Transcript
by A.A. Hodge in the volume of Charles Hodge's collected papers on the church entitled The Church and Its Politics. Now according to Charles Hodge, there are three distinct classes of doctrine. First, doctrines common to all Christians, summed up in the ancient creeds, Nicene, Athanasian, the same point made by Samuel Rutherford. And second, doctrines common to all Protestants, by which they are distinguished from the Roman Catholic Church. And then third, doctrines peculiar to reform churches, which
distinguishes them from the Lutherans, Remonstrants, that is, so on. Now in line with that, in 1837 and 1892, the Northern Presbyterian Church distinguished those articles of faith which are properly creedal from the rest. And in 1901, the church made some changes regarding the doctrine of the magistrate and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. But adherence to the confession of faith was required as to the system of doctrine rather than to the substance of the faith to
which the doctrines bore witness. Now in the Church of Scotland, however, the movement was in the other direction. Robert Rainey, who had an immense impact upon all Scottish churches, as though he was the leader at that time of the Free Church, Robert Rainey in 1874 distinguished between two strata of confessional matter. A, those articles which constitute the solid core, which cannot alter unless the conviction of the whole church alter. Let's say the whole universal church, the
whole Catholic Church alter. Those articles which constitute the solid core, which cannot alter unless the conviction of the whole church alters. And second, those articles which may reasonably be regarded as the more variable element, which circumstances might require to be extended at one time or contracted at the other time. That is to say, while there is a constant in the faith, an invariant element, there are nevertheless variable elements where the faith has to be expounded in
terms of this or that circumstance, this or that age, or this and that church. But Rainey went on to insist that when the confessional formulas of churches diverge, the point of view of the universal church ought to be accepted as the fundamental one. Let's say, it is the faith of the one holy Catholic apostolic church that must be regulative for every particular church of what it believes and of its divergences. Now this opened up the way
in Scotland for an interpretation of the unchanging core or substance of the faith to which the whole church must agree in distinction from what particular churches may require. But differences between particular churches, let's say not only between Presbyterian churches like the United Frit... Presbyterian Church, the Free Church and the Church of Scotland, but difference between the Presbyterian and Episcopalian, the Church of Scotland and Church of England, differences may be settled by reference to the substance of
the faith as the controlling principle. Now this divergence between the views of Hodge and Rainey affected Scotland from top to bottom and had a upon the first Pan-Presbyterian Council of Reformed Churches which met in Edinburgh in 1877 when some 35 different churches with their different confessions came together and the centrifugal force alone pointed to the common core of their faith, forcing them to make some kind of distinction so that the distinction, the problem between substance
of the faith and system of doctrine emerged right out of that. Well a long controversy ensued after that before and after that and this led up to certain acts by the United Presbyterian Church and then the Church of Scotland and then the Free Church. In 1878-9 the United Presbyterian Church agreed to a modification of the formula of subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith, allowing liberty of opinion insofar as it did not enter into the
substance of the faith. And the same position was taken up by an act of the General Assembly of the Old Church of Scotland in 1892, but that of course had to be ratified by Act of Parliament and that followed well in the next century. And the more limited acceptance of place of freedom of conscience in points that do not enter into the substance of the faith was adopted by the Free Church and that reflects particularly the
General Free Church attitude that we have in the what we call the today, the We Free, the Free Church. Now meantime, I think this is important, the Roman Catholic Church was involved in the same debate in its own way. And at the First Vatican Council in 1870, it took up a very hardened position in regard to Christian doctrines, in which it identified the truth of the substance of the faith with explicit formulations of doctrine. And it
is this identification of the truth with statements about the truth, which lies of course behind the doctrine of the substance of the faith formulated at the First Vatican Council and lies behind the doctrine of infallibility promulgated at the First Vatican Council. So if the truths of the Christian faith are to be identified with the formulations of the truth, specific formulations of the truth, then of course the formulations of have to be infallible in some way or
other. So that you have therefore a nominalist conception of the faith under the truth built into the structure of the Roman Catholic position by the First Vatican Council. Well then that was the background for the situation that is for today from the 1870s and 1880s. And today once again the debate between subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith as to the substance of the faith or as to its embodying an explicit system of doctrine has come
