Chapter 23

The Best Possible Approach

Optimal Grace, Middle Knowledge, and the Threefold Offer

The Daughter in the Waiting Room

The coffee in Karen's hand has gone cold. She doesn't notice. She sits in a plastic chair in a hospital hallway, and her eyes are fixed on the far wall, and her lips are moving. She is praying the same prayer she has prayed for thirty years.

Her father, Frank, is seventy-eight. He lies behind the door at the end of the hall. The cancer has won. The doctors say it could be hours now, or it could be days, but the direction is settled. Frank is dying.

Karen knows her father. She grew up in his house. She knows his stubbornness, his pride, his old grievances nursed like embers. Frank walked out of a church service in 1973 and never went back. He told Karen once that God had done nothing for him and he owed God nothing in return. When her mother died, Frank said nothing about heaven. He said nothing about anything. He just closed the door to the bedroom and sat in the dark.

For thirty years Karen has invited him to Easter services, left books on his kitchen counter, asked the pastor to stop by. For thirty years Frank has said no. Sometimes with a grunt, sometimes with a slammed door, once with a string of words that sent her home in tears. The answer has always been the same.

Now the answer is almost final. The machines behind that door are counting down. And the question Karen cannot shake, the question that keeps her lips moving in that plastic chair, is this:

When Frank dies, will God have done everything He could?

That is the question this chapter sets out to answer.

It is not a small question. It carries the weight of every deathbed prayer ever whispered by a child for a parent, a wife for a husband, a friend for someone they loved and could not reach. It carries the weight of the whole argument this book has been building. We have seen that God's love does not quit at the grave (Chapter 2). We have seen that the soul survives death and enters a conscious state beyond it (Chapters 6–8). We have seen the encounter at the threshold (Chapter 11), the descent of Christ to the dead (Chapters 15–16), and the hard biblical texts that people cite to close the door at death (Chapter 19). We have weighed whether a soul can truly refuse God face-to-face (Chapter 22).

Now it is time to put the pieces together.

This chapter makes three connected claims, and then fuses them into one. First: God does not offer Christ the same way to everyone. He tailors the offer to each heart. That is optimal grace. Second: God knows exactly which appeal, at which moment, would win each person's free "yes." That is middle knowledge. Third: the offer is not a single moment but a whole composed sequence, running from the deathbed through the intermediate state to the final judgment. That is the threefold offer this book has been tracing.

Put the three together, and this is what you get: God gives every person the best possible approach. Not a generic invitation. Not a one-size-fits-all altar call from the sky. A sequence of appeals composed by perfect love and perfect knowledge, fitted to one soul, across the whole window from the last heartbeat to the last judgment.

Karen's question gets its fullest answer here. Let us begin with the love.

A Love That Knows Each Heart

Suppose you wanted to reach a person you loved. Really reach them. Not just send a form letter. Not just knock on the door and read from a script. You would think about who they are. What moves them. What they fear, what they long for, what language their heart speaks. You would choose the right moment, the right words, the right tone. You would approach them in the way most likely to open the door, not the way that was easiest for you.

This is what Jerry Walls calls optimal grace. And in his account, it is not a theory about how God might act. It is a claim about how a perfectly loving God must act.

Walls puts it this way:

Such grace is deeply personal and individual in the sense that God knows how best to elicit a positive response from each person, without destroying or overriding their freedom. What would be highly effective in converting one person might make another more resistant. Jerry L. Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, ch. 5

Notice what Walls is saying. Grace is not a single dose poured out equally on everyone, like rain on a field. It is personal. It is fitted. God does not use the same appeal on Karen that He uses on Frank, because Karen and Frank are different people. What opens one heart may harden another.¹

And notice the scope of the claim. Walls continues:

Optimal grace, moreover, implies that God is not content with merely giving everyone some chance for salvation, but desires to give everyone every opportunity as made possible by the death and resurrection of Christ, and all that flows from those events. God truly desires to save all persons, and does not extend the offer of grace merely in a cursory fashion so that everyone has some minimal chance, in order to establish God's justice in damning them if they reject it. Walls, Purgatory, ch. 5

Read that last sentence again. God does not hand out a minimal opportunity just so He can say, "Well, I gave you a chance." A God who did that would be a God going through the motions. He would be covering Himself, not loving people. Walls is clear about where that leads: "Given that God bestows abundant grace on all persons in this fashion, damnation only results from the persistent choice to reject optimal grace."²

James Beilby sharpens the point further. In Postmortem Opportunity, Beilby contrasts Walls's optimal grace with a very different idea: what Terrance Tiessen calls "sufficient grace." And the contrast is revealing. What is sufficient grace sufficient for? Tiessen's own answer is striking: the sufficiency of God's grace "lies particularly in its being enough to justify God's condemnation [of sinners]."³

Beilby does not let that pass. He calls it self-defeating:

Any act done to avoid condemnation is by its very nature insufficient as an act done for its original purpose. If I only teach well enough to sidestep my students' complaints when I fail them, my teaching is insufficient as teaching. Similarly, God's provision of grace that is only sufficient to justify his damnation of sinners is insufficient as an account of grace and nonsensical as an account of saving grace. James K. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 45

I think Beilby is exactly right. Grace calibrated to justify condemnation is not grace at all. It is a legal fig leaf. And it does not match the God we meet in the Gospels, the God who leaves ninety-nine sheep on the hillside to chase the one that wandered off (Luke 15:4).⁴

The God of the parable does not yell once across the valley, check a box, and go home. He searches until He finds. And when He finds, He rejoices. That is the picture of optimal grace. Not a minimum. Not a formality. The very best that infinite love and infinite knowledge can compose.

