Chapter 5
The doorway with depth, and what the dying see on its threshold
A woman's heart stops on an operating table. The monitor goes flat. The surgeon calls out a time. For the chart, for the family, for the law, that is the moment of death.
But her cells don't know that. Her brain still flickers with fading electrical traces. Individual neurons will go on firing for minutes. Some tissue will remain alive for hours. And in a growing number of cases, the medical team restarts her heart. She opens her eyes. She was dead on the chart, and now she is alive again.
So when, exactly, did she die?
We treat death as a sharp line: alive on this side, gone on that side. Medicine tells a different story. Death is not a line. It is a process, with stages, and the boundary between life and death is far blurrier than most of us have been taught.1 That blurry space matters for this book. If God pursues the dying, it matters that the dying process has room in it. What I want to show in this chapter is that the "moment of death" is not a knife-edge. It is a doorway with depth.
Modern medicine recognizes two major markers. Clinical death is the point at which the heart stops beating and breathing ceases.2 This is the moment the monitor flatlines. But clinical death is not the end. With CPR, defibrillation, and drugs, doctors can sometimes restart a stopped heart. The window for that effort has stretched in recent decades. Sam Parnia, the intensive-care physician who led the landmark AWARE studies on cardiac-arrest survivors, has called it a "gray zone" between life and death.3
Brain death is the second marker. It means the total and irreversible loss of all brain function, including the brainstem. In most legal systems, brain death is the legal definition of death.4 But even here the lines are not as firm as they look. Cellular death creeps through the body unevenly. Different organs fail at different speeds. The brain itself does not go dark all at once.
The gap between clinical death and absolute, irreversible death is larger than most people think. In the minutes after the heart stops, the brain still has oxygen reserves. Neurons begin to die, but not all at once. Some survive for minutes. With modern medicine, that gap can be stretched further. Cold water drowning victims have been revived after an hour or more of cardiac arrest. Hypothermia slows cell death to a crawl. The record cases read like fiction, but they are documented in the medical literature.25
What this means is plain. The space between "the heart has stopped" and "the person is gone" is not a hairline crack. It is a real interval, with real time in it. And what the research I am about to describe suggests is that something happens in that interval. Something that medicine, so far, has not been able to explain.
The philosopher and Jesuit theologian Ladislaus Boros drew an even sharper distinction. He identified three stages. Clinical death is the body's systems shutting down. Relative death is a deeper stage: the soul can no longer express itself through the body, but the process is still not finished. And absolute death is the final moment, the point at which the soul separates from the body and the person's state becomes permanent.5 That last moment, Boros argued, cannot be pinpointed by any instrument. It is a metaphysical event, not a medical one.
Key Argument. "Death" is not a single instant but a process with stages. Between the heart stopping and the final, irreversible end, there is a window, a passage, a crossing. Medicine calls it the gray zone. Boros called it the space in which the soul meets its final reality. This book argues that God meets the dying person inside that window.
I don't pretend to know the exact relationship between Boros's metaphysical distinction and the clinical timeline. What I am saying is simpler than that. The dying process has room in it. It is not a wall. It is a corridor. And the question for this book is: what happens inside that corridor?
Hospice nurses have known something for a long time that the rest of us are only beginning to take seriously. Dying patients see things. They see people who are not in the room. They speak to relatives who died years ago. They describe places none of the living have been to. And they do this not in delirium, not in confusion, but calmly, with full awareness, often in their final hours or days.6
Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, two experienced hospice nurses, collected these accounts in their book Final Gifts. They called the pattern "Nearing Death Awareness." The dying, they wrote, often know when death is coming. They describe seeing a beautiful place. They speak of someone waiting for them. They sometimes announce the timing of their own death with startling precision.7
One patient told Callanan that she could see a beautiful light and a garden, and that her mother was there, waiting. Another described a bridge she needed to cross. Another said simply, "They're here for me."8 These were not confused or medicated patients. Many were alert, oriented, and entirely aware that the people beside their bed could not see what they were seeing.