to the fore. But here let me go back to a point raised by Charles Hodge. I pointed out that he drew a distinction between three classes of doctrine. Those who refer to the one Catholic faith, which we have in the ancient creeds, and those which refer to the Protestant churches, and those which refer to the reformed churches against the other Protestant churches. Now in spite of that he insisted on the identity of doctrines with the form
in which they were given in the Westminster Confession of Faith. He argued that just as in a marvel statue you cannot distinguish the form from the substance and the form and the substance go together. So you cannot distinguish the doctrines that are formulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith from the precise form in which they are given in the systematic construct in the system of the Confession. And then he also argued that the term substance of
the faith has what he called no assignable meaning. That is to say if meaning is determined by explicit doctrinal propositions then the substance of faith has no logical that is assignable meaning in that sense. Now as I understand it that is the issue the basic issue that lay behind the historical problems of Princeton when you have the break between this seminary and those that hived off to Westminster. Now the Church of Scotland was faced with this
issue when it sought to bring together the Free Church, the United Presbyterian Church, and the Church of Scotland. First of all in the course of this United Presbyterian Church and the Free Church were united in the United Free Church and then the United Free Church and the Church of Scotland came together and the union was affected in 1929. Now this was affected on the ground of acts taken by the old Church of Scotland between 1911 and
1926 when it built up a position in which apart from uh distinguishing the and the acts of the General Assembly from from the acts of Parliament the Church had to free itself from that kind of tyranny that kind of external domination. The Church of Scotland drew up articles declaratory as it called it. Now it distinguished in the articles the clarity between a certain attitude of the faith which is constant and invariant and this was formulated in
article one and then in article two it talked about the Westminster Confession of Faith as a subordinate standard and went on to say that the Church had now authority to amend or to change and to interpret its subordinate standard but only in terms of the Catholic faith and example the classical creeds and only in terms of the first article. Now the first article expressed the Catholic faith in a doxological form it's not a form of propositions
but every term used is one of worship or adoration or the glorying of God and witness and so on so that in the first article the the substance of the faith is set forth in a doxological and way in which the faith is confessed in an act of worship and proclamation before God that is unchangeable and that of course has the the classic doctrines of the trinity and incarnation and so on but it included in that
as the ancient articles had not the ancient creeds if not the doctrine of the word of God in holy scripture. Now this has not been understood and I think there were deep ambiguities about it and it is because of these ambiguities that we have had recurring in our own day practically all the same problems that arose in the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic. Now I wish to propose a reconsideration of the whole question
by examining again what is meant or what should be meant by the substance of faith in the light of several lessons which we have learned in modern scientific inquiry and formulation and first I refer to a point that is made first of all my knowledge by Pascal and taken up by people like Michael Polanyi. Pascal pointed out that when you are working with mathematical propositions then all mathematical propositions in our use of them depend upon other
propositions which are not formulated every explicit formulation of a mathematical proposition for the purpose of that definition refers to and relies upon undefined mathematical ideas. Now Polanyi pointed out that this is this happened in every definition if you look up any word in the dictionary then it defined the term but in defining that term it relies upon other meanings which for the purpose of definition are left undefined that's to say it's quite impossible to reduce everything
to explicit definition. Now Polanyi of course developed this terms of explicit and implicit knowledge formal informal knowledge so and he went on to point out that this refers to our basic acts of knowledge in which all basic acts of knowledge depend upon informal implicit acts which actually control and determine all our explicit formulations so that in the long result it is the implicit informal knowledge that is more important than the explicit knowledge. Now this is a
fundamental change in our understanding of mathematical and scientific propositions and I think is of immense importance and it is that I think that helps us here when we are concerned with the old controversy between systems of doctrine a system of doctrinal propositions and the substance of the faith Second point I'd like to call to mind is a point made by Clark Maxwell and Albert Einstein which relates to what Clark Maxwell called embodied mathematics. He had a
