Myk Habets just alerted me to some audio of Thomas Torrance, and Torrance responding to Donald MacLeod’s critique of Torrance’s book Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell. It is this book from Torrance that inspired the book that Myk and I co-wrote/edited, and it is from Torrance in this book that Myk and I got the nomenclature of Evangelical Calvinist. There are some who seem to think that Thomas Torrance and his Scottish Theology merely modified Westminster Calvinism, and thus what Torrance has articulated and developed is not all that radical—of course the concept ‘radical’ is quite relative. Next to Barth, what Torrance has thought and written might not be quite as radical; but next to Westminster Calvinism what Torrance has provided is quite radical and distinct and different. Anyway, here is the link, below to the page where Torrance’s audio is located; his audio is found at 198, 199, 200. 198 is actually Donald MacLeod critiquing Torrance’s material in his book Scottish Theology.

Click Here.

Here is a quote from Torrance and his book Scottish Theology; this quote illustrates and sets the basic trajectory of the rest of Torrance’s book:

In Chapter One on John Knox and the Scottish Reformation, I have offered a general account of the deep doctrinal change that took place, but in the succeeding chapters I have tried to focus on the main issues that arose as a result of the adherence of the Church of Scotland to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Following upon the teaching of the great Reformers there developed what is known as ‘federal theology’, in which the place John Calvin gave to the biblical conception of the covenant was radically altered through being schematised to a framework of law and grace governed by a severely contractual notion of covenant, with a stress upon a primitive ‘covenant of works’, resulting in a change in the Reformed understanding of ‘covenant of grace’. This was what Protestant scholastics called ‘a two-winged’, and not ‘a one-winged’ covenant, which my brother James has called a bilateral and a unilateral conception of the Covenant. The former carries with it legal stipulations which have to be fulfilled in order for it to take effect, while the latter derives from the infinite love of God, and is freely proclaimed to all mankind in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was the imposition of a rigidly logicalised federal system of thought upon Reformed theology that gave rise to many of the problems which have afflicted Scottish theology, and thereby made central doctrines of predestination, the limited or unlimited range of the atoning death of Christ, the problem of assurance, and the nature of what was called ‘the Gospel-offer’ to sinners. This meant that relatively little attention after the middle of the seventeenth century was given to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and to a trinitarian understanding of redemption and worship. Basic to this change was the conception of the nature and character of God. It is in relation to that issue that one must understand the divisions which have kept troubling the Kirk [church] after its hard-line commitment to the so-called ‘orthodox Calvinism’ of the Westminster Standards, and the damaging effect that had upon the understanding of the World of God and the message of the Gospel. . . . (Thomas F. Torrance, “Scottish Theology,” x-xi)

It is this, as you will hear (if you listen to the audio) that Torrance is continuing to reiterate in contrast to Donald McLeod’s critique.