Chapter 19
How the Meeting with Christ Actually Works in Real Souls
Condensed Edition
She was ninety-one and had been dying for three days. Her breathing had gone shallow. Her family had gathered, taken turns holding her hand, sung her favorite hymns. The hospice nurse said it could be any hour now.
What was happening inside? Not in her lungs or her blood pressure. Inside. In the place where she was still herself, still aware, still capable of choosing.
This chapter tries to answer that question. We've argued that every dying person meets the risen Christ at the moment of death (Chapter 18). We've argued that the encounter is real, conscious, and free. We've argued that time dilation stretches those clinical seconds into a period long enough for genuine interaction (Chapter 10). But what does the interaction actually look like? What happens during it? How does it unfold?1
I want to offer a working model. Not a script God follows. Not a rigid sequence every soul must walk through in the same order. A model, built from NDE reports, from Boros's philosophical work, from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and from Scripture. Think of it the way a physician thinks of a typical disease course: most patients go through recognizable phases, but every patient is different.
I'll describe seven phases. They're offered as a helpful guide, not a fixed formula. Some souls may skip a phase or spend longer in another. The order itself, as we'll see, may vary. But the pattern is consistent enough across the NDE data and the theological tradition to be worth laying out.2
The soul becomes aware that something has changed. The body is failing, and for the first time the soul senses the boundary between life and death. NDE researchers call this the "separation experience." The dying person often reports looking down at their own body, watching medical staff work, feeling surprisingly calm.3 Boros puts it in more philosophical terms: the soul begins to emerge from what he calls ontological indigence, the lifelong condition in which we can never fully possess ourselves. In death, that limitation starts to fall away.4
Think of it like waking from a dream you didn't know you were having. All your life you've seen through a glass darkly, to borrow Paul's phrase. Now the glass clears. The soul senses that the dying moment is not an ending but the start of something.
This is not panic. It is awakening.
The soul sees itself. Not a summary. Not a highlight reel. The full life, every action, every word, every effect on others, present at once in the presence of Christ. This is what NDErs call the "life review" and what Boros calls "total self-encounter." We gave this phenomenon its own chapter (Chapter 11), so I won't repeat the evidence here. What matters for the dynamics is this: the life review is not judgment imposed from outside. It is truth told from inside. The soul sees itself as Christ sees it.5
Primary Source. Tom Sawyer, who experienced a detailed life review during his 1978 NDE, described it this way: "I could feel what they felt when I did something to them. Not just the good things. Every sarcastic remark, every cruel word. I felt the pain I'd caused, and I felt the joy too. It was all there, all at once." This pattern of experiencing one's own impact on others is among the most consistent features reported across NDE accounts.6
The life review matters for everything that follows. It's the soil in which submission or resistance takes root. A soul that sees what it has done to others, and sees it in the light of perfect love, cannot pretend anymore.
Christ pursues the soul. Not with a pamphlet. Not with a generic announcement. The pursuit is fitted to who this particular person is, shaped by the soul's formed character, loves, wounds, and resistances. The NDEr who was a lifelong atheist does not hear the same words as the one who grew up singing hymns. The soul that built walls out of pride encounters a different approach than the soul that built walls out of grief.7
This responsiveness is not a lucky guess. It is not Christ reading the room. It is what theologians call optimal grace, a term coined by the philosopher Jerry Walls: God offers each person the best possible appeal, fitted perfectly to who they are, because God already knows by middle knowledge which approach this soul would receive. (The full case for optimal grace and middle knowledge is developed in Chapter 28; here I note only the engine.) The encounter is tailored. It is personal address, not a broadcast.8
The soul begins to respond. For some the response is immediate: they see Christ, they see themselves, and they submit. Howard Storm, the atheist art professor whose hellish NDE led to his conversion, described the moment he cried out to Jesus as instant surrender after long resistance.9 For others the response is gradual: layers of resistance peeling back, old wounds surfacing, pride softening. Anita Moorjani, who encountered unconditional love during her NDE while dying of cancer, described a dawning realization rather than a single dramatic turn.10
And for some, the response is refusal. The soul sees the love and will not receive it. An initial "no," however, is not necessarily the final word. Within the still-open encounter, a soul that has refused may be permitted to taste what its "no" means: a stretch of experienced separation, a time in the dark. From that darkness the soul may still call out. And it is answered.