The physician John Lerma recorded similar accounts from his work in a Houston hospice. Patients described encounters with figures of light, deceased loved ones, and beings they identified as angels. One patient reported seeing a brilliant light and hearing music she had never heard before. Lerma noticed a pattern: the closer patients came to death, the more vivid and more peaceful the visions became.9
One feature of these visions stands out. The dying sometimes see deceased relatives they did not know had died. A patient says, "Uncle Robert is here," and the family exchanges startled looks because Uncle Robert died that morning and no one had told the patient. These "Peak in Darien" cases, named after a phrase from John Keats, are among the strongest reasons to take deathbed visions seriously. The information should not have been available to the dying person.24
Peer-reviewed studies have confirmed that these experiences are widespread. Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick studied them in the UK. Emily Williams Kelly and her colleagues at the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies have done the same. Both research teams found that deathbed visions occur across cultures, across religious backgrounds, and regardless of whether the patient is on medication.10 They are not hallucinations in the ordinary sense. Hallucinations tend to distress the patient. Deathbed visions almost always bring peace.
A Note on the Evidence. Deathbed visions and nearing-death awareness are well-documented in the hospice and palliative-care literature, but they are difficult to study under controlled conditions. The dying person cannot be placed in a laboratory. What we have is careful observation by trained clinicians, corroborated across decades and across cultures. I treat these reports as real data, not proof of any particular theology. They raise a question that the rest of this book tries to answer.
Something is happening to the dying. That much is hard to deny. The question is what.
In 1975, a young psychiatrist named Raymond Moody published a small book called Life After Life. He had collected stories from people who had been pronounced clinically dead, or who had come very close to death, and who were then revived. Their accounts shared a striking set of common features. Moody did not claim to have proven life after death. He simply laid the reports side by side and let the pattern speak for itself.11
That pattern has held up. In the half-century since Moody's book, researchers including Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, Pim van Lommel, Bruce Greyson, Jeffrey Long, and Sam Parnia have studied thousands of cases. The details vary from person to person, but a common core keeps appearing. I want to sketch that core here in broad outline. The evidence behind it gets a full hearing in Chapter 6. The time anomalies get their own treatment in Chapter 9. The dark and frightening experiences are taken seriously in Chapter 10. And the meaning of the life review is explored in Chapter 13. For now, I just want the reader to see the shape of it.
The experience often begins with a sense of separation from the body. The person feels themselves rising above the scene. They look down at their own body on the operating table or in the hospital bed. They can see the doctors working. They can hear conversations. Some report details they had no way of knowing through their physical senses.12
Then comes a passage through darkness. Many describe a tunnel, a void, or a dark space. The darkness is not always frightening; often it is calm, a transition. At the far end of the darkness, there is light.13
The light is the most commonly reported element. It is described as brilliant but not blinding, warm, and overwhelming in its love. People struggle to find words for it. "It was like being loved by everyone who ever existed, all at once," one experiencer told researcher Kenneth Ring.14 Within or behind the light, many encounter a being of love. Some identify this being as Christ. Others describe a presence of pure acceptance and compassion. The being communicates, but usually not in spoken words. The communication is felt, immediate, and total.15
Many experiencers report a life review. Their entire life plays out before them, but not as a movie watched from the outside. They feel it from every angle. They feel the effects of their actions on others. They feel the kindness they gave, and they feel the pain they caused, from the other person's point of view. The review is not a courtroom. It is closer to an education. The being of love does not condemn. It asks, gently: "What have you learned? How have you loved?"16
After the review, many come to a boundary. It might be a river, a fence, a gate, or simply a line they understand they must not cross. They are told, or they sense, that if they go further they cannot return. Some choose to go back. Others are sent back, often with a felt reluctance. The return to the body is usually sudden and disorienting.17
The NDE Common Core. Across thousands of reports and dozens of studies, near-death experiences share a recognizable pattern. The elements include separation from the body, passage through darkness, encounter with an overwhelming light and a being of love, a life review, a boundary, and a return. Not every experience includes every element. But the pattern is consistent enough to demand an explanation. This chapter introduces the pattern. The chapters that follow test it.
