Transcript
Attention, thanks. We want to go ahead and get started because we're working under the time pressure of lunch and we want to give Dr. Torrance all the time that we possibly can. We're very lucky to have Dr. Torrance, member of the Board of Institute of Theological Inquiry, was head of the Department of Dogmatics at University of Edinburgh until he retired in 1979, author of various works, including being one of the editors of Karl Barth's Dogmatics, which
is obviously especially timely for today's lecture. Dr. Torrance will be speaking on Karl Barth, the interconnection between grace and revelation. Dr. Torrance. Thank you. I was asked first to speak about Karl Barth and evangelical theology and I said, I'd be happy to do that. And then I was asked to specify it a little more. So I took this theme of the inner connection between grace and revelation. Now, what is meant by evangelical? Karl Barth himself gave
addresses on that subject over here and in fact in Princeton under the title, published under the title, evangelical theology. And yet he has been regularly attacked by people who claim to be evangelical on both sides of the Atlantic. Now evangelical, of course, refers basically to the gospel. So we have to ask who is really concerned with the gospel and concerned with the gospel in an evangelical way, because there are people who preach the gospel, not in
an evangelical, but a legalized way. And we have to learn how to preach the gospel in a way appropriate to the gospel and how to be theologians of the gospel in a way appropriate to the gospel. Now, I believe the particular theme I have taken, the inner connection between grace and revelation, goes right to the heart of the matter, especially as Karl Barth himself is concerned. And it's in that connection that we can judge whether he
or his would-be opponents are deficient in their evangelical claims. Barth's position, if you asked him, as I have asked him a number of times, in fact the last time I met him, and I shall refer to this again, we were talking about the scientific theology, the relation of science to theology, and he said, as I told Heinrich Scholz long ago, my scientific position begins with the resurrection, the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, risen
from the dead, risen in body. That's the starting point of a theology that is realist in terms of our relation to Jesus Christ in space and time. Actually, it was the Blumhardt movement, with their great emphasis upon the resurrection of Jesus, it was a kind of charismatic movement which stressed the resurrection, they also stressed healing in that bit, with their great war cry, as it were, Jesus ist Sieger, Jesus is Conqueror, that woke Barth to the
immense importance and the realism of the resurrection, and it is that realism of the resurrection that is his starting point. Now, I had a problem with him right here, because I said to him, now let's take some of your pupils, your former pupils, take Ernst Käsemann, who insisted that he also is concerned with the resurrection, but Käsemann doesn't really believe in the resurrection of the body. Now, there are other pupils of yours who hold the take
of the resurrection, but they haven't moved in your way, now why is that? And he asked me why, you're used to that sort of thing. And I said, well, I think that we need to stress much more the relation between the resurrection and the incarnation, because it's in that connection that we have the relation of resurrection to space and time, the concrete reality of the space and time, and if we don't do that, then people like
Käsemann can take off into another realm. I could tell you stories of arguments I've had with Käsemann in this way, and someone was mentioning, oh yes, it was Jan Lochman who was mentioning Jaspers, and Jaspers used to accuse Käsemann of speaking with a forked tongue about resurrection, and I quoted a Käsemann this one day, and forced him to say what he said, he said, ah, if you mean that Jewish business about the body, of course, I
don't believe in that. Well, now contrast Karl Barth, when I was talking to him just a few weeks before he died about this, and I mentioned the fact that some of his pupils had taken off in that way, he thumped the table fiercely like that, and he leaned over and said to me, Wohlverstanden, leiblicher Auferstehung, bodily resurrection, and emphasized it, and it was on his knees at that point in that room that Karl Barth died and
went to be with I collect those two, my mind with him together. Well now, Barth said that that was his starting point, and in one sense it was the great motivation and the ground which he constantly returned, but there are another side I want to take about Barth, is of course connected with this, and that's the side of Barth that first seized my mind when I was studying for the BD in Edinburgh. I was reading
G. T. Thompson's translation of the Dogmatics I/1, and immensely excited by Karl Barth's exposition of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Now I had been very concerned to get at the inner scientific structure, the inner architectonic of theology. Just shortly before then I had read Schleiermacher's Christian Faith, and I was deeply interested in the sheer beauty, the architectonic beauty of that, and how everything was integrated together, and yet the whole thing was nonsense because there was no realism
