The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology. Edited by Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering.

Abstract

Here are 44 separate chapters (a few of them written jointly) on sacramental theology, addressing a great range of eras, themes, and theologians. The two editors, one from an evangelical teaching post, the other from a Roman Catholic one, have brought together 50 authors from different spheres of study, different continents, and differing confessional standpoints. They state that their purposes are ‘historical, ecumenical, and missional’. The authors have an average of around 14 pages for each chapter (plus two or more of bibliography), and so could hardly handle their allocated subjects in great depth, but most have compressed their expertise helpfully into the limited compass. However profound the scholarship of each, the overall impression is not that of a jigsaw, where a single overall picture has been broken into pieces which by definition fit each other, but rather of a crazy paving, where the compilers have hit upon components of different colours and shapes and have then laid their paving, not greatly minding whether each of the pieces matches the shape, colour, or texture of its neighbours, nor whether there are gaps left unpaved between them—nor whether the pathway is leading in any one direction. The themes and authors appear in their pristine separation, with no attempt to reconcile differences. The upshot has a strongly North American slant to it, coloured by three gentle presuppositions, namely, that Roman Catholicism provides the ‘norm’ of sacramental theology, that Eastern Orthodoxy has much to contribute (and to this reviewer the Orthodox chapters were highly informative and stimulating), and that Protestantism needs to be recorded because it is ‘there’.