Chapter 28

The Best Possible Approach

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

Condensed Edition

Frank is seventy-eight years old. He is dying in a hospital bed. His heart is failing, and the nurses have stopped pretending otherwise.

He is not a cruel man, exactly, but he is hard. He has held grudges the way some men hold property: quietly, tightly, with no intention of letting go. When his wife was dying five years ago and asked him, at the end, whether he had ever once prayed, Frank told her the truth. No. And he was not about to start.

His daughter sits beside him now. She is a believer. She has prayed for her father for thirty years. And the question she has carried her whole adult life sits in the room with her, heavier than the monitors: Was there ever really a chance for him? Did God do everything God could do?

This chapter answers her.

I want to bring three streams together in this chapter. The first is the concept of optimal grace, developed by the philosopher Jerry Walls. The second is this book's moment-of-death thesis, the claim that every dying person encounters the risen Christ at the threshold. The third is a view called Molinism, the idea that God possesses a special kind of knowledge about what every free creature would freely do in any possible situation. Timothy Stratton, building on the work of the sixteenth-century Spanish priest Luis de Molina and the philosopher William Lane Craig, has given this view its most accessible recent treatment.

Here is the claim in plain terms. If God knows every possible approach He could make to Frank, and if He knows which approach Frank would freely accept, and if His love is the kind that would choose the best one, then the moment-of-death encounter is exactly what we should expect. It is not a backup plan. It is not a last resort or a consolation prize. For many people, it is the single best approach God knew would work.

Walls supplies the why. The moment-of-death encounter supplies the where and how. Stratton's Molinism supplies the architecture. Each stream gives what the other two need. Together they form the strongest case this book can build.

But I also owe the reader honesty about the hard parts. Not every thread in this chapter ties up neatly. The Molinist framework is contested. Some philosophers think middle knowledge is incoherent. Others think it points so strongly toward universalism that anyone who resists universalism should abandon Molinism entirely. And there is the sobering possibility of what philosophers call transworld damnation: a person who, under every possible appeal, would still freely refuse. I will face each of these honestly.

I will not dodge the hard parts. Some of them are sobering. But I owe Frank's daughter the whole picture.

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

Suppose you wanted someone to say yes to the most important invitation of their life. Would you hand them a pamphlet? Or would you send their closest friend, the one who knew their story, who understood the exact shape of their fears and their hopes, to sit down with them and speak in a way they could hear?

Jerry Walls thinks God would do the second thing. And he worked out why, in careful philosophical detail, over two decades of writing.

The idea first appears in Walls's 1992 book Hell: The Logic of Damnation. In its fourth chapter, "Hell and Divine Goodness," Walls defines what he calls optimal grace. For each person, Walls says, there is a measure of grace that represents the greatest positive influence God can bring to bear on that person's will without destroying their freedom.¹ A perfectly good God who truly wants all people to be saved would give each person that measure. Not less. Not a generic, one-size-fits-all appeal. The optimal one.

And this grace is personal. What moves one heart may harden another. Walls puts it plainly: what works for Smith may only make Jones more resistant.² So optimal grace is not a single tool applied to everyone. It is a tailored approach, shaped to each soul.

Here is the part that matters most for this book. Walls does not limit optimal grace to this present life. In the same chapter, he considers the case of a young woman who dies before she has fully responded to God's offer. He draws on the old debate between Luther and Erasmus. Erasmus argued that God's grace is unfair if some people die before they have a real chance to respond. Walls's answer is striking: God may give her the grace "at the time of death" that she would have received had she lived longer. She can begin at the threshold what she would have become if she had lived. The whole argument that unequal grace is unfair, Walls says, rests on a single assumption: "that grace cannot extend beyond the boundary of this present life." Remove that assumption, and the problem dissolves.³

Notice what Walls has done. He has opened the door that this entire book walks through. If grace can reach the threshold of death, then the timing of death is not a theological emergency. A baby who dies at three months, a soldier killed at twenty, a Frank who reaches seventy-eight with walls intact: none of them are beyond reach simply because their earthly clock ran out. The optimal appeal extends to the final moment. It meets each soul where it is, when it is.

Twenty years later, Walls restated the idea in Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, and this time the phrasing was sharper. God, he wrote, "knows how best to elicit a positive response from each person, without destroying or overriding their freedom." The grace is "deeply personal and individual." And the conclusion: "damnation only results from the persistent choice to reject optimal grace."⁴

Notice the difference. Think of the gospel as an invitation. One way to deliver an invitation is to hand someone a pamphlet. Anyone can do that. The words are the same for every reader. They may reach some. They will bounce off others. But now imagine that you could send the one person the recipient trusts most, the one who knows the shape of their specific fears and their particular hopes, to sit with them and say what only that person could say. That is what Walls means by optimal. Not generic. Not mass-produced. The best possible appeal, fitted to one soul.

