Chapter 26
When an Experience Doesn't Fit Scripture
A Framework for Honest Engagement

Pastor Daniel Hayes had been in ministry for eleven years. In that time he had learned to handle most pastoral conversations with a kind of quiet calm. But the little paperback in his lap was making him uneasy.

It was a slim book, corners softened from use, with a gold title embossed across a watercolor sky. A woman in his congregation named Janet had pressed it into his hands after the service the previous Sunday. Janet's husband, Gary, had died eighteen months earlier from pancreatic cancer. The dying had been long and hard, and Janet had been, by her own admission, "just barely holding on" through most of the year that followed.

"This book helped me more than anything else I've read," she told him, her eyes bright in a way they had not been bright in a long time. "Would you read it, Pastor Daniel? I'd like to talk with you about it."

He had promised he would. Now, at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night, with the house quiet and a cup of tea cooling on the desk beside him, he was most of the way through the book and he did not know what to do.

The author had written about a near-death experience after a car accident. She had been clinically dead, she said, for several minutes. During that time, she had found herself in a place of indescribable light. There she had been met by a figure she recognized, immediately and with certainty, as Jesus. Pastor Daniel had read several NDE accounts over the years. The love, the light, the sense of being fully known and yet fully accepted — all of that was familiar. All of that moved him.

But then had come the passage that made him uneasy.

The Jesus the author met had looked at her, she said, with infinite compassion, and He had told her three things. First, that He loved her. Second — and this part was italicized on the page — that all religions lead to Him, and none is truer than another. Third, that no human soul is ever finally lost. Every person, eventually, would come home.

Pastor Daniel set the book down on the desk and rubbed his eyes.

He knew the easy response. He could tell Janet that the book was dangerous, that the "Jesus" in its pages was not the Jesus of the Bible, that she should put it in the recycling bin and not look at it again. That would be the quick, tidy answer. It would also, he suspected, be the end of Janet's trust in him. Janet had found something like comfort in this book. She had come back to church after months away, in part because of it. She had begun to sleep again.

He could also, he supposed, tell her the book was fine. "Whatever brings you comfort, Janet." That would be easier in the short run. But that would be a lie, and Pastor Daniel did not lie to his people. There were real problems here, and he could not in good conscience pretend otherwise.

He sat for a long time with the book closed in his lap. Then he opened his study Bible, picked up his pen, and began to write. There had to be a better path than the two he had been offered. He was going to find it.

The Tension We Have to Name

Let me begin where Pastor Daniel began: by naming the tension honestly.

The overwhelming majority of near-death and deathbed experiences, studied carefully in the research literature, are strikingly consistent with biblical Christianity. That is one of the most important findings to come out of forty-plus years of NDE research, and it is a finding that should make every grieving Christian's heart lift. When J. Steve Miller studied one hundred consecutive near-death experiences from the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) database, he found that the core features — the overwhelming love, the awareness of being fully known, the encounter with a personal God, the sense of reunion with the deceased, the life review, the reality of a moral universe — dovetailed remarkably with the teachings of Scripture.¹ John Burke, surveying nearly a thousand accounts, reached the same conclusion: what the experiencers describe, whatever cultural vocabulary they use, lines up with striking consistency with the God revealed in the Old and New Testaments.²

That is the big picture. Keep it in view. Because the big picture is the reason this chapter exists at all.

If every experience were consistent with Scripture, we would not need a discernment framework. We would only need to say "receive it" and move on. And if every experience were inconsistent with Scripture, we would only need to say "refuse it" and move on. The reason we need a framework is that the picture is more complicated. Most experiences are deeply consistent. Some are not. And some are mixed — consistent at the core, cloudy or contrary at the edges.

Miller's own findings bear this out with unusual clarity. In his one hundred consecutive cases, only two mentioned reincarnation at all, and both had red flags that made them shaky witnesses.³ Only a handful included anything that clearly contradicted historic Christian teaching; of those, most were vague comments rather than specific doctrinal claims.⁴ The oft-repeated claim that NDEs pull people toward universalism, reincarnation, or Eastern religions "does not appear to be the case," Miller writes.⁵

But "vastly in the minority" is not the same as "zero." Some accounts — especially the popular books that get passed around in church small groups — do contain elements at odds with what Scripture teaches. And when a grieving person hands such a book to her pastor and says, "This helped me. What do you think?" — a real answer is required. Not a shrug. Not a sermon. A real, pastoral, honest answer.

Pretending otherwise is a disservice to the grieving reader. So is pretending that the whole account must be false because parts of it are off. Both responses fail the test of love. One is false peace, the other false war. The path we are looking for runs between them.

Three Failure Modes to Avoid

Before we get to the framework, it helps to name the three ways this goes wrong in most pastors' offices and most kitchen-table conversations. I have seen each of these, in myself and others, more times than I want to admit.

