Transcript
Oh God, we pray that you would teach us to think as your children, as children of a God who is alive and all-wise and powerful, one who loves us and who calls us and sets us in motion. Guide us in this time as we develop our framework for thinking and for doing ministry. Be with our speaker as he shares with us. In Jesus' name, amen. We would like to welcome again Dr. Thomas F. Torrance, who is
an emeritus theology professor from Edinburgh. He is also on the Board of Trustees at the Center for Theological Inquiry, and that's why we are fortunate to have him every year, because he has to be here, and we are lucky, because out of his graciousness and our very meager budget, we can bring people like him to challenge us, and he is going to challenge us about thinking theologically. Welcome Thomas F. Torrance. Thank you very much for your
warm welcome. First of all, may I just claim that I have any such exalted status as a member of the trustees at the Center? I'm merely a humble member of the advisory committee. I'd like to begin by telling two stories of two very different people in two very different areas of culture. When I was a student at the University of Basel, one of my fellow students from Edinburgh was a gentleman called Edgar Curtis, who had studied
philosophy with me, and then he had taken a degree in the Faculty of Music. He came to Basel in order to study piano under Rudolf Serkin. Serkin had married the daughter of Adolf Busch, a well-known violinist and two of the most famous physicians of our previous generation. And each of them had 12 students, no more. They were the very select, elitist school of music they had. And Edgar wanted to study piano with Serkin, a man
with massive hands like a blacksmith. And Serkin asked him, he said, how old are you? And he said, I'm 27. By the way, can you hear me? You can't. My voice is a bit old now, so I have to shout a bit. Is this working? Right. And he said, well, let me look at your hands. He examined his hands and he said, you're too old for me. And Edgar was very disappointed and hung about, and she
used to go away. And then Serkin found that he had such a musical understanding of music that he decided to do something with him. So he sent him to a friend in Salzburg. And for nine months, the man in Salzburg put him through exercises. And he told me his hands ached with pain. They were terrible because he had restructured the muscles in his hands. And then after nine months training, he came back to Serkin and Serkin
took him on. Now, that is what happens when you turn to theological thinking. There takes place a very painful reconstruction of your mind. The muscles that were of your rational thinking in theology have to undergo change and extremely painful experience. I often told the story to my first year students in Edinburgh and told them that in due course, I know they would be throwing books at me because they'd be very angry at the kind of metanoia,
repentant change that had to take place in their mind. Now, the other story is about someone very different. C. H. Waddington was my colleague in Edinburgh. He was the doyen of European biologists and one of the most distinguished biologists on both sides of the Atlantic. He complained to me one day that his experiments he'd been putting through on the evolution of fruit flies, drosophila, had somehow failed. They came with a result that he said was impossible.
He found a discrepancy between their evolution and their genetic structure. I didn't say much to him at that time, but later on, several years later, he was in Chicago and he carried out the same experiment with the same result. And this time, he was now near the end of his professorial career in Edinburgh. He was very disappointed because he hoped to get something very significant out of this. And so I said to him, but Wad, there
is a scientific result. And he said, what's that? That the genetic structure is not closed, but open at its boundary conditions to change. Now, he wouldn't have it. Why wouldn't he have it? Because he had earlier developed a concept of what he called crayons, putting together two Greek words to describe a necessary path, which according to him, biological movement takes. And so because this, what I call a scientific result, conflicted with his notion of Craon-icity, he
wouldn't accept it. About five or six years later, Crick, who along with Watson had discovered the DNA code, came up with the same result. And now the world accepts that there is this open structure. Now, here we have a great scientist who was unable to repent. He was so dogmatically, I suppose later, stuck with his previous idea that he wouldn't allow the results to call in question preconceptions. Let's say the pain of radical change was here
impossible for him. Now, there you have a musician and a scientist. And they both illustrate for me what our Lord Jesus said. If you're going to come after me, you must renounce yourself and take up your cross and follow me. If you're going to follow the Lord Jesus, you have to follow him in such a way that you allow him to call your whole being into question. And see, our questions are tied up with our being
