Chapter 32

The Consuming Love—What We’ve Learned and Why It Matters

I almost walked away from God.

I told you about that in the very first chapter of this book. I told you how the doctrine of eternal conscious torment nearly destroyed my faith—not because I was weak, not because I wanted an easy gospel, but because something deep inside me knew that a God who tortures people forever is not the God I met in Jesus Christ. Something in my bones said, “This is wrong. This picture of God is wrong.” And for a long time, I didn’t know what to do with that feeling. I loved the Bible. I loved the church. I loved the creeds. But I could not love a God who would hold billions of souls in a furnace of unending agony, watching them scream for mercy He would never give, century after century, with no hope of escape and no purpose in the suffering. That God was not the Father Jesus revealed. That God was not the one who left the ninety-nine sheep to find the one that was lost. That God was not the one who ran down the road to embrace the prodigal son before the boy could even finish his apology.¹

So I went looking for answers. And the journey I took—a journey through Scripture, through the Church Fathers, through philosophy and theology, through the oldest traditions of the Christian faith—brought me to the place where this book was born.

I want to sit with you now, in this final chapter, and tell you what I found.

Where We Started

When we began, I asked you to hold a question in your heart: What kind of God do you worship? Not in the abstract. Not as a theological exercise. I mean really—when you close your eyes and think about the God who made you, the God who knows your name, the God who will one day look you in the face—what do you see? Do you see a Judge with a gavel, eager to sentence? Or do you see a Father with open arms, desperate to hold you close?

The answer to that question, I have argued throughout this book, determines everything else. It determines how we read the Bible. It determines how we understand judgment. It determines how we think about hell. And it determines whether our faith is grounded in love or in fear.²

We started with a simple claim—one that the apostle John makes with stunning directness: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Not “God has love.” Not “God sometimes acts lovingly.” God is love. Love is not one of His attributes among many. It is what He is. It is His very nature, His essence, the core of His being from which everything else flows.³ And because God does not change—because He is the same yesterday, today, and forever—He never stops being love. Not in creation. Not in judgment. Not in hell. Not ever.

This was the foundation. Everything we built in this book was built on that rock.

What We Discovered Along the Way

From that foundation, we went deep. We studied the Hebrew words for justice—tsedaka (saving righteousness) and hesed (steadfast love)—and we found that in the Bible, justice and love are not opposites pulling God in different directions. They are the same thing seen from two angles. God’s justice is His saving love in action.⁴ When God does justice, He sets things right—not by inflicting infinite pain, but by restoring what sin has broken. As Sharon Baker puts it, reconciling justice “pierces the darkness of retributive violence with the grace of God and the message of peace through love, forgiveness, and reconciliation.”⁵

We looked at the wrath of God and found something surprising. The “wrath” that Scripture talks about is not a divine temper tantrum. It is not God losing His patience and exploding in fury. In Romans 1, Paul describes God’s wrath in a startling way: “God gave them over” (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). Three times Paul uses that phrase. God does not attack. God does not strike. God steps back. He respects our choices. He lets us experience the natural consequences of turning away from the Source of all life and goodness.⁶ As Saint Basil the Great taught, God is not the cause of our evils—we are.⁷

We studied the distinction between Hades and Gehenna—two words that English Bibles often translate with the single word “hell,” creating enormous confusion. Hades, we found, is the intermediate state—the waiting room between death and the final judgment. It is not the lake of fire. It is not the final destination of the wicked. It is the conscious state in which all the dead exist while awaiting the resurrection and the great white throne judgment of Revelation 20. The rich man in Luke 16 is in Hades, not in the lake of fire. He is suffering, yes—but his story is not yet finished. And Gehenna—the lake of fire—is the final state, the reality that comes after judgment, when every heart has been laid bare before the consuming presence of God. Getting this distinction right matters enormously, because it means that the traditional picture of people dying and going straight to an eternal torture chamber is simply wrong. Death is not the end of the story. Judgment is not immediate. And God’s grace has more room to work than most Western theologies have allowed.⁶⁸

We made the case for substance dualism—the view that human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul. The soul is real. It survives the death of the body. It exists consciously in the intermediate state, either with the Lord (for believers) or in Hades (for unbelievers). This is not an optional add-on to the divine presence model. It is foundational. Because if the soul survives death, then the intermediate state is a time when God’s grace can still reach people—when the gospel can still be preached, when hearts can still be softened, when the consuming fire of God’s love can still do its purifying work before the final judgment arrives.⁶⁹

