Scripture as Real Presence: A Review

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 today. One of the major questions asked of each OT theology was how the scholar understood the unity of Scripture, or, otherwise put, the relationship of the OT and the NT. Views ranged from radical continuity to radical discontinuity, but one of the central worries that came up time and time again, was that of supersessionist and Christian triumphalist readings of the text. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, biblical scholarship has been especially careful to try to avoid those charges, which has added extra complexity to articulating the unity of the whole Bible. 

It is worth noting, however, that this particular pit-fall avoids the metaphysical question, 'what is the nature of this text?' instead focusing on the texts reception, use, power relations, and intertextual references of form, language, history, typology, etc. These are all incredibly important questions, to be sure, and questions that Boersma's proposal, if it is accepted, will need to deal with in future work, but it goes beyond the question at hand, re: the nature of Christian Scripture.

Boersma takes his readers through a wider array of examples of early Christian exegesis. In doing so, he picks up on the neo-platonism of the Church Fathers in order to show how their exegesis, far from being arbitrary and forced, actually rests on a metaphysics of participation. So, for example, when Melito of Sardis makes, what by today's standards would be, an etymological fallacy in his homily, On Pascha, what he is really doing is pointing to the christological res that holds the text together. He is able to hold Christ's suffering together with the festival of Passover not simply by establishing a literary type between the two historically discrete events, but by insisting that "the reality of Christ - the historically later event - was mystically or sacramentally present already in the Passover celebration of the Hebrews" (96).  Through a metaphysics of participation, history is not simply linearly horizontal chain of cause and effect, but is instead also a vertically oriented reality to the the divine res.

The metaphysical point is really the central issue for this book. If it is the case that the Bible is a sort of sacrament, then the divine reality to which it points and participates in is not an arbitrary conclusion of an interpretive community, but is a truthful description of what kind of text it is. The exegetical arbitrariness of the Fathers begins to look a lot less arbitrary if there is in fact a real presence of Christ in these texts. The Fathers are simply finding what is already there (103)!

Boersma's resourcement proposal carries with it implications for the type of education that is required for Christian exegesis. A recovery of a virtue based education is recognized as being vital for this project (260), for which Boersma rightly points his readers toward the work of Alasdair MacIntyre (260), and Stephen Fowl (264).  It is important to note that this theologically construed 'virtue training' is itself a sort of sacramental pursuit, as it points us toward the sanctifying or deifying work of the Spirit in the life of a Christian by which one might receive the Word and be drawn deeper into the divine mysteries. Divine virtue training does not replace the scholarly virtues (rigour, charity, clarity, etc.) that our modern guild requires, but perfects and orients these scholarly virtues toward divine truth.

While I mostly endorse Boersma's thesis, there are a couple areas for further work and reflection. Conceptually, Boersma could have tightened his thesis with an engagement of Mircea Eliade's book, The Sacred and the Profane. Eliade identified the participatory ontology operative in ancient writings many years ago now, and an engagement with his work could have helped provide some conceptual clarity and distinguished Boersma's own unique proposal. This point of criticism leads me to my second, which Boersma addresses in passing in the conclusion. 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? To reclaim a sacramental reading of Scripture, we must not only have a resourcement in theology and biblical studies, but we must also do constructive philosophical work to resurrect metaphysics. The work of the Radical Orthodoxy movement may provide us with one path here, but we may need others.

If these obstacles can be overcome, and I have every confidence that they can, then we may see a new golden-age of Christian biblical interpretation. We now have the fruit of much of what was good of modern higher-criticism to bring into conversation with a renewed theological program. Our biblical scholarship must not seek to replicate the methods of the Fathers, but a recovery of their sacramental assumptions is a project worth pursuing.