so that we ourselves come under question. And that means the crucifixion along with Christ. I've often said that those words of our Lord, if anyone will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me on account of pure scientific method, rigorous scientific method in any field. You see, in any field when we ask our question, we ask them in order to allow the field or the object to disclose itself to
us. And in the light of what it does, we rephrase our question and then we put our question again. And in light of what is further revealed, we then question our question and put it again through that your questioning is a whole progressive questioning because you yourself are tied up with your questioning because you can't separate your question from yourself. You yourself are under question all the time. So in all scientific methods, you don't criticize the
rocks or the plants, it's yourself that comes under criticism because we ourselves obstruct our knowledge. And that's what our Lord was saying and that is one of the main things I want to bring before you today. Now I'd like to, in the light of those two stories, I want to speak about mainly about four things. First of all, theological thinking and indeed all rational and scientific thinking is thinking under the constraint of the object. Now this
was developed by the empirical scientists and by the theologians in Alexandria in the early centuries when they said you have to think in any field of knowledge kata phousin. You think of something according to its nature and you allow the nature of it as it becomes disclosed to you in your inquiry to determine for you how you are to know it, how you are to express it and how it is to be verified. So in the whole
area of knowledge and verification, it is the disclosure of the nature of the reality of the field that determines every step that you take. Now I call that kata physin teaching, nature thinking, theological thinking, kata phousin, cataphysical teaching. That is thinking that is objectively controlled by the object. Now when they developed this and gave it a name from Clement of Alexandria to Cyril of Alexandria, they called this way of thinking whether in science because empirical science took its
first arise in Alexandria two centuries before our Lord and afterwards, though it couldn't go very far for certain metaphysical reasons, whether in science or theology, they called this episteme dogmaticae, dogmatic science. And that is what Christian theology is. In fact, that's what physics is. In fact, the term dogmatic science in the modern world was first applied to physics after Bacon thought was applied to theology. And you read the literature from Bacon to Kant to Cyril and
to Whitehead who used the word dogmatic science in this way. Now what does that mean? The term dogmatic, dogmaticos, was invented, as it were, by the Second Academy. The Second Academy in Athens, they were concerned to ask questions that had no answers. You just go on asking questions and they did not like positive answers. But scientists came along who asked questions that yielded positive answers in which they found they had to state A is B and
not C. So when you know something in its own positive structures, you also have to say it is not that. When you entertain one mode of thinking governed by the object, you thereby discount other approaches. Now that is what the New Academy called dogmatic. They say these scientists are dogmaticors. And so Sextus Empiricus wrote, for example, books contra dogmaticos, contra mathematicos, and contra the logicians also. And all the way through, that is the basic problem. Do
you think in such a way that your mind is governed by the constraint of the object that you think under the compelling force of the evidence, or do you think out of yourself? Now, as Athanasius puts it, do you think kat idiosin in such a way that your mind is governed by the object of reality, or do you think kat epinoian out of your own devising? Now when great Christian theology arose, it arose in that form. It was
dogmatic science in which dogmatics is controlled by what you know and what you think, in every sphere and certainly sphere in theology. Now I want to emphasize that because dogmatic in this sense, which is a scientific sense, is utterly different, toto caelo, from the popular notion of dogmatics, or if you like, the notion of dogmatic to Roman Catholic theology. Because dogmatics in that sense is the systematic understanding of propositions of dogmas laid down by authority. And
of course, that was rejected by modern science, rejected in the foundations of the British Royal Society in London, and rejected by the early pollutants. No, you think properly dogmatically when you don't think out of yourself, but you think outside of yourself in ways that your reason is controlled beyond it by what you think about. Now let's pursue that a little. Think of thinking of a tree or a cow or a man and then the Lord God.
