Chapter 28

The Postmortem Opportunity — God’s Love Beyond the Grave

A. Thesis and Context

In the last chapter, we talked about what happens when we die. We saw that Scripture paints a picture of a conscious intermediate state—a real, continuing existence between the moment of death and the final resurrection. Believers are with the Lord. Unbelievers wait in Hades. Nobody is yet in the lake of fire. Nobody has yet faced the final judgment. The story is not over.

But that raises a question that has haunted Christians for centuries. What about the billions of human beings who died without ever hearing the name of Jesus? What about the infant who lived three days? What about the woman born in a remote village a thousand years before Christ, who worshiped the only gods she ever knew and loved her neighbors with a fierce tenderness? What about the man raised in an abusive home where “Christianity” was used as a weapon, who could never separate the real Jesus from the twisted caricature he was handed?

Are all of these people simply lost—forever—because they never prayed a certain prayer or walked a certain aisle?

I don’t think so. And I don’t think Scripture teaches that, either.

This chapter presents the case for what theologians call the postmortem opportunity—the belief that God, in His love and justice, provides a genuine chance for salvation to those who did not have an adequate opportunity to respond to the gospel during their earthly lives. I believe the last chance to receive Christ comes at or during the final judgment, when God’s presence is fully unveiled and every person stands face to face with the One who made them.

This is not some liberal fantasy. It is grounded in Scripture, rooted in the earliest Christian tradition, and demanded by the very character of God. If God is love—and He is—then He would not condemn those who never had a real chance to know Him. The divine presence model, which we have been building throughout this book, provides the theological and metaphysical framework that makes this hope possible.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that it doesn’t matter what we do in this life. I am not saying the gospel is unimportant. I am not saying we should stop sharing the good news. I am saying that our God is bigger, more loving, and more just than the cramped theology of “die without saying the right words, and you’re done forever” allows. If deathbed repentance is real—and every evangelical I know believes it is—then the question of why God’s grace must stop at the exact moment a heart quits beating deserves a serious answer.¹

B. The Case

The Problem: Why We Need a Postmortem Opportunity

Before we look at the biblical evidence, we need to feel the weight of the problem. And the easiest way to feel it is through a story.

The philosopher Jerry Walls tells a thought experiment about twin brothers, John and Charles.² They are seniors in college. They were raised in a Christian home and heard plenty of sermons, but neither has committed his life to Christ. Their life experiences have been nearly identical.

For their twenty-first birthday, they get a fast car. They go out drinking with friends. On the way home, driving way too fast, they crash. Charles is killed instantly. John survives.

John takes it as a wake-up call. He repents. He gets serious about his faith. He goes to seminary instead of law school. He becomes a great evangelist and wins many people to Christ.

What about Charles? On most traditional readings, he is damned forever. He died without accepting Christ, and death is the deadline. But think about this: is it not likely—even overwhelmingly likely—that Charles would have repented too, had he survived? He and his brother were nearly identical in their spiritual state. The only difference between them is a split second of physics—which side of the car took the impact.

Walls pushes the point further. What if God knows that Charles would have repented? What if God, in His infinite knowledge, sees that Charles would have become a great Christian songwriter who brought thousands to faith? Is Charles truly lost forever because of which side of the car he was sitting on?³

Something feels deeply wrong here. And that feeling is not sentimentality. It is the moral intuition that a just and loving God does not operate this way.

Now multiply that case by billions. Think about every person born before Christ. Think about every person born in a place where the gospel has never reached. Think about every person raised in a culture where Christianity was presented in such a distorted form that what they rejected was not really Jesus at all, but a monstrous caricature. Are all of these people beyond hope simply because their earthly circumstances did not include an adequate encounter with the real gospel?

The traditional answer—the one I grew up hearing—is that God gave everyone enough “general revelation” through creation and conscience, and if they rejected that, they are without excuse. Romans 1 is usually cited here. But honestly, that argument has always felt thin to me. Yes, creation reveals that God exists. But creation does not reveal the name of Jesus. Creation does not explain the cross. Creation does not tell anyone how to be reconciled to a holy God. And Romans 1 is talking about the human situation in general, not providing a detailed map of every individual’s eternal destiny.⁴

And it is not just a modern problem. Think about the first fifteen centuries of human history. Abraham was born around 2,000 BC. Moses received the Law around 1,400 BC. But human civilization goes back much further than that. What about the people of ancient China? What about the indigenous peoples of Australia, who have inhabited their land for tens of thousands of years? What about every civilization that flourished before a single missionary ever set foot on their soil? On the traditional view, every single one of these people is condemned—not because they rejected Jesus, but because they were born too early or too far away.

