Chapter 34

The Deathbed of an Unbeliever

Hope Beyond the Last Breath

Her father was dying, and he had not been to church since 1968.

That is how Marie put it to me when she called the hospice chaplain’s office on a Tuesday afternoon in late October. Her voice was thin from too little sleep. Her father had been admitted four days earlier. The pancreatic cancer had metastasized. The oncologist gave him a week, perhaps less. Marie had driven up from Cincinnati on Friday and had not left the room since. She said her mother was somewhere down the hall in the family lounge, sitting alone, looking at nothing. She said the room smelled like the hospital’s honeysuckle hand cream and the iron-tang of her father’s blood thinners. She said her father had stopped speaking on Saturday and now only opened his eyes when they sponged his lips with water.

Then she said the thing she had called to say. “Pastor, I don’t know what is going to happen to him. I have prayed and prayed. He raised me in the church but he walked out when I was eight, and he never went back. He told me once that he stopped believing the day his brother drowned. That was 1968. He was nineteen. He never said another kind word about God after that. And now he is dying and I do not know if I can bear what I think is going to happen to him.”¹

I sat with the phone against my ear and the late-afternoon sun making a long bar of brass-colored light across the carpet of the office. I had taken this call a hundred times before. The names changed. The story did not. A father who never came back. A husband who would not pray. A mother who said she would never trust God again after the war, after the miscarriage, after the bishop. A son who left the faith at college and joined a freethinkers’ club and put a sticker on his car and now lay unresponsive in a county hospital while his sister tried to remember if he had ever, in his whole life, said the name of Jesus without sneering.

What Marie was asking me was not a theological question. It was a pastoral one. But underneath the pastoral question was a theological one she had been carrying since she was old enough to read a tract. Her version of evangelical faith had told her, with the unmistakable clarity of every Sunday-school felt-board, that her father was going to hell. The window of opportunity closed at the moment of death. There were no more doors after this one. He had spent fifty-six years saying no. The next thing he was going to say no to was breath itself. And then it would be too late.

That is the framework I want this chapter to challenge.

I do not want to soften the gospel. I do not want to invent a wider hope so that Marie will sleep better. I do not want to comfort the bereaved with a doctrine I cannot defend. I want to ask, as carefully as I can with the resources of Scripture, the historic Christian tradition, contemporary near-death experience research, and the best evangelical theologians presently writing on this question, whether the picture Marie was carrying is in fact the picture Scripture warrants. I want to ask whether what is happening, right now, in that hospice room, is what Marie thinks is happening — the closing of a final door — or whether something else is happening. Something stranger. Something more hopeful. Something the Christian tradition has held alongside the more familiar restrictivist account for two thousand years, even when it has not been the loudest voice in the room.

I told Marie that I would come within the hour. I drove to the hospice. I sat with her father for a while and held the cold thin hand and prayed quietly, the way one does when the patient is past speech. Then I went out to the family lounge with Marie and her mother, and we talked. What I am about to say in this chapter is, in part, what I tried to say to them — though more carefully now, with citations, and with the room to develop ideas that, in the lounge, I had to compress into a single tearful conversation.

The Pastoral Cost of Strict Restrictivism

The pastoral problem in the strict-restrictivist evangelical tradition is straightforward to state and devastating to live with.

The position runs like this. Salvation is through faith in Jesus Christ alone. Faith must be exercised in this life. The window of opportunity closes at biological death. Anyone who dies without explicit conscious faith in Christ — whether through deliberate rejection, cultural ignorance, mental incapacity, infant mortality, deathbed unconsciousness, or the simple grinding away of a life that never quite got around to the question — passes immediately into a state of conscious, unending, retributive torment. There are no more chances. There is nothing the bereaved can do for the dead. There is nothing God will do, either, because to do something would be to violate the framework in which God Himself is supposed to operate. The deceased has chosen, by the negative space of an unfinished spiritual life, an eternity of agony. And the survivor is left holding what evangelicals sometimes call “the burden of unanswered witness” — the conviction that they should have spoken sooner, prayed harder, pressed further, and that the gap between their effort and their loved one’s screaming damnation is, in some real measure, their fault.²

I have given that framework its strongest possible statement on purpose. I do not want to caricature it. Many of the people who hold it hold it because they believe Scripture demands it. They are not cruel. They are trying to be faithful. They have read the texts they have been given to read, and they have drawn the conclusion they have been taught to draw, and they have lived with the resulting weight. That weight, I want to say plainly, has been enormous. It has shaped how evangelicals grieve. It has shaped how evangelicals do funerals. It has shaped how evangelicals talk to dying loved ones, and what evangelicals say or refuse to say at the bedside, and what evangelicals do with the bodies of those they love after the bodies become “remains.”

Stephen Jonathan, a Pentecostal pastor in the English Midlands whose 2014 book Grace Beyond the Grave remains the most direct pastoral treatment of the question this chapter addresses, has documented the cost in some detail.³ He notes that clergy in the restrictivist tradition typically deal with the deathbed of an unbeliever — or worse, the funeral — through a series of evasions. The Abraham line is invoked: shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? The mustard-seed verse is invoked. The thief on the cross is invoked. The grandmother’s long-ago church attendance is invoked. The Philippian jailer is invoked. The hope is offered, gently, that the deceased might have whispered an unheard prayer in the last moments. None of these moves is dishonest. All of them are theologically possible. But Jonathan’s observation, which matches my own pastoral experience, is that they are deflections. They allow the minister to leave the room without actually saying, in the open, what the minister’s theology requires the minister to believe. They offer a small mercy at the price of a large evasion.

