Chapter 21
Christological Reflections on Who Meets Us at the Door
Last night I read two near-death accounts back to back.
The first came from a Methodist deacon in Kansas. Mid-fifties. Massive heart attack one Wednesday evening, walking from his car to the church. His daughter, an ICU nurse, did chest compressions in the parking lot for almost nine minutes before the ambulance arrived. He was clinically dead through most of that interval. When he came back, before he asked about his wife, before he asked where he was, he said: “I saw Jesus. He was waiting. He knew everything. And he loved me anyway.”
The second came from a Hindu schoolteacher in Tamil Nadu. She lost consciousness during a difficult childbirth. Her cardiac monitor flatlined for somewhere between three and five minutes. She, too, came back changed. But when her interviewer asked her who she had met in the light, she did not say Jesus. She said: “It was someone who knew me completely. Someone who loved me completely. The most loving Person I have ever met. I do not have a name for him.”
Two reports. Two different cultural-religious frameworks. One phenomenology. The deacon weeps with joy. The schoolteacher meets Someone she cannot quite name and weeps with the same joy.
This chapter is about that Person.
Christian near-death experiencers almost universally name Him explicitly. Non-Christians encounter the same phenomenological reality and reach for whatever vocabulary their tradition offers. The argument I want to make is that the deacon and the schoolteacher met the same Person — and that Person is Christ. Stay with me. This is not an easy claim, and I do not make it lightly.
Chapter 19 surveyed the broader phenomenology of the light — one of the most consistent and cross-cultural elements of the NDE pattern. In this chapter I am asking a more specific and theologically loaded question: who is the being of light?
Christian NDErs name this Person Jesus. They tell the rest of us, sometimes through tears, that they recognized Him. Sometimes the recognition was instantaneous; sometimes it developed through the encounter. Sometimes it was so overwhelming that the experiencer reordered their entire life around it. John Burke’s Imagine Heaven is built almost entirely on these accounts.1
Non-Christian NDErs name this Person something else. Hindus may say Yama, the god of death, or simply “a divine being.” Some Buddhists may say Kannon (Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion) or use no name at all. Iranian Muslims may identify the figure with God or with a figure from Islamic tradition. Secular NDErs often say only “the most loving presence I have ever known” and admit they have no theological vocabulary for it.
Are these the same Person? That is the question this chapter must answer.
Chapter 19 owns the broader description. Here I want only to remind us what the encounter is like before we ask what it means.
The first thing every NDEr says about the being of light is that He is a person. Not an “energy field” — though some experiencers struggle for words and reach for that language. Not an “experience of light” the way a sunrise is an experience of light. A Person. Aware. Alive. Looking back. There is a relational quality to the encounter that is impossible to capture in third-person prose, which is why NDE reports keep returning to first-person speech: He saw me. She knew me. I was loved.
The second thing is that this Person knows everything about them. Not as an abstract omniscience. As the felt knowing of being completely exposed, with no power and no inclination to hide, before a Person who has already seen the worst and the best. This is often the moment the life review begins (the subject of Chapter 20) — a comprehensive moral self-recognition in the presence of the One who already knows.
The third thing — and the thing that most commonly appears in the case files — is unconditional love. The being’s response to what He knows is not condemnation. It is love. NDErs often report this as the most overwhelming feature of the encounter: the realization that they are fully known and fully loved at the same moment.
Add to this the sense of homecoming. Many NDErs describe a deep recognition: I have come home. I have always belonged here. I never knew it until now.
That is the encounter. Now, who is He?
Howard Storm was a tenured art professor and self-described atheist when he collapsed in a Paris hotel in 1985 from a perforated duodenum. His NDE began as one of the most distressing on record — pulled into darkness by entities he could not see clearly, tormented, terrified. In desperation he remembered a Sunday school song from his childhood and called out the name of Jesus. The being who came to him then, Storm reports, was a person of overwhelming light and overwhelming love — a Person who knew everything about him and loved him anyway. Storm became a pastor.2 The case is theologically rich for at least three reasons: the Christ-encounter was not produced by prior Christian framework (Storm had none); the recognition was immediate and explicit; the transformation has been durable (decades, not weeks).
