Chapter 32
Hearing the best case against the book, and answering honestly
Grace After Death — Condensed Edition
A seminary professor once told me that if nobody disagrees with your theology, you probably haven't said anything. I took his point. This book has said something. It has argued that God's saving pursuit opens at the moment of death and continues through the conscious intermediate state. It reaches its fullest intensity at the final judgment. The door closes there, not at the grave.
That claim has drawn fire from every direction. Catholics want to know how this differs from purgatory. Reformed theologians press the "deadline" texts and the sovereignty of God. Evangelicals worry that the whole argument guts the Great Commission. And a good number of readers on all sides suspect the whole thing is wishful thinking dressed up in footnotes.
Each of these objections deserves a serious hearing. An idea that can't survive its best critics isn't worth holding. So this chapter gives the critics the floor, states their case at full strength, and then answers as honestly as I can.
Start with the most natural comparison. If God's purifying presence meets the soul after death and burns away sin, how is this different from Catholic purgatory? If the intermediate state can be a place of transformation, what separates the two?
The question is fair. It deserves a careful answer, not a dismissive one.
Purgatory, as the Catholic tradition has understood it, carries specific commitments this book does not share. In its strongest historical form, purgatory is where those who died in God's grace suffer punishment to satisfy a remaining debt of sin.1 The inhabitants of purgatory are already justified. They are already saved. Their final destiny is not in question. The process is about paying what remains of the penalty for sins that have been forgiven but not yet fully satisfied.2
Jerry Walls, in his careful study of the doctrine, distinguishes between two major models. A satisfaction model stresses payment of a debt. A sanctification model stresses the real transformation of the person's character. Walls prefers the sanctification model, and he makes the point that many Protestants have been fighting a straw man. When purgatory is understood as sanctification rather than satisfaction, the gap between Protestant and Catholic theology narrows.3
I appreciate Walls's honesty here, and I agree that Protestants have often dismissed purgatory without understanding its best form. But the differences between purgatory and the model this book defends remain real.
First, purgatory is for believers only. The souls in purgatory already died in a state of grace. They are on their way to heaven; the question is only when they arrive.4 The encounter this book describes is universal. Every soul meets God's purifying presence, including souls that never professed faith. The fire is not a holding room for the saved. It is the one great meeting between God and every person He has made.
Second, purgatory in its satisfaction form is punishment to pay a debt. Christ's death, on that view, covers the eternal penalty of sin but leaves a temporal debt. This sits badly with Protestant convictions about justification by faith, and I share those convictions.5 The purifying fire of Chapter 26 is not a penalty anyone must pay. It is what happens when the holy God draws near and the soul's sin meets His love. The fire purifies because God is holy, not because a debt demands balancing.
Third, purgatory is a separate place (or state) between earth and heaven. What this book describes is a dimension of God's own presence, not a location between other locations. The same divine love that warms the redeemed burns the sin from those who are not yet ready. Heaven and hell, on the divine-presence model (see Chapter 21), are two experiences of the same God.6
Fourth, and most importantly: in purgatory, the will's decision is already made. The soul has already said yes to God. What remains is cleanup. In this book's model, the will's decision is the whole point. The purifying encounter is not finishing what conversion started. It is the invitation to conversion. The soul may say yes. It may say no. The outcome hangs on that free response, and God will not force it.
I think Walls is right about this. The question of how sin is finally removed is real. Every Christian tradition answers it somehow. Protestants who say sanctification is completed "immediately at death" are giving an answer too, and it is not obviously a better one.8 John Fletcher, Wesley's theologian, made the point sharply: death has no power to cure our pride, any more than old age removes our greed.9 If sin must be purged, something must do the purging. This book says that something is the direct presence of God Himself. That isn't purgatory. But it isn't afraid of the question purgatory was built to answer.
Reformed and evangelical critics of postmortem opportunity almost always begin in the same place: the Bible says the deadline is death. Here is the cluster of texts they cite.
I have given Hebrews 9:27 a full chapter of its own (see Chapter 19), so I'll be brief. The text says death is followed by judgment. It does not say grace ends at death. The "then judgment" is exactly what this book affirms: judgment does come, and it is the deadline. The question is what happens between death and that judgment. Hebrews 9:27 is silent on that question.10 The verse locates the destination. It does not close the road to grace before the traveler arrives.
