I’d like to start by thanking Peter for taking the time to read and review The Slavery of Death and for letting me share a few thoughts about some the questions and concerns he had about the book.

Let me start with a confession. Interdisciplinary work is a scary thing when you are trying to make connections with sophisticated and sprawling disciplines outside of your area of expertise. In my case a psychologist trying to make contact with theology, church history and biblical studies. The risks of looking foolish and making amateurish mistakes are quite real. And I’ve made my fair share of the years. I simply lack the breadth of knowledge needed to cover all the bases.

Consequently, it is a blessing to have scholars from these disciplines engage your work critically as well as charitably. I find these exchanges to be very educational. When it comes to theology, church history and biblical studies I remain very much a student.

Turning to Peter’s review of The Slavery of Death, after his excellent summary of the main themes of the book he expresses three concerns. I’d like to share some thoughts related to each.

First, Peter raised the concern that my book tends to marginalize some atonement theories, especially those that involve the wrath of God. Peter’s concern:

“In any case, we cannot dispense, as Beck is inclined to do, with the category of wrath. It’s far too prominent in Scripture, and if God’s wrath is real then salvation must involve some solution to wrath.”

I have another confession to make. I have to out myself as one of those Christians who have struggled mightily with atonement theories that privilege the wrath of God. In many ways, The Slavery of Death is an exploration of alternative perspectives regarding the atonement, Christus Victor perspectives in particular. My interest in Christus Victor perspectives is how this view envisions the actions of God as wholly benevolent and non-violent, God rescuing us from oppressive and enslaving powers (sin, death and the devil).

So Peter is very right in noting this bias in the book. It’s a bias that flows out of my own theological journey and struggles.

But rather than rehashing the atonement debates in addressing Peter’s concern, let me attempt to make a connection between death and wrath that might be helpful.

There are locations in the biblical text where death is a manifestation of God’s wrath and judgment upon sin. For example, consider Psalm 90.7-11: “We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. If only we knew the power of your anger! Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due.”

Death is here envisioned as the wrath of God punishing our iniquities. We also see a connection between death and God’s wrath and judgment of sin in places like Romans 8, where creation stands under God’s judgment in being subjected to the forces of death.

All that to say, if we consider death as being a manifestation of God’s wrath then being set free from death would be an instance of being rescued from God’s wrath.

That isn’t the line of argument I make in the book, but I offer it here as a bridge for those wanting to keep death at the center of the human predicament (a key notion in The Slavery of Death) and who want to embrace Peter’s suggestion that the wrath of God be included in this account. If death is an example of God’s wrath—even God’s primary means in punishing sin—then liberation from death, in any form, can be seen as salvation from the wrath, punishment and judgment of God.

Let me now turn to Peter’s second criticism, how Peter wishes that I had included a bit more about the Orthodox notion of deification, especially how God, via the Spirit, supports and sustains a life of loving self-donation. Here is Peter’s concern:

“[Beck] talks much about self-donation, but less about the promise that those who lose their lives receive them back…Put otherwise, I wish Beck had considered another Orthodox theme, that of deification, instead of (or before) talking about “ceilings” and “limits” and before saying “Past a certain point, you can’t get better” (63). As Nyssa said, because we are creatures of God, He determines our limits. We are as capacious as He would have us be, capacious enough to house the Spirit; our energies are as inexhaustible as He would make them, and His own resources for restoring our resources are infinite.”

Again, Peter is a keen reader. The book does lack a robust pneumatology. Consequently, while The Slavery of Death starts with the Orthodox account of ancestral sin, how humans have become separated from God’s vivifying Spirit, it doesn’t continue, at least overtly, on to the Orthodox account of how our slavery to death is overcome when we are “reconnected” with Life via the indwelling Spirit. This is the connection that Peter points to, a connection that enables us to transcend our mortal and moral limitations in our journey toward sanctification.

We can add here to Peter’s criticism how The Slavery of Death also lacks a metaphysical appeal to life after death. That should seem strange given that the promise of the resurrection would seem to be the critical antidote to our fear of death. Why fear death if we are going to life with God in heaven forever?

The reasons for these curious omissions in the book are complex. Peter hazards a guess about what my worries are: “In general, I had the sense that Beck was worried about turning the gospel into another hero system, another neurotic pathway to significance.” That’s a part of my concern, but not the most important one.

We’ve all heard the quip, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” In fact, psychologists have done research showing how if you make people think about their death their belief in God and life after death increases. Even atheists. The point being, we can see how belief in life after death can be used as a defense mechanism, as a form of existential consolation in the face of death.  Freud famously described belief in the afterlife as a “narcotic,” as an existential drug that numbs the terror of death.

