Chapter 4
The Soteriological Problem of Evil and the Dying Encounter Model
Condensed Edition
Her name was Mei. She lived in a small village in third-century China, far from any Roman road, any synagogue, any Christian community. She raised children, honored her parents, and helped neighbors through hard winters. She grew old. She died.
She never once heard the name of Jesus.
Multiply her by tens of billions. Before the age of global missions, most of the human race lived and died without ever hearing a clear gospel. Pre-Columbian peoples across two continents. Entire civilizations in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Infants who lived only hours. Adults with severe cognitive disabilities who could not grasp a single proposition. People like Mei: good, ordinary, unreached.1
The question they pose is not academic. It is a wound in the heart of Christian theology. And it deserves to be felt before it is solved. We owe these billions more than a clever phrase.
James Beilby gives this problem a name: the soteriological problem of evil. The term means "the problem of evil applied to the question of salvation." Just as the classic problem of evil asks why a good God permits suffering, the soteriological version asks why a God who desires everyone's salvation permits billions to die without access to the gospel.2
Beilby frames it as a tension among three claims that most Christians hold:
First: God desires that the gospel be available to everyone.3
Second: Responding to the gospel with explicit faith is necessary for salvation.
Third: Some die without ever having heard the gospel.
Each claim looks defensible on its own. Together they clash. If God wants everyone to have a chance, and if faith requires hearing, then why do billions die without hearing? Any two of these three propositions are perfectly compatible. All three together produce what Beilby calls an "expectation/reality gap" that demands an answer.4
The Shape of the Problem. God desires universal access to salvation. Explicit faith in Christ is necessary for salvation. Billions die without hearing the gospel. Any two of these claims sit comfortably together. All three together produce a deep tension. Every major position in this debate resolves the tension by weakening or denying one of the three.5
Beilby anchors the problem in concrete lives, not abstractions. Consider his test cases. George is a nomad in pre-Christian Mongolia. He has never met a Christian, seen a Bible, or heard of Christ. Anna is a six-month-old infant who dies before she can form a single thought about God. Sam is an adult with profound cognitive disabilities who cannot grasp abstract propositions.6
Then come the harder cases. Kunta Kinte hears the name of Jesus only from the mouths of the men who enslave him. The "gospel" he receives is the religion of his oppressors. Micha is abused by a foster father, disbelieved by a foster mother, and then sexually exploited by her youth pastor, the one person she trusted. He used Scripture to justify his abuse. She has "heard" the gospel. But what she heard was a weapon, not good news.7 Rapunzel is on her way to a church event where her identical twin sister, Gretel, will give her life to Christ that very evening. Rapunzel dies in a car crash on the way there. Had she arrived, she almost certainly would have followed the same path as her sister.8
Stand with these six at the final judgment. Picture the moment. What does God say? "Sorry, wrong place"? "Sorry, you heard a distortion"? "Sorry, you ran out of time"? If our theology forces those answers, the theology has gone wrong.
The oldest and most familiar answer is restrictivism. It holds that explicit faith in Christ during this life is the only path to salvation. Those who die without it are lost. Defenders include J. I. Packer, Ronald Nash, Millard Erickson, and D. A. Carson. Their biblical anchors are strong: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). "There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).9
I respect what restrictivism guards. It refuses to soften the uniqueness of Christ. It takes the Great Commission seriously. It does not pretend the cross is optional. These are real strengths, and they deserve to be acknowledged before the view is criticized.
But what restrictivism guards in one hand, it surrenders in the other. It protects Christ's exclusive saving work—and then declares that work irrelevant to the majority of the human beings He came to save. The cross is sufficient for all, yet applied to none who never heard about it. That is not a tension. It is a contradiction.
Common Objection: Restrictivism and the Lottery of Birth. Dale Moody pressed the question sharply: What kind of God gives people enough knowledge of Himself to damn them, but not enough to save them?10 Under strict restrictivism, Mei's eternal fate turns on the accident of her birthplace. She was born in China in the third century rather than in Palestine in the first. That is the whole difference between salvation and condemnation. A soteriology that makes eternal destiny a lottery of latitude and longitude has a deep problem with the God who "desires all people to be saved" (1 Tim 2:4).
The difficulties run further. Restrictivism hollows out the universal salvific will texts. If God sincerely wants every person saved but designs a system in which billions never had any chance of hearing, the desire starts to look like a wish rather than a will.11
And what about Anna and Sam? Restrictivism either consigns infants and the cognitively disabled to condemnation or quietly invokes an unstated exception. The popular "age of accountability" doctrine has no direct scriptural support. Its widespread acceptance reveals the position's internal instability: if explicit faith is always required, then infants are lost. If infants are not lost, then explicit faith is not always required. Either way, the restrictivist framework cracks under its own weight.12
Stephen Jonathan helpfully distinguishes three strands within the restrictivist camp: hard restrictivism (the unevangelized are certainly lost), pessimistic agnosticism (we don't know, but it looks bleak), and optimistic agnosticism (we hope God has a way, but we can't say what it is).13 The optimistic agnostic is really groping toward a different model. The hard restrictivist is left defending a God whose love has a geographic boundary.
Inclusivism offers a broader answer. Christ is the only Savior, but explicit knowledge of Christ is not always required for salvation. A person who responds faithfully to whatever light she has received, through creation, through conscience, through the pull of grace she cannot name, may be saved by Christ's merits even without knowing His name.14
Karl Rahner called such people "anonymous Christians." Vatican II expressed the principle in Lumen Gentium 16. Clark Pinnock defended a "faith principle": what counts is the direction of the heart, not the catalog of doctrines a person can recite. John Sanders argued similarly.15 C. S. Lewis dramatized it unforgettably in Emeth, the Calormene soldier in The Last Battle who served Tash all his life but was received by Aslan.16
What Inclusivism Gets Right and Gets Wrong. Inclusivism is right that God's love is not bounded by geography and that Romans 1–2 suggests a universal awareness of the divine. But it faces five serious objections. It can be patronizing, labeling people "anonymous Christians" without their knowledge or consent. Romans 10:14–17 ties saving faith to hearing. A "content-free faith" risks dissolving into mere sincerity. It labels people as Christians from the outside, without their participation. And most seriously for this book, inclusivism supplies no mechanism: no conscious encounter, no actual "yes," no relationship freely entered. It offers salvation by category rather than by communion.17
I can hold a modest inclusivism alongside the Dying Encounter Model. God may well honor faithful responses to partial light during a person's lifetime. But I think the moment-of-death encounter provides something far stronger: an actual meeting with the actual Christ. Mei does not merely get classified. She meets Him. She sees His face. She hears His voice. She makes a real decision in a real relationship, not a theological category applied from the outside. That is the difference between inclusivism and what this book proposes.
A third approach says God ensures that every person has at least one genuine chance to respond to the gospel before death. The most sophisticated version appeals to Molinism, the view that God possesses middle knowledge (scientia media). This is God's knowledge of what every free creature would freely do in every possible set of circumstances.18
William Lane Craig uses middle knowledge this way: God has arranged the world so that every person who would have believed, if she had heard the gospel, is in fact placed in circumstances where she does hear it. Those who never hear would not have believed anyway. No one who would have responded is ever missed.19
The logic is ingenious. But Beilby identifies the fatal problem: a hypothetical opportunity is not an actual one. Destiny should turn on a choice a person consciously and explicitly made, not on a choice she would have made in circumstances that never arose.20 Craig's view also does nothing for Anna and Sam. A six-month-old and a profoundly disabled adult cannot respond to the gospel in any counterfactual scenario within this life. The hypothetical is empty.
Andrew Hronich, drawing on Jason Marsh, adds an important twist. If Molinism is true at all, it arguably pushes toward universal reconciliation rather than away from it. If God knows every circumstance in which a given person would freely say yes, and if God can arrange those circumstances, then middle knowledge strengthens the case for the moment-of-death encounter. God would know the perfect approach to each dying soul.21 This is precisely what Chapter 28 develops at length: the "optimal grace" synthesis, in which Molinism and the dying encounter work together rather than in tension.
A fourth position says the unevangelized will hear and may respond in the intermediate state after death. Beilby himself defends this view. So do Stephen Jonathan, Jerry Walls, the later Pinnock, and the later Sanders.22 The intermediate-state model has real strengths. It provides full opportunity for everyone. It takes seriously the descent passages in 1 Peter 3 and 4, which Chapter 21 examines. And it preserves the requirement that faith be explicit and conscious.
Beilby treats moment-of-death models as allies of his broader case. He considers those who place the encounter at the threshold of dying to be "postmortem opportunity theorists" in a broad sense. They see the need for universal opportunity and acknowledge that some never receive it in this life. The primary difference, in his view, is that moment-of-death advocates work under the assumption that repentance after death is impossible, a view he respects even where he disagrees.23
The chief objection to intermediate-state postmortem opportunity comes from Hebrews 9:27: "It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment." That text is addressed fully in Chapter 24. For now, I simply note the advantage of the Dying Encounter Model on this point. Because the encounter occurs at the threshold of dying—during the process of death rather than after it—it is technically antemortem. The person meets Christ while still in the act of dying. Hebrews 9:27 does not reach it.24
The fifth position is this book's own: every dying person encounters Christ at the moment of death. The encounter is real, conscious, fully informed, and fully free. For the unevangelized it is not a lesser offer. It is the same encounter every soul receives, calibrated to who this person has been. Christ does not meet the unevangelized with less love or less clarity. He meets them as the truth behind whatever partial light they followed in life—and He shows them more.
Return to the hard cases and see how the model answers each one.
Anna, the six-month-old, actually meets Christ. Beilby argues persuasively that cognitive idealization in the resurrection state is uncontroversial. We assume that a ninety-one-year-old with advanced dementia will stand before God with his faculties restored. Why not an infant? The infant and the idealized forty-year-old version of that infant are, in terms of personhood, identical.25 In the encounter, Anna meets her Creator with whatever maturation the moment requires. The infant-election texts (Matt 19:14; 2 Sam 12:23) speak of God's posture toward children, not of a categorical guarantee that bypasses encounter. Anna is met. She is not merely sorted. Chapter 30 develops this at length.
Sam, the cognitively disabled adult, is freed from the constraints of an injured brain. Beilby presses an important point: relationship with God does not require the cognitive level needed to parse doctrinal propositions. Salvation involves more than cognition. It includes an affective component, and persons with cognitive disabilities may actually be better suited to embrace that affective dimension than those without disabilities.26 Sam can be met, and met fully, once the body's limitations no longer bind the soul. Chapter 31 takes up his story in detail.
George, the pre-Christian Mongolian nomad, and Mei, the third-century Chinese villager, and all the billions who lived and died in places and centuries the church never reached: the Dying Encounter Model reaches what missions could not. These people are not at a disadvantage in the encounter. Christ meets each of them at the threshold, responsive to who they have been. The faithful elder who reverenced the source of life he could not name is met by Christ as the truth behind that conscience. The devout seeker after God in any religious tradition is met by Christ as the fulfillment of every genuine longing for the divine.27 Chapter 32 develops these cases fully.
The Pseudoevangelized. Beilby coins a word every pastor should learn: pseudoevangelized. These are people who "heard" the gospel, but what they heard was a distortion so severe that rejecting it was the morally appropriate response.28 Kunta Kinte heard Christ from his enslaver's mouth. Micha heard Christ from her abuser's mouth. To call that "hearing and rejecting" abuses the word "heard." Can anyone seriously claim that Kunta Kinte had an opportunity to respond to the good news? He heard about Jesus. He did not hear the gospel. And the gap between the two is the whole problem. Even an accurate gospel can be distorted in reception by trauma, culture, or timing. God can tell the difference between a genuine rejection of the real Christ and a "rejection" that was the predictable fruit of forces beyond honest understanding.
Beilby sharpens the point with his discussion of "soteriological vagueness." The differences between a person who heard the gospel and one who did not often come down to their geographical and temporal location, not to any morally significant property. And yet, one has access to a radically different eternal outcome. Under restrictivism, this seems to conflict with God's love, goodness, and justice.29
The Dying Encounter Model holds together for three reasons.
First, it preserves the necessity of explicit, conscious faith in Christ. It does not weaken John 14:6 or Acts 4:12. It does not make the cross optional or reduce Christ to one option among many. It simply relocates the moment of faith, for the unevangelized, to the moment of death. Mei still meets the real Jesus, face to face. She still says yes or no. No one is saved without knowing it.30
Second, it preserves the universal salvific will. When Paul writes that God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim 2:4), and when Peter writes that God is "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Pet 3:9), those texts mean what they say. The model gives those texts an actual mechanism. God's desire is not a wish. It is a will backed by an encounter that reaches every soul.31
Third, and this is the decisive point, it provides what the alternatives lack: an actual mechanism. Restrictivism has no mechanism at all for the unevangelized; they are simply lost. Inclusivism has a category (the anonymous Christian) but no encounter, no conscious relationship, no personal yes. Middle-knowledge universalism has a hypothetical response but no actual one. The Dying Encounter Model provides a real meeting between a real person and the real Christ—not a category, not a counterfactual, but a face-to-face encounter in which Mei, Anna, Sam, and Kunta Kinte each see the true Jesus and respond.32
Key Argument: Why the Dying Encounter Model Holds Together. (1) It preserves the necessity of explicit faith: no one is saved without a conscious encounter with Christ. (2) It preserves the universal salvific will: God's desire reaches every soul without geographic or temporal limit. (3) It provides an actual mechanism: a real meeting, not a hypothetical one or a categorical exception. The alternatives each sacrifice one of these three. The Dying Encounter Model keeps all three intact.
Stand with Mei at the threshold now.
Under restrictivism, her fate was sealed by latitude and longitude. Under inclusivism, she is declared a Christian without her consent or her encounter. Under the pre-death universal-opportunity view, her destiny rests on a choice she never actually made. Under the Dying Encounter Model, the real Mei meets the One who loved her into existence. At the threshold of dying, in that subjectively extended moment this book will spend many chapters exploring, she sees Him. She knows Him. She responds freely, knowingly, finally.
Will she say yes? I think she will. But the book does not require that she must. What it requires is that the encounter be real, and that whatever happens be just. If Mei accepts, she accepts the real Christ. If she refuses, she refuses with full knowledge and full freedom. Either way, the encounter was genuine, and the love that met her was boundless.33
The same is true for Anna, asleep in her mother's arms. And for Sam, locked behind an injured brain. And for Kunta Kinte, who knew the name of Jesus only as the religion of his chains. And for Micha, whose trust was shattered by the very people who spoke that name. And for Rapunzel, dead on the highway while her sister knelt in prayer. Each of them is met. Each of them encounters the real Christ. Each of them responds freely. The love that meets them does not expire at any border, at any age, at any cognitive threshold, at any distortion. It meets every soul at the threshold of dying.
This is not sentimentalism. It is a rigorous theological claim with a specific mechanism, one that the remaining thirty-one chapters of this book will develop. The encounter requires substance dualism (the soul can act when the body fails). It requires time-dilation (the moment can hold long). It requires a Christ who is present, personal, and active at the threshold. And it requires a God whose love does not give up—not at the grave, not at the border, not at the limits of the human brain.
The first four chapters have laid the foundation. God's character is the ground (Chapter 2). The universal atonement is the provision (Chapter 3). The soteriological problem of the unevangelized is the question that demands an answer. The Dying Encounter Model is that answer.
Now the book turns to the framework of the encounter itself. Chapter 5 asks the first question: what, exactly, is the moment of death? And how long can it last?
↑ 1. The World Christian Encyclopedia estimates that tens of billions of people have lived and died without any meaningful access to the Christian gospel. Beilby draws on these estimates. James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), 19–21.
↑ 2. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 19–20. He models it explicitly on the structure of the classical problem of evil, borrowing Alvin Plantinga’s framework.
↑ 3. 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9. The universal salvific will is developed in Chapter 2.
↑ 4. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 20–21.
↑ 5. Beilby frames this tension as structurally parallel to the logical problem of evil: any two of the three claims are compatible, but the conjunction of all three generates apparent incompatibility. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 20–21.
↑ 6. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 8–14. George, Anna, and Sam are his three foundational test cases.
↑ 7. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 12–13. Micha’s case is especially wrenching: abused by every person supposed to love and protect her, she has not truly heard the gospel in any meaningful sense.
↑ 8. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 13–14. Rapunzel is the twin of Gretel, who commits her life to Christ at the event Rapunzel was driving to attend.
↑ 9. John 14:6; Acts 4:12 (ESV). Stephen Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave: A Defence of Posthumous Salvation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2018), ch. 2, provides a helpful taxonomy of restrictivist positions.
↑ 10. Dale Moody, The Word of Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981). Moody’s challenge remains one of the sharpest moral objections to restrictivism.
↑ 11. 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9. The tension between the universal salvific will and restrictivism is the core of the soteriological problem.
↑ 12. The “age of accountability” doctrine, widely held in popular evangelicalism, lacks direct biblical support. Its existence reveals an internal instability: if explicit faith is always required, infants are lost; if infants are not lost, explicit faith is not always required.
↑ 13. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, ch. 2.
↑ 14. John Sanders defines inclusivism 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.” Quoted in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 244.
↑ 15. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 5 (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), 115–34; Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, §16; Clark Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992); John Sanders, No Other Name (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).
↑ 16. C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (London: Bodley Head, 1956). Emeth served Tash faithfully but is received by Aslan.
↑ 17. Romans 10:14–17 (ESV). Beilby’s critique of inclusivism as correct in direction but insufficient in mechanism runs through ch. 8 of Postmortem Opportunity.
↑ 18. Middle knowledge (Latin: scientia media) is the knowledge God has of what free creatures would freely choose in any possible circumstance. It was first developed by the sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina. For a contemporary defense, see Timothy A. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 2nd ed. (2026).
↑ 19. William Lane Craig, “‘No Other Name’: A Middle Knowledge Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation Through Christ,” in The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, ed. Philip L. Quinn and Kevin Meeker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Beilby engages Craig in Postmortem Opportunity, 92–93.
↑ 20. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 92–93. Beilby also notes the grounding objection, which questions what makes middle-knowledge claims true.
↑ 21. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 1 (“Of God and Men”). Hronich draws on Jason Marsh’s proposal that God places people in environments conducive to their long-term salvation through postmortem grace. See also R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, ch. “Providence, Freedom, and God’s Creation of the Damned,” ~p. 134.
↑ 22. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, passim; Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, passim; Jerry L. Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 5.
↑ 23. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 97–98. He uses “postmortem” broadly to encompass the moment of death as well as the intermediate state, treating moment-of-death advocates as allies.
↑ 24. Hebrews 9:27 (ESV). The full exegesis is in Chapter 24.
↑ 25. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 59–63. He argues that cognitive idealization in the resurrection is uncontroversial: no one expects a person with advanced dementia to stand before Christ with compromised faculties.
↑ 26. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 63–65. Sam’s case illustrates that salvation involves more than cognition.
↑ 27. This is the book’s own application of the encounter to the religious contexts of the unevangelized, building on the inclusivist insight that God’s grace is at work beyond the visible church while insisting that encounter, not category, is the mechanism.
↑ 28. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 219–20. “Hearing” requires genuine comprehension of the good news, not mere auditory exposure to distorted information.
↑ 29. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 99–101. The “soteriological vagueness” problem shows that the difference between the saved and the lost, under restrictivism, often reduces to location rather than any morally significant property.
↑ 30. John 14:6; Acts 4:12 (ESV). The Dying Encounter Model honors these texts fully. It does not relativize Christ’s uniqueness; it extends the moment of encounter.
↑ 31. 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9 (ESV). Thomas Talbott argues compellingly that a love which arbitrarily expires at the moment of biological death is not the love described in these texts. See Chapter 25 for full engagement with Talbott.
↑ 32. This three-part synthesis is the book’s foundational argument. It shapes everything that follows.
↑ 33. The book’s eschatological neutrality means it does not pronounce on what happens to those who refuse. Conditional immortality, eternal conscious torment, and universal reconciliation are all compatible with the Dying Encounter Model. See Chapter 29.