Embracing Our Mortality

The End of the Christian Life (Billings)
Rejoicing in Lament (Billings)
The Lost Art of Dying (Dugdale)
Dying and the Virtues (Levering)

Speaker 1:

Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture, brought to you by Dallas Theological Seminary.

Kymberli Cook:

Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture. My name is Kymberli Cook and I'm the senior administrator here at the Hendricks Center. Today, we're going to be talking about embracing our own mortality and why it's a necessary practice for Christians. We are joined by the esteemed J. Todd Billings the Gordon H. Girod research professor of reformed theology, that is quite a title, at Western Theological Seminary.

Todd Billings:

A mouth full.

Kymberli Cook:

Thank you so much for joining us today, Todd.

Todd Billings:

It's great to be with you, Kym.

Kymberli Cook:

So why don't we just start out by you telling us a little bit about yourself. How did you end up in scholarship and at Western Seminary? How did you even end up in the scholastic academic world?

Todd Billings:

There's I think probably several versions of that story that I could tell, but I think that for me, formative experience was spending a couple of years at the end of my college time and then after college in East Africa and working with the church there. I was both fascinated and engaged by the energy of the church that sometimes you can see in a different context with even more clarity than in your own context, but I was also really puzzled. There were hard theological questions that I realized were ones that I hadn't really thought through and that I realized that for the preaching and the ministry of the church would need to be thought through. So it was at that point that I decided to go to seminary and then started to eventually think going for a PhD.

Todd Billings:

So I went out to California after a couple of years in East Africa for seminary at Fuller Seminary, then I went to Harvard for my PhD work in theology. So since my time at Harvard, I met my wife there, we were both graduate students and we met at an InterVarsity fellowship there. And since my time at Harvard, I've stayed where I got my first job which is Western, Michigan. It's been a really good match, so yeah, I love teaching, I have a deep love for the church, I love writing and feel called to writing as well.

Todd Billings:

I guess one part that is maybe a significant background to this as well is in 2012, when I was 39 and my wife and I had a one and three year old at home, I was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. So thankfully I'm still alive, this is not a ghost version of myself here, and I still have side effects of chemotherapy as I continue on chemo. But I'm able to work and I'm really grateful. After that experience, I wrote a book on lament, partly processing that experience with the Psalms. But some of how I became interested in the topic of how we die and how we live in light of our mortality is just becoming a cancer patient. You enter into a community where there's a lot of love and compassion and anxiety and a lot of deaths. A lot of my friends from the cancer community have died and there's certain gifts and challenges that come with that increased awareness of death.

Todd Billings:

But it just struck me how my life before and so many aspects of especially middle-class, Western culture today try to convince us that death is something that happens to other people and not to us or it's supposed to happen after a long life in your 80s or something like that. And started to see how we've shortchanged the Gospel in buying into that narrative. God never promises a long life and the good news is better than that. So that's some of how I became interested in the topic of how we live in a way where we embrace that we're dying.

Kymberli Cook:

So this can be an intense topic I think for people, I would have to imagine. It was intense as I was thinking about it and even preparing for the podcast and just really reflecting on it and reflecting on the dimensions of the conversation. Some of that is very uncomfortable, particularly, probably for us here in the Western culture. I know at least that's really all I can speak to, is our own culture. But your insights in this area seem to assert that it's unhealthy and unhelpful, particularly for believers, to hide away from this. So we're going to step in, you already started us a little bit on the train of thought we're going to step in. I think the first place to start would really be, maybe let's dig in a little bit more of what you were talking about with just our current culture not being comfortable with it and hiding it away a little bit. What are your thoughts on just how death is portrayed and not even just portrayed obviously in movies and that thing, but how it's handled in our culture?