Now when you think of a tree, you try to behave towards the tree in accordance with the nature of the tree. When you turn to a living animal or a cow, then you behave towards the cow, not as you do towards a tree, but as a living beast, a living animal. So the mode of your reason undergoes a shift in accordance with the nature of the object, under the constraint of the nature of the object. Then
when you move from a cow to a human being, to a rational agent, again there is a fundamental shift in the nature. So you don't approach a human being as though it were a cow, any more than you talk to a cow in the way you would a human being. I madly do that because that's nice. But nevertheless, you certainly don't treat a human being as an animal, or less a tree. Now when you make a
move from a human being to God, there's the biggest shift in the mode of your reason possible. On the one hand, it's a shift from the creature to the creator. What God has created out of nothing to what God is in himself. There's also a shift from the fact that you have here a transcendent lordly object. When I talk to a tree, speak to a tree, well it's an object. When I speak to a cow, I
don't treat a cow quite as an object because I have some kind of living relation to him. When I speak to another human being, we're on the same level. And so we can only speak to one another only as there is a mutual interplay of knowledge. But when we come to the Lord God, he is the Lord. And we're not on the same level. I can only know him as I look up to him as the
Lord God. So here we have a very fundamental shift in the mode of the human reason. Now I want to say at this point that we are concerned with, I like to say that we have to make a distinction, an important distinction between relativism and relativity because this is a confusion I find rife in the theological colleges and seminars due to the really incredible confusion we have in our social sciences. Relativity has to do with an
inherent relatedness in the universe which is invariant, dynamically invariant. Relativism has to do with our relation to it all the time. It varies with us all. Now in dogmatic thinking, in scientific thinking, in theological thinking, we're not concerned with relativism with relativity. Let's say we're concerned with nature of the object in terms of its intrinsic truth, its inner relations. I'll come back to that a little later. And we think in such a way we allow our
mind to be governed by that. Now when we think of this change, this epistemic change, I call it often epistemological inversion in the way of our thinking, there are two main characteristics of thought. As for me, interestingly, there are more and more characteristics that have a modern scientific operation, but they were very clear in regard to theology. On the one hand, the Greek fathers used the term cataleptic, and the other time the term apophetic. Now cataleptic
came from the stoic thinkers, which the scientists were engaged with. When you think of something that is objectively real, it grabs you by the hair and it will not let you go. And you think in accordance with it. It will not let you go. Now that is cataleptic thinking. And when you think dogmatically or objectively under the constraint of the object, it grabs a hold of you, and you're not true to it unless you obey it.
The other thing is cataleptic thinking, because you can never completely reduce to your concepts or to expression the realities you seek to know. Therefore apophetic thinking, did I say cataleptic? It was a mistake. Apophetic thinking is open structured thinking. So even though we think dogmatically under the constraint of the object, the dogmatic formulations are open structured, because we're concerned here with what reaches beyond what we can express or conceive. And that is fundamentally what we're concerned
with in the post-Einsteinian and era of modern science, where we are concerned with an open structured universe, and yet a universe that is governed by internal relations into which we attune our minds and under which we think in natural science. It's basically the same in theology, except that it is the nature of the object, the Lord God, and the way in which he reveals himself to us that makes all the difference. So then what are
theological dogmas? What does thinking theologically in a dogmatic way mean? It means thinking of God in terms of the way in which he has revealed his nature to you, in terms of his inner relations in which, to be faithful to him, you cannot think in any other way. You're free, you cannot think in any other way, but nevertheless what you think is open structured, because the more we know God, the more we know he infinitely transcends
what we can see. Now, by apophetic, I'm not thinking in terms here of the Pseudo-Dionysian or the Plutinian or even the Thomistic way of looking at apophetic. Where you start with the negative, not this, not this, not that. On the contrary, it's because you know God and Christ, and on the ground of your knowledge of God and Christ, that you know he infinitely exceeds what you can have. Quo maius, this is, as you remember, Anselm's great
