Speaking of the trinity, here's a letter that T. F. Torrance sent to an Australian minister back in 1984, responding to a question about the filioque. Torrance explains his criticism of the filioque and why he thinks Athanasius is better than the Cappadocians. Many thanks to Murray Earl for allowing me to post this.
(PS: I imagine it's one of the high-points of being a minister, that you can receive mail addressed to The Manse.)
The T. F. Torrance Fellowship has released the first issue of its new journal, Participatio: The Journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship. It's available for free download, and this first issue features contributions by Ray Anderson, Paul Molnar, Alister McGrath, George Hunsinger, and others.
Meanwhile, Ashgate have released Myk Habet's new monograph on Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance; and they'll soon also be releasing Paul Molnar's much-anticipated 400-page whopper, Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity.
A guest-post by George Hunsinger (responding to the recent exchange between me, Travis and David – you can find all the links here)
Without attempting to address all the points raised in the recent discussion, I would like to offer the following reflections.
1. There is a difference between theological journalism and theological scholarship. The latter makes measured judgments and works closely with texts. The former traffics in sweeping generalizations and big fuzzy ideas like “substance metaphysics” and “actualistic ontology.” Such notions are of little use for understanding either Torrance or Barth.
2. No theologian in recent times has made a clearer connection than Torrance between the Incarnation and the Cross, and between Christ’s bodily Resurrection and his Ascension. Torrance states repeatedly that the Incarnation is the precondition of the Atonement as completed in the Cross, and that the Cross is the inner fulfillment of the Incarnation. Neither can be had without the other. Moreover, the Cross of Christ, for Torrance, as grounded in the Incarnation, necessarily carries intercessory and vicarious significance for the world’s salvation. Finally, Christ’s Resurrection not only serves uniquely to reveal him as the Incarnate Son, but also to elevate him into eternal life, where he intercedes perpetually for the church and the world until the end of all things.
3. No Reformed theologian since John Owen has had a firmer grasp than Torrance of Christ’s priestly mediation. His contribution here, which I believe surpasses Barth, is of inestimable significance. Barth was arguably less solid than Torrance about how to grant proper centrality to the New Testament’s cultic metaphors – blood, sacrifice, access, intercession, vicarious representation, expiation, etc. – in a way that rightly displaced the forensic metaphors dominant in the West, while still affirming and preserving them. Torrance’s grasp of the eucharist was therefore of greater ecumenical promise than anything in Barth.
4. The mediation of Christ, as understood by Torrance, was essentially an elaboration of passages like this from Barth: “But what does it mean to take the place of man, to be Himself a man, to be born of a woman? It means for Him, too, God’s Son, God Himself, that He came under the Law …, that He stepped into the heart of the inevitable conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of man. He took this conflict into His own being. He bore it in Himself to the bitter end. He took part in it from both sides. He endured it from both sides. He was not only the God who is offended by man. He was also the man whom God threatens with death, who falls a victim to death in face of God’s judgment. If He really entered into solidarity with us – and that is just what He did do – it meant necessarily that He took upon Himself, in likeness to us, … the ‘flesh of sin’ (Rom 8:3). He shared in the status, constitution and situation of man in which man resists God and cannot stand before Him but must die” (II/1, p. 397). Like Barth, Torrance stressed that there is no system (no ontology) by which such affirmations can be explained. They are either understood out of themselves or not at all.
5. Torrance’s idea about “ontological healing” was an attempt to re-think the doctrine of sanctification. It attempted to place it within the frame of Christ’s incarnational mediation, in which our Lord “took this conflict into his own being” and “took part in it from both sides,” including therefore from the human side. Like Barth, only more so, Torrance explained both our justification and our sanctification by means of Christ’s obedient humanity. For sanctification this meant that regeneration took place in Christ before it took place in us. For Torrance there was one sanctification common to Christ and the church, and it was ours only by virtue of our participation in him (unio mystica).
