Engaging Wholesale Rejection with Honesty and Charity
Let me open this chapter with a scene I have watched unfold more than once. A middle-aged woman sits in a small-group Bible study at her church. Her voice trembles a little as she shares. Her mother, a lifelong Christian, died two weeks ago. In the final hours, her mother opened her eyes, looked toward the ceiling, smiled, and said, "Oh, it's so beautiful. Jesus is here." She died a few minutes later. The woman tells the group that this memory is the single most precious thing she owns. Then she asks: what do you think it means?
The group leader — a sincere, Bible-loving man — answers gently but firmly. He tells her he does not want to take anything away from her mother's passing. But he has been taught by his favorite pastors and teachers that these sorts of deathbed visions are not reliable. The Bible is enough, he says. The dying brain can play tricks. Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light. It is better, he concludes, not to build much on such experiences. He says it kindly. He even prays for her. But the woman goes home feeling as if the most important moment of her life has just been set on a shelf and labeled "be careful."
This scene is the opposite of the scene with which this book began. In the opening chapter, we looked at a Christian audience applauding a conference speaker whose theology was drifting into clear error. That audience suffered from too much credulity. The woman in the small group suffers from something else. She is pressing up against the opposite error: the wholesale dismissal of all near-death and deathbed experiences. Her group leader did not mean to wound her. He was trying to be faithful. He was trying to protect her from deception. But his framework gave him no way to receive her mother's final gift. That framework is the subject of this chapter.1
We have spent a great deal of this book warning against uncritical acceptance of NDE and DBE testimony. We have named specific teachers whose theology has drifted. We have walked through counterfeit elements, hybrid experiences, and fabricated accounts. If this were the only book a Christian read on the subject, they might finish it thinking the main danger is believing too much. That would be a mistake. The opposite danger is just as real and, in my pastoral experience, more common among serious, Bible-centered evangelicals. It is the danger of believing too little — or, more precisely, of dismissing the whole category before examining the individual cases.
My aim in this chapter is not to score points against brothers and sisters in Christ who hold this view. Some of the most godly Bible teachers I have ever read fall somewhere on this side of the debate. I have learned from them. I honor them. I want to engage their arguments with the same fairness and charity we have tried to show toward everyone else in this book. But I also want to say clearly where I believe they have overshot the mark, and why the wholesale dismissal position finally fails both the biblical witness and the pastoral needs of NDErs, DBErs, and the families who love them.2
Let me begin by naming the view I am engaging. I am calling it the "wholesale dismissal" position, or sometimes the "wholesale rejectionist" position. It goes by other names too — "NDE skepticism" among Christians, "the cessationist objection," the "heaven tourism critique." Different teachers emphasize different pieces. But the core claim is the same: the category of near-death experience, as a source of information about the afterlife, should be rejected. Individual NDE stories may sometimes be interesting as case studies, but they should not be trusted as evidence for anything beyond the activity of a dying brain, the imagination of an excited patient, or — in more serious versions of the view — the deceptions of spiritual enemies.
The reasons given for this position vary. I will list the most common versions before we examine them one by one. A wholesale dismissal typically rests on some combination of the following claims:
First, some argue that NDEs are simply hallucinations produced by the dying brain. When the brain runs low on oxygen, or when certain chemicals flood the system near death, it can produce vivid, dream-like experiences that feel real to the patient but are not real. Christians who hold this view sometimes add a theological layer — these hallucinations are a feature of a fallen creation — but the core claim is medical, not spiritual.
Second, some argue that NDEs are demonic deceptions. Satan is able to disguise himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), and what better opportunity than the threshold of death? On this view, the being of light is often (perhaps always) a disguised enemy. The love and peace are counterfeit. The goal is to lead the experiencer and everyone who hears their story into syncretism, universalism, or a generic "spirituality" that bypasses the gospel.
Third, some argue from the sufficiency of Scripture. The Bible tells us what we need to know about the afterlife. Any additional "revelation" is suspect and risks distorting what God has already revealed. If we need to know it, Scripture already contains it; if Scripture does not contain it, we do not need to know it.
Fourth, some point to the popular NDE bestsellers and the bad theology those books often contain. Betty Eadie, Eben Alexander, Anita Moorjani, and others teach clear errors. Therefore (the argument runs) the category as a whole is unreliable. If the most famous NDErs teach unbiblical doctrine, then the whole genre should be treated with deep suspicion.
Fifth, some appeal to fabrications. Alex Malarkey's retraction of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven hit the evangelical world hard. If a story that sold more than a million copies turned out to be a lie, how can we trust any of them? The argument from fabrication says: the genre has been so compromised by dishonest accounts that Christians should not engage with it at all.3
Sixth, some express a pastoral concern. NDE literature, they warn, can distort Christian priorities. It can produce an unhealthy fascination with heaven, an emotional dependence on extra-biblical experience, and a neglect of the ordinary means of grace — Word, prayer, sacrament, church. The best Christian life, in this view, is built on Scripture and the gospel, not on someone else's vision.
Finally, some hold a cessationist theology that rules out post-apostolic revelatory experience in principle. On this view, the age of visions, angelic visitations, and prophetic experience ended with the closing of the biblical canon. Whatever NDEs are, they cannot be what they seem to be, because God does not do that kind of thing anymore.
John MacArthur's book The Glory of Heaven (revised second edition, 2013) brings together several of these arguments in the most influential evangelical critique of the NDE genre that has yet been written.4 Hank Hanegraaff has offered similar — though more selective — critiques through his radio ministry and in his book Afterlife: What You Need to Know about Heaven, the Hereafter and Near-Death Experiences.5 Gary Gilley's Is That You, Lord? Hearing the Voice of God: A Biblical Perspective and his associated critiques of "heaven tourism" books represent a similar pastoral stream.6 A broader Reformed and cessationist theological current lies in the background, influencing many pastors who have not read any of these books directly but have absorbed the general posture.
These teachers are not foolish. Several are among the most serious expositors in the contemporary church. When MacArthur raises a concern, I take it seriously. When Hanegraaff critiques an account, he is usually right about that specific account. When Gilley warns about a cultural trend, he has often identified a real trend. The problem is not that the concerns are invalid. The problem is that the concerns are allowed to swallow the whole category without first examining what is actually inside it.7
Before I engage the arguments one by one, I want to sit with them for a moment. I do not want to rush past them. Each one contains partial truth, and the response we build in this chapter will be strongest if we first give the concerns their due weight.
