Transcript
Professor Torrance just instructed me to make the introduction as short as possible and that is very difficult when you are introducing him. He is well known worldwide as one of the premier theologians of our time. He has published a great number of books including fairly recently Space Time and Incarnation and Space Time and Resurrection. Only recently he's retired from the Thomas Chalmers chair in theology in the University of Edinburgh. He has served not only in that
position but also as moderator of the Church of Scotland and in 1978 was awarded the prize in religion. I remember sitting in one of Professor Torrance's classes here at Princeton Seminary a few years ago when I was a student and I found him a stimulating lecturer at that time and followed his writings with great interest over the years. We've been intrigued in recent years by Professor Torrance's interest in the analogy of modern physics and theological science.
Today his lecture is on the topic of the resurrection. Professor Torrance, greetings. Thank you sir for your kind word of introduction. I would like to read a few verses from the 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians in order to set the perspective and then because I have to make some selection I shall take three epistemological points dealing with the approach to the resurrection. I think this is necessary today and then I shall select three points of material
content after that. Now the verses from 1 Corinthians 15 verses 11 to 17. Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised then our preaching is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified that he raised Christ
whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Now three points epistemological points in approach to understanding Jesus and not least the resurrection. If we've learned anything at all from the last hundred years of what it means to think honestly, rigorously and
scientifically in any sphere of knowledge we've learned that all rational and properly scientific knowledge combines the rational and the empirical the theoretical and the empirical in knowledge. But a good deal depends on how the theoretical and empirical elements are combined. Now so-called classical science and I think mainly of that of the Newtonians who took up unfortunately Newton's somewhat idle word I do not invent hypotheses I deduce them and so developed the idea that scientific concepts
are deduced that they logically derive from appearances from phenomena. Now if you do that you have to do it from within some kind of static framework. Now in Newton that static framework was beside provided by God and the mind of God and the mind of God was identified with space and time absolute space this was it was because God not only created the world but he was present to it he held it in his mind his
presence identified with space his life identified with time that God held the world in a framework of absolute mathematical time and space so he gave it objective order. But as Newtonian developed this thought and as Kant came on the scene the absolute mathematical time and space was transferred from the mind of God to the mind of man. So we know things only in such a way that we structure them as we know them in terms of
time and space and of course causality and substance. So that man's knowing is a constructivist knowing he imparts pattern and rationality into what he knows. Now that is why when this is how the the Newtonians and the Kantians explained the methods of science all we have our appearances mere phenomena we don't know things in themselves we only know things as they appear to us but we in our act of knowing structure them and give them patterns
and it is because we do that that we can deduce rational scientific concepts. Now of course that whole concept we needn't say has been utterly destroyed and collapsed by Einstein and the whole development of especially after general relativity and I won't go into that. But let me point out what happens if you take the Newtonian Kantian idea seriously. If you don't know anything in terms of its inner relations in itself and the thing in itself the
ding an sich is really a hypothetical X an unknowable X a fiction. If you don't know anything in itself then of course you cannot possibly know Jesus in himself. You only know the appearances of Jesus but be consistent. If you can only you cannot know anything in itself you cannot even know in itself how the early church interpreted Jesus. You can only know how the early church appears to you. So you are on a completely relativistic
course and ends up in quite nonsensicality. Now that whole line of thinking had a climax at the turn of the last century and the climax can be documented in many respects with relation to the interesting debate between Anse-Marc and Max Planck over whether atoms exist. Now according to the neo-Kantian line and the line that Anse-Marc took atoms are just fictions. They are mental artifices. These are his terms. They don't exist at all. Now
of course Planck was concerned with developing as he was this amazing deepening understanding of quantum mechanics and he held that we are concerned with reality. Now it's interesting that Planck in his epistemological side was deeply influenced by Kant but nevertheless against all that he was insisting that what we are concerned with in atomic physics is with reality. Now Planck was completely vindicated against Marx when it was found that atomic physics could penetrate into the internal relations
of the atom and understand the atom in terms of its internal structure. And then and this is well documented in a couple of his books by Stanley Yaki. Dear Anse-Marc had a deathbed repentance. He finally admitted that atoms existed. Now but think of what happened there. Here you had a tremendous shaking up from this whole positivist approach. You do know things in their internal relations. What happened to the theologians? Dear me they're still stuck behind
