Until the High Middle Ages in the 12th century, Christianity had a synthesis with Platonism. This is not because Greek philosophy corrupted the pure Hebrew faith (which Boersma notes was a claim advanced by a liberal theologian), since Christians flatly rejected Platonism’s pantheism, its matter-bad-spirit-good dichotomy, and its assumption that unity was perfection but multiplicity was imperfection. Christians did integrate Platonism’s articulation of participation in the divine unity (which I note is in 2 Peter 1:4: “partakers of the divine nature”), and this synthesis became the sacramental view, which in the West held from the early Church fathers until the 12th century.

A sacrament, here, is different than a symbol. A symbol is unrelated to what it points to: no one swerves to miss the deer on the warning sign. A sacrament also participates in what it points to. C.S. Lewis observes that writing does not participate in speech (it is symbolic), which the light in a photograph does participate in the light of the sun in a fashion, being a record of it. So if the Eucharist is a sacrament, then the bread and wine participate in God in some fashion, hence the “real presence” of God.

The synthesis began fraying in the 12th century from a number of factors, but the first one was the increasing political power of the Pope, which led people to try to articulate the difference between the realm of the authority of Man (the king) and that of the divine authority of the Church (the Pope). This created a split in authority, which had hitherto be seen as one. However, this sort of split kept occurring in other areas. Berengar of Tours argued for the spiritual primacy in the Eucharist, with the result that his opponents defended by arguing the opposite position, instead of the synthesis; this split material and spiritual. With the rediscovery of Aristotle came the idea of an independent nature. The Reformation split Church and Scripture, with the Reformers taking Scripture as their only authority, leaving the Catholics to emphasize Church Tradition. These splits resulted in a split between the natural and supernatural, since their synthesis became untenable in context of all the earlier splits. Boersma notes that the first three of these came before the Reformation, so evangelicals and Catholics both need to own their responsibility.

Two additional developments cut the synthesis. The first was when Duns Scotus (1200s) said that being is a category of its own. This put God’s existence and creation’s (our) existence on equal footing, whereas in the Platonic-Christian synthesis, only God has being in himself; anything with being participates in God’s being. (This also looks a lot like idolatry, putting something [existence] above God.) The second was William of Ockham saying that we should take the simplest explanation, and the simplest explanation is that universals (the Forms) do not exist but we name them as such because we all generalize the same way, which has come to be known as nominalism. This led to voluntarism: things are good not because they participate in the nature of God but because he declares them that way—and he could, in theory, change his definition. This led to the conclusion that God could alter the rules in specific situations, which ultimately led to theological skepticism.

Both Luther and Calvin attempted to repair the synthesis, but they failed because they had been influenced by some of the thinking, and so their repair was incomplete. While the Reformation did have good aspects, such as the emphasis on the Bible, personal Bible reading, evangelism, and a “flowering of hymnody”, the failure of the Reformation to repair the synthesis has led to our individualism, which is causing the good things to be lost. Younger evangelical theologians are reacting to the overconfidence of modernist propositional theology, but are doing so with the post-modern turn. Unfortunately, skepticism that truth can be known is not at all the same thing as mystery. A sacramental mystery is something that cannot be fully comprehended, of course, but it can be partially comprehended.

Boersma suggests that in order to reweave the sacramental tapestry we need to weave together the Eucharist, Church tradition, Scripture, and truth to work together into a theological-ascetical discipline based on the Platonist-Christian sacramental synthesis. He argues that the Eucharist must be properly seen as that which creates the Church: through sharing in Christ’s body we become the Church. He argues that the Christian view of time is sacramental, that events which are far apart in time, like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and the Father’s sacrifice of his Son, are nearby in meaning/purpose, thus sacramentally time becomes unified in the Church (Old Testament and New Testament events, past saints and present saints), etc. He argues that Church Tradition should be seen (and is currently seen by Catholics) not as opposed to Scripture, but the framework of interpretation of Scripture. The apostle’s teaching (following Christ’s) showed that the Scriptures speak of Christ—Christ is how we interpret Scripture. This makes Scripture a sacrament (it participates in Christ, and thereby in God), and if it participates in God, we should expect multiple interpretations to coexist. The medieval view saw four coexisting meanings: the literal meaning of what happened in history, the moral meaning of how it instructs us on living our life, the allegorical meaning of how we see Christ and the Church in it, and the analogical meaning of our end. Allegorical interpretations risk being arbitrary when they leave the boundary of Tradition and are not seen through the lens of Christ, but within that lens, because we each have different perspectives on God, we should expect differing interpretations and meanings expressing that perspective. Truth, since it participates in God’s truth, is sacramental, too. But in this view truth is not only something to be understood, but something to be participated in. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, describes the progression from perceiving the light of Christ in the purgation stage of sin-repentence cycles, to perception of God via the senses, to going beyond the senses to a darkness where the senses no longer perceive God yet the darkness is “luminous”. The role of theology, then, is not simply understanding God rationally, which though both good and essential, is insufficient. Theology should primarily function as an ascetic training discipline that enables us to come closer to the mystical participation and communion of the beatific vision.

In Heavenly Participation, Boersma gives a concise, yet thorough summary of how we find ourselves in the current situation in the contemporary West. He gives thoughtful suggestions on the theological perspectives that we need to adopt to regain the synthesis, although I see no evidence of any concrete ideas to actually achieve this change. It is all very well to describe what “someone” should accomplish, but since the rift within the dichotomies has only widened with passing centuries, if he wants change, he had better identify (create, really) some new force in the opposite direction. His suggestions would be a useful blueprint for a church that was adjacent to the Great Tradition and wanted to move into a robust Great Tradition. American conservative Anglicans might occupy a Great Tradition adjacent space, although their evangelical leanings show no sign of desire for a sacramental synthesis.

As of this writing (2012), Boersma identified himself as an evangelical, and was teaching at Regent Seminary in Vancouver. I am surprised that he seems to think that he can convince evangelicals to recover a Platonist synthesis. I, coming from an evangelical + charismatic background, did find his arguments persuasive, but I was already convinced due to a personal awareness of a meaning vacuum, and interacting with eastern Church fathers (largely mediated through podcasts). My experience is that evangelicals (and charismatics) have no grid for transcendence, that is participating in the divine unity, but focuses on the divine unity uniting itself with our multiplicity. (To be fair, the desire of unity with the divine is in charismatics, but it is confused with the divine uniting itself with us.) In fact, because evangelicals, of which charismatics can be considered a mostly-overlapping subset, agree with the material-supernatural split and are largely unknowingly philosophically materialist, and because “sacramental” is associated with medieval Catholic excess, evangelicals are largely resistant to a return to any Platonist synthesis. Perhaps evangelical theologians (who seem like the audience of this book) are more amenable, but the rank and file is not. Since Boersma joined the Anglo-Catholic Nashota House Seminary seven years after publication, perhaps Boersma did not meet much success.

I was hoping that this book would talk about a sacramental worldview, meaning that all of creation is a (are) sacrament(s), and how to experience this. The first chapter gives a helpful summary of what a sacrament is, and thus is useful to that end, but unfortunately for me, that is not the book he wrote. Boersma does think that theology should be an ascetic discipline to bring me to this mystical participation, but unfortunately he offers essentially nothing. I am asking how to do heavenly participation via a sacramental worldview, while he is giving an academic defense of a sacramental worldview as the proper Christian framework. I guess I am asking “how do I become a mystic” or “how do I have the beatific vision”, which is a different book. But the book Boersma did write would have been helpful to me two years ago in understanding the direction to go (assuming that I would have understood it, which is unlikely.)

This is a useful book if you want to understand the current crisis of meaning and identify a path back to meaning. It is very readable, and commendably concise. However, you should understand how Plato’s Forms work; as a test, if you understand how God is Being in himself (or, the Form of Being), you have this part covered. It will also be helpful to understand theories of the Eucharist (as the sacrament par excellence), in particular transubstantiation (which is not that the bread and wine stop being bread and wine, but rather that their Forms change) and Anglican “real presence”. Reading up on philosophical realism, nominalism, voluntarism, and skepticism, as well as post-modernism, will be helpful as well.


Review: 8.5
I want to give this book a higher value, since it is refreshingly concise while still being thorough. However, I think the audience is a little narrow. Also, this book is arguably a summary of nouvelle théologie with commentary and critique, which is nice, but also seems a little narrow in source material.
▶ Notes

Copyright © 2026 by Geoffrey Prewett