The first failure mode is wholesale rejection. "If any part of this account is off, none of it is real. Put the book down. Don't think about it anymore." This is the reflex of the pastor who has been burned once too often by a "heaven tourism" memoir that later had to be withdrawn by the publisher.⁶ His caution is understandable. But his response throws the baby out with the bathwater. If one page of a book contains something off, he treats the whole experience as a lie — including the parts that encountered the real Jesus, the parts that produced real love, the parts that are bringing real comfort to real people in his church. The hurt he inflicts by this response is substantial. The grieving person hears: "You are gullible. The thing that has been holding you up is garbage. Find something else." That is not pastoral care. That is pastoral cruelty disguised as pastoral care.

The second failure mode is wholesale acceptance. "It's all from God because she experienced it. Whatever brings you comfort is true for you." This is the response of the pastor who has learned, rightly, that people need comfort in grief — but who has forgotten, wrongly, that not every comfort is true, and that a lie in the grieving season is still a lie. Compromise on the truth of Scripture may feel like kindness today. In six months, when the bereaved person is trying to build the rest of her Christian life on the foundation the lie gave her, it will feel like something else.

The third failure mode is silencing the experiencer. "Let's not talk about it." This is the response of the pastor who does not know what to say, and so says nothing. He changes the subject. He suggests the person focus on "the basics." He never returns to the conversation. This response is the worst of the three, in some ways, because it leaves the grieving person alone with the question — to sort through the account, discern the mixed signals, and build her theology by herself, often in the glow of a phone screen at three in the morning. Pastors who want to protect their people from bad teaching by refusing to engage with it usually end up handing their people over to the very teachers they are most afraid of.

The Faithful Middle Way

There is a better path. It runs between the two ditches, and it looks like this:

Affirm what is affirmable. Question what needs questioning. Distinguish experience from interpretation. Distinguish core from periphery. Trust Scripture as final authority without dismissing lived reality.

That is the framework. The rest of this chapter unpacks what each phrase means in practice.

Experience Is Not Interpretation

The first and most important distinction in this whole conversation is between what happened and what the person made of what happened. These are not the same thing. Everybody knows this when we talk about other subjects. A man wakes up feeling a deep sense of dread and interprets it as a premonition. His wife might say it's indigestion. The feeling of dread is real. The interpretation is a separate matter, subject to evaluation.

NDEs work the same way. Something happened to the experiencer. She saw a light. She felt unconditional love. She had a sense of being known. She met a figure who seemed more real than the reality she had left behind. That is the experience. Now — what does it mean? Was the figure Jesus? Was it an angel? Was it God the Father? Was it something else entirely? These are interpretive questions. They cannot be settled just by saying "well, that's what it felt like to her."

This matters because the experiencer's interpretive frame is never neutral. No one comes to an NDE without a lifetime of stories, images, religious teachings (or absences of religious teaching), cultural assumptions, and vocabulary. When the experience happens, those frames are what the person has to think with. Miller and Burke both note this carefully. A Christian in Ohio encounters a figure of overwhelming love and recognizes Him as Jesus. A Hindu in Chennai may encounter what seems to be the same figure of overwhelming love and reach for the name "Krishna" or "Kaalika" — not because the figure is Krishna, necessarily, but because that is the vocabulary available.⁷ An atheist may encounter the same overwhelming love and describe it as "the Light" or "the Universe" — not because the figure is an impersonal force, but because that is the only language she has for what happened.

This observation is important, and it cuts both ways. On one hand, it means we should not panic when an experiencer uses non-Christian vocabulary for what seems to be a Christian encounter. A "Being of Light" who radiates unconditional love, knows every thought, shows the person her whole life in a single glance, and tells her she is loved is not distant from the biblical portrait of God. The language "Being of Light" is thinner than "Jesus" — but it is not opposed to "Jesus." Osis and Haraldsson, in their cross-cultural study of deathbed visions in America and India, noted that Indian patients often described a bearded figure in white with "a book of accounts" — a figure remarkably close to the biblical picture of God, quite different from what orthodox Hindu teaching would have led one to expect.⁸ Bruce Greyson's conclusion, after decades of cross-cultural study, was that "it is not the core experience that differs but the ways in which people interpret what they have experienced."⁹

On the other hand, the distinction between experience and interpretation means we do not have to treat every statement an experiencer makes as an infallible report about reality. When an NDEr says, "I understood that all religions lead to the same place," we can ask: Did you hear that in so many words from the being you met, or did you infer that from the feeling of universal love you sensed? Those are different claims. The first is a content claim. The second is the experiencer's post-hoc interpretation of the content. The two require different responses.

Core and Periphery

The second distinction is between the core of an experience and the periphery.

