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The importance of the doctrine of justification in the theology of Thomas F. Torrance and of Karl Barth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2017

Paul D. Molnar
Paul D. Molnar*
Affiliation:
St John's University, Queens, NY 11439, [email protected]
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Abstract

This discussion of the interaction between Thomas F. Torrance and Karl Barth first highlights how and why the doctrine of justification binds them together theologically, since each theologian applies this doctrine relentlessly to all aspects of theology. The article then explores how their views of religion illustrate their thinking. Finally, it considers two areas of disagreement between Barth and Torrance regarding the issue of subordination within the doctrine of the Trinity and the possibility of natural theology.

Keywords

Karl Barthjustificationnatural theologyreligionT. F. TorranceTrinity
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 198 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 Torrance, Thomas F., ‘My Interaction with Karl Barth’, in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), How Karl Barth Changed my Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1986), p. 52 Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 52.

3 Ibid., p. 53. He was referring to what Barth had categorised as Ebionite and Docetic Christologies that did not allow Jesus Christ himself to be their starting point and criterion.

4 Ibid., p. 54.

5 This was published in 1946 and reprinted by Wipf & Stock in 1996. Torrance's original proposal finally was realised in his two monumental works on the Trinity: The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988) and The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996).

6 Torrance, Karl Barth, pp. 1, 26. In an entry on Barth in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 2, p. 68, James B. Torrance attributes the latter statement to Pope Pius XII.

7 Ibid., pp. 61–2.

8 Ibid., p. 61.

9 Torrance, Thomas F., ‘Justification: Its Radical Nature and Place in Reformed Doctrine and Life’, in Theology in Reconstruction (London: SCM, 1965), p. 161 Google Scholar. See also Torrance, Thomas F., God and Rationality (London: OUP, 1971; reissued Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), p. 63Google Scholar.

10 Torrance, ‘Justification’, p. 161.

11 Ibid., pp. 150–1. See Torrance, God and Rationality, pp. 60, 69.

12 Torrance, ‘Justification’, p. 151.

13 Ibid., p. 152.

14 Ibid., p. 154.

15 Ibid. This is why, following Calvin, Torrance insists upon our union with Christ as the factor that enables our justification and sanctification. ‘Apart from Christ's incarnational union with us and our union with Christ on that ontological basis, justification degenerates into only an empty moral relation’, such as he sees in the Westminster Confession, which claimed that ‘we are first justified through a judicial act, then through an infusion of grace we live the sanctified life, and grow into union with Christ’ (God and Rationality, p. 65).

16 Torrance, ‘Justification’, p. 155.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid. See Torrance, God and Rationality, pp. 63, 84.

19 Torrance, ‘Justification’, p. 157. Torrance develops this thinking in detail in his Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), esp. pp. 76–7 and 121–2.

20 Torrance, ‘Justification’, p. 157.

21 Ibid., pp. 157–8.

22 Ibid., p. 158.

23 Ibid., pp. 159–60.

24 Ibid., p. 160.

25 Ibid. This shifts the emphasis away from a focus on our assurance, as happened with Luther, to the fact that what was done by Christ alone is and remains our objective and subjective assurance. Thus, as John Knox stressed, it is ‘not by any act of ours, even if that act be an act of believing’ that we are justified, since ‘We believe in Christ in such a way that we flee from ourselves and take refuge in him alone’ (ibid.).

26 Ibid.

27 See Webster, John B., Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 103 Google Scholar. Webster here is referring to Jüngel's account of justification, but he references Torrance as a further example of this ‘characteristic problem of Protestant theology’ in footnote 52 (p. 160).

28 Torrance, God and Rationality, p. 58. See also Torrance, Thomas F., Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 36–7Google Scholar.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, p. 163. Torrance maintained that ‘No one since the Reformation has applied justification by God's grace alone so radically and daringly to human theologizing as Karl Barth,’ God and Rationality, p. 68.

32 Ibid., p. 163. See also God and Rationality, p. 71.

33 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, ed. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75), II/1, p. 212 Google Scholar.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., p. 213.

36 Torrance, God and Rationality, p. 68. See also and esp. Torrance, Thomas F., Theological Science (Oxford: OUP, 1978)Google ScholarPubMed, pp. 47ff. and 198ff.

