Albert Mohler is the president of a southern baptist seminary and has a blog that I read regularly, even though I quite often disagree with him and always in the broad area of ‘sexuality’–abortion, stem cell research, cloning, family, etc, However, he writes in such a well-reasoned way that he causes me to sharpen my own thinking. This is from his most recent blog.
I arrived in New York City over the weekend and discovered that the Rev. Forrest Church had died on Thursday, September 24, after a battle against esophageal cancer. Pastor of the Unitarian Church of All Souls on the Upper East Side for many years, Forrest Church was almost certainly the best-known and most influential Unitarian figure of the late twentieth century.
Forrest Church was in the public eye for most of his life. His father was the late Senator Frank Church [D-Idaho], who chaired committees that investigated the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1970s. Sen. Church also ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. After serving four terms in the Senate, Church was defeated for re-election in 1980. Then, in 1984, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died just three months later.
Forrest Church was 61 when he died last Thursday. He lived only two years longer than his father. But Forrest Church did something that few people are able to do — he wrote extensively about his own (impending) death. When told that his cancer was terminal, Forrest Church preached a sermon that was intended to help his congregation understand the process of death and dying. In the month that followed, he wrote a book about death and the experience of approaching his own death.
In Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, Church wrote of his understanding of death and its meaning. At the end of it all, the Unitarian pastor and philosopher wrote of “my abiding belief in love after death.”
Significantly, Church wrote of his fascination with death. As a younger person, he had romanticized death and contemplated various scenarios of a famous demise. Later, though no longer believing himself to romanticize death, Church still seemed to see death in similar terms. Writing as a pastor, he told of a terminally ill church member who had committed suicide with the assistance of the Hemlock Society. Church wrote of his sympathy for her wish to remain in control of her life, even through her death. “I could only admire her,” he wrote.
Forrest Church was a man of intelligence and culture — assets no doubt valued by his socially elite congregation at All Souls. He was also a gifted writer. In helpful sections of the book Church took on the “conspiracy of silence concerning death” and helpfully reminded his readers that all of us will surely die. Church saw our modern obsession with health as a barely-disguised effort to postpone death, but to no avail. Vegetarians and joggers die, the pastor reminds.
Church compared life to the voyage of the Titanic. In the end, every life hits an iceberg and sinks. His exhortation was for all people to “dare to live before you die.”
He also tied his understanding of religion to the knowledge that we shall surely die. “I draw from a strong faith tradition which, if not orthodox, invites me to explore everything from the scriptures to ancient philosophy to current events,” Church wrote. “But the object is always the same. For me, religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”
Therefore, “if religion is our human response to being alive and having to die, the purpose of life is to live in such as way that our lives will prove worth dying for.”
As is to be expected, Mohler then comments that missing from Church’s picture is any notion of life on the other side of death. Church’s belief was in “love after death,” but not in life after death.
I admired Forrester Church, although I never met him. It surprises me that a person so theologically removed from Forrester Church has such kind words to say about him, especially in this contentious time in which we live.
For more, read http://www.albertmohler.com/2009/09/29/life-after-death-or-just-love-after-death/
