Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition by Hans Boersma (review)

Known for his retrieval of God's "sacramental presence" in creation, a critique of modern secularism's reduction of nature to quantifiable matter, Boersma here offers a study of the "beatific vision," seeing God face to face in the afterlife, humanity's ultimate fulfillment. Boersma intentionally counters trends in modern Protestant theology which ignore the transcendent dimension of human nature and substitute either political or therapeutic agendas in its place. His history describes numerous views of the beatific vision, including those of Plato, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Aquinas, Gregory Palamas, Symeon the New Theologian, John of the Cross, Bonaventure, Nicholas of Cusa, Dante, Calvin, John Donne, John Owen, Abraham Kuyper, and Jonathan Edwards. Curiously, any reference to Lutherans is entirely missing, leading one to wonder how intentional this omission is.

For Boersma, the primary agency of God upon our lives is that of teaching, guiding us to seek our fulfilment in the beatific vision: "God's pedagogy arrives at its telos when, in the hereafter, his providential vision of us in Christ will transform us—body and soul—so that our physical and intellectual capacities will be healed and transfigured, as a result of which they will obtain powers of contemplation such as 'no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined' (1 Cor. 2:9)" (439). At its telos, human visionary capacity for the divine will far transcend "the capacities of body and mind in their fallen state. . . . the soul's reunification with the perfected, reconfigured resurrection body . . . will render the beatific vision much more glorious than it was in the intermediate state" (429).

According to Boersma, the purpose of life is attainment of the vision of God (10). Indeed, this telos is embedded in human nature (11) such that not only the goal but also the "sacramental end" is already embedded in our lives (13). Unfortunately, in modernity, we think in terms of outcomes and not final causes (20). Our telos is not, however, just for us to develop. In a sense, it also "comes to us and pulls us from within" (24). This truth is found not only in the Christian tradition but also in Plato for whom such illumination initiates an upward movement of the soul towards the eternal. An important question for Boersma is whether or not the ultimate vision of God, given after we climb the heavenly ladder, will satisfy human desire completely or whether human desire for God will continue on indefinitely in eternity (69). With Gregory of Nyssa and Jonathan Edwards, Boersma favors the latter.

Boersma notes that the "light of glory" will allow humans to see God's essence (139). Even so, God's essence will be seen not apart from Christ's humanity. Hence, as John of the Cross puts it, in this life, humans enjoy mystical union with God while in the life to come they enjoy the beatific vision (164). Although Boersma does not say it, John of the Cross is similar to Luther since spiritual purgation happens only through God's work to reduce arrogant humans to nothing, that is, to make them humble and receptive, prior to any further spiritual advances (or, in Luther's case, a resurrection by means of becoming one with Christ in baptism). In other words, a cruciform approach to life is not entirely lacking in Boersma, though it is not highlighted in the book. Quoting Michael J. Gorman's view of Paul's theology of the cross, Boersma notes that Paul's Christ says: You shall be cruciform, for I am cruciform. If Boersma would follow that line of thought, he could offer a mystagogy informed by the theology of the cross. Unfortunately, this truth is underplayed in his survey of theologians, including his review of various Reformed theologians, from Calvin through Kuyper.

Boersma concludes that Christian life is an education, a pedagogy in which we do not initiate the beatific vision, but process towards it as our fulfillment, as centered...