Wisdom on reading well (part 2): Tom Torrance

Part two of a series about lessons authors have given me on how to read the Bible.

I've recently posted notes of Thomas Torrance's very detailed and carefully thought through principles for learning. They all deserve meditating on. I also recently read this by him:

Normally when one reads an author one understands what he says be looking with him at the 'object' to which he points or which he describes, but early in the nineteenth century there grew up the tendency to study the text of an author in its correlation with the 'subject' or the author himself rather than in its correlation with the objective reality he intended, and so to read it as an expression of his individuality or genius [...] Applied to the New Testament, however, this meant that the focus of attention was not so much upon Jesus Christ himself in his ontological reality as Son of God become man, or even as objective historical figure, but upon the creative spirituality of the early Church"

(pp. 35-36, TF Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian)

TFT's principles of instruction

General Principles - for every field of knowledge

(i) adaptation of our capacities in accordance with the nature of the object, and therefore instruction requires a specific adaptation on the part of the learner, a specific mode of rational activity determined by the nature of what is being taught or communicated"

(ii) an attitude, that "reflects the nature of the subject-matter involved"

(iii) asking "the right questions"

(iv) material to think about

(v) holding "together the realm of the image and the realm of idea"

(vi) having "tools with which to think and shape the thoughts in your mind and form your judgements"

(vii) "the community of others" is required

Particular Principles - for knowing Christ

(i) "Jesus Christ is Himself the Truth"

(ii) Jesus Christ "can be communicated only historically" because "The Truth is a historical Person"

(iii) "True Christian instruction requires on the part of the learner or receiver a response of self-denial and self-criticism"

(iv) "Instruction in Christian Truth involves reconciliation with the Truth.

(v) "Christian instruction involves renewal on the part of the learner."

(vi) It requires "the supernatural operation of the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son in order to apprehend the Truth"

(vii) It must be reckoned that Truth "may put the learner at variance with the world"

[Italics original quotations and structure from pp. xxiii-xl, TF Torrance, The School of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church.]

Thomas F Torrance MP3s

This is all I know about (let me know if you know anymore):

• 7 Talks delivered at Union Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland (hosted by Ben Myers)
• 3 MP3s of Donald Macleod and Tom Torrance on Scottish Theology (Rutherford House - please consider donating)
• 10 lectures on the Ground and Grammar of Theology delivered at Fuller Theological Seminary (hosted by GCI)
• Talk on 'Theological Instinct' delivered at Regent College (pay to download)
• 3 lectures on the Mediation of Christ delivered at Regent College (pay to download)

Fulfilled from both sides

[In the Old Covenant, God] wills to be a father to his people, and desires his people to be his children. 'I will be your Father, and you will be my children. I am holy, therefore be you holy. Walk before me and be perfect.' [cf. Lev 26:12; 2 Sam 7:14; Lev 11:44; Gen 17:1]

[In sending his Son] God fulfils the covenant from the side of God, 'I will be your God, your Father', and fulfils the covenant from the side of man, 'I will be your obedient child'. This is the mighty act of the incarnation which is at once the act of God's humiliation and the act of man's exaltation, for he who in such amazing grace descended to make our lost cause his own, ascended in accomplishment of his task, elevating man into union and communion with the life of God.

(pp. 56-57, TF Torrance, The Incarnation)

Glorious isolation?

"We cannot compare the fact of Christ with other facts, nor can we deduce the fact of Christ from our knowledge of other facts... we cannot understand [the fact of Christ] in terms of other facts"

(p.1, TF Torrance, Incarnation)

I think that's half right. We cannot deduce Christ from other facts, but to understand him we do need to compare him with other things.

Theology is not a conversation that faith has with itself, it is not a monologue, but it is a critical engagement with doctrines, ideas, and ideologies inimical to the faith of the church. It only becomes what it is meant to be by engaging with objections and entering into disputes.... faith should be no stranger to conflict and dispute if its charter is: "I am the Lord, your God. You shall have no other gods besides me!"

we cannot examine the claim [of Christ] in isolation but only with reference to other things. Without such points of reference, we cannot even articulate the necessary contradictions. For proof of this, we only have to look at 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16, Romans 1:18-3:20, and Acts 17. Only an a priori Christological construct, divorced from all connections with life and suffering, could exist in glorious isolation because it spins everything out of itself.

(p.187, Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way)

Contingent Rationality and Science

[I'm not sure that I fully understand Torrance fully, so please point out any errors in my interpretation.]

