Abstract
‘In thrall to time, we struggle to pause in awe at the wonders that inhabit the world.’ So begins Daniel Hinshaw’s most recent book on loss, suffering and the human condition. This line sounds rather cheerful for what might prove to be a somewhat gloomy prospect, and yet Hinshaw’s book is anything but melancholy – although he also refuses to turn his face away from the realities that pepper human life as it progresses towards frailty and old age.
Hinshaw’s focus is kenosis – the process of emptying oneself fully, most perfectly and voluntarily seen in Christ’s taking on human flesh and yet faced, involuntarily, by all humankind as they move through life’s different stages in which the flesh fails and certainties cease. Hinshaw’s thesis is that it is in our human response to this involuntary process that we give an account of who we truly are as people, and he charts out a number of responses to this process of kenosis that might lead to more hopeful outcomes.
For many, the idea of embracing decline in human function and individual agency would be anything but welcomed, yet here, by focusing on seven specific ways of living kenosis as opportunity, that narrative is challenged, as is the binary that looks either to endless (yet unachievable) youth or planned death. Hinshaw sees the move through life not as a curse but as a blessing – an opportunity to grow into the person we are created to be rather than something to be feared and avoided at all costs. He embraces restraints and limits, humility and simplicity, as gifts rather than as enemies to avoid, and offers a countercultural understanding of human growth that rejects individualism and personal gain and instead looks towards an ever increasing focus on ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’.
Hinshaw’s vision is broad, and at times the sheer wideness of his conception of kenosis can feel a little challenging to engage with. Yet throughout the book he points to many parts of human existence to which his overarching thesis might be applied, seeing kenosis playing out not only in a narrow, individual sense, but also in our relationships with one another, with society more widely, and with all creation. He writes as a doctor who appeals not to abstract ideas but to lived and embodied realities and the practical outworkings of his ideas, and he continually brings us back to the theological ideas underpinning his argument. This is, then, unmistakably a book of Christian theology, and it draws particularly on Hinshaw’s own Orthodox faith, yet it has much to say to those whose own beliefs may be different or faint. It is, too, a book that carefully links insights from the medical sciences to those from the theological world, and in so doing makes clear why such a dialogue is essential.
This is a book about dying and death, and yet it is really a book about life. It is in facing the former that the latter’s secrets might best be revealed. Hinshaw gives us a glimpse into this simple truth, and in doing so shows us something of the human and of the divine.