The Slavery of Death

by Richard Beck

Throughout the New Testament sin, death, and the devil are at times described as almost interchangeable forces, three facets of an ontological unity—a sort of unholy Trinity.

Consequently, if we are to have a full biblical understanding concerning the work of Jesus—the work he accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection—we must pay attention to texts like 1 John 3:8: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.” What is this “work of the devil”? And how was it destroyed? Most Protestants tend to reduce the role of Satan to that of tempter, and undeniably that is a part of the picture. But the New Testament also describes Satan as holding the power of death.

The Bible presents us with a dense and complex causal matrix in which sin, death, and the devil all mutually interact. Consequently, an exclusive focus on sin tends to oversimplify the dynamics of our moral struggles. I argue that a fuller analysis is critical as it will present us with a clearer picture of Christian virtue—love in particular. By exposing the dynamics of “the devil’s work” in our lives, works produced by a “slavery to the fear of death,” we will be better positioned to resist the satanic influences in our lives, better equipped to do battle with the principalities and powers of darkness, and better able to love as Christ loved us.

The power of death that the devil wields is characterized here as a slavery to the fear of death. It is not death per se that gives the devil power. It is, rather, the fear of death. It is this fear that creates the satanic influence, a fear that tempts us into sinful practices and lifestyles, a fear that keeps us demonically “possessed” in our idolatrous service to the principalities and powers.

Salvation, then, involves liberation from this fear. Salvation is emancipation for those who have been enslaved all of their lives by the fear of death. Salvation is a deliverance that sets us free from this power of the devil. What might be the sign of this liberation? In the biblical imagination the antithesis of fear is love. Freedom from the fear of death makes love possible.

Where we find fear and death on one side, we find love and resurrection on the other.

While there is a great deal of theological literature to consult regarding Orthodox or Christus Victor theology, there is precious little work from theologians on how death anxiety produces “the works of the devil.” There is, however, a great deal of psychological literature—both empirical and theoretical—that has connected death anxiety with a variety of unhealthy outcomes—psychological, social, and moral. This psychological research holds great potential for unpacking what the Bible describes as “slavery to the fear of death.”

The book brings modern psychological science into conversation with Orthodox theology to illuminate what the writer of Hebrews describes as “slavery to the fear of death.” Phrased positively, the book is a psychological and theological analysis of “perfect love” and why it must “cast out fear.”

This book is written in the hope that if the dynamics of this slavery are exposed and the deep roots of our sinful practices brought into the light, we might be better able to “cast out fear” in the name of love. But what makes this so hard, as we will come to see, is that our slavery to the fear of death is often so deep, hidden, and repressed that at times it can be impossible to detect our bondage.

How, exactly, might I be enslaved to the fear of death in my day-to-day experiences and interactions with others? And how might this slavery cause me to behave sinfully?

The central contention of this book is that death, not sin, is the primary predicament of the human condition. Death is the cause of sin. More properly, the fear of death produces most of the sin in our lives.

No doubt that in the Genesis story a primal disobedience precedes the introduction of death into the world. In that account, sin comes first and results in death—this much seems clear. But the issue we must consider as we go forward is this: how much of our current situation can be modeled on the story of the primal sin? To cut to the chase, we’re not in Eden anymore. Unlike Adam and Eve, we are born into a mortal state, subject to death from the moment of conception. Before our moral lives begin—before we sin—we are born into a death-saturated existence. Unlike Adam and Eve, death predates us.

In many ways the doctrine of original sin preserves and recapitulates the primal ordering of sin and death in the biography of every person. Since each of us is “born in sin,” sin remains the primary predicament, the prime mover and original cause, just as it was with Adam and Eve.

the Eastern Orthodox tradition does not endorse the Western notion of original sin, but rather espouses a view called ancestral sin. Where original sin sees sin as producing death, ancestral sin tends to flip this sequence and place most of the emphasis upon the power of death.

