[image: Death, 2013, JA Van Devender]
Location: Peggy's Cove, NS, CA
1 Timothy 5:6 (NKJV)
6 But she who lives in pleasure is dead while she lives.
Ernest Becker's very important book, The Denial of Death, is well worth reading though it is not written from a distinctly Christian perspective at all. A cultural anthropologist he was very controversial in his day and continues to be though not as violently opposed now as before. In this book his discussion of Freudian views and Kierkegaarde is among the best I have seen and have significantly improved my own understanding of those thinkers. But it is his primary thesis, that most of us live lives of denial... constructing and half-believing lies that comfort us and keep us from facing the awful reality of our own "creatureliness" and mortality... that most commends this book.
Becker sees man as facing a terrifying existential delimma. He is a "self" who is aware of his own "animality." Human beings, early on, come to a "self"-understanding that in someway communicates to them that they are something more than a physical being that has many sordid characteristics (Becker speaks here of bathroom and bedroom stuff). However this "self"-understanding is in contrast and conflict with this physical reality. They believe they are "more" than physical... and that there is a "nobility" to the "self" that is in contrast to the "common" reality of their bodies. Thus they suppress those common things through dress and manners and cultural performance. This creates a neurotic or dualistic conflict in them that is not truly faced but rather simply suppressed or ignored.
But men also, not early on, but at some point begin to be aware that they are, by that very animal nature, in a terminal state. They are not only subject to death but in fact will die. Thus the "noble" thing that constitutes their "worth" is subject to the "common" thing that is their animal nature. This is simply too horrible to contemplate for most people. Rather than face this reality they avoid it at all costs, manufacturing ideas of "worth" and "purpose" and "significance" that gives them some hope of control over their lives and even some semblance of immortality. This is the "existential" crises that Kierkegaarde defines so clearly and which so undermines common man's desperate strivings.
Man lives in denial of death for it is the proof of his own ultimate insignificance and, plainly speaking, makes man the most miserable and pitiable of all creatures: for he is condemned to know his own insignificance and futility. This is the existential crises that he strives with all his might to avoid.
Becker, following Kierkegaarde, argues that man must face this crisis though. He must come to grips with his own mortality before he can "relax" into his true potential. He must die to the delusion and embrace the reality. Becker correctly says that the only way he can do this is through some transcendent perspective that gives him a foundation to do this and, of course, Kierkegaarde roots this in the Christian world view centered on God in Christ.
No matter how much or little that any of us agree with Becker in his precise formulations, there is no doubt that the reality of death and our own mortality is something that most of us seek to avoid thinking about at virtually all costs. In the passage above, Paul speaks of widows given over to sensual indulgence as being "dead while she lives". She is living a lie thinking she is "truly living" when all she is doing is running full speed from her own mortality, seeking at all costs to suppress it in unrighteousness.
The sentence of death, the curse of death, is the one constant in all empirical, measurable reality, yet it's supremacy in the world of experience is the most denied of all truths. Man concocts all kinds of idols, sciences, cultural props, to convince himself that man is somehow beyond it in essence... that it is not ultimately supreme but is only one more obstacle to overcome... and, while there is yet breath, he individually might overcome it somehow.
Only through the lens of Christ can we see hope for this situation. The existential crisis is the true ground on which man's ultimate humanity can be sought. For it is only in dying to self, giving up any hope or pretense of self-capacity to overcome death and throwing oneself on the mercy of the God Who must exist, Who alone must be able to answer death, that freedom to live a truly mortal and yet significant life can be found. In contrast to the Existentialist despair, Christians have Existential hope, for that hope is grounded on the historical fact that one Man died and then took back His own life... He rose again from the dead not through the means of another but of His own will and power. Death has been conquered and no longer reigns as supreme.
Thus "faith" in the resurrection, not as another mental gambit hypocritically put on as a means of "not thinking about death", but as a result of facing our own mortality... clearly and without blinking... becomes, interestingly enough, the door through which our conflict ceases and we have peace.
We must "die" in order to "live." We must die to self, die to the idea that somehow we are "better" than death and that we do not "deserve" to die, before we can learn what it means to be truly alive.
Thank God ... that is exactly what He has rendered not only possible but present in Jesus Christ.
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