Two guardrails, stated right away. First, optimal grace is not coercion. God woos; He never forces. A manufactured "yes" is a puppet's nod, not faith. Love that overrides freedom is not love at all. Second, optimal grace does not guarantee that everyone says yes. Walls is clear: some still refuse. The grace is optimal, not irresistible. Walls himself writes that a decisive rejection is one made under optimal conditions. The person has been fully informed. The appeal was the best possible. And the answer was still no. Walls does not flinch from this.

Think about what this means for Frank's daughter. If God gives each person optimal grace, then nobody slips through the cracks of a sloppy or generic offer. Nobody is lost because the invitation arrived in the wrong language, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong tone. The offer was perfect. The only variable left is the response.

One more point, and I will develop it later in this chapter. If the manner of the appeal is tailored to each soul, so is its sequence. What order things come in is part of what makes an approach the best one. For some souls, the best approach may not begin with light. It may begin with the honest taste of what "no" actually means.

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

Several defenders of postmortem opportunity place the decisive meeting in the intermediate state, the conscious existence between death and final resurrection. Others locate it at the last judgment. I have argued something different in this book. The entire opportunity is concentrated at the threshold of dying itself.

The technical term is peri-mortem, meaning "around death." Not post-mortem, "after death." The encounter happens during the dying process, before the soul finally separates from the body. The dying person is still a living agent.⁶

Why does this matter? Because it dissolves one of the hardest worries about postmortem opportunity: can the dead still make real, free, life-defining choices? If the soul has already left the body, some wonder whether it retains the kind of living freedom a real decision requires. The intermediate state, whatever it is, may not be the same as living agency. The Reformers pressed this point. If death closes the door, then postmortem opportunity arrives too late. But on this book's view, the question does not arise. The choice is the last living act of a living person. The soul is conscious, aware, and free. It is, as Chapter 16 explored through Boros, the most lucid moment of a lifetime.⁷

Boros called it the soul's Endentscheidung, the final decision. He believed that we never fully possess ourselves during ordinary life. Some part of us always stays just out of reach. At the moment of death, that limitation falls away. The soul sees itself whole. And in that clear, unclouded, fully free moment, it makes its real and final choice. The encounter is the setting in which that choice occurs.

The near-death experience research we have walked through in Chapter 10 gives this claim empirical backing. NDE time-dilation shows that clock time and felt time are not the same. A few seconds by the monitors can hold what the soul experiences as hours or even days. There is room, at the threshold, for a real and unhurried encounter. The encounter does not need to be rushed. It does not need to be a single flash. It can take whatever subjective time the soul requires to make a settled, persevering response.⁸

So the pieces begin to fit. Walls supplies the why: a loving God would give each person the best possible appeal. The moment-of-death encounter supplies the where and how: the threshold of dying, in a meeting that the soul experiences as subjectively long and personally tailored.

But here is the bridge question. How would God know what the best approach is? What gives Him the knowledge to tailor the encounter, person by person, soul by soul? That requires a third stream.

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

In 1588, a Spanish Jesuit priest named Luis de Molina published a book that started one of the longest arguments in Christian theology. The question was simple to state: How can God be sovereign over everything and humans be genuinely free? If God controls all outcomes, are we puppets? If we are truly free, is God merely watching?

Molina proposed a solution. He said God's knowledge comes in three logical stages. Not three moments in time. God does not learn. But there is a logical order to what He knows.⁹

The first stage is natural knowledge. This is God's knowledge of everything that could happen. Every possible world. Every possible scenario. Every logically consistent combination of circumstances and creatures. Think of it as the full library of "what could be."¹⁰

The second stage is middle knowledge. This is the heart of Molina's idea, and it is what makes the system work. Middle knowledge is God's knowledge of what every free creature would freely do in any possible circumstance. Not what they could do. Not what they will do. What they would do, if placed in that exact situation. This is knowledge of free choices that have never been made, in worlds that may never exist.¹¹

The third stage is free knowledge. After God's creative decision, He knows everything that will actually happen in the world He chose to create. This is the world we live in. The actual story. The real Frank. The real corridor.

Think of it as a funnel. Could be, would be, will be. At each step, the range narrows. And the crucial point is this: middle knowledge lets God work through free choices rather than over them. He does not need to override anyone's will. He knows what each person would do, freely, in each possible setting. He then creates the world in which those free choices play out according to His purposes.¹²

This is what makes the sovereignty-freedom knot come undone. The Calvinist says God is sovereign, and human freedom is an illusion. The open theist says humans are free, and God does not know the future in detail. The Molinist says both are true at the same time. God is fully sovereign because He chose which world to create. Humans are fully free because, in the world He chose, they make their choices without compulsion. The middle knowledge is the bridge between the two.

For Frank, this means something personal. God did not determine Frank's response. Frank is not a puppet. But God knew, before He created the world, what Frank would freely do in every possible encounter. He is not guessing. He is not hoping for the best. He knows.

