

Manis says something similar happens in a person’s relationship with God, but on a much deeper level. The person who repeatedly rejects God’s conviction is not just making isolated bad decisions. They are forming a character—a settled way of being that becomes harder and harder to reverse. Their rational abilities are no longer being used to pursue truth. They are being used to construct self-justifying stories about why their rebellion is okay. The result is that their perception of spiritual reality is skewed and distorted. They are spiritually blind.¹²

And here is the crucial point that Manis makes—the one that cuts against Talbott’s argument most sharply. The universalist critic imagines that anyone who rejects God must be in the grip of some delusion. But the critic has things backwards. The evil person is not wicked because they are blind. The evil person is blind because they are wicked.¹³

This is one of the most important principles of the spiritual life: a person’s ability to see moral and spiritual truth is a function of their character. The more virtuous a person is, the clearer their moral vision. The more wicked a person is, the more distorted their moral vision becomes.¹⁴ Think of two people standing in the same sunlight. One has healthy eyes and delights in the brightness. The other has diseased eyes and finds the same light agonizing. The light has not changed. The eyes have. This is precisely Kalomiros’s point about the final judgment: all will stand in the same light of God’s truth and love. The difference is not in God. It is in the human heart.¹⁵

Jerry Walls, in his work on the logic of damnation, makes a related point. He argues that moral freedom can either be perfected or perverted. In the former case, a person loses all motivation to do evil. In the latter case, a person loses all motivation to love God.¹⁶ The process goes in both directions. Just as the saints grow more and more into love until sin becomes unthinkable, so the wicked can grow more and more into rebellion until repentance becomes, for all practical purposes, impossible—not because God has taken the option away, but because the person has destroyed their own capacity to choose it.

Walls draws here on Søren Kierkegaard’s profound book, The Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard describes a particular kind of despair—a defiant refusal to be oneself before God—that becomes so deeply embedded in a person’s identity that giving it up feels like annihilation. Sin becomes a source of continuity for the person’s personality. To repent would feel like losing yourself entirely.¹⁷ Manis develops this insight further. The self-deceived person’s rebellion is not just something they do; it has become something they are. Their false beliefs, their twisted desires, their defiant will—all of these are so intertwined with their sense of self that to let them go would feel like death. And so they cling to them, even though clinging brings agony.¹⁸

The Apostle Paul put it simply: “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Manis sees in this verse the natural endpoint of the trajectory we have been describing. The cumulative effect of persistent, willful self-deception is not just confusion. It is spiritual death—the destruction of the very capacities that make repentance possible.¹⁹

Can God Break Through? The Limits of Evidence

At this point, someone will ask the obvious question: “Fine, people deceive themselves. But God is omnipotent. Can’t He just break through the self-deception? Can’t He give people such overwhelming evidence of His existence and love that they have no choice but to believe?”

Manis addresses this question with great care, and his answer may surprise you. He says that God absolutely can give a person compelling evidence. Think of Saul on the road to Damascus. God gave him an experience so overwhelming that it knocked him to the ground and blinded him (Acts 9:1–19). Surely that kind of evidence would force anyone to believe. Right?²⁰

Actually, no. And the reason is that presenting someone with evidence—even overwhelmingly powerful evidence—still leaves their power of self-deception intact. The evidence has to be interpreted, and interpretation involves the will. As long as a person’s free will is left intact, they are capable of misinterpreting even the most obvious evidence in order to hold onto their cherished false beliefs.²¹

Manis gives a vivid example. Imagine a militant atheist named Bertie who has just died and now has an experience of standing before God. You would think this would settle the question once and for all. But Bertie could interpret his experience in all kinds of ways that do not require him to give up his atheism. He could decide he is hallucinating. He could conclude he is in a simulation. He could tell himself his brain is misfiring in the moments before death. The point is that there is always a way to explain away the evidence, if you are determined to do so.²²

Jonathan Kvanvig makes a similar point in his work on the problem of hell. He notes that experience can force us to admit we are wrong about something, but it cannot always tell us which belief is the false one. A person can always find a way to save their overall picture of the world by adjusting other beliefs rather than giving up the one they are most attached to. There is no limit to the creative strategies people can use to protect a cherished belief from contrary evidence, however irrational those strategies might be.²³

This is not just a theoretical point. We see it all the time in this life. God has already informed people, in no uncertain terms, that sin leads to misery and that there is no true happiness apart from submission to Him. He has done this through Scripture, through the witness of the church, through individual conscience. And yet many people spend their entire lives in endless pursuit of happiness in all the wrong places, blaming everything and everyone except themselves for their misery.²⁴ Why should we assume that death or even the experience of the afterlife would automatically change things?