Research into NDEs for over four decades has identified a set of features that appear again and again across cultures, ages, genders, and religious backgrounds. Jeffrey Long lists twelve common elements that make up the well-established pattern: an out-of-body experience, heightened senses, intense and usually positive emotions, movement through a tunnel, encounter with a brilliant light, encounter with deceased relatives or mystical beings, alteration in the sense of time and space, a life review, encountering otherworldly realms, encountering special knowledge, encountering a boundary, and a return to the body.¹⁰ Not every experience has every element. But a recognizable NDE has many. These are the core.

Around the core of any specific account, there are peripheral details. This is the stuff that does not repeat across thousands of experiences but that showed up in this one account. It is the specific conversation with the ambiguous being. It is the detail of what the streets looked like. It is the experiencer's reading of what a particular silence meant. It is the felt "understanding" that "came with" the love, which may or may not have been a separate communication.

The core of most Christian NDEs lines up beautifully with biblical Christianity — an encounter with a personal God, overwhelming love, being fully known and yet fully accepted, a summons to go back and live differently, a loosening of the fear of death, a deepening of faith. These are the marks that appear again and again in the research and again and again in Scripture.¹¹ When a grieving Christian reads an account and finds these things there, the core is affirmable. We should affirm it.

The periphery is where problems often live. The specific theological statement that didn't match Scripture. The strange side-comment about "many lives." The moment where the experiencer says, "and I understood that no one ever really ends up in hell." Those are not the core. Those are the edges. And the edges are where we hold more lightly, where we weigh more carefully, where we sometimes have to say, "I'm not convinced that part is right."

This is not cherry-picking. It is discernment. It is the same thing we do any time we listen to a sermon, read a Christian book, or watch a testimony video. We do not treat every word equally. We know that the speaker is a human being, capable of getting some things beautifully right and other things partially wrong. We take the good, we flag the questionable, we pray for wisdom, we check it against Scripture. NDE accounts get the same treatment. Nothing more, nothing less.

Three Categories of Problematic Elements

When a Christian brings us an experience — her own or one she has read about — and says, "What should I make of this part?", the first question I ask is this: What kind of problem is it? Not all problems are the same. Some are not really problems at all, once we look closely. Others are more serious. A careful framework sorts them into three categories.

Category One: Peripheral Details That Seem Off

The first category is peripheral details that seem inconsistent with the main experience. These are details that are usually explainable by the experiencer's interpretive framework, the limits of her vocabulary, or cultural conditioning. They are the normal noise that surrounds an extraordinary event.

Here is a common example. A Christian woman has an NDE. She meets Jesus. The core is unmistakable — love, recognition, a sense of being sent back. But she says, "And I understood there were many people there who had been in past lives." When her pastor asks her what she means, she says, "I'm not sure. It was just a feeling. It wasn't a voice telling me. It came with everything else."

That is a category-one element. The detail is in tension with Scripture's teaching on one life followed by judgment (Hebrews 9:27). But the detail is also vague. The experiencer herself does not claim to have been taught reincarnation. She had a "feeling" or "understanding" that wrapped around the edges of an encounter with Christ whose core she is sure of. The best pastoral move here is to name the tension lightly ("Scripture teaches one life, not many — let's hold that edge loosely") and leave the core intact. Miller's point about category-one items is crucial: we expect some noise in any profound experience, and a detail occurring in two percent of NDEs cannot drive our theology one way or the other.¹²

Category Two: Theological Claims That Contradict Scripture

The second category is more serious. Here the experience does not just carry a vague feeling. It carries a specific doctrinal claim — and the claim is at odds with Scripture.

This is what happened in the book Pastor Daniel was reading. The author did not just describe overwhelming love. She did not just speak of a feeling of universal acceptance. She reported that the figure she identified as Jesus explicitly told her, "All religions lead to Me. No one is ever finally lost." Those are not peripheral feelings. Those are claims — claims on specific Christian doctrine. And those claims contradict what Jesus Himself taught in Scripture: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6, ESV). They contradict what Paul wrote to the Galatians: "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:8, ESV).

When we meet a category-two element, we have three possibilities to weigh. First, the experiencer may have misremembered or reinterpreted. Memory in profound experiences is not always as precise as it feels. The "understanding" that came with the encounter may have been the experiencer's own meaning-making after the fact, not a direct communication. Second, the experience may have been genuinely compromised by deception. Scripture is explicit that Satan disguises himself "as an angel of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14, ESV).¹³ A "Jesus" who denies what the Jesus of the Gospels taught is not the Jesus of the Gospels. Third, the core of the experience may have been a real encounter with the real God, with the experiencer's interpretive frame adding content that was not actually part of the encounter.

