Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

By Hans Boersma

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467434423

Hans Boersma

  Hans Boersma is the Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Chair in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, Wisconsin. His other books include Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry and Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church.

Book preview

Preface

The Italian painter Fra Angelico (c. 1395-1455) had a preoccupation with heaven. The Dominican friar recognized that life lived on earth carried eternal implications. No doubt the Renaissance painter’s fervent hope was for the seraphic angels to take him to heaven on the final day. Therefore, in one of his most famous paintings, The Last Judgment, angels and saints join hands in a heavenly procession, ready to enter the bliss of paradise. From then on, the saints would be joining the divine liturgy in the singing of the heavenly Sanctus (Isa. 6:3; Rev. 4:8). Heavenly participation was the vision that animated Fra Angelico’s work, and it is that same vision that also inspires this book (hence its cover).

Heavenly participation does not mean that we should ignore earthly concerns. Far from it! As this book will make clear, it is only otherworldliness that guarantees an appropriate kind of this-worldliness. However, heavenly participation does mean that Christ, the eternal Word of God, provides the created order with stability and makes it trustworthy. As the psalmist puts it, in the words quoted in the epigraph, Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. Your faithfulness continues through all generations; you established the earth, and it endures. Prior to the advent of modernity, few people would have been able to read these words of the psalm without thinking of Christ as the eternal Word, who himself was the faithfulness of God and who himself had established the earth. They were convinced 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.

The broad consensus of the church fathers and medieval theologians — which in this book I am calling the Great Tradition — was not satisfied with merely observing facts. People were convinced that they could perceive the eternal mystery of the Word of God in these facts. This sacramental vision lies behind Augustine’s words quoted in the epigraph: We have heard the fact; let us seek the mystery. Over the past number of years, this Augustinian vision has captured my imagination, to the point that I have become persuaded that the church’s well-being depends on the recovery of this sacramental tapestry.

The twentieth-century French Catholic renewal movement that has been called nouvelle théologie has shaped my thinking tremendously over the past few years. Its recovery of a sacramental mindset has become an inspiration to me, and a year-long reprieve from my teaching duties has allowed me to immerse myself in the thought of the nouvelle theologians. I am most grateful to both the Association of Theological Schools and the Henry Luce Foundation for appointing me Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for the 2007-2008 academic year, and also to Regent College for granting me a year off to study the nouvelle theologians. Part 2 of this book, in particular, will make clear that nouvelle théologie’s recovery of the Great Tradition has had a deep impact on my thinking. Upon reading my book Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery, two dear colleagues, Richard Mouw and John Stackhouse, urged me to write a somewhat more popular account, which — with a particular eye toward an evangelical audience — would spell out the theological implications that I believe nouvelle théologie continues to have. This book, especially the second part, is my attempt to do so.

In a very significant way, my friends at Regent College, both faculty and students, have enabled me to write this book. Among the many wonderful experiences at Regent has been an interdisciplinary team-taught course that touched on many of the topics I address in this book. I am deeply grateful for the lively engagement on these issues, with both fellow faculty members and students. Whenever we found ourselves disagreeing — at times perhaps even vehemently — the result was growth in insight, in wisdom, and in affection. I suspect that there are few places where it is possible to engage in the kind of principled discussion that we thoroughly enjoy at Regent College. With deep appreciation, therefore, I dedicate this book to my colleagues and students.

Several friends, colleagues, and students graciously agreed to read the entire manuscript and have provided me with invaluable suggestions. I am grateful to Gerald Boersma, Fritz Dewit, Bruce Hindmarsh, Matthew Levering, Matt Mattoon, Dick Moes, and Jens Zimmermann for taking the time to work through the manuscript. Their numerous comments have greatly improved the readability of the book and have corrected a number of awkward shortcomings and mistakes. I thoroughly enjoyed the self-styled nerdish conversations with several of my students — Alex Abecina, KC Flynn, Matthew Martin, Ben Paulus, and Nomi Pritz — who helped me tremendously by picking apart the manuscript over burgers and beer. May the tradition always hold out to them eternal vistas of truth, goodness, and beauty.

I am also indebted to Dennis Danielson, Mark McConnell, and Bert Moes for their kind input at various stages of my work. Alex Abecina, my research assistant, has kindly crafted the diagrams and the bibliography, while my son, Gerald, has skillfully put together the indexes. I appreciate the permission of several journals — Books and Culture, CRUX, and Evangelical Quarterly — to reprint material from my previously published essays, each of which is mentioned in the bibliography.

Finally, I am surrounded by the love of my wife and family. They are a great source of joy, and they keep inspiring me to devote myself to the knowledge of God.