Kant. They're still stuck behind Marx. They don't believe you can know Jesus in himself. They still stick to this old notion that you only know things as they appear to us. So the scientists go one way and the biblical scholars tend to go the other way. Now here we have a crisis. Is it any wonder that they lose the historical Jesus? Is it any wonder they can't understand the resurrection of Jesus if they operate with those
notions? Further suppose you take this Newtonian notion that you only have scientific ideas as you deduce them from appearances. First of all your appearances. That's all the reality that you have. These are the so-called data, whatever that means. And then you deduce certain ideas so that the theoretical ideas are later than empirical ideas. What does the New Testament scholar make of that? Whenever he finds a theological element in New Testament, oh that must be late
you see. That must be late. And so the theological elements are reinterpreted and they belong to a later construction put upon Jesus. What do we have? We have this crazy constructivist notion imported into the New Testament in which the theoretical ideas and empirical ideas are torn apart and then the theoretical ideas are later imposed upon the empirical. Now of course I said that whole concept is shattered. Theory that is uninformed by empirical contact and experiment that
is undirected by theoretical constructs are utterly barren and futile and misleading. But together the empirical and the theoretical properly united open the very secrets of reality in nature. Now it is that kind of combination of empirical and the theoretical that is just as necessary in theology and biblical interpretation as it is in any area of rational knowledge. If you do not combine the empirical and theoretical that way then quite frankly you're no longer thinking rationally. And
therefore I question the rational assumptions of a great deal of modern scholarship because they are still thinking in impossible ways about the relation of the empirical and the theoretical. Now I could go on and elaborate that but I won't. Time is running away. Now let's take another element. How do you know what is new? Now those of you are interested in the modern problems of language and say the questions that Chomsky and company have raised. How
do you how do people come to know new things in language? How do new things develop? Now of course this is an ancient question that was raised by Plato in the Meno and the answer given regularly was and it's still given by the Cartesians and the Chomskyites because they have no other answer. Somehow you have it already innate. Either you remember it or it's innate. Now of course this is also a bit of nonsense. Do you
mean to say the symmetrical patterns are somehow innate in my mind before I apprehend crystalline formations in the rocks and somehow impose these upon the rocks and they are not crystalline in the rocks when I'm not looking at them or independent of them? That's utter nonsense. The staggering fact is this that we apprehend what is new out of the new itself. Now when you come across anything that is quite novel, it can only be known and
justified if it proves itself to you, if it justifies itself to you. There's no other way of knowing it. If you meet someone new, never met before, you can't know his name unless he tells you his name. But that's simple. But that's exactly the principle we're operating here. If you are up against something new which you cannot in any way derive from what you already know by logic or deductive means, you can only know it out
of itself. You must let it prove itself to you. And this is a very ancient point. Long ago the Stoics talked about two kinds of apodichesis, two kinds of proof. There's one kind of proof which is proof by geometrical reasoning in which you work with logic, you derive your knowledge by logical argumentation in what you know. The other way of apodichesis is you have to question it until it stands in front of you and grabs you
by the hair and will not let you go. Now they said that is the way you really know the new things. This cataleptic grasp of reality. And that is the way in which all scientific proof is established today. Scientific proof is never established by any kind of logical reasoning. You never discover anything by logic and you never justify anything by logic. Now logic plays an important part in consistency and coherence but never in establishing what is
new. If you work with logic in that way then you tear apart form from being and think by manipulating the forms, you could establish being. But of course that's impossible. And is that not fundamentally the era of form criticism where form criticisms have been taxed from objective events in history and you think that by manipulating this and that form in different phenomenological, historical ways, you can establish reality? Of course you can't. And then it's no wonder
that people give up the the historicity of the Gospels if they operate in that way because logic can tell you a single thing about events. If you know events, they have to prove themselves to you. And you can know them only if they prove themselves to you out of their inner rationality and intelligibility. Now it seems to me that that is what we're concerned with in Jesus. Now this is something we're concerned with today in quite
a new way. Because in science we have thrown up again and again problems that people call singularities. Now this can be used in mathematical ways and other ways and some of you here know this far better than I do. But take something that is quite singular, quite unique. Now you cannot know the unique in terms of anything else, then it wouldn't be unique. If you come across the unique, you've got to know the unique simply out
