Explainer
Creed
Death & life
7 min read

How Christianity transformed attitudes towards death

Once we buried bodies outside cities. Then we started burying loved ones inside them. This is why.

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

Dozens of candles in cloured jars and holders litter the ground of a cemetry.
Commemorative candles at cemetery in Srebrniki, Gdańsk, Poland.
Ludomił Sawicki on Unsplash.

‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’  

Seeing things two ways at the same time doesn’t mean ambivalence. Christianity has two things to say about death, and it says both forcefully.  They particularly come to mind during November, as the season of the year when we remember the dead. In this month we get the modern secularised rituals of Hallowe’en, but we also get Remembrance Sunday, when we think of those who fell in war; and on 2 November, we have All Souls’ Day, when ‘the faithful departed’ are recalled, and in many traditions, prayed for. 

Christianity’s two entwined attitudes to death are lament and hope. On the one hand, death is a shadow; on the other, a light has dawned that will banish that shadow.  Both aspects are in that line from St Paul:  

‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’  

Death is our enemy; death is slated for destruction.  

Whatever a popular funeral poem might claim, death is not ‘nothing at all’.  That poem has been suggested a few times when I’ve been planning a funeral. It’s never stayed in the draft order of service longer than it’s taken me to ask the question ‘But do you really think that death is nothing at all?’  

Unlike our benighted predecessors, ancient and mediaeval, don’t we now understand that death is natural, just part of being the sort of creatures we are? 

I take the opposite approach to funerals. I do not treat death as ‘nothing at all’. I wear black vestments: I do not assume that mourners are ready, only a week or two into their bereavement, to skip to the bright hope of white as a liturgical colour. I make the liturgy solemn. I avoid circumlocutions like ‘he’s moved on’ or ‘she has passed’ (somehow popular at present). No: someone has died, and even if that came after a long illness or a long life, a death is a loss.  

The idea of death as enemy, though – ‘the most fearful of bodily evils’ (Thomas Aquinas) – might look out of date in the twenty-first century. Unlike our benighted predecessors, ancient and mediaeval, don’t we now understand that death is natural, just part of being the sort of creatures we are?  

It’s almost always a mistake to underestimate our forebears. They knew that we are animals, but also said that we are animals of an odd sort: we are ‘rational animals’. That left them with a conundrum (and here I continue to have Aquinas in mind). On the one hand, we are animals, and animals are mortal, so that makes death natural. On the other hand, Christianity also insists that death is a wrench, a disjunction, an affront.  

Reconciliation for this tension rests on that odd status of the human being, as a rational animal. We are animals, but also the sort of self-aware animals who are made for a relationship with God: suited for it, called to it. One model for that relationship, remarkably, has been friendship, with Moses as an example: ‘So the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.’ That sort of relationship, that sort of seeing God face to face, would confer immortality on our naturally mortal bodies (‘when we see him, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’). Thus, both parts of the conundrum are true: as animals, we are naturally mortal, yet our animality is called to a destiny beyond its nature. Our tragedy is not that we are animals, but that we are rational animals foolish enough to turn from God, and from the light of immortality.  

  

The message of the Incarnation and the hope of the resurrection turned something around for early Christians. They no longer found dead bodies frightening.

That’s the first half of our opening phrase: death is our enemy because, although mortal by nature, we were originally called to something beyond nature, but lost it. God was turned towards us, but we turned away. However, enmity, tragedy, and loss are not the whole story, and they are certainly not the end of the story. There is also death’s destruction. That’s what the life, death, and resurrection of Christ were about. If death is our enemy, then it’s a routed enemy, overcome, although not fully destroyed, until God recreates the world.  

Christians can be so excited about the prospect of death’s destruction that they forget that this destruction is still a promise, and we still live under its sway. For now, the hope and the sadness lie woven together.  That is why we read in the New Testament about ‘not grieving as others do who have no hope’. I don’t take that as a blanket injunction against grieving (death is still our enemy, after all), but as standing only against the kind of grief that has no hope (because death’s destruction is assured). Again, here are the two strands, woven together. We also see that two-sidedness in a funeral prayer used by Eastern Orthodox Christians (and at the funeral of the HM Queen Elizabeth II), the kontakion of the dead. Its final lines put place wrenching tears right next to the church’s great word of praise and celebration, ‘Alleluia’:  

All we go down to the dust; 

weeping o’er the grave we make our song: 

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. 