The "hallucination" concern is partially right. Some experiences that get reported as NDEs are in fact drug-induced, pain-induced, or dream-like brain events. Medical staff regularly see patients in delirium or coming out of anesthesia who say strange things. Not every vivid experience near death is a genuine encounter with the spiritual realm. A careful discernment framework must account for this. One of the reasons researchers such as Michael Sabom, Pim van Lommel, and Penny Sartori have mattered so much to the Christian engagement with NDEs is that they have taken the medical explanations seriously and tested them rigorously. Their research has shown that hallucination cannot explain the core NDE, especially those cases involving veridical perception of events the patient could not have seen by natural means. But it can explain many experiences that get loosely classified under the NDE umbrella. The concern, in other words, has teeth.8
The "demonic deception" concern is also partially right. The Bible is explicit that our enemy disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). We have developed this point at length in Chapter 7. Some NDE accounts do contain features that are hard to square with anything other than spiritual deception — beings of light teaching reincarnation, universalism, or open occult practice. The Christian who dismisses the possibility of demonic involvement in some reports is not reading his Bible carefully enough. The concern is legitimate. What is at stake is whether the concern applies to every report or only to a subset.
The "sufficiency of Scripture" concern is partially right. Scripture is indeed sufficient for faith and practice. It contains everything we need to know God, to be saved, and to live faithfully. No NDE testimony can add to the closed canon of Scripture, correct its teaching, or function as a new revelation binding on the conscience of believers. If a friend tells me that in her NDE she was given a new commandment that contradicts the Sermon on the Mount, I know without further investigation that something has gone wrong. The Christian discernment framework we have built throughout this book (see especially Chapter 8) takes Scripture as the final standard. No NDEr and no NDE researcher is competing with the Bible for authority.
The "bad theology in popular books" concern is entirely right. If you walk through the NDE section of a typical bookstore, you will find a lot of unreliable material. Betty Eadie's Embraced by the Light reads, in places, like a Mormon systematic theology filtered through New Age language.9 Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven ends in a generic "all is one" mysticism. Anita Moorjani's Dying to Be Me is explicit about rejecting the doctrine of sin. A reader who picks up five random bestselling NDE books can easily come away with the impression that the entire genre teaches some form of universalist spirituality. MacArthur and Hanegraaff are not making up this concern out of thin air. It reflects what is actually on many bookstore shelves.
The "fabrication" concern is right too. Alex Malarkey's retraction of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven is a genuine scandal in the evangelical world. Publishers rushed to print stories that had not been carefully tested. Readers bought them by the millions. When the fraud came out, the embarrassment was not merely Alex's; it was shared by an entire publishing culture that had not exercised appropriate scrutiny.10 Chapter 32 in this book is devoted to this problem.
The "distorted Christian priorities" concern is partially right. I have met Christians whose reading diet consists almost entirely of NDE testimonies and heaven-tourism books. Their conversation circles back again and again to what so-and-so saw, and what her book says, and what we can learn from the other side. Their engagement with Scripture has grown thin. Their fascination with the afterlife has become a kind of spiritual candy, pleasant but not nourishing. This is a real pastoral phenomenon. When MacArthur speaks about Christians whose priorities have been scrambled by "heaven tourism," he is describing something I have watched play out in real lives.
Even the cessationist concern — which I believe is the most vulnerable of the set — contains partial truth. Scripture is the norm. Personal experience must be tested, not followed blindly. Private visions and special revelations have historically been a breeding ground for heresies and cults. The cessationist is not wrong to be nervous. He is wrong to move from appropriate caution to categorical prohibition.11
A fair engagement with the wholesale dismissal position begins by admitting that its concerns are not silly. Each one identifies a real problem in some portion of the NDE literature. The question is never whether these problems exist. The question is whether they are best addressed by dismissing the whole category or by building a careful discernment framework that separates genuine cases from counterfeit and corrupted ones.
Because John MacArthur's The Glory of Heaven is the most developed evangelical case for wholesale dismissal, I want to walk through five of his main arguments in turn. I am going to try to represent his view as he would state it, then respond from the broader framework this book has developed. My disagreement with MacArthur on this subject is real. But it is a disagreement between brothers in Christ who share far more than divides us.
MacArthur's first and most foundational argument runs roughly like this: God has revealed what we need to know about heaven in Scripture. Anything beyond that is speculation, and speculation is dangerous. When Christians begin to rely on extra-biblical visions — whether medieval mystics, modern charismatics, or near-death experiencers — they begin to build a theology on unstable ground. The solution is to return to Scripture and leave the speculation alone.12
There is much here I affirm. Scripture is sufficient for faith and practice. No NDE report is binding revelation. A Christian who trims her theology to fit someone else's vision has already gone wrong. I have no interest in defending any version of the NDE enthusiasm that puts experiences on the same level as the Bible.
But MacArthur's argument confuses two distinct claims. The first claim — Scripture is sufficient — I accept. The second claim — God does not do anything He has not already described in Scripture — does not follow. The Bible itself is full of post-canonical possibilities that the sufficiency doctrine does not close off. Scripture tells us that God gives dreams and visions (Joel 2:28; Acts 2:17). Scripture tells us that angels minister to the heirs of salvation (Hebrews 1:14). Scripture tells us that Paul was caught up into the third heaven and heard unspeakable things (2 Corinthians 12:1-4). Scripture tells us that Stephen saw the risen Christ standing at the right hand of the Father as he was being stoned (Acts 7:55-56). If Scripture itself records such events, Scripture itself cannot be used to prove that such events never happen afterward.13
The sufficiency of Scripture means that Scripture contains everything necessary for salvation and godly life. It does not mean that Scripture describes every event that will ever happen. It does not mean that God has stopped acting. It certainly does not mean that Christians should treat dying saints' visions of Jesus as illegitimate. Paul's own third-heaven experience shows that something consistent with Scripture can happen to a person that is not itself additional Scripture. Paul did not come back with a new gospel. He came back unable even to describe clearly what he had seen. His experience confirmed and deepened his biblical faith; it did not replace it.14
J. Steve Miller, in his book-length response to MacArthur, makes a telling point. MacArthur himself regularly uses extra-biblical knowledge — historical studies, scientific findings, cultural observations — to illustrate and reinforce biblical truth.15 When MacArthur quotes a scientist on the complexity of the human cell to illustrate the doctrine of creation, he is not treating the scientist as a new source of revelation. He is using natural knowledge to confirm what Scripture already teaches. This is the classical Protestant distinction between general and special revelation. Scripture (special revelation) is the final authority; but creation, providence, and human experience (general revelation) bear witness to the same God.
