On the Orders and Disorders of the God-World Relation: With Reference to Augustine, Athanasius, Barth, and Torrance

Posted on May 3, 2026 by Bobby Grow

There are two orderings in the world structure: God’s real order, and man’s real disorder in an attempt to be contra God. God has freely and graciously elected to be for this world, as both the electing God and elected man, in Jesus Christ. Soteriologically driven theologies, like Augustinianism, sets these two worlds in a competitive relationship. Contrariwise, the Athanasian-Barthian-Torrancean combine thinks these orders from within the nexus of God and humanity in the reconciling and hypostatically uniting person, Jesus Christ. This combine allows the Christian to think the God-world relation from within the strictures God has setup, even in-spite of humanity’s inherent urge to fight against God as a condition of their fallen nature as lapsarian humans. Against the Augustinian effort to think the elect of God into God through a decree of God (decretum absolutum), the Athanasian complex is required to think the God-humanity relation from within the gift of God’s Self-givenness for the world, for humanity, from within the confines of His own second-person, the eternal Son en sarkos, Jesus Christ. This Athanasian frame offers a cosmic frame of reference when it comes to things worldly, things salvific, so on and so forth.

Barth writes of this relationship presciently:

This is obviously the underlying form of our problem—the real distance in which the God appearing in the human sphere, and acting and speaking for us in this sphere, confronts us to whom He turns and for whom He acts. Note that on the one hand it is God for man, on the other man against God. There are two orders (or, rather, order and disorder), two opposite world-structures, two worlds opposing and apparently excluding one another. Note that it is He and we—and He and we in a direct encounter, we before Him—how can we live before Him and with Him?—we with the God who by Himself reconciles us with Himself, we in His presence, in the sequence of His work and Word. On the side of man the only possible word seems to be a deep-seated No, the No of the one who when God comes and acts for Him and tells him that He is doing so is forced to see that his day is over and that he can only perish.[1]

As Barth rightly emphasizes there is no such thing as a competitive relationship between God and humanity. That is, because God has already become both the Yes and the No on behalf of humanity’s rebellion against God in His free movement towards humanity in Christ, and His equipoise movement of humanity towards God, in a Yesward movement, of Christ’s making. This is not to say, of course, that humanity no longer sees itself, consciously or subconsciously, in a Noward stance before the living and triune God; it does. It is just to say that even in that ongoing rebellious spirit, the one that has already been put to death in the archetypal humanity of the Second Adam, there remains no power behind it. Humanity’s rebellion, its no to God, has already been put down, and thus risen up in the Yes and Amen of God in Jesus Christ. Rebellious humanity, at this point, simply lives against their humanity already won for them in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.

The work of God in Christ’s salvation for us is finished!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [291] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London:T&T Clark, 2010), 284.

TF Torrance and Augustine in Discussion on a Knowledge of God vis-à-vis the Imago Dei

Posted on February 7, 2026 by Bobby Grow

I find Thomas Torrance’s stratified knowledge of God and St. Augustine’s exercitatio mentis (spiritual exercises), and their relative correspondence to be quite intriguing, and yet in this intrigue there is also recognition of a fundamental difference. Here is how Ben Myers describes Torrance’s ‘stratified knowledge’ (if you want to read Torrance on this see his Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons):

Thomas F. Torrance’s model of the stratification of knowledge is one of his most striking and original contributions to theological method. Torrance’s model offers an account of the way formal theological knowledge emerges from our intuitive and pre-conceptual grasp of God’s reality as it is manifest in Jesus Christ. It presents a vision of theological progression, in which our knowledge moves towards an ever more refined and more unified conceptualisation of the reality of God, while remaining closely coordinated with the concrete level of personal and experiential knowledge of Jesus Christ. According to this model, our thought rises to higher levels of theological conceptualisation only as we penetrate more deeply into the reality of Jesus Christ. From the ground level of personal experience to the highest level of theological reflection, Jesus Christ thus remains central. Through a sustained concentration on him and on his homoousial union with God, we are able to achieve a formal account of the underlying trinitarian relations immanent in God’s own eternal being, which constitute the ultimate grammar of all theological discourse. [Benjamin Myers, “The Stratification of knowledge in the thought of T. F. Torrance,” SJT 61 (1): 1-15 (2008) Printed in the United Kingdom © 2008 Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd]

And here is how Gilles Emery, O. P. describes Augustine’s exercitatio mentis:

Augustine emphasizes in particular that in order to glimpse God, the spirit must purify itself of corporeal representations and “phantasmata.” The spirit must not stop at created images but must rise to what the created realities “insinuate.” This is precisely the usefulness of the study of creatures and the goal of the exercise. The exercitatio proposed by Augustine is an ascension … toward God from the image that is inferior and unequal to him, and it is at the same time a gradual movement toward the interior (introrsus tendre). From these corporeal realities and sensible perceptions, Augustine invites his reader to turn toward the spiritual nature of man, toward the soul itself and its grasp of incorporeal realities, in a manner ever more interior (modo interiore), in order to rise toward the divine Trinity. The exercise of the spirit is “a gradual ascension toward the interior,” in other words, an elevation from inferior realities toward interior realities. One enters, and one rises in a gradual manner by degrees (gradatim). Such is the way characteristic of Augustine: “pull back into yourself [in teipsum redi]…, and transcend yourself.” [Gilles Emery, O. P., Trinitarian Theology as Spiritual Exercise in Augustine and Aquinas, in Aquinas the Augustinian edited by Michael Dauphinais, Barry David, and Matthew Levering, p. 14.]