Walls reinforces this with a striking observation from Dante. In the Divine Comedy, Dorothy Sayers noted that every soul in Dante's vision is getting exactly what it wants. The souls in hell want their own way, and they are getting it. The souls in purgatory want the will of God, and they embrace the pain that leads them there. Sayers sums up Dante's picture: "When every allowance is made (and Dante makes generous allowance), when mercy and pity and grace have done all they can, the consequences of sin are the sinner's."³⁹

Walls highlights the strong claim inside that quotation. "Every allowance is made." "Mercy and pity and grace have done all they can." Only after all of that does anyone end up separated from God. The separation is not the fault of a stingy grace. It is the fruit of a stubborn will that has been offered everything and refused it.⁴⁰

But Walls also adds a crucial qualification. Optimal grace does not mean the absence of hardship. Grace may include trial. What matters is that the trial comes with the resources to meet it. A person born into terrible circumstances has not lacked optimal grace just because life was hard. They have lacked it if the difficulty was so crushing that they never had a genuine shot at responding. And that is precisely what the postmortem offer addresses: the person who, through no fault of their own, never received the gospel clearly enough to respond. Under optimal grace, that person is not left behind. God catches up.⁴¹

Walls is also careful about what a decisive rejection looks like. It is not a hasty "no" spoken in ignorance. It is not a frightened retreat from something half-understood. A decisive rejection is "a settled response which is made by one fully informed of the Christian faith. Such a response would not be haphazard, superficial, or prone to change in shifting circumstances or with awareness of new information. Such a response could be described as a rooted disposition."⁴² Only after optimal grace has been fully received and fully refused does the rejection become final. That is a high bar. And it is the bar this book applies at every stage of the threefold offer.

Beilby presses the same point from a different angle. What would the "best possible opportunity" to be saved actually look like? He writes: "I am not sure, but I am confident that God does. Since God knows us better than we know ourselves, it seems obvious that he would know what would make the gospel of Jesus Christ most persuasive to each person." And then: "There is no reason to suppose that the best possible opportunity for one person will be the same as another."⁴³

Paul said it first: "I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some" (1 Corinthians 9:22). If Paul, a finite human, adapted his approach to his audience, how much more would an infinite God? Beilby turns Paul's logic into a question: "How much more would God give each person what they need to see him as he is and commit their life to him?"⁴⁴

There is one more layer here, and it matters. Beilby insists that the best possible opportunity must include an honest picture of God. The goal is not to trick people into heaven. The goal is to present God as He truly is, so that the soul can respond to the real God, not a distortion. Cognitive idolatry, committing yourself to a God of your own invention, is not salvation. The encounter has to be true. And that means it may be harder than we imagine, because God will not pander to our fantasies. He will show up as He is.⁴⁵

This matters for the argument ahead. Optimal grace is not a sugarcoated sales pitch. It is perfect love meeting a real person with the real truth. And that meeting may, for some souls, begin in something that feels like fire.

The Best Sequence, Not Just the Best Moment

Here is where this book makes its own move. Walls developed optimal grace in the context of this life and of purgatory. He was asking: does God give each person the best possible chance to respond to Him? And his answer is yes.

I agree. But I want to press the idea further. I believe optimal grace does not stop at death, and it does not operate in a single moment. I believe it operates across the whole window this book has been tracing: the deathbed, the intermediate state, and the final judgment.

Think about what this means for Frank. A single burst of light at the deathbed might not be the best approach for him. Frank is proud. Frank is angry. A sudden blaze of divine glory might feel more like an assault than an invitation. It might drive him deeper into his defenses, not draw him out.

But suppose God knows that Frank needs something different. Suppose the best approach for Frank involves first the gentle, quiet meeting at the threshold (Chapter 11). If Frank refuses there, then the long passage through the intermediate state, where he tastes what he has been choosing: the loneliness of a life lived in bitterness, the emptiness of pride without an audience (Chapter 8). And then, at last, the full unveiling at the Great White Throne, where God's love and holiness stand before him with nothing hidden (Chapter 27).⁵

That is a composed sequence. It is not random. It is not God flinging chances at Frank and hoping one sticks. It is the work of a Father who knows His wayward child better than that child knows himself, and who has arranged the whole arc of the pursuit to bring that child home.

For Karen's neighbor, maybe the deathbed encounter alone is enough. She has been softening toward God for years. She just needs the meeting. One gentle word, one unveiled glimpse, and she says yes.

For someone else, the best approach might begin in darkness. That claim deserves its own section, and we will come to it shortly.

The point for now is this: optimal grace, extended across the whole offer-window, becomes the best possible approach. Not a single best moment, but the single best sequence of moments, composed by a God who knows what He is doing.⁶

Let me press this further. The traditional picture of God's offer, for many Christians, is a single event: you hear the gospel, you respond, and the case is closed. If you hear and refuse, or if you never hear at all, the door shuts at death and nothing can be done. That picture may be well-intentioned, but it does not fit the God we have met in this book. A God of optimal grace would not be satisfied with a single attempt. He would pursue. He would adapt. He would try again, in a different key, at a different stage, with a different appeal, because He knows what will work and He loves the soul too much to stop at one try.

