Chapter 31: The Subtle Danger — Orthodox-Sounding Teachers with Unorthodox Cores

When Christian Vocabulary Hides Non-Christian Theology

A friend you trust hands you a book. She is excited. "You have to read this," she says. "It changed how I think about Jesus, about heaven, about everything." You look at the cover. The author is a priest. Or a former pastor. Or a hospice chaplain with a gentle face and kind eyes. The book quotes Scripture on the back cover. The endorsements come from familiar Christian names. The language of the opening chapter is warm, pastoral, and full of love for Jesus. So you start reading. And at first you nod along. The author writes beautifully about God's kindness, about the presence of Christ in suffering, about the mysterious depths of divine love. You find yourself moved. You find yourself agreeing.

Then, about three chapters in, something feels off. You can't quite put your finger on it. The author uses the word "Christ" in a way that doesn't quite match what you believe. Sin is mentioned, but briefly, and always in contexts where it seems to dissolve rather than demand response. Judgment is almost absent. When the word "hell" does appear, it is bracketed in quotation marks, as if placed there only to be dismantled. You keep reading. By the end of the book, you close it thoughtful but uncertain. The author has said many true and beautiful things. The author has also, somewhere along the way, said something else — something that doesn't fit with the Bible you have been reading for years. You can't name it exactly. But you can feel it.

Welcome to one of the hardest discernment challenges in the entire field of near-death and deathbed literature. The teachers in this category are not flagrantly non-Christian. They are Christian-adjacent, Christian-flavored, or Christian-in-name. They quote Jesus. They use the creeds' vocabulary. They belong to Christian traditions. And yet, on careful examination, their actual theology departs from biblical Christianity in ways that matter enormously for anyone trying to evaluate an NDE or DBE account. This chapter is about them.

A Different Kind of Danger

In the previous chapter, I surveyed NDE authors who openly teach frameworks that are not Christian. Betty Eadie writes from a Latter-day Saints lens. Anita Moorjani writes from a Hindu-influenced monism. Eben Alexander has moved into explicitly post-Christian territory. With those authors, the theological markers are visible. A Christian who knows the basics of the gospel can spot the problems within a chapter or two. The Christian language, where it appears at all, is thin. The non-Christian content is thick.

The teachers I want to examine in this chapter are different. They do not present themselves as outside the Christian tradition. They present themselves as within it — often as a more advanced, more loving, or more spiritually mature version of it. They use Christian language fluently. They quote Scripture often. They may even be ordained clergy in historic Christian denominations. But the theology that emerges, when you look closely, does not sit inside the boundaries drawn by Scripture and the historic creeds. It sits just outside them. Sometimes only just. That "just" is the whole danger.

Shaun Tabatt, in his book The NDE Conspiracy, argues that Satan's pattern is not usually to present obvious darkness. The pattern is to take what God intends for good and twist it, often subtly, so that the result looks beautiful on the surface while leading the soul away from Christ.¹ This is the pattern 2 Corinthians 11:14 describes when it tells us that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. And it is a pattern that plays out not only in NDE testimonies themselves but in the writing and teaching that surrounds them — including teaching that wears a Christian face.

I want to say something pastoral before we go any further. I am not trying to make you paranoid. I am not trying to suggest that you cannot read anything by anyone whose theology is not perfectly aligned with yours. That would be an impossible standard, and it would rob you of many treasures. What I am trying to do is help you see a specific pattern clearly so that you can read these teachers with eyes open, keep what is true, and leave what is not. This is the discernment posture Paul commends in 1 Thessalonians 5:21: "test everything; hold fast what is good" (ESV). It is not cynical. It is not suspicious. It is Christian maturity.

Why Christian Readers Are Especially Vulnerable

Before we look at specific markers and teachers, we need to understand why this category of teaching is particularly dangerous for Christian readers — and why secular readers, ironically, often see the pattern more clearly than we do.

A secular reader who picks up Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven has no investment in whether the content aligns with orthodox Christianity. She reads for the experience, the story, the spiritual flavor. She will probably not catch the theological drift because she has no framework against which to catch it. But she also will not be harmed in a specifically Christian way, because her Christian formation is not at stake.

A Christian reader who picks up Richard Rohr's The Universal Christ faces a different situation. He picks it up because Rohr is a priest. Because friends in his church recommended it. Because the language of Christ, cross, and resurrection threads through the pages. He reads with his defenses down. He assumes that he is inside the family, listening to a brother. And because he is reading with affection and trust, he is more likely to absorb the framework without testing it. The Christian vocabulary gives the content a pass that it would not get if it were wrapped in openly non-Christian language.²

J. Steve Miller notes a related observation in Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? He points out that Christians are often most vulnerable to theological error when that error is presented through familiar vocabulary — the words themselves disarm the reader's critical instincts.³ The Christian reader brings a lifetime of positive associations to words like "Jesus," "grace," "Spirit," "love," and "resurrection." When those words appear, something inside relaxes. "This is home territory." And if the teacher uses those words to carry content that is not actually the content those words mean in biblical Christianity, the reader often does not notice the substitution. The familiar wrapper delivers unfamiliar cargo.

This is why Paul's language in Galatians 1 is so pointed. When he warns the Galatians against "a different gospel" (Galatians 1:6, ESV), he is not warning them against pagans. He is warning them against teachers who came claiming the name of Christ but teaching a different content. The Judaizers were not openly anti-Christian. They presented themselves as better Christians — more rigorous, more obedient, more connected to the Jewish roots of the faith. And Paul's response was not to say, "Well, they mean well." His response was to say, "Let them be accursed" (Galatians 1:8, ESV). The subtle departure from the gospel was, for Paul, the most serious departure of all, precisely because it wore the name of Christ while undoing His work.³¹

That is the category we are entering in this chapter. And I want you to enter it with both alertness and charity — alert because the stakes are real, charitable because many of the teachers involved are sincere people who love God in their own framework and whose positive contributions deserve acknowledgment even where we must critique their errors.

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This Pattern Is Not New

Before we examine the markers of subtle departure, I want to place this whole discussion in a larger frame. The pattern we are looking at is not a modern invention. It is, in fact, one of the oldest patterns in the history of the Christian church. Almost every major theological battle the church has faced has been a battle against a form of Christianity-adjacent teaching that wore Christian vocabulary while carrying a different content.

Consider the Gnostics of the second and third centuries. They spoke freely of Christ. They quoted biblical texts. They even wrote "gospels" and presented themselves as the custodians of a deeper, more spiritual Christianity than the one the apostles had handed down. The early church fathers — Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus — wrote volume after volume to expose the subtle theological drift in Gnostic teaching. The Gnostics did not announce themselves as anti-Christian. They announced themselves as a superior, more enlightened Christianity. The fathers had to show, patiently and carefully, that the vocabulary had been borrowed but the content had been replaced.³⁶

Consider Arius in the fourth century. He did not deny that Jesus was divine. He said Jesus was the highest of all created beings, the Son of God, exalted and honored above every other creature. He quoted Scripture extensively. He framed his teaching in prayerful, pastoral terms. And yet Athanasius saw that the whole gospel was at stake in the fine distinction between Christ as eternal Son and Christ as exalted creature. If Arius was right, the Christ Christians worshiped was not fully God, and the atonement could not reach its biblical depth. A single word — ὁμοούσιος (homoousios), "of the same essence" — became the line between orthodoxy and heresy at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325.

