Transcript
Dr. Torrance is Professor of Christian Dogmatics at New College, which, as you know, is the Divinity School of the University of Edinburgh. He's a graduate of Edinburgh, of New College, and took his Th.D. with Karl Barth in Basel. Since then, he's served in two parishes in Scotland. One of them, by the way, the Beech Grove Church of Aberdeen, where, among others, his predecessors included H.R. McIntosh, the great theologian, and Arthur Gossip and James Stewart, the
great preachers. Then he became Professor of Church History in Edinburgh, New College, in 50, and in 52 was transferred to the chair of Christian Dogmatics, which he has occupied with international distinction for the last 25 years. He has written a number of books on various aspects of theology, which have won widespread acclaim. Most recently, the Church of Scotland has honoured him by appointing him Moderator of the General Assembly, a duty in which he served with distinction
during this past year. His subject is contemporary theology, and I don't know anyone more capable of dealing with that subject than Dr. Torrance. We shall look forward with interest and pleasure to what he has to say. Dr. Torrance. Thank you. Dr. Hope, thank you for your kindly welcome. It's nice having fellow Scott, or an worthwhile Scott, introducing me for a short time. If I can't hear, if you can't hear, let me know and I'll try and
speak louder. Is this for merely for recording or for projection? Projection. Projection both, so I hope that if I can't, if you can't hear me in the back, please hold up your hand. Now I hope to be looking at the subject which has been given to me from the perspective of dogmatics and science. And by dogmatics, I mean the pure science of theology, and by science, I mean natural science here. Many of our contemporaries are frightened
to relate theology and science, and they operate with a practical segregation between theology and science, and that itself says an enormous amount about our contemporary scene, and it's certainly a tragedy. But the interesting thing is that today, everywhere I go in this continent as well as in Europe, we have everywhere scientists who are increasingly believers, and indeed as one molecular biologist said not long ago, among the scientists in Oxford, there's a higher proportion of believers than
outside the university. Now this is an indication of a profound change in outlook, and these scientists demand everywhere proper theology, and by and large, they don't get proper theology precisely at the point where the world of science needs it and needs dialogue. They are let down very badly by contemporary theology, because a good deal of contemporary theology, as I've said, is frightened of science and of relating their thought to the context of science and the scientific
revolution of our times. Now behind the separation of science and theology, there lies a false concept of theology and a false concept of science. And on both sides there, we operate with, or people operate with, an obsolete conception of the mechanistic universe. That is, they think of the universe as a closed continuum of time and space, of cause and effect, with a hard determinism about it. You may remember, for example, the couple of essays of Rudolf
Bultmann about hermeneutics in which he begins right away with accepting, without demur, the fact that we have a closed continuum of cause and effect. And accepting that nonsense, he then goes on to try to relate his theology to that. Now, I've just been, last week, at a conference of two international academies meeting in Long Island, where we've had some of the most distinguished creative scientists in the world meeting with some theologians. And the encounter and the
positions that were taken up there were rather illuminating. Every single one of the theologians who read papers or gave lectures showed that the era of determinism has come to an end, whether they were mathematicians or physicists or people concerned with thermodynamics or biology, this was the case. But in contrast, we had one continental theologian who insisted on speaking of the iron determinism of nature, as though he hadn't heard anything that he'd said before or hadn't read
anything in this direction. And we had another continental theologian who so spiritualized a way, the resurrection and the new creation in the contrast between science and theology, that Professor Mercier, the famous physicist of Bern, came up to me afterwards and said, I want some reality in theology, a real understanding of resurrection and creation. So the contrast there between the scientists and the theologians could not have been greater. Now, this is the problem that affects contemporary theology
by and large, although there are fundamental changes of a positive nature that are taking place and about which I shall speak largely in the subsequent three lectures. Now, here we have operating what I would call a thoroughly dualist mode of thought in which theology and science are separated behind what I've called an obsolete deterministic outlook in the universe. Now, this radically dualist mode of thought goes back to in modern times, goes back to Galileo and to
Newton and then to Kant. But by and large, this dualist mode of thought is Augustinian in character. And if one is to look at the whole history of Western thought, one must say that apart from certain great exceptions in Greek theology in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, all Western thought has been Augustinian, Aristotelian. It has had that combination and that characterizes basically all medieval theology. But of course, the Reformation was thoroughly Augustinian, the Lutherans more