"Mere Molinism" and Real Freedom

Timothy Stratton, in Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, builds on Molina's framework with a two-pillar definition. Mere Molinism holds two things: God possesses middle knowledge, and humans have libertarian freedom. Stratton uses the word "mere" the way C. S. Lewis used it in Mere Christianity: this is the common ground, the core claim, not one denomination's spin on it.¹³

What is libertarian freedom? It means a choice that is neither random nor determined. You could really have chosen otherwise. Nothing forced your hand. This has nothing to do with the political party of the same name. It is the philosopher's term for genuine free will: your choice was truly yours.¹⁴

Stratton offers a pointed argument for why this matters. He calls it the free-thinking argument. If every belief you hold is merely the inevitable result of prior causes, then praise and blame lose their meaning. Love becomes a chemical reflex. Moral responsibility dissolves. And here is the twist: even your confidence in your own reasoning becomes suspect. If your conclusion was forced by prior causes, you cannot trust that it is true. You can only trust your thinking if your thinking is genuinely free.¹⁵

This is not just an abstract puzzle. It hits the encounter directly. If Frank's beliefs are determined, then his "no" to God is not really a rejection. It is just what the dominoes had to do. And his "yes" would not be real faith either. It would be another domino falling. For the encounter to matter, for the response to count, Frank must be genuinely free. The free-thinking argument says that this kind of freedom is not optional for rational creatures. It is the condition without which rationality itself collapses.

Apply this directly to Frank. If Frank's "yes" to God were determined rather than free, it would not be faith. It would be a programmed output. God can make the appeal overwhelmingly clear without making the response unfree. That distinction is everything.

Stratton closes his case with a striking image. In the Incarnation, God limited Himself willingly. Stratton writes: "The omnipresent became localized; the eternal stepped into time; the infinite clothed himself with finitude . . . not because of any deficiency, but out of love."¹⁶

This is the deepest logic of the whole book. The God who stepped into time and a body to meet us in Bethlehem is the same God who meets each dying person in the corridor of their dying. He limits Himself, in both cases, for love. He could overwhelm. He could force. He will not. He enters the narrow space where a real "yes" or "no" is possible, because only a free response has any worth.

Is Any of This in the Bible? The Keilah Window

We need to see this idea in Scripture, not just in philosophy. The clearest biblical window into middle knowledge is a story about David, a city called Keilah, and two questions that never came true.

In 1 Samuel 23, David has just rescued Keilah from the Philistines. But now Saul is coming after him. David asks the Lord two questions through the priest Abiathar. First: "Will Saul come down?" God answers yes. Second: "Will the men of Keilah hand me over to Saul?" God answers yes again.¹⁸

So David leaves. And because he leaves, neither event ever happens. Saul does not come. The men of Keilah do not hand David over. God answered truthfully about events that never occurred. He spoke with certainty about free choices that were never made in circumstances that were never realized.

That is middle knowledge. Not prediction of what will happen. Knowledge of what would happen, in circumstances that may never come to pass. As Kirk MacGregor points out, God's answers here were not predictions of the actual future. They were divine knowledge of counterfactual free choices.¹⁹

Other passages open a similar window. In Exodus 32, God tells Moses what He would do if Moses did not intercede. In Jeremiah 38:17–18, God tells Zedekiah two possible futures, one if he surrenders and one if he refuses. In each case, God speaks with certainty about free choices in unactualized circumstances.²⁰

Then there is the harder case. In Matthew 11:21–24, Jesus says the people of 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.²¹ Craig demurs and reads the saying as rhetorical hyperbole. The debate is real, and this is not the place to settle it. But the text at least raises the question.

And it raises an uncomfortable one. If Tyre and Sidon would have repented, why did they not get the chance? If God knew they would turn, why did He not send the miracles there? This is one of the sharpest questions a Molinist has to face.

Stratton's answer introduces a distinction that matters for the whole chapter. He calls it the perseverance distinction. A burst of repentance is not the same as persevering saving faith. Tyre might have been stunned into a momentary turning. The miracles might have produced a flash of awe that looked like repentance. But stunned turning and "a freely chosen, persevering love relationship with God" are not the same thing.²² Paul writes that love "never ends" (1 Cor 13:8). Jesus tells the parable of seed on rocky ground, the one that springs up fast and withers faster (Matt 13:20–21). The point: true faith is settled, not startled. It lasts because it has roots, not because it was shocked into existence.

This matters directly for the encounter. God is not trying to wring a panicked flinch from a frightened person. The encounter is not a jump scare designed to get a reflex "yes." It is the soul's real and settled orientation, brought fully into the open. It is ratified or refused. This is one more reason the time-dilation we explored in Chapter 10 matters: the encounter is subjectively long enough for a real and persevering yes, or a real and final no. The soul has time to think, to feel, to consider, and to choose with its whole self.

