3. Thomas F. Torrance
Thomas F. Torrance (1913–2007)
The second practitioner I have chosen to discuss is Thomas F. Torrance (1913–2007), one of the twentieth century’s greatest Christian theologians. I first began to read Torrance while I was doing theological studies at Cambridge University in 1979. I had already completed my scientific studies and gained a first class degree in theology at Oxford by the summer of 1978. I then moved to Cambridge for two years. I had been elected to the Naden Studentship in Divinity at St John’s College, Cambridge. This research position, which dates back to the 1780s, gave me access to Cambridge’s excellent theological research libraries. I also used this time to prepare for ministry in the Church of England at Westcott House, where I overlapped with John Polkinghorne for a year.
My intention at Cambridge had been to begin the serious study of the relationship of science and theology, working with Dr Arthur Peacocke (1924–2006), then Dean of Clare College. I had taken a specialist paper in the field of science and religion while studying theology at Oxford, and knew there was much work that needed doing. However, senior colleagues at Oxford advised me against plunging straight into the field of science and religion. They strongly recommended immersing myself in the field of Christian theology, so that I would bring serious theological commitment to the field. In the end, I accepted their advice. They were right.
I had been impressed by the example of two theologians I had studied at Oxford: Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann. Both had begun their theological careers by focusing on episodes in the history of the discipline. I decided I would do the same. I would use my time at Cambridge to research the development of the theology of Martin Luther. Professor Gordon Rupp (1910–86), a Luther expert who had recently retired as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, agreed to be my supervisor. In the event, I broadened out my research to consider the development of the doctrine of justification – a major theme in Luther’s works – within the Christian tradition as a whole, and the general question of the intellectual origins of the European Reformation.
My immersion in Christian theology lasted much longer than I had anticipated, partly because it proved so interesting and partly because there was so much I needed to learn. In fact it was not until 1995 that I felt I understood enough about the history and methods of Christian theology to begin writing seriously about the relationship of the natural sciences and theology. However, I began reading works about the relation of science and faith immediately, partly to get a sense of the questions being asked and the approaches adopted. And so I came across Torrance’s work Theological Science, which I bought in Heffer’s bookshop in Cambridge in June 1979 and read over the next few weeks. By the time I had finished this book, I knew that exploring the relation of science and theology was going to be hugely stimulating, just as I also knew that Torrance was someone I would be engaging extensively.
I first met Torrance by accident in 1986. I had been invited to a conference of younger theologians to explore how we might think about the relation of science and theology. We were told that some invited guests would be present but no mention was made of any specific names. The conference was held in a wonderful location: Windsor Castle. Although the event was due to start at 4.00 p.m., for some reason I wrote this down in my diary as ‘14.00’ and so arrived two hours early. The conference organizers were mildly amused and suggested I made myself comfortable while I waited. They showed me into a room, telling me that someone else had also arrived early and we might as well get to know each other. And so I met Torrance, who had made the long journey from Edinburgh to Windsor earlier that day. We spent the next two hours in discussion, focusing especially on his Theological Science. The rest of the conference was interesting but there was no doubt in my mind as to its intellectual highlight. I went back to Oxford with my mind racing, having realized that the relation of science and theology was not merely important – it was exciting.
In this chapter, I shall explore some aspects of Torrance’s contribution to this field, and focus especially on the landmark contribution he made to understanding the relation between science and theology.
Introducing Thomas Torrance
Thomas Forsyth Torrance was born, to missionary parents, on 30 August 1913 at Chengdu in the Szechuan region of China.1 Thomas Torrance senior had been deeply influenced by the work of the great British missionary David Livingstone (1813–73), and determined that he himself would undertake missionary work. In the end, Torrance senior joined the China Inland Mission. He was posted to Chengdu, a city in western China. There he met and married Annie Elizabeth Sharpe, who had also been working in that region of China with the same missionary organization. They had five children, of whom Thomas was their second.
