SOURCE: A review of Eternal Life? Life After Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, in Theological Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2, June, 1985, pp. 361-62.

In the following review, Devenish complains that Küng's Eternal Life? fails in comparison to the first two works of the trilogy.

In this series of nine public lectures given in Tübingen and Ann Arbor, we have the final installment, [Eternal Life?] along with On Being a Christian and Does God Exist?, of K[üng]'s “trilogy” (xvi). His basic approach parallels that taken in On Being a Christian. In the first section, “The Horizon,” K[üng] sets the “background” of his question and poses it from the point of view of medicine, contemporary philosophy, and the history of religions. He confronts the reader with a “decision” between “alternatives”: “a definitive extinguishing in nothingness or an eternal permanence in being” (68). In the second...