This is the NDE common core. Not every experiencer reports every element. Some have only one or two features. The sequence is not always the same. But the pattern recurs with enough consistency that Bruce Greyson, one of the field's most careful researchers, developed a standardized scale to measure it.18 Pim van Lommel led a prospective study of cardiac-arrest survivors in the Netherlands, published in The Lancet in 2001. His team found that about 18 percent of clinically dead patients who were successfully resuscitated reported some form of NDE.19 Jeffrey Long's large database at the Near Death Experience Research Foundation has catalogued thousands of cases from around the world.20
The cross-cultural reach of these reports deserves attention. NDEs have been reported in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. They appear in Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and people with no religious commitment at all. Cultural and religious background shapes some of the details, as you would expect. But the core pattern holds. The light, the love, the life review, the boundary: these are not products of one tradition. They show up everywhere.27
I am not asking the reader to accept a theology based on these reports. Not yet. I am asking the reader to notice what is being described: something happens to people at the threshold of death. It involves felt separation from the body. It involves an encounter with love. And it happens in exactly the space we have been looking at, the blurry interval between clinical death and whatever lies beyond it.
The aftereffects are worth noting too. People who come back from near-death experiences are changed. Study after study has found that NDE experiencers lose their fear of death. Many report a stronger sense of purpose, a deeper empathy for others, and a conviction that love is the most real thing in the universe. These changes are lasting. They persist for decades. Ring documented them in Heading Toward Omega. Van Lommel confirmed them in his follow-up interviews years after the original cardiac arrests. Greyson has tracked them across a career spanning forty years.26
Whatever is happening at the threshold, it is not trivial. It changes people at the root. And that, I think, is worth taking seriously before we try to explain it away.
The Bible does not give us a medical definition of the moment of death. But it gives us two vivid snapshots of people who encountered God in the last minutes of their lives. Both deserve attention here.
The first is Stephen, the church's first martyr. The scene is recorded in Acts 7. Stephen has preached a long, bold sermon before the Jewish council, and they are enraged. Stones are about to fly. But just before the mob closes in, Luke tells us what Stephen sees:
But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." — Acts 7:55–56 (ESV)
Notice the details. Stephen is dying. He has not yet been struck, but death is seconds away. And in that moment his eyes open to something the crowd cannot see. He sees the glory of God. He sees Jesus standing, not seated, as though risen to receive him. The heavens are "opened." Something that is normally closed has been thrown wide.21
The crowd sees a man about to be stoned. Stephen sees an open heaven and the risen Lord. Two realities, the same moment. The question for this book is whether Stephen's experience was unique to him, or whether it tells us something true about what happens at the edge of death for everyone. I believe it tells us something true.
Then, as the stones hit, Stephen cries out: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." And then, with his last breath: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them" (Acts 7:59–60). He dies seeing Jesus, speaking to Jesus, and forgiving his killers in the same breath. The threshold of death, for Stephen, was a meeting.
The second snapshot is the thief on the cross. Two criminals are crucified beside Jesus. One of them, in the last hours of his life, turns to the dying Savior and says: "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Luke 23:42). Jesus answers with a promise: "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43).22
Salvation in the Last Minutes. The thief on the cross asked for nothing more than to be remembered. Jesus gave him everything: "Today you will be with me in paradise." A whole salvation was transacted in the final minutes of a life. If this happened once, on a cross beside Jesus, it is at least possible that something like it happens still. It may happen at thresholds we cannot observe, by the same Jesus who holds the keys of death (Revelation 1:18).
