1. The temporal death.
(De morte temporali)
The essence of death. The essence of the temporal or bodily death1719) consists, according to the Scriptures, not in the annihilation of the man, but in the separation of the soul from the body.1720) The death of the rich man, whose field had brought forth plentifully, is described by the words, "This night thy soul shall be required of thee," την ψνχήν σον άπαιτονσιν από σον (Luke 12:20). Likewise it is said of the death of Christ, because it was a true death: άφήκεν τό πνεύμα and: παρε'όωκεν τό πνεύμα.1721) Quenstedt: Forma mortis est animae a corpore solutio et separatio τοπική seu localis.1722)
The cause of death. The cause of death is not to be sought in an original condition of human nature, as has been asserted not only by heathens,1723) but also within external Christianity.1724) The Scriptures of the Old
1719) The order: spiritual, bodily, eternal death was dealt with in the doctrine of sin.
1720) Gerhard, L. de morte, § 54: Nec anima, nec corpus hominis in jnorte in nihilum redigitur. Non anima, quia illa a corpore discedens immortalis subsistit (Matt. 10:28). Non corpus, quia somno consopitum in pulvere terrae quiescit resuscitationem in extremo die exspectans (Ioh. 5:28). [Google]
1721) Matt. 27:50; Joh. 19:30.
1722) II, 1701. To localis Quenstedt adds by way of explanation: quia anima revera, a corpore discedit et non amplius in eo manet, illud relinquit et quoad praesentiam et quoad informationem. [Google]
1723) Seneca: Morieris, ista hominis natura, non poena est. [Google] In Gerhard, L. de morte, § 27. The detailed antithesis § 38.
1724) The Pelagians, the old and new Unitarians, Catech. Racov. s. 2, c. 1, qu. 2-6. So also more recent theologians: Nitzsch-Stephan, Ev. Dogm., p. 358; Kirn, Ev. Dogm., p. 92. Cf. the detailed antithesis in Gerhard, l. c., § 39.
570 > The Last Things. [English ed. ~ 507-508.]
and New Testament know no other cause of death than the sin of man. When it says in Gen. 2:17 in the warning of God: "Which day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die", and after the Fall in Gen. 3:17 ff.: "Because thou hast obeyed the voice of thy wife ..., unto dust shalt thou return", then it comes to the statement that the death was not set by the original nature of man, but only came into the world as a result of the transgression of the divine commandment. Likewise in the New Testamept, Rom. 5:12, it is said of the cause of death, "Death through sin," διά τής αμαρτίας δ ϑάνατος, and Rom. 6:23: "Death is the wages of sin," τά δψώνια τής αμαρτίας ϑάνατος. The interpretation that death was there before sin, but after sin became a special species of death, a death of judgment,1725) is an insertion into the text. Scripture knows only death, which is a judgment on sin. All other causes of death that Scripture still mentions are causes only because of and as a result of sin. Thus God is the cause of death, insofar as he, as the justified judge according to his righteousness (iustitia vindicativa), inflicts death on the sinner as a punitive evil (malum poenae), Ps. 90:7-8: " We are consumed by Thine anger. … Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee." The devil is a cause of death — he is called John 8:44 άνϑρωποκτόνος, slayer of men — inasmuch as he tempted men to sin. Adam, too, as the first man, is expressly called the cause of death, Rom. 5:15: "Of one sin the many died," τφ τον ενός παραπτώματι οΐ πολλοί άπέϑανον. But from Adam's sin "the many" died because Adam's sin passed to the many by imputation and therefore also by procreation. Even if diseases, old age, fire, water, sword, etc., are mentioned as causes of death, these are only middle causes, which are based as the last and real cause on the one fact that sin entered the world and all men became sinners. That men die after seventy or eighty years, perish by misfortune, by the sword, etc., the Scripture expressly attributes to sin. That the number of years is not in itself the cause of death is also clear from Ps. 90, where not only the deaths that we call sudden deaths are mentioned,
1725) Thus Kirn, Dogm., p. 92 f. Nitzsch-Stephan, Dogm., 357 f.
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but also those occurring after seventy or eighty years are attributed to the wrath of God on sin. And when Christ, on the occasion of the death both of those on whom the tower of Siloah fell and of those who perished by Pilate's sword, says: "If you do not repent, you will all perish also" (Luke 13:1-5), he thereby declares the death by sword and misfortune, which only befalls some, to be a consequence of God's wrath against the sin of all men. — The view that death would have occurred even without sin has been supported primarily by the argument that the human body, because of its material nature, must necessarily succumb to dissolution, or that such heterogeneous elements as the immaterial soul and the material body could not possibly get along with each other over time. So especially pagan philosophers.1726) But it is also said by Nitzsch-Stephan:1727) "A body composed of the same constituents as the rest of nature can hardly escape the fellowship law of re-dissolution into its parts." It cannot be said that this argument can be placed in the class of reasonable arguments. He who admits an omnipotent God must also admit that this omnipotent God can easily preserve material parts from redissolution. If it is added: "According to the undoubted results of physiological science, the body of the first man would have finally dissolved into its parts again, completely apart from sin", then this is unscientific rhetoric. Also no proofs for the "undoubted results of physiological science" are given. Of all who attribute death, instead of the guilt of sin, to the original constitution of man, it is to be judged, that first of all they do not understand the death of man — this after all important fact. To recognize death precisely as the punishment of sin belongs, according to Scripture, to the prudence necessary to all men.1728) Secondly, they also do not understand the death of Christ — also an important fact — because Christ's death is a
1726) Further explanation in Gerhard, L. de morte, § 38.
