Chapter 29
Eschatological Neutrality and the Three Views of the Final State
Condensed Edition
What if Frank said no?
We met Frank in Chapter 28. Seventy-eight years old. A lifelong skeptic. Dying in a hospital bed with a failing heart. In the subjectively extended moment of his death, Frank met the risen Christ. The encounter was tailored to his particular soul, composed by a God who knew exactly what approach was most likely to win Frank's free "yes." Christ pursued him. Christ showed him the truth of his life. Christ offered him everything love could offer.
But the book has been honest throughout: some people may say no. Not because the encounter fails. Not because Christ holds anything back. But because human freedom runs deep enough that a soul can look at love itself and turn away.1
So what happens to Frank if he refuses?
This book takes no position on that question. Not because the question does not matter. It matters enormously. But because this book is about something else. The central thesis of Between Heartbeats is about the mechanism of the encounter, not the downstream fate of those who reject it. We have argued that every dying person meets Christ. We have not argued for what happens afterward to those who say no.
That is a separate question. A huge one. And the Christian tradition holds three serious answers. This chapter lays them out, shows how each is compatible with what we have argued, and explains why we deliberately leave the question open.2
The first and historically dominant view is eternal conscious torment, which we will abbreviate as ECT. On this view, those who refuse Christ remain in conscious suffering forever. There is no end. There is no second exit. The soul's refusal is permanent, and so is its consequence.3
ECT has deep roots. It is the majority position in the Western Christian tradition. It is affirmed by Augustine, Aquinas, the Roman Catholic tradition in its main lines, the Eastern Orthodox tradition in its main lines, and the mainstream of evangelical theology. Among contemporary defenders, Jerry Walls, Robert Peterson, D. A. Carson, and Larry Dixon have articulated it with care.4
The biblical case rests on passages like Matthew 25:46, where Jesus speaks of "eternal punishment" alongside "eternal life." The word aiōnios (ai̳nios, often translated "eternal" or "everlasting") appears in both halves of the verse.5 Second Thessalonians 1:9 warns of "eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord." Revelation 14:11 says the smoke of their torment "rises forever and ever." These are serious texts, and the tradition has read them as teaching a punishment with no expiration date.
The strengths of ECT are real. It preserves the gravity of refusal. If a soul says no to infinite love, the consequence is proportionate in a certain sense: endless. It takes human freedom with ultimate seriousness. And it has the weight of the longest theological tradition behind it.
The challenges are also real. The disproportionality objection presses hard: how can finite sins committed during a finite lifetime deserve infinite punishment? The moral-philosophical pressure is not easily dismissed, even by those who hold the view. And there is a genuine lexical question about aiōnios: does it always mean "everlasting in duration," or can it carry other nuances, such as "belonging to the age to come"? That question is explored more fully in Appendix L.6
What matters for our purposes is this: the book's central thesis is fully compatible with ECT. The moment-of-death encounter is real. Some refuse. And on the ECT reading, the refusing soul remains forever in the presence of God, experiencing that presence as torment rather than joy. R. Zachary Manis's Divine Presence Model, which we explored in Chapter 26, is one of the most sophisticated ways of holding ECT alongside the encounter. Hell, on Manis's account, is not God-absent. It is God-present-and-refused.7
I present this view not as the correct one, the one Christians ought to hold, but rather as a view that Christians would do well to entertain. — R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God
Manis's own humility about his model mirrors this book's humility about the final state. A pastor who holds ECT can embrace everything this book has argued. The universal encounter adds to ECT the assurance that no one was damned without a fair hearing. Every soul met Christ. Every soul was fully informed, fully pursued, fully loved. If some still said no, the tragedy is real, but it is not a tragedy of divine neglect.8
The second view is conditional immortality, sometimes called annihilationism. We will abbreviate it as CI. On this view, the soul is not inherently immortal. Eternal life is God's gift to those who accept it. Those who refuse eventually cease to exist. The punishment is real, but it ends. The soul that refuses Christ is not tortured forever; it is, in the end, destroyed.9
