Chapter 26

The Divine Presence Model: Engaging R. Zachary Manis

When the Same Love Feels Like Heaven or Hell

Full-Length Edition

Imagine standing before a fireplace on a winter night. Your hands are cold. The heat feels wonderful. Now imagine pressing your bare skin against the grate. The same fire that warmed you now burns. The fire did not change. You did.

That image sits near the heart of one of the most careful recent books on the problem of hell. R. Zachary Manis is a philosopher at Southwest Baptist University, trained in the analytic tradition and deeply engaged with the history of Christian thought. His 2019 monograph, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell, was published by Oxford University Press.¹ It is one of the most rigorous treatments of hell in the current literature. Manis is not a universalist. He does not defend the standard retributive picture of hell, either. What he offers is something different: a model in which the same divine love that fills heaven with joy fills hell with torment. Not because God changes his posture toward different souls. Because the souls have changed their posture toward God.

I came to Manis's work after the basic shape of this book was already in place. I had built my account of the moment-of-death encounter from NDE research, from Boros, and from the descent tradition. When I read Manis, I found a philosophical structure that matched my account at point after point. The convergence was not planned. Two very different paths had led to the same place. That matters. When independent lines of research arrive at the same conclusion, the conclusion is harder to dismiss as one person's bias.

This chapter will spend serious time with Manis. We will walk through his survey of the standard views on hell, watch him build the Divine Presence Model, and then ask what happens when his model meets ours.

The Problem Manis Sets Out to Solve

The problem of hell is a specific form of the problem of evil. If God is perfectly good, perfectly loving, and all-powerful, why would he allow any creature to suffer forever? The standard answers have never satisfied everyone, and Manis is candid about why. Each familiar option purchases one theological virtue at the cost of another.

Manis frames the problem with precision. He wants a solution that meets five criteria.² It must find real support in Scripture. It must fit the weight of Christian tradition. It must be held, at least in its broad strokes, by a real portion of the church. It must be consistent with what theologians call perfect being theology, the commitment that God's goodness, justice, and love are each as great as they could be. And it must not water down divine love. Love, for Manis, must extend to every person without exception. It must include God's willing the highest good of every person he loves.³

Those are not easy standards. Most existing views of hell struggle with at least one of them. That struggle is what drives Manis to build something new.

The Landscape According to Manis

Before building his own model, Manis surveys the field. The survey is careful and fair. He does not set up straw men. He takes each view at its best and then asks where it falls short.

Eternal Conscious Torment

The traditional view holds that the lost suffer consciously forever. Its defenders include major voices: Jerry Walls (in part), C. S. Lewis (in part), William Lane Craig, and Robert Peterson.⁴ The view has the weight of centuries behind it. It takes the "eternal punishment" passages at face value. It preserves the gravity of moral choice. And it has the advantage of familiarity.

But Manis sees real problems. The biggest is proportionality. Even if we grant that sin against an infinite God carries infinite weight, the gap between a finite life of sin and an infinite span of torment creates moral pressure that is hard to relieve.⁵ The retributive versions of ECT face the sharpest form of this problem. If God is directly inflicting suffering as payback for sin, the picture of God cracks under the weight of perfect love. A God who tortures creatures forever, deliberately and without end, is hard to call loving in any sense most people would recognize. Manis does not say the traditional view is impossible to hold. He says it has paid too little attention to what it costs.

Universalism

Universalism says that every soul is eventually saved. Thomas Talbott, Robin Parry (writing as Gregory MacDonald), and John Hick each argue for this in different ways.⁶ The attraction is plain: universalism preserves the widest scope of divine love. Nobody is left out. The love of God succeeds in every case, no matter how long the process takes.

Manis is sympathetic to the motivation, but he resists on free-will grounds. If human freedom is genuine, then some free agents may be genuinely capable of refusing God's love for good. Universalism cannot be guaranteed without either denying this or assuming a psychology in which permanent refusal is impossible. Manis does not argue that universalism is incoherent. He argues that it cannot be assured without sacrificing the libertarian freedom he believes Scripture and theology require.⁷ We examined Talbott's universalist argument in the previous chapter. Manis presses different pressure points than the ones we explored there, but the concern about freedom is the same.

Annihilationism and Conditional Immortality

Annihilationists hold that the lost are eventually destroyed. They cease to exist. Edward Fudge, John Stott, and John Wenham have each defended versions of this view.⁸ The attraction is that it avoids the proportionality problem directly. Infinite suffering goes away because the suffering ends. God's justice is preserved without unending torment.

Manis grants the force of this. But the extinction language raises its own difficulties. If souls are made for communion with God, and if that communion is what makes existence good, then the total destruction of a soul is a strange kind of love. How does God will the highest good of a person and then erase that person from existence? The Bible speaks of "eternal punishment," and annihilationists must explain how permanent non-existence counts as punishment in any meaningful sense. Manis also raises the question of the soul's natural immortality. If immortality is part of the soul's nature, given by God at creation, then annihilation requires a special divine act of un-making. That act raises its own moral questions.⁹

These difficulties are not fatal. Manis is honest about that. Annihilationism remains a serious option. But it does not satisfy all five of his criteria.

The Choice Model

The choice model holds that the damned freely choose hell. They are not dragged there against their will. They go because they prefer self-rule to surrender, even at the cost of suffering. Walls is the most prominent defender of this view. Alvin Plantinga and Andrei Buckareff have contributed to it as well.¹⁰

Walls develops the view most fully in Hell: The Logic of Damnation, especially in chapter 5, "Hell and Human Freedom." A decisive rejection of God, for Walls, is a settled disposition. It is a choice made with genuine understanding of what is being refused.¹¹ The damned are not confused. They are not tricked. They know what God offers, and they say no. For Walls, this is a decision made freely, and it is one God honors.

Manis takes the choice model seriously. He grants that it preserves both divine love and human freedom in an elegant way. But he thinks it faces a deep problem: psychological plausibility. Talbott presses this point hard. Once all ignorance, deception, and bondage to desire are removed, there is no longer any motive for choosing eternal misery for oneself.¹² Manis quotes Talbott on this objection directly, and he does not dismiss it. The choice model must explain what the damned are actually choosing, why they would keep choosing it, and how that choice can be called free. Manis thinks this explanation has never been fully satisfying.¹³

There is a second difficulty. What, exactly, are the damned choosing? If hell is defined as separation from God, and if God is the source of everything good, then the damned are choosing a state with nothing good in it. But a choice with nothing attractive is hard to call free. The "mild hell" proposal tries to address this. Lewis, Swinburne, and Walls have each suggested that hell still affords its residents some degree of pleasure or self-expression.¹⁴ But Manis worries that this makes hell too comfortable. If the damned are basically fine with their situation, the gravity of refusal is lost. And if hell is truly miserable, then we are back to the motive problem. Why would anyone freely choose genuine misery?

This impasse is where Manis turns to build something new. Each standard view has real strengths. Each has real costs. Manis wants a model that preserves what is best in all four while avoiding their distinctive weaknesses. That is an ambitious goal. I think he gets remarkably close.

The Divine Presence Model

The constructive heart of Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God is the Divine Presence Model. The name says it plainly: hell is not a place where God is absent. Hell is a place where God is present, overwhelmingly so, and where that presence is experienced as torment by those who have formed themselves against it.

The model rests on a set of connected claims. Each one matters for the argument this book has been building.

First: God's love is the supreme good. This is not a slogan for Manis. It is a claim about reality. God is love. The experience of God's immediate presence is the experience of that love at full strength. For the blessed, this is joy, fulfillment, communion. It is what they were made for.¹⁶

Second: After death, every soul stands in the immediate presence of God. There is no escape hatch. There is no corner of reality where God is not. The popular image of hell as a place where God has withdrawn, where the lights are off and the door is locked, is rejected. Manis draws on Psalm 139 and Acts 17:28, and on the Christian tradition's insistence that all creaturely existence depends moment by moment on God's sustaining power.¹⁷ The damned do not escape God. They cannot. They exist because he sustains them.

Third: The blessed and the lost are in the same divine presence. This is one of Manis's sharpest moves. The blessed and the lost are not in different metaphysical situations. They are standing before the same God. What differs is their response. The blessed receive God's love as joy. The lost experience that same love as torment.¹⁸

Fourth: The torment of the lost is the experiential consequence of the soul's own formation. This is where the fireplace image does its real work. The fire does not change. The soul's disposition toward the fire determines whether the heat is comfort or agony. A soul that has spent a lifetime forming itself in opposition to love, cultivating pride and self-deception and rebellion, arrives in God's unfiltered presence and finds that presence unbearable. Not because God is punishing the soul. Because the soul cannot stand what it is standing in.¹⁹

Fifth: Hell is God-present-and-refused, not God-absent. If hell were God's absence, the damned would be cut off from the source of all good, and their suffering would be a kind of deprivation. Manis thinks that picture is too simple. On his model, the damned suffer precisely because God has not withdrawn. His love is still there, pressing in on them, and they cannot bear it.²⁰

