Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry.

Written by Hans Boersma Reviewed By John J. Bombaro

With a driving concern that evangelicals and Roman Catholics alike have lost sight of St. Paul's otherworldly theology due to a preoccupation with the here-and-now rather than the there-and-then, Hans Boersma of Regent College petitions in Heavenly Participation for an allegorical reading of nature concomitant with Scripture. “A purely biblical theology,” writes Boersma, is both an inadequate and “terribly naïve” expression of Christian theology. The “presence of God” (however understood by the author) is not confined to the pages of Scripture but permeates nature. The end result of the re-enchantment of nature yields a “sacramental tapestry” that reconstitutes spatiotemporal reality with a sense of the divine presence, meaning, and purpose necessary for authentic human ontology and deontology. For, as the central thesis of the book argues, “only otherworldliness guarantees proper engagement in this world” (p. 5).

Creaturely participation in heavenly realities is the result of a “Platonic-Christian synthesis,” meaning the Christian accommodation and appropriation of some of the defining elements of Platonic thought. The author suggests that the way to recover an abandoned premodern sacramental mindset or, synonymously, the Platonic-Christian synthesis, is by way of “ressourcement” theology, particularly the French Catholic movement of Nouvelle Théologie that polarized Roman Catholicism during Vatican II by challenging Neo-Thomism, but also the Patristic period.

Boersma's research is erudite, broad, and teeming with insights. His work evidences mastery of various disciplines: theology, philosophy, and the history of ideas. And even though his writing style is engaging and digestible and his main theses well-argued, this book is not for theological novices and will test the abilities of learned laypersons and seminarians. As a theological proposal for ressourcement, advanced theological readers will agree that, indeed, there is internal consistency and plausibility to this endeavor, given the Platonic-Christian lens through which Boersma views a sacramental tapestry in the world.

But therein lays the problem, namely, getting into bed with Plato; for this is an unabashedly Platonic enterprise. Whether one speaks of Christian identity, the righteousness of faith, or union with Christ, participatory connections here are “real” only in that these things have their reality in another dimension: heaven. Anytime Boersma uses the word “real” it invokes the philosophical categories of Platonic realism. Consequently, for all of the sacramental rhetoric within Heavenly Participation, the theology offered within its pages is consistently sacramentarian, which, incidentally, never distinguishes a “sacrament” from anything or even the sum total of things. In the Platonic-Christian synthesis of Boersma, there is no need to identify a sacrament per se because “[t]he entire cosmos is meant to serve as a sacrament: a material gift from God in and through which we enter into the joy of his heavenly presence” (p. 9). If everything is a sacrament, then really nothing is a sacrament, and we are back to the basic need for the sacraments for divine specificity in promise and presence.

Like Jonathan Edwards, who saw divine beauty, excellence, and meaning “in everything” (Personal Narrative) and yet repudiated the incarnational presence of Christ in the Eucharist (to say nothing of the triune presence of God in the waters of Holy Baptism and a priesthood that stands in persona Christi), Boersma extends a typological reading of spatiotemporality as sacramental while continuing the same theological pessimism regarding the sacraments that Christ himself instituted as the reality of God's promissory-presence on Earth, not typologically but “antitypologically.” “Heaven” is manifesting itself in spatiotemporality explicitly through the sacraments, and it is the sacraments that “guarantee a proper engagement in the world” because they are the points at which the eternal occupies time, the unseen touches the seen, and grace invades nature. Holy Baptism, Holy Absolution, Holy Orders, Holy Communion, and even Holy Matrimony are designated hagios not because of a Platonic correspondence or association but precisely because the divine is in fact present in our time-space dimension. By collapsing the adjective “sacramental” into the noun “sacrament,” Boersma flattens the topography of the means of divine grace and presence and thereby pushes Holy Communion to the margins of Christian worship and consciousness. Clearly, what is sacramental and what is a sacrament are not identical.

The Platonic-Christian synthesis does not bring one closer to the reality of God manifest in the world, which happens only through the One who is the overlapping of heaven and earth, the Incarnate Word, through the means by which divine specificity is objectified and objectively identified.

There is something disingenuous about a clarion call to a “sacramental ontology” by resourcing the Church Fathers that, at the same time, absorbs the Church's curacy of Christ-instituted sacraments into the colorless snowy landscape of the cosmic Lapland. The “sacraments” and “real presence” are terms that possess specific, non-transferrable theological meaning. Boersma's ressourcement hijacks and misappropriates established dogma. And where the proper use of language is lost, then so is the meaning; lose the meaning and the significance is lost also.

Additionally problematic is Boersma's failure to acknowledge Semitic philosophy, which, if considered, would mitigate clamoring for Platonic integration of the spiritual and physical dimensions of our one reality. Semitic ontology already maintained that not only are human beings an interpenetrating unity of matter and the immaterial, but spatiotemporality itself is bonded to the ethereal realm of heaven. It was their typological and sacramental world that ceded to christic realities and the efficacy of the sacraments. Anachronistically, the author writes, “The Platonic-Christian synthesis made it possible to regard creation, history, and Old Testament as sacramental carriers of a greater reality” (p. 38).

In the final analysis, though a worthy piece of scholarship full of fascinating considerations, Boersma's book does not deliver. The influence of this work should be negligible if, for no other reason, Boersma himself never really moves outside his theological tradition concerning the sacraments but rather appropriates the ontological perspectives of the sacrament traditions of the Church and postures as if they comport with evangelical theology.

Lastly, confessional Lutherans and Anglicans, to say nothing of Roman Catholics and the Orthodox tradition, will be little convinced that the problem with the Church today is its this-worldly focus. Evangelicals are already too much given to Platonism, that is, to philosophical dualism, opposing the immaterial dimension against the material. When evangelicalism's soteriology posits “getting to heaven” as the goal of salvation or, alternatively, continues in its commitment to sacramentarian beliefs and conflation of Pneumatology with Christology, to say nothing of the docetism and utter confusion about the resurrection and the world's terminus ad quem that plagues the evangelical mind, the last thing the evangelical needs is less of a reason to attend to the means of divine grace and presence in the word and sacraments.


John J. Bombaro

John J. Bombaro
University of San Diego
San Diego, California, USA

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