Posts Tagged ‘Mediation’

Who is Torrance Indebted to: Part 2

{ August 16, 2009 @ 8:59 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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As I keep working on this paper I am writing on Torrance I am becoming more and more amazed at the way in which he takes Barth further. This quote from I/1 has been buzzing around my head over the weekend. MY paper is to do with the human response of faith in particular. While I don’t think Barth explicitly goes as far as Torrance there is definitely some interesting stuff.

The last turn in our discussion of the concept of the analogia fidei has brought us already to the third and final thing that must be said in this connexion about faith and the knowablility of the Word of God for man. If it is true that man really believes 1. that the object of faith is present for him and 2. that he himself is assimilated to the object, then we are lead in conclusion to the third point that man exists as a believer wholly and utterly by this object. In believing he can think of himself as grounded, not in himself but in this object, as existing only by this object. He has not created his own faith; the Word has created it. (CD I/1, 244)

The idea of faith seeking understanding is huge in the first chapter of Barth’s prolegomena. It seems to me that in making this move i.e. that the Word of God is the object and the giver of faith, the whole dogmatic enterprise is then an exercise undertaken solely in grace. I think Barth was onto something here which Torrance elucidates.

Who is Torrance Indebted to for His Doctrine of Mediation?

{ August 2, 2009 @ 9:05 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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Over the last few weeks I have been working on a research essay on the Mediation of Christ and I have been pondering who T.F. Torrance is most indebted to for this doctrine. While I dont think that there is any one particular influence that has dominance here I am leaning toward the idea that Torrance moves deliberately beyond Barth here. Heres a nice long quote from the Church Dogmatics to have a think about.

“But what does it mean to take the place of man, to be Himself a man, to be born of a woman? It means for Him, too, God’s Son, God Himself, that He came under the Law …, that He stepped into the heart of the inevitable conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of man. He took this conflict into His own being. He bore it in Himself to the bitter end. He took part in it from both sides. He endured it from both sides. He was not only the God who is offended by man. He was also the man whom God threatens with death, who falls a victim to death in face of God’s judgment. If He really entered into solidarity with us – and that is just what He did do – it meant necessarily that He took upon Himself, in likeness to us, … the ‘flesh of sin’ (Rom 8:3). He shared in the status, constitution and situation of man in which man resists God and cannot stand before Him but must die” (II/1, p. 397)

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