Some theologians try to solve this problem by saying that God judges people based on their response to the “light” they had. If they were faithful to what they knew of God through creation and conscience, God would somehow count that faith as sufficient. I have some sympathy for this view. But it raises its own problems. If people can be saved without ever hearing about Jesus, then the gospel seems unnecessary for salvation—and that undercuts everything the New Testament says about the centrality of Christ. Acts 4:12 is clear: “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” If salvation is only through Christ, then people need to encounter Christ. And for billions of people throughout history, that encounter did not happen during their earthly lives.

The deeper issue is about what kind of God we worship. Walls gets to the heart of it when he distinguishes between two fundamentally different ways of understanding God’s grace: what he calls optimal grace and minimal grace.⁵

Minimal grace is the view that God gives each person just enough of a chance to be saved so that He is justified in condemning them if they don’t respond. On this view, God’s primary concern is that no one can complain at the judgment: “You had your chance. You blew it. I’m in the clear.”

Optimal grace is the view that God deeply and sincerely loves every single person and passionately desires the salvation of all. On this view, God gives each person the best possible opportunity to respond to His love—the opportunity most suited to that individual, given their circumstances, temperament, and history. A God of optimal grace does not just provide enough rope for people to hang themselves. He pursues every lost sheep until it is found—or until it has decisively and irrevocably refused to come home.⁶

As Walls puts it, many Christians happily affirm the rhetoric of optimal grace—they sing about God’s amazing, boundless, never-ending love—but then stop short of affirming it in substance. When the logic of that love points toward a postmortem opportunity, they draw back.⁷ But why? If we really believe what we sing, shouldn’t we follow the music wherever it leads?

The Biblical Foundation

The postmortem opportunity is not just a nice idea. It has roots in Scripture—deeper roots than many people realize.

1 Peter 3:18–20: Christ Preached to the Spirits in Prison

The single most important biblical text for the postmortem opportunity is 1 Peter 3:18–20. Peter writes that Christ was “put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit,” and that in this state He “went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.”⁸

This is one of the most debated passages in the New Testament. Scholars have argued for centuries about exactly who these “spirits” are and what Christ “proclaimed” to them. Some say the spirits are fallen angels. Some say Christ was proclaiming victory, not offering salvation. Some, following a creative but strained reading, say that Christ preached through Noah to the people of Noah’s day, so that the preaching happened before the flood, not after the cross.⁹

But the most natural reading—the reading the early church overwhelmingly adopted—is that between His death and resurrection, Christ descended to the place of the dead and proclaimed the good news to those held there.¹⁰ The “spirits in prison” are the souls of human beings who had died—specifically, those who had been “disobedient” in the days of Noah. Peter’s point is striking: even the most wicked generation in human history—the generation so evil that God sent a flood—was not beyond the reach of Christ’s saving work.

Think about that for a moment. If the people of Noah’s generation received a proclamation from Christ after they had died, then death is not the absolute barrier to grace that we have been told it is.

1 Peter 4:6: The Gospel Preached to the Dead

Peter reinforces this idea just a few verses later, in 4:6: “For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to human standards in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.”¹¹

The language here is even more direct. The gospel—not merely a proclamation of victory, but the actual good news of salvation—was preached to people who are dead. And the purpose was that they might “live according to God in regard to the spirit.” That is the language of salvation. That is the language of new life. Peter is saying that the gospel reaches even into the realm of the dead, and that it has the power to bring spiritual life even there.¹²

Some try to read this differently. They say the “dead” here are people who were alive when they heard the gospel but have since died. But that reading is forced. Peter is making a theological point about the scope of Christ’s saving work, and the most natural reading is that the gospel was proclaimed to people who were already dead at the time of the proclamation.¹³

Notice, too, how this verse connects to the bigger picture of Peter’s argument. In 1 Peter 4:5, he has just said that God “is ready to judge the living and the dead.” Immediately after that, in verse 6, he explains why the gospel was preached to the dead: so that even those who had died could be judged fairly and could receive the opportunity to live. The logic is clear. God judges both the living and the dead. Therefore, God extends the gospel to both the living and the dead. A just judge does not condemn defendants who never had the chance to hear the charges or respond to them.

Gerry Beauchemin, in Hope Beyond Hell, draws out the implications beautifully. He notes William Barclay’s observation that if Christ descended into Hades and preached there, then there is no corner of the universe where the message of grace has not reached. This, Barclay says, is the solution to one of the most haunting questions raised by the Christian faith: what happens to those who lived before Jesus, and those to whom the gospel never came?¹⁴

As Beauchemin also notes, the early church father Justin Martyr picked up on this idea long ago. God, Justin said, “remembered his dead, those sleeping in the earth, and came down to them to tell them the good news of salvation.”¹⁵ The postmortem opportunity is not a modern invention. It is an ancient Christian conviction.

The Descensus: “He Descended to the Dead”

This brings us to one of the most remarkable—and most neglected—lines in the Apostles’ Creed: “He descended to the dead” (in older versions, “He descended into hell”). Every Sunday, millions of Christians around the world confess this clause. Most of them have no idea what it means.

