Transcript
Thanks so much. I wanted to call your attention. First of all, this talk is being taped. And so if you want to tape, you can just go right over to the Media Center and let them know that you desire a tape from TSF Noontime Forum of T. F. Torrance. They can get that for you. We also want to call your attention that the bookstore this morning did get in some editions of "The Mediation of Christ", as well
as "The Christian Frame of Mind", both by Dr. Torrance. And so we did get those in in time. So after the lecture, if you'd like, you could go down and pick up a copy or both of them and bring them up. And I'm sure that he will stay after for a few moments just to inscribe that and also maybe to converse with you for a time. Our speaker today is Dr. T. F. Torrance, Thomas F. Torrance. He
doesn't need much of an introduction. He's been with us before. He was here last year. He's formerly from the University of Edinburgh, professor there, emeritus, as well as the general moderator for the Church of Scotland for a time. He's written a number of books, too. We've just called to your attention. Without any further ado, Dr. Torrance, come and speak to us. Thank you very much for your kindly welcome. It's always a joy to come back to
Princeton. I've been coming here since 1938 before, many of you weren't born then. Now, the subject I've taken is incarnation and atonement in the light of modern scientific rejection of dualism. Now, let me explain to you the choice of the subject. I belong to two international academies, one the International Academy of Religious Sciences and International Academy of the Philosophy of Sciences. The second one is not one of philosophers, but of scientists also engaged in philosophy. There's
a big difference in that. Some of us are a member of two academies and some of them are a member of only one academy. Because we rub shoulders like that, problems arise. The big problem that has been arising is that the theologians and the biblical scholars on the whole are still trapped within dualist patterns of thought, which our scientist friends have rejected. They have their problems, too. Now, for example, one of our main scientists is John
Wheeler here, and I have some discussions with him, and also with Dispenza and Beauregard, two quantum visitors to France, who tend still, I think, in my point of view, to be a bit dualist because of their adherence to teachings of Niels Bohr as some of the other people are. Well, however, by and large, the scientists have made a radical change since the epistemological revolution carried out by general relativity. Now, general relativity, let me explain that. With
general relativity, physics and geometry are integrated so that you don't have an independent conceptual system prior to your physics. That was comprehensively destroyed by Einstein. As a result, we think from beginning to end in terms of the integration of the empirical and the theoretical factors. Now, that is an immense epistemological revolution in which ontology and epistemology are now wedded together. But that is a revolution that, by and large, biblical scholars and theologians haven't come into yet.
They're still trapped in the old pre-Einsteinian way of thinking, and this is to a certain extent due to the massive genius of Immanuel Kant, because the dualism that was built into modern science by Newton was given a metaphysical term and justification in Kant's approach. Now, let me give you one of the problems that comes out of that, and this we have discussed in the Academy two years previously. They asked in the dualist way of thinking,
drew a distinction that you're all familiar with between Historia and Geschichte. Now, Historia is a type of history where you interpret history in terms of the causal relations, external relations between events. Now, if you take it in that way, then of course, from the historian's point of view, you wipe out all divine revelation, all God's interaction, all miracles, and so on. And that, of course, is the way that Bultmann took it. On the other hand, there's
another concept of history, which they call Geschichte. The secular historians don't do this, but the biblical historians do this. Now, this is a way of understanding history in which you develop its meaning for you. Now, that dualism goes back to Newton, who distinguished between absolute mathematical time and space, which governs all causal interpretation phenomena, and relative apparent time and space, and to do with appearances. Now, that dualism, for example, you find in Lessing's great distinction between
accidental truth of history and necessary truth reasons. And that was taken up by Bultmann and the biblical scholars, and to this day, they have not yet overcome it. And it is built into the basic concept of the historical scientific method, which is neither truly scientific nor truly historical. Now, that gives you many lectures on that very point, but that is the case. In fact, we've discussed this a number of times, as I said, and a few
years ago, I wrote a paper on that, which was published. I also gave to the Bultmann festive my contribution to his work. Well, then our problem was that we live in a vast hangover in our culture and in the social sciences and in the biblical and theological sciences of the dualism of the enlightenment. Now, during the enlightenment, we have a very radical split between the is and the ought and the how and the why. And precisely
