Chapter 28

The Best Possible Approach

Optimal Grace, Middle Knowledge, and the Encounter God Knew Would Work

Full-Length Edition

Frank is seventy-eight years old, and his heart is giving out.

He lies in a hospital bed with the monitors beeping their tired rhythm. His daughter Sarah sits beside him. She has been there for hours. She has been praying for her father for thirty years.

Frank is not a cruel man. But he is hard. He held grudges the way some men hold property. When his wife was dying and asked whether he had ever once prayed, he told her the truth: no, and he was not about to start. He has lived seventy-eight years without God, and he plans to die the same way.

Sarah watches the monitors. She watches his chest rise and fall. And the question she cannot stop asking is the one this whole chapter tries to answer: Was there ever really a chance for him? Did God do everything God could do?

This chapter says yes. And it says yes by bringing three streams together into one river.

The first stream is the work of the philosopher Jerry Walls, who gave us the idea of optimal grace: the claim that a perfectly loving God would offer each person the best possible appeal, tailored to that particular heart. The second stream is this book's moment-of-death thesis: the claim that every dying person meets the risen Christ at the threshold between life and death. The third stream is a system called Molinism, developed by Timothy Stratton on the foundation laid by the sixteenth-century Spanish priest Luis de Molina and the philosopher William Lane Craig. Molinism answers the question of how God knows which appeal would work for which soul.

Walls supplies the motive: what a loving God would do. The moment-of-death encounter supplies the mechanism: where and how the appeal lands. Stratton's Molinism supplies the architecture: how God knows what the best appeal is. Take away any one of the three, and the picture is incomplete. Together, they tell a single story. The encounter is not God's backup plan. It is, for many people, the single best approach God knew would work.

We will not dodge the hard parts. There is a sad possibility built into this model, and we will look at it honestly. But first, the good news. And the good news is very, very good.

A word about how this chapter is built. We begin with Walls's optimal grace: what a loving God would do. Then we locate the offer at the threshold of death: where it lands. Then we introduce Molinism: how God knows what the best appeal is. After that, we test the idea against Scripture, walk through a worked example at Frank's bedside, face the hard edge honestly, lay the strongest opposing argument on the table, and close with the pastoral heart of the matter. The structure follows the logic. One stream leads to the next.

What a Loving God Would Do: Jerry Walls and Optimal Grace

Start with what we know about God. The Bible says God desires all people to be saved (1 Tim 2:4). It says God is not willing that any should perish (2 Pet 3:9). It says God is love (1 John 4:8). These are not footnotes in the story of God. They are the headline.

If God truly loves every person, then God would not offer the gospel the way a company offers a coupon. He would not broadcast a generic message and shrug at whoever missed it. A God who knows each heart, who knows each wound and each wall, would present the gospel to each person in the way most likely to win a free "yes."

The philosopher Jerry Walls gave this idea its name. In his 1992 book Hell: The Logic of Damnation, Walls proposed that for each person there is a certain measure of grace that represents the best God can do for that soul without destroying that soul's freedom. He called it optimal grace.¹ Walls's own definition is worth hearing in full: this measure of grace is "the optimal amount of influence toward good which God can exercise on that person's will without destroying his freedom."² And God distributes this grace to everyone: "grace of optimal measure is given to all persons."³

Twenty years later, Walls restated the idea in Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation. There he made the personal nature of optimal grace even more vivid. "God knows how best to elicit a positive response from each person, without destroying or overriding their freedom," he wrote. "What would be highly effective in converting one person might make another more resistant."⁵ Optimal grace is not a cookie-cutter distribution. It is not merely sufficient grace. It is the best God can do for each soul. And Walls was clear about its result: "damnation only results from the persistent choice to reject optimal grace."⁶

Think of it this way. A pamphlet left on a doorstep is sufficient grace. A closest friend sitting down with you, knowing your fears, your wounds, and your deepest longings, speaking truth in exactly the words you need to hear, at exactly the moment you are most ready to hear them: that is optimal grace.

Notice what Walls is saying. A decisive response to God is not a snap judgment. It is not a last-second panic under pressure. It is "a settled response which is made by one fully informed of the Christian faith." The response must be "a rooted disposition." It "normally would not be achieved in a moment, but rather only through a longer series of choices." Initial choices might be against God. In the long run, a person might still come to love God in a settled way. What is decisive is "the settled disposition one ultimately acquires."⁶⁷

This is crucial for the encounter at the moment of death. The encounter, subjectively extended by time-dilation, gives the soul time for a real, settled response. It is not a pop quiz. It is an invitation with room to breathe, to see, to choose.

