Transcript
On behalf of the Koinonia Fellowship and the seminary community at large, I want to welcome Dr. Tom Torrance, Professor of Church Dogmatics at the University of Edinburgh, who will speak to us today. Dr. Torrance was born in China, given to understand. He left China at the age of 14. I was told that he spoke Mandarin before he spoke English. I hope he'll stick to the latter today. Dr. Torrance has a wide education in Scotland, England, and
on the continent of Europe, taking his THD in Basel. He has served in several parishes, among them the Beech Grove Church in Aberdeen. He was a chaplain in World War II, and after his period in the pastorate, he returned to New College in Edinburgh in the field of church history, and then to his current position in the field of church dogmatics. I discussed this Dr. Torrance career briefly with Dr. Hendry, who is a long-time friend
of Dr. Torrance, and they have enjoyed a long and happy association together. They are both founding fathers of the Scottish Journal of Theology, which still continues under the editorship today of Dr. Torrance. Dr. Torrance is the author of a number of books, among them the Doctrine of Grace and the Apostolic Fathers, Calvin's Doctrine of Man, a book on the early Barthes, the book Theological Science, a more recent work, Space, Time, and the Incarnation, published in 1969.
He, of course, is editor of the monumental Church Dogmatics by Barth, and he, as I said, continues as editor of the famed Scottish Journal of Theology. Dr. Torrance, it's a pleasure to have you here, and we welcome you to the Princeton campus. Mr. Chairman, thank you for your kind welcome. This is a place I've long learned to love, and there's no place I'd rather be for a while in the United States than at Princeton. Everything about
us today tells us that we live in a world that will be increasingly dominated by empirical and theoretic science. This is the world in which the church lives and proclaims its message about Jesus. It is not an alien world, for it is in this world of space and time explored by science that God has planted us. He made the universe and endowed man with gifts to investigate and understand it. Just as he made life to produce
itself, so he has made the universe with man as an essential constituent in it to bring forth and articulate knowledge of and thus to be the creation of God. Regarded in this light, the pursuit of science is one of the ways in which man exercises the dominion in the earth which he was given at his creation. That is how, for example, Francis Bacon understood the work of human science as man's obedience to God. Science is, in
fact, a religious duty, while man as a scientist can be spoken of as the priest of creation, whose task it is to interpret the books of nature, to understand the universe in its wonderful structures and harmonies, and to bring it all into orderly articulation so that it proper end as a vast theatre of glory in which the Creator is worshipped and praised. Nature itself is dumb, but it is man's part, as part of nature, to give
it word, to be its mouth through which the whole universe gives voice to the glory and majesty of the living God. That then is the universe of space and time in and through which God has revealed himself to man, and it is in and through that universe, as it comes to view under human inquiry, that we are surely to develop and articulate our knowledge of God. The natural scientist and the theologian are both at work within
the space-time structures of the universe. The natural scientist inquiring into the intelligible structures of contingent existence to which man himself belongs, and the theologian inquiring of God, the creator of the universe, the source of all its created rationalities, to which man also belongs. Theological science and natural science, each has its proper objective to pursue, but their work inevitably overlaps, for both operate through the same rational structures of space and time. While each develops modes of
inquiry and verification in accordance with the nature and direction of its distinctive field, each is what it is as a movement of human inquiry because of the profound coordination between human knowing and the space-time structures of the creation. Now it is the deeper understanding of that coordination which we have reached in our times that has affected such a profound change in our understanding of what science itself is about, and thus inevitably of the relation between
natural science and theological science. For many people to speak of science and theology, theology and science in the same breath seems to be an utter contradiction, and they are certainly poles apart if theology is a subjective movement of life and thought, and if science is equated with technology or a merely instrumentalist activity. That is precisely the kind of bifurcation that is now in process of collapse before the advances of science itself. And so we are in
a moment in the history of Western civilization where the whole concept of science is undergoing radical change and opening out and also deepening in a marvelous way. More and more as the special sciences bring to light the astonishing complexity and richness of nature, there is demanded of us a deeper and a more comprehensive grasp of science than that into which we tumbled within the compass of a mechanistic universe and its rigid instrumentalism. This is nowhere more
apparent today than in the field of biology, which has so long suffered obstruction in its advance through reductionism into mechanistic concepts. And now it becomes more and more apparent that nature must be courted, not imposed upon. We must let it develop and flower under our investigation if we are really to know it in accordance with what it is and not simply along the lines of our tormenting, distorting or twisting of it. Science is not therefore something
to be set against our ordinary and natural experience in the world, but on the contrary, a development and refinement of it and a deeper penetration into the rational structures with which we operate in normal behavior within the universe. The objective of science in every field is to discover the relations of things and events at different levels of complexity and to develop our understanding and expression of them in such a way that their real nature becomes progressively
disclosed to us. What we are concerned to do then in every science is to connect things and to think their interrelations, hence the importance of correct thinking to determine the specific mode of connection or the distinctive kind of relation that obtains between the things we are investigating. And so we have the double task of penetrating into and determining again and again a new kind of connection and of lifting our minds to higher level where we can
apprehend and bring the new kind of connection to appropriate formulation. But now the great characteristic of science today is that we are learning how to operate with the integration of form and being in laying bare the dynamic structures and transformations in the flow of space-time reality. This is in part the immense significance of field theory and of the way in which pure science, in physics for example, has had to leave behind the abstractive procedures of
positivist science or at least to treat them only within certain methodologically imposed limits. That is to say here we operate with an objective comprehensibility, as Einstein put it, in the nature of things that is independent of our perceiving or conceiving of them. Now in order to explain that a little more fully and at the same time to show how theology is related to it, let me discuss briefly the three great periods of cosmological change in the
development of Western civilization. The first period we can date from roughly the first century BC, perhaps a little earlier, to the third century AD and indeed a little later. This is a period when we have the rise of Ptolemy cosmology. Now the distinctive characteristic of this age is that the new science of astronomy, as it now flourished, built into the fabric of civilized thought a radical dualism and a dualism that was particularly hard because of the
Aristotelian interpretation of the old charismos or separation between the intelligible and the sensible realms. Now it was with this dualism that the Judeo-Christian tradition had to struggle so hard in the first and second and third centuries and the Christian theologians had to struggle particularly hard with it in laying scientific foundations for the whole structure of its thought within the compass of Greek philosophy and science. It was in this period that we find them coming into
head-on collision with those movements that were bound up with dualism such as the Gnostics and the Aryans in different ways and later on of course historians and civilians in their way. They were all forms of thought whether Christian or non-Christian which gave profound expression or which were profoundly influenced by the radical dualism that was given scientific form in the Ptolemaic universe and it's interesting to note that Christian theology was able to articulate itself precisely
by coming to radical grips with the very foundations of epistemology and science as they developed in Greek thought and indeed to such an extent that by overcoming the dualism not only in theology but in science itself it laid the basis for the classical attitude of mind that has in many respects been characteristic of the whole development of western science and further one can point out how the Christian theologians, Christian theology laid the basis for a physics
as we see in the magnificent work of John Philoponus which developed relational views of space and time upon which we have caught up only in our own generation. The next great change happened somewhere between the 14th and the 17th century this was a change from medieval dualism to Newtonian dualism although the great Greek theologians had radically overcome dualism nevertheless it was introduced into the west and built into the fabric of western thought for more than a
thousand years in Augustinianism although that was modified by an Aristotelian Thomism once again it was the Aristotelian thought which hardened the dualism introduced by Saint Augustine and so when we have the great period of transition that carries us from the medieval to modern times over the reformation and renaissance the movement is one from a medieval form of dualism to a Newtonian form of dualism and as the medieval dualism was a modified form of Augustinian dualism so
the Newtonian dualism is same although the Augustinian dualism comes rushing back through Descartes and indeed through Kant and the Christian church had somehow to readjust itself to this vast change but precisely because the change was from one form of dualism to another that one can see the very errors that the reformation was concerned to analyze in the medieval situation taking root and form again in the Protestant period so that Protestantism reproduces all the medieval errors except
that they have now Protestant dress and the more we look back upon the relation of the reformation to the medieval thought the more is very difficult to see a radical change from one to the other but now today we have a third great period and this is the change from a Newtonian dualism to the Einsteinian universe now the the exciting thing about this change is that here we have a rejection of dualism both in epistemology and
in natural science here then we have beginning of with four-dimensional geometry and with the geometries of space time here we have a way of thinking which restores again the basic unity of form and being which had largely been lost to western culture after the introduction of the Augustinian dualism as we turn back to the Greek fathers we find that they operated and their reconstruction with Greek philosophy and science they operated with a profound integration between
