Chapter 26

When the Experience Is Real but the Interpretation Is Wrong — Correct Visions, Incorrect Theology

Imagine you are walking with a friend through a forest. You both see the same hawk pass overhead. You see a hawk. Your friend, who grew up around farms, sees an osprey, because that is the only large bird he has ever paid attention to. The bird was real. Your friend's identification was wrong. The seeing and the naming are two different things.

This simple distinction is one of the most important tools we have for thinking carefully about near-death experiences. In this chapter, I want to argue that we must keep two questions completely separate. First: what actually happened during the NDE? Second: what did the experiencer conclude about what happened? The first is the experience. The second is the interpretation. Both can be evaluated. But they cannot be evaluated together, as if they were one thing.

If we miss this distinction, we are pushed toward one of two extremes. Either we accept everything an NDEr reports as if it came directly from the throne of God — including their theological conclusions about reincarnation, universalism, or the nature of religion. Or we throw everything out together, concluding that because some NDErs return with bad theology, the experience itself must have been false. Both extremes fail. The middle path — which I believe is the biblical path — is to evaluate the experience and the interpretation as two distinct things.¹

Why This Distinction Resolves So Much

Let me say plainly why I find this distinction so important. It does the heavy lifting of resolving the apparent conflict between NDE reports and biblical theology. If we cannot tell the difference between what was experienced and what was concluded, then every report of "all religions lead to God" or "I have lived many lives" forces us either to accept those teachings or to reject the entire experience. Once we recognize that the experiencer did the interpreting — usually with the only mental tools they had — we can affirm the genuine encounter while gently correcting the conclusion. This is not theological dodging. It is honest description of how human beings receive any experience at all.

John Burke makes this very point near the start of Imagine Heaven. After reading hundreds of NDE accounts, he says, he started to see the difference between what NDErs reported experiencing and the interpretation they gave to that experience. The shared core experience pointed clearly to what the Scriptures describe. But the personal interpretations varied wildly, and sometimes contradicted each other and the Bible.² Burke's solution is not to throw out the experiences but to read them through the lens of Scripture, separating the data from the experiencers' commentary on it.

J. Steve Miller frames this even more pointedly. NDErs, he reminds us, do not have to be expert interpreters of their experiences. A person can have a real encounter with the divine and still not understand what they encountered, especially if they have no Christian framework to make sense of it.³ We do not require eyewitnesses of a car accident to be expert accident reconstructionists. We listen to what they saw and let trained investigators interpret it. The same principle applies to NDEs.

Four Illustrations of the Distinction

Let me walk through four cases where the experience and the interpretation come apart. These are the kinds of situations that come up again and again in the NDE literature. In each one, I will try to identify the raw experience and then the theological interpretation laid on top of it.

(a) The Hindu NDEr Encounters a Being of Light

A Hindu woman dies briefly during surgery. She finds herself in a place of overwhelming light and love. She returns and tells her family that she met Brahman, or perhaps Krishna. Was the experience real? I would say yes — the encounter with a personal, loving, radiant divine being is real. Was the identification correct? That is a different question.

Here Miller's research becomes crucial. Miller searched the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) database for accounts of Krishna sightings. Out of more than 5,000 cases, only three or four NDErs claimed to have seen Krishna — far less than one in a thousand.⁴ By contrast, around one in five NDErs in the same database specifically identifies Jesus.⁵ When Miller looked at Hindu NDErs in particular, he found that even practicing Hindus did not typically describe seeing the visual features of Hindu deities (Krishna's blue skin, Shiva's three eyes). They tended to describe encountering "God" and using whatever name their culture gave to the Supreme Being.⁶ The encounter was an encounter with one personal God of love and light. The label varied with culture. The label was the interpretation; the encounter was the experience.

Burke makes the same observation. After reading nearly a thousand accounts, he says that the descriptions of the Being of Light are remarkably similar across cultures, even when the names attached to that Being vary.⁷ The NDE data itself supports the experience-interpretation distinction. The core encounter is consistent. The cultural naming is not.

