Transcript
Let me extend a warm welcome to you, and especially to several guests. This convocation is under the auspices of Oxford University Press and Princeton Seminary. It's always a joy to work with Oxford Press and its distinguished program of publication, especially in this context of theological and religious publications. I should like to present to you now Mr. E. Alan Kelly, who is the Vice President of Oxford University Press, Mr. Kelly. Dr. McCord, Dr. Torrance, ladies and gentlemen,
it's a great pleasure for us to be here today and to take part in this lecture on a most critical topic in our time. Oxford University Press, as you probably know from reading a lot of our publicity in the last several months, is 500 years old, or at least observing an observance of publishing that is printing at Oxford 500 years ago, 1478. It began with a religious book, Commentary on the Creed, and ever since that time
it's been our pleasure and our responsibility to do publishing in this area. So we're pleased to participate in this seminar and especially to have a chance to hear Dr. Torrance on this most auspicious occasion and on this important topic. So thanks again to the seminary, Dr. McCord, for the kindness of having us on the campus, and we thank you all for coming, and look forward to participation with you all in discussion afterwards. Thank you very much,
Mr. Kelly. The volume, some of them, by Dr. Torrance are to be found on the table to my right, to your left, and also order cards if you would like to secure copies through the Theological Book Agency. You're welcome to do that at the conclusion of the lecture. Let me say that when Professor Torrance has completed his lecture, there will be some time for discussion, for questions, for dialogue with the lecturer, and I hope that all
of you will participate. It's a great joy always to have Professor Thomas F. Torrance as a guest of Princeton Seminary. He's in the spring of 1959. He graced the campus for several months when he spent a sabbatical in Princeton, or at least he made this his point of departure for lectures all over the United States and Canada, and we remember those months with very great pleasure. There's much I could say about Professor Torrance, but I would
be taking his time and you want to hear him. I am going to say a few things. He grew up in China where his parents were missionaries, his education in Scotland and also abroad, taking his doctorate in Basel, and everyone who has read his Doctrine of Grace and Apostolic Fathers is in his debt for illuminating this central reality of the Christian faith, the grace of God in our Lord Jesus Christ. He has been moderator of the
Church of Scotland and gave distinguished leadership to that responsibility for a year, in particular his work with the Eastern Orthodox Church has been very significant in the ecumenical movement. I had the joy of introducing him at the Guildhall in London back in March when he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, and I'm going to say to you what I said then by way of introduction since Dr. Torrance was the only person present to hear
it that's in this room this afternoon. The very Reverend Professor Thomas F. Torrance of the University of Edinburgh has made distinguished contributions in so many areas that one can only begin to enumerate them. His historical research and writing have led not only to fresh understanding of the apostolic, patristic, and Reformation periods of Christian history, and thus to the purification and revivification of the Christian tradition, but also to the possibility of much closer understanding and unity among
the various branches of Christendom. In the early 1950s he led the faith and order movement out of the sterile methodology of comparative ecclesiologies into a fresh understanding of the relationship of Christ to his church. In 1975 he published Theology in Reconciliation, whose argument is designed to carry thought into the heart of patristic theology, and above all to the axis constituted by Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, for it is there that we find a basis for profound
unity between East and West. Dr. Torrance is on the frontier of those who are seeking to heal the tragic breach between East and West that runs back into the 11th century. It is in the area of science and theology, however, that he is even more active and creative today, although the latter endeavor has enormous implications for the ecumenical goals outlined above. He has sought to rid the discipline of theology from the blinders that have left it
oblivious to what is going on in modern science, and from its captivity to bad science, into a fresh awareness of the revolution that has taken place in modern thought and its implications for the understanding of God. Professor Torrance has written books like Space, Time, and Incarnation, Space, Time, and Resurrection. I hope you will have an opportunity after having heard him to read these volumes and others, for to my mind he is indeed on the frontier of
the theological enterprise, illuminating the way that theology must take if it is indeed to inform the Church as the Church moves out in the wake of our Lord. I present to you now the very Reverend Professor Thomas F. Torrance. Thank you, President McChord, for your very kindly welcome. May I take this opportunity of saying how grateful I am for the very warm hospitality I am always given here in your seminary when I come, and which I
enjoy very much indeed. May I also say two other things. First, when Mr. Alley and Mr. Wilburne asked me to give a lecture here, it was a request that came across the Transatlantic Telephone, I had no time to write a new paper, and the one in which I am going to read to you is rather longer than it would have been if I had written it for a lecture, so I shall have to cut bits of
