Chapter 28
Inclusivism and Postmortem Opportunity:
Compatible or Competing?

Introduction

We come now to a question that has sparked serious debate among Christian theologians who care about the fate of those who have never heard the gospel: Is inclusivism a rival to postmortem opportunity, or can the two views work together? On the surface, these positions seem to offer very different answers to the problem of the unevangelized. Inclusivism says that people can be saved in this life without hearing the name of Jesus, so long as they respond in faith to whatever light God has given them through creation and conscience. Postmortem opportunity says that the unsaved will have a chance to encounter the risen Christ after death and respond to him with explicit, personal faith. One seems to say, "God saves people before death through general revelation." The other says, "God saves people after death through a direct encounter with Christ." So are these two positions locked in combat? Must we choose one or the other?

I want to argue in this chapter that the answer is no. Inclusivism and postmortem opportunity are not competing positions but deeply complementary ones. When we combine them, we get the most complete picture of how a loving, relentless God pursues every single human being he has created. God does not limit himself to a single strategy. He works through general revelation and the inner witness of the Holy Spirit during a person's earthly life—this is the truth that inclusivism rightly captures. And he provides a more explicit, personal, face-to-face encounter with Jesus Christ after death for those who have not had a genuine opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel—this is the truth that postmortem opportunity captures. Together, these two convictions form a comprehensive framework that accounts for the wideness of God's mercy, the necessity of explicit faith in Christ, and the deeply personal nature of salvation as relationship with God.

To make this case, I will first define and explain inclusivism, tracing its development from Karl Rahner's "anonymous Christians" through the Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium to the evangelical inclusivism of Clark Pinnock and John Sanders, and the famous literary illustration of C. S. Lewis's character Emeth in The Last Battle. I will draw extensively from James Beilby's superb treatment in Chapter 8 of Postmortem Opportunity and from Stephen Jonathan's helpful analysis in Grace beyond the Grave. Second, I will evaluate inclusivism's genuine strengths—and there are real strengths worth celebrating. Third, I will identify the critical weaknesses where inclusivism falls short. Fourth, I will argue that postmortem opportunity provides exactly what inclusivism lacks: an explicit, personal encounter with Christ. Fifth, I will address the particularly difficult problem of the "pseudoevangelized"—those who heard a twisted or distorted version of the gospel—where inclusivism especially struggles. Finally, I will present the case that combining the two positions into a single, integrated framework is not only logically coherent but theologically superior to either position taken alone.

What Is Inclusivism?

Before we can evaluate whether inclusivism and postmortem opportunity are compatible, we need to understand clearly what inclusivism actually teaches. As Beilby explains, inclusivism is a "wider hope" view that affirms God's desire to save all people while maintaining that Jesus Christ is the only Savior of the world. John Sanders describes it as the view that "some of those who never hear the gospel of Christ may nevertheless attain salvation before they die if they respond in faith to the revelation that they do have."¹ The key word there is before they die. Inclusivism, in its classic form, holds that destinies are sealed at death. But it insists that God's saving grace can reach people even if they have never heard the name of Jesus.

This is a crucial distinction from religious pluralism—the idea that many different religions are equally valid paths to God. Inclusivism emphatically rejects that claim. Inclusivists are clear that all who are saved are saved only and entirely through the atoning work of Jesus Christ. There is no "other savior." What inclusivists affirm is that a person might be saved through Christ without having explicit knowledge of Christ. In theological language, Christ's work is "ontologically necessary" for salvation—without his death and resurrection, no one could be saved—but it is not "epistemologically necessary," meaning a person does not have to know all the details of what Christ has done in order to benefit from it.²

Beilby helpfully identifies the core components of what he calls "General Revelation Inclusivism." First, inclusivists affirm that God genuinely desires all people to be saved, pointing to passages like 1 Timothy 2:4, 2 Peter 3:9, and Ezekiel 33:11 (as we explored in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4). Second, they affirm the absolute ontological necessity of Christ's saving work. Third, they acknowledge that some people simply do not hear the gospel in this life. And fourth—and this is the distinctive inclusivist claim—they affirm that it is possible for some of these unevangelized people to be saved through their response to general revelation and the inner working of the Holy Spirit.³

The Distinction Between Explicit and Implicit Faith

At the heart of inclusivism is the distinction between explicit faith and implicit faith. Explicit faith is what happens when a person hears the gospel of Jesus Christ—his life, death, and resurrection—and consciously, intentionally trusts in him as Savior and Lord. This is the kind of faith described throughout the New Testament. Inclusivists do not dismiss or downplay the value of explicit faith. They simply argue that it is not the only kind of faith that can be salvific.

Implicit faith, by contrast, is a genuine openness to God, a real turning of the heart toward the Creator, even when the person does not know the name of Jesus or the details of the gospel. Clark Pinnock coined the term "the faith principle" to describe this idea. As Beilby summarizes Pinnock's view, "The fact that different kinds of believers are accepted by God proves that the issue for God is not the content of theology but the reality of faith."⁴ In other words, what matters most is not the amount of theological information a person possesses, but whether their heart is genuinely turned toward God in trust and dependence.

