Not Responsible for My Own Being
“To live the life of active fellowship with God is, therefore, to live out of the event of freedom from sin and death. Evangelical freedom is the freedom that comes from not being finally responsible for my own being: by the mercy of God I am restored to know myself to be a creature in fellowship with my creator and savior. And to such freedom I cannot liberate myself: self-liberation is precisely the ‘yoke of slavery’ (Gal. 5:1) from which I have been set free.”
[John Webster, Holiness, 94
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.
Heavenly Participation by Hans Boersma: A Serial Conversation
If you have never heard of it, Ken Myers’s project called Mars Hill Audio is a wonderful gift to the Christian church in the modern age. I continually am stimulated to think about topics and in ways I previously would not have. The recent issue, no. 108, included an interview with Regent College theologian Hans Boersma, discussing the ideas presented in his new book, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry.
This conversation was right up my alley since I have been asking similar questions to Boersma ever since a 2008 course on Medieval theology at Bethel Seminary. The wonders of Amazon.com had the book in my hands in less than 72 hours. I am going to attempt (!) to faithfully report on each chapter as I read.
Pt. 1: Introduction
The Introduction to the book is actually very helpful since Boersma sets out not just critical reasons for his pursuing this topic, but also personal ones. This book is a popular version of his scholarly study called Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology, and he describes it as, “a plea for a retrieval (ressourcement) of a theology of heavenly participation” (3). By this he means the premodern Christian idea that, “created objects found their reality and identity in the eternal Word of God. It is this link between heaven and earth that allowed premodern Christians to see God’s own truth, goodness, and beauty in the world around them” (x). A motivation for this recovery is that it is only this “other-worldliness that guarantees an appropriate kind of this-worldliness.”
The theologian sees a need to aid the church in this modern/postmodern age in which the world has been “desacramentalized.” First, Boersma cites the Apostle Paul’s repeated descriptions of Christians’ past, present, and future participation in the heavenly reality as counters against the current trend of “this-worldly”emphases in Christian eschatology (e.g., that of N. T. Wright in Surprised by Hope). Second, and much more controversially these days, he points the reader to St. Augustine and his City of God as one to follow in our important recovery of proper “heavenly-mindedness” in the church.
It is not merely Augustine that is controversial, but Boersma’s rather unapologetic acceptance of his “Platonist-Christian synthesis” (and that of the Patristic and Medieval ages). As a Dutch-born Protestant theologian, it will be very interesting to see how Boersma retrieves this worldview not only from this early church era but from the Roman Catholic Nouvelle theologians whom he claims have spurred him on to his beliefs. Thinkers like de Lubac, Danielou, von Balthasar, and Congar are his sources, being like them “convinced that the vision of sacramental participation was the only viable answer to the secularism of the modern age” (16).
The questions raised in my mind by this Introduction include: how does Boersma see the historical development of nominalism affecting both Protestant and Catholic theology in and after the Reformation? how does he propose to keep up the Creator–creature distinction? how does his proposal differ from that of, e.g., Radical Orthodoxy? how can one hold to _sola Scriptura_ properly and also adopt part of the Platonic worldview into one’s ontology? what definition does Boersma give to the Pauline, Johannine, and Hebrews’ use of “spirit/flesh” and “heavenly/earthly” language?
All these questions must be answered well if the project is to succeed and result in a truly Protestant worldview in which the being of creation is not devoid of any connection to the supernatural, one that is not only good and beautiful, but one that is true in relation to Scripture as a whole. Nevertheless, it is an exciting beginning to an intriguing book.