form and being logos and fusis energia and uzia but these became detached one prescinded from the other as the medieval said and it's only in our own day with the advanced particularly of relativity theory with the discovery of invariant structures in the universe independently of our perceiving and conceiving of them that we have established a genuine ontology that's to say a movement of thought which breaks through the phenomenology the phenomenal phenomenalism of Kant and the substitute
ontologies that developed with it and the restoration of a genuine ontology and therefore with a science that is concerned as Planck in his way but Einstein particularly insisted is concerned with reality with existence and not simply with convenient arrangements of our concepts about it that makes no metaphysical claims in relation to being itself and so now after centuries of thought christian theology is faced with a new situation as the theologians laid the scientific foundations of classical
theology they had to come to grips with a culture and a new science that had built into its fabric dualism but today we are faced with a new science that rejects dualism and points forward to a new way of apprehending the universe a profounder way of knowing in which form and being come together and that is why in their different ways we have in the interim period philosophers like Heidegger or Wittgenstein versus whom incidentally taking their
cue from Dan Scotus who are concerned in some kind of a way to prophesy a way of thought in which form and being Lagos and Fuses Ennegeia and Uzia come together and now with the recovery of the unity of form and being there takes place profound changes in the modes of rationality that we develop in knowledge and the nature of the cognitive instruments we have to use and in the procedures of verification that are forced upon
us from the nature of that into which we inquire now we are still in process of this change in the midst of the process and it is precisely in this period where we are advancing from one cosmological to the other that we have the same kind of confusion the same chaos in epistemological outlooks that we find so characteristic of the second and the third centuries we can parallel the Gnostic and Aryan movements of the second and
third centuries with chaotic myths and ritual with cacophonous gloom and guts religion almost everything that you would have today you can see in terms of this transitional period that's pretty closely parallel to the problems that were raised in the second and third century now it's not about that transitional period that I wish to discuss nor about the change in the social outlook that is inevitably going on as a result of the dislocation and change what I'm
concerned is to probe more deeply into the concept and the development of the advancing science and to relate it or to see how theology is related to it or from what I have said it should be clear that they ought to be profoundly related if christian theology and its scientific foundations establish itself by overcoming cosmological as well as epistemological dualism then it ought to stand far closer to the new science after einstein which is also concerned
to reject cosmological epistemological dualism that is why it is the new thinking in the greek fathers particularly that is so astoundingly relevant to the era of modern science for here we see classical theology and pure science has now pursued working extremely close together here more than at any period in history since perhaps the fifth or sixth century we can see that the theological concepts and the basic concepts physical concepts and natural science overlap now it may
help us to get into this if we look a little into the development that lies behind this great change and first to look at new science as it developed in the 16th century which in characteristic contrast to medieval science or in ancient science it was called positive science let's say here the new science was concerned with a way of knowing in which we could actually advance knowledge not a science in which is simply concerned to clarify
what we already know but the kind of science in which we actually learn what we could not infer from what we already know the kind of science which we actually discover what was never known before and the kind of science in which we think only as we are compelled to think by the actual structures in the universe itself now this was the kind of science in which we think in terms of the interior connections or laws
or principles in any field and not in terms of external authorities final causes or merely skeptical questions now as this science got underway with this new kind of question with the new way of making its positive affirmations and succeeded in advancing knowledge it took to itself the name dogmatic science and indeed dogmatics was first applied to physics before it was ever applied to theology and it was applied to physics of course because in contrast to the
skeptical questions of the new academy as you remember attacked by sexus empiricus and adversus dogmaticos this was the kind of science that asked the kind of question where you have positive answers the kind of science where you really advance and build securely upon foundations that are positively laid now the characteristic of this science then was that not only did you advance in knowledge but you advanced in knowledge in such a way that your concepts were forced
upon you by the objective structures of nature and in such a way that you had to make positive affirmations about it and face to face with these structures as they came to view it would be quite irrational not to affirm them and indeed not to confirm them with a universality of intent and an exclusiveness now this is a character of that science that is so often misunderstood and confounded with positivism or scientism and therefore i think
