Chapter 26

Postmortem Opportunity Advocates

Pinnock, Sanders, Walls, Beilby, Jonathan, Hronich, Harrison — the modern evangelical scholarly conversation

A McMaster Office in 1992

Picture a small office at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, sometime in the early 1990s. Clark Pinnock is at his desk. He is fifty-five years old, Canadian, a Baptist, a former student of F. F. Bruce at Manchester, a former defender of biblical inerrancy who once accused Southern Baptist seminaries of going soft on Scripture.¹ He has taught at New Orleans, at Trinity in Deerfield, at Regent in Vancouver. He has moved — he would say he has been moved by Scripture — from Calvinism to Arminianism. He has helped launch a movement called "the openness of God," and he will pay a professional price for it. Right now he is finishing a manuscript. The book will be called A Wideness in God's Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions, and Zondervan will publish it in 1992.²

That same year, an Eerdmans book lands in seminary mailrooms: No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Unevangelized, by John Sanders, a young theologian at Huntington College in Indiana.³ And that same year, the University of Notre Dame Press publishes Hell: The Logic of Damnation, the first volume in a trilogy by Jerry Walls, a Methodist analytic philosopher with a Notre Dame PhD who is then teaching at Asbury Theological Seminary.⁴ Three evangelical scholars. Three different presses. Three different angles on the same cluster of problems: What happens to people who never hear the gospel? Can Christian theology still affirm the universal scope of God's saving love? Is the deadline doctrine — the conviction that death seals one's fate — really the only orthodox option?

Nineteen ninety-two is the year the modern evangelical Postmortem Opportunity conversation goes public. It is not the first time the question has been asked. We have already met it in the patristic descent texts, in the Alexandrian school, in the Anabaptist soul-sleep tradition, in the Wesleyan wider hope, in Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar.⁵ But 1992 is the year a distinctly evangelical scholarly conversation about postmortem opportunity becomes visible — published by mainstream evangelical presses, written by tenured evangelical professors, defended in academic journals with footnotes and indices and bibliographies.

Three decades later, the conversation has matured. James Beilby, a Bethel University theologian with a Marquette PhD, publishes Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Idea of a Second Chance to Be Saved after Death with IVP Academic in 2021.⁶ It is, as Jerry Walls writes on the back cover, "a model of how philosophical theology ought to be done."⁷ It is the most thorough single-volume scholarly defense of postmortem opportunity in print. Around it cluster other voices — Stephen Jonathan in Britain, Andrew Hronich in the United States, William Harrison from the pastoral evangelical side, all of them publishing book-length cases in different keys. The conversation Pinnock started is now a recognizable theological movement.

This chapter tells the story of that movement. I want to introduce you to the major figures, walk you through their books, show you where they agree and where they part ways, and assess what the conversation has and has not accomplished. The argument I will make at the end is that the contemporary Postmortem Opportunity conversation is the institutional expression of the long hope in contemporary American and British evangelical scholarship. It is distinct from the universalist movement (which we covered in Chapter 25) and the conditionalist movement (which we will reach in Chapter 28). It overlaps with both, but it is not reducible to either. It is its own thing.

One more word before we begin. I write this chapter as someone whose own theological position is what I have called CI plus PO — conditional immortality combined with postmortem opportunity, held with openness to the universalist alternative. I share much with the figures in this chapter, and I will say so where I do. But this is still a historical chapter. My job here is to let the figures speak in their own voices, to track their actual arguments, and to flag the places where I think they are right, the places where I think they are wrong, and the places where the question remains open.

Why 1992 Mattered

To understand why three evangelical books on the unevangelized appeared the same year, look at the world in which they were written. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989. The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. Christian missionary access to vast formerly closed regions of the world was opening at a pace no missiologist had predicted a decade earlier. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity was exploding in the Global South. And evangelical scholars, looking at the numbers, were forced to confront an awkward statistical fact: throughout most of human history, the majority of human beings who ever lived had never heard the name of Jesus Christ.⁸

Restrictivism — the view that those who do not hear and respond to the gospel in this life are damned — had been the default position of post-Reformation Protestant evangelicalism. The default was not unchallenged. We have seen the Wesleyan wider hope (Chapter 18) and the late-nineteenth-century American restorationist debate (Chapter 19). But for the mainstream of twentieth-century American evangelicalism, restrictivism functioned as something close to a confessional standard, defended by figures like Carl Henry, Millard Erickson, Ronald Nash, J. I. Packer, and, in a more popular register, by Billy Graham's earlier writings.⁹

The pastoral pressures on this default had been building. Stephen Jonathan, writing twenty years later from his Elim Pentecostal pastorate in Tamworth, England, would put the problem with disarming directness: a pastor stands at the graveside of someone who was not, by any visible standard, a believer. The grieving family looks to him for hope. What does he say? The funeral committal in the Elim Ministers' Manual contains the words in sure and certain hope of the resurrection, and Jonathan describes how some pastors quietly add the phrase "for those that love the Lord" so they can keep their theological integrity while offering at least some pastoral comfort.¹⁰ Eric Stoddart, the practical theologian whom Jonathan engages, calls it a "conspiracy of silence" — the gap between what evangelical pastors preach from the pulpit and what they whisper at the graveside.¹¹

That kind of pastoral pressure does not, by itself, change theology. But it makes theology look for new resources. In the early 1990s, evangelical scholars began to ask whether the resources had been there all along. Pinnock looked at Justin Martyr's spermatikos logos — the "seed of the Word" present in all human beings — and at Wesley's sermon "On Faith." Sanders looked at Gabriel Fackre, Donald Bloesch, and Nigel Wright, all of whom had argued that death may not be the absolute terminus of grace.¹² Walls reached for the medieval Catholic doctrine of purgatory and asked whether something like it could be retrieved on Protestant grounds.¹³ Each came at the same problem from a different angle. The result was a quiet convergence: by the mid-1990s, the question of postmortem opportunity was no longer fringe.

The Reformed mainstream of American evangelicalism noticed. In 2002, Daniel Strange published The Possibility of Salvation among the Unevangelised: An Analysis of Inclusivism in Recent Evangelical Theology, the major book-length critique of Pinnock and Sanders.¹⁴ In 2004, Christopher Morgan and Robert Peterson edited Hell Under Fire, the most concentrated Reformed evangelical defense of the strict ECT-plus-restrictivism position against the new wider-hope writers.¹⁵ D. A. Carson devoted significant attention to Pinnock in The Gagging of God (1996). And the institutional cost was not abstract. In 2003 the Evangelical Theological Society held a heresy trial in which both Pinnock and Sanders were on the dock, narrowly acquitted by a vote that left the society itself fractured.¹⁶ A year later, Sanders was dismissed from Huntington College.¹⁷

The PO conversation, in other words, did not develop in a vacuum. It developed under fire. The figures we are about to meet wrote with the knowledge that careers and friendships and institutional homes could be lost over the positions they were taking. Some of them lost those things. That should be kept in view as we read them.