it. But I also want to say that I am not a scientist. What I try to do as a theologian is to understand modern science as much as I can, and it's very hard going, and I understand the reluctance of many theologians and biblical scholars to do so, but I believe that we are obliged to try and understand this as much as possible because what science does is to unfold the structures of the universe which God
himself has created and within which we are summoned to develop our knowledge of him. In his initial work, in his influential work, the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn of Princeton has drawn a rather sharp distinction between the processes of normal science concerned with problem-solving within the paradigms of a mature scientific community and the of major scientific discoveries when paradigms are under attack and are subject to change. His concern is to make clear the
depth and radical nature of revolutionary advance in our controlling concepts, which he can speak of in terms of a gestalt switch or a conversion experience. A revolutionary change of this kind is probably not such a sudden or unstructured event as Kuhn would like sometimes to make out, but it is the translation of the change into real terms that counts, and that takes rather longer. An enlightening example of what happens is provided by the treatise Copernicus, which
was published in 1543 by Andreas Ossiander with a preface explaining the formal value of the work as offering the best way to calculate the revolutions of heavenly bodies, but without claiming that it constituted a physical description of the nature of things. It was only when that claim was made by Galileo in 1616 and the mathematical formalization was translated into natural philosophy and presented as valid in real terms that the Scientific Revolution really began to bite. That
is to say, it was 73 years after the publication of Copernicus that the radical implications of the new theory began to be realized and worked out in such a way that it transformed the foundations of our knowledge of the universe. Something like that has been taking place in our own day. In 1905, Einstein published several essays of epoch-making significance bearing on relativity and quantum theory, which initiated changes that have been transforming the whole perspective of
modern science. But only now, more than 70 years later, are we coming to terms with the implications of these changes for fundamental epistemology, affecting every area of human knowledge. I believe that the rapidity of change will now be all the greater after the recent advances in cosmology, which depend, of course, upon the equations of relativity theory. But there is still a serious gap between what has been taking place in the of pure science and the principles
of knowledge with which we operate elsewhere, especially in the social sciences. Let me set out the problem that faces us in terms of the paradigmatic shape of mind that developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Within the framework of the Newtonian system of the world and its sharp distinction between absolute mathematical time and space and relative and apparent time and space, which had become really normative for all the Newtonians. Here, on the one hand, we have
a masterful analytic habit of mind which carved up the universe into discrete particles or bodies in motion in such a way that they could be connected together only in terms of their external relations. And so there arose the mechanistic conception of the universe, which has cruelly fettered the human spirit. Here, on the one hand, in contrast to ancient and medieval science, which tended to reduce everything knowable upwards into timeless abstract essences, we find a regular tendency
to reduce everything knowable downwards into observable material phenomena. And so there arose the normative conviction that we have no knowledge of things in themselves, but only knowledge of things as they appear to us. And that, of course, became the ground for all Kant's metaphysics and philosophy of science. With Newton himself, scientific knowledge involved a massive objectivity for absolute mathematical time and space, by reference to which as an inertial system, all knowledge of the phenomenal world is
controlled and reduced to order, when identified with the divine mind, sometimes with the divine being, the duration and immensity of God, as he spoke of it. That is to say, it is the mind of the Almighty Creator, which gives and maintains the inherent order, regularity, and stability of the universe, thereby making it accessible to our objective rational inquiry. But when Kant transferred absolute time and space from the mind of the divine creator to the mind of
the human knower, it could not but be held that the human intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but imposes them upon nature. Thus we have the emergence of the paradigmatic conviction that we can understand and verify only what we ourselves can construct and shape for ourselves, for it is our knowing of phenomena that gives them their intelligible form and imposes any meaningful order they may have for us, extrinsically upon them. Now, such is the
attitude of mind that has come to permeate our Western culture, and not least with the human and social sciences, and of course the technological society within which they function, but also within the Christian church, within which the Christian church is bound to communicate its message and interpret it to the contemporary world. Here an insidious sociology of knowledge tends to replace epistemology and social ideology substitutes for theology. The fatal bearing of this paradigmatic shape of mind upon