For those moving toward submission, the pain of the life review is met by forgiveness. This is not a legal transaction. It is more like a wound being cleaned. The submitting soul walks through the pain with Christ, not alone. Every harm the soul caused is acknowledged. Every lie the soul believed about itself is exposed. And at each point, the love of Christ receives the confession and gives back grace.11
I want to be precise about this. The purification isn't punishment for sins already forgiven. It is the soul's free participation in letting those sins go. A person who has carried bitterness for forty years doesn't shed it painlessly. The letting-go hurts. But the hurt is healing, not harm. The soul comes out the other side lighter, cleaner, more itself than it has ever been.
Boros calls this the "state of purification," and he locates it within the single encounter, not as a centuries-long postmortem process.12 That's where I stand too. The purification is real, and it may be painful. But it happens in the presence of the One who loves you most, and the pain leads to healing.
The response becomes final. The soul has seen itself truly, been pursued fully, and now its choice settles. For the submitting soul, this is the moment of full surrender to Christ. For the resisting soul, this is the hardening of refusal into a settled posture. The encounter does not end prematurely. It lasts as long as the soul needs to reach a genuine decision.13
I should be honest about something here. I don't know exactly how "final" works from God's side. I believe the encounter gives every soul the fullest possible chance. Whether a soul that refuses in the encounter still has some further opportunity later is part of the eschatological question I've chosen to leave open. What I can say is that the encounter itself is sufficient. Nothing more was needed. Nothing was withheld.
The soul passes to its destination. Paradise and the presence of God for those who submitted. Hades, the state of separation, for those who refused. What happens next, after the transition, is a separate question that the book deliberately leaves open (Chapter 29). The encounter itself is over. The clinical death event is, from the bedside, complete.14
Key Argument. The encounter is not a single instant followed by a binary choice, like checking a box on a ballot. It is a process with recognizable phases: awareness, self-encounter, pursuit, response, purification, decision, and transition. The phases are offered as a working model, not a rigid sequence. They draw on NDE phenomenology, Boros's philosophical analysis, the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and Scripture. The model's strength is that it makes sense of the wide variety of NDE reports while giving a coherent account of how God's love and the soul's freedom interact at the moment of death.15
Here is something I think many readers will find surprising. The seven phases are a helpful map, but the order of the phases is composed per soul. God does not follow one script. Two variants matter most, and both have support in the NDE data.
Note: Two Sequence Variants. The dark opening. For some souls the encounter does not begin with the felt presence of Christ at all. It begins in apparent absence: silence, darkness, even torment. Nancy Evans Bush's research classifies these as "void" or "hellish" NDEs (Chapter 12 owns the NDE data). Howard Storm's experience began in exactly this way: attacked by hostile beings, lost in darkness, remembering a childhood hymn, crying out to Jesus, and being rescued. For such a soul, the pursuit's first word is not "come" but felt silence. The absence is the opening of the address, not its failure. The dark passage after an initial refusal. The order can also run: meeting Christ, refusing him, tasting what that "no" means in a stretch of experienced separation, and from that darkness crying out. In this variant the encounter has already begun in light before the soul enters darkness of its own making. In both variants, the encounter remains open until the decision is settled. The darkness is the soul's own condition experienced honestly, never a terror tactic. (The theological rationale for why a loving God would compose such a sequence is developed in Chapter 28.)16
I expect the dark opening to be the more common shape, though I hold that loosely. In most cases, the soul's distance from God means its first honest experience of its own condition is darkness. But I stay agnostic case by case. What the book does not claim is that every dark NDE resolves. Some experiencers report no rescue. I won't pretend to know from outside which unresolved cases were interrupted sequences and which were refusal hardening.17
What I will say is this. The darkness is always truth-telling. It is not a scare tactic. A frightened "yes" is not faith. A soul bullied into submission has not freely chosen Christ. If God opens the encounter in darkness for some souls, it is because truth about the soul's real condition is the only starting point from which a genuine "yes" can eventually come. That distinction matters enormously, and Chapter 28 develops it fully.
