76 - Death, Sin and the Moral Life: Contemporary Cultural Interpretations of Death

Death, Sin and the Moral Life: Contemporary Cultural Interpretations of Death
By Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore
Atlanta, Scholars Press, 1988. 196 pp. $29.95 ($19.95 pb).

Graduate dissertations fortunate enough to find their way into print generally suffer from what might be called the "string of pearls" syndrome. By threading together the little gems mined here and there, especially the jewels fashioned from sand in the bellies of one's own mentors, authors cast before their readers a lengthy string of quotations-stone after stone-until mercifully the necklace finally latches shut. Bonnie Miller-McLemore's Chicago thesis is a happy exception to this rule. By threading gems of theological, psychological, and biomedical wisdom about human death onto a clear and tightly linked chain, she forms an erudite and insightful compostion, placing on our breast a magnificent Aztec neck crown, at its pendant-the mysterious emerald, Mors in Homine.

Miller-McLemore sets for herself the formidable task of refreshing the "practical norms and images" that might again provide a satisfying Ars moriendi-an ethic of terminal care, or what her mentor, Don Browning, calls a practical theology of mortality. The Chicago Theological Seminary professor first surveys the wasteland of our imaginations concerning beliefs and values about dying and death. Surprisingly, the bleak diagnosis she derives from her survey of the landscape of theology, psychology, and medicine does not leave her with a grim prognosis. Her chronograph of the demise of a once satisying consensus of the cultural meaning and orthopractical litany of death leads her instead to predict a somewhat hopeful journey ahead. This very promising young scholar feels that we are on the verge of a new and more penetrating moral vision about death. Though built on the rich wisdom of our heritage, a new sustaining vision will be cleansed of its illusion and offense.

The practical theology she proposes draws together what we have learned from the arts of clinical orthanasia (dying well) derivative of the death and dying movement and from the recovery of moral meaning in medical thanatology. These new ventures of understanding she then views in light of Paul Tillich's correlational philosophy and Paul Ramsey's covenantal theology.

The strength of the book also points to the yet uncharted path we must travel. In drawing a synthetic comprehension of human death from theology, psychology, and medicine, she establishes the theoretical foundation for sound public and ecclesial policy on dying and death. How desperately our world, which has made of death a hedonisitic obscenity, technological entity, and economic commodity, needs to struggle here where "deep calls to deep" (Psalm 42:7). Such profound revitalization of an ethos can only come as we ponder all that the human sciences of theology, psychology, and biology have discovered. Miller-

77 - Death, Sin and the Moral Life: Contemporary Cultural Interpretations of Death

McLemore serves this reflection well with her bold and expansive inquiry.

Her book can help us confront the two decisively relevant forces in our world that thwart our efforts to form such a contemporary and noble "practice of Death" (Kluge). The book fails as does our culture (both religious and scientific) to deal candidly with the idolatry, or better the iconography of contemporary death. We kill and are killed, one dies or many-and we walk away because of a debilitating apatheia and amnesia that sickens the modern soul. We need to find bold new ways to confront the demons of modern micro- and mega-death with the spirit-power of Christus Victor. The answer is not sociologic accomodation, economic expedition, or theological rationalization. It is rigorous wrestling with the question of why we die (the persistence of sin), wherein lies hope (the ultimacy of grace), and how we therefore accompany with care and console with abandon. Our gospel frontierthe age of AIDS, dying cedar forests, and star-wars-requires nothing less.

Kenneth L. Vaux

University of Illinois College of Medicine
Chicago, Illinois