modern theology is particularly evident at its most sensitive point, knowledge of the historical Jesus Christ. If it is the case that we do not know things in themselves, but only in their external relations as they appear to us, if we can understand only what we assimilate into the circle of our own preconceptions and structures of consciousness, interpreting them as having meaning for ourselves insofar as we endow them with intelligibility, then we can know nothing of Jesus
as he is in himself in his own truth or personal reality, but only what the earliest Christians appeared to make of the phenomenon of Jesus as they closed it with the patterns of significance to suit their own spiritual needs and even created historical events upon which to hang those patterns of significance. I say it appeared to make of the phenomenon of Jesus for on the same principle, we cannot really grasp any objective content in their knowledge,
but can only seek through some symbolic reinterpretation to let what they did become a focus of meaning for ourselves. Hence no research on these principles can ever penetrate into the truth of Jesus independent of the controlling structures of meaning imposed upon him from the self-understanding of the early church. We may indeed be able to clever analysis to discern something of the various layers of theologizing embedded in the literary tradition interpreting the phenomenon of Jesus, but
in the nature of the case, it will not be possible even in the final analysis to reach anything beyond constructions out of the religious consciousness of the earliest witnesses. What is more, if event and meaning are originally disparate, as all this assumes, then the more spiritually or theologically rich a fact is in its literary presentation by the early church, the further we are removed from the original bare events, which ex hypothesize have no inherent or controlling
significance of their own. That is to say, Jesus himself is ultimately only a shimmerer, which inevitably eludes our grasp, for he is completely submerged in the piety of the early church and irretrievably lost in the objectifying interpretations of the gospel handed on to us in the New Testament writings. Now that is the recurring denouement of the quest of the historical Jesus, which for 150 years has been carried on within a framework of radical dualism of fact
and meaning or empirical and theoretic components of knowledge, necessarily creating an unbridgeable gulf between the original Jesus and the tradition of the church. Moreover, such a procedure inevitably predetermines the results of historical critical research from the very outset, not because of the historical critical method itself, but because that method is not carried far enough through radical questioning into the conceptions controlling its deployment and above all into the axiomatic assumption that at all stages it is man's
knowing of phenomena, which gives them the intelligible shape and structure in which their meaning is claimed to lie. They can hardly be insisted strong enough, however, that at least so far as the pure sciences are concerned, this whole way of thinking has utterly collapsed for the dualist principles of knowledge upon which it rested have had to give way to a profound epistemological revolution, to another and more concrete way of thinking in which empirical and theoretical components
are found to be inextricably interwoven from the very bottom. Here the basic facts or events with which we have to do in the universe in any area of rational inquiry are found precisely as effects or events to be shot through and through with their own intrinsic significance and therefore may be understood and interpreted to write only in terms of their interior structure or inherent intelligibility. It was with Einstein himself that the really decisive advance affecting the
first principles of knowledge came in his establishment of mathematical invariances in nature irrespective of any and every observer enabling us to grasp reality in its depths, as he used to say. This advance was reinforced and carried further in the development of relativity theory, which carries with it the ontological indivisibility of matter and structure in the spacetime metrical field and thus also the epistemic unity of being and form in our scientific understanding of the universe. Now these
advances have proved quite decisive not only because they completed the dethronement of the mechanistic universe begun by Maxwell's explanations of the electromagnetic field, but also because they broke through and overturned the phenomenalist and positivist approach of science stemming from Kant and Ernst Mach and established the objective intelligibility of the universe independent of our perceiving and conceiving of it. Thus the paradigm of scientific activity which has permeated so much of our Western culture in accordance with which
we start with so-called neutral or uninterpreted observational phenomena, derive our concepts by way of logical abstraction from them and elaborate scientific theories as convenient functional agreements between these concepts and observational phenomena has collapsed, has crashed. Ontology is again restored as well as epistemology to a genuine scientific and philosophical status, but an ontology in which being and intelligibility are inextricably interwoven at every level of our knowledge. The discovery of the indivisible unity of structure and substance