The soul that says yes experiences something remarkable. The pain of the life review does not vanish, but it is received differently. Where before the soul saw the harm it caused and flinched, now it sees the harm and grieves openly, and the grief is met by the love of Christ. The soul experiences being fully known and fully accepted at the same time. Not approved of in every action. Known. Accepted as a person. Loved into transformation.18
I think of it this way. Imagine you have done something deeply wrong to someone you love. You've carried the guilt for years. Then one day you confess it, and the person looks at you and says, "I already knew. And I love you." That relief, that breaking open, that rush of gratitude and sorrow together is a small picture of what the submitting soul experiences in the encounter with Christ. Except that Christ's knowledge is perfect, his forgiveness complete, and his love without limit.
NDErs who report life reviews consistently describe this same pattern: devastating honesty about their failures, combined with overwhelming acceptance. Kenneth Ring documented dozens of such accounts. So did Pim van Lommel. The reports converge on a truth the church has always known: confession in the presence of love brings freedom.19
The submitting soul doesn't just receive forgiveness. It is changed by it. Self-understanding shifts. The person who defined themselves by their career now sees they were defined by their loves. The person who thought they were beyond repair discovers repair was already underway. The transformation is not earned. It is received. It flows from the encounter itself.
The resisting soul sees the same things the submitting soul sees. The same life review. The same perfect love pressing in. But the response is different. The resisting soul will not receive it.
Why not? The reasons vary. Pride that cannot bend. Anger at God that has become an identity. Self-sufficiency so deep the soul would rather suffer than depend. Attachment to pleasures or powers the soul knows Christ's love would transform. The formed character of a lifetime does not dissolve instantly in the presence of light. Some souls have spent decades building walls, and the walls hold.20
The refusal compounds pain. The divine love is still there, still pressing, but the soul won't receive it. Think of it like standing in front of a fire when you're soaking wet and shivering, but you refuse to step close enough to be warmed. The fire isn't punishing you. The fire is doing what fire does. You're the one standing back.
C. S. Lewis captured this dynamic beautifully in The Great Divorce. The lost souls in Lewis's story are not prevented from entering heaven. They are invited. But the grass of heaven hurts their feet. The light hurts their eyes. They shrink from the very joy they were made for, because they have formed themselves into souls that can no longer bear it. Hell, for Lewis, is a door locked from the inside.20
The Eastern Orthodox tradition has said this better than anyone. The same divine light that warms the saints burns the lost. The difference is not in the light. It is in the soul's response to it.
Primary Source. St. Isaac the Syrian, the seventh-century mystic, wrote: "Those who find themselves in Gehenna will be chastised with the scourge of love. How cruel and bitter this torment of love will be! For those who understand that they have sinned against love undergo greater sufferings than those produced by the most fearful tortures. The sorrow which takes hold of the heart which has sinned against love is more piercing than any other pain. It is not right to say that the sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God." Isaac's insight is striking: the pain of the lost is not the absence of God's love but the presence of a love they refuse to accept.21
Insight: The Asymmetry. God offers everything love can offer. Every soul receives the same quality of love, the same completeness of pursuit, the same fullness of truth. The difference in outcome is entirely on the soul's side. This matters for the doctrine of human responsibility. Nobody is lost because of ignorance. Nobody is lost because the offer was insufficient. Nobody is lost because God didn't try hard enough. If a soul is finally lost, it is because that soul refused a complete and perfectly tailored offering of grace. The playing field is perfectly level. The asymmetry is in the response, not the offer.22
The philosopher R. Zachary Manis has developed a model that converges remarkably with the picture I've just described. In his book Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, Manis argues that hell is not a place where God is absent. It is the experience of God's inescapable presence by a soul that refuses to receive it. The same divine love that produces joy in the blessed produces torment in the lost. The difference is in the creature's response, not in God's disposition.23
I didn't build the encounter model from Manis. The basic insight goes back to the Eastern Fathers, to Basil of Caesarea and Isaac the Syrian. But the convergence is confirming. An analytic philosopher working independently from the data I've been drawing on reaches a structurally identical conclusion: same love, different experience, depending on the soul's formed response. Chapter 26 engages Manis in full.24
From the bedside? Brief. The clinical dying process may take minutes. Sometimes less.
From the soul's side? As long as it needs to. That is the whole point of the time-dilation argument we built in Chapter 10 and the philosophy-of-time work in Chapter 14. Subjective time can stretch far beyond clock time. Some NDErs report experiences equivalent to hours. Some report what felt like days. Some report what seemed like weeks or months. I find the upper range defensible, though the book doesn't require it.25
The point is not to fix a number. It is to remove the assumption that the encounter must be hurried. A soul that needs time to wrestle, to grieve, to let down its defenses, is given time. The encounter is not on a clock. It is on the soul. God is patient. And the dying moment, stretched by time dilation, gives patience room to work.
Here is where the model touches the living. If the dying are not simply slipping away but are in encounter with Christ, then our prayers for them matter. Not because prayer earns salvation. Not because our prayers arm-twist God into being more generous than He would otherwise be. But because prayer participates in the love that surrounds the dying person. It is part of the atmosphere of grace in which the encounter takes place.26
Catholics and Orthodox Christians have always prayed for the dying. The Catholic tradition of the "commendation of the dying" (commendatio animae) is one of the oldest prayers in the church. Orthodox Christians pray the "Canon at the Departure of the Soul." Both traditions assume that the dying process is spiritually significant, that something real is happening inside the person, and that the prayers of the living can accompany them.27
Protestants have often been uneasy here. If salvation is settled before death, what is there to pray for? But the encounter model changes the question. If the dying person is actively meeting Christ, then prayers for them are prayers that accompany a real, ongoing, living interaction. I believe the Catholic and Orthodox instinct is right, and I think Protestants can recover it without giving up anything essential to Reformation theology.28
Let me say this more personally. If you are sitting beside someone you love as they die, you are not watching them slip into nothing. You are watching them enter the most important conversation of their existence. Your prayers are not empty words spoken to a ceiling. They are your participation in the love that is, right now, reaching for your loved one. Pray. Sing. Read Scripture. You are joining something already in progress.
Common Objection. "If the encounter is so loving, so personal, so perfectly tailored, why would anyone refuse? Doesn't this model imply that everyone will eventually say yes?" This is the universalist pressure, and it comes in its strongest form from the philosopher Thomas Talbott, who argues that no fully informed, rational agent could permanently refuse its own supreme good (Chapter 25). I take Talbott seriously. His argument is powerful. But I believe formed character can resist what it sees clearly. Freedom includes the freedom to refuse one's own deepest good. The dynamics of resistance described in this chapter are real, and they are the foundation of the book's response, developed fully in Chapter 27.29
The dynamics described in this chapter are the working model of the encounter. They are the operational logic that makes sense of the NDE data, fits Boros's philosophical account, accommodates the biblical material on the descent and the intermediate state, and provides the model that pastoral practice (Chapter 34) can engage.
Everything we've built so far has led to this point. Chapters 6 through 12 gave us the empirical evidence. Chapters 13 through 15 gave us the philosophy of time. Chapter 16 gave us Boros. Chapter 17 showed how the NDE data confirms Boros's hypothesis. Chapter 18 grounded the encounter in Christ. Now we have the dynamics: how the encounter actually works in real souls.
The model is not speculative guesswork. It is built on converging lines of evidence. NDE researchers document the phases. Boros provides the philosophical framework. The Eastern Orthodox tradition supplies the theological insight about divine love and the soul's response. Manis confirms the structure from analytic philosophy. And Scripture, as we're about to see, supports the whole picture.
