The End of the Christian Life

J. Todd Billings is one of my favourite theological authors. He writes with real warmth and rich theology; his dual experience of living with terminal cancer and being a theologian mean that we has both authority and wisdom. Reading a book about death probably shouldn't be enjoying - but this one was!

Today, it came at me again. I was teaching a small group of people at our State Capitol and we were hunkered down examining James 4:13-17. James was correcting the brazen outlook that thinks we have control of our lives and our outcomes, while not having God anywhere in the equation (4:13). And part of James’s remedy was to point out that in light of our brevity (4:14) what we should say is, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that” (4:15). If the Lord – the Lord Jesus Christ (1:1 and 2:1) wills, we will live…and then engage in our activities. And that thought is what “The End of the Christian Life: How Embracing Our Mortality Frees Us to Truly Live” occupies itself with in 240 softback pages. The author, J. Todd Billings, Gordon H. Girod Research Professor of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America, and author of numerous studies, has some skin in this game as he faces his own incurable cancer. It’s not a book for the light-of-heart, but for the live-at-heart! This volume is a must-read for anyone who claims to believe in the Christ of Good Friday and Easter Morning. As Billings states it, the “strange thesis of this book is that whether you are nineteen or ninety-nine, whether you are healthy or sick, or whether the future looks bright or bleak, true hope does not involve closing over the wound of death. Instead, even the wound can remind us who we are: beloved, yet small and mortal children of God, bearing witness to the Lord of creation who will set things right on the final day.”

The author takes readers through an extended meditation on our mortality beginning with our plunge into Sheol, that dark pit that can encircle us even while living. He moves on to two views of death among ancient Christians that, with Irenaeus, sees death as a relief, and with Augustine, perceives death as the enemy. Further, Billings addresses how we mere mortals delude ourselves with dreams of invincibility and immortality, especially in the face of modern medicine. Next, he graciously takes on the prosperity gospel and its anemic cousins, showing how Christians appear to be three times as likely to grasp at extreme medical measures that will only marginally extend their lives. Finally, the author wraps up his material with a glance over the cloudy ridge into the canyon vistas beyond. In these two chapters, he comes at Near Death Experiences (NDE) from a sagacious and pastoral posture, and looks at the differences between what happens when we die, and the glorious day of Christ’s return when he raises all of his people from the dead. We are forced to contemplate what we expect to meet in the end; “The difference is between expecting oblivion and expecting God. Christian hope expects God to be the unrivaled King in the end, so that sin, the devil, and even death will be destroyed.”

Much of the material is challenging, sobering, and enlightening! There were times Billings had me in tears (especially when retelling the stories of “Jack” and “Claude”), and other times he had me walking around the house and yard thinking hard. The author doesn’t shy away from the important topics, like the Day of Judgment and why it is such good news; that NDEs are not revelatory and therefore not a guide; how the Scriptures repeatedly emphasize that Christians actually should expect a life of unexplained suffering; and that the Christian hope is not in life extension or healing, but eternal life with the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, boundlessly! In the end, Billings helps us to recognize that “our mortal limits can lighten our load and deepen our joy. We are small, and the world is not on our shoulders.”

“The End of the Christian Life” is THE book to get this year, especially as the Lord of heaven and earth has given us a good reason to pause, reset, and reboot (2020 and COVID19). This would be a healthy gift for your loved ones, and for you to read yourself. Church leaders and laity should snatch up a copy as it comes out and make this manuscript a priority. Seminaries must require their students to delve deep into its pages and ponder its gravities. I highly recommend this volume, and plan to make numerous copies available to my congregation.

My gratitude goes out to the author and publisher who invited me to be part of the book’s “launch team” and supplied me with a pre-published electronic copy of the volume. They made not stipulations on me, offered me no bribes, nor promised me riches and wealth untold. Therefore, I can say unashamedly that this analysis is all mine, freely made and freely given.

In "The End of the Christian Life," J. Todd Billings examines our current culture’s aversion to the topic of death and how the Christian worldview provides a much more fulfilling alternative. The author begins by analyzing how the Hebrew word Sheol is used throughout the Bible. Billings points out that Sheol is used in the Bible to describe a variety of dire, hopeless experiences that bring us down to the pit physically, emotionally, or spiritually. In our fallen world, we cannot avoid these hopeless occurrences although we struggle to fight by attempting to reclaim control or feign ignorance. One example is in the field of modern medicine which is God’s gift to us as we experience temporal relief from pain and the prolonging of our lifespan. Conversely, we can also cling to medicine as our saviour by pursuing unproven treatments that drain physically, emotionally, and financially. Furthermore, on a broad scale, our culture tries to crowd out any reminders of death and mortality in all spheres of our lives. To counter this, Billings states that we ought to reclaim the art of dying well by fostering holy habits that flow from faith in Jesus Christ. As we engage regularly in the ordinary means of grace, we no longer try to control our lives by our own means but learn to enjoy and treasure each day as a gift from God. The author also discusses how the fear of death plagues both believers and non-believers as we try to avoid physical death in whatever ways we can. Nevertheless, these futile attempts just drive us to greater despair and disappointment. Billings suggests that Christians need not be enslaved to the fear of death if we learn to embrace our limitations and place our hope in God who rules over life and death. Next, the author discusses how the teachings of the prosperity gospel infiltrates Christian circles by promising healing and happiness if we just have enough faith to claim those blessings. In his own experiences and research on cancer patients, the author finds that those who self-describe as being religious were the ones most frequently seeking extreme treatments. The reasoning for their doing so seems to be rooted in these individuals’ belief that God can and will definitely heal their sickness. However, the Bible is replete with stories of godly people who suffered greatly and extensive exhortations to trust God in the midst of suffering. Prosperity for the Christian is not evidenced by earthly riches and bodily health but in the eternal treasure of a life hidden with Jesus that will be revealed when He returns. Although death is the final outcome for all human beings, Billings finds that death can be a friend to some who have lived to a ripe old age and feel that they are ready to pass the finish line. On the other hand, death is a terrible tragedy to families in which babies or young children pass away due to an accident or sickness. Both viewpoints are equally valid as death is a complex mystery containing a mixture of sweetness, relief, bitterness, and longing. What is important is that in both life and death, Christians can find comfort and strength in Christ who lived the most perfect life and died the most violent death. Billings concludes that just as those of the Bible seek the presence of God through the temple, tabernacle, or Jerusalem, Christians today ought to seek after the crucified and risen Christ as the One who sustains our present life and provides us hope for life eternally with Him. Moreover, our individual bodies and the corporate body of Christ are also temples in which Christ dwells empowering us by His Spirit to daily transformation internally while our physical bodies are wasting away.

