Chapter 33

What Respected Evangelical Scholars Say About NDEs

And Why Their Voices Matter

One of the most common claims we hear from Christian critics of near-death experiences is that "no serious Christian takes NDEs seriously." The implication is that anyone who treats this evidence as worth engaging must be a theological liberal, a naïve pop-Christian, or someone who has wandered off the rails of biblical orthodoxy. If you find NDE evidence compelling, the argument goes, you are out of step with the great stream of conservative, Bible-believing Christianity.

I want to take that claim seriously. If it were true, it would be a serious problem. Christians ought to listen to wise voices — to teachers, scholars, pastors, and physicians who have devoted their lives to defending the historic Christian faith. If all such voices were aligned against NDEs, that would carry real weight. We should not be too quick to break ranks with believers far better equipped than we are.

But here is the thing: the claim simply is not true. It is not even close to true. When you actually look at who has investigated NDE evidence and what they have concluded, you find a remarkable group of conservative, biblically committed, theologically careful evangelical scholars who have decided — sometimes reluctantly, sometimes after years of study — that NDEs deserve to be taken seriously, that much of the evidence is credible, and that the phenomenon is far more compatible with biblical Christianity than the critics suppose. As Steve Miller observes, the critics "don't represent a united Christian front."¹

This chapter is a guided tour of those voices. I want to walk you through the credentials, the engagement with the evidence, and the actual conclusions of nine respected evangelical thinkers — and a few others besides. My goal is not to argue that we should believe NDE claims because important people endorse them. That would be the fallacy of appeal to authority. My goal is more modest: to dismantle the false impression that anyone who takes NDEs seriously has wandered outside the bounds of conservative Christianity. As we will see, some of the most rigorous defenders of biblical orthodoxy in our generation have engaged this evidence carefully — and have come away convinced.

Michael Sabom, M.D. — A Cardiologist on His Knees

Let me begin with Michael Sabom, because his story is so striking. Sabom is a cardiologist who practiced for decades in Atlanta. He is the author of two landmark books on near-death experiences, Recollections of Death (1982) and Light and Death (1998). He is also a committed Christian — an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), one of the most theologically conservative Reformed denominations in the United States.²

Sabom did not start out as a believer in NDEs. He began his research as a skeptic, expecting to find that NDEs were imaginary or psychologically explainable. What he discovered was the opposite. His patients were describing accurate details of their own resuscitations — details they could not have known by ordinary means. As his research deepened, so did his faith. He writes that his walk with the Lord deepened over the years of NDE research, and that he ultimately joined the PCA and was ordained as an elder shortly before completing Light and Death.³

Then Sabom did something no other NDE researcher had done. He launched what he called The Atlanta Study — a careful, methodical examination of whether NDEs were drawing his patients away from biblical Christianity (as media reports suggested) or pulling them toward it. He interviewed 160 patients, 47 of whom had NDEs. He measured the depth of their faith using validated instruments. He compared NDErs with non-NDE control groups. The results were the opposite of what the popular narrative had claimed: his patients moved toward more conservative faith, not away from it. Of the four NDErs who changed their Christian beliefs after the experience, every single one moved in a more conservative direction.⁴

The Atlanta Study also showed that NDEs significantly bolstered intrinsic faith, meaning in life, capacity for love, and family involvement.⁵ These are not the fruits of demonic deception. They are the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). And they came from a study designed and executed by a conservative Reformed elder using rigorous medical methodology.

Bill Bright — Endorsing Sabom's Work

Sabom's research was endorsed by no less a figure than Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) — one of the most influential evangelical missions organizations of the twentieth century. Bright explicitly affirmed that Sabom's study examined NDEs through the lens of Scripture and offered a needed scientific look under the authority of God's Word.⁶ Bright would not have endorsed an effort he thought was undermining biblical Christianity. His blessing on Sabom's work tells you something about how a leading evangelical missionary read the evidence.

Gary Habermas, Ph.D. — The World's Leading Resurrection Scholar

If you have spent any time in evangelical apologetics, you know the name Gary Habermas. He is the distinguished research professor at Liberty University and is widely regarded as the leading scholar in the world on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. His "Minimal Facts" approach to the resurrection has reshaped Christian apologetics for two generations. Habermas has debated the most prominent atheists of our time — Antony Flew, Richard Carrier, Michael Shermer — and he has done so as a thoroughly orthodox, Bible-believing evangelical.

Habermas is not the kind of scholar who plays fast and loose with evidence. His standards are high. And yet Habermas treats NDE evidence as a serious line of support for the afterlife. Together with J. P. Moreland, he co-authored Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (1998), a book that engages NDE data alongside philosophical and biblical arguments for the soul's survival.⁷ The fact that two evangelical philosophers of this caliber considered NDE evidence worth a full chapter in a serious book on immortality should give every critic pause.