And the cost has not only been borne by clergy. It has been borne, far more painfully, by the bereaved. I have sat with men who, twenty years after the death of an atheist father, still cannot close their eyes at night without imagining what their fathers are experiencing in the place strict restrictivism says their fathers are now experiencing. I have sat with mothers whose teenage sons committed suicide and who cannot get past a five-minute conversation about hell without weeping uncontrollably. I have sat with widows whose husbands worked seventy-hour weeks and never quite made it to a profession of faith, and who now wake up at three in the morning terrified that their husbands are screaming in flames. The strict-restrictivist framework is not an academic position. It is a daily psychological furnace into which the survivors of any unbelieving loved one are required to throw themselves and their grief.

One of my goals in this chapter is to argue — carefully, biblically, theologically — that this framework is not what Scripture finally requires us to believe. Some Christians who read this book will find that argument unsettling. They will worry that I am loosening the gospel, encouraging spiritual procrastination, undermining the urgency of evangelism, or paving the road to a soft universalism. I want to take those worries seriously, and I will, in the latter half of the chapter. But I want to say at the outset what I am not doing.

I am not saying everyone goes to heaven regardless of what they have done. I am not saying Christ is irrelevant. I am not saying the dying unbeliever has nothing to fear. I am not saying the response of faith does not matter. I am not denying judgment, or holiness, or the reality of moral accountability before God. I am affirming all of those. What I am denying is that biological death — the cessation of the heartbeat, the flatline of the EEG, the cooling of the body — is the iron deadline beyond which Christ’s saving offer cannot reach. That denial is not an innovation. It is the position held by some of the earliest fathers of the church, defended by a substantial recent literature, and (I will argue) given fresh empirical illumination by the near-death experience research that this book has spent thirty-three chapters developing.⁴

The chapter has six tasks. First, to show what the historic Christian tradition has actually taught about Christ’s ministry to those who die outside the visible church — which is more, and more hopeful, than most contemporary evangelicals realize. Second, to set out the contemporary case for postmortem opportunity (PO), particularly as developed in the last fifteen years by James Beilby, Stephen Jonathan, Andrew Hronich, William Harrison, Sharon Baker, Thomas Talbott, Gregory MacDonald, and others. Third, to show how the near-death experience evidence developed in earlier chapters bears on the question. Fourth, to address the major pastoral objections — especially the “evangelism-killing” objection and the “you should have witnessed” guilt cycle. Fifth, to offer concrete pastoral counsel for the deathbed, the funeral, and the long aftermath of bereavement. And sixth, to say what hope honestly looks like in the room Marie was sitting in — what hope is, what hope is not, and how to hold hope without forcing certainty where Scripture has not given it.

Christ at the Threshold: An Old Hope Recovered

The first thing to say is that the strict-restrictivist framework I just described is not the only Christian framework available, and it is not even the oldest one. The early church taught a doctrine that, if recovered, transforms the deathbed of an unbeliever from the place where hope dies into the place where Christ goes to find the lost. That doctrine is the descent of Christ to the dead. Chapter 25 develops the descent at length, both as a piece of Apostles’ Creed orthodoxy and as the empirical correlate of the NDE encounter pattern; I will not repeat that work here.⁵ But I want to remind the reader of what the descent doctrine, taken seriously, means for the question we are now asking.

Between His death and resurrection, Christ went somewhere. Whatever else the descent texts mean — 1 Peter 3:18–4:6, Ephesians 4:8–10, the “He descended” clause of the Apostles’ Creed, the patristic harrowing-of-hell tradition — they mean that Christ’s ministry did not stop at the moment when His body became a corpse. He went to the dead. He preached. And the early church, reading those texts in Greek and reading them with the patristic fathers as their teachers, generally took for granted that what Christ did once for the Old Testament saints He continues, in some real sense, to do for the dead now. Clement of Alexandria put the matter directly: the gospel is preached to the dead because God’s love is just, and a just God offers the same opportunity to those who never heard in life as to those who did.⁶ Origen reasoned similarly. So did Gregory of Nyssa. So did, in different ways, a long catena of Eastern fathers whose theology of the dying soul has never quite been domesticated by the Augustinian narrowing that came to dominate the Latin West.⁷

Jeffrey Trumbower’s indispensable historical study Rescue for the Dead documents what amounts to a constant minority strand within the early church: the conviction that those who died without hearing the gospel, or having heard it could not understand it, or having understood it could not respond to it for reasons that are theologically interesting, are not therefore beyond the reach of Christ.⁸ Trumbower documents prayers offered for the pagan dead. He documents Christian beliefs that the apostles, after their martyrdoms, continued to evangelize in the underworld. He documents the early Christian ritual of baptism for the dead in 1 Corinthians 15:29 — a passage Paul nowhere condemns and on which he builds an argument for resurrection. None of this proves the modern doctrine of postmortem opportunity. But it shows that the question this chapter is asking is not a recent invention. It is one of the oldest questions in the church, and the church has been answering it — not always with one voice, but never with the harsh restrictivist voice alone — for two thousand years.

What I want to argue is that this older, more hopeful strand of the tradition is biblically defensible and pastorally indispensable, and that the NDE evidence developed in this book provides a striking phenomenological confirmation of what the older strand has always claimed: that Christ Himself, in person, meets the dying soul.

