Chapter 21

McClymond on the Petrine Epistles and Postmortem Proclamation

Every now and then, you stumble across a passage of Scripture that stops you cold. Not because it’s hard to understand in the usual way—obscure vocabulary, tricky grammar, uncertain context. No. It stops you because you suddenly realize that if it means what it most naturally seems to mean, it changes everything.

First Peter 3:18–20 is that kind of passage. So is 1 Peter 4:6. And taken together with 2 Peter 3:9, they form a trio of texts that opens a window into something most Christians have been trained to believe is impossible: the idea that God’s saving work does not stop at the grave. That the gospel was preached—past tense, in Peter’s telling—to people who were already dead. That Christ Himself went to the realm of the dead and made a proclamation there. And that God’s patience, far from being a temporary holding pattern, is a reflection of His eternal character, a patience that does not want anyone to perish.

If you have been reading this book from the beginning, you know that we have been building a case—chapter by chapter, text by text—that universal restoration is the most faithful reading of Scripture. We have examined the “all” texts in Paul (Chapter 14). We have taken a hard look at aionios and found that it does not mean what most English translations suggest (Chapter 15). We have walked through Jesus’s warnings about Gehenna and shown that they are entirely compatible with restorative judgment (Chapter 16). We have worked through the Pauline vision of cosmic reconciliation (Chapter 20).

Now we turn to Peter. And Peter takes us somewhere extraordinary: beyond the grave.

Michael McClymond, in The Devil’s Redemption, does not give the Petrine passages the detailed treatment they deserve. He acknowledges the doctrine of Christ’s descent to the dead and admits that it “could be regarded as the first form of a ‘larger hope’ for salvation to appear in church history.”¹ But his broader framework dismisses the postmortem opportunity as a slippery slope to universalism, and he treats the Petrine texts as too ambiguous to support any kind of salvific work beyond death. His approach to these passages is largely one of containment: admit they exist, downplay their significance, and move on.

I think that is a serious mistake. These texts are not marginal curiosities. They are windows into the heart of God—a God whose love is so relentless that not even death can put it out of reach.

A. McClymond’s Argument

To give McClymond his due, we need to understand both what he says directly about the Petrine texts and what his broader framework implies about them.

In his section on “Christ’s Descent to the Dead and the Larger Hope,” McClymond acknowledges that the descensus ad inferos—the doctrine that Christ descended to the realm of the dead between His crucifixion and resurrection—is rooted in early Christian tradition and supported by several biblical passages, including Matthew 12:39–40, Acts 2:24, Romans 10:7, and Ephesians 4:9–10.² He admits this is “a matter of consensus in the patristic and medieval tradition.”³ He recognizes that both Clement of Alexandria and Origen saw the descent as involving a genuine offer of salvation to the dead, with Origen proposing that “when [Christ] became a soul unclothed by a body he conversed with souls unclothed by bodies, converting also those of them who were willing to accept him.”⁴

But here is where McClymond draws his line. He argues that “a universalist interpretation goes well beyond what is found in the earlier tradition,” and that “the logic of Christ’s descent thus falls within the bounds of inclusivism rather than universalism. It broadens the boundaries of salvation but does not efface them.”⁵ In other words, McClymond is willing to concede that Christ’s descent may have brought salvation to some of the dead—but not all. The boundary remains.

McClymond also invokes Augustine’s influential reading of these passages. Augustine dismissed 1 Peter 3:19–20 as a reference to the preincarnate Christ preaching through Noah, and he interpreted 1 Peter 4:6 as referring to spiritually dead people who heard the gospel while alive, not to those who were physically dead.⁶ McClymond notes that Augustine’s reading was followed by most medieval theologians, many of the Reformers, and “continues to be influential to this day.”⁷

More importantly for our purposes, McClymond’s broader argument casts the postmortem opportunity as inherently dangerous. He argues that universalism typically relies on “abstract or a priori theological reasoning” that leaps from God’s love to the salvation of all “while omitting the messy part in between.”⁸ He calls this the “abbreviated John 3:16”—as if universalists are simply saying, “For God so loved the world that he gave eternal life to all,” skipping over Christ, faith, repentance, and everything else.⁹ And he sees the postmortem opportunity as a key link in this chain: if people can be saved after death, the slide toward universalism becomes, in his view, almost inevitable.

As James Beilby notes in his careful study Postmortem Opportunity, the fear of universalism played a massive role in the Western church’s rejection of postmortem hope. Beilby writes that “for those who believe that Scripture clearly teaches that not all will be saved, the concept of Postmortem Opportunity resides squarely on a slippery slope to heresy.”¹⁰ McClymond stands firmly in this tradition. The Petrine texts, in his framework, must not be allowed to teach what they appear to teach, because if they do, the logical trajectory points toward something McClymond considers unthinkable: the salvation of all.

So let us summarize McClymond’s core position: (1) The descent of Christ to the dead is a genuine early Christian doctrine, but its significance should be limited to inclusivism, not universalism. (2) The Petrine texts are too ambiguous to build any strong case for postmortem salvation. (3) The postmortem opportunity is a slippery slope that undermines the urgency of the gospel and leads inevitably to universalism. (4) Augustine’s interpretation of these passages, which strips them of any genuine postmortem salvific meaning, remains the most responsible reading.