than the or the Anglican, but nevertheless, thoroughly Augustinian. And the Protestant development has been what one might call Augustinian-Newtonian in outlook. As the Protestant outlook developed in its synthesis or relations with the development of modern thought, modern leading up to the end of last century, one can say that all Protestant and Western theology has been Augustinian-Newtonian in character. But whether we take the earlier or the later thought, it has been radically dualist. Now you
remember Augustine's famous account of the sacraments as outward and visible signs of inward and invisible grace. That is typical of all Augustinian thought and all Protestant catechisms speak of the sacraments in that way and shows how this Augustinian dualism was embedded in thought. But the problems become acute with Galileo. I shan't go into these questions very much. I shall simply mention them, particularly Galileo's distinction between primary and secondary qualities that say the geometric aspects of reality
which are quantifiable and those aspects of reality which concern appearances and phenomena which are not as quantifiable but nevertheless we have to try and correlate the two and thus quantify phenomena and motion. Well, it was, of course, Newton who gave, supplied the great paradigms which have governed the whole of Western thought in science and philosophy and these were taken on and developed in another way by Kant. Let me indicate just how one can briefly see this
connection. Newton operated with a disjunction between what he called absolute mathematical time and space which he identified with the mind of God, the mind and the presence of God. He called it the divine sensorium because he felt that God with his mind and presence contained the whole universe in terms of absolute time and space. But in contraposition to that he thought of the phenomenal world as characterized by what he called relative apparent time and space, the
realm of phenomena. Now this was a very radical dualism in which the absolute unchangeable inertial frame of the mind of the immovable impassable God was clamped down upon the world of phenomena and this enabled Newton to expound the laws, the immutable laws of nature in terms of causality and the mechanistic universe. Now while that applied to physics alone, when Immanuel Kant transferred absolute time and space from the mind of God to the mind of man and
made space and time the intuitions of our apprehension and at the same time made causality as well as substance, categories of the understanding, then Kant generalized the determinism in Newtonian physics for all human sciences and all human knowledge. And thus we have the hard context of modern thought which the Germans naturally feel much stronger than any other people because Kant is so endemic to them and that is why today the most backward theology, I must say,
for the last two or three generations is basically German, I must say that, because they are more tied to a Newtonian Kantian outlook than any other and this applies also to, one can see, to certain scientific concepts as indeed in quantum theory, still the same problems are lurking there. But it's in this area of radical dualism which has been built into the fabric of our thought, Kant's dualism between the noumena, the phenomena, between the theoretical and
the empirical, the dualism in which we only apprehend appearances relative time and space in Newton's language and are unable in Kant to penetrate into the interior structures and connections of things, that dualism has had a massive effect upon Protestant theology and one can by reference to that plot the character and the place of any Protestant theologian today. Now to this point I shall say in passing that we have, and this also is indicative of contemporary theology,
a massive failure on the heart of modern theology, whether it's Roman Catholic or Protestant, to understand the problem of Karl Barth's relation to natural theology. Now if you work within a dualist structure, a deistic relation between God and the world, and there's many different evil form or post-Newtonian form after Locke and Lord Herbert of Sherbury, then of course natural theology is terribly important. How do you get across the gap from this world of cause and
effect to God so that natural theology is proper to or naturally arises in a radically dualist outlook? But suppose you abolish that dualism, you don't have it, then you don't have that dualism between the natural and the supernatural in the same kind of way and so you don't make your distinction between natural and a supernatural theology. But look at it from the scientific point of view, look at it from the problem of the Newtonians who sought
to develop, let's say, an understanding of the electromagnetic field, something that is dynamic and indivisible in terms of classical mechanics. What did they do? They have here a concept of geometry, of the relations between rigid bodies independent of time, a Euclidean idealized geometry, and it's all antecedently developed apart from physics. Then what they find in physics, they try to crush into that and it was with electric magnetic field and later on with biology that that crashed,
