Beeson Podcast, Episode 352 Hans Boersma August 8, 2017 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. We're coming to you today from New York City where I have the privilege of having a conversation with Professor Hans Boersma. Hans is the J. I. Packer Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, Hans. Hans Boersma: Thank you very much, Timothy. Timothy George: Now, I want to begin by noticing the fact you speak with an accent. Tell us why that is. Hans Boersma: I suppose it's because I’m Dutch. Timothy George: So you're from Holland. Hans Boersma: I've lived in Canada for over 30 years but I am Dutch and so yes the accent is definitely still there. Timothy George: And did you grow up in a Dutch Reformed home? Hans Boersma: I did. I did. My dad was a pastor, still is a Pastor. He’s retired now but yes I grew up in a Christian home. Reformed home. Timothy George: So a lot of people, when they think of the Dutch reform tradition, they think of Abraham Kuyper. Is that a figure that you would have known about growing up? Hans Boersma: Yes, I would have. Although the subgroup of Reformed Christianity that I grew up in had an ambivalent attitude toward Kuyper. Kuyper was the leader of a larger group of Reformed Christians from whom we had split in 1944. So there was a love hate relationship with Abraham Kuyper. Timothy George: And he was the founder of the Free University in Amsterdam but you went to Utrecht, right? Hans Boersma: Yes. I went to Utrecht much later. After I had studied theology in Hamilton, Ontario, we moved back to Holland. Timothy George: Now, one of the few people I have known who had a Ph.D. from Utrecht was Heiko Oberman, who was my teacher for a while and my friend. He was very proud of the fact that he had an Utrecht Ph.D., not an Oxford one. He had studied at Oxford but his doctorate was from Utrecht and he thought that had much more valence to it. I can see that. Timothy George: Now, I want to talk a little bit about your work, and in particular, you've been, I would say, among Evangelicals a pioneer in mining theology that sometimes called nouvelle theologia, “new theology” in French. Tell us a little bit about what that is and why you got interested in it. Hans Boersma: Nouvelle theologia a mid-twentieth century movement of theology of Catholic theology. A number of different, both Jesuit and American, theologians were involved in it. What I found particularly interesting about them is that they turned to the church fathers in order to renew theology for their own day. I think that has a number of interesting spinoffs for theology still today, both Catholic and evangelical, I think. And the way in which I got interested in nouvelle theologia and theology of those such as Jean Daniélou, Henri du Lubac, Yves Congar and others, is I was teaching at the time. At Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C. and we had a reading group there of some evangelical Catholic and Orthodox theologians. And one of the texts that we read there was Yves Congar’s massive two volume book, Tradition and Traditions. And I was struck by Congar both because he showed how Scripture and tradition are not two separate sources of revelation but are closely interconnected, which didn't quite fit with my understanding, Catholic understandings of tradition. And I thought it was very insightful, very helpful from your understanding of Scripture and tradition inter-relate. And the other related point to that is that I thought of Congar when I read that book is that he was someone who understood Protestants well. He was not uncritical to his own tradition, on Catholic tradition. He was someone who understood the Protestant Reformation quite well, I thought, and understood their motivations. So those two points combined interested me in Congar. The other persons that I particularly love maybe even especially more so is Henri du Lubac, especially from the fact that within the Department of Religious Studies Department at Trinity Western University, we had a lot of discussion on how Bible and theology relate to each other. And so the department at one point asked me, well, why don't you write up some points and we can discuss them together, which we did and for that occasion, I read for the first time on the day back home I didn't know at all. I read an essay by him on allegory and topology. I didn't grow up in a tradition that appreciated either of the two really—especially allegory. That was a very bad word. But early on I decided that if you're going to reading the church fathers. In reading them I would at least hope that some of these words were intelligent and godly people, that these people were probably as intelligent and godly as I, and I simply couldn't write them off. So I wanted to understand that from inside out before perhaps critiquing them. Timothy George: Let me ask you about these three theologians, the three you mentioned: Henri du Lubac, Jean Daniélou, and Yves Congar. All three had a palpable influence on the developments at Vatican II. And, I think, du Lubac might have been there, was he not? Hans Boersma: Yes. Timothy George: So say a little bit about that renewal of Catholic theology that issued in some ways and the changes, the revolution, the evolution, however you want to describe Vatican II. Hans Boersma: The novella theologians that we're talking about wanted to renew Catholic theology. They were concerned that especially since the late 19th century, Catholic theology had separated the will of nature, the realm of nature that is often called, and the realm of the supernatural, had separated those too much. So when Protestants think of Catholic theology, they often have a picture of a world of nature all by itself with its own proper goals and ends. And then on top of that, the church pauses to think of the supernatural with its own distinct ends and purposes. That may be a bit of a caricature with regard to some Catholic