quarrel with what he called the professional mathematicians of his day who were concerned with what later Einstein called idealized mathematics. Now Euclid is the great example of idealized mathematics where mathematical propositions geometrical propositions are detached from nature detached from empirical reality certainly empirical reality gave rise to them but these geometrical propositions are quite detached and then they are idealized they're connected together logically and therefore they are certain so that these mathematical propositions considered by themselves as
logical mathematical propositions are related perfectly logically and inherently together but as Maxwell said that's not nature nature isn't like that nature in nature we have certainly mathematical structure but the mathematical structure is embedded in nature and cannot be separated from nature and so Clark Maxwell the distinction between mathematical propositions that are true and those that are certain and this was taken up by Einstein in his great essay in 1930 the Berlin lecture the Berlin Academy in
which he said this on geometry and experience he said that if mathematical propositions are certain they are not true and if they are true they are not certain you see the kind of certainty you can have can only be had with abstracting mathematical equations and relating one to the other but then you have to ignore reality if they are true then you are concerned with embodied mathematical so now this has to do for example curved space
and time and all that sort of thing the effect of gravity upon upon geometry which we still don't adequately understand but we do see the point of it well the point of all this then i want to stress is that true mathematical propositions are embodied and anything that is disembodied is artificial now granted you can pursue disembodied mathematical equations and you can elaborate their patterns and they may have nothing to do with nature whatsoever it may
happen that sometimes your embroidery of mathematical theories may have an effect upon nature and this happened with the Clark Maxwell there was a brilliant genius in called W.G. Hamilton in Trinity College Dublin who when he was an undergraduate applied for the chair of mathematics in Dublin and lo and behold they appointed him to the chair to the horror of the his professors and everyone else and in his early days which happened later on took to
the bottle too much and so on but in his early days he came up with what we know as Hamilton's quaternions and Clark Maxwell found that these quaternions actually applied to nature or could apply to nature and he made use of them in determining the structure of the electromagnetic field now it's not often that that happens but it does happen and this tells us about the fact that mathematics has a heuristic value all mathematics comes from
the behavior of nature if that is the case then the closer mathematics are kept in nature the truer and the more helpful they are now again and again you have to detach them and pursue them in their syntactical relations but they're no good unless you get back to their semantics so but what comes out of this is that any science in from clark maxwell to einstein and beyond that works with mathematical propositions cannot afford to detach
them from the actual dynamic structures of nature of the universe so the third point which is related to this is that mathematical propositions have their truth not in themselves but in that to which they refer as clark maxwell said mathematical propositions are useful when they bear upon what is non-mathematical now this is a point that's been taken up by Richard Feynman of Caltech when he points out again and again the whole purpose of mathematics is
to bear upon the non-mathematical reality let's say mathematical propositions have their truth beyond themselves now take the partial differential equations of of say the dynamical theory of electromagnetic field which clark maxwell published in 1865 and people have said to me and i've heard that now these these equations are absolutely tight and if that is true then you have a determinist view of nature i said not at all your mathematical propositions have to be tight but
the whole point of them is that they refer to nature beyond themselves and you cannot identify the partial equations with nature there are deep dynamic structures of nature to which you refer and the whole purpose of these propositions that they open out an understanding of nature but nature in its own depth of intelligibility reaches far beyond them and if by these partial differential equations you're able to grasp something of the intelligibility of nature that very intelligibility
bursts through the framework of your propositions and precisely because it bursts through them you know the limited truth of your propositions now i believe that these three lessons have something mental to say to us in theology now in that light turn back to the to the to the biblical field turn back to the new testament turn back to what the pastoral epistles speak about as the faith once delivered to the saints to the parasite to the
deposit of faith now incidentally the uh uh modern commentaries for a long time now have referred to the pastoral epistles as exhibiting the beginnings of the catholic faith and therefore they put them very late because they see in the statements of the catholic pistols here we have statements about uh about doctrinal propositions which they didn't find elsewhere in the new testament now i believe a fundamental mistake i believe that misreading the pastoral pistols in the light