this split that our scientists, working in the epistemological foundations of their knowledge, find they cannot go along with. They have to bridge that gap and very, very difficult to reach that gap. For example, the moral imperative has to be built into the basic structure of natural law, physical law. And that's not easy, but papers are now appearing mainly by physicists on this very point. But let me point out the spiritual problem that arises when you work
with this dualist outlook. Because when you work with a dualist pattern of thinking, you not only divide between God and the world, you deny really any interaction between God and the world. But in the end, you draw a split between Jesus Christ and God. Now, when the enlightenment came along and they had this split between God and the universe and God and interaction with universe, then you have a resurgence of natural theology, which is always a
rhythm in great dualist periods of thought in the medieval and the post-Newtonian, in which people tried to build a logical bridge between God and the world. Now, a great deal of modern apologetics, both from the liberal and fundamental side, is all tied up with that. But this logical bridge has been comprehensively destroyed, not only by Karl Barth, but by the profound revolution in logic. And most theologians just haven't yet begun to appreciate, I'm sorry to
say, the revolution in logic. But this goes to some of you people like La Montagne who understand that. But very, very few theologians and very many scientists don't really understand the profound revolution in logic. But if you look at it in that point of view, the great structures they built up between natural theology just collapse. Well, that then, by way of introduction, that is why I chose this title. It fitted in with something that Dr. Caters...
Mr. Caterson has said to me. And so I want to do today three things. First of all, I want to talk very briefly about the nature of scientific inquiry or inquiry because many people still are worried about interrelationship in science and theology. And second, I want to ask, how did the early church cope with this problem? And then thirdly, I want to ask, what do we do today? Now let me speak a little about the nature
of scientific inquiry. Now here I have learned as much from the great fathers like Athanasius and Clement of Alexandria and Cyril of Alexandria as I have from people like Karl Barth or the modern scientists. And you can put it basically in this way. In any rigorous scientific inquiry, you inquire into any field or object in such a way that you let the nature of the field or the nature of the object control your thought, control how
you think about it, how you express it, and how you demonstrate it. Now I speak of this as cataphysic theology because it comes from the Greek kata phusin. You think of things according to their nature. Now if you think of things according to their nature, you think of things according to the truth. And for the Greeks, this was kata physin. Now when this developed in early theology, rigorous scientific theology, it was called dogmatika episteme. That's a term that
you can find in the Phusikois, the early scientists in the first two centuries. And it's given by Cyril of Alexandria. Now that to me expresses the fundamental way in which scientific inquiry operates. But let me illustrate that. Suppose you're going to study a tree. Now you'll use all your rational faculties to try and understand the tree. Now in doing so, you develop a modality of the tree. You don't treat the tree as a human being. It's
live, but it's not personally live. So you have to adapt your mode of reason to the nature of the tree. And then suppose you switch your inquiry to a cow. Now here the cow is an animal, it's not like a tree, and it moves. But here there's another switch in the modality of your reason. Your reason is adapted to the nature of the animal. Now your scientific method is the same. As rigorous as possible, knowing something
in accordance with its nature. But because you do that, though your modality changes, then you switch from a cow to a human being. And here you have another change, a radical change, because the human being can talk back to you where a cow cannot, and the human being has a depth of intelligibility that a cow doesn't have. It is basically, of course, an intelligence of a rational entity, but not in the same way that we have
a personal intelligibility of a human being. And a human being, you can't know a human being without a two-way relation, an interaction. You don't know another. If you say, now just you keep dumb, don't say anything, let me try and understand you. You can never know another person that way. You have to open your heart and mind to him and listen to what he or she says about himself or herself. And in that interaction, you
get to know somebody. You probably know the other as you reveal yourself to them, more than simply trying to elucidate what they are in themselves. Then switch your modality to God. Now here we have an even deeper change, because God is the Lord God, and we are the creatures. So here you have a way of relation, which is quite different. Suppose I'm looking at a tree, well it's an object I can perhaps control up to a