Closely related to the faith principle is what Beilby calls the "Degree of Access Principle." The basic idea is simple and, I think, deeply intuitive: God holds people accountable for the revelation they have actually received. A person who has heard a clear, faithful presentation of the gospel is held accountable for their response to that message. A person who has never heard the gospel but has seen something of God's character through creation (Romans 1:19–20) is held accountable for their response to that revelation. As Pinnock puts it, "Since God has not left anyone without witness, people are judged on the basis of the light they have received and how they have responded to the light."⁵

The third component of inclusivism addresses how implicit faith actually comes about. Inclusivists argue that God's witness extends far beyond the preaching of human missionaries. God reaches out to all people in two ways: through general revelation (creation, conscience, the moral law written on the heart) and through the direct work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is not confined to the walls of the church. As Peter declared at Pentecost, God pours out his Spirit "on all flesh" (Acts 2:17). This "Pneumatological Inclusivism," as some scholars call it, affirms that while the Spirit works powerfully within the church, the Spirit also works beyond the church's reach, drawing people toward God even in places where no missionary has ever set foot.⁶

The Historical Development of Inclusivism

Karl Rahner and "Anonymous Christians"

One of the most influential—and controversial—expressions of inclusivism came from the twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner and his concept of "anonymous Christians." Rahner faced a puzzle: the Catholic Church historically taught that there is no salvation outside the church (extra ecclesiam nulla salus), yet Rahner also firmly believed that God genuinely desires the salvation of all people. How could both be true when the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived were not Catholic Christians?

Rahner's solution was bold. He argued that all people are capable of being members of the church in some sense. Some are explicitly members through baptism and confession. But others, Rahner proposed, are part of what he called "a non-official and anonymous Christianity which can and should be called Christianity in a meaningful sense, even though it itself cannot and would not describe itself as such."⁷ As Millard Erickson helpfully summarizes, anonymous Christians are "people who do not have an explicit, overt, or conscious Christian faith. So far as others know, or even as they themselves know, they are not Christians. Yet they are actually Christians and participate in God's grace."⁸

It is important to note that Rahner did not teach that everyone is an anonymous Christian regardless of their choices. He was careful to say that anyone who truly and decisively rejects God should not be called even an "anonymous theist."⁹ Nevertheless, Rahner's concept has drawn significant criticism—from evangelicals who find it patronizing (calling a devout Muslim an "anonymous Christian" hardly seems respectful of that person's actual beliefs), and from pluralists who think Rahner did not go far enough. I share some of these concerns, and I think the concept of postmortem opportunity provides a far more satisfying answer than the "anonymous Christian" framework. But Rahner deserves credit for taking seriously both the uniqueness of Christ and the scope of God's saving desire.

The Second Vatican Council and Lumen Gentium

Rahner's ideas found a broader institutional home in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which dramatically expanded the Catholic Church's understanding of who might be saved. As Jonathan explains, while the Council reaffirmed the traditional extra ecclesiam nulla salus formula, it broadened its understanding of church membership to include multiple "degrees" of belonging.¹⁰ The first category consisted of practicing, communicant Roman Catholics—those "fully incorporated" into the church. The second included non-Catholic Christians who honor the Scriptures, believe in the Trinity, and have been baptized. The third—and most relevant for our discussion—included those who have not received the gospel at all: Jews, Muslims, and even those who "without blame on their part have no unequivocal knowledge of God but attempt to live a good life by his grace."¹¹

This was a remarkable development. The official teaching of the world's largest Christian body had moved from a rigid "no salvation outside the visible church" position to an acknowledgment that God's grace could reach people far beyond the church's institutional borders. Even before Vatican II, the direction was clear: in 1949, Father Leonard Feeney was eventually excommunicated for teaching that non-Catholic Christians were necessarily damned—a sign of how far the Catholic Church had moved from its earlier rigorism.¹²

Clark Pinnock and the Evangelical "Wider Hope"

Within evangelicalism, the most prominent and passionate advocate for inclusivism has been Clark Pinnock. In his influential book A Wideness in God's Mercy, Pinnock argued that the evangelical tradition had been far too restrictive in its understanding of who can be saved. He did not deny that Jesus is the only Savior. He emphatically affirmed it. But he insisted that the "faith principle" demonstrated in the Bible—the fact that people like Abraham, Melchizedek, and Job were saved by faith without knowing the name of Jesus—provides a template for understanding how God might save the unevangelized today.¹³

Pinnock's position provoked fierce reactions. Some evangelicals accused him of compromising the gospel. Others welcomed his work as a long-overdue correction. What makes Pinnock particularly interesting for our purposes is that he did not limit himself to inclusivism alone. He also argued for a form of postmortem encounter with Christ, describing it as "another way of conceiving universal access to salvation."¹⁴ We will return to Pinnock's combined view later in this chapter, because it becomes a crucial test case for whether inclusivism and postmortem opportunity can be held together.

John Sanders and No Other Name

John Sanders provided one of the most rigorous scholarly treatments of inclusivism in his landmark book No Other Name. Sanders carefully defined the "wider hope" views—inclusivism, universal opportunity before death, and postmortem opportunity—and argued that each one affirms "that God, in grace, grants every individual a genuine opportunity to participate in the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus, that no human being is excluded from the possibility of benefiting from salvific grace."¹⁵ Sanders's contribution was to show that these wider hope views were not liberal innovations but had deep roots in the Christian theological tradition. His work also demonstrated that the restrictivist position—that only those who hear and accept the gospel in this life can be saved—was far from unanimous in church history and faced serious biblical and theological difficulties.