it's impossible. And so here on this university, Einstein spoke about changing the whole relation of geometry to physics. You don't pursue your physics in terms of an antecedent geometry, you take your geometry and you put it into the heart of physics where it is inseparable from physics and it becomes natural science because it is natural to the physical realities. This of course involves the whole change concept of space and time and the use of four-dimensional
geometries so that you do not pursue any science in terms of a whole system of thought antecedent to it and independent of it and you attack it. That's exactly the problem of Karl Barth and natural theology. You cannot pursue theology scientifically in such a way that you interpret it in terms of a framework of antecedent natural theology that was already a conceptual system on its own apart from interaction with the living God. So that Barth's basic
attack upon natural theology has to do with the rigor of scientific method in which you will operate in theology without submission to antecedent preconceptions, but you develop your knowledge of the field in its own internal structures. Now the failure of our contemporaries radically to understand that really means that they are failing to understand the radical changes going on in our thought which already have gone on in our thought. So that the theologians by and large tend
to be left away back before 1900 at least and certainly before the 1920s with the development of general relativity which finally gave the coup de grace to that kind of thinking although we are still struggling to develop its understanding. Now I don't want to pursue that further but I want now to do for the rest of this hour is to show the effect of the dualist modes of thinking in this separation between science and theology upon
contemporary theology and I shall speak first of all of contemporary theology largely from a Protestant point of view. Later on in the next three lectures I shall develop the positive side of that and then at the close of this lecture I want to look at the problem of contemporary Roman Catholic theology and to look at that in relation to what has been happening generally in the Protestant world. Now let's look first at the effect of this
dualism upon biblical interpretation and I've asked to have a blackboard here today so that I can say by a few pictures briefly how one can look upon this. You see dualism means that you take your phenomenal world the world of appearances and you abstract it from the geometrical frame in being and reality upon which it is grounded and when you abstract the phenomenal world from its objective frame that it starts to disintegrate you can see this
if you like in the whole history of science if you're interested read a book a little paper back here by Eric Taylor on the disintegration of form in the arts. It's a perfect illustration of the point that I'm making in from the side of the of art but now look at it like this let's say that here is a field of reality which we are telling in interpreting in any biblical text and we make a whole
set of statements about it. Now these statements are statements which we develop in terms of our empirical relation to them because this reference here is basically ontological let's say when I speak about a table the word table refers to a reality independent of my thought and independent of my statement there is a blackboard here on this platform so that here you have your objective references now all scientific thought and all rational thought is primarily pivoted upon
your objective references but of course you relate your different statements to one another and so you have your coherences as well as you have your ontological reference and it is in the balance of the two that all science and all rational knowledge is concerned. Now suppose however that that relationship there is broken or damaged suppose your objective reference your ontological relation is broken or refracted then how do you interpret these? Now you are shut up then
to one of two ways either you interpret your various statements in terms of the subject who makes them they are then forms of expressing his mind and of course they are expressing his mind as an observer therefore they are related to between the observer and appearances as things appear to him how it what it means for him and so on either you interpret it in that way or you interpret these in the interrelations of statements with
one another in a in a linguistic in by penetrating into the linguistic or grammatical interconnections. Now look at what happens in philosophy if that happens if that happens in philosophy then you are shut up either to some kind of existentialist interpretation in which your relation to the other world is interpreted in terms of what it means for you and now or you interpret your statements in relation to one another so you have your language philosophy your
linguistic philosophy so that the bipolarity of existentialism and the linguistic analysis are twin errors that arise out of the radical error of a break in the ontological reference and that's why the scientists can't have anything to do with existentialism the one hand or the linguistic analysis on the other now they can learn something from both up to a point but basically neither is rational for them and they react very much therefore against the existentialist elotions on
