Chapter 1

A New Way to Understand How God Meets the Dying

The Moment That Holds More Than Time Can Measure

Condensed Edition

The Funeral Pastor Dan Could Not Preach

Pastor Dan stood behind the pulpit and looked out at Ray’s family. He had known Ray for twenty years. Ray was the kind of neighbor everyone loves: the one who fixed your fence, watched your dog, and brought soup when you were sick. He coached Little League. He drove elderly church members to their appointments even though he never attended a service himself. His grandchildren adored him.

Ray never went to church. He never prayed, as far as anyone knew. He never spoke about God, at least not with any interest. And now Ray was dead at seventy-one, and his daughter, a woman of deep and quiet faith, sat in the front row waiting for Dan to say something true.

Dan had preached hundreds of funerals. He knew the standard options. He could dodge the question. He could offer warm generalities about God’s love. He could hint at the worst and watch the family crumble. None of those options felt honest.

What Dan wanted was a single sentence he could say with integrity. Something that honored the Bible, took seriously the love of God, and did not pretend to know more than he did about the state of Ray’s soul.

This book is about that sentence.

Dan is not alone in his struggle. Across town, a young mother is burying a stillborn daughter she never got to name. In a village clinic halfway around the world, a missionary is thinking about the unreached valley over the next ridge — the people who have never heard the name of Jesus. In a hospital room, a son watches his father slip away after a decade of Alzheimer’s. He wonders whether God can still reach a mind that can no longer reach itself.¹

Every one of these people is asking the same question: What does God do at the moment someone dies?

The Thesis

I want to state the answer this book proposes as plainly as I can.

Every dying person, without exception, encounters the risen Christ at the moment of death. The encounter is real, conscious, and free. The dying person sees Christ, knows who he is, and chooses to accept or refuse him. It does not matter whether the person was a lifelong believer, a committed atheist, a six-month-old infant, or someone who never once heard the gospel. Christ meets every soul at the threshold between life and death. Every single one.²

I need to be precise about what I mean and what I don’t.

This is not a “second chance after death.” It happens at the threshold, during the dying process itself, before biological death is complete. By every medical clock, the encounter lasts seconds. But by the dying person’s own experience, it may last weeks or months. Research into near-death experiences shows that people who come close to dying often report massive changes in how they experience time. Minutes of clinical death can hold what feels like days of rich, vivid experience.³ If this is what happens at the edge of death, imagine what happens at the threshold itself.

The title of this book captures the idea. Between heartbeats: in the sliver of silence between the last beat and the stillness, there is more time than any clock can see. And Someone is there.

Three Streams of Evidence

A claim this bold needs evidence. This book draws on three streams, each independent of the others. They come from different fields, rely on different methods, and were developed by scholars who often did not know about each other’s work. When they all point in the same direction, the convergence is hard to ignore.

The Near-Death-Experience Literature

Over the past fifty years, researchers in cardiology, neuroscience, and psychology have documented thousands of near-death experiences. These are vivid, structured experiences reported by people who came very close to death, and in many cases were clinically dead for minutes. NDEs show a striking pattern across cultures and religious backgrounds. People report an out-of-body perception and an encounter with a being of overwhelming love, often identified as Christ. They describe a review of their entire life and a radical change in how they experience time.⁴

Some of these cases are veridical, meaning the person accurately reported things they could not have seen or known from their physical position. Pam Reynolds, for example, was clinically dead with a flat-line brain during surgery. She accurately described the surgical instruments and conversations in the operating room.⁵ Cases like hers provide serious evidence for substance dualism. That is the view, held by most Christians throughout history, that the human person includes an immaterial soul that can exist apart from the body. Chapter 8 develops this case in full.

For our purposes, the most important feature is the time-dilation. NDErs consistently report that their experience felt far longer than the clock time that passed. Minutes became hours. Seconds became days. If the dying moment can hold that much experience, it can hold a genuine encounter with Christ. Chapter 10 examines the evidence in detail, and Chapters 6 through 12 survey the full scope of NDE research.

The Philosophy of Time

Mainstream Christian theology has long wrestled with how God relates to time. Is God outside of time altogether? Or does God experience real moments, real before-and-after? This book argues, alongside a growing number of Christian philosophers and theologians, that God is genuinely temporal. He experiences real succession, responds in real time, and engages the dying soul within the soul’s own expanded moment.⁶

Equally important is the philosophical question of how long a moment can be. We tend to assume that a “moment” is a fixed unit. The Bible suggests otherwise. The psalmist writes that a thousand years in God’s sight are like a day (Psalm 90:4). Peter echoes the same idea (2 Peter 3:8). The Hebrew Bible uses the word ‘olam (meaning a vast, open stretch of duration) in ways that resist rigid clock-time categories. And the Greek New Testament draws a distinction between chronos (measured, sequential time) and kairos (a decisive, loaded moment, the right time). The dying moment is a kairos, not a chronos.⁷ Chapters 13 through 15 develop the full argument.

The Biblical and Theological Tradition of Christ’s Descent

The third stream is the oldest. Between his crucifixion and resurrection, Christ visited the realm of the dead. The Apostles’ Creed says he “descended into hell” — or more precisely, descended to the dead. Peter says he “went and made proclamation to the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:19). Paul says he “descended to the lower, earthly regions” and “led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8–10).⁸

Between Heartbeats extends this logic. If Christ went to the dead once, the same Christ — risen and alive — can meet every dying person now. The descent was the prototype. The moment-of-death encounter is the continuing application. Chapter 20 explains the biblical framework of Hades before and after Christ’s death. Chapters 21 through 24 work through the key biblical passages one by one.

Where This Idea Comes From

I am not the first to think along these lines. The Catholic theologian Ladislaus Boros published The Mystery of Death in 1965, arguing that the moment of death is the occasion of the soul’s deepest self-realization: its encounter with God. He called this the Endentscheidung, the “final decision.”⁹ Boros wrote a full generation before the modern NDE literature existed. He did not have the empirical evidence we now have. But his philosophical and theological intuition was remarkably close to what NDE researchers would later document. That convergence is one of the most striking features of this entire inquiry. Chapter 16 tells his story.

More recently, the analytic philosopher R. Zachary Manis has developed a “Divine Presence Model” in which the presence of God becomes, for the unrepentant, the very content of hell.¹⁰ Manis’s work intersects with this book’s thesis at several important points, and the tension between the two models is productive. Chapter 26 engages him in depth.

The NDE research itself includes Pim van Lommel’s landmark 2001 prospective study in The Lancet and Bruce Greyson’s decades of peer-reviewed work at the University of Virginia. Jeffrey Long’s large-scale database analysis adds further weight.¹¹ Together, these three streams — theological, philosophical, and empirical — converge on a single picture.

Who This Book Is For

I wrote this book for anyone who has ever stood where Pastor Dan stood: uncertain what to say, unwilling to lie, and hoping there is something both honest and hopeful to offer.

I wrote it for the lay Christian who has buried a loved one and wondered whether God was there in the final moment. For the pastor who has preached one too many funerals and needs better theological resources. For the seminary student who senses that the standard answers leave gaps. For the hospice worker, the grief counselor, and the parent of the stillborn child.¹²

And I wrote it for anyone who has ever asked: What does God do for the babies who die? For the severely disabled? For the billions of people throughout history who never heard the name of Jesus? These are not academic questions. They are the questions people ask at two in the morning, sitting by a hospital bed, wondering if God has forgotten the room.

The book is written in plain language on purpose. Its hardest questions belong to everyone, not only to scholars. Every technical term is defined the first time it appears. The sentences are short. If a twelve-year-old cannot follow a sentence, the sentence needs to change, not the idea.¹³

How the Book Is Organized

The argument unfolds in nine parts.

Part I (this chapter and Chapters 2 through 5) lays the foundation: the character of God, the universal scope of the atonement, the problem of the unevangelized, and what “the moment of death” actually means.

Part II (Chapters 6 through 12) surveys the near-death-experience literature — its history, its common features, its strongest cases, and what it tells us about time, the life review, and hellish experiences. Part III (Chapters 13 through 15) takes up the philosophy of time: God’s relation to time, the difference between subjective and objective time, and the biblical theology of time at the edge of death.

Part IV (Chapters 16 through 19) develops the encounter itself: Boros’s hypothesis, its convergence with NDE research, the identity of the Christ who meets the dying, and the internal dynamics of the encounter. Part V (Chapters 20 through 24) works through the biblical foundations: the two-stage history of Hades, the descent passages in 1 Peter 3 and Ephesians 4, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16, and the “and then the judgment” question of Hebrews 9:27.¹⁴

Part VI (Chapters 25 through 29) faces the hardest questions. Can anyone really refuse God in a face-to-face encounter? What about the philosopher Thomas Talbott’s argument that God’s love is irresistible? What about R. Zachary Manis’s model? Is refusal rational? And what does this book leave open about final outcomes?¹⁵

Part VII (Chapters 30 through 32) addresses the cases that keep people awake at night: babies and children who die, the severely cognitively disabled, and the billions who have never been evangelized. Part VIII (Chapters 33 and 34) engages objections from across the theological spectrum and draws out the pastoral heart of the doctrine. Part IX (Chapter 35) pulls it all together.

What This Book Does Not Claim

Honesty matters from the first page. Here is what this book does not claim.

It does not claim that everyone will be saved. The encounter is real, but so is freedom. Some may refuse Christ even in a face-to-face meeting, and the book takes this possibility seriously. Chapters 25 through 27 engage it at length.

It does not take a position on what happens to those who refuse. Whether the result is eternal conscious suffering, the end of existence, or an eventual reconciliation, the book is deliberately neutral. Chapter 29 explains why.¹⁶

It does not claim certainty. I am proposing a model, a way of understanding what Scripture, theology, philosophy, and empirical evidence together suggest. I believe the model is strong. I do not believe it is proven. I offer it as a contribution to ongoing Christian thinking, not as a settled doctrine.¹⁷

The Promise

Here is what I think I can offer.

If this model is right — or even close to right — then something extraordinary is happening in every dying moment. The silence in that hospital room is not empty. The stillness in that crib is not final. The last breath of the unreached farmer in a distant valley is not unheard.

The risen Christ, who descended once to the dead and rose again, stands at the threshold of every death. He meets every soul. He shows himself. He offers himself. He waits for the answer.¹⁸

I cannot prove all of that in a single chapter. It will take the rest of this book. But I can promise you this: the case is stronger than you might expect. The evidence is more substantial than the popular dismissals suggest. The theological roots go deeper than most people realize. Whatever you believe when you finish, you will not finish thinking the question was unworthy of careful attention.

Pastor Dan, standing at Ray’s funeral, didn’t have this book. He stumbled through the service. He said kind things about Ray’s character. He offered vague comfort. He went home unsatisfied.

By the end of this book, I want to give Dan, and you, something better.

Let’s begin.¹⁹