Death and the Afterlife: A Theological Introduction by Terence Nichols (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 510 In some ways, this book could have profited from a closer and more demanding copy editor. The unequal lengths of the chapters do not help the reader to work through the book. In addition, every analytic philosopher must always be attuned to the warning expressed by Peter Geach some time ago: only appeal to formalization in a philosophical analysis when it is absolutely needed because of the set of problems under discussion. Peterson at time falls prey—especially in the Ethics chapter—to this alluring temptation that all analytic philosophers must resist. In conclusion, this is a philosophically sophisticated monograph from which philosophers who have worried conceptually about thorny issues in Aquinas can find light. To profit from Peterson’s analyses, one needs to bring to the table a thoughtful sense of the structure of the many issues that Aquinas brings front and center in philosophical discussions. This is not, for the most part, a book for beginners in Aquinas. The late Ralph McInerny’s A First Glance at Thomas Aquinas: A Handbook for Peeping Thomists would be more appropriate for a novice inquirer. For a specific audience versed in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, this book is thoughtfully recommended; it is well worth plodding through the more than ample arguments that fill its pages. ANTHONY J. LISSKA Denison University Granville, Ohio Death and the Afterlife: A Theological Introduction. By TERENCE NICHOLS. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2010. Pp. 224. $22.99 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-58743-183-8. Alexander Schmemann once said that while theology was traditionallydefined as the study of God, modern theology had been reduced to the study of theology. In the years following the Second Vatican Council, the dominant school of American Catholic theology was characterized by two things: first,apenchant for discussions of theological method which highlight the “messy” (historical, cultural, partial, etc.) nature of theological truth claims, and, second, a turn from theory (which divides) to praxis (which unites). The first of these moves allowed theologians to downplay the normativity of Scripture and Tradition in order to allow for greater dialogue; the second allowed theology to become increasingly political, and usually political in a particular way. This situation made for an especial dearth of books dealing with eschatology, except the purely realized sort. The appearance, then, of Terrence Nichols’s new book, Death and the Afterlife: A Theological Introduction, is yet another hopeful sign that a theological corner has been turned. Nichols’s book takes the classic BOOK REVIEWS 511 questions of eschatology—individual salvation, the state of the soul immediately after death, the nature of the final judgment, heaven, hell, purgatory, and the like—with the utmost seriousness. He writes, unapologetically I might add, as a believer. This is a theology that once more presupposes faith, in both its fides qua and its fides quae dimensions. The book focuses on questions of the soul, the resurrection, judgment, heaven, purgatory, and hell, with an entire chapter dedicated to near-death experiences, and along the way responds to distinctively modern challenges. In other words, Nichols doesn’t set out simply to write a book on eschatology as if the past few hundred years of skepticism regarding such things had not occurred. This is clearly a book written on the other side of the so-called passage to modernity, so that, after a solid and succinct walk through the eschatologies of both Testaments and major Christian thinkers up through Luther and Calvin (and even Descartes), Nichols quickly gets down, in chapter 4, to the “Scientific Challenges to Afterlife.” Indeed, it is this chapter and those following that set the book apart from simple catechesis—though it must be said that the survey of the biblical and historical background to these questions is very well done and betrays a great deal of careful reading and reflecting on the latest scholarship. Still, the heart of Nichols’s project is answering the so-called scientific objections to the Church’s traditional eschatological teachings. He enumerates these challenges as four: (1) modern cosmology, which has shown that “the heavens” are made of the same sort of matter as the earth; (2) the science of history, which resulted...