Think about what this means. Here is a man who spent his whole life as a criminal. He made no profession of faith before this moment. He had no time for baptism, for catechesis, for years of discipleship. All he had was the dying moment and a plea. And Jesus said it was enough. A whole salvation was transacted in the final minutes of a life.23
I am not building a theology on two passages. The full biblical case for what this book argues comes in Chapters 14–19. But I want the reader to notice that Scripture itself puts saving encounters with God right at the threshold of death. Stephen saw heaven opened in his dying seconds. The thief received paradise in his last breath. Whatever else we say about the moment of death, the Bible does not treat it as a blank wall. It treats it as a place where God shows up.
And it is worth noticing one more thing. Both encounters share a feature with the NDE reports. Stephen sees a light, a glory, and a person. The thief addresses a person and receives a promise. In both cases, the dying person is not alone. Someone is there. Someone meets them. That is the thread I want to hold as we move forward.
Here, then, is the picture I want to carry into the rest of Part II.
Medicine shows us that death is a process, not a point. There is room inside the dying passage for something to happen. Hospice clinicians show us that the dying often experience something in that passage: visions of the dead, encounters with unseen presences, reports of light and beauty and peace. The near-death research shows us something more. People who have been to the edge of death and come back describe a pattern. They report separation from the body, passage through darkness, and an encounter with a being of overwhelming love. They describe a review of their life, a boundary, and a return. And Scripture gives us two people who met God at the threshold of death in the most concrete way possible.
None of this, by itself, proves what this book will argue. I have not yet made the case that the soul survives the body (that comes in Chapter 6). I have not yet addressed the skeptic who says this is all just a dying brain (that comes there too). I have not yet dealt with the experiences that are dark rather than light (that comes in Chapter 10). And I have not yet connected this evidence to the theological claim that the one who meets the dying soul is Christ (that comes in Chapter 12).
What I have done is open the door. The moment of death is not a wall. It is a crossing, and the crossing has depth. Enough depth, I believe, for the God who pursues every soul to step into it.
If the earlier chapters of this book laid the theological groundwork, this chapter begins to lay the experiential groundwork. Who is God? What does the atonement cover? Whom does God will to save? Those questions have been addressed. Now a new question comes into focus: what actually happens when we die? People die. And in the process of dying, something happens. Hospice nurses have seen it. Resuscitated patients have reported it. And the Bible records it.
The question is no longer whether the threshold has room in it. It does. The question is whether the God who loves the dying steps into that room. The rest of Part II argues that He does.
What This Chapter Does Not Claim. I am not saying that NDEs prove Christianity, or that every dying person has a near-death experience, or that deathbed visions are proof of heaven. I am saying that the dying process opens onto something, and that something fits remarkably well with the picture of a God who meets people at the threshold. The rest of Part II builds the case. This chapter opens the door.
The rest of Part II will build the case that the one who encounters at the threshold is not a misfiring brain but a surviving soul. It will also build the case that the one encountered is not a chemical artifact but the living Christ. For now, it is enough to say that the moment of death is more than we thought it was. It is more than the last beep of a heart monitor. Something stirs in the corridor between this world and whatever comes next.
And the dying have been telling us about it for a very long time.
↑ 1. For a popular-level overview of the medical complexity of defining death, see Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (New York: HarperOne, 2013), chs. 1–3. Parnia argues that "death is a process, not a moment" and that modern resuscitation science has pushed the boundary of reversibility further than most people realize. Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), ch. 3, reaches the same conclusion from clinical cardiology. Drawing on Linda Emanuel's landmark article "Reexamining Death: The Asymptotic Model and a Bounded Zone Definition," Hastings Center Report 25 (July–August 1995): 27–35, Sabom argues that the dying process "occurs at different levels of organization, from the organism to the organ, cellular, and subcellular levels, and each set of systems can decline on a somewhat independent trajectory." There is, Emanuel and Sabom conclude, no single definable moment of death—only a process of dying that starts with life and eventually ends in death.