point here. Well, so I'm saying that proper theological thinking is at once dogmatic and positive, in which you assert the truths that are posed upon you by reality, and yet you're not dogmatic in the other sense, because you're open structured in your thinking, and therefore all your thoughts are open structured. Now, when I published my book long ago, Theology and Reconstruction, I was showing this in some of my Roman Catholic reviewers, the torrents have given up
dogmatics. On the contrary, this is genuine dogmatic, not the false dogmatic you simply think about propositions laid down by authority, but you stick your dogmatic thinking out of the inner structures of reality. Well then, how do we know God according to his nature? Because if our theological thinking is going to be governed by God, it must be governed by his nature. How do we allow the constraint of his nature to take effect in our thinking about
him? Now, here let me cite a word from Athanasius, which comes several times, De Decretis and Contra Arianos, and I think also De Sinulis, in which he says, It is more scientific and godly, now he uses the various terms here, alethes, eusebates, accruates, and so on, it is more scientific and godly to signify the father from the son and call him father, than to name him from his works and call him infinite or the unoriginate. Now
the point here of this statement is this, it is only in Jesus Christ, the offspring of the divine nature, that you can know the nature of God. In Jesus Christ, God has come to us and disclosed his own nature, so in relation to Jesus Christ alone, that we can really think of God according to his nature, and this has geared us into the father-son relationship. Now the opposite is not right, he says, if you think
of God from his works, then of course his works are created out of nothing, and they are infinitely different from God, so if you try to think about God from his work, you have a muddy amudras, a word from Plato, a cloudy way of thinking, and you can never really get a concept from God properly, and what Athanasius was concerned to do, we can see that even his youthful works, not to drive, first of all, natural
theology, I don't know how people read that interim, there's no natural theology interim, it is thinking about this, that in your knowledge of God, you cannot interpret that in terms of a preconceptual system of thought, but if you really have knowledge of God, that knowledge of God creates structures in your mind and thought out of which you have to know God. Let me give another modern expression, because I often use these illustrations from science. When Einstein
came to tackle Newton, one of his main criticisms with Newton was that Newton, on the one hand, developed this differential understanding of the universe, but he took all that and he crushed it into, within the brackets in the frame, of a pre-conceptual system, namely Euclidean geometry, and therefore he forced upon Einstein a purely determinist notion, let's say, a geometry of relations between rigid bodies independent of time, so in spite of all he said about time, it
wasn't there. Now, Einstein destroyed that. He said, no, you've got to take your geometry and put it at the heart of your physics where it becomes kata phousin according to the nature of what you're concerned with, and therefore geometry here becomes a natural science. Now, that's what Karl Barth has done. He rejects any notion of natural theology as a preconceived conceptual system, a praeambula fidei. You must think of that only in terms, within the inner structure of
God's self-revelation, self-objectification to us, and then you find epistemological structures emerging and rising, which then you can test in different ways. And if you want a Roman Catholic reader on this, take the reading of Henri Bouillard, who has explored and developed this really magnificently, much better than most Protestants, by the way. He used to be a professor on the two Catholics in Paris, a friend of mine who rather died rather prematurely. Well, now, let's
go back to the words of Athanasius. It is more scientific, more precise, accurate, and godly, use of it, to think of God in this way according to his nature than to think of him from his works. Now, the first point I want to mention here is this, that scientific rigor and godliness go together. If you were to think of God rigorously in accordance with the nature of God, you can only think of him in a godly
way, so that theological truth and godliness go together. If you read the literature of the 4th century, you'll find that Theosophia, Eosophia, govern your understanding of the truth. And one of the rejections of Arius was that he was Athanasius. He wasn't really godly in his way of apprehending God. I was once having a discussion with a mathematician in Switzerland, a man called Gongseth, who is now dead. He was the leading mathematician of a whole group of
people we used to meet together. And I said to him, you know, you can be a mathematician. I was thinking of somebody in Edinburgh, a good mathematician and an immoral man, because your mathematics doesn't affect the way you behave. And I said, but you can't be a good theologian and be an immoral man. If you are really thinking according to the nature of God, then you can only be godly. See, logical thinking and godliness go together.
