Dr Paul Allen

Author: Cripplegate This annoying little book is not going away. Upon hearing his 4-year-old claim that he had visited heaven and met Samson and a blue-eyed Jesus, Pastor Todd Burpo encountered the same challenge all parents of toddlers frequently face. When my boy claims that he is actually Superman I wrestle with an identical dilemma: Do I just smile and play along til he grows out of it, or do I write a book sharing the claim with the world? What to do, what to do? Pastor Burpo didn’t chicken out and opt for the condescending smile-and-nod approach most of us lazy dads do. No, he employed a literary agent who successfully lured Thomas Nelson Publishers into eventually putting 1.5 million copies into print. (If anyone can get me that agent’s number, I’m very interested!) Dad exploited assisted his boy to polish his story, and Nelson presented their newest father-and-son trophy as the very yellow “Heaven is For Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back.”

Visions from the Hereafter: Ascent of the Blessed (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In recent years, Christian booksellers have inundated the evangelical world with testimonies from people who say they visited heaven in near-death experiences. Their stories are full of specific details about what heaven is like, who is there, and what is happening in the celestial realm. But when we compare their claims with Scripture, it becomes clear that they are merely figments of the human imagination, not true visions of heaven as it is described in God ’s Word. The best known of all these tales, Heaven Is for Real, 1 is to be a major motion picture, released in April 2014. It is the story of Colton Burpo , whose parents believe he visited heaven when he was just four—during surgery after a burst appendix nearly took his life. Colton’s descriptions of heaven are full of fanciful features and peculiar details that bear all the earmarks of a child’s vivid imagination. There’s nothing transcendent or

Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglican Church  (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Tim Challies writes: There are several themes in today’s “I went to heaven” books: Each of the people experienced heaven after dying a natural death. In every case, the soul had left the body so the person was clinically and spiritually dead. After the experience of heaven, each of the people was restored to life so that the soul returned to the body and the body was no longer clinically or spiritually dead. Each of the people describes as much as they can remember and does so in order to offer encouragement and in order to validate what the Bible says. There is no biblical precedent for experiences of this kind. Let me look to each of the biblical passages. Revelation The Revelation is unique in being New Testament apocalyptic literature. This genre is prophetic, meaning that it is inspired by God in order to show what will take place in the end times, tying together past, pres