The question “What happens to me when I die?” is of perennial interest. As several recent books—both scholarly and popular—attest, there are increasingly more opinions and options with considerably less convincing support. Many popular opinions are little more than wishful thinking enshrined as belief. In such an environment, it is paramount that the distinctly Christian perspective on death and the afterlife be clearly articulated. Terence Nichols attempts to do just that. As Nichols notes in the introduction, however, that distinctly Christian perspective is challenged by philosophical materialism and naturalism, the sheer difficulty of belief in resurrection in the modern world, and various philosophical and theological objections to the traditional Christian depictions of heaven and hell. Nichols approaches these challenges with three themes of his own: the credibility of Christian belief, the necessity of personal preparation for death, and hope.

Nichols begins his investigation with three chapters that orient discussion. First, he surveys the presentation of the underworld, soul, and resurrection in the OT and intertestamental literature. His summary reveals the significant development that occurred in the theology of afterlife during the ancient period. He also compares the growing Hebraic understanding with that of Israel’s neighbors. Next he similarly overviews death and the afterlife in the NT. He discusses heaven and the kingdom of God as well as eternal life and resurrection. While he does not offer extended treatments of many of the important passages, he does succinctly summarize what can be gleaned from key passages like 1 Cor 15. In a final orienting chapter, he surveys various views of the afterlife throughout church history, touching on Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Descartes. What is perhaps most interesting about this brief survey is that it reveals to the contemporary reader that some of the most dearly cherished ideas about the afterlife, and heaven in particular, are not all that old.

In discussing Descartes, Nichols begins to turn toward the modern challenges of belief in the afterlife. With the intention of addressing these concerns in later chapters, he summarizes the challenges to traditional Christian beliefs that have come from physics and cosmology, historical-critical methodologies, evolutionary biology, and psychology and neuroscience. Though certainly not an exhaustive list, the survey does present the reader with the basic objections one is likely to face from the skeptic.

Nichols then considers the issues raised by psychology and neuroscience in two chapters: one on near-death experiences and one on the soul. Some of the near-death experiences that Nichols relates are truly fascinating. He suggests that these experiences raise serious issues about the nature of human consciousness and the possibility of the afterlife that “mind-is-no-more-than-the-brain” anthropologies struggle to answer. While he is careful not to base too much of an argument on what at times amounts to little more than anecdotal evidence, he suggests that Christian theology must reckon with these experiences and may find as much helpful as harmful. The relative amount of space given to the evidence of near-death experiences is a bit out of balance with the book’s introductory character.

From near-death experiences, Nichols moves to discuss the soul. He briefly introduces five positions on the existence and nature of the soul: metaphysical materialism (body only), emergent monism (body plus), holistic dualism (body plus soul), reincarnation, and his own position: “soul as subject-in-relation.” Obviously these are deep issues that he can only introduce, but he does try to present each position, some of its proponents, and strengths and weaknesses.

Nichols turns next to the resurrection. He introduces and addresses several of the main objections to Jesus’s resurrection and resurrection in general. He states what can be said about the nature of resurrected bodies on the basis of Scripture. Though one might wish that he had addressed more fully both the centrality of resurrection to the Christian faith or distinguished it more clearly from reincarnation, he rightly emphasizes that the concept of resurrection includes more than just resurrected humanity but a resurrected creation as well.

Before reaching the topics of heaven and hell, Nichols dips his toe into the bubbling cauldron of current discussions about justification. He surveys various NT corpora on the issue of how one comes to be worthy of entrance into heaven. Though not heavy-handed, Nichols’s Catholicism is in evidence in his efforts to reconcile the roles of faith and works in justification. In the same chapter he discusses judgment and advocates the view that God does not send people to hell but that people put themselves there. He concludes the chapter by asserting that since at the end of their lives few humans have either totally rejected God or been perfected in the love of God, there must be some post-mortem solidification of that rejection or purification.

This obviously leads to a treatment of heaven, purgatory, and hell in the penultimate chapter. In an effort to articulate a theo-centric view of heaven rather than the more popular anthropocentric versions, Nichols expounds on the divine attributes of love, goodness, beauty, truth and understanding, and freedom as they pertain to the eternal state. To discuss purgatory Nichols likens the doctrine to that of the Trinity, noting that neither are explicitly stated in Scripture. Nichols’s argument rests on the historical practice of prayer for the dead and on the incompletion of human sanctification in this life. Since radical personal change does not happen in the blink of an eye in human experience, he does not accept the idea of an instantaneous completion of sanctification upon death. Interestingly, Nichols does not interact at all with Jesus’s pronouncement to the thief on the cross nor with Paul’s teaching in 2 Cor 5:1–10. While affirming the reality of hell, Nichols demurs from its physicality, preferring to view the suffering as a “pain of loss.” He interacts briefly with the matter of hell’s eternality and the “solutions” offered by universalism and annihilationism. Nichols closes the book with a more pastoral chapter on the concept of dying well.

While each individual reader will find points of conflict with Nichols’s conclusions, there is much to commend in this introductory text. Its breadth may be its strength and its weakness. Its outline and the issues it covers could serve well as the outline of an undergraduate or church class, but its treatment of several key matters demand much deeper investigation, investigation Nichols may have been able to offer had he pared down some areas of personal interest such as near-death experiences, justification, and views of the soul.