And he gave an answer, which rather startled me. He said, you cannot be a good mathematician without acquiring a sanctity of mind. Well, that's a rather interesting point, because if you are true to the mathematical formula, true to mathematical thinking, it destroys all your mental dishonesties and sanctifies and clarifies your mind, so that even in mathematics this can be true up to a point. But in effect, my mathematical friend in Edinburgh was still a rather immoral
creature, however. And of course, I know would-be theologians that are immoral. Now, that is really theologically impossible. You cannot know God except in accordance with the nature of God. And therefore, theological thinking must, from beginning to end, be godly thinking, always from beginning to end, in accordance with the nature of God. Now, for Athanasius, that, of course, did mean that you have to think of God in terms of his self-revelation in Jesus Christ, because
it's only in the Lord Jesus Christ whom God is becoming incarnate, only in him that he's revealed something of his nature, and only in relation to him that we can think scientifically and in a godly way of God. Now, that means that to be a Christian, that to be a theologian, we have to be Christian. You know, and that's startled many people today. They can think they can be theologians without being Christian. You cannot. Godliness and
Christlikeness, theocentricity and Christocentricity belong together. You see, there is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ. You cannot get at God behind the back of his revelation. You cannot try to know God better than himself on ways in which he has never revealed himself. So the only God we can know is this God who has revealed himself through Israel in Jesus Christ and can only know him in accordance with the steps in which he has
taken through Israel, through the Old and New Testament revelations, to reveal himself to us. And therefore, really to know God is to know him face to face in Jesus Christ. I should never forget a moment which made a great impression on me as a party during the World War, and I often think about it. I was tending a young lad after a very fierce battle we had, and the body is lying all about, and I came
to this chapel, it was still alive, it was only about 19, and a private Phillips. As I bent over him, I saw we couldn't move him. He would die at once, and I did what I could to ease his pain. He looked up into my face and said, Padre, is God really like Jesus? Is God really like Jesus? And I thought afterwards, what do my friends in Edinburgh think of the term of natural theology? I said
to one of the masters, when he said it was giant, do you think I should have described to him the beauties of the sunset, the glory of nature? No, you go straight to Jesus Christ. That is the only way to God. And what all of us are terrified by, in some way or other, at the bottom, this is our deepest anxiety, that God is some unknown deity who terrifies us and we're afraid of meeting him, and
that's why our conscience has paid black streaks in the face of God. But no, all that is rubbed out in Jesus Christ. If God is really like Jesus, then it is only in Jesus that we really know the nature of God. When I came back to Scotland, I perished in Aberdeen. A dear old lady who had not long to live said to me, Dr. Torrance, is exactly the same words, is God really like Jesus? And I
knew that that is the deepest cry of every human heart. I knew the problem of the church today, the problem of theology today, we have developed so-called exhibitions of God, which have come like a great thick black cloud between Jesus Christ and the human being, between members of our country and Jesus Christ. In our country, recent surveys have shown that more than 70 % believe in the deity of Christ or the incarnation, but less than
40%, much less than 40 % ever go to church. Why? Because the church and its theology has come in between the human being, the sinner, and God in Christ. So it's our theological thinking, our church behavior, which has really done immense damage, and we have to learn again how to repent of all that and to regain a way of theological thinking, which is strictly rigorously in accordance with the nature of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
Now I want to explore that a little further in a third place, and to come back to the point that to know God, and to know God in Jesus Christ, is a painful experience. You see, Paul tells us our minds are alienated from God. See, original sin belongs to our mind. That's why Apollinaris in the early church, when he thought of the incarnation, he couldn't think of the Son of God taking the human mind upon him,
because the mind, he said, is a hegemonic arm. That's the place where all our sin is governed and determined, and if he took our human mind upon him, he'd be taking the roots of our sin, our original sin upon him. He couldn't tolerate that. But then it became quite clear that what Christ hasn't taken upon him is not saved. What he has not assumed is not healed. Although Christ took, therefore, our alienated mind, our fallen humanity
