Appendix E
The Encounter at the Threshold of Death
This appendix gathers into one place the book’s case for the perimortem offer—the encounter with Christ at the very threshold of death. The full argument is developed in Chapter 13, with supporting foundations in Chapter 11 (the conscious intermediate state) and Chapter 14 (optimal grace and middle knowledge). What follows is a self-contained treatment for the reader who wants the moment-of-death piece whole.
A woman sits beside her husband of fifty years. He is dying. He was a kind man, a decent man, but he never came to faith in Christ. Not in any way she could see. His breathing slows. His hand goes limp. And the question that has haunted her for months settles over the room like a weight: Is it too late?
The perimortem offer says: No. It is not too late.
The word itself is plain. Perimortem means "around the time of death." The hypothesis is this: at the very threshold of dying, every person meets Christ. Not a vague light. Not a warm feeling. The risen Lord himself. And in that meeting, the person makes the clearest, freest, most fully informed response of his or her entire life.
This is the first place at which grace reaches those who died with no visible faith. It is not the only place. The intermediate state follows, and then the final judgment (Appendix F). But the threshold of death is where the offer begins to reach past the limits of this earthly life. For the wife at the bedside, for the pastor at the graveside, for anyone who has ever loved someone who died without confessing Christ, this hypothesis matters. It says that the last heartbeat is not the last word.1
Let me be clear about what kind of claim this is. The perimortem offer is a hypothesis. It is well motivated by theology, by philosophy, and by a careful reading of Scripture. But it is not a doctrine that Scripture states in so many words. I find it deeply persuasive. I believe it coheres with everything Scripture reveals about the character of God and the scope of the cross. But I hold it as a convinced hope, not as a dogma. The reader deserves that honesty from the start.2
The most developed account of what happens at the threshold of death comes from Ladislaus Boros, a Hungarian-born Jesuit theologian and philosopher. In his 1965 work The Mystery of Death, Boros argued that death is not the end of personal action. It is, in fact, the first fully personal act a human being ever performs.3
That sounds startling. But Boros builds the case carefully. During our earthly lives, we are never fully free. The body has needs that press on us. Habits shape us before we choose them. Fear clouds our thinking. Social pressure bends our will. We make choices, yes, but we make them from inside a fog of competing drives, half-understood motives, and unexamined assumptions. No single act of our lives ever gathers our whole self into one undivided response.
Death changes that. When the body drops away, the fog lifts. Boros calls this "ontological indigence." It is not poverty of being. It is the stripping away of every camouflage. All the props that held up our false selves are gone. What remains is who we actually are, standing in the open.4
Boros on Death as the First Fully Personal Act
“In death the individual existence takes its place on the confines of all being, suddenly awake, in full knowledge and liberty. The hidden dynamism of existence by which a man has lived until then—though without his ever having been able to exploit it in its fullest measure—is now brought to completion, freely and consciously. Man’s deepest being comes rushing towards him.”
Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death, Introduction
What Boros describes is a moment of total self-encounter. The dying person sees, for the first time, everything he or she has ever been. Every act of love and every act of selfishness. Every small courage and every small betrayal. The past does not vanish in death. It comes rushing forward. The soul takes hold of its whole life at once.5
At the same time, the soul is not sealed off from reality. Boros argues that the dying person enters a new kind of relationship with the world itself. He calls this becoming "pan-cosmic." The soul, freed from the limits of one body in one place, touches the roots of all being. It is not less connected to reality but more connected. And at those roots, where the whole of creation meets its source, the soul encounters God.6
This is the moment Boros calls the "final decision." The soul, fully awake, fully exposed, and face-to-face with God, responds. For the first time, the choice is made with total clarity and total freedom. No distractions. No half-truths. No borrowed opinions. Just the person and the God who made that person. The soul says yes or no with its whole being.7
I want to stress two things about Boros’s account. First, he is not saying that life before death does not matter. It matters enormously. The whole shape of a person’s earthly life is what determines who that person is when the final moment arrives. A lifetime of choosing love prepares the soul to say yes. A lifetime of choosing cruelty makes the yes harder, though not impossible. The earthly life is the formation; the death-moment is the harvest of that formation.8
Second, Boros is a philosopher as well as a theologian. His argument draws on Blondel’s analysis of the will, Bergson’s philosophy of memory, Marcel’s analysis of love, and Thomas Aquinas’s account of the angels’ decision. He was not guessing. He was working through the logic of what it means to be a soul embodied in matter, and what happens when that embodiment ends. The argument is dense, but the conclusion is plain: death is the place of maximal freedom, not the place where freedom stops.9
In much popular writing about near-death experiences, the dying person meets "a being of light." Sometimes the light is warm and welcoming. Sometimes it is identified with God in some general sense. Rarely is it named.
