Chapter 28
When the light is not the first thing the dying see — and what that does and does not tell us about the hereafter
He was a college professor. Not a religious man. By his own later telling, he was the kind of person who looked down on people who took religion seriously. He had built a comfortable life around his intellect, his reputation, and his ambitions. And then his stomach gave out.1
It happened in a hospital in Paris. He was on a sabbatical with his wife. The pain came on suddenly, and what should have been a treatable condition became an emergency. The nurses and doctors moved fast. He drifted in and out. And then he found himself standing — standing — next to his own body in the hospital bed.
What followed, he would later say, was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
He was led down a long corridor by figures he could not quite see. At first they seemed friendly. Then their tone changed. He realized, with a horror that was sharper than any pain he had ever known, that they meant to hurt him. The corridor ended somewhere dark. He was in a place where the air felt wrong, where every cell of him understood that he did not belong, that he was being unmade. There was no fire in the cartoon sense. There was something worse: a settled, unhurried cruelty, and the knowledge that no one was coming.
He fought. He cursed. He tried to think his way out, the way he had thought his way out of every problem in his adult life. None of it helped. The figures laughed at him. He was being dismantled.
And then, from somewhere he could not name, an old fragment surfaced — a half-remembered Sunday school song from a childhood he had long since dismissed. Something about Jesus loving him. He could not remember the words. He could not even remember whether he believed them. But in the dark, with nothing left, he sang what he could of it.
The figures shrieked and pulled back.
And then, from a long way off but coming closer, he saw a light. Not the kind of light that fills a room. The kind of light that fills you — that fills everything you ever were and everything you might still be. He cried out. The light came. He was lifted out of the dark. He was held. He was loved.2
That is, in compressed form, the testimony of Howard Storm. It is not the standard near-death experience. It is not the peaceful tunnel and the welcoming relatives and the gentle Being of Light meeting the dying soul at the threshold. It is something else. It is darker. It is more disturbing. And it is real.
Anyone writing about NDEs has to deal with stories like Storm’s. Most of the literature, popular and scholarly, focuses on the peaceful cases — for understandable reasons. They are more common. They are easier to talk about. They make for better book covers. But they are not the whole picture.
A minority of NDErs do not see the light first. They see the dark. They feel terror, abandonment, isolation. Some of them describe imagery that maps onto the most traditional Christian pictures of hell. Some of them describe nothing at all — just an unbearable nothingness. Some of them, like Storm, find their way out. Some don’t.
What do we do with these accounts? That is the question this chapter takes up. And it is not a small question. If a meaningful percentage of dying souls report something hellish at the threshold of death, that has obvious implications for the Christian doctrine of hell — or seems to. We need to be careful here. The story is more complicated than it first looks.
Let me say at the outset what this chapter is and is not trying to do.
This chapter is not an argument for any particular doctrine of hell. The big questions — eternal conscious torment (ECT), conditional immortality (CI), universal reconciliation (UR) — are debated in serious detail elsewhere in my work and in the larger contemporary conversation.3 I hold a particular view: conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, with genuine openness to a conservative biblical universalism. I will tell you where I land. But I will not pretend that distressing NDEs settle the debate. They don’t. They are consistent with several positions. The data, read honestly, leave room for ongoing disagreement among Christians who care about Scripture.
This chapter is also not a sensationalized tour of “hell experiences.” A whole subgenre of popular Christian publishing has built itself on lurid retellings of distressing NDEs presented as proof of the worst things you can imagine.4 I am not interested in joining that genre. The pastoral cost of those books has been heavy. They have terrified the dying. They have re-traumatized the bereaved. They have turned what should be a careful theological inquiry into a marketing strategy. We can do better.
What this chapter is trying to do is simpler and harder. I want to walk through the actual research on distressing NDEs — the careful, peer-reviewed, decades-long body of work most readers have never heard of — and ask what it shows. I want to put that research in conversation with the most thoughtful contemporary theological accounts of hell, including ones I disagree with. And I want to ask, at the end, what a Christian who is dying, or watching someone die, or pastoring someone who has had such an experience, should do with all of it.
Here is the thesis. Distressing NDEs are real. They are a recognizable subset of the broader phenomenon. They follow patterns that researchers have documented carefully. But they do not by themselves settle the question of hell. They are compatible with several theological readings. Read most charitably and most consistently with the rest of the NDE evidence, they fit a framework I find theologically and pastorally most coherent: the soul, in dying, encounters the same loving God that all souls encounter; what differs is the soul’s response to that encounter; some respond in fear or rejection, and that response — not a separate place — is what the “hell” imagery in distressing NDEs reflects. The destiny of those who finally and irrevocably refuse the encounter is then a separate eschatological question that the NDE evidence does not, by itself, resolve.
Stay with me. The argument requires patience.
The serious academic study of distressing NDEs begins with a 1992 paper in the journal Psychiatry by Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush.5 Greyson is a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and one of the most respected NDE researchers alive. Bush is a former IANDS director who has spent decades collecting and analyzing distressing NDE accounts. Their paper did something nobody had done before: it took the difficult cases seriously, it sorted them into recognizable types, and it asked what kind of evidence they were.
Greyson and Bush identified three subtypes of distressing NDE. The names have stuck.
The first subtype is the most theologically interesting and the most commonly missed. Greyson and Bush called it the “inverse” distressing NDE. The phenomenology — the actual elements that show up in the report — is identical to a peaceful NDE. The same darkness opens up. The same passage. The same approaching light. The same sense of presence. The same expanded awareness.
What is different is the experiencer’s interpretation of all of it.
Where the peaceful NDEr reports the tunnel as warm and welcoming, the inverse NDEr reports it as terrifying. Where the peaceful NDEr reports the light as loving, the inverse NDEr reports it as searing, exposing, overwhelming. Where the peaceful NDEr feels welcomed by the presence, the inverse NDEr feels confronted, judged, or pursued. The objective elements appear to be the same. The subjective response is the opposite.6
This subtype is critical, and we will come back to it.
The second subtype is bleaker. Greyson and Bush called it the “void” experience, sometimes also called “eternal nothingness.” The experiencer reports being suspended in a darkness that has no feature, no edge, no presence. There is no movement. There is no encounter. There is no relief. There is just the experiencer, alone, in what feels like permanent abandonment.
Bush has written movingly about this subtype in her book Dancing Past the Dark, which collects and analyzes hundreds of such accounts.7 The void experience is harder to shake than the more dramatic hellish reports. Some experiencers report returning to ordinary life and being unable to enjoy ordinary things for years afterward, because the memory of the void haunts them. They cannot quite trust that anything is real anymore.
I want to slow down on this subtype for a moment because it is the most theologically puzzling of the three and the most pastorally undertreated. The void NDEr is not seeing demons. The void NDEr is not feeling the heat of any fire. The void NDEr is in something that has no content. The phenomenology is closer to what the philosopher might call “pure absence” than to anything in the traditional iconography of hell.
Some void experiencers describe the absence as cold. Some describe it as gray. Some describe being aware of themselves as a kind of point or thread of consciousness with nothing around it. Some describe the suspension as enduring — subjectively, for what seemed like years — even though the medical event lasted only minutes. The terror of the void is not the terror of being attacked. It is the terror of being forgotten. Of having the universe simply close behind you.
Why does this matter? Because the void subtype is harder to fit into traditional ECT frameworks than the hellish subtype is. The traditional picture of hell is occupied: there are demons, fire, the company of the damned. The void is unoccupied. It is what nothing feels like. And as we will see, the void subtype maps more naturally onto certain readings of the conditional-immortality framework — in which the soul that is being unmade is, as it were, beginning to feel its unmaking — than onto the traditional retributive picture.
