Chapter 21

The Divine Presence Model: Engaging R. Zachary Manis

Heaven and Hell as Two Experiences of One Reality

What if hell is not a place far from God?

A friend of mine once told me about standing at his father's hospital bed in the final hours. The old man had spent fifty years running a small business, coaching Little League, fixing the neighbors' plumbing on weekends. He was a good man by any honest measure. But he had never had much use for God. Religion was something other people did. When the chaplain came in, my friend's father waved him off with a tired hand.

My friend asked me the question that haunts so many people in those moments: "If Dad meets God after he dies, what happens? Does God send him away? Does God punish him? Or does God just—keep loving him?"

I did not have a good answer then. I do now. But the answer did not come from any source I expected. It came from a philosopher.

We are trained to think of heaven and hell as two separate rooms in the universe. Heaven is where God lives, bathed in light. Hell is some dark basement on the other side of the cosmos, as far from God as a soul can get. The saved go up; the lost go down. The two destinations share nothing but finality.

But what if that whole picture is wrong? What if the lost soul does not flee from God at all? What if, instead, the lost soul is brought face to face with Him, and the meeting itself is the torment?

That is the claim at the heart of the most important recent book on the problem of hell. In Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, the analytic philosopher R. Zachary Manis builds what he calls the "divine presence model." His central idea is striking in its simplicity. Heaven and hell are not two places. They are two experiences of one reality: the full, unveiled presence of God.¹ The saint who has been reconciled to God meets that presence as joy beyond words. The sinner who has set his will against God meets the same presence as agony beyond measure. The fire is the same fire. The love is the same love. The difference is in the soul that receives it.

I find this picture not only plausible but beautiful. It has reshaped the way I read the biblical fire texts and the way I think about the final judgment. In the chapters to come, I will build on Manis's insight when I develop the theology of the lake of fire as God's purifying presence (Chapter 26). But I part company with him at a crucial point: Manis holds that the torment of the lost is eternal. I do not. I take his insight and carry it in a different direction. This chapter presents his model at its strongest and explains both where I agree and where I must step off his path.

And it begins with a question my friend's father never thought to ask: What if the problem is not that God is absent from hell, but that He is overwhelmingly present?

The Problem with the Standard Views

Manis does not arrive at his model by accident. He gets there by showing that the usual views of hell each have a crippling weakness. This is important. A new model only earns its place if the old ones have failed. And Manis argues that they have, each in its own way.²

The retributive model says God punishes the wicked because justice demands it. Sin offends a holy God, and the offense is infinite, so the punishment must be infinite too. But if God freely chose to create a world in which He knew some would be lost, and then inflicts suffering on them forever, the picture starts to look less like justice and more like cruelty. The punishment never ends. It never corrects. It never restores. It is sheer pain without purpose, administered by a God who claims to love the very people He torments.³ What kind of father lights his child on fire and calls it justice? Manis does not quite say it that bluntly. But the force of his argument is clear: the retributive model makes God's love and God's justice pull in opposite directions, and something has to give.

The natural-consequence model tries to soften this. It says God does not actively punish anyone. The sinner simply chooses to separate from God, and that separation is the suffering. C. S. Lewis gave us this picture most memorably: the gates of hell are locked from the inside.⁴ The trouble, Manis argues, is that this model has a hard time explaining why God allows the separation to persist forever. If God is truly loving and truly powerful, why does He not break through? Why would He let someone He loves rot in a self-made prison when He has the key? And how does "separation from God" work when God is omnipresent? Where, exactly, does the sinner go to get away from a God who fills all things?⁵

The annihilationist model says God does break through, in a sense. Those who finally refuse are not tortured forever. They are destroyed. Their existence simply ends. But Manis sees a problem here, too. If God could save a person but instead destroys them, we are still left asking: Is that really love? And if the soul is never given the full, clear vision of God before it ceases to exist, is the destruction truly just? Manis also notes a practical difficulty. Many people die in a state of mixed motives, partly drawn to God and partly resisting. Do they deserve destruction? Does the model have room for the messy middle ground where most people actually live?⁶

The universalist model says none of these problems arise because, in the end, everyone is saved. God's love wins every last soul. But Manis worries that universalism can only guarantee the outcome by overriding freedom, and a love that overrides freedom is no longer love at all. If every soul must eventually say yes, then freedom is an illusion, and the "yes" is not a gift but a reflex.⁷

Each view solves one problem by creating another. The retributive view honors justice but wounds love. The choice model honors freedom but leaves God strangely passive. Annihilationism avoids endless suffering but raises the question of premature judgment. Universalism honors love but may erase freedom. Manis wants something better. He wants a model of hell that takes divine love with full seriousness, treats freedom as real, accounts for the traditional claim that hell involves conscious suffering, and still makes sense of God's character. That is a tall order. The divine presence model is his attempt to fill it.

The Central Claim: Love Is Inescapable

The key to the model is divine omnipresence. God is everywhere. There is no place in the universe where God is not. The psalmist knew this: "Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!" (Psalm 139:7–8).⁸

If God is truly everywhere, then hell cannot be a place away from God. The traditional picture of hell as a region of the cosmos where God is absent runs straight into a basic claim of Christian theology: that God fills all things. Manis takes this ancient claim seriously and follows it to its end.

