Chapter 30
The soul is not its disability.
Condensed Edition
Sam never spoke a full sentence in his life.1 He was born with a severe cognitive disability. He could not read, could not follow a conversation, and could not process even the simplest gospel presentation. His parents loved him fiercely. His church loved him, too, in the halting way that churches sometimes love people they don't quite know how to include. But every Sunday, as the sermon unfolded, Sam sat quietly beside his mother, and no one in the room could say for certain whether any of it reached him.
He died at forty-three. And the question that hung over the family was the same question that hangs over millions of families around the world: What happens to someone who never had the mental capacity to believe?
If salvation requires conscious faith in Christ, what do we say about a man whose brain never let him form a conscious thought about anything as complex as the gospel? Is Sam lost because of a condition he did not choose? Is he saved by some blanket exception that skips the need for personal faith? Or is there a third answer, one that honors both the dignity of Sam's personhood and the seriousness of God's offer?
I believe there is. And I believe the answer runs straight through the heart of everything this book has been building.
Cognitive disability covers a vast range of human experience. Some people carry mild impairments and can grasp spiritual truths with patience and help. Others live with such profound limitations that they never develop the capacity for abstract thought at all. The question before us is not really about the first group. It is about the second: those whose cognitive limitations are so deep that the ordinary means of hearing, understanding, and responding to the gospel are simply closed to them in this life.2
This is not a small category. Millions of people across history have lived with severe intellectual disabilities, traumatic brain injuries, or degenerative conditions that stripped away capacities they once had. As James Beilby has argued, the range of cognitive disabilities is far greater than the range of infant cases, and our answers need to be fine-grained enough to honor that variety.3 Whatever we say about Sam won't apply in exactly the same way to every person with a different kind of disability. I want to be honest about that from the start.
Still, there is a common thread. In every case, the barrier to hearing and responding to the gospel is not the person's will. It is the person's brain. And that distinction changes everything.
Here is where the argument of Chapter 6 carries real weight. If substance dualism is true, then the conscious self is not the same thing as the brain. The soul uses the brain the way a musician uses an instrument. A damaged piano limits what the pianist can play. It tells us nothing about whether the pianist can hear the music, feel the music, or long for the music. The limit is in the instrument, not in the one who plays it.4
This is the claim that Chapter 7 defended at length. Physicalism cannot carry this hope. If the mind is nothing more than the brain at work, then a severely damaged brain means a severely damaged person, full stop. There is no "person behind the disability" waiting to be freed; there is just the disability. On physicalism, Sam's cognitive limits are not a mask over a deeper self. They are all there is.5
But dualism sees things differently. The soul is the true subject of consciousness. The brain is the organ through which the soul interacts with the physical world during this life. When the brain is damaged, the soul's ability to express itself is reduced. But the soul itself is not damaged. And when the brain is left behind at death, the soul is freed to operate without that constraint.6
This is not speculation built on wishful thinking. There is evidence for it. And it comes from one of the most surprising phenomena in the medical literature.
In 2009, the German biologist Michael Nahm published a landmark study on what he called "terminal lucidity."7 The term describes a well-documented but poorly understood phenomenon: people with severe and long-standing cognitive impairment suddenly regain clear, coherent consciousness shortly before death.
The case literature is striking. Patients with Alzheimer's disease who have not spoken a recognizable word in years suddenly sit up, call their family members by name, hold full conversations, and express love and gratitude. People with lifelong severe intellectual disabilities display, in their final hours, a clarity of thought and feeling that no one had ever seen in them before. The lucid episode may last minutes or hours, and it is almost always followed closely by death.8
Nahm and his colleagues catalogued cases going back to the eighteenth century. The historical record includes accounts from physicians, family members, and nurses. In one widely noted example, a woman with severe Alzheimer's who had been nonverbal for years recognized her family one last time, spoke with them warmly, and then died peacefully the next morning.9 In another, a young man with a lifelong severe intellectual disability who had never spoken in sentences suddenly addressed his mother clearly, expressed things he had apparently understood all along, and then passed away.10
Why does this matter for our question? Because terminal lucidity is exactly what substance dualism would predict, and exactly what strict physicalism struggles to explain.11
On physicalism, consciousness is the product of brain activity. A brain ravaged by decades of Alzheimer's should not suddenly produce clear, coherent thought. There is no known neural mechanism for it. The tissue is still damaged. The plaques and tangles have not reversed. Yet the person is, for a brief window, fully present.
