Thomas F. Torrance, and his views

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Jerusalem Blade

Puritan Board Professor
Anyone familiar with T.F. Torrance and his views? I know he was involved in publishing Calvin's New Testament Commentaries, and was a Calvin scholar.

Or the books, Thomas F. Torrance and the Orthodox-Reformed Theological Dialogue, by Jason Robert Radcliff

And also, T. F. Torrance and Eastern Orthodoxy: Theology in Reconciliation, by Matthew Baker (Editor)

Blurb on the latter book: “A properly ecumenical theology, T. F. Torrance believed, points the church to Christ as the only source and reality of its own unity. Its only hope for unity must be discovered in him and unveiled to the church, rather than pieced together and manufactured through ecumenical slogans and well-meaning intentions. Acting on this belief, Torrance initiated an international dialogue of Reformed and Orthodox Churches, which culminated when the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Orthodox Church issued a groundbreaking joint statement of agreement concerning the Trinity in 1991, a move beyond the filioque controversy that has divided East and West for a millennium. The current volume on T. F. Torrance and Eastern Orthodoxy continues the theological and ecclesial work of the reintegration of Western and Eastern traditions on a classical patristic foundation.”

In his discussions with the Eastern Orthodox on the Trinity, was Torrance true to the creedal formulations of the early church councils on the Trinity? Is T.F. Torrance sound?

Jacob @RamistThomist , are you familiar with these things?
 
Anyone familiar with T.F. Torrance and his views? I know he was involved in publishing Calvin's New Testament Commentaries, and was a Calvin scholar.

Or the books, Thomas F. Torrance and the Orthodox-Reformed Theological Dialogue, by Jason Robert Radcliff

And also, T. F. Torrance and Eastern Orthodoxy: Theology in Reconciliation, by Matthew Baker (Editor)

Blurb on the latter book: “A properly ecumenical theology, T. F. Torrance believed, points the church to Christ as the only source and reality of its own unity. Its only hope for unity must be discovered in him and unveiled to the church, rather than pieced together and manufactured through ecumenical slogans and well-meaning intentions. Acting on this belief, Torrance initiated an international dialogue of Reformed and Orthodox Churches, which culminated when the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Orthodox Church issued a groundbreaking joint statement of agreement concerning the Trinity in 1991, a move beyond the filioque controversy that has divided East and West for a millennium. The current volume on T. F. Torrance and Eastern Orthodoxy continues the theological and ecclesial work of the reintegration of Western and Eastern traditions on a classical patristic foundation.”

In his discussions with the Eastern Orthodox on the Trinity, was Torrance true to the creedal formulations of the early church councils on the Trinity? Is T.F. Torrance sound?

Jacob @RamistThomist , are you familiar with these things?
Yes. I’ve read almost everything he’s written. He’s the standard on the Trinity. His take on reformed trinity isn’t so good. He’s really good on epistemology
 
“Thomas F. Torrance (1913–2007) was arguably Karl Barth’s most distinguished exponent in the English-speaking world through much of the twentieth century.”

He’s far more dangerous than Grudem.
 
“Thomas F. Torrance (1913–2007) was arguably Karl Barth’s most distinguished exponent in the English-speaking world through much of the twentieth century.”

He’s far more dangerous than Grudem.
He’s closer to Athanasius on the doctrine of God than to Barth. Both hold to the debunked Calvin vs Calvinists thesis, which is making a comeback among biblicists. Torrance work is academic and expensive. He won’t have that big an influence on laymen
 
I have a dozen reviews of Torrance somewhere. I’ll post the when I get back to my computer
I think I read somewhere that he believed Christ was sinful in someway so as to be fully human, as if sin is essential and not accidental to being human?
 
From what I've read of Torrance, he's alright. The main difficulty is that he's confusing in several ways:
- He uses (as Jacob mentioned) the "Calvin vs. Calvinists" idea that the Reformed Orthodox are evil.
- He is prone to somewhat exaggerated rhetoric, then contradicting it (Ex: "omnipotence [is to be understood] in terms of what God actually is and actually has done...abstract questions postulated about what God can do and can not do are empty of meaning and give rise to nonsensical answers" in The Christian Doctrine of God, 204-205; but then later: "His almighty power and freedom are not exhausted in what he has done, does do, and will do" on pg. 209).
- He doesn't clearly define his terms (especially common and frustrating ones: abstract, dynamic, ontological, hypostatic, being, becoming...the list goes on. Unfortunately, he also doesn't use some terms - especially "becoming" - in the normal way, which can only be figured out when you pair his explicit rejection of their normal definitions with his fascination with the patristics, and especially his point that the interesting thing about the philosophical words they used wasn't their Greek source, but rather the way their definitions changed in order to articulate theological realities).
- Incarnational atonement is wrong and weird.