(b) The Atheist NDEr Encounters Transcendent Reality

Here is another common pattern. An atheist nearly dies, leaves her body, and finds herself in a realm of stunning beauty and peace. She returns and announces, "There is no personal God — there is only universal consciousness. We are all one." Was she lying? I do not think so. Did she encounter something real? Almost certainly yes. But notice how her interpretation has been shaped by what she already believed before the NDE.

The NDE data itself does not support an impersonal "universal consciousness." Across thousands of reports, the Being encountered is consistently personal. The Being communicates, knows, loves, decides, and responds. Jeffrey Long's God Study, the largest systematic analysis of God-encounters in NDEs, found that NDErs overwhelmingly describe a personal Being.⁸ The atheist's report of "universal consciousness" is not actually a description of what she experienced — it is her best attempt to fit a personal experience into her impersonal worldview. The experience and the interpretation have come apart at the seams.

(c) The Cultural Christian Concludes That Religion Does Not Matter

A third case is perhaps the most common. A nominally Christian NDEr encounters Jesus' overwhelming love. She returns saying, "Religion does not matter. God loves everyone the same, so all paths must lead to Him."

Notice the move. The experience: a personal encounter with unconditional love. The interpretation: therefore, all religions are equally valid. But this conclusion does not actually follow from the experience. A parent can love every one of her children unconditionally while still insisting they take their medicine, finish their homework, or stop running into traffic. Unconditional love is a fact about the lover, not a verdict on whether everything the loved one believes is true. Jesus Himself was both the most loving and the most exclusive religious teacher in history, claiming, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6, ESV). I will develop this argument in detail in Chapter 27. Here, the point is simpler: love does not equal indifference to truth. The experience may have been real; the inference was the NDEr's, not the divine being's.

(d) The NDEr Shown Other Lives Concludes "I Have Lived Before"

An NDEr is shown vivid scenes of other people's lives — their joys, sorrows, and choices. Returning to consciousness, she announces, "I have lived many past lives." But was she actually shown her own past incarnations? Or was she shown the lives of others — perhaps ancestors, perhaps people her own life has affected, perhaps simply a panoramic vision of human experience?

I treated reincarnation in detail in Chapter 24, so I will not repeat that argument here. The point for our purposes is simply this: the experience of seeing scenes from human lives does not, by itself, require the interpretation "those were my past lives." That is theology added on top of the data, often supplied by the NDEr's pre-existing beliefs or by a culture saturated with Eastern thought. The experience may be genuine; the framework is the experiencer's contribution.⁹

The Theological Framework Behind the Distinction

Why should we expect this gap between experience and interpretation? Several biblical and theological reasons line up.

All Human Reception Is Filtered

God communicates in many ways — through Scripture, creation, conscience, dreams, visions, and (so the NDE data suggest) experiences at the threshold of death. But every channel of divine communication runs through the human mind. And the human mind is not a blank slate. It is shaped by culture, language, prior beliefs, theological training (or lack of it), and personal expectations.

This is why Scripture, the Word of God in written form, holds a unique place. Theologians sometimes call Scripture the norma normans non normata — the "norming norm that is not normed by anything else." It is the standard by which we evaluate other claimed words from God. An NDE, however vivid and life-changing, is a personal experience. Even if everything in it came from God, the experiencer's report of it is filtered through their own mind and culture. That is not divine revelation on the level of Scripture. It is personal testimony — and personal testimony has to be tested against Scripture, not the other way around.¹⁰

Even Biblical Prophets Sometimes Misunderstood

The Bible itself gives us examples. Consider Peter on the rooftop in Joppa (Acts 10:9–17). He fell into a trance and saw a great sheet lowered from heaven, full of unclean animals, with a voice telling him to kill and eat. Peter's first interpretation was that God was changing the dietary laws — telling him it was now okay to eat pork. He was wrong. The vision was not really about food at all; it was about the inclusion of Gentiles in the people of God. Peter only figured this out when Cornelius's messengers arrived. The vision was genuinely from God. Peter's first interpretation was off the mark.

