Chapter 21

The Divine Presence Model: Engaging R. Zachary Manis

Heaven and hell as two experiences of one God

What if the worst thing about hell is not the absence of God, but His presence?

That question stopped me the first time I read R. Zachary Manis's book Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God. I had spent years working through the standard accounts of hell. Some cast it as a place God throws the wicked into. Others describe it as a place the wicked choose. Still others deny it exists at all. But Manis did something different. He argued that heaven and hell are not two places. They are two experiences of one reality: the full, unveiled presence of God.¹

The idea has roots in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, in Isaac the Syrian and the Greek fathers, in writers most Western evangelicals have never read.² But Manis gave the idea its most careful and complete philosophical defense. He brought it into the conversation of analytic philosophy of religion. And in doing so, he built something I believe this book needs. Not all of it. But the heart of it.

I want to walk through his model slowly, because it is brilliant and because it matters for everything this book argues about the lake of fire and the final judgment. I also want to be honest about where I follow Manis and where I part company with him. He has earned that honesty.

The Problem Manis Is Solving

Manis begins with a problem that should bother any thoughtful Christian. The traditional view of hell says God is perfectly loving, perfectly just, and perfectly good. It also says some people will suffer consciously, forever, with no hope of relief. How do those two claims fit together?³

Most answers fall into a few standard categories. The retributive model says hell is deserved punishment. God is just, sin is infinite, and the penalty matches the crime. The choice model (developed by C. S. Lewis and Jerry Walls) says hell is what people choose. God respects human freedom, and those who refuse Him get what they asked for. The annihilationist model says the lost are destroyed. God does not torment anyone forever; He simply lets them cease to exist.⁴

Manis finds something wrong with each of these. The retributive model struggles to explain how a loving God could design a system of endless pain. The choice model often makes hell sound voluntary in a way that strains belief. Does anyone really "choose" eternal misery?⁵ Annihilationism avoids the cruelty problem but, Manis worries, raises questions of its own about whether the total destruction of persons is consistent with divine love.⁶

He is looking for something better. Not a softer view. A truer one.

The Model: God's Presence as Both Heaven and Hell

The divine presence model begins with a claim about what kind of being God is. God is not simply very powerful, very smart, and very kind. He is, as Rudolf Otto put it, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: a mystery both terrifying and captivating.⁷ Manis draws on Otto's analysis and Marilyn McCord Adams's work to describe the characteristic human response to a close encounter with God. It involves terror, intense awareness of one's own sinfulness, a feeling of being on the edge of destruction, and at the same time a powerful, almost magnetic attraction.⁸

Think of Moses at the burning bush. He hid his face, "afraid to look at God" (Exodus 3:6). Think of Isaiah in the temple: "Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips" (Isaiah 6:5). Think of Peter, falling at Jesus's knees after the miraculous catch: "Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!" (Luke 5:8). In each case the reaction is the same. The person feels terrified, undone, exposed. And yet drawn.⁹

Manis argues that these reactions are not accidental. They are what naturally happens when a finite, fallen creature gets too close to the infinite holiness of God. The gap between the creature and the Creator is not just moral. It is what Manis calls "metaphysical." We are small and contingent. God is self-existent, infinite, the source of all being. The closer we get to that reality, the more overwhelming the experience becomes.¹⁰

Now comes the core of the model. Right now, in this life, God is partially hidden. Theologians call this divine hiddenness. God does not show up in full glory on our street corners. He veils Himself. And Manis says that veil is an act of mercy. It protects us. Were God to reveal Himself fully to creatures in our current condition, the experience would be unbearable.¹¹

Think of God's warning to Moses: "You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live" (Exodus 33:20). Manis takes this seriously. It is not a threat. It is a description of what kind of being God is. To stand in the full force of His presence, unshielded, is something a sinful creature cannot survive without being transformed or destroyed.¹²

At the eschaton (the final consummation), the veil lifts. God brings divine hiddenness to a definitive end. Every creature stands before Him as He truly is. The Greek word for "revelation," apokalupsis (apokalypsis), literally means "an unveiling." And what happens next depends entirely on the state of the creature.¹³

For those who have been transformed by grace, whose hearts have been made ready, the unveiled presence of God is the beatific vision. It is glory. It is home. It is the deepest joy a creature can know.

