living in the expectation of dying

What About Bob is traditional family viewing for my in-laws, and over years of joining in against my will, I’ve slowly warmed up to the very-much-not-my-style comedy. Besides the delights of late-1980s fashion and its farcical plot, the movie somehow manages to make you (or me, anyway) think a lot about human nature and the human experience. The scene above is one that sticks with me: it’s supposed to be funny, watching these two neurotics room together and overthink the nature of life and reality of death, but of course—Siggy is right.

“There’s no way out of it. You’re going to die. I’m going to die. It’s going to happen.”

Or, as my Grandma B. used to say, “Honey, I don’t have to do anything except die and pay my taxes, and I’m in no hurry to do either one.”

Except some of us (ahem, me) have spent our lives convinced that there was a pretty good chance that it wouldn’t happen—not to us. We’d pay our taxes, but we weren’t planning on dying.

We were the Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye generation: We spent Sundays listening with interest (or terror) to a literal, dispensationalist interpretation of Scripture with an eschatology built around the core belief that we are looking for an end of the world that begins with the sudden whisking away of the entire Christian population from the earth (an event called the Rapture). The key signs to watch out for, despite the fact that this is supposed to happen “like a thief in the night,” are the decline of society into ever-greater evil and corruption, plus increasing violence against Christians all over the globe. The present-day headlines, whatever they happened to be, would serve as proof for this theory. I can’t remember how many times in the aftermath of 9/11 I heard, then just eight or nine years old, that we might at any time have to line up for a firing squad of terrorists and be called on to renounce our faith. I often imagined this scene, wondering if Jesus would intervene at the last moment by Rapturing us to heaven. (There is an entire website dedicated to watching for the Rapture, including a “Rapture Index” that measures current events in terms of how close we are getting to the event we seek. It’s currently within a few points of its all-time high.)

If you’ve ever walked into your home expecting to see your parents or your spouse there, only to find the place deserted, and thought “Did I get left behind?” you know exactly what I’m talking about.

As I’ve read through the Bible again and again over the last 10 years, I’ve come to wonder how an event with so little Biblical evidence has been allowed to take up so much space in many churches. I’m far from convinced it’s not there at all—if Jesus does suddenly sweep us all away from a dying earth while it experiences its last great troubles, I for one will be thrilled to see Him—but I do wonder if the obsession with it has blunted some of the Church’s work.

I’m 31 years old and I’m only now reaching Siggy’s uncomfortable conclusion: I am going to die. There is no get-out-of-death-free card. In the words of St. Paul, “To live is Christ and to die is gain”; this isn’t a reason to panic. But it is a reason to think about how I am living, how I am aging, how I am resting in Christ’s victory as I come to grips with my mortality and the high likelihood that this earth and the human race will continue well after I am gone.

Suppose we’ve had our eyes set on entirely the wrong prize all our lives? Looking endlessly for a worsening world, of course we found it; what we missed from that narrow viewpoint were all the ways life for human beings has massively improved over these last centuries, and maybe even some of the ways we could have joined in the spread of blessing. Injustice, greed, and cruelty are still everywhere, but so are efforts to make the world a better place and treat humans with greater dignity. Given the choice to be born at any time in history, realistically we’d all choose some point in the last 50 years—girlish romantics who fancy themselves Elizabeth Bennett notwithstanding (though I think they’d change their minds once they had to make, mend, wash, dry, starch, and iron all those pretty dresses by hand). Child mortality alone is a stunning example: For most of history, around 50% of all children globally didn’t live to age 15; by the year 1950 that number had fallen to 25%. As of 2020, it was just 4%, and it’s lower by another tenfold in wealthier countries.

But if our escape from death depends on this earth becoming more hellish, what motivation do we realistically have to bear good fruit, to bless our communities, and to spread the kingdom of heaven?

What better incentive to sit on our hands and watch the world burn than the expectation that as long as the fire gets bigger, we won’t be among those burning up?

