Chapter 23

The Lake of Fire as God's Purifying Presence

An Eastern Orthodox Insight for Evangelical Theology

Introduction: A Different Way to See the Fire

Most of us were taught a simple picture of hell. God is in heaven. Hell is somewhere else. When the wicked die, God sends them away from His presence into a fiery place where they suffer. Heaven and hell, on this picture, are two locations on a cosmic map.

What if that picture is wrong? What if heaven and hell are not two places, but two ways of experiencing one reality? What if the Lake of Fire is not a furnace God built to punish His enemies, but the very presence of God Himself — a presence that warms the saints and burns the unrepentant? What if the fire that lights the New Jerusalem is the fire that consumes evil at the final judgment, because that fire is God, and God is love?

This chapter argues that the Lake of Fire, properly understood, is God's full and unfiltered presence. For those whose hearts have been opened to receive God, this presence is glory. For those who hate God and refuse to repent, the same presence is torment. The fire purifies. Where there is something good to save, the fire saves. Where a person has bound themselves entirely to evil, the fire consumes that evil — and on the conditional immortality view, when the evil is gone there is nothing left of the person to remain. This is what Scripture means by "the second death."¹

This is a synthesis chapter, not a deep dive. Chapter 24 unpacks R. Zachary Manis's philosophical model. Chapter 25 explores the biblical theology of fire and engages Sharon Baker. Chapter 26 traces the Eastern Orthodox patristic tradition through Kalomiros, Isaac of Nineveh, and others. My goal here is to show you the forest; those chapters walk you through the trees.

The Eastern Orthodox "River of Fire"

Most evangelical Christians have never heard of this view. That is partly because it grew up in the Christian East, and Western theology — Roman Catholic and Protestant alike — went a different direction. But the view is ancient. It can be traced back to the early church fathers, and it remains the standard Orthodox teaching on hell to this day.²

The clearest contemporary statement of the Orthodox position comes from a small but powerful essay by Alexandre Kalomiros titled The River of Fire. Kalomiros was a Greek physician and lay theologian, and his essay was first delivered at an Orthodox conference in 1980. His central image is taken straight from Orthodox iconography. In icons of the Last Judgment, you can see Christ enthroned. From beneath His throne flows a river. On one side stand the saints, bathed in light. On the other side stand the damned, suffering in flame. But here is the key: the river of light and the river of fire are the same river. There is one stream flowing from God. The difference is not in the river. The difference is in the people who stand in it.³

Kalomiros puts it like this: "The Light of Truth, God's Energy, God's grace which will fall on men unhindered by corrupt conditions in the Day of Judgment, will be the same to all men. There will be no distinction whatever. All the difference lies in those who receive, not in Him Who gives."⁴ The same sun warms healthy eyes and pains diseased eyes. The same God is heaven for the holy and hell for the hateful.

This is not a new idea Kalomiros invented. He is summarizing centuries of Orthodox teaching. Saint Isaac of Nineveh, a seventh-century Syrian father whose authority among Eastern Christians is enormous, wrote that those in Gehenna are "scourged by the scourge of love."⁵ Notice what he is doing. He is saying that the torment of hell is not God's hatred but God's love — felt as a whip by those who have set themselves against love. Saint Basil the Great spoke of the same fire having two effects, one that burns and one that illuminates, depending on who is in it.⁶

The twentieth-century Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky gave the classic short statement of the view: "The love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves."⁷ Bishop Kallistos Ware, perhaps the most beloved Orthodox writer in the English-speaking world, articulates the same vision: God's love is the one and only fire of judgment. There is no "other" fire that God lights to torment His enemies. There is only Him.⁸

I will say more about all of this in Chapter 26. For now, just hold the picture in your mind: one God, one fire, one judgment, two responses.

Manis and the "Divine Presence Model"

In 2019, the Christian philosopher R. Zachary Manis published a book with Oxford University Press titled Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God. It is a careful, philosophically rigorous defense of what he calls the "divine presence model" of hell. Manis is not Eastern Orthodox. He is a Western analytic philosopher of religion. But he reaches almost exactly the same conclusion as the Orthodox tradition, working from different starting points.