of a pre-einsteinian or indeed pre-maxwellian relation of statements to of mathematics to nature or statements to reality they do but i just mentioned that in passing and once you see that then i think that most of i've tried to test this out most of the arguments for that late date the pastoral pistols on those dogmatic grounds just collapse so that one has to reconsider that i was very glad to see that john kelly in
his commentary now of years ago has revived and argued for the early and apostolic date of those let's say the pauline authorship of those pastoral epistles well now but let's get to basic points in the new testament we are concerned with the incarnation of the word and truth of god then to say the word and the truth is embodied in jesus christ it's embodied truth that we have to do with here the word is embodied now
that is to say that god is telling us that the word of god is more than word and the very incarnation of the word of god and the identity of the word of god with the sheer concrete reality of the incarnate son tells us that we cannot possibly construe jesus in terms of doctrinal propositions but it's a verbal proposition verbal sentences revelation is far more than verbal sentences so that one has this means that here we
are concerned with with a revelation of god certainly in and through word which is identical with god's self-communication god's self-being and the incarnating of that or in short we have in jesus the embodiment of that word that word truth of god now if that is the case then theological propositions are true if they are not separable from that embodied form in jesus if they are detachable from that embodied form then they're not true you
can are you can systematize them in that sense make them logically valid in relation to one another but but they don't really bear upon the fundamental truth and so here we have something exactly parallel to what the scientists are telling us but you know this point was made long ago in its own way by john kelvin he used to argue and argue very carefully that we don't have any such thing as a naked christ a nudus
christus the only jesus christ we have is the christ who is clothed with his own saving acts the christ who's clothed with his promises or christ who's clothed with his his gospel a christus vestitus suo evangelio let's say jesus christ and his acts and his his deeds his words go together and they are inseparable now here we have something fundamental i think that we have really neglected take the ego i eimi of jesus in the ego
i me the word and the person and the act are they all in here in one another and are inseparable now with me my acts are different from my words and and and my decisions are different from my acts and they are of course different from my person when i speak these words are different from me they float out into the air but i'm quite different from them now granted if i'm have any kind of fidelity
of truth there ought to be a relation of faithfulness between what i say what i am or what i say what i do otherwise i'm just just a liar or a hypocrite and we try not to be that but with creatures word and person and act are differentiated have to be differentiated but that's not case with god and certainly not the case with god incarnate so that in jesus christ the person the word and the deed
in here in one another in the embodied form of his incarnation now that is the gospel now when you look at it in this way you see that what have our new testament scholars been trying to do when they're trying to get back to a jesus and which they they peel away the traditions and so on and they get back to some kind of naked christ and so you could get back to a christ apart from
his teaching or christ apart from his act there was no such jesus this is calvin's point there is no other christ but that christ who acted and said and taught as he did because he embodied all that and what he taught was a manifestation of himself christ then clothed with his gospel to take calvin's expression is the embodied form of the truth now we have something more which we have taken into account and this is in
calvin but much more in the some of the greek fathers like athanasius because we have in christ not only the word of god become man but we have in him man answering to god so that in christ we have the word of god and the word of man as closely united as divine and human natures are hypothetically in this one person so that we have here the the human element taken up into and united hypothetically in
the divine element of the truth so we have uncreated truth and created truth uncreated word and created word united inseparably in the in jesus christ so that if you ask what is the word what is the revelation you have undoubtedly to refer to what modern people call sometimes vaguely but sometimes less vaguely the christ event let's say the whole christ with his saving acts and his message but now we have to take something further into account
because the christ that we have in the gospel is the christ who created for himself a nucleus to receive himself you see put it quite put it like this that in jesus christ the god's self-giving god's revelation to man has been earthed has been brought down to earth and given a form in the unity of the word of god the word of man the word of god to man the word of man to god in
christ given a form which is humanly intelligible and communicable but to be communicable it has to be communicable to man to person person to person now that means that jesus christ revelation does not stop stop short with himself as a as a particular person jesus his revelation involves fundamentally his relations with other persons because he became incarnate not only in our flesh in our he being came incarnate in interpersonal intersubject relations so that he objectified himself
