Chapter 4
What Near-Death Experiences Are (and What They Are Not) — A Primer

David had not opened the paperback his wife set on his desk.

It had been sitting there for three days now, a glossy cover with a sunset-colored tunnel on the front, the kind of book that made him nervous just looking at it. Julia had picked it up at a Christian bookstore earlier that week. "I thought maybe Mark would find it helpful," she said, setting it down gently. "After Teresa."

Mark was David's closest friend from seminary. Three months ago, Mark's wife Teresa had died of ovarian cancer at forty-seven. The two men had stood together at the graveside. David had preached the funeral. And now, on Tuesday afternoons, they met for coffee at a diner halfway between their towns, and David mostly listened while Mark tried to put words to what he could barely feel.

But what Mark kept asking was: Is she okay?

David had answered the way he had been trained. He had quoted Philippians 1. He had said the things pastors say. And every week Mark would nod and look away and say, "I know, David. I know. But I mean — is she really there? Does she know me? Is she safe?"

David did not know what else to say.

Now, on his desk, was this paperback. He picked it up. He turned it over. The back cover promised "stunning accounts of what lies beyond." He made a face. He had heard of this kind of book. He had also heard of the scandals — the boy who had claimed to see heaven and then admitted, years later, that he had made the whole thing up. David had preached a sermon warning his congregation about "heaven tourism," about building their theology on someone's dramatic story rather than on Scripture.

He set the paperback back down. Uncomfortable. Unsure.

And then he thought of Mark. Sitting at that diner. Drinking the same coffee that had gone cold an hour before. Asking whether Teresa was safe.

David reached for his phone to text his wife that he was going to toss the book. Then he paused.

Was it possible that he had lumped all of this together too quickly? That there was a difference between a disgraced paperback and decades of medical research? He knew, vaguely, that cardiologists had written about these experiences. He knew that Christians had written about them too — serious ones, people he respected. He had just never looked.

He picked the book back up.

He did not know yet what he would find. He did not know whether he would end up recommending it to Mark or quietly returning it to Julia with a shake of his head. What he knew was this: his friend, at that diner, was going to ask him again next Tuesday. And David was tired of the answer he had been giving.

So that evening, when the house was quiet, he sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and opened the paperback. Where do I start? he thought. What is this, really? And how do I know what to trust?

This chapter is written for David. And for Mark. And for everyone in between.

What Is a Near-Death Experience?

Let me begin simply. A near-death experience — NDE, for short — is the name we give to what some people report after surviving a close encounter with death.

The person might have had a cardiac arrest. Or a car accident. Or a hemorrhage during childbirth. Or complications on the operating table. Their heart may have stopped. Their breathing may have ceased. On the hospital monitors, they may have looked, to the medical team, exactly like someone who had died.

Then they were resuscitated.

And later — sometimes hours later, sometimes days — they told a story no one quite expected.

The Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, who has spent decades studying this phenomenon, offers a careful definition. A near-death experience, he writes, is the reported recollection of impressions gathered during an unusual state of consciousness — a state that may include, for example, a sense of moving through a tunnel, seeing a light, witnessing a panoramic review of one's life, or meeting deceased persons. This state, he notes, can occur during cardiac arrest, during serious illness, or even without an obvious medical cause.¹

The American psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, who has probably studied more NDEs than anyone alive, offers a similar definition: NDEs are profound psychological events with transcendental and mystical elements, typically occurring to people close to death.²

When researchers gather large numbers of these accounts, certain themes show up again and again. Not every feature appears in every NDE. But the following cluster of features, in some combination, is what the research usually has in view.³

An out-of-body experience

The person feels as if they have left their physical body. They may look down and see themselves from above — on the operating table, on the pavement, in the hospital bed. They often describe this perception as more vivid, not less, than ordinary sight.

Intense peace, often described as beyond words

Most NDErs say this peace was unlike anything they had ever known — deeper, richer, more real than the peace of ordinary life.

Movement through a dark space or tunnel

About a third of experiencers report a tunnel; others describe a dark void, a passageway, or simply a sense of movement.

Encountering a brilliant light

Not a harsh light. A warm one. Often described as alive, loving, personal.

Meeting a being of light

Christian experiencers very often identify this being as Jesus. Others describe a presence they call "God" or simply "Love." We will look at this in detail in Chapter 9.

Meeting deceased loved ones

A parent, a spouse, a grandparent, a sibling, sometimes a friend — often waiting, often welcoming. We look at this in Chapter 7.

A review of one's life

Not a quick summary. A full and vivid review, often experienced from the perspective of the people the experiencer has affected — both for good and for ill.

A border or limit

A fence, a river, a line in a field — something the person feels they cannot cross without staying on the other side.

A return to the body

Sometimes a choice. Sometimes a command. Sometimes a shock of reentry. Almost always, a sense that the experience is real, and that ordinary waking life, by comparison, is thinner.

