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“Jesus Christ is that Truth truthfully communicating himself, and enabling us truthfully to receive him. He is the Truth communicating himself in and through truths, who does not communicate himself apart from truths, and who does not communicate truths apart from himself. It is in this utterly unique way that Jesus Christ constitutes in himself the controlling and justifying Center of reference for all our statements about God, and as such he is the ultimate Judge of their truth or falsity.”[1]
T.F. Torrance’s set of biblical-theological essays touching on the nature of the Bible, the Word of God, and the appropriate place of biblical interpretation and theological reasoning, is titled Reality & Evangelical Theology: The Realism of Christian Revelation. In it, Torrance sets out to clarify his mode of theological reason, his style of writing, and his particular approach to the meditative study of the Scriptures in tandem with his Barth-derived notion of the Word of God. In my continuous study of Barth’s “Word” doctrine, Torrance could not have been a better guide and help.
Torrance’s continual emphasis throughout the set of essays is the divide which exists between God and man, and how when man views his own theological language – much of which could be right in line with how Christians have always spoken and in line with a semi-coherent wrestling with the message of Scripture – as univocally apprehending the (capital T) Truth of God which exists always and evermore before and outside of our linguistically-encapsulated notions of God’s Truth (i.e., in our creaturely realities), man takes his first step down the road to theological inconsistency and revelational emptiness. The divide which Torrance rightly recognizes as existing between God and man functions in his theological programme as a sort of parallel paradigm to the hypostatic union of Jesus Christ, with both human and divine realities existing side by side, yet with the divine side firmly in control of and sovereign over the human side. On the human side is human speech: our language, thought forms, and general speech patterns about God which over time we behave as if speaks univocally of the Truth of God towards which it points. On the divine side is the Truth of God, the ontological reality of God’s separately-existing being (identical with God Himself) which cannot and will never be captured by the limited notions of human thought forms and speech, but which sovereignly decides to so intervene within the partially-true events of human theological speaking to so reveal Himself in Jesus Christ to real people in their spatiotemporal existences.
The way the Barthian notion of the Word of God functions in Torrance’s theology is by both further supporting his other consistent claim that what God reveals is not something outside of Himself but is really and truly Himself and providing an objective referent against which the myriadly-colorful but far too often anarchic warscape of human theological speaking may be judged, analyzed, and sifted. Without some objective Truth to appeal to – apart from some magically-imbued theological power-structure like the Roman church – Torrance believes, our theological speaking becomes even more anarchic and ridiculous than it already tends to be. He backs up his claim, writing:
“It is the Truth itself and not any formulation of the church’s understanding of it that is the canon or criterion of true knowledge. The Truth of God may be known only in accordance with what it is independently in itself and as we on our part submit our understanding to its judgment… Understood in this epistemological way, justification by Grace, or verification through the Truth that Christ himself is, provides theology with the most powerful principle of objectivity, for it cuts away the ground from all our subjective claims and assertions.”[2]
Now, how is Torrance’s idea of the Word of God then apprehended, at all, by human interpreters? Torrance’s answer runs along the lines of the traditionally-conceived debate between faith and reason. Torrance, ever the Barthian, insists that it is only as the human theologian/biblical interpreter – the same thing in Torrance’s (and my) opinion – “submit[s] [his]… understanding to [the Bible’s]… judgment” that the human theologian may wish to utter any correct theological speech at all. It is only through a total dependence on the Reality of God – a hope that that Reality apprehends and encompasses the interpreter – that any human language may hope to participate in the ontological Reality of God by God’s own intervention and eventing of his revealing-of-Self. In Anselm’s classic phrase, “I believe [or, allow myself to be encompassed by God’s reality], therefore I understand.”
All the ways that certain Modern categories about textual authority and truthful correspondence have infiltrated evangelical understandings of the Word of God, I am convinced Torrance presents a solid case here for a unique understanding of these concepts of the Word of God and the Word of Man. Of course, one of Torrance’s other argumentative veins is that his arguments are not new, as he claims Athanasius, Calvin, and others have thought identically. I myself have long been wrestling with issues of biblical-textual coherence, and for all the ways I have reconceptualized my own understanding of biblical authority I have come back to the thought that the Bible is indeed revelatory, wonderfully amazing, and inspired; where that inspiration, authority, and revelation is to be located, however, is purely and completely with the power and control of the God who reveals, authorizes, and inspires the text. When the text itself is imbued with an independent power, as many evangelicals implicitly think of it, it takes on a truly dangerous discursive function and serves the power-moves of those theological speakers who would proof-text their way to the top. Although the “implications” of such a view would seem to some in the conservative evangelical vein to lead to “liberal theology,” I think it does just the opposite: emphatically pushing the claim that the reality of the Bible’s inspiration lies in the sole hands of the God who willed its existence destroys the foundations of contemporary theological leftism. How, I think deserves a whole other blog post. I would, of course, add as a footnote add that such an understanding of the Word of God must always and evermore be supplemented by a constant listening-ear to the word of the Ancient Church Catholic (i.e., the saint’s throughout the ages who have themselves wrestled, better than us, over these issues). Take these thoughts with a grain of salt; I myself am still thinking through them.
Soli Deo Gloria
[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Reality & Evangelical Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1982), 125-6.
[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Reality & Evangelical Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1982), 123.
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