Posted on 05/01/2014 3:20:40 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A recent piece I wrote on hell was inspired, in part, by the story of 23 Minutes in Hell, an account from a gentleman named Bill Wiese of a nighttime experience in which, he believed, he was permitted to experience hell for a short period of time in order to return to the land of the living and tell everyone that hell is for real. MY own post was not a careful exegetical treatment of the issue of damnation, but a description of a personal struggle between the vision of the afterlife I have inherited from my evangelical upbringing and my own scripture-shaped intuitions of what it means to call God loving.
In this guest post, Hank Hanegraaff asks an important and related question: What are we to make of these near-death experience accounts in the first place? I’m exceedingly grateful to Mr Hanegraaff — the famed “Bible Answer Man” and author of a new book on the afterlife — for this guest post:
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By Hank Hanegraaff
In 2006 real estate broker Bill Wiese became a New York Times best-selling author with the publication of 23 Minutes in Hell. During his alleged out-of-body experience, Wiese uncovered a wealth of brand new information regarding the hellish side of afterlife, including temperature (300 degrees/zero humidity); location (center of the earth); reptilian-looking demons (some in excess of fifteen feet tall) who rule over and torture humans; rats the size of dogs and snakes as big as trains.
The flip side of the afterlife hit the headlines with the 2010 publishing phenomenon Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. In it, Wesleyan pastor Todd Burpo tells of how his son Colton endured the equivalent of a near-death experience. Speaking “with the simple conviction of an eyewitness,” Colton revealed a heaven with “jeweled gates, shining rivers, and streets of gold”; a God with blue eyes, yellow hair, and huge wings; a Jesus with sea-green-bluish eyes, brown hair, no wings, but with a rainbow colored horse; and a Holy Spirit who is bluish but hard to see.
It wasn’t until 2012, however, that the mother of all near-death experiences emerged. “As arrogant as that might sound,” writes Dr. Eben Alexander in his mega-bestseller Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, mine was “a technically near-impeccable near-death experience, perhaps one of the most convincing such cases in modern history.” Through it he grasped the essence of all religion and the single most important truth in the universe, namely, unconditional love. Says Alexander: “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.”
Though novel, near-death experiences are hardly new. During medieval times stories of trips to heaven and hell were a potent means by which unbelievers were converted and believers convinced to stick to the straight and narrow. Still, it wasn’t until 1975 that the moniker near-death experience (NDE) was coined by the occult parapsychologist Raymond Moody in the run-away best-seller Life After Life. Since then the endless stream of stories concerning subjective experiences occurring during a state of unconsciousness brought on by a medical crisis, such as an accident, suicide attempt, or cardiac arrest, have flooded the market. Precipitating the question, “What’s up with near-death experiences?”
First, we should note that the subjective recollections of near-death experiencers are wildly divergent and irreconcilable. Wiese’s notion of reptilian-looking demons commissioned to torture humans as care-takers of hell hardly squares with Alexander’s version of an afterlife in which unconditional love reigns supreme. Both can be wrong. But both can’t be right. Not only so, but the implications of such subjective predilections are profound. If Wiese is right the biblical authors are wrong. One may find demons as caretakers of hell in medieval tomes but never in Scripture. Conversely, if Alexander is right, Hitler merely dies in the comforting arms of his mistress with no eternal consequences. Such is no doubt solace for modern-day killers. After murdering his mother, twenty children, and six adults in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut, Adam Lanza blissfully soared off on what Alexander has romanticized as “the wing of a butterfly.”
Furthermore, worthy of note is the subjective specter of hyperliteralism. As such, it is not surprising for heavenly travelers to return from the afterlife with tales of “a great domed hall” (Mary Neal, To Heaven and Back), “streets of gold” (Don Piper, 90 Minutes in Heaven), and “pure, white angels with fantastic wings,” green demons with long fingernails and hair made of fire, and an earless devil, replete with three heads, a nasty nose, and moldy teeth (Alex Malarkey, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven). Such exacting literalism has become pandemic. For example, it is not uncommon to see heaven described as a translucent cube measuring fifteen hundred miles in each direction. (One wonders if, by the same interpretive method, the present earth is set on pillars. After all, does not the Bible say that God “shakes the earth from its place and makes its pillars tremble?”) Small wonder then that terrestrial travelers return from near-death experiences with stories of pearly gates, brightly colored horses, and a Holy Spirit that is, well, “kind of blue.”
Finally, while near-death experiencers seem convinced that their particular version of the afterlife is the real McCoy, in reality natural explanations might actually be far more realistic. Psycho-active drugs ingested during a medical crisis can cause experiences strikingly similar to NDEs. Physiological factors, such as oxygen deprivation and the release of endorphins may play a role in NDEs as well. In her book, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences, Dr. Susan Blackmore argues that a lack of oxygen in the brain can trigger both autoscopic and transcendental episodes in which NDErs leave their bodies and/or move through dark tunnels in route to being embraced by the light. Moreover, psychological factors, including fantasy proneness, may also play a role in near-death experiences. Statistically, one out of every twelve Americans is predisposed to creating a fantasy out of thin air and then believing it to be true.
