A Few Comments on Death and Resurrection

A younger LCMS pastor recently directed a question to me (in the context of a private internet group to which he and I belong): “When it comes to evolution and the Scriptures you never deal with the problem of death.  I am very interested and open to theistic evolution but you lose me when it comes to the issue of death.  How can it be reconciled with theistic evolution?  It just doesn’t jive in my mind.“

A few people thought my response was helpful, so I’m taking the liberty of sharing it here. (I’ve added some content that was not in the original post.)

Death is always with us. We cannot not deal with it. It comes up in expected and unexpected ways. It affects each of us individually and all of us in our various circles of family and friends and fellow believers. For those of us who serve as ministers of Christ in congregations, e.g., as pastors or interim pastors (as I did recently for several years), the reality of death and its effects are near the center of our vocation. In a sense, the essential content of the Christian faith as a whole is directed to the reality of death. We are called to shed light on this reality, to proclaim the judgment of God that is wrapped up with it, and to proclaim the good news of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. We are called to comfort those who mourn and to point to the Risen One as the basis of our hope, especially in the face of death.  We proclaim the death of the Lord Jesus as "the death of death." During Lent, the focus on our own mortal nature has been sharpened and intensified: “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” We are mortally aware of our sins and our depraved condition. We are daily reminded of our need for Christ, his forgiveness, his new creation, and the salvation that he freely offers to us and the whole world.

And of course today, on Good Friday, our eyes are directed to the suffering, crucified Christ, even as we also anticipate the joy of Easter morning and the central apostolic proclamation: Christ is risen!

We look upon death differently because of Jesus Christ. We face our death in the sure and certain confidence that because Christ has died and has been raised from the dead, we too shall be raised—and even now may walk in the newness of that resurrected life. “You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead… If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God…” (Col. 2.12; 3.1ff.)

That NT teaching is the largest context for dealing with the reality of death and all other earthly realities. That "good news" is at the heart of every evangelical sermon; it is the promise that is attached to the means of grace; it is the center of the Scriptures; it is the basis for all Christian pastoral care (and not merely at funerals); it is the principal theme in all of my university courses in theology. That NT gospel keeps the heartbeat of faith pumping. It is what gets me out of bed in the morning, allows me to go about my vocation with a deep sense of purpose and frequent joy, and gives me a sense of peace when I fall asleep at night.

This being said, one has to note that the context given by Col. 2-3 and similar NT passages is not the only context for addressing the reality of death and the questions it raises. There are other contexts that need to be taken into account as well, at least if one is to probe these matters theologically (i.e., academically, in relation to the natural and human sciences, medical knowledge and ethics). For instance, many contemporary people whom we seek to reach with the gospel—including people who have heard that gospel and continue to hear it and receive it in faith—wonder about the nature of death as a human reality in light of the evidence of death in the plant and animal kingdoms in the long history of the planet. Such evidence indicates that creatures have been dying—and going extinct!—for millions and millions of years, long before the advent of the first human beings. What are we to make of this “hard” evidence?

There is no question that creatures of God were living and dying long before the emergence of the first human creatures. The evidence of these pre-human deaths in nature is as irrefutable as the fact that the earth is spinning on its axis and orbiting the sun (additional natural facts that God has chosen not to reveal in his Holy Scriptures!). As I tell my students, the evidence here is something on which you can stub your toe.

This evidence needs to be taken into account by educated Christians, especially pastors and theologians and others who seek to make sense of the Christian faith in light of contemporary knowledge and in contexts that include scientifically-informed people.

The way I do this is to take note of the fact that the Scriptures illuminate and address the reality of death in the most profound and promising of ways. To begin with, the Scriptures do not contain a single, monolithic understanding of “death.” There is instead a great variety of passages that address and illuminate the reality and threat of death (both “physical,” “bodily” death, and other, harsher kinds of “death,” e.g., alienation and separation from God, “spiritual death,” the “second death” mentioned in Rev. 20.6, 14). Any good Christian dogmatics text will indicate that the Scriptures do not have a monolithic presentation about "death." I have found Pannenberg's reflections on sin and death helpful in this regard (see his Systematic Theology, 2.231ff.).