The Contemporary Case for Postmortem Opportunity

The most careful contemporary articulation of postmortem opportunity is James Beilby’s Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death, published in 2021 by IVP Academic. Beilby is a conservative evangelical philosopher and theologian at Bethel University. His book is not a brief for universalism. It is not a brief for inclusivism in the strong sense. It is a brief for the more limited claim that those who did not have a genuine opportunity to receive Christ in this life will be given a genuine opportunity in the next.⁹

Beilby’s argument runs roughly as follows. God desires the salvation of all people (1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9). Salvation requires a personal, conscious response to Christ. There are vast numbers of people — the unevangelized, the pseudoevangelized, those who died as infants, those whose mental capacities never permitted explicit faith, those whose only exposure to the gospel was so distorted that what they rejected was not actually the gospel — who never had a genuine opportunity to respond. If God genuinely desires the salvation of these people, and if salvation requires a genuine opportunity, and if the only places that opportunity can occur are this life and the next, then it follows that for those who never had it in this life, God will provide it in the next. The argument is abductive, not deductive: Beilby claims that PO is the best explanation of the data, not that it can be proven syllogistically.¹⁰

Beilby is careful about what PO does and does not entail. It does not entail universalism. The opportunity is real, but the response is not coerced; some may refuse. It does not entail inclusivism in the sense that all roads lead to God; the opportunity is the opportunity to respond to Christ, not to confirm one’s allegiance to whatever religion one happened to inherit. It does not entail that every dying person will use the opportunity well; the encounter at death is the occasion for response, but the response is genuinely theirs. And it does not entail that the deathbed of a lifelong unbeliever is irrelevant; what one has done with this life shapes who one is at the moment of the encounter, even if it does not finally determine what happens at the encounter itself.¹¹

Stephen Jonathan’s Grace Beyond the Grave reaches similar conclusions from a different starting point. Jonathan’s book is the published version of his University of Wales (Bangor) doctoral dissertation, written from inside Pentecostal-evangelical pastoral ministry. The book is more pastoral and less philosophical than Beilby’s, and it spends a long chapter (Chapter 5) on the practical implications of PO — whether it undermines evangelism, how it transforms funeral ministry, how it changes pastoral care of the bereaved.¹² Jonathan’s framework, like Beilby’s, is conservative and biblically grounded. He affirms the necessity of explicit faith in Christ. He affirms the seriousness of judgment. He simply denies that biological death is the final point at which the offer of faith may be extended.

Behind both Beilby and Jonathan stands a longer twentieth-century evangelical conversation. Clark Pinnock’s A Wideness in God’s Mercy (1992) opened the modern evangelical engagement with inclusivism, the idea that the saving work of Christ extends to people who never explicitly heard His name in this life. Pinnock affirmed Christological exclusivity (salvation is through Christ alone) while denying epistemological exclusivity (you must consciously know His name in this life to be saved by Him).¹³ John Sanders, in No Other Name (1992), surveyed the evangelical options for the destiny of the unevangelized and gave PO a serious hearing.¹⁴ Gabriel Fackre developed the doctrine of “divine perseverance”: God continues to pursue the lost across the boundary of death because God Himself is not bounded by death.¹⁵ Stephen Davis, Donald Bloesch, George Beasley-Murray, and others raised similar possibilities. None of these scholars was a universalist. All of them were conservative evangelicals who had read 1 Peter 3:18–19 and 4:6 carefully and had concluded that the standard restrictivist reading of those texts had domesticated Peter past the point of credibility.

The Different Theological Versions of the Hope

It will help, before going further, to distinguish the various positions that fall under the broad heading of “hopeful eschatology.” They are not the same.

The most modest is inclusivism in Pinnock’s sense: the saving work of Christ may apply to those who never knew His name. The opportunity to respond is in this life, but the response need not be the explicit confession of Jesus as Lord. Some people, even in this life, are responding to Christ without knowing it. This is roughly the position of the Roman Catholic Vatican II teaching on the unevangelized. It does not require postmortem opportunity. It simply expands the bounds of what counts as a saving response in this life.¹⁶

The next position is postmortem opportunity proper, the Beilby/Jonathan/Fackre position. The opportunity to respond extends across the boundary of death for those who did not have it in life. Those who finally refuse the opportunity, after a genuine encounter with Christ in His own person, will face whatever the appropriate destiny is for those who have refused. PO is consistent with several different views of what that destiny is.

The third position, conditional immortality (CI), holds that those who finally and irrevocably refuse Christ will eventually cease to exist. The Lake of Fire, on this reading, is not a place of eternal torment but the final destruction of the unredeemed. CI has a long history within evangelicalism (John Stott, Edward Fudge, Philip Hughes, John Wenham, the broader Rethinking Hell movement) and is increasingly the consensus position among careful biblical scholars who have done the lexical work on the relevant texts.¹⁷ Conditional immortality combined with postmortem opportunity (CI + PO) is the author’s primary position. It holds that the offer of Christ remains open across the boundary of death; that those who have not had a genuine opportunity in life will have one at or after death; that some, having had the genuine opportunity, will refuse; and that those who finally refuse will eventually be destroyed rather than tormented eternally.

The fourth position is conservative biblical universalism (UR), associated in the contemporary evangelical conversation most prominently with Thomas Talbott, Gregory MacDonald (Robin Parry), Andrew Hronich, and increasingly David Bentley Hart.¹⁸ UR holds that the love of God will eventually prove irresistible to every created person and that all will, in the end, freely embrace Christ. UR is not the claim that there is no judgment; it is the claim that judgment is purifying rather than punitive, finite rather than endless. The Lake of Fire is the fire of the divine love itself, and what the fire consumes is the evil in the person, leaving the person eventually whole. The author of this book holds CI + PO as his primary position while remaining genuinely open to UR. The two positions agree about a great deal — including the rejection of eternal conscious torment and the affirmation of postmortem opportunity. They differ on the question of whether the love of God will, in the end, succeed with everyone.

For the deathbed of an unbeliever, the practical difference between CI + PO and UR is smaller than it might appear. Both positions hold that the dying unbeliever has not yet had their final encounter with Christ. Both positions hold that what occurs at the threshold of death is the offer of Christ Himself in unmediated love. Both positions hold that the response to that offer is genuinely the response of the dying person, free from the distortions and obstructions of embodied life. The difference is in the long-run prediction about the cumulative response. The CI + PO advocate expects that some will refuse and will eventually be destroyed; the UR advocate expects that even refusal is finite and that the divine love will eventually win all. At the moment of the deathbed, however, both positions have the same pastoral content: Christ is meeting your loved one. The encounter is real. The opportunity is genuine. We do not know the outcome, but we know who is conducting the encounter, and we know He loves your loved one more than you do.