in it. It didn't really touch, it was all in the air, and I still wanted a realist structure of a realist scientific kind, and I found that here as I was reading Barth, and the point that came to me there was the expression he was using from St. Augustine about the Communio quaedam consubstantialis, the way he was working out the concept of the homoousion, the fact that the incarnate, the incarnate Jesus Christ is of one
and the same being with God the Father. Now the incarnate, let's say the one who is concrete reality with us in space and time, he is Homoousios to Patri, and as you may remember he works this out in the whole structure of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and of course in the particularly in the end in the section of the Redeemer and the Doctrine of the Spirit. Now for Barth, as indeed for the Nicene Fathers, it's
at this point that the gospel is at stake. It is at this point that we come to the fundamental question of whether you're evangelical or not. Is Jesus Christ and his concrete reality in history and space and time of one being and one agency with God the Father or is he not? Now if in some way you are faulty there, if in some way you cut the bond in being an agency between Jesus Christ and God,
then you've lost the gospel. And the early church realized that at this point they were fighting a battle for the Christian gospel against pagan corruption of the gospel. Now that's the point that Barth took up very strongly. You may remember the Nicene theology found that the dualist modes of thought that the Aryans worked with and later on of course the Nestorians and the Anomoeans, Anomoean historians who were working with this way, thought in this line, they
also worked with dualist modes of thought. But if you bring to the gospel of Christ, the gospel of grace, the gospel of the person, the mediator, and you have a dualist thought, then you tear Jesus Christ apart from God. Ultimately he is a creature. You draw the line of demarcation between the transcendent God and this world and Jesus is put upon the creaturely side of that demarcation. But further if you have that line of demarcation, you
cannot escape tearing Christianity apart from the person of Christ. But Christianity has to be attached to something so it becomes attached to society. Now this is something we know well today and it's exactly what happened in the Nile Delta in the Aryan revolt which was not simply a theological revolt but it was a remarkably ideological revolt. And it's very interesting. One of my old friends, John Murray, has traced the roots of communism to the Aryan theology
that went up through Greece, through the Goths. Now that's a long shot but there's something fundamentally right about that. There's certainly a basic parallel there but I won't go into that. Now if you take the emphasis of the Greek fathers seriously, they were concerned with the fact that in Jesus Christ it is none other than God and the full undiminished reality of God who acts. He saves us, he renews us, he sanctifies us. Now their term
for that, which the Latins of the western world has misunderstood, was theosis. It doesn't mean divinization. It means the downright act of God and person and being and therefore it's part of the whole doctrine of the homoousion. Now that's what Barth was concerned with. Now the way that Barth expressed this was in this way and it comes straight out of the language of the Nicaean theologians. What God is toward us in Jesus Christ in his
saving, healing, sanctifying acts. He is antecedently, inherently and eternally in himself. And what he is eternally in himself in his own being as God, he is toward us in Jesus Christ. So there's a relationship absolute oneness, absolute fidelity between all that God is in Jesus Christ and what he is in his own triune being. Cut that bond and you don't have theologia in the proper sense but as the native said it so clearly, you have mutologia,
mythology and it's the same issue today. At this point you're either a theologian or you're a mythologist. Ultimately you're concerned with the God in the realism, the reality of his interaction with us in space and time or you're concerned with some kind of mythology and you know how the modern world over here too likes to talk about metaphors and images and all that sort of thing. Well they are all in an Athanasian sense, mythologizing and not
realist in their theology. Now the Nicene fathers of course ask the fundamental question. They say Jesus Christ is the son of God. In what sense is he of God? Now we are made in the image of God. Every creature has been made of God and has come from God in that same way. So there was an immense searching through the scriptures, Old and New Testament and like to see how can we clarify the relation of this
of God. I won't go into it all but as you know in the end they insisted that Jesus Christ is God of God as God himself is of God. True God of true God. So that the of God is part of God. Let's say the relation between the son and the father is internal to the being of God. Now that is the decisive point that separated them from all dualist modes of thought. Now that's why the
creed of course defines the of God as the of the very being of God. Now looking at Barth's theology especially we have it in not only in the Catholic dogmatic instantly but in the Christian dogmatic that hasn't yet been done into English. It's very clear that this is fundamental and that there are three basic corollaries perhaps corollaries to abstract a term but it's more than implication of this fundamental position about the consubstantiality of the son to
