Chapter 30
A concluding essay turned toward the contemporary church
A pastor I know once told me about a Tuesday morning in early spring. He was in the church office, sermon notes spread across the desk, when the phone rang. A man he barely knew had lost his father overnight. The family wanted a graveside service on Friday. The father had not been a churchgoer. The son, calling from a hospital parking lot, said only this: “Pastor, please. Tell me there’s still hope for him.”
My friend told me he stared at his sermon notes for a long time after he hung up the phone. He had been taught, all the way through seminary, what to say in moments like that. He was supposed to remind the family that God is just. That God knows the heart. That perhaps the man had whispered a prayer at the end. That we should not presume. The script was familiar. It was also evasive, and my friend knew it. The son had not asked for a script. The son had asked whether the gospel had anything to say about his father after Friday.
That was the question that started him reading. He read through the patristic universalists and the Cambridge Platonists. He read Wesley and Barth and Balthasar. He read Pinnock and Beilby and Jonathan and Hart. By the time he stood at the grave on Friday, he was not sure where he had ended up theologically. But he was sure of one thing he had not been sure of before: when he told the son that the love of God reaches further than this life, he was not making it up. He was speaking from inside a long Christian tradition. “I’m not standing alone,” he told me. “That’s what changed.”1
This concluding chapter is for that pastor, and for everyone who has stood where he stood.
For twenty-nine chapters, this book has done one thing: it has drawn a map. A careful, primary-source-driven, documentary map of what Christians have believed about the fate of the dead from the second century to the twenty-first. The map is not a polemic. It does not tell the reader which long-hope position is correct. It does not even tell the reader they must hold a long-hope position at all. It tells the reader what the historical record actually shows.
And what it shows is this. The long hope of postmortem opportunity, in some form, has been part of the Christian conversation from the beginning. It has appeared as universal restoration in the Greek East (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh), as conditional immortality from the late third century forward (Arnobius, Whately, White), as postmortem opportunity in Hermas’s Similitude 9, in the patristic descent tradition, in Clement of Alexandria, and across the modern Pinnock–Sanders–Walls–Beilby stream, as Pietist universalism in the Petersens and Bengel and Oetinger, as Wesleyan wider hope, as Barthian triumph of grace, as Balthasarian holy Saturday, as Moltmannian crucified-God reach, as the contemporary recovery from MacDonald to Talbott to Parry to Hart.2 The long hope is not new. It is, as Chapter 29 argued, a recovery.
That is the historical claim. But what should it mean for the contemporary church? That is the question this chapter takes up.
I want to be honest about my own location as I ask it. I write as someone who holds conditional immortality with a postmortem opportunity, open to universal restoration. I have not concealed that position in this book. I have, I hope, also not let it distort the historical record. The implications I am about to sketch are not implications for people who already agree with me. They are implications I want every reader to weigh — whether you hold strict eternal conscious torment, hopeful universalism, conditionalism, postmortem opportunity, or full apokatastasis. The historical record is the same map for all of us. The question is what we do with it.
A pastor who has read this book should preach with greater care than before. Not greater timidity. Greater care. Strict eternal conscious torment, preached as “the Church has always taught this,” is now historically untenable. That single sentence — the Church has always taught this — appears in pulpits, in apologetics videos, in Christian college classrooms, and in funeral homilies across the American evangelical world. It is asserted with confidence. It is also wrong, in the form the assertion typically takes. The patristic East held universal restoration in the open. The conditionalist stream has roots in the late third century. The descent tradition was a common-property doctrine across the early Church.3
The pastor preaches Scripture. That has not changed. But the pastor who has read the historical record should stop borrowing the historical claim from the popular apologetics culture and pretending it carries weight it does not carry. Preach what Scripture says. Preach what your tradition holds. Preach what your conscience can defend. Do not preach a historical claim that is false.
The polemical move — “the Church has always taught eternal conscious torment” — cannot survive a careful reading of the actual sources. A pastor who has read Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, the Cambridge Platonists, Wesley, Barth, and Balthasar cannot use that line again without misrepresenting what he knows. The honest move is not to flip to universalism; it is to retire the rhetorical shortcut and preach the texts themselves.
