Chapter 26
What the fire actually is—and why it changes everything
Picture a man standing before a furnace. He has lived a life full of cruelty. He expects anger. He expects punishment. He braces himself for the wrath he is sure he deserves. Then he steps closer to the flame, and he realizes something that shatters every assumption he has ever held about God.
The fire is God.
It does not hate him. It loves him. And the love is worse than any punishment he ever imagined, because it shows him, in a single blinding instant, who he really is.
That image comes from Sharon Baker, and it sits at the heart of this chapter.1 In the last chapter we sorted the biblical terms: Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and the lake of fire. We saw that they are not all the same place, and that the lake of fire is the final reality that awaits beyond the judgment (Ch. 25). Now the question becomes sharper: what is that fire? The traditional picture says it is a torture chamber, built by God for His enemies, where the lost suffer forever in conscious agony. That is the image that fills most imaginations when the word hell is spoken.
This chapter says the tradition has it wrong. Not about the fire. About what the fire is. The lake of fire is not a dungeon far from God. It is God Himself, fully revealed. The fire is His presence. The fire is His love. And how you experience it depends entirely on the condition of your heart.
The idea that the fire of judgment is really the fire of God’s own presence comes from three different traditions, each arriving at the same conclusion by its own path. I want to let each one speak before we gather them together.
In Chapter 21, we spent serious time with the philosopher R. Zachary Manis. His model of hell is striking in its simplicity. Heaven and hell are not two separate places. They are two experiences of one reality: the full, unshielded presence of God.2 Right now, Manis argues, a kind of veil stands between us and the full intensity of God’s holiness. At the end, that veil is removed. For the redeemed, the unveiled presence is glory and joy beyond words. For the unredeemed, the same presence is agony, because unholiness in the presence of holiness is anguish.3 Hell, on this reading, is not separation from God. It is God, met by a soul not ready to receive Him.
This matters for everything that follows. If the fire is God’s presence, then the lake of fire is not a place God sends people away from Himself. It is the place where they stand before Him, fully exposed. That single insight reshapes the whole doctrine.
Sharon Baker develops this same insight at the popular level in her book Razing Hell, and she does it through a powerful story. She asks us to picture a man named Otto. Otto is a tyrant. He has launched wars. He has caused the deaths of thousands. He comes to the judgment expecting rage and punishment.4
Instead, he walks into fire. And the fire is God.
Notice what Baker is doing. She is not softening the judgment. Otto suffers. His teeth gnash. His heart breaks with remorse as he sees every victim, feels every wound he caused.6 But the suffering is not God’s cruelty. It is God’s love, doing what love does: stripping away the lies, the self-deception, and the evil until only what is real remains.
Then comes the question the whole doctrine hangs on: what happens next? Baker gives two possible endings. In one, the purifying fire burns away the evil and Otto, now clean, freely accepts God’s offer of forgiveness and enters life.7 In the other, the fire burns away the evil and there is nothing of Otto left. He has been so consumed by his own wickedness that once it is gone, he is gone too. That is not God hatefully destroying him. That is the natural result of a life that chose evil all the way down.8
Baker also makes a fascinating linguistic move. The Greek word for “brimstone” in Revelation’s lake-of-fire passages is theion (θει̃ον). That word is spelled the same as the Greek adjective meaning “divine.”9 The ancients used sulfur for purification and temple dedication. They thought of it as sacred fire, fire from God. The brimstone in the lake of fire, Baker suggests, is not just hot. It is divine. It comes from God, surrounds God, and is God.10
Long before Manis wrote his philosophy or Baker told her story, the Eastern Orthodox tradition was saying the same thing in its own voice. The seventh-century monk Isaac the Syrian put it this way: those in Gehenna are “scourged by the scourge of love.”12 The fire is not an instrument of hatred. It is love itself, and it burns only because the soul receiving it has chosen to resist it.
Vladimir Lossky, one of the great Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, developed the idea further. God’s love, Lossky wrote, becomes “an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves.”13 Heaven and hell, in this tradition, are not two places. They are two ways of experiencing the same God. The sun that warms the flower also scorches the corpse. The difference is not in the sun. It is in what receives the light.
The Greek-American theologian Alexandre Kalomiros pulled this tradition together in a landmark essay called “The River of Fire.” His central claim is bold: God’s justice is not retributive punishment. It is tsedaka (×××××), the saving, setting-right justice of the Hebrew prophets.14 The “river of fire” that flows from God’s throne in Daniel 7:10 is the river of God’s own glory, the same love that is paradise for the saints and fire for those who reject it.15 (Appendix G develops this Eastern tradition at length; here I draw on it as one stream in a wider river.)16
Three streams, then. The philosopher says heaven and hell are two experiences of one divine presence. The popular theologian says the fire is God and it purifies whatever it touches. The Eastern fathers say the fire is God’s love, and the heart that resists love is the heart that burns. All three arrive at the same place.
Now let us see if Scripture agrees.
The Bible does not speak about fire with one voice. But when you line up its fire images, a pattern appears. The fire associated with God is almost never raw destruction for its own sake. It is the fire of presence, the fire of purification, and the fire of testing. What is pure survives it. What is not pure is consumed by it.
Start at the burning bush. Moses sees a fire that burns but does not destroy (Exod. 3:2–6). The bush is aflame, yet it stands. God speaks from within the fire. The first fire in the Bible that is directly tied to God’s presence is a fire that does not consume what it touches.17
Then Deuteronomy calls God Himself “a consuming fire” (Deut. 4:24). The letter to the Hebrews picks up the same phrase (Heb. 12:29). Notice the claim: the fire does not come from God, as if He lit a match and threw it. God is the fire. The consuming fire is not a tool in God’s hand. It is God’s own nature.18
The prophet Malachi gives the image its sharpest edge. God is “like a refiner’s fire” (Mal. 3:2–3). A refiner does not use fire to destroy metal. He uses it to purify metal, to burn away the dross and leave the gold. The image is precise: God’s fire is aimed at removing impurity, not at destroying the thing it touches.19
Isaiah asks the haunting question: “Who among us can dwell with the consuming fire?” (Isa. 33:14–15). His answer is surprising. It is not the fireproof. It is the righteous. The one who walks in integrity can dwell with the fire because the fire has nothing in him to burn.20
Then there is the fiery furnace in Daniel 3. Three men are thrown into the fire. The soldiers who threw them in are killed by the heat. But the three walk freely inside the furnace, and a fourth figure walks with them. The fire destroyed those who stood outside the presence. Those who stood inside it, with the Son, were unharmed.21
Paul applies this directly. In 1 Corinthians 3:12–15, he writes that each person’s work will be tested by fire. The fire will reveal what kind of work it is. If the work survives, the builder receives a reward. If it burns up, the builder suffers loss—“yet so as through fire.”22 The builder himself is saved, but only after passing through the purifying fire. Paul is describing the same reality: the divine fire does not aim to destroy the person. It aims to burn away what is false and leave what is real.
Finally, Revelation itself. The imagery of Revelation 14:10 places the torment of the wicked “in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.” That detail is easy to miss, but it is crucial. The torment is not far from God. It is before God. And in Revelation 20:14–15, Death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire, and this is called “the second death.” The fire puts death to death.23 If death is destroyed, what is left? Life.
One passage deserves special attention here because it is often used to prove that hell means separation from God. Paul writes that the wicked “will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thess. 1:9, ESV). On a first reading, that sounds like the opposite of everything I have just argued. If hell is away from God’s presence, then the divine-presence model falls apart.
But the Greek tells a different story. The key phrase is apo prosōpou tou kyriou (απὸ προσω′που του̃ κυρι′ου). The preposition apo can mean “away from,” but it can also mean “from,” in the sense of “coming from” or “proceeding from.”24 A number of scholars read the phrase as “destruction that comes from the presence of the Lord,” not destruction away from it. On this reading, the verse says the same thing the divine-presence model says: the Lord’s unveiled presence is itself the source of the ruin.25
The context supports this reading. Isaiah 2:10, 19, and 21 use similar language: people hide “from the terror of the Lord and from the splendor of his majesty.” The terror is not distance from God. It is the overwhelming force of God’s nearness. Paul, trained in the Hebrew prophets, likely draws on this same image.26 I do not claim the “from-the-presence” reading is the only possible one. But it is at least as strong as the traditional “away-from” reading, and it fits the pattern we have seen in every other biblical fire passage.
Let me draw the threads together and state plainly where I land.
Notice what this view preserves. It preserves the seriousness of judgment. The fire is real. The suffering is real. No one “gets away with it.” As Baker says of Otto, “He doesn’t get away with murder; he doesn’t get to take a walk without suffering any consequences. He burns in God’s eternal fire.”28
It also preserves human freedom (Ch. 22). Baker asks what happens if, after the purifying fire has done its work, Otto still refuses God. She answers: “If God truly respects Otto’s freedom to say no, God will not force reconciliation.”29 God respects the final no, even when it breaks His heart. On the CI view, the one who refuses is not kept alive to suffer forever. He simply ceases to be.
And it preserves the character of God. The fire is not a machine of vengeance. It is the natural result of a holy God being fully present to a creature. Baker captures this perfectly: God’s love, “in the sheer extravagance of its force, acts as judgment against the total excessiveness of Otto’s sin.”30 The judgment is the love. They are not opposed. They are the same fire.
The difference matters. Traditional purgatory is a station on the way to a destination already decided. The purifying presence of God is the destination itself, where the decision is still live. One is a waiting room; the other is the throne room.
If you have been reading in order, you may have already sensed a connection. In Chapter 13, we explored the life review that appears in so many near-death accounts. The dying person, in the presence of an overwhelming love, sees their whole life as it truly was. They feel the pain they caused, seen from the other side. And that seeing is itself a kind of cleansing. The lies fall away. The self-deception burns off. What is left is the truth.
That is the same fire, in its gentlest first form.
The life review at the threshold of death is the opening note of a melody that reaches its full volume in the lake of fire. At the deathbed, the fire whispers. In Hades, it presses closer. At the judgment, it blazes in full.32 But it is always the same fire, and it always does the same thing: it shows you who you really are, in the light of a love that will not look away.
If all of this is true, then the doctrine of hell is not what most people think it is. It is not the story of a God who loses patience and throws people into a dungeon. It is the story of a God who never stops loving, whose love is so intense that standing in it burns away every falsehood. And the question is not “Will God send me to the fire?” The question is “What will the fire find when it meets me?”
For the willing heart, the fire is warmth. It is coming home.
For the unwilling heart, the fire is agony. Not because God wants it to be, but because love refused is the most painful thing in the universe.
And there is no corner of the afterlife where God is absent. There is no place a soul can go where the love that is also the fire does not reach. Baker sums it up: a God “who doesn’t close the door on grace after closing the door on time, whose entire purpose centers around rescuing and redeeming a sin-enslaved world.”33
That is the reframing. Hell is not God’s absence. It is God’s presence, experienced by a heart that will not have Him. And even then, the fire does not stop offering what it offers: come home. Be clean. Be loved.
Whether every soul finally says yes is a question I carry as a hope and not as a certainty (Ch. 24; Ch. 28). But what I do not doubt is this: the fire reaches everywhere. The love reaches everyone. And the last word of the fire is not rage. It is invitation.
In the next chapter, we come to the final stage: the Great White Throne, where the veil lifts all the way and every remaining soul stands in the full blaze of the presence we have been describing. That is the last opportunity. And when it ends, the offer ends. That is Chapter 27.34
↑ 1. Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), ch. 9. The Otto narrative is Baker’s central literary device for the theology of judgment; see the full sequence beginning at her chapter on “The Fire, the Wicked, and the Redeemed.”
