Rescue for the Dead: The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity (review)

George and Martha Washington, along with 380,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust, share a unique status. All were posthumously baptized—by proxy—by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In the 1840s, Shakers similarly saw posthumous salvation as possible for Native Americans. The Shakers believed that the souls of dead Native Americans could possess them, and, as a result, these dead non-Christians could receive the gospel and experi-ence salvation. However alien or peculiar these practices may seem, both Mor-mons and Shakers grounded them in what they saw as first-century Christian claims that death represented a permeable boundary.

In early Christianity were dead non-Christians seen as permanently separated from God, perhaps in eternal torment? Or could they be saved posthumously? In Rescue for the Dead, Jeffrey A. Trumbower acknowledges the existence of both perspectives, but he highlights the latter, examining those references, traditions, and theological perspectives in early Christianity which seem to support the belief that at least some non-Christians could experience salvation after death. Trumbower does so by focusing not just on Marcion, Origen, and the so-called gnostic writings but also on the Shepherd of Hermas, the Martyrdom of Perpetua, the Acts ofPaul and Thecla, and the Apocalypse of Peter. Key passages in these writings are linked both to "Greek, Roman, and Jewish Succor for the Dead" and to relevant New Testament passages such as 1 Corinthians 15.29 (where Paul speaks of baptism on behalf of the dead) and 1 Peter 3.19-20 and 4.6 (which describe Jesus as proclaiming the gospel even to the dead).

Trumbower concludes Rescue for the Dead by acknowledging that "although I have much sympathy for those in every age who have wished to rescue the dead, it is not the goal of this volume to take sides or to chart a course for Christian theology. Those who take on such a task, however, should be informed of the early history of the question in all its facets, and if this book has shed some light on that history, then it will have achieved its goals" (155).

The book clearly accomplishes those goals. It should become a standard work for persons interested in issues of universalism either in the early church or, as Trumbower notes, in modernity. At the same time, as its closing words imply, the book does not read like a sustained argument with an explicit thesis. In part, this is because "there was no clear uniform position on posthumous rescue for the pagan dead in the first four centuries of Christianity" (84). As a result, many users of the volume may find individual chapters, which can stand alone, to be of particular interest. For instance, the reflections and research on the Perpetua and the Thecla literature are thorough and are of use to anyone studying these works. Furthermore, Trumbower's comparisons of Perpetua and Mormons, and his reflections on Gregory the Great's prayer for Trajan simply make for interesting reading. Although the analysis of the New Testament passages (especially 1 Corinthians and 1 Peter) is disappointingly thin, and although more discussion of these passages would have made chapter 2 particularly of interest to seminary students and ministers, Trumbower does include and highlight references to the most exhaustive exegetical discussions of these passages.

Readers engaged by Droge and Tabor's A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity will find Rescue for the Dead interesting in similar ways. Even though the two works focus on different phenomena, each reflects on Christian views of death. Each examines the historical development of a particular theological concept with attention to Greco-Roman and Jewish influences. Each explicitly claims that modern theological beliefs should be informed...