Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition

Product Description
Winner of the Christianity Today Book Award in Theology/Ethics
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.
Review
“Hans Boersma’s
Seeing God is the most significant and theologically comprehensive treatment of this topic in English since Kenneth Kirk’s classic
The Vision of God. And, far more than Kirk, Boersma provides the invaluable service of breaking down the barriers (mostly barriers of misconception) separating differing Christian traditions, East and West, Orthodox and Catholic and Protestant. This is theological reflection of the most illuminating kind.”
— David Bentley Hart
author of
Atheist Delusions and
The Beauty of the Infinite
“Christian theology has traditionally identified the beatific vision as the ultimate end of humanity. But what does it mean to ‘see God’? How can we pursue such an end if it is beyond our understanding? Building on his exemplary ‘sacramental ontology,’ Hans Boersma here offers us a ‘sacramental teleology’ in which the end of humanity—the
visio Dei—is revealed sacramentally within the created order. A profound and important work.”
— Simon Oliver
Durham University
“Only Hans Boersma could write this book. With a superb command of the Scriptures and of the Reformed, Protestant, and Catholic traditions, he revisits the neglected topic of beatific vision and reminds us what it is to see God in Christ. An energizing book from one of today’s best theologians.”
— Janet Soskice
University of Cambridge
“
Seeing God is a subtle yet sustained polemic against the notion that the Christian eschaton is simply an improved version of the universe as we know it, and that Christian Platonists—Nyssen, Augustine, Dante, Jonathan Edwards, C. S. Lewis—were all wrongheadedly otherworldly. Boersma’s breviary for sacramental ontology, advocating a more ‘vertical’ kind of theology and spirituality, deserves consideration among so-called Christian materialists and contemporary proponents of the ‘renewed cosmos’ approach to eschatology.”
— Michael McClymond
Saint Louis University
“Hans Boersma’s
Seeing God provides a richly comprehensive historical account of theologies of the beatific vision. But it also successfully mediates between the Nyssen account of eternal progress into God and the Thomist account of an eternal finality, and it properly modifies Aquinas by insisting that the final vision will be one achieved essentially and not accidentally in the resurrected body. This is a wonderful achievement.”
— John Milbank
University of Nottingham
“This is a striking manifesto, in the form of a gentle, subtle, moving, and encyclopedic tour through the church’s long reflection on our final destiny of gazing upon God’s face given in Christ. Boersma eloquently unveils the powerful truth that we are made in our bones to thirst for such a vision and that the ordering of our lives is properly geared toward this end.”
— Ephraim Radner
Wycliffe College
“The doctrine of the beatific vision, the final vision of God, has been sidelined in some recent theological discussions. In this rich and exciting study Hans Boer