The Question: What is Death?

Answering this question seems obvious. Just as darkness is the absence of light, isn’t death just the absence of life? It may not be so simple after all…

Thank you, dear readers, for your faithfulness in reading and engaging some very complex and nuanced topics with me each week. Your feedback makes me a better writer and a more faithful Christian. This week in particular, I am keenly aware of the sharp divisions in my own community, and in the larger landscape of American Christianity. The topic of death and the ethics and morality surrounding it is a timely but difficult topic. Be gentle with yourselves.

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There may be no two buzzphrases in the English language more polarizing in 21st century America than “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” Although the culture surrounding these phrases points us toward coming down on one side or the other on the abortion question, as has been my custom in my ongoing series, I’d like for us to zoom out a bit and consider a related question on its own merits: what is death, and how does our answer to that question inform our contextualization and moral and ethical decision-making on some of the most acute and divisive issues of our day—namely, abortion, capital punishment, and medically-assisted suicide?

As I suggested in the tagline of the piece, the simplest and most common answer to the question, “what is death?” is to define it in the negative: death is the absence of life. If a created thing is not alive, then it is dead. But defining anything only by what it is not leaves much to be desired. The fact that Marshall is not a cabbage doesn’t exactly tell you much about what Marshall is. Consider, for example, the Blessed Apostle’s famous line in Romans chapter 6: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (6:23, NRSV) The Greek for death is the very common θάνατος (thanatos). It arrives on the shore of the English language as just that: death. But its origins in Greek carries weightier cargo. It is almost always associated with darkness—the thickest darkness—and with misery and punishment due to the weight of unrepented and unpurgated sin. It is also, in this context, final and thus eternally separated from God.

One of the most ancient claims about God made in Judaism is that God is living. The ancient Hebrew moniker for God, Elohim Chayim, means “living God” or “God of life.” Theologically speaking, our life depends only and always on God. If God were, say, to hold God’s breath for even an instant, the cosmos would cease to exist. Jesus makes an even more poignant point on this theme in the Synoptic Gospels: “And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? He is God not of the dead, but of the living.’” (Matthew 22:31-32)¹

But wait a second: don’t Christians believe that when our mortal bodies die, that is the gateway to life with God? What’s the line from the Eucharistic prayer at funerals? “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.”² Right you are! So what do Paul and Jesus mean? They are referring to the death of those who are unrepentant—those who spend their life saying to God, “My will be done,” to which God finally relents (following C.S. Lewis), and says to them, “Thy will be done.”

I’m not naïve (at least not about this): to most 21st century progressive-ish Christians (aka Mainline Christians—and we need to have a talk about what that actually means in the Year of Our Lord 2025), the idea that God would let anyone go to Hell, or that Hell actually exists in the first place, seems, well…mean. It isn’t nice. And we shouldn’t talk about ugly things! Permit me two rebuttals: First, in the bedrock of my belief in the God revealed in Jesus Christ is that there is not a single soul in Hell who did not freely choose to be there. Second, (again, following C.S. Lewis),³ the gates of Hell are locked from the inside.

With this in mind, a constructive rather than deductive definition of death begins to come into view. Death—that is, the death of a soul—is to be completely and utterly separated from God and God’s life. It is putting down your stake so far from the bus stop that leads to God that you can’t possibly find your way back. Now, to be clear: I am wholly unconvinced that the death of our mortal bodies in this life is the death of the soul. The New Testament seems pretty clear that there is a dwelling place apart from time for the soul in God’s nearer presence prior to the finished New Creation, when resurrected body and soul are reunited in eternity. Now, those of you with an allergy to Catholicism will surely start sweating about Purgatory. I must remind you of what has always been true and most recently clarified about Catholic doctrine: Purgatory is a verb, not a noun. It is an action or a process that happens to us, not a place we physically go. I like to think of it as standing in the Narthex of God’s great Basilica, waiting for a moment when we can slip into the back pew without disturbing the worship.

To be honest, I cannot conceive of anyone who, after having been confronted with the sheer, unadulterated, undiluted love, grace, and mercy of the God I know in Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit, would stick up their hand and say, “no thank you.” But my belief in a God who self-limits God’s own self and endows God’s most beloved creatures with free will must allow for that possibility. Thus, death (thanatos) would then befall that person: eternity apart from God.

Likewise, death as the conclusion of this life is the final separation from our incarnated existence, which God called very good and created in God’s own image. Although this is distinct from the final death of the soul to an eternity apart from God, they are closely related. Death in this life does mark the end of our earthly life and the final separation from those we love until the life to come in union with God and those who love and follow God. In short, in the same way that all life is serious business, so too is all death serious business and not at all to be taken lightly!

If this seems like a long way to get to a short point, I promise, it’s coming. The reason I say all of this is because I fear that we’ve over-corrected on our understanding of death. My wife’s beloved and now departed mentor and dear friend of our family, Dr. Peter Barboriak, who was both a renowned forensic psychiatrist and a scholar of history, having earned his MD only after taking time off to earn a PhD in history at Duke University (not to worry, I gave him grief about his alma mater), studied the impact of the Union forces cutting off the supply of morphine to the Confederacy. While there is no direct evidence that draws a clear link between the lack of access to drugs and the Confederate surrender, the utter agony and barbarity of death without anesthetic wrought on (mostly) young soldiers in the Confederate army was enough for Robert E. Lee to call for an end to “useless sacrifice.” In short, death can be sheer and utter torment.

Thanks, however, to modern medicine and science, and the great advances in palliative and hospice care, the agony of death can now be treated and managed wholly unknown at any other time in human history.⁴ Thus, somewhere in the last fifty years or so, as our fear of the agony and barbarity of death has diminished, our culture has sought to strike a peace deal with death; to treat it as something other than the final enemy. And if we’re not clear in our theology and in our worldview that death is the enemy of life, our understanding of what life is can also begin to slip from our grasp.

