Thursday Theology: Ed Schroeder’s “Encountering the Last Enemy”: A Reprise (Part 1)

Co-missioners, 

For this week and next we dusted off another item from the Ed Schroeder corner of our online library. It’s an article Ed published in Dialog, a Lutheran theological journal, in 1972. The version in our library reports that it was “reprinted with permission.” As heirs of that permission we think the piece merits a quick resurfacing in the light of day. 

Two things drive this conclusion. The first is the seasonal timeliness of Ed’s topic. What is Easter joy about if not the defanging of death that the Church gets to announce and celebrate?  

But then a question that seems suddenly pertinent and pressing, all over again, fifty years after Ed wrote this piece: why should this celebration be focused so squarely to Christ? What is it about this resurrected Jesus that makes him so singularly of the essence in facing death with aplomb? Or to flip that question around, what is it about death that requires nothing less than a crucified Son of God to handle it on our behalf?   

The latter question is the one Ed is aiming at here. As he puts it toward the piece, his limited and provisional goal is “to reconnoiter the enemy and see what the fuller truth (if not yet the full truth) about him really is.” 

We at Crossings hear too little of that “fuller truth” being broached in the conversation of the wider church these days. Hence our urge to resurface this piece. Perhaps it catches the eye of one or two who haven’t yet dared to think this starkly about what’s at issue in the death we’ve all got to die. Perhaps it prompts a fresh burst of relieved joy in all that Christ has done for us. God be praised, if so.  

When Ed wrote this in 1972, the older English habit of using “man” and its cluster of masculine pronouns to refer to humankind as a whole was still in place. This grates so badly on sensitivities fifty years later that it pushes readers away. We have adjusted Ed’s prose accordingly. If you’re moved for some reason to track those changes, see the original. 

Peace and Joy, 
The Crossings Community

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Encountering the Last Enemy
(Part One of Two) 

by Edward H. Schroeder  

From Canva

The expression comes from St. Paul: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” It is found in his great chapter on resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15, a chapter that also spells out his view of the span of human history from Adam to the second coming of Christ. He says: “Then shall come to pass the saying that is written. (Isaiah 25.8) ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ (Hosea 13.14) ‘O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

How might that ancient word from St. Paul illuminate for us our encounter with death? 

From Canva

I.  The Forensic Fact

One fundamental premise that surfaces here about human life is what I shall label THE FORENSIC FACT. Human life unfolds in the forum, in the market-place of encounter and response, of challenge and reaction, of opposition and defense, of offense and withdrawal, facing adversaries larger or smaller. And my own death is an event in that forum. Even though all encounters in the forum are by no means adversary encounters— thank God!—the encounter with death is. 

But is there more to the forensic fact than that which an existentially-tinted psychologist or sociologist might also notice? Indeed there is. Fundamental to the forensic fact is God. The nature of human creaturehood is not exhausted by illuminating the varied encounters I have with other creatures—human, non-human, and inhuman; adversary, neutral, or benign—for even more important, in my creaturely life I keep on encountering the Creator himself. 

And that encounter is more than just the initiating encounter that pops me into existence in the creation—even though Christians make that confession about themselves implicitly when they recite the first article of the Creed (wherein they are also confessing: “I believe that God created me”). The on-going contact that God keeps me with his human creatures is twofold: sustaining (keeping that creature going whose existence came to be) and evaluating. If human beings are moral beings, the root of their being lies in the Creator from whom they come, who also does moral evaluation and judging and takes action appropriate with that evaluation and judgment. 

Whatever else the Creation stories in the early chapter of Genesis say, they do throw light on the word of God not only as creator, the one who says: “Let there be…”, but also on God the evaluator, God doing a second action: “It is good.” God both creates and evaluates, especially with his human creatures, his images. As Adam and Eve soon found out after fellowship with the creator was broken, their new dilemma was precisely that, although the garden-forum encounters with the Creator continued, the evaluative words from God in those encounters were adverse. 

Under these conditions life in the forum with God is bad news; worse still is the awareness that even if you move out of Eden (whether by virtue of eviction or your own decision), the forensic fact of having to live in evaluative encounters with God is inescapable. Death enters the conversation in Genesis as an event of this forum. Even though we scientific westerners are overwhelmingly impressed with the “naturalness” of death—and envision absurd situations arising if human death had not been natural in the history of the race—death is not natural in the vision of the Genesis author. At least not human death. Death of images of God is not part of the original blueprint. It is an ex post facto event inflicted by the creator as new physical fact, new judgmental fact: “And the LORD God said: “Because…to dust you shall return.”

II.  Death Is My Enemy

In the phenomenon of death God himself has a hand, and that hand is not benign. In the Corinthians text Paul does not come out and say: “In death God himself is my enemy,” although there are other Pauline passages which draw this conclusion when Paul is discussing God’s regular response to sinners. His rhetoric about the “Wrath of God” has this as its fixed point: God is the opponent of sinners, their critic: not one who affirms them, but one who says “no” to them. The most comprehensive “no” is my death. Committed as Paul is (and we too) to monotheism, death cannot finally be traced back and rooted in something other than God the Creator. In the ancient history of Israel this was apparently a constant temptation provided by the non-Israelite religions: positing two Gods, one of life and another of death. 

At one level di-theism is more reasonable for coming to terms with the experienced antithesis of life. There is goodness and affirmation, on the one hand, and death, evil, conflict and negation on the other. In the face of this constant tempting alternative, the Deuteronomist cites God as saying: “See now that I, even I, am the one, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand” (32.39). Although the Old Testament picture of death is variegated, Jahweh’s finger in the phenomenon is an item of which ancient Israel is constantly aware. (Read Psalm 90.3-12.) 

It is worth noting that death is not “explained” in any casual description by such a passage. The Psalmist apparently would not have bridled at saying: the patient died from a massive coronary. God is not brought into the picture by the Psalmist as the fundamental and final factor in a line of tracing cause and effect. Instead, speaking with some of our own terms, God exercises his criticism of sinners via the biological medium which can be seen to have its causal connections completely comprehended in biological cause/effect grounds. 

The focus here, of course, is not primarily on the death of human beings, but on the death of human beings who are sinners, who for whatever reasons are outside of Eden. Thus the same biological sequences can be observed in operation in a person’s dying as in the death of a horse; but the person’s death is more than the horse’s death; just as the person’s life is more than the horse’s life. Human life is life in a divine forum with God as the relational partner; and so is human death. It makes ecological sense that the human creature, like horses and trees, should finally pass away. And yet it does not make sense—especially when I contemplate my own death.