Chapter 6 — Grace Eclipsed: Salvation by Self-Expiation

If the fire of judgment is where you pay off your own sins, then the cross was only a down payment. McClymond is right to call that a problem. The fire I describe in this book does something else entirely.

In Chapter 4 we saw that some forms of universalism eclipse grace by turning salvation into a product of nature. In Chapter 5 we met the version that eclipses grace by making salvation a matter of logical necessity. Now we come to the third and final prong of McClymond's eclipse-of-grace charge. It is, in many ways, the most troubling of the three. Here the problem is not that salvation happens automatically by what the soul already is, or that it must happen by the force of metaphysics. The problem is that the sinner earns it. The soul, on this view, suffers in a postmortem fire until it has paid enough to clear its own account. If that is how it works, then Christ's death on the cross becomes redundant. Why would you need a Savior if you can save yourself by suffering?¹

McClymond calls this the self-expiation model of universalism, and he traces it through a long line of thinkers. The idea of a cleansing postmortem fire, he observes, runs through nearly the whole universalist tradition. From Clement of Alexandria and Origen through the Böhmist line of Jane Lead, William Law, and George MacDonald, to the Russian theologians Vladimir Solovyov and Sergius Bulgakov, and on to the leading modern voices Thomas Talbott and Robin Parry, the belief that sinners undergo purifying suffering after death is almost standard equipment.²

I want to be clear about what I am conceding here. McClymond's charge, as stated, lands on the model it targets. Any view where suffering earns forgiveness does sideline the cross. If the sinner is his own savior, then Christ is not. I share that concern. And I share it because the fire I describe in this book is not the fire McClymond is attacking.

B. Why This Argument Has Force

The self-expiation charge is serious because it has real targets. McClymond is not attacking a strawman. He has the receipts.

Consider Bulgakov. McClymond quotes him at length, and the words are hard to explain away. Bulgakov rejected the idea that simple forgiveness is possible. He wrote, "One must reject every pusillanimous, sentimental hope that the evil committed by a human being and therefore present in him can simply be forgiven, as if ignored at the tribunal of justice." And then, even more plainly: "God does not tolerate sin, and its simple forgiveness is ontologically impossible."⁴ McClymond sees this clearly. Bulgakov threw out substitutionary atonement, calling it unworthy of a loving God. But then he needed some other way for sin to be dealt with. And so the burden fell on the sinner. Each person must expiate, must suffer through, must pay the full price for every evil act. As McClymond puts it, "the exorcised demon of juridicism came back to haunt Bulgakov's theology."⁵

The logic is relentless. If Christ did not pay the debt, someone has to. And if the sinner pays it, the cross is not doing the saving. Grace is eclipsed by self-payment. McClymond is right that Bulgakov's version of universalism cannot be squared with the gospel of grace as the New Testament teaches it.

This pattern shows up in more than just Bulgakov. McClymond traces it through a broader strand of the universalist tradition where thinkers rejected legal or penal reasoning about the atonement but then, without meaning to, reinvented it on the backs of sinners instead. If you will not let Christ bear the penalty, the penalty does not go away. It simply shifts. And the result, as McClymond charges, looks less like grace than like karma.⁶

The Reformers fought this battle centuries ago. The classic Protestant objection to the medieval doctrine of purgatory was that it competed with the finished work of Christ. If Christ's death paid for sin fully, then no further payment is needed. McClymond stands in a long Protestant tradition when he raises this alarm. And the alarm is real. The idea that you can suffer your way into God's favor is the opposite of the gospel Paul preached. "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9, ESV). Self-expiation is a result of works. It is a result of the sinner's own suffering-works. Paul would have rejected it.

So I want to be honest. The charge is fatal to that model. Any view where the sinner's own suffering is the thing that purchases forgiveness has eclipsed grace. I reject it as firmly as McClymond does. The question that matters is whether his charge reaches further, to the purifying-fire model this book actually holds. I believe it does not. Here is why.

C. The Response

1. The Fire Purifies; It Does Not Pay

The single most important move in this chapter is a distinction. Two things can look alike on the surface and be completely different at the root. In one model, the sinner suffers in the fire in order to pay a debt. Suffering is the currency. When enough has been paid, the account is cleared. That is self-expiation, and I reject it. In the other model, the sinner suffers because the fire is burning away what is evil. The debt has already been paid at the cross. What the fire does is apply that finished work to a heart that has been resisting it. That is purification, and it is grace, not self-salvation.⁷

Think of it this way. Imagine a surgeon removing a tumor. The patient suffers during and after the surgery. But nobody would say the patient is earning his healing by suffering. The surgeon is doing the healing. The pain is the side effect of having something bad removed. That is closer to what the purifying fire does. The fire removes what is evil in the person. The pain is real. But the pain is not the price of admission to heaven. It is the cost of having sin taken away.⁸