B. Identifying Weaknesses

McClymond’s treatment of the Petrine texts suffers from several significant problems. Let me name them plainly.

The Problem of Neglect

The most striking weakness is the one I have already flagged: McClymond simply does not give these texts the attention they deserve. For a two-volume, 1,400-page work that claims to be a comprehensive critique of universalism, the treatment of 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6 is remarkably thin. These are the most direct New Testament texts addressing Christ’s activity among the dead, and McClymond treats them almost as an afterthought. He engages the doctrine of the descent in historical terms, tracing how various church fathers handled it, but he never sits down with the Petrine texts themselves and does the kind of careful exegesis that would be required to dismiss the postmortem opportunity reading.

This matters. You cannot credibly reject a theological position if you have not seriously engaged the strongest textual evidence for it. McClymond is happy to spend hundreds of pages tracing supposed gnostic and kabbalistic influences on universalism, but he spends comparatively little time on what the apostle Peter actually wrote about Christ preaching to the dead.

The Augustine Problem

McClymond leans heavily on Augustine’s interpretation of these passages, but Augustine’s reading is widely recognized as problematic—even among scholars who are not sympathetic to universalism. Augustine’s dismissal of 1 Peter 3:19–20 as the preincarnate Christ preaching through Noah requires an extremely unnatural reading of the text. As we will see in detail below, the passage follows a clear christological formula: crucifixion, death, descent, resurrection, ascension. Reading the “going” and “preaching” as a reference to Noah’s preaching ministry, animated by the preincarnate spirit of Christ, breaks this formula apart.¹¹

Augustine’s reading of 1 Peter 4:6 is equally strained. The text says “the gospel was preached even to those who are dead.” Augustine insisted this meant “those who were spiritually dead”—that is, living people who were dead in sin. But as David Horrell has argued, the immediate context of the passage uses “the living and the dead” in a general, inclusive sense (1 Peter 4:5), and there is no good reason to suddenly limit “the dead” in the very next verse to a different, metaphorical meaning.¹²

McClymond’s reliance on Augustine here is not just exegetically questionable. It is historically revealing. Augustine’s shift on these passages came in the heat of the Pelagian controversy, when his theology was hardening in ways that would shape Western Christianity for over a millennium. The early Augustine was more open to postmortem possibilities. The later Augustine, fighting Pelagianism on every front, needed to close every loophole he could find. His reading of 1 Peter was driven at least in part by theological necessity, not by a careful, dispassionate engagement with the text.¹³

The Slippery Slope Problem

McClymond’s “slippery slope to universalism” argument is not an exegetical argument at all. It is a consequence-based objection: “If we accept the postmortem opportunity, it might lead to universalism, so we should not accept it.” But this is logically fallacious. The question is not what a doctrine might lead to; the question is whether the doctrine is true. If Scripture teaches that Christ preached to the dead, and if Scripture teaches that the gospel was proclaimed to the dead so that they might live, then the slippery slope objection is irrelevant. We do not get to reject a biblical teaching because we are afraid of where it might go.

Beilby makes this point with characteristic precision: the correlation between postmortem opportunity and universalism is real, but it does not establish that the postmortem opportunity is false. It simply means that “those who believe that all will be given an opportunity to be saved, in this life or the next, must grant that it is possible that all will be saved.”¹⁴ That is true. But possibility is not inevitability. The postmortem opportunity does not require universalism any more than the doctrine of God’s universal love requires it. And from the universalist perspective, the correlation is not a problem to be feared—it is a feature of the gospel itself.

The “Abbreviated John 3:16” Problem

McClymond accuses universalists of relying on an “abbreviated John 3:16” that strips away Christ, faith, and repentance, leaving only “God loves everyone, so everyone is saved.”¹⁵ This is a straw man when applied to conservative biblical universalism. Every major conservative universalist scholar—Talbott, Parry, Hart, Ramelli—affirms the absolute necessity of Christ as mediator, the necessity of personal faith, and the reality of judgment. The conservative universalist does not skip over the “messy middle” of John 3:16. The conservative universalist affirms all of it: the gift of the Son, the call to believe, the reality of perishing. What the universalist adds is that God is patient and powerful enough to bring every person to genuine, willing faith—if not in this life, then beyond it. That is not an abbreviated gospel. It is a completed gospel.

And notice the irony: the very Petrine texts we are examining in this chapter prove that the “messy middle” is not skipped. Christ goes to the dead. Christ preaches to the dead. The gospel is proclaimed to the dead so that they might live. The mechanism McClymond says is missing is exactly what the Petrine texts describe. The postmortem opportunity is not a shortcut around Christ; it is Christ continuing to do what He has always done—seeking and saving the lost.

C. The Universalist Response

We turn now to the heart of this chapter: a careful examination of the three major Petrine texts that bear on the question of postmortem proclamation and universal restoration. These are 1 Peter 3:18–20, 1 Peter 4:6, and 2 Peter 3:9. I will treat each in turn, drawing extensively from Beilby’s Postmortem Opportunity and other key sources, and then connect them to the broader universalist case.

