Chapter 1

A New Way to Understand How God Meets the Dying

The Central Thesis of Between Heartbeats

Full-Length Edition

The Funeral

Pastor Dan stood at the front of the church and tried to think of one honest sentence to say.

The casket behind him held Ray Caldwell. Seventy-one years old. Retired electrician. A man who could fix anything in your house and never send a bill. He coached Little League for a decade, not because his own kids played but because the league needed coaches. He brought soup to sick neighbors. He taught his grandchildren to fish.

He also never set foot in a church. Not once. Not on Christmas. Not on Easter. Not when his wife died. Dan had invited him personally, more times than he could count. Ray had always smiled, shaken his head, and said the same thing: "I appreciate it, Pastor, but that's not my thing."

Now Ray was dead. And his daughter, Liz, had asked Dan to do the funeral because Ray would have wanted someone he liked, even if he didn't believe what Dan believed.

Dan had done hundreds of funerals. He knew the standard words. For believers, the language came easily: "absent from the body, present with the Lord." You could say it and mean it. The person you were burying had lived a visible faith. They had prayed. They had served. They had confessed Christ. The family knew where they stood, and so did Dan.

But Ray hadn't been a believer. Not in any visible way. He wasn't hostile to the faith. He wasn't angry at God. He was just... somewhere else. He lived his whole life somewhere else. Kind, decent, generous, and somewhere else.

And now Dan had to stand at this pulpit and say something true.

He couldn't bring himself to say Ray was in heaven just to comfort the family. That would be a lie, or at best a guess dressed up as a promise. Seminary had taught him that confidence about someone else's eternal destiny was above his pay grade, and he believed it. But neither could he bring himself to say nothing. To dodge the question. To fill twenty minutes with warm memories, read a poem, and sit down. The family would smile and thank him, but they would know he had ducked the only question that mattered.

The question was simple. It was the oldest question. It was the question everyone asks at every funeral, whether they say it out loud or not: Where is he now?

Dan stood there, and the silence stretched. He found himself asking a harder version of that question. Not "Where is Ray now?" but something sharper. "What happened to Ray three days ago, at 2:14 in the morning, when his heart stopped beating?" What happened in that moment? Not theologically. Not in the abstract. Actually. What happened to Ray Caldwell in the last seconds of his life?

Dan didn't know. And for the first time in twenty-three years of ministry, the not-knowing felt like a wound.

This book is written for that wound.

Others at the Graveside

Dan is not alone. The same wound shows up in a dozen different forms.

A young mother stands at a tiny grave. Her daughter, stillborn at thirty-eight weeks. The doctor said the cord wrapped. The baby never drew a breath. The mother's pastor told her that God "has a plan," and she nodded, because what else do you do? But at three in the morning, alone, she asks a different question: Did my daughter ever know she was loved? Not by me. By God. Did God meet her? Did she hear His voice? Or did she simply stop existing before she started?

A missionary sits on a hillside in central Asia, looking at a village he'll never reach. The people there speak a language no one has translated the Bible into. They have their own stories about God, or the gods, or the ancestors. They marry, raise children, bury their dead. Some of them are generous. Some of them are cruel. All of them will die without ever hearing the name of Jesus. The missionary believes the gospel is the power of God for salvation. He also believes God loves those villagers as fiercely as God loves him. And he can't make those two beliefs fit together. One of them has to give. He has spent years trying not to think about which one. But sitting on that hillside, watching smoke rise from cook fires in a village he cannot enter, the question will not leave him alone.

A hospice nurse holds the hand of a ninety-year-old woman with dementia so advanced that she no longer recognizes her own children. The woman's name is Margaret. Ten years ago, Margaret taught Sunday school. Five years ago, she could still hum "Amazing Grace" when her daughter played it on the piano. Now she stares at the ceiling. She eats when fed. She breathes. Her family gathers in the hallway and asks the nurse, very quietly, whether their mother "is still in there." The nurse doesn't answer. She has seen too many deaths to guess. But she wonders: when Margaret dies, will she be herself again? Will the fog lift? Will someone meet her on the other side of the silence?

Each of these people is asking, in a different key, the same question Dan asked at Ray's funeral: What does God do for the dying?

This book offers an answer.

