The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones)

331 Pages·2016·2.28 MB·English

by  Thomas F. Torrance

To
Thomas Spear Torrance,
Economist and Philosopher of Science
Other Titles in the Cornerstones Series
The Israelite Woman by Athalya Brenner-Idan In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ by
Philip R. Davies Neither Jew nor Greek by Judith Lieu Sanctify Th em in the
Truth by Stanley Hauerwas Solidarity and Difference by David G. Horrell
One God, One Lord by Larry Hurtado Ancient Israel by Niels Peter Lemche
Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet by Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza The
Pentateuch: A Social and Critical Commentary by John Van Seters
Confessing God by John Webster
Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith by Francis Watson Fragmented Women by
J. Cheryl Exum Word and Church by John Webster
Contents Introduction to the Second Edition of
Thomas F. Torrance’s
The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons
Preface
1. Introduction
2. The Christian Perspective
3. The Biblical Frame
4. The Trinitarian Mind
5. One Being, Three Persons
6. Three Persons, One Being
7. Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity
8. The Sovereign Creator
9. The Unchangeableness of God
Index
Preface
THIS monograph is devoted to clarifying understanding of the most profound
article of the Christian Faith, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The exposition
takes place within the frame of the biblical and Nicene tradition of the One Holy
Catholic and Apostolic Church. It is heavily influenced by Greek patristic and
Reformed theology, with particular acknowledgement of debt to Athanasius the
Great, Hugh Ross Mackintosh and Karl Barth. My argument and presentation
have taken an open-structured form in the conviction that the truth of the Holy
Trinity is more to be adored than expressed. The Holy Scriptures do not give us
dogmatic propositions about the Trinity, but they do present us with definite
witness to the oneness and differentiation between the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit, under the constraint of which the early Church allowed the pattern
and order of God’s Triune Life to impose themselves upon its mind. There took
shape within the ecumenical thinking of the Church a specifically apostolic
frame of understanding the truth of the Gospel which soon came to be revered as
the distinctive mind or ϕρόνημα of the Catholic Church. It was to this mind that
the great fathers and theologians of the Church intuitively appealed in forming
theological judgments and making conciliar decisions.
It was thus that something of immense significance for the whole life,
worship and mission of the Church took place, the formation of a theological
paradigm of understanding which became more and more articulate as the
Church sought to expound, clarify and integrate the truths of the Gospel, and
defend them from damaging misinterpretation. I believe it is important to
recognise that in these early centuries, as the truth-content of apostolic Scriptures
unfolded within the understanding of the Church, something of definitive and
irreversible significance took place. This is very evident in the Nicene
confession of belief in one Lord Jesus Christ ... of one substance with the Father
(ὁμοούσιος τῷ Πατρί)’ In that conciliar formulation of the homoousion the
fathers of the Nicene Council were articulating what they felt they had to think
and say under the constraint of the truth and in fidelity to the biblical witness to
Christ and the basic interpretation of it already given in the apostolic foundation
of the Church. The explicit formulation of the homoousion at the Council of
Nicaea was an absolutely fundamental event that took place in the mind of the
early Church, It was a decisive step in deeper understanding of the Gospel,
giving precise expression to the all-important relation between the incarnate Son
and God the Father, which they made in obedience to God’s saving revelation in
Jesus Christ and in continuity with the apostolic tradition upon which the Church
could not go back. With it a giant step was taken in grasping and giving
expression to the internal relation of the incarnate Son to the Father, and thereby
to the ontological substructure and coherence of the Gospel. It proved to be an
inerasable and irreversible event in the history of Christian theology.
In its way the Nicene formulation of the homoousion may be said, mutatis
mutandis, to be not unlike some of the great events in the history of science in
which the rational structure of human knowledge of the created universe has
been profoundly revised in a way upon which we cannot go back, even if our
understanding of nature may have to be reformulated in the light of the deeper
knowledge of the universe to which the revised structure of science gave rise.
This is not to claim of the Nicene term homoousios that it is somehow sacrosanct
and beyond reconsideration, for all theological terms and concepts fall short of
the realities they intend and are open to further modification in the light of it.
Like any other creative ‘definition’ of this kind, owing to its essentially semantic
and interpretative function, this formulation must also be continually tested and
revised in the light of what it was coined to express in the first place, as well as
in the light of its fertility in the subsequent history of thought. But apart from the
linguistic expression coined by the Nicene Fathers the formulation of the
homoousion proved to be of astonishing generative and heuristic power, for it
was so well rooted in the source of the Church’s faith that it was pregnant with
intimations of still profounder aspects of divine reality in Jesus Christ pressing
for realisation within the mind of the Church.
Elsewhere I have likened the irreversible nature of such an event in the
history of Christian theology to what we do with a jig-saw puzzle.
We assemble the scattered pieces together, fitting them appropriately to
each other until the pattern they conjointly make comes to view. If then
we break it all up and throw the pieces back into disorder, we may have
little difficulty in fitting them all together again, but it will be impossible
for us to do that without recalling the picture we reached the first time.
Something irreversible would have taken place in our mind and memory,
which could not but influence all subsequent attempts to recover the
1
coherent pattern made by the different parts.
Although the formulation of the homoousion was a turning point of far-reaching
significance in the development of Christian theology it cannot be isolated from
what happened in the early centuries in the mind and memory of the Church as a
whole. It belonged to the decisive movement of thought in which the conceptual
content of the Gospel mediated to the Mediterranean world through the apostolic
tradition was unfolded within the preaching and teaching of the Church in the
course of its transforming impact upon the thought of the Hellenic world. There
resulted throughout the Church a development of the distinctive doxological and
theological outlook canonically upheld and regularly cultivated in its
sacramental and liturgical life. This was an apostolically mediated participation
by the Church in the very Mind of Christ, which grounded, shaped and
integrated the mind of the Church in its grasp and confession of the supreme
truths of the Gospel. In this way there came to prominence what was known as
the Catholic as well as Apostolic mind or ϕρόνημα to which the theologians and
bishops like Athanasius regularly appealed in expounding and defending the
Faith once delivered to the saints.
Thus, as I understand it, there arose in the early era of the Christian Church a
fundamental orientation and theological structure of a conceptually irreversible
nature. It belongs to the very esse, and not just to the bene esse of the Church,
and as such constitutes the intellectual as well as spiritual basis upon which the
whole historic Church throughout the centuries rests. It is not surprising that the
Nicene Council was soon regarded with awe as divinely ‘inspired’, for it was
recognised as uniquely constitutive for all subsequent theological and conciliar
activity. It is certainly upon the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed that all
Christendom in the West as well as the East has rested and continues to rest. I
myself appreciate Nicene-Constantinopolitan theology as still having a decisive
and formative role to play in all Christian theology, and find myself turning
particularly to the great Greek Fathers in that tradition as providing me with the
incisive insights I find most helpful today in rethinking and reformulating
Christian theology, not least in the field of trinitarian theology. Hence I make no
apology for my constant concern with Greek patristic theology in this book, and
in making use of some of the main insights it offers for an exposition of
Christian doctrine.
The account of the doctrine of the Trinity offered here is not analytical,
deductive, or discursive, but holistic. It is an attempt to be faithful to the way in
which the Holy Trinity is presented to us in the Gospel, if only implicitly, as a
Whole but as a differentiated Whole. This means that exposition must proceed in
a circular way, in which understanding of the whole is not built up from a prior
grasp of its constituent parts, but in which the whole while understood out of
itself is nevertheless understood with subsidiary attention to its parts, and the
parts are properly understood in the light of the whole. Circular procedure of this
kind cannot but involve repetition, for an account of any one Person of the Holy
Trinity cannot be given without relation to the other two Persons. Not a little
repetition is also involved in this book due to my urge to make theological
statements as rounded or complete as possible in themselves. But I hope that
repetition of this kind, in which the same truth is restated in cognate forms,
instead of annoying readers may help them toward a better understanding of the
main contentions of the monograph, and even mitigate for them my rather
difficult style. I would claim, however, that the difficulty of my style is
sometimes due to the difficulty of the subject-matter! In order to help the
understanding of the reader I have included references throughout to several
other books of mine where the same trinitarian concepts are given another or
fuller exposition.
Readers should note that the theological terms employed here in the doctrine
of the Holy Trinity (not least ‘being’ and ‘person’) are to be understood, not in
accordance with some later use or current sense, but in the transformed meaning
they are given within the doctrine of the Trinity itself and under the impact of
the reorganised consciousness of God brought about in the Church through the
Gospel. While Greek words are used in many references, I have added
transliterations in Roman letters to help readers. It should be emphasised that the
word ‘man’ is used throughout this book in the inclusive biblical sense and not
in a sexist way, and thus with no confusion between linguistic gender found in
this or that language and personal gender. Gender belongs only to the creaturely
world and may not be read back into God.
I would like to express great indebtedness to my dear son Thomas, not only
with his assistance in handling computer software in the production of this book,
but for the great help he has been to my wife and myself in untold ways.
Edinburgh,
Advent, 1994.
1
The Trinitarian Faith (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1988), p. 144.
1
Introduction
THE Christian doctrine of God is to be understood from within the unique,
definitive and final self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ his only begotten Son,
that is, from within the self-revelation of God as God become man for us and our
salvation, in accordance with its proclamation in the Gospel and its actualisation
through the Holy Spirit in the apostolic foundation of the Church. It is in the
Lord Jesus, the very Word and Mind of God incarnate in our humanity, that the
eternal God ‘defines’ and identifies himself for us as he really is. Only in Christ
is God’s self-revelation identical with himself, and only in Christ, God for us,
does he communicate his self-revelation to us in such a way that authentic
knowledge of God is embodied in our humanity, and thus in such a way that it
may be communicated to us and understood by us. Jesus Christ is at once the
complete revelation of God to man, and the perfect correspondence on man’s
part to that revelation required by it for the fulfilment of its own revealing
movement. As the faithful answer to God’s self-revelation Jesus Christ yields
from out of our human existence and life the fulfilled reception and faithful
embodiment which belongs to the content of God’s revelation of himself to man.
Moreover, it is only in Christ in whom God’s self-revelation is identical with
himself that we may rightly apprehend it and really know God as he is in
himself, in the oneness and differentiation of God within his own eternal Being
as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for what God is toward us in his historical self-
manifestation to us in the Gospel as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he is revealed
to be inherently and eternally in himself. It is thus in and through Jesus Christ
and the Holy Spirit that the distinctively Christian doctrine of God in his
transcendent triunity is mediated to us.