(From my coming book)

For nineteen centuries, Christian apologists were not reluctant to use death in their arguments for the faith. It is instructive to briefly survey the historical apologetic writings of the church. The certitude of death makes it a powerful apologetic that speaks to everyone.

The historical church was not reluctant to discuss physical death for the Christian, affirming it as something to be embraced with joy. Hebrews 2:9 decrees that Christ tasted death for everyone. In context, it is clear the author is referring to the church when he uses the term “everyone.” But what does it mean that Christ “tasted death” for us? Chrysostom comments that Christ tasted death for us to release us from our fear of death. Theodoret of Cyr commented on this verse that by tasting death Christ destroyed death for the believer by the power of his resurrection. In tasting death for us, Christ emptied death of its power when he rose from the dead. During his earthly ministry, we see a foreshadowing of what is to come when he calls Lazarus out of the grave, and when he raises the widow’s son in Nain and Jairus’ daughter.

Death as an apologetic argument is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is a sobering warning for unbelievers that can (and should) spark fear (Acts 24:25). Jesus was not hesitant to warn of the consequences of dying unrepentant and faithless apart from him. On the other hand, death for the believer is emptied of its power and transformed. As Kreeft and Tacelli point out, apologetics has two areas of focus—to unbelievers and to believers (the church). When we fail to address physical death, we shortchange apologetics which has a ministry both outward (towards unbelievers) and inward (towards the church). Physical death is a subject that is pertinent to both. When the church laid death aside in the middle of the 20th century and ceded it to medical professionals, it wrongly thought it was acting with the best interests of Christians in mind. But in fact, it was rejecting millennia of Christian teaching and tradition that helped believers at a defining moment at the end of their life.

Contemporary apologists have unfortunately largely abdicated death as an argument for the faith. In his excellent book Reasonable Faith, William Lane Craig has no exposition on physical death for believers as powerful evidence; in fact there is not even any entry for “death” in the subject index. The same is true for Douglas Groothuis’ superb work Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (once again there is no subject index entry for “death’). The same is true for Kreeft’s and Tacelli’s splendid work Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions (again not even a subject index entry for “death”). Van Til’s powerful Christian Apologetics is the same (again not even a subject index entry for “death”). The multiple contributors to Sean McDowell’s recent Apologetics for an Ever-Changing Culture: A Biblical and Culturally Relevant Approach to Talking About God of course talk about the sacrificial death of Christ but have no mention of its transformative effect on physical death for the believer. Voddie Baucham’s masterful Expository Apologetics: Answering Objections with the Power of the Word, is better with discussion of the Second Death for unbelievers, but with no mention of physical death of believers (again not even a subject index entry for “death”).