Bring Keilah back to the bedside. God knew what the men of Keilah would do in a situation that never arose. He knows what Frank would do in every possible encounter. And He chooses the one that gives Frank the best chance to say a free and lasting yes.

A Worked Example: The Three Moments at One Deathbed

Stratton illustrates middle knowledge with Peter's denial in the courtyard. God knew what Peter would freely do when confronted by a servant girl beside a charcoal fire. Peter could have said otherwise. He did not. God knew he would not.²⁴

Now walk Frank through the same three stages.

Natural knowledge. God knows every possible way He could meet Frank in the corridor. Blazing glory. Quiet words. The face of Frank's late wife. A life review showing seventy-eight years in a single sweep. Patient silence. An opening stretch of felt absence. Each approach is a genuine possibility. Each could go either way.

Middle knowledge. God knows which approaches Frank would freely refuse. Blazing glory would ignite the old defiance. Gentle words would bounce off walls seventy-eight years thick. A direct confrontation would provoke the stubbornness that has defined him. God also knows which approach, if any, Frank would freely embrace. Not all approaches are equal. For Frank, one sequence has a door.

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. For the first time in his life, the room is truly empty. Not the emptiness of a quiet afternoon. The emptiness of a universe with no one in it. Frank has spent decades insisting he needed no one. He has lived as though the room were always empty and that was fine. Now the emptiness lets him feel the weight of that claim. Not as punishment. As honesty. This is what "no" has always meant. He is only now feeling it clearly.

A man like Frank may need to feel the room empty before he will believe anyone was ever in it. You cannot miss what you never knew you had. But the absence, felt honestly, can open a door that argument never could.

In that emptiness, something surfaces. Something God placed within reach decades ago. A half-remembered line from a hymn at a funeral Frank attended under protest. Or his wife's voice, the one he silenced by never praying. Howard Storm's near-death experience follows exactly this pattern: darkness, a remembered hymn, a cry, and a rescue.²⁵

From the dark, Frank does something he has never done in seventy-eight years. He calls out. Not a prayer, exactly. Not the right words. Just a sound aimed at something beyond himself. And the Christ who composed the silence answers. The face of the wife he failed is beside His own. The light does not crush Frank. It meets him. It knows him. It has been waiting for exactly this cry.

The real Frank then freely says yes. Or, I must be honest, he may still refuse. The encounter makes the best appeal God knows how to make. It does not override Frank's will. Even in the corridor, Frank remains Frank.

Two guardrails. First, Frank stays free the whole way. At the cry and before it, at the moment of seeing Christ and after it, the choice is his. Second, this scheme works only if some winning approach actually exists for Frank. If, in every feasible encounter, Frank would refuse, we face a harder possibility. I will get to that in Section 7.

Now the synthesis. Picture three gears that interlock. Gear one is Walls's optimal grace: what a loving God would do. This is the motive. Gear two is the moment-of-death encounter: where and how the appeal actually lands. This is the mechanism. Gear three is Stratton's Molinism: how God knows what the best appeal is. This is the architecture. Take away any one gear and the machine stutters. Together they turn smoothly.²⁶

The payoff is this: the encounter is tailored, person by person. Overwhelming tenderness for one soul. The staggering relief of being known and not condemned for another. Confrontation with a long-fled truth for a third. The face of a loved one for a fourth. And for some, the sequence itself is the tailoring: darkness first, then the dawn.

Why Darkness Can Be Mercy

I owe the reader a careful case for the claim that some encounters may begin in darkness. This chapter owns that case.

First, the guardrail. This is truth-telling, not terror tactics. God does not inflict horror to frighten a "yes" out of anyone. The perseverance distinction from Section 4 already ruled that out: a frightened flinch is not saving faith. A person scared into a "yes" has not really said yes to God. They have said yes to the end of their fear. That is a different thing entirely. The dark passage, when it occurs, is the soul's own condition apart from grace, experienced honestly. The soul is finally feeling what it has always been choosing. The Orthodox tradition has long held that the same divine love, met by resistance, is felt as fire. It is not two different things. It is one love, received two ways.²⁷

Think of a parent who lets a stubborn child feel the cold before opening the door. The parent is not punishing the child. The parent is not inflicting the cold. The cold was already there. The parent is letting the child understand what "outside" means, honestly, in their own experience. And a parent with perfect knowledge knows exactly which child needs to feel the cold before they will come inside. Some children hear "it is cold out there" and come in. Frank is not that child. Frank needs to stand in the cold and feel it. Not forever. Not cruelly. Long enough to know it is real.

Second, this approach threads a famous needle. Thomas Talbott, the universalist philosopher we engaged in Chapter 25, reads Romans 11:32 as God shattering "the illusions that make evil choices possible" by letting sinners endure the consequences of their own rebellion. Against Craig, Talbott poses a sharp dilemma: a revelation stunning enough to remove all ignorance would also destroy the freedom to refuse. But remaining ignorance means no one ever rejects the true God.²⁸

The stakes of this dilemma are high. If the revelation is too bright, freedom burns up. The soul cannot refuse what it cannot look away from. But if the revelation is dim enough to leave room for refusal, the soul has not really seen the truth. Either the freedom is gone or the information is incomplete. Either way, the choice is compromised.