Right now, in this life, God is present but hidden. Manis draws on a long Christian tradition here. God veils Himself from us. He does this not out of indifference but out of mercy. If the full force of God's holiness fell on a sinner all at once, it would be unbearable. Think of Moses on the mountain. God told him, "You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live" (Exodus 33:20).⁹ The veil protects us. It gives us room to grow, to choose, to turn toward God freely rather than being overwhelmed by His glory.

But on the Day of Judgment, Manis argues, the veil comes off. God reveals Himself fully. Every soul stands in His unshielded presence. And what happens next depends entirely on the state of the soul.

Read that line again. "Love is inescapable. But to those who are damned, Love is hell." That is the model in a single breath. It is not that God stops loving the lost. He never stops. It is not that the lost are sent to some dark corner where God's love cannot reach. There is no such corner. The problem is that they receive His love as torment. The very thing that makes heaven glorious makes hell agonizing. The fire is the same fire. It is God Himself.¹⁰

Manis draws support from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, where this idea has deep roots. The influential twentieth-century theologian Vladimir Lossky put it this way: God's love is "an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves."¹¹ Metropolitan Hierotheos put the same point even more directly. God will love sinners too, he argued, but they "will be unable to perceive this love as light. They will perceive it as fire." The iconography of the Second Coming in Orthodox churches makes this visible: the saints stand in the light that streams from God's throne, and from the same throne flows the river of fire where the unrepentant dwell. Same throne. Same source. Two experiences.¹²

And Manis notes the irony in the title of Thomas Talbott's book defending universalism. The Inescapable Love of God could just as well be a description of hell. Love is inescapable. That is exactly the point.¹²

I want to dwell on this for a moment, because it changes everything about how we picture the fate of the lost. We tend to imagine hell as distance from God. Manis says it is closeness. We imagine hell as darkness. Manis says it is light too bright to bear. We imagine God turning His back on the damned. Manis says God faces them head-on, pouring out the same love He gives the saints, and the damned cannot stand it.

Think of what this means for someone like my friend's father. On the divine presence model, if that man met God after death, God would not send him away. God would draw near. The question is what that nearness would feel like. Would it feel like coming home? Or would it feel like standing in a furnace?

Contact Without Union

But if everyone is in God's presence, what separates heaven from hell? Manis answers with a careful distinction. He borrows it, in part, from Talbott himself.

There is a difference between contact with someone and union with them. You can be in the same room as someone, standing face to face, and still be utterly estranged. Think of two people in the middle of a bitter divorce, seated across a courtroom table. They are in close contact. They are not in communion. The physical nearness only sharpens the emotional distance.

That is Manis's picture of hell. On the Day of Judgment, everyone is in what he calls "intimate and inescapable contact with God's presence." But only the righteous experience this contact as the beatific vision. All others experience the same contact as what Talbott calls "unbearable torment."¹³

In his appendix on the biblical case for the model, Manis sharpens this further. Hell, he writes, is "a separation, not from God's presence but from communion with Him." It is "an inability—made permanent through hardness of heart and persistence in sin—to experience His love as love."¹⁴ The lost soul is not far from God. The lost soul is as close to God as anyone could be. But closeness without love is not heaven. It is torment.

This distinction explains something that has always puzzled me about the biblical language of hell. Scripture sometimes speaks of the damned as being "away from" God, and sometimes speaks of them as being "before" God. The traditional view has to pick one or the other. The divine presence model holds both. The damned are in God's presence (they cannot escape it) but they are cut off from communion with God (they cannot bear it). They are near in every objective sense and far in every relational sense. The separation is not spatial. It is spiritual.

I want to pause here and let the weight of this land. If Manis is right, then every common picture of hell as a dark, God-forsaken dungeon misses the point. Hell is not dark. Hell is blinding light. Hell is not the absence of love. Hell is the presence of a love the soul cannot bear. Think of someone who has spent decades hiding in a dark room. Now fling the curtains open at high noon. The light is good. The light is beautiful. But to those dark-adapted eyes, it is searing pain.¹⁵

Or think of it in terms of music. Imagine a person who has never heard anything but noise. Not just silence, but jangling, discordant noise, year after year, until it becomes the only sound they know. Now place that person in a concert hall and let a full orchestra play the most beautiful piece ever written. The beauty is real. The music is glorious. But to ears trained on nothing but discord, the symphony might feel like an assault. The problem is not in the music. The problem is in the ears.

That is the divine presence model. The problem is never in God. The problem is always in us.

Why the Veil?

If God's unveiled presence is torment for sinners, then the obvious question is: Why does God hide at all? Why not just show Himself now and get it over with?