We studied the fire of God and found that fire in Scripture is not an instrument of torture. It is a symbol of God’s very presence. God appeared to Abraham in a smoking fire pot (Genesis 15:17). He spoke to Moses from a burning bush (Exodus 3:2). He led Israel through the wilderness as a pillar of fire (Exodus 13:21). He descended on Sinai in fire (Exodus 19:18). He filled the temple with His glory as fire (2 Chronicles 7:1–3). And Hebrews 12:29 tells us plainly: “Our God is a consuming fire.” This fire is not something God uses. It is something God is.⁸

And then we asked the question that changed everything: If God is fire, and God is love—then what is the fire of God? It is His love. The fire and the love are the same thing.⁹

The Heart of the Divine Presence Model

Here is what the divine presence model teaches, and what I believe is the most biblically faithful, theologically coherent, and historically grounded understanding of hell available to us today.

Paradise and hell are not two different places. They are two different experiences of the same overwhelming reality—the inescapable presence of God.¹⁰

Read that again. Let it sink in.

The righteous and the wicked do not go to different locations. They both stand before the same God. They both encounter the same fire. They both experience the same love. The difference is not in God. The difference is in the human heart.

For those who love God—for those whose hearts have been softened by grace, whose wills have been surrendered to Christ, whose lives have been shaped by the Spirit—the consuming fire of God’s love is paradise. It is warmth and light and joy beyond anything we can imagine. It is coming home. It is the embrace of the Father who has been watching the road, waiting for us to appear on the horizon.¹¹

But for those who hate God—for those whose hearts have been hardened by sin, whose wills have been entrenched in rebellion, whose minds have been darkened by self-deception—that very same love is torment. Not because God is tormenting them. Not because God has changed. But because a heart that hates love will experience love as agony. A soul that has spent a lifetime running from the light will find the light unbearable when it can no longer be escaped.¹²

Fr. Thomas Hopko, in his summary of Orthodox teaching, puts it with beautiful clarity: “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.”¹³

Alexandre Kalomiros, whose essay The River of Fire opened my eyes to this ancient teaching, describes it with an image I will never forget. In the Orthodox icon of the Last Judgment, a river of fire flows from the throne of Christ. It flows toward both the righteous and the wicked. It is the same river. But for the saints, it is the river of paradise—the river of grace that has watered God’s garden from the beginning. For the unrepentant, it is the river of fire that burns and suffocates. And Kalomiros explains: “Love is fire. 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.”¹⁴

Then he gives us the image that became the title of this book:

“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.”¹⁵

The difference is in the material, not in the fire. The difference is in the heart, not in God.

What the Church Fathers Knew

One of the most important things we discovered in this book is that the divine presence model is not a modern invention. It is not something cooked up by a philosopher to solve a puzzle. It is the recovery of the earliest Christian understanding of hell—an understanding that was preserved in the Eastern church for two thousand years, even as the Western church drifted toward the juridical framework that gave birth to eternal conscious torment.¹⁶

We listened to Saint Isaac the Syrian, the seventh-century bishop whose writings on God’s love are among the most beautiful in all of Christian literature. Isaac wrote that the sinners in hell “will be chastised with the scourge of love.” He said that “the sorrow which takes hold of the heart which has sinned against love, is more piercing than any other pain.” And he insisted—listen carefully—that “it is not right to say that the sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God.”¹⁷ The sinners in hell are not separated from God’s love. They are drowning in it. And their hatred of that love is what makes it feel like fire.

We listened to Saint Basil the Great, who taught that the fire prepared for the devil and his angels has two capacities: “one of burning and the other of illuminating.” The same fire that scorches those who deserve to burn also shines with “illuminating and radiant warmth” for those who are rejoicing.¹⁸

We listened to the great twentieth-century Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky, who captured the whole model in a single sentence: “The love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves.”¹⁹

These are not fringe voices. These are some of the most revered teachers in the history of the Christian church. They knew something that much of the Western tradition forgot: that the fire of hell and the light of heaven come from the same source. They flow from the same throne. They are the same reality—the unquenchable, inescapable, all-consuming love of God.²⁰

And there is a stunning biblical connection that ties all of this together. In the book of Daniel, the prophet sees a vision of the Ancient of Days seated on a throne, and “a river of fire was flowing, coming out from before him” (Daniel 7:10). In the book of Revelation, John sees a different vision—but from the same throne: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1). A river of fire from the throne. A river of water from the throne. In Orthodox iconography, both rivers are depicted flowing from the same source. And on the divine presence model, they are one and the same river. The river of fire and the river of life are the same reality—God’s love, flowing out to all creation. For those in communion with Christ, it is the water of life. For those in rebellion against Him, it is the fire of judgment. Same river. Same God. Same love. Different hearts.⁷⁵