CI has its own list of serious defenders. Edward Fudge's landmark study The Fire That Consumes argued that the Bible's dominant imagery for the fate of the wicked is destruction, not everlasting torment. John Stott, one of the most respected evangelical leaders of the twentieth century, expressed his openness to CI in a widely read exchange with David Edwards. Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, Greg Boyd, and John Stackhouse have each argued for variations. The Rethinking Hell movement has gathered a growing community of evangelical scholars and pastors. And James Beilby, whose work on postmortem opportunity has shaped this book, holds a form of CI as well.10
The biblical case focuses on the Bible's destruction language. Matthew 10:28 warns about the One who can "destroy both soul and body in hell." Passages throughout the Old and New Testaments describe the fate of the wicked as perishing, consuming, fading, being no more. The CI case argues that these images fit actual destruction better than they fit endless conscious torment. Arnobius of Sicca, in the early church, held a form of CI, so the view has patristic precedent as well.11
The strengths of CI are real. The lexical case for destruction language is strong. The moral appeal is clear: a God who ends suffering rather than perpetuating it forever may seem more just. And CI preserves the gravity of the choice: saying no to Christ still costs you everything.12
The challenges are also real. CI has been a minority view in the Western tradition, though its recent resurgence is significant. The "eternal punishment" passages of Matthew 25:46 and others require careful rereading if punishment has an endpoint.
For our purposes: the book's thesis is fully compatible with CI. The encounter is real. Some refuse. The refusing soul goes to Hades, retaining the dispositions formed during its life and during the encounter. At the final judgment, the soul that still refuses is annihilated. One further possibility lies within the CI framework as well: there may be a final opportunity at the last judgment itself, a last moment where the refusing soul stands before God's throne and is offered grace once more.13
A Note on Physicalist CI. Some defenders of conditional immortality hold a physicalist view of the human person. On this view, there is no immaterial soul; the person is entirely physical, and immortality comes only through bodily resurrection. Christian physicalists like Joel Green, Nancey Murphy, and Glenn Peoples defend versions of this position. Physicalist CI is in tension with this book's commitment to substance dualism (see Chapter 8) and with the moment-of-death encounter itself (see Chapter 9). If there is no soul that survives the body's dying, there is no soul to meet Christ at the threshold. Dualist CI, by contrast, is fully compatible with everything this book has argued.14
The third view is universal reconciliation, sometimes called universalism. We will abbreviate it as UR. On this view, God's love ultimately wins every soul. Some may refuse at first. Some may refuse for a long time. But in the end, everyone yields. Hell may be real, but it is not permanent. It is remedial, purifying, temporary. The last rebel eventually comes home.15
UR has its own serious defenders. Thomas Talbott's The Inescapable Love of God, which we engaged at length in Chapter 25, is the most rigorous philosophical defense in recent decades. Robin Parry's The Evangelical Universalist makes a closely related case from a more biblical-theological angle. David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved argues with characteristic force that ECT is morally incoherent. Andrew Hronich, in Once Loved, Always Loved, adds a Molinist layer, arguing that if God has middle knowledge he could bring about a world in which all freely accept salvation.16
Among the early church fathers, UR has significant precedent. Gregory of Nyssa taught a version of it. Origin is widely (if debatedly) associated with it. Isaac the Syrian affirmed a form of it. Contemporary patristic scholars like Ilaria Ramelli have argued that universal hope was more widespread in the early church than later traditions acknowledged.17
The biblical case for UR rests on the universal-scope passages: "God desires all people to be saved" (1 Timothy 2:4); "not wanting any to perish" (2 Peter 3:9); "through him to reconcile to himself all things" (Colossians 1:20); "as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22); God's plan "to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ" (Ephesians 1:10). UR defenders argue that "all" means all, and that these texts describe God's actual accomplishment, not merely his wish.18
The strengths of UR are real. The philosophical pressure from Talbott's argument is considerable. The universal-scope passages carry genuine force. And the patristic precedent, while debated, is not invented.