If it is legitimate for MacArthur to appeal to the study of cell biology to confirm the doctrine of creation, it is legitimate for other Christians to appeal to NDE research to confirm the doctrines of the soul's survival of death, the reality of the afterlife, and the presence of Christ with His dying people. Neither claim replaces Scripture. Neither claim is treated as a new revelation. Both use general knowledge to reinforce what Scripture already teaches.
A stronger form of MacArthur's argument would require him to show that NDE testimony routinely adds content to Scripture in a way scientific observation does not. He does not show this. What he shows is that some popular NDE books add content to Scripture. That is true. It is also the reason this book spends so much time on discernment. But the category as a whole is not guilty of that crime. Many NDE and DBE reports simply testify to themes already present in Scripture — Christ's presence with the dying, the comfort of the departed, the reality of angelic ministry, the vividness of the afterlife — without adding anything new.16
MacArthur's second argument is that the popular NDE books are full of content that contradicts the Bible. He walks the reader through Betty Eadie's Embraced by the Light, Dannion Brinkley's accounts, and others, pointing out where their theology veers into Mormonism, New Age, or universalism. His conclusion is that the genre as a whole is suspect.17
Here MacArthur is on his strongest ground — and also commits his clearest logical overreach. He is right that Eadie, Brinkley, and others teach serious error. Much of this book (especially Chapters 30 and 31) agrees with him on these specific authors. Readers who come away from those popular accounts with a picture of the afterlife built from New Age categories have indeed been misled.
But notice the move MacArthur makes. He observes problems in specific bestsellers. Then he concludes that the category of "near-death experience" is suspect. That does not follow. The fallacy is easy to name once you see it: it is the fallacy of treating an unrepresentative sample as the whole.
The NDE research literature is not the same thing as the NDE popular literature. Scholarly studies by Sabom, van Lommel, Sartori, Long, Greyson, and others examine thousands of cases, most of which have never been published in a popular book at all. When Miller surveys this scholarly literature, he finds that the majority of cases are devoid of anti-Christian doctrinal content. When he tallies up the themes that recur across thousands of reports, he finds themes that line up closely with biblical teaching — meeting God as personal and loving, encountering departed loved ones, receiving a sense of purpose to return and live, feeling profound peace in Christ's presence.18 The anti-Christian doctrinal material that dominates the popular books is, in the scholarly literature, a minority phenomenon.
Sabom's Atlanta Study, for example, found that NDErs tended to become more committed to historic Christian practice, not less.19 That directly cuts against the media image of NDErs drifting away from organized religion into generic spirituality. John Burke, who has interviewed or read over a thousand NDE accounts, finds striking consistency between core NDE reports and biblical descriptions of the afterlife.20 The picture from scholarly and pastoral sources is simply not the picture MacArthur gets from the bestseller shelf.
MacArthur is in essence evaluating the NDE phenomenon by looking at its worst public representatives. Imagine if a non-Christian evaluated "Christianity" by reading Joel Osteen, a health-and-wealth prosperity preacher, and a UFO cult leader who calls himself Christian. He would draw unflattering conclusions. But those conclusions would not be about Christianity. They would be about a very narrow and unrepresentative slice of it. The same is true of MacArthur's engagement with NDEs. The problem is not that the cases he cites are bad — they are. The problem is that the cases he cites are not a fair sample of the phenomenon he is evaluating.
The valid conclusion from MacArthur's observation is the conclusion this book draws: NDE literature requires discernment. Readers should approach popular books cautiously. Some authors can be read with confidence; others cannot. Some specific experiences check out against Scripture; others do not. That is a call for careful evaluation, not wholesale dismissal. You do not burn down the orchard because some of the apples are rotten.21
MacArthur's third argument points to fabricated NDEs, with Alex Malarkey as the prime example. If a memoir that sold more than a million copies turns out to be invented, how can we trust the others? The argument from fabrication says that the genre has become so compromised that the safer course is to treat all such accounts as suspect.22
The Malarkey case is genuinely damaging. I will not minimize it. A young boy's name was attached to a story that was not true, and that story shaped the faith of many readers in ways that now have to be undone. The evangelical publishing world deserves its share of blame for rushing to press without sufficient scrutiny. The lesson is real.
But the argument from fabrication proves too much. If one fabricated memoir invalidates a genre, then one fake conversion story invalidates all conversion stories; one forged miracle report invalidates all miracle reports; one hoaxed archaeological find invalidates all archaeology. The principle collapses on contact with any honest application. Fabrications exist in every category of human testimony. The existence of fabrications calls for careful vetting, not categorical rejection.
Notice, too, that the discovery of the Malarkey fraud presupposes the existence of reliable standards. The story was exposed because Alex himself came forward and said it was not true — because his testimony mattered, and because the Christian publishing world, despite its earlier failure, was still capable of acting on truth when the truth came out. The fabrications do not erase the distinction between real and fake. They sharpen it. They remind us that the work of discernment matters.23
The scholarly literature that this book has drawn on over and over — Sabom, Long, Miller, van Lommel, Sartori, Greyson — does not consist of unverified popular bestsellers. It consists of peer-reviewed research, hospital-based interviews, carefully documented medical records, and statistical analysis of thousands of cases. Alex Malarkey is not in that literature. Neither are most of the popular heaven-tourism authors. The scholarly literature is not invalidated by a memoir's collapse. If anything, the collapse of unverified popular accounts highlights the value of the verified scholarly ones.
The right response to Malarkey is the one this book has been teaching: develop the skills to tell the difference. Ask hard questions. Look for corroboration. Compare reported experiences to Scripture. Do not buy what is on the bestseller shelf just because it is on the bestseller shelf. But do not throw out the whole category because some items in it were counterfeit. Counterfeits exist only because something real exists to be counterfeited.
MacArthur's fourth argument runs in the direction of Christian piety. The Christian's mental diet, he says, should be dominated by Scripture and gospel proclamation, not by other people's visions. If we are reading heaven tourism books instead of the Book, something has gone wrong. The solution is to close those books and open the Bible.24
As a devotional instinct, I agree. I would urge any Christian whose reading life is dominated by NDE books and neglects Scripture to rearrange her shelf. Scripture is primary. The Bible is the food of the soul. No anthology of other people's experiences can substitute for the Word of God. I wrote this book because I love Scripture and want Christians to engage NDE material in submission to Scripture. I am not competing with the Bible; I am trying to protect the Bible's priority.