Notice what Paul says. The person "will be saved." But the saving comes "through fire." The fire burns what is bad. The person comes through. This is not a payment; it is a purging. And the foundation Paul names, the thing that does not burn, is Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 3:11). The cross is the floor, not the ceiling.⁹

The prophet Malachi uses a similar image. God comes "like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap." He "will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi" (Malachi 3:2–3, ESV). A refiner does not destroy the silver. He heats it until the impurity rises to the surface and is skimmed off. What remains is pure. The fire serves the silver. That is the biblical picture I hold, and it is worlds apart from a courtroom where the sinner pays his own fine.¹⁰

2. The Atonement Is the Ground; the Fire Is the Application

Here is the center of my answer. Forgiveness was purchased once, at Calvary. It is finished (John 19:30). The postmortem encounter with God's holy love is not where a new payment is made. It is where that finished forgiveness finally reaches the heart that has been refusing it.

One offering. For all time. The work of purchasing salvation is done. But the work of applying that salvation to each person is ongoing. "Those who are being sanctified" is a present-tense process. And in the universalist hope I hold, that process extends beyond death for those who have not yet yielded. The fire does the applying. The cross does the saving. These are not competing; they are cooperating. The fire is the delivery system for grace, not a replacement for it.¹¹

We already believe this about sanctification in this life. When the Holy Spirit convicts a believer of sin, the conviction is painful. When God disciplines His children, as Hebrews 12 describes, the discipline is "painful rather than pleasant" (Hebrews 12:11, ESV). Nobody calls that self-expiation. We call it grace at work. The parent who corrects a child is not making the child earn his place in the family. The child already belongs. The discipline is making the child more like what the family needs him to be. The postmortem fire does the same thing, for those who did not yield to it in this life. The family membership is already secured by the cross. The fire is the final discipline that finishes the job.

This is exactly the distinction McClymond's charge misses when it sweeps all purgationist universalism into one heap. A universalist who rejects the atonement and then requires the sinner to suffer for his own sins is doing self-expiation. A universalist who affirms the atonement and sees the fire as the place where that atonement is applied to the resistant heart is doing something completely different. The first eclipses grace. The second completes it.¹²

3. The Divine-Presence Model

What is the fire, exactly? In the model I hold, the fire is not a separate substance created to punish. It is God Himself. The "fire" is God's unveiled love and holy presence, experienced differently depending on the condition of the soul that meets it.¹³

For someone who loves God, His full presence is heaven. It is warmth and joy and home. For someone in rebellion, that same presence is agony. Not because God has changed, but because the rebel is clinging to things that cannot survive the light. Sin cannot exist in the full presence of a holy God. So the fire burns it away. And while the person is still clinging to the sin, the burning hurts.¹⁴

This is close to the Eastern Orthodox tradition of the afterlife, and it is also the insight developed by R. Zachary Manis in his study of hell as God's presence rather than God's absence. Manis, who is not a universalist himself, argues that the torment of the damned may be the torment of sinners standing in the unveiled presence of a holy God. His reading of 2 Thessalonians 1:9 supports this: "destruction from the presence of the Lord" may point to a destruction that comes from God's presence, not a banishment away from it.¹⁵ The early church fathers shared this understanding. Clement of Alexandria taught that God "does not punish" in retribution, but "chastises for good to those who are chastised." And Origen described the postmortem fire not as a created furnace but as the sinner's own confrontation with truth in the presence of God.⁴⁰

Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, offered a striking version of this same idea. In his encyclical Spe Salvi, he wrote that "the fire which both burns and saves us is Christ himself, the Judge and Savior." The encounter with Christ, Ratzinger said, is itself the judgment: "Before his gaze all falsehood melts away." And this burning is a saving. It is "a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God."¹⁶ McClymond himself quotes this passage in his discussion of the newer Catholic models of purgatory.¹⁷

Notice what this means. On the divine-presence model, the fire is not a payment mechanism. There is no transaction. The fire is God doing what God does when He comes near. His love and holiness purify whatever they touch. This is grace operating, not self-expiation. The person is not saving himself by suffering. The person is being saved by God, and the saving hurts because sin hurts to lose.

I want to press this point one step further, because it matters. On the self-expiation model, God is passive. He sits behind a desk, waiting for the payment to arrive. When enough suffering has been deposited, He stamps the receipt and opens the gate. On the divine-presence model, God is active. He is the fire. He is the one doing the work. He comes to the sinner. He surrounds the sinner with His love. He burns away what is evil. He holds the sinner while the sinner screams. And He does not let go until the job is done. That is not a transaction. That is a rescue. And the rescuer, from start to finish, is God.

