Death Becomes Us

I’ve been struggling with how to say this.
Death is neither arbitrary nor capricious. It’s not a justice issue. It’s not an issue of evil. It’s not an issue of salvation. It’s not an issue of divine love and goodness. It is not the opposite of life. Death is life: to live is to die.
This isn’t nihilism. It’s reality.

I’m watching people whose theology centers on experience - a sort of natural theology - be confused about the presence of death. But experience says that nothing - neither human nor plant nor animal nor even stone - lasts forever. Everything dies. Everyone dies. In every moment, we are both living and dying. Death is when the dying outlasts the living and that’s the human experience of it. It’s what nature shows us. The worm and the lion, the weed and the redwood, the stone tombs of the Nabateans and the skyscrapers of Dubai, all of earth ... and all of Heaven: it will all die, all pass away. That’s natural theology. That’s theology that takes experience seriously as a source: death is a part of life. It takes everyone and is always in the midst of taking everyone. The question “Why this one and not that one” is to deny the experience of corporeality, to deny the reality of what it means to be embodied: that this one AND that one both have the same end, one is just racing there more quickly than the other.

I’m watching people for whom scripture is a primary theological source fret over the continued existence of death after Christ as though “death where is your sting” means that death ceased to exist. They point to death “entering the world through sin” as though the Biblical text does not assert that God gave Adam and Eve permission to consume plants. Consumption is death. Eating is participation in death. The plant and animal alike both die before they’re consumed. The digestive process is the breakdown of formerly living material into excretions that may or may not feed other living material. This death pre-exists sin. Death entered into the world when life did. The Bible says so.
Even God, incarnate died.
So death isn’t about who is righteous and faithful. It is no respecter of persons. The scripture doesn’t say “the just shall live” and stop. It says “by faith.” It’s a description of how to live and NOT a promise that death will not be present.
Even as an issue of salvation, the question isn’t “if we are saved, why do we die.” It’s “since we are saved, what happens when we die?” All of existence, every faith system everywhere, has sought to answer the latter. There’s nothing in the whole of reality - but especially in the Christian texts - that suggests death won’t happen. The Bible says the physical death ain’t permanent. That’s the resurrection of the body: not the dismantling of death itself.

I’m watching activists conflate the Black Lives Matter movement to Black people living and not dying. The justice issue, in death, is which - and by what authority and by what criteria - humans get to decide when another human dies. It’s not about people living forever. That’s not a thing.
Black lives matter because we get to live - and be perpetually within a state of decay - until our bodies give out. We get to live without our lives be unjustly taken by those with no authority to do so. No human has authority to take a life.

And this notion that God wills death makes God capricious is dependent upon the notion that death, itself, is evil. Such an idea would mean that death is not something in which we always and at all times participate. If that were true, we couldn’t live. We couldn’t eat. We couldn’t breathe. Even our blood cells are dependent upon a life-death cycle.
Death is not the absence of life. It’s part of living.
Death is not an evil, abhorrent interruption of the natural order. It’s a necessary component for nature to exist.
God does not will death for some and life for others: God wills life and that requires death. Everything in human history, every part of the Biblical text, every theological source that exists, the whole of the experience of Black people on the planet, white people on the planet, and every person that has ever existed says that everything and everyone dies.

I’m worried about Black liberation theologians - in all of its forms - who don’t carefully consider their own theological methods such that death is not as normative as life. The sources of Black theology say so. They speak it.
I do not do Black Liberation theology. I don’t do natural theologies nor do I rely on experience for my theological construction. I find it abhorrent and idolatrous because it allows us to conflate the individual human experience with a universal one and conclude death to be arbitrary and God capricious ... while missing the reality that even heaven, itself, will pass away.

I guess my point is that we’ve constructed ourselves into a theological quagmire that doesn’t allow for us to grieve properly because we’re too busy fighting against life... in the name of loathing death. And that construction isn’t necessary, it’s poorly wrought theology, and it’s unduly harmful to the goal of the preservation of Black lives - from the hands of other human beings, not from reality, and not from life - and we oughta do better.

The sting of death is the pain for the living. It’s not the existence of death itself. Help people grieve... stop theologizing unhealed trauma and help the people see that life matters. And that means death happens. Focusing on one part of that is not helpful and it’s piss poor theology.