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) is the other standard text. Abraham tells the rich man that a "great chasm" separates the two sides. Critics read this as proof that destiny is sealed the instant a person dies.11 But as Chapter 18 argued, the parable's chasm describes the intermediate state, not the final one. It does not say the chasm is permanent; it says no one is presently crossing it. And the parable is not about the mechanics of the afterlife at all. Jesus told it to challenge the Pharisees' assumption that wealth proved God's favor.12
The "today is the day of salvation" texts (2 Corinthians 6:2; Hebrews 3:7–4:7) genuinely call for urgency. Paul is right: now is the day of salvation. Every moment matters. But urgency is not exclusivity.13 A doctor who says "take this medicine today" is not saying "it won't work tomorrow." Paul urges his hearers to respond now because delay is dangerous. Sin hardens the heart. This life shapes the dispositions the soul carries into the next.14 None of that requires the claim that God's offer expires at the last heartbeat.
The full treatment of these texts lives in their owning chapters. Here I'll state the structural payoff plainly. Once the deadline is correctly located at the end of the judgment rather than at the moment of death, the whole architecture of this book follows. The offer runs from the deathbed through Hades to the Great White Throne, and no further (see Chapter 27).
Another Reformed objection runs deeper than the texts. "Doesn't this make salvation depend on the creature's free choice rather than God's sovereign decree?" critics ask. "You've put the human will in the driver's seat."
This objection comes from the heart of Reformed theology. Salvation is God's work from first to last, and the decisive factor is His choosing, not ours. Theologians like Grudem and Erickson press the point.15 If anyone can choose or refuse Christ after death, doesn't that mean human freedom trumps divine sovereignty?
I want to answer charitably, because I respect the instinct behind it. The instinct is to protect the priority of grace. I share that instinct. Everything in this book depends on grace. The soul does not earn, achieve, or negotiate its encounter with God. God initiates it. God designs it. God brings every resource of wisdom and love to bear on each person.16 Chapter 23 called this "the best possible approach."
But this book also holds, with the Arminian and Wesleyan traditions, that God made human beings with genuine libertarian freedom. He does not override it.17 These are not competing claims. They work together. God is sovereign in offering; the creature is free in responding. A God who forces a "yes" does not have a relationship with a person. He has a puppet. And the God of Scripture does not want puppets. He wants children.
As Chapter 2 argued, the universal salvific will of God (1 Timothy 2:4) is a genuine desire, not a hypothetical one. The Reformed critic may reply that God's decrees distinguish between His revealed will and His secret will. I find that distinction less convincing than the plain reading of the text. But even on the Reformed view, the span of the offer is a separable question from who determines the outcome.18 A Reformed reader could accept the extended timeline and attribute the outcome to God's sovereign election. The mechanism and the metaphysics of the will are different questions.
This one crosses traditions. I hear it from Catholics, Protestants, and skeptics alike. It may be the single most common reaction to the phrase "postmortem opportunity."
The objection I hear most across traditions is the simplest: "This is just a second chance. Everyone knows there are no second chances after death."
The phrase "second chance" carries a weight it hasn't earned. It implies that the person already had a full and clear first chance and blew it, and now God is handing out a do-over. But for millions of people, this picture is simply false.
What was the "first chance" for the baby who died at six weeks? What was the "first chance" for the woman in an unreached village who never heard the name of Jesus? What was the "first chance" for the man whose only encounter with Christianity was an abusive priest? As Beilby argues, for a person who never received a genuine opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel, the postmortem encounter is not a second chance. It is a first chance.19
And even for those who heard some version of the gospel in this life, the question remains. Did they hear it clearly enough, from credible enough witnesses, to make a genuinely informed decision? God knows the answer. We don't. What this book argues is that God, in His fairness and love, will ensure every person gets the best possible opportunity to respond to the real Christ. For some, that opportunity began in this life. For others, it begins only at death. Either way, it is not a loophole. It is the justice and mercy of a God who refuses to condemn anyone without a genuine encounter with His love.20
There is also a logical problem with the "no second chances" claim. As Walls has pointed out, the church has always accepted deathbed repentance. A man who rejected God for seventy years can turn to Christ in his last breath, and the church rightly calls that grace. If deathbed repentance does not "trivialize this life," then postmortem opportunity does not trivialize it either.21 The logic is the same. Both say that grace can reach a person late. The only question is how late.