We usually cannot tell, from the outside, which of the three it is. That is why the pastoral posture is to receive the experiencer, weigh the claim, and refuse to accept contra-biblical doctrine on the basis of the experience. The person is loved. The encounter is taken seriously. The claim, though, does not get to override Scripture.

Category Three: Moral Instructions That Contradict Scripture

The third category is rarest and the most alarming. Here the experience issues a moral directive — a specific instruction to do something — and the instruction contradicts biblical teaching.

"My deceased mother appeared in a dream and told me to leave my husband."

"The being of light told me to stop going to church and follow my own inner light."

"The voice told me I should go see a medium to contact him again."

These are not peripheral details. They are not abstract doctrinal claims. They are pressure toward specific action — action Scripture forbids.

Category-three elements call for a different response than the first two. Here we do not weigh and ponder. Here we say, gently but firmly: this instruction should not be followed. Whatever the experience was in its core, a command to divorce, to abandon the Church, to enter occult practice, to consult the dead (Deuteronomy 18:10–12), or to violate a commandment is not from God. Scripture is absolutely clear on this. An experience that issues such a command has, at least in that part, crossed into territory that cannot be received — whether it is explained as deception, grief-driven projection, or something else. Chapter 25 develops the broader discernment framework in full; here I simply flag the category and say: instructions contrary to Scripture do not become safe because they come wrapped in a spiritual experience.

When a Christian Book Contains Elements That Concern You

Let me come back to Pastor Daniel and his paperback.

The book in his lap is the most common way problematic content reaches the average Christian: not through a personal experience, but through a popular memoir, passed around small groups and Bible studies, recommended by a grieving friend. These books are a genre. The bestselling ones — 90 Minutes in Heaven, Heaven Is for Real, Imagine Heaven, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Waking Up in Heaven — range widely in theological care. Some are solidly rooted in biblical Christianity. At least one was later retracted as fabricated.¹⁴ Many fall somewhere in between — real-sounding accounts, deeply comforting, shot through here and there with details that do not quite fit.

Pastor John MacArthur has written an extended critique of the whole genre, arguing that the heaven-tourism books are a distraction at best and an error at worst. His concerns are serious, and where a particular book makes claims that clearly contradict Scripture, MacArthur's warnings deserve weight.¹⁵ But his criticism also tends to sweep too broadly. It can lump careful, cautious, biblically responsible books in with reckless ones. A thoughtful Christian response does not need to decide between "all such books are suspect" and "any such book is fine." It can ask, book by book: What is the core claim? How does the account handle Scripture? What is the fruit in the experiencers' lives? Some accounts pass those tests with flying colors. Some do not. Most are mixed.

This is a pastoral, not a polemic, framework. The grieving reader does not need a takedown. She needs a guide.

Scripture Is the Final Rule

Underneath the whole discussion is the principle that shapes Christian engagement with any experience, anywhere: Scripture is the final rule of faith and practice.

This is not a diminishment of experience. It is the Christian way of honoring experience — by refusing to let it float free, untethered from the Word, where it can drift into any shape at all. The Bereans, whom Luke called "more noble" than the Thessalonians, "received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11, ESV). They did not dismiss what Paul said to them. They did not accept it either, until they had checked it against the Word. That is the posture.

Paul is explicit with Timothy: "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16–17, ESV). Scripture is God-breathed — theopneustos (θεόπνευστος), from theos (God) and pneo (to breathe). It is breathed from God Himself. This gives it a status no other text, no experience, no feeling, no vision, no memoir, can claim.

A dream does not become infallible by being vivid. A vision does not become infallible by being moving. An NDE does not become infallible by being life-changing. A book does not become infallible by being comforting. Only Scripture is infallible. Everything else is weighed against Scripture.

This principle sets us free in two directions. On one side, it sets us free from the tyranny of demanding that every experience produce exact theological precision. Experiences are allowed to be partial. They are allowed to be confused. They are allowed to be rough-edged. They do not have to carry the weight of being Scripture — because we already have Scripture. On the other side, it sets us free from the pressure to accept whatever comes with a spiritual label. Something can be sincerely reported, emotionally powerful, and personally transformative — and still be partly wrong. Scripture gives us the courage to say so without feeling like we are being cruel.

The Interpretive-Framework Factor, in Practice

Let me put the principle of experience vs. interpretation to work with a harder example.

An atheist woman has an NDE during cardiac arrest. She encounters a being of overwhelming, personal love. She is fully known, fully accepted, fully seen. She returns changed. She tells her story on a YouTube channel, and she describes the being as "the universal consciousness" and "the source" and "the light that connects all beings."

What do we say?

A reflexive response says: "Her description is not Christian, so her experience is not from God." But look at what she actually describes. A personal being. Overwhelming love. Total knowledge of her. Acceptance despite what she knows about herself. A sense of purpose for her return. That is not a description of impersonal cosmic force. That is a description of a person. Her categories for that person are thin — "source," "universal consciousness" — because those are the categories her worldview provides. But the being she describes is not less personal than the Jesus of the New Testament. It is described in a vocabulary that lacks the name "Jesus."

The charitable Christian reading is that she met the real God through the only lens she had. That does not make her interpretation correct. It makes her experience real. If she continues to think about it, and if the fruit of love and reduced fear of death and hunger for meaning draws her further into the light, she may come one day to recognize the being she met as the Jesus Scripture proclaims. Many have. Burke's Imagine Heaven is in large part a collection of such stories — people of various backgrounds whose NDEs drew them toward the biblical Christ.¹⁷

So the first move with a confusing or non-Christian-sounding account is not to reject the experience. It is to look under the vocabulary for the reality. Is the being personal? Is the love overwhelming? Is the fruit life-change toward love and away from fear? Is the account drawing the person toward or away from Christ? These questions matter more than whether the exact words line up with a catechism.

But — and here we have to be honest — sometimes the exact words matter. When a being is reported not just to radiate love but to explicitly deny Christ, deny Scripture, deny the possibility of ever being finally lost, or pressure the experiencer toward occult practice — the content itself, not just the framing, has crossed a line. This is the distinction we have to hold.

Specific Problematic Themes and How to Engage Them

Some themes come up often enough that it helps to think about each by name. Here are four.

"All Religions Lead to the Same God"

This is probably the most common problematic claim in popular NDE memoirs. The author meets a being of light, experiences overwhelming love, and comes back convinced that every religious path leads to the same destination.

A Christian response begins not with a refutation but with an affirmation: the God you met in your experience is the real God. The love you experienced was real. It was not imaginary. It was not projected. You met a personal being who loves you more than you thought possible. Hold that tightly.

Now — what you have concluded about that love is a separate question. Scripture is clear that the real God reveals Himself fully and uniquely in Jesus Christ (John 14:6; Hebrews 1:1–3). The love you experienced is not a generic, undifferentiated love with no Person at its center. It is the love of the Father, revealed in the Son, poured out by the Spirit. The universality of God's love (God loves every human being, always, infinitely) does not translate into the universality of every religion (every religion is equally true). Those are two different claims. The first is true and beautiful. The second does not follow from the first.

I would also gently add that the framework of postmortem opportunity, which we develop in Chapter 13, offers a way to hold both the overwhelming love you experienced and the specific uniqueness of Christ. God's love pursues every person, before and after death, and at one or more junctures every person will have a genuine, personal encounter with Him — through Christ, not around Him. That framework takes your experience of overwhelming love seriously and takes Scripture's warnings seriously. It is a larger home than the too-small, too-quick universalism your memoir reports.

"No One Ever Goes to Hell"

This is the close cousin of the first problematic theme. The love the experiencer felt was so total that she concluded no one could finally resist it — everyone, without exception and without any change of heart, would end up home.

Here again the first move is to affirm what is affirmable. The love you experienced is the love of the real God. It is that big. Scripture's God is exactly that big: "The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9, ESV). What you felt is what God actually is. Hold that.

But the conclusion — that therefore no one ever is finally lost — does not follow from the love. Scripture also presents the real possibility of final, irrevocable refusal (Matthew 25:46; Revelation 20:14–15; Galatians 1:8). C. S. Lewis's famous description of hell as a place whose doors "are locked from the inside" captures the tension. God's love does not override human agency. A person can, in the end, refuse the invitation.¹⁸

Christians disagree about the final state of those who finally reject God. Some hold eternal conscious torment. Some hold conditional immortality (the unrepentant eventually cease to exist). A smaller but serious strand within the Christian tradition holds hopeful universalism — the conviction that God's love eventually wins every heart. These debates are real, and they matter. What is not biblically responsible, however, is the quick, easy universalism that pops out of some NDE memoirs — the claim that the love the author felt means no one ever needs to repent, trust, or turn. That quick universalism says less than Scripture does about the weight of sin, the urgency of the gospel, and the seriousness of refusal.

"Reincarnation"

Reincarnation claims appear in a small minority of NDEs — about two percent in Miller's study, both with red flags.¹⁹ When they do appear, they rarely come as doctrinal instruction. More often they come as a "feeling" or "understanding" or brief image — a sense that the experiencer has "been here before" or has "seen people in past lives."

Scripture teaches one life, then judgment: "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27, ESV). The parable of the rich man and Lazarus assumes a single earthly life followed by a fixed intermediate state (Luke 16:19–31).²⁰ The thief on the cross receives Paradise "today" — not an opportunity to try again in another life (Luke 23:43).