Manis's answer is that divine hiddenness is a mercy. It is the space God gives us to grow. In this life, God reveals Himself gradually. He works through conscience, through Scripture, through the witness of other believers, through the quiet tug of the Holy Spirit. He does not force Himself on us. He invites. He woos. He knocks.¹⁶

Manis engages several earlier explanations for why God stays hidden. John Hick proposed that God creates an "epistemic distance" between Himself and creatures so that we can develop moral character freely. Others, drawing on Reformed epistemology, have argued that the Fall damaged our spiritual senses. But Manis finds each of these partial accounts incomplete on its own terms. They explain parts of the puzzle, but none of them fully explains why God stays hidden even from people who desperately want to see Him clearly.¹⁶

The divine presence model, Manis argues, provides the missing piece. God hides not only because seeing Him would overwhelm our freedom, and not only because sin has damaged our sight. God hides because His full presence would destroy an unprepared soul. The veil is not a barrier. It is a shield.

This gradual approach matters because sanctification takes time. We need to see our sin slowly, in manageable pieces. If the full truth about our hearts were dumped on us all at once, we would be crushed. Manis suggests that partial ignorance of our own depravity is actually a necessary condition for spiritual growth. We must learn the depth of our brokenness step by step, "so as not to become overwhelmed or lose hope."¹⁷

This gives the Christian life its shape. God calls us, shows us a piece of ourselves, invites us to repent of that piece, and draws us a step closer. Over time, the veil gets thinner. Over time, we can bear more of the light. Paul described this process in 2 Corinthians 3:18: "We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another." The veil comes off slowly, and as it does, the soul changes. The saints in glory, Manis argues, will one day stand in the full blaze of God's presence and find it nothing but joy, because they have been prepared for it by the long process of sanctification.¹⁸

But Manis pushes deeper. The goal of this process is not merely moral improvement. It is what the early church called theosis: participation in the life of God Himself. Manis takes the doctrine seriously. He reads Paul's language of being "changed from one degree of glory to another" as a description of growing union with God. He connects it to the remarkable claim in 2 Peter 1:4 that believers "participate in the divine nature." And he traces the theme through the Fourth Gospel, where Jesus prays that His disciples will be "one as we are one, I in them and you in me" (John 17:22–23). Salvation, on this view, is not escape from punishment. It is entrance into the communion of the Trinity.

This matters enormously for the divine presence model. If the goal of human life is participation in God's own life, then the gradual removal of the veil is not just about preventing damage. It is about building capacity. Each step of sanctification increases the soul's ability to receive more of God. Each act of repentance, each surrender, each moment of trust opens the heart a little wider. And when the veil finally comes off entirely, the prepared soul does not flinch. It rejoices. The light that would have blinded it years ago now feels like home.

Manis puts the summary precisely. God's intention in remaining partially hidden is to create conditions that are "maximally conducive" to the process of sanctification. God meets each person where that person is, revealing Himself to the degree the person can bear, "in a gradual way that does not overwhelm or undermine creaturely freedom." As one progresses, one perceives God more clearly and becomes capable of deeper communion with Him. The light and the capacity grow together.

But what about those who refuse the process? What about those who spend their lives running from the light? What happens when the veil is removed from a soul that has never submitted to the slow, painful work of being made ready?

Why Repentance May Become Impossible

This is where Manis's model gets hardest. He believes that for the damned, repentance becomes impossible once the veil is fully lifted. He does not say this lightly. He offers several reasons, and he presents them not as certainties but as plausible accounts of how the mechanism might work. I want to lay these out carefully, because each one deserves a fair hearing.

The coercion problem. Perhaps the level of suffering caused by God's unveiled presence is so great that any act of repentance under those conditions would be coerced. It would not be free. And if it is not free, it is not real repentance. Since real repentance is essential to salvation, the possibility of salvation is lost.¹⁹

The trust problem. Perhaps, because the damned experience God's presence as tormenting, they cannot come to love and trust Him. But trust is essential to genuine faith, and faith is necessary for salvation. So once the presence is experienced as agony, the path to faith is blocked.²⁰

The kidney-stones problem. Manis reaches for a vivid analogy here. Imagine trying to carry on an intimate conversation while passing kidney stones. The pain is so overwhelming that you simply cannot focus on anything else. Perhaps the suffering of the unveiled presence works the same way. The damned cannot even begin to think about repentance because their minds are consumed by the agony of being exposed to God's holiness while still clinging to their sin.²¹

The inflamed-vice problem. Perhaps the presence of God, in some mysterious but real way, "inflames" whatever sin remains in a person's soul. For those already turning toward God, the exposure brings painful but healing purification. But for those turned away from God, the same exposure makes their rebellion worse, not better. It drives them deeper into the very sin they refuse to release.²²

The truth-exposure problem. The presence of God "reveals the secrets of the heart." On the Day of Judgment, the full moral truth about every person is disclosed. No more hiding. No more self-deception. The damned are forced to see themselves exactly as they are. For many, this forced encounter with the truth is itself unbearable. It plunges them into despair.²³

Manis connects this to the prophet Jeremiah's lament: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9, KJV). If the full depth of our depravity were exposed all at once, without the slow, merciful preparation that sanctification provides, we might be utterly destroyed by it. The lost soul, suddenly seeing the full gap between itself and holiness, despairs of ever crossing it.²⁴

The dismantling problem. Here Manis borrows a striking claim from the philosopher Marilyn Adams. She argues that "vice in the soul preserved beyond death" eventually "brings about a total dismantling of personality, to the torment of which this worldly schizophrenia and depression … are but the faintest approximations."²⁵ In other words, the corruption of sin, left unchecked and then exposed to the full light, does not just cause suffering. It tears the soul apart.