But What If God Overrides Their Free Will?

The universalist critic has one more move to make. “Forget the evidence approach,” they might say. “Why doesn’t God just override their free will? Why doesn’t He simply remove the self-deception by force and implant true beliefs directly?”

This is where Manis’s argument becomes especially powerful. He says the problem is not that God lacks the power to do this. The problem is that doing it would either be pointless or self-defeating.²⁵

Here is why. Suppose God forcibly causes Bertie, the atheist, to believe that God exists. Just that one belief, nothing more. What happens? Almost immediately, Bertie can deploy his capacity for self-deception to try to get rid of the belief. To prevent this, God would have to override not just Bertie’s belief-forming mechanisms, but also his belief-maintaining and belief-revising mechanisms. In other words, God would have to take away Bertie’s capacity for self-deception altogether.²⁶

But even this is not enough. Making Bertie believe that God exists does not make him a believer in any meaningful sense. He does not yet trust God, have faith in God, or recognize God as Lord of his life. To get Bertie from bare belief to saving faith, God would have to forcibly change a whole network of beliefs, attitudes, emotions, desires, and commitments. God would have to force Bertie to believe he is a sinner, that he needs a Savior, that God loves him, that Jesus died for him, and that he should accept Christ as Lord. And all of these beliefs would have to be not just installed once but maintained by God on an ongoing basis, continually overriding Bertie’s free will.²⁷

Can you see the problem? What we have just described is not conversion. It is mind control. The resulting “faith” would not be Bertie’s faith at all. It would be God’s beliefs installed in Bertie’s mind against his will. And this is fundamentally incompatible with the very thing that salvation requires: a free, personal relationship with God. You cannot love someone by force. You cannot trust someone because you were made to. A “conversion” produced by overriding the will is not a conversion at all. It is coercion.²⁸

Walls argues that God will give every person “optimal grace”—the measure of grace best suited to draw a free response from that individual, without overriding their freedom. Optimal grace is not minimal grace, as if God merely gives people enough information to be held accountable. It is lavish, generous, tailored to each person. It is the best possible invitation God can offer while still leaving the person free to say no.²⁹ But even optimal grace can be rejected. That is the whole point of it being grace rather than compulsion.

Talbott’s Counter: Can Suffering Shatter Every Illusion?

Talbott does not give up easily, and his argument deserves a full hearing. He believes that, eventually, the natural consequences of rejecting God will become so unbearable that every person will be forced to see through their illusions. As he puts it, the painful experience of being separated from God will “shatter all our illusions” that happiness can be found apart from Him.³⁰ On this view, hell is real suffering, but it is suffering with a purpose: to break down the walls of self-deception until the person finally gives in and accepts God’s love.

Robin Parry, writing as the universalist contributor in Four Views on Hell, develops a version of this argument. He contends that a genuinely free action requires a basic level of rationality. If someone performs an action when they have no motive for doing it and a very strong motive for not doing it, we do not call that freedom—we call it insanity. Imagine a boy who keeps thrusting his hand into a fire for no reason. We would not celebrate his freedom. We would call a psychiatrist.³¹

Parry pushes this further. If someone truly understood the reality of what they were choosing—if they fully grasped that God is the source of all joy, all meaning, all life—how could they possibly say no? Such a choice would be even more insane than the boy putting his hand in the fire. It would be utterly beyond comprehension. Parry concludes that any rejection of God can only be the product of ignorance, deception, or slavery to desires—all factors that diminish freedom rather than expressing it.³²

And so, Parry argues, God simply needs to work in many and various ways to gradually increase a person’s awareness of the truth. The greater our Spirit-enabled understanding of reality, the greater will be our desire to choose God and the smaller will be our desire to reject Him. Eventually, resistance becomes impossible—not because freedom has been overridden, but because the person has finally seen the truth clearly enough to respond to it freely.³³

I find this deeply moving. I want it to be true. The picture of God patiently, lovingly wearing down every wall of resistance until every last soul comes home—that is a beautiful picture. And there are texts in Scripture that seem to point in this direction. “Every knee shall bow” (Philippians 2:10). God “desires all people to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4). Christ will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).

