Why a real encounter and a true interpretation are not the same thing
Two friends stand on a porch one summer night, watching a thunderstorm roll across the sky. Lightning splits the dark. Thunder shakes the windows behind them. The first friend says quietly, "Look at the majesty of God in that storm." The second friend grins and says, "Thor must be furious tonight." Same storm. Same flashes of light. Wildly different conclusions about what is going on.
Notice what happened. The storm was real. Both friends saw it. Their senses were not playing tricks. But the meaning each of them drew from the storm came from somewhere else — from beliefs and frameworks they brought with them onto the porch. The reality of the experience did not, by itself, settle the truth of the interpretation. One friend was reading the storm rightly. The other was reading it through a Norse myth.
Hold that picture in mind. We are about to apply it to one of the most important ideas in this whole book.
This chapter argues for a distinction that runs through every chapter that follows. An NDE may be genuinely from God while the experiencer's theological conclusions about it are mistaken. The NDEr may have actually met something real — even Jesus Himself — and still walk away with an interpretation that does not match the biblical witness. Catching this distinction is the difference between throwing out genuine spiritual experiences along with bad theology, or swallowing bad theology because the experience felt so real. Neither move is faithful. Both miss the layered nature of what NDErs actually report.1
When we read an NDE account, we are usually reading three things stacked on top of each other, even when the NDEr presents them as one. Pulling the layers apart is the first move in discernment.
Layer one is the phenomenology. Phenomenology is just a fancy word for "what the person actually experienced." A tunnel. A light. A being who radiated love. A panoramic life review. A sense of being out of the body. A meeting with a deceased grandmother. These are the raw data of the experience — what the NDEr saw, heard, felt, and perceived. If someone really had an NDE, this layer is where the actual encounter sits.
Layer two is the NDEr's in-the-moment interpretation. As the experience unfolds, the NDEr is already making sense of it in real time. "That being must be Jesus." "This light must be heaven." "That voice must mean I am loved without limit." The NDEr is not a neutral camera. They are a thinking person who is naming what they perceive, and that naming uses categories they already had in their head before the experience began.
Layer three is the NDEr's subsequent theological framework. This is the larger story the NDEr tells about their experience after the fact, often built up over years of reflection, conversations, NDE conferences, NDE books, and counseling. "This experience proves all religions are equally true." "Since I felt unconditional love, no one is judged for anything." "Since I saw no hell, hell must not exist." This third layer is the most distant from what actually happened and the most vulnerable to error.
Walk the layers through one common claim. A man returns from his NDE saying, "The being of light loved me with no conditions, which proves God doesn't judge anyone." We can split that single sentence apart. The phenomenology — overwhelming love from a luminous being — may be entirely real. He may have actually encountered Jesus. The in-the-moment interpretation — "this being loves me completely" — may be partially correct, since Jesus does love him completely. But the further conclusion — "therefore God judges no one" — is a theological leap that does not follow from anything that actually happened. The man went from "I was loved during a temporary glimpse of the afterlife" to "final judgment doesn't exist for anyone." That inference is bad reasoning, even if the love was real.
This is the heart of the experience-interpretation distinction. The encounter and the conclusion drawn from the encounter are two different things. Both can be evaluated. They do not stand or fall together.
A genuine encounter does not guarantee a true interpretation. A real experience of divine love does not, by itself, prove a particular doctrine of judgment, salvation, or the afterlife. Scripture, not the experiencer's reasoning afterward, settles those questions.
Why does this matter so much? Because if we collapse experience and interpretation into one thing, we will fall into one of two opposite errors — and both are common in how Christians handle NDE accounts.
The first error is wholesale rejection. It runs like this: "This NDEr teaches universalism. Therefore the experience was fake or demonic." But that conclusion does not follow. The experience may have been entirely genuine. The interpretation that the NDEr later built on top of it is the part that went wrong. Rejecting the whole account on the basis of a faulty conclusion throws away the genuine encounter along with the bad theology.
The second error is wholesale acceptance. It runs like this: "This NDEr had a real experience. Therefore everything they teach about the afterlife is true." This too does not follow. Real experiences can produce false conclusions. A person may have honestly met Jesus and still teach badly about who Jesus is, what His cross accomplished, or what He requires of those who follow Him.
