Chapter 33

Near-Death Experiences and the Nature of Time

What NDEs Teach Us About God's Relationship to Time

Introduction: A Window into Wider Time

I want to begin this chapter with a story. It is not my own, but it has been told so often in the medical literature that it has become something like a landmark in the field. A woman named Pam Reynolds was facing surgery for a massive aneurysm deep in her brain. The operation was so dangerous that her surgeons used a method called "standstill." They chilled her body down, drained the blood from her head, and stopped her heart. For a measurable window of time, she had no heartbeat, no breathing, no brain activity on the monitors, and no blood in her brain. By every clinical standard we use to define death, she was dead.¹

And yet, when she woke up, she had a story to tell. She described the surgical instruments she had never seen. She described the comments the surgical team had made during the procedure. She said she had left her body, watched the operation from above, and then moved through a tunnel toward a brilliant light. She met deceased relatives. She was then told she had to go back. When she returned to her body, she remembered everything in vivid, structured detail.²

But the detail that interests me most — and the one that matters for this book — is what she said about time. She did not experience the episode as a quick flash or a sudden blackout. She experienced it as a long, rich, unhurried reality that seemed to unfold in its own rhythm. What felt like a full afternoon of experience had happened during a surgical window of about an hour of external clock-time, with a shorter span during which her brain was flatlined. Time, during this event, did not behave the way our wristwatches tell us it should.

Pam Reynolds is not alone. Thousands upon thousands of people across many cultures and decades have reported strange, striking things about time during near-death experiences. Time slows. Time stops. Time compresses. A whole life plays out in an instant. Events happen "all at once" and in sequence at the same time. A week of events unfolds during a sixty-second cardiac arrest. The experiencers almost always say the same thing when they try to describe it: "It wasn't like time here. Time there works differently."³

This chapter is about what we can learn — and what we cannot learn — from those reports. Our question in this book is God's relationship to time. And we have been arguing that God is genuinely temporal but not stuck inside our created clock-time the way we are. He experiences real sequence, but He is not boxed in by the "now" the way we are. He can see the whole span of history without being imprisoned by a tick-tock of seconds. That is a bold claim. It is also a claim that sounds, at first, a little hard to imagine. How could any being experience real before and after and still somehow transcend the limits of seconds and minutes? What would that even feel like?

This is exactly where near-death experiences offer us something precious. They do not prove the doctrine of divine temporality. They do not settle any philosophical debate about the metaphysics of time. But they do show us, in real human beings with real verified testimony, that temporal experience can be stunningly different from the ticking clock in the corner of the kitchen — and yet still be experience, still involve real sequence, real events, and real awareness.⁴ In other words: NDEs show us that our everyday clock-time is not the only kind of temporal experience possible. And if that is true for creatures whose consciousness has been briefly unhooked from the body, how much more so for the Creator who designed time in the first place?

Before we go further, let me say what this chapter will not do. It will not try to make NDEs do too much. I am not going to claim that the life review shows us how God knows the future. I am not going to claim that the tunnel of light proves the B-theory of time is wrong. I am not going to claim that Pam Reynolds or any other NDEer had a mystical vision of God's own timeline. The argument is modest and strictly analogical. NDEs show us a creaturely mode of experience in which time does not operate the way clock-time does. That is all. What that experience can do is help our imaginations. It helps us see that the concept of "dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access" — which has been the thesis of this whole book — is not wild, not contradictory, not incoherent. It is conceivable. We have neighbors who have tasted a sliver of something like it.⁵

Here is the plan for the chapter. First, we will take a careful look at what near-death experiences actually are and what the research has found. I want to do this fairly and soberly, without sensationalism and without dismissal. Second, we will zero in on the temporal features of NDEs — the six or seven strange things NDEers say about time. Third, we will look at the evidence that many NDEs involve veridical perception — that is, seeing real things during a period when the brain should not be working. This supports substance dualism, which matters for how we understand the intermediate state. Fourth, we will consider how NDEs illustrate (by analogy) the author's model of divine temporality. Fifth, we will fairly consider the skeptical and materialist objections to taking NDEs seriously. And sixth, we will close with pastoral and theological reflections.

Along the way, I will try to be careful. I am a Th.D. student and I take both Scripture and evidence seriously. I do not want to build doctrine on the report of someone's private experience. Scripture is our foundation. But I also do not want to ignore what thousands of people have consistently described for over fifty years of serious medical research. If God made the world such that temporal experience can become different near the boundary of death, that is worth noting. It tells us something about how time actually works at the edges of the created order — and about what kind of God could stand above it.

What Are Near-Death Experiences?

Let us start with definitions. A near-death experience — often shortened to NDE — is a vivid, subjectively real, deeply meaningful experience reported by people who have come very close to death or who have been, by clinical standards, clinically dead and then resuscitated. The term was popularized in 1975 by Dr. Raymond Moody, a physician and philosopher, in his book Life After Life. Moody interviewed dozens of patients who had survived cardiac arrest, major trauma, or other life-threatening events, and he noticed something remarkable: across very different people, very different ages, and very different backgrounds, the same set of features kept showing up in the reports.⁶

Moody identified a core set of common elements. He did not claim that every NDEer had all of them — that is never the case. But these features show up again and again, in various combinations, at rates that cannot be chalked up to coincidence. The classic elements include: a sensation of peace and calm; a feeling of being out of one's body; a tunnel-like passage; an encounter with a being of light; a review of one's life; an encounter with deceased loved ones; a point of no return or a boundary; and a return to the body. Later researchers added features like seeing one's physical body from the outside, hearing medical staff speaking, encountering indescribably beautiful landscapes, and receiving knowledge that felt infinite and all-encompassing.⁷

After Moody's book hit shelves, researchers around the world began to study the phenomenon more systematically. And when they did, they found that NDEs were not rare. Different surveys have estimated that somewhere between four and fifteen percent of the general population reports having had such an experience at some point in life, and studies of cardiac arrest survivors have found even higher rates — roughly ten to twenty percent in some samples.⁸ Some researchers think the rate among the genuinely resuscitated is higher still, since memories of the experience can fade, and many people never tell anyone about what they saw because they are afraid of being mocked or labeled.

Here I want to introduce four of the major researchers in this field because their names will come up again and again. First, Dr. Raymond Moody, the psychiatrist who coined the term and whose early work shaped the whole field. Second, Dr. Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, who developed the "Greyson Scale" — the standard research instrument for assessing whether a reported experience counts as a near-death experience. Greyson has studied more than a thousand cases over a career of several decades, and his book After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond is considered a gold standard in the field.⁹

Third, Dr. Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist in the Netherlands, whose 2001 study published in The Lancet — one of the most respected medical journals in the world — followed 344 cardiac arrest survivors across ten Dutch hospitals. Van Lommel found that about eighteen percent reported some form of NDE. His study is especially important because it was prospective — meaning the patients were recruited before anyone knew who would have an NDE, so the research could not be biased by picking only those who had interesting stories to tell.¹⁰

Fourth, Dr. Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist who founded the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation. Long's organization has collected the largest database of NDE accounts in the world, now numbering in the several thousands. His book Evidence of the Afterlife statistically analyzes these accounts and catalogs recurring features, including the striking consistency of reports about time.¹¹

There are several other important researchers worth mentioning. Dr. Kenneth Ring, a psychologist, conducted influential studies in the 1980s and documented NDEs in blind individuals who nevertheless reported seeing things during their experiences — an especially strong case for veridical perception.¹² Dr. Sam Parnia, a critical care physician at NYU Langone, led the AWARE study (AWAreness during REsuscitation), a multi-hospital prospective study that tested whether patients could accurately report events in the hospital room during cardiac arrest. And Dr. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist, produced some of the earliest rigorous case studies in which patients' reports of events during cardiac arrest were cross-checked against medical records. In each case, the researchers were initially skeptical. In each case, the data changed their minds.¹³

Now, I should add a caveat right here. This is a deep book about God and time, not a book about NDEs as such. I treat the evidence for NDEs as veridical experiences in my companion book Beyond the Grave, where I argue for substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state. If you want the full defense of why I believe NDEs are not explained away by mere hallucination, please consult that volume.¹⁴ What I will do here is assume the conclusions of that earlier argument and build on them. I accept — on the basis of careful scrutiny of the evidence — that many NDEs are genuine experiences of consciousness during clinical death, and that they provide substantial (though not airtight) support for the survival of consciousness after bodily death. This chapter focuses on one particular feature of those experiences: what they report about time.

The Temporal Features of NDEs

When we go through the thousands of NDE reports that researchers have carefully collected, we find something striking: nearly every NDEer says something unusual about time. This is not a minor detail buried in a few accounts. It is one of the most consistent features of the whole phenomenon. In Dr. Long's large database, a remarkable majority of experiencers reported that time felt different in some way during the event.¹⁵ Let me lay out the main ways NDEers describe this strange temporal experience.

Feature 1: Time Slowing or Stopping

One of the most common reports is that time slowed down dramatically or seemed to stop altogether. A man in cardiac arrest for two minutes reports what feels like a quiet hour of conversation with a luminous being. A woman whose surgery lasted forty-five minutes reports a full day of experience. People trying to describe this say things like "time no longer mattered," "time seemed to have no meaning," "a minute felt like an eternity," or "I don't know how long I was there — it could have been a moment or a century."¹⁶

This is not the same as ordinary time distortion. We all know the feeling that a boring meeting drags on or that a fun afternoon flies by. That is perceived time versus measured time. What NDEers describe is different and stronger. It is not that they felt time was slow. It is that time itself seemed to work by different rules. Many experiencers explicitly say their sense of duration broke down, as if minutes and hours no longer applied.

Feature 2: Time Compressing

Closely related but distinct is the experience of compression. Here, what would have taken a long time in ordinary experience seems to happen in a compact instant. An NDEer might report a rich, sequential series of encounters — meeting a relative, traveling through a landscape, hearing music, holding a conversation, being given knowledge — that, when it is over, they realize took place during only a few seconds of cardiac arrest. The events were not skipped or blurred. They were full, vivid, detailed. They simply unfolded in a compressed timeframe that does not match clock-time.

Van Lommel documented many such reports in his Lancet study, where patients recounted elaborate experiences during the roughly two-to-five-minute windows of clinical death.¹⁷ Any of us could describe a two-minute dream. But the NDEers' reports are not dreamlike. They have crystal clarity, logical order, and detail far richer than typical dreams. They also often include verifiable details — things the patient could not have known unless somehow observing events during a period of no brain function.

Feature 3: The Life Review

Perhaps the most striking temporal feature of NDEs is the life review. In a life review, the experiencer sees — in varying degrees of detail — events from their own life, sometimes from earliest childhood to the moment of the crisis. The review often includes not only the experiencer's point of view but also the perspectives of others — what it felt like to be the person on the receiving end of the NDEer's kindness or cruelty. Some describe it as "watching a film," others as "re-living" each moment, others as "being inside every person I touched."¹⁸

Now think about this carefully. A full life review covers decades. And yet experiencers routinely report that it happened in what felt like seconds to minutes. Some even report that every moment of every day was there — every word spoken, every glance given, every thought — and yet the whole review fit within a single, extended "now" that they could survey. This is a temporal experience that has almost no analog in our ordinary lives. It is as though time becomes thick, layered, or transparent all at once. The past is not merely remembered; it is re-accessible. The experiencer is not watching a movie of themselves; they are somehow re-present to those earlier moments.¹⁹

Feature 4: Simultaneity

A fourth temporal feature is simultaneity. Some NDEers report that events were experienced "all at once" — not in a sequence, but together, like facets of a single reality present to them at the same moment. This is hard to describe, and experiencers often say that human language breaks down when they try. They will say things like "everything was happening at once," "past and future and present were all there," or "I knew everything simultaneously."²⁰

Dr. Greyson, who has a scientist's caution about strong claims, notes that these simultaneity reports are among the most difficult to categorize but are also among the most consistent features of NDE testimony.²¹ He quotes one experiencer who said that trying to describe it was like trying to explain color to someone born blind. The NDEer insists that the experience was real, that it had a structure, and that the structure was not the structure of ordinary time — yet it was not the absence of time either.

