One of Thomas Torrance’s most basic contributions to the Christian theological landscape was to develop an epistemological approach that works from the principle that reality is a unitary whole; terminating on its ultimate source, the Triune God. Part of Torrance’s project was to undo the modern enlightenment epistemology/ontology that operated (and still does) from a dualist perspective; wherein word and concept (reality) had been decoupled one from the other so that the result becomes one where man imposes his categories of thought (abstracted from his experience of reality) upon reality and then calls that reality — this has also been called, foundationalism.

Torrance develops some of his thinking on this in his book Reality and Scientific Theology. I am going to provide a quote from him that I think is cool. The quote is in the context of Torrance talking about the possibility of Natural Theology—which he thinks is possible, but only under the constraints of his qualification that the Medieval kind of Natural Theology (amongst others) disjointed reality from word (or reality from thought) in a way that places man prior to both God and nature is not acceptable, he rejects the idea that man can create a logical bridge between human knowing and the reality that it purports to signify—Torrance, in the following quote, is in the middle of sketching and responding to Heideggar’s emphasis on ‘being and knowing’; and how Torrance believes that Heideggar was onto to something, but then misses his own point when he fails to accept that being presents us with a rational question which presupposes a rational answer. In other words, that God is the ground of all created being in His uncreated being and reality. The basic point that I want to highlight from the quote is the idea that there is an intimate relation between being and word (or knowledge); so that we cannot have one without the other. This is Torrance’s form in being-form in knowing matrix, or his epistemological inversion or tacit inferencing (borrowed from Polyani); the idea that under the weight and compulsory push provided by the reality itself—when we allow ourselves to be pushed by it—we are opened up beyond ourselves and begin to see reality as it is under its own constraints and categories of inquiry (e.g. not ones that “we” have imposed upon it through logico-deductive methods of abstraction and then induction). Enough said, here’s Torrance:

[I]t is a similar approach that is found in the thought of Martin Heideggar, who is concerned to break up the rigid structures of language and existence in order to let being itself show through in its freedom and primordial reality. Heideggar is rather more specific than Hartt [another philosopher Torrance just sketched and addressed] as to the relation between logos and physis. Logos is not itself the locus of truth, but is the manifesting of the reality of things or their “unconcealment” (aletheia). It is significant that here we do not need and do not operate with intermediary representations or sense-data [foundationalism], the sort of thing that seems forced upon us whenever we allow logos to secede from being, for what we are concerned with here is the showing of reality itself through to us. This is why Heideggar has devoted so much effort to analysing “existence” (Dasein) in order to destroy the false ontologies that keep on cropping up through the hardening of substitute-symbolisms, so that the whole focus of attention may be directed upon being in the full and proper sense (Sein). Heideggar’s own movement of thought, however, tends to be stultified and distorted, for he lowers the horizon of inquiry (Fragehorizont) in a strangely arbitrary way, so that in the last resort he is forced to break out by taking a leap into nothing, instead of letting his mind fall under the power of the inherent signification of being and its reference beyond itself. But far from opening up the reality of being, as Heideggar hoped, the leap of thought into nothing can only fall back into the relativities of existentialism.

When reality is allowed to unveil itself, however, in its own inner intelligibility, our thought is thrust up against the truth of being in such a way that it is sustained by an objective signification and does not fall back into the dark whirlpool of man’s self-understanding. Not only do we grasp the truth of intelligible being out of the depth of its own reality, but we respond to that which is not of our own making and which acts with categorical force upon our minds. Here too we find that explaining and understanding do not fall apart, as they do when logos and being become disjoined, for they operate together as we penetrate into the inner relations and significations of things and allow them to set up their own laws and meanings in our grasping of them. To express this the other way round, what we apprehend like this in the truth of its own being proves itself to us by bringing our minds under an imperative obligation which we cannot rationally resist. This is what happened, for example, when St. Anselm, breaking free from the psychologism of St. Augustine, could speak of truth not only as that which is what it is and and as it manifests itself, but as what it had to be in his understanding or conceiving of it, for he found himself together with the truth of created being under compulsion from beyond. It was in this way that the so-called “ontological argument” forced itself upon him from the side of what he had to acknowledge as the Supreme Being or Supreme Truth. That is not to be understood as the force of some logical argument or deductive or inductive train of ideas, but as the force of Reality itself (necessitas, as St. Anselm called it, its impossibility of being otherwise) in which truth and being are indissolubly one. [T. F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 47-8]

This quote evinces some of Torrance’s own influences, both philosophical and theological. What do you think? Do you think that Torrance’s way is better than the ‘Analytic’ dualistic mode of thought that abstracts so called ‘indubitable’ principles from their experience of reality, and then seeks to correspond these categories back upon “reality?” Don’t you think it better to think from within the inner structures of reality as it is from within itself? True many would call Torrance’s approach fideistic, and maybe even philosophically naïve. But of course the ones who might ascribe this to Torrance would be, most likely, imposing their analytical modes of thought upon Torrance’s epistemological project, and thus not really ever able to grasp the reality of Torrance’s point to begin with 😉 .