The Afterlife: Fact or Fiction?
by on October 04, 2009
This week I interviewed Don Piper, author of New York Times Bestseller, 90 Minutes in Heaven.
Don told me how he was traveling to Trinity, Texas, and an eighteen-wheeler crossed the centerline and slammed into his Red Ford Escort. By the time the EMTs arrived on the scene, he was dead. They covered his body with a tarp and left him for 90 minutes.
That’s when his journey began. Don said that the last thing he remembered was driving across the narrow bridge and then he was immediately standing at the gates of heaven. In the upcoming podcast, you’ll hear about his experiences. “It was the most real thing that’s ever happened to me,” Piper reflected.
The afterlife has intrigued some of the greatest minds in history. Where do we go when we die? Is there a heaven? What about hell? A Barna survey shows that eight out of every ten Americans believe in some form of afterlife, and 71% believe in a traditional view of hell.
In his book, 23 Minutes in Hell, Bill Weise recounts his experiences falling into a stony cell with two reptilian-like creatures. “The strength of the beast was amazing,” he noted (pg 5). In his sequel, Hell, Weise described hell as a place of unending trauma, fire, and thirst, not entirely dissimilar to Jesus’ description of hell as a fiery furnace where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Why do so many people believe in heaven and hell? Perhaps because there’s something exciting about trusting in what we can’t see — believing in someone we can’t touch. Jesus once told a disciple, “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).
As I travel on my own pilgrimage, I confess that I’ve never been to heaven, or to hell for that matter (knock on wood). But I do believe that they are more than mere allegories. While Dante’s Inferno and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress incarnated life’s journey in words that can be easily digested and understood, I believe Jesus communicated to his disciples that there really was a place that he was going in the future, and he would “prepare a place for them.” Jesus really believed in paradise, and told the thief on the cross that he would join him there.
Now it has to be said that while there are some Christians that emphasize the afterlife in exclusion to the present life, I believe we can hold these two things in tension. We can believe in the “not yet” and also the “right now.” They influence each other. Living with Christ is an adventure in suspended tension. We are suspended between birth and rebirth. Restlessly torn between present and future, sin and grace, healing and brokenness, we travel on pilgrimage through a world that’s not our final home.
This summer has been a summer of airports for me. Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Orlando, etc. And as I fly to Edinburgh on Monday, and eventually on to St. Andrews, Scotland to continue my Ph.D, I just can’t help but think about pilgrimage. I suppose you could say it’s a theme that I just can’t untether myself from.