What the NDE Evidence Adds

The earlier chapters of this book have laid out, at considerable length, the empirical case for the conscious survival of personal identity through the early stages of biological death. Substance dualism is empirically supported by the cumulative case across the dissertation’s 5,278-case dataset (Chapter 14) and by the failure of every available physicalist alternative (Chapter 17). The conscious intermediate state is empirically supported (Chapter 24). The encounter with the being of light is, on the author’s reading, the encounter with Christ — the empirical correlate of the patristic descent doctrine (Chapter 23 and Chapter 25). The phenomenology of the encounter is consistent across cultures, across belief systems, and across the prior religiosity of the experiencer (Chapter 29). The encounter happens to atheists, to Hindus, to Buddhists, to lapsed Catholics, to lifelong Methodists, to ex-Christians who walked out at fourteen, and to people who never thought about religion at all. It does not seem to be selective on the basis of who deserves it.

What the NDE evidence adds to the theological case for PO is this: it provides a phenomenological window into what the threshold encounter looks like from the inside. The patristic tradition told us, on the basis of biblical exegesis and theological reasoning, that Christ goes to the dead. The NDE evidence shows us what that going-to-the-dead seems to feel like to the dying person. It is the encounter with a personal presence who knows the experiencer completely and loves the experiencer without reservation. It is the experience of being seen, all the way through, and not condemned. It is the experience of being summoned to a moral self-reckoning — the life review — in which one’s own actions are felt from the inside of those one acted upon, and yet within a context of love rather than wrath.¹⁹ It is, again and again, in case after case, in the language of NDErs from radically different backgrounds, the experience of being met by a Person.

And what the NDE evidence shows about the religious diversity of those who report this encounter is, for our purposes here, the crucial point. The encounter does not check the experiencer’s church attendance record at the door. The atheist physicist who flatlines on the surgical table reports the same core phenomenology as the Pentecostal grandmother who arrests on the way to the bathroom. The young soldier who has not been to church since his confirmation has the same encounter as the missionary in his eighties. The dissertation’s 5,278-case analysis found that NDEs occur across the full range of religious and irreligious backgrounds with no statistically significant difference in the core phenomenology of the encounter, though significant differences in the subsequent interpretation.²⁰ This is what we would expect if the patristic descent doctrine is correct. It is what we would not expect if strict restrictivism is correct.

The Encounter at the Threshold and the Final Decision

The mid-twentieth-century Hungarian Catholic theologian Ladislaus Boros developed a framework that I find theologically compelling and that Chapter 26 develops in detail: the “final decision hypothesis.” Boros’s thesis, in The Mystery of Death (1962), was that the moment of death is precisely the moment when, for the first time in the soul’s entire embodied existence, the soul becomes free from the distortions, evasions, distractions, and self-deceptions of bodily life and stands before God in unmediated personal encounter. The decision the soul has been making, half-consciously, by the long arc of its embodied choices — do I want God or do I not — comes finally into the open. The soul sees what it has been doing. The soul sees who has been on the other side of those choices. And the soul, for the first time fully integrated, fully present, fully responsible, makes the final decision in light of the full reality of what is at stake.²²

I do not think Boros’s hypothesis can be proven from Scripture. But I think it makes excellent theological sense of the pastoral problem we are wrestling with in this chapter. It explains why the NDE evidence repeatedly shows people of every background having an encounter that calls forth a genuine moral and spiritual response. It explains why people who in life were apparently hostile to Christ — Howard Storm being the most famous example — can in extremity find themselves choosing Christ. It explains why we should not make confident eschatological claims about the dying unbeliever based on the embodied life that we observed from outside. The embodied life is not the whole life. The embodied life is the soul making its way toward God or away from God under conditions in which the choice is constantly clouded by physical pain, neurochemical noise, social pressure, intellectual mistakes, woundedness from the abuses inflicted by the church itself, and the simple inability to see clearly what one is choosing. The threshold encounter, on Boros’s account, lifts those clouds. What was unclear becomes clear. What was diffuse becomes focused. The choice is finally a choice, and the soul finally chooses.

If Boros is right, then Marie’s father — the boy whose brother drowned in 1968, whose faith was broken by an event he never recovered from, whose subsequent life of unbelief was the long aftermath of an unhealed nineteen-year-old’s grief — will, at the moment of his actual death, finally encounter the Christ who has been pursuing him for fifty-six years. He will see what he could not see in life. He will choose what he could not see clearly enough to choose in life. We do not know what he will choose. But we know who is doing the asking, and we know that the asking is being done in fullness rather than in fragment, and we know that what Marie’s father is being offered is not a club membership but the full, unmediated love of Jesus Christ for him personally.

This is, I want to say plainly, hope. It is not certainty. It is not the assurance that every unbeliever will be saved. It is not the guarantee that Marie’s father will use the threshold encounter well. But it is hope of the kind the Christian tradition has carried in its bones for two thousand years: hope that the love of God is wider, deeper, longer-lasting, and more relentlessly faithful than the strict-restrictivist framework allows.

The Same Encounter, Different Responses

One feature of the NDE record that needs more theological attention than it usually receives is the variability of response within a phenomenologically consistent encounter. Most NDErs report a peaceful encounter. A minority — somewhere between 15 and 23 percent in the major studies — report distressing or hellish experiences.²³ Bruce Greyson and Nancy Bush, in their classic 1992 typology, identified three subtypes of distressing NDEs: the “inverse” type (the same phenomenology as a peaceful NDE but interpreted by the experiencer as terrifying); the “void” type (a sense of nothingness or eternal abandonment); and the “hellish” type (explicit imagery of demons, flames, torment). Chapter 28 develops the distressing-NDE evidence at length; here I want to draw out one feature of it that is directly relevant to the deathbed of an unbeliever.