I greatly recommend this book to readers in all walks of life as death is an inescapable reality for all and it is wise to prepare ourselves accordingly. Billings’s observations, especially those of his own struggles with sickness, provide an invaluable perspective to the challenges and difficulties of living in Sheol on a daily basis. Sadness and pain in the midst of suffering and death is just as poignant and heart-wrenching for both the believer and non-believer as we all will experience Sheol in one way or another. When we come to accept physical death as our inevitable end, we begin to give up trying to control our own future or being enslaved by the fear of passing away. We ought to live each day by giving thanks to God for what He has given us and enjoy the blessings He lavishes upon us. Moreover, we can prepare for our deaths by holding loosely to earthly, temporal things and focusing our attention on cultivating our faith through prayer, Scripture, and communion with other saints. In addition, we can learn to embrace death as part of the rhythm of our lives and invite others around us to do so in light of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. In our earthly lives, we will continue to experience tragedy, sickness, and death until our own deaths or Christ returns. However, we have a Saviour who came in the flesh to dwell among us and suffer for us to the point of death on the cross. Furthermore, the same resurrection power that raised Jesus also works in us to regenerate our hearts enabling us to repudiate sin and live a new life in Christ. As we grow in spiritual maturity each day in God’s grace, comfort, and mercy, we ought to be preparing for the day when we will breathe our very last breath. As those who are indwelt by Christ, Christians can look forward to that day when sin, Satan and, death is no more and we will reign with Christ forever.

In compliance with Federal Trade Commission regulations, I was provided a review copy of this book from Brazos Press.

Very profound writing by the author on a subject touchy for so many Christians and the world as a whole. Recommended for serious reflection only.

The title could be perhaps misleading. When seeing it, my wife presumed it was a jeremiad dire regarding the collapse of Western Christendom. In reality, it is an extended meditation - what is the end, the target, the consummation, the final destination of the Christian life.

Theological meditations on sickness and suffering are manifold, as are memoirs of the sick and dying, but this book fuses the two and does so astonishingly well. The author writes of the Christian hope in the midst of physical decline, pain, and hospitalisation and an eye and tongue of one theologically trained and schooled - but this is no dry monograph. ‘I am writing imperfect theology that invites the curious, the confused, and those seeking authentic hope amid death into deeper fellowship with Christ.’ Indeed, there were moments that felt less like theology, than an extended sermon or meditation, and these moments were a pure pleasure to encounter.

The book asks an important question - do we live with the realisation that we are mortal, and if so, how does this impact our life and our faith? The book raises from many different angles the difficulty of living with the Christian hope in the midst of a culture that denies the reality of death and wishes to defer thought of it whenever possible.

The author explores the place of the dead in the Old Testament, and how this vision still impacts how we speak of the departed today; how in our overwhelming focus on relationships (that will end), we make those and that we love not into God, but into idols; that the narrative of an end of our lives helps bring meaning to them (even to those who do not share the author's faith); what does eschatology look like for those in the early days of the 21st century.

One of the book's most intriguing sections was where the author explores both the world of the hospitalised and those who dwell in it, as well as the concept of the ‘liturgy’ of the present age which piece by piece, is subtly ‘encouraging us to worship our own lives and act as if we belong completely to ourselves.’

The author reminds us that for the Christian, we are first those created by God, and therefore part of an order that includes both life and death. Keeping the realism of our bounded mortality in front of us, allows us ‘to properly live and hope as creatures.’ And as such, we learn our place. We are not those who can fix all things, solve all problems, conclude our lives with nothing undone. We live instead as those dependant on God, and live out our mortality as an act of witness - we cease from being the main star of the movie of our lives, we cease being slaves of time.

The book hopes that we might be liberated from the fear of mortality, and instead live with it in our sight. ‘You are liberated to delight in the acorn, to love the neighbours forgotten in the shadows. Freed to lift our frail voices…trusting that even when our voices cease, the song will continue.’

I must admit, on opening this book my heart dropped - a book on death, in the middle of a pandemic, ugh! But it was a surprising joy to read, and I eagerly commend it.