Will Your Dying Be Holy?

Richard Deibert

Preface

This article aims to prepare you for a graceful end of life on this sweet, troubled planet. No matter how the door of your “one wild and precious life”¹ closes, whether by accident, terminal illness, cognitive decline, or withering age, every inching step toward readiness will pay a hundredfold for you and your beloved. Please begin now.

I am writing specifically for worshiping Christians, and the article will unfold in four parts:

I. The Current Definition of “Good Death” in the United States

II. The Church’s New Testament Gospel of Human Mortality

III. Preparing Your Body for Holy Dying

IV. Preparing Your Soul for Holy Dying² 

I begin emphasizing how radically the landscape of death in the United States has shifted over the last fifty years. How we die; how not to die; how we fail to die; where we die; why we die; how to manage our dying; how to manage our dead bodies; and most recently, whether we’ll die.³ Here is the essence of this radical shift: Your death no longer belongs to you. The most intimate, transcendent, memorable, and holy moment of human life, the only event you perfectly share with the whole of humanity, no longer personally belongs to you.⁴

How you will die has been stolen and is now primarily the purview of those who do not deeply know you or care about you. We in the Western church stood silent and watched this burglary of our most precious treasure. Modern medicine “hides death with technology and dissolves death in discourses,” writes physician-philosopher Jeffrey P. Bishop. “In short, medicine seeks to remove death’s sting from the human community.”⁵ Bishop is worth hearing at length:

The important problem in the medical world is how to manipulate the body or the psyche in order to get the effects that we desire. Bodies have no purpose or meaning in themselves, except insofar as we direct those bodies according to our desires. . . . [The body] stands before us as a manipulable object.⁶

Owning the way we die is both the essence and culmination of our Christian witness, and if you want to own your death again, you must start pursuing your death now; you must stay strong on the trail; you must fight through countless obstacles until you secure this pearl of great price: a death that glorifies our Lord Jesus Christ and elevates the spirit of Christ’s church. This is what I will call “holy dying.”

I am a hospice and palliative care physician and a Presbyterian minister of the Word and Sacrament with a New Testament PhD on the apostle Paul’s theology of human mortality. As a pastor-physician-New Testament theologian, I have been privileged to shepherd countless men, women, and a handful of children, as well as my mother, father, and only brother, through their final days in this world. I have come to believe that there is no more powerful or longer-lasting testimony a worshiping Christian can make to Jesus Christ than to choose holy dying. Yes, choose. 

Anglo-Catholic convert T. S. Eliot famously wrote:

And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.⁷

Just as the four Gospels write backwards from their encounter with an embodied Jesus risen from the dead and just as the early church writes Christian life backwards from its confident martyrdom, affluent Western Christians (those whose death no longer personally belongs to them) must learn again to write their lives backwards by recovering the way they die. How we make an end to our earthly life—and “make” it we almost always can—will be our most powerful proclamation of the gospel in this fleeting life. 

I urge you to battle through the obsessive immediacy and unthinking pragmatism of this here-and-now culture. Begin planning the concrete details of how you will die. Take even the smallest step as soon as you can. In a worshiping Christian life, we start from our end, for our end will illumine our lived Christianity.

I. The Current Definition of “Good Death” in the United States

Roughly 18 percent (sixty million people) of the total U.S. population are adults aged sixty-five or older. Ninety-nine percent of these adults are enrolled in Medicare, and half of them die while taking advantage of the 1982 Medicare Hospice Benefit.⁸ Therefore, how we die as hospice patients has become a de facto cultural standard for the “best” pattern of dying in the United States. And the gold standard for this “best dying” is what has come to be known as the “good death.”

