Chapter 24

The Divine Presence Model of Hell

A Philosophical Deep Dive into Manis's Framework

Introduction

In the previous chapter we surveyed the divine presence model in broad strokes, drawing on Eastern Orthodoxy, Sharon Baker's Razing Hell, and Alexandre Kalomiros's The River of Fire. The basic shape of the view is this: heaven and hell are not two separate places but two radically different experiences of the same reality—the unshielded presence of a holy and loving God. Now I want to dig in. The most rigorous defense of this model in recent decades comes from R. Zachary Manis, whose 2019 book Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God was published by Oxford University Press.¹

My thesis is that Manis's divine presence model gives us the most philosophically rigorous and theologically satisfying framework for understanding hell available today, and that when we integrate it with conditional immortality (CI) and postmortem opportunity, the result is a powerful and pastorally hopeful eschatology. I will walk us through Manis's argument, show why it succeeds where its rivals fail, and mark out where I build on, extend, and diverge from him.

The Tripartite Structure: Where the Divine Presence Model Lives

Manis begins by reorganizing the contemporary debate. Most philosophers of religion sort views of hell into four standard options: traditionalism (eternal conscious torment), the choice model (the damned freely choose their condition), annihilationism (the damned cease to exist), and universalism (all are eventually saved).² Manis argues that, when we look closely, these views actually cluster into three families based on the final destiny of the damned: eternal suffering, annihilation, or restoration. His divine presence model belongs in the eternal suffering family, but it stands between traditionalism and the choice model.³

Why between? Because traditionalism and the choice model each fail in nearly opposite ways. Traditionalism affirms strong biblical themes of judgment, wrath, and the destruction of the wicked—but it can't satisfactorily explain how a perfectly loving God could inflict eternal artificial torment as just retribution for finite sins. The choice model avoids that problem by saying the damned choose hell, but in doing so it has trouble accounting for the Bible's clear language of divine wrath, vengeance, and judgment imposed on the wicked against their will. Manis's question is simple but profound: What if there's a view that keeps the strengths of both while shedding the weaknesses of each? That view, he argues, is the divine presence model.

The Three Problems Manis Forces Us to Face

Manis spends Part I of his book showing that traditionalism faces three severe and overlapping problems. I will summarize them briefly here, since they are the negative motivation for everything that follows.

The problem of justice. Retributive justice requires proportion. We do not give a child a life sentence for jaywalking. Yet traditionalism asserts that finite human creatures, with finite understanding, performing finite acts, somehow incur infinite culpability deserving infinite punishment.⁴ Manis carefully evaluates the most sophisticated traditionalist responses (including W.G.T. Shedd's argument that guilt is everlasting and Jonathan Kvanvig's analysis of the "status principle") and concludes that no version of this defense actually works.⁵ Culpability is in part a function of understanding, and no finite creature could fully understand what it does in sinning against God. So infinite culpability is impossible, and pure retribution can never justify eternal torment.

The problem of love. Loving someone, in the New Testament sense of agapē, requires willing that person's highest good insofar as one is able. But on retributive views, the punishment of hell is not aimed at the good of the damned at all—it's aimed at balancing some moral ledger. So the traditional God appears not to love the damned. That is theologically intolerable.⁶

The doxastic problem. This is Manis's most original contribution to the debate. He argues that genuinely believing the traditional doctrine of hell creates a cluster of psychological and theological pathologies. It tends to make rational worship impossible (because perfect love casts out fear, but hell-belief is built on fear). It poisons motives for evangelism. It can make the rational soul wish it had never been born, since any positive probability of eternal torment outweighs any finite earthly good.⁷ The doxastic problem isn't whether the doctrine is true—it's whether anyone could rationally internalize it without spiritual harm.

I think Manis's case here is devastating to traditionalism. The doxastic problem in particular deserves more attention from evangelical theology than it has received. It also gives us part of the reason that conditional immortality is a more humane reading of Scripture than eternal conscious torment—a point developed in Chapters 8 and 34.