But I have to be honest about the difficulties.

Manis’s Response: The Unveiling of Truth Does Not Guarantee a Positive Response

Manis agrees that the self-deceived person’s rejection of God is irrational. In fact, he says it is maximally irrational. But—and this is the critical distinction—irrational does not mean unintelligible. We can understand why someone does something irrational even if the action itself does not make logical sense. The rejection of God is highly motivated by the combination of beliefs and desires that are the natural fruit of persistent, willful disobedience. It is not random. It is not a mystery. It is the end of a long, terrible road that the person has been walking for a very long time.³⁴

Consider the divine presence model specifically. On this model, hell is not a place of separation from God. It is the experience of God’s unveiled presence by those who have hardened their hearts against Him. At the final judgment, the books are opened. The truth is laid bare. Every person stands before the penetrating light of God’s love with nothing hidden.³⁵

Now the universalist assumes that this unveiling will automatically produce repentance. If only people could see the truth, they would respond to it. But Manis points out that even on the divine presence model, where God’s presence is fully revealed, the self-deceived may experience that presence as torment rather than invitation. The unveiling of truth does not guarantee a positive response.³⁶

Remember the analogy of the sun and the eyes. Kalomiros, drawing on the Orthodox Fathers, says that the light of God will fall on all people equally on the Day of Judgment. There will be no distinction in what God gives. But the person with hatred in their heart will experience that same light as agony. They will want to hide, to flee, to get away from this piercing brightness that exposes everything they have spent their lives trying to conceal. And there will be nowhere to hide, because in the New Creation, God will be everywhere and in everything.³⁷

The difference, Kalomiros insists, is in the person, not in God. And the difference is conditioned by the free choice of the person—a choice that God respects absolutely. As he writes in one of the most striking passages of The River of Fire: “No, my brothers, unhappily for us, paradise or hell does not depend on God. It depends entirely upon us.”³⁸

The Analogy of the Addict

Perhaps the best way to understand what we are talking about is through the analogy of addiction. This is an analogy that both Manis and Talbott use, though they draw very different conclusions from it.

Think about a drug addict. The addict knows the drug is killing him. His family has told him. His doctor has told him. He has seen friends die from the same substance. He has experienced the terrible consequences himself—lost his job, lost his family, lost his health. And yet he keeps using. Why?

The universalist says: this is exactly the kind of bondage God can and will break. Just as a doctor can treat an addict by correcting the chemical imbalance in the brain, so God can break the spiritual bondage of sin. This is not an interference with freedom; it is a restoration of freedom. The addict is not free. He is enslaved. Freeing him is not coercion; it is healing.³⁹

Walls offers a sharp response. Suppose the addict had deliberately chosen to become addicted. Suppose, before the addiction took hold, he made it absolutely clear to everyone that this was his choice and that he did not want anyone to intervene. In that case, if the doctor restores the chemical balance against his wishes, the doctor is interfering with a settled, deliberate decision—a decision the person made freely and with full knowledge of the consequences.⁴⁰

The example is extreme, but it makes an important point. If a person has freely and deliberately chosen the path that leads to bondage, repeatedly rejecting every offer of help along the way, at what point does “healing” become coercion? At what point does God’s breaking of the chains become a violation of the very freedom He created?

Manis pushes the analogy further. It is commonplace, he notes, for addicts to enter rehabilitation, suffer through withdrawal, stay clean for a while, and then fall back into addiction. Why could the same not be true of spiritual addiction? Even if being in the presence of God has a sanctifying effect on the unrighteous—even if some experiences in God’s presence lead to genuine moments of repentance—there is no guarantee that the repentance will last. The person might cycle through repentance and rebellion endlessly, never finally settling into either one.⁴¹

C. S. Lewis and the Great Divorce: Why Some Choose the Gray Town

No one has captured the psychology of damnation more powerfully than C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce. In this small but profound book, Lewis imagines the inhabitants of a gray, dreary town—which represents hell—being given the opportunity to take a bus ride to heaven. They are free to stay in heaven as long as they want. Common sense says they would jump at the chance. Who would not want to leave hell for heaven?

But Lewis shows, with heartbreaking clarity, that most of the visitors choose to go back. And the reasons are achingly human. One ghost returns because the grass in heaven hurts his feet. The explanation given is that “Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.”⁴³ The truth—real, solid, uncompromising truth—is painful to those who have built their lives on illusions.