Clark Pinnock and the Wider Hope

Clark H. Pinnock was born in Toronto in February 1937, the grandson of British Methodist missionaries to Nigeria who became Baptists when their understanding of baptism shifted.¹⁸ He grew up in a fairly liberal Toronto Baptist congregation, came to a serious evangelical faith as a teenager through Youth for Christ and an encounter with the writings of Francis Schaeffer (with whom he later spent a summer at L'Abri), and earned his BA in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto in 1960. He was awarded both a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Harvard and a British Commonwealth Scholarship to England. He chose England, and went to Manchester to study under F. F. Bruce. His 1963 PhD dissertation was on "The Concept of Spirit in the Epistles of Paul."¹⁹

In 1965 he joined the faculty of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where he became a central figure in the Southern Baptist Convention's battles over biblical inerrancy. His 1967 A Defense of Biblical Infallibility made his reputation. The next year, New Reformation: A Challenge to Southern Baptists accused Southern Baptist seminaries of a "scaled-down" view of Scripture and called for a new reformation in the denomination. Pinnock at that point was at the conservative front line.²⁰

The shift began at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where Pinnock taught from 1969 to 1974. Reading Hebrews closely — particularly the warning passages in chapters 6 and 10 — he became persuaded that strict Calvinism could not account for the New Testament's serious warnings against apostasy. He moved to Arminianism. From Trinity he went to Regent College in Vancouver (1974–1977) and from there to McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, where he remained until his retirement in 2002. He died in 2010 of a heart attack after announcing earlier that year that he had Alzheimer's disease.²¹

Pinnock's career arc is itself a small history of late-twentieth-century evangelical theology. He moves from neo-fundamentalist inerrancy fighter to evangelical Arminian to the openness-of-God movement to the wider hope. Each step was, by Pinnock's own self-description, a movement made under the pressure of Scripture rather than against it.²² He preferred to be known, he once said, not as one who had the courage of his convictions but as one who had the courage to question them and to change old opinions which needed changing.²³

A Wideness in God's Mercy is the book that made him a national lightning rod. The argument runs on two tracks. On the first track, Pinnock insists on what he calls the finality of Jesus Christ — salvation is exclusively through Christ, no exceptions, no parallel paths. He is not a religious pluralist. He is not John Hick. He is not even Karl Rahner with the "anonymous Christian" framing taken in a strong sense.²⁴ On the second track, Pinnock argues that the reach of Christ's saving work extends beyond the boundaries of explicit Christian profession in this life. The Old Testament saints did not know the name of Christ. Melchizedek did not know it. Job did not know it. Cornelius, at the moment the angel appeared to him, did not know it. Hebrews 11:6, Pinnock argues, gives us a faith principle: "anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him." That principle does not require theological literacy. It requires sincere seeking, which God himself enables and rewards.²⁵

From there Pinnock moves to the question of how, exactly, those who never explicitly heard the gospel might come to share in Christ's salvation. Several possibilities, he says, can be held together rather than as competing alternatives: God's prevenient grace at work in general revelation; the operation of the Holy Spirit recognized but unnamed in non-Christian religions; and — importantly for our purposes — a postmortem encounter with Christ for those who responded faithfully to whatever revelation they had. Pinnock is careful about this last move. He is not arguing for postmortem evangelism in Fackre's strong sense, in which the gospel is preached for the first time after death to those who never heard it. Pinnock thinks, rather, that those who in their earthly lives turned toward God in faith (even without knowing his name) will, after death, encounter the Christ they implicitly were seeking.²⁶

That qualified position has been read in two contradictory ways by Pinnock's critics. Daniel Strange, in his careful 2002 monograph, criticizes Pinnock for collapsing into religious pluralism in everything but name.²⁷ Ronald Nash claims that Pinnock holds both inclusivism and postmortem opportunity, and that the two positions are logically incompatible — if implicit faith saves, postmortem opportunity is superfluous; if postmortem opportunity is needed, implicit faith doesn't save.²⁸ Pinnock's response is that decisions in this life set the direction of the soul, and the fuller revelation after death lets the person pick up where things left off. Stephen Jonathan, who reads Pinnock carefully, summarizes the position by quoting Pinnock directly: "I do not hold to evangelism for the unevangelized after death, as Fackre and Bloesch do. Rather, I contend that those who have had faith in God during their earthly lives, as Hebrews 11:6 indicates, are 'believers,' even if they are not Christians; and I hold that after death, these people encounter the reality of God's grace in Christ for which they had longed."²⁹

Jonathan calls this Pinnock's "intermediate position" and judges it "weak" — not because it is wrong, but because it adds little beyond what inclusivism already implies. Most inclusivists, Jonathan observes, would already affirm a postmortem encounter with Christ for those who lived by implicit faith. The encounter is, in a sense, inescapable.³⁰ The more aggressive postmortem-opportunity claim — that genuine evangelistic opportunity might be offered to those who had no faith of any kind in this life — Pinnock himself never quite makes. That stronger claim belongs to Sanders, to Beilby, and to Jonathan himself.

Pinnock's other major contribution to the long-hope conversation is his defense of conditional immortality, articulated most fully in his contribution to the 1996 Four Views on Hell volume.³¹ By the mid-1990s, Pinnock had moved from a generic "wider hope" position to something close to what I have called CI plus PO — conditional immortality combined with extended opportunity. Eternal conscious torment, he argued, is incompatible with the character of God revealed in Christ. The biblical language of destruction, perishing, and being consumed describes a real terminus — not endless conscious suffering, but the cessation of being for those who finally and irrevocably reject God's grace. Subsequent conditionalist scholarship — the Edward Fudge revival traced in Chapter 28 — recognized Pinnock as one of its major evangelical defenders.

Pinnock's significance for this chapter is hard to overstate. He is the figure who carried the wider-hope conversation into evangelical respectability. Before A Wideness in God's Mercy, postmortem opportunity in evangelical circles was associated with figures most evangelicals would not read — with George MacDonald, with the American restorationists, with the soft European Protestant liberals. After Pinnock, it was a position one could hold from an endowed chair at McMaster Divinity College and publish with Zondervan. He paid for the cost — he was, after all, very nearly expelled from the Evangelical Theological Society in 2003 — but the conversation that followed him operates in his shadow. Beilby, Sanders, Jonathan, and Walls all cite him. Most of them disagree with one or more of his specific positions. None of them write as if he were a heretic.

John Sanders and the Taxonomy of the Unevangelized

John Sanders, born in central Illinois in 1956, came up through the small evangelical college and seminary world. He earned a BA from Trinity College, a master's degree, and his ThD in systematic and philosophical theology from the University of South Africa.³² By the time he published No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Unevangelized with Eerdmans in 1992, he was teaching at Oak Hills Christian College in Minnesota; he moved to Huntington College (later Huntington University) in Indiana in the late 1990s and was dismissed there in November 2004 over his role in the open theism movement.³³ He now teaches at Hendrix College.

If Pinnock is the bigger personality in the early 1990s wider-hope conversation, Sanders is the patient cartographer. No Other Name is, more than anything, a taxonomy. Sanders maps the options for understanding the destiny of those who never hear the gospel. He distinguishes restrictivism (which restricts salvation to those who hear and respond to the gospel in this life), universalism (which affirms that all will finally be saved), and several varieties of "wider hope" position. He distinguishes universal evangelization before death (a position associated with Norman Geisler), eschatological evangelization or postmortem evangelism (associated with Fackre, Bloesch, Wright), inclusivism (Pinnock's term, refined by Sanders), and what Gabriel Fackre called "divine perseverance" — the view that God continues to seek the lost wherever they are.³⁴

What Sanders does with this taxonomy is significant. He treats the various wider-hope positions not as rivals to be eliminated by argument but as complementary perspectives that may share more than they disagree about. He defends what he calls accessibilism — the affirmation that God makes salvation accessible to all people, in some real way, including those who never hear the gospel.³⁵ Where Pinnock is loudest about inclusivism and quietest about postmortem evangelism, Sanders is more willing to grant the latter as one legitimate option within a broader wider-hope frame. He is, on the whole, more cautious about saying which version is correct, and more interested in showing that the case for some version of accessibilism is serious and respectable within historic evangelicalism.