Christian education that presents only the strict-ECT default as the Christian view is now inadequate. This is not a call for relativism. It is a call for accuracy. Youth pastors, Sunday-school teachers, seminary professors, and Bible-college lecturers carry an enormous responsibility. The student who is taught that there has only ever been one Christian view of hell, and who later discovers that this is not true, will conclude one of two things. Either the teachers lied. Or the teachers themselves did not know.4
Neither conclusion is good for the Church. The remedy is straightforward. Teach the diversity. Teach the patristic universalists alongside Augustine. Teach the conditionalist stream alongside the traditionalist stream. Teach Barth alongside Hodge. Let students see the actual landscape. Then teach them how to weigh Scripture, tradition, reason, and pastoral experience in deciding among the options. That is a harder pedagogy than the one most evangelical institutions have been practicing. It is also the more honest pedagogy, and it is the one the historical record requires.
For roughly a century, popular American evangelism has run on fear. The altar call has been a fire-escape. The tract has shown stick figures falling from a cliff into flames. The mission video has lingered on the unsaved millions. I do not deny that fear can move people. I do deny that fear is the only or best engine of evangelism the Christian tradition supports, and I deny that the long hope tradition empties evangelism of its urgency.5
The patristic East did not preach less for believing that God’s saving will reaches further than the moment of death. Gregory of Nyssa wrote treatise after treatise on the spiritual life. Isaac of Nineveh poured himself out for the salvation of souls in the present. Wesley preached forty thousand sermons in a wider-hope frame.6 Beilby’s contemporary defense of postmortem opportunity opens with the missio Dei — the conviction that evangelism is God’s work in which we participate, not a deadline on which God depends. Our work in evangelism ends at death; God’s work does not.7
Evangelism rooted in the love of God, in the breadth of mercy, and in the urgency of present-life faithfulness can be at least as compelling as evangelism rooted in fear. Arguably more so — because it presents the gospel as a treasure to be received rather than a punishment to be avoided. That was Paul’s emphasis. That was Wesley’s. That can be ours.
This is where the historical record cuts closest to the bone. Every pastor knows the scene Stephen Jonathan describes at the opening of Grace beyond the Grave. The phone rings. The funeral is in three days. The deceased was not a churchgoer. The family is in shock. The pastor knows what he is supposed to say, and what he is supposed to say feels like a script.8
Jonathan is honest about the evasions ministers have used. We say God is just. We say God knows the heart. We hint at an eleventh-hour prayer. We point to faith the size of a mustard seed. Many of these statements are true. None of them, by themselves, is what the family is asking for.
“There can be few ministers or priests who do not identify with Stephen Jonathan’s pastoral starting point for this inquiry... the anxious question of the bereaved as to the security in death of their loved one is one that many ministers would prefer to evade.... Divine grace defies logic such that what we regard as impossible is by no means impossible for God.”
— Nigel G. Wright, Foreword to Stephen Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave (2014)9
The long hope tradition gives the pastor real resources. Not a guarantee — no faithful Christian tradition issues guarantees about another human being’s eternal destiny — but real resources. The descent of Christ. The breadth of the atonement. The patristic conviction that the God who is love did not become less loving on the far side of the grave. The Balthasarian permission to hope, with prayer, that God’s reach extends as far as God’s will. The Wesleyan emphasis on prevenient grace. The Pauline trajectory toward every knee bowing.10
None of this requires the pastor to be a confident universalist. It only requires the pastor to be honest about what the Christian tradition actually contains. A grieving son does not need a guarantee. He needs to know that the God his father may now be encountering is the same God Christ revealed — the God whose love is wider than the strict-ECT default suggests. That is something the long hope tradition allows the pastor to say without lying.
Christians who talk with non-Christian friends, coworkers, and family members about the things that matter most often find themselves caught. They believe what their churches taught them about the fate of the unbelieving dead. They also love the unbelievers in their lives. The two convictions grind against each other. Some Christians resolve the grinding by suppressing the love. Others resolve it by suppressing the belief. Neither resolution is healthy. Neither is necessary.
The long hope tradition provides a way to hold both. The urgency of the gospel call remains. So does the breadth of God’s mercy. A Christian can love a non-Christian friend without secretly assuming that the friend is consigned to an outcome the friend would not, on full understanding, choose. The Christian can pray for the friend with the trajectory of God’s saving will at his back. That is not a softening of evangelism. It is a deepening of it.