Consider the various forms of liberal Protestantism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Friedrich Schleiermacher, often called the father of modern liberal theology, loved Jesus, wrote movingly about "the feeling of absolute dependence" on God, and sought to make Christianity intellectually credible to an educated European audience. Yet his framework reduced Christ to the supreme example of God-consciousness rather than the unique incarnate Son. Adolf von Harnack, in What Is Christianity?, extracted what he considered the essence of Jesus's teaching — the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the infinite value of the human soul — while cutting away the supernatural framework of the New Testament. Neither Schleiermacher nor Harnack saw themselves as leaving Christianity. They saw themselves as purifying it for a modern age. And yet the Christianity that emerged from their work was not the Christianity of the apostles and martyrs. It had, by small and gradual moves, become something else.³⁷

This historical pattern is important for the reader of this chapter for a simple reason: it should give us both humility and confidence. Humility, because if the church has repeatedly been tempted to accept subtle departures wrapped in Christian language, we should not assume that we are somehow immune. Confidence, because the church has also repeatedly been able to name the pattern, correct the drift, and hold fast to the apostolic deposit. The Holy Spirit who guided Irenaeus, Athanasius, and countless others has not stopped guiding the church. The discernment tools we apply today stand in a long tradition of faithful Christian evaluation. We are not inventing anything new. We are doing what the church has always done when teachers sound Christian but teach something that, on examination, is not.

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The Six Markers of Subtle Departure

When I read a teacher who falls into this category, I usually notice one or more of six recurring markers. No single marker by itself proves that a teacher has departed from biblical Christianity. Any one of these markers might appear in a faithful Christian writer for legitimate reasons. But when several markers cluster together — and especially when they cluster at the very center of the teacher's message rather than at the edges — the pattern is real and worth attending to.

Marker 1: Universalist Conclusions Reached Through Christian Framing

The teacher does not say, "All religions are equal." That would be too obvious. Instead, the teacher says something like, "God's love is bigger than our theology," or "The Spirit works in ways that exceed our formulas," or "Ultimately, all things will be reconciled through Christ." The ending point is universal salvation — everyone saved, no one lost, hell dissolved or emptied — but the reasoning that gets there is dressed in Christian clothes.

The reader who has not been trained to notice the move hears only the Christian vocabulary. Love, Spirit, Christ, reconciliation — all of these are biblical words. Surely a theology built out of these words is biblical, right? Not necessarily. The biblical doctrine of God's love does not, in fact, dissolve the biblical doctrine of judgment. The biblical doctrine of the Spirit's freedom does not, in fact, bypass the biblical insistence that Christ is the way (John 14:6). The biblical doctrine of cosmic reconciliation (Colossians 1:20) does not, in fact, mean that every human individual will be saved regardless of response to Christ.⁴

A faithful reader can hold out the possibility of postmortem opportunity for salvation, or even wrestle seriously with questions about the extent of final judgment, without moving into universalism proper. The line between honest theological inquiry and subtle universalism is not always easy to draw. But one test is simple enough: does the teacher's framework allow for the reality of final loss, or does it quietly close that door and assure the reader that no one is ever truly lost? If the door is quietly closed, and closed through vocabulary that sounds Christian, you are looking at this marker.

Marker 2: Deprioritizing Doctrine in Favor of "Experience"

The teacher emphasizes the transformative power of the spiritual experience — the NDE, the contemplative practice, the mystical encounter — while treating specific doctrinal questions as secondary. "What matters," the teacher says, "is the love. What matters is the encounter. What matters is the transformation." Questions about the uniqueness of Christ, the reality of judgment, the authority of Scripture, the nature of the atonement are treated as the narrow preoccupations of immature or fearful believers. The mature Christian moves beyond them into pure experience of God.

This sounds gracious. It sounds loving. It sounds humble. It is, in fact, a deep theological mistake. Because in biblical Christianity, experience and doctrine are not separable in this way. The experience of God's love is grounded in specific doctrinal realities — that God so loved the world that He sent His Son (John 3:16); that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3); that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. Strip away the doctrine and the experience hangs in midair, pointing to nothing in particular. The love the teacher celebrates becomes a free-floating spiritual mood rather than the specific love of the specific God revealed in the specific person of Jesus Christ.

Michael Sabom, in Light and Death, makes a similar observation when he distinguishes between NDEs that deepen the experiencer's Christian faith and NDEs that lead the experiencer into a generic spirituality that could have been generated by any religious tradition.⁵ The former group integrates experience into a clear doctrinal framework. The latter group dissolves doctrine into experience, and the result is a spirituality detached from the gospel even while using gospel vocabulary.

Marker 3: Soft Critique of "Traditional Christianity" or "the Church's Past"

The teacher positions himself as a more spiritually mature voice than the historic church. He speaks warmly of "moving beyond" the "narrow" or "fear-based" theology of "the tradition" into something more loving, more inclusive, more spacious. The critique is rarely direct. It is usually delivered with a smile. But the cumulative effect is to distance the reader from the deposit of Christian teaching that has come down through two thousand years.

Now, I want to be careful here. Real theological development has happened in church history. The creeds themselves represent development. Luther and Calvin critiqued medieval errors. The Wesleyan revival critiqued a cold, dead orthodoxy. C. S. Lewis gently pushed against overly wooden readings of Scripture. None of these critiques should embarrass the Christian. Genuine development and course correction are part of how the Spirit leads the church.

But genuine development always happens in continuity with the apostolic deposit, not in rejection of it. Genuine development deepens what Scripture teaches; it does not overturn it. When a teacher speaks of "moving beyond" the historic teaching of the church on matters like the exclusivity of Christ, the reality of judgment, or the authority of Scripture itself, that is not development. That is departure dressed in the language of development. The fact that the departure is polite, pastoral, and softly spoken does not make it less of a departure.

Marker 4: "Christ" Detached from the Historical Jesus

This is perhaps the most telling marker of the whole set. The teacher speaks of "Christ" in ways that do not anchor the word to the historical, incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended Jesus of Nazareth. "Christ" becomes a cosmic principle, a universal pattern, a divine consciousness that runs through all reality and was merely illustrated (not uniquely embodied) in Jesus. The historical particulars of Jesus become examples of a larger truth rather than the unique grounding of that truth.

This move has a long history in theology. It shows up in various ancient gnostic systems. It surfaces in Theosophy and in New Thought. It appears in some strands of twentieth-century liberal Protestantism. And it has been given a new and influential expression in Richard Rohr's concept of the "universal Christ," which we will examine more closely in a moment.

The biblical pattern runs exactly the other way. In the New Testament, "Christ" is not a principle that Jesus embodies but a title that belongs to Jesus uniquely. The confession "Jesus is the Christ" is the confession on which the church is built (Matthew 16:16-18). The Christ who appears in Colossians 1 as the one "in whom all things hold together" is the same Christ who "reconcile[d] to himself all things... by the blood of his cross" (Colossians 1:20, ESV). You cannot separate the cosmic Christ from the crucified Jesus without losing the Christian Christ altogether.⁶ When a teacher's "Christ" is something that could, in principle, be found at the heart of every religion and every spiritual tradition, that teacher is not teaching the Christ of Scripture, whatever Christian vocabulary they use.

