Death is a deplorable reality. We often attempt to avoid thinking about it until we can’t; until we or someone close to us is faced with it either through disease, sickness, or accident, or they die themselves. We have constructed a society, as Arthur McGill notes that attempts to sanitize death, indeed attempts to segregate it out away from our daily experience. We have created insane asylums, cancer wards, homeless and refugee camps all hidden away behind well groomed gardens and ornately architectured buildings; we have constructed facades that attempt to keep the reality of death away from us. But in the end we can never really escape its reach; we feel it, it touches us, even when we don’t want it to. It’s not that death has an inherent power of its own, but the way we treat it in society you would think it does.

Christians fall prey to this line of culturally formed thinking as well. We are like everyone else, so often. But in reality we really aren’t. We live in a Kingdom where death has no power, yes it still has sting, but its actual power has indeed died. This is the evangel, the Good News hope that us Christians live from and for; we live to bear witness to this inbreaking reality. The reality that God in Christ has broken the surly bonds of the frailty of a fallen sub-humanity, and entered into it by his own self-humiliation clothing himself with the dust of our broken humanity in order to redeem and reconcile us unto God from the inside out. We might even see this as apocalyptic; i.e. that God has entered into our situation, assumed it for himself, and in this assumptio, in this wonderful exchange (mirifica commutatio) he has annihilated the ‘last enemy’ which is indeed, death. Christians live from this reality on a daily basis whether we acknowledge it or not; whether we live with the gravitas that this ought to engender in our daily lives. This reality, what Christ has done by accomplishing the death of death, ought to inject a sense of transitoriness into our lived lives as Christians; we ought to recognize that the shadow of this earth is passing away such that the new creation has already come (‘now’ and ‘even more so’ in the eschaton).

Philip Ziegler in his book Militant Grace The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology develops what death and life look like in the frame offered by what is being referred to these days as ‘apocalyptic theology.’ Here he engages the locus of death in the theology of Eberhard Jüngel in an apocalyptic frame:

The theme is even more sharply present in Jüngel’s theology. Evangelical faith obediently trusts that “the God who in participating in man’s death gains victory over death” has done so for me. As Jüngel sees it, the antithesis between God and death structures the gospel itself. “God and death are opponents,” he writes, “they are enemies. The style in which God deal with death, and in which death also has to deal with God, is the history which faith tells about Jesus Christ.” As the annihilating power and consequences of sin, death is aggressively active, “repudiate[ing] life by hopelessly alienating men and God from one another.” Salvation is the business of dealing with death, as it were. For Jüngel, the death of Christ accomplishes the death of death: in the identity of the living God with the dead man Jesus, God meets death, taking its enmity and contradiction into himself in virtue of his own divine life. Death is thus overcome in and by the outworking of the eternal vitality of God’s love. When this victory is consummated “even then” in the final judgment, human beings will be given to know that it is by grace that they are “undying, or better . . . plucked from out of death.”

The final judgment is judgment unto eternal life because it means final deliverance from that annihilating power of death, which is “God’s enemy and mine.” And we should recognize that it is exactly the apocalyptic form of the saving work of cross and resurrection and its close identification with final judgment that makes it possible and then necessary to link the philanthropy of saving divine justice with the vision of God’s ultimate triumph over death’s inimical misanthropy.[1]

One thing that ought to immediately stand out is what God has accomplished in the atoning work of Christ; the frame is not primarily forensic. In other words, what we see in Jüngel’s theology is something akin to what us Evangelical Calvinists refer to as the ontological theory of the atonement. The idea that what God came to do was greater than (not lesser than) the juridical (i.e. pay for a penalty); he came to deal with the depth issue that leads to sin or rupture in the first place; the issue of our discordant and deceitfully wicked hearts. We see a creational and recreational theme funding Jüngel’s thought, such that what takes place in the saving work of Christ is that humanity is recreated to a place wherein humanity can actually be humanity as originally intended; that is humanity can be in a right and koinonial relationship with the living God. This is nothing short than apocalyptic; nothing short of God breaking into his own world, working it from the inside out in his humanity in Christ, and reversing the curse that sought to sublimate humanity into nothingness.

On a personal note, as someone who has survived a normally terminal incurable cancer all I can say is that God’s apocalyptic presence is real and vivacious. Whatever his purposes, he chose to break into my life and put to death a monster that would have liked to kill me. But God’s prevailing grace in Christ decided that that wasn’t going to happen, at least not yet (and I pray never!). There is life in Christ, concrete life; we live in and from it, and death has no hold on us because of it. Death is indeed dead in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It couldn’t hold him down, and it can’t hold us down; at least if we are full participants in his type of indestructible life.

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2018), 109 kindle.