Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

by Hans Boersma

Propositional truth, once a hallmark of evangelicalism, is making way for more elusive means of expression, such as narrative, image, and symbol. Postmodern

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

Throughout this book I will make the argument that when we abandon Augustine by turning created realities from objects of penultimate interest into objects that have ultimate importance, we ironically end up losing their significance.

The "sacramental tapestry" of the subtitle speaks of a carefully woven unity of nature and the supernatural,

God. In that sense, created matter is meant to serve...

In baptism and Eucharist we witness the restoration of matter to its original function. Elsewhere, Schmemann puts it beautifully:

I thought baptism and eucharist pointed us to the cross

The purpose of all of matter, as I have already mentioned, is to lead us into God's heavenly presence, to

beginning of the cosmic restoration.

I have become convinced that a common rediscovery of the depths of the Great Tradition will, as a matter of course, lead to genuine rapprochement between evangelicals and Catholics.

Catholic theologians and artists tend to emphasize the presence of God in the world, while the classic works of Protestant theologians tend to emphasize the absence of God from the world.

Protestant Reformation was part of a shift that had been in the making for centuries, and of which the desacramentalizing of the cosmos was the most significant feature.18

Reformation is the problem

especially those of the Pentecostal and charismatic persuasion - do not know what to do with ...

really - only pentes & charismatics?

both Protestants and Catholics have succumbed to the onslaught of a d...

desacralized modernity?

sacramental ontology not just in the Reformation but also in Catholicism. Unfortunately, I will argue, neither side of the Ref...

Henri de Lubac

Jean Danielou

ressourcement, its return to the broad consensus of the fathers and the Middle Ages - that is, the Great Tradition.31

What Leo's encyclical did was entrench Thomist philosophy and theology as the one normative system of Catholic thought.

Nouvelle theologie was a protest against this unified Neo-Thomist approach.

Nouvelle protest

by reintegrating nature and the supernatural, the two realms that the Neo-Thomist Scholastics

Platonist-Christian synthesis a sacramental ontology that they believed had been lost through the modern separation between nature and the supernatural. As a result, nouvelle

Reformation - negative

acceptance of postmodernity among younger

common (public)

resacramentalized Christian ontology (or outlook on reality).

Key

Great Tradition of the church

Great Tradition.

"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

Mystery defined

understanding of reality)

that the mysterious character of all created reality lies in its sacramental nature. In fact, we would not go wrong by simply equating mystery and sacrament.

Key to book

For Lewis, a sacramental relationship implies real presence.

But the insistence on a sacramental link between God and the world goes well beyond the mere insistence that God has created the world and

Sacramental goes beyond covenantal

subsists or participates in God.

forms the underlying ontological basis that makes it possible for a covenant relationship to

When we talk about "real presence," we tend to think in terms of eucharistic theology, and we ask the question: Is Christ really present in the Eucharist (the sacramentalist position), or is the celebration of the Lord's Supper an ordinance in which we remember what Christ did

He clarifies this later as Calvin believed in a real (sp) precence

Christ's sacramental presence in the Eucharist was, we might say, an intensification of his sacramental presence in the world.

Intensification

Saint Anselm

Modern theology's problem is its rational confidence - and thus, ultimately, its pride.

Therefore, there is a growing sense that we need a healthy dose of mystery to counter sterile intellectualism.

danger of confusing postmodern skepticism with mystery.

a denigration and commodification of the created order, in this case of the human body.

But the Christian twist on things is that we dare not assign it ultimate significance. C. S. Lewis puts it this way:

Spirit - is to be enjoyed. Only

This point is important because it is precisely by celebrating created realities for their own sake (frui) that we unhinge them from their grounding in the eternal Word or Logos of God. Unhinged from their transcendent

predicated on its participat...

Maximus the Confessor

Only God is to be enjoyed for his own sake, and creation has no more than a sacramental participation in the life of God.

High Middle Ages.

I want to emphasize that, in many ways, the angelic doctor still continued the synthesis between Christianity and (other-worldly) Platonism.

D...