Sixth: The pain of hell is the soul's contact with what it cannot bear. Manis draws on what he calls the "Otto-Adams analysis," named for Rudolf Otto's phenomenology of the numinous and Marilyn McCord Adams's work on the metaphysical gap between God and creatures. Otto showed that the experience of the holy, the mysterium tremendum (the overwhelming mystery), produces a distinctive set of responses: dread, creature-feeling, the sense of being radically weak and impotent in relation to something overwhelmingly powerful. In Otto's words, the person experiencing the holy feels on the verge of being undone or annihilated, while at the same time feeling powerfully drawn toward the very thing that threatens to overwhelm.²¹

Adams developed Otto's insights further. She argued that the metaphysical gap between an infinite God and finite creatures is so vast that the encounter is inherently overwhelming, regardless of the creature's moral condition. We are, in Adams's memorable phrase, no more naturally suited for God's company than worms and maggots are for ours. The gap is not merely quantitative. It is a difference in kind. No amount of moral progress can close it on its own. This is why even the holiest figures in Scripture fall on their faces in God's presence. They are not being punished. They are being outmatched.²²

Manis combines these insights but adds a crucial correction. Adams located the problem primarily in what we are, our creaturely nature itself. Manis locates it in what we have become. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve experienced God's presence as joyful communion. The Genesis account describes them walking with God in the cool of the day without fear. It was only after sin entered that God's presence became terrifying, and their first instinct was to hide. On Manis's account, the overwhelming quality of God's presence is not simply a matter of the size gap. It is the size gap combined with moral corruption. The purified soul can bear what the corrupted soul cannot. For the purified soul, the overwhelming quality is ecstasy. For the corrupted soul, it is agony.²³

That honesty is worth pausing over. Manis has built one of the most rigorous accounts of hell in the contemporary literature. And he ends by calling it a view worth entertaining. Not a proven truth. Not the only option. This is the same posture this book has tried to hold throughout.

The Philosophical Architecture

Manis does not simply assert his model. He builds its philosophical foundation with care. Three of his moves deserve attention, because each addresses an objection that any serious account of hell must face.

The Freedom-of-the-Damned Objection

If the damned are suffering against their will, how is God not responsible? On a retributive model, the answer is straightforward: they deserve it. But Manis has rejected retributivism. On his model, the suffering is a natural consequence, not an imposed penalty. So the question becomes: if the damned would choose not to suffer, and they cannot escape God's presence, is God forcing suffering on them?

Manis answers by drawing a distinction between volitional and metaphysical causation. God's presence is not something God chooses to inflict on the damned. It is a feature of reality itself. God is everywhere. All things exist in him. The damned suffer because of what they are in the presence of what God is, not because God is doing something to them.²⁵

Think of it this way. A person with a severe allergy walks into a field of wildflowers. The flowers are not attacking the person. The person's own body makes the flowers unbearable. In the same way, the soul that has corrupted itself through sin enters God's uncorrupted love and finds that love painful. The love is not an assault. The pain is a consequence of what the soul has become.

The freedom involved is real. The soul formed itself across a lifetime of choices. Nobody forced it to cultivate pride, self-deception, or rebellion. The dispositions that now make God's presence painful are the soul's own work. In this sense, the damned are where they are because of what they chose to become.²⁶

The Proportionality Objection

Is eternal suffering proportional to a finite life of sin? Manis thinks his model handles this better than retributivism does. On a retributive model, the punishment is imposed by God, and proportionality is a direct demand of justice. If the punishment exceeds the crime, God is unjust.

On the Divine Presence Model, the suffering is not imposed. It is what happens when a corrupted nature stands in uncorrupted love. There is no sentencing judge calibrating the penalty to the offense. There is only a soul, its own formed character, and the love of God. The question of proportionality simply does not arise in the same way. You do not ask whether the wildflower field is being "proportional" to the allergic person. The mismatch is not a matter of justice. It is a matter of constitution.²⁷

This does not make the suffering less real. But it changes who bears the responsibility. The blame, if that is the right word, falls not on God for punishing too harshly, but on the soul for forming itself into something that cannot stand in love without pain.

