Chapter 35
A theology of dying, gathered up and handed back to the church.
A woman I will call Margaret sits at her father’s bedside in a small hospice room outside Omaha. Her father is eighty-seven. He has hours, maybe a day. The morphine drip ticks softly. The nurse comes in, adjusts the pillow, leaves. Margaret has read this book. She is not a theologian. She is a high-school chemistry teacher with a Methodist Sunday-school background and a mother she lost two years ago. She holds her father’s hand.
Two years earlier, at her mother’s deathbed, Margaret had felt nothing but a kind of useless dread. She did not know what was happening to her mother. She did not know what to say. She watched the rise and fall of breath, counted the seconds between, and felt her faith thin out into something pale and abstract. She believed in heaven, more or less. But she did not know how to think about what was happening to the body in front of her, or to the woman inside it.
Tonight is different. Margaret knows now — not from speculation but from evidence and tradition gathered together — that her father is not dissolving into nothing. She knows the brain is going dark in stages, that the he of him is not identical with that brain, that what comes next is not a void but a Person.1 She has read the cases. She knows that thousands of people have been clinically dead, with flat brain tracings, and have come back with stories that line up too well to dismiss. She has read the church fathers on the soul that lays down the body as one lays down a coat. She is still afraid. But she is afraid the way one is afraid before a great kindness, not the way one is afraid before an ending. She squeezes her father’s hand. She speaks his name. She tells him it is all right to go. She tells him Jesus is waiting.
That is the reader I have been writing for. That is the room into which this book is meant to walk. And so it is time, gently, to gather up what we have learned and hand it back to the church.
The book has moved through nine Parts, each doing a particular job. Part I framed the three questions: what happens to the body, to the soul, and what does the soul encounter at the threshold. Part II walked through the biological-medical baseline — the cellular cascade, the stages of cardiac arrest, the boundary question of when, exactly, a person is dead. Part III introduced the literature of near-death experience research, from Moody and Sabom in the 1970s through van Lommel, Parnia, Greyson, and the contemporary peer-reviewed corpus.
Then, in Part IV, the empirical heart of the book: the veridical case files. The 1,114 cases of accurate distant observation in my dissertation database. The thirty-three blind NDErs, including the congenitally blind, who reported visual perception they could not have constructed.2 The cardiac-arrest patients with documented flat EEGs whose later reports matched events in the room. The encounters with deceased relatives whose deaths the patient did not know about until later. The cumulative case across 5,278 NDE cases, with 30.7% scoring “Strong” or “Exceptional” on the three-dimensional scale.3
Part V took up the physicalist response at full strength. The Borjigin pig-and-rat EEG studies. The temporo-parietal junction OBE-induction work. Anesthesia awareness, anoxic hallucination, REM intrusion, ketamine, DMT, expectancy. Each was given its strongest articulation. Each, in Chapter 17, was shown to fail — not on theological grounds but on its own evidential terms.
Part VI walked through the inside-the-experience phenomenology: the OBE phase, the tunnel and the light, the life review, the encounter with the being of light, the return. Part VII built the theological synthesis: substance dualism vindicated, the conscious intermediate state confirmed, Christ’s descent and the patristic descent tradition recovered, the final-decision hypothesis seriously engaged, and a Christological argument that physicalism cannot host. Part VIII handled the shadows and edges: distressing NDEs, cross-religious patterns, Christian discernment, children’s NDEs. And Part IX turned to pastoral theology — dying well, companioning the dying, the deathbed of the unbeliever.
Across nine Parts and thirty-four chapters, then, one cumulative thesis: substance dualism is empirically supported; the conscious intermediate state is empirically supported; the encounter with Christ at the threshold of death is empirically attested; the historic Christian theological anthropology is vindicated; postmortem opportunity is theologically defensible and pastorally hopeful. The book’s argument does not depend on any single case. It depends on a converging body of evidence read alongside a two-thousand-year theological tradition that, against all expectation, the evidence quietly confirms.
Key Argument
The cumulative case is not that NDE evidence proves Christianity. It is that NDE evidence supports substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state — and that the historic Christian tradition has, all along, been describing the very threshold of death that NDE researchers stumbled upon in the 1970s. The convergence is not coincidence. It is recognition.
So what, in the end, have we learned from those who were dead and came back? Six things, gathered into a small bundle. They are not new. The church has been saying most of them for two thousand years. What is new is that we now have a body of evidence, gathered painstakingly by physicians and researchers (most of them not Christian), that turns out to confirm what the church has been saying. The dying are teachers. We have only to listen.