6. I think Torrance would have done better to describe this regeneration of fallen humanity in Christ by resorting to Calvin’s terms of “mortification” and “vivification.” Instead he used the metaphor of “healing,” taken from Nazianzen’s famous saying that “the unassumed is the unhealed.” Torrance’s proposal was arguably better than the metaphor used to advance it. But his grasp of sanctification’s objective pole as anchored in the Incarnation was simply an elaboration (not a contradiction) of sanctification as developed by Barth. Admittedly the actualistic motif was sharper in Barth than in Torrance, but it was by no means absent from Torrance, and more than actualism is to be found in Barth.
7. Like Hans W. Frei and Eberhard Jüngel, Torrance thought with Barth and beyond Barth, while also sometimes against him. Barth himself had occasion to insist: “Ich bin kein Barthianer!” Torrance shows himself to be a true “Barthian,” because Barth would have had it no other way.
Last month, I made a short (impromptu) video for the Sydney discussion group, Theology & Praxis. My talk was entitled “Why I Think T. F. Torrance is Not a Barthian.” Although the video is no longer available online, Travis has provided a summary of my talk, together with a very thoughtful, detailed response. When I can find a few spare moments, I might try to write a brief response to Travis as well – but in the meantime, be sure to check out his excellent post: Why I think Ben Myers is not quite right about Torrance.
by Kim Fabricius
The Independent features an obituary of T. F. Torrance, who was undoubtedly the greatest British theologian of the 20th century.
The obituarist David Fergusson rightly points to the immense contribution that Professor Torrance made to the dialogue between theology and science – or rather between the science of theology and the science of nature. Only in the English-speaking world do we find the ideological reductionism that cedes the natural sciences hegemony over the rational and critical investigation of reality and allows the likes of Richard Dawkins fraudulently to prosper.
David Fergusson remarks on the conflict between Torrance and his colleague James Barr, citing Torrance’s stinging remark that “Barr had been a brilliant tailgunner in the RAF and had carried on shooting throughout his academic life.” At least Barr shot at moving targets. Dawkins prefers shooting fish in a barrel to taking on the great whales like Torrance who would have him for breakfast.
A guest-post by George Hunsinger
Thomas Forsyth Torrance (1913-2007), who died peaceably in Edinburgh on December 2nd, 
was arguably the greatest Reformed theologian since Karl Barth, with whom he studied, and an eminent 20th century ecumenist. Having served for 27 years as Professor of Christian Dogmatics at New College, he was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1976; and in 1978, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion for his contributions to the emerging field of theology and science.
In theology he generally placed himself somewhere between Calvin and Barth, though also moving well beyond them. An accomplished patristics scholar, he devoted himself to Eastern Orthodox–Reformed dialogue, being highly esteemed among the Orthodox for his ecumenical spirit and his grasp of primary sources in the original languages. He once surprised me by saying that his favorite theologian was Athanasius, whom he placed in illuminating relationship with Barth. An icon of the great Alexandrian appears as the frontispiece to his The Trinitarian Faith (1988), an exposition of the Nicene Creed which remains perhaps the most accessible of his numerous learned works.
Besides the theologian, the ecumenist, and the church leader, there were at least three other Torrances: the translator, the interdisciplinary theologian, and the historian of doctrine. English-speaking theology stands greatly in his debt for his monumental efforts in editing and translating not only Calvin’s New Testament commentaries but also Barth’s voluminous dogmatics. His interest in Einstein and modern physics from the standpoint of Nicene Christianity has yet to be adequately assessed. Least well known, perhaps, is his work as an intellectual historian. Scattered throughout many journals is a series of essays on virtually every major figure in the history of doctrine, though alongside Athanasius he had a special fondness for Gregory Nazianzen and Hilary of Poitiers.
In breadth of learning, depth of scholarship, quality of output, ecumenical conviction, and devotion to the Nicene faith, theology and church will not soon see another like him.
I’ve just heard the sad news that Thomas F. Torrance died today, 2 December 2007, at 
2:45 am. Torrance’s work has profoundly shaped and influenced the contemporary theological landscape; Alister McGrath was right to describe him as “the greatest British theologian of the twentieth century.”
