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In this book, R. Zachary Manis develops in detail the various facets of the problem of hell, the reasons that the usual responses to the problem are to varying degrees unsatisfying, and the way that an adequate solution to the problem can be constructed. What drives discussion of the problem of hell, most fundamentally, is the question of why a perfectly good and loving God would consign anyone to eternal suffering in hell. Four main lines of response have been developed to answer it-viz., traditionalism, annihilationism, the choice model, and universalism. In Manis’s assessment, all come up short in some crucial respect. The alternative view that he develops and defends, the divine presence model, stands within the tradition that understands hell to be a state of eternal conscious suffering, but develops this idea in a way that, Manis contends, is able to avoid the worst problems of its competitors. The key idea is that the 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 in which different persons will experience the same reality of God’s omnipresence once the barrier of divine hiddenness is finally removed.