Another ghost is a woman whose speech is an endless stream of complaints. The question raised about her is devastating: “Is she a grumbler, or only a grumble?” If there is still a real woman in there, she can be saved. But if the grumbling has consumed the entire person, so that there is nothing left but the grumble going on forever like a machine, then there is nothing left to save.⁴⁴

One of the most powerful scenes involves a man from hell who meets his wife, Sarah Smith, in heaven. She is radiant with perfect love. She invites him to stay. She explains that God has satisfied every need, and she can no longer be manipulated by his old tricks—his sulking, his self-pity, his attempts to use “love” as a weapon to control her. And Lewis tells us that for a moment, it seems as if the man will give in. The invitation to joy, singing out of her whole being, seems like something no creature could resist. And yet he does resist. He clings to his old ways, retreating into sulking and bitterness rather than accepting the terrible gift of honest love.⁴⁵

Walls, commenting on this scene, points out that the man was given optimal grace. He was presented with a beautifully gracious invitation to love and happiness—an invitation that genuinely moved him. But to accept it, he would have had to come to terms with reality. He would have had to acknowledge the truth about himself, painful as it was, and let go of the lies that had defined him. And he could not do it. Lewis describes it as “the struggle of that Dwarf Ghost against joy”—and says he has never seen anything more terrible.⁴⁶

This is exactly what the divine presence model predicts. The damned are not kept from God by walls or gates. They are kept from God by their own hearts. As Lewis puts it through his fictionalized George MacDonald: “A damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.”⁴⁷

“First they will not, in the end they cannot.” That sentence haunts me. It captures the entire trajectory in seven words. The will comes first. Then the ability follows. Choose darkness long enough, and eventually you lose the ability to see light—not because the light has been taken away, but because you have destroyed your own eyes.

The Talbott Insight Manis Turns Around

One of the most fascinating moments in Manis’s argument comes when he uses Talbott’s own work against him. Talbott, in his discussion of the biblical story of Pharaoh, argues that the Hebrew word for “hardening” a heart literally means “strengthening.” God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart was not God making Pharaoh do evil. It was God giving Pharaoh the strength and courage to do the wrong that Pharaoh already wanted to do. As Talbott puts it, “God gave him the courage to sin.”⁴⁸

But Manis presses: if this is true, why would God not do the same for the damned in the afterlife? If those in hell are getting what they have chosen, and if God respects human choices enough to “strengthen” a person in the direction they want to go, then perhaps the damned will persist in their rebellion no matter how painful it becomes—because they believe they are right, and God gives them the “courage” to follow through on their conviction.⁴⁹

This is a powerful move. Talbott’s own theology of how God relates to human free will can be turned to support the very conclusion Talbott wants to deny: that some people may hold out against God forever.

Baker’s Otto and the Limit of Purification

Sharon Baker’s story of Otto, which we discussed in earlier chapters, is relevant here as well. In Baker’s telling, Otto is one of history’s worst sinners. When he stands before God, he encounters not wrath but love. The fire of God’s presence burns away his wickedness. He goes through a kind of purgatory, experiencing the pain of seeing his sin for what it truly is. And in the end, Otto accepts God’s offer of forgiveness and restoration.⁵⁰

But Baker is honest enough to acknowledge the other possibility. “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.” Baker insists that “in order to preserve human freedom, which God gave to us at creation, we must allow for the possibility that some people will still reject God. The fire does not eliminate the gift of human freedom.”⁵¹

This is significant. Baker is not a hard-line conditionalist or a hard-line universalist. She is a theologian who takes both the power of God’s love and the reality of human freedom seriously. And she concludes that the outcome is genuinely open. The fire does its work. But the person still has the final word.

On Baker’s view, if Otto rejects God even after the fire has burned away everything impure, then either nothing remains of him at all (and he is annihilated) or what remains of him freely chooses the opposite of life (and is consumed). Either way, the result is the same: Otto ceases to exist—not because God destroyed him in anger, but because there was nothing left of him that wanted to live.⁵²

Walls’s Deeper Question: The Pressure and the Breaking Point

Walls raises one more challenge to the universalist position that deserves careful attention. He notes that, on Talbott’s view, God ensures that those who continue to rebel against Him grow ever more miserable and tormented. The increasing misery is supposed to eventually shatter their illusions and bring them to repentance. But Walls asks: if God is using ever-increasing suffering to force repentance, is that not a kind of coercion?⁵³