in space and time but in such a way that he objectified himself in the relation of person to person and which the relation of person to person this is one of the things that come out of paschal christology belongs essentially to persons and incidentally the concept of the fact that relation of person to person belongs to what persons are let's say the onto relations in person in person was one of the very points that clark maxwell
took to help him interpret the electromagnetic field he took it from theology and broke therefore the utonian doctrine of action at a distance from mechanistic behavior now but here that rises out of the incarnation if we think of incarnation as taking place vertically then the in the incarnation the revelation regarding faith vertically but in order to be revelation it had to be folded out horizontally where it could be communicated from person to person so that christ
self-witness took the form also of witness to christ in which his own self-witness far from being lost was operated so that one can say that christ created the apostolic nucleus the apostolic community as a receptacle for his self-revelation a receptacle for faith and understanding through which he unfolded once for all the truth and through which he continues to reveal and communicate himself to the truth so that the apostolic nucleus was assimilated to himself
and his relations with the father and the self-revelation of god in and through him that's why we're concerned in the new testament not with the obsessive verb of jesus we're concerned with the apostolic revelation with the apostolic witness or put it in another way well housing once said jesus was not a christian now of course he wasn't a christian because a christian is a sinner who's forgiven by christ but you see the point of view
we have in the gospels is a christian point of view it's an understanding of the gospel by sinners who are forgiven by christ through whom the whole revelation has been mediated by christ and mediated by his incarnate and saving operation so the revelation of god in the new testament cannot be separated from his atoning work his reconciling work now that's another way to say that the revelation we have indeed an act cannot be separated from the
person of christ and we don't know any person of christ except that which we have in his atoning action in life and death and resurrection well then here i think to bring this short we have to think of the truth embodied in the new testament as operating at two levels at one level we have christ revealing and communicating himself a saving event and that is the embodied truth on the other level we have that embodied in
the apostolic understanding and interpretation and communication of jesus christ and that also takes place once and for all now once the vertical self-revelation of god is folded out horizontally in that way to the apostles you can't undo it so that what happened in the apostles was an irreversible once and for all event in which christ himself was operating so if you try to get behind jesus of the gospels you're trying to make yourself your own
apostle another possibility and that's what calvin's point that you cannot get behind the christ clothes of his gospel the mediated to us through the apostolic revelation so then we have this embodied deposit of faith on two levels as it were the fundamental level a saving event in christ the secondary level in the apostolic community apostolic nucleus through which the primary level operates now we have difficulty perhaps in thinking how those are coordinated but we have no
difficulty today in mathematics and doing that over there there used to be long ago a very unique gentleman called kurt girdle who in 1930 or 31 produced a 30 40 page little essay on certain undecidable propositions and the principia mathematica of rosselin whitehead and which he demonstrated that we have to think on different levels that that you you think on one level and which your are not your mathematical propositions are not tightly certainly contained and and
valid in the way that rosselin whitehead said but they're only valid by reference to a higher level beyond them they're open to the higher level beyond them so when rosselin read that he said this means that we have to think in terms of a hierarchy of levels in which each level is open to and controlled by the level above it now that's exactly true and that's true here in we have to think of the new testament
is built on that kind of of levels now there may be more than two but the primarily two levels so that the level of understanding of god's self-revelation in the apostolic community is one that is open to and controlled by the ultimate level in jesus christ but one can also add incidentally that the level in jesus christ is open to and controlled by the supreme level of the holy trinity what i'm after is this that
we have to think of the embodied truth as that which we have in the apostolic community but the apostolic community is the form in which the saving event of christ is mediated to us in such a way that on the horizontal level it is communicable from person to person so that once that has been done all history the whole church knows jesus christ only in and through the second level through which we approach the first level
