Chapter 12

Hellish NDEs and What They May Tell Us

When the Light Burns

Full-Length Edition

Howard Storm was not the sort of man who cried out to God.

He was a professor of art at Northern Kentucky University. He was an atheist and proud of it. He had built a life on the conviction that the material world was all there was, and he saw no reason to doubt that view. Religion struck him as weakness. Prayer struck him as foolishness. If you had asked Storm on the morning of June 1, 1985, whether he believed in any sort of afterlife, he would have told you flatly: no.¹

Then his intestine perforated during a trip to Paris. He collapsed in his hotel room. The pain was blinding. He was rushed to a hospital, where he waited hours for surgery that kept being delayed. At some point the pain crossed a line that Storm could not describe afterward. And then, as he would later tell it, something worse happened. He found himself standing beside his own body, looking down at it. He was out. He was somewhere else. And the somewhere else was dark.²

What followed was, by Storm's own account, the most terrifying experience of his life. He heard voices calling him from the darkness. They sounded friendly at first. They told him to come with them, that they would take him somewhere he needed to go. He followed. But the further he went, the darker it became. And the voices changed. They turned cruel. Mocking. The beings around him stopped pretending to help. They began to claw at him, to tear at him, to taunt him with a gleeful hostility that he had never encountered in any living person. He fought back. He screamed for help. Nothing worked. He was being pulled deeper into the dark, and the beings grew more vicious as he weakened.³

Storm would later describe this period as feeling like it lasted a very long time. Not minutes. Something closer to hours. He was in a state of complete despair, stripped of every defense he had ever built. His intellect could not save him. His reputation could not save him. His atheism could not save him. He was nothing. He knew it.

And then, from somewhere far back in his memory, a fragment of a hymn surfaced. "Jesus loves me, this I know." He had not sung it since childhood Sunday school. He had not believed it for decades. But in the darkness, with nothing else left, he began to mouth the words. He did not know why. It was not a calculated decision. It was the last thing left in him, rising up from a place deeper than his convictions. And then he did something he never thought he would do. He cried out. "Jesus, save me."³

What happened next changed everything. A light appeared, small at first, then overwhelming. He felt himself lifted out of the darkness. The beings fled. He was drawn into a presence of such love that he could barely describe it afterward. He was held. He was known. He was not judged, not condemned, but received. He saw his life, all of it, in a way he never had before. Every act of cruelty, every dismissal of kindness, every choice to turn away from love. And in that seeing, he understood that he had been wrong about almost everything.

Storm survived his surgery. He left his teaching position. He went to seminary. He became a pastor. And he spent the rest of his public life telling anyone who would listen: "I was an atheist who went to hell. And Jesus came and got me."⁴

Storm's case is the most famous hellish NDE in the literature. But it is not the only one. A minority of people who have near-death experiences report not light and peace and love, but darkness and terror and pain. These distressing NDEs are less common than the blissful kind. They are harder to study, harder to talk about, and harder to fit into simple categories. But they are real. And I believe they tell us something important about the encounter this book describes.

In the previous chapters, we have looked at what NDEs teach us about the moment of death. The common core of the experience points to a real encounter with a being of overwhelming love, whom many identify as Christ (Chapter 7). The life review shows that this encounter includes a thorough, compassionate reckoning with one's whole life (Chapter 11). Time-dilation suggests the encounter can feel much longer than the clock allows (Chapter 10).

All of that fits the book's thesis nicely. But what about the dark cases? What about the people who did not meet love first but instead met terror? Do hellish NDEs undermine the argument? Or do they actually support it?

I think they support it. In fact, I think hellish NDEs may be some of the strongest evidence we have. But that claim takes some careful work. So let me lay out the data, then the possible readings, and then what I think it all means.

The Evidence: What Research Tells Us

Distressing NDEs were not part of the early conversation. When Raymond Moody published Life After Life in 1975, the cases he reported were almost all positive. Light. Peace. Love. The early picture of NDEs was sunny, and many readers assumed that was the whole story.⁶

The first serious challenge to that picture came from Maurice Rawlings, a cardiologist in Tennessee. In his 1978 book Beyond Death's Door and his 1993 follow-up To Hell and Back, Rawlings reported cases of patients who, upon being resuscitated, described terrifying experiences. Darkness. Fire. Demonic beings. Some patients were so frightened that they begged Rawlings not to let them die again.⁷

Rawlings made a striking claim: hellish NDEs were actually just as common as blissful ones, but they were being missed because researchers waited too long to interview patients. By the time a researcher showed up days or weeks later, the patient had suppressed the frightening memory. Only a doctor at the bedside, catching the patient in the first minutes after resuscitation, would hear the full, terrifying truth.⁸

His claim got attention. But it also drew serious criticism.