For the sake of brevity, we may take note of two key emphases about “death” in the Scriptures. On the one hand, natural, physical death is understood to be an aspect of finite, creaturely existence, as an aspect of life itself. This emphasis is especially prominent in many OT passages. “Lord, teach us to number our days [teach us to remember that we have to die] that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90.12). Our lifespan is in the hands of God (Ps. 31.15). Our lives do not belong to ourselves; they are a gift of God. We are created for life, yet in the end, all humans die (Ps. 89.48f.; cf. Eccl. 2.16ff.) It is God who returns people to the dust (Ps. 90.3) So the psalmist prays to God for protection from an untimely death. “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Ps. 73.26). Those who are blessed by the Lord die “old and full of years” (Gen. 25.8; Jud. 8.32; 1 Chr. 29.28). When one comes to a ripe age, “full of days,” then it is time for death. If death comes then, a person has truly lived. “You shall come to your grave in ripe old age, as a shock of grain comes up to the threshing floor in its season” (Job 5.26). Commenting on this aspect of the OT’s teaching about death, Eberhard Juengel  remarks: “To be delivered from death means that one’s life is prolonged so that the number of one’s days may be fulfilled (Exod. 23.26). In the end, for Israel, the longed for future time of salvation in the new Jerusalem was pictured as a time when there would be no old man who had not fulfilled his days—that is, who was not ripe for death (see Isa. 65.20; Zech. 8.4). Death can therefore be something other than a curse” (E. Juengel, Death: The Riddle and the Mystery [Westminster, 1974], 76).

In other words, to be a creature, human or otherwise, is to be a finite, mortal being. Finite beings are not eternal. Death marks the end of every life. Every multiple-celled life must die. Physical, biological death is an aspect of our creaturely finitude that we share with all of God's other creatures, going all the way back to the very first simple, single-celled life forms. Creatures have an end. Karl Barth (d. 1968) was right when he wrote, "Finitude means mortality" (Church Dogmatics 3/2.625). The life we are given is an allotted time; it has limits, boundaries. “Death is intrinsically the end and limit of human life” (ibid., 588). “…[I]t also belongs to human nature, and is determined and ordered by God’s good creation and to that extent right and good, that man’s being in time should be finite and man himself mortal… Death is man’s step from existence into non-existence, as birth is his step from non-existence into existence. In itself, therefore, it is not unnatural but natural for human life to run its course to this terminus ad quem, to ebb and fade, and therefore to have this forward limit” (ibid., 632). We live our lives at present always under the shadow of death. “It then becomes clear that dying is the way of all the earth (1 Ki. 2.2)” (Juengel, Death, 67). (Even the Christian who takes the story of Adam and Eve in Gen 2-3 quite literalistically has to agree that “Adam” was subject to death from the very beginning of his being created. Adam/Eve were “mortal” creatures, even before they sinned, something Luther also acknowledged in his great commentary on Genesis.)

On the other hand, the Scriptures elsewhere reveal, especially in the NT, that human death is a judgment from God as a consequence of sin. “The wages of sin is death…” (Rom. 6.23). As a result of sin, God has subjected creation to futility. The world is fallen, corrupt, and suffering under the judgment of God. Here death is the sign of God’s judgment. Death has become an enemy, the “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15.26). Why? Because death brings us mortal sinners into the hands of Almighty God.

A careful study of the biblical words and Scripture passages relating to “death” helps to uncover the rich variety of meanings that these terms/passages convey for a fuller theological understanding of death. Many of these passages can be understood to fit within an understanding of the natural history of the world that includes the reality of death—the condition of creaturely finitude established by the Creator, the temporal character of all life, of death as the boundary of all life—long before the appearance of the first human beings.

