In Theory: Experiences with heaven and hell

A spate of books by people claiming they’ve died and literally gone to heaven — or hell, in one case — before returning to Earth have been recent bestsellers. Don Piper’s “90 Minutes in Heaven” has sold 4 million copies, and Piper is now a traveling minister preaching that he knows heaven is a real place because he’s been there. Bill Wiese, on the other hand, wrote his bestselling “23 Minutes in Hell” after being transported to Hades one night while asleep.

Possibly the most sensational book is “Heaven is for Real,” written by Todd Burpo but based on Burpo’s then-3-year-old son’s claim that he died one night, went to heaven and met John the Baptist, Jesus and his own great-grandfather. The book hit the top of the New York Times bestseller lists and has been reprinted multiple times. The father claims there’s no way his son, Colton, could have known about the things he described, such as his mother having suffered a miscarriage several years before.

Selling millions of copies of such books is one thing, but some claim the actual descriptions of the afterlife really don’t have any basis in scripture. In an article titled “Heaven Tourism” on Christianity.com, Tim Challies says that God has no need to let people die, show them heaven and then return them to life. “[T]he Bible gives us no reason to believe that a person will truly die, truly experience the afterlife, and then return,” he says, adding, “You dishonor God if you choose to believe what the Bible says only when you receive some kind of outside verification.”

Q: Do you believe any of these people really went to heaven (or hell), or did they experience some kind of dream or stress-induced hallucination?

There is a famous Shakespeare line that goes something like this: “There is more to the universe than what is contained in your philosophy, Horatio.” Forgive me if I don’t have the quote exactly right, but I believe the gist of it with all my heart: There is more to this life and what comes after than what is contained in any of our theologies or philosophies or points of view.

I am not a big fan of Mel Gibson, but in his movie “Signs” there is a bit in which his wife, as she is dying, tells the Gibson character’s brother to “swing away.” The guy is a baseball player, so of course he is going to “swing away,” and her dying words are thought to be some delusion. But later on in the picture the brother does “swing away” with his baseball bat and saves the life of somebody special. So were her words the dying delusion of a brain that was about to stop functioning, or did she get a glimpse of the future through some contact with a force beyond?

Most of us want to believe that there is life beyond this life, including this preacher. So such stories of people leaving this life and then returning with news that there is something else after the grave are automatically appealing. But do I believe that real people actually died, saw heaven or hell, and then returned? I must say that I don’t know what I believe!

I certainly believe there is more after this life; that’s one reason I’m a minister. But did they actually go and return? While I believe all things are possible (see the Shakespeare quote above), I have no idea if they did or didn’t. But, boy! I certainly do find their accounts fascinating!

The Rev. Skip Lindeman
La Cañada Congregational Church
La Cañada Flintridge

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One option is to take all of these claims at face value and believe them. But we’ve all heard numerous spiritual claims that contradict each other. So we need more, and the person of faith must compare these claims with what God has authoritatively revealed in Scripture.

We know heaven is real, and that people are there now in God’s presence. We have several descriptions of heaven, most of which focus on the glory of God (see Isaiah 6; Acts 7:56; Revelation chapters 4 and 21). We know that Jesus came from heaven and he returned there. But even with his perfect knowledge of heaven, his emphasis was on how we should live for God now, not what it will be like there. Jesus did say it’s a place of joy and reward, and a kingdom in which his people shall both serve and rule.

We know that Paul the apostle was taken up to heaven and returned, “whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know” (2 Corinthians 12:2). He described his experience as being “caught up to the third heaven” and “caught up into Paradise.” But Paul didn’t elaborate except to say that he “heard inexpressible words, which a man is not permitted to speak.” If Paul wasn’t allowed to describe what he saw and heard, I’d wonder why God would allow someone to do so today.

So I believe it’s possible that someone today could be taken to heaven and return. But taking all into consideration, I’d carefully compare any person’s claims with Scripture and reject them all at the first discrepancy. At best I’d say, “Well, possibly...” and if I wanted to read a book about heaven, I’d stick with the Bible.

Pastor Jon Barta
Valley Baptist Church, Burbank

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Yes, I do believe that many people have actually had a near-death experience (NDE).

Someone I am very close to recounted to me her own NDE that happened about 15 years ago. She was in a hospital bed, recovering from extensive surgery. She felt herself leave her body and float toward the ceiling. She saw a beautiful field that looked very much like any field on Earth ... but she said the colors were more vibrant, and everything seemed so vivid and “alive” to her.