4. Suffering as Consequence, Not Currency

There is an objection hiding in everything I have said so far. If the person suffers in the fire, is not the suffering still doing the work? Is it not still the thing that changes him? And if it changes him, is it not, in some sense, earning his salvation?

Suffering in the fire is a consequence of meeting holy love while still in rebellion. It is not a currency that buys anything. The pain of the fire is the pain of a rebel standing in the presence of a God whose holiness will not leave sin alone. It motivates surrender. It does not purchase pardon.¹⁸

Think of a child who touches a hot stove. The pain is not a payment for the mistake. It is a natural result of contact between a hand and a surface that is too hot for skin. The pain teaches the child to pull back. Nobody would say the child earned something by burning his fingers. The pain was a consequence, not a transaction.

In the same way, the rebel who meets God and feels the fire is experiencing the natural result of sin meeting holiness. The pain drives the rebel to let go of what he is clinging to. When he lets go, the pain stops, and what remains is the love that was there all along. Nothing has been purchased. Nothing has been earned. The person has simply stopped resisting the grace that was already offered at the cross.¹⁹

Peter uses a powerful image for this process. He tells his readers that trials come "so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 1:7, ESV). Gold is not earning anything by being heated. The heat is revealing what is real and burning away what is not. The gold is precious because of what it is, not because of what it paid.²⁰

And John says simply: "The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin" (1 John 1:7, ESV). Notice the word. Cleanses. Not the sinner's suffering. Not the fire's punishment. The blood of Jesus. The fire may be the context in which that cleansing happens for the most resistant hearts, but the cleansing agent is always the blood, always the cross, always grace.²¹

5. Where Some Universalists Really Do Err

I want to be candid here. McClymond's charge does not miss every universalist. Some do talk about the fire in ways that slide toward self-expiation, even if they do not mean to.

When someone says, "You will suffer it off," or, "Everyone pays for their own sins eventually," or, "The fire is where you work off your debt," those phrases are doing exactly what McClymond accuses. They are turning the fire into a payment plan and the sinner into his own redeemer. I disown that language, and I think universalists who use it should stop.²²

McClymond's exhibit A is Bulgakov, and on this point Bulgakov is genuinely hard to defend. When he says that "sin cannot be remitted for free, without suffering," he is saying that grace is not enough. When he says that "every evil of which a human being is guilty must be fully and totally expiated by him, even if he is forgiven," he is contradicting the gospel in the act of trying to preach it.²³ McClymond is right that Bulgakov's system "might function efficiently apart from Jesus Christ, almost like a law of karma."²⁴ That is a devastating sentence, and it is fair.

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

McClymond's treatment of self-expiation is one of his strongest sections. He is right that the Böhmist lineage of universalists created a deep problem for themselves. When Law, MacDonald, and Bulgakov threw out substitutionary atonement but kept the demand that sin be paid for, they trapped themselves. The juridical reasoning they rejected at the cross came back at the fire, and now the sinner was the one paying.²⁵ McClymond saw this clearly, and I am grateful for the clarity.

Where I part from McClymond is in his sweep. He treats nearly all purgationist universalism as though it commits the same error. He lists Talbott and Parry alongside Bulgakov as purgationists, and while that label is accurate, the label conceals an important difference.²⁶ Parry, for example, consistently emphasizes that the postmortem suffering he envisions is purgative, not transactional. He sees sin as carrying consequences that forgiveness alone does not remove, just as a forgiven alcoholic may still need to recover from the damage alcohol has done. In the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist, Parry addresses McClymond head-on. He concedes that purgatorial universalism "needs to be very carefully spelled out, lest it run the risk of making Christ unnecessary for salvation," and clarifies his own position: the sufferings of the postmortem fire "have no direct salvific effect." Their role is "indirectly salvific in that they are educative and can lead us to see our condition and our need for Christ" (Appendix 5, p. 292). Parry is not asking the sinner to pay a debt. He is saying that healing takes time, may involve pain, and always points back to Christ.²⁷

Sharon Baker, in Razing Hell, builds a case for a restorative reading of the fire that keeps the cross at the center. She identifies God Himself with the fire: "Fire comes from God, surrounds God, and is God" (p. 113). On Baker's reading of 1 Corinthians 3, everyone passes through this fire at the final judgment, and the fire "burns up whatever is evil, wicked, or sinful" while it "cleanses and purifies what remains" (pp. 113–115). The cross is not weakened by this reading; Baker insists it is strengthened. A restorative view of hell, she argues, "in no way compromises or diminishes the reconciling work of the cross of Christ. In fact, it enhances it!" (p. 163). Her fire is the cross applied, not the cross bypassed.²⁸

