Chapter 25

When Christians Reject Every NDE

“Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good.” — 1 Thessalonians 5:19–21

A. The Question on the Table

A pastor I know told me a story that has stayed with me. A woman in his church lost her husband to a sudden heart attack. The medical team brought him back after several minutes. When he woke, he told his wife that he had seen a radiant figure he believed was Jesus. He described a peace so deep it had no name. He came back a different man, kinder and less afraid, more attentive to others, and more serious about Scripture. His wife was moved. She wanted to share the story with her pastor.

The pastor listened politely. Then he told her, gently but firmly, that the Bible says no one has gone to heaven and come back. He said the experience was probably a brain trick, or worse, a deception from the enemy. He meant well. He loved this woman. He was guarding what he believed Scripture required him to guard. But the woman left his office confused and hurt, and she never brought it up again.

I understand that pastor. I respect the instinct behind his answer. He was trying to protect the sufficiency of Scripture. He was worried that if he said yes to one NDE, he would have no way to say no to the next. And he had heard prominent Bible teachers warn against every near-death experience without exception.

But I believe he was wrong. Not because the Bible does not matter, but because the Bible itself gives us a better way. It does not tell us to reject every vision. It tells us to test everything and hold fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:19–21).¹ That command assumes some things will pass the test.

In this chapter I want to speak to Christians who share that pastor’s concern. I share much of it myself. The rise of New Age teaching on the back of NDE stories is a real danger, one we took seriously in Chapters 20 and 21. But I am convinced that the wholesale rejection of every NDE is itself a mistake, and one that the evidence and the Bible together correct.

B. The Concern in Front of Us

The Christians who dismiss all NDEs are not careless people. Many of them are scholars, pastors, and teachers who love the Bible and fear for their people. Their worry usually rests on three pillars.

First, there is the sufficiency of Scripture. If the Bible gives us everything we need for life and godliness (2 Timothy 3:16–17; 2 Peter 1:3), why should we need reports from people who claim to have seen the other side? Adding experience to Scripture feels like a step toward the mistakes of the cults, which add new revelations to the Bible.²

Second, there is the danger of deception. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). If the enemy can counterfeit a heavenly experience, then every NDE is suspect. Safer, some conclude, to reject them all than to risk welcoming a lie.³

Third, there is the track record. Some of the most popular NDE books have taught things that plainly contradict Scripture. Betty Eadie promoted unbiblical doctrines.⁴ Eben Alexander announced that there is nothing you can do wrong.⁵ When these books become bestsellers, it is easy to conclude that the whole field is rotten.

Doug Groothuis, a Christian philosopher, has cautioned believers against the theological dangers of accepting NDE accounts. He warns that they can lead people away from the gospel and toward a vague spirituality. His concern deserves a fair hearing. He is protecting something real: the authority of God’s written Word.⁶ To his credit, Groothuis has also acknowledged a more balanced point. In the same book, he wrote that NDEs cannot all be explained by natural factors and that the near-death experience “proves to be a challenge to the materialism of modern science, just as it challenges those who are spiritually inclined to interpret its meaning properly.”⁵⁰ That is a fair statement. I wish more critics started there.

John MacArthur has been even more direct. MacArthur teaches that no one has gone to heaven and returned, and that the ideas about heaven promoted by NDE books bear little resemblance to what Scripture describes. He has argued that every such account is either misguided, fraudulent, or demonic.⁷ MacArthur’s position grows, in part, from a broader theological framework. He holds a cessationist view, meaning he believes the miraculous gifts of the Spirit ceased after the apostolic era. That framework naturally leaves little room for visions or supernatural experiences today.⁸

I want to be clear: I take these critics seriously. I share their commitment to Scripture. I share their alarm at false teaching. Where I part company is in the conclusion that the right response is to reject every NDE in one sweep. As J. Steve Miller puts it, some Bible teachers seem to have assumed that by unmasking some popular deceptions, they must explain away all NDEs.⁹ I believe this proves too much. Let me show you why.

