40 Bicycles

Someone visited today and offered me a few books that he was clearing out from his library. One was on Jewish apocalyptic, another on posttribulational rapture (I don’t see myself reading this in a hurry!) and the final one was Reality and Evangelical Theology by Thomas Torrance. This book looks particularly interesting and should provide me with much food for thought (with things both to agree and disagree with). Kurt Anders Richardson writes in the foreword:—

Theology is not philosophical argument for the knowability of God, because God has already given us real knowledge of himself in Jesus Christ. Even more, this knowledge of God reorients all of our knowing and thinking about all that is not God. For evangelicals this is a realist knowledge of God—a knowledge independent of preconceived notions or speculations. This is not a naïve realism nor even a critical realism that establishes the fact of the knowledge of God before it is learned. It is not a priori knowing but a posteriori knowing; Torrance presses for our basic comprehension of this throughout all his books. A posteriori knowing of God, that which is already given to us by revelation in the gospel of Jesus Christ and in the Scriptures, is a theological or evangelical realism.

…

The realism of Christian theology becomes apparent, claims Torrance, as the result of deep, intelligible contact with the reality of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit within the communion of believers. This is evangelical or theological realism because while it is human knowledge, it is continually shaped and corrected in us by the Word of God in Scripture. It is also critical realism but in a very special sense. It is critical in terms of criteria outside of ourselves, namely, in terms of Scripture and the living God of Jesus Christ, which are constantly spurring us on to know God and to serve him in Spirit and in truth. Theological realism, further, is critical because God and Scripture are not methodological principles but entities that act on us as knowers and lovers of God. Scripture, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, becomes an active agent in our reading. God, on whom we meditate as a result of our being vitally informed by Scripture, acts on our knowledge as well. The same Holy Spirit guides our understanding and ultimately our theological formulations in order that our theological account of what we know will be ever more appropriate to his being and acting.

Torrance criticizes the dualistic epistemology of fundamentalism and its static view of revelation. He argues that we need to move beyond the subject/object division and advocate a way of knowing ‘in which the personal and the objective are fused together in the activity of establishing contact with reality and its intrinsic rationality.’ He stresses the ‘church-conditioned’ and ‘church-orientated’ nature of true theology. I like this statement:—

It is, I believe, still within the matrix of the Eucharistic worship and meditation upon the Holy Scriptures, and evangelical experience in the fellowship and mission of the church, that the empirical and theoretical components in our knowledge of God are found fused together, in a kind of stereoscopic coordination of perceptual and auditive images, and thus provide us with the cognitive instruments we need for explicit theological understanding of God’s interaction with us.

The theological work of the church is carried out within the context established by the Eucharistic life of the church. Torrance describes the type of theology that arises from this as fluid dogmatics. This theology is progressively modified as the realities are disclosed to us by God and our formulations are open structures. We should always distinguish between the truth itself and our dogmatic formulations of it. Indeed, Torrance argues, the inadequacy of our dogmatic formulations is an essential part of their truth as they point away from themselves to the objective reality that they are grounded upon.