Chapter 26

Postmortem Opportunity Advocates

Pinnock, Sanders, Walls, Beilby, Jonathan, Hronich, Harrison — the rise of a distinct evangelical scholarly stream

A Scholarly Stream Comes of Age

In 1992 Clark Pinnock published a book that put a phrase into evangelical circulation: a wideness in God's mercy. He took the title from F. W. Faber's old Catholic hymn. He took the conviction behind it from a long reading of Scripture, two decades of teaching, and a pastoral worry that would not let him go: what about those who never heard?¹ Pinnock had moved a long way by then — trained as an evangelical New Testament scholar under F. F. Bruce at Manchester, an early defender of inerrancy in Southern Baptist circles, slowly working his way out of strict Calvinism toward Arminianism, then toward openness theology, then toward the wider hope.² The reaction from the Reformed side was sharp. Within a decade he would stand before the Evangelical Theological Society to defend his standing as an evangelical. He kept his membership by a thin margin. The cost was real.

Almost thirty years later, in 2021, James Beilby of Bethel University published a book whose title gave the position its modern name. Postmortem Opportunity is the most thorough single-volume scholarly defense in print — nine chapters, close to three hundred pages, careful philosophical analysis, biblical exegesis, patristic engagement.³ What Pinnock had to argue for from a defensive crouch, Beilby could lay out as a developed scholarly position with its own taxonomy and a generation of literature behind it. That is the story of this chapter. A distinct evangelical conversation has emerged on Postmortem Opportunity (PO) as a theological position separable from universalism. It is not the same as the universalist movement traced in Chapter 25, though it overlaps. It is not the same as the conditionalist movement coming up in Chapter 28, though it overlaps there too. It is its own stream. And it has come of age.

The Cast: Seven Scholars, One Conversation

The seven figures treated here did not set out to start a movement. Each came to the question from a different angle. Pinnock (1937–2010), a Canadian-born evangelical, moved through New Orleans Baptist, Trinity Evangelical, Regent, and finally McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario.⁴ John Sanders (b. 1956), trained in systematic and philosophical theology at the University of South Africa, wrote a companion volume to Pinnock's in the same year and later lost his post at Huntington College over the controversy around The God Who Risks.⁵ Jerry Walls (b. 1954), a Methodist analytic philosopher trained at Houghton, Princeton Seminary, Yale Divinity, and Notre Dame — where he wrote his doctorate on damnation under Thomas Morris — spent decades at Asbury Theological Seminary and Houston Christian University producing a trilogy on heaven, hell, and purgatory.⁶ James Beilby, at Bethel, came at the question through analytic philosophy of religion before turning to the soteriology of the unevangelized. The other three are more recent: Stephen Jonathan, a British Elim Pentecostal pastor in Tamworth, completed a DMin at the University of Wales, Bangor, in 2011 and published it in 2014;⁷ Andrew Hronich, a young evangelical scholar, published a major work in 2023 with endorsements from David Bentley Hart, Greg Boyd, and Dale Allison Jr. — an unusual combination signaling a book that crossed party lines;⁸ William Harrison wrote a pastoral-popular treatment running to twenty-one chapters, aimed at lay-evangelical readers.⁹ The seven span the academic, pastoral, philosophical, and popular registers of the contemporary evangelical conversation.

Pinnock: The Wider Hope Made Evangelical

I think the best way to understand A Wideness in God's Mercy is as a careful refusal of two positions Pinnock judged inadequate. The first was pluralism — the view that all religions are equally valid paths to God. Pinnock rejected this. Christ is, he insisted, the unique Savior of the world. There is no salvation apart from him. The second was restrictivism — the view that those who never hear the gospel in this life are simply lost, regardless of how they responded to the light they had. Pinnock thought this position made God's universal love either an empty word or a cruel joke.¹⁰

The way through was what Pinnock called accessibilism or inclusivism. Salvation comes only through Christ's atoning work, but the reach of that work is not limited to those who have explicitly heard the gospel preached. Pinnock drew on Justin Martyr's old doctrine of the logos spermatikos — pronounced "LOH-gos sper-mah-tih-KOS," roughly "the seed-bearing Word," the idea that the Logos of God scatters seeds of truth among all peoples, so that anyone living by what they know of the good is being drawn (whether they know it or not) by the same Christ who walked in Galilee.¹¹ The full treatment of Justin belongs in Chapter 5. What matters here is that Pinnock recovered that ancient evangelical instinct for a contemporary audience.