In the Latin tradition, this is called the Descensus ad inferos—the descent to those below. The idea is that between His death on the cross and His resurrection on the third day, Christ went to the realm of the dead. He did not go there as a prisoner. He went there as a conqueror.¹⁶

The Eastern Orthodox church has always given this doctrine a central place in its theology. The most famous Orthodox icon of Easter does not show Jesus emerging from a tomb, as Western art typically does. Instead, it shows Christ standing on the shattered gates of Hades, reaching down with both hands to pull Adam and Eve out of their coffins. He is trampling down death by death, as the great Paschal hymn declares, and bestowing life on those in the tombs.¹⁷

Manis draws our attention to the significance of this tradition for the divine presence model. On his reading, what happened in the Descensus was not merely a rescue mission for a select group of Old Testament saints. It was a revelation of a deeper principle: where Christ is present, death is absent. Christ’s very presence in Hades is what raised the saints to life. His presence is life-conferring.¹⁸

That idea is central to everything we have been arguing in this book. On the divine presence model, God’s presence is not merely a spiritual concept. It is a metaphysical reality. God is the source of all being, the creator and sustainer of everything that exists. His presence gives life. His absence brings death. When Christ descended to the dead, His presence broke the power of death itself.¹⁹

And here is what matters for the postmortem opportunity: if Christ can break the power of death and bring life to those in the grave, then death cannot be an absolute barrier to salvation. The God who holds the keys of Death and Hades (Revelation 1:18) is not stopped by a heartbeat. He is not limited by the boundaries of our earthly life. His love reaches beyond the grave.

Beauchemin drives this point home with a string of rhetorical questions that deserve to be heard. Christ abolished death (2 Timothy 1:10). For whom did He not abolish it? He tasted death for everyone (Hebrews 2:9). If Christ tasted death for everyone, then hope beyond death must be for all. He destroyed the one who had the power of death (Hebrews 2:14). If the one who held the power of death is destroyed, then there must be hope. He holds the keys of Death and Hades (Revelation 1:18)—and He has already used those keys. He went and preached to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:19). He led captivity captive (Ephesians 4:8). He descended into the lower parts of the earth so that He might “fill all things” (Ephesians 4:9–10).⁵²

That last phrase is breathtaking. Christ descended so that He might fill all things. All things. Not some things. Not the things above the grave but not below it. All things. The purpose of the Descensus is cosmic in scope. It is Christ laying claim to every corner of creation, including the realm of the dead. It is Christ declaring that no part of His universe is outside the reach of His love.

If we take this seriously—and the Apostles’ Creed asks us to take it seriously every time we recite it—then the postmortem opportunity is not a strange add-on to the Christian faith. It is built into its very foundation. Christ descended to the dead. He preached to the imprisoned spirits. He holds the keys. The doors are open.

Hebrews 9:27 — The Supposed Death Blow

At this point, I know what many readers are thinking: “But what about Hebrews 9:27? Doesn’t it say that it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment?”

Yes, it does. And I take that verse seriously. But it does not say what people think it says.

Hebrews 9:27 says that we die once and then face judgment. Every side of this debate agrees with that. What the verse does not say is that judgment is immediate, that judgment is final, or that there is no possibility of repentance between death and the final judgment.²⁰

In fact, according to orthodox Christian theology, the final judgment has not happened yet. It is still in the future. So even if there is some kind of preliminary assessment at death, the big judgment—the one at the great white throne of Revelation 20—is a distinct event. Hebrews 9:27 tells us that judgment follows death. It does not tell us that death is the last possible moment for grace.²¹

As Walls points out, those who use Hebrews 9:27 as proof against the postmortem opportunity are reading far more into the text than it actually says. The verse establishes the certainty of judgment. It does not establish the impossibility of repentance after death.²²

Luke 13:23–30 — The Closed Door

Another text sometimes cited against the postmortem opportunity is Jesus’s parable in Luke 13:23–30, where the owner of the house closes the door and refuses to admit those who knock and say, “Lord, open to us.” This passage is taken to mean that once the door is closed—at death—there is no more chance.

But again, the text does not quite say that. The people in the parable are not humble seekers who never had a chance. They are people who presume on their relationship with God: “We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.” Jesus’s point is that casual acquaintance is not the same as genuine faith. Presumption is dangerous. Simply being in proximity to Jesus does not save you.²³

Moreover, as Walls observes, these people seem regretful but not truly repentant. The text gives us no insight about how God would respond to genuine, heartfelt repentance after death. It only tells us that presumption and superficial religion are no substitute for a real relationship with Christ.²⁴ At most, this parable might apply to those who had every opportunity to know Christ in this life but only knew Him in a shallow, surface-level way. It has nothing to say about the billions who never had any opportunity at all.