And that is what the threefold offer gives Him room to do. The deathbed is the opening movement. Hades is the development. The judgment is the climax. Each stage offers different conditions, different pressures, different kinds of clarity. And God, who knows perfectly which conditions would freely win each soul, composes across all three.

Think of a doctor treating a difficult case. One treatment may not be enough. The best physician does not give up after the first try. She adjusts the approach. She tries a different medication, a different combination, a different dosage. She tailors the treatment to the patient, not to a textbook. And if one round of treatment fails, she tries again, because the goal is healing, not checking a box.

God's approach to each soul is infinitely more personal, more patient, and more knowledgeable than any physician's. And the threefold offer gives that approach the room it needs to work.⁶¹

But how could God know which sequence would work? How could He know, in advance, what Frank would freely choose at the deathbed, in Hades, at the judgment? That question leads us to the second pillar of this chapter's argument.

What God Knows Before He Acts

In the sixteenth century, a Spanish Jesuit priest named Luis de Molina asked a question that still shapes the conversation today. The question was this: How does God know what free creatures will do?

Most Christians agree that God knows everything that is. He knows the present. And most agree He knows everything that will be. He knows the future. But Molina pressed a third question: Does God also know what would happen in circumstances that never actually occur?⁷

For instance: Does God know what Peter would freely choose if he were placed in the courtyard of the high priest on the night of Jesus's arrest? Not just what Peter will do (since God knew the future), but what Peter would do in that setting, even before God decided to create the world?

Molina said yes. And he called this kind of knowledge middle knowledge, because it sits logically between two other kinds of knowing that God has.⁸

To make this concrete before we get technical, think of Ebenezer Scrooge. In Dickens's A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge a possible future. After the vision, Scrooge asks whether these are "shadows of things that will be, or shadows of things that may be only." William Lane Craig points out that Scrooge asks the wrong question. The ghost was not showing him what will happen or what might happen. The ghost was showing him what would happen if Scrooge kept living the way he was living. That is a different kind of knowledge. And it is exactly the kind of knowledge Molina said God possesses about every free creature.⁴⁶

The idea can sound abstract. But Timothy Stratton and Jacobus Erasmus offer a helpful way to picture the logical ordering. They point out that "the words in a sentence are logically, but not temporally, prior to the meaning of the sentence; and the left-hand of an equation (e.g., '2 + 4') is logically, but not temporally, prior to the answer or right-hand of the equation (e.g., '6')."⁹ In the same way, the stages of God's knowledge are logically ordered without being ordered in time. God has all three eternally.

And the Peter illustration, drawn from Molina himself, makes the concept vivid. As Kirk MacGregor explains:

God knew in his natural knowledge that Peter, if placed in the courtyard of the Sanhedrin, could freely affirm or deny Christ, but God discerned in his middle knowledge that Peter would freely deny Jesus under those circumstances. Kirk R. MacGregor, Luis de Molina, 92–93, cited in Stratton, Mere Molinism, ch. 13

Peter was not forced. There is a logically possible world where Peter stands firm and confesses Jesus in that same courtyard. But God knew, with certainty, which way Peter's free will would go in those exact circumstances. That is the heart of middle knowledge.¹⁰

Now, does the Bible actually show God acting on this kind of knowledge? Molina thought it did. Let me walk through three passages that this chapter owns.

David at Keilah

The story comes from 1 Samuel 23. David is hiding from King Saul, and he has taken refuge in the city of Keilah. He asks God two questions: Will Saul come to Keilah? And will the men of Keilah hand me over to Saul?

Look carefully at what happens. God tells David what Saul would do and what the men of Keilah would do. But neither thing actually happens. David leaves, so Saul never comes, and the men of Keilah never hand anyone over. As MacGregor notes, "The knowledge mediated here did not constitute predictions of the future (foreknowledge), for Saul did not actually come to Keilah and the citizens of Keilah never actually handed over David to Saul."¹¹

This is not foreknowledge. It is not a prediction of what will happen. It is knowledge of what would happen in a situation that ends up never occurring. That is middle knowledge, right there in the narrative of 1 Samuel.¹²

Tyre and Sidon

Jesus says something striking about two ancient cities in Matthew 11:21–24:

"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." (Matthew 11:21, ESV)

Jesus declares what would have happened if His miracles had been done somewhere else. Tyre and Sidon would have repented. But they never got the chance, because those miracles were not done there. Again, this is knowledge of what free creatures would do in circumstances that did not occur.¹³

Stratton adds a useful point here. Repentance and saving faith are not the same thing. The people of Tyre and Sidon would have repented, but that does not mean they would have persevered in faith for the long haul. Repentance can be genuine but shallow, like the seed that springs up quickly and then dies for lack of root (Matthew 13:20–21). God's middle knowledge covers not only initial responses but long-term trajectories.¹⁴

Zedekiah's Two Futures

The prophet Jeremiah delivers a message to King Zedekiah that puts two possible futures side by side:

"If you will surrender to the officials of the king of Babylon, then your life shall be spared, and this city shall not be burned with fire, and you and your house shall live. But if you do not surrender to the officials of the king of Babylon, then this city shall be given into the hand of the Chaldeans." (Jeremiah 38:17–18, ESV)

God knows what would happen in each case. Surrender, and live. Refuse, and the city burns. Both outcomes are real possibilities, and God knows the result of each, in advance, as certain truths about free choices.¹⁵