The Core Insight: The Wax Near the Fire

Now to Manis's positive proposal. The key claim of the divine presence model is this:

The eternal suffering of hell is not the result of any divine act that aims to inflict it, but rather the way that a sinful creature necessarily experiences the unmitigated presence of a holy God. Heaven and hell are not two "places" to which the saved and damned are consigned, respectively, but rather two radically different ways that different creatures will experience the same reality of divine omnipresence once the barrier of divine hiddenness is finally and fully removed.⁸

The image Manis uses to illustrate this is unforgettable. He writes that it is not true that "God cannot be in the presence of sin," as some Christians casually say, as if sin were spiritual kryptonite to God. The truth runs the other direction: sinful creatures cannot be in the presence of God without devastating consequences. "Like pieces of wax brought too close to a raging fire, it is devastating to creatures to come into the full presence of God in an unregenerate state."⁹

Notice what this image captures. The fire isn't trying to hurt the wax. The fire is just being itself. It is the wax that cannot endure the fire's nearness in the wax's current condition. Apply that to hell: God is not selecting torments to inflict. God is simply being present—being the holy, loving, infinite Source of all being, fully revealed. And anyone who comes into that presence as an unrepentant sinner will experience that very Love as torment, of metaphysical necessity.

This is not Manis's invention. He locates the same insight in Eastern Orthodox theology, in Vladimir Lossky's striking sentence: "The love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves."¹⁰ He finds it in St. Isaac of Syria, in St. Symeon the New Theologian, and—more surprisingly—in passages from Martin Luther and C. S. Lewis.¹¹ There is a delightful irony in the title of Thomas Talbott's universalist book The Inescapable Love of God: that phrase, Manis quips, is "a perfectly apt description of hell."¹²

Divine Omnipresence and Divine Hiddenness

If God's full presence is unbearable to unregenerate creatures, why aren't all of us in agony right now? Manis's answer turns the traditional problem of divine hiddenness on its head.

Most philosophers ask: Why does God hide? Why doesn't He show Himself plainly so that no rational person could doubt His existence? The standard answers appeal to soul-making, to free will, or to the need for a non-coercive context for faith. Those answers are not wrong, but Manis thinks they don't go deep enough.¹³

The divine presence model offers a much more startling explanation. God hides because if He didn't, we would be destroyed. Given that we all begin in a fallen state (a minimal doctrine of original sin), if there were no period of divine hiddenness in our lives, we would be born straight into damnation. Hiddenness is not a defect or a divine choice to remain aloof. It is mercy. It is the indispensable space God carves out so that we can be redeemed, sanctified, and made fit to behold Him before the day His glory becomes inescapable.¹⁴

The eschaton, then, is not the moment God arrives. God has been here all along. The eschaton is the moment the veil drops. C. S. Lewis captured the idea perfectly:

God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else—something it never entered your head to conceive—comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature.¹⁵

Lewis is, in this passage, almost a card-carrying advocate of the divine presence model—even though he is usually labeled a choice-model theologian. That's a hint of how widely the core insight extends.

Hell Between Natural and Retributive Punishment

Where exactly does hell, on this model, fit in our usual categories of punishment? This is one of Manis's most subtle and important contributions, so let me slow down.

An artificial punishment is one that an authority freely selects and imposes—a fine, a prison sentence, the loss of a license. The connection between the offense and the punishment is conventional, not natural. A natural punishment is one in which the authority allows the offender to experience the natural consequences of his own actions—a parent letting a child feel the sting of a poor decision in order to learn a lesson.¹⁶

Manis argues that hell on the divine presence model is between these two. It is not artificial: God is not picking a torment to inflict. But it is not quite a natural punishment either, because natural punishments must be intended as such by the one inflicting them. God doesn't intend the suffering of the damned. What God intends, in exposing all to His presence, is "a state of perfect and everlasting joy for every person." God foresees that this will not be everyone's experience, but it is what He wants for everyone.¹⁷