Sanders's biblical engagement is careful and tightly argued. He devotes significant attention to 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 and the descent texts, to Hebrews 9:27 and the apparent counter-text, to Luke 16 and the rich man and Lazarus.³⁶ He works through the patristic descent tradition. He engages the New Testament's "every knee" passages (Phil 2:10; Isa 45:23). He concludes that the biblical data does not require restrictivism and is at least consistent with some version of accessibilism. Stephen Jonathan later observes that Sanders is properly read as agreeing with Pinnock's methodological claim — that the scriptural evidence for postmortem opportunity is not abundant, and that the strength of the position lies in the theological argument rather than in any single proof text.³⁷

Sanders's significance for the PO movement is twofold. First, he provides the categorical map that subsequent scholarship inherits. When Beilby in 2021 organizes his book around the categories of restrictivism, universal opportunity, and inclusivism, he is working from a Sanders-shaped grid. Second, like Pinnock, Sanders paid a professional price for his theological work. The 2003 ETS attempt to expel him for open theism failed by a narrow vote of 388 to 231, with 9 abstentions — not the kind of margin that suggests a robust consensus.³⁸ A year later, Huntington's trustees ended his contract. The president told the faculty that the problem was not Sanders's open theism — other open theists, including William Hasker, remained on faculty — but his "notoriety" in promoting it.³⁹ The dismissal was a vivid reminder of what it costs an evangelical scholar to take a public position outside the post-Reformation consensus on these questions.

What Pinnock and Sanders together established by the mid-1990s is the categorical framework within which all subsequent evangelical wider-hope and PO scholarship operates. The terms are theirs. The taxonomy is theirs. The defense of God's universal salvific will against rigid Calvinist objection is theirs. They are not the first Christians to ask these questions — the long hope is much older than Pinnock and Sanders — but they are the figures who placed the questions on the agenda of contemporary American evangelicalism. Everything that follows in this chapter operates downstream from them.

Jerry Walls and the Logic of Total Transformation

Jerry L. Walls came at the question from a different angle entirely. Walls is a Methodist analytic philosopher of religion, a Wesleyan-Arminian in theological location, trained at Houghton College (BA), Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv), Yale Divinity School (STM), and the University of Notre Dame (PhD in philosophy, 1987).⁴⁰ At Notre Dame he sat at the feet of Alvin Plantinga, then in the process of building the great Christian philosophy department of the late twentieth century. After his doctorate Walls joined the faculty of Asbury Theological Seminary, where he taught from 1987 until 2010, after which he moved to Houston Baptist University (later renamed Houston Christian University) as scholar in residence and professor of philosophy.

Walls's signature contribution to the long hope conversation is his trilogy on the afterlife. Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, 1992), Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (Oxford, 2002), and Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford, 2011) constitute, taken together, the most sustained twentieth-century philosophical analysis of the doctrine of the afterlife from a Protestant Arminian standpoint.⁴¹ The trilogy is not primarily a defense of postmortem opportunity. Walls's main project is to defend the doctrine of hell on philosophically rigorous grounds — against universalism (he argues for the possibility, though not the certainty, that some persons may finally and freely reject God) and against the strict Calvinist account he believes makes God morally indefensible.⁴² But along the way, especially in the third volume, Walls develops a philosophical scaffolding that the broader PO conversation has come to lean on heavily.

The core argument in Purgatory is the sanctification argument. The argument runs as follows: heaven is a place of moral perfection. The beatific vision requires the redeemed person to be morally fit to enjoy it. But few if any Christians arrive at death in a state of completed sanctification — most arrive partially sanctified, with sin still clinging to them, with character not yet fully conformed to Christ. How then are they made fit for heaven? Two basic options present themselves. Either God instantaneously perfects the soul at the moment of death (the standard Protestant claim), or God brings the soul to perfection through a process of postmortem moral and spiritual growth (the doctrine of purgatory).⁴³

Walls argues that the instantaneous option is philosophically suspect. Genuine moral character is, by its nature, the product of a history — choices made, habits formed, dispositions cultivated over time. To instantaneously transform a partially sanctified person into a fully sanctified person is, in Walls's view, to perform something close to a personal-identity puzzle: is the resulting person really the same person who died, or is it a new creation magically substituted for the old? The process option, by contrast, preserves personal identity. The same person who died continues, through a period of moral growth, to become what God intends her to be. That process, Walls says, is what the church has historically meant by purgatory.⁴⁴

Walls's bold claim is that this doctrine can be developed on Protestant grounds. The Protestant Reformers rejected purgatory for good reason — the medieval Roman system had attached to it the abuses of indulgences, the satisfaction-model account of penance, and an ecclesial structure that was easily monetized. But the doctrine itself, Walls argues, is separable from those abuses. A Protestant doctrine of purgatorial sanctification need not require Roman sacramentology. It need not be transactional. It need not be about working off temporal punishment. It can be, simply, the continuation after death of the same process of sanctification that the Holy Spirit began in the believer in this life. Walls finds in C. S. Lewis — especially in the closing chapters of The Great Divorce and in scattered comments throughout Letters to Malcolm — a Protestant precedent.⁴⁵

It is that last move — "modified to allow for postmortem repentance" — that opens the door from the sanctification argument to the broader PO conversation. If the believer can grow morally after death, why not the unevangelized? If a person who died with implicit faith may be sanctified after death, why not a person who died without explicit knowledge of Christ? Walls is careful here. His project is primarily about the sanctification of the redeemed, not about the salvation of the lost. But the door he opens is the door Beilby and Jonathan walk through.

Walls's other contribution to the PO conversation is his careful philosophical engagement with Thomas Aquinas's argument against postmortem repentance. Aquinas had held, on hylomorphic grounds — the view that a human person is a single substance composed of soul and body together, in which the soul is the form of the body — that the separated soul, lacking its body, cannot change its fundamental moral orientation. The separated soul is in a state of "rest in the end acquired," not "motion toward the end." Therefore postmortem repentance is impossible.⁴⁶ Walls argues, plainly, that Aquinas's argument depends on a specific theory of human persons that not all Christians share. A substance dualist who holds that the soul is the essential self — able to think, choose, and grow without the body — will not be persuaded. Neither will a Christian materialist who holds that the resurrection body is necessary for personal existence at all. Beilby picks up this argument and develops it further; we will return to it shortly.⁴⁷

Walls's significance for the PO movement is that he provides the philosophical scaffolding for postmortem moral and spiritual development. Where Pinnock and Sanders developed the biblical and theological case, Walls developed the analytic-philosophical case. He showed that something like purgatorial sanctification is defensible on Protestant grounds, that the standard objection from Aquinas is not decisive, and that personal identity and moral growth can be coherently extended past the moment of biological death. He is, more than anyone else in the modern PO conversation, the analytic philosopher's defender of the long hope.