↑ 2. Clinical death is sometimes also called "cardiac death" in the medical literature. It is defined by the cessation of heartbeat, breathing, and blood circulation. It should be distinguished from brain death, which requires the irreversible cessation of all brain function, including the brainstem. See Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's Essentials, 2021), 20–23. Sabom, Light and Death, ch. 3, traces the history of these definitions from the mid-nineteenth-century invention of the stethoscope, through the Uniform Determination of Death Act of 1981 (which required "cessation of all functions of the entire brain"), to the ongoing debate between "whole brain" and "higher brain" definitions. As Sabom notes, the debate itself signals "the arbitrariness of deciding" which definition is scientifically accurate.
↑ 3. Parnia, Erasing Death, 8–12. Parnia's AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) studies, begun in 2008, represent the largest prospective investigation of consciousness during cardiac arrest. AWARE I was published in 2014 in Resuscitation; AWARE II results were reported in 2023. See also Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science of Life, Death, and What Comes After (New York: Harper Wave, 2024). The gray zone is wider than even these studies suggest. Sabom, Light and Death, ch. 3, cites three striking findings: physicians at Loyola University found persisting EEG activity up to seven days after brain death was otherwise diagnosed; normal pituitary function has been documented days after brain death; and ten organ donors diagnosed as "brain dead" showed significant increases in blood pressure and heart rate during organ removal—responses inconsistent with total cessation of brain function.
↑ 4. In the United States, the Uniform Determination of Death Act (1981) defines death as either the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem. Most developed nations use a similar standard, though the criteria and procedures vary.
↑ 5. Boros, The Mystery of Death, I.1 (footnote 3 in the original). Boros distinguishes clinical death, relative death, and absolute death and notes that "the moment of absolute death cannot be determined" by clinical observation. He adds that "various clinical experiments indicate that the time required to pass from one state of dying to the next should be reckoned as long rather than short." Boros develops this distinction into the foundation of his "final decision" hypothesis, which is given full treatment in Chapter 11. For a strikingly parallel argument from a physician, see Sabom, Light and Death, ch. 4, where he concludes that "the spiritual mechanism of death seems best understood as a process and not as a single definable moment. This model fits well with our current understanding of the physical mechanism of death." Sabom finds biblical support in Genesis 35:18–19, where Rachel's death is said to occur "as her soul was departing" (NASB)—not when it departed—suggesting that the soul's departure takes place over a period of time, not instantaneously.
↑ 6. The distinction between deathbed visions and delirium or drug-induced hallucination is important. Deathbed visions typically occur in lucid patients, bring a sense of peace rather than agitation, and often include specific details (naming a deceased relative the patient did not know had died, for instance) that resist a purely psychological explanation. See Fenwick and Fenwick, The Art of Dying (London: Continuum, 2008), 33–50. Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic, Evaluating Death-Related Visions, Terminal Lucidity and After Death Communications (2023), ch. 1, marshals the peer-reviewed evidence at length. Miller reports that in longitudinal hospice studies by Kerr et al., over 80 percent of dying patients reported experiences with the other side that they claimed were "more real than real," characterized by "clear consciousness, heightened acuity, and awareness of their surroundings"—distinguishing them from typical dreams or hallucinations. See also Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife: A Multicultural Examination of the Literature (doctoral dissertation, Columbia International University, 2019), chs. 3–4.
↑ 7. Callanan and Kelley, Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Callanan and Kelley coined the term "Nearing Death Awareness" to describe a cluster of behaviors and perceptions they observed across hundreds of patients in the hospice setting. The term distinguishes these experiences from near-death experiences (NDEs), which occur during actual clinical crisis.
↑ 8. Callanan and Kelley, Final Gifts, chs. 3–5. The authors note that the visions tend to share several features: deceased relatives appear more often than living ones; the figures are described as comforting, not frightening; and patients often report a sense of traveling toward a beautiful destination.
