'Why has modern Protestantism so largely lost its grip on this biblical otherworldliness? Several factors have combined to produce the effect.
First, death is no longer our constant companion. Until the twentieth century most children died before they were ten, and adults dies at home with the family around them. But nowadays deaths in the family are rarer and, as often as not, happen in hospitals, so that we can easily forget the certainity of our own death for years together.
Second, modern materialism, with its corollary that this life is the only life for enjoying anything has infected Christian minds, producing the feeling that is a cosmic outrage for anyone to have to leave this world before he or she has tasted all that it has to offer.
Third, Marxist mockery of the Christian hope ("Pie in the sky when you die") and the accusation that having a hope of heaven destroys one's zeal for ending evil on earth have given Christians a false conscience that inhibits them about being heavenly minded.
Fourth, modern Christians are rightly troubled at the cultural barrenness, social unconcern, and seemingly shrunken humanity that have sometimes accompanied professed longings for heaven. We have come to suspect that such longings are escapist and unhealthy.
Fifth, man's natural sense of being made for an eternal destiny, the awareness formerly expressed by the phrase "the greatness of the soul," has largely atrophied amid the hectic artificialities of Western urban life.'
JI Packer, 'When You Know How To Die You Know How To Live' in Nancy Guthrie (Ed.), O Love That Will Not Let Me Go: Facing Death with Courageous Confidence in God, p.16.