The resentment problem. Perhaps the damned resent God. They are offended by His very presence. It is natural, Manis observes, to be offended by someone who reveals an ugly truth about you against your will. If God's presence has this effect, then the soul's response is not repentance but deeper hostility. And Kierkegaard argued repeatedly that offense is the opposite of faith. The two cannot live in the same heart at the same time.²⁶

I have laid out these proposals in some detail because I think they deserve respect. Manis is not being cruel. He is not gleefully describing suffering. He is doing the painful work of trying to understand how a loving God and an unredeemed soul could end up in the same room forever, with no resolution. Each proposal is, in his own careful words, "not only possible but at least somewhat plausible."²⁷

Behind all of these mechanisms lies a deeper theme that runs through Manis's entire book: the role of self-deception. Drawing on Kierkegaard, Manis argues that the descent into sin is always also a descent into lying to yourself. The sinner does not simply choose evil. The sinner convinces himself that evil is good, or at least that it is not as bad as it seems. Over time, the lies harden. The self-deception becomes a shell. And when the full truth is finally revealed, the shell does not soften. It cracks.

Paul described exactly this pattern in Romans 1. Those who "suppress the truth by their wickedness," even when the truth is "plain to them," become "darkened" in their hearts and "futile" in their thinking. Eventually, God "gives them over" to the consequences of their own choices (Romans 1:18–28). The language of "giving over" is crucial. It means the suffering is not an external punishment imposed from outside. It is the natural result of a soul that has been running from the truth for so long that it can no longer recognize the truth when it comes.

Jesus made the same point even more sharply. He told His opponents: "Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say" (John 8:43). And later: "Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice" (John 18:37). The ones who cannot hear are not deaf in any physical sense. Their ears work fine. But their hearts have been shaped by years of resistance, and the shaping has made them unable to receive what they hear.

Manis sees this as the mechanism that drives the divine presence model. It is not that God refuses to save the damned. It is that the damned have so thoroughly corrupted their own capacity to receive love that God's love, when it arrives in full force, can only be experienced as torment. The soul has trained itself to call light "darkness" and love "pain." And on the Day of Judgment, when the veil comes off, the training proves permanent.

Manis and the Intermediate State

Here is where the conversation gets personal for this book. Because Manis does not only think about the final judgment. He also, almost in passing, suggests something about the time before the judgment that runs remarkably close to the picture I have been building across these chapters.

Manis raises a question. God currently hides Himself. On the Day of Judgment, He will be fully revealed. But does the transition from hiddenness to full disclosure happen all at once? Or might it happen gradually, over the course of the intermediate state?

Listen to his own words:

Read that again and notice how close it is to the picture this book has been developing. God does not simply leave souls in darkness until judgment day. He increases the light. Step by step, through the intermediate state, He draws nearer. The veil gets thinner. The disclosure deepens. The soul has time to respond, time to turn, time to say yes or to harden further.

I agree with nearly all of this. This book has argued that the intermediate state is a conscious realm where God's pursuit continues (Chapter 8). It has argued that the encounter with Christ becomes deeper and more personal over time (Chapter 13). Manis's picture of "an ever-increasing divine disclosure" is a philosopher's way of describing exactly what I mean by God's relentless pursuit of the soul in Hades.

What strikes me most about Manis's suggestion is that he makes it almost in passing. It appears in a footnote, not in the body of his argument. He is a careful thinker, and he sees the possibility clearly. But he does not develop it. He leaves it as a suggestion, a road he notices but does not walk down. This book walks down that road. The intermediate state is not a side note in God's plan. It is the middle movement of a three-part symphony. The deathbed is the opening. Hades is the development. The judgment is the climax. And at every point, the same love is at work, drawing the soul toward itself.

But I part company with him at the end of his sentence. Manis says that at the Day of Judgment, "repentance is no longer possible." I am not ready to say that. In this book, the Day of Judgment is not the moment the door slams shut. It is the final, most intense, most personal appeal. It is the last stage of the threefold offer. The soul stands in God's full presence, yes, and that presence is overwhelming. But I believe the offer remains open through the judgment itself. The deadline is the end of the judgment, not its beginning (see Chapter 19).²⁸

And I am not sure that repentance becomes impossible even there. Hard to imagine? Yes. Rare beyond counting? Perhaps. But impossible? That claim would require more than Manis's proposals, as thoughtful as they are. It would require proving that no soul, under any circumstances, could freely turn to God under the full weight of His glory. I am not ready to grant that. Manis himself, remember, offered his proposals as possibilities, not as certainties. He held them with open hands. I take that openness seriously.

The question of whether a fully informed soul can still say no is the subject of the next chapter.²⁹

A Theologian of Rare Honesty

One of the things I admire most about Manis is his intellectual honesty. He is not a universalist. He holds a form of eternal conscious torment. He believes the damned are, in his own careful phrase, "consigned against their wills on the Day of Judgment."³⁰ He thinks the suffering does not end.