Marker 5: Blurring the Boundaries Between Christianity and Other Faiths

This marker often accompanies Marker 4 but is distinct from it. Here the teacher does not necessarily cosmicize "Christ" but instead softens the distinctiveness of Christianity relative to other religions. Christians and Buddhists are presented as fellow travelers on a shared contemplative path. Jesus and the Buddha are presented as complementary teachers. The wisdom of "all the great traditions" is said to converge. Specific disagreements between Christianity and other religions are either minimized or treated as superficial compared to the "deeper" unity beneath.

I want to honor what is legitimate in the impulse behind this move. Christians can learn things about discipline, silence, and attention from contemplatives of other traditions, even while rejecting the metaphysics those traditions hold. Christians can recognize that God's common grace touches all humanity, that people of other faiths are often earnest seekers, and that conversations across religious lines can be done with respect rather than contempt. The biblical text itself allows for a limited affirmation of truth wherever it is found (Acts 17:22-28).

But there is a difference between recognizing common grace and dissolving Christian distinctiveness. Jesus made exclusive claims. The apostles preached Jesus as the only name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12). The biblical frame is not "all paths converge" but "Christ is the way." A teacher who consistently softens this into a broader, more ecumenical vision — treating the claim of Christ's uniqueness as an embarrassing leftover from a less mature past — has moved outside biblical Christianity, even if the move is gradual and gentle.

Marker 6: Pastoral Framing That Discourages Discernment

This last marker may be the most clever of all. The teacher frames critical engagement itself as unloving, narrow, or spiritually immature. "Let's not get caught up in doctrine," he says. "Let's focus on love." "Fundamentalism and cold dogmatism have wounded so many people — let's be different." "The people who criticize this work are usually acting out of their own fear."

This framing disarms the reader in advance. It tells the reader that applying biblical discernment to the teacher's content would be a sign of spiritual immaturity. It preemptively casts every critic as a rigid fundamentalist and every questioner as a fear-driven legalist. And it leaves the Christian reader in an awkward place: if she questions the teaching, she is not being faithful to Scripture; she is, in the teacher's framing, failing to be "loving" or "open."

But Scripture does not set discernment and love against each other. Paul prays that the Philippians' love would "abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment" (Philippians 1:9, ESV). Love and discernment are friends, not enemies. The Greek word here — αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), meaning "moral perception" or "insight" — names the very capacity the teacher is trying to talk the reader out of using. When a teacher frames the exercise of Christian discernment as unloving, you should treat that framing itself as a warning sign. The biblical writers never saw love and discernment as at odds. They saw the refusal to exercise discernment as the opposite of love — because refusing to test the spirits leaves the flock vulnerable to wolves.⁷

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Richard Rohr: A Case Study in Christian-Sounding Teaching

Of all the teachers who fall into this chapter's category, Richard Rohr is the one most likely to show up in an NDE-interested Christian reader's life. His books are widely available. His Center for Action and Contemplation reaches millions through daily email meditations. He is often recommended by well-meaning friends. He is quoted approvingly by Christian pastors who may not have studied his framework carefully. And his teaching on the "universal Christ" has had a quiet but significant influence on NDE and spiritual-but-not-religious communities. For all these reasons, he deserves extended examination.

I want to approach this examination the way I hope the rest of this book approaches every teacher: fairly, charitably, and with documentation. I will not caricature Rohr. I will represent his actual published positions as closely as I can, using his own words and categories. I will note what is admirable in his work. And then I will show, plainly and without polemic, where I believe his framework has moved outside the boundaries of orthodox Christianity — and why that matters for NDE discernment.

Who Is Richard Rohr?

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest in the Roman Catholic tradition, born in Kansas in 1943, ordained in 1970. In 1987, he founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has written many widely read books, including Everything Belongs (1999), Falling Upward (2011), Immortal Diamond (2013), and most notably for our purposes, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (2019).⁸

Rohr remains formally within Catholicism. He is not a renegade priest operating outside the church. He has canonical standing. Many Catholic and some Protestant readers regard him as a beloved spiritual guide. His work has been praised by prominent evangelical voices on occasion, including popular authors and pastors who have publicly recommended his books.

At the same time, Rohr's teaching has generated significant controversy, and that controversy is not limited to conservative evangelical quarters. Catholic theologians in various corners have raised concerns about his Christology. Eastern Orthodox writers have pointed out departures from traditional dogma. And a steady stream of evangelical analysts — not all of whom can be dismissed as partisan — have argued that his theological framework, however beautifully expressed, moves outside the boundaries of historic Christian orthodoxy at several key points.⁹

What Is Admirable in Rohr's Work

Before examining where I believe Rohr has drifted, let me note what I think is admirable in his contribution. He writes beautifully. He has a deep pastoral heart for the wounded, the marginalized, and those who have been harmed by harsh religious environments. He takes the contemplative tradition seriously at a time when much of Western Christianity has lost touch with it. He insists that Christianity is meant to transform the whole of life and not remain a mental assent to doctrines. He is often right in his diagnosis of what is shallow and performative in American religion, even where I think his prescribed cure goes awry.

I do not want a Christian reader to come away from this chapter thinking that Rohr is simply a wolf in sheep's clothing, or that everything he says is wrong. Many of his pastoral instincts are sound. Many of his literary gifts are real. The concern is not that he is wholly malicious or wholly confused. The concern is that, at specific and important theological junctures, his framework departs from biblical Christianity in ways that matter — and that the framework is particularly influential in NDE-interested circles, where his ideas have been picked up by teachers and experiencers who may not realize the extent of the departure. A teacher can be gifted pastorally while their framework remains problematic theologically; the gift does not cover the framework.²⁹

The "Universal Christ" Framework

The heart of Rohr's later teaching is the distinction he draws between "Christ" and "Jesus." In The Universal Christ, he famously writes, in effect, that "Christ" is not Jesus's last name — implying that the two are, at one level, separable realities. "Christ," in Rohr's framework, is the cosmic reality of divine incarnation running through the whole of creation from the first moment. "Jesus" is the particular historical embodiment of this cosmic Christ in first-century Palestine.¹⁰

Rohr builds this framework out of Colossians 1:15-20, Ephesians 1:9-10, and John 1:1-14 — biblical texts that do speak of Christ's cosmic significance, His role in creation, and His work as the firstborn over all things. A Christian reader who knows these passages can feel the resonance. Rohr is not making his framework out of nothing. There is real biblical material here.

The problem, however, is not with what Rohr includes; it is with what he subtly shifts. In biblical theology, the cosmic Christ and the historical Jesus are one Person, identical in reference. The Christ who holds all things together (Colossians 1:17) is the Christ who was crucified (Colossians 1:20). The Word who was with God in the beginning (John 1:1) is the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). These are not two realities that can be separated. They are one reality described from two angles. Jesus of Nazareth simply is the eternal Son incarnate. There is no "Christ" that exists apart from the historical, particular, crucified, risen Jesus.

