Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry [Paperback]

Hans Boersma (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2011

Surveying the barriers that contemporary thinking has erected between the natural and the supernatural, between earth and heaven, Hans Boersma issues a wake-up call for Western Christianity. Both Catholics and evangelicals, he says, have moved too far away from a sacramental mindset, focusing more on the “here-and-now” than on the “then-and-there.” Yet, as Boersma points out, the teaching of Jesus, Paul, and St. Augustine — indeed, of most of Scripture and the church fathers — is profoundly otherworldly, much more concerned with heavenly participation than with earthly enjoyment. In Heavenly Participation Boersma draws on the wisdom of great Christian minds ancient and modern — Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, C. S. Lewis, Henri de Lubac, John Milbank, and many others. He urges Catholics and evangelicals alike to retrieve a sacramental worldview, to cultivate a greater awareness of eternal mysteries, to partake eagerly of the divine life that transcends and transforms all earthly realities. “Hans Boersma makes a superb contribution to evangelical theological reflection in this well-designed book, and it goes a long way to drawing us back from the brink of a fashionable evangelical tendency to reductive historicism. His re-situation of the doctrine of the Incarnation in its historic sacramental language and thought opens up the way to a deeper understanding of the truths of faith that evangelicals and Catholics alike seek to comprehend and nurture.” — David Lyle Jeffrey Baylor University “Theology at its best, says Hans Boersma, is less interested in comprehending the truth than in participating in it. Skillfully marshalling passages from the church fathers and medieval theologians and drawing judiciously on contemporary evangelical and Catholic thinkers, Boersma shows that theology is not primarily an intellectual enterprise but a spiritual discipline by which one enters into the truth and is mastered by it. Though this ‘sacramental tapestry,’ as he calls it, is as old as the church, it is refreshing to have it presented anew in this engaging book.” — Robert Louis Wilken University of Virginia

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Hans Boersma makes a superb contribution to evangelical theological reflection in this well-designed book, and it goes a long way to drawing us back from the brink of a fashionable evangelical tendency to reductive historicism. His re-situation of the doctrine of the Incarnation in its historic sacramental language and thought opens up the way to a deeper understanding of the truths of faith that evangelicals and Catholics alike seek to comprehend and nurture.”
— David Lyle Jeffrey
Baylor University

“Theology at its best, says Hans Boersma, is less interested in comprehending the truth than in participating in it. Skillfully marshalling passages from the church fathers and medieval theologians and drawing judiciously on contemporary evangelical and Catholic thinkers, Boersma shows that theology is not primarily an intellectual enterprise but a spiritual discipline by which one enters into the truth and is mastered by it. Though this ‘sacramental tapestry,’ as he calls it, is as old as the church, it is refreshing to have it presented anew in this engaging book.”
— Robert Louis Wilken
University of Virginia

About the Author

Hans Boersma holds the J. I. Packer Chair in Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. His other books include Nouvelle Th�ologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery and Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition, which won the 2005 Christianity Today Book Award in theology/ethics.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; First Edition edition (February 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802865429
• ISBN-13: 978-0802865427
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.6 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #557,779 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Losing and regaining a Sacramental Tapestry May 12, 2011

By Father Gregory

Format:Paperback

Hans Boersma is a fellow countryman of mine and he has written an excellent and timely book. Two reasons for me to like the man without even (personally) knowing him!

The Book is basically an apologia for understanding Jesus Christ as the centre of all reality. Not a separate reality though. The way all "participates" in Jesus Christ is "sacramentaly" so that the symbolized and the symbol are not identical but related by "transcendental participation" which Boersma explains as: "sharing in something else in a small way (see p. 185)." This he does not justify by diving into Platonism (Middle, Neo-whatever) but by referencing St. Paul's speech on the Aereopagus in Acts 17, 27-29. Scripture itself orients us to appropriate Platonism to a limited extent. Platonism speaks of "ideas" in which "reality" participates in order to exist. This is what Boersma is saying allows Christianity to appropriate it in a limited sense. The world exists because it participates in Jesus Christ, that is Jesus Christ is present to us sacramentally. The word sacrament is deliberately chosen because it has a clear Christian history and use, and is capable of explaining just how Platonism is more appropriate as a philosophical framework for Christianity than "Nominalism," or "Univocity," or even "Post-modern Skepticism."

