Response to “T. F. Torrance’s Hermeneutic of Humility”

As Darren Sarisky shows, Torrance’s central account of divine revelation and human understanding posits a particular sort of synthesis between God’s essential epistemic transcendence of rational creatures and the person- or party-specific interpretative activities of creaturely response to God’s self-disclosure. Initiative belongs strictly to divine speech and action; divine self-communication enacts sovereign generosity that sets its own terms. Election and accommodation offer conceptual condensations of a vital point: creaturely recipients of revelation are beneficiaries of a uniquely free movement, determinants of its possibilities neither antecedently nor actually. Human beings are finite, incapable by nature of comprehending their infinite creator, the unfathomable source and sustainer of their existence; they have also come to be fallen, alienated, darkened in their understanding, prone to fashion idols in place of the one true God. Apprehension of this God is for them a miracle, procurable in no currency of their possession. In revelation, the parties are fundamentally impares. If certain models of interpretation are resistant to the point, or if certain theologies risk its compromise, so much the worse for them. Human knowledge of God is, for Torrance, party-dependent nonetheless. There is an “anthropological co-efficient” conditioned by the diverse situations of human knowers; there is also formation within them of an appropriate framework for knowledge. In the latter case, they are, in the nature of revelatory disclosure, worked upon, but they also bear significant obligations. Mystery revealed is encountered and responded to by faith in human thought and speech; it remains greater than human minds can deal with and confronts countless forms of their inadequacy, misapprehension, and recalcitrance. There is ongoing disruption, purgation, pathos; these knowing subjects continue to discover in personal, context-specific, and stratified fashion what it is to enter into and be indwelt by that which repeatedly confounds their presuppositions and remains beyond their measure or control. They learn to wonder and worship, to speak in conceptual terms, to find the import of those terms clarified and refined, and thus to yield to and be directed by an incomparable reality. In this lies human activity: tasks of mental submission and contemplation, the subordination, adjustment, and correction of ideas. These are “practices,” to be sure, but not exactly as others intend such things. At their core stands purposeful recognition of the irreducibly critical force of divine presence and the pursuit of dispositional pliability to the appointed instruments of divine speech, supremely the living and untameable Word that is Holy Scripture, heard in the Spirit’s power. Hermeneutical responsibilities are real; the most basic is humility. Sarisky raises some perceptive questions about the coherence and effectiveness of Torrance’s ways of holding together epistemic transcendence and interpretative activity. Central to these is a query about Torrance’s ways of inflecting human response as party-dependent. What might it mean to speak of response as affected by context, while at the same time insisting that theological affirmations are general, shareable, or ventured with universal intent? Is there a tension between apparent acceptance of the inevitable plurality of understanding on the part of interpreting subjects and a strong emphasis on a universally objective reality? Insofar as Torrance effectively acknowledges an ineradicable dimension to subjectivity alongside its necessary subversion, the suggestion is that his account of hermeneutical humility could be usefully extended by insights from critical philosophy. The ideas of Ricoeur on the desirability, as well as the necessity, of a plurality of interpretative frameworks might thus relativize Torrance’s Polanyian idiom of universal intent but also enrich his efforts to speak of the diversity of human epistemic situations and the judgements they render as they formulate faith’s primordial confession. There are a few things going on here, not least the issue of whether Torrance’s recognition of the effects of context or culture on Christian language merits appraisal in exactly this way amidst consideration of his dominant concern to emphasize revelatory objectivity and excoriate the evils of thinking from a center in ourselves. It may be that “party-dependent” as a descriptive category potentially serves some differing purposes, as indeed might the language of transcendence and hermeneutics at large. In a much fuller treatment, the idiom of reception, response, understanding, description, intent and so on—never mind “knowing” or “reality”—would clearly need to be teased out further in respect to an array of usages on Torrance’s part. Torrance’s openness to some expressions of trinitarian personhood or the incarnation but not others obviously illustrates his construal not only of humility but also of the media of authoritative revelation, and of what might be occurring in their responsible engagement. More would need to be said about Torrance on theological language; on what he might understand person-specific knowledge and confession of God to be; on its relation to evangelistic, scriptural, ecclesial, and sacramental means; and on his ways of framing theology’s associations with other discourses, especially the natural sciences. The relationship between Torrance’s debts to Barth and the perceived need for a “new” natural theology hovers over a great deal of what Torrance does and does not attempt. The possibilities and limits of Ricoeur’s potential supplement to Torrance on finitude and plurality could indeed also, as Sarisky suggests, be brought into a much larger conversation with Torrance on textual interpretation, especially the responsible “depth-interpretation” of Scripture as instrument of God’s economic presence. In Sarisky’s assessment of the strengths and weaknesses in Torrance’s account, the implications of the finitude of creaturely knowers perhaps loom a little larger than the implications of their estrangement from God. Creaturely intellectual limitation is certainly a significant element in Torrance’s theological epistemology and its entailments, but I would be inclined to say that, for immediate purposes at least, the fallenness of these knowers is at least as dominant a note in the characterization of their restrictions and the remedies that, crucially, they find. The depiction of Torrance’s sense of human interpretative obligations as a matter of human subjects reforming themselves in thinking, making way for what God has revealed, or permitting new networks of belief to take shape in their minds so as to allow the