For those who have refused that transformation, who remain in their rebellion, the same presence is agony. Not because God chooses to inflict pain. But because unholiness in the presence of holiness is anguish. The light that is warmth to the saint is fire to the sinner.¹⁴

The Presence That Gives Life

Manis adds an important layer. God's presence is not just overwhelming. It is life-giving. The further you are from God, the closer you are to nonbeing. The closer you are to God, the more alive you become. This is not the old Neoplatonist idea that creation flows out of God without His choice. Manis is careful to distinguish his view from emanation. God creates freely, by will. But having created, He sustains all things by His presence. Nothing exists apart from Him.¹⁵

The traditional doctrine of divine conservation says the same thing. The world exists at each moment only because God holds it in being. But Manis pushes the idea further. He suggests that God's presence "comes in degrees, so to speak," in the sense that He can be more or less present to created beings.¹⁶ This is an ancient biblical idea. The Shekinah (Shekinah), the dwelling-presence of God, settles in certain places: the tabernacle, the temple, the pillar of cloud. God is always omnipresent, but His manifest presence varies.¹⁷

This means the spectrum runs from near-absence to full presence. At the near-absence end is something close to total nonbeing. At the full-presence end is the state of the world in the eschaton, when God is "all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28). Right now, in earthly life, we sit somewhere in the middle. God is present enough to sustain us, hidden enough to give us room.

And then, at the judgment, the room disappears. The veil is removed. Every soul stands in the full light.

What the Biblical Pattern Shows

Manis is not building in a vacuum. He traces a consistent pattern through Scripture. When people encounter God with unusual intensity, the reactions follow a recognizable shape. There is fear. There is a painful awareness of sin. There is a sense of being on the edge of annihilation. And there is an irresistible attraction.¹⁸

The Exodus narrative is especially rich. God warns Moses that the people must not approach Mount Sinai "lest the Lord break out against them" (Exodus 19:22). Manis reads this not as a psychological threat. It is a description of reality. God is telling Moses about "the kind of being He is, not psychologically, but metaphysically." The people would be destroyed by getting too close. Not by God's anger. By God's nature.¹⁹

This fits the Revelation 6 account, too. At the opening of the sixth seal, people hide in caves. They cry out: "Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne!" (Revelation 6:16). The face of God brings blessing to the righteous. It brings terror to the wicked. Same face. Different hearts.²⁰

Manis is honest that not every biblical encounter fits the pattern neatly. Cain, confronted by God after murdering Abel, is brazen rather than terrified. Some prophets talk with God in later passages without visible signs of terror. Manis does not force the data. He notes several possible explanations. Perhaps the reactions occurred but weren't recorded. Perhaps the encounter involved information from God, not an unveiling of God. Perhaps the person had grown in holiness enough to receive God's presence warmly.²¹

The biblical evidence, Manis admits, is "neither clear enough nor consistent enough" to establish the model all by itself.²² He supplements it with a careful reading of John 14:6 and the doctrine of theosis (théōsis), the transformation of the creature into deeper participation in God's own life. Salvation, on this reading, is not just getting a ticket to a place called heaven. It is being made fit to stand in the presence of the One who is both the Way and the Life.²³

This means the parousia, the second coming of Christ, is not simply a political event or a courtroom session. It is, in the most literal sense, an apokalypsis: an unveiling. It is the moment divine hiddenness ends forever. And what happens next depends entirely on what the soul has become.

What Hell Actually Looks Like on This Model

I want to be clear about what Manis is and is not saying. He is not saying hell is simply a bad feeling. He rejects the idea that heaven and hell are "two different states of mind." Hell, on his account, is an objective reality. It is what happens when a creature who has set its will against God is exposed to God's full presence with no shield and no escape.²⁴

The experience, as Manis describes it, echoes the Fall in reverse. In Eden, Adam and Eve experienced God's presence as home. After sinning, they hid. They felt exposed, ashamed, afraid. They could no longer stand before Him comfortably. The divine presence model says hell is that condition made permanent: guilt, shame, exposure, self-deception, fear, dread. Not because God changed. Because the creature refused to be changed.²⁵

Manis puts it in striking terms. For the blessed, God's presence is aiōnios (aiōnios) life. For the damned, that same presence is aiōnios punishment. He does not hesitate to draw the contrast to its sharpest point. The same God, the same light, the same love, experienced in two opposite ways.²⁶

This is no mere thought experiment. Manis connects it to Talbott's observation that contact with the divine nature should not be confused with union with it. On the day of judgment, everyone is in intimate, inescapable contact with God's presence. Only the righteous experience that contact as the beatific vision. Everyone else experiences it as torment. As Manis writes: "In the eschaton, Love is inescapable. But to those who are damned, Love is hell."²⁷

Manis Is Not Alone

What makes the divine presence model especially compelling is that Manis is not its only builder. Jerry Walls, working from a different angle, arrived at a similar picture. In Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, Walls notes that several biblical passages rule out a total escape from God's presence. The psalmist asks, "Where can I flee from your presence?" (Psalm 139:7). The answer is nowhere. No creature fully escapes the God who sustains its existence. What is possible is a relational separation. Creatures may rebel. They may refuse communion. But they cannot flee the roof.