[For further reading on a Reformed version of ascension theology check out Julie Canlis’ sweet book Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension.]

One fundamental and important difference—even given some apparent similarity between Torrance and Augustine, like on stratification or graded movement towards Triune knowledge of God—becomes an issue of theological anthropology and the difference between Augustine’s a priori versus Torrance’s a posterori approaches in relation to the imago Dei/Christi.

For Augustine, knowledge of God is already present (even if soteriologically and christologically construed) by way of analogical reflection upon the image of God (which is opened up soteriologically by Christ). For Torrance, knowledge of God is not a result of turning inward, but looking outward to Christ. So we don’t know what it is to really be in the image of God, there is not resonant knowledge of God available in the human being, per se. It is only as we are recreated in Christ in the resurrection by the Spirit that genuine knowledge of God can be acquired by observing and spiritually participating in the knowledge of God through Him. So the analogy for both of the these theologians—by which we come to knowledge of the Triune God—is grounded in reflection upon the image of God. But the difference is that for Augustine, the image of God is grounded in each individual person (which would help to explain his view of election/reprobation as well); for Torrance the image of God is grounded in Christ (Col. 1.15), and thus the supposition is that God’s image has a ground external to creation in Christ, which allows us to think of knowledge of God as something external to us, and not something resonant within us (even if like Augustine we try to explain this in his kind of soteriological way).

My Reduction

I don’t like doing this, but for sake of blogginess and reception let me do so: For Augustine knowledge of God happens by turning inward to the self (by Christ to be sure) and attending to personal piety; For Torrance knowledge of God happens by turning outward to Christ, and attending to personal intimacy therein.

This kind of movement (inward a priori and outward a posterori) has some other interesting implications that get fleshed out in subsequent centuries and theologies that continue to affect us to this day. We will have to talk about this later.

*Originally posted in 2019 at another site of mine.

The Father-Son God by the Holy Spirit: Repudiating Social Trinitarianisms

Posted on January 31, 2026 by Bobby Grow

Torrance is discussing the impact that dualistic Hellenism has had upon Western-thought-forms; namely the precedence that classical thought has given to the optical mode of thinking and verification (so the obsession with empiricism, etc.). TFT is highlighting the impact that this methodology and epistemology can have upon our construal of God’s “Father-hood” and “Son-hood,” and how Christian/Patristic theology, primarily through Athanasius’ influence, eschewed this “Hellenizing” effect by reifying it through Christian ontology.

The contrast between Christianity and Hellenism could hardly be greater than at this fundamental level, where biblical patterns of thought governed by the Word of God and the obedient hearing of faith (υπακοη της πιτεως) conflict sharply with those of Greek religion and philosophy. The issue came to its head in the Arian controversy over the Father – Son relation at the heart of the Christian Gospel. Are the terms ‘father’ and ‘son’ to be understood as visual, sensual images taken from our human relations and then projected mythologically into God? In that event how can we avoid projecting creaturely gender into God, and thinking of him as grandfather as well as father, for the only kind of father we know is one who is son of another father? To think of God like that, in terms of the creaturely content of images projected out of ourselves, inevitably gives rise to anthropomorphic and polymorphic notions of deity and in fact to polytheism and idolatry. However, if we think from a centre in God as he reveals himself to us through his Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, then we know him as Father in himself in an utterly unique and incomparable way which then becomes the controlling standard by reference to which all notions of creaturely fatherhood and sonship are to be understood. ‘God does not make man his pattern, but rather, since God alone is properly and truly Father, we men are called fathers of our own children, for of him every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named.’ Unique Fatherhood and unique Sonship in God mutually define one another in an absolute and singular way. As Athanasius pithily expressed it in rejection of Arian anthropocentric mythologising: ‘Just as we cannot ascribe a father to the Father, so we cannot ascribe a brother to the Son’.[1]

[1] T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 69-70.