This duality in Christian attitudes to death shows up in how Christians treat the bodies of the dead. We probably take burial practices for granted, but the idea of treating the bodies of the dead with utmost care and dignity was a point that Christianity really belaboured. Christ, for instance, had given a list of six good deeds in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering travellers, visiting the sick, and visiting prisoners. It would be a bold decision to add to any list draw up by Christ, but the church did it, adding a seventh ‘act of corporeal mercy’: burying the dead. 

Christianity is definitively the religion of the Incarnation: of God taking up human flesh. Bodies therefore matter. Talk of casting off the body, as if the body were just some old cloak that the soul has outgrown, is not something Christians say. We are bodily creatures, so Christian hope is for the resurrection of the body. (So also – I should add for completeness – is Christian doom also bodily. Those who die at enmity with God and the good, the faith insists, turning down the offer of reconciliation, face the consequences in the resurrected body.) 

The message of the Incarnation and the hope of the resurrection turned something around for early Christians. They no longer found dead bodies frightening. In the ancient world, bodies were to be buried outside the city, cast out from the human community. Christians changed that, and started burying their loved ones inside the city. Bodies were to be treasured, not feared. The bodies of their heroes – those who excelled in virtue, and especially the martyrs – were brought right into their churches. Before long, no altar (the communion table) was quite proper unless it was built over the body of a martyr or other saint, or at the very least contained some part or relic.  

Veneration of relics has not been so common in the Church of England (the church to which I belong) since the Reformation, nor in the wider Anglican Communion. Slowly, however, it has edged its way back. In 2002, the cathedral where I’m a canon, St Albans, received a shoulder blade of St Alban, England’s first martyr, the gift of one of the dozen remarkable Romanesque churches in Cologne. That bone gets considerable honour on the weekend closest to his feast day (22 June). Relics are also familiar in the church in Philadelphia where I currently celebrate the Eucharist once or twice per week. The altars are usually at least lightly decked with relics. During Eastertide, they groan under the weight of them, including some impressive whole-bone affairs. Only in Advent and Lent – penitential seasons – do the relics disappear to the sacristy, replaced with statues of the prophets in Advent.  

It’s easy to grow accustomed to relics after a while. I should remind myself of their strangeness. Defying any trend in religious thought down the ages to denigrate the body in favour of the soul, here the body is holy, recognised as the site of God’s great works. Here, dead bodies are no longer to be feared. They are the most precious things the church owns, and threaten no contamination. Or, rather, if they suggest any contagion, it is a contagion of the good.  

Care towards the bodies of the dead reflects both poles of Christian attitudes to death. On the one hand, Christians have preserved the bodies of the dead with great care because death is an affront. Death is the enemy that falls upon us all, even the most holy among us. Lamenting that loss, we keep bodies safe until it is reversed. And there is also the other side of the Christian attitude to death: alongside lament there is hope in death’s destruction.  

Christianity, at its wisest, has not skipped through lamentation too quickly, but neither has it given lamentation the final word. Day-by-day funeral practice probably connects most clearly with the sadness, although the hope is woven through. The place of relics in many strands of Christianity (although by no means all), swings more towards an emphasis on death’s defeat. It rejoices in having among us, in all those slivers of bone, fragments poised towards Resurrection, when ‘death shall be no more’. 

  

Explainer
Creed
Easter
Resurrection
5 min read

Beyond immortality there’s restoration

The resurrection strikes at the heart of the cold reality of the human condition.

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A fine art painting depicts a risen Jesus hold a flag in one hand and raising his other hand above his head, against a dark background
Caravaggio's The Resurrection, detail.
Art Institute of Chicago, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

No one on the planet can pretend not to care about death or about a way to overcome it. The heart of the Christian message is that death has been overcome. This isn’t just about immortality. It’s about Resurrection: the triumph of life over death. If we want to see why that matters we need first to face the reality of death squarely and without flinching. The best person to help us do that is Martin Heidegger.  