The Christian theological warrant for identifying this being as Christ is not weak. It rests on at least four converging lines.
First, the Scripture’s persistent identification of Christ with light. John’s Gospel opens with the Logos (a Greek word meaning Word or Reason — the New Testament’s name for the eternal Christ before His incarnation) as “the true light, which gives light to everyone” (John 1:9). Jesus calls Himself “the light of the world” (John 8:12). The first letter of John summarizes: “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). When Christian NDErs encounter a being of light who is personal, knowing, and loving, they are encountering exactly the figure the New Testament names.
Second, the doctrine of the descent — what the Apostles’ Creed names with the line “He descended to the dead.” Christ entered the realm of the dead between His crucifixion and resurrection. He is the One who, on the historic Christian account, has gone before us into death and meets the dead at their threshold. That is, at minimum, a doctrinal commitment of the church for almost two thousand years. Chapter 25 develops the descent doctrine in full. Here I want only the headline.
Third, the New Testament’s identification of Christ as universal mediator. “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Whatever encounter happens at the boundary of death is mediated, on the historic Christian account, through Christ. There is no other channel.
Fourth, the New Testament’s restriction of salvation to Christ. “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). If the encounter at death is salvific — and the dissertation evidence strongly suggests it can be — it must, on the church’s grammar, be an encounter with Christ.
If a personal, loving, knowing being of light meets dying souls, the natural question on Christian premises is not whether this is Christ. The question is: how could it be anyone else?
But what about the schoolteacher? What about the Hindu who names the figure Yama, the Buddhist who names Him Kannon, the Iranian who names Him Allah?
Here I want to be careful, because Christian readers will sometimes feel pulled in two directions on this question. On the one hand, salvation is exclusively through Christ — I hold that without qualification. On the other hand, the phenomenological encounter the Hindu schoolteacher describes is not measurably different from the encounter the Methodist deacon describes. Same loving presence. Same comprehensive knowing. Same homecoming. The dissertation database is full of these parallels, and Chapter 29 develops the cross-religious data in detail.
There are three positions a Christian could take here.
The pluralist position says all religions encounter the same divine reality, and Christ is one valid expression among many. I reject this. The New Testament is too insistent on Christ’s exclusivity to allow it.
The strict particularist position says only Christian NDEs are real; non-Christian NDEs are demonic deception or simple hallucination. I reject this too. The phenomenology is too consistent across cultures to be wholesale demonic. And the suggestion that God leaves the unevangelized to deception, or to no encounter at all, is hard to square with the universal scope of God’s love that I take Scripture to teach.
The third — the position I hold — is the inclusivist reading. The encounter is exclusively with Christ. But Christ meets people across cultures, in their own frameworks, with their own interpretive vocabulary. The Hindu schoolteacher, on this view, is not encountering a different Person from the Methodist deacon. She is encountering the same Person. She simply does not have the New Testament categories to name Him. Christ is “the light of the world” for the world, not just for the Christian-formed corner of it.
This reading has deep roots. Justin Martyr’s spermatikos logos — the “seminal Logos,” the seeds of the Word at work in every culture. Clement of Alexandria’s universal pedagogical Logos. Karl Rahner’s anonymous Christian (with cautions about its pluralist drift). Clark Pinnock’s A Wideness in God’s Mercy and James Beilby’s recent careful articulation of postmortem opportunity with inclusivist scope.3 The author follows that line.
I want to spend several pages on the historical-theological heart of this chapter: the patristic descent tradition.
The early church believed something about death that most modern Western Christians have quietly forgotten. It believed that between the crucifixion and the resurrection, Christ went somewhere. He did not merely lie dead in the tomb. He descended — into Hades, into the realm of the dead — and there He did something. He preached. He proclaimed. He brought light. He opened a door.
