Guest post by © Dr Myk Habets, myk.habets@carey.ac.nz

From his reading of Barth Torrance derives the following principles, both theological and scientific, regarding a natural theology. Theologically, the God we come to know through Jesus Christ is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in his own eternal and undivided Being. Natural theology (of the traditional kind) can only bring to mind some Being of God in general, hence, natural theology abstracts the existence of God from his Act, so that if it does not begin with deism it ends up there.[1] However, if to know God through his saving Act in our world is to know him as Triune, then the doctrine of the Trinity belongs to the very ground and grammar of our knowledge of God (hence the title of one of his works).[2] Natural theology then has a legitimate place in Christian theology but a very localised place, it is posterior to that of revealed theology and not, as many sectors had made it, a praeambula fidei.[3] For this reason Torrance maintains that natural theology is the ‘rational infrastructure’ of revealed theology.[4] Another way of putting this same thing is to say that even natural theology is in service to the Christocentric theology evident in Calvin, Barth, and Torrance (indeed also in Luther!). Natural knowledge of God is not in competition with revealed knowledge through the Word and the Spirit within Calvin’s, Barth’s, or Torrance’s theology. Nature, illuminated by Scripture, reveals the work of the one God, the Spirit no less than the Father and the Son.

Scientifically, it is Torrance’s contention that Barth rejects all a priori assumptions of any kind but rather sees science, and so theology, as an a posteriori science, something Torrance has been concerned to expose. What Barth really rejects in traditional natural theology, according to Torrance, is not any invalidity in its argumentation, nor even its rational structure, but its independent character, abstracted from the self-disclosure of the Triune God.[5] The result of traditional natural theology is to create a dualism between the knowledge of God seen in terms of natural knowledge of the One God and revealed knowledge of the Triune God. When natural theology is once again brought within the orbit of a robust revealed theology then it can, as Barth suggested and Calvin maintained, be a useful and meaningful tool for Christian theology.[6] It is in this very specific sense then, that Torrance accepts and works with a natural theology.

It will be instructive to see at this point how Torrance is actually drawing on the theology of Calvin here more so than Barth apparently did. Calvin allowed natural theology (cognitio dei Creatoris) to play a major part in his theology and he too gave it a distinctive place, before that of the knowledge of God as Redeemer (cognitio dei Redemptoris).[7] In the early chapters of Book 1 of the Institutes Calvin develops a basis for a natural theology through a knowledge of ourselves as beings created in the imago Dei.[8] Due to our created image all people are able to discern a supreme Being, they may not call that Being God but the knowledge of God is there. Due to the fall this ‘natural’ knowledge must be supplemented with further revelation. However, Calvin does not see the knowledge of God in creation obliterated by the fall.[9] It simply needs supplementing. We would naturally expect this to be knowledge of the Redeemer but before Calvin enters into that he first mentions ‘the need of Scripture, as a guide and teacher, in coming to God as Creator.’[10] This takes Calvin’s discussion to the end of Book 1. With Book 2 he takes up the theme of the fall (2.1-5) and then centres on knowledge of God as Redeemer.

The whole human race having been undone in the person of Adam, the excellence and dignity of our origin, as already described, is so far from availing us, that it rather turns to our greater disgrace, until God, who does not acknowledge man when defiled and corrupted by sin as his own work, appear as a Redeemer in the person of his only begotten Son. Since our fall from life unto death, all that knowledge of God the Creator, of which we have discoursed, would be useless, were it not followed up by faith, holding forth God to us as a Father in Christ.[11]

Natural theology is not redundant, it is useful and indeed integral to a knowledge of God. However, while distinct, it is not a separate category from knowledge of God as Redeemer. As Alasdair Heron described this process within Calvin, ‘In the same way, however, that faith does not abolish or do away with the cognitio dei Creatoris, nor does it subsume it under the cognitio dei redemptoris. Instead, it establishes it in the fullest sense by setting humans once more in a proper relation to their Maker.’[12] Herein lie the limits of natural theology within Calvin, and strikingly within Torrance too.