BUT, and this is a big BUT: If physical death is merely talked about as a natural part of life, as merely something to be accepted as a part of the natural rhythm of this created order (though, to be sure, it is this, too), then a key biblical teaching is minimized or even lost. Barth, Tillich, Niebuhr and most other Protestant theologians are right to stress that there is a profound anxiety that overcomes one when one contemplates the reality of one’s death. Here the Pauline emphasis that connects “divine judgment” and “death” is spot on. We know that death is a threat not merely to our existence, but to our standing before God. Through death we enter into God’s perfect judgment. And that judgment is also then a kind of “separation” or “estrangement” from God, the source of our being. To paraphrase Tillich, when we are estranged from the ultimate power of our being, we are then determined by our finitude. We are given over to our natural fate (and all the other creaturely conditions that mark us and define us). We know then too well the truth of what we hear on every Ash Wed and at funeral services: “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” We are under the domination of death and are driven by the anxiety of having to die. That leads to all sorts of other problems and sinful consequences, as we try to secure ourselves against the threat of death and against the sober reality of its being more than a mere inconvenience.

Our Christian hope, however, anticipates a new life beyond death and the divine judgment connected with it, a new life that has dawned for the first time in the multi-billion-year history of planet earth in Jesus of Nazareth. This new life has dawned in his death and resurrection from the dead—God’s decisive, final act in creation. Jesus alone makes this new life possible for all mortal sinners who put their trust in him. (I will leave open the question about whether or not the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the dawn of the new creation in him have positive implications for the future of God’s other creatures. I remain hopeful, in this regard, provided the new life of the dinosaurs means they no longer will eat meat...) God alone is able to bring us through death into new life through Jesus and the creating Holy Spirit. So Scripture also refers to death as liberation from this mortal life and as gain, so as to be with the risen Christ.

Set free from the curse of death, life’s end may therefore be understood more precisely as man’s natural death, as the end of that existence which he is by nature. It is not because of his nature but because of his guilt as a sinner that this natural death can become a curse. From the quite remarkable terminological fact that the New Testament makes a temporal distinction between the curse of death which threatens man’s existence and the true end of man’s life we can see that the end of man’s life does not have to be a curse: both Paul and John can say of believers that this death prior to life’s ending is something which for them is already past (Juengel, Death, 92).

The death of Jesus has inaugurated the death of death for us. Jesus has suffered the harshest, most damnable death of all, his suffering of God’s judgment upon all sins, so that we might receive life to the fullest.

So the death of which paleontologists, biologists, anthropologists, and other natural scientists speak, and which they analyze, needs to be set into that larger context to which the author of Colossians spoke (and speaks!). "Set your minds on things above, not on things that are on earth." There is here a more profound understanding of death than that which any natural scientist or medical doctor could offer, based on his/her scientific understandings of this old, fallen creation (as important as this latter knowledge is for our understanding of human beings and their place in the natural history of the world). The law and gospel of God offer a new interpretation of death, but not merely that. The gospel promises a great victory over death and the grave/ash urn/final resting place of human dust. “For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom. 14.9). That Easter promise makes all the difference for your finite, mortal, sinful dust. (For a profound reflection on precisely this point, see Bob Bertram’s classic, “Pardon My Dying: A Sequel to Ash Wednesday,” which is available at the online Crossings website. See also Ed Schroeder's essay, "Encountering the Last Enemy," which builds on reflections in Tod und Leben [Life and Death] by Ed's Doktorvater, Thielicke.)

Dying has been occurring in God’s creation since the beginning of the earliest life forms. At least for human beings, who uniquely bear the image of God and who are mortal sinners under the law of God, such “damned dying” (to quote Bertram) needs forgiving and it needs a resurrection.

Hence, the return to baptism again and again. While all creaturely life leads to death, Holy Baptism takes one from death to new life. According to the Gospel of John, the person who hears Jesus and believes the One who sent him, has eternal life; “he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (Jn. 5.24). Cf. the Colossians passage above, which makes the same point.

Hopefully, these informal comments give you a better idea of how I address the reality of death theologically in view of the physical evidence of death in the natural history of the world but especially in light of the gospel promise.

For the Record

Over the past several weeks a lot has been published online and in print about me and my teaching. The President of the LCMS and many of his supporters have criticized me on his Facebook page. Two districts of the LCMS have adopted resolutions that call upon me "to repent" of my supposed "false teaching." The national newspaper of the LCMS has published articles about these two district conventions and about a recent meeting of the LCMS Council of District Presidents in which my teaching was discussed. In two of these articles I am mentioned by name.