So phenomenologically—from the standpoint of how it feels to the damned—hell looks and feels like retributive punishment. The wicked experience the divine presence as wrath, as judgment, as vengeance. That is exactly how Scripture describes it.¹⁸ But ontologically—in terms of what it actually is—hell is much closer to a natural consequence. The Bible's vivid retributive language is therefore analogical, not univocal. The Greek word kolasis (κόλασις, "punishment") in Matthew 25:46 fits this analogical use perfectly: it is the apt human term for an experience that is, ontologically, the inevitable consequence of being unfit for God's holy presence.¹⁹

This single move—reframing hell as phenomenologically retributive but ontologically natural—dissolves a stunning amount of theological tension. It accounts for the Bible's wrath language without making God a torturer. It honors the Christian tradition's emphasis on judgment without locking God into the artificial-punishment framework that drives the problem of justice. And it provides exactly the framework that conditional immortality needs to make sense of the "second death" as something that happens to the persistently rebellious rather than something God does to them.

The Biblical Case: 2 Thessalonians 1:9 and the Aiōnios Question

Some readers will be wondering at this point: Is any of this actually biblical? Manis devotes an entire appendix to that question, and the case is far stronger than most evangelicals realize.²⁰

The single most important text is 2 Thessalonians 1:9, which the ESV renders: "They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might." That little word away does a lot of theological work, and it is almost certainly mistranslated. Talbott has shown convincingly that the Greek preposition apo (ἀπό) here is not separative but causal—exactly as in Acts 3:19, where "times of refreshing" come from (apo) the presence of the Lord. The destruction of the wicked, in other words, is destruction caused by God's presence, not separation from it.²¹ Detailed exegesis is given in Chapter 23, but the upshot for our purposes is that the Pauline epistles' clearest text on hell is, on a fair reading, the divine presence model in compressed form.

The word aiōnios (αἰώνιος) in that same verse points to something further. As shown in Chapter 20, aiōnios often signals not duration but quality—belonging to the age to come, or pertaining to God Himself. Read this way, "aiōnios destruction" describes destruction whose source is divine and whose character belongs to the eschatological age, not necessarily destruction that drags on without end.²² That reading meshes seamlessly with both the divine presence model and conditional immortality.

Hybrid Views: Why Almost Everyone Borrows from Manis

One of the most striking features of Part III of Manis's book is his survey of hybrid views. He shows that almost every major contemporary philosopher of hell has, in one form or another, ended up reaching for elements of the divine presence model—even when their stated framework is something else.²³

Sharon Baker's hybrid annihilationism. Baker (Razing Hell) develops a version of the divine presence model in popular form. Her central claim that "fire comes from God, surrounds God, and is God" is essentially the divine presence model expressed in biblical-theological idiom. Her imaginative narrative of "Otto" facing judgment is one of the clearest illustrations available of how a divine-presence encounter could elicit either repentance or final destruction. Manis treats Baker fairly but raises concerns about her purgatorial elements; the full discussion of Baker belongs to Chapter 25.²⁴

C. S. Lewis. Best known as a choice-model thinker, Lewis nonetheless writes passages that practically are the divine presence model—the Mere Christianity passage just quoted being the most famous example.²⁵

Jerry Walls. In his more recent popular work, Walls explicitly endorses key claims of the divine presence model, drawing on Eastern Orthodox sources and acknowledging that "fire in the Bible is a common image for the presence of God, not his absence."²⁶

Jonathan Kvanvig. Manis shows that Kvanvig's free-will annihilationism actually requires the divine presence model in order to answer the "arbitrariness problem"—the question of why annihilation and salvation should exhaust the live options once the veil of hiddenness is lifted.²⁷

Thomas Talbott. The universalist Talbott offers what Manis calls the clearest and most detailed example of a hybrid divine-presence view in the contemporary literature. Talbott's exegesis of 2 Thessalonians 1:9, his treatment of the lake of fire, and his account of divine retribution as inseparable from divine love all sit comfortably within the divine presence model, even though Talbott's universalist conclusion goes further than Manis (and further than my own working position) is willing to follow.²⁸