But MacArthur's argument again slides from a true claim about priority to a false claim about exclusivity. "Scripture is primary" does not mean "Scripture is the only thing we should read about the things Scripture addresses." Christians read commentaries, theology books, biographies, church history, systematic works, devotional classics, and even secular scholarship. All of these are extra-biblical. The question is not whether they are extra-biblical. The question is whether they submit to Scripture and serve the reader's growth in Christ.25
Well-chosen NDE material, read in submission to Scripture, can serve the Christian's growth. It can reinforce faith in the afterlife — a faith already taught clearly in Scripture but sometimes dimmed by modern materialism. It can stir love for Christ, who appears so prominently in many NDE reports as the kind and loving Lord that Scripture describes. It can prepare the believer to die well and to care for the dying with confidence. It can give the non-believer a foothold for considering the gospel.
I have watched this happen in real people. A hospice worker reads Miller's book and finds her daily ministry transformed; she now recognizes the DBEs her patients are describing, and she can receive them with joy instead of dismissal. A skeptical college student reads a scholarly treatment of veridical NDEs and, for the first time, seriously considers that consciousness might survive death — a doorway that led her, over months, to an encounter with the risen Christ through the gospel. A grieving son reads Burke's Imagine Heaven and finally has language for what he saw at his mother's bedside. In each case, the NDE material did not replace Scripture. It prepared the ground for Scripture to do deeper work.26
There is an old pastoral principle that applies here. Good teaching does not dry up affection for Scripture; it inflames it. If an NDE book is making a Christian lose her appetite for the Bible, the book is not doing its job, and the reader should close it and come back to the Scriptures. But if an NDE book is stirring a Christian's wonder at the God who meets His people at the threshold, and driving her back to Scripture with fresh hunger, then the book is functioning as any good Christian book should function — as a servant of the Word, not a competitor with it.
MacArthur's fifth argument is pastoral in tone. He worries that the heaven tourism industry produces Christians whose emotional life has become over-focused on the afterlife, at the expense of present discipleship. The Bible calls us to live faithfully in this world. It does not call us to spend our hours daydreaming about the next.27
There is real insight here. I have met Christians whose NDE fascination has become unhealthy. They do not think about their jobs, their families, or their sanctification. They think about heaven — someone else's heaven, as reported in someone else's book. This is not spiritual maturity. It is a kind of escape. It can also produce a strange envy of NDErs, as if the rest of us are second-class Christians because we have not had the experience.
But notice, again, that MacArthur's concern is about a particular kind of reader, not about the NDE phenomenon itself. The problem he describes is not unique to NDE books. The same distorted emotional pattern can attach to prophecy charts, political news cycles, worship music, personal testimony genres, or any number of other legitimate-but-abusable Christian interests. The solution is not to abolish the category. The solution is balanced discipleship — Word, prayer, sacrament, church, service, work, family, and heaven all held in proper proportion.
Scripture itself encourages a robust hope in heaven. Colossians 3:1-2 tells believers to set their minds on things above, where Christ is seated at God's right hand. Philippians 3:20 says our citizenship is in heaven. 2 Corinthians 5:8 says Paul would rather be absent from the body and at home with the Lord. Hebrews 11 holds up saints who looked for a better country. A believer who thinks too much about heaven has not sinned against a Bible that thinks too little about heaven. She has perhaps failed to integrate her hope properly with her present duties. But the hope itself is biblical.28
A dying Christian who is preparing to meet her Lord is not being distracted by an unhealthy heaven-focus. She is doing exactly what Scripture calls her to do. A bereaved family member who finds comfort in reading about DBEs is not drifting from the gospel. She is finding her way back into the gospel's promises by a path Scripture commends. The distortion MacArthur worries about is real, but it is not the general pattern. It is the exception.
The sufficiency of Scripture means Scripture contains everything necessary for salvation and godly life. It does not mean God has stopped working in ways Scripture itself describes — dreams, visions, angelic encounters, spiritual experiences at the edge of death. The Bible itself records such events. The Bible itself cannot be used to prove they have ceased.
· · ·
Hank Hanegraaff occupies a somewhat different space than MacArthur. For years as the host of The Bible Answer Man, he has offered thoughtful critiques of specific NDE accounts — particularly Betty Eadie's Embraced by the Light and similar New Age-inflected testimonies. His book Afterlife provides a more developed statement of his position. Hanegraaff's critiques of the specific problematic accounts are largely sound. He has rendered real service to the Christian public by helping believers see the theological errors in books they might otherwise have accepted uncritically.29
Where Hanegraaff stops is instructive. He does not, to my reading, go as far as MacArthur toward wholesale dismissal. He evaluates specific accounts. He names specific errors. He distinguishes between the more reliable and the less reliable. He is, in other words, doing discernment — the very practice this book commends. His position is closer to mine than to MacArthur's in at least this respect: he engages cases rather than dismissing the category.
The question Hanegraaff's work raises is not whether the problematic accounts he critiques deserve critique. They do. It is whether the critique should be generalized. When Hanegraaff is at his most careful, he does not generalize. He evaluates. When he slips toward more sweeping language, he moves closer to MacArthur's territory. The careful Hanegraaff is, in my view, the better guide.30
I think Hanegraaff's approach points the way forward for Christians who share his concerns. Specific books can be evaluated specifically. Eadie's teaching about a Mormon-like preexistence is wrong, and Hanegraaff is right to say so. Brinkley's spiritist-adjacent teaching is wrong, and Hanegraaff is right to say so. Alexander's concluding generic mysticism is problematic, and Hanegraaff is right to say so. But such evaluations do not add up to a blanket condemnation of the NDE phenomenon. They add up to a reading list that Christians should approach carefully, with certain authors marked in green, others in amber, and others in red.
A Christian who followed Hanegraaff's more cautious instinct — read carefully, evaluate carefully, praise what is biblical and critique what is not — would end up exactly where this book is trying to land. Where Hanegraaff's language hardens into wholesale dismissal, I part ways with him; where his actual practice is careful evaluation, I follow him gladly.
Gary Gilley and a broader stream of Reformed and Baptist pastoral critics have written shorter-form critiques of the heaven-tourism genre. Gilley's pamphlet-length treatments of specific books — 90 Minutes in Heaven, Heaven Is for Real, 23 Minutes in Hell, and others — exemplify a careful, article-length evaluation of specific popular accounts. His concerns are often legitimate. His scholarly habits are admirable. His pastoral heart is obvious.31
Gilley's critiques share with Hanegraaff's the focus on specific cases rather than categorical dismissal. When Gilley evaluates a book, he typically asks three questions: Does the content align with Scripture? Is the theological framework sound? Does the book's popularity reflect good reading habits or poor ones? These are good questions. They are, in fact, the questions this book has been asking throughout.
What I want to encourage Gilley's readers to do is to bring those same questions to the scholarly NDE literature — not just to the popular books. The scholarly literature includes careful, sober research by Christian physicians and researchers who share Gilley's concerns about popular excesses. Sabom is the obvious example. Van Lommel, Sartori, Long, Miller, and others have produced work that passes most of Gilley's evaluative tests. A reader who reads only the popular books and never the scholarly research will form a distorted picture — even a reader who is rightly skeptical of the popular books.