The 1992 book was cautious about PO proper. Pinnock allowed it as a possibility without committing to it as a teaching of Scripture. But over the next decade his position firmed up. By his contribution to the 1996 Four Views on Hell, Pinnock was defending conditional immortality openly — the view that the finally lost will not be tormented forever but will be destroyed.¹² By the time of his late writings he held what amounts to CI plus PO: the opportunity for salvation extends beyond death, and those who finally refuse will not exist forever in agony but will pass out of existence. This is, near enough, the position I hold as the author of this volume. Pinnock's importance lies less in any single argument than in the simple fact that he made the wider hope respectable in evangelical circles. Every subsequent PO scholar walks on ground Pinnock cleared.

Sanders: The Taxonomy and the Cost

John Sanders's No Other Name appeared the same year as Pinnock's book and took up the same question with a slightly different temperament. Where Pinnock argued from divine love downward, Sanders mapped the territory and asked the reader to choose. He laid out the major options for handling the destiny of the unevangelized: restrictivism (only those who hear and believe are saved), universalism (all are saved), postmortem evangelism (the gospel is preached after death), and what he and Pinnock called accessibilism — salvation is available, somehow, even to those who do not hear the gospel preached in this life.¹³ Sanders defended the accessibilist option carefully, with substantial biblical engagement.

The professional cost of taking such positions inside evangelicalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries should not be underestimated. Sanders's later book The God Who Risks (1998), a major statement of openness theology, drew sharp opposition. In 2003 the Evangelical Theological Society voted on whether to expel him; he survived narrowly. The next year the trustees of Huntington College declined to renew his contract. He moved to Hendrix College and continued to write.¹⁴ The pattern of professional consequence for taking PO seriously inside evangelicalism is real, and Sanders is the clearest example of it.

Walls: Purgatory Without Trent

Jerry Walls came to the conversation from a different angle. As a Methodist analytic philosopher, he was less interested in the unevangelized question as such and more interested in the philosophical structure of postmortem moral and spiritual change. Across his trilogy — Hell: The Logic of Damnation (1992), Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (2002), and Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (2012) — Walls developed a position that has come to be called mere purgatory.¹⁵

The argument runs like this. At death most Christians are not yet fully sanctified. But full sanctification — conformity to Christ — is required for the beatific vision, the unmediated enjoyment of God in heaven. Either God completes that sanctification in an instant, by sheer decree, or he completes it through a process. Walls argues that the instant-decree option is philosophically problematic, because it severs the link between the person one becomes and the person one was. A process of completion preserves continuity of identity. That process — postmortem, painful, purifying — is what the older tradition meant by purgatory.¹⁶ Walls is careful to distinguish his proposal from the Roman Catholic doctrine the Reformers rejected: not indulgences, not Tridentine sacramentology, but a Protestant doctrine of postmortem sanctification — the same instinct that drove C. S. Lewis to write, in Letters to Malcolm, "I believe in Purgatory."¹⁷

The implications for our question are significant. If postmortem moral and spiritual change is conceivable for the already-saved Christian, then the move to PO proper — postmortem salvific encounter for the not-yet-saved — is small. Walls also developed an analytic argument, drawing on Molinist resources, that God's love commits him to giving each person optimal grace — the best possible chance to come to him. Since some people clearly do not receive that chance in this life, optimal grace requires that they receive it in the next.¹⁸ Walls is more open than Pinnock to what he calls hopeful universalism, though he stops short of the confident version. His significance lies in providing a Protestant evangelical framework for postmortem spiritual development that is not embarrassed by the word "purgatory."

Beilby: The Scholarly Backbone

If Pinnock and Sanders pioneered the modern PO conversation and Walls supplied the philosophical-purgatorial frame, James Beilby's 2021 monograph supplied something the movement had been missing: a single, rigorous, comprehensive scholarly defense at book length. Postmortem Opportunity is the book to start with if you want to know what the position actually is in its most carefully argued form. Let me walk through it.

Beilby opens with a taxonomy. The "problem of the destiny of the unevangelized" arises from three claims that seem incompatible: (1) God desires that all people have an opportunity to be saved; (2) responding to the gospel of Jesus Christ with explicit faith is necessary for salvation; (3) some die without having heard the gospel.¹⁹ One can resolve the tension by denying any one of the three. Restrictivism denies (1) — God does not, in fact, desire that all have an opportunity. Universal Opportunity (a Molinist variant) denies (3) — God arranges, through middle knowledge or counterfactuals, that all do hear in some sense. Inclusivism denies (2) — explicit faith in Christ is not strictly required. Beilby finds all three options inadequate as they stand and proposes a fourth: Postmortem Opportunity. Death is not the deadline.²⁰

Chapter 2 develops the theological core. Beilby walks through the parables of the lost in Luke 15 — the lost sheep, the lost coin, the prodigal son — and shows that what runs through all three is a portrait of a God who seeks. The shepherd does not give up on the sheep because it has wandered too far. The father does not give up on the son because the son has thrown away his inheritance. The point is not just that God is willing to forgive the lost; it is that God pursues the lost. And the question Beilby presses is whether anything in those parables suggests the pursuit ends at the deadline of biological death.²¹

Beilby pushes the argument further with what he calls the Missio Dei consideration — pronounced "MISS-ee-oh DAY-ee," the Latin theological phrase meaning "the mission of God." If salvation is fundamentally God's project, not ours, then it cannot be the case that the failure of human evangelistic effort is the final word on any person's destiny. To say otherwise is to make God a passive observer in his own redemptive work. The Great Commission is real and important. It is not the whole story.²³

The disability case is one of the most pastorally compelling sections of the book. Beilby asks the reader to imagine three figures: George, who lives and dies somewhere the gospel never reached; Anna, who dies in infancy; and Sam, who lives with a cognitive disability significant enough that the standard auditory-and-cognitive presentation of the gospel cannot reach him.²⁴ The standard restrictivist account has no good answer for Anna and Sam — or, worse, has the kind of answer that, as John Sanders pointed out, would imply that high infant mortality in unevangelized countries is providentially merciful, a suggestion Beilby calls morally horrifying.²⁵ Postmortem Opportunity offers a coherent and humane account: Anna and Sam meet their Creator face-to-face, in some idealized state of their cognitive faculties, and respond freely. That is what the love of God for the least requires.

The historical and biblical sections are where Beilby's careful method shows best. In Chapter 3 he documents the early church's near-universal assumption that God's salvific will is genuinely universal — an assumption he says "nobody in the early church until Augustine's shift in 396 saw anything other than" in the standard passages (1 Tim 2:4, 2 Pet 3:9, John 3:16).²⁶ The full account of Augustine's shift in 396 belongs to Chapter 12; what matters here is that Beilby is willing to make the historical claim with real specificity.