point, and even an animal I can control up to a point. When it comes to a human being, I can't control the human being. He's other than I, so a human being is more profoundly objective than a cow or a tree, because he would object to my controlling him or her. So there's a depth of objectivity here we don't have in the others. When you move to God, the Lord God, you have the profoundness, objectivity. This
is the Lord, and before whom you can only know him therefore in a mode of prayer and worship and adoration, as well as in personal response. That means that here your modality of reason has to be adapted accordingly. Now this is very important, because it does involve a radical change in the whole structure of your soul and mind in approach to God. Unless that changes, you cannot really be a theological student, far less a minister. So
the change in the very structure of your mind is particularly important. Now then, if we think of science in this kind of rigorous way, and we think of theology as a rigorous science, as I do, how is theological science related to natural science? Now the theologian and the scientist operates within the same room, the same sphere of space and time, and therefore the theologian and the scientist have to take space and time seriously. God reveals himself
to us through Israel, Jesus Christ, and incarnation within space and time, and therefore you cannot divorce what God says to you from spatial temple structures. They're important. Now the scientist does that. He doesn't think about anything except in relation to some form of space-time coordinates. So there is undoubtedly an overlap. Now let me illustrate that in a crude way, very briefly. I'm delighted someone put Clark Maxwell's four equations here. Did you do that? That's the
right thing to do. Suppose I let that be the room of space and time in which we operate. Now the scientist inquires into the nature of nature, so he inquires in that direction, and the theologian inquires into the nature of God. He moves therefore in that direction. Now of course when the scientist inquires into the nature of nature he does it not by looking at God but by looking at nature. So in a way he sets
God aside because God has created the world out of nothing and therefore he doesn't understand nothing from God but something quite different from God. So a proper theological understanding forces him to look at nature. Now this is part of the Christian doctrine of contingence upon which the whole of modern empirical science rests, of historical science rests. And the theologian also operates within space and time because there is an overlap here between the two. Now if there
is an overlap here between the two then there must be some basic connection between the concepts of natural science with our spatial temporal and the concepts we use in theology which also have spatial temporal aspects of them. In fact we'll take incarnation, the coming of God himself into space and time and becoming one of us in space and time. He doesn't abrogate space and time but on the contrary he supports and qualifies and strengthens and even
heals it so that the incarnation and the atonement cannot be expounded except in terms of space-time coordinates. I shall come back to that point later. Now let me go to the early church because the early church was faced with basically the same problems that we've been faced in the modern world. It was a radical form of dualism that had infected all classical culture, Greek or Roman culture, came mainly from India in which they drew a
radical separation, a charisma between the intelligible realm and the sensible or empirical realm. And for the Greeks of course anything that took place in the empirical realm was not really worthy of scientific attention. It was evil, it passed away, it didn't have any substance to it and the only realm that was devoted to, you could give proper scientific attention to, was the intelligible realm of eternal and necessary forms of thought. Now if you have that radical
distinction between the heavenly and the earthly or the intelligible and the sensible realm and the Bible comes along in its Old Testament and New Testament, particularly New Testament, and speaks about God acting in the sensible material world, then of course for the Greek that can only be a mythological way of thinking. Let's say within the dualism from within our material world you are projecting symbolically into the other realm but of course it isn't true, it's a
myth. Now don't be beguiled by the fact that a myth is the way of talking the truth. Let's spread around, that's a way of myth covering itself up. But now let me indicate briefly, again crudely, the kind of problem that arrives here. Here we have a radical disjunction between the two realms and that is the kind of radical disjunction you find in Gnostic literature. They are so far apart that the Gnostics are the people with semi
-divine creatures, intermediaries between the two. Now this gave an awful lot of trouble but in the end, I don't think the Church had very much difficulty with it, but then there's another form of this in which the two realms meet at a tangential point, a mathematical point. Now if they meet at the mathematical point then of course there are myriads of mathematical points. Now this was the way that the Arians saw, Arius and his companions, so
