Like the Apostle Paul, Thielicke’s preaching extols the truth that in life and in death, we belong to the Lord.
Helmut Thielicke lived in the shadow of death.[1] He writes,
“We have seen Stuttgart burned and bombed, and we now know what is meant by the destruction of a ‘world.’ Only the language of the Bible is great enough to speak of the fire and smoke, of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, of endurance to the end and of love growing cold under the overpowering weight of affliction. Only the language of the Bible is powerful enough to speak of the unburied dead, of evil spirits in the air, and of comforting angels. Only the Bible possesses the language for these things.”[2]
He recounts the lasting imprint the death of his grandfather left on his young life as he saw the old man’s pale face and lifeless limbs. As a university student, Thielicke would suffer from a chronic illness which left him bed-ridden for months with uncertain prospects for recovery. Thielicke would often recall how so many of his own promising students, who he hoped would be pastors and theologians, fell on the blood-soaked battlefields of Europe. While the war was going on, Thielicke would preach in Stuttgart as the angel of death came clothed in exploding bombs, devastating churches and culling hearers from those sitting under his pulpit. For many, Thielcke’s preaching on the Lord’s Prayer or the Small Catechism, would be the last sermon they would hear before their earthly lives were extinguished by the flames and fumes of warfare.
In a sermon on “Thy Kingdom Come,” Thielicke describes a woman coming to him after her husband had perished in the bombing. Thielicke was overtaken with discouragement:
“My work in Stuttgart seemed to have gone to pieces and my listeners were scattered to the four winds. The churches lay in rubble and ashes. One occasion when I was absorbed in these gloomy thoughts, I was looking down into the concrete pit of a cellar which had been shattered by a bomb and in which more than fifty young persons had been killed. A woman came up to me and asked whether I was so and so, since she was not sure who I was in the clothes I wore. Then she said, ‘My husband died down there. His place was right under the hole. The clean-up squad was unable to find a trace of him. All that was left was his cap. We were there the last time you preached in the cathedral church. And here, before this pit, I want to thank you for preparing him for eternity.”[3]
With these words, Thielicke was comforted with the comfort he had received (see 2 Corinthians 1:3-7) and was now giving.
Given the nearness of death, there is an eschatological urgency to Thielicke’s preaching. Each human being stands in the twilight, in the evening time of a world heading toward death. Death is not just out there in some unknown future. Death is always projecting itself into our present. Human beings live with an awareness of their finitude.
“Animals live only for the present; humans anticipate the future in anxiety and hope.”[4]
Death is not just out there in some unknown future. Death is always projecting itself into our present.
Death is not only on the horizon out there after the end of a long and rich life; it is a companion along the way, casting its shadow over all of life.
“Death is a cipher for God’s extermination of a life that is at odds with Him and has not remained faithful in its creatureliness... Death so understood casts a retroactive shadow upon birth. Or, expressed without ciphers, the fatal end also characterizes the created beginning of the course of human existence so that one can no longer speak of creation without, at the same time, speaking of the fall and man’s vulnerability to nothingness and to the end.”[5]
In a similar fashion, Thielicke speaks of death as a divine imposition on humanity which distinguishes man from other mammals:
“Death is not characterized by the fact that it is a limit but also by him who is limited; namely, limitless man who wants equity with God and not just likeness. Death is characterized, too, by Him who imposes the limit, namely, the Holy One who will tolerate no other gods and who, therefore, humbles the superman. Biblically, death is not the death of man as a mammal, but the death of man as one who wants to be God and hence has to learn he is only man.”[6]
In light of his own re-occurring encounters with death, it is not surprising Thielicke would devote prolonged attention to the fact of death in both his theological writings and in his sermons. Thielicke’s most substantial theological treatments are of death are in Death and Life, Living with Death, and The Evangelical Faith, Volume 3, and there is significant overlap between these three books. Thielicke views death in light of God’s work in the Law and the Gospel, God’s alien and proper work as the Lord who kills and makes alive. Death is not an impersonal entity, nor is it part of the “great circle of life.” It cannot be confined to biology. Thielicke writes a long reflective letter to a former student now a soldier (who would himself die not long after receiving this epistle from his mentor):
“God alone can heal the wound because He is the one who inflicted it.”[7]
The God who kills is the God who makes alive.
Cutting through every attempt to soften death with deceptive language that would deny its sting, such as “she has gone to a better place” or “now he is part of the ages,” Thielicke is starkly biblical in his description of death.