↑ 9. Lerma, Into the Light: Real Life Stories About Angelic Visits, Visions of the Afterlife, and Other Pre-Death Experiences (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2007). Lerma's observations are largely anecdotal and have not been subjected to the same peer-reviewed scrutiny as the NDE studies cited below, but they corroborate the hospice literature's reports of deathbed visions in terminal patients. More rigorously documented accounts appear in Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Vol. 1, ch. 1, which collects cases from multiple clinical sources. Miller reports a hospice nurse's firsthand testimony: "Being a hospice nurse, often I saw many patients as they were approaching death having visions—often it was ongoing conversations with members of their family who had preceded them in death." Miller also cites Diane Komp, professor of pediatrics emeritus at Yale, who describes a teenage cancer patient who had a vision of walking with Jesus in a beautiful garden and, two days later, told his parents he would not live through the night—and died peacefully in his sleep.
↑ 10. Fenwick and Fenwick, The Art of Dying; Kelly, Greyson, and Kelly, "Unusual Experiences Near Death and Related Phenomena," in Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, ed. E. F. Kelly et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 367–421. For an earlier landmark study, see Osis and Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death: A New Look at Evidence for Life After Death, rev. ed. (New York: Hastings House, 1977), which surveyed physicians and nurses across the United States and India. Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Vol. 1, ch. 1, draws on all of these and adds further multicultural data; his doctoral dissertation (Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife: A Multicultural Examination of the Literature, Columbia International University, 2019) provides the fullest scholarly treatment to date of the cross-cultural consistency of deathbed phenomena. Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings (2023), chs. 4–5, evaluates the compatibility of these cross-cultural patterns with biblical themes.
↑ 11. Moody, Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death (Atlanta: Mockingbird Books, 1975). Moody identified fifteen common elements in the accounts he collected, including the out-of-body experience, the tunnel, the light, the being of light, and the life review. He was careful to note that his work was "not a scientific study" but a descriptive collection. Subsequent researchers have built the empirical case he opened.
↑ 12. The out-of-body experience (OBE) is one of the most commonly reported elements. In some cases, patients have accurately described events in the operating room that occurred while they were clinically dead, including details they could not have perceived with their eyes or ears. For the strongest veridical cases, see Chapter 6.
↑ 13. Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980), 45–66. Ring's study was one of the first to use a systematic interview protocol with NDE experiencers and to classify the experience into stages. The darkness or tunnel is Stage 2 in his model.
↑ 14. Ring, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Morrow, 1984), ch. 3. Ring's second major study focused on the transformative effects of the NDE on those who had them. The light and the being of love were consistently described as the most impactful elements.
↑ 15. On the identification of the "being of light" with Christ, see Chapter 12. Moody's original research described the being in deliberately neutral terms ("a being of light"); many subsequent experiencers have identified the being as Jesus, though the identification varies with cultural and religious background. See Long with Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), chs. 2–4. Long found an awareness of God occurring more than any other NDE element; none of his respondents reported an awareness that God did not exist. Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, ch. 6, builds a systematic case that the being of light's characteristics—unconditional love, intimate knowledge of the experiencer's entire life, personal presence—correspond with remarkable precision to the biblical portrait of God. Van Lommel observes that "during an NDE, the encounter with 'the light' is felt to be the most intense and most essential part of the experience," while Moody calls it "the most incredible common element," adding that "not one person has expressed any doubt whatsoever that it was a being, a being of light."
↑ 16. The life review is one of the most theologically suggestive elements of the NDE. Experiencers consistently report that the review is not punitive but educative. The two questions reported most often are "What have you learned?" and "How have you loved?" (or close variants). For the theological significance of the life review, including its connection to purification and the divine-presence theology of hell, see Chapter 13.
↑ 17. The boundary or "point of no return" is reported in a significant percentage of NDEs. It takes many forms: a river, a bridge, a fence, a garden wall, a door. Moody, Life After Life, 73–75; Ring, Life at Death, 68–72. The boundary raises a tantalizing question: if crossing it means permanent death, then what the experiencer reports is the experience of someone who came up to the edge of absolute death but did not cross it.