that the realm of God and the realm of this world touch one another tangentially at a point which we call Christ. And so because it's a mathematical point, Arius said there are myriads, use the word myriads of images of Christ and so Christ is only a passing transient symbol of something else. Then how do you know Christ or how do you know God through Christ? Now if you do that, let's suppose you're here, you want to
make a query to God, you can't get beyond that so it turns back upon yourself. That's exactly how Athanasius expressed it. If you really try to think properly, scientifically of God or any reality, you think a cross toward God, but the Arian thinks out of himself because in the end all he can say about the other is out of his self-understanding. Now if that represents Tillich in some way, it certainly represents Bultmann in the modern
world. It's exactly how he thinks. Now and this gave the church of course a great deal of trouble. Now of course if you're going to say that God became man in Christ and communicate that to the Greek world, you've got to do something that destroys the dualism. Now what the Christians did was rather to look at it in depth and say that in Jesus Christ, God himself has come into our world and so he, Jesus Christ,
is a creature of our world and yet he is the creator through whom all things are made. He is God of God and man of man. So when you know God in Jesus Christ, your knowledge terminates on the being of God and not just on the being of man. And this of course carried with it two fundamental principles, which enunciated as the homoousion, if you're familiar with it, Christ was a one substance with the father
or one of the same being with the father, and the other one was that in Christ, divine and human natures are one. Now first of all, let me indicate the evangelical significance of this because this is really what the church was up against. And this is what happened in the fathers of Nicaea. You see, if you, there is no ontological bond between Jesus Christ and God and he's just a man upon earth speaking about God who
is quite other than himself, then what about the gospel? When he says to you, son, daughter, your sins are forgiven, they're not forgiven. That's just the word of a man. It's not the heart. It has no divine validity in it. So if you cut the bond between Jesus and God, you tear the heart out of the gospel, out of forgiveness, and that was desperate. Or take divine revelation. If you say that Jesus Christ is a revelation
of God, and yet he is not God, then you have no way of saying that what he says really is in God. There's no fidelity between what he is and God. So the whole structure of divine revelation falls apart. Now, earlier before, and I see the real principle formulated here by Irenaeus, which is massively appropriated by Karl Barth, that God reveals himself to himself. So the self-revelation of God is the revelation of God in Jesus
Christ. The content of revelation is identical with the God who reveals. But tear that apart, and revelation is hollow of any ultimate truth or reality. You're flung back upon a merely mythological or symbolic or romantic way of thinking. So that the Father, as I see it, absolutely central is the unbroken relation in being an act between Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, and the Father. Or take atonement. And this is a point that's today being
discussed in a new way. If God became incarnate, then in some fundamental way, God was at work on the cross. Now, we don't have belief in the crucifixion of the Father. But as Gregory Nazianzus said, God crucified in a fundamental sense. Now, there are Germans today who make an awful lot of nonsense about this. It doesn't come from theology. It comes from a gentleman called Jean-Paul Richter, Nietzsche, and Hegel, and these God is dead people.
It's not that way we think at all. Here we have a unity in the atonement on the cross between what happened to the Son, happened to the Father. There's an unbroken relation there in being an act. So cut the bond, ontological bond, in Christ, and the whole atonement goes out of the door. Now, here you see that what the Church was up against was to preserve the central heart of the Church, the central part of the
Gospel. Now, let me indicate that for our pastoral concerns today, I was a pastor of the Church for 10 years, and I enormously regret the day most of the professors and teachers in theology and seminaries and universities had no pastoral experience. You're supposed to train ministers, but actually they know very little about actual ministers, personally. Now, I learned. What I used to do was to not only preach from the pulpit, but I read the scriptures and
prayed with people in their homes regularly. When I'd done that two or three times, they opened their hearts to me, and I learned more about what goes on in the depth of human nature than you can ever learn from psychologists or textbooks. Now, one of the things that pressed me immensely, the deepest cry of the human heart, is, is God really like Jesus? Now, this came home, I've said this before in the top chair, very sharply
one day in a battlefield in Italy when a young lad, he was only 19, dying, it was less than half an hour to live, and he said, Padre, is God really like Jesus? I thought about that. I said, what has happened here? What's come in between Jesus Christ and God? When I went back to parish in Aberdeen, an old lady said to me, hardly been home, Dr. Torrance, is God really like Jesus? The very same word.