theology but people such as du Lubac, Congar, and Danielou, they thought it did hold some truth with regard to some neo Thomas theology that became quite strong ever since the late 19th century. They decided to turn particularly to an understanding of the Jewish fathers and also later on of Thomas Aquinas himself whom they thought had been misread by the later neo-Thomasts. So they said, well we actually turned to the 13th century, particularly when he turned to the church fathers. You'll find an interrelatedness of nature and the supernatural that we need to recover. And it's that that gave an impetus to the Second Vatican Council and also to the period after that in the Roman Catholic Church. So all of these theologies were hugely influential. Timothy George: I want to get in a few minutes to the whole question of exegesis and how scripture is read, and this tradition, and by you as someone who has been informed by it as an evangelical and a Protestant. But before we do that, traditional Catholic theology has often been understood to be a kind of real articulation of Aristotle. And one of the things Luther protested so much against were the Aristotelians, the scholastic theologians, of which he was one in some ways because he was brought up in that tradition as an occamist, a follower of the ___ Moderna. But you have proposed a kind of renewal of theology through a more Platonist Christian synthesis. We usually associate Plato with heaven and Aristotle with the other place. That's of course an exaggeration but talk a little bit about a shift, if you will, in your own thinking. Why Plato? Many people regard Plato as not the way forward but as someone who kind of removes you from reality into this transcendental route. But what do you mean by a Platonist Christian synthesis? Hans Boersma: What I mean by that is that for the Christian Platonist tradition, those two “realms” that I just talked about, nature and the supernatural, are not separate but are closely linked together. Now Plato used the term methexis which simply means participation. So the earthly realm, you could say, for Plato was unreal, did not exist but it was less real than the “realms of forms” as he called them. So this worldly reality, say earthly reality, participates in something greater. Now it's true that for Christian Platonist that means earthy reality is not ultimate. It's not the thing we live for. We live ultimately for something greater namely to see God Himself. We long for the face of God. We long to see God. That always renders to a Christian, I think, certainly to a Christian Platonist, that renders the here and now, even less important than that, even in some cases you could even say it's precisely that supernatural orientation, that orientation onto the face of God, that gives importance to everything I do here and now. And that's why I often call this perspective, this Christian perspective, simply a sacramental perspective on the sacramental anthology, because it makes everything that we see around us. In some sense you could say “a sacrament” because it makes you important. It makes it important because it shows us something of the grandeur of God. Timothy George: It's a window, maybe a prism, through which we see that and in some way what you're describing is just another way of talking about New Testament Christianity, isn't it? Because here we have no continuing city, we seek one to come, if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we would be of all people most miserable St. Paul says, and yet that the problem or the danger may be a focus so much on the supernatural to come, the eschatological that we lose, we become docetic. Hans Boersma: That's certainly a possibility. There's a danger in Christian Platonism, namely that we lose the significance of God blessing us in time and space here and now. There definitely is a danger. But I think it's a danger perhaps especially today worth taking because it seems to me that we live in a materialist society, a society that is thoroughly oriented on the here and now and the kind of focus on the disciplines, the kind of focuses on renunciation of the self and of certain goods in themselves but the things that we want to may want to temporarily set aside for the sake of something greater. That kind of focus so many in the Christian tradition, including in the Reformation tradition. What the Puritans, for example, had almost seems to be gone and I want to say no, we need to resource that, we need to retrieve that because the here and now is not ultimate. Yes, it's important, but it's not the ultimate. Timothy George: Now you have used the word “Sacramental” a couple of times and it's one that it resonates with your writings in different ways. You said, if we take seriously the ressourcement of the sacramental tapestry, I believe that we will discover great ecumenical opportunities. Sacramental has been a difficult word for a lot of Protestants, in particularly maybe the more Puritan Protestants, the more Zwinglian wing of Puritanism. You want to give it a better, fuller, richer, more textured meaning. Talk a little bit about sacramental, and you have a book entitled Heavenly Participation that deals in some ways with this ressourcement of the sacramental. Say a little bit about that. Hans Boersma: Yes, when we think of the word Sacrament, us Protestants, but certainly also many Catholics, we typically tend to think of the kind of things that we got from church, baptism, the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper, which is perfectly legitimate. But you could also think of sacramental in a broader sense. You could also think of it as the notion that there are some traces of God wherever we look around us. Those traces, or those vestiges, as many in the Christian tradition have called them, also within the Reformation tradition have called them, they bespeak a “mentality” of a broader sense. They tell us, I think, that the things around us don't stand on their own two feet, don't have their existence from themselves but have their existence from God in Jesus Christ, so that the eternal Word, the eternal Logos of God, is the source of all that we see around us, everything that exists in the world in which we find ourselves. And in that sense, everything is sacramental, their sacraments of our reality, that is the eternal logos of itself, the eternal Word of God itself. Everything exists in this understanding by virtue of participating in the eternal Word of God. Timothy George: I think it was Pope Benedict XVI who referred to Jesus Christ as the ___ sacrament, the fundamental original sacrament in a way. And so everything else in the Christian understanding of sacraments has to be understood in relation to Jesus Christ. And I wonder how Scripture fits into that, The Word of God, the divinely inspired revelation of God to us in Jesus Christ. Is the Bible a sacrament? And if so in what way? Hans Boersma: Yes it is a sacrament, I think. And we are to read Scripture sacramentally. I don't mean anything particularly outlandish or strange by that, I think. We can simply translate it that we need to look for Christ wherever we turn in the Scriptures. Christ, as you said, is the Old Testament sacrament, not only I think for Pope Benedict XVI, but for much of the Christian tradition even if they didn't use that term. From the early Christians onward, people could say the Old Testament, for example, is our book, the book of the church because it speaks of Jesus Christ. Christ is the reality, the raise in a theological term, the reality of which the Old Testament speaks. So whenever we open up the Bible, whenever we open up the Old Testament, we open it up precisely for the sake of finding Jesus Christ there. If we open it up for any other reason, I may do legitimate things with it perhaps but I haven't yet reached the ultimate reason of why I have this book. The reason why the early church fathers read the Old Testament allegorically or sacramentally, is not to do some strange trick with it, to read it in some odd other sense, but precisely to find Jesus Christ there. Henri du Lubac once put it this way once: when he wrote for the early church, there was still a battle going on in terms of trying to ascertain their right as it were, to say that this is our book, and they can only do that by saying along with Philip, show me, tell me where it is, and how it is that that speaks of Jesus Christ. Timothy George: This Christological understanding of the Old Testament, and I’m thinking especially the Psalms, has been very controversial. And I remember visiting not long ago with a Baptist pastor who is an evangelical, I would say a conservative evangelical, but he said all these young students from Beeson and other schools are talking about the intratextuality and how Jesus Christ is in the Old Testament. So I was taught the Old Testament to read it historically, critically, but you know that was then and this is now. So there's been a revolution here that is reaching, I think, in some ways down to the pastoral preaching level. Hans Boersma: The very fact that you get this question shows this huge importance, I think, of what it is that we're doing here. Again it's nothing new. It wasn’t from the early church onward, it was done really also in many ways by the reformers themselves and later on by the Puritans. They always looked in the Scriptures just to see how it speaks of Jesus Christ. They always were open to typological and even to allegorical readings of Scripture and the understanding that simply we’re e looking for Jesus Christ here. That's why we’re reading these psalms. Now I can understand what the pastor is saying in some way, and he's opening up a legitimate avenue of investigating the Scriptures in the sense that history matters and chronological point A is not identical to chronological point B. So when we are doing historical, even an historical critical reading of the psalm, we are not doing, to my mind at least, something entirely illegitimate. But we're doing something limited in that case. We're simply looking at something historical and whenever we investigate history, I think, we need to keep two points in mind. One is history does not stand on its own two feet and so we always need to keep in mind that we're doing something a little artificial because we're engaging in some sort of methodological naturalism, if you wish, that can take on a life of its own and we need to be very careful with mythological naturalism. So it's a very limited thing. And secondly, I think we need to keep in mind that history can only give you probability, it’s never more than that. If there is something more that you want, you're going to have to read the Scriptures Christological. Timothy George: And we have Jesus’s own words, don’t we, in the Gospel of John, “Search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life and they are they which speak of me which testify.” Hans Boersma: The entire New Testament reads the Bible this way. The New Testament never looks to the Old Testament simply in order to ascertain certain historical verities or historical recreations or anything like that. The New Testament always asks the question: What is the meaning of this? And when we ask for meaning, what I mean here is, how does this speak of Jesus Christ? How does this speak of the church? How does it speak of the eschaton, which is simply a medieval fourfold method as it were. How it speaks of today’s and the future realities in Jesus Christ? That's what this is all about. Timothy George: Now the Protestant reformers were great students of the church fathers. They published their writings, many of them for the first time ever in modern vernacular and critical editions, but the church father most of them loved most dearly was St. Augustine. Luther was a member of the Augustinian