James Beilby and the Major Scholarly Defense

If Pinnock and Sanders pioneered the conversation, and Walls supplied the philosophical scaffolding, James Beilby gave the movement its first comprehensive single-volume scholarly defense. Beilby (PhD, Marquette) is professor of systematic and philosophical theology at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota.⁴⁸ Before 2021 he was better known as an editor and apologetics scholar than as a defender of any particular eschatological position — his earlier work includes Naturalism Defeated?, The Historical Jesus: Five Views, Justification: Five Views, and a number of other multi-author volumes on contested theological questions.⁴⁹ In 2021 he published, with IVP Academic, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Idea of a Second Chance to Be Saved after Death — a book that Jerry Walls would call "a model of how philosophical theology ought to be done."⁵⁰

The book has nine chapters across roughly 290 pages, and it works through the question with disciplined rigor. Let me walk you through the structure briefly, because the structure itself shows where the contemporary PO conversation has matured beyond Pinnock and Sanders.

Chapter 1, "The Destiny of the Unevangelized," sets up the question. Beilby refines Sanders's taxonomy. He distinguishes three "traditional categories of response" to the problem of the unevangelized: Restrictivism, Universal Opportunity, and Inclusivism, situating each in relation to a three-statement set whose conjunction creates the problem — that God desires universal accessibility of salvation, that explicit faith in Christ is necessary for salvation, and that some die without hearing the gospel.⁵¹ Each traditional view denies one of the three statements. Restrictivism denies the first; Universal Opportunity denies the third; Inclusivism denies the second. Beilby then introduces postmortem opportunity as a fourth option that affirms all three statements by reinterpreting the relationship between death and salvific opportunity.

The chapter also handles two problem cases that Beilby keeps in view throughout the book. The first is the age of accountability question — what about infants who die, or children who die before any meaningful response to the gospel? The standard restrictivist resort to "the age of accountability" turns out to be theologically slippery, as Beilby notes (pp. 6–7).⁵² The second is the pseudoevangelized — persons who have heard the gospel in some external sense (as audio waves striking the ear) but have not in any meaningful sense understood what they heard. Beilby's careful work on pseudoevangelism (pp. 11–12) is one of his most distinctive contributions to the conversation.⁵³

Chapter 2, "Postmortem Opportunity," is the constructive proposal. Beilby moves through the love of God as displayed in the parables of the lost (Lk 15) — the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son — arguing that God's persistence in seeking the lost is not plausibly limited by the moment of biological death (pp. 43 ff.).⁵⁴ He then develops what he calls the Missio Dei argument: salvation is fundamentally God's mission, not the church's. The church participates in the mission of God, but God does not depend on our evangelistic effort to reach the world (pp. 47–48). To make salvation depend on whether someone happened to be reached by a Western missionary in this life is to collapse soteriology into ecclesiology and to make God hostage to human evangelistic efficacy.⁵⁵ Beilby's careful sketch of "postmortem preparation" (p. 54) describes the encounter as not a single fleeting moment but a real opportunity in which God presents the gospel to the person in a way calibrated to that person's particular history and barriers to faith.⁵⁶

The chapter's most affecting material is the long discussion of the disability case (pp. 60–66), in which Beilby walks through the hypothetical examples of Anna (an infant who dies in the womb) and Sam (a young adult with profound cognitive disability that prevents him from ever being able to grasp the propositional content of the gospel). On any consistent restrictivism, Beilby argues, Anna and Sam are damned — not because of any choice they ever made, but because biological death intervened before they could make one. That conclusion, Beilby says with appropriate restraint, is theologically intolerable. Some version of postmortem opportunity for Anna and Sam is, at the very least, "intuitively obvious."⁵⁷

Chapter 3, "The Theological Case," is the more sustained theological argument. Beilby walks through the relationship between monergism (the Calvinist claim that God alone effects salvation) and PO (pp. 74 ff.), arguing that monergism does not strictly require the denial of postmortem opportunity — God could elect persons to salvation through a postmortem encounter as easily as through an earthly one — though monergism does eviscerate the motivational rationale for PO (a Calvinist does not need PO because God can save anyone he likes in this life).⁵⁸ He then engages the doctrine of God's universal salvific will at length (pp. 82 ff.). The most striking historical claim in the chapter — a sentence I want you to weigh carefully — comes on page 82: prior to Augustine's shift in 396, Beilby argues, the early church was largely "marked by a synergistic understanding of salvation" in which God's universal salvific will was simply assumed.⁵⁹ Augustine's shift to monergistic predestinarianism in 396 changed the trajectory of Western thought on this question. Whether Beilby's historical claim is correct in every detail can be debated (we covered the Augustinian turn at length in Chapter 12), but the basic point is that universal salvific will was a patristic commonplace, not a modern innovation.⁶⁰

Chapter 4, "Biblical Evidence Part 1: Apparent Counter-Texts" (pp. 107–131), takes up the texts most often raised against postmortem opportunity. Hebrews 9:27 — "it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment" — gets the most space. Beilby walks through the context: the passage is not primarily about the timing of judgment but about the once-for-all-ness of Christ's sacrifice. The parallel structure of 9:27 and 9:28 (just as humans die once, so Christ died once) makes the point clear — the verse rules out reincarnation, not postmortem opportunity (p. 109).⁶¹ He handles Luke 16:19–31 (the rich man and Lazarus, where Beilby reminds the reader the chasm is the chasm between the wicked rich and the suffering poor, not a metaphysical thesis about the impossibility of postmortem repentance), the "narrow gate" passages (pp. 125 ff.), and Revelation 20:11–15 with the book of life (pp. 129–131).⁶² The argument is not that these passages prove postmortem opportunity. The argument is that the standard restrictivist reading reads more into the texts than the texts themselves contain.

Chapter 5, "Biblical Evidence Part 2: Direct Support" (pp. 132–167), is the careful positive case. Here Beilby's methodological honesty is at its sharpest. He frames the chapter's project as "indirect support" rather than direct teaching (p. 134) — the biblical texts open the possibility of postmortem opportunity, they do not teach it as established doctrine.⁶³ The central text is 1 Peter 3:18–22, with its puzzling reference to Christ "preaching to the spirits in prison." Beilby walks through the four most plausible interpretations — Enoch (not Christ), Noah animated by Christ's Spirit, Christ proclaiming condemnation to fallen angels, and Christ proclaiming the gospel in Hades to those killed in the flood. He defends the last reading on careful exegetical grounds and connects it to 1 Peter 4:6 (pp. 153–156).⁶⁴ The chapter then ends with a methodologically important section called "Doing Theology Where Scripture Does Not Go" (p. 160), in which Beilby argues for the legitimacy of inferential theological reasoning where Scripture does not directly teach a position but is consistent with it.⁶⁵

Chapter 6, "Historical Evidence" (pp. 168–211), is the chapter that overlaps most heavily with the work I am doing in this whole volume, and accordingly I will keep this engagement brief. Beilby walks through Hippolytus on the descent (p. 179), the Alexandrian school's reading of 1 Peter 3:19 in connection with the descent — Clement, Origen, Athanasius (p. 182) — the moving story of Perpetua's prayer for her dead brother Dinocrates (p. 187), and the gradual suppression of the descent-as-soteriologically-significant reading under the consolidating Cyprian-Augustine-Gregory tradition with its extra ecclesiam nulla salus formula (p. 201).⁶⁶ The chapter closes with a fascinating case study from Japan on the cultural-experiential factors that have made some forms of PO more receivable in non-Western Christian contexts (p. 205).⁶⁷ For our purposes, the relevant point is that Beilby's historical chapter and this book's Chapters 4 through 11 are doing complementary work. He gives a focused contemporary case; we give the extended historical map.

