O Death Where Is Thy Sting edition by Alexander Schmemann Alexis Vinogradov Religion Spirituality eBooks
Download As PDF : O Death Where Is Thy Sting edition by Alexander Schmemann Alexis Vinogradov Religion Spirituality eBooks 
"...In order to console himself, man created a dream of another world where there is no death, and for that dream he forfeited this world, gave it us decidedly to death.
"...Therefore, the most important and most profound question of the Christian faith must be, how and from where did death arise, and why has it become stronger than life? Why has death become so powerful that the world itself has become a kind of global cemetery, a place where a collection of people condemned to death live either in fear or terror, or, in their efforts to forget about death, find themselves rushing around one great big burial plot?"
-- Alexander Schmemann, Radio Liberty Broadcast
In this brief collection, Father Alexander Schmemann does not have the luxury for platitudes and pleasantries on the most difficult of life's ultimate questions. Taking us to the heart of Christian revelation and anthropology, he leads us unequivocally and directly, as only he can, to disclose why the apostle Paul calls death the "last enemy" (1 Cor. 1526) and Christ's decisive answer to this enemy.
O Death Where Is Thy Sting edition by Alexander Schmemann Alexis Vinogradov Religion Spirituality eBooks
For me this book was something of a sequel to For the Life of the World, which was one of the best textbooksthat I had. It looks at many of the same fundamental Christian mysteries especially for this season of Easter.
The Orthodox Schmemann contrasts the resurrection with the immortality of the soul, which is a valid argument
for those who already are inclined to believe in it-few people say "now that I've read Plato's Phaedo I believe".
It's not just immortality but resurrection, victory, conquest over death as proclaimed by the Church. Jesus wept
at the death of Lazarus, showing that it's not normal, you can't just say that his soul is in heaven. Even though
sickness and dying are normal in this world, it is abnormal in its normality, revealing the defeat of life that is
conquered not by medicine but by Christ's resurrection only.
Several of the passages were very similar to the words in For the Life of the World, such as "help is not the
criterion. Truth is the criterion". And theologians are tempted to give up the idea of "transcendence", or more
simply, the idea of "God". This gives a feel for Schmemann's blunt and powerful rhetorical approach.
The story of Adam and Eve shows how food, life, the gift of God to his creatures becomes a goal in itself,
and represents what sin does to all gifts received from God.
Schmemann offers a reflection on secularism, which is more of a Western issue so the Eastern perspective
is valuable. Secularism comes from Christianity affirming life so much for so many centuries that eventually
only this life matters, so we have even skyscrapers and world's fairs fitting into a Christian view of the world.
There's also an analysis of funeral homes, hospitals both Christian and secular, and the sacrament of oil
as they relate to the sacramentality of death and life. It's the sacrament of passage into life, but it had
become the sacrament of death, and in today's world is just as likely to become the sacrament of health.
But sickness as well has a sacramental value in the mystery of Christ's resurrection.
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O Death Where Is Thy Sting edition by Alexander Schmemann Alexis Vinogradov Religion Spirituality eBooks Reviews
Finally a Christian book that tells the truth about death.
Deep, touching, real and without being tempted to give the "easy", meaningless answers...
A wonderful essay from a great theologian.
It is a book I would read again and again
Remarkable!
A very good book.
I own an entire book case filled with works of Orthodox theology and devotional works, but if I had to keep only four or five of them, I would include this little volume among them. Fr. Schmemann is well-known to Orthodox Christians for his eloquent and inspiring writing on a wide range of topics, but this book is open and accessible to any Christian.
The title may be misleading to some, as this is definitely NOT intended to be a "feel-good" or consoling book for people facing death (as do we all) or serious illness (having had HIV for over 21 years, I have been exposed to a plethora of such dubious comfort). Rather, it is to be understood in the context of Christian Faith and more specifically, the Paschal message of resurrection.
Fr. Schmemann explodes the commonly-accepted but erroneous view that Christianity preaches the "immortality of the soul" in the sense of a disembodied spirits who somehow "go to heaven," some mysterious ethereal place of which no one has any knowledge whatsoever. "Christ did not talk about the immortality of the soul," he says, "he preached about the resurrection of the dead!"* He traces our modern conception not to Christ, but to Plato, and his outlook is refreshing, positive, and inspiring.
"He's in a better place," we so often hear of those beloved family and friends who have died. And yet, what better place can there be than the world that God has created, ultimately to be restored from its fallen state to what he intended it to be? Fr. Schmemann uses the story of the raising of Lazarus (Gospel of St. John, Chapter 11) to illustrate this and debunk our commonly-held misconception. When Christ encounters the grieving Martha, she tells him "if you had been here, my brother would not have died." So what does he respond? That death is natural, and that Lazarus is in a "better place?" No, he weeps! And then he goes on to pull Lazarus back from that supposed "better place" to this terrible, earthly place. Fr. Schmemann helps to reveal to us the true and terrible nature of death, as well as the hope that Christ offers, "trampling down death by death," as Orthodox Christians proclaim at the Paschal services.
Death is not natural, nor part of God's plan. Death is not something "to come to terms with." There is no reconciling with death; death is rotten to the core. "Death is," as St. Paul says, "the last enemy to be destroyed."
"The Resurrection of Christ comprises, I repeat, the very heart of the Christian faith and Christian Good News. And yet, however strange it may sound, in the everyday life of Christianity and Christians in our time there is little room for this faith. It is as though obscured, and the contemporary Christian, without being cognizant of it, does not reject it, but somehow skirts about it, and does not live the faith as did the first Christians. If he attends church, he of course hears in the Christian service the ever resounding joyous confirmations "trampling down death by death," "death is swallowed up by victory," "life reigns," and "not one dead remains in the grave." But ask him what he really thinks about death, and often (too often alas) you will hear some sort of rambling affirmation of the immortality of the soul and its life in some sort of world beyond the grave, a belief that existed even before Christianity. And that would be in the best of circumstances. In the worst, one would be met simply by perplexity and ignorance, "You know, I have never really thought about it." [But] "it is absolutely necessary to think about it, because it is with faith or unbelief, not simply in the "immortality of the soul," but precisely in the Resurrection of Christ and in our "universal resurrection" at the end of time that all of Christianity "stands or falls," as they say. If Christ did not rise, then the Gospel is the most horrible fraud of all. But if Christ did rise, then not only do all our pre-Christian representations and beliefs in the "immortality of the soul" change radically, but they simply fall away. And then the entire question of death presents itself in a totally different light. And here is the crux of the matter, that the Resurrection above all assumes an attitude toward death and an concept of death that is most profoundly different from its usual religious representations; and in a certain sense this concept is the opposite of those representations." --Fr. Alexander Schmemann
This book is nothing short of a treasure. There are few books I pull off of my book shelf more often to reference than this one. The text is succinct and easy to read, and this makes the analysis given all the more compelling. As another reviewer has noted, this is not a "feel good" book and will not offer usual "everything will be ok" comforts. Rather, Fr. Schmemann challenges our understanding of death (and therefore of life). After reading this simple and beautiful book, I found my understanding of this life and its encounters with death to be more deep and complete than before. Only in seeing death as the ultimate corruption, the final enemy to be destroyed, can we fully appreciate how radical Christ's resurrection is.
It would be easy to ramble about the thought-provoking content of this book; I would recommend it to anyone in a heartbeat. I hope you find it as helpful as I have.
For me this book was something of a sequel to For the Life of the World, which was one of the best textbooks
that I had. It looks at many of the same fundamental Christian mysteries especially for this season of Easter.
The Orthodox Schmemann contrasts the resurrection with the immortality of the soul, which is a valid argument
for those who already are inclined to believe in it-few people say "now that I've read Plato's Phaedo I believe".
It's not just immortality but resurrection, victory, conquest over death as proclaimed by the Church. Jesus wept
at the death of Lazarus, showing that it's not normal, you can't just say that his soul is in heaven. Even though
sickness and dying are normal in this world, it is abnormal in its normality, revealing the defeat of life that is
conquered not by medicine but by Christ's resurrection only.
Several of the passages were very similar to the words in For the Life of the World, such as "help is not the
criterion. Truth is the criterion". And theologians are tempted to give up the idea of "transcendence", or more
simply, the idea of "God". This gives a feel for Schmemann's blunt and powerful rhetorical approach.
The story of Adam and Eve shows how food, life, the gift of God to his creatures becomes a goal in itself,
and represents what sin does to all gifts received from God.
Schmemann offers a reflection on secularism, which is more of a Western issue so the Eastern perspective
is valuable. Secularism comes from Christianity affirming life so much for so many centuries that eventually
only this life matters, so we have even skyscrapers and world's fairs fitting into a Christian view of the world.
There's also an analysis of funeral homes, hospitals both Christian and secular, and the sacrament of oil
as they relate to the sacramentality of death and life. It's the sacrament of passage into life, but it had
become the sacrament of death, and in today's world is just as likely to become the sacrament of health.
But sickness as well has a sacramental value in the mystery of Christ's resurrection.
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