Each of the 5,861 hospices in the United States,⁹ some nonprofit and some for-profit, is federally mandated to collaborate as a team with a patient and family for the goal of a good death. Indeed, every hospice case receives a post-mortem review by their “interdisciplinary group” (IDG) that focuses on this single question: Did this patient have a good death? If so, what made the death good? If not, why was the death not good, and what can hospice do to make it better next time?¹⁰

So laser-focused is hospice on this question that “good death” has become a terminus technicus in hospice and palliative medicine, a technical term that all practitioners of the art are presumed to know. After all, who does not want their death to be “good”? However, not only is the notion of “good death” a subjective determination, it is also relative to each dying patient. We who practice palliative medicine presume that we have the knowledge, medication, tools, and support services to achieve a relatively good death in almost any situation. We believe we can make death “good” in the compassionate withdrawal of life support from a teenage motorcycle victim, just as we can for a ninety-seven-year-old grandmother who stops eating and comfortably drifts into unresponsiveness. And while the components of a good death vary both subjectively and contextually, there is consensus in the end-of-life community that the three qualitative measures of comfort, meaning/dignity, and relational integrity, not the quantitative measure of time alive, are definitive. 

Two recent end-of-life medical literature reviews support these three qualitative measures as essential to a “good” human death (taking into account, of course, the variables of age, life circumstances, disease, religion, finances, and culture). The individual findings of these two reviews can be categorized under these three measures: comfort (pain and symptom control, quality of life); meaning/dignity (life completion, closure, preparation, religiosity-spirituality, recognition as a person); relational integrity (strong emotional relationship with oneself, family presence, giving to others).¹¹

Sounds “good,” doesn’t it?

But are these worthy categories of universal human well-being enough? Are comfort, meaning/dignity, and relational integrity sufficient measures for the death of a worshiping Christian? If it is true for us as believers that “the end is where we start from,” does secular medicine’s “good death” carry sufficient proclamatory power for Christians who encounter their risen Lord in weekly Word and Sacrament? 

What is it that the church has always believed about the dying, death, and value of bodies in the light of Jesus’ resurrection? And if we are worshiping consistently enough to believe that Jesus truly “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light” (2 Tim. 1:10), do we not have a whole lot more to say as we lie dying than a standard “good death” can offer? Can we truly rest content to let Christ’s exultant triumph over death

be reduced to symptom control (comfort), personal patient preference (meaning/dignity¹²), and bidding farewell to significant others (relational integrity)?

Is it enough—is it even Christian—to stand on the sidelines as hospice and palliative care subsumes the extraordinary witness of church and New Testament? Is it enough to let the supreme glory of Christian dying be stolen out from under our own deathbed?¹³

Of course not! 

How can our death proclaim the glory of the Son of God in a way that snatches death from medicine’s clutches and redefines dying not just as good but as holy? How can we take back our own death?

First, understand and live into the church’s good news of human mortality in the New Testament. Second, begin preparing your body for holy dying. Third, begin preparing your soul for holy dying. Three things.

II. The Church’s New Testament Gospel of Human Mortality

Christianity was born a Jewish sect amidst a Greco-Roman culture of death. In first-century Roman Palestine, the average life expectancy at birth was twenty-five to thirty years due to high infant, child, and adolescent mortality, high maternal mortality, infectious disease, and malnutrition. Even among the better-protected elite (of whom not many were Christian), “of 100 live births, 25–30 would typically die before reaching age 1; a further 15–20 before age 5.” In some areas, as many as 60 percent died before reaching age 10.¹⁴ In addition, for early Jewish Christians under the thumb of Roman military occupation, the specter of violence overshadowed daily life. Death lurked everywhere; if not by Roman crackdowns, then by revolutionary Jewish uprisings; if not by sectarian intra-Jewish rivalry, then by rising apocalyptic expectation.¹⁵

The primary nonviolent way Greco-Roman society dealt with death’s ubiquity was philosophy, the quest for wisdom. So, when faced with the approach of death, Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) replies, “In fact . . . the true philosophers practice dying, and death is less terrible to them than to any other men.” Practicing dying, for Plato (c. 427–347 BC), however, involves a hostile dualism of soul battling body, specifically, the philosophical quest for “release and separation of the soul from the body.”¹⁶

And for the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (c. AD 50–135), remembering death recalibrates the mind: “Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible, be daily before your eyes, but death chiefly; and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.”¹⁷ The impact of this “therapy” by philosophy was pervasive and enduring. “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse, as Epictetus used to say,” recalls Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–180).¹⁸ First-century Greco-Roman culture scorned the corruptible human body and sought at every turn to “decontaminate” the soul.

On the other hand, such contempt for the body never sat well with Judaism, despite the vast success of Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) to transform the known world into a unified Hellenistic empire, planting Greek culture, language, and customs in every known city. Although thoroughly Hellenized, the Second Temple Judaism¹⁹ of Jesus’ day largely retained its ancient reverence for the God-ensouled human body (Gen. 2:7) and could never fully accommodate this pagan discomfort with embodiment.

Forged both by distaste for the Greeks’ dualism of soul versus body and admiration for its own righteous Jewish martyrs, the Judaism of first-century Palestine therefore found itself stretched between a theology of place for the dead (Sheol) and a theology of resurrection for the dead, albeit nascent. N. T. Wright summarizes:

In so far as we can generalize, the regular Jewish hope in the period we are studying was for some kind of bodily resurrection, of all or some of the dead, sometime in the future, in which those who were to be raised would be rewarded or punished appropriately. This belief was held, of course, over against the idea that the dead were simply dead, and would remain so for ever.²⁰

Into this turbulent culture of death, Jesus Christ the Son of God becomes flesh and dwells among us, on Palestinian soil in an observant Jewish family, until he dies a brutal but fully human death. Immediately thereafter, Christianity surges across the Roman Empire with its strange gospel of death’s destruction. 

It is impossible to overstate early Christianity’s sudden, radical departure from both its Jewish origin and Greco-Roman milieu in its approach to the menacing dominion of death.

Jewish, but no longer bound by Hebraic Law; Hellenized, but not Greco-Roman; the earliest Jewish church began to talk and write about its ongoing encounter with the risen Messiah Jesus in its worship, as it bartered in the marketplace, and as its saints died their bodily deaths and departed this world. Thus, the New Testament gradually “happened,” story by story, letter by letter, in the radiant light of Christ’s resurrection. And with time the New Testament became the worshiping church’s faith writ large. 

The New Testament does not contain the church’s faith; the New Testament is the church’s faith. And it is a faith-in-motion: sprouted from the soil of Palestinian Judaism, scattered across the Hellenized Jewish Diaspora, and nourished by the Old Testament’s witness to the one Lord Yahweh’s steadfast love in life and in death.

But it would be a mistake to view the church’s faith as streaming with undisrupted continuity from Israel’s faith, New Testament from Old Testament, Christianity from Judaism, all one seamless sequence. No, it is more accurate to speak paradoxically of Christianity including Judaism while at the same time rapidly growing discontinuous with it. Indeed, the apostle Paul’s earliest written Christian witness is best described as a perspective of “inclusive discontinuity.” That is, the apostle “sees God’s redemptive act in Jesus Christ in continuity with the salvation history of Israel, but at the same time in dramatic discontinuity with Israel’s messianic hope.” While Paul passionately reads Jesus Christ within the arc of God’s salvation of the world through the Jews, “the defeat of death for creation by the physical resurrection of Jesus,” for Paul, “so far transcends Israel’s messianic hope as to appear discontinuous with it.”²¹

We dwell here on Christ’s shattering defeat of death because it is what turns human dying inside out and creates the possibility for you and me to die a truly “Christian” death. In other words, Christ’s victory over death turns even the gold standard of “good death” upside down for worshiping Christians and fills both Paul’s and our dying with radically new potential. By the paradoxical grace of Jesus’ physical death and resurrection, our physical death has been “ontologically transfigured,”²² so much so that “by resurrecting Jesus’ body, God has made death the way in which life now works in the body.”²³ Dwell on that sentence a moment. 

The church’s New Testament faith asserts that worshiping Christians can only live fully by dying.²⁴ This is the extraordinary proclamatory power of death for worshiping Christians that is completely lost to secular medicine.

If physical death has not been ontologically transfigured by Christ, how could Saint Ignatius of Antioch (c. AD 50–110) possibly have been so emboldened on his captive journey to martyrdom in Rome to write what may be the most profound testimony to the radical reconfiguration of dying in Christian history:

Now at last I am beginning to be a disciple. . . . Fire and cross and battles with wild beasts, mutilation, mangling, wrenching of bones, the hacking of limbs, the crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil—let these come upon me, only let me reach Jesus Christ . . . for when I arrive there I will be a human being . . . for though I am still alive, I am passionately in love with death as I write to you.²⁵

This ontological transfiguration of death is precisely what Saint Athanasius (c. AD 296–373) views as the reality empowering Christian martyrs to “trample on [death] as on something dead . . . [to] tread it underfoot as nothing. . . . Even children hasten thus to die, and not men only, but women train themselves by bodily discipline to meet [death] [and] mock at it now as a dead thing robbed of all its strength.”²⁶

Such is the church’s counterintuitive, paradoxical good news of Christ’s inversion of human mortality. Such is the gospel of holy dying that has been stolen from us by secular Western medicine. There is no greater challenge before the church than to recover this glorious gift.

Let us now turn to practical matters of body and soul. As we do, let me be clear about a matter of such conceptual importance it is axiomatic, in any Christian discussion, of what it means to be a human being. Neither the Old or New Testament nor Israel or the church supports a dualism between body and soul that is essentially antagonistic. Nor do they support the materialistic “monism” of modern Western science, in which body and soul are conceived as a single “substance” in which soul emanates evolutionarily from biological matter. Human body and soul—however construed—are God’s bipartite creation, entirely good and completely cooperative.

Moreover, Judaism and Christianity both distinguish this bipartite human animal as a unique and intimate mirroring of its Creator by the theological words “image” and “likeness”²⁷ in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (emphasis added). Divinity is the mold in which the human animal is specially fashioned.

Christianity then takes this one step further, radically advancing what “image” and “likeness” mean, not only for the creature human but for God the Creator. Christianity’s unique gift to the earth via the incarnation, and singular contribution to the history of religion, is the ontological primacy of “personhood.” Christianity reveals that nature coheres in person. Whatever is naturally constituent to human being holds together—receives its harmony and unity—through one’s personhood. Just as the two natures of humanity and divinity in the Incarnate Son cohere in Jesus’ singular person, so the two “natures” of body and soul hold together harmoniously in our singular human person.

Above all, personhood does not confuse or change or divide or separate or annul the bipartite distinction of body and soul. Personhood unites them in a perfect harmony of communion. For we are the image of the Image of the invisible God,²⁸ and our body and soul reflect the unity of Christ’s humanity and divinity. Like Jesus Christ, who is known in two natures that have come together into one person,²⁹ each of us is known in a particular body and soul that have come together into our one person.³⁰

Thus, the separate treatment of body and soul that follows is merely for practical matters that require tangible documents. In no way does this paper support an ontological dualism of body and soul that is adversarial. The reign of sin that sets body at war against soul, dividing our person, has been definitively vanquished by the incarnation. And it is in the wholistic freedom of this victory that worshiping Christians are called to live and die. 

III. Preparing Your Body for Holy Dying

By “preparing your body” I mean visible, tangible decisions that will affect the way your body is treated at the end of life, the paperwork that prepares our body to die holy.

Because Western culture is the heir of ancient Latin jurisprudence, we view and organize our world legally. Law defines and defends our social order and governs our communal affairs, including our great sectors of health care, education, government, business, recreation, city, neighborhood, arts, family, religion, and . . . death. The law defines our liberty to die and defends the exercise of this liberty, within limits. It is here that we run into mounds
of paperwork.

Dear reader, if you do nothing in the twenty-four hours after reading this article other than scratch a longhand draft of any one item of the following paperwork, this article will have served you well:

A. Create a Last Will and Testament.

B. Create Advance Directives for Health Care.

C. Understand the “Do not resuscitate” order. 

D. Understand food and fluids at the end of life. 

E. Understand artificial hydration and nutrition. 

F. Understand a “Do not hospitalize” order.

G. Create an ethical will.

Before proceeding, let the church hear the gospel:

Worshiping Christians are no longer slaves to the fear of death (see Heb. 2:14–15).

Do not underestimate the power of these targeted ethical gifts! A simple paper with words or object of significance can channel sacramental, life-creating memories and not only change lives here and now but also change lives for generations to come in ways unforeseen and unimaginable. Just as the church hands down its holy tradition to future generations, an ethical will hands down your personal holy tradition.

Just imagine being chosen by your beloved grandmother to receive, guard, and pass on any of the following as her personal legacy: a selected or original poem in her own hand, a beloved book she personally inscribed, a playlist of old songs picked out for you, a faded favorite handwritten recipe, a piece of cheap or heirloom jewelry you had seen many times around her neck, a personal letter articulating her view of the world and her hope for you and your children, a simple list of the values by which she tried to live, one of her proud houseplants, a voice recording or video of her calling you by name saying “I love you,” an icon or piece of art with one sentence explaining what she felt when she stood before it, her surviving small dog that companioned her and brought much joy, and so forth, and so on, and on. Ethical wills are easy; the options are endless; you already have some ideas; they can be changed, embellished, or discarded anytime. Do not procrastinate. Get started!

It is imperative that you communicate the details of all this paperwork, which we are calling “preparing your body,” with your significant others, especially with the agents you are choosing to act on your behalf. Let them know where to find the documents or give them copies. Continue discussing your decisions, listening to the Holy Spirit, and adjusting as you are guided. This honest, vulnerable sharing about matters of your body and embodied life will confer incalculable dignity upon those you love. In doing so, you will be consecrating them and sanctifying your own dying. You will be showing the world that you are no longer a slave to the fear of death.

Let us now make a final turn to the preparation of our soul.

IV. Preparing Your Soul for Holy Dying

We have identified the primary problem facing worshiping Christians as the loss of our personal death to medicine’s totalizing scientific “triumph” over death. We have asserted that for worshiping Christians there is no more powerful witness to Christ’s glory in the church than dying in holiness. We have distilled the church’s New Testament gospel as God’s real defeat of death and transfiguration of our “last enemy” into a life-giving miracle. And we have reviewed the contemporary legal and medical tools required to “make space” for our bodies to die in holiness. Our final move as worshiping Christians is the disciplined preparation of our souls. What follows is a list of suggested disciplines to facilitate Christian dying, a kind of Eastern Orthodox-flavored Art of Dying (Ars Moriendi) for Western Protestants.

Throughout this paper, my assumed reader is the “worshiping Christian.”³¹ By this, I mean a person who is trusting Jesus Christ to care for them in life, in death, and in eternity, and whose personal trust is being disciplined by weekly exposure to corporate worship in Word and Sacrament. Above all disciplines of our soul’s preparation for death, this weekly life of Word and Sacrament is foremost. There is no more powerful preparation for holy dying than our weekly, full-body encounter with the risen Lord. It is the lush soil in which all other soulful disciplines are rooted and fed. I recognize that most congregations celebrate the Lord’s Supper less frequently than weekly, but I do not accept it, and neither should you. Historically, Word and Sacrament in our Reformed tradition has been the minimum standard for what must happen on the Lord’s Day for Christian people: Scripture read and preached and the Eucharist celebrated. From that first unplanned sit-down of Cleopas and his partner with Jesus at table, it was Word and Sacrament, always together, a heavenly symbiosis opening our eyes and feeding our hearts’ burning desire for the earth’s risen Lord (Luke 24:13–35). The 2018 Book of Common Worship (BCW) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is unequivocal that Word and Sacrament are the “heart and lungs” of weekly corporate worship: “The norm of Christian worship is to celebrate the Lord’s Supper on each Lord’s Day.”³²

Here are four more essential disciplines for your soul:

A. Daily Scripture reading with a sacramental mind

B. A daily Rule of Prayer

C. Funeral, obituary, and post-mortem planning

D. Practicing your death every day

And here, with the communion of the saints, every one of whom testify that the veil between heaven and earth is silken indeed, it is most fitting to end this journey into Christian death. Not only do we march here with a great company of living Christian heroes on their way through death to the new Jerusalem, we also march before the faces of a countless cloud of witnesses who “were tortured . . . suffered mocking and flogging . . . chains and imprisonment . . . stoned to death . . . sawn in two . . . killed by the sword . . . destitute, persecuted, and tormented” (Heb. 11:32‑12:3), a mighty choir singing as one that we have nothing to fear, for the gates of hell have been trampled and refashioned into the gates of eternity. Listen to them:

“We have seen the Lord!”

Notes

1. Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” in House of Light (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), p. 60, line 19.
2. Throughout this paper, I prefer the term “holy dying” rather than “holy death,” to convey our conviction that death is a temporal reality that will be eradicated from creation. John of Patmos could not be more emphatic: “Death will not exist any longer!” (Rev. 21:4, my translation). See Thomas G. Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral, 1st ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 27: “Death is a liar, trying to conceal the sanctity of humanity under the disguise of devastation . . . death itself is not holy.”
3. See the dated but still classic book by Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years, trans. Helen Weaver, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books: A Division of Random House, 2008), who coined the term “invisible death” to describe the dramatic removal of death from the public eye in the twentieth century. For the United States, see Institute of Medicine (U.S.), Committee on Approaching Death: Addressing Key End-of-Life Issues, Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2015), which reveals the fragmentation and poor coordination of care for the dying, the intensive medicalization of dying and its economic burden, the increasing burden on caregivers, and the emergence of hospice and palliative medicine.
4. Perhaps the ultimate form of this theft occurs in the modern Intensive Care Unit (ICU). See “Diary of an Intensive-care Nurse,” New York Post, 2012, https://nypost.com/2012/12/09/diary-of-an-intensive-care-nurse/ for a harrowing depiction of life and death in the ICU.
5. Jeffrey Paul Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, Notre Dame Studies in Medical Ethics (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 17. I urge readers to engage Bishop’s analysis of Western medicine’s theft of death.
6. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse, 21.
7. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, V, lines 2–3.
8. I continue to be flabbergasted at the ignorance and inaccurate knowledge of both patients and physicians regarding this free federal benefit that they have owned as U.S. taxpayers since 1982. Because the details of this Medicare-Medicaid benefit are modified on a regular basis, see the following up-to-date websites for accurate, friendly overviews of the Hospice Benefit: “National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization,” https://www.nhpco.org/; Hospice Foundation of America, https://hospicefoundation.org/.
9. “Hospice Enrollments,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, accessed April 27, 2025, https://data.cms.gov/provider-characteristics/hospitals-and-other-facilities/hospice-enrollments.
10. The modern hospice “movement” emerged in the United Kingdom in the mid-1950s through the work of Cicely Saunders (1918–2005), widely regarded as its “Mother.” A nurse, social worker, and physician, Saunders was attuned to the multidimensional nature of human suffering and developed the foundational concept of “total pain” underlying all hospice care. Total pain is the recognition that four dimensions of human personhood always complicate suffering in terminal illness, none of which can be neglected without great cost.
11. Emily A. Meier et al., “Defining a Good Death (Successful Dying): Literature Review and a Call for Research and Public Dialogue,” The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 24, no. 4 (2016); Alicia Krikorian, Camilo Maldonado, and Tania Pastrana, “Patient’s Perspectives on the Notion of a Good Death: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 59, no. 1 (2020).
12. Thomas Long alerts us to the misunderstanding and consequent misuse of the word “dignity.” He urges us not to conflate dignity with sacredness: “We should be careful about swapping terms. Seeing human beings as sacred is not exactly the same as saying that human life has dignity. . . . Dignity is an achievement . . . and therefore it can be lost. Sacredness is a divine gift, and it can never be taken away.” Long, Accompany Them with Singing, 26.
13. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse, 275–278. Bishop’s critique of what hospice and palliative care is becoming in the United States is disturbing: “A good death is one that is managed in all its facets by those whose expertise defines a good death. Holistic and comprehensive care, achieved by virtue of the deployment of expertise in all facets of human life . . . becomes totalizing care, indeed, totalitarian care.”
14. Keith Hopkins, Death and Renewal: Sociological Studies in Roman History, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), especially chapter 2, pp. 69–116.
15. Richard A. Horsley, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time of Jesus (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 37.