The challenges are also real. Passages that appear to teach eternal separation are not easy to dismiss. The freedom-of-the-damned concern presses: if some souls genuinely and freely refuse, does not UR override that freedom? And historic creedal commitments in most traditions have been read as affirming a permanent separation.19
For our purposes: the book's thesis is fully compatible with UR. The encounter is real. Some may refuse initially. But on the UR reading, God's pursuit continues. In Hades, the refusing soul continues to experience divine love. Some are gradually drawn to repentance. The lake of fire itself may function as a final purifying encounter rather than a place of endless torment. Eventually, all yield. The moment-of-death encounter is the beginning of a pursuit that, on the UR reading, never ends until it succeeds.20
Key Argument — The Principled Neutrality. The moment-of-death encounter is the mechanism. What happens afterward to those who refuse is a separate question. This book argues for what happens at the moment of death, not for what happens in the long run to those who say no. Each of the three positions can be held alongside the encounter without contradiction. The neutrality is not evasion; it is the recognition that two very different questions should not be confused.
Some readers may wonder whether the neutrality is a dodge. It is not. There are four good reasons for it.
First, the arguments for each position are substantial. Good scholars, reading the same Bible with the same devotion to Christ, arrive at different conclusions about the final state. I am not in a position to settle that question for the broader Christian community in a single chapter. The debate has been running for two thousand years, and it shows no sign of ending soon. Humility is appropriate.21
Second, this book's central thesis is about the mechanism of the encounter. What happens at the moment of death is a different question from what happens after the encounter is over. Mixing the two arguments would muddy the central case. A reader who disagrees with my view of the long-term outcome might dismiss the encounter itself by association. That would be a loss, because the encounter stands on its own evidence regardless of where you land on hell.
Third, bracketing the long-term question makes this book usable across traditions. An ECT-affirming pastor can take this book into a hospital room. A CI-affirming chaplain can draw on it at a hospice bedside. A UR-affirming counselor can use it with a grieving family. Each of them can say the same thing to the bereaved: your loved one was met. Christ was there. The encounter was real. They will differ on what comes next for those who refused. But the comfort of the encounter itself belongs to all three.22
Fourth, my own position is one of careful ongoing study. I lean toward CI, with the hope that there may be a final opportunity at the last judgment. I remain open to UR. But these are personal convictions still in formation, and I have no interest in pretending they are settled conclusions. Silence here is honesty, not evasion.23
Let me be more specific about how the encounter fits within each framework. These are not mere assertions of compatibility. They are worked-out pictures of what the encounter looks like from within each eschatological position.
On the ECT reading, the encounter is real and the refusal is final. The soul meets Christ, is fully informed, is fully pursued, and still says no. After the encounter, the soul enters the intermediate state, carrying its formed dispositions with it. At the final judgment, the same refusal stands. The soul remains forever in the divine presence, which it experiences as torment because of its settled hostility toward the love that surrounds it. This is Manis's model, and it has the virtue of explaining hell not as God's cruelty but as the soul's own self-disclosure in the presence of perfect love.24
What the encounter adds to ECT is important. On the standard ECT view, the worry is always that some people were damned unfairly: they never heard the gospel, or heard only a distortion, or lacked the cognitive capacity to understand it. The encounter removes that worry entirely. Every soul had its chance. The pursuit was complete, tailored, and loving. If the soul still refused, the tragedy is real, but it is not a tragedy of God's neglect.
On the CI reading, the encounter is real and the refusal is genuine but not necessarily the soul's last word. The refusing soul goes to Hades. It retains the character it formed during life and during the encounter. At the final judgment, it stands before God again. If it has softened, there may be one more opening. If it has hardened further, it is judged and annihilated. Existence itself is withdrawn. The fire consumes.25
CI gives the encounter an additional poignancy. The soul that refuses is not merely consigned to suffering; it is eventually unmade. The loss is total. What could have been eternal life becomes non-existence. And the encounter makes the contrast vivid: the soul saw what was offered, understood it, and walked away.
