Abstract
This collection of solid essays by a group of well-established and respected theologians derives from a project supported by the Templeton Foundation’s Immortality Project, based at Riverside University, California. This is interesting, since the approach represented in the collection, which is broadly though not exclusively Barthian (Thomist and Tillichian views are also heard in the essays by Christopher J. Holmes and Russell Re Manning), seems to be virtually diametrically opposed to that of the Templeton project. The latter seems primarily interested in the survival of bodily death and draws on such evidence as the apparently infinite self-replication of hydra. In Eternal God, Eternal Life, however, the shared starting-point is that whatever is to be said about immortality and related concepts must be derived from the doctrine of God since God is the primary subject of such concepts. Any application of these to human or other creaturely life must therefore be theological and soteriological.
Here, however, we immediately stumble against the perennial obstacle embedded in this kind of theological approach, namely, that it offers very few points of contact to what most non-theologians (i.e. the vast majority of people now living) are interested in talking about when the subject of immortality is broached. As Katherine Sonderegger puts it in her exegesis of G. M. Hopkins’ ‘God’s Grandeur’, ‘the subject matter of this volume—the doctrines of Resurrection and Eternal Life—have receded well out of the mind’s eye of modern Christian people’ (p. 117). Although she too eventually endorses a properly theocentric approach, her contribution almost uniquely acknowledges the gap that theology finds itself needing to cross.
It would be wrong to imply that all contributions are cut from the same cloth. The longest essay, ‘The Resonating Body in Triune eternity’ by Markus Mühling goes via the development of a phenomenological exploration of the idea of the extended mind, while Robert Song confronts transhumanist fantasies of infinitely extending biological life—a good example of the kind of heavy lifting a solidly theological approach can achieve. Angels and sacramental life provide other angles on the question.
If this book helps get these questions back on the agenda, that must be good. But it can also be read as witnessing to just how much there is still to do.