Rawlings was an evangelical Christian with a clear agenda. He wanted to use hellish NDEs as a tool for evangelism. His research methods were informal at best. He did not use standardized interview protocols. He did not employ the Greyson NDE Scale or any other validated instrument. He mixed his patients' reports with his own theological commentary in ways that made it hard to tell where the data ended and the preaching began. His books read more like sermons than clinical studies.⁹

Several prominent NDE researchers raised concerns. Bruce Greyson noted that Rawlings's sampling was not random and may have been shaped by selection bias. Kenneth Ring questioned whether Rawlings's bedside manner, including his habit of praying with patients immediately after resuscitation, might have influenced what patients reported. Other researchers simply could not replicate his numbers. When large prospective studies were conducted, the proportion of distressing NDEs did not approach fifty percent. It was much lower.

I mention all of this because honesty matters. Rawlings raised a real question. He was right that distressing NDEs exist and that the field may have underreported them. But his data cannot bear the weight of the conclusions he drew from it. We need better evidence. And, fortunately, we have it.

The Greyson-Bush Typology

In 1992, Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush published a landmark paper in the journal Psychiatry that brought scholarly rigor to the study of distressing NDEs. They analyzed fifty cases and identified three distinct types. This typology has held up well over three decades of further research, and it remains the standard framework for the field.¹¹

Type 1: The Inverse NDE. This type has the same structure as a positive NDE. The person leaves the body. They move through a passage. They encounter a being or a realm. But the emotional tone is reversed. What should feel peaceful feels terrifying. The tunnel feels like a trap. The being feels menacing. The realm feels threatening. The features are the same; the experience of those features is turned inside out.¹²

This is puzzling. It means that the same core experience can register as ecstasy in one person and as horror in another. The structure does not change. The soul's response to the structure changes. That observation will matter when we get to the theological readings below.

One woman described leaving her body and moving through a dark tunnel toward a light, just as many positive NDErs report. But instead of peace, she felt dread. "The light was pulling me," she said, "and I didn't want to go." For her, the standard NDE structure felt like coercion. She fought it. The experience was deeply distressing, even though its elements matched cases others found comforting.¹³

Type 2: The Void NDE. The experiencer finds herself in an empty, featureless space. No light. No being. No tunnel. Just an enormous, formless nothing. Many who report void experiences describe a crushing sense of loneliness, meaninglessness, and existential dread. Some describe it as being aware that they exist but that nothing else does. Others feel trapped in an endless, silent emptiness with no way out.¹⁴

Bush herself studied this type extensively. One man reported floating in total blackness with no sense of time or direction. "I was absolutely alone," he said. "I knew I would be alone forever. There was nothing. Not even nothing. Just the awareness of being, and nothing to be aware of." The void experiences are particularly striking because they do not fit neatly into religious categories. There is no fire. No demons. Just absence. And absence, it turns out, can be its own kind of torment.¹⁵

Type 3: The Hellish NDE Proper. This is what most people picture when they hear the phrase "hellish NDE." The experiencer encounters a scene of suffering. Flames. Darkness. Hostile beings. Torment. Some describe a place; some describe a state. The imagery varies from person to person, but the common thread is an experience of active suffering in the presence of malevolent forces.¹⁶

Storm's experience falls into this category. So do many of the cases Rawlings collected. A patient of Rawlings described seeing people in cages, screaming. Another reported being dragged into a pit. These cases use the imagery of hell as it appears in popular culture and sometimes in Scripture: fire, darkness, beings of cruelty.¹⁷

How Common Are They?

Prevalence estimates vary widely, from about 1% to 15% of all NDEs. The range depends on how broadly you define "distressing." If you count only full hellish NDEs proper (Type 3), the number is small, perhaps 1% to 3%. If you include void experiences and inverse NDEs (Types 1 and 2), the number climbs. Greyson has suggested a figure around 10% to 15% when all three types are included. Bush's long-term research places it in a similar range.¹⁸

Van Lommel's 2001 Lancet study was one of the most carefully controlled in the field. It found that about half of all NDEs included some frightening element, though only a small percentage were primarily distressing. Jeffrey Long's large database at NDERF (the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation) has put numbers on this. In a survey of 1,122 NDErs, 64.3% described their experience as "wonderful," 32.1% as "mixed," and 3.6% as "frightening." Of those frightening cases, only a fraction contained genuinely hellish imagery. Long estimates that about 1% of all NDEs shared with NDERF are hellish in the strict sense. But he also notes something important for this chapter: when NDEs have both frightening and pleasant components, it is more common for the frightening part to come first, eventually giving way to the pleasant part. That pattern matches Storm's arc precisely.¹⁹

The phenomenon extends beyond NDEs. J. Steve Miller, drawing on Christopher Kerr's longitudinal study of over 1,400 hospice patients in New York, reports that up to 18% of deathbed visions were distressing. These are not resuscitation cases. These are patients who are actively dying and who report encounters with the other side in the final days and hours of life. The fact that distressing visions appear in the deathbed window as well as in the NDE window suggests that the phenomenon is not limited to clinical crises. Whatever is happening in distressing NDEs, something similar is happening at the very threshold of death itself.^19b

Miller's broader survey of the research literature reinforces the underreporting concern from a different angle. While nine studies with 459 experiencers found no distressing NDEs at all, twelve other studies involving 1,369 experiencers found that 23% reported NDEs ranging from disturbing to terrifying. Nancy Evans Bush, who spent decades researching negative NDEs, estimates that up to one in five NDEs have distressing elements. The gap between zero and twenty-three percent tells its own story about how the questions are asked, whom the researchers are, and how comfortable the experiencer feels in the room.^19c

One finding matters especially for this book. Hellish NDEs do not track with prior beliefs in any predictable way.

Devout Christians have them. Atheists have them. Kind and generous people have them. Selfish people have them. Storm was an atheist, yes. But his case does not prove that atheists get hellish NDEs and believers get pleasant ones. The data shows nothing so neat. Plenty of believers have reported distressing experiences. And plenty of atheists have reported blissful ones. There is no clean line between "good person, good NDE" and "bad person, bad NDE."²⁰

Greyson is direct about this. After decades of research, he has found no reliable predictor of whether a given NDE will be positive or distressing. Not religious belief. Not moral character. Not age, gender, or cultural background. The distressing NDE appears to be an equal-opportunity experience. And that randomness tells us something. It tells us that something more complex than simple reward-and-punishment is going on.

This is important. If hellish NDEs tracked cleanly with moral character, they might simply be previews of a deserved punishment. But they don't. Something more complex is going on. And that brings us to the harder question: what do these experiences mean?

Four Theological Readings

I want to lay out four possible ways to read the distressing NDE data. Each has something to recommend it. Two of them, I think, come closest to the truth, and they turn out to work best when held together. But all four deserve a fair hearing.

Reading 1: Previews of Hell

This is the reading Rawlings championed. Hellish NDEs are exactly what they look like: glimpses of the real hell that awaits the unrepentant. The patient saw hell because that is where they were headed. The experience was a mercy, in a way, because the patient was sent back with a warning: repent, or this is your future.²¹

It is a straightforward reading. It takes the experience at face value. And it has the advantage of fitting the traditional Christian teaching that hell is a real place of real suffering.

But I don't think it works as a full explanation, for several reasons.

First, it does not account for the randomness. If hellish NDEs were previews of a deserved destiny, we would expect them to correlate with the person's spiritual state. But they don't. Believers and unbelievers, saints and sinners, have hellish NDEs in roughly equal measure. The data does not support the simple equation: "You saw hell because you were going there."²²

Second, many hellish NDEs resolve. Storm's is the most famous example: he started in hell and ended in the arms of Christ. If the hellish phase were simply a preview of a fixed destiny, why would it transform into its opposite? The transformation strongly suggests that the dark phase was not the whole story. It was a beginning, not an ending.²³

Third, this reading tends to flatten the encounter into a binary: heaven or hell, saved or damned, with nothing in between and no real process. The model this book proposes is richer than that. The encounter has dynamics, phases, movement. What the hellish NDE captures may not be a fixed destination but a moment in the middle of an unfinished conversation.

So while Rawlings asked the right question, his answer was too simple. The data asks for more.

Reading 2: The Same Love, Experienced Differently

This reading draws on a deep well of Eastern Orthodox theology, and I find it compelling. The idea is this: the fire of hell and the light of heaven are not two different things. They are the same thing. They are the presence of God. But that one presence is experienced in opposite ways depending on the state of the soul that meets it.

For the soul that loves God, his presence is joy, warmth, peace, and fulfillment. For the soul that resists God, the same presence is agony.

The Orthodox tradition has a long line of voices saying exactly this. Isaac the Syrian, writing in the seventh century, put it powerfully:

"Those who find themselves in Gehenna will be chastised with the scourge of love. How cruel and bitter this torment of love will be! For those who understand that they have sinned against love undergo greater sufferings than those produced by the most fearful tortures. The sorrow which takes hold of the heart which has sinned against love is more piercing than any other pain. It is not right to say that the sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God.... But love acts in two ways, as suffering in the reproved, and as joy in the blessed."

Isaac the Syrian, as cited in R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God²⁴

Alexander Kalomiros, an Orthodox writer who did much to bring this view to Western readers, put it in memorable terms. The river of fire, he argued, is not a river of punishment flowing from an angry God. It is the river of love flowing from a God who is love. "Fire consumes all those who are not fire themselves," he wrote, "and renders bright and shining all those who are fire themselves."²⁶

The modern Orthodox theologian Fr. Thomas Hopko developed the same idea in his widely used theological primer. "The final coming of Christ will be the judgment of all men," Hopko wrote. "His very presence will be the judgment.... For those who love the Lord, His Presence will be infinite joy, paradise and eternal life. For those who hate the Lord, the same Presence will be infinite torture, hell and eternal death."²⁷

R. Zachary Manis, a philosopher at a Baptist university, has developed what he calls the divine presence model of hell along these same lines. Manis argues that this view is not limited to the Orthodox tradition. He finds traces of it in Martin Luther, in the Reformed tradition, and in Catholic thought as well. The Catholic theologian Zachary Hayes made the point through Gregory of Nyssa. The soul suffers, Hayes wrote, not because God enjoys its suffering but because the pain belongs to the encounter itself. When the holy love of God meets a soul that is still imperfect, the meeting hurts. The hurt is not cruelty. It is friction between perfect love and the resistance it encounters.²⁸ This book will engage Manis's model at length in Chapter 26.

Why does this reading matter for our purposes? Because it explains something about distressing NDEs that a simpler model cannot. The encounter with Christ at the moment of death is an encounter with love. And some souls resist that love. If that is true, then we should expect some NDEs to be painful. The pain is not a sign that God is absent. It is a sign that God is present. And the soul cannot yet bear the weight of that presence.

For now, I want to note how well this reading fits the NDE data. The same core elements appear in both positive and distressing NDEs. But the experiencer's relationship to those elements is reversed. That is exactly what Reading 2 predicts. The presence is the same. The response is different.²⁹

Reading 3: Encounters with Genuine Spiritual Evil

Some hellish NDEs include elements that Reading 2 does not easily account for. Storm's tormenting beings, for instance. They did not feel like the presence of a loving God experienced negatively. They felt like something else entirely: malevolent, predatory, and cruel. Other experiencers have described similar entities. They are not indifferent. They are not merely frightening. They seem to have their own will, and that will is hostile.³⁰

A theological reading that takes this at face value would say: some hellish NDErs encounter genuine spiritual evil. Demons. Fallen beings. Whatever we want to call them. The Christian tradition has always affirmed that such beings exist. If the dying moment opens onto a spiritual reality, it should not surprise us that the spiritual reality includes hostile presences as well as loving ones.³¹

I take this reading seriously. I don't think we can dismiss it simply because it makes modern readers uncomfortable. The malevolent beings in Storm's account did not behave like the presence of a loving God. They behaved like predators. The imagery of tearing, mocking, and dragging is specific. It resists easy reduction to "divine love experienced negatively." These beings seemed to have their own agenda, and that agenda was to destroy.³¹

Other experiencers have reported similar encounters. Some describe being surrounded by beings of pure hatred. Some describe being interrogated or accused. The reports share a common thread: whatever these entities are, they are not indifferent. They are personal, active, and hostile. That is hard to square with a model that says all distressing NDE content is simply God's love perceived through a filter of resistance.

