Chapter 26

The Divine Presence Model: Engaging R. Zachary Manis

When the Same Love Is Both Heaven and Hell

Condensed Edition

What if hell is not a place where God is absent? What if the suffering of the lost is caused not by God's distance, but by God's closeness?

That is the central claim of the most important recent work in the philosophy of hell. R. Zachary Manis, a philosopher at Southwest Baptist University, published Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God with Oxford University Press in 2019.¹ The book offers what Manis calls the divine presence model of hell. On this view, the blessed and the damned are not in different places. They are in the same place, standing before the same God, bathed in the same love. The difference is not in God. The difference is in the soul.

I believe Manis has written the most careful, most honest philosophical account of hell in a generation. And I believe his model converges in striking ways with the account of the moment-of-death encounter we have been building in this book. This chapter will show why.

The Philosopher and the Problem

Manis writes as an analytic philosopher of religion, trained in the rigorous Anglo-American tradition. He is not a universalist. He does not believe that everyone will certainly be saved. But he is deeply troubled by the standard defenses of hell, and he says so plainly. His goal, as he puts it, is to construct a "weak theodicy" of hell: a model that is at least plausible, that holds together the goodness of God with the hard reality of human refusal, and that satisfies serious scriptural, traditional, and philosophical standards.²

To reach that goal, Manis first walks through the four standard views of hell. He takes each seriously. He finds each wanting. The survey is tight and honest, and I want to sketch it here because the problems Manis finds in the standard options help explain what his own model is trying to solve.

The Four Options and Their Problems

The first option is traditional eternal conscious torment (ECT). Defenders include Jerry Walls, Robert Peterson, and (in part) C. S. Lewis and William Lane Craig. The view has a long history and takes seriously the biblical language of "eternal punishment." But it faces a deep philosophical problem: proportionality. Is infinite punishment for finite sin really just? Can a loving God sustain the eternal torment of creatures He made?³ Manis grants that the view has real strengths, but he argues that it carries real moral weight that many of its defenders do not adequately feel.

The second option is universalism. Thomas Talbott, Robin Parry (writing as Gregory MacDonald), and John Hick all defend forms of the view that God's love will in the end bring every soul home.⁴ The attraction is obvious: no one is ultimately lost, and God's love is truly victorious. But Manis resists universalism on free-will grounds. If a soul can genuinely refuse God, then universal salvation is not guaranteed. We explored Talbott's powerful case in Chapter 25; Manis takes it seriously but finds it too confident about what freedom must produce.

The third option is annihilationism, also called conditional immortality (CI). Edward Fudge, John Stott, and John Wenham have argued that the lost do not suffer forever but are eventually destroyed.⁵ This avoids the proportionality problem. But Manis notes that the language of extinction creates its own difficulties: does God create souls only to snuff them out? And can the extinction of a person ever serve the cause of love?

The fourth option is the choice model. Here Manis engages Jerry Walls, Andrei Buckareff, and Alvin Plantinga. On this view, the damned freely choose hell. They prefer their own misery to the surrender that heaven requires.⁶ C. S. Lewis gives the classic literary portrait in The Great Divorce, where the residents of the grey town keep refusing heaven because pride, resentment, or self-deception holds them captive.

Manis admires the choice model but offers a careful critique. The problem is psychological plausibility. Talbott presses the point: if there is no ignorance, no deception, and no bondage to irrational desire, then there can be no motive for choosing eternal misery.⁷ Walls draws on Kierkegaard's account of sin as a source of personal identity to explain how a soul might cling to evil even when it sees the good clearly.⁸ But Manis pushes further. Even with Kierkegaard's help, the choice model has trouble explaining what, exactly, the damned are choosing. Are they choosing separation from God? Then how can the choice be free if they do not understand what separation means? Manis wants a model that avoids these tangles.

There is another difficulty. Walls argues that God should not annihilate the damned, even if they want Him to, because this "would detract from the seriousness of moral freedom." Freedom "requires that we live with the consequences of our choices, at least our decisive choices." But Manis spots the flaw: the whole point of Christian grace is that we don't have to live with the eternal consequences of past sins. Grace and forgiveness are precisely the escape from what we have earned. If the choice model says freedom can never be used to escape consequences, it conflicts with the very gospel it means to defend.

I linger on this critique because it shows why a new model is needed. The four standard views each handle some problems well and others poorly. The traditional view preserves the seriousness of hell but struggles with proportionality. Universalism preserves God's love but struggles with freedom. Annihilationism avoids eternal torment but raises questions about whether extinction can serve love. The choice model respects freedom but strains psychological plausibility. Manis wants a model that holds all the pieces together.

A Different Kind of Hell

Having laid out the problems, Manis does something unusual. Instead of patching one of the four standard views, he builds a fifth. He calls it the divine presence model.

The core idea is simple, even though its consequences run deep. Here it is in plain language: After death, every soul stands in the full presence of God. There is no place where God is not. The blessed experience that presence as joy. The lost experience the same presence as torment. Same God. Same love. Different experience, because of the soul's own formed character.

That last sentence deserves a moment's thought. Lossky is not saying that God withholds love from the lost. He is saying the opposite. God pours out love on everyone. The difference is inside the soul. A soul that has spent its whole life running from love, building walls against it, refusing to receive it, will experience that same outpouring as something terrible. Not because the love is punishing. Because the love is exposing.

Manis builds his model on several connected claims. God's love is the supreme good. Every soul, after death, stands in the immediate presence of that love. No one escapes. The image of hell as a dark, God-forsaken dungeon is wrong. Hell is not God-absent. Hell is God-present-and-refused.¹⁰

The pain of hell, then, is the soul's contact with what it cannot bear. A soul shaped by pride, resentment, selfishness, and contempt for others meets the God who is perfect humility, perfect generosity, perfect love. The encounter is agonizing. Not because God wants it to hurt. Because the soul's own structure makes it hurt.

Help from the Eastern Tradition

Manis is honest that his model is not new. The basic insight runs through centuries of Eastern Orthodox theology, and he names his debts carefully. St. Isaac the Syrian, writing in the seventh century, put it this way: those in gehenna "will be chastised with the scourge of love." Their suffering comes not from the absence of God's love, but from its overwhelming presence in a heart that has sinned against it. Isaac says plainly that "it is not right to say that the sinners in hell are deprived" of God's love.¹¹

What is new in Manis is the philosophical development. He takes this ancient intuition and works it out with the tools of analytic philosophy. He addresses objections. He engages the major competitors. He shows how the model handles divine hiddenness, freedom, retribution, and the fear of the Lord. That kind of sustained philosophical defense is what the tradition needed and did not have.

Key Philosophical Moves

Three of Manis's moves deserve special attention.

First, he rejects the assumption that the blessed and the lost are in fundamentally different metaphysical conditions. On most views, heaven and hell are separate places. The blessed are "here," in the presence of God, and the damned are "there," away from God. Manis says no. Everyone is in the same condition: standing before the God who is love. The difference is experiential, not locational. The soul that loves God receives His presence as fulfillment. The soul at war with God receives the same presence as fire.¹³

Second, the freedom involved is genuine. Manis does not say the damned were fated to suffer. He says they formed themselves. Over a lifetime of choices, the soul builds a character. That character determines how it experiences the unfiltered presence of divine love. No one is forced into torment by an angry God. Each person's experience flows from the shape of the person's own heart.¹⁴

Third, the model preserves what the other views struggle to hold together. It preserves the goodness of God, because God isn't inflicting punishment. It preserves human freedom, because the soul's response is its own. It preserves the gravity of moral formation, because character has eternal consequences. And it does all this without the proportionality problem that haunts traditional ECT, because the "punishment" is not externally imposed. It is the soul's own self-disclosure in the presence of perfect love.¹⁵

Manis's Engagement with the Major Voices

Manis doesn't build his model in isolation. He engages the leading voices in the debate carefully and fairly. His treatment of Talbott is especially worth noting.

Talbott, as we saw in Chapter 25, argues that no fully informed soul could rationally refuse God. Manis takes that argument seriously. He even draws on Talbott's own language, noting that Talbott rightly distinguishes "contact with the divine nature" from "union with it." On the divine presence model, everyone has inescapable contact with God. But only those who surrender experience union. Manis points out the irony in Talbott's own book title: "the inescapable love of God" is, on the divine presence model, a perfectly apt description of hell.¹⁶

Manis also engages Walls at length. Walls is one of the chief defenders of the choice model, and in his later work, Walls himself moves toward elements of the divine presence model. In Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, Walls notes that fire in the Bible is a common image for God's presence, not His absence. He even connects the biblical images of the lake of fire and the river of the water of life to the same source: the throne of the Lamb.¹⁷ Manis sees in Walls's later writings "perhaps the clearest endorsement of key elements of the divine presence model" by any defender of the choice model.¹⁸

He engages Marilyn McCord Adams as well. Adams famously argues that the gap between humans and God is so vast that free-will defenses of hell are inadequate. Manis takes her point about the scale of the gap, but he uses the divine presence model to show how human agency still matters even in the face of God's overwhelming love.¹⁹

That kind of intellectual honesty is rare. Manis is not trying to win an argument. He is trying to open a door. I find it refreshing, and I think the church needs more of it.