Alongside Torrance’s close reading of Calvin in reformulating a natural theology we must also see the importance that the natural sciences have played in Torrance’s thinking. Where Torrance goes beyond Barth is in exploring the deeper connection between the basic concepts of theological science and natural science than Barth allowed for himself.[13] The result of this exploration is that natural theology should be natural both to theological science and to natural science. A natural science of this sort will necessitate dialogue between theological and natural science within their common sharing of the rational structures of space-time conferred on the universe by God in his creating of it, and within their common sharing in the basic conceptions of the unitary rationality of the universe, its contingent intelligibility, and contingent freedom (‘the three masterful ideas’ treated earlier).[14] As a consequence of Torrance’s natural theology is the idea, a favourite of his, that men and women, especially men and women involved in scientific endeavour, are the priests of creation.[15]

So far as theological science is concerned it is imperative that we operate with a triadic relation between God, man and world, or God, world and man: for it is this world unfolding its mysteries to our scientific questioning which is the medium of God’s revelation and of man’s responsible knowledge of him. This implies, however, once more, that there is a necessary and inescapable connection between theological concepts and physical concepts, spiritual and natural concepts, positive and natural science, for it is in that connection that the changed status of natural theology has its place.[16]

Like Calvin and Barth, Torrance is clear that natural theology plays an important role in Christian dogmatics, but not as some kind of necessary prolegomena but rather as an illustration or further illumination of God after God’s self-revelation through the incarnation.[17] In a 1969 work Torrance stated categorically that ‘it is no longer possible to operate scientifically with a separation between natural theology and revealed theology any more than between geometry and physics.’[18] In order to further explain what this connection is Torrance draws the following conclusions, which I quote here in full:

In theology, this means that natural theology cannot be undertaken apart from actual knowledge of the living God as a prior conceptual system of its own, or be developed as an independent philosophical examination of rational forms phenomenologically abstracted from their material content, all antecedent to positive theology. Rather must it be undertaken in an integrated unity with positive theology in which it plays an indispensable part in our inquiry and understanding of God. In this fusion ‘natural’ theology will suffer a dimensional change and will be made natural to the proper subject-matter of theology. No longer extrinsic but intrinsic to actual knowledge of God, it will function as a sort of ‘theological geometry’ within it, in which we are concerned to articulate the inner material logic of knowledge of God as it is mediated within the organized field of space-time.[19]

Torrance maintains that theology is scientific because of its objectivity, and he ‘moves natural theology from its previous position of prolegomena into positive theology proper.’[20] It is for this reason that Torrance’s doctrine of natural theology has been considered after an examination of his scientific theology and the relation between Christian theology and the natural sciences.[21]

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[1] As Torrance stated in T.F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: Handsel, 1976), 1:

I do not deny that there is a proper place for rational argumentation in what is traditionally known as ‘natural theology’, for I find it contradictory to operate with a deistic disjunction between God and the universe, which presupposes belief in the existence of God but assumes at the same time that he is utterly detached and unknowable … This demands, doubtless, a proper natural theology in which form and content, method and subject-matter, are not torn apart – that is, not a ‘natural theology’ as an independent conceptual system, antecedent to actual or empirical knowledge of God upon which it is then imposed, quite unscientifically, as a set of necessary epistemological presuppositions!

[2] T.F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980), 89.

[3] For Torrance’s definition and treatment of a Roman Catholic natural theology functioning as a praeambula fidei see: T.F. Torrance, ‘Preface,’ in Space, Time and Resurrection (1976. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), ix; idem., Reality and Evangelical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), 33; idem., The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980), 147; and idem., God and Rationality (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 133. Torrance concludes that a traditional Roman Catholic doctrine of natural theology functioning as a paeambula fidei resulted in Roman Catholic theology being subordinated to philosophical ontology, T.F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 178.

[4] T.F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), 61-62. Torrance borrowed the term ‘rational intrastructure’ from H. Bouillard, The Knowledge of God, trans. S.D. Femiano (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 62. Torrance considers Bouillard’s work on Barth’s natural theology to be of ‘outstanding importance,’ T.F. Torrance, ‘The Problem of Natural Theology in the Thought of Karl Barth,’ Religious Studies 6 (1970), 134.

[5] T.F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980), 90 and T.F. Torrance, ‘The Problem of Natural Theology in the Thought of Karl Barth,’ Religious Studies 6 (1970), 128, ‘…it becomes clear that what Barth objects to in natural theology is not its rational structure as such but its independent character, i.e. the autonomous rational structure which it develops on the ground of ‘nature alone’ in abstraction from the active self-disclosure of the living God.’ Perhaps the clearest and most concise articulation of Torrance’s position here is found in the ‘Preface’ to his work Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: Handsel, 1976), ix-x. See also T.F. Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation (1969. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 69-70.

[6] See T.F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), 39, The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980), 90-91, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge: Explorations in the Interrelations of Scientific and Theological Enterprise (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 293-295, and Theological Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 9-10. For Barth’s suggestion that natural theology is made clear through revealed theology see K. Barth, ‘Church and Culture,’ Theology and Church: Shorter Writings 1920-1928, trans. L. Pettibone Smith (London: SCM, 1962), 342. See J. Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion trans. H. Beveridge in 2 vols, (London: Clarke & Co, 1953), 2.6.1.

