Let me start by saying this: I am not a fan of Christian bookstores in general. I've been to a few, namely bookstores connected to seminaries or Christian colleges, that contain solid material, but I have not been a fan of Lifeway, Mardel, and other such chains for a long time. I have friends who work at said bookstores, and I have nothing at all against them as individuals, but I have tried to go out of my way as much as possible to avoid purchasing materials from these bookstores.
Pulpit and Pen, with their Twitter movement #the15 (a movement I do NOT support for other reasons), has been going after Lifeway over the past few weeks in an attempt to get some of these "heavenly tourism" books pulled, and it seems that Kevin Malarkey's "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" is the first to go. This is good. Lifeway, or any other Christian retailer for that matter, should never have picked this book up or any other book in the I-died-went-to-the-afterlife-and-came-back genre (including 90 Minutes in Heaven, 23 Minutes in Hell, and others). They might mean well by selling these books, but in their attempt to possibly encourage believers in the existence of the afterlife, they have undercut the authority and sufficiency of the Scriptures in the process. If the Scriptures were truly enough for our comfort, we would not need the testimony of others in this regard; the fact that these "heavenly tourism" books have sold millions of copies is a testimony of our nonexistent confidence in the Scripture.
Alex Malarkey's move is a brave one, and while there are some articles on the Interwebz that suggests that he and his mom Beth have been trying to get this book pulled for some time, it is disappointing that the Christian publishers had to wait until a recantation before recognizing the crap behind the book. The same can be said for the equally ridiculous Heaven is for Real and other similar books - must we wait for a recantation before we admit the obvious concerning these and other similar books? John MacArthur, in his book The Glory of Heaven, makes this point embarrassingly clear:
"For anyone who truly believes the biblical record, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that these modern testimonies—with their relentless self-focus and the relatively scant attention they pay to the glory of God—are simply untrue. They are either figments of the human imagination (dreams, hallucinations, false memories, fantasies, and in the worst cases, deliberate lies), or else they are products of demonic deception.
We know this with absolute certainty, because Scripture definitively says that people do not go to heaven and come back: "Who has ascended to heaven and come down?" (Proverbs 30:4). Answer: "No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man" (John 3:13, emphasis added). All the accounts of heaven in Scripture are visions, not journeys taken by dead people. And even visions of heaven are very, very rare in Scripture. You can count them all on one hand." (1)Legitimate spiritual damage is being done in the promotion of these books and in the consumption of these books. Whether the authors intend for it to be or not, these books cannot co-exist with the Bible. Either the Scriptures are sufficient, or they are not.
In short, good on Lifeway and Tyndale for deciding to pull the book, even though it took them way too long to get this done and they presently have shown no remorse for carrying the book in the first place. Hopefully this will open their eyes to see the BS that this book and other books in this lucrative genre are. This is a good step, but more need to be made, and more books need to be pulled.
(1): http://www.gty.org/Blog/B121018