Why This Matters for the Character of God

Let me tell you why all of this matters so much to me. It matters because the character of God is the most important question in theology. It is more important than the mechanics of hell. It is more important than the details of the end times. It is more important than any debate about who gets in and who stays out. If we get the character of God wrong, we get everything wrong.²¹

The traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment paints a picture of God that, frankly, is terrifying—and not in the good, holy-awe kind of way. It paints a God who creates billions of human beings knowing full well that most of them will end up in a place of unending torment. A God who watches His children scream in agony and does nothing. A God who has the power to end the suffering but chooses not to—forever. A God whose justice demands infinite punishment for finite sins. A God who, in the words of Jonathan Edwards, holds sinners over the fire “much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire.”²²

Is that really the God we worship? Is that the God who said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28)? Is that the God who wept at the tomb of Lazarus? Is that the God who forgave Peter after three denials? Is that the God who prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34)?

Kalomiros asked this question with devastating honesty, and I think he was right: the atheism that has swept through the Western world was born, in large part, because the Western church turned God into a monster.²³ When people looked at the God that ECT described—a God who tortures people forever—their moral instincts recoiled. And who can blame them? A good human father would never do such a thing. Are we to believe that God is less loving, less merciful, less good than the best of us?

The divine presence model answers this with a resounding no. God is not the torturer. God is the Lover. God is not the one inflicting pain. God is the one whose love is so pure, so fierce, so radically good that a heart filled with hatred and rebellion cannot bear it. The problem is not God. The problem is sin. The problem is what happens to a human heart when it turns away from love so completely that love itself becomes unbearable.²⁴

What Sin Does to Us

This is one of the most important lessons of this book, and I want to make sure you hear it clearly: We do not need to be afraid of God. We need to be afraid of what sin does to our capacity to receive love.

R. Zachary Manis, whose philosophical work has been one of the primary foundations of this book, helped me see this with a clarity I had never had before. Sin is not just a list of bad things we do. Sin is a process of decay. It is a slow corruption of everything that makes us human—our minds, our hearts, our desires, our ability to perceive truth and beauty and goodness.²⁵

Think about it this way. When a person lies, they do not just produce a false statement. They damage their own relationship with the truth. And if they keep lying—if lying becomes a habit, a way of life, a settled pattern of the soul—they eventually lose the ability to recognize truth at all. The liar becomes blind, not because the light has gone out, but because they have destroyed their own eyes.²⁶

The same thing happens with love. Every time we choose selfishness over generosity, revenge over forgiveness, pride over humility, we are not just committing a “sin.” We are reshaping our own hearts. We are making ourselves into the kind of people who cannot receive love—who will experience love as pain, who will hear forgiveness as insult, who will feel grace as humiliation.²⁷

Manis calls this the corruption of a person’s cognitive, affective, and appetitive natures. The mind becomes darkened. The emotions become twisted. The desires become warped. And worst of all, this process gains momentum as it progresses. The wicked person “is increasingly unable to tell right from wrong, not because of an innocent ignorance, but because they have willfully and repeatedly hardened their heart to the conviction of the Holy Spirit and seared their conscience by repeatedly engaging in self-deception.”²⁸

Manis uses the analogy of addiction to help us understand this. Think of someone who is addicted to a drug. The addict knows, at some level, that the drug is destroying them. They can see the damage it is doing to their body, their relationships, their life. But knowing the truth does not automatically produce change. The addiction has rewired their desires. It has corrupted their ability to want what is good for them. They have become enslaved to something that is killing them, and the chains are forged from their own choices, their own habits, their own repeated decisions to reach for the bottle or the needle one more time.⁷³

Sin works the same way, but at a far deeper level. Every act of selfishness is a hit of the drug. Every lie is another chain link. Every act of cruelty reshapes the heart just a little more, making the next act of cruelty a little easier and the next act of kindness a little harder. Over time, the cumulative effect is devastating. The person who began as a normal human being—capable of love, capable of goodness, capable of responding to the voice of God—becomes something twisted. Not because God made them that way. Because they made themselves that way, one choice at a time.⁷⁴

