Chapter 12

Hell as the Presence of God

The Divine-Presence Model and the Fire That Heals

The Question on the Table

The same sun that warms a healthy eye blinds a wounded one. The same embrace that comforts a friend is suffocating to someone who hates you. What if hell works like that?

I want to press a question that changes everything about how we picture the afterlife. We have spent the last several chapters reasoning about punishment, proportionality, and the problem of hell. In Chapter 11, we examined the "doors locked from the inside" picture, where the damned choose to stay in hell and God simply lets them have their way. That picture has real strengths. But it also has a gap. It makes hell sound like a place God has vacated, a dim room where the miserable huddle by choice, left alone. Where is God in that picture? Psalm 139 says there is nowhere to flee from His presence. "If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there" (Psalm 139:8). If God is truly everywhere, then hell cannot be where He is absent. So what is it?

The philosopher R. Zachary Manis asks this question with precision. He calls his answer the divine-presence model of hell.¹ (The title of his book, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, deliberately inverts Jonathan Edwards's famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.") Manis is not a universalist. He builds his model as a defense of the traditional idea that some may be lost forever. But the model he builds does something unexpected. It shows that the fire of hell is not foreign to God's love. It is God's love, experienced as torment by those who refuse it. And once we see that, the path to a different ending opens up.

Here is the thesis I want to defend: What if heaven and hell are not two places but two ways of experiencing one Presence? On the divine-presence model, the "fire" of judgment is God's own unveiled love. To the reconciled it is bliss. To the rebel it is agony, because he refuses the love that surrounds him. And the fire that torments is the very fire that, in the end, heals.

Why It Matters

Most discussions of hell assume a geography. Heaven is "up there." Hell is "down there." God is in one; the devil presides over the other. This spatial picture is so familiar that we forget it is a picture. And it carries a weight of theology with it. If hell is a region apart from God, then at some point God stopped caring about the people in it. He handed them over to some other force. His love reached a limit, and He walked away.

I do not think that picture survives serious thought about God's character, as we examined in Chapter 3. A God who is love (1 John 4:8) does not stop loving. A God who is omnipresent does not vacate a region. A God who desires all to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4) does not abandon the project. The question is not whether God is present in hell. The question is what His presence means for those who refuse it.

This matters for the larger hope in a direct way. If hell is a place where God is absent, then there is no mechanism for healing. The rebel sits in the dark, alone, forever. Nothing reaches him. But if hell is the experience of God's presence by a soul that is not ready for it, then the situation looks very different. The fire is not a wall between the sinner and God. It is God, getting closer. And a God who never stops getting closer is a God who never stops working on the rebel's heart.

This is not an easy comfort. I want to be clear about that from the start. The divine-presence model does not make hell gentler. It makes hell more terrible than any other model, because to stand in the presence of perfect Love while hating it is the worst torment imaginable. But it also makes hell purposive. The same fire that causes the torment is the fire that can, in time, do its healing work. That "in time" is where the hope lives, and where the hard question of freedom enters (a question I will face squarely in Chapter 17).

The Argument

1. One Presence, Two Experiences

The core claim of the divine-presence model is surprisingly simple. Manis puts it this way: "It is the very being of God that the wicked experience as hell."² Heaven and hell are not two destinations to which the saved and the damned are sent. They are two ways of experiencing the same reality: the full, unveiled, unshielded presence of God.

The saved experience that presence as joy beyond imagining, because they have been transformed by grace to receive God's love. The damned experience the very same presence as agony, not because God is doing anything different to them, but because of what they are. Their unhealed, rebellious nature makes God's love unbearable.

This idea is not new. It runs deep in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, where it has been held for centuries. The influential theologian Vladimir Lossky captured it with striking clarity: "The love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves."⁴ Andrew Louth, writing in the Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, described the tradition this way: for those whose deepest desire is longing for God, the full disclosure of His glory will be the ultimate joy; but for those whose deepest desire is opposition to God, that same glory will mean eternal torment, because their deepest longing will be forever frustrated.⁵

Think of it this way. Imagine a man who has spent decades nursing a grudge against his father. He has built his whole identity around resentment. Now imagine that he is forced to live in the same house with that father, who loves him with a patient, unbreakable, undemanding love. The father does nothing hostile. He simply is there, being who he is, loving his son. And the son, who has made hatred his home, finds that presence unbearable. Not because the father is cruel but because the love exposes the lie the son has been living.