This is the objection I hear most often, and it deserves the fullest answer.
The objection has emotional force that runs ahead of its logic. People feel that postmortem opportunity makes evangelism pointless. So let me take it apart carefully.
The first answer is the simplest. We evangelize because God told us to.22 "Go into all the world and preach the gospel" is a command, not a suggestion conditioned on the probability of success. Beilby makes this point with a homely comparison. If a father asks his son to mow the lawn, the son can't reply that Dad would do a better job and will get to it eventually.23 The father has a right to expect obedience. The request stands whether the son's mowing is the best mowing or not. The Great Commission is not a loophole-driven necessity. It is a calling.
The second answer goes deeper. Premortem conversion matters. It matters enormously. A person who meets Christ in this life and walks with Him through decades of growth and service has been shaped by that walk. She is not in the same position as a person who first hears the gospel at the Great White Throne.24 The choices made in this life create dispositions. Dispositions become habits. Habits form character. Beilby calls this "solidification of character." A soul shaped toward Christ in life is, on the optimal-grace logic of Chapter 23, more likely to say yes at the encounter, not less. Evangelism doesn't become pointless. It becomes preparation. It tills the soil the encounter will harvest.
Beilby adds a pastoral observation that cuts even deeper. Not all unevangelized cases are equal. A baby who dies is in a different position from a man who spent decades feeding his own pride.25 The choices this life's candidates for postmortem encounter have made don't vanish at death. They travel with the soul. That is why this life is not a dress rehearsal. It is where the habits of the heart are forged. Evangelism serves not only as information delivery. It serves as soul-formation. And soul-formation is the work of a lifetime.
The third answer may be the most important. The gospel is not merely a fire-escape plan. N. T. Wright has argued powerfully that the things we do in this life carry forward into God's future. The work of preaching, serving, building hospitals, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor, all of it becomes part of what God is making.26 Evangelism matters because knowing Christ now transforms how a person lives now. A lifetime spent following Jesus bears fruit that no postmortem encounter can replicate. The question is not only where someone ends up. It is what kind of person they become along the way.
There is a harder version of the objection. Maybe our evangelism is so flawed, so tangled with cultural baggage and bad theology, that it actually makes postmortem conversion less likely. Beilby states the concern formally: does flawed preaching combined with a later postmortem opportunity produce a lower probability of conversion than the postmortem opportunity alone?28
Two things need saying. First, we have no idea what those probabilities are. Vague guesses about afterlife conversion rates should not override a direct command from Jesus. Second, the answer to bad evangelism is not less evangelism. It is better evangelism. The gospel has sometimes been preached badly, with colonial arrogance or manipulative fear. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be preached. It means it should be preached the way Jesus preached it: with love, with truth, with attention to the person in front of you.29
And the dark passage is real. This book has never claimed that the postmortem encounter is easy or pleasant for the resistant soul. Chapter 10 described what happens when a soul that has spent a lifetime building walls meets a love that will not stop knocking. The encounter with God's purifying presence can burn. The intermediate state can be long and painful for the soul that refuses to yield. Postmortem opportunity is no one's comfortable Plan B. The soul that faces it unprepared faces something far more searching than any sermon.
Lesslie Newbigin once wrote that the deepest motive for mission is the desire to be where Jesus is, on the boundary between God's reign and the darkness.30 That is not the language of obligation. It is the language of love. A missionary who knows God will pursue every soul to the very end is not robbed of urgency. She is freed from panic. She can proclaim the gospel without the anxiety that every failed conversation is a soul lost forever. She goes because the gospel is true, because Christ is worth knowing, because this life is where the soil is tilled.
I'll be honest: I do want it to be true. I want it to be true the way I want love to be stronger than death. But wanting something doesn't make it false. Wanting your child to survive surgery doesn't make the surgeon incompetent. The question is whether the evidence holds.