In Rohr's framework, however, a gap opens up. "Christ" becomes something you can locate in all faiths, all traditions, all moments of grace, independent of explicit connection to the Jesus of the New Testament. Hindus are pointed to the Christ in their tradition. Buddhists discover Christ in their contemplative practices. Muslims encounter Christ in their mystical traditions. People of no faith encounter Christ in nature or love or suffering. The implication — and often the explicit statement — is that Jesus is one particular manifestation of the cosmic Christ, a vivid and beautiful one, but not the exclusive or necessary means by which the cosmic Christ is known.¹¹

This is where the framework moves outside biblical Christianity. The New Testament does not permit this separation. The New Testament insists that "no one comes to the Father except through" Jesus specifically (John 14:6, ESV) — not through a cosmic Christ-principle accessible apart from Him. The New Testament insists that Jesus is "the name that is above every name" (Philippians 2:9, ESV) — not one name among many for a universal reality. When Rohr's framework softens these exclusive claims, it is not advancing beyond the New Testament; it is departing from it. The Chalcedonian definition — Christ as one Person in two natures, without confusion, change, division, or separation — forbids the very separation Rohr's framework introduces between "the Christ" and "Jesus."²⁷

Rohr's De-emphasis of the Atonement

A second place where Rohr's framework diverges from historic Christianity is in his treatment of the atonement. Rohr has been sharply critical of substitutionary atonement — the traditional understanding that Christ died in our place, bearing the just wrath of God against sin, so that we could be forgiven. He has called this view variously a distortion, an impediment to true spirituality, and a portrayal of God as demanding violence in order to love.¹²

In place of substitutionary atonement, Rohr has offered what he considers a richer view — that the cross is a revelation of God's eternal suffering love, a pattern that unmasks the violence of human systems rather than a payment demanded by divine justice. "Jesus did not come to change God's mind about us," Rohr writes in effect; "he came to change our mind about God."

There are real theological resources in Rohr's critique of crude or caricatured versions of substitutionary atonement. Bad versions have existed. The tradition is more subtle than some popular presentations suggest. The Christus Victor motif and the moral influence motif and the incarnational motif are all legitimate strands of historic atonement theology. A thoughtful evangelical can engage Rohr's critique and learn from it.

But Rohr's move goes further than nuancing substitutionary atonement. It often dissolves the doctrine altogether, and with it the biblical picture of sin as genuine guilt requiring real atonement. In the framework that results, the cross is a revelation rather than a transaction; our problem is unconsciousness rather than guilt; salvation is awakening rather than forgiveness. This is not how the New Testament describes the cross. Romans 3:25-26 describes Christ as a propitiation, a sacrifice that satisfies divine justice. Hebrews 9-10 describes Christ's death in thoroughly sacrificial and atoning terms. 1 Peter 2:24 says Christ "bore our sins in his body on the tree." When these passages are either absent from a framework or consistently reinterpreted into something else, the framework has moved outside the bounds of biblical orthodoxy.

Rohr's Trajectory on Universalism

Rohr's most recent works have also moved in an increasingly universalist direction. He has written that God's love cannot, in the end, fail to bring every creature home. He speaks of "restorative justice" in ways that dissolve any final rejection of God's saving purpose. He quotes favorably from Christian universalist traditions while rarely engaging the substantial biblical material that points the other way.¹³

I want to be careful here, because the question of final judgment is one where serious evangelical Christians do disagree. Some hold to eternal conscious torment. Some hold to conditional immortality, in which the unsaved are finally destroyed rather than eternally tormented. Some hold to a possibility of postmortem opportunity for faith in Christ. These are genuine conversations within the evangelical family, and I do not want to treat every form of hopeful eschatology as heretical.

But Rohr's framework is not merely hopeful. It tends to present a system in which the final loss of any creature is metaphysically impossible — in which the logic of cosmic Christ and divine love make damnation in any form simply inconceivable. That is a step further than honest evangelical wrestling. And when paired with the cosmic Christ framework I described earlier, it produces a theology in which Christ's particular work on the cross is no longer the decisive means by which anyone is saved, because the cosmic reality of Christ is already at work everywhere, inevitably gathering all things to itself. The specific urgency of the gospel call — "repent and believe" — dissolves.

Why This Matters for NDE Discernment

A reader might ask at this point: why does a whole section on a Franciscan priest belong in a book about NDE discernment? The answer is that Rohr's framework has become one of the most widely adopted theological lenses through which NDE experiencers and NDE researchers interpret their work. The "universal Christ" concept gives NDE teachers a Christian-sounding way to affirm that the being of light could be Jesus, or the Buddha, or some universal presence, depending on the experiencer's culture — all of which are "really" the same cosmic Christ under different names. Rohr's de-emphasis of atonement gives NDErs a theological pattern for holding onto a loving God without taking seriously the biblical teaching on sin and judgment. Rohr's universalist trajectory aligns with the universalist conclusions that many NDE experiencers report reaching.

In other words, Rohr has provided the theological infrastructure for a kind of "Christianized" NDE spirituality that wears Christian vocabulary while teaching a framework that does not fit biblical Christianity.¹⁴ When a Christian reader picks up an NDE book that cites Rohr favorably, or uses "universal Christ" language, or treats the cosmic Christ as available through all traditions, the reader should recognize the theological current behind the account and evaluate accordingly.

How to Read Rohr (If You Choose To)

I am not saying a Christian should never read Richard Rohr. I am saying that a Christian who reads him should do so with eyes open. Here is what I would suggest:

Read his most explicit theological statements, not only his pastoral passages. It is in the theological statements that the framework becomes visible. The pastoral passages are often lovely and largely unobjectionable; the framework behind them is where the drift appears.

Compare his framework to the historic creeds. Does Rohr's "cosmic Christ" fit what the Nicene Creed says about the Son? Does his treatment of the cross fit what the Apostles' Creed confesses about Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection? Where the fit is incomplete, note it.

Notice what he avoids. In long stretches of his writing, the topics of sin as guilt, judgment as a divine response to sin, the need for personal faith in Christ, and the bodily resurrection of believers are either absent or transformed into something gentler. These absences are not accidental; they are structural to the framework.

Hold onto what is true and leave what is not. Rohr's instincts about the transformative dimension of Christianity, the call to contemplation, and the rejection of shallow religiosity are worth hearing. His framework as a whole is not a reliable map of biblical Christianity. The Christian can appreciate the first without adopting the second.

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Rob Bell: From Evangelical Orthodoxy to Post-Evangelical Drift

A second figure worth examining in this chapter is Rob Bell. Bell is not primarily an NDE teacher — his work has engaged heaven, hell, and the afterlife more broadly rather than focusing on near-death testimonies specifically. But his influence on how younger evangelicals think about these topics has been substantial, and his trajectory illustrates the pattern of this chapter almost too perfectly: a teacher who began firmly within evangelical Christianity, gradually reframed core doctrines, and ended up in territory that most evangelical theologians consider outside orthodox boundaries.

Who Is Rob Bell?

Rob Bell founded Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1999, and pastored it until 2012. The church grew rapidly. Bell's Nooma video series reached millions. He published Velvet Elvis (2005), Sex God (2007), Jesus Wants to Save Christians (2008), and several other books that generally sat inside evangelical conversation, though sometimes at its edges. For most of his pastoral years, Bell was regarded as a creative, if sometimes provocative, evangelical voice.¹⁵

Then, in 2011, he published Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. The book became an immediate theological flashpoint. Bell's publisher released a promotional video in which he pointedly questioned whether anyone was really going to hell. The book itself argued for what has often been labeled a form of Christian universalism or hopeful universalism — the position that, in the end, God's love wins, and no human being is finally lost.

Love Wins provoked sharp responses from across the evangelical world. John Piper famously tweeted "Farewell, Rob Bell" shortly after the promotional materials appeared. Kevin DeYoung wrote an extensive critique. Hundreds of pastors, scholars, and ordinary believers wrote responses.¹⁶ Bell left Mars Hill in 2012. In subsequent years, he moved into a broader spiritual teaching ministry, appeared on Oprah's Super Soul Sunday, published What We Talk About When We Talk About God (2013) and How to Be Here (2016), and increasingly positioned himself outside traditional evangelical identity.