it's important to see what it was about and also to trace how it changed and how we had to reconstruct it and advance beyond it in order to say something about the positive or the dogmatic character of this science what einstein himself called dogmatic realism let me draw a distinction between a tune and a noise communication theory defines a noise in contrast to any distinctive series of signals as a random sequence of sounds conveying no information
no message no meaning but just going on and on in that noisy way a tune on the other hand is a distinctive series of signals for example emitted by an oriole or a canary a distinctive series of signals with a pattern intended to signify something to give an identifiable message now any single identifiable message is represented ideally by only one configuration of signals but the opposite holds true of a noise no significance whatsoever is attached to
any configuration of signals that are a mere noise the chance sounds which compose it could well have been otherwise any chance sounds could compose it in contrast however once we have recognized an aggregate as orderly and meaningful once we've recognized a sequence of sound as identifiable we cannot think that it might just as well have been otherwise now that is what happens when we recognize an intelligible pattern or structure of events in nature we affirm it
positively and with an exclusiveness now other modern thinkers like Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker have made use of de Fermat's principle that light takes the shortest path between two points do the same he argues and rightly that when we apply that to the formulation of natural law one possibility forces itself upon us as the actual state of affairs and thereby the others are stamped as really impossible in fact unentertainable and so we have the formulation of natural
law with an exclusiveness or with what Einstein called the a dogmatic realism here we are concerned with a structure of reality which we can conceive only in one way as we conceive it in accordance with the nature of things and their inner relations now these are natural laws as we have come to speak of them and these natural laws as Whitehead pointed out are the dogmas of natural science but dogmas used in this sense of scientific
dogmatics and not in the sense of popular sense of course of the dogmatical person or the dogmatist who lays down an arbitrary opinion from some unquestioned framework of thought apart altogether from rational grounds now it's in this sense that scientific theology develops its dogmas this is what Christian dogmatics is concerned about it's a dogmatic science in that classical sense for here we are concerned with positive assertions that are forced upon us by the nature of the
realities into which we inquire and by their objective structure which we are forced to affirm we think only as we are compelled to think in accordance with the nature of things and in accordance with the interior connections that come to view in them and our inquiry and which have traditionally been called at least it found it had to reject the Aristotelian method of argument from fixed principles or fixed axioms here on the other hand we're not
concerned with certain fixed principles from which we argue either logical deductively a logical inductively however we wish to proceed on the contrary we're not concerned with a logical clarification of an area of knowledge of course everyone who speaks grammatically and coherently is concerned with that up to a point but that's not what science is about what we are concerned with is not simply the relations of ideas but with relations of matters of fact to quote butler
or hue and it's in that connection that we find the new concept of principia being developed and so here we have in the Newtonian principia an attempt to find a way of penetrating into a field of experience in order to lay bare its inner structure but that requires the development of appropriate modes of rationality or cognitive instruments by which the field can be grasped in its depth and through which the scientist can distinguish and articulate its
inner principles and so we have Newton proceeding in just this way in order to probe into and articulate the structures of the universe he had to discover and elaborate of course he shared this with Leibniz discover and elaborate the differential calculus for this purpose and so we have had ever since the development and the use of variational principles in physics and Newton could not have formulated the laws of motion without the instrumentality of differential quotients they
were the appropriate cognitive instrument which he found he had to use as he explored the structures of the universe now this represented of course an enormous advance forward in our understanding of the universe and in the whole procedure and structure of science but with the confluence particularly of deutonian and cartesian modes of thought into which i'm unable to enter fundamental problems arose within the whole fabric of deutonian science and the deutonian universe which have for 300
years constituted our main problems not only natural science but in theology and indeed in biblical interpretation let me discuss several of these first newton thought of space and time as constituting a vast as it were divine envelope they constitute the divine sensorium that envelops and contains all things in the universe space and time are absolute that's to say they are quite different from the events that go on it but space and time in this way constitute
an inertial system conditioning all events and all knowledge now because in view of this it meant that any exploration of the events that go on within the universe could only be understood and articulated from a point of view from the point of rest as constituted by absolute space and time now inevitably this gave rise to a thoroughly mechanistic universe and within that mechanistic universe the concepts which we operate are basically static now let's remember that it