Roughly two billion human beings on this earth have never heard the gospel through any fault of their own. They were born in places, in eras, in conditions where the gospel has not reached them in a way they could understand or respond to. Strict eternal conscious torment, applied to these two billion, asks Christians to affirm that God will consign to endless conscious suffering people who never had the chance to hear the name of Christ. There are evangelical theologians — serious ones — who have affirmed exactly that. Most thoughtful Christians find the affirmation difficult to make.11
The long hope tradition offers several serious answers to the unevangelized problem. Wesleyan inclusivism holds that those who respond to the light they have are saved through Christ even without explicit knowledge of him. Postmortem opportunity holds that the saving offer of Christ is extended after death to those who did not receive it during life. Universal restoration holds that God’s saving will is finally accomplished in the salvation of all. Each of these is a serious theological position, with patristic warrant, with biblical resources, and with contemporary defenders. The Christian who is asked about the unevangelized is not stuck with strict ECT as the only Christian answer.
“Doesn’t this just remove the urgency of missions?” No. The patristic universalists, the Pietists, the Wesleyans, and the modern PO advocates have all been ardent missionaries. Pinnock argued that inclusivism fuels mission rather than killing it; Beilby grounds postmortem opportunity in the missio Dei; Jonathan offers an extended missiological defense in his fifth chapter.12 Mission grows when the missionary is moved by love rather than driven by terror. The historical record is clear on this.
A doctrine of God whose love stops at the moment of death is hard to reconcile with the love revealed in Christ. Christ on the cross prayed for those who were murdering him. Christ went down to the dead between Good Friday and Easter Sunday and, on the apostolic and patristic reading, proclaimed his victory to the spirits in prison.13 The God who pursues the lost sheep until it is found, the lost coin until it is recovered, the lost son until he is home — this God does not, on the face of it, become a different God at the moment a sinner stops breathing.
The long hope tradition does not require a softening of Christology. It requires a strengthening of it. The Christ who descended to the dead is the same Christ who reigns from the right hand of the Father. The breadth of his saving will and the seriousness of his judgment are both genuine, and both extend as far as he extends. The strict-ECT default has its own theological case to make. So does the long hope tradition. The two cases meet on theological ground, not on the pretended ground of “the Church has always taught this.”
I have written this book in hope. Several hopes, actually.
I hope that readers who hold strict ECT will hold it with greater historical humility. You may end the book holding the same theological position you began with — and that is your right. I ask only that you hold it knowing that the tradition you appeal to is more various than the popular polemic suggests. Origen was a doctor of the early Church. Gregory of Nyssa was a Cappadocian Father. Isaac of Nineveh is venerated by Eastern Christians as a saint. These were not heretics writing on the margins. They were central to the early Church’s self-understanding, and they did not agree with the strict-ECT default. Hold your position. Hold it without pretending the rest of the tradition agrees with you.
I hope that readers who hold long-hope positions — CI, PO, hopeful universalism, full apokatastasis — will hold them with greater theological seriousness. The long hope tradition is not a sentimental softening. It is not a refusal to take Scripture seriously. The figures we have walked with in this book — the patristic universalists, the Pietists, Wesley, Barth, Balthasar, Moltmann, Pinnock, Talbott, Parry, Beilby — were and are biblically rooted, theologically careful, and pastorally grounded thinkers. The long hope at its best is a recovery of biblical and patristic depth, not a flight from it.
I hope that readers wrestling with these questions — the seminarian, the graduate student, the pastor in mid-career, the lay Christian who has loved and lost — will find here resources for careful thought and faithful conviction. The historical map will not by itself tell you what to believe. It will tell you that you are not alone in believing what the popular consensus may have told you was forbidden. It will tell you that the Christian tradition is large enough to contain your questions.
I hope, finally, that this book contributes — however modestly — to a more honest and more charitable Christian conversation about the fate of the dead. The conversation has too often run on caricature. ECT advocates have caricatured universalists as soft, sentimental, and unbiblical. Universalists have caricatured ECT advocates as cruel, fearful, and pre-Christian. Both caricatures are unworthy of the gospel. Both caricatures should be retired. The historical record gives us a better starting point.
I want to say something directly to readers who hold strict eternal conscious torment and have stayed with the book this far. Thank you for staying with it.
