Abstract
Although he remained undeservedly marginal to the mainstream of Anglo-Saxon British theology between the 1950s and the 1980s, Thomas F. Torrance was taken very seriously in the much bigger Protestant and Presbyterian theological pond, especially in America and Germany. As a young theologian, working on theological methodology, I cut my teeth on his demanding works on ‘theological science’, and this advanced introduction will enable a new generation of keen postgraduate students to get to grips with the vast range of Torrance’s work. The range of contributors, most of whom seem to have published monographs on Torrance’s thought, is ecumenical in complexion, which is fitting because Torrance was an outstanding ecumenist (with a special regard for the Church of England). This is not a sanitized or uncritical presentation of the theological achievement of Thomas F. Torrance: some contributors seem to be biting their tongues quite a lot, stifling their exasperation at some aspects of the Torrance phenomenon.
The God of Jesus was ever present to Torrance’s heart and mind. Unashamedly, he approached theology ‘from above’, beginning from what he believed to be given in divine revelation – supremely, of course, in Jesus Christ as he is testified to primarily in the Scriptures, and secondarily in the Church’s proclamation, confession and liturgy. Intoxicated by the imaginative power and the academic reputation of the philosophy of the physical sciences, Torrance appeared to regard divine revelation as though it were a kind of empirical datum to be explored and expounded. Torrance was not troubled by the contingencies, uncertainties and probabilities that attach to the whole question of revelation and the scriptural testimony to it. In expounding the Scriptures, which he did extensively, he passed up the debatable issues of provenance, authorship and textual history. Neither did he fully face up to the challenge of the fact that multiple, frequently incompatible, interpretations of the same scriptural passages have competed for acceptance in the Church over the centuries. He did not waver in his rather daunting confidence that his interpretation of the Scriptures and of the theological tradition was the only correct one.
Nevertheless, Torrance’s major theological axioms are well taken: that God can only be known through God; that the nature of the object of our enquiry must govern the method that we pursue; that God is not so much the ‘object’ as the ‘subject’ in the revelatory encounter; that our questioning must be open-textured and responsive to the evidence; that repentant rethinking of preliminary positions is called for, and so on. Although Torrance professed to hold to a critical realism in relation to our knowledge of God, he has always seemed too much of an unmodulated realist to me. I want more apophaticism and divine darkness, and a greater recognition of the role of the symbolic in all human speech about the transcendent. I am also uncomfortable with his characteristic language of divine action with regard to the natural or historical order – the language of ‘intervention’, ‘insertion’ and ‘penetration’. Where is divine immanence in this, God working from within God’s creation, the model of emergence? Torrance’s characteristic verbs about our apprehension of divine truth – ‘laying bare’, ‘stripping out’, ‘opening up’ and so on – are unpalatable. And although he insists that the persons of the Holy Trinity are not gendered, his heavy use of masculine pronouns for God, though of its time, is troubling today.
George Hunsinger contributes a perceptive Foreword and Paul D. Molnar, a distinguished exponent of Torrance, offers a concise Introduction. Ivor J. Davidson, on the vital topic ‘Why read Torrance today?’, is quite compressed and sometimes cryptic, though the majority of contributions are more accessible. David Fergusson is fascinating in locating Torrance within Scottish theology and Molnar is incisive on the relation between Karl Barth’s and Torrance’s positions. There are some quite demanding chapters on Torrance’s trinitarian theology. The chapter on Torrance’s philosophical and theological ‘personalism’ strangely fails to mention the influence of either his mentor at Edinburgh, the philosopher John Macmurray, or his friend and ally, the philosopher of science and of society Michael Polanyi. Kate Tyler from New Zealand provides a very competent account of Torrance’s ecclesiology (she has recently published a full treatment: The Ecclesiology of Thomas F. Torrance). Torrance’s strenuous ecumenical work with a range of Christian traditions (notably the Greek Orthodox) is also given its due. His ministry of word and sacrament is attended to.
This book belongs in the new series of T&T Clark Handbooks. It is about half the size of the established series of interdisciplinary Oxford Handbooks, but a number of its chapters are more academically demanding. Unlike the Oxford Handbooks, it is not a true introduction to its field; generally it does not take the reader by the hand. It assumes a lot of basic knowledge of its themes. At its own level it is hugely helpful and should go straight into theological libraries. Devotees of Torrance – and there are many, especially in the USA – will lap it up. But it also deserves to be in the hands of doctoral-level students of systematic theology, ecclesiology and practical theology, and their teachers.