Torrance’s Theological-Exegetical Gloss on Romans 8:31-39: And a Word of Encouragement About God’s Unrelenting Love For Us

Posted on October 10, 2025 by Bobby Grow

As I have been rereading TF Torrance’s The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons, I came across a passage that struck me as a sort of theological-exegetical gloss of Romans 8:31-39. Torrance is often accused of not doing any biblical-exegetical work; but I would counter, that in his role as a Christian Dogmatist his work is saturated in the thematics that allow Scripture to say what it does about God and His works. I would contend that, Torrance, as a Christian Dogmatist, par excellence, has Scriptural themes and their reality in Christ, pervading all of his writings. What is required for the reader though, is that they be familiar enough with Scripture, as Torrance was, to be able to discern just how Scripturally rich and informed his theologizing is. In the following we will compare Romans 8:31-39 and the passage I came across from Torrance; and then in conclusion offer some reflection on its theological and spiritual implications.

³¹What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? ³²He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?³³Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. ³⁴Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. ³⁵Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ³⁶As it is written: “For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” ³⁷Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. ³⁸For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, ³⁹nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And Torrance:

In the outgoing movement of his eternal Love God himself has come among us and become one of us and one with us in the Person of his beloved Son in order to reconcile us to himself and to share with us the Fellowship of Love which he has within his own Triune Life. Since in the Lord Jesus Christ the fullness of God dwells bodily we must think of the entire Godhead as condescending in him to be ‘God with us’ in our human life and existence in the world. This does not mean of course that the Father and the Spirit became incarnate with the Son, but that with and in the incarnate Son the whole undivided Trinity was present and active in fulfilling the eternal purpose of God’s Love for mankind, for all three divine Persons have their Being in homoousial and hypostatic interrelations with one another, and they are all inseparably united in God’s activity in creation and redemption, not least as those activities are consummated in the incarnate economy of the Son. In refusing to spare his dear Son but in delivering him up in atoning sacrifice for us all, God the Father reveals that he loves us with the very Love which he bears to himself, and that with Jesus Christ he freely gives us all things. If God is for us in this way what can come between us? And in giving us his one Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son and sheds abroad in our hearts the very Love which God himself is, God reveals that there is nothing that can ever separate us from him in his Love. Through the Son and in the Spirit, we are taken into the triune Fellowship of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Thus in an utterly astonishing way the Holy Trinity has committed himself to be with us and among us within the conditions of our human and earthly life in space and time, but, it need hardly be said, without being subjected to the processes and necessities of created space and time, and without in the slightest compromising the mystery of his divine transcendence.[1]

We see Torrance creatively interweaving classical trinitarian locus like the opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt (‘the works of the Trinity on the outside are indivisible’) into his thinking on God’s “for us-ness,” which in itself places an emphasis on the oneness of God in recognition of his works toward us in the economy of His life become revealed for us in the Son. Beyond that, we see how the canonical themes, and in particular in this passage, the themes of Romans are informing Torrance’s thought in regard to God’s love for us; and then what that love implies in its grounding in Jesus Christ.

More practically, the great hope this provides us with is without measure! I often feel like I’m just going through the motions of life; getting caught up in the necessary busy-ness of it all, and not really living into the full participatio Christ that I’ve been called to in Christ. What this passage from Torrance, as a gloss on Romans, encourages me to remember is that no matter what, it is the whole God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who is holding me deeply in His grasp, and who cannot be deterred in His tremendous Love for me. I find great hope in knowing that no matter what the goings on of my life are, that God in Christ for us, for me will never allow me to be separated from Him; that I am as close to Him as the Son of God is to His Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. While daily requisites of life seem to plague my existence moment by moment; while my energy is zapped by the long hours of work, and the financial responsibilities that seem to be at every turn and corner of life; while health issues, and other anxieties and fears seemingly seek to suck up the time that ought to only be God’s; while all of these things and more are present in our daily lives as Christians, what Torrance and the Apostle Paul encourage us with is the reality of “so what!” God is God, and He will not be thwarted in His great love for us; just as sure as His great Love just is who He is, and He has shown us that in His undivided work for us in the three persons, as revealed first in the Son.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 162.

*originally posted at another old blog of mine in 2019.

Unlimited Atonement in a Reformed Theology as Told by James Torrance and John McLeod Campbell

Posted on October 4, 2025 by Bobby Grow

James B. Torrance, brother of Thomas F. Torrance, offers a very nice and concise synopsis of the entailments of what me and Myk Habets (along with our various authors) have identified as an Evangelical Calvinism. JBT’s synopsis comes as he wrote the foreword for a book titled, So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian Atonement by George M. Tuttle. Here, JBT is explicitly referring to the themes of John McLeod Campbell’s theology, particularly as that developed as an alternative to the juridically/forensically framed understanding of the Calvinism that we find in Federal (Covenantal) theology; indeed, as that gets codified in the Westminster Confession of Faith, among other confessions and catechisms. As JBT notes, Campbell’s theology, as an alternative iteration of Reformed theology, indeed, a Scottish Theology, challenges the assumption that God primarily relates to humanity through a covenant of works, rather than a relation based on triune love, thus leading to an ostensible Christian spirituality that leaves the would-be saint always wondering about their standing before the Lawgiving God. With further pinpointed clarity, JBT, also shines a light on the implications of thinking of God’s relation to humanity through a Love-giving God, as that is resplendent in Campbell’s theology, and how that rightly alters the way the seeking person might approach God; indeed, as an adopted child in the loving and caring arms of the Father of Life who freely gave His life for the world, in His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. If you are looking for an alternative theology, Reformed even, that first sees God as Father, before Creator and Lawgiver, then what you will find in an Evangelical Calvinism might be just what you have been longing for.