1 Peter 3:18–20: Christ’s Proclamation to the Spirits in Prison

Let us begin with the text itself:

For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; in which He also went and made proclamation to the spirits in prison, who once were disobedient when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water. (1 Peter 3:18–20, NASB)

Martin Luther once said of this passage, “A wonderful text is this, and a more obscure passage perhaps than any other in the New Testament, so that I do not know for a certainty just what Peter means.”¹⁶ Robert Mounce went even further, calling it “widely recognized as perhaps the most difficult to understand in the whole New Testament.”¹⁷ Anyone who tells you this passage is simple is not being straight with you. It is complex, layered, and contested.

But “difficult” does not mean “unknowable.” And the difficulty of the passage, I want to suggest, is not inherent in the text itself. Much of the difficulty comes from the fact that interpreters bring to it a prior conviction—that death ends all salvific opportunity—and then struggle to make the text fit that conviction. If you remove that assumption and let the text speak on its own terms, the passage becomes remarkably coherent.

Following Beilby, we can identify four major interpretations of this passage:¹⁸

Interpretation 1: Enoch, not Christ, preaching to sinful angels. This view, advanced powerfully by Karen Jobes, appeals to Jewish traditions about Enoch recorded in 1 Enoch 12, where Enoch descends to Hades to announce God’s judgment to the fallen angels who had sexual relations with human women (Genesis 6:1–4).¹⁹ The problem with this view is obvious: there is no reference to Enoch anywhere in the text. The theory requires either a scribal omission (for which there is zero textual evidence) or the assumption that Peter’s audience was so familiar with 1 Enoch that they could fill in the reference without any textual cue. If Peter’s audience included Gentiles, this is extremely implausible.

Interpretation 2: Noah, animated by Christ’s Spirit, preaching to his contemporaries. This is Augustine’s view, and it remains popular. It holds that the passage does not describe Christ’s descent to the dead at all, but rather the preincarnate Christ preaching through Noah to Noah’s wicked neighbors. Proponents point out that 2 Peter 2:5 calls Noah a “preacher of righteousness.”²⁰ But this view has serious problems. First, it is very awkward to say that Christ “went and made proclamation” if Christ did not actually go anywhere but merely spoke through Noah. As Beilby observes, Wayne Grudem’s suggestion that the preincarnate Christ “went” to where the people were is “utterly implausible given the fact that the preincarnate Christ did not need to be spatially present in order to see a situation and speak through a person.”²¹

Second—and this is the critical point—the passage follows what scholars recognize as a christological formula: crucifixion, death, descent, resurrection, and ascension. Beilby lays this out clearly:²²

Crucifixion (1 Peter 3:18): “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God.”

Death (1 Peter 3:18): “having been put to death in the flesh.”

Descent (1 Peter 3:18–21): “but made alive in the spirit; in which also He went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison.”

Resurrection (1 Peter 3:21): “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

Ascension (1 Peter 3:22): “who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven.”

Reading the passage as a reference to Noah’s preaching breaks this formula apart. MacCulloch states the point bluntly: “No other interpretation than that of the work of the discarnate Spirit of Christ in Hades seems natural and self-evident here. Indeed all other interpretations merely evade this evident meaning.”²³

Interpretation 3: Christ preaching a message of condemnation to sinful angels. This view acknowledges that it was Jesus doing the preaching, but argues that the recipients were the fallen angels of Genesis 6:1–4 (imprisoned in the “gloomy dungeons” of Tartarus, as described in 2 Peter 2:4), and that the message was one of condemnation, not salvation.²⁴ This is probably the most common view among contemporary evangelical scholars. But it has significant weaknesses.

The word Peter uses for “preached” or “proclaimed” is the Greek verb kēryssō (κηρύσσω). In the New Testament and the Septuagint, this word is consistently used for evangelistic preaching—the announcement of good news. As Beilby observes, even Thomas Schreiner, who does not favor a postmortem opportunity reading, admits that this is “the greatest difficulty” for the view that Christ was merely announcing condemnation to angels.²⁵ If Peter had wanted to describe a message of doom, he had other words available. He chose the word that means “to proclaim good news.”

Moreover, it is strange that Christ would go out of His way to announce condemnation to angels who were already imprisoned and already under judgment. Why bother? As Beilby notes, it would be far more relevant to confront Satan himself, who was not imprisoned and remained an active threat—the “roaring lion” of 1 Peter 5:8.²⁶

Interpretation 4: Jesus preaching the gospel to the dead in Hades. The fourth interpretation—and, I believe, the best one—is that Christ descended to Hades and preached to the human dead who had been disobedient in the days of Noah. This view has a number of powerful advantages.²⁷

First, it allows us to see Jesus as the one preaching, which fits the immediate context of the passage. Second, it allows the term kēryssō to be understood in its most natural sense—as a proclamation of good news, not a pronouncement of doom. Third, the descent of Christ into Hades fits the christological formula of crucifixion, death, descent, resurrection, and ascension perfectly. Fourth, it aligns with Peter’s own words in his Pentecost sermon: “God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him” (Acts 2:24). As MacCulloch observes, “Death” here functions as a synonym for Hades.²⁸ Peter is describing what Christ did while in the realm of the dead: He preached. The earliest Syriac manuscript of the New Testament, the Peshito, renders 1 Peter 3:19 as, “He preached to those souls which were detained in Hades.”²⁹

But what about the obvious question: why does Peter single out the people from Noah’s time? If Christ preached to the dead in Hades, why mention only these particular dead?