was within the newtonian outlook that protestant scholasticism arose and whether they like it or not there's no doubt at all about it that the protestant schoolman so-called protestant orthodoxy was formulated within the structures of thought and indeed the universe as they emanated from the new science and operated with basically static concepts that were built in that way into the fabric of their minds again here we have and this is particularly after the cartesian distinction and
divorce really of subject and object here we have the elaboration of science by way of abstraction from observational experience now here interestingly protestantism reproduce the modes of science developed in medieval thought for example saint thomas aquinas thinks of science as abstraction from sense experience and all knowledge is built up in that way which we have to elaborate the objecta mentis upon which our thought terminates now here we have in the protestant mode and now in a
more secular mode the elaboration of science in basically the same way as abstraction from observational experience and here too we find as in medieval science this observational science operating with a logical bridge between concepts and experience and that is precisely what constitutes it positivist science now of course the science that as it began began by rejecting the idea that there is a logical connection between our thought and what we discover but the more it developed in
this way it found itself in the position in which it tried to verify its science its results in such a way that it did after all operate with the logical bridge between science its concepts and of course it's that point that collapsed under the critique of einstein but now we have another ingredient built into the western science and thought and this takes its rise from the problem created by david hume's criticism of the principle of causality
in the newtonian model now it appeared to people i can't that that was who accepted the critique that that really meant that science was left to the whims and arbitrary activity of the human mind and how could any science really develop in that kind of way what science needed now therefore was a stable structure of rationality within which it could operate and so can't set himself to develop regulative principles which became in fact modes of construction
of knowledge out of phenomenal realities now what can't really did was to take the inertial system of space time in the newtonian model because after all can't was concerned to give a rational way of of speaking and holding the supporting the laws of motion developed by newton what can't did was to take space and time which in newton thought constituted an inertial system and transfer it from god to human mind so that here it is the
structures of the human understanding which inertially condition and determine how we know and what we know but as with newton space and time they are absolute and are therefore not to be modified by our experience now this meant that in a profounder way than ever we operate with static structures and science tied up with can't becomes inevitably stuck at point after point as we can see it in its advance but it also had the effect of
transferring the major emphasis in epistemology we know only what we construct can construct and only what is constructible is that which we can accept as valid now all this had the effect of restricting the development of science within the rigid structures of a particulate view of nature and once again we find the principia turned back into fixed premises from which logical deductive operations upon sense experience could be carried out and in terms of which they could
be verified by logical deductive operations now this of course proved has proved more and more unsatisfactory especially after the discovery of the electromagnetic field and the failure again and again to interpret that mechanistic concept and again after the discovery of four dimensional geometries and then we have the new great stride forward that i've been speaking about in which science broke out of the enclosure of the mechanistic universe and its static concepts and fixed principia through relativity
theory through the new axiomatic geometries of space time here the new mode of rationality beyond the differential or the differential quotients of newton here the new mode of rationality developed was what we speak of as mathematical invariance now this had the effect of breaking through kantian phenomenalism as i've said and here we are concerned in our science to operate with or to assume and to probe into to understand invariant structures of nature irrespective of any and
every observer again to cite einstein we're concerned then to develop a science that operates with the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe with objective structures and being in which form and being energia and lusia and so on logos and fuses are profoundly integrated now once this develops as i've said we have a vast change in our basic modalities of knowledge and the verification and we can see right away that there develops a different concept of theory see
in the positive science a theory is a convenient functional arrangement of our observational concepts or observational data but without any claim upon its relation to being it is a convenient arrangement for certain purposes but now theory becomes something quite different here in fact we have a return to the ancient greek concept of teoria a theory is a means through which we penetrate into the structures of reality itself a way of looking at observing reality in which
we allow reality the structures of reality to show through and to force themselves upon our understanding and here we have at the same time a different a further development in the concept of principia here the principles are no longer fixed axioms in fact they are no longer the initial items of knowledge in the science they constitute the first a b c upon which the rest of science is built up like the axioms say of euclidean geometry