See, at the bottom of your heart, when the chips are down, both of these were dying, and that's when the chips are really down, but also at other times in life, the cry of the heart for God is, what is God like? Now, what natural theology did was to drive a wedge in between God and Jesus Christ. It did, in the medieval world, as Calvin has said, as Barton said quite clearly, develop a split concept between
God and himself. That's why I couldn't agree at all with Lonergan's two treatises, De Deo Uno, De Deo Trino, and even Rahner has attacked that, quite rightly. You cannot have that kind of split. If you have it between God and Christ, it goes into God himself, then God is schizophrenic. Now, so you see the importance of it, and when you're ministering to people, that is the most fundamental thing you've got to attack. Your ministry is to
bring people face to face with God in Jesus Christ. It's only God in Jesus Christ who can forgive and heal. It's only God in Jesus Christ who can reveal the ultimate truth to you, even about yourself, so that this problem of dualism has immense effect in our practical ministry, pastoral ministry, our spirituality, as well as just in geology and science. Now, let us take the early church emphasis I mentioned, the two main doctrines, the principles I've
singled out, the homoousion and hypostatic union, and reflect about that for a moment, and here I think Christian theology since the fifth century hasn't reflected enough about this. If Jesus Christ is really a one and the same being as God the Father, then in a fundamental way, the incarnation falls within the being of God. The incarnation cannot be separated from the Holy Trinity. Now, when you look at it in that way, then the whole understanding
of Christ and the Trinity in divine revelation undergoes a sea change. You reach a dimension of depth you couldn't otherwise. Now, that dimension of depth has really been left out of a great deal of our theology, especially Western theology, Protestant, Roman Catholic alike, and I feel that that is really disastrous, and as some of you know, for years I've campaigned about the fact that it's a doctrine of Trinity that gives us a fundamental grammar of theology,
and we can engage in dialogue with the orthodox informed. We've now published a complete agreement on the doctrine to maintain which was agreement doctrine of Trinity. We can come behind all the other doctrines and clear away or iron out our differences, but now take the other side of it. Take the, which belongs to it, the hypostatic union. The hypostatic union means that God and man, divine human nature and Christ, are united in one person. That the
whole of Christ's life from beginning to end is a life in which the God and man are united. Now, if that is the case, then Christ's saving work and his incarnation are inseparable. If that is the case, then the atonement of redemption begins with the very conception and birth of Jesus. Jesus' conception of the Virgin Mary, his birth of the Virgin Mary, are part and parcel of the fundamental act of divine redemption of this world. But
it doesn't mean, therefore, that if you will understand atonement, it takes place within the incarnate constitution of the mediator, within the incarnate constitution of the mediator. That's why the New Testament actually says Christ is redemption. He is righteousness. He is life because he himself in his incarnate person is our salvation and our atoning edge. Now, by and large, this means we have to understand both of these, understand the incarnation and atonement in terms of their internal
relations to God and the Holy Trinity and their internal relations to Christ as God and man. Now, if you take the latter, you have some very severe problems arising. And the question formulated sharply by the Greeks, from Irenaeus to, first of all, to Nazianzus and Cyril, is this. When Christ took our humanity upon him, what kind of humanity was it? Was it some kind of quite new humanity, neutral humanity, or did he really take it from
Virgin Mary, a sinner? Was Jesus the Saviour, the Redeemer of the Virgin Mary or not? He says he was. Now, that is fundamental. Now, either you accept the fact that he took our Adamic humanity upon him and in taking it from the very beginning, he'll sanctified and redeemed it to the whole of life. All you hold that he didn't, he took some neutral humanity. Now, if you take the latter, then the atonement has to be formulated
in terms of external relations, namely, in terms of moral structures or legal structures. If you take the former, the atonement takes place fundamentally, first of all, in the ontological depths of the incarnation in which he plumbed to the dark depths of our being, took even our alienated mind upon him, as Nazianzus said, citing Saint Paul, and healed it and overcame it, and even took our original sin upon him. Now, this is a very difficult thing for
Western thought, from Augustine on. But you can only do that if you take the incarnation and the atonement together in this way. Now, by and large, what's happened to the notion of atonement? By and large, and I'm thinking here of the Western world particularly, by and large, all through history, with very few exceptions, except people like MacLeod Campbell and Dr. Van Dyck is working on that. By and large, the atonement is expounded in terms of the
external moral relations of the moral order that has not yet been redeemed, or in terms of a legal order that has not yet come under the saving work of Christ. Now, as I look back upon church history, this seems to me to be one of the most disastrous things that's happened to us. Take, for example, the problems of canon law in Saint Thomas Aquinas. You see, when the church developed and became the Gospel, it did not