the one hand and against the the grammatical linguistic thinkers on the other hand. Now come to biblical interpretation let's say here we have in the gospels references to to god in christ reconciling the world and we see the biblical statements referring to them now if the object of reference is cut off what do we have we then interpret the bible either subjectively in terms of the expression of the of the subject and so we interpret the
new testament not as having objective reference to christ but as determined by the feelings and understandings of the early christians the so-called gminder theology that is the real content of the new testament not but the appearances of christ to the early christians or we interpret them merely in terms of linguistic grammatical connections and this can lead to a fundamentalist direction the one hand where people are only concerned with biblicist relations of statement to statement or
in the other hand in a kind of linguistic analysis applied to theology where the bible just disintegrates well you see i've taken those examples to show that a dualist mode of thought which separates our thinking in the so-called phenomenal world from the world of objective reality has this colossal effect upon theology and one could say that the whole modern world has been radically affected by this our interpretation and so on but look at the problems
that arise in history because this is fundamentally important you see if you take newton's concept of the two kinds of time and remember that with newton time now becomes an ingredient of scientific reality but unfortunately newton's dualism between absolute unchangeable time and phenomenal apparent time led him to try and understand apparent time merely in terms of cross sections of time in the discrete particles so that time was finally ousted from the real subject matter of science
and that only came back of course with with einstein well beginning with faraday and maxwell both einstein it really becomes belongs to the fundamental ingredient of scientific subject matter and everything becomes changed but if you still work with the old newtonian concept of two times then on the one hand you have the kind of time that is concerned in terms to interpret the world in terms of the causal connections between bodies in motion as newton divided
the whole world atomistically into particles or bodies in motion and try to understand them in terms of their external relations apart from the inner cohesion then he interpreted everything in terms of causality now that concept of time gave rise to what hellman called historia in distinction from geschichte so on the one hand you have a historic way of interpreting history in terms of the causal necessities and of course with that close continuum of cause and effect
you wipe out anything that has any objective reference to christ to god in in any objective sense to miracle resurrection so on it follows from that but then how do you have the other interpretation now then geschichte the other interpretation is largely interpreted in a kind of symbolic sense what it means for me and so on so that the radical disjunction with which so much modern biblical interpretation has operated between historia and geschichte goes right back
ultimately to the newtonian dualism and when you are trapped in that then what can you do but the significant thing is that the secular historians say in germany do not operate or have not operated with this kind of dualism they have struggled in the opposite sense although they also have been trapped in dualism through largely a marxist attempt to interpret history and perhaps they are today more than most places well what do we what happens then
now here we have therefore a way of interpreting the bible in which genuine theology of the proper kind is lost but the interesting thing is that we have the exact opposite movement in modern science the opposite movement in which we have here a massive recovery of the ontological reference and the inseparability of the empirical with the ontological and therefore a way of thinking our coherences in such a way that through them we penetrate into the internal
structures of reality so that science has been moving in the opposite direction of much modern theology whereas much modern theology has been moving back into the back water of a science which really pure science has left behind and that's true of biblical interpretation but now let us look at what happens when you approach christ jesus christ in this way now the dualist paradigms of thought with which people operate have the effect the double effect of detaching
jesus from god on the one hand and on the other hand detaching the message of jesus from the person of christ so that here you have an uprooting of jesus from his ground in the being of god and you have at the same time an uprooting of what jesus teaches his message from relation to his own personal being so that we have a double uprooting of the christian message now this it is this up detachment of
jesus from god and the detachment of the message of jesus from the personal being of jesus which has given rise to the current confusion in christian conviction but let us remember that when christian theology arose in the classical sense in the third and fourth centuries it had to express itself also in a world of radical dualist thought now this was of two kinds if i may illustrate that on the one hand it was a very radical