These three texts do not prove Molinism in every detail. But they show that the Bible itself portrays God as possessing exactly the kind of knowledge Molina described: certain knowledge of what free creatures would do in situations that may or may not ever happen. And that knowledge is what makes the best possible approach possible.¹⁶

Let me press one more point about what middle knowledge does. In His natural knowledge, God sees every possible world. An infinite range. But not all possible worlds are worlds God can actually bring about. Why? Because in some of those possible worlds, free creatures make choices they would not in fact make. Peter confesses Christ in the courtyard, but if God knows Peter would not do that in those circumstances, then that world is not available to God. It is logically possible but not feasible. The term philosophers use is feasible world: a world that God can actually create, given how free creatures would actually choose in it.⁴⁷

This distinction matters. Middle knowledge narrows the infinite range of possibilities down to the feasible range. God then chooses, from among the feasible worlds, which one to create. He does so with full knowledge of how every free choice will go, and with His own purposes and character guiding the selection. No one is forced. But nothing catches God off guard.⁴⁸

Think of it this way. A chess grandmaster can see dozens of moves ahead, but the opponent still makes real choices. The grandmaster's skill is not coercion. It is knowledge of what each move opens up. God's middle knowledge is infinitely greater than any chess player's foresight, but the principle is the same: knowing does not mean controlling.⁴⁹

Now, I suspect that some readers are growing uneasy. Perhaps you come from a Reformed background, and the word Molinism sets off alarm bells. Let me address that directly.

Two Pillars, Not a System

I know that some readers, especially those from Reformed traditions, may be feeling uneasy right now. The word Molinism can trigger alarm bells. It sounds Catholic. It sounds like it might undermine God's sovereignty or sneak in a human-centered view of salvation.

I want to put that worry to rest. Stratton helpfully defines what he calls mere Molinism, and he builds it on just two pillars:

That is it. Two pillars. You do not need to accept any particular view of predestination or election. You do not need to reject the five points of Calvinism. You just need to agree that human beings sometimes make genuinely free choices (at least in everyday, non-salvation matters), and that God has always known what those choices would be.¹⁷

Stratton tells a story of a conversation with a Reformed theologian that puts the point beautifully. After walking through the two pillars, Stratton asked the theologian whether he agreed that humans have some real freedom, at least outside of salvation, and whether God has always known how those free choices would go. The theologian said yes to both.

Stratton: Then you are a Molinist!

Reformed Theologian: How did you reach that conclusion?

Stratton: Well, Molinism is not necessarily a soteriological view. It simply offers a model as to how some human thoughts and actions can be free in a libertarian sense—so responsibility entails—and also how God can be sovereign over these free thoughts and actions by choosing to create a world in which he knew how people would freely choose.

This Reformed theologian paused for a few moments and then offered a response that I will never forget:

Reformed Theologian: Well, if that's what it means to be a Molinist, then I guess I'm a Molinist! Stratton, Mere Molinism, ch. 15

I love that exchange. It shows that the idea behind Molinism is far more modest than the label suggests. And MacGregor adds a point that should comfort any Reformed reader who values the solas: "the Molinist framework can be entirely monergistic rather than synergistic." In plain words: both Calvin and Molina agree that God does all the saving work. The two pillars of mere Molinism do not settle the debate over whether grace is resistible. They simply affirm that God knows how free creatures would choose, and that He chose this world knowing all of it in advance.¹⁸

For the fuller engagement with Reformed concerns about this framework, see Chapter 32. Here, it is enough to note that mere Molinism is a modest and widely shareable claim. And it provides the architecture for the synthesis this chapter is building.

One more point on this, because it matters for the broader argument. Some worry that Molinism makes God's sovereignty dependent on human choices. But there is a powerful precedent in Christian theology for the idea that God limits Himself for the sake of relationship. The Incarnation is the greatest example. In becoming human, the eternal Son of God did not cease to be God. But He did freely choose to enter into the limits of a human life, to experience time, hunger, pain, and death. That was not a failure of sovereignty. It was sovereignty exercised in its most stunning form: the God who could do anything choosing to do the hardest thing, for love.⁶⁵

If God was willing to limit Himself to a human body, is it really so strange that He would choose to create free creatures whose choices He does not determine? The Incarnation itself is the precedent for a God who operates through freedom rather than overriding it. Stratton calls this the "God-desired limitation": God's choice to create a world of free agents is not a weakness in His plan but the very shape of His plan.⁶⁶

The Three Put Together

We have the pieces now. Let me put them on the table together.

This is the heart of the chapter. This is the claim.

God does not throw a dart at a board. He does not roll dice. He does not offer Christ to seven billion people with one megaphone and hope for the best. He approaches each soul the way a master artist approaches a canvas: with perfect knowledge of the material, with perfect love for what it could become, and with the patience to work in stages.¹⁹

For the woman who is almost ready, one gentle encounter at the threshold is enough. She has been softening toward God for years. She just needs the meeting. One gentle word, one unveiled glimpse, and she says yes.

For the child who dies in infancy, the encounter meets a soul freed from the limits of the infant body and given the capacity for a real choice (Chapter 29). The soul is not "still a baby" in the encounter. God gives the infant whatever maturity is needed for a genuine response. And on the optimal-grace framework, He gives it in the way most likely to win that particular soul's free "yes."⁶³

For the man in a remote village who never heard the name of Jesus, the deathbed encounter is the first clear hearing of the gospel, tailored to his heart and his culture and his longings (Chapter 31). Not a Western altar call. Not a formula. A meeting with Christ Himself, in the form and language that this particular soul can receive.