↑ 18. Greyson, "The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, Reliability, and Validity," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171, no. 6 (1983): 369–375. The Greyson Scale assigns numerical scores based on the depth and breadth of the NDE. It remains the standard measurement instrument in the field. Long, God and the Afterlife, ch. 1, notes that a score of 7 or higher on the Greyson Scale qualifies an experience as a definite NDE. Long's NDERF research identifies twelve common elements that "usually occur in consistent order": out-of-body experience, heightened senses, intense and generally positive emotions, passing through a tunnel, encountering a mystical or brilliant light, encountering deceased relatives or mystical beings, a sense of alteration in time or space, a life review, encountering otherworldly realms, encountering or learning special knowledge, encountering a boundary or barrier, and a voluntary or involuntary return to the body. Long reports that 74.9 percent of NDErs experienced separation of consciousness from the body, 64.8 percent saw a light, and 33.2 percent passed through a tunnel.
↑ 19. van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands," The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (December 15, 2001): 2039–2045. This was a landmark study because it was prospective: van Lommel interviewed patients shortly after resuscitation, not years later. Of 344 consecutive cardiac-arrest survivors, 62 (18 percent) reported an NDE. See also van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010).
↑ 20. Long with Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010). Long's database at the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) had collected over 5,000 cases by the book's publication and has grown since. His contribution is breadth: the sheer volume of cases and the cross-cultural consistency of the common core elements. Long's subsequent God and the Afterlife (2016) represents the largest scientific study of NDEs ever reported, drawing on over four thousand cases shared through NDERF and translated by over four hundred multilingual volunteers into more than twenty languages. Long found that the collective response from those four thousand reports "point to the reality of the world we call the afterlife." Multiple lines of evidence are presented, including the impossibility of lucid experiences during unconsciousness, the logical consistency of NDE narratives (unlike dreams), and the near-universal accuracy of verified out-of-body observations.
↑ 21. The detail that Jesus is standing at the right hand of God is significant. In most other New Testament references, Christ is described as seated at the right hand (e.g., Heb 1:3; Col 3:1; Eph 1:20). The standing posture may indicate that Jesus rose to receive His dying servant. Whether this is a literal vision of the risen Christ or a symbolic representation of Stephen's real spiritual encounter with the Lord, the point stands: at the moment of Stephen's death, heaven was opened and Christ was present.
↑ 22. For the intermediate-state significance of Luke 23:43 and the question of how "today" and "paradise" should be understood, see Chapter 8. In this chapter the passage is cited for a simpler point: that a whole salvation was transacted in the final minutes of a life, with no prior profession, no prior instruction, and no prior preparation beyond the plea itself.
↑ 23. The thief's conversion is one of the most frequently cited examples of deathbed salvation in the Christian tradition. It does not, by itself, prove that God continues to offer salvation after death; the thief was still alive when he made his plea, and Jesus was physically present. But it sets a precedent: the last minutes of life are not too late for God to save. If that is true, the question becomes whether God's willingness to save at the last moment extends into the space just beyond it. That is the question this book addresses.
↑ 24. These are called "Peak in Darien" cases, after a phrase from Keats. The earliest systematic collection is in Frances Power Cobbe, "The Peak in Darien: The Riddle of Death," New Quarterly Magazine (1877). More recently, see Fenwick and Fenwick, The Art of Dying, 44–47, and Greyson, After, 98–102. Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Vol. 1, ch. 1, provides the most extensive analysis to date. Drawing on Greyson's article "Seeing Deceased Persons Not Known to Have Died: 'Peak in Darien' Experiences," Anthropology and Humanism 35 (2010): 159–171, Miller distinguishes three varieties: cases where the deceased had died some time before the vision (though this was unknown to the experiencer); cases where the person died at the time of or immediately before the vision (allowing no possibility for the experiencer to have learned of the death); and cases where the deceased was someone the experiencer had never known. Greyson documented fifteen, nine, and four cases in these categories respectively and concluded that "these Peak in Darien cases provide some of the most persuasive evidence for the ontological reality of deceased spirits." Kubler-Ross corroborated this pattern: "every single child who mentioned that someone was waiting for them mentioned a person who had actually preceded them in death, even if by only a few moments." The evidential force of these cases is that the dying person perceives information (the death of a relative, for instance) that was not available to them through any ordinary channel. They overlap with the veridical NDE cases treated in Chapter 6.