Walls also stresses that optimal grace does not require the removal of all difficulty. A certain element of trial may be necessary. What matters is that the soul has everything it needs to respond freely. The grace "compensates for the unfair disadvantages which some have had." It levels the field without leveling the soul.⁶⁸

Two protections need to be stated right away. First, optimal grace is not coercion. God woos; He never forces. A manufactured "yes" is a puppet's nod, and a puppet's nod means nothing. Second, optimal grace does not guarantee that everyone says yes. Walls is explicit: some may still refuse. But the refusal is not for lack of love on God's part. It is despite the fullest love God can give.

One more thing. If the manner of the appeal is tailored, so is its sequence. What comes first, what comes second, what the soul sees before it sees Christ's face: all of this is part of what makes the approach optimal. We will return to this in Section 5, where the full picture comes into focus.

Before we move on, a clarification. Some readers will wonder whether optimal grace is just another name for "irresistible grace" in the Reformed tradition. It is not. Irresistible grace, in the Calvinist system, is grace that always succeeds. The elect cannot finally resist it. Optimal grace is grace that can be refused. It is the best God can do, but the best God can do still leaves the soul free to say no. This is not a weakness in the concept. It is its strength. A love that cannot be refused is not love. It is compulsion. Walls's genius is to describe a grace that is as powerful as it can possibly be without crossing the line into force.⁷⁰

And if God truly loves each person this way, the next question is immediate: where does the offer happen? When does the dying person meet this love? This brings us to the second stream.

Where This Book Locates the Offer: The Threshold, Not the Afterlife

Most proposals about postmortem salvation put the offer somewhere in the intermediate state, in Hades, or at the final judgment. This book proposes something different. The offer is peri-mortem, not strictly post-mortem. The word "peri-mortem" means "around death." The word "post-mortem" means "after death." The difference matters enormously.⁷

On this book's view, the encounter happens at the threshold between life and death. The dying person is still a living agent. This dissolves a worry that haunts many postmortem proposals: do the dead have the kind of living freedom a real, life-defining choice requires? At the threshold, that question does not arise. The choice is the last living act of a living person.⁸

Walls himself anticipated this placement. In the very chapter of Hell that coins optimal grace, he works through a thought experiment about two women who die young. What does a loving God do for a woman who never had a real chance to respond to the gospel? Walls's answer is striking: God "could give her the grace at the moment of death to begin to become what she would have become if she had not died."⁹ Grace withheld in this life, Walls writes, "could be given at the time of death" and extended "beyond this life."¹⁰ That sentence was written in 1992, twenty years before this book existed. The moment-of-death thesis is not a departure from Walls. It is the completion of a move Walls himself began.

The fit between Walls and this book is not forced. It is natural. Walls recognized that some people never get a fair chance in this life. A child who dies in infancy. A person born into deep deprivation. A woman killed before she could explore the faith. Walls's own logic demanded a solution. And the solution he reached for, almost in passing, was exactly the one this book develops at length: grace given at the threshold of death itself.

Fit the two streams together. Walls supplies the why: a loving God would offer optimal grace. The moment-of-death encounter supplies the where and how: the offer lands at the threshold between life and death, in a subjectively extended corridor where the soul has time to respond. The two streams need each other. Without Walls, the encounter is unexplained love. Without the encounter, Walls's optimal grace has no clear landing point. Together, they tell a coherent story.

But a question remains. If God tailors the approach to each person, how does God know what the best approach is? How does God know that overwhelming tenderness would reach one soul, while the quiet voice of a long-dead spouse would reach another? How does God know that blazing glory would break one heart open and harden another?

This is where the third stream enters the river.

How God Knows: A Spaniard, Three Kinds of Knowledge, and "What Would Happen"

In the sixteenth century, a Spanish Jesuit priest named Luis de Molina (1535–1600) tackled one of the oldest puzzles in theology. How can God be fully sovereign over everything that happens while human beings remain genuinely free? If God controls every detail, are we just puppets? If we are truly free, has God lost control?¹¹

Molina was a Jesuit. He lived in Spain during the great age of Catholic theology. And the question he faced was not merely academic. The Reformation had put the sovereignty of God at the center of the debate. Luther and Calvin argued that God determines everything, including who is saved and who is lost. The Catholic side wanted to protect human freedom without surrendering God's control. Molina found a way to do both.⁶⁹

Molina's answer hinged on a special kind of divine knowledge. He proposed that God's knowledge comes in three logical moments. The philosopher William Lane Craig later gave these their standard names, and the theologian Timothy Stratton summarized them clearly in Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism.¹²

Understanding why Molina's proposal matters requires grasping the knot he was trying to untie. If God determines everything, then human beings are not genuinely free. If human beings are genuinely free, then God seems to lack control. Molina refused to accept the dilemma. He argued that God can be fully sovereign and humans can be genuinely free, if God knows what free creatures would freely do in every possible situation. That knowledge, logically prior to God's decision to create, gives God the ability to choose a world in which free choices serve His purposes.