Todd Billings:

There's all sorts of forces at work, and one of the most dramatic ones is ones that we don't notice unless we actually go to another country that doesn't have the technology and healthcare and so forth that we have. In one of the places I was in East Africa, it had around a 50% infant mortality rate. So the whole way in which identity is configured is so different, when I would meet someone, they would introduce themselves, say their family and tell me I have seven children, three living or I have six children, four living. So everything about who you are is marked by life and death in a different way. Sociologists in the West have called this the great health transition. It's not just the story actually of the West, it's becoming more and more of a global phenomenon as medicine itself and particularly public medicine and public health becomes global.

Todd Billings:

But you have this dramatic increase in lifespans that we've just taken for granted, you have… In the middle of the 20th century, most deaths still took place in homes, so most children growing up or many children would have had the experience of basically a hospice worker today, of taking care of a parent or grandparent or a sibling while they die in the living room. Today, the vast, vast majority of deaths take place in institutions, the dying are in institutions. It's not unusual as a seminary professor for me to have a seminary student preparing to be a pastor who's never been to a funeral or maybe been to just one or two funerals. The life experience is just totally different with this.

Todd Billings:

I know it's counter-intuitive though to say that death is somehow being denied in our culture because it's all over the headlines and it's all over entertainment, but that's actually quite different. Again, although I draw upon biblical, theological resources, I dig dive into some of the social scientific work too, and it's a very, very different experience to have a firsthand experience with someone whose dying in an ordinary way. To have a headline hit you about so-and-so died and now there's a lawsuit or a politicized death or a death and in entertainment, in a strange way that can actually reinforce to us that death is something that happens to other people and not us. With cell phones and social media, the whole world is configured to our interests and gives us the sense that we're at the center of the universe and we're the central star in our story in our movie. And that's about as far as you can get from what I would say, a biblical self-awareness of mortality is. Biblical teaching is that we are small, we are like breath, and every moment we have is a gift from God.

Todd Billings:

So it's not just that people have been sat down and taught death is not something that applies to you, it's much more what I call the cultural liturgies and ways that shape not just how we think, but also how we feel and what we expect. These are really, really powerful and powerful for Christians and the church as well.

Kymberli Cook:

So before we get too much further, we're about to dive into the biblical understanding concepts of death and approaches to death, and we'll get there in a second. But before we go to that, I do want to talk about what you understand to be the relationship between death and suffering in this conversation. So if we're talking about embracing our mortality, where does suffering have a place in this conversation? Because some people might be in a place where they are really in a time of suffering, and that may or may not lead to death from that particular event of suffering. But I think that that's… I don't know. As I was reflecting on all of this, it was something that I thought, it's not exactly death because death is, again because of our cultural liturgies, the big thing that we almost don't talk about, the fear of death. But I think suffering also has a large part in this conversation, so what do you see the relationship being?

Todd Billings:

I think that the relationship can be complex. As you mentioned, not all suffering is directly related to our mortality. I think that some of where it may become especially important is when we think about what is the gospel and what is the good news of Christ saving us from and for. So if Christians are really formed deeply in a context where I am the center of the universe and I should expect to live till 80 or 90 or 100, then it's very natural for a lot of Christians to assume, well, if I do the right Christian things or if I trust in God, if I have trust in God when I pray in faith, then I'll make it there, then God will give me what really I deserve. When someone falls ill and they're not at that age, then that shapes how the prayer often takes place.

Todd Billings:

When I was in the hospital with my own cancer, I appreciated all the prayers that were lifted up. But I also noticed that some of the prayers seemed like, give Todd back his middle-class lifestyle and long life that he deserves. I have to say that that's a view of God that I had questions about because God doesn't owe us anything, God doesn't owe us life. So often there's all sorts of things we encounter in life as suffering that we think that as Christians we should get over. Particularly in what I explore in terms of the prosperity gospel, which isn't just preachers who are promising a tenfold reward when you send them in money, it is that, but it's also just much more subtle forms of the Christian faith where when we're raising someone in the youth group, we lead them to expect that if they live a good Christian life, then they're going to live till their 90s, that this is just part of what God owes them.