of itself. How can you understand the unique in the universe by construing it with universal laws? When you come across the ultimate singularity of the universe, people say our laws of physics break down because they don't cope with that. The laws of physics can only cope with what we already know and developing it regularly steadily and so on. When you come up against something utterly unique, you have to know it out of itself. Now when you
do know it out of itself, it fits into what you already know, but not in a logical way. It is consistent with it because the universe is orderly and consistent. Now apply that to knowing Jesus. If you assume from the start that Jesus is not unique, then of course you start to integrate him with what you already know and you only accept from Jesus what you already know. You'll accept from Jesus any idea or pattern that
can be logically related to what you already know, but then you say you have started dogmatically from the start with the assumption that I'm up against nothing here unique at all. That itself is not a scientific assumption or rational assumption because whatever it is, I must try to understand it out of itself. If I cannot understand it in terms of other patterns and events, I must ultimately understand it in terms of itself and then see how
I can relate it to what I already know and usually requires what Einstein called perhaps mistakenly using the word logical in this way, a logical reconstruction of what I already know, certainly a rational or theoretic reconstruction of what I already know. Now take the resurrection. If I'm going to understand the resurrection, I cannot understand it as a phenomenon which I can relate to other phenomena. If it really is what the New Testament tells us to be,
then it is something I have to appreciate in its own uniqueness. Now here we have a very difficult problem for the history of thought in which the biblical scholars are themselves deeply involved. Let me put it this way. In the Newtonians operated with a mathematical concept of space and time on the one side and a sensible apparent concept of space and time on the other side. Now this had the effect of bifurcating knowledge of reality into
such an event that they decided that we have two different kinds of truths, as Lessing put it, the necessary truths of reason and the contingent truths of history and there's an ugly big ditch between the two. Unique events are not rational. Rational events are only those you can coordinate necessarily with other events. Now that is the problem that has today been shattered again and again in natural science. If you think empirical and theoretical together, you know
that there is nothing in science that is absolutely necessary. We're concerned with contingent order and contingent order's rational order we understand out of itself, but the whole distinction between necessary truths of reason and contingent truths of history is gone, especially now that we know that even atoms and even protons have time embedded in them. They have a history embedded in them and therefore all science is concerned with contingent truths of history. So what a change that
is for those people who thought that science is only concerned with necessities and never who ruled out anything unique in Jesus and therefore it's these scientists that are concerned with the utterly contingent truths of reason that call for the theologians to stop all that monkeying about with trying to relate the incarnation or the resurrection into necessary patterns of thought that they found elsewhere. They have to be understood out of themselves in all their definite uniqueness because
there is a contingent intelligibility, a unique subtle profound rational order in the contingent events and if Jesus is like that, he has to be understood out of himself in that kind of way. Now this means that from this point of view we have an immense rehabilitation of the rationality of the contingent and therefore the old way of thinking of all those, especially the German type of thinking from blessing Reimarus right down to Wultmann with his separation
between Historia and Geschichte and all that nonsense that goes back to Newtonian dualism that has collapsed and why should we be any more just obsolete dinosaurs thinking in this realm when the whole world of science is moving in the opposite direction. Now a third point let me put this way and again this is something we've got to think about in other areas the place of ultimates, the place of ultimates in knowledge. Oh yes, science is concerned
with ultimates which are unprovable, unverifiable, unforcifiable. Now of course that's something that the linguistic analysts didn't believe, that's what the pupils of the Viennese Circle, of Ernst Mach and Freddie Ayer and company just treated with contempt but you can't prove that there is order in the universe because you have to assume it in order to prove it. You can't prove that the laws of logic are valid because you have to assume them in order to prove
them. You can't do the same thing in mathematics so that here in mathematics or logic or on the contingent order of the universe you have to assume these are ultimate beliefs and so the idea that there is an intelligibility of the universe independent of our knowing of it, that is our fundamental ultimate belief. The simplicity, the constancy, the regularity of nature, these are ultimate beliefs which you cannot prove or falsify but you have to assume all
the time in your operations and it's only as you assume them and operate with them that you can really get on with your scientific understanding. Now the point I want to get at is this, ultimates cannot be understood in terms of what is less than ultimate, they have to be understood on the ground that they themselves constitute. Now the incarnation and the resurrection are ultimates in that sense, they constitute the ground upon which they themselves are