C. The Heart of the Case

1. The Concern, Taken Seriously

Before I answer the critics, I want to sit with their worry a little longer. The worry is real, and it is not baseless.

Scripture is sufficient. I believe that without reservation. The Bible gives us everything we need for salvation, for doctrine, for the knowledge of God’s character and purposes. No NDE adds a missing chapter. No experience overrides a verse. If that is what these critics are guarding, I stand with them completely.

The danger of new revelations is also real. History is littered with movements that started with someone’s private spiritual experience and ended with a new scripture: the Book of Mormon, the Quran, the writings of Ellen G. White. Christians are right to be cautious when anyone says, “I went to heaven and here is what I learned.”¹⁰

And the New Age drift is not imaginary. Some NDE books teach that all religions lead to God. Others teach that there is no judgment and no sin. About 12% of the cases in my doctoral research promoted some form of reincarnation. About 19.6% promoted psychics or mediums.¹¹ These numbers matter. There is real spiritual danger in parts of the NDE world, and we covered that danger honestly in Chapter 20 and Chapter 21.

I have also watched what happens when churches get careless. A pastor reads a popular NDE book, shares it from the pulpit without testing it, and soon his people absorb ideas that contradict the Bible. That is a real harm, and I do not take it lightly. The critics who warn against it are doing the church a service.

So the concern is well-founded. The question is whether the right answer to the concern is to reject every experience without testing it. I believe it is not.

2. The Strongest Form of the Dismissal

Let me state the case against NDEs the way its strongest defenders would state it. This matters. If I am going to answer it, I owe it to the reader to answer the real thing, not a weaker version of it.

MacArthur’s argument runs roughly like this: The Bible alone is our source of truth about heaven and the afterlife. The only reliable descriptions of heaven are the ones Scripture itself gives, in passages like Isaiah 6, Ezekiel 1, and Revelation 4. Every NDE account departs from these descriptions in some way. The people who claim these experiences are either deceived, lying, or suffering from a brain event that has nothing to do with heaven. No one has gone to heaven and returned, because Proverbs 30:4 asks, “Who has ascended to heaven and come down?” and the implied answer is no one.¹²

Groothuis adds a philosophical concern: accepting NDEs as evidence opens the door to subjectivism, where personal experience trumps revealed truth. The history of the church, he argues, shows that mystical experience, when not anchored firmly to Scripture, leads people astray.¹³

The cessationist version adds another layer. If the gifts of prophecy and miraculous signs were limited to the apostolic age, then modern visions of heaven are, by definition, not from God. They cannot be genuine spiritual experiences, because God no longer works in that way.¹⁴

Taken together, this is a strong position. It has the virtue of simplicity, of caution, and of a high view of the Bible. I respect every part of it. But I believe it breaks under the weight of three things: the evidence, the Bible’s own precedents, and the very logic of discernment.

3. Why Wholesale Dismissal Proves Too Much

The first problem with rejecting every NDE is that it forces you to explain away evidence that deserves a better answer.

As we saw in Chapter 9, there are cases where clinically dead patients described specific details they had no natural way of knowing. In my doctoral research, I analyzed 5,278 near-death experiences. Of those, 1,618 cases (30.7%) met the criteria for strong or exceptional evidence that the person’s mind was working apart from the brain.¹⁵ There were 1,114 cases of accurate observation from a point outside the body. Thirty-three cases involved blind people reporting verified sight.¹⁶

Second, the biblical compatibility of most reports is far higher than the critics assume. When I scored these cases for how well they lined up with a biblical framework, about 87% of the scholarly (qualitative) cases showed high or moderate compatibility. The overall figure was about 71%.¹⁷ These are not stories of cosmic consciousness or reincarnation. Most of them report peace, the presence of God or Christ, meetings with deceased loved ones, and a deep sense that love and moral accountability are real. These are themes the Bible teaches on every page.

Third, if we reject every NDE, we reject things that should encourage the church. As we saw in Chapter 14, about 20% of NDEs involve Jesus, while less than 1% involve any other named deity.¹⁸ If these experiences were cultural inventions or demonic tricks, we would expect a much more even spread across religions. Instead, we find Jesus showing up far more than any other figure. That fact alone should give a thoughtful Christian pause before throwing out the entire category.

