Near death experiences

I laid myself open when I preached on the Ascension last Sunday. I majored on one of the things I find most wondrous – that there is an embodied Man in heaven, ruling all things on the throne of God. I unpacked scriptures around that. In passing, I warned people against the hundreds of YouTube videos along the lines, “God took me to heaven, and gave me this message for the world…” Even the apostle Paul was told to keep quiet about what he heard and saw, whether in or out of the body he knew not, in his one view of the third heaven.

Because we have two services on Sunday mornings, I preached it twice, and after the first somebody helpfully stuck a spanner in the works with the examples of Enoch and Elijah, taken into heaven bodily. Second time around I mentioned that those were above my pay-grade. But after the second, a sister challenged me with the phenomenon of near-death experiences of heaven, and later gave me one of the several books on the subject, which I’ve just started. They’re no challenge to my main point – Jesus is embodied, and any souls in heaven, either after death or near death – are awaiting resurrection bodies. Probably even Enoch and Elijah. More problematic is whether (granted the veracity of the experiences) NDE witnesses actually see heaven-as-it-is, or instead a visionary symbolic heaven.

I’m not entirely unread on the phenomenon, and only recently neurosurgeon Mike Egnor was interviewed by Piers Morgan on it. He is convinced from his own patients that such experiences surrounding cardiac arrest and brain-death demonstrate the reality of the soul, which he views in classic Aristotelian/Thomist terms rather than Cartesian. I won’t argue overmuch with that.

I also have a dog in the fight, in that I myself had a low-grade NDE, at the age of fifteen, when I’m pretty sure I had never even heard of them. A play-fight in a field at a Christian youth camp turned serious when my “antagonist,” (now an emeritus professor of nutrition) got carried away with a scissor-grip on my neck. My last conscious memory is of alarm at not knowing what was going on, and my next is of being bathed in golden light, with some kind of city before me which seemed to be a destination, and of two (male) figures, whom I suppose I took to be angels, discussing me and deciding it was not yet time for me to be there. Then I came round, and my first impression was of the greyness of the world I’d returned to compared to where I’d been, with some sense of regret at the transition.

Now, the experience was dream-like, not crystal clear, and transient. I didn’t float above my body, or see Jesus, or my dead grandfather. Furthermore, nobody was around with an EEG to see if my brain was active or flatlining. Conceivably I was hallucinating and misconstruing the conversation of anxious bystanders. But it has stuck with me as a significant, though not obviously life-changing experience. I was already a Christian of two years standing, and it certainly reinforced my faith, and still gives me the sense of having been spared for whatever works I’ve done. It probably does so more in the context of the more graphic experiences of other credible NDE witnesses.

As Mike Egnor says, NDEs are hard to explain on any non-spiritual understanding. The author of the book I was lent, John Burke, provides interesting case studies suggesting that even the experiences of secular Jews or Hindus point more to Christ than to their own belief-systems. The documentation of features of the local surroundings would appear to point to a non-material out-of-body element, and the reports of seeing dead relatives, and a sense of overwhelming divine love (or in some cases an entirely opposite vision of hell, of which more anon) provide the religious, life-after-death significance.

At the same time, though, however many thousands of reports exist from witnesses one would consider reliable, we are still, always, dealing with mere human testimonies, and they are full of anomalies that make leaning on them too much for spiritual truth somewhat risky. We are told to trust God’s word over human experience: in the Old Testament the false prophet’s visions are trumped by the torah, and in the New Testament Paul warns the Galatians to ignore even an angel from heaven, or the apostle himself, if they should offer a different gospel from the one already preached to them.

Parallel phenomena might be UAP sightings, or the Shroud of Turin. Your trustworthy pilot brother tells you he saw a weird metallic object doing aerobatics round his Airbus at 30,000 feet, and you believe it, and muse (inevitably inconclusively) on how it affects you view of the world. But a retired senior Intelligence Officer says he spoke to aliens in Area 51 and I, for one, lean towards scepticism, whatever his credentials.

As I’ve written on The Hump, the Turin Shroud and its epiphenomena seem to resist debunking, and to the extent one is convinced by the evidence one will find support for belief in historic Christianity. But if the shroud expert says it shows the gospel-writers got the details wrong, then we have a problem: Jesus and the apostles tell us to preach the Word, not the Shroud. We might still find that the anomalies, in the full light of day, disqualify the relic, though I’m cautiously as positive about it as I am about NDEs. And UAPs.

It’s important to remember that the vast, vast majority of people never have NDEs, even if they suffer cardiac arrests. The friend who shares his testimony of Christ’s love with us is validated by our conversion, for we come to share his experience. But we have to take reports of NDEs on trust until we ourselves die – and that, like the teaching of the Charismatic “anointed prophet,” lays us open to deception. The Bethel “translator” of the awful “Passion Version ,” Brian Simmons, claims God showed him a gospel of John in the heavenly library with an extra chapter he will publish in due course. And how do I refute his claim, compared to that of the Atheist whose atheist relatives greeted him in heaven in his NDE?

