Eight Theses on Martyrdom's Hermeneutical Prospects

Not mine (alas!) but Craig A Slane's. In may ways, here is encapsulated my project (oh dear!) ... I have bold-ed the theses I would like to think about some more...

1. The totality of a human life and its identity is graspable only whe death is entertained as a consititutive feature of that identity.

2. Subjectively or existentially, in the midtemporal experience of one's own death by anticipation the posttemporal whole of a life may be grasped in advance and become a significant catalyst for life.

3.Objectively, the postmortem vantage point, though excluding the subject of death by definition, is one in which the totality of a life appears to others as an object for consideration and reconsideration.

4. The quality of that totality of life which now appears as an object for consideration and reconsideratio is fixed neither by the end point of its death nor by its continuity as such, but by its evident comportment toward death, and hence, by the kind of end and the kind of continuity achieved.

5. A Christian death is one that consummates a life into which Christ's death has been assimilated.

6. The process of assimilating Christ's death into one's life begins at baptism.

7. Martyrdom is the quintessential form of that assimilation of Christ's death begun at baptism, whose possibility is contained embryonically within it.

8. The quintessential Christian death called martyrdom may serve, then, as a powerful lens for observing various aspects of the life it encapsulates.