to be understood. The incarnation is an ordering event, it is the divine log-off, the divine word by whom all things were made itself coming into our world and not interrupting order, God bless you, but restoring order where there was disorder, where there is disease nature is naturalized, where there is human corruption man is humanized. The order of the creator is restored by the coming of the creator word into reality but it is that kind of
order that we have that is assumed in the incarnation and of course it's the resurrection that we have the same thing. So that the resurrection has to be looked at as one of the ultimates, a stupendous event like the creation of the universe out of nothing, is to be understood only on the ground which it supplies, thus the resurrection like the incarnation is to be understood only within a framework of thought of which the resurrection is
a determining constituent, a constitutive determinant. Now is that a circular movement of thought? Yes it is, it is, but it's a proper circularity and not a vicious circularity. To take again the question I raise about order, a natural scientist assumes that there is order in the universe. When he comes across a series of events which he can't make much of and they seem to baffle him, when finally he finds that they are orderly, he's come back
full circle to what he assumed. It's in the light of his assumption of order that he will not allow any interpretation of these series of events that are irrational disorderly. There's a proper circularity here when you are concerned with ultimates and of course that's how we operate also and you can know in proper axiomatic systems. Now the universe constitutes a contingent secularity, a coherent secularity like that and today we are up against the point where the
universe can ultimately be understood only as consistent insofar as it has integrated from beyond itself. I put it in another way and this has to do of course with an application of the of the Gidelean theorems that the universe today in its contingent order is ultimately rational insofar as it has a rational reason for this contingent state of affairs. If there is no sufficient reason for this contingent state of affairs there is no order in the
universe. If I could go into that in detail it is partly I mean in this this place you had for many years Kurt Gödel whose work on the Gödelian theorems was of course staggering but it's the application of that now to the universe as a whole which is staggering because the universe as a whole this contingent universe as a whole which has time built into it which is temporal and finite and yet rational in order to
be that rational requires a sufficient reason beyond it to be integrated from above or beyond it. Let's say here even the universe as a whole with its order requires an ultimate that is beyond it. Now let me let me give an illustration of that point. On March 14 last year I was giving a lecture in Bern at the Einstein celebrations in Switzerland and I was lecturing on this point ensuring how we can no longer operate with
what the mathematicians call a monotonic view of the universe. We have to the universe is a contingent and whole and yet it's utterly singular and time is so embedded in it that you that the scientist now has to ask questions if time belongs to the essential subject matter he has to ask questions as a scientist about the beginning and about the end he cannot do that if he could look at science as necessary timeless truth he
would need to do that but now he has to do that then I said this forces the very question of God. Now I was I saw in front of me there so Herman Bundy the man who has who was one of the chief architects of the so-called steady state theory and I wonder what he was going to say. He jumped up at once and he said I don't know whether I may have been an atheist
I don't know whether I'm an atheist anymore his whole atheism had collapsed in front of this he didn't yet know what he was he was followed immediately by Victor Weiskopf the president of the American Academy of Science and he said the same I have been an agnostic but now I don't know what I am because the grounds which I held these views have gone. Now that's the point I'm trying to make here even in pure science
itself we are forced to points where we push our questions to the very frontiers of being where the universe bounds on so to speak nothing either at the micro physical level at the macro physical level astrophysical level and these great questions have to be raised the scientist raises them he knows there must be a rational answer but as a scientist he can't give them an answer. But he is admitting that to know the universe in a
rational way he has worked with an ultimate beyond the universe itself. Einstein used to say at this point we're concerned with and he used Christian language the incarnation of an intelligence in our world which we can apprehend only at its elementary levels basically the same point he reached before. Well look at Jesus and now let's ask questions about before I do that one other point that belongs to the epistemic approach and I think this is an
important point because we mustn't fool ourselves and I find a lot of this self-fooling goes on in our theological scholarship put it this way suppose you've got a jigsaw puzzle and you don't know what the picture is and you finally you solve the jigsaw puzzle and you put it together and you see the picture. Can you break it up again and start banishing that picture entirely from your mind? You can't do that. If you're a
Christian scholar of the Old Testament can you possibly look at the Old Testament banishing the New Testament from your mind? Don't fool yourself you can't do that even the Jews won't allow you to do that. So if you look at Jesus and you see the resurrection can you possibly look at Jesus banishing the resurrection from your mind? Aren't you really fooling yourself you try to do that you can't. You see the resurrection throws a light upon