The problem, then, is that wholesale dismissal lumps the gold in with the dross. It treats the verified and the fraudulent alike. It cannot tell the difference between Pam Reynolds, whose perceptions during documented brain inactivity have never been explained by any naturalistic theory (Chapter 9), and Betty Eadie, whose book promoted clearly unbiblical ideas (Chapter 21). To reject both for the same reason is not careful thinking. It is a blanket that covers everything without examining anything.

4. Biblical Precedents for Glimpses of the Unseen

The second problem with rejecting all NDEs is that the Bible itself records cases where God showed people glimpses of the spiritual world. If God has done it before, on what basis do we say He can never do it again?

Consider the apostle Paul. In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul describes being caught up to the third heaven, into paradise, where he heard things too sacred to repeat. He was unsure whether he was in his body or out of it during the experience.²⁰ Most scholars link this to the stoning at Lystra (Acts 14:19), where Paul appeared dead and was dragged out of the city. His companions gathered around him. He got up and went back in.²¹ Whatever we call this experience, it shares clear features with modern NDEs: apparent death, uncertainty about being in the body, a journey to a heavenly place, and an inability to put the experience into earthly words.

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. (2 Corinthians 12:2–4)

The phrase “whether in the body or out of the body” is striking. Paul did not see a theological problem with either possibility. He accepted that a person could be conscious apart from the body.²² That is exactly the claim substance dualism makes, and exactly what modern NDEs appear to demonstrate (Chapter 2).

Now consider Stephen. As he was being stoned to death, he “gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55–56).²³ This was a dying man looking into the spiritual world. He was aware of both the earthly scene and the heavenly one at the same time, much like modern deathbed visions (Chapter 26). His response was not terror. It was joy. He called out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” (Acts 7:59).

MacArthur has argued that in every biblical instance where someone sees heaven, that person is “frightened, hyper-aware of his own insignificance, deeply conscious of his guilt and fallenness.”²⁴ But Miller points out that this does not hold up even within Scripture. Stephen was not terrified. He was looking at the glory of God with a face like an angel (Acts 6:15), and his dying words were about mercy, not fear. Paul mentions no fear in his account of the third heaven either.²⁵

Isaiah saw the Lord in His temple and cried out, “Woe is me!” (Isaiah 6:1–5).²⁶ Ezekiel saw the living creatures and the glory of God and fell on his face (Ezekiel 1:28). John on Patmos fell at the feet of the risen Christ “as though dead” (Revelation 1:17). These responses are more like what MacArthur describes. But Miller makes the important point that the context matters. Isaiah and Ezekiel were being commissioned for hard prophetic work. They needed to see the awesome, fearsome side of God. Stephen, dying for his faith, needed to see the tender, welcoming side. God shows people what they need to see.²⁷

Here is the bottom line. The Bible shows God giving visions to prophets, apostles, and ordinary believers at critical moments. It shows a man caught up to paradise, possibly during a near-death crisis. It shows a dying man looking through an open heaven. If we claim that God stopped doing anything like this after the first century, we must show where the Bible says so. And the Bible does not say so.

5. The Lumping Error

There is a mistake in logic that runs through the wholesale rejection of NDEs. I call it the lumping error. It treats every NDE as the same kind of thing.

Think about it this way. If someone showed you a barrel of apples and told you that some were rotten, you would not throw out the whole barrel without checking. You would sort. You would look at each apple. You would keep the good ones and discard the bad. That is exactly what the Bible tells us to do: “Test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).²⁸

The lumping error works in two directions. On one side, there are credulous believers who accept every NDE story as a message from God. We dealt with that problem in Chapters 20–23. On the other side, there are cautious believers who reject every NDE as a deception. Both groups make the same mistake. They treat the whole category as a single package, instead of examining each case on its own terms.

