Newsletter N.21

Vatican File #153.
A Few Remarks on the Evangelical Fascination with the “Sacramental Tapestry”
— A Book Review of Hans Boersma’s Two Volumes on the Topic
by Leonardo De Chirico | Sept. 1st, 2018

In some evangelical circles, “sacramental theology” attracts a growing attention and, in a few cases, makes converts to Roman Catholicism. For many of those coming out of a neo-fundamentalist mindset, focused on battles for objective truth and the certainty of belief, and often fighting secondary battles, some evangelical theology finds in the present-day Catholic discourse on “mystery” a nuanced and intriguing attraction.

Two books by Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of the Sacramental Tapestry(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), testify to the fascination some contemporary protestant theologians have for the categories of “sacrament” and “mystery.” These groupings were relaunched by the nouvelle théologie (new theology), a stream of Catholic thought (mainly French) that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. This strain of theology was highly influential at the Second Vatican Council and afterward.

These two volumes, the work of a professor at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada, form basically the same work: the first is the editio maior (expanded version) and the second is the editio minor (condensed version).

In the first volume, Boersma shows how, at the end of the 19^thcentury, under the influence of the Enlightenment that had broken the relationship between faith and life, Catholic theology built a theological-philosophical system that, in order to fight against the Enlightenment, ended up assimilating its plausibility structures. The Neo-Thomism that was carved into the encyclical Aeterni Patris of Leo XIII (1879) was a rational, sophisticated, intellectualist apparatus that lost sight of the “mystery” of faith expressed in the liturgy and the sacraments.

The nouvelle théologie is a reaction to this drying up of faith through the rediscovery of a sacramental ontology that “opens” the eyes of faith to the world (M. Blondel, J. Maréchal, P. Rousselot), makes fluid the distinction between the natural and the supernatural (H. De Lubac and H. Bouillard), insists on the category of incarnation and human “participation” in the incarnation (H.U. von Balthasar and M.-D. Chenu), rediscovers the “spiritual” interpretation of Scripture and tradition (J. Daniélou and H. De Lubac), and invests a great deal on ecclesiology in sacramental terms (H. De Lubac and Y. Congar). In short, it proposes a re-appropriation of the pre-modern heritage of the Christian faith as a way to appreciate afresh its Roman Catholicity. Everything revolves around the category of ressourcement: return, re-appropriation, re-assimilation of the tradition and, by extension, of the “mystery”.

Boersma maintains that...

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