Jerry Walls, in his philosophical work on purgatory, argues for a model where purgation is sanctification by grace, not satisfaction by suffering. Walls, who is not himself a universalist, sees the postmortem purifying process as God completing in the believer what was begun in life. On his reading, purgatory is the final stage of sanctification, and sanctification is always the work of the Holy Spirit. The person cooperates; the Spirit does the transforming. Walls presses the point further: moral change, he argues, is "incremental and progressive" and "cannot happen all at once." Finite persons need time to see truth, own it, and let it reshape them. The fire is that time. Sanctification is not a transaction that can be settled all at once. It is a relationship unfolding. That is grace, not karma.²⁹

George Sidney Hurd, across several studies of the biblical case for reconciliation, argues that Scripture presents God's judgments as remedial and restorative. In The Triumph of Mercy, Hurd observes that the fire of God "only consumes that which is consumable" — the sin, the rebellion, the dead works — and that what remains is "His eternal spiritual kingdom, that which cannot be shaken." The fire is God Himself at work, not a payment system. In The Universal Solution, Hurd makes a point that bears directly on this chapter's argument: only the universalist can honestly affirm a truly unlimited atonement. If the cross really does purchase salvation for all, as Scripture declares, then the fire cannot be replacing the cross. It must be delivering what the cross accomplished. Grace and purifying judgment are cooperating agents of the same divine love.³⁰

David Bentley Hart, in That All Shall Be Saved, adds a linguistic observation that supports the same conclusion. Hart notes that the Greek word kolasis (the word Jesus uses for "punishment" in Matthew 25:46) most properly refers to corrective discipline, not retributive suffering. Hart further points out that Mark 9:49, "everyone will be salted with fire," uses "salting" as an image of purification, since "salt is good" (Mark 9:50). If the fire of judgment is corrective and purifying by its own biblical vocabulary, then the self-expiation reading is not just theologically misguided. It is linguistically wrong. The fire is healing, not billing.³⁹

McClymond himself also calls attention to a charge that cuts in the other direction. He notes that Talbott's view of postmortem suffering diverges from Parry's. Talbott envisions God using increasing measures of consequence to bring the rebel to the point of surrender. McClymond calls this "unevangelical" and claims it sounds "like moralism rather than a gospel of grace."³¹ That charge has some force. But it matters where the force lands. If Talbott's fire is Christ's purifying presence meeting the rebel in full disclosure, then it is not moralism at all. It is the gospel arriving in its most undiluted form. The person does not earn anything by being in pain. He sees truth he has been refusing, and the seeing breaks him open. That is conviction, not currency.

The Manis contribution is especially important here because of what it concedes from the other side. Manis is a defender of eternal conscious torment, not a universalist. But his divine-presence model of hell supports the very distinction this chapter draws. If the fire is God's presence, then the suffering is a consequence of meeting holiness, not a price paid to satisfy a ledger. Even a traditionalist's own exegesis, in other words, cuts against the self-expiation reading of the fire.³²

E. Counter-Objections

"But the suffering still changes the person. If it changes him, it is doing the saving, and that is self-expiation in disguise."

This confuses the occasion of change with the cause of change. When a doctor gives a patient a painful injection that cures a disease, it would be odd to say the patient saved himself by enduring the needle. The injection is the occasion of healing; the medicine is the cause. In the same way, the fire is the occasion in which the resistant heart finally opens to grace. The cause of salvation is still Christ and His finished work. The person does not save himself by suffering any more than the patient saves himself by flinching at the needle.³³

In one sense, yes. I believe in a postmortem purifying process, and I believe its scope is wider than the traditional Catholic model. But the comparison actually helps my case, not McClymond's. The most respected recent Catholic thinkers have themselves moved away from the old satisfaction-based model of purgatory (what McClymond calls "Purgatory A") and toward a relational, Christ-centered model (what he calls "Purgatory B").³⁵ Ratzinger himself described purgatory not as a payment plan but as a personal encounter with Christ whose love burns and heals at once. If that is purgatory, it is already the model I hold. And it is already a grace model, not a self-expiation model. The paint is not covering a different substance. It is the same substance, extended further.³⁶

"Origen himself said the fire is the sinner's own conscience. Is that not self-judgment and therefore self-salvation?"

Origen did describe the fire as the sinner's confrontation with his own past sins. McClymond quotes him at length. But self-judgment is not self-expiation. To see the truth about yourself is the beginning of repentance, not the payment for sin. When the prodigal son came to his senses in the far country, his self-knowledge did not pay for the robe or the ring. His father gave those freely. The moment of clarity simply turned the son toward home.³⁷

F. Conclusion

McClymond is right that self-expiation eclipses grace. I agree. And I have tried to show, clearly and specifically, that the purifying-fire model I hold is not self-expiation.

