Chapter 12
When the Encounter Begins in Darkness
Condensed Edition
In 1985 a professor of art named Howard Storm lay dying in a Paris hospital room. He was an atheist. He had no use for God, no patience for religion, and no interest in what came next. What came next nearly destroyed him.
Storm's account, published two decades later in My Descent into Death, is one of the most detailed and disturbing near-death experiences on record.1 After emergency surgery for a perforated duodenum, Storm found himself standing beside his own body. Shadowy figures appeared in the hallway and beckoned him forward. He followed. They led him into deepening darkness, then turned on him. They tore at his flesh, mocked him, and reduced him to agony. He lay in a heap in utter blackness, broken beyond anything he had imagined possible.2
Then something surfaced in his memory. A hymn from childhood. He hadn't thought of it in forty years. He began to sing it, badly, through the dark. And he cried out to Jesus, a name he hadn't spoken with any sincerity in his adult life.
A light appeared. Hands reached for him. The tormenting beings fled. What followed was a blissful encounter with Christ that Storm describes as the most real experience of his life. He saw a life review. He received instruction, love, and forgiveness. He was sent back to his body. He eventually left academia, entered seminary, and became a pastor.3
Storm's experience is remarkable. But it is not unique. A significant minority of near-death experiences are not blissful at all. They are dark, terrifying, and sometimes hellish. The NDE literature calls them distressing NDEs, and this chapter argues that, far from undermining the book's thesis, they may be among its strongest supports.
Not every NDE involves warm light and gentle love. Researchers have known this since the early days of the field, though the happy cases received most of the attention. Raymond Moody's Life After Life (1975) focused almost entirely on positive NDEs. Maurice Rawlings, a cardiologist, pushed back. In To Hell and Back (1993) he argued that frightening NDEs were far more common than the literature suggested, because patients tended to suppress or forget them shortly after resuscitation.5
Rawlings's methodology drew criticism. He conducted bedside interviews immediately after resuscitation, which raised questions about leading questions and patient distress.6 His evangelical convictions shaped how he framed the data. But his core observation was not wrong: frightening NDEs exist, and they were being underreported.
Two other researchers confirmed the pattern from different angles. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist who conducted the prospective Atlanta Study, located two hellish NDEs among his participants. One was Jake, a wheelchair-bound veteran who overdosed during a suicide attempt. Jake described a scorched valley, demons mocking and kicking him, and a voice like chain lightning: he had thrown away everything he could have had. In utter desperation he cried out to God and came back. His case fit Greyson and Bush's third pattern: hellish imagery with demonic beings.6a Jeffrey Long's NDERF database added scale. Of over a thousand experiencers surveyed, 3.6 percent described the content of their NDE as frightening, and roughly 1 percent as fully hellish. The sheer size of the database meant that even a small percentage yielded more cases than researchers had ever had before.
The best estimates put the incidence of distressing NDEs between 1 and 23 percent of all reported cases, depending on definition and methodology.8 The wide range reflects genuine ambiguity: Long's strict count finds about 1 percent fully hellish; Bush's broader reckoning reaches one in five. The percentage matters less than the pattern: a real minority of NDEs are genuinely negative, and the data are too consistent across studies to dismiss.
One of the most helpful frameworks comes from Nancy Evans Bush, whose Dancing Past the Dark (2012) classifies distressing NDEs into three types.9
The first is the inverse NDE. The standard NDE sequence unfolds — out-of-body experience, tunnel, light — but is experienced with dread rather than peace. The tunnel is suffocating rather than welcoming. The light is harsh rather than warm.
The second is the void NDE. The experiencer finds themselves in absolute nothingness. No light, no beings, no landscape. Just featureless emptiness without presence or hope. Some describe the feeling that this emptiness will last forever. Of Bush's three types, the void is the hardest to classify theologically, because it involves the absence of encounter rather than a negative one.
The third is the hellish NDE proper. The experiencer encounters malevolent beings, landscapes of torment, or extreme suffering. Storm's case falls squarely here. So do cases from Rawlings's collection, Sabom's Atlanta Study, and several in Greyson and Bush's 1992 study. These accounts most directly raise the theological question: what is happening when the moment of death opens not in light but in darkness?