1727) Ev. Dogmatik, p. 358.
1728) When it is said in Ps. 90:12: "Teach us to remember that we must die, that we may become wise", it is not the fact of death itself that is meant, but the fact of death as a consequence of the sin of the men, as v. 7-11 explicitly say: "Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee ", etc.
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propitiation as payment of the sin debt of man and thereby for man is life. The denial of the guilt of sin as the only cause of death is always based, consciously or unconsciously, on the denial of the satisfactio Christi vicaria,1729)
Subject of death. All men are the subject of death, because the cause of death, sin, is found in all of them. Rom. 5:12: "Death passed upon all men" (διήλϑεν, spread), "because all have sinned." 1730) The claim that occurs from time to time that men have discovered a remedy for death is a fraud and self-deception that is also refuted by experience.1731) He who wants to free men from death must attack the evil at its root. He must free men from the cause of death, from the guilt of sin, and from the wrath of God against sin. Christ has done this through the satisfactio vicaria, and therefore Christ is the only deliverer from death, as it is said of him in 2 Tim. 1:10: (has done away with) τον ϑάνατον.
But here it has been asked at all times, how it comes that also the Christians still die, since they have forgiveness of their sins. The fact that Christians also still die was and is cited as proof that death is not to be regarded as a consequence of the guilt of sin. Concerning the death of Christians, Scripture teaches a twofold thing: 1. that Christians, unless they experience the Last Day, must, however, still pass through death, and that as through a judgment on the sin still dwelling in them, Rom. 8:10: "The body is dead because of sin," τό σώμα νεκρόν δί αμαρτίαν, 2. that the death of
1729) If the old rationalists so vigorously advocated that death was not a punishment for sin, but a "natural, original institution of the Creator" (Bretschneider, Dogmatik I, 845 ff. (p. 820)), they had an eminently personal interest in this. They did not want to let themselves be disturbed by the fact of death in the pleasure of their own righteousness and be caused to have to seek consolation against death in the atoning death of Christ. They therefore instructed man "to develop and use the powers and faculties of both body and mind given to him according to the laws of truth, goodness and beauty, and thereby to become worthy of and capable of a higher and more blessed existence.”
1730) Death is personified. The mighty man, Death, "accompanies, as it were, the branching out of the human race" (Stöckhardt [Römerbrief, p. 238; Schade/Stahlke, p. 217). Death attaches itself to the heel of all men, because men have become sinners.
1731) Ps. 89:49; Job 14:1. 2.
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Christians is no longer death, because what actually makes death death is no longer present in them. What makes death death is the sensus irae divinae, [sense of divine wrath] as the Apology says.1732) Through faith in Christ, the sensation of divine wrath has been replaced by the awareness of God's grace, so that in death they entrust their soul into God's hand.1733) Then death becomes death because, if nothing intervenes, it is followed by the second death (ό ϑάνατος δ δεύτερος Revelation 20:14), eternal destruction. In place of this consequence, however, the opposite consequence has occurred among Christians. They go straight through death into life. Christ says of every believer that he has eternal life (εχει), does not come into judgment, but has passed through from death to life (μεταβέβηκεν).1734) To what extent this already applies to the state between death and resurrection is to be set forth under the following section. We find, therefore, that Scripture, in regard to the death of believers, is full of epitheta ornantia that is, of "predicates of beauty," compiled both by the ancient teachers of the Church and by Luther and our dogmatists. Every Christian, especially every teacher of the Church, should have them at hand and present. 1735)
1732) M. 196, 56 [Trigl. 299, 56 🔗]: Dicit Paulus 1 Cor. 15:56: ,,Aculeus mortis peccatum est, potentia vero peccati lex." Illa potentia peccati, ille sensus irae vere est poena, donec adest; mors sine illo sensii irae proprie non est poena. [Google]
1733) Examples: Acts 7:58; Luke 2:29. Luther (I, 1512): "Natural death, which is nothing other than the soul separating from the body, is a simple death. But where one feels death, that is, the terror and fear of death, there is the right and true death. Where there is no terror, death is not death but sleep, as Christ says John 8:51: 'He that believeth on me shall not see death.' For where the terror is gone, there is also the death of the soul gone."
1734) Joh. 5:24. The perfect tense μεταβέβηκεν denotes the perfected fact certain to faith. The same perfect tense is found in the Christian statement of faith 1 John 3:14: Ήμεΐς οϊδαμεν, οτι μεταβεβήκαμεν εκ τον ϑανάτον είς την ζωήν. Luther (I, 1514): "If you will listen to the law, it will thus say to you, as the old and Christian hymn reads, so one sings in church: 'In the midst of life we are embraced with death.' But this is only a hymn of the law; but the gospel and faith turn this hymn around and sing thus: 'In the midst of death we are in life'. We praise you, dear Lord God, who are our redemption, have raised us from death and made us saved."
1735) Luther writes: "The Scriptures have a very fine way of speaking of death and people who have died," whereupon he points out the "very fine way," XIII, 1328 f.
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