Adiaphora

Heavenly Participation 1A: The Shape of the Tapestry

In this chapter, Boersma sets out to describe the sacramental ontology that modernity has left behind and which he is calling the reader to recover. Incidentally, he begins here and allows himself to structure the whole of his book in a cleverly Platonic way: the old exitus–reditus pattern that Platonists believed the soul to take, going out from the One and returning again to it. 

Keeping in mind that “ontology” is simply a fancy word for “an understanding of reality, an idea of everything’s being,” Boersma rightly sees that there is no way to accomplish what many postmodern scholars desire, namely, to abolish ontology as a field of thought. It is impossible to work without an ontology, just as it is impossible to read a book without a cultural context, and typically “the ontology of those who plead for the abolition of ontology turns out to be the nominalist ontology of modernity.”  

The Major Point of this first chapter (and of part 1 of the entire book) is that until the late Middle Ages, Christians saw the world as “mystery.” Mystery is not a secret we deduce from observations, but rather the fact that a reality lies behind the appearances of this world which cannot be grasped by our usual 5 senses. Our senses can truly know this world, but they cannot fully know it, they cannot comprehend it. Further, Boersma contrasts a “symbolic” view with a sacramental view of reality: in a symbolic view, an earthly thing X only represents heavenly thing Y, having no real  (merely nominal) connection between the two. In a sacramental view, there is an “overlap” between X and Y such that X has its being “in” Y: the earthly thing cannot and would not exist without the heavenly thing. 

It is this linkage to Mystery that Boersma calls “sacramental,” using the term in its fullest sense not limited to the traditional two (or Roman Catholic seven) sacraments in the church. Yet this is a helpful correlate since it is in the acts like the Lord’s Supper that one can clearly observe the differences in ontology. One feels this more as a Baptist: I hear our ministers declare that the bread and the grape juice which we take together once a month are symbols of Christ’s body and blood, and that in our eating and drinking we are proclaiming the Lord’s death and our own faith (as in baptism). This is a strictly nominalist view of the Supper, and one which I personally find hollow and weak; I ask, “What is actually happening during this ritual outside of my own psychological process of remembering, and what change does that affect to me as a whole person?” 

In a more sacramental ontology, there is some sense in which, just as God is “really present” in the entire created order at all times, Christ is “really present” in the bread and wine or in the act of eating and drinking the Supper—mysteriously so. Because the things we can feel, smell, see, and taste are sacramentally linked to the heavenly things which they point to—the blood and body of the Lord—and because each believer is already by the Spirit “seated in the heavenly places,” then on this view God is doing something efficacious to me. Without this linkage, Boersma argues, that action seems lost.

This ontological overlap between sign and thing signified, it seems to me, fits with both nature and Scripture. An example of a similar overlap: in the Protestant scholastic tradition, there was an important distinction made between archetypal and ectypal theology, in other words, our creaturely knowledge of God. Only God could have archetypal theology since only He is infinite so as to comprehend Himself as He is. We finite creatures have only ectypal theology, or knowledge that is a subset of God’s own total knowledge of God and thus we only apprehend Him. Similarly, our knowledge of reality, Boersma argues, is apprehensive and not comprehensive, partial not full. There is more knowledge of the creation that our senses cannot grasp and this is therefore the Mystery or Sacramental nature of all things.

So this is the shape of the sacramental tapestry for which Boersma is arguing: that in some sense similar to the “Forms” of Plato, there is a heavenly reality in which the earthly, physical, created reality participates. It is this participation that gives creation its significance and which, moreover, leads creatures to the God who freely created it all out of His love and for His glory.

Next: the other major aspect of this chapter, the Christian tempering of Platonic thought.