The broader Reformed critic tends to share this profile. He has read the Heaven is for Real phenomenon and found it wanting. He has not typically read Sabom's Light and Death, van Lommel's Consciousness Beyond Life, Miller's academic volumes, or Long's God and the Afterlife. He knows what he opposes. He does not always know what he is refusing to engage. I would encourage any Christian influenced by this pastoral stream to read the more careful literature before settling on a final position. The data is larger and more interesting than the popular books suggest.32
Having engaged the specific arguments, I want now to step back and name seven broader problems with the wholesale dismissal position. These are not arguments against MacArthur, Hanegraaff, or Gilley as individuals. They are problems that attach to any version of the position when pressed to its logical conclusion.
The first and most serious problem is that wholesale dismissal ignores the strongest evidence the NDE literature has produced. When critics treat all NDEs as hallucinations of the dying brain, they have to find some way to explain veridical cases — cases where the patient reports observing details during clinical death that could not have been known by natural means. These cases exist, they are well-documented, and they cannot be plausibly explained as hallucinations.33
Consider Pam Reynolds' famous case, described by Sabom in Light and Death. During a surgical procedure that included the deliberate stopping of her heart and the cooling of her body to prevent brain damage, Reynolds reported observing specific details of her operation — including the unusual shape of a surgical bone saw she could not have seen before the surgery, and conversations among the surgical team about the size of her femoral artery. Her eyes were taped shut. Her ears were fitted with speakers playing audible clicks to monitor brain-stem function. Standard medical monitoring showed no brain activity. Yet her descriptions were accurate.34
Or consider the substantial literature of blind NDErs who report seeing during their experience, sometimes describing visual details they had never seen before — the appearance of their own resuscitation equipment, the faces of family members, the patterns of a hospital room. Kenneth Ring's research on blind NDErs (summarized in Mindsight) documents this pattern across many cases.35 A dying-brain hallucination cannot produce accurate visual description in a person who has never had visual experience. Something else is happening.
The wholesale dismissal position has to treat these cases as coincidences, confabulations, or frauds. It cannot engage them on their merits, because engaging them would open the door it is committed to keeping shut. This is not a posture of intellectual humility. It is a posture of commitment-first, evidence-later — and that is the very posture Christians rightly criticize in secular materialism. We cannot object to materialists dismissing miracles on the basis of a prior commitment to materialism, and then ourselves dismiss NDEs on the basis of a prior commitment to dismissal. Either evidence matters or it does not.
The second problem is that wholesale dismissal ignores how deeply Christ-centered much of the NDE and DBE literature actually is. If the phenomenon were driven primarily by demonic deception, we would expect the content to run toward the enemy's agenda — universalism, syncretism, occult practice, hostility to Christ. Some NDE content does run that way. Much does not.36
What Miller's extensive survey of the scholarly literature shows is that Jesus appears in NDE reports with striking frequency and in ways that match biblical descriptions remarkably well. He appears as the good shepherd, the loving Lord, the bearer of wounds in His hands and side. He appears speaking words that sound like the words He spoke in the Gospels. He appears producing the specific fruit Scripture attributes to encounters with Him — repentance, peace, renewed discipleship, love for the neighbor, commitment to Christian community. Sabom's Atlanta Study found that NDErs overwhelmingly reported increased religious commitment after their experience, with conversion and increased church involvement as common outcomes.37
Burke's Imagine Heaven draws out this pattern with dozens of accounts that mirror biblical imagery — the river of life, the city of God, the light, the throne, the reunion with departed believers, the meeting with the risen Christ. The consistency of these elements across accounts from different cultures, ages, and faith backgrounds is striking. It is not the pattern you would expect from demonic counterfeit. It is the pattern you would expect from genuine encounter with the God the Bible reveals.38
The wholesale dismissal position has no room for this pattern. It has to treat every Christ-encounter in an NDE as either false memory, cultural conditioning, or demonic counterfeit. But it cannot explain why the counterfeit, if counterfeit it is, so consistently produces the fruits of genuine encounter — repentance from sin, renewed love for Christ, deeper engagement with Scripture, commitment to the church. By their fruits you shall know them, Jesus said. The fruits of many NDEs are the fruits the Bible associates with meeting Jesus.
The third problem is pastoral. A pastor or teacher who wholesale dismisses NDEs and DBEs will find himself unable to minister effectively to a growing number of people who encounter these phenomena in real life. The woman whose mother saw Jesus on her deathbed. The father whose son had an NDE after a near-drowning. The hospice chaplain whose patients routinely describe visions of departed loved ones. The friend of a skeptic whose NDE led him to start asking about Jesus for the first time. These people will come to their pastors. What will the pastor say?39
If the pastor's only theological category is "deception or hallucination," he has nothing to offer. He cannot receive the grandmother's DBE as the gift it plainly is. He cannot help the NDEr integrate her experience with Scripture. He cannot guide the searching skeptic through the questions the experience has raised. He will, in many cases, drive these people away — not from Christ, but from the pastor and the church.
And they will find help somewhere. That is the pastoral tragedy of the wholesale dismissal position: it does not stop people from engaging NDE material. It only stops Christian pastors from engaging it. The NDEr who gets no help from her church will find help from the International Association for Near-Death Studies, from a New Age hospice volunteer, from a YouTube channel, from the very problematic authors MacArthur warns against. The dismissive pastor has not protected his flock. He has just handed it over to the wolves he most fears.
I have seen this pattern repeatedly. A young woman has an NDE, goes to her evangelical church, is told her experience is probably deception, and leaves. Two years later she is deep in a spiritual-but-not-religious milieu, reading whatever NDE books she can find, absorbing ideas that would have been unthinkable in her old church. Her pastor thinks he protected her. He did the opposite.
Chapters 33 and 34 of this book lay out a better way — one that does not compromise biblical truth but also does not abandon the experiencer to the problematic influences. The wholesale dismissal position cannot take that better way, because it has already closed the door to engagement.
