Chapter 23

The Best Possible Approach

Optimal Grace, Middle Knowledge, and the Threefold Offer

A Daughter’s Question

Frank is seventy-eight years old, and he is dying.

He lies in a hospital bed in a small room with pale green walls and a window that faces east. The morning light falls across the blanket over his thin legs. A heart monitor beeps in steady rhythm. His eyes are closed. His breathing is shallow.

Frank has been a hard man his whole life. Proud. Stubborn. He held grudges the way other men hold tools, tight and ready to use. He drank too much in his forties. He said cruel things to his wife before she passed. He walked out of two churches because the pastors asked him to forgive people he had no intention of forgiving. He told his son-in-law once that religion was a crutch for weak people, and he meant it.

His daughter Rachel sits in the waiting room down the hall. She is fifty-two. She has prayed for her father for thirty years. She prayed through the drinking and the silences, through the ugly phone calls, through the years he refused to come to Christmas. She prayed when her mother died, hoping it would soften him. It did not.

Now she sits with a Styrofoam cup of cold coffee and a question she cannot push away. It is the question that has been circling through this entire book, and now it lands where questions like this always land: in the lap of someone who loves a person who may be running out of time.

Rachel's question is simple. When my father dies, will God have done everything He could?

Not: will Frank be saved? She cannot know that. Not: is Frank good enough? She knows he is not, and neither is she. Her question goes deeper. It reaches past outcomes and into the character of God Himself. If God is as loving as she believes, as powerful as she hopes, as wise as she trusts, then surely He will not let Frank slip into eternity without the very best appeal that infinite love and perfect knowledge can compose.

Millions of people have asked Rachel's question. They have asked it about fathers and mothers, children and friends, spouses and strangers. They have asked it at hospital bedsides and gravesides, in dark bedrooms at three in the morning, in the car on the way home from the funeral. It is the question that theology exists to answer. And it is the question this entire book has been building toward.

This chapter exists to answer Rachel's question. And the answer is yes.

To get there, we need three ideas. The first is optimal grace, the claim that God gives every person His very best appeal, not a generic one. The second is middle knowledge, the claim that God knows exactly what appeal would work best for each person, and in what order. The third is the threefold offer that this whole book has been building: the deathbed encounter, the pursuit through the intermediate state, and the final meeting at the judgment. Put these three together, and the picture that emerges is stunning. God does not just offer Christ. He offers Christ in the best possible way, at the best possible time, in the best possible sequence, to every single person who ever lives. And the only ones finally lost are those who refuse even that.

That is the best possible approach. Let me show you how it works.

A Love That Knows Your Name

The idea of optimal grace comes from the philosopher Jerry Walls. He develops it in Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, and it begins with a simple observation: a perfect lover does not use one pitch on everyone.¹

Think of it this way. A good teacher does not explain fractions the same way to every child. She notices which student learns by seeing and which learns by doing. She adjusts. She finds the angle that fits the child. A good parent does the same. One child responds to a gentle word. Another needs a firm hand. The difference is not that one child is loved more. The difference is that the parent knows each child and appeals to each one in the way that fits.

If human parents can do this, how much more the God who made each soul? Optimal grace means that God gives every person the very best appeal His love and wisdom can compose, the one most likely to win a free “yes” without forcing the will. The appeal is not generic. It is personal. It fits the person the way a key fits a lock.

This matters enormously. It means God is not standing at a distance, calling out the same words to every soul and hoping some respond. He is close. He knows each heart. He knows that Frank needs something different from what Rachel needs. He knows the exact word, the exact moment, the exact tone that has the best chance of breaking through the wall Frank has built around himself.

Walls goes further. He argues that God does not just give people some chance. He gives them every opportunity. The notion of optimal grace, Walls says, “assumes that God knows and loves each of us as individuals as well as members of the larger human race, and values each of us enough that he desires each of us to experience his love in the fullest possible measure.”³ This is not a God who extends a quick, minimal invitation and moves on. This is a God who stays. Who adjusts. Who tries again.

And when someone finally refuses? Walls does not flinch. He writes that “damnation only results from the persistent choice to reject optimal grace.”⁴ The only people who end up lost are those who turn away from the very best God could do for them and keep turning, freely, knowing full well what they are refusing. That is the measure of how seriously God takes both love and freedom.

Not everyone agrees with this picture. Terrance Tiessen, for instance, speaks of God providing merely “sufficient grace.”⁵ On that view, God gives people enough grace to respond, but not necessarily the best. As James Beilby observes, this kind of “sufficiency” sets the bar low. It means God might know a better way to reach a person but choose not to use it.⁶ For the God of the Bible, who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one (Luke 15:4), who searches for the lost coin until it is found (Luke 15:8), who runs to meet the prodigal while he is still far off (Luke 15:20), “sufficient” is not enough. The Shepherd does not settle for adequate. He does His very best.

