Chapter 4

God's Universal Salvific Will and the Problem of the Unevangelized

Introduction: The Gap That Demands an Answer

In the previous chapters, we laid a foundation. We explored the character of God—a God who is love in His very nature, who relentlessly pursues every person He has made (Chapter 2). We examined the atonement of Jesus Christ—an atonement that is truly universal in its scope, offered not for a select few but for every human being who has ever lived (Chapter 3). Those two truths, taken together, press us toward a question we cannot avoid. If God genuinely loves every person and if Christ truly died for every person, then what happens to the billions who never even get a chance to hear about it?

That is the question at the heart of this chapter. I want to state the problem clearly and then walk us through the major answers that Christians have offered. Along the way, I'll explain why I believe postmortem opportunity—the view that God continues to offer salvation after physical death—is the most satisfying answer. Not just for the mind, but for the heart. Not just for the theologian, but for the grieving mother, the bewildered missionary, and the honest skeptic who looks at Christianity and says, "This doesn't seem fair."

Here is the thesis I want to defend: If God truly desires the salvation of all people and has provided a universal atonement, then the existence of billions who die without ever hearing the gospel creates a deep theological problem—what scholars call the "soteriological problem of evil"—and postmortem opportunity is the most biblically faithful, theologically coherent, and pastorally satisfying answer to that problem.

Let me be clear about something from the start. This is not just an academic puzzle. Real people are affected. A widow stands at her husband's graveside and wonders, "He never went to church—is he lost forever?" A mother buries a child born with severe cognitive disabilities and asks, "Did God provide for my baby?" A missionary arrives in a remote village only to find the people have been worshiping a twisted caricature of Christianity forced on their ancestors by colonizers. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They happen every day. And any theology worth holding must be able to look these people in the eye and give them an honest answer.

The Soteriological Problem of Evil

James Beilby, whose book Postmortem Opportunity is one of the most important recent works on this subject, gives this dilemma a helpful name. He calls it the "soteriological problem of evil."¹ The word soteriological comes from the Greek word sōtēria (σωτηρία), which simply means "salvation." So the soteriological problem of evil is the problem of evil applied specifically to the question of salvation. Let me explain what that means.

Most Christians are familiar with the classic problem of evil. It goes something like this: If God is perfectly good, He would want to get rid of evil. If God is all-powerful, He would be able to get rid of evil. But evil exists. So how do we make sense of all three claims at once?² Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with this for centuries. It is a genuine difficulty, but it is not our main concern here.

Our concern is a related problem that hits even closer to home for Christians. Beilby lays it out with three simple statements that, on the surface, seem to contradict each other:

1. God desires that all people have an opportunity to be saved.

2. Responding to the gospel of Jesus Christ with explicit faith is necessary for salvation.

3. Some die without having heard the gospel.³

Do you see the tension? Any two of these statements fit together perfectly. But holding all three at the same time creates an expectation-reality gap, as Beilby puts it.⁴ If God really wants everyone to have a chance to be saved, and if hearing the gospel is necessary for that chance, then why do some people die without ever hearing the gospel? Something doesn't add up—at least on the surface.

Beilby is right to call this a "problem of evil" because it has the same logical structure as the classic problem. The classic problem asks: why does a good and powerful God allow suffering? The soteriological version asks: why does a loving God who wants everyone to be saved allow billions to die without ever hearing how to be saved? In both cases, there is a gap between what we would expect from a perfectly good God and what we actually observe in the world. And in both cases, Christian thinkers must offer some explanation for that gap—or else accept that the gap is evidence against the God they worship.

Beilby frames the challenge powerfully by noting that the destiny of the unevangelized is not merely a theological curiosity—it strikes at the very heart of Christian belief. "In seeking an answer to the question of the destiny of the unevangelized," he writes, "we are asking, 'Can we really affirm God's universal love?'" To merely affirm God's love in the abstract while ignoring these questions, Beilby warns, "is to remove the mind from the Christian faith."⁵⁶ As Clark Pinnock once asked, "Isn't theology supposed to face tough questions as well as easy ones?"⁵⁷ Indeed it is. And this is one of the toughest.

This problem is also closely related to what philosophers call the "problem of divine hiddenness." As J. L. Schellenberg has framed it: if God is perfectly loving and personal, why isn't His existence more obvious to everyone?⁵ We can take that question and apply it directly to the gospel: if God is perfectly loving, why isn't the gospel available to everyone? The divine hiddenness question is about knowledge—why don't all people have clear evidence that God exists? The soteriological question is about salvation—why don't all people have a genuine opportunity to be saved? They are related puzzles, but the soteriological version carries even greater weight because the stakes are eternal.

The Staggering Numbers

Before we look at the different answers Christians have given, I want us to feel the full weight of this problem. It is easy to talk about "the unevangelized" as an abstract category. But we are talking about real human beings—men, women, and children who were born, who loved, who laughed, who suffered, and who died without ever hearing the name of Jesus Christ.

How many are we talking about? The exact number is impossible to pin down, and estimates vary widely depending on how you define terms and what you believe about human origins. But the figures are staggering no matter how you calculate them. Consider: in the year 1000 CE, the world's population was roughly 310 million people, and only about 50 million of them were Christians. That means the vast majority—over 80 percent—had little or no access to the Christian gospel.⁶ And that is just one snapshot from one moment in history.

When you add up all the people who lived before Christ—the entire Old Testament era, plus the hundreds of millions who lived in regions that had no contact with Israel's faith—and then add all the people who lived after Christ but in places the gospel had not yet reached, you arrive at a number that is almost incomprehensible. Beilby suggests it is reasonable to say that tens of billions of people have never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ.⁷ Some scholars think the number is even higher. John Hick once estimated that 98 to 99 percent of all humans who have ever lived never had a meaningful opportunity to respond to the Christian message.⁸

Think about that for a moment. If those numbers are even in the right ballpark, we are not talking about a small oversight or an unfortunate exception. We are talking about the overwhelming majority of all human beings who have ever existed. And if the traditional view is correct—that everyone who dies without hearing and accepting the gospel is eternally lost—then we are forced to say that the vast majority of God's beloved creatures were born into a situation where they had virtually no chance of being saved. I don't know about you, but I find that deeply troubling. And I believe God finds it troubling too.

Who Are the Unevangelized? A Closer Look

To really grapple with this problem, we need to understand that "the unevangelized" is not a single, uniform category. There are different kinds of people who, for different reasons, have been unable to hear and respond to the gospel. Beilby helpfully identifies several categories, and I want to walk through each one, because each one presses the problem in a slightly different direction.⁹

The Geographically and Temporally Isolated ("George")

Beilby asks us to imagine a man he calls "George"—a resident of Upper Mongolia in the ninth century before Christ.¹⁰ George lived centuries before Jesus was born, in a part of the world that had no contact with Israel or its faith. He never heard of Moses or the prophets, let alone of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Romans 1:20, George did receive some revelation of God through the created world—what theologians call "general revelation." Perhaps George looked up at the stars one night and was struck by the majesty and power behind them. Perhaps he responded to that revelation with something like faith and trust. But he never heard the gospel. He never had the chance to put his faith in Jesus Christ.

There are, of course, many "Georges" throughout history. Every person who lived in the Americas before European contact. Every person in sub-Saharan Africa who lived and died before missionaries arrived. Every human being in the ancient world who lived outside the tiny geographical footprint of ancient Israel. The number is, frankly, astronomical.

Infants and Young Children ("Anna")

Beilby also asks us to consider a baby named "Anna," who dies at the age of six months.¹¹ Anna never had a chance to develop the intellectual ability to understand the gospel, much less respond to it with faith. Throughout history, infant and childhood mortality rates have been devastating. In many eras and regions, a significant percentage of children died before their fifth birthday. What happens to them?

Scripture does not speak directly and clearly to the salvation of infants who die. Some Christians appeal to an "age of accountability"—the idea that children below a certain age are not held responsible for personal sin. Others point to David's words about his deceased infant: "I will go to him, but he will not return to me" (2 Samuel 12:23), taking this as a statement of hope that his child was safe with God. Still others, in the Calvinist tradition, argue that God elects certain infants for salvation.¹²

Each of these approaches has problems. The age of accountability is not clearly taught in Scripture. David's words might express hope, but they are not a clear theological statement about infant salvation. And the Calvinist approach, while internally consistent, raises the horrifying possibility that some infants might not be elect. As George Hurd documents, the history of the church on this question is not pretty. Jonathan Edwards called reprobate infants "vipers of vengeance," and even in 1990, John Gerstner wrote that infants "are not innocent, but are born with guilt and sin" and are therefore "in imminent danger of eternal condemnation."¹³ Most Christians today recoil from such language—and rightly so. But the question remains: on what theological basis are infants saved, if they cannot understand and respond to the gospel?

The Cognitively Disabled ("Sam")

Closely related to the infant question is the case of those who, due to severe cognitive disabilities, never develop the mental capacity to understand the gospel. Beilby calls this the "Sam" case.¹⁴ Sam is born with a severe intellectual disability. He is a person made in God's image, loved by God, and precious to his family. But he will never be able to grasp concepts like sin, grace, or faith—at least not in the way most people understand them.

For a long time, this category received very little theological attention. When it was discussed, it was often lumped together with infant salvation, as if cognitive disability were just a form of permanent childhood. But as Beilby rightly points out, the range of cognitive disabilities is enormous. Some individuals can understand and respond to simple truths about God's love. Others cannot process abstract thought at all. And treating all people with disabilities as a single category does not do justice to the complexity of their situations.¹⁵

What I find most compelling is Beilby's observation that the question is not simply whether people like Sam have "heard" the gospel. The deeper question is how we should understand the concept of salvation when we are talking about people who are created in God's image and loved by God, but who may lack certain intellectual categories that we normally think of as essential for a saving response.¹⁶ If salvation is fundamentally about relationship with God—and I believe it is—then surely God can relate to people like Sam in ways that go beyond intellectual understanding.

The Pseudoevangelized

Now we come to a category that, in my view, is not discussed nearly enough. The pseudoevangelized are people who have "heard" the gospel in some technical sense, but what they heard was so distorted, so twisted, or so mixed with evil that it was not really the gospel at all.¹⁷ Beilby gives several vivid examples that I find deeply compelling.