Both errors miss the same point. Most of the corruption in NDE literature does not happen at the experience layer. It happens at the interpretation layer. An NDEr can have really met Jesus and still teach things about Jesus that are not biblically faithful. Tabatt makes a similar point throughout The NDE Conspiracy: the deception in the NDE field is rarely about wholly fabricated experiences. It is much more often about real experiences being filtered through frameworks that distort what they mean.2 Miller, working from a different angle but reaching a similar conclusion, argues that the syncretistic and universalist frameworks now dominant in popular NDE writing represent an interpretive overlay rather than a fair reading of the underlying data.3
If the interpretation layer is where most error creeps in, we should ask: where does that layer come from? Why do different NDErs interpret their experiences so differently? Four sources stand out.
The first source is the NDEr's pre-existing worldview. Two people can have nearly identical NDEs and walk away with strikingly different accounts because they walked into the experience with different categories. A Baptist pastor and a New Age spiritualist who both perceive a luminous being filled with love will tend to name and frame that being differently. The Baptist will look for Jesus and report finding Him. The New Ager will look for "the source" and report finding that. The phenomenology may have been the same. The framework for understanding it was not. Chapter 18 will develop this idea in detail under the language of the "interpretive lens."
The second source is the NDE community itself. After most NDErs come back, they look for help making sense of what happened. Many find their way to NDE conferences, NDE books, NDE researchers, and NDE support groups. Whichever interpretive community they fall into shapes how they come to understand their experience over time. An NDEr who joins an Anita Moorjani teaching circle will end up with a very different theological framework than an NDEr who joins a Bible-teaching church. The original experience may have been the same. The communities supplied very different categories for naming it.
The third source is the simple human need to make sense of what happened. NDEs are disorienting. The NDEr will reach for some framework — any framework — that explains what they went through. If their pre-existing framework is too thin, they will reach for a thicker one. Which one they reach for depends on what is available. Christians have not always been good at offering NDErs robust biblical categories for the afterlife, the soul, paradise, and the intermediate state.4 When the church is silent, the NDE community is happy to fill the void.
The fourth source is the trickiest one: deliberate teaching delivered inside the experience itself. Sometimes the NDEr is not just perceiving something. They report being told things by a being. "All religions are equal paths." "There is no judgment." "You and I are one." If those messages are coming from a deceptive spirit (see Chapter 7 on Satan as an angel of light), the so-called teaching is not really the NDEr's later interpretation at all. It is part of what happened — and it needs to be tested against Scripture (see Chapter 8). Sabom's careful documentation of mixed NDEs shows how this kind of in-experience teaching can sit alongside otherwise beautiful elements, leaving the experiencer with a memory that mixes truth and error from the start.5
When an NDEr says "the being told me X," do not assume the being was God or that the message was from God. The content still has to be tested. A real being may have spoken. The question is whether the message agrees with Scripture.
Let me walk through four well-known NDE cases to show how the distinction works in practice. I will be careful in each case to separate what the experiencer actually reported from the framework they have built on top of it.
Storm's NDE has become a touchstone for Christian discussion of the topic. He was a secular atheist art professor who had a near-death experience that began very dark — he found himself in what he understood to be a hellish place, surrounded by hostile beings — and was rescued when he cried out for Jesus to help him.6 He emerged a Christian. In Storm's case, the experience and the interpretation cohere with biblical theology. The phenomenology (rescue by a luminous Christ figure), the in-the-moment interpretation (this is Jesus), and the subsequent framework (Christian discipleship and pastoral ministry) all line up. Storm's case is also the disruptive type, where the experience broke through the prior worldview rather than being shaped by it. The atheist did not return saying "love is everywhere"; he returned saying "Jesus saved me."
Eadie's Embraced by the Light (1992) was a runaway bestseller that promotes a thoroughly Latter-day Saints theological framework: the pre-existence of human souls, councils of beings making decisions before earthly life, and a thoroughly universalist outcome.7 Whether Eadie had a real underlying experience is debated. What is not debated, on a careful reading, is that her interpretive framework is Mormon theology imposed on the account from beginning to end. The experience-interpretation distinction does not save Eadie's book from biblical evaluation, but it does help us name what is happening. The framework is the part that fails the biblical test, and the framework is doing most of the theological work in the book.
