If we are agreed that the matter is of some importance, why is it that we avoid talking about it? D. H. Lawrence called it the "dirty little secret". Helmut Thielicke observed that death is coming to have the same position in modern life and literature that sex had in Victorian times. One of the best descriptions of the modern attitude to death I have come across is given by philosopher and social commentator Os Guiness in The Dust of Death. He says:

Contemporary society...meets death by escaping into romanticism. It was once a common idea that when Christian views of death, dying and the afterlife were removed, there could be a new, free, pragmatic, almost casual approach to death, one releasing man from the fear of non-being. The reverse is the case, partially because of the aggravation of twentieth-century social problems and the addition of the Eastern concept of reincarnation, but especially because men cannot escape the fear of non-being. Secular man now has an even greater fear of death and non-being. The gross commercialism of grief and dying is only the flip side of the fear of death; the fear is hiding itself in an extreme romanticism, laying men open to manipulation.

There are many ways of avoiding the subject. In an article in Time, "Death as a Constant Companion", psychologist Rollo May said:

We run away from death by making a cult of automatic process or by making it impersonal. Many people think they are facing death when they are really side stepping it with the old "eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die"-middle-aged men and women who want to love everybody, go every place, do everything, and hear everything before the end comes. It is like the advertising slogan "If I have only one life...let me live it as a blonde."

He points to our modern-day obsession with sex as one of the ways we avoid facing death:

The clamour of sex drowns out the ever-waiting presence of death...Death is the symbol of ultimate impotence and finiteness. What would we see if we cut though our obsession with sex? That we must die.

The fact that we do not talk about death does not mean that we do not think about it. A team of psychiatrists in Missouri came to the conclusion, on the basis of tests that indicate what goes on under the skin and inside the skulls of Americans of all ages, that people think four-and-a-half times as much about how to solve the riddle of death and what comes after it as they do about sex and romance. Similarly, an opinion poll among 3,000 West German teenagers in Kitzingen, only five per cent of whom belonged to church youth groups, revealed that the number-one question on their minds concerned life after death. Social and political questions, which the pollsters (public school religious teachers) expected to rank higher, interested them less.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death Ernest Becker suggested that the primary concern of every living person is death, and most people deal with that concern by denying that it will ever happen to them. That reminds me of a story told of Lord Palmerston. Seriously ill, his doctor told him the severity of the situation. He huffily replied, "Die, my dear doctor! That is the last thing I shall do!"

Many who do not believe in life after death, or at least are uncertain on that score, are prepared to face it with a stoical courage. Eugene O'Neill, in Long Day's Journey into Night, expresses a philosophical attitude common enough today. "Life's only meaning," he says, "is death, so face it with courage and even with a love of the inevitable. Death becomes a blanket on a cold night." However, you don't have to scratch people very hard to find that not far beneath the surface there is an anxiety about death, even a real fear. Melanie Klein, an English psychoanalyst, believed fear of death is at the root of all human anxiety. Paul Tillich, the renowned theologian, based his theory of anxiety on the idea that man is finite and must die. Austrian psychiatrist William Stekel went so far as to express the hypothesis that every fear we have is ultimately fear of death.

However, it is not just fear of annihilation which causes us to fear death. Epicurus, the Greek philosopher, made this revealing comment: "What men fear is not that death is annihilation but that it is not." If it is indeed true that we live in a moral universe, and that our moral awareness does not just come from some evolutionary process, but behind everything is a God of moral perfection who has created us with a moral conscience, then that puts a certain perspective on things. If, as the Bible consistently states, we are accountable to God and one day we will have to give an account of what we have done with our lives, and if we will ultimately be judged by God's standards and not ours, then maybe we have every right to be afraid of death. It is only the most callous (or dishonest!) who are not conscious of their failures in this respect. James Packer puts this bluntly in a magazine article "Dying Well is the Final Test":

Physical death is the outward sign of that eternal separation from God which is the creator's judgement on sin, and which will only become deeper and more painful through the milestone event of dying, unless saving grace intervenes. Unconverted people do well therefore to fear death: it is in truth fearsome.

Avoidance of death, however, has its consequences. Joseph Bayly, whose three sons pre-deceased him, wrote in View from the Hearse:

When a civilisation denies death and hems its members in with cars and amusements, science and organ transplants, against the mystical elements of life that reach their zenith in death, we should not be surprised if young men and women create their own mystery through conscious-expanding drugs and Eastern religions. Nor perhaps, should we be surprised if that civilisation has a high rate of mental illness and suicide.

Paul Helm, in The Last Things, adds: “Because death is often associated with deep grief and an acute sense of loss, it is sugar-coated, or even plastic-coated, the perfect vehicle for inducing superstition.”

Christianity has an answer to all of this, but before exploring the Bible's outlook, there is one other subject I wish to tackle-is it reasonable to believe in life after death, and the two options that the Bible describes?