Feature 5: Time Feeling "Different" — Qualitatively Altered

Perhaps the most common thing NDEers say is also the vaguest: "Time was different there." Not just faster or slower. Not just compressed or stretched. Different. The very fabric of time seemed to work by other rules. The experience had its own temporal texture.²²

Van Lommel found that this report came from experiencers of all backgrounds — religious and secular, educated and not, young and old, men and women. The specific words varied, but the message was consistent: ordinary time-talk does not fit the experience. This does not automatically mean the experience was timeless. Most experiencers do not say "there was no time." They say "time was strange, not like here." The distinction is important. It is not the removal of time but the transformation of time.

Feature 6: Both Sequence and Simultaneity at Once

The most philosophically interesting feature — and the one most relevant to our thesis about God and time — is this: some experiencers report both sequence and simultaneity at the same time. They describe events happening in a certain order — first the out-of-body experience, then the tunnel, then the light, then the life review — and they describe a sense of being able to access it all at once, as if the whole experience were simultaneously available to them even as it unfolded in steps.²³

This is exactly the kind of temporal structure that we have proposed for God's experience in this book. Genuine sequence, yes — there is a real before and after in God's life. But also transcendent access — God is not boxed into the "now" of the present moment. He can experience temporal succession while also holding all of time in view. Our creaturely clock-time is one mode of temporality. NDEs illustrate (in a small, imperfect way) that other modes are conceivable and in fact are sometimes experienced. If a human consciousness detached briefly from the body can taste such a thing, the idea that the Creator of time experiences His own temporality in an even richer and fuller mode is not far-fetched. It is, in fact, exactly what we would expect.

Veridical NDEs and Substance Dualism

Before we use NDEs as an analogy for divine temporality, we need to face a big question: are these experiences real? Or are they just hallucinations of a dying brain, as some skeptics insist? If NDEs are nothing more than misfiring neurons, they would tell us nothing about time, nothing about the soul, and nothing about God. So it matters whether the accounts are trustworthy. It matters whether something real is being experienced.

The strongest evidence that NDEs involve real perception and not mere hallucination comes from what researchers call veridical perception. The Latin word veridicus means "speaking truth." A veridical perception is an accurate observation — something actually seen or heard that later turns out to match reality. If a patient reports seeing an unusual object on top of a cabinet in a room she was not in, and that object is then confirmed to be there, that is veridical perception. And if she reports seeing it during a period when her brain was flatlined and her eyes were taped shut, we have something that cries out for explanation.²⁴

The literature on veridical NDEs is large and growing. I will briefly mention some well-documented cases. Dr. Sabom, the cardiologist I mentioned earlier, conducted a careful study comparing NDEers' reports of their resuscitations with medical records. He found that the NDEers who had "out-of-body" experiences described their resuscitations with a precision that matched the records far better than a control group of patients who had not had NDEs but were asked to describe what they thought a resuscitation would look like. The control group made predictable mistakes; the NDEers did not.²⁵

Dr. Ring's studies of blind NDEers are especially striking. He interviewed 31 people who had been blind — including people blind from birth, with no visual experience of any kind — who reported visual NDE content. They described colors they had never seen, objects they had never seen, and visual details of their resuscitation rooms. For a person blind from birth to describe visual content in a way that matches the room's layout is a staggering finding that cannot easily be explained by sensory leakage or confabulation.²⁶

Dr. van Lommel's Lancet study is likewise important. In one much-cited case, a comatose patient with no vital signs had been brought in with no identification. During resuscitation, a nurse removed the patient's dentures to insert a breathing tube. The patient survived and, a week later, recognized the nurse and asked for his dentures back — describing exactly where they had been placed. He also described, accurately, the unusual resuscitation procedure used on him. He had been clinically dead during the whole episode.²⁷

Dr. Parnia's AWARE study took veridical research a step further. It placed hidden visual targets — pictures near the ceiling that could only be seen from above — in hospital rooms where cardiac arrests were most likely to occur. The goal was to see whether any NDEer, reporting an out-of-body view of their resuscitation, would later describe the hidden images. The design was methodologically careful. Results from AWARE and its successor AWARE II have been complex, with a small number of promising cases but limits in how many cardiac arrests happened in rooms with the targets. What the studies did confirm, though, was that a measurable percentage of cardiac arrest survivors have experiences of awareness during resuscitation and that their descriptions of events often match reality.²⁸

Now, what does this have to do with the question of time? Quite a lot. If NDEs involve genuine perception during a period when the brain is not functioning, then consciousness must be able to exist — at least briefly — apart from brain function. That is exactly what substance dualism predicts. And this matters for our chapter's argument in two ways.²⁹

First, if consciousness can exist apart from the body, then the temporal reports of NDEers are reports of actual temporal experience by a mind that is not running on ordinary clock-time via neural firing. The NDE happens during cardiac arrest, when the brain's neurons are not working normally. So if time still goes on being experienced — if there is still a sequence of thoughts, still a progression of encounters, still a life review — then temporal experience does not reduce to neural timekeeping. Human consciousness, when briefly unhooked from the brain's clock, can still experience time. And when it does, time can take on these unusual qualities. This is a direct blow to the materialist assumption that time is "just" what a neural network measures.³⁰

Second, if the soul is real and separable from the body, then the theological claim that God interacts with souls in an intermediate state — a claim I discuss in depth in Chapter 34 — has empirical support as well as biblical support. And God's interactions with those souls require that God be temporal. An interaction is a to-and-fro, a giving-and-receiving, and those require sequence. A strictly timeless God cannot "interact" with anyone.³¹

How NDEs Illuminate Divine Temporality

Now we come to the heart of this chapter. What does it mean to say that NDEs offer an analogy for God's relationship to time? I want to unpack this carefully, because it is easy to misstate what the analogy claims. Let me start with what it does not claim.