Here is JB Torrance at some length:

A few years ago, while teaching for an academic year in the Vancouver School of Theology, I came across Dr. Tuttle’s doctoral dissertation in the library of the University of British Columbia, on ‘The Place of John McLeod Campbell in British Thought Covering the Atonement,’ and was so impressed by it that I encouraged him to have it published. McLeod Campbell was a remarkable Scottish theologian – thought by many to Scotland’s greatest – whose theology was hammered out on the anvil of his pastoral experience. Here was an invaluable study, not only of McLeod Campbell’s theology of atonement, but also of his influence on subsequent thought, not least on nineteenth century Anglican theology. Now Dr. Tuttle, from his own rich experience as a pastor and teacher in the training of men and women for the Christian ministry, has written this splendid study showing how McLeod Campbell’s theology is such fertile soil and so relevant for us today.

As a young minister in Row in Dunbartonshire, Campbell was aware of a strong ‘legalistic strain’ in the religion of Scotland, coupled with an introspective lack of joy and assurance which he believed derived from the high Calvinism of his day, with its doctrine of a ‘limited atonement,’ that Christ did not die for all but only for an elect number. Generations of Scots had been taught to ‘examine themselves’ for ‘evidences’ of election. But this had produced an inward looking, too often guilt-ridden, attitude which contrasted so sharply with the joyful triumphant faith and assurance of the New Testament church. So he tells us he made it his early concern to give to his people ‘a ground for rejoicing in God’ by directing their minds away from themselves to the love of God the Father is revealed in the whole life of Christ, and supremely on the Cross.

He soon came to see that our answer to the question of the extent of the atonement depends on our view of the nature of the atonement. The doctrine of a limited atonement, in the federal Calvinist tradition, especially taught by John Owen, the English Puritan, and Jonathan Edwards in North America, flowed from two convictions about the nature of God. The first that justice is the essential attribute of God, but the love of God is arbitrary, seen in his will to elect some individuals and send Christ to die for them. John Owen had taught that love is not God’s nature, but his will. This, Campbell saw, was not true to the New Testament and the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, that God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is Love in his innermost Being, and has created us and redeemed us in love and for love – for ‘sonship.’ With the ancient fathers, in their negation of Sabellianism, he saw that what God is towards the world in love, in creation and redemption, he is in his eternal nature, as the Triune God.

The second was that in the federal (covenant) scheme, law is thus prior to grace. God is related to all humankind by ‘the covenant of works (law)’ and only to some by ‘the covenant of grace’ in redemption. Hence atonement was construed in terms of the view that God would only be gracious if law was satisfied and sin punished, that is, by Christ fulfilling for the elect the conditions of the covenant of works (law). McLeod Campbell saw that this inverted the Biblical order, that grace is prior to law, that ‘the filial is prior to the judicial.’ Both creation and redemption flow from grace, and law is ‘God’s heart coming out in the form of law.’ Law is the gift of grace, reveals our need of grace and leads to grace. The Incarnation and the Atonement, which must be held together, are the Father’s act of sending his Son to fulfill for humankind the filial and judicial purposes of creation. Atonement is God’s act of grace in which he takes to himself for us his own divine judgments ‘in order that we might receive the adoption of sons.’ The filial purposes of creation and incarnation are secured by atonement. Hence atonement must be interpreted in terms of both the Trinity and the Incarnation, ‘retrospectively’ removing condemnation on past sin and ‘prospectively’ leading to sonship.

In our own day, theologians like Barth, Rahner, Moltmann, Jüngel and von Balthasar have seen how Western theology has too often operated with concepts of God which owe more to Aristotle and the Stoic Lawgiver, than the New Testament, and has consequently drifted away from seeing the centrality of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. McLeod Campbell discerned this long ago, and saw its implication, both for the pastoral ministry and for our understanding of the doctrine of God, that the sufferings of Christ the Son on the Cross reveal the suffering Love of the Father. ‘He who has seen me, has seen the Father.’

Dr. Tuttle’s book is profoundly relevant for the contemporary situation both theologically and pastorally in its concern to show that the Gospel is the Good News of God coming to restore to us our lost humanity, ‘to bring many sons to glory’ – and therefore good news for every creature.