↑ 2. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), esp. chaps. 1–3. The core thesis appears at p. 249: heaven and hell are “two radically different ways that different creatures will experience the same reality of divine omnipresence once the barrier of divine hiddenness is finally and fully removed.” Manis holds a form of eternal conscious torment; the present chapter embraces his divine-presence insight while parting with his eternal-torment conclusion.
↑ 3. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, chaps. 2–3 (pp. 249–250). Manis argues that suffering in hell is not the result of any divine act that aims to inflict it; rather, it is “the metaphysically inevitable concomitant of the state of affairs of being an unrepentant sinner in the unshielded presence of a holy God” (p. 250). God does not decree that the damned suffer; He simply removes the veil of divine hiddenness, and unholiness in the presence of holiness is anguish.
↑ 4. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 9. Otto is Baker’s fictional composite—an international leader “who has launched preemptive wars and terrorized nations with his arrogant dominance.”
↑ 5. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 9 (p. 116 in Baker’s numbering).
↑ 6. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 9. Baker describes Otto seeing each victim, placing his hand on their hearts, and feeling all the pain he has caused. “With gnashing teeth and uncontrollable weeping, his heart breaks, and he cries out in utter remorse.”
↑ 7. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 9. “Then Otto hears God say, ‘I forgive you. Will you be reconciled to me and to those you have wronged?’”
↑ 8. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 10. Baker presents this as one of two views of the lake of fire: if Otto “has no good at all in him” after purification, “the fire would burn all of him. It would completely destroy him. There would be nothing left of him, which means that he would be annihilated.”
↑ 9. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 10 (pp. 143–144 in Baker’s numbering). The Greek noun theion (sulfur, brimstone) appears in Rev. 19:20; 20:10; 21:8.
↑ 10. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 10. Baker writes that the ancients “believed that the purity of the fire came from God, just as brimstone is a fire from heaven.” Hence the lake of fire is “a lake of divine purification, a lake of cleansing so that the purified object (in our case, a person) can be dedicated and restored to God.”
↑ 11. On the homonymous relationship between theion (sulfur) and theion (divine), see also Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 17–22; and Liddell-Scott-Jones, Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “θει̃ον.”
↑ 12. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, Homily 28 (Second Part). The full line: “Those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love.” Manis cites the same Eastern tradition as independent support for the divine-presence model, quoting Andrew Louth: “The ultimate state of human beings, after the final judgment, is to behold the glory of God’s love; for those whose inmost desire is longing for God, this will be ultimate fulfillment, ultimate bliss, but for those whose inmost desire is opposition to God … their inmost longing will be eternally frustrated; they will experience eternal torment” (Manis, Sinners, p. 250, citing Andrew Louth, “Eastern Orthodox Eschatology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 242).
↑ 13. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: James Clarke, 1957), ch. 12 (p. 234 in standard editions). The divine love “will be an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves.” Hronich traces the same trajectory in Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 3, citing Lossky at p. 234.
↑ 14. Alexandre Kalomiros, “The River of Fire” (1980), sections I–IV. Kalomiros traces the distortion of God’s justice from saving tsedaka to retributive punishment as a result of Western juridical theology, beginning with Anselm.
↑ 15. Kalomiros, “River of Fire,” sections V–VII. The river of fire in Dan. 7:10 (“A stream of fire issued and came out from before him”) is interpreted as the outpouring of God’s own glory. See also the St. Anthony text in the Philokalia, ch. 150: God loves all equally; the difference is in the receiver.
↑ 16. See Appendix G for the full development of the Eastern Orthodox tradition on hell as God’s love.