That is hell on the divine-presence model. Not a torture chamber. Not a dark pit. The unveiled presence of a God who is perfect Love, experienced as torment by a soul too broken to receive it.

2. God as Consuming Fire

This model is not built from philosophical speculation alone. It rises from a reading of Scripture that takes the fire imagery seriously. The Bible describes God Himself as a fire. "Our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:29; cf. Deuteronomy 4:24). This is not a metaphor for something else. It is the most direct statement Scripture can make about what it is like to encounter the living God.

Fire in the Bible carries three meanings, and all three matter here. Robin Parry has traced them with care in a section on the divine-presence model.⁶ First, fire is a symbol of the divine presence: God appears as flame in the burning bush (Exodus 3), atop Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:18), as a pillar guiding Israel (Exodus 14:24), and as tongues at Pentecost (Acts 2:3). Second, fire is a symbol of divine punishment: the fire that destroyed Sodom (Genesis 19:24), the fire that consumed Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10:1-2), and all those "hell as fire" texts. Third, fire is a symbol of purification: trials that burn away what is impure and leave only the pure (1 Peter 4:12; 1 Corinthians 3:13-15).⁷

The prophet Malachi holds all three meanings in a single passage. The coming day of the Lord will be "a burning oven" to the arrogant (Malachi 4:1). But the very same day brings "the sun of righteousness with healing in its wings" to those who fear God's name (Malachi 4:2). One day. One coming. Two experiences. The proud are burned; the humble are healed. And the source of both the burning and the healing is the same: the Lord Himself.

Parry draws a powerful conclusion from this triple meaning. "What if we take all of these pictures as images of the way that humans encounter the holy presence of God? God's presence is a holy flame, pure and beautiful, but the human experience with that presence will vary depending on the state that one is in when one encounters it."⁸ If one is "in Adam," sold in slavery to sin, God's presence can be experienced as burning wrath, as a consuming fire. But if one is "in Christ," that same presence is experienced as warmth, glory, and the deepest joy a human being can know.⁹

Gerry Beauchemin traces this fire-as-presence pattern across the whole Bible with impressive range. Fire is not a random symbol that Scripture attaches to destruction. It is consistently linked to God's own being: the pillar of fire guiding Israel, the lamps before the throne, the eyes of the risen Christ described as "a flame of fire" (Revelation 1:14). The Holy Spirit descended in tongues of fire at Pentecost. In every case, the fire is an element of divine life. Beauchemin draws a conclusion that sharpens the point we are building: "Fire was an element of life, of purification, of transformation and never of preservation alive for purposes of anguish. To them, fire was the sign of God's being, not His wrath."³⁸ That last phrase is worth pausing over. If fire is the sign of God's being, not merely His anger, then the fire of judgment is not a weapon God picks up and puts down. It is what God is, always, whether the creature welcomes it or flees.

George Hurd, in Extermination or Restoration?, presses the same pattern to its logical conclusion. The prophet Malachi, Hurd argues, gives us the true nature and intent of God's fire: it is a refiner's fire, not an incinerator's. A refiner's fire does not consume what is subjected to it; it consumes only the dross in order to purify what is precious. And it has an end in view: not annihilation, not perpetual torment, but restoration. The imagery of God as the Consuming, Refining Fire runs from Israel's deliverance out of the "iron furnace" of Egypt (Deuteronomy 4:20; 1 Kings 8:51) all the way to the eschatological furnace of fire in Matthew 13.³⁹ What never changes is God's purpose. The fire purifies the heart, because only the pure in heart can see God (Matthew 5:8; Hebrews 12:14).

3. The Brimstone That Is Divine

There is a detail in Revelation that most readers skip past. It concerns the word "brimstone." The lake of fire, we are told, burns with "fire and brimstone" (Revelation 19:20; 20:10; 21:8). In English, "brimstone" simply means sulfur, and the image sounds purely destructive. But the Greek word is theion.¹⁰

Sharon Baker noticed something that changes the picture. The Greek noun theion (sulfur, brimstone) is spelled identically to the Greek adjective meaning "divine."¹¹ The ancient Greeks used sulfur to purify temples and dedicate offerings to the gods. They burned it as a purifying incense. They believed the purity of the fire came from the divine realm. Baker argues that a first-century reader, encountering a "lake of fire and theion," would not picture a random torture pit. They would picture a lake of divine fire, a fire from heaven, a fire that purifies and cleanses whatever is thrown into it.¹²

Baker connects this to the broader fire-as-presence theme: "The fire in the lake actually comes from God, the fire that surrounds God, the fire that is God's very presence."¹³ This is not a proof, of course. Wordplay is suggestive, not definitive. But it fits the pattern we have been tracing. Fire in the Bible is not a random element. It is consistently linked to God's own being. And when we read that sinners are cast into the fire, the biblical pattern suggests they are being cast into the presence of God Himself.

