It was a simple question, but it landed with the force of grief.
A coworker told me that both his parents had recently died. His family is Christian. They believe in Jesus, in resurrection, in eternal life.
And yet, in a hushed voice, he asked what many brokenhearted believers quietly wonder: Do you think they’ll know each other in heaven?
This is a dormant uncertainty within our convictions. We affirm life after death. We say our loved ones are with the Lord. When grief gets close, though, so does ambiguity: Will we see our loved ones again? Will heaven reunite us? Or does death somehow sweep all of that away?
The questions are pastoral, but they are also theological and evidential: What happens to personal identity, memory, and relational continuity if death is not the end? Here Scripture must lead, but near-death research may also have a reinforcing role.
The good news is that Christians have real reason for hope.
A Hope Implied in Scripture
The Bible may not give us an explicit promise here, but it does offer powerful clues and a consistent picture. Those who belong to God do not dissolve into anonymity. They remain themselves.
Several times, the Old Testament says that when a person died, he was “gathered to his people” (e.g., Gen. 25:8; Num. 20:24; Deut. 32:50). Because the idiom is often distinguished from burial, commentators from the Reformation to the modern day have interpreted this to mean more than interment. It gestures toward continued existence among one’s people.[1]
The New Testament takes us further. Jesus speaks of drinking again with his disciples in his Father’s kingdom (Matt. 26:29), and of many reclining at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Matt. 8:11)—images that at least assume personal identity and recognizable fellowship, not anonymous survival. Paul likewise describes resurrection not as the loss of the self, but as its transformation (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:42-49; Phil. 3:20-21). And when comforting grieving believers, he does not offer the hope of solitary existence, but of shared reunion: “together with them” we will be “with the Lord forever” (1 Thess. 4:13-18).
In other words, these passages present the redeemed as still identifiable as themselves. That may help explain why Dallas Willard could write in The Divine Conspiracy: “we do not lose our personal sense of who we are, and all our knowledge of and relationships to other persons will remain intact.”[2]
For Christian scholars, this is more than a consoling sentiment; it is an implication of Christian anthropology. If God raises us as ourselves, then we have good reason to believe that we will still remember and recognize those we love.
And there is more to strengthen our hope: abundant testimony from the brink of death.
A Hope Reinforced by Research
For decades, researchers have studied near-death experiences, or NDEs. These are the gripping reports of another world from people who came close to dying—some with no detectable heartbeat or breathing—and then recovered.[3]
Not every story is equally persuasive. Not every case has corroboration. But the sheer scale of the testimony gives us cause to take the phenomenon seriously.
Surveys suggest that somewhere between 4 and 9 percent of people say they have had an NDE.[4] If those figures are even close to accurate, that translates to millions in the United States alone, and hundreds of millions worldwide.
Most relevant here is a theme that appears repeatedly in NDEs: encounters with the deceased. Parents. Grandparents. Siblings. Friends. Sometimes even beloved pets from long ago.
Is this just wishful thinking, seeing what we would expect to see? In some cases, perhaps. However, that explanation does not fit every report.
In one account described by Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia School of Medicine in his book After, a man hospitalized with severe pneumonia in South Africa later said that during his coma he met a young nurse named Anita. She told him to go back and to tell her parents she was sorry for wrecking the red MGB (a sports car), and that she loved them.[5]
When he woke and relayed the details, one of the staff burst into tears. Nurse Anita had indeed just died in her red MGB.
Then there are the cases involving young children, which can be even harder to dismiss. This one is from Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel in Consciousness Beyond Life. After a brush with death from meningitis, a five-year-old girl described meeting an older sister her parents had never told her about. The patient gave specifics, including the sister’s name, Rietje. Her shaken parents left the hospital room to compose themselves. They had lost a daughter named Rietje to poisoning a year before their younger daughter was born.[6]
That story might sound familiar since it resembles others, among them the well-known American case of four-year-old Colton Burpo, who said after an NDE that he met a sister in heaven—a child lost to miscarriage, though his family had never shared that with Colton.[7]
No, these accounts do not offer airtight proof, but they do carry evidential weight. Taken together with similar reports, they caution us against assuming that reductive materialism has already explained the full range of human experience.
Will We Reunite with Our Loved Ones in the Life to Come?
As for reunion, then, the NDE evidence echoes what Scripture already leads Christians to hope: that death is not the end of identity or community.
This is theology with tears on it. When we stand at a graveside, we are not simply asking whether life continues. We are asking whether love continues.
We want to know whether the mother we buried is still herself. Whether the husband we miss still knows our name. Whether the child we lost is gone forever, or waiting for us in the very presence of God.
The Bible does not answer every mystery. It does, however, answer this kind of despair. It tells us that those who die in Christ are alive to God. It gives us hope that death does not erase the bonds God has made. And the growing body of near-death testimony may further strengthen that hope.
So, returning to my colleague’s lament: Will we reunite with our loved ones in the life to come?
Christians have every reason to believe this. Scripture gives us confidence; the research reinforces it. For followers of Jesus, separation is painful, but it need not feel permanent.
[1] See Gen. 25:8-10; 25:17; 35:29; 49:29, 33; Num. 20:24, 26; 27:13; 31:2; Deut. 32:50. On Gen. 25:8, John Calvin argues that “gathered to his people” points to “the state of our future life,” noting that Abraham’s burial is narrated only afterward. John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, vol. 2, trans. John King (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 32. See similarly Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton, 2008), 133.
[2] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (HarperCollins, 1998), 395.
[3] For an overview of this evidence, see Michael Zigarelli, “Near-Death Experiences and the Emerging Implications for Christian Theology,” Christian Scholar’s Review 53, no. 2 (Winter 2024), 75-97.
[4] See, for example, Pim van Lommel, “Dutch Prospective Research on Near-Death Experiences During Cardiac Arrest,” in The Science of Near Death Experiences, ed. John C. Hagan (University of Missouri Press, 2017), 40, citing work from the Gallup organization and the University of Konstanz in Germany; and Bruce Greyson, “Incidence of Near-Death Experiences,” Medicine and Psychiatry 1 (December 1998): 92-99.
[5] Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021), 132-33. Greyson is a psychiatrist and the author of more than two hundred academic papers.
[6] Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of Near-Death Experience (HarperOne, 2010), 71-72.
[7] See Todd Burpo, Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 93-97.For a similar story, see Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (HarperOne, 2016), 121–23. For earlier work in this field, examining the NDEs of twenty-six children, see Melvin Morse and Paul Perry, Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children (Ivy Books, 1991).