James Torrance[1]

There isn’t much to add to this. Only that, to my chagrin, as I have been sitting with this above reality since around 2002, and more pointedly since in and around 2007, when I first started reading TF Torrance et al., becoming aware of this development within a Reformed theology, I can really only continue to shake my head. I see so many young and old alike continuously running full speed ahead into a Reformed theology that is indeed shaped by the juridical/legal parameters that Campbell, JBT, TFT, Karl Barth et al., in their own respective ways, have presciently offered a more biblically based alternative to. Whether this be at the scholarly level or popular level, no matter, theologians and laymen/women, continue to harp and joust back in forth; as if the Calvinist/non-Calvinist binary, black and white as it apparently is, in regard to sides, is the only way through this theological malaise. I continue to see the masses in evangelical and Protestant christianities hem and haw, as if they have found the golden scepter of theological truth; and this within, again, their respective binary of Calvinism/non-Calvinism—to boot, with all the theological imagination of a dodo bird (sorry, too harsh? . . .). May the Lord give more eyes to see and ears to hear that in fact God is Father of the Son first, before He is ever Creator. With this realization there is a theological hope that outstrips much of the pablum being fed to the people today. Kyrie eleison

[1] George M. Tuttle, So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian Atonement (Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1986), 6–7.

The Antecedence of God in Procession Before Mission: Avoiding the Socialization of God

Posted on September 2, 2025 by Bobby Grow

TF Torrance is discussing the impact that dualistic Hellenism has had upon Western-thought-forms; namely the precedence that classical thought has given to the optical mode of thinking and verification (so the obsession with empiricism, etc.). TFT is highlighting the impact that this methodology and epistemology can have upon our construal of God’s “Father-hood” and “Son-hood,” and how Christian/Patristic theology, primarily through Athanasius’ influence, eschewed this “Hellenizing” effect by reifying it through a Christian ontology.

[1] T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 69-70.

The Christological Men: Karl Barth and TF Torrance

Posted on June 1, 2025 by Bobby Grow

Barth and TF Torrance are the only modern theologians I have come across who if you don’t start with radically construed Chalcedonian premises, you won’t get. Their dialect is strictly christologically conditioned all the way down. This is one reason I think so many evangelical and conservative theologians of today write them off as incoherent. For example, theologians who harvest purely from the Post Reformed orthodox (pro), and some of the mediaeval theologians, will attempt to read Barth and TFT through the speculative, decretal categories they have imbibed vis-à-vis their recovery of said pro and med. theologians. And yet, this is precisely why I took such a liking to both TFT and Barth. I am really just a Bible reader, and as a result christological theology had an immediate resonance with me. Barth and TFT’s theology was the most organic move I could make as someone who also sees the value of doing Christian Dogmatic and systematic theology; i.e., engaging with the inner-theologic of the text of Holy Scripture.

This is why I will always remain confused by evangelical and other conservative theologians who write Barth and TFT off. TFT, a named protopresbyter of the Greek Orthodox church (even as a Church of Scotland churchman), and Barth called purportedly, by Pope Pius XII, ‘the greatest theologian since Thomas Aquinas,’ have a breadth and depth among the church catholic that most theologians since the Protestant reformation have never had. Beyond that, as already mentioned by illusion, I see Barth and TFT actually continuing on within the conciliar Christianity started at Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon in particular, in ways that no one else has. In my view, there are no modern or contemporary theologians who are so principially Christ conditioned in their methodology and devotion, as are Barth and TF Torrance.

c’est la vie

The Heavenly Dust: Christian Knowledge of God

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Bobby Grow

As Christians we want to think about God as Christians. Christians, definitionally, aren’t profane persons. Indeed, according to Scripture, Christians are saints; i.e., set apart in Christ who is our Set Apart in the presence of the Father for us. This might seem scandalous to even recognize, but Christians are simply in a different place in regard to knowing reality as it is; insofar as the Christ (Jesus) allows us entrée in these, our bodies of death, in this in-between time. Some might want to push back and describe my observations as idealist. But it is just the opposite, in fact. Only Christians, in regard to thinking God and all else, can operate as non-idealists. That is to say, the Christian is confronted in their very beings with the fact that they, in themselves, left to their profane-selves, are sublated by the very dust and water their flatlander bodies consist of. Further, this entails that Christians, as they are confronted by reality in Jesus Christ, can acknowledge their subhuman statuses as profane persons; repent, because God in Christ first repented for us; and experience life re-created on the primordial plane of God’s elect and elevated life for us in Jesus Christ. On this new plane the dust the Christian consists of is no longer mortal and earthy, but immortal and heavenly; it is of a new body, with new capacities, which entail a capacity to actually think the living and true God from within a center in Himself for us in Jesus Christ. If this is the case, it behooves the Christian, who is distinct from the profane or secular person, to learn to imbibe and think from the sensory-tablet provided for by the Son of Man, as He sits at the Right Hand of the Father.

