Chapter 4

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

The pastor sat in his study on a Tuesday afternoon, holding a paperback his wife had pressed into his hands the night before. The cover showed a tunnel of golden light. The title had the word heaven in it. He turned it over, read the back, and set it down with something like distaste.

His wife had bought it for their friend Linda, whose husband had died six weeks earlier. "She keeps asking me if I think Don is okay," his wife had said. "I think this might help her." The pastor had nodded, taken the book home, and now found himself uneasy. He had heard sensational stories about near-death experiences. He had also heard angry sermons against them. He had read about the Malarkey retraction. He did not know what to think.

What he did know was that Linda was sitting in her kitchen tonight, asking the question he could not answer with confidence: Where is my husband right now? Is he okay?

He picked the book up again. Then he set it down. Then he picked it up. Finally, he opened his laptop and typed a question into the search bar: What does the actual medical research say about near-death experiences?

What he found surprised him. There were peer-reviewed studies in The Lancet. There were prospective studies of cardiac arrest survivors in major hospitals. There were named researchers — physicians, not television hosts — who had been studying this for forty years. He sat back in his chair. Why has nobody at my seminary ever told me about any of this?

What Is a Near-Death Experience?

A near-death experience — usually shortened to NDE — is a profound, conscious experience reported by some people who have come close to death or have been clinically dead for a short time and then returned. The most common working definition comes from psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, who has studied NDEs at the University of Virginia for nearly fifty years. Greyson developed what is now called the NDE Scale, a 16-item questionnaire used by researchers worldwide to help distinguish a true NDE from a vivid dream, a drug reaction, or some other altered state.¹

NDEs do not all look alike. Some people report only one or two features. Some report many. But across thousands of cases, a familiar cluster of elements keeps appearing:

An overwhelming sense of peace, often described as more real than any peace ever felt on earth. A feeling of leaving the body — what researchers call an out-of-body experience, or OBE — sometimes accompanied by an aerial view of the room, the medical team, the accident scene. A sense of moving through a dark passage or tunnel. Encountering a brilliant light that is felt to be alive, loving, and personal. A life review in which the person re-experiences moments of their life and feels how their actions affected others. Meeting deceased loved ones. Encountering a being of light often identified by the experiencer as Jesus Christ, God, or "the Lord." Reaching some kind of border or boundary. And finally, a return — sometimes welcome, often reluctant — to the body.²

Not every NDE includes every feature. A child's NDE may be very simple. An adult cardiac arrest patient's NDE may be richly detailed. A few NDEs are distressing rather than peaceful (we will deal with these in Chapter 20). What matters for now is this: the pattern is real, it is consistent across cultures, and it has been documented in serious medical journals.

A Brief History of the Research

The phenomenon itself is ancient. Plato's Republic describes the soldier Er returning from death with otherworldly news. The early church kept records of dying saints' visions. But the modern study of NDEs began in 1975 with a young physician-philosopher named Raymond Moody. His book Life After Life coined the term "near-death experience" and described fifteen common features culled from interviews with about 150 people.³ The book sold millions of copies and started a serious research field.

Kenneth Ring soon followed with the first formal scientific study, published as Life at Death in 1980. Ring confirmed the basic Moody pattern and began to analyze its stages. Bruce Greyson, working alongside Ring at the University of Virginia, developed the NDE Scale in 1983, giving researchers a reliable tool to distinguish authentic NDEs from look-alikes.⁴

Then came the studies that changed everything for serious medical readers. In 2001, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel published a landmark prospective study in The Lancet — one of the world's most respected medical journals. Van Lommel and his team had followed 344 cardiac arrest survivors across ten Dutch hospitals. They found that 18 percent reported a recognizable NDE. Crucially, NDE incidence could not be explained by medication, oxygen levels, fear of death, or psychological factors alone.⁵ Around the same time, British physician Sam Parnia began the AWARE and AWARE II studies, large multi-hospital research projects examining consciousness during cardiac arrest.⁶