"Natural science tacitly assumes the contingence, as well as the orderliness, of the universe. If there were no order immanent in the universe, if there were chaos and not a cosmos, the universe would not be accessible to scientific knowledge; if the universe were not characterized by contingence, the laws of nature would be derived from it immediately and necessarily through logico-deductive processes without experimental questioning of nature to induce it to yield its secrets - which would make empirical science quite pointless. It is through relying on the indissoluble bond between contingence and order in the universe that natural science has come to operate with the distinctive interconnection between experiment and theory which has characterized our greatest advances in knowledge of the physical world. Yet we cannot prove that there is order in the universe, for we have to assume it in order even to attempt proof of it; while genuine contingence is something that natural science on its own cannot come up with, but is rather something that natural science, through its ways of determining regularities in nature and formulating universal laws, is always on the point of resolving away. Quite evidently science must assume conceptions and principles that are themselves not logically derivable, explainable, or provable, but without which it could not function. Contingence and order are assumptions of that kind"

(pp. 26-27, Divine and Contingent Order)

How can you know that there is an order to the universe? How can you assume that it is understandable?

We assume order all the time. Inductive reasoning is based on it, and science is just the most refined example of this. But it is not provable, as David Hume and others have shown. In faith scientists commit to trying to understand the order of the world, without being able to prove that order exists to understand. However, Christianity provides the support for believing in an ordered universe because it believes the universe was created by God who is reliable, rational and loving.

Why do we use experiments to understand the order in the universe?

Scientists in faith believe that the way to understand the world is empirical research. Their whole enterprise is founded on this commitment. Why not assume that the world must be a certain way? Why not assume that the order of the universe is necessarily X? That was what the Greeks tended to do and that was why they also tended to think that "its regularities and laws can be discovered by pure a priori thought alone" (p. 31, ibid). However, if the universe is contingent then we cannot use reason alone to understand it. If it is contingent we expect it to constantly challenge our attempts to understand it, and so we perform endless experiments to understand from nature what its laws are. However, again it is Christianity that provides the support for believing in a contingent universe. In opposition to prevailing Greek thought and on the authority of the Bible it rejected the idea that the universe (and God) had to be a certain way. It insisted on the freedom of the personal Creator, and so gave the foundations for assuming that the way to understand nature is endless experiments.

To quote Torrance again:

"It is through being correlated to the endless possibilities of the Creator, that the universe is endowed with innate power constantly to surprise us in its manifestation of unexpected features and structures which nevertheless always turn out to be consistent with its other features and structures. What else is that but a manifestation of its contingent intelligibility and indeed its objective reality over which we have no control? This intelligibility of the created universe, its intrinsic orderliness, consistency, and reliability, is the ground of our confidence in scientific inquiry, but it is the contingent nature of that intelligibility which makes the universe attract and challenge the most arduous and unremitting scientific effort, and gives discovery its immense excitement" (p. 40, ibid).

Modern science flourished in Western Europe, to a degree not seen in other cultures where it existed but did not flourish, because of the Biblical teaching about our Creator. The biblical worldview has now been largely cut away but that was the origin of the foundations it is now built on.

Our representative and substitute

I've been listening to Oliver Crisp lecture on the atonement today as I go about my daily business. He identifies several theories of the atonement:

1. Penal substitution - Calvin, Evangelicalism
2. non-Penal substitution (vicarious repentance view) - John McLeod Campbell
3. Penal non-substitution (Governmental view) - Hugo Grotius, 19th Cent Methodists
4. Satisfaction - Anselm
5. Christus Victor (Ransom view)- Early fathers?, Gustaf Aulén
6. Moral-Influence - Peter Abelard, 19th Cent Liberals

I could say a lot about theories of the atonement but won't bore you with them at the moment. But as I was listening to all the complexities of the theories as Oliver Crisp described them I remembered this comment of TF Torrance that I heard some time ago but which I keep coming back to. I think it makes a very important point:

We have to bring together and sink into each other the concepts of representation and substitution in order to grasp the vicarious mission and role of Jesus in his humanity.

If we were to work with representation alone, where Christ represents us and therefore represents what we do, that would be a Pelagian or a semi-Pelagian understanding of the atonement. And by-and-large that is often put forward.

If we were to have a stress on substitution alone, in which Christ takes our place detached from us, then that would be something that he did over our head and that had no relevance to us.

But if we combine these two, as you should combine, and as they are certainly already combined for example in the Isaianic songs about the Servant, then we have an act of substitution which takes place in the depths of our humanity where our humanity is taken up and therefore the atonement is made to issue out of our humanity as humanity's offering toward God. And then of course it is fundamentally relevant to each and all of us in the depths of our own humanity.