My dissertation data shows exactly why this matters. About 71% of the cases I scored lined up well with a biblical framework. But at least one in ten carried clearly unbiblical content.²⁹ Those two facts belong together. They mean that most NDEs point in a biblical direction, but not all of them do. The only honest response is to sort. Keep the ones that pass the test. Reject the ones that fail. That is discernment. It is not a compromise with error. It is the very thing Scripture commands.

Miller makes a fair and important observation on this point. He notes that many of the critics seem to have based their conclusions mainly on a few popular NDE books, not on the professional medical research. They read the sensational bestsellers, found them lacking (and rightly so in many cases), and concluded that the entire field was bogus. But that is like reading a few bad novels and deciding that all books are worthless. The scholarly research, conducted by cardiologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists, tells a very different story.³⁰

Moses once said something that surprised me the first time I noticed it. When Joshua complained that two men were prophesying in the camp without permission, Moses replied, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29).³¹ Moses was not threatened by the Spirit showing up in unexpected places. He welcomed it. I think that spirit, the spirit of testing rather than fearing, is the right one for our question too.

6. The Careful Middle

So where does this leave us? Not with credulity. Not with rejection. With discernment.

We have spent several chapters building that discernment. In Chapter 20, we established that not every NDE is from God and that demonic hijacking is real. In Chapter 21, we learned to separate the experience from the interpretation, because a real encounter with God can still be twisted into a false lesson. In Chapter 23, we laid out a practical field guide for testing any NDE. The tools are in the reader’s hands. The question is whether we will use them, or whether we will refuse to pick them up.

The careful middle looks like this. Take each case on its own. Ask the questions we laid out in Chapter 23: Does it point to Jesus? Does it line up with Scripture? Does it produce fruit consistent with the Holy Spirit? Does it call sin what the Bible calls sin? Does it lead the person closer to Christ or away from Him?³²

When an NDE passes those tests, we are free to receive it with gratitude. When it fails, we set it aside. That is not dangerous. That is exactly what Paul told the Thessalonians to do. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise reports of the supernatural. But test everything. And hold fast only to what is good.

This approach also frees us from two traps. On one side, the trap of gullibility, where every glowing story is treated as gospel truth. On the other, the trap of fear, where every unfamiliar experience is treated as a demonic threat. Both traps come from the same root: the refusal to do the patient work of discernment. The careful middle takes longer. It requires thought, prayer, and Scripture. But it honors both the evidence God has placed in the world and the authority of the Word He has given us.

D. What the Researchers and Scholars Say

Not all Christians who study NDEs agree with each other, but a growing number of respected thinkers have moved past the blanket rejection and toward careful engagement.

J. Steve Miller, a Christian researcher and author, has made the most detailed case for the biblical compatibility of NDEs. His work walks through the objections from MacArthur, Groothuis, and Hank Hanegraaff point by point, answering each with Scripture and evidence. Miller’s tone is irenic. He does not attack the critics. He respects their concerns. But he insists, rightly I think, that they have not engaged the strongest evidence.³³

Gary Habermas, the philosopher and resurrection scholar at Liberty University, has argued that NDEs, when handled carefully, provide strong evidence for the soul and the afterlife. He sees them as consistent with Christian theism, not as a threat to it. J. P. Moreland, the philosopher at Biola University, takes a similar view.³⁴ Christian apologist Lee Strobel has drawn on NDE research to defend a Christian view of the afterlife. Pastor John Burke has used NDEs as a way to illustrate and confirm biblical teaching, not to replace it.³⁵

Michael Sabom, the cardiologist whose research we have drawn on throughout this book, offers a particularly important voice. Sabom’s story matters because it answers the critics’ prediction firsthand. When he published his first study in 1982, he noticed something that contradicted the popular narrative. As he later wrote, media reports claimed that NDEs “drew persons away from organized religion and toward a more abstract spirituality. But my observation from my own patients was exactly the opposite: NDEs seemed to produce a stronger faith and a higher level of commitment to traditional religious practice.”³⁶ That contradiction drove Sabom to test the question carefully.

