Quotes from Hans Boersma

The modesty that theology needs is the recognition that we cannot rationally comprehend God.

What we need is evangelicals and Catholics who discern the primary demand of our time: a celebration of our heavenly participation in the eternal Word of God. Only a heavenly minded Christian faith will do us any earthly good.

The rise of modernity corresponded with the decline of an approach that regarded the created order as sacramental in character. The patristic and medieval mind recognized that the heavenly reality of the Word of God constituted an eternal mystery; the observable appearances of creation pointed to and participated in this mystery.

Augustine's concept of time was sacramental: time participates in the eternity of God's life, and it is this participation that is able to gather past, present, and future together into one.11

The ecclesial body was the sacramental reality to which the Eucharist pointed and in which it participated.

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

We have heard the fact; let us seek the mystery.

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.

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.

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).

Precisely because heaven is already present on earth, the moral lives of Christians on earth are to reflect their heavenly participation.

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.

The primary task of theology (and let's forget here about the distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology) is not to explain the historical meaning of the text but to use the Scriptures as a means of grace in drawing the reader to Jesus Christ.

The patristic and medieval mind recognized that the heavenly reality of the Word of God constituted an eternal mystery; the observable appearances of creation pointed to and participated in this mystery.

So when one person has said 'Moses thought what I say,' and another 'No, what I say,' I think it more religious in spirit to say 'Why not rather say both, if both are true?' And if anyone sees a third or fourth and a further truth in these words, why not believe that Moses discerned all these things? For through him the one God has tempered the sacred books to the interpretation of many, who could come to see a diversity of truths.

Mystery" referred to realities behind the appearances that one could observe by means of the senses. That is to say, though our hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue are able to access reality, they cannot fully grasp this reality. They cannot comprehend it.

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 .6

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.

J.-M.-R. Tillard, Flesh of the Church, Flesh of Christ: At the Source of the Ecclesiology of Coninaunion, trans. Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2000).

He maintains that when, by faith, we share in the one eucharistic body, the Spirit makes us one ecclesial body. As Augustine would put it, we become what we have received. Or, as de Lubac famously phrases it, the Eucharist makes the church.

It is the proper function of the theologian to go back and forth, like the angels on Jacob's ladder, between heaven and earth and to weave continually new connections between them.