The fourth problem is theological. The Bible is full of the very sorts of experiences the wholesale dismissal position tends to rule out. Visions. Dreams. Angelic visitations. Heavenly translations. Encounters with the risen Christ. Spiritual experience at the edge of death. A position that treats all such phenomena as inherently suspect is, ironically, less biblical than the position it critiques.40
Consider the biblical data. Enoch was taken up (Genesis 5:24; Hebrews 11:5). Elijah was taken up in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11). Isaiah saw the Lord seated on a throne (Isaiah 6). Ezekiel saw the glory of God by the river Chebar (Ezekiel 1). Daniel had visions of future kingdoms (Daniel 7). Mary saw and heard the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:26-38). The shepherds saw the heavenly host (Luke 2:9-14). Peter, James, and John saw the Transfiguration and spoke with Moses and Elijah, both of whom were dead in earthly terms (Matthew 17:1-9). Stephen saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at God's right hand (Acts 7:55-56). Paul was caught up to the third heaven and heard unspeakable things (2 Corinthians 12:1-4). John received Revelation (Revelation 1:10).
This is not a marginal feature of the Bible. It is woven through the whole story. God meets His people with vision, dream, angelic visitation, and heavenly glimpse. Not everyone has such experiences, and not every experience is genuine — Scripture itself warns of false prophets and lying dreams. But the fact that such experiences happen, and that God authors them, is not in biblical doubt. Joel prophesied that in the last days God would pour out His Spirit and the people would dream dreams and see visions (Joel 2:28). Peter applied this prophecy to the age of the church (Acts 2:17). Dreams and visions are, on Scripture's own account, a feature of the present age.41
The cessationist version of wholesale dismissal tries to confine all such experiences to the apostolic period. But this move requires Scripture to say something it does not in fact say. The passages cessationists typically cite — 1 Corinthians 13:8-12, Hebrews 1:1-2, Ephesians 2:20 — do not teach that God has stopped giving visions and dreams. They teach that certain sign-gifts had specific foundational functions and that the completeness of revelation is found in Christ. None of these claims rules out ongoing, non-canonical spiritual experience at the edge of death.
Miller makes this point carefully in his discussion of cessationism. Even most cessationists, when pressed, do not deny all contemporary miracles. They deny the continuation of the gift of working miracles. But an NDE is not an exercise of a miraculous gift. It is a passive experience that happens to a dying person. It does not qualify the experiencer as a prophet. It does not add to Scripture. It does not require any version of the charismatic gifts to be accepted as genuine. Even a thoughtful cessationist can affirm the reality of NDEs without abandoning his cessationism.42
The fifth problem is evangelistic. Many people in our secular age will not be reached through traditional apologetic arguments. They have been taught that God is a fairy tale, that the soul is a superstition, that the afterlife is a psychological projection. For some of them, an NDE — their own or someone else's — is the crack in the wall. It is the point at which materialism becomes intellectually unsustainable. It is the door through which serious spiritual questioning can begin.43
I know atheists who became Christians through NDEs. Some had their own experience. Others read a scholarly treatment of the evidence and could no longer hold their materialism. Others were helped when a Christian friend was able to engage their questions thoughtfully because the friend had read the literature. In each case, the NDE was not the gospel. But it was the preparation of the ground. The gospel came through Scripture, proclamation, and the Holy Spirit's work. The NDE cleared the intellectual obstacles that had previously blocked the gospel's hearing.
A pastor who wholesale dismisses NDEs forecloses this evangelistic opportunity. He cannot help the skeptic who is reconsidering materialism because of an NDE. He cannot follow up on the spiritual awakening a near-death experience has produced. He cannot recommend the books that might help the searcher move from "something exists beyond the brain" to "the One who exists is Jesus Christ." The wholesale dismissal position is not merely pastorally ineffective within the church. It is evangelistically ineffective outside it.
Miller, Burke, Sabom, Long, and others have written precisely for this kind of reader. They are evangelistically sensitive authors. They know that their most important audience is not the choir but the edge — the skeptic, the seeker, the grieving one who has just watched a loved one die and seen something she cannot explain. To dismiss this whole category of engagement is to close a door God is evidently using to draw people to Himself.44
The sixth problem is apologetic. When secular researchers publish peer-reviewed studies on NDEs, and Christians respond with "it is all fake" or "it is all demonic," Christianity looks as if it fears the data. This is exactly the wrong posture for the faith once delivered to the saints. Christians ought to be the ones who welcome careful investigation, because truth about reality will always, in the end, align with the God who made reality.45
The scholarly NDE literature contains findings that are actually helpful to Christian apologetics. Veridical NDEs point to the reality of consciousness independent of the brain — which is consistent with substance dualism and incompatible with physicalism. The consistency of NDE reports across cultures points to a shared spiritual reality that secular naturalism cannot easily explain. The transformative outcomes of NDEs point to a spiritual realm that actually makes contact with human life. All of these findings are friends to Christian theology, not enemies.46
John Cooper's work on biblical anthropology makes this connection explicit. The biblical worldview has always included a conscious intermediate state — the idea that the soul survives the death of the body and exists in conscious awareness before the final resurrection. This doctrine was denied in the twentieth century by certain Christian physicalists and monists. NDE research has become one of several lines of evidence that pushes back against physicalist reductions and supports the traditional Christian position.47
Joshua Farris's theological anthropology similarly shows how the traditional dualist position on body and soul is not only biblically grounded but is supported by converging lines of evidence, including the emerging literature on near-death consciousness. Michael Wilkinson's Chalcedonian anthropology argues that the soul's capacity for consciousness independent of the body is essential to a full-orbed Christology. If Christ's human soul was conscious in Sheol between His death and resurrection, as the traditional reading of 1 Peter 3:18-20 suggests, then human souls are the kind of thing that can be conscious apart from the body. NDE reports, where consciousness seems to function apart from brain activity, are therefore not only theologically permissible but theologically expected, at least as a possibility.48
The Christian who engages the NDE evidence carefully, who welcomes what confirms biblical teaching while critiquing what distorts it, is doing the harder and more credible intellectual work. The Christian who waves the whole field away is making a smaller, weaker claim — and one that does not finally help the faith.
The seventh and deepest problem is that wholesale dismissal often, without meaning to, adopts the very materialist framework Christian theology ought to be critiquing. When a Christian critic says "NDEs are just the dying brain," he is accepting the materialist assumption that consciousness is reducible to brain activity. But that assumption is precisely what Christian theology denies. Christian theology teaches that the human person is body and soul, and that the soul is not reducible to brain activity.49
If substance dualism is true — and the early creeds, the witness of Scripture, and the best contemporary theological anthropology all testify that it is — then the sorts of events NDE reports describe are in principle possible. The soul can function apart from the brain, because the soul is not the brain. Consciousness can continue when the brain is inactive, because consciousness is not a mere product of the brain. The whole category of "near-death experience," far from being impossible on Christian assumptions, is actually predicted by Christian assumptions. What would be strange on Christian assumptions is the opposite: a world in which no dying person ever experienced anything, because dying people have no inner life beyond the failing brain.