The Moral-Psychology Objection

Can a soul really form itself so deeply against God that even the direct experience of divine love cannot change it? This is perhaps the hardest question the model faces. Talbott, as we saw in the previous chapter, argues that it cannot. He insists that a soul fully informed and fully free would inevitably choose the good.²⁸

Manis draws on Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death for his response, and the analysis is worth walking through carefully. Kierkegaard distinguishes two forms of despair that lead to damnation. The first is the direct form: defiance. The defiant soul clings to despair as a source of identity. It becomes so invested in its own suffering that it refuses to give it up. On Kierkegaard's account, the defiant soul wills to be itself in its torment precisely in order to protest against God's goodness. It sees itself as a living witness against the Creator, standing as evidence that God made an error. The damned in this form do not merely endure their suffering. They will it. They hold it close because releasing it would mean admitting that God is right and they are wrong.²⁹

The second form is subtler and, Kierkegaard thinks, far more common. This is despair in weakness. The person in this condition does not openly defy God. Instead, the person retreats into what Kierkegaard calls "inclosing reserve," an inwardness with a jammed lock. The despairing person is unable to will the good consistently. The wound of sin has become so deeply embedded that the person cannot extract it. The soul may even want healing, in a sense. But the healing would require surrendering the very structure of the self, and the soul cannot bring itself to do that. Pride, disguised as weakness, holds the lock shut. As Manis reads it, the soul in this condition cannot repent because repentance would require an act of freedom, and the soul's freedom has been turned inward, against itself. It is trapped, not by external chains, but by its own formed character.³⁰

Manis uses this material carefully. He does not claim that every damned soul is in "demonic despair," the most extreme form. Kierkegaard himself thought that form was rare. But the mechanism of inclosing reserve runs through the whole spectrum of despair. Sin can become constitutive of identity at any level. When it does, the soul's own freedom becomes the means of its continued refusal. The soul is not ignorant. It is not deceived in the ordinary sense. It is self-deceived in a way that runs so deep that the deception feels like truth.³¹

I find this reply more powerful than it might look at first. We all know people who cling to harmful patterns even when they can see the damage. The addict who knows the substance is killing him and cannot stop. The spouse who knows the relationship is destructive and cannot leave. The proud man who knows his pride is costing him everything and cannot bend. Scale that human reality up to the encounter with perfect love, and the Kierkegaardian mechanism becomes plausible. Not inevitable, but plausible. That is all Manis claims.

This is the same territory we will enter in Chapter 27, where we ask whether it is genuinely possible for a soul to refuse Christ in the moment-of-death encounter. Manis's Kierkegaardian analysis provides one of the strongest available accounts of how such a refusal could be genuine.

Manis and the Tradition: East Meets West

One of the most striking features of Manis's work is how naturally it connects to the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The idea at the center of his model has been a staple of Orthodox thought for a very long time.

Isaac the Syrian, the seventh-century ascetic and mystic, wrote that the torment of Gehenna is the scourge of God's love.³² The wicked do not suffer because God has stopped loving them. They suffer because God has not stopped. The fire is love itself. For those who have learned to receive it, the fire is warmth and light. For those who have turned against it, the fire burns.

Maximus the Confessor developed a similar theme. God's love is one and undivided. It does not change its character depending on who stands before it. What changes is the soul's capacity to receive it. A purified soul drinks the love of God like water. A corrupted soul chokes on it.³³

Gregory of Nyssa pushed the logic further. He argued that the fire of divine love is itself purgative. It burns away what is false in the soul, and the burning is painful because the false parts resist being burned away. The pain is real, but it is not pointless. It is the pain of being made new.³⁴ (Whether the purgation is eventually complete for every soul is, of course, the universalist question. Gregory himself was a universalist. The purgative mechanism, however, is separable from the universalist conclusion.)

In Orthodox iconography, this theology takes visible form. The river of fire and the river of the water of life are often depicted as flowing from the same source, the throne of the Lamb. It is the same divine love, the same river, but experienced as living water by the righteous and as consuming fire by the wicked. Walls himself notes this tradition approvingly in his later work.³⁵

Manis does not adopt the Orthodox framework wholesale. He writes as a Western analytic philosopher, not as a patristic theologian. But he acknowledges the tradition openly, and he notes that the Orthodox roots give his model the support of a significant portion of the church.³⁶ The convergence is important for this book, too. When we built our account of encounter dynamics in Chapter 19, we drew on the same Orthodox stream. Boros drank from it (see Chapter 16). The NDE literature echoes it. And now Manis, working from an entirely different starting point, arrives at the same structural picture.

The Biblical Foundation

Manis devotes a full appendix to the biblical case for the Divine Presence Model. The case rests on three pillars.³⁷

The first is the pattern of theophanies in Scripture. When Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up, he cries, "Woe is me! For I am undone" (Isa. 6:5). When Peter sees the miraculous catch of fish, he falls at Jesus' knees: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man" (Luke 5:8). When John sees the risen Christ on Patmos, he falls at his feet as though dead (Rev. 1:17). The Lord warns Moses that the people must not approach Mount Sinai, lest the Lord "break out against them" (Exod. 19:22). Manis reads this last passage with care. The warning, he argues, is not about God's bad temper. It is about the kind of being God is. The people will be destroyed if they draw too close, not by God's choice, but because of what they are and what God is.³⁸

The pattern is consistent. The closer a human being comes to the unmediated presence of God, the more overwhelming the experience becomes. For the holy, it is awe. For the sinful, it is terror. This is exactly what the Divine Presence Model predicts.