Torrance was initially educated at the Chengdu Canadian Mission School from 1920 to 1927. The political situation in China deteriorated in 1927 and it became difficult for foreign missionaries and their families to lead normal lives. Torrance returned to Scotland to continue his education at Bellshill Academy from 1927 to 1931, before going to the University of Edinburgh in 1931, gaining his MA in Classical Languages and Philosophy in 1934. He would have liked to have studied for longer but the family’s financial situation was difficult. Torrance senior had returned to minister in China, leaving the family to live and work in Edinburgh until his final return in 1934.
Torrance had always longed to study for the ministry, perhaps becoming a missionary like his father. After completing his undergraduate studies, in 1934 he transferred to New College, Edinburgh (one the Church of Scotland’s recognized centres of theological education, based within the University of Edinburgh), gaining his BD (with specialization in systematic theology) in 1937. He subsequently undertook further research work at Oxford and Basle, where he studied under Karl Barth and was awarded a doctorate from Basle for his work on the doctrine of grace in the writings of some early Christian theologians.
After spending an academic year as Professor of Systematic Theology at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York State, from the autumn of 1938 to the summer of 1939, Torrance was ordained as a minister in the Church of Scotland and served as Parish Minister at Alyth, a village in Perthshire, from 1940 to 1947. During this period he also served as a chaplain with the British Army during the Second World War (1943–5), seeing action during the Italian campaign. He returned to parish ministry at Alyth after being demobilized, where he remained for two years before going on to minister at Beechgrove Parish Church, Aberdeen (1947–50).
However, although Torrance was firmly convinced of the importance of pastoral ministry, he realized that his own gifts lay elsewhere. He had come to believe that he was called to some form of teaching ministry within the Church. Others clearly shared this view. In 1950, Torrance was appointed Professor of Church History at Edinburgh University and New College. Yet while he enjoyed this position, his real passion was Christian theology rather than church history.
When G. T. Thomson announced his retirement from the chair of Christian dogmatics at New College in 1952, Torrance realized he might be able to arrange for an internal move within New College, by which he would transfer from the chair of church history to that of dogmatics. Torrance was able to secure support for his proposal and was duly appointed Professor of Christian Dogmatics at Edinburgh, and remained in this position until his retirement in 1979. During this ‘retirement’ he wrote two of his most highly regarded works: The Trinitarian Faith (1988) and The Christian Doctrine of God (1996).
Torrance is widely regarded as the most significant British theologian of the twentieth century. He was a pioneer of English-language reception of the great Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth and was heavily involved in the translating of Barth’s massive Church Dogmatics. However, his reputation also rests on his long-standing interest in the relation of the natural sciences and Christian theology, which first became evident in Theological Science (1969, based on the Hewett Lectures delivered in 1959 at Union Theological Seminary, New York) and was further developed in later works such as Reality and Scientific Theology (1985, based on the Harris Lectures at the University of Dundee in 1970). Torrance was awarded the Templeton Foundation Prize for progress in religion in 1978 on the basis of his extensive contributions to the discussion of the interaction of Christian theology and the natural sciences.
The development of Torrance’s views on science and theology
Torrance published little on the relation of the natural sciences and Christian theology before his landmark work Theological Science. Yet there are reasons for thinking that some of his core insights on their relationship formed early in his career, partly through his reading of Daniel Lamont’s Christ and the World of Thought (1934), which set out a vision of a coherent theological engagement with intellectual culture, including the natural sciences.2 Through Lamont, Torrance discovered the writings of the theologian Karl Heim (1874–1958), who held that Christian theology was under an obligation to interact with both the natural order and the natural sciences. For a theologian to ignore the issues thrown up by the natural sciences is, according to Heim:
a rebellion against God, who has placed us in a reality which inevitably confronts us with questions of this kind, and who has given us an intelligence which cannot rest until we have sought for some sort of answer to these questions.3
The influence of Lamont is evident in a course of lectures on ‘Science and Theology’ that Torrance delivered during his period as Professor of Systematic Theology at Auburn Theological Seminary in 1938–9.4 In these lectures, he argued that science and theology should not be understood as two disconnected and non-interacting disciplines, as if there could be two hermetically sealed compartments within the mind, with interaction excluded as a matter of principle. Torrance highlighted the importance of ‘a belief in the ultimate consistency of things as they are in themselves’ for both science and theology. But how was this belief in the ultimate coherence of reality to be affirmed? The scientist may well believe ‘that there is a principle of order in the universe’, which the natural sciences can uncover and explore. But can they account for it? Theology, on the other hand, is able to offer an account of that ordering, which it grounds in the nature of God.