Dr. Jeffrey Long, an oncologist who founded the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), has collected thousands of NDE accounts through a structured online survey. In his analysis of 1,300 of these accounts, he found that roughly three-quarters of experiencers reported an out-of-body experience, three-quarters reported heightened senses and intense peace, nearly two-thirds described a brilliant light, over half described a heavenly realm, and nearly sixty percent were aware of a decision to return to their bodies.⁴

Not every NDE contains every feature. Some are short and spare — a few seconds of peace, a sense of presence, then waking in the ambulance. Others unfold like a full symphony. But the cluster of themes is remarkably stable, across many decades of research, across many cultures, across the religious and the unreligious alike.

To give you a feel for how these pieces can come together in a single account, consider the broad shape of what happened to a woman in her forties during cardiac arrest on an operating table — a composite of the kind of case that appears again and again in the literature. She remembers the sudden sense of rising above her body and looking down. She sees the medical team working on her. She is not afraid; she is curious. She feels a peace she cannot describe. She moves — without her body, without effort — toward a light that is somehow alive and personal. A figure meets her there. She knows, without being told, that she is loved. She sees a review of her life, vivid and honest, showing her the moments she had hurt others and the moments she had helped. She meets a grandmother who has been dead for twenty years. She comes to a point where she understands that she could go forward or go back. She is told it is not her time. She returns — suddenly, painfully — into a body that feels heavy and wrong. She wakes up crying. She tells no one for months.

That composite is not any one real person's story. But every element of it is drawn, unchanged, from the research literature. Versions of it — with different details and different emphases — have been recorded thousands of times.

Now, an important word of caution before we go further: the name itself — "near-death experience" — is not a claim about what lies beyond death. It is a careful, restrained label. These are near-death experiences. The experiencer, by definition, did not finally die. We will return to this point.

How Common Are These Experiences?

Here I want to correct what may be a very common assumption: that NDEs are rare, fringe events, the province of a few eccentric paperbacks. They are not.

Studies of cardiac arrest survivors consistently find that between ten and twenty percent of those who are resuscitated report some form of NDE.⁵ That is one in every five or ten people brought back from cardiac arrest — not a trickle, but a steady stream.

In the general population, a 1982 Gallup poll estimated that around eight million Americans had had some form of near-death experience.⁶ More recent surveys put the rate at roughly four to five percent of the general population.⁷ That is one in every twenty or twenty-five people.

If you are reading this in a church on a Sunday morning, it is statistically likely that several people in the pews around you have had something they would describe as an NDE — even if they have never told anyone. Research consistently finds that experiencers often hesitate to speak. They fear being mocked. They fear being pathologized. They fear being dismissed as unstable. Dr. van Lommel noted that most of his patients did not mention their experience until asked directly.⁸

So these are not exotic, once-in-a-generation events. They are happening in hospitals around the world. They are happening to the people sitting next to us. The question is not whether NDEs occur. The question is what to make of them.

A Brief History of NDE Research

It may help to walk briefly through how NDEs became a field of study in the first place.

For most of human history, scattered accounts of dying people describing visions or "trips to the other side" were treated as pious legend, folk tale, or private mystery. Stories of this kind appear in Plato's Republic, in medieval Christian literature, and in the memoirs of ordinary people across many centuries.⁹ They were not studied. They were told.

That changed in 1975.

A young American philosopher and physician named Raymond Moody published a slim paperback called Life After Life. Moody had heard the story of Dr. George Ritchie — a psychiatrist who, as a young soldier in 1943, had been pronounced dead of pneumonia and later revived, and who told of a profound experience during those minutes of apparent death.¹⁰ When Moody began asking his own students and colleagues whether anyone had heard similar stories, he was astonished to find that about one in every thirty of his students reported something comparable. He began collecting accounts. His book coined the phrase "near-death experience" and sold millions of copies.¹¹

Life After Life was not, by scholarly standards, a rigorous study. Moody was the first to admit it. But it did something important: it named a phenomenon. And it invited serious researchers to come investigate.

Many did.

Michael Sabom, cardiologist

A cardiologist in Atlanta, Sabom had heard about Moody's book and thought it was nonsense. A Baptist, a scientist, and a man who had personally resuscitated many heart attack patients, he had never heard any of his patients describe anything like what Moody reported. Then a colleague challenged him to actually ask. He did. And to his astonishment, patient after patient, when asked gently and with respect, began telling him the same kinds of stories. Sabom eventually published his findings in two major books, Recollections of Death (1982) and Light and Death (1998).¹² The second of these, which studied the spiritual aftereffects of NDEs among Christians and others, is one of the primary sources for this present book.¹³

Kenneth Ring, psychologist

A psychologist at the University of Connecticut, Ring became another early leader. He developed structured interview methods, studied long-term aftereffects, and helped move the field from anecdote toward measurable data.¹⁴

Bruce Greyson, psychiatrist

A psychiatrist then at the University of Michigan and later at the University of Virginia, Greyson developed what is now the standard research instrument in the field: the Greyson NDE Scale. The Scale is a sixteen-question survey that scores experiences on several dimensions — cognitive, affective, paranormal, transcendental. Scores range from zero to thirty-two. A score of seven or higher qualifies, for research purposes, as a genuine NDE.¹⁵ The Greyson Scale has allowed researchers to compare experiences across hundreds of studies and decades of work.