But the model raises questions. How does it fit the biblical passages about the intermediate state? How does it handle the descent of Christ? What about Luke 16 and Hebrews 9:27? The next several chapters turn to those questions. The encounter model doesn't hang in the air. It stands on Scripture. And it's to Scripture that we turn next.30
↑ 1. The question of the encounter's internal dynamics belongs to this chapter. Chapter 18 establishes who is encountered (Christ); this chapter asks how the encounter unfolds. The working model here draws on NDE phenomenology, Boros's philosophical analysis, and the Eastern Orthodox theological tradition.
↑ 2. The phase model is the author's synthesis. No single source presents all seven phases in this arrangement. The model integrates patterns from NDE case literature (Ring, van Lommel, Long, Greyson), Boros's Mystery of Death, II.8 and III.5–6, and Orthodox patristic sources. For the full working model in extended form, see Appendix O.
↑ 3. The separation experience is among the most frequently reported NDE elements. See van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life (2010), ch. 2; Greyson, After (2021), ch. 3; Sabom, Recollections of Death (1982), ch. 2.
↑ 4. Boros, Mystery of Death, II.8. Boros argues that in death "the soul experiences what he calls 'ontological indigence.' No longer able to hide behind the various forms of 'having' or 'being' afforded by corporeity, it must instead produce the corporeity out of itself in a moment of 'total self-encounter.'" See the full discussion in Chapter 16.
↑ 5. The life review as "total self-encounter" is one of Boros's most fertile concepts. He develops it philosophically; the NDE data confirm it empirically. See Chapter 11 for the full treatment.
↑ 6. Tom Sawyer's NDE is documented in Sidney Saylor Farr, What Tom Sawyer Learned from Dying (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 1993). Kenneth Ring discusses Sawyer's case in Heading Toward Omega (1984), ch. 4, and in Lessons from the Light (1998), ch. 7. The "experiential" quality of the life review, where the NDEr feels the impact of their actions on others, is reported across hundreds of cases.
↑ 7. The personal character of the NDE, fitted to the experiencer's background and needs, is noted by Long, God and the Afterlife (2016), ch. 6; Ring, Lessons from the Light (1998), ch. 12; and Greyson, After (2021), ch. 8. The encounter does not follow a single script.
↑ 8. Jerry L. Walls introduces the concept of optimal grace in Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, 1992), ch. 4, "Hell and Divine Goodness," and restates it in its most quotable form in Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford, 2012), ch. 5. For the full integration of optimal grace, middle knowledge, and the moment-of-death encounter, see Chapter 28.
↑ 9. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005), chs. 1–3. Storm's case is discussed in Chapter 12.
↑ 10. 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 encounter with unconditional love during her NDE is one of the best-documented cases of a gradual, dawning response rather than a dramatic moment of conversion.
↑ 11. The purification dimension of the encounter is closely connected to the life review. See Chapter 11 for the empirical pattern. Boros develops the theological framework in Mystery of Death, III.5, "The State of Purification."
↑ 12. Boros, Mystery of Death, III.5. Boros locates purification within the single moment-of-death encounter rather than treating it as a centuries-long postmortem process. This distinguishes his view from the standard Catholic doctrine of purgatory, as discussed in Chapter 33.
↑ 13. The decisional character of the encounter is central to Boros's thesis: "Death gives man the opportunity of posing his first completely personal act; death is, therefore, by reason of its very being, the moment above all others for the awakening of consciousness, for freedom, for the encounter with God, for the final decision about his eternal destiny." Boros, Mystery of Death, preface (pp. xlviii–xlix in the Monkfish edition).
↑ 14. On the eschatologically neutral treatment of what follows the encounter, see Chapter 29. The book takes no position on whether those who refuse experience eternal conscious torment, annihilation, or eventual restoration.
↑ 15. The phase model synthesizes several streams: NDE phenomenology (especially Ring, van Lommel, Greyson, and Long), Boros's philosophical analysis (especially Mystery of Death, II.8), Eastern Orthodox patristic theology (Isaac the Syrian, Basil of Caesarea), and the biblical descent tradition (Chapter 21). The synthesis is the author's; no single source presents the model in exactly this form.