There are anomalies in NDEs that, at least, lead me to conclude that the reported tunnels to heaven may be personally-tailored visions rather than astral travel. Like the design of UAPs, there seems little consistency. A large number of NDEs seem to be of the “Elysian fields” variety, with an upgraded parkland landscape peopled with happy relatives and so on. In others, the landscape is a cultivated garden.

On the other hand, John Burke’s first example is of a practising Hindu whose experience is clearly derived directly from the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation ch21’s vision of the heavenly Jerusalem, but perceived in a rigidly literalistic way. He sees a golden cubic city, with twelve gates and the whole nine yards. Only, strangely, his vision includes other strands of English-speaking Christianity. For one thing, his city contains many mansions, an unusual word from the KJV of John’s gospel that doesn’t really translate what the Greek says, but which has become proverbial. For another, his twelve gates are shut, whereas in Revelation the point is that they are permanently open; and he has to enter through a narrow gate, once more apparently a fusion of the idea of Jesus as the gate of the sheep in John, and the popular understanding of the “eye of the needle” in Matthew. All this was seen, Burke tells us, without the guy having any experience of Christianity.

Now, I’m slightly troubled by the jumbling of scriptural teaching, but in principle I’ve no overwhelming problem with the Lord pointing a pagan to some specific biblical imagery in an NDE. Or even that he had come across the imagery before, and God used it to give shape to his experience. But the picture is entirely different from the naturalistic meadow imagery of many NDEs. A different heaven, or different visionary imagery?

What troubles me more in the book I’m reading is the streak of fashionable universalism it seems to imply. When Jesus meets people in the cases he cites, he is always 100% affirming, as well as overwhelming them with love, even when the person has no Christian faith. This does not seem to accord with biblical encounters with Jesus, even after his resurrection. Thomas is rebuked for his lack of faith in the upper room. Jesus “puts Peter through it” by the Sea of Galilee in John about his denial, prior to his full restoration. Paul is rebuked for his persecution on the Damascus road. Even the couple on the way to Emmaus are deemed “foolish” for failing to see the Resurrection in the prophets.

Always, Jesus is concerned to correct errors and instil true faith in the Cross that reveals the glory of his love. But Burke, whilst admitting that many non-Christians interpret their encounters with the love of Jesus in terms of their own gods or goddesses, doesn’t explain why Jesus would allow them to misinterpret him and stay as idolaters. Why would he not allow them to see him as he is, the crucified, risen Messiah whose name alone can save? God’s love may be unconditional, but the experience of it is not – his love is shown to sinners through rebuke more often than not (Hebrews 12:4-12).

Moreover, Burke mentions (note p.29) that 23-50% of NDEs feature hellish, rather than heavenly experiences. He refers us to a separate book of his about this, but surely a responsible treatment of the subject must account for both extremes in the same place. Somehow, death has two radically opposite possible outcomes, and the crucial thing is to know how to gain one and avoid the other. On what grounds are some unbelievers given a foretaste of a heaven full of their deceased family, and others a threat of Dante’s Inferno rather than being swept up in God’s unconditional love? Does Jesus teach that 50-77% of people find the narrow way, and only a minority the broad way that leads to destruction? Are those arrest patients not granted an NDE in a third salvation category? I’m not raising the questions to answer them simplistically here – I’m genuinely intrigued by a phenomenon I’ve experienced myself, and yet troubled by anomalies, especially when they are not faced theologically.

The modern Evangelical message is hot on unconditional love, and extremely cool on God’s wrath against sin. Contrast earlier centuries, when debilitating conviction of sin routinely preceded glorious conversion, sometimes by years (witness John Bunyan, Deborah Huish, John Wesley, or Charles Spurgeon). The gospel is about salvation from sin and eternal judgement through repentance and faith in the sacrifice of Jesus, and false gospels like to downplay both. If a Spiritualist medium, in a trance, tells someone that their husband and parents are happy in the wonderful garden “on the other side,” why should I criticise them for believing her, when people brought back from clinical death by medics give the same unchallenging message?

But, you might say, spiritism is not sanctioned in the Bible. And NDEs are? I don’t think so. As somebody said, “If it ain’t in the Bible, it ain’t biblical.” Remember, here, that I believe that as a young Christian in 1967, I gained a glimpse – and only a glimpse – of heaven. But I’m not bothered if you even believe my account, let alone my interpretation of it. God does not ask us to believe other people’s experiences uncritically, even if they number in their thousands and are of impeccable character, though like reports of miracles such testimonies might point us towards investigating Jesus. Instead, though, we gain eternal life from hearing the whole counsel of God, proclaimed and understood through the Holy Spirit.

By all accounts, NDEs are such powerful experiences that many are led to true faith by them: God calls each of us in a unique way. But as for employing them in apologetics and evangelism, remember what Jesus put in the mouth of Abraham to the rich man in torment in the parable (Luke 16:31):

“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'”