Pim van Lommel, cardiologist

A Dutch cardiologist, van Lommel conducted the first major prospective study of NDEs — meaning that he and his team set out to interview every cardiac arrest survivor at a group of Dutch hospitals, whether or not the patient volunteered an NDE account. In 2001, his team published their findings in The Lancet, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals. They reported that 18 percent of their 344 cardiac arrest survivors had had some degree of NDE.¹⁶ This study moved NDE research firmly out of the tabloid press and into peer-reviewed medicine.

Sam Parnia, critical care physician

A critical care physician who trained in the United Kingdom and now works at NYU Langone in New York, Parnia has led two major multi-hospital studies known as AWARE and AWARE II ("AWAreness during REsuscitation"). These studies placed hidden visual targets in hospital resuscitation rooms to test whether NDErs who report leaving their bodies could actually see things they should not have been able to see from their physical position.¹⁷ Parnia's work is ongoing, careful, and medically grounded.

Jeffrey Long, oncologist

An American radiation oncologist, Long founded the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) in 1998. NDERF maintains the world's largest public database of first-person NDE accounts, gathered through a structured survey that takes each participant roughly thirty minutes to complete.¹⁸ Long's work has allowed cross-cultural comparison on an unprecedented scale.

This is not an exhaustive list. Melvin Morse (pediatrician), Penny Sartori (nurse and dissertation researcher), Christopher Kerr (hospice physician), and many others have contributed careful clinical and academic work. What I hope you see from this brief sketch is this: the serious study of NDEs is not a fringe enterprise. It is being conducted, in many cases, by practicing cardiologists, emergency physicians, psychiatrists, and oncologists — people who spend their professional lives at the bedside of the dying, people who have watched many patients die, people whose reputations depend on careful, sober, medical reasoning. This is not the Art Bell late-night radio show. This is peer-reviewed research, conducted in major hospitals, published in major journals.

It is worth our attention.

What the Research Actually Shows

So what, fifty years in, do we know?

Let me name the findings I consider most important, with care. I am not going to overclaim. I am going to tell you what the best research has found, and let you weigh it yourself.

NDE features are strikingly consistent across many cultures

The basic pattern — separation from the body, movement, light, peace, sometimes deceased loved ones — appears in accounts from Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, secular, and atheist backgrounds. The specific interpretation an experiencer gives to the encounter is, understandably, shaped by their culture. An American Christian may describe the being of light as Jesus. A Hindu may describe a similar figure as Krishna or Yama. But the core structure of the experience — the sense of profound presence, overwhelming love, heightened reality — is remarkably stable across contexts.¹⁹ This is, at minimum, a datum worth noting.

NDEs often occur when brain activity is severely compromised

This is perhaps the most provocative finding. According to the standard materialist account — that the mind is simply what the brain does — consciousness should cease when the brain stops functioning. In a cardiac arrest, brain activity typically becomes undetectable on an electroencephalogram (EEG) within about ten to twenty seconds.²⁰ Yet during exactly these periods, some patients report lucid, structured, detailed experiences, which they remember with startling clarity after resuscitation. This does not by itself prove anything. But it is a finding that any serious theory of consciousness must reckon with.

Some NDEs include veridical elements

"Veridical" is a philosopher's word meaning "confirmed as true" or "corresponding to reality." A veridical NDE is one in which the experiencer, during the period when they were apparently unconscious, perceives something — a conversation, an event, a detail — that can later be verified by outside observers as having actually occurred. We will return to this point shortly. It is a central piece of the evidence.²¹

NDEs produce lasting change in experiencers

This is one of the most well-documented findings in the field. Studies from Ring, Greyson, Sabom, van Lommel, and many others consistently show that NDE experiencers, in the years after their experience, report reduced fear of death, increased spirituality, reordered priorities, greater compassion for others, and a heightened sense of life's meaning.²² In Sabom's Atlanta Study, NDE experiencers showed significantly higher increases in intrinsic religious faith than a carefully matched control group of cardiac surgery patients who had had no NDE — suggesting that the lasting changes are caused by the NDE itself, not merely by the brush with death.²³

Standard physiological explanations struggle to account for NDEs

I want to be careful here. It is not impossible that NDEs have a purely physiological explanation — reduced oxygen, neurotransmitter surges, REM intrusion, temporal lobe activity. Various researchers have proposed such explanations.²⁴ But each of the leading physiological theories faces a significant problem: they do not, in fact, predict the structured, lucid, transformative experience that NDErs report. People in oxygen-deprived states typically become confused, not clear. People with temporal lobe seizures report disorganized experiences, not coherent journeys. The physiological candidates may well contribute something to the picture. But as comprehensive explanations, they keep falling short.