On dualism, the explanation is simpler. The soul has always been there, fully intact, behind the damaged instrument. As the body loosens its grip at the edge of death, the soul's own capacities begin to surface. What the family sees in those final hours is not a damaged brain briefly rallying. It is the person, the real person, emerging from behind a wall that the brain had imposed for a lifetime.12
I don't want to overstate the case. Terminal lucidity is not proof of dualism all by itself. Researchers are still studying it, and some have proposed partial physiological explanations.13 But I do want to say this: the phenomenon fits dualism like a glove. And when you combine it with the veridical NDE evidence from Chapter 6, the cumulative picture is compelling. The soul is real. The soul survives the body. And the soul is not limited to what the brain allows it to do.
If that is true, then Sam's disability was never the whole story.
Before I go further, I need to address something that Beilby raises with real care. When we talk about the encounter, and about the soul being "freed" from cognitive limitations, we need to guard against a subtle and destructive error: treating disabled people as broken versions of "normal" people who need fixing before God can love them.14
That is not what I am saying. Not at all.
Sam was always a full person. He was always made in God's image. He was always loved by God with the same infinite love that God gives to every human being. His disability did not make him less human, less valuable, or less worthy of God's attention. Amos Yong has argued powerfully that some impairments are so connected to a person's identity that removing them entirely would mean changing who the person is.15 I take that seriously.
Beilby also makes a point I find deeply important: salvation is not purely intellectual. It includes an affective dimension, an emotional and relational core. Some people with cognitive disabilities may be better suited to embrace the affective side of salvation than those of us without disabilities. The capacity for love, trust, and simple openness to another person is not reducible to IQ.17 Sam might not have been able to parse a sermon. But his capacity to love and be loved was real and visible to anyone who knew him.
So when I say the soul is freed in the encounter, I don't mean Sam becomes someone else. I mean he finally gets to be fully himself, without the wall that his brain imposed between his inner life and the world. The encounter does not fix Sam. It reveals him.
Here is where the book's central argument meets Sam's story. The threefold offer, as developed in Chapter 23, claims that God's pursuit of every person stretches from the moment of death through the intermediate state and all the way to the final judgment. At any point in that window, a person may freely receive Christ.
For Sam, this means that his cognitive disability is no barrier to God. In the encounter, at whatever stage God brings it, Sam meets Christ. The soul that was always there, always a full person, now operates without the brain's constraint. Sam understands the gospel. Not because he has been turned into someone else, but because the wall has been removed and the person he always was can finally respond.18
The God who knows every soul perfectly, who tailors every approach with the precision of optimal grace, knows exactly how to present Himself to Sam. He knows what Sam can receive. He knows the language of Sam's heart. Middle knowledge means that God's appeal is not a one-size-fits-all gospel presentation. It is the best possible approach for this particular person, designed by a God who has loved Sam since before the foundation of the world.19
Some Christians have tried to solve this problem by extending the "age of accountability" concept to cover the cognitively impaired. On this view, people like Sam are treated the same way as infants: because they never reached the capacity for moral responsibility, they are automatically saved. As Millard Erickson puts it, many of the texts people appeal to for this view "really do not seem to bear sufficiently upon the issue to be of help."20
I understand the pastoral instinct behind this move. It comes from a good place. But it carries real problems.
First, it assumes that all cognitively disabled people are alike. They are not. Some have mild impairments and are clearly capable of moral reasoning. Others have profound impairments and are clearly not. The range is enormous, and drawing a bright line of accountability across that range is not simple.21
Second, it has an awkward consequence that John Sanders pointed out years ago: if all who die before reaching accountability are automatically saved, then the higher the infant and disability mortality rate in a country, the more people from that country are saved. Taken to its logical end, this reasoning comes uncomfortably close to justifying the very suffering it is trying to comfort.22
Third, and most important for our purposes, it bypasses personal faith entirely. It says Sam is saved not because he met Christ and freely received Him, but because he was never able to meet Christ and so God simply excuses him. That may sound kind. But I think it sells Sam short. It treats his disability as a reason to skip the encounter rather than a barrier that God, in His relentless love, removes.
I think God wants more for Sam than a blanket exception. I think God wants Sam.
Jerry Walls has argued that a proper view of God's optimal grace extends naturally to those whose mental capacities were impaired in this life. In his words, all such persons "will hear and understand the gospel in the life to come and have every opportunity to respond to it."23 The logic is straightforward. If God truly desires to save all and gives every person optimal grace, then those who could not receive that grace in this life because of cognitive barriers must receive it in the next.