Meanwhile, his own study of NDEs led him deeper into faith, not away from it. In the opening of his conclusions chapter, he wrote plainly:

A cardiologist who spent his career studying NDEs and ended up an ordained Presbyterian elder. That fact alone should give the critics pause.

But Sabom did not stop with his own story. He designed the Atlanta Study to test whether NDEs really pull people away from traditional Christianity. His findings were striking. Of 47 near-death experiencers, 43 (92%) reported no change in their basic doctrinal beliefs after the experience. Of the four who did change, every one of them moved to a more conservative form of Christianity, not a less conservative one.³⁷ Church attendance increased across all groups—conservative Christians, liberal Christians, and God-believers alike—with the largest increase among those who held the most traditional beliefs. That increase actually reversed a trend of declining attendance that Sabom found in both NDErs before their experiences and in a control group of cardiac patients who did not have NDEs.⁴⁸

A belief in reincarnation and in Eastern, universalist religion is not a direct aftereffect of near-death experience.

Michael Sabom, Light and Death, 140

On reincarnation specifically, belief “strongly decreased” in 20% of his subjects and showed no net change across the group.⁴⁹ Far from drifting toward New Age ideas, Sabom’s patients took their existing faith more seriously. Their intrinsic faith deepened. Their concern for others grew. Their focus on material things decreased.

Penny Sartori, a nurse and researcher who studied NDEs in a UK hospital, found a similar pattern. All the patients in her study reported an increased tendency to pray, to attend church, and to read the Bible after their experiences.³⁸ If these experiences were from the enemy, we would expect them to bear the enemy’s fruit. They do not.

Groothuis and MacArthur remain unconvinced. I respect their position and their right to hold it. But I believe they have placed too much weight on the worst NDE stories and too little on the best research. And I think the Bible gives us a better tool than wholesale rejection. It gives us discernment.

E. Counter-Objections

“NDEs are not given in Scripture as normative for doctrine.”

This is true. And no serious defender of NDEs claims otherwise. NDEs do not give us new doctrine. They do not add to Scripture. They do not tell us how to be saved. As Miller notes, the vast bulk of NDEs are not teaching novel doctrines; they simply reinforce mainstream biblical teachings, serving to strengthen faith in God and the priority of love.³⁹ No one in this book has argued that an NDE is a new chapter of the Bible. The argument is that real evidence, tested against Scripture, can confirm what the Bible already teaches. That is not a threat to the sufficiency of Scripture. It is the same thing that happens when an archaeologist digs up a tablet that confirms a biblical narrative. The Bible did not need the tablet. But the tablet makes the Bible’s witness louder.

“Satan can counterfeit, so the risk is too high.”

Yes, he can. That is exactly why we test. We covered demonic hijacking in depth in Chapter 20. We built a detailed testing framework in Chapter 23. We are not asking anyone to drop their guard. We are asking them to use the guard Scripture provides, instead of the blunt instrument of blanket rejection.⁴⁰

Consider this: Satan also counterfeits miracles, prophecy, and preaching. False teachers exist. False prophets exist. But the church does not respond by rejecting all miracles, all prophecy, and all preaching. It responds by testing. “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1).⁴¹ The same principle applies to NDEs.

And consider the fruit. Sabom’s patients came out of their experiences with stronger faith, more church involvement, deeper prayer lives, and less interest in material things. Their doctrinal beliefs stayed stable or moved in a more conservative direction. As Miller observed, if this were a strategy of the enemy, it appears to have backfired badly. A scheme that causes people to love God more, pray more often, and attend church more faithfully is a strange kind of deception.⁵¹

“The church got along fine without NDEs. Why do we need them now?”

The church does not need NDEs the way it needs Scripture. But God uses many tools to confirm His truth. Testimonies, answered prayer, the witness of creation, the changed lives of believers, archaeological discoveries. None of these are Scripture. All of them point toward the God Scripture reveals. NDEs belong in that category: not as new revelation, but as contemporary evidence that confirms what the Bible already teaches about the soul, the afterlife, and the reality of God.⁴²

And the church has never existed without experiences of the supernatural. Deathbed visions have been reported for centuries (Chapter 26). Early church records include accounts that resemble modern NDEs.⁴³ John Wesley’s journals record dying believers reporting visions of heaven and encounters with angels.⁴⁴ What is new is not the experiences. What is new is the medical technology that brings more people back from the edge of death, and the research tools that let us study what they report.

