The Slavery of Death

by Richard Beck

preservation, our survival instincts make us tragically vulnerable to death anxiety—the desire to preserve our own existence above all else and at all costs. And as we’ve seen in Hebrews 2:14–15, Satan uses this fear to enslave us, to keep us rooted in disobedience and continually separated from God. Salvation, in this view, becomes about breaking this cycle—the tragic feedback loop of the human condition—in which sin produces death and death makes us vulnerable to sin. Theologian S. Mark Heim summarizes the Orthodox view; removed from Eden, we are unourished by the divine energy, [and] our existence fades into subjection to corruption and death. In such a state, our mortality becomes a source of anxiety. Futile attempts to defend ourselves from it lead us into active sin and estrange us from trust in God. Now sinfulness is more a result of mortality than mortality from sinfulness. To say that humans are “conceived in sin” does not mean that some guilt or evil inclination is passed on to them in the act of their conception, but that what they inherit is a mortal human nature, which became mortal as a result of sin.