Two Varieties of Inclusivism: General Revelation and World Religions

Before we move on, it is important to note that there are actually two varieties of inclusivism, and the distinction matters for our discussion. The first is what Beilby calls "General Revelation Inclusivism"—the view I have been describing, which holds that people can be saved through their response to God's self-revelation in creation and conscience. The second is "World Religions Inclusivism," which takes the further step of claiming that the world's religious traditions can themselves serve as vehicles of salvation. This does not mean that all religions are equally valid—a World Religions Inclusivist still affirms that Christ's death is the only basis for salvation. Rather, the claim is that some non-Christian religions contain genuine elements of God's general revelation (and perhaps even remnants of special revelation) and can, to the degree that they point people toward the true God, be salvifically meaningful.⁴⁹

I am cautious about World Religions Inclusivism. While I agree with Pinnock that non-Christian religions may contain genuine truths that reflect God's general revelation, I share his warning that "the idea that world religions ordinarily function as paths to salvation is dangerous nonsense and wishful thinking."⁵⁰ Non-Christian religions are a complex mixture of truth and error, and they can just as easily lead people away from God as toward him. What I will affirm, following Beilby, is the more modest claim that a person's faithful adherence to genuine elements of truth within their non-Christian tradition may, in God's providence, dispose them to respond positively when they encounter the risen Christ—whether in this life or after death.⁵¹ But the religion itself does not save; Christ saves. And the encounter with Christ—whether through the preaching of the gospel or through a postmortem meeting—remains essential.

The Case of Cornelius: A Biblical Test Case

The New Testament case of Cornelius (Acts 10) has long been a battleground between inclusivists and restrictivists, and it provides an illuminating test case for our combined framework. Cornelius was a Roman centurion described as a "God-fearer"—a Gentile who worshipped the God of Israel, prayed regularly, and gave generously to the poor. He clearly had some kind of genuine faith in the true God. Yet God still sent Peter to preach the gospel to him.

Inclusivists often cite Cornelius as evidence that he was already a "believer" before Peter's arrival. Jonathan notes that inclusivists "make the distinction between believers and Christians. In Cornelius's case, it is claimed that he was a believer before Peter's visit and later became a Christian through Peter's proclamation of the gospel."⁵² On this reading, Cornelius had implicit faith that was already salvific, and Peter's visit simply "updated" or "completed" his knowledge.

But notice what actually happens in the story. God does not simply declare Cornelius saved on the basis of his existing faith. Instead, God orchestrates an elaborate sequence of events—a vision to Cornelius, a vision to Peter, the sending of messengers, a journey—all so that Cornelius can hear the explicit gospel message about Jesus Christ. And when Cornelius hears and believes, the Holy Spirit falls on him and his household in a dramatic display (Acts 10:44–48). The pattern is striking: Cornelius's implicit faith was real and genuine, but God did not leave it there. God went to great lengths to bring Cornelius to an explicit encounter with the gospel. His implicit faith was salvifically efficacious—it prepared him to receive the gospel—but God still deemed it necessary for Cornelius to hear and respond to the explicit message about Christ.

This pattern is exactly what the combined inclusivism-postmortem opportunity framework would predict. For those who are alive and reachable by human messengers, God orchestrates encounters with the preached gospel (as with Cornelius). For those who die without such an encounter, God provides a postmortem meeting with Christ himself. In both cases, the pattern is the same: implicit faith prepares, but explicit encounter with Christ completes.

C. S. Lewis and Emeth: A Literary Illustration

Perhaps no illustration of inclusivism has captured the Christian imagination as vividly as C. S. Lewis's portrayal of Emeth in The Last Battle, the final book in the Narnia Chronicles. As Beilby recounts the story, Emeth is a young Calormen soldier who has devoted his entire life to serving Tash—the wholly evil deity worshipped by Narnia's enemies. Emeth describes his own religious commitment: "Since I was a boy, I have served Tash and my great desire was to know more of him and, if it might be, to look on his face. But the name of Aslan was hateful to me."¹⁶

When Emeth walks through a stable door expecting to find Tash, he instead finds himself in the Narnian equivalent of heaven—a world of breathtaking beauty and joy. Eventually he encounters Aslan (the Christ-figure), and falls at his feet in terror, assuming he will be destroyed. Instead, Aslan embraces him and says, "Son, thou art welcome." Aslan explains that all the service Emeth did to Tash out of genuine love and goodness was actually, unknowingly, service done to Aslan himself—because "I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him." The conclusion: "All find what they truly seek."¹⁷

The inclusivist implications of this story seem obvious. Emeth is saved even though he spent his entire life worshipping the wrong god. His implicit faith—his genuine love of truth, his desire to know the divine, his commitment to goodness—was enough to open his eyes to the true God when he finally stood in God's presence.