or form and being and not least the primacy of the inherently invisible and intangible structure of the space-time metrical field has profound and immense implications for all human knowledge and every area of human inquiry which is carried on within the spatial temporal structures of the contingent universe which are the bearers of its rational order. Now what do these revolutionary changes in epistemology and in particular in the rediscovered unity of form and being mean for Christian
theology? In answering that question we shall take our starting point from three of Einstein's epigrammatic sayings in which he into sharp relief certain decisive issues and first God does not play dice. Now this is the most well-known of Einstein's logia but it has perhaps often been the most misunderstood. He was apt to make this statement in his opposition to what he considered to be quixotic or random elements in contemporary quantum theory for example the
so-called uncertainty principle and by way of declaring his own belief in a world of law and order which objectively exists. It was not intended to express determinism which as Powley showed in a very significant letter to Max Born in 1954 after visiting Einstein here and talking it over with him which as Powley showed Einstein energetically rejected. Rather was it intended to insist that even in quantum theory we cannot rest content with anything less than structural field
laws through which we rigorous scientific description of the intrinsic orderliness of nature at the micro physical as well as at every other level of reality. In other words God does not play dice formulates the fundamental belief to which Einstein found himself driven more and more in the objective intelligibility of the universe independent of our conceptual constructions. But God does not play dice imports then a concept of order not simply as a regulative principle in the Kantian
sense but as a state of affairs independent of us. The universe is so inherently orderly that it is accessible to our rational investigation in its inner constitutive relations while in so far as the scientist allows his inquiry to be controlled by that imminent comprehensibility in the universe he may to a measured degree penetrate to a knowledge of things in themselves and grasp reality in its depth. That this is a way of thinking which breaks through
neo-Kantian phenomenalism and observationalism in which the human knower is limited to the regulative objectifying forms of his thought processes is evident for example in enormous advances of astrophysics in which we can reach an orderly and a reliable understanding of the universe that can be carried back through time without loss of its significance and validity to a state of affairs millions and millions of light years before the emergence of any sentient creature let alone intelligent life. Here
we have the establishment of a massive objectivity which while valid independent of the observer does not discount the knowing human subject for he finds himself discovering and compelled to acknowledge an objective rationality governing nature which precisely in knowing he knows to reach beyond what he can reduce to the forms of his own understanding. In fact the recognition of such a transcendent rationality over which he has no control is now discerned by the scientist not only to
be central to pure science but the human rationality as such. It hardly needs to be pointed out that such a view is much more congenial to classical Christian understanding of the relation of God to the world he has made then the positivist outlook which rests upon the bifurcation of nature into mind and body subject and object and the conception of the universe to which that gave rise. It is in fact Christian teaching about creation and incarnation
which produced the concept of contingent intelligibility upon which all modern science rests while it is the transcendence and oneness of God the creative source of all rational order which gives unity identity objectivity and comprehensiveness to the space-time medium in which we and all created reality are bracketed together in one world. We can't pursue that train of ideas further now but must content ourselves with noting the implication of the rediscovered unity of form and being for
our understanding of God's self-revelation and communication to us within the spatial temporal structures objectivities and intelligibilities of the world. Dualist epistemologies resting upon the model of visual perception undoubtedly have made havoc of divine revelation for they are so restricted to the description of things only as they are related to ourselves that they cut off the appearances of things from their objective ground and interpret them as symbolic representations which have meaning for us in so far
as they evoke or occasion certain experiences within ourselves. Thus the New Testament revelation is subjected to a radically symbolic interpretation in terms of our human moral and social responses in rejection of any objective act or word of God or any real communication of God's own self in the incarnation. In such a context the New Testament is treated only as a record of the beliefs and experiences of the early church and Jesus Christ is reduced to a
status of secondary significance interpreted in terms of the symbolic objectification of a primitive religious and moral consciousness. What is really primitive however is precisely this pre-scientific way of thinking in pictures and images on the model of visible perception or visual perception that is in terms only of a subject-object relation in which we cannot escape from ourselves. In the last resort and all modern theology from the 19th century on this this way of thinking reduces