She saw former pets, her grandparents, and then she told me that a “... heavenly being or an angel (a man) walked toward me and pointed his finger at me and told me ‘It’s not your time. Your granddaughters need you. Your husband loves you and needs you.’“ With that, she quickly returned to her body. She told me that the return to her physical body was very painful, but that she had a renewed sense of her purpose in life.

She said it was an interesting reference to her granddaughters, because her daughter wasn’t married at the time and certainly had no children. The granddaughters were born several years later.

Did this individual see an actual place, or was it a creation from her own subconscious mind and her particular spiritual belief system? I think that she experienced exactly what she needed to experience at that time in her life to make a speedy recovery from surgery and to feel inspired to continue her life with a strong sense of purpose.

Unity believes that life is eternal. Life doesn’t cease to be (to “die”), but it may change form, but our souls certainly continue in our journey of spiritual growth and awareness of our oneness with God.

Rev Jeri Linn
Unity Church of the Valley
La Crescenta

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Who am I to say? So many people, so very many, have had these near-death experiences that you’d have to be arrogant, or at least more theologically confident than I am, to say they can’t have happened. If such a story were related to me by someone I know, I’d be glad for them, and think it was cool. And, someone I do know was greatly, greatly helped by one of these books, in facing her pending death — and who am I to take that comfort from her?

I think it’s interesting that heaven has become such a popular subject of books, TV and movies lately. The books mentioned here are from religious sources, but much is being published from the “secular spirituality” angle, which seems to want to create a heaven without God or any other infinite entity attached.

The focus seems to be on love and relationships, (“The Five People You’ll Meet in Heaven” and the ending of the TV show “Lost” come to mind), a focus which, while it’s in keeping with religious tradition, also smacks of the popular tendency to replace divine mystery with human smarminess.

Somewhere along the way we switched from the biblical aphorism “God is love” (1 John 4:8) to the oh-so-American belief, “Love is god.” Love is the thing we lend ultimacy to; love is our last and best answer for just about everything, so it’s not surprising that love is becoming our definition of heaven too.

I guess there are worse things for heaven to turn out to be — although those of us who hail from dysfunctional families shudder to think that the afterlife might be more of the same, forever. I think God is bigger than the human ties that bind us, and I think we can hope for more than love-with-better-music in the life to come.

Personally, I’m hoping that life after death is more about God and much, much less about me, and all my messy relationships, than my mortal life has been.

The Rev. Amy Pringle
St. George’s Episcopal Church
La Cañada Flintridge

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It is easy to empathize with our friends who have thoughts or visions of heaven or an afterlife. We all worry about death and the future. Likely people who report going to heaven and returning are experiencing a hallucination or misperception. Our minds and bodies are very complex and wondrous systems, and we have many ways to experience the world and fantasies. All people seem to sometimes perceive events that do not exist, which are the result of neurological or chemical activities in the brain. The human body produces psychedelic compounds including Dimethyltryptamine, which can produce sights and sounds that do not exist.

While these reports of heaven are not likely, it should not discourage people about life and death. Life is real and death is real, and we should embrace each day as a gift and joyous opportunity. Everyone dies, and each person should do things to help the loved ones that surround them. The Earth is immense and filled with billions of people. Our lives are entangled with those around us, and we should take advantage of this time to share the joy and wonder of this life.

Steven Gibson
South Pasadena Atheist Meetup
Altadena

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I always wish I had the simple pastoral answer that everyone wants for this kind of question.

Given the amazing sales of these books, there is clearly a deep hunger to know for sure that God waits for us at the end of our journeys, and that discipleship is worth the struggle. I personally have found it deeply moving and assuring to sit with dying believers as they make the crossing with a peaceful smile. Perhaps even more importantly, I have been with dying believers for whom the process of dying became an apex of their faith journey.

It is hard to describe in few words, but when someone has spent a lifetime loving and serving as Jesus loved and served, the indignity of illness can strip away everything except their core identity as a child of God. A lightness of soul emanates from them, and draws others to them, eager for a blessing. (More on this in a great book by Rev. John Fanestil titled “Mrs. Hunter’s Happy Death.”)

Because of my faith, and because of these witnesses to the ultimate goodness of God, I can rest assured that everything will be OK, even without getting the tour of heaven.

