Gerhard LOHFINK, Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life. Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Collegeville, Min.: Liturgical Press, 2018. HC. 300 pp. $34.95. Reviewed by Peter C. PHAN, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

Gerhard Lohfink, Professor of New Testament exegesis at the University of Tübingen and a prolific author with many works in English translation, tells us that the title of his book is taken from a hit song in the 1960s. For the benefit of millennials, this song was written by American songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and sung by Peggy Lee. Its lyrics, inspired by the 1896 story Disillusionment (Enttäuschung) by Thomas Mann, recounts a woman’s disillusionment with events and experiences in her life that she thought unique.  If that is all there is to life, she suggests, we “break out the booze and have a ball” instead of worrying about the meaning of life.  One might conclude that suicide would be a natural course of action for such a pessimism, but the woman says she will never kill herself because she knows that death will be no liberation but, ironically, a disappointment as well, perhaps the most bitter.

The immediate motive for Lohfink’s writing this book is not however that hit song but a conversation with an older priest whom he greatly admired for wisdom, holiness, and pastoral sensitivity. In public the priest preached about death, judgment, resurrection, and other “Last Things,” but in private he confessed to Lohfink that he did not want to trouble his parishioners with talk about the afterlife since most of them “never spoke of the hereafter but had learned to accept their lives and ultimately came to their end quietly and calmly. Is that not the real Christianity?” (7). Lohfink was deeply disturbed by the old pastor’s private thought and set out to break that silence.

Being a recidivist author of books on the “Last Things” myself, I agree with Lohfink that we must talk about the hereafter, if for no other reason than people keep bombarding theologians with questions about it, or, as Lohfink phrases the title of the first chapter, about “The Question of Questions.”  The sixty-million dollars question is of course: What to talk about and where to find answers to the questions people ask?

Lohfink divides his book into five parts, the titles of which indicate their subject matter: “What People Think,” “What Israel Learned,” “What Entered the World in Jesus,” “What Will Happen to Us.” And “What can We Do.” Lohfink confesses that there is one thing he fears (original italics) in writing this book, and that is “boring the readers” (x). I for one find the book not slumber-inducing but clear, attractively written, and informative. The chapters of each part, no matter the weightiness of the topics discussed, are kept relatively brief, averaging some ten pages each, and thus not overtaxing readers with short attention span.

Needless to say, the longest part is Part IV, dealing with twelve issues people usually want to know. The sources from which Lohfink derives information to answer those questions are the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament, which are his areas of expertise. From the biblical point of view, Lohfink frames the “ultimate question” about the hereafter as a choice between “Is there just nothing?” and “Is there a resurrection of the dead?”

It is not readily obvious that Lohfink’s way of framing the question-and-answer about the afterlife, understandable from the biblical context, is by and large the way most people, particularly non-believers and non-Christian believers, approach the “Question of Questions.”  Even religions that teach the resurrection such as Islam do not understand resurrection in the way Christians do. In this respect, Lohfink’s discussion of reincarnation, Hinduism, and Buddhism (27-32), partly because of its brevity, leaves much to be desired. Also one notes with regret that his limitation of his partners-in-dialogue to European, and mostly German, thinkers, while fully understandable given his intellectual milieu, unduly narrows his theological vision. Apart from these minor quibbles, Is This All There Is? is an eloquent and persuasive apologetics for the Christian faith in the afterlife. Read it, and you will not need to “break out the booze and have a ball,” especially when tormented about the meaning of life in the middle of the night.