evangelize the foundations of Roman law, whether in Byzantium or in Rome. So then, theology began to be expounded by the lawyers in terms of existing law, at developing it, certainly molding it, slanting it some way in regard to Christ, but it wasn't evangelized. So poor Saint Thomas Aquinas, when he comes to express the Gospel, he had to do within the structures already laid down by the Gratiani, already laid down by the canon lawyers, and it's very
difficult to do that. Read him in the Harmony of the Gospel how different that is, but he says the same thing in either the Summa. This is a desperate problem. But by and large, all Protestant theology, take, for example, evangelical theology in the West, is nearly always expounded in terms of initial relations and not in terms of what took place in Christ. Now this is, I think, disastrous, but that is really a result of allowing dualism
to eat into the very heart of the Christian faith at its most sensitive point in atonement. Now I said, and I haven't left myself all that much time, what are we going to do today? And let me here be a little quicker on my point. I've already mentioned, well, let's look at the note, what happened with the Hamausion in the early church. When it said that Jesus Christ is of one being with the Father, it had
the effect of destroying the dualism in Greek thought and had the effect also of reconstructing the very foundations of so that the basic concept used by the Father cannot be interpreted except as they are transformed and changed, readily altered under the impact of the Gospel. Now in the modern world, the same thing has to happen. We have to allow the unity of God and man in Christ to overcome the dualism in the pattern of thought that
we have around us in which we think of him. Now I said that in the early church they had to break the bond, break the barriers of dualism in order to make room for the Gospel and develop in a really theological way, ontological, epistemological way, the understanding of the Gospel. But in the modern world, that dualism has already been destroyed, radically destroyed. I mentioned earlier on what happened after general relativity theory. And so here we can
proclaim the Gospel and teach the truth of Christ within a concept of space-time which the early fathers couldn't do without immense struggle. Today the universe of space and time is far more congenial to Christian theology than any other science. A couple of years ago I was asked by the Pontifical Academy to write a critique, they called it that, of the Pope's message on science and theology when they celebrated the third centenary of Newton's Principia Mathematica.
Well it was rather daring of them to ask me to write a critique of that. I wrote one which they turned down because I thought that they weren't doing the Pope justice, I may say so, I thought the Pope's language had been doctored a little bit by other people in the Curia and made it ambiguous. They said no they wouldn't have that. Then I wrote another one and this one they accepted. Now this time I took
up the point that the Pope had commanded us to follow the example of St. Thomas Aquinas when he related theology to Aristotelian science and built up the synthesis. And so I pointed out that that was a synthesis between Christianity and pagan science and that wouldn't do. But modern science had been changed radically over the years and now had Christian foundation and notions of contingent intelligibility contingent order and the Pope needn't be afraid of it as he
said he was. I gave three examples of how this is so. Now I believe that is the case that again and again when you expound the Gospel in this kind of a way then you get a reaction from scientists, this is really quite tremendous. I never forget for example when I first published Space, Time and Incarnation had a letter from Sir Alan Cook. He now is one of the most famous scientists in the world. He said
I read this and I find myself agreeing with it and it helped him a great deal. He was at that time a geophysicist later became head of the Cavendish Laboratory of Physics in Cambridge and the whole concept of space and time and these equations were actually primary for his thinking as they dealt with the mathematical properties of light he was able to use in his science. And he recommended to me to use general relativity more than
I had. But what has staggered me was that here was a scientist reacting to an unashamed account of the of incarnation space and time and he fully accepted it and it actually helped him. Now I find that again and again in the world but you see the solution the biblical scholars are scared of doing that because they think that the scientists when people won't react to that. Why? Because they are still tied to a Newtonian notion
of science that is causalistic and deterministic and they and they're cramped they can't they have no liberty in it but they need to come into the modern world with the scientists and then they would find this kind of dialogue uh relatively easy. Well that's the first thing I wanted to say the great change that's come over even on that now come to another one I've spoken about a number of times and that's the question of the
so-called singularity of Christ and this is becoming more and more important. You see in classical science Newtonian science singularity was a dirty word because in enlightenment there was no singularity there were no particularities you had to resolve all these away in order to get something that was universal and timelessly true and necessarily true and that's what Newton did following the middle ages and of course following the whole way of thinking more adeometrical [sp?] in a Euclidean
geometric way but today that whole point of view has been shattered by the fact first of all by the discovery of the so-called black hole because the black hole is an absolute singularity but more important than that is this namely that the speed of light has has a is absolutely unique in its invariance I remember reading a book the other day which Professor Edward Nelson told me about Hermann Weill who points out that today after