let's say through the apostolic witness to the apostolic revelation do we have to do with jesus christ there is no christ except in this sense apostolic christ now this was understood very clearly in the early church and in that sense they spoke about the truth as embodied and as a deposit of faith and by deposit of faith they didn't mean a box of propositions a receptacle of theological ideas this is made very very clear by iranaeus
because from him we have the greatest development here according to iranaeus if you take the term salvation to understand christ you got to understand him as savior and as saving salvare we don't have the point and and a salvation so that salvato salvare and salvatio go together say the person of the savior the actual the action of saving event and and salvation itself are inseparable the person the word and the deed are well in the same
and that is the truth that is the ultimate canon of jesus christ but that is also the deposit of faith now that deposit of faith which has been given to the church the apostles is a live thing because christ is alive there and therefore he called this deposit of faith the deposit whom you've been asking it's a deposit that is all the time rejuvenating itself and rejuvenates those who are concerned with it so that this embodied
truth is precisely that which keeps the church alive from generation to generation now incidentally when you look at it like this all that later concept of historical or episcopal succession and there is that in in iranaeus but that cannot be separated from this it's only a witness to this point that is primary iranaeus so that what iranaeus is concerned with is a fundamental deposit of the faith that we have in christ primarily and in the apostles
integrated with that but what he was concerned with was unfolding that just a little so that its internal structure came to view and as its internal structure comes to view then we can use it as that ultimate deposit it was referenced to which all doctrinal propositions can be formulated now the internal structure that comes to view we have later quite clearly well it's already there in iranaeus in the trinitarian form which anticipates and upon which ultimately
the niacin creed is built now as against iranaeus we have another early theologian uh to tell you now to tell you also discusses the deposit of faith but he discusses the deposit face quite explicitly as a set of doctrinal propositions of logical propositions which were taught as such by jesus christ he says this this actual set of propositional concepts and ideas goes back to jesus christ so that the gospel was headed down in the form of
doctrinal concepts and propositions and therefore he had to do what he called the rule of faith which is a rule of a set of fundamental theological concepts upon which the church must rely now incidentally the roman catholic tradition the latin tradition took the line ultimately of tertullian and not the baronets that's why it came out with the vatican council one we can trace it also history but the other side is quite clearly formulated in the niacin
creed now what is the niacin creed now the niacin creed seems to me to be the implicit the the the substance of the faith the trinitarian faith which is not unfolded in the form of doctrinal propositions but it is expounded it is clarified in terms in part at least of its internal structure and as such constitutes the informal fundamental base upon which all explicit doctrinal formulations are made so it is always by reference to that informal
base and the niacin creed confess the niacin creed that every other formulation took place in the church now if you examine the subsequent councils the council even the council of constantinople which fills out the 381 which fills out the niacin creed all the council of ephesus and chalcedon so they all refer back to the niacin creed as the one irreversible account of the fundamental substance of the faith by reference to which every other doctrinal formulation has
to be made now do you see here we have exactly the point made by paschal polanyi and so on that in all true mathematical or scientific formulation you operate with a base which is fundamentally informal and implicit upon which you rely in all explicit formulation and which controls all your further inquiry in heuristic activity but you cannot do without that informal base now if you try to convert that informal base entirely into explicit statements then you
have lost the truth you have then gone into some realm of systematic ideas that has no real connection with reality now i think the same thing is true in theology now what then are we concerned with in the subscription to the westman's confession of now i believe that all controversy between looking at it in terms of a system of doctrine and looking at in terms of a substance of faith can now be clarified quite clearly what
the westman's confession of faith unfortunately the westman's confession of faith is not nothing like what the niacin creed was the niacin creed insofar as it manifests a structure it's a natural structure inherent in the very substance of the faith which is trinitarian but the westman's confession of is formulated in terms of quite an alien system of ideas so that although all the doctrinal propositions which you get in the classical creeds are there in the westman's confession
of faith they're all systematized in quite a different way and hodge's point is that in the westman's confession of faith they are necessarily tied up with the form in which they are put together now that seems to me to be an antithesis to the very foundations of the catholic faith as we know today in conflict with the way in which we think in any realm of knowledge so i would say that we've got to revert to
