Hans Boersma > Quotes

“The modesty that theology needs is the recognition that we cannot rationally comprehend God.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“Yahweh set his heart on you and chose you . . . because he loved you and meant to keep the oath which he swore to your ancestors” (Deut. 7:7–8). The tautology could hardly be more blatant: God bases his love on his love. Indeed, this statement in Deuteronomy is an acknowledgment that election cannot ultimately be explained. It is not the logic of rationality but the logic of love that is at work in divine election.”
― Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition

“We read the Bible in order to find there Christ himself, revealed to us through the Spirit.”
― Hans Boersma, Pierced by Love: Divine Reading with the Christian Tradition

“A desacramentalized view of time tends to place the entire burden of doctrinal decision on the present moment: I, in the small moment of time allotted to me, am responsible to make the right theological (and moral) choice before God. The imposition of such a burden is so huge as to be pastorally disastrous. Furthermore, to the extent that as Christians we are captive to our secular Western culture, it is likely that this secular culture will get to set the church’s agenda. If we do not see ourselves sacramentally connected to the tradition (and thus to Christ), we sense no accountability to tradition, and we are likely to accommodate whatever demands our culture places on us and capitulate to them. By contrast, when we are faced with a theological and moral conundrum, a participatory approach to tradition will always ask how the catholic, or universal, church throughout time and place has dealt with the issue. The widespread assumption that Christian beliefs and morals are to a significant degree malleable has its roots in a modern desacralized view of time.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church

“Precisely because heaven is already present on earth, the moral lives of Christians on earth are to reflect their heavenly participation.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“by insisting that the created order carries its own truth, its own goodness, and its own beauty, modernity has made the created order into an idol.22”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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).”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“We have heard the fact; let us seek the mystery.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“Congar then makes it clear that he believes that, according to the Christian understanding, time itself is sacramental in character:
Thus the sacraments have a peculiar temporal duration, in which past, present and future are not mutually exclusive, as in chronological time. Sacramental time, the time of the Church, allows the sharing by men who follow each other through the centuries in an event which is historically unique and which took place at a distant time; this sharing is achieved not merely on the intellectual level, as I could commune with Plato's thought, or with the death of Socrates, but in the presence and action of the mystery of salvation.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“The ecclesial body was the sacramental reality to which the Eucharist pointed and in which it participated.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery

“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.”
― Hans Boersma, Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew

“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”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“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).”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“We could say, therefore, that we are human inasmuch as we are conformed to Christ. As we become more and more like Christ, we become more truly ourselves”
― Hans Boersma, Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition