What is the Christian view of death? The picture below is worth the proverbial thousand words. This bright, strong picture is from a Christian burial site. It was painted while the ink was still fresh on some of the pages of the New Testament. It portrays a deceased person in his or her current status — joyfully praising God, glorying in the new life. Now for the thousand words.

Christianity views death as something quite real — it is not an illusion. We do not say that dead people are “only sleeping.” It is real, and it is dreadful. Now the next step is the difficult one. Many Christians have been reticent to take it. They have instead taken a kind of half step. They have been content to say “death is dreadful, but we hold out the hope of an afterlife that softens this blow.”

Christianity in its fullness — in the Gospels, the Letters of Paul, the Creeds and the central theological tradition — goes further than this. Christianity proclaims that though death is dreadful, it is also good. Positive. An open doorway. An opportunity. Something to celebrate.

The first Christians knew this. They decorated their gravesites with bright, colorful, powerful pictures. They celebrated the anniversary of the deaths of their families — not in “memory” of them, for they were still very much alive — but as their birthdays unto eternity.

As St. Paul put it with his usual freshness, God, in Christ, has taken the sting out of death.

What happens when we die? What would you want to happen?

That is not as strange an approach as it may sound at first. The question of what death is, and of life after death, is one of the most urgent questions humans ask, perhaps the most urgent. Everybody is interested in it — which is why, like sex, food and (fashionable at the moment) fitness, it can sell magazines.

At the same time, it is one of the deepest mysteries, perhaps the deepest. No line of reasoning, no investigation of historical records, no amount of scientific investigation, will bring us closer to an answer.

The evidence of our senses is next to useless here. For what our senses tell us — that bodies die, and decompose, and eventually revert to their constituent elements — only tells what happens to us if by “us” we mean only our material nature. And to mean that is to have begged the question.

What we do know is what the great faith traditions proclaim. And here we find a vivid range of differences — perhaps more difference than in any of the other matters of religion.

On questions of ethics, for example, the major religions are, contrary to popular impression, in large agreement. It is as wrong to steal for a Hindu as it is for a Christian; murder is as odious in Confucianism as it is in Judaism. In the areas of spirituality and prayer, the world’s religions similarly show a surprising family resemblance, as anyone who has studied such matters as meditation knows: Buddhist nuns and Orthodox monks both cast the eyes downwards and count the breaths. And even in the way they understand God, the evolved religions of the world seem to converge: whether we turn to the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the Analects, the Prophets or the Letters of Paul, we find a deity who has created the cosmos, who transcends its limitations, who lives forever and who loves without condition.

But when we ask that question about the “afterlife,” we find profound, significant differences. One tradition tells us that we are like drops of moisture, and that we shall eventually be reabsorbed into the universal sea. Another sees us as, essentially, souls imprisoned in this mortal prison: death, in such a tradition, is escape from the vessel of clay. Another sees the soul progressing through a staggering number of worldly lives, on its way to enlightenment and release. Yet another sees nothing, in the end, but annihilation: a peaceful, but terminal, return to nothingness. Yet again some faiths simply assert that the question cannot be answered, that we must do our best in this life and hope for the best afterwards.

Here is where Christianity offers an utterly unique answer — or, rather, an utterly unique hope: for our response is not meant to satisfy curiosity, no matter how rabid or morbid, but to strengthen the spirit.

In the words of the Ecumenical Creed, we look for the resurrection of the dead.
That is, to borrow a phrase from Graham Greene, the heart of the matter. We believe that the dead will be resurrected. And that is probably the most optimistic, the most joyful, the boldest and the best claim any faith or any human being has ever made.

Resurrection does not merely mean that the dead will be reconstituted. It does not mean simply that the dead will come to life again — that is resuscitation, not resurrection. Nor does it mean that the soul is immortal and persists without the body — that is what the great teacher Plato thought, but not what we believe. We believe, as we say in the Baptismal Creed, in the resurrection of the body.

It does not mean that we will be recycled through many generations; nor that death is an illusion because this world is such; nor that we shall be annihilated and thereby procure peace and quiet at last.

This is why I asked that startling question at the outset: what would you want to happen? What would you like for death to be, and how would you like to spend eternity — given the choice?

Would you like to spend eternity a disembodied soul — or as soul and body? Would you like to try again in another material body — or would you like to achieve your destination? Would you prefer to be lost in a magnificent sea — or would you like to smell the sea and sail upon it and swim in it?

For most people these questions really are rhetorical: of course, we would prefer what Christianity proclaims.

Now Christianity does not reject those other models of “what happens” as nonsense or evil. Quite the contrary. First, when it comes to other questions, we acknowledge the spiritual wisdom of other traditions. For example, Hinduism expresses a sacral sense of creation that we acknowledge as truly God-given, genuine and the best expression of its kind.

When it comes to death, we do assert that we possess the truth. But we see all those other views — yes, even annihilation — as partial glimpses of reality. The notion that the soul is weighted down by the body, for example, does express the partial truth that we are alienated spiritually from our physical selves (even St. Paul talks about this when he mentions the “war” within his “members”). Reincarnation likewise points to a truth, that creation is incomplete, that human existence is a process of which this mortal life is just a fraction.

But Christianity goes far beyond any of these views. Christianity asserts simply and boldly that our destiny is something glorious: that we shall be reunited with God, that we shall be reunited with our loved ones and that we shall be conscious. We shall be whole humans — body, mind, and soul, not disembodied spirits.

Not only is this what we believe, it is also what most people would want. It would be wishful thinking, too good to be true, blind faith, if it did not rest on an equally strong understanding of God. But that understanding — resting on 2,000 years of Christian tradition and 5,000 of Biblical tradition, stretching from creation to the end of time and embracing the history of Israel’s call, trial and redemption, the out-of-this world voice and vision of the prophets, the hard faith and facts of the New Testament and the absolutely unique and genuinely unparalleled story of the resurrection of Jesus — converges on one absolute. That, as St. Paul said and our Catechism concludes: nothing, not even death, shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.