dualism between two different realms entirely in gnostic thought a realm that was transcendentally quite other and this realm and therefore it had to bridge the gap by all these mythologies and geologies and so on that's the gnostic way of doing it or you had the arian way of doing it in which somehow the two met at a tangential point called jesus but jesus really belonged to this world and ultimately to that world but he was the
point at which the two somehow were tangentially related now in those dualist structures you had the rise of demythologizing or you had the rise of remythologizing let's say if you take the gnostic way then the two are so distraught so torn apart that only way to make existential sense for you is to treat them as as as missing to give them a highfalutin theological interpretation and this happened by the semi-christian gnostics in alexandria on the
other hand if if you take the arian view then you have to demythologize the faith in this sense that jesus because he belongs ultimately to this world and not to that world you have therefore to take him as the symbol within space and time of a timeless reality on the other hand that is only tangentially or if you want to change the image asymptotically related to our world now within that dualist structure what did classical christian
theology concerned with now they were concerned with the fact that in jesus christ we have a way of thinking in which this world of ours is intercepted by the reality of the divine world and in here we have in christ one who is god of god and yet man of man who in his own being belongs to the eternal world and yet in and yet belongs to our contingent world now the linchpin therefore that theology was
the so-called homo usion of the nicene creed the confession that jesus christ incarnate son is of one being or one substance with the father so that because christ belongs to god of god and man of man in christ we are who are men can really know god in such a way that our knowledge of god rests upon the reality of god and this gave rise to the doctrine of the trinity because if we know christ
in terms of the inherent logos of god because if in christ we don't only have the eternal act the energia of god inherent in the being enusios energia but we have the eternal logos in inherent in the being of christ the logos of god then enusios logos that say you know god therefore in terms of his internal rationality internal relations and so the doctrine of the trinity naturally follows from them but of course these are the
two points that are radically denied by the kantians or the by the high good high degarians whatever the word is and so that but it's exactly again the opposite way of thinking of the modern science we're concerned to think no in terms of external relations we're concerned to think for example of atomic structures in terms of their internal relations and you remember when this first arose with where in quantum theory was the development of of of
the thought of max plank the great high priest of the old positivist thought ernst marx it atoms are just symbols they don't exist in reality because you cannot know things in terms of their internal relations but of course you can do so that whole way is destroyed we do know realities in terms of internal relations so here is a radically different way of thinking that is completely the opposite of the kantian way of thinking now that's
exactly the way of thinking they developed in the early church when they established the great creeds we know god in terms of his internal relations and therefore you cannot know christ or god in christ without developing a doctor of the trinity and the doctor of trinity surprised the fundamental grammar of all theology well i'm not concerned to develop that now but i'm simply concerned to say that in the modern world where we have this radical disjunction
between the phenomenal the numeral or the radical junction between our thoughts and concepts and the objective reality upon which they ground then we have a way of thinking in which jesus becomes detached from god usually today it's in some form like that that's quite clearly the bultmannian form and jesus becomes detached from god and it's only a tangential point in which we are flung back upon ourselves to see what all this means symbolically or mythologically
for us now here this involves a detachment of the message of christ from his person and that gives rise not only to a radical confusion of thought but it gives rise to a thorough fragmentation of belief a thorough fragmentation of belief now the clearest example of this if you wish to follow it through is in modern art when you take say the rise of impressionism what you have you have a way of thinking in which you
you focus you withdraw your focus upon something you're looking at in such a way you concentrate upon the phenomenal appearance and you abstract the phenomenal appearance from the objective frame and of course at this point what you appear becomes fuzzy and that's the character of the of the great impressionistic painting but as that develops the the phenomenal surface abstracted from the geometric foundation breaks up and therefore you have fragmented forms and when you have fragmented forms
you've got other attempts to try and introduce coherences into the fragmentation of your forms of thought and so you have different forms of abstract thought which again and again try to introduce coherence and structure alien to the actual structure and they lapse again and again and that's also the history of modern philosophy the way that phenomenalist philosophy breaks up again and again and you got the old game of trying to make your phenomenalist particulars your nominalist