This is what the Bible means when it talks about “hardening the heart.” It is not a one-time event. It is a trajectory. It is a direction of travel that, if continued long enough, can reach a point of no return—a point where the person is so deeply sunk in self-deception that they can no longer recognize truth even when it stands right in front of them.²⁹

Jesus said it plainly: “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:22–23). The problem is not a lack of light. God’s light shines everywhere and on everyone. The problem is that sin has destroyed our ability to see it for what it is.³⁰

And here is what makes this so terrifying—and so important to understand. On the Day of Judgment, when every human being stands in the blazing, unveiled presence of God, the light will be inescapable. The truth will be laid bare. Every heart will be opened. But Manis shows us that the revelation of truth does not guarantee a positive response. For those with hard hearts, a clearer revelation of truth only results in greater entrenchment in self-deception.³¹ The light does not automatically bring healing. For those who have spent a lifetime destroying their capacity to receive light, the light brings agony.

This is hell. Not a torture chamber designed by an angry God. But the experience of infinite love by a heart that has made itself incapable of receiving it.³²

The Story of Otto—And What It Teaches Us

Sharon Baker gave us one of the most powerful illustrations of this truth in her telling of the story of Otto—an imaginary war criminal who stands before God on the Day of Judgment. You remember the story. Otto comes into the throne room expecting fury and vengeance. Instead, he finds love. Overwhelming, terrifying, incomprehensible love. The fire of God burns away his wickedness. He sees his victims. He feels their pain. His heart breaks. And at last, God offers him forgiveness and restoration.³³

That story moved me deeply when I first read it, and it still does. It captures something essential about the divine presence model: that God’s judgment is not the opposite of His love. God’s judgment is His love, experienced by those who are not ready for it. The fire that burns Otto is not a fire separate from God. It is God Himself—His presence, His beauty, His overwhelming goodness.³⁴

Notice what happens in Baker’s story. Otto does not hear what he expects to hear. He expects fury. He expects condemnation. He expects the voice of an angry Judge pronouncing sentence. Instead, he hears words of love: “I have loved you with an everlasting love. But look at your life; what have you done?” And it is precisely those words of love that break him. Not threats. Not punishment. Not the crack of a whip. Love. The sheer, overwhelming, unbearable kindness of a God who loves even Otto. That is what brings Otto to his knees in “utter remorse” and “unmitigated repentance.”⁷⁰

Think about that for a moment. In the traditional view of hell, God’s response to Otto would be retribution—an eternity of pain designed to balance the scales of justice. But in Baker’s telling, God’s response is something far more devastating and far more redemptive: He shows Otto the truth. He makes Otto feel what his victims felt. He opens the books of Otto’s heart—every memory, every cruelty, every choice—and lets Otto see it all in the light of perfect Love. And the pain of that revelation is, as Baker says, hell. Real hell. Not because God is inflicting pain, but because the truth hurts when you have spent your whole life running from it.⁷¹

And then God makes Otto go to each of his victims and lay his hand on their hearts. As Otto touches them, he feels their pain—all of it. Every lost son, every murdered father, every terrified child. Baker writes that when Otto finally touches the heart of Jesus Himself, he feels both the pain and the unconditional love that Jesus has for him. And this is what finally undoes him. Not punishment. Not vengeance. Love.⁷²

But Baker is honest enough to tell us the rest of the story, too. “The possibility exists,” she writes, “that Otto does not accept God’s offer of restoration, or that after the testing by fire, nothing remains of him at all. Nothing.”³⁵ In order to preserve human freedom—real, genuine, uncoerced freedom—we must allow for the possibility that some hearts will say no to God even in the full blaze of His revealed love. The fire does not eliminate the gift of human freedom. And those who say no to God’s yes face a terrible consequence—not because God punishes them, but because a soul that refuses love has nothing left to sustain it.

The Open Question—And Why It Is Okay That It Is Open

This brings us to the question I have wrestled with throughout this entire book, and the question I know many of you have been wrestling with too: What happens in the end? Does every heart eventually yield to the fire of God’s love? Or do some hearts harden so completely that they are finally consumed by it?