Nominalism - though often associated (and in my opinion correctly) with Protestantism - actually began with Medieval Catholics. The Reformation suggests Boersma was unable to put this genie back into the bottle. Nominalism tears the "sacramental tapestry" by denying that "universals" exist and that real beings participate in them. Rather "universals" are to be understood as mere "names" and have no ontological significance. Boersma correctly identifies Medieval Catholics as the originators of Nominalism, but he does not sufficiently emphasize that Protestantism has built its very foundations on it. Univocity tears at the "sacramental tapestry" because it holds that Creator and creation fit in the category of "being" in the same way. That is both "are" (have being) in their own right the one independently from the other. This also denies "participation." These two form the blades of a pair of scissors which ultimately cut the "sacramental tapestry" up completely in today's Protestant AND Roman Catholic theology. This theology is not merely academic, it has influenced evryone in both faith communities from the academia to the pews.

Young Evangelicals - dissatisfied with the Modernist emphasis on historicity and other Modernist characteriztics - ought not to presume Post-modernism is an ally in overcoming the short-comings of Modernism. Modernism and Post-modernism both happily apply the two blades of Nominalism and Univocity to cut through any real Christian framework of sacramentality. Instead they ought to turn to the tradition of the Church - the very suspicion many Evangelicals have toward Church and tradition, suggests Boersma (correctly if I may add), is the result of an unconscious acceptance of Nominalism and Univocity! The problem with that is of course that these very "blades" cut the pages of Scripture in the very same way and in the very same movement with which they cut the "sacramental tapestry." Iow Nominalism and Univocity cloud and prevent a scriptural understanding rather than support it. This should be of as great concern to Roman Catholics as it should be to Evangelicals Boersma writes. Evangelicals and Catholics both need to disabuse themselves of Nominalism and Univocity and regain the "sacramental tapestry" which the pre and early Medieval Church maintained intact.

Boersma suggests that engaging the Roman Catholic Nouvelle Theologie authors (especially Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar and Maurice Chenu) are particularly important in thjis respect. They are squarely Catholic, but not anti-Protestant. That is they are not trying to polemically engage the Reformation so much as they are addressing the very Nominalist and Univocist (yep, I just made up a new word) tendencies in (their own) present day Catholicism. Their focus is on presenting Jesus Christ as the heart of all reality and that we sacramentally relate to Him. This has implications for the Church, Scripture (and its exegesis), authority, Eucharist and even the perception of time. As an Evangelical Boersma is not convinced that regaining such a "participatory" understanding necessarily leads to particularly Roman ideas of Church, Sacraments, Mariology etc. But he does establish very clearly that both Roman Catholics and Evangelical Protestants - insofar as they are Christians - ought to regain a participatory understanding. For where Protestants have failed in harboring Nominalism Roman Catholicism has erred in being too this-worldy (univocist if you will). Since Protestants and Roman Catholics both need to combat a common enemy - this struggle presents and Ecumenical opportunity and so does its victorious fulfillment.

Boersma's work follows a particular pattern. He starts out with explaining what the "sacramental tapestry" is and than proceeds to explain how it was lost (and what is means to have lost it) only to conclude by indicating how it can be regained. This is a so-called "exitus-reditus" pattern. A pattern which we see in Scripture: creation > fall > restoration as well as in Platonism. This is an attempt to relate the intelectual discussion the reader is being presented with to real life. That is the reader at the end is supposed to have gained some understanding and feeling of what it means to have, to have lost, and to have regained a sense of "heavenly participation" a sharing in the life of the tri-une God. He is to be "re-oriented" so that world, Church, Scripture, Sacraments, are all "particpatory events" where he or she participates in real sense in the life of God shared with us in Jesus Christ.

In conclusion: Boersma's excellent work reads as an elaborate "gloss" on Acts 17, 16-34.

The one thing which I would like to have seen integrated into this correctly "woven tapestry" which Boersma's book itself is, is an unpacking of how Jesus Christ is the anchor holding all things in place pecisely as the Crucified Lord. For it seems to me that if we are not to absorb Platonism uncritically - which Boersma certainly does not want us to do - there is hardly a more radical fail safe than precisely the Cross of Jesus Christ. In a sense all participation in the life of God begins in the crucifixion of the Lord. Unless we participate in His Cross and are re-oriented thereby, we are unlikely to be re-oriented at all. We have lost the "heavenly participation" (life in and through Jesus Christ) and can only regain it if by being crucified with Him our death dies in this very co-crucifixion and new, re-oriented life which consists precisely in this "heavenly participation" first becomes possible.

Fr. Gregory Wassen +

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Evangelical Ressourcement June 18, 2012

By Matthew Milliner

Format:Paperback

Note: A version of this review originally appeared in Books & Culture (October 2011)

Evangelical lamps are sputtering. Prognostications of the movement usually announce its impending death as a threat, unless it makes the changes for which the given prophet calls. Such proposals include filling lamps with expired postmodern vinegar, or insisting they be replenished with the coagulated liquid of old-time religion. Hans Boersma's book Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry affords a different response. Boersma offers the rich, luxuriant oil of medieval metaphysics to keep evangelical lamps warmly aglow. Boersma is not a fringe figure. It's somewhat symbolic that he holds the J. I. Packer chair in theology at Regent College. Could this kind of neo-medieval evangelicalism hold the same potential for the movement as did the broadly Reformed perspective of Packer?

Boersma, of course, is not the first evangelical who has made progress by looking back. Robert Webber famously discovered the liturgical rhythms of the early church, and Thomas Oden's "paleo-orthodoxy" project, centered in Christianity's first millennium, gave rise to the Ancient Christian Commentary series. John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy movement do much of the heavy lifting for this perspective, telling a story of ancient richness and modern, secular decline, a story helpfully translated into an American idiom by James K. A. Smith's Introducing Radical Orthodoxy (Baker Academic, 2004).

These relatively contemporary figures, however, can themselves be situated in a much broader--I am tempted to say inevitable--trajectory of American Protestantism. One thinks of the Mercersburg Theology of the mid-19th century, born when John Williamson Nevin--a brilliant student of the staunch American Calvinist Charles Hodge--re-discovered the Real Presence in the Eucharistic theology of John Calvin after nearly converting to Catholicism. Harriet Beecher Stowe records the same impulse, as Protestants migrated from cold New England meetinghouses to the neo-Gothic façades of once-forbidden Episcopal churches: "There came to them gentle spirits," she chronicled, "cut and bleeding by the sharp crystals of doctrinal statement, and courting the balm of devotional liturgy and the cool shadowy indefiniteness of more aesthetic forms of worship."[1]

Boersma's project differs from its predecessors by its unique inspiration: the circle of 20th-century Catholic theologians whose collective project came to be known--disparagingly at first--as the nouvelle théologie. Dissatisfied with a desiccated Thomism, thinkers such as Henri de Lubac, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, and Henri Bouillard renewed Catholic theology by literally "re-sourcing" Scholastic faith with ancient Christian thought. They were heavily criticized but ultimately effective, many of their insights informing the Second Vatican Council and in turn renewing Thomism as well.[2] Having produced a lengthy academic investigation of these thinkers entitled Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), Boersma has now given us a more accessible version of the argument informing that longer text, one that puts his research into conversation, and opposition, with contemporary evangelical trends.

Though it will easily be misunderstood, I'm tempted to summarize Boersma's project with the phrase: Doctrine divides, metaphysics unites. By which I mean not doctrine's insignificance (Boersma relentlessly criticizes doctrinal relativism), but that a shared medieval framework could potentially break stalemates in doctrinal disputation. Truths now polarized--Scripture and tradition, faith and works, Eucharist and church--were seamlessly united in the church's first millennium, making that period a resource for healing present rifts. According to Boersma, "both Protestants and Catholics suffer the loss of a sacramental ontology." Though Boersma does not, we might also include the Orthodox in this formulation. Greek translations of Tridentine theology and illusionistic 19th-century Orthodox icons reveal that they too were westernized, making a rediscovery of patristic insights necessary (though admittedly easier) for Eastern Christians as well.

Boersma calls this medieval atmosphere the "Platonist-Christian synthesis," specifically addressing evangelical readers who may greet that formulation with suspicion. Ontology and Platonism, after all, are the boogiemen of modern theology. But for Boersma, "usually the ontology of those who plead for the abolition of ontology turns out to be the nominalist ontology of modernity." Platonism has been thoughtlessly caricatured as well. Emboldened by the fact that Christian Platonism was a significant ingredient in C. S. Lewis' recipe for success, Boersma shifts the burden of proof to those who would irresponsibly conflate Gnosticism and Platonism, a slip unfortunately made in the popular writings of scholars as reputable as N. T. Wright. Christianity was not Hellenized, according to Boersma (and countless other scholars of rank); rather, Hellenism was Christianized. Early Christians such as Clement of Alexandria, in the words of Peter Brown, "cut twigs from the rank, dried-back and brittle bushes of pagan literature, and graft[ed] them on the succulent root-stock of Christ's truth."[3] It is in fact the thinner strands of evangelicalism, which instinctually refuse the sacramental perspective, that border on Gnosticism.

Boersma's controlling metaphor for the medieval synthesis is the "sacramental tapestry." He explains how this tapestry was woven by early Christian thinkers, frayed in the Middle Ages by a creeping naturalism and an overly juridicized church, cut by theologians such as John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, and further unraveled throughout modernity, as chronicled most famously by Charles Taylor. Boersma is especially critical of evangelicals who embrace postmodern skepticism. "Rather than attempting to reweave the tapestry," books such as Carl Raschke's The Next Reformation "threaten to shred the last little bits that may still remain."

Boersma is less concerned with consistent Protestantism than with a broader church unity. "We evangelicals only do justice to our past if we regard the Reformation not as something to be celebrated but as something to be lamented." But in a move that may seem counterintuitive, this does not entail abandoning Protestant distinctives: "My argument is that, as evangelicals, we need Catholic voices precisely in order to maintain and reinforce our evangelical identity." Is Boersma speaking out of both sides of his mouth? Not necessarily.

Although he does not focus on evangelical sources, neither does he ignore them. The truth of sacramental participation is less "Catholic" or "Orthodox" than simply true, which is why it belongs as much to--and can even be found in--Protestantism as in other traditions. Boersma explains that "Calvin's view of grace overcoming the insufficiency of nature ... would not have been out of place in the integrated cosmos of the Great Tradition," even if this "did not fit well with other elements of Calvin's thought." Boersma also shows the similarities between Yves Congar and contemporary evangelical theologian Kevin Vanhoozer. Other Protestants mentioned by Boersma who approximate the medieval perspective include William Laud, Jeremy Taylor, Herbert Thorndike, T. S. Eliot, and the various thinkers associated with the Oxford Movement.

Still, these sources are mentioned in passing, and Boersma might have taken them further. He might also have spoken more directly to North American Protestants, by teasing out the participatory themes in Jonathan Edwards,[4] whose view of the universe as a sacramental icon is sometimes indistinguishable from that of Maximus the Confessor or John of Damascus.[5] Even Karl Barth, whom Boersma is wise enough not to overlook, has more points of contact with Boersma's project than the book lets on. Indeed, Keith Johnson has shown how the later Barth developed his own version of the "analogy of being," that indispensible shorthand for medieval metaphysics which Boersma hopes to recover.[6] Likewise, the theologian Kenneth Oakes, describing some fascinating parallels between Barth and Henri de Lubac, sounds almost exactly like Boersma: "Barth interweaves a whole tapestry of analogical, ontologically determinative relations between the act and being of the Triune God ... and the act and being of humanity in general."[7]

Accordingly, the appeal to Patristic sources known as ressourcement need not entail a forsaking of the Protestant birthright; undertaken rightly, it promises fulfillment. Boersma's is still very much an evangelical perspective, and is sufficiently distinguished from Radical Orthodoxy to make it more palatable to evangelicals. One might even argue that the "declinist" story of medieval richness and modern malaise is a specifically evangelical one. The evangelical New Testament scholar F. Dale Bruner, commenting on Matthew 24:10, makes a surprising observation about Jesus' apocalyptic prophecy: "I think that some Western secularization is a form of the Great Apostasy."[8] Still, readers hoping for a more thoroughly Protestant perspective will be more satisfied with William Dyrness' Poetic Theology (Eerdmans, 2010), which is much more critical of the lionization of the Middle Ages. But Dyrness, too, ends up in similarly contemplative, richly sacramental terrain. That a view akin to Boersma's can be extracted from chiefly Protestant resources as well is further testimony to its truth, and to its potential as one of evangelicalism's brightest possible futures.

Evangelical ressourcement may, therefore, be less a retreat than an ascent. Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Disagree with its thesis... but really like it February 23, 2012

By Lance Green

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm coming from a different theological and philosophical background than Boersma, so I actually don't agree with him on many points. This book has a different intent than most of Boersma's writing: it is an attempt to engage people outside of the ivory tower of academia, mostly evangelicals, and get them thinking about their own Christian tradition.
The book read really well; it's clear and concise, and Boersma takes the time to explain the language that might act as hangups for evangelicals. Though critical of evangelicalism, he offers benefit of the doubt of their true faith. This books really acts as a corrective. Boersma, I think, offers something far more interesting than what most of post-evangelicals are doing. Rather than pithy engagement with old mysticism, it is a reclaiming of the tradition. A sacramental ontology does not take away from what evangelicals love, but it actually builds it up!
He does a great job of dialoguing with evangelicalism and the tradition, but I do believe he does a poor job of handling the reformation. But my issue isn't his interpretation of the reformation (even if I disagree with it) but with how little space he offers it. Evangelical theology, indeed protestant theology, is rooted in the movements of Luther, Calvin, and others... I believe they deserve more time, whether viewed from a positive or negative light.

This book is really helpful for anyone trying to get their head out the new platonic movements in the academy, or any protestant wanting to engage with the tradition. It shouldn't be read as a negative commentary on protestants, but as a helpful, joyful correction of what might bolster the faith.

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Not more than a year since I first read it, I have found that I actually agree with the book more and more.