Seeing God

“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 Boersma restores the appreciation of its centrality that was common in earlier Christian traditions. He invites us to engage in the ultimate adventure of our lives—to become who God made us to be and thereby come to know God in ways that anticipate the vision of him in his fullness. A wonderful and supremely worthwhile feat.”
— Lydia Schumacher
King’s College London

“Remarkable. . . . Hans Boersma seems to me a one-man ecumenical movement, as he explores with rare skill the different ways of thinking that have expressed Christian faith and hope.”
— Andrew Louth
from the foreword

“In creating a resource tracing the doctrine of the beatific vision through the ages, Boersma does an excellent job of tracing the beatific vision from the pre-Christian era with Plato and Plotinus through the post-Reformation era with Johnathan Edwards.”
— Southwestern Journal of Theology

“We would do well to join Boersma in the hopeful pursuit of our ultimate end.”
— The Living Church

“Boersma has succeeded in the task he set himself: to re-articulate the beatific vision in a ‘Christological, God-focused’ way with an ecumenical and sacramental core.”
— Theology

“Seeing God is historical theology of the first order.”
— Scottish Journal of Theology