This is where Bruce Greyson's own balance is instructive. He has said, fairly, that the idea that NDEs are due to some undiscovered physiological process is plausible and consistent with a purely physical view of reality; and that the idea that NDEs are a kind of spiritual gift is also plausible, and consistent with the view that there is a nonphysical aspect of human nature. Neither idea, he notes, is strictly a scientific premise, because neither can be conclusively disproven. They are, he says, ultimately matters of worldview and belief.²⁵ That is honest. It is also, I think, the right posture for a careful Christian reader.

The Veridical NDE: A Brief Introduction

Let me say just a little more about veridical NDEs, because they deserve their own careful treatment later in this book (we will look at them more fully in Chapter 6). Here I want only to introduce the concept.

A veridical NDE is one in which the experiencer reports perceiving something during their apparent unconsciousness that they could not have perceived in any ordinary way — and the perception is later confirmed as accurate by independent observers.

One of the most closely documented veridical NDEs in the medical literature is the case of Pam Reynolds. In August 1991, Pam underwent a highly unusual and dangerous brain surgery to repair a basilar artery aneurysm — a bulging weakness in a major artery at the base of her brain that, had it burst, would have killed her instantly. The procedure, called "hypothermic cardiac arrest" or "standstill," required the surgical team to cool her body to around sixty degrees Fahrenheit, stop her heart, flatten her brain waves, and drain the blood from her head. For roughly an hour, by every clinical measure that medicine uses to define life, Pam Reynolds was dead. Her neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Spetzler, later put it plainly in a televised interview: clinically, during that hour, the patient was by every definition dead. There was no brain activity, no blood flow to the brain.²⁶

And yet.

When Pam came back — when the blood was warmed and reinfused and her heart restarted — she reported a detailed near-death experience. She described the bone saw being used to open her skull, including features of the instrument (what looked like interchangeable blades in a case resembling a socket wrench set) that she had never seen before and that were later verified as accurate. She reported hearing a specific conversation between the cardiac surgeon and the neurosurgery team about the small size of her femoral blood vessels — a conversation that, according to the operative record, had indeed taken place, at roughly the time she described, and which she could not have heard through the ear speakers that had been sealed into her ear canals for brain-stem reflex testing.²⁷

Her cardiologist, Dr. Michael Sabom, investigated her case in painstaking detail and published the findings in his 1998 book Light and Death, including photographs of the bone saw and transcripts of the operative reports.²⁸ Pam Reynolds scored 27 on Greyson's NDE Scale — one of the deepest NDEs in Sabom's entire Atlanta Study, where the average score was about 13.²⁹

There is more to Pam's account than the verifiable medical details, and I mention it here only briefly because its substance belongs to later chapters. During the time that her brain was clinically silent, Pam reported being drawn toward a light and meeting a number of her own deceased family members, including a grandmother she recognized immediately and an uncle who, she said, helped shepherd her back. She reported being "nourished" in some way she had no earthly vocabulary for. When her heart was restarted, she experienced the return to her body as "diving into a pool of ice water." She described the whole experience as one of the most real things that had ever happened to her. Sabom's transcripts of his interviews with her are striking in their specificity and in the quiet, almost matter-of-fact way she described what she had seen.

I want to be careful here. No single case proves everything. Skeptics have challenged aspects of the timing and the physiological record. Pam Reynolds's case, like every veridical case, has been argued over in the scholarly literature. But the broader point stands: there are many such cases. We will look at others in Chapter 6. For now, take this away: the claim "NDErs sometimes perceive things they could not possibly have perceived" is not a claim made only in breathless paperbacks. It is a claim made, with careful documentation, in the medical literature.

How the Research Is Actually Done

Because readers sometimes ask how researchers study something as elusive as a near-death experience, let me briefly describe the methods.

Retrospective self-reports are the most common type of study. A researcher publishes a call for accounts, or interviews patients known to have had an NDE, and gathers their written or spoken descriptions. This approach is easy and gathers large samples, but it is vulnerable to memory distortion, to self-selection, and to storytelling. Critics rightly press on these weaknesses.