The patristic sources on this are not obscure. They are early. They are widespread. They say similar things.
Ignatius of Antioch, writing around AD 110 in his letter to the Magnesians, refers to “the prophets, His disciples in the Spirit, who waited for Him as their Teacher.” The standard reading takes this as a reference to Christ’s encounter with the dead in Hades.4
Justin Martyr, writing around AD 160 in Dialogue with Trypho 72, cites a tradition he attributes to Jeremiah: The Lord God remembered His dead people of Israel who lay in the graves; and He descended to preach to them His own salvation. Whatever the textual provenance of that saying, what matters is that Justin treats it as settled apostolic teaching: Christ descended, and Christ preached.5
Irenaeus of Lyons, around AD 180 in Against Heresies 4.27, repeats the same Jeremiah-logion no fewer than five times. He attributes it, significantly, to “an elder” — which means Irenaeus understood himself to be receiving an established tradition, not inventing one.6
Clement of Alexandria, around AD 200, gave the doctrine its sharpest articulation. In Stromateis 6.6, he asks the question plainly: did Christ descend in order to preach to the Hebrews only, or to all the dead? His answer is unflinching. The descent must include the Gentiles — including the just pagans — because, in Clement’s words, God is no respecter of persons. If the gospel was preached on earth so that the unevangelized would not be condemned unjustly, then the same gospel must be preached in Hades, for the same reason. Otherwise, those who lived before Christ would obtain either salvation or punishment without ever having had the chance to hear and respond. Clement calls that “the exercise of no ordinary arbitrariness.”7
Origen of Alexandria, Clement’s most famous student, confirmed and extended the doctrine. In Against Celsus 2.43, responding to a pagan critic’s sneer that Jesus had failed on earth and so resorted to preaching in Hades, Origen does not deny the descent. He affirms it. Christ, when He became a soul without the covering of the body, dwelt among those souls without bodily covering and converted such of them as were willing. The conversion was real. The willingness was real. The encounter was salvific.8
By the third century this doctrine had become standard in the Alexandrian school and increasingly across the broader church. Hippolytus, in his Easter Homily, extended the descent’s preaching to those who had once been disobedient — explicitly including those who had refused God in life.9 The descent doctrine entered the Apostles’ Creed itself in the version preserved by Rufinus around AD 390, though the line had a complex reception history in the West.10
What unites these patristic sources is a striking claim that the modern Western church has often muted: at the threshold of death, Christ meets the dead. Not just the saints. Not just those who heard the gospel. The dead — including those who had never heard, those who had refused, those whose chance to hear had not come.
That is what the early church believed. And that is what NDE evidence shows us, phenomenologically, fifteen hundred years later.
The patristic descent tradition tells us, on doctrinal grounds, what happens at the threshold of death: Christ meets the dead. The NDE evidence tells us, on empirical grounds, what this looks like: an encounter with a being of light who knows the experiencer comprehensively and loves them unconditionally. The two witnesses are not in tension. They are complementary. A doctrine articulated in the second century — long before any reasonable suggestion of cardiac arrest research — predicts in advance exactly the phenomenology that twenty-first-century resuscitation science is documenting.
A point I want to underscore. The NDE encounter is not the final judgment. NDErs return. Whatever they encountered at the threshold, they did not encounter the eschatological consummation. They encountered the beginning of the postmortem journey.
What this encounter most resembles, in the historic tradition, is what Catholic theology has called the “particular judgment” — the immediate postmortem encounter of the soul with Christ — and what the broader Christian tradition has simply called the meeting at the threshold. It is real. It is offered to all. On my view of conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity (CI + PO — see Chapter 3 and the discussion of the intermediate state in Chapter 24), it is the first opportunity for those who never met Christ in earthly life.
But it is not necessarily the only opportunity. Beilby, Walls, Hronich, and others argue — with the broader PO and conservative biblical universalist (UR) traditions — that the encounter may be repeated and extended. The intermediate state is a real interval. The final judgment is real. Christ’s pursuit, on the view I hold, does not stop at the moment the cardiac monitor flatlines, and does not stop at the moment the soul leaves the body. The threshold encounter is the first move. Subsequent moves are open.11
What about those who refuse?