But as Beilby perceptively argues, a closer reading of Lewis's text actually points more toward postmortem opportunity than toward pure inclusivism. When Emeth first walks through the stable door, he does not immediately understand where he is. Lucy describes him as "rather like a man in a trance. He kept on saying, 'Tash, Tash, where is Tash? I go to Tash.'"¹⁸ His theological confusion persists even after entering the new world. It is only when he stands face-to-face before Aslan—when he encounters the true God directly—that his implicit faith becomes explicit, and he responds with love and worship. Aslan breathes on him, takes away his fear, and welcomes him. This looks very much like a postmortem encounter: Emeth's lifelong seeking prepared him, but it was the direct, personal meeting with Aslan that actually sealed his salvation.¹⁹

Moreover, there are reasons to think Lewis himself was sympathetic to something like postmortem opportunity. In an April 28, 1960 letter to Audrey Sutherland, Lewis addressed the fate of those who lived before Christ: "The [New Testament] always speaks of Christ not as one who taught, or demonstrated, the possibility of a glorious after life but as one who first created that possibility—the Pioneer, the First Fruits, the Man who forced the door." Lewis went on to say, "I believe in something like this. It would explain how what Christ did can save those who lived long before the Incarnation," connecting this to Christ's descent to the dead in 1 Peter 3:19–20.²⁰ This suggests that Lewis's own theology was moving in the direction of a combined inclusivism-postmortem opportunity framework, even if he never fully developed it.

The Strengths of Inclusivism

Before I turn to my critique, I want to affirm clearly what inclusivism gets right. These are genuine strengths that any adequate theology of the unevangelized must incorporate.

First, inclusivism rightly affirms God's universal salvific will. Against restrictivism, which sometimes implies (even if it does not always say explicitly) that God is content to leave billions without any real chance of salvation, inclusivism takes seriously the biblical testimony that God desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4) and is "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). As I argued in Chapter 2, this universal desire is not a minor theme in Scripture—it is central to God's character. Inclusivism honors this truth.

Second, inclusivism rightly acknowledges the complexity of salvation history before Christ. How were Old Testament believers like Abraham saved? Abraham did not know the name of Jesus. He could not have articulated the doctrine of the Trinity or the substitutionary atonement. Yet Paul declares that Abraham "believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness" (Genesis 15:6; cf. Romans 4:3). And what about the "holy pagans"—figures like Melchizedek, Job, Jethro, and Rahab—who appear to have genuine faith in God despite having no connection to Israel's special revelation?²¹ As Beilby notes, even if restrictivists are not fully persuaded by the inclusivist argument from holy pagans, they must acknowledge that "dealing with figures like Melchizedek creates complexities for the Restrictivist's picture of salvation."²²

Third, inclusivism rightly emphasizes that faith is fundamentally about a relational orientation toward God, not merely intellectual content. As Beilby puts it, the inclusivist arguments "drive home the point that faith is not primarily about theological content, but a matter of one's 'directional vector' toward God."²³ Hebrews 11 teaches that it was by faith that Abraham was saved, and "it is difficult in the extreme to explain how Abraham's faith included belief in Jesus Christ" in any explicit sense.²⁴ The content of saving faith has changed across the ages of redemptive history—what has remained constant is the relational posture of trust in and dependence upon God. This is a profoundly important insight.

Fourth, inclusivism rightly insists that the Holy Spirit is not confined to the institutional church. The Spirit "blows where it wishes" (John 3:8), and there is substantial biblical evidence that God's witness precedes human missionaries. Don Richardson's well-known book Eternity in Their Hearts documents cases where missionaries encountered people groups who seemed to have already responded to God's work among them—modern-day parallels to Melchizedek.²⁵

The Weaknesses of Inclusivism

For all its genuine strengths, inclusivism faces serious difficulties that, in my judgment, it cannot fully resolve on its own. These weaknesses are not fatal flaws—they are, rather, gaps that point toward the need for a supplementary account. And that supplement, I will argue, is postmortem opportunity.

The Insufficiency of Implicit Faith

The most fundamental problem with inclusivism is its claim that implicit faith can be salvifically sufficient. Let me explain what I mean by this. As Beilby so helpfully argues, "while the Inclusivist's point that faith is not primarily about theological content, but a matter of one's 'directional vector' toward God is absolutely correct, it is equally true that an implicit openness to God or a directional vector aimed at God is supremely irrelevant if it does not result in relationship with God."²⁶ This is a crucial point. The goal of salvation is not merely to have the right inner disposition. The goal of salvation is relationship with God himself—a personal, knowing, loving relationship with the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ.

Beilby offers a wonderful analogy here. Consider an engaged couple. The bride-to-be genuinely loves her fiancé. She desires to be married to him. She is fully committed to him. Does all of that mean they are already married? No. They will be married when they actually pledge themselves to each other on the wedding day. The love and commitment leading up to the wedding are important—even necessary—but they are "proximate steps" toward the actual goal. None of them, by themselves, constitute the marriage itself.²⁷ In the same way, implicit faith—a genuine turning of the heart toward God—is immensely important and salvifically efficacious (it really matters, and it really moves a person in the right direction), but it is not salvifically sufficient by itself. It needs to be brought to completion in an actual encounter with the God it has been seeking.

This is why the inclusivist attempt to use Hebrews 11:6 as the baseline for saving faith falls short. Inclusivists often cite this verse—"without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him"—as evidence that minimal theological content is sufficient for salvation. But as Beilby observes, treating this verse as a justification for the salvific nature of implicit faith "is to miss the entire context of Hebrews," which teaches that the faith of the Old Testament saints "was not an end in itself but a means to an end, i.e., that which anticipated and looked forward to the coming of Christ."²⁸ In other words, the implicit faith of the Old Testament era was always pointing forward to something—or rather, to Someone. It was never meant to stand on its own.

The Problem of the Pseudoevangelized

The second major weakness of inclusivism is one that I find particularly compelling, and it is the problem Beilby presses most forcefully: the pseudoevangelized. Inclusivism works best when we are thinking about the most straightforward cases of unevangelized people—those who live in remote areas and have simply never heard the name of Jesus. For these people, the inclusivist framework is fairly plausible: they respond to whatever light God gives them through creation and the Spirit, and God accepts their implicit faith.