↑ 17. Exod. 3:2–6. The burning bush is not consumed because the fire is God’s presence, and God does not destroy what He indwells. The image becomes a template for every divine-fire passage that follows. Manis treats the burning bush as the first and paradigmatic instance of the Shekinah—the rabbinic term for God’s presence “settling” or “dwelling” in a specific place—alongside the pillar of cloud/fire (Exod. 13:21–22) and the glory filling Solomon’s temple (2 Chron. 7:1–3): all are instances in which God’s presence is “located or manifested to a degree much greater than other places and times” (Manis, Sinners, p. 251, n. 19).
↑ 18. Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29. The “consuming fire” in both passages is a predicate of God, not an attribute of a place. See Terence E. Fretheim, Exodus, Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 53–55. Manis develops the same point in his appendix (“Is the Divine Presence Model Biblical?”): the claim that God is a consuming fire “is found in both the Old and New Testaments,” and on the divine-presence model the fire and the “living water” (John 4:14; 7:37–39) are two metaphors for the same reality, experienced differently by those in communion with Christ and those in disunion with him (Manis, Sinners, pp. 389–390).
↑ 19. Mal. 3:2–3. The refiner sits “as a refiner and purifier of silver” (ESV). The verb is tsaraph (××××), “to smelt, refine.” The purpose is purification, not destruction. See Pieter A. Verhoef, The Books of Haggai and Malachi, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 289–291.
↑ 20. Isa. 33:14–15 (ESV): “The sinners in Zion are afraid; trembling has seized the godless: ‘Who among us can dwell with the consuming fire?’” The answer given is “He who walks righteously and speaks uprightly.” Manis quotes this passage (from the NASB) as part of a broader catena that includes Jer. 4:4 and Mal. 4:1–2 and reads the whole sequence as confirmation of the divine-presence model: “For those accustomed to thinking of divine wrath in volitional terms, these passages are read as the Lord’s issuing threats”—but on the divine-presence reading they are warnings about the metaphysical nature of God’s holiness, not threats of a choice God will make (Manis, Sinners, pp. 352–353).
↑ 21. Dan. 3:19–27. The soldiers who cast Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the furnace “were killed by the flame of the fire” (v. 22), while the three walked unharmed within, accompanied by a fourth who appeared “like a son of the gods” (v. 25). The same pattern appears in Exod. 19:12–24, where God warns Moses that the people must not approach Mount Sinai “lest the Lord break out against them.” Manis reads this passage not as a divine threat but as a warning about “the kind of being He is—not psychologically, but metaphysically. He is warning (not threatening) that the people will be destroyed if they draw too close to God—not by God’s choice, but merely in virtue of the kind of creatures they (presently) are, and the kind of being God is” (Manis, Sinners, p. 346).
↑ 22. 1 Cor. 3:12–15 (ESV). The testing is by fire; the “fire will test what sort of work each one has done” (v. 13). The person “will be saved, but only as through fire” (v. 15). See Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 314–320. Walls notes that this passage “was commented on perhaps more extensively than any other during the formative period in which the doctrine of purgatory was formulated and given its classic shape”: it was taken to describe persons who love Christ but whose loves “may not always be properly ordered,” and who therefore need to “pass through purgatorial fire to cleanse them and reorder their loves” (Walls, Purgatory, ch. 1). On this book’s reading, the passage points to something broader: any soul may pass through the divine fire and be saved, not only those whose foundation is already Christ.
↑ 23. Rev. 14:10; 20:9, 14–15. Revelation 14:10 specifies that the torment occurs “in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb” (ESV). Revelation 20:14 calls the lake of fire “the second death.” If death itself is destroyed in the fire (Rev. 20:14), then the fire’s ultimate work is the abolition of death, not its perpetuation. Manis develops this reading at length in his appendix: “On the reading I am suggesting, the meaning of this claim is that death and Hades will be destroyed, and more specifically, destroyed by the presence of God. … Here the presence of God is depicted as a lake of fire. Significantly, consignment to it is said to be the ‘second death’—that is, the death of death itself. If death is a separation, the second death is the end of this separation” (Manis, Sinners, pp. 384–385). Cf. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 187: “the lake of fire will consume and thus destroy the death in us, provided that we permit it to do so. Being cast into the lake of fire is therefore called ‘the second death’ because it represents the death of death.”