The Content of Bell's Drift

Bell's trajectory illustrates several of the markers I identified earlier in the chapter. He did not begin by denying any central Christian doctrine. He began by asking questions — gently, pastorally, rhetorically — about doctrines that had caused harm in many people's lives. He questioned the standard evangelical account of hell. He questioned whether the picture of God as holding countless souls in eternal torment could be reconciled with the God Jesus revealed. He questioned whether the scope of Christ's saving work was as narrow as traditional accounts suggested.

Many of his questions were not, in themselves, illegitimate. Sincere Christians have long wrestled with the nature of final judgment. Conditional immortality has a respectable minority tradition in evangelical thought. Even universal reconciliation has had Christian defenders from the patristic era forward, though always in minority position. The question of what the Bible actually teaches about hell is worth careful exegetical work.

But Bell's method went beyond asking questions into something closer to quiet dissolution of doctrine. In Love Wins, central passages about judgment are given surprisingly brief treatment; the rhetorical force of the book carries the reader toward a universalist conclusion without always providing the exegetical work to sustain it. The biblical picture of sin, wrath, and judgment is consistently softened. The central question of the book — "What happens when we die?" — is answered in a way that, in effect, removes the urgency of the gospel call altogether. If love wins for everyone regardless, the specific moment of repentance and faith loses its decisive weight.¹⁷

The Methodological Problem in Love Wins

One of the things that makes Love Wins instructive for our purposes is not primarily its conclusions but its method. A thoughtful reader coming to the book without a firm theological framework can easily miss how the argument works. The book proceeds largely by asking provocative questions, telling stories, and raising emotional objections to traditional teaching. It rarely does the careful exegetical spadework that would be required to sustain its conclusions against the substantial biblical material that points the other way.

For example, on the topic of hell, Bell raises the emotional problem of eternal punishment — the difficulty of imagining a God of love who could permit endless suffering — and uses that emotional weight to push the reader toward a less severe view. Fair enough; the emotional question is a real question. But the biblical passages about judgment are many, extensive, and often placed on Jesus's own lips. Matthew 25:31-46, with its final separation of sheep and goats. Luke 16:19-31, with Jesus's own description of the gulf between Abraham's bosom and the place of torment. Revelation 20:11-15, with the judgment of the great white throne. A serious treatment of Christian eschatology has to engage these passages carefully. Love Wins engages them briefly, often rhetorically, and typically in ways that soften rather than exposit the text. The reader is carried toward a conclusion by accumulated rhetorical weight rather than by exegetical argument.³⁸

This is a methodological pattern worth noting because it recurs in subtle-departure teaching across the theological spectrum. The teacher raises hard questions about traditional doctrines — questions that often deserve honest engagement. Then, rather than doing the hard exegetical and theological work required to answer them faithfully, the teacher substitutes a different framework that dissolves the questions by dissolving the doctrines. The reader, moved by the questions, accepts the substitute framework without realizing that the actual biblical material has never been carefully reckoned with. This is how subtle drift happens: not by confrontation with Scripture but by quiet evasion of it.

Bell's Later Work

Since Love Wins, Bell's trajectory has continued to move away from evangelical categories. His What We Talk About When We Talk About God (2013) engages heavily with scientific vocabulary — evolution, quantum mechanics, process — and uses that vocabulary to frame a God who sounds less like the God of biblical revelation and more like a cosmic creative principle. His speaking circuit now routinely includes platforms that are not distinctively Christian. He has co-taught with Oprah Winfrey on "Super Soul Sessions" and made appearances on podcasts and in venues that are explicitly post-Christian or trans-religious in their framing. His more recent work, Everything Is Spiritual (2020), continues to blend Christian vocabulary with a broader spirituality that does not privilege Christian claims over other frameworks.³⁹

He has spoken affirmingly of various positions — including a full endorsement of same-sex marriage as fully compatible with biblical Christianity, process-theology-flavored accounts of God, and generic spirituality language — that place him outside the evangelical coalition in clear ways. On any of these topics individually, serious Christians can have conversations. Taken together, however, the trajectory is unmistakable: Bell has moved from the inside of evangelical Christianity to a post-evangelical position that no longer recognizes itself as bound by evangelical commitments.

I am not trying to pronounce on Bell's personal faith. That is not my place, and Scripture is clear that only God searches hearts. I am describing a published teaching trajectory, and the trajectory has moved from inside the evangelical tent to outside it over roughly a decade. This is, in itself, a matter of public record rather than controversy.

Why Bell Matters for NDE Discernment

For the NDE reader, the relevance of Bell's trajectory is less direct than Rohr's, because Bell does not typically engage NDE material specifically. But the pattern is identical. A teacher begins with Christian vocabulary and evangelical identity. Subtle departures accumulate. The end point is a framework that looks Christian on the surface but, at its center, teaches a gospel quite different from the one the New Testament apostles preached. Any NDE author or speaker who leans on Bell's framework for theological moves is importing that drift into NDE interpretation.

More importantly, Bell's work has helped normalize a certain kind of soft-universalist framing among younger evangelicals. When an NDE experiencer returns from their experience reporting that "love wins" for everyone, that no one is really lost, that the traditional Christian teaching on hell is a misunderstanding — they are now speaking into a cultural environment where those ideas have been made respectable by books like Love Wins. The cultural soil has been prepared. The subtle departure in NDE interpretation is not arising in a vacuum; it is drawing on a theological current that has been building for years. Recognizing the current helps the Christian reader see what is happening when an NDE account, presented in Christian terms, ends up teaching universalism.

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Progressive Pastors, Hospice Writers, and Catholic Mystics

Beyond Rohr and Bell, a broader category of subtle-departure teachers shows up in NDE-adjacent literature. It is impractical to survey every individual, and I do not want to turn this chapter into a name-by-name index. But I do want to sketch the general types so that the reader can recognize the pattern when it appears.

Progressive Christian Pastors and Writers

A range of pastors and writers have drifted from evangelical identity into a broader progressive Christianity that holds Christian vocabulary while loosening historic doctrines. Each case has to be evaluated on its own terms, but a few examples illustrate the pattern with particular clarity.

Brian McLaren is perhaps the best-documented example. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, McLaren was a central figure in the emerging church movement, pastoring Cedar Ridge Community Church outside Washington, D.C., and writing books like A New Kind of Christian (2001) and A Generous Orthodoxy (2004) that were widely read in evangelical circles. His early work raised interesting questions and was welcomed, even if cautiously, by many evangelical pastors. By the time he published A New Kind of Christianity (2010), however, he had explicitly begun to challenge what he called "the Greco-Roman narrative" of historic Christianity, questioning foundational doctrines including the nature of Scripture, the exclusivity of Christ, and the reality of hell. His more recent work, including The Great Spiritual Migration (2016) and Faith After Doubt (2021), positions him clearly outside evangelical orthodoxy, even as he continues to write as a Christian voice.⁴⁰ The same six markers I identified earlier all appear in his later work: universalist-leaning conclusions, deprioritization of specific doctrine, soft critique of "conservative Christianity," broad reframing of Christ, interfaith softening, and rhetorical framing that casts critics as fear-driven.

