In Scripture as Real Presence, Hans Boersma offers a learned and stimulating contribution to the growing collection of studies on the relevance of premodern Christian reading strategies for contemporary Christian theological interpretation of Scripture.
Boersma's two-pronged argument is that (1) “the church fathers were deeply invested in reading the Old Testament Scriptures as a sacrament, whose historical basis or surface level participates in the mystery of the New Testament reality of the Christ event,” and that (2) “this sacramental approach to reading the Scriptures is of timeless import and … is worthy of retrieval today” (xiii).
In the first major chapter, Boersma examines the impact of metaphysical commitments for scriptural interpretation. The kind of “sacramental hermeneutic” that Boersma argues undergirds premodern exegesis, and the kind he promotes for contemporary use depends upon a “sacramental ontology.” Boersma maintains a Christian Platonist metaphysic that holds that “eternal realities are really present in visible things” (12). Such commitments, Boersma argues, are foundational for his premodern interlocutors and are superior to the atomistic modern metaphysical commitments that have often undergirded modern historical approaches to the Bible.
In the nine chapters that follow, Boersma examines premodern “sacramental” treatments of a number of texts, from the creation narratives (chapter 2) to the Beatitudes (chapter 10), by significant premodern figures, including Irenaeus, Melito of Sardis, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Augustine, and others. These studies can stand on their own, as Boersma notes (xii), and they serve to advance contemporary understanding of the particularities of premodern Christian exegesis. For that contribution alone Scripture as Real Presence has value within the ongoing conversations about theological interpretation. But it is not without its problems.
The mystery that God is reconciling all things in Christ (Eph 1:10) clearly elicited a commitment in premodern Christian interpreters to something like the kind of sacramental hermeneutic Boersma promotes. From the New Testament onward, early Christians held that the God who inspired the ancient Scriptures pointed readers beyond those texts to deep, even sacramental, truths (sacramentum was actually the Latin word most often used to translate the Greek mystērion, in fact). The texts were and are able to mediate to readers the truth of Christ's presence.
But while many premodern interpreters found “Platonic” metaphysics useful, explicit commitments to Platonism were by no means necessary for such exegesis. From a strictly historical perspective, not all of Boersma's interlocutors exhibit the influence of Plato or his interpreters. And “Platonism” was by no means monolithic and unchanging. All of the premodern readers Boersma treats were, however, explicitly committed to a Christocentric understanding of reality (as Boersma notices; see p. 15 n. 55).
Boersma treats historical-critical scholarship as almost entirely problematic in this work. But the mystery of God's self-revelation in history is also a scandal of (historical) particularity. As Henri de Lubac has noticed and emphasized, the historicity of that work entailed a commitment to the value of historical investigation in Christian thought that has affinities with the attentiveness to particularity manifest in historical-critical scholarship. I am in full agreement with Boersma that the Church Fathers would find any presupposition of methodological “atheism” a fundamental obstacle to the understanding of Scripture. But how would they have responded to the actual achievements of historical criticism? We cannot say with certainty whether or not Origen or Augustine would have rejected those achievements, but I sincerely doubt they would have. We will need more than a return to a Platonic metaphysic (if there ever were such a uniform commitment) to appreciate both the achievements and the shortcomings of premodern and modern engagements with Scripture.