Meanwhile, American radiation oncologist Jeffrey Long founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), which has now collected thousands of detailed first-person NDE accounts in many languages. His books Evidence of the Afterlife and God and the Afterlife draw on this enormous database to identify recurring features and statistical patterns.⁷

Approximately 10 to 20 percent of cardiac arrest survivors report NDEs, with similar percentages in other near-death situations. Across the general population, surveys suggest that roughly 4 to 5 percent of Americans have had at least one. That works out to many millions of people.⁸ This is not fringe. This is not the lunatic edge. This is a phenomenon documented in The Lancet, in Resuscitation, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, and in dozens of other peer-reviewed venues. A grieving Christian deserves to know that.

What the Research Actually Shows

Let me summarize five findings that the bulk of the careful research now supports.

First, the core pattern is strikingly consistent across cultures. An NDE in Japan, India, or sub-Saharan Africa shares the same basic architecture as an NDE in Iowa: a sense of leaving the body, a passage, a light, an encounter, often a meeting with the deceased, sometimes a border, then return. The cultural details vary — the figure of light is more often identified as Jesus by Christians, as a luminous being by others — but the core experience is recognizably the same.⁹

Second, NDEs are reported in conditions where ordinary brain activity is severely compromised or absent. Many of the most carefully documented cases involve patients in cardiac arrest, with no measurable heartbeat and no measurable brain-wave activity, who nevertheless return with rich, organized, sequential memories. This is the opposite of what we would expect if NDEs were generated by a dying brain.¹⁰

The deepest documented case, often called the gold standard, is that of Pam Reynolds, a 35-year-old singer who underwent a rare procedure called hypothermic cardiac arrest in 1991 to remove a brain aneurysm. During the surgery her body was cooled, her heart stopped, the blood was drained from her head, and her brain was clinically silent — flat-lined on every monitor. While in this state she reported a remarkably detailed NDE, including specific accurate observations about surgical instruments and conversations she could not have heard with her ears (her ear canals were occluded by speakers). Cardiologist Michael Sabom, who first published her case in Light and Death, has documented the medical record in detail.¹¹ Pam's case is by no means the only one of this kind, but it is among the most thoroughly investigated, and it shows up everywhere in the literature for good reason. We will look more closely at veridical elements like Pam's in Chapter 6.

Third, many NDEs include verifiable details the experiencer could not have known by ordinary means — accurate descriptions of resuscitation efforts, conversations from other rooms, deceased relatives the family had never told the experiencer about. These are called veridical elements, and they are one of the most challenging features of the data for any purely physical explanation.¹² Again, full treatment in Chapter 6.

Fourth, NDEs produce dramatic and lasting life changes. Unlike a vivid dream — which fades — an NDE typically reshapes a person's life for decades. Researchers consistently document reduced fear of death, increased compassion, reordered priorities (less concern with status and possessions, more with relationships and meaning), and deepened spirituality. Christians who have NDEs often report a renewed and intensified faith.¹³

Fifth, standard physiological explanations have struggled to account for the data. Theories involving low oxygen, excess carbon dioxide, anesthetic side-effects, or temporal-lobe seizures each explain some features in some cases, but none accounts for the full pattern, the cross-cultural consistency, the veridical content, or the occurrence under conditions of clinically silent brains. The honest scientific verdict is: we do not yet have a complete materialist explanation, and several of the leading researchers — physicians, not theologians — have abandoned the attempt.¹⁴

What NDEs Are Not

This is where the careful Christian must speak as plainly as possible. NDE research offers genuine reasons for hope. But the claims must be measured. Let me name four things NDEs are not.

An NDE is not infallible revelation. The Bible is the inspired, authoritative Word of God. An NDE is the experience of a person — a person who, like all of us, brings their own background, vocabulary, and limitations to what they perceived. The experience may be real and meaningful without being a new chapter of Scripture. When details of an NDE conflict with the clear teaching of Scripture, Scripture wins. Always.