on the contrary they are fluid axioms they are cognitive instruments which which we use in an axiomatic penetration into the objective structures of nature these are principia that are developed only in and through processes of interrogation and discovery and are not known beforehand we are not then concerned with fixed axioms or that kind of argumentation deductively as in scholastic theology or science whether the medieval or protestant period nor are we concerned with the kind of premises
or axioms that we have in euclidean geometry which are closed at both ends what we have are open flexible structures used postulationally and therefore with fluid revision the further they penetrate into and lay bare the inner logic or the material logic of the field under investigation but as they succeed in revealing the basic rational structures of the universe they force themselves upon us as valid instruments cognitive instruments imposed upon us by the very nature of reality
itself once we have penetrated into these mathematical invariances and harmonies in which we apprehend the real world we cannot think that they might just as well have happened otherwise they are thrust upon us as intelligible structures reaching out beyond and independently of our knowing of them and it must therefore be in this line that one would have to develop a new natural theology in the heart of theology much as geometries now develop as a natural science
to gain sight einstein in the heart of physics and not as a science antecedent to or independent of physics now i have spent a long time in analyzing the development and structures of science that has been developing because i believe that fundamentally the same procedure operates should operate in scientific theology here we are also concerned to reject fixed principia here we are concerned with the discovery of appropriate instruments or opposite modes of rationality with which to
penetrate into the heart of our religious experience here we're concerned with the development of axiomatic concepts with which to lay bare its interior connections and in that light to understand the rational structure of the whole field of god's interaction with the universe and with man and history now let's be clear we're not concerned to think in accordance with abstractive procedures from sense experience not through logical deductive operations from fixed principles even with their biblical principles but
through axiomatic penetration into the intrinsic intelligibilities of the field of experience or rather the whole field of the divine interaction in revealing and loving between god and the world and god and man and to bring to light the profound inner connections and in that light to develop and to structure our theology now the rejection of abstractive operations means the rejection of course of modes of thinking whether natural theology or indeed an historical investigation with which we
have operated for so long and i believe that this affects as profoundly new testament studies and the whole quest of the historical jesus as any other because it seems to me that the whole quest of the historical jesus still operates in the hangover from positivist science and the old way of thinking by way of abstractions from observational data and so on now all that seems to me to belong just as much as the linguistic philosophy that
came out of the vienna circle to the way of thinking developed by cant and mach a way of thinking that has certainly collapsed from the side of pure science but which is still kicking very strongly in the social sciences and i'm afraid also in the religious sciences now this way of thinking that i've been advocating in theology is not new in the history of christian theology let me give you some examples and i could give you
many of them if you take the little work classical work of athanasios the day in carnationi and read it together with the earlier part of it the country gentes where he is concerned to destroy the radical dualism in the cosmos which he had inherited not only from greek culture but from clement and origin where he criticizes severely the philosophical concept of the logos and restructures it a long line certainly begun by origin then when he comes
to the positive side of thought he is concerned to develop what he calls the acolysia and later on the higher mass the inner connection the the chain of events the chain of happening and in this way to bring out what we would call well after all acolysia means this the the logic of events now not just the logic of ideas he's not concerned with the relations of ideas but in hume's language with the relations of matters
of fact and indeed the relations of god's interaction with the world in creation and incarnation and incarnation and creation and so he distinguishes the kind of connection he's concerned with here from that of causal connection and that of logical connection and as he penetrates into it he finds he has to develop language in order to articulate it and he uses such terms as hey kataykona harris that's a kind of logic of grace a structure of grace
and it's in this way that he seeks to interpret the divine philanthropy the the act of the love of god toward man and the inner connection between incarnation and atonement and so on now if we turn over the pages of history and come to saint ansom who is influenced by athanasis at this point and also by hillary we find him saying theology scientific theology does not begin with biblical statements it begins precisely where biblical statements leave
off because what we are concerned with are those realities to which we are referred by biblical statements and so we do not think out of the theatrical or indeed biblical authority but we think out of the authority of the truth itself the solida veritas and its own ratio veritatis its own inner logic and he says you cannot even take jesus christ as a fixed cipher as a logical cipher from which to argue in this way and