particulars cohere by some kind of artificial framework and that breaks down again and again and you can't do that but then science comes back again and turns the whole thing upside down and said no no that's not the way to look at it get behind Galileo Newton and apprehend your phenomena in terms of the objective structures behind them God does not wear his heart on his sleeve of Einstein says and therefore look at all the surface
patterns in terms of their inner objective connections and everything changes and that's what exactly happened but our theologians haven't really begun to learn that lesson yet and that is why today we have so much confusion we're in the period where Christianity detached from Christ tends to become fragmented and so there's confusion and Christian convictions but when you detach your message from from Christ the Christian Christianity from Christ and Christ from God what do you do with
Christianity well you tend naturally then to attach it to society because you've got to attach it to something we don't attach it to the natural world though I suppose to a certain extent there are some people who do that and in a way yes in a way this is the direction of the process theologians who tend to have an imminent his view of God and they work therefore with Whitehead's concept of relativity which I would to
God they would read because they couldn't accept it if they did but it lies at the foundations of Whitehead's thought and either you accept Whitehead's doctrine of relativity or you accept Einstein's you can't have both except Einstein's the whole basis of process theology goes but in that way of thinking you do have some kind of attempt to combine God and the world in a rather monistic outlook in order to save the appearances again in much like
an ancient pre-christian fashion but if your Christianity is not attached to the world but attached to society what happens to it well society has been undergoing the same processes and therefore we have society fragmenting look at it like this John Locke attempted to give the foundations of interpretation to society much along the lines of Newton and when Newton divided the world up into discrete particles of bodies in motion and tried to find laws of their
organization through external relations John Locke does the thing with with human beings as individuals and therefore he he develops a way of thinking of human beings and persons in line with the old boethian thomas view of the person as individual substantia rationalis naturae the individual substance of rational nature and then they have to be organized from externally and this of course tended to give rise to the french revolution and it is that Lockean view that still
alas lies behind our social sciences in a massive way between our psychology and our psychiatry yes this is the case and therefore the whole of that structure we have developed in the human and social sciences reposes upon certain atomistic foundations which today have been completely undermined and that is why society and the social sciences have been disintegrating and fragmenting when therefore you attach you detach christianity from christ and attach it to society already in the process
of disintegration and and fragmentation your christianity becomes dissipated and fragmented so it suffers doubly from the detachment and that again is that the confusion of our people today we can see rife not only in the way that christians live often but in the way that they they hold ethics and laws which i may say a word of in a moment but look at the enormous contrast at this point in passing between the protestant outlook and roman
catholic theology because it has tended in some ways to move in a different direction and i shall come back to that under the impact of carl bart but in roman catholic theology by and large today is concerned with salvation by grace with forgiveness but protestantism is concerned largely with salvation through social righteousness so the staggering fact today is that the roman catholics have turned the tables on the reformation and if lucerne calvin were here today and
they looked at the roman catholic church and they looked at the protestant church they would say who were the reformed and who were not now that is an indication of the measure of our problem that we have so detached christianity from christ where the offered loses its radical saving power and attaches to society where we are tied up in a socialized view of salvation by works righteousness this is not in any way to denigrate our social
concern on the contrary but it does that we simply try to fulfill it in the way that the secular world has been trying to and failing to do so but now i wanted at this point to give an analogy between ethics and law and uh the problem of contemporary theology now let me look at it this way i shall have to be brief because i see my time is running away from me pretty quickly it's not
utonian time but victorial time and time this is take the problems of law which i as in my year as moderator i've been trying to wrestle with in terms of our own situation in britain and about which i preached westminster abbey when we were celebrating the second centenary of the american declaration of independence if you look at modern law let me give you example in britain modern law in britain is merely statute law let's say law