For the person who heard the gospel in this life but heard it badly, who encountered not Christ but a caricature of Christ, the encounter corrects the distortion. Beilby calls this the problem of the "pseudoevangelized": people who think they have heard the gospel but have heard something so far from the truth that their rejection was not a rejection of Christ at all (Chapter 4). Under optimal grace, these souls are given the real thing, perhaps for the first time.⁶⁴

The cases are as varied as human lives. But the principle is the same in every case. God tailors the approach. God composes the sequence. God does not settle for a generic offer when He knows exactly what each soul needs.

And for Frank, bitter and proud and dying behind that hospital door, the best approach might be a longer road.

That longer road is what we turn to now.

Before we go there, I want to pause on what we have just built. This is not a speculative theory pulled from thin air. Optimal grace comes from the character of God as revealed in the Gospels. Middle knowledge comes from the biblical portrait of a God who declares what free creatures would do. And the threefold offer comes from the biblical evidence this book has traced across a dozen chapters. The synthesis is not a leap. It is the natural conclusion of taking all three seriously at the same time.

And notice what the synthesis does for Karen's question. It transforms it. She is no longer asking, "Did God try?" She is asking, "Did God compose the best possible approach for this particular man?" And the answer, on this framework, is yes. God did not leave Frank's soul to chance. God did not offer Frank the same generic call He offered the rest of the world and hope for the best. God knew Frank. God knew what would reach Frank, if anything could. And God composed the sequence accordingly.⁵⁰

That is not the same as saying Frank will be saved. It is saying something better: that Frank's God did everything love could do, and anything less than everything was never an option.

When Darkness Comes First

Some people will not yield to gentleness. They have spent a lifetime building walls, and the soft knock does not reach them. For these souls, the best approach may begin not in light but in darkness.

We saw this pattern in Chapter 10, in the accounts of distressing and hellish near-death experiences. Howard Storm descended into darkness, surrounded by menacing figures, tasting the full weight of a life lived in self-sufficiency and contempt. Only when the darkness had done its work, only when he had felt the utter emptiness of his own "no," did he cry out. And when he cried out, Christ answered.²⁰

That pattern, repeated in case after case, fits perfectly with what we are building here. If God composes the best possible approach for each soul, then for some souls the best approach includes a stretch of felt separation. Not because God has abandoned them. Not because He is punishing them. Because that is the only road this particular heart will walk.

This is the same logic as the refiner's fire in Malachi 3:2–3, and the consuming fire of Hebrews 12:29. The fire is not the opposite of love. It is love meeting resistance. And for some people, meeting resistance is the only way love can break through.²¹

The divine-presence theology of the lake of fire (Chapter 26) reinforces this point. If the fire of judgment is not a separate torture chamber but God's own holiness experienced from the inside, then the dark passage and the refining fire are not two different things. They are two names for the same reality: a soul meeting the God it has been running from. For the willing soul, that meeting is warmth and welcome. For the unwilling soul, that meeting is agony, not because God has changed but because the soul's posture has made the same love unbearable. And even that agony serves a purpose. It is the felt consequence of the soul's own resistance, and it can become the very thing that breaks the resistance open.⁷⁰

I want to say this carefully, because I know it sounds hard. I am not saying God tortures people into submission. I am saying something different. Some people have built walls so high that gentleness cannot reach them. The gospel presented softly slides off like water off a window. It is not that the soul does not need gentleness. It is that the soul has become incapable of receiving gentleness until it has first felt the absence of everything it put in place of God.

Think of an addict. A person can spend years telling an addict that help is available. They can plead. They can weep. They can offer every resource. And none of it lands, because the addict has not yet reached the bottom. It is only when the bottom arrives, when the last defense crumbles and the last excuse dies, that the addict is finally open to hearing the word that has been spoken all along. The bottom is terrible. But it is the road to life.

God's staged approach works on the same principle, at an infinitely deeper level. For the soul that has spent a lifetime running, the taste of separation is not God's cruelty. It is God's composing. It is the best approach for that particular heart. The darkness comes first because the darkness is the only thing that will make this soul ready for the light.⁵¹

And notice how this integrates the distressing NDE data we examined in Chapter 10. Howard Storm's experience followed this exact pattern: darkness, then the cry, then the rescue. The darkness was not the end. It was the beginning of the approach. It was the part of the sequence that broke through Storm's defenses and brought him to the place where he could cry out. And when he cried out, Christ was already there.⁵²

On the optimal-grace framework, that pattern makes perfect sense. God knew that Storm needed the darkness first. God composed the sequence: the descent, the terror, the stripping away, and then the voice. The whole arc was the approach. And it worked.

Now, here is a question we cannot avoid. If God really does know what each person would freely choose in every possible circumstance, then what about the hardest case? What about the person who would refuse Christ in every circumstance?

The Hard Edge: Transworld Damnation

This is the sharpest question Molinism raises. And I want to face it honestly.

If middle knowledge is true, then God knows what every possible person would do in every possible world. And that opens a disturbing possibility. Could there be a person, a creaturely essence in the philosophical language, who would freely reject Christ in every feasible circumstance? No matter what world God placed them in, no matter what appeals He made, no matter how the sequence was composed, this person would say no?

