Eucharistic Participation deals with the importance of the Eucharist, and in the process challenges Protestants (and especially evangelicals) to treat the Eucharist more seriously than they sometimes do.

In particular, Boersma re-addresses the two issues of the Lord's Supper as sacrifice and as real presence. These were the two issues central to the Eucharistic debates of the Protestant Reformation. This booklet is written from an attitude of sympathy with the motivations and concerns of the Reformers. At the same time, it suggests that it is possible to get beyond the disagreements of the Reformation period. If we take seriously the notion of participation-the idea that in the Eucharistic celebration we share in Christ and in his work-we can affirm both sacrificial language and talk of real presence-while at the same time holding on to the all-sufficient and unique character of Christ's sacrifice.

Participation, so Boersma argues, reconfigures our understanding of both time and space. If past, present, and future coincide in and through Christ, this means that what we do today in the Eucharist can participate in the unique sacrifice of Christ without undermining it. And if heaven and earth are reunited in and through Christ, this means that the heavenly reality of Christ's body can become really present in the celebration of the Eucharist. Serious ecumenical dialogue requires, therefore, that Protestants do justice to the theology of participation as they try to come to grips with the disagreements between Rome and the Reformation.

Surveying the barriers that contemporary thinking has erected between the natural and the supernatural, between earth and heaven, Hans Boersma issues a wake-up call for Western Christianity. Both Catholics and evangelicals, he says, have moved too far away from a sacramental mindset, focusing more on the here-and-now than on the then-and-there. Yet, as Boersma points out, the teaching of Jesus, Paul, and St. Augustine -- indeed, of most of Scripture and the church fathers -- is profoundly otherworldly, much more concerned with heavenly participation than with earthly enjoyment.

In Heavenly Participation Boersma draws on the wisdom of great Christian minds ancient and modern -- Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, C. S. Lewis, Henri de Lubac, John Milbank, and many others. He urges Catholics and evangelicals alike to retrieve a sacramental worldview, to cultivate a greater awareness of eternal mysteries, to partake eagerly of the divine life that transcends and transforms all earthly realities.

2023 Credo Magazine Book Awards Winner, Theological Retrieval

Holy Scripture requires holy reading.

• Encounter an ancient but fresh way of reading the Bible.
• Learn from Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, and others.
• Experience a structured and attentive way to focus on Christ, listen to the Spirit, and rest in God's love.

Christians read Scripture to encounter Christ and be conformed to his image. Jesus is the point of reading the Bible. But Scripture is no mere human text; it is God's living word. So how should we read it?

For Christians throughout the centuries, the answer has been lectio divina--divine reading. Lectio divina is a sacramental reading. It aims to take us more deeply into the life of God. Through practicing the four movements of lectio divina--attentive reading, extended meditation, prayerful reflection, and silent resting--we focus on Christ, listen to the Spirit, and rest in God's love. We no longer simply read the words of Scripture; instead, we read the face of God in the eternal Word.

Christianity Today Book Award Winner

This work argues that the heart of patristic exegesis is the attempt to find the sacramental reality (real presence) of Christ in the Old Testament Scriptures. Leading theologian Hans Boersma discusses numerous sermons and commentaries of the church fathers to show how they regarded Christ as the treasure hidden in the field of the Old Testament and explains that the church today can and should retrieve the sacramental reading of the early church. Combining detailed scholarly insight with clear, compelling prose, this book makes a unique contribution to contemporary interest in theological interpretation.

This study takes the reader to the intriguing debates on justification in seventeenth-century English Puritan thought. Richard Baxter (1615-91), the well-known Kidderminster pastor and theologian, insisted that the Calvinists of his day, with their unyielding emphasis on the sola fide of the Reformation, ran the danger of ignoring the conditions that came with God's gift of the covenant of grace. Justification, Baxter insisted, required at least some degree of faith and works as the human response to the love of God. As one of his antagonists, John Crandon, put it: If we magnifie one grain of our own pepper to that height that we make it a part of that righteousness by which to stand at Gods tribunall this one grain will sink us down to hell, so hot a poison is Mr. Brs pepper-corn. The mix of theological differences and unbending personality traits resulted in years of acrimonious and unyielding debate. Building on previous studies of Baxter's soteriology, this study maintains that Baxter is best understood as an eclectic scholastic covenantal theologian for whom the distinction between God's conditional covenant and his absolute will is key to the entire theological enterprise.

Interpretation is tricky business. Music and art are among the most difficult 'texts' to interpret. And yet, today more than ever, the media are bombarding us with sounds and images that desperately need imaginative Christian minds to interpret. Is it possible to find traces of the transcendent in contemporary culture? Do we perhaps even find Christian modes of expression where we would least expect them? Or should Christians take a far more critical interpretive stance toward contemporary cultural art forms than they generally do? Consisting of three main sections, this collection of essays first asks how we should interpret the cosmos and the biblical story of salvation. The second part deals specifically with questions surrounding music and worship. The final section deals with the interpretation of contemporary art and mass media. This collection of essays is a helpful guide for those who are willing to engage the imagination as they face tough interpretive questions, particularly in the areas of music and the arts. Contributors to this volume: Jeremy Begbie . John L. Bell . Hans Boersma Dennis R. Danielson . Laurel Gasque . Wayne L. Roosa Quentin J. Schultze . Diane Sekuloff . James K.A. Smith Hans Boersma (Th.D., University of Utrecht) is associate professor of religious and worldview studies at Trinity Western University. He has been appointed to the J. I. Packer Chair of Theology at Regent College. Boersma is also the organizer of the annual LambLight Lecture series sponsored by the Geneva Society and the author or editor of several books, including A Hot Pepper Corn: Richard Baxter's Doctrine of Justification in Its Seventeenth-Century Context of Controversy and Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition.