the father. First it means that God in his own being is dynamic not static. You see if God is eternal in his own being what he is toward us in Jesus Christ in space and time this savior the creator that God is that in his own being. So that this involved a radical rethinking of the relation of the being to the act of God and the being God and that of course you have magnificently set out
and perhaps the greatest theological treatise for many many hundreds of years in dogmatic II/1 the doctrine of the being of God and the act the being and the act of God. So that the being and the act of God and indeed the being and the act and the word are indivisible. I'll come back to that later and second the one I've mentioned there is an internal relation of the son to the father. Now the implications
of this are immense if you if the son who is eternal to the father became incarnate then the incarnation falls within the life of God does falls within the life of God himself for further if Jesus Christ is the mediator our savior then our salvation that he mediates falls within the person the incarnate constitution of the mediator. Now that's a very profound point I'll come back to that again and of course the third corollary which is
really the presupposition of the whole many ways and that is the doctrine of the trinity that you cannot that this God we know this way is triune his father son and holy spirit. Now while these three corollaries so I may use that term constitutes the fundamental planks of Barth's evangelical theology they it's upon the second of them that I wish mainly to concentrate in order to draw out how Barth developed his thought on that basis let's
turn to the Reformation and its theology where we have the double emphasis upon grace and the word but what Barth did was to develop the inner connection between them in the light of the Nicene theology in the light of the doctrine of the homoousion between the son and the father. Now let's take grace first salvation is by grace alone. Now when I went to Basel to start my doctoral work Karl Barth asked me what I
wanted to do and I told him quite frankly I wanted to get at the scientific structure of theology and I proposed that I should work with the homoousion and the communio substantialis and so on he said oh you're a bit young for that yet and he appreciated that's what had to be done. He himself was actually still working at that he hadn't yet written his dogmatics too well so in a sense that I was anticipating
what he himself wanted to do so he said is there I'm concerned with the inner connection to go through all doctrines another way of speaking about this is in terms of grace he said now that's what you can do and first he wanted me to have suggested to Wesley and I said I know he doesn't touch it and so eventually we fastened upon the patristic with doctrines of grace and finally we settled restricted it to the
doctrine of the grace and the apostolic fathers but this is the basic point the homoousion of grace now that's precisely what the reformation was concerned with you see unfortunately owing to the dualist position adopted by augustine which had affected the whole of the western world in which this world goes to the devil eventually because in western eschatology this world is not saved it's all that only in greek eschatology and calvin of course not in luther
unfortunately but in this dualist position you have you had to have a middle stance a tertium quid between god and the world so that augustinian and latin theology developed the concept of the medium of grace and in fact invented the term means of grace ask yourself whether you ever used an expression if so you're Latin it's never found in the greek theology it belongs to this latin augustinian tradition now so they worked with the concept of
of of an image or realm or an idea in the middle and of grace in the middle now if you think of grace in that sense there's something in the middle between god and us then of course it is something that that well you have to how do you know we're with grace how do you know that in grace we're concerned with god so that in the augustinian tradition you have start to causalize it now augustine
had already started that with the doctrine of invisible grace uh individual irresistible grace but it was due due to the canon lawyers in the middle ages who had the task of administering grace administering the church that gradually they developed a problem a question of causalizing grace of course this was formulated by hugo saint victor and then all the great medieval theologians followed it so the grace then is something you can cause you can administer you can
uh order sacramentally and so on and then grace is something an eloquent between you and god now that is to say this is a radical departure from Nicene theology and that's what the reformation destroyed i said no grace is christ and the Nicene says what god is toward us in grace he is inherently in himself what god is in himself he is in grace there is no intermediary realm between these two now that's luther that's calvin
that is bark so at this point bark takes his fundamental stand on the of grace as total indivisible in the sense of the reformation Tota Gratia is Totus Christus but bod had something more to them you get it in aspects of reformation theology but this is particularly clear part and here it's the doctrine of god and later on we shall see doctrine of trinity that are fundamental well take the doctrine of god who is whose act and whose
