Here’s another proposal I once wrote in the past as I was considering doing the PhD back in the day.

Thomas F. Torrance’s Evangelical Calvinism: A Historical and Constructive Theological Proposal

The Problem: Thomas F. Torrance’s Reformed theology has been challenged in regard to its genuinely Reformed provenance by Richard Muller. Muller claims that Torrance operates from the ‘older theology,’ meaning a “Reformed theology” that thinks After Barth, and the mediating theologians of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. As a result, Muller contends that Torrance’s so-called Reformed theology denies the basic tenets of classical Reformed theology, and displaces those tenets by so reformulating Reformed theology that it becomes non-corollary with its historical antecedents as Muller understands those to be within what he calls ‘Christian Aristotelianism.’ This research study will endeavor to demonstrate that Torrance’s Reformed theology operates within the broad confessional parameters provided for by the historic Reformed faith as that has developed over the last many centuries in the Western European continent. This study will further demonstrate that Muller’s thesis, with particular reference to Torrance’s Reformed theology, misses the mark by attempting to read Reformed theology’s provenance through a reductionistic lens, of which Torrance’s theology serves as one antidote among many that resists Muller’s type of reductionistic reading of the Reformed history, and more to the point, its material theological developments as those have taken shape under the panoply of Reformed theology with its various eddies and tributaries across its total landscape in the Western world.

The Procedure: This study will demonstrate the genuinely Reformed provenance of T. F. Torrance’s theology by offering a biography on Torrance’s birth and development in the Church of Scotland, and its historic antecedents of the early developments of Reformed theology. It will show that Torrance’s Reformed theology operates from a decidedly Scottish iteration and development of Reformed theology, such that Muller’s claims that Torrance’s theology is less than a genuinely Reformed theology are shown to be shortsighted. Conversely, this study will demonstrate the historical lines of development wherein Torrance’s theology, among the ‘older theology,’ as Muller pejoratively refers to it, has a classical Reformed origin story that resists the Mullerian notion of a monolithic understanding of what Reformed orthodoxy entails. This study will show these things by way of comparing and contrasting Muller’s historical reconstruction of the Reformed faith with an alternative reading of the Reformed faith as that developed concurrently with the Westminster confessional faith of the Post Reformed orthodox theologians. Further, this study will attend to a variety of Torrance’s theological loci as that pertains to decidedly Reformed doctrinal currents. These loci will include Torrance’s: 1) Doctrine of God, with particular focus on the Tri-unity of God vis-à-vis the Reformed confessions; 2) Theory of Revelation, as that is related to the Protestant Reformed ‘Scripture Principle’; 3) Theological ontology and epistemology as that is related to God’s decretal relation to the world; 4) Soteriological commitments as those are understood through the dual lenses of Incarnation and Atonement, and its Christ conditioned ground in the vicarious humanity of Christ as Reformed theology; and 5) Eschatology as the Apocalyptic irruption of God’s grace as the first and last word of God’s ‘pre-destination’ to be for the world as understood from within the Reformed frame of sola gratia.

By paying close attention to these various theological loci, in Torrance’s theology, along with the historical coverage of Torrance’s provenance within the Scottish Reformed church, this study will demonstrate that Muller’s claims of Torrance’s inadequacy as a genuinely Reformed theologian fall flat. This demonstration will not obtain through a negative, or reactionary response to Muller’s claims, but by allowing the positive material developments of Torrance’s theology to demonstrate how it is that his theology falls within the parameters of a broadly construed, confessionally oriented Reformed theology as an iteration of a Christologically constructive Reformed imagination.