Winner of the Christianity Today Book Award in Theology/Ethics (2019)

To see God is our heart's desire, our final purpose in life. But what does it mean to see God? And exactly how do we see God--with our physical eyes or with the mind's eye? In this informed study of the beatific vision, Hans Boersma focuses on vision as a living metaphor and shows how the vision of God is not just a future but a present reality.

Seeing God is both a historical theology and a dogmatic articulation of the beatific vision--of how the invisible God becomes visible to us. In examining what Christian thinkers throughout history have written about the beatific vision, Boersma explores how God trains us to see his character by transforming our eyes and minds, highlighting continuity from this world to the next. Christ-centered, sacramental, and ecumenical, Boersma's work presents life as a never-ending journey toward seeing the face of God in Christ both here and in the world to come.

The relationship between theology and biblical studies is often marked by misunderstandings, methodological differences, and cross-discipline tension. With an irenic spirit as well as honesty about differences that remain, theologian Hans Boersma highlights five things he wishes biblical scholars knew about theology so that these disciplines might once again serve the church hand in hand.

In recent decades many fundamental Christian assumptions about the nature of God and the world have come under attack. No longer can one assume even in many church circles that historic Christian beliefs about the Trinity and providence are generally accepted or understood. Scientific knowledge and new technologies have also presented challenges for the church. How, for example, should Christians understand the ecological crisis? And how should the opening chapters of Genesis be understood in an age of genetic research and evolutionary science? This collection of essays attempts to chart a faithful path for postmodern Christians, exploring the foundational ideas and concepts of a Christian worldview and suggesting their implications for Christian living today.Contributors: Hans Boersma John Cooper Marva J. Dawn Michael W. Goheen Christopher D. Marshall Arnold E. Sikkema John G. Stackhouse, Jr. Rikki E. Watts John R. Wood

The cross is central to understanding Christian theology. But is it possible that our postmodern setting requires a new model of understanding the cross?

Hans Boersma's Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross proposes an understanding of the atonement that is sensitive both to the Christian tradition and to the postmodern critiques of that tradition. His fresh approach draws on the rich resources of the Christian tradition in its portrayal of God's hospitality in Jesus Christ.

Leading Scholar Offers a Theological Approach to Preaching

This primer on the ministry of preaching connects reading the Bible theologically with preparing and preaching sermons. Hans Boersma explains that exegesis involves looking beyond the historical and literal meaning of the text to the hidden sacramental reality of Christ himself, which enables us to reach the deepest meaning of the Scriptures. He provides models for theological sermons along with commentary on exegetical and homiletical method and explains that patristic exegesis is relevant for reading the Bible today. The book includes a foreword by Eugene H. Peterson.

As a multi-faceted introduction to sacramental theology, the purposes of this Handbook are threefold: historical, ecumenical, and missional. The forty-four chapters are organized into the following parts five parts: Sacramental Roots in Scripture, Patristic Sacramental Theology, Medieval Sacramental Theology, From the Reformation through Today, and Philosophical and Theological Issues in Sacramental Doctrine.

Contributors to this Handbook explain the diverse ways that believers have construed the sacraments, both in inspired Scripture and in the history of the Church's practice. In Scripture and the early Church, Orthodox, Protestants, and Catholics all find evidence that the first Christian communities celebrated and taught about the sacraments in a manner that Orthodox, Protestants, and Catholics today affirm as the foundation of their own faith and practice. Thus, for those who want to understand what has been taught about the sacraments in Scripture and across the generations by the major thinkers of the various Christian traditions, this Handbook provides an introduction. As the divisions in Christian sacramental understanding and practice are certainly evident in this Handbook, it is not thereby without ecumenical and missional value. This book evidences that the story of the Christian sacraments is, despite divisions in interpretation and practice, one of tremendous hope.

Recent years have witnessed a series of books, articles, and lectures raising serious questions about the Christian doctrine of the Atonement. While coming from a variety of sources, the questions usually center around the central issue of atonement and violence. Doesn't the Atonement promote the idea of violence on the part of God? If so, isn't such violence incompatible with a God of love? Doesn't this doctrine send the wrong signal, excusing and perhaps even promoting such things as child abuse? Is it time to abandon what has become an outmoded and harmful doctrine? The authors of this book claim that to abandon the Christian doctrine of the Atonement is to abandon the central witness of the gospel, for atonement speaks of nothing less than God's reconciliation of the world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, to believe in the atoning death of Jesus Christ does not mean that one believes that God has engaged in cosmic child abuse. Drawing on the classical theories of the Atonement, engaging in creative theological construction, they present set of cogent, cohesive alternatives to either rejecting the doctrine out of hand, or uncritically accepting it. Contributors include: J. Denny Weaver, Bluffton University: Narrative Christus Victor: The Answer to Anselmian Atonement Violence; Thomas Finger, Associated Mennonite Seminary: Christus Victor as Nonviolent Atonement; Hans Boersma, Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia: Violence, the Cross, and Divine Intentionality: A Modified Reformed View; and T. Scott Daniels, Pasadena First Church of the Nazarene: Passing the Peace: Worship That Shapes Nonsubstitutionary Convictions.

This collection assembles essays by eleven leading Catholic and evangelical theologians in an ecumenical discussion of the benefits - and potential drawbacks - of today's burgeoning corpus of theological interpretation. The authors explore the critical relationship between the earthly world and its heavenly counterpart.

• Ground-breaking volume of ecumenical debate featuring Catholic and evangelical theologians
• Explores the core theological issue of how the material and spiritual worlds interrelate
• Features a diversity of analytical approaches
• Addresses an urgent need to distinguish the positive and problematic aspects of today's rapidly growing corpus of theological interpretation