Habermas also publicly endorsed John Burke's Imagine Heaven, calling Burke's approach clearly reasoned, well-sourced, and worth recommending highly.⁸ The world's leading resurrection scholar — a man whose entire career has been about defending the historicity of biblical claims about life after death — has examined NDE evidence and decided it deserves an honored place in the Christian conversation.

J. P. Moreland, Ph.D. — A Philosopher Who Cannot Stop Recommending the Book

Then there is J. P. Moreland, distinguished professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. Moreland is one of the leading evangelical philosophers in the world today and has written a major academic defense of substance dualism, The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters.⁹ Moreland has spent his career defending the rigorous philosophical and biblical case that human beings are not just bodies — that we possess immaterial souls.

Moreland's reaction to NDE evidence is, frankly, remarkable. After reading Imagine Heaven, Moreland concluded that the book was solidly biblical and contained "exciting and convincing NDE accounts."¹⁰ He said it ranked among the top two or three books he had ever read on the subject. He went so far as to urge Christian readers to share the book with their friends. This is not the casual blurb of someone scratching out a quick endorsement. This is the considered judgment of a senior Christian philosopher who knows the literature, who has spent decades thinking about the soul, and who finds the NDE evidence genuinely persuasive.

Lee Strobel — From Atheist Journalist to NDE Investigator

Lee Strobel is one of the best-known evangelical apologists of the past thirty years. His book The Case for Christ has sold millions of copies and has been adapted into a feature film. Strobel was an atheist investigative journalist for the Chicago Tribune before his conversion, and he brings the discipline of an investigative reporter to questions of faith.

Strobel has engaged NDE research seriously in The Case for Heaven (2021) and has also publicly endorsed John Burke's work, calling Burke's approach to NDEs creative, compelling, and addressed to a topic that is both controversial and genuinely important.¹¹ When Strobel investigates a claim, he typically interviews the leading experts and weighs the strongest arguments on each side. The fact that his investigation of NDE evidence has yielded a generally positive verdict should not be brushed aside.

R. C. Sproul — Reformed Theologian Urging Open-Mindedness

R. C. Sproul (1939–2017) was one of the towering figures of late twentieth-century Reformed theology. As founder of Ligonier Ministries and longtime professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Sproul was famously rigorous, conservative, and uncompromising on matters of biblical orthodoxy. He was no friend of theological liberalism. He was no slouch on the authority of Scripture.

And yet Sproul, considering near-death experiences, urged Christians to keep an open mind. He thought it would be a mistake to be shocked when those undergoing clinical death and being revived returned with vivid recollections. So many such experiences have been reported, he argued, that they cannot simply be dismissed as imaginary or hoaxes. He hoped that further research, analysis, and evaluation would continue.¹²

Now, Sproul did not endorse every NDE account, and he certainly would not have approved of the New Age interpretations some experiencers attach to their experiences. But neither did he embrace the wholesale dismissal common among other conservative voices. He thought the phenomenon was worth honest investigation. That cautious, open-minded posture from one of the most respected Reformed theologians of his generation is itself a strong argument against the claim that all conservative Christians reject NDEs.

John Burke — A Pastor Comparing NDEs With Scripture

John Burke is the lead pastor of Gateway Church in Austin, Texas, an evangelical congregation he and his wife founded in 1998. He is also the author of Imagine Heaven, which became a New York Times bestseller and has been read by hundreds of thousands of Christians.¹³

Burke's approach is exactly what we would want from a pastor handling this material. He systematically compares NDE accounts with Scripture, asking again and again: does what these experiencers report line up with what the Bible says about heaven, about Jesus, about angels, about the life to come? His conclusion — backed by extensive engagement with the research literature — is that the convergence is remarkable. NDE accounts of heaven, of light, of love, of the presence of Christ, of life reviews, of the boundary that says "it is not your time" — these line up strikingly with biblical teaching.¹⁴ Burke's pastoral voice has helped thousands of Christians engage NDE evidence without panic and without naivety.

Walter Bradley, Ph.D. — A Scientist Examining the Data

Walter Bradley is a distinguished materials scientist and the co-author of The Mystery of Life's Origins, an early and influential challenge to naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios that helped seed the intelligent design movement. Bradley is a serious scientist with a serious commitment to Christ.

Reviewing Burke's Imagine Heaven, Bradley as a fellow scientist appreciated Burke's careful analysis of NDE interview data — including data from people of very different ages, cultures, religious backgrounds, and physical conditions (such as the blind). The convergence of common elements across such a diverse data set, Bradley noted, paints a remarkably believable picture of life after death.¹⁵ Bradley's voice adds yet another dimension: a scientist trained in handling raw data, looking at the NDE evidence, and finding it impressive.

Penny Sartori, Ph.D. — A Nurse-Researcher in the UK

Across the Atlantic, Penny Sartori conducted a five-year prospective NDE study at a hospital in Wales — one of the most rigorous nursing-based studies of NDEs ever done. Sartori interviewed cardiac arrest survivors and compared their accounts of their resuscitations with the medical record. Her work is a model of careful, hospital-based research.