On the UR reading, the encounter is the first act of a drama that God is determined to bring to a good ending. Some refuse at the threshold. But God does not stop pursuing. In Hades, in the intermediate state, in whatever follows, the same love that met the soul at the moment of death continues to meet it. The fire of divine love, which the soul initially experienced as torment, gradually does its purifying work. Resistance weakens. Illusions shatter. And eventually, freely and genuinely, the soul yields.26
What the encounter adds to UR is a concrete mechanism for the beginning of that process. The moment-of-death meeting is not a formality. It is the first real encounter, and for many souls it will be enough. For others, it is the opening chapter of a longer story. But the story always begins at the threshold.
Insight — Three Frameworks, One Encounter. Notice what all three positions share. In every case, the encounter is real. In every case, Christ is present. In every case, the soul is fully informed and fully free. In every case, the encounter is an act of love, not a procedural formality. The three positions differ on what follows refusal, but they agree completely on what happens at the moment of death. That agreement is what this book has argued for.
Some readers will press this question. After all, the book has engaged Talbott's universalism at length in Chapter 25. It has engaged Manis's model, which is most naturally (though not exclusively) read as an ECT model, in Chapter 26. It has argued in Chapter 27 that genuine refusal is possible, which might seem to lean against UR. And in Chapter 28, the possibility of transworld damnation was acknowledged honestly. Does all this not add up to a position?27
No. Here is why. The book argues that refusal is possible. That is not the same as arguing that it is permanent. A UR defender can grant everything this book says about the moment-of-death encounter, including the reality of some initial refusals, and still hold that God's pursuit continues until every soul eventually yields. The book's engagement with Talbott took his argument seriously and did not concede it. But declining to affirm universal reconciliation is not the same as affirming eternal conscious torment.28
The book is genuinely neutral. My personal leanings are noted above, but the book's argument does not depend on them. A reader may take everything this book offers about the encounter and place it within whichever eschatological framework they find most compelling.
This book's contribution is specific. We have argued that God's universal saving love reaches every soul through a real, conscious, fully informed encounter with Christ at the moment of death. That claim stands on its own. It is supported by the NDE evidence explored in Chapters 6–12, the philosophy of time explored in Chapters 13–15 and Appendices F–O, the biblical foundations laid in Chapters 20–24, and the theological and philosophical engagements with Boros, Talbott, and Manis in Chapters 16–19 and 25–28. None of that evidence depends on which view of the final state you hold.
The question of what happens after refusal is a separate question, and the wider literature on hell and final judgment addresses it at length. The works we have engaged throughout this book offer serious starting points. Walls's Hell: The Logic of Damnation and Purgatory develop ECT and modified ECT positions with philosophical rigor. Fudge's The Fire That Consumes is the standard reference for CI. Talbott's The Inescapable Love of God and Parry's The Evangelical Universalist are the essential UR texts. Manis's Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God offers a model that sits comfortably with ECT but does not strictly require it.29
We leave this question to those works and to the reader's own study.
Note — Where the Book Goes from Here. The remaining chapters do not revisit the eschatological question. Chapters 30–32 take up the special cases: babies, the cognitively impaired, the unevangelized. Chapter 33 addresses tradition-specific objections. Chapter 34 develops the pastoral implications. And Chapter 35 brings the book to its conclusion. In all of them, the eschatological neutrality of this chapter holds. The encounter is the constant. The downstream questions remain open.
I want to close this chapter where it started: with Frank. And with you, the reader.
If you are reading this book because you have lost someone you love, and you do not know whether they were a believer, here is what this book offers: your loved one was met. Christ stood at the threshold. The encounter was real, personal, and loving. Your loved one saw Christ, heard Christ, and was given every reason to say yes.
What this book does not tell you is whether your loved one said yes or no, or what comes next if they said no. I am sorry about that. I know you want the full answer. I do too.