We should note that Wisdom, as a deuterocanonical book, informs the imaginations of the Orthodox and Catholic traditions but is relatively unknown to many Protestants. And what we find in Wisdom, returning to Genesis 3, is less a description of a “fall from moral perfection” than a story about the etiology of death. To be sure, human disobedience is a part of this story. But the main impulse of the story, given how the Orthodox follow the framing given in texts like those in Wisdom, is less about how the world became infected by sin than how it became infected by death. And looking at the Genesis 3 narrative, we see that the root cause of death isn’t sin, as the devil/serpent actually predates sin. It’s the “envy of the devil” that introduces sin and death into the world.

Genesis 3 might be less interested in explaining why humans are “depraved” than it is in explaining why we die. We do inherit a predicament from the Primal Couple, but what we inherit isn’t a moral stain. Rather, we inherit the world they have left us. We are exiles from Eden.

the simple take-home point of Genesis 3 is this: our bodies, and all of the created order, are infected with death and subject to death. The story, instead of emphasizing a congenital moral defect, tries to explain the view out of our present windows. “Look around you,” the text encourages. “This isn’t Eden. Death is here.”

If Genesis 3 is a story about the etiology of death, making death the primary predicament in our post-Eden condition, how does death relate to human sinfulness? Again, as we’ve seen in the account above, sin, death, and the devil are deeply intertwined. So the issue here isn’t to displace the importance or role of sin in bringing about death, but to embed our understandings of human moral failure within a richer theological matrix.

Rather than original sin—a moral depravity and incapacity passed on from generation to generation—we have a death-infected world created by a primal act of disobedience. Thus the Orthodox don’t speak of original sin but of an ancestral sin, a primal event where death was introduced into the world. The condition we inherit from Adam and Eve is less moral than mortal.

This isn’t to say that the Orthodox marginalize the power and ubiquity of sin in our lives. But the frame here has shifted in an interesting way. As mortal creatures, separated from God’s vivifying Spirit, humans are fearful and survival-driven animals, easily drawn into sinful and selfish practices. Because we are mortal and driven by self-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.

We are mortal. We don’t escape our bodies (soma) at the resurrection. Rather, our bodies shed sarx—their vulnerability to death—as the “mortal takes on immortality.”

Where Western Christianity has tended to interpret sarx as a depraved and congenital “sin nature,” the Orthodox see sarx as mortality—our corruptibility and perishability in the face of death. And it’s this vulnerability, Paul explains, that makes us susceptible to sin. The idea here is that we are less wicked than we are weak. As sarx—as mortal animals—we are playthings of the devil, who uses the fear of death to push and pull our survival instincts (our fleshly, sarx-driven passions) to keep us as “slaves to sin.”

The fear of death creates the experience of the satanic in our lives. In all this we again note the close and intimate association between sin, death, and the devil. But the links here are not mysterious, mystical, mythical, or metaphysical. The psychology at work here is clear, simple, and widely attested to.

As Chrysostom argues, the one who does not fear death is outside the tyranny of the devil. The reason he gives is clear: the fear of death gives the devil moral traction. When we face the threat of loss, want, or lack, we react defensively, even violently. But if the fear of death is absent the devil is stymied. As Chrysostom says, when the devil finds such a soul he can accomplish none of his works in such a person.

While I predominantly use the language of the devil/Satan as shorthand for moral disapprobation, I do think these terms are useful in describing distributed and suprahuman moral forces and influences. Satan might not be a personalized agent, but I do believe there are moral forces that transcend individuals, forces that have a real causal effect on moral decision-making.

From Wright’s analysis we can see at least two benefits of retaining language that points to spiritual forces at work in human affairs. First, such language points to suprahuman forces—what the Bible refers to as “the principalities and powers”—that are difficult to reduce to isolated moral agents. And yet, because these spiritual forces have real causal effects upon human affairs, we need to reckon with them in some way. But why must we use the word spiritual to describe the forces? We’ll address that issue more thoroughly in chapter 4, but for now suffice it to say that these forces are difficult to locate in any material way, and they tend to exert their moral influence within the realm of human subjective experience—our hearts, minds, and spirits. A second reason to use this language, as Wright points out, is that it helps us shift the moral conversation to a plane where we are less prone to victimize and demonize each other.