The Logic of Divine Love and Justice

Beyond the specific texts, there is a broader theological argument for the postmortem opportunity that flows directly from what Scripture reveals about the character of God.

Consider: God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). God is “not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Jesus came to “seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10). The Father in Jesus’s parables leaves the ninety-nine sheep to find the one that is lost and throws a party when He finds it (Luke 15). The God of the Bible is not a God who is looking for excuses to condemn people. He is a God who moves heaven and earth to save them.

If this God knows that a person would respond to His love if given a genuine chance, but that person dies without ever receiving such a chance, would this God simply shrug and say, “Too bad. Time’s up”? Everything we know about the character of God from Scripture screams: No.

Baker puts it powerfully in Razing Hell. She notes that Isaiah 30:18 paints a picture of God “sitting on high, longing with unquenchable thirst, with a desire so strong that it consumes every thought, longing to shower us with grace.” And then she asks the question that needs asking: if God’s desire for our salvation is that intense, why would the death of the body put anyone beyond that grace? If God exists outside of time, why would grace exist only within time? If Jesus is forever a priest, forever interceding, forever praying for us (Hebrews 4:14–16; 7:17–25), and if “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), then hope must extend beyond bodily death.²⁵

Some will object: “But if everyone gets a chance after death, why bother sharing the gospel now? Doesn’t this undermine missions?” No. It doesn’t. And I’ll address that objection directly later in this chapter. For now, let me simply say: the postmortem opportunity does not make this life irrelevant. It makes God more just. These are not the same thing.

The Postmortem Opportunity Within the Divine Presence Model

Now we come to the part of this chapter that ties everything together. The divine presence model, which we have been building throughout this book, provides the theological and metaphysical framework that makes the postmortem opportunity not just possible but deeply coherent.

Recall Manis’s framework of the unveilings. In our earthly lives, God’s presence is partially veiled. We live under conditions of what philosophers call divine hiddenness—God is real and present, but He is not experienced directly, face to face. This hiddenness serves a purpose: it creates the space for genuine faith, genuine freedom, and genuine moral development.²⁷

The first unveiling happens in this life, when a person voluntarily opens their heart to God. It is an act of human free will in response to the Holy Spirit’s conviction. The person allows God to begin the process of inner transformation. This is conversion. This is being born again.²⁸

The second unveiling happens at the end of the age, when Christ returns in glory. This is not voluntary. It is the act of God, brought about without regard to human consent. Every person will see Christ as He truly is. The veil of divine hiddenness will be removed completely and permanently. God will finally be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).²⁹

Now, on the divine presence model, the second unveiling is not just an event that precedes judgment. It is the judgment. The revealing of Christ in glory is itself the moment when every human heart is laid bare. Those who have been transformed by the first unveiling—those who opened their hearts to God in this life—experience the second unveiling as joy beyond description. They are coming home. They are seeing the face of the One they have loved and trusted.

But for those who never experienced the first unveiling—those who never had a genuine opportunity to respond to God in this life—the second unveiling is something entirely different. It is their first real encounter with the living God.

And that is exactly where the postmortem opportunity fits.

For the person who was born in a remote village before Christ, who never heard the gospel, who had no access to the Bible—the second unveiling is not a judgment on their rejection of Christ. How could it be? They never rejected Christ. They never knew Him. For these people, the unveiled presence of God at the final judgment is the first genuine invitation they have ever received. It is the first time they have encountered the love that they were made for. And on the divine presence model, that encounter is real. It is powerful. It is an invitation—not a trap.³⁰

This is what I mean by the postmortem opportunity. It is not a “second chance” in the cheap sense—as if God is handing out do-overs to people who already blew their first chance. It is, for many, the first real chance. The only adequate chance. The chance that a God of optimal grace would never withhold.

Think of it this way. Imagine a child raised in a cult where he was taught from birth that “God” is a rage-filled monster who delights in punishment. He was beaten in God’s name. He was told that love must be earned and that failure means damnation. When missionaries came to his village and spoke of a “loving God,” he heard the same words his abusers used. He could not separate the real God from the one his captors invented. He rejected what he heard—but what he rejected was not really Jesus. It was a grotesque parody of Jesus.

Did this man have an “adequate opportunity” to respond to the gospel? I don’t think so. And I believe the God who sees every heart, who knows every circumstance, who understands every wound and every misunderstanding, would not count that distorted encounter as the final word. For this man, the postmortem opportunity—the moment when the real Jesus stands before him in blazing, undeniable love—is the first time he has ever actually heard the gospel. And God will not deny him the chance to respond.