is determined entirely by the house of parliament and what the ruling party determines and lays down that is law irrespective of whether it is grounded in what is intrinsically true or right irrespectively of something called natural law irrespective directly at any rate of so-called protestant conscience merely what the rulers wish to put over that is expressed as law and is and therefore the ground for law is merely the absolute authority of parliament now when that
happens of course you confound laws in the strict sense with social regulations and this is particularly difficult in a socialized state or strangely in a state like south africa which is also trapped in this concept of law which is not a socialized state but the opposite type of state and say here you have law then as mere statute law that bears no relation to the objective structures in reality now the american declaration of independence is the
you remember is concerned with ways of thinking grounded upon self-evident principles that have universal validity let's say they developed a way of thinking in which in this legal and social political sphere they are operating with laws that were grounded in what is intrinsically true and right now when you tear up your laws from that foundation then of course they become the plaything other politicians they are merely conventional rules that this or that party this or
that passing fashion in society can use to serve its own selfish ends and that has been the problem of ethics also so we have a conventionalist notion of law a conventionalist notion of ethics similar to the old obsolete notion of scientific theory the conventionalist notions of Ernst Mach and so what are we faced with we are faced with the fact that the whole concept of physical law nowhere better expounded in many ways in this country than
by Richard Feynman of Caltech physical law have changed in this way in which laws are now grounded upon the internal structures of reality ontologically grounded forced upon us by nature itself independent of our desires or conditions and in that situation there must come about a similar revolution in the whole realm of law and ethics but equally there must come about a similar revolution theology in which theology also like law and ethics required to be grounded again
upon the intrinsic structures which gave rise to them and that is as i see the development today now i won't develop that further now but i say a few some things along the this line again in later lectures i want now to close by giving you something of the problem of contemporary roman catholic theology because here we have an enormous change which as i've said has already reversed in many ways the contraposition of the reformation as
we can see for example in lefebvre because archbishop lefebvre today maintaining the old tridentine position which the roman catholic church maintained in in the 17th century whereas today the roman catholic position is maintaining a position which speaks of the mediation of christ in a more massive way than any reformation document that's quite staggering so that what the roman catholic church today has been doing has been returning to the ancient liturgy from which the tridentine was the
utmost aberration and today protestantism is faced with facing a roman catholic theology that has done this now how did that come about well there's no doubt about it that the greatest impact from outside at any rate on the roman catholic church for 400 years has been the theology of karl barth one man has had greater impact on the roman catholic church than 400 years of protestantism there's no question about that it's immense and therefore it's from
the roman catholic that we have the most significant works on inflection on barth and applying this kind of theology to their own situation but we have also of course the enormous impact of biblical theology and it's linked with that and of the liturgical renewal now the result of all this has been a massive recovery of as i indicated a moment ago the concept of the mediation of christ the mediation of christ there's barely a sentence or
two for example in the reformed liturgy of the mass that we can have any difficulty with the prayer to the virgin and so on but otherwise basic theological points there are really no no real problem it's massively returned to christology to soteriology and an understanding of the mediation of christ which fulfills the old canon which we find in the mass of the sixth century but which really goes back to the alexandrian theologians of the fourth fifth
and sixth centuries the idea that we worship god not only in the name of christ but through him and with him and in him so here when you have a vicarious understanding of christ as worshiping with us to the father so that we worship sue him by worshiping with him and in him you have a profounder concept of the mediation of christ then you have by and large at the reformation there are problems still in the
as one can see in there but now this is the problem the roman catholic church which in a way monsignor lefebvre brings to the surface quite sharply you have the developments of the second vatican council largely in this way it has i think undoubtedly contradictions and difficulty but nevertheless this is the main direction of it in terms of the mediation of christ but the problem arises how does that reform fit into the codex heuris canonicae how