Torrance’s approach to the relation of science and theology clearly mirrors that of Lamont, although Torrance develops some of his ideas in new directions. For Torrance, the natural sciences aim at accurate description and generalization – but cannot strictly be said to offer explanations that go beyond a simple redescription of the natural world. ‘Science cannot tell us anything about the ultimate origin or ends of things. If these questions are to be answered, they must be answered within the sphere of religion.’5 Torrance thus affirms the complementarity of science and theology, provided that both are correctly understood.
Science only informs us what light is thrown upon reality by the empirical observation of the facts of external nature. When science claims that this is all that can be said, it is no longer science but the species of philosophical theory called naturalism.6
The development of a theological science
The Auburn lectures on science and religion map out a defensible and reflective approach to understanding the relation of science and theology that was clearly capable of being developed further. Yet Torrance’s writings from 1939 to 1959 do not indicate any particular interest in the relation of the natural sciences and Christian theology. In 1959, however, he delivered the Hewett Lectures on ‘The Nature of Theology and Scientific Method’ at three theological institutions in New England: Union Theological Seminary, New York; Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Center, Massachusetts; and the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It seems that Torrance was invited to give these prestigious lectures on a subject of his choice within the broad field of Christian theology, leaving him free to select his own topic.
The relation of theology and the natural sciences was not an obvious topic for Torrance to address, given his interest in, and sympathy for, the theology of Karl Barth, not least on account of Barth’s disinclination to explore the relation of theology and the natural sciences. Barth’s relatively few pronouncements on the natural sciences suggest that he knew little about them and regarded them as having little relevance for theology.7 Barth makes no attempt to engage with the theory of relativity in particular or the intellectual achievement of Albert Einstein in general at any point in his Church Dogmatics.8 In effect, Barth treats Christian theology and the natural sciences as non-interactive disciplines, each with its respective field of competence,9 developing a theological equivalent to the biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of science and faith as ‘non-overlapping magisteria’.10 For both Barth and Gould, a meaningful conversation between Christian theology and the natural sciences is neither necessary nor of any theological significance.
So why did Torrance choose to speak on this theme, which he had not addressed to any significant extent for more than 20 years? Happily, Torrance offers an explanation to his readers about his reasons for choosing this particular topic. In 1946, he developed a friendship with the prominent British physicist Sir Bernard Lovell (1913–2012), who served as the first Director of Jodrell Bank Observatory from 1945 to 1980. Lovell was a cousin of Margaret Edith Spear, whom Torrance married on 2 October 1946 in Combe Down Parish Church, near Bath. Torrance’s ensuing conversations with Lovell raised some important questions. How did theology compare to the natural sciences? Could theology be described as scientific in any meaningful sense?