It is unfortunate that one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century is also among the hardest to understand. There are even philosophy professors who avoid Heidegger’s work and refuse to talk about it (his associations with Nazism and antisemitism don’t help either). Yet for all that, his fame and influence continue unabated. Why? Perhaps it is due to the bold way he points to realities at the heart of the human condition. Realities like death.  

Nobody can avoid death. No matter how rich, healthy, successful, or famous you are, death comes to you as it came to everyone before you. 

If you dare to open Heidegger’s most renowned work, Being and Time, you will find a description of human existence as being-towards-death. What on earth does that mean? It starts with Heidegger’s claim that time is part of our very essence. We are time-bound beings. And the way in which we are time-bound has a direction: the future. Anxiety about the future constitutes our existence. We never stop being anxious: about where our lives are going, whether we will achieve our goals and dreams, whether our loved ones will be safe and happy, even (for some) whether we will survive another day. Only the most downtrodden and dehumanised in society have lost this forward-looking drive. The rest of us live most of our lives in our own projected future. Earning money, getting engaged, buying a house, getting a secure job, raising children: almost everything we do is future-oriented. 

Yet our ultimate future faces us all as a horrifying reality we can’t avoid, that we spend most of our lives trying to ignore. We are all going to die. 

Nobody can avoid death. No matter how rich, healthy, successful, or famous you are, death comes to you as it came to everyone before you. The greatest emperors, the wealthiest entrepreneurs, and the most famous superstars in literature, music or art have no advantage over the lowliest peasant. Death is the great leveller. And what of all that achievement then? What does it mean?  

Death puts an end not only to ‘worldly’ ambitions like the above, but also to more meaningful pursuits like love, family, and relationships. Whoever you love will die too. This was the terrible truth that the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy learnt. After decades of promoting family as the true meaning of life, he realised that he was simply passing the buck to the next generation. Unless each individual life had its own meaning, he had nothing to offer his children: like him they would end their lives six feet under the ground. He could neither stop them from dying nor give them a meaning to their lives that outlasted their death. 

Heidegger said we should spend more time in graveyards. He believed that facing the inevitability of our death would make us live more authentic lives. No doubt he was right. But wouldn’t something else change how you lived your life? Namely, if you believed death was not the end? 

There’s a point being made here that goes far beyond immortality: it is about the restoration of life by the author of life who defeated death. 

The Christian tradition is founded on an event with a unique promise. Christians claim that Jesus defeated death by dying and rising again. This means that even though we still die we will one day rise with him and never die again. There is no greater hope on offer. Nothing could be more relevant, more urgent, more meaningful than this central Christian claim. It is equally relevant to someone gasping for breath on a sinking ship and to someone bursting with health in the prime of life.  

If Heidegger is right, the Christian message strikes at the heart of the most horrifying and cold reality of the human condition. The event of the Resurrection has the power to transform every anxious future-oriented human being facing their inevitable death. The reality is cold and horrifying no more. Jesus’ death broke the curse of death and robbed it of its power. If we follow him in dying, we will also follow him in rising. Just as Jesus rose again (and because Jesus rose again), we will rise again one day and death will be no more. 

But is the Christian claim really unique? Don’t other religions believe in life after death? 

Not like this. Not bodily resurrection. We must not confuse the Christian claim with a general belief in immortality, though that is an essential part of it. Other religions hold that our souls continue after death. Some teach reincarnation, an endless cycle of birth and death. But there’s something more to the Christian claim. The Gospel accounts tell that Jesus died and was buried in a tomb. If all Jesus wanted to prove was that the spirit outlives the body, then his body could have remained in the tomb. No big deal: it’s just a dead body. His ghost could have still wandered around and appeared to people. 

All four Gospel accounts begin their scandalous news with the inability to find Jesus’ dead body. Three days after he dies, the women go to his tomb, and the tomb is empty. When the risen Jesus appears to the disciples, he takes pains to prove he is not a ghost. He invites them to touch him. He eats breakfast with them. He walks among them as flesh-and-blood. There’s a point being made here that goes far beyond immortality: it is about the restoration of life by the author of life who defeated death. 

That’s why the Christian teaching on immortality is unique: because immortality is just the beginning. It’s about far more than that. It’s about restoration to life in the world God made: the bodily world in which we live. God created it. He doesn’t want us to leave it after we die. He wants us still to live in it. Jesus’ death empowered us so that we can live in it forever.