Other figures in this orbit — including some whose work has been read across evangelical, mainline, and spiritual-but-not-religious audiences — have followed similar trajectories. Some, like the late Rachel Held Evans, traveled from conservative evangelicalism through a questioning middle period into mainline Protestant identity; others, like Diana Butler Bass, have moved more rapidly into forms of progressive Christianity that explicitly rewrite historic doctrines. I mention these names not to issue verdicts on any individual's faith but to describe documented published trajectories that a Christian reader in our moment is likely to encounter.¹⁸ In each case, what matters for discernment is not the label the teacher claims but the framework the teaching actually carries.

When an NDE book is written by such a figure, or when an NDE teacher leans on the work of such figures, the framework they bring to the material will shape what they do with it. An NDE account interpreted through a progressive Christian lens will typically end up teaching universalism, religious pluralism, or a generic spirituality rather than biblical Christianity — even if the teacher uses Christian words throughout. The framework is the water in which the fish swims; the fish does not always know it is wet.

Hospice Chaplains and Thanatology Writers

A distinct category is that of hospice chaplains and end-of-life care writers whose professional work brings them into contact with deathbed experiences and who publish reflections on what they have seen. Much of this literature is empirically valuable. The phenomenon of deathbed visions, end-of-life dreams, and terminal lucidity is real and important, and hospice workers are often our best observers of it. Miller's dissertation on deathbed experiences draws extensively on this literature, and any serious researcher of DBEs has to engage it.⁴¹

At the same time, the theological framework that hospice writers bring to their material varies widely. Some are faithful Christians who interpret what they see through a biblical lens. Others are generic spiritualists who draw on a palette of Christian, Buddhist, New Age, and humanist elements without privileging any one framework. Still others are explicitly post-Christian or non-religious in their interpretive lens while remaining respectful of their patients' faith. A reader who does not distinguish between the empirical contribution and the theological framing can easily absorb the framing unnoticed, simply because the data is so compelling.

Christopher Kerr's Death Is But a Dream is a prominent example of the middle category. Kerr is a hospice physician in Buffalo whose longitudinal study of end-of-life dreams and visions is genuinely important — the kind of empirical work on DBEs that anyone studying this subject should take seriously.¹⁹ His documentation of the reality, vividness, and consoling effect of end-of-life visions is excellent. Miller cites Kerr's work approvingly on exactly this empirical front, noting that more than 80 percent of dying patients in Kerr's study reported experiences with the other side that they described as "more real than real" — conversations with the deceased, vivid encounters with loved ones, moments of profound peace.²⁰

But Kerr's theological framework, where he discusses it, is broader than evangelical Christianity. He interprets the visions largely in psychological and phenomenological categories rather than in specifically Christian ones. He treats all traditions' frameworks as equally valid interpretive options for the visions he documents. This is not a sin on his part — he is a physician, not a theologian, and he writes as a careful observer rather than a partisan theologian. But a Christian reader using Kerr's work needs to be able to distinguish between his empirical findings (which are valuable and largely trustworthy) and his theological framing (which is broader than biblical Christianity). The data can be embraced; the framework needs discernment.

Other hospice and thanatology writers fall at various points along this spectrum. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, the pioneering figure in death and dying research, moved increasingly into New-Age-influenced territory in her later career, engaging with spiritualist mediums, teaching about astral projection, and blending her early clinical insights with frameworks that many of her original admirers would not recognize. David Kessler, her collaborator, writes from a generic spiritual framework and has moved increasingly toward teaching on "signs" from the deceased in ways that touch on the same mediumistic territory this book engages elsewhere. Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick's The Art of Dying documents remarkable DBE cases while interpreting them through a broadly spiritual-but-not-religious frame. Each of these writers contributes real empirical work and also carries a theological palette that is not identical with biblical Christianity. Read them for the data; evaluate the framework.²¹

Raymond Moody, whose Life After Life (1975) opened modern NDE research, has himself drifted into past-life regression work, mirror-gazing experiments aimed at contacting deceased relatives, and increasingly syncretistic spiritual territory in his later career. His pioneering empirical work remains foundational; his subsequent theological and metaphysical framework has moved far from anything an evangelical reader can adopt without major qualification. Kenneth Ring, another major figure in NDE research, has traveled a similar arc — from empirical study to universalist-spiritual teaching that treats NDEs as precursors to a planetary consciousness shift. These are not evangelical teachers at all, but they are often cited, sometimes indirectly, by writers who sound evangelical, and their frameworks shape the broader field.

Catholic Charismatics, Mystics, and Contemplatives

A final sub-category that deserves mention is certain Catholic writers whose work engages NDE and mystical experience from within the Catholic tradition. Most Catholic engagement with NDE material is theologically orthodox within Catholic categories — often more theologically careful than popular evangelical NDE books, in fact, because Catholic theological tradition has a long and disciplined history of reflection on mystical experience. Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and many others provide resources for evaluating mystical claims that much of evangelicalism has not developed to the same depth.

But some Catholic voices depart from orthodox Catholic teaching as well as from evangelical orthodoxy. The late work of Thomas Merton, while beloved in many quarters, drifted in a direction that troubled even sympathetic Catholic readers — toward an increasingly Buddhist-influenced contemplative framework that softened Christian distinctiveness. Merton's The Asian Journal, compiled from notes made during his final trip to Asia shortly before his death, shows a thinker who was intensely interested in finding common ground with Zen and Tibetan Buddhism; whether he would have sustained that interest as an orthodox Catholic had he lived longer is a question that cannot be answered. Some contemporary Catholic contemplatives follow Merton's later trajectory further than he did.

Matthew Fox, a former Dominican priest who was eventually dismissed from the order, developed what he called "creation spirituality" — a framework that reworks Christian categories around themes of creation and mystical experience but that Catholic critics judged to have moved substantially away from Catholic orthodoxy. Other Catholic authors have drawn on New Age themes and imported them into Catholic vocabulary, producing a syncretistic blend that is no more orthodoxly Catholic than it is orthodoxly evangelical.²²

Figures associated with Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation — including Cynthia Bourgeault, James Finley, and others — carry forward aspects of Rohr's framework in their own work. Their teaching is often beautiful and sometimes genuinely helpful on the devotional side; the theological framework they share with Rohr carries the concerns I described earlier. A Christian reader encountering any of them should apply the same discernment tools developed for Rohr himself.

The Catholic tradition itself provides resources for discerning these cases. The magisterium's teaching, the historic creeds, and careful Catholic theological writing all supply tests by which to evaluate whether a given Catholic voice is speaking inside or outside the tradition's boundaries. Evangelical readers engaging Catholic NDE material should look for engagement with these resources rather than taking the presence of Catholic identity as a guarantee of theological soundness. Orthodoxy, for Catholics as for evangelicals, is a matter of content, not of label.

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NDErs Who Present as Evangelical But Teach Problematic Content

A narrower but important subcategory is NDE experiencers who identify as evangelical Christians, use evangelical vocabulary, quote Scripture frequently, and sometimes even appear at evangelical conferences — but whose actual teaching, on careful examination, includes elements that conflict with biblical Christianity at specific points.

These cases are especially delicate, and I want to proceed with care. I am not going to produce a list of names here, because the status of specific individuals can change, because public teaching shifts over time, and because my goal is not to label particular people but to help the reader recognize the pattern. The pattern is what matters for discernment, and it is the pattern — not any single teacher — that this section is about.