The first moment is natural knowledge. This is God's knowledge of everything that could happen. Every possible world, every possible scenario, every possible combination of events and persons. This knowledge is necessary. God could not lack it.

The second moment is middle knowledge. This is the distinctive Molinist idea. Middle knowledge is God's knowledge of what every free creature would freely do in any given circumstance. Not what they must do. Not what they are forced to do. What they would freely choose. If Sarah were placed in this circumstance, she would freely choose this. If Frank were placed in that circumstance, he would freely choose that.

The third moment is free knowledge. This is God's knowledge of what will actually happen in the world God chose to create. Armed with middle knowledge, God selected this particular world out of all feasible options and brought it into being.¹³

The order is logical, not chronological. God never learns. He never turns a page and discovers something He did not already know. The three moments describe the structure of God's knowledge, not a process of discovery.¹⁴

A key emphasis: middle knowledge does not determine what people choose. It knows what they would choose. The difference is everything. Determination destroys freedom. Knowledge respects it. A parent who knows that her child will choose chocolate over vanilla is not forcing the child to choose chocolate. She simply knows her child.

The payoff is this: middle knowledge lets God achieve His purposes through free choices rather than over them. God does not override anyone's freedom. He arranges the world so that free choices fit within His plan. Craig puts the point simply: God's sovereignty is exercised through free human decisions, not against them.¹⁵

"Mere Molinism" and Real Freedom

Stratton has given the basic Molinist framework a helpful label: "mere Molinism." The word "mere" does the same job C. S. Lewis's title Mere Christianity did. It identifies the core that different theological traditions share.¹⁶ Mere Molinism rests on two pillars: (1) God possesses middle knowledge, and (2) human beings possess libertarian freedom.¹⁷

Libertarian freedom needs a plain definition. It has nothing to do with the political party. Libertarian freedom means that a person's choice is neither random nor determined. You could really have chosen otherwise. Your decision was not the inevitable output of prior causes like a ball rolling downhill. It was a genuine choice, made by you, from real options.¹⁸

Stratton defends libertarian freedom with what he calls "the free-thinking argument." The argument runs like this. If every belief you hold is merely the inevitable result of prior physical causes, then your beliefs are not the product of rational evaluation. They are just dominoes falling. But if that is true, then you cannot trust your own reasoning. You cannot trust even the belief that determinism is true. Rationality itself collapses. Trusting your own mind requires that your thinking is genuinely free.¹⁹

The force of this argument is felt most sharply in the present conversation. If determinism is true, then Frank's rejection of God for seventy-eight years was not really Frank's fault. He was just dominoes falling. And if God forces Frank to say yes at the deathbed, that "yes" is not really Frank's achievement. It is just more dominoes. The whole drama of salvation collapses into a puppet show. But if libertarian freedom is real, then Frank's "no" was genuinely his, and Frank's "yes," if it comes, will be genuinely his too. That is the only kind of "yes" worth having.

Apply this directly to Frank. If Frank's "yes" to God were determined, if it were just the inevitable result of prior causes, it would not be faith at all. It would be a reflex. God can make the appeal overwhelmingly clear without making the response unfree. Clarity is not coercion.

Stratton closes his argument with a stunning parallel. God has already shown us what it looks like for Him to limit Himself out of love. The Incarnation itself is the precedent. In Stratton's words: "The omnipresent became localized; the eternal stepped into time; the infinite clothed himself with finitude . . . not because of any deficiency, but out of love."²⁰

The God who stepped into time and a body to meet us is the God who meets each dying person in the corridor. He limits Himself, in both cases, for love.

Is Any of This in the Bible? The Keilah Window

Middle knowledge is a philosophical concept. But does it have any footing in Scripture?

The clearest biblical window is found in 1 Samuel 23:11–13. David is hiding in the city of Keilah, and he asks God two questions. "Will Saul come down to Keilah?" God answers: yes. "Will the men of Keilah hand me over to Saul?" God answers: yes, they will.²²

So David leaves. And because David leaves, neither event ever happens. Saul does not come to Keilah. The men of Keilah do not hand David over. God answered questions about what free people would do in circumstances that never came to pass.

As the scholar Kirk MacGregor has pointed out, God's answers "did not constitute predictions of the future."²³ They were answers about what free agents would freely choose in a situation that was never actualized. That is precisely what middle knowledge is: certain divine knowledge of free choices in circumstances that never actually occur. A fortune-teller offers a hunch. Only a God who possesses middle knowledge speaks such statements without error.²⁴

Other biblical texts point in the same direction. In Exodus 32, Moses intercedes with God, and God's response shifts based on what Moses freely does.²⁵ In Jeremiah 38:17–18, the prophet tells King Zedekiah two different futures: "If you surrender, the city will not be burned. If you do not surrender, it will." Both futures depend on Zedekiah's free choice.²⁶

