Back to the Garden

At the end of my last post,  I raised some concerns with the possibility of the kind of  resourcement advocated by Boersma in his very interesting book, Scripture as Real Presence.   It wasn't until, today, while having coffee with one of Boersma's former students that I was able to grasp the problem more clearly. In my last post I wrote: Is the recovery of the sort of sacramental, pre-modern exegesis possible today? If so, what would it look like? As a theologian, I appreciate the coup that this would be for a dogmatic account of Scripture, but can we actually reclaim the neo-platonic infrastructure necessary to support such an account? The genius of the Fathers was their ability to use the best philosophical tools at their disposal to fill out their theological claims about Scripture. In our post-modern context where we have witnessed the death of metaphysics proclaimed by Nietzsche  et al,   how do we go forward? Charles Taylor has expressed the ...

Boersma, Hans. Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church .  Grand                Rapids, MI:Baker Academic, 2017. Hans Boersma's recent book, Scripture as Real Presence  is a valuable work of resourcement (273) for the contemporary upsurge in the Protestant interest in the theological interpretation of Scripture. Boersma's thesis is two-fold: Modern biblical scholarship has bracketed out questions of metaphysics, creating a crisis for dogmatic descriptions of Scripture , AND,  the church should recover the sacramental understanding of the Bible that rests on the Christian Platonism of the Fathers. In my Old Testament Theology course in seminary, one of the assignments we had was for each student to present a snapshot of a different scholar's OT theology. It was a large class (for that school), so we ended up covering around 20 different OT theologies that ranged from the late 19th century to toda...