The staged encounter threads that needle. An experienced taste of separation is knowledge by acquaintance. The soul does not receive a lecture about what "no" means. It feels what "no" means. It stands in the empty room. It breathes the cold air. And that taste fully informs the will about what "no" means, without the overwhelming unveiling that would crush freedom. The choice that follows is both informed and free. I believe this is the strongest single answer this book gives to the informed-freedom dilemma.

Third, an honest boundary. In most cases, I expect the darkness to come before the meeting. This is the dark opening. But it can also follow an initial refusal within the still-open encounter. The soul meets Christ, says no, tastes the "time" in the dark that its no means, and from there may yet cry out and be answered. I do not claim to know from outside which shape a given case took, and the model does not require me to.²⁹

Fourth, Storm as the pattern in miniature. Howard Storm's NDE follows this arc exactly: darkness, a remembered hymn, a cry, a rescue. And if middle knowledge is true, the hymn was never an accident.³⁰

This Is Stronger Than Both of the Usual Alternatives

Compare this model with the two most common alternatives.

Against postmortem-only views, including the intermediate-state models of postmortem opportunity I have treated with respect throughout this book: 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 between life and encounter to explain.³¹

Against Craig's antemortem-only Molinism, in which God arranges earthly circumstances so that everyone who would believe under some circumstances actually hears in this life: it strains against the unevangelized, infants, and the cognitively disabled. Billions of people have lived and died without ever hearing the name of Christ. An infant who dies at three months has heard nothing. A person with profound cognitive impairment cannot process a verbal gospel. Craig's view requires God to have ensured that none of these people would have believed anyway. That is a heavy claim, and it is hard to square with God's universal love. And a merely hypothetical opportunity is not a real one. James Beilby puts the point well: it is far better that a person's eternal destiny turn on a choice they consciously and actually make.³²

The moment-of-death encounter takes the best of both and leaves the weaknesses behind. It is an actual, conscious, personal meeting. It happens while the person is still a living agent. It is informed by God's middle knowledge. And it reaches everyone, including the billions who never heard a clear gospel in this life. It is postmortem in timing but antemortem in theological substance: the choice is made before the soul finally separates from the body.

One final point here. Stratton's philosophical framework develops the metaphysics of middle knowledge in great depth. But he never says where in a person's existence the decisive circumstance lies. He builds the house. He furnishes it. He installs the locks. But he does not say who is at the door. The moment-of-death thesis fills that open slot. It proposes who is at the door: the risen Christ, meeting each soul at the threshold, with the approach God knew would work. Stratton built the house; the moment-of-death thesis proposes who is at the door.³³

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

Stratton uses a phrase I find haunting: the eternal endgame. It means the ultimate defeat of evil and the salvation of all who can be reached by love without coercion.³⁴

Working with the philosopher Jacobus Erasmus, Stratton proposes that a perfectly wise and loving God would create what they call a maximal harvest world. Among all the feasible worlds God could have made, He would choose one in which evil is ultimately defeated and all who are not beyond the reach of any possible appeal are saved. Nobody who would say yes is denied the chance to say it.³⁵

The idea is both beautiful and sobering. Beautiful, because it means God's creation is not careless. He did not toss dice. He selected, out of every possible configuration of free creatures, the arrangement that would bring the greatest number of people home. He did this in full knowledge of what every soul would freely do. The word maximal means this is the most productive arrangement possible. Not the only good one. The best one. Like a master gardener who studies soil, light, and water, and then places every seed where it has the best chance of growing, God composed the world for the greatest harvest of free yeses.

But the word maximal also implies a limit. A maximal harvest is the greatest harvest feasible. It may not be a total one. There may be seeds that will not grow in any soil. There may be souls who will not turn in any circumstance. The harvest is vast. Whether it is complete is the question this chapter keeps honest.

Stratton and Erasmus add a careful note. The words about those beyond all possible appeal "leave room for hopeful universalism," they acknowledge. But they add: "Neither Erasmus nor I are universalists."³⁶ The door stays open. The guarantee does not follow. Hope and honesty sit side by side.

The moment-of-death encounter fits this picture as the instrument of the harvest. It is the great gathering-in. God's middle knowledge and God's universal love meet each soul, one at a time, with the best possible appeal. The encounter is how the maximal harvest actually happens. It is the mechanism by which the endgame is played out, person by person, in the corridor of each soul's dying. Paul says in 1 Timothy 2:4 that God "desires all people to be saved." The encounter is how that desire reaches every door.

The Hard Edge: Transworld Damnation

I promised not to dodge the sad part. Here it is.