being i want god's act that his act and his being and his beings is being in the act or an athanasian language is concerned with the anuncios energeia the the activity that it inheres in the very being of god later on we shall see the other term athanasius anuncios logos the logos that is inherent in the being of god now if god's grace is that it is his own being so that in grace it's not something
he communicates to us and here about wouldn't have any distinction wouldn't wouldn't accept the Cappadocian distinction as i don't between the beings and energies of god because that is the dualism neoplatonic dualism slipping back but when god communicates himself to us in great it is himself he gives if it is himself he gives and it is this god in the grace now about expands this and you'll be familiar with this in terms of the latin terms
datum and dandum now grace is certainly a gift but if the gift is god himself you can't take that grace and pocket it anymore you can pocket god that's something you can control in episcopal succession or sacramental administration it's god we're concerned with you see so that you can only have the grace of god as you're always having it and as you have in such a way that you're holding it is called in question so bart
initiates a fierce attack upon what he calls the beati possidentes the blessed possessors and this is the whole medieval tradition of the church and believers possessing grace incidentally also an attack that medieval doctrine upon the Greek doctrine of theosis which the latins unfortunately translated by demonization and in line with their concept of grace now if i have to watch my time here temptation to go on take grace then in this sense that it is consubstantial with
the self god that he indicates to us so that in grace the being and the act of god and his self-giving are inseparable so that grace then is this remarkable self-manifestation self-giving of god and salvation in which the act of salvation is inseparable from the savior now if you're interested this comes up marvelously in Irenaeus who says you cannot separate the savior from salvation or from the act of saving now that's exactly part's
position he found it in Athanasius and he works it out himself but what do we have in augustine now you may be interested to read his little book on the holy ghost and the christian life i don't know i hope that it could be re-insulated i will republished it was a book he wrote with his younger brother heinrich on the doctrine of the spirit but in that little book especially in the notes you have a
sustained criticism of the whole augustinian view of grace in line with this i heard him once say the augustinian view of grace it is well it's süßes Gift sweet as i translated honey poison now there's no doubt that augustinian doctrine of grace is beautiful it is some kind of magnetic aesthetic quality and of course this is tied up with augustine's beautiful mellifluous musical latin nevertheless there's something here fundamentally wrong and a great deal of our western
thinking including protestant evangelical thinking is augustinian this point i was quite delighted last year i was lecturing in regent college and and uh packer pointed out at the end of my lecture i was an athanasian he was an augustinian i nearly said exactly right there is a fundamental difference at this point and i don't know whether he he saw the difference but i was interested he still would claim to be an augustinian but now let us
come to the other side to the word so Barth applies not only the homoousion to grace and thus strengthens and reaffirms a whole evangelical intention of reformation he applied it also to the concept of word and to revelation now just before the reformation got underway Melanchthon's uncle a remarkable gentleman called uh Johannes Reuchlin who you remember produced a hebrew grammar and talked about veritas hebraica and so on uh wrote a little book i don't think
bark ever saw this book called, De verbo mirifico now the interesting thing about this book is that here you have someone uh fiercely attacking medieval theology because it would not accept the fact that the word is word in god and so Reuchlin takes the homoousion of the Nicene creed and accuses the Thomists of sinning against Nicaea at this fundamental point now you see saint thomas held that in god there's intelligence and light but not word
as such and this is the augustinian tradition word comes into being in the relation between god and us so word has to do with our world where we have words and words and space and time and you can see this very clearly in saint thomas's criticism of saint anselm the great realist elogen middle ages who insisted that there are three levels of which we think of this and that there is a decree in god a locutio
intima there is in god a speech profoundly in the being of god let's say locution word is consubstantial in to god inherently his own being and saint thomas regularly attacks that there's no decree in god there is only intelligory now that is the point that Reuchlin attacked but suppose the word is in god and within what word do we have in holy scripture you see then if you hear the word of god in holy scripture then
you're concerned with the word that god is in his own being but for the Thomists no for the augustinian no for the whole latin tradition no but for the reformation tradition yes but for the evangelical tradition they've lapsed back into the augustinian and the medieval tradition that is where we have to put the question to modern evangelicals whether they really are evangelical in a sense now what bart insists then is this that what god is toward