The third subtype is the one that gets the most attention and the one that most resembles traditional Christian hell imagery. Greyson and Bush called it “hellish.” The experiencer reports explicit imagery of demons, fire, screams, torment, malevolent figures. The setting is dark and sometimes underground. The figures are sometimes human-like, sometimes monstrous.
Howard Storm’s account, summarized at the start of this chapter, falls into this third subtype. So do most of the cases that have gotten popular Christian attention — the ones reproduced in books and on websites.
It is worth saying something pastorally important here at the start: the “hellish” subtype is a real category, but it is also probably the rarest of the three. The void and inverse subtypes appear to be more common. The lurid imagery is the exception, not the norm, even among distressing NDEs.8
Case Study — The Three Subtypes in One Person’s Words
One of the difficulties with distressing NDE research is that experiencers often do not fit neatly into one category. Bush has documented cases that began as inverse experiences (a tunnel and light interpreted as terror), shifted into void (a sense of being abandoned in featureless darkness), and culminated in hellish imagery (encounters with figures the experiencer named as demonic). The three subtypes are useful as a taxonomy but not always cleanly separable in practice. What unites them is the affective signature: terror, isolation, despair — rather than peace, welcome, and love.
This is where the literature gets messy.
Early NDE research, in the 1970s and 1980s, almost entirely missed distressing NDEs. The major works of Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, and Michael Sabom focus on peaceful experiences.9 When Sabom did note distressing reports, they were a small minority of his sample.
Several factors made distressing NDEs hard to count. First, experiencers are reluctant to talk about them. A pleasant tunnel and a meeting with a deceased grandmother is something you tell your family. A dark corridor with malevolent figures is something you keep to yourself. Second, researchers in the early decades sometimes assumed without arguing that distressing NDEs were either rare or somehow not “real” NDEs — an assumption that biased the data. Third, the experiences themselves can be hard to classify. An NDE that begins distressingly and ends peacefully — the Howard Storm pattern — might get filed under either category depending on the researcher’s emphasis.10
Recent estimates, when researchers ask carefully and create safe space for reporting, place distressing NDEs at somewhere between fifteen and twenty-three percent of all NDEs.11 Bush’s longer engagement suggests that the number could be higher still — not because most NDEs are distressing, but because under-reporting has been substantial. My own dissertation analysis found a distressing-NDE sub-category in the broader 5,278-case dataset that was consistent with this range, with the qualification that the open-source databases (NDERF and IANDS) are themselves subject to self-selection bias on the part of experiencers willing to share their accounts publicly.12
What does that mean? Roughly: out of every five or six NDEs we know about, one is distressing. That is not most of them. But it is not nothing. It is enough to require careful theological attention.
Storm’s case has become a kind of paradigm for one specific arc within the distressing-NDE literature: the experience that begins distressingly and ends in deliverance. The pattern, when you find it, looks something like this. The experiencer enters the dying state with little or no relationship to Christ. The early phase of the NDE is dark, terrifying, and isolating. At some point, the experiencer reaches the limit of what they can bear. They cry out — sometimes in words, sometimes wordlessly — for help. The cry is heard. A presence comes. The experiencer is lifted into a peaceful encounter with what they typically describe as Christ. The NDE ends with a sense of being called back to life. The experiencer returns transformed, often dramatically, often into Christian faith or a deepened version of it.13
It is not the only arc. Some distressing NDEs do not resolve. Some end with the experiencer being pulled back to life from within the dark, never reaching the light. Some are mixed in ways that resist any tidy summary. But the Storm arc is common enough — and theologically loaded enough — that we have to think carefully about it.
Storm himself was a professor of art at Northern Kentucky University. He published his account in My Descent into Death, which I would commend to anyone wrestling with these questions, with the caveat that Storm’s post-NDE theological development has gone in a more universalist direction than my own settled position; readers should weigh his framework alongside the Scripture-grounded discernment we will discuss in Chapter 30.14 His personal trajectory, however, is undeniable. The man who returned from that hospital bed in Paris was not the man who had entered it. He left academia. He went to seminary. He became a pastor. The fruit of his life since is consistent with what Christians since the apostolic era have called genuine conversion.15
What does the Storm pattern tell us? At minimum, this: distressing NDEs are not simply foretastes of hell from which there is no escape. They are sometimes — perhaps often — encounters in which the soul, even at the threshold of death, can call out and be heard. The encounter with Christ is available even there. That is a significant theological claim, and I will return to it.
It is also worth noting that the Storm arc — descent into terror, cry from the depths, answering presence, deliverance — is not strange to Scripture. It is, in fact, one of the most common shapes of biblical prayer. Jonah cries out from the belly of the fish and from what he calls Sheol itself, and is heard. The psalmist cries from the deep waters and from the pit, and is heard. The thief on the cross, in the last minutes of his life, asks Jesus to remember him and is told he will be in paradise. The Christian tradition has always read the Psalms of lament not as exceptions to faith but as expressions of it: faith is what the soul does in the dark when there is nothing left but a cry. If the Storm pattern is unsettling for some readers, it is partly because we have grown used to a sentimentalized version of evangelical conversion that does not include the depth from which biblical conversion is so often cried. The distressing NDEs that resolve are, in this respect, structurally similar to a great many of the conversion accounts found in Scripture itself.
None of this means that every distressing NDE will resolve in this life. Some experiencers do not, in their NDE itself, reach the answering presence; they are pulled back to mortal life from within the dark. What that means for them theologically is one of the most important pastoral questions raised by the literature. We will come back to it. For now, the more limited claim suffices: the cry from within the dark is, in many documented cases, heard. That alone changes how an honest Christian theology has to read the distressing-NDE category.
No serious treatment of distressing NDEs can skip Maurice Rawlings. And no serious treatment can rest on him.
Rawlings was a cardiologist who, in 1978, published Beyond Death’s Door, a book that argued against the optimistic picture emerging from Moody and others. Rawlings claimed that hellish NDEs were actually quite common, but that experiencers tended to repress or forget them by the time they were interviewed days or weeks later. His basis for this claim was clinical: he reported encountering distressing accounts when he interviewed patients in the immediate aftermath of resuscitation, and noted that those same accounts often softened or disappeared in later interviews.16
Subsequent research has not been kind to Rawlings’s methodology. The empirical claim — that immediate-interview NDE reports are systematically more distressing than later reports — has not held up under controlled study. Greyson and others have noted that Rawlings’s sampling was unsystematic, that his case selection was theologically motivated in ways that compromised the data, and that the specific cases he leaned on most heavily contain inconsistencies that suggest editorial shaping rather than direct reporting.17
I bring this up because Rawlings still gets cited in popular Christian writing on NDEs, and the citation is a problem. Distressing NDEs are real. The case for them does not need Rawlings, and leaning on Rawlings actually weakens the case by associating it with methodologically poor work. The Greyson–Bush research and the broader peer-reviewed literature have established the distressing-NDE category on firm ground. We can be honest about that without retreating to the older sensational accounts.
Common Objection — “Doesn’t Rawlings Prove Hell?”
I have had this question put to me in pastoral conversations. The honest answer is no, and the reasoning is twofold. First, Rawlings’s specific empirical claim — that immediate post-resuscitation interviews yield systematically more hellish reports than later interviews — has not been replicated under careful conditions. Second, even if it had been replicated, the existence of distressing NDEs would not by itself prove eternal conscious torment. As we will see, distressing NDEs are compatible with several theological readings of hell, only one of which is the traditional ECT view. We should make our doctrinal arguments from Scripture, not from disputed clinical anecdotes.
So we have a recognizable phenomenon: a minority but significant subset of NDEs in which the experiencer reports terror, isolation, or torment-imagery rather than peace and light. What does this mean? Christians have offered at least five readings. I want to walk through each carefully, because the differences matter.