The markers to watch for include: teaching that drifts toward universalism despite evangelical self-identification; integration of elements drawn from charismatic or "spiritual warfare" frameworks that go beyond biblical warrant into speculation presented as revelation; blending of NDE content with teachings about soul contracts, pre-life agreements, or other concepts that overlap with New Age frameworks even when wrapped in Christian language; uncritical acceptance of every detail of the NDEr's experience as revelation from God, equal in authority to Scripture; a teaching ministry that increasingly drifts from the biblical gospel toward a gospel built around the experience itself.²³

One specific pattern deserves particular attention because it is common in this subcategory. An NDEr has a genuinely transformative experience — perhaps even a real encounter with Jesus — and returns with a commitment to telling others about Him. For a while, the teaching is centered on the gospel: the reality of Jesus, the seriousness of eternity, the need for faith. Then, as the speaking circuit expands and book deals multiply, new content begins to appear. The NDEr adds specific details about heaven's geography that go well beyond anything Scripture describes. They begin to teach things they claim were revealed in the NDE but that carry the weight of doctrine in their ministry. They may incorporate content from other NDEs or other teachers without clearly distinguishing between their own experience and material they have absorbed from elsewhere. The teaching gradually becomes a framework of its own, competing with Scripture rather than being tested by it.

This drift is often not malicious. The NDEr may still love Jesus and mean well. But the practical effect is that the experience itself becomes authoritative in ways Scripture alone should be. When an NDEr says, "Jesus told me that X," and X is not found in Scripture or even contradicts what Scripture teaches, the Christian listener faces a real discernment moment. The loving response is not to attack the teacher but to gently distinguish between what the experience may have genuinely given them and what has been added to it, whether by their own interpretation, by the influence of other teachers, or by the pressures of a public teaching ministry that demands ever-new content.

A Christian reader should apply the seven tests developed in chapter 10 of this book to any NDE teacher who identifies as evangelical but whose teaching seems to wander from biblical lines. Evangelical identification by itself is not a guarantee of orthodoxy. Teachers who are sincerely evangelical can still drift into problematic teaching, sometimes gradually, sometimes rapidly, sometimes without realizing that the drift has occurred. The reader's task is to evaluate what is actually taught, not to take the label at face value.

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Six Tools for Discerning Subtle Departure

Given the challenge of reading teachers in this category well, let me offer six practical tools that can help a Christian reader navigate their work without either credulity or reactive suspicion.

Tool 1: Read the Most Explicit Theological Statements

When you pick up a book by a teacher in this category, resist the temptation to judge it by its most emotionally resonant passages. Those passages are often genuinely beautiful, and they may be largely unobjectionable. The framework lives somewhere else — typically in the explicit theological chapters, the doctrinal statements, the sections where the teacher is making specific claims about God, Christ, sin, salvation, or judgment.

Find those passages. Read them slowly. Ask yourself: what is the teacher actually claiming about these central Christian doctrines? Does the teacher's account of the cross square with what Paul says in Romans 3 and 5? Does the teacher's account of Christ square with what John says in his prologue and what the creeds summarize? Does the teacher's account of salvation square with Ephesians 2:8-9? If the answers to these questions are evasive, vague, or different in direction from the biblical material, you have found your answer.³⁰

Tool 2: Check the Framework Against the Historic Creeds

The Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed are not evangelical distinctives. They are the common confession of all historic Christianity — Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant.²⁶ A teacher who cannot affirm these creeds as they stand, without mental reservation or secret reinterpretation, is not standing where the universal church has stood for nearly two thousand years. This does not prove the teacher is wrong in every respect. But it does locate them somewhere other than where the church has always located the boundary of the Christian family.

The test is not just whether the teacher recites the creeds but whether the teacher means what the creeds mean. A teacher can say "Jesus rose from the dead on the third day" while meaning something like "the disciples encountered a new consciousness." The words are orthodox; the content is not. Apply the test with care. Ask: when this teacher says "risen," do they mean the bodily resurrection the apostles claimed to have seen? When they say "the forgiveness of sins," do they mean real forgiveness for real guilt through Christ's atoning death? When they say "he will come again," do they mean a real future coming of the real Christ? Scripture itself functions as the final norm against which even creedal language is measured, and a teacher who uses Scripture's words while meaning something foreign to Scripture's content has slipped the anchor that holds Christian teaching in place.²⁵

Tool 3: Note What Is Softened or Avoided

A teacher's silences are often more revealing than their speeches. Read through several chapters of a book in this category and ask: how often does the teacher speak about sin? About judgment? About the exclusivity of Christ? About repentance? About the reality of spiritual darkness and the need for rescue? About the biblical descriptions of final loss?

Faithful Christian teaching includes these themes because Scripture includes them. They are not pleasant, but they are true, and they give shape to the good news. If a teacher consistently avoids them, or consistently transforms them into something gentler than the biblical picture, ask why. The avoidance is not accidental. It reflects a theological choice to minimize material that sits uncomfortably with the teacher's framework.

By the same token, notice what the teacher amplifies. Every teacher selects. A faithful Christian teacher will not give equal time to every biblical theme in every book. But when the amplifications consistently point away from the biblical accents and the silences consistently cover the biblical accents, you are seeing a framework in operation — and the framework deserves evaluation.

Tool 4: Follow the Trajectory Over Time

An author's earliest work is usually their most conservative. The later work typically reveals where the framework has been heading all along. When evaluating a teacher, do not rely solely on their first book or their most popular book. Look at what they are writing now, what they are saying in recent interviews, what platforms they share, who they endorse.

Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis (2005) is more orthodox than Love Wins (2011), which is more orthodox than What We Talk About When We Talk About God (2013). Richard Rohr's early work on contemplative prayer is more traditionally Catholic than his later work on the universal Christ. Following the trajectory lets you see the destination, not just the starting point. It also helps you assess whether a teacher is moving toward or away from biblical Christianity — information that matters for how you evaluate their current work.³³

Tool 5: Check Who Endorses and Who Critiques

A teacher's endorsements and critiques tell you where they are located in the broader theological landscape. If a teacher is endorsed primarily by figures who have themselves moved outside evangelical orthodoxy, and critiqued primarily by evangelical pastors, scholars, and discernment ministries, the teacher is probably located outside evangelical orthodoxy, whatever their self-identification.

This test is not infallible. Good teachers can be misunderstood. Bad teachers can occasionally be endorsed by figures who have not read them carefully. But in aggregate, the pattern of endorsements and critiques is a reliable indicator. When Rob Bell's Love Wins was published, the endorsements came from progressive theologians, emerging-church leaders, and spiritual-but-not-religious voices; the critiques came from evangelical pastors and theologians across the spectrum. That pattern told readers something worth knowing.

Tool 6: Apply the Seven Tests from Chapter 10

In chapter 10, I developed a seven-test framework for evaluating any NDE or DBE account. Those seven tests — the Scripture test, the Christ test, the gospel test, the fruit test, the spiritual direction test, the consistency test, and the coherence test — apply just as well to subtle teachers as to obvious ones. In some ways they apply more pointedly, because the subtle teacher is easier to miss.

When you read a teacher in this category, run them through the seven tests explicitly. Does their teaching align with Scripture, or does it softly move away from it? Is their Christ the biblical Christ, with His real humanity, divinity, death, and resurrection — or is He a cosmic principle with Christian dressing? Does their gospel match Paul's gospel? Do their followers bear biblical fruit over time, or do they drift toward syncretism? Where does their spiritual counsel point — to Christ specifically, or to generic spirituality? Are their views consistent with the historic faith, or do they require reinterpreting the creeds? Does their framework as a whole cohere with Scripture, or does it require softening or avoiding large portions of Scripture to work?

