How We See Death: Natural? Circle? or Resurrection?
The subversive message Disney tells our kids
Last week, I screened a new film from the Discovery Institute called The Story of Everything (coming to theaters April 30). Through the testimony of experts—atheistic and theistic alike—and the beauty of the cinematography, the program contrasts atheistic and theistic views of science. Along the way, one atheist, when asked what happens when we die, says we simply cease to be. We’re worm food.
Of course, as Christians, we expect this view from an atheist. It reminds us today that the Resurrection is our great hope for those in Christ. I particularly like the title The Story of Everything because it reminds us that our most important truths—the ones that shape our paideia and worldview—are encapsulated in stories.
Hollywood, the muse and myth-maker of our time, frequently presents a story about death that sounds “almost right” but pollutes our Christian paideia with pagan ideas.“ “Worm food” doesn’t play well with audiences. So Hollywood has long leaned on a much more insidious viewpoint for our children—that of Eastern religion. The “Circle of Life” seems so, well, natural. (I just put that song from The Lion King into your head, didn’t I?) Disney’s earlier film Bambi played on the same theme. On a whim, I recently watched Tuck Everlasting, a Disney film from the 1980s with a remake in the 2000s. It was clearer in its worldview: the “wheel” of life is to be preferred over immortality. The ending of Tuck, honest to this theme, may explain its lackluster ratings. Eastern religions, taken in full, are hopeless.
Variations on this view of death come in various packages. “Death is a natural part of life” from the Star Wars franchise depicts cremation as a passage into the spirit afterlife, integrated with an impersonal reality that cycles on. We see this in the funeral pyres where the body is reduced to smoke and rises to return to the circle of life. So what’s wrong with this view? Is there something wrong with cremation?
Christian cosmology uniquely tells us of a personal “Storyteller” God. In His world, time is linear, leading from beginning to end—Genesis to Revelation. There is no circle. At the beginning of the story, God creates perfectly, and sin enters to corrupt the world, leading to death. We were created as eternal beings, but must now suffer death as a curse. Yet there’s hope. This hope began with the promises we see early in God’s story in the Old Testament. The good news emerges in the New Testament with the resurrection of Christ and the pronouncement of His Kingdom on earth. Death, far from natural, is conquered. Those in Christ sleep, awaiting the great and final resurrection. Our souls are eternal. There is nothing more true. We yearn for it, as Ecclesiastes says: “God has set eternity in our hearts.” And we look toward a future of communion with Christ, eternally worshiping the greatness of our God. That’s why it is the greatest story ever told. God’s greatness and His love for us win.
For nearly two millennia, the church proclaimed this reality in word and deed. For centuries, Christians carved out caves from the limestone beneath the cities that martyred them in which to lay countless believers who sleep. As Christianity spread, churchyards became the resting place, commonly with all bodies oriented toward the east, from which Christ will come (Matt. 24) as we await the great resurrection. As our grasp of the story loosened in recent times, we spiritualized eternal life as a ghostly existence in the clouds. The Eastern method of cremating bodies eased into practice. Of course, we know from Revelation 20 that the dead will be reconstituted from whatever earthly state they are in. But the true story dimmed as we conflated the “circle of life” from Eastern religions and animism—and their practice of funeral pyres—with the Christian narrative.
As we absorb more and more from Hollywood, the story blurs and blends into our paideia. Our affections start to embrace death as natural. We cave to the lie that we should embrace death. In this Easter season, we can take the opportunity to teach our children about the hope we have. Tell the story, from beginning to end. If you watch Hollywood’s stories with your children, be sure to point out the hopeless and false “circle of life” and its various narratives. The Christian story of Resurrection has been ridiculed for centuries, and there’s a good reason why: it is not hopeful for those outside of Christ. And as C.S. Lewis depicts in The Great Divorce, those who refuse the new heaven and new earth do so because they hate the very idea of it. We should expect unbelievers to embrace a story more to their liking.
The insidious thing about stories is that they influence us more than arguments. We can immerse ourselves in better stories, even outside the Scriptures, to deepen our affections toward the truth. Many stories from old Western Christendom better depict our lives as a gift from which we can love and sacrifice, even to death, with the hope of eternal life. Stories like Les Misérables or A Tale of Two Cities, even when written by unbelievers from that time, still reflect the truth of a culture once steeped in the Christian story. If we make these a regular part of our literary diet, perhaps we can counteract the “almost true” lies etched into the silver screen.
“Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.”