An important finding cuts across all three types. Prior belief does not predict whether an NDE will be distressing.10 Devout believers have reported hellish NDEs. Lifelong atheists have reported blissful ones. Sabom's Atlanta Study confirmed this: Jake scored among the lowest in the study on measures of faith and religious motivation, yet two other suicide-induced NDEs in the same study were not hellish at all. Greyson and Bush's nine experiencers included Protestants, a daughter of Unitarian ministers, a Jew, and persons with no religious background. Van Lommel's prospective study, published in The Lancet in 2001, reinforced the same finding: NDE content did not correlate with prior belief, church attendance, or fear of death. Whatever determines whether an NDE is positive or distressing, it is not a simple function of the experiencer's spiritual resume.
Another important pattern: some distressing NDEs transform. Storm's experience shifted from hellish to blissful when he cried out. Other experiencers report that the darkness broke when they prayed, called for help, or simply stopped resisting. Not all distressing NDEs resolve this way. Some remain dark throughout. But the transformation pattern is one of the most theologically suggestive features of the literature.11 Long found that when NDEs contain both frightening and pleasant elements, the frightening part almost always comes first. He judged these hell-to-rescue cases to be among the most transformative NDEs of all. Rommer, whose Blessing in Disguise is the largest study of frightening NDEs, confirmed that the experience often produces substantial positive life changes. Some experiencers came to view it as the most important experience of their life.
What are we to make of these experiences? The theological literature offers at least four readings, and I think two of them work together in a way that directly supports this book's central thesis.
Reading 1: Previews of Hell. This is Rawlings's interpretation. Distressing NDEs are exactly what they look like: brief glimpses of the damnation that awaits the unrepentant. Rawlings used them as evangelistic motivation. I find this reading too simple. It treats hellish NDEs as finished verdicts rather than as moments within an ongoing encounter. It also fails to account for the transformation pattern: if the experience were a preview of a settled destiny, why would a cry to Jesus change it?12
Reading 2: The Same Love, Experienced Differently. This is the reading closest to the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The divine light that warms the welcoming soul burns the resistant one. Isaac the Syrian, the seventh-century monk whose writings shaped Eastern Christian thought for centuries, developed this idea with striking clarity. He taught that the fire of Gehenna (the biblical term for the place of final punishment) is nothing other than the fire of God's love.13 Those who have prepared themselves for that love experience it as paradise. Those who have not, experience the same love as torment. The love doesn't change. The soul's disposition toward it does.
Gregory of Nyssa offered a similar image: the same sun softens wax and hardens clay. The difference lies in the material, not the sunlight. Applied to the NDE data, the image is powerful. The being of light that fills one experiencer with peace fills another with agony. The soul receiving it has changed, not the light.
I find this reading compelling. It preserves God's character as unchangingly loving. It accounts for the experiential data. And it fits the broader pattern of Scripture: the same pillar of fire that gave light to Israel was darkness to Egypt (Exodus 14:20).
Reading 3: Encounters with Genuine Evil. Some hellish NDEs involve beings that are not merely the absence of good but actively malicious. Storm's tormenting figures behaved with deliberate cruelty. A third reading takes these at face value: some NDEs involve contact with demonic entities. The Christian tradition has always affirmed the reality of spiritual evil, and I take this reading seriously.15 Miller notes that reports of evil sentient beings are so common in distressing NDEs that some researchers include them in the very definition of the category. His warning deserves attention: even if the experience was real, the experiencer does not have to believe what malevolent beings tell them. Demons lie. They say life was never real, that you are doomed, that God cannot help. But this reading does not tell the whole story. Even in Storm's case, the malevolent beings fled when Christ appeared. Whatever their nature, they did not have the final word.
Reading 4: The Encounter Beginning in the Worst Place. This reading has grown more central to my thinking as this book has developed. Some souls need to see the truth of their condition before they can receive the truth of God's love. Storm spent decades building walls against God. For a man like Storm, a gentle approach might have bounced off those walls without leaving a mark. The darkness was not a threat. It was the honest starting point for a soul that had spent a lifetime refusing the light. Sabom reached a strikingly similar conclusion from his clinical data: a frightening NDE may be more merciful than a pleasant one, because it carries the warning of God's judgment and tends to encourage turning back to God. Rommer concluded from studying dozens of frightening NDEs that people get the experience they need. Some get the point with a gentle life review. Others need something more forceful.15b
This reading deepens when we consider the argument of Chapter 28. If God composes each soul's encounter with the wisdom of middle knowledge, then the sequence of the encounter is not accidental. For some souls, God knows the only approach that begins to open the door is one that starts with the felt truth of separation. The darkness is the first word of God's address, not its failure. Storm didn't arrive at the cry by accident. The corridor of darkness, the failure of every earthly resource, the absolute emptiness that left nothing but a half-remembered hymn: that sequence may have been the approach Storm needed.16
I commend Readings 2 and 4 together. They fit. The same divine love, experienced as painful by the resisting soul, can itself be the opening movement of the approach God knows will work. The fire is real. The pain is real. And the love underneath both is also real. The darkness is truth-telling, not terror tactics. God does not inflict horror to frighten a "yes" out of anyone. A panicked flinch is not faith. The dark passage is the soul's own condition, experienced honestly, apart from grace. And the cry from that darkness is the soul's first real prayer.
I want to be careful here, because this is a place where the data support two possibilities, and I don't think we can tell them apart from the outside.
In most cases, I expect the first shape to be more common. A soul that has never seriously engaged with God meets the darkness first because that is its honest starting condition. The darkness is where God finds it, not where God leaves it. The second shape remains possible. A soul could encounter Christ, say no, experience the consequences, and then turn. The encounter, as this book understands it, is not a single flash but a subjectively extended meeting (see Chapter 10 on time-dilation in NDEs). There is room within the encounter for refusal, consequence, and return.
What I do not claim is that every hellish NDE resolves. Some experiencers report no rescue. Some remain in darkness throughout the experience. I cannot say from the outside which of those unresolved cases were sequences interrupted by resuscitation and which were refusals hardening into permanence. Honesty about this limit protects the chapter's credibility. The model predicts that the encounter offers every soul a genuine opportunity to turn. It does not predict that every soul will.19
Do hellish NDEs prove that some people are eternally lost? No. This book is deliberately neutral on the question of final outcomes (see Chapter 29). Hellish NDEs are consistent with eternal conscious torment, conditional immortality, and universal reconciliation. A reader who holds any of those positions can engage the data without abandoning it. What the data show is that the encounter is real and consequential, that resistance has texture, and that turning is possible even from the darkest starting place.
If the encounter is so loving, why would anyone experience it as hellish? Because love that confronts is painful to the soul that has spent a lifetime running from it. When a difficult truth finally arrives, it hurts, even when the person bringing it means only good. The divine love does not stop being love when the resistant soul experiences it as fire. It stops being comfortable. That is a different thing.21
R. Zachary Manis's Divine Presence Model, which Chapter 26 engages in full, reaches a similar conclusion from a different direction. Manis argues that the same divine presence is experienced as bliss by the surrendered soul and as torment by the resistant one.22 The convergence between Manis's philosophical model, the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and the NDE data is striking. Three independent lines point the same way: the difference between heaven and hell may begin not in geography but in the soul's response to the same love.