Philosophers call this transworld damnation. A person who suffers from it is not forced into rejection. They are free. But in every world God could create, they would freely choose to refuse. There is no combination of circumstances, no sequence of appeals, that would win their free "yes."²²

This idea is part of a larger discussion about which world God chose to create. Stratton and Erasmus, building on Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds," frame it in terms of a maximal-harvest world:

This is a striking idea. It says: perhaps this world, with all its pain and evil and apparent abandonment, is the one world where the greatest number of free creatures are freely saved. Perhaps God chose this world because it is the one that brings the richest harvest of souls freely saying yes to His love.²³

Stratton and Erasmus are careful to note that they are not claiming universal salvation: "Neither Erasmus nor I are universalists."²⁴ They leave room for transworld damnation. Some people, on their view, may genuinely be beyond the reach of any appeal, in any world, simply because that is how their free will runs.

I share that worry. Transworld damnation is a logical possibility. I cannot prove it never occurs. But the idea that vast numbers of people, or even many, would freely reject God in every conceivable world strikes me as a hard thing to accept about creatures made in God's image and designed for communion with Him.²⁵

Consider Jesus's own words about Tyre and Sidon. He says they would have repented. That means at least some of the people who never heard the gospel were not transworld-damned. There was a feasible world in which they said yes. God simply did not place them in those circumstances. Manis draws attention to this point and calls it "a biblical reason for thinking that [transworld damnation] is false" for at least some individuals.⁵³

And if the people of Tyre and Sidon were not transworld-damned, how many others are in the same position? How many of the billions who lived and died without ever hearing the gospel would have said yes, if the circumstances had been different? The number could be enormous. It could be nearly everyone. And if God has the power to arrange those circumstances, either before death or after it, then the Molinist framework begins to look very friendly to a very wide salvation indeed.

This is not my argument alone. Some of the sharpest minds working on this question have reached the same conclusion, from very different starting points. That brings us to the chapter's most striking tension.

A Match Made in Heaven?

Here is something I did not expect to find when I began studying this material. The deeper you go into Molinism, the more it seems to point toward universal salvation. Not because anyone forces it there. Because the logic keeps pulling in that direction.

The argument goes like this. If some creaturely essences suffer from transworld damnation, God does not have to create them. He can simply choose not to bring those essences into existence. He can select from among the transworld-sanctified, the mirror image of the transworld-damned: creaturely essences who would freely accept Christ in at least some feasible world. If God populates the world only with transworld-sanctified souls, and then places each one in the circumstances where they would freely say yes, the result is a world where everyone is freely saved.²⁶

This is the argument Jason Marsh developed, and Andrew Hronich has pressed it with force. Hronich goes further than most. He argues that freedom itself, properly understood, points toward God rather than away from Him. Drawing on the tradition that runs from Aquinas through the contemporary philosopher Eric Reitan, Hronich contends that human beings are naturally ordered toward union with God. God is our telos, our final end, the one in whom our deepest longings find their rest. If that is true, then the idea that someone could finally reject God, with full knowledge and full freedom, begins to look less like a live possibility and more like a philosophical fiction.⁵⁴

I am not fully persuaded by that last step, for reasons I gave in Chapter 22. The demons believe and shudder, but they do not repent. Self-deception runs deep. Still, Hronich's argument deserves a hearing, and his Molinist application of it is powerful.

Hronich adds a further layer. Even for those who would reject Christ in the actual world, perhaps they would accept Him in some other feasible world. And if so, God can do something about it. Hronich puts it directly:

Perhaps God, in His goodness, strongly saves such individuals so that, in the end, all are reconciled to Him. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 1

Hronich fleshes this out with a careful setup. Using the language of congruist theology, he imagines God knowing the conditions under which each person would freely repent. Suppose two things are true about a person named Adam:⁶⁹

(1) If God were to subject Adam to experiences A, B, and C in S, then Adam would freely repent of all wrongdoing and be reconciled to God.
(2) If God were to subject Adam to experiences A and B but not C in S, then Adam would freely refuse to repent of all wrongdoing and would not be reconciled to God. Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 1

If God knows the truth of both conditionals, He is in a position to bring about (1) rather than (2). Adam's freedom is preserved. God does not force the choice. But God arranges the circumstances so that Adam encounters exactly the conditions under which he would freely choose to come home.²⁷

And then there is Manis. R. Zachary Manis is no universalist. He holds a form of eternal conscious torment. He is one of the most careful analytic philosophers working on hell today. And yet, after a thorough examination of Molinism and anti-universalism, Manis reaches this remarkable conclusion:

I want to let that sink in. Manis argues that if God really does have middle knowledge, and if God really does love every person and want every person saved, then the natural conclusion is that God would use that knowledge to bring about universal salvation. The Molinist who wants to resist universalism has to explain why God, possessing the power and the knowledge to save everyone, does not do so. And Manis finds the available explanations unpersuasive.²⁸

What are those explanations? The main one is Craig's suggestion that there are feasible worlds where everyone is saved, but in those worlds, the total population of heaven is too small. God might prefer a world with more saved people overall, even if some are lost, to a smaller world where everyone is saved. Manis considers this, and he finds it disturbing. He likens it to a couple choosing a fertility treatment that produces ten children but kills two, over a treatment that produces three healthy children. The analogy is not perfect, but the moral intuition is sharp: is a larger population of the saved really worth the eternal loss of even one soul?⁵⁵

And Manis presses further. The Molinist anti-universalist needs three things to be true all at once: that God has middle knowledge; that God genuinely loves every person; and that all the lost suffer from transworld damnation. That third claim is doing enormous work. It requires that every single person who ends up in hell would have refused God in every feasible world. Not just this one. Every one. Without any good explanation of why that is true or even plausible. Manis calls this price "metaphysically dubious at best."⁵⁶

That is a stunning intellectual moment. Three different thinkers, from three different starting points, converging on the same conclusion: Molinism and universalism fit together like a hand and a glove.