Torrance’s contributions to theology have included editing the English translation of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, founding the Scottish Journal of Theology, pioneering Reformed–Eastern Orthodox ecumenical dialogue, and authoring dozens of works on constructive theology. His most significant dogmatic works focused on the doctrine of the Trinity and on the relation between theology and science.
In an earlier post, Ray Anderson has spoken of Torrance’s deep personal faith – a faith which resonates through all his theological endeavours: “Born in China of Scottish missionary parents, Torrance was as comfortable talking about his personal relationship with Jesus as he was lecturing to an assembly of world class physicists.”
The recent post on Badiou led to some interesting discussion about the theological idea of mediation – and I admitted that I’m extremely unenthusiastic about T. F. Torrance’s notion of Jesus’ “high-priestly mediation in heaven.” In case anyone wants to continue this discussion, here’s a re-post of one of my comments:
The Letter to the Hebrews interprets Jesus’ saving work typologically via a range of cultic categories. I think we can accept and appreciate all this – but it’s another thing to reify these very categories, so that (as in Torrance’s theology) they are turned into pure mythology.
My own impression is that we can do full justice to the soteriological message of Hebrews, without getting involved in this kind of reification. The writer to the Hebrews uses various cultic and Jewish-Alexandrian categories to articulate the significance of what took place in Jesus. But if we reify these categories, we end up with an inversion of the whole message – i.e., the death and resurrection of Jesus are eclipsed, and the action of God is removed from real history and located instead in some distant Platonic “heaven.”
To my mind, that’s exactly what happens in Torrance’s theology: his mythological portrayal of a “high-priestly mediation in heaven” actually results in the opposite of what the Letter to the Hebrews intends – i.e., it leads away from the sheer eventfulness of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Thus, while Torrance believes he is improving on Barth at this point, he is in fact radically undermining the whole impulse of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation!
I have a lot of admiration for Torrance’s work – but I reckon his conception of a mediation that takes place “in heaven” is a theological dead end.
Here is a series of mp3 files (4.2 hours in total) of some lectures which Thomas F. Torrance gave at Union Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the early 1980s:
You can hear the final part of T. F. Torrance’s lecture-series here (43 minutes), or you can get the podcast feed.
You can hear the next two parts of T. F. Torrance’s lecture-series here (24 minutes) and here (31 minutes), or you can get the podcast feed.
You can hear the next part of T. F. Torrance’s lecture-series here (1:01 hours), or you can get the podcast feed.
You can hear the next two parts of Torrance’s lectures here and here (or you can get the podcast feed).
Recently, a reader from the UK got in touch with me about some T. F. Torrance audio lectures. He had old cassette copies of a lecture series that Torrance gave at Union Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland, some time in the early 1980s. This reader was kind enough to convert the audio cassettes to mp3, and he has sent me the series of lectures as eight mp3 files (4.2 hours in total). This is a great resource – as far as I know, there are no other lectures by Torrance available online.
So I’ll be posting these lectures as podcasts over the next couple of weeks. The quality varies – unfortunately, the quality is poorer in the first lecture, and the start of the first lecture seems to be missing. (If you happen to know how to edit mp3 files, I’m sure you could improve the sound-quality; please send me an email if you’d like to volunteer for this job.)
Anyway, here’s the first 32-minute instalment: you can listen to it here, or you can get the podcast feed here.
There is a growing number of books on the theology of T. F. Torrance, but if you were going to buy just one, you’d want to get Alister McGrath’s important work, Thomas F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999). This volume has just been released in an attractive new paperback edition, and the good people at Allen & Unwin (via their marketing guru Drew) have been kind enough to send me a copy.
McGrath’s work offers both an overview of Torrance’s life (supplemented with lots of nice photos) and an account of the development of his theology, with particular focus on Torrance’s relationship to Karl Barth. And while other studies of Torrance rely solely on published materials, McGrath also closely analyses Torrance’s unpublished lectures on dogmatics from the late 1930s. As McGrath shows, this unpublished material is especially valuable for grasping the early shape and development of Torrance’s thought.