Consider a man Beilby calls "Kunta Kinte"—an African man enslaved by white men who claimed to be Christians. The "gospel" Kunta heard was preached by the very people who kidnapped him, brutalized him, and treated him as less than human. Understandably, Kunta rejected this "Jesus" wholeheartedly. But did he reject the real Jesus? Or did he reject a horrifying caricature of Jesus that bore almost no resemblance to the actual Son of God? I would argue it was the latter. And if that's the case, can we really say Kunta had a genuine opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel?¹⁸

Or consider a woman Beilby calls "Micha"—someone so deeply damaged by abuse and trauma that she is psychologically incapable of trusting anyone, including God. She may have heard an accurate presentation of the gospel. But her experience has left her so broken that the very concept of putting her trust in someone—even God—feels impossible.¹⁹ Is it fair to say that Micha had a genuine opportunity?

Or consider "Rapunzel"—a young woman who was beginning to show interest in the Christian faith but was killed in a car accident before she had a chance to respond. Her life was cut short at the very moment she was moving toward God.²⁰

These cases matter enormously because they shatter the neat categories that many Christians rely on. It is easy to say, "Those who hear and reject are lost; those who never hear deserve our sympathy." But the real world is far messier than that. Between "hearing" and "not hearing" lies an enormous spectrum—people who heard something, but something so mangled that it hardly counts. The pseudoevangelized force us to ask: What counts as a genuine opportunity to hear the gospel?

Evaluating the Alternative Solutions

Christians throughout history have recognized this problem and have offered various solutions. I want to walk through the major ones, treating each one fairly, before making the case that postmortem opportunity is the best answer. Beilby provides a helpful taxonomy of the options, and I will follow his basic framework while adding my own assessment.²¹

Option 1: Restrictivism — All Unevangelized Are Lost

The most traditional answer in much of Western Christianity is restrictivism. This view says that only those who explicitly hear and accept the gospel of Jesus Christ during their earthly lives are saved. Period. Those who never hear are lost. Stephen Jonathan notes that restrictivism holds Jesus to be both an "ontological necessity" (people can only be saved through His atoning work) and an "epistemological necessity" (people must have explicit knowledge of Him and respond with faith).²²

I want to be fair to restrictivists, because many of them are sincere, devout Christians who are trying to be faithful to Scripture. They point to verses like Acts 4:12 ("there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved") and John 14:6 ("no one comes to the Father except through me") as evidence that explicit faith in Christ is the only way to God. Some restrictivists—particularly in the Reformed tradition—are comfortable with this conclusion because they believe God sovereignly sends the gospel to all of His elect, so that no one whom God has chosen to save will fail to hear.²³

But I believe restrictivism has devastating problems. First, it forces us to say that the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived are eternally lost through no fault of their own. They did not reject God. They were never given the chance to accept Him. They were simply born in the wrong place at the wrong time. As Clark Pinnock pointedly asked, can we really believe that the opportunity to be saved is "a matter of temporal and geographical luck"?²⁴

Second, restrictivism creates a deep tension with the character of God as revealed in Scripture. If God truly desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4) and is "not wanting anyone to perish" (2 Peter 3:9)—as we argued extensively in Chapter 2—then how can we say that He has designed a system in which the overwhelming majority of His creatures have no chance of being saved? As Beilby argues, this amounts to effectively denying that God truly desires universal salvific access.²⁵

Third, as Jonathan observes from his years of pastoral experience, it is actually restrictivism—not the wider hope views—that often acts as a stumbling block to the gospel in evangelistic conversations. People hear the restrictivist position and respond, "That's not fair!"—and they are not wrong to feel that way.²⁶

Fourth, restrictivism cannot adequately handle the cases of infants, the cognitively disabled, or the pseudoevangelized. Most restrictivists today acknowledge that infants who die are probably saved, but they cannot explain how without appealing to some exception to their own rule—which is, as William Harrison notes, already a form of postmortem salvation, whether they realize it or not.²⁷

Fifth, the restrictivist position creates an uncomfortable tension between God's universal salvific will and His sovereignty. If God truly desires all to be saved and is truly sovereign over His creation, then we would expect Him to ensure that His offer of salvation reaches all people. But on the restrictivist view, God chose to make salvation depend on human messengers—missionaries, preachers, evangelists—and then allowed those messengers to fail to reach the vast majority of humanity for most of history. This seems deeply inconsistent with a sovereign God who genuinely desires the salvation of all. Beilby summarizes the restrictivist dilemma in stark terms: if restrictivists affirm that some do not hear the gospel and that implicit faith is not salvific, the logical conclusion is that "ultimately God does not desire all to have an opportunity to be saved."⁵⁸ For anyone who takes 1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9 seriously, that conclusion should be very difficult to accept.