Considered collectively, psychopharmacological, physiological, and psychological explanations provide a compelling naturalistic rationale for near-death experiences. But a word of caution is in order. Naturalistic explanations assume that consciousness is merely a function of the physical brain. However we can be certain that this is not the case in that the mind and brain have different properties. As aptly noted by Drs. J. P. Moreland and Gary Habermas (Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality), “the subjective texture of our conscious mental experiences—the feeling of pain, the experience of sound, the awareness of color—is different from anything that is simply physical. If the world were only made of matter these subjective aspects of consciousness would not exist. But they do exist! So there must be more to the world than matter.” Indeed, if we are merely material, libertarian freedom (freedom of the will) does not exist. Instead we are fatalistically relegated to a world in which everything is a function of factors such as brain chemistry and genetics. Reason itself is reduced to the status of conditioned reflex. Moreover, the very concept of love is rendered meaningless.
In sum, purely naturalistic explanations may account for autoscopic and transcendental episodes, but what they cannot account for is consciousness. Despite the fact that near-death experiences are wildly divergent and dangerously subjective, they nonetheless serve to highlight the reality of consciousness—something Dr. Alexander should have comprehended long before flying off on the wings of a mythological butterfly.
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Hank Hanegraaff is president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast heard daily throughout the United States and Canada via radio, satellite radio Sirius-XM 131, and the Internet at Equip.org. Hank is the author of many books including the recently released AfterLife: What You Need to Know about Heaven, the Hereafter, and Near Death Experiences (Worthy Publishing, 2013).
How Should Christians Think? The $64,000 question. Start with Reason and Honesty. If you dare.
Without the Resurrection of the Dead, Christianity is a lie.
Do deny that the dead can “comes back” is (a) to deny that Jesus did, and (b) to deny that he raised Lazarus.
It appears that Dalrymple likes to tell God what he can and cannot do.
RE: Anything from Hank Hanegraaff is questionable. IMHO, he stole Walter Martin’s ministry and does little but attack other Christians.
______________________________________________
Steal? Or take over after Martin died?
During the late 1980s, Hanegraaff became associated with Walter Martin at the Christian Research Institute (CRI), the conservative Protestant countercult and apologetic ministry which Martin founded in 1960.
After Martin’s death from heart failure in June 1989, Hanegraaff became president of CRI. As part of his role as ministry president, Hanegraaff assumed the role from Martin as anchorman on the radio program The Bible Answer Man (which he still does today ).
I disagree with you. I am just a plain ordinary human being and I am nobody special in this world except to God. I was a custodian at a Middle School and been employed for a few years when one day some teachers found me laying on the floor. They said I had no pulse or was I breathing, they were getting ready to do CPR on me and when they started to turn me over I came back. I don't have any recollection of anything that went on, but I do know that I felt peaceful, until I started breathing again. I saw no lights, no angels or anything that was an out of body experience. Shortly after that situation happened to me I had to resign from my job and go on disability because I started having bad events. I started having seizure like symptoms and tried medicines w/some real bad side effects. To this day I still having problems and I am going to a hospital to have test taken to find what remedies there are available and what is the cause of these events.
I do know that when I accepted Jesus into my life and confessed I was lost w/out Him, I felt a love and warmth that I never felt from a human or from my parents. I do believe that God saved me from death and even from the eternal death of damnation. That's my story on near death experience.
I don’t think you can be absolutely certain about any of them, but a lot of near death experiences seem to be real.
My take on it is that the person nearly died, or clinically speaking actually died, but that for whatever reason God decided it wasn’t time for him to die.
And I don’t believe that anyone actually goes literally to Heaven or Hell in such an experience, but that God may give them a true vision of Heaven or Hell, as a warning or caution, giving them a chance to return to life, repent their faults, and mend their lives.
Interesting.
But I think no one should tell them what to think. This is a personal experience either for the observer or one who experiences it.
Dr. Jeffrey Long’s Near-Death Experience Research a “Game Changer” for Science
The most comprehensive research into near-death experience deals a kill shot to skeptics and aims to change how science views the afterlife.
Science has studied the near-death experience for more than 20 years. Most research has concluded NDEs are real and unexplainable, but scientists have been slow to accept consciousness beyond death. A new scientific study by Jeffrey Long, M. D. may change that. The research compiled in his new book, Evidence of the Afterlife, represents the largest, most comprehensive study of near-death experience and according to the study’s author is, “a real game-changer”.
Dr. Long explains, “we looked at nine lines of evidence that indicate the reality of near-death experiences and their consistent message of an afterlife. With each of these lines of evidence we carefully reviewed all prior scholarly research on the subject and made our contributions with our original research… from my point of view, the scientific term is compelling, but you can put it another way — the nine lines of evidence that I present is proof of the reality of near-death experiences.”
