McCullough Remember Death

The Surprising Path to Living Hope
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 979-8-8749-0817-1
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

The Best Way to Find Meaning in Life Is to Get Honest About Death Life expectancy worldwide is twice what it was a hundred years ago. And because of modern medicine, many of us don't often see death up close. That makes it easy to live as if death is someone else's problem. Ignoring the certainty of death doesn't protect us from feeling its effects throughout the lives we're living now-but it does hold us back from experiencing the powerful, everyday relevance of Jesus's promises to us. So long as death remains remote and unreal, Jesus's promises will too. But honesty about death brings hope to life. That's the ironic claim at the heart of this book. Cultivating death awareness helps us bring the promises of Jesus from the hazy clouds of some other world into the everyday realities of our world, where they belong. - Insightful and Accessible: Draws from many sources, including research from science and psychology, and examples from literature, pop culture, theology, and Scripture - Christ-Centered Encouragement for Life and Loss: Teaching what the Bible says about identity, futility, and grief, McCullough offers hope that is tied to the promises of God - Replaces ISBN 978-1-4335-6053-8

Matthew McCullough (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is the pastor of Edgefield Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mccullough, Matthew

Leseproben

1

Where Is Thy Sting?

Compared with most of us these days, seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal was obsessed with death. In his Pensées Pascal offers one of the most disturbing images of the human condition I’ve ever read:

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.1

That’s dark, isn’t it? Try for a moment to imagine yourself in Pascal’s nightmare. You’re one of a line of prisoners condemned to die by firing squad, one at a time. You hear the captain’s call: Ready. Aim. Fire. You hear the sound of the shots. You hear a body fall to the ground. Then you hear it all over again, only this time a little closer. One by one the others before you in line are killed. And you know in every one of their deaths your own is foreshadowed. You are implicated in what is happening to them. Each death implies your own.

This is how Pascal views all of life. He is the condemned man on death row. Every death he sees around him forecasts his own. It’s a sign of what will happen to him, a reminder that his turn is coming. And all he can do is wait.

Pascal lived with a sense of solidarity with the dying that is mostly unknown to many of us. Of course, we know that people die, even people close to us. But I wonder how often you see your own death foreshadowed in the death of someone else.

There are many people, of course, whose circumstances don’t allow the space necessary to avoid the reality of death. Perhaps you’re a physician or a hospice nurse. Perhaps you serve in the military or in law enforcement. Perhaps you belong to a majority-world nation or live in a disadvantaged community in the West, where life expectancy is lower than average.2 You may have lost a spouse or a child. You may live even now with a terminal illness. To whatever extent you belong in a group like these, Pascal’s perspective may not seem unfamiliar.

But for most people living in a modern Western context, Pascal’s personal, regular engagement with death feels foreign. Perhaps Pascal’s way of thinking strikes you as unstable, unhealthy, even dangerous. But before the past century Pascal’s outlook was far more typical than ours. And the reality Pascal imagined hasn’t changed at all. Every one of us lives with a death sentence we cannot escape. We’re still waiting our turn. We’re simply less honest about the facts. Most of us no longer see what he saw.

Before we move to the problem of death and how it exposes the beauty of Jesus, we need to consider how and why so many of us have stopped paying attention to death in the first place. I want to highlight four ways we often deny death in our culture, and then ask why we’re avoiding the truth.

From Home to Hospital: Where We Die Now

In 1993, a Yale surgeon and professor of medicine named Sherwin Nuland published an award-winning bestseller called How We Die.3 The point of the book was to introduce unfamiliar readers to what Nuland calls “the method of modern dying”—what death typically looks like in modern-day America.4 Each of the book’s chapters takes up one of the six most common causes of death, causes like cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer’s. Nuland describes the pattern of decline you can expect with each pathway and what you can do to prepare.

What is most striking to me, however, is the sheer fact that this book was necessary. In our culture, death is foreign. The book reads like a travel guide to a place you’ve never been. A good guide book tells you where to eat if you want to avoid the tourist traps. It tells you which sites are worth your time and money and which are overrated. It explains how to navigate transportation options, which neighborhoods have the best hotels, and how much you should expect to pay for what you’ll need. You need all this from a travel guide because you haven’t been to the city before. It’s a stand-in for actual experience.

Nuland’s book is necessary because for most of us, for most of our lives, death is a foreign country. It belongs to another world. It’s not just a place we’ve never been. It’s a process we’ve rarely witnessed. And above all it’s a reality we don’t often consider. This makes our time and place different from any other time in history and most other places in the world. And Nuland’s book points to the first major reason death has been shoved out of our consciousness: the incredible accomplishments of modern medicine. Over the last century medicine has made our lives longer and far more comfortable, but it has also carved out space for us to live as if we’re not going to die.

A little historical context helps us see how unique our experience really is. Three hundred years ago it was impossible to avoid death, because death was everywhere. “Death dwelt within the family,” as one historian put it.5 It happened within the walls of every home. And it happened not only to your grandparents. It happened to your daddy. It happened to your little brother. It happened to your new bride. It happened to your children.

Imagine, for example, that you lived in Andover, Massachusetts, during the late 1600s. The average married couple in those years would give birth to roughly nine children. But three of the nine children would die before they were twenty-one years old. That is one of three on average. For some families the reality was far worse.6

Take the family of New England minister Cotton Mather, one of the most prominent citizens of his time. Mather was the father of fourteen children. Seven of his children died as infants soon after they were born. Another child died at two years old. Of the six children who survived to adulthood, five died in their twenties. Only one child outlived his father. Mather enjoyed all the medical advantages available to anyone in his time. He could afford the finest care money could buy. And he buried thirteen of his children.7

When you got married, in other words, you expected that you would have to bury your children. When you got pregnant, you knew there was a good chance you would not survive childbirth. When your children got a fever, you weren’t annoyed that they would have to miss school; you were worried they might not recover at all, and that whatever they had could mean death for everyone else in your family.8

The rise of modern medicine has had radical implications for the presence of death in our lives, most of them wonderful. Death in childbirth for mothers and for infants has drastically declined in the West. So has the occurrence of epidemics like smallpox or yellow fever. At the end of the eighteenth century, four out of five people died before the age of seventy. Average life expectancy was in the late thirties.9 Now the average is nearly eighty years old.10

And we’re not just living longer. We’re also living better. The aches and pains earlier generations had to live with are now erased or at least covered up by new drugs, new surgical procedures, and always-developing technologies. We have drugs to attack everything from cancer cells to routine headaches. We have outpatient surgeries to relieve back pain from a herniated disk, knee pain from a torn meniscus, or cloudy vision from a cataract. These are problems our great-great-grandparents would have accepted as a normal part of life. Now doctors are remarkably good at solving them.

But all these medical marvels have come to us with a profound, often unnoticed side effect. The reality of death has been pushed to the margins of our experience. Every one of us still dies, but many of us don’t have to think much about it.

In Being Mortal, surgeon Atul Gawande describes some of the effects of medicine on what he calls the “modern experience of mortality.”11 Gawande’s book reflects on how medicine shapes the way we think about, confront, and ultimately experience death.

Consider, for example, that by the 1980s just 17 percent of deaths occurred in the home. In previous centuries, death happened where life happened. Death by disease was often a slow, agonizing process without the help of pain-controlling medication. This happened to someone you loved, perhaps in the room where you slept, in a place where you would see the agony and hear the moans or the screams. There was no isolating the young from the harsh reality of death. Now the experience of death has shifted from a familiar event in a familiar place—an event that occurred at the center of life—to sanitized, professionalized institutions that most people rarely visit. In the modern era, more often than not, our final days “are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in...