all theology into some form of anthropology. In genuinely scientific thinking however while symbolic representation retains an essential place we are concerned to penetrate into the objective coherences and structured interrelations of things in themselves that is into object-object relations in which our subject-object relations are transcended and controlled from beyond themselves by reference to the ontological structure of the realities being investigated. Perhaps I may illustrate this with a crude reference from the blackboard. Suppose here I
have some object I shall call O which I'm studying as a subject. Now if I simply observe that then I know that only as it appears to me so that I can never get it away from me. Now you can understand this if you happen to be colorblind or not colorblind you want to test whether you are colorblind you cannot see that by any direct vision. What you've got to do is somehow to cut behind your
seeing so that you can determine whether whether you are colorblind or not. Now what we do is to penetrate into some some field of reality in terms of its internal relations where we have the relation of object to object and therefore in terms of the object-object relation we are able to get behind and control the subject-object relation. Now without thinking merely in terms of the subject-object relations that's what I call primitive thinking but
scientific thinking is thinking which we penetrate into the relation of the inherent relatedness of things that's Einstein's theory of relativity into the object-object relations inherent reality and thus come behind and control the subject-object relations. Now this transition from a primitive to a scientific thinking is one of which we move from Muthos to Logos from myth or image to inner logic from subjectivity to Now when we do that we move away from the old observationalist
and phenomenalist approach to the historical Jesus which inevitably loses him to a profoundly Christological approach which transcends the cosmological and epistemological dualism alike in an understanding of Jesus Christ as God's self communication to mankind within the structures, objectivities and intelligibilities of our created existence. Far from being violated by the coming of God himself among us in these ways these structures, objectivities and intelligibilities are in fact creatively established and confirmed in their human, creaturely and contingent reality
as they could not be otherwise. In other words the sheer humanity of Jesus far from being a mask or a symbol of divine reality detached from it is found to be the constitutive form of God's self-giving to us in indissoluble union with himself and is maintained as such in its perfect integrity and reality as humanity. In Jesus Christ God has revealed himself and imparted himself to us within the space-time continuum of this world in
such a way that what he is inherently in himself he is toward us in Jesus and what he is toward us in Jesus he is inherently in himself. Here then in what theology speaks of as the homo-ousion, the consubstantiality of the Nicene Creed or the hypostatic union, the union of divine and human natures in the one indivisible person of Christ. Here in the homo-ousion and the hypostatic union there is discerned an indissoluble unity of
form and being in the material content of God's self-communication to us in Jesus Christ which constitutes the ground and the justification for the unity of form and being in a rigorously scientific approach to our understanding of him. The God who reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ is a God who does not play dice with us for the pattern of his self revealing the order of his love and grace manifest in the incarnation of his
son is one which objectively exists and is dynamically operative in his own eternal being. Second God the second saying of Einstein God does not wear his heart on his sleeve. If God does not play dice stands for Einstein's profound conviction that there is an that there is imminent in the universe and ordered regularity of all events. God does not wear his heart on his sleeve stands for the no less profound conviction that the real secrets of
nature the reasons for that order cannot be read off the patterns of its phenomenal surface. This is not to say that Einstein was concerned to look for hidden causes detached from and of a different category from the ordered regularity of things we experience in our everyday world for he was just as much concerned to reject occult causes as either Bacon or Newton and indeed was more concerned to reject the occult than they if only because he
rejected the kind of dualism upon which the occult thrives. Einstein's concern was rather to penetrate into the underlying ontological structure of the ordered regularity of things in which the phenomenal patterns of that regularity are coordinated by which they are controlled and in reference to which they are to be accounted for. It must be frankly admitted that the pattern of events manifest on the observed surface is always relative to the observer we never therefore get away from
the subject-object relation. It's always relative to the observer his private sensations and his particular stance in time and space and that is after all the so-called Galilean principle of but on dualist assumptions that means we can never reach knowledge of the real or external world. If we reject dualism however we operate with the inheritance of form and being then a different procedure must be adopted. Here we have to do with the inner image less
constitutive structure of things which is invariant through all relativity for the human knower and which cannot be grasped by relativistic observational means but only by intellective penetration or theoretic insight. While outward shape on the surface of existence remains observable and is variant for every observer the invisible image less ontological structure remains constant and invariant while dynamic of course for all observers. As such it provides the objective frame underlying the variable that the observable variations correlated with