Prospective studies address some of those problems. In a prospective study, researchers identify a population at high risk for NDE — typically cardiac arrest survivors — and interview every survivor, whether they volunteer an account or not, within a defined time after resuscitation. This removes the self-selection problem. Van Lommel's 2001 Lancet study is the classic example. Parnia's AWARE studies have extended this approach across multiple hospitals and multiple countries.³⁰

Structured interviews using tools like the Greyson NDE Scale allow different researchers to compare results directly. Rather than relying on any one researcher's judgment of whether an account "counts" as an NDE, the Scale provides a standardized, scored, replicable instrument.³¹

Hidden-target studies are the most methodologically ambitious approach. The idea is simple: if NDErs are really leaving their bodies and perceiving the surroundings from above, then placing a visual target that can only be seen from an out-of-body vantage point should allow confirmation. Researchers have placed symbols, shapes, and numbers on top of operating room lights, cabinets, and shelves — visible only from above, invisible from the floor. To date, these studies have produced no clear "hits." But they have also produced very few cases in which an NDEr was resuscitated in a room with a target — the opportunity sample is small. The jury on hidden-target studies is still out.³²

Aftereffect studies — of the kind Sabom and Ring pioneered — attempt to document the long-term changes in an experiencer's beliefs, relationships, and values. These are often the most convincing studies for a careful reader, because the aftereffects are not just claimed; they are measured, controlled, compared against non-NDE controls, and followed over years.³³

The methodological challenges in this research are real. Memory is fallible. People interpret their experiences through their own frameworks. Hospitals are chaotic places, and precise timing of events during a cardiac arrest is hard to establish. The field has its critics — some fair, some less so — and every responsible researcher acknowledges the limits.

It is worth pausing here on the critics, because readers sometimes hear only one side. Serious skeptical work has been done by researchers like Susan Blackmore, Dean Mobbs, and Caroline Watt, who have argued that NDEs can be accounted for by known physiological processes — oxygen deprivation, REM intrusion, release of endorphins, or disruptions in the temporoparietal junction of the brain. Their papers are not cranky; they are published in respected journals and deserve engagement. But researchers like Greyson, van Lommel, and Parnia have responded carefully, point by point, showing that the proposed physiological candidates either do not fit the temporal pattern of NDEs (they would predict gradual symptoms, not sudden onset during flatline), or do not produce the cognitive clarity and structured content that NDErs report, or cannot account for verified perception of events. The scientific debate is active, and it is genuinely back-and-forth. What it is not, on either side, is a settled story in which all the evidence has been reduced to ordinary brain chemistry. Anyone who tells you otherwise — in either direction — is overclaiming.

But the rigor that is there is genuine. When a cardiologist reviews operative records against a patient's account, that is evidence. When a psychiatrist scores hundreds of experiences against a standardized scale, that is evidence. When a peer-reviewed article appears in The Lancet or Resuscitation or the Journal of Near-Death Studies, that is evidence.

We should receive it as such — with discernment, and with gratitude.

What NDEs Are Not

Now I want to pivot and be equally careful about what NDEs are not. This is where many well-meaning pastors get nervous, and where many enthusiastic writers, in my view, have overreached.

NDEs are not infallible revelation

Scripture is the final authority for Christian faith and practice. No NDE — however vivid, however transformative, however Christ-saturated — carries the authority of the Bible. The Bible was given through prophets and apostles, tested by the church, confirmed by the Spirit across centuries. An NDE is an individual experience, filtered through an individual mind, interpreted by an individual vocabulary. When an NDE and Scripture appear to conflict, Scripture wins. Every time. Without exception.

NDEs are not uniformly Christian in their content

Some NDEs include elements that any careful Christian would flag as problematic — universalist pronouncements, denials of the unique role of Christ, invitations to pursue occult practice, descriptions of reincarnation. These elements are in the minority, but they exist, and they must be named. A thoughtful approach does not pretend otherwise. We will develop a framework for discernment more fully in Chapter 25.

NDEs are not evidence that everyone goes to heaven

Some popular writers have used the overwhelmingly peaceful quality of most reported NDEs to argue for a kind of universal salvation. That is not a warranted conclusion from the data. For one thing, distressing and frightening NDEs do exist, and they are more common than many first-generation researchers admitted (we will look at these in Chapter 20). For another, an NDE is not the final state. Which brings us to the most important point of all.

NDEs are not a substitute for the gospel

Let me add one more. An NDE, even a profoundly Christian one, is not a substitute for personal faith in Jesus Christ. It is not salvation. A person may have a genuine encounter with the risen Lord at the edge of death and still be called, after that encounter, to respond in repentance and faith. The experience may have been the means by which God drew them — but the drawing still requires a response. Howard Storm, whose story we will look at in Chapter 13, is one well-known example: an atheist professor who had a terrifying NDE, cried out to Christ for rescue, and came back a believer. His encounter was real; but the encounter itself was not the end of the story. Faith in Christ was.

This matters pastorally for at least two reasons. First, no Christian reader should conclude that a loved one's reported NDE automatically means they were saved. That is not how salvation works in Scripture, and it is not how responsible research presents NDEs. Second, no Christian should treat their own NDE as a kind of unshakable spiritual credential. The New Testament warns against boasting in visions (2 Corinthians 12:1–7). What matters is not the vision. What matters is Christ.