That is optimal grace. And it raises an obvious question: if God gives every person His best, and His best is truly the best possible, then what happens when a lifetime is not long enough for that best to reach a hardened heart? What happens when the person dies before the appeal has finished?

Across the Whole Window

Here is where this book makes its distinctive move.

Walls applies optimal grace mainly to this life and to purgatory.⁷ That is already more generous than many theologians allow. But this book has argued, across twenty-two chapters, that the offer does not end at death. It opens at the deathbed. It continues through the conscious intermediate state. It reaches its fullest intensity at the final judgment (see Chapter 27). If God truly gives everyone His best appeal, and if that appeal does not end at death (as this book has argued), the question becomes: what does optimal grace look like across the whole window?

The answer is striking. The “best possible approach” is not a single best moment. It is the single best sequence of moments.

For some people, the deathbed encounter is enough. The light breaks through. Christ is present. The person sees, at last, the love they missed or refused in life. They say yes. It is finished. We saw this pattern in the near-death accounts discussed in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, where people meet a presence of overwhelming love and warmth at the moment of death.

But for a harder soul, someone like Frank, the deathbed may not be enough. His walls are too thick. His pride is too deep. The gentle light that wins a softer heart bounces off his armor. For Frank, the best approach might require more. It might require the deathbed encounter and the long, slow pursuit through the intermediate state and the final, blazing unveiling at the judgment, where every veil is lifted and God stands before him in unshielded love.

God composes the whole arc. He does not improvise. He does not react in surprise when Frank refuses at the deathbed. He knew, before Frank drew his first breath, exactly how the sequence would need to unfold. He knew that the deathbed would not be enough. He knew that the time in Hades would soften something. He knew that the judgment would bring the last, fullest appeal. And He composed all of it, beginning to end, as one continuous act of love fitted to one stubborn, precious soul.

Consider what this means in practice. A person who dies suddenly, with no time to prepare, is not at a disadvantage. God knew exactly when that death would come. He composed the deathbed encounter for that precise moment. And if that moment is not enough, He composed the continuation through Hades and the meeting at the judgment as well. No death catches God off guard.⁴⁷

Consider also the person who dies in a coma, or the child who dies before forming any understanding of God, or the person in a remote village who never heard the name of Jesus. The threefold offer means none of these are lost by default. The deathbed encounter is personal and internal. It does not require prior knowledge. It does not require consciousness in the medical sense. The soul meets Christ, and the encounter is composed for that soul’s particular history, understanding, and freedom (see Chapter 29 and Chapter 31).⁴⁸

This is also why the book has spent so much time on each stage. The deathbed encounter (Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13) is not the whole picture. Neither is the intermediate state (Chapter 8). Neither is the judgment (Chapter 27). Each one is a movement in a single symphony. The deathbed is the overture. Hades is the long development. The judgment is the finale. And the Conductor has been composing the whole piece from before the world began.

P. T. Forsyth, the great British theologian, once expressed the hope that there would be “more conversions on the other side than on this.”⁴⁹ That hope makes sense only if the offer continues past death. And if it does, then optimal grace demands that the continuation be just as personal, just as fitted, just as wise as the first encounter. God does not lower His standard when He crosses the threshold. He raises it. Each stage of the offer is more intense, more personal, and more fully informed than the last.

But how? How does God know what sequence will work for Frank and not for Rachel? How does He know that a gentle word at the deathbed will bounce off but that a long silence in Hades followed by a blazing unveiling at the judgment will crack the armor? The answer takes us to one of the most fascinating ideas in all of theology.

How God Knows What Would Work

In the sixteenth century, a Spanish Jesuit named Luis de Molina asked a question that changed the landscape of Christian thought.⁸ The question was simple: does God know what free people would do in situations that never actually happen?

Not just what will happen. That is ordinary foreknowledge. But what would happen if the circumstances were different. Would Peter have denied Jesus if the courtyard had been empty? Would Judas have betrayed Him if the price had been thirty pieces of silver or thirty pieces of gold? Would you have said yes to Christ if you had been born in a different century, in a different country, to different parents?

Molina said yes. God knows all of that. He called this kind of knowledge scientia media, or “middle knowledge.” It sits between two other kinds of knowledge that God has always been understood to possess.

Timothy Stratton, in his Mere Molinism, lays out the three “logical moments” of God’s knowledge in a way that makes the structure clear.⁹ These are not moments in time. God does not learn things one after another, the way we do. They are logical stages, steps in an order of dependence. Think of it like the parts of a math problem: you do not add the numbers before you write them down in time, but the writing comes logically first.