I have been honest with you from the beginning. I lean toward conditional immortality—the view that those who finally and irrevocably reject God, even in the full blaze of His unveiled love, will eventually be destroyed. The “second death” is real. Matthew 10:28 tells us that God can “destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” I take that seriously. I believe that genuine human freedom means the possibility of a final, irrevocable “no”—and that God will not force anyone into paradise against their will.³⁶

But I hold this position with humility and with open hands. I have told you about the arguments for universal reconciliation—the hope that God’s love will eventually win every heart. I have taken those arguments seriously because they deserve to be taken seriously. The universal scope texts in Scripture are real: “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things” (Colossians 1:19–20). “As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). “God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3–4).³⁷

Gregory of Nyssa hoped for the apokatastasis (restoration of all things). Thomas Talbott argued powerfully that no rational person would choose eternal misery if they truly understood what they were choosing. David Bentley Hart has made the case with fierce brilliance.³⁸ And I feel the pull of these arguments. I really do. If God’s love is truly infinite, if it is truly inescapable, if it is truly unstoppable—then can any finite human resistance hold out against it forever?

I do not know. And I think that is okay.

Here is what I do know. The divine presence model works with either outcome. Whether the final result of God’s consuming love is the destruction of the unrepentant or the eventual restoration of all, the model holds. The character of God does not change. His fire is always love. His judgment is always aimed at restoration. His presence is always both the greatest joy and the most fearful reality in the universe.³⁹

I will not condemn those who hope that all will eventually be saved. That hope is rooted in the very character of God as revealed in Scripture. But I also will not dismiss those who believe, as I tentatively do, that human freedom is real enough and self-deception is powerful enough that some may resist God’s love to the very end.⁴⁰ Both positions flow naturally from the divine presence model. Both take God’s love with absolute seriousness. And both take sin with absolute seriousness.

What We Lost—And What We Found

I want to step back for a moment and think about what went wrong in Western Christianity—and what this book has tried to recover.

Somewhere along the way, the Western church made a catastrophic mistake. It separated God’s love from God’s justice. It put love on one side of the scales and justice on the other, as if God were pulled in two directions—as if His love wanted to save us but His justice demanded our punishment, and the cross was the compromise that allowed both sides of His nature to be satisfied.⁴¹

That picture is deeply wrong. It turned God into a split personality. It made the cross into a cosmic legal transaction instead of the supreme act of divine love. And worst of all, it gave us a God who does not love the damned—a God who has one face for the saved and a different face for the lost.

The divine presence model heals this divide. On this model, heaven and hell share a common source: the love of God. It is not that God loves the righteous and hates the wicked. God loves them both—with the same love, the same fire, the same consuming passion. The difference is in us, not in Him.⁴² As Manis puts it, the divine presence model “eschews the theological double-mindedness that plagues traditionalist attempts to account for heaven solely by reference to God’s love (with no reference to divine justice) and hell solely by reference to God’s justice (with no reference to divine love).”⁴³

On the divine presence model, there is a certain irony in the title of Thomas Talbott’s famous book defending universalism: The Inescapable Love of God. That phrase is, in fact, a perfectly apt description of hell. The love of God is inescapable. And that is precisely what makes it both the greatest hope and the most fearful reality in all of existence.⁴⁴

The Postmortem Opportunity—A God of Second Chances

There is one more thing I want to make sure we hold onto as we close. Throughout this book, I have argued that God provides a genuine offer of salvation to those who never had an adequate chance to respond to the gospel during their earthly lives. The Descensus clause in the Apostles’ Creed tells us that Christ “descended into hell.” First Peter 3:18–20 tells us that He went and preached “to the spirits in prison.” First Peter 4:6 tells us that “the gospel was preached even to those who are dead.”⁴⁵

A God who is love—really, truly, unfailingly love—would not destroy those who never had a genuine chance to hear and respond. The billions of people throughout history who lived and died without ever hearing the name of Jesus are not lost by default. God is not a bureaucrat who stamps “rejected” on every application that was never filed. He is a Father who seeks and saves the lost. And if the intermediate state is conscious, as I have argued throughout this book, then the period between death and the final judgment is a time when God’s grace can still reach hearts that were never adequately reached in this life.⁴⁶

The last chance to receive Christ, I believe, comes at or during the final judgment itself. When every human being stands in the unveiled presence of God—in the full blaze of His love, with every self-deception stripped away, with every truth laid bare—those who respond with repentance and faith will be received. Those who harden themselves even then face the consequences of that final refusal. But God does not give up easily. He is the God of the second chance, the third chance, the hundredth chance. He is the God who runs down the road.⁴⁷

Baker says it well: “Although the possibility exists that some may still reject God after walking through the divine fire, God never forsakes or abandons those God loves—ever.”⁴⁸

To Those Who Hold to ECT

I want to speak directly now to those of you who came to this book holding to the traditional view of eternal conscious torment. I want you to know that I have never, in any chapter of this book, questioned your sincerity or your love for God. Many of the finest Christians in history have held that view—people I admire, people who love Jesus with a depth that puts me to shame. This is not about who is more sincere. It is about which picture of God best fits what Scripture actually teaches.⁴⁹

I am asking you to consider one thing. Look at the God you worship. Look at Jesus. And then ask yourself: Does the God who wept at Lazarus’s tomb really hold billions of people in an eternal torture chamber? Does the God who told us to love our enemies really inflict infinite suffering on His? Does the God who said “Father, forgive them” really refuse to forgive those who never had the chance to ask?