The first reading is the most common in popular Christian writing. On this view, distressing NDEs are exactly what they appear to be: previews of literal eternal hell, granted by God to specific souls as warnings. The hellish imagery is to be taken as pointing to a real place where the unsaved are tormented forever. Distressing NDEs, on this reading, are evidence that traditional ECT doctrine is correct and that the urgency of evangelism is even greater than we thought.18
I want to engage this reading respectfully. The Christians who hold it are often deeply serious about Scripture and deeply concerned for souls. I share their concern. But I do not think this reading is what the data actually show, and I do not think it is what Scripture, read carefully, requires.
The problems are several. First, the strict ECT reading has trouble explaining the Howard Storm arc. If a distressing NDE is a preview of literal eternal hell, why is it possible to call out from within it and be delivered? In Storm’s case, in countless similar cases, the cry was answered. The Christ who is supposedly absent from hell came. Either we are not seeing eternal hell, or eternal hell is not what we have been told it is.19
Second, the strict ECT reading has trouble with the inverse subtype. If a distressing NDE involves the same objective phenomenology as a peaceful one — the same tunnel, the same approaching light, the same presence — then we are not looking at two different places. We are looking at one encounter being met by two different kinds of soul. That is a finding theologically heavy with implications, and it does not square neatly with separate-place models of heaven and hell.
Third, the strict ECT reading has trouble with the broader biblical evidence about the duration and nature of postmortem judgment, an area I will not relitigate here but which I have written about elsewhere.20 The Greek word translated “eternal” in the relevant judgment passages (aiōnios) and the word translated “punishment” (kolasis) carry meanings broader than the strict ECT reading allows.21
I do not think the strict ECT reading is dishonest, and I do not think Christians who hold it are unintelligent. I think it is a possible reading. But I do not think it is required by the NDE data, and I think there are better readings available.
The second reading is one I find very illuminating, even though I do not endorse the framework in which its leading philosophical defender embeds it. R. Zachary Manis, in his Oxford monograph Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, develops what he calls the “divine presence model” of hell.22 The basic insight is simple, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.
What if the same divine presence is met by all the dead — saved and unsaved alike — and what we call heaven and hell are not separate places but the experience of that single presence by souls in different states? The prepared soul, the soul transformed by grace, meets the holy presence as the fulfillment of every longing. The unprepared soul, the soul still turned away from God, meets the same presence as exposure, terror, judgment.
This is not a new idea. It has roots in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, in passages from C. S. Lewis (Manis quotes a striking passage from Mere Christianity), in the writings of George MacDonald, and in scattered places in the patristic tradition. The fire of God’s love, on this view, is the same fire whether it warms or burns. What it does to a particular soul depends on the soul.23
What makes this reading so useful for our subject is that it explains the inverse subtype of distressing NDE almost perfectly. If the same objective encounter (the approaching light, the felt presence, the sense of complete exposure) is met by some souls as joy and by others as terror, then the inverse subtype is not anomalous — it is exactly what the divine presence framework would predict. The soul that has spent a lifetime turned away from love does not suddenly find love congenial when it appears. The soul accustomed to hiding does not enjoy being seen. The encounter is the same. The response differs.24
I find this phenomenological insight powerful, and I incorporate it into my own reading. I do not, however, follow Manis to his conclusion. Manis defends a version of eternal conscious torment in which the resistant soul continues, forever, to experience the presence of God as torment. I do not think the biblical evidence requires that conclusion, and I think the divine presence framework is actually compatible with conditional immortality (the resistant soul eventually ceases to exist) or with universalism (the resistant soul, given enough time and the right kind of love, eventually yields). What Manis has done is given us the phenomenology. The eschatology is a further question.25
Key Argument
The most important thing the divine presence framework gives us is this: distressing NDEs and peaceful NDEs do not require two different objective realities. They can be two different responses to the same reality. That single insight reorganizes the entire theological conversation about distressing NDEs — and once you have it, the strict ECT reading looks less like the obvious interpretation and more like one option among several.
The third reading draws on the older Christian purgatorial tradition. The idea is this: a distressing NDE is not a glimpse of final destination but a stage in the process of preparation. The soul, on its way to encountering Christ, must first encounter itself — its own sin, its own self-deception, its own resistance to love. That confrontation is necessarily painful. The pain is not punishment in any retributive sense; it is the burn of a wound being cleaned.26
This reading has a long pedigree. Early Greek Fathers like Origen and the Cappadocians wrote about postmortem purification in ways that anticipate this kind of phenomenology. Medieval Western theology developed the doctrine of purgatory in a more systematic direction. Protestant theology has historically been suspicious of purgatory because of its association with indulgences and merit-theology, but the underlying intuition — that the soul does not enter glory instantaneously and unprepared — has resurfaced repeatedly in Protestant thought, including in contemporary writers like Jerry Walls who argue that some kind of postmortem purification is biblically and philosophically warranted.27
If the pre-purgatorial reading is correct, then distressing NDEs — particularly the Howard Storm arc — are not previews of damnation but stages of preparation. The terror is real. The confrontation is real. But the trajectory is toward Christ, not away from Him. The distressing phase is preparatory, not final.
I take this reading seriously. I think it captures something true about what is happening in cases like Storm’s. I would not, however, lean my whole framework on it, because I do not think the biblical case for purgatory in the strict medieval sense is settled. What I do think is that the broader insight — that the soul must in some sense be confronted with itself before it can rest in God — is biblically and theologically defensible, and that it helps explain the structure of many distressing NDEs.
The fourth reading is the one I hold most firmly, though with continued openness to the fifth. On this view, distressing NDEs are real phenomenological episodes within a larger framework that holds the following: God genuinely loves every person and offers Christ to every person, with the offer extending beyond physical death; some souls respond and are saved; some souls finally and persistently refuse, and those who refuse are not tormented forever but are eventually destroyed — they cease to exist.28
This is conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity. It is the position I have defended at length elsewhere and the position from which I read the NDE evidence in this book.29 Within this framework, distressing NDEs make sense in several ways.
They make sense as warnings. A soul on a trajectory of refusal — a soul whose habits of self-orientation are deeply set — may be granted a glimpse, in the dying state, of what its trajectory looks like from the outside. The terror, the isolation, the sense of being unmade are not arbitrary. They are what self-orientation actually is when the supports of bodily life and social distraction fall away. The distressing NDE shows the soul where it is going. The mercy of the warning is that there is still time to turn.
They make sense as opportunities. The Howard Storm arc fits this directly. Storm reached the limit of what self-reliance could do for him and called out. The cry was answered. That answering — the appearance of Christ in the dark — is the hinge of conditional-immortality theology. God does not give up on souls at the moment of biological death. The encounter with Christ is offered. Some respond.30
They make sense, finally, as glimpses of trajectory. The soul that persists in refusal, all the way through the offered encounter with Christ, will not be tormented forever. It will finally cease. The void experience — the sense of being abandoned in featureless darkness — may be the closest empirical correlate we have, in the NDE literature, to what that final ceasing looks like as it begins. The soul is being unmade. Where there was a self, there is becoming nothing.31
I want to be careful here. I am not claiming that any specific NDEr who returned was on the brink of final destruction. They were not, by definition: they returned. What I am claiming is that the phenomenology of the distressing NDE — especially the void subtype — is consistent with a theological framework in which final destruction, not eternal torment, is the destiny of those who finally refuse. CI does not require ECT-flavored hell imagery. It requires only that the encounter with God be real, that the response be genuinely free, and that those who finally refuse the encounter cease.
Let me say a little more about why the CI framework reads the NDE evidence with what I take to be unusual fit. Three points.
