Death

My (Paul’s) father died of pneumonia in my brother’s arms after being unable to speak or eat for two years. He was not afraid to die, but he seemed to be lingering, hanging on, for reasons we could not discover. His wife had died months before, and there was no unfinished business known to us or admitted by him. My brother embraced him and said, “Dad, it’s all right to go.” And within minutes he died peacefully, sleeping in Jesus. But he left us wondering about the mystery of death, its timing, its meaning and the strange way that we are created by God to hang on to life, sometimes even longer than we need. It is difficult to tell yourself to die.

This article considers death as an occasion for theological reflection and spiritual contemplation and deals with letting go of ourselves. Grieving is the process of letting go of others (see Grieving). But the two are related; the experience of losing others can teach us how to die and, because of that, how to live today in the light of eternity, or as the Puritan William Perkins put it, “the science of living blessedly forever” (p. 177).

The Last Unmentionable Topic

Death is rarely discussed in polite company and has been tragically separated from everyday life. Instead of dying at home surrounded by relatives and friends, we normally die in a hospital surrounded by machines. Death has become institutionalized. In older cultures and before medical science became capable of prolonging life by two or three decades, people expected death at any time, if not from disease, than from childbirth, famine, plague or war. But now people do not expect to die. Few people actually see someone die, except for those in the medical profession, and dying for them is often surrounded by a sense of failure.

Death has also been sanitized. Instead of washing the person’s body and digging the grave themselves, something still done in rural Africa, the family arranges for a mortician to prepare the body to be as “lifelike” as possible and displayed for all to see, though rarely in one’s home. The funeral service takes place in a mortuary chapel, and the body is delivered hygienically to the flames or the soil. The cemetery is not likely to be found in the courtyard of the family church but in a place apart. It may never, or only rarely, be visited. In contrast, my dear friend Philip in Kenya walks past his wife’s grave mound every time he goes to the maize field of his small farm. To gain a theology and spirituality of death will involve recovering the connection between this once-in-a-lifetime experience and everyday living. To do that, we must also try to understand just what death is.

When Is Someone Dead?

Clinically death is defined as “the cessation of heartbeat, breathing and brain activity.” At this point a physician pronounces someone “dead.” Yet it is widely recognized that a person as a fully robed body-soul-spirit being may have died hours and perhaps even months earlier. The ambiguity of the matter is highlighted by the intrusion of technology. Life can be artificially prolonged on machines, sometimes with the purpose of “harvesting” organs for transplants from a dead-yet-still-living being who will die in all respects once the machines are turned off. Or will he? Does the soul remain near for a while to be reunited should the person be resuscitated by starting the heart and breathing again? Did the person actually die when brain activity ceased, perhaps in a traumatic car accident, even though clinically the person remained living? Is it possible to die months before clinical death by becoming incapable of giving and receiving love, perhaps through a debilitating disease that puts the person in a “vegetative” state? If so, there are many walking dead in this world. Such is the ambiguity of the subject.

There were two trees in the Garden of Eden, the tree of life (presumably offering immortality; Genesis 2:9) and the tree offering godlike knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve could live forever only if they accepted their creaturely limitations, eating from the first tree and refusing to eat from the second. If they took from the knowledge tree, they would die (Genesis 3:3). But there were other dimensions of that than simply returning to the dust (Genesis 3:19). They died to oneness with God (spiritual death), intimacy with each other (relational death) and trusteeship of the world (vocational death).

Could Adam and Eve, had they not sinned, have died of old age, perhaps in a transition like Enoch’s that led to fuller life with God? We do not know. Significantly, the first death in the account was not God-inflicted, but brought by humankind on itself: the murder of Abel. Equally significant is the growing consciousness of sin-cursed death by the characters of the drama exemplified in Cain’s plea for protection from a violent death (Genesis 4:14-15) and Eve’s plea for a replacement son to fill the emptiness left by death (Genesis 4:25). So whatever might have been possible in Paradise before human sin, death has become something terrible, something fraught with spiritual consequences, something to be feared. It is more than mere physical annihilation.

One reason death is so terrible is that it is not easy to kill a human being. The Polish filmmaker Krzystof Kieslowski explores this subject in his film on the sixth commandment: thou shalt not murder. In A Short Film on Killing Kieslowski graphically conveys the enormous effort it takes for a sad young man to fully extinguish the life of a cab driver. Then the filmmaker shows the strenuous and violent effort taken by the Polish government to end the life of this young criminal through the hanging that followed his conviction. In a technological age when a city can be annihilated by pressing a button, when a bullet can be planted in a chest at a distance too great to make eye contact and when an unseen fetus can be vacuumed from the womb, this is an important statement. Life is almost irresistible. The will to live is almost indomitable. Who then could dare be an instrument of death?