If something in your heart says “no”—listen to that. That instinct is not unfaithfulness. It is the Holy Spirit, pointing you toward a better understanding of the God who is love.

I am not asking you to lower the stakes of eternity. On the contrary. The divine presence model raises them. Under the traditional view, the worst thing that can happen to you after death is that an angry God punishes you. Under the divine presence model, the worst thing that can happen to you is that you meet infinite Love and cannot bear it. You stand in the presence of everything your heart was made for—beauty, truth, goodness, joy beyond description—and you cannot receive any of it, because sin has destroyed your capacity to receive it. That is not a softer hell. In many ways, it is a harder one. Because it means the door to paradise is standing wide open, and you cannot walk through it. Not because God is barring the way. Because you have become the kind of person who experiences paradise as agony.⁸²

Kalomiros said it with devastating clarity: “No, my brothers, unhappily for us, paradise or hell does not depend on God. It depends entirely upon us.”⁸³ The responsibility is ours. The choice is ours. God has done everything possible—He has given His own Son, He has poured out His Spirit, He has written His law on our hearts, He has sent preachers and prophets, He has made Himself known in creation, He has whispered in the still small voice of conscience. The question is whether we will open our hearts to receive what He is giving. That question is the most serious question any human being will ever face.

To Those Who Fear God

And to those of you who have lived your whole lives afraid of God—afraid of judgment, afraid of hell, afraid that one wrong step will send you into the flames forever—I have a message for you.

You do not need to be afraid of God.

I do not mean that God is not awesome. I do not mean that God is not holy. I do not mean that judgment is not real. It is. Sin has real consequences. Hardening your heart against love has real and devastating consequences. The fire of God is real, and it is not something to take lightly.

But the fire is not your enemy. The fire is your healer. The fire is the love of God, reaching into the deepest, darkest corners of your heart to burn away everything that is not love. The fire is the Father’s embrace, so fierce and so pure that it consumes everything in you that is not capable of embracing Him back.⁵⁰

George MacDonald, the great Scottish preacher whose theology of the consuming fire influenced C. S. Lewis and so many others, wrote something that I come back to again and again: “Nothing is inexorable but love. Love is one, and love is changeless. For love loves into purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds.”⁵¹

Nothing is inexorable but love. Let that wash over you. God’s love is the one thing that will never stop, never let go, never give up. And its aim is not your destruction. Its aim is your purification. Its aim is to make you into the person you were always meant to be—a child of God, radiant with the light of Christ, fully alive in the presence of infinite Love.

What We Should Fear

So if we should not fear God, what should we fear? We should fear what sin does to us. We should fear the slow, quiet hardening of our own hearts. We should fear the comfortable lies we tell ourselves—the rationalizations, the excuses, the self-deceptions that pile up over time until we can no longer hear the voice of the Spirit.⁵²

We should fear the kind of person we are becoming. Are we becoming people who can receive love? Or are we becoming people who flinch at the first sign of it? Are we growing softer, more open, more transparent before God? Or are we building walls, thickening our armor, burying our hearts under layers of pride and self-justification?⁵³

Because here is the truth that runs through every page of this book: heaven and hell begin now. They begin in the disposition of our hearts. They begin in the daily choices we make about how we will respond to the love of God. Every act of humility opens our hearts a little wider. Every act of pride closes them a little more. Every time we forgive, we become more like the God who forgives. Every time we choose revenge, we become more like the darkness that cannot bear the light.⁵⁴

Manis shows us that the virtuous become more virtuous and the vicious become more vicious. Character formation has momentum. It gains speed as it goes. And it reaches a terminal point—in both directions. The saint becomes so fully surrendered to love that they cannot imagine wanting anything else. The hardened rebel becomes so deeply entrenched in self-deception that they can no longer recognize love even when it stands right in front of them.⁵⁵

That is what we should fear. Not the fire. The fire is love. What we should fear is becoming the kind of person for whom love has become unbearable.