The first moment is natural knowledge. This is everything that is logically possible. God knows every possible world He could create, every possible person He could make, every possible set of circumstances He could arrange. This knowledge is fixed. God does not choose it. It comes from His own nature. It is the raw material.¹⁰

The second moment is middle knowledge. This is where Molina’s breakthrough comes. Out of all those possible worlds, God now knows what every free person would do in every possible set of circumstances. Not what they could do (that was the first moment). What they would do, freely. This knowledge is also not up to God. It depends on what the free creatures themselves would choose. God sees it, but He does not control it.¹¹

The third moment is free knowledge. Armed with His middle knowledge, God now makes His creative decision. He chooses which world to make actual. And because He already knows what every free person would do in every circumstance of every possible world, His choice is perfectly informed. He picks the world that best accomplishes His purposes while respecting the freedom of every creature in it.¹²

This is not abstract philosophy. It shows up in the Bible.

Peter in the Courtyard

Stratton illustrates middle knowledge with one of the most vivid scenes in the Gospels: Peter’s denial.¹³ Before it happened, Jesus told Peter, “Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times” (Matthew 26:34, ESV). How did Jesus know this? Not because Peter had no choice. Peter could have stood firm. His denial was free, which is why it cut so deep and why he wept so bitterly afterward (Matthew 26:75).

And notice: Jesus did not stop Peter. He warned him. He prayed for him (Luke 22:32). But He did not override the freedom that made the denial real and the repentance genuine. That is precisely what middle knowledge enables. God sees the outcome. He works around it. He weaves it into a larger plan. But He does not bulldoze the will.

David at Keilah

The clearest biblical example of middle knowledge appears in 1 Samuel 23:11–13. David is hiding from King Saul. He asks God two questions. First: “Will Saul come down?” God says yes. Second: “Will the men of Keilah surrender me?” God says yes.¹⁴

David leaves Keilah. And because he leaves, neither event happens. Saul does not come. The men of Keilah do not surrender David. But God’s answers were true. They were about what would happen, not what will happen.

Kirk MacGregor draws out the key point: God’s answers here “did not constitute predictions of the future.”¹⁵ They were statements about what free people would freely do in circumstances that never came to pass. That is middle knowledge, right there in the Old Testament. God knows the “would” as clearly as the “will.”

Tyre and Sidon

Jesus Himself uses middle knowledge in Matthew 11:21–24. He says of the cities that saw His miracles and rejected Him: “If the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (ESV).¹⁶

This is a stunning claim. Jesus is saying that people who never saw His miracles would have responded with repentance if they had. He knows the counterfactual. He knows what Tyre and Sidon would have freely chosen in a situation that never occurred. This is middle knowledge applied to real people and real cities.

Stratton notes an important subtlety here.¹⁷ The people of Tyre and Sidon would have repented, Jesus says. But repentance is the beginning of faith, not its perfection. Would they have persevered? The text does not say. This distinction between initial response and lasting faithfulness matters when we think about God’s world-selection (more on this below).

Zedekiah’s Two Futures

One more example. In Jeremiah 38:17–18, the prophet tells King Zedekiah that if he surrenders to Babylon, the city will be spared. If he does not, it will burn.¹⁸ God lays out two futures, each depending on what Zedekiah would freely do. Both futures are real possibilities. Both are known to God. The one that becomes actual depends entirely on Zedekiah’s free choice.

This is what middle knowledge looks like in practice. God sees every fork in the road before the traveler reaches it. He knows which way the traveler will turn. And He builds His plan around it, never forcing but always knowing.

Now bring this back to the offer of Christ at death, in the intermediate state, and at the judgment.

If God possesses middle knowledge, then He knows, for every person who has ever lived, exactly which appeal, in which form, at which moment, in which order, would have the best chance of winning a free “yes.” He knows that for Rachel, a gentle deathbed encounter will be enough. He knows that for Frank, the deathbed alone will fail, but the deathbed followed by a long silence in Hades followed by the full unveiling at the judgment will crack the armor at last. He knows what would work. And because He knows all of this before He acts, He can compose the approach, the exact sequence of encounters, most likely to win Frank’s free “yes” without ever overriding Frank’s will.¹⁹

Notice what middle knowledge does that ordinary foreknowledge cannot. Ordinary foreknowledge tells God what will happen. It tells Him that Frank will refuse at the deathbed. But it does not tell Him what Frank would do under different circumstances. Middle knowledge fills in the whole picture. It tells God not only what Frank will do in the actual world, but what Frank would do in every possible variation. It tells God which appeal would work at the deathbed, which would work in Hades, which would work at the judgment. It gives God the full map of Frank’s free responses across every conceivable circumstance.

This is why Stratton’s “mere Molinism” matters for the argument of this book. It is not an abstract philosophical hobby. It is the mechanism that makes the best possible approach possible. Without middle knowledge, God might know what Frank will do, but He could not compose the optimal sequence. With middle knowledge, He can. And because He is perfectly loving, He does.

That is middle knowledge applied to the threefold offer. And it changes everything.

