The End Is Clear
Death and Afterlife: A Theological Introduction
by Terence Nichols
Brazos, 2010
(220 pages, $22.99, paperback)
reviewed by Graeme Hunter
Diane, a mother in her mid-forties, is dying of leukemia, leaving behind her husband and two teenage boys. The stuff of domestic tragedy. You can easily imagine distraught relatives, and nagging questions that have no reply.
However, in Terence Nichols's fine book, Death and Afterlife, Diane's death figures as a luminous episode, which left her loved ones with "an inexplicable sense of peace and joy." Her story serves as a frame for Nichols's book, not only to introduce the wider themes of death and what comes after, but also to prepare the reader to consider the forgotten art of "dying well," the master theme towards which the story builds.
It was wise to defer that unfamiliar theme to the end of the book. Modern people need all the help they can get to grasp an idea so out of keeping with the age. A world as materialistic, scientistic, and consumerist as ours inclines by its nature to impulsive self-absorption, and is little given to introspection about death or the inscrutable reality behind death's door. Instinctively the modern mind thrusts aside such meditations as morbid and medieval. In their place we put the celebration of life. Think of the new style of obituary, in which we are promised a celebration of the loved one's life but seldom a funeral, much less a Service or Mass of Christian Burial. Lacking the concepts to deal intelligently with death, we think it better to avert our gaze.
A Better Approach
Nichols's engaging book offers readers something better. It presents the Christian Church's considered wisdom about death and the afterlife in a manner that is both informed and practical. It addresses the difficulty of integrating Christian belief on these matters with modern presuppositions, and only then turns to offering practical ways of making the contemplation of mortality, resurrection, and eternal life our means of dying well.
The early chapters relate the main stages by which the Christian understanding of last things came to have its present form. Nichols moves with assurance through the Old and New Testaments, the church fathers, the Reformation period, and up to the present day.
He is aware that he "cannot present a comprehensive scholarly account of all the relevant material" in such a short book. Nor does he attempt to hide the diversity of Christian opinion about eschatological matters. He is able, however, to establish the existence of a broad agreement, forged over many centuries, according to which death is the dissolution of the union between an imperishable soul and a perishable body, while the afterlife involves the eventual union of the soul with an immortal, resurrection body, forming a person who is morally continuous with the one who lived and died on earth.
Addressing the Challenges from Science
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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