The difference is not small. It is the difference between a courtroom and a hospital. In the courtroom, the defendant pays his fine. When the payment clears, he walks free. The judge did not save him. His own suffering did. That is self-expiation, and it makes the cross unnecessary. In the hospital, the patient has already been given the cure. But the cure must be administered. The administration hurts. The patient did not make the cure, did not earn the cure, and cannot replicate the cure. He can only receive it, even if receiving it is painful. That is the purifying fire this book describes, and the cross is the cure it delivers.

The cross saves. It saves fully, finally, and for everyone. The fire applies. It applies the finished work of the cross to the most resistant hearts, in the most direct way possible: by bringing the sinner into the unveiled presence of the God who died for him. That encounter is painful because sin is painful to lose. But the pain is a consequence of healing, not a price that buys healing. The sinner does not earn his way out of the fire. He is rescued out of it, by the same grace that hung on a cross outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago.

In Chapter 24 we will look more closely at the biblical texts about the lake of fire and the second death, and see how the divine-presence reading makes sense of Revelation's hardest images. In Chapter 37 we will face the gravest version of this concern: McClymond's charge that in some universalism the cross recedes entirely, so that people are "saved though never forgiven." That chapter is where this book sides with McClymond at its most honest. The cross must never recede.

But in this chapter, at least, the cross has not receded. It stands at the center. And the fire that burns around it is the fire of a love too stubborn to leave anyone in the dark.

The universalism McClymond defeats in these pages is real. Bulgakov's self-payment system is a genuine problem. But it is not the universalism I hold. The hope I hold does not ask the sinner to pay for his own sins. It asks him to stop running from the One who already did.³⁸

Notes

↑ 1. McClymond identifies three forms of universalism that eclipse grace: salvation by nature, salvation by necessity, and salvation by self-expiation. This chapter addresses the third. See Michael J. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 2:1027–1031.

↑ 2. McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 2:1029. He notes that "the idea of a postmortem cleansing or purgatorial process is extremely common in Christian universalist literature" and traces it from Clement and Origen through the Böhmist universalists and into the contemporary period.

↑ 3. McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 2:1029–1030. The quotations from McClymond frame the third eclipse-of-grace charge. His statement that "if I am saved because I suffer, then, in all consistency, it is not clear how or why Christ needed to suffer for me" is the sharpest formulation of the problem.

↑ 4. Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, quoted in McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 2:739. McClymond quotes the full passage to show that Bulgakov rejected the very idea of "simple forgiveness" as theologically impossible.

↑ 5. McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 2:1030. McClymond's phrase captures the irony precisely: the juridical reasoning Bulgakov rejected at the cross returned as the juridical demand that sinners pay their own debt.

↑ 6. McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 2:740. McClymond notes that Bulgakov's "purported system of self-expiation for sins might function efficiently apart from Jesus Christ—almost like a law of karma." The comparison to karma is sharp but fair: any system where suffering pays the debt operates on a moral ledger rather than on grace.

↑ 7. The distinction between penal self-payment and sanctifying purification is the hinge of this chapter's entire argument. It corresponds to McClymond's own distinction between "Purgatory A" (satisfaction-based, juridical) and "Purgatory B" (relational, encounter-based). See McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 1:65–68.

↑ 8. The surgical analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are. The key point is the difference between pain that earns something and pain that accompanies a healing already provided. On the distinction between satisfaction and purification in the theology of purgatory, see Jerry L. Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), where Walls argues that purgation is sanctification by grace, not payment for sin.

↑ 9. The 1 Corinthians 3:10–15 passage has been central to discussions of purgation since the patristic period. Note that Paul's image does not describe the destruction of the person but the destruction of what the person has built poorly. The person is saved; the bad work is burned. For a fuller treatment of this text in the context of the lake-of-fire imagery, see Chapter 24.

↑ 10. The refiner's fire of Malachi 3:2–3 is restorative, not retributive. The purpose of the fire is to produce pure silver and gold, not to destroy the metal. This is the controlling image for the purifying-fire model defended throughout this book. On the refiner's-fire tradition in the Old Testament and its role in shaping the early Christian understanding of judgment, see the discussion of the biblical fire imagery in Chapter 24. Gerry Beauchemin makes the same point across dozens of Old Testament passages in Hope Beyond Hell: The Righteous Purpose of God's Judgment, showing that every biblical example of God's judgment ends in restoration: "Judgment to victory" (Matthew 12:20–21) is the pattern, not judgment to annihilation.

↑ 11. Hebrews 10:14 is theologically decisive. The single offering of Christ has "perfected for all time" those who are being sanctified. The perfect tense (teteleiōken, "has perfected") describes a completed action with ongoing results. The present participle (hagiazomenous, "those who are being sanctified") describes an ongoing process. The purchase is complete; the application continues.