In light of these public actions and events, I would like to offer my own response, "for the record."

You may read that response here.

A Nice Chesterton Quote

Fundamental Theology

Earlier today I learned that my new book, Fundamental Theology (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark), is now available in North America. I'm hoping the book will be beneficial to individuals who want to explore basic, preliminary issues in Christian theology. After providing brief overviews of the history of Christianity and Christian theology, the book analyzes issues relating to the reality of God (e.g., atheism, philosophical theology), the nature of Christian faith, central themes in special revelation, the authority and interpretation of the Christian Bible, and the interface between Christian thinking about God and other forms of knowledge. 

Each of the fifteen chapters ends with several study questions that invite additional reflection. These questions could serve to open up discussion within a group setting. Each chapter also contains suggestions for further reading. The book includes both a glossary of terms and a glossary of names. Martin Marty has written the Afterword. 

Carl Braaten (retired professor of theology at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago) read an early draft of the book and was invited by the publisher to give his assessment. According to Braaten, the book "is destined to become a standard textbook both in college and seminary courses of theology. I know of no better compendium of Christian theology to introduce beginning students to the study of theology." 

While I wrote the book primarily for high-school graduates, college students, and seminarians, the book could be useful in a congregational setting as well, perhaps as the focus for an adult forum or discussion group. The issues addressed in the book and the questions raised are ones that ought to be of interest to anyone who wants to think more deeply about Christian faith.

Here's a link to the book on Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamental-Theology-A-Protestant-Perspective/dp/0567568334/ref=cm_sw_em_r_dpcod_2-p3ub19FAVPD_tt

When Religions Collide

"Do you want to speak with Big Detra or Little Detra?" Confused by the server's question, I thought to myself, "How many people named 'Detra' could there be in the world, let alone employed at the same restaurant?" A bit impatient, the busy server fired off a follow-up: "Do you want the younger one or the older one?" "I, I, I don't know. I think I want the younger one, but maybe you should send the older one over, just in case." "Well, you can't talk to Big Detra because she's not here. I'll get Little Detra."

A few minutes later, after I had noticed a group of servers and the hostess who had seated me cautiously eyeing me from around the corner, the latter hesitantly came over to my table. "I'm Detra," she said. "I'm sorry," I responded. "You don't know me, but Dave at the Squire, whom I think you know, has been after me for some time now to come here and introduce myself to you." 

As a young, single, culinarily-challenged assistant pastor of a large, suburban Lutheran congregation and a full-time graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I didn't have a lot of time to prepare or eat my meals. So I had gotten to know Dave, the bartender at one of the better eating places in town. I frequently found myself in conversation with him, while waiting for a table to open up. On many occasions, I just ate at the bar, which allowed the two of us to continue our discussions about religion, politics, literature, the arts, and other important matters. For nearly eight months, he'd been prodding me to go meet this young woman named "Detra" who worked at her family's nearby Greek restaurant and whom he knew from his frequent visits there, where he would go to eat his dinner on his days off. But I wasn't really in a position to date anyone at the time. Besides, I had my hands full with church and academic challenges. So I kept deflecting his prompts. 

I had passed that Greek restaurant I don't know how many times, typically when I went to make pastoral visits at the large regional hospital a few miles away from it. Sometimes I would eye it, as I passed by, and wonder about this woman with the strange name. 

On that particular dog-day, however, as I approached Paul's, I decided that I could at least stop in for a cup of coffee and check things out a bit, which is what I did after making a couple of pastoral visits to two of our hospitalized members. 

"My name is Matt and I've known Dave for a while. He asked me to come in and introduce myself to you." "Oh. Ok." And off she walked. Talk about "crash and burn." Although she never came back to the table, I did spot her on my way out. Mustering up some courage, I went over to where she was eating her lunch. "I realize you don't know me but I'm wondering if I could call you sometime to go to lunch." There followed a very long pause. "Normally I don't give out my number to customers. But since you know Dave, you can call me here, if you want." 