If a teacher fails multiple tests, especially the Christ test and the gospel test, you have your answer. The teaching is Christian-adjacent but not Christian in its central framework.

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The Pastoral Dimension: When Loved Teachers Drift

I want to close the evaluative portion of this chapter with a pastoral word, because I know that for many Christian readers, this material is not abstract. You may have loved a teacher whose framework I have just critiqued. You may have been formed by their books in an important season of your life. You may have recommended their work to others. And I want to speak to that experience gently.

First, the fact that a teacher has drifted from biblical Christianity does not mean that your earlier formation through their work was wasted. God is not limited by our imperfect teachers. The truths in Rohr's early contemplative writing, in Bell's early pastoral work, in many other authors' better moments — those truths are still truths, and the Spirit can use them. When you go back to such a teacher later and find their framework wanting, you are not invalidating your own past. You are simply growing into a more mature discernment.

Second, separating appreciation from endorsement is a Christian skill worth cultivating. You can appreciate a writer's literary gift without endorsing their theology. You can appreciate their insights on contemplative practice without adopting their cosmic Christ. You can learn from their critique of shallow religion without following them into deeper error. C. S. Lewis once wrote that we should always be ready to "take back" a false step in our thinking without shame, because truth matters more than our pride in any particular position. The same principle applies to our relationship with teachers. If we find that a teacher we loved has drifted, we do not have to defend their drift to honor what they gave us. We simply thank God for the true things, leave the false things, and go on.

Third, evaluating a teacher's teaching is not the same as judging their soul. I have been careful throughout this chapter not to pronounce on the personal Christian state of any individual teacher. That is not my place. I can evaluate what they have published; I cannot see into their hearts. Neither can you. You can critique Richard Rohr's framework without claiming he is not a Christian. You can disagree with Rob Bell's trajectory without declaring him damned. Our job is to evaluate teaching so that we and those we love are not led astray. Their eternal standing is between them and the Lord.²⁸

Fourth, if you have been shaped by a teacher who has drifted, walking away from their framework is itself an act of faithfulness. It is not betrayal. It is discipleship. Jesus said that His sheep hear His voice and follow Him (John 10:27). Part of hearing His voice is distinguishing it from other voices, even voices that sound Christian at first. The more you grow in Scripture and in the community of the historic church, the more finely tuned your ear becomes. That growth is a gift, not a loss.

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The Ultimate Antidote: Biblical Literacy

If you have read carefully up to this point, you may have noticed that the discernment tools I have offered all depend on something more fundamental: a deep, working knowledge of the Bible. You cannot test a teacher against Scripture if you do not know Scripture. You cannot notice when biblical vocabulary is being used in non-biblical ways if you do not know what the biblical vocabulary actually means in its biblical context. You cannot recognize what is avoided or softened if you do not know what ought to be there in the first place.

This is why the ultimate protection against subtle theological drift is not more suspicion. It is more Scripture. The Christian who knows the Bible thoroughly — who has read it from Genesis to Revelation, who has meditated on its theological structure, who has learned to think the thoughts of the apostles and prophets — is far less vulnerable to the pattern this chapter has described. When such a Christian reads Richard Rohr speaking of "Christ," internal alarms go off almost automatically: "That's not how Paul uses that word. That's not the Christ of Colossians. That's not the Christ I know." When such a Christian reads Rob Bell softening the biblical teaching on final judgment, the same alarms sound: "The Bible doesn't actually say what he's implying; the passages he skips say something else."

This is not legalism. It is not fear-driven fundamentalism. It is simply what Paul calls being "transformed by the renewal of your mind" (Romans 12:2, ESV) — having your thinking so shaped by Scripture that you can "discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." The Greek word there is again δοκιμάζειν (dokimazein), "to test" or "to prove." A renewed mind is a discerning mind. A biblically literate Christian is a discerning Christian.³⁴

So if there is one practical conclusion I want you to draw from this chapter, it is this: invest in Scripture more than in any single teacher, including the best of them. Read the Bible through. Read it again. Read it in different translations. Read good commentaries that help you understand the historical and literary context. Read the creeds and catechisms that summarize the historic Christian faith. Read systematic theologies that show you how the biblical material hangs together. The more deeply the biblical framework inhabits you, the more easily you will spot when a teacher's framework has departed from it — whether that teacher sounds Christian or not.³²

John Burke, an evangelical pastor whose book Imagine Heaven engages NDE material extensively, makes a similar point when he urges readers to compare every NDE claim against the biblical text rather than against other NDE accounts.²⁴ The same principle applies to NDE teachers and interpreters. Compare their frameworks to Scripture, not to other frameworks. Scripture is the rule that measures every other rule, the voice that judges every other voice, the final court before which every teacher — including the ones you love, and including me — must stand.

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Conclusion

This chapter has mapped one of the hardest categories of discernment in all of NDE and DBE literature: teachers who sound Christian, use Christian vocabulary, quote Scripture, and may even hold Christian orders or pastoral ministry — but whose actual theological framework, on careful examination, departs from biblical Christianity in ways that matter. These teachers are dangerous not because they are openly hostile to the faith but because they wear its language. Christian readers let their guard down. The subtle departure slips in without resistance. Over time, frameworks accumulate that are not what they appeared to be.

We walked through six markers that typically appear in such teaching: universalist conclusions reached through Christian framing; the deprioritizing of doctrine in favor of pure experience; soft critique of traditional Christianity; a "Christ" detached from the historical Jesus; the blurring of Christianity's distinctiveness relative to other faiths; and pastoral framing that discourages the very discernment Scripture commands. We examined Richard Rohr at length as the most influential example, and Rob Bell as an illustration of the drift pattern. We sketched the broader categories of progressive pastors, hospice writers, and Catholic mystics whose frameworks sometimes show the same pattern. We offered six practical tools for evaluating any teacher in this category: reading their explicit theological statements, checking against the historic creeds, noticing what is softened or avoided, following the trajectory over time, checking endorsements and critiques, and applying the seven tests developed in chapter 10.

Two things should remain with you after this chapter. The first is confidence. Christian readers are not powerless in the face of sophisticated theological drift. The Bible, the creeds, and the discernment tools given in this book are more than enough to spot the pattern when it appears. You do not need a doctorate in theology. You need a growing familiarity with Scripture, a willingness to read carefully, and the humility to test what you read. That combination — available to every Christian who will cultivate it — is a reliable protection.

The second is charity. The goal of this chapter has not been to denounce individual teachers as enemies of Christ. The goal has been to evaluate published teaching fairly and help fellow believers read with eyes open. The teachers we discussed have, in most cases, substantial positive contributions. They have also made theological moves that cannot be integrated into biblical Christianity. Saying that clearly, while praying for the teachers by name and acknowledging what is true in their work, is an act of love rather than hostility. It is what real Christian community looks like — speaking the truth to one another, testing the spirits, and holding fast to what is good.

In the next chapter we turn from teachers whose frameworks have drifted to accounts that were never spiritual experiences at all — the phenomenon of fabricated NDEs and unreliable testimonies. That is a different kind of discernment challenge, but one that draws on the same biblical commitment: love for the truth, care for our neighbors, and honor for the God who does not deceive.