↑ 12. This distinction answers McClymond's critique at its root. His charge is valid against self-expiation (the sinner pays the debt). It is not valid against cross-grounded purification (the fire applies the already-finished work of the cross). To conflate the two is to miss the theological difference between a debt-clearing system and a healing process.

↑ 13. The divine-presence model of the fire is rooted in the Eastern Orthodox understanding of the afterlife, in which heaven and hell are not two places but two experiences of the same divine reality. See Isaac the Syrian, who taught that the fire of hell is the fire of God's love, experienced as torment by those who have rejected that love. For the modern philosophical development, see R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. pp. 309–311, 324–326, and the appendix, pp. 355–358. Manis surveys several versions of the divine-presence model, noting that Baker's approach holds "that the presence of God and the fire experienced by the wicked on the Day of Judgment are identical" and that "this encounter with God is a purgatorial experience for the wicked" (p. 309). David Burnfield, in Patristic Universalism: An Alternative to the Traditional View of Divine Judgment, 2nd ed. (2016), traces this understanding through Ezekiel 20:43–44 and Job 42:5–6, noting that the biblical pattern is a two-step process: the person is brought face to face with truth, and "having been reminded of the evil things they did…they lament over their past actions and see the wrong they have done." This is the divine-presence model in embryo.

↑ 14. The logic is similar to what happens when light enters a room where someone has been sitting in darkness. The light does not change. The pain is in the eyes that have grown used to the dark. God's love does not change between heaven and hell; the condition of the soul that receives it does.

↑ 15. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 324–326, 355–358. Manis's reading of 2 Thessalonians 1:9 follows Thomas Talbott's exegesis (see The Inescapable Love of God, ch. 5) in arguing that apo ("from") in this verse is causal, not separative. Talbott writes: "Just as the presence of the Lord is the causal source of, or that which brings about, refreshing times for the obedient [Acts 3:19], so the appearance of the Lord 'with his mighty angels in flaming fire' (2 Thess 1:7–8) is the causal source of, or that which brings about, the destruction of the disobedient." Manis, who defends eternal conscious torment and not universalism, endorses this exegesis on independent grounds, noting that the punishment is "destruction that comes from the presence of the Lord" rather than banishment away from it (pp. 356–357). This supports the divine-presence model on independent exegetical grounds. For a fuller treatment of this text, see Chapter 33.

↑ 16. Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), Spe Salvi (2007), §§46–47. The encyclical's description of the postmortem encounter with Christ as a fire that "both burns and saves" is one of the most important recent statements of the relational, non-transactional understanding of purgation. McClymond quotes this passage in his discussion of the newer Catholic models; see McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 1:74.

↑ 17. McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 1:74. McClymond notes the shift in Catholic theology from "Purgatory A" (the satisfaction model) to "Purgatory B" (the encounter model), and quotes Ratzinger at length. It is worth noting that McClymond's own summary of the newer model is compatible with the purifying-fire model defended in this chapter, even though he does not draw that conclusion.

↑ 18. The distinction between consequence and currency is parallel to the distinction theologians draw between natural consequences of sin (the damage sin does to the soul) and penal consequences of sin (the punishment God imposes). In the model defended here, the suffering of the fire belongs to the first category: it is the natural result of sin encountering holiness, not a fine imposed to balance a ledger.

↑ 19. The dynamics of this process are developed more fully in Chapter 28, which addresses the objection that hell only hardens the heart. The key insight is that the fire, understood as God's unveiled presence, does not just punish; it reveals and persuades. The rebel sees God as He is, and that sight, combined with the pain of clinging to sin, creates the conditions for a free surrender.

↑ 20. The gold-and-fire imagery of 1 Peter 1:7 supports the refiner's-fire model. Peter's point is not that the gold pays for something by being heated. The point is that the heat reveals and preserves what is genuine. Applied to eschatology, the fire of judgment reveals and preserves what is of God in each person, burning away what is not.

↑ 21. 1 John 1:7. The cleansing agent is the blood of Jesus, not the sinner's own suffering. This is the anchor for the entire chapter: whatever the fire does, it does as the instrument of the cross, not as a replacement for it.

↑ 22. The sloppy language of "suffering it off" or "working off your sins" is, unfortunately, common in popular-level universalist writing. It is theologically careless, and it plays directly into McClymond's charge. Universalists who hold a purifying-fire model need to be more careful to distinguish their view from self-expiation. The distinction this chapter draws is the one that matters: the cross pays; the fire applies.

↑ 23. Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, quoted in McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 2:740. Bulgakov's statement that sin "cannot be remitted for free, without suffering" directly contradicts the Pauline gospel of justification by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8–9). McClymond is right to find this troubling.