Option 2: Inclusivism — Salvation Through General Revelation

Inclusivism takes a different approach. Inclusivists agree with restrictivists that Jesus is the only Savior—no one is saved apart from Christ's atoning work. But they disagree about whether a person must know about Jesus in order to be saved through Him. Inclusivists say that people can be saved by responding in faith to whatever revelation of God they have received—even if that revelation is only the general revelation available to all people through creation, conscience, and the inner working of the Holy Spirit.²⁸

The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner famously developed this idea with his concept of "anonymous Christians"—the notion that people in other religions (or no religion) might be responding to God's grace without knowing it, and might thereby be in a saving relationship with Christ without having heard of Him.²⁹ In the evangelical world, Clark Pinnock and John Sanders have been the most prominent advocates of a form of inclusivism. They appeal to the "faith principle"—the idea that what God requires is not a specific amount of knowledge about Himself, but a heart-level response of trust to whatever light a person has received.³⁰ They often point to Old Testament figures like Abraham, who was declared righteous by faith (Genesis 15:6) even though he knew nothing about Jesus of Nazareth.

I have a great deal of respect for the inclusivist position, and I think it gets several things right. It correctly affirms God's universal love and desire to save. It correctly recognizes that the Holy Spirit is at work in the world beyond the boundaries of the visible church. And it provides a more hopeful picture than restrictivism for the billions who have never heard the gospel.

But I believe inclusivism, by itself, is not enough. It has several significant weaknesses.

First, there is a genuine question about whether general revelation alone can lead to saving faith. Many evangelical theologians—including Donald Bloesch, who himself believes in postmortem opportunity—argue that general revelation provides enough knowledge to leave people "without excuse" (Romans 1:20) but not enough to bring them to genuine saving faith. As Bloesch puts it, "the natural knowledge of God is sufficient neither for a valid understanding nor for salvation but only for condemnation."³¹ If this is correct, then inclusivism's promise of salvation through general revelation may be an empty one.

Second, inclusivism struggles badly with the pseudoevangelized cases. Consider Kunta Kinte again. He has not simply failed to respond to general revelation—he has explicitly rejected the name of Jesus because of what was done to him in Jesus' name. An inclusivist might try to argue that Kunta's response to God through African traditional religion constitutes implicit faith, but that is a stretch for any orthodox Christian theology. And Micha's case is even harder for inclusivism: her trauma has left her without faith of any kind. She has not responded to any revelation, general or special, because her capacity for trust has been shattered.³²

Third, and most fundamentally, I believe that salvation involves more than an anonymous, implicit relationship with God. Salvation is not just being pardoned by a God you've never met. It is a personal relationship with the living God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It involves knowing Christ, loving Him, and being loved by Him. While I do not dismiss the possibility that the Holy Spirit works in people's hearts through general revelation—I believe He does—I also believe that at some point, a person must encounter the real Jesus and respond to Him personally. The question is simply when that encounter happens—in this life, or beyond it.

This is why I believe the best approach, as Beilby argues, is not to choose between inclusivism and postmortem opportunity, but to hold them together. God's Spirit is at work everywhere—in creation, in conscience, in the religious yearnings of people in every culture. That is the truth in inclusivism. But God also wants every person to know His Son personally—to hear the name of Jesus, to understand what Christ has done, and to respond in faith. That is the truth in postmortem opportunity. The two views complement each other beautifully. As we will see below, this "both/and" approach is far more satisfying than either view taken alone.⁵⁹

Option 3: Middle Knowledge Universal Opportunity (Molinism)

A third option appeals to a philosophical concept called "middle knowledge" or "Molinism," named after the sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina. The basic idea is this: God knows not only what will happen and what could happen, but also what would happen in any conceivable situation. So God knows exactly how every unevangelized person would have responded to the gospel if they had heard it.³³

William Lane Craig, the most prominent defender of this approach, uses middle knowledge in a restrictive way. He argues that God has providentially arranged the world so that "anybody who never hears the gospel and is lost would have rejected the gospel and been lost even if he had heard it."³⁴ In other words, no one who would have accepted the gospel fails to hear it. Those who never hear were people who wouldn't have accepted it anyway—they suffer from what Craig calls "transworld damnation."

I have several problems with this approach. First, as Beilby notes, the very concept of middle knowledge is philosophically controversial. There is a serious "grounding objection"—the question of what makes it true that a person would have made a particular choice in a hypothetical situation that never actually occurred. This debate shows no signs of being resolved anytime soon.³⁵

Second, even if we grant that God has middle knowledge, Craig's version has a deeply troubling implication. It means that salvation is ultimately based not on what people actually choose but on what God knows they would have chosen. As Beilby argues, "the problem is that salvation would be based on what people would have done rather than on what they actually choose. And that problem is, I believe, damning."³⁶

Third, the doctrine of transworld damnation is, frankly, very hard to believe. Robin Parry states it bluntly: the claim that every single person who never heard the gospel would never have freely responded to it under any circumstances is "massively implausible."³⁷ Out of the tens of billions of unevangelized people throughout history, are we really to believe that not one of them would have responded positively if given the chance? That strains credulity to the breaking point. R. Zachary Manis, in his careful philosophical analysis of these issues, notes that the Craigian scheme requires us to believe that God creates people whom He knows will be damned—and whom He could have simply chosen not to create. The only way to avoid saying that God "sacrifices" some individuals for the sake of others is to embrace transworld damnation, claiming that those who are lost could not have been saved under any circumstances. But as Manis observes, this requires accepting "a conjunctive proposition that is simply incredible."⁶⁰