“This is why death is a problem in the Bible. For here, man is not simply a piece of life or of a spirit or of the nation, but behind all of these and apart from all of them he still has a self which bears an indelible character for which he must give account. Because of this self, death is a problem. For seen in this life, death is no longer an event of transition, the self going over into something else. It is, rather, destruction, the self going under like a sinking ship. For the same reason redemption from the bondage to death is not to be found in some alleged immortality, which is, after all, nothing else than a transition; redemption is to be had only in the resurrection of the dead, that is, in that reality whereby I am caught up and carried through the very destruction by that One whom death was unable to smother in its vortex. Resurrection is the shattered grave (but nevertheless a previously occupied grave); immortality is the denial of the grave.”[8]
The Christian kerygma is not one of a shadowy life after death, but the proclamation that on account of Christ’s death and resurrection, all who cling to Him will share in His victory over the grave and be partakers of eternal life.
Thielicke draws on the realism of Luther’s treatment of death in the Reformer’s lectures on Psalm 90[9] and Genesis 3. Once again, Thielicke returns to the anxiety death generates. Tracking with Luther, Thielicke notes how natural man has lost all sense of measure and proportion and instead:
“...strives to gain a few more years when eternity is at stake, who struggles to be calm in the face of his minuscule microcosmic bodily death when what is really at stake is the macrocosmic fact of being torn asunder from God, the overwhelming fact of bounds being imposed on the One who is out of bounds.”[10]
Man becomes more concerned with postponing dying, rather than turning to the One who alone is the resurrection and the life.
Thielicke’s sermons on death accent the raw reality of death: It is not natural. Death enters the world as a result of sin, and it disfigures God’s good creation. Thielicke illustrates this by telling a story recorded in the diary of a young flier who, reaching down to pick a bouget of lilacs, draws back in horror to see beneath the fragrant flowers the decaying corpse of a fallen soldier. The beauty of the flowers stood in contradiction to the ugliness of death. Yet, he realized the radiant lily would all too soon wilt and whither in decay.
“He sensed that the dead man lying there was somehow a foreign body in God’s flowering world. And in this, that young flier was closer to the world of the New Testament and its message than the people who are always driveling about the naturalness of human death.”[11]
Human death points to the disorder now present in the fallen world.
“It was unnaturalness incarnate. It was something contrary to God’s order that this young flier sensed with his boyish instincts.”[12]
The judgmental character of death as an invader and disrupter of God’s creation is clearly seen in Thielicke’s sermon, “The Mystery of Death,” based on Genesis 3:8-19. Thielicke speaks of how human beings die not merely by old age, disease, or accident, but as those who are guilty. Burdened by guilt there is no peace with God.
“The absurdities of life are manifestations of the creature’s disobedience to the Creator. They reveal that the world is no longer whole and sound, and it has lost its peace because it has lost peace with God.”[13]
Yet, it is into the abyss of this garden turned graveyard, this paradise become a sewer, that the Son of God comes to bear our guilt, die our death, be buried in our grave, and to rise again as victor over all that would separate us from God and consign us to eternal death. In Christ, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves so we can die with confidence:
“So, He blesses the flush and flower of youth and comforts the loneliness of age. He lays His hand upon the little ones, and upon us too when the end draws near. He sends us the happy, starry hours of life, but He is also beside us in the dark valleys with His rod and staff and the marvel of His consolations. He always blesses. He is always near, and He changes everything... everything.”[14]
In Christ, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves so we can die with confidence.
With the repletion of “everything,” Thielicke ends the sermon on an astounding note of confidence in the promises of God, given us in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
Thielicke’s preaching on death unmasks the mythologies people use to deny or evade death. He often includes references to his own encounters with the dying, but most important he draws his hearers to see death with the eyes of the Eternal God. It is only from the perspective of Golgotha that one can come to rejoice at the empty tomb. There is death and there is the Lord who died and is now risen from the grave never to die again. To paraphrase Luther’s hymn, death with life contended, but the victory remains with life. Thielicke’s preaching on death draws his hears to this Christ. He alone gives eternal life, but as Thielicke notes in a sermon on “The Resurrection of the Body, and the Life Everlasting,” he says:
“He himself is always greater than His greatest gifts. The pinnacle of the promise is not what He gives, but what He Himself is to me. Nothing shall come between us. That is life everlasting.”[15]
The Christian hope is not a utopia but a dwelling place with God in Christ where all evil is banished, and death has no more dominion.