Run Toward the Fire

And so here is where I want to leave you. Here is the invitation that has been building in my heart from the first page to this last one.

Run toward the fire.

Do not run away from it. Do not hide from it. Do not build walls to keep it out. Run toward it. The fire of God is not your enemy. It is your salvation. It is the purifying love of a Father who will stop at nothing to burn away everything in you that is not gold.⁵⁶

When the fire exposes your sin—do not flinch. Let it burn. When the fire reveals your pride—do not defend yourself. Let it burn. When the fire shows you the pain you have caused others—do not make excuses. Let it burn. Because the fire that burns is the fire that heals. The fire that destroys the dross is the fire that reveals the gold. And the God who holds you in the fire is the God who loves you more fiercely, more tenderly, more relentlessly than you have ever dared to imagine.⁵⁷

Michael Phillips, reflecting on MacDonald’s theology, captured this with an image that has stayed with me: the consuming fire is not a dungeon of torment. It is a workshop of restoration. God’s fire is the tool of a master craftsman, burning away impurities so that only the gold remains.⁵⁸ The fire does not burn us—our true selves, the selves created in God’s image. It burns away the parasites of sin that cling so close they suffocate our true selves. It burns out the impurities that are embedded in our fallen nature, so that only the gold remains.⁵⁹

And the child of God who desires to be pure and clean will welcome God’s fire.

A Word about Hope

I am not a man who claims to have all the answers. I have told you throughout this book where I stand and where I am unsure. I lean toward conditional immortality, but I hold that position with open hands. I believe in a postmortem opportunity for salvation, and I hold that with stronger conviction. I believe that hell is real, that judgment is real, that sin has consequences that are devastating and potentially final. I believe all of that.

But above all else, I believe in hope.

I believe in hope because I believe in the character of God. A God who is love does not design a universe in which the majority of His children end up in a place of unending, purposeless agony. A God who is love does not give up on anyone easily. A God who is love does not stack the deck against those who never had a fair chance. A God who is love pursues, and pursues, and pursues—until either the heart breaks open in surrender or it hardens so completely that nothing remains for the fire to purify.⁶⁰

What This Means for the People We Love

I know that many of you picked up this book because someone you love has died without Christ. A parent. A child. A spouse. A best friend. And the traditional doctrine of hell told you that they are in a place of unending torment right now, with no hope of escape, forever. I know what that does to a person. It eats at you. It makes you afraid to think about it too carefully. It poisons your grief with a horror that never fully goes away.

Baker tells the story of her friend Lisa, who called her in tears because Lisa’s grandmother had just died without accepting Jesus. Lisa said through her tears: “I just can’t believe anymore what I’ve always been taught about God’s wrath and judgment. I finally understand the extent of God’s love for all people, including for my grandma. I have to believe that a God we define as love would never send my grandma to eternal hell.”⁷⁶

I hear Lisa. And I want you to hear what this book has been saying. Your loved one who died without Christ is not in the lake of fire right now. That does not happen until after the final judgment. If they are in Hades—the intermediate state—they are in a conscious state of waiting, and God’s grace is not locked out. If the Descensus is real—if Christ really did descend to the dead and preach the gospel there—then the intermediate state is not a place of hopelessness. It is a place where God is still at work.⁷⁷

And even at the final judgment, when every person stands in the unveiled presence of God, the divine presence model tells us that God is not looking for reasons to condemn. He is looking for any flicker of repentance, any crack in the armor, any opening through which His love can pour in. The fire is purifying, not punitive. The judgment is aimed at restoration, not revenge. And no one is beyond the reach of a God whose love is infinite, whose patience is boundless, and whose fire never stops burning.⁷⁸

I cannot promise you that every person will be saved. I have told you honestly that I lean toward the view that some may harden their hearts so completely that the fire eventually consumes them. But I can promise you this: the God who holds your loved one is not a torturer. He is a Father. And His fire is love. Whatever happens in the end, it will be the act of a God who is infinitely good, infinitely wise, and infinitely loving. You can trust Him with the people you love—even the ones you have lost.

What This Means for the Gospel

There is one more thing I want to say before we reach the end, and it is about the gospel itself. Some people will read this book and worry that I have weakened the gospel. That by taking away the threat of eternal torture, I have removed the urgency of evangelism and the motivation for faith. Let me address that head-on.