At the same time, I want to be cautious. Not every dark figure in an NDE is necessarily a demon. The soul that is separating from its body and entering a new reality may be experiencing its own inner darkness projected outward. The shame, the guilt, the accumulated cruelty of a lifetime may take on visible form in the dying moment. The line between "encountering spiritual evil" and "encountering your own moral condition in a vivid, externalized form" may not always be clear.³²

Miller's research on distressing NDEs across three chapters of his Is Christianity Compatible? adds a data-rich dimension to this reading. Reports of evil sentient beings are so common in distressing NDEs that some researchers include them in their very definitions of negative NDEs. Researchers at Washington State defined a negative NDE as one containing "visions of demonic creatures that threaten or taunt the subject." Gallup's research found features like "a sense of being tricked or duped into ultimate destruction." Bush's own distressing NDE included beings who heckled and mocked her, telling her authoritatively that she had never existed, that her life had been a joke. The beings were personal, deliberate, and cruel.^32b

Miller draws a practical lesson from this pattern. If the other side includes hostile, deceptive entities, then practices that seek to open contact with that side — consulting mediums, using hallucinogenic substances for spiritual exploration, or pursuing occult techniques — carry real risks. The being that responds may not be the loved one it claims to be. Miller notes that he has never found a distressing NDE in which a person came before a mean, fearful God. Instead, the distressing part of the experience is experienced in a place where God seems absent, and the distress is often caused by lies, taunts, and attacks of evil beings. This is a sobering detail, and it fits the model this book proposes: the hostile beings occupy the darkness; the rescue comes from the light.^32c

This book does not commit to a strict answer on that question. I take the reports seriously. I leave the precise nature of the hostile beings open. And I note that Reading 3 is not necessarily in conflict with Readings 2 and 4. A composed encounter could include a phase in which the soul faces genuine spiritual opposition before Christ intervenes. Storm's experience might involve both: real malevolent beings in the darkness, and real divine rescue from the light. The two need not exclude each other.

Reading 4: The Encounter Beginning in the Dark

This is the reading I find most important for the book's argument. And it is the one that Storm's case best illustrates.

Storm did not start with Christ and then fall into darkness. He started in darkness and then found Christ. The darkness came first. The love came second. And the movement from the one to the other was not random. It had a shape: darkness, then a remembered hymn, then a cry, then rescue.

What if that sequence is not an accident?

What if, for some souls, the encounter with Christ at the moment of death begins not with the immediate felt presence of love but with the felt truth of separation? What if the darkness is the first word of a conversation, not the absence of one?

This book has argued that the moment-of-death encounter is personally fitted to each soul. God meets each person where they are, in the way that will reach them most fully. If that is true, then it follows that the encounter will not look the same for everyone. For some, the first thing they need to experience is the reality of what life without God actually feels like.

Consider Storm. He had spent his entire adult life building a worldview with no room for God. He was not just indifferent to Christ; he was actively opposed. If the encounter had begun for Storm with an immediate, overwhelming flood of divine love, would it have reached him? Or would the shock have been so disorienting that he could not have processed it? Maybe the darkness was not the absence of the encounter. Maybe the darkness was the encounter's opening movement, tailored to a man who needed to feel what godlessness actually means before he could freely choose God.

This reading deepens the book's model. In Chapter 28, I will develop the theological rationale for this kind of tailored approach in detail. There I'll draw on the concept of optimal grace, the idea that God provides each soul with the best possible circumstances for a genuine, free, and informed response. What this chapter supplies is the empirical pattern. The NDE data shows us what a tailored sequence might actually look like from the inside: Storm, in the darkness, remembering a hymn he had forgotten for thirty years. That memory was never an accident.³³

Two Readings Together: Love That Warms and Burns

Readings 2 and 4 work best when held together. And I think that is where the truth lies.

Reading 2 tells us that the same divine love can be experienced as joy or as pain, depending on the state of the soul. Reading 4 tells us that the sequence of the encounter may itself be part of the love's strategy. Put them together and you get this: the dark passage is the soul's own condition, experienced honestly in the presence of divine love. And that honest experience is itself the first movement of the approach God has composed for this soul.

The darkness is not punishment. It is truth-telling. The soul that has spent its life turned away from God experiences, for the first time, what that turning-away actually means. It feels what it has chosen. And the feeling is terrible. But the feeling is also the beginning of something. It is the opening of a conversation that will, if the soul allows it, lead to the cry, the rescue, and the light.