Here is Manis's core claim, in his own framing:

The eternal suffering of hell is not the result of any divine act that aims to inflict it, but rather the way that a sinful creature necessarily experiences the unmitigated presence of a holy God. Heaven and hell are not two "places" to which the saved and damned are consigned, respectively, but rather two radically different ways that different creatures will experience the same reality of divine omnipresence.⁹

Manis arrives here by working through the standard options. There are basically three Christian views of hell that take eternal suffering seriously. The first is traditionalism: God actively inflicts eternal punishment on the damned. The second is the "choice model" associated with C. S. Lewis and Jerry Walls: hell is what people choose for themselves, and God simply lets them have what they want. The third is Manis's divine presence model. Manis argues that traditionalism faces deep moral problems — it makes God look like He is doing something cruel — while the choice model has trouble with the strong biblical language of divine wrath. The divine presence model, he says, splits the difference. God's stance toward the damned is love and only love. But the damned, because of what they have made of themselves, experience that love as fire.¹⁰

Manis points to a key biblical text most readers gloss over: 2 Thessalonians 1:9. Many translations render it "destruction away from the presence of the Lord," as if the wicked are exiled. But the Greek preposition apo (ἀπό) more naturally reads "from" in the sense of source. The American Standard Version captures this: "eternal destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might."¹¹ The destruction does not happen because God leaves. It happens because God shows up. (Chapter 19 treats this passage in more detail; Chapter 24 develops Manis's full philosophical case.)

One of Manis's most striking moves — and the one that matters most for this book's overall argument — is his openness to postmortem salvation. The divine presence model, he says, leaves room for the intermediate state to be "a state of partial divine hiddenness, in which the soul-making process may continue."¹² A philosopher of his caliber, defending a traditional view of hell as eternal conscious suffering, allowing this much daylight for postmortem repentance is a remarkable concession. I will return to it in Chapter 24.

Sharon Baker and the Fire That Is God

The third stream comes from inside the evangelical world. Sharon Baker's Razing Hell (2010) is written for ordinary Christian readers. It does not aim at philosophical precision the way Manis does. But it makes the basic move with vivid clarity. Baker argues that "the fire in the lake actually comes from God, the fire that surrounds God, the fire that is God's very presence."¹³

Baker notices something most readers miss. The Greek word for "brimstone" in the Lake of Fire passages is theion (θεῖον). It is spelled exactly the same as the Greek adjective for "divine."¹⁴ In the ancient world, sulfur was used to purify temples and dedicate offerings to the gods. The expression "fire and brimstone" did not primarily evoke torture. It evoked cleansing. The Lake of Fire, on this reading, is a lake of divine purification — a place where everything that is not of God is burned away.¹⁵ William Harrison makes a very similar argument in Is Salvation Possible After Death?, surveying the Greek lexicons to confirm that theion in the New Testament context carries strong overtones of purification, not just punishment.¹⁶

Baker illustrates her view with an imaginary scene. A man named Otto — picture history's worst villain — comes before God at the final judgment. He expects condemnation. Instead, he meets divine love. The fire of God's presence burns him, but it is burning his evil, not him. He sees, for the first time, what his sin has cost his victims. He breaks. He repents. The fire that terrified him purifies him, and he enters the kingdom — "tested by fire, forgiven by grace."¹⁷

But Baker is not a universalist. She insists that human freedom must be preserved. Some, she suggests, may stand in the fire of God's presence and still refuse to bend. For those, "after the testing by fire nothing remains of him at all. Nothing."¹⁸ Baker calls her view a hybrid: the divine presence model combined with annihilationism.¹⁹ Manis criticizes Baker for not being philosophically precise enough — she blurs at least two different ways of getting to annihilation.²⁰ Chapter 25 takes that critique seriously and works out the details. For our purposes here, the basic shape of Baker's view is what matters: God's presence purifies, and that purification can end in either salvation or annihilation, depending on the response of the creature.

The Author's Synthesis

I find all three streams compelling. The Orthodox tradition supplies the deepest theological vision; Manis supplies the philosophical precision; Baker supplies the accessible biblical exegesis. Put them together with conditional immortality and a robust postmortem opportunity, and we get something — at least to my mind — beautiful.

Here is the synthesis I would like to defend:

(a) The Lake of Fire is God's full, unshielded presence — what it looks like when the barrier of divine hiddenness, which protected sinful humanity during this age, is finally removed.

(b) For the saved — those clothed in Christ's righteousness — this unshielded presence is heaven. It is the beatific vision, what we were made for, what we have longed for our whole lives without knowing it.

(c) For the unsaved who still hate God and refuse Him, the very same presence is hell. Not because God has changed. God does not have a "loving face" for some and an "angry face" for others. God is one. But sin is incompatible with God's holiness in the way that wax is incompatible with fire.

(d) The fire purifies. This is the consistent biblical picture of God's fire — Malachi's refiner, Isaiah's furnace, Paul's testing flame in 1 Corinthians 3:12–15. (Chapter 22 develops the corrective purpose of divine punishment; Chapter 25 traces the biblical fire motifs.) The fire of God's presence burns away what is false, what is evil, what cannot survive the truth.

(e) For those who, in this fire, repent — even at the final judgment itself — the evil within them is consumed and they themselves are saved. This is real repentance, not coerced compliance. They are given the truth they had previously been able to avoid, and on seeing it, many will choose Christ. (Chapter 36 develops the final judgment as the last opportunity.)