I have not weakened the gospel. I have strengthened it. The gospel is not a threat. The gospel is good news. It is the announcement that God is love, that Christ has conquered death, that the kingdom of God is at hand, and that everyone is invited to come home. The motivation for responding to the gospel is not terror. It is love. “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). We do not come to God because we are afraid of what He will do to us if we do not. We come to God because He is beautiful, because He is good, because His love has captured our hearts and we cannot stay away.⁷⁹

Beauchemin, in Hope Beyond Hell, asks a devastating question of the traditional view: Can you really love a God with all your heart if you believe He will torture you forever if you do not? Is that love? Or is it a survival instinct dressed up in religious language?⁸⁰ Only the God of the divine presence model—a God whose fire is love, whose judgment is aimed at restoration, whose justice is saving justice—can inspire the kind of genuine, wholehearted love that the first and greatest commandment requires.

And the urgency of evangelism is not diminished one bit. The stakes are still enormous. Sin still has devastating consequences. Character formation is still happening right now, in every choice we make. Every day that a person lives without Christ is a day their heart may be growing harder, their capacity for love may be shrinking, their ability to receive grace may be diminishing. The call to repentance is urgent—not because God is standing over us with a club, but because the longer we wait, the harder it becomes to say yes. The fire does not become less real just because it is love. In some ways, it becomes more real. More fearful. More demanding. Because love will not leave us alone. And love will not let us stay as we are.⁸¹

Baker, in the final pages of Razing Hell, asks a series of questions that I want to leave with you: “Which vision of hell most coheres with the God revealed in Jesus—the view of hell in which persons suffer for all eternity with no hope for reconciliation with God, or the view of hell in which persons understand the depth of their sins, take full responsibility for them, and reconcile not only with God, but also with their victims?”⁶¹

She continues: “First Corinthians 13 tells us that love endures forever, that after all is said and done, only faith, hope, and love remain, but the greatest of all is love. If all else is done away with, burned up, perished, gone when time comes to an end, and only faith, hope, and love abide eternally, we may legitimately say that hell is not eternal, only love is.”⁶²

Only love is eternal. That is what this book has been about, from first page to last. God’s love endures forever. God’s fire is that love. And nothing in all creation—not death, not hell, not the grave, not the most hardened human heart—can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38–39).⁶³

The Journey That Changed Me

I told you at the beginning of this book that I almost lost God. Now let me tell you what I found instead.

I found a God who is bigger than I thought. Bigger than the theological systems I inherited. Bigger than the fear that had been handed to me as a child. I found a God whose love is not a soft, sentimental thing but a blazing, consuming fire that will stop at nothing to destroy evil and restore what has been broken. I found a God who does not sit on a distant throne, coldly dispensing rewards and punishments. I found a God who runs. Who searches. Who calls by name. Who refuses to let go.⁶⁴

I found the God of Isaac the Syrian, who scourges with love. I found the God of Basil the Great, whose fire both illuminates and burns. I found the God of Kalomiros, whose river of fire is the river of grace. I found the God of Sharon Baker, who stands before Otto not with a gavel but with open arms. I found the God of Zachary Manis, whose very presence is both heaven and hell—depending on the state of the human heart that encounters Him.⁶⁵

I found the God of Jesus Christ. The God who ate with sinners. The God who touched lepers. The God who forgave from the cross. The God who descended into the realm of the dead to preach good news even there. The God who will one day make all things new.

And I found that this God—the God who is a consuming fire—is not someone to run from. He is someone to run to.

A Final Word

Phillips, in his conclusion to What If Hell Is God’s, Not the Devil’s?, writes something that captures my own heart perfectly. He says, in essence, that he trusts God more than he trusts his own ability to understand the infinity of God’s loving purpose. He believes that God is a good Father, that everything God does must be good and can only be good, and that His essential nature is love, so everything that proceeds out of His divine will must reflect that love.⁶⁶

That is where I land, too. I have spent thirty-two chapters wrestling with the hardest questions in Christian theology. I have engaged the philosophers and the theologians, the Church Fathers and the modern scholars, the exegetes and the apologists. And at the end of all that wrestling, here is what I know for sure.

God is love.

His fire is His love.

His judgment is His love.

His justice is His love.

Paradise and hell are both His love—experienced differently by different hearts, but flowing from the same inexhaustible source.

He does not torture. He purifies. He does not take vengeance. He restores. He does not abandon. He pursues.

And His fire—His consuming, terrifying, glorious, inescapable fire—is aimed at one thing and one thing only: making us into the people we were always meant to be. Children of God. Radiant with love. Fully alive. Home at last.

For our God is a consuming fire.⁶⁷

And His fire is love.