The second pillar is Jesus' claim to be "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). Manis reads "Christ the truth" through the lens of his model. The presence of God reveals the inner truth about a person. In Jesus' presence, the secrets of the heart are laid bare (cf. 1 Cor. 14:25).³⁹

This is exactly what the life review is, on the account we built in Chapter 11. The soul sees itself as God sees it. Some receive that truth with gratitude and repentance. Others harden against it. The NDE literature documents both responses.

The third pillar is the Parousia (parousia, "appearance" or "arrival"), the second coming of Christ. This is the event that ends divine hiddenness forever. On the Divine Presence Model, this is the decisive moment. When Christ appears in glory, every soul is exposed to the full, unmediated presence of God. For the righteous, this is the beatific vision. For the wicked, it is the beginning of torment. In Revelation 6:16, the wicked cry out for the mountains to fall on them and hide them "from the face of him who sits on the throne."⁴¹ They are not running from God's absence. They are running from his face.

Convergence with the Encounter

Here is where Manis's work and this book meet.

In Chapter 19, we built an account of what happens when the dying soul meets Christ. The structure of that account is remarkably close to what Manis describes. The convergence was not designed. I developed the encounter dynamics from NDE research, from Boros, and from the descent tradition before I read Manis. But when I read him, I found a philosophical architecture that matched mine at point after point.

Let me lay out the convergence carefully.

God's love is universally present. On our account, Christ meets every dying soul. No one is missed. On Manis's account, every soul stands in God's immediate presence. Neither model allows for a soul that is simply overlooked. God is there. Love is there. The encounter is real.⁴²

The soul's response determines its experience. In the moment-of-death encounter, the same Christ who draws one soul to grateful surrender provokes another soul to fury. In Manis's model, the same divine presence that fills the blessed with joy fills the lost with torment. In both cases, the variable is not God. The variable is the soul.

The response emerges from formed character. The encounter does not find a blank slate. It finds a person with a lifetime of habits, loves, and refusals. Those habits shape how the soul hears Christ's voice. As we said in Chapter 18, the encounter is mediated through the person's own categories. Manis says the same thing: the soul's dispositions, formed across a lifetime, determine whether God's presence is experienced as communion or as torment.⁴³

Torment is the soul's own resistance, not external punishment. In the encounter, the soul that refuses Christ does not suffer because Christ retaliates. The soul suffers because it cannot bear what it is standing in. On Manis's model, the same logic applies. The torment is a natural consequence of the soul's formed character meeting unfiltered divine love. It is not a penalty imposed from outside.⁴⁴

Freedom is preserved without sacrificing love. God does not coerce. Christ pursues, reveals, offers, and waits. If the soul refuses, the refusal is real. If the soul accepts, the acceptance is real. On both accounts, love has done everything love can do. The outcome rests with the soul.

Where the Models Diverge

The convergence is striking. But the models are not identical.

The most important difference is timing. Manis's model describes the post-death state broadly. He is describing what happens after the final judgment, when divine hiddenness ends and every soul stands in the unfiltered presence of God. This book locates the decisive encounter at the moment of death. For us, the encounter happens in the sliver of dying time, extended by the time-dilation reported in NDEs. The encounter is antemortem, not postmortem. It occurs at the threshold, not after it.⁴⁵

This difference is not a contradiction. It is a relocation. The same dynamics Manis describes for the general judgment, we describe for the individual moment of death. The structure is the same: the soul meets God, responds, and the response flows from formed character. What we have done is moved the meeting from the end of history to the end of a life. The dynamics are portable. They work in both settings.

The second difference is eschatological. Manis tends to leave his model compatible with ECT, though he does not strictly require it. He has shown that eternal conscious torment need not be retributive. It can be a natural consequence of the soul's formed character in God's inescapable love. This book is eschatologically neutral on the long-term outcome (see Chapter 29). We describe what happens at the moment of death. What happens after the soul's decision is a separate question. Manis's model is compatible with our neutrality.

The third difference is the evidential base. Manis works from philosophy, theology, and Scripture. His argument is rigorously analytical. This book adds an empirical layer that Manis does not touch. The NDE literature, the hospice observations, the deathbed visions: these provide a kind of data that philosophy alone cannot supply. They do not prove the encounter thesis. But they give the philosophical structure a grounding in observed experience. They show that the dynamics Manis describes in abstract terms are already being reported by people who have been to the threshold and come back. Manis provides the architecture. The NDE data provides the case studies. Together, the philosophical and the empirical make a stronger argument than either makes alone.

