This fascinating study of the meaning of death and the idea of life after death comes from an author equally at home in the worlds of philosophy and theology, and is much to be recommended. It restricts itself, for the most part, to western philosophy and the Christian tradition, but it will also be of great interest to readers from other spheres of world philosophy and religion, where comparable problems arise.
Part One concerns itself with general reflections on the meaning of death. The inevitability and the moral significance of our mortality are well brought out, and the folly of attempts to acquire, or even to hope for, more and more of the same kind of life is clearly demonstrated.
Part Two turns to the theology of Heaven and Hell. Again, the difficulty of imagining Heaven and the moral grotesqueness of traditional images of Hell are convincingly stressed, as are the problems of envisioning some purgatorial intermediate state. The influence of Donald MacKinnon's powerful writings is discernible behind these reflections.
Part Three examines the difficulties attending both the idea of the immortality of the soul and also that of the resurrection of the body, as we find these ideas articulated in the New Testament and in the post-biblical period. Again the problems of some kind of intermediate state between death and resurrection are stressed. It is suggested – a suggestion to be developed later in the book – that these problems are eased if the idea of our translation into God's eternity replaces that of life after death, certainly if ‘after’ means continuation of time as we experience it here.
Part Four turns to the treatment of these issues by philosophers of religion. Familiar critiques of the idea of a disembodied soul are rehearsed, though insufficient justice is perhaps done to the mind/body dualism espoused by Richard Swinburne and H. D. Lewis (the latter being rather oddly referred to as a theologian). John Hick's ‘replica’ theory is subjected to trenchant criticism.
Part Five provides us with the author's own view. Echoing the philosophers’ difficulties with criteria of identity and continuity in the notion of survival, Corner adopts a more Kantian notion of the limits of experience and a more Barthian notion of the overcoming of death by being taken into God's eternity.
The book concludes with a brief, clear, summary of the argument that permits the reader to appreciate both the strengths and the possible weaknesses of the author's position. My own reservations concern his excessively Kantian reading of Barth, especially on the topic of time. After all, Kant's view of the transcendental ideality of space and time is not really a tenable notion, and Barth's view of God's time as something analogous to our time might permit a conception of life ‘after’ death rather than just life ‘beyond’ death. In other words there is a sense in which God's eternity can be thought itself to contain futurity. Certainly life ‘after’ death should not be thought of as a continuation of this life in the same dimension of this world's space/time. But there is a certain over-literalism in restricting the sense of the word ‘after’ in this way. So I would recommend closer reflection on the notion of God's time, as found in the writings of Barth, Balthasar and Pannenberg.