First, the CI framework can affirm everything the divine presence model affirms about the inverse subtype. The same Christ is met by all dying souls. Some meet Him as joy and some meet Him as terror, depending on the state of the soul. CI does not require that there be two different places, one full of God and one empty of Him. CI is fully compatible with the patristic insight that hell is the experience of the divine presence by a soul unprepared to bear it. What CI adds is that this experience does not have to continue forever. The soul that cannot finally come to bear the divine presence as love is not condemned to bear it as torment for eternity; the soul, after the offered encounter has been finally refused, simply ceases.
Second, the CI framework is not a theology of stinginess. It is a theology of God’s patience. The mercy of conditional immortality is not in saving the lost, which God does not do against their final will; the mercy is in not subjecting the lost to interminable conscious torment when their final answer has been given. There is something in the deepest moral instincts of the Christian church that has always resisted the picture of God maintaining souls in misery for eternity simply because they refused His love. Conditional immortality honors that instinct without becoming sentimental about the seriousness of refusal.32
Third, the CI framework with postmortem opportunity is a theology of God’s patience extended through the threshold of death. The cry from within the dark, on this view, is heard not because the soul has somehow earned a second chance but because Christ never stops offering. The encounter at the threshold is not a last desperate scramble. It is the same encounter that Christ has been pursuing the soul toward for the soul’s entire life, only now stripped of every distraction. The Storm pattern is what the offer of grace looks like at the moment of dying when there is finally nothing left between the soul and Christ.33
What the framework cannot tell us — and here I come to the question I am still working out — is whether some souls do, in fact, finally refuse the offer when it is fully presented. The conditional-immortality framework holds that they do; the universalist framework holds that they do not. Both readings can incorporate the same NDE evidence. The difference is at a level the NDE evidence cannot reach.
The fifth reading is one I do not hold but am genuinely open to, and one I want to engage at full strength. On this view, every distressing NDE is part of a process that ultimately ends in the soul’s reconciliation with God. No soul is finally lost. The fire that distressing NDErs experience is the same fire that purifies all souls; for the prepared soul it is light, for the unprepared soul it burns until what cannot be saved is consumed and what can be saved is freed.
The most rigorous contemporary defender of this view is the philosopher Thomas Talbott, whose book The Inescapable Love of God is the leading analytic case for Christian universalism.34 Talbott argues that the New Testament word for “punishment” in the major eschatological passages — kolasis — carries a meaning of corrective discipline rather than retributive torment. Eschatological punishment, on his reading, is for the punished, not against them. It is therapeutic. It is meant to heal. And because God is omnipotent and infinitely loving, the therapy will eventually work. Not because human freedom is overridden, but because God is patient and good enough to keep offering, in whatever form is needed, until the soul finally yields.35
Talbott’s linguistic argument deserves more weight than evangelicals have generally given it. The standard Greek lexicons recognize the corrective-disciplinary semantic field of kolasis: the word originally referred to pruning trees, then to chastisement aimed at the improvement of the chastened, and only secondarily to mere punishment. Aristotle drew an explicit distinction between kolasis — punishment for the sake of the one being punished — and timoria — punishment for the sake of the punisher. The New Testament uses kolasis. If the choice of word is theologically meaningful, then Matthew 25:46 should be read in the corrective-disciplinary sense rather than the strict retributive one.36
Sharon Baker’s Razing Hell works in a similar direction from a more biblical-theological angle, reframing the “fire” and “outer darkness” imagery within a restorative-justice framework rather than a retributive one.37 Baker offers a vivid imaginative account of a wicked man named Otto, who at judgment is confronted by the fire of God’s presence, undergoes a thorough exposure of the harm he has done, and is brought through that exposure to repentance and reconciliation — though Baker also leaves room for the possibility that some souls do not yield and are finally annihilated.38
Robin Parry, writing under the pseudonym Gregory MacDonald, has produced what is probably the most evangelically accessible UR articulation in The Evangelical Universalist, working through the relevant biblical material with care and arguing that a universalist reading of the eschatological texts is internally coherent and theologically attractive.39 And Andrew Hronich’s recent Once Loved, Always Loved offers a comprehensive engagement with both the conditional-immortality and purifying-fire readings, drawing the conclusion that the latter is finally more biblically and morally satisfying.40
Hronich’s engagement with conditional immortality is particularly important for any honest CI advocate to read. He notes that CI shares with traditional ECT the assumption that some souls are finally lost, and asks whether the difference between “lost forever in torment” and “lost forever in non-existence” is as morally significant as CI advocates have suggested. From the perspective of God’s purposes for those souls, both involve final loss. The deeper question, for Hronich, is whether infinite love is finally compatible with any version of final loss at all.41
What does the universalist reading do with distressing NDEs? It treats them as the first stages of the long work of love. The soul that finds itself in the dark is not destined for the dark forever. The soul that is unmade in the void is not unmade for nothing. The soul will, eventually, come home. Distressing NDEs are not previews of final loss. They are previews of the painful but redeemable confrontation that the soul must finally undergo.
I find this reading theologically attractive in many ways. I share its instinct that God’s love is more determined than human resistance. I share its concern that strict ECT puts pressure on the very nature of divine love. I share its sense that the New Testament’s judgment language is more about purification than retribution. The reason I have not finally settled on it is that I am not sure the biblical evidence rules out the conditional-immortality alternative — in which God’s love is fully offered, fully available, and yet some souls (mysteriously, tragically) finally refuse it.42
I am, in other words, working out something between Reading 4 and Reading 5. I tilt toward 4. I am open to 5. I do not think the NDE data settle the question between them. They are compatible with both. And I want to be honest with the reader that this is where my own thinking is, not pretending to a settledness I do not have.
Note — The Core Methodological Point
The five readings above differ in their eschatology — in what they say about the final destiny of souls who do not respond to Christ. They do not differ much in what they say about the immediate phenomenology of distressing NDEs. All five readings can accept that distressing NDEs are real, that they follow the patterns documented by Greyson and Bush, and that the experiencer encounters something theologically significant. Where they part ways is in what they say about the larger eschatological frame in which the distressing experience sits. The NDE evidence, by itself, cannot decide among them. Scripture, theological reasoning, and the broader Christian tradition have to do that work.
Before I move to assessment, I owe the careful reader a discussion of what the physicalist literature says about distressing NDEs. The physicalist asks: maybe these are not encounters with anything real at all. Maybe they are entirely products of the dying brain.
The physicalist account of distressing NDEs runs along several lines. First, the dying brain may produce terror states for purely physiological reasons. Anoxia — the loss of oxygen to brain tissue — produces predictable patterns of cortical disorganization that can include intense fear.43 A distressing NDE, on this account, might simply be what an anoxic episode feels like for a particular brain. Second, drugs given during resuscitation can have terror-producing side effects. Ketamine in particular, sometimes used in trauma settings, is well known for producing dissociative experiences with frightening features.44 Third, fear itself is a feedback system. A patient who is conscious of dying may experience escalating panic that feeds on itself, producing increasingly distressing imagery.
I want to give these explanations their due. They likely account for some distressing NDE-like reports. Patients who report fragmentary, confused, panic-flavored experiences in the immediate aftermath of cardiac arrest may indeed be reporting the felt texture of anoxic cortical disorganization rather than anything more.