The Right to Inflict Death

The judgment of Cain (Genesis 4:1-16) shows that God does not want human beings to inflict death, either by taking the life of another through murder (Exodus 20:13) or by ending life by one’s own act through suicide. The time and manner of death are to be left in God’s hands, whether death comes by disease, accident or some natural process. Consider the distinction between artificially prolonging a life and actively ending a life (see Euthanasia). While murder by an individual or group is prohibited in all of its forms, including physician-assisted death, execution by the state or nation (as a just penalty for a grievous sin) was prescribed by the Old Testament. Some Christians arguing from both testaments claim that capital punishment is state murder, though in contrast to this view, Luther maintained that even the hangman is God’s servant bringing God’s justice into this world.

On this vexed subject the existentialist Albert Camus made a telling point. He argued that capital punishment could be justified only where there was a socially shared religious belief that the final verdict on a person’s life was not given in this life. To condemn a fellow human being to death in this context would not involve divine pretension since the human verdict could be overturned by the only perfectly competent judge, God himself. But in a society that lacked such a religious framework, execution would be a godlike activity since it eliminated a person from the only community that indisputably existed (Meilaender, pp. 20-21).

We have much to learn about death from Jesus’ own fate. It was a murder by the sinful religious establishment (expressing the violence in all human hearts against God); it was a state execution by the Roman government on the presumed charge of treason; but it was a voluntary death without being suicide. “No one takes it [my life] from me,” he said, “but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18). The voluntary aspect of his death is most deeply indicated by the statement that he committed his spirit to God (Luke 23:46) and “gave up his spirit” (Matthew 27:50)—a powerful hint that while death is ultimately in God’s hands, we may be permitted a part in relinquishing ourselves, something we observe happening with many people at the point of death. While Jesus’ death has some unique dimensions as a sacrificial death for all, it is also “typical” in this way: it involved his whole person, not just his body.

Death of the Whole Person

The author of Hebrews says that Jesus tasted death for everyone (Hebrews 2:9), clearly indicating that whatever death has become through sin—in all of its psychological and spiritual consequences (Matthew 27:46)—it was experienced by Jesus on the cross. Death is more than the mere stopping of the heart, breathing and brain activity.

Understood biblically, persons are not souls with bodily wrappings but ensouled bodies or embodied souls, a psycho-pneuma-somatic unity. The body does not “contain” a soul to be released through death—a fundamentally Greek notion that has permeated European culture. The body is the expressiveness of soul, and soul the heart of body. But these are so interdependently connected, indeed interfused, that to touch either is to touch both—hence the seriousness of sexual sin. We do not “have” bodies and “have” souls but are bodies and souls. So death, to the Hebrew mind, cannot strike the body without striking the soul, a connection that is not clear in many translations that substitute “person” for “soul” or “body” (Pederson, 1:179). For example, “the soul that doeth aught presumptuously . . . shall be cut off from the people” (Numbers 15:30 KJV). However much we may qualify this in the light of passages like “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43; see Cooper), we must still deal with death as death of a person, not just of a person’s shell.

More than our bodies die: emotions, personality, capacity for relationships, for giving and receiving love. Do our spirits die or at least “taste” death? We simply do not know whether we enter into a “soul-sleep” until the day of resurrection or persist in some kind of intermediate state, as it is called in theological texts, until Christ comes again and the dead are raised. What we do know is that death is more than a merely physical phenomenon. The whole person dies. We are obviously dealing with a mystery, but it is a mystery with windows.

A Vanquished Power

In all of this we admit we are facing a formidable power. Death holds people in slavery to lifelong fear (Hebrews 2:15). The fear may have multiple sources: fear of pain, of the unknown, of having to experience something we cannot control or predict, of losing all that is familiar and dear to us. Many older people fear increasing withering, loss of dignity and loss of independence, all preludes to death. A profound fear we carry from our earliest infancy is the fear of being dropped; the fear of death is the anxiety that when we can no longer hang on, we will be dropped and plunge into nothingness. Deeper still is the fear of unpredictable consequences after the grave if there is a God. We are ultimately accountable to God, and the happy continuation into the “next” life is contingent on our performance in this life. Death is fraught with eternal consequences.

The fact that human beings cannot simply treat death as a way of recycling people illustrates what Scripture proclaims: death is one of the principalities and powers. Paul spoke of death as the last enemy (Romans 8:38; 1 Cor. 15:26) because it seems death has a “life of its own,” making its pretentious claims on human hearts and holding them captive to their mortality. This last enemy was destroyed by the death of Christ, this death of death being certified by the resurrection of Christ. Death has been killed! For the person found in Christ, death is not fraught with temporal fear or eternal consequences, as it is for those who have not yet heard the gospel. Yet we still must die.

Come Sweet Death

The epicenter of our hope for life through death is the resurrection of Jesus. Only one has come back from the dead to tell us about the other side. The Gospels record all we need to know about Jesus after his death: (1) he had a real body that could walk, cook, eat and speak—this was no mere phantom or angelic presence; (2) there is a continuity between the body in this life and the next, so much so that the disciples recognized him—a powerful hint that we may recognize one another in the New Jerusalem; (3) there were continuing evidences of things experienced in bodily life in this world, namely, the scars; (4) the scars were not now the marks of sin but a means of grace as Jesus invited Thomas to touch and believe.