Storm did not know he was in a conversation. He thought he was simply in hell. But the hymn that surfaced in his memory was not random. The cry he offered was not wasted. The rescue that came was immediate. What looked to Storm like a series of unrelated events was, I believe, a single encounter unfolding in the order that could reach him. Torment. Memory. Prayer. Rescue. Not chaos. A sequence.³⁴

The Orthodox tradition gives this the right theological grounding. The fire is one fire. The love is one love. But that one love does different things depending on who receives it. Steel shines in the furnace. Clay hardens. The fire did not change. The material changed what the fire could do.

And here is the part that matters most: the clay can still become steel. The process is not closed. The encounter is still open. Storm, in his darkness, was still in the encounter. He had not yet made his final choice. The darkness was part of the conversation, not the end of it.

Two Shapes of Darkness

I want to be honest about something this chapter cannot resolve. When we look at hellish NDEs, we see darkness. But that darkness might be happening at different points in the encounter, and I don't think we can always tell from the outside which shape we are looking at.

The first shape is, I expect, the more common one. It is Storm's pattern. The soul opens in darkness because that is where it is: turned away, uninformed, spiritually lost. The cry from that place is the beginning of the turn. Christ answers the cry, and the encounter moves from darkness into light.³⁵

The second shape is different but equally important. In this version, the soul has already been offered Christ's presence, has said no, and is now living with what that no feels like. The dark passage after an initial refusal is the soul's own experience of its own choice. It tastes separation, and in that tasting, it may change its mind. The encounter is still open. The cry from the post-refusal darkness is just as real and just as answered as the cry from the pre-meeting darkness.³⁶

Why does it matter which shape is in play? Because the theological implications are slightly different. If the darkness comes first, the soul has not yet heard the offer. The dark passage is the experience of life-without-God that prepares the soul for the offer. If the darkness comes second, the soul has already heard the offer and rejected it, and the dark passage is the soul learning what its rejection means. In both cases, the encounter continues. In both cases, the cry is answered. But the dynamics are different, and Chapter 19 will develop those dynamics in detail.

What this book does not claim is that every hellish NDE resolves. Some experiencers report no rescue. They come back still in the dark. I do not presume to say which of those unresolved cases represent interrupted sequences and which represent genuine refusal. Was the person pulled back by resuscitation before the encounter finished? Or was the soul in the process of settling its no? (The question of why some may persist in refusal even in the face of such love is developed in Chapter 27.) I cannot tell from outside. Neither can anyone else. Honesty here protects the argument's credibility. The model works whether some souls finally refuse or not. The point is that the darkness, wherever it falls in the sequence, is part of a real encounter, not the absence of one.³⁷

The Guardrail: Truth, Not Terror

I need to say something directly, because this is a point where the argument could be misread. The dark passage is not a scare tactic. God is not dangling the threat of hell in front of a soul to frighten it into saying yes.

That matters theologically, and it matters pastorally.

A frightened flinch is not faith. A yes extracted under threat is not a free response. If the encounter is to be genuine, if the soul's decision is to be truly free, then the dark passage cannot function as intimidation. It must function as truth. And there is a difference.³⁸

Consider a parent with a strong-willed teenager. The teenager insists on leaving the house without a coat on a freezing night. The parent could lock the door. That would be coercion. The parent could shout threats about frostbite. That would be manipulation. Or the parent could let the teenager step outside and feel the cold for ten seconds before opening the door. That is truth-telling. The cold is real. The teenager's body registers it. And the decision to come back inside, when it comes, is free because it is informed by experience, not forced by fear.³⁹

The dark passage in the moment-of-death encounter works the same way. The soul that has been turned away from God feels, perhaps for the first time, what that turning-away actually is. The experience is painful. It is real. But it is not imposed by God as a punishment. It is the soul's own condition, experienced honestly. The Eastern Orthodox reading and the composed-sequence reading describe one divine love, not two divine strategies. The love that lets the soul feel its own darkness is the same love that answers when the soul cries out.