Jesus and the Gospels are portrayed in that way but it's not an alien light and this is what I'm now coming to it's a light that is inherent in Jesus himself an ultimate aspect of Jesus in the light of which the whole of Jesus has to be understood and that is really something happened parallel to what I've just been trying to say. Now then three points of material content and these all have to do with consistency
and I read that passage from 15th chapter of Saint Paul but this is the point if you work with an ultimate that you are on the resurrection you have to move in a proper circularity from ultimate to ultimate and it's only in that way that you understand in the movements in between exactly in the same way if you accept there is order in the universe and you try to order your any area of thought you're working
in this sense with an ultimate that constitutes its own ground it's not a vicious circle but it's a rational circle. Now take first of all and this seems to me to be one of the primary points in the Gospels the utter consistency we have in Jesus himself. Jesus is portrayed in the New Testament in such a way that the resurrection cannot be detached and considered as a phenomenon in itself but only in the light of who
Jesus is in his own person in the light of his own inner logos his own inner rationality if you like and indeed in the light of the union of the divine and human natures in him as one person. Jesus however you look at the New Testament you cannot possibly say that Jesus was a Schizophrenic staggering things seems things to us that seem incompatible but he wasn't in any way insincere he wasn't in any way a hypocrite
he wasn't in any way too faced here you have something staggeringly simplistic and whole about him now it is this utter transparent consistency in Jesus that stands out not only his life but the resurrection of Jesus the risen Jesus and historical Jesus have that kind of consistency about them. Or we put it in quite a different way if that is so then it means does it not that Jesus rose again from the dead in a profound
sense even before he was crucified. Put it like this you and I are human beings not one of us is the man he ought to be there's a great big gap in us we're all schizoid in some way that's why our image and our identity are broken apart and when a culture is diseased as our present culture is the problem of seeking your image now becomes a popular thing people have lost their identity because the image
and reality are broken apart there's nothing of that in Jesus here you have the image and the identity are one and therefore he comes across to us just like that there is no gap in Jesus between what he was and what he ought to be there to say now the gap between what you are and what you ought to be is part of our original sin it's part of the fact we've broken we've estranged from God
and if you're estranged from God you you're in death now Jesus by the sheer holiness of his life had already lived in such a way as to transcend that gap so that in a real way by his holiness he'd already risen from the dead although he had come into our mortal corruptible humanity he lived it in such a way in such a holy way to sanctify the very humanity that he lived that the humanity of Jesus
was already hallowed sanctified and resurrected even before it was crucified because the agent who was the historical Jesus the agent also him who rose again from the dead because the n-hypostatic middle voice aspect of of of a gyro and and an anesthetist there also the new testament he raised himself from the dead as well as being raised dead by God that consistency is I think of fundamental importance and tells us we cannot begin to understand
the resurrection as though the resurrection were something alien put upon Jesus because the resurrection is not that it is absolutely consistent every point with the kind of person he was the kind of life he lived the kind of relations he had with the father and therefore it's understandable that the new testament says that Jesus is the resurrection the fourth gospel ego I mean a anesthetist I am the resurrection is therefore precisely expressing the utter consistency between
Jesus before and after his crucifixion the historical Jesus and the risen Jesus are one and the same now that seemed to me to be a primary method now how do you get at that you see if you think the empirical and the theoretical together if you don't divorce the inner lock-offs of Jesus from his life then you are bound to come out in this way only if you've already by some kind of preconceived idea torn
these two things apart because you possibly come out in such a way as harnack did where the historical Jesus is one thing who vanishes in any case from his fingers and and then you got the other thing called the faith of the Easter disciples they're two quite different things because in the very presuppositions he uses he had cut the two apart from the staff which is the most unscientific thing you could do but if you don't
take that approach and you understand Jesus in terms of his own inner logicality only in a lock-off then you see that there is a profound consistency between the risen and the historical Jesus but now there's a consistency between Jesus and God now of course this became the primary point of the early church take for example a passage like the fifth chapter of John's gospel where Jesus was challenged when he healed someone on the Sabbath day
and and he says well what my father has been doing hitherto I am doing let's say he was claiming to be continuing the creative act of God now when you move through the story you see that that the issue behind everything is this when Jesus forgives sins is that just a man saying that or is it God saying that when he announces to someone your sins are forgiven you that just merely the fleeting words of a
human being or is this something that God himself is saying and even the Jews said no one can forgive sins but God only and yet that's precisely what Jesus does he exercises the absolute prerogative of God and forgiveness of sin and John five it goes on and says that even the judgment the ultimate judgment the judgment of Jesus the judgment of one and even in the resurrection it goes on to say the action of God and