↑ 16. For the NDE data on distressing and hellish experiences, see Chapter 12. For Nancy Evans Bush's typology, see Bush, Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences (Cleveland, TN: Parsons Porch, 2012). For the theological rationale behind the composed sequence, see Chapter 28.
↑ 17. Honesty requires this admission. NDErs are survivors; they were brought back before the encounter concluded. Some hellish NDErs report rescue (Storm's case); others do not. The book does not presume to know whether an unresolved hellish NDE represents an interrupted sequence or a hardening refusal. See the careful discussion in Chapter 12.
↑ 18. Ring, Lessons from the Light (1998), chs. 5–7, documents post-NDE transformations extensively. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life (2010), ch. 3, reports similar patterns. The combination of full self-knowledge and unconditional acceptance is among the most consistently reported features of positive NDEs.
↑ 19. Ring, Heading Toward Omega (1984), ch. 4; van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life (2010), ch. 3; Long, Evidence of the Afterlife (2010), ch. 5. Ring comments that the life-review accounts are remarkably consistent across religious, cultural, and demographic lines.
↑ 20. For the full treatment of the rationality of refusal, see Chapter 27. C. S. Lewis's image of "doors locked from the inside" (The Great Divorce) captures the dynamic: the resisting soul is not locked out by God but locked in by its own formed choices. See also Jerry Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation, ch. 5, "Hell and Human Freedom."
↑ 21. Isaac of Nineveh (Isaac the Syrian), quoted in Hilarion Alfeyev, The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2000), 283–84. This passage is also cited and discussed by Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God (Oxford, 2019), 254–55, in his development of the divine presence model. See also Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), Life after Death (Levadia-Hellas, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2000), ch. 8.
↑ 22. The asymmetry is theologically significant for the problem of evil and the justice of divine judgment. If God gives each soul optimal grace (Walls) through an encounter personally tailored by middle knowledge (Chapter 28), then any loss is the soul's own doing, not God's failure.
↑ 23. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God (Oxford, 2019), 250–55. Manis labels his proposal "the divine presence model" and develops it from both philosophical argument and Orthodox patristic sources. For the full engagement, see Chapter 26.
↑ 24. The convergence between the encounter model and Manis's divine presence model is independent. Both draw on the same Eastern Orthodox sources (Isaac the Syrian, Basil of Caesarea), but they arrive at structurally identical conclusions from different starting points: the encounter model from NDE data and Boros; Manis from analytic philosophy and patristics.
↑ 25. On time dilation in NDEs, see Chapter 10. On the philosophical case for subjective extension, see Chapter 14. For the full working model of the encounter's subjective architecture, see Appendix O.
↑ 26. I want to be careful here. I am not claiming that human prayers determine the outcome of the encounter. The soul's free decision is its own. But I am saying that prayer for the dying is theologically meaningful: it is participation in the love of God that surrounds the dying person, and that love is part of the atmosphere in which the encounter takes place.
↑ 27. The Commendatio Animae (Commendation of the Dying) has roots in the early centuries of the church. The Orthodox "Canon at the Departure of the Soul" (from the Trebnik) is prayed at the bedside. Both traditions express the conviction that the dying process is a spiritually active time. See Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995), ch. 7.
↑ 28. Protestant unease about praying for the dying stems partly from anxieties about purgatory. But praying for someone who is actively dying is not praying them out of purgatory; it is accompanying them in a real spiritual encounter. Martin Luther himself prayed for the dying. The encounter model gives a theological framework for this pastoral instinct.
↑ 29. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), chs. 7–9. For the book's full engagement with Talbott, see Chapter 25. For the author's reply, see Chapter 27.
↑ 30. Chapters 20–24 take up the biblical foundations in sequence: the two-stage history of the intermediate state (Ch. 20), 1 Peter 3–4 and the descent (Ch. 21), Ephesians 4:8–10 (Ch. 22), Luke 16 (Ch. 23), and Hebrews 9:27 (Ch. 24). Each passage is read in light of the encounter model developed in Chapters 16–19.