The Thesis in Plain Words

Here is the claim this book makes, as plainly as I can say it.

Every dying person meets the risen Christ at the moment of death. Every one. The lifelong believer and the lifelong atheist. The missionary and the villager who never heard the gospel. The stillborn baby and the ninety-year-old with dementia. The saint and the sinner. No exceptions.

I need to say right away what this is and what it isn't.

This is not a "second chance after death." The encounter doesn't happen in the afterlife. It happens at the threshold. During the dying process. Before the soul has fully left the body. Before biological death is complete. By every clock in the room, the encounter lasts seconds. But by the dying person's own experience, it may last much longer. Days. Weeks. Perhaps longer still.

How is that possible? Because clock time and felt time are not the same thing. We all know this from ordinary life. A car accident unfolds in slow motion. A wonderful afternoon vanishes in a blink. Time stretches and compresses depending on the state of the person living through it.

Near-death experiences take this everyday truth and push it to the extreme. People who have been clinically dead and then revived consistently report that time behaved differently while they were gone. Minutes of clock time held what felt like hours of lived experience. Some describe reliving their entire lives in a few seconds. Some describe conversations with a being of overwhelming love that seemed to go on and on. The medical team later said they were "dead" for only a few minutes. But from the inside, the conversation had no such limit.¹

The technical name for this is time dilation. And it is the key that unlocks the book's central claim. If the dying person's inner experience of time can run at a different pace than the clock, then the moment of death is not as brief as it looks from the outside. From the inside, it may hold an entire encounter.

That is the claim. In the sliver between the last heartbeat and the stillness, there is more time than the clock can see. And Someone is there.

The Title Image

The title of this book is Between Heartbeats. I chose it because it names the reality I want you to see.

Picture a hospital room. A heart monitor traces its green line. The beeps are slowing. The family holds hands. Then the last beep sounds, and the line goes flat.

From the family's side of the bed, that's the end. The pause between the last heartbeat and the flat line is a fraction of a second. Silence.

But from the dying person's side, I believe that fraction of a second opens like a door. Behind that door is a meeting. Christ is there. The person sees Him, perhaps for the first time. And in that meeting, the person is fully awake, fully informed, and fully free to respond.

Between heartbeats. That's where it happens. In the space between the last beat and the stillness, there is room for grace.

Three Streams of Evidence

This is a bold claim. I know it is. So the book builds the case carefully, drawing on three streams of evidence that flow together into a single river.

The Near-Death-Experience Literature

The first stream is near-death-experience research. Over the past five decades, physicians, psychiatrists, and researchers have collected thousands of accounts from people who were clinically dead and then came back.² These accounts are remarkably consistent across cultures, religions, and centuries. The dying person leaves the body. The dying person passes through a transition. The dying person meets a being of overwhelming love, often identified as Christ. The dying person undergoes a life review, seeing the full sweep of a lifetime in what feels like a single moment. And time behaves strangely: minutes of clock time contain what feels like hours or days of lived experience.³

Some of these accounts include a detail that changes the conversation entirely. The dying person reports seeing or hearing things during the period of clinical death that they could not have known by any ordinary means. A woman describes the instruments used in her surgery while her brain showed no measurable activity. A man describes a conversation in a hallway he had never entered. When the medical team checks the details later, they match.⁴

These are called veridical NDEs, and they are the strongest available evidence that human consciousness can function apart from the brain. If that is true, then the mind is not simply the brain at work. Something else is going on. The Christian tradition has a name for that something: the soul.⁵ And if the soul can perceive, think, and remember while the brain is shut down, then consciousness at the moment of death is not a fantasy. It is exactly what the data suggest.

We'll spend six chapters on this evidence (Chapters 6 through 12). For now, the point is simple. NDEs give us reason to believe three things. First, consciousness survives clinical death. Second, the dying person encounters a loving presence. Third, time works differently during the dying process. Each of those three findings matters enormously for the thesis of this book.

The Philosophy of Time

The second stream is the philosophy of time. This one sounds academic, but the core idea is intuitive. Clock time and felt time are not the same measurement.

You already know this. A dentist's drill makes five minutes feel like an hour. A sunset with someone you love makes an hour feel like five minutes. That is not an illusion. It is how human consciousness actually works. Time is not a single, rigid container. It has layers.⁶

Philosophers have explored this for centuries. Augustine wrote in his Confessions that time is something the mind measures, not something that exists apart from the mind.⁷ Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, drew a sharp line between clock time and experienced duration. William James did the same. More recently, analytic philosophers of time like William Lane Craig, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Garrett DeWeese have argued that God Himself experiences temporal succession. If that is right, then God is not frozen in an "eternal now." He acts in time. He responds in time. He meets the dying person in time.⁸

Why does this matter for the book's thesis? Because the most common objection to the moment-of-death encounter is simply this: There isn't time. A person dies in seconds. How could an entire encounter fit into a few heartbeats?

The answer is that "a few heartbeats" is a clock-time measurement. And clock time is only half the story. The soul's own experience of time may run on a completely different scale. If NDE reports are even partly accurate, the soul can live through hours of experience in seconds of clock time. And if God is the kind of God who enters time, who responds and pursues and waits, then the encounter is not squeezed into a fraction of a second. It is extended, on the inside, for as long as it takes.⁹

Chapters 13 through 15 develop this case. Appendices F through O build the full argument for divine temporality and its bearing on the encounter.

The Biblical and Theological Tradition of the Descent

The third stream is the one with the deepest roots. It comes from the Bible itself and from nearly two thousand years of Christian reflection on what Christ did between His death and His resurrection.

The Apostles' Creed says it bluntly: "He descended into hell." More precisely, He descended to the realm of the dead. The New Testament gives this several angles. In 1 Peter 3:18–19, Christ "went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison." In 1 Peter 4:6, "the gospel was preached even to those who are dead." In Ephesians 4:8–10, Christ "descended into the lower regions" and then "led captivity captive," bringing the Old Testament righteous from Sheol into heaven.¹⁰

The early church took these texts at face value. The great Eastern icon of the Resurrection, the Anastasis, depicts Christ standing on the broken gates of Hades, pulling Adam and Eve out of their graves. It is a picture of rescue. Christ went where the dead were. He preached to them. He offered them salvation. And those who heard and responded were set free.¹¹

That is the descent tradition. And Between Heartbeats extends it. If Christ visited the dead once, at His own death, what about now? After His resurrection, is He still present at the threshold? I believe the answer is yes. The risen Christ stands at every deathbed. What He did once in the descent He now does always: He meets the dying, He reveals Himself, and He offers them the chance to respond.

Chapters 20 through 24 examine each descent passage carefully. For now, the point is that the New Testament already contains a picture of Christ meeting the dead and offering them salvation. The book's thesis does not invent this picture. It extends it from a one-time event to an ongoing reality.

Not a Second Chance

I need to address a likely misunderstanding head-on.

Many readers will hear "encounter with Christ at the moment of death" and think: a second chance. That phrase carries baggage. It implies the person already had a first chance, blew it, and now gets a do-over. It sounds like a cheat code. It sounds like it makes earthly faith pointless.

That is not what this book proposes.

For many people, the moment-of-death encounter is not a second chance. It is a first chance. The stillborn baby never had a first chance. The woman in the third-century Chinese village never heard the name of Jesus. The man with profound cognitive disabilities could not grasp a gospel presentation. For them, the encounter at the threshold is the first and only time they will hear the gospel with full clarity and full freedom.¹²

Even for people like Ray, who heard the gospel and turned away, the encounter at the threshold is something different from what they experienced in life. In life, Ray heard the gospel from Dan, a good man doing his best. But Dan is not Jesus. Dan's words, however faithful, were filtered through Ray's moods, his assumptions, his habits, his emotional scar tissue. At the threshold, Ray meets the real thing. He meets the risen Christ, face to face, with every barrier removed, every filter gone. That is not a "second chance" in any trivial sense. It is the first time Ray has ever stood in the unmediated presence of God and been asked, in perfect clarity, what he wants.¹³

This matters because it keeps the encounter honest. The encounter is not a guarantee of salvation. It is a guarantee of opportunity. Every person will meet Christ. But not every person will say yes. The encounter is fully persuasive but never coercive. God does everything love and reason can do to draw the soul toward Himself. But the soul is free. Some will say no.

What happens to those who say no? That is a separate question, and this book leaves it open on purpose. Christians disagree about the long-term fate of the lost. Some believe in eternal conscious torment. Some believe the lost are eventually destroyed. Some believe God's love will eventually win everyone. Chapter 29 shows how each of those views can work alongside the encounter described in this book. For now, the point is that the encounter itself is the mechanism, not the verdict.¹⁴

Who Is This Book For?

I wrote this book for several kinds of readers, and I want each of you to know you're welcome here.

If you are a grieving parent, spouse, or child who has lost someone whose faith was uncertain, this book is for you. I don't pretend to remove the pain. But I want to give you a picture of what may have happened at the moment your loved one died. That picture is grounded in Scripture, in the best available research on what the dying experience, and in two thousand years of Christian reflection on God's character. It is a picture of hope.

If you are a pastor who has stood where Dan stood and wished you had something more to say, this book is for you. You need theology that doesn't force you to choose between honesty and comfort. I think the model in this book gives you both.

If you are a seminary student or theology reader working through the options on eschatology, the fate of the unevangelized, or the doctrine of the intermediate state, this book is for you. The argument is scholarly. The footnotes are real. The interlocutors include analytic philosophers and systematic theologians. But the prose is plain, because these questions belong to everyone, not just to academics.¹⁵

If you have wondered what God does for babies who die, for the mentally handicapped, or for the billions who lived and died without ever hearing the gospel, this book is for you. Chapters 30 through 32 take up each of these special cases directly.

And if you are simply someone who wants to think carefully about what happens when we die, this book is for you. That question is as old as the human race. I don't claim to have the final answer. But I believe I have a model that deserves serious attention.

Where This Book Stands

Before we go further, I should tell you where this book stands among the options.

The question of what happens to the unevangelized, the young, and the cognitively impaired has produced several answers in Christian theology. Some scholars locate the opportunity for salvation entirely in this life: you must hear the gospel and respond before you die, or there is no other chance. Others believe that those who respond to whatever light they receive in this life may be saved by Christ's work even without knowing His name. Still others locate the opportunity in the intermediate state: the period between death and the final resurrection, during which the dead may hear the gospel and respond.¹⁶

This book explores a different option. The opportunity is not located in the intermediate state after death. It is located at the moment of death itself. The encounter occurs during the dying process, at the threshold between life and death. By the time the soul has fully separated from the body, the encounter is already complete.

This distinction matters for two reasons. First, it keeps the encounter on the right side of a line that worries many Christians. If the encounter happens during the dying, then strictly speaking it is not "after death." It is part of the dying. That matters when we come to texts like Hebrews 9:27. Second, it gives the encounter a natural time-container. The dying process is a real physiological event, and NDE research has documented that subjective time during that process can be radically extended. The soul doesn't need an indefinite stretch of post-death time. It needs the subjectively expanded moment of the dying itself.

A number of defenders of postmortem opportunity argue that the dead can be evangelized in Hades, perhaps over a long stretch of time, culminating at the final judgment. That is a respectable position, and this book does not oppose it. James Beilby, Stephen Jonathan, and others have made serious biblical and theological cases for it. But the model in this book is different. It concentrates the entire opportunity into a single encounter: one meeting, one moment, one choice. The subjective time dilation makes the encounter long enough to be real, but it is still, in clock time, part of the dying itself.¹⁷

One advantage of this approach is that it handles the "deadline" texts more naturally. Hebrews 9:27 says, "It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment." If the encounter occurs during the dying, then strictly speaking it is not after death. It is part of the dying. The encounter is technically antemortem: it happens before the person is fully dead. Chapter 24 develops this argument in detail.¹⁸

How the Encounter Works

I want to give you a brief sketch of the encounter so you know what the book is building toward. Chapters 16 through 19 develop this in full.

The encounter begins as the dying process reaches its critical point. On the physical side, the body is failing. The heart is stopping. The brain is shutting down. But on the soul's side, something very different is happening. The soul is waking up.

In 1962, a Hungarian Jesuit theologian named Ladislaus Boros published a book called The Mystery of Death. His central claim was startling: the moment of death is not the end of consciousness but its fullest awakening. During earthly life, Boros argued, the soul can never fully possess itself. Our freedom is always partial. Our self-knowledge is always limited. But at the moment of death, those limits fall away. The soul, freed from the body's constraints, encounters itself in total clarity for the first time. And in that same moment, it encounters Christ.¹⁹

Boros called this the Endentscheidung, the "final decision." Not a decision imposed from outside, but a decision that rises from the deepest truth of the person. The soul, fully awake, fully aware, fully free, meets God and responds. The direction of the whole life becomes clear. The choice, for the first time in the soul's existence, is made with complete freedom.²⁰

I find Boros's picture stunning. It solves a problem that has nagged theologians for centuries: how can a single moment of dying hold enough weight to bear a person's eternal destiny? Boros's answer is that the moment of death is not the thin thing we imagine. It is the thickest moment of a person's life. Everything the soul has ever been comes together in it. And at that point of total self-knowledge, Christ is there.

This book builds on Boros. But it adds something Boros did not have: the NDE evidence. Boros wrote in 1962, before modern NDE research began. He argued on philosophical and theological grounds alone. We now have decades of empirical data that support, from a completely different direction, the picture he drew. NDEs confirm that the dying person experiences heightened awareness, encounters a loving presence, undergoes a life review, and experiences radical time dilation. The philosophical hypothesis and the empirical data point the same way.²¹

Here is how I picture the encounter. The soul, at the moment of death, meets the risen Christ. Christ reveals Himself. The soul sees who He is. A life review unfolds: the person's whole life, every action, every word, every effect on others, made visible in the presence of perfect love. This review is not condemnation. It is truth. The soul sees itself clearly, perhaps for the first time.

Then comes the offer. Christ extends grace. The soul is invited to respond. For some, the response is immediate: recognition, repentance, surrender. Howard Storm, a former atheist who experienced a well-documented NDE during a medical crisis in Paris, described being rescued from darkness by a light that answered when he called out a half-remembered childhood hymn. His resistance broke in an instant.²²

For others, there is resistance. Old habits. Old grudges. Old loves that crowd out the new one. The encounter is patient. God does everything love can do, short of coercion. And in the end, the soul makes its choice.

Some may say yes who never would have said yes in this life. A woman who was abused in the name of Christ may, for the first time, meet the real Christ and discover that He is nothing like the monster who used His name. A child who died before learning to speak may, in the freedom of the encounter, know and love and choose.

And some may say no. Even in the full presence of God, some souls may turn away. That is the cost of real freedom. The encounter does not guarantee a particular outcome. It guarantees a real opportunity. What the soul does with that opportunity is its own.

What This Book Assumes

Every book rests on assumptions. I want to name mine so you can judge them fairly.

I assume substance dualism: human beings have both a body and a soul, and the soul survives the death of the body. This is the historic mainstream of Christian theology. It is also supported by the veridical NDE evidence. Chapter 8 makes the case.²³

I assume God's universal saving will: God genuinely desires the salvation of every person (1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9; Ezekiel 33:11). Not "all kinds of people." All people. Chapter 2 defends this claim at length.²⁴

I assume divine temporality: God experiences temporal succession. He is not trapped in a static "eternal now." He acts, responds, pursues, and waits in real time. This is developed in Appendices F through O.²⁵

I assume genuine human freedom, including at the moment of death. The encounter is persuasive, never coercive. A forced "yes" is no faith at all.²⁶

And I assume eschatological neutrality. The book takes no position on what happens to those who refuse Christ in the encounter. Whether they suffer eternally, are eventually destroyed, or are ultimately reconciled is a question the book leaves open. Chapter 29 makes this neutrality explicit and shows how each position works alongside the moment-of-death thesis.²⁷

A Map of the Book

This is a long book, and I want to give you a map before we begin.

Part I (Chapters 1 through 5) lays the foundation. This chapter states the thesis. Chapter 2 grounds the encounter in God's character: a God who is love, who desires the salvation of all, who relentlessly seeks the lost. Chapter 3 argues that Christ's atonement was intended for everyone. Chapter 4 faces the problem of the unevangelized head-on: billions of people have died without hearing the gospel, and that is a problem any honest theology must solve. Chapter 5 asks what "the moment of death" actually is, medically, philosophically, and theologically.

Part II (Chapters 6 through 12) examines the NDE evidence. The history of the field, from Raymond Moody's groundbreaking 1975 Life After Life through Sam Parnia's ongoing AWARE studies. The anatomy of an NDE. The veridical cases that support substance dualism. The time-dilation reports. The life-review phenomenon and its theological significance. And the difficult question of hellish NDEs, which raise the possibility that not every soul's encounter begins in light.

Part III (Chapters 13 through 15) takes up time. God's relationship to time. The difference between subjective and objective time. And the biblical theology of time and eternity, including the chronos / kairos distinction and the "today" of salvation.

Part IV (Chapters 16 through 19) develops the encounter itself. Boros's hypothesis of the final decision. The surprising connection between Boros and the NDE evidence. Christ as the One who stands at the threshold of every death. And the internal dynamics of the encounter: the phases of awareness, pursuit, response, purification, and decision.

Part V (Chapters 20 through 24) builds the biblical case. The two-stage history of Hades, before and after Christ's descent. The descent texts in 1 Peter 3 and 4. The "captives led captive" in Ephesians 4. Luke 16's rich man re-read. And Hebrews 9:27, the verse most often cited against any form of postmortem opportunity.

Part VI (Chapters 25 through 29) handles the hardest philosophical questions. Thomas Talbott's powerful argument that a fully informed soul cannot rationally refuse God. R. Zachary Manis's Divine Presence Model. The grounds for the rationality of refusal. The role of Molinism, middle knowledge, and optimal grace in God's design of the encounter. And what the book deliberately leaves open.

Part VII (Chapters 30 through 32) addresses the special cases: babies and children who die, the mentally handicapped and cognitively impaired, and the billions of unevangelized.

Part VIII (Chapters 33 and 34) takes up objections from Catholic, Reformed, and Evangelical traditions and then offers the pastoral heart of the doctrine.

Part IX (Chapter 35) pulls everything together.

Fifteen appendices follow. Appendices A through E provide reference materials: an annotated NDE bibliography, notable NDE case studies, a glossary, a topical cross-reference map, and a quick-reference guide to common objections. Appendices F through O form a self-contained cluster on God and time, building the full case for divine temporality and its bearing on the moment-of-death thesis.²⁸

A Model, Not a Dogma

I want to end this introduction with a promise and a disclaimer.

The promise: this book is honest. I will not claim more than the evidence supports. I will not pretend the case is airtight. I will not dodge the hard objections. Where I'm uncertain, I'll say so. Where the argument is strong, I'll press it. Where it's speculative, I'll name the speculation.

The disclaimer: the model in this book is a model. It is a theological proposal offered for the church's consideration. It is not a new doctrine. It is not a revelation. It is not a creed. It is an attempt to think carefully about what God does at the moment of death, drawing on the best evidence and the best theology available. I think it is the best model we have. But I am aware that "the best model we have" is not the same as "the final truth." The church has been thinking about death for two thousand years. This book adds one voice to that conversation.²⁹

I believe the model is true, or I wouldn't have written the book. But I hold it with open hands. If the church tests it and finds it wanting, I'll listen. If better evidence or better arguments come along, I'll adjust. The question is too important for stubbornness. And the people who need an answer to this question are too real, and too precious, for me to pretend I have more certainty than I do.

Back to the Funeral

I began with Pastor Dan, standing at the front of the church, searching for one honest sentence to say at Ray's funeral.

I believe this book gives him one.

Not a platitude. Not a dodge. Not a guarantee. A hope, grounded in who God is, in what Christ has done, and in what the evidence suggests happens when a person dies.

Something like this: I believe Ray met Jesus. Not in this life. At the threshold. In the last moment, when the monitors went silent and his body let go, I believe the silence was full, not empty. I believe someone was there. And I believe Ray, for the first time in his stubborn, generous, complicated life, saw the face of the God who had been loving him all along.

What Ray did with that meeting, I don't know. Neither do you. That's between Ray and God. But I believe the meeting happened. And I believe it was real.

That is different from saying, "Ray is in a better place." It is different from saying, "We can't know." It is a third thing: a hope with teeth. A hope that rests on an argument. A hope that the rest of this book will build, brick by brick, from the NDE evidence, from the philosophy of time, from the descent of Christ, and from the character of a God who does not stop loving at the last heartbeat.

That is the thesis of this book. The next thirty-four chapters and fifteen appendices build the case.

Turn the page.³⁰