When the framework comes from somewhere else
A few years ago, a woman shared with me what she described as the most important moment of her life. During an NDE, she was "shown" a memory from before her birth — a planning session in which her soul had chosen her parents, picked out her body, and signed agreements with other souls about what they would teach each other in this life. She was crying as she told me. The memory had given her peace about a difficult childhood. "I picked them," she kept saying. "I knew what I was signing up for."
I want you to feel the weight of a moment like that before we go further. The woman was sincere. The peace was real to her. So when I tell you that the framework she received cannot be reconciled with the Bible, I am not making a small point. I am asking you to walk with me through a hard conversation — one that will come up, sooner or later, with someone you love.
In the last chapter, we looked at past-life memories — the claim that some NDErs remember previous incarnations on earth. Pre-life memories are related but distinct. Past lives look backward through a chain of supposed earthly incarnations. Pre-life memories look upward, into a supposed soul-realm that existed before this body was conceived. The two often appear together in the same teachers' books, but they are not the same idea.
In its most popular form, pre-life teaching says that your soul existed before you were born, that you spent time in a heavenly council planning the life you were about to enter, that you chose your parents and your body and your challenges, and that you entered into "soul contracts" with the people who would later become important to you — your spouse, your children, even strangers who would one day hurt you. Some NDErs report being "shown" all of this during their experience. Others report that a being of light reminded them of agreements they had supposedly made before birth. Still others encountered the framework only later, through teachers and books, and then re-read their NDE through that grid.1
This is the pattern I want us to take apart carefully. Because I believe — and I think Scripture compels us to believe — that the framework is not Christian. It is not even Christian-adjacent. It is an ancient pagan worldview gently dressed in spiritual-sounding language and quietly imported into a great deal of NDE literature.
The most influential popularizer of pre-life content is the late Michael Newton, a hypnotherapist whose book Journey of Souls has shaped a generation of NDE teaching. Newton claimed to have regressed thousands of clients into the "between lives" state through hypnosis. From those sessions he constructed a detailed picture: souls live in a heavenly realm, gather in soul-groups, attend a "council of elders" who help plan each life, and choose their bodies and circumstances before being incarnated. Newton presented this as empirical research.2
The trouble is that hypnotic regression is exactly the kind of process most likely to produce framework-shaped content. A suggestible subject in a relaxed state, guided by a therapist who already believes in pre-life planning, is going to "remember" pre-life planning. This is not data. This is theology produced by suggestion.
Newton's framework spread far beyond his own books. NDE conferences feature pre-life sessions. Bestselling NDE memoirs include scenes where the experiencer suddenly recalls choosing their parents. Psychic teachers like Ainslie MacLeod build entire ministries on the idea of "soul contracts" — claiming to identify the supposed agreements you made with the people in your life and to coach you on how to fulfill them.3
When an NDEr's account includes detailed pre-life content — soul contracts, councils of elders, choosing parents — ask one diagnostic question first: Was this present in the original experience, or did it enter the account later, after the experiencer encountered Newton, MacLeod, or similar teachers? In many cases the pre-life content is a later overlay, not the core experience.
Scripture's picture of human origins is strikingly different. The Bible knows nothing of a pre-existent soul-realm where I existed before my body did and chose the conditions of my earthly life. The biblical picture is that human beings begin to exist when God creates them, in time, in connection with their biological formation. We are not visitors descending from above. We are creatures, called into being by a Creator.
Five passages anchor this conviction. Consider them together.
Genesis 2:7 describes the origin of the first human: "Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." Adam's existence begins with this divine act. He does not arrive from elsewhere. He is dust shaped by God and given life by the breath of God.4
Psalm 139:13–16 applies the same picture to every human life: "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." Notice where the formation happens. Not in a heavenly council. Not in a planning session attended by my soul. In my mother's womb. The "book" written before my days began is God's record of His foreknowledge — not a contract I signed.5
Jeremiah 1:5 records the LORD's word to the prophet: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations." The Hebrew verb here is yāda‛ (יָדַע), "to know" in the rich biblical sense of personal, covenantal knowing. God's knowing of Jeremiah preceded Jeremiah's existence — not because Jeremiah's soul was floating around to be known, but because God's foreknowledge and election are eternal. The text affirms God's prior knowledge of the person He was about to create, not the prior existence of the person.
