Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God

What is it about?

This book is a philosophical exploration of the various facets of the problem of hell, the reasons that the usual responses to the problem are 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—but, for different reasons, each of these standard options ends up being deficient in some crucial respect. The alternative view that the author defends in this book, 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 is able to avoid the worst problems of its counterparts. 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 instead are two radically different ways that different persons will experience the same reality of God’s omnipresence once the barrier of divine hiddenness is finally removed.

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Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash