Chapter 1

Introduction — The God Who Meets Us at the Threshold of Death

The man's heart had stopped. He was not breathing. He was wheeled into the emergency department of a Dutch hospital deeply unconscious, his face blue, his pupils fixed and dilated. A nurse pried open his mouth and removed his upper dentures so a breathing tube could be inserted, and she set the dentures aside in the sliding drawer of the crash cart. The medical team worked on him for over an hour and a half. Eventually, against the odds, his heart began to beat again. He was moved, still comatose, to the intensive care unit, where he stayed unconscious for another full week.

When he finally woke up, the same nurse happened to walk into his room. The patient took one look at her and said, in essence, that this was the woman who knew where his teeth were. He proceeded to describe — in accurate detail — the cart she had used, the drawer she had opened, and what she had done with the dentures. He even described watching the resuscitation from above, looking down at his own body and at the team trying to revive him. The nurse was stunned. The man had been clinically dead and deeply comatose during every moment of the encounter he was now describing. There was no medical, sensory, or normal physical way for him to know any of this. And yet he did.¹

This case did not appear in a tabloid or a self-published memoir. It was reported in The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, as part of a careful prospective study of cardiac arrest survivors led by Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel.² The denture case is now one of the most famous in the entire field of near-death research, and it is far from alone. We will return to it in Chapter 6, where we will examine veridical near-death experiences in detail. For now, let us simply sit with the weight of what happened.

A man's brain had ceased to function in any way that the standard physicalist picture of human nature can account for. Yet during that very window, he saw, he heard, he understood, and he remembered. When he came back, he could prove it. Whatever this is — and we will spend this entire book asking that question — it is not nothing.

A Problem With Three Faces

Cases like the denture case raise an obvious question: what are we supposed to do with this? And here, almost immediately, three very different objections rise up to meet the evidence — each of which I want to take seriously before going any further.

The skeptic's objection

The first objection comes from materialist scientists who insist, on principle, that nothing of the sort just described can really happen. Consciousness, on this view, is something the brain produces, the way a liver produces bile. When the brain shuts down, consciousness stops. Anything a patient "remembers" from a period of clinical death must therefore be a hallucination — a story the brain stitched together as it was crashing or recovering. Various candidate explanations are then offered: oxygen starvation, the release of a chemical called DMT (a naturally occurring compound that can produce vivid imagery), random firing in the temporal lobe, a brief surge of brain activity at the edge of death, or the patient unconsciously absorbing information from people around the bed.

I want to grant right away that these are not foolish hypotheses. They deserve a fair hearing, and we will give them one in Chapter 3 and Appendix B. But I will say up front what the data eventually forces us to admit: hallucinations do not produce verified information about events the patient could not have witnessed. A dying brain misfiring at random does not pull the right details about a specific drawer in a specific crash cart out of thin air. When NDE researchers have tested these naturalistic explanations carefully, the explanations have not held up.³ Something else is going on.

The Christian's objection

The second objection comes from a very different quarter — and it is one I take with even more seriousness, because it is rooted in love for the Bible. Some of the most respected pastors and teachers in the evangelical world have warned Christians away from near-death experiences. Pastor John MacArthur, in his book The Glory of Heaven, has argued that contemporary NDE accounts are essentially imagined or, worse, demonic. Christian apologist Hank Hanegraaff has likewise warned that NDEs serve as a vehicle for New Age teachings that smuggle false ideas into the church under the cover of personal experience.⁴

I want to be clear: these critics are not being silly, and they are not being mean. They love the gospel, they love the Bible, and they are trying to protect the flock from spiritual confusion. We owe them honest engagement. We will give them several full chapters of it later in the book (especially Chapters 30–33). For now, I will only point out one piece of background that almost everyone misses. The kind of NDE accounts that critics typically read are popular bestsellers, written for general audiences, by experiencers who often had no theological training. The kind of NDE accounts that fill the pages of medical journals like The Lancet, Resuscitation, and the Journal of Near-Death Studies are very, very different.⁵ The two bodies of evidence do not look the same. And as Steve Miller, John Burke, Michael Sabom, Gary Habermas, and J. P. Moreland have all argued in different ways, the careful scholarly research is far harder to dismiss than the bestseller list.⁶ Sabom's own Atlanta Study, which followed a group of NDErs over time, found something remarkable: their experiences pushed them toward a more conservative, more biblical, more committed Christian faith — not away from it.⁷

The confused believer's situation

Caught between the skeptics and the critics is the third group — and probably the largest. These are ordinary Christians whose lives have been touched, in real and personal ways, by the very phenomenon the experts are arguing about. A grandmother sees Jesus in her hospital bed and dies smiling the next morning. A teenager pulled from a swimming pool tells her parents about a "bright man" who told her it wasn't her time yet. A father recovering from cardiac arrest tries, with shaking hands, to describe the operating room as he saw it from somewhere near the ceiling. These people are not chasing fame. They are not selling a book. They are usually a little embarrassed, a little afraid, and not entirely sure who to talk to.