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly from a pastoral standpoint, the middle knowledge approach offers no comfort to the grieving. Stephen Jonathan makes this point powerfully. A widow whose husband died without faith gains no comfort from being told that God knows her husband would have rejected the gospel anyway. The philosophical concept of middle knowledge is nearly impossible to explain to a grieving person—and even if you could explain it, it offers no real hope.³⁸

Option 4: Universal Sending — God Ensures Everyone Hears Before Death

A fourth approach claims that God makes sure everyone hears the gospel before they die, whether through human missionaries, angelic messengers, dreams, or supernatural visions. This "universal sending" view was fairly popular in the Middle Ages. Alexander of Hales, writing in the thirteenth century, claimed that if an unevangelized person genuinely seeks God, "the Lord will enlighten him with a secret inspiration, by means of an angel or a man."³⁹ More recently, Norman Geisler has suggested that God can convey special revelation through dreams and visions to ensure universal access.⁴⁰

There is something appealing about this view—it takes seriously both God's universal love and the necessity of the gospel. And I do believe that God sometimes works through dreams, visions, and extraordinary means. Missionaries in the Muslim world have reported numerous cases of people coming to faith after experiencing visions of Jesus. But the universal sending view claims much more than this. It claims that every unevangelized person receives such a special revelation before death. And that claim is simply not supported by the evidence. If it were true, we would expect to find widespread reports of it throughout history. Instead, the evidence is anecdotal and sporadic.

Moreover, this view has the same problem as restrictivism when it comes to infants and the cognitively disabled. A dream or vision of Jesus would not help a six-month-old baby or a person with a severe intellectual disability. The universal sending view simply cannot account for these cases.

Option 5: Postmortem Opportunity — The Superior Solution

We come, finally, to the view I believe is the most faithful to Scripture, the most consistent with God's character, and the most pastorally adequate: the postmortem opportunity. This view says that God continues to offer the opportunity of salvation after physical death—through the dying process, in the intermediate state (Hades), and at the final judgment. It affirms everything the other views get right while avoiding their fatal weaknesses.

Let me summarize the argument, drawing on Beilby's formal structure from Chapter 3 of his book:

1. God desires that all people be saved. (Premise)

2. Being saved requires having an opportunity to be saved. (Premise)

3. Therefore, God desires that all people receive an opportunity to be saved. (Inference from 1 and 2)

4. There are some who do not receive an opportunity to be saved in this life. (Premise)

5. There are no good reasons to think that death is the end of salvific opportunity. (Premise—defended in Chapters 11-12 and 18-19)

6. Therefore, God desires that those who do not receive a premortem opportunity will receive a postmortem opportunity. (Inference from 3, 4, and 5)

7. There are no good reasons to think God's desire to provide a postmortem opportunity will be thwarted or overridden. (Premise)

8. Therefore, we have good reason to believe that God will provide a postmortem opportunity to those who do not receive a premortem opportunity. (Inference from 6 and 7)⁴¹

This argument is not a deductive proof—Beilby is careful to note that it employs abductive reasoning, or "inference to the best explanation."⁴² It doesn't guarantee the conclusion with mathematical certainty. But it shows that postmortem opportunity is the most reasonable inference from premises that most Christians already accept. If you believe that God desires all to be saved, and you agree that some people don't get a chance in this life, and you don't have good reasons to think death ends all opportunity—then postmortem opportunity follows naturally.

I want to highlight several features of this argument that I find especially compelling.

But first, a word about the nature of faith and salvation, because it matters a great deal for how we understand the postmortem opportunity. Beilby makes an important observation that is often missed in these discussions. There is, he says, "a pernicious sequence of thought about salvation that is disturbingly common in the Western world." It goes like this: God wants people to believe in Him, believing in Him means you are saved, and being saved means you go to heaven when you die. While there is an element of truth here, this way of thinking about salvation is deeply incomplete.⁶³

The problem is that this view reduces faith to believing certain things about God—having the right theology, checking the right doctrinal boxes. But that is not what the Bible means by faith. Biblical faith is not primarily about intellectual assent to propositions. It is about the disposition of a person's heart—a commitment, an allegiance, a trust in the living God. As Beilby puts it, "salvation is about the disposition of a person's heart and particularly whether that disposition involves a commitment or allegiance to God."⁶⁴ This has enormous implications for the postmortem opportunity. If salvation were merely about hearing the right information and believing it, then it would be hard to see how someone who had "heard" and "rejected" could ever have another chance. But if salvation is fundamentally about relationship—about a person's heart being drawn into loving trust toward God—then the question is not whether someone heard a set of facts, but whether they have truly encountered the living God and responded with their whole heart. And that is precisely what the postmortem opportunity provides: a genuine, personal encounter with the God who loves them.

This understanding of faith also helps us see why the postmortem opportunity is not a "second chance" in any cheap or trivializing sense. It is God doing what He has always done—pursuing people with His love and inviting them into relationship. The venue changes (from this world to the next), but the invitation is the same. The God who was drawing people to Himself through creation, conscience, and the Holy Spirit during their earthly lives continues to draw them in the intermediate state and at the final judgment. There is perfect continuity between God's premortem pursuit and His postmortem pursuit, because God's character does not change.

Now, with that understanding of faith in place, let me return to the features of Beilby's argument that I find especially compelling.