Alvin Plantinga introduced the concept of transworld depravity: a person who would do at least one morally wrong thing in every possible world.³⁸ William Lane Craig applied the same logic to salvation. He described the idea of a person who, in every feasible world and under every possible appeal God could make, would still freely refuse. Craig calls this transworld damnation: a soul beyond the reach of any possible approach, not because God lacks power, but because the soul's own freedom will not bend.³⁹

This is the possibility I need to name honestly. If every approach in Frank's corridor would end in "no," then even optimal grace cannot produce a "yes." The best approach there could be was given. And it was refused.

Three careful points, each one important.

First, transworld damnation does not mean God gave up on anyone. It is the opposite. It is what maximal love met by constant refusal would look like. Every possible road was tried. Every door was held open. Every appeal that could have reached this person was made. The refusal was free, informed, and persistent. God did not stop trying. The soul stopped listening. There is a vast moral difference between a God who abandons a soul and a God who pursues a soul through every possible avenue and is finally told "no" in all of them.

Second, it does not mean we can identify who such persons are. We cannot look at Frank or at anyone and say, "That one is beyond reach." We have no access to the counterfactuals. We do not know what any person would freely do in circumstances we cannot even imagine. This is a humbler position than either the confident universalist (who says no one can finally refuse) or the confident restrictivist (who draws firm lines around who is saved and who is lost). We hold our hope in one hand and our honesty in the other. We do not pretend to read the final chapter of anyone's story.⁴⁰

Third, it does not impugn God's justice. It actually strengthens it. If every person receives the best possible appeal, tailored to them personally, then nobody can say they never had a real chance. No one can stand before God and say, "You never came for me." Every excuse is removed. The justice of any final judgment is underwritten by the certainty that the offer was complete, personal, and genuinely free. The encounter answers Frank's daughter with an unqualified yes: God did everything God could do.

The link to Chapter 27 is direct. Transworld damnation is the philosophical name for what that chapter described pastorally. Formed character. Disordered loves. Augustine's bent will. The soul that has shaped itself against love so deeply that even love at its strongest, in the most favorable circumstances imaginable, cannot turn it. Not because love is weak. Because freedom is real.

An Honest Tension: Does Molinism Point Toward Universalism?

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

Andrew Hronich, building on the work of philosopher Jason Marsh, makes a sharp case. An infinitely resourceful God could add persons to a world one at a time. He could create only those who would, in some feasible circumstance, freely come to Him. He need never create the souls who would jeopardize a universal harvest. Hronich introduces the mirror-image term transworld sanctity: the possibility that no one is constant in refusal across all possible worlds. And he notes explicitly that the free "yes" could come at the moment of death.⁴¹

Now the verdict that gives this argument its weight. The line comes from R. Zachary Manis, one of the sharpest analytic philosophers of religion writing on this topic. Manis is no universalist, and that is exactly what makes his conclusion so striking.

In his book Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, Manis examines the relationship between Molinism and universalism head-on. He grants that Molinism "seems to be a perfect match" for universalism: if God can select from among all feasible worlds, why not select one where everyone is saved?⁴² If the universalist's world is feasible, and if God desires all to be saved, then the Molinist's own logic seems to require it.

Manis then constructs what he calls Molinist Anti-Universalism (M-AU). This is the position that holds middle knowledge while denying that any universalist world was feasible. The idea is that, given the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, no possible world exists in which everyone freely says yes. Jerry Walls is named as M-AU's defender. Manis examines the position piece by piece. The central claim is the no-feasible-universalist-world hypothesis (NFUW): the universalist's dream world is simply not on the menu. But Manis finds the hypothesis undefended. Nobody has shown why it should be true. Nobody has given a reason to think the counterfactuals are arranged that way. Contemporary M-AU, he concludes, is "metaphysically dubious at best."

And then his verdict, which Hronich quotes approvingly: "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." He advises anti-universalists to "reject Molinism altogether."⁴³

I feel the force of this argument. It is one reason this chapter builds on a contested foundation and says so openly. Manis is not grinding an axe. He is not a universalist trying to co-opt Molinism. He is a careful philosopher who has traced the logic and found it pointing in a direction he himself does not fully embrace. That intellectual honesty is exactly why his verdict carries weight.

Let me spell out the pressure more plainly. If God surveys all feasible worlds before creating, and if He truly wants all to be saved, and if the universalist's dream world is feasible, then God would create that world. The only way out is to deny that the universalist's world is feasible. That is what Manis calls the no-feasible-universalist-world hypothesis. And his complaint is simple: nobody has shown why this hypothesis should be true. It is not defended. It is just asserted. And to assert it, you have to claim that the counterfactuals of freedom just happen to be arranged so that no matter what God does, some souls refuse in every possible world. That is a very heavy metaphysical claim to make without evidence.