And yet he does not overstate his case. At the close of his book, he borrows a remarkable statement from the philosopher Paul Griffiths. It is worth hearing in full:

"I present this view not as the correct one, the one Christians ought to hold, but rather as a view that Christians would do well to entertain."

— Paul Griffiths, quoted in R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, 338

Manis echoes those words about his own model. He offers the divine presence view not as established doctrine but as a "weak theodicy" of hell.³¹ A weak theodicy, in his usage, is not a feeble argument. It is a model that makes hell at least understandable under certain assumptions, even if it cannot be proven to be the final truth. He recognizes that no one on this side of eternity can settle the details of what lies beyond the grave. "We see in a mirror dimly," as Paul wrote, and there is "neither sense nor piety in pretending otherwise."³²

I respect that deeply. A scholar who can build a model as powerful as the divine presence view and still hold it with open hands is a scholar I trust. It is one of the reasons I take his arguments so seriously, even the ones I ultimately resist.

One example of that honesty is worth noting here, because it connects directly to this book's argument. N. T. Wright has famously proposed that persistent idolaters may slowly lose their humanity. Those who give their allegiance to what is not God, Wright argues, "progressively cease to reflect the image of God." Over time, they become something less than human. Wright suggests that after death, they might become "beings that once were human but now are not." Manis takes this idea seriously, but he spots a crucial flaw in its timing. "Presumably," he observes, "there are many who die in a state of mixed allegiance, double-minded in their conflicting desires." If Wright is right that the disintegration of personhood happens naturally, then it cannot happen all at once at the moment of death. Something must give those mixed-allegiance souls time to resolve in one direction or the other.

That observation is, to my ear, almost a plea for the intermediate state this book defends. Manis does not draw that conclusion himself. But the logic points there. If people die in mixed spiritual states, and if the process of spiritual clarification requires time, then there must be a period after death in which the clarification happens. That is exactly what I have argued Hades provides (Chapter 8).

Manis and Molinism: An Unexpected Verdict

If the divine presence model were all Manis offered, this would already be one of the most important recent books on hell. But he does not stop there. In a section called "Providence, Freedom, and God's Creation of the Damned," Manis takes on a question that cuts to the heart of this book: What does Molinism, the doctrine of God's middle knowledge, mean for the debate between universalism and its critics?³³

Let me sketch the problem briefly. (The full treatment of Molinism and its role in this book's argument comes in Chapter 23. Here I present only what Manis himself develops, which this chapter owns.)

Molinism says that God, before creating the world, knew not only what every possible person would do in every possible situation, but what they would freely do. This is called middle knowledge. Armed with this knowledge, God chose to create a specific world. He picked the circumstances. He placed each person in the setting where their free choices would unfold in a way that fit His purposes.³⁴

Now here is the trouble. If God knew, before creating anyone, that some people would end up in hell, why did He create them? He had the knowledge. He had the power to arrange things differently. He could have created a world where everyone freely chose to say yes. Or, if no such world was feasible, He could have simply refrained from creating the people He knew would be lost. Why would a loving God bring someone into existence knowing that person would suffer forever?³⁵

Manis takes this problem apart piece by piece.

Molinism and Universalism: A Natural Fit

First, Manis shows that Molinism and universalism go together surprisingly well. If God has middle knowledge, He can survey all the possible worlds and choose one in which every free creature eventually turns to Him. No one's freedom is overridden. God simply selects the world where the right circumstances, the right encounters, the right moments of grace lead every soul home. The universalist can say: God picked the world where everyone freely says yes.³⁶

To make this concrete, imagine God looking at the vast array of possible worlds before creation. In some of those worlds, a particular person hears the gospel at age twenty and accepts it. In others, the same person never hears the gospel and dies in ignorance. In still others, the person hears the gospel but at a moment of deep personal crisis, and the message bounces off. God sees all of this. And if Molinism is true, God can choose the world where the right person hears the right message at the right time, from the right messenger, in the right way, and freely says yes.

Extend that to every soul, and you have a world where everyone is saved. God's sovereignty and human freedom work together perfectly. God does not override anyone's will. He simply places each person in the circumstances where that person will freely choose Him. The universalist who accepts Molinism does not need to say God forces anyone. She only needs to say God chose wisely.

This means that anyone who wants to use the "free will argument" against universalism is in trouble if they also hold Molinism. On Molinism, God could have arranged a world where all are saved. So the free will argument does not work unless you first reject Molinism. As Manis puts it, the anti-universalist who wants to use free will as a weapon must be "committed to a rejection of Molinism."³⁷

Why Does God Create the Damned?