Then there is Matthew 11:21–24, where Jesus says that Tyre and Sidon would have repented if they had seen the miracles done in Chorazin and Bethsaida. MacGregor and Stratton read this as a genuine expression of middle knowledge: Jesus knew what these cities would have done in different circumstances.²⁷ Craig has offered a different reading, suggesting the statement is hyperbole. But even on Craig's reading, the words assume that God knows what people would do in circumstances that never occurred.²⁸

The Jesus saying about Tyre and Sidon is one of the most haunting verses in the Gospels. "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes" (Matt 11:21). Jesus speaks as though He knows what people in other cities would have done under different conditions. Whether one reads this as literal middle knowledge (MacGregor, Stratton) or as hyperbole (Craig), the words assume a divine knowledge that reaches into the hypothetical, into the "what if."

A difficult question rises from this text. If Tyre and Sidon would have repented, why did God not give them the chance? Stratton answers with an important distinction found in his notes on this passage. A burst of repentance is not the same as persevering faith. The response God seeks is not a panicked flinch but "a freely chosen, persevering love relationship with God" (cf. 1 Cor 13:8). Think of the stony-ground seed in Matthew 13:20–21: it springs up quickly but has no root. It withers under pressure.²⁹

The implication for the encounter is honest in both directions. The encounter at the moment of death is not about wringing a last-second flinch from a frightened person. It is the soul's real, settled orientation brought fully into the open and freely ratified or refused. This is one more reason the time-dilation discussed in Chapter 10 matters so much: the encounter is subjectively long enough for a real and persevering yes, or a real and final no.

Think about what this means for the encounter at the moment of death. The encounter is not about speed. It is not a game show buzzer that demands an instant answer. The time-dilation reported in near-death experiences (Chapter 10) gives the dying person subjective time. Enough time for a real process. Enough time for a settled response. The encounter is long enough for a persevering "yes" and long enough for a genuine, settled "no." No one is rushed into heaven or hell.

Bring Keilah back to Frank's bedside. God knows every possible way He could meet Frank. He knows which approaches Frank would freely refuse. He knows which approach, if any, Frank would freely embrace. He knows this the way He knew what the men of Keilah would do. And He acts on that knowledge.

A Worked Example: The Three Moments at One Deathbed

Stratton illustrates the three moments of divine knowledge with a vivid example from Scripture: Peter's denial of Jesus in the courtyard. Jesus told Peter he would deny Him three times before the rooster crowed. Jesus knew what Peter would freely do in that particular situation. Peter was not forced. He was free. And Jesus knew exactly how Peter's freedom would play out.³⁰

Now let us walk Frank through the three moments. And let us write Frank's encounter as a staged one, because that is what optimal grace, informed by middle knowledge, would produce for a man like Frank.

Natural knowledge. God knows every possible way Christ could meet Frank in the corridor of his dying. Blazing glory. Quiet words. The face of his late wife. The life review. Patient silence. An opening stretch of felt absence. Each approach is genuinely open either way: Frank could say yes or no to any of them.

Middle knowledge. God knows which approaches Frank would freely refuse. Blazing glory ignites the old defiance. Gentle words bounce off walls seventy-eight years thick. A commanding voice triggers every rebellious nerve in Frank's body. But God also knows which sequence, if any, Frank would freely embrace.

Free knowledge. God actualizes the approach He knows would reach Frank. And for Frank, it is a sequence.

The corridor opens not with light but with silence and felt absence. For the first time in his life the room is truly empty. Frank has spent seventy-eight years insisting that nobody is there. Now, in the corridor, he gets to feel what "nobody is there" actually means. And a man like Frank may need to feel the room empty before he will believe anyone was ever in it.³¹

In that emptiness, something surfaces. Something God placed in reach decades ago. A voice. His wife's voice, perhaps. Or the half-remembered line of a hymn from a funeral he attended under protest. Howard Storm's near-death account documented this exact pattern: darkness first, then a fragment of a remembered hymn, then a cry, then rescue.³²

The silence stretches. Frank has spent his whole life filling silence with noise, with argument, with the sound of his own certainty. Now the noise is gone. The arguments have no one to argue with. The certainty has nothing to be certain about. For seventy-eight years, Frank insisted that the room was empty. Now the room is empty. And it turns out that emptiness is not what Frank thought it was. It is not freedom. It is not independence. It is cold. It is vast. It is terrifying in a way Frank has never let himself feel.

In that emptiness, something surfaces that God placed in reach decades ago. A voice. His wife's voice. Or the fragment of a hymn, half-remembered from a funeral he attended under protest. Howard Storm's account documented this exact pattern: darkness first, then a fragment of a remembered hymn, then a cry, then rescue.⁷¹

From the dark, Frank does something he has never once done. He calls out. And the Christ who composed the silence answers it. The face of the wife Frank failed stands beside His own.

The real Frank then freely says yes. Or, this chapter stays honest, he may still refuse. We do not know which Frank chose. But we know this: the approach was the best one there could have been. Even the silence was composed.

Note the beauty of this. The encounter is not a trick. It is not a manipulation. It is the supreme act of a God who knows every road to every heart and takes the one that leads home. The silence is not cruelty. The darkness is not punishment. It is the approach that love, armed with perfect knowledge, chose for this particular soul. Even the emptiness is a word.

Two guardrails must be stated clearly. First, Frank stays free the whole way. He is free in the darkness, free at the cry, free at the moment of decision. If his "yes" were forced, it would mean nothing. Second, the shadow: this scheme works only if some winning approach exists. If in every feasible encounter Frank would refuse, we face the possibility named in Section 7. That possibility is real, and we will look at it honestly.

Now step back from Frank's bedside and see what has happened. Three streams have converged into a single event. The love of God (Walls) has taken a specific form (the moment-of-death encounter) and has been guided by perfect knowledge (Stratton's Molinism) into the precise approach that Frank needed.

Think of it as three gears in a single machine. Gear one is Walls's optimal grace: the motive. What would a loving God do? He would give the best appeal He can give. Gear two is the moment-of-death encounter: the mechanism. Where and how does the appeal actually land? At the threshold of death, in a subjectively extended meeting with the risen Christ. Gear three is Stratton's Molinism: the architecture. How does God know what the best appeal is? Middle knowledge. Take away any one gear and the machine stutters. Together, they turn smoothly.³³

Why Darkness Can Be Mercy

The idea that a loving God might open some encounters in felt darkness needs more than an illustration. It needs a rationale.³⁴

The rationale has four parts. First, there are souls whose defenses are so deep that a direct confrontation with glory would trigger a reflexive rejection. For such souls, an opening stretch of absence may be the only thing that disarms the defenses. You cannot shatter a wall by throwing light at it. But you can let a person feel what it is like to be truly behind that wall, alone, with no one to impress and no one to fight against. That felt absence is itself a form of honesty.³⁵

Second, the darkness informs without coercing. Talbott has argued powerfully that full information about the consequences of rejection would shatter any illusion that makes rejection attractive.³⁶ The staged encounter finds the truth in Talbott's insight without following it to his conclusion. Full information does not guarantee universal acceptance. But it does strip away the false comforts. The soul that tastes separation in the dark discovers what its "no" actually means, and that discovery is itself a gift. The soul remains free to persist in its "no." But it can no longer pretend it does not know the cost.

Third, the model does not require us to identify, from outside, which souls experienced a dark opening and which did not. The book is agnostic on whether a given dark passage precedes the meeting or follows an initial refusal within the still-open encounter (see Chapter 12 for the empirical pattern and Chapter 19 for the phase dynamics). What matters is that God composes the sequence for each soul, and darkness can be mercy.³⁷

Fourth, Howard Storm's case is the pattern in miniature. Darkness, then the remembered hymn, then the cry, then the rescue. And middle knowledge would say the hymn was never an accident.³⁸

This Is Stronger Than Both of the Usual Alternatives

It helps to see why this model is stronger than the two usual alternatives.

Against postmortem-only views, including intermediate-state proposals about the opportunity coming in Hades or at the final judgment, the dead-agent freedom worry simply does not arise at the threshold. The choice is the last living act of a living person. There is no gap to explain. There is no need to construct a theology of how the dead exercise freedom. The peri-mortem placement avoids the problem altogether.³⁹

Against Craig's antemortem-only Molinism the case is even sharper. Craig holds that God so orders earthly circumstances that everyone who would believe under some possible circumstance actually hears the gospel in this life: this view strains against the unevangelized, infants, and the cognitively disabled. And a merely hypothetical opportunity is not a real one. As James Beilby has argued, it is far better that a person's eternal destiny turn on a choice they consciously and actually make.⁴⁰ (Chapter 32 surveys Craig's view in one paragraph as its Position 3 and links here for the developed treatment.)

Stratton's architecture develops the metaphysics of middle knowledge in depth, but he never says where in a person's existence the decisive circumstance lies. The moment-of-death thesis fills the slot. Stratton built the house; the moment-of-death thesis proposes who is at the door.⁴¹

God's Eternal Endgame: The "Maximal Harvest World"

Stratton uses a powerful phrase: God's "eternal endgame." The ultimate defeat of evil. The salvation of all who can be saved. The greatest harvest of free souls that any possible world could yield.⁴²

Working with the philosopher Jacobus Erasmus, Stratton develops the idea of a "maximal harvest world." Among all feasible worlds, a perfectly wise and loving God would actualize one in which evil is ultimately defeated and all who are not transworld damned are saved. Nobody who would say yes is denied the chance to say it.⁴³

The phrase "maximal harvest world" is striking. It captures the idea that God does not settle for less than the best possible outcome. Among all the feasible worlds, God does not pick randomly. He does not pick the easiest. He picks the one that brings the most people freely home. The harvest is as large as free human choices allow it to be.