This book names it. The one met at the threshold of death is Jesus Christ, the risen Lord.
That is not a narrow dogmatic reflex. It follows directly from what the New Testament teaches about who Christ is and what he has done. Boros himself saw this clearly. In Part III of The Mystery of Death, he turns from philosophy to theology and argues that Christ’s own passage through death has reshaped the entire realm of the dead. Through his death, descent, resurrection, and ascension, Christ became present to the whole cosmos. The "pan-cosmic" reality the dying soul enters is not neutral ground. It is ground that Christ has already claimed.10
Scripture makes this point in several ways. Paul tells the Romans that Christ is Lord of "both the dead and the living" (Romans 14:9). He tells the Ephesians that Christ "descended into the lower regions" and then "ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things" (Ephesians 4:9–10). Peter writes that "the gospel was preached even to those who are dead" (1 Peter 4:6). The full treatment of these descent passages belongs to Chapter 13. The point here is simpler: there is no region of reality, including the region of death, that is outside the reach of the risen Christ.11
This matters for a precise reason. If the encounter at death is merely a meeting with "the divine" in some formless sense, it could be anything. A Buddhist might see it as nirvana. A secularist might see it as the dissolving of consciousness. But the Christian claim is specific. The one who waits at the threshold is the same Jesus who died on a cross, who rose on the third day, and who is the only Savior. The perimortem offer is the offer of Christ. It does not bypass him. It leads directly to him.12
Stephen Jonathan, writing from a pastoral and Pentecostal background, makes the same case. He argues that a postmortem encounter with Christ is the only credible version of grace beyond the grave that can be squared with the New Testament’s insistence on salvation through Christ alone. Any model that removed Christ from the encounter would not be a Christian model at all. It would be something else wearing the name.13
The Perimortem Offer Is the Offer of Christ, Not a Back Door Around Him
The encounter at the threshold of death is not a second path to God that avoids the cross. It is the same path—the only path—extended to those who never walked it during their earthly lives. The dying person meets Jesus, not a nameless force. He or she is offered the gospel, not a generic blessing. Salvation at the threshold of death is still salvation by grace, through faith, in Christ. The perimortem offer expands the reach of the gospel. It does not lower the requirements of the gospel. Any version of grace at death that dispenses with Christ, with faith, or with the cross is not the biblical hope. It is one of the counterfeits (Chapter 2).
What does the encounter look like? We are speaking of something no living person can observe from the outside. But we are not guessing blindly. Boros’s philosophical analysis, the theological logic of God’s character, and even certain features of near-death accounts all point in the same direction.