Chapter 7, "Replies to Objections" (pp. 212–243), is the technical philosophical heart of the book. Beilby works through the "irrelevance of this life" objection (the worry that PO renders this life pointless) (p. 217), the probability-of-conversion argument (whether those who reject the gospel in this life are likely to accept it postmortem) (p. 231), and the Aquinas hylomorphic argument we encountered with Walls (p. 236).⁶⁸ On the latter, Beilby largely follows Walls: Aquinas's argument depends on a specific anthropology not all Christians share. A substance dualist or a Christian materialist who holds to a resurrected body at judgment will not find the hylomorphic argument decisive.⁶⁹ This material in Beilby's chapter 7 intersects in interesting ways with the analytic philosophy of hell developed by R. Zachary Manis in Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, whose Divine Presence Model offers a non-PO, non-universalist alternative on the moment-of-death encounter; we will engage that material more fully in Chapter 28.⁷⁰

Chapter 8, "Postmortem Opportunity, Pluralism, and Inclusivism" (pp. 244–277), is where Beilby distinguishes his own position from Pinnock-Sanders inclusivism (pp. 246 ff.). His verdict is that inclusivism alone is theologically insufficient — it does not provide a place for explicit faith in Christ as the saving act, only for implicit faith as a precursor to something. PO plus inclusivism, in Beilby's view, is significantly better than inclusivism alone, because it preserves the necessity of explicit faith in Christ while accounting for the unevangelized.⁷¹ He spends the second half of the chapter engaging D. A. Carson's critique of Pinnock at length and offering a careful reply (pp. 253–262).⁷²

Chapter 9, "The Cumulative Case," is the synthetic close. Beilby ends with a reading of Isaiah 45:22–23 — "Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth ... To me every knee shall bow, every tongue confess" — and connects it to the Pauline "every knee" trajectory (Phil 2:10).⁷³ The vision is universal: God's salvific will encompasses the ends of the earth, and the postmortem opportunity is the means by which that will is brought to its full expression in those whom evangelistic history did not reach.

One critical point of departure with Beilby has to be flagged here. Beilby's PO is restricted in scope. He limits it — consistently and carefully — to those who never had a "genuine chance" to hear and respond to the gospel in this life. The unevangelized, the pseudoevangelized, the cognitively disabled, infants. He does not extend PO to those who heard the gospel meaningfully and rejected it. My own position, as I have noted, is that the postmortem opportunity extends to all without exception — not because I think Beilby's anthropology is wrong, but because I think a God who continues to seek the lost (the parables in Luke 15 are explicit on this) does not draw such a line. The Father of the prodigal does not stop running when the son crosses some line of culpability. He runs until he finds. Beilby and I disagree here. He is right about much; I think he draws the scope too narrowly.⁷⁴

Beilby's significance for the contemporary PO movement is that he gives it its first comprehensive single-volume defense. Postmortem Opportunity is not a popular-level book. It is not, strictly, a Wesleyan or a charismatic or a Pentecostal book. It is a Bethel-University-style careful evangelical book, in the lineage of Carl Henry's logical rigor but without Henry's restrictivist conclusions. It engages the analytic philosophy of religion, the patristic historical record, the contemporary biblical scholarship, and the systematic-theological tradition. It is the book that, in 2021, gave the modern PO movement a flagship.

Stephen Jonathan and the Pastoral Case

If Beilby supplies the rigorous analytic-philosophical case, Stephen Jonathan supplies the pastoral-evangelical one. Jonathan is a British Elim Pentecostal pastor based in Tamworth, a market town in Staffordshire, England. He came to Christian faith in 1977 at age eighteen. He trained for pastoral ministry in the Elim Pentecostal Church, planted a church, and then took up team ministry in Tamworth in the early 1990s, where he has served ever since. He completed an MTh at Manchester in 1998 and a DMin at the University of Wales, Bangor, in 2011. The DMin was supervised by Nigel G. Wright, principal of Spurgeon's College, London, and the foreword to the published version is by Wright. The book is Grace beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife? A Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Evaluation, published by Wipf and Stock in 2014.⁷⁵

The pastoral framing of Jonathan's book is what distinguishes it from Beilby's. Where Beilby opens with the theological taxonomy, Jonathan opens with the funeral. A pastor stands at the graveside of someone who was, by any reasonable measure, not a believer. The grieving family is there. What does he say? The standard evangelical scripts — reassuring relatives that the deceased "may have prayed at the end" or "may have responded to general revelation" — serve as pastoral half-truths that ease grief without satisfying conscience. Eric Stoddart calls it a "conspiracy of silence" between what the evangelical pulpit preaches on Sundays and what the evangelical pastor whispers at the graveside on Mondays.⁷⁶ Jonathan agrees. He has felt the dissonance. He has lived it for years in active pastoral ministry. The book is his attempt to resolve it.

The book's structure tracks the dissonance through six chapters. Chapter 1 sets the pastoral scene and identifies two foundational axioms: God's universal salvific will, and the particularity and finality of salvation through Christ.⁷⁷ Chapter 2 covers the standard taxonomy of positions on the destiny of the unevangelized, with somewhat different emphases from Beilby's. Chapter 3, which Jonathan flags in his preface as requiring "a quiet room and a certain level of concentration," is the detailed biblical evaluation — 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 and the descent texts, Hebrews 9:27, Luke 16, and the apparent counter-texts.⁷⁸ Jonathan agrees with Pinnock that the scriptural evidence for postmortem opportunity is not abundant and that the strength of the view lies in the theological argument rather than in any single proof text — an honest methodological position.

Chapter 4 is, Jonathan says, "the key chapter of this book." This is the theological evaluation, and it is his most distinctive contribution. The chapter argues for divine simplicity in such a way that God's love and God's justice are not competing attributes that need to be balanced against each other, but complementary expressions of a single divine character. The traditional Western move — appealing to heaven as proof of God's love and to hell as proof of his justice — Jonathan calls "both naïve and misleading." If love is part of God's essence, then he cannot act in unloving ways even toward his enemies. And if justice is part of God's essence, then his justice cannot demand what his love forbids.⁷⁹

From there Jonathan moves to the question of what kind of justice God's justice is. Building on the work of Christopher Marshall, Alister McGrath, and others, he argues that biblical justice is fundamentally restorative rather than retributive. Retributive justice is reactive — a response to something that has happened. If the final judgment were essentially retributive in character, divine justice would be compelled by something external to God: the existence of sin. Restorative justice, by contrast, is motivated by something within God's own nature: his love for humanity.⁸⁰ Jonathan's argument is not that retributive language is absent from Scripture — divine wrath is biblical and serious — but that it functions within a larger restorative frame. As Isaiah 54:8 puts it, the divine anger lasts for a moment, but the divine kindness extends forever.⁸¹ If God's justice is finally restorative, postmortem opportunity is its natural expression: God continues to seek the lost because the goal of his justice is their restoration.

Chapter 5 takes up the practical implications — whether PO undercuts evangelism (Jonathan answers no), and whether it offers real pastoral relief at the funeral of an unbeliever (he answers yes, with the caveat that PO cannot become a license for procrastination in this life). Chapter 6 is the conclusion. Two appendices add discussion of general revelation and salvation and the descent in the early church.

