How does the Christian view of death differ from the secular view?

Question 5152.

The Christian view of death is stranger than most people assume, because it refuses both of the positions on offer in our culture. It will not say that death is natural and fine, and it will not say that death is the end. It calls death an enemy, and then says the enemy has been beaten.

That combination is unusual enough to be worth spelling out, particularly since many believers have absorbed a good deal of the surrounding culture without noticing. I have taken funerals where the Christian family used language that came straight from the secular script.

The secular options, briefly stated

Broadly there are three. The first is denial, which is our society’s default: we hide the dying in institutions, use euphemisms, and organise our lives so as not to think about it. The second is naturalism, which says death is simply what organisms do, that we are recycled matter, and that there is nothing here to be frightened of because there will be nobody left to be frightened.

The third is sentimentality, which has grown enormously at funerals in my lifetime. Death is a doorway, the departed is watching over us, a star in the sky, a robin in the garden. It is a view of death constructed entirely from wishes, with no authority behind it and no capacity to bear weight.

Each of these has a certain kindness about it, and each of them collapses at the graveside of a child. That is where you discover whether a view of death is true or only comforting.

Death is an enemy

Scripture does not domesticate death. It calls it the last enemy to be destroyed. Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus was deeply moved and troubled, and the Greek suggests something closer to anger than to gentle sadness. He wept, though he knew he was about to raise the man. That is the opposite of the calm acceptance we are told to aspire to.

Death entered the world through sin, and it is an intrusion rather than a design feature. That is why grief is not a failure of faith. It is the appropriate response to something that should not be. Christians are permitted to hate death, and I think we should be more honest about hating it.

This is the first way the Christian view of death cuts against the culture. We will not call it natural, and we will not pretend the sting is imaginary. 1 Corinthians 15:26 names it as an enemy, and Romans 5:12 traces it to the fall rather than to the way things always were.

Death is a defeated enemy

Then comes the turn that has no parallel anywhere else. The enemy has been met and beaten. Jesus died and rose, not as a resuscitated corpse who would die again, but as the firstfruits of a new order. Because he lives, death for the believer has become a departure rather than a destruction.

Paul can therefore taunt it. Where is your victory, where is your sting. That is not the tone of a man philosophically reconciled to mortality. It is the tone of someone whose side has won, and it is available to any believer who grasps what happened on Easter morning.

So the Christian view of death holds both things at once. It is terrible and it is beaten. Most errors in this area come from dropping one of the two. Drop the first and you get sentimentality. Drop the second and you get despair with a hymn tune.

Death is not the end of the person

The secular view of death has no room for the person continuing, and the sentimental view has the person continuing in an undefined haze. Scripture is more definite. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. The thief was told that today he would be with Jesus in paradise.

That state, between death and resurrection, is real but temporary. The Christian hope is not disembodied survival, which was the Greek hope, but bodily resurrection. We are not aiming at becoming spirits. We are waiting for bodies that cannot die. I have written on this in the intermediate state and in what happens to the believer at the moment of death.

This is worth pressing, because a great deal of popular Christian talk at funerals is functionally Greek. Heaven is described as an escape from the body rather than as a waiting room before the body is restored to us in glory.

Death is a judgement, and that is not optional

Here the Christian view of death parts company with everything comfortable. It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement. That single sentence rules out reincarnation, annihilation and the assumption that everyone drifts to the same soft destination.

I am aware that this is the least popular thing in the article, and I am not going to soften it, because removing it would leave the gospel with nothing to save anyone from. The reason the resurrection of Jesus is good news is that there was bad news to answer. You can read where that leads in what hell is.

What I would say pastorally is that this truth is not a weapon to be swung at grieving people. It is a reason to speak to the living while they are living, and to speak with tears rather than relish.

How a Christian view of death looks in practice

You can usually tell which view of death someone actually holds by watching them in a hospital corridor rather than by asking them. The secular view produces either avoidance or a determined brightness that exhausts everyone. The Christian view of death, where it is genuinely held, produces people who can sit still in the room.

It also produces a peculiar freedom about one’s own dying. Christians have historically been noticeable for being willing to nurse in plagues and to die badly for good reasons, and it was never because they thought death was nothing. It was because they thought it was not final.

And it produces honest funerals, where the loss is named as loss and the hope is named as hope, and neither swallows the other. That is the tone I aim for every time I take one, and it is the tone the New Testament models when it says we do not grieve as those who have no hope. Note that it does not say we do not grieve.

Where believers absorb the culture

I would gently name three places where I hear the secular view of death on Christian lips. The first is the language of the departed watching over us, which Scripture never teaches and which quietly replaces the presence of God with the presence of granny. The second is the assumption that everyone who has died is in a better place, which cannot be squared with anything Jesus said.

The third is the avoidance itself. Churches that never speak about dying leave their people to face it with whatever the culture supplied, which is usually denial dressed in soft furnishings. We can do better, and it costs us nothing but a little courage in the pulpit.

None of this is a reason to be harsh with a grieving family who reach for the wrong words. It is a reason to teach the right ones long before the words are needed. I have written on that groundwork in how doctrine helps in times of suffering.

Sleep, and why the New Testament uses it

One small detail illuminates the whole Christian view of death. The New Testament repeatedly describes dead believers as asleep, using the verb koimao, from which we get the word cemetery, meaning a sleeping place. Stephen, stoned to death, is said to have fallen asleep.

The word is not a denial of the reality of death, since the same writers speak plainly of dying. It is a comment on how death now looks from the far side of Easter. Sleep is temporary, it ends in waking, and the sleeper is still there. That is a compact statement of the whole Christian view of death.

Notice that the metaphor is applied to believers rather than to everybody. The New Testament is not sentimental about universal outcomes. But for those in Jesus, 1 Thessalonians 4:14 promises that God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep, and the promise is about a morning rather than about a peaceful night.

So, now what?

So what do you do with a view of death like this? For one thing, stop pretending. If you have been avoiding the subject, let it into your thinking while you are well, because the day will come when it arrives uninvited and you will want to have thought about it already.

For another, examine which script you are actually running. When you comfort someone, do you reach for Scripture or for the robin in the garden? The second is easier and it will not hold anybody up for long.

And if death frightens you, you are in good company. It frightened the disciples too, right up until the morning they found the stone rolled away. Take that seriously, and then ask yourself what it would mean to live as though it were true.

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 (ESV)