Chapter 31

"All NDEs Are Demonic!"
Why Wholesale Dismissal of NDEs Fails

In 1980, a young emergency physician named Tom Aufderheide cared for a patient who suffered repeated cardiac arrests and, against all odds, recovered. Before leaving the hospital, the man told Dr. Aufderheide something that left him stunned. While clinically dead, the patient had floated above his body, watched the resuscitation, overheard hallway conversations, and even read Dr. Aufderheide's private thoughts — the doctor had been feeling sorry for himself because his supervisor skipped his first night on duty.¹

Aufderheide encouraged the patient to talk to someone he trusted — first his minister, then a psychiatrist. The patient came back devastated. "I got half-way through my story and he said, 'That's not in the Bible,' walked out, and slammed the door." The psychiatrist's response was the same kind of door-slam: "This is ridiculous." Click.²

I cannot read that story without grieving. A man had just lived through the most vivid spiritual event of his life — and the two people most equipped to help him both walked away. The pastor created a dilemma he never should have: believe your minister, or believe your experience. If the experience felt "realer than real," whose authority do you think won? Many experiencers, told by pastors that their visions are demonic, have left the church entirely. They didn't lose faith in the NDE. They lost faith in the people who refused to listen.

This is the human cost of one Christian response to NDEs — the sweeping, dogmatic claim that all NDEs are demonic deceptions, hallucinations, or frauds. I want to examine that claim, honor what the critics are trying to protect, and show why wholesale dismissal fails on biblical, evidential, and pastoral grounds.

The Critics and What They're Trying to Protect

The two most influential Christian voices in the wholesale-dismissal camp are pastor John MacArthur, whose The Glory of Heaven contains an extended critique of NDE accounts, and Christian apologist Hank Hanegraaff, who has long warned that NDEs promote New Age theology.³ Their main arguments boil down to five points: NDEs are not described in the Bible; they are hallucinations or, worse, demonic; popular NDE books contain false theology; they distract from the sufficiency of Scripture; and they may give people false security about heaven and hell.

I want to be fair to these brothers in Christ. Their concerns are not foolish. They are motivated by a deep love for biblical truth. As J. Steve Miller notes, the critics "were concerned that some of these were spreading false doctrine — encouraging people to get their theology of heaven from someone's uncorroborated testimony of heavenly visions, rather than the Bible. And their concern was warranted."⁴ Some popular NDE books really do teach things that conflict with Scripture. Betty Eadie's Embraced by the Light reads like a systematic theology of Mormon and New Age doctrine. Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven contains messages such as "there is nothing you can do wrong" — a teaching the Bible flatly rejects.⁵ Alex Malarkey's The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven sold over a million copies — and was later confessed by Alex himself to be fabricated.⁶ The need for discernment is real (see Chapter 25). The problem is that the critics take this real concern about some popular books and stretch it into a sweeping condemnation of all NDEs — including the carefully documented cases produced by professional medical research. That is where the argument breaks down.

Response 1: "NDEs Are Not in the Bible"

The first objection sounds powerful: the Bible doesn't have a chapter called "Cardiac Arrest Visions." Therefore, the argument goes, NDEs cannot be a real thing God is doing.

But this proves too much. The Bible does not describe modern medical resuscitation either — no defibrillators, no organ transplants. Are these "not biblical" in a way that makes them illegitimate? Of course not. The Bible was not written as a medical textbook.

What the Bible does describe — extensively — is the very kind of phenomenon that NDEs represent. As I showed in Chapter 30, the biblical record is filled with visions of God's throne (Isaiah 6; Ezekiel 1), angelic messengers, and people caught up to heaven. Stephen, while being stoned, saw "the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56). Paul "was caught up into paradise — and he heard things that cannot be told" (2 Corinthians 12:4). The Bible also reports many people coming back from death — the widow's son in 1 Kings 17, Jairus's daughter in Mark 5, Lazarus in John 11, Tabitha in Acts 9, Eutychus in Acts 20. Notice what it does not do: it never says what those people experienced while on the other side. The Bible reports the result without describing the subjective experience. That silence is not a denial. Saying "the Bible doesn't mention NDE-style accounts" is not evidence that such accounts cannot occur — only that the biblical authors did not stop to interview them.⁷

And ancient Christian writers did engage such experiences. Plato told the story of Er, a soldier who returned from death with a vision of the afterlife. Pope Gregory the Great recorded NDE-style accounts in his Dialogues. Medieval Christians knew of vision literature in which dying people glimpsed heaven and hell. NDEs are not a modern invention but an ancient phenomenon the church engaged for centuries before cardiac monitoring made them more frequent.⁸

Response 2: "NDEs Are Just Hallucinations"

The second objection is the standard secular response: dying brains misfire, oxygen drops, and the brain manufactures vivid dreams. MacArthur uses a softer version, calling many NDE reports the products of imagination or wishful thinking.⁹ Here the critic and the skeptic shake hands and walk together. And here, both run into the same wall.