First, the encounter involves a life review. Boros developed this idea from Bergson’s philosophy of memory. Our past does not disappear. It accumulates. During life, our practical needs push most of it into the background. We remember what is useful and forget the rest. But at the moment of death, when the practical demands of the body cease, the whole past comes flooding back. Every moment, every choice, every person we helped or harmed, is present at once. Boros called this "integral perception and remembrance in death."14
R. Zachary Manis, in his analysis of the divine-presence model, makes a related point. The "life review" is not merely a remembering. It is a seeing in the light of truth. When the soul encounters God's full presence, self-deception becomes impossible. Every excuse, every rationalization, every carefully constructed version of "I was right and they were wrong" dissolves. The person sees his or her life as God sees it. That is both terrifying and liberating.15
Manis is not himself a universalist. He defends the divine-presence model of hell without committing to universal salvation. But his analysis serves the universalist hope well. If the encounter with God strips away self-deception, then the choice the dying person faces is not obscured by the lies he or she has been telling. It is the clearest possible choice. And a clear choice, made in the full light of perfect Love, is exactly the kind of choice the perimortem offer requires.16
The Life Review and the End of Self-Deception
In the presence of God, the dying person sees everything clearly. Every act of love, every act of harm, every motive laid bare. Self-deception is no longer possible. The person who says yes to God at this moment says it knowing exactly who he or she is and exactly who God is. And the person who says no says it without excuses. This is why the perimortem offer is the most serious moment in a human life. It is also why it is the most hopeful. A soul that finally sees the truth about God's love—sees it without the fog of sin, fear, and bad religion—has every reason to say yes.
Second, the encounter is deeply personal. God does not offer the gospel as a loudspeaker announcement to a crowd. He meets each person as that person, with full knowledge of his or her story. If middle knowledge is real—if God knows what each person would freely choose in any situation He might place them in—then the encounter at death is not a generic appeal. It is the most perfectly tailored appeal imaginable. The right words, the right presence, the right moment. This is what Chapter 14 develops as "optimal grace."17
Third, the encounter involves freedom. This is the hinge. A soul that is forced to say yes has not been saved. It has been overridden. The perimortem offer respects the person’s freedom completely. The appeal is maximal. The clarity is total. But the choice remains the soul’s own. Boros drew on Aquinas’s account of the angelic decision to illustrate this point. The angels chose for or against God in total lucidity, with their whole being, in a single act. The final decision at death is the human equivalent of that angelic moment.18
A question arises naturally at this point: Is there any evidence that something like this actually happens?
The literature on near-death experiences (NDEs) is vast and growing. Millions of people have reported experiences during clinical death or near-death events that include many of the features Boros describes: an encounter with a presence of overwhelming love, a panoramic life review, a sense of total clarity, and a feeling that the experience was "more real than real." Some of these cases are what researchers call "veridical"—the person reports accurate details about events that took place while they were clinically dead, details they had no ordinary way of knowing.19
Manis notes that the life review, in particular, is one of the most commonly reported elements of near-death experiences. People describe seeing their entire life played back, often from the perspective of those they affected. They felt the pain they caused others. They felt the joy they brought. The review was not neutral. It was an encounter with truth.20
I want to be careful here. Near-death experiences are suggestive evidence. They are not proof. There is an important difference between evidence that coheres with a hypothesis and evidence that proves it. The NDE literature coheres strikingly with the Boros hypothesis and with the biblical picture of an encounter with God at the boundary of life and death. But NDE accounts come from people who were revived. By definition, they did not complete the passage through death. They got a glimpse, not the full reality. And the experiences are filtered through human memory, cultural expectations, and the limits of language.
A Word of Caution on Near-Death Experiences
This book does not build its case on near-death experiences. The case rests on the character of God, the scope of the cross, and the logic of the soul’s encounter with its Maker. NDEs are interesting supporting data. They show that the features Boros describes—the life review, the encounter with a loving presence, the total clarity—are not just philosophical abstractions. Real people report them at the boundary of death. But reports are not revelation, and anecdotes are not doctrine. The perimortem offer stands or falls on theological and philosophical grounds, not on the testimony of those who came back. The veridical cases deserve honest attention. They do not deserve uncritical trust.
James Beilby approaches the empirical dimension with the same caution. Writing from a careful evangelical perspective, he acknowledges that there is evidence suggesting that consciousness continues around the time of death and that some kind of encounter or decision may be possible. But Beilby is clear that the theory of postmortem opportunity does not depend on NDE research. The case is theological and biblical, not empirical.21
I take the same position. The NDE data is welcome when it lines up with what we would expect from the biblical and philosophical case. But if every NDE account were debunked tomorrow, the perimortem offer would still stand on the character of a God who wills all to be saved, on the descent of Christ to the dead, and on the logic of a soul that meets its Maker in full freedom.