In one sense, these questions were not new. The rise of theology faculties within medieval universities led to a new interest in the relation between theology and other intellectual disciplines, and hence the question of whether theology could be understood as a ‘science’ (Latin scientia, a form of knowledge), in the sense of a discipline with agreed methodological criteria. Thomas Aquinas’s magisterial discussion of the scientific character of theology demonstrates a keen sense of the new intellectual climate resulting from the rediscovery of Aristotle, particularly the new interest in syllogistic logic.11 Yet Aquinas understands a ‘science’ more in the sense of an ‘intellectual discipline’, whereas the English word ‘science’ has now come to mean ‘natural science’.12
Torrance clearly felt that Barth’s discussion of the important theme of theology as a science ‘fell somewhat short’ of what he had expected and what he believed necessary for the task of theological reflection.13 The absence of any serious consideration of the natural sciences impoverished Barth’s vision of theology and its wider application. Theology needed to advance ‘through and beyond Barth’ to develop such themes properly, exploring the ‘profound harmonies and symmetries of the divine grace’ that expressed the ‘inner logic of God’s creative and redemptive operations in the universe’.14
Theology as a science: the question of the object
Torrance’s basic approach to theology as a science can be summed up in two basic principles. First, theology is to be understood as a human discipline that aims to use human reason to produce, to the extent that this is possible, an ordered account of what can be known of its object. It shares this desire to yield an ordered account of things with other sciences, including the natural sciences. Second, theology alone recognizes the self-revelation of God in Christ as its object and hence as the sole foundation and criterion of its basic statements.
Torrance’s approach contrasts sharply with that of Wolfhart Pannenberg, whose theological project marks a reversion to the outdated modernist notion that a single research method can be applied to all disciplines.15 Pannenberg’s approach shows a questionable grasp of the methods of the natural sciences, complicated by his idiosyncratic notion of a ‘field’. Torrance, in marked contrast, has a good grasp of the methods of the natural sciences and a sure sense of their theological relevance.
Torrance argued that both these principles could be upheld while respecting the genuine differences between theology and the natural sciences, if it was agreed that all intellectual disciplines or sciences are under an intrinsic obligation to give an account of reality according to its distinct nature (Greek kata physin).16 For Torrance, this means that both scientists and theologians are under an obligation to ‘think only in accordance with the nature of the given’.17 The object to be investigated must be allowed a voice in this process of inquiry. The distinctive characteristic of a ‘science’ is to give an accurate and objective account of things in a manner that is appropriate to the reality being investigated. Both theology and the natural sciences are thus to be seen as a posteriori activities that respond to ‘the given’ rather than as a priori speculation based on philosophical first principles. In the case of the natural sciences, this ‘given’ is the world of nature; in the case of theology, it is God’s self-revelation in Christ.
Torrance thus maintains the scientific character of theology while insisting there is no generalized or universal methodology that can be applied uncritically to all sciences. In that each science deals with a different object, it is under an obligation to respond to that object according to its distinctive nature. The methods appropriate to the study of one object cannot be abstracted and applied to everything else. Each science develops procedures appropriate to the nature of its own particular object in which it ‘has solved its own inductive problem of how to arrive at a general conclusion from a limited set of particular observations’.18
Torrance here follows Barth, who insisted that it was not possible to develop a universal method capable of being applied across disciplines; rather, it was necessary to identify the unique object of Christian theology and respond in a manner consonant with its distinctive characteristics. Although the basic features of this idea can be seen in Barth’s earlier writings, it is set forth with particular clarity in his 1927 Göttingen Dogmatics. In this important work, Barth criticized the views of the theologian Hans Hinrich Wendt (1853–1928), who had argued that a ‘scientific’ knowledge was not dependent on the specific nature of its subject matter; more or less the same research method was appropriate for all intellectual disciplines.19 Wendt’s view was opposed by the theologian Martin Kähler (1835–1912), who insisted that the specific object of a discipline must determine its methods.20 Barth sided with Kähler, declaring that it was essential to respect the unique subject matter of Christian theology and respond accordingly.21 Ontology determines epistemology. Barth thus emphasized the divergence of theology from other disciplines, such as the natural sciences. Yet unlike Barth, Torrance envisaged a potential intellectual convergence between theology and the natural sciences, in that both are to be seen as a posteriori responses to ‘the given’, in which human ideas are correlated with a reality that is independent of the knower.
Torrance on realism in science and theology
As Torrance understands theology, both theology and the natural sciences assume and work with a realist epistemology. This important point needs to be explored further, as it is fundamental to any discussion of the relation of theology and the natural sciences. As we shall see when considering the views of John Polkinghorne in the following chapter, both theology and the natural sciences can be understood as an attempt to develop human ideas so that they provide the best possible account of a reality that is ultimately outside the human mind. A long list of technological developments, widely regarded as essential to modern Western existence, rest on the ability of the natural sciences to develop theories that may initially explain the world and subsequently allow us to transform it. And what more effective explanation may be offered for this success than the simple assertion that what scientific theories describe is really present? As Polkinghorne himself comments:
The naturally convincing explanation of the success of science is that it is gaining a tightening grasp of an actual reality. The true goal of scientific endeavour is understanding the structure of the physical world, an understanding which is never complete but ever capable of further improvement. The terms of that understanding are dictated by the way things are.22
The simplest explanation of what makes theories work is that they relate to the way things really are. If the theoretical claims of the natural sciences were not correct, their massive empirical success would appear to be totally coincidental. ‘If scientific realism, and the theories it draws on, were not correct, there would be no explanation of why the observed world is as if they were correct; that fact would be brute, if not miraculous.’23
Torrance is widely credited with having developed a rigorous realist approach to theology. For Torrance, true knowledge represents a genuine disclosure to the mind of that which is objectively real. Both Christian theology and the natural sciences operate with an understanding of knowledge that has its ‘ontological foundations in objective reality’. Any intellectual discipline is thus under an intrinsic obligation to give an account of that reality:
The concept of truth enshrines at once the real being of things and the revelation of things as they are in reality. The truth of being comes to bear in its own light and in its own authority, constraining us by the power of what it is to assent to it and acknowledge it for what it is in itself. St Anselm, who developed that further in a more realist way, held truth to be the reality of things as they actually are independent of us before God, and therefore as they ought to be known and signified by us.24
Torrance emphasizes the importance of ‘responding to reality’ as the hallmark of any truly scientific venture. It is both necessary and proper to be attentive and responsive to things as they actually are, and to ensure that we do all we can to give an accurate and objective account of things, in a manner appropriate to the reality being investigated.
Torrance’s approach would command wide assent within the philosophy of science. Physics, biology and psychology – to mention just a few examples – each have their own vocabularies and research methods, and engage with nature at their own distinctive levels. This point has long been understood and is not controversial. For example, consider the comments of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67), widely regarded as one of America’s finest nuclear physicists:
Every science has its own language … Everything the chemist observes and describes can be talked about in terms of atomic mechanics, and most of it at least can be understood. Yet no one suggests that, in dealing with the complex chemical forms which are of biological interest, the language of atomic physics would be helpful. Rather it would tend to obscure the great regularities of biochemistry, as the dynamic description of gas would obscure its thermodynamic behaviour.25
Oppenheimer rightly notes that each natural science develops a vocabulary and a working method that is appropriated or adapted to its object. There is no ‘universal’ method; rather, each science develops procedures that arise naturally from its field of investigation.
Torrance could have made more of this point, for example by drawing on the writings of Werner Heisenberg (1901–76), who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1932 for his pioneering work in the field of quantum mechanics. In his 1942 treatise on the ‘order of reality’, Heisenberg emphasized that exploring a new field or area of reality inevitably involved the development of a new language and way of thinking, adapted to what was being experienced and encountered: ‘Our thought processes will always develop a language suitable to the envisaged domain of reality that accurately reflects the way things are in this domain.’26
Torrance argues that theology and the sciences share a common commitment to a realist epistemology, to which they respond in manners appropriate to the nature of that reality. The precise nature of this approach cannot be set out in advance – and here Torrance’s implicit critique of the universalizing tendencies of the Enlightenment will be clear – but is determined by the engagement itself.
[Theology and the sciences recognize] the impossibility of separating out the way in which knowledge arises from the actual knowledge that it attains. Thus in theology the canons of inquiry that are discerned in the process of knowing are not separable from the body of actual knowledge out of which they arise. In the nature of the case a true and adequate account of theological epistemology cannot be gained apart from substantial exposition of the content of the knowledge of God, and of the knowledge of man and the world as creatures of God.27
Torrance’s vision of theology thus rests on a fundamental conviction that there exists a real world outside the human mind, which is grasped – not constructed – by human reason, which engages with each aspect of that real world according to its distinct identity and property. Torrance put this point particularly clearly in his Keese Lecture delivered at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in April 1971:
Scientific theology, no less than natural science, is concerned with the discovery of appropriate modes of rationality or cognitive instruments with which to enter into the heart of religious experience, and therefore with the development of axiomatic concepts with which to allow its interior principles to be disclosed, and in that light to understand, as far as we may, the rational structure of the whole field of God’s interaction with man and the world he has made.28
Torrance thus locates Christian theology within the broad spectrum of human attempts to engage the real world, while identifying and respecting its distinct nature. Christian theology can be understood as a ‘theory’, a ‘“speculative” penetration into the structure of things’ or a ‘refined “lens” through which we see into the underlying order of nature or rather allow it to disclose itself to us’.29
So why is Torrance’s approach so important? To appreciate its merits, it is helpful to compare it to the non-realistic approach to theology developed in a series of works by Don Cupitt, best known for his iconoclastic book The Sea of Faith.30 Dismissing any form of realism as ‘obsolete’ or as representing an uncritical ‘nostalgia’ for the past, without any attempt to engage the substantial literature within the philosophy of science that suggests otherwise, Cupitt declares that human beings invent their core ideas, including their methods of investigation and criteria of assessment. ‘All our normative ideas have been posited by ourselves, including the truths of logic and mathematics as well as all our ideals and values.’31 Reality is something we construct, not something to which we respond. ‘We constructed all the world-views, we made all the theories … They depend on us, not we on them.’32 This reluctance to engage seriously with the natural sciences, despite Cupitt’s earlier interests in this field,33 is both surprising and distressing.
In The Sea of Faith, Cupitt argues that Newtonian mechanics and Darwin’s theory of evolution have made it impossible to go back to earlier ways of conceiving and practising the Christian faith. Yet it is clear that Cupitt has tacitly accepted some form of scientific realism in making this point; otherwise, he would have to speak merely of arbitrary shifts in intellectual fashions, rather than justifiable changes in our understanding of the world. In his haste to dismiss traditional religious beliefs as ‘outmoded’, Cupitt seems to overlook the awkward fact that what he believes to render them outmoded – such as Darwin’s theory of natural selection – originates from outside the human mind and gains its credibility and intellectual force precisely because it is the way the world is rather than the way we choose to view the world. While claiming to reject realism, Cupitt implicitly assumes its validity in advancing scientific arguments against traditional theological notions. It is an impossibly circular position to maintain.
Cupitt, especially in his later writings, treats statements about God or moral values as arbitrary human constructions, reflecting the exercise of radical human autonomy.34 In contrast, Torrance insists that both the natural sciences and Christian theology are obliged to do their best to give an account of the way the world is, rather than imposing their own views on it. Theology is responsible, in the double sense of representing a response to a reality that lies beyond its control but that it is under an obligation to represent to its best ability; and in the sense that it is to be held accountable for those accounts of reality. Where Cupitt sees theology as the exercise of human autonomy (we create our own moral and theological worlds), Torrance argues that theology must acknowledge human heteronomy (we are constrained by the reality of God in developing our theological ideas).35
Natural and revealed theology
Torrance has much to say that illuminates the mutual interaction of the natural sciences and Christian theology. Perhaps one of his wisest and most discerning comments concerns the distinct approaches of theology and the natural sciences to the natural world. The natural sciences, Torrance declares, look ‘at the universe and its natural order’; what he terms ‘theological science’, however, looks ‘through the rational structures of the universe to the Creator’.36 For Torrance, the rational transparency of the cosmos allows us to see through it – and see beyond it – to grasp a deeper vision of God as its creator and sustainer.
