A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life

The miracle of birth and the mystery of death mark human life. Mortality, like a dark specter, looms over all that lies in between. Human character, behavior, aims, and community are all inescapably shaped by this certainty of human ends. Mortality, like an unwanted guest, intrudes, becoming a burden and a constant struggle. Mortality, like a thief who steals, even threatens the ability to live life rightly. Life is short. Death is certain. Mortality, at all costs, should be resisted or transcended. In A Time to Keep Ephraim Radner revalues mortality, reclaiming it as God's own. Mortality should not be resisted but received. Radner reveals mortality's true nature as a gift, God's gift, and thus reveals that the many limitations that mortality imposes should be celebrated. Radner demonstrates how faithfulness - and not resignation, escape, denial, redefinition, or excess - is the proper response to the gift of humanity's temporal limitation. To live rightly is to recognize and then willingly accept life's limitations. In chapters on sex and sexuality, singleness and family, education and vocation, and a panoply of end of life issues, A Time to Keep plumbs the depths of the secular imagination, uncovering the constant struggle with human finitude in its myriad forms. Radner shows that by wrongly positioning creaturely mortality, these parts of human experience have received an inadequate reckoning. A Time to Keep retrieves the most basic confession of the Christian faith, that life is God's, which Radner offers as grace, as the basis for a Christian understanding of human existence bound by its origin and telos. The possibility and purpose of what comes between birth and death is ordered by the pattern of Scripture, but is performed faithfully only in obedience to the limits that bind it.

Table of Contents:
Preface: Recovering the Context of Life 1. Clocks, Skins, and Mortality 2. How Life Is Measured 3. Death and Filiation 4. The Arc of Life 5. The Vocation of Singleness 6. Working and Eating Conclusion: The Church's Vocation to Number Our Days Notes Scripture Index General Index

About the Author :
Ephraim Radner is Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. His books include A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West and Hope among the Fragments: The Broken Church and Its Engagement of Scripture. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Review :
For pointing to the fundamental nature of finitude and creatureliness and for writing in a manner manifesting that very mode of being, we are in Radner's debt. The book is commended, though the reader must be warned that, as in life, time will be taken to assimilate it. -- Michael Allen -- Reading Religion Radner's prose is thoughtful, and he clearly names the complexities of contemporary life and presents a rich vision of the ways in which Christian wisdom calls humans to lives of meaning and purpose amid finitude. -- Choice Anything written by Ephraim Radner can be guaranteed to be serious, constructively difficult, spiritually challenging and original, and this book is no exception...This establishes Radner as not only an unusually profound analyst of ecclesial and ecclesiological issues (his previous books have shown that in abundance), not only a theological essayist of near-genius, but a truly systematic theologian in the best sense, someone who can connect the great themes of dogmatic orthodoxy and scriptural figure to the challenges of our culture, which seems increasingly adrift from any idea of what common humanity--let alone common created identity--might amount to. -- Rowan Williams -- The Living Church A formidable book repaid by a second reading -- Jeremy James -- Expository Times Wide and expansive, sure to command the attention of scholars for years, even decades, to come. -- J. Todd Billings -- First Things Ephraim Radner in A Time to Keep gives us considerable theological guidance for relating to our struggles with mortality, and how those struggles shape and form our lives, to our life as beings created by God. It is a remarkable effort, worthy of Radner's considerable skills and creative abilities. -- Mark Harris -- Anglican Theological Review