(23:35-24:55 "Christ's Mediation/Human Response", Lecture 3 of The Mediation of Christ)

[BTW The Crisp lectures are some hard-core metaphysics that I've only read in the likes of Anselm and Augustine. I suppose it has been my first taste of modern philosophical theology. I am left with a lot of admiration for the brains of those involved but a feeling that it is of limited helpfulness. Also BTW my breakdown of what he said about the different theories may not be quite right as I did it from memory (Interestingly, Theopedia has a slightly different taxonomy of Atonement theories which is quite helpful).]

Is God really like Jesus?

Now if God is not what he is towards us in Jesus Christ then of course there is no fidelity between what God is towards us and what he is in Jesus Christ, and therefore the revelation is not ultimately trustworthy, it is not ultimately something upon which all our knowledge of God can rest.

But tie that up also with the love of God. If what we have in Jesus, the love so manifest and embodied in Jesus, is not rooted in the very being of God. If God himself is not loving us and acting out his love in the life and death of Jesus, then that means that God does not love us to the uttermost, to the extent that he really became one with us in the incarnation and cross of Christ.

That means that there is no essential real connection between what we call 'love' defined by Jesus and what God is in his own being; and so we cannot say that God is love. And so cut the bond of being between Christ and God and we are left in the dark with an inscrutable deity behind the back of Jesus Christ. Now, a manifestation of God for which Jesus Christ does not, as it were, go bail or for which he is not a sure pledge.

Now pastorally this is one of the most fearful thing that can afflict people. I remember on the battlefield a soldier with only half an hour to live asking me 'padre, is God really like Jesus' and I can remember people in the parish wondering whether God was ultimately really like Jesus or not. You see behind the back of Jesus they've got some concept of God that is dark and terrifying.

(Tom Torrance in one of the MP3 Mediation of Christ lectures - I can't remember which)

The approach to God

Tom Torrance remembers a trip to the Sinai desert:

Night after night we made our camp in the wilderness, and as the darkness fell we gathered sticks of acacia and camelthorn, the dry sapless bushes of the desert, with which to make a fire. They burned up so quickly and brilliantly, but almost as soon they died away. They had so little substance that when kindled they were consumed almost immediately.

I always thought of Moses when that happened, and his astonishment at the fire in the desert that did not die down. But what was even more astonishing was that the bush itself was not consumed but remained intact [...]

What are we to see in [the burning bush]? Fire that is steady and undying, fire that burns and does not burn away, fire that has no tendency to destruction in its own nature, and fire that is not consumed by its own activity. Surely all that may well be taken as a symbol of the One divine Being whose being derives its law and life from itself [...]

But here is a remarkable fact in this Old Testament record that we must consider: The fire of God had no destructive nature - on the contrary it gave life - but immediately Moses approached the burning bush there leapt out of its flames a voice of urgent command: "Draw not nigh hither put off they shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Instantly, Moses knew that his life was threatened [...] Now why was it that although the fire carried no threat to the desert bush, but rather enhanced its life, yet when Moses came near, it terrified him and menaced his soul? Burning in this bush and not consuming it was the eternal flame of the life of God, the power of an endless life, the inexhaustible source of love. This is the very God to whom all men aspire, and for whom our mortal souls pant. Human beings grow weary and decay and crumble away into the dust, but here is the fountain of unending life, life that burns like a fire, so gently that it does not burn or consume [...]

Moses draws near, but immediately he is thrust back, and he is afraid because he is a sinner. He is unclean, and God is infinitely holy, and in the presence of sin even God's love is as a consuming fire [...] How are we, then, to approach Him? How can we share in the life and the love which He offers to us, who are sinners? [...]

Jesus washes the feet of the disciples and makes them clean, and in which through the Holy Supper He gives them to participate in the life and love of God.

(pp.127-135, When Christ Comes and Comes Again)

That is a bit of a long quote. But I thought it was about time I gave you a taste of When Christ Comes and Comes Again which is a beautifully written book of evangelistic sermons by the young(ish) Tom Torrance. Highly recommended, although you will have to get it second hand.

Theocentric or anthroprocentric?

Reading Tom Torrance is great because he gets how exciting and shocking it is that God became man in Jesus Christ. He has taught me to see that this is central to everything, while never losing what PT Forsyth says is 'the true seat of Incarnation — a Christ made sin' ("Immanence and Incarnation"). This post is a bit of an application of that...

Listening to a recent discussion on Wright and Piper's debate I was reminded about how both see much contemporary Christianity as too anthroprocentric, and not theocentric enough. I've never been completely happy with drawing a sharp distinction between the two as humanity is made in the image of God. Therefore to be truly anthroprocentric is to be theocentric.