The irony here is deep. Christian critics of NDEs often invoke the dying brain as the explanation. But the dying brain is a materialist explanation. It assumes that if the brain is dying, consciousness must be dying with it. A consistent Christian theology would say the opposite: as the brain dies, the soul may precisely be most free to see what it has always been ordered toward seeing. The moment the body's hold loosens is the moment the soul can rise into awareness of the spiritual realm that has surrounded it all along.
Michael Sabom, writing as a Christian cardiologist, brings this point home. His research was not driven by a desire to prove the afterlife. It was driven by observation of his patients and by the question of what was actually happening in the moments he had previously thought to be pure medical events. What he found forced a reconsideration of what death is. It also forced a reconsideration of what the dying brain is capable of and what it is not capable of. Sabom's conclusion was not a naïve embrace of every NDE claim. It was a sober reassessment of the medical framework that had taught him, by training, to dismiss what he now could no longer dismiss.50
Michael Sabom began his NDE research as a skeptic. When a Sunday school teacher first mentioned Raymond Moody's work in his church class, Sabom told the group he did not believe a word of it. His own clinical experience had given him no reason to think resuscitated patients had anything unusual to report. Then he began asking his patients carefully. By patient number three, his skepticism had buckled. Twenty years of clinical research later, Sabom could no longer defend the wholesale dismissal position with intellectual integrity. What changed his mind was not enthusiasm but evidence. His example points to the same path this chapter commends: engage the data honestly, test against Scripture carefully, and let the truth lead where it leads.
When a Christian says "NDEs are just the dying brain," he is quietly accepting the materialist assumption that consciousness is nothing more than brain activity. That assumption is not a Christian assumption. Substance dualism — the historic Christian view — actually predicts that consciousness can function apart from the body. Wholesale dismissal of NDEs on materialist grounds ends up holding a more secular position than the framework it is trying to defend.
· · ·
I want to pause here to offer what I hope is a more charitable framework for the Christian who has been influenced by the wholesale dismissal position but is reconsidering. The goal is not to flip such a reader into the opposite error of uncritical acceptance. The goal is to help her find the middle ground where genuine discernment becomes possible.
The charitable framework begins by receiving what is right in the critics' concerns. MacArthur is right that Scripture is sufficient for faith and practice. Hanegraaff is right that the Eadie-Brinkley-Alexander stream teaches serious error. Gilley is right that many popular books in this genre have not been carefully vetted. The cessationist instinct rightly resists treating personal experience as binding revelation. All of these concerns are legitimate and should be honored.
The charitable framework then asks a further question: Do these concerns require wholesale dismissal of NDEs and DBEs? And the answer the concerns themselves point to, when followed carefully, is no. Every one of them is addressed by discernment. Scripture is sufficient — so all NDE content must be tested against Scripture, as this book has taught throughout. Popular books contain error — so popular books must be evaluated one by one, with some trusted, others cautioned against, others rejected, as Chapters 29-32 have laid out. Fabrications exist — so careful vetting of specific testimonies matters, as Chapter 32 has shown. Personal experience can mislead — so the seven-test framework of Chapter 10 helps the reader distinguish reliable from unreliable experience.
The charitable framework says, in effect: everything the critics are worried about is real, and this book is designed to address all of it. Not by dismissing the whole phenomenon, but by developing the skills to engage it rightly. The critics and this book share a common goal. The difference is in method. They have chosen amputation; this book chooses surgery. Amputation is simpler but costs the patient the whole limb. Surgery is harder but preserves what is healthy.
I hold that this book's approach is actually more conservative and more biblically grounded than wholesale dismissal, in a sense worth making explicit. Wholesale dismissal makes a large claim on little evidence: the claim that the whole category is worthless. Discernment makes a smaller, more defensible claim: the claim that each case must be evaluated on its own merits. Wholesale dismissal refuses to engage the data; discernment engages the data and submits it to Scripture. Wholesale dismissal effectively rules that Scripture has spoken so clearly against NDEs that no further evaluation is needed — a position Scripture itself does not clearly support. Discernment lets Scripture be the final judge, case by case. The second approach actually honors Scripture more faithfully than the first.51
Let me speak directly to my Reformed and cessationist brothers and sisters for a moment. I was raised in a theological tradition that was deeply suspicious of contemporary spiritual experience. I understand the concern. I have watched Pentecostal and charismatic excess do real damage to churches, families, and individuals. I have seen what happens when personal impressions are treated as prophecy, when emotional highs are confused with the Spirit's work, when "God told me" becomes a trump card over Scripture and pastoral wisdom. The cessationist impulse was born, at least in part, from watching such excess and trying to protect the flock.
I think Reformed Christians should continue to hold many of the convictions their tradition has given them. Scripture is the final authority. Personal experience must be tested, not followed blindly. Visions and dreams are not binding on the conscience unless they align with what God has already clearly revealed. Revelatory authority, in the foundational sense, is closed with the completion of the apostolic canon. The church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20). Nothing in this book is trying to reopen that foundation.52
What I want to suggest to my Reformed brothers is that cessationism, rightly understood, does not close the door to NDEs and DBEs. It closes the door to revelatory additions to the canon. An NDE does not add to the canon. A DBE does not add to the canon. A dying saint who sees Jesus and is comforted by His presence is not founding a new prophetic tradition. She is experiencing what Scripture already describes and trusting the Christ Scripture already reveals. The hard cessationism that rules out such experiences is doing more than classical cessationism requires. It is adding a further claim — that God does not act in ways Scripture describes unless those ways are explicitly continuous with apostolic function. That claim cannot be sustained from Scripture itself.53
My hope for Reformed readers is that they would consider a softer version of their tradition on this specific point. Hold Scripture as the final authority. Test every spirit. Be appropriately suspicious of popular excess. But leave room for God to do what Scripture itself says He does — meet His people at the threshold, send angels to minister to the dying, give the grieving the comfort of visions and dreams. You are not giving up anything essential to Reformed theology when you leave that room. You are honoring what Reformed theology has always said at its best: that God is sovereign, that God is free, and that God is near.
Miller's work is especially helpful here because he writes as someone who takes the theological concerns seriously and engages them patiently. Sabom writes as a Presbyterian who did not abandon his confessional commitments in order to engage the NDE evidence. Burke writes as a pastor committed to biblical Christianity who finds NDE material consistent with, rather than threatening to, that commitment. These authors are not naïve charismatics. They are careful evangelicals who have engaged the evidence and come out on the side of discernment rather than dismissal. They are worth reading even by Christians who ultimately land somewhere different from them.54
What does all of this mean for the reader who has been shaped by wholesale dismissal teaching? Let me offer several practical reflections.