Chapter 28 develops the theological rationale for this at length. There I'll show why this is stronger than the usual alternatives. One alternative says God simply overwhelms the soul with love, flooding it with glory until resistance becomes impossible. But that risks coercion. A soul that yields only because it has been overpowered has not freely chosen anything. Another alternative says God simply leaves the resistant soul alone, withdrawing the offer and respecting the refusal immediately. But that abandons the pursuit. A love that gives up at the first "no" is not the love described in Scripture.⁴⁰

The staged approach threads the needle. The soul learns what separation means by tasting it. The tasting is real, honest, painful. But it is not the end. The encounter remains open. And when the soul cries out, the cry is heard. The staged approach informs without coercing. It tells the truth without giving up.

This matters for how we think about the character of God. A God who would scare people into faith is not trustworthy. A God who would abandon people after one refusal is not loving. But a God who lets a soul feel the real weight of its own choices, while remaining ready to answer the moment the soul turns, is both honest and merciful. That is the God this chapter's data points toward.

Hard Questions

Do Hellish NDEs Prove That Some Are Eternally Lost?

No. This book is eschatologically neutral, and hellish NDEs don't change that. The dark passages are consistent with all three of the major views on the final outcome. If eternal conscious torment is true, the hellish NDE may be a foretaste of what final, settled refusal feels like. If conditional immortality is true, the hellish NDE may be the soul's experience of what it is like to choose non-existence over God, before that choice becomes final. If universal reconciliation is true, the hellish NDE may be the painful-but-temporary darkness through which every resistant soul passes before finally yielding to love.⁴¹

Miller makes a related point in his chapter "On the Reality of Hell." If you believe that some positive NDEs reinforce belief in spiritual realities such as paradise and God, he argues, then distressing NDEs may reinforce belief in spiritual realities such as demons and hell. He notes that distressing NDEs are frequent enough — perhaps one in five — that they cannot be dismissed as anomalous. They are part of the core NDE phenomenon. This does not mean, as Miller is careful to add, that having a hellish NDE puts a stamp of condemnation on the experiencer any more than a pleasant NDE guarantees a heavenly afterlife. The NDE is a window, not a verdict.^41b

The point is that hellish NDEs show us the encounter's dark side without telling us how the story ends. They show us that refusal has texture, that resistance has consequences, and that turning is possible. They do not show us whether the turning always comes. That question belongs to Chapter 29.

If the Encounter Is So Loving, Why Would Anyone Experience It as Hellish?

Because love that confronts is painful to the soul that resists it.

This is not hard to understand from ordinary human experience. Think of someone who has been living a lie, and a close friend finally tells them the truth. If the person is ready to hear it, the truth is relief. If the person is not ready, the truth is agony. The friend did not change. The truth did not change. What changed is how it was received.

Now magnify that to infinite proportions. The divine love that meets the dying soul is perfect, total, and completely honest. It sees everything. It knows everything. For the soul that submits, that knowing is the greatest comfort in the universe: I am fully known, and fully loved. For the soul that resists, the same knowing is unbearable: I am fully seen, and I cannot hide.

The fire warms and burns. The light heals and sears. It is the same fire. The same light. The difference is in the soul.⁴²

A Pastoral Word

Before we close this chapter, I want to speak directly to anyone who has had a distressing NDE, or who loves someone who has.

If you have experienced something dark in a near-death event, you are not condemned. You are not marked. The darkness you experienced may have been the opening of a conversation that God is still having with you. The fact that you are alive to read this means the encounter was interrupted, not finished. The cry from the darkness is still heard.

And if someone you love had a distressing NDE, or if you worry about a dying loved one right now, hear this: the darkness is not the end of the story. Storm's pattern is darkness, hymn, cry, rescue. The rescue came. It can still come. Your prayers for the dying are not empty gestures. They participate in something real, even if you cannot see it from where you stand.

What About Non-Christian Hellish NDEs?

If a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Muslim reports a distressing NDE, does that count against the book's Christological thesis? I don't think so. As I will argue in Chapter 18, the being of light is Christ whether or not the experiencer recognizes him by that name. The same logic applies to the dark side. The presence felt as painful in a distressing NDE may also be Christ, experienced negatively by a soul that does not yet know how to receive him. The experience is mediated through the person's existing categories. A Buddhist may not identify the darkness as separation from Christ. But that does not mean Christ is absent from the encounter.⁴⁴

What About Hellish NDEs That Do Not Resolve?

Some experiencers report no turn. They come back from the NDE still in the dark, with no rescue, no light, no Christ. What do we do with those cases?

