The Slavery of Death
Rate it:
Read between November 15 - November 21, 2022
45%
Flag icon
Corporations die. Nations die. Ideologies die. Death survives them all. Death is—apart from God—the greatest moral power in this world, outlasting and subduing all other powers no matter how marvelous they may seem for the time being. This means, theologically speaking, that the object of allegiance and servitude, the real idol secreted within all idolatries, the power above all principalities and powers—the idol of all idols—is death.
45%
Flag icon
despite the shiny, heroic, and deathless allure of the principalities and powers, we can’t escape death by serving them and sacrificing for them. Nor can we escape death by internalizing the spirituality of these powers. No matter where we turn in the world, the spirituality of death is all we will find. Death saturates our work, our worldview, our identity. Everything is held in bondage by our slavery to the fear of death.
47%
Flag icon
In affluent societies where self-preservation is not a pressing concern, we begin to worry about living a meaningful and significant life in the face of death. More specifically, in American society this anxiety tends to manifest in the American success ethos. That is, while we might not fear death on a day-to-day basis, we do fear being a failure in the eyes of others (or ourselves). But failure here is simply a neurotic manifestation of death anxiety, the fear that at the moment of death we won’t have accomplished enough to have made a permanent and lasting difference in the world.
47%
Flag icon
What I am critiquing here is when our thirst for “success” becomes a form of demonic possession, an all-consuming passion where the next achievement or conquest pushes aside concern and care for others. If we are to love each other fully, we must be able to say “no” to the principalities and powers in order to say “yes” to others.
48%
Flag icon
Sacrifice-free excellence is unavailable to us. We are not gods. This is why cultural and workplace calls for “excellence”—calls for ever escalating betterment, progress, and improvement—are really, at root, a demand for more sacrifice, for greater allegiance, service, and loyalty to the institution, organization, or nation. Of course I could do “better” in various areas of my life. I could throw in more time, energy, or resources. But if I do so, what will I have to sacrifice?
50%
Flag icon
Because our worldview is the source of our significance and self-esteem, we want to defend it from the criticisms of out-group members. Those who are different from us implicitly or explicitly call into question the things we hold most dear, the cultural values that ground and shape the contours of our identity and self-esteem in the face of death. In this, out-group members become a source of anxiety, an existential threat. To cope with the anxiety, we rush to defend our worldview and become dogmatic, fundamentalist, and ideological in regard to our values, culture, and way of life. We ...more
50%
Flag icon
How can we come to reject fear and death and embrace love and life? How do we experience the liberation of Christus Victor that empowers us to say “no” to the works of the devil and “yes” to Christ? In this and the chapters that follow I will argue that this courage comes from two places—the formation of a new sort of identity and the formation of a new sort of community.
55%
Flag icon
Anxiety is replaced by a state of relaxation. And this relaxation—grounded in the fact that the “individual now feels that he counts, that he belongs”—inoculates the ego from fear. This relaxation comes from the “awareness of being a child of God,” which stabilizes the ego and “results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power.”
59%
Flag icon
When our identities are rooted in God, we cling to nothing and thus have the psychological capacity to make sacrifices for the sake of others. Jesus interprets his cross for his disciples in this way, teaching them that it represents love and self-expenditure for the sake of others: Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:13) In other words, the cross symbolizes the Christian identity and the call to willingly “lay down our lives” for others.
59%
Flag icon
Following the example of Jesus, we become “nothing.” In a sense, we “die”—and thus we no longer have to fear dispossession, loss, diminishment, or expenditure in the face of death. Not that we seek out such losses.72 But we form our identities in such a way that we are freed from the anxiety of self-preservation, which makes different choices and modes of being human open and available to us. The creation of a secure heart makes love a possibility.
59%
Flag icon
place the interests of others before our own. This capacity is created when we become indifferent to the anxiety that arises when we begin to act lovingly, when we begin to put ourselves at the end of the line and allow others to go before us. We become indifferent to the basic anxiety attendant to acts of material sacrifice for others, as well as to the neurotic anxiety attendant when we forgo success (as our culture defines it) and place ourselves in the role of servant.
59%
Flag icon
What tends to happen when we talk about carrying the cross of Jesus is that we get distracted with heroic visions of “laying down our lives for others” and miss how all this plays out in more mundane circumstances.
60%
Flag icon
Here the martyological ideal—that Jesus Christ laid down his life for us, and thus we ought to lay down our lives—isn’t connected to something heroic but to something simple and fairly unexciting: generously sharing, caring, empathizing, and giving.
60%
Flag icon
Christian martyrdom may involve dying for the faith, this heroic ideal misses the point that martyrdom is the calling of every Christian. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”73 For Hovey, martyrdom is less about being burned at the stake on some foreign mission field than it is about the small daily acts of self-expenditure and self-donation that we make in order to love and serve others. Martyrdom, according to Hovey, is best displayed in small acts of asceticism, moments of self-denial in which I say no to the self in order to say yes to ...more
60%
Flag icon
At the end of the day, the martyrs show us that being non-anxious in the face of death frees us to make mainly small, but even large, sacrifices for others. If the martyrs are a witness to anything—martyr simply means “witness”—it is to freedom from fear in the face of death.
62%
Flag icon
Christians have a thin view of what this renunciation looks like—we tend to think of it as an act of willpower, as simply resisting cravings and temptations. This perspective is symptomatic of the Protestant focus on piety; however, the Christus Victor frame we’ve explored in earlier chapters shows that the problem is much deeper and more pervasive. Sin, in this view, is less about hedonic craving than it is about our slavery and bondage. The issue isn’t temptation as much as it is identity and how we ground our sense of self-definition and self-worth.