it and therein constitutes the integrative force of their order on the phenomenal level even of their surface phenomenal connections as appearances. To grasp nature like that unitively in its objective depth and inherent relatedness and in such a way as to do full justice to the difference differences and relativities of observational experience without allowing them to disintegrate into pluralistic relativism is what science is about. But it does mean that we have to think in a dimension of
ontological depth in which the surface of things is coordinated with a deep indivisible intelligible structure and thus think of empirical and theoretical phenomenal and numinal levels of reality conjunctively together if we are really to reach knowledge of things in accordance with their distinctive and constitutive nature. God does not wear his on his sleeve really to know is to be in touch with the depths of reality which has the capacity for disclosure beyond what we can anticipate
or imagine. Now there's an obvious application of this to our knowledge of Jesus Christ which reinforces the finding we have already reached as to the necessity of a proper Christology if we are not after all to lose Jesus in the relativities of man's religious and cultural responses. Jesus Christ is not to be understood by trying to fit him into the surface regularities of other phenomena or by interpreting his decisive significance by reference to establishable observations and
deductions from them but only by penetrating into the non observable intelligible reality in such a way that we grasp Christ in his wholeness and inherent force that is only as we penetrate into his essential logos constitutive of his incarnate actuality. Here above all we have to learn the discipline of thinking conjunctively together his human historical and divine eternal aspects and thus to think of him from the start as at once human and divine one indivisible whole
reality. It is the prevalence still of obsolete dualist assumptions which makes people approach the fact of Christ either from his empirical side in the hope of deducing concepts about him of divine import or from his divine eternal side in the expectation of discerning the relevance of his saving power to human existence but the effect of such a bifurcation is to reproduce again the heretical tensions between ebonite and docetic ideas of the past which have always proved
damaging and sterile. However, if we abandon that dualist approach and attempt to approach the fact of Christ as an indivisible whole in order to let it disclose itself to our inquiry out of its own ontological depth then we find ourselves understanding him theologically in the light of his own intrinsic significance and discover that the divinity of Christ belongs to and undergirds the sheer irreducible fact of Christ even in his human actuality. Just as much as the
intelligible structures of space-time which are intangible belong to the everyday world of actual and visible events and account for what they are even in the observational variations in which we cannot but experience and describe them. A scientific theological approach of this kind does not operate with picturing models built up from observational phenomena but with disclosure models that is with rational structures in our knowing of Christ which are correlative to the self-disclosure of God and
which are forced upon us by the inner relations of the one God who meets us and saves us in Jesus Christ as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That is to say God's self-communication to us in and through the incarnation penetrates into the objective ontological structures of our human existence in the space-time medium of this world in such a way that it sets up within it the laws of its own internal relations and our rational
understanding takes on the imprint of what it comes to know namely the triune reality of God himself. Thus the Christological approach inevitably moves from what is known as the economic Trinity of God in his revealing and saving activity in history to the ontological Trinity for God is in himself inherently antecedently and eternally what he is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In this way we penetrate into the deep objective structure of God's self-communication to us
in Jesus Christ in such a way as to discover that the doctrine of the Trinity constitutes the basic grammar of theological understanding with reference to which all aspects of God in his relation to the world are to be construed. Here in the Holy Trinity we have the ultimate constitutive relations in God himself the fundamental constant upon which the intelligibility and objectivity of all our knowledge of God finally reposes invariant through all relativity of human knowers. Without
the unifying simplicity and objectivity of that constant we lapse back into the abstractions of dualism in which a serious disjunction opens out not only between natural knowledge of the one God and revealed knowledge of the triune God but between keroogma and dogma for then the revelation of God in Christ becomes detached from its ontological structure in the incarnation of the logos and a serious decomposition of both keroogmatic and dogmatic form takes place and that is precisely
this sad story of much modern theology as it becomes trapped in the fatal dualism of the empirical and theoretical components of knowledge. Perhaps I ought to say at this point to help some people but the great difficulty that people have in thinking in this way as I have been indicating from Einstein's statement that God does not wear his heart upon his sleeve is that when we start thinking with our eyes as observations and working with images