In acknowledging these powerful forces, we can increase our empathy for others and help focus our efforts on changing the political, economic, and cultural institutions that embody systemic evil.

To be set free from the slavery to the fear of death is to be liberated from self-interest in the act of genuine love. Thus the sign of Christ’s victory in our lives over sin, death, and the devil is the experience and expression of love. This is resurrection and life.

Over a hundred yeas ago the leading causes of death were communicable diseases and infections, but today, in the industrialized world, the leading causes of death are degenerative diseases of old age like heart disease and cancer. This shift has profoundly altered our experience of death. Basically, we’ve come to expect to live to a ripe old age. Given this expectation, when death comes sooner we experience a radical disruption, as if something has gone wrong. Despite the fact that we know we are biological creatures and that death is inevitable, death comes as a shock to us, whereas it rarely, if ever, shocked our forebears.

It’s also important to note that American religion plays a part in supporting the cultural illusion. Vast portions of American Christianity are aimed at propping up the illusion, giving religious sanction to American death avoidance. We see this in the triumphalism within many sectors of Christianity—the almost manic optimism of church culture that cannot admit any hint of debility, disease, death, or decay.

These churches are filled with smiling cheerful people who respond with “Fine!” to any inquiry regarding their social, financial, emotional, physical, or spiritual well-being. Due to many churches’ explicit and implicit religious sanctioning of the American success ethos, church members become too afraid to show each other their weakness, brokenness, failure, and vulnerability. Such admissions are avoided, as they threaten to expose the neurotic lie that sits at the heart of Christian culture and American society—that death doesn’t exist.

McGill’s argument is that what we tend to call “success” in American culture is often a neurotic delusion, a defense mechanism we use to deny the reality of death, both in our lives and the lives of others. The cultural expectation to be “fine” is at root an ethic of death avoidance:

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. These are the “works of the devil” in our lives, works produced by our slavery to the fear of death.

What does it mean to say that we are enslaved—all our lives—to the fear of death? Becker helps us see this slavery, suggesting that our sense of life meaning and self-esteem, the very bedrock of our identities, are actually forms of death denial, an existential defense mechanism, an illusion to help us avoid the full force of our existential predicament.

Our identity is a lie because it is a fundamental dishonesty, in the moment, about our true existential situation. This lie obscures the fact that our self-esteem is borrowed, that it rests upon a cultural hero system. More, the lie hides the fact that our self-esteem is fundamentally a form of idolatry, a service rendered to the cultural hero system—what the Bible calls a principality and power. But this dishonesty is vital in that it is necessary in order for the human animal to continue on in the face of death. Again, the existential burden that death places upon us is impossible to carry. Consequently, culture steps in to lighten our load, largely through repression and sublimation. As we’ve discussed, cultural heroics provide us with routes of identity formation.

we arrive at a startling, radical, and destabilizing conclusion: we are enslaved to the fear of death because the basis of our identities—all the ways we define ourselves and make meaning with our lives—is revealed to be an illusion, a lie, an obfuscation, a neurotic defense mechanism involved in death repression. Death saturates every aspect of our personhood.

in order to fully and completely confront our slavery to the fear of death, we must “die” to our entire identity as it is currently configured. Moreover, we must “die” to the overarching cultural hero system, the way everyone around us makes meaning and defines success and significance. And that is a terrifying prospect. This is a renunciation on a grand scale where the “old man” (a death-saturated identity producing sinful attitudes and behaviors) is “buried” so that a “new creation” (an identity rooted in Christ) can be raised to take its place.

Becker follows Freud in suggesting that it’s our neurotic anxiety that makes us human and provides the fuel for all our creative cultural output.38 Like self-interest in capitalism, the hero system enables something unsavory—a desire for significance in the face of death—to be harnessed and channeled into something useful and creative.

also produces violence, then there is no escape. Neurotic anxiety builds our sense of identity as we pursue self-esteem and meaning in the face of death, which means that if neurotic anxiety is linked to violence, then violence is an intrinsic feature of our identity. In other words, violence is not triggered only by external causes, during times of lack and scarcity. Violence also bubbles up from within.