upon himself, far from sinning, he did the opposite. He condemned sin in the flesh, and he worked out in our human mind a sanctification, and through his self-sanctification, we become sanctified. But see, the tricky thing here for all of us still is that we all have minds that are alienated and distorted, and the fundamental frame of mind has to be changed. That's what you Americans call the mindset. Now, the mindset is governed partly by original
sin, partly by inherent self-centeredness and selfishness, but also governed by the culture that you've been in and the ways in which you've been taught. And I think this is one of the points where we do enormous damage to our children. I don't know what it is, but our series of education soon twists the minds of the child around. The child is naturally adapted to what is out there. Let me be simple. I shut my eyes
and opened them. There are men and women around me. I'm free, and yet I'm compelled to think of that. We have dogs in our family. If I had a dog at that corner and I called him, he would negotiate the tables and chairs and come round to me. He would behave in terms of the nature of the object and come to me. But we have ways of thinking which we don't do then. Our whole concepts have
to be re-changed so that we get back to ways of thinking in which we do not dominate it through our preconceived mindset, but our mindset, our frame of mind is radically undone and changed. Now, we cannot do that, as our Lord said, without taking up the cross and following him. Because to follow Jesus involves one of the most radical changes any human being in any culture could undertake. Now, let me give you one or two examples,
to start the example, I think, where this is the case. And this is the case where we're still very much at a loss in our science as well as in theology. When the word became fresh, as Kierkegaard emphasized, that involved a kinetic mode of thinking. You cannot understand becoming kinesis in terms of static categories. So you've got to develop a dynamic or a kinetic mode of the reason to apprehend that. Now, that's perfectly right. And Kierkegaard
attacked the static categories of Aristotle and Kant and Hegelian and Schelling and so on. But he didn't really, I think, come up with the proper mode of the reason. He did, however, insist that to think of God, we can only think of Him by abandoning a point of absolute rest and think of a new way. It was only 100 years later that science came up with that. Einstein's whole thought is based upon the fact that we
have to abandon the point of absolute rest and develop dynamic modes of thinking. But even in science, we're still at loss here. Because if you're going to develop a dynamic mode of thinking, then somehow time and movement must be built into the very structures of your reasoning. Now, how have we done that? See, our problem is that we work with a kind of mathematics, invariant mathematics in nature. And that doesn't have time to bend into it.
And I believe that that really lies behind a lot of our problems in so-called chaos theory. Because our conceptual instruments do not yet match the subtle dynamic behavior of nature. And so we bring to nature conceptual instruments that are not adequate, and therefore part of the chaos, part of it, is created by ourselves, by the instruments we use. Same thing true in theology. If you really need to understand the incarnation, which is surely the most
central pivotal point in all Christian theology, you have to develop quite different mode of reason at which your reason moves along. You can't see a bullet flying through the eye unless you move with the bullet. But Jesus said, if you're going to come after me, you must follow me. He says, only by constantly following Christ, living with him, obeying him, listening to him, worshipping with him and through him, that our reasons can be adapted into a
dynamic and kinetic mode that in some measure is appropriate to what we're apprehending, we're due to apprehend of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let me take another example, which is even more difficult for many people, and that is the doctrine of justification. Now this is the point, I may have said this here before, that probably Karl Barth is most seriously misunderstood. If you read his Romans, all the way through he's talking about justification. But
what he's concerned with there is not the fact that justification calls in question our works of righteousness, but it calls in question the works of our mind. It's an epistemological side of justification that is so fundamental. Let God be true, St. Paul says, that every man a liar. And so Karl Barth says, let God be true and Karl Barth a liar. Let the Word of God, the people of the Romans be true, but let my commentary
in the Romans be a liar. Let God be true and Princeton Theological Seminary a liar. Now see, that cuts right to the bottom of everything. Because if you're put in the truth with God, that tells you you are in the wrong with yourself. That was one of, that was Kierkegaard's point, just forgot the other side unrecht haben. Before God, we're always in the wrong, and that is revealed by justification. So the more you're put in the
