In The Slavery of Death I try to use psychology to describe what Hebrews 2.14-15 means when it says we have been "enslaved, all our lives, to the fear of death" and why this slavery to the fear of death is described as "the power of the devil." And in describing all this I lean upon the notion from Orthodox theology that death, rather than sin, is the primary human predicament.
In the final part of the book I then move to describe how we might become emancipated from our fear of death to create the capacity for love. For love, according to 1 John, is how we know that we have "moved from death to life." Love is the experience of resurrection here and now, the life of Jesus manifest in our own lives.
As I describe it, our emancipation from our slavery to the fear of death is achieved, first of all, by a prior experience of death. We overcome death by dying. We take up our cross to deny ourselves and die "in Christ." I call this a martyrological identity. In the book I describe this martyrological identity, this meeting death with death, as fundamentally the renunciation of the cultural hero-system, the cultural self-esteem project. By renouncing the idolatrous ways our culture defines worth and significance we extract ourselves from the power of death and the devil as these idolatrous pursuits are, deep down, enslaved to the fear of death.
From there, after the dying involved in renouncing all the death-driven and idolatrous ways we've constructed our identities, we then receive our identities as an experience of grace. I call this, borrowing a term from David Kelsey, an eccentric identity, an identity that isn't owned as a possession but is always and continually received as a gift. This experience of gift lessens our anxious grip on life, on our very selves. In sum, the degree to which this experience of grace and gift saturates our lives is the degree to which "perfect love has cast out fear."
Abstractly, these are the processes, the pincer movements of the martyrological (death) and eccentric (resurrection) identities, that create the capacity to love others fully and sacrificially. Regarding concrete practices that pull us deeper into these identities I describe, for the eccentric identity, the practices of doxological gratitude (again borrowing from David Kelsey). And for the cultivation of the martyrological identity I talk about the small, daily acts of asceticism of the "little way" of Thérèse of Lisieux. It is the assessment of Arthur McGill that "the way of Jesus is the way of self-expenditure." That's a scary prospect, but the little way helps ease us into a life lived for others.
Okay, that's a snapshot of the book. Parts 1 and 2 articulate our fundamental human predicament, our slavery to the fear of death. And Part 3 articulates an answer to that predicament, how perfect love can come to cast out fear so that we might move from death to life.
Time for Q&A. If you've read the book and have any questions you'd like to ask me please post them in the comments. If you've not read the book something in my summary above might have sparked a question. Feel free to leave your questions as well.
I'll let these questions gather over the week and then respond in a post in a week or so. (I doubt I'll be inundated with questions, but if there are a lot I might have to be selective in responding.)