object to have its way clearly requires immediate delimitation. The transcendent objectivity of which Torrance speaks is majestic, determinative, self-securing. It is abundantly adequate to address the epistemic problems faced by alienated creatures to the fullest extent that could ultimately matter to them, delivering them both ontologically and existentially from the self-imprisonment (and immense dangers) of supposing that experiential projection of divinity, chastened as it may be, is all there is. Address these problems it does. Revelation is, in a vital sense, reconciling and redemptive movement in its noetic (then moral) effect; it is thus that the possibilities and needs, as well as the perduring challenges, of person-specific creaturely knowing are to be specified. As Torrance paints things extensively elsewhere, decisive human response, as well as divine condescension, is already in the person and work of the incarnate Son; human fellowship with the incarnate Son and human approach to the Father he makes known are also in and with him through the person and work of the Holy Spirit. When divine missions address the moral and spiritual, as well as intellectual, obstacles to the knowledge of God that God in mercy intends, the knowledge that follows is genuinely human—ours—but it is secured already for us in the Triune God’s self-movement to ensure it. In Torrance’s rendition, human understanding of God is enacted definitively in the humanity of Jesus Christ, whose uniquely faithful human response to God is of decisive representative and substitutionary consequence. In the one mediator, the Word of truth is divinely spoken; it is also humanly answered. The personal realization of the enfleshed Son’s human response—the vicariousness of which continues in his ascended state—is in turn effected by the Spirit within our diverse histories. Particular human beings of all kinds are drawn into personal relation to the blessing of Christ’s achievement for them; initiated into his mind, their minds are brought, in essentially transformative ways, into growing correspondence with the pattern of his obedience as knowledge proper. Thus does the Spirit enable the reception of divine light and establish its outworking. Divine self-disclosure does indeed secure its own framework for its human reception; it does so in ongoing transformation of active participatory subjects who live by the Son’s faith in the Spirit’s power. It may be, as some critics have suggested, that Torrance’s presentations of the vicarious humanity of the Word leave too little place for our human responses to him. It may be that Torrance is not right about the faith of Christ, about every aspect of our participation in him through the Spirit’s agency, or about other things besides. Such critiques must assess the transparency of Torrance’s soteriology to the contours of Scripture’s evangel, and to the articulation of a noncontrastive relationship between divine action and human responsibility. But what Torrance’s Christological and pneumatological approach to human understanding undoubtedly does venture is a resolutely theological exposition of the basis and nature of the salvific metamorphosis wrought in the minds of otherwise hopelessly estranged and confused human subjects, and thus of the boundaries of their interpretative work. The familiar cultural forms are brought to acquiesce, the false associations are shed, the possibilities of plural versus singular languages are determined not simply as the object is permitted to have its way, but as the mind is renewed and conformed – and so goes on repenting and, with awe and wonder, speaking. Torrance’s alternative to Rahner’s commendation of a nonconceptual knowledge of God as supposedly universal human experience crystallizes around the conviction that such an approach fatally undermines the sheerly radical arrival of the Word in self-defining and self-authenticating authority. (Rahner’s other perceived weaknesses on trinitarian language and on the freedom of divine economic action are not unrelated to the point.) None of this means that human interpretative action, in all its complexity and existence under the conditions of creaturely finitude and continuing brokenness, is cancelled. It means only that such action—what it reaches after, deploys, or conceivably achieves—is always, for Torrance, located aright as consequence of divine self-presence all along the line, and that presence goes on dispelling interpretative darkness, howsoever challenging the confession may often seem. This reality bears directly upon what Torrance is able to say about epistemic modesty, about the modification of concepts and language, and about human context and culture as a long way removed from theological fate. In commending interpretative humility, among other things, Torrance enacted a confidence that the metaphysical investments of classical Christian theology were not imperiled by the deliverances of modern philosophy or science but could render substantive account of themselves amidst later modernity’s richer explorations of acts of human knowing. Loving exposition of Christian claims about divine being and action served in part to identify and overcome modern (as ancient) versions of a fateful breach between mind and reality. Newer cosmology and philosophy of science spoke powerfully of the mental frame that shaped critical inquiry as distinct from fictive idealism; theology could demonstrate a rational approach alongside other fields of study in which the inherent nature of a matter was seen as necessarily determinative of its cognitive pursuit and corrective of falsehoods in representation. The doctrinal terms of Torrance’s theological epistemology do not always align neatly with other modern accounts of interpretation, and on the whole he engaged little with the possibilities of Continental philosophy and literary theory. Theological rendition took firm priority; its Reformed as well as catholic accents are clear. If there are certain tensions between his own investments or legitimate questions about aspects of their exegetical and historical anchorage, his work nevertheless demonstrates, perhaps surprisingly for some, the potential of a positive Christian theology to articulate a constructive relationship between hermeneutics and transcendence. As Sarisky shows, possible dialogue between Torrance and figures such as Ricoeur may be a further aspect of such an exercise, pursued in critical terms. For Torrance, a great many modern theologians, for their part, remained mired in one version or another of dualism, phenomenalism, or nominalism. He challenged them with vigor to think again. Insofar as the problems may not have entirely disappeared since his time, his work might be said to retain something of its provocative force.