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This book considers what it means to die. Trew achieves this through the prism of two significant twentieth century thinkers: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Christos Yannaras. In doing so, he continues an esteemed tradition of works considering the theology and philosophy of death, including Karl Rahner''s On the Theology of Death and Martin Heidegger''s Being and Time . However, Trew is also breaking new ground: this is the first English language book to compare the late Christos Yannaras with major western theologians, making this an innovative and ecumenical work. Different as they are, both Bonhoeffer and Yannaras are well-known for their robustly relational views of human existence. Trew elegantly guides us through a systematic unfolding of how they both believe that, in and through Christ and his church, human life stands newly formed and empowered before the radical individuation of death. Bonhoeffer and Yannaras both see in the means for modern theological anthropology to address the asymmetrical togetherness of historical existence and divine transcendence. Trew highlights how this is crucial for a redescription of what individual death might mean in the context of the church as ''communion''. In doing so, he constructively recasts Heidegger''s best insights about anticipating death with Bohoeffer and Yannaras. Ultimately, Trew powerfully argues for the Christological conversion of human creaturely passivity into recapitulative activity wherein human beings, by their ''daily dying'' take up death''s power and transfigure it into new life. Death becomes entangled within a distinctively and irreducibly relational vision of the human being.
List of contents
Introduction1. The Person of Christ and Human Existence: Traditions, Ontologies, and the Meaning of Death
2. Church and Human Existence: Sacraments, Freedom, and Self-Giving
3. Human Existence and Death: Freedom and the Love of God
4. Is Death a Gift?
BibliographyIndex
About the author
Alex Michael Trew is Sessional Instructor in Philosophy at The King's University, Canada.Rowan Williams is a former Archbishop of Canterbury and was until 2020 Master of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of many books, including Looking East in Winter, Holy Living, and The Edge of Words, published by Bloomsbury Continuum. He lives in Cardiff and continues to broadcast, preach and lecture internationally. In 2022, he gave the second of the BBC’s centenary Reith Lectures. He is contributing writer to The New Statesman.
