Chapter 35: Answering the Opposite Error — Responding to Christians Who Dismiss All NDEs

Engaging the wholesale rejection of NDEs with charity, evidence, and biblical clarity

A pastor I once spoke with told me a story I cannot forget. He had been trained at a fine Reformed seminary. He had read John MacArthur's book on heaven. He believed, with great conviction, that all near-death experiences were either hallucinations or demonic deceptions. Then a woman from his church asked him to visit her dying mother in hospice. He sat by the bed for two hours. In the last hour, the dying woman opened her eyes, smiled, and said, "Pastor, I can see Jesus. He's right there. He's so beautiful." She died forty minutes later, peaceful and unafraid.

The pastor walked to his car shaken. The framework he had been given did not fit what he had just seen. He had been told that all such experiences were false. But this experience did not look false. It looked like the dying grandmother of Chapter 1 — the woman whose story this book began with. He did not know what to do. He told me later, "I had nothing to say to her family. I had been taught to dismiss this. But I could not dismiss it."

This chapter is for that pastor. And it is for the readers who have sat under teaching like his. Throughout this book we have warned against credulity, hybrid theology, and occult drift in the NDE world. Those warnings stand. But there is another error among Christians, and it is the opposite error. Some respected teachers argue that we should dismiss every near-death experience as worthless or deceptive. I disagree, but I want to disagree well. The teachers who hold this view are often godly people who love the Bible. Their concerns deserve a fair hearing — and a careful response.

Naming the Position

The wholesale dismissal of NDEs comes in several flavors. Some critics say NDEs are simply hallucinations produced by a dying brain. Others say they are demonic deceptions designed to lead people into false religion. Others say the Bible tells us all we need to know about heaven, so any "extra" revelation is suspect. Still others point to the unbiblical theology of famous NDErs and conclude that the whole genre is rotten. And some warn that NDEs distract Christians from Scripture and earthly discipleship.¹

I want to say clearly: these concerns are not silly. Each one contains a grain of truth. The popular NDE genre does contain a great deal of bad theology. Some accounts have been exposed as fabrications. Christians have sometimes built a whole spirituality around someone's vision rather than around Scripture. The wholesale dismissal position is not coming from nowhere. It is reacting to real problems. The question is whether the reaction goes too far.

Engaging John MacArthur

John MacArthur's book The Glory of Heaven, especially its 2013 revised edition, is the most influential evangelical critique of the NDE phenomenon. MacArthur is a careful expositor with decades of pulpit ministry. He deserves to be read carefully, quoted accurately, and engaged on his own terms. Let me work through five of his main arguments and offer a fair response to each.

Argument 1: The Bible alone tells us what we need to know about heaven

MacArthur argues that Scripture is sufficient and that any extra revelation about heaven is dangerous. We should not treat near-death experiences as adding anything to what God has already revealed.² This concern has real weight. Scripture is sufficient for faith and practice — that is a core Protestant conviction I share without hesitation. But the sufficiency of Scripture is not the same as the cessation of all spiritual experience. Scripture is sufficient to tell us how to be saved, how to live, and what to expect when we die. It does not follow that God has stopped doing the kinds of things Scripture itself describes Him doing.

Consider Paul. In 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 he describes a man (almost certainly himself) who "was caught up to the third heaven" and "into paradise" — whether in the body or out of the body, he could not say. This was a genuine spiritual experience that occurred in the apostolic age, and Scripture treats it not as a threat to biblical authority but as a fact. J. Steve Miller rightly notes that Paul's account has many features in common with what we now call near-death experiences: rapture to a heavenly realm, encounter with paradise, and an inability to put the experience into words.³ Paul did not say, "Since Scripture is sufficient, my experience added nothing." He said it happened.

Argument 2: Popular NDE books contain unbiblical content, so the whole category is suspect

MacArthur points to specific books — Betty Eadie's Embraced by the Light, for example — and shows how they teach Mormon and New Age doctrines under the cover of an "encounter with Jesus."⁴ He is right about Eadie. We have already addressed her account in earlier chapters. But the move from "this book is bad" to "the whole category is bad" is the kind of move we would never accept in any other field. Some Christian biographies are dishonest. Some Christian devotionals contain questionable theology. Some sermons preached from Christian pulpits have led people astray. The right response is discernment, not the dismissal of biographies, devotionals, and sermons as a class. The category of NDE accounts deserves the same fair treatment.

Argument 3: The Malarkey case proves the genre is unreliable

In 2010, Kevin Malarkey published The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, supposedly the NDE account of his son Alex. The book sold over a million copies. In 2015, Alex publicly admitted he had made the story up, and the publisher pulled it from the market.⁵ MacArthur and others point to this as proof that we cannot trust NDE testimonies. The Malarkey case is genuinely damaging — and it is a warning we should take seriously, as we discussed in Chapter 32. But here is the logical problem: one fabricated memoir does not invalidate every account in the genre any more than one fraudulent miracle claim invalidates every miracle. The proper response to the Malarkey case is the very thing this book is teaching: careful, biblical discernment.

Argument 4: Christians should focus on Scripture, not extra-biblical experiences

Scripture is primary. I agree fully. But "Scripture primary" is not the same as "Scripture only." Miller has made an interesting point here that I find hard to answer. MacArthur himself uses extra-biblical knowledge constantly in his sermons — quoting scientists, citing historical events, drawing on his own observations of life. He does this to illustrate biblical truths and to bring out the wonder of God's creation.⁶ If extra-biblical knowledge can be used to enrich our understanding of creation, why is it suddenly forbidden when it relates to dying? Where in Scripture does God draw a line that says, "You may study biology and astronomy, but you may not study what people report at the edge of death"? I cannot find such a line. And I do not think MacArthur can either.

Argument 5: NDEs lead to excessive focus on heaven and away from earthly discipleship

This concern has some real validity. Some NDErs and their promoters do focus on heaven in a way that crowds out service, evangelism, and earthly faithfulness. But I would gently note that the cure for this is balanced discipleship, not the wholesale dismissal of every dying grandmother's vision. Pastors can teach people to long for heaven and to serve faithfully here. We do not have to choose.

Engaging Hank Hanegraaff and Gary Gilley

Hank Hanegraaff has been a vocal critic of specific problematic NDE accounts, especially Eadie's Embraced by the Light. His critiques of those particular accounts are largely sound. Eadie really does teach Mormon-influenced theology. Hanegraaff is right to say so. But Hanegraaff has not gone as far as MacArthur toward total dismissal. His more measured position — critique what is bad, leave room for what may be genuine — is actually closer to the position of this book than to MacArthur's.

Gary Gilley's Heaven Tourism takes a similar approach, focusing his fire on the specific bestsellers of the "heaven tourism" movement and warning Christians against accepting these accounts uncritically. His concerns are legitimate. Books that present uncorroborated personal visions as if they were Scripture-level revelation can lead Christians badly astray. But again, the cure for credulity is discernment, not blanket rejection.

I want to be clear here. I am grateful for Hanegraaff and Gilley. Their work has helped Christians spot real problems in real books. I disagree only when the critique stretches from "this account is bad" to "all such accounts are bad." That stretch is where the wholesale dismissal goes too far.

Seven Problems with Wholesale Dismissal

Let me now spell out, as plainly as I can, why the wholesale dismissal position fails. There are at least seven serious problems with it.

First, it ignores the evidence. Veridical NDE cases — the ones in which the experiencer accurately reports things they could not possibly have known by ordinary means — cannot be dismissed as hallucinations. Pam Reynolds, the patient in Michael Sabom's Atlanta Study, was anesthetized, her eyes taped shut, her ears blocked with speakers, her brain monitored as silent and bloodless during a hypothermic cardiac arrest procedure. Yet she accurately described a conversation between her surgeons that took place during this period.⁷ A hallucination cannot do that. The wholesale dismissal position simply does not engage cases like Pam's.

Second, it ignores the Christ-centered data. Miller's systematic study of NDEs catalogues the surprising prominence of Jesus in NDE reports — far higher than the cultural background would predict.⁸ Sabom's Atlanta Study found that NDEs typically deepen, rather than weaken, traditional Christian faith.⁹ If NDEs were merely demonic, would they so often produce a stronger commitment to prayer, Bible reading, and church attendance? It would be a remarkably foolish demonic strategy.

Third, it fails pastorally. Think back to the pastor I described at the beginning of this chapter. He had been given a framework that left him speechless at the bedside of a dying woman. The dismissal position trains pastors to deny the reality of what their people are experiencing. It tells the dying grandmother's family that her vision was nothing. And when those families are told nothing by the pastor, they often go elsewhere — to NDE conferences, YouTube channels, and books written by the very teachers the dismissal position fears most. Wholesale dismissal hands NDErs over to the unbiblical NDE community. It cedes the field.

Fourth, it contradicts biblical teaching about ongoing spiritual experience. The Bible is full of dreams, visions, angelic visits, and heavenly journeys. Paul went to the third heaven. John received the visions of Revelation. Stephen saw heaven opened. Joel prophesied that in the last days the Spirit would be poured out and people would dream dreams and see visions (Joel 2:28). Acts 2 says we are now in those last days. The cessationist arguments that all such experiences ended with the apostles are not, in my judgment, well supported by the text of Scripture itself. They put limits on God that God has not put on Himself.

Fifth, it misses the evangelistic opportunity. Many people who later came to Christ first encountered Him in an NDE. Others have had experiences that primed them to take spiritual reality seriously, and a thoughtful Christian was ready to walk them toward the Bible from there. Christians who dismiss every NDE wholesale lose this open door. Tabatt notes that the question is rarely "will this person take their experience seriously?" — they will. The question is who will help them interpret it.¹⁰

Sixth, it makes Christianity look intellectually defensive. When credentialed researchers like Sabom, Sam Parnia, Pim van Lommel, and Bruce Greyson present serious medical evidence for NDEs, and Christians respond with "it's all fake," we end up looking like we are afraid of the data. We are not afraid of the data. We should not act as if we are.¹¹ The strongest Christian engagement with NDEs takes the evidence seriously, affirms what is true, and critiques what is corrupted. That is a confident posture. Wholesale dismissal is not.