First, the argument respects the transitivity of God's desires. If God genuinely desires the salvation of all people, then He also desires whatever is necessary for that salvation to be possible—including a genuine opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel. For God to desire the end but not the means would require either ignorance of the means (impossible for an omniscient God) or indifference to the implications of His own desire (inconsistent with a loving God). As Beilby puts it, "for God to desire a particular end necessarily includes an awareness of what would be required to bring that end about."⁴³

Second, the argument eliminates what Beilby calls "soteriological vagueness." On any view that limits the opportunity for salvation to this life, there will always be borderline cases—people who are just barely on one side of the line between "heard enough" and "didn't hear enough." As C. S. Lewis observed, the world does not divide neatly into 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians.⁴⁴ There are people who are slowly becoming Christians and people who are slowly ceasing to be. Where does God draw the line? The postmortem opportunity eliminates this problem entirely. God doesn't have to draw an arbitrary line because He continues to offer the opportunity until every person has had a genuine chance to respond.⁴⁵

Third, there is an important asymmetry between God's desire that all be saved and His ability to make salvation universally accessible. Some critics object that if God cannot guarantee that all will be saved (because human free will might resist), then He also cannot guarantee universal access to the gospel. But Beilby rightly points out that this objection fails. "God cannot guarantee that all will be saved without being willing to override human freedom," Beilby writes, "but he can make salvation universally accessible without overriding human freedom."⁶⁵ In other words, providing the opportunity does not require overriding anyone's will—only providing the encounter. The human element comes in the response, not in the offer. God controls the offer. He does not control the response. And because God controls the offer, there is nothing that can prevent Him from making that offer available to every person who needs it—whether before or after death.

Fourth, the argument is rooted in what we know about God's character. As we established in Chapter 2, God is love (1 John 4:8). He is not willing that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9). He desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). He is the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one lost sheep (Luke 15:4-7). This is who God is. And a God who is like this would not abandon the pursuit of the lost simply because they happen to have crossed the threshold of physical death.

Why the Offer Must Extend to All the Unsaved

Now I want to make an argument that goes beyond what Beilby himself defends, and it is one of the key claims of this book. Beilby limits the postmortem opportunity to those who never had a "genuine opportunity" to hear and respond to the gospel in this life.⁴⁶ On his view, a person who heard a clear and accurate presentation of the gospel during their earthly life and rejected it has had their chance. The postmortem opportunity is only for people like George, Anna, Sam, and the pseudoevangelized.

I respectfully disagree. I believe the postmortem opportunity extends to all unsaved persons without exception. Let me explain why.

First, consider the pseudoevangelized cases more carefully. Who gets to decide whether someone heard a "genuine" gospel presentation? On Beilby's view, there must be some criteria for distinguishing between a genuine presentation and a distorted one. But where do you draw that line? What about the person who heard an accurate gospel presentation from a pastor who was later exposed as a fraud or abuser? What about the person who heard the gospel clearly but was in the middle of a personal crisis that made it psychologically impossible to process what they were hearing? What about the person who heard the right words but in a cultural context that made those words meaningless? The line between "genuine opportunity" and "not genuine opportunity" is impossibly blurry—which is precisely the problem of soteriological vagueness that Beilby himself identifies.

Second, only God knows the true state of a person's heart and the true quality of the opportunity they received. We cannot see the barriers—psychological, cultural, familial, emotional—that may have prevented a person from responding to the gospel even when it was accurately presented. A person might appear to have had every opportunity, and yet God might know that their circumstances made a genuine response virtually impossible. As Jesus said, "Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment" (John 7:24). Only God judges with right judgment. And I believe God, in His perfect knowledge and infinite love, will give every person whatever further opportunity they need.

Third, this is simply who God is. As we argued at length in Chapter 2, God's love is relentless, persistent, and unfailing. He is the God who pursues. He is the Hound of Heaven. He does not give up on people simply because they failed to respond during the brief window of their earthly lives. If Beilby is right that God would offer a postmortem opportunity to those who never heard, how much more would a God of infinite love offer that same opportunity to those who heard but did not truly understand? Or who heard but were too broken to respond? Or who heard but rejected a counterfeit gospel?

I want to be very clear: I am not saying that the response people give in this life does not matter. It matters a great deal. Those who hear the true gospel in this life and respond with faith begin their relationship with God now—and that is a beautiful and precious thing. I am also not saying that everyone who receives a postmortem opportunity will accept it. Tragically, I believe some will continue to reject God even after the fullest possible revelation of His love. The postmortem opportunity is a genuine offer, not a guarantee. But it is an offer extended by a God whose love never quits.

Addressing Specific Categories with Pastoral Urgency

I want to return now to the specific categories of unevangelized persons and show how the postmortem opportunity provides a satisfying answer for each one.

Infants and Young Children

On the postmortem opportunity view, infants who die are not simply "assumed" to be saved through some theological exception clause. Instead, they are welcomed into God's loving presence where they will have a genuine encounter with the God who made them and loves them. This encounter will be perfectly suited to who they are—God will relate to them in whatever way is appropriate for their unique personhood. I believe with all my heart that infants who die will joyfully embrace the God who loves them. The postmortem opportunity view does not merely hope this is the case—it provides a theological framework that explains why it is the case: because a God who loves these children will never stop pursuing them, and the simplicity of their hearts makes them ideally suited to respond to that love.