The analogy does not claim that God's experience of time is the same as an NDEer's experience of time. It does not claim that God travels through a tunnel, has a life review, or leaves His body. It does not claim that NDEers have a vision of God's own timeline. It does not claim that NDE testimony is Scripture or carries authority for Christian doctrine. And it does not claim that NDEs prove the author's view against any competing view. The analogy is strictly analogical. That word matters.³²

What the analogy does claim is this: in the NDE, we see an actual instance of a conscious mind experiencing time in a mode radically different from ordinary clock-time. That mode involves real sequence (things happen in order) and, at the same time, a kind of transcendence of clock-time (decades collapse into moments; events feel simultaneous; access to past is re-opened). This is a small, finite, creaturely taste of what "transcendent temporal access alongside genuine sequence" might mean. If such a mode is conceivable for creatures, then it is surely conceivable — indeed, expected — for the Creator. The analogy does not prove the doctrine. It helps our imagination receive the doctrine without dismissing it as incoherent.

Let me walk through the parallels one at a time.

Parallel 1: Real Sequence Preserved

One of the first things our book has argued is that God is genuinely temporal — He experiences real sequence and succession, real before and after. This is not a metaphor. God's "before" is truly before, and His "after" is truly after. This is the position defended in depth in Chapter 7, building on the work of R. T. Mullins, Wolterstorff, DeWeese, and others.³³

The NDE parallel is straightforward: NDEers report genuine sequence. They do not report timelessness, strictly speaking. The tunnel precedes the light. The life review unfolds step by step. Encounters happen one after another. Even when simultaneity is reported, experiencers usually describe the experience as having had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The temporal structure is not erased; it is transformed.

This matters because a common objection to divine temporality is that any non-clock-time experience would collapse into timelessness. The thought is: if God is not bound by clock-time, then He must be timeless; there is no middle option. But NDEs quietly refute that objection. They show an experience that is neither ordinary clock-time nor strict timelessness. It is a third option: real sequence freed from the ticking clock. That is precisely the model for divine temporality we have been defending.

Parallel 2: Transcendence of the Present Moment

A second thing our book has argued is that God is not locked into the "present" the way we are. We, as creatures, experience only the current moment in full. The past is gone; the future has not yet happened. This is the creaturely condition of temporal experience, and it is set by the limitations of a biological brain processing sense input in real time. God, we have argued, is not set inside this constraint. He can access all moments — He can "see" the past without losing it, and He can "see" the future without causing it.³⁴

The NDE parallel is found most clearly in the life review. During a life review, the experiencer is not limited to the current moment. Events from decades past are re-present to them. They do not merely remember a childhood event; they re-experience it, sometimes from multiple points of view, in full detail. For that brief window, the normal present-only constraint of creaturely experience is suspended. Past is not gone; it is accessible.

Now here is a crucial caveat: the NDE is creaturely. The NDEer is not actually changing the past. They are re-accessing it, re-experiencing it, not re-writing it. This is exactly what we have claimed for God's access to created time: He can see and know the past perfectly, but He does not re-write it or alter it. The past, once it has happened, is fixed. What God has, and what NDEers apparently get a small taste of, is unrestricted access to what has already been — without the ability, or need, to alter it. This is an A-theory-compatible access, not a B-theory block universe.³⁵

Parallel 3: Sequence and Simultaneity Together

A third and perhaps the most striking parallel is the coexistence of sequence and simultaneity. Our author's position — "dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access" — says that God experiences both real sequence and simultaneous access to all of time. Critics have sometimes said this sounds incoherent. How can God experience Monday as after Sunday while also seeing both Monday and Sunday at once?³⁶

NDE reports provide an important answer: this is exactly what some NDEers describe. Their experience had an order — they can narrate it as a story — and yet they also had a sense of the whole being simultaneously present to them. It is not one or the other. It is both. And NDEers insist that the combination was not incoherent in the living of it. It is difficult to describe, yes, because our ordinary language assumes clock-time. But it is not impossible to live, because several thousand people now have given testimony that they did live it.³⁷

Consider a very imperfect but suggestive analogy. Imagine reading a novel. The story has real sequence: chapter 1 comes before chapter 2, and the events are in order. But at any point in reading, you have access to the whole book. You can flip back and re-read a scene. You can thumb forward and see what is coming. The book itself has a sequence, but your relation to the book is not purely sequential. You can hold the whole thing in your hands. God's relation to created time is something distantly like that — though richer, because He is not reading a novel but is living with His people in real relationship. The NDE is another imperfect picture: a creaturely consciousness that briefly gets a glimpse of relating to time in a richer way than the tick-tock of clock-time allows.

Parallel 4: Experience That Does Not Depend on a Brain

A fourth parallel is more subtle but important. Our book's doctrine of divine temporality requires that temporal experience is possible for a non-physical being. If only physical beings with brains can experience time, then an immaterial God cannot experience time. This is actually a standard argument against divine temporality: time requires change, change requires physical processes, God has no physical processes, therefore God cannot be temporal. We have addressed this argument in Chapter 7 and Chapter 28, but it is worth coming back to it here.³⁸

The NDE parallel is that the NDEer's mind, during clinical death, is having rich conscious experience — including temporal experience — during a period when the brain is not functioning normally. If the brain is not providing the temporal structure of the experience during cardiac arrest, then temporal experience must be possible for a consciousness that is not running on ordinary neural timekeeping. This is a huge blow to the argument that time requires a physical substrate. A non-physical, or at least brain-independent, consciousness can have temporal experience. And if that is true for a human soul briefly detached from the body, it is certainly true for God, who is never attached to a body to begin with.³⁹

Once again, the NDE does not prove that God is temporal. But it removes a major philosophical objection by showing, empirically, that temporal experience is not tied solely to physical brain activity.

Parallel 5: Compression and Expansion Are Both Live Options

Fifth, our model allows for God to experience time in modes that include compression and expansion. When Scripture says that "a day with the Lord is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day" (2 Peter 3:8) — a passage discussed in depth in Chapter 22 — it may be gesturing at exactly this. God's temporal experience is not tied to the ticking rhythms of our created clocks. He can experience things at different temporal densities. His engagement with eternity past is not an ordeal of boredom as He waits for creation. His engagement with the future is not a frustrated waiting as He stands at the present moment. The richness of His temporal life is not limited to our second-by-second pace.⁴⁰

NDEers describe both compression and expansion. An instant can feel like a year. A year can feel like an instant. Time can stretch or contract. Once again, the point is not that God experiences exactly what they experience. The point is that temporal experience comes in different densities and textures, and the assumption that clock-time is the only real kind is wrong.

Psalm 90:4 and the Biblical Parallel

I want to pause for a moment and notice something the Bible itself says — something that dovetails nicely with what NDEers report. Psalm 90 is a song of Moses that speaks about God's relation to time. And one verse in particular has long fascinated theologians who think about this topic. I discuss Psalm 90:4 in depth in Chapter 19 as part of the treatment of Psalms and wisdom literature, so I will not repeat that full exegesis here. But the connection to this chapter is too rich to skip entirely.⁴¹

The verse reads: "For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night" (Psalm 90:4 ESV). Let us hear it in Hebrew. The key phrase is ki eleph shanim b'eynekha k'yom ethmol ki ya'avor v'ashmurah balailah (כִּי אֶלֶף שָׁנִים בְּעֵינֶיךָ כְּיוֹם אֶתְמוֹל כִּי יַעֲבֹר וְאַשְׁמוּרָה בַלָּיְלָה). Literally: "For a thousand years in your eyes are like a day — yesterday, when it has passed — and like a watch of the night."

This is a wonderful image, and it is commonly misread. Some have taken it to mean that God is timeless — that a thousand years and a moment are "the same" to Him. But that is not what the Hebrew says. The verse is not saying that God experiences no duration. It is saying that a vast stretch of time feels brief from God's perspective. That is not timelessness; that is temporal experience at a different density. God does not experience time as we do. But He does experience time.⁴²

Now look at the parallel with NDE reports. What do NDEers say over and over again? A minute can feel like a year. A year can feel like a minute. Time has a different density. Psalm 90:4 says something very similar about God: a thousand years can feel like yesterday to Him. A vast stretch of clock-time, from His perspective, is a brief and compact experience. This is exactly the kind of temporal mode NDEers describe. It is also exactly the kind of temporal mode our dynamic divine temporality thesis expects.⁴³

I do not want to over-press this parallel. The psalmist is not describing an NDE and is not giving us a scientific theory. But the Bible, when it speaks of God and time, uses language that NDE research now helps us read with fresh eyes. God experiences real duration — "from everlasting to everlasting you are God" (Psalm 90:2) — but His experience of that duration is not identical to our clock-bound experience. A thousand years pass by, to Him, like yesterday. That is not the claim of a timeless deity. That is the claim of a deity whose temporal life is qualitatively different from ours — fuller, richer, more transcendent, but still genuinely temporal.

Fair Engagement with Skeptics

In keeping with the irenic and fair-minded style of this book, I want now to consider the strongest objections to taking NDE evidence seriously and how I would respond. It would be unfair and unscholarly to stack the deck; so let me steel-man the skeptic before giving my response.

Objection 1: NDEs Are Hallucinations of a Dying Brain

The most common skeptical explanation is that NDEs are hallucinations produced by the dying brain. As oxygen supply drops, the brain produces unusual experiences. Certain neurochemicals are released during trauma — some have argued endorphins, or perhaps DMT. Certain brain regions, like the temporal lobe, can produce out-of-body sensations when stimulated. On this view, NDEs are real experiences in one sense (the person is having the experience) but nothing more than brain events. No actual perception, no soul, no afterlife.⁴⁴

Now, this is a serious position held by serious researchers. We cannot just wave it away. But there are good reasons to doubt it is an adequate explanation. First, many NDEs occur during periods of no brain activity — flat EEG, no cortical function. The brain is not producing hallucinations because, by every measurable standard, it is not producing anything at all. Hallucinations require a working brain. A brain that has no electrical activity is not hallucinating; it is, for the moment, off.⁴⁵

Second, veridical perception is hard to explain on a hallucination hypothesis. If NDEs are hallucinations, why do NDEers accurately describe medical procedures they never saw, conversations they never heard, and details of rooms they were never in? Hallucinations are generated from within the brain. They do not normally contain accurate information about the outside world that the person had no prior access to.⁴⁶

Third, NDE experiences are remarkably structured and consistent. Hallucinations and drug experiences are typically disordered, strange in irrational ways, and unique to each individual. NDEs, by contrast, are clear, ordered, coherent, and report very similar features across thousands of unrelated accounts from very different people. The consistency is striking.⁴⁷

Fourth, NDE memories are qualitatively different from normal memories and from hallucinatory memories. Studies comparing NDE memories with memories of real events and memories of imagined events have found that NDE memories pattern-match with real-event memories, not imagined-event memories. They have more detail, more emotion, and more coherence than hallucinations or fantasies usually produce.⁴⁸

I do not say that any one of these points is decisive on its own. Taken together, however, they form a cumulative case that something more than a simple hallucination is going on in NDEs. The brain's dying activity cannot explain the full set of features. And that means NDE testimony deserves a serious hearing, especially on matters like temporal experience that are hard to fake and hard to generate by misfiring neurons.

Objection 2: NDE Time Distortion Is Just Normal Memory Distortion

A subtler objection grants that NDEs are interesting experiences but argues that the reports of time being "different" are just the kind of memory distortion that happens under stress. Everyone knows a car accident can feel like it is happening in slow motion. That is a well-documented stress response. So reports of stretched or compressed time in NDEs may just be the same phenomenon — a brain trick, nothing deeper.

This is a fair objection, and there is a real phenomenon of subjective time distortion under stress. But several things make the NDE case different. First, NDE time distortion is far more extreme and far more structured than ordinary stress distortion. A car accident feels slow for seconds. A full life review covers decades of material with sensory and emotional detail, sometimes from multiple perspectives. Second, NDE reports of simultaneity — not merely slowness — are not typical of stress distortion. Third, time reports correlate with other NDE features that themselves resist neural explanation (veridical perception, encounters with deceased loved ones the experiencer did not know had died). The whole package is more than stress time-slip.⁴⁹

Objection 3: NDEs Are Culturally Conditioned

Another objection is that NDEs simply reflect what a given culture expects the afterlife to look like. Christians see Jesus; Hindus see Yama; non-religious people see generic "beings of light." So the objection runs: NDEs tell us nothing about any deep truth — only about the cultural expectations of the experiencer.

There is partial truth here. Religious and cultural background does shape how experiencers interpret what they saw. A Christian might identify the being of light as Jesus; a Hindu might identify him as a divine messenger; a secular person might just say "a being of light." But the core features of NDEs are remarkably consistent across cultures. The tunnel, the light, the sense of peace, the out-of-body experience, the life review, the encounter with deceased loved ones, the sense of returning to the body — these show up across cultures that have had no contact with each other. Even in cultures with no prior tradition of NDE narratives, when people have them, they report them with the same basic features.⁵⁰

And here is the important point for this chapter: reports of temporal anomalies — time slowing, stopping, compressing, feeling different — are not culturally specific. They show up in every cultural context where NDEs have been studied. Someone with no religious framework at all, no vocabulary for "eternity," no prior interest in theology, will still report that time was "different" during the experience. This is a cross-cultural, cross-religious, cross-age-group finding. That strongly suggests the temporal anomaly is a feature of the experience itself, not an artifact of expectation.⁵¹

Objection 4: NDEs Should Not Form Any Basis for Doctrine

A final objection comes from careful Christian theologians who are rightly worried about building doctrine on personal experience. Scripture is our norm, not the testimony of cardiac arrest survivors. If this chapter is building its theology on Raymond Moody, something has gone badly wrong.

I take this objection very seriously. And let me be clear: I am not building doctrine on NDEs. The doctrine of dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access has been defended in this book from Scripture (Chapters 16–23), from philosophy (Chapters 24–32), from history (Chapters 11–15), and from the great debates among theologians. The doctrine stands or falls on those grounds. What NDEs do is illustrate. They give us a picture. They help our imaginations understand what Scripture already teaches. They provide an analogical confirmation that what the Bible says about God's temporal experience — that a thousand years are like a day, that God declares the end from the beginning, that He comes in real engagement with His people in real time — is conceivable and not incoherent.⁵²

NDE testimony is like a picture in a biology textbook. The doctrine of cells rests on the science, not the illustration. But the illustration helps us picture what the text teaches. That is all I am asking NDEs to do for our doctrine of divine temporality. They illustrate. They suggest. They confirm by analogy. They do not dictate. And they certainly do not replace the authority of God's Word.

NDEs and the Intermediate State: A Brief Preview

I need to say a word here about the relationship of this chapter to the next one. Chapter 34 is devoted to the intermediate state, substance dualism, and time after death. That chapter is the home for the extended argument that souls continue in a conscious, temporal mode of existence between bodily death and bodily resurrection. I will not repeat that argument here in any depth. What I want to do in this closing section is show the clean link between this chapter's analogical point and the doctrine of the intermediate state.⁵³

The link is this. NDEs involve the soul's brief, partial, temporary detachment from the body at a moment when the body is clinically failing. The soul, during this window, continues to experience time — but in a mode that is not clock-time. If this is what happens for a few minutes near the boundary of death, it is reasonable to extend the same picture (with proper caveats) to the intermediate state more broadly. That is, the souls of believers with Christ between death and resurrection are experiencing time in a mode that is not our ordinary physical clock-time. They have not entered timelessness. They are not frozen. They are awake, aware, and in relationship with God. But their mode of temporal experience is qualitatively different from embodied earthly time, just as NDEers briefly glimpse.⁵⁴

And this means, in turn, that God's interactions with souls in the intermediate state are themselves temporal. They involve a God who is temporal and can engage with souls in real, living, give-and-take relationship. That is one more reason why a timeless deity cannot make sense of Christian eschatology. A timeless God could not interact with Paul in paradise. He could not hear the souls under the altar crying "How long?" (Revelation 6:10, treated in Chapter 34). He could not continue to pursue any lost souls in the intermediate state. He could not do anything at all. Only a temporal God can.⁵⁵

A Deeper Look at Three Representative Cases

Because the analogical argument of this chapter rests on the assumption that NDE reports are credible accounts of real experience, I want to pause and work through three representative cases in more detail. These are not the most dramatic cases in the literature, but they are well-documented, and each illustrates one of the temporal features I have outlined above. Reading them helps us move beyond abstract discussion and actually see what this research looks like on the ground.⁶³

The Case of Al Sullivan

Al Sullivan was a 55-year-old truck driver who underwent triple bypass surgery in 1988. During the operation his cardiac surgeon noticed something he described later as "peculiar" — the patient, under full anesthesia, made a comment about what the surgeon had been doing with his elbows. Sullivan later reported that during the surgery he had floated out of his body, viewed the operation from above, and seen his surgeon "flapping his arms as if trying to fly." What he had actually seen was the surgeon's habit of resting his hands on his chest with his elbows up so as to keep his gloves sterile before the incision. Sullivan had no prior knowledge of this habit, had never been in an operating room before, and had been under general anesthesia with his eyes taped shut.⁶⁴

What makes this case interesting for our chapter is not only the veridical detail but also Sullivan's description of time. He said the experience did not feel rushed. What felt like a long span of observation happened during a much shorter window of actual surgery. Time was, as he put it, "not the same kind of thing" in that state. He observed, he traveled, he met a being of light, and then he returned — and all of it had happened during a period of a few minutes of operative time. Sullivan's report matches the general pattern: time is compressed in clock terms, expanded in experiential terms, and the subjective texture of time is "not the same kind of thing" as earthly time.

The Case of Maria's Tennis Shoe

Another well-documented case involves a migrant worker named Maria who was brought to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle in 1977 after a severe heart attack. During resuscitation she had an out-of-body experience, floated above the building, and — so the story goes — drifted to a third-floor window ledge on the far side of the hospital where she saw a single tennis shoe. She described the shoe carefully: the type of shoe, the condition of the laces, the scuff marks, the position on the ledge. Maria's social worker, skeptical of the report, went to check. The shoe was there, exactly as described. The position on a far-side ledge meant it could not have been seen from any window Maria had access to from her bed.⁶⁵

The Maria case has been debated in the literature. Some skeptics have argued that details might have been filled in after the fact by the social worker. Defenders have noted the timing of the report (before the shoe was found) and the care the social worker took in recording it. Whatever one concludes about the details of this particular case, it is one of many similar cases that, taken together, create a cumulative body of evidence pointing toward real perception during clinical death.

For our purposes, Maria's case matters because she also described the event as taking place in a kind of time that was not clock-time. She could see, she could move (or at least her vantage point could move), and the whole event felt like a longer, richer experience than the clinical window allowed. Once again: time in the experience was not ordinary clock-time, but it was not simply the absence of time either.

The Case of the Life Review

For a final case, consider not a single named person but the composite picture of hundreds of life review reports. Among them is the oft-quoted testimony of Howard Storm, a college art professor who had an NDE during a stomach ulcer perforation in Paris in 1985. Storm described a life review in which he was shown each moment of his life from multiple perspectives. He saw his own words and actions, but he also saw how each one had affected others — experiencing what it felt like to be the recipient of his kindness or cruelty.⁶⁶

Storm described the review as taking place in something like a moment, but containing decades. What struck him most was that his whole life seemed to be present and accessible at once — not as a blur or a summary, but in full detail. He could linger on particular moments. He could see a conversation from the other side. He could feel the weight of a single cruel remark not just as he had intended it but as it had landed. And yet the whole thing was happening in what he described as a timeless-feeling window.

Storm's case is a vivid example of the combination of sequence and simultaneity we have been describing. He could narrate the review as a story. But he also said the whole review was simultaneously present to him. And when he tried to explain this combination, he said something I find striking: "Earth time doesn't fit." Clock-time did not apply, but time itself was not erased. It was a different kind of time.

I share these three cases not to sensationalize. I share them because abstract summaries miss what repeatedly strikes careful readers of the NDE literature: real human beings, in concrete medical situations, describing a coherent set of experiences that do not fit the ordinary categories of waking life. Their reports of temporal experience are not outliers or tricks of memory. They are one of the most consistent features of the entire phenomenon — and they are what makes these experiences so useful as an analogy for the kind of divine temporal life we have been defending in this book.

Addressing One More Objection: Could the Time Reports Be Artifacts of Reconstruction?

Before closing, I want to address one more objection that I find especially pressing because it is more subtle than the outright dismissals. Here is the objection: perhaps the NDE happens during a brief moment of returning brain activity, and the experiencer then reconstructs the content into a longer-feeling narrative after the fact. On this view, the temporal anomalies are not real features of the experience but are features of the memory of the experience. The real event was brief; the remembered event was long; the apparent stretching of time is an artifact of memory consolidation.⁶⁷

This is a serious proposal. It has the virtue of not requiring that consciousness function without a brain. It suggests that everything happens in the normal cognitive way, just compressed and then re-expanded during recall. How should we respond?

First, there is the problem of the veridical content. If NDEs are post-hoc reconstructions from a brief moment of returning brain activity, how do experiencers accurately describe events that happened during the period of no brain activity? The reconstruction hypothesis cannot easily explain the accuracy of specific details — positions of objects, contents of conversations, actions of medical staff — that the patient had no access to from within her body during resuscitation. Memory reconstruction might explain the feeling of a longer narrative, but it cannot explain the veridical details.⁶⁸

Second, there is the problem of the structure of the NDE narrative. Memory reconstruction produces content that is coherent with the patient's prior expectations and background. But NDEs often include content that the patient had no reason to expect — encounters with specific deceased relatives the patient did not know were dead, theological content inconsistent with the patient's prior beliefs, and so on. These cannot be explained by the patient drawing on existing cognitive resources to fill in a narrative.⁶⁹

Third, the temporal reports in NDEs have a distinctive quality that ordinary memory reconstruction does not produce. People who fill in a gappy memory do not typically report having had clear simultaneous access to decades of material. They typically report a feeling of "knowing" what happened without having experienced it in rich detail. NDEers consistently report the opposite: they had full, rich, simultaneous detail of a lifetime. This is not typical memory behavior. It is something else.

Fourth, and perhaps most tellingly, the reconstruction hypothesis has trouble with the sheer cross-cultural consistency of these reports. If the temporal anomalies were artifacts of memory consolidation in a particular cultural context, they should vary with the cultural expectations of the experiencer. But they do not. Across religious traditions, across languages, across ages and education levels, the same basic temporal structure appears. This cross-cultural uniformity is much better explained by a real feature of the experience than by culturally-variable reconstructive memory.⁷⁰

I do not say the reconstruction hypothesis is unworthy of consideration. It is a serious proposal. I say only that the full body of evidence — cross-cultural consistency, veridical content, structural features, memory-quality studies — points toward the conclusion that NDEs are real experiences that really have the temporal features reported, not mere artifacts of reconstruction. And if that is right, then the analogical argument of this chapter stands.

Time, Judgment, and the Life Review

Before closing, I want to offer one more reflection — a theological one. The life review is not just a philosophical oddity that happens to line up nicely with our doctrine of divine temporality. It is also a deeply moral event, and it has a notable resonance with biblical teaching about judgment.

Many NDEers describe the life review as a moment of profound moral reckoning. They do not merely remember their lives; they feel the weight of what they did and what they failed to do. Some describe feeling the effect of their actions from the other side — experiencing kindness they showed as the recipient did, feeling cruelty they dealt as the victim did. Some describe the review as being present with a compassionate but searching being who helps them see clearly. None of this is described as condemnation or cruel punishment. It is described as truth — the truth about a life, shown with love but shown in full.⁵⁶

Scripture teaches that "we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil" (2 Corinthians 5:10). It teaches that God will "bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart" (1 Corinthians 4:5). It teaches that every idle word will be accounted for (Matthew 12:36). The biblical picture of judgment is not a rushed trial with a wrathful judge. It is the full disclosure of a life, in the presence of the Lord who knows it perfectly and loves truly.

I am not arguing that the NDE life review is the final judgment. It is not. NDEers return to embodied life with more to live. The final judgment is a future event tied to the resurrection. But the life review shows us something important: the full accessibility of a lifetime in a single moment is, apparently, not foreign to creaturely consciousness at the boundary of death. And this supports a biblical picture of final judgment as something not in conflict with dynamic divine temporality — not a mystical "timeless simultaneity" that a timeless God stares at, but a real temporal event in which God opens up the truth of every life with full and loving accuracy.⁵⁷

This, for me, is actually pastorally warming. I do not dread the life review. I dread the thought of standing before God without Christ, yes. But the life review itself — an honest, loving, searching presentation of a lifetime — is the kind of encounter only a God who knows us intimately can give. A timeless God, removed from my daily life, cannot look at me with the tender attentiveness of one who has walked with me through every moment. Only a God who has genuinely been present in my life, moment by moment, can hold that life up before me in love and truth. The doctrine of divine temporality is not a cold philosophical claim. It is pastoral news. And NDE reports of the life review are a small, early, suggestive hint of what it will mean to stand before such a God.

Limits of the Argument

We are near the end of the chapter, and I want to be very clear about the limits of what NDEs can do for theology. This is important because it is easy to overstate. I have seen popular books and sermons that treat NDEs as if they are a fifth Gospel, and I want to distance this chapter firmly from that kind of use.⁵⁸

First, NDEs are not inspired. They are not Scripture. They do not have canonical authority. A given NDEer's report of what he or she saw is not a message from God that we must accept as doctrine. Scripture is the final norm. If any NDE report contradicts Scripture, we follow Scripture, not the NDE.

Second, NDE reports are filtered through the experiencer's own perceptions, vocabulary, and interpretive framework. We should expect some cultural coloring, some memory revision, some emphasis on certain features over others. This does not mean the reports are worthless. It means we treat them with the same care we would give any human testimony — listen, weigh, consider, but do not treat as infallible.

Third, NDEs do not prove any particular philosophical theory of time. They are compatible with the A-theory (which I favor and Chapter 24 defends) and, in some versions, with the B-theory. They do not settle the A-theory/B-theory debate. They do tell us that temporal experience is richer than clock-time. But the exact metaphysical theory of how this works is not determined by the NDE data alone.⁵⁹

Fourth, NDEs do not prove the author's specific model of dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access over other forms of divine temporality. A Wolterstorff-style unqualified temporalist, a Padgett-style relative atemporalist, a Swinburnian temporalist — all of them can accommodate NDE data in roughly the same way. My claim is only that NDEs illustrate, suggestively, that a view of God like mine — real sequence plus transcendent access — is conceivable and compatible with creaturely experience at the edges of life. This is modest, and it is intended to be.⁶⁰

Fifth, NDEs should never be used to undermine any Christian doctrine. They should never be invoked to teach universalism as a settled fact, or to teach a specific structure of the afterlife, or to contradict the plain teaching of Scripture on sin, salvation, judgment, or Christ. Where NDE reports speak consistently with Scripture — the soul surviving the body, God's loving and searching presence, a moral reckoning with one's life — we can receive them as suggestive confirmation. Where any individual NDE report goes beyond or against Scripture, we set it aside.

Conclusion: A Window, Not a Foundation

We come now to the close of this chapter. What have we seen? We have seen that for over fifty years, careful researchers have documented a phenomenon called the near-death experience. We have seen that a remarkable and consistent feature of these experiences is that they report time behaving in strange ways — slowing, stopping, compressing, becoming simultaneous, transforming into something qualitatively different from clock-time. We have seen that the best evidence — veridical perception, patterns of memory, cross-cultural consistency — supports taking these reports as genuine experiences of consciousness near the boundary of death. We have seen that these reports, while not authoritative in any doctrinal sense, provide a powerful analogical resource for our doctrine of God and time.

Dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access says that God experiences real sequence and succession but is not bound by our clock-time; He can access all of creation's history from His unique divine vantage point; He is not frozen in a timeless eternal now, but He is also not locked into the present moment the way we are. That is a bold claim. It is easy to call such a claim incoherent or science-fictional. NDEs help us answer the charge of incoherence. Here, in verified human reports, is something like it in small. A consciousness briefly detached from the body can experience real sequence and also transcend clock-time. That is exactly what we say God does, only fully and without limit.

Let me end with a pastoral note. If you have ever worried that God might be a distant, cold, timeless observer who does not really enter your life, let this chapter reassure you. The Bible teaches — and the odd testimony of cardiac arrest survivors faintly confirms — that the kind of life that transcends clock-time is not the life of a frozen statue. It is the life of a Mind that is more alive, more present, more engaged, more responsive, not less. God's transcendence of clock-time does not make Him more removed from you. It makes Him more available. He is not trapped in the tick-tock of the moment. He is with you in this moment, and in every moment of your life — past, present, and future — with a fullness and attentiveness that a merely time-bound companion could never match.⁶¹

When you pray, He is there. When you suffer, He is there. When you rejoice, He is there. And when the day comes for you — as it came for Pam Reynolds, and as it has come for so many whose testimonies fill the NDE research literature — when you finally step across the boundary of this life into what comes next, you will not find yourself alone. You will find yourself in the presence of the One whose relationship to time has always been greater than the ticking clocks could tell. And you will understand, perhaps for the first time, that every prayer, every tear, every laugh, every word, every thought of your life was always held in the living attention of a God who never misses a single moment.

That is the God beyond the clock. That is the God whose temporality is real but not tiny. That is the God I want you to know. And that is the God I believe the Bible has been telling us about all along — the God whose eyes see a thousand years as yesterday, whose love is from everlasting to everlasting, whose breath is in every moment of your life, and who is with us in time precisely so that He can bring us at last into the fullness of His own rich eternal life.

NDEs, in the end, are not the argument. They are a window. Through the window we glimpse, faintly and imperfectly, something of what it means to say that time works differently for those who stand at the edge of our small clock-time world. And through this small window we are encouraged to look beyond to the One who stands above it all, whose temporality is real and whose access is unlimited, who has been walking with you all along, and whose name is the Lord.⁶²