Walls draws a striking comparison. Centuries ago in England, when an accused person refused to enter a plea, the court would pile iron weights on their chest, increasing the pressure until they either consented to plead or died. Walls suggests that Talbott’s view of how God brings about universal repentance is uncomfortably similar. There is a limit to how much “pressure” our freedom can bear. Just as a person subjected to ever-increasing physical pressure will eventually die, so a person’s freedom will eventually be destroyed if their repentance is induced by ever-increasing torment.⁵⁴

In other words, the universalist faces a dilemma. Either God’s persuasion preserves genuine freedom, in which case there is no guarantee it will work on every person. Or God’s “persuasion” becomes so intense that resistance is impossible, in which case it is no longer persuasion at all but compulsion—and the resulting “repentance” is not genuine.

Walls argues, and I find his argument compelling, that moral freedom requires the ability to deceive yourself—at least initially. If we cannot deceive ourselves, there can be no sustained motive to choose evil, and therefore no genuine freedom to make moral choices. Self-deception is not just a bug in the human system. It is, in a sense, a feature—part of what makes genuine moral freedom possible. And if we have the ability to maintain our self-deception indefinitely, then Talbott is wrong to insist that our choices are always “truly free in the libertarian sense.”⁵⁵

C. Objections and Responses

Objection 1: “Surely God’s love is stronger than human stubbornness.”

This is the strongest objection, and I feel its force deeply. If God is infinite and we are finite, how can any finite resistance hold out against infinite love? Doesn’t infinity always win?

The appeal of this argument is enormous. And I do not dismiss it. In fact, I think it is the best argument for universal reconciliation, and I respect it greatly. But I think it rests on a misunderstanding of how love and freedom relate.

Love that overrides the beloved’s will is not love. It is domination. The whole point of love is that it invites, it woos, it draws—but it does not force. If God’s love were the kind that simply overpowered resistance regardless of the person’s will, it would not be love in any recognizable sense. It would be irresistible manipulation.⁵⁶

I think the better way to frame it is this: God’s love is infinite in its offer but not in its compulsion. God will never stop offering. He will never give up. His love will beat upon the damned incessantly, as Lewis said. But whether that love is received is up to the person. And the divine presence model shows us exactly what happens when infinite love meets a hardened heart: the love does not diminish. The heart breaks. But whose heart breaks—the person’s or just the onlooker’s—is the question.⁵⁷

Objection 2: “If some are lost, God has failed.”

This objection suggests that a God who does not save everyone is a God who has been defeated. But this assumes that success means overriding every person’s will. Is that really success? A parent who forces their adult child to obey through threats and manipulation has not succeeded as a parent. They have failed, even if the outward behavior is what they wanted.

True success in love is not getting the outcome you want by any means necessary. True success in love is making yourself fully available, fully known, fully present—and then honoring the other person’s response. If God has done everything that love can do without becoming coercion, and if some still say no, then God has not failed. God has loved perfectly. The failure belongs to those who refused the gift.⁵⁸

I say this with sadness, not triumph. If CI is correct and some souls are finally lost, that is not a victory to celebrate. It is a tragedy to grieve. But it is a tragedy that love itself makes possible. You cannot have a world where love is real and rejection is impossible.

Objection 3: “This view seems to limit God’s power.”

Not at all. God can do all things. But “all things” does not include logical contradictions. God cannot make a married bachelor. God cannot make a square circle. And I would argue that God cannot create a being that freely loves Him while simultaneously overriding that being’s will. Freedom and compulsion are contradictions. Genuine love requires genuine choice.⁵⁹

This does not diminish God’s power. It defines it properly. God’s power is the power of perfect love, and perfect love is not a bulldozer. It is a fire that warms, purifies, and invites—but it does not force. The limitation, if we can even call it that, is not in God. It is in the nature of love itself.⁶⁰

Objection 4: “Doesn’t the Damascus Road conversion of Paul show that God can override resistance?”