Basically, for a hero system to “work,” for it to give us a sense of security and permanence in the face of death, we need to experience it as absolute, unassailable, true, eternal, transcendent, and ultimate. This belief is threatened when we come into contact with cultural outsiders who espouse different values. The existence of other ways of life, other values, and other paths by which to pursue significance threaten to relativize our culture’s unique values. That is, we find in our encounter with cultural outsiders that our “way of life” is just one among many in the marketplace of worldviews. This discovery shakes our confidence that our particular worldview is both true and eternal. If there are many hero systems, how can we be sure that our culture’s specific system is durable and eternal in the face of death? If our cultural lifeways are revealed to be arbitrary and relative, then their function as existential lifeboats—as cultural containers of immortality that we can pour our lives into—is radically compromised. In short, alternative hero systems—other values, worldviews, and ways of life—threaten to undo everything that has made our lives feel significant, meaningful, and secure in the face of death. The ideological Other—usually some out-group member who has different values and beliefs from our own—presents us with an implicit critique of our personal hero system. This threatens us to the core, attacks the very source of our self-esteem. This means that the id...

Outgroup members represent, on the edges of our awareness, a dissenting voice that suggests that the way we’ve constructed our identities and the criteria we’ve used to manage our self-esteem are not eternal and transcendent but are instead arbitrary human fictions.

in order to protect the worldview that gives our life grounding and significance, we are driven to victimize out-group members and persecute those who are different.

Worldviews, because of the ways in which they ground our being in the face of death, lead us to kill. And even at their mildest, worldviews cause us to marginalize and exclude out-group members—the beginnings of the slow process of dehumanization and demonization.

in order to feel significant in the face of death we engage in cultural heroics. More often than not we achieve these heroics, this sense of meaning and significance, by serving various institutions or ideologies in our world—what the Bible calls the “principalities and powers.”

Institutions fail and nations fall. It’s only a matter of time. We must remember that service to an institution, even when the soaring rhetoric of its mission statement suggests otherwise, provides no real protection from death.

narrow and reductionistic focus on individuals fails to recognize the powers that operate in a more distributed fashion across time (often over the course of many human life spans) but that still exert a real causal influence on smaller scales.

the biblical language of the principalities and powers provides us with the skills of macroscopic moral description, allowing us to examine the moral forces within human affairs that can’t be named by examining the behaviors and choices of isolated individuals.

Beyond artifacts (e.g., mission statements, policy and procedure manuals, founding documents), the spirituality of an institution is encoded across a variety of practices, beliefs, attitudes, habits, values, expectations, norms, and traditions. We become “possessed” by the principality and power when we internalize the spirituality of the system and the practices, beliefs, attitudes, habits, values, expectations, norms, and traditions of the system become the sources we use to form our own identity.

It’s not just that the powers push us around from the outside with demands, deadlines, and expectations. The powers also affect (and infect) us from the inside. A focus on service—how we work and make sacrifices for the institution—tends to miss how we often internalize the spirituality of the institution, how our identity becomes formed by and fused with the institution. A focus on service and work (though important) tends to be too behavioral in nature to capture how the institution gets inside us, inhabiting our hearts and minds and affecting how we see ourselves, others, and the world around us. As we explored above, we allow this to happen because we think that the durability of the institution makes it an existential lifeboat, a repository for our lives that will carry forward into the future long after we are gone. The allure of the principality and power is that it can do something that we cannot, namely, outlast death. But as we noted, this is an illusion. Every institution, organization, and nation—every principality and power—plays the same game that we play, the game of survival and self-preservation.

The death-driven spirituality of self-interest and self-preservation remains at the heart of it all. Yes, the principalities and powers offer us a route to success, self-esteem, and significance in exchange for a life of service. But this service is revealed to be idolatrous—a service rendered to death and aimed only at helping the institution survive. Personal self-preservation is simply being exchanged for institutional self-preservation.