But here is what I can say. The God who would compose a tailored encounter for your loved one, the God who would pursue them with optimal grace in a subjectively extended moment at the threshold of dying, is not a God who gives up easily. That is true whether you hold ECT, CI, or UR. On every one of those views, the God who met your loved one is a God of relentless love. And that, at least, is ground enough for hope.30
The encounter is certain. The love is certain. Everything else, we can entrust to the One who stands at the threshold.
↑ 1. For the full argument that genuine refusal is possible even in the face of a fully loving, fully informed encounter, see Chapter 27. The philosophical concept of transworld damnation, developed in Chapter 28, names this possibility in Molinist terms: there may be some persons who would freely refuse God in every feasible world.
↑ 2. The three positions surveyed here—eternal conscious torment, conditional immortality, and universal reconciliation—are not the only options in the Christian tradition, but they represent the three major families of eschatological conviction. Variations abound within each. For a helpful survey, see Jerry L. Walls, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
↑ 3. The abbreviation "ECT" is widely used in the contemporary literature. See Robert A. Peterson, Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1995), for a thorough evangelical defense.
↑ 4. Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992); Robert A. Peterson, Hell on Trial; D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 515–36; Larry Dixon, The Other Side of the Good News (Wheaton, IL: Victor, 1992). The Catholic tradition's affirmation is found in, e.g., the Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1033–37.
↑ 5. Aiōnios (ai̳nios): the standard Greek adjective translated "eternal" or "everlasting." Its range of meaning—whether strictly durational ("lasting forever") or qualitative ("belonging to the age to come," aiōn)—is one of the most contested lexical questions in eschatological debate. See Appendix L for the full treatment. This book does not develop full exegesis of Matt 25:46, 2 Thess 1:9, or Rev 14:11; they are introduced here in a neutrality-framing context. For the broader interpretive landscape, see the treatments in Walls, Peterson, Fudge, and Parry cited in these notes.
↑ 6. The disproportionality objection is articulated with particular force in Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), ch. 7. Manis surveys the proportionality debate in Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pt. I.
↑ 7. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pt. III. Manis's core claim: the blessed and the lost are not in fundamentally different metaphysical conditions. Both are in God's immediate presence. The difference is the soul's response to that presence, which depends on the dispositions it has formed. See the fuller engagement in Chapter 26.
↑ 8. This is one of the pastoral strengths of combining the moment-of-death encounter with any view of the final state: the encounter removes the worry that someone was damned through ignorance, disadvantage, or lack of opportunity. See Chapter 34 for the pastoral implications.
↑ 9. The terminology can be confusing. "Conditional immortality" emphasizes the positive claim: immortality is conditional on God's gift. "Annihilationism" emphasizes the negative consequence: the unsaved are annihilated. Many CI defenders prefer the first label, since it foregrounds God's gift rather than the punishment. See Edward William Fudge, The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), ch. 1.
↑ 10. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes; John R. W. Stott, in David L. Edwards and John R. W. Stott, Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), 312–20; Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, The True Image: The Origin and Destiny of Man in Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989); Greg Boyd, The ReEnchantment of Nature (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004); John G. Stackhouse Jr., various contributions to the edited volumes; the Rethinking Hell project (rethinkinghell.com); James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021).
↑ 11. Matt 10:28. For the destruction language across both testaments, see Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, chs. 5–14. Arnobius of Sicca, Against the Heathen (ca. 303 AD), argued that the soul is not naturally immortal and that the wicked perish.
↑ 12. For a concise recent defense of the moral case for CI, see the contributors to Christopher M. Date, Gregory G. Stump, and Joshua W. Anderson, eds., Rethinking Hell: Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).
↑ 13. This "final opportunity at the last judgment" reading is compatible with the two-stage history laid out in Chapter 20. The intermediate state (Hades) is the period between the moment of death and the final judgment; the final judgment itself could include a last encounter. This book does not develop this possibility in detail but notes it as one natural extension of the encounter thesis within a CI framework.
↑ 14. Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Glenn Peoples, various contributions to the Rethinking Hell project. For the book's case that substance dualism is necessary for the encounter model, see Chapter 8 and Chapter 9.