C. E. B. Cranfield provides a brilliant answer. He argues that Peter is making a deliberate rhetorical choice. The generation of the flood was “generally regarded as the most notorious and abandoned of sinners.”³⁰ Think about that. Peter is not limiting Christ’s preaching to these people alone. He is using them as the most extreme example. If Christ preached the gospel even to them—the worst of the worst, the people whose wickedness was so great that God sent a flood to judge the entire earth—then the implication is staggering. As Cranfield puts it: “If there was hope for them, then none could be beyond the reach of Christ’s saving power.”³¹

William Barclay says it even more plainly: “The doctrine of the descent into Hades conserves the precious truth that no man who ever lived is left without a sight of Christ and without the offer of the salvation of God.”³²

Stop and let that sink in. No one who ever lived. Not the worst sinner. Not the most remote tribal person who never heard the name of Jesus. Not the infant who died at birth. Not the atheist who rejected a distorted version of the gospel. No one.

This is not sentimental wishful thinking. This is what the text says, read in its most natural sense, by some of the most respected New Testament scholars of the twentieth century.

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

If 1 Peter 3:18–20 opens a door, 1 Peter 4:6 throws it wide open:

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. (1 Peter 4:6, NIV)

This verse is remarkably direct. The gospel was preached to the dead. The purpose of this preaching was so that they might live. You would think a verse this clear would settle the question. But as Beilby documents at length, interpreters have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid the most natural reading.³³

There are three main interpretations:

The “spiritually dead” interpretation. Some, following Augustine, argue that “the dead” here refers to people who were spiritually dead (dead in sin) but physically alive when they heard the gospel. The problem with this reading is that it ignores the immediate context. In the very preceding verse, Peter says that ungodly people “will have to give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead” (1 Peter 4:5). “The living and the dead” here clearly refers to the physically living and the physically dead—all humanity, across both sides of the grave. As Horrell notes, “Since the phrase ‘the living and the dead’ has a general reference, we should expect the same to be true of ‘dead’ in verse 6.”³⁴ Switching from the physical meaning of “dead” in verse 5 to a metaphorical meaning in verse 6 would be jarring and inexplicable. No competent writer would do this without signaling the change.

The “now dead” interpretation. Another approach holds that the gospel was preached to people who are now dead but who were alive when they heard it. On this view, Peter is reassuring his readers about the fate of recently deceased Christians. But as Beilby observes, this interpretation has a serious problem: “it seems highly unlikely that the author of 1 Peter would need to assure his readers about the salvation of those who had recently died because ‘there is no indication that the readers of 1 Peter doubted this.’”³⁵ Horrell has argued convincingly that projecting the concern Paul addresses in 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 (worry about the fate of deceased believers) onto the readers of 1 Peter is implausible. The contexts are completely different.

There is a further problem with both the “spiritually dead” and “now dead” readings. Look at the verse again: the gospel was preached to the dead so that they might be judged according to human standards in the body but live according to God in the spirit. The purpose clause “so that they might live” connects directly to the preaching. The preaching was aimed at producing life. If the “dead” were merely people who had heard the gospel in life and then died, the purpose clause becomes redundant and strange. Why would Peter need to explain that the purpose of preaching to people (while alive) was so that they might live? That’s what all gospel preaching aims to accomplish. Peter is saying something more dramatic: that the gospel was preached to those who are dead, in their condition of being dead, for the explicit purpose of bringing them to life.

The “physically dead” interpretation. The third and most natural reading takes “the dead” to mean exactly what it says: people who are physically dead. Joel Green describes these as “dead members of the human family given Postmortem Opportunity to hear the good news.” F. W. Beare goes further, asserting that “the dead” are “all the dead from the beginning of time, all that are to stand before the judgment seat of Christ.”³⁶

On this interpretation, 1 Peter 4:6 provides the theological justification for God’s judgment of all humanity. God can justly judge both the living and the dead (verse 5) because the gospel has been announced to both—to the living through normal preaching, and to the dead through Christ’s postmortem proclamation. This reading ties beautifully to 1 Peter 3:18–20: the same Christ who descended and preached to the spirits in prison is the one whose gospel has been proclaimed even to the dead, so that no one stands before the judgment seat without having been given a genuine opportunity to hear and respond.³⁷

Notice the beautiful parallel between the two passages. In 1 Peter 3:18, Christ is “put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.” In 1 Peter 4:6, the dead are “judged according to human standards in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.” Christ’s own experience of death-then-life-in-the-spirit becomes the pattern for those to whom He preaches. What happened to Christ—death in the flesh, life in the spirit—is what happens to those who hear and receive His gospel, even on the other side of the grave.³⁸

Thomas Schreiner has raised an objection worth addressing. He argues that the passive verb in “the gospel was preached” suggests that someone other than Jesus did the preaching—perhaps human evangelists, not Christ Himself. But as Beilby responds, the passive voice does not require this reading. It “seems to be a reach to claim that the passive voice would require such a reading.”³⁹ Moreover, if Christ can announce His own victory to the imprisoned spirits in 3:18–19, “then the idea of Christ announcing the good news about himself to the human dead is no less plausible.”⁴⁰

The Patristic Witness: This Is Not a New Idea

One of the things that makes these Petrine passages so compelling is that the early church largely read them the same way I am reading them here. McClymond knows this. He admits that the descent tradition is ancient and widespread. But he underplays just how widespread it was.