I know I, for one, have noticed a shocking Max Detweiler-esque attitude within myself at times: “What’s going to happen’s going to happen. Just make sure it doesn’t happen to you!” But for hundreds upon hundreds of years, the Christian faith was second to none in building institutions and societies around the outlandish idea that humans are uniquely valuable. Yes, we’ve done an abjectly terrible job of this at times, but the fact remains that everything in the Western world and beyond has been touched by the influence of Christianity—the influence of Christians who believed a vital part of their calling was to broaden the boundary lines of God’s space on earth.

And so it should be! The Church is the plan. We are the Act Two of Israel’s mandate to bless the nations, commissioned by the Son of God Himself to take the Good News of the Kingdom to the ends of the earth. If we don’t prepare the way for the return of the Lord, who will? We eagerly wait, not to be snatched to safety while the bad guys get their due, but to welcome our Conqueror back to His Kingdom when His work is done.

And that could be tomorrow or in 10,000 years—so we must live in the expectation of dying, expending our lives for the testimony of God’s goodness and setting the big and small things right so that the next generation, and the next, and the next can continue the work toward readiness.

We plant gardens. We bake bread. We serve our neighbor. We share our resources. We learn, we work, we retire; we grow up, we raise children and grandchildren, we grow old. We love, we doubt, we fear, we trust. And then, like countless generations before us, we cross to the other side of that thin veil, into the open arms of a great cloud of witnesses.

And here, the work goes on until the King rides home.

to be

A professor and philosopher named John Vervaeke has developed a framework called the “4P Metatheory of Cognition.” He uses four terms to explain four different ways we measure what we know and how we know it: Propositional knowledge, procedural knowledge, perspectival knowledge, and participatory knowledge. I have been thinking about these four terms a lot and how they relate to our faith. Read part one here, part two here, and part three here.

---

I’ve been sitting with the final “P” in the 4P Metatheory of Cognition for several weeks now, not quite ready to put my thoughts into words. In fact, I don’t think I’m ready now, either, but as a written and verbal processor, just sitting down and doing it is probably the only way I’ll ever get closer.

To know by participation is somehow both the most basic and the most profound form of knowledge in Vervaeke’s framework. It’s the ultimate state of childlikeness: even the tiniest newborn babies, before they know anything through proposition or procedure or perspective, know just by being. They simply are, and that is all. And they are so completely that it’s several months, at least, before they have any idea that they’re actually a separate being from their mother.

This knowledge is unclouded by fluctuations of feeling, nuances of experience, differences in technique, or debates over terminology. It’s entirely pure and innocent, defined by the Known instead of the knower. The perfect embodiment of a branch abiding in the Vine, without which it has no life, no fruit, no identity, no meaning, no anything.

In a world we struggle to describe without terms of emotion, action, or fact, it’s incredibly hard to describe what it means to just . . . be. Particularly to be as a form of knowing, which we tend to think of as more of an action or activity than a state of existence.

And yet participatory knowledge isn’t passive or idle. It’s “experiential and co-creative,” leading to growth and engagement and relationship in a way that can’t be helped. Something like tending a garden in Eden must have been: Perfect conditions, perfect soil, pure sunlight, ideal moisture, flawless weather, no weeds or pests. Flourishing wouldn’t be a matter of strain and effort for seeds and plants there—no, in those conditions, they couldn’t do anything but flourish.

Sadly, our approach is often to drill propositions and force procedures, eking meager fruit from exhausted and resentful plants, instead of feeding the seeds first on a pure and cloudless relationship with the Lord, using perspective as a bridge back to that childlike state when needed, and allowing the desire for greater wisdom and understanding to grow naturally.

What does this mean for how we walk with Jesus, how we understand the Gospel, how we operate in the church?

I wonder if it means letting go of some of our extremely individualistic approach to faith and embracing the fact that we are interdependent on one another and on the core Vine for our life and fruitbearing. The health of one of us affects the state of all of us.

I wonder if it means changing the focus of our church gatherings, away from lengthy propositional sermons and toward the communion table where we meet together with Jesus and wash in the water of the Word.

I wonder if it means releasing our grip on being “right” about every little theological debate and opening our hands and hearts to the big-picture vision of the Triune God to reopen the gates of Eden and spread His upside-down kingdom over the face of the earth.