Kevin Vanhoozer: Teaching the Church to Die Well
“To die will be an awfully big adventure,” says Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s same-titled play.
It’s one thing for a boy who never grows up to describe death as a big adventure; it’s quite another for grown-ups who know their ultimate end to do so.
Anthropologist Ernest Becker argues in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death that the need to repress all thought of our eventual demise motivates much if not all human behavior. We pursue “immortality projects,” ways of thinking about the story of our lives that omit the ending, and so avoid an uncomfortable truth.
Author Stephen Jenkinson has issued a prophetic-like critique of contemporary culture’s “death-phobia”: We don’t simply deny death; we manage, battle and postpone it. Drawing on his many years in hospice care, Jenkinson calls us to resist our cultural conditioning and instead “die wise.”
The church’s failure to form a distinctly Christian culture of dying has ceded the task of catechism to the medical industrial complex, and its false creed of “if you can, you should.” In a medicalized culture, gains in pain management lead seamlessly to the premise that we can manage death and dying. However, the only prize patients get for battling what ails them, says Jenkinson, is the hope for more time, which means more time to think about dying. After all, there is no cure for mortality.
Spiritual Formation by a Medicalized Culture
Our medicalized culture treats the dying person only as a patient, not an agent. But people are more than their bodies. What should be of ultimate concern is not preventing our dying—which is a fool’s errand—but how we face it.
Allen Verhey, a Christian ethicist, agrees in The Christian Art of Dying: Learning From Jesus, “The medicalization of death makes dying well difficult.” The church has been complicit, and too silent, about the medicalization of death, “in effect surrendering death—or at least dying—to medicine and to the hospitals they helped to establish.”
Surely dying is too important to outsource to secular institutions. Verhey calls pastors to assume their responsibility to care for the sick and dying, “to teach them to live well and to die faithful.” We need to name and critique cultural distortions of death and dying.
The culture provides a template for living, a handbook for human flourishing, an intensive course in spiritual formation. The prevailing cultural approach to death is technological mastery: “It’s terrible, get going with treatments.”
At the other extreme is naturalistic acceptance, seeing death as a normal part of life. In a widely viewed TED Talk, “How I Made Friends with Reality,” Emily Levine announced her stage 4 lung cancer, adding “I’m OK with it.” To fight death, she argues, is disrespectful to nature. She would rather be in sync with the cyclical rhythms of nature than to be immortal. The “particles” that constitute her will decompose and be available for nature to reorganize, and she is excited to be part of that “gift economy.” Her mantra? “It’s natural; go with the flow.”
Culture abhors a vacuum, and if the church is no longer teaching people how to die well and faithfully, other institutions and ideologies will inevitably do so. Recent studies have surprisingly shown that churchgoers are more likely to pursue aggressive, life-prolonging treatments. Spiritual formation by a medicalized culture leads people to hold out a secular hope: more life—on earth.
So how should pastors frame death and dying? What is the church’s responsibility to teach people to die wisely, and well? The problem is not modern medicine, for which we should be grateful, but a competing medicalized eschatology.
Retrieving the Ars Moriendi
Once upon a time, before the invention of the X-ray machine, MRIs or chemotherapy, mortality was conspicuous. It was impossible to deny death in the wake of the bubonic plague in 14th century Europe. A new type of literature emerged on the “art of dying.” It wasn’t technical theology so much as the medieval equivalent of self-help literature.
The Ars Moriendi was published in the latter half of the 15th century. An abridged version included woodcut engravings illustrating the contest between angels and demons over the dying person’s soul: temptations to avoid (e.g., unbelief, worldliness) and virtues to emulate (e.g., faith, Christ-centeredness).
Medieval Christians approached death and dying with a theological frame of reference: the big biblical picture of creation, fall, redemption and consummation. They learned from Scripture to resist despair; death is not the last word.
They also knew that the art of dying well pertains not only to the moment of death, but the whole span of one’s life. For to die well one needs to have formed, over a lifetime, a particular habitus or set of habits for integrating doctrine, spirituality and daily life. The way we die tends to recapitulate the way we have learned to live. One can only enroll in “Dying Well,” then, if one has taken the prerequisite “Living Well.”
Getting Real About Dying
Christian dying is countercultural. Several individuals have left us moving examples that are far from death-phobic: Billy Graham, J.I. Packer, Tim Keller, Ben Sasse. One of my favorite examples is Wendell Berry’s short story “Fidelity,” in which a farmer’s friends kidnap him from his sterile hospital room so that he can die with dignity with the people he loves. Dying in Christian community, in the communion of saints who believe that death is not simply dignified but defeated, should be a Christian practice too.
Theology is a ministry of what is ultimately real: the truth revealed in God’s Word. Learning to die well, and wisely, is not a matter of mastering deathbed techniques; it is rather a matter of getting real.
“Dying wise,” says Jenkinson, “is a life’s work.” Indeed. You can’t cram for your final final exam.
Last year, cancer abruptly cut short the life of my friend and former student, Dan Treier, a Wheaton College theologian, who was only 53. Even when he was undergoing painful procedures, he found strength in memorized Scripture, especially Philippians 3:10: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings.”
Dan learned the Christian art of dying by participating in the life of the church: the proclamation of the Word; the celebration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper; the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Dan died well not because of personal grit, but because he had been formed by an ecclesial culture, which in turn was informed and transformed by the gospel. Jenkinson is right: “People die in the manner of their living.”
Paul says, “I die every day” (1 Cor. 15:31). The ultimate service pastors provide for their congregants is to help them get real, cultivating communities where death is not hidden, because the baptized are reminded that they have already died with Christ. Death is not natural—it is an enemy—but neither is it ultimate, for it has been defeated in Christ.
If people die the way they have been formed to live, then the church bears responsibility for that formation. Pastors help when they help people get real about life and death, making full use of the church’s culture-forming means of grace: the ministry of the Word, prayer, corporate worship and the visitation of the sick.
Coming face-to-face with those who are dying helps us face our own mortality. Whether in hospitals or homes, the church should always embody the hospitality of the crucified and risen Christ—everywhere, to everyone, and particularly to those who are dying.