Does this mean that everyone who has a frightening NDE is especially sinful? Absolutely not. Prior belief does not predict NDE content; neither does prior behavior, at least not simply. The darkness may be the opening of an approach tailored to a particular soul's needs, not a verdict on its moral record. A loving parent carrying a deep, hidden wound of shame might need to face that wound honestly before the encounter can proceed. The darkness is personal, not penal.23
Should hellish NDEs be used in evangelism? I counsel caution. Using frightening NDE accounts to scare people into faith reduces the encounter to a threat. It turns God's love into a stick. It also misreads the data. The hellish NDE is not the whole story. Storm's account does not end in the dark corridor. It ends in the arms of Christ. If we tell only the first half, we have told a lie by omission.24
Miller offers three misconceptions to avoid. First, do not assume that every distressing NDE is an authentic glimpse of the afterlife; each case must be examined on its own merits. Second, even if real, the experiencer need not believe what malevolent beings told them (a point developed under Reading 3 above). Third, and most important: a bad NDE does not mean a bad afterlife. The most common response to a distressing NDE, Bush found, is the conversion response. The experiencer connects the experience to behaviors they know were wrong and changes course. Social worker Kimberly Clark Sharp observed that all the people she knew who had negative NDEs became Bible-based Christians. Repentance, Bush concluded, is the most common outcome. The darkness did not end the story. It started a new one.24
The pastoral value of these accounts lies elsewhere. They tell us that the encounter is real. They tell us that human freedom is genuine: a person can say no, and the no has consequences that are felt, not merely theoretical. They tell us that turning is possible from the darkest starting place. And they tell us something about God's character. A love that would compose a sequence of darkness and rescue for a hostile atheist in a Paris hospital is not a sentimental love. It is a love that will go anywhere to bring a soul home.25
Families of the dying sometimes ask whether their loved one will suffer at death. The distressing NDE literature offers a complicated but hopeful answer. Some souls may pass through difficulty. That difficulty is not arbitrary cruelty. It is the honest starting point of an encounter tailored to that soul's needs. And the arms of Christ are on the other side of the darkness, waiting for the cry.
The question of whether anyone can finally resist such love is one of the deepest in Christian theology. Thomas Talbott argues that no one can (see Chapter 25). This book's own answer is more cautious: I believe some may refuse, and Chapter 27 develops the case. But whether one follows Talbott or the author, hellish NDEs demonstrate that the encounter is not a formality. It is a real meeting with a real choice, and both the "yes" and the "no" are experienced as real.26
I began this chapter with Howard Storm in a dark corridor, broken beyond imagining. I want to close by noting what his experience, and the broader pattern of distressing NDEs, actually teaches.
It teaches that the encounter is real. If the moment-of-death meeting with Christ were a pleasant hallucination, we would expect it to be uniformly pleasant. It isn't. Some of it is terrible. That is what real things are like. Real love has edges. Real freedom has consequences. Real encounters go badly sometimes, and the fact that they can go badly is evidence that they are encounters and not fantasies.27
It teaches that resistance has texture. A "no" to God is not an abstract theological category. It is experienced. It feels like something. The hellish NDE gives us a window into what refusal actually looks like from the inside: darkness, isolation, the absence of love that the soul itself has chosen. And it teaches that turning is possible. Storm cried out, and Christ came. For souls whose encounter begins in darkness, the cry is not a last resort but a first prayer. And it is heard.
It teaches that God will go to the darkest place. The Christ who descended to the dead (see Chapter 21) is the same Christ who enters the hellish NDE and rescues the crying soul. The descent was not a historical one-time event. It is the shape of God's love: always downward, always toward the lost, always into the dark.28
And it teaches, finally, that the encounter has both halves. It has the darkness and the rescue, the pain of truth and the relief of grace. Storm did not stay in the corridor. He was carried out of it by the same Christ he had spent a lifetime ignoring. Both happened within the same encounter, within the same dying moment, between the same heartbeats.
The next three chapters shift our attention from what the dying person experiences to the question of time itself. How can a moment hold all of this? Chapter 13 opens the inquiry with God's own relation to time, and the answer begins to take shape: the clock and the soul keep different hours.
↑ 1. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005). Storm's account is one of the most detailed and extensively discussed hellish NDE narratives in the literature.
↑ 2. Storm, My Descent into Death, chs. 1–2. The sequence—shadowy figures, the hallway, deepening darkness, and the attack—is consistent across Storm's multiple retellings and published interviews.
↑ 3. Storm, My Descent into Death, chs. 3–5. Storm was ordained in the United Church of Christ and served as pastor of Zion United Church of Christ in Cincinnati for many years.
↑ 4. Storm, My Descent into Death, ch. 3. Storm's insistence on the encounter's reality is characteristic of NDE experiencers generally; see Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's, 2021), ch. 8.
↑ 5. Maurice Rawlings, To Hell and Back: Life after Death—Startling New Evidence (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1993). Rawlings was a cardiologist who conducted bedside interviews and argued that the medical community was systematically overlooking frightening NDEs.
↑ 6. Greyson has noted concerns about Rawlings's interview timing and methodology; see Bruce Greyson, "Near-Death Experiences," in Varieties of Anomalous Experience, ed. Etzel Cardeña, Steven Jay Lynn, and Stanley Krippner, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: APA, 2014).