Todd Billings:

Well, this prosperity gospel makes suffering itself a problem that we're supposed to be delivered from if we have enough faith. But I think a more biblical gospel framed suffering as an opportunity for witness because Jesus Christ is the man of sorrows and he shows in the cross that the way of flourishing is not seeking out suffering for its own sake, it's not masochistic, and it doesn't stay in an abusive relationship or something like that. But it does realize that in the midst of this mortal life, and some of this will relate to our crumbling bodies as mortals, and some of this will just relate to difficulties we have with other people or with other trials, but in this mortal life, we will have the death of Christ in us bearing witness and sharing in his sufferings. That ultimately that is a testimony to the King of Kings.

Todd Billings:

That's a very counter-cultural movement because there's so much of the Christian faith, I think, formed by so many of these different consumer factors, as well as prosperity gospel type factors that just makes us assume that if you're suffering, it's either your fault or God's fault. It's not God's fault, so must be your fault or something like that. Or the suffering itself is a problem. But all over, Paul, for example, you have suffering and joy linked together again and again, and I think that's often the case. I have had people say about my book, "Wow, there's a lot of joy in that book, it's not a morbid book even though it's about death." That pleases me. Of cause, I wasn't trying to write morbid book, but trying to show us how when we're trying to stay at the center of the universe, in some sense, we don't open ourselves up to either suffering or joy in the way that we can when we live as mortals before God.

Kymberli Cook:

So we've talked a lot about how we currently at least approach death or the lack thereof to try to hide it away. How have Christians historically approached death? Are there different approaches? What are those approaches? Are they better than what we are currently doing? I'm presuming that they probably are, they're at least more complex. So what have you found in that, just to help us understand maybe again, following some other examples of people who might be handling it better?

Todd Billings:

Well, I think there's a couple of different approaches in terms of the theology of death that Christians have had. That was actually a discovery in the process of writing because I had only heard about one for the most part or really absorbed deeply one. Then there's also a whole long set of practices that are hundreds of years old. But on the theology side, the one that I knew about and had really championed in my book on lament, is death as an enemy. Good biblical support for this, Romans 5 and the reading of Genesis as through the sin of Adam comes death and Revelation and all this language of death as an enemy, death in some sense fundamentally unnatural, not the way things are supposed to be.

Todd Billings:

It was interesting because I was actually really honored to have a retirement home in town that has a lot of former missionaries and ministers read my Lament book. Not all of them could read at that point, so they found one person who could read out loud and they read each chapter aloud to each other in small groups over 10 weeks and discussed it, and then I came and dealt with their questions. The most repeated question was, "Why do you talk so often about death as an enemy? Our biggest fear is that we're going to live too long, that we're going to keep on living after." They're feeling the deterioration of their bodies and the loss of mobility, one thing after another, and there's always something that medicine can do to just keep them beating their heart longer. But they were saying, "We understand why death would be an enemy for you or for our grandkids or something like that."

Kymberli Cook:

Something tragic.

Todd Billings:

Yeah. But almost to a person, they had a sense, "We are not in a position where we don't want to die. We want to die, and not in a self-harm way at all, but just to think we've lived this arc of life, all the different stages, and here we are, we're ready to die." As I did more into it, both historically and scripturally, I found that there really is a trajectory there where Abraham and a number of Old Testament figures in particular died full of years and old age. There's a fullness, an arc, that takes place there. Irenaeus in the second century was really a champion of this view of death, where he talks about how Christ went through all different stages of life and in a sense sanctifies them through his person and being our brother in the flesh and flesh and blood. He is the pioneer and shows us how every stage of life, including the process of dying, is one where we have the opportunity to give ourselves over to God.