In Chapter 4 Beilby handles the apparent counter-texts. Hebrews 9:27 — "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" — is the verse most often quoted against PO. Beilby reads it in context. The passage is a parallel: just as humans die once and after that face judgment, so Christ died once and after that will appear a second time. The point of the verse is to establish the once-for-all character of Christ's atoning death by analogy with the once-for-all character of human death. The point is not to settle the question of what happens between death and judgment. If anything, the verse is an argument against reincarnation, not against PO.²⁷

In Chapter 5 Beilby handles the positive scriptural support — cautiously. He distinguishes between texts that teach PO and texts that open the possibility of it. The most important of the latter is 1 Peter 3:18–22 with 4:6 — the famous passage on Christ preaching to "the spirits in prison." Beilby walks through the four major interpretive options (Enoch, Noah preaching by the Spirit, Jesus condemning fallen angels, Jesus preaching the gospel to the human dead in Hades) and argues that the fourth is the most natural reading of the Greek and fits best with the christological sequence (crucifixion — death — descent — resurrection — ascension) the passage clearly displays.²⁸

Chapters 6 through 9 do the historical, replies-to-objections, and synthetic work. The historical chapter overlaps substantially with the patristic chapters of this book and we will not duplicate it here (see Chapter 4 through Chapter 11). The synthetic close (Chapter 9) builds a cumulative case, with the trajectory of Isaiah 45:22–23 and the Pauline "every knee shall bow" passages playing a culminating role.²⁹

One scope qualification in Beilby's book deserves to be flagged plainly, because it is where I disagree with him as the author of this volume. Beilby limits PO to those who never had what he calls a "genuine chance" to hear and respond to the gospel in this life. He does not extend PO to those who heard and rejected. My own position — sketched in Chapter 3 and developed across this volume — is that the postmortem encounter extends to all unsaved persons without exception. This is not a small difference. But it is a difference within a shared conviction that something significant happens at, in, or after the moment of death — an encounter that does not exist on the restrictivist map.

Jonathan: The Pastor's Case

Stephen Jonathan's Grace beyond the Grave began as a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of British evangelical scholars and was published with a foreword by Nigel Wright. The book reads differently from Beilby's. Where Beilby writes as the analytic philosopher he is, Jonathan writes as the pastor he is. The book's opening question is not "How do we resolve the inconsistent triad on the destiny of the unevangelized?" but rather "What do I say at the funeral of a person whose Christian faith was, at best, uncertain?"³⁰

The pastoral problem is the book's animating concern. Jonathan reflects on the words of the Anglican burial liturgy, "in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection from the dead," and asks what integrity requires of the minister who says those words over a coffin whose occupant lived and died without any visible profession of faith.³¹ Whispered qualifications ("for those that love the Lord"), private mental reservations, the awkward dance between evangelistic pulpit and pastoral graveside — none of these strike Jonathan as honorable. Either the gospel offers genuine hope beyond the grave for the not-yet-evangelized, or it does not. The pastor needs to know.

Jonathan is candid about his method. He follows Pinnock in admitting that "the scriptural evidence for postmortem opportunity for salvation is not abundant and… the strength of this view lies in its theological argument."³² The fourth chapter, which Jonathan calls "the key chapter of this book," develops that theological argument: the unity of God's love and justice, the case for understanding divine justice as primarily restorative rather than retributive, the implications for what God might do with the unsaved beyond the grave.³³ Jonathan's restorative-justice frame parallels (without depending on) the more philosophically developed treatment in Sharon Baker's Razing Hell, which is treated in Chapter 27.

The book closes with a missiological and pastoral evaluation. Does belief in PO undercut evangelism? Jonathan argues no — the motivation for evangelism cannot be reduced to fear of the eternal consequences of unbelief without distorting the gospel into something it is not. The Great Commission stands on its own ground: obedience to Christ, gratitude, love, joy.³⁴ The book is not a polemic and does not claim to settle the question for everyone. It claims that PO is a theologically responsible option that gives the pastor better resources for funeral-home ministry than confident damnation or empty platitudes.