Here I follow Walls, MacDonald (Parry), and Talbott in thinking that genuine final rejection of fully-known love is rare and difficult.12 The being of light is loving. Comprehensively loving. He sees what each person actually is and loves them anyway. To refuse Him after that — fully knowing, fully seeing — is not the kind of refusal that comes from confusion or partial vision or the ordinary opacity of earthly life. It is refusal in the face of what one fully sees.
But not impossible. Free will, on the position I hold, is real. Christ does not coerce. He woos. He persuades. He purifies. He offers Himself again and again. But He does not override the soul’s no.
Those who finally refuse, on the CI position, eventually cease to exist (the book holds this against eternal conscious torment). On the UR position, the love eventually proves irresistible to all. The author holds CI with PO, with genuine openness to UR. What I will not affirm is that anyone is forever conscious in unending torment. That is not the picture either Scripture or the NDE evidence requires.
Here I want to pull in an idea from R. Zachary Manis’s Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God (Oxford, 2019), Part III. Manis develops what he calls the divine presence model: what Scripture and tradition call “hell” is not a separate place where God is absent. It is the experience of God’s presence by a soul that is unprepared or unwilling to receive Him. The same fire is felt as warmth by those who love it and as torment by those who hate it. The Eastern Orthodox tradition has long carried this insight. Manis articulates it analytically.13
I should be plain: I do not adopt Manis’s full framework, because Manis attaches the divine presence model to eternal conscious torment, and I reject that. But I do adopt his core phenomenological insight, and it explains something I think no other framework can explain as cleanly.
It explains why distressing NDEs (the subject of Chapter 28) and peaceful NDEs do not require two separate “places.” A single objective encounter — Christ Himself — can be felt as homecoming by the prepared soul and as terror by the unprepared. The peaceful NDE and the distressing NDE may not be reports from two different destinations. They may be two different soul-responses to the same Person. This framework is, by the way, compatible with CI, with UR, and even with ECT. Where it cuts is at the metaphysical claim of two separate places with two different sources. There is one source. The response is what differs.
“If everyone meets Christ at death, why preach the gospel here? Surely the descent doctrine and postmortem opportunity collapse evangelism.”
The objection has rhetorical force, but I do not think it survives examination. The descent has been part of the church’s faith for almost two thousand years and has not killed evangelism. PO does not say everyone is automatically saved; it says everyone is genuinely encountered. The motivation for evangelism shifts but does not disappear. We preach Christ now because we love people, because earthly preparation matters for the encounter to come, because being prepared makes the difference between meeting the Lover and meeting the consuming Fire as the same Person, and because the gospel is good news for life and not only for death.
The second objection is harder. If salvation is through faith in Christ in this life, how can it be through encounter at death? The objection assumes a doctrine that is not, in fact, uniformly held by the historic Christian tradition. Salvation is through Christ — I affirm that. The encounter at death is the encounter with Christ. Faith — the appropriate human response to encountering Christ — is what the encounter calls forth. If the appropriate response is faith, then the response of faith may be made wherever Christ is genuinely encountered. The Apostolic Fathers, the Greek patristic tradition (Clement, Origen), and the modern PO scholars (Pinnock, Sanders, Beilby) all argue that the Christological encounter — and therefore the response of faith — can extend beyond death.14
The third objection this chapter must take with full weight: discernment. Not every reported encounter with light is a genuine encounter with Christ. Some NDEs include theological content inconsistent with Christianity — reincarnation imagery, universalist confidence without atonement, pluralist content. Christian discernment is necessary, and Chapter 30 develops it at length. What I want to say here is only that the existence of doubtful cases does not undermine the strong cases. Roughly 87 percent of the qualitative NDEs in the dissertation showed high or moderate compatibility with biblical anthropology and eschatology.15 The minority of theologically problematic cases require care. The majority do not.
