Life Hereafter: The Rise and Decline of a Tradition

ISBN-13: 9783030542818 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 316 str.

Paul Crittenden

Spis treści

1 From Beginning to End

2 God in Biblical and Early Christian Belief

Creation and Covenants

From the Patriarchs of Israel to the Fathers of the Church

3 From Sheol to the Resurrection of the Dead

The Afterlife: From Genesis to the Book of Wisdom

The Kingdom of Light and the Powers of Darkness: The New Testament

The Invention of Satan and his Kingdom of Darkness: Judaic Sources

The Day of the Lord in the New Testament and Early Christianity

4 From Homer to Plato and Aristotle

The Poets: Homer and Hesiod

The Presocratic Philosophers

Plato: The Immortality of the Soul

Aristotle: The Soul as Form of the Body

5 Salvation or Damnation: From Paul to Augustine

Irenaeus of Lyons: God’s Plan for the Fulness of Time

Origen: Restoration as Universal Salvation

Augustine: From Freedom of the Will to Human Bondage

‘The Crabbed Crusader of Predestination’

The Pelagian Controversy: Original Sin, Free Will, Grace, Virtue and Vice

The Afterlife of Pelagianism

6 Thomas Aquinas: Body and Soul 

From Augustine to Thomas Aquinas

Platonism versus Aristotelianism:

  The Soul as Subsistent?

The Soul as Immortal?

    The Creation of the Soul?

    The Mind (Soul) as Form of the Body

    Body and Soul after Aquinas

7 Thomas Aquinas: Life in the World to Come

The Mental Powers of the Separated Soul

The Afterlife of the Soul in Medieval Theology

Salvation: Heaven, Hell, Angels and Demons      

A New Heaven and Earth, Resurrection, Judgment, The Joy of the Blessed       

The Punishment of the Damned, Divine Justice and Mercy

The Will to Punishment

Purgatory and Indulgences

8 Eschatology: From Dante to Ethics and Religion in a Secular Age

The Reformation Era: Disputed Authority

Religion, Ethics and Human Fulfilment in the Modern World      

9.          Eschatology Now: the Catholic Case

Eschatology since the Second Vatican Council

A Theologian’s View: Joseph Ratzinger

Resurrection in Death: Gisbert Greshake

Magisterial Intervention: Current Questions in Eschatology      

Recent Papal Pronouncements      

Eternal Punishment   

10 Last Things

Biblical Testimony      

Philosophical Queries      

Faith and the Limits of Knowledge: Kierkegaard and Socrates     

Bibliography

O autorze

Paul Crittenden is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Learning to Be Moral (1990), Changing Orders (2008), Sartre in Search of an Ethics (2009), and Reason, Will and Emotion (2012).

Blurb

In this book, Paul Crittenden offers a critical guide to the problematic origins of biblical teaching about the afterlife and the way in which it was subsequently developed by Church authorities and theologians—Origen, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas in particular. In the post–Reformation era the focus falls on the challenges set by modern secularism. The tradition encompasses a body of interconnected themes: an apocalyptic war in which the Kingdom of God triumphs over Satan’s powers of darkness; salvation in Christ; the immortality of the soul; and finally the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment, ratifying an afterlife of eternal bliss for the morally good and punishment in hell for wrongdoers. The critique questions these beliefs on evidential, ethical, and philosophical grounds. The argument overall is that what lies beyond death is beyond knowledge. The one fundamental truth that can be distilled from the once compelling body of Christian eschatological belief—for believers and unbelievers alike—is the importance of living ethically.