A Response to Darren Sarisky on T. F. Torrance
This entry is part of a series of responses to Theological Genealogies of Modernity, a special issue of Modern Theology edited by Darren Sarisky, Pui-Him Ip, and Austin Stevenson. In this installment, Alex Irving offers a reading of Darren Sarisky’s “Neither Progress nor Regress: The Theological Substructure of T. F. Torrance’s Genealogy of Modern Theology.”
Darren Sarisky’s recent Modern Theology article explores an outworking of the theological method of one of the most prolific and intuitive Anglophone theologians of the modern period. The article engages with the way in which Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007) conceived of the relationship between positive theological speech and metaphysics. Sarisky is specifically interested in how this relationship is expressed in Torrance’s writings on the tides and currents through which the Church’s speech concerning God has progressed—a genealogical effort that provokes a comparison to Michel Foucault (surely the only time TF Torrance has been compared to Foucault)!
On Torrance’s account of the relationship between positive theological speech and metaphysics, Sarisky helpfully orientates the reader to Torrance’s “ultimates,” beliefs that cannot be verified upon any other basis than themselves. Here Torrance follows closely in the steps of Karl Barth, for whom revelation bursts upon human beings “vertically,” from above. It is, as Torrance frequently puts it, utterly self-contained and utterly new: that is, revelation has no dependence and no precedent. Moreover, there is no ground in the human being by which revelation can be prepared for or apprehended. This point is key for Torrance. So far as he is concerned, we cannot “prepare” ourselves to receive revelation by establishing a rational basis whereby it can be received as revelation or otherwise (as did, for example, Jean-Alphonse Turretin). Revelation bursts upon us as something utterly new and is received on its own terms or not at all.
T.F. Torrance (1913-2007)
It is in this context that we can understand the function of Torrance’s “ultimates” in connection to the relationship of theology and metaphysics. In this, there is something curiously Heideggerian about Torrance’s thinking. In his account of metaphysics, Heidegger characterized the subject as the attempt to identify being by establishing being upon the ground of human ideas. As Kevin Hector helpfully summarizes, “Heidegger claims that (a) metaphysics equates the being of beings—their fundamental reality—with our conception of them and (b) that it thus fits into a prior conceptual framework.” Torrance shares the same inchoate thought in his critique of what he terms the rational activity of the “modern” mind, which is more concerned with imposing coherence upon reality than exposing the intrinsic coherence that visits upon us through the encounter. This imposition of coherence (as contrasted to the exposition of coherence) underlies his seminal contributions on the function of logic in theological speech. It is in this context, as I have suggested elsewhere, that Torrance’s so-called “reconstruction” of natural theology should be understood.
Torrance’s “ultimates” are not so much doctrines among other doctrines. They function rather more like axioms (or “norms”) in relation to which the rest of theological speech is to be regulated. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity is the “ground and grammar” of theology: it is (a) the fundamental assertion to be made about God (on the grounds that God reveals himself as the triune one apart from which we can say nothing regarding God) and (b) it provides the fundamental rules to govern the behavior of other theological doctrines. What is in view is a theoretical framework through which we apprehend God’s self-givenness which is itself determined by God’s act. Torrance’s is not a post-metaphysical theology; it is a metaphysic that has been thoroughly revised (one might almost say “evangelized”) by God’s act. The conceptual furniture by which we apprehend God’s self-revelation is itself a product of revelation, as portrayed in Torrance’s provocative image of the penetration of the Word of God into the hearts, minds, social structures, and institutions of Israel as the “womb of the incarnation.”
Vincent van Gogh, Prayer Before the Meal
Those to whom Hans Frei’s typology of modern theology might be more familiar than the work of Torrance may well be trying to locate Torrance within that conceptual map as they read. There is some benefit to this, as Frei’s typology engages this question of whether speech of God can be correlated as and amongst other human possibilities. For Torrance, Christianity has its own distinctive language and conceptual framework. They are both a posteriori: something that is given in the event of God’s self-revelation. In this, Torrance has followed Barth into the “strange new world” within the Bible.
Sarisky’s article does more than simply lay out the specifics of Torrance’s “ultimates” as theological substructure. Sarisky goes on to show how this approach to theological apprehension lends shape to Torrance’s analysis of the theological interpretation of Scripture. Certainly, this can never be far from Torrance’s mind. Divine being, so far as Torrance is concerned, is a being-in-interpretation, something normative for tradition as the way the Church has read Scripture. To see exactly how Torrance’s “ultimates” function as the theological substructure of his account of the development of theology, the reader will be best served by reading Sarisky’s article for themselves. There are few better introductions to this deeply creative theological mind.
[You can read Darren Sarisky’s response to this article here.]
Alex Irving is Lecturer and Tutor in Theology at St Mellitus College and priest in the Church of England. He is dad of two young kids and husband of Sophia.