But what about the pseudoevangelized? These are the people I described in Chapter 1—those who have heard the gospel, but what they heard was distorted, twisted, or wrapped up with so much cultural baggage that it was not really the gospel at all. Beilby illustrates this with vivid case studies. Consider "Kunta Kinte"—an enslaved African who has been told about Jesus by the very people who have enslaved him. Kunta has rightly rejected the "gospel" as presented to him by his white slave owners, because what they presented was a grotesque distortion of the real thing. He sees the Jesus of his oppressors as "more demonic than divine."²⁹ What does inclusivism say about Kunta? An inclusivist might try to argue that Kunta's commitment to Islam could be a form of implicit faith. But as Beilby rightly observes, "it is a stretch for any orthodox Christian inclusivist to claim that Kunta is saved by virtue of their non-Christian religious beliefs and in spite of explicit rejection of the name of Jesus Christ."³⁰

Or consider "Micha"—a woman whose experiences of abuse and trauma at the hands of professing Christians have left her so damaged that she has no faith of any kind. She is not merely unevangelized; she has been de-evangelized. Her capacity to respond in faith to anyone or anything has been disabled by those who were supposed to represent Christ to her. Beilby's powerful question rings in our ears: "Wouldn't the God who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to seek the lost sheep want to give Micha an opportunity to respond, an opportunity not tainted by the scars of her experience in this life?"³¹

These cases expose the limits of inclusivism in a way that I find deeply persuasive. Inclusivism can handle the "easy" cases—the remote tribesman who has never heard of Jesus. But it struggles mightily with the hard cases—the people whose experience of "Christianity" has given them every reason to reject the name of Christ. And these hard cases are not rare. They are, tragically, all too common. Every person who has been abused by a pastor, every woman forced into submission by a distorted theology of male authority, every indigenous person who was told that Jesus requires them to abandon their language and culture, every enslaved person who was preached a gospel of obedience to masters—all of these are, in a sense, pseudoevangelized. Inclusivism does not have an adequate answer for them.

Postmortem opportunity does. If God provides a direct, personal, genuine encounter with the real Jesus Christ after death—an encounter untainted by human distortion, cultural imperialism, or abusive authority—then every pseudoevangelized person gets the chance they never truly had. They get to see Jesus as he really is, not as he was caricatured to them. And they get to respond freely, without the weight of trauma and manipulation clouding their judgment. This, I believe, is exactly what we should expect from the God who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one.

Combining Inclusivism and Postmortem Opportunity

Not Either/Or but Both/And

I believe, with Beilby, that "in the final analysis, it is best to realize that God's soteriological efforts with respect to the unevangelized are multifaceted."³² God does not use just one strategy to reach the lost. He works through general revelation—through the beauty and order of creation, through the moral law written on the conscience, through the longing for transcendence that appears in every human culture. He works through the Holy Spirit—convicting of sin, drawing people toward himself, opening blind eyes, even in places where no human missionary has ever set foot. And he works through a postmortem encounter with Christ—a direct, personal, face-to-face meeting with the risen Jesus for those who did not have a genuine opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel in this life.

As Beilby summarizes his own position: "I utterly reject the either/or between Inclusivism and Postmortem Opportunity. It is a both/and."³³

Here is how I would put the framework together. During a person's earthly life, God is already at work. General revelation reveals God's "eternal power and divine nature" through creation (Romans 1:20). The Holy Spirit draws all people toward God, seeking to convict them of sin and make them aware of their need for a Savior. Some people respond to this drawing with genuine faith—even if their theology is incomplete, even if they do not know the name of Jesus, their hearts are genuinely turned toward God. This is what inclusivism rightly describes. But—and here is where I go further than most inclusivists—this implicit faith, while genuinely important and salvifically efficacious, is not by itself sufficient for salvation. It needs to be brought to completion in a personal encounter with the risen Christ. And that encounter, for those who did not receive it in this life, comes after death—in the intermediate state, during the dying process itself, or at the final judgment (as I have argued throughout this book).

This means that a person's response to general revelation in this life really matters. It is not irrelevant. It is not a waste. A person who has spent their whole life turning their heart toward God—even if they did not know God's name—is being prepared for the encounter that will come after death. Their implicit faith has been shaping their character, building dispositions of trust and openness, creating what Beilby calls a "directional vector" aimed at God.³⁴ When they finally stand face-to-face with the risen Christ, they will be far more likely to respond with joy and love and worship, because their whole life has been a preparation for that moment.

Answering the Objection: Are These Two Views "Logically Incompatible"?