What I want to add to Walls's proposal is this: the encounter is not just a transfer of information. It is a revelation of a person. Sam does not merely learn a set of propositions about Jesus. He meets Jesus. He stands in the presence of a love that has always known him, always valued him, always seen past the limitations of his body to the person within.24
Think of what terminal lucidity suggests. If the soul can surface even in the last hours of a failing body, what happens when the body falls away entirely? If the real person could shine through briefly at the threshold of death, what happens when there is no longer any barrier at all?
I think what happens is what the encounter has always been: a meeting between the soul and its Maker, without interference. And in that meeting, Sam is not fixed. He is found. The God who made him meets the person He always saw. And Sam sees God, perhaps for the first time without any veil between them.
This is the honest edge of the question, and I won't soften it. If the encounter is genuine, and if freedom is real, then Sam could say no. The offer respects his agency. A real yes requires a possible no.
But I will say what Beilby says, and I think he is right: I cannot imagine a scenario in which someone like Sam, who has never spent a lifetime running from God, who has never built up walls of resistance and bitterness, would stand before the God who made him and turn away.25 Sam has no long history of sin to harden him against grace. He has no grudges, no ideological defenses, no practiced habits of refusal. He comes to the encounter, as it were, without armor. And what he meets there is not a demand but a welcome.
I am not saying Sam must say yes. I am saying I have every reason to expect that he will. The hope here is very strong, stronger even than in the cases of adults who have spent decades building defenses against God. Sam is free, and freedom is real. But a soul met by perfect love, with no history of resistance behind it, is about as likely to refuse that love as water is to flow uphill. It could happen. I don't think it will.26
I want to close where Beilby closes his own treatment of Sam: with confidence and with humility. We can say two things with assurance. First, anything that keeps Sam from entering into relationship with God will be removed. Second, anything essential to who Sam is will be retained, redeemed, and perfected.27
In heaven, Sam will not be labeled "cognitively disabled." He will just be Sam. The categories we use to sort people in this life will dissolve. What will remain is the person God created, the person God loved, the person God pursued all the way to the end.
I said at the start that Sam never spoke a full sentence. That was true of his body. But I believe his soul has always had things to say. And I believe the God who made that soul has always been listening, long before the rest of us learned how.
If you are a parent, a sibling, a caregiver, or a friend of someone like Sam, I want you to hear this clearly: God has not overlooked your loved one. God has not filed them under "exception" and moved on. The same relentless love that pursues the skeptic and the rebel pursues Sam, with the same intensity and the same respect. The brain that limited Sam's earthly life does not limit God. And when the body falls away, I believe Sam will finally get to respond to the love that has been reaching for him all along.
That is not wishful thinking. It is the logical consequence of everything this book has argued: a God of relentless love, a soul that survives the body, an offer tailored to each person, and a deadline that does not arrive until every possible appeal has been made. For Sam, and for everyone like him, the offer stands.
The soul is not its disability. It never was.28
↑ 1. Sam is a composite figure introduced in Chapter 4. He represents the profoundly cognitively disabled adult who never had the capacity to understand a gospel presentation. See James K. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical, Theological, and Philosophical Argument (IVP Academic, 2021), 9–10, for the original framing of this case.
↑ 2. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 10. Beilby notes that the range of cognitive disabilities is far greater than the range of infant cases, and that some diagnosed with cognitive disabilities nonetheless retain partial capacity for spiritual response.
↑ 3. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 9–10. Beilby treats infant cases (Anna) and cognitive disability cases (Sam) as separate categories because of the significant differences between them, even though many theologians have treated them as subsets of the same problem.
↑ 4. J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014), ch. 3. Moreland argues that the soul is a simple, immaterial substance that uses the brain as its instrument of interaction with the physical world. John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), makes the biblical case for the same conclusion. Cooper surveys dualist anthropologies from Augustine through Swinburne, noting Swinburne’s analogy: the soul is like a light bulb and the brain like a socket—the bulb can exist apart from the socket but cannot light up without it. See also Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), who develops the creationist account of the soul’s distinct essence from physicality and its relationship to the body. Michael A. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2024), locates the human person as a hypostasis subsisting in a soul-body nature, modeled on Chalcedonian Christology.