the action of Jesus there was now that is the point that the early church emphasized so much is Jesus in himself consistent with the message that he brings put this way you can put it in two ways is Jesus Christ in himself that which he proclaimed now he manifests the love of God to us he proclaims the forgiveness of sins to us he brings us sanctification and eternal life now is that really what happens in God
is Jesus really in himself antecedent inherently in God what he is toward us oh put it the other way around is God in himself what he is toward us in Jesus all we concerned in Jesus with someone that is too faced are we concerned with a duplicity between Jesus and God now the whole new testament the pauline arguments he said no no there's no lying here there's no duplicity there's utter consistency between what Jesus is in
himself now to illustrate that problem take the analogy from physics again because this is fundamental you see I said that utonians they were concerned with appearances and they tried to deduce concepts from appearances but then the question arose you see is nature in itself what it appears to be is there an utter consistency with nature as we apprehend it and what it is in its own inner structure and of course with general relativity and the unity
of form and being we have what I call established the homo usion of physics where physics insists on this fact that it is concerned in our daily life with something that is real in itself not just with fictions and appearances but concerned with reality we're grasping reality in its depths Einstein's work now that's what we're concerned with in Jesus is he so consistent in his behavior and his message that it is bound up with his very
being as such in God now it's upon this point that the whole of the early church gospel consists next year 1981 we celebrate the 16th centenary of the Nicene Constantinopolitan creed in 381 when the homo usion became quite clearly the absolutely central point go back to the point I made before about the jigsaw puzzle here we have an irreversible element in the history of theology once such an insight is seen you can never go back upon
it once you have found the picture in a jigsaw puzzle you can't go back upon it something irreversible has happened now in the same way with with Newton although Newtonian science is modified and developed by Einstein something quite irreversible happened with Newton and also something quite irreversible happened with Einstein now it's that kind of utter irreversibility that happened in the early church when they saw that there was sheer consistency between Jesus and God what he is
in himself he is inherently in his own being the saving message of Jesus in forgiving and healing and sanctifying is act of God now if it's not act of God then you are yet in your sins and there is no salvation whatsoever it's all just appearance and no reality the whole gospel collapses at this point if you are prepared to cut the ontological bond between Jesus and God sever the connection between Jesus Christ and God the
father and the gospel proves empty inconsistent and ultimately nonsensical and there are no alternatives here in spite of the people who try to straddle both sides of the fence are both concepts now scientific thinking will not allow you to play about like that you have to be rational consistent and rigorous and we are faced with this and that is a challenge we have to work with but now in closing just for a moment or two to
let you have some time for discussion there's a hint in the verses that I raised that if we say that Jesus is not raised from the dead we're not only bearing false witness to God but we're making God out to be a liar we're saying that God himself is not consistent now let me read you a few verses from my friend Donald MacKinnon he says what is realized in the mission of Jesus and perfected in the
fathers raising him from the is the very unity of God the consistency of God with himself in relation to his creation we have to do with a prolonged human action that is grounded in God and in fact provides the very rationale of the creation itself yet it is unique because in it the very being of God is put at risk and by the way in which it does is put at risk we learn as nowhere else
that it is I'm sorry I missed out a verse in my my typescript that God is in himself in himself what we believe him to be. now let me put it this way suppose Jesus didn't rise again from the dead that would mean that the cross is a fiasco, as that gink Mr Moon thinks. now if the cross was a great failure in a fiasco you then how in the world can you relate God to the
evil or hurt of the world God's own rationality is at stake here God's own consistency is at stake here and therefore in a profound sense God justified himself in raising Jesus from the dead God justified himself these are via creation that had become disordered and evil in some respects so that the cross and the resurrection of Jesus are absolutely essential to God and it's not only that we will be found misrepresenting God but we will be
found saying that God himself was a liar if we say that the resurrection didn't take place so that the argument of consistency within this properly circular argument has to do as McKinnon rightly says with the very unity of God in his all his relations with the creation now that is the staggering fact of the resurrection now let me end with this when we speak of the resurrection in this way we are speaking of the resurrection in
the most realist terms the incarnation is the incarnation of the eternal sun and word within the contingent structures of space and time and the resurrection takes place within the structures of space and time it's a concrete physical event a spatial temporal reality there was an empty tomb no doubt about that as Karl Barth said to me when make no mistake about it a physical bodily resurrection you see the resurrection is nonsensical unless it really has to
