Chapter 4

God’s Universal Salvific Will and the Problem of the Unevangelized

Introduction: A Question That Will Not Stay Quiet

Imagine a young woman named Mei. She is born in a remote village in central China around the year 800. She lives a quiet life. She marries, raises children, mourns her parents, and dies of fever at thirty-six. In her entire life, she never once hears the name of Jesus. No missionary ever reaches her village. No Bible is translated into her dialect. She lives, and she dies, and the gospel never comes near her.

What happens to Mei?

Multiply Mei by tens of billions. That is the soteriological problem we face. The earlier chapters of this book argued two things: God truly desires the salvation of all people (Chapter 2), and Christ’s atoning death was offered for all without exception (Chapter 3). But here is the rub. If both of those claims are true, what do we do with the simple, undeniable fact that most of humanity has died without hearing of Christ? The thesis of this chapter is straightforward: the existence of billions of people like Mei creates a soteriological problem that demands a solution—and postmortem opportunity is the most satisfying answer the Christian tradition has produced.

I want to be honest with you. I do not think this is a problem we can simply tidy up with a clever phrase. It deserves to be felt before it is solved. So we will sit with the weight of it for a moment, evaluate the three main solutions Christians have offered, and then show why a postmortem encounter with Christ holds together the loose ends that the other solutions cannot.

The Soteriological Problem of Evil

James Beilby calls this issue “the Soteriological Problem of Evil.”¹ The name is helpful. Just as the classic problem of evil asks how a good and powerful God can allow suffering, the soteriological version asks how a loving God who wants everyone saved can allow billions of people to die having no real chance to respond to His offer.

Beilby formalizes the tension this way:

1. God desires that the gospel be universally accessible.
2. Responding to the gospel of Jesus Christ with explicit faith is necessary for salvation.
3. Some die without having heard the gospel.²

Each statement, on its own, looks defensible from Scripture. Together, they appear to clash. Something in the picture is not adding up.

The numbers are sobering. The World Christian Encyclopedia estimates that in AD 100 there were 181 million people alive, of whom roughly one million were Christians—leaving about sixty thousand unreached people groups. By AD 1000 the global population was roughly 270 million, with around 50 million Christians and still some 50 thousand unreached groups.³ Beilby plausibly suggests that “there have been tens of billions of people (and maybe a lot more) who have never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ.”⁴ Tens of billions. That is not an abstract number. That is parents and children and grandparents stretching back through every continent and century.

Beilby helpfully gives us three test cases that anchor the abstract problem in real human lives.⁵ “George” is the man in ninth-century-BCE Mongolia who never heard of Israel, let alone Christ. “Anna” is the six-month-old infant who dies before she can understand any message at all. “Sam” is the adult born with a profound cognitive disability who cannot grasp propositional content. None of these three has rejected Christ. None of them has had what we would call a real opportunity. And there are more besides them: “Kunta Kinte,” the slave who hears the name of Jesus only from the mouths of slave owners who use Christianity to justify his torture; “Micha,” the abused girl whose youth pastor disbelieves her; “Rapunzel,” the young woman whose first genuine encounter with the gospel is interrupted by sudden death.⁶

What do we say to these people on the day of judgment? “Sorry, you were born in the wrong place”? “Sorry, you only heard a distorted version”? “Sorry, you ran out of time”? If our soteriology forces us to that answer, something has gone wrong with our soteriology.

Three Solutions That Don’t Quite Work

Christians have not been silent in the face of this problem. Three serious answers have been offered: restrictivism, inclusivism, and universal opportunity before death. I want to take each one seriously, because each contains a real insight. But I am also going to argue that each one breaks down at a critical point.

Restrictivism: The Door Closes at Death

Restrictivism (sometimes called exclusivism) holds that explicit faith in Christ in this life is necessary for salvation, full stop. Anyone who dies without that explicit faith is lost. J. I. Packer puts the position bluntly: “Living by the Bible means assuming that no one will be saved apart from faith in Christ, and acting accordingly.”⁷ Stephen Jonathan helpfully distinguishes “hard restrictivism,” “pessimistic agnosticism,” and “optimistic agnosticism” within this camp—but each variation lands in roughly the same place: the unevangelized are most likely lost.⁸

I want to acknowledge what restrictivism gets right. It takes seriously the New Testament insistence that salvation is in Christ alone (John 14:6; Acts 4:12). It refuses to soften the cross. It honors the Great Commission. These are not small things, and any solution to the soteriological problem must hold onto them.

But the moral and theological problems are severe. If restrictivism is correct, then the eternal destinies of billions are determined by where and when they happened to be born—a circumstance over which they had no control whatsoever. As Dale Moody wryly asked, “What kind of God is he who gives man enough knowledge to damn him but not enough to save him?”⁹ Restrictivism also has to deny what Chapter 2 argued was clearly taught in Scripture: that God genuinely desires the salvation of all (1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9). If God’s “desire” for universal salvation is a desire He systematically declines to act on for most of humanity, the word has lost its meaning. And what about Anna and Sam? Restrictivism either consigns infants and the cognitively disabled to hell or quietly invokes some unannounced exception—which is to admit, at the door of the church, that pure restrictivism cannot account for the people most of us already believe to be saved.

Inclusivism: Saved Without Knowing the Name

Inclusivism is a more attractive proposal. It teaches that Jesus Christ is the only Savior—ontologically necessary for anyone’s salvation—but that explicit knowledge of Him is not always epistemologically necessary. A person responding in faith to whatever light God has given them through general revelation may, by the merits of Christ’s work, be received by God even without ever hearing the name of Jesus.¹⁰

The most famous version is Karl Rahner’s “anonymous Christians”: those who, in their basic orientation toward truth and goodness, are responding to God’s grace whether they know it or not.¹¹ Vatican II adopted a softened form in Lumen Gentium 16. Clark Pinnock developed a Protestant “wider hope” based on the “faith principle”—that God saves by faith, not by knowledge alone. John Sanders, in No Other Name, argued that God judges every person by the light they received. C. S. Lewis, in The Last Battle, gave us the literary picture of Emeth, the Calormene soldier whose service to Tash is accepted by Aslan because, deep down, what he loved was love itself.

Inclusivism has real strengths. It honors the universality of God’s love. It takes Romans 1 seriously when it says God has not left Himself without witness in creation. It refuses to write off the Mei’s of the world without a hearing.

And yet I am not finally persuaded. Five problems press in. First, the “anonymous Christian” framing is patronizing. It tells the devout Buddhist or Muslim that what they actually are, deep down, is something they have explicitly rejected being. Second, Romans 10:14–17 anchors saving faith in hearing the message of Christ—Paul’s logic for missions assumes that hearing matters. Third, what exactly is the content of saving faith without explicit knowledge of Christ? “Faith” that is content-free starts to dissolve into mere sincerity. Fourth, inclusivism is epistemically presumptuous in reverse: who am I to declare a stranger an “anonymous Christian” without their consent or knowledge? Fifth—and most importantly for this book—inclusivism provides no clear mechanism for how Christ’s work is applied to the recipient. There is no encounter, no conscious yes, no relationship freely entered. The person is saved, in effect, by category rather than by communion.¹²

(I will return to inclusivism in Chapter 31, where I argue that the two views need not compete; one can hold a modest inclusivism alongside postmortem opportunity. But I find the postmortem framework strictly stronger.)

Universal Opportunity Before Death: Dreams, Visions, and Middle Knowledge

A third proposal seeks to keep the deadline at death but to remove the unevangelized category altogether. On this view, God ensures that everyone hears the gospel before they die. The means may be ordinary (a missionary arrives just in time) or extraordinary (an angelic visit, a prophetic dream, a near-death encounter).

A philosophically sophisticated form of this view appeals to Molinism, or middle knowledge.¹³ William Lane Craig has argued that God, knowing what each person would have freely chosen in any circumstance, providentially places people in the times and locations where their actual response (yes or no) reveals what they would have done in any setting. So Mei in ninth-century China is not unjustly disadvantaged; God knew that wherever she was placed, her free response would have been the same.

I find this clever but unpersuasive as a stand-alone solution. A few problems stand out.

First, the theory faces the well-known “grounding objection”: what makes counterfactual statements about creaturely freedom true when the choices in question never actually occur? Beilby concedes the philosophical debate is unresolved, and even sympathetic readers of Molinism must admit the framework rests on contested foundations.¹⁴

Second—and this is the heart of Beilby’s critique—even if Molinism is true, it does not give the unevangelized an actual opportunity. It gives them a hypothetical one. As Beilby points out, it is far better “that a person’s final destination be decided by a decision that they consciously and explicitly make, not by decisions that they would have made.”¹⁵ Imagine being told you were judged based on what you would have done in a situation you never faced. That is not justice; it is bookkeeping.

Third, this view does nothing for Anna or Sam. No volume of dreams or visions reaches the cognitive capacity of a six-month-old infant.

And yet—here is an interesting twist—Andrew Hronich has recently argued that if Molinism is true at all, it actually pushes toward universal salvation rather than away from it. If God has middle knowledge of every counterfactual, He can in principle “weakly actualize” a world in which every person freely receives sufficient grace to be reconciled, whether antemortem or postmortem.¹⁶ Building on Jason Marsh’s proposal, Hronich notes that God could place persons in environments where, in the long run (including postmortem encounters), they would freely embrace Him.¹⁷ I do not think this argument settles the universalism question (we will revisit that in Chapters 14 and 33). But it does show that the Molinist machinery, once granted, is not the friend of restrictivism that its evangelical defenders have assumed. If anything, it strengthens the postmortem opportunity case: even on Molinist premises, the natural conclusion is that God’s grace finds people across the boundary of death.