The pastoral location of Jonathan's book matters. He writes from inside British evangelicalism, with a Pentecostal pastoral background, having come to PO over the course of an active pastoral ministry in which he has been forced to face the death of unbelievers again and again. The book is, in a real sense, the working theology of a man who has stood at too many graves. Sharon Baker's Razing Hell (which we will engage in Chapter 27) develops a parallel restorative-justice argument from a Mennonite-Caputo-influenced angle without depending on Jonathan; the convergence is striking. Pastoral theology, working in different idioms across the evangelical world, is converging on something like the restorative-justice frame.⁸²

Andrew Hronich and the Apokatastasis Argument

Andrew Hronich's book sits at the boundary between the PO conversation and the universalist conversation we covered in Chapter 25. Hronich is a young American scholar, a graduate of Liberty University, pursuing his master's at Princeton Theological Seminary. His 2023 book Once Loved, Always Loved: The Logic of Apokatastasis is, properly speaking, a defense of universal restoration that operates on PO premises.⁸³ The book carries foreword endorsements from David Bentley Hart, Greg Boyd, and Dale Allison Jr. — a representative trio of contemporary universalist and PO-sympathetic voices.

The seven chapters of Hronich's book move from the doctrine of God and humanity (ch. 1), through the free-will and predestination question (ch. 2), through the universal salvific will (ch. 3), through the unity of divine attributes against the retributive-justice frame (ch. 4), through a careful engagement with conditional immortality as a third option (ch. 5), through the purgatorial-fire reading of 1 Corinthians 3 and the patristic pedagogical-punishment tradition (ch. 6), to the synthetic close on apokatastasis panton — the restoration of all things — in chapter 7.

Hronich's chapter 5 is the most directly relevant for our purposes, because it engages CI as a distinct alternative to UR — which is to say, it engages my own position from a universalist vantage. Hronich's argument is that conditional immortality lacks the philosophical robustness of either eternal conscious torment or universal restoration. While CI has a strong biblical-theological case (the language of destruction, perishing, being consumed), Hronich claims it suffers from internal inconsistencies. His most ambitious argument is a Christological one. If, as conditionalism standardly claims, death is equivalent to non-existence, then on the cross either Christ's divine nature was annihilated (a Trinitarian impossibility) or his human nature was annihilated (a Chalcedonian impossibility). Either way, conditionalism appears to undermine orthodox Christology.⁸⁴ The argument is sharp. It is not, in my judgment, decisive — conditionalists have ready responses involving the analogical character of "death" and the careful distinction between cessation of conscious existence and metaphysical annihilation — but it is sharp enough to deserve serious response, and the conditionalist tradition treated in Chapter 28 will need to engage it.

Where Beilby restricts PO to the unevangelized and remains open on what follows the postmortem encounter (CI, UR, or final ECT), Hronich pushes the PO premises through to UR conclusions. His basic argument is the one we saw at the end of Beilby's chapter nine: if the postmortem opportunity is real, if God continues to seek the lost, and if God's love is finally irresistible to a rational being who sees Christ clearly, then the trajectory of PO is universalist. Hronich is sympathetic to Pinnock and Beilby and Jonathan, but he thinks they stop short of where their premises lead. He thinks the long hope is finally a universalist hope — not a hope that most will be saved, but a hope that all will.

I disagree with Hronich here, though I take his arguments seriously. His engagement is one of the most rigorous attempts to push PO premises into universalist conclusions. My own position remains CI plus PO — with genuine openness to the universalist possibility, but with what I find to be intractable biblical-theological evidence for the language of perishing, destruction, and finality. Hronich is right that PO premises tend to push in the universalist direction. Whether they require the universalist conclusion is the question I continue to work through.

William Harrison and the Pastoral-Lexical Case

The last figure in our cluster, William Harrison, represents the popular-pastoral pole of the PO conversation. Harrison's Is Salvation Possible after Death? A Biblical and Historical Study is a 21-chapter pastoral-evangelical book aimed at a lay-evangelical readership.⁸⁵ It lacks the academic apparatus of Beilby, the rigorous analytic-philosophical depth of Walls, the theological subtlety of Jonathan, or the comprehensive scope of Hronich. What it has is pastoral clarity and an extended lexical case for the limited duration of aiōn and aiōnios — the Greek words traditionally translated "eternal" in the English versions of the New Testament.

Harrison's chapters 4 and 5 ("The End of Eternity? Limited Duration of Aion/Aionios Demonstrated" and "If it's Forever, Why Not Just Say That It Is?") work through the lexical case at length, and chapter 19 returns to it with extended attention. Harrison's basic claim, in line with Thomas Talbott (whom we covered in Chapter 25) and the patristic Greek usage we discussed in Chapter 8, is that aiōnios primarily refers to "an age" or "pertaining to an age" rather than to strict endlessness. The adjective takes its scope from the noun it modifies. The "aiōnios God" is the God who is involved in the ages. The "aiōnios life" is the life that pertains to the age to come. The "aiōnios punishment" is the punishment that pertains to that same age. Harrison rehearses the classical authors (Marcus Aurelius, Josephus, Philo) and shows that aiōn and aiōnios do not in their ordinary range denote strict eternity.⁸⁶

Harrison's chapters 6 and 7 ("Jesus, the Evangelist of Hell?" Parts 1 and 2) handle the biblical material on the descent (Mt 25:46; 1 Pet 3:18–20; 4:6) and the apparent counter-texts (Heb 9:27; Lk 16:19–31). The argument here parallels Beilby and Jonathan on these passages: Hebrews 9:27 is about the once-for-allness of death and Christ's atonement, not the impossibility of postmortem repentance; Luke 16 is a parable about wealth and indifference, not a metaphysical thesis. Harrison's chapters 8 through 10 develop a constructive case that leans more universalist than Beilby's. His chapters 12 through 14 handle the doctrine of hell directly, and his chapters 15 and 16 ("What is 'The' Traditional View of the Duration of Punishment?" parts 1 and 2) make the historical-tradition argument that we are spending this whole book making at much greater length: the strict eternal-conscious-torment-with-no-postmortem-opportunity view is not "the" historic Christian view but one position among several.⁸⁷

Harrison's significance for the contemporary PO conversation is that he carries it into pastoral-popular evangelical idiom. His book is less rigorous than Beilby's, less theologically ambitious than Hronich's, and less pastorally distinctive than Jonathan's, but it is the kind of book a layperson or a busy pastor can read and learn from. It exists in the same conceptual space as Bradley Jersak's Her Gates Will Never Be Shut (treated in Chapter 25) and Sharon Baker's Razing Hell (treated in Chapter 27). The fact that books like Harrison's are now being written, published, and read in evangelical circles is itself a sign of how the PO conversation has spread beyond the academy.

Reception and Controversy

The contemporary PO movement has been received in two distinct registers. Within evangelical scholarship it has been treated as a serious option requiring rigorous response. Within evangelical popular culture it has been treated as soft on the gospel, dangerous to evangelism, and possibly slippery toward universalism. The two receptions are not unrelated, but they are not identical, and the gap between them shapes how the movement has developed.

The major book-length critical engagement is Daniel Strange's The Possibility of Salvation among the Unevangelised: An Analysis of Inclusivism in Recent Evangelical Theology, published by Paternoster in 2002.⁸⁸ Strange offers a careful Reformed critique focused primarily on Pinnock and Sanders. His argument is not that the wider-hope writers are insincere or untrained — he is generous in his characterizations — but that they have softened the necessity of explicit faith and the seriousness of the gospel call. Strange's worry is that wider-hope inclusivism, however orthodox in formal terms, functionally undercuts evangelistic urgency.

