On p.40 of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Mario keeps his older brother from sleep attempting to circle the conversation towards his real goal: the question of “do you believe in God?”
Hal complains, “You ask me this once a week.”
But mighty-hearted Mario is not so easily put aside and continues his questioning, “You never say is why.”
Finally Hal gives something close to an answer:
“So tonight to such you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.” (40)
Another time, perhaps I’ll pick up the theme of God’s “management style” but for now I want to simply wonder if Hal is right. Is God “pro-death” by all accounts?
The easy response, though maybe less helpful for Hal in this moment, would be the evidence of Scripture that God, “does not desire the death of the wicked, but that he turn from his wickedness and live” (Ezek. 33:11). Well that may be true, Hal might argue, but he sure lets a lot of them die and that dying is a direct result, biblically speaking, of his taking-away the Tree of Life in the Garden (Gen 3:22-23).
Why, a conversant and less sleepy Hal might ask, would God do this, remove the Tree of Life if he not “pro-death”?
As I argue at greater length here, God does this not to remove the possibility of future life, the possibility of renewal or the resurrecting and transformation of life is still there, but rather to keep Adma and Eve from being sealed forever in their fallen state. It would have finished their story as one of hopeless tragedy; it would have granted them endless living, but that endless living would have been separated from and over-and-against the Life of God. We have a word for that kind of endlessness extension fo existence apart from the Love of God: Hell. As I wrote for Logos:
Had Adam or Eve or any of their children, having sinned and fallen from glory (Rom 3:23), taken from that Tree they would have had endless life, but that living forever would have been a living forever in a condemned and cursed state, eternally cut-off from redemption. Being the Tree God made it to be, it would have sealed Adam and Eve, but it would have sealed them for destruction. To put it simply, their length of days would only have been a distended misery. Their living forever would be a living hell. By suspending the eating of the Tree of Life, God opened up his story for a plan of redemption, the opportunity for new life in God.
Dracula, Jadis the witch in C.S. Lewis’ The Magicians’s Nephew, Sauron, Voldemort, Darth Sidius, —all the classic villains offer this kind of deathlessness. A deathlessness which, insofar as it flees death is doomed forever to death’s thrall.
Death, however was not always this way. Death was once the road of transformation, moving us from glory to glory. Even now, this kind of “death” is seen in our daily lives. We die to singleness when we marry, we die to Kindergarten as we enter 1st grade, we die to secrecy when we reveal secrets. When God puts Adam into a “deep sleep” —a death-like state— before the Fall, Adam rises again and rises more gloriously —with Eve!
Christ has come and died for us that our dyings may not be futile deaths but that we too will be moved from glory to glory until the great day of the Resurrection where our bodies will be raised glorious and truly undying —having been transformed by his Death.
Hal’s question assumes an over-simplistic notion of death. ne must either be pro-death or anti-death. God is neither. He does not so much occupy a third and middling position between the two false poles, as he moves in a deeper and truer way in both Life and Death. God is anti- living in fallen, broken, death-dealing rebellion and lovelessness, and he will not grant to that way of existence the fortifying gift of eternal Life. He must bring that way of life to death. But he brings that way of life, the way of sin and death, to death in order to kill it and raise it up in glory.
I am not far enough into Infinite Jest to know, but I wonder if Hal ever thinks-through the Resurrection. What would Hal do with a God who troubles his pro-death / anti-death dualism by being the God who died and rose again?