Hallucinations cannot produce verified information. They cannot describe what happens in another room. They cannot tell you which surgical instruments were used while your eyes were taped shut and your brain showed flatline EEG. They cannot let a person blind from birth accurately describe colors. But veridical NDEs do all of these things.

I have already laid out the key cases in Chapters 6 through 8: Pam Reynolds's standstill operation, where she perceived precise details of surgical instruments and overheard conversations while her brain was completely silent and her ears were occluded; Maria's tennis shoe on the third-floor hospital ledge; the AWARE study patient who described his cardiac resuscitation; Kenneth Ring's blind subjects who reported visual NDEs.¹⁰ Hallucination cannot explain those cases. Neither can dreams, drugs, oxygen deprivation, DMT release, or temporal-lobe seizures.

So when a critic dismisses all NDEs as hallucinations, the question is simple: has he actually read the veridical research? Sadly, in most cases the answer is no. The critics have read popular trade books, where the focus is the experiencer's spiritual journey rather than the medical evidence. They have not engaged with Sabom's verification studies, van Lommel's Lancet paper, Greyson's data from the University of Virginia, or Parnia's AWARE study.¹¹ When you read what the medical researchers actually found, the hallucination explanation collapses.

Response 3: "NDEs Are Demonic"

This is the most serious version of the wholesale-dismissal claim. If NDEs are not from God, and if hallucination cannot explain the verified data, the only remaining options for a Christian critic are fraud or the devil. So the claim becomes: every NDE is, in some way, a demonic deception. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), and that is precisely what is happening here.

Let me say clearly: some NDEs do appear to involve demonic elements, and Christians need discernment. I made that case in Chapter 25, drawing on Shaun Tabatt's The NDE Conspiracy.¹² Counterfeit welcoming committees exist. Lying spirits exist. Some NDErs return with messages that flatly contradict Scripture. So I am not arguing that every reported NDE is benign or divine.

But the blanket claim — every NDE, demonic — fails one of Jesus' clearest tests. He gave us a way to discern spirits, and it is not first a doctrinal test or a credentials check. It is a fruit test:

"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit." (Matthew 7:15-18)

Jesus is unmistakable. A bad tree cannot bear good fruit. The Greek verb is ou dynatai (οὐ δύναται) — "is not able." It is a categorical denial. If a source of spiritual experience consistently produces good, godly fruit, that source cannot be evil. Jesus' logic forbids it.

So what fruit do NDEs actually produce? Cardiologist Michael Sabom — a committed evangelical and PCA elder — set out to answer that question with rigorous research. His Atlanta Study tracked 47 NDErs through standardized interviews, control groups, and detailed life-change questionnaires. His findings were the opposite of what NDE critics expected. Sabom's NDErs reported increased faith in God, increased prayer and Bible reading, increased church involvement, decreased emphasis on the material world, and a remarkably enlarged capacity for love.¹³ Among the small group who shifted denominations after their experience, every single one moved toward more conservative Christian doctrine, not away from it.¹⁴ Penny Sartori's UK hospital study found the same: "All patients reported an increased tendency to pray, go to church, and read the Bible."¹⁵

Now compare that with Paul's catalog of "the fruit of the Spirit": "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22-23). The Greek word for "fruit" here is karpos (καρπός), and Paul uses it in the singular — one bundled fruit with nine facets, not nine separate produce items.¹⁶ Compare that to the aftereffects most commonly reported in the professional NDE literature: deeper love for God and others, increased patience, decreased fear, greater kindness, restored marriages, less materialism, greater self-discipline. The lists are nearly identical.

This is the trap the wholesale-dismissal claim cannot escape. Either Jesus' fruit test is true, or it is not. If it is true, then a phenomenon that systematically produces the fruit of the Spirit cannot have a demonic source. Miller puts it tongue-in-cheek but exactly right:

"Satan to demons: 'When people come near death, let's give them a deluding vision which causes them to connect more closely with their churches, love God more dearly, pray more regularly, and love people more fervently.' Demons, in unison: 'Do what?'"¹⁷

Demons do not run a sanctification program. They do not produce the fruit of the Spirit. The blanket "all NDEs are demonic" claim collapses on Jesus' own test.

Response 4: "Popular NDE Books Contain False Theology"

Here is where the critics have their strongest point — and where their argument fails for a different reason: it commits a basic logical fallacy.

Yes, popular NDE books sometimes contain bad theology. Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven teaches that "there is nothing you can do wrong" — a statement Greg Boyd rightly calls so absurd that, if a being from the other side really delivered it, that being can only be demonic.¹⁸ Donald Whitney's review observes that in Alexander's account, "Jesus is absent and presumed non-essential" and "all people appear to be headed to heaven, regardless of their sins, beliefs, pursuit of God, trust in Christ, or anything else."¹⁹ Alex Malarkey's bestseller turned out to be a complete fabrication. Betty Eadie's account is built on Mormon theology dressed in vision language. I agree with the critics that these works should not be treated as reliable sources.²⁰

But generalizing from some popular trade books to the entire NDE phenomenon is a logical error — the fallacy of composition. Some used cars are lemons; that does not mean all used cars are lemons. The professional research literature tells a very different story than the popular bestseller list. Sabom, van Lommel, Greyson, Long, Parnia, Sartori, and others have published hundreds of careful studies in peer-reviewed medical journals. Long's NDERF database contains over five thousand consecutively uploaded accounts, which Miller has analyzed systematically and found overwhelmingly compatible with mainstream biblical themes — not New Age.²¹ A critic who forms his entire opinion of NDEs by reading Embraced by the Light, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, and Proof of Heaven has not actually examined the field. He has examined a small, problematic, and commercially successful slice of it — and confused that slice with the whole.

