Co-missioners,
Fifty years have gone by since Ed Schroeder penned the piece of which today’s post is the second half. We mentioned this last week. No wonder that much of what Ed says here will feel out-of-date in 2025. Who in the churchly circles that lots of us inhabit these days still thinks openly along these lines—who dares to? Death as the enemy, death as an expression of God’s critique: both these ideas will be widely dismissed as antiquated if not grotesque. Does this also mean that these ideas—St. Paul’s, as it happens; Luther’s too—are not true? Or does it rather signal that the Gospel which makes it possible to face such things is more poorly told and more feebly grasped that it was when Ed wrote?
As it happens, we think the Lord whose Easter we’re still celebrating both authorizes and enables the kind of deep and honest probing that Ed draws us into in this essay.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Encountering the Last Enemy
(Part Two of Two)
by Edward H. Schroeder
III. The Enemy-Quality of Death
From Canva
In Kubler-Ross’ book On Death and Dying (Macmillan, 1970, p. 2), a comment is made about humanity’s fear of death that points at the awareness of death as enemy: “It is inconceivable for our unconscious to imagine an actual ending of our own life here on earth, and if this life of ours has to end, the ending is always attributed to a malicious intervention from the outside by someone else. In simple terms, in our unconscious mind we can only be killed; it is inconceivable to die in a natural cause or of old age.” My unconscious thus perceives death as the onslaught of an aggressor.
At the level of our physical facticity, death is destroyer: “In the disintegration of the body our destruction becomes physically manifest and leaves no room for the delusion that anything of a biological nature survives” (Werner Elert, The Christian Ethos, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957, p. 167). Is there anything more that does escape destruction?
Frequently at this point conversation among Christians switches to discuss the soul. Yet precisely at this point Christians in the western tradition must proceed cautiously. It is easy to slip into a Platonic perspective that sees the soul ipso facto as death-proof, and thus as destruction-proof. This will not suffice as designation of the “something more” about human beings as they live in the forum and face death there. For there is nothing about me which is death-proof, if death-proof means judgment-proof in the forum of God’s creation. “Rather fear him,” says Jesus, “who can destroy both body and soul (vis., God himself).”
When death comes, it comes as total death. How can the nature of God’s verdict be more clearly demonstrated than by that fact? Yet, in one sense it is even worse than that: it is not merely that we do die, but that we have to die. We have no choice in the matter. And that observation leads to another: death is not simply the phenomenon which every human being meets on the last day of their life-span. No, death has a feed-back quality, from my end backwards, shaping my life now, long before my own personal last day. St. Paul specified this with such terms as “death ruling, dominating, reigning.” Our human fear of death shapes our lives long before the fact of death destroys them. Here is another apparent difference between the death of a human and the death of a non-human living being. Awareness of death, consciousness of death shapes the line of our lives as it apparently does not that of the animals.
Heidegger gives expression to this insight with his terrible Teutonism: “Seinzum-Tode.” This is his label for the sort of being human beings have. My own mortality is a present-tense reality. Long before I die, death is exercising a regime in my life. That leads to a fundamental awareness of helplessness too: even though I win one battle with a particular sickness, I know already that I’m going to lose the war. You can cure meningitis in certain cases, but you cannot cure mortality in any case.
With that we now come back to St. Paul’s equation about “Death as enemy; Sin as death’s sting; Law as Sin’s power-source.” All three of these terms are partners in the human dilemma according to Paul’s theology.
Without going into extended treatment of them, I can perhaps focus them as follows: Sin is Paul’s designation for the Adamic solidarity of the whole human race. It pinpoints the fractured relationship between human beings and their creator as the root quality of their inescapable on-going lives in the forum with God. People everywhere are naturally Adamic. They do not trust the Creator as beneficent father; they do not honestly acknowledge the forensic fact that they must live with God as donating partner; they have a “yen” to run their own show with little or no reference to the divine creator/judge.
Sin is Paul’s label for the fact of this ethical fracture, this operational fact. Thus when the human sinners die, sin is the sting in their deaths, the “ouch” quality which reminds them that theirs is the death of a sinner, someone whose demise is not only a biological coming to an end but also the creator’s judgment of creatures who are guilty of bad faith with their God. That’s the ouch, the sting, in the death of man.
But where does the sting get its power, its “clout”? Paul’s word for that is “the law.” What’s that? In Paul’s rhetoric it’s a big word. It designates the “whole bag” of rubrics whereby God regularly relates to his creation. When we are focusing on death, the impact of law comes to surface as God himself attributing our culpable deed to our bodily person. The connecting link between my sin and my death is the decree and sentence of the judge in the forum where I stand. All of this is a legal procedure with God acting as judge and eventually also as executioner. All this is encompassed with the term LAW.
Death is a consequence of sin, but not a mechanical consequence. It is rather a consequence of guilt, of adjudged culpability. Elsewhere (Romans 6.23) Paul can say: “death is the wages of sin.” The fair-and-square, legal and legitimate pay-off for a sinner is death. People do not die merely as people, but as people-in-rebellion, God’s own adversaries in the forum. Their death is the death of culprits, i.e., culpa-carriers. It is this quality of our death, arising because we are sinners, which is the unique character of our death. Were we not sinners, we would not have to die this kind of death. The question of what the death of a non-sinner is like, though tantalizing, is empirically unanswerable because there is no such person. Even Jesus by willingly dying a sinner’s death gives us no hard data on what the death of a non-sinner might be like.