↑ 6a. Michael Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), ch. 9. Jake's case and Beau's case (a retired grocer who went first to a hellish landscape, then was transported to heaven by guardian angels) are the two hellish NDEs in the Atlanta Study. Both fit Greyson and Bush's third pattern. Sabom noted that Gallup had found only 1 percent of NDE experiencers reporting a sense of hell or torment. Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), ch. 9, pp. 157–168. Long's NDERF survey of 1,122 respondents found 64.3 percent described their NDE content as wonderful, 32.1 percent as mixed, and 3.6 percent as frightening. Roughly 1 percent of all NDEs shared with NDERF contained fully hellish content.
↑ 7. Nancy Evans Bush, Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences (Cleveland, TN: Parson's Porch, 2012), ch. 1. Bush argues that the cultural weight of positive NDE accounts creates a reporting bias against frightening ones. Bush herself refused to tell anyone about her own distressing NDE for decades; see also J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek, 2023), chs. 10–12. Rawlings estimated that about half of his patients reported hellish NDEs immediately after resuscitation; see Rawlings, To Hell and Back, and Miller's discussion of the methodological complexities. Bush concluded that about one in five NDEs contain distressing elements when researchers ask the right questions and are trusted by the experiencer.
↑ 8. Estimates vary by study. Greyson and Bush reported roughly 1–2% in their 1992 analysis; broader definitions push the figure toward 15–23%. See Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush, "Distressing Near-Death Experiences," Psychiatry 55, no. 1 (1992): 95–110. Long's NDERF survey found 3.6% described their NDE content as frightening, with roughly 1% fully hellish; see Long, God and the Afterlife, ch. 9, pp. 163–164. Bush later concluded that about one in five NDEs contain distressing elements when researchers use trusted interview methods; see Bush, Dancing Past the Dark, pp. 65–69.
↑ 9. Bush, Dancing Past the Dark, chs. 3–5. Bush's three-category typology (inverse, void, hellish) has become the standard framework in the field. Long's study of twenty-six hellish NDEs from the NDERF database confirmed the same three types; see Long, God and the Afterlife, pp. 161–163, citing Greyson and Bush, "Distressing Near-Death Experiences," Psychiatry 55, no. 1 (1992): 95–110. Sabom found that both of his Atlanta Study hellish NDEs fit the third pattern; see Sabom, Light and Death, ch. 9.
↑ 10. Greyson and Bush, "Distressing Near-Death Experiences," 100–102. The finding that prior belief does not reliably predict NDE content is corroborated by van Lommel's prospective data: Pim van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands," The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (2001): 2039–2045; see also van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, ch. 6. Sabom's Atlanta Study confirmed the same pattern; see Sabom, Light and Death, ch. 9. Long likewise found that prior beliefs did not predict hellish content; see Long, God and the Afterlife, pp. 163–165.
↑ 11. Bush, Dancing Past the Dark, ch. 7. Bush identifies the transformation pattern as one of the most distinctive features of distressing NDEs. Storm's case is the most famous example. Long, God and the Afterlife, ch. 9, p. 162, finds that when NDEs contain both frightening and pleasant elements, the frightening part almost always comes first. He judges these hell-to-rescue cases to be among the most transformative NDEs of all (p. 161). Barbara Rommer, Blessing in Disguise: Another Side of the Near-Death Experience (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 2000), confirmed that frightening NDEs often produce substantial positive life changes. Long discusses Rommer's three proposed causes of frightening NDEs in God and the Afterlife, pp. 165–166.
↑ 12. Rawlings, To Hell and Back, chs. 3–4. Rawlings used his cases explicitly as evangelistic motivation. The critique offered here is not that Rawlings was wrong about the reality of frightening NDEs but that his interpretation was too narrow.
↑ 13. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, Homily 84 (sometimes numbered differently in various editions). Isaac's teaching that the fire of Gehenna is the fire of God's love has been one of the most influential strands of Eastern eschatological thought. See also Hilarion Alfeyev, The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 2000).