But the physicalist explanations have the same problem with distressing NDEs that they have with peaceful ones, and the problem is structural. Many distressing NDEs include veridical elements — accurate reports of events the experiencer could not have observed by any ordinary means — and these elements rule out simple anoxic-confusion accounts. Many distressing NDEs occur in patients who received no drugs that would explain the imagery. Many distressing NDEs include the hallmark structural features of NDEs more broadly — the OBE phase, the sense of moving through a transition, the encounter with figures — in a coherent rather than fragmentary form, which is not what anoxic confusion looks like clinically.45
The Howard Storm case is a useful example. Storm’s account, told and retold consistently across decades, has the structural coherence of a remembered experience, not the fragmentary scrap of an anoxic episode. He reports veridical perception of his hospital room. His narrative arc — the corridor, the figures, the calling out, the answering presence — has the shape of an experienced sequence. The physicalist must say either that the entire account is post-hoc confabulation (a heavy lift given Storm’s consistency and the testimony of his wife and others present at the hospital) or that anoxia produced a coherent narrative experience structurally indistinguishable from a peaceful NDE except in affective valence (which would be a remarkable claim about anoxic cortical states).46
What I think the physicalist literature actually shows is this: some experiences that look like distressing NDEs probably are physiological terror states without metaphysical significance. But the well-documented distressing NDEs — the ones with veridical perception, with structural coherence, with consistent reporting over time — resist physiological reduction in the same way the peaceful cases do. The distressing-NDE evidence stands on the same evidential foundation as the broader NDE evidence: substance dualism, soul-body separation at the threshold of death, real encounter with something not produced by the failing brain.
Step back with me for a moment. After all the typology, the case studies, the theological readings, the physicalist replies — what can we actually conclude?
I think we can conclude the following.
First, distressing NDEs are real. They are not artifacts of bias, not imaginative reconstructions, not the products of fundamentalist anxiety. They occur in roughly fifteen to twenty-three percent of NDEs as best we can measure, and they fall into recognizable subtypes that researchers have documented across decades.
Second, distressing NDEs include cases that resist physicalist reduction in the same way that peaceful NDEs do. The full apparatus of out-of-body veridical perception, structural narrative coherence, and post-experience life transformation appears in distressing cases, especially in the resolved arc represented by Howard Storm. The phenomenon is metaphysically serious in the same sense the peaceful phenomenon is.
Third, distressing NDEs are not previews of eternal conscious torment in any straightforward sense. The Storm arc — the cry from within the dark and the answering presence — rules out the simple ECT interpretation. The inverse subtype — identical objective phenomenology with opposite affective response — rules out the simple separate-place interpretation.
Fourth, distressing NDEs are best read through some version of the divine presence framework, in which the same encounter with God is met by different souls in different ways depending on their disposition. This framework is theologically illuminating, biblically defensible, and pastorally honest. It explains the data without over-claiming.
Fifth, the divine presence framework is compatible with conditional immortality, with conservative biblical universalism, and even (if one wishes to argue it carefully) with eternal conscious torment. The NDE evidence by itself does not decide among these eschatological options. The decision has to be made on biblical and theological grounds, in conversation with the broader Christian tradition.
Sixth, my own settled position is conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, with genuine and ongoing openness to the universalist alternative. Distressing NDEs fit comfortably within both of these frameworks. They do not require strict ECT, and they should not be used to defend it.
That is, I think, where the data take us. Not as far as some popular Christian writers want them to go. Further than some skeptical writers will allow. Far enough to matter pastorally and theologically. Not far enough to settle the deepest questions.
I want to draw out one further implication before moving on. If the assessment above is broadly correct, then the popular Christian conversation about NDEs and hell needs to shift in three concrete ways. First, the distressing NDE data should not be presented as evidence for ECT. They are not. The phenomenology does not require ECT, and the resolved-arc cases positively complicate the ECT reading. Christian writers who lean on distressing NDEs to defend ECT have been making the right pastoral point (death is serious, the response of the soul matters, hell is not nothing) with the wrong evidential apparatus. Second, the distressing NDE data should be read together with the broader NDE data. Both peaceful and distressing NDEs point toward the same metaphysical conclusions: the soul outlasts the body at the threshold of death, the encounter at the threshold is real, and the encounter is with the same God who will be the final reality of every human life. The two categories of NDE are not opposed; they are two faces of one phenomenon. Third, the distressing NDE data, properly read, are a goad to evangelism rather than to fearmongering. They tell us that the response of the soul to God matters now, that what we are becoming day by day matters at the threshold, that the cry from the dark is heard but the soul that does not learn to want God in this life will find it harder to want Him in the next. That is a serious word and a hopeful one. It is a different word from “repent or be tortured forever,” and I think it is a more biblical one.
Before I close with the pastoral application, one more piece needs to be put in place. The discernment question.
Christians who take NDEs seriously have to read them with the same kind of discernment we bring to any other claim of religious experience. Not every report is what it appears to be. Not every experience is from God. The biblical mandate to test the spirits is non-negotiable (1 John 4:1; 1 Thessalonians 5:21). I will develop the discernment framework at length in Chapter 30; here, I want to apply it briefly to the distressing-NDE category.
Some distressing NDEs are clearly redemptive. Howard Storm’s case is the obvious example. The arc — from rejection of God to confrontation with self to encounter with Christ to repentance to changed life — is recognizable as the Spirit’s work. The fruit confirms the experience. We can read such cases with theological seriousness and gratitude.
Some distressing NDEs are ambiguous. The void experiences, especially, can be hard to interpret. They lack obvious Christian content. They may be encounters with the soul’s own emptiness apart from God. They may be glimpses of the trajectory of a life uncentered on Christ. They may be something we do not have categories for. We can take them seriously without claiming to know exactly what they mean.
Some distressing NDEs may, in rare cases, be demonic deceptions. The Christian tradition has always affirmed that not every spiritual encounter is with God. The enemy is real and active, especially in the vulnerable moments of physical crisis. I am cautious about this category — it has been over-used in popular Christian writing — but I am unwilling to rule it out entirely. Where an NDE produces fruit inconsistent with the Spirit (lasting despair, occult fascination, drift toward New Age teaching, abandonment of Christ), the question of demonic deception has to be on the table.47
The discernment task is not to sort distressing NDEs into “real” and “fake.” That sorting is too crude. The task is to read each case — or to help the experiencer read it — with attention to fruit, to biblical content, to the trajectory of the experiencer’s life since. That is pastoral work, slow and careful. It cannot be done in print. It is done with people, over time.
I want to close where the chapter has been quietly headed all along: the pastoral implications.
Some readers will come to a chapter like this with a personal stake. Maybe you are a pastor, and someone in your congregation has reported a distressing NDE and is asking you what it means. Maybe you are an NDEr yourself, and the experience you had is one you have not been able to talk about because the people around you would not know what to do with it. Maybe you are dying, and you have read enough popular Christian books to be afraid of what you might encounter at the threshold. Maybe you are bereaved, and you fear that someone you loved went into the dark.
For the pastor: take distressing NDEs seriously, but do not let them drive your theology. The experiencer needs you to listen, to receive the account without flinching, and to help them locate it within a Christian framework that is honest about what we know and what we don’t. Resist the temptation to either dismiss the experience as “just a dream” or weaponize it as a confirmation of the most fearsome theology. Both moves are pastoral failures. The middle path — reception, discernment, theological framing — is harder and better.48
For the experiencer: your experience was real. The fact that it does not fit the standard NDE narrative does not mean it was not significant. It does not mean you are doomed. It does not mean God hates you. The Howard Storm pattern teaches us that the cry from within the dark can be heard. The inverse subtype teaches us that what felt like terror may have been an unprepared soul’s first contact with a love it could not yet receive. The presence you encountered — even if you encountered it as judgment — was real, and the real thing it was is the love of Christ, who has come to find you. The right response to a distressing NDE is the same as the right response to any encounter with the holy: to repent, to draw near, to ask Christ to help you receive His love properly.