The Convergence with This Book's Thesis

Here is what struck me most when I first read Manis. His model and the moment-of-death encounter we have developed in this book are structurally identical. I did not derive my account from Manis. The basic insight predates both of us by many centuries. But the convergence is remarkable, and it deserves careful attention.

Think back to the life review we discussed in Chapter 11. Near-death experiencers consistently report seeing their lives replayed in full, feeling the effects of their actions on others, standing fully exposed before a presence of overwhelming love. Some describe it as the most painful thing they have ever experienced, yet also the most healing. Others describe it as devastating, because they refused to receive the love. The life review is Manis's model in lived experience. The soul sees itself as Christ sees it. For those who surrender, the exposure becomes cleansing. For those who resist, it becomes fire.²²

The parallel goes even deeper. In the encounter dynamics we described in Chapter 18 and Chapter 19, the dying soul does not simply observe a static vision. Christ pursues. He persuades. He appeals. He reveals what the soul has been hiding from itself. The encounter is active, relational, personal. And the soul's response is not determined by the encounter's intensity but by the soul's own inner shape. Two people meeting the same Christ can walk away in opposite directions. One falls to her knees. The other digs in. Same love. Same truth. Different hearts.

This is exactly Manis's point, translated from philosophical categories into the language of lived encounter. On his model, heaven and hell are not two different divine dispositions. They are two different human responses to the same God. The fire that warms one soul burns another. The light that illuminates one soul blinds another. The love that fills one soul with joy fills another with anguish. And the difference is not in the fire, the light, or the love. The difference is in the soul that receives it.

Consider Howard Storm's near-death experience, which we examined in Chapter 12. Storm initially experienced darkness, hostility, and terror. Only after he cried out did the light come. But on the divine presence model, the light was always there. Storm's initial terror was itself a form of contact with the divine presence; his formed character, shaped by years of atheism and self-sufficiency, experienced God's closeness as threat before it experienced it as rescue. The encounter didn't change God's disposition. It changed Storm's capacity to receive.

Where We Differ

I don't want to overstate the overlap. Two real differences are worth naming.

First, a difference of timing. This book locates the decisive response at the moment-of-death encounter. The soul meets Christ at the threshold of dying and makes its choice there. Manis does not limit the model to a single decisive moment. His model applies to the post-death state broadly; it describes what heaven and hell are, without pinning down when the definitive encounter happens.²³

Second, a difference of eschatological posture. This book stays deliberately neutral on what happens long-term to those who refuse (see Chapter 29). Manis tends to develop the model in an ECT direction: the lost remain forever in God's presence, experiencing it as eternal torment. But Manis is careful to note that his model does not strictly require ECT. The structure itself is compatible with several long-term outcomes.²⁴

Manis and Molinism

One section of Manis's book deserves a brief note, because it connects directly to the argument of Chapter 28. In his chapter "Providence, Freedom, and God's Creation of the Damned," Manis engages Molinism, the view that God possesses "middle knowledge" of what every free creature would do in any possible circumstance. Manis grants that Molinism "seems to be a perfect match for universalism": if God knows what every soul would freely do, He could simply create only those He knows will say yes.²⁵ He then constructs what he calls "Molinist Anti-Universalism" (M-AU), the position that holds middle knowledge while denying that any universalist world was feasible, with Jerry Walls named as its chief defender.²⁶ After careful analysis, Manis finds M-AU wanting. The conclusion is memorable: Molinism and universalism "may well be a match made in heaven," while Molinism and anti-universalism are "at least ill-wed," and "anti-universalists are best served to reject Molinism altogether."²⁷ That verdict, coming from a non-universalist, carries real weight. Chapter 28 takes up the tension at length.

Compatible with Every Outcome

This is exactly why Manis's model matters for our argument. This book's eschatological neutrality (developed in Chapter 29) is not a weakness. It is a principled refusal to answer a question we don't have enough evidence to settle. Manis's model sits comfortably in that same space. It tells us what the soul experiences in God's presence, without insisting on how long the experience lasts or whether it can ever change.

The Moral Psychology of the Model

There is a deeper layer in Manis that I want to draw out, because it connects to some of the hardest questions this book has to face.

On the divine presence model, the torment of the lost is not something God does to them. It is the natural consequence of the soul's own formation. Think of it this way. A lifetime of selfishness, cruelty, pride, and contempt does something to a person. It shapes the soul's capacity for love. When that soul meets the God who is pure love, every wall it has built, every self-deception it has maintained, is exposed. The exposure is the torment. God isn't punishing. God is simply being who God is. The soul that has spent its life building defenses against love discovers that love was the one thing it needed most and feared most.²⁹

Manis develops this point with real care. He notes that the divine presence model avoids the "theological double-mindedness" that plagues standard accounts. Most traditional views explain heaven by reference to God's love and hell by reference to God's justice, as if God has two faces. Manis says that is wrong. Both heaven and hell flow from the same single source: God's love. The question is not whether God loves the soul. God always loves every soul. The question is what the soul has made of itself, and therefore what the soul can bear.