This clearly raises the question of natural theology – the manner and extent to which the natural world is able to disclose anything about the nature of God. Torrance proposes what he terms a ‘reformulated natural theology’, which amounts to reconceptualizing natural theology as an integral aspect of systematic theology.37 Torrance sees such a ‘reformulated natural theology’ as being a necessary consequence of a properly Christian knowledge of God, rather than a necessary – though not sufficient – condition for our knowledge of God in the first place.
Torrance argues that Karl Barth’s rejection of natural theology reflects Barth’s concerns about the innate human desire to ground theology on anthropocentric foundations, as an assertion of human autonomy. Any claim to a ‘natural knowledge of God’, as Barth understands it, is directly linked to his belief that humanity seeks to assert and justify itself ‘over against the grace of God’, which inevitably leads to a form of natural theology ‘antithetical to knowledge of God as he really is in his acts of revelation and grace’.38
If all theology proceeds from God’s self-revelation in Christ, as Barth insists is the case, then there seems to be no valid place for natural theology. Torrance, however, argues that Barth is not denying the possibility or even the actuality of natural theology.
What Barth objects to in natural theology is not its rational structure as such but its independent character, i.e. the autonomous rational structure that it develops on the ground of ‘nature alone’ in abstraction from the active self-disclosure of the living God.39
According to Torrance, Barth’s objection to natural theology lies in his concern that such a natural theology will be seen as an independent and equally valid route to human knowledge of God, which may be had under conditions of our choosing. Yet this danger can be avoided if natural theology is itself seen as a subordinate aspect of revealed theology. In other words, natural theology is something that can be grounded on revealed theology rather than natural presuppositions or insights. It is something that takes place from within the Christian faith, in that its legitimacy is established by divine revelation, which also defines its scope.40 Natural theology thus has a proper and significant place within the scope of revealed theology.
Barth can say that theologia naturalis is included and brought to light within theologia revelata, for in the reality of divine grace there is included the truth of the divine creation. In this sense Barth can interpret, and claim as true, the dictum of St Thomas that grace does not destroy nature but perfects and fulfils it, and can go on to argue that the meaning of God’s revelation becomes manifest to us as it brings into full light the buried and forgotten truth of the creation.41
Torrance thus presents his notion of a ‘reformulated natural theology’ not as a correction of Barth but as the unfolding of lines of thought implicit in Barth’s own theological programme.42 Although Torrance’s interpretation of Barth has met with resistance from some interpreters of Barth, it offers a helpful perspective on how a natural theology can be reconceived in a helpful and productive manner, avoiding some of the concerns raised by Barth.
Why is Torrance’s approach so important? Overall, he draws out the parallels between theological science and other forms of science in a way that helps us see theology as an academic discipline among others, with its own distinct method, reflecting its own distinct object. It can thus lay claim to a legitimate place in the academic world, with a proper place in discussions about human identity and destiny. In particular, it reassures natural scientists that Christian theology is a discipline with a strong sense of academic identity and accountability, with an inbuilt commitment to engagement with other disciplines – such as the sciences.
Yet theology is distinct and cannot be collapsed into some generic concept of religious studies. Its methods are adapted to the specific nature of its objects of study. It articulates a specific vision of God, humanity and the world, which gives it distinct insights that allow it to bring to the table ideas that do not passively echo those of the natural sciences but genuinely add something to the discussion. This is central to the narrative of ‘enrichment’ both presupposed and expressed in this book.
Torrance both unfolds and applies a vision of theology, which has the potential both to engage the natural sciences and to add to the substance of their conversation. This is evident at many points but perhaps particularly in his approach to natural theology, which both secures its Christian foundations while at the same time mandating dialogue and engagement with the natural sciences. It is no surprise that this has been adopted – and also adapted – by a number of writers engaged in exploring the relation of science and theology, including myself and John Polkinghorne.43 This naturally leads us to consider the approach of the third of our practitioners, John Polkinghorne, in the next chapter.