Not everyone thinks this combination works. The most forceful objection has come from Ronald Nash, who declared that inclusivism and postmortem opportunity are "logically incompatible."³⁵ As Beilby rightly points out, this claim is simply wrong as a matter of logic. There is nothing contradictory about saying both that God works through general revelation in this life and that God provides a postmortem encounter with Christ. Nash's real complaint seems to be that, given his own rigid categories, he cannot see how the two views fit together. But that is a failure of imagination, not a demonstration of logical impossibility.³⁶

D. A. Carson raised a more nuanced version of this objection. While he wisely avoided Nash's overblown claim of logical incompatibility, he argued that "it is very hard to see why anyone would want to hold both views simultaneously." Carson offered two reasons: first, if implicit faith is salvific, then there is no need for a postmortem opportunity; and second, if people will have a postmortem opportunity, then there is no need for them to hear the gospel in this life.³⁷

Both of Carson's objections, however, fail upon closer examination. Beilby's response to the first is devastating: even if implicit faith were sufficient for some, there are others—like Kunta and Micha—for whom it clearly is not. Inclusivism handles the easy cases; postmortem opportunity handles the hard ones. Why would we not want both tools in our toolkit?³⁸ Moreover, as I have argued, implicit faith is salvifically efficacious without being salvifically sufficient. It genuinely matters—it shapes the person's character and prepares them for the postmortem encounter—but it does not by itself constitute the saving relationship with Christ. So Carson's first objection rests on a confusion between "efficacious" and "sufficient."

Carson's second objection is equally problematic. If people will receive a postmortem encounter with Christ, does that make earthly evangelism pointless? Absolutely not. As I argued in Chapter 26, there are multiple reasons why evangelism remains vitally important even if postmortem opportunity is true: we are commanded to share the gospel (Matthew 28:18–20), hearing the gospel in this life can transform a person's earthly existence, and there is no guarantee that those who receive a postmortem opportunity will accept it. Knowing that someone might receive a second chance does not make the first chance irrelevant—any more than knowing a student will have a chance to retake an exam makes the first attempt unimportant.³⁹

Perhaps Carson was assuming that all who receive a postmortem opportunity will automatically accept it. But as Beilby notes, "that is no claim of mine and it ignores the reality of free will."⁴⁰ Some people may reject Christ even after standing face-to-face with him in all his glory. This is part of the terrible mystery of human freedom. The postmortem opportunity guarantees the offer, not the outcome.

Pinnock's Attempt at Combination—and Its Limitations

Clark Pinnock stands out as the only major evangelical theologian who has publicly and at length defended the combination of inclusivism and postmortem opportunity. His approach is instructive but also, I believe, does not go far enough. Pinnock's position, as he described it, was that "decisions in this life set the soul's direction in relation to God, and fuller revelation after death enables the person to pick up where things left off and decide once and for all whether to journey toward or away from God."⁴¹

Notice what Pinnock is doing here. His postmortem encounter is essentially a confirmation of a decision already made in this life, not a genuinely new opportunity. As he clarified: "I do not hold to evangelism for the unevangelized after death. . . . Rather, I contend that those who have had faith in God during their earthly lives, as Hebrews 11:6 indicates, are 'believers,' even if they are not Christians; and I hold that after death, these people encounter the reality of God's grace in Christ for which they had longed."⁴² In other words, for Pinnock, the postmortem encounter only applies to those who are already "believers" by virtue of their implicit faith. It does not extend a genuinely new offer of salvation to those who rejected God (or who were never in a position to respond at all) during their earthly lives.

As Jonathan observes, "Pinnock's intermediate position on posthumous salvation is weak and adds little to the debate."⁴³ His postmortem encounter is really just an "updating" of knowledge for people who are already saved—similar to how Cornelius was already a God-fearer before Peter arrived and simply had his understanding "completed" by hearing the full gospel (Acts 10). This does not help the hardest cases at all. It does nothing for Kunta Kinte or Micha.

My position goes significantly further than Pinnock's. I believe the postmortem encounter extends to all the unsaved—not just those who demonstrated implicit faith during their earthly lives, but also those who rejected God (perhaps for very understandable reasons), those who never had any meaningful encounter with the divine, and those whose capacity for faith was damaged by abuse, trauma, or distortion of the gospel. God's love does not distinguish between "worthy" and "unworthy" recipients. As I argued in Chapter 2, God's character is one of relentless, pursuing, unfailing love. He goes after the one lost sheep. He searches for the lost coin. He runs to meet the prodigal son. A postmortem opportunity that is limited to those who already demonstrated faith in this life is not wide enough for the God we see revealed in Jesus Christ.

Jonathan's Insight: Complementary Rather Than Competing

Stephen Jonathan's treatment of this issue in Grace beyond the Grave is particularly helpful. While most theologians have treated inclusivism and postmortem opportunity as rival theories competing for the same theological space, Jonathan suggests a more generous approach. He writes that he would be "more prepared to view the wider hope views as complementary to each other rather than as competitors in the race to find the one supreme answer to challenge the restrictivist position."⁴⁴

Jonathan makes a point that I think is exactly right: could not an all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving God "save the unevangelized through their implicit faith response to the light they received to then have their knowledge of God 'updated,' before or after death, and save those who had not responded to the misty half-light of general revelation whilst on earth through a postmortem opportunity?"⁴⁵ There is no good theological reason why God should be limited to only one of these strategies. An infinitely resourceful God would use every means at his disposal to reach every person he has created.

This insight aligns beautifully with the broader theological framework I have been developing throughout this book. God's pursuit of the lost is not a one-size-fits-all operation. Some people are drawn to God through the beauty of creation. Some are convicted by the moral law written on their hearts. Some encounter Christ through the preaching of the gospel in this life. Some are reached by the Holy Spirit working in ways we cannot see or understand. And some—those who were never given a genuine chance, those whose experience of "Christianity" was a distortion of the real thing, those who died in infancy or with intellectual disabilities that prevented them from understanding the gospel—are reached by a direct, personal encounter with the risen Christ after death. God is not limited to a single strategy. His love is too creative, too relentless, and too personal for that.