The Greyson-Bush “inverse” type is theologically illuminating. It suggests that the same objective encounter can be experienced very differently depending on the soul’s preparation, disposition, or response. R. Zachary Manis, in Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God (Oxford, 2019), has developed what he calls the “divine presence model” of hell: hell is not a separate place where God is absent but the experience of God’s omnipresent love by a soul that refuses to receive it.²⁴ Manis draws on the Eastern Orthodox theological tradition, particularly the patristic insight that “our God is a consuming fire” (Heb 12:29). The same fire that warms is the fire that burns; what determines the experience is the relationship of the experiencing subject to the fire. The author of this book affirms Manis’s phenomenological insight without endorsing his eternal-conscious-torment framework. The divine presence model is, in fact, equally compatible with CI, with PO, and with UR.

What this means for the deathbed of an unbeliever is that we should not be surprised if the threshold encounter is sometimes initially distressing for the soul who has spent a lifetime turned away from God. Howard Storm’s pattern — hellish onset, calling out to Christ, deliverance into a peaceful encounter, conversion — is theologically intelligible on the divine presence model. The hellishness was not punitive. It was the soul’s own posture toward the loving presence becoming finally visible to itself. The deliverance was not the substitution of one being for another but the soul’s willingness, in extremity, to receive what had been offered all along. If this is what is happening in some distressing NDEs — and we cannot prove it, but it makes good theological sense of the data — then we have additional reason to hope that even a deathbed that begins in distress can end in homecoming.

The Anti-Christian Dying Person

I want to address, before moving to objections, the hardest case the chapter has to face: the dying person who was not merely indifferent to Christ but actively, deliberately, articulately hostile to Him. The atheist apologist who spent a career arguing that religion is the opiate of the masses. The ex-pastor who left the church in disgust at twenty-five and spent the next forty years writing essays explaining why. The bitterly betrayed survivor of clerical abuse who told her family on her seventieth birthday that if there was a God she would spit in His face. These cases are real. I have known several. The strict-restrictivist framework would say that the threshold encounter for such a person is not an opportunity but a final ratification of their refusal — that they have so set their will against God that the encounter, when it comes, will be precisely the moment when their refusal becomes irrevocable.

The CI + PO position takes the strict-restrictivist concern seriously without sharing its conclusion. The will is real. Refusal is possible. There may indeed be souls who, at the threshold, persist in refusing Christ. The CI position holds that those souls will eventually cease to exist; the UR position holds that even their refusal is finite. But the position the author defends does not concede the strict-restrictivist’s confident identification of who those persisting refusers are. The atheist apologist may have spent forty years arguing against a god he constructed in his head out of childhood trauma, the worst examples of religious hypocrisy he encountered, and a series of theological arguments that sounded much weaker when he was sixty than they had when he was twenty-six. What such a person has been refusing all his life may not be Christ at all. It may be a caricature, a wound, a failure of the church to show him anything different. At the threshold encounter, that caricature falls away. He is not asked to revise his book. He is asked, by the Christ he has never actually met, whether he wants to come home.

How will he answer? I do not know. I do not believe Scripture warrants the confidence that he will say yes, and I do not believe Scripture warrants the confidence that he will say no. What I believe Scripture warrants is hope — sober, defensible, theologically careful hope — that the Christ who descended for the dead has not stopped descending, that His pursuit of His lost ones is more relentless than their resistance, and that the embodied refusals of life are not necessarily the same thing as the unembodied refusal of the threshold. I will hope for that man. I will pray for him. I will not, before God, write him off.

The Strongest Objections

I have known intelligent and sincere Christians who hear what I have said in the previous section and respond with concerns that need careful answers. The concerns are not unreasonable. They have to be addressed if the position I am defending is to be more than a sentimental rearrangement of the gospel.

Objection One: This Will Kill Evangelism

The first objection is the oldest and the most often raised: if the dying unbeliever has another opportunity beyond the grave, why bother witnessing in this life? Why not let them have their fun now and trust that Christ will sort it out later? The Evangelical Alliance’s 2000 report The Nature of Hell, while affirming conditional immortality, refused to affirm any version of postmortem opportunity precisely on this ground: the doctrine, the report’s authors argued, runs the risk of delegating back to God a responsibility He has assigned to us.²⁵

I want to make four responses.

The first is historical. The descent doctrine has been part of the church’s confession for two thousand years. The Apostles’ Creed has affirmed it since at least the fourth century. The Eastern Orthodox liturgies celebrate it every Holy Saturday. The Lutheran and Anglican traditions have preserved it. None of those traditions has been characterized by a collapse of mission. The greatest period of evangelical missionary expansion — roughly 1750 to 1950 — took place in churches that confessed the descent without difficulty. If postmortem encounter with Christ kills evangelism, the descent doctrine has had two thousand years to do its damage, and the damage has not happened. The contemporary missionary crisis is not caused by hopeful eschatology. It is caused by other things: cultural disestablishment, the credibility costs of strict eternal-conscious-torment doctrine in a society that no longer accepts retributive infinity, the failures of fear-based evangelism, the mismatch between the gospel and the political-cultural identity of contemporary American evangelicalism, and the broader collapse of Christendom in the post-1960s West.²⁶ Blaming PO for those problems is a category mistake.

The second response is theological. The motivation for evangelism in the New Testament is not, at root, the rescue of souls from torment. It is the announcement of good news. Paul’s “woe is me if I do not preach the gospel” (1 Cor 9:16) is the declaration of someone who has met Christ and cannot stop introducing other people to Him. It is the joy of the lover, not the desperation of the firefighter. Stephen Jonathan, drawing on Michael Green’s analysis of early Christian missionary motivation, observes that the early Christians shared the gospel because they had fallen in love with the Lover, not because they had calculated probabilities about universalism, annihilation, or unending torment.²⁷ The motivation Paul names again and again is the love of Christ that constrains us (2 Cor 5:14), not the fear of hell that pursues us. To make fear of hell the indispensable engine of evangelism is to make evangelism depend on a doctrinal scheme that may not, in the end, be biblical — and to risk the gospel collapsing if the scheme collapses.

