Death
Epilogue 5 March 2022: I think about the things I write long after I publish them. So, I have recently realized that Maginley’s book (see below) is open to some criticisms, maybe many. Near death experiences (NDE) are not the same as death itself; affected individuals are alive to tell the tale. They didn’t necessarily return; they just didn’t get to where they were headed! A reasonable hypothesis is that NDE represent hallucinations due to brain processes that current technology cannot detect or explain. As far as I know, no NDE involves absence of life signs for extended periods, say 48 hours or after putrification begins. As much as I hate to say it, Maginley’s stories reinforce the magic we would all like to believe, that death is merely a transition. Magical thinking gets us into deep trouble sometimes. Jesus took death very seriously; overcoming the grave was just one of the reasons he was sent. If death is not real, why not just eat, drink, and be merry waiting for the great denouement? If death is not real, let’s all go out and jump in front of a bus! At the end of the book of Revelation (20:14) we are told, “Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.” For me to believe otherwise is to deny the Word of God; this I cannot do. Still the book has merit in terms of the importance of ministry to those in the process of dying and, of course, their family members and friends. Though the process is terribly difficult, the rewards are tangible. One last point of emphasis, I am not saying Maginley is lying about his experiences or observations, I am saying that he is misinterpreting his observations. As you will read below, it is very hard to know something. Of course I am always open to other hypotheses 😇
UPDATE 1/26/22: Like a dope, I left out the paragraph immediately following the picture below. It is essential when you get to “My Point” further on. Sorry about the confusion 😎
Preface: For whatever reason, I have wanted to write about this. It has been exceedingly difficult to pull it together, to get it to the point where it seems right, what I am trying to pass on to you. I am not sure I have reached my goal. There are some very complex ideas, language, reasoning, and conclusions we should think about very carefully. It is long because I am long-winded 😇 but please take your time. Read slowly, even meditate on what I have written. I want to teach, to encourage, and to serve, but most of all I want to honor Jesus. I have done the best I can at this point; perhaps it will start a dialogue, which is needed within the Body of Christ. It certainly has within me. Enjoy.
Death. Tis the season. Seems everybody around me is dying. Or, maybe it is “merely” the passing of a generation. Last year, my uncle died, Korean War medic. His wife, my aunt, recently followed him. Her older sister, also my aunt, 95, may soon be following her younger sister having just been moved to a care facility. My dad just started his 97th year, body failing. My aunt and uncle, 20 years younger than Dad, are stricken with early dementia. A couple of cousins that used to babysit me when I was an infant are experiencing deteriorating health, cancer. Mother and father, in-laws, are suffering with Parkinson’s, blindness, and debilitating pain. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact we are all on a one way trip.
The Narrow Gate
Nothing like starting the new year off with a happy thought, David! Oh, it gets better! I just read a book by David Maginley, Beyond Surviving: Cancer and Your Spiritual Journey. He is a chaplain in a large cancer center in eastern Canada and like all of us in health care, he has battled death. While winning some and losing many, he has made some astonishing observations, which lead to surpassingly astonishing conclusions.
Digressions
Modern culture teaches that death is the final step, the end of life, lights out. The fact is we don’t really know. That which happens, or doesn’t happen, after we die is a mystery. Our measurements stop, whether they are breathing, electrical activity, energy consumption, we don’t have the ability to see past “death” even with the most sophisticated of instruments. Ergo, so, modern culture is a belief system. It is as much religion as anything else we might share; anything else invented by man. As for death, not knowing drives us crazy. Most fear it, some welcome it, some even look forward to it as a denouement, a passage into the new life, that which was ultimately meant for us. They are probably crazy.
Others claim something comes after death, which is the cessation of observable life. Most notable for westerners are the resurrections from the dead described in the Bible, particularly that of Jesus. Other religious traditions also claim death is not the end, the spirit of man lives on, even forever. Sounds like a fairy tale.
Or maybe it isn’t.
