Preaching Death: The Transformation of Christian Funeral Sermons

16 What Christians No Longer Want to Say about Death

227 16 What Christians No Longer Want to Say about Death In these chapters, we have questioned some of the popular assumptions about the Christian past. It is not necessarily a “resource” for persons today. Our expectations that it should be need to be held in check. While the death awareness movement tells us “people used to see death as a natural event,” this statement may be useful as a rhetorical device in an argument about the present, but it misleads as a real description of what held true for persons one hundred years ago. As we looked back to the ways Protestant Christians once spoke of death, on the formal occasion of a funeral, during the decades of the twentieth century, we should instead let their own ideas and images be severed from our own needs and hopes. These Christians’ views on death were internally coherent, supported by what they believed the Bible taught, and by their own traditions and sensibilities. But that does not make them suitable for appropriation by us today. Suppose we reverse the perspective of these questions. Imagine that the people of the past received a glimpse of our present. Some things would surely surprise them about our lives, views, and attitudes. Some of our ways would delight them, while other beliefs and assumptions would disappoint or even horrify them. We are not speaking here of the people from biblical times, but of persons a few generations back. Those who sat at the funerals of their families and friends, and heard 228 Preaching Death “Are you living under the power of the world to come?” or listened as the pastor recited “Crossing the Bar” to them during the sermon. When it came to wisdom about death, they would surely feel they could teach us something. Perhaps they would smugly sit in judgment on our preference for tacky sentimental biographical anecdotes over solid and profound doctrinal truths. Or they might be bewildered by our abundant use of “death as enemy” language, when they knew their faith taught that heaven was a home, and death a journey. They could be delighted that, finally, mourning was being taken seriously as a Christian theme, or they would believe this was both theologically erroneous and pastorally misguided (to twist Mitchell and Anderson’s statement). In short, they might admire and envy us for what we have learned on these topics, or pity us for what we have forgotten. Some answers to these “maybes” seem beyond dispute. The Christians of the past would not have denied that “death is a natural event.” But by this they did not mean what we do. They would have included immortality of the soul as part of “natural” universal truth, and therefore death as transition rather than annihilation would have been the most “natural” understanding of it. Not “there is a time to be born, and a time to die,” but other imagery, especially of transformations such as caterpillar into butterfly, would have been best to illustrate this vision of death as “natural event.” Birth and death are not paired together, and all our imagery of the life span or “circle of life” is foreign to them in this context. Most of all, they would all have agreed that this vision of “natural immortality” is behind the message of the gospel, and so Christ’s promise of eternal life with him in the mansions of his Father’s house is not based on anything utterly unique. It is not based on his own one-time miraculous resurrection, although this offers historical proof of the general reality. It is based on universal intuited truth. The message of life everlasting, then, does not need to be christologically focused or christocentric. Barth, Brunner, Cullmann, and Archbishop Myers were all wrong. Christian faith does not rest on any such narrow, miraculous, historical or quasi-historical foundation. Jesus offers us salvation, his death redeems and restores us to God’s favor, but it does not become the entire foundation for the entire edifice of doctrine. “Are you living under the power of the world to come?” could make sense without this. To accuse such a stance of being “sub-Christian” or “Platonist,” as some What Christians No Longer Want to Say about Death 229 of the theologians just named did, would have made no sense at all to those earlier generations of clergy and their people. To us...