The Central Synthesis

We have now assembled three ideas that this book has been building across its entire span. Let me bring them together.

Optimal grace tells us what God wants to do: give each person the very best appeal His love can compose, not a generic invitation but a personal one, perfectly fitted to the person’s heart, history, and freedom.

Middle knowledge tells us what God knows: exactly which appeal would work best for each person, in which form, at which moment, in which sequence. He sees every possible approach and knows which one each free person would freely accept.

The threefold offer tells us where God delivers it: at the deathbed, where the encounter opens; through the intermediate state, where the pursuit continues; and at the final judgment, where the veil lifts entirely and the last appeal is made in God’s full presence.

This is not a theory about a distant God running calculations. It is a picture of a Father who knows each child by name and pursues each one with everything He has. It means that no one is lost because God did not try hard enough. No one is overlooked because the right moment did not come. No one slips through the cracks of a system too big to notice them. Every soul gets God’s personal, composed, perfectly timed best.

Think of what this means for the grandmother who prayed for her grandson every night and died before he came to faith. Think of what it means for the pastor who spent forty years in ministry and still wonders about the ones who walked away. Think of what it means for the parent who lost a child too young to choose. God composed an approach for each of them. Not a leftover approach. Not a one-size-fits-all. A personal one, drawn from perfect knowledge and driven by perfect love.⁵⁰

This is also why the threefold offer matters so much. A single encounter, however powerful, is not always enough. Some hearts need time. Some walls need seasons to erode. Some souls need to taste the emptiness before they can taste the fullness. The threefold offer gives God the room to work that a single-moment model does not. And middle knowledge gives Him the perfect sight to know exactly how to use that room.⁵¹

And the only ones finally lost, if any are, are those who refuse even that. Not those who missed it. Not those who never heard. Not those who needed one more moment. The ones who saw God’s very best, across the whole window, and still said no.

Walls puts it with characteristic bluntness: damnation only results from the persistent choice to reject optimal grace.²⁰ On this picture, the persistent choice is not a hasty refusal or a confused moment. It is a settled, informed, fully free “no” spoken in the face of the best God can do. That is the only thing that can finally separate a soul from God. Not ignorance. Not bad timing. Not a lack of trying on God’s part. Only free, knowing, sustained refusal of the very love that was composed for that soul alone.

But if this is right, then a question follows naturally. What does the “best possible approach” look like for the hardest cases? What does it look like for Frank?

When the Best Approach Begins in the Dark

Here is something most people do not expect. The best approach for some souls may not begin with light. It may begin in darkness.

Think of it this way. Some children will not learn that a stove is hot until they feel the heat. No amount of gentle warning will do. The warning is not failing. It is just not the right first step for that child. The right first step, for that child, is the felt warmth of the burner, followed by the parent’s hand pulling them back. The warmth is not punishment. It is the only door that child will walk through.

Something similar may be at work in God’s approach to certain hardened souls. We saw in Chapter 10 that some near-death experiences begin not in light but in darkness: isolation, emptiness, the felt experience of being alone.²¹ Howard Storm, a self-described atheist, described his NDE as beginning in a place of terrifying darkness, surrounded by hostile presences. Only after crying out in desperation did the light come. Storm later said it was the darkness that made the cry possible, and the cry that made the rescue real.²²

This is the “staged approach,” or what we might call the dark-first approach. For a soul like Frank, the best possible sequence may look like this: first, a deathbed encounter where the light is present but Frank’s pride keeps him from receiving it. Then, a time in Hades (the intermediate state, see Chapter 8) where he lives with the consequences of his refusal, where the grudges he carried all his life lose their warmth and begin to feel like the prisons they always were. Then, at last, the judgment, where every wall falls and Frank stands face to face with the love he spent a lifetime running from.

This is not God being cruel. This is God being wise. The darkness is not a punishment. It is an education. It is the felt experience of what life without God is actually like, and for some people, that felt experience is the only thing that will break through the armor of pride, self-sufficiency, and anger.

Think of the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). What brought the son home? Not the father’s lecture. Not a second-hand report about how nice the father’s house was. It was the pig trough. It was the hunger. It was the felt experience of what his choice had cost him. Only then did he “come to himself” (v. 17) and turn for home. And the father was waiting. He had been waiting the whole time. He ran to meet the boy while he was still far off. The pig trough was not the father’s idea of punishment. It was the son’s education. And the father’s response was not “I told you so.” It was a robe, a ring, and a feast.

The staged approach works the same way. God does not design the darkness to hurt. He permits the person to taste what their “no” actually means. The taste is real. The emptiness is real. But the Father is waiting, the whole time, ready to run.⁵⁷

The dark passage at the deathbed (see Chapter 10), the silence of Hades, the burning presence of the judgment: these are not three separate trials. They are movements in one composed appeal. The darkness is the opening chord. The cry is the turning point. The light is the resolution. And the Composer knew, before He wrote the first note, exactly how the music needed to go for this particular soul.

