In the first chapter of his short book The Eucharist, the late Edward Schillebeeckx OP asks the question: ‘What does God’s word of revelation … tell me about the eucharistic event?’Footnote ¹ Throughout Taste and See, J. W. Olson asks, ‘What the Eucharist tells us about God’s self-revelation in Christ?’ As such, the doctrine of revelation is the primary concern of this book, and indeed Olson describes his task as the pursuit of ‘a modernly viable way of articulating how divine revelation occurs’ (p. 4). Sacramental theology is the fulcrum about which this pursuit turns, as Olson proceeds to argue that the Eucharist ‘might prove to be the most natural site for a renewed theology of revelation’ (p. 223). Although Olson cites Schillebeeckx’s The Eucharist just once in the book, there are some fascinating parallels between the two, including in method (they share a phenomenological approach) and in theme (both emphasise the essential sacramental importance of encounter). Ultimately, Olson has made an original and thought-provoking contribution to sacramental theology, foregrounding the encounter with Christ and the human other at the heart of the Eucharist, and therefore recognising the wider significance of this encounter for the doctrine of revelation.

Like Schillebeeckx, Olson’s motivations for this book are incubated within the present challenges of his time. Where Schillebeeckx sought to renew sacramental theology ‘in the new climate of thought of the twentieth century’, Olson constructs his argument in the twenty-first century context of our postmodern condition; his desire to revisit the question of revelation stems from today’s secular, pluralist, and post-truth world, where ‘the question of what is true increasingly demands a re-evaluation of how we come to know and assess truth as such’ (p. 1). In light of this, Charles Taylor plays an important role in the early exchanges, as Olson deploys his concept of the immanent frame in order to set a standard for the reconception of revelation in modern thought. In today’s scientifically minded milieu, this standard demands a theology of revelation that grounds truth materially and empirically, as something demonstrable.

Here, the doctrine of the incarnation emerges as the key to revelation. However, Olson observes two challenges in identifying revelation with the life and person of Christ: ‘the problem of language’ and ‘the problem of time’. As Olson succinctly explains, ‘the problem of language is that it is not self-evident how one moves from a living, incarnational revelation of God to true speech about that revelation’ (p. 222). The problem of time, as Olson sets it out, follows on from the problem of language, for ‘even if language can be shown to relate properly and effectively to a revelatory being, we are still left with an insuperable gulf of time and cultural difference between the life of Jesus and Christians today’ (p. 222). Theologically, these two connected challenges pave the way for the central theme of the book to emerge: encounter, which is shared communally in the life of faith. It is for this reason that Olson proposes a sacramental approach, arguing persuasively that the Eucharist is ‘the foundational locus of individual encounter with Christ as God’s self-communication’ (pp. 35–36). And so Olson proceeds to offer a phenomenological account of the Eucharist, developed largely through the book’s primary dialogue partner, Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger comes to the fore at the beginning of Chapter 2 and remains a strong presence throughout the book. Phenomenologically, Heidegger is central to Olson’s account of the Eucharist because Olson argues that analysing the sacrament entails the primordial analysis of being itself – and this is Heidegger’s great contribution in Being and Time. If we are to ask what the Eucharist reveals, Olson suggests, then we must first ask how it can reveal anything at all – and this requires an understanding of Being as well as an understanding of all the various beings involved in the sacrament: Christ, celebrant, table, participants, bread and wine. While the goal of the book is certainly not to rehearse the debate of Heidegger’s place in theological discourse, there is an impressive awareness of the various receptions of Heidegger in theology. Ultimately, Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein is indispensable for Olson’s work. This is not to say that Olson’s is a Heideggerian account of the Eucharist, but rather that his conceptual resources and tools for theology are Heidegger’s own.

One of the strongest passages of the book concerns the understanding of persons, and here Olson also engages Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As Olson observes, Merleau-Ponty makes for a fruitful conversation partner given Heidegger’s great neglect of the body in his philosophy and given the centrality of embodiment within the Eucharist. Indeed, the body is the central category of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.Footnote ² Through a discussion of his famous example of the phantom limb, Olson follows Merleau-Ponty in concluding that ‘any world in which we are immersed is always co-constituted by others’ (p. 124), and that personhood is communicable through our shared embodiment. The key theological move Olson makes here is to connect Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology with the person and body of Christ, and so to open up a new dimension of his analysis of the incarnation – one which will provide ‘an account of Jesus’ present embodiment’ and which will therefore foreground ‘the Eucharist as the mechanism of such presence’ (p. 128).

This discussion is followed in Chapter 5 by a key turn in the book: Olson’s own account of the Eucharist, which is built on ‘the ontological structure of reality laid out by Heidegger’ (p. 223). Here, Olson proposes that the sacramental event of the Eucharist constitutes ‘a dynamic world’, which sweeps up its participants and reveals the person of Christ. The Eucharist, Olson suggests, ‘patterns its participants into certain attunements and possibilities at the unconscious level of embodied habituation’ (p. 149). Crucially, these are the attunements and possibilities of a persistent, communal encounter with Christ, and in this way, Olson argues that the Eucharist is the embodied epicentre of divine revelation.

Taste and See is an engaging and impressive work of scholarship. It is a sign of the book’s quality that I found myself wishing that Olson might engage further with particular philosophers and theologians. For example, since Olson is concerned with phenomenology and the doctrine of revelation, I would be fascinated to see how he might engage Jean-Yves Lacoste, especially given the topic of his essays in The Appearing of God. Likewise, I think there are some fascinating parallels between Olson’s project and Schillebeeckx’s phenomenological interpretation of the sacraments as ‘interpersonal encounters between the believer and Christ’.Footnote ³ Olson engages Schillebeeckx early on (pp. 12–13), and I would have liked to see this conversation developed more substantially in subsequent chapters.

One aspect of the book that may prompt further debate concerns the extent to which we can securely understand and express the content of revelation in our language. Apophaticism is strongly critiqued at various points in the book, as Olson sets up his theology of revelation ‘against the staunchly apophatic theologian’ (p. 27). Yet in the conclusion of his very thorough account of language (via Heidegger) in Chapter 3, Olson does not sound dissimilar to an apophatic theologian himself:

Here Olson seems to recognise something of the elusive nature of revelation in apophatic terms. To advocate apophaticism is not always (as the book suggests elsewhere) to ‘hedge against speaking of God’ (p. 27), or to adopt a position of ‘non-commitment’ (p. 66) that is ‘frustrating’ (p. 104) or ‘hollow’ (p. 71). Rather, if apophaticism involves the claim that revelation eludes our conceptual recognition and our propositional expression, then Olson’s suggestion that religious language should forego semantic precision, and that revelation is not ‘a matter of propositional or mental content’, seems very close to this position. Perhaps the book need not position itself in direct opposition to apophaticism, even while it recovers a certain confidence with which the theologian can talk about revelation. But this is a matter for further response, motivated by Olson’s excellent and thought-provoking work in this monograph.

This book represents a significant contribution to sacramental theology and to the doctrine of revelation. By reiterating that the content of revelation is found fundamentally in the person of Christ, and by undertaking his original phenomenological analysis of the Eucharist, Olson has opened up a fascinating way of viewing the sacrament as the mechanism for God’s self-revelation.