Here is an excerpt from a work in progress of mine on T.F. Torrance. Sorry footnotes have been left out, but I will insert them if people want to see where I’m getting this from. Its mainly from the ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’ but there are a few articles by others thrown in. I’m posting this because I think it is illustrative of what I have argued in part, in earlier posts, that God in fact must commandeer our language and thought, so as to impress his reality upon us so that we can speak of him accurately. This realistic epistemology, which I propose below, with the help of Torrance and others, allows me to see this as a real possibility.
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.” For Torrance this reality is God in his revelation, that is, 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.
For Torrance this does not mean that we have a simplistic ‘correspondence theory’ of truth. That is, by a kind of static correlation between knowledge and reality. But rather through repentance, and self-renunciation we slowly change 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”. Thus, by allowing all knowledge to be governed by the object under investigation and freely deciding to allow this object to impose its structures of thoughts upon us. “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.” Thus, Torrance’s epistemological foundations lead him to believe that we can in fact know reality as it is in itself.
Scott Kirkland