United Methodists are doctrinally pretty quiet on what happens between death and being with God. We believe that God prepares a place for us (John 14), and that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39).

So I can’t make audacious judgments about who is seeing heaven and who is hallucinating, but I can remind all avid seekers of eternity that God is indeed ready to receive us, now and later.

The Rev. Paige Eaves
Crescenta Valley United Methodist Church
Montrose

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I believe that the pictures, sounds and emotions we experience when we are dreaming are real as life in our minds. I am fascinated by our incredibly complicated brain, from which emanates everything that makes us human.

A recent article I read described a brain quirk that magicians exploit to trick us. Reality — what is happening right before our eyes — and what we think we see are far from concurrent. Some philosophers debate whether such a single reality even exists — we may each be living our own. That would explain why getting along is so hard sometimes.

One theory is that dreams are created as the brain organizes memories, like glimpses of pages being filed, moved, even discarded. Mine often seem to be random brain dumps. Dreams are fun usually, both in the dreaming and to think and talk about later.

So hurrah for Piper, Wiese and Burpo for turning dreams into popular and profitable books, and extra credit if they spun these visions out of whole cloth. And by the way, a child wouldn’t need to know his family history to have picked up the notion of miscarriage from TV, overhearing adults, or other children.

But going to an afterlife and back is the stuff of dreams only. When we die and our big brain shuts off, our reality and our dreams cease.

We get one go-round here on Earth. Whether it is heaven or hell is up to us.

Roberta Medford
Atheist
Montrose

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The Bible provides some foundational information that seems to contradict this idea of afterlife visitations. First, when the specifically chosen Apostle Paul had his “vision of heaven” experience, he did not describe it, and said it wasn’t allowed to be described (2 Corinthians 12:3-4). He was then given a lifelong malady to humble him as he went on to transmit God’s inspired words in the New Testament. This was especially unique, and he wasn’t dead.

How then are so many books written by people claiming death, with full-blown stereophonic, Technicolor descriptions of both Paradise and Perdition, often contradictory, and often literalizing things that are clearly not meant to be?

I believe the Bible is literally true, but truth sometimes conveys in metaphor, like Jesus saying “I am the door” (John 10:9 KJV). He’s literally the sole entryway into God’s kingdom, but he isn’t literally a 3-by-7 oak panel with peephole, knocker and knob. Many biblical descriptions of heaven and hell are meant to express their respective joys and horrors, not provide photos, as if faith depended on such.

Jesus taught that even if one could be visited from residents of hell it wouldn’t matter, because all that is necessary is Scripture; if that’s not believed, even visitations won’t help anyone (Luke 16:31). So it’s forbidden, and trips in reverse would serve no better purpose. I do believe there are near-death experiences — that people near death experience something. But they aren’t truly dead or they wouldn’t return. Death is final, happens only once, and then comes judgment (Hebrews 9:27).

I think dreams are great indicators of the soul’s existence, because all the sensations of the body are in force and apparently real, despite the body’s obvious uninvolvement. The soul can experience physicality apart from it, so perhaps a mind full of biblical imagery, life experience and afterlife expectation melds everything into a seemingly real story, but it’s just that. If the person sits up and lives to tell the tale, it convinces me that they were with us the whole the time. I still believe in heaven and hell.

The Rev. Bryan Griem
Montrose Community Church
Montrose

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Judaism teaches us that the soul has an immortal character, and that there is indeed an afterlife. However, exactly what eternal life is and what it looks like, nobody is entirely sure. Personally, I find it hard to rely on all these “out of body” experiences and books for concrete evidence of what happens in the hereafter since it is very difficult to definitively conclude that these occurrences were not influenced by outside factors.

For example, these recollections are often penned by people who were severely ill and inevitably under heavy doses of powerful medication.

There is a Jewish custom that when entering a cemetery, one is forbidden from outwardly displaying any ritual observance lest we “offend” those who have passed on. The understanding is that even though the souls of the deceased may be basking in the glory of heaven, nevertheless they envy the living for our ability to do good deeds and positively transform our environment.

It is interesting to ponder these claims about encounters with life after death, but what is paramount and fundamental to religious observance is how we conduct ourselves today, in the here and now. Whatever happens in the next world should not be our primary concern. Instead, we must remember that the most important thing is the action that we can take to improve the lives of others — in both physical and spiritual terms — in the material world we currently inhabit.

Rabbi Simcha Backman
Chabad Jewish Center
Glendale