do with the changing the altering the recreating the healing of our physical existence if that doesn't happen God is still a liar then the whole creation shouts aloud against God you've deceived us you're not true now this is a point that people run away from one day a number of years ago and I think it was in the early 1960s when the concilium group of Roman Catholic theologians had their first meeting when they invited Protestants along
this happened in Brussels I was staggered to listen to Hans Kung expounding the resurrection as a purely spiritualistic event now I'd known Hans for a number of years and I said to myself dear me Hans has collapsed into bad tubing in Lutheranism and so I challenged him in the discussion because I was on the platform I had to raise issues with him and I said but he said but you can't speak about the resurrection in any
other way in a world of science I said the exact opposite is the case unless the resurrection has empirical correlates in space and time it is absolutely nonsensical for any kind of scientist because the scientists can only think in rational terms and space and time are the bearers of our rationality if you take it out of that it is irrational it means nothing at all and up from the back of the audience jumped a physicist from
California backing me up against Hans Kung is that a physicist couldn't stand any other view several years later I was giving elections in John's University in in Long Island and a continental theologian again started this game of spiritualizing the resurrection and so at the end of the I happened to be presiding that day the head of the physics department in bed Andre Mercier came to me the table and he said I want real theology a resurrection
like that doesn't mean anything to me now it's interesting that is the action of our scientist world today they demand those theologians that they think out rationally and seriously the relation of god to this physical now that doesn't mean to say that the resurrection can be reduced reducted to purely physicality how do we think in science today we have certain certain structures of thought at one level they are coordinated with structures at another level for example
the level of physics and chemistry is coordinated with the you cannot interpret the organ-genismic relations in an organism by reducting them to the level of the physics and chemistry you can only understand the level of physics and chemistry in terms of the new element that has emerged in organic life and they are coordinated and you have to understand one level over against the other and the physical level physical chemical level is to a higher level
but a higher level cannot be explained simply by reducing it to the lower level that's the way the scientist thinks and he demands of us to think of that way in terms of act of god in relation to the resurrection of jesus that's after all what i said earlier what he's now finding so false to do when he thinks of the universe as a unique event as a whole a concrete singularity and in this concrete singularity
the resurrection of jesus he asks of us to do the same kind of hard rational thought and therefore we however difficult it may be for us we have to think through the resurrection in such a way we take dead seriously the relations of god in jesus now we have problems here because you see if what we believe in jesus and the incarnation if we believe that the resurrection is a new creation we have here also the
recreation of time and space now that means that while we we look at the resurrection in that way we cannot interpret the event of the resurrection simply in terms of the kind of time the other events are determined in namely in a world that has yet fallen where time has not been redeemed now all time that has fallen is deficient it is less real because it has been corrupted to a certain extent but here we have
a temporal event that is more real more temporal than any other temporal event because it is time without evil in it it's time where evil is being vanquished and therefore this event is more truly temporal more truly historical than any other event in the history of mankind and that is the of the future that's where all our eschatology comes from that here we have out of the passion and resurrection of jesus that promise the gospel of
a new creation thank you we have a few minutes before we have to conclude for the supper hour of maybe we can take a question or two before having to close are there questions that you'd like to ask um certainly as one looks at the macroscopic world if you assume order in the motion of the planet so you can derive kepler's laws however as you begin to look at smaller and smaller things um if you take
a beam of electrons and shine it at two slits you quantum mechanics tells us that we cannot know in principle which slit it goes through so it almost seems like now scientists are assuming that there is no water and through that finding water in certain laws of probabilities and that type of thinking comment someone on that well this was the problem that you see um over against the quantum theory as it appeared in gretchen and in
born and heisenberg in his own day and he said look that is not really science ultimately what you're doing is to describe being the order of your experimental observations not nature now it seems to me that einstein has been justified now granted that in all science we're concerned with interaction with nature and we are part of nature uh now but in the interaction with nature nevertheless what we are concerned with in nature is to penetrate into
