Penultimate Conversion

Some Suggestions: 

Moment of Clarity:  A moment in which a person is given the ability and situation in which they must make the ultimate decision, for God or against.

Restraint: Some individuals will not be saved.

Penultimate Conversion:  In the moment of death, the Moment of Clarity occurs.

Post-Mortem conversion seems clearly unbiblical, but perhaps Penultimate Conversion can be made to work.   

Does this not undermine the need for missionary work? Not in light of Alternate and the Goodness Thesis:

Goodness Thesis:  The Missionary enterprise is just a better life, both for the missionaries themselves and for those who get to become Christians even earlier - even if not strictly necessary for the salvation of all.

Alternate:  Some individuals that would have rejected the Moment of Clarity must be saved through missionary work instead. 

Plus Penultimate Conversion is merely a speculative proposal, so missionary work should still spur us on.  

I also think that the Holy Spirit can overcome any obstacles that would seem to prevent the Moment of Clarity occurring even in this life, so that a potential convert can make an informed and free decision for God.  As WLC says: "I’ve suggested that God has so providentially ordered the world that anyone who rejects the Gospel in his present circumstances would not have believed it even if he had been born in more conducive circumstances."

So even granting Penultimate Conversion, we have three reasons to perform missionary work:

1. It’s just good and a better life. 

2. Penultimate conversion is speculative.  We’re not sure of it.

3. In light of Alternate, it may be that some individuals *require* missionary presentations in order to be saved.  That is, they wouldn’t be saved in the Moment of Clarity if not for missionary work or would have been saved already earlier through missionary work. 

In 1522, Martin Luther wrote a letter to Hans von Reichenberg about the possibility that people could turn to God after death: “It would be a completely different question to ask whether God could grant faith to a few at the moment of their death or after death and thereby save them through faith. Who would doubt that he could do this? But no one can prove that he does do this.”

This is all merely suggestive and I decline to endorse it.  To balance it out, here's a quote from Germain Grisez in an opposite spirit: 

Confidently expecting heaven and no longer fearing hell, one reasonably assumes that nothing one does or fails to do is likely to make any difference to what will happen to oneself, one’s loved ones, or anyone else after death. Without a kingdom that must be sought, there no longer is any reason for non-Christians to repent and believe, and Jesus’ exhortation to seek first the Father’s “kingdom and his righteousness” (Mt 6:33; cf. Lk 12:31) no longer evokes the theological hope unsullied by presumption that alone can motivate Christians to live their faith in love, to try to form their children in its practice, and to promote others’ salvation.

These considerations listed by Grisez strongly weigh against the suggestions, I think. 

Two more thoughts.  1 Peter 3:19 may help in supporting post-mortem conversion.  Second; those who go through life without hearing the gospel or without having a clear presentation of it are not condemned on  their basis of unbelief in the gospel.  Rather, they're condemned for their already having disbelieved God's testimony in nature and on account of their wrongdoing.

All of this seems to be largely based on a Arminian way of considering salvation.  Perhaps the Calvinist has a simpler option in just saying that those individuals who are elect will just come to have faith in this life, end of discussion.