Alexander, a neurosurgeon, had a striking near-death experience during bacterial meningitis and wrote about it in Proof of Heaven (2012).8 Some elements of the phenomenology may be genuine. But Alexander's overall conclusion — that love is essentially all there is, and that no particular faith in Christ is needed for connection with the divine — is an oversimplification that bypasses biblical teaching about sin, judgment, and the cross. His later books have moved further into New Age territory, including channeling and consciousness-based spirituality. What Alexander actually saw and what Alexander now teaches are not the same thing, and the second can be rejected without the first having to be rejected automatically.
Moorjani's Dying to Be Me (2012) offers an account framed entirely in a Hindu-monist worldview. She returns saying, in effect, that we are all God, that there is no need for salvation, and that fear is the only real problem.9 The framework is pre-existing Hindu theology read into the experience. Whatever genuine elements her account may contain, the theological conclusions she has drawn are not compatible with Christian faith.
In each of these four cases, splitting the layers helps. We can ask: which parts of this account are phenomenology, which parts are immediate interpretation, and which parts are the larger framework? Once we ask, evaluation becomes possible without either swallowing the package whole or throwing the whole package away.
I need to add a hard nuance here. Sometimes the interpretation is so corrupt that it makes the entire account unreliable, even on its own terms.
If an NDEr reports that Jesus told them there is no sin, no judgment, no need for the cross, and that all religions are equally valid paths to God, the proper Christian response is not to gently affirm the experience while gently disagreeing with the conclusion. Paul's words in Galatians 1:8 are direct:
"But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed." (Galatians 1:8, ESV)
The Greek word translated "accursed" is ἀνάθεμα (anathema), which means "set under God's curse, devoted to destruction." Paul is not making a polite suggestion. He is saying that any messenger — angelic or otherwise — who delivers a different gospel falls under God's judgment, and the message they deliver should be rejected outright. When the message embedded in an NDE account directly contradicts the gospel, the verdict is not "real experience, wrong conclusion." It is anathema — the message itself is rejected, and the source of that message becomes suspect.
This is where the Christian reader has to hold two things together at the same time. Most NDE accounts deserve the generous "real experience, possibly mistaken interpretation" reading. Some do not. The more an account is built around explicit denials of the gospel — denials of Christ as the only way, denials of judgment, denials of sin — the more likely the corruption runs deeper than the interpretation layer. It may go all the way down. Tabatt makes essentially this point in his discussion of cases where a supposed "Jesus" delivers messages that contradict the actual New Testament Jesus.10 The fingerprint of deception is the message. A "Jesus" who teaches against Galatians 1:8 is not the Jesus of Galatians 1.
Most of the NDEs your friends, neighbors, and church members will share with you are not anti-gospel accounts. They are simple, biblically-coherent encounters at a bedside. The discernment in this chapter is mostly for evaluating teaching about NDEs, not for evaluating Aunt Margaret's deathbed vision.
When you read an NDE book, watch an NDE testimony on YouTube, or listen to a friend describe their experience, six questions can help you sort the layers.
First, what did the person actually see and experience? Get clear on the raw phenomenology before doing anything else. Strip away the language about meaning and sit with what they actually report.
Second, what did they think it meant in the moment? Notice when in-the-moment interpretations are being woven into the account. "I knew it was Jesus." "I knew this was heaven." Those are interpretive moves, even when they sit inside the description of the experience.
Third, what theological framework do they now hold because of the experience? Listen for the larger story they tell about the afterlife, salvation, judgment, and other religions. That story is the third layer.
Fourth, where did the framework come from? Was it their pre-existing worldview reasserting itself? Was it the NDE community? Was it teaching delivered inside the experience itself by some being? Was it a mix? In each case, the source matters for evaluation.
Fifth, does the framework cohere with Scripture? This is where 1 John 4:1 ("test the spirits") and Galatians 1:8 do their hard work. Compare the framework to the Bible — not the experience to the Bible primarily, but the framework. Most experiences are very hard to evaluate directly. Frameworks are easier.