does it fit into the whole history of canon law the whole structure of the roman church going right back to leo the great who developed structures of canon law now here we have an attempt by the canon lawyers and the old god the curia and rome to produce a schema called the lex fundamentalis ecclesiae in which they to update canon law in such a way as to take vatican two into account but what happens when you
do that this has been carefully analyzed in bologna by a group of roman lawyers led by professor alborigo whom i know quite well and they have shown with the use of the computer as well as with conceptual analysis that the this updating of the canon law in point of fact rubs out almost all the distinctive advances of vatican two and it has to do so if you continue the developments of canon law in this way and
you must rub out that so the roman church is at face at the biggest impasse of its long history either it must update canon law and go back upon the enormous advances in vatican two or it must reconstruct the foundations of canon law and change them from the very bottom in such a way that they are made to serve the gospel of mediation of christ and not in any way to crush it into a legal canonical
administrative process now when i have raised this question with roman theologians they have said to me why they don't their way out certainly canon law will not win the day and i think that's true but they have this task and it's now being forced upon them sharply by lefebvre because he claims you see foundations in the structure of canon law on his side so the roman church is forced to come to the great decision now if
it does reconstruct canon law and open it out in open structures then it will become the most evangelical church in christendom and create the most ecumenical situation imaginable but what is the fundamental problem in roman law now the fundamental problem in roman law and i'm still looking at it from my perspective is basically the same problem we have with newton because in the utonian outlook let's say in augustinian utonian outlook as in an austinian austinian outlook
you operate with closed structures and the canonical relations operate here within the structure of the roman church a role similar to the way that causal connections operate within the framework of a mechanistic universe and roman laws based on radically dualist concepts which come from old stoic background similar to the dualist concept the basis of newtonian science or medieval outlook so that if canon law has to be reconstructed what must happen is a radical change in the
dualist foundations of thought and therefore it is the dialogue between science and theology where theologians are questioned by those scientists who have given up dualist modes of thought which will in the end have the biggest impact on the roman church and help them overcome that now i've never made to a session of the academy of science in the Vatican and i don't know how they work though i have several friends who operate there but i have
been and i'm a member of two academies international academy of religious sciences international academy of the philosophy of science in which scientists mainly mathematicians and biologists meet together and and twice over we've had joint meetings with theologians we just had one in in long island and half the theologians are mainly roman catholic theologians and it's interesting to see those of them who are scared to come to such a confrontation with the scientists and the scientists demand
of them something positive but when they do come together we see a far greater advance again and again in the roman theologians in this way who are prepared to rethink through the foundations of their thought than in most partisan theologians so i know more roman theologians who are prepared to go in this way than protestant theologians but i believe that it is in this kind of dialogue well we shall all be questioned and the dualist structures
and paradigms of all our thought roman protestant and scientific will be so uprooted as they are now being uprooted that the future that looks is really of great hope because not only do we have in modern science behind all the specialization arising today a very clear underlying order of unification a grand synthesis as we can see already in the interrelational relativity and quantum theory and now breaking through the use of thermodynamics into the biological sphere where
we have something like the second law of thermodynamics restated at a higher level in terms of open systems or or non-equilibrium systems as they call them here we have a staggering unification of and i believe that if this kind of dialogue will continue we will have not only a profound unification of thought between the theologians and the scientists of course each pursues his field in a different way but they are interrelated but in that we
shall have an ecumenical confrontation and a unification beyond anything that at the moment we can see such then broadly friends is the way in which i look upon contemporary theology and in the next three talks i shall try and deal more decisively with certain basic issues next one for example the relation of god to the universe and god to creation and show how the basic theological ideas we're concerned with here are precisely the basic theological ideas
with which the new scientific revolution is operating with everywhere thank you