↑ 15. Universal reconciliation must be distinguished from the loose popular idea that "everyone goes to heaven no matter what." The serious theological versions affirm the reality of judgment, the reality of hell as experienced suffering, and the genuine need for repentance. They simply deny that hell is permanent. See Robin A. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), ch. 1, for this important distinction.
↑ 16. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014); Robin A. Parry (as Gregory MacDonald), The Evangelical Universalist, 2nd ed.; David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: Universal Reconciliation in the Light of Divine Love (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2023). For Hronich's Molinist supplement, see ch. 1, "Of God and Men."
↑ 17. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection; Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies. See Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Leiden: Brill, 2013), for the most comprehensive modern treatment of universalist hope in the patristic period.
↑ 18. 1 Tim 2:4; 2 Pet 3:9 (both treated in Chapter 2); Col 1:20; 1 Cor 15:22; Eph 1:10. For Talbott's reading of these texts, see The Inescapable Love of God, chs. 5–6. For Parry's treatment, see The Evangelical Universalist, chs. 2–5.
↑ 19. The freedom-of-the-damned concern is engaged in this book's treatment of Talbott (Ch. 25) and in the discussion of the rationality of refusal (Ch. 27). Talbott argues that fully informed freedom cannot rationally refuse the supreme good; the book takes that pressure seriously but does not concede the point.
↑ 20. Some UR accounts read the "lake of fire" (Rev 20:14–15) as a final purifying encounter rather than endless torment. See Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, ch. 5; see also Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You've Been Taught About God's Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010).
↑ 21. Manis himself models the appropriate humility. He closes his treatment of the divine presence model with an echo of Paul Griffiths: he presents his view "not as the correct one, the one Christians ought to hold, but rather as a view that Christians would do well to entertain." Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, conclusion. The same spirit governs this book's posture toward the final state. Mixing the encounter argument with a commitment to one view of the final state would also narrow the book's audience unnecessarily. A CI reader might dismiss a book perceived as ECT-committed; an ECT reader might dismiss a book perceived as UR-leaning. The neutrality is not only honest; it is hospitable.
↑ 22. For the pastoral application of this point, see Chapter 34.
↑ 23. The author's personal leaning toward CI with openness to UR reflects a position still in formation. This is not unusual among evangelical theologians working on eschatological questions. Beilby, for instance, combines a postmortem-opportunity thesis with a CI framework. The important point is that the book's argument is separable from the author's private convictions.
↑ 24. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pt. III. The core insight: "The same divine love that produces joy in the blessed produces torment in the lost," because the lost have formed dispositions that resist the love surrounding them. See Chapter 19 for the book's own development of this dynamic.
↑ 25. For the two-stage history (Hades as the intermediate state; the final judgment as the definitive moment), see Chapter 20. For a CI reading of the final judgment, see Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, chs. 15–19.
↑ 26. Talbott develops the idea that God's loving pursuit continues beyond death in The Inescapable Love of God, chs. 8–9. The reading of the "lake of fire" as purifying rather than punitive is explored in Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, ch. 5.
↑ 27. For transworld damnation, see Chapter 28. For Manis's engagement with the universalist pressure on his model ("Molinism and Universalism," ~p. 120; "Molinist Anti-Universalism (M-AU)," ~p. 126), see Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, ch. "Providence, Freedom, and God's Creation of the Damned."
↑ 28. The distinction is important. Affirming that refusal is possible is logically compatible with hoping (or even believing) that no one will finally refuse. A UR defender can hold that the moment-of-death encounter is real, that refusal is possible at that encounter, and that God's post-encounter pursuit will eventually win every soul. The encounter thesis does not settle the outcome; it describes the mechanism.
↑ 29. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation and Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Fudge, The Fire That Consumes; Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God; Parry, The Evangelical Universalist; Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God. See also Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, and Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, for positions that integrate postmortem opportunity with CI and UR frameworks respectively.
↑ 30. The book's culminating argument is developed in Chapter 35. The God who composes optimal-grace encounters is, on every eschatological reading, a God whose love is not defeated by the clock running out. See also the pastoral development in Chapter 34.