right with him, the more you are shown to be fundamentally wrong in the very roots of your being. But that we can't tolerate. And now it's epistemological relevance to that. That is absolutely fundamental to theology. And yet, look at it this way, is that not exactly what we do in our science? When we're concerned with any new discovery or any scientific theory, what do we do? We devise an experiment with a physical question, and we put
it to nature and ask nature to tell us whether that is right or wrong. Now, nature alone can be the judge of the truth and falsity of our concepts. Let's say science is justified by the grace of nature. In a staggering way, justification by grace is radical form as a counterpart in science. You see, the reason always remains the same, whatever area of culture you are, but is determined and shaped by the field you're investigating or
the nature of reality you're at. And so the mode of justification, the mode of kinetics changes likewise. Now, these are some of the most difficult things for theological students to have. In my experience, over 30 years of teaching, 10 years of more parish experience, I found that justification by grace alone is the most difficult thing for people to understand. And it's more difficult for the good people than the bad people. It's more difficult for the clever
people than the simple-minded people. It's more difficult for those who are concerned with theoretical structure, because they and with all their thoughts are radically called in question and they have ever to be thrown upon the objective reality of Jesus Christ to be transformed. Now, the last main point I want to put is that knowledge of God must be knowledge of his internal relations. Now, this will be really concerned with the doctrine of trinity, where we're
concerned with the fact that in what we call the economic trinity, God's self-revelation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one in which God is revealed to be internally, eternally, antecedently in himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Let's say the trinity comes from and rests upon and points back to internal relations in God. Now, again, this is one of the most difficult areas in the whole history of modern thought. In roundabout turn of the century
in Germany, there was a hefty debate between Max Planck and Ernst Mach about whether atoms really existed or not. And because Mach was governed by Kant, you can't know things in themselves, but you only know things as they appear to you, he rejected the idea of atoms as real and said they are just scientific devices, they are fictions, these are the words he used. Now, of course, Max Planck, with his discoveries about atomic field, beginning quantum
atomics, was absolutely convinced that the atom had objected to reality. And a few years later, Rutherford, of course, broke open the atom and people began to understand the atom in its internal relations. Now, look at that change. Do you understand things according to their external relations, their appearances, or do you understand them in terms of internal appearances? Now, this is a very, very serious question. I said to some of my German friends, I said to someone
at the table today, why is it that in a single university in the United States or Britain, say Caltech or Cambridge, you have no more Nobel laureates in physics than all the universities in Germany and France put together? That's a staggering fact. The reason is because their Kantian and Hegelian metaphysics obstruct their science. And that is the way of thinking that obstructs modern theology. Modern theology of non-logical thinking is still inundated with that way of
thinking. And it is through that we must break if we are really distinct in a way in accordance with God and in a way in accordance with his internal relation. Now, at this point, I want to point you to how many minutes do I have? Four or five. I want to point you to the second chapter of Ephesians, which shows us, I think, something very significant. You may remember, it begins when Paul says, at that time
you were without Christ being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world and so on. Now, he goes on to say in language that's quite clear from the Temple of Literature, that only those who are in Israel are able to draw nearer to God and worship God. But you remember around the temple, there's a great barrier. And the Gentiles were beyond that. And
they couldn't draw near to God and really understand God as he is in himself. The first thing he says then, that we Christian Gentiles have to be incorporated into Israel and say the divine revelation in Old and New Testament, divine revelation mediated to Israel if we are really to know God, because there is no other God revealed except that God would reveal himself to Israel and, of course, to the Lord Jesus Christ. He says we Gentiles
are without God apart from the Jews. On the other hand, he says we Gentiles, if we're going to be incorporated into Israel, must cross that barrier, that barrier must be broken down. Now, that barrier is broken down only through the cross of Christ. It's only through the blood of Christ, the sacrifice of Christ's cross. And the middle wall of partition is broken down. And when that is broken down, then we come incorporated in God's self-revelation