Second, Manis pushes the problem further. Even if you reject the universalist conclusion, Molinism still creates trouble for anyone who believes some are lost forever. If God has middle knowledge, and He chose to create some people He knew would be damned, the natural question is: Why? What possible reason could a loving God have for bringing someone into existence when He knows that person will suffer without end?³⁸

Jerry Walls, himself no universalist, admits the force of this question. God's goodness, Walls acknowledges, is "closely connected with his desire to save all persons." A truly good God wants everyone to be happy. So why would He create anyone He knows will not be?³⁹

Molinist Anti-Universalism: The High Price

Manis then examines the main defense that Molinist anti-universalists have offered. William Lane Craig argues that perhaps there is no feasible world in which all are saved and heaven is populated with enough people. Maybe the only way to get a large number of saved souls is to also create some who will be lost. God faces a tragic choice: a smaller heaven with no hell, or a larger heaven with some souls lost. Craig suggests God chose the bigger harvest, even at the cost of some being damned.⁴⁰

Craig's phrase for this is chilling: "The terrible price of filling heaven is also filling hell." In other words, God could have had a small heaven with no hell. But He chose instead to have a large heaven and also a hell, because the gain of more saved souls outweighed the cost of some being lost. On this view, the damned are collateral damage. They are the price God was willing to pay for a bigger kingdom.

Manis finds this deeply unsatisfying. He offers a thought experiment. Imagine a couple who desperately wants children. They have exactly two options. The first will give them three healthy children, with no risk. The second will give them ten children, but several of those children will suffer terribly and irreversibly. Most people, Manis suggests, would find it monstrous to choose the second option. The couple might want more children. But a loving parent does not trade the well-being of some children for the existence of others. Yet that is roughly what Craig's view asks us to accept about God.⁴¹

Gordon Knight sharpens the point. Even if the damned choose freely, God is not absolved of all responsibility. "One does not, in general, lose all responsibility for an action just because it involves another person's free choice," Knight writes. If you knowingly hand your car keys to a drunk friend, you share responsibility for what happens next. God, in creating people He knows will be damned, shares responsibility for the outcome. The fundamental issue, Knight argues, is not whether God behaves immorally. It is whether God behaves unlovingly. And love, by definition, values each person for their own sake.

To make matters worse, Craig's defense requires an additional claim: that those who are lost suffer from "transworld damnation." This means they would reject God in every possible world, no matter what God did for them. Without this extra claim, God is simply sacrificing some people for the sake of others. With the claim, the defense requires us to believe three things at once: (1) there is no feasible world where all are saved and heaven is full enough, (2) it is worse for fewer to be saved than for many to be saved and some lost, and (3) every lost person would be lost in every possible world. Manis calls this combination "simply incredible."⁴²

I would put it more gently, but I think Manis is right. Each of those three claims is, on its own, hard to believe. Together they form a tower that leans dangerously. And the burden of proof falls on those who build it. You cannot simply say these things are possible. For a theodicy to work, it needs to be plausible. Manis argues that the combination is not plausible. I agree.

There is even a biblical reason to doubt transworld damnation. Jesus Himself said of Chorazin and Bethsaida: "If the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes" (Matthew 11:21). That is a counterfactual claim about what would have happened under different circumstances. If Tyre and Sidon would have repented under different circumstances, then they do not suffer from transworld damnation. There are feasible worlds in which they are saved. And if that is true for Tyre and Sidon, it may well be true for others who are lost in this world.⁴³

The Verdict: "A Match Made in Heaven"

This brings us to the most remarkable moment in Manis's book. After pages of careful analysis, after showing that every attempt to combine Molinism with anti-universalism runs into serious trouble, he issues a verdict that no one expected. Remember: Manis is not a universalist. He holds a form of eternal conscious torment. Yet here is what he writes:

Let the irony of that sink in. A defender of eternal conscious torment has just told us that Molinism fits better with universalism than with his own view. A philosopher who personally believes that some are lost forever has honestly assessed the evidence and concluded that the doctrine of middle knowledge is a natural partner for the view that all will be saved.

That concession carries enormous weight, precisely because Manis does not want it to be true. He is not a universalist trying to score points. He is a careful thinker following the argument where it leads, even when it leads away from his own conclusion. When a hostile witness testifies against his own side, the testimony counts for more, not less.⁴⁴

For this book, Manis's concession is a gift. I have been building an argument that God gives every soul the best possible approach, tailored by His middle knowledge and extended across the deathbed, the intermediate state, and the final judgment (Chapter 23). Manis's analysis confirms that Molinism and a universal offer fit together beautifully. The constructive synthesis I develop in that chapter builds directly on the ground Manis has cleared here.⁴⁵

Jason Marsh and Transworld Sanctity

Manis's engagement with Molinism opens the door to one more idea worth noting here. If some people might suffer from "transworld damnation" (rejecting God in every feasible world), what about the reverse? What about "transworld sanctity"?

The concept is the mirror image. A person with transworld sanctity would freely accept God in every feasible world, no matter the circumstances. If such people exist, then God could simply create them, and leave the transworld-damned uncreated. This is one of the moves the philosopher Jason Marsh presses, and Manis engages it.⁴⁶

Think about what this means. If Craig is right that some people would reject God in every possible world, then those people are, in a sense, unreachable. But the mirror claim is just as plausible: some people would accept God in every possible world. They are, in a sense, unsinkable. God knows who is who. So why not create the unsinkable and leave the unreachable uncreated? Why would a loving God bring into being a person He knows will suffer forever, when He could have created a different person who would freely say yes?