For a Christian who encounters reincarnational imagery in her own or another's NDE, the counsel is to hold the Christ encounter firmly and the past-life imagery lightly. It may have been a symbol. It may have been the experiencer's brain producing imagery from half-absorbed cultural sources. It may have been a kind of ancestral awareness — a felt connection to family lines or spiritual lineages that the mind then wrapped in reincarnation vocabulary. It may, in some rarer cases, have been a deceptive element within an otherwise real encounter. We often cannot tell. What we can say is that Scripture's one-life-then-judgment teaching is clear, and the experiencer's reincarnational imagery does not become binding because it was vivid. The experiencer can walk forward, loving Christ, holding the imagery with open hands, letting it recede as the Christ encounter deepens.

"You Are Divine"

A final theme, less common but spiritually serious, is the claim that the experiencer herself is divine — that "we are all God," or that "the spark of God in you is you." This is the pantheistic or quasi-pantheistic overlay that sometimes appears in New Age NDE accounts.

The Christian response begins with what is true: you are made in the image of God. You are loved infinitely. You are destined for glorification in Christ (Romans 8:29–30). You are not a random accident. You are not a piece of cosmic dust. You bear the image and are heir of the King. Every one of those statements is staggering.

But the step from "made in God's image" to "you are God" confuses the creature with the Creator. Scripture is everywhere clear that this confusion is the ancient, consistent pattern of spiritual deception, going all the way back to the serpent's offer in Eden: "you will be like God" (Genesis 3:5). The experiencer who returns from an NDE convinced of her own divinity has not come back with good news about God. She has come back with an echo of the oldest bad news. The love she experienced was real. The conclusion she drew was not. She is beloved of God, not divine as God.

The Humble Posture on the Edges

Not every strange detail in an experience falls neatly into a category. Some things are just odd. The experiencer saw something unusual. The account includes imagery that is neither clearly consistent with Scripture nor clearly contrary. It is just outside the frame.

In such cases, the right pastoral posture is humility. Scripture does not answer every possible question about the life to come, and it is not our job to force an answer where Scripture is silent. If a dying woman says she saw her childhood pet waiting for her at the edge of a field, we do not need to argue that she did or did not. We can say, honestly, "I don't know what that was. Scripture doesn't speak to it directly. I trust Scripture, and I trust that God knows what it was, and I'm glad it was beautiful to her."

Humility on the edges is not liberal caving. It is Christian restraint. Deuteronomy 29:29 — "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever" (ESV). Some things are revealed. We can speak clearly about those. Some things are secret. We can rest in the fact that God knows, even when we do not.

When to Receive With Thanks, Despite Imperfect Framing

Turn the coin over. Many experiences — I would say most of the ones that grieving Christians actually encounter — pass the tests with only minor edges to hold loosely.

When should we receive an experience with thanks, even if the framing is imperfect? When the core encounter is with a being of love. When the fruit is peace, reduced fear of death, love of neighbor, and moral improvement. When the experiencer is open to biblical framing. When the main direction of the account exalts love, truth, and a personal encounter with God.

Under those conditions, the experience is almost certainly a genuine encounter with the real God, received through imperfect categories. The right response is to receive, to weigh, to integrate. Not every edge will be tidied up this side of glory. The fruit over time will tell what the Spirit has done.

Jonathan Edwards, in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, gave us a framework for this that is worth dusting off and putting to use. Edwards was writing in the wake of the First Great Awakening, when reports of extraordinary spiritual experiences were everywhere and the Church desperately needed a way to tell which were from God and which were not. His answer was neither "all of them are from God" nor "be wary of all of them." His answer was: look at the fruit. Real spiritual experiences, Edwards said, produce humility, love of Christ, love of Scripture, love of neighbor, hatred of sin, and lasting growth in godliness. They do not produce pride, self-display, division, or moral decline.²¹ Edwards's framework is three hundred years old, and it still applies. Run the experience past the fruit test. If the fruit is good, the tree is probably good. If the fruit is bad, something is wrong, whatever the experience felt like.

The Pastor's Patience

One more word before we return to Pastor Daniel. This work — walking with someone through the integration of a complex experience — is not one conversation. It is sometimes a year. It is sometimes longer.

When I meet with a person who has had an experience, or who is holding a book that contains mixed content, I do not try to resolve the whole thing in one sitting. I try to plant one seed. "Here is one thing I saw that lined up with Scripture. Here is one thing that I would want us to look at together. Can we read it again next month?" The goal is ongoing conversation, not a verdict at the end of the first meeting.

