Chapter 11
When the Light Shows You Everything You’ve Been
Condensed Edition
Howard Storm was a committed atheist when his intestine ruptured in a Paris hospital room in 1985. What followed was one of the most harrowing near-death experiences on record. After a descent into darkness and an encounter with hostile beings, Storm cried out for help. Light appeared. He was rescued. And then came the part he was not ready for.1
In the presence of beings of light (whom Storm later identified as Jesus and attending angels), his entire life played back before him. Not as a highlight reel. Every moment. Every word he had spoken. Every act of cruelty, every flash of kindness. But the review carried a feature that shattered him: he felt what others had felt when he had acted. A sarcastic remark he had forgotten became the wound it had left in his student. A small kindness he had dismissed became the warmth it had planted in a stranger.2
Storm wept. He wanted to hide. But the beings did not condemn him. They showed him his life in the same spirit a loving parent shows a child the mess the child has made: not to humiliate, but to teach. The review was devastating and tender at once.
This chapter argues that the life review, one of the most consistent features of near-death experiences, is far more than a psychological curiosity. It is a window into the mechanism of divine judgment. Not judgment as a courtroom verdict, but judgment as the soul seeing itself clearly in the presence of perfect love. And that seeing is the heart of purification.
The life review is among the best-documented elements of NDEs. Bruce Greyson’s research places it in the cognitive cluster of the Greyson NDE Scale, alongside time alteration, speed of thought, and sudden understanding.3 Kenneth Ring found that roughly a quarter of NDErs in his early studies reported a life review, with the percentage rising in deeper experiences.4 Jeffrey Long’s large-scale survey data confirmed the pattern across thousands of cases.5
The reports share a striking core. The experiencer re-lives events, not as distant memories but as if they are happening again. The review is comprehensive, covering the whole life or large swaths of it. It is multi-perspectival: the person feels what others felt in response to their actions. A harsh word spoken in 1972 is felt from the other side, as the person who heard it felt it in the moment. A forgotten act of patience is experienced from the receiving end, with its full emotional weight restored.6
The review is also illuminating. Connections that were invisible during life become plain. The experiencer sees how a pattern of anger in one relationship was rooted in a wound from a different one. They see how kindness they never noticed had shaped a stranger’s life. The understanding is instantaneous and total in a way that ordinary memory never achieves.
Two more features stand out. First, the review is accompanied. A loving presence stands with the experiencer through the process. Storm identified this presence as Jesus. Others describe it as a being of light or simply as a warmth that holds them. The presence does not accuse or lecture. It witnesses. Second, the review is non-condemnatory in tone, even when the content is painful. The truth itself is enough. The presence seems to say: Look. See. I know all of this, and I am still here. Long’s “God Study,” the largest survey of its kind, confirmed this pattern across hundreds of cases. NDErs almost universally report self-judgment rather than condemnation from outside. One woman, Jean R., whose account NDERF classified as “exceptional,” described it this way: her life review was “all about my relationships with others,” and she felt what they felt. “No one was judging me,” she said. “I was judging myself.” Yet the “feeling of unconditional love” never wavered.7
Primary Source: A Life-Review Report
Anita Moorjani, who experienced an NDE during organ failure from late-stage lymphoma in 2006, described her life review as an experience of understanding, not blame. She saw how fear had driven her choices and how self-judgment had shaped her suffering. She saw how each decision had rippled outward into others’ lives. The review, she said, was saturated with a compassion so total that it dissolved her shame. She understood everything she had done and everything it had cost, and she was held through all of it.8
Raymond Moody, who first catalogued the phenomenon in 1975, noted that the review often unfolds at impossible speed. An entire lifetime passes in what feels like seconds or minutes of clinical time. Some NDErs describe it as simultaneous: the whole life seen at once, as if spread across a single plane. Others describe it as sequential, unfolding scene by scene from childhood forward.9 Both patterns point to the same reality: the dying soul enters a mode of consciousness where normal clock-time no longer governs experience. (Chapter 10 explored this time-alteration in detail.)
The aftereffects are well documented. NDErs who undergo a life review consistently report lasting moral change. They become more compassionate, less materialistic, more attuned to others’ feelings. Ring called this pattern the “omega effect.”10 Pim van Lommel’s prospective study found similar changes persisting for years after the experience. Strikingly, J. Steve Miller found that life reviews appear regularly in NDEs but are rare or absent in deathbed visions, where the dying person does not return. Raymond Moody confirmed the pattern. The distinction makes theological sense: the review transforms the person who will carry its lessons back into life.11 The review does not merely inform. It transforms.
The theological significance of the life review starts with its resemblance to judgment. But it is judgment of a particular kind.
The New Testament’s primary word for judgment is κρíσις (krisis), a term that carries the sense of separation, discernment, and exposure.12 In John 3:19–21, Jesus says that the light has come into the world, and that judgment consists in this: people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. The one who does the truth comes to the light, so that their deeds may be revealed. Judgment, in John’s Gospel, is not the gavel coming down. It is the light turning on.
That is exactly what the life review does. The light turns on. The soul sees. It sees everything it has been, in the company of the One who already knows.
The parallel extends further. In John’s account, judgment is self-sorting. People “loved darkness rather than light.” The light does not push anyone away. It simply shines, and each person’s response to the light reveals who they are. The life review operates in the same way. The truth is shown. The soul responds. The response is the judgment.
J. Steve Miller has pressed the compatibility point forcefully. Since the Bible calls Jesus a “friend of sinners” (Matt 11:19) and says God “is kind to ungrateful and evil men” (Luke 6:35), a gentle and loving review is exactly what we should expect. The life review shows every sin clearly, often through the eyes of the person who was hurt. That is a devastating judgment on how we have lived. God does not need to yell once we have felt the blow ourselves. Yet it is not always gentle. Barbara Rommer, studying three hundred NDEs, found a category of distressing life reviews where the person “feels he is judged by a higher power.” One NDEr said: “God judged me in that life review. He humbled me to my knees. It was designed to wake me up.” The conclusion? We get the review we need. Some respond to tenderness. Others require something stronger.12a
Key Argument: The Life Review as the Mechanism of Judgment
The life review accomplishes what traditional Christian eschatology has spread across several doctrines. It is judgment in the sense of John 3:19–21, where the light reveals. It is purification through exposure in the presence of love. It is the ground of self-knowledge. And for those who submit to its truth, it is transformative. All of these occur within a single element of the dying experience, within the moment of death itself.
This convergence matters for the book’s thesis. Traditional Western theology has often separated these functions. Judgment happens at the throne. Purification happens in purgatory. Transformation happens across a lifetime of sanctification. The life review suggests that all three happen together, in a single encounter, at the threshold of death.
The life review is the mechanism by which the dying soul is purified. Not by fire, not by duration, but by truth experienced in the presence of perfect love.
I believe this is how purification actually works. For the soul that submits, the pain of seeing the harm is real. Storm wept. Moorjani trembled. The weight of a whole life’s selfishness, laid bare at once, is not a small thing. But the love of Christ relieves the pain as repentance deepens. Each moment of honest seeing is a moment of release. The guilt does not accumulate. It dissolves as the soul surrenders to the truth about itself and to the mercy of the One holding it.13
Think of it as the difference between seeing a doctor about a wound and ignoring the wound until it festers. The doctor’s touch hurts, but the hurt is healing. The untouched wound only gets worse. The life review opens the wound in the presence of the Healer. The soul that submits to the opening finds healing. The soul that pulls away does not.
For the soul that refuses, the same review becomes a different experience. The truth is the same. The love offering relief is the same. But the soul that will not accept the love cannot escape the knowing. The review becomes ongoing pain without the relief that comes through surrender. The soul sees the harm and refuses the healing. The light that would purify instead burns, not because the light has changed, but because the soul will not open to it.14
This account of purification is closer to the Eastern Orthodox tradition than to the Western Catholic one. I want to develop both briefly, because the comparison helps us see what the life review is and is not.
The Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory, especially as developed in the medieval West, imagines a prolonged postmortem state in which the soul is cleansed through suffering before it can enter God’s presence. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§1030–1032) describes purgatory as a state of final purification for those who die in grace but are not yet perfectly purified.15 In the popular Catholic imagination, this state can last centuries or longer. Prayers and masses offered for the dead are said to shorten it.
Note: The Life Review and Catholic Purgatory
The book’s account shares Catholic purgatory’s concern for real purification but locates it differently. Purification is not centuries-long. It is not spatially separate from Christ’s presence. It is a dimension of the moment-of-death encounter, subjectively extended by the time-dilation that NDErs consistently report, but occurring within the encounter itself. Ladislaus Boros, himself a Jesuit, was already moving in this direction in 1959. His hypothesis that purification occurs in the moment of death anticipated the NDE data by decades (Chapter 16).16
I want to be fair to the Catholic tradition. Post-Vatican-II theology has moved toward more nuanced understandings of purgatory. Joseph Ratzinger’s Eschatology described purgatory in relational rather than temporal terms, and the 1979 CDF letter Recentiores episcoporum synodi cautioned against treating it as a place in space.17 The best Catholic thinking is closer to this book’s picture than the popular medieval version is. The difference lies mainly in whether the purification requires a state separate from the encounter or is a dimension of it.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition offers something closer to what the life review reveals. The Orthodox have never formally defined purgatory as a doctrine. Instead, figures like Gregory Palamas, Maximus the Confessor, Hierotheos Vlachos, and Kallistos Ware speak of the divine light itself as the agent of purification. In this tradition, the same uncreated light of God is experienced as joy by the receptive soul and as fire by the resistant one.18
Palamas taught that the divine energies are not created intermediaries but God himself, reaching out to his creatures. The soul that opens to these energies is warmed and illuminated. The soul that turns away experiences the same energies as torment, not because God punishes, but because the soul’s resistance transforms grace into pain.19 Vlachos developed this theme at length, arguing that heaven and hell are not places but two modes of experiencing the same divine presence.20 Ware echoed the point: God does not send anyone to hell; the soul creates its own hell by refusing the love that surrounds it.21
Insight: Convergence with Eastern Orthodoxy
The life review maps almost exactly onto the Orthodox picture. The same light exposes, purifies, and warms the willing soul. It also exposes and burns the resistant one. The difference lies in the soul’s response, not in the nature of the light. This convergence between NDE phenomenology and a patristic tradition reaching back to the fourth century is striking and lends independent support to both.
I find this convergence compelling. The NDE researchers did not read Palamas. The Eastern fathers did not anticipate the work of Greyson and Ring. Yet they describe the same structure: a presence of overwhelming love, a total exposure of the self, and two radically different responses depending on the soul’s willingness to be seen. When two independent lines of evidence, separated by sixteen centuries, point to the same picture, the picture deserves serious attention.
Ladislaus Boros came remarkably close to describing the life review fifty years before the NDE researchers made it famous. In The Mystery of Death, Boros argues that the moment of death is the occasion of what he calls “total self-encounter.” The soul, freed from the body’s limits, sees itself completely for the first time. It stands before its own full reality.22
Boros meant this in a very specific way. During life, the soul cannot fully possess itself. It hides behind roles, habits, distractions, and the sheer busyness of bodily existence. Boros called this condition “ontological indigence.” The soul is genuinely poor in self-knowledge because the body’s life keeps it busy with other things. In death, all of that falls away. The soul stands naked before its own reality. And for the first time, it can act with complete freedom, because it finally sees clearly what it is acting about.23
This self-encounter is, for Boros, intrinsically an encounter with Christ. The soul does not merely see itself in isolation. It sees itself in the light of the One who made it, who knows it entirely, and who loves it entirely. The self-knowledge and the Christ-knowledge arrive together. They are two dimensions of the same event.24
Boros also anticipated the purification dimension. In his discussion of the state of purification, he follows the line begun by Cajetan, Thomas Aquinas’s great commentator, who transferred the purification process to the moment of death itself. The soul’s concentrated self-knowledge, in the presence of Christ, is enough to accomplish what Catholic theology had traditionally extended across purgatorial centuries. Boros saw no reason for the extension. The moment itself is sufficient.25
What Boros did not have, writing in 1959, was the empirical confirmation that NDE research would later supply. He described what the dying experience should look like if his philosophical and theological reasoning was sound. The life-review data show something remarkably similar to what he imagined. The philosophical anticipation and the empirical evidence converge.
A Reformed critic might raise a sharp question at this point. Doesn’t the life review grant a postmortem second chance? If the dying soul sees itself clearly, repents, and is purified, haven’t we smuggled in an opportunity for salvation after death, exactly what Hebrews 9:27 appears to rule out?
The book’s response is the same response it offers throughout. The life review occurs during dying, not after death. The soul is not yet dead. The biological process of dying is still underway. What looks from the bedside like seconds is, on the soul’s side, a subjectively extended encounter. The review is part of that encounter. For the unevangelized, this may be the first and only opportunity to see themselves in the light of Christ. For the evangelized, it is the culmination of a lifetime of formation. In neither case is it a “second chance after death.” It is the fullest moment of a dying life.26
There is also a deeper point. The life review is not adding anything to the soul’s history. It is not giving the person new information they never had access to. It is showing them, at last, what was always true. The light was always shining. The consequences were always real. The soul simply could not see them clearly through the noise of embodied life. In death, the noise stops. The truth appears. This is less like a second chance and more like the first clear view.
This is worth pausing on. The life review is the most obviously tailored element of the near-death experience. No two reviews are alike, because no two lives are alike. The review is not a generic screening. It is a personally composed encounter between this soul and the God who knows it. What needs to be seen is shown. What needs to be felt is felt. The soul receives exactly what it needs to be fully known.
Here we get our first real glimpse of the “optimal” character of the whole moment-of-death encounter. Jerry Walls gives this quality its name: optimal grace. God does not offer a generic appeal. He offers the best appeal He can make to each particular heart, composed with full knowledge of what this soul needs. The life review is the first empirical evidence of that tailoring. God does not show the soul a random selection of its past. He shows it exactly what it needs to see. Chapter 28 will develop the idea at length.
If the life review is so loving, so revealing, and so perfectly composed for each soul, can anyone actually refuse its invitation? Doesn’t the overwhelming compassion of the presence make resistance impossible?
I don’t think so. The life review exposes, but it does not override. The soul sees the truth, but it can still turn from the truth. Self-deception runs deeper than most of us want to admit. A soul that has spent a lifetime building walls against love can look directly at the love and still refuse it, not because the love is weak, but because the will is that stubborn. Thomas Talbott has pressed this point harder than anyone, and Chapter 25 takes his argument seriously. Chapter 27 develops the book’s answer: genuine refusal remains possible even in the face of perfect love.27
R. Zachary Manis has articulated the philosophical structure here with care. His “Divine Presence Model” describes exactly how a soul in the immediate presence of God can experience that presence as either joy or torment, depending on the soul’s disposition. The life review is the NDE-data face of what Manis describes philosophically (Chapter 26).28
What about the souls whose lives offer less to review? A baby who dies at birth has no life-review material in the usual sense. A severely cognitively impaired person may have lived decades without forming the kind of memories that NDErs report re-experiencing. The unevangelized person has never heard the name of Christ, so how does the review point them toward a Savior they do not know?
The book’s answer for each of these is the same: the life review is not the whole encounter. It is one element of a larger meeting with Christ. For the baby, the review may be brief in content but the encounter is full in purpose. The soul meets the One who made it, and it responds (Chapter 30). For the cognitively impaired, the soul’s capacity has never been limited in the way the brain was. The review reveals a person who was always whole before God (Chapter 31). For the unevangelized, the review shows them what they did with what they knew, and then the gospel is given in full (Chapter 32).29
The common thread across all these cases is tailoring. God meets each soul where it is. The encounter is not a one-size-fits-all screening. It is a personally composed meeting, and the life review is the part of that meeting where the soul comes to know itself as God has always known it.
I want to close with a word about what kind of God the life review reveals.
If this chapter’s reading is right, judgment is not God reading a list of charges. It is not a cosmic courtroom. It is not a sentence handed down from above. It is the soul seeing itself in the light of a love that already knows everything and has already decided to forgive.
The dying person is not arraigned. They are received.
Storm saw his worst cruelty, and the beings of light wept with him, not at him. Moorjani saw her deepest fears, and the presence dissolved them with a compassion that needed no words. Across thousands of reports, the pattern holds: the review is painful because truth is painful, but it is saturated in a love that makes the pain bearable and the repentance possible.
This is the gentlest doctrine of judgment ever proposed. It honors the gravity of sin. Every harm is felt, every wound exposed. It honors the reality of human responsibility. The soul sees clearly what it has done. And it honors the character of God. The Judge is the Lover who stands beside you while you look, and who catches you when the seeing brings you to your knees.30
If your loved one’s last moments held nothing more than what NDErs routinely report, those moments held a clarifying review of her whole life. She knows herself now, fully and honestly, in the arms of the One who made her. She is ready to be met.
↑ 1. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005), chs. 1–3. Storm’s NDE occurred in Paris in June 1985. His account of the life review is among the most detailed in the literature.
↑ 2. Storm, My Descent into Death, ch. 4. The multi-perspectival quality—feeling what others felt in response to one’s actions—is one of the most consistent features of life-review reports. See also Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021), ch. 5.
↑ 3. Bruce Greyson, “The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, Reliability, and Validity,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171, no. 6 (1983): 369–75. The life review falls in the cognitive cluster alongside time alteration, speed of thought, and sudden understanding.
↑ 4. Kenneth Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980), chs. 3–4. Ring found the life review more common in deeper experiences (those scoring higher on his “Weighted Core Experience Index”).
↑ 5. Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010), ch. 4. Long’s NDERF database provides one of the largest samples of life-review accounts. His later “God Study,” reported in God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), ch. 6, extends the analysis specifically to the question of judgment, finding that NDErs overwhelmingly report self-judgment rather than external condemnation (pp. 101–109).
↑ 6. The multi-perspectival feature is the most theologically striking. It is one thing to remember what you did; it is another to feel the full impact from the other person’s point of view. The effect is moral transformation through empathic exposure. See Ring, Lessons from the Light (with Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino; New York: Insight/Plenum, 1998), ch. 7.
↑ 7. These features are remarkably consistent across cases. See Greyson, After, ch. 5; Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010), ch. 3; Long, Evidence of the Afterlife, ch. 4. Long’s later “God Study” confirmed the pattern at scale: NDErs in his database consistently described the review as saturated with unconditional love, with self-judgment replacing any external verdict. See Long, God and the Afterlife, pp. 106–109.
↑ 8. Anita Moorjani, Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2012), chs. 7–9. Moorjani’s NDE occurred in February 2006 during organ failure from stage-four lymphoma. She experienced a complete remission afterward. Her account should be read with the appropriate caution that accompanies all individual NDE reports.
↑ 9. Raymond Moody, Life After Life: The Bestselling Original Investigation That Revealed “Near-Death Experiences” (1975; repr., New York: HarperOne, 2001), ch. 3. See also Chapter 10 for the broader treatment of temporal anomalies in NDEs.
↑ 10. Kenneth Ring, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (New York: William Morrow, 1984), chs. 6–8. The “omega effect” includes increased compassion, decreased materialism, greater ecological concern, and enhanced spiritual sensitivity.
↑ 11. Pim van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–45. Van Lommel’s longitudinal follow-up at two and eight years showed persistent transformative effects in NDErs compared to non-NDE cardiac arrest survivors. On the striking absence of life reviews in deathbed visions (where the dying person does not return), see J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, vol. 1 (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek, 2021), ch. 14. Miller consulted Raymond Moody, who confirmed that he could recall life reviews only in shared death experiences reported by the non-dying bystander.
↑ 12. The Greek κρíσις (krisis, “judgment,” “discernment,” “separation”) in John 3:19 denotes not a juridical verdict but the exposure and separation effected by light itself. The verb κρíνω (krinο) carries the same range. John’s use is distinctive: judgment is not something God does to people; it is something the light does in them.
↑ 12a. J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, vol. 3 of Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek, 2023), ch. 8. Miller argues that the NDE life review is deeply compatible with the biblical picture of judgment: God’s kindness leads to repentance (Rom 2:4), and showing us our own sin clearly — “often through the eyes of those we’ve either hurt or helped, without our shallow excuses and coverups” — is itself a profound form of judgment. The Rommer quotations are drawn from Barbara R. Rommer, Blessing in Disguise: Another Side of the Near-Death Experience (St. Paul: Llewellyn, 2000), 34, 88, 92.
↑ 13. This account of purification-through-surrender builds on the framework developed in Part Two (§2.10) of this book’s theological commitments. The key claim is that purification is not an additional postmortem process but a dimension of the moment-of-death encounter itself.
↑ 14. The asymmetry between submission and resistance—same light, same love, radically different experience—is developed further in Chapter 19 and in R. Zachary Manis’s philosophical account of the “Divine Presence Model” (Chapter 26). See Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
↑ 15. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), §§1030–1032.
↑ 16. Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death (1962; repr., Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish, 2020), III.5. Boros argues that the soul in the moment of death can undergo the purification traditionally located in a separate postmortem state. The Monkfish edition includes Cynthia Bourgeault’s introduction and commentary, which develops Boros’s kenotic framework.
↑ 17. Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988). The 1979 CDF letter Recentiores episcoporum synodi introduced greater caution about spatial and temporal language for postmortem states.
↑ 18. The patristic foundation is in Gregory Palamas, Triads, esp. I.3 and II.3, where Palamas distinguishes the divine essence from the divine energies and argues that the energies are uncreated: God himself in his outward activity. The distinction is central to the Orthodox understanding of both theosis and judgment.
↑ 19. For Palamas, the divine energies are not adjustable. God does not soften them for one soul and intensify them for another. The soul’s disposition determines how the same energies are experienced. See also Maximus the Confessor, whose theology of cosmic liturgy and final restoration informs the broader Orthodox picture.
↑ 20. Hierotheos (Vlachos), Metropolitan of Nafpaktos, Life After Death, trans. Esther Williams (Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1996). Vlachos argues that heaven and hell are two experiences of the same divine presence, not two separate locations.
↑ 21. Kallistos Ware, The Inner Kingdom, Collected Works 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 193–215. Ware’s essay “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?” draws on Isaac the Syrian and Gregory of Nyssa to argue that the Orthodox tradition is more hospitable to universal hope than the Western traditions.
↑ 22. Boros, Mystery of Death, II.8. The phrase “total self-encounter” (totale Selbstbegegnung) is central to Boros’s account. No longer able to hide behind the forms of “having” afforded by embodiment, the soul must face what Boros calls “ontological indigence” (p. 76): the condition of being utterly exposed before its own full reality.
↑ 23. Boros, Mystery of Death, II.8. Boros writes that the soul, freed from bodily constraints, can for the first time exercise complete freedom because it finally perceives the full truth about itself. The hidden dynamism of existence is “brought to completion, freely and consciously.”
↑ 24. Boros, Mystery of Death, III.2. For Boros, the encounter with Christ is not a second event that follows the self-encounter. The two are one: to see oneself fully is already to see oneself in the light of the One who made you.
↑ 25. Boros, Mystery of Death, III.5. Boros follows the line initiated by Cajetan (1469–1534), Thomas Aquinas’s commentator, who transferred the purification process to the moment of death itself: the soul’s act of perfect charity, exercised with its full concentrated strength, effects the purification that other hypotheses extended across purgatorial duration.
↑ 26. The key distinction is during dying versus after death. The book’s thesis is that the encounter occurs at the threshold, within the biological process of dying, before death is complete. This preserves the force of Hebrews 9:27 (“it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment”) because the review-encounter is technically antemortem. See the discussion in Chapter 33.
↑ 27. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), argues that no rational agent fully informed of God’s love could permanently refuse it. The book engages this argument at length in Chapter 25 and develops its response in Chapter 27.
↑ 28. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God. Manis’s “Divine Presence Model” argues that the same divine presence is experienced as beatific or tormenting depending on the soul’s moral and volitional orientation. The philosophical structure maps onto NDE life-review data with striking precision.
↑ 29. The life review for special cases (infants, the cognitively impaired, the unevangelized) is treated in Part VII of this book. The common thread: the encounter is tailored by God to the soul’s actual capacity and need. The life review is one element, not the whole encounter.
↑ 30. The pastoral significance of this picture of judgment is developed more fully in Chapter 34.