Stop and consider how unusual that is. Marsh starts from analytic philosophy. Hronich starts from congruist theology and the Thomist tradition of the soul's natural orientation toward God. Manis starts from the defense of eternal conscious torment. None of them set out to support universalism. And yet they all arrive at the same place: the logic of middle knowledge, taken seriously, pulls hard toward universal salvation. When thinkers who disagree about nearly everything agree about one thing, that one thing deserves careful attention.

Gregory MacDonald (Robin Parry), writing as a universalist, reached the same conclusion from the opposite direction. In The Evangelical Universalist, he argues that Molinism actually provides the tools for a universalist to answer the free-will objection. If God has middle knowledge, God can arrange circumstances so that every free creature freely says yes. Parry finds transworld damnation "massively implausible" as applied to actual human beings, and he uses the Molinist framework to defend the view that God can and does save all.⁵⁷

So where does this leave us?

Where I Come Down

I find the Molinist-universalist convergence deeply compelling. Hronich's argument is strong. Manis's concession is honest and weighty. And the logic of middle knowledge plus optimal grace does, I think, make universal restoration a serious and respectable hope.

But I do not claim it as certain.

Here is why. Freedom is real. This whole book has been built on the claim that the offer is genuine, that the "yes" must be free, that God persuades without coercing. And if the "yes" must be genuinely free, then a genuine "no" must also be possible, even at the end, even in God's full presence. I argued this in Chapter 22. The demons believe and shudder (James 2:19), but they do not repent. Seeing God face-to-face removes ignorance, but it does not remove will.²⁹

I know that Hronich would push back here. He would say that final rejection is not just unlikely but incoherent: a person who truly sees God, with all defenses stripped away, would recognize Him as the satisfaction of every longing. Self-deception, on this view, cannot survive the full light. I take the force of that argument. But I think Walls has the stronger case when he insists that a decisive rejection can be "a settled response which is made by one fully informed of the Christian faith." It may be irrational. It may be tragic. But it is possible. Freedom is freedom, even when it is used badly.⁶²

And so I land where I land. Not with certainty about outcomes. With certainty about God's character.

Let me say plainly what grounds that certainty. It is not Molinism. Molinism is a lens. The ground is something deeper. It is the character of a God who sent His Son to die for the whole world, not for a chosen slice of it. The atonement is for all. Christ tasted death for every person (Hebrews 2:9). If the sacrifice is universal in scope, the offer must be universal in reach.⁶⁷

And if the offer is universal in reach, then the character of God demands that it be delivered with everything God has. Not a token gesture. Not a formality. The fullest, wisest, most personally crafted appeal that infinite love and infinite knowledge can compose. That is what this chapter has been building. And the foundation under all of it is not a sixteenth-century philosophical system. It is the God we meet in Jesus Christ: the God who leaves the ninety-nine, who runs to the prodigal, who weeps over Jerusalem. If that God also possesses middle knowledge, then the synthesis holds with breathtaking force. But even if the philosophical framework falls, the love does not.⁶⁸

This landing matters for the whole book. The mechanism I have been building, the threefold offer from the deathbed to the judgment, does not require any particular answer to the question of what happens to those who finally refuse. That question belongs to Chapter 24. The mechanism works whether you are a conditionalist, a universalist, or even (with some adjustments) a defender of eternal conscious torment. What the mechanism does is guarantee the invitation. It does not guarantee the outcome.³⁰

Frank's Story, from Beginning to End

Let me take you back to that hospital hallway and walk Frank's story through everything this chapter has built.

Frank lies dying. His heart is failing. And at the threshold between this life and the next, God meets him. Not with a blinding flash. Not with a sermon. With the appeal most likely to reach Frank. Maybe it is the memory of his mother's face, the only person who ever made him feel safe. Maybe it is the silence of a presence that asks nothing and offers everything. God, who has known Frank since before he was born, knows which key fits this lock.³¹

And Frank says no.

He says no because he has been saying no for seventy-eight years, and the reflex is deep, and the pride is thick. And God does not force the door.

But God does not leave, either.

Frank enters the intermediate state. And now, for the first time, he is stripped of the noise, the distractions, the other people to blame. It is just Frank and the consequence of his choices. The bitterness he carried like a badge of honor is now his only company. The grudges he nursed have become his landscape. And in that silence, in that felt absence of everything he used to fill his life with, something begins to crack.³²

This is the Hades this book has been describing: not a sealed prison but a place of continued divine presence and pursuit (Chapter 8; Chapters 14–16). After Christ's descent, the realm of the dead was no longer a place where God was absent. It became a place where God was at work. And for Frank, that work is the slow, patient stripping away of the lies he has lived on. Every grudge he held was a wall between him and love. In the intermediate state, those walls have nothing to lean on. The people who wronged him are not there. The audience he performed his anger for is gone. It is just Frank and the emptiness.⁷¹

Maybe it takes a long time. Time in the intermediate state may run differently from clock-time (Chapter 9; Appendix F). Maybe Frank sits in that emptiness for what feels like years, turning his resentments over and over, and gradually finding them lighter, thinner, less convincing. Maybe one day (if "day" is even the right word), he remembers Karen's face. The face of someone who loved him when he gave her nothing in return. And for the first time, he wonders whether love like that could come from somewhere beyond Karen.⁵⁸

Or maybe he doesn't crack. Maybe the defenses hold through Hades. Maybe Frank carries his bitterness all the way to the Great White Throne.

And there, at the judgment, he stands in God's full unveiled presence. Not a veiled hint. Not a distant call. The full weight of who God is, pressing in on every corner of Frank's soul. The love is total. The holiness is total. The truth is total. There is nowhere to hide and nothing left to hide behind. Frank sees himself as he is, and he sees God as God is, and the question is laid bare: will you let go of this, and come home?⁵⁹

This is the staged approach. The dark-first road. God did not abandon Frank. God composed a sequence. The gentle approach at the threshold, then the taste of what Frank has been choosing, then (if Frank is still refusing) the full unveiling at the judgment, where every soul stands in God's complete presence and the final, fullest appeal is made (Chapter 27).³³

At any point, Frank may turn. At the deathbed. In Hades. At the Great White Throne. The door is open at every stage. The offer is alive at every stage. And at every stage, the appeal is composed by a God who knows this particular man, this particular hardness, this particular heart.

And here is where the Molinist framework does its work. On middle knowledge, God knew before He created the world exactly how Frank would respond at each stage. God knew whether the gentle approach would work. God knew whether the taste of separation would crack the defenses. God knew whether the full unveiling at the judgment would finally open the door. And God composed the sequence accordingly. Not hoping for the best. Not guessing. Knowing. And choosing the sequence that gives Frank the highest possible chance of freely coming home.⁶⁰

Now. Did God do everything He could?

Yes. The fullest possible yes.

God gave Frank the best possible approach, in the best possible sequence, composed by perfect love and perfect knowledge, running from the last heartbeat to the last judgment. If God loses Frank, it is not for lack of effort or lack of love or lack of knowledge. It is because Frank, fully seeing, fully knowing, freely chose to hold on to his bitterness rather than let it go. And that is a tragedy. But it is Frank's tragedy, not God's failure.³⁴

And there is room for hope. I said a moment ago that I hold conditional immortality with genuine openness to universal restoration. That openness applies to Frank. Maybe the fire wins in the end. Maybe Frank, stripped of everything he held in front of his heart, finally sees the love that was behind all of it, and says yes. I do not know. But I hope.³⁵

What This Chapter Does and Does Not Claim

Before I close, I want to set three honesty fences around what I have just argued.

First: this is not universalism by the back door. Faith is still required. The offer is real, but the "yes" must be free. The outcome is not guaranteed. I have left it genuinely open, and Chapter 24 will address what the book does and does not claim about the final fate of the unrepentant.³⁶

Second: God is not the author of anyone's loss. Optimal grace means that every loss is a refusal of God's best, never a failure of God's effort. If Frank is finally lost, it is not because God did not try hard enough. It is because Frank, receiving more love and more light than we can imagine, chose his own way.³⁷

Third: the best possible approach does not make this life unimportant. Quite the opposite. A soul shaped toward Christ in this life is, on the logic of optimal grace, more likely to say yes at every stage, not less. The antemortem gospel does real work. Evangelism matters, not because death is the deadline (it isn't; the judgment is), but because the gospel in this life bears fruit in this life, and because the dark passage is real and no one should want to walk it (Chapter 10). The Great Commission is a command, not a loophole-driven necessity.³⁸

Put it this way. If a doctor discovered a cure for a disease, and you knew the cure would be available to everyone eventually, would you stop telling people about it now? Of course not. You would tell them today, because people are suffering today. The gospel is not a ticket to be redeemed later. It is the power of God for salvation now (Romans 1:16). It transforms marriages, heals communities, gives meaning to suffering, and brings the peace of God into ordinary days. A person who hears the gospel and believes in this life does not merely gain an afterlife destination. They gain a whole new life in the present. The postmortem offer does not reduce the urgency of the antemortem gospel. It extends the reach of the same love that drives the proclamation.

Karen is still in that hallway. The coffee is still cold. The machines behind that door are still counting down.

But she does not sit there without hope. She sits there with the deepest hope this book can offer: the truth about a God who will meet her father with the very best He has. A God who knows Frank's heart better than Karen does. A God who will not give a cursory chance and walk away. A God who composed the approach.

Maybe, as she sits there, she remembers the verse she learned as a girl: "The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). She always thought that verse was about this life. Now she knows it is bigger than this life. It is about a patience that runs past the grave, into the place of the dead, and all the way to the throne of judgment. It is about a God who is not slow but relentless.

Karen does not know what will happen to Frank. Neither do I. Neither does this book. What this book knows is the God who will meet him. And that knowledge, honestly held, is the most honest comfort anyone can offer a daughter with cold coffee and a prayer that has lasted thirty years.

The machines will stop. The body will go cold. But the pursuit will not end.

What happens after the approach, what happens when the offer has been given and the freedom exercised and the judgment rendered, is the question we turn to next. Chapter 24 takes up what this book leaves open. And Chapters 25–27 take up the fire.

But this much is settled: God gives every person the best possible approach. And the only ones finally lost are those who refuse even that.⁷²