God and Rationality by Thomas F. Torrance (review)

BOOK REVIEWS God and Rationality. By THoMAs F. ToRRANCE. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Pp. 228. $9.00. Thomas Torrance, Professor of Christian Dogmatics in the University of Edinburgh, dedicates this collection of essays to the memory of Karl Barth, " Doctoris Ecclesiae Universalis, Magistri Mei Cari In Universitate Basiliensi." In his earliest writings, Torrance followed Barth in teaching that faith was self-vindicating and that to search for apologetic evidence is to reject justification by God alone through Jesus Christ. The present book's title as well as its central thrust, an attempt to show the rationality of Christian faith and theology, would suggest that Torrance has modified his position. We will restrict our analysis here to the central theme of these essays and certain difficulties we find with it. Torrance's views have an importance, both for his real contributions and for the stimulus they give us to reflect on theological method today. Torrance sees the current crisis in theology as due largely to the emergence, in the shift from a Newtonian to a post-Einsteinian physics, of a new scientific view of the world and a new scientific method. Scientific changes in the past have brought about crises in theology; this was the case particularly in the shift from Greek astronomy to the Ptolemaic universe during the second to the fourth centuries, and in the change from medieval science to the universe of Copernicus and Newton during the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Arianism was a theological aberration dependent in part on the emerging Ptolemaic universe, whereas the true development went through Nicea and Athanasius; so too today, Bultmannianism is a theological casualty of the contemporary scientific development, while the true development today will come from a renewed realization of the intrinsic rationality of the Christian mystery and the use of a strict scientific method in theology appropriate to this mystery's distinctive nature. Torrance presents his analysis of the rationality appropriate to theology through analogy with the method of contemporary physical science; and in studying the latter, Torrance depends largely on Michael Polanyi (e. g., his book, Personal Knowledge. Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy). Polanyi emphasizes, in his important book, the personal character of scientific knowledge. He studies science particularly at the point of its breaking out into the discovery of a new theory. He shows that discovery emerges not simply from an objective submission to empirical data but rather from the adoption of another structure of interpretation, a structure that the scientist 684 BOOK REVIEWS 685 cannot verify at the time but adopts for such personal reasons as its simplicity, its aesthetic value, and its suspected future possibilities in interpreting a large range of data. The scientist cannot demonstrate the validity of his theory to those who do not accept his standpoint of interpretation ; demonstration here is essentially dependent on persuading the other to adopt the new standpoint and look at the data from that perspective. Positivism and empiricism can explain neither such discovery nor the scientist's more fundamental confidence in the intelligibility of the universe and his own ability to know it. The scientific endeavor is based on a belief, and it is only through this belief that the scientist is introduced to the inherent rationality of his sphere of study. As Augustine wrote, "nisi credideritis, non intelligitis." For Torrance, theology's future is dependent upon its use of a scientific rigor as strict and as appropriate to its object as physical science uses in its own sphere. This has a number of implications, of which we may mention a few. It displaces medieval objectivism, for even as early as the sixteenth century, Calvin made it clear that there is a mutual relation between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. That can be taken to mark the beginning of modem theology, for it is within this orbit that all our theological thinking since has moved. We do not know God in the abstract as He is in Himself, but only in the reciprocal relation which He has established through His revelation between God and us and us and God. (31) On the other hand, and it is on this that...