The conclusions of Dr. Long’s research are paradigm smashing for near-death experience skeptics who’ve argued that limited brain functioning may explain NDEs. “What near-death experiencers see correlates to their time of cardiac arrest and it is almost uniformly accurate in every detail. That pretty much refutes the possibility that these could be illusionary fragments, or unreal memories associated with hypoxia, chemicals, REM intrusion, anything that could cause brain dysfunction”, Dr. Long stated.
“I looked at over 280 near-death experiences that had out-of-body observations of Earthly ongoing events… If near-death experiences were just fragments of memory, unrealistic remembrances of a time approaching unconsciousness or returning from unconsciousness, there is no chance that the observations would have a high percent of completely accurate observations. They’d be dream-like or hallucinations. But 98% of them were entirely realistic… In fact, these observations of Earthly ongoing events often include observations of things that would be impossible for them to be aware of with any sensory function from their physical body. For example, they can see the tops of buildings. They can see far away. In my study over 60 of these near-death experiencers later went back and independently attempted to verify what they saw in the out-of-body state. Every single one of these over 60 near-death experiencers that reported checking or verifying their own observations found that they were absolutely correct in every detail.”, Dr. Long said.
While some near-death experience researchers have been reluctant to make the leap from NDEs to proof of the afterlife, Dr. Long is convinced by his research findings, “I’ve gone over every skeptic argument I can get my hands on. At the end of the day, I have no doubt in my mind near-death experience is for real. It’s a profound and reassuring message that we all have an afterlife. Every single one of us. And it’s wonderful. It is probably the greatest thrill of my life to be able to carry forward that important message to the world. I wouldn’t do it if I weren’t absolutely convinced that it’s correct.”
The conclusions of this research will be controversial, but Dr. Long stands ready to take on the critics, “I would be delighted to debate any near-death experience skeptic, any time, any place, on any media, as long as they’re scholarly, well informed, and as long as it can be a very high-level, intellectual debate.”
Jeffrey Long, M.D., is a physician practicing the specialty of radiation oncology (use of radiation to treat cancer) in Houma, Louisiana. Dr. Long has served on the Board of Directors of IANDS (International Association for Near-Death Studies), and is actively involved in NDE research. His book, Evidence of the Afterlife (HarperCollins), was published in 2010.
From Dr. Long’s website: Does Near-Death Experience (NDE) Evidence Prove an Afterlife?
Consider the Evidence, and Determine YOUR Answer!
This book is so powerful because Dr. Long puts forth his scientific findings on each case and then he has the story of the NDE following.
Great book. Everyone needs to read it.
Check out his website.
They're interesting accounts in some cases.
But really, it's not going to convince anyone who isn't a believer to accept Christ.
Remember what Abraham said to the rich man in hell. If his brothers wouldn't listen to Moses and the prophets, they would not believe even if someone was raised from the dead.
WE also have more sure word of the existence of heaven and hell than some people's alleged eyewitness accounts. It's called Scripture.
I question the wisdom in believing a person over Scripture.
As I lay dying a voice said: ‘Let’s go’ (the near-death experience of a cynical prof)
Atheist Professor’s Near-Death Experience in Hell Left Him Changed
Near-Death Experiences: 30 Years of Research - A neurosurgeon’s perspective
Near-Death Experiences: 30 Years of Research
Seeking Proof in Near-Death Claims (18 Hospitals to study mystery of near-death experiences)
Review of Life After Death: The Evidence
Who is the Being of Light Encountered in Near-Death Experiences
Doctor Claims He Has Evidence of the Afterlife
An Interview with Dinesh D’Souza on Life After Death: The Evidence
World's Largest-ever Study Of Near-Death Experiences
Why are you putting words in my mouth?
Show me where I said that. Post number please.
Otherwise, stop the underhanded debate techniques of accusing someone of something and then demanding that they defend themselves against it.
I asked you questions.
I think people need to be wary of buying in to “extra-biblical” experiences and circumstances. What we need to know now, we find in the Bible. Beyond that, situations fall into the soothsayer category and, even though it’s interesting, it’s demonic.
Like this kid in the movie, I’m a P.K. I’d have come up with the same “report” he did just from having listened to my dad’s and uncles’ sermons and singing hymns. It’s pretty basic stuff — streets of gold, rivers, winged angels, Jesus with brown hair like the paintings, etc.
(I’d like to know if this kid saw my cats Homer, Duke, and Duchess.)
I have sought wisdom in this matter through reading Scripture and prayer, and asking for wisdom. The only New Testament near death experience is the Apostle Paul’s description, in II Corinthians 12:1-10, of one who went to heaven and returned, and was admonished not to reveal anything about heaven. That’s as far as I wish to carry the matter.
Bookmarked.
Jesus came back from not just death but Sheol.
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