D. A. Carson's The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Zondervan, 1996) develops a parallel critique, though in a broader frame. Carson is particularly concerned with the way Pinnock combines inclusivism with postmortem opportunity. The two positions, Carson argues, are at best in tension and at worst incompatible. If implicit faith saves, why postmortem opportunity? If postmortem opportunity is needed, why bother with implicit faith?⁸⁹ Beilby spends a substantial portion of his chapter 8 responding to Carson's critique and arguing that the combination is in fact stable: implicit faith starts a trajectory toward Christ which is completed by the postmortem encounter.⁹⁰

The most concentrated Reformed counter-mobilization is the 2004 volume edited by Christopher Morgan and Robert Peterson, Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment.⁹¹ The book contains essays by R. Albert Mohler, Sinclair Ferguson, Christopher Morgan, Robert Peterson himself, J. I. Packer, Daniel Block, Douglas Moo, and others. The argument across the volume is that the eternal-conscious-torment view is biblically required and that the modern alternatives — conditionalism (Fudge, Stackhouse), universalism (Talbott), inclusivism (Pinnock), and PO (Pinnock again, Sanders) — all represent capitulations to contemporary cultural sensibilities rather than honest readings of Scripture. The book is the closest thing the Reformed evangelical world has produced to a manifesto against the new wider-hope writers.

Todd Miles's A God of Many Understandings: The Gospel and a Theology of Religions (B&H, 2010) adds another careful Reformed engagement, this time focused more on the theology of religions side of the question.⁹² Miles, like Strange, is concerned with what he sees as the wider hope's gradual loosening of the conviction that explicit faith in Christ in this life is necessary for salvation.

The institutional dimension of the controversy is harder to summarize neatly because it has affected different figures differently. Pinnock's Evangelical Theological Society vote in November 2003 was extraordinarily close. The society took up the question of whether Pinnock and Sanders should be removed for theological positions held to be inconsistent with the ETS doctrinal basis. Both survived. The vote on Pinnock was 432 in favor of him remaining, 277 in favor of removal, with 9 abstentions. The vote on Sanders was tighter still, with 388 in favor of him remaining, 231 in favor of removal, and 9 abstentions.⁹³ Neither margin reflects a confident consensus. The ETS as an institution survived the controversy but was visibly fractured by it.

One year later, in November 2004, the trustees of Huntington College (then about to be renamed Huntington University) announced that they would not be renewing John Sanders's contract. The college president told the faculty that the problem was not Sanders's open theism — William Hasker and other open theists remained on faculty — but Sanders's notoriety in promoting it. A student group called "Page 6" (named for the catalog statement on academic freedom) tried to advocate on his behalf. Sanders was dismissed. He moved to Hendrix College.⁹⁴

Underneath these official institutional moves lies a broader story. The PO conversation has been received differently by different streams of evangelicalism. Wesleyan-Arminian-Methodist evangelicals (Walls, the conditionalist John Stackhouse, Greg Boyd) have been more receptive. Pentecostal and charismatic evangelicals (Jonathan, Boyd, some streams of the Vineyard movement) have been more receptive. Anabaptist-Mennonite evangelicals (Sharon Baker, Bradley Jersak) have been more receptive. Conservative Reformed evangelicals (the writers in Hell Under Fire, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Gospel Coalition) have been most resistant. This is not a perfect map — there are exceptions in every camp — but the general pattern holds. Where the soteriological tradition is more synergistic (Wesleyan-Arminian) and more pneumatologically open (Pentecostal), the PO conversation has found a home. Where the soteriological tradition is more monergistic (Reformed) and more rigorously cessationist, the resistance has been strongest.

Outside American evangelicalism, the parallel conversations are worth noting. Hans Urs von Balthasar's "dare we hope" thesis (Chapter 22) is the major Catholic parallel. Ladislaus Boros's Mystery of Death (1962/1965/2020), with its "final decision at death" hypothesis grounded in Karl Rahner's transcendental anthropology, is the major Catholic-Rahnerian-Jesuit antecedent of the modern PO conversation; even where the evangelical PO writers do not cite Boros directly, his hypothesis and the broader Rahnerian framework structure the conceptual space in which they operate. (Boros's full treatment belongs to Chapter 24; what matters here is the conceptual overlap.)⁹⁵ The contemporary Eastern Orthodox revival of apokatastasis (Bulgakov, Hilarion Alfeyev, Met. Kallistos Ware) provides yet another parallel from a different ecclesial tradition.⁹⁶ The contemporary PO movement is, in its evangelical idiom, doing work that is being done in different idioms by Catholic and Orthodox theologians as well.

Assessment

What has the contemporary PO movement clearly contributed to Christian theology and pastoral practice? Six things, in my reading.

First, it has provided a coherent theological framework that is distinct from both universalism and the strict ECT-plus-restrictivism default. Before Pinnock and Sanders, evangelical conversations about the unevangelized typically operated within a narrow set of options: most are lost; some are saved by general revelation (the inclusivist option, treated as marginal); or all will be saved (universalism, treated as heretical). The PO option opened a fourth space — the affirmation that explicit faith in Christ is necessary for salvation and that the opportunity for explicit faith is not foreclosed by death. The space turns out to be habitable. It can be defended on biblical, theological, and philosophical grounds. It is consistent with conditionalism (Pinnock, Harrison, my own position), with hopeful universalism (Walls, Jonathan), or with explicit universalism (Hronich). It does not, by itself, require any of these. Beilby explicitly keeps open the possibility that PO ends in CI, UR, or final ECT for those who finally reject the offer.⁹⁷

Second, the PO movement has done serious biblical-theological work. Beilby's chapters 4 and 5 on the apparent counter-texts and the direct support, Jonathan's chapter 3 on the descent and the counter-texts, Harrison's chapters 6 and 7 on the same material — these constitute a substantial body of careful exegetical engagement with the texts that have most often been used against PO. The work on 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 in particular has been significant. The PO writers have shown that the Alexandrian-school reading of these verses — Christ preaching the gospel to the dead in Hades during the triduum mortis — is a respectable patristic reading that the medieval Latin tradition narrowed and that the Reformation tradition further narrowed, but that has never been entirely lost. The recovery of the patristic descent material has been one of the PO movement's signal contributions to evangelical biblical theology.

