Rebekah EKLUND, The Beatitudes through the Ages. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. pp. 346. $35.00 hb. ISBN 9780802876508. Reviewed by Kathleen BORRES, Saint Vincent Seminary, Latrobe, PA 15650.

Rebekah Eklund has done a fine job articulating and expounding upon the Beatitude’s “surplus of meaning” in this history of exegesis (“reception history”) that spans the landscape of Christian thought and belief. It is apparent to me that Eklund loves the Word, believes in the Living Word, and hopes in the Living Word’s promises for a kingdom to come. In her study, she teams up with well-known and not so well known figures from the tradition to mine the meaningful purpose and possibilities of the Beatitudes lived out in a broken world. As she writes in her conclusion, “Now, I also want to make a case that the Beatitudes can be known most fully not by reading about them but through seeing what they look like in human lives. Perhaps it’s better to say not that the Beatitudes mean something but that they hope to transform someone, that they aim to transform us” (287). Her method of mining the riches of the Beatitudes is rooted in what is really a very fundamental principle of the Christian faith, despite countless wars that suggest otherwise. The principle is this: we are in this together, this story of salvation, and need others’ perspectives that come from different personal, social, and historic locations to deepen our understanding and grasp of our story.

Eklund’s overall work reflects this methodological consideration, that “the Beatitudes contain the whole gospel” (1), the good news of salvation. Unpacked, this means that for her, “studying them led [her] into exploration of divine and human agency, the beatific vision . . . the doctrine of the image of God, the role of grace in human goodness, the significance of poverty and wealth, the relations of the emotions to the moral life, and the nature of prayer” (1). The Beatitudes as presented through this history of exegesis reveals all of the above and then some. The truth is, as the story of the Beatitudes’ “meaning” (Ecklund’s caution about meaning duly noted) unfolds in her book, so will the reader be brought to a deeper awareness of the meaning of salvation, which, of course, cannot be exhausted with any study given our limits. As Ecklund admits in her introduction and conclusion, “This is a reception history, not the reception history of the Beatitudes” (10) and “The Beatitudes occupy the same space we do: the time in which it is not yet God’s future” (289). Stated differently, this is ultimately God’s story of the realization of our salvation as it unfolds generation by generation. Our job is to cooperate with God, to be wise and faithful stewards of the deposit of the faith reflected in the Beatitudes (“the Beatitudes contain the whole gospel”).

In terms of the structure of the book, there is a foreword by Dale C. Allison, Jr., to whom Ecklund attributes some influence upon her: “Dale Allison was another [i.e., someone who valued reception history in biblical scholarship]: The history of interpretation shows us how readings always change because readers are always changing. . . [He, along with Ulrich Luz,] helped pave the way for New Testament scholars to take seriously premodern interpretation” (4).

An Introduction, ten chapters and a conclusion follow. The Introduction and first two chapters focus on methodological considerations. In the Introduction, Ecklund discusses the value of a reception history (and the limits and possibilities of meaning); context, that is, the historical context, the wider context of Scripture, and the context of our lives; and, finally, premodern comfort with multiplicity. The first chapter focuses on such basic questions as “are Matthew’s and Luke’s Beatitudes the same, or are they different?”; “Who are the Beatitudes for?”; “(How) are they countercultural?”; “Are they commands or descriptions?”; “How many are there [i.e., four, seven, eight, nine, or ten]?”; and “When are they for?” (12). The second chapter focuses on how some of the above plays out in the tradition via “two key trajectories (laid down in the fourth and fifth centuries) that influenced beatitude interpretation for the next thousand years” (49). More specifically, Ecklund discusses the Beatitudes as “steps of ascent” (one trajectory) and in their relationship to the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer and the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (second trajectory of “sentenaries”). Readers will learn in this second trajectory that each “seven” illuminated a wisdom sought in the way of salvation. The second chapter also considers the role of the Beatitudes in worship, personal spirituality, social justice, and grace in all of the above.

In the next eight chapters, Ecklund offers her readers a history of exegesis/interpretation of each of the Beatitudes and does so with fairness and honesty in my estimation. She makes a good case for reading each of the Beatitudes in the light of the others without at the same time losing sight of the significance of the single Beatitude in the history of interpretation. She admits when she is not comfortable with an interpretation or is otherwise skeptical, e.g. “I’m too much of a Westerner to wrap my head around that one [i.e., “the possibility of seeing God (whether Father or Spirit or the Trinity as a whole) in some bodily or visual sense”] (233). Also, “Can a Christian intent on correcting heresy avoid becoming a persecutor?” (278). There are many such admittances and probing questions in this work, which I commend as truly an ecumenical and faithful work worthy of assignment in undergraduate and graduate scripture and theology programs.

Finally, the book ends with an appropriate conclusion, one that sums up a pivotal point Ecklund wants to make about her method of study, the Gospel, “meaning” and salvation. It is worth quoting:

As Origen says . . . “the presence of mysteries in the divine text is hardly accidental: . . . the struggle to understand them is one of the divinely appointed means for bringing believers to maturity.”
Perhaps one of the main functions of the Beatitudes is to make us wonder about them – to move us to talk to each other about what poverty is, and what poverty of spirit is, and whether they’re the same or different, and why they’re both declared blessed by Jesus. The more you wrestle with the Beatitudes, the more they pull you into their depths. The deeper you dig, the more they yield (290).