This will be the last post concerning method. I will explore the way that Torrance’s critical realism functions briefly.(1) This will hopefully mean we can move onto some doctrinal categories after this.
For Torrance all theological knowledge must be objective, that is, in accordance with the reality being investigated. Objective thinking “lays itself open to the nature and the reality of the object in order to take its structure from the structure of the object and not to impose upon it a structure of its own prescription.”(2) For Torrance this reality is God in his revelation, Jesus Christ. All theology therefore presupposes the objective revelation of God in Jesus Christ and indeed the way this knowledge of God is structured is revealed in Jesus Christ.(3)
This does not mean that we have a simplistic ‘correspondence theory’ of truth.(4) That is, by a kind of static correlation between knowledge and reality. But rather through repentance, and self-renunciation (metanoia) we are slowly changed in our mind to begin to think in accordance with the reality under investigation. Only by this subjective process can we come to know our object in any capacity, and therefore be “open to real objectivity”.(5) Thus, all knowledge is to be governed by the object under investigation and by freely deciding to allow this object to impose its structure of thought upon us, we come to know. “Theological conceptuality is therefore never equivalent to the ontic structures in reality, but it is at best a ‘disclosure model’ through which reality may make itself known to us.”(6) This means that the reality must disclose itself to us though our ontic structures of reality but is never itself those structures and as such our knowledge is real but not full.(7) Thus, Torrance’s epistemology is realistic, meaning that there is a possibility of actually knowing the reality as it is in itself as it impresses itself upon us; but critical because it must constantly be distinguished from created reality. Therefore, all theological knowledge for Torrance is a posterioi; a priori knowledge of God is rejected as importing anthropology into theology as it refuses to allow the object of knowledge to lay itself open and provide us with the appropriate thought patterns by which to speak of it within our created limitations.
1. For further elucidation see: Roland Spjuth, Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence in the Theologies of Thomas F. Torrance and Ebhard Jungel (Lund: Lund University Press, 1995), 94-101 and P. Mark Archtemeier, ‘The Truth of Tradition: Critical Realism in the Thought of Alasdair McIntyre and T.F. Torrance’, Scottish Journal of Theology 47 (1994), 362-5
2. T.F. Torrance, God and Rationality (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 9.
3. Benjamin Myers, ‘The Stratification of Knowledge in the Thought of T.F. Torrance’, Scottish Journal of Theology 16 no. 1 (2008), 2.
4. Archtemeier, ‘The Truth of Tradition: Critical Realism in the Thought of Alasdair McIntyre and T.F. Torrance’, 362.
5. T.F. Torrance, Theological Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 311.
6. Meyers, ‘The Stratification of Knowledge in the Thought of T.F. Torrance’, 4.
7. It is interesting to note the similarity here to the veiling/unveiling dialectic which Karl Barth sees at work throughout the doctrine of revelation, see: Church Dogmatics, 14 Vols. Vol I/1 Trans. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1964).
Scott Kirkland