we seem to be unable to understand that images can refer to what is not imageable. Now see this is something that is so found in said relativity in quantum theory. Images refer to what is not imageable and that is precisely what we do in theology. The so-called images the iconic pictures of Jesus refer to what is image less and indeed if you wish to understand properly the theology of icons that say in the Orthodox Church
the icons do not image anything in the transcendent world they point to what is precisely image less. Now it is that relation between the image and the image less which is today so absolutely central theology but central to science but that was from the start primary in Christian theology and as the recovery of that I think it is toward the recovery of that Einstein helps us considerably. Now the last of Einstein's statements which is not so
easy to render his full statement in German is which I translate more simply as God is deep but not I think that probably Paul Ehrenfest was really referring to this when he said that the laws of nature are simple but not are simple but subtle. If God does not wear his heart on his sleeve is intended to express the idea that the secrets of nature cannot be read off its phenomenal surface. God is deep but not
devious expresses the complexity and subtlety yet ultimate simplicity and reliability of the universe. That is to say the imminent order behind the intricate and often baffling interconnections which we find in the universe is essentially trustworthy for in spite of all that might appear to the contrary when we come up against sets of events for which there seems to be no rational explanation. The universe is not arbitrary or evil. God does not play tricks with us. Now
this conviction relates to Einstein's discovery I give it in the form of Hermann Weyl that light has a unique metaphysical status in the universe. If all bodies in motion are defined with reference to space and time and all space and time are defined with reference to light, then undefined by reference beyond itself light remains the great constant with reference to which all else we know in nature is relationally known and defined and upon which we can
invariably rely and that holds good in spite of the fact that astrophysical exploration of the universe as far as we can reach through space and time raises problems for us which may appear intractable to the laws of physics for example the so-called black holes about which I think more bunk is now being written than almost anything else. So about all the dynamic multivariable structures that evade the universe of bodies in motion somehow the constancy of
light with its unique metaphysical status supports the conviction that God does not play tricks with us that is that there is an imminent order in the universe of the inviolability of which we remain totally convinced for apart from it the universe would nowhere be accessible to rational inquiry and we ourselves who are creatures of space and time belonging to the same universe could not be capable even of rational thought or behavior of any kind. Thus while
in the logical sense such an order in the universe is neither verifiable nor falsifiable it remains the most persistent of all our scientific convictions for without it there would be no science at all. Hence we do not believe that there is or there could be anything that can ultimately count against it. To imply another theological paraphrase in Einstein's vein God does not let us down. However this kind of imminent order dynamic though it is and compatible
with the multivariable forms of existence in life throughout the universe cannot cause serious difficulties for theology if it is generalized to comprehend all human existence for it cannot account for evil pain error and sin that is for the disorder and irrationality of the world which faced to face with God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ we know to conflict with his divine will and love. Certainly theology is and can be pursued only within the medium of space
and time that's why demythologizing that tries to cut out spatial temporal concepts is really intellectually nonsensical. Theology can only be pursued within the medium of space and time and therefore only through the spatial temporal structures of the national order which it shares with all human rational inquiry for it is through that medium that God makes himself known to man and through that medium that man is summoned to respond to God's self-revelation and therefore theology must
respect the spatial temporal structures of the natural order and not least the objectivity and constancy of those structures which God has given them through the status of created light within the universe for all this belongs to the covenant steadfastness with which God continuously sustains the creation in its contingent being and intelligibility. Nevertheless theology is not grounded upon the natural order of things but grounded ultimately upon the transcendent logos or uncreated light of God and takes its
form from God's interaction with man in the space-time track of the universe as he brings his creative order to bear upon him in such a way as to intersect the disorder and irrationality which have somehow erupted into man's existence in the form of evil, pain, error, and sin and to redeem human and indeed all creaturely being for the perfect will and love of the Creator. Far from interfering or conflicting with the created order of things,