That is what the best possible approach looks like when the person is hard. Let me show you what it looks like for Frank, stage by stage.

Frank at the Threshold

Frank’s monitors go flat at 6:14 in the morning. The nurses come. Rachel is called. She stands in the doorway and watches them try, and then stop trying.

But Frank’s story is not over. If what this book has argued is true, it is just beginning.

At the threshold of death, in the experience described by so many who have been there and come back (see Chapter 5), Frank’s soul separates from his failing body. He becomes aware. The room fades. He enters a space that is not a room and not a dream.

And there, he meets someone. A presence. A light. The warmth is overwhelming. It is not harsh. It is not angry. It is personal, intimate, directed at him. It says, without words or with words that are more than words: Frank. I know you. I have always known you. I am here.

Frank stiffens. Seventy-eight years of pride do not melt in an instant. He recognizes, somewhere deep, that this presence is real and that it means him no harm. But he cannot let go. He spent a lifetime building walls, and the walls are still standing. The light feels like exposure, and Frank has spent his whole life avoiding exposure. He turns away.

He does not say the word “no.” He does not have to. His whole posture is a no. His crossed arms. His averted eyes. His tight jaw. The presence does not force itself. It does not grab him. It lets him turn. But it does not leave, either. It waits.

And now the first movement of Frank’s composed sequence is complete. The deathbed encounter has happened. The light was there. Frank refused it. Not because it was not good enough. Because he was not ready. And God, who knew before the foundation of the world that Frank would refuse at the threshold, has already composed the next movement.

Notice what did not happen. God did not force Frank. He did not override Frank’s will. He did not grab Frank by the collar and drag him into the light. The offer was real. The freedom was real. The refusal was real. And yet God is not finished. He has composed a sequence, not a single note. And the sequence has barely begun.⁵²

Down the hall, Rachel feels it. She does not know, in any medical or scientific sense, what happened in that room in the moment her father died. But she knows her father. She knows his stubbornness, his pride, his tight jaw. And she prays, as she has prayed for thirty years, that God will not give up on him. She does not know, yet, that God has no intention of giving up. The approach is just beginning.

The Hard Edge: Can Anyone Refuse Forever?

Before we follow Frank into Hades, we need to face the hard question. If God gives every person the best possible approach, could anyone still refuse? Could anyone say no to God’s very best, all the way to the end?

The answer is: yes. It is possible. And Molinism, honestly applied, helps us see why.

Philosophers use the term “transworld damnation” for a chilling idea.²³ If God has middle knowledge, He knows what every person would do in every possible world. It is at least logically possible that some persons would freely reject God in every world God could create. No matter what circumstances God arranged, no matter what appeals He made, no matter how long the window stayed open, those persons would freely, persistently say no. They would be, in the technical language, “transworld damned.”

Andrew Hronich, in Once Loved, Always Loved, introduces the corresponding idea of “transworld sanctity”: a person who would freely accept God in every possible world.²⁴ Most of us, presumably, fall somewhere in between: we would accept in some worlds and reject in others. The question for God’s world-selection is how to create a world that saves the most people without overriding anyone’s freedom.

Stratton and Erasmus address this in their discussion of the “maximal harvest world.”²⁵ The idea is this: given all the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that God knows, He selects the world in which the greatest possible number of people freely come to saving faith. This is not a world where everyone is saved (that might not be feasible, given what the free creatures would do). It is the world where the most are saved. It is, to borrow Stratton’s language, the “maximal harvest.”

Stratton also draws a distinction that matters here.²⁷ When Jesus says the people of Tyre and Sidon “would have repented” (Matthew 11:21), the word is repented, not “would have persevered in saving faith for eternity.” Repentance is the beginning. Perseverance is the finish line. God’s maximal-harvest calculation is about the finish line, about who would freely enter and sustain a love relationship with Him forever. That is a harder bar to meet than a momentary response.

Now here is where this book parts ways with the conclusion Stratton draws. Stratton and Erasmus are not universalists. They accept that some may end up lost. But the question for this book is not whether transworld damnation is logically possible. It is whether the set of the transworld-damned is actually populated. And here, two things matter.

First, this book has argued that the window of opportunity stretches all the way to the judgment. The longer the window, the more chances the person has to say yes. The more chances, the harder it becomes to sustain a completely consistent “no” across every possible appeal, in every possible order, at every possible moment.