The perimortem offer does not stand alone. It is the first of three stages in which the offer of Christ reaches every human soul.
At the threshold of death, the soul meets Christ and is given the clearest possible opportunity to respond. This is the perimortem offer. For many, I believe this encounter will be enough. The soul, freed from the body’s distractions and the world’s noise, sees God’s love clearly for the first time and says yes.
But for some, the yes does not come at once. A lifetime of hardened rebellion, of deep wounds, of distorted images of God does not always dissolve in a single moment. For these souls, the offer continues. In the intermediate state—the conscious waiting realm that Scripture calls Hades—God's pursuit does not stop. Christ, who descended to the dead and preached the gospel even there, remains present and active. The offer stands. This is the subject of Appendix F.
And beyond the intermediate state, the final judgment is not the slamming of a door but the last and fullest offer. At the Great White Throne, every remaining soul stands in God’s unveiled presence, face to face, with no barrier left. Chapter 14 develops the judgment this way in full.
Together, these three stages explain how the universal-scope passages of the New Testament can be true. When Paul writes that God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4), the perimortem offer is part of the mechanism by which that desire is fulfilled. When Paul declares that God will be "all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28), the encounter at the threshold of death is the first step on that road.22
The perimortem offer also fits naturally with optimal grace and middle knowledge (Chapter 14). If God knows what each person would freely do in any situation, then He can arrange the encounter at death to be the single most persuasive appeal that person could receive—without ever forcing the choice. God does not offer grace generically. He offers it perfectly, fitted to each heart. The threshold of death is one of the places where that perfect offer is delivered.23
Beilby, it should be noted, does not go as far as this book does. His theory of postmortem opportunity is designed for the unevangelized—those who never had a genuine chance to hear and respond to the gospel in this life. He does not extend the offer to everyone, and he does not embrace universalism. He writes plainly that he rejects universalism as a conclusion, even while arguing that death is not the end of the saving opportunity.24 I respect his care, and I draw on his work gratefully. But I believe the logic of God’s love reaches further than Beilby takes it. If God provides a postmortem opportunity for the unevangelized because his love will not leave them without a fair hearing, why would that same love abandon those who heard a distorted gospel, or who rejected a version of Christianity they had every reason to reject? The principle that drives Beilby’s case—that a loving God ensures everyone gets a genuine opportunity—points, I believe, toward the universal hope this book defends (Chapter 3).25
Three Stages of One Offer
The perimortem encounter at the threshold of death, the continued offer in the intermediate state, and the final encounter at the judgment are not three separate programs. They are three stages of one relentless offer from one relentless God. The threshold of death is where the offer begins to reach past this life. The intermediate state is where the offer continues. The judgment is where the offer reaches its fullest intensity. Together they form the mechanism by which the God who “desires all people to be saved” actually saves all people—not by overriding freedom, but by meeting every soul with the truth.
I need to close with what this hypothesis does not license.
