I was inspired to read Richard Beck’s “The Slavery of Death” after hearing Prof. Sheldon Solomon’s talk on it from almost 11 years ago at the Ernest Becker Foundation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4wXfP6So7o. I urge you to take a listen. Beck, a Protestant Christian psychologist, was confronted with the same problem that most people (well, Solomon and myself at least) have after reading the late Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Denial of Death”: what do I do with this? Because if Becker was right, and we now know that he was (see “Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life”, Solomon, Greenberg, Pysczynski (2015)1, then this changes our understanding of humanity.2 This being so, if Christianity purports to address the problems of the human condition, it must address the denial of death and Terror Management Theory (TMT). This is what Beck tries to do in “The Slavery of Death.”
Beck takes issue with the Protestant formulation that sin causes death, which is an extrapolation of Romans 6:23: “For sin’s wages are death….” (The New Testament, Yale 2017). He instead looks to the Eastern (Orthodox) formulation that death causes sin, which is an extrapolation of 1 Corinthians 15:56: “Now death’s sting is sin….” (TNT). These are distinctions with enormous differences as any student of Western and Eastern Christianity would know. The entire meaning of the death, burial, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is tied up in which approach you take. Importantly, however, it is only along the Eastern path that there is an answer to the Becker/Solomon conundrum of immortality projects and TMT – as Becker said, “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destination for man.” The Christian response to Becker is what Beck, a western Christian, finds on the eastern road.
My copy of this book is so marked up with Beck’s important points that it is hard for me now to even interpret, but you can read his book to understand them. Some of the more important points include: the differences between “Ancestral” and “Original” sin, where Beck relies heavily on the famous work “Ancestral Sin” by John Romanides, the deuterocanonical book “Wisdom” (sadly, not found in many Bibles today but legitimate for Christian teaching), and Church Father St. John Chrysostom; a wonderfully readable summary of the work of Becker (and some of Solomon, whose book “Worm at the Core” did not come out until 4 years later), which includes work by Walter Brueggemann; that cultural institutions become “principalities and powers”; the eccentric identity of Christ that does not buy in to the death denying cultural myth and to which all Christians have access; timor mortis (the fear of death) as a fact of life for which Christianity offers an answer; and much more.
The human animal has to be communal to survive. You can’t make your own cheeseburger.3 Therefore, human communities bind themselves together through cultural myths. Cultural myths are very important. But they always have counter-arguments as well. Those who raise them are usually perceived as enemies to the tribe. Take the United States in the 21st century for example. Is the cultural myth still one of: Freedom, the Rule of Law, God, The Spirit of ’76, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Manifest Destiny, etc.? I’m not sure it still holds. Also, there are the counter-arguments that we rarely are taught: benefit to powerful elites, the Proclamation Line of 1763, genocide, enslavement, etc. Nevertheless, the myth is important regardless of its truth. Beck describes the cultural institutions through which or lives play out as “principalities and powers.” Churches can be included in this category. One purpose they serve is to ease our timor mortis/fear of death. To admit this is to “threaten to expose the neurotic lie that sits at the heart of Christian culture and American society—that death doesn’t exist.” “Success” in America is a neurotic delusion as a defense mechanism to annihilation, and American churches as cultural institutions play right along. Beck argues that understanding that the fear of death leads to sin, rather than the other way around, is the road to understanding and sharing in the eccentric identity of Christ and sharing in His Resurrection. For the non-Christian, Beck’s approach simply points out that religions can have answers to the Becker/Solomon problem. Neither Becker nor Solomon ever disputed that, and both were/are receptive to religious approaches (see Solomon’s talk at the beginning of this piece). For the Christian, I highly recommend this book.
One could say that Beck came to the Eastern road through Becker; and that I came to Becker via the Eastern road. The journeys of each of our lives unfold as they will if we have the courage to engage with that journey. And that is my wish for you, wherever it may take you.
Dispatches from the Imperial Capital 