Manis and the Other Voices

Manis does not build the Divine Presence Model in isolation. His engagement with the major voices in the hell debate is extensive and worth noting here.

His engagement with Talbott is thorough. We saw Talbott's universalist argument in the previous chapter. Manis takes it seriously. He grants that Talbott has identified a genuine difficulty for the choice model. But he thinks the Divine Presence Model offers a path between Talbott's universalism and the choice model's weaknesses. On Manis's account, the damned are not "choosing hell" in the way Walls describes. They are being what they have made themselves, in the presence of a God who has not stopped loving them. The motive problem that Talbott raises against the choice model does not apply in the same way, because the damned are not making a clean, deliberate choice for suffering. They are suffering as a consequence of what they have become.⁴⁶

His engagement with Walls is also revealing. Walls, as we noted, has recently moved in the direction of the Divine Presence Model. In Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, Walls writes that biblical fire is "a common image for the presence of God, not his absence," and that God's presence "is experienced very differently by those who are rightly related to him, as opposed to those who are not."⁴⁷ Manis sees this as part of an emerging consensus. Even the strongest defenders of the choice model are borrowing elements of the Divine Presence Model. The two views may be converging toward a hybrid.⁴⁸

Manis also engages Marilyn McCord Adams. Adams presses the "metaphysical size gap" between God and humans. We are so much smaller than God, so much more fragile, that standard free-will defenses of hell overestimate our capacity for genuine choice. The gap between Creator and creature is too vast for us to bear the full weight of blame for our own damnation. Adams argues that the relationship between God and human adults is less accurately modeled by parents and teenagers than by a nursery-school teacher and an infant. However mature our moral agency may seem in relation to other human beings, it never gets beyond the infantile stage in relation to God.⁴⁹

The force of Adams's argument is real. If the size gap is as vast as she claims, and if culpability is proportional to understanding, then no human being could possibly incur infinite culpability for rejecting God, because no human being can fully understand what that rejection means. The guilt accrued in wronging God, however great, must always be less than infinite. Adams uses two analogies to drive the point home. In the stove analogy, a parent leaves a three-year-old in a room with brightly colored gas-stove knobs. If the child turns the knobs and the room explodes, the parent bears primary responsibility. In the terrorist analogy, a terrorist announces he will kill a hundred citizens if anyone wears a red shirt on Tuesday. The citizen who slips up bears some blame, but the terrorist who set up the situation bears far more. Adams's point is that God, who set up the conditions of human existence and who knows the stakes infinitely better than we do, cannot simply hold us fully responsible for our eternal fate as if we were moral peers.⁵⁰

Manis partly agrees and partly disagrees. He agrees that the size gap is real and that it matters for understanding why God's presence is overwhelming. But he locates the explanation in our status as sinful creatures, not as creatures per se. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve experienced God's presence as joyful communion. It was only after sin entered that God's presence became terrifying. The problem is not finitude. The problem is corruption. Adams's analysis points toward universalism, because if the problem is metaphysical rather than moral, then God alone must fix it. Manis thinks the moral element is primary, which preserves a genuine role for human freedom in the outcome. But he credits Adams with illuminating the phenomenology of the encounter.⁵¹

Lewis appears throughout Manis's work as a companion voice. The Divine Presence Model has roots in Lewis's The Great Divorce, where the solid realities of heaven are too intense for the ghostly visitors from hell. The grass cuts their feet. The rain hammers them like bullets. The heavenly reality is not hostile. It is simply too real for those who have made themselves insubstantial through sin.⁵²

Molinism and the Divine Presence Model

In one chapter of his book, "Providence, Freedom, and God's Creation of the Damned," Manis examines the relationship between middle knowledge and the problem of hell. His findings are worth noting briefly. Manis observes that Molinism seems to be a natural fit for universalism, since if God has middle knowledge, he could select a world in which every free creature freely accepts him. He then examines Molinist Anti-Universalism, the view that God has middle knowledge but no universalist world was feasible. Jerry Walls is named as a defender of this position. Manis constructs and then critiques it, closing with the verdict that Molinism and universalism "may well be a match made in heaven," while Molinist Anti-Universalism is "at least ill-wed," so that "anti-universalists are best served to reject Molinism altogether."⁵³ This is the same tension that Chapter 28 develops through the work of Jason Marsh and Andrew Hronich. Manis supplies the analytically rigorous voice on the problem. I flag it here but will not develop it. Chapter 28 owns this territory.