The hope this generates is staggering. If God has actualized a maximal harvest world, then the number of the saved may be far larger than any tradition has dared to imagine. We do not know the number. But the architecture suggests that the harvest is vast.

The moment-of-death encounter is the instrument of this harvest. It is the great gathering-in, where God's middle knowledge and God's universal love meet each soul, one at a time, with the best possible appeal. The encounter is the mechanism by which the maximal harvest world becomes actual: soul by soul, approach by approach, each one tailored to the person who stands at the threshold.

The Hard Edge: Transworld Damnation

We promised at the start not to dodge the sad part. Here it is.

Alvin Plantinga coined the idea of "transworld depravity": the possibility that a person might freely go wrong in every feasible world. William Lane Craig applied the idea to salvation and gave it the name transworld damnation: a person who, in every feasible world and under every possible appeal, would still freely refuse God.⁴⁵

Walls engages this idea directly in Hell. He reframes "the unsaved" as those who decisively reject optimal grace "either in this life or after death." He argues that those who die unevangelized do not automatically suffer transworld damnation. They simply have not yet had the chance to respond under optimal conditions. The unsaved, in Walls's view, are those who have received optimal grace and still refused.⁴⁶

Walls also argues that in the world God has chosen, "no one would be lost in this world who would be saved in some other feasible world."⁴⁷ If there is any feasible world in which a person would freely say yes, then God gives that person the measure of grace to which they would freely respond. No one is lost by accident. No one is lost for lack of effort on God's part.

What does transworld damnation look like from the inside? Not a person who says "I know God is love and I reject Him anyway." That would be cartoonish. Think instead of the person described in Chapter 27: a will so formed by decades of self-deception, disordered love, and proud refusal that even the most loving, most fully informed appeal cannot pry it open. Not because the appeal was too weak. Not because God did not try hard enough. But because the soul itself, in the unfathomable depths of its own freedom, has become something that cannot receive what is offered. The door is not locked from the outside. It is locked from the inside.

The concept is painful. But it is also, in a strange way, hopeful. Because if transworld damnation is the only way a soul can be finally lost, then no one is lost for lack of opportunity. No one is lost because the gospel never reached them. No one is lost because they lived in the wrong century or the wrong country. Every soul that is lost, if any are, is lost despite having received the very best approach that infinite love and perfect knowledge could provide. That is a different kind of tragedy than the one most people fear. It is not the tragedy of abandonment. It is the tragedy of freedom.

Connect this back to Chapter 27. Transworld damnation is the philosophical name for what that chapter described pastorally: formed character, disordered loves, Augustine's bent will that does not automatically straighten when shown the supreme Good. A soul that has spent decades forming itself in pride, bitterness, or contempt may carry that formation into every feasible encounter. The encounter brings clarity. It does not force transformation.⁴⁸

An Honest Tension: Does Molinism Point Toward Universalism?

Fairness demands that we lay the strongest opposing argument on the table at full strength.

Andrew Hronich, building on the proposal of the philosopher Jason Marsh, has argued that an infinitely resourceful God could add persons to a world one at a time, creating only those who would, in some feasible circumstance, freely accept God's grace. Any individual who would jeopardize a universal harvest is simply not created. On this view, God can "weakly actualize" a world in which everyone freely responds to grace and is reconciled to Him.⁴⁹

Hronich introduces a striking mirror-image term: transworld sanctity. If transworld damnation means a person who would refuse God in every feasible world, transworld sanctity means a person who would accept God in at least one feasible circumstance. Hronich wonders whether anyone is truly constant in refusal across all possible worlds. And he explicitly leaves room for the free "yes" to come at the moment of death.⁵⁰

The analytic philosopher R. Zachary Manis presses the same tension with even sharper tools. Manis is no universalist. But in his chapter "Providence, Freedom, and God's Creation of the Damned," he grants that Molinism "seems to be a perfect match" for universalism. If God can select which world to create, and if God knows what every free creature would do in every circumstance, then why would God not simply create the world in which everyone freely says yes?⁵¹

Manis then constructs a position he calls "Molinist Anti-Universalism," or M-AU: the view that holds middle knowledge while denying that any universalist world was feasible. Jerry Walls is named as M-AU's defender. But Manis finds the position wanting. He concludes that M-AU is "metaphysically dubious at best," and delivers a verdict that has echoed through the literature: "whereas Molinism and universalism may well be a match made in heaven, Molinism and anti-universalism are, if not quite a match made in hell, at least ill-wed." Anti-universalists, Manis argues, "are best served to reject Molinism altogether."⁵²

The weight of Manis's verdict cannot be overstated. He is not a universalist. He is an analytic philosopher who has spent a career thinking about hell, freedom, and the character of God. When a non-universalist says that Molinism fits more naturally with universalism than with anti-universalism, the honest response is not to dismiss the observation but to sit with it.

