True sanctification begins with what we used to call “mortification,” which is a one-word way of saying “dying of the old man.” As I wrote under Heidelberg 88, this teaching is not complicated but it is not easy either. Death is never easy if only because it always entails loss. The truth is, to the degree we are Adam’s children, we like sin and we like to sin. It is pleasurable for a while to think evil, vindictive, murderous, or lustful thoughts. It is momentarily satisfying to gratify sinful desires but only for a while. In that way sin is like drug abuse.
Americans and residents of the late-modern West generally do not like to think about or discuss death. Ask your table mates at lunch today what they think about death. How do they hope to die? What happens after death? Where do they want to be buried? Try it and see what happens to the conversation. I guess that the conversation would go better if you ask about the Chiefs or the Nebraska Cornhuskers’ new coach Mike Riley. Few things will—pardon the pun—kill a conversation more quickly than raising the matter of death.
Our reluctance to discuss death or even to think about it is remarkable because, unless Christ returns first, every single one of us will go through it. It is a truly universal fact of human experience. We are naturally reluctant to discuss it, however, because we know intuitively that it is wrong, that it is not natural—whatever the New Age gurus and others may tell us. If death is so wonderful and beautiful, why are wired with a flight or fight impulse?
Why do we struggle mightily in the water when we think we may be drowning? The most calm, rational person you know turns into a crazed animal when drowning. I know this because, as a lifeguard I was trained how to disable a drowning person so I could drag him to shore. Our fight or flight impulse, the rapid pulse, the shot of adrenaline, the tunnel vision and all the other natural, instinctive features of our fight to survive are not the products of nurture.
They the products of a fallen nature. This is because we were not created to die. We were created to live in communion with God forever. Our rebellion destroyed that relationship and brought death into the world.
Still, our aversion to thinking about death in the late-modern West seems to be even stronger now than it once was. Four or five decades ago death came more quickly for most of us than it does today. In rural communities people were more likely to die at home. Funerals were conducted differently. Among those of us who grew up on the Plans it was expected that there would be an open casket funeral. Indeed, the space we today call the “living room” was once called “the parlor” and one of the major functions of “the parlor” was to host a visitation of the deceased. Today we gather in “funeral homes” for that purpose.
In short, where, in a more agrarian society death was nearer (whether livestock, crops, or humans). Today, in a more urbanized and suburbanized society, death seems remote. We tend to die in hospital or in nursing homes and death itself is made more alien to our experience. We do not generally slaughter our own food. Someone, somewhere else does it for us. It comes to us in nice plastic packages almost as if by magic.
When the Apostle Paul used death to explain the first major aspect or facet of the Christian life, he assumed that we all knew what he was saying, that we were personally familiar with it. Child mortality was higher. Lifespans were (probably) shorter. There is some dispute about whether or to what degree lifespans are longer now. Nevertheless, death was familiar enough that Paul did not have to explain it to his readers.
The same is true of the period in which the Heidelberg Catechism was written. Calvin died at age 55. Ursinus, the primary author of the catechism, died at age 49. Olevianus, a contributor to the catechism, died at the same age. Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva and a teacher of Ursinus and Olevianus, lived to age 86, which was exceptional for the time. The bubonic plague was a regular feature of sixteenth-century life.
In the 14th century Europe’s population was reduced by millions in just a few years as the plague swept through. One observer said that bodies were stacked in the street like lasagna. There were no antibiotics. The practice of medicine in the period was crude and often harmful. Anesthetics? They did not exist, at least not as we know them. Life was hard and then you died.
All this to say that, in order to understand the biblical doctrine of the Christian life, we must try (as it were) to dislocate ourselves from our late-modern experience and try to sympathize with the worlds in which Scripture was written and in which the catechism was written. Scripture unabashedly uses death as the metaphor for the Christian life. After all, we Christians believe in and follow the God-man, who saved us by living for us and by dying for us and he died one of the most shameful, horrible deaths imaginable then or now. People today object to capital punishment on the grounds that it is cruel because the anesthetic drugs do not work quickly enough. There were no effective anesthetics for the crucified. It was meant to be a brutal, humiliating death and it was.
The Apostle says “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?