Torrance writes:

Here we are faced with another fundamental characteristic of the Truth of God as it is in Jesus; it is both divine and human. Knowledge of it, accordingly, is essentially bi-polar. This bi-polarity corresponds to the two-fold objectivity of the Word we have already noted. Knowledge of God is given to us in this Man, Jesus, but that knowledge does not allow us to leave the Man Jesus behind when we know Him in His divine nature. There is an indivisible unity in the ultimate Fact of Christ, true God and true Man. Theological knowledge rests upon and partakes of that duality-in-unity in the Person of Christ. In Him we know God in terms of what God is not, namely, man, for in Christ God, who is God and not man, has become Man and comes as Man, but in such a way that what God is in Christ He is antecedently and eternally in Himself. We know God is indissoluble unity with Jesus as we encounter Him through the witness of men, and we know Jesus in His human and historical actuality in indissoluble unity with God.[1]

The Christian inhabits another world whilst grounded in this world by the grace of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The Christian doesn’t have to leave this world to see the antecedent world of God’s Kingdom. Precisely because God’s Kingdom, in the wisdom of the Cross, the wisdom of God in Christ, comes to us; here, where we are in this mortal dust, in order to make us partakers of the heavenly dust of His recreated-resurrected-ascended humanity.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 149.

A Critical Theological Anthropology vis-à-vis a Knowledge of God against a Turn to the Subject

Posted on October 11, 2024 by Bobby Grow

I put together the following some time ago, and only had it saved as a draft here on the blog. I thought I would publish it now. I actually don’t even recall who my interlocutor is anymore; maybe he’ll see this and remind me.

I shared the following passage on Facebook and X, from John Baillie, as cited by TF Torrance in his book: Theological Science.

The fact is that no true knowledge, no valid act of perceiving or thinking, can be explained by beginning from the human end—whether it be my perception of the number of peas in a particular pod or my discovery of an argument for the existence of God. In either case my cognition is valid only so far as it is determined by the reality with which I am faced.

I’ve had a “friend” on FB who more recently has become somewhat aggressive with me; like he is angry because he thinks I speak in platitudes (which he can’t understand) too much. And so, this our last exchange, just took place under my posting of the John Baillie passage. In the following I have compressed all of his comments, along with mine, as mine were responses to his. Even in compression, the spirit of what is being engaged with should be understandable, I hope. I have removed my interlocutor’s last name; his first name is Chris. He and I and will meet again in the Eschaton. Until then there is no reason to pursue anything further here. I will say though, this exchange reminded me of how the old school blogosphere used to be, on a day to day basis (I actually don’t miss that so much). Anyway, you might find this interesting. You might agree more with Chris, or with me. But I’m unsure, at least from a genuinely Christian theological vantage point, how you could agree with Chris. He is thinking from some sort of ‘pure nature’ ‘pure humanity’ notion, that fits better with the rationalism, and monism, of Enlightenment anthropology, not to mention Augustinian anthropology, as that is understood soteriologically, in regard to the massa of humanity.

Interlocutor’s Assertions

That is an absurdity since anything, whether true knowledge, or false, starts with a human end. Theologians work in solipsisms huh? And yet all that must be experienced and validated or spurned inside a human. Without that what comes of what you write? Nada. Without god there is no man. Without man there is no god to receive. Even as you write you contradict what you’ve written, since it comes from within you, a human end. It is fundamentally solipsistic. And that leads to madness imo. And still all you’ve written comes from you, a human end, which you overlook, or excuse away with abstractions of that end.. Thus the abstraction is yours, friend. The external reality is not in question. Rather, whether a human is an end or a means. I say an end since I cannot escape that end, where I meet external reality, which includes god. Every time you type you contradict yourself since you employ your human end to deny it. I feel the same regarding you. Whatever your human end is grounded in it is met in you, a human end. You assume defacto to assert dejure. And you continue to miss the obvious, which is you. Brother everytime you text you affirm my assertion. So I leave you to it. Peace to you in Christ.

