A reader writes:
I was wondering if you could help me with a question about Church
teaching and destiny or the end of ones life. I hope this doesn’t come
off sounding stupid but… what does the Church teach, if anything, on
when we die.
If I am eating cold pizza for breakfast on Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at
7:57am, choke on a pepperoni and die. Did I die because I chose the path
to eat cold pizza this morning? Could I have gone on another day if I
had eaten Fruit Loops?
Or, was Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at 7:57am it was my TIME to go? So, if I
hadn’t eaten the cold pizza, at that exact time, I would have had a
heart attack, choked on a Fruit Loop, or an anvil could have dropped on
my head because my number was up and my choices in life had nothing to
do with my death.
Obviously the "choices" I am speaking of do not include actual dangerous
activities, smoking or anything like that.
If the Church doesn’t have a position on things like this, would you
please give me your opinion?
This is one where the Church has not formally advanced a teaching. The issue seems to involve two questions:
1) Does God predestine the deaths of individuals? and
2) Does God predestine particular ends or does he predestine the end with the means leading to it.
In regard to the first question, the whole subject of divine predestination is up in the air at the moment. We know that God does predestine things, but which things and the manner in which he predestines them is quite disputed.
Scripture uses language that at time seems to ascribe a greater role to God’s activity in predestining events, as if he were actively causing the event to take place, while other times it seems to ascribe a larger role to the choices of individuals, with God foreknowing and allowing the event and thus predestining it in a more passive sense.
In the Middle Ages the more active interpretation of predestination was assumed to be true. This was the position of Augustine & Aquinas, for example. While this view is still quite permitted, of late both theologians and the Magisterium seem to have been inclining more toward that more passive understanding of predestination. John Paul II and Benedict XVI (when he was a cardinal) have both said things that place strong emphasis on human freedom and responsibility and that suggest a view of God as allowing humans to make their choices rather than causing them to make their choices.
How that shakes out, only time will tell, but I don’t expect it to be resolved in my lifetime. The pressure to get a definitive settlement of how predestination works ain’t there at present (though this was a HUGE controversy a few hundred years back).
If one takes the more passive view then if you don’t eat the cold pizza (mmmmm . . . cold pizza)–or if you eat it more carefully than in your hypothetical–then you don’t end up dying.
But what if you take the more active view of predestination? Here is where the second question kicks in.
A number of years ago, back when I was a Presbyterian (and thus in a church that mandated an active view of predestination), I was once having a discussion with the pastor of the Church and its minister to college students. There were a number of really good theological minds in the congregation, and we often had discussions of a fairly theoretical nature. In this discussion the pastor was mentioning an idea that he’d heard from someone who suggested that if a particular person failed to preach the gospel to you then you wouldn’t have become a Christian.
He was very dismissive of this idea. Since certain people are, in the Presbyterian view, "the elect" (meaning that they are actively predestined from all eternity to come to God and be saved), it seemed to the pastor that it was inconceivable that someone not preaching the gospel to you would affect your salvation. Instead, somebody else would end up preaching the gospel to you so that you’d be saved.
The pastor was quite certain of this conclusion, but the college minister and I both instantly had a negative reaction to it.
On our view, the pastor was taking an unduly simplistic view of how divine predestination operates: Not only does God predestine particular ends (like your salvation) but also with those ends he predestines the means to their accomplishment (like Person X preaching the gospel to you).
Therefore, if God had chosen differently with regard to the means then the end is no longer guaranteed. If he hadn’t chosen to predestine Person X to preach the gospel to you, you can’t assume that he’d predestine somebody else to do so. Maybe he would, but maybe not. Your membership in the elect is not known to be a first-order divine decree around which other, more contingent events in the universe must arrange themselves.
It may be that it’s the other way around–that God has predestined the means that lead to your becoming one of the elect (e.g., someone preaching the gospel to you, you having the efficacious grace required to respond positively to it), and if you change those means then you change your status as a member of the elect.
It strikes me that the same would apply to the question of when one dies. Even on the more active theory of predestination, if God predestines you to die at a certain point then that might be a first-order divine decree that other, more contingent matters must adjust for (so that if the cold pizza doesn’t kill you, the fruit loops or something else will) or it may be that God predestines your-death-at-a-particular-time-and-by-a-particular-means, so that if you throw the means up in the air it takes the time of death with it.
On balance, since on the more passive view of predestination your not eating the pizza leads to you not dying, and since on the more active view of predestination your not eating the pizza may lead to you not dying, I suspect that if you don’t eat the pizza, you don’t die.