This matters pastorally. I have sat with parents who have lost babies. The last thing they need to hear is a shrug and an "I hope so" when they ask if their child is with God. They need to hear—and I believe we can confidently tell them—that their child is in the arms of a God who loves that child even more than they do, and who would never fail to provide what that child needs to be safe in His presence forever.

The Cognitively Disabled

The postmortem opportunity also provides a beautiful answer for people like Sam. Beilby makes an important point here: even if a certain level of cognitive ability is necessary for understanding God's offer, it does not follow that the same level is necessary for entering into relationship with God. Some individuals with severe cognitive disabilities may not be able to grasp concepts like sin and grace, but that does not mean they cannot experience and reciprocate God's love.⁴⁷

On the postmortem opportunity view, God will encounter people with cognitive disabilities in a way that is perfectly suited to who they are. For some, this may involve a restoration of cognitive faculties—not because their disability made them less human, but because removing barriers to relationship is an act of love, not an act of judgment. For others, it may involve God relating to them in ways that go beyond what we normally think of as "understanding the gospel." The point is that God is creative, personal, and infinitely resourceful. He will find a way to bring every person—including every person with a disability—into a genuine encounter with His love.⁴⁸

Those Who Lived Before Christ

The postmortem opportunity provides a clean and satisfying answer for the millions who lived before the incarnation of Christ. On the restrictivist view, these people are in a deeply awkward position—they could not have believed in Jesus because Jesus had not yet come. Some restrictivists argue that Old Testament saints were saved by faith in God's promises, and that this faith was credited to them as righteousness (as with Abraham in Genesis 15:6). I agree with this—but what about all the people who lived outside of Israel, with no access to God's promises? What about George in ninth-century Mongolia?

On the postmortem opportunity view, George will encounter Christ—the real Christ—in the afterlife. He will have the chance to respond to the God whose existence he may have sensed through the beauty of creation but never truly knew. This is not a "second chance" in the sense of God offering something new. It is God fulfilling His original desire—that George, like every person, should have a genuine opportunity to hear the gospel and respond in faith.

Those from Non-Christian Religious Traditions

The postmortem opportunity also addresses the situation of those who have been devout followers of other religions throughout their lives. I want to be careful here, because I am not saying that all religions are equally valid paths to God. I believe, as the New Testament clearly teaches, that salvation is through Jesus Christ alone (Acts 4:12; John 14:6). But I also believe that many sincere people in other religious traditions are genuinely seeking God—seeking truth, seeking meaning, seeking the source of the beauty and goodness they have experienced in the world. They may be responding to God's general revelation without knowing it. And I believe that the God who sees their hearts and knows their sincere seeking will not leave them without a genuine encounter with His Son.

This is where I agree with Beilby's argument that inclusivism and postmortem opportunity should be held together, not as competitors but as complements.⁴⁹ The Holy Spirit is at work in the world, drawing people to God through creation, conscience, and the religious traditions they inhabit. For some, this work of the Spirit leads them to genuine faith in Christ during their earthly lives—even if they don't know His name. For others, the Spirit's work prepares their hearts for the encounter with Christ that will come after death. The two views work together beautifully. As Beilby writes, God's soteriological efforts are "multifaceted"—He works through general revelation, through the Holy Spirit, through human messengers, and through the postmortem encounter.⁵⁰

Those Who Heard and Rejected the Gospel in This Life

This is the most controversial category, and I know that many Christians will push back on what I am about to say. But I believe that even those who heard an accurate presentation of the gospel during their earthly life and rejected it may still receive a postmortem opportunity. Not because they deserve a "second chance," but because only God knows whether their rejection was truly final—whether they truly understood what they were rejecting.

Think of the teenager who grows up in a legalistic church, is turned off by the hypocrisy he sees, and walks away from the faith. Did he reject Christ? Or did he reject a version of Christianity that was itself a distortion of the gospel? Think of the college student who encounters the "New Atheism" and decides that faith is irrational. Did she reject God? Or did she reject a caricature of God that she was never given the intellectual tools to critique? Think of the man who suffered horrific abuse at the hands of a religious leader and now cannot hear the word "God" without feeling revulsion. Did he reject God's love? Or is he responding to trauma in the only way he knows how?

I am not saying that these people bear no responsibility for their choices. I am saying that God—who sees the heart, who knows every circumstance, who understands every barrier—is in a far better position than we are to judge whether someone has had a truly "genuine" opportunity. And I believe that a God of infinite love and infinite patience will provide whatever additional opportunity is needed. This is not about lowering the bar for salvation. It is about trusting that God's pursuit of the lost does not have an arbitrary expiration date.

Beilby himself, while limiting the postmortem offer to the unevangelized, acknowledges the deep truth that underlies my broader position. He writes that a person's existence can be divided into two categories: premortem and postmortem. "And if a person does not hear in their premortem existence, then hearing in their postmortem existence is the only other option."⁶¹ I simply extend this logic one step further. If a person did not truly understand in their premortem existence—regardless of whether they technically "heard"—then the postmortem encounter becomes the only way for them to receive a genuine opportunity. And a God who desires all to be saved would not withhold that opportunity.