so gently he says remoto cristo let's even put jesus christ aside insofar as we treat him or tempted to treat him as a logical cipher a fixed principle from which to argue and so he finds a way of penetrating into the inner connections of things which he calls the rationes necesariae and these are not necessary reasons in the logical sense they are ways of thinking rational modes of thought which are forced upon us as we allow
our minds to come under the compulsion of the truth of being the veritas um sentiae rerum and indeed the veritas of god himself the creator of being and he finds he can only develop this in terms of course of the three-tiered logic three-tiered structure which has been so highly illuminating and which we're only beginning to appreciate in the light of modern logic and multiple logic now anthem had one great weakness particularly and that is
his failure to understand time and the relation of time to connection but it precisely this point that kirchgaard was concerned to operate with and we find him in the philosophical fragments operating in much the same kind of way he will not operate either with fixed principia biblical or logical on the other hand what he is concerned to do in his strange anonymous way is to penetrate into the inner connection which he finds in the movement of
the eternal in time now what he is concerned with then is a way of apprehending kinases of movement now this thought had come to him through trend and both critique of kanchen concepts of space and time particularly and what he is concerned to do is to distinguish temporal connection from logical connection and causal connection and to find a way of grasping a reality which is basically kinetic and he can only do that by a mode of
the reason which is appropriate to it and so a hundred years before his time or before the scientists go go abandon the point of absolute rest and develops a mode of thinking in accordance with the movement of truth itself later einstein in his own field was to call this kinematics better called kinetic because it is a kinetic logic if you like that term an incarnational logic that kyoko was designed to develop but of course he was
a very strange person kyoko who i think deliberately put his language his thoughts in such a way that most fools who would misunderstand him that they weren't worthy to understand in any case and indeed the whole herd of the existentialists have radically misunderstood him at this point and i can see kyoko gore chuckling in his grave over the success of his way of speech but a tragedy nevertheless now i believe that we have to learn from
these various ways of thinking throughout classical theology but our task is to go on our task is to carry through the same sort of development in theology which we have at different stages in the advance of modern science from newton to einstein from differential quotients to mathematical variances from particle theory to field theory and the kind of dynamic but objective structures or connections basic to scientific knowledge of the universe scientific theology is is at the most
exciting point in its whole developed scientific scientific thought today is at the exciting point in the whole development of its history where it's on the verge of breaking into what it calls quantum logic let's say the the connection between the dynamic and the geometrical aspects of things and until it does that it can't get much beyond overcoming the canton elements in quantum theory which has done in the last four or five years and thus responded to
einstein's from princeton and we are the most exciting development in biology where at last we seem to be breaking through to a point of biological logic in edinburgh for example and in chicago they have recently developed generations of fruit flies which are identical but with different genetic codes which shows us that dna does not really give us the logic of the organismic relations here we are after something which a few years ago wm elsasser and this
university called the logic of inhomogeneity as over against the logic of homogeneity now i believe that theology stands on the same kind of threshold it stands at the point where we are at the breakdown of the old abstractionist mode of thought at the breakdown of any attempt to reduct the theology theological connection either into logical mechanical connections on the one hand or other on the other hand into the kind of non-scientific understandings with which the
social sciences have been operating by and large of course modern theology has been struggling hard to interpret and articulated thought precisely within those areas of social science as forms of phenomenology and sociology of religion and will inevitably follow the collapse of those sciences and that mode of thought which is happening everywhere in the world today and the great problems of our young people on the campuses of the universities as i think a reflection of the chaos
at the moment in the social sciences which suffer from the transitional stage that i've been speaking of but it seems to me that the challenge to christian theology in the light of its own classical foundations is this that we must do today what classical theology in the third fourth fifth sixth seventh century did in the ancient world as they sought to think out their theology and to find appropriate modes of penetrating into the real structures and
articulating their thought in such a way as to overcome the dualism that kept on breaking up their thought and fragmenting it and they succeeded in such a way that they destroyed greek pluralism and laid the basis for one pervades a rationality in the universe but alas modern thought collapses so much that it allows the old pluralisms to invade its own thought and even into biblical interpretation and so removes itself further and further away from the field
of pure science but theology today seems to me to be challenged by dialogue with the other sciences to carry out in its own field the same kind of rigorous self-criticism the same kind of determination to allow the structures of its own field to come to view and to think out its own structures in the light its own formulation in the light of those structures now i would have liked to develop positively how this is to