Further, this book is important not only for an understanding of Torrance, but also for an understanding of McGrath’s own recent work on the relationship between theology and science. His three-volume Scientific Theology (also abridged as The Science of God) is indebted above all to Torrance – McGrath describes Torrance as his theological “role model,” and he dedicated the first volume of his Scientific Theology to Torrance.
A guest-post by Ray S. Anderson
I went to Edinburgh in 1970 to study under Tom Torrance after reading Theology in Reconstruction (1965) and Theological Science (1969), both of which are heavily underlined, marking my first introduction to an incarnational theology presented with scientific rigor, and grounded in a trinitarian epistemology of the self-revealing act of God. “We are not concerned simply with a divine revelation which demands from us all a human response,” he wrote, “but with a divine revelation which already includes a true and appropriate and fully human response as part of his achievement for us and to us and in us” (TIR, 131).
After sitting in his lectures for two years and writing my dissertation under his direction, I came to appreciate even more the deeply devotional, even pietistic life of faith that lay hidden behind his often forbidding erudition and the semantic thicket of his writing. Born in China of Scottish missionary parents, he was as comfortable talking about his personal relationship with Jesus as he was lecturing to an assembly of world class physicists (as he did on the occasion of the anniversary of Einstein’s 100th birthday).
In 1986 I spent a week with him in Hong Kong where we were both invited to present lectures and dialogue with Confucionist scholars on eastern and western versions of human nature. It was there, sharing a flat with him where we cooked our own breakfast, that I finally dared to make the transition from being “his student” to a colleague, brother in Christ and personal friend—a transition made difficult only by my own deference to his immense learning, but made easy by the grace of his own humanity.
Now, after publishing more than two dozen books (including his forthcoming lectures in dogmatic theology), and having suffered a minor stroke some time ago, 92-year-old Professor Torrance lives in an assisted care facility in Edinburgh. When one of my former students recently visited him and asked, “Are you not bored just sitting here?” Tom replied, “Oh no, I am talking to the Lord.” When asked if he had a message for me, he replied: “Yes, tell him I am going to heaven soon.”
As one of the primary translators of Barth and one whose theology follows in that tradition, Torrance has made his own indelible mark as a post-Barthian, evangelically situated theologian. He is often misunderstood, and he is sometimes caricatured for his “take no prisoners” approach to the defense of the faith. But I love him for all of that!
The 2006 Templeton Prize has just been announced, and it has been awarded to Cambridge cosmologist John D. Barrow. The prestigious prize is awarded for a contribution to the dialogue between science and religion, and it comes with 795,000 pounds sterling (about US $1.4 million).
In his nomination of Barrow, Thomas Torrance described Barrow’s contribution: “The hallmark of his work is a deep engagement with those aspects of the structure of the universe and its laws that make life possible and which shape the views that we take of that universe when we examine it.... [This] has lead to a huge expansion of the breadth and depth of the dialogue between science and religion.”
For more details, see the report here; and you can read Barrow’s own reflections here.
My “greatest living theologian” poll seemed to attract more comments than votes. But although only 37 people voted, a clear winner emerged: T. F. Torrance, the only English-language theologian on the list, who claimed 35% of the votes. In second place was Jürgen Moltmann (27%), followed by Wolfhart Pannenberg (22%), and then Hans Küng (8%) and Eberhard Jüngel (8%).
The Incarnation is “the chosen path of God’s rationality in which he interacts with the world and establishes such a relation between creaturely being and Himself that He will not allow it to slip away from Him into futility or nothingness, but upholds and confirms it as that which He has made and come to redeem.”
—T. F. Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 67.
T. F. Torrance is my favourite British theologian, and his work has influenced me deeply (especially his work on science, theological method, and the Trinity). Although I have read most of his books, I have never read his collection of sermons, When Christ Comes and Comes Again (London: Hodder, 1957).
So imagine my delight when yesterday I received a lovely first edition of this book, sent to me all the way from Scotland by Mike Bird. Thanks Mike!
Incidentally, if you’re interested in Torrance, I’ve written an article on his trinitarian theology which will appear later this year in the Scottish Journal of Theology.
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