About human nature. Humans are not merely physical. The soul is real. Consciousness is not identical with brain function. The body is the soul’s instrument, not its source. This is not a Greek import smuggled into Hebrew anthropology, as some Christian physicalists have argued.4 It is the consistent witness of Scripture, of the patristic tradition, of the medieval and Reformation churches, of the early conditionalists like Edward Fudge — and now, of the dying themselves, who report perceiving the world from outside the body during periods their brains were not generating consciousness. The Hebrew anthropology of the Old Testament, with its nephesh (soul, life) and ruach (spirit), and the Greek anthropology of the New Testament, with its psychē (soul) and pneuma (spirit), are not at war. They are agreeing about the same human being — embodied, ensouled, made for life with God.
About death. Death is a transition, not an ending. The dying soul does not face emptiness. It faces a Person. The transition, for most NDErs, is not terrifying but peaceful — sometimes radiantly so. Fear is the human response. It is not the appropriate Christian response, because the dying Christian is not stepping off a cliff. They are stepping into an embrace they have been preparing for all their life.
About Christ. Christ has descended. Christ meets every dying soul. The encounter is real. The love is real. The patristic descent tradition — long marginalized in Western Protestantism — turns out to be the theological key that unlocks the strange empirical fact that NDErs from radically different cultures and religious backgrounds describe encounters with the same kind of Person: a being of overwhelming light and overwhelming love, who knows them, who shows them their lives, who offers them a choice.5 The opportunity for response is genuine.
About the church’s mission. If Christ meets every dying soul, then the mission of the church is not to rescue people from a torment they would otherwise enter the second they die. It is to introduce them, in this life, to a Person they will meet anyway. That changes the music of evangelism. The motivation becomes love rather than fear. The basis of hope for the unbelieving becomes Christ’s faithful pursuit, not our own desperate persuasion. The gospel becomes good news again rather than a frantic countdown.
About suffering. Suffering is real. Many people suffer terribly as they die. The book does not pretend otherwise. But the encounter at the threshold is greater than the suffering. The dying who have crossed and come back nearly all describe peace breaking through pain — not pain erased, but pain swallowed. Hope here is not sentimental. It is empirically grounded.6
About the church’s future. The contemporary church can recover what it has largely lost: the lost arts of dying well and companioning the dying. The historic Ars Moriendi tradition is not dead. The patristic resources are still on the shelf. The hospice movement is teaching us, again, what the medieval church knew. The NDE evidence does not replace any of this. It confirms it. And it gives the contemporary pastor empirical ground on which to stand when he tells the dying believer that the next breath will not be the last.
Out of those six lessons, I see a pastoral and theological vision the church might actually take up. On the pastoral side: local churches recovering the Ars Moriendi tradition in modern dress, with deathbed liturgies that name what is happening; pastors trained in actual deathbed ministry rather than left to improvise; Christian hospices and palliative-care ministries that integrate medical care with the theological reality of dying; liturgical renewal around the threshold — commendations, anointings, the prayers of the dying; and pastoral resources for the bereaved that hold grief and hope together without erasing either.7
On the theological side: a revival of substance dualism in evangelical theology, no longer apologizing for it as a Hellenistic embarrassment but defending it as biblical and now empirically supported; a renewed engagement with the patristic descent tradition and the long-hope tradition that grew from it; a serious wrestling within the conditional-immortality movement with its own anthropological choices, particularly the temptation to baptize a physicalism the historic CI tradition never held; and an integration — not a confusion — of empirical evidence and theological reflection, in which the data confirm what Scripture has been saying all along without ever pretending to displace it.
Pastoral
If you are a pastor reading this, my plea is small and concrete. Read one of the books in Appendix B. Sit with one dying parishioner this year longer than the schedule allows. Pray the historic deathbed prayers over a dying saint. Discover that this is recoverable ministry — and that it is one of the deepest ministries the church has ever known.
I want to be honest about what this book has not done. Three limits matter.
First, NDE evidence is not Scripture. It confirms what Scripture teaches. It does not replace it. Where an NDE account contradicts Scripture — reincarnation imagery, syncretist theology, denial of judgment — the NDE account is wrong on those points. Scripture remains the rule and the test. NDEs are illustrative; they are not foundational.