Sixth, is the experiencer aware of the difference between their experience and their interpretation, or do they treat them as identical? This is often the most telling question. Wise NDErs hold their interpretations with humility, knowing they may have misread parts of what happened. Less wise teaching collapses the two and treats the entire account, framework included, as the unquestionable voice of God.
These questions are not a magic formula. They are a way of slowing down the reading so that the layers become visible. They will reappear in Chapter 10, where they fold into a fuller seven-test framework for evaluating any NDE or DBE.
Here is the part that ought to keep all of us honest. Christians who approach NDE accounts have lenses too. We bring categories from our own theological tradition, our own pastors, our own favorite books, our own fears and hopes. We do not read NDE accounts from nowhere. None of us does.
This does not mean Scripture loses its authority — it absolutely does not. Scripture remains the standard, as we argued in Chapter 8. But it does mean we should hold our own interpretive moves with humility. When a Christian reader encounters an NDE account and immediately concludes "this is demonic," that is itself an interpretation, and it can be wrong. When a reader concludes "this is wonderful," that is also an interpretation, and it can be wrong too. The same lens-shaping that affects NDErs affects us. Even the holistic dualist anthropology that makes this book possible — the conviction that the soul really can survive bodily death — is itself a careful synthesis of biblical exegesis with theological tradition, defended by scholars like John Cooper through patient engagement with Scripture.11 It is the right framework, in my judgment. But it is still our framework as we approach NDE reports, and that is worth naming.
The pastoral implication is gentle. We can be confident in Scripture as the standard while remaining humble about our own readings. Discernment is not the same as certainty. It is careful, prayerful, biblically-grounded testing — done with the awareness that we ourselves are testers, not infallible judges.
This same humility matters when we sit across from someone who has had an NDE. If we crash in convinced that we already know what their experience must mean, we will miss what God may have actually been doing. If we drift in convinced that whatever they say must be straight from heaven, we will fail to help them with the bad theology that has crept into their account. Discerning love sits in the middle: listening carefully, taking the experience seriously, and gently helping the experiencer separate what they actually went through from what they have come to think it means.
When a believer shares an NDE with you, ask gentle questions about layers before you offer evaluation. "What do you remember actually seeing?" is different from "What do you now believe because of it?" The gap between those two questions is often where the real pastoral conversation happens.
· · ·
Two friends stood on a porch and watched the same storm. One of them was right about what was happening in the heavens. The other was reading it through Thor. The storm itself was real. The interpretations were the work of the watchers, and one of them was wrong.
NDEs are like that storm. Something real happens. The accounts that come back to us, though, are not pure phenomenology. They are phenomenology plus in-the-moment interpretation plus a framework built up afterward. Bad theology in an NDE book is not, by itself, evidence that nothing happened. And a vivid, transformative experience is not, by itself, evidence that the framework built around it is true.
This distinction is one of the most important tools the Christian discerner has. It rescues us from wholesale rejection and from wholesale acceptance. It allows us to honor genuine encounters with God in the lives of NDErs — including in the lives of NDErs whose theology we cannot endorse. It also keeps us honest when an NDE account drifts into a different gospel, where Galatians 1:8 stops the conversation cold.
The next chapter pulls all of this — together with what we have learned about testing the spirits (Chapter 4), the spiritual realm (Chapter 6), Satan as an angel of light (Chapter 7), and Scripture as the final standard (Chapter 8) — into a single practical tool: a seven-test framework that any believer can apply to any NDE or DBE. The layers we have learned to see in this chapter become the raw material that framework operates on.
Alexander, Eben. Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
Alexander, Eben, and Karen Newell. Living in a Mindful Universe. New York: Rodale, 2017.
Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2015.
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
Eadie, Betty J. Embraced by the Light. Placerville, CA: Gold Leaf Press, 1992.
Miller, J. Steve. Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Moorjani, Anita. Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2012.
Sabom, Michael. Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998.
Storm, Howard. My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life. New York: Doubleday, 2005.
Tabatt, Shaun. The NDE Conspiracy. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2025.