I have not written this book to dismiss your concerns. They deserve respect. The seriousness of the gospel call. The horror of sin. The character of God’s justice. The danger of cheap grace. The integrity of human freedom. The weight of biblical texts that warn of judgment. These are real concerns, held by serious Christians, with real biblical anchorage. The long hope tradition does not deny any of them. The patristic universalists held the seriousness of the gospel call as fiercely as Augustine did. They held the horror of sin and the character of God’s justice no less firmly. They simply read the trajectory of God’s saving will differently, and they read the biblical warnings of judgment within a different theological frame.14
You may end the book unconvinced. That is your right, and I respect it. What I ask is that the next time someone in your congregation, your classroom, or your family pushes back on the strict-ECT default, you remember what this book has shown. The pushback is not new. It is not modernist. It is not sentimental. It is, in some form, as old as the Christian conversation about the dead. Engage it on its substance. Do not dismiss it as innovation.
And a word, equally direct, to readers who hold a long-hope position. The historical record is on your side in one specific sense: the modern-innovation charge fails. The long hope is old. It is patristic. It is recurrent. You may say so with confidence.
But the historical record does not by itself settle the substantive theological question, and it does not give you permission to dismiss your strict-ECT brothers and sisters as theologically backward. They are reading the same Scriptures we are. They have serious concerns about cheap grace, about pastoral irresponsibility, about the integrity of the biblical warnings. Their position has Augustinian, Anselmian, Calvinist, and Edwardsian warrant that the long hope position does not enjoy in the Western mainstream.15
The case for the long hope is biblical and patristic. It should be made on those grounds. The ad hominem (“you are uncharitable”) and the moral-shock argument (“ECT is a doctrine of monsters”) are not the right modes of conversation. They are not new modes either — D. P. Walker traced their seventeenth-century forebears in The Decline of Hell, and they have been a recurring failure mode of the long hope tradition for three hundred years.16 Let them go. Make the case on the texts and the theology. That is where the conversation deserves to be.
This book is historical theology. It is not biblical theology. It is not systematic theology. It is not pastoral theology. The reader who finishes it should know what Christians have believed about the fate of the dead across two thousand years. The reader should not finish it expecting to know whether postmortem opportunity is correct as a matter of biblical exegesis. That is a different inquiry.
I have written that inquiry elsewhere. The reader who wants the verse-by-verse biblical case for postmortem opportunity should turn to my Beyond the Grave: A Biblical Theology of Postmortem Opportunity. The reader who wants the verse-by-verse rebuttal of the standard restrictivist proof-texts — Hebrews 9:27, Luke 16:19–31, the Matthew 25:46 *aiōnios* question — should turn to my Death Is Not the Deadline. The reader who wants the near-death-experience and dualist-anthropology basis for a theology of dying should turn to my When Death Approaches. These are separate projects, with separate methodologies, written for separate purposes.17
This book’s contribution is the historical map. The reader who has walked through it has, I hope, gained something none of the companion volumes provides: a sense of the long sweep, the diversity, the recurrent recoveries, and the resilience of the long hope across two millennia. That is what I owed the reader, and that is what I have tried to deliver.
Let me close where the book began, and try to bring this thing full circle.
The opening chapter began with the scene of a pastor at a graveside. A son asking whether anything could possibly be done for the unbeliever now in the ground. A seminary student told confidently that “the Church has always taught that death seals one’s fate.” A Christian wrestling with the death of a non-Christian parent and reaching for hope, only to be told by a trusted teacher that no such hope exists.18 Those scenes are not hypothetical. They are happening, today, somewhere in the world, while I write this and while you read it.
The reader who has walked through this book has now walked with a long company. Hermas, reading the apostles preaching to the dead in his vision in second-century Rome. Clement of Alexandria, holding that God’s correction extends as far as God’s love. Origen, sketching the eventual restoration of all rational creatures in his cell at Caesarea. Gregory of Nyssa, gathering Macrina’s last words on the soul and the resurrection. Isaac of Nineveh, refusing the doctrine of unending punishment because it was contrary to the goodness of God. Eriugena, recovering the Greek tradition for the Carolingian West. Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Julian of Norwich — the medieval mystics who heard mercy where the schoolmen heard wrath. The Cambridge Platonists. The Petersens. Bengel. Oetinger. The Blumhardts. Wesley. Maurice. MacDonald. Barth. Balthasar. Moltmann. Bulgakov. Ware. Pinnock. Sanders. Walls. Beilby. Jonathan. Talbott. Parry. Hart. Fudge.19
This is the company. They are not in agreement among themselves on every point. They disagree on whether the long hope takes the shape of universal restoration or conditional immortality or postmortem opportunity or hopeful universalism. They disagree about Origen’s pre-existence speculation and about Barth’s alleged objective universalism and about Balthasar’s holy Saturday. They do not need to agree on those things to constitute, together, a long hope tradition that the strict-ECT default has been telling us does not exist.