First, honor the pastors and teachers who shaped you. Many of them have served the church faithfully. Many of them had good reasons for the positions they took, including protecting their people from real excesses. To disagree with a teacher on a particular point is not to reject his ministry or his service to Christ. It is to love the truth enough to follow it where it leads, even when the path diverges from the one you were given.
Second, engage the evidence for yourself. Read Sabom's Light and Death. Read Miller's Is Christianity Compatible? Read Burke's Imagine Heaven. Read Long's God and the Afterlife. Do not form a final opinion about NDEs and DBEs based on critiques of the worst books in the field. Read the scholarly work the critiques do not engage. Let the evidence bear on your thinking before you decide where you land.55
Third, maintain biblical discernment throughout. This book is not asking you to trade one extreme for another. It is asking you to walk the harder road of discernment. That road requires ongoing engagement with Scripture, with prayer, with the church, with wise counsel. It does not get easier once you leave behind the simplicity of wholesale dismissal. It gets richer, but not simpler.
Fourth, be prepared for the encounter. Whether you have been taught to engage NDEs or not, they will come into your life. A family member will share one. A friend will mention one. A dying church member will describe one. You will be the person on the other end of the conversation. Make sure, before that day comes, that you know how to receive the story with love, evaluate it with Scripture, and respond with both truth and kindness. Chapters 33 and 34 of this book provide practical guidance. The time to prepare is before the phone rings.56
Fifth, pray for the NDErs and DBErs you encounter. Pray for the ones whose experiences have been clear and whose faith has been deepened. Pray for the ones whose experiences have been hybrid, with real encounter mixed with confused interpretation — that they would find the discernment to sort the true from the false. Pray for the ones whose accounts have drifted into serious error, that God would bring them back to clarity. Pray for the critics, too — that those who have dismissed the whole category would come to a more nuanced position that honors both Scripture and the God who meets His people at the threshold. Pray for yourself, that you would walk this narrow path faithfully.
If you have been influenced by wholesale dismissal teaching, do not feel rebuked for holding the position you inherited. It was taught by sincere people who meant well. But consider reopening the question. Read the scholarly NDE literature you have not read. Pray as you read. Ask the Lord to show you whether there is more here than you have been told. Many faithful Christians have walked this path and found their faith deepened, not weakened, by engaging the evidence carefully.
This book has rejected two errors throughout. The first is credulity — the error of accepting every NDE and DBE claim without evaluation. That error has received most of the attention in this book, because it is perhaps the more publicly visible error, and because most of the interesting work of discernment happens in engaging specific corrupted accounts. Chapters 17 through 32 have dealt with that work.
The second error is the wholesale dismissal error — the error of this chapter. It receives less attention in the popular literature because the Christians who fall into it tend to be quieter, more serious, more grounded in Scripture. Their error is not as loud as the credulous error. But it is just as real. It leaves the church unable to minister to the dying. It abandons the NDE community to exactly the voices Scripture would have us challenge. It effectively tells the grandmother whose mother saw Jesus that her precious memory should be set aside. It adopts, without meaning to, the very materialism Christianity ought to be critiquing.
The middle path between these two errors is discernment. Discernment is harder than either extreme. It requires work. It requires humility. It requires Scripture, prayer, wise counsel, and ongoing engagement with the literature. It requires the willingness to say yes to what is true and no to what is false within the same account. It requires the willingness to praise what God is doing through NDEs and DBEs without therefore endorsing every book with "heaven" in the title. It requires the willingness to critique what is wrong in popular accounts without therefore dismissing the whole field.
But discernment is the biblical path. Scripture calls us to test the spirits (1 John 4:1). To test is neither to accept nor to reject out of hand. To test is to examine. The Greek word dokimazō (δοκιμάζω), which John uses, comes from the world of metalwork — it describes what a craftsman does when he puts a supposed piece of gold through fire to see whether it really is gold. Testing is neither enthusiastic acceptance nor dismissive rejection. It is careful examination. This book has tried, from start to finish, to teach the craft of such examination.57
The Christian who walks the middle path will look different from her brothers on either extreme. She will not applaud every conference speaker with an NDE story, nor will she dismiss every testimony without hearing. She will weep with the widow whose husband saw Jesus before he died; she will ask questions, gently, of the friend whose NDE came back with a reincarnation message. She will read Sabom and Burke and Miller with appreciation, and read Eadie and Alexander with caution. She will honor her cessationist pastor's concerns and honor the charismatic hospice nurse's testimony. She will, in short, be the kind of Christian the New Testament describes — wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove, quick to hear, slow to speak, rich in discernment, warm in love.
This chapter has been the most difficult in the book to write, in some ways. The Christians who hold the wholesale dismissal position are, by and large, serious disciples who love Scripture and want to protect the church. I have no desire to attack them. I want to reach them — to say: the concerns you raise are real, but the conclusions you have drawn do not fit the evidence. There is a better way. It is harder than the way you have been taught, but it is more faithful both to Scripture and to the God who meets His people at the threshold of death.
MacArthur is right that Scripture is sufficient, that popular NDE books contain error, that fabrications exist, and that heaven tourism can distort priorities. These concerns should inform how Christians engage the NDE phenomenon. They do not justify dismissing the phenomenon wholesale. Hanegraaff's more careful evaluations of specific accounts point toward a better method than categorical rejection. Gilley's case-by-case critiques, extended to the scholarly literature he has not engaged, would produce a more balanced picture. Even the Reformed cessationist concern, at its best, does not close the door to experiences that do not add to the canon but simply testify to the Christ the canon reveals.
The seven problems with wholesale dismissal — ignoring evidence, ignoring Christ-centered data, failing pastorally, contradicting biblical teaching about spiritual experience, missing evangelistic opportunity, appearing intellectually defensive, and implicitly adopting materialism — together show why the position cannot stand as a final framework for the Christian engagement with this subject. A wiser response is discernment: engagement with the evidence, submission to Scripture, careful evaluation case by case, charity toward experiencers, love for those whose testimonies have gone awry.
The next and final chapter will draw together everything this book has argued into a single pastoral vision — the Christian who walks the narrow path between credulity and cynicism, receiving with joy what God is doing at the edge of eternity, while holding every claim firmly under Scripture. That vision belongs neither to the enthusiastic NDE promoter nor to the wholesale dismissing critic. It belongs to the faithful discerning disciple, holding both the dying grandmother's vision and the Bereans' notebook in the same hand, because she loves the Christ who meets people at the threshold and the Scripture through which that Christ is finally known.
May the Lord give us grace to walk that path together.
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