Second, there is good reason to hope that the set may be empty. Not to assert it. To hope it. If God’s love is truly optimal, and His knowledge is truly exhaustive, and His window is truly this wide, then it is at least possible that no free creature would refuse every possible appeal across every possible moment of the whole sequence. The set of the transworld-damned might be like the set of married bachelors: logically conceivable, actually empty.²⁸

Manis himself, though no universalist, gives us reason for this hope. He argues that the defender of Molinist anti-universalism must accept not only that some people are transworld-damned, but that no good explanation can be given for why this is so. He asks the anti-universalist to believe that God has it within His power to save everyone, that He chooses not to, and that we cannot say why. That is a high price for anti-universalism to pay.⁵⁸

Manis also points to a biblical reason for doubting that transworld damnation is actual. Jesus said that the people of Tyre and Sidon would have repented if they had seen His miracles (Matthew 11:21). If so, then at least some people who died without repenting in the actual world would have repented in a different set of circumstances. They were not transworld-damned. They were damned in one set of circumstances but reachable in another. And if God has the power to compose circumstances, as middle knowledge says He does, then He has the power to reach them.⁵⁹

I do not assert this. The freedom argument of Chapter 22 means I cannot. A real “yes” needs a possible “no.” But I hope it. And the reasons for that hope are stronger than you might expect.

A Match Made in Heaven?

One of the most surprising moments in recent analytic theology comes from a philosopher who is not a universalist. R. Zachary Manis, whose divine-presence model of hell we explored in Chapter 21, reaches a verdict about Molinism and universalism that stops you in your tracks.

After a careful analysis of what he calls “Molinist Anti-Universalism” (M-AU), Manis concludes that the defender of M-AU must accept three claims: that no feasible world exists in which all are saved, that no good explanation can be given for why this is so, and that all those who are lost suffer from transworld damnation. He finds each of these claims difficult to swallow, and the combination of all three harder still.²⁹

Then he writes the line that matters most for our purposes.

Read that again. A philosopher who holds eternal conscious torment, a man who is not a universalist, is conceding that Molinism fits better with universalism than with anti-universalism. He is saying that if you believe God has middle knowledge, the most natural conclusion is that God can and does save everyone. The two ideas fit together like lock and key.

Manis is not alone in noticing this. Jason Marsh has pressed the point from the universalist side, arguing that Molinism gives God the resources to guarantee universal salvation without overriding freedom.³¹ And Hronich, in Once Loved, Always Loved, builds a full case for Molinist universalism, arguing that God’s middle knowledge, combined with His perfect love, gives Him everything He needs to compose a world where all are eventually won.³²

But notice: Manis resists the universalist conclusion. He admits the fit, but he does not follow it. Why? Because he takes the freedom argument seriously (see Chapter 22). He believes that a genuinely free creature can persist in rejection even under optimal conditions. And he believes that eternal conscious torment, however difficult, is the result.

Hronich presses the case further than Manis is willing to go. In Once Loved, Always Loved, he argues that if God truly possesses middle knowledge and truly desires the salvation of all, then God has the resources to compose a world in which every soul eventually says yes. The key move is the idea that God can arrange circumstances, across both this life and the next, so that every person freely comes to faith at some point. Not by force. Not by manipulation. But by the patient, wise arrangement of encounters that middle knowledge makes possible. Hronich does not deny freedom. He argues that freedom, rightly understood, is what God works through, not what He works against.

Where do I stand? I find Hronich’s case compelling and Manis’s concession striking. But I part ways with Manis at two points.

First, I do not believe the terminus of final refusal is eternal torment. On my view (conditional immortality, see Chapter 24), what finally and freely refuses God is not tortured forever but consumed, ceasing to exist. That is still loss. It is still grievous. But it is not the picture of endless suffering that has driven so many people from the faith.³³

Second, I take the hope of universal restoration with full seriousness. I agree with Manis that the fit between Molinism and universalism is real and deep. If Molinism and universalism are “a match made in heaven,” as even he concedes, then perhaps the God who possesses perfect middle knowledge has composed a world in which every soul, across the full window of the threefold offer, eventually says yes.³⁴ I do not assert this. The freedom argument of Chapter 22 means I cannot. A real “yes” needs a possible “no.” But I hold the hope open, and the framework we have built in this chapter gives us the strongest possible reason for it.³⁵

Now let us return to Frank. We left him at the threshold, refusing the light. The first movement of his composed sequence is complete. What comes next?

Frank in Hades

After the threshold, Frank enters the intermediate state. The New Testament calls it Hades, the place of the dead, the waiting room of eternity (see Chapter 8).³⁶

Frank’s Hades is not fire and pitchforks. It is something worse. It is himself.

The grudges that kept him warm in life grow cold here. They were always cold, really, but in life he could distract himself. There was work to do, whiskey to drink, arguments to win. Here, there is nothing but the grudge itself. And in the silence of Hades, it looks different. Smaller. Uglier. The offense that Frank nursed for forty years, the wrong his brother did him, the slight from his business partner, they shrink. Not because they were not real, but because they were not big enough to build a life around. And Frank, slowly, begins to feel the emptiness of the house he built.