↑ 14. Kallistos Ware, The Inner Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2000), ch. 9. Ware's treatment of the distinction between heaven and hell as subjective responses to the same divine love is widely cited in ecumenical discussions of eschatology.
↑ 15. J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek, 2023), ch. 11, "Lessons from Hellish, Distressing NDEs/DBEs: Part II — On Demons, Mediums, Shamans, Meditative Trances, and Hallucinogenic Substances." Miller documents extensive reports of evil sentient beings in distressing NDEs and argues that the demonic hypothesis is underexplored. His warning: even if the experience was real, demons typically lie, intimidate, and induce fear. When they tell the experiencer that life was never real, that they are doomed, or that God cannot help, these should be recognized as the tactics of malevolent entities, not as statements of fact.
↑ 15b. Sabom, Light and Death, ch. 11: "While the NDE does not necessarily predict the final afterlife destination, a frightening NDE may, in fact, be more merciful than a pleasant one, since the ‘hellish’ experience carries with it the warning of God's judgment and, in turn, tends to encourage a turning back to God and a seeking after salvation." Rommer, Blessing in Disguise, as discussed in Miller, Is Christianity Compatible, ch. 10, and Long, God and the Afterlife, pp. 165–166. Miller summarizes Rommer's position: we get the experience we need. Some get the point with a gentle life review; others need something more forceful.
↑ 16. The full theological argument for why God might compose a sequence that opens in darkness is developed in Chapter 28, under the heading "Why Darkness Can Be Mercy." This chapter supplies the empirical pattern; Chapter 28 develops the rationale. The guardrail matters: a frightened "yes" is not the same as a freely chosen commitment. Chapter 28 develops the perseverance distinction drawn from Timothy Stratton's Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 2nd ed. (2026), ch. 13: a burst of repentance is not persevering saving faith.
↑ 18. The phase dynamics of the encounter, including the possibility that the order of phases is composed per soul, are developed in Chapter 19.
↑ 19. The model's prediction is not that every soul will accept but that every soul will be offered a genuine encounter. The question of whether some may finally refuse is developed in Chapter 27. Chapter 29 develops the book's deliberate eschatological neutrality. The thesis is about the mechanism of the encounter, not the downstream eschatology of those who refuse.
↑ 21. The analogy is imperfect but illustrative. Gregory of Nyssa used the image of wax and clay: the same sun softens wax and hardens clay. The difference lies in the material, not the sunlight. See Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection.
↑ 22. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). Manis's Divine Presence Model is engaged in full in Chapter 26.
↑ 23. Bush, Dancing Past the Dark, ch. 8. Bush notes that many experiencers of distressing NDEs were not notably "sinful" by any conventional measure. The experience seems more connected to the soul's inner state than to outward behavior.
↑ 24. J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek, 2023), chs. 10 and 12. Miller urges caution about using any NDE account, positive or negative, as a substitute for the gospel itself. His three common misconceptions are drawn from chs. 10–12. The "conversion response" language is from Bush, Dancing Past the Dark, ch. 7; Bush notes it as the most common response. Sharp's observation is quoted in Bush, p. 48, via C. Flynn, After the Beyond (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986), 85. Bush concludes that experiencers commonly move "toward a religious community, often a conservative one."
↑ 25. The Christ who meets the dying is the Christ who stands in the place where they actually are, not in the place where they ought to be. See Chapter 18 on the Christological necessity of the encounter.
↑ 26. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). Talbott's argument that informed freedom necessarily yields acceptance of God is engaged in Chapter 25.
↑ 27. Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010), ch. 9; and Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), ch. 9. Long's database at NDERF includes hundreds of distressing NDE reports alongside the positive ones. His study of twenty-six hellish NDEs found a variety of elements including frightening or threatening beings, hellish landscapes, threatened or actual torture, and communications containing taunts or malevolence.
↑ 28. On Christ's descent to the dead as the paradigm for the moment-of-death encounter, see Chapter 21 (1 Peter 3:18–19 and 4:6) and Chapter 22 (Ephesians 4:8–10).
↑ 29. This convergence of the NDE evidence, the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and the philosophical model (Manis) is, in my judgment, one of the strongest unplanned confirmations of the book's thesis. Three independent sources, working from different starting points, arrive at the same structural conclusion.