The full development of this idea, and the way Andrew Hronich extends it in his recent defense of universal restoration, belongs to Chapter 23. What matters here is that Manis, the anti-universalist, sees the force of the argument. He cannot easily dismiss it. The more seriously one takes Molinism, the harder it becomes to explain why God would create anyone who is finally lost.⁴⁷

What I Take and What I Leave

It is time to state plainly where I stand.

I take the divine presence model. I believe Manis has given us the best framework for understanding what the lake of fire actually is. It is not a torture chamber God built for His enemies. It is God Himself, His holy, unveiled presence, experienced by each soul according to the state of its heart. This insight will shape everything I say about the lake of fire in Chapter 26.⁴⁸

I also take the contact-versus-union distinction. I believe it is biblical and illuminating. It makes sense of the old question of how God can be present in hell. He is present, fully present, but the presence is not experienced as communion. The fire imagery in Scripture fits this perfectly: God is a "consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:29), and the question is not whether you will meet the fire, but whether the fire will warm you or burn you.

I take the intermediate-state suggestion. Manis's picture of "an ever-increasing divine disclosure" through the intermediate state is remarkably close to what I have been arguing. The soul in Hades is not forgotten. God draws nearer. The light grows brighter. The invitation grows more urgent. This is the second stage of the threefold offer. It is God doing what love always does: pursuing.

And Manis's own logic supports extending the point further than he does. If sanctification is gradual, as he insists, and if many people die with mixed motives, as he acknowledges, then the intermediate state is not an afterthought. It is a necessity. Jerry Walls has pressed this argument directly. If salvation involves real transformation, not just a legal verdict, then what becomes of those who die before the transformation is complete? The common Protestant answer, that God finalizes sanctification at the moment of death, works well enough for lifelong believers. But what about the unevangelized? What about the child who never heard the gospel? What about the deathbed convert who said yes to Christ with his last breath but never had time to grow? These cases cry out for a period of postmortem preparation, a time when the soul can receive the deeper work that earthly life did not allow. Manis's "ever-increasing divine disclosure" is, whether he intends it or not, a description of exactly that preparation.

I take the Molinism analysis. Manis has shown, against his own position, that Molinism and universalism are natural partners. That finding strengthens the case I will build in Chapter 23 for the "best possible approach."

But I leave the eternal-torment conclusion. I cannot follow Manis to the claim that the torment never ends. Here is where I part ways, not with anger but with sorrow, because I know what Manis is trying to protect. He is trying to preserve the seriousness of hell. He is trying to honor the tradition. He is trying to say that God's judgment is real and final. I respect all of that.

But the same divine presence that Manis describes as the source of hell's suffering is, in this book's argument, also the source of hell's resolution. For those who yield, the fire purifies. It burns away everything false, everything selfish, everything broken, and leaves the true person standing in the light at last. For those who finally refuse even the most intense encounter with God's love, I believe the fire at last consumes. The unrepentant soul is not tortured without end. It is destroyed (Chapter 24).⁴⁹

This is the point where conditional immortality and the divine presence model meet. Manis gives us the mechanism. I give it a different ending. The fire is the same fire. The love is the same love. But in my reading, the fire does not burn forever. It finishes its work. For the willing, the work is purification. For the unwilling, the work is consumption. Either way, the fire accomplishes something. It does not simply persist, endlessly, without purpose.

And I leave open the possibility that Talbott is right and no one will finally refuse. The universalist hope remains alive in this book, held honestly and without apology (see Chapter 28). The divine presence model does not require universal salvation, but neither does it rule it out. If every soul, standing in the full blaze of God's love, eventually says yes, then the fire that was meant to purify does purify, and there are no ashes left over. That is a beautiful hope. I will not pretend to know whether it is true.⁵⁰

The Biblical Thread

I should note briefly how Manis's model connects to the biblical evidence. The full biblical argument for the lake of fire as God's presence belongs to Chapter 26. But a few threads are worth pulling here, because they show that the divine presence model is not just a philosopher's invention. It has roots in Scripture.

Start with Paul's image of the veil. In 2 Corinthians 3, Paul writes about a "veil" that covers the hearts of unbelievers. He recalls Moses, whose face shone so brightly after meeting God on the mountain that the people could not bear to look at him. Moses wore a veil. Paul says believers in Christ have had that veil removed, but for others it remains. "But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away" (2 Corinthians 3:16).⁵¹

Manis takes this further. He reads it as a picture of what happens in both salvation and judgment. For those who turn to God, the veil is removed gently, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit. For those who do not turn, the veil is removed anyway, on the Day of Judgment, but the removal is not gentle. It is overwhelming. The same glory that transforms the willing is agony for the unwilling.⁵²

There is also the theme of God "revealing the secrets of the heart." Paul uses this phrase in 1 Corinthians 14:25, and the idea runs throughout the New Testament. On the day of judgment, nothing will be hidden. Every thought, every motive, every self-deception will be laid bare. Jesus warned that "nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light" (Luke 8:17). Manis suggests this disclosure is itself a source of torment for those who are not reconciled to God. To stand in the presence of perfect truth while clinging to lies is its own kind of suffering.⁵³

And there is the theme of hardened hearts. In Ephesians 4:18, Paul speaks of those who are "darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart." Manis connects this to the experience of the damned: their hearts are so hardened that even the full light of God cannot penetrate. They see the truth but cannot receive it. They are in contact with Love but cannot experience it as love.⁵⁴

The connection to Jesus's words in John 8 is striking. Jesus says to those who oppose Him: "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:31–32). The truth sets free those who receive it. But the same truth, resisted and resented, becomes a prison. The Pharisees heard the truth from the mouth of Truth Himself, and it did not free them. It enraged them. They picked up stones. Manis sees in this pattern a preview of the final judgment: the truth is the same truth; the response depends on the heart.