This is hard for pastors who want to help. It is especially hard for pastors who are afraid the person is going off the rails. I know the temptation well. I have felt it. But a premature conclusion almost always closes the door. A patient, ongoing conversation keeps it open. Sittser, in A Grace Disguised, writes about how the crucial work of grief is not fast, and how the people who try to hurry the griever usually end up hurting her.²² The same is true of spiritual-experience integration. Some of it takes years. The pastor who stays in the conversation for those years is the pastor whose counsel, eventually, gets heard.

Back to Pastor Daniel

Pastor Daniel came to see me a few weeks after that Tuesday night.

He had decided what he was going to do. He was going to call Janet and ask if they could meet for coffee. He was going to bring the book with him. And he was going to say something like this:

"Janet, I read the book. I'm so glad you shared it with me. I want to tell you what I found, and I'd love to hear what you found, too.

"There's a lot in here that is beautiful. The experience of love the author describes, the sense of being fully known and yet fully accepted — that is deeply consistent with what the Bible teaches about God. I don't doubt that she had a real experience of love. And I'm so thankful that encountering this book has brought you comfort. I mean that.

"There are also a couple of passages that I would want us to look at carefully. When the author writes that Jesus told her all religions are equally true, and that no one is ever finally lost — those are specific claims that don't match what Jesus taught in the Gospels. I don't think that disqualifies the whole book. I think it means that, like every book, this one is a mix of human insight and human limitation. I'd love to read the key passages together and compare them with Scripture.

"More than anything, I want you to know: the Jesus who met her in her experience is the same Jesus who has been holding you through this year. He is not a different Jesus. He is the one we know from the Bible. And the love that comforted you in this book is the love He actually has for you. That love is true. Some of the conclusions the book draws about that love are not quite right. But the love itself is real. Can we walk through it together?"

That was Pastor Daniel's path. It was not wholesale rejection. It was not wholesale acceptance. It was not silencing. It was affirmation of what was affirmable, honest naming of what needed naming, and a patient invitation to keep talking. It was the faithful middle way.

Janet cried, he told me later. Not in hurt. In relief. She had known something was a little off. She had been afraid, quietly, that she was doing something wrong by reading the book. She had also been afraid that her pastor would take it from her. Neither of those things happened. Instead, she found a pastor who would sit with her and the book and the grief and the Bible, and work through it all slowly, and trust her to be able to handle the truth.

A year later, she was still reading. She had returned to the book one more time to underline the passages that had first comforted her. But next to them in the margins were now handwritten notes: "where this agrees with Scripture," "where this goes beyond Scripture," "the core of love is real." She was no longer leaning on the book. She was leaning on the Lord the book had pointed her to — more carefully, more clearly, more biblically — and she was doing it with her pastor's help.

That is what the framework looks like when it works. It looks like love and honesty refusing to be separated. It looks like Scripture and experience in careful conversation, with Scripture in the chair of final authority and experience welcomed as guest. It looks like a grieving widow sleeping at night and a pastor not needing to have all the answers in one conversation. It looks like the long, patient, faithful walk we call discipleship.

For Your Reflection

These questions are meant to be sat with, not rushed through. You may find one or two that are especially tender. Give those ones time.

1. Is there an experience — your own, or one you have read or heard about — that contained elements that troubled you alongside elements that moved you? What was the troubling part? What was the moving part?

2. Which of the three failure modes have you been most tempted by: wholesale rejection, wholesale acceptance, or silencing? Why?

3. Looking back at the experience or book that troubled you, can you distinguish the core of what happened from the periphery? What would it look like to hold the core firmly and the periphery loosely?

4. Who in your life has helped you weigh a spiritual experience well? What did they do that was helpful?

5. Is there a passage of Scripture that you have leaned on when you have been uncertain about what to make of an experience? What does that passage remind you of?

6. What would it mean, in your life, to let Scripture be the final rule — without using that principle as a weapon against experiences that are partly God-given?

7. If a grieving friend were to ask you about a book that contains a mix of comfort and unsettling content, what would you want to say to her?

For Pastors and Caregivers

Key Observations

Pastors are handed this question more often than we realize, because the people who are reading the heaven-tourism books are usually not telling us. They pick up the book at the Christian bookstore or the secular one, they read it late at night after the house is quiet, and they do not bring it up in the foyer after the service because they know what most pastors think of it. The grieving person in your church who has been reading something you would have concerns about is likely not going to ask you. She is going to figure it out herself — and whatever she figures out, she will carry forward into the rest of her grief.

The pastoral task, then, is to make it safe for her to ask. That means signaling — in sermons, in conversation, in casual comments at coffee — that you are a pastor who will engage these questions thoughtfully rather than dismissively. The NDE field has become, in the last twenty years, a part of pastoral ministry whether we want it to be or not. The books are in the homes of our people. The questions are on their hearts. The only choice we have is whether to be a resource or an absence.

What to Say

Here are a few sentences you can use almost verbatim. Adapt them to your voice.