Or consider Jonah. He understood the call to preach to Nineveh perfectly well. What he misunderstood — or perhaps refused to understand — was God's character of mercy. He expected destruction; God intended forgiveness. The communication was clear; the prophet's interpretation of God's intent was warped by his own bitterness toward the Assyrians.

If even biblical prophets occasionally misunderstood divine communication, why would we expect untrained, unbelieving, or theologically untaught NDErs to interpret their experiences perfectly? The wonder is not that some get it wrong. The wonder is how often, even without Christian background, they get the core right.

Miller's Crucial Observation: The Gag Order

One of Miller's most important findings is that NDErs almost never report receiving long theological lectures during their experiences. He puts it bluntly: NDErs who report detailed theological instruction are "so rare as to be anomalous."¹¹ The core experience is about love, light, life review, the reality of God, and the priority of love and service to others. It is not, in the main, about systematic theology.

Miller offers a memorable image. It is, he says, "as if there's some gag order from the other side to the angels and deceased relatives, 'Don't get into theological discussions!'"¹² The denominational debates we obsess over down here — mode of baptism, charismatic gifts, the ordination of women, Catholic versus Protestant — are simply not what NDErs come back talking about. Across thousands of accounts in serious studies, those topics almost never appear.

Why does this matter for our distinction? Because it tells us where the elaborate theological systems in some NDE books actually come from. They are not, for the most part, things the NDEr was taught on the other side. They are things the NDEr concluded after returning, when trying to package the experience for an audience. The detailed teaching is the experiencer's theological construction, built on top of the actual experience but extending well beyond it. This is precisely the experience-interpretation gap.

Tabatt's Case Studies: Where Interpretation Goes Off the Rails

Shaun Tabatt's The NDE Conspiracy contains a particularly helpful chapter that takes specific cases from the NDERF database and walks through what to note and what to flag. I want to look at three of his examples because they illustrate the experience-interpretation gap so vividly.

Bristol O. (NDERF #13171) reports being approached by what she takes to be a divine being who speaks to her about an "incarnation cycle." Tabatt observes two things. First, the being is vague and unidentified, which makes him cautious. Second, the talk of an "incarnation cycle" is essentially a reincarnation framework — incompatible with the Christian view that each soul lives one life.¹³ Notice how Tabatt's analysis works. He does not dismiss the entire experience. He asks: what was the experience, and what was the message? The vague identity of the being and the reincarnation framework are red flags. Something happened to Bristol. But the theological content delivered (or interpreted) is not consistent with Scripture.

Anne W. (NDERF #9119) reports a beautiful experience of light, energy, and love, but returns saying, "I was the UNIVERSE in expression, and the Universe was within me… EVERYTHING WAS CONNECTED. I WAS EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE; omnipresent, omniscien[t]!"¹⁴ Tabatt notes that this language leans straight into pantheism — the idea that God is everything and everything is God. He also notes that Anne ascribes to herself qualities (omnipresence, omniscience) that the Bible reserves for God alone. The experience of love and connection is consistent with much NDE data. The interpretive leap to "I am God, the universe is in me" is a different matter altogether. That conclusion did not have to be drawn from her experience; it was drawn through a worldview lens.

Robyn (NDERF #6636) reports a vivid out-of-body experience during anesthesia overdose. She returns with a chilling sentence: "Murder, rape and cannibalism, they are all okay. Just experience to grow from… My true nature is one with all, and I am God."¹⁵ Tabatt's response is sober and biblical. He observes that murder, rape, and cannibalism are genuine expressions of evil. He cannot conceive of a real encounter with the God of the Bible producing such a takeaway. As he puts it, this on its face sounds like "a lie from the pit of hell."¹⁶

Robyn's case is a place where the experience-interpretation distinction may not be enough. When the message itself flatly contradicts the moral character of God revealed in Scripture, we may be looking at more than a confused interpretation. We may be looking at demonic content injected into the experience, in line with Paul's warning that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). I treated that scenario in detail in Chapter 25. The point here is that careful discernment requires both tools: the experience-interpretation distinction and the recognition that some content is so contrary to Scripture that something deeper is wrong.