Beilby’s research is devastating on this point. He demonstrates that belief in Christ’s preaching to the dead in Hades was not a marginal opinion. It was common. Frederic Huidekoper argued that “in the second and third centuries, every branch and division of Christians, so far as their records enable us to judge, believed that Christ preached to the departed; and this belief dates back to our earliest reliable sources of information.”⁴¹ Moreover, for many in the early church, the preaching was seen as the very purpose of the descent.⁴²

Consider the evidence. The Odes of Solomon, compiled by a Jewish Christian around 100 CE, describe Christ’s descent and the response of the dead: “Those who had died ran towards me; and they cried out and said, Son of God, have pity on us… May we also be saved with You, because You are our Savior.” Christ responds: “Then I heard their voice, and placed their faith in my heart. And I placed my name upon their head, because they are free and they are mine.”⁴³ This is not a message of condemnation. It is a message of salvation, received and embraced by the dead.

The second-century Epistle of the Apostles, written around 160 CE to refute the gnostic teachings of Cerinthus and Simon Magus, puts these words in Christ’s mouth: “I have descended and have spoken with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, to your fathers the prophets, and have brought them news that they might come from the rest which is below into heaven, and have given them the right hand of the baptism of life and forgiveness and pardon for all wickedness.”⁴⁴ Notice: this anti-gnostic text teaches the salvific significance of the descent. The gnostic connection McClymond keeps drawing is simply not there.

Irenaeus, one of the most important second-century theologians and a fierce opponent of gnosticism, affirmed the descent and its salvific purpose.⁴⁵ Hippolytus, in his Easter Homily, extended the scope of Christ’s preaching beyond the Old Testament saints to include the unconverted: “For it behooved him to go and preach also to those who were in Hell [Sheol], namely those who have once been disobedient.”⁴⁶ The allusion to 1 Peter 3:19–20 is unmistakable.

Clement of Alexandria pushed the question further than anyone before him. He argued that if Christ preached the gospel to the living so that they would not be condemned unjustly, then logic demanded that He do the same for those who had died before His coming. He asked plainly: “If, then, He preached the Gospel to those in the flesh that they might not be condemned unjustly, how is it conceivable that He did not for the same cause preach the Gospel to those who had departed this life before His advent?”⁴⁷ This is not liberal theology. This is second-century Alexandrian Christianity, rooted in the logic of God’s fairness.

Origen extended the idea further, affirming that Christ “dwelt among those souls which were without bodily covering, converting such of them as were willing to Himself.”⁴⁸ Cyril of Alexandria, writing in the fifth century, stated it plainly in his commentary on John: “On the third day He revived, having preached unto the spirits in prison. The proof of His love towards mankind was hereby rendered most complete by His giving salvation, I say, not merely to the quick, but also by His preaching remission of sins to those who were already dead, and who sat in darkness in the depths of the abyss.”⁴⁹

Chad Pierce summarizes the evidence: “It appears that a majority of the Alexandrian view of 1 Peter was that Christ, during the triduum mortis, proclaimed a message of salvation to human souls imprisoned in the underworld.”⁵⁰ Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tyrannius Rufinus, Cyril of Alexandria, and Athanasius all connected 1 Peter 3:19 with Christ’s descent and preaching to the dead in Hades.⁵¹

This is not a fringe reading. This is the mainstream of the early Greek-speaking church. And it was not limited to universalists. Even theologians who did not hold to universal salvation affirmed that Christ’s descent had soteriological significance—that something genuinely salvific happened when Christ went to the dead. As Beilby writes, quoting Bauckham: “Christians from a very early date saw in the descent an event of soteriological significance for the righteous dead of the period before Christ, whose souls were in Hades.”⁵² The pattern of preaching in Hades was described with the same vocabulary used for earthly evangelism: Christ “preached the gospel,” and the result was “salvation,” “the remission of sins,” “salvation from all evil.”⁵³

McClymond knows all this. He just will not follow the evidence where it leads.

The Descent and the Creed: “He Descended into Hell”

It is worth pausing here to note that the doctrine of Christ’s descent is not merely a scholarly curiosity. It is embedded in the Apostles’ Creed: “He descended into hell.” Every Sunday, millions of Christians around the world confess this. The Latin is descendit ad inferos—“He descended to the lower regions.”

Wayne Grudem has famously argued that this clause was a late addition to the creed, that it was not present in the Old Roman Creed, and that even Rufinus (who included it around 390 CE) understood it merely as a restatement of “He was buried.”⁵⁴ But Beilby shows that Grudem’s argument is surprisingly weak. Even Augustine, who rejected the postmortem opportunity, accepted the reality of the descent: “It is established beyond question that the Lord, after he had been put to death in the flesh, descended into hell.”⁵⁵ Rufinus himself, in the very passage Grudem cites, explicitly defends the descent and argues that Christ’s purpose was “the delivery of souls from their captivity in the infernal regions.”⁵⁶ Grudem’s attempt to reduce the creedal confession to “He was buried” simply does not hold up under scrutiny.