Walls makes a fascinating point about the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, who argued that repentance after death is impossible because the soul cannot change its fundamental preferences without the body. Once the body dies, the soul is “stuck” in whatever direction it was heading at the moment of death. Walls rightly notes that this argument will carry very little weight with dualists who believe the soul is the essential self—and that is exactly the anthropology we have been defending in this book.³⁰ If the soul is a real, immaterial substance that can exist consciously apart from the body—as we argued in the last chapter—then there is no reason in principle why the soul cannot make genuine decisions after bodily death. The conscious intermediate state, which we established in Chapter 27, provides the metaphysical space for the postmortem opportunity. People in Hades are not unconscious. They are not frozen. They are real persons with real awareness. And they can respond to the God who reaches out to them.

What About Those Who Heard and Rejected?

Now, a careful reader will have noticed that I have been talking mainly about those who never heard. What about those who did hear the gospel in this life, who did have an adequate opportunity, and who rejected it? Does the postmortem opportunity apply to them?

This is where things get more complex. And I want to be honest about my own thinking here.

I believe the second unveiling—the full revelation of Christ in glory at the final judgment—is an experience that everyone will share. Both the righteous and the wicked. Both those who heard and those who did not. On the divine presence model, the judgment is not a courtroom where God reads off a list of charges. It is the moment when every person stands in the blazing, unfiltered presence of God’s love and truth, and the deepest reality of their heart is revealed.³¹

For those who heard the gospel and deliberately, consciously, persistently rejected it—the second unveiling is the final confrontation. Their hearts are laid bare. Every self-deception is stripped away. They see God as He truly is—not as the monster they imagined, but as perfect, blazing, all-consuming Love.

Manis calls this the “judgment of transparency.” It is a third type of unveiling, connected to but distinct from the first two. In the presence of the glorified Christ, every hidden thing is revealed. Not just God’s nature, but the person’s own nature. Every excuse they ever made for their rebellion. Every self-justification. Every rationalization. All of it is exposed in the light of God’s perfect truth. They see themselves as God sees them.³¹

And in that moment, one of two things happens.

Some may be broken. Like Baker’s character Otto, who spent his life in unspeakable wickedness, they may find that the experience of God’s unveiled love shatters their resistance. The fire burns away the chaff, and what remains—however small—says yes to God at last. Baker describes Otto experiencing the pain of every victim, feeling the weight of every sin, and finally falling on his face in “utter remorse” and “unmitigated repentance.”³² Then God says, “I forgive you. Will you be reconciled to me?” And Otto, barely able to speak, nods his head in disbelief.³³

But others may harden further. And this is the possibility that keeps me from being a universalist—at least most days. Baker herself acknowledges it. After telling Otto’s story, she adds this crucial caveat: “The possibility exists, however, that Otto does not accept God’s offer of restoration, or that after the testing by fire nothing remains of him at all. Nothing. In order to preserve human freedom, which God gave to us at creation, we must allow for the possibility that some people will still reject God. The fire does not eliminate the gift of human freedom.”³⁴

I find Baker’s honesty here refreshing and important. The postmortem opportunity is not a guarantee that everyone will say yes. It is a guarantee that everyone will have a genuine chance. What people do with that chance is up to them.

The Postmortem Opportunity and Conditional Immortality

One of the beautiful things about the postmortem opportunity is that it is compatible with both conditional immortality and universal reconciliation—the two views we are exploring in this book.

On conditional immortality, the postmortem opportunity works like this: every person will encounter the unveiled presence of God at the final judgment. Those who respond—whether they first heard the gospel in this life or only at the judgment—receive life. They are welcomed into the joy of God’s eternal presence. But those who finally refuse, even when standing in the full blaze of God’s love—those whose hearts have hardened to the point of no return—are destroyed. Body and soul. The fire of God’s love, which purifies the willing, consumes the finally resistant. This is the second death.³⁵

On universal reconciliation, the postmortem opportunity is even more expansive. God’s love is so powerful, so relentless, so inescapable that every heart eventually yields. The fire may burn for a long time for some—the deeply hardened may take ages to be softened—but in the end, love wins. Every knee bows and every tongue confesses, not out of coercion, but out of genuine recognition of who God truly is.³⁶

I lean toward conditional immortality, as I have said throughout this book. I take human freedom seriously, and I believe that Scripture’s language of finality—destruction, the second death, the consuming fire—points to a real and permanent end for those who finally refuse God. But I hold this with humility. The universalist hope is not foolish. It is grounded in the same conviction about the character of God that drives this entire book: God is love, and His fire is always aimed at restoration.