“The cessationist concern.”

Some Christians believe that miraculous gifts and visions ended after the apostolic age. This is a respectable position within the church, and I do not want to dismiss it. But even most cessationists draw a line between the gift of working miracles and miracles that God Himself may choose to work at any time. NDEs are not worked by a miracle-worker. They come to people who did not ask for them. They do not give the person any special authority or status. As Miller notes, they do not qualify people to be prophets or to add to the Bible.⁴⁵ If God, in His freedom, chooses to give a dying person a glimpse of the world to come, that does not violate even a cessationist framework, properly understood.

Miller also makes the helpful point that even cessationists like MacArthur draw on evidence from outside the Bible in their own teaching. MacArthur cites scientific research in his sermons. He draws on wisdom literature. If the Bible alone is sufficient in the strict sense that nothing else matters, why does he reach outside the Scriptures to illustrate and support his message?⁴⁶ The answer, of course, is that “sufficiency” does not mean “isolation.” Scripture is sufficient for salvation and doctrine. That does not mean we are forbidden to notice when the world confirms what Scripture teaches.

F. Conclusion and Pastoral Application

I began this chapter with a pastor who told a grieving widow that her husband’s experience could not be real. I understand why he said it. But I wish he had said something different. I wish he had said, “Let’s look at this together. Let’s test it. Let’s see what lines up with Scripture and what does not.”

That is the careful middle this book has been walking from the start. We do not accept every NDE as true. We do not reject every NDE as false. We test each one against the Bible, and we hold fast to what is good.

I want to speak directly to any reader who is wrestling with this question. Perhaps you had an NDE yourself, or someone you love did. Perhaps a pastor or teacher told you it could not be real. Perhaps you feel torn between what the experience meant to you and what a respected leader said. You do not have to choose between your experience and your Bible. You can bring the experience to the Bible. You can lay it alongside Scripture and see what matches and what does not. That is faithful. That is wise. And in most cases, I believe you will find that the experience and the Bible are telling the same story: that God is real, that the soul survives death, that Christ is present, and that love and holiness matter.

The evidence in this book is strong. Verified cases where dying patients perceived things they had no way of knowing (Chapter 9). Blind people who saw (Chapter 10). A consistency across cultures and decades that rules out cultural invention (Chapter 11). Hospital studies that show these experiences happen when the brain is at its quietest (Chapter 12). And a pattern where Jesus shows up far more often than any other figure (Chapter 14). To sweep all of this aside without examining it is not faithfulness to the Bible. It is a failure of the very discernment the Bible calls for.

At the same time, the caution in this book is real. Not every NDE is from God (Chapter 20). Some carry unbiblical content that must be rejected (Chapter 21). The tools for testing are in our hands (Chapter 23; Appendix C). The answer to the critic is not “you are wrong to be careful.” The answer is “be more careful, not less. Test, don’t reject sight unseen.”

And if you are a pastor or a church leader, I have a gentle request. When someone in your congregation tells you about a near-death experience, do not dismiss it. Do not panic. Listen. Ask what they saw. Ask whether it points to Christ. Walk through the tests with them. You may find that the experience strengthens their faith, deepens their love, and makes them more serious about the things of God. Or you may find red flags that need to be addressed. Either way, you will be doing the work of a shepherd: caring for the sheep, not by locking the gate against everything unfamiliar, but by walking with them through it.

Paul once prayed for the church at Ephesus that God would give them “the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened” (Ephesians 1:17–18).⁴⁷ He did not fear that prayer. He did not worry that the Spirit of revelation would undermine the written Word. He trusted that the God who inspired the Bible is the same God who opens hearts, who meets the dying, and who is not afraid of the evidence His own world produces.

Neither should we be.