More importantly for our purposes: when you confess “He descended into hell,” what are you confessing? If the early church is any guide, you are confessing that between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Christ’s soul went to the realm of the dead and did something there. Something significant. Something salvific. The creed’s inclusion of this clause is a permanent marker of the early church’s conviction that death is not the boundary of Christ’s saving activity.

The Eastern Orthodox church has never lost sight of this. Archbishop Alfeyev states: “The belief in Christ’s descent into Hades and his preaching to the dead is not a theologoumenon [personal opinion], but belongs to general church doctrine.”⁵⁷ It is only in the Western church, under Augustine’s towering influence, that this conviction was gradually stripped of its salvific force.

2 Peter 3:9: God’s Patience Means Salvation

We turn now to our third Petrine text:

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9, NIV)

This verse is not typically discussed in connection with the postmortem opportunity. But it belongs here, because it reveals the character of the God who descended to Hades. And the character of God is the foundation of the entire universalist case.

Peter is answering a question about the delay of Christ’s return. Scoffers are asking, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised?” (2 Peter 3:4). Peter’s answer is not what you would expect. He does not say, “Be patient; He’s coming soon.” He says, “The Lord is not slow. He is patient. And His patience has a purpose: He does not want anyone to perish. He wants everyone to come to repentance.”

The universals here are breathtaking. Not wanting anyone to perish. Wanting everyone to repent. As Talbott has argued, a naive reader of this verse—someone who simply picks up the Bible without bringing a load of theological presuppositions—would naturally take it to mean exactly what it says: God genuinely desires the salvation of every person.⁵⁸

Calvinists have tried to restrict the scope of this verse. Some argue that “not wanting anyone to perish” means “not wanting any of the elect to perish.” Others argue that “anyone” means “all kinds of people” rather than “all people without exception.” Beilby responds with characteristic directness: “The problem with such interpretations is that they are not interpretations of what the texts actually say; they are clever ways of avoiding the implications of what the texts say.”⁵⁹ If Peter wanted to say that God desires all kinds of people to be saved, he could have said that much more clearly. He said “anyone.” He said “everyone.”

John Piper offers a more sophisticated Calvinist response: the “two wills of God” view. God genuinely desires the salvation of all, Piper argues, but He also desires to demonstrate His justice and wrath, and the latter desire overrides the former.⁶⁰ Beilby points out the problem: Piper’s argument is only plausible if you have already accepted the Calvinist doctrines of effectual grace and limited atonement. If you have not, the natural reading of 2 Peter 3:9 is clear: God wants all to be saved. Period.

Now connect this to the descent. If God genuinely does not want anyone to perish, and if God is patient precisely because He wants everyone to come to repentance, then what are we to make of the billions of people who have died without ever hearing the gospel? What about the infant who died in the womb? The woman in a remote village in 3000 BC? The person raised in a militant atheist household who was taught that Christianity was a fairy tale?

If God’s patience means salvation (as Peter says), and if God does not want anyone to perish (as Peter says), then God’s pursuit of the lost does not stop at the grave. The descent of Christ to Hades is the mechanism. First Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6 describe the action. Second Peter 3:9 reveals the motivation. God’s patience is not a temporary feature of this age. It is who He is. And who He is does not change when a person draws their last breath.

The Postmortem Opportunity Is Not a “Second Chance”

Before we move on, we need to address what is perhaps the single most common objection to everything I have just argued: “Doesn’t the postmortem opportunity amount to a ‘second chance’ at salvation?”

This objection has enormous emotional force. The fear of a “second chance” has driven the rejection of postmortem hope more than any exegetical argument. As Beilby writes, “It would be difficult to overstate how significant this objection is for those who find the idea of a postmortem repentance to be problematic.”⁶¹

But the objection is based on a misunderstanding. As Beilby explains with great care, the postmortem opportunity is not a second chance for those who had a genuine first chance and squandered it. It is a first chance for those who never had one. Think about that small child who died of malaria in a pre-Christian village. Think about the woman born into a family where the name of Jesus was never spoken. Think about the person who heard a twisted, hateful version of the gospel and understandably rejected it. These people did not have a “first chance” in any meaningful sense. The postmortem opportunity, as Beilby defines it, affirms not a second chance but “the universality of a first chance, an opportunity for salvation for those who have never heard the gospel in its fullness.”⁶²

Some object that Romans 1 teaches that all people have had a genuine opportunity because God has revealed Himself through creation. But as Beilby responds, this conflates “having an awareness of God as Creator” with “having a genuine salvific opportunity.” Knowing that a powerful being made the world is not the same as hearing the good news of Jesus Christ. Restrictivists who argue that the knowledge received through general revelation is sufficient to condemn but insufficient to save cannot then turn around and claim that Romans 1 proves everyone has had a genuine opportunity to be saved.⁶³

Jonathan Kvanvig raises a philosophical objection: “If a second chance is deserved, then it is hard to see why the same considerations would not justify a third chance if the second chance were passed on, thereby launching an infinite sequence of delays.”⁶⁴ But Kvanvig himself acknowledges that this objection only has force if one already believes that some will end up permanently in hell. For the universalist, the “infinite sequence” is not a problem—it is the very mechanism of God’s patient, relentless love. God does not stop pursuing until the last sheep is found. The fact that some might need many opportunities is not evidence that the system is broken. It is evidence that God’s love is more stubborn than human resistance.