For the evangelist: distressing NDEs are not a tool. I want to say this carefully because I have heard them used as one. Christian evangelism that is built around scaring people with hellish-NDE accounts mistakes the shape of the gospel for the shape of a threat. The gospel is good news, not a warning. Yes, judgment is real; yes, the response of the soul to Christ matters; yes, there is something genuinely at stake at the threshold of death. But the scriptural pattern of evangelism is not, in the main, fear-driven. It is love-driven. The early Christian preachers proclaimed a risen Christ who had defeated death and was inviting every soul into life. They did not, on the whole, lean on previews of torment to do their persuasive work. The distressing NDE evidence does not give us license to invert the apostolic pattern. What it gives us is something different: an empirical confirmation that what we tell people about Christ matters not only for their lives now but for the encounter every soul will have at the threshold of death. The reason to share Christ with our neighbor is not so that they will avoid hell. It is because the love we have come to know is the love every human heart was made for, and we cannot keep good news of that magnitude to ourselves. Distressing NDEs, properly read, sharpen the urgency of that good news without distorting its character. They show us that the encounter at the threshold is real, that the soul’s state matters when it gets there, and that the patient and long-suffering work of helping someone come to want God now is among the most consequential things any of us can do for each other.
For the dying: do not be afraid. The encounter you are approaching is the encounter with Christ. The descent of Christ into death — what the historic creeds confess about His descent and what the NDE evidence in Chapter 25 sketches as the empirical correlate of that descent — means that there is no place where dying souls are met that Christ has not already reached. He has been there. He has gone before. He is present. If your dying is peaceful, you will be welcomed. If your dying is harder, He is there too, even in the dark. The cry is heard.49
For the bereaved: take heart. We do not know with certainty what your loved one experienced at the threshold of death. We do know that Christ is Christ, that His love is determined and tender, that He has gone where every dying soul goes, and that the encounter He offers is genuine. We know that the cry of even an unbelieving heart can be heard at the threshold — the Storm pattern is evidence of that. We have reasons for hope that go beyond what the dying person could have articulated about their own faith in their final months. None of this is presumption. None of this rules out the seriousness of the choices we make in this life. But it does mean that we do not have to read every difficult death as a final loss. The encounter is real. The encounter is offered. What happens in that encounter is more than we can see from this side.
Pastoral Reflection
I have sat with NDErs who reported distressing experiences, and I have noticed something. The experiencer is almost always more frightened of what other Christians will say about their experience than of the experience itself. They have heard the popular books. They are afraid we will tell them they are damned. The pastoral gift we can give them is honesty: we do not know what their experience finally meant. We know that Christ is the same loving presence whom every soul encounters at the threshold of death. We know that the cry to Him is heard, even from within the dark. We know that fruit is the diagnostic of the Spirit’s work, and that the Spirit has often used distressing NDEs to bring souls to repentance and faith. That is enough to walk forward with hope.
Distressing NDEs trouble us, and they should. They will not let us be sentimental about death. They will not let us replace Christian doctrine with cheery affirmations. They are reminders that the Bible’s judgment language is not metaphor, that what we make of our lives matters at the threshold, that there is something genuinely at stake in the response of the human soul to the love of God.
But they do not require us to believe that hell, in any traditional sense, is a separate place where God is absent and where the dying go to be tormented forever. They do not require us to abandon hope for the dying who did not finish well. They do not require us to retreat into the fear-driven theology of the worst popular Christian books on this subject.
What the distressing-NDE evidence requires us to do is take seriously the fact that the encounter with Christ at the threshold is real, that the soul’s response to that encounter is real, and that not every soul is ready to meet the love it was made for. The encounter is the constant. The response varies. That variation is what produces, in the NDE literature, the distinction between the peaceful and the distressing report.
The proper Christian response to all of this is not panic and not presumption. It is the long, slow work of being shaped by Christ now, so that when we meet Him — and we will all meet Him — we meet Him as the One we have been longing for, not as the One we have been hiding from. That work is what the Christian art of dying has always been about, and it is what the next several chapters of this book turn toward more directly.
The dark is real. The light is realer. And the cry is heard.
The chapters that follow take up the discernment work that the present chapter has only sketched. The next chapter turns to NDEs in non-Christian religious contexts and asks how a Christ-centered framework should read encounters that experiencers describe in non-Christian terms. The chapter after that develops the discernment principles — biblical, theological, pastoral — that the present chapter has appealed to in passing. Together those two chapters will, I hope, leave the reader with a framework that can hold both the peaceful and distressing NDE evidence with theological seriousness, evidential honesty, and pastoral steadiness. If this chapter has felt heavier than some of the earlier ones, that is partly because the topic has been heavy. The question of hell is not a topic for casual treatment. But the heaviness, I think, has not finally been the heaviness of dread. It has been the heaviness of a real encounter with a real God, who at the threshold of every dying life has gone before and is, even now, calling.
↑ 1. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005). Storm’s account is the most widely circulated published example of a distressing-then-resolved NDE in the contemporary evangelical literature. The summary in this opening section follows Storm’s own published narrative; readers are directed to Storm’s book for the full text. Pre-NDE biographical details are drawn from chapters 1–3 of My Descent into Death.
↑ 2. Storm, My Descent into Death, chapters 4–7. The compressed summary in the chapter opening foregrounds the structural arc — rejection of religion, distressing onset, calling out, deliverance — that has become paradigmatic in the distressing-NDE literature. For the original full account, including detailed phenomenological descriptions Storm has elaborated in subsequent interviews and lectures, see also Storm’s ongoing pastoral ministry materials.
↑ 3. The author’s primary engagements with the eschatological question include the broader companion volumes in this project. For accessible contemporary articulations of the three principal evangelical positions, see Edward Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011) for conditional immortality; Robert A. Peterson, Hell on Trial (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1995) for traditional eternal conscious torment; and Gregory MacDonald [Robin A. Parry], The Evangelical Universalist, 2nd ed., foreword by Oliver D. Crisp (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012) for conservative biblical universalism. The four-views volume Preston Sprinkle, ed., Four Views on Hell, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016) is also a useful single-volume entry point.
↑ 4. The genre is large and uneven. Examples on the more sensational end include Bill Wiese, 23 Minutes in Hell (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2006), and earlier titles such as Mary K. Baxter, A Divine Revelation of Hell (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 1993). The methodological problems with these works are widely noted; see Nancy Evans Bush, Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences (n.p.: 2012), introduction and chapter 1, for a careful summary of the difficulties. The author of this volume is not endorsing or recommending any of the books cited in this footnote; they are listed only as exemplars of the genre under discussion.
↑ 5. Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush, “Distressing Near-Death Experiences,” Psychiatry 55, no. 1 (1992): 95–110. This is the foundational scholarly paper on the topic and the source of the three-subtype taxonomy used throughout this chapter. The paper is also notable for being one of the earlier serious peer-reviewed treatments to take distressing NDEs seriously as a category rather than dismissing them as fringe cases.
↑ 6. Greyson and Bush, “Distressing Near-Death Experiences,” 96–99. The inverse subtype is the most theologically loaded of the three because of its implication that the same objective phenomenology is being met by different subjective responses. This implication is developed at length later in the chapter in connection with R. Zachary Manis’s divine presence model.
↑ 7. Bush, Dancing Past the Dark, chapters 4–6, where the void experience is treated at length. Bush’s longer pastoral-research engagement with the void experience is among the most important contributions to distressing-NDE studies. See also Nancy Evans Bush and Bruce Greyson, “Distressing Near-Death Experiences: The Basics,” Missouri Medicine 111, no. 6 (2014): 486–490, for a more recent summary of the void subtype with case examples.
↑ 8. Bush, Dancing Past the Dark, chapter 1, summarizes prevalence estimates across the three subtypes. The popular Christian literature has tended to over-represent the hellish subtype because of its dramatic and theologically familiar features. The void subtype, despite being more common, has received much less attention.
↑ 9. Raymond A. Moody, Life After Life (Atlanta: Mockingbird, 1975); Kenneth Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980); Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). These foundational works focus almost entirely on peaceful NDEs; their relative silence on distressing experiences contributed to the early underestimation of prevalence.