My Rejoinders

Chris only for the philosopher not the theologian. Chris no, they work, in principle, with extra mental/mind independent extra nos (outside of us) objective reality, as God has given Himself for us both as the object of our knowledge, but come as a subject/personally. That’s what Baillie is referring to. Indeed, that’s the whole point of Christian theology; someOne outside of us upon who we are contingent; and Who speaks to us through Himself in the Son. The end of human knowledge, biblically construed, is knowledge of God; which the incarnation “helps” with. It’s called *dialogical theology*. So a praying theology. There is actually someOne there, outside of us who circumscribes all knowledge as He is indeed the Word who upholds all things by the Word of His power. All of reality is Christ conditioned, in other words. As David Fergusson notes “the world was made so that Christ might be born.” No, it doesn’t come from within me as an absolute subject or center in myself; it comes from within a center in Godself pro me, from within His vicarious humanity. So in that sense, I could agree that there is a human end, but archetypal humanity, not abstract as your original comment made it sound. Which again, Baillie’s thinking can be applied to. There is no such thing as an *abstract humanity* in the economy of God, only the concrete humanity of God within which we now find correspondence through the humanity of Christ for us, by the Spirit. Baillie’s passage is simply noting contra the Enlightenment turn to the subject that there is an external reality that grounds humanity; i.e. thus entailing the further notion that humanity is contingent upon God’s Word all the way down. That seems like an uncontroversial teaching. Baillie is referring to, and Torrance takes it from Baillie in his work, as a reference to a non-competitive understanding in a God-human relationship. Show me the contradiction. Or show me the money. Here’s some deeper context for the Baillie passage as TFT utilizes it in his own thinking on a knowledge of God (i.e., theological ontology vis a vis theological epistemology in an order of being to knowing and vice versa: Kataphysics. TFT’s ‘stratified knowledge of God’ and the Christian Existence). What I am noting is descriptive with prescriptive implications. You aren’t understanding, it seems, the idea or the explosive nature of what the vicarious humanity entails. So, you have accepted the Enlightenment turn to the subject anthropology. That’s not reflective a truly Christ conditioned theoanthropology, nor does it take the implications of the incarnation with the gravity it requires. You’re not getting it. You don’t want to, it seems. My human end is grounded in Christ’s end for me, as the alpha and omega of all of reality. My points are de jure, while you are taking them as de facto; which means you’re engaging in the category mistake, not me. You also seem to be suffering from a nihilistic linguistic theory wherein reality and the words used to signify that reality cannot point beyond themselves. That’s how I am using my language to refer to Christ conditionality, and its implications towards knowledge of God, and knowledge in general; insofar that all of reality is circumscribed by the Word of God. So far all you’ve done is assert that I am contradicting myself, when I have explained to you how I haven’t (ie not just by assertion). You need to show how my explanations terminate in the type of contradiction you are claiming. So far you haven’t. Just do it. I have no human end apart from Christ’s human end for me. The objective ground of humanity is Christ’s humanity. I have come to that conclusion insofar that I have the Spirit of God and can now call Jesus, Lord. My conclusion, is in echo of God’s conclusion for me in Jesus Christ. I’ve also explained how you are thinking in terms of an abstract humanity, which a genuinely Christian theology knows nothing of. This is what TFT properly identifies as the *Latin heresy*. An adroit dualism that the incarnation negates. My human end is met in Christ. He is the firstborn from the dead, in whom my life terminates and is born again in correspondence to his resurrection recreated humanity. I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. No man, you haven’t responded to one thing I have said in regard to a theological anthropology and its implications. You have only presumed upon a rationalist turn to the subject notion of humanity that you have received from the secular age. You say you want to learn, but you’re actually hyper arrogant. We part ways, I see no fruit forthcoming in the future. See you in the Eschaton.

The Spoken Word of God Theology for Us: On a Dialogical Theology

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Bobby Grow

Dialogical theology. It is one of our theses we put forward in our first Evangelical Calvinism book. What is it; what are its entailments; and why am I such a strong proponent of it? In nuce, dialogical theology is exactly what it sounds like: it is a theological “method” that allows the object of theology, who is also Subject for us, to confront us, to speak to us first that we might speak to Him; that we might come to know Him as He knows Himself from a center in Himself for us in Jesus Christ. So, this approach, this theological prolegomenon, starts as God starts with us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This prolegomenon ingresses as God invades our humanity in and through His assumption of humanity in the humanity of Jesus Christ. It is in this [hypostatic] union that humanity comes to have the capacity to hear God’s Word, as God’s Word becomes us in the grace of Jesus Christ. It is here where a theological coinherence of knowledge can obtain, insofar as God has pre-destined Himself for this coinherence in His free election to become humanity in Jesus Christ; and all of this, in order that humans might come into the parousia (presence) of God, as God presences Himself with us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit’s free unction of adoptive grace. Underneath this total covenantal relationship between God and humanity in Jesus Christ there are the everlasting arms of God’s triune life of love for us. It is a purely relational, even marital and filial relationship wherein a genuinely Christian theology comes to have wings to breathe and fly freely over and within the hinterland of God’s city; where God’s Word serves as the foundation of everything.

As Evangelical Calvinists (or now, Athanasian Reformed), we have taken our cue from TF Torrance (along with Karl Barth) on thinking a dialogical theology. It will serve us well then to read along with Torrance as he develops his own thinking on a dialogical theology; indeed, as he does so as he engages with Barth’s ‘double objectivity’ of God (see CD II/1), in both God’s archetypal and ectypal reality for us (ab intra, ad extra).

We may note three important implications from this double objectivity.

(i) The object of theological knowledge is creaturely objectivity bound to divine objectivity, not just creaturely objectivity in general but that specific creaturely objectivity which the divine objectivity has assumed, adapted and bound to Himself, Jesus. Thus theological activity is concerned with that special creaturely objectivity in its relation to divine objectivity, and therefore with that creaturely objectivity as it is given ultimate objectivity over against all other objectivity within the created universe. We shall see how this distinguishes theological science from other sciences.

(ii) In the nature of the case we cannot break through to ultimate objectivity, to the sheer reality of God, simply by an examination of this creaturely objectivity, for of itself it can only yield knowledge of the empirical world of nature.

