Professor says Christians often lose sight of death as God intended

The American obsession with avoiding death robs Christians of the ability to accept death as God intended it, theologian Stanley Hauerwas told a Hardin-Simmons University audience.

Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at the Duke University Divinity School, delivered the first T.B. Maston Christian Ethics Lectures at HSU’s Logsdon School of Theology in Abilene, Texas, April 9–10.

Hauerwas explored how American cultural ideals separate Christians from historic Christian understandings of church as community. Americans want to avoid death to the degree that death-deferral has become the principal focus of medicine, Hauerwas said.

“We go to physicians to be cured, not to be cared for,” he noted. “In the past, doctors did not treat illnesses; they treated patients.”

But now, money spent on crisis-care medicine equals 14 percent to 16 percent of the U.S. gross national product, and 12 percent of that amount is spent on people in the last year of their lives, he said. Consequently, medicine has become a religion of the people, he observed, citing the disparity between emphasis on trained physicians and ministers.

“No one believes an inadequately trained minister will harm their salvation,” he illustrated. 

“But they believe an inadequately trained physician will harm their health. “Look at it that way, and you see where their church is. They believe medicine will cure them.”

Hauerwas said Americans, and Christian Americans in particular, are limited by their focus on avoiding death. “The problem is we don’t know how to die. Our culture denies death,” he said.

“Dying requires training, and we have a dearth of examples,” Hauerwas added. “Now, you’ve got to keep yourself alive. To what point?

“We can only die today when a physician gives us permission to die  — when the doctor says there is nothing more to do,” he said.

He said Christians ought to view death differently from popular culture.

“I do not propose that we can die more easily because we are Christian and expect an afterlife,” Hauerwas said. “We Christians rob ourselves with sentimentality about death and afterlife.

“To suggest ‘hope for the future’ as a reason for accepting death makes about as much sense as having children because they are our ‘hope for the future,’ ” he continued.

Hauerwas called such self-serving wishing sinful. “Only God is our hope for the future.”

Rather than avoidance of death, “Christianity is ongoing training to die early,” Hauerwas insisted. (ABP)