↑ 10. See Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2009), chapter 4, for a discussion of the methodological challenges in classifying distressing NDEs. The chapter on distressing NDEs in the Holden volume is the most authoritative scholarly summary of the subfield.
↑ 11. Estimates vary across studies depending on sample, methodology, and operational definitions. Greyson and Bush in 1992 reported prevalence on the lower end; Bush’s later work suggests significantly higher figures with better elicitation. The Holden et al. Handbook chapter on distressing NDEs gives a useful range; estimates in the fifteen to twenty-three percent range fall within the consensus of the better-designed studies. The authors of The Handbook caution against any precise single figure given the methodological challenges discussed in note 10.
↑ 12. The dissertation, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for Substance Dualism within the Conditional Immortality Debate (Trinity College of the Bible and Trinity Theological Seminary, 2025), includes a sub-analysis of the distressing-NDE category within the broader 5,278-case dataset. The findings are consistent with the published prevalence range. The qualifications mentioned in the body text — particularly the self-selection bias of the open-source databases — should be kept in mind when interpreting any specific figure.
↑ 13. The Storm pattern is described and analyzed in Storm, My Descent into Death, and engaged theologically in John Burke, Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God’s Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2015). Burke’s evangelical engagement is sympathetic and biblically grounded, though it tends toward theological conclusions broader than the data themselves require.
↑ 14. Storm’s subsequent theological development is worth careful attention. His later writings and ministry have moved in directions that some readers will find more universalist than the strict-evangelical reading of his initial conversion would suggest. The discernment principles laid out in Chapter 30 of this volume should be applied to Storm’s post-NDE theological articulations on the same terms as to any other source. The integrity of his original distressing-NDE-and-deliverance account is not in question; the theological interpretations he has subsequently advanced require the same testing as any other secondary articulation.
↑ 15. Storm’s vocational change — from professor of art to ordained pastor, with subsequent decades of ministry — is one piece of the “fruit” that any Christian discernment of his case has to weigh. See Galatians 5:22–23 for the biblical criterion of the Spirit’s fruit; see also Chapter 30 for the application of this criterion to NDE testimony in general.
↑ 16. Maurice S. Rawlings, Beyond Death’s Door (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978). Rawlings’s work was influential in popular Christian circles in the late 1970s and 1980s and continues to be cited in some contemporary popular writing. The methodological problems noted in the body text are well-documented in the academic NDE literature.
↑ 17. See the discussion in Holden, Greyson, and James, Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, chapter 4; and Bush, Dancing Past the Dark, chapter 1, for assessments of Rawlings’s methodology. The specific empirical claim that immediate-interview NDE reports are systematically more distressing than delayed reports has not been confirmed by subsequent careful study. This does not mean Rawlings encountered no genuine distressing NDEs; it means that the systematic claim he built around them is not supported.
↑ 18. The strict ECT reading of distressing NDEs is more common in popular Christian writing than in serious academic theology, but it has serious defenders. See, for example, the trajectory of Rawlings’s argument in Beyond Death’s Door, and the broader theological framework in works such as Robert A. Peterson, Hell on Trial. For a more philosophically careful defense of a freely-chosen-hell view (which is not strictly identical to the popular ECT reading but shares some of its features), see Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).
↑ 19. The objection here is the central pastoral and theological problem with the strict ECT reading of the Storm-type distressing NDE. If the experience is a preview of literal eternal hell from which Christ has been excluded, and yet Christ comes when called, then either we are misidentifying the experience or we are misidentifying hell. The cleaner reading is that the experience was not a preview of literal eternal hell at all but something else — an encounter with the soul’s own state in the presence of the holy. See the divine presence model discussion below.
↑ 20. See the author’s broader work on the conditional-immortality and postmortem-opportunity question in the companion volumes. For the most recent comprehensive treatment of postmortem opportunity from an evangelical-conservative standpoint, see James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021). For Christian conditional immortality, Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, remains the standard contemporary articulation.
↑ 21. On the lexical range of aiōnios, see Ilaria L. E. Ramelli and David Konstan, Terms for Eternity: Aiōnios and Aïdios in Classical and Christian Texts (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007); on kolasis, see the survey in William R. Harrison, Is Salvation Possible After Death? A Detailed Investigation of the Doctrine of Postmortem Salvation, 2nd ed. (n.p.: 2019), chapters 13 and 19. The lexicographical evidence does not by itself prove any particular eschatology, but it does undercut the simple equation of aiōnios kolasis with “eternal conscious torment.” The corrective-disciplinary semantic field of kolasis is well attested in classical and Hellenistic Greek usage.
↑ 22. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). The divine presence model is developed at book length in Part III. The model has roots in Eastern Orthodox patristic thought, particularly in the imagery of the “river of fire” that flows from the throne in some patristic readings of the eschaton.
↑ 23. For the Lewis passage Manis cites, see C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, in the chapter on the “practical conclusion.” Lewis’s phrase about goodness as “either the great safety or the great danger” captures the divine-presence intuition compactly. For the George MacDonald material, see his sermons on “The Consuming Fire” and “Justice” in Unspoken Sermons, Series I and II respectively. MacDonald’s direct influence on Lewis is well documented.
↑ 24. The application of Manis’s divine presence model to the inverse subtype of distressing NDEs is, as far as I am aware, original to the analysis in the present chapter and in the dissertation that underlies it. The connection seems obvious once both literatures are read together, but I have not encountered it in print elsewhere. Manis himself does not engage NDE research in Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God.
↑ 25. Manis develops his argument for the eternal-conscious-suffering version of the divine presence model in chapters 7–8 of his book. My disagreement is with the conclusion, not with the framework. The framework can be straightforwardly extended in a conditional-immortality direction by noting that the soul who finally refuses to receive the divine presence as love does not necessarily continue to exist forever; the soul may, after persistent refusal, simply cease. The framework can also be extended in a universalist direction by noting that an infinitely loving and patient God may continue to offer the encounter until it is finally received. The phenomenology is shared; the eschatology is debated.
↑ 26. The pre-purgatorial reading is well represented in the patristic tradition, especially in the Eastern Fathers. See Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, and the broader survey in Brian Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For an excellent recent Protestant reappraisal of purgatorial themes, see Jerry L. Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things That Matter Most (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2015).
↑ 27. Walls, Purgatory, develops the Protestant case for postmortem purification at length. The argument turns on the observation that few Christians die in a state of perfect sanctification, that holiness is required to enter the immediate presence of God, and that something must therefore happen between death and final glory to bring the soul to that completed holiness. The argument does not require the medieval merit-and-indulgence apparatus and is fully compatible with sola fide.
↑ 28. The classical evangelical case for conditional immortality is laid out in Fudge, The Fire That Consumes; see also John W. Wenham, “The Case for Conditional Immortality,” in Nigel M. de S. Cameron, ed., Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992); and the various contributions in Rethinking Hell: Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism, ed. Christopher M. Date, Gregory G. Stump, and Joshua W. Anderson (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). The author’s position differs from some of these in affirming substance dualism (over against the physicalist conditionalism of some contributors to Rethinking Hell) and in affirming postmortem opportunity (over against the death-as-final-deadline position of much traditional evangelical conditionalism).
↑ 29. See the broader argument in the author’s companion volumes on conditional immortality and postmortem opportunity. The position laid out here — CI + PO with substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state — is a minority position within contemporary evangelicalism but has substantial historical and biblical support, as I have argued elsewhere.
↑ 30. The biblical case for postmortem opportunity is most fully developed in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity; see also Stephen Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife? A Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Evaluation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014). The relevant biblical passages include 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6 (the most-debated texts), Ephesians 4:8–10 (Christ’s descent), and the broader pattern of God’s persistent pursuit of the lost throughout Scripture.