the way of subscribing to westman's confession of faith or the augustana or the senator wrought insofar as in such a way that we are really concerned in and through them of affirming the the substance of faith and we rely upon that in order to determine our attitude to all explicit formulations now of course as the explicit formulations conflict with this then there's some something fundamentally wrong let me give you an indication in scotland we have today
a polarization unfortunately between the beginning of polarization which you certainly have in the state between a sort of hyper calvinist group and certainly a liberal wing but what i would call an evangelical wing of the church to which i belong concerned with the classical catholic faith now it's interesting one of the leaders of this polarization who claims to be the great champion of calvinism has come out with doctrines like you see he believes that that you
have in jesus christ you have in in the westman's confession of faith and in the gospel an act of god that is an eternal decree which is not identical with what happened in jesus christ so that apart from the incarnation the work of christ you have no less a prior and eternal decree of god that so many people shall save and the others shall be passed over or damned now what what happened there christologically you have
here christologically divided the being of christ from the being of god now this is of course one of the one of the weaknesses of calvinism that it has right from the start a tendency toward an historian heresy so you have a subtle distinction between the being of god and the being of the incarnate son now that is carried further in which on this ground you have to separate entirely the atonement from the incarnation but it's carried
even further because the incarnation then becomes only a temporary episode because at last when christ has done the work which he had to do by having an incarnate form he gives up the incarnation and hands over everything to the father in this misguided interpretation one crimson 15 so the incarnation then becomes a temporary episode now how did that arise it arose by taking the westman's the confession of faith as a body of logical propositions which you
have to work out consistently and this chap boldly has worked them out but in doing so it shows what a heretic is because what does it mean it means he has sinned against the museum he's sinned against the fact that jesus christ the incarnate son is one with the being of god now if he had formulated his doctrines by using the niacin creed which he despises as the fundamental informal base which controls and regulates all other
dogs you never got into that mess now i believe that is a lesson which we have to learn today so that we have to rethink the relation of all our reformed confessions and all our classical creed to the fundamental base formulated in the niacin creed which an attempt to formulate before god in a confession of faith what the new testament calls the deposit of faith now if we take it truly in that sense then the deposit
of faith becomes alive and quickening let's say the depositum [euvanescam?] of Iraneaus. it is in other words christ closed with his gospel christ closed with this understanding which he meant us to have as christians who are forgiven by him and saved by him so here then we have an approach to the whole problem which i think can be clarified but it doesn't mean and let's be quite frank about it it means that if the logical propositions are
certain let's say logically certain and inherently connected together they are just not true if they are true and they are embodied in jesus christ then they cannot be captured in any framework of absolute logical certainty you can't box god in through logical proposition god and the love and the grace of god burst through all our conceptualities the very god who reveals himself to us rationally intelligibly is a god whom we know infinitely to transcend whatever we
can conceive of him and it's on that basis with open structured thought that we must today do our activity it's this man theology and the formulation of any creeds or confessions which we may have to make and change circumstances of the day as against yesterday thank you thank you very much professor torrance you can take time for perhaps uh two or three questions uh direct dressily to uh dr torrance does your thesis apply equally to the
nice increase is that you can't subscribe to a proposition well the dicing creed is not a proposition not a set of propositions it's what i'm making it's not made in that kind of a way and uh it's made in a in a in a different kind of way before god uh in a much more biological way but in which to a certain extent to a minor extent the internal structure becomes revealed so if you take the
question of say definition any definition any explicit definition in order to be a definite reply relies upon something which for that purpose is undefined so that's how we look at nice and clean but to say it is also definition to describe the very basic things in life there's one application of what you've been saying that we we increasingly interested in and believe more in what professor loader at the center called transforming moment the experiential base of
our faith all these words so what really works more experiential as basis for a person life and say well it was made to test all our education all our training and this is really the struggle of modern physics and you