This defensive deployment of religious belief wouldn’t be so worrisome if it weren’t connected to violence. As Ernest Becker argued, and has been confirmed in empirical studies, when we adopt beliefs to experience existential consolation we aggress against out-group members who do not subscribe to our belief system as these Others threaten the source of our existential equanimity. Psychologists studying this phenomenon have dubbed this dynamic “worldview defense.”

Consequently, my worry in all this is less about, as Peter posited, religious belief being “another neurotic pathway to significance” than faith being (unconsciously) adopted for the purposes of existential consolation and how those beliefs, given why they are adopted, are implicated in violence.

In short, while belief in the afterlife might seem to set one free from a slavery to the fear of death the adoption of such beliefs might actually be a sign and symptom of that very slavery.

Navigating this psychological tangle affected my approach in the book. My concern is that in the face of death we will move too quickly to assertions about how God has rescued us from death (via the Spirit or an afterlife) and end up bound to the very fears we were trying to escape. In that instance we’d be simply exchanging a conscious fear for an unconscious one.

(Incidentally, my book The Authenticity of Faith is preoccupied with sorting through the various subterranean motivations affecting faith. That book is my attempt to address Freud’s critique that religious belief is primarily motivated by a need for existential consolation.)

The Slavery of Death suggests that our slavery to the fear of death is not overcome by a belief in heaven. Rather, the book argues that our slavery to the fear of death is overcome by a deep reconfiguration of our identities. The book is an invitation into the processes and practices of that reconfiguration without short-circuiting or short-changing the process with explicit discussions about heaven or the activity of the Holy Spirit.

In this, I would argue that the pneumatology of the book is implicit rather than explicit. Through the practices of doxological gratitude (prayer and worship in particular) the self is emptied and God is received. And I contend that in this open posture of receiving God our slavery to the fear of death is decisively transcended. It is this posture that is existentially emancipatory rather than any beliefs about what God may do within us or through by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit. I agree with Peter that once the Spirit is welcomed transformation, power and life await. But my fear in the writing the book, in light of our existential dread, is that in making that outcome the focus we would rush ahead and end up getting the cart before the horse.

In short, I was trying to walk an existential tight-rope in the book. I was hesitant, because of the temptations involved, to write in such a way that prematurely promoted beliefs that provided consolation before the practices were fully engaged. I might have gone too far with this strategy, and the strategy as a whole may have been ill-conceived, but I hope this explanation illuminates some of the tensions I was trying to navigate in presenting the material of the book and the pitfalls I was trying to avoid.

Finally, Peter’s third concern about the book was that I am hard on institutions. Peter’s observation:

“Beck doesn’t say much positive about institutions…he says almost nothing about the redemption of institutions, how institutions might be liberated from the fear of death so that their participants might devote themselves to serving life rather than death.”

Once again, guilty as charged.

It is true, I am very cynical about institutions. This is party due to my personality. I’ve got an anarchist temperament and chaff at the dehumanizing forces implicit in institutional systems and structures. And beyond my personality, my biases against institutions have been shaped by theologians who have greatly impacted my thinking. For example, William Stringfellow, no fan of institutions, has been an important influence upon me and his analysis of the principalities and powers has been foundational to my own thinking on this topic.

And yet, I’ve recently come to recognize the theological shortcomings in how I’ve approached the subject of the principalities and powers. Soon after I finished the draft of The Slavery of Death I engaged with Hendrik Berkhof’s classic work Christ and the Powers. Berkhof helped me see that, while the powers are fallen and in various states of rebellion toward God, the powers were created to structure, preserve, and safeguard creation from dissolving into chaos. And the powers, despite their falleness, continue to perform this vital function. More, the powers will one day be redeemed when brought under the Lordship of Christ. There is a goodness in the powers.

Still, given the biblical witness regarding the antagonism between Christ and the powers, I believe that Christians should remain skeptical and wary of institutions and nation-states. I agree with Peter that the powers are redeemable. But I am skeptical that human beings can redeem the powers this side of the eschaton. Consequently, the threat of idolatry, as I describe in The Slavery of Death, is an ever-present temptation.

To conclude, I think each concern Peter expressed about the book is both warranted and insightful. And I’m deeply appreciative to have the chance to clarify, elaborate, and explain some of my thinking on these topics. And if my elaborations are not wholly satisfactory they may at least clarify where my biases and positions might be found.

If you read The Slavery of Death, I hope and pray that you will be blessed by it.

Richard Beck is a Professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University.