↑ 5. See Chapter 7 for the full critique of physicalist conditional immortality. On physicalism, the cognitive limits are the person, because there is no immaterial self behind the brain’s activity. This is the central reason the book insists on substance dualism as the anthropology that carries the postmortem hope. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, ch. 1, surveys the present state of the dualism-physicalism debate and notes that the philosophical alternatives to substance dualism that began with Hobbes and Spinoza have strengthened into a rival paradigm, but that “the mind-body problem remains wide open” (quoting Kevin Corcoran). The author’s own doctoral research systematically examines how veridical NDEs pose an insurmountable challenge to the physicalist position. See Matthew Friend, “Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for Substance Dualism within the Conditional Immortality Debate” (ThD diss., Trinity Theological Seminary, 2025), chs. 4–5.
↑ 6. Moreland, The Soul, ch. 4; Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chs. 4–6. The claim is not that the soul is unaffected by the body’s condition during embodiment. It is that the soul is not identical to the body or the brain. Damage to the instrument limits the performer’s output without limiting the performer. Cooper develops the “dualist-holist” position at length: the soul and body form a functional unity during earthly life, but the soul’s existence does not depend on the body. Wilder Penfield, the internationally respected neurophysiologist and brain surgeon, confessed at the end of his career that “it is easier to rationalize man’s being on the basis of two elements than on the basis of one.” Nobel Laureate Sir John Eccles likewise concluded that the soul is nonmaterial and not subject at death to disintegration. See Cooper’s survey of scientific perspectives in the final chapters. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology, ch. 8, argues that the soul has a sufficiently distinct essence from physicality, though on simple creationism the soul inhabits the body and is influenced by it.
↑ 7. Michael Nahm, “Terminal Lucidity in People with Mental Illness and Other Mental Disability: An Overview and Implications for Possible Explanatory Models,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 28, no. 2 (2009): 87–106. This was the foundational study that introduced the term “terminal lucidity” into the research literature. Nahm surveyed historical and contemporary case reports and argued that the phenomenon posed serious questions for purely materialist accounts of consciousness. J. Steve Miller provides an extensive treatment of terminal lucidity as evidence for the afterlife in Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, vol. 1 (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2024), ch. 2, Lines of Evidence #5–6, and in his doctoral dissertation, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife (PhD diss., Columbia International University, 2019), ch. 2. Miller documents that terminal lucidity has been recognized since antiquity, noting that Cicero, Plutarch, Avicenna, Hippocrates, Galen, and others observed that mental confusion, epilepsy, and melancholia may all improve at the approach of death. The president of the Royal College of Physicians reported in 1833, “We have all observed the mind clear in an extraordinary manner in the last hours of life.”
↑ 8. Nahm, “Terminal Lucidity,” 90–95. See also Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson, “Terminal Lucidity in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia and Dementia: A Survey of the Literature,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 197, no. 12 (2009): 942–44. Miller, Deathbed Experiences, vol. 1, documents how common the phenomenon is: Nahm reported cases involving “brain abscesses, tumors, strokes, meningitis, dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and affective disorders.” In surveys of nursing home staff, 70 percent had personally witnessed cases of terminal lucidity. A 2010 study found that staff from all units reported firsthand accounts of previously confused residents suddenly becoming lucid enough to recognize and say farewell to relatives and carers. Alexander Batthyany’s multi-phase study found that among 227 observations of dying Alzheimer’s patients, over ten percent showed signs of terminal lucidity. Since 63 percent of episodes lasted only thirty minutes to two hours, many may be missed entirely.
↑ 9. Nahm, “Terminal Lucidity,” 92. Cases like this are reported frequently by hospice nurses and geriatric physicians. Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley document similar episodes in Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying (New York: Poseidon, 1992). Batthyany, as documented in Miller, Deathbed Experiences, vol. 1, reported an elderly woman with dementia who was almost mute and no longer recognized people. Unexpectedly, she called her daughter, thanked her for everything, had a warm phone conversation with her grandchildren, said farewell, and died shortly after. See also the case of a resident with severe spinal fusion who, days before death, suddenly lifted her head and could look out the window for the first time in years, reported in S. Brayne and P. Fenwick, “The Case for Training to Deal with End-of-Life Experiences,” European Journal of Palliative Care 15, no. 3 (2008): 118–20.