NDEs are not the final state — they are not what the finally dead experience

This is so important that I want to underline it. An NDE is, by definition, a near-death experience. The experiencer did not finally die. They came back. They lived to tell the story. Whatever their soul glimpsed during those minutes, it was glimpsed on this side of the true threshold. The person who has been irreversibly dead for weeks or years or centuries is in a different situation than the person who was resuscitated after twelve minutes.

This matters because it keeps our theology modest. An NDE gives us evidence that consciousness can persist when the brain is offline. It gives us evidence that something personal, loving, and often identifiably Christ-like meets people at the threshold. It gives us evidence that the universe, at that edge, is not cold and mechanical but warm and personal. All of that is enormous. But none of it is a travelogue of heaven. None of it tells us every detail about what awaits the saved or the unsaved for eternity. Scripture remains our primary map. NDE research is a specific, limited, but genuine corroboration of key pieces of what Scripture already teaches.

Let me say that again, because it is the core of my whole approach in this book:

NDEs do not tell us new things about the afterlife. They do not replace Scripture. They are not a new revelation. What they do — what the best of them do — is provide independent, cross-cultural, medically documented corroboration of what Scripture already teaches about the conscious survival of the soul, the love of God, the reality of Christ, and the presence of the departed with the Lord.

Bible first. Always.

How a Christian Should Approach the NDE Literature

If you are a grieving Christian, or a pastor trying to figure out how to help one, you need a sensible framework for engaging this research. Let me offer five principles that I have found helpful.

First: Read with Scripture open

The Bible is the rule. When you encounter an NDE account, measure its content against Scripture. If the account describes an encounter with Christ that fits what Scripture teaches about Christ, receive it. If the account claims revelations that contradict Scripture, set those elements aside. This is not disrespectful to the experiencer. It is what Scripture itself calls us to do.

John does not tell us to stop listening. He tells us to test. That is the Christian posture toward all spiritual experience, not just NDEs.

Second: Distinguish the researcher from the experiencer

Not every NDE researcher is a Christian. That is fine; neither was every doctor who treated the apostle Paul. What matters is the quality of the research. A Dutch cardiologist who carefully documents his cases, publishes in peer-reviewed journals, and offers nothing more than what the data support is a valuable resource for Christian reflection, even if his own worldview differs from ours.³⁴ We can learn from his research without adopting his philosophy.

In the same way, not every individual experiencer is a theologically grounded Christian. Some are unbelievers. Some are new to faith. Some have been changed profoundly but without finding their way into a church. Honor what they report. Weigh it. Do not require every experiencer to have the theological vocabulary of a seminary graduate.

Third: Look for patterns across many cases, not single sensational accounts

A book built on one man's dramatic story is not evidence. A database of thousands of structured accounts, tested against standardized scales, is evidence. When you hear a claim about NDEs, ask: Is this what the many say, or what the one says? The patterns that hold across thousands of cases — peace, love, a being of light, departed loved ones, reduced fear of death — carry significant weight. The details unique to one account carry much less.

Fourth: Prefer peer-reviewed medical research over popular "heaven tourism" books

I do not mean that every popular book is untrustworthy; some are careful. I do mean that if you are trying to build your understanding, the book by the cardiologist publishing in The Lancet is more reliable than the paperback pitched at airport bookstores. Take your foundation from the researchers. Let the popular books, if you read them, be tested against that foundation.

Fifth: Receive evidence with gratitude when it aligns with biblical truth; test carefully when it seems to deviate

When NDE research corroborates what Scripture already teaches — that the soul survives, that God meets the dying, that love and peace greet the believer — rejoice. When an individual account contains content that strains with Scripture, do not panic. Weigh it. Set aside what is problematic. Receive the core, if there is a core worth receiving. Be neither breathlessly credulous nor reflexively dismissive. Be a Christian: careful, humble, Scripture-soaked, open to what is true wherever it is found.

A Word on "Heaven Tourism"

I owe the reader a direct word about the "heaven tourism" controversy, because many pastors and thoughtful Christians have been shaped by it, and rightly so.

In the decade roughly from 2004 to 2015, American Christian publishing saw a wave of bestselling books describing personal visits to heaven. Some were written by children, some by adults. Some were, in my estimation, sincere and careful. Others were sensationalized, theologically loose, and — in at least one well-known case — outright fabricated.

The most notorious case is that of Alex Malarkey, whose book The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, co-authored with his father, sold over a million copies before Alex, as a teenager, publicly stated that he had made the story up and asked the publisher to stop selling it. The publisher, to its credit, did so.³⁵ Pastors who had warned their congregations against uncritical acceptance of heaven-tourism books felt vindicated — and reasonably so.