Seventh, it implicitly accepts a materialist framework. When Christian critics try to explain NDEs as "just the dying brain misfiring," they are quietly conceding the very materialist worldview Christians should be challenging. The biblical worldview affirms an immaterial soul that survives bodily death. NDEs are powerful evidence for that worldview. To dismiss them as brain events is to give away ground we should be holding.¹² John Cooper makes the case carefully in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: the consistent biblical witness is that the human person can exist as a conscious self apart from the body in the intermediate state.¹³ NDE evidence fits that biblical picture beautifully. It does not undermine it.

A Charitable Reframing

Now I want to do something a little unusual. I want to grant MacArthur as much as I can.

MacArthur is right that Scripture is sufficient for salvation and Christian living. He is right that popular NDE books contain serious distortions. He is right that the Malarkey case is a warning. He is right that some NDE teachers promote unbiblical theology. He is right that some Christians treat NDE accounts with the kind of authority that should be reserved for Scripture.

I agree with all of that.

What I do not agree with is the further step — the leap from these legitimate concerns to a sweeping rejection of every NDE. Sufficiency does not forbid ongoing spiritual experience. The presence of distortions does not invalidate the genuine. The existence of fabrications does not mean every testimony is fabricated. The errors of some teachers do not condemn the experiences of all. The proper response is not the bulldozer of dismissal but the scalpel of discernment.

In a real sense, I think the framework of this book is more conservative than wholesale dismissal — because it submits the entire phenomenon to Scripture for testing, rather than dismissing it without examination. Discernment takes Scripture more seriously, not less.

The Reformed Cessationist Concern

Some readers from a Reformed cessationist background may still be uneasy. They may worry that taking NDEs seriously opens the door to a continualist or charismatic theology of revelation that they reject for solid biblical reasons. I want to speak directly to those readers.

This book is fully compatible with conservative Reformed theology on the question of Scripture's final authority. Chapter 8 hammered that point home: when an NDE conflicts with Scripture, Scripture wins, every time. No NDE adds new doctrine. No NDE corrects the Bible. No NDE has the authority of an apostle.

What I do gently push back on is the further claim that all spiritual experience ended with the close of the canon. The Bible itself describes ministering angels in the present tense (Hebrews 1:14). It describes deceiving spirits at work in "later times" (1 Timothy 4:1). It describes God pouring out His Spirit and giving dreams and visions in the last days (Joel 2; Acts 2). None of this gives new doctrinal authority to anyone. But it does mean that ordinary spiritual experiences — including a dying believer's vision of Jesus — are not biblically impossible. They are biblically expected.

Pastoral Implications

If you have been taught the wholesale dismissal position, this chapter may feel uncomfortable. I want to honor what is good in your formation, not throw it away. Several practical things are worth saying.

Respect your teachers. The pastors and writers who taught you this position were often deeply concerned to protect God's people from real errors in NDE literature. Their motives were good. Their warnings about Eadie, Alexander, Brinkley, and others were on target. Even where I disagree with their final position, I am grateful for the seriousness with which they took bad teaching.

Engage the evidence yourself. Do not rely on summaries and critiques. Read Sabom's Light and Death. Read Tabatt and Miller and Burke. Read the actual NDE accounts, including the troubling ones. Form your own judgments under Scripture, with prayer and a willingness to be surprised.

Hold the line on biblical discernment. The cure for credulity is not cynicism. It is testing. You can take experiences seriously without believing every claim made about them. You can affirm what is genuine while rejecting what is corrupt.

Be ready. Whether you have been trained to engage NDEs or not, they will come to you. Someone in your life will tell you about their dying parent's last words. Someone will hand you a book they read. Someone will sit in your living room and pour out a story that shook them. You will need to know what to say.

Conclusion

This book has spent thirty-four chapters warning against credulity. We have looked hard at corrupted experiences, false teachers, occult drift, and fabrication. Those warnings are real, and they stand. But the equal and opposite error — the error of dismissing every NDE as either delusion or demon — is not the answer to credulity. Cynicism is not discernment. Dismissal is not faithfulness. The biblical posture is harder than either extreme. It tests every claim against Scripture. It welcomes the genuine. It rejects the corrupt. It honors both the God who still meets people at the edge of eternity and the Word through which He has finally spoken.

The pastor I told you about at the beginning of this chapter eventually found his footing. He told me he no longer thinks the dying woman saw nothing. He thinks she saw what she said she saw. He also still believes that some NDE books are bad theology badly told. Both can be true. He has learned to walk the narrow path between credulity and cynicism. So can we. The next chapter brings the whole book together and shows what that path looks like for the rest of our lives.

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