Page 13 - AECA.org.uk ¦ Koinonia 64

All this betrays a very ambiguous, and disturbing, attitude to the body:
no longer “seeing” the process of death, the dead person, death itself, our focus
is now ever more on the body. We exercise and look after our body more than
any previous generation, and we might do so under a veneer of Christian theol-
ogy, arguing that ours is an “incarnational faith” in which the body is the temple
of the Spirit. Yet, when we come to death, we treat the person as “liberated”
from the body, discarding the coils of the mortal ?esh. Today, we live as hedon-
ists and die as Platonists!

In a very real sense, then, we no longer see death today: we don’t live
with it, as an ever-present reality, as has every generation of human beings be-
fore us. To put it at is most extreme: today we must be killed in order to die!
What we call life is capable of being sustained inde?nitely by machines in an
Intensive Care Unit; the machines must be switched o? for the patient to die.
One cannot but recall the verse from the Apocalypse: “And in those days, they
will seek death and will not ?nd it; they will long to die, and death will ?y away
from them” (Rev. 9:6).

The erasure of the process of dying, the dead person, and death itself,
has, of course, been observed many times: such as the classic work by Ernest
Becker, The Denial of Death (1973), following on from other equally noteworthy
studies, such as Geo?rey Gorer, Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Brit-
ain (1965), and Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963).5 There have
also been excellent studies with a much longer historical sweep, examining the
changing patterns of death and dying in Western culture, especially the works
of Philippe Aries.6 And there have also, of course, been any number of books
written in response to these changing patterns, mapping out the best way for
looking after the dying and the grieving, from the older works of Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross to the more recent works of Ira Byock.7

However, I would suggest, that despite various “death of God” theolo-
gies, the problem has yet to be addressed on a theological level, and that when

5 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1977); Geo?rey Gorer, Death, Grief
and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (New York: Doubleday, 1965); Jessica Mitford, The American
Way of Death (New York Simon and Schuster, 1963)
6 Philippe Aries, The Hour of our Death (New York: Penguin, 1981 [1977]), and more brie?y, Western
Attitudes to Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1974).
7 cf. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying: What the Dying have to teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy
and their own Families (New York: Scribner, 2003 [1969]), and Death: The Final Stage of Growth (New
York: Touchstone, 1986 [1977]); Ira Byock, Dying Well: Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life (New
York, Riverhead, 1977) and The Best Care Possible (New York: Avery, 2012).

11