Manis uses Kierkegaard's language to describe this condition. Kierkegaard called the deepest form of despair a kind of "double-mindedness," where first-order desires (I want what I want) and second-order desires (I wish I didn't want what I want) are locked in permanent conflict. Some of the damned may know, in their clearest moments, that they are choosing wrongly. But their formed character overrides their clearest judgment. The resentment has grown too deep. The pride has become too central to who they are.³⁰

This is not an abstract problem. We see it in ordinary life. We all know people who are destroying their closest relationships through patterns they recognize and cannot break. Addiction, grudges, bitterness that hardens into identity. Now extend that psychology into the unfiltered presence of infinite love. The soul that clings to its grudges meets the God who forgave everything. That meeting, on Manis's model, is hell.

Manis also draws attention to a feature of the model that traditional views miss. On the divine presence model, the suffering of the lost is not arbitrary or random. It has a precise shape. The specific contours of each soul's torment mirror the specific contours of that soul's refusal. A proud soul experiences humiliation. A resentful soul experiences the generosity it refused to give. A self-deceived soul experiences the truth it spent a lifetime denying. The torment is personal, not generic. It is the soul's own history, played back to it in the light of infinite love.

Can Refusal Be Final?

The question of finality cuts to the heart of the book's eschatological neutrality. I don't know whether refusal is permanent. I believe it is genuinely possible, for the reasons Chapter 27 will develop. But I also hope that God's love is so relentless, so creative, so patient, that every soul eventually turns. I hold the hope and the sober possibility together, and Manis's model allows exactly that.

What Manis Gives Us

Let me step back and state plainly what Manis contributes to the argument of this book.

First, he gives us philosophical precision. The claim that the same divine love can be experienced as both heaven and hell is not just a poetic image. Manis works it out with the rigor of analytic philosophy. He answers objections. He engages competitors. He shows how the model handles proportionality, freedom, divine hiddenness, and retribution. The result is a model that can be stated clearly, defended carefully, and tested against the major alternatives.³²

Second, he gives us independent confirmation. This book did not derive its encounter dynamics from Manis. The roots of the idea go back to the Eastern Fathers, to Boros (see Chapter 16), and to the NDE reports themselves. But the fact that a leading analytic philosopher, working from different starting points, arrived at a structurally identical model is significant. Convergence from independent lines of evidence is one of the strongest forms of confirmation any thesis can receive.³³

Third, he gives us honest limits. Manis does not overclaim. He presents his model as a "view that Christians would do well to entertain," not as settled truth.³⁴ That is the right posture for anyone writing about what happens after death. We are reaching into deep mystery. The best we can do is reach with care, with honesty, and with the kind of intellectual humility Manis models.

Readers who want the full philosophical case for the encounter dynamics this book describes should read Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God. It is the most rigorous analytic defense of the structure we commend. What this book adds is what Manis does not provide: the empirical grounding in near-death experience research, the biblical foundations in the descent passages, the historical roots in Boros's hypothesis of a final decision, and the integration with divine temporality and the philosophy of time. Together, the two arguments reinforce each other. Manis builds the philosophy. This book builds the wider case.

One final reflection. There is a pastoral dimension to Manis's model that he does not develop at length but that I think is worth naming. If the divine presence model is right, then God never stops loving the lost. Not for one moment. Not for one second. The lost are not thrown into a pit and forgotten. They are held in the closest possible contact with perfect love, forever. That does not make their suffering easier to contemplate. In some ways it makes it harder, because it means their suffering is self-inflicted, and God grieves it as only infinite love can grieve. But it does mean something for how we think about God's character. A God who builds a torture chamber is hard to worship. A God who holds the refusing soul in love, even when that love becomes fire, is heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time.

In the end, the divine presence model tells us something simple and shattering. God's love is the most powerful reality in the universe. It will reach every soul, without exception. For those who receive it, that love is paradise. For those who refuse it, that love is fire. And the fire is not God's wrath. The fire is God's love, meeting a soul that has run from love its entire life.

As Manis's book so memorably puts it: "In the eschaton, Love is inescapable. But to those who are damned, Love is hell."³⁵

Whether that fire burns forever, or burns until the soul is consumed, or burns until the soul finally yields, is a question for Chapter 29. But the fire itself? That fire is love. And that, I believe, changes everything about how we think about the moment of death.