16. Plato, “Phaedo,” Plato in Twelve Volumes: With an English Translation, trans. Harold North Fowler, ed. Edward Capps, Loeb Classical Library (London, Cambridge: W. Heinemann; Harvard University Press, 1930), Phaedo, 67d–68a.
17. Epictetus, The Works of Epictetus. Consisting of His Discourses, in Four Books, The Enchiridion, and Fragments, ed. and trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1890), Enchiridion, chapter 21.
18. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Gregory Hays, Modern Library (New York: Modern Library, 2002), Book 4.41.
19. The Judaism most relevant to Christian origins is known as “Second Temple Judaism,” the period between the construction of the second temple in Jerusalem in 516 BC and its destruction in AD 70.
20. N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, vol. 3, Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 85.
21. Richard I. Deibert, “Paul, Saint,” in The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, ed. George Thomas Kurian (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Ltd., 2011), emphasis added. “Inclusive discontinuity” describes the relationship of Paul’s gospel to the faith he once so passionately shared with his people Israel.
22. The word “ontology”—that which is truly real—is used here to convey a real change in the nature of biological death.
23. Richard I. Deibert, Second Corinthians and Paul’s Gospel of Human Mortality: How Paul’s Experience of Death Authorizes His Apostolic Authority in Corinth, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2 Reihe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 214.
24. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 143, emphasis added: “Christian life in this world is a continual practice of death, or rather, of life in death, taking up the Cross daily and laying down their life for others, considering themselves dead to this world, but alive in Christ Jesus.”
25. Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), pp. 231–33 (sections 5–7), emphasis added. John Behr, “Life and Death in the Age of Martyrdom,” in The Role of Death in Life: A Multidisciplinary Examination of the Relationship Between Life and Death, ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 80.
26. Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God: Being the Treatise of St. Athanasius De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, trans. Penelope Lawson, 2003 new ed., revised ed., ed. C. S. Lewis (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1944), p. 57 (chapter V, “The Resurrection,” section 27), emphasis added.
27. Genesis 1:27:       and         in the Hebrew; εἰκών and ὁμοίωσις in the Greek Septuagint.
28. The direct reference here is the Christ hymn in Colossians 1:15–20. But this ontological relation of Father and Son receives witness across the New Testament: Colossians 2:9; Hebrews 1:1–3; John 1:1–18, among many others; 2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:4–6; Philippians 2:6–11; John 14:9; Romans 8:29; 1 Corinthians 15:47–49; Ephesians 1:23; 4:13; Revelation 1:13–18; 22:3–4; 1 Peter 1:20 and others.
29. See the definition of Christ’s person agreed upon by the unified church at the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in AD 451: Christ is one person with two distinct, unconfused, and inseparable natures, human and divine.
30. Deibert, Second Corinthians, 227: “Neither body nor soul has prior ontological status; each derives from and is contingent upon personhood. Neither body nor soul is independent of the other, nor is either completely dependent upon the other; their relationship is synergistic and their synergy is dependent upon personhood. In this way, the human person can be said to be more of an ontological duality than a dualism.
31. Intriguingly, there is accruing evidence that the tired disclaimer “I’m spiritual but not religious” does not bode well for one’s mental health. See the British study Michael King et al., “Religion, Spirituality and Mental Health: Results from a National Study of English Households,” The British Journal of Psychiatry: The Journal of Mental Science 202 (Nov. 22, 2012). Also, see J. R. Vittengl, “A Lonely Search?: Risk for Depression When Spirituality Exceeds Religiosity,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 206, no. 5 (May 2018).
32. The BCW pays tribute to the faithful recovery of weekly Word and Sacrament by our Presbyterian service books: “The 1970 Worshipbook . . . presented a service of Word and Sacrament as the norm for the Lord’s Day” and “the 1993 Book of Common Worship . . . maintained and strengthened the Word and Sacrament pattern for the Service for the Lord’s Day.” Book of Common Worship, ed. Office of Theology and Worship for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), 25, xxix.