Major evangelical voices, including John MacArthur and Hank Hanegraaff, have raised strong, often sweeping concerns about the whole category.³⁶ Their concerns usually take several forms: first, that such books build doctrine on personal experience rather than Scripture; second, that they contain theological content inconsistent with biblical teaching; third, that they may be fabricated or embellished; and fourth, that they create a market pressure for ever-more-dramatic experiences.

Every one of these concerns is legitimate. I share them.

But a careful reader will notice that these concerns apply most sharply to a particular genre — popular Christian paperbacks pitched by trade publishers for mass-market sales. They do not, as critics sometimes imply, disqualify the whole category of NDE research. The peer-reviewed work of Sabom, van Lommel, Parnia, Long, Greyson, and many others is not "heaven tourism." It is medicine. It is published in hospitals and medical journals. It has been through blind review by other physicians and psychiatrists. It is a different kind of evidence entirely, gathered with different methods, under different scrutiny.

What I am asking you to do, in this book, is to distinguish. Not to lump. The paperback with the disgraced author and the peer-reviewed article in The Lancet are not the same thing. A pastor who rightly warns his people about the one need not reject the other.

The scholar J. Steve Miller, a Christian researcher whose work I draw on heavily in this book, notes carefully that MacArthur's and Hanegraaff's concerns are warranted with respect to specific books but that sweeping, all-encompassing language risks delegitimizing a body of careful research that does not share the problems of those specific books.³⁷ I think that is right. I also think that the best reason to trust NDE research is that it has been subjected to critique — by skeptics inside and outside the church, by philosophers, by cardiologists with reputations to protect — and has held up. Not by proving everything. But by standing the test.

Let me add a note for the worried pastor, because I have been one: you are not being asked, in this book, to endorse any particular experiencer's account as infallible. You are being asked to recognize that a substantial body of peer-reviewed research corroborates central biblical claims about the continuing life of the soul. You remain the judge of what is trustworthy. The book simply hands you better tools.

A Pastoral Closing

Let me close this chapter where it began, with the pastor and his paperback.

The rest of this book will draw on NDE research to offer specific, warranted hope to grieving Christians. We will look at the reunion with deceased loved ones that experiencers consistently describe (Chapter 7). We will look at the encounters with Jesus that recur in thousands of accounts (Chapter 9). We will look at the peaceful deaths of believers, the deathbed visions of the dying, the terminal lucidity sometimes granted before the end, and the specific hope all of this offers to those who are asking whether their loved one is okay (Chapters 10, 11, 8, and 6).

In every chapter, I will hold to what I have laid out here. Scripture is the rule. Patterns matter more than single cases. Warranted hope is not credulity. Discernment is not dismissal.

Trust yourself, reader. You can learn to weigh this. The evidence is more accessible than you may have been told. It is less sensational than the paperbacks suggest. It is more substantial than the critics allow. And — this is the pastoral point — it speaks, in its core, with one voice alongside Scripture, on the truths that matter most: the soul survives, God meets us, love endures, reunion is real.

David set his paperback aside that evening and opened his laptop. He typed "van Lommel Lancet 2001" into the search bar. He began to read. When he next met Mark at the diner, he still did not have every answer. But he had something new. He had a framework. He had a set of sources he could trust. And he had a new willingness to believe, with Scripture as his anchor, that the hope he was offering Mark was not a wish. It was a well-grounded claim.

That is what I hope to offer you.

For Your Reflection

For Pastors and Caregivers

Let me shift, now, to those of you reading this in your role as pastor, chaplain, grief counselor, or lay friend to the bereaved.

Key pastoral observations

In my own experience and in conversations with pastors across many traditions, I have found that most pastors sit in one of two ditches when it comes to NDEs. The first ditch is enthusiastic credulity: accepting every dramatic story at face value, building sermons around them, letting bestselling paperbacks shape their theology of the afterlife. The second ditch is reflexive dismissal: treating the entire topic as the province of kooks and cranks, warning their people off it, refusing to engage.

I want to train you into a third way, which is neither ditch. Call it discerning engagement. You take Scripture seriously. You take peer-reviewed research seriously. You keep the former above the latter. You learn to distinguish popular paperbacks from medical journals. You receive what aligns with Scripture as independent corroboration of biblical hope. You set aside or challenge what does not. You are pastoral, not paranoid. You are careful, not credulous.

What to say

Here are a few sentences that may help when a parishioner brings an NDE story to you — whether their own or someone else's:

"Thank you for trusting me with this. I want to hear what happened."

"I am actually studying this carefully. Not everything in popular NDE books is trustworthy, but the medical research on this is more serious than I used to think. I am not going to dismiss what you are telling me."

"Can we look at your experience alongside Scripture together? Not to judge it, but to understand what was true in it and how to integrate it with your faith."

"The central pieces of what you are describing — the peace, the presence of Jesus, the sense of being deeply loved — these are things Scripture itself leads us to expect at the edge of death. I can help you think about what is consistent, and what may need more careful reflection."