One of the greatest mysteries in physics concerns the mechanisms of consciousness. The materialistic view is that the brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile. This sounds dismissive; it is; it does not explain anything. Indeed, it begs the question. In fact, it is a religious statement, no matter if it is uttered by a Nobel Laureate in Medicine 😲 It is exactly akin to saying, “That’s the way God made us” 😲 This latter statement doesn’t explain anything either and was a commonly held, even vulgar and dangerous viewpoint that lead to the so-called war between science and religion during the Enlightenment. It continues to this day.
As this trivializing, religious adage yielded to burgeoning scientific methodology, it lead to the “God-of-the-gaps hypothesis.” Which is, God exists where science cannot explain. It is dangerously insidious and often unrecognized; in religion and in science! For example, if we don’t understand consciousness, it must be of God. If we don’t understand consciousness, science eventually will. Both are faith statements! And both are true!
I wrote previously I was a biomedical scientist for more than forty years. In fact, I went into science because God called me to it. From a youngster, I seemed to hold the conviction that truth is true 😲 If religion is one form of truth and science another, then those truths must converge at some point. Even at a young age, I was formulating hypotheses. So my reasoning went, and these truths, if they did not converge, then somehow, one or the other was not properly understood. One or the other, or both, needed better (more accurate) interpretation.
It is very hard to know something. It takes excruciatingly hard, exacting work to understand what is true, whether we are discussing consciousness, a molecule, the cosmos, disease, or sacrifice, justice, righteousness. It’s much easier to say, “That’s the way God made it.” Or, “Scientists will figure it out.” Though not necessarily wrong, such “conclusions” often indicate a lazy mind.
Bear with me through another long digression.
The battle cry of the Reformation was “sola scriptura,” only scripture or scripture alone. It meant the scriptures were to be the final arbiter of truth, the ultimate authority. Aye, there’s the rub! To understand truth, one must search the scriptures, study them, and ultimately, interpret them. Without even considering oral traditions, the availability of original texts, and translations of ancient languages, interpretations require conjecture. And scholarly though it may be, it is still human. It’s hard to know something.
Science is similar yet different in that it depends upon contrived experimentation. Contrived in the sense that we invent experiments we hope will lead us to understanding. So extreme are the effort and precision required, clouded by our biases and beliefs, we say nothing can be proved, only disproved; experiments are designed not to prove a point, but to falsify hypotheses. To understand the universe, a scientist must be painstakingly rigorous, even to the point of self doubt. At least this is true of good scientists. It may take years, decades, even centuries. In the end, we are left with results and to determine the meaning of results we must interpret them. Interpretations require conjecture, scholarly though it may be, it is still human. It’s hard to know something.
I am setting up religion and science as opposing one another. In reality, they are both ways of knowing something. The rub is they often appear to contradict each other, not always, but often. Religion loses because science has experimentation to fall back upon: These results prove… No! Useful results can only DISprove, everything else is belief. But so powerful is this scientific dynamic that religion has been forced to retreat because it has no great experiment to illuminate truth. It has retreated so far that proof of God seems to only exist in the gaps of human knowledge; a sad situation.
One way to escape the God-of-the-gaps conundrum is we divided the world into two domains, subjects open to scientific inquiry and those considered religious questions, so called metaphysics. Each domain had its own field of inquiry, science and theology. The problem with this sort of thinking was exacerbated by Einstein’s relativity theory and the nascent field of quantum mechanics, both of which are problematic in that their inherent truths have not yet converged. It is the great hope of physicists that one day the differences between these two great theories will be resolved fully and then, we will know everything. The Theory of Everything will have supplanted the need for God; that is the ultimate goal, just read Hawking.
However, as I read physics language, the interpretations describing its outer limits begin sounding to me almost religious. Why? Because we are obsessed with extracting meaning: Not the what, the why of all things and this requires even scientists to resort to metaphor in order to interpret their findings; even math is a metaphor! Interpretations require conjecture and scholarly though it may be, it is still human. It is very, very hard to know something! Advocates believe we will fully understand the universe and consciousness when the differences between relativity and quantum physics, the two most successful scientific theories ever contrived, are resolved. In theory anyway 😉 It seems in science as well as religion truths converge.