I think we hold them with open hands. The most likely explanation, in many cases, is that the experience was interrupted. The person was resuscitated before the encounter reached its resolution. Clinical interventions pulled them back before the sequence was complete. If the encounter has phases, as I believe it does, then being resuscitated during an early phase would leave the person with a partial memory. They would remember the dark beginning but not what came next. What came next had not yet happened.⁴⁵

But I won't claim that all unresolved cases are interrupted sequences. Some may represent genuine refusal in process. I cannot tell from outside, and neither can anyone else. The book is honest about this limit. Not every question has a tidy answer. What I can say is that the model does not depend on every hellish NDE resolving. It only requires that the encounter be real, that the dark passage be a genuine part of it, and that turning remain possible from within the darkness. The data supports all three of those claims.⁴⁶

What Hellish NDEs Mean for the Book's Thesis

I said at the beginning of this chapter that I think hellish NDEs actually support the book's thesis. Let me now say why.

First, they show that the encounter is real and consequential. If every NDE were blissful, a skeptic might say, "Well, that's just the dying brain producing pleasant hallucinations." But hellish NDEs resist that dismissal. Nobody's dying brain is motivated to produce torment. The distressing experiences are evidence that something real is happening, something that is not under the experiencer's control and not simply a product of wishful thinking.⁴⁷

Second, they show that the encounter involves genuine choice. If the experience were automatic, if the divine love simply overwhelmed every soul regardless of its response, then there would be no distressing NDEs. Everyone would report light and peace. The fact that some experience the encounter as painful shows that the soul's response matters. Resistance is possible. And resistance has consequences that the soul can feel.

Third, they show that turning is possible from the darkest starting point. Storm began in the deepest darkness the literature records. He ended in the arms of Christ. If the encounter can reach a confirmed atheist in the grip of tormenting beings, it can reach anyone. The darkness is not a dead end. It is a place from which a cry can still be heard.

Fourth, they fit the model of a personally tailored encounter. If God composes the sequence of the encounter for each soul, then the dark opening is not a failure of the system. It is the system working as designed, for a particular kind of soul that needs to feel the truth of separation before it can freely choose the truth of love.

I think of it this way. If the moment-of-death encounter were simply a pleasant experience that washed over every dying person, it would not really be an encounter. It would be an anesthetic. A real encounter with a real person involves the possibility of discomfort, of confrontation, of being seen more clearly than you want to be seen. The fact that some souls experience the encounter as painful is evidence that it is real. The pain is the mark of truth, not the absence of love.⁴⁸

And there is something else. The existence of distressing NDEs means the encounter is not automatic. It is not a machine that processes souls. It is a meeting. Meetings go differently depending on who shows up and what they bring with them. The same dinner table that holds a joyful reunion can hold a painful confrontation. The table is the same. The food is the same. What differs is the hearts of the people who sit down.

This is why the model this book proposes is richer than a simple binary. "Saved or damned" is too flat. "Pleasant NDE or hellish NDE" is too simple. What the data actually shows is a spectrum of responses to the same divine presence. Some respond with immediate surrender. Some respond with gradual opening. Some respond with initial resistance that deepens into acceptance (Storm). Some respond with resistance that may or may not soften. The encounter is the same. The souls are different. And the differences matter, because they are the differences between persons, and God deals with persons, not categories.

Storm knew this. In the years after his experience, he would often say that the worst part of his NDE was not the tormenting beings. It was the moment when, in the light of Christ's presence, he saw what his life had actually been. He saw the arrogance. He saw the cruelty. He saw the wasted love. And he wept. But he also said that the seeing was the beginning of healing. "You can't be healed," he told audiences, "until you see what's broken."⁴⁹

That line could serve as a summary of this entire chapter. The darkness of the hellish NDE is not the opposite of the love. It is what happens when love meets a soul that has not yet learned to receive it. And if the love is patient enough, and the encounter long enough, even the darkest beginning can open onto rescue.

In the chapters ahead, we will look at how the philosophy of time makes this extended encounter possible (Chapter 13). We will explore the encounter's internal dynamics (Chapter 19). And we will see how the concept of optimal grace explains why the sequence is composed differently for each soul (Chapter 28). But the empirical foundation for all of that is here, in the data on distressing NDEs. The darkness is real. The rescue is real. And the cry from the darkness is always heard.

Between heartbeats, some souls enter darkness before they find the light. But the light is still there. And the cry from the darkness is still heard.