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 toda...