Practical Application: How to Read Any NDE Account

Let me put this into a practical method we can use whenever we read an NDE report. I would suggest five steps.

First, identify the raw experience. What did the person actually see, hear, feel, and (importantly) what were they actually told in clear words by an identifiable being? Strip out post-NDE commentary and interpretive framing.

Second, identify the interpretation. What conclusions did the experiencer draw? What worldview does the report assume? What lens did they use to make sense of what happened?

Third, evaluate the experience provisionally. Does the raw experience fit with what NDE researchers consistently find? Does it line up with biblical descriptions of the afterlife and the Being of Light? Provisional acceptance is not naive acceptance — it is a willingness to take the report seriously while still subjecting it to further tests.

Fourth, evaluate the interpretation rigorously. Does the interpretation contradict Scripture? Does it lead the experiencer toward Christ, or away from Him? Does it bear the fruit Jesus described — love, joy, peace, repentance, faith — or does it produce confusion, pride, occult involvement, or moral compromise (Matthew 7:15–20)?

Fifth, take what is good; leave what is not. Receive the testimony to the reality of God, the conscious survival of the soul, and the priority of love. Set aside or correct the parts that conflict with Scripture. This is the same posture we would take with any human testimony about anything.

Counterarguments — and Why I Find Them Unpersuasive

Some readers may push back on this whole approach. Let me try to honor the strongest objections.

Objection 1: "If the interpretations are so unreliable, why trust the experiences at all?" Response: because the core features of NDEs are remarkably consistent across cultures, religions, and centuries — out-of-body experiences, the tunnel and light, the personal Being of love, the life review, heightened senses. The variability shows up in peripheral details and in personal commentary. The core is stable; the interpretations vary. That is precisely the pattern we would expect if there is a real encounter that human beings then process through their own worldview lenses.

Objection 2: "Aren't you just being convenient — accepting what you like and rejecting what you don't?" Response: not arbitrarily. The standard is Scripture (Galatians 1:8; Deuteronomy 13:1–5; 1 John 4:1) and the fruit produced (Matthew 7:15–20). I will lay out a fuller framework in Chapter 29. We apply the same logic to any human testimony — we do not say that because some witnesses lie or misremember, no testimony can be trusted. We test it.

Objection 3: "But the NDErs themselves believe their interpretations are part of the experience." Response: of course they do — they were there, and to them, experience and meaning are fused into a single overwhelming impression. But our beliefs about our experiences are not infallible, even when an experience is itself genuine. Peter knew this. Jonah knew this. Every Christian who has ever misread a providence knows this. The distinction is not an attack on the NDEr's honesty; it is a recognition of how all human knowing works.

Conclusion: A More Faithful Way to Listen

The experience-interpretation distinction is not a clever escape hatch. It is, I believe, the most honest way to read NDE accounts. It refuses the easy comfort of either extreme. It will not let us swallow problematic theology because the experience was vivid. It will not let us throw out the experience because the theology is muddled. Instead, it invites us into careful, prayerful, biblically grounded listening.

Sabom's Atlanta Study quietly reinforces the wisdom of this approach. His NDE patients did not drift toward Eastern, universalist, or syncretistic theology after their experiences. The four patients in his study who did change their Christian doctrinal category all moved toward a more conservative Christian doctrine, not away from it.¹⁷ Penny Sartori's UK study found similar results — increased prayer, church attendance, and Bible reading among NDErs.¹⁸ The empirical record cuts strongly against the popular story that NDEs lead people away from biblical Christianity. When we listen carefully to the actual data — and apply the experience-interpretation distinction — we find that NDEs, far from being enemies of Christian orthodoxy, often quietly point people toward it.

What the NDEr saw is one thing. What they made of it is another. Both can be received, weighed, and answered with charity. That is, in the end, a deeply Christian way to listen. It honors the experiencer as a real person who had a real encounter. And it honors Scripture as the standard by which we evaluate every claim, including our own.