And the evidence is not a single thread. It is a cumulative case built from multiple independent lines.31 The character of God as revealed in Scripture: a shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine, a father who runs to the prodigal (see Chapter 2). The descent tradition, rooted in 1 Peter 3–4, in which Christ preached to the dead (see Chapter 15). The near-death experience data, in which people consistently report a being of overwhelming love at the threshold of death (see Chapter 5). The philosophy of divine temporality (see Chapter 9). And the best work of analytic theology on the divine-presence model of hell, optimal grace, and middle knowledge (see Chapters 21 and 23).
Each of these lines is debatable on its own. Together, they converge on a picture of God that is not sentimental but serious. A God who pursues to the end. Who respects freedom. And who stops at the hard deadline of the final judgment.
This book does not claim certainty about outcomes. I don't know whether Frank will say yes (see Chapter 23). I don't know whether Ray will come home (see Chapter 1). What I claim is that God will have done everything love and wisdom can do for both of them. No soul capable of being won will be lost for lack of God's trying. That isn't wishful thinking. It is what the evidence points to. And it is a claim I hold with open hands, not clenched fists.32
I've tried to be fair. Some readers will think I haven't been fair enough. Others will think I've been too generous to the critics. Both responses tell me I'm probably in the right neighborhood.
The quick-reference version of these answers, along with several additional objections, can be found in Appendix E. What I want to close with here is something more personal.
I am not asking any reader to abandon the convictions of their tradition. A Catholic reader can hold this book's account of the purifying encounter and still believe the Church's teaching about sanctification after death. A Reformed reader can accept the extended timeline and understand it within divine sovereignty. An evangelical can take the argument seriously and still walk out the door to share the gospel with fresh energy. The God worth sharing is even better than we thought.33
What I am asking is simpler. I am asking every reader to consider whether the God of Jesus Christ might be more relentless than we have dared to believe. Not less holy. Not less just. More relentless. And to consider what it would mean for the grieving parent, the doubting widow, and the tired pastor if that were true.
The next chapter asks that question directly.34
↑ 1. The Council of Florence (1439) declared that souls in purgatory "are cleansed after death" by "punishments designed to purge away their debt." The language mixes satisfaction and sanctification. See Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 3.
↑ 2. The satisfaction model holds that the temporal punishment due to sin remains even after guilt has been forgiven. Indulgences were developed to remit this temporal punishment, the practice that triggered Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. See Walls, Purgatory, ch. 3.
↑ 3. Walls, Purgatory, ch. 4. Walls argues that "Protestants can affirm sanctification models of the doctrine without in any way contradicting their theology."
↑ 4. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1030–1032. Purgatory applies only to those who "die in God's grace and friendship."
↑ 5. Erickson voices this concern: "on this basis, the concept of purgatory—and indeed any view which posits a period of probation and atonement following death—must be rejected." Quoted in Walls, Purgatory, ch. 2. The author shares Erickson's commitment to sola Scriptura while disagreeing with his reading of the evidence.
↑ 6. The divine-presence model of hell, developed by R. Zachary Manis, holds that heaven and hell are two subjective experiences of the same objective divine presence. See Chapter 21 for the full treatment. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: A Theology of the Final Option (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
↑ 7. Walls, Purgatory, ch. 1. Fletcher develops this argument in detail in his Checks to Antinomianism.
↑ 8. Charles Hodge defended the Protestant position that "the souls of believers are immediately made perfect at death," citing Paul's instantaneous conversion on the Damascus road as precedent. See Walls, Purgatory, ch. 3.
↑ 9. Fletcher, Checks to Antinomianism, "A Polemical Essay on the Twin Doctrines of Christian Imperfection and a Death Purgatory." Fletcher argues that "death has no more power to cure our pride, than old age to remove our covetousness." Quoted in Walls, Purgatory, ch. 2.
↑ 10. See the full treatment in Chapter 19. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Philosophical Defense, ch. 6, concludes that the verse establishes the certainty of judgment, not the impossibility of grace between death and judgment.
↑ 11. Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), ch. 41. Nash, When a Baby Dies (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), ch. 4.
↑ 12. See Chapter 18 for the full exegesis. The parable is addressed to the Pharisees (Luke 16:14) and follows a sequence of teachings about money and faithfulness.