One passage deserves special mention, though its full treatment belongs to Chapter 26. In 2 Thessalonians 1:9, Paul writes that the disobedient "will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might." The key question is the meaning of the Greek word apo (apo, "from"). Many translations render this as "away from the presence of the Lord," as if the punishment is separation from God. The NIV has "shut out from the presence of the Lord." The RSV has "exclusion from the presence of the Lord."⁵⁵

But Manis, following Talbott and others, argues that apo here means "coming from." The destruction is not away from God's presence. It comes from God's presence. The very glory of God is what brings the destruction.

Talbott makes the grammatical case forcefully. In Acts 3:19, the same construction appears: "times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord." No one reads that as "refreshing away from the Lord's presence." The refreshing comes from God. Just so, Talbott and Manis argue, the destruction in 2 Thessalonians 1:9 comes from God's presence and glory. The presence is not what the sinner escapes. The presence is what brings the judgment.

That reading fits the divine presence model perfectly. It also fits this book's argument. If the fire is God, and the fire is what the disobedient encounter at the judgment, then destruction comes not from distance but from closeness. The lake of fire is not far from God. The lake of fire is God's presence, experienced by those who will not yield to it. The full exegetical case for this reading is developed in Chapter 26.⁵⁶

Where the Argument Goes from Here

Manis has given us two enormous gifts in one book. The divine presence model reshapes how we understand hell. And his honest assessment of Molinism strengthens the case for a universal offer, even though he personally resists the universalist conclusion.

But two questions remain open, and this book must face them both.

The first is the question of freedom. In the previous chapter, Talbott argued that no fully informed soul can finally say no to God. In this chapter, Manis has argued that the damned cannot repent once the veil lifts. Between these two positions lies the space where this book's own view must stand. Can anyone really refuse God when they see Him clearly? Can anyone repent when they are overwhelmed by His presence? The next chapter takes up that question directly.⁵⁷

Notice the tension. Talbott says the fully-seeing soul must say yes. Manis says the fully-exposed soul cannot say yes. Both are brilliant thinkers. Both are reasoning carefully from their premises. And both are making claims about what happens in a situation no living person has ever been in. The truth, I suspect, lies between them, and finding it will require us to think very carefully about what freedom means when you are standing in the presence of God. That is the work of the next chapter.

The second question is constructive. If Molinism and the divine presence model are both true, what does that mean for the way God pursues each soul? If God has middle knowledge and uses it to shape the best possible approach to every person, and if that approach extends through the deathbed, Hades, and the final judgment, what does the whole picture look like when you put the pieces together? That is the question Chapter 23 will answer.⁵⁸

For now, I want to close with a word of gratitude. Manis wrote a book about hell that is relentlessly honest, philosophically rigorous, and deeply human. He treated the suffering of the lost with seriousness, not satisfaction. He followed the arguments where they led, even when they led away from his own position. And he gave the rest of us a model that opens more doors than it closes.

Not many books about hell make you think more kindly about God. This one did. Reading Manis, I found myself less afraid of God's judgment and more awed by it. The God who judges on the divine presence model is not a tyrant on a throne, passing sentence from behind a bench. He is a lover who has been pursuing the beloved since before time began, and who will not stop pursuing until the beloved has made a final choice. The judgment is not the moment God gives up. It is the moment God gives everything. Every last ounce of His glory, held back through centuries of patience, is finally poured out. And the soul stands in that flood and chooses.

I think of my friend's father again. On the divine presence model, if that man met God after death, the meeting would not be a sentencing. It would be an encounter. The question would not be whether God's love reached him. Love always reaches. The question would be what the love felt like when it arrived. And the answer, I believe, depends on what happened in that man's heart, not just during his life, but in every moment God gives him after it.

I imagine that encounter sometimes. I imagine the veil thinning. I imagine the light growing. I imagine a man who spent his life avoiding God suddenly realizing that God was never far away. He was always right here, waiting. And the light is painful at first. It shows the man things about himself he does not want to see. But if this book's argument is right, the light does not stop at exposure. It offers healing. And if the man turns toward the light instead of away, the very presence that burned now begins to warm.

Manis would say the encounter ends in permanent torment for those who refuse. I would say it ends in one of two things: transformation or, for the soul that will not yield, a merciful end. But on the most important point, Manis and I stand together. The fire is not a punishment separate from God. The fire is God. And God is love.

I do not agree with everything in his book. But I would not be writing this one without it.