T F Torrance 1913-2007

I have sadly only just discovered from 'An Appreciation' by Peter Forster, the present Bishop of Chester, in the current issue of Anvil (Vol. 25 No. 1 2008) that Tom Torrance died on 2 December last year (2007). I am always sad when someone I have respected, enjoyed or known of dies without my knowing, and, as it were, being able to participate in their death.

I also always regret never having written - as I had often planned to do - to the Prime Minister's Office to urge that he be awarded a Knighthood, for Services to Theology.

He was for me a giant among theologians, someone who almost defined orthodoxy, with massive knowledge of the Patristic and Reformation periods, and with an equally clear sense of their resonances in the modern world. Combined with his conviction that theology was a science on a par with, and able to debate with, natural science, his grasp of the mutual benefits of classical theology and modern quantum physics made him a fascinating explorer of God and God's universe(s). Apart from referring readers to the Anvil article (above), I can note three reasons for regarding him so highly, and why (like Peter Forster) I am puzzled that he was not estimated more highly.

Having requested a copy of his Theological Science (1969) from some friends for my deacon-ing in 1970, I recall spending weeks, much later, in the summer of 1978 or 1979, struggling with this thought-defying tome, trying to understand it, and not knowing whether I had or had not properly comprehended his argument, but knowing that he had changed and expanded my mind for ever. Lines of thought can also ingrain themselves subconsciously on your mind, in any case. This was some of the most demanding and rewarding theology I have ever encountered.

But his two 'smaller' books - Space, Time and Incarnation (1969) and Space, Time and Resurrection (1976) - have remained more foundationally seminal. Besides wonderfully limpid phrases (!) such as 'a fatal deistic disjunction between God and the world', 'obsolete phenomenalist and positivistic assumptions', 'Q fundamentalism' and 'an obsolete Cartesian-Kantian dualism' in his introduction to SPR, Torrance stressed that only an undivided theological engagement with the biblical text will do it justice, for while theological questions yield theological answers, historical questions only yield historical answers (e.g. question of authorship, etc.). i.e. he absolutely countered the split between 'history' and 'theology' in modern study. The breadth and depth of his theological engagement with contemporary science was breath-taking, and the consequences of that thinking vital for all theological study.

As his theological debt to Barth, Polanyi and the Gregorys was great, and his scientific debt to Einstein, von Weizsaecker and Goedel equally so, nonetheless some of his most fruitful conversations were between ancient and modern Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and depleted forms of Western Christianity on the other. But all these streams flowed into, and out of, one mind of exceptional ability. He was a colossus: too orthodox and traditional in general for some Evangelicals, and too evangelical for others of a more liberal persuasion; but the strength of his writings very significantly contributed to the extraordinary rapprochement in theology between East and West which we sense going on all around us. His subsequent work on (e.g.) Divine and Contingent Order (1981) and The Trinitarian Faith (1988; sub-titled: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church') shows him engaging deeply in his chosen fields.

A couple of examples of typically precise wording conclude this small tribute, to indicate that he wrote no sloppy English:

'We must not think of the Incarnation as an intrusion of the Son of God into the determinations and conditions of space and time...Rather is the Incarnation (NB: in both cases, capital I) to be understood as the chosen path of God's rationality in which He interacts with the world and established such a relation betwen creaturely being and Himself that He will not allow it to slip away from Him into futility or nothingness, but upholds and confirms it as that which He has made and come to redeem' (STI, 67).

'[The resurrection] is the only historical event that does not suffer from decay and is not threatened by annihilation and illusion' (STR, 95).

I thank God for the memory of a life filled with, and witnessing to, the mind of Christ.

Article cited: Peter Forster, 'T. F. Torrance (1913-2007): An Appreciation', Anvil Volume 25 No 1 2008, pp. 21-31.