(f) For those who refuse to repent even when they stand face-to-face with the truth, the fire still burns away the evil. Here is where conditional immortality enters the picture. If a person has so completely bound up their identity with rejection of God that nothing remains once their evil is removed, then they cease to exist. This is the "second death" of Revelation 20:14 — not God's hateful destruction, but the inevitable result of being in God's presence while clinging to non-being.

(g) God does not want this. God is not the cosmic executioner. He desperately wants every person to repent and be saved (1 Tim. 2:3–4; 2 Pet. 3:9; Ezek. 33:11; see Chapter 2). When someone is finally lost, on the conditionalist view, it is because they refused — not because God refused them.

Why This Strengthens the Postmortem Opportunity Thesis

If the Lake of Fire is God Himself, and if God is love, then the very nature of the final encounter changes. It is not a verdict announced from a distance. It is a meeting. A meeting in which everything is finally seen clearly — both who God is and who we have made ourselves to be.

Such a meeting is itself an opportunity. To stand in the unfiltered presence of incarnate Love and recognize Him for who He is — and to recognize what we have done with our lives — is the most powerful evangelistic moment imaginable. Many will repent. Some, perhaps, will not. But the encounter is real, and it is gracious, because the One they meet is the same Jesus who wept over Jerusalem and prayed for His murderers from the cross.

This vision does not require universalism. (Chapter 33 takes up the CI versus universal restoration question honestly.) What it gives us is a coherent way to think about a God who never stops loving the lost, never gives up, and yet does not violate their freedom. If they finally choose non-being over Him, that is on them. But the opportunity will have been real, and the love will have been everything Scripture says it is.

Three Objections

Objection 1: "This sounds like purgatory."

It is true that the divine presence model can sound like the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory. Both involve a postmortem purifying fire. But there are important differences. Purgatory, in Catholic theology, is a place where already-saved believers undergo purification of remaining sin before entering heaven. It does not extend salvation to those who died outside Christ. The divine presence model, as I am developing it, is about the encounter every person has with God — and the offer of salvation extended through that encounter.²¹ Chapter 32 treats this distinction in depth. The short version: postmortem opportunity is about conversion, not the cleansing of believers. They are different things, even if they share the imagery of fire.

Objection 2: "Where does Scripture actually teach this?"

Two passages, briefly. First, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, already noted: when read with apo as "from" in the sense of source, the destruction of the wicked comes from the Lord's presence, not because they are excluded from it. Second, and more decisively, Revelation 14:10: "he also will drink the wine of God's wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb" (ESV, emphasis added).²² Notice where the torment happens. In the presence of the Lamb. Not far away from Him. Not banished from Him. The torment is something that occurs while the wicked are face-to-face with Christ Himself. This is exactly what the divine presence model predicts and what the traditional "separation" model cannot account for. (Chapter 21 covers the broader Lake of Fire taxonomy; Chapter 19 covers 2 Thessalonians 1:8–9 in greater detail.)

Beyond these texts, the larger biblical fire motif points the same direction. God Himself is described as a "consuming fire" (Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29). When God's presence appears, fire appears. Sinai burned. The bush burned. The pillar of fire led Israel. Pentecost descended in flame. Throughout Scripture, divine presence and fire are nearly inseparable. Chapter 25 walks through this in detail.

Objection 3: "This is too speculative."

Every doctrine of hell involves some speculation, because Scripture's language about the next world is irreducibly figurative. We are dealing with realities that exceed our experience. Even the traditional view of hell as a "place of fire separate from God" rests on a particular reading of imagery that could be read other ways. The question is not which view is speculation-free (none is), but which view best accounts for the biblical data, the character of God, and the witness of the historic church.²³

The divine presence model, far from being a modern innovation, has roots in the early church and remains the standard view in one of the three major branches of historic Christianity. It accounts for the biblical fire motifs better than the traditional view. It honors the unchangeable love of God. It does not require any of God's attributes to be set against any other. And it integrates beautifully with both conditional immortality and postmortem opportunity. That is not speculation gone wild. That is theology trying to do justice to all the data.

Conclusion

For most of my Christian life, I pictured hell the way most evangelicals do: a place far from God where the unsaved suffer eternally. The more I have studied — Scripture, philosophy, the early church, the Eastern tradition — the more convinced I have become that this picture is mistaken. The Lake of Fire is not God's exile of His enemies. It is God's full, unshielded, unfiltered self. For those who are ready, that meeting is heaven. For those who are not, that meeting is fire. And the fire purifies. It saves what can be saved. It consumes what cannot.

What I find most moving about this vision is what it says about God's character. God does not change face when judgment comes. He does not become someone other than the One who hung on the cross. The Lamb who was slain remains the Lamb. The Father who ran to meet the prodigal remains the Father. There is one God, one love, one fire, all the way down — and the question is never whether God will love us, but only whether we will let that love finally have us. That, I think, is good news, even when it speaks of fire.