Response 5: The Pastoral Cost

This brings me back to the man Tom Aufderheide tried to help. Surveys consistently find that four to nine percent of the general population have had an NDE. In a congregation of 500 adults, that means somewhere between 20 and 45 of them have probably had one. Deathbed experiences are even more common, with one New York hospice unit finding more than 80 percent of dying patients reporting them when asked daily.²² When pastors dogmatically declare from the pulpit that all NDEs are demonic, they are addressing real congregants — many sitting in the pew having just been told, in effect, "What you experienced was a lie of the devil."

I am not saying pastors should never warn against false NDE accounts. They should. I am saying pastors should never dismiss genuine experiences without doing the work of evaluation. There is a vast difference between saying "This particular NDE teaches reincarnation, which contradicts Hebrews 9:27, so be careful with this one" and saying "All NDEs are demonic." The first is biblical discernment. The second is reckless. When experiencers are dogmatically told their vivid, life-changing encounter was satanic, they often do not start doubting the NDE. They start doubting the church, and sometimes the Bible. They head to mediums, psychics, or New Age teachers — anyone willing to listen.²³ The pastor's "protection" becomes the very thing that drives the person away from biblical Christianity.

The Witness of Respected Evangelical Voices

The final reason wholesale dismissal fails is that it does not represent any united Christian front. It represents a particular minority view among evangelicals — and a growing list of conservative theologians, philosophers, physicians, and pastors disagree openly.

R. C. Sproul, the late Reformed theologian and founder of Ligonier Ministries, wrote: "It shouldn't shock the Christian when people undergoing clinical death and being revived come back with certain recollections.... Too many of these experiences have been reported for us to simply dismiss them as imaginary or hoaxes."²⁴ Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, endorsed Sabom's Light and Death as "a needed scientific look at near-death experiences under the scrutiny of God's Holy Word."²⁵ Gary Habermas — distinguished research professor at Liberty University and the world's leading scholar on Jesus' resurrection — and J. P. Moreland, distinguished professor of philosophy at Biola and a leading defender of substance dualism, both treat NDE evidence as legitimate testimony to the afterlife in Beyond Death.²⁶ Moreland called John Burke's Imagine Heaven "in the top two or three books we have ever read on the subject" and "solidly biblical." Lee Strobel, bestselling author of The Case for Christ, has likewise endorsed serious engagement with NDE evidence.²⁷

This is not a list of theological liberals. Sproul, Bright, Habermas, Moreland, Strobel, Burke, Sabom, Sartori, Miller, Tabatt — these are conservative evangelicals who confess the inerrancy of Scripture, the deity of Christ, salvation by grace through faith, and the reality of judgment. They have looked at the evidence and concluded it deserves serious engagement, not blanket dismissal. Miller suggests critics might do well to apply Jesus' words to those who do not stand with them on this issue: "whoever is not against us is for us" (Mark 9:39-40).²⁸

Conclusion: A Better Pastoral Response

The patient who knocked on his pastor's door in 1980 deserved better than a slammed door. So do the millions of Christians today who have lived through NDEs and DBEs and simply want their pastors to walk through the experience with them, Bible in hand.

This book is, in part, an attempt to give pastors and ordinary believers something better. The previous chapters have laid out the biblical case for substance dualism (Chapter 5), the veridical evidence that consciousness can function apart from the brain (Chapters 6-8), the remarkable compatibility between NDE elements and biblical theology (Chapter 18), the proper framework for discernment (Chapter 25), and the biblical precedents for visions and afterlife encounters (Chapter 30). The cumulative case is straightforward. Most NDEs appear to be genuine spiritual experiences that confirm rather than contradict biblical teaching. Some contain demonic elements that require careful evaluation. The proper Christian response is neither naive acceptance nor reflexive rejection — it is the patient, prayerful, biblically grounded discernment Paul commanded: "test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

The wholesale-dismissal position fails that command in both directions. It does not test — it merely rejects. And in rejecting everything, it loses the good along with whatever bad it imagined was there. As I argued in my earlier work Beyond the Grave, NDEs provide some of the most powerful empirical evidence available for the conscious intermediate state, the immateriality of the soul, and the reality of the God who meets us at the threshold of death.²⁹ To dismiss all of that out of hand is to throw away a remarkable gift God has given His church in our generation. The right response is not a slammed door. It is an open Bible, a listening ear, and the humility to recognize that God still speaks — sometimes from the very edge of eternity itself.