This is the staged approach at work. God has not abandoned Frank. He has allowed Frank to sit with the results of his own choices, the way a good father sometimes lets a stubborn child experience the consequences. The darkness is not punishment. It is information. It is Frank learning, in his bones, what life without God actually feels like.³⁷

And all through it, God is there. Not loud. Not forced. But present, the way the sun is present behind clouds. Frank cannot see Him, but the warmth is there, faint, waiting. The same presence that met him at the threshold is still close. It has not given up. It is simply waiting for the walls to thin.

Days pass, or what feels like days. Time is different here (see Chapter 9). The grudges erode. The anger loses its heat. Frank begins to feel something he has not felt in decades: tired. Not the tiredness of the body but the tiredness of the soul that has been fighting a war it cannot win. He is tired of being angry. Tired of being right. Tired of the emptiness that was always underneath the pride.

He does not pray. He does not know how. But he stops resisting. The fists unclench. The jaw loosens. It is not yet a “yes.” But it is the first crack in the wall. And God, who composed this moment before time began, has been waiting for exactly this crack.

Something stirs. A memory. Frank is nine years old, and his mother is singing in the kitchen. He has not thought of that song in sixty years. But it comes now, unbidden, and the warmth of it surprises him. His mother believed. She prayed for him, too, the way Rachel does. She died when Frank was forty, and he hardened after that. But the song is here, in the silence, and it does not feel like a memory. It feels like a hand, reaching through time.⁵³

This is optimal grace at work in the intermediate state. God knows which memory will soften the hardest ground. He knows that Frank’s mother’s song, heard in the silence of Hades where all distractions are stripped away, will do what a thousand sermons could not. The approach is tailored. The timing is exact. The song is not a coincidence. It is a composed moment in a composed sequence, and it is doing precisely what it was designed to do.⁵⁴

The second movement is nearly complete. The third is about to begin.

Frank at the Judgment

The judgment comes. Scripture calls it the Great White Throne (Revelation 20:11–15). This book has argued (Chapter 27) that the judgment is not merely a sentencing. It is the last encounter, the final and most intense meeting between the soul and God.³⁸

Here, every veil lifts. There is nothing between Frank and the full, unshielded presence of the love he has been refusing. This is the divine-presence model that Manis describes (see Chapter 21): not a different place from heaven, but a different experience of the same reality.³⁹ The same presence that would be joy beyond measure to a willing heart is agony to an unwilling one. Not because God is cruel, but because unholiness in the presence of holiness is pain.

Frank stands in that presence. And for the first time in his seventy-eight years plus whatever time has passed in Hades, he sees everything clearly. He sees the love he wasted, the people he hurt, the years he threw away on grudges that did not matter. He sees his daughter Rachel, her thirty years of prayer. He sees his wife, the woman he failed. He sees the cross, and what it cost.

And he sees the face of the one who has been pursuing him since before his first breath. Not angry. Not gloating. Not cold. Just there. Open. Holding out hands that bear nail scars.

The presence speaks. Not with words, exactly. With something deeper than words. It says: I knew you would turn away at the threshold. I composed the silence of Hades for you, because I knew you needed it. I sent the song. I waited for the crack in the wall. And now I am here, with nothing between us, because this is what your soul needs: to see Me, all of Me, with no wall left standing.⁵⁵

Frank sees, in that moment, the whole arc of the approach. He sees that his refusal at the deathbed was not a surprise to God. He sees that the darkness of Hades was not abandonment. He sees that the erosion of the grudges, the memory of his mother’s song, the slow crumbling of his pride, all of it was part of a single, composed, perfectly timed sequence designed for him alone. He sees that God has been loving him, personally and relentlessly, from the first moment of his existence to this very instant.

This is the third movement. The last appeal. The final, fullest, most winsome approach that infinite love and perfect knowledge can compose for one man named Frank.

Does he say yes?

I cannot tell you. That is not the point of this chapter, and it is not something any human being can know about another. The freedom that makes the offer real is the same freedom that makes the outcome uncertain. What I can tell you, what this whole book has been building to tell you, is this: God has done everything He can do. Everything. He has met Frank at the door of death. He has followed him into the dark. He has stood before him at the end with nothing hidden. Whatever Frank does with that, and I cannot tell you what Frank does, I can tell you that he was loved all the way down, and pursued all the way to the end.⁴⁰

Two Pillars

Before we close, one more piece deserves attention. Stratton defines “mere Molinism” as resting on two pillars, and only two.⁴¹ The first pillar is that God possesses middle knowledge. The second is that humans possess libertarian freedom (the genuine ability to choose otherwise). That is it. No soteriology is built in. No particular view of hell is required. No position on universalism or conditional immortality or eternal torment is assumed.