37 Torrance, Theological Science, p. 201. While Torrance has been criticised for obviating Barth's stress on the constant need for God to actively disclose himself to us in and through our views and concepts – e.g., La Montagne, D. Paul, Barth and Rationality: Critical Realism in Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), pp. 176–7Google Scholar – Torrance also insists on this very point when he argues forcefully that we cannot build up to a knowledge of Jesus Christ since that has to come to us as an act of God: Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Milton Keynes: Paternoster; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), pp. 2ff. and 36. The similarity between what Torrance says here and what Barth says in IV/2, pp. 119ff. is unmistakable.

38 Barth, Karl, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation, Recalling the Scottish Confession of 1560: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Aberdeen in 1937 and 1938, trans. Hair, J. L. M. and Henderson, Ian (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1949), p. 87 Google Scholar.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., p. 88.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid., pp. 88–9.

43 Ibid., p. 89.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Torrance, God and Rationality, p. 71.

47 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 523.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., p. 527.

50 Ibid., p. 528.

51 Barth, CD II/1, p. 159; cf. pp. 319–20. See also CD IV/1, where Barth carries this through, insisting that the necessity of faith is grounded in Christ and not in us: ‘it does not even remotely lie in faith in itself and as such. It is to be found in the object of faith’ (p. 747; cf. I/1, pp. 222–3).

52 See e.g. Barth, CD IV/1, pp. 92, 122, 130 and 492.

53 See e.g. Torrance, Thomas F., Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), p. 7 Google Scholar; cf. p. 120, where Torrance refers to Barth's statement that ‘The Holy Spirit is the awakening power in which Jesus Christ has formed and continually renews his body, i.e. his own earthly-historical form of existence, the one holy catholic and apostolic Church’ (Barth, CD IV/1, pp. 643ff.). Cf. also Torrance, Karl Barth, p. 25 and Barth, CD IV/2, pp. 614ff.

54 Barth, CD I/2, p. 280.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 Torrance, Karl Barth, p. 83, and Theological Science, pp. 25ff.

58 Barth, CDI/2, p. 280.

59 Ibid.

60 Torrance, Karl Barth, p. 83.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., p. 94.

63 Torrance, God and Rationality, p. 74. Torrance means by ‘prop-God’ the act of using God as an ‘external prop’ in service of one's own self-justification rather than receiving God as the One who confronts us in judgement and grace.

64 Ibid., pp. 68–9.

65 Ibid., p. 69.

66 Ibid.

67 According to Torrance (ibid.), it was this that Bonhoeffer meant when he called for a ‘religionless Christianity’.

68 Torrance, God and Rationality, p. 70.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

72 Barth, CD I/2, p. 354.

73 Ibid., p. 342.

74 Ibid., p. 343.

75 Ibid., p. 344.

76 Ibid., pp. 353–4.

77 Ibid., p. 354.

78 Gregory/Basil, Ep. 38.4, cited in Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, p. 238.

79 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, p. 239.

80 Nazianzen, Gregory, ‘Fourth Theological Oration’, XI, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, trans. Schaff, Philip and Wace, Henry, vol. 7 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 313 Google Scholar. Torrance notes this as well in The Trinitarian Faith, p. 239.

81 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, p. 239.

82 Ibid., p. 238.

83 Ibid., p. 240.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid., p. 241.

86 Ibid., pp. 240–1.

87 Ibid., p. 241.

88 Barth, CD I/1, pp. 413–14; emphasis added.

89 It has been observed that Barth ‘distinguishes between two forms of subordination within the Trinity’. First, ‘Subordination (Unterordnungsverhältnis) regarding their deity’ (CD I/1, p. 393), which Barth unequivocally rejects and second ‘the relation of subordination (Unterordnungsverhältnis)’ (ibid., p. 413), which Barth favours as ‘a matter of the distinction and relationality between the various modes of being of the one essence’. Johnson, Adam J., God's Being in Reconciliation: The Theological Basis of the Unity and Diversity of the Atonement in the Theology of Karl Barth, (London: T&T Clark International, 2012), pp. 73–4Google Scholar, n. 37. Johnson concludes by saying that ‘Barth reaffirms and more fully explores the nature of this Trinitarian subordination in CD IV/1, 200–10’, ibid., p. 74.

90 Barth, CD I/1, p. 415.

91 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 180. In Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994) Torrance says ‘the subordination of Christ to the Father in his incarnate and saving economy cannot be read back into the eternal personal relations and distinctions subsisting in the Holy Trinity’ (p. 67).