65%
Flag icon
This is why death in Christ brings about resurrection, the ongoing event in our lives in which death has no dominion. Our victory over death is something that happens before physical death, a victory found in the capacity to experience life in this moment, emancipated from slavery to the fear of death. Resurrection in Christ, then, becomes freedom from death’s power in daily existence.
66%
Flag icon
fearlessness is not an end in itself, but a means toward an end—love. The goal isn’t simply to be courageous, the goal is a courage for.
71%
Flag icon
In sum, our anxiety in the face of death creates either suspicion or superficiality depending upon whether our anxiety is basic or neurotic, whether we are focused on survival or self-esteem. Either way, love becomes compromised in the face of these fears. To be set free from these dynamics—to be liberated from slavery to the fear of death—we need to create a new sort of identity. As described in chapters 5 and 6, this new identity is an eccentric identity, one received as gift rather than owned as a possession. Such an identity allows us to engage in acts of kenosis—letting go of the self in ...more
74%
Flag icon
forgoing opportunities to “sell” or “promote” ourselves in the workplace and choosing, instead, to point out others’ good work often has real consequences in the business world. We like to think that good, honest work will be recognized in the long run, but that is not necessarily the case. Thus, being able to “take the lowest place” in life requires us to master the neurotic anxiety that we might get “passed over,” that we might not “get ahead” or be as “successful” as others. If we don’t master this fear we begin to anxiously push, overly asserting or promoting ourselves in an attempt to ...more
75%
Flag icon
Upon reflection, we all know this to be true. Every second spent on others is time we could have spent on the self, and any cent given to others is money that could have been spent on the self. We observe how our anxieties—our natural concerns over the well-being and preservation of the self—are heightened as the sacrifices grow larger and the impact upon the self becomes more keenly felt. In this we observe how the root dynamic—love in the face fear—is the same across the board, from the smallest acts of sacrifice to the largest acts of self-giving.
77%
Flag icon
we tend to think of possessions as material resources that can be taken away from us, and we fear this loss. Thus, we can see how gratitude can function as a potent antidote for this sort of anxiety: if we view resources as gifts that are not our own, we are much better positioned to share them with others. This dynamic—gratitude as antidote to anxiety—seems fairly straightforward.
77%
Flag icon
If we are willing to give material possessions away, are we also willing to let go of everything that makes us feel significant and worthy? Are we willing, in the words of Paul, to appear to be a “fool,” perceived as “out of our mind” in the eyes of friends, family, coworkers, and the culture?
77%
Flag icon
In biblical language, mere gratitude doesn’t address the idolatry inherent in our self-esteem projects. In fact, gratitude can become idolatrously misplaced. For example, we can start to feel grateful to and for ourselves. I feel grateful for myself being just so damn awesome.
80%
Flag icon
Prayer is that posture—in action, word, or silence—where we do not possess anything but receive our lives as gift.
84%
Flag icon
The Christian vision of love isn’t the sacrificial heroism of the lone individual, for Jesus doesn’t ask us to love the world all by ourselves. That’s not sustainable. Rather, Jesus asks us to participate in communities of love, what he calls the Kingdom of God.
90%
Flag icon
Fearing death—neurotically manifested as a fear of “failure” or being needy in American culture—we slavishly pursue “success” as it is defined by the surrounding culture. Even more troubling, we become hostile toward out-group members who call our hero system into question.
91%
Flag icon
Idolatry, then, is the slavery of God where “God” and “the church” become another manifestation of our slavery to death, another form of “the devil’s work” in our lives.
92%
Flag icon
This capacity for prophetic imagination, that God is free to be against us, is the great weapon against idolatry. Whenever and wherever the people of God lose this capacity, God becomes enslaved. When the prophetic imagination is eclipsed—when God can no longer be imagined as being against us and for those we oppress, exclude, stigmatize, marginalize, ignore, or aggress against—God is no longer free but a slave.
92%
Flag icon
In that event, with the silencing of the prophetic voice within the faith community (or those voices of critique from the outside), God is no longer God but a principality and power—a tool of the devil—leading us into sin.
92%
Flag icon
God is not a possession of the faith community—a possession that, like all possessions, can be lost or damaged and that requires protecting or defending. God is experienced eccentrically, as coming to us from outside the boundaries of the faith community. God is not owned by an individual or by the church, the nation, or any other human institution. God is not a possession of any person or community. God is always free, beyond our borders and boundaries.
93%
Flag icon
In worship God must be free to stand over “God,” the fear-based idols we have created to validate our cultural way of life, the blue ribbons of our self-esteem projects, and our stigmatization of out-group members. This is a worship so profound, a worship so deep and destabilizing, that it can stand in judgment of our worship. This is the capacity for a worship that can admit that God despises our worship.
93%
Flag icon
The radical, prophetic freedom of God is fully realized when we see the face of God in our victims and our enemies. In that moment our slavery to the fear of death is fully overcome. In that moment the sacrificial love of Christ becomes fully manifest. In that moment the Kingdom comes, on earth as it is in heaven.
95%
Flag icon
The icon in front of me is a visual representation of the Orthodox notion that our fundamental predicament is less about sin than it is about death, and that the fear of death is the tool of Satan in our lives. In the harrowing of hell icon I’m reminded that the work of Christ is to free us from the power of death and to destroy the works of the devil. To that I say, Amen and Amen.
« Prev 1 2 Next »