Postmortem Opportunity Solves Inclusivism's Greatest Problem

Let me draw the threads together. The greatest problem facing inclusivism is the gap between implicit faith and explicit relationship with God. Inclusivism can explain how a person might develop a genuine "God-ward" orientation through general revelation and the Holy Spirit. But it struggles to explain how that orientation, by itself, constitutes a full saving relationship with the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. The engagement analogy captures this perfectly: being engaged is wonderful, but it is not the same as being married.

Postmortem opportunity bridges this gap. It provides the "wedding day"—the moment when implicit faith becomes explicit, when the person who has been seeking God all their life finally stands face-to-face with the One they have been seeking. It provides the occasion for the relational commitment that inclusivism's implicit faith cannot supply on its own. And it does so in a way that honors both the inclusivist insight (that God has been at work in this person's life all along) and the exclusivist insight (that explicit faith in Jesus Christ is ultimately necessary for salvation).

This combined framework also resolves the pseudoevangelized problem that inclusivism cannot handle. For those who heard a distorted gospel, who were abused by those claiming Christ's name, who rejected a caricature of Jesus rather than the real thing—postmortem opportunity gives them what they never had in this life: a genuine, undistorted encounter with the real Jesus. Their earthly rejection of "Christianity" was not a rejection of Christ; it was a rejection of a counterfeit. When they meet the real Jesus, they will have their first genuine opportunity to respond.

Extending the Framework Beyond Beilby

While I have drawn extensively from Beilby's superb analysis in this chapter, I want to be transparent about the key point where my position differs from his. Beilby argues that the postmortem opportunity extends to those whom God "deems to have not had the opportunity to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ in this life."⁴⁶ This means Beilby limits the postmortem offer primarily to the unevangelized and pseudoevangelized—those who genuinely did not have a fair chance to hear and respond to the true gospel.

I believe the postmortem opportunity must extend further. As I have argued throughout this book, the offer extends to all the unsaved without exception. This includes not only the unevangelized and pseudoevangelized, but also those who grew up in nominally Christian environments and never had a genuine encounter with the living Christ; apostates who explicitly renounced Christianity (perhaps for very understandable reasons); infants and children who died before they could respond to the gospel; those with mental disabilities who lacked the cognitive capacity to understand the gospel; Old Testament-era peoples who lived before Christ; and those from non-Christian religious traditions.

Why do I extend the offer this far? Because of who God is. As we explored in Chapter 2, the God revealed in Scripture is a God of unfailing, relentless, pursuing love. He leaves the ninety-nine to find the one. He does not stop searching until the lost coin is found. He runs to meet the prodigal while the son is still a long way off. Would this God really limit his postmortem mercy to only certain categories of the unsaved? Would the Father who gave his only Son "so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16) draw an arbitrary line and say, "You qualify for a postmortem opportunity, but you do not"? I cannot believe that of the God I see revealed in Jesus Christ.

This broader view also integrates more naturally with the combined inclusivism-postmortem opportunity framework. If we accept that God works through general revelation and the Holy Spirit during a person's earthly life (the inclusivist insight), and that God provides a postmortem encounter with Christ for those who did not have a genuine opportunity (the postmortem opportunity insight), then the most comprehensive and theologically coherent framework is one in which both mechanisms are available to all people. God's strategy is not compartmentalized. He uses every means at his disposal to reach every person—whether that means drawing them through creation and conscience in this life, convicting them through the Holy Spirit, providing the gospel through human messengers, or encountering them personally after death.

The Solidification of Faith and the Continuity Between Life and Death

One further dimension of the combined framework deserves attention. Beilby introduces the important concept of the "solidification of faith"—the idea that consistent choices in a particular direction, over time, produce dispositions that become habits, and habits that become character.⁴⁷ This is, as Beilby notes, something like a spiritual version of Newton's first law of motion: an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.

Applied to our topic, this means that a person's response to God's revelation in this life has real consequences for their postmortem encounter. Someone who has spent their whole life turning their heart toward God—responding to the beauty of creation with worship, responding to the moral law with obedience, responding to the promptings of the Spirit with openness—has developed a character that is oriented toward God. When they finally stand face-to-face with the risen Christ, their whole life has prepared them for that moment. Their "yes" to Christ is, in a sense, the culmination of a lifetime of saying "yes" to whatever light they had. Beilby suggests that for some people, their implicit faith may be so fully "solidified" in this life that their positive response to the postmortem encounter is virtually certain.⁴⁸

But the opposite is also true. A person who has spent their life turning away from God—hardening their heart against the promptings of conscience, suppressing the truth that creation reveals, choosing selfishness over love at every turn—has developed a character that is oriented away from God. For such a person, the postmortem encounter with Christ may be deeply unwelcome. As I discussed in Chapter 23, when we explored the divine presence model of hell, the same fire of God's love that is experienced as warmth and joy by the righteous is experienced as torment by those who hate God. This is not because God changes—it is because the person's character determines how they experience God's presence.

This insight bridges the inclusivist and postmortem opportunity perspectives in a particularly elegant way. The inclusivist is right that what happens during this life matters—that a person's response to general revelation has real significance. The postmortem opportunity advocate is right that the final, decisive encounter with Christ happens after death. And both insights together show us that earthly life and postmortem encounter are not separate, disconnected events, but parts of a single, continuous story of God's pursuit of each human soul.

Implications for the Book's Broader Argument

This chapter's argument has important implications for the broader framework I am developing in this book. Let me highlight three.

First, combining inclusivism and postmortem opportunity strengthens the case against restrictivism. The restrictivist holds that only those who hear and accept the gospel in this life can be saved. Inclusivism challenges this by showing that God has always worked beyond the boundaries of explicit gospel proclamation. Postmortem opportunity challenges it further by showing that God's pursuit of the lost does not end at the grave. Together, the two positions present a formidable cumulative case that God's saving mercy is far wider than restrictivism allows.

Second, the combined framework supports the conscious intermediate state. As I argued in Chapters 6–9, the soul survives the death of the body and is conscious and aware in the intermediate state. This is essential for postmortem opportunity: if there is no conscious existence between death and resurrection, there is no "place" or "time" for a postmortem encounter with Christ. The combined inclusivism-postmortem opportunity framework therefore provides further theological motivation for affirming substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state (see Chapters 6–9).

Third, the combined framework is compatible with all three major views of hell. Whether one holds to eternal conscious torment, conditional immortality (as I do), or universal reconciliation, the combined inclusivism-postmortem opportunity framework can be affirmed. Those who hold to ECT can affirm that God provides every possible opportunity—through general revelation in this life and through a postmortem encounter after death—before consigning anyone to eternal punishment. Conditionalists like myself can affirm that God's relentless pursuit gives every person the maximum opportunity for salvation before the final, irreversible destruction of the unrepentant. And universalists can affirm the framework while maintaining their conviction that God's love will ultimately prove irresistible. The combined framework does not dictate one's view of hell; it is a prior question about the scope of God's salvific efforts.

Fourth, the combined framework coheres powerfully with the divine presence model of hell developed in Chapters 22–23. As I argued in those chapters, drawing on the work of R. Zachary Manis and Sharon Baker, the Lake of Fire is best understood not as a place of external punishment imposed by an angry God but as the experience of God's own unshielded presence. For those who love God, his presence is heaven—warmth, glory, joy. For those who hate God, that same presence is experienced as torment. The combined inclusivism-postmortem opportunity framework fits beautifully with this model. During earthly life, God's presence comes to people in a veiled, mediated form—through creation, through conscience, through the promptings of the Spirit. Some respond with love and openness (this is what inclusivism describes). After death, God's presence comes in a more direct and unveiled form—through a personal encounter with Christ. And at the final judgment, God's presence is fully unshielded, and each person's response to that presence reveals whether their heart has been oriented toward God or away from him throughout the whole course of their existence. The combined framework thus provides the narrative arc that connects earthly life, the intermediate state, and the final judgment into a single, coherent story of God's relentless pursuit.

Fifth, the combined framework provides the most pastorally satisfying answer to the problem of the unevangelized. Consider the missionary who arrives in a village and discovers that the man she most wanted to reach died just the day before. Under restrictivism, she is too late—his fate is sealed forever. Under inclusivism alone, she might take comfort in the possibility that he responded to general revelation, but she has no way of knowing, and inclusivism offers no mechanism for a definitive resolution of his status. Under the combined framework, she can trust that the God who led her to that village is the same God who was already at work in that man's life through general revelation and the Holy Spirit—and that the same God will now meet that man face-to-face after death, giving him the explicit encounter with Christ that no human messenger was able to provide in time. This is not wishful thinking; it flows directly from the character of God as revealed in Scripture—a God who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one, who searches for the lost coin, who runs to meet the prodigal son.

Conclusion

Inclusivism and postmortem opportunity are not competing theories. They are complementary dimensions of a single, comprehensive account of how a loving God pursues every human being he has created. Inclusivism is right that God does not wait until death to begin his pursuit—he is at work through creation, conscience, and the Holy Spirit throughout every person's earthly life. Postmortem opportunity is right that God does not stop his pursuit at death—he provides a direct, personal encounter with the risen Christ for all who have not had a genuine opportunity to respond to the gospel.

The combined framework is superior to inclusivism alone for at least three reasons. First, it solves the insufficiency problem: it provides the explicit encounter with Christ that implicit faith, by itself, cannot supply. Second, it solves the pseudoevangelized problem: it gives those who heard a distorted gospel the chance to encounter the real Jesus for the first time. Third, it provides a unified account of God's salvific strategy that spans both earthly life and the afterlife, showing how every moment of a person's existence is part of God's relentless pursuit.

The combined framework is also superior to postmortem opportunity alone, because it takes seriously the inclusivist insight that God is already at work during a person's earthly life. A person's response to general revelation is not irrelevant—it genuinely shapes their character and prepares them for the postmortem encounter with Christ. The inclusivist and the postmortem opportunity advocate each hold part of the truth. The fullest picture emerges when we hold them together.

In the end, the question of whether inclusivism and postmortem opportunity are compatible comes down to a question about God's character. Is our God the kind of God who uses only one strategy to reach the lost? Or is he the kind of God who uses every means at his disposal—creation, conscience, the Holy Spirit, human missionaries, and a personal encounter with the risen Christ after death—to draw every person he has made into the embrace of his love? I believe the testimony of Scripture is clear: our God is a God of relentless, creative, endlessly resourceful love. He will not stop pursuing us until every avenue has been exhausted. And if I am right about that, then combining inclusivism and postmortem opportunity is not merely permissible—it is demanded by the very character of God.

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