The Molinist reply comes from Craig. Not every logically possible world is feasible. A feasible world is one that the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom make available. The universalist's dream world may not be on the menu. Not because God lacks power, but because a forced "yes" is not free. If some persons would freely refuse God in every feasible arrangement, then no feasible world achieves universal salvation without overriding someone's freedom.⁵³

The debate is unresolved. The honest thinker must sit with both possibilities. Perhaps every person, in at least one feasible circumstance, would freely say yes, and God has created a world in which every person encounters that circumstance. If so, the harvest is universal. Perhaps some persons, in every feasible circumstance, would freely refuse, and the best God can do is minimize their number while maximizing the saved. If so, the harvest is vast but not complete.

And here is the honest admission. We do not know which side is right. Only God knows the true counterfactuals. Stratton himself concedes that the bracketed words in his passage "leave room for hopeful universalism," even as he declines to embrace it.⁵⁴

Land here, on the book's eschatological neutrality. Hope held in one hand, the sober possibility in the other. We hope all are saved. We fear some, in the dreadful freedom of a will bent against love, may refuse. We do not know the number and are not asked to (see Chapter 29 for the full treatment of this neutrality).

Why Would God Create Anyone He Knew Would Refuse?

If God knew, by middle knowledge, that some persons would refuse Him in every feasible encounter, why create them at all? This is the hardest question the model faces.

Craig's answer is the interconnection reply. Human lives are woven together. The person you are, and the circumstances in which you might freely turn to God, are shaped by countless others. Your grandmother's faith shaped your mother's character, which shaped the world you grew up in, which shaped the moment you were ready to hear the gospel. Pull one thread, and the whole tapestry shifts. The world in which the greatest number freely come home may unavoidably contain some who freely refuse.⁵⁵

To put it more bluntly: in order to fill heaven, God may have to permit hell to be filled. This is not because God wants anyone lost. It is because human lives are interconnected, and the feasible world that saves the most people may not be one from which every refuser can be removed without unraveling the fabric that brought others to faith.⁵⁶

An analogy may help, though all analogies limp. Think of a family reunion organized by a grandmother who knows every member of her large family. She knows that if she seats Uncle Robert next to Cousin James, they will argue all night and ruin the evening for everyone. She knows that if she invites Aunt Helen, Helen's presence will bring out the best in three other relatives who would otherwise stay home. She cannot invite everyone and seat them however she likes. The combinations matter. The best reunion, the one that brings the most joy to the most family members, may be one in which a few difficult relatives are present. They are not excluded. They are invited. They are loved. But their presence is the unavoidable shadow of a gathering arranged to bring the most people together in joy.

Guard the misreading. God does not want anyone lost. The lost, if any, are the tragic shadow of a world arranged to save the most people possible.

MacGregor adds an important refinement from Molina himself. Molina held an optimal balance principle: God considers for creation only worlds with no more of the lost than are necessary to achieve the greatest salvation. God is minimizing loss, not running up numbers.⁵⁷

Then a humbling wrinkle. Molina himself believed that no possible individual is depraved enough to refuse God's grace in all available circumstances. And no individual is good enough to accept in all circumstances either. This relocates the source of any loss from unsavable persons to the limits of compossibility. That is a big word for a simple idea: it means that some combinations of free creatures simply cannot coexist in the same world. It is not that any one person is beyond reach. It is that the combination of all persons in one world may make some losses unavoidable.⁵⁸

One final matter before we close this section. Walls raises the missionary objection to Craig's antemortem scheme. If those who die unevangelized are lost only because they were transworld damned anyway, why carry the gospel to them at all? In Hell, Walls frames and answers this objection himself. The unevangelized are not automatically transworld damned. They simply have not yet had the opportunity to respond under optimal conditions. The gospel remains urgent because it is part of how God prepares hearts for the ultimate encounter.⁶⁰

The missionary objection is one of the most practical worries in the whole debate. If God gives everyone a chance at death, why bother sharing the gospel now? The question is sincere. And the answer matters for the church.

The moment-of-death model dissolves this objection entirely. On this book's view, no one is written off in advance. No one's loss is a statistic tolerated for the totals. Every soul, reached and unreached alike, receives a personal, optimal, free invitation at the threshold of death. Evangelism is not rendered pointless. It is rendered precious. We will return to this in the pastoral close.

Three Honest Objections

Objection 1: "Middle knowledge is itself disputed. You are building on a contested foundation."

