Thomas Torrance's Mediations and Revelation by Titus Chung (review)

Chung's purpose is to explore the logic and substance of revelation in the work of Thomas F. Torrance, highlighting throughout the book the role of mediation in all of Torrance's thought, not privileging any one tome but acknowledging that Torrance's most explicit discussion is the sustained argument found in the latter's The Mediation of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

In his investigation Chung carefully distinguishes between mediation (biblically understood) and immediacy. While he never quotes Kierkegaard to the effect that immediacy is paganism, he plainly endorses Kierkegaard's assessment. And while he never formally states the difference between mediation and inference or deduction, he is evidently aware that according to Hebrew logic any deity that is inferred or deduced or concluded is eo ipse an idol, since the identifying characteristic of the Holy One of Israel is the self-disclosing speech/act that renders all inference not only unnecessary but also impossible. In short, immediacy and inference alike presuppose a deity other than Yahweh. The living God is known non-immediately (only the creaturely realm can be known immediately) yet non-inferentially, since human recipients of God's grace are included by the Spirit in the divine/human Son's knowledge of the Father.

Accurately reflecting Torrance's concern in his many discussions of mediation, Chung begins his exposition with a discussion of Israel and its ardent, oft-anguished wrestling with God wherein its life with God and its disciplinary suffering under God formed it as the "womb" that nurtured and gave birth to Jesus. In Israel's history under God there were fashioned the categories—such as sacrifice, priest, king, sin, salvation— by which Jesus Christ was to be understood and the language in terms of which he was to be described, announced, and commended.

As Chung moves from a discussion of Israel as the locus of God's self-revealing activity to the locus of the Word incarnate, Chung probes Torrance's reiterated distinction between anhypostasia and enhypostasia. Enhypostasia means that Jesus Christ is human with the humanness with which all humankind is human, apart from which he would lack representative and substitutionary significance. Anhypostasia means that in order for the Son or Word to become incarnate he must be incarnate in a particular human individual. Apart from anhypostasia, no incarnation has occurred; apart from enhypostasia, the incarnation possesses no significance for anyone beyond Jesus of Nazareth.

Chung's exploration of the foregoing forms the bridge to his examination of dualism and Torrance's hallmark aversion to it. In his theological work spanning almost seven decades, few matters drew Torrance's ire more than the dualism that he regarded as having disfigured theology for centuries. Dualism—between fact and meaning, soul and body, eternity and time, act and being—warped theology and above all theo-epistemology, wherein a hiatus appeared between our knowledge of God and God's knowledge of himself. Humankind's knowledge of God was distorted by assorted speculations instead of rightly being seen as an implicate of God's knowing himself, the latter a predicate of God's own intra-Trinitarian life.

In this light, Chung fittingly guides readers to Torrance's searching, searing criticisms of Arius in the realm of Christology, and Newton in the realm of physics. Athanasius (Torrance never relaxed his admiration for the latter's homoousion apart from which Torrance always insisted the gospel would have been lost) remained as pivotal for Torrance in theology as Maxwell, Einstein, and Polanyi did in science, not least because of the lattermost's sustained argument for the presence of a personal yet non-subjectivistic element in all knowing, scientific included. Newton's dualism divorced God from the world and rendered God unknowable as surely as Arius's Christology rendered Jesus Christ neither divine nor human and therefore divorced from both at once.

Chapter 3, "The Epistemological Realism of Theological Science," traces Torrance's epistemological debt to Albert Einstein, particularly Einstein...