"Thank you for bringing this to me. I want to read it with you and think about it together. What part of this has meant the most to you?"

"There are some things in this account that feel deeply consistent with what the Bible teaches, and I want to celebrate those. There are also one or two things I'd want to weigh carefully with you, because they don't quite line up with what Jesus Himself taught. Can we take it slowly?"

"I don't think you are foolish for finding comfort here. I want you to know that. The love she experienced is the real love of the real God. Some of the conclusions she draws about that love may go further than Scripture does. But the love itself — hold onto that."

"Let's not try to figure all of this out today. Let's just start with what spoke to you most. We can come back to the harder passages next time."

What NOT to Say

Avoid these well-meant but damaging responses. Each of them closes a door that needed to stay open.

"That book is heretical. Put it away and don't read it again." (Shames the reader, closes the conversation, makes you the enemy of her comfort.)

"Whatever you experienced is true for you." (False irenicism. Accepts a contradiction she will eventually notice, and blames you for not warning her.)

"That's just your grief talking." (Dismisses a real question with a psychological label. Grief does not make people stupid. It makes them tender.)

"Focus on Scripture, not on other people's experiences." (Presents Scripture as a replacement for conversation rather than as a guide through conversation. She will hear: "Stop talking to me about this.")

"If it has any problems, you can't trust any of it." (The all-or-nothing rule guarantees she will drop either the book or you. Neither outcome serves her.)

Questions to Ask

When a person brings you an experience or a book, ask questions before you offer conclusions. Try some of these.

"What was the core of the encounter — what was the main thing that happened or was said?"

"What were the specific claims or teachings that came through? Can you point me to those pages?"

"What fruit has it borne in your life so far? What has changed in you since you started reading it, or since you had the experience?"

"Was the troubling part something you were told directly, or something you concluded afterward?"

"How does the experience line up with what you already know of Jesus from the Bible?"

"Has any of this pressured you toward something Scripture warns against — toward occult practice, or away from the Church?"

Questions like these surface the real issues. They also help the experiencer articulate things she has only felt. Many people have not yet put language to the edges of their experience. Being asked the right questions helps them see clearly.

Watch-Outs

A few pastoral landmines to avoid.

Do not force a conclusion in one conversation. These topics are often year-long (or longer) processing topics. Plant one seed. Come back to it later.

Do not weaponize discernment. Some pastors use the language of discernment to shut down any spiritual experience that makes them uncomfortable. That is not discernment. That is control. Discernment is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. Use it with care.

Do not abandon the conversation either. The opposite error — soft irenicism that refuses to name anything troubling because naming it might be unkind — fails the person just as surely. She came to you because she thought you would help her think. Help her think.

Notice your own reactivity. If you find yourself wanting to rip the book out of her hands, ask why. Is it because you have been burned by a heaven-tourism controversy before? Is it because the book touches something you are uncomfortable with in your own theology? Your reactivity is not her problem. Work through it on your own time.

Remember the big picture. Most NDEs, studied carefully, are deeply consistent with Scripture. The one in front of you is more likely to be mostly right than mostly wrong. Lead with affirmation of what is affirmable. Flag the edges. Keep talking.

Next Steps

For follow-up, consider these resources. John Burke's Imagine Heaven is a generally reliable pastoral introduction, weighing accounts carefully against Scripture. J. Steve Miller's Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? gives the fuller research picture and the discernment tools. For the experiencer who is doing the deeper work, Jonathan Edwards's A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections remains the classic framework for weighing spiritual experience against Scripture. For the pastor wrestling with his own responses, an afternoon with C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters or The Great Divorce will recalibrate the imagination.

And — as always — walk with the person over time. Six months from now, the conversation you began today will not be over. That is not a failure. That is the shape of faithful care.

For Further Reading

John Burke, Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You (Baker, 2015). A generally reliable pastoral survey that weighs accounts carefully against Scripture. Burke's framework for engaging NDEs biblically is worth reading closely.

J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Wisdom Creek, 2022). The single most thorough research-level treatment of the question this chapter asks. Miller's "Gray Scale" of red flags and his survey of problematic themes are invaluable.

Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746; many modern editions). The classic Christian framework for discerning genuine spiritual experience from counterfeit. Slow going but richly rewarding for pastors.

John MacArthur, The Glory of Heaven: The Truth About Heaven, Angels, and Eternal Life (Crossway, 2013). Engage critically — MacArthur's skepticism about the entire NDE genre sweeps too broadly — but his warnings about specific heaven-tourism books are worth considering, and his high view of Scripture as final rule is a helpful anchor.

C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Macmillan, 1946). Not a study of NDEs but an imaginative theological exploration of heaven, hell, and human refusal. Few books better prepare the Christian imagination for the questions this chapter raises.