Zechariah 12:1 is easy to miss but theologically loaded. The LORD is the one "who stretched out the heavens and founded the earth and formed the spirit of man within him" (emphasis added). The human spirit is something God forms — and forms within the man, not transfers from somewhere else. The spirit is part of the creating, not a separate piece that pre-exists and is then attached.
Hebrews 12:9 calls God "the Father of spirits." This is a remarkable title. He is the source, the originator, the creator of every human spirit — not the destination to which pre-existing spirits eventually return. The whole biblical picture runs in the opposite direction from the pre-life framework: we come from God's creative act, not from a pre-incarnate realm.
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations." (Jeremiah 1:5, ESV)
Christians have historically debated how the soul comes into being, but they have agreed on when. The two major positions are creationism, the view that God creates each human soul directly at conception, and traducianism, the view that the soul is transmitted from the parents along with the body at conception. John Cooper notes that both views have been held by serious Christian thinkers, and Scripture does not decisively settle the matter.6 But notice the boundary: both positions place the soul's beginning at conception. Neither allows for a soul that already existed before that moment.
The early church faced this question head-on. The brilliant but speculative theologian Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–253) had taught a doctrine of pre-existent souls — souls that had fallen from a previous heavenly state and were now incarnated as a kind of remedial education. The church recognized this as a Hellenistic-Platonic intrusion into Christian doctrine. Origen's teaching on the pre-existence of souls was condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in AD 553.7 The verdict has stood ever since. From the early creeds through the Reformation through modern evangelical theology, the church has consistently rejected the idea that human souls existed before their earthly lives began.
This is not a minor doctrinal preference. Soul pre-existence rearranges the basic story of who we are. If I existed before my parents conceived me, then I am a soul who selected them rather than a child given to them. If I planned this life, then God's providence is downstream of my pre-birth decisions. If I made contracts with other souls, then human relationships are negotiated agreements rather than gifts of providence. The whole geometry of the Christian life shifts.
The biblical witness places the beginning of every human person at God's creative act in time. We are not pre-existing souls who chose to descend. We are creatures called into being. The Father of spirits forms each one — and that forming is the start of the story, not the middle of one.
Let me walk through the four claims that come up most often in pastoral conversations, and offer a brief response to each.
"I remember planning this life." Memories of pre-life planning cannot be verified or cross-checked against any objective record. They show up overwhelmingly in subjects who have either been hypnotized by a regressionist who already believes in pre-life planning, or who have read books like Journey of Souls before their experience or before their later interpretation of it. The most plausible explanations are confabulation under suggestion, framework-generated imagery, deceptive spirit impressions, or sincere reinterpretation of unrelated NDE content through a pre-existing grid. None of these requires pre-existence to be real.
"I saw my council of elders." This is Michael Newton's framework almost word for word. When the same imagery shows up in account after account from people who have read Newton or attended Newton-influenced sessions, that is not independent confirmation — that is a shared script. The "council of elders" structure also parallels Latter-day Saint teaching about pre-mortal divine councils. It is theology, not data.
"I have soul contracts with the people in my life." Scripture has no category for pre-birth contracts between souls. The Bible's picture of human relationships is providential, not contractual. God brings spouses together (Genesis 2:24). Children are gifts (Psalm 127:3). Friendships, neighbors, even adversaries arrive in our lives by the providential ordering of God, not by agreements we negotiated in a pre-existent state.
"I chose my parents, my body, my challenges." The Bible flatly contradicts each piece of this. We do not choose our parents — we are given to them and they to us (Psalm 68:6). We do not choose our bodies — they are knit together by God in the womb. We do not choose our challenges — they come through some combination of providence, the brokenness of the fallen world, the actions of others, and spiritual warfare (Romans 8:18–25). The biblical picture is one of receiving a life, not of designing one.