The third response is empirical. PO does not say everyone is saved. It says everyone gets a genuine opportunity. Some refuse. The strict-particularist who fears that PO will produce universalism by the back door has misunderstood the position. The Beilby version of PO, which is the most carefully argued contemporary version, explicitly affirms that not all will respond well to the postmortem encounter, and that some will face the appropriate consequence of their final refusal.²⁸ If PO is true, evangelism still matters, and matters profoundly. People who come to Christ in this life enjoy fellowship with Him for the duration of their embodied lives, are sanctified by the Spirit, are formed by the church, are equipped to do the works God has prepared for them, and arrive at the threshold encounter as people who already know who is meeting them. People who come to Christ only at the threshold encounter, if they come at all, miss all of that. The evangelist’s vocation, on the PO view, is not less urgent. It is differently framed. The urgency is the urgency of love rather than the urgency of fear.

The fourth response is pastoral. I have observed, over many years of ministry, that fear-based evangelism produces fragile converts and burned-out evangelists. Christians who come to faith because they are terrified of hell often spend the next twenty years either spreading their fear to others (with diminishing returns) or quietly suspecting that their faith is a hostage of their anxiety and trying to find a way out. Christians who come to faith because they have met Christ and want their friends to meet Him too tend to produce healthier evangelism, healthier churches, and healthier converts. The contemporary evangelical missions movement increasingly recognizes this. The shift from fear-driven to love-driven motivation is not the betrayal of evangelism. It may be its rescue.

Objection Two: This Underestimates the Hardness of Sin

The second objection is more sophisticated and harder to answer. It runs roughly as follows. Sinful human beings are not in a position to receive Christ when they meet Him at the threshold. The cumulative weight of a lifetime of refusal has hardened them past the point of response. The threshold encounter, on this objection, is not a fresh opportunity. It is the moment when the soul’s long-cultivated bent against God becomes finally visible to itself, and the soul, seeing itself, refuses to be other than what it has made itself. C. S. Lewis put the version of this argument most memorably in The Great Divorce: the doors of hell are locked from the inside.³⁰

I take this seriously. Sin does harden. A lifetime of saying no to God produces a soul more disposed to say no than a soul that has been saying yes. The threshold encounter is not a magic restart in which the lifetime is erased. The soul brings to the encounter what it has made of itself.

But two things have to be said in response. The first is that the doors of hell may be locked from the inside, but Christ has the key. He has descended into hell. He has gone to the dead. He has met the soul at its lowest. To insist that the soul’s freedom is so hard that even Christ’s direct, personal, unmediated love cannot reach it is to say something stronger about the soul’s freedom than the New Testament says. Paul’s own conversion story is the conversion of someone who had spent his career persecuting the church and approving the death of Christians. By any reckoning, Paul was hardened. And yet, on a road outside Damascus, the encounter with the risen Christ broke through the hardness in a moment. If that can happen to Paul on a Tuesday afternoon outside Damascus, it can happen to Marie’s father at four in the morning in a county hospital.

The second response is that the “hardness” objection assumes a continuous account of moral character that does not survive the testimony of the deathbed itself. Many people who have spent fifty years saying no to God spend their last weeks doing something different. They review their lives. They reconsider. They soften. The dying often become more open than they were when healthy. Whether this is the work of the Spirit, the natural disposition of the soul under the imminence of death, or the partial lifting of the embodied distortions Boros described, it is real. The dying are sometimes radically more receptive than they were in robust life. Christian hospice chaplains have been documenting this for fifty years. The deathbed is not, as a rule, the moment when the heart is hardest. It is sometimes the moment when, for the first time in a long while, the heart is soft enough to be addressed.³¹

Objection Three: Pastoral Guilt and the Anxious Witness

The third concern is pastoral rather than theological, and it has to be addressed because it has shaped the spiritual lives of so many evangelicals: the anxiety that one’s own failure to witness is what condemned a loved one. I have heard a hundred versions of this. The man who watched his father die in 1989 and never had the courage to say the name of Jesus and now wakes up at three in the morning replaying the room. The woman whose mother died of a heart attack with no warning and who tortures herself over the conversation she did not have on Mother’s Day. The pastor whose unbelieving brother committed suicide and who has spent twenty years asking what he could have said.

This guilt is, in one sense, the appropriate response to the strict-restrictivist framework. If the framework is true, the failure to witness genuinely is a horror, and the survivor’s guilt is rationally proportional to the magnitude of what was lost. The framework forces this guilt onto its adherents. It is, I think, one of the deepest pastoral cruelties of strict restrictivism: the framework converts every grieving Christian with an unbelieving loved one into a defendant in a trial of their own conscience.

The CI + PO framework lifts that defendant’s charge. It does not say the witness did not matter. It says the witness was not the soul’s only opportunity. Christ Himself is the evangelist at the threshold. Our witness is the witness of friends — real, important, sometimes the means of grace by which someone is brought to Christ in this life — but the soul’s eternal destiny is not finally hostage to whether we found the right words at the right moment. We are not, before God, the agents of our loved ones’ salvation. Christ is. We are His witnesses. The salvation is His.

I have used this distinction to good pastoral effect. I have asked the survivor: Do you believe Christ loves your father more than you do? The survivor always says yes. I have asked: Do you believe Christ would have given anything to bring your father home? The survivor always says yes. I have asked: Do you believe that biological death — a process that took place over forty minutes in a hospital room — was the only window in which Christ could approach your father? Here the survivor often hesitates. The hesitation is the opening for a different framework. The framework I have offered, with whatever skill I had at the time, is the framework I am defending in this chapter. It does not erase the survivor’s grief. It does erase the survivor’s self-accusation. It restores the survivor to the role of mourner rather than defendant. That has been, in my experience, an enormous pastoral mercy.