us in his revelation he is inherently in his own dynamic being and what god is in his own being he is toward us and here the athanasian doctrine of the logos enusios the logos inherent in the very being of god is in central to bart now if you look at it in that sense then what is revelation well as in jesus christ god doesn't communicate something of himself but communicates himself the son who is eternally internal
in the being of god so in his revelation he communicates not something about himself by himself the word that is eternal in the being of god so that here then bart parallels his doctrine of grace datum dandum with the doctrine of the word datum dandum here the realism of his doctrine of grace is parallel with the realism of doctrine of revelation and both are tied up with the realism of the resurrection in space and time but
what are we to say to that now take again the latin tradition take a supreme point like the first vatican council with the doctrine of infallibility now there you have undoubtedly an identification of the logical statements with the truth about which they state let's say you have an identification of the truth with the statement of the statement with the truth and therefore any error and the statement is an error in the being of god in god
himself so that you have to have on that ground a doctrine of infallibility 1871 1871 was the year in which pan-presbyterian alliance met in edinburgh and at that point hodge's doctrine of subscription to the west minister confession as a system of propositions which you cannot tear apart from the form in which they are given was debated with question whether you subscribe to the west minister confession in terms of its substance or in terms of its
logical propositions and still a debate as curious that half the presbyterian world at that point took the same line as the first vatican council but other presbyterians looking at first batting council saw their own mistakes and heresies as in a mirror and resiled from that they had to take a different view of that oh we're still in that struggle now comes bart and bart is attacked by evangelicals because he insists on the term well we should
say the word of god becomes what does he mean by the word of god becoming well on the one hand if the word is god and his own being and god is in god his being and his how can you have a revelation that is not always becoming how can you have a revelation that is something you can put in your pocket or formulate in theological propositions you can't the datum and the dandum are one the
consubstantial union between the revelation and god can't be torn apart all right then we have to rethink the whole doctrine of revelation now of course god became man and he speaks to us in human words and the word that he speaks to us in jesus christ our words that have their root ultimately in the word in the being of god here we're anselmin and not Thomist i hope or athanasian now that is the case and we
therefore have to take the verbal the word character of god's revelation to us seriously but does that mean that what we have in holy scripture are propositions that are independent of the truth or are themselves the truth the vast point is no that the bible refers to truth and witnesses the truth and leads us into truth that is independent of the bible itself see the bible will pass away well we won't have bibles in heaven but
the word of god doesn't pass away so why do do evangelicals want to identify the scripture as such with divine revelation it wasn't the the revelation wasn't the scriptures that were crucified for you and died and rose again it was jesus christ who rose again from the dead now that's how we have to look at the word of god and that's how we can understand revelation that's bart's point and it's entirely consistent no one in the
whole history of theology has thought this out more consistently in Barth in carrying out the homoousion in terms of grace and revelation as he has and in terms of having now time to go into it the whole trinitarian background to it now let me put it there's another point here that is very fundamental and you can test yourself we can test ourselves about what our own position is if you let me refer back to the doctrine
of the atonement if you take revelation and word together as inseparable from the act of god and you take the fact that because the incarnation falls in the life of god and the stoning reconciliation falls within the life of the mediator then you cannot separate atonement from incarnation now ask yourself whether you attempted to do that because you see that's exactly what the romans did unfortunately they separated incarnation from atonement at home from incarnation so that
in the whole west the atonement tends to be formulated in some form or another as an external transaction sometimes more legalistically sometimes not but nevertheless as an external transaction and of course it has immense consequences for the roman doctrine the church but they don't like the greek idea that the atonement begins with the birth of jesus the virgin mary that incarnation is itself the assuming of the very humanity that had to be saved they don't like
the fundamental principle the unassumed is the unhealed what has not been taken up has not saved and therefore they have to invent some neutral humanity that jesus the son of god took and that neutral humanity which is not our humanity it is not then a humanity within which the ontological depth of which atonement is worked up that neutral humanity becomes the instrument by which god and the cross of christ works out in an external form a
