THEORIES OF DEATH

In the Christian worldview what happens is that we give death oiver to the control of Goid and specifically to Christ the savior. Christ conquers, that is takes over and controls death by his own death. Dying on the corss sacralizes death and remakes it as a gateway to a better world, which it was not before he did this saving act. Christ saves not only people but death itself. 

But understand what this has to mean. In Lucretius for example one's death was one's own. One did not have to advert to outside sources to understand it -- dying is completely reasonable for Lucretius -- and death itself is built into the body, which as a collection of atoms must disassemble at some future point. This could not be more unlike what Christians say, or more unlike what Plato says, although there is ultimately more likeness between Lucretius and Plato than between Plato and the Christians despite what most people might believe. 

Plato also believes in a sense thay my death is within me. That is, I am an immortal soul trapped, imprisioned he sometimes says, in a mortal body. My 'job' is to free myself, who is essentially and truly the soul, from all bodily affections, which draw me away from my genuine nature as a soul. Dying for Plato means the separation of the self-contained soul from the mortal, non-self-contained and therefore perishable body. Death then is the emergence of my true self from its occlusion in my dense body. Death is liberation.

In that sense my death is always inside me; it is not exactly my death but the death of the temporary combination between me and the body I accidentally and temporarily occupy. This idea has of course crept into the Western religious thought in a big way. I would venture that the majority of American Christians are really Platonists who, in direct contradiction to Christian tradition, believe that the body, which in Genesis is inherently good and well-made, an essential part of the divine creation, is somehow inherently defective and to be abandoned at death, as if it were an emcumbrance.