through Israel and then through Christ and in one spirit, we have access to God. And here we have the Doctoral Trinity. Let me explain that a little. You see, the Jewish doctrine of God, especially in rabbinical literature, is the doctrine of God as undifferentiated unity and oneness. Suppose you're going to climb up a rock faith and there are no cracks in the wall. You can't climb up, you can fall down. How can you grasp God unless
you get the fingers of your mind into the relations in God? Now, Martin Buber in a series of lectures he gave in America attacked Protestantism for what he called conceptual letting go of God. And this is a tack upon Kant and the idea that we cannot really know God because we don't know him in himself, we don't know who he appears to us. And that is not really to know God. Well, my question then to Buber,
I didn't ask it personally, question to Buber, then Buber, how do you know God? How do you have a conceptual grasp of God? Now, Buber's answer is very interesting. He goes back to Spinoza and Spinoza says that we know God through his internal relations. God loves himself. And as we grasp God in those inner relations of love in God, we have a conceptual grasp of God. And that's what Buber relied upon. But you know, that is
in some sense the epistemological point of the Trinity. As only as we through the cross of Christ have access to God in one spirit and grasp him in his internal relations as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, they can really know God in a Christian and a theological way and in a way faithful to himself. So you see, the Trinity is absolutely essential to our knowledge of God. It belongs to what I call the ground and grammar
of theology. And not to have that is really to go away with Kant and Hegel and all the subjectivists. It's really an enormously backward step in our civilization. And our scientists have moved far beyond us. The social scientists are still lagging far behind and a great deal of modern theology is still in that backwater. And we really have to fight today to get our students to see that really to know God, you've got to know him
in his internal relations. Otherwise you cannot know him. Any more than you climb up a rock face, no cracks in it, no stiches in it, can you know God without somehow grasping him in his internal relations that are inherent and eternal in themselves. So it's only through the atonement actually we can have a proper doctrine of Trinity. And only through the atonement we can have theological thinking. Only when your minds are attuned to God in Christ
and reconciled to him through the cross can you begin to think theologically. Christian, the nature of Christian theological thinking is absolutely bound up with that. Now, just to close, I want to say, at the end of my students' course in Edinburgh, I wanted to know how they were and fair. I had two tests for them in my mind. One was the test whether this chap, man or woman, had developed a theological instinct or not. I wasn't
concerned there whether he was clever, whether he'd done well his examinations, whether he knew his Athanasias or his Calvin or his Barthes, anything like that. But whether he, in all that, he obtained a theological instinct, now that's absolutely essential. For three months I studied all the works of Einstein here in Princeton. And I was immensely impressed with the fact that he betted on his scientific instinct again and again against a host of other theories and so
-called evidence. And he nearly always proved right. Ultimately, unless you have a scientific instinct, you cannot be a good scientist. Unless you have a theological instinct, you cannot be a good theologian. Now, this is where Michael Palangi told us that we have to learn to indwell the truth, indwell anywhere in reality. And Christians have to indwell Christ, indwell the Holy Scriptures, until their whole being breathes revelation of God in the Holy Scriptures. And you can't cultivate
the instinct. It grows under the generative power of divine revelation. And when you have that instinctive perception, then you really are a theologian, whether you're a clever person or not. My wife hasn't been trained theologically, but she has, God bless her, an unerring theological instinct. And that's because of the second thing, prayer. The other test I put to my students was, when they took public prayer at college, you can tell when someone does that whether he
prays privately or not. You know, many ministers, I listen to them, you know perfectly well they don't say their prayers at night or morning, they don't say their prayers, they don't pray. How in the world can you pray to God? You see, we don't think of God over our back as he or him. You think of God and speak to him face to face. That's what prayer is. Prayer is a theological way of thinking, which you're
talking to God face to face, let him talk to you. And only in that prayerful attitude can you become a theologian, learn to think theologically. So if a student has a theological instinct and he hasn't learned to pray in private, then I'm very worried about him. And frankly, it's very difficult on paper, difficult recommending him to be a minister. Well, then, if you get everything else, remember this, that to know God according to his nature can
only be done in a godly way. And theological thinking, scientific rigor, and sheer godliness belong together. Thank you.