general relativity theory we define bodies in motion in relation to space and time and define space and time in relation to light movement of light but light not in relation to anything else light occupies a unique metaphysical and physical status in the universe and the relation to light that all other things are ordered if light were to wobble there'd be chaos in the universe if god were to wobble if god went to be utterly faithful we'd
have chaos but somehow god has created the world in such a way that the that the invariance of light in its creaturely way is a reflection of his eternal invariance his faithfulness and so today we can speak about that of the uniqueness of christ in a new way he is absolutely singular there's only one christ here compared compared to that there's only one christ here there's only one and it could only be one who is both
god and man in one person and now that is the transcendent the finality and the singularity of christ which today is everywhere being denied and rejected in the so-called multi-faith culture and that's a tragedy it's back into the into the enlightenment because the enlightenment said you cannot study christianity unless it is one rigid in a class of universal religions but that's the opposite but today scientists are taking the in the singularity of christ seriously
and many of them now have no difficulty much less difficulty in accepting and believing in understanding the uniqueness of christ finality of christ and then then the churchmen now take another point this is also admonished in the early church if you if god and man are one in christ then there is a oneness in being and act between god and man now this had the effect if god is in himself what he has done in christ
then the action of god and the so-called economic finality is identical with the action of god in himself so that the god is god the being of god has to be stood in a dynamic way now this is the point that Athanasius made on anuncios energaia it's the activity inherent in the very being of god totally on greek conception and this conception alone changes the foundations of greek thought now think of that today because here
we have the union of the dynamical and the ontological which our modern science has been struggling with a long time and had to struggle with after general relativity we see the problems here Einstein raise them sharply right away in this in in in regard to the split experiment regard to light and regard to the fact that light is apprehended as a particle and as a wave and is this not here a duality and he wanted to
to amalgamate them i don't think you can completely amalgamate them you can't because you can't get rid of all spatial elements it's a temporal element or perhaps a spatial element nevertheless there is a profound unity here and so today in relativistic quantum theory we are all thinking of the kind of behavior in nature in which is a very subtle unity of the ontological and the dynamic which we are unable to construe with the conceptual instruments we
still have i'll come to that in another in a moment and to develop new conceptual intimate instruments to grasp the subtle refined behavior of nature until we do that i don't think we can overcome these problems although physics has made enormous advances in this direction but now take my old teacher Carmard because this is what he did he brought together the patristic emphasis upon the being of god in his acts and the reformation emphasis upon the
acts of god and his being the there was some of the being of god and his acts had fallen foul of medieval dualism and tolling dualism so that the being of the act became separate and the reformation emphasis upon the acts of god and his being also fell foul of the post-natonian enlightenment dualism so that the ontology tended to drop out of last publicist theology the being of god tended to drop out and you have
the absurd idea of the germans of zeitlose a rightness a timeless event but bart brought them both together and his doctrine of god is god's being in his act and his action is being and that part of the dogmatic since two one is probably one of the greatest works ever written in geology because he does that herculean effort i think no solution ever done at that extent before adam breaks it certainly by Athanasius but nevertheless he
worked out in tremendous form now when we could speak in that way then i think we can make remarkable contact with our scientists they say oh you've been doing 40 years before what we're now trying to do and that is the case at least if you take the line that carl bar had taken now take my fourth point now try and be brief here go to the second chapter of the pistol to the ephesians where saint
paul is saying look you christians christianity is grounded and rooted in in israel and apart from israel you've got unrevealed god you're just without god in the world without hope because the oracles of revelation they said in roman they all belong to israel on the other hand he said this it's only through the cross of christ or we reconcile to god that through the sun and in the spirit we have access to god let's say it's
only through atonement through christ and the spirit we have access to in his internal relations and know him as trinity now this is something i take up again again with my jewish friends i point out to them that it's jews above all who have destroyed the canceling notion that you don't know things in themselves but only as they appear to us let's say they have opened up the fact that we know things in their internal relations
and this is what we accept we understand the ethym and internal structures and so on so we know things now in their internal relations and that is something we owe to the jew all right i say to my friends then why do you not apply that to god how can you think of god as an undifferentiated oneness you can't have any grasp of god unless in some sense your grasp of him is in terms of his