The reader may wonder why I lay this argument out at full strength. Because a book that hides the strongest objection to its own framework is not trustworthy. The Molinist-universalist pressure is real. It does not destroy the book's thesis. But it sits alongside it as an honest tension.

The Molinist reply is Craig's: not every logically possible world is feasible. The true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom have to cooperate, and the universalist's dream world may not be available. A forced "yes" is not free, and God cannot actualize a world in which someone freely does what they would not freely do.⁴⁴

Then the honest admission. We do not know which side is right. Only God knows the true counterfactuals. Stratton himself concedes that the bracketed wording about the transworld damned "leave[s] room for hopeful universalism," even as he declines to embrace it.⁴⁵

I land exactly where the rest of this book does. Hope held in one hand, the sober possibility in the other. We hope all are saved. We fear that some, in the dreadful freedom of a will bent against love, may refuse. We do not know the number, and we are not asked to. The number is not ours to count. It belongs to God alone, who alone sees the counterfactuals. Chapter 29 makes the book's eschatological neutrality explicit. What happens to those who refuse is the question this book brackets. The encounter is the mechanism. The downstream eschatology is a separate question, one on which thoughtful Christians disagree, and this book respects that disagreement.

Why Would God Create Anyone He Knew Would Refuse?

This is the hardest question the Molinist faces, and I will not dodge it.

Craig offers what is sometimes called 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 parents, your neighbors, the stranger who said the right thing at the right time. The world in which the greatest number of people freely come home may unavoidably contain some who freely refuse. The connections cannot be untangled without unraveling the whole fabric. To fill heaven, God may have to permit hell to be populated.⁴⁶

Guard the misreading: God does not want anyone lost. The lost, if any, are the tragic and unavoidable cost of a world arranged to save the most people possible. God weeps over them. He does not shrug.

The mathematics of compossibility make this clearer. Compossibility is a philosopher's word for which combinations of free creatures can actually coexist in one world. Not every combination is possible. If God creates Alice, she freely comes to faith only in a world where Bob also exists. But in every world where Bob exists, Bob freely refuses. God cannot have Alice without Bob, and Bob will not come. The tragedy is structural. God has not abandoned Bob. Bob's presence is the necessary context for Alice's free yes. He is loved, pursued, and given the best possible appeal. But the web of free choices does not untangle into a neat arrangement where everyone says yes.⁴⁷

Extend the example. If God removes Bob to avoid his loss, Alice's circumstances change. In a world without Bob, Alice might never come to faith at all. And Carol, whose faith depended on Alice, would also be lost. The threads cannot be pulled without fraying the whole cloth. This is not a failure of God's power. It is the nature of what it means to create a world of genuinely free creatures whose lives touch and shape one another. Every parent knows this on a smaller scale: helping one child sometimes means watching another struggle. The difference is that God's knowledge is perfect, and His choices are made with full awareness of every trade-off.

MacGregor traces an important point back to Molina himself. Molina held that God's optimal balance principle governs creation: God considers for creation only those worlds with no more lost persons than are strictly necessary to achieve the greatest salvation overall. God is minimizing loss, not running up numbers. Every lost soul, if there is one, represents a cost that could not be avoided without losing more souls on the other side.⁴⁸

And here is a humbling wrinkle. Molina himself held that no possible individual is depraved enough to refuse God's grace in all available circumstances, and none good enough to accept in all. Everyone has a world in which they say yes. Everyone has a world in which they say no. If Molina was right, the source of any final loss lies not in unsavable persons but in the limits of compossibility: which combinations of free creatures can coexist. The tragedy, if there is one, is structural, not personal. No soul is simply irredeemable. The problem is that the web of free choices may not permit every soul's winning world to coexist with every other soul's.⁴⁹

One last point. Walls, in Hell, raises the missionary objection to Craig's antemortem scheme: if the unreached are lost only because they were transworld damned anyway, why bring them the gospel at all?⁵¹ If the outcome is fixed, the effort is wasted. The moment-of-death encounter dissolves this problem. 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. The missionary carries that invitation in this life. Christ carries it at the threshold. Neither makes the other pointless. Both are part of the same love, reaching the same souls from different directions.

And the implications stretch further. If the encounter is tailored and optimal, then it reaches infants who never heard a word of the gospel (Chapter 30). It reaches the cognitively impaired whose bodies could not process the message (Chapter 31). It reaches the billions born in places and times where the name of Christ was never spoken (Chapter 32). The optimal encounter is how the harvest reaches every corner of the human family. No one falls outside its scope. No one is forgotten. No one is left to wander in the dark because the missionaries never came.

