Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures
by paul griffiths
baylor, 408 pages, $69.95
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here is much of surprising beauty in Paul Griffiths’s theological “speculations” about last things: death, final judgment, heaven, and hell. He affirms the authority of Catholic doctrine on these topics, asserting that theologians who contradict or ignore it are heretics of one sort or another. But there are many open questions, and this is a book far more at the experimental boundaries of the Catholic theological tradition than at its center. Griffiths proposes—tentatively, humbly, but with the greatest argumentative force his considerable intellectual gifts allow—that the Church consider:
1. We now live in the devastation of God’s good creation, a world everywhere marked by the suffering passage toward decay and death. This is not the result of human sin. The world’s metronomic, clock-counting, downward march toward damage and loss precedes and extends beyond the reach of human creatures. Its origin is to be found in the first fall of the angels.
2. Sin is our deliberate choice of nothingness, a choice that, apart from God’s grace, might very well culminate in our self-annihilation, a nothingness of our own self-choosing. Coming after death, this self-annihilation is hell, the maximal separation from God.