Introduction

The past few decades have witnessed two remarkable developments in evangelical theology. First, the nature of the theological discipline appears to have undergone a change. Propositional truth, once a hallmark of evangelicalism, is making way for more elusive means of expression, such as narrative, image, and symbol. Postmodern worry about essentialism, along with a suspicion of absolute truth claims, is affecting younger evangelicals’ willingness to stand by the rational apologetics and theological edifices erected by a previous generation.¹ Second, increasing doubts about our ability to capture the essence of absolute truth have placed in question the legitimacy of the scientific method and are thus turning more and more evangelicals away from the various methods of higher biblical criticism.

This mounting opposition to critical exegesis is all the more remarkable considering the fact that its acceptance among evangelicals is only about half a century old (while, all this time, heirs to the fundamentalist detractors of liberal theology have never let go of their opposition to higher criticism). Of course, the younger evangelicals are by no means identical to the fundamentalists of the 1920s and 1930s. Still, they do share with them an aversion to rarefied academic biblical interests and to some of the excesses of higher criticism. The younger evangelicals seem intent on restoring theological or spiritual interpretation: a search for deeper, spiritual levels beyond the historical or literal meaning of the text, hidden in the inner recesses of the biblical text itself.² Both the nature of theology and the interpretation of Scripture are experiencing the effects of our postmodern cultural mindset.

Let me make clear from the outset that I do not consider myself a postmodern younger evangelical. At the same time, I do think that some of the criticisms that younger evangelicals are directing against modern approaches to theology and interpretation are largely on target. Theology has suffered — among evangelicals as well as elsewhere — from an undue desire for clarity and control, something to which the often abstract and rarefied distinctions of Scholastic theology have contributed. And the same mindset has caused not only a proliferation of biblical theological methods intent on recovering the historical meaning of the text; it has also entrenched the separation between biblical studies and dogmatic theology, between exposition and application, and between theology and spirituality.

While consenting to the ever-louder evangelical criticism of a modern theological and interpretive paradigm, the underpinnings of this book nonetheless do not stem from the same postmodern attitudes toward reality. Rather, I agree with the common perception that postmodernity is little more than modernity coming home to roost. Both, I believe, are predicated on the abandonment of a premodern sacramental mindset in which the realities of this-worldly existence pointed to greater, eternal realities in which they sacramentally shared. Once modernity abandoned a participatory or sacramental view of reality, the created order became unmoored from its origin in God, and the material cosmos began its precarious drift on the flux of nihilistic waves.³

Ressourcement of Heaven

Saint Paul’s theology is an otherworldly theology. He is much more concerned about heavenly participation than about earthly enjoyment. For the apostle, heaven is the place we come from, the place we currently inhabit, and the place we aim for. In short, according to Paul, our past, present, and future lie anchored in heaven (Heb. 6:19). In contemporary Western theology, however, discourse on heaven has lost its central place. Evangelicals and Catholics alike have become more focused on the here-and-now than on the then-and-there. To speak of creaturely participation in heavenly realities (heavenly participation) cannot but come across as outlandish to an age whose horizons have narrowed to such an extent that bodily goods, cultural endeavors, and political achievements have become matters of ultimate concern. Nonetheless, in line with the apostle Paul’s otherworldly theology, this book will present a plea for a retrieval (ressourcement) of a theology of heavenly participation.

In a recent book, Surprised by Hope, N. T. Wright speaks for an increasingly common trend among evangelicals when he derides what he believes to be a widespread understanding of the afterlife: So far from sitting on clouds playing harps, as people often imagine, the redeemed people of God in the new world will be the agents of his love going out in new ways, to accomplish new creative tasks, to celebrate and extend the glory of his love.⁴ Admittedly, the combination of harps and clouds makes for a rather otherworldly outlook on the life hereafter. But I am intrigued by the concrete, this-worldly character of the expectations of the life hereafter with which evangelicals seem to be increasingly comfortable. There is often little anticipation of surprise: we seem to know a great deal about the future life, both in terms of what it will not be like, and what it will be like.