object object relations that control our subject object relations now in this event the subject object relation of the measuring instruments we use in quantum theory but as einstein as heisenberg himself admits at the end of his life where he questioned the whole question of the uncertainty in determinism we have here a more subtle kind of order which we cannot construe in the old way i think that's it right and i could show you how from different
reasons from the philosophical point of view popper and mario bunga and so on have shown that that the idea that you cannot get objectivity in quantum theory is nonsense it's a logical nonsense also if in in in modern particle theory and the people here like ian paul who knows this inside out as i don't we are concerned with now with understanding the particles in terms of their relations with one another and these relations are belong to
very being itself now the difficulty where that form of the quantum theory is it has already defined locality in time and space in terms of newtonian but that won't fit the quantum so it had to relativize have to relativize that way of defining time and space before it can get some kind of unity as i understand it this is the way which it has moved but see a lot of people have taken that form of quantum
theory the old form of quantum theory which some germans are still stuck in actually to justify the idea that you can't get on the subject i'm afraid that it just won't hold there another question yes i had a little bit of a problem understanding some of the relationship possibly between our current way of thinking and the way of thinking i would say but um as i understand some of this historical approach part of the approach is
to try to get behind what we might superimpose at or to get through the sense of how people describe their world and in a sense get more of the reality of that world in front of them and i sort of have some problems trying to applicant whether first century thinkers are thinking of all in terms of categories and ways of thinking so that they use patterns of reality that may not be the same kind of patterns
that we certainly call it up there so many nice things something people use anyway i was wondering if you could further the library on what your criticism is well that would go a long way my my main so my main criticism historical approach is that the general historian biblical historian works with uh the double view of time that stems from newton this is what comes with with with hermann's distinction between history and geschichte that duality goes
back the whole foundation and it's impossible anymore but there's this also this is the point i think i was elaborating if you take say a newtonian type of science it is abstractive to deduce ideas from experience you abstract from experiences now the newtonian type of science becomes further and further removed from ordinary experience therefore if you think in that way you have great difficulty in relating scientific thought to the ordinary life of the ancient world but
if you take einsteinian way of he says this is an extension of our ordinary ways of knowing another expression a refinement of the ordinary ways of knowing and he shows how even the most abstruse concept of place in time repose upon and involve the basic concepts that we have an everyday experience in the unity of the theoretical empirical now from this point of view you don't need to have the arrogant idea that we have a way
of thinking that that those ancient people after all they were human beings they were rational let me put it another way a child by the age of five learns more physics than he could possibly understand if he becomes the ablest physicist in the world he knows far more than he can tell now that's the ordinary human being so don't despise the ordinary human being ancient or modern is now it's in the rehabilitation of ordinary humanity ordinary
experience that's one of the primary things whereas this arrogant notion that they couldn't understand our world they they had an antique worldview after all that's importing into their worldview see there isn't anywhere i've examined the whole history of thought in greek world to see whether there's any justification of a three-decker universe the first time it arises in the pseudo aristotelian day about the second century a d doesn't arrive anywhere before that's the pure imposition upon
the world where they come from it came from bultmann's false understanding of science to haiku so he imports that back and it obscures his whole position now all this kind of abstracted thinking collapses and you have a much more natural much more honest a much more rational approach to the ancient and modern and after all when you look at the new testament you see that they adopted a worldview that was slap against what they were traditionally
had they weren't that isn't no worldview see the resurrection the virgin birth of jesus are slap against what they would have expected what the jews were certainly expected and that again happens again and again in science when we come across new views they are slap against our misunderstandings of nature not that they are stuck against nature misunderstanding against nature and it's when you get someone adopting something that conflicts that he's forced to adopt in conflict with
what he previously held that usually you can trust him most because then it is most objective now that is i think how we have to approach the ancient world i must say i have an immense respect for the ancient world and the more i read them and understand them the more staggering i am about the understood and i can only explain in terms of this point i made earlier that a child can learn more physics in
five years everyone else that's it spots through spontaneous mutation adjustment he understands much more than he can tell for actual physical reality and that is the basis for this form of thinking we mustn't deprive him deprive him of that kind of basic rationality let me on behalf of all of you thank professor torrance for the stimulating lecture and assure him that he's always welcome in princeton