The perimortem offer is not an excuse to live carelessly. The earthly life shapes the soul that arrives at the threshold. A lifetime of cruelty, of self-worship, of deliberate rebellion against known truth does not leave the soul in a good position to say yes when the moment comes. Boros was clear about this: the final decision is made by the person the whole of life has formed. The dying moment is the harvest. If what was sown was poison, the harvest is hard. It is not impossible—God is very good at reaching hard hearts—but it is not easy, and the passage through the fire of truth will be painful in proportion to the evil that must be burned away (Chapter 12).26
Nor is the perimortem offer a guarantee that everyone says yes at the threshold. Some may not. The no is a real possibility. Freedom means freedom to refuse, even when the appeal is perfect and the vision is clear. The author of this book believes that no soul, seeing God in full clarity, will refuse forever. But the belief that final refusal is vanishingly unlikely is not the same as the claim that it is impossible. The open question of free will is faced squarely in Chapter 23.27
And the perimortem offer does not remove the urgency of evangelism. Just the opposite. If the encounter at death is the harvest of the earthly life, then the gospel preached now is what prepares the soul for that harvest. A person who hears the gospel clearly, believes it, and lives in it arrives at the threshold of death already shaped by love. A person who never hears it arrives at the threshold with the whole work still to be done. The soul that knows Christ before death enters the encounter already running toward God. The soul that does not know him enters it from a standing start. The gospel preached now is never wasted. It is the best possible preparation for the encounter that waits at the end (Chapter 24).28
Stephen Jonathan captured this well from his own pastoral experience. He argued that the concept of grace beyond the grave does not undermine evangelism. It makes the gospel better news. A gospel that says God’s love reaches past the grave is a more powerful gospel, not a weaker one. And a God who pursues every soul all the way to the threshold of death and beyond is a God worth proclaiming with urgency, not complacency.29
So the perimortem offer is held with conviction, but also with humility. It is a hopeful, well-motivated hypothesis about the mercy of God. It does not license presumption. The encounter is real. The fire of truth is real. The dark passage through self-knowledge is real. But the love that waits on the other side of that passage is the love of the God who gave his Son for the world. And that love, I believe, is strong enough to reach every soul that was ever made.
The threshold of death is not the end. It is where the door swings open.
↑ 1. The perimortem offer, as used in this book, refers specifically to the encounter with Christ at the threshold of death, prior to or at the very moment of the soul’s separation from the body. It is distinguished from the postmortem offer (the continued offer in the intermediate state and at the final judgment) treated in Appendix F.
↑ 2. James Beilby strikes a similar note of epistemological humility in Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), pp. ix–xiv. He describes the theory of Postmortem Opportunity as “a good answer to the question of the destiny of the unevangelized,” not the only possible one.
↑ 3. Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death: Awakening to Eternal Life, with introduction and commentary by Cynthia Bourgeault (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish, 2020). The original German edition appeared in 1962; the English translation by Burns & Oates appeared in 1965 under the title The Moment of Truth. All page references in this appendix are to the 2020 Monkfish edition.
↑ 4. Boros, Mystery of Death, p. 76. Cynthia Bourgeault’s commentary explains that Boros does not mean a poverty of personal being but “a complete transparency of personal being where the old habits are gone forever and one must step forward to claim and inhabit what one has become.”
↑ 5. Boros, Mystery of Death, pp. 53–54. Boros argues that in death “the whole dynamic force of existence is then transformed into person and the man can arise in the completely untrammeled statement of himself as man.”
↑ 6. Boros, Mystery of Death, pp. 73–76. Boros writes that “thanks to the process of death the soul is given access to a more really essential proximity to matter” and “the soul reaches the place where the whole world has its source, where it is brought together and grasped as one whole.”
↑ 7. Boros, Mystery of Death, p. 75. Boros states that at the “heart of the earth”—this metaphysical center—the soul must make its “complete and final decision.”
↑ 8. Boros, Mystery of Death, pp. 44–54, on the “two curves of existence”—the declining curve of the “outer man” and the rising curve of the “inner man.” The inner person develops throughout life and comes into full possession of itself only in death.
↑ 9. Boros draws explicitly on Maurice Blondel’s L’Action (the analysis of the will), Henri Bergson’s theory of durée vécue (the philosophy of memory and integral perception), Gabriel Marcel (the analysis of love), and Thomas Aquinas (the angelic decision in total lucidity). See Mystery of Death, Sections II.1–II.9 for the full philosophical demonstration.
↑ 10. Boros, Mystery of Death, pp. 136–44, esp. p. 144, where Boros argues that Christ’s death establishes “a new universal scheme of salvation embracing the whole human race.” In Section III.2 he develops the claim that death is “the place of our fully personal encounter with Christ.”