From Postmortem Opportunity to Universal Restoration

Here is where we take the final step. We have established that the Petrine texts teach—or at the very least, strongly support—the idea that Christ’s saving work extends beyond the grave. The gospel has been preached to the dead. God’s patience is aimed at bringing everyone to repentance. No one who ever lived is left without the offer of salvation.

The question that remains is: will everyone accept?

McClymond would say no. He would argue that the postmortem opportunity, even if it exists, does not guarantee universal acceptance. People can still say no. And he would be right that, in principle, the postmortem opportunity by itself does not logically require universalism. As Beilby concedes, “the conclusion ‘All will be saved’ does not follow from the claim ‘All who receive a Postmortem Opportunity are saved.’”⁶⁵

But here is what McClymond does not reckon with: the cumulative force of the biblical witness. The Petrine texts do not stand alone. They stand alongside Paul’s vision of a Christ who will reconcile all things (Colossians 1:20), a God who will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28), and a Savior who “will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). They stand alongside 1 Timothy 2:4 (“God wants all people to be saved”) and 1 Timothy 4:10 (“the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe”). They stand alongside the open gates of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:25) and the leaves of the tree of life that are “for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).

When you combine the Petrine teaching that God’s saving work continues beyond death with the Pauline teaching that God’s ultimate purpose is the reconciliation of all things, what do you get? You get universal restoration. Not because of a sentimental wish, but because of the cumulative testimony of Scripture.

Consider the logic. God desires the salvation of all (2 Peter 3:9; 1 Timothy 2:4). God is able to accomplish everything He desires (Ephesians 1:11; Isaiah 46:10). Christ’s saving work extends beyond the grave (1 Peter 3:18–20; 4:6). The postmortem encounter with Christ involves the proclamation of the gospel—good news, not mere condemnation. And God’s love, as Paul insists, “never fails” (1 Corinthians 13:8).

If God never stops pursuing, and if every person will eventually encounter the full reality of Christ’s love—not the distorted version they may have rejected in this life, but the real thing—then on what basis do we conclude that some will permanently resist? As Talbott has argued so powerfully, persistent rejection of God is a sign of bondage, not freedom. A truly free choice, made with full knowledge and an unbound will, always tends toward the Good.⁶⁶ God’s purification does not override freedom; it restores it.

The Petrine texts give us the mechanism. Paul gives us the scope. John gives us the invitation that never closes. And the character of God, as revealed throughout Scripture, gives us the confidence: His love is more powerful than our resistance. His patience is longer than our stubbornness. His gospel reaches further than the grave.

What About the “Irrelevance of This Life” Objection?

Before we leave the universalist response, I want to address one more concern that naturally arises from the postmortem opportunity: if salvation is available after death, does this make this life irrelevant? Why should we bother following Christ now? Why evangelize?

These are serious questions, and they deserve serious answers.

First, notice that these same objections were raised against the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone. “If we are saved by grace and not by works, why bother doing good works?” Paul himself anticipated and answered this objection in Romans 6:1–2: “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” The fact that grace is free does not make obedience pointless. It makes obedience a response to love rather than a payment for survival.

Second, the postmortem opportunity does not say, “It does not matter when you come to Christ.” It says, “God will not let anyone miss their chance.” There is a vast difference. Every day spent apart from Christ is a day of unnecessary suffering, missed purpose, and wasted joy. The person who comes to faith in this life lives in the light. The person who does not may eventually come to faith in the postmortem encounter—but they will have missed the beauty of walking with God in this life. They will also face the purifying fire of God’s love, which is not pleasant for those who have spent their lives running from it. The urgency of the gospel is not diminished by the postmortem opportunity. It is redirected. We preach not because people will burn forever if they do not hear us, but because people are suffering now, and the life God offers is better than the life they are living now.

Third, the postmortem opportunity actually provides better motivation for evangelism, not worse. As we noted in Chapter 27, the gospel under the universalist framework is genuinely, completely good news. We do not preach out of fear that our neighbors will be tortured for eternity. We preach because we know something wonderful and we cannot keep it to ourselves. We preach because every moment spent apart from God is a moment wasted, and we want people to experience the joy of knowing Him as soon as possible. Love, not terror, is the engine of evangelism in the universalist framework.

D. Counter-Objections

“The Petrine texts are too ambiguous to support the postmortem opportunity.”

McClymond might respond that the complexity and ambiguity of 1 Peter 3:18–20 make it impossible to build any firm doctrine on it. After all, if Luther himself admitted he did not know what Peter meant, who are we to claim certainty?