Sartori found something striking about the spiritual aftereffects of NDEs in her patients. According to Sartori, all of her NDE patients reported an increased tendency to pray, to attend church, and to read the Bible.¹⁶ Read that again. All of them. Not "many." Not "most." All. If NDEs were truly demonic deceptions designed to lead people away from biblical Christianity, this is a strange outcome. The "deception" is making people pray more, read the Bible more, and worship in church more often.

A Few More Voices Worth Hearing

The list of credible Christian thinkers who have engaged NDEs positively is longer than just these nine. Maurice Rawlings, a cardiologist and committed Christian, documented hellish NDEs in Beyond Death's Door and To Hell and Back, providing important balance to the predominantly positive narratives in the popular literature.¹⁸ Steve Sjogren, an evangelical pastor, has written about his own NDE in The Day I Died. Dale Allison, a respected New Testament scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary, has engaged NDE evidence carefully in Encountering Mystery.¹⁹ Focus on the Family, the well-known conservative evangelical ministry, has even produced a video series on NDEs in support of a Christian view of heaven.²⁰ These are not fringe voices. These are mainstream conservative Christian thinkers and institutions.

The Diversity of the Witness

Look at the list together for a moment. Sabom is Reformed (PCA). Burke is non-denominational evangelical. Habermas teaches at Liberty University, a Baptist institution. Moreland is at Biola, a broadly evangelical school. Sproul was Reformed. Bright was a parachurch evangelical missionary. Rawlings was a Southern medical doctor of conservative faith. Bradley is an Intelligent Design–friendly scientist. Sartori is a UK nurse-researcher. Strobel is a former atheist journalist turned evangelical apologist.

What unites these voices is not a shared denomination or theological tradition. What unites them is something simpler and more important: an honest engagement with the evidence. They have actually read the studies. They have actually examined the cases. They have actually thought carefully about how the data fits with Scripture. And they have come to the same conclusion: NDEs deserve to be taken seriously, and much of the evidence is compatible with — even confirmatory of — biblical Christianity.

Compare that to the typical critic. As Miller has pointed out, many of the most strident Christian critics of NDEs have engaged primarily with popular trade books rather than with the medical research literature. They have read Eben Alexander but not Sabom. They have skimmed Embraced by the Light but not Sartori's five-year hospital study. They have heard sensational television interviews but not waded through Habermas and Moreland's careful philosophical argument. The asymmetry between the careful engagement of NDE proponents and the often surface-level engagement of critics is striking.

"Whoever Is Not Against Us Is for Us"

Steve Miller, in his careful treatment of Christian critics, applies a striking biblical principle to this debate. In Mark 9:38–40, the disciples come to Jesus complaining that someone outside their immediate circle was casting out demons in Jesus' name. Their instinct was to shut him down. Jesus' response is illuminating: do not stop him, because no one who does a mighty work in Jesus' name will soon afterward speak evil of him. And then this striking statement: "whoever is not against us is for us."²¹

Miller suggests that this principle should govern how Christians treat one another in the NDE debate.²² Sabom, Habermas, Moreland, Burke, Bright, Strobel, Rawlings, Sproul, Bradley, Sartori — these are not enemies of the gospel. They are not promoting heresy. They are not abandoning the authority of Scripture. They are fellow servants of the same risen Lord, examining a particular set of phenomena and concluding that the evidence is worth taking seriously. We may disagree with one another about specific NDE accounts. We may differ on emphasis, on how much weight to give particular cases, on what conclusions to draw. But we ought to listen to one another. We ought to assume good faith. And we ought to remember that those whose work bears the fruit of the Spirit and whose lives commend the gospel are not properly classified as opponents.

Conclusion: A Better Question

So is it true that "no serious Christian takes NDEs seriously"? The honest answer is that the claim is demonstrably false. Some of the most respected, biblically committed, theologically rigorous Christian scholars of the past half-century have investigated NDE evidence and concluded that it is worth our careful attention. They are not theological liberals. They are not New Age sympathizers. They are conservative evangelicals — Reformed theologians, leading apologists, world-class philosophers, distinguished scientists, conservative pastors, and committed missionaries — who have examined the evidence and come away impressed.

This does not settle the question for us. We still need to do our own thinking. We still need to apply biblical discernment to specific NDE accounts (see Chapters 25, 26, 29). We still need to recognize that not every element of every NDE is from God (Chapter 25). But the next time someone tells us that "no serious Christian believes this stuff," we can answer plainly. Sabom believes it. Habermas believes it. Moreland believes it. Sproul believed it was worth investigating. Bright endorsed it. Burke is built his ministry around it. Strobel investigated and was persuaded. Bradley examined the data and was impressed. Sartori found that it deepens her patients' walk with God. The witnesses are many. The credentials are real. The voices deserve a hearing. And when the verdict of so many careful observers points in one direction, the wise Christian will at least pause, listen, and consider whether the consensus that we have been told exists — the consensus that "all serious Christians reject NDEs" — is itself the real myth that needs to be retired.