Beauchemin strengthens Baker's case with an observation about the word "torment" itself. The Greek word in Revelation for the experience in the lake of fire is basanizo. It originally meant "to test with a touchstone." Touchstones were basalt stones used by refiners to determine the purity of gold. The metal was rubbed against the stone, and the color of the mark revealed whether the gold was genuine. In other words, the very word the Bible uses for the suffering of the lake of fire carries the meaning of testing for purity, not pointless infliction. Beauchemin quotes Charles Pridgeon of the Pittsburgh Bible Institute: "The meaning and usage harmonizes with the idea of divine purification and the torment which is the test to find whether there has been any change in the sufferer."⁴⁰

Hurd, in Extermination or Restoration?, takes this refiner's imagery one step further. The word translated "lake" in our Bibles is the Greek limne, which can mean a pool, a pond, or even a receptacle. In the context of fire and sulfur, Hurd argues, the image that would have registered with ancient readers was not a vast burning lake. It was the refiner's crucible, the small vessel in which gold was melted and purified. From antiquity, sulfur was added to impure gold once it reached the molten state. The impurities and baser metals bonded with the sulfur, rising to the surface as dross to be skimmed away, leaving the pure gold behind.⁴¹ The "lake of fire and sulfur," on this reading, is not a torture pit. It is the divine crucible. And crucibles exist for one purpose: purification.

Revelation 14:10 makes this connection explicit. The wicked are "tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb." Not away from God. In God's presence. The torment does not happen because God leaves. It happens because God shows up.¹⁴

4. Destruction from the Presence

A key text for the divine-presence model is 2 Thessalonians 1:9. Many English translations render it as if the wicked are sent away from God: "shut out from the presence of the Lord" (NIV) or "exclusion from the presence of the Lord" (RSV). These translations suggest exile, separation, banishment. But Thomas Talbott has shown that these are interpretive paraphrases, not translations.¹⁵

The Greek preposition is apo (from). And apo can mean "from" in the sense of source, not "away from" in the sense of separation. The American Standard Version captures this more faithfully: "eternal destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might."¹⁶ The destruction does not come because God is absent. It comes because God is present. His glory, His might, His unveiled being: these are the source of the destruction.

Talbott draws a parallel to Isaiah 2:10, where the wicked are told to hide in the rocks "from the terror of the Lord, and from the glory of his majesty." No one reads Isaiah as saying the wicked are excluded from God's glory. They are terrified by it. The glory is the cause of the terror. The same grammar applies in 2 Thessalonians: the presence of the Lord is the cause of the destruction.¹⁷

Manis points out that this reading resolves one of the deepest puzzles in the traditional doctrine. Traditionalists have always struggled with a tension: the Bible describes hell both as separation from God and as suffering in God's presence. The choice model emphasizes separation. The retributive model emphasizes imposed suffering. The divine-presence model holds both together. Hell is a separation, not from God's being (which is impossible) but from communion with Him. It is a relational separation, not a spatial one. And the suffering is real, but it flows from the encounter with God's holiness, not from a penalty God selects from a menu of punishments.¹⁸

5. Between Natural and Retributive

One of Manis's most careful philosophical moves is to show where the divine-presence model sits on the spectrum of punishment. Standard views of hell divide into two camps. Retributive views say God imposes hell as a penalty. Natural-consequence views (like the choice model) say the damned bring hell on themselves, and God merely permits it. Each has a serious weakness.¹⁹

Retributive views make God look cruel. If God is the one inflicting the suffering, and the suffering is endless, then the proportionality problem from Chapter 9 hits with full force. How does a loving God impose infinite pain for finite sin?