We seem to have forgotten C. S. Lewis’s wise word of caution that heaven is not really full of jewelry any more than it is really the beauty of Nature, or a fine piece of music.⁵ I am not sure who, in the Christian tradition, may have argued that in the hereafter we will be playing harps on the clouds (though it would not be an entirely unpleasant business). However, I am fairly confident that the extent of our eschatological transfiguration will be much more thoroughgoing than many of us suspect and that even our biblical language will literally prove infinitely inadequate to the task of describing the earthly reality that will have been transformed or divinized into our heavenly home.⁶

For Saint Paul, heaven is our home. After all, he insists that our citizenship papers carry the stamp of heaven. [O]ur citizenship is in heaven, he plainly remarks (Phil. 3:20; cf. Eph. 2:12). This citizenship of Christians is incompatible with attempts to turn earthly ends into ultimate concerns. Speaking of enemies of the cross, the apostle observes: Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things (Phil. 3:19). The heavenly identity of believers is, according to Paul, already a present reality. The rather realized eschatology of the letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians is emphatic about this present reality. For Paul, it is not as though believers here on earth somehow identify with a faraway place called heaven. Rather, they have a real or participatory connection with heaven. The central paschal event — Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension — is something Christians participate in: God made us alive with Christ, Paul insists (Eph. 2:5). He raised us up with Christ (Eph. 2:6; Col. 3:1). The result of this sharing in Christ is that believers participate in heavenly realities. We are seated with Christ in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:6; Eph. 1:3).

To be sure, St. Paul’s otherworldliness does not stand in absolute opposition to every this-worldly orientation. Rather, heavenly participation means that life on earth takes on a heavenly dimension. The church, through her participation in heaven, is called upon to make known the wisdom of God to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms (Eph. 3:10). Heavenly participation implies a battle against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Eph. 6:12). Precisely because heaven is already present on earth, the moral lives of Christians on earth are to reflect their heavenly participation. Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things (Col. 3:1-2). The apostle then comments on the vices that are connected to the earthly nature (Col. 3:5) and encourages believers to follow the virtues of Christ (Col. 3:5-17). Participation in heaven changes life on earth: paradoxically, only otherworldliness guarantees proper engagement in this world.

Not only is heaven the place in which Christians are already at home today, but it also marks their origin and aim. Believers are blessed in the heavenly realms because heaven is the place of their eternal predestination in Christ (Eph. 1:4, 11). The origin of the Christian hope lies in Christ — and thus in heaven. Likewise, the prize for which Paul aims and toward which he strains is the heavenward call in Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:13-14; cf. 2 Tim. 4:18).⁷ One of the reasons Neo-Platonism has been so attractive to theologians throughout the centuries is that the Neo-Platonic view of the cosmos going out from God and returning to him — the so-called exitus-reditus schema — was broadly compatible with Pauline Christianity.⁸ According to the well-known Pauline hymn of Philippians 2, the pattern of Christ — who humbled himself by coming to earth and was exalted by returning to heaven (Phil. 2:6-11) — must be the pattern of the church. Contemporary theology needs, it seems to me, a recovery — a ressourcement — of this Pauline focus on our heavenward call.

In line with this Pauline focus, Saint Augustine borrowed from the Platonic tradition when he centered his account of the history of the city of God on the reality of heaven. Heaven, Augustine explains, was the source and destination of the city of God. The bishop begins his treatment of the rise, the development and the destined ends of the two cities by referring to two classes of angels, namely, the angels of light and the angels of darkness.⁹ The Fall in paradise ensured that both cities had their counterparts in human history. While Cain belonged to the city of man, Abel belonged to the city of God. Unlike Cain, Abel never built a city, because the City of the saints is up above, though it produces citizens here below … (XV.1). Christians are pilgrims on earth, since their citizenship is in the heavenly city of God. This city, Augustine maintains, is said to come down from heaven because the grace by which God created it is heavenly…. This City has been coming down from heaven since its beginning, from the time when its citizens began to increase in number … (XX.17). For Augustine, already today, heavenly participation is a reality for the citizens of the city of God.

Augustine concludes his account of the pilgrimage of the citizens of the heavenly city with a discussion of the eschatological reality in which believers will see God face to face (1 Cor. 13:12; 1 John 3:2). This beatific vision will produce a peace far transcending human understanding (Phil. 4:7):

It surpasses our understanding: there can be no doubt of that. If it surpasses the understanding even of the angels, so that St. Paul in saying all understanding does not make an exception of them, we must then take him as meaning that the peace of God, the peace that God himself enjoys, cannot be known by the angels, still less by us men, in the way that God experiences it. (XXII.29)

Here Augustine has an eye for mystery: he recognizes that the full reality of heavenly participation far transcends the categories of the earthly city. Heaven — the place of Christ’s eternal dwelling place — is the place where the church finds both her origin and her destination. Heaven is the Christian home. Augustine sketches his account of the heavenly city without worrying about whether the Platonic and the Christian traditions are compatible on this point. Along with nearly all Christian theologians prior to modernity, he was convinced that the Christian faith is about heavenly participation and that this biblical insight allows for some kind of Platonist-Christian synthesis.¹⁰