An NDE is not uniformly Christian. Most NDEs are pastorally consistent with the Christian story — overwhelming love, encounters with figures of light frequently identified as Jesus, reunion with loved ones, peace. But some include elements that do not fit biblical teaching: hints of reincarnation, claims that all roads lead to God, mystical insights that contradict the gospel. These outlier elements need careful handling, not credulous repetition. (We treat the discernment framework fully in Chapter 25.)

An NDE is not evidence that everyone goes to heaven regardless of faith. Some popular books overreach badly here. The fact that many NDEs are loving and Christ-centered does not erase Jesus' own teaching that one must be born again (John 3:3), nor Paul's insistence that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ (Ephesians 2:8–9). What the NDE record may show — and we will explore this in Chapter 13 — is that God's pursuit of love is more relentless than many of us have been taught. But that is not the same as universal salvation by default.

An NDE is not, technically speaking, a tour of the final afterlife. By definition, an NDE happens to someone who is near death and then returns. It is, at most, a glimpse — perhaps the early stages of dying, perhaps the entry to the intermediate state, perhaps something else again. Scripture, not the experiencer, must remain the foundation of our doctrine of heaven.

Five Principles for the Christian Reader

Here, then, is how I would invite a thoughtful Christian to engage NDE literature.

(1) Read with Scripture open. Every claim should be tested against the Word of God. Where Scripture and the NDE record agree — on the survival of the soul, the reality of God's love, the reality of conscious life beyond the body — receive the convergence with gratitude. Where they seem to diverge, follow Scripture.

(2) Distinguish researcher from experiencer. The experiencer tells what happened to them. The researcher analyzes patterns across many cases. Both are useful, but they serve different purposes. A pastor looking for sober, evaluable evidence should lean on the researchers (Greyson, van Lommel, Long, Parnia, Burke) more than on any single dramatic memoir.

(3) Look for patterns across many cases, not single sensational accounts. One vivid story can be embellished, misremembered, or even fabricated. A pattern across thousands of cases is much harder to fake. The hope offered in this book rests on the pattern, not on any one celebrity testimony.

(4) Prefer peer-reviewed research over popular "heaven tourism" books. There is good Christian literature on NDEs — John Burke's Imagine Heaven and J. Steve Miller's careful work are honest examples.¹⁵ But there is also a flood of poorly verified popular books that have done real damage. When a claim is striking, ask: Has this been examined by serious researchers? Does it appear in the medical literature?

(5) Receive evidence with gratitude when it aligns with biblical truth; test carefully when it seems to deviate. The grieving Christian does not need to choose between Scripture and the NDE record. Properly handled, they speak with one voice on the central truths: the soul survives, God meets us, love endures, reunion is real.

The "Heaven Tourism" Controversy

I want to address one specific concern many pastors have, because it has shaped a generation of Christian skepticism: the so-called "heaven tourism" backlash. In 2010, Tyndale published The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, an NDE memoir credited to Alex Malarkey and his father. The book sold over a million copies. Five years later, Alex — by then a teenager — publicly admitted that he had made the story up. The publisher pulled the book from circulation.¹⁶ John MacArthur, Hank Hanegraaff, and others wrote sharp critiques of the broader "heaven tourism" genre — and many of their concerns were warranted.¹⁷

What we must not do, however, is allow the failure of one popular book — or even a category of popular books — to foreclose serious engagement with five decades of medical research. The Malarkey retraction is a reason for discernment. It is not a reason for blanket dismissal of a phenomenon documented in hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. The careful Christian asks both questions: Is this particular account trustworthy? And does the broader research point somewhere worth following? The answer to the second question, I believe, is yes.

A Pastoral Frame

The rest of this book will draw on careful NDE research to offer specific, warranted hope to grieving readers. Hope that your loved one was met. Hope that there was light and not darkness. Hope that the person you loved was loved more deeply than you knew, by a Person more present than you imagined.