Fair point. But here is the thing: the ambiguity of the passage is not equally distributed across all four interpretations. As we have seen, the Enoch view lacks any textual basis in the passage itself. The Noah view breaks the christological formula and requires an unnatural reading of “went.” The “message of condemnation to angels” view cannot explain why Peter used the standard vocabulary for evangelistic proclamation. The fourth interpretation—Christ preaching the gospel to the dead in Hades—has problems of its own (such as the question of why Noah’s generation is singled out), but these problems are answerable, and the interpretation makes the best sense of the text’s grammar, vocabulary, structure, and theological context.

Beilby is admirably honest about the difficulty. He writes that perhaps “the only thing that is clear about the descent texts is that there is no clarity and no widespread agreement on what they mean.”⁶⁷ But he then makes a crucial observation: much of the disagreement is driven not by the internal evidence of the texts but by “beliefs about Scripture’s broader stance on relevant matters”—especially “the belief of whether death ends salvific opportunity.”⁶⁸ If you come to the text already believing that death closes all doors, you will read the passage in a way that avoids the postmortem opportunity. But if you come to it open to the possibility—as the early Greek church did—the text supports that reading naturally and powerfully.

“Even if Christ preached to the dead, that does not mean He preaches to all the dead in every generation.”

This objection was raised by Millard Erickson. He argued that even if Christ preached to the dead in Hades, “that only takes care of those few people. It says nothing about others who have lived since or will live in the future.”⁶⁹

As a point of logic, Erickson is correct. First Peter 3:18–20 describes a specific event: Christ’s descent during the triduum mortis (the three days between His death and resurrection). It does not explicitly say that this same opportunity will be offered to everyone who ever lives and dies.

But Beilby responds with a powerful theological argument: “The argument is not simply that Jesus happened to descend into Hades to preach to those held in bondage there. It is that his love compelled him to do so.”⁷⁰ And if love compelled it once, why would that love not compel it always? The character of God does not change. If it was consistent with God’s justice and love to preach to the dead of Noah’s generation, then it is consistent with God’s justice and love to ensure that every person encounters the gospel, whether in this life or the next. What would it say about God if He rescued the dead of one generation but left the dead of all other generations without a word?

First Peter 4:6 strengthens this point by broadening the scope. The text does not say “the gospel was preached to the spirits from Noah’s time.” It says “the gospel was preached even to those who are dead.” The scope is general, not limited. And the theological rationale given—that God judges “the living and the dead” (4:5)—requires that the gospel be available to both.

“If the postmortem opportunity leads to universalism, that proves it is wrong.”

This is McClymond’s core concern, and it deserves a direct response.

The postmortem opportunity does not inevitably lead to universalism. Beilby himself is not a universalist. His book carefully argues for the postmortem opportunity as a position that is compatible with, but does not require, universalism. He envisions a genuine postmortem encounter with Christ in which people retain the freedom to say no.⁷¹

But from the conservative universalist perspective, the correlation between postmortem opportunity and universal restoration is not a bug. It is a feature. If God’s love is relentless, if Christ’s preaching in Hades is genuinely good news, if every person will eventually encounter the unmediated reality of who God is—then yes, we believe every person will eventually say yes. Not because freedom is overridden, but because, as Talbott argues, to encounter the full truth about God and the full truth about one’s own rebellion is to have the illusions stripped away. Sin is bondage. Freedom is found only in God. When the scales fall from the eyes of the dead, and they see Christ as He truly is, they will respond as the dead in the Odes of Solomon did: “Son of God, have pity on us. May we also be saved with You, because You are our Savior.”⁷²

McClymond fears this conclusion. But fear is not an argument. And the God revealed in the Petrine epistles is not a God whose love stops at the grave. He is a God who descends. Who preaches. Who pursues. Who waits with patience that reflects His eternal character, not wanting anyone to perish.

Conclusion

The Petrine epistles open a window that many in the Western church have tried to shut. They show us a Christ who does not merely save the living. He descends to the dead. He preaches to the imprisoned. He brings the gospel to those who never heard it. And the God behind this mission is a God of infinite patience who genuinely, passionately, stubbornly does not want anyone to perish.

McClymond’s treatment of these texts is inadequate. He acknowledges the descent tradition but refuses to follow it to its natural conclusion. He invokes Augustine, whose reading of the Petrine texts is widely recognized as strained. He warns of a slippery slope, as if the truth of a biblical teaching should be judged by where it might lead rather than by what it says. And he fails to engage the strongest patristic and exegetical evidence for postmortem proclamation.

The Petrine texts, read honestly and in their most natural sense, do not merely leave open the possibility of postmortem salvation. They describe it. Christ preached to the dead. The gospel was proclaimed to the dead so that they might live. And the God who arranged all of this does not want anyone—anyone—to perish.

If we combine the Petrine witness with the Pauline vision of universal reconciliation, the Johannine promise that Christ will draw all to Himself, and the Revelation’s portrait of gates that never shut and leaves that heal the nations, the picture that emerges is breathtaking. Not some will be saved. Not most. All. Because the gospel is not limited to this life, and the God who sends it is not limited by death.

McClymond calls the postmortem opportunity a slippery slope. I call it a bridge—the bridge God builds between His love and every person who has ever lived, a bridge that death itself cannot destroy.