But we can go further in rejecting this dichotomy.

Both Wright and Piper are part of the Reformed tradition and so this also reminded me of John Halton's post quoting Herman Bavinck saying that 'the Reformed Christian thinks theologically, the Lutheran anthropologically' (RD 1:177). John says that he would like to say that 'the Lutheran thinks Christologically' and to be Christocentric is to combine the two in the God-man.

In Christ the true God is revealed, but we are less familiar with the idea that he also reveals our true humanity. For some reason we have focused on all the NT statements that Jesus is the image of God (e.g. 2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3, cf. John 1:18; 12:45; 14:9) as just referring to his divinity and missed the implication that this shows his humanity as well.

As Tom Smail comments:

Christ is both the divine prototype that is stamped on to our humanity and so imparts to it the divine image, and is also the human being who has received that image and is the perfect expression of it. In the rest of us, in our over-flexible human nature, that image has been eroded and distorted but in Christ it is fresh and new, authentic and complete.

(p. 59, Like Father, Like Son)

So if we want to be free to be ourself we have to look to Christ. But not by following his example, because we cannot be the image of God, but by being in the image of God by his gracious identification with us in our sinful twisted humanity.

Adam is, as is said in [Romans 5:14], the type of Him who is to come. Man's essential and original nature is to be found, therefore, not in Adam but in Christ. In Adam we can only find it prefigured. Adam can therefore be interpreted only in the light of Christ and not the other way round.

(p. 29, Karl Barth cited in Tom Smail, Like Father, Like Son)

What is the point of Mark 13?

Mark 13 caused me some considerable vexation when we reached it in Christianity Explored. I find it difficult because much of it seems to point toward the passion narrative, some seems to fit better with the early church (pre 70AD?), but some of it doesn't seem to have happened at all. However, this is perhaps only a problem if we assume that Jesus is giving a straight answer to the disciples' question ('when will these things be, and what will be the sign when all these things are about to be accomplished?') which would be most unlike him. I decided to see what the explicit commands that Jesus gives were to get more of a handle on the passage. They are:

• 'See that no one leads you astray' (v.5)
• 'do not be alarmed' (v.7)
• 'be on your guard' (v.9)
• 'do not be anxious' when before governors and kings about 'what you are to say' (v.11)
• 'Pray that it may not happen in winter' (v.18)
• 'if anyone says to you, "Look, here is the Christ!" or "Look, there he is!" do not believe it' (v.21)
• 'be on guard' (v.23)
• 'know that he is near' (v.29)
• 'Be on guard, keep awake' (v.33)
• 'stay awake' (v.35)
• 'Stay awake' (v.37)

Jesus is not concerned that we know when the end will come because no-one but the Father knows that (v.32). In that respect he doesn't answer the disciples' question. Instead he is concerned that we are aware that the day could come at any moment, but that nevertheless we shouldn't panic when signs of this appear.

Perhaps Tom Torrance is right when he comments on Mark 13:

He has told us that [his second coming] will be sudden, and just when we expect it least, like a thief in the night. But there are signs of His coming. They are not signs that tell us when He will come, but signs and pledges telling us unmistakably that the end will come, as surely as day follows night, and that world-history will be brought to a close [...]

God gives us signs in history like that, not in order to predict the time of Christ's coming but to keep us faithful to our task of preaching the Gospel to all nations, and serving of our fellow-men in acts of unstinting love.

(pp. 21-22, When Christ Comes and Comes Again)

I'm still not sure, but I'm still thinking.

Abstracting doctrine

As I read systematics I increasingly find that so much that contemporary biblical studies thinks it is 'discovering' in the bible was actually being batted around by systematic theologians a generation before. I'm not sure whether I should find this disturbing or not.

Anyway, a recent example of this was reading TF Torrance criticising the Reformed Catechisms:

None of them really gives us Christian doctrine in its inseparable relation to the whole history of redemption in Israel, to the whole life of the historical Jesus Christ, and to the Baptism of the Spirit at Pentecost and the founding of the Christian Church. Certain great moments of the Heilsgeshichte are singled out, the creation and fall of man, the giving of the Law, the birth of Jesus, His crucifixion and resurrection and ascension, but Christian doctrine cannot be abstracted from the whole course of God's intervention in Israel, and the whole course of teh life work of Christ, without alteration and misunderstanding.

(p.xx, The School of Faith)

I think I need to hear that again and again. I too often go abstract. I can almost hear Tom Wright in my head sometimes when I read Romans these days. He would agree passionately with Torrance's comment written in 1959!