There is another angle worth considering here. Some have objected that if God provides a postmortem opportunity, that somehow cheapens the choices we make in this life. But Walls has a powerful answer to this objection that bears repeating. He points out that those who object to the postmortem opportunity for fear that “if everyone had the same opportunity for salvation that they have had, no one would end up in hell” need to ask themselves a searching question: what would be so bad about that? Would it not be a result most to be desired? And should not those who have been given much grace and opportunity be the first to wish the same for others?³⁶

Walls adds something deeply personal here. He has written extensively in defense of the doctrine of eternal hell. And yet he says he would be delighted if that doctrine turned out to be false. Eternal hell is, on his view, an entirely contingent truth—meaning he only believes it is true because he believes Scripture teaches that some persons will in fact freely and persistently resist the grace of God. If he is wrong about that interpretation, it is an open question whether all will be saved. Certainly all could be saved, since Christ died for all and God sincerely desires all to be saved. God’s glory is not threatened or diminished in any way if all are saved. Eternal hell is not true because some people lack opportunity. It is only true—if it is true—because of the rejection of grace and opportunity, not the lack of it.³⁶

I find this profoundly moving. Walls is a man who has spent his career defending a doctrine he would be thrilled to see overturned. That is the mark of a theologian who cares more about truth and love than about being right.

What matters most is this: on either view, the postmortem opportunity ensures that no one is lost due to ignorance, bad luck, or inadequate access to the gospel. Everyone gets a real encounter with the real God. And that encounter is the basis of judgment—not the accident of geography or the timing of a heartbeat.

Protestant Voices for the Postmortem Opportunity

Some readers may be surprised to learn that the postmortem opportunity is not just an Eastern Orthodox idea. A significant number of Protestant theologians have affirmed it or expressed sympathy for it.

Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation, was once asked about the possibility of salvation by faith after death. His answer was straightforward: “Who would doubt God’s ability to do that?” He added, however, that “no one can prove it.”³⁷ Luther was cautious, but he did not dismiss the possibility. And I think the biblical evidence we have surveyed goes a long way toward proving what Luther thought could not be proven.

Donald Bloesch, a respected Reformed theologian, went further. He argued that the gates of the holy city are depicted in Scripture as being open day and night (Isaiah 60:11; Revelation 21:25), which means that access to the throne of grace is a continuing possibility. Even when we find ourselves prisoners in the darkness we have created, Jesus has the keys to this hell and can reach out to us by His grace (Revelation 1:18). Bloesch concluded that even in hell, one can be forgiven.³⁸

Bloesch cited a number of biblical texts in support of this idea, including Psalm 49:15, Isaiah 26:19, Matthew 12:31–32, Matthew 27:51–54, John 5:29, 1 Corinthians 15:29, 1 Peter 3:19–20, and 1 Peter 4:6.³⁹ This is not a marginal position. It is a serious theological proposal with serious biblical support.

Peter Forsyth, the Scottish theologian, also affirmed the possibility. He argued that the most important thing is not what happens at the moment of death, but what happens when a person encounters God. And if that encounter has not yet fully happened for many people, then the story is not over at death.⁴⁰

C. S. Lewis, while not explicitly affirming the postmortem opportunity, wrote a whole book (The Great Divorce) imagining the possibility of people in hell being given the chance to leave and enter heaven. His vision was one in which the doors of hell are locked from the inside—meaning that those who remain there do so because they choose to, not because God has shut them in.⁴¹ This is very close to the position I am advocating. The postmortem opportunity keeps the door open from God’s side. Whether anyone walks through it is up to them.

Walls himself, though he has spent his career defending the doctrine of eternal hell, has come to embrace the postmortem opportunity as a necessary implication of God’s character. He concludes that postmortem repentance is a “theological proposal that deserves serious consideration” and suggests that the traditional doctrine of purgatory should be amended to include this possibility. This, he argues, is a natural extension of the traditional idea that “purgatory is hope.” The ultimate ground of this hope is the immeasurable mercy and grace of God. An amended doctrine of purgatory allows us to give theological expression to that hope even beyond the barrier of death. The same God whose mercy welcomes sincere repentance in the last moment of life is the God who would rejoice at the sincere repentance of a sinner after death.⁴²

Now, I am not advocating for purgatory as the Catholic Church has traditionally understood it. I am not talking about a place where believers go to have their remaining sins purged through additional suffering. I am talking about something much simpler and much more biblical: the claim that God’s grace does not expire at the moment of physical death. The claim that the God who desires all people to be saved will make sure all people have a genuine opportunity to be saved. The claim that the cross of Christ reaches farther than the grave.

The Postmortem Opportunity and the Character of God

Walls asks the fundamental question that underlies all of this: “How do we conceive of God? Does He truly love all persons and sincerely desire the salvation of all, or is His primary concern only to provide sufficient grace so that those who are damned are without excuse?”⁴²

How you answer that question determines everything.

If God is primarily concerned with His own justification—if His goal is to make sure He cannot be accused of unfairness when He damns people—then minimal grace is enough. Give everyone a vague sense that God exists through sunsets and butterflies, and if they don’t respond to that, they are without excuse. Case closed.