Now, let the reader understand: this issue is not one wherein we should reach for the concrete to try and pour for ourselves a solid, rock-hard foundation. The boundaries of life and death are ultimately not in our purview. When I teach from the Old Testament, I remind students and parishioners that the reason much ado is made about blood and semen in the Old Testament is that they are the two life-giving substances,⁵ and thus, to encounter them is to come to another shore: God’s territory.

After the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that enshrined abortion as a private matter, immune from Government regulation, many clergy and laity in the Episcopal Church issued all sorts of pronouncements (mostly) condemning the Court’s decision. While I too abhor the effects of that decision on women’s reproductive care in this country, I was amazed at the distance between the unbroken teaching of the Episcopal Church since 1967 and what I was hearing from faithful Episcopalians in the wake of that decision.

Since 1967, the Episcopal Church has taught that, “all human life is sacred. Hence, it is sacred from its inception until death. The Church takes seriously its obligation to help form the consciences of its members concerning this sacredness. Human life, therefore, should be initiated only advisedly and in full accord with this understanding of the power to conceive and give birth which is bestowed by God.” Moreover, specifically related to abortion, “[The Episcopal Church] emphatically oppose[s] abortion as a means of birth control, family planning, sex selection, or any reason of mere convenience…[and we maintain our] unequivocal opposition to any legislation on the part of the national or state governments which would abridge or deny the right of individuals to reach informed decisions [about the termination of pregnancy] and to act upon them.”⁶ However, in the weeks and months after the Dobbs decision, that robust, nuanced teaching got reduced to one word: choice.

Many years ago, this teaching became real to me in a very difficult way. My now-ex wife and I were married during seminary, and shortly after, we became pregnant. We wanted this child, we planned for this child, and we celebrated this child. However, after a few months, we learned that the fetus had died, and that my now-ex wife needed a procedure called “dilation and curettage” or “D & C” to prevent her from developing sepsis, among other things. We were racked with unimaginable, paralyzing grief during that period. Although it wasn’t the culminating event that led to the end of our marriage, it was a contributing factor. Our community of church and friends and family rallied around us, helped us grieve, grieved with us, and took care of us.

Part of what I learned from that experience is the deep wisdom in the Episcopal Church’s teaching. At once, we celebrated this new life that was growing into our family, and at the same time, the very procedure my now-ex wife needed to survive is a procedure now banned in nearly half of the country. This is but one of trying to legislate an area of our lives rather than showing compassion and care.

Let me be clear: the Episcopal Church’s robust, nuanced teaching on the question of life and abortion is one I fully support. We must be for life, but we must also hold that tenderly and carefully, fully mindful of the fact that life is God’s purview, not ours, and that there are a million unique circumstances that must be taken into account. Trying to legislate the purview of God is a contradiction in terms. Rather than “pro choice” or “pro life,” the tagline that has served me best pastorally and personally is, “trust women.” One in three women have experienced an abortion or the loss of a pregnancy. Let us take great care and diligence to speak, think, and act with humility, grace, and compassion.

Alongside that, one of the most important things our churches can do is to help new parents in the sacred and holy an hard task of rearing children to know and love the Lord Jesus in a very dark and dangerous world. Much of the time, the statement, “pro-life” is really “pro-birth.” All of us have a part to play in ensuring that church and society alike support, encourage, and assist in the rearing of children.

Permit me to mention briefly two other areas that enter God’s purview over life and death with growing frequency in our culture: namely, capital punishment and medically-assisted suicide. Since 1958, the Episcopal Church has been resolute on the question of Capital Punishment: the taking of a life as a means of punishment is always sinful and must be condemned. Period. Full stop.

I am planning to write separately and more completely on the question of medically-assisted suicide, but I will treat the subject briefly here. In the September 2025 edition of The Atlantic, Elaina Plott Calabro wrote an utterly terrifying article entitled, “Canada is Killing Itself,” in which she explored the vast and growing mechanisms empowering the practice of so-called “MAiD” or “Medical Assistance in Dying.” My colleague Ben Crosby, who is an Episcopal priest studying for a PhD in theology in Canada, has also written well on the topic. Once again, a delicate, nuanced area of our existence seems to be hinged on one word: choice. To say that I am worried about the increased spread of “MAiD” in this country and our Church’s ability to respond to it and resist it forcefully is quite the understatement.

TL:DR Life and its beginning and ending is in God’s purview, not ours. Thus, we must look for tenderness and care in this area, not certainty. The death of the soul means eternal separation from God and God’s life, and the death at the end of this life is its close kin. The death of our incarnated existence and the separation from those whom we love and who love us is serious business! The complexities around these issues are far too nuanced to be reducible to the word “choice.” Contrary to what you may have heard, death remains the final enemy of life, and to treat it as anything less leads to some dark and dangerous places. The Blessed Apostle’s poetic taunt of death in the wake of the resurrection of Jesus is a hope-filled place to pause for now:

“O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?”⁷

1. See also Mark 12:27 and Luke 20:38. Emphasis mine.

2. Proper Preface for the Commemoration of the Dead, BCP p. 382.

3. If you have not read it already, drop everything and read Lewis’s harrowing short story, “The Great Divorce.”

4. I am keenly, personally aware that this is not true in all cases, and that many areas of our country do not have access to robust palliative and hospice care networks.

5. At least, in ancient times.

6. https://www.episcopalchurch.org/ogr/summary-of-general-convention-resolutions-on-abortion-and-womens-reproductive-health/

7. 1 Corinthians 15:55, RSV.