[7] See how Torrance works his way appreciatively through Calvin’s doctrine of the imago Dei and into the discussion on natural theology in T.F. Torrance, Calvin’s Doctrine of Man (London: Lutterworth, 1949), 154-183.

[8] This is clearly seen in the famous opening paragraphs of his magisterial work the 1559 Institutes 1.1.1-2:

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. . . On the other hand, it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he have previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. . .

See further in E.A. Dowey, ‘The Structure of Calvin’s Thought as Influenced by the Two-Fold Knowledge of God,’ in Calvinus Ecclesiae Genevensis Custos, edited by W. Neuser (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1984).

[9] Calvin, Institutes, 1.3.1 reads:

That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service.

[10] Calvin, Institutes, 1.6; 1.10. In 1.6.1-2 Calvin uses the famous analogy of likening the Scripture to a pair of spectacles.

[11] Calvin, Institutes, 2.6.1.

[12] A.I.C. Heron, ‘Homo Peccator and the Imago Dei According to John Calvin,’ in Incarnational Ministry: Essays in Honor of Ray S. Anderson, edited by C.D. Kettler and T.H. Speidell (Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1990), 42. Heron is self-consciously basing much of his discussion on a reading of T.F. Torrance, Calvin’s Doctrine of Man (London: Lutterworth, 1949).

[13] T.F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980), 94. Although Barth did envisage others to go where he did not when he wrote that he would leave the problem of investigating the relationship between theology and natural science to ‘future workers in the field of Christian doctrines of creation.’ K. Barth, CD 3/1, x.

[14] He is also drawing on the insights of the ‘new science’ which seeks to explain lower levels of order in terms of higher levels. See T.F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980), 142 and The Christian Frame of Mind (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1989), 60.

[15] T.F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980), ‘Man the Priest of Creation,’ 1-14, and ‘Theological Science’ 111-145. See also T.F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), 68-69.

[16] T.F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), 69. For an appreciation of this aspect of Torrance’s work see R.J. Palma, ‘Thomas F. Torrance’s Reformed Theology,’ Reformed Review 38/1 (Autumn 1984), 29-31.

[17] This conclusion stems from Torrance’s rigorous thinking through the implications of what a contingent universe means. Contingency implies rationality and freedom. It also reveals the fact that the immanent rationality of the universe is unable to give any final account of itself. The universe itself is determinate and knowable but over against the creation God remains free in his eternal self-existence and cannot therefore be known in the determinate way in which created things are known. These themes are developed in detail in T.F. Torrance, ‘Incarnation in Space and Time,’ in Space, Time and Incarnation (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 52-90.

[18] T.F. Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 69. In the preface to his 1976 work Space, Time and Resurrection (1976. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), ix-x, Torrance relates his last discussion with Karl Barth, late in the summer of 1968, shortly before Barth’s death on 10 December, 1968:

… I put a number of questions to him, mostly bearing on the interrelation between theological and natural science … I was anxious to get Karl Barth’s reaction to the way in which I explained to a Thomist or a physicist his attitude to natural theology by referring to Einstein’s account of the relation of geometry to experience, or to physics … Karl Barth expressed full agreement with my interpretation of his thought, and said, rather characteristically, of the relation of geometry to physics, ‘I must have been a blind hen not to have seen that analogy before.’

[19] T.F. Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 70.

[20] T. Peters, ‘Theology and Science: Where Are We?,’ Zygon 31 (1996), 335. It is a valid question as to whether Torrance’s ‘natural theology’ is in fact what the tradition has termed natural theology at all. See a brief history of the term and definition in A.E. McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Volume 1: Nature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 241-305, pages 279-286 being an evaluation of Torrance’s natural theology.

In an interaction with Torrance’s conception of natural theology Colin Gunton prefers to maintain a distinction between natural theology and ‘a theology of nature’ rather than constructing, as Torrance does, a transformed natural theology. See C. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 63. This position has some merit in that traditionally natural theology refers to a knowledge of God from nature, whereas Torrance’s wishes our knowledge of God to be derived only from God himself with nature then becoming a second order display of God’s Being and Act.

[21] Of some importance to Torrance’s understanding of natural theology but not of particular importance to our immediate study is the idea of the ‘social coefficient of knowledge.’ Torrance treats this in one place only, Reality and Scientific Theology (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), 98-130. For an interaction with Torrance on this point see, C. Weightman, Theology in a Polanyian Universe: The Theology of Thomas Torrance (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 170-173, E.M. Colyer, How To Read T.F. Torrance: Understanding his Trinitarian and Scientific Theology (Downers Grove: IVP, 2001), 353-355, 370, and idem., The Nature of Doctrine in T.F. Torrance’s Theology (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 95-127. We shall have recourse to consider the social coefficient of knowledge in our discussion of theōsis and ecclesiology.

*reposted