order. He read St. Augustine and wanted to be a faithful disciple of his. But you seem in some ways at least, you want to not put St. Augustine down but you want to raise up Origen in some ways. And Origen has been a problematic church father for a lot of Protestants. Why Origen? Hans Boersma: I am indeed not trying to put Augustine down. Very true. And I do not want to just retrieve Origen either. In my work I have focused on Gregory of Nyssa perhaps more than on Origen. Gregory of Nyssa did borrow a great deal from Origen as you know. But I also do work with Augustine. I do love Augustine, but that said, yes there is a law in Origen that’s absolutely beautiful. Other certain ideas, controversial ideas, particularly on first principles for example, of about which you may scratch your head and think how did he get there? Yes, we can. And there's a lot of scholar debate about how seriously Origen himself took those ideas. When you look at his exegetical writings, yes, he engages in allegory. But again, also for Origen, this is not some arbitrary imposition an alien imposition on text. When he allegorizes, he does something quite similar to what Augustine does. He simply reads the text Christologically. Now, does he always do equal justice to history? To my mind he does not, does not always do equal justice to it. Sometimes he's quite frankly completely uninterested in it and I wish he would do with it more than he does sometimes. But the beautiful thing is, he takes Christ as the starting point of his exegesis and his ending point of his exegesis. That's what we need to retrieve. Timothy George: Great. We're almost out of time. I wish we had another hour to go on with this but I want to move to another area in which you've written more recently. You have a book called Sacramental Preaching which is really a compilation of your own sermons that you delivered in the church of which you are a part. I'm interested in that church, and if you could say a little bit about that, but also in your preaching, and how you understand preaching theologically. Hans Boersma: Yes, I’ve preached each of the sermons that I published in that book in our local church which is a Christian Reformed church in Langley, British Columbia, and also I’ve preached a number of these sermons, at least in some form, at a chapel presentation at Regent College. And in many ways these sermons are very much like other sermons that I have preached either in the local church or elsewhere. The difference with regard to these particular sermons as compared to others, is perhaps that in these sermons, I reflect within the sermon on the question of: how do we interpret? So that the very topic of the sermons and in some way or another it has to do with interpretation itself. So I raise the question, in other words, that we've just been discussing at length about how do we read the Bible. I try not to do it overly direct but I do preach the text. Timothy George: It’s a sermon, not a lecture. Hans Boersma: Exactly. And it should be a sermon to my mind. We're not interested in a hermeneutics lecture when we are preaching. We’re interested in preaching Christ and that is what I try to do here. But I also try to show somewhat, a look into the kitchen of how we do these things, how we go about this. And I tried to legitimize somewhat to the congregation without being overtly robust about it, I tried to show something of how we get to the point of Christological exegesis in the text. Timothy George: We talked about the Bible as sacramental. Is preaching sacramental? You know Karl Barth has this doctrine of threefold Word of God: Jesus Christ, the written Word, and the preached word. Say a little bit about preaching as a form of the sacramental reality. Hans Boersma: And yes, preaching is sacramental in very important sense. The reform confessions talk about both preaching and what we often call the sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper as means of grace, and within the reformed tradition where I come from, that means essentially that preaching is a sacrament even if we didn’t often call it that. But if it's a means of grace, it is a sacrament of sort. And the reason for that is that preaching renders Christ present to us. Preaching is never about the pastor and the pastor's own ideas. It’s never about things that a person can pull forward. Preaching needs to be, in that sense, needs to be very conservative. It cannot come with all sorts of ideas. ___…the topics that may or may not be of interest, it needs to focus on Jesus Christ. He needs to bring the reality of Jesus Christ to the congregation. If preaching doesn't do that, along with the Apostle Paul who preaches nothing but Jesus Christ, knows nothing but Jesus Christ. If the preaching is anything else then it fails. So it's sacramental which places to me on the order of highest importance. Ironically, in some sense, I sometimes attend a Catholic church. And ironically, there is much within the Catholic tradition that I love, the preaching is always equally strong shall we say. And for a Catholic to be truly a Catholic, I think, he can learn a lot from the Protestant tradition in the sense that sometimes the preaching is stronger there. And Protestants, I think, can often learn from a Catholic here, in the sense that, know the importance of what it is that you're doing because you're engaging in the sacrament—you're rendering Christ present. Timothy George: My guest today on the Beeson Podcast has been Dr. Hans Boersma. He is the J.I. Packer Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. A wonderful theologian and a godly man. Thank you so much for this conversation, Hans. Hans Boersma: Thank you very much. Announcer: You’ve been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, www.BeesonDivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical Divinity School training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.