So that's what I did a few days later. A week after that, we had a picnic lunch together alongside the Fox River. Ten minutes into that meal she asked, "So what do you do for a living?" I was a bit surprised by the question, as I thought Dave had told her. "I'm a Lutheran pastor." I could tell by the expression on her face, this was not something she had wanted to hear. "Are you a Christian," I asked as casually as I could. Long, long pause. "I'm a Jehovah's Witness." 

I don't think either of us said anything for several minutes. We did, however, continue to eat the crab salad I had purchased from a deli. Gradually, we resumed our conversation and carefully avoided bringing up anything that might lead us back to the awkward subject of religion. After a couple of hours of rather enjoyable food-centered discussion, I took her back to her aunt and uncle's house, where she lived. (I later learned that her mom had died of a heart-attack when Detra was only nine. Her mom's side of the family is Greek Orthodox. Her aunt and uncle had been operating Paul's Restaurant for several decades--and that's where Detra worked. Detra’s other aunt, "Big Detra"--who stands all of about five feet tall!--also worked at the restaurant.)

That initial, somewhat “blind” date would have been our only one, except that I was smitten by her intelligence and beauty. I just couldn't get her out of my head. So, in addition to seeing Dave at the Squire, I started making sure that I ate at least a few of my meals each week at Paul's. While Detra tried to keep her distance, we still found opportunities to talk. Food had a way of bringing us together. 

But religion kept intruding and creating awkward conflicts. Some elders from Detra's local Kingdom Hall stopped by my office one day to tell me to stop seeing her. I told them that she was 23 and could make up her own mind about who she saw. A month or two after that, her aunt--the one who owned the restaurant--took me out to lunch to encourage me to stop seeing her niece: "Matt, you seem like a nice man. We don't want you to get hurt. We've tried unsuccessfully for many, many years to encourage Detra to become Greek Orthodox. All to no avail. If she won't listen to her own family, do you really think she'll listen to you?" My response: "You might be right. But I'm willing to try to keep the lines of communication open--and to trust the Holy Spirit." One of my members was shocked to learn that I was "dating" Detra. Initially he thought I was dating Big Detra--who is married!--but then he really became flummoxed when he learned I was seeing her niece, the one who is a Jehovah's Witness.

I had to have a special meeting with the elders of my congregation to explain the situation. For a couple of hours we discussed the matter. At the end of the meeting, the head elder, speaking for the senior pastor with whom I worked and the other elders, said, "Pastor, we trust you. We will pray for you and for Detra. However, we ask that you not do anything that would harm the ministry of this congregation." I assured them that I would ask God to help me to seek His will.

My parents, on the other hand, were worried and bewildered. "Matt, can't you find a nice Lutheran girl to date? Surely in that large congregation of yours, you could find someone! Not a Jehovah's Witness...!" One of my pastoral colleagues told me: "Matt, you always like to do things the hard way, don't you?" He joked that I surely was the only LCMS pastor in history ever to date seriously a practicing Jehovah's Witness.

At one point, during that first year, Detra and I were contacted by a producer from Oprah's talk show. Oprah wanted to interview us. Somehow she learned about us—a Chicago-area Lutheran pastor who was dating a Jehovah's Witness—and wanted to have us on her show to talk about how we were faring. We respectfully declined the invitation.

The greatest conflict was yet to come, however. Detra's father had become a Jehovah's Witness shortly before Detra was born. He had made sure that his two younger children were active in their local Kingdom Hall.  When he learned that one of them, his middle child, was seeing a Lutheran pastor, he was beside himself. He reminded Detra of her promise always to remain loyal to him and to Jehovah. Her dad told her that he would completely disown her if she continued to see me.

There were many difficult, troubling moments throughout the three years that Detra and I dated each other. During that time, we actually stopped seeing each other for extended periods--only to find ourselves together again at the same booth at Paul's or at the movies or at the Art Institute or a concert. It helped that Detra met gospel-oriented people from my congregation, who showed her unconditional love and acceptance. It helped that she enrolled at Concordia, Chicago, where she took some theology classes as a  part of her degree program in education. It helped that her roommates at Concordia could talk about the Christian faith in ways that were better than my more "academic" approach. It helped that the Christian message of God’s love and grace in Jesus Christ is truly a good message, almost too good to be true!