Objection Four: This Cannot Be Comfortable for the Deathbed

A fourth concern, sometimes raised in conservative circles, is that PO undermines the urgency of deathbed evangelism. If the dying person will have another opportunity, why press them now? Why even mention the gospel in the room? Why disturb their peace with theological intrusions when Christ is going to handle it anyway?

This objection misunderstands what PO claims and what deathbed ministry is for. The opportunity at the threshold is the opportunity to encounter Christ in fullness. But the opportunity in this life is the opportunity to begin the relationship now, to enjoy it for whatever time remains, to be sanctified by the Spirit, to die into the arms of someone the soul already knows. PO does not make this-life evangelism unnecessary; it makes it not the last word. The deathbed Christian witness, on PO, is not the desperate snatching of a brand from the burning. It is the offer of a friend — let me introduce you now to the one who is going to meet you in a few hours; you will know His face when He arrives. That is, if anything, a more pastorally tender frame for deathbed witness than the strict-restrictivist alternative, which has often produced the truly grotesque scenes of weeping evangelists demanding that incoherent dying patients pray a sinner’s prayer they cannot follow and could not consent to in any meaningful sense.

What We Can Say and What We Cannot

It is time to be careful about what this chapter has and has not established.

What I think the case as developed here does establish, with reasonable confidence, is the following. The strict-restrictivist framework — the view that biological death is the absolute final terminus of God’s saving offer, that anyone who dies without explicit conscious faith in Christ in this life passes immediately into eternal conscious torment, and that nothing further can be done for the dead — is not the only Christian option, is not the oldest Christian option, and is not the only or even the most natural reading of the relevant biblical texts. A serious case can be made, from Scripture, the early church tradition, the contemporary evangelical theological literature, and (I have argued) the NDE evidence, that Christ’s saving work extends to the dying soul at the threshold of death and offers a genuine encounter that can be received in faith.

What this established case does not tell us is who, in particular, will respond well to the threshold encounter. The encounter is universally offered, on the framework I have defended; the response is genuinely the soul’s own. I do not know how Marie’s father will respond. Neither does Marie. Neither, more pointedly, does the strict restrictivist who is so confident that he will go to hell. The honest Christian position toward any individual death is humility. We do not have access to the threshold encounter. We have not seen who Christ is to the dying soul or what the soul does with what it sees. We can hope. We can pray. We must not claim to know.

This places the chapter’s position somewhere between two confident extremes. The strict-restrictivist confidently affirms that the dying unbeliever is damned. The strong universalist confidently affirms that the dying unbeliever is saved. The CI + PO position, holding open both possibilities while inclining toward hope, is properly described as a position of theological humility before the threshold. We do not know. We trust the One who does. We pray that He is, as we believe Him to be, more merciful than our worst fears and more just than our cheapest comforts.

Praying for the Dead

I want to address, here, the question of what the bereaved should pray for after the death of an unbelieving loved one. The Roman Catholic tradition has a long history of praying for the dead. The Eastern Orthodox tradition prays for the departed at every liturgy. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer includes prayers for the dead. The Reformed tradition, following the Reformation polemic against the medieval indulgence economy, generally rejected such prayers. Many evangelical Christians today inherit the Reformed reflex and feel that praying for the dead is theologically inappropriate or even idolatrous.³²

I think this reflex is wrong. Praying for the dead is not the same as praying that they earn their way to heaven by accumulating posthumous merit they did not have at death. Praying for the dead is asking God, who loves them more than we do, to do for them whatever it is good to do for them. If the dead are conscious in the intermediate state, as the empirical evidence and the historic tradition both attest, then they are still capable of being prayed for. They are still loved. They are still pursued by Christ. We do not know what God will do with our prayers for them, any more than we know what God does with our prayers for the living. But to pray for them is not idolatry. It is love. The Reformed tradition’s suspicion of prayers for the dead was a polemic against a specific medieval economy of indulgences and merit, not against the practice of remembering the dead before God. We can recover the practice without recovering the economy.

Marie, a few weeks after her father’s death, asked me whether she could pray for him. I told her yes. I told her that her prayers were not magic and that she could not pray her father into heaven against his will, but that she could pray for him as she had prayed for him while he was alive — that he would meet Christ, that he would know himself loved, that he would say yes when the offer came. The CI position holds that some refuse and are eventually destroyed; the UR position holds that all eventually accept; both positions hold that the encounter is a personal encounter with personal stakes, and that God values our prayers as part of the larger texture of love that surrounds the dying. I told Marie to pray. She prays. She prays still.

The Funeral and the Question of False Comfort

One thing the framework I am defending must not become is a license for false comfort. I do not believe the bereaved should be told, “I am sure your father is in heaven.” We are not sure. The framework does not warrant that confidence. What we can say is this: Christ has met your father. The encounter was real. The opportunity was genuine. We do not know what your father did with the opportunity, but we know who was offering it and we know how He loves your father. That is a substantial comfort. It is not the maximal comfort of false-assurance. It is honest comfort. It is the comfort that Scripture warrants.

The pastor at the funeral of an unbeliever has, on the framework I am defending, a meaningful word to say. The word is not “your loved one is in heaven.” The word is not “your loved one is in hell.” The word is “Christ met your loved one. We do not know what happened in that encounter. But we know who was conducting it. And we know that Christ does not abandon the lost. We hold our hope in Him.” That word, said honestly and without manipulation, is in my experience pastorally healing in a way that the older confident verdicts have rarely been.

