Dying Unto Life

""McGill has the power to make ideas, concepts, differing perspectives vivid--to 'in-flesh' them. . . .Then comes the ""switch"" or reversal or inversion empowered by the very confrontation McGill has arranged. . . . McGill leaves only the demonic as the object of our worship. Just when we supposed that he was about to come to the defense of this ""world-governing, background God,"" he dismisses such a God, leaving us with the demonic, leaving us room to affirm our own doubts and perplexities, leaving us with a harsher formulation than we might have ventured, leaving us attentive to what he is going to do next and to where he is going to lead us. Because by now we are following him.""
--From the ""Introduction.""


One of Art McGill's favorite passages from the Gospel of John (12:24) notes that a grain of wheat becomes fruitful not when it is on the stalk but when it falls to the ground and dies. The stalk of wheat must expend itself in letting a new crop flourish. Nourishment rather than domination described McGill's sense of the Christian life. It is the theme of this collection of his writings on the New God, New Death, and New Life. David Cain has admirably, painstakingly, and patiently expended himself in making McGill's work available for our tasting and nourishment.
--William F. May, Testing the National Covenant: Fears and Appetites in American Politics


Arthur C. McGill was the Bussey Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School. A distinguished philosopher and theologian, he also taught at Amherst College, Wesleyan University, and Princeton University.

David Cain is Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia, and minister in the United Church of Christ. He is editor of Sermons of Arthur C. McGill, (Cascade Books, 2007), and author and photographer of An Evocation of Kierkegaard / En Fremkaldelse af Kierkegaard (1997).