Where does the pre-life framework actually come from? Not from the Bible — that much we have already seen. The historical lineage runs through five overlapping streams that have been blended over the past 150 years into the contemporary New Age synthesis.
Theosophy. The 19th-century movement founded by Helena Blavatsky and her associates pulled Hindu and Buddhist concepts into Western occult thought, teaching the evolution of souls through many lifetimes toward a divine consummation. Theosophy is the grandparent of nearly every modern pre-life teaching. When you hear about "soul levels," "soul lessons," and "soul evolution," you are listening to Blavatsky's grandchildren.
Hindu philosophy. The doctrines of ātman (the eternal self) and saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth) provide the underlying logic of "soul education through lifetimes." The pre-life planning session is a Westernized version of the Hindu picture in which the eternal self chooses or is assigned the conditions of its next incarnation according to karma.
Gnosticism. Ancient Gnostic systems — which the early church explicitly rejected — taught that the soul originated in a heavenly fullness (the plērōma), descended into matter as a kind of fall, and is now seeking to return. Echoes of this story persist whenever an NDEr reports that the body is a "prison" or that earth is a "school" the soul descended into.
Mormonism. The Latter-day Saint church teaches a robust doctrine of human pre-existence: every person existed first as a spirit child of heavenly parents in a pre-mortal realm where life decisions were prepared. This is core LDS teaching, and it has bled into popular NDE literature through LDS-influenced experiencers and authors — most clearly in Betty Eadie's account.
Spiritualism and the psychic movements. The 19th- and 20th-century traditions of mediumship, channeling, and spirit communication popularized many of the themes — guides, councils, soul-groups, between-life realms — that later showed up in NDE literature.8
When an NDEr or NDE teacher promotes pre-life memories and soul contracts, they are — often without realizing it — promoting ideas with this lineage. Whatever else you say about that combination, you cannot say it is biblical Christianity.
A few names show up over and over in pre-life teaching, and Christian readers benefit from knowing them.
Michael Newton. Journey of Souls (1994) and its sequels are the foundational texts of the popular pre-life movement. Newton's clients describe — under hypnotic regression — soul groups, council meetings, and lesson planning. Newton presents this as independent discovery, but the content depends entirely on the regression process and on the framework the therapist has supplied. Christians should reject the framework while acknowledging that his work has been enormously influential. His influence is the main reason "soul contract" language now appears almost everywhere in the NDE space.
Ainslie MacLeod. A self-described psychic and "past-life specialist" whose books, including The Instruction, present soul contracts as standard spiritual teaching. MacLeod claims to identify the contracts his clients made before birth and to coach them on living out their pre-arranged purpose — Theosophy and Hindu reincarnation theology repackaged for a general audience.
Betty Eadie. Eadie's 1992 bestseller Embraced by the Light recounts an NDE in which she claims to have learned, among other things, that she chose her parents, planned her life, and made agreements with the souls who would become her children. Eadie's framework aligns remarkably well with Latter-day Saint theology — which is unsurprising, since she was an LDS member at the time of the experience. Her account is one of the clearest case studies of the principle that NDErs interpret their experiences through the framework they brought into the experience. The fact that an LDS NDEr reports LDS doctrine is not independent confirmation of LDS doctrine; it is exactly what we would expect.
When the same theological content appears almost exclusively in NDErs who already held that theology — LDS pre-existence in LDS NDErs, soul contracts in students of Newton — that is not the experience confirming the theology. That is the framework shaping the report.
If pre-life ideas are not biblical, why do they show up so often? J. Steve Miller's experience-interpretation distinction helps us here.9 An NDE has two layers. There is the experience itself — what actually happened spiritually. And there is the interpretation — how the person made sense of it afterward, using whatever frameworks they already had. The experience may have been genuine. The interpretation may still be wrong.