Natural-consequence views, on the other hand, struggle with the strong biblical language of divine wrath. Scripture does not talk about hell as if God is simply standing aside. The Bible speaks of fire prepared, of the wrath of the Lamb, of destruction coming from God's might. The choice model softens these texts more than the texts will bear.²⁰

The divine-presence model splits the difference. Manis argues that on this view, hell sits between natural and retributive punishment. The suffering is not a penalty God selects and imposes. God does not intend anyone's damnation. He wills the highest good for every person. But the suffering is also not a mere side effect that has nothing to do with God. It flows from God's own nature, from the reality of who He is. The holy, loving, omnipresent God simply is, and the sinner's refusal to receive Him makes that "is" agonizing.²¹

This positioning matters for a reason the traditionalist may not expect. Because God does not intend the suffering, His love for the damned is not in question. He loves them fully. He is present with them fully. The suffering is real, but it is not God's goal. His goal is their healing. And if His goal is healing, then the fire is not a dead end. It is a road.

6. From Defense to Hope

Here is where I part company with Manis, and I want to be transparent about it. Manis builds the divine-presence model as a defense of the traditional view that some may be lost forever. He is not a universalist. He does not argue that the fire necessarily heals everyone. His argument is that the divine-presence model is a coherent way of understanding hell as eternal conscious suffering, one that avoids the worst problems of both traditionalism and the choice model.²³

I think his model is brilliant. I also think it points somewhere he does not follow.

Consider what we have established. The fire is not foreign to God; it is God's presence. The suffering is not punitive in its purpose; it flows from the encounter with holiness. And the fire, in the biblical pattern, is a fire that purifies. Gregory of Nyssa, a father of the church, drew the conclusion plainly: "Just as those who refine gold from the dross which it contains not only get this base alloy to melt in the fire, but are obliged to melt the pure gold along with the alloy, and then while this last is being consumed the gold remains, so, while evil is being consumed in the purgatorial fire, the soul that is welded to this evil must inevitably be in the fire too, until the spurious material alloy is consumed and annihilated by this fire."²⁴

Notice what Gregory says. The fire does not destroy the person. It destroys the evil in the person. The dross burns; the gold remains. The self-deception, the rebellion, the hardened refusal of love: these are what the fire consumes. And when they are gone, the person is left, healed and whole.

This gives us a metaphysic for the restorative fire we discussed in Chapter 8. The fire that purifies is not a separate mechanism from the fire that torments. They are the same fire: God's unveiled presence and love. The torment is what happens while the evil is being burned away. The healing is what happens when it is gone.

And if that is right, then a fire that purifies will, given time, finish its work. The torment is real. It may be terrible and prolonged. I do not minimize it. But its purpose is not endless agony. Its purpose is restoration. And a purposive fire has an end: the completion of its purpose.

I want to be honest about the question this raises. Does the fire always finish its work? Or could a free person resist it forever? That is the hinge question of this entire book, and I will face it directly in Chapter 17. For now, I want to note what the divine-presence model gives us: a picture of judgment that is neither arbitrary retribution nor toothless acquiescence, but the patient, purposive, unrelenting love of God encountering every last corner of a rebel heart.²⁵

Engagement with Specific Philosophers

The divine-presence model stands at a remarkable convergence of voices. I have already drawn on Manis, who built the model's philosophical framework, and on the Orthodox tradition that supplied its theological roots. But the convergence runs wider than that.

Thomas Talbott, in the second edition of The Inescapable Love of God, added a striking section on the lake of fire and the outer darkness. There he endorses the core claim of the divine-presence model: the misery of the lake of fire is "simply the way in which the rebellious and the unrepentant experience God's holy presence."²⁶ Talbott even concedes (with a modesty I admire) that the phrase "the inescapable love of God," which he uses as the title of his universalist defense, is "a perfectly apt description of hell" on the divine-presence model.²⁷ The love that saves is the same love that torments. The difference is only in the receiver.