Second, individual NDE testimony requires discernment. Not every NDE book on the shelf is reliable. Not every televised NDE story holds up to scrutiny. Chapter 30 and Appendix C develop a working framework. Pastors and lay readers need that framework before they recommend a specific NDE memoir to a grieving widow.
Third, the book has settled the substance-dualism question, not the eschatological question. Whether conditional immortality, biblical universalism, or some traditional view of eternal conscious torment is the final word about the unrepentant — that the NDE evidence cannot tell us, because every NDEr returned. Every reported experience covers, at most, the first hour of the postmortem journey. My own primary position remains conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, with genuine openness to conservative biblical universalism — but those questions are settled, if at all, in other works, not here.8
And several things remain genuinely uncertain. The precise eschatological details. The scope of postmortem opportunity. The mechanism by which an immaterial soul interacts with a physical brain. The full nature of the intermediate state between the early phase NDErs glimpse and the final resurrection. I do not pretend to have settled these. The book hopes only to have moved the conversation forward by establishing the ground on which they must be discussed.
This book sits within a larger project. Beyond the Grave developed the biblical and systematic case for postmortem opportunity. Death Is Not the Deadline took on the verse-by-verse rebuttal of strict restrictivism. The Long Hope, the historical-theological companion volume, traced the patristic and medieval traditions of postmortem hope from the Apostolic Fathers through the Reformers and beyond.9 This volume, When Death Approaches, develops the empirical and pastoral theology of dying. Together the four constitute a comprehensive treatment of what I have come to call the long-hope tradition: that the love of God in Christ does not abandon any soul, that the encounter Christ has with the dying is real, and that the door of grace does not slam shut at the moment the heart stops.
I want to address you directly, in the categories I imagine you may be reading from.
If you are dying: hope. Your body is letting go, but you are not your body alone. Christ has descended, and Christ rises again to meet you. The evidence is in your favor. The tradition is in your favor. The Lord Himself is in your favor. Whatever else dying is, it is not the end of you.
If you are caring for the dying: be present, pray, trust. Speak as if your loved one hears, because they may. Calm the room. Hold the hand. Speak Christ’s name softly. You are not the savior in that room; Christ is. But you are His witness, and your presence is itself a kind of liturgy.
If you are bereaved: the encounter was real. Whatever you did or did not say in time, Christ Himself met your beloved at the threshold. Grieve fully — the loss is real, the absence is real — but grieve in hope, not in horror. The God who meets every soul met yours.
If you are a pastor: this is recoverable ministry. The deathbed is not a place where the church should be silent. Train for it. Teach for it. Preach the Christian deathbed back into the Christian imagination. There is no parishioner you will serve more deeply than the one you serve dying.
If you are a theologian: substance dualism deserves a fresh hearing. Not the cartoon Cartesian version, but the holistic dualism of John Cooper, J. P. Moreland, Charles Taliaferro — the position that has held the historic Christian field for nineteen centuries and now has empirical support to add to its biblical and philosophical credentials. The contemporary Christian-physicalist alternative, however earnestly defended, has to explain a great deal of evidence it does not currently account for.10
If you are skeptical: the empirical case deserves engagement, not dismissal. Read the AWARE studies. Read van Lommel’s Lancet paper. Read the cases of the congenitally blind. Find your strongest physicalist explanation and apply it honestly to the cumulative evidence. If, after that, you still hold a confident materialism, you will at least hold it on better grounds than most who hold it now.
Case Study
One of the cases that has stayed with me longest is a Vietnam veteran in the dissertation database who suffered cardiac arrest during routine surgery. His EEG went flat for nearly three minutes. He later described, with documented accuracy, the position of the surgeon’s hands, the conversation between the anesthesiologist and the circulating nurse about a stalled car in the parking lot, and the small jagged shape of a chip in the ceiling tile above the operating table. Then, he said, the room dimmed. He felt himself drawn toward something larger than the room. He saw — he insisted on the verb — a Person. He said he came back not because he wanted to but because the Person sent him back. He has not been the same since. Whatever else this case is, it is not nothing. The cumulative weight of cases like his — thousands of them — is what the book has tried to honor.
The dying have taught us. They have taught us that consciousness is not the same as the brain. They have taught us that the soul is real. They have taught us that the encounter at the threshold is not nothing but Someone. They have taught us that the historic Christian tradition has been telling the truth about death all along.