Todd Billings:

Even as we lose things, one by one, mobility, friends, family, from dying, this is an opportunity to give ourselves over to God in sanctification. So no, I don't think there's anything directly contradictory about Irenaeus and Augustine in their biblical account, but they certainly aren't intention. I think that some examples when I give an example of in the book of a friend who was a missionary, died unexpectedly at a young age, that seemed to me to be very much an Augustinian moment at the funeral. At least the Augustinian moment was needed where we're like, "This is not the way things are supposed to be. We don't understand, we just don't understand at all." Augustine said, "Death is fundamentally irrational, you can't come up with a human reason why this happened."

Todd Billings:

Then there have been other funerals that I've been at where I've known the person who have died and they were both entering into the life that they were given at that stage of life, entering into ministry, entering into love of others, and they were tired, they wanted to go and be with Christ as Paul said. So that has a different sense to it. So I ended up saying that I think in some ways, all of our deaths, we don't control in advance how we're going to die. So all of our deaths will be somewhere on this continuum. But I'll let you ask the practical question too, that's its own whole thing, but that's the theology of death. I would just say that most Christians, I think we're, like me in the Lament book, most Christians today they're only really aware of death as an enemy, that trajectory. So I think there is actually some need to rediscover this other theme as well.

Kymberli Cook:

So what I'm hearing you say is both of them seem to be legitimate historically, biblically and that we night not necessarily want to just ascribe to one. Is that death can be, and you can think Christianly about death and not just see it as the last enemy to be destroyed is that thing. That was really interesting to me as I read and thought about that because I very much had also been trained very fervently with an Augustinian approach to death. I still think that it's valid, like you even assert. But there are situations, like you said, particularly with the elderly or those who are suffering where it's not that clean and there's just this sense of… But that doesn't seem to fully cover what's going on, the situation and how, again, it's portrayed in Scripture.

Kymberli Cook:

So you've talked a lot about Christ, which is always a good thing, but you talked a lot about Christ as the nexus, the point that our mortality and… I lost my train of thought. But where he really is the point where humanity and mortality and our understanding of those things and our experience and example intersect, he is that for us. But I'd like to focus in a little bit on the cross specifically, the cross and resurrection. What does that accomplish? What would you say it accomplishes with regard to death? I think that's a pretty standard creedal question, but the part B of it would be, what is to be enjoyed now and what is to be enjoyed later? And how does all of that work with what you're saying as far as embracing mortality? Because if we're embracing mortality on some levels, it could be construed as embracing death, not necessarily as a good thing, but maybe a little bit as a good thing, but isn't that what Christ defeated? So how do you think through, help us think through those things.

Todd Billings:

That's a really good question and it's a complex nexus there. So let me say a little bit, and feel free Kym to come back and push me out of there to clarify.

Kymberli Cook:

Yeah, you're fine.

Todd Billings:

Because I found that even as I was reading some of the classic prosperity gospel teachers, some of the teachers who were really influential on later prosperity gospel preachers, so some of the less well-known ones, but super influential ones, they actually did think things through theologically in terms of union with Christ and death. I'm very interested in those issues, I have a couple of books on meaning with Christ. And from a doctrinal perspective, I often felt like I could say yes, yes, no and that no may seem small at the moment, but it ended up being a huge no. So there's a sense in which our union with Christ as well as the kingdom of God is already but not yet.

Todd Billings:

In union with Christ, one of the most frequent terms used in the new Testament, one of the most frequent metaphors is adoption. So we often think of ourselves, as Christians, as adopted sons and daughters of God, adopted children of God, and we should, this is a good thing. But it's interesting that there's places that say that, but there's even more places that say, talk about how we will be adopted or we will be fully adopted. So I think that we can sometimes obscure the sense in which with Romans 8, yes, we are adopted children of God able through the Spirit to call out to God as Abba, father, and yet we groan, we lament with the whole creation until that day when our adoption takes place in fullness. So it's actually a sign of the spirit that we are groaning and lamenting that our union with Christ in a sense isn't full yet, isn't that strange?