Thanks for persisting with me through these digressions, the last of which concerns how we can know truth. You might anticipate two of the answers, scientific investigation and supernatural revelation, but there are others. For example, experience: You put your hand into a fire, it hurts like hell. Not scientific, but extremely effective. Another is observation: You watch me put my hand into the fire, and I withdraw it quickly, dancing and screaming, obviously in pain; that and my hand turns black. Wouldn’t you think twice before approaching that exercise yourself? Both science and religion take advantage of these forms of knowing. Experience and observation are overlapping subsets of knowing. Religion and science are organized subsets of experience and observation. Both can be used to examine the same subject, consciousness for example, and yet come to different conclusions. My hypothesis is, if both are true, then their conclusions will eventually converge. Simple!
Truth is revealed to us through experience and observation. Moses, at the burning bush, had an experience that changed the nation of Israel; the Bible is full of such divine revelation. It is also full of that which I will call examples of natural revelation.
Psalm 19:1-4: The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
Acts 14:15-17: Friends, why are you doing this? We are mortals just like you, and we bring you good news, that you should turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. In past generations he allowed all the nations to follow their own ways; yet he has not left himself without a witness in doing good—giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy.
The Apostle Paul says it most succinctly:
Romans 1:19-20: For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.
There are numerous similar examples throughout the Bible. Check it out.
We also know the Bible is incomplete 😲 If you disagree with me or you think what I am saying is heresy, interpret the following:
John 20:30-31: Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
John 21:25: But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
Incomplete, yes, but sufficient for us to understand the unfathomable grace of God in saving us through the sacrifice of His Son on the cross of Calvary that we might “have life in his name.” God asks us to prove Him through the experience guaranteed by our life in His Spirit. Read about Gideon in the book of Judges and his “experiment” to assure himself he understood God’s commandment to go out against the Midianite army with only 300 soldiers. Search for other examples. Finally, the Apostle whom Jesus loved, John, adds in his gospel, chapter 14, verses 11-17:
Observation- Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Experience- Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. Observation- If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it. Experience- If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. (Annotations mine)
We,The Church, are to be the messengers to the world that the peoples of the world will hear the Good News of the Gospel. Observation and experience.
My Point
Well, what does this have to do with death? Back to the Maginley book in which he describes his experience with dying patients and also some of their near death experiences, the incomplete passing over. Hear me carefully: This book may include examples of profound natural revelation. You should read the book and test whether I am “rightly explaining the word of truth.” If such revelations are of God, and I can see no reason at this time why they could not be so, they point to an almost unbelievable truth about the purpose of this “veil of tears” and what it means to depart this life and be transformed in the presence of God. This is a deep area, one fraught with many potential pitfalls, it must be handled with fear and trembling as it is holy ground, but it may also be a glimpse, evidence, of a magnificent reality beyond this life. If I am handling it right, then it may be a gracious provision of comfort to many for whom death is their greatest fear.
Study the entirety of Romans 8 and in particular verses 19-21: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” There’s a lot riding on this, my friends! But I believe God is calling us to something so totally beyond our imagination, beyond our denomination, beyond our doctrinal interpretation, why, even “going to heaven” seems cheap. And the sacrifice of Jesus on that cross was no mere historical event, it was THE event. It was the DEATH OF DEATH! Lift up your hands in praise! Lift up your hands in praise! And He invites all to participate in the celebration. The invitation has been delivered in the mail: OPEN IT!
Postscript: Maginley could be lying. I could be mistaken. One or both of us could be deluded, crazy. But I urge you to be pragmatic. Test this. Treat it like the scientific experiment of all time. Look into the Word of God. Look into your experience. Observe. Listen to the still small voice, your Advocate, the very Spirit of God. God is not the deceiver, we know who that is and he whispers, “The end of your body is the end of you.” IT. IS. NOT. SO.
Now, He who is able to keep you, He that is able to transform you into the new creature you are to be in Christ Jesus, and He that began a good work in you, will complete it in the day of our Lord. Let Him fill you. Let Him guide you. And let Him bless you. Amen.