↑ 11. On the descent of Christ to the dead and its implications for the scope of the saving offer, see the full treatment in Chapter 13, with supporting exegesis of 1 Peter 3:18–20; 4:6; Ephesians 4:8–10; and Romans 10:7.
↑ 12. On the exclusivity of salvation through Christ, see Chapter 4 (the scope of the atonement) and Chapter 2 (the boundary against pluralism). The universalism this book defends claims that all will be saved through Christ, not that Christ is unnecessary.
↑ 13. Stephen Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife? A Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Evaluation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014), pp. vii–viii, and ch. 4. Jonathan argues from the twin theological axioms of particularity (salvation is through Christ alone) and universality (God desires the salvation of all) that a postmortem encounter with Christ is the best way to hold both commitments together.
↑ 14. Boros, Mystery of Death, Section II.3. Boros draws on Bergson’s analysis: “Our life consists of an uninterrupted duration. It is a single sentence, begun on the first day of our consciousness, and nowhere divided up by full stops.” In death, the practical filter that suppresses most memory is removed, and the whole past becomes present at once.
↑ 15. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 163 and 170. Manis notes that the life review, frequently reported in near-death experience literature, is consistent with his divine-presence model. He is not himself a universalist; he defends the model as an account of what hell is, without committing to what its final outcome must be.
↑ 16. On the divine-presence model of hell and its relation to the perimortem encounter, see Chapter 11.
↑ 17. On optimal grace and middle knowledge as the means by which God tailors the saving appeal to each person, see Chapter 14.
↑ 18. Boros, Mystery of Death, Section II.8, p. 76 and the discussion of Aquinas on the angelic decision. Boros writes: “The angels made their decision in total lucidity, calmly and coldbloodedly, one might almost say, and putting the whole of their being into the decision. Their being became decision and their decision being.” The final decision of the dying human is the analogue of this.
↑ 19. The foundational modern study is Raymond Moody, Life After Life (New York: Bantam, 1975). More rigorous clinical work includes Pim van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–45, and Sam Parnia et al., “AWARE—Awareness During Resuscitation: A Prospective Study,” Resuscitation 85 (2014): 1799–1805. For a careful philosophical assessment, see J. P. Moreland and Gary Habermas, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004).
↑ 20. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 163, n. 8. Manis notes that “the literature on near-death experiences is instructive here: the life review, in particular, is a common element of such experiences.”
↑ 21. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 54–55. Beilby discusses the “Universal Opportunity at Death” view and the “final option” theory, noting that while he argues for a postmortem opportunity, he does not have “any vigorous objection” to a saving opportunity at the moment of death.
↑ 22. On 1 Timothy 2:4 and the universal saving will of God, see Chapter 3. On 1 Corinthians 15:28 (“God may be all in all”), see Chapter 5.
↑ 23. On middle knowledge and optimal grace as the mechanism of the saving encounter, see Chapter 14.
↑ 24. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 55–56. Beilby writes: “While I would love Universalism to be true, I don’t believe it squares with the biblical data. While I do not believe that death is the end of salvific opportunity, I do believe that salvific opportunity ends at the day of judgment. After judgment has been passed, it is final.”
↑ 25. On the scope of the hope extending to the unevangelized, the pseudoevangelized, and all persons without exception, see the master theological statement in Chapter 3 and the boundary discussion in Chapter 2.
↑ 26. Boros, Mystery of Death, pp. 53–54. The two curves of existence mean that the “inner man” is shaped by the entire history of choices made during the earthly life. On the purifying fire and its proportional intensity, see Chapter 12.
↑ 27. On the open question of free will and the bare logical possibility of final refusal, see Chapter 23.
↑ 28. On the relationship between the continued offer and the urgency of evangelism, see Chapter 24.
↑ 29. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, Preface. Jonathan writes that the concept of grace beyond the grave makes the gospel “truly good news” and offers a stronger apologetic, one “where God is not viewed as capricious or unreasonable.”