Surveys consistently find that somewhere between four and nine percent of the general population has had a near-death experience.⁸ In a typical congregation of five hundred people, that means at least twenty members have likely had one, and many more have sat at the bedside of a dying loved one and wondered what was happening behind those peaceful, knowing smiles. They want to know what the Bible says. They want to know what to think. And too often, no one has given them a place to bring the question.

"That's Not in the Bible": A Story That Should Haunt Us

Steve Miller, whose work runs through this book like a thread, tells a story I cannot get out of my head. In November 2019, a panel of medical professionals convened by the New York Academy of Sciences took up the question of what happens when people die. Among the panelists was Dr. Tom Aufderheide, professor of emergency medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin and director of its Resuscitation Research Center. Dr. Aufderheide reached back to a story from the very beginning of his career, in 1980.

A patient with a grim prognosis had survived repeated cardiac arrests, and before being discharged he confided something to the young Dr. Aufderheide. While clinically dead, the patient had been outside his body. He had heard conversations in the hallway. He had even known, with eerie precision, what the resident had been thinking — including the fact that the supervising physician had not shown up that night and that the resident felt sorry for himself about it. Aufderheide was rattled. He encouraged the patient to talk to his pastor. The patient did. He got partway into the story, and the pastor said, in effect, "That isn't in the Bible," and walked out, slamming the door. So Aufderheide called a psychiatrist on the patient's behalf. He got partway into the story, and the psychiatrist said something to the effect of "ridiculous" and hung up.⁹

Miller calls those two responses heartless and inexcusable, and I agree.¹⁰ Think for a moment about that patient. He had just lived through what was, by every indication, the most vivid and meaningful experience of his entire life. He went to his pastor — the spiritual authority in his life — and to his psychiatrist — the scientific authority — and both of them slammed a door in his face. Where, after that, was he supposed to take his question? It is not hard to picture him drifting into the arms of a psychic, a medium, or a New Age teacher who would at least listen. The pastor's instinct to protect biblical truth was right. His method was a disaster.

What This Book Is Trying to Do

This is a comprehensive, biblical, and theological investigation of near-death experiences (NDEs) and deathbed visions or deathbed experiences (DBEs). It is written by a conservative evangelical Christian who has spent years studying the medical, philosophical, and theological dimensions of these phenomena and who has reached the following conclusions, which I will defend in the pages that follow.

First, most genuine NDEs are real spiritual experiences, not products of dying brain chemistry. The evidence for this — especially the veridical evidence we will examine in Part II — is significantly stronger than most readers realize. Second, the core content of these experiences is remarkably compatible with biblical Christianity. As Miller has documented, there are dozens of points of overlap between what NDErs report and what the Bible teaches.¹¹ Third, this compatibility does not mean we should accept every element of every account. Scripture clearly warns that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14, ESV), and Shaun Tabatt has helpfully shown that the same enemy who has corrupted every other channel of revelation is unlikely to ignore this one.¹² Discernment is required. Fourth — and this matters enormously — even when the experience is genuine, the experiencer's interpretation can be wrong. We must learn to separate what happened from what the person concluded about what happened.

Where I Am Coming From

Honesty requires me to lay my cards on the table at the start. I write as someone holding to the historic Christian faith as expressed in the Apostles', Nicene, and Chalcedonian creeds. I affirm the inspiration and authority of Scripture, the Trinity, the deity and humanity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, and salvation by grace through faith in Jesus alone.

On the question of human nature — which sits at the heart of this book — I hold to substance dualism. That is a fancy term for a fairly simple idea: a human being is made up of two real and distinct things, a physical body and an immaterial soul (or spirit), and the soul can survive — and continue to think, feel, and love — when the body dies. John Cooper has argued the biblical case for this position with great care, calling it "holistic dualism" — body and soul are deeply integrated in this life, but they are genuinely two and can come apart at death.¹³ Joshua Farris and Michael Wilkinson have made parallel cases from theological anthropology and from Christology.¹⁴¹⁵ Closely tied to substance dualism is the doctrine of a conscious intermediate state — the historic Christian conviction that those who die in Christ are immediately with the Lord, conscious and aware, while waiting for the bodily resurrection at the end of the age.