This matters because it means the argument of this chapter does not depend on adopting a specific view of hell. Whether you hold eternal conscious torment, conditional immortality, or universal restoration, you can accept the picture of God using middle knowledge to compose the best possible approach to every soul. The mechanism works the same way regardless of the outcome. What changes is what happens to those who finally refuse. On ECT, they suffer forever. On CI (my working view), they are consumed. On UR, perhaps no one finally refuses at all. But the approach itself, the composed, sequenced, optimal appeal from deathbed to judgment, stands on all three.

This is an important point that I want to underline. Many books on hell and the final state are written for one camp. They preach to the choir. This book is written for all three. The mechanism of the offer, the best possible approach, is the common ground. Readers who disagree about the destination can still agree about the journey: God gives every person the best possible sequence of encounters, from the deathbed through the intermediate state to the judgment. The question of what happens after the last refusal is a real question, and Chapter 24 will address it head-on. But the offer is the offer, regardless.⁵⁶

This is why I have been careful, throughout this book, to state my view (conditional immortality, open to universal restoration, rejecting eternal conscious torment) without making it a load-bearing pillar of the argument. The offer is the argument. The outcome is the open question. Chapter 24 will address that question directly.

The Answer

Let me speak now to Rachel. And to you, if you are her.

You are sitting in the waiting room, or you are sitting in your living room, or you are lying awake at three in the morning, and the question will not let you go. Did God do everything He could? Your father. Your mother. Your brother, your friend, your child, the one you loved who died without showing any sign of faith. Did God just let them go? Did He give up?

Here is your answer, and I am not speaking carefully or hedging. I mean every word of this.

God met your loved one at the door of death. Not with a generic invitation. Not with a form letter from heaven. With a personal, composed appeal, designed for that soul alone, by a God who has known that soul since before the foundation of the world. He came to the door Himself. He brought the very best His love and wisdom could compose.

And He did not stop there.

If your loved one turned away at the threshold, God followed. Into the dark, into the silence, into the intermediate state where the soul waits. He did not give up. He did not write them off. He pursued, with patience and tenderness and a knowledge of the heart that no human counselor could match. He knew exactly which moments would crack the armor. He knew exactly how long to wait. He knew what would make the grudge let go, what would make the pride soften, what would bring the cry that opens the door.

And if your loved one was still holding on at the end, if the stubbornness ran all the way down, then God met them one final time. At the judgment. In full. With nothing hidden and nothing held back. The unveiled, unshielded, total presence of the love that made the universe and died on a cross for every soul in it. The last appeal. The fullest appeal. The one that no pride, no anger, no bitterness can pretend is anything other than what it is: a God who will not let go.

Whatever your loved one did with that, and I cannot tell you what they did, I can tell you this: they were not overlooked. They were not ignored. They were not lost because God ran out of time or ran out of love or ran out of ideas. They received, across the whole window from the deathbed to the judgment, the single best approach that infinite love and perfect knowledge could compose for one human soul.⁴³

The only way anyone is finally lost, on this picture, is by freely, knowingly, persistently refusing God’s very best. Not His second best. Not a hasty, undersized, poorly timed offer. His best. Personal. Composed. Fitted. Sequenced. Given with everything God has.⁴⁴

And even then, I hold open the hope, the Molinist hope, the hope that even Manis sees the logic of, that God’s best may be enough. That the set of the finally refusing may be empty. That in the end, love wins not by forcing but by being so relentlessly, so personally, so perfectly good that every last soul finally says yes.

I do not know this. I hope it. And the hope is not wishful thinking. It is grounded in the character of God, the power of middle knowledge, the width of the threefold offer, and the logic of optimal grace.⁴⁵

Rachel, I know you are still in that waiting room. I know the coffee is cold and the clock is slow and the chaplain’s words, however kind, are not enough. You do not need platitudes. You need to know that God is who you have always believed He is: a Father who does not give up, who does not settle for less than His best, who does not stop at the grave.

He does not stop at the grave.

Did God do everything He could for your father, Rachel? Yes. Everything. Every single thing that love and wisdom and power and patience and perfect knowledge could do. From the deathbed to the very last moment of the judgment. He composed the whole approach. He played every note. He held out His hands until the very end.

And what is true for Frank is true for every person who has ever lived. The child who died before she could speak. The man in the remote village who never heard the name of Jesus. The teenager who overdosed alone in a parking lot. The grandmother who went to church every Sunday and still was not sure she believed. Every one of them received, or will receive, the best possible approach. Not because they earned it. Not because they deserved it. Because that is who God is. He does not settle for adequate. He does not offer second best. He composes, for each soul, the most beautiful and perfectly timed sequence of appeals that infinite love and perfect knowledge can produce.⁶⁰

No one your God can save without unmaking them will be lost for lack of His trying.⁴⁶

That is the best possible approach. And it is how God loves every one of us.