‘The Triune God and the ‘Re-schematised Mind.’
‘Christians neither should nor can ground their belief in the triune God on abstract arguments for theism in general. The recognition of where and how God speaks is intrinsic to the Self-communication of God…It is precisely in and through God’s Self-disclosure that we recognise that God speaks here and in this way and not there and in that way.’
Torrance thinks this point is not fully appreciated in theological circles. Partly because people fear it is circular. He thinks it is but not viciously so, since any knowledge of a person involves us depending on their free self-disclosure to us. Partly because it seems to undermine human freedom. Again, he thinks it does, since if God reveals Godself to a person it does reduce their freedom not to believe in God. Partly because it compromises objectivity. Yet if there is a God proper objectivity would involve knowing this God.
Torrance thinks the more serious criticism is that he’s advocating esoteric and individualistic knowledge of God. So the main question of the lecture is: what are the criteria for theological claims? Torrance used Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments to produce an answer.
For K, if we say the criteria for recognising Christian truth are immanent within us, then we repudiate God’s Self-disclosure by collapsing it into Socratic self-knowledge (from the Meno problem and its midwife solution).
K proposes a different scheme (neither Plato nor K are proposing general epistemologies, but asking about knowledge of the divine). The teacher and the moment in time are and remain decisive for our relation to the truth (the opposite of Plato’s model). Prior to this decisive help from the teacher we are in ‘untruth’. But to recognise the truth is not an irrational leap, it is not to abandon reason nor have something added to reason; it is rather a paradigm shift, a new perception on the world.
Torrance thought this should be conceived christologically not rather than individually. What I think he meant by this is that through coming to faith we participate in a person, Christ, through the Spirit, and thereby in God, in contrast to a platonic conception of participation in the forms. But when he publishes the book you can check out the details.
I had dinner with him last night; he’s a remarkably nice man.
Thanks for these summaries. My first course in graduate school was on Modern Christology with Alan Torrance. Our first book was Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments”. I quickly fell head over heels in love with systematic theology.
He’s a great lecturer. He loves drawing things, which apparently John Haldane does too. Maybe it’s a St. Andrews thing. Where were you at grad school?