Let me step back and assess what this chapter has and has not established.
What it has established. There is a being of light at the heart of the most common NDE pattern. He is personal. He knows. He loves. He communicates. He offers homecoming. The Christian tradition’s grammar — Christ as the light of the world, the universal mediator, the One who descended to the dead — fits this phenomenology exactly. The patristic descent tradition, articulated as early as the second century and embedded in the Apostles’ Creed, predicts on doctrinal grounds what NDE evidence is now documenting empirically. The author’s view: this is the encounter with Christ.
What it has not established. The chapter has not proved that every NDEr is saved through their NDE. The chapter has not proved that every “being of light” report is reliable. The chapter has not proved that the encounter, by itself, is the whole of the postmortem journey. NDErs return. They tell us about the threshold, not the eschaton.
The chapter has also not, by itself, settled the difference between conditional immortality with PO and biblical universalism. Both views accommodate the data. Both can integrate the patristic descent tradition. Both can affirm that Christ meets every dying person. Where the views part company is on what happens after the encounter, in the long arc of God’s pursuit through the intermediate state and at the final judgment.
I hold CI with PO — I think the New Testament’s strong language about destruction has to be taken seriously, and I think genuine final refusal is metaphysically possible even if rare. But I do not hold the position with certainty against UR.
What I do hold with high confidence is this. Strict particularism — the position that those who never heard the gospel in life are simply lost without further opportunity — does not survive contact with either the patristic descent tradition or the empirical encounter pattern of contemporary NDE research. It asks us to believe that God lets people perish without ever having truly encountered Him. The historic church — and the dissertation evidence — both push back against that picture.
If you have lost someone who never made an explicit profession of faith: do not despair. The New Testament does not tell us that the only locus of the response of faith is the present life. The Apostolic Fathers did not believe that. Clement and Origen did not believe that. The Apostles’ Creed itself preserves a tradition that says otherwise. The Person your loved one met at the threshold is the Person you have been praying to. He is not less merciful at the moment of death than He was during their life.
If you are dying — or someone you love is dying — and the question pressing on you is whether you, or they, will meet anyone at the threshold: the answer of the historic Christian tradition is yes. Christ has gone before. He has descended. He is the One who meets the dead at the door. Contemporary NDE research is not the foundation of that hope, but it is striking confirmation. Five thousand cases in the dissertation database, across cultures, across centuries, across religious traditions, point in the same direction. Someone is there. Someone who knows. Someone who loves.
If you are a pastor, you have something better to say to the dying than vague reassurance. You have a doctrine — the descent — that has been part of the church’s faith since Ignatius. You have an empirical confirmation — half a century of NDE research — that should sober the materialist and embolden the believer. The dying are not stepping into nothing. They are stepping into the presence of a Person.
This is not pastoral wishfulness. It is what the tradition has, at its best, always taught. Chapter 22 takes up the question that follows: why some NDErs come back, and what they bring with them.
↑ 1. John Burke, Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God’s Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015). Burke’s book is the most widely read evangelical engagement with the Christ-encounter NDE pattern, drawing on roughly one hundred case files. The author engages Burke as the leading popular-pastoral voice in this space, while noting that Burke’s methodological controls are looser than those required by the dissertation’s scoring system.
↑ 2. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005). Storm’s account is engaged again in Chapter 28 as the leading exemplar of a distressing-then-converting NDE. On the strength of that case, see also Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush, “Distressing Near-Death Experiences,” Psychiatry 55, no. 1 (1992): 95–110.
↑ 3. Clark H. Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992); James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021), ch. 8 (“Inclusivism and Postmortem Opportunity”); Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 5, trans. Karl-H. Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 115–34. On the cautions about Rahner’s pluralist drift, see Gavin D’Costa, Christianity and World Religions (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
↑ 4. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Magnesians 9, in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. and trans. Bart D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 24 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1:243–47. The descent reading is contested; for the standard early-church interpretation see Jeffrey A. Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead: The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 91–110.
