Firbush Retreats Firbush retreats are organized and led by Robert T. Walker. Firbush retreats are designed to make the best theology accessible to as many people as possible and especially those not trained in theology and often not familiar with routine technical terms. They combine times of worship and prayer with reflection on a theme related to Torrance theology. For more information see https://tftorrance.org/firbush. ----------- June 13, 2018 Firbush Retreat Summer 2018 Robert T. Walker, "The Relation between Theology and Other Subjects" Https://tftorrance.org/firbush The audio recording for this presentation is available on the Firbush Retreat section of the website for the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship. The following AI transcript is too rough to rely upon, but perhaps useful for word searches and time-stamps. It is unretouched; if anyone wishes to listen to it and clean it up we will be happy to post an improved version (contact the webmasters). We invite speakers to send us slides for their talks, which we will post alongside the audios and transcripts. If any speaker wishes to have their talk removed from the website, just let us know and we'll take down both the audio and the transcript. ------------ 00:00-00:07 There's an eight page handout here for you, but you're getting it afterwards, because 00:07-00:15 I can't possibly give you all eight pages. It's worth a full paper, maybe two papers, 00:15-00:20 and a possible topic at a next retreat. 00:20-00:25 What can music and theology learn from each other? How might Torrance answer? 00:25-00:30 Well, fortunately, that's Jeremy's question. But here we can at least look at his theology 00:30-00:37 to see what kind of framework it could provide for the question, and for the wider question 00:37-00:43 of the relation between theology and other subjects. 00:43-00:50 The incarnation of the Word is the eternal Word becoming flesh. The whole world who brought 00:50-00:57 the Creator into being has now become flesh. The Creator who is invisible, inherently invisible, 00:57-01:07 inaudible, intangible, unknowable, is now all these things in the flesh. There could 01:07-01:15 not be a more logically impossible juxtaposition. The eternal Word is not just in this body, 01:18-01:25 but now is this body, this body, Jesus Christ. The one who is and remains forever the eternal 01:25-01:34 Word is now and forever will be this man, Jesus Christ. 01:34-01:41 What's the relation between the two, between the eternal Word and the utter embodiedness 01:41-01:48 of Jesus? The answer to this question gives us a basic answer to the relation between 01:48-01:55 theology and other subjects. In the Old Testament we have a stark juxtaposition 01:55-02:03 of God and of bodily creatureliness. That juxtaposition of God, whose spirit and bodily 02:03-02:16 creatureliness runs right through the Old Testament, but it's at its starkest in the 02:16-02:23 view. God walks in the garden in the cool of the day, but God as we know has no hands 02:23-02:31 and feet. Jesus walks in Galilee and does have hands and feet. What's the relation between 02:31-02:40 the two? Here we come to the massive significance of the doctrine of creation out of nothing. 02:40-02:47 The fact that we've been brought into being out of nothing has radical implications for 02:47-02:55 our knowledge of God. It means that we're not divine in any way, we're not emanated 02:55-03:01 from Him, there's no spark of the divine in us, but we've been brought into being out 03:01-03:08 of nothing as an entirely new reality alongside God with our own spiritual and spiritual power. 03:08-03:15 There's no inherent connection between us and God other than that of creation out of 03:15-03:27 nothing. There's no umbilical cord of being or knowledge, so we can't look at God to see 03:27-03:35 what we're like because we're a new reality different from God. In fact we can't even 03:35-03:42 look at God because He's on a new level, a different level. As creatures we can have 03:42-03:49 absolutely no knowledge of God. He is Spirit and we are physical. He's brought us into 03:49-03:58 being out of nothing. We cannot go through nothing to reach God. As physical creaturely 03:59-04:06 beings we can only think in creaturely terms. How then can creaturely language speak of 04:06-04:14 God? That's of course what the Bible, the Old Testament and the Bible of Jesus Himself 04:14-04:23 does do. The Old Testament uses the starkest physical images to talk of God. He's sheep, 04:25-04:32 He's our shepherd. He found Israel naked, clothed her, loved her and wooed her tenderly. 04:32-04:41 He's the rock, the shield, the salvation of His people. He sends out His arrows against 04:41-04:48 His enemies. In one of the Psalms He even wakes up from a drunken sleep to smite them. 04:50-04:57 The Old Testament has no qualms whatsoever in speaking to God and about Him in bold and 04:57-05:08 arresting creaturely images. In fact the Bible has no non-creaturely language to speak of 05:08-05:16 God. Even the word nefesh, soul, actually means breath and breath is a physical thing. 05:16-05:23 For example, Psalm 69, Psalm 124, the waters have come up to my neck. The Hebrew is the 05:23-05:38 waters have come up to my soul, up to my breath. They're about to put out my breath and if 05:38-05:46 the breath is put out then you're dead, or a deed as we say in Scotland. The nefesh is 05:47-05:54 the life. When we're hungry or fainting the nefesh gets weak. When we have water or honey 05:54-06:07 the nefesh, the eyes get bright and the nefesh revives. So nefesh simply means the life of 06:07-06:15 the human being. It's not a spiritual word, it's a physical word ultimately. 06:15-06:22 But we can only speak about God in creaturely physical language drawn from creation. How 06:22-06:31 then can the Bible speak truly of God at all? Well of course it's only God who can speak 06:31-06:41 of God. Nothing less than God can make God known. And because we can only know creaturely 06:43-06:50 reality it's only because God himself comes down and speaks to us in creaturely language 06:50-06:59 backed up by creaturely event. So the further question arises, if creaturely language and 06:59-07:06 images as such, physical creaturely images, are totally inappropriate for God who is not 07:06-07:13 creaturely, how can creaturely language be used of God truly? And the biblical answer 07:13-07:21 is that God alone can choose the creaturely images, languages and images he can use to 07:21-07:29 be made to speak of him and he alone can instruct the creaturely mind in their use. And even 07:30-07:37 then it is only when God himself speaks through those creaturely images that they can become 07:37-07:44 fit instruments for his disclosure. And the record of the Old Testament is the record 07:44-07:51 of God's long struggle with Israel giving it the means and the language and the way 07:51-07:59 of understanding him. There's a radical difference between the 07:59-08:06 biblical creaturely language of God and non-biblical. The natural human mind loses all that radical 08:06-08:19 difference and ends up worshipping a God constructed out of and clothed in purely creaturely images. 08:24-08:31 In the Bible we have the word that's been moulded by the action of God through the prophets, 08:31-08:39 through the spirit. I've got a little bit on Torrance as a very 08:39-08:51 brief outline of him, but no one has done any more than T.F. Torrance to explore the 08:51-08:57 meaning of the incarnation for knowledge of God and it's the incarnation that highlights 08:57-09:04 this radical juxtaposition between God as spirit and our physical embodiedness. There 09:04-09:12 are many myths about T.F. Torrance, here are a few of them. He didn't believe in the Bible 09:14-09:21 as the word of God. He's impossible to understand. He's only for theologians. He overestimated 09:21-09:30 the incarnation. He underestimated the atonement. He's a universalist. No place for human faith. 09:30-09:40 No doctrine of the spirit. Far too reformed. Not reformed enough. These are all common 09:42-09:49 misconceptions. The reason for that is that his whole theology is a rethinking of the 09:49-09:59 whole history of human thought in the light of the incarnation and in the light of Christ. 09:59-10:06 He's putting things together in an entirely new way, in a new framework. Every failure 10:06-10:13 to understand them is coming at him with a different framework and picking up things 10:13-10:20 he says and understood in terms of the framework people come to him with, it doesn't make sense. 10:20-10:27 So to understand them we have to learn to think in a new way, learn a new language. 10:27-10:36 So anyhow, distinctive features of Torrance. One, he was absolutely steeped in the point 10:36-10:43 in the Bible. Steeped unbelievably more than we can believe. Not just in English but in 10:43-10:51 the Hebrew and the Greek texts. And not just in the texts but in the biblical thought forms. 10:51-10:58 And his two published lectures, incarnation and atonement, are an extended profound commentary 10:58-11:05 on the Bible. The second main feature to him, the whole Christocentric end of the world 11:06-11:13 is the Christocentric emphasis and that Christ is the key to the scripture. That was very 11:13-11:21 much one of Calvin's key points too, that Christ was the Scopos, the goal of scripture, 11:21-11:28 the target. Torrance is radically Christocentric and therefore Trinitarian. And Jesus is the 11:31-11:38 Self speaking. Another key point is the whole distinction between theological statements 11:38-11:46 and the reality of God himself. Theology can only point. Torrance is systematic, very systematic, 11:46-11:56 but not systematic in the sense of having a system, but in pointing to Christ because 11:57-12:04 all theology or our thinking is held together in Christ and not in what we say. The third 12:04-12:11 key element is that he has a dynamic, developmental and receptive concept of reason. The whole 12:11-12:19 nature of reason. Normally we think of reason as a kind of power that we have, a light we 12:19-12:26 shine out on nature and we know what's right and wrong in the light of reason. But the 12:26-12:33 reason came to learn from different sources, from some of his teachers at New College, 12:33-12:44 from Calbert, very much also from John McMurray, that reason is best defined as the capacity 12:44-12:52 for objectivity. Reason is not a power in itself, it's the object of study that dictates 12:54-13:01 what reason is. And that makes a lot more sense. It's only because things are what they 13:01-13:08 are and that we are somehow able to encounter them, feel them, touch them, sense them, come 13:08-13:16 to know and understand them, that makes us rational. Our rationality is built on the 13:16-13:23 inherent intelligibility of the universe. And it's a two-way process. We have to understand 13:23-13:30 the process. And the very word 'intelligible' comes from the Latin 'intus legare', reading 13:30-13:37 into. That's not that we read our meaning into it, but what we do is we're reading the 13:37-13:43 meaning which is in it, we're penetrating into something in order to understand it. 13:43-13:50 So intelligibility is the God has made the universe in such a way that in all its aspects 13:50-13:57 it's there to be grasped and understood. It's not obvious it's deep, but it's inherently 13:57-14:04 intelligible. So our rationality is fundamentally dependent on the manifold, innate order and 14:04-14:10 intelligibility of the universe. It's the capacity which we want to develop for ourselves 14:10-14:17 in our response to that intelligibility, and which is at the same time created in us by 14:18-14:25 our engagement with it. The reason is essentially obedience. It's looking and seeing and being 14:25-14:36 obedient to what is there. In the very nature of the case it has to change. It's faithful 14:36-14:45 to the object. And so it's the object which is the arbiter and the determiner of what 14:45-14:52 is rational or not. So we can't have a constant of reason and apply it to everything. It's 14:52-15:01 the object that determines what's rational. If there is a God, of course there is, and 15:01-15:11 if that God is orderly, intelligible, speaks, utterly faithful, and is not able to speak, 15:11-15:18 speaks, utterly faithful, then the intelligent thing, the rational thing, is to say, "Well, 15:18-15:30 He can be trusted, because that is His nature." And so faith becomes the rational response. 15:30-15:38 It's the appropriate response to understanding the nature of the object. So if you get hold 15:38-15:44 of the whole meaning of rationality in the sense it makes a massive difference to our 15:44-15:50 whole thinking. And it's not just the mind, it's the whole person. Ephesians speaks about 15:50-15:57 the minds of our hearts. And there's an extreme discipline in all rationality. And anything 15:57-16:06 we do, we have to be focused on the object, and it's a skill. Whatever we're doing, God 16:06-16:13 and cooking, woodwork, playing the piano, learning all these things is discipline. Learning 16:13-16:23 how it works, we need to keep rushing on. The significance of Christology. For Christ, 16:23-16:33 Christ is the key to everything. And the person of Christ is the basic pattern. The way that 16:33-16:40 God has interacted with us in Christ is the basic pattern for all God's relations with 16:40-16:48 creation. Torrance saw that very, very early on in his studies. In Christ there's a hypostatic 16:48-16:57 union, a personal union, but not in the sense of marriage is a personal union, but not in 16:57-17:04 that sense. A personal union in the sense of a union in one person between God and man. 17:04-17:09 There's no such union between God and creature, between the living Word and scripture, or 17:09-17:16 between God and us, or God and creation. It's only in Christ you get that one personal union 17:16-17:25 of God and man in one person, one reality. Fully God, fully man. And the same goes for 17:25-17:32 God, fully man. But here's the key point. The early church wrestled with this in order 17:32-17:39 to try to comprehend it as much as it could be comprehended. In the fundamental sense, 17:39-17:48 it cannot be comprehended, because only God can do this. We can't possibly understand 17:49-17:56 how God brought creation into being out of nothing. Equally, we can't understand how 17:56-18:05 God, even less can we understand how God became man. But these are facts that he did. We have 18:05-18:09 to take them as facts, even if we can't understand the how. 18:09-18:16 The early church tried to understand it, but they could only define it negatively, the 18:17-18:24 wrong ways of understanding it. So God has become man in one person, God and man in one 18:24-18:30 person, with two natures, divine and human. They used four adjectives to describe wrong 18:30-18:37 ways of understanding it, in an attempt to be faithful to what it positively is. One 18:43-18:49 person and two natures without confusion, change, division or separation. So there's 18:49-18:56 no confusion between divinity and humanity. They're not mixed up. When you cook, you stir 18:56-19:02 things together. There's no mixing like that. God remains fully God, humanity remains fully 19:02-19:09 humanity. There's no change either. God doesn't cease to be God and become man. He becomes 19:10-19:17 man but remains fully God. So without confusion or change, at the same time, no dualistic 19:17-19:24 division. You can't separate the two. As Luther said, as Barth says, "I know no God but the 19:24-19:33 man Christ Jesus. This man is God." You can't separate them, but you can't confuse them. 19:35-19:42 That gives us the basic key to the relation between theology and all other subjects. There 19:42-19:53 can be no confusion between God and creaturely reality. God is God and must be known as God. 19:53-19:59 Creaturely reality is creaturely and must be known as such. We have to look at each 19:59-20:06 other to see what they're like. Of course, theology is a creaturely topic. It's creaturely 20:06-20:16 knowledge of God. It's knowledge of God. So theology is in an utterly unique place, but 20:16-20:25 it's still creaturely. It's tempting here to give theology a special place because it's 20:28-20:35 a unique knowledge of God. But it's creaturely. Remember that to be rational is to respond 20:35-20:49 appropriately to the nature of the reality we're engaged with. That's what theology is. 20:49-20:57 But even though theology has a special place, it can't be used to affect or change other 20:57-21:04 disciplines. They should each stand on their own feet with their own logic. If we mix the 21:04-21:11 two, then we get bad theology and bad art, or bad theology and not so good music too. 21:11-21:19 I'm sure Jeremy will come back to that. Theology, as I've said, is a living participation in 21:23-21:30 the risen Christ's actual human knowledge of God. It's not talk about God, but a living 21:30-21:36 knowledge of God Himself. It's a living participation through the Spirit, prayer, study of the word 21:36-21:43 and worship in the risen Christ's actual human knowledge of God. As such, it has been immensely 21:43-21:51 fruitful historically, above all in science perhaps, but also, for example, in literature, 21:51-21:58 art and architecture. That's because as creatures we are at once totally dependent on God for 21:58-22:07 our being and our maintenance in being. Yet we have our own integrity, our own rationality 22:07-22:14 and creatureliness. Until we know God as God, we cannot really know ourselves as creaturely. 22:18-22:25 It's only when we really come to know God who is not physical that we can really understand 22:25-22:33 ourselves as physical and creaturely, and as good in our physicalness and creatureliness. 22:33-22:40 Knowing God gives us a whole new perspective, and we can appreciate our creatureliness for 22:40-22:47 what it is. The two go essentially together, but we can't mix the two falsely in such a 22:48-22:55 way that we distort one by the other. We cannot explain the relationship. We can't explain 22:55-23:03 how our faith, which is our genuine faith, is actually a participation in Christ's faith. 23:03-23:11 The Chalcedonian adverbs are key to everything. We have to learn to rediscover, recapture 23:14-23:21 this whole biblical juxtaposition of God who alone is Spirit and everything else is physical 23:21-23:28 and creaturely. Everything we do, whatever it is, every single task, hobby, little chore, 23:28-23:39 should be done as to God, but done with all our might in enjoyment of its creatureliness, 23:40-23:47 and not attempt to mix up the two. I'm missing huge chunks here. 23:47-23:59 When the stark biblical juxtaposition is lost of God's direct action in history, God in 23:59-24:06 the flesh and Jesus, then he inevitably becomes distant and unreal. 24:07-24:14 An attempt has to be made to connect him to creaturely reality. In that situation of falsely 24:14-24:25 perceived distance, and that's a violation of the without division or separation, in 24:25-24:34 that situation of falsely perceived distance between God and earthly reality, there are 24:34-24:41 two basic options. God is distant. You either have to bring God back to earth as an idolatry 24:41-24:50 and in all forms of divine immanentism or pantheism, and that's a violation of without 24:50-24:59 infusion or change, or you have to attempt to lift the creature up to God again, and 25:00-25:07 that's a violation without confusion or change. If the latter is the main emphasis, if we 25:07-25:14 attempt to lift the creature up to God, because you never get one movement entirely by itself, 25:14-25:24 because one direction can never fully cancel out the perceived distance, and it requires 25:24-25:31 to be balanced out by movement in the opposite direction, so these things tend to go together. 25:31-25:41 We've got the problem of wispy abstraction, bereft of the immediate presence of God with 25:41-25:49 us in time and space. We are forced to think of him in abstract terms and distant from 25:49-25:56 us as the infinite, the absolute, the ground of being, even as the unknowable, as the nameless 25:56-26:02 one or as the fully deistic God who created the world and set it in motion to run on its 26:02-26:09 own lines and watch us from afar. That's the classical God of deism. We're also forced 26:09-26:15 to wonder how we can approach him, and knowing he is not physical as we are, we think of 26:15-26:22 him as spirit in a non-physical sense and begin to use non-physical language, so we 26:22-26:30 think, to speak of him. Thinking of him as spirit, we begin to talk of him in spiritual 26:30-26:37 terms and to develop our own spirituality as a ladder to him. In fact, we have no other 26:37-26:44 choice, because bereft of the living God, we can only turn inwards to our own supposing 26:45-26:52 spiritual being, becoming immersed in our own psychology, floundering about in the morass 26:52-26:59 of spirituality. How much of that do we see today in the whole welter of types of meditation 26:59-27:06 and gurus and self-discovery movements, be yourself, etc. etc. The wisdom of the Bible. 27:08-27:15 In its wisdom, the Bible knows no such way. It never, ever speaks of spirituality, but 27:15-27:21 only of the living God. It knows that we can never construct a way of our own choosing 27:21-27:28 to God. It knows that we cannot construct a language to speak truly of him, and that 27:28-27:35 only he can do that. It speaks of him in stark physical language, because that is how God 27:35-27:42 spoke to them. It knows that God is not physical, but that using non-physical language does 27:42-27:50 not bring him any nearer or any closer. For all human language is just as anthropomorphic. 27:50-27:57 Even the most spiritual language we have is every bit as anthropomorphic as physical language 27:57-28:04 about God. The Bible has the wisdom to know that in fact the opposite is the case. The 28:04-28:11 stark incongruity of stark biblical language about God makes it all the more obvious that 28:11-28:20 he is not these things, but that he is nevertheless with us in the midst of the same immediate 28:20-28:28 stark realities of daily life. In conclusion, and in light of the points made in this paper, 28:28-28:35 several comments and questions arise. One, all churches need to understand the rationale 28:35-28:42 of the stark biblical juxtaposition of God and creature reality so astonishingly fulfilled 28:42-28:50 in incarnation, and do all they can to recover it in doctrine, life and practice. Secondly, 28:52-28:59 to what extent and in what ways do not all churches suffer from a degree of deism in 28:59-29:07 thinking and from human attempts to correct it, which run counter to the without confusion 29:07-29:14 or change of Chalcedon? Three, and possibly more controversially, to what extent does 29:15-29:22 a latent dualism not lie surprisingly behind much Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism, prompting 29:22-29:32 Pentecostals to attempt to overcome it by confusing God uncreaturally, overlooking the 29:32-29:41 work of the Spirit in establishing the creaturely after the pattern of Christ, so failing to 29:41-29:48 remain fully human. And Evangelicals, by wedding God, scripture and human reason together in 29:48-29:59 a way that undermines the integrity of each, failing to see the full significance of Christ's 29:59-30:06 divinity and substitutionary representative humanity, the one Word and Son of God. That's all. 30:06-30:08 [Laughter] 30:08-30:13 [End of session] 30:13-30:14 Thank you.