Talbott makes much of this example, and Parry agrees. Paul was a violent enemy of the church, and God knocked him to the ground with an overwhelming revelation. If God did this for Paul, surely He can do it for anyone.⁶¹

But there is an important difference between Paul and the hypothetical person we have been discussing. Paul was sincere in his opposition to Christianity. He genuinely believed he was serving God by persecuting the church. His problem was not self-deception about God’s existence or goodness; his problem was a mistaken understanding of what God was doing in Jesus. When God showed him the truth, Paul’s heart was already oriented toward God—it just needed to be redirected. The Damascus Road experience did not override Paul’s will. It corrected his understanding, and his will, already pointed toward God in its deepest intentions, followed gladly.⁶²

The case of the self-deceived person in hell is quite different. This is someone whose will is oriented against God at the deepest level. Their self-deception is not an innocent mistake that can be corrected by new information. It is a settled posture of defiance, built up over a lifetime (and perhaps longer) of choices. Correcting their factual errors would not produce repentance, because their rejection of God is not primarily based on factual errors. It is based on who they have become.⁶³

D. The Author’s Reflection

I have tried to present both sides of this argument as fairly as I can. And now I owe you my honest assessment. Where do I land?

I lean toward the view that yes, it is possible for a person to choose hell forever—or at least to choose rejection of God so persistently that the result, on the divine presence model, is their eventual consumption by the very love they refused. I lean, in other words, toward conditional immortality on this point.

I lean this way for three reasons.

First, I take human freedom seriously. If God has given us genuine freedom—the real, costly, dangerous kind—then that freedom must include the possibility of a final “no.” A freedom that can only go in one direction is not freedom. It is a leash. And I do not think God puts His children on leashes.⁶⁴

Second, the psychology of self-deception, as Manis and Kierkegaard and Lewis have shown, is terrifyingly powerful. I have watched people destroy their own lives, their families, their health, their futures—all while insisting they were right and everyone else was wrong. I have watched people reject love, refuse help, and retreat deeper into darkness with every act of grace offered to them. If this can happen in a single human lifetime, I cannot rule out the possibility that it can continue beyond this life.⁶⁵

Third, the biblical language of finality, while debated, seems to me to carry genuine weight. When Jesus speaks of the destruction of soul and body in Gehenna (Matthew 10:28), when Revelation speaks of the second death (Revelation 20:14), when the language of the New Testament describes outcomes that appear permanent—I find it difficult to read all of this as merely provisional. These texts may not prove CI beyond all doubt, but they create a strong presumption in its favor.⁶⁶

But I hold this view with deep humility, and I want to be completely honest about the reasons for my uncertainty.

The universalist argument from God’s infinite love is not weak. It is powerful. Texts like Colossians 1:19–20, 1 Corinthians 15:22 and 28, and 1 Timothy 2:4 speak of a scope of salvation that takes my breath away. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the greatest theologians in the history of the church, taught apokatastasis (the eventual restoration of all things) and was never condemned for it.⁶⁷ David Bentley Hart has argued in our own time that the logic of God’s love simply cannot tolerate any final loss.⁶⁸ I find these voices compelling even when I am not fully persuaded by them.

And so I leave this question where I believe it belongs: in the hands of God. I do not claim to know the final answer. What I know is what the divine presence model tells us about the character of God: He is love. His fire is love. He does not torture. He does not take vengeance. His judgment is always aimed at restoration, never at destruction for its own sake. Whether every last heart will eventually yield to that love, or whether some will be consumed by it—that is a question I trust to the wisdom and goodness of a God who is better than I can imagine.⁶⁹

E. Conclusion and Connection

This chapter has wrestled with one of the hardest questions in all of theology. Can anyone choose hell forever? Can a finite human being hold out against the infinite love of God?

We have seen that Manis, Walls, Kierkegaard, and Lewis all argue that the answer may be yes. Self-deception is powerful. Character hardens. The will can become so entrenched in rebellion that even the full blaze of God’s unveiled presence produces not repentance but deeper anguish. And God cannot override this resistance without destroying the very freedom that makes love—and salvation—possible in the first place.

We have also seen that Talbott, Parry, and the universalist tradition argue that the answer must be no. God’s love is infinite. Human resistance is finite. No illusion can endure forever in the face of perfect truth. Eventually, every heart will yield.

I have shared where I lean and why. But more important than where I lean is what I believe with my whole heart: the God revealed in Jesus Christ is not a torturer. He is a lover. His fire is not punishment. It is purification. And whether that fire eventually heals every soul or whether some souls are finally consumed by it, the fire itself never changes. It is always, always, always the fire of love.

In our final chapter, we will step back and look at the whole picture we have built together over these thirty-one chapters. We will return to the question that started it all: What kind of God do we serve? And we will end with the only answer that matters: He is a consuming fire—and His fire is love.⁷⁰