Framing God's Story: Fear of Death Enslaves Humanity

Continuing on the theme of reframing the story of God and His creation with the frame of the fear of death as humanity's fundamental predicament rather than of sin, I'll share some ways in which we humans are "held in slavery by their fear of death" (Heb. 2:14,15), according to Richard Beck. (For previous posts, go here and here.)

One way we manifest our bondage to the fear of death is in our denial of death which we do by attempting to remove signs of it in our everyday life. Arthur McGill says of the American lifestyle: "All traces of weakness, debility, ugliness and helplessness must be kept away from every part of a person's life..." Beck adds that "we are happy to help others but are loathe in this culture of death to ask for help...Beyond maintaining personal appearances, the culture of death avoidance demands that reminders of death, disability, age, failure, and weakness be removed from public view...In contemporary American culture our slavery to the fear of death produces superficial consumerism, a fetish for managing appearances, inauthentic relationships, triumphalistic religion, and the eclipse of personal and societal empathy."

Another manifestation of our enslavement to fear is our participation in cultural hero systems. All cultures have their hero system which defines success for those living in it. We all want to "make our mark" by creating or being part of something that is 'lasting.' "For example, my life is deemed meaningful because my children outlive me, or I wrote a book, or I helped the company have its best quarter of the year. Child, book, and company are all forms of 'immortality', ways to continue living into the future in an effort to 'defeat' death."

For the hero system to give a sense of permanence and security in the face of death, it must be experienced as absolute, eternal, transcendent and ultimate. When someone comes along who has different values, everything that has contributed towards my sense of significance and security in the face of death is threatened. This gives rise to demonizing (marginalizing and dehumanizing) the "other", the outsider.

Finally, Beck shows how our fear of death pressures us to attach ourselves in idolatrous relationships with institutions (including  Christian institutions). Beck quotes William Stringfellow who says that the contemporary equivalent to the biblical language of "powers, virtues, thrones, authorities, dominions, demons, princes, strongholds, lords, angels, gods, elements, spirit..." are realities such as "all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols..." These entities exert a moral force in our lives in the form of demanding our service and allegiance and loyalty, and we willingly yield to this, finding ourselves in rivalry with those inside our organization and in competition with other institutions who may be a threat to our success.

Stringfellow explains why the temptation to yield to this moral force is so great: "Make work your monument, make it the reason for your life, and you will survive your death in some way...Work is the common means by which (people) seek and hope to justify their existence while they are alive and to sustain their existence, in a fashion, after they die."

The irony of giving our allegiance to these powers (be they institutions, nations, movements, etc) is that they too are mortal, and self-preservation is at the heart of their existence, meaning that to surrender ourselves to them is a form of worship of something mortal rather than worship of the eternal God. All of this can happen in the name of God as can clearly be seen in the religious and political systems of Jesus' day (and ours).

Next week I will conclude this series about framing God's story differently by sharing how the slavery to fear of death is broken in our everyday walk in God.