Todd Billings:

Some of what we're groaning and lamenting is that we live in a world where death is still an enemy. So there's nothing Christ's cross and resurrection is completely sufficient to have victory over sin and death, and yet when the New Testament speaks about it, it speaks about it in the sense that this is something that will happen, it will be on the final day, it will be when Christ returns, when Christ comes and the kingdom comes in fullness. Then we will be able to say, "Oh, death, where is your sting?" Until then, there's a sting to death. I think we sometimes miss that or feel like that's less than Christian to admit, but I think it's fully, fully biblical.

Todd Billings:

I remember being with a member of my congregation, had been married for over 50 years, and it was the anniversary of the death of his wife about I think a year before. He just started crying and saying, "I know I'm not supposed to be sad because everyone tells me that she's in a better place, but I want her here. No, I want her here." I think that when we are so quick to tell people, yes, your lost one, your loved one is in a better place, we can obscure this. There is a sting to death. Death hasn't been defeated yet in a certain sense. Now, I'm not at all meaning to imply that there is-

Kymberli Cook:

No.

Todd Billings:

It's fully accomplished through the cross and resurrection, but it hasn't come yet. Some of where the prosperity gospel, I think, goes wrong with this is when they think about the benefits of Christ and what we have now, they still think that there's an already, not yet. But they would say that disease, poverty, and sometimes death, or at least disease and poverty, are in fact already accomplished through the cross of Christ and already received through the cross of Christ to those who have faith to receive it.

Todd Billings:

At least the classic prosperity folks talk about how if you're not receiving healing from disease and rescue from poverty, so in other words material wealth, then you are stuck in the sense world around us, the sensory world around us, which is not really real. So when Christ comes again, then there will be a coherence between the sensory world they think and the Lordship of Christ. But the way to enter into this real world is to have a bold faith that shows you that disease doesn't really exist for Christians in a way when you have faith. So there's still an already, not yet there, but I think it's a very distorted one.

Kymberli Cook:

So what I'm hearing you say is that in the very, I think, widely accepted understanding of the already, not yet kingdom, that we still, obviously we along with creation, lament and groan under the weight of sin and death awaiting Christ's ultimate redemption of all of it. So I guess my question is, and even maybe turning to the practicalities of what does it actually mean to embrace our mortality, how do we lament and groan with creation yet embrace our mortality? Are those mutually exclusive things? And if not, what does it look like to actually do that while still definitely being under the weight of sin? Because embracing almost seems like a positive celebration rather than this lamenting and gowning.

Todd Billings:

Interesting. Yeah, I know some Christian authors have talked about it in terms of mortality acceptance, that we accept the fact that we are finite dying creatures rather than living the path that even our culture wants us to live, which is to live most of our life in a way as if we were immortal. I think one of the reasons why I use the word embracing mortality, it has to do with a theology of creation, that we are created finite and small and different from God, but still good. And we are in fact fallen, and this is something similar to what Irenaeus would say. Given the state of our fallenness, God actually uses our creaturely limits as a gift to lead us further into our identity in Christ. So precisely because we are so inclined to act as if we were God, to act as if we are the center of the universe, the fact that we have bodies and bodies that are failing can actually become, in a strange way, a touch of grace that we need to embrace.

Todd Billings:

So there's also just the sense, the broader sense related to this that as we think about the cross and resurrection, I do think, and what we have now and what will we have to come, the categories of justification and sanctification are really helpful. That is in justification, we find our righteousness in Jesus Christ, that our status in Christ is such that we no longer have to live in fear or serve God in fear that we will be rejected in the final judgment, that we have been acquitted from our sins, and yet we still live with the old self, we still live with sin, we still live with death. So there's this long process of sanctification.