The Hard Cases: Infants, the Disabled, the Pseudoevangelized

Every soteriological theory must answer the hard cases. Postmortem opportunity, I will argue, answers them better than the alternatives.

Infants. What about Anna, who dies at six months? Restrictivism stumbles here. Some Calvinists invoke a doctrine of infant election, but the texts cited (2 Samuel 12:23; Matthew 19:14) speak of God’s posture toward children rather than guaranteeing their salvation by category alone.¹⁸ Inclusivism stumbles too: an infant has no capacity to respond to general revelation. As Beilby points out, postmortem opportunity offers what neither view can: Anna gets to actually meet Christ. Whatever maturation or development is necessary in the intermediate state, the encounter is real, personal, and chosen.¹⁹

The cognitively disabled. Sam is in a similar but distinct category. Beilby argues, rightly, that even if some level of cognitive development is necessary for understanding theological propositions, it does not follow that the same level is necessary for relationship. People with profound cognitive disabilities respond to love. Christ can encounter them. That encounter, freed from the limitations of an injured brain, can be salvifically meaningful.²⁰ (The metaphysical foundation for this claim—the soul’s cognitive capacity beyond bodily limitations—is developed in Chapter 9 and grounded in the substance dualism arguments of Chapters 6–8.)

Indigenous peoples and entire civilizations. What about pre-Columbian Mesoamericans, ancient Polynesians, the Inuit, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia? Whole cultures lived and died without exposure to the gospel. The traditional answer is functionally to consign them en masse to hell—a conclusion most modern Christians find morally intolerable, and rightly so. Postmortem opportunity does what Christian missions could not do in time: it ensures that every person, in every culture, will at last meet the Christ they never had a chance to meet on earth.

The pseudoevangelized. Beilby coined this term for those who heard a version of the gospel so distorted that to reject it was, ironically, the morally appropriate response.²¹ The slave who hears Jesus from the slaver. The abused child who hears about a heavenly Father from the man who hurts her. The Holocaust survivor whose only encounter with Christianity is the Christianity that blessed her tormentors. To say these people “heard and rejected the gospel” is to abuse the word “heard.” They heard a name attached to a lie. A loving God will not let that be their final hearing. As George Hurd argues, the pure gospel has always been under assault, and what some have rejected is the “leaven of the Pharisees” rather than Christ Himself.²²

Postmortem Opportunity: The Solution That Holds Together

Why is postmortem opportunity the most satisfying answer? Three reasons stand out.

First, it preserves the full force of the New Testament texts on the necessity of explicit faith. Salvation is still through Christ alone, by faith in Him, and that faith is conscious and personal. Postmortem opportunity does not weaken John 14:6 or Acts 4:12. It simply locates, for the unevangelized, the moment of explicit faith on the other side of death rather than before it.

Second, it preserves the full force of the texts on God’s universal salvific will. 1 Timothy 2:4 means what it says. 2 Peter 3:9 means what it says. As Thomas Talbott has argued at length, the language of divine love does not work if it expires arbitrarily.²³ A God whose pursuit of the lost stops at the moment of physical death is not the God of Luke 15.

Third, it provides an actual mechanism. Inclusivism gives us salvation without encounter. Universal Opportunity Before Death gives us hypotheticals. Restrictivism gives us a closed door. Postmortem opportunity gives us what every other model lacks: a real meeting between a real person and the real Christ. Mei meets Jesus. Anna meets Jesus. Sam meets Jesus. Kunta Kinte meets the actual Jesus and not the false one his captors invented. The encounter is genuine, the response is genuine, the relationship is genuine.

Conclusion

I started this chapter with Mei. I want to end with her too. The traditional restrictivist answer asks us to believe that her eternal fate was sealed by the latitude and longitude of her birth. The inclusivist answer asks us to call her a Christian without her consent and without an encounter. The universal-opportunity-before-death answer asks us to settle for a hypothetical decision she never actually made. None of these is worthy of the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

The postmortem answer is different. It says that Mei—the real Mei, with her real hopes and fears and her real heart—will, on the other side of dying, meet the One who loved her into existence and into His arms. He will speak. She will see Him. She will respond freely, knowingly, finally. Whatever else we say about how that encounter goes, we can say at least this: it will be just. It will be loving. It will be God acting like Himself.

That is the picture this book exists to defend. Having laid the foundation in these first four chapters—God’s character, the universal atonement, and the soteriological problem of evil—we now turn to the metaphysical framework that makes the postmortem encounter possible: the conscious survival of the soul after death, beginning with the empirical evidence from veridical near-death experiences in Chapter 5.