(iii) Nevertheless we are bound unconditionally to the creaturely objectivity of God in the Incarnation of His Word in Jesus Christ. What scandalizes rationalist man is that in his search for ultimate objectivity he is bound unconditionally to contingent and creaturely objectivity, in fact to the weakness of the historical Jesus. To try to get behind this creaturely objectivity, to go behind the back of the historical Jesus in whom God has forever given Himself as the Object of our knowledge, and so to seek to deal directly with ultimate and bare divine objectivity, is not only scientifically false, but the hybris of man who seeks to establish himself by getting a footing in ultimate reality. Scientific theology can only take the humble road in unconditional obedience to the Object as He has given Himself to be known within our creaturely and earthly and historical existence, in the Lord Jesus Christ.

(d) A fourth scientific requirement for theology arises from the centrality of Jesus Christ as the self-objectification of God for us in our humanity, that is, from the supremacy of Christology in our knowledge of God. All scientific knowledge has a systematic interest, for it must attempt to order the material content of knowledge as far as possible into a coherent whole. It would be unscientific, however, to systematize knowledge in any field according to an alien principle, for the nature of the truth involved must be allowed to prescribe how knowledge of it shall be ordered. In other words, the systematic interest must be the servant of objective knowledge and never allowed to become its master. The order is in the Object before it is in our minds, and therefore it is as we allow the Object to impose itself upon our minds that our knowledge of it gains coherence. In theological knowledge the Object is God in Christ whom we know as we allow Him to impose Himself upon our minds or as we allow His Word to shape our knowing in conformity to Him. Scientific theology is therefore the systematic presentation of its knowledge through consistent faithfulness to the divine, creaturely objectivity of God in Christ.

It is the centrality of Christ that is all-determinative here, for He is the norm and criterion of our knowing and it is out of correspondence to Him that theological coherence grows. Scientific theology is systematic, therefore, only through relation to Christ, but its relation to Christ cannot be abstracted and turned into an independent systematic principle by means of which we can force the whole of theology into one definite and fixed pattern. Some use of formal Christology is necessary in systematic theology for the way that the Word of God has taken in the Incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Christ is the way in which God has revealed Himself to us and the way in which He continues to do so, but we cannot abstract it from dialogical encounter with God in Christ for it is only through sharing in the knowledge of the Son by the Father and the knowledge of the Father by the Son, that we can know God as He has given Himself to us in Jesus Christ.

Thus the organic unity of theology goes back to Christ to the unity of the Godhead, but in the nature of the case theology cannot, and must not try to seek knowledge of God apart from His whole objectivity, divine and human, in Jesus Christ. Therefore the modes and forms our theological knowledge must exhibit an inner structural coherence reflecting the nature of Christ. Moreover, it is because mystery belongs to the nature of Christ as God and Man in one Person that it would be unfaithful of us not to respect that mystery in our knowing of Him and therefore in our systematic presentation of our knowledge. It is upon this fact that every attempt to reduce knowledge of God to a logical system of ideas must always suffer shipwreck.[1]

The astute reader, among other things, will see how the above from TFT implicates a so-called natural theology, or a speculative theology. The aforementioned becomes an impossibility in the type of ‘dialogical’ ‘kataphysical’ ‘epistemological inversion[al]’ theology TFT is proposing. That is to say, for TFT (and me following), to do a genuinely Christian theology first presupposes that Godself in the objectivity of His own eternal and internal life as triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, freely chooses to make His objective Self known to His ‘very good’ creation; indeed, as that very good creation, that is “us,” was created to be a counterpoint of koinonia-fellowship that God might share His superabundant life with forever and into His eternal life of pleroma and bliss. The ground of this type of theological endeavor, for TFT, isn’t reducible to a ‘systematic’ frame wherein the would-be knower of God comes with an a priori and immanent frame of reflection to think ‘godness’ from. Instead, as TFT has made clear, it is a matter of God, the God who freely chose to become Creator because of who He eternally is in triune relationship, to impose Himself upon is, with the patterns and emphases of life and love that have always already formed His life as the Monarxia (‘Godhead’).

If you understand what Torrance is getting at in the “short” snippet above, then you will understand what has animated my own theological work for these last couple of decades. It really isn’t a matter of pointing to “my work,” or even “Torrances” though, it is a matter of pointing beyond ourselves to the risen and ascended Christ who intends on coming once again bodily; even as He comes to us moment-by-moment now by the Holy Spirit.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 137–39.

	Bobby Grow on The Church as Prolongation of…
	reubenhuffman on The Church as Prolongation of…
	Bobby Grow on On the Orders and Disorders of…
	Bobby Grow on On the Orders and Disorders of…
	Richard Bridgan on On the Orders and Disorders of…

Athanasian Reformed

𝑉𝑒𝑟𝑏𝑢𝑚 𝐷𝑒𝑖 𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑢𝑚. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐆𝐨𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫.

Category Archives: T. F. Torrance