I am also, at present, a conditional immortalist who is open to a careful biblical universalism. I do not believe immortality is something the soul has on its own; it is something God gives. I believe Scripture leaves room for postmortem opportunity for salvation, with a final and decisive moment at the last judgment. I am still working through whether the strongest reading of the New Testament finally points to conditionalism or to the eventual reconciliation of all things in Christ. None of that is the focus of this book, but it shapes how I read certain pieces of NDE evidence — particularly distressing NDEs and the loving demeanor of Jesus toward the unsaved.

How This Book Fits a Larger Project

This is the sixth book in an ongoing series of theological studies, and a few brief words of cross-reference may help readers who are following the larger project. Beyond the Grave: A Biblical and Theological Case for Postmortem Salvation argued for postmortem opportunity, the conscious intermediate state, and openness to biblical universalism; this book takes the chapter-length treatment of NDE evidence in that earlier work and develops it into the full investigation it always deserved. The Heart of God: Does God Feel? argues that God has genuine emotional responses to His creatures — directly relevant here, because the God encountered in NDEs is overwhelmingly described as warm, personal, and emotionally engaged. The God Beyond the Clock argues for dynamic divine temporality and helps make sense of the strange ways NDErs experience time. The Word Made Flesh argues that physicalism is incompatible with orthodox Christology — and the NDE evidence for the soul converges nicely with that Christological argument. Crowned with Glory and Honor develops the broader theological anthropology of body and soul created in God's image. Where these companion volumes are relevant in what follows, I will signal it briefly without rehashing the full argument.

A Map of the Journey Ahead

The book unfolds in seven parts. Part I (Chapters 2–5) lays the foundations — what NDEs and DBEs actually are, how the scientific research is conducted, and the biblical case for substance dualism that gives us the categories to interpret the data. Part II (Chapters 6–10) puts the strongest evidence on the table: veridical NDEs, the famous Pam Reynolds case, NDEs in people blind from birth, children's NDEs, and shared-death experiences. These chapters, taken together, are the empirical heart of the book.

Part III (Chapters 11–17) walks through what NDErs typically experience — leaving the body, encountering a being of light, meeting Jesus, reuniting with the dead and with angels, the life review, the strange behavior of time, and the landscapes of heaven — with theological reflection on each. Part IV (Chapters 18–24) is where the book becomes most explicitly biblical and theological. Drawing on Miller's careful catalog of overlap, we will see how remarkably well the consistent core of NDE reports lines up with mainstream Christian teaching on the afterlife, the intermediate state, the love of God, and the rejection of reincarnation.

Part V (Chapters 25–29) is the discernment section. Here we engage Tabatt's framework for recognizing demonic hijacking, the distinction between a genuine experience and a flawed interpretation, the fringe world of psychics and alien encounters that has grown up around the NDE community, and a biblical evaluation framework that any Christian can use. Part VI (Chapters 30–33) takes up the Christian critics directly — MacArthur, Hanegraaff, and others — engaging their concerns charitably and answering them. Part VII (Chapters 34–36) brings the book home: terminal lucidity, the cumulative philosophical and empirical case for substance dualism, and a closing meditation on NDEs, conditional immortality, and what all of this tells us about the God we serve.

Why This Matters

I want to close this introduction the way I hope the rest of the book will read: not as an academic exercise but as something pastoral. The questions in front of us are not abstract. They reach into the most tender corners of human life. They reach into the hospital room where a dying grandmother whispers, with shining eyes, that Jesus is in the corner waiting for her. They reach into the living room where a hospice nurse — who has watched dozens of people die — tries to explain to a skeptical son why his mother spent her last week peacefully talking to relatives no one else could see. They reach into the ordinary kitchen where a woman in her sixties confesses, for the first time in forty years, that she once watched her own resuscitation from somewhere above her body, and that she has been a different person ever since.

These people deserve more than a slammed door. They deserve more than a smug "ridiculous." They deserve careful listening, careful biblical reflection, and an honest answer to the question their experience has put in front of them. That is what this book aims to give. We are going to ask whether what they describe is real. We are going to ask what the Bible has to say about it. We are going to ask whether the Jesus they sometimes meet at the threshold is the same Jesus we read about in the Gospels. And we are going to ask what it means, for our doctrine and our discipleship and our daily walk, that the God of the Bible appears to be in the habit of meeting people at the very edge of eternity.

So let us begin.