↑ 24. McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 2:740.

↑ 25. McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 2:1029–1030. The broader pattern McClymond identifies is clear: the Böhmist universalists rejected penal substitution (Christ paying for the sinner's sins) but then required penal self-substitution (the sinner paying for his own sins). The juridical reasoning they rejected at the cross returned at the fire.

↑ 26. McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 2:1029. McClymond lists Talbott and Parry as purgationists alongside the Böhmists, noting that "leading contemporary universalists, such as Thomas Talbott and Robin Parry, are also purgationists." But the label conceals the difference between purgationism-as-self-payment and purgationism-as-grace-applied.

↑ 27. Robin A. Parry [Gregory MacDonald], The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019). Parry's purgationism is consistently framed in terms of consequences and healing, not in terms of debt and payment. In Appendix 5 of the third edition, his direct response to McClymond, Parry writes: "I have sought in my publications to be clear that the sufferings of hell have no direct salvific effect—we are not saved though our sufferings. Their role is indirectly salvific in that they are educative and can lead us to see our condition and our need for Christ" (p. 292, n. 17). That distinction is the one this chapter defends. McClymond himself notes that "Parry emphasizes that all sin carries consequences and that forgiveness from God does not remove the necessity of purifying sufferings" (Devil's Redemption, 2:1029), but the language of "consequences" is not the same as the language of "satisfaction." Parry elsewhere warns that "purgatorial universalism needs to be very carefully spelled out, lest it run the risk of making Christ unnecessary for salvation" (p. 292)—a caution this chapter shares.

↑ 28. Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You've Been Taught about God's Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), pp. 112–118, 147–148, 163–165. Baker argues that "fire comes from God, surrounds God, and is God" (p. 113), and reads 1 Corinthians 3:10–15 as teaching that "in the final judgment, everyone will go through the fire," but "the fire of God will not burn up whatever is righteous and pure" (pp. 113–114). Her reading sees God's judgment as restorative rather than retributive, keeping the cross at the center: "A more hospitable hell in no way compromises or diminishes the reconciling work of the cross of Christ. In fact, it enhances it!" (p. 163). Baker's fire is not a payment mechanism. It is love that burns away "chaff, wickedness, and sinfulness" while leaving intact what is pure (p. 115). As R. Zachary Manis observes, Baker's account is best classified as a hybrid of the divine-presence model and restorative judgment; its central tenets are that "the presence of God and the fire experienced by the wicked on the Day of Judgment are identical" and that "this encounter with God is a purgatorial experience for the wicked" (Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 309).

↑ 29. Jerry L. Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. the sanctification-model chapters. Walls distinguishes between a "bookkeeping" model of purgatory (so many years for so much sin) and a sanctification model in which purgation is "a process of spiritual improvement which is completed precisely when it is complete." His argument that purgation is the final stage of sanctification, accomplished by the Holy Spirit, is the philosophical counterpart of the theological claim made in this chapter. On the question of whether God could simply perfect all souls instantly at death, Walls asks: "Is it the case that finite agents require time to come to see truth for themselves as it is disclosed to them, and moreover, to own it and internalize it?" His answer, developed at length, is yes. Moral change is "incremental and progressive," not something that can be "short-circuited or achieved by short cuts." He illustrates with Dickens's Scrooge: when Marley tells Scrooge he will be visited by three ghosts, Scrooge asks, "Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and have it over?" The rest of the story, Walls writes, is "a narrative argument that moral and character transformation cannot happen all at once." If the Spirit's work of sanctification requires free cooperation, then the fire that completes it is grace operating through a process, not a bill paid by a single act of suffering.

↑ 30. George Sidney Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ, 2nd ed. (2018), ch. 5, "The Duration of Punishment." Hurd's argument that God's fire "only consumes that which is consumable" is drawn from Hebrews 12:26–29: "Our God is a consuming fire." See also Hurd, The Universal Solution: Presenting Biblical Universalism as the Solution to the Debate between Calvinists and Arminians (2016), ch. 3, "Limited Atonement or 'Limitless Atonement,'" where Hurd argues that "only the Biblical Universalist can honestly and unapologetically be said to believe in a truly unlimited atonement" and that both Calvinists and Arminians unwittingly limit the atonement by restricting the cross's efficacy. If the atonement is truly unlimited, then the fire cannot be replacing what the cross accomplished; it must be delivering it.

↑ 31. McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 2:956–957. McClymond concludes his treatment of Talbott by arguing that "the effort to extend grace to all undermines the principle of grace" and that "to assert that salvation comes through the spiritual purification of the human self (per Talbott's interpretation of 2 Thess. 1:9) sounds like moralism rather than a gospel of grace." The charge is fair against any model where the person's purification is self-achieved. It does not reach a model where the purification is Christ's work applied.

↑ 32. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 309–311, 324–326, 355–358. Manis's treatment of the divine-presence model runs throughout the book, and his appendix on biblical support draws on 2 Thessalonians 1:9 and related texts to show that the punishment of the wicked is "neither artificial nor arbitrary" but rather "destruction [that] comes 'from the face of the Lord': that is, from the experience of being in the presence of Christ, fully revealed in glory" (p. 357). The fact that a defender of ECT reaches this reading on independent exegetical and philosophical grounds is among the strongest supports for the distinction this chapter draws. If the fire is God's presence, then the suffering is a consequence of meeting holiness, not a price paid to satisfy a ledger. Even a traditionalist's own exegesis, in other words, cuts against the self-expiation reading of the fire.

↑ 33. The distinction between the occasion of change and the cause of change is standard in the philosophy of causation. In the theological context, the cause of salvation is always the grace of God operative through the cross of Christ. The fire is the occasion in which that grace reaches the resistant heart, not the cause of the person's rescue. Andrew Hronich, in Once Loved, Always Loved: A Defense of Universal Restoration (2024), makes a complementary point: "punishment cannot satisfy the demands of justice!" On his reading, "to speak of one of the damned 'serving his time' and therefore being admitted into the pearly gates is incredibly unjust, for if such an individual has not yet repented of his sin and sought communion with God, he is still in his sins. Reconciliation requires more than the mere nullification of sins through punishment. It requires a contrite spirit and a broken heart." The fire is the context that produces this contrite spirit, but the contrition itself is a response to grace, not a payment that replaces it.

↑ 34. The distinction between forgiveness offered and forgiveness received is central to the Arminian and Molinist soteriological traditions. Grace must be freely accepted to be effective in the life of the recipient. The fire is the context in which the most stubbornly resistant hearts finally accept what has been offered all along. See the discussion of middle knowledge and optimal grace in Chapter 26.

↑ 35. McClymond's distinction between "Purgatory A" (satisfaction-based) and "Purgatory B" (encounter-based) is helpful and is outlined in Devil's Redemption, 1:65–74. The shift among Catholic theologians from the first model to the second mirrors the distinction this chapter draws between self-expiation and grace-driven purification.

↑ 36. The Ratzinger model of purgatory-as-encounter-with-Christ is already, in substance, the model this book defends. The difference is scope: Ratzinger limits the encounter to believers who die in a state of grace but with remaining impurities; this book extends it to all persons without exception, on the ground that the cross's reach is unlimited and the offer of grace is never withdrawn.

↑ 37. McClymond, Devil's Redemption, 1:271–272. McClymond quotes Origen's description of the postmortem fire as a crisis of conscience, in which the sinner recalls all his past sins and is pierced by the truth about himself. This is self-judgment in the sense of coming to see the truth, not self-expiation in the sense of paying a debt. The prodigal's moment of clarity (Luke 15:17) is the nearest Gospel parallel: the son came to himself, but the father gave the robe.

↑ 38. The cumulative argument of Chapters 4–6 is that McClymond's three-pronged eclipse-of-grace charge is valid against the counterfeits it targets (salvation by nature, by necessity, and by self-expiation) but does not reach the conservative, creedal, cross-centered universalism this book defends. For the capstone treatment of the eclipse-of-grace thesis as a whole, see Chapter 40.

↑ 39. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), second meditation. Hart observes that kolasis "most properly refers to remedial chastisement" rather than timōria, which "most properly refers to retributive justice." On Mark 9:49–50, he notes that fire and salt are images of "purification and preservation," since Jesus adds that "salt is good." See also Hunter Coates, Grace Abounds: A Holistic Case for Universal Salvation (Resource Publications / Wipf & Stock, 2024), who traces the kolasis / timōria distinction through Aristotle, Plato, Clement of Alexandria, Basil the Great, and both Gregorys, concluding that the early church recognized the corrective connotation of the word Jesus chose. For the full word study, see Chapter 22.

↑ 40. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 7.16; see also Robin A. Parry, with Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, A Larger Hope?, Volume 2: Universal Salvation from the Reformation to the Nineteenth Century (Eugene, OR: Cascade / Wipf & Stock, 2019), where Ramelli documents that both Clement and Origen "held that God does not punish anyone merely on the basis of retributive justice" but seeks "the moral and spiritual restoration of the one undergoing punishment." Clement spoke of a "wise fire" (pyr phronimon) that burns away sin while leaving the soul purified. This patristic witness, centuries before the scholastic satisfaction model, confirms that the earliest Christian understanding of the fire was grace-driven, not transactional. See also David Burnfield, Patristic Universalism: An Alternative to the Traditional View of Divine Judgment, 2nd ed. (2016), on the early-church witness.