Third, the PO movement has provided real pastoral resources for those wrestling with the deaths of unbelievers. Jonathan's whole book is structured around this question. Beilby's disability case (Anna and Sam) addresses it. Sharon Baker's Razing Hell (Chapter 27) addresses it. The "conspiracy of silence" Stoddart described is no longer quite as silent. Evangelical pastors now have a body of serious literature they can turn to when the death of an unbeliever puts pressure on the standard scripts.⁹⁸

Fourth, the PO movement has supplied analytic-philosophical scaffolding for postmortem moral and spiritual development. Walls's Purgatory in particular has shown that the standard Protestant assumption of instantaneous glorification at death is philosophically problematic, and that a Protestant doctrine of postmortem sanctification can be defended without lapsing into Tridentine sacramentology or indulgence theology. Beilby's chapter 7 develops the response to Aquinas's hylomorphic argument and shows that PO does not depend on a single contested theory of human persons.⁹⁹

Fifth, the movement has reframed the doctrine of divine justice. Jonathan's chapter 4, building on Marshall and McGrath and parallel work by Baker, has made a serious case for understanding biblical justice as restorative rather than retributive — not by deleting the retributive dimension but by setting it within a larger restorative frame. The Augustinian assumption that God's justice is fundamentally about giving people their deserts and that his mercy is a gracious overriding of justice is, in this reframing, replaced by a more unified picture in which God's love and God's justice are complementary expressions of a single divine character.¹⁰⁰

Sixth, the movement has contributed a Protestant framework for the postmortem moral life. The medieval Catholic tradition had purgatory. The Eastern Orthodox tradition had its analogue in the "toll-houses" tradition and the practice of prayers for the dead. The Protestant Reformation rejected both. What replaced them was, in most popular Protestant accounts, a model in which death is followed by instantaneous transition to one of two final states. Walls and Beilby together have made the case that this binary instantaneous model is not the only Protestant option and that something more like postmortem development can be defended on biblical and philosophical grounds.

The limits of the movement are, in my judgment, three. First, the PO movement is young as a recognizable scholarly conversation. Most of its core works are post-1990. The body of literature is still relatively small. Substantial questions remain unresolved: What is the relationship between the postmortem opportunity and the final judgment? Where is the postmortem encounter located — in the intermediate state, at the resurrection, at the judgment seat of Christ, all of the above? What is the relationship between PO and personal identity over the death-resurrection transition? These are live questions that the next generation of PO scholarship will need to engage.

Second, the diversity of internal positions within the PO movement can make external assessment difficult. Pinnock is PO plus CI. Sanders is PO plus a relatively open position on what follows. Walls is PO plus increasingly explicit hopeful-universalist tendencies. Beilby is PO with the question of CI versus UR versus ECT held open. Jonathan is PO with conditionalist sympathies and a strong restorative-justice emphasis. Hronich is PO plus explicit UR. Harrison is PO with CI-and-UR-leaning conclusions in a popular-pastoral voice. This is not a single position. It is a family of positions held together by a shared rejection of the deadline doctrine. Critics sometimes treat this diversity as a sign of incoherence. I think it is rather the sign of a young theological conversation that has not yet settled into mature institutional forms.

Third, the institutional resistance from conservative Reformed evangelicalism has not abated. The Gospel Coalition continues to treat PO as outside the bounds of acceptable evangelical theology. The Southern Baptist Convention continues to publish books like Hell Under Fire. The Evangelical Theological Society, after the close vote of 2003, has not held another formal expulsion vote on these questions, but the institutional climate within conservative Reformed evangelicalism remains hostile. PO advocates continue to be employed at the more open evangelical institutions (Bethel, Houston Christian, Asbury, McMaster) but are largely absent from the more confessionally Reformed institutions.

My own assessment, then, is that the contemporary PO movement is one of the most important developments in late-twentieth-and-early-twenty-first-century evangelical theology. Its scholarly density, biblical-theological rigor, and pastoral attention have moved PO over the course of about three decades from "fringe heterodoxy" to "respected minority option" within evangelical theology. The fact that IVP Academic published Beilby's Postmortem Opportunity in 2021 is, by itself, a marker of how far the conversation has come. Thirty years earlier, no major American evangelical academic publisher would have touched the book.

I should also state plainly where my own position fits in this landscape. I hold what I have called CI plus PO — the conviction that the opportunity for salvation extends beyond death (the PO move) and that those who finally and irrevocably reject Christ will be destroyed rather than tormented eternally (the CI move). I read Beilby and Jonathan and Harrison as close kin. I read Hronich as a serious universalist interlocutor whose arguments I take seriously but cannot fully follow. I differ from Beilby on the scope of PO — he restricts it to those who never had a "genuine chance" in this life; I extend it to all without exception, on the grounds that a God who continues to seek the lost does not draw such a line.¹⁰¹ I differ from Hronich on whether PO premises require UR conclusions — I think they tend in that direction, but I do not yet think they compel it. I am, in the contemporary evangelical landscape, a typical specimen of the conversation this chapter has been describing — one of many who hold PO without holding UR, one of many for whom the biblical-theological case is compelling but not yet decisive on every question.

Why This Matters

Three reasons the contemporary PO movement matters for the long-hope tradition we have been tracking across this book.

First, it shows that the long hope did not die with the patristic universalists, the medieval mystics, the Anabaptists, the Pietists, the Wesleyans, the Cambridge Platonists, the American restorationists, or the twentieth-century giants. It is alive. It is being written about today by tenured professors at evangelical universities, published by major evangelical academic presses, and read by pastors and seminarians and lay Christians across the English-speaking world. The "modern innovation" charge against postmortem opportunity is, at this point, historically untenable. The Pinnock-Sanders-Walls-Beilby-Jonathan-Hronich-Harrison conversation is not an innovation. It is a recovery. The writers in this conversation are, in many cases, explicitly working with materials they have inherited from the patristic, medieval, and early modern long-hope tradition. They are not making things up. They are reading the Christian tradition more carefully than the critics who claim "the church has always taught" the deadline doctrine.

Second, the movement has institutional and pastoral consequences. The pastor who reaches for Beilby or Jonathan or Harrison when standing at the graveside of an unbeliever has resources that the pastor of fifty years ago did not have. The seminarian wrestling with the unevangelized question can read serious works by serious evangelicals that take the question seriously rather than dismissing it with the standard restrictivist scripts. The lay Christian who has been told confidently that "the church has always taught that death seals one's fate" can be handed Beilby's chapter 6 on the historical evidence or Harrison's chapters 15 and 16 on the traditional view of the duration of punishment. The PO movement has done what the long hope tradition has always done in moments of recovery: it has put the resources of the older tradition back into circulation.

Third, the movement is the link between the universalist conversation we covered in Chapter 25 and the conditionalist conversation we will reach in Chapter 28. PO is not universalism. PO is not conditionalism. But PO is consistent with universalism (Hronich), consistent with conditionalism (Pinnock, Harrison, my own position), and consistent with the open position that any of CI, UR, or final ECT might follow the postmortem encounter (Beilby). PO is, in this sense, the broader theological frame within which the contemporary evangelical debates about final destiny can be carried on. It is the institutional expression of the long hope in contemporary American and British evangelical scholarship.

Three decades after Pinnock at McMaster, the conversation he opened has matured. The figures are different, the books are longer, the philosophical work is more careful. But the basic claim — that the opportunity for salvation extends beyond death because God's love does not stop at the moment of death — remains the heart of the long-hope tradition. It is being said in evangelical idiom, in scholarly form, by people who care about Scripture and orthodoxy and the witness of the church. That fact alone should give the reader pause when she hears the next iteration of the "modern innovation" charge. The charge is not new. It has been answered, again and again, across two thousand years. It is being answered now.

In the next chapter we turn to the broader phenomenon of "hopeful universalism" in contemporary evangelical thought — the position that the Christian may hope for universal restoration without claiming to know it. Where the PO movement we have just traced focuses on the question of opportunity, the hopeful-universalism conversation focuses on the question of outcome. Many of the same figures will reappear. Greg Boyd, Bradley Jersak, Heath Bradley, Steve Gregg, Sharon Baker, and a host of pastoral and popular voices have made hopeful universalism perhaps the most pervasive contemporary form of long-hope theology in evangelical Christianity. That is the conversation we take up next.