"You are not crazy, and you are not alone. What you are describing fits patterns documented in thousands of cases."

What NOT to say

Here are some sentences, all of them well-meant, that tend to land hard on the wrong note:

"That's all New Age nonsense." It is not. Much of it is peer-reviewed medicine. More importantly, even if you have doubts about a particular account, calling a person's most meaningful experience "nonsense" shuts them down and sends them elsewhere — often to someone less discerning than you.

"Well, everyone who has an NDE goes to heaven — so your loved one is definitely safe." No. That is not what the research shows, and it is not what Scripture teaches. Be careful with this. Offer hope that is honest.

"It was probably just the medication, or oxygen deprivation, or a dream." Possibly. But stated this way, it dismisses the person. Far better: "There are several possible explanations, and I'd like to think carefully with you about which best fits what you experienced."

"You shouldn't talk about this. The church isn't ready." Pastors have said this to experiencers for decades. The result is hidden grief, spiritual loneliness, and sometimes a permanent drift away from the church. Be the pastor who received the story, even if you had to sit with it awkwardly.

"I don't believe in that stuff." Even if you have reservations, this shuts the conversation before it begins. Let them tell you what happened. Then think together about what to make of it.

Questions to ask

When a bereaved person or an experiencer brings up NDEs, try some of these:

"Where did you first hear about NDEs? What drew you to them?"

"When you think about your loved one right now, what are you hoping might be true?"

"Is there something in what you've read that gave you comfort? Or something that troubled you?"

"Would it help if we looked at Scripture together on the intermediate state — on what the Bible itself teaches about what happens right after death?"

"If you were to write down the specific things you wish you knew about where your loved one is, what would be on that list?"

Watch-outs and cautions

A few landmines worth naming.

First, do not let a parishioner's NDE become the framework through which they read their whole Bible. The direction must run the other way. Scripture frames the NDE, not the NDE the Scripture. When someone says, "I now know God is love because of my NDE," gently respond, "Yes — and God told us He was love long before your NDE, and that is the foundation your experience rests on, not the other way around."

Second, be alert to the parishioner who is drifting into obsessive consumption of NDE content. Some bereaved people, particularly early in grief, binge on NDE testimonies the way others binge on grief podcasts or old photos. This is not necessarily wrong. But it can become a way of avoiding Scripture, prayer, and Christian community. Notice it. Gently name it. Point them back to the fuller diet of the Word, the sacraments, and the people of God.

Third, if a parishioner's own NDE contains explicit anti-Christian content — clear denials of Jesus, commands to pursue occult practice, ongoing "contacts" demanding obedience — treat that with the seriousness it deserves. This is a pastoral moment, not a discussion-group moment. Scripture's warnings about deception (2 Corinthians 11:14) apply. Guide carefully. Call in help if needed. Chapter 25 develops this at length.

Fourth, do not preach a funeral that is built on an NDE rather than on Scripture. By all means reference NDE research where it confirms and enriches the biblical hope you are proclaiming. But your funeral sermon rests on Christ's resurrection, not on a stranger's paperback.

Next steps

For the pastor wanting to build out competence in this area, I recommend the following path. First, read John Burke's Imagine Heaven for an accessible Christian treatment grounded in Scripture.³⁸ Second, read Bruce Greyson's After for the view of a sympathetic, careful, mainstream researcher.³⁹ Third, dip into J. Steve Miller's Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? for a Christian scholar's careful engagement with the research literature.⁴⁰ Over time, if you want more, add Sabom's Light and Death, van Lommel's Consciousness Beyond Life, and Long's Evidence of the Afterlife. You do not have to read everything. You do have to read something. Your bereaved parishioner deserves a pastor who has done the reading.

Finally, let me say this gently to my fellow pastors: your people will be reading this material whether or not you engage with it. They will encounter it on podcasts, in documentaries, at their coworker's lunch table. If you are not a thoughtful guide for them, they will find a less thoughtful one. Lean in. Read. Weigh. Engage. Pastor.

For Further Reading

John Burke, Imagine Heaven (Baker, 2015). An evangelical pastor's accessible, Scripture-anchored synthesis of NDE research. A good first book for most Christian readers.

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond (St. Martin's Essentials, 2021). A lifetime of research presented by the field's most influential psychiatrist, in a warm and careful memoir form.

Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife (HarperOne, 2010). The statistical and evidentiary case from the oncologist who founded NDERF.

Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life (HarperOne, 2010). The Dutch cardiologist's detailed presentation of his Lancet study and his interpretation of consciousness.

J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Wisdom Creek Press, 2022). A Christian scholar's rigorous engagement with the research, with special attention to the presence of Jesus in NDEs and the scarcity of anti-Christian elements.

Michael Sabom, Light and Death (Zondervan, 1998). The cardiologist who did the Atlanta Study. Includes the full Pam Reynolds case and the measured aftereffects on intrinsic faith.