Conceded openly. The grounding objection to Molinism asks what makes the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom true. Stratton engages this question at length, and there is a growing literature defending Molinism against the challenge.⁶¹ But the chapter's claim is deliberately modest and conditional. If Molinism is true, it fits the moment-of-death encounter like a key fits a lock. But this book's central thesis does not stand or fall with Molinism. The encounter can be affirmed by anyone who believes God is omniscient and loving, whether or not they accept the specific architecture of middle knowledge. Molinism is an illuminating frame, not a load-bearing wall.

Objection 2: "If God already knows by middle knowledge how each person would respond, is the actual encounter not just theater?"

This objection has real force. If God already knows how Frank will respond, what is the point of the encounter? Is Frank just going through motions that are already settled?

No. Counterfactual knowledge of what Frank would do is not the actual doing. Destiny turns on what the real Frank actually, freely does in the real corridor. Middle knowledge tells God which door to open. It does not walk Frank through it. The advantage of this model over purely hypothetical schemes is precisely that the encounter is real, not hypothetical. Frank actually meets Christ. Frank actually decides.⁶²

Objection 3: "Does 'choosing the best approach' make God a manipulator running a sales technique on the dying?"

Consider a parent with two frightened children. The parent knows that one child needs to be held and another needs to be spoken to firmly. There is nothing manipulative about a parent who knows what each child needs and gives it. That is not a sales technique. That is love. Tailoring the appeal is what love does when love also has perfect knowledge. And the response stays free. The child who is held can still push away. The child who is spoken to firmly can still refuse to listen.⁶³

The Pastoral Heart of It

Everything in this chapter was finally for Sarah.

She sits at her father's bedside. The monitors are slowing. And the question she has carried for thirty years is the question the chapter set out to answer: Did God do everything He could?

The chapter's answer is the strongest yes this book knows how to give. Out of every possible way the risen Christ could have met her hard, weary, walled-off father in the corridor of his dying, God knew the very best one and gave him exactly that. Not a generic offer. Not a pamphlet left on a doorstep. The face of the One who made him, in the single most persuasive form God knew would reach him.⁶⁴

The specificity is what gives this comfort its power. It is not the vague reassurance that "God is love" or "God works in mysterious ways." It is the precise claim that God knew the best road to Frank's heart and took it. He knew whether tenderness or confrontation would reach Frank. He knew whether the face of Frank's wife or the voice of a long-forgotten friend would break through. He knew whether silence or song would disarm the walls. And He gave Frank exactly that. The encounter was not a chance meeting. It was a composed masterpiece of love, written for an audience of one.

No false comfort. This book will not promise Sarah that Frank said yes. False comfort is its own cruelty. But she can lay down one particular torment: the fear that her father slipped away uninvited, unreached, lost in the dark for lack of a fair chance. There was a chance. It was the best chance there could be. It was given.

What about the Franks who say no? What about the souls who, despite everything, choose to stand outside? The image Scripture gives us is not a dungeon door slamming. It is something sadder and gentler.

Think of the prodigal's older brother in Luke 15:25–32. Standing outside the party. Fully invited. Refusing to come in. That is the picture of whatever souls are finally lost, if any are: not shut out, but invited with everything heaven has, and choosing to stand outside. The Father does not lock the door. The Father comes out and pleads.⁶⁵

Then the second gift, for the living. The optimal encounter does not make our witness pointless. It makes it precious. Every act of love, every prayer, every word of truth spoken gently to a Frank in our own lives is a softening of the walls. It is part of how God prepares a heart so that when the great encounter comes, the heart is more ready to say yes than it would otherwise have been. This is the truth behind Chapter 27's discussion of formed character, read in reverse: if character can harden a soul against the encounter, then love can soften a soul toward it. Every prayer Sarah prayed for thirty years was not wasted. It was part of the approach God was composing.⁶⁶

We close where we began, with three words for the living.

We hope. The harvest may be vast. The God who knows every road to every soul may bring home more than we dare to imagine. The model we have described in this chapter is the engine of that hope. If God has middle knowledge, if He gives optimal grace, and if the moment-of-death encounter is the mechanism by which that grace lands, then the scope of the harvest is not limited by geography, culture, or century. It is limited only by freedom. And even there, we do not know the number.

We labor. Our love now is part of how God prepares hearts for then. Our witness is not replaced by the encounter. It is woven into it. Every prayer Sarah prayed for thirty years was part of the approach. Every act of kindness, every word of truth, every moment of patience with a stubborn father was a loosening of the mortar between the bricks. When the great encounter came, the walls were not as thick as they would have been without her. That is the preciousness of our witness. It is not pointless. It is part of God's composition.

We trust. We trust the God who knows every road to every soul to do, for each one, the best possible thing. We trust the God who stepped into time and a body to meet us. We trust the God who composed even the silence at Frank's bedside. We trust the God who did not leave the seventy-eight-year-old skeptic without an invitation. Because that is exactly the kind of God He is.