↑ 10. Nahm, “Terminal Lucidity,” 94–95. Such cases involving lifelong cognitive impairment are especially significant because they cannot be explained by the “recovery of previously formed memories” hypothesis. The person displayed capacities that had never been observed before. Miller, Deathbed Experiences, vol. 1, devotes a full section to this phenomenon (Line of Evidence #6: “The Life-Long Mentally Challenged Sometimes Become Lucid, Clear Communicators and Thinkers at the Time of Death”). The most striking case is that of Anna Katharina Ehmer, documented in Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson, “The Death of Anna Katharina Ehmer: A Case Study in Terminal Lucidity,” Omega 68, no. 1 (2013): 77–87. Ehmer was born with the most severe cognitive disabilities, never spoke a single word in her life, and showed no awareness of her environment. Yet on the day she died, she sang hymns clearly and intelligibly for half an hour, her face “transfigured and spiritualized.” The attending physician, Wilhelm Wittneben, the chief physician of Hephata (a facility of over 500 patients), stated that given the anatomical damage to her cortical brain tissue from repeated meningitis infections, her singing was medically incomprehensible. Miller also documents a 1975 Russian study of three patients with chronic schizophrenia who had no lucid intervals for years—one had spent seventeen years in a profoundly regressed catatonic state—yet all three became almost normal just before death.
↑ 11. Alexander Batthyany, “Terminal Lucidity and the Neuroscience of Exceptional Experiences,” in The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness, ed. Rocco Gennaro (New York: Routledge, 2018). Batthyany argues that terminal lucidity poses a challenge to strict neural-correlate models of consciousness, since the neural substrate is not improving when the lucidity occurs. Miller, Deathbed Experiences, vol. 1, documents that none of the researchers he surveyed concluded that terminal lucidity could be explained naturalistically. Nahm himself stated that the cases “pose difficulties for currently prevailing explanatory models of brain physiology and mental functioning,” and that the evidence suggests cognitive functions “may function by neurologic processes different from those of the normal brain.” Batthyany acknowledged “anomalous/otherworldly elements” to the phenomenon. Particularly striking is the case of Dr. Scott Haig’s patient David, documented in Miller: David lay terminally ill with cancer that had spread to his brain, destroying nearly all of it. His doctors confirmed there was “barely any brain left.” Yet in his final moments, he fully awoke, recognized his family, and said his goodbyes.
↑ 12. This is the dualist reading proposed by Nahm and further developed by Gary R. Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), chs. 7–8. See also the discussion in Chapter 6 of this book. The cumulative case for consciousness operating independently of the brain is developed at length in Friend, “Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for Substance Dualism,” chs. 4–5, where 5,278 near-death experiences are analyzed, including 1,593 involving cardiac arrest. Michael B. Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), provides the definitive clinical account of the Pam Reynolds case, in which a patient whose brain was “dead” by all three standard clinical tests—silent EEG, absent brain-stem response, and no blood flow to the brain—experienced the deepest NDE in his study. As Pam’s surgeon stated, “If you would examine that patient from a clinical perspective during that hour, that patient by all definition would be dead.” See also Jeffrey Long, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), for the NDERF data on consciousness surviving clinical death.
↑ 13. Some researchers have proposed that terminal lucidity may involve endogenous neurochemical surges (e.g., endorphins or DMT released near death) or transient reactivation of neural circuits. See Jesse Bering, “One Last Goodbye: The Strange Case of Terminal Lucidity,” Scientific American, November 25, 2014. However, these proposals do not explain cases involving lifelong cognitive impairment with no prior history of the capacities displayed. Miller, Deathbed Experiences, vol. 1, systematically identifies six aspects of terminal lucidity that naturalistic explanations struggle to account for: (1) the brain was deteriorating, not improving, when lucidity occurred; (2) patients who suddenly awoke were not privy to their recent medical history yet immediately knew they were dying; (3) the content of the experience is consistent with the afterlife, not with random hallucination; (4) professionals distinguish these episodes from psychotic or delirious states; (5) there is an apparent purpose consistent with the afterlife hypothesis; and (6) the experience is consistent with the mind separating from the damaged brain. Miller also notes that atheist Michael Shermer, arguing against the soul, seems unaware of terminal lucidity when he claims that “when portions of the brain die as a result of injury, stroke, or Alzheimer’s, the corresponding functions we call ‘mind’ die with them.” Sabom, Light and Death, further demonstrates that the dying brain hypothesis cannot account for the veridical elements of near-death experiences.
↑ 14. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 64–65. Beilby notes that the understanding of cognitive disabilities as something requiring “fixing” to make people “more fully human” has been rightly subjected to criticism. He suggests that nondisabled people may be more in need of “becoming more fully human” than those with disabilities.
↑ 15. Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 274. Yong argues that in the eschaton, impairments will be redeemed rather than eliminated, and that some impairments may be so identity-constitutive that their removal would involve the obliteration of the person. I take this concern seriously, and it informs the distinction I draw between removing barriers and remaking the person.
