Clarence Oddbody: Did a 4-year-old really go to Heaven and come back to tell about it?

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Did a 4-year-old really go to Heaven and come back to tell about it?

All you have to say is something rather remarkable and esoteric (even if occasionally but rarely sorta kinda believable) to get condescending and thoughtless responses.

Just check out the 400+ one-star reviews of Heaven is for Real at Amazon >

(Colton Burpo made national news as the subject of his father’s book, Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. If you haven’t heard of it: It’s purportedly a true account of a 4-year-old boy who nearly dies, visits Heaven, meets Jesus and other biblical figures, his great grandfather, sister, even Satan, and over the course of a few years relates new details to his family.)

Before I give my opinion on this account, can we agree that a 4 year old would use fantastic language and familiar images to describe a new and disorienting experience?

Adults do this all the time. Ask someone from a tropical climate who has never experienced snow to describe it. I actually saw this happen: I knew this person in college; upon seeing snow from his dorm for the first time, he said he thought someone a floor above him was shaking a rug out the window.

Imagine he was describing snow this way to someone who never saw snow. That other person might say, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Snow has nothing to do with rugs or cleaning. You didn’t see snow.”

So: The fact that a child describes something with childlike language doesn’t mean he didn’t see something.

Okay, that’s out of the way.

Now My Opinion

I recently finished the audiobook of Heaven is for Real.

To be honest, as fascinating as it was to listen to (it goes very quickly), most of Colton’s revelations are pretty routine and could easily have very terrestrial explanations. Colton’s father Todd Burpo, who is narrating the story, seems astounded each time a new detail is revealed and exclaims “How could he know this?”, but most of what Colton “knows” is no more remarkable than the “facts” extracted by a medium doing a reading.

(For example, a 4-year-old that nearly dies may very well say something like “I almost died,” even if no one around him ever said anything like it. And Colton’s father is a Methodist minister; Colton’s life was no doubt daily filled with talk and images of Jesus and biblical personalities; it’s hardly a stretch that Colton discovered his stories were flabbergasting the adults in his life and he enjoyed telling them for that reason.)

Two revelations stand out, however:

The first is Colton’s awareness of his mother's miscarriage, which Colton describes as a sister that died in his mother’s tummy. If it were certain that Colton knew nothing of it, we’d have a real puzzle, but it’s not inconceivable that as his parents contemplated the loss (or afterward, the near-loss) of another child, they said something that Colton picked up on.

The second is Colton’s eventual identification of what Jesus looks like. As Todd Burpo tells it, throughout the few years Colton was revealing new insights about Heaven, Todd Burpo would occasionally point to a portrait of Jesus and ask Colton if that Jesus looked like the Jesus he saw in Heaven.

In each instance, Colton would say something was wrong with the picture. Until he saw Prince of Peace by child prodigy Akiane Kramarik, which was featured in a CNN segment. That picture, which appears below, looks like the Jesus Colton saw:

Prince of Peace by Akiane Kramarik

Why this is interesting is that Akiane Kramarik also claims to have visited Heaven and seen Jesus, and that is the Jesus she saw.

Now of course, both Akiane Kramarik and Colton Burpo are products of 21st Century American sensibilities, popular culture, art, language, etc. It’s no surprise that a contemporary portrait is more recognizable than one painted for a previous generation.

Yet it is interesting that of the many other portraits, some which no doubt resembled Akiane Kramarik’s to some degree, it was only Kramarik’s that he said got it right.

Below is the Jesus I grew up with, and I like the picture very much; it was retro when I was a child but I didn’t know it then; the most important images preserved by a culture usually retain nostalgic elements.

The Head of Christ (1941) Warner Sallman