IV. Encountering the Enemy—With and Without Christian Resources
Book Cover
The last enemy is death—the last enemy in my own biography, the last enemy in the biography of the cosmos. That is what Paul is discussing in 1 Corinthians 15: death as my individual enemy, and as the total enemy of the whole cosmos—by virtue of the fracture of sin and God’s fair-and-square lawful operations with sinners in that cosmos. Of course, resurrection, Christ’s, ours, is the major theme of that chapter, but you don’t see what a victory you’ve really got in Christ unless you see the full enemy for all he is. The fullness of the enemy is that he is invincible, because in encountering him we encounter the creator’s own operation. So any alternative to that death will have to come from the same source. Paul’s doxology expresses both the focus for the source of victory in the face of the enemy, and his apparent surprise that the victory came from that source at all, given the full truth about the enemy. “Thanks be to God, Who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!”
Of course, there are other options used for coming to terms with death. Our contemporary age is consistently criticized for its attempts at repression or suppression: hiding death under the sweet funeral culture of the “American Way of Death”; treating death pornographically because it is a taboo; constructing procedures which do not seem deliberately intent on hiding death, but which nevertheless do so, for example, hospitalizing dying persons so that their death is removed from the “public view.”
Helmut Thielicke (Death and Life, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970) has come up with a model of non-Christian “world-views” (“Weltanschauungen”) used in manifold concretizations for coming to terms with death. In this model, death is managed by dividing the human “I” into the “real me” and a sort of “fellow-traveler me” (eigentlich / uneigentlich Ich”). The fellow-traveler admittedly dies, but survival of death comes by positing immortality to the real me. Plato does this with his immortal soul. Idealism and Romanticism each in its own way posited in each man the universal “x” of which he then became the bearer; and the universal survived when the individual carrier finally died. Thielicke shows how the myth propounded by National Socialism in Germany followed the same patterns. Here are Thielicke’s words on the operation of such a model today in what he calls “Two Stop-Gap Solutions” (Ibid, pp. 12-13):
On the one hand [human beings] may attempt to relieve the relentless pressure of the problem of death (which is also the problem of life) by positing one particular value as absolute and then, by a conscious act of the will, refusing to inquire whether there is any other reality which might still transcend it in meaning. Such an attempt is precisely what is involved in all the talk about “our nation” as something eternal and indestructible. Here the act of absolutizing is especially obvious. And then it is but a logical consequence when imperceptibly and by degrees the ultimate criterion of good and evil become simply whether or not something is useful and beneficial for the nation so understood.
On the other hand, human beings may attempt to see the meaning of life not in some single, supposedly absolute aspect which they have posited for themselves, but in the infinite parade of life’s finite realities, each one regarded as a fragmentary parable for that totality of life which, though hidden in the background, is nevertheless symbolically present to determine the meaning of the whole procession. To fulfill the meaning of one’s life then, is to wander like Faust from one entity to the next, in a diligent and unending search, never coming to rest at any absolutized and supposedly achieved goal.
In either case a person’s mortal life is absorbed into an ever-arching higher configuration of meaning. In the first case we think of this configuration of meaning statically as a particular, concretely posited telos (e.g., ‘nation’ or ‘Humanity’). In the second we think of it in dynamic terms as that totality of the universe which discloses itself only as we struggle and wander.
Either way, if we could succeed, we would demonstrate that death belongs integrally to life. Death would no longer be something alien, contradictory, or puzzling. As ultimate and terminal finality death would be rendered impotent, null, and trivial, just as God himself is rendered impotent, null, and trivial when he is accommodated to us, made to conform to our human notions of reality. Vis-à-vis both of these—death so conceived and God so conceived—human. beings no longer die completely; they remain essentially intact while undergoing transition into that manifestation of life which is indigenously authentic for them.
The fallacy which Christian theology detects in the variety of ways which people in our day seeks to come to terms with death is that basically all the modes are “sub-gospel.” And if sub-gospel, they finally won’t work. They won’t work to give humanity victory over the last enemy. God’s own criticism won’t stay repressed by any immortality scheme other than that immortality which has been brought to light in the resurrection of Jesus himself from the dead.
And that bring us back to 1 Corinthians 15, for the fundamental fallacy inherent in any sub-gospel alternative to the gospel is that it amounts to distrust in the gospel. In that one good word which God himself gives us for us to be victorious over the last enemy. Of course, distrusting God’s gospel is but another enactment of “bad faith” on our part in the forum—and the cycle of events that this engenders makes us once more vulnerable to the last enemy.
The fuller truth about death—fuller at least than those pictures which by-pass the fact as they seek to illuminate what’s really happening as death occurs—is that my creator encounters me as an adversary in a situation that I cannot handle. But although that is the fuller truth about death, it is not the full truth about God. God’s last word to me and about me is Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected. With that last word and full truth about the Creator, I am liberated not only from death’s sting and clout, but also from hang-ups that might inhibit me from admitting the fuller truth about death.
Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
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