But if God is Love—really, truly, passionately, relentlessly Love—then that answer is grotesquely inadequate. A God who is Love does not look for the minimum. He goes to the maximum. He leaves the ninety-nine. He searches until He finds. He runs to the prodigal while the boy is still a long way off. And He does not stop at the boundary of death.

Baker captures this when she writes that the view of hell she is proposing “does not compromise God’s power and goodness. No one suffers in eternal flames. No one spends eternity in hell. They stand in the fiery presence of God and find themselves forgiven, tested, purified, reconciled, restored, and transformed by divine power and love. God’s goodness desires all to be saved, and God’s power works to make it happen.”⁴³

This does not mean everyone will be saved. Baker herself allows for the possibility that some will finally refuse. But it means that no one is lost because God didn’t try hard enough. No one is condemned because they were born in the wrong century or the wrong village. No one is eternally destroyed because they never had a chance.

That is a God worth worshiping. That is a God who is truly good.

C. Objections and Responses

Objection 1: “This Undermines the Urgency of Evangelism”

This is the most common objection I hear, and I understand why. If people can be saved after death, why should we bother sharing the gospel now?

But think about that argument for a moment. If it proves anything, it proves too much. After all, we believe that God can save people right up to the last second of their lives. Does that undermine evangelism? Does the doctrine of deathbed repentance make us say, “Well, they can always repent at the last moment, so why bother witnessing now?” Of course not. We share the gospel because it is good news, because knowing Christ transforms lives now, because the quality of one’s earthly life—and the lives of those around them—is immeasurably enriched by knowing God. The gospel is not just a fire escape. It is the key to abundant life.⁴⁴

Furthermore, we do not know what happens to those who reject the gospel in this life and then encounter God at the judgment. Their experience may be far more painful and difficult than it would have been had they responded in this life. Baker’s account of Otto makes this vivid: the fire of God burns away everything wicked in him, and the process is agonizing. He goes through hell. The fact that he comes out the other side does not mean the journey was easy.⁴⁵

The postmortem opportunity does not eliminate the urgency of evangelism. It redirects it. We share the gospel not because people are doomed without us, but because the gospel is true, beautiful, and life-giving—and because the sooner someone encounters the love of God, the better off they are.

Objection 2: “The Bible Teaches That Death Is the Deadline”

We have already addressed this objection at length above. Hebrews 9:27 establishes the certainty of death and judgment. It does not establish the impossibility of postmortem repentance. Luke 13:23–30 warns against presumption, not against the possibility of grace beyond death. And 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6 explicitly describe Christ preaching to the dead.

The honest truth is that the Bible does not directly settle this question one way or the other. As Robin Parry notes in Four Views on Hell, there are no biblical texts that say death is a point of no return, but neither are there texts that unambiguously guarantee postmortem repentance.⁴⁷ The question is: given the ambiguity, which direction do we lean? And I believe the weight of Scripture’s testimony about the character of God, combined with the specific evidence of 1 Peter 3–4 and the Descensus tradition, tips the balance firmly in favor of the postmortem opportunity.

Objection 3: “But What About the Rich Man and Lazarus? There’s a Great Gulf Fixed!”

Some people point to Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) as proof that there is no hope after death. In the parable, Abraham tells the rich man that “between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.”

This is an important text, and I do not dismiss it. But several things need to be said. First, this is a parable. It is a story told to make a specific point—in this case, about the reversal of fortunes between the rich and the poor, and about the sufficiency of Moses and the prophets for producing repentance. It is not a detailed blueprint of the afterlife. Second, the parable describes the intermediate state (Hades), not the final state after the resurrection and judgment. As we established in Chapter 27, Hades is a temporary holding place, not the final destination. The rich man is in Hades, not in the lake of fire.

Third, and most importantly, the “great chasm” refers to the conditions during the period of punishment. It does not say that once the punishment is complete, there will be no release. Beauchemin makes an apt analogy: if a road is blocked by deep snowdrifts, we might well say, “You cannot cross from there to us.” But once the snow is cleared, the road is open again. While God is the jailer, there will be no prison breaks. But who holds the prison keys? Christ does. “I have the keys of Hades and of Death” (Revelation 1:18). And He has already used those keys—He went and preached to the spirits in prison.⁴⁷

Objection 4: “This Is Just a Soft Form of Universalism”

No, it is not. The postmortem opportunity does not guarantee that everyone will be saved. It guarantees that everyone will have a genuine encounter with God. What they do with that encounter is their own choice. Baker is clear: “In order to preserve human freedom, which God gave to us at creation, we must allow for the possibility that some people will still reject God.”⁴⁸

On conditional immortality, those who finally refuse God after the postmortem encounter are destroyed. On universal reconciliation, they eventually yield. But on either view, the postmortem opportunity itself is not universalism. It is the claim that God is fair—that He gives everyone a genuine chance. Universalism is a claim about the outcome. The postmortem opportunity is a claim about the process. The two are not the same, even if they can be held together.

Objection 5: “This Idea Is a Novelty with No Basis in Church History”

This objection is simply false. As we have seen, the Descensus is in the Apostles’ Creed—one of the oldest and most widely accepted statements of Christian faith. Justin Martyr, one of the earliest church fathers, explicitly taught that God came down to the dead to tell them the good news of salvation.⁴⁹ The Eastern Orthodox tradition has always given the Descensus a central place in its theology of Easter. And as we noted, Protestant theologians from Luther to Bloesch to Forsyth to Walls have expressed varying degrees of support for the idea.

What is novel is the insistence that death is an absolute, impenetrable barrier to God’s grace. That idea became dominant in the Western church largely through Augustine’s influence, and it was reinforced by medieval Catholic theology. But the early Greek-speaking church—the church closest to the original language and culture of the New Testament—did not universally hold this view. The postmortem opportunity is not a modern novelty. It is an ancient hope that the Western church forgot.⁵⁰

Objection 6: “If People Can Be Saved After Death, Why Did Jesus Need to Die?”

This objection misunderstands what the postmortem opportunity claims. The postmortem opportunity does not bypass the cross. It extends the reach of the cross. People who are saved after death are saved by the same means as people who are saved before death: through the finished work of Jesus Christ. It is Christ who descended to the dead. It is Christ who preached to the spirits in prison. It is Christ whose presence in Hades broke the power of death. The postmortem opportunity does not replace the cross. It is the cross’s final victory march—the moment when the saving power of Christ’s death and resurrection reaches even the most remote corner of creation.⁵¹

As Beauchemin asks, if Christ tasted death for everyone (Hebrews 2:9), then hope beyond death must be for all. If that does not at least mean this, what is the point?⁵²

D. Conclusion and Connection

Let me bring this chapter to a close by returning to the question we started with. What about the billions who never heard? What about the infant, the woman in the remote village, the man whose only experience of Christianity was abuse and manipulation?

The postmortem opportunity says: God has not forgotten them. God is not done with them. Death is not the end of the story.

On the divine presence model, the final judgment is not a distant deity reading off a list of infractions. It is the moment when every person stands in the unveiled presence of the God who is love. For some, this is a homecoming. For others, it is an agonizing confrontation with the truth about themselves. For many—perhaps billions—it is the first genuine encounter with the real Jesus they have ever had.

And in that encounter, God extends the invitation. “I have loved you with an everlasting love. Will you be reconciled to me?”

I believe a just and loving God would extend that invitation. I believe Scripture points us in that direction. I believe the earliest Christians understood this. And I believe it changes everything about how we think about God, about hell, and about the hope of the world.

Does everyone say yes? I don’t know. As I have said, I lean toward conditional immortality—the view that some may finally refuse, and that the fire of God’s love will consume them. But whether the final outcome is CI or universal reconciliation, the postmortem opportunity ensures that the judgment is fair. Everyone gets a real encounter. Everyone meets the real God. And the God they meet is not a tyrant handing down sentences. He is a Father reaching out His hands.

I want to speak personally for a moment. This is not just an abstract theological question for me. I have lost people I love. I have sat by hospital beds. I have stood at gravesides. And the question that every grieving person asks—“Will I see them again? Are they okay? Is there hope?”—is the question that drives this chapter.

I will not offer cheap comfort. I will not pretend to know the eternal destiny of any specific person. That is God’s business, not mine. But I will say this: the God I have found in Scripture is a God who is not willing that any should perish. He is a God who sent His Son into the world not to condemn the world, but to save it (John 3:17). He is a God who descended to the dead and preached the gospel even there. He is a God whose love is stronger than death.

If you are reading this and you are grieving someone you love—someone who died without knowing Christ, or without giving any visible sign of faith—I want you to know that your hope is not in their last words. Your hope is not in whether they said the right prayer. Your hope is in the character of God. And the God who holds the keys of Death and Hades is a God of infinite love, infinite patience, and infinite creativity in reaching the lost.

Baker speaks of God whose entire purpose centers around “rescuing and redeeming a sin-enslaved world, whose absolute will focuses on reconciliation and restoration”—a God who “doesn’t close the door on grace after closing the door on time.”⁵³ I can think of no better summary.

In our next chapter, we will zoom out and look at the full eschatological picture: death, the intermediate state, the resurrection, the final judgment, and the final state of the saved and the lost. We will see how all the pieces we have been assembling throughout this book—the divine presence model, the conscious intermediate state, the postmortem opportunity, and the question of CI vs. UR—fit together into a single, coherent vision of the last things. But the foundation of that vision is what we have established here: that the God who is love does not stop loving at the grave. His fire reaches everywhere. His invitation extends to all. And His grace is bigger than death.

As Paul wrote, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).

Not even death.

Especially not death.⁵⁴