Hronich: From PO to Universalism

Andrew Hronich's Once Loved, Always Loved (2023) is a different kind of book. It is not, strictly, a defense of PO. It is a defense of universal restoration — apokatastasis panton, "restoration of all things" — that operates with PO premises and reaches universalist conclusions. Hronich treats the universalist movement in detail and overlaps substantially with the figures discussed in Chapter 25. What earns him inclusion here is his explicit engagement with PO as a stage on the way to UR.³⁵

Hronich's argument is that the standard PO premises, once accepted, generate a momentum toward universalism that PO advocates like Beilby try to resist but cannot quite hold off. If God genuinely desires all to be saved (1 Tim 2:4), if God is patient with all and not willing that any should perish (2 Pet 3:9), if Christ's atonement is sufficient for all, if the offer of salvation extends beyond the grave for the unevangelized — then what stops it from extending to all the unsaved indefinitely, until divine love wins them all? Hronich thinks nothing stops it short of an arbitrary cut-off, which the texts do not actually impose.³⁶

For the purposes of this chapter, Hronich's Chapter 5 ("Conditional Immortality") is the most interesting. He treats CI as a serious option and engages it carefully — not dismissively, the way some universalist writers do, but as a position with real biblical support that nonetheless (in his view) faces philosophical difficulties.³⁷ His chief argument is that CI cannot establish the eternality of annihilation without further philosophical work, and so even if conditionalism is biblically defensible it does not by itself foreclose universal restoration. As an author who holds CI plus PO while remaining open to UR, I read Hronich's Chapter 5 as the strongest universalist challenge to my own position. Whether his arguments succeed is a question I am still working through. The fuller treatment of his engagement with CI belongs in Chapter 28. Chapter 6 ("Saved through Fire") and Chapter 7 ("Apokatastasis Panton") complete the constructive case for universal restoration, drawing heavily on the patristic universalists treated in Chapter 7, Chapter 8, and Chapter 9.³⁸

Harrison: The Popular Case

William Harrison's Is Salvation Possible after Death? is the most accessible of the books treated in this chapter — twenty-one chapters plus three appendices, structured for a lay-evangelical reader who has been told all his life that death is the deadline and wants to test that claim against Scripture and history. Harrison's chapters on the meaning of aiōn and aiōnios (chs. 4–5, 19) overlap with the lexical material in Chapter 8 and the treatment of Talbott in Chapter 25, and we will not duplicate that material here.³⁹ Harrison's two chapters titled "Jesus, the Evangelist of Hell?" (chs. 6–7) treat the descent texts (1 Pet 3:18–20; 4:6) and the apparent counter-texts (Heb 9:27; Lk 16:19–31) at length, in a register accessible to a careful lay reader. His historical chapters on "the traditional view" (chs. 15–16) make the same kind of case this whole book makes — that the traditional view is more various than the standard evangelical telling suggests.⁴⁰ Harrison's book ends up in the same general neighborhood as my own position: PO combined with conditionalist or universalist leanings, in a pastoral popular register.

Reception, Controversy, and Pushback

The reception of this stream of scholarship has been mixed in ways that say more about contemporary evangelical institutions than about the arguments themselves. On the academic side, the PO advocates have produced careful work, engaged opposing voices, and built a literature. The major Reformed-evangelical critique came in Daniel Strange's The Possibility of Salvation among the Unevangelised (2002) and in the volume edited by Christopher Morgan and Robert Peterson, Hell Under Fire (2004) — both written largely against Pinnock and Sanders. D. A. Carson's critique of inclusivism in The Gagging of God set the polemical tone. Beilby engages Carson in his Chapter 8 and offers what amounts to a careful refutation of the charge that PO collapses into pluralism.⁴¹

The institutional response has been more punitive. Pinnock and Sanders both faced motions to expel them from the Evangelical Theological Society in 2003, and both survived by narrow votes. Sanders lost his post at Huntington College the following year. The major evangelical denominational statements on hell have not budged. The Gospel Coalition and its theological allies have been consistently and publicly critical of PO and of any softening of the strict-ECT default.⁴² Methodist, Wesleyan, and Pentecostal-charismatic seminaries have been more open to the conversation than confessional Reformed institutions. The Catholic interlocutor in the background of much of this work is Ladislaus Boros, the Hungarian Jesuit student of Karl Rahner, whose 1962 The Mystery of Death proposed a "final decision at the moment of death" hypothesis that structurally parallels PO without using the language. Boros's full treatment belongs in Chapter 24;⁴³ what matters here is that the modern evangelical PO conversation is not isolated.