↑ 24. BDAG, s.v. “απο′,” definition 5: “marker of cause or reason”; also definition 1b: “from” as indicating source or origin. The prepositional phrase apo prosōpou echoes the Septuagint of Isa. 2:10, 19, 21, where the terror proceeds from the Lord’s face.
↑ 25. For the “from-the-presence” reading (destruction proceeding from God’s presence), see Gordon D. Fee, The First and Second Letters to the Thessalonians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 285–287; also Charles A. Wanamaker, The Epistles to the Thessalonians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 227–228.
↑ 26. Isa. 2:10, 19, 21 (ESV). The people hide in caves “from before the terror of the Lord, and from the splendor of his majesty.” The destruction is clearly sourced in God’s presence, not God’s absence. Manis notes the same pattern in Rev. 6:16, where those still alive after the sixth seal cry out to the mountains, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!” On the divine-presence model, “these references to the face of God as experiences of both blessing and judgment are readily explained; in fact, they are central to the model’s core claim” (Manis, Sinners, p. 355).
↑ 27. For the author’s full statement of his working view on the three Christian positions (CI, UR, ECT), see Chapter 24. Manis himself, though he holds ECT, explores a “hybrid annihilationist model” as a possible development of the divine-presence model: “one of the natural consequences of sin is that full exposure to the divine presence subsequently results in death for human beings” (Manis, Sinners, p. 382). He also notes that on the corruption argument for annihilationism, persistence in sin may destroy the very capacities essential to personhood, leaving “something nonhuman, or perhaps subhuman” (p. 170)—a point this book’s CI reading takes seriously. Cf. Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 5, who cites Manis (pp. 170, 176, 178) in his critique of CI’s philosophical coherence.
↑ 28. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 9 (p. 117 in Baker’s numbering).
↑ 29. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 10 (p. 142 in Baker’s numbering).
↑ 30. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 9 (p. 117 in Baker’s numbering).
↑ 31. For the full engagement with purgatory and the Catholic tradition, see Chapter 32. The key distinction: traditional purgatory is for the already saved; the purifying-fire model described here applies to every soul, regardless of prior faith status, and the will’s response at the encounter determines the outcome. Walls traces the history: the ironic “founders” of purgatorial theology were the Greek fathers Clement of Alexandria and Origen, who “made a fundamental contribution to the doctrine of purgatory by interpreting those biblical passages in which God is described as a fire in terms of purification rather than wrath” (Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], ch. 1). The fire-as-purification tradition thus predates the later Latin satisfaction model. Ratzinger himself moved toward a more personal reading: the fire of purgatory is “the transforming power of the Lord himself, whose burning flame cuts free our closed-off heart, melting it, and pouring it into a new mold to make it fit for the living organism of his body” (cited in Walls, Purgatory, ch. 3). This book’s model is closer to Ratzinger’s personal-encounter reading than to the Thomistic satisfaction model, though it extends the encounter to all souls and leaves the outcome to the will.
↑ 32. For the life review and its purifying dynamics, see Chapter 13. For the threefold structure of the offer (deathbed, Hades, judgment) and the concept of a sequenced divine approach, see Chapter 23. Cf. Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965): “The intensively experienced proximity of God is full of suffering and danger. It brings with it torment of soul … To see God face to face is to look into God’s eyes of fire. This shakes a man’s whole existence, leading it through indescribable suffering” (see Ch. 11 for the full treatment of Boros).
↑ 33. Baker, Razing Hell, ch. 10 (p. 146 in Baker’s numbering).
↑ 34. The Great White Throne judgment as the hard deadline and the last opportunity is the subject of Chapter 27. For the aiōnios question and the meaning of the “second death,” see also that chapter and Appendix C.