Manis's Postmortem Concession—and Where I Go Further

Now we come to the move that, more than any other, makes Manis's framework usable for the project of this book. Toward the end of his discussion of objections, Manis acknowledges that the divine presence model is compatible with—indeed, hospitable to—postmortem conversion, at least up to the Day of Judgment. He writes: "The intermediate state, prior to this eschatological milestone, may still be a state of partial divine hiddenness, in which the soul-making process may continue—or even, in some cases, begin."²⁹

This is an enormous concession, and I do not think Manis fully appreciates how far it can be pressed. He frames it modestly, mostly to address the problem of infants who die. But the logic is generalizable. If divine hiddenness exists precisely to give creatures a redemptive opportunity, and if that hiddenness can persist in modified form into the intermediate state, then there is no principled reason to confine the postmortem opportunity to infants. Anyone for whom earthly conditions did not permit a genuine, free, well-informed response to Christ—the unevangelized, the pseudoevangelized, those crushed by trauma or culture, the cognitively impaired, those who never met the real Christ behind a distorted gospel—has the same theological standing.

This is where I build on Manis. I argue, as developed in Chapters 4, 9, 11–13, and 35, that the postmortem opportunity extends to all the unsaved without exception. God is who Scripture says He is: a God whose love does not have an arbitrary cutoff at the moment of physical death.³⁰ The divine presence model gives us the metaphysical mechanism for this offer. As long as the veil of full disclosure has not been finally lifted, redemption remains possible.

I also extend Manis's framework in a second direction: integration with conditional immortality. Manis's "purest" version of the divine presence model holds that the damned suffer eternally in God's presence. But once we recognize that God's presence functions as a refining fire—one that purifies what can be purified and consumes what cannot—the conditionalist conclusion becomes natural rather than forced. After every opportunity for repentance has been exhausted, what cannot be redeemed is eventually consumed. There is nothing left to suffer, because there is nothing left. The "second death" of Revelation 20:14 is not God's hateful annihilation of His enemies. It is the natural terminus of resisting the only Source of life there is. Chapter 34 develops this integrated framework in detail.

Finally—and this is the openness to universal restoration I have signaled throughout this book—it is at least conceivable that on the divine presence model, God's purifying love proves so compelling, given enough time and grace, that no rational creature ultimately resists it. That would be Talbott's, Hronich's, or Parry's conclusion.³¹ I am not yet persuaded that universal restoration follows necessarily, but I no longer find it unbiblical. The divine presence model framework is genuinely hospitable to all three views of final destiny: traditional eternal conscious torment (Manis's own preferred conclusion), conditional immortality (my working position), and universal restoration (the position I cannot dismiss).

A Bridge to Near-Death Experience Research

Before closing, I want to note one connection I think Manis would find interesting. The phenomenological pattern of veridical near-death experiences—surveyed at length in Chapter 5—maps with surprising precision onto what the divine presence model would predict.³² NDErs report encounters with a being of overwhelming light and unconditional love. Some experience this as ecstatic joy. Some experience it as searing exposure during a life review. A small minority experience initial dread or even something hellish, often resolving into transformation when resistance ceases. The cross-cultural consistency of these patterns, and the empirical pressure that veridical NDEs put on physicalist accounts of consciousness, supplies an unexpected line of empirical support for the picture Manis paints philosophically. Whether one experiences God's presence as joy or as torment depends on the spiritual condition one brings into it.

Conclusion

Manis's divine presence model is, I am convinced, the most rigorous philosophical theology of hell available today. It honors the biblical themes of judgment, wrath, and the destruction of the wicked. It avoids the crippling problems of justice, love, and doxastic incoherence that plague traditionalism. It explains divine hiddenness as mercy. And it provides exactly the metaphysical framework the postmortem opportunity thesis requires.

The picture I am proposing is this: a God whose love is genuinely inescapable; a divine hiddenness that exists for our redemption; an intermediate state in which that hiddenness is partially lifted to give every unsaved person a real, personal encounter with Christ; a final judgment in which the veil drops entirely; and a Lake of Fire that is none other than the unmediated love of God, purifying what can be purified and—if conditional immortality is correct—consuming what stubbornly refuses to be transformed. It is a picture of a God whose love does not give up. It is a picture, I think, that gives us reasons to hope.