that has come from God, God's creative interaction gives it a deeper level at which it is fulfilled and thus establishes it and wherever disorder may manifest itself there he is at work in his creating and redeeming purpose restoring it to order and goodness beyond anything that it is of in itself. Hence theological activity can be pursued by men who are themselves constituents of the creative created order only by thinking the levels of the created and the
creative orders conjunctively together. That is why theological statements are not are properly not without empirical correlates in our space-time creaturely reality so that an idea of the resurrection without the empty tomb is nonsensical. No concept of the resurrection is rational unless it has a space-time empirical correlate and therefore coherent with the multi-level structures of the universe as they become revealed to our scientific inquiry even though they are grounded beyond in the transcendent rationality
of the living and loving God who is the creator and sustainer of the whole universe of space and time and the source of its contingent intelligibility. The fact that theology is concerned with God in this way in the interaction between his transcendent rationality and contingent rationality or his uncreated light and created light whether physical or mental means that theology cannot but regard the objective structures and regularities that are disclosed in the advance of scientific knowledge as
essentially open stable though they are to a transcendent source toward which they continually point by the very nature of their intelligibility which demands completion beyond itself even though that pointing by reason of contingency is unable to terminate upon that source. Hence it is understandable that theology cannot but regard the unique metaphysical but finite status of light and the order it involves in the universe as reflecting in some way through all its immense difference the infinite status
of uncreated light and law of God with reference to which all finite realities and intelligibilities are relationally and dynamically to be defined. It is also understandable that in thinking conjunctively in this way of created and uncreated light theologians should hold to their belief in the transcendent order and law of the living God the father of mighty the creator of all things visible and invisible in spite of everything that may appear to account against it strange as
it may appear at first the steadfastness of that belief in the face of evil pain error and sin which are admittedly so baffling irrational and disorderly is not damaged but reinforced by them just because they are contradictory to the will and love of the Heavenly Father. In other words it is precisely because they believe so persistently and unshakably in the transcendent order and law of God in the constancy and invariance of his holy love that theologians
find their faith rebelling against the presence of evil pain error and sin wherever it may be found in the world but of course the real actual ground of that faith is in Jesus Christ the incarnate crucified and risen Son who is the unreserved self communication of God to man in the very midst of his darkness and stupidity where evil and disorder are so deeply entrenched in his existence for that means that God has not held himself
aloof from us in our dark and terrible experiences the self-inflicted hurt and unappeasable agony of pain and guilt in which we human beings are entrapped God has given nothing less than himself to us there and brought the complete negation of his holy love to bear upon our disorder thus revealing to us that the ultimate order that prevails invariantly through all the relativities of our human experiences in evil pain error and sin is the love of
God there to say there is no irrational enigma behind the creation but only the divine order of of love above all the passion of Christ insists and this is backed up by the pledge of God's own being incarnate in him that come what may this divine order of divine love will finally prevail throughout all space and time for he who made the terrible cross to be the saving power of God is able by the same cross
to make all things work together for good to those who love him and nothing will ever be able to separate them from the love of God the God who confronts the world in the crucifixion of his son is deep but never devious God is light and in him is no darkness at all he does not deceive us but he remains forever constant and invariant in the perfection of the law of his own eternal being and as
creator and consummator of the universe he is at work setting up within it an invincible order of love which is a creature a reflection of his own of course there remains a great deal in this world that baffles us and challenges our faith and not least the terrible irrationality which have somehow overtaken the creatures God has made together with the monstrous suffering of the innocent in animal as well as human life which we dare not minimize
but in the revelation of the constancy of the light and love of God we have been given the ultimate center by reference to which we may find our way through the enigmas and labyrinths of these complexities waiting for that glorious end when there will be a new creation with the final advent of Christ our Lord if I may just end by contrasting that with the words of Steven Weinberg at the end of his first three minutes
he says the more the universe seems to be the more it seems pointless I can't understand that even on rational or scientific grounds but certainly on theological grounds we are not trapped in such an ultimate farce in which the universe deceives us but are up against a universe which by its very nature proclaims the steadfastness of God in his love toward what he has made you