God is not a God of the dead but of the living. Those who die in Christ are alive in Him forever. Thielicke cites the nineteenth century theologian, H.F. Kohlbrὒgge:
“Hence, when I die, but die no more, and someone finds my skull, this will preach to him: I have no eyes, but I see Him. I have no brains or understanding, but I comprehend Him. I have no lips, but I kiss Him. I have no tongue, but I praise Him with all of you who call upon His name. I am a hard skull, but I am fully softened and melted in His love. I lie here outside in this churchyard, but I am inside Paradise. All suffering is forgotten. His great love has done this for us, for He bore His cross and went to Golgotha for us.”[16]
Dying, we live. Those who depart this life with faith in Christ remain in a sweet communion with those who still live in time.
Thielicke’s preaching in the face of death is marked by biblical realism and is anchored in the confidence that Christ is trustworthy to the end. Thielicke often speaks of death as a dark enigma leaving us with anxiety and uncertainty. In the face of all death brings, there is still the risen Savior who gives us a new relationship with the future.
“I am not alone with my anxiety; He has also endured it. In that way, an entirely new relationship to the future comes into being. It is no longer the fog-shrouded landscape where I anxiously keep watch because somewhere ‘out there’ dark dangers are brewing against me. No, everything is entirely different. We do not know what is coming, but we know who is coming. The final hour belongs to us. We need have no fear of the next minute.”[17]
Like the Apostle Paul (see Romans 14:7-8), Thielicke’s preaching extols the truth that in life and in death, we belong to the Lord.
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[1] For a fine treatment of Thielicke’s biography and the impact of death and sickness in his life, see Fabian Grassl. In the Face of Death: Thielicke-Theologian, Preacher, Boundary Rider. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2019. 3-69.
[2] Helmut Thielicke. Out of the Depths, trans. G.W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962. 41.
[3] Helmut Thielicke. Our Heavenly Father, trans. John W. Doberstein. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1960. 65-66.
[4] Helmut Thielicke. Being Human… Becoming Human, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1984. 87. Later in this book, Thielicke specifically connects human anticipation of the future with death: “As humans, in distinction from animals we have to ask about the basis, goal, and meaning of life; thus, death is also a question for us. This distinguishes us from all other creatures. The most obvious mark of this distinction is that, unlike animals, we know about death. We know we have an allotted span, and this span is limited” (363). Also see Helmut Thielicke. Death and Life, trans. Edward H. Schroeder. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970. 59, where Thielicke says: “Only for the Christian does death move out from its chronological confinement in the Last Day and become something that leaves its mark on his entire life, stamping his life as a life separated and thrown back behind its boundaries by God. Thus, death becomes ‘ever present’ (Luther), a palpably real death in the here and now. ‘In the midst of life, we are in death’” (157). The Christian, as a “Theologian of the Cross,” learns to see death for what it is.
[5] Helmut Thielicke. Death and Life. 59.
[6] Helmut Thielicke. The Evangelical Faith Vol. 3: The Holy Spirit, Church, and Eschatology, trans. G.W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982. 393. Also see Thielicke, “The Message of the Limit of Death in Proclamation” in Living with Death, trans. G.W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983. 137ff.
[7] Helmut Thielicke. “Letter to a Soldier About Death,” in Death and Life. xxv.
[8] Helmut Thielicke. Death and Life. 98-99.
[9] For more on Thielicke’s use of Luther, see John T. Pless. “Luther’s Reading of Psalm 90: The Eschatology of Pastoral Theology,” in Take Courage: Essays in Honor of Harold L. Senkbeil, ed. Timothy J. Puls and Mark Pierson. Irvine: New Reformation Publications, 2016. 49-63.
[10] Helmut Thielicke. Death and Life. 157.
[11] Helmut Thielicke. Christ and the Meaning of Life, trans. John W. Doberstein. Harper & Row Publishers, 1962. 35.
[12] Helmut Thielicke. Christ and the Meaning of Life. 36.
[13] Helmut Thielicke. How the World Began, trans. John W. Doberstein. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961. 173.
[14] Helmut Thielicke. How the World Began. 184.
[15] Helmut Thielicke. I Believe: The Christian’s Creed, trans. John W. Doberstein and H. George Anderson. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968. 149.
[16] Helmut Thielicke. The Evangelical Faith, vol. 3. 463.
[17] Helmut Thielicke. On Being a Christian When the Chips are Down, trans. H. George Anderson. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979. 28.