Pre-life content most often enters NDE accounts in three ways. First, through later teaching: the experiencer has a real NDE, then attends a Newton-influenced workshop or reads Journey of Souls, and later begins to "remember" pre-life details. Second, through framework-shaped reinterpretation: the experiencer recalls a sense of welcome and recognition during the NDE and re-reads it as evidence that they had been there before — when the original experience was simply love, not memory. Third, in a smaller number of cases, through demonic deception. Shaun Tabatt notes that the one IANDS conference presenter he heard describe pre-life memories had begun having those memories only after taking up transcendental meditation — which deliverance ministers commonly identify as a doorway for the demonic.10 Tabatt is cautious about generalizing from one data point, and so should we be — but the pattern is worth noting.
None of these explanations requires that the underlying NDE be fake or wholly demonic. Many of these experiencers had real encounters with the divine. The pre-life material is the overlay, not the bedrock.
If you have a friend or family member shaped by pre-life teaching, four pastoral commitments will keep you on solid ground.
First, do not dismiss the underlying NDE. The person may well have had a genuine spiritual experience. Throwing out the experience because of the framework around it is unfair both to the experiencer and to what God may have actually done. Take the core experience seriously.
Second, gently distinguish between experience and interpretive framework. "I want to take seriously what happened to you. I also want to ask whether the explanation you've been given matches what actually happened." That kind of question opens conversation rather than closing it. Many experiencers have never had anyone make this distinction for them.
Third, trace the framework's non-Christian origins. Many people who use language like "soul contract" or "council of elders" have no idea where these ideas come from. When they learn that they are using vocabulary borrowed from Theosophy, Hinduism, and Mormonism, the frame begins to shift. A friend of mine put it this way: "Once I realized that what I'd been told was 'just spiritual truth' was actually a 19th-century occult package, I couldn't unsee it."
Fourth, point back to the biblical picture. Scripture's account of human existence is more — not less — beautiful than the pre-life framework. You were not a wandering soul who picked this life. You were known by God before you were formed. He knit you together with His own hands. Your days were written in His book. Your parents were His gift, not your selection. Your challenges are not assignments you signed up for but circumstances God is using to conform you to the image of Christ.11
The woman I mentioned at the start of this chapter found peace in believing she had chosen her parents. Here is what surprised me about our later conversation: when I gently offered her Psalm 139 — "you knitted me together in my mother's womb" — she wept harder than before. Not because she was being corrected, but because she had been told a smaller story and was now hearing a larger one. God made her. God placed her. God pursued her through every hard year. That is sturdier than any soul contract.
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Set the two pictures side by side and ask which one Scripture actually paints. The pre-life framework says: You chose to be here. You planned your challenges. You contracted with these people. The life you are living is the curriculum your soul selected. The biblical picture says: God created you. God placed you. God providentially superintends your life. God pursues you in love through every circumstance He has appointed.
The two are not compatible. They give different answers to the most basic questions of human existence — Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? The pre-life framework places the self at the center; the biblical picture places God at the center. The pre-life framework treats earth as a classroom for self-development; the biblical picture treats earth as the theater of God's redemptive purpose. The pre-life framework owes its lineage to Theosophy, Hinduism, Gnosticism, Mormonism, and Spiritualism; the biblical picture flows from Genesis to Revelation in unbroken testimony.
I believe the biblical picture is true. I also believe it is more pastorally life-giving. Most of all, it gives glory to the right Person — the Father of spirits, who knit each of us together, who knows our days, and who has appointed us to lives we did not choose for purposes we did not design, in the loving care of a Creator who never improvises. In the next chapter, we will look at the most pervasive unbiblical theme in NDE literature — the claim that all religions are equal paths to the same God. But what we have seen here applies there, too: where the framework is foreign, the conclusions will be foreign.
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
Eadie, Betty J. Embraced by the Light. Placerville, CA: Gold Leaf Press, 1992.
Farris, Joshua R. An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020.
MacLeod, Ainslie. The Instruction: Living the Life Your Soul Intended. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2008.
Miller, J. Steve. Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Newton, Michael. Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1994.
Tabatt, Shaun. The NDE Conspiracy. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2025.
Wilkinson, Michael A. Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2022.