internal relations and of course there are people like say well god loves himself and they are relations of loving god and that's how Buber himself grasped god now let's say on scientific grounds and theological ground it's now possible to talk to jews about the holy trinity and i've done that again and again and so i believe at this point radical science is breaking down the barriers which we have erected in history not only between jews and
gentiles but between christians and believing jews and the hope for the future is i think here very remarkable now the other final point i want to mention is to do with question of time and determinant now this is raised again in the early church if you believe that god became man in jesus christ that he entered into space and time then the action of god in christ penetrates back in time to the very beginning and it
penetrates forward in time to the very end time is you're taken seriously it's not just something a movie image of eternity now of course you've got this already in Irenaeus but if the atonement is thought of in that kind of way then there is a redeeming of time in it so we have to think out our theology in terms of a new way of thinking of time that comes under the radical change of the incarnation and
and redemption now there are all kinds of problems arise here one of the things i like to think i learned this from Athanasius he said look god wasn't always father always creator but he nothing the creation of something new even for god how do we understand that he goes to the incarnation jesus christ wasn't always incarnate son of god wasn't always incarnate so the incarnation of something new even for god so that in god we look
at creation incarnation there's a before and an after in god we can't understand this but somehow there is a time of the divine life we talk about uncreated light it's the light of god uncreated light it's light of god and created like created time and created created being there's also a created time but an uncreated time we don't know what that is but what we can be sure of the god uncreated time embraces our time fallen
time and gathers it up and redeems it now there's no redemption of time has come bouncing back it for interestingly modern world let's take a jew like Ilya Prigogine who took a lot of his truth from another jew a french jew called Bergson who talks about real time and newton didn't give us real time must have real time but Ilya Prigogine is current the real time of the world becoming real time and then he
speaks about redemption of time because in the reconstruction of the second law of thermodynamics which will take in open systems the whole universe the arrow time has to go another direction so we have what he called redemption time so here even at this very difficult point we have something that is fundamentally congenial to the christian faith now this does force upon us something very important if the atonement means not only a penetration back into time penetrated
full against time an old time we have as a future reference this is one of the things of course that Pannenberg takes seriously but i think in an exaggerated form but if we take it seriously then the the the allusions ought to work out some kind of relation between eschatology and cosmology now that's a profound task we can only do it if we take seriously this concept of redemption of time now remember the new testament speaks
of the parousia the coming which is the presence and the presence which is a coming it never uses it in the plural but only in the singular so there's one parousia that stresses from the birth of jesus to his coming again and consummation of history and we live in the midst of that one parousia this is where nice work from justin martyrs says we live we celebrate the sacraments in the midst of his parousia now that
is so then there is a moment that spans our life here now risen with christ and our life when we will our resurrection christ comes again how can we understand it well einstein has shown us that it's possible even in the physical world to have for an event to have two different real times it's mystifying but in his way it's perfectly clear uh that chimes in if you like with the fact that they were they pull
right through Ephesians the use of resurrection in the aorist tense we already risen with christ and yet somehow we're still waiting for christ coming now it is that dynamic we're thinking between what has happened once and for all and what is still to come that you mystifies people that's why people attack Karl Barth i think oh everything is done it doesn't believe it's a radical misunderstanding even the very heart of the gospel is redemption of time
well perhaps i've said enough now but what i wanted simply to do is to say an answer to these people in in the two academies there is a way of bringing theologians and biblical scholars and scientists together in our modern world if we take rigorous science seriously and take theology seriously and we find you don't build theology upon science or science upon theology but there is a conceptual interface between the two which helps both it helps
the scientist because it helps him to get rid of false theological ideas he's picked up in culture it helps the theologian to get rid of false obsolete scientific ideas which he's picked up so that this kind of dialogue is a mutual purification now and we engage in that as allows us to be much freer to preach the gospel to the modern world now you're going to be sent out students to preach the gospel to the scientific
world today but what seminaries are they give any courses in this are they really training their students for the pastoral care of people in the scientific world unless we need, perhaps you'll do that one day because that's what we badly need and if anything i've said here has any validity and it surely calls for that kind of rethinking in our theological curricula well thank you very much