Todd Billings:

So I think that on that point I'm very influenced by Calvin, I think his way of framing those two is inseparable, where you can't have one without the other is really helpful. And it's really helpful as you're dying in the sense that if you are just constantly worried about the final judgment, it doesn't necessarily lead to a very healthy hope. But the coming of the Lord and the Day of the Lord in Scripture is certainly a fearful thing at times in the sense that the Lord is King and we are not. But it's also celebrated, it's celebrated in the Psalms, it's celebrated in the New Testament. I think those in Christ can look forward to it.

Todd Billings:

So some of what we're lamenting and aching is just that the Day of the Lord isn't here yet. So the way to ache as mortal creatures and lament is not to say, "I should act as much as if I were immortal as possible." But is to say, "Come Lord Jesus to us in our brokenness. And in the meantime, thank you for these bodies that we have, which are temples of the Holy Spirit." These broken crumbling bodies are both temples of the Holy spirit and we look forward to the age to come as a place where, in a sense, the whole cosmos becomes a temple in the sense of a dwelling place where God dwells with his people. So even I think with the temple imagery in the Bible, you have something like an already, but not yet as well.

Kymberli Cook:

And coming, like you said, the aching is the waiting and the hurting until Christ comes and the ultimate redemption is offered. But you're in the midst of that, like you said, you're recognizing the manner in which God is utilizing even this fallen world to again, bring us to himself, sanctify us, however you want to use the terminology. But yeah, I see what you're saying, and I hope it doesn't come across that I'm pushing against what you're saying.

Todd Billings:

No.

Kymberli Cook:

As I was listening to you, I thought, "But what does it mean to lament and to goran with creation but also embrace?" I think that you've showed us that it does involve both. So as far as just practically what you do in your life, so somebody hung with us all the way through all of this theological conversation, but they say, "Okay, but what does that actually mean that I do next Thursday?" So what would you say to that? How does it impact our daily life, daily actions? What does a life that is embracing mortality look like?

Todd Billings:

Well, I think in our culture in particular, it requires intentionality because what the automatic default, especially I've found in white middle class contexts, is to put death in the sidelines and put it in an area where it's off limits from everyday conversation when it comes to the normal experience of death. It's almost like pornography or something in the sense of like it's headlines and entertainment, but then we just don't talk about the normal experience. So concretely, this was a big challenge for me as a parent finding out, wow, this is the percentage, this is the chance you have roughly speaking, of course, the doctors don't know for sure, but of being alive when your kids graduate from high school. Do I want that to be their first funeral they go to? That would be a really bad idea. I want them to actually be exposed to dying and for this to be part of their growing up and part of their development.

Todd Billings:

So this happened in some pretty simple ways at times, we took the opportunity when we had a dog die, had some pet fish die just to spend some time with the dog before we buried it and to say prayers and to weep and to give space for that to be really, really open to the questions of children about death because especially if they have an experience with it in everyday life, they will ask a lot of questions and just to welcome those. If you don't know the answer, just say, you don't know. You'll get a lot of questions like, is our dog and heaven or things like that. Then I think the church, especially in multi-generational church, is such a gift, an underutilized gift, on this.

Todd Billings:

I found that in all of my different spheres and areas, whether it's work or social or things like that, the one place where I could really help my whole family to get to know people who are in the process of dying, especially in the last few years, was the church, was congregations. A lot of these folks had a lot of their friends die already, were pretty lonely, but it was not at all just about being a good samaritan to them. I would go and bring the kids to the nursing home in different places where they were and there were such a gift to us. But you have to get used to, people will look at you strange when you say, yeah, I'm taking my kids out of school to bring them to the funeral of this older man who they got to know or things like that. I think there's much in the concrete life of the church and its worship life and so on, where the reality of death is both seen as something that we all go through in baptism and the Lord's supper and can be highlighted and entered into more.