I trust the reader. I trust that you can learn to weigh this evidence responsibly, holding Scripture as the rule and the research as the witness. The widow in Linda's kitchen tonight does not need a sensational story. She needs honest, careful, grounded reasons for the hope she already half-believes. That is what the rest of this book is for.

For Your Reflection

1. What did you believe about near-death experiences before opening this chapter? Where did you learn what you believed?

2. Did anything in this chapter surprise you? What — and why?

3. Are there fears or hesitations that come up for you when you consider NDEs? Can you put them into words?

4. If the NDE research is essentially what this chapter has described — careful, peer-reviewed, consistent — what difference might that make for your grief?

5. Has anyone you love ever had an experience of this kind? Have you ever had one yourself? What was it like to talk about it (or to keep it hidden)?

6. What hope, if any, are you most afraid to let yourself feel?

7. As you sit with the Lord this week, what one truth from this chapter would you most like to hold onto?

For Pastors and Caregivers

Most pastors I know are stuck between two equally unhelpful postures on NDEs: enthusiastic credulity ("Have you read this amazing book about heaven?") or reflexive dismissal ("That's all New Age nonsense"). Train yourself, and your people, into a third way: discerning engagement. You can take the medical research seriously without endorsing every popular book. You can affirm what aligns with Scripture without rubber-stamping every detail. This third way is what your grieving people need from you.

Key observation. When a member of your congregation brings up NDEs — perhaps because of a loved one's experience, perhaps because of something they read — they are usually testing the waters. They want to know if you are safe to talk to. If you wave it off ("That's just hypoxia"), they will close down and find someone else to ask. If you swallow it whole ("Yes! Heaven is exactly like in the book!"), you teach them to confuse Scripture with personal testimony. Aim instead for the steady middle: "Tell me more. What are you wondering about?"

What to say.

"I am studying this carefully. Not everything in the popular books is reliable, but the medical research is more serious than I used to think."

"Whatever your loved one did or didn't experience, I know this for certain: the God of the Bible meets His people."

"Scripture is our final guide. But Scripture and careful research can speak together about real hope."

What NOT to say.

"That's all New Age nonsense." (You will lose people who needed you to engage.)

"Everyone goes to heaven if they have an NDE." (You will overpromise and undermine the gospel.)

"It was probably just the medication." (You will dismiss what may have been a real and meaningful encounter, and the bereaved will feel patronized.)

Watch-outs. Do not let "heaven tourism" cynicism foreclose serious research. The Malarkey case was real and the warnings were real, but the medical literature on NDEs is not the same thing as the popular publishing market. The careful pastor distinguishes the two. Likewise, do not preach NDE accounts as Scripture. They are at best a witness, never a rule. And do not, in your eagerness to comfort, promise more than the data warrants. The data warrant a great deal — but they do not warrant turning every dramatic memoir into a sermon illustration.

One more watch-out: be ready for the experiencer in your own pews. Most pastors will, sooner or later, encounter someone in their congregation who has had an NDE and has never told anyone in the church. They are afraid you will dismiss them, label them, or worse. When you preach with discerning warmth on this topic, you make space for them to come forward. That alone is worth the careful study.

Next steps. If you are new to this material, begin with John Burke's Imagine Heaven for an accessible Christian overview, then Bruce Greyson's After for the medical research, then van Lommel for the prospective-study foundation. Read with a notebook open. Ask: Where does this match Scripture? Where does it strain? Where does it offer my grieving people specific reasons for hope? Within a year of careful reading, you will be able to sit on Linda's couch on a Tuesday afternoon and answer her question with both honesty and hope.

For Further Reading

John Burke, Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You (Baker, 2015) — the most widely read evangelical engagement with NDE research; warm, careful, biblically grounded.

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond (St. Martin's, 2021) — fifty years of research, distilled by the field's leading academic voice.

Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (HarperOne, 2010) — accessible summary of the NDERF data.

Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (HarperOne, 2010) — the cardiologist behind the Lancet study, in his own voice.

J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Wisdom Creek, 2022) — a Christian scholar's careful engagement with the data.