NEW from the March/April 2013 issue of Touchstone.
The End Is Clear
Death and Afterlife: A Theological Introduction
by Terence Nichols
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.
I’ll seek out this book. Readers might also note: The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the End of Life. Written by Rob Moll (2010, IVP Books).