↑ 31. I want to be careful with this reading. The void experience is reported by experiencers who returned, so by definition the experiencers were not in fact unmade. What I am suggesting is that the phenomenology of being unmade may be perceptible at the threshold of unmaking even when the unmaking is not completed. The void is what the trajectory feels like, not the destination itself. The destination, on the conditional-immortality reading, is non-existence — which by its nature has no phenomenology.
↑ 32. The phrase “theology of God’s patience” here picks up a strand running through the conditional-immortality literature, especially Edward Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), final chapters; and is treated explicitly in John Stackhouse Jr., “Terminal Punishment,” in Sprinkle, ed., Four Views on Hell, 2nd ed., on the moral character of the conditional-immortality framework. The point against ECT made here is intended to be moral-theological rather than emotional: any view that has God maintaining souls in interminable torment after their final answer has been given owes an account of why such maintenance is consistent with divine love. CI does not face the difficulty in the same form.
↑ 33. On postmortem opportunity as the extension of God’s patience through the threshold of biological death, see Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, especially the central chapters on the biblical case; and Stephen Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave. The position is theologically distinct from purgatorial views: it does not assume that the postmortem encounter is a process of refinement for the already-saved, but rather an offered encounter with Christ available to those who did not, in this life, knowingly receive Him. The conditional-immortality framework holds that the offer is genuine but not coercive: the soul that finally refuses the offered encounter is not punished forever but eventually ceases.
↑ 34. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). Talbott’s argument is the most rigorous analytic-philosophical defense of Christian universalism in print. Chapters 6 (“Eschatological Punishment”) and 13 (“Love’s Final Victory”) are particularly important for the present chapter’s engagement. Talbott’s reading of kolasis as corrective rather than retributive draws on the broader Greek-lexical evidence noted earlier and on the patristic tradition’s general interpretation of the term.
↑ 35. Talbott’s argument from divine omnipotence and the nature of love is summarized in Inescapable Love, chapter 11 (“God, Freedom, and Human Destiny”). The argument has been extensively engaged by both critics and defenders; for a sympathetic critique, see the relevant essays in Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge, eds., Universal Salvation? The Current Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
↑ 36. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.10, distinguishes kolasis (corrective punishment, “for the sake of the sufferer”) from timoria (retributive punishment, “for the satisfaction of the one who inflicts it”). The distinction is preserved in the standard classical lexica, including LSJ s.v. kolasis. Talbott’s argument, building on this lexicographical foundation, is developed in The Inescapable Love of God, chapter 6. The argument is also engaged in the broader survey in Harrison, Is Salvation Possible After Death?, chapter 13, which treats the lexicographical evidence with care from a postmortem-opportunity perspective. The argument from word-choice does not by itself settle the question, but it does considerably weaken the case for reading kolasis in Matthew 25:46 as straightforwardly retributive eternal torment.
↑ 37. Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010). Baker’s reframing of judgment language within a restorative rather than retributive frame is accessible and pastorally generative, even where her conclusions go beyond what the present author would defend.
↑ 38. The Otto narrative appears in Baker, Razing Hell, chapters 9–10. Baker’s position is in fact a hybrid of the divine presence model and conditional immortality, as Manis observes; she leaves room for the possibility that Otto may finally refuse the offered restoration and be annihilated in the lake of fire. See Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, 309–312, for the analysis.
↑ 39. MacDonald [Parry], The Evangelical Universalist, 2nd ed. The first chapter (“A Hell of a Problem”) frames the underlying difficulty for the evangelical reader. The sixth chapter (“To Hell and Back”) treats postmortem opportunity within the universalist frame. The entire volume is structured to engage the conservative evangelical reader on his or her own terms; it is among the most pastorally accessible UR articulations in print.
↑ 40. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: The Logic of Apokatastasis (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2023), chapters 5 (“Conditional Immortality”) and 6 (“Saved through Fire”). Hronich’s engagement with the CI position is among the most thorough recent universalist treatments and deserves attention from CI advocates who want to test their position against the strongest UR objections.
↑ 41. Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, chapter 5 (“Conditional Immortality”), develops the challenge engaged here in detail. His broader theological argument is that any final loss of a soul is incompatible with God’s announced purpose to reconcile all things to Himself in Christ (Colossians 1:20; Ephesians 1:10). CI advocates owe a serious response to Hronich’s case; in my own judgment, the response turns on the proper understanding of the freedom of finite agents and the question of whether love can finally fail of its object even where its object is the highest good. I am working out my own answer to that question and have not yet reached a final settlement.
↑ 42. The conditional-immortality position holds that human freedom is sufficiently real that some souls may finally and irrevocably refuse the divine love, even after the full encounter. The universalist position holds that no rational soul, fully exposed to divine love and freed from every distortion that prevents acceptance, would refuse it; therefore, given enough time and the right kind of love, all will yield. The disagreement turns on questions about the nature of human freedom, the extent to which a soul fully exposed to divine love can still resist, and the implications of certain biblical passages on either side. I find both positions defensible. I have not been persuaded that either is decisively closed off by Scripture.
↑ 43. For the cortical-disorganization account of dying-brain phenomenology, see Jimo Borjigin et al., “Surge of Neurophysiological Coherence and Connectivity in the Dying Brain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 35 (2013): 14432–14437; and the later cardiac-arrest extension in Jimo Borjigin et al., “Surge of Neurophysiological Activity in the Dying Brain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 19 (2023): e2216268120. The Borjigin findings are addressed at length in the dying-brain chapter of this volume; see Chapter 15 for the full discussion.
↑ 44. See Karl L. R. Jansen, “The Ketamine Model of the Near-Death Experience: A Central Role for the N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Receptor,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 16, no. 1 (1997): 5–26. The ketamine model has been engaged extensively in the NDE literature; see Chapter 16 for the full treatment.
↑ 45. The structural coherence of NDE narratives, including distressing ones, is a major problem for purely physiological accounts. Anoxic confusion is fragmentary, disorganized, and typically without narrative arc. NDEs — including most distressing ones — have the character of remembered experiences with beginnings, middles, and ends. The dissociation between the structural quality of the report and what we know about the structural quality of anoxic cortical activity is one of the core difficulties for the physicalist explanation. See the discussion in Chapter 17.
↑ 46. Storm’s veridical perception — his post-NDE description of details from the hospital room and the surrounding environment that he could not have known by ordinary perceptual means — is documented in My Descent into Death, especially chapters 3–5. As with all veridical-perception NDE cases, the details require cautious assessment; but Storm’s account has been remarkably consistent across decades of retelling.
↑ 47. The discernment principles applied here are developed at length in Chapter 30, where the broader question of demonic deception in spiritual experience is engaged. The biblical mandate to test the spirits (1 John 4:1) and to test all things and hold fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21) is non-negotiable for any Christian engagement with NDE phenomena.
↑ 48. For pastoral guidance on receiving NDE reports, see Janice Miner Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” in Holden, Greyson, and James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, chapter 9; and the broader pastoral material developed in Chapter 33 of the present volume.
↑ 49. The doctrine of Christ’s descent — descendit ad inferos in the Apostles’ Creed — is the historic theological foundation for the claim that Christ has been to every place where dying souls are met. See Chapter 25 for the full development of this argument and its connection to the NDE encounter pattern. The patristic tradition’s reading of 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 in connection with the descent supports the broader pastoral claim made here. For the historical-theological treatment, see John Yocum, Ecclesial Mediation in Karl Barth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), and the older standard treatment in J. A. MacCulloch, The Harrowing of Hell: A Comparative Study of an Early Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1930). For the contemporary engagement of these themes with NDE evidence, see also the dissertation chapters underlying Chapter 25 of the present volume.