Assessment: What This Stream Has Achieved

Looking at the seven figures together, what can we honestly say about this stream of scholarship?

First, the diversity of final positions is real. Pinnock landed on CI plus PO. Sanders held PO with openness on the final question. Walls developed PO with hopeful-universalist tendencies and a serious doctrine of purgatorial sanctification. Beilby holds PO and remains formally open about whether the postmortem encounter results in universal salvation, conditional immortality, or final eternal conscious torment. Jonathan holds PO with conditionalist sympathies and a strong restorative-justice frame. Hronich holds PO as a stage on the way to UR. Harrison sits in the same general territory, leaning conditionalist or universalist in a popular register. None of them holds the standard restrictivist position. All of them hold that death is not the deadline. What they disagree about is what happens at and after the postmortem encounter.

Second, the biblical-theological case has matured. The descent of Christ in 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 has become the focal text. The careful treatment of Hebrews 9:27 in its parallel-construction context, of Luke 16:19–31 as parable rather than topographical map of the afterlife, and of Revelation 20:11–15 in its apocalyptic-judgment framing has supplied modern PO scholars with answers to the standard objection-texts that did not exist in popular form a generation ago. The theological case has matured too: the argument from God's character (Jonathan's restorative justice, Beilby's parables of the lost), the argument from the universal scope of the atonement, the argument from the Missio Dei, the disability case (Anna and Sam), Walls's optimal-grace argument, Pinnock's recovery of Justin's logos spermatikos.

Third, the historical case has been strengthened by the larger turn in patristic scholarship represented by Ilaria Ramelli and others — though Beilby is careful to engage that scholarship critically rather than uncritically. The work of Michael McClymond cuts against the more sweeping universalist claims, and the modern PO advocates have generally been willing to absorb that criticism.

Fourth, and most importantly: the cumulative effect has been to move the PO position from "fringe heterodoxy" to "respected minority option" within evangelical theology over roughly thirty years. That is a remarkable shift. It is not the same as saying PO has won the day — most evangelical institutions remain officially committed to the strict-restrictivist default. But the conversation can no longer be ended by a single citation to Hebrews 9:27 and a confident assertion that the matter is settled. The matter is being argued.

Why This Matters

The contemporary PO movement is, I think, the institutional expression of the long hope in contemporary American and British evangelical scholarship. It is distinct from the universalist movement of Chapter 25 — though Hronich operates partly across that boundary. It is distinct from the conditionalist movement of Chapter 28 — though Pinnock, Jonathan, and Harrison lean that direction. It is distinct from the hopeful universalism of Chapter 27 — though Walls overlaps. The seven figures treated here have, between them, given the long-hope tradition a contemporary evangelical scholarly form that did not exist when Pinnock first put F. W. Faber's old Catholic phrase on the cover of an evangelical book in 1992.

I write as someone who operates within this conversation. My own CI-plus-PO position is closest to Pinnock's later view, with the important qualification — against Beilby — that I extend PO to all unsaved persons without exception, not only to those who never had a "genuine chance." Whether the final position is CI or UR I am, as the preface to this book makes plain, still working out. What I am no longer working out is whether the strict-restrictivist default is the only evangelical option. It is not. It is one option among several, and it is not the option with the deepest historical roots, the strongest pastoral resources, or the most careful contemporary scholarship behind it. Pinnock helped open the door. Beilby has built a scholarly room behind it. Other rooms are being added by Jonathan, Hronich, Harrison, and the contemporary hopeful-universalist and conditionalist conversations we will come to next.

The long hope has a house in contemporary evangelicalism. It is not the biggest house on the street. But it is no longer a tent.