↑ 13. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, ch. 6. The 2 Corinthians 6:2 context (beginning at 5:18) is Paul's appeal as an ambassador of reconciliation. Paul is addressing people who have already heard the gospel, not making a metaphysical claim about the boundary of grace at death.
↑ 14. As Walls observes, "If allowing postmortem repentance would trivialize this life, the same might be said for deathbed repentance." The church has always accepted that a person can turn to Christ at the last moment. Walls, Purgatory, ch. 5.
↑ 15. Erickson, How Shall They Be Saved? The Destiny of Those Who Do Not Hear of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), chs. 7–8. Grudem, Systematic Theology, ch. 41.
↑ 16. Walls defines optimal grace as "the optimal amount of influence toward good which God can exercise on someone's will without destroying his freedom." See Walls, Purgatory, ch. 5; cf. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, 92.
↑ 17. See Chapter 22 for the full defense of libertarian freedom in the postmortem context.
↑ 18. A Calvinist could, in principle, hold that God's sovereign decree extends the offer through the intermediate state and that the elect among the unevangelized are effectually called there. The mechanism of the offer and the metaphysics of the will are separable issues.
↑ 19. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 217–22. Beilby argues that for the unevangelized and the pseudoevangelized, the postmortem encounter is "not a second chance but a first genuine chance" to hear and respond to the gospel. The "second chance" objection rests on the unexamined assumption that everyone has already had a fair hearing.
↑ 20. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 222. "One who justifies their decision to delay repentance until the afterlife on the basis of God's provision of a Postmortem Opportunity to the unevangelized has severely misunderstood the theory. They have illicitly assumed that if the unevangelized are given a Postmortem Opportunity, then all must be given one."
↑ 21. Walls, Purgatory, ch. 5. The point is that the church already accepts late grace in principle. The debate is about the outer boundary of "late," not about the principle itself.
↑ 22. Matthew 28:18–20. The Great Commission is grounded in Christ's universal authority, not conditioned on projected effectiveness.
↑ 23. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 228. The lawn-mowing analogy captures the point: obedience to a command does not depend on our assessment of our effectiveness versus God's.
↑ 24. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 229–30. "Choices create dispositions to choose in similar ways in the future, repetitively acting on dispositions creates habits, and habits create our character." A person who has walked with Christ is not in the same position as one who has not.
↑ 26. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 230–31. Beilby distinguishes cases like Anna and Sam (infants, no history of self-choosing) from cases like George (an adult with a long history of moral choices). Not all candidates for postmortem encounter are equal, because "the morally significant choices humans make in this life matter."
↑ 27. N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 193. Wright argues that the things we do in the present "are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly" but "part of what we may call building for God's kingdom." Quoted in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 226.
↑ 28. The distinction between fear-driven and love-driven evangelism echoes the observation in Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 1, that hell is absent from the kerygmatic preaching of the early church in Acts. See also Randal Rauser's argument that the gospel is worth sharing because of what it offers, not because of what it threatens.
↑ 29. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 231–32. Beilby formalizes the harder version: P(C/EV & PMO) < P(C/PMO), where C = conversion, EV = premortem evangelism, and PMO = postmortem opportunity.
↑ 30. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 232. "It is absurd to say that we have anything like a reasonable guess on what the relevant probabilities would be here."
↑ 31. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 232–33. "We should never assume that evangelistic success hinges on our words and actions. It is the Holy Spirit that changes hearts, not us."
↑ 32. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). Quoted in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 229.
↑ 33. For the cumulative-case method, see Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, chs. 1–2, where he builds from converging lines of biblical, theological, and philosophical evidence rather than from any single prooftext.
↑ 34. See Chapter 24, where the author states his own position (conditional immortality, open to universal restoration, rejecting eternal conscious torment) and shows why the book's mechanism is compatible with all three views.
↑ 35. This is the irenic claim of Chapter 24: the mechanism this book defends (the threefold, sequential offer with its deadline at the end of the judgment) is compatible with all three major views of final destiny.
↑ 36. Chapter 33 returns to Pastor Dan and Ray, and to Frank and his daughter, to ask what this doctrine means for the people who carry the heaviest grief.