I started reading Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences by Jeffrey Long, M.D. and Paul Perry the other day. This is in addition to another book I've read on the subject, Proof of Heaven written by a neuroscientist named Eben Alexander, M.D. about his own near death experience while he was brain dead for a week. What strikes me most about all of these accounts that I have read, and watched on YouTube, is the remarkable consistency between them, and the sheer number of them which are consistent. But the thing which makes me sit up and pay attention to them is that they are eyewitness accounts of what awaits after death, something which Christian theologians, let's face it, really can only speculate and theorize on based on what previous theologians have theorized and speculated on for the last 2000 years. It's like the paleontologist trying to piece together what an ancient animal looked and acted like as compared to actually being able to observe living animals in their own natural habitat like in the Jurassic World movies. You can theorize all you want and come up with dogmatic beliefs about something, but once you have eyewitness observations of that subject of study all of those theories and dogmas about it become pretty worthless.
The same is true of the accounts of children reporting memories of previous lives as documented by the University of Virginia, and recounted in the book Before: Children's Memories of Previous Lives by Jim B. Tucker, M.D. His department at the university has been recording, documenting, and investigating these accounts since the 1960s or so, and come up with documented cases that genuinely throw any theological arguments against reincarnation or past lives into the trash heap. They have 2500 such documented cases on record. Again, you can cite creeds, councils, and theologians until you are blue in the face, but once you have documented, verifiable eyewitnesses and evidence, all such doctrines and dogmas against it are pretty worthless.
And these things are threatening to those established theological and religious structures. I know they were certainly threatening to my own worldview when I first heard of them and started taking an honest look at the evidence. I used to think they were just scattered delusionals seeking attention. But the truth is far, far different from what I was led to believe. If I was going to be an honest theologian, and an honest "Christian," I couldn't just ignore it or dismiss it any more regardless of how much it would require a complete overhaul of my "religious worldview." If I accept the testimony of twelve eyewitnesses from two thousand years ago that a Man rose from the dead, I can't ignore the testimony from hundreds of eyewitnesses on these subjects without being a hypocrite.
As an honest theologian, I don't think the testimony from NDEs and very young children reporting memories from past lives can be ignored or just dismissed. There's just too much consistency with the NDEs and too many reports, 1300 on the NDERF website alone, to ignore. The same is true with the very young children reporting memories from past lives, 2500 documented cases. There are too many verified cases where the past life has been genuinely identified to ignore.
I accept Prima Scriptura, where the Scriptures are the first authority, but not the only authority. As a theologian who considers all the data and information available, ignoring, dismissing, or outright attacking these documented cases of eyewitnesses to things that fall squarely within a theologian's field of study strikes me a lot like the Catholic Church ignoring and even excommunicating Galileo's observations and calculations when, of course, he was proven right.
Can they be threatening to one's belief structure or worldview? Of course they can be. But any new information which touches on the afterlife is going to be threatening to one's belief system whether it's genuine or not. It's our job to do the hard work of learning the new evidence, vetting it, and if necessary, change our worldview to bring it into line with the new information. It's our job to also do the hard work of changing our interpretation of the Scriptures in the light of the new information, and between the two try to understand what the authors were actually talking about. Theology used to be considered the "Queen of Sciences." It's time we started treating it as a science again with observation of a phenomenon, hypothesis, experimentation or vetting of the evidence, and checking the results against our observations of reality.
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