Theology and Issues of Life and
Death
John Heywood Thomas
Susan F. Parsons, editor
James Clarke & Co. £17.50
(978-0-227-17420-3)
The Cambridge Companion to Life and
Death
Steven Luper, editor
Cambridge University Press £18.99
(978-1-107606-76-0)
Church Times Bookshop £17.10 (Use code
CT131 )
TWO very different
paperbacks - one theological, personal, and very Welsh,
and the other largely secular, didactic, and international -
but with a common concern for beginning- and end-of-life
issues.
In Theology and Issues
of Life and Death, the veteran Welsh theologian Professor John
Heywood Thomas has gathered together lectures (including his
inaugural professorial lecture given at Nottingham University in
1976) and mostly unpublished papers. The Christian ethicist Dr
Susan Parsons writes a preface, and has helped him in this task.
Over the years, he has been quite hesitant to publish - albeit very
effective when he has done. So it is good to hear his voice
again.
The seven chapters that form
the book are very different in style - some are more academic than
others - but his tolerant and inclusive humanity and love of
Kierkegaard and Tillich underpin them all. He was one of the first
British theologians to champion Kierkegaard. He was also dubbed by
Tillich himself his "logical critic". His 1963 SCM book, Paul
Tillich: An appraisal, was justifiably regarded as a masterly
critical analysis of Tillich's dense prose and abstract
concepts.
Following the largely
unchanged script of his inaugural lecture, there are chapters on
unborn life, the meaning of death, funerals, responsibility, and
global death. The inaugural lecture is intelligent but a piece of
its time, assuming as it does that Marxism is still a dominant
force in the world and that Biblical Theology a spent force within
academic theology. (I think that Tom Wright might have something
to say about that.) Subsequent chapters, however, have been updated
to take some account of more recent developments in, say, stem-cell
research and climate change. There is nothing especially original
about his otherwise judicious comments on these recent
developments, and there is quite a bit of repetition, which more
thorough editing could have avoided. His text is enriched at many
points, however, by thoughtful quotations from poetry, typically
Welsh, and sometimes even in Welsh.
Like other Cambridge Companions, The Cambridge Companion to
Life and Death is written with students in mind, and those
looking for an up-to-date and accessible account of scholarship
in a particular area. The 19 contributors here are all philosophers
who write well and clearly about life and death from various
perspectives.
In the first section, five of them explore metaphysical issues,
including the nature of human and other forms of life, human
identity across time, and the nature of human physical death.
In the second section, seven of the contributors examine issues
of "significance", such as how the relative merits of particular
human lives might be compared, whether a long life is better than a
short one, whether the dead can be harmed, whether non-existence
after death can be compared meaningfully with non-existence before
conception (the so-called symmetry problem), and what constitutes a
purposeful life.
In the final section, the rest of the contributors address
ethical issues around life and death, including both familiar
topics such as abortion, assisted and non-assisted suicide, and
killing in self-defence, as well as less familiar topics such as
human enhancement, whether human procreation is morally good, and
the ethics of extinction.
The tone of the essays is uniformly liberal and secular. There
is little mention of religious arguments, even those used by
professional philosophers who are themselves religious. For
example, John Nottingham from Reading is mentioned only once in
passing, and neither Stephen Clarke from Liverpool nor John Haldane
from St Andrews features even in the bibliography. Nevertheless,
if one of the functions of philosophy, whether secular or not, is
to help us to think more clearly, then this is what
thisCompanionachieves admirably. For the most part, as befits
aCompanion, technical terms are explained or avoided.
This is an important area, and it merits and gets serious and
sustained thought in both of these interesting but very different
books.
The Revd Professor Robin Gill is editor of Theology and
Canon Theologian of the Cathedral Chapter of the diocese in
Europe.