Let me clarify that the language of heavenly participation in no way downplays or undermines the significance of the earthly city. Our identification with the heavenly city should not tempt us to disparage earthly concerns. [I]t is altogether right, the Bishop of Hippo claims in The City of God, that the soul should learn to look for those temporal blessings from God, and from him alone … (X.14). Indeed, Augustine argues, it would be incorrect to say that the goods which this [earthly] city desires are not goods (XV.4; cf. XXI.24). For Augustine, we should not despise temporal blessings; Christians should not view the ends of the earthly city as inherently evil or tainted. Nonetheless, Augustine — and most Christian theologians following him — does carefully distinguish between the ends of the earthly city and the aim of the heavenly city. The former ends are on a much lower scale of significance than are the latter: Now physical beauty, to be sure, is a good created by God, but it is a temporal, carnal good, very low in the scale of goods … (XV.22). It is thus altogether appropriate to have a certain kind of contempt of the world (contemptus mundi). Augustine claims that the "inferior goods of this world … although essential for this transitory life, are to be despised [contemnenda] in comparison with the eternal blessings of that other life" (X.14).

The contempt with which the great African bishop speaks is not an absolute contempt; it is a comparative or relative contempt. Earthly enjoyment pales in comparison to heavenly participation. Augustine’s relative contempt for earthly goods was also that of the latter-day Platonist-Christian C. S. Lewis: But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.¹¹ Paradoxically, earthly realities carry significance only when we refuse to rank them first.¹² Far from downplaying or undermining the significance of the earthly city, heavenly participation is its only warrant. Throughout this book I will make the argument that when we abandon Augustine by turning created realities from objects of penultimate interest into objects that have ultimate importance, we ironically end up losing their significance.

The subtitle of this book speaks of the weaving of a sacramental tapestry. The Russian Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann presents a lucid picture of what I mean by the sacramental tapestry that characterized the Christian consensus of the fathers and the Middle Ages (the Great Tradition).¹³ In his book For the Life of the World, Schmemann rejects the opposition between nature and the supernatural, and he attempts to reintegrate the two sacramentally. The sacramental tapestry of the subtitle speaks of a carefully woven unity of nature and the supernatural, according to which created objects are sacraments that participate in the mystery of the heavenly reality of Jesus Christ. Schmemann makes the point that everything in the so-called world of nature is meant to lead us back to God. In that sense, created matter is meant to serve eucharistically. By treating the world as a eucharistic offering in Christ, received from God and offered to him, we are drawn into God’s presence. Schmemann puts it this way: The world was created as the ‘matter,’ the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament. Thus, when he discusses baptism and the Eucharist — the two material elements for which we usually reserve the term sacrament — Schmemann makes a point of connecting the water, as well as the bread and the wine, with the rest of the cosmos: Baptism, he insists, refers us inescapably to ‘matter,’ to the world, to the cosmos.¹⁴ In baptism and Eucharist we witness the restoration of matter to its original function. Elsewhere, Schmemann puts it beautifully:

Christ came not to replace natural matter with some supernatural and sacred matter, but to restore it and to fulfill it as the means of communion with God. The holy water in Baptism, the bread and wine in the Eucharist, stand for, i.e. represent the whole of creation, but creation as it will be at the end, when it will be consummated in God, when He will fill all things with Himself.¹⁵

Schmemann, in this quotation, laments the way in which we often oppose nature and the supernatural to each other. In the church’s sacraments — baptism and Eucharist — we witness the supernatural restoration of nature to its original purpose. The purpose of all of matter, as I have already mentioned, is to lead us into God’s heavenly presence, to bring about communion with God, participation in the divine life. Thus are the church’s sacraments simply the beginning of the cosmic restoration. The 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.

Ressourcement for Evangelicals and Catholics Together

This book is a project of retrieval (ressourcement). By that I mean that it looks to the history of the church for resources to give theological direction to people in the twenty-first century. I do not look to any particular period as a golden age that we should recover. However, I do believe that the increasing trend among evangelicals to look for inspiration to the church fathers is a healthy one.¹⁶ The sacramental ontology (or outlook on reality) that characterized theology for a full millennium is worthy of renewed exploration, and this book will make clear why I think this is the case. If we take seriously the ressourcement of the sacramental tapestry (along with the Platonist-Christian synthesis that it implies), I believe that we will discover great ecumenical opportunities, particularly ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and evangelicals. I have become convinced that a common rediscovery of the depths of the Great Tradition will, as a matter of course, lead to genuine rapprochement between evangelicals and Catholics.