Let me also address an important underlying concern. Some readers may worry that extending the postmortem offer to all unsaved persons cheapens the choices people make in this life. I understand that concern, and I want to push back on it firmly. The choices we make in this life matter enormously. They shape our character. They set what Pinnock calls "the soul's direction."⁶² A person who spends a lifetime hardening their heart against God will not suddenly find it easy to accept His love after death. In fact, as we will explore in later chapters—especially Chapters 22-23 on the purpose of divine punishment and the Lake of Fire—there is every reason to believe that rejecting God in this life makes it harder, not easier, to accept Him in the next. The postmortem opportunity is not a "get out of jail free" card. It is a continuation of God's patient, relentless pursuit—but the person's own choices and character still determine how they respond to that pursuit.

Objections Considered

I want to briefly address two common objections to this chapter's argument. Each of these receives much fuller treatment elsewhere in this book, but they deserve a preliminary response here.

Objection 1: "Doesn't Hebrews 9:27 Settle This?"

The most common objection to postmortem opportunity is Hebrews 9:27: "It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment." Many Christians take this verse as a definitive statement that death ends all opportunity for salvation. But as we will demonstrate in detail in Chapter 18, this reading misunderstands the passage's context. The author of Hebrews is making an analogy: just as people die once (not repeatedly—this is an anti-reincarnation statement), so Christ was sacrificed once (not repeatedly like the Old Testament animal sacrifices). The point is about the finality of Christ's sacrifice, not about the impossibility of postmortem repentance. The verse says nothing about whether an opportunity for salvation exists between death and judgment.⁵¹

Objection 2: "Doesn't This Undermine Evangelism?"

Another common objection is that if people can be saved after death, then there is no urgency to share the gospel now. This objection is addressed at length in Chapter 26, but here is the short answer: the postmortem opportunity does not undermine evangelism; it transforms its motivation. Instead of sharing the gospel out of fear that people will be damned if we fail, we share the gospel because it is the best news anyone could ever hear—the news that God loves them, that Christ died for them, and that they can begin a relationship with God right now. Salvation is not just a ticket to heaven. It is a relationship with the living God that transforms every dimension of life. Why would anyone want to delay that? As Jonathan argues, the motivation for mission should not be reduced to fear of eternal consequences. It should spring from obedience to Christ, gratitude to God, love for neighbor, and the joy of the Lord.⁵²

The Pastoral Superiority of the Postmortem Opportunity

I want to close this chapter by coming back to where we started—with the real people whose lives are affected by these theological questions. Stephen Jonathan, writing from over twenty-five years of pastoral experience, describes the agonizing situations that pastors face regularly. A church member suffers a double bereavement—a brother and nephew die within days of each other, and neither was a believer. She is devastated, angry with God, and wracked with guilt for not sharing the gospel with them sooner. What does her pastor say?⁵³

Jonathan walks through the options. Restrictivism offers little hope—and what hope it does offer ("maybe he turned to God in his last moments") feels like a desperate reach. Inclusivism is slightly better, but cannot help if the deceased showed no spiritual inclination. Middle knowledge is philosophically impressive but pastorally useless—try explaining counterfactuals of creaturely freedom to a grieving widow. Agnosticism ("we just don't know") helps no one.

But the postmortem opportunity offers something none of the other views can. It offers genuine hope—not a false hope that ignores the seriousness of sin and the necessity of faith, but a well-grounded hope rooted in the character of God. It says: "Your loved one will meet God. The God who has always loved him will pursue him still. He will encounter Christ face to face and will be invited to bow the knee in faith. We cannot guarantee the outcome—that depends on his response—but we can guarantee the opportunity, because that is who God is."⁵⁴

As Jonathan concludes, if postmortem salvation is true, then we can say without hesitation that the gospel is "truly good news" for everyone—not just for those lucky enough to have been born in the right place at the right time.⁵⁵

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have confronted the soteriological problem of evil—the deeply troubling reality that billions of people throughout history have lived and died without ever having a genuine opportunity to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. We have examined the major Christian responses to this problem: restrictivism, inclusivism, Molinism, and universal sending. Each has strengths, but each also has fatal weaknesses that prevent it from adequately solving the problem.

The postmortem opportunity emerges as the most satisfying answer. It respects God's universal salvific will (Chapter 2). It builds on the universal scope of Christ's atonement (Chapter 3). It takes seriously the reality that many people simply do not get a genuine chance in this life. It handles every category of the unevangelized—the geographically isolated, infants, the cognitively disabled, the pseudoevangelized, and even those who heard and rejected a distorted or misunderstood gospel. And it provides what no other view can offer: genuine pastoral hope for the millions of people who grieve the loss of loved ones who died outside the faith.

I want to end with a personal word. The argument of this chapter is not merely academic for me. I have wrestled with this question for years—not just in the library, but in my own heart. I believe that the God revealed in Scripture is a God of relentless, pursuing, never-giving-up love. And I believe that love does not stop at the grave. In the chapters that follow, we will examine the biblical, philosophical, and historical evidence for this belief in much greater detail. But the foundation is here: a God who truly loves all people will make sure all people have a genuine opportunity to respond to that love. That, I believe, is the most natural and most beautiful implication of the gospel itself.