Walls compares the misery of the damned to a son who hates his father but depends on him and is forced to live under the same roof. The son experiences his father's presence as oppressive. He resents his dependency. The analogy is simple, but it captures the emotional logic of the model. Hell is not a place where God throws you out. It is a place where you cannot leave and will not love.

Walls also notes something that connects directly to this book's account of the lake of fire (see Chapter 26). Fire in the Bible, he observes, is a common image for the presence of God, not His absence. Think of Deuteronomy 4:24 and Hebrews 12:29. The fire is God. The question is how you meet it.

Sharon Baker, working from a very different tradition, arrives at the same conclusion from the other side. I'll engage Baker fully in Chapter 26, but for now it is enough to note the convergence. Baker argues that the "fire and brimstone" (theion, theion, which can also mean "divine") in Revelation 14:10 comes from God, surrounds God, and is God. The lake of fire is not a torture chamber. It is the divine presence experienced by those who have not been made ready for it.

The convergence is striking. An analytic philosopher (Manis), a Wesleyan theologian (Walls), a pastoral theologian (Baker), and the Eastern Orthodox fathers all say the same thing. They use different idioms. They work from different methods. But they land in the same place. Hell is God, met by a heart that will not have Him.

I find that convergence persuasive. When thinkers from different traditions, using different methods, arrive at the same deep insight, it is worth paying attention. And the insight is this: there is no place in the cosmos where God is not. The question is never whether you will meet Him. The question is what you will have become by the time you do.

Manis, Molinism, and a Striking Confession

There is a section of Manis's book that has nothing to do with the divine presence model as such. But it has everything to do with this book's argument. It appears in the chapter "Providence, Freedom, and God's Creation of the Damned." Manis asks how God's foreknowledge relates to people He knows will be lost.²⁸

He examines Molinism, the view that God possesses "middle knowledge" of what every free creature would do in every possible set of circumstances. William Lane Craig is the most prominent Molinist defender of anti-universalism. Craig argues that there may be no possible world God could create in which everyone freely accepts salvation. The people who are lost, Craig suggests, suffer from "transworld damnation." They would reject God in every possible world.²⁹

Manis finds this picture deeply troubling. If Molinism is true, God surveys all the possible worlds. He sees which people would say yes and which would say no. He then creates a world in which some people are lost.

But here is the problem: does the list of who is lost change from one possible world to the next? Suppose person A is saved in one world but lost in another. And person B is saved in the second world but lost in the first. Then no matter which world God creates, He is sacrificing someone. He could have saved A by arranging things differently. He chose to save B instead.³⁰

That is a disturbing picture of divine love. A God who has to pick winners and losers, trading one soul's salvation for another's damnation, does not look like the Father of Jesus Christ.

The only escape, Manis argues, is Craig's transworld damnation thesis. The Molinist anti-universalist must claim that the people who are lost in the actual world are lost in every possible world. Nobody is being sacrificed. Nobody who is lost could have been saved. But Manis finds this conjunction of claims "simply incredible." It requires belief, without good explanation, that no possible world exists where all are saved and heaven is full enough. It also requires that every lost person is lost in every possible world. Both claims must be true. Neither is easy to believe.³¹

And then comes the line that stopped me cold.

But the argument goes further. The philosopher Jason Marsh has pushed the Molinist case for universalism in a direction Manis takes seriously. If God truly has middle knowledge, Marsh argues, then God can compose a world designed to bring every free creature to a willing "yes." He can arrange the right circumstances, the right timing, the right encounters. Manis introduces "transworld sanctity" as the mirror image of Craig's transworld damnation. This is the idea that some possible persons would freely accept God in every possible world. The universalist needs only to claim that God can populate His world with such persons. Manis finds the universalist's resources here surprisingly strong.

Read that again. The man who wrote the most sophisticated philosophical defense of eternal conscious torment in a generation is telling us something surprising. Molinism fits better with universalism than with anti-universalism. He is no universalist himself. He does not draw the conclusion. But he concedes the fit.

That concession matters enormously for this book's argument, and I will return to it in Chapter 23, where the constructive Molinist synthesis takes center stage. For now, I simply want the reader to notice what is happening. One of the sharpest analytic minds in the philosophy of religion says that if God really does possess middle knowledge, the natural outcome is not eternal loss for some. The natural outcome is that God finds a way to save them all.³²

Where I Follow Manis, and Where I Part Company

Let me be direct about what I take and what I leave.

I take the heart of the divine presence model. I believe Manis has identified something real and important. Hell is not a place where God is absent. It is the experience of God's unveiled presence by a soul that has not been made ready for it. The same love that is warmth to the willing heart is fire to the unwilling one. This insight shapes everything this book says about the lake of fire and the final judgment.