My main interpretation of Torrance is that what he was attempting to articulate is just classical Christian theism, with an emphatic focus on the centrality of Trinity and incarnation in it. However, his (correct) ire against deism and his historiography made him interpret sources of classical Christian theism (like the Reformed Orthodox) as the enemy, and so he fought their articulation of it...only to end up saying the same thing that they were attempting to communicate in the first place.

So he's a bit of a difficult and frustrating read. I think it was beneficial for me to read him (at least a bit), and as has been mentioned he has good thoughts on epistemology, and I think on language. But you really have to be determined to take the time to understand what he's saying on his own terms, and understand what he means by certain words rather than assuming their meaning. In a sense, his difficult prose points to the fact that language itself is analogical and contingent rather than transcendent and ultimate.
 
You do not want to make him your main diet, but he is simply too powerful a thinker on the Trinity to ignore.
 
I think I read somewhere that he believed Christ was sinful in someway so as to be fully human, as if sin is essential and not accidental to being human?
Here is the problem. Torrance is following Gregory of Nazianzus's claim that the unassumed is the unhealed. So far, so good. He says that if Christ did not assume a sinful nature, he could not heal our sinful nature.

This just sounds wrong. The Reformed got around it by saying that Christ did assume our nature, but the Holy Spirit immediately sanctified it in the womb.
 
Here is the problem. Torrance is following Gregory of Nazianzus's claim that the unassumed is the unhealed. So far, so good. He says that if Christ did not assume a sinful nature, he could not heal our sinful nature.

This just sounds wrong. The Reformed got around it by saying that Christ did assume our nature, but the Holy Spirit immediately sanctified it in the womb.
This is new to me. I thought he assumed an unsinful human nature.

Edit: can you source me on this?

How does the virgin birth interact with this? I’ve always heard the virgin birth removed him from the sinful headship of Adam, more or less.
 
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This is new to me. I thought he assumed an unsinful human nature.

Edit: can you source me on this?

How does the virgin birth interact with this? I’ve always heard the virgin birth removed him from the sinful headship of Adam, more or less.

Here's a helpful article: https://www.monergism.com/john-owen-spirit-life-Christ

I actually found that reading Owen's The Person of Christ in conjunction with Torrance was very helpful, because many of the points that Torrance wants to hit are present in Owen (and clearer, but also usually less emphasized). And where Torrance gets things wrong, Owen corrects them.
 
As others have said, he's simply terrific on the Trinity. His masterpiece, in my view, is The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being, Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996). He interacts quite extensively with the early church fathers in explicating the doctrine. Top notch. His writing style can be somewhat dense at times, but that just forces the reader to pay more attention.

And, yes, Barth was an early mentor of his. But, in later years, he distanced himself from Barth on some points.
 
This is new to me. I thought he assumed an unsinful human nature.

Edit: can you source me on this?

How does the virgin birth interact with this? I’ve always heard the virgin birth removed him from the sinful headship of Adam, more or less.
See Nazianzus, the second letter to Cledonius.
 
I myself am satisfied with Samuel Baird's explanation of the matter (The Elohim Revealed, pgs. 587-588):

Whilst the Son of God took to himself the nature of man, by which the apostasy was wrought, and which lay under the curse of the apostasy, he did not assume it as apostate. In taking the human into union with his divine nature, he received it in perfect holiness and conformity to the law. This was a necessary result of the remarkable manner of his birth: - "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." Here the angel attributes the unsullied purity and holiness of the child to the overshadowing power of the Holy Spirit. The hypostatic union of the divine and human natures, in the person of the Mediator, was not wrought by the Holy Spirit; but is immediate, and consequent upon the immediate power of the Second Person of the Godhead taking up the human nature into union with his own. Were is otherwise, - were the union one wrought by the mediate agency of the Spirit, - the result would be, not one person, but two; not a hypostatic, but a relative, union. The only office, therefore, which can be attributed to the Holy Spirit, in the incarnation of the Son, was the generation of a body and soul, out of the human nature of the virgin, free from sin: - "Christ the Son of God became man by taking to himself a true body and a reasonable soul, being conceived, by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the virgin Mary, of her substance, and born of her, yet without sin." (Larger Catechism, Qu. 37). On this subject, Marck [?], having stated the conveyance of original sin by generation, says, "Nor must Christ, therefore, be subject to its guilt; not because he never was in Adam, as the Anabaptists and Weigelians imagine; since his genealogy is expressly terminated in Adam, (Luke ii. 38); but, first, because he was not propagated from Adam as to his whole person, - for, we commonly say, sins are personals, - but only as to his humanity, and that, manifestly, by an extraordinary and supernatural nativity; wherefore, also, he was not tithed in the loins of Levi (Heb. vii. 9, 10.) Second, strictly, he was not in Adam when he sinned, because he came into the world, not by virtue of the blessing given before the fall, - 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,' (Gen. 1. 28), - but by the special promise, following the fall, concerning the seed of the woman, which should bruise the head of the serpent. (Gen. iii. 15)."
 
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