That message was tested in all sorts of ways, none more significantly than when Detra learned that her college roommate, Becky, had died as a result of complications from a bone-marrow transplant. We went to Becky’s funeral in St. Louis, where the gospel was proclaimed loudly and clearly in word, song, and deed—with joy and hope and confidence in Christ’s victory over death and the grave. On the way back to Chicago, we were mostly silent. And then, rather out of the blue, Detra told me, “I want to be baptized.”

After being instructed further in the Christian faith by another local Lutheran pastor, she was baptized on Easter Sunday, 1993. We were married later that summer. (If you’ve seen the movie, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” you have an idea of what ours was like. On our wedding day I had asked a couple of the groomsmen to keep their eyes open for Detra’s father, in case he should try forcibly to stop the ceremony from taking place.)

True to his promise, Detra’s father disowned her. Despite her efforts, her father refused to meet me. He was angry that his daughter had left him and her childhood faith to marry this apostate. Thereafter, year in and year out, we never heard from him. He was not a part of our lives, not even when his grandson was born to us in 1999. Actually, that’s not quite right: there were times when the absence of Billy Joe in our lives created problems of a special sort, which I need not describe. For more than twenty years, we were estranged from him. Actually, that’s not quite right either, at least in my case and that of my son: I had never met my father-in-law and my son had never met his Grandfather Crunk. How can you be estranged from someone you haven’t ever met?

Exactly one year ago this weekend, however, a minor miracle occurred. We got word that Billy Joe was not doing well and that he wanted to see us, to meet me for the first time, and to meet his 14-yr-old grandson. We were cautiously joyful, excited, nervous, and perhaps a little fearful. We didn’t know what to expect. How would that meeting go? What would (or wouldn’t) be said? But we knew we needed to risk the encounter and to trust that God could bring about reconciliation.

Our meeting went better than any of us could have imagined. Billy Joe was happy, pleased to see his long-lost daughter and to meet her family. There were hugs and smiles, jokes and stories, moist eyes. We were surprised to see on his dresser and bookshelves all of the photos of our family that Detra had sent him through the years. Despite the fact that his daughter had been "disfellowshipped" from the JWs, he had not destroyed the photos. At one point, Billy Joe, who was in a wheel chair, and I were off by ourselves. “I know you know that I didn’t want Detra to marry you. I had hoped she would remain a Jehovah’s Witness. I know now that she is happy with you.” I didn’t say anything, but nodded my appreciation for the comment. He then continued, “I know we’re all trying to go to the same place.” “It’s all by God’s grace, isn’t it?”, I asked. “Yes. You are right. It is by God’s grace.” When it was time to go, he shook my hand in both of his. He hugged his daughter. Our son then went over and hugged him. “Grandpa, I love you.”

We left that day with a sense of quiet gratitude. I knew that my sermon for the next Sunday would have to be different now.

We have tried not to be bitter and angry about all the joys that could have been shared--but were not--with Billy Joe during the previous twenty-three years he had been separated from us. There were certainly times during those years when I was angry with him and, I’m sure, he with me. Detra, too, had to face her own anger, frustration, and sadness that occasionally confronted her. We had often pondered all that could have been experienced with her dad but didn't happen. Nevertheless, during this past year, we have been thankful for this reconciliation and the contacts with her dad that subsequently occurred.

This past October one of Billy Joe’s step-children (the daughter of his second wife) called to tell us that Billy Joe had unexpectedly died a few hours earlier. As we drove south later that day (he had always lived in southern Illinois), I couldn’t help but think that our time of mourning would be tempered by what had happened last January. God’s grace and mercy had had their way again.

During the funeral and afterward, when we again found ourselves together as a family, eating a good meal, I kept returning to what Billy Joe had acknowledged to me a year ago when he and I had been by ourselves.  

Rest in God's grace and peace, Dad.