In other words, our works done in this life are transfigured rather than annihilated. Even the creation itself will not be annihilated but transfigured (this being quite probably the meaning in 2 Peter 3:10). Ezekiel envisions the land “radiant” with the glory of God (Ezekiel 43:2), a prophetic announcement that the earth will become “a new earth” (Rev. 21:1) just as the psychological body (literal Greek; “natural” NIV) will be transfigured into a “spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44). In other words, the Christian hope is not the survival of the spirit after the death of the body or even the continuation of immortal (but disembodied) soul in a nonmaterial “heaven” or the provision of another body, soul and spirit to be given us through reincarnation.

Christian hope promises a renewal not a replacement. Our bodies, souls and spirits are transfigured and “will be like his [Christ’s] glorious body” (Phil. 3:21). Christians see death in a sacramental way: a physical experience through which a spiritual grace is mediated. In this case the spiritual grace is located in the promise of resurrection. Even personality defects in this life get healed, but not by our becoming different persons. In Christ we more than survive the grave; we triumph over it. It remains to consider how to die well.

The Art of Dying

First, we must repudiate the death denial of contemporary Western culture. Deaths of relatives and friends provide good opportunities in a family context to discuss what death means and to declare the Christian hope. The thoughtful preparation of our last will and testament helps us prepare for death and contemplate what inheritance, material and nonmaterial, we leave behind.

Second, living Christianly involves the idea of dual citizenship: living simultaneously in this world and the next. We are equidistant from eternity every moment of our life from conception to resurrection. We treasure life as good and really flourish on earth, but it is not the highest good. We resist death as evil, but not the greatest evil, because it is the way to a better world.

Third, we can number our days, as the psalmist said, not by calculating our expected life span by the latest actuarial tables and then squeezing all we can into the remaining years because there is nothing more (or because eternity is just more of the same). This view unfortunately treats time as a resource to be managed rather than a gift. Rather numbering our days means treating every day as a gift, being aware that it may be our last yet investing ourselves, talents and all in a world without end (compare Matthew 25:1-13). We do not live “on borrowed time” but on entrusted time. So we live one day at a time, not bearing tomorrow’s burdens and anxieties today (Matthew 6:25-34), but trusting that God will be sufficient for each day that we live.

Fourth, everyday hardships give us an opportunity to learn to “die daily.” Paul said that we are like sheep led daily to the slaughter. Through these pains, persecutions and weaknesses that we suffer, we are able to live in the resurrection power of Christ, dying to self, living in him (2 Cor. 4:10-12, 16-18).

Fifth, we can practice progressive relinquishment. As we go through life, we relinquish childhood and youth, our friends and parents through death, our children as they leave home (see Empty Nesting) and eventually our occupations and health. Most people will discover the hard words of the marriage vow, “until death us do part.” Ultimately we must relinquish life in this world. We are left with the one treasure of inestimable value—the Lord. One of the Ignatian exercises invites us to contemplate our own death using our inspired imaginations and doing so prayerfully in the Lord’s presence: people gathering around our bed, the funeral, the burial in the soil, the gradual decomposition of our body until all that we were as a person in this life has dissolved and we are ready for full transfiguration. Are we ready to die? Are there broken relationships to be mended, persons to be forgiven, debts to settle? Is there something we can do for someone that we have been putting off?

The philosopher George Santayana said, “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval” (quoted in Jones, p. 30). This accurately expresses the practical theology of a generation that denies death, fails to believe in a new heaven and new earth and, therefore, is preoccupied with fitness, health and pleasure. But the Christian approach, as J. I. Packer once said, is to “regard readiness to die as the first step in learning to live” (quoted in Jones, p. 30).

» See also: Aging

» See also: Body

» See also: Euthanasia

» See also: Grieving

» See also: Menopause and Male Climacteric

» See also: Retirement

» See also: Will, Last

References and Resources

C. D. Exelrod, “Reflections on the Fear of Death,” Omega 17, no. 1 (1986-87) 51-64; J. W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989); O. Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? (London: Epworth, 1958); T. K. Jones, “Death: Real Meaning in Life Is to Be Found Beyond Life,” Christianity Today 35 (24 June 1991) 30-31; G. Meilaender, “Mortality: The Measure of Our Days,” First Things 10 (February 1991) 14-21; Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, trans. J. W. Leitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); J. Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture, 4 vols. (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1964); William Perkins, “The Golden Chain,” in The Work of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward (Appleford, U.K.: Courtney, 1970); E. Trueblood, The Common Ventures of Life: Marriage, Birth, Work and Death (New York: Harper & Row, 1949).

—Gail C. Stevens and R. Paul Stevens