It exists. You have walked with it through this book. What you do with that company now is the next question. My prayer is that the answer will be faithful, hopeful, and theologically serious.
The pastor I told you about at the opening of this chapter — the one who stared at his sermon notes that Tuesday morning — he stood at the graveside on Friday. He did not deliver a sermon on universal restoration. He did not deliver a sermon on postmortem opportunity. He delivered a sermon on the love of God in Jesus Christ, and on the trajectory of that love through and beyond the grave. The son came up to him afterward and shook his hand and said, simply, “Thank you for not lying to me.”
That is the kind of preaching the long hope makes possible. That is the kind of ministry the historical record permits us to do. The Church has always been larger than its loudest party. The long hope continues. The reader who has walked this far now stands in the company of those who have always known it.20
Go in peace.
↑ 1. The pastor is a composite of several ministers I have known across more than a decade of conversations about pastoral practice in the context of unbelieving deaths. The exchange is reconstructed from the substance of those conversations rather than from a single transcript. The opening vignette intentionally echoes the pastoral framing of Chapter 1, where the same scene at the graveside is introduced as the question that animates the entire book.
↑ 2. The cumulative case is the burden of the preceding twenty-nine chapters. The synthetic map is drawn formally in Chapter 29; that chapter should be the reader’s reference for the historical-pattern claims summarized here.
↑ 3. The patristic descent tradition is developed at length in Chapter 4 (Hermas, Similitude 9.16), Chapter 7 (Clement of Alexandria’s reading of 1 Peter 3:18–4:6), and Chapter 11 (the descent reception across the patristic East). On the broad patristic consensus regarding the descent and its postmortem-opportunity implications, see Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge, 1991), passim. Cf. Beilby’s historical chapter on the Alexandrian school (Clement, Origen, Athanasius) reading 1 Peter 3:19 in connection with the descent: Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 182.
↑ 4. The pedagogical point is widely recognized in contemporary debates over evangelical institutional integrity. For the analogous methodological discussion on representing premodern figures fairly to seminary students, see Chapter 2, especially the discussion of distinguishing what a figure held from what later interpreters have claimed about them.
↑ 5. The history of fear-driven American evangelism, particularly in the revivalist tradition from Edwards through the Second Great Awakening through twentieth-century crusade evangelism, is well documented. For a sympathetic but critical history, see Iain H. Murray, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750–1858 (Banner of Truth, 1994). For the contemporary critique of fear-based evangelism from inside the postmortem-opportunity tradition, see Clark H. Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Zondervan, 1992), chs. 1–2.
↑ 6. On Wesley’s evangelistic output in the context of his wider-hope theology, see Chapter 18. Wesley’s sermon volume is preserved in the standard Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley (Oxford / Abingdon, 1975–).
↑ 7. James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Idea of a Second Chance to Be Saved after Death (IVP Academic, 2021), 47–48. Beilby develops the missio Dei argument extensively in his second chapter; the basic point is that the task of bringing the gospel to humanity is God’s task, in which we cooperate, rather than a deadline on which God’s saving work depends. Donald Bloesch, cited by Beilby at p. 47, makes the same point in the context of inclusivist theology. For Beilby’s full development, see Chapter 26. I note here that Beilby restricts postmortem opportunity to those who have not had a “genuine chance” in this life to respond to the gospel (Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, ch. 2); my own position holds that the offer extends to all, which is a point of friendly departure from Beilby that the chapter on him develops.
↑ 8. Stephen Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife? A Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Evaluation (Wipf & Stock, 2014), 5–7. Jonathan opens his book with the pastoral “funeral problem” and catalogues the typical evasions used by ministers facing the unbelieving-dead question. The full development is in Chapter 26.
↑ 9. Nigel G. Wright, Foreword, in Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, vii. Wright’s foreword frames the entire book’s pastoral concern.
↑ 10. On Balthasar’s “dare we hope” thesis as the most influential pastoral resource of the late twentieth century, see Chapter 22. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? (Ignatius, 1988). On Wesleyan prevenient grace as a pastoral resource, see Chapter 18. On the Pauline trajectory — Isaiah 45:22–23 read through Romans 14:11 and Philippians 2:9–11 — see Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 288, and Talbott, Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed., ch. 5 (“Saint Paul’s Universalism”).
