Christians Need To Get Better At Addressing Near-Death Experiences

Here's something I recently posted in a YouTube thread on the subject:

Near-death experiences (NDEs) have a large subjective element to them, in addition to the objective element. We need to explain both simultaneously. NDEs seem to come from a paranormal dreamlike state the soul enters when prematurely separated from the body. In a disembodied state, without physical sense organs, the soul could operate through means like telepathy and clairvoyance. The contents of an NDE could be shaped not only by the mind of the experiencer, but also by the minds of one or more other individuals, a sort of group experience (which would help explain the combination of objective and subjective components). I view NDEs as a pre-afterlife experience, something that resembles the afterlife in some ways, but is distinct from it. Gregory Shushan, a prominent non-Christian researcher who's studied NDEs and other paranormal issues, has reached similar conclusions (though he seems to lean toward thinking of NDEs as highly similar to the afterlife, whereas I don't). He discusses the dream model of NDEs at length near the end of his book Near-Death Experience In Indigenous Religions (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Another book he wrote, The Next World (United States: White Crow Books, 2022), discusses NDEs along with other paranormal phenomena. Though he's a non-Christian who thinks highly of the paranormal, he acknowledges a lot of false prophecies, racism, classism, and other problems in paranormal phenomena like NDEs and mediumship. His books are good for getting documentation of both the subjective and the objective aspects of NDEs and other paranormal experiences.

Some Christians have argued for a more veridical view of NDEs. I think there are too many problems with that approach. Like much of modern culture, NDEs tend to neglect the first commandment (loving God) while being overly focused on the second one (loving other people). And the people individuals report seeing in NDEs, typically in a heavenly sort of state, don't line up well with Christian soteriology. Then there are all of the non-Christian gods and other non-Christian religious entities that sometimes appear in NDEs (like the ones in indigenous religions discussed in Shushan's book cited above), false prophecies, suspicious behaviors (e.g., dismemberment, two men fighting over a woman they'd both been married to in this life), etc. A small percentage of NDEs involve seeing in a non-earthly realm one or more individuals who are still alive on earth. That characteristic is rare in NDEs, but it's a recurring theme that's been reported by many researchers. Christians who take a more veridical view of NDEs have various means of trying to explain these kinds of things, but it makes their view much larger and more complicated. The most parsimonious and the best explanation seems to be something like the dream model I've referred to.

With regard to sola scriptura, we need to keep in mind that the concept is about how scripture is alone in a particular context, not every conceivable context. Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith, but that's about special (as opposed to general) and public (as opposed to private) revelation. There's a lot we can learn about religious issues outside of scripture (learning about animals God created who aren't mentioned in the Bible, learning about an answer to prayer in our lives, etc.). Reading the Bible is itself a practice that involves many extrabiblical factors (extrabiblical manuscripts, information from non-Christian sources regarding how to translate the words involved in scripture, using our eyesight and mind to understand scripture, using things like dictionaries and commentaries to help us understand scripture and its context better, and so on). Just as we should try to reconcile scripture with what we know about the shape of the earth and heliocentrism from science, what we know about the Roman empire and crucifixion from historical research, etc., we should try to offer the best explanation of NDEs we can from a Christian perspective. If anybody is interested, I've written many posts over the years on NDEs and other paranormal issues, and you can find a collection of those articles by searching for a December 14, 2011 Triablogue post titled "An Evangelical View Of Near-Death Experiences And Related Phenomena". One of the posts there, a September 8, 2024 post titled "Problems With A Demonic View Of Near-Death Experiences", addresses some problems with the demonic hypothesis, for example.