"No longer seeing death, our focus is now ever more on the body. We exercise and look after our body more than any previous generation, and we might do so under a veneer of Christian theology, arguing that ours is an 'incarnational faith' in which the body is the temple of the Spirit. But then at death, when the coils of the mortal flesh are discarded, we think of the 'person' as liberated from the limitations of the body. Today we live as hedonists and die as Platonists!
In a very real sense, we no longer see death today. We don't live with it as an ever-present reality as has every generation of human beings before us. To put it most extremely: today we must be killed in order to die. What we call 'life' is capable of being sustained indefinitely by machines in an ICU; they must be switched off for the patient to die. One cannot help but recall the warning in the final book of Scripture: 'And in those days, they will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die and death will fly away from them.'"
John Behr, The Joy of Life
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