↑ 16. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 65. Beilby frames this as the first of two avenues of response: questioning the assumption that idealization of cognitive faculties entails that the disabled person was of less value or less human. The person remains the same; it is simply that they have the ability to respond to an offer of relationship from their Creator.
↑ 17. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 64. Beilby writes that persons with cognitive disabilities may be “better suited to embrace the affective component of salvation than nondisabled persons.” Even if they cannot grasp the concepts of sin, grace, and conversion in abstract terms, they may be able to experience and reciprocate God’s love at a deeper level than many of us.
↑ 18. This follows from the §2.12 commitment of this book: “In the encounter (at whichever stage it is received), the soul is granted whatever maturity, knowledge, and spiritual understanding is needed to make a genuine choice.” For the cognitively disabled, this means removing the brain’s barrier while preserving the person’s identity.
↑ 19. See Chapter 23 for the full development of optimal grace and middle knowledge. Jerry L. Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 5, argues that God gives “optimal grace”—the best possible measure of influence toward good that God can exercise on someone’s will without destroying freedom. For Sam, this means God knows exactly how to approach him.
↑ 20. Millard Erickson, How Shall They Be Saved? The Destiny of Those Who Do Not Hear of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), cited in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 61. Erickson finds the standard proof texts for infant salvation (2 Sam 12; Matt 19:14; Mark 10:13–16; Luke 18:16–17) insufficient to bear the weight placed on them. The same applies to their extension to the cognitively impaired.
↑ 21. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 9–10. Beilby emphasizes that some cognitive disabilities are so severe as to rule out any possibility of grasping the gospel, while others allow partial comprehension. The variety demands a fine-grained approach.
↑ 22. John Sanders, No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Unevangelized (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), cited in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 61–62. Beilby quotes Sanders’s observation and notes Norman Geisler’s suggestion that high infant mortality in unevangelized countries might be providential—a suggestion that “comes close to attempting to justify infanticide.”
↑ 23. Walls, Purgatory, ch. 5. Walls argues that if we take God’s universal salvific will seriously, then those whose mental capacities were impaired in this life to such a degree that they could not respond to the gospel will hear and understand it in the life to come and have every opportunity to respond to it.
↑ 24. See Chapter 12 on the Christological necessity: the encounter is always an encounter with the actual Christ, not a generic spiritual experience. This applies to Sam as much as to anyone else. The NDE research supports this claim. J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2024), ch. 6, documents over eighty cases from NDE researchers of experiencers encountering Jesus, including cases studied by Sabom, Moody, Greyson, Fenwick, Morse, Osis, Haraldsson, and Long. Nearly 20 percent of NDEs involve Jesus, while less than 1 percent involve deities of other religions. Even when adherents of other religions report encountering a divine being, they typically describe the same features—light, love, and welcome—rather than the physical appearance of their tradition’s deity. Friend, “Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for Substance Dualism,” ch. 4, confirms that NDEs involving encounters with Jesus specifically are more highly compatible with biblical teachings than those involving other or no divine encounters.
↑ 25. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 63–64. Beilby writes that he “cannot imagine a scenario” in which people like Anna or Sam would stand before God and not recognize Him as Lord and Savior. He clarifies that this does not remove their freedom: being free with respect to a choice does not mean one of the options must be chosen, only that it is possible to do so.
↑ 26. See Chapter 29 for the parallel argument about infants: the offer is genuine, and a real “yes” requires a possible “no,” but a soul met by perfect love with no lifetime of hardening behind it gives us every reason for strong hope. The same logic applies to Sam.
↑ 27. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 60. Beilby identifies these as the two things we can say with confidence about the cognitively disabled in the encounter. In heaven, Sam will not be seen as “cognitively disabled”; he will just be Sam.
↑ 28. This chapter’s thesis echoes the broader argument of Chapters 6–7: substance dualism is the anthropology that carries the postmortem hope, and it applies with special force to the case of the cognitively impaired. Friend’s dissertation provides the empirical dimension of this argument, demonstrating through analysis of over 5,000 NDEs that the evidence strongly favors substance dualism over physicalism. In every category of evidence—veridical perception during flatline EEG, blind-sight cases, distant accurate observations, enhanced clarity during brain dysfunction—the dualist explanation fits the data while the physicalist explanation requires theoretical contortions. The NDE data supports the book’s core claim: the soul survives death and meets Christ in the encounter. Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, demonstrates that the overall pattern of both NDEs and deathbed experiences is consistent with a biblical worldview and has much to offer Christians. For the unevangelized, see the next chapter, Chapter 31.