↑ 25. Parnia discusses the remarkable cases of prolonged cardiac arrest followed by successful resuscitation in Erasing Death, chs. 2–3. Hypothermia dramatically slows cellular death, allowing some patients to be revived after extended periods of clinical death. Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), was among the first cardiologists to investigate what patients experienced during cardiac arrest. He began as a skeptic; his research persuaded him that the experiences were real. Sabom, Light and Death, chs. 3–4, develops the argument further with the case of Pam Reynolds, whose 1991 hypothermic cardiac arrest surgery provides the most extensively documented NDE in the medical literature. During the standstill operation, Pam's brain was found "dead" by all three clinical tests—her electroencephalogram was silent, her brain-stem response was absent, and no blood flowed through her brain. Yet she reported the deepest NDE of all participants in Sabom's Atlanta Study, with a Greyson Scale score of 27 (far above the study average of 15). Her surgeon, Dr. Robert Spetzler, stated on CBS's 48 Hours: "If you would examine that patient from a clinical perspective during that hour, that patient by all definition would be dead. At this point there is no brain activity, no blood going through the brain. Nothing, nothing, nothing."
↑ 26. Ring, Heading Toward Omega, chs. 5–7, was the first systematic study of NDE aftereffects. Van Lommel followed up with his cardiac-arrest survivors two and eight years later and found that the transformative effects persisted and in some cases deepened; see van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, chs. 4–5. Greyson has studied aftereffects across his career; see Greyson, After, chs. 10–12. Habermas and Moreland engage the NDE evidence from a philosophically sophisticated and explicitly Christian perspective in Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998). Sabom, Light and Death, ch. 7, provides a biblical evaluation of NDE aftereffects and finds that the NDE promotes, rather than detracts from, belief in certain biblical principles: it leads to increased belief in God (consistent with Romans 1:19–20) and in life after death (consistent with Ecclesiastes 3:11, where God "has set eternity in the hearts of men"). Long, God and the Afterlife, chs. 7–8, confirms that the aftereffects are among the most compelling lines of evidence for the reality of NDEs, since they are lasting and transformative in ways that dreams and hallucinations are not. Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, chs. 4–5, evaluates the compatibility of these transformative effects with historic Christian teachings.
↑ 27. On the cross-cultural consistency of NDEs, see Long with Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife, ch. 10, which draws on the NDERF database to compare cases across cultures and nations. Ring and Valarino, Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience (Needham, MA: Moment Point Press, 2006), ch. 1, discusses the universality of the NDE pattern. The cross-cultural data does not mean that NDEs are culture-free; the interpretive framework the experiencer brings shapes the account. But the common core elements persist. See also Kellehear, Experiences Near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), for a sociological treatment of the cross-cultural data. Long, God and the Afterlife, strengthens the case further: in a study of 79 non-English NDEs and 583 English, "all thirty-three NDE elements were present in both groups," and "no NDE element occurred statistically more or less often in either group." Long concluded that "the most reasonable conclusion from the NDERF cross-cultural NDE study is that the content of near-death experiences appears to be the same around the world." Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, chs. 8–9, presses the point from a Christian apologetic angle: in his study of non-Western, non-Christian NDEs, he found no pattern of anti-Christian elements, and his searches for competing religious figures (Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna) found them only in a few anomalous cases, even when searched by country or religion.