way of salvation now by and large all evangelical protestantism has fallen into that so evangelical protestantism on the whole has lapsed into the latin heresy now is that doubt about the matter the father when this doctrine first came up and it was first mooted really by leo the great at least home not taken into chalcedon fortunately but when this doctrine came up the father said that is evangelical and Soteriologically deficient and it's the same problem today
so i would say that by and large and i claim to be very much an evangelical by and large evangelical tradition at this point is evangelically and Soteriologically deficient and Barth is the one who stands for the wholeness integrity of the gospel now this means that there are fundamental things to be sought out i don't think for a moment that there at least have to do only with theology for example i'm concerned as some of you
know with my discussions with the scientists and one of the most difficult points we have with modern science and modern mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics is whether mathematics constitutes a tautological system complete and consistent in itself and you see that is the position that's taken again and again by many mathematicians but is not the point of mathematics as Richard Feynman can say even he can say interestingly and he spoke on the nature of physical law
the real point of mathematics is non-mathematical now you cannot put into mathematical form the relation between mathematical equations and the non-mathematical this was james clark maxwell's great problem he didn't believe that his beautiful partial differential equations which have done so much for us were themselves describing what he called a mode of connection in nature they were a model that enabled us to understand that but the real modes of connection in nature were different from
that which he could constribe with his mathematics now therefore the bearing of mathematics upon the real world is something you can't put into mathematics and yet that is the point where scientific discovery scientific truth emerges and is to be grasped now translate that into linguistic form can you put in statements the way the statements are related to being you can't and this again is something that you have so much in the in in in early christian theology
often misunderstood i'm afraid and distorted especially in the so-called mystical traditions you cannot image the way an image images reality so you can't put into an image the way in which this painting of warfield images warfield you've got the image and warfield existed what you can't do is to image the way in which this painting is related to warfield you can't do that so you can't image the way in which an image images what it
images no can you state in statements the way in which a statement is related to being if you try to convert the of statements to be into statements then you've converted everything to statement and that is the nominalist heresy again that's what we do and to do that is to sin against the homoousion epistemologically linguistically of Chalcedon of of Nicaea now again at this point this is fundamental point apart and therefore the romans have said
again again now he he misses theology because his dogmatic may put it this dogmatic equations your mathematical term don't grasp reality they point beyond it but that's exactly what we do now in our science now your science is more realist when it's concerned with mathematics of that kind than a mathematics of a tautological kind and your bible is more realist is revelation of god when it performs in the same way and your theology is more real
it performs in the same way that's why bart in these different fields is a champion of realist theology one thing to close and that talk i had with him before he died i we were then retranslating dogmatics one one and there were all kinds of statements in there i wanted to be clarified i said to him uh you quote Heinrich Schultz and some of your statements you work with him at bonn and in the great seminar
over anthem and you take up some statement and not a Schultz was a formidable number analyst he said yes i knew that but i said you use his statements but you are not anomalous horrified at the idea now i said it's important for us to translate that into english in such a way that that doesn't carry it out or take another point in the first english translation we have words used called uh derive or deduce or
something like that but these are all logical terms but there's none of that in bart's original because the logical statements are not logically derived from some kind of data other than themselves so i discussed this with him and the best way translated so in the new translation which normally did i went it through very very carefully and we cut out every term that might mislead in regard to this and we carefully rephrased these statements so that
but we will be true to bart and not in any way misled because some of the linguistic philosophers had taken passages from bart and treated them in the wrong way but one was thought that children of the viennese school would have read it in german which they hadn't done well what i've been saying then ranges far and wide but may i point out that the heart of it all then lies the question of homoousion and
the application of that on the one hand to saving grace on the other hand to divine revelation and therefore on both accounts do what we mean by evangelical theology thank you [applause]