I also take his honesty about Molinism. Manis concedes that Molinism and universalism are naturally paired. This book rests on middle knowledge and optimal grace. So his concession gives this book even more reason to hold open the hope that God's relentless pursuit may finally win all. I don't claim it will. But I notice that even Manis, who doesn't want it to be true, can see why it might be.

Here is where I part company. Manis holds that the suffering of the damned is eternal. He defends a form of eternal conscious torment, refined and dignified by the divine presence model but ECT nonetheless. He says the damned experience "a state of eternal conscious suffering, to which the damned are consigned against their wills on the Day of Judgment."³³

I do not believe that. I believe the fire is real. I believe the presence of God really does burn away what is unholy. But I believe the fire is purifying, not punitive in the sense of endless torment. For those who yield, the fire saves. For those who finally refuse, I hold that the purifying presence at last consumes what remains. That is conditional immortality: the soul that absolutely and finally refuses God's love has nothing left in it that God's presence can sustain. It is not tortured forever. It ceases to exist. Not because God hates it, but because it has refused the only source of life there is.³⁴

Interestingly, Manis himself opens a small door toward this view. He does not walk through it. But when engaging the annihilationist position, he makes a telling concession. If the corruption of the soul involves a shrinking participation in God's life, he reasons, then perhaps the end point of that corruption is the total destruction of the soul's capacities. He credits Paul Griffiths with a similar idea. And on his own framework, the logic runs naturally in that direction. If God's presence sustains all existence, then a soul that has completely cut itself off from communion with God has cut itself off from the source of its own being.

And I hold open the hope, with genuine openness, that universal restoration may be true. If God's love really is the fire, and if the fire really does purify, then perhaps the fire eventually wins everyone. Perhaps no creature can finally resist the full, patient, relentless presence of perfect love. I don't know. I hold this as a hope, not a doctrine. The next few chapters will say more about why I hold the question open.

Why This Matters for the Offer

Here is the payoff for everything this book has been building. If Manis is right that hell is God's presence experienced by the unwilling, then the difference between heaven and hell comes down to one thing: the will's response. A "yes" to God makes the fire glory. A "no" makes it agony.

And that is exactly what the offer is working on.

The God of this book meets every dying person at the threshold (Chapter 11). He pursues every soul through the conscious intermediate state (Chapter 8). And He stands before every remaining person at the final judgment (Chapter 27), in the full blaze of His unveiled glory, with nothing hidden and nothing held back. At that moment, the veil lifts completely. Every soul sees God as He really is. The life review has already revealed the soul to itself (see Chapter 13). Now God reveals Himself. And the soul's response to that revelation determines its experience of the fire.

The threefold offer, from deathbed to Hades to the Great White Throne, is God's patient, staged attempt to turn unwilling hearts into willing ones before that final unveiling. Every encounter along the way prepares the soul for the last one. Every taste of the staged approach, every moment in the "dark passage" of Hades, every whisper of the pursuing love carries the same message: Let me change your heart before the veil lifts. I want the fire to feel like home.

Think about what this means. If the difference between heaven and hell is not location but the heart's response to God, then God's entire strategy makes sense as a single campaign. From the deathbed encounter through Hades to the judgment, He is doing one thing. He is not trying to get you to the right place. He is trying to get you to say "yes" to the love that will be everywhere.

There is no place in God's creation where His love does not reach. There is no corner of the afterlife where He is absent. The God who meets the dying at the threshold also follows the soul into Hades. He also stands at the Great White Throne with nail-scarred hands. He is the same God whose presence is the fire. And the fire does not change. It is always love. The only question is whether the soul it meets has been made willing to receive it.

That is why the offer matters so much. That is why God gives so many chances. That is why He does not give up at the grave or stop at the gates of Hades. Because the fire is coming for everyone, and God wants every soul to meet it as warmth, not as destruction. He wants them all home.

Whether He gets them all, I cannot say. Manis, who gave us the model, says no. Talbott, whose argument we met in the previous chapter, says yes. I stand between them, holding the hope, honoring the freedom, and trusting the love. The chapters ahead will explain why.³⁵

But let me close by saying this. The divine presence model changes the way you think about God's pursuit of the dying and the dead. If hell is not a torture chamber God built, but the experience of His own love by hearts that refuse it, then the whole strategy of the offer makes sense. He is not trying to rescue people from a dungeon. He is trying to prepare their hearts for the fire that is already everywhere. The fire that is who He is.

Every deathbed encounter, every whisper in Hades, every moment of the staged approach is preparation for one thing: the moment when the veil lifts. God wants each soul to greet that moment with joy, not anguish. He wants the fire to feel like home.

That is, I think, what love does.