Compatibility: ECT, CI, and UR

One of the most important features of the Divine Presence Model is its compatibility with each of the three major long-term outcomes. This matters for our project, because this book is deliberately neutral on what happens after the encounter (see Chapter 29).

If the long-term outcome is eternal conscious torment, the Divine Presence Model explains how it works without making God a torturer. The lost remain in God's presence forever. Their corrupted character makes that presence unbearable. The torment is real and unending, but it is a natural consequence. God has not stopped loving them. They have not stopped refusing that love. The dynamic is stable.⁵⁴

If the long-term outcome is conditional immortality, the model accommodates that too. Perhaps the soul's resistance to divine love is a kind of slow dissolution. A soul that refuses the source of all being is cutting itself off from what sustains it. Over time, the resistance may consume the soul until there is nothing left. Manis himself notes this possibility. In his discussion of annihilationism, he observes that "if the corruption of the soul involves a diminishing participation in the life of God, then perhaps the upper limit of such corruption in fact would be a complete destruction of the soul's capacities."⁵⁵ The soul would not be destroyed by God. It would be destroyed by its own refusal, carried to its logical end.

If the long-term outcome is universal reconciliation, the model works as well. Perhaps the soul's torment in God's presence is purgative. Perhaps the fire of divine love, experienced as agony by the resistant soul, gradually burns away the resistance until the soul can finally receive what it has been refusing. Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac the Syrian, and Talbott himself all point in this direction.⁵⁶ On this reading, the torment is real but temporary. It serves a purpose. It ends in joy.

Manis does not commit to any one of these three. His model describes the mechanism. The downstream outcome is a separate question. This is exactly the posture this book adopts. And it is worth noticing why that flexibility is not a weakness but a strength. Most philosophical models of hell are built to defend a particular conclusion. They are arguments for ECT, or for universalism, or for annihilationism. The Divine Presence Model is an argument about the structure of the soul's encounter with God, and it is compatible with each long-term conclusion. That structural focus is what makes it such a natural partner for a book that deliberately holds the long-term question open. The encounter is what matters. What comes after is a question we can face honestly, without forcing the data.

The Moral-Psychological Dimension and the Life Review

There is a feature of Manis's model that connects directly to the NDE literature we examined in Chapter 11.

On Manis's account, the torment of the lost has specific content. The soul in God's presence sees itself as God sees it. Every self-deception is exposed. Every hidden cruelty is brought to light. Every betrayal, every act of cowardice, every moment when the soul chose its own comfort over another person's need: all of it stands revealed in the light of perfect love.⁵⁷

This is what the life review is. NDE researchers have documented it consistently. The dying person, in the presence of the being of light, relives the significant moments of life. They experience the effects of their actions from the perspective of the people they affected. They see what they did, and they feel what others felt. The experience is not punishment. It is truth. It is the soul seeing itself with perfect clarity, in the light of perfect love.⁵⁸

The fit between Manis's model and the NDE data is remarkably close. Manis did not draw on NDE research. He arrived at the same picture from philosophical reasoning. The NDE literature arrived at it from empirical reports. The independent convergence is significant.

What makes the parallel especially striking is the two-response pattern. In the NDE literature, people report two kinds of reaction to the life review. Some respond with gratitude and humility. They see their failures clearly and experience deep sorrow, but the sorrow is mixed with acceptance. They recognize the truth about themselves and receive it as a gift. Others report resistance, defensiveness, a desire to look away. They harden against the truth the review reveals. The being of light does not force them to see differently. It simply shows them what is. The soul chooses how to receive the showing.

This is precisely what Manis describes when he writes about the two responses to God's self-revelation in Christ's presence. Those who humbly receive the truth about themselves turn to God in repentance. Those who cannot bear what they see harden their hearts. The hardening is not a single dramatic act. It is a process, built across a lifetime, in which the soul gradually walls itself off from uncomfortable truths. At the moment of full disclosure, those walls either crack open or hold firm. The life review is the experiential form of what Manis describes in philosophical terms.⁵⁹

I want to be careful not to overstate this. Manis is describing the post-death state. The NDE literature is describing experiences that occur during clinical death and are remembered after resuscitation. These are different contexts. But the structure is the same: in the presence of divine love, the soul sees the truth about itself. For those who can receive that truth, the seeing is healing. For those who cannot, the seeing is torment. The mechanism is identical. The context differs.

Does the Model Require Finality?