be done and my time has already overtaken me but let me say something only in conclusion i believe that as we do this and proceed in this way we shall find ourselves in theology faced with the same challenging problems that have undoubtedly faced modern physics as we see for example in einstein's great essay in physique and reality in that essay he describes how as we develop in physics we push our thought to level after level in
the clarification of our concepts we refine our concepts from their pre-scientific images and pre-conceptual images in such a way that while we push our thought to level after level that's deeper and deeper we clarify the basic the core of our basic concepts and attain what you call the ultimate logical basis of all thought and as we do that we find at the same time it's an immense illumination upon the whole area of our thought
but in this way something happens we begin to distinguish clearly between the basic concepts which are the center and which are profoundly correlated with the world we experience we distinguish those from other concepts that are more on the periphery but which are bound up with them and we distinguish at the same time what he called theorems that say a different kind of concept in which we connect our basic concepts with one another and theorems are also
required to connect basic concepts with one another until we see their profound inner connection there are theorems of course of this kind that and smart from whom einstein differed so much but from whom he learned so much was concerned with but as we do that we find that there are base there are concepts which have forced themselves upon us which no longer can no longer be scientifically correlated with the structures of reality and so the deeper
science penetrates the more it has to use something like occam's razor to slice away concepts and thought and indeed perhaps whole levels of thought and language that are thrown up by our culture from time to time and which were perhaps necessary at that stage but once we penetrate into the inner structure and logic of things we find we must kick them away and they cannot be allowed to remain because then they distort our basic apprehension of
reality and so the profounder science worms its way into einstein said the basic invariances in the universe the simpler the more universal its range and the profounder its dogmatic realism now if theology is to operate in that way this will undoubtedly mean a profound simplification and a unification of the whole corpus of theological thought and we shall find ourselves faced with the decision where we shall have to take something sharper than occam's razor to slice away
from our textbooks from our traditions from yes let's put even the confessions of the faith concepts and ideas and forms of doctrine that cannot be correlated with the inner structures of the divine reality that come to view as we inquire into his self-revelation in the holy scriptures on the history of the church we find ourselves faced with concepts and doctrines which are the answers to wrong questions that they are the answers to questions thrown out
by this or that structure and as we see that we may find that there are profound elements of truth in them which have been distorted and which require to be dug out of them and integrated in the proper way but it does mean that any theology that takes us seriously will have to work with what i've called a profound unification and simplification but when it does this then i believe that theology as it does this theology
will be able to set itself upon scientific foundations in the same way that the great greek theologians of the fourth and fifth century did they did in such a way as to reconstruct radically the basis of science and philosophy in their own day they had that courage they had that ability they had that conviction in the downright aletheia of their enterprise and i believe they challenge us to do the same but we have an enormous advantage
over them because we have today a pure science allied with us in rejecting the radical dualisms that corrupted thought throughout the centuries and we today can't take advantage of that god-given opportunity then i don't know whether we would be worthy to carry on the tradition of christian theology as i look abroad upon contemporary theology i find very few who concerned to do this and that's why in spite of all the frantic efforts of modern theology
they have not been able to communicate with our generation not been able to communicate with the world of sciences advances day after day and year after year but i believe that we can do this and we should do it and the possibilities are now open for us in startling the new way and with encouragement on every hand so that wherever i go in the united states i'm looking for young men who will be have the courage
to dedicate their intellectual powers to this kind of task it will require the same kind of dedication and the same kind of that the physicist needs in order to work in his field don't think for a moment you can work in theology just by making a noise you can only work in theology in so far as you prepare to let your mind come under the sheer force of the reality in which you think and you're prepared
to allow your whole rational consciousness to be reconstructed and that of course does mean the consciousness of the community with which you're integrated and this is by far the profoundest revolution that could take place don't skim about the surface or play with theology but let me challenge you to engage at last in theology that is profoundly scientific in which you'll be able then to have such a dialogue with the modern world that you will be able
to influence it beyond anything you'd ever dreamt of thank you very much let me express our gratitude to you dr tartans not only for your comments but for the zeal with which you presented them the hour is late i think i must declare a conclusion on the part of