Thanks for your responses, Bram. I'm recognizing that there's a particular kind of conversation that is driving the way I'm framing these questions. Holiness is of course more than just "intolerable." It's also awe-inspiring, beautiful, wonderful, etc. In the context of describing hell as a product of God's holiness, the question would be whether God cannot tolerate sin or sin cannot tolerate God. I like to say it the second way because it preserves God's sovereignty and perfect benevolence. God doesn't need to "react" to sin with wrath. Being entirely self-sufficient, God's God-ness simply IS wrath to sin, which cannot survive its encounter with His holiness.

As far as the ontological question about God's relation to our being, I really think that the problem with Western Christianity is nominalism, the idea that God is just another being in the universe which is held in place by His externally-imposed will, instead of the sacramental view from the first half of Christian history that God is the only "real" thing in the universe and all other things are contingent upon God for their being. 

All of the arguments about free will vs. determinism, etc, disappear under the sacramental ontology, because if God is the source of our existence, then following God's will for our lives is not submitting to some arbitrary omnipotent bully completely outside of us, but instead connecting fully with the source of our being instead of getting tossed around by idolatrous fetishes that don't represent our true desires. Augustine's definition of free will occurs within a sacramental ontology and thus has a completely different meaning than the nominalist definition of free will. Calvin read Augustine with a late-medieval nominalist lens rather than a sacramental one. Hence TULIP.