“Deciding to accept Christ meant Don had an eternal home in Heaven no matter when he died. Acknowledging Christ as Savior guarantees that you will spend eternity with Him…And those who die without Christ will sadly go to Hell.”

   This quote from Don Piper Ministries website on “How to go to Heaven” again shows us his false conclusion about Jesus being the only path to heaven. Don Piper also tells us that his Christian ministry believes that, “Even though many great religions profess an after-life, that there is a place called ‘paradise’ or ‘heaven,’ Christ alone represents the one who conquered death to go to heaven.”

   This means that all other religions, even good people of other faiths, will all go to hell because they have not accepted Christ. And Piper tells us that this also includes the Jewish people, since even though they are the “chosen people of God,” Piper still believes that they “must profess Christ” as their Lord and Savior in order to go to heaven.

   However, in chapter three of his book 90 Minutes in Heaven, Piper admits that: “I did not see God…I only saw a bright iridescence.” If Piper did not see God then how can he be sure that the God he “did not see” is the actual God of the Bible?

   Obviously, he cannot, and this is the fault in his logic. Yes, he experienced heaven and the Bible talks about heaven. But this does not automatically follow that the heaven he experienced is the heaven of the Bible. Nor does it follow that the heaven he experienced is limited to the heaven of the Bible or any narrow interpretation thereof.

   In fact, Piper’s conclusion that his experience of heaven confirms a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible is uncommon among people who have NDEs. Much more common is it that people conclude that God is inclusive, as researcher Kenneth Ring here points out in his book Heading Towards Omega:

The strongest evidence of NDEr’s [people who have NDEs] universalistically spiritual orientation…is their belief in the underlying unity of all religions and their desire for a universal religious faith that will transcend the historical divisiveness of the world’s great religions.

   I confirmed this conclusion in my own study, where I found that 87 percent said that what they had experienced is “the core or essence of all religions.” I also found that 85 percent said: “God is inclusive,” with 64 percent saying that they strongly agreed with this statement.

   The reason that people who have NDEs arrive at this conclusion is, as we saw in chapter two, that they experience God in a very broad sense which is spiritually neutral. A book or one line in a book is very limited compared to an overwhelming experience of God as an indescribable profound love that is as infinite as the universe.      

   In his book The Truth in the Light, Dr. Peter Fenwick explains that,

            Although the ‘being of light’ always has a spiritual significance, it is only seldom that people describe seeing a particular religious figure such as Christ. Even those people whose Christian faith is strong don’t always see Christ. Much more often there is a feeling of ‘coming before one’s maker’: the being is felt as ‘God’ in a very broad sense.

   To understand what “God in a very broad sense” means Fenwick explains that the most common experience of the “being of light” is to be understood in a manner that is spiritually neutral. He says: “Perhaps ‘neutrally spiritual’ is the nearest one can get to the feeling the being evokes.”

   In my own study, I found that this spiritually neutral experience of coming before one’s maker was indeed experienced in a very broad sense and much broader than a conventional understanding of God. I found that 93 percent would say that God is “non-physical” and experienced as a “form of energy.”

   I also tried to put a name on this form of energy by providing alternative answers to what God is and found that 73 percent would say “the Light,” 66 percent “the Light of God,” 60 percent “the essence of existence,” and 53 percent said: “pure being.”

   Not only is the experience of God in the NDE to be understood in a broader sense, but also heaven is to be understood in a very broad sense as a non-physical place. To the statement: “Heaven is a physical place,” I found that 69 percent said that they disagreed and instead 79 percent said that, “Heaven is an unearthly dimension of energy.”

   Fenwick tells us about the core of heaven that,

            Although many of these visions of Paradise include strong well-formed, visual images, sometimes the imagery is much less pictorial, at times almost losing its form completely. And yet it still remains intensely emotional, and still gives this very strong impression of heightened awareness.  

   Piper describes in the second chapter of his book that this intensely emotional state is experienced as perfect love and that “human words can’t express the feelings of awe.” Identical to this experience of Piper most people who have NDEs experience an intensely emotional state of love, peace and joy.

   While this feeling state together with a strong sense of heightened awareness is regarded as the core, or heart, of heaven, Fenwick makes an important point about NDE research. Visions of paradise are not considered the core of heaven. In fact, while the emotional state is universal, experienced by 88 percent of people in his study, the music heard or the visual images seen in heaven are not.

   NDE research concludes that each individual will try to make sense of the experience by integrating their pre-existing belief system into their experience. Because the NDE is a very powerful experience that takes the understanding of most people far beyond their comprehension, many people will use their pre-existing belief system to try to make sense of it.