↑ 11. The unevangelized problem as the most pressing pastoral and theological challenge to strict ECT is developed across Chapter 26; see also John Sanders, No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Unevangelized (Eerdmans, 1992); Clark H. Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy (Zondervan, 1992); Gabriel Fackre, Ronald H. Nash, and John Sanders, What about Those Who Have Never Heard? Three Views on the Destiny of the Unevangelized (IVP, 1995). For the contrary view, see Ronald H. Nash, Is Jesus the Only Savior? (Zondervan, 1994).
↑ 12. For Pinnock’s argument that inclusivism fuels mission, see A Wideness in God’s Mercy, ch. 8. For Beilby’s missio Dei argument, see Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 47–48. For Jonathan’s extended missiological-pastoral evaluation, see Grace beyond the Grave, ch. 5 (pp. 167–204).
↑ 13. 1 Peter 3:18–22 and 4:6, read in light of the Apostles’ Creed, has been the locus of the descent-of-Christ tradition since the second century. The verses are the central scriptural anchor of the postmortem-opportunity stream in the patristic East. See Beilby’s analysis of 1 Peter 3:18–22 and 4:6 as the central biblical loci of postmortem opportunity at Postmortem Opportunity, 153–156. For the full patristic reception, see Daley, Hope of the Early Church, chs. 2–6, and the development in Chapter 11 of this book.
↑ 14. The careful patristic universalists are emphatic about the seriousness of present-life faithfulness. Gregory of Nyssa’s De Anima et Resurrectione — the dialogue with Macrina on the soul and the resurrection — holds the urgency of present moral formation alongside the eventual restoration of all. The two are not in tension in his theology. See Chapter 9. For the contemporary universalist insistence that universalism does not vitiate moral seriousness, see Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 2nd ed. (Cascade, 2012), App. 7 (“Hell, Moral Formation, and Calvinism”), and Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Cascade, 2014), ch. 9 (“Punishment, Forgiveness, and Divine Justice”).
↑ 15. The point is not that the strict-ECT default is wrong because it has Augustinian-Anselmian-Calvinist-Edwardsian warrant. The point is that its warrant is real, however contested. Long-hope advocates owe the strict-ECT tradition the same charitable engagement they ask in return. For the major critical engagement with the long-hope tradition from inside contemporary evangelicalism, see Michael J. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Baker Academic, 2018); Robert A. Peterson, Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment (P&R, 1995); Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson, eds., Hell under Fire (Zondervan, 2004); Ralph Martin, Will Many Be Saved? (Eerdmans, 2012).
↑ 16. D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (University of Chicago Press, 1964), passim, but especially chs. 1–3, on the seventeenth-century English critique of eternal torment. Walker is alert to the moral-shock argument and traces its rise and limits.
↑ 17. Matthew Friend, Beyond the Grave: A Biblical Theology of Postmortem Opportunity (the biblical-theology companion volume); Death Is Not the Deadline: A Verse-by-Verse Response to Restrictivism (the exegetical-rebuttal companion volume); When Death Approaches: A Christian Theology of Dying in the Light of Near-Death Experiences (the dualist-anthropology and dying-process companion volume). All three volumes are available through GraceAfterDeath.com.
↑ 18. See Chapter 1, the opening vignette of the introductory essay. The deliberate echo here closes the book’s frame.
↑ 19. Each figure named here is treated at length in his or her own chapter; the reader who wants to revisit any particular figure can return to the relevant chapter. Hermas (Ch. 4); Clement of Alexandria (Ch. 7); Origen (Ch. 8); Gregory of Nyssa (Ch. 9); Isaac of Nineveh (Ch. 10); Eriugena (Ch. 11); the medieval mystics (Ch. 14); the Cambridge Platonists (Ch. 17); the Petersens, Bengel, Oetinger, Blumhardts (Ch. 16); Wesley (Ch. 18); MacDonald and contemporary universalists (Ch. 25); Barth (Ch. 21); Balthasar (Ch. 22); Moltmann (Ch. 23); Bulgakov and Ware (Ch. 24); Pinnock, Sanders, Walls, Beilby, Jonathan (Ch. 26); Fudge (Ch. 28).
↑ 20. The closing image — the long hope as a continuing tradition rather than a sealed-off historical artifact — is the synthetic claim of Chapter 29 in its pastoral mode. The historical record this book has traced does not by itself prescribe a single course of action for the contemporary church. It does present a long company of faithful Christians whose hope reached further than the popular polemic has admitted — and it permits the reader to walk with them.