April 23, 2001
'How do you want to die?' noted
ethicist asks in Logsdon address
___By Marv Knox
___Editor
___ABILENE--The American obsession with avoiding death robs from Christians the ability to accept death as God intended it, theologian Stanley Hauerwas told a Hardin-Simmons University audience.
___Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at the Duke University Divinity School, delivered the first T.B. Maston Christian Ethics Lectures at HSU's Logsdon School of Theology in Abilene April 9-10.
___In two lectures--on death and on family--Hauerwas explored how American cultural ideals separate Christians from historic Christian understandings of church as community.
___Americans want to avoid death to the degree that death-deferral has become the principal focus of medicine, Hauerwas insisted.
___Hauerwas frequently asks people how they want to die. "They say they want to die in their sleep, quickly and painlessly, and they don't want to be a 'burden,' which means they no longer trust their children," he reported.
___The preference for sudden death is not a historic Christian inclination, he said. "Medieval people feared what we want--sudden death. They didn't so much fear death as they feared God" and hoped for time to prepare to die.
___Ironically, two causes of death that are anathema to Americans today--cancer and war--would have been preferred by medieval Christians, because both would have given them time to reconcile with God.
___Americans today are guilty of "the medicalization of death," Hauerwas said. "We go to physicians to be cured, not to be cared for. In the past, doctors did not treat illnesses; they treated patients."
___But now, money spent on crisis-care medicine equals 14 percent to 16 percent of the U.S. gross national product, and 12 percent of that amount is spent on people in the last year of their lives, he said.
___Consequently, medicine has become a religion of the people, he observed, citing the disparity between emphasis on trained physicians and ministers.
___"No one believes an inadequately trained minister will harm their salvation," he illustrated. "But they believe an inadequately trained physician will harm their health.
___"Look at it that way, and you see where their church is. They believe medicine will cure them."
___Hauerwas expressed appreciation for physicians and their commitment to treating illness, but their limitations are flagrant, he said. "Most doctors only teach you how to get on with an illness you're not going to get over."
___Americans, and Christian Americans in particular, are limited by their focus on defeating death, he stressed.
___"The problem is we don't know how to die. Our culture denies death," he said. "Dying requires training, and we have a dearth of examples. Now, you've got to keep yourself alive. To what point?"
___For all his faults, "suicide doctor" Jack Kevorkian gives seriously ill people permission to die, Hauerwas reported.
___"We can only die today when a physician gives us permission to die--when the doctor says there is nothing more to do," he said, adding, "Ministers can give permission to die."
___ Christians ought to see death differently than does popular culture, he urged.
___"I do not propose that we can die more easily because we are Christian and expect an afterlife," he said. "We Christians rob ourselves with sentimentality about death and afterlife.
___"To suggest 'hope for the future' as a reason for accepting death makes about as much sense as having children because they are our 'hope for the future,'" he continued, calling such self-serving wishing sinful. "Only God is our hope for the future."
___Rather than avoidance of death, "Christianity is ongoing training to die early," Hauerwas insisted. "Christians are sent into the world to stare death down--to say, 'You are not our Lord.'"
___That makes Christians susceptible to martyrdom, but it does not mean Christians should seek death, he said, noting early Christian martyrs did not "too readily seek death" because they did not desire that their enemies would bear the sin of their deaths.
___Christians' deaths should point beyond issues related to the end of their physical lives, Hauerwas declared.
___"Christians' deaths should be commensurate with their lives," caught up in "the hope of the communion of the saints" expressed in earthly life in the community of the church.
___"Christians live to one another because we are obligated to live in communion with one another," he said. "What is important is not whether the illness is unto death but whether the life points to the goodness of God, for the upbuilding of the community" of the church.
___Just as they give the living of their lives, Christians should give their suffering and death to the church to build community through the shared experience, he said.
___"Notice how seldom we preach, even at funerals, about death," he recalled. "When was the last time a minister told you you are dying, told you to prepare for death?
___"People approach death with no way to understand how to experience it."
___But the community of Christian friends who can be with a person who is dying can dispel ultimate loneliness, he said.
___"It is very important for friends to be with us as we die," he said. "We need the bodily presence God has given us in the life and death of his Son (today manifest in the 'body of Christ,' the church). This presence of God in Christ is with us; we are not alone.
___"Christian friends do not give one another hope; they are hope."
___And that hope is sufficient, he added. "The devil wants us to look on death and be lonely. We gaze on death and see Christ, for whom we are created."
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