Jerry Walls, who defends the choice model and is not a universalist, has also moved toward the divine-presence model in his later work. In Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, Walls recognizes the puzzle of Revelation 14:10. He sketches what Manis calls a simplified version of the model: the damned are relationally separated from God but cannot escape His presence, and they experience that presence as oppressive.²⁸ Walls acknowledges the Orthodox tradition behind this idea and tentatively endorses the link between the lake of fire and the river of life flowing from the same throne.²⁹ Manis observes that among defenders of the choice model, Walls offers "perhaps the clearest endorsement of key elements of the divine-presence model."³⁰

Sharon Baker approaches from the evangelical side, writing for a popular audience. Her identification of theion (brimstone) with the divine, and her argument that the fire "is God's very presence," brings the Orthodox philosophical tradition into ordinary evangelical conversation.³¹ Baker's view is not identical to Manis's. She is less precise about the model's internal workings, and she combines the divine-presence idea with a version of annihilationism: if nothing good remains in a person after the fire does its work, that person may be entirely consumed.³² But her basic insight, that the fire in the lake comes from God and is the fire of God's own presence, reinforces the convergence from a very different starting point.

What strikes me about this convergence is that these thinkers do not share a conclusion. Manis is a traditionalist. Walls is a free-will theist who allows final loss. Baker combines elements of universalism and annihilationism. Talbott is a universalist. Yet all of them, reasoning from different premises, arrive at the same central insight: there is one God, one fire, and the difference between heaven and hell lies not in two destinations but in two responses to one Presence.³³

Hunter Coates, in Grace Abounds, traces how this convergence has played out in Orthodox theology specifically. What Coates calls the "Lewisian model" of hell, which most contemporary infernalists hold, actually incorporates the core insight of the divine-presence tradition. As Coates puts it, the model holds that "all people experience the presence of God as fire, as Scripture depicts, but this consumes some into torment while others are illuminated by it." The difference is determined by how a person has lived. Wicked souls experience torment; virtuous souls experience love.⁴² What interests me here is the concession. Even the strongest defenders of final loss increasingly accept that hell is not a region outside God's reach. The divine-presence model is no longer a fringe idea. It is, quietly, becoming the standard account of hell across confessional lines. The question left hanging is whether a fire that is God's love can truly burn forever without finishing its work. That is the question this book presses.

Counter-Objections

Two pushbacks deserve a direct answer.

First: "If the fire is God's love, why does it not heal at once?" This is a fair question, and it has a fair answer. Healing a free person is not like melting metal. Metal has no will. You apply enough heat, and it yields. A person has a will, and healing that will requires something heat alone cannot provide: consent. The fire removes the conditions that make refusal seem attractive (the ignorance, the self-deception, the distorted desires we examined in Chapter 11). But it does not override the person. It waits. As I will argue in Chapter 17, the wait may be long. But God is patient, and His patience is not passivity. It is active, relentless, never giving up.³⁴

Second: "Is this not just speculation?" Manis himself addresses this honestly. He presents his model as what philosophers call a "weak theodicy": not a proof that this is how hell works, but a demonstration that all the accepted constraints (scriptural, theological, traditional) can be reconciled under a model that is itself plausible.³⁶ I agree with that framing. No one has been to hell and reported back with a philosopher's precision. But plausibility is not nothing. This model fits the biblical fire imagery better than its rivals. It resolves the tension between separation and divine omnipresence. It accounts for both the wrath language and the love language without contradiction. And it stands in a long theological tradition going back to the church fathers. When we add the convergence of voices noted above, the case for taking this model seriously is strong.

Conclusion and the Boundary

Let me draw the threads together. The divine-presence model tells us that hell is not a region outside God's care. It is God's care, experienced as fire by a soul that refuses it. The suffering is real. It is severe. And it flows from the deepest possible source: the unveiled love of the God who made us.

This model sits squarely within the ancient Christian tradition. The Eastern fathers taught it. The biblical fire imagery supports it. The best contemporary philosophical work confirms its coherence. And it does something no other model of hell can do: it holds together God's love, God's justice, God's omnipresence, and the reality of judgment without contradiction.

For the larger hope, the implications are profound. A fire that is God's love cannot be pointless. Love has a purpose, always: the beloved's good. And a fire that purifies has an end: the moment the dross is gone and the gold remains. I have not yet argued that this end is reached for everyone; that argument belongs to Chapter 17, where the freedom question is met head-on. But the divine-presence model gives the hope its engine. If the fire of hell is God's own love, then hell is not a dead end. It is a furnace. And furnaces are for refining.

The picture that emerges is not comfortable. I do not want it to be. A God whose love burns like a consuming fire is not a God we domesticate. But He is a God we can trust. And that trust, I think, is the beginning of the hope that will not let us go, because the Love that fuels it will not let us go either. Even in the fire. Especially in the fire.³⁷