God was Talking about Death

One of the most destructive concepts in the world is that of “the Christian life.” There is no such thing, at least as it is generally understood. Followers of Jesus do not live individual lives, much less the individual lives of fulfillment and prosperity promised by the hucksters. Followers of Jesus necessarily, by definition, give up their lives. While “life” in a larger, exalted sense is the state of being of a Jesus-follower, this true life is a participation in the greater life of Creation.

Eve and Adam were not given an implicit promise of marital bliss or parental gratification when they were roundly cursed by God. Eve and Adam—who were promised death commencing the very day they ate of the forbidden tree—got what they had been threatened with. What they had been threatened with, moreover, was not just the “spiritual death” that the commentators like to describe.

The commentators sell a religion in which mankind is cursed from the Fall by having tribulations and impediments injected into a divine plan of personal and family life that, nevertheless, is predicated on the idea that good Christian living lets one enjoy a good Christian life. Just let the “spiritual death” of the Fall be attended to by the proper salvation mechanism, and the believer is free to revel in earthly delights.

No, when God threatened death, he meant it. In severest form, this means the requirement to be ready at any time to die for necessary just cause. In most poignant form, this means that death is intertwined with parenthood, as the very logic of the first parents’ curse entails. Parenthood is not the enlargement or fulfillment of life that the (demographically-driven) religions describe it as being.

The only good parent is he or she who gives up life, in the individually-driven sense, to engage in the process of parenting. (To be plain, there are no good parents—at least in light of the importance of the challenge.) Parenthood detracts from life; it doesn’t add to life or fulfill it. The parent who does not understand this fact is headed for horrible disappointment, or even worse is bound to engage in horrible self-delusion.

One thing that remains to be said, though it is logically evident, is that the concept of “parenthood” attends all of adult human life. By any number of analyses, we are all responsible for the world’s children (and all those requiring some manner of guardianship). We have only to choose whether we will address this responsibility as a joyful death to self, or as an exhausting and ultimately futile phantasm of “the Christian life,” or some such.