92 Ibid.

93 Ibid.

94 Gregory Nazianzen, ‘Fourth Theological Oration’, p. 311.

95 Torrance, , Trinitarian Perspectives: p. 66 Google Scholar; cf. also pp. 28–36, 118–20 and 133.

96 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 195.

97 See e.g. Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 199, and The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, pp. 146–7 and 163; Barth, CD IV/2, p. 357. Both theologians agree that ‘it is God, really God in Christ, who suffers and bears the sin of the world – that is the particle of truth . . . as Karl Barth once said, in the Patripassian heresy’ (Doctrine of Christ, p. 167).

98 Barth, CD I/1, p. 353; emphasis added.

99 See e.g. Torrance, Karl Barth, p. 201, and Christian Doctrine of God, p. 108.

100 In the rare instance where Torrance speaks of ‘a “before” and an “after” in the life of God’ he attempts to make sense of the fact that the incarnation was something new even for God. See Torrance, Preaching Christ Today, p. 69, and Christian Doctrine of God, p. 241; and Molnar, Paul D., Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 253–9Google Scholar.

101 Barth, CD IV/1, p. 209. Here Barth was inconsistent in distinguishing without separating the processions and missions, the immanent and economic Trinity, while Torrance consistently maintained that ‘the incarnation was not a timeless event like the generation of the Son from the Being of the Father, but must be regarded as new even for God, for the Son of God was not eternally Man any more than the Father was eternally Creator’. Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 144.

102 Dean, Benjamin, ‘Person and Being: Conversation with T.F. Torrance about the Monarchy of God’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 15/1 (Jan. 2013), p. 69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; emphasis added.

103 Ibid., p. 75.

104 See Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, p. 175; see also Molnar, Paul D., ‘The Obedience of the Son in the Theology of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance’, Scottish Journal of Theology 67/1 (2014), pp. 50–69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

105 For a thorough discussion of Barth and Torrance on natural theology see Molnar, Paul D., ‘Natural Theology Revisited: A Comparison of T. F. Torrance and Karl Barth’, Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 21/1 (2005), pp. 53–83 Google Scholar. While Torrance seeks to offer ‘a viable reconstruction’ of natural theology ‘in something like its traditional form’ – The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1980), pp. 86–7 – Barth insisted that ‘Christian theology has no use at all for the offer of natural theology, however it may be expressed’ (CD II/1, p. 168).

106 See Torrance, God and Rationality, pp. 133–4, Ground and Grammar, pp. 92–3, and Reality and Evangelical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), p. 34.

107 Torrance, Theological Science, p. 48.

108 Ibid.

109 Ibid., p. 49.

110 Ibid.

111 See e.g. Theological Science, p. 161 and God and Rationality, pp. 178ff.

112 Barth, CD II/1, p. 173.

113 Torrance, Ground and Grammar, p. 91.

114 See Torrance, Thomas F., Reality and Scientific Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2001), p. 40 Google Scholar.

115 See e.g. Barth, CD IV/4, pp. 27–8, and II/1, pp. 70ff.

116 See Barth, CD II/1, p. 207, and Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, p. 26. This is why Torrance speaks of the incarnation and resurrection as ultimates that cannot be verified apart from the grounds they themselves provide.

117 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, p. 54; Reality and Evangelical Theology, p. 26.

118 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, p. 52.

119 Ibid., p. 53.

120 Ibid., p. 56.

121 Ibid., p. 59.

122 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, p. 33. See also Reality and Scientific Theology, pp. 39ff.

123 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, p. 42.

124 Ibid., p. 34.

125 Barth, CD II/1, p. 84. In our discussion of Torrance's view of religion, we saw that he would agree with Barth on this point as he also applies the doctrine of justification. But the question here concerns one of consistency.

126 Godsey, John D. (ed.), Karl Barth's Table Talk (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1962), p. 20 Google Scholar.

127 Torrance, Thomas F., Divine and Contingent Order (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), p. 73 Google Scholar.

128 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, p. 54.

129 Ibid., p. 56.

130 Ibid., p. 58.

131 Torrance, God and Rationality, p. 41. See also Ground and Grammar, pp. 5–6.

132 See Torrance, T. F., ‘Faith and Philosophy’, Hibbert Journal 47 (Oct. 1948–July 1949), pp. 237–46Google Scholar.

133 Ibid., p. 244.

134 Ibid., pp. 244–5.

135 See McGrath, Alister E., A Scientific Theology, vol. 1, Nature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 264–305 Google Scholar.

136 Ibid., p. 299.

137 Ibid., p. 298.

138 Ibid., p. 299.