They have taught us to hope. Not the brittle, abstract hope of a doctrine merely affirmed, but the empirically grounded, theologically anchored, pastorally usable hope of a Christ who has gone before and goes still — into the rooms of the dying, into the small hours of cardiac arrest, into the silence after the heart stops — and meets every soul there.
They have taught us to trust. The soul is in the hand of a faithful God. The body is being unmade only that it might be remade. The Christ who descended has not forgotten the descent.
They have taught us to love. The dying are not problems to be solved but persons to be accompanied. The bereaved are not patients of grief but bearers of love that has not stopped, only changed direction. The Christ who meets the dying meets them, in part, through us.
And they have taught us, above all, to believe. To believe that when our turn comes, when the heart begins to slow and the breath to space itself out and the lights of the room begin to dim, the One we have loved without seeing will be there. The descent of Christ is not theory. It is the country we are walking into. May we, when our turn comes, recognize Him.
— Matthew Friend, Th.D.
Omaha, Nebraska
↑ 1. The argument that the “I” of a person is not identical with the brain is developed in Chapter 2 conceptually and in Chapter 23 as the empirical conclusion. See also John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014).
↑ 2. The thirty-three congenitally and adventitiously blind cases are catalogued in Chapter 11. The foundational study remains Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind (Palo Alto: William James Center, 1999), with the Vicki Umipeg and Brad Barrows cases discussed at length.
↑ 3. See the dissertation, Matthew Friend, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for Substance Dualism within the Conditional Immortality Debate (Th.D. diss., Trinity College of the Bible and Trinity Theological Seminary, 2025), Chs. 3–4 for the full quantitative analysis. The three-dimensional scoring system is described in Appendix A; the cumulative-case argument across the database is owned by Chapter 14.
↑ 4. The “Greek-contamination” charge against substance dualism is most prominently advanced in Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), and Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Cooper’s Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting remains the most thorough evangelical reply, demonstrating the dualist tradition’s biblical roots in Hebrew anthropology, Second Temple Judaism, and the New Testament. See also Stephen Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife?, foreword by Nigel G. Wright (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014), Ch. 3, on the dualist anthropology presupposed by the standard PO/intermediate-state passages.
↑ 5. The descent tradition and its application to NDE phenomenology is owned by Chapter 25. Indispensable historical work: Jeffrey A. Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead: The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The contemporary evangelical case for postmortem opportunity rooted in the descent: James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021), esp. Chs. 2–3.
↑ 6. On the relative peace of the typical NDE transition, see Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021); Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010). On distressing NDEs as the qualified counter-pattern, see Chapter 28 and Nancy Evans Bush, Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences (n.p.: Bush, 2012).
↑ 7. On the recovered Ars Moriendi tradition, see Allen Verhey, The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); Lydia S. Dugdale, The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom (New York: HarperOne, 2020). For the contemporary medicalization-of-dying critique that frames the recovery, see Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (New York: Metropolitan, 2014). On the deathbed companioning ministry specifically, see Henri J. M. Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994); Christopher Kerr with Carine Mardorossian, Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life’s End (New York: Avery, 2020).
↑ 8. For my fuller treatment of the eschatological question, see Matthew Friend, Beyond the Grave (forthcoming) and Death Is Not the Deadline (forthcoming). For the strongest contemporary cases on the various sides: Edward Fudge, The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011) for conditional immortality; Gregory MacDonald [Robin A. Parry], The Evangelical Universalist, 2nd ed., foreword by Oliver D. Crisp (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), and Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), for biblical universalism; R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), for a non-strict-ECT restrictivism; Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: The Logic of Apokatastasis (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2023), for the most recent comprehensive UR case.
↑ 9. The four-volume long-hope project is described in the preface and revisited briefly in the prefaces of the other three volumes. The contemporary literature on which the project draws is annotated in Appendix B. See especially Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity; Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave; Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death: Awakening to Eternal Life, trans. Gregory Bainbridge OSB, intro. and commentary Cynthia Bourgeault (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish, 2020); William Harrison, Is Salvation Possible After Death? (n.p.: Harrison, 2019); Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010).
↑ 10. The Christological argument against Christian physicalism — that the historic confession of Christ crucified, in the tomb, raised, requires a metaphysics physicalism cannot host — is owned by Chapter 27 and developed at length in the dissertation, Appendix C. For the holistic-dualist position the book defends, see esp. Charles Taliaferro, Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, A Brief History of the Soul (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting; Moreland, The Soul.