↑ 5. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 72, in Justin Martyr: The Dialogue with Trypho, trans. A. Lukyn Williams (London: SPCK, 1930), 153. The textual provenance of the “Jeremiah-logion” is uncertain; Justin attributes it to a saying he claims has been removed from the Jewish copies of Jeremiah. See James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 181–82, for discussion of its source-critical status and significance for the early descent tradition.
↑ 6. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 4.27.1–2, in The Apostolic Fathers and Justin Martyr; Irenaeus, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1885), 498–500. The five citations of the Jeremiah-logion across the Irenaean corpus are catalogued in J. A. MacCulloch, The Harrowing of Hell: A Comparative Study of an Early Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1930), 84–88.
↑ 7. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 6.6, in Fathers of the Second Century, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1885), 490–92. For careful contextual treatment, see Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead, 100–105; James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 190–91; Stephen Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife? A Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Evaluation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014), ch. 3.
↑ 8. Origen, Against Celsus 2.43, in Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1885), 448. Origen’s formulation that Christ converted those who were “willing” preserves the freedom of response and resists any mechanical or coerced reading of the descent encounter.
↑ 9. Hippolytus, Easter Homily (preserved in Syriac fragment), discussed in Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead, 105–7; and in Chad T. Pierce, Spirits and the Proclamation of Christ: 1 Peter 3:18–22 in Light of Sin and Punishment Traditions in Early Jewish and Christian Literature, WUNT 2/305 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 219–24.
↑ 10. The line “He descended to the dead” (Latin: descendit ad inferos) appears in the version of the Apostles’ Creed preserved by Rufinus around AD 390. Wayne Grudem has argued that the line is a late Western intrusion lacking adequate scriptural foundation; see Wayne Grudem, “He Did Not Descend into Hell: A Plea for Following Scripture Instead of the Apostles’ Creed,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 34, no. 1 (1991): 103–13. For the contrary position grounding the line in 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 and the patristic tradition, see Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 175–200; Karen H. Jobes, 1 Peter, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 233–58; William J. Dalton, Christ’s Proclamation to the Spirits: A Study of 1 Peter 3:18–4:6, 2nd ed. (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989). Chapter 25 develops this debate in full.
↑ 11. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, chs. 3 and 8; Jerry L. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things That Matter Most (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2015); Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: The Logic of Apokatastasis (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2023), ch. 7. Stephen Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave, develops a similar trajectory from a Pentecostal-evangelical angle.
↑ 12. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; Gregory MacDonald [Robin A. Parry], The Evangelical Universalist, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), ch. 1; Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), ch. 11 (“God, Freedom, and Human Destiny”). Talbott in particular argues that the choice to refuse fully-known love is functionally incoherent over an infinite horizon — though Manis offers a careful counterargument: see Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 198–216.
↑ 13. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), Part III, chs. 7–8. Manis draws on patristic sources, especially Isaac of Syria and Symeon the New Theologian, and argues that the divine presence model is “the echo of an ancient one in a contemporary discussion” rather than a new theological invention. The author affirms Manis’s phenomenological framework while declining his ECT framework. For a similar restorative-justice articulation that the author finds more congenial to CI with PO, see Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), chs. 7–10.
↑ 14. Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy; John Sanders, No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Unevangelized (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992); Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity; Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave. The patristic-tradition argument that the response of faith can extend beyond death is developed at length in Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead, esp. chs. 4–7.
↑ 15. Matthew Friend, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for Substance Dualism within the Conditional Immortality Debate (Th.D. diss., Trinity College of the Bible and Trinity Theological Seminary, 2025), ch. 4 (“Findings: Biblical Compatibility Analysis”) and Appendix B (“Christian Discernment Framework”). The 87 percent figure refers to the proportion of cases in the qualitative dataset (n = 832, drawn from approximately 90 scholarly books and 116 academic journal articles) that scored at the “high” or “moderate” level on the dissertation’s biblical-compatibility scale. See Appendix A for the full scoring methodology and Appendix C for the discernment framework.