One question worth asking is whether the Divine Presence Model requires the soul's response to be permanent. Manis's development tends toward finality. He draws on Kierkegaard's account of despair as constitutive of identity, which suggests that at some point the sinner's refusal becomes so deeply part of the self that reversal is practically impossible.⁶⁰

Kierkegaard's metaphysical reasoning here is worth noting. He argues that to be human is to be free in a significant sense, and that the most significant use of freedom is the decision about how one will relate to God. The human self, on this view, is a being who chooses its own eternal destiny. That is not a feature added to human nature. It is human nature. We cannot be stripped of the capacity for self-determination without being stripped of our humanity. As Kierkegaard puts it, despair is both a sickness and a superiority: the possibility of despair is what marks us as spirit. The possibility of self-damnation is, paradoxically, the price of being creatures who are capable of genuine love. God could not have created us without also creating beings who possess the power to say no forever.⁶¹

But the model itself does not strictly require permanence. The mechanism Manis describes, a corrupted soul in the presence of uncorrupted love, is neutral on whether the corruption is permanent. If the soul can change, the model explains why the change would bring relief. If the soul cannot change, the model explains why the torment continues. The model describes the dynamics. The duration is a separate question.

This matters for our project. The moment-of-death encounter, as this book describes it, is a limited window. The soul meets Christ. The encounter is extended by time-dilation. The soul responds. And then the encounter is over. What happens next depends on the response. But the encounter itself is not eternal. It is a moment, expanded into a meeting. Everything hangs on the soul's freedom.

The Inescapability of God's Presence

One of the strongest features of Manis's model is its treatment of inescapability. God is everywhere. There is no place in all reality where God is not. The Psalmist said it: "Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!" (Ps. 139:7–8).⁶²

On Manis's model, this inescapability is not a threat. It is a statement about the structure of reality. God is the ground of all being. Every creature depends on him for existence at every moment. The damned do not escape God. They cannot. They exist because he sustains them. The love they cannot bear is also the love that keeps them alive.

The inescapability also explains why the moment-of-death encounter is so intense. If God is everywhere, the dying soul is not "going to" meet God in some distant place. The soul is already in God's presence. What changes in the encounter is that the veil of divine hiddenness is lifted. The soul suddenly experiences what has always been the case: that it exists in the immediate presence of infinite love. For the soul that is ready, this is homecoming. For the soul that is not, this is exposure.⁶³

Boros describes this same dynamic (see Chapter 16). At the moment of death, the conditions that have shielded the soul from the full impact of God's presence fall away. The body fails. The defenses drop. And the soul stands naked before the love it was made for. Manis and Boros, working in different decades and from different traditions, arrive at the same structural picture.

What This Book Takes from Manis

I want to close by being explicit about what Between Heartbeats takes from Manis and what it adds.

From Manis, this book takes the philosophical architecture of the encounter's dynamics. The idea that the same divine love produces different experiences depending on the soul's disposition. The idea that the torment of refusal is natural rather than retributive. The idea that freedom and love are both preserved without either being sacrificed. These are Manis's contributions, developed with a rigor no other contemporary philosopher has matched. Readers who want the full analytical foundation for the encounter dynamics described in Chapter 19 should read Manis.⁶⁴

What this book adds is context. Manis builds his model in philosophical and theological terms. He does not engage the NDE literature. He does not draw on Boros. He does not develop the descent tradition or the biblical case for a two-stage history of postmortem opportunity (see Chapter 20). He does not ask what the life review has to do with the soul's encounter with divine love. This book provides those connections. It gives Manis's philosophical structure a richer grounding than Manis himself provides: empirical grounding in the NDE data, historical grounding in Boros, biblical grounding in the descent passages, and pastoral grounding in the bedside realities of dying.⁶⁵

The convergence between Manis and this book is, I believe, one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the model we are building. Not because Manis agrees with every detail of our thesis. He does not. He has never, so far as I know, considered the moment-of-death encounter as a specific application of his model. But the structural fit is precise. The dynamics he describes for the final judgment are the same dynamics the NDE literature reports for the dying process. The moral psychology he develops from Kierkegaard is the same moral psychology we see in the life review. The inescapable presence of divine love that he places at the center of his model is the same presence that NDE experiencers describe in the being of light.

Two different lines of research, one philosophical and one empirical, arrived at the same place. That kind of convergence deserves attention. It may not prove the model true. But it makes it harder to dismiss as one person's speculation.

The fireplace image works both ways. The same fire that warms you can burn you. The same Christ who welcomes one soul troubles another. The difference is not in the fire. The difference is in you.

And the deepest hope this book offers is that the fire is patient. It is love. And love will not let you go.

But what if someone, fully aware and fully free, still says no? Is that possible? Can a rational person look at perfect love and turn away? That is the question we must face next.