The ground of comfort is not our knowledge of the deceased’s eternal destiny. The ground of comfort is our knowledge of Christ. We commit the deceased into the hands of the One who loves them. We trust the One into whose hands we commit them. That is what the historic Christian funeral has always done at its best. The committal phrase “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection from the dead” can be said over the body of an unbeliever without dishonesty. The hope is in the Resurrection, which is Christ’s, and in the One whose Resurrection it is, who has descended for the dead and risen for the living and meets every soul at the threshold. That hope is sure. The deceased’s personal destiny we leave, properly, to God.³³

The Limits of What NDE Evidence Can Settle

It is worth saying clearly what the NDE evidence does and does not settle in relation to this chapter’s pastoral claims. The NDE evidence supports the empirical case for substance dualism and for the conscious survival of the early phases of biological death. It does not settle the eschatological questions of CI versus UR versus ECT. It does not tell us, with finality, what the threshold encounter accomplishes for any individual soul. It does not tell us how many of the people who report distressing NDEs are experiencing hellish phenomenology that is purifying versus phenomenology that is finally damning. It does not, by itself, prove postmortem opportunity.

What the NDE evidence does is provide phenomenological data that is striking compatible with the framework this chapter has defended. The encounter at the threshold of death is universally offered, regardless of the experiencer’s prior beliefs. The encounter is personal, knowing, and loving. The encounter calls for a response from the experiencer. The encounter is sometimes initially distressing for those whose lives have been turned away from God, and the distress can sometimes be resolved by the soul’s response. None of this proves PO. All of it is what we would expect to find if PO were true.³⁴

The Christian theologian who finds this chapter’s pastoral framework congenial is not asked to wager on NDE phenomenology. The framework stands or falls on its biblical, historical, and theological merits. The NDE evidence is corroboration, not foundation. The foundation is the descent of Christ, the universal salvific will of God, the love of God for every soul He has made, and the unwillingness of the early church and of careful contemporary evangelicals to read 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 in the strained ways the strict-restrictivist tradition has required. The NDE evidence is the empirical confirmation of what the descent doctrine has always taught. It is the threshold seen, partially, from the inside.

Why This Matters: The Pastoral Horizon

I have been writing about Marie because Marie is real, and because most Christians in the contemporary West have a Marie in their lives somewhere. The unbelieving father. The lapsed sister. The atheist husband. The agnostic college roommate who became the agnostic insurance executive who became the agnostic late-stage cancer patient. The numbers in the developed West are not what they were in 1955. Roughly one-third of American adults now identify as religiously unaffiliated.³⁵ A substantial fraction of evangelical families have at least one prominent member who has walked away from the faith. The pastoral question of this chapter is not a marginal one. It is a question evangelical pastoral practice will be answering, again and again, for the rest of our lifetimes.

What I want pastors and Christians to take away from this chapter is not a new doctrine. The doctrine is old. The descent is old. The hope is old. The early fathers held it. The Eastern Orthodox liturgies still confess it. The Apostles’ Creed still recites it. What I want pastors and Christians to take away is permission to say what some of us have always wanted to say at the bedsides and in the funeral homes: Christ went to the dead. Christ goes to the dying. The deathbed of an unbeliever is not the place where hope ends. It is the place where Christ has come to find the lost.

That changes how we sit at the bedside. We can sit there with hope rather than with horror. We can speak to the dying person of love rather than reading them an emergency tract they cannot follow. We can pray with them, even if they cannot pray with us, knowing that the prayer enters the room where Christ is meeting them. We can talk with them about the people they have loved who have gone before, about the long arc of their lives, about the things they have wanted, about the ways they have been hurt, and we can let those conversations be what they are without forcing them to terminate in a sinner’s prayer the dying person is in no condition to mean. We can love them. We can be present. We can trust.

And it changes how we sit with the bereaved. We do not have to lie. We do not have to traffic in pious evasions. We do not have to manufacture a confidence we do not have. We can say, simply: Christ met your father. The encounter was real. We do not know what happened in it. But we know who Christ is. And we know that Christ does not abandon the souls He has gone all that way to find. That is the truth. It is sufficient. It allows the bereaved to grieve without also defending themselves against an indictment they have been carrying since before the funeral.

And it changes, finally, how we live in our own embodied lives toward our own embodied deaths. The Christian who hopes that the encounter at the threshold is real for the unbelievers we love is also the Christian who hopes the encounter is real for ourselves. We will be at that threshold one day. The same Christ who went to find Marie’s father will come to find us. He will know us all the way through. He will love us anyway. He will offer us, in the unmediated reality the embodied life cannot quite manage, the chance to come home. Chapter 32 developed what dying well looks like for the believer who already knows His face. The previous chapter developed what it means to companion the dying with NDE-informed pastoral wisdom. This chapter has developed what hope looks like at the deathbed of someone whose face Christ has not yet shown them. The conclusion of the book, which follows in Chapter 35, will pull these threads together.

Marie’s father died at 4:17 a.m. on the Saturday after I first met her. He had not regained speech. The room had been quiet for two days. The hospice nurse who was with him at the end said his face changed in the last few minutes — he opened his eyes once, and the nurse said, “He looked at something. Not at me. Past me.” That report is, of course, not evidence of anything in the strict sense. It is a hospice nurse’s impression of a dying man’s last moments. I do not want to make too much of it. But Marie has held that report in her hands ever since. She believes her father saw something. She does not know what. She does not claim to know what. But she has, in the framework I have offered her, a place to put what the nurse said. The framework does not require her to know that her father is in heaven. It requires only that she trust the Christ who came to meet him. That trust she has. That trust, I believe, is well placed.

The deathbed of an unbeliever is not the place where hope dies. It is the place where Christ comes to find the lost. We are witnesses, not judges. We are companions, not saviors. We pray, we love, we trust, and we let the One whose work it is do the work that is His. The hope is in Him. The hope holds.