Three Honest Objections

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

I concede this openly. Molinism is not universally accepted in Christian philosophy. The grounding objection, which questions where the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom get their truth-values, is a genuine challenge. Stratton answers it at length in his book.⁵² But I want to make my claim modest and conditional. If Molinism is true, it fits the moment-of-death encounter like a key fits a lock. But the central thesis of this book does not stand or fall with Molinism. This is an illuminating frame, not a load-bearing wall. God can meet every soul at the threshold whether or not we have the right philosophy of how He knows what He knows.⁵³

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

No. Counterfactual knowledge of what Frank would do is not the actual doing. God's knowledge that Frank would say yes in circumstance C does not make the encounter a stage play. Frank still has to walk through the corridor. He still has to hear the silence. He still has to feel the emptiness, remember the hymn, make the cry. None of that is skipped. The real Frank, in real time, makes a real choice. God's knowledge is certain. The response is still free. Knowledge of a free act is not the cause of it. This is precisely the advantage of this model over purely hypothetical schemes, where the person never makes a conscious, actual choice. On Craig's antemortem-only view, some people's eternal destiny turns on a choice they never made. On this book's view, every person makes a real, conscious, personal choice.⁵⁴

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

Consider a parent who knows one frightened child needs to be held and another needs to be spoken to firmly. The parent gives each what they need. There is nothing manipulative about that. A manipulator deceives. A manipulator withholds truth or manufactures false impressions. That is not what is happening here. God is presenting the truth of Himself in the form most likely to be received, not in a form designed to deceive. The gospel remains the same. The Christ who appears is the real Christ. The love is genuine. Only the manner of presentation varies, because people are different and love pays attention to that difference. Tailoring the appeal is what love does when love also has perfect knowledge. And the response stays free.⁵⁵

The Pastoral Heart of It

Everything in this chapter was finally for Frank's daughter.

She sat at the bedside for three days. She prayed while the monitors beeped and slowed. She asked the question she had carried for thirty years: Did God do everything He could?

This chapter's answer is the strongest yes I know how to give.

Out of every possible way the risen Christ could meet her hard, weary, walled-off father in the corridor of his dying, God knew the very best one. He gave Frank exactly that. Not a generic offer. Not a pamphlet slipped under the door. But the face of the One who made him, in the single most persuasive form God knew would reach him.

I will not offer Frank's daughter false comfort. False comfort is its own kind of cruelty. I will not promise her that Frank said yes. I do not know that, and neither does she. The encounter does not come with a receipt that the living can read. The response happened inside the corridor, between Frank and Christ, and it belongs to them.

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. He was not uninvited. He was not unreached. He was not lost for lack of a chance.

Every believing child who has watched a parent die without faith carries this particular weight. It is not just grief. It is the fear that the universe is unjust. That the game was rigged. That her prayers hit the ceiling and came back empty. This chapter's answer is not cheap comfort. It is the hardest-won comfort I know how to offer. The encounter was real. It was tailored. It was composed by a God who knew Frank better than Frank knew himself. And it was the best possible appeal God knew how to make.

There was a chance. It was the best chance there could be. It was given.⁵⁶

If Frank said no, I think of the prodigal son's older brother, standing outside the party. Fully invited. The music is playing. The door is open. He can hear the laughter inside. And he refuses to come in (Luke 15:25–32). The father does not drag him through the door. He goes out to him. He pleads with him. He tells him that everything the father has is already his. And the story ends without telling us whether the older brother comes in. That is not an accident. The ending is open because the brother's choice is real. The door stays open. The feast continues. The refusal is his own. But the invitation was never withdrawn. The father stood at the door and pleaded. That is what optimal grace looks like when it meets a determined refusal.

And here is the second gift, the one for those of us who are still 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 not wasted. It prepares the heart, so that when the great encounter comes, the soul is more ready to say yes than it would otherwise have been. Our love now is part of how God prepares hearts for then. The walls that Frank built over seventy-eight years might have been thinner if someone had kept knocking. Maybe someone did. Maybe his daughter's thirty years of prayer made the walls thin enough for the hymn to get through.⁵⁷

I close with a triad.

We hope. The harvest may be vast. The encounter may win more souls than we dare imagine. Molina's own optimism, Stratton's open door, the sheer creativity of a God who composes each approach with perfect knowledge of every heart: these are grounds for hope that lean toward generosity without falling into presumption. We hope because we serve a God who is infinitely resourceful, infinitely patient, and infinitely loving.

We labor. Our love now is part of how God prepares hearts for then. Every prayer, every kindness, every honest word spoken in love makes a difference. It changes the texture of the walls. It plants hymns that will surface at the right moment. The encounter is not a reason to stop evangelizing. It is a reason to do it better, with more hope and less fear. Our work matters precisely because the encounter is real.

We trust. We trust the God who knows every road to every soul to do, for each one, the best possible thing. We trust because we have looked at the logic and found it sound. We trust because Walls, Stratton, and the NDE evidence all converge on the same picture. And we trust because that is exactly the kind of God we meet in Scripture: the shepherd who leaves ninety-nine to find the one, the woman who sweeps the whole house for a single coin, the father who runs to meet the returning son. He is the God who does the best possible thing. Because that is exactly the kind of God He is.⁵⁸