Death is not the end—either for humans or for all creatures. But while Christianity has obsessed over the future of humanity, it has neglected the ends for nonhuman animals, inanimate creatures, and angels. In Decreation, Paul J. Griffiths explores how orthodox Christian theology might be developed to include the last things of all creatures.
Griffiths employs traditional and historical Christian theology of the last things to create both a grammar and a lexicon for a new eschatology. Griffiths imagines heaven as an endless, repetitively static, communal, and enfleshed adoration of the triune God in which angels, nonhuman animals, and inanimate objects each find a place. Hell becomes a final and irreversible separation from God—annihilation—sin’s true aim and the last success of the sinner. This grammar, Griffiths suggests, gives Christians new ways to think about the redemption of all things, to imagine relationships with nonhuman creatures, and to live in a world devastated by a double fall.
Table of Content
Preface and Acknowledgements
Part I: The Grammar of the Last Things
§1 Lexicon
§2 Last Things Defined
§3 Annihilation: The First Last Thing
§4 Simple Stasis: The Second Last Thing
§5 Repetitive Stasis: The Third Last Thing
§6 Epektasy: Denying Last Things
§7 Iconicity: Representing Last Things
Part II: Doctrine About Last Things
§8 Theology and Last Things
§9 Doctrine and Last Things
§10 The Doctrinal Schema
§11 The Narrative Arc
§12 Patterns of Thought
Part III: Timespace
§13 The Lord’s Eternity
§14 The Chronic Temporality of Creatures
§15 Time Damaged: Metronome
§16 Time Healed: Liturgy, Systole, Fold
Part IV: Angels
§17 Thinking About Angels
§18 What Angels Are
§19 Angelic Fall
§20 Angelic Last Things
Part V: Humans
§21 Human Flesh
§22 The Discarnate Intermediate State
§23 Human Last Things (1): Annihilation
§24 Human Last Things (2): Heaven
§25 Hell Reconstrued
§26 The Church’s Last Thing
Part VI: Plants, Animals, Inanimate Creatures
§27 Plants and Animals
§28 The Last Things of Plants and Animals
§29 Inanimate Creatures
§30 The Last Things of Inanimate Creatures
Part VII: The Last Things in the Devastation
§31 Opus Domini
§32 Trembling
§33 Delight
§34 Lament
§35 Quietus
Part VIII: Bibliography
§36 Bibliographic Essays
§37 Bibliographic List
About the author
Paul J. Griffiths is Warren Chair of Catholic Theology at Duke Divinity School.
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