Todd Billings:

The other thing that I was reminded of, Kym, with your last question too, and it may be a concrete way to get at the sense of, well, if death is really an enemy, should we embrace mortality? Is I do think we do need to have hard conversations about end of life. My book is definitely not just about end of life, it's about living the whole life as a creature who is mortal with that awareness and embrace. But I was really troubled when I entered the cancer community and I had Christian friends die. To see how that happened in many circumstances, where faith was utilized in such a way that if you really had faith, then you would believe that the oncologist was wrong in terms them being in a serious condition as they are. So someone on the verge of dying, there would just be calls out for prayer again and again. Pray that they live another 40 years, then a couple of days later, they're dead. I think there's got to be more than one storyline about how God acts than that.

Todd Billings:

I was pretty troubled to find out that highly committed Christians are over three times as likely to ask for extreme measures at the end of life. And these extreme measures are things that basically have a lottery ticket level chance of doing any good. It's not like they would bring people back for a long life or something, they might give people a few months, but what they almost certainly give in most circumstances is terrible side effects so that they can't actually be with or be present with family. So I think that what I noticed was that Christians who would do this would just champion the death is an enemy language in such a way that all that they could possibly imagine of God wanting for this person would be to have more heartbeats, to live longer.

Todd Billings:

But that's not at all how I see Paul speaking in the New Testament. He is so looking forward to being with Christ after he dies, and so looking forward to the age to come. This is such so much more of a bigger miracle than living a few months more on a ventilator or things like that. So I think concretely that is something that the church needs to take on very directly because if you think about how this affects the spiritual life of those who are continuing on after their loved one has died, after there's been calls out that if you pray, this person will live another 40 years or if you pray, then this person will not die, and then they die, it's devastating. The thing is, it's prayer that I think is not ultimately based on what God has promised. So I'm not at all against praying for healing, but to pray in such a way that it's open-handed and that God is working and that God is not up to just extending our lifespan, he's into resurrection, which is totally different than extending our lifespan.

Kymberli Cook:

Well, our time is up. Just real quick, are there any resources out there that people might want to check out if they want to dive deeper into this concept, into this practice of trying to embrace one's mortality in a more intentional way?

Todd Billings:

Yeah, sure. Well, certainly I would recommend my own book, "The End Of The Christian Life," which isn't just about end of life, but about the whole Christian life, even how we raise children or how we live different stages of the Christian life, where death is not pushed to the margins but it's actually part of our discipleship. It's really a recovery of resurrection hope because I found that so many of us, it's almost like we don't really want resurrection hope, we just want life extension, we just want some other form of earthly prosperity. But I think that entering into this practice is a really deeply formative one.

Todd Billings:

There's another book that's a new book and just a superb one that I think is especially good for those end of life discussions. I would recommend it for churches too, even though it's not as directly theological, it's by Lydia Dugdale called "The Lost Art of Dying." She's a physician and a professor at Columbia University School of Medicine and has just been present with hundreds of people as they have died. She's seen so many circumstances, like I was just talking about a few minutes ago, where people hadn't really thought through even what was going on when they think about end of life and extreme measures. But it's a really a rich piece where she gives you some of the history of how Christians have related to death with the Ars Moriendi tradition. I draw some upon that tradition too in my book, but she has more of a historical section. And Ars Moriendi means "art of dying." Particularly after some of the plagues and bred of illnesses, there were these manuals that developed of how not just to die, but to live in light of the fact that you're going to die.

Todd Billings:

So there's a lot of wisdom there. I guess one more resource is from a Roman Catholic theologian, Matthew Levering on "Dying and the Virtues." I don't agree with every part of it, being Reformed and not Roman Catholic myself, but it's so beautiful in terms of how he talks about the different sorts of ways of patients and hope and so forth that we should cultivate, and just how different that is from the stories we're given about death and dying in our culture today, he draws that contrast in a really beautiful way.

Kymberli Cook:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Todd, for joining us today. We'd just like to thank those of you who were listening. And if you enjoyed today's podcast, please be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and to join us next week, when we discuss issues of God and culture.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to The Table Podcast. For more podcasts like this one, visit dts.edu/thetable. Dallas Theological Seminary, teach truth, love well.