A Loud Absence: T.F. Torrance in the Light of Stephen Holmes (Part Three): Stories Theologians Tell

In our last post we claimed that Torrance—whatever high merits his concept of the co-quality (homoousion) of Father, Son, and Spirit has for systematic theology—has a tendency to idealize some of the muddy waters of the historical process by retroactively utilizing a later criterion to judge earlier formulation.  More precisely: Torrance absolutizes the far-end of a historical process of development by using a fully-orbed concept of homoousion, tracing a historical lineage or “hall of heroes” that Torrance in turn utilizes for his own theological expression. As Morwenna Ludlow puts it: “Torrance constructs a line of what one might call Trinitarian heroes extending from the earliest discussions of the idea of a triune God via Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus to Calvin, and thence to Barth.  He thus … supports his argument ... by placing Nazianzen in a tradition or family of theological antecedents and descendants of whom Torrance approves.”[1] 

In pointing this out, it might be misunderstood that we mean that we believe Torrance to be uniquely guilty here, or perhaps uniquely culpable.  By no means.   As Wolfhart Pannenberg puts it, this phenomenon is unavoidable: “Historical research in dogmas and theology has shown that in every developmental phase of Christian thought, from early Christianity onwards, theological reflection has never left the content of the tradition undisturbed.  It has always altered it, even in situations in which theologians want to say the same thing as the tradition.” [2]

In fact, both among historical and systematic theologians, Torrance is in good company.  Aloys Grillmeier, in the first volume of his magisterial Christ in Christian Tradition has been critiqued—despite its brilliance and encyclopedic learning—for elevating the Council of Chalcedon in a way that Torrance similarly elevates the homoousion as a guiding historical criterion.  Thus, for Grillmeier, the history leading up to Chalcedon is parsed as a series of false-starts, dead-ends, or proto-Chalcedonian logic.[3]  

To do so is again from a standpoint of systematic theology plausible.  But from a historical standpoint it not only skews the history under investigation by foisting our own later concerns on to earlier periods, it can easily as such mis-categorize thinkers.  It is like the oft-heard fallacy that Origen “taught subordinationism.”  Now, it is certainly true that Origen’s thought ends up in subordinationism (that is, that in some sense the Son is ontologically lesser than the Father, and the Spirit even more so).  But to describe him in this way mistakes his own intentions and concerns for our categories that have been created after-the-fact.  Origen, probably to the surprise of many, was attempting to argue for a supremely strong ontological continuity between Father and Son.[4]  That he failed to achieve as much can really only be asserted from a post-Nicene vantage point.

Among systematic theologians, Torrance is likewise in good company.  Daniel Castelo observes regarding (for example) the “suffering God” debate that: “Historical narrations of the shift [to a passible God] have ensued with the purposes of establishing some sort of continuity with the received tradition, but interestingly enough the assessment of the change has occurred post factum to divine passibility’s establishment as the biblical and conceptual norm.”  In other words, “the impulse to affirm ‘a suffering God’ was often applied to, rather than generated from, the inquiry itself, thereby skewing the ensuing historical findings and reconstructions.”[5]  Historiographically speaking, the concept of a suffering God is a solution in search of a problem.  Paul Gavrilyuk has recently concluded much the same: “Patristic theology did not face a choice between the apathetic deity of the philosophers and the suffering God of the Bible, because these views of God represent questionable scholarly constructs, rather than the actual theological options available to the theologians of late antiquity.”[6]    

This has occurred as well among explicitly Trinitarian scholarship (as will become important in the next post).  Aristotle Papanikolaou points out that both Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas—two important Eastern Orthodox figures in the revitalization of the Trinity in the 20^th century—“illustrate the realism of divine-human communion, [by] construct[ing] a history of Eastern and Western patristic thought.”[7]  And though Papanikolaou is a very sympathetic interpreter, he notes “these histories … are often too simplistic and texts are often interpreted in such a way as to be forced into particular trajectories.”[8] 

Indeed, as we shall see in a moment, these histories—which often laud the Eastern path over the Western—themselves owe quite a bit to emerging self-critical Western theological historiography contemporary to their times of writing.[9]  But they are not alone, of course.  Colin Gunton largely follows an unstable mixture of Zizioulas, Torrance, and Jenson in blaming the West—and principally Augustine—for its woes of “Western” trends towards monism and (a typically Torrance-ian) attribution of “dualism.”[10]  Catherine LaCugna blames the Council of Nicaea (!) and post-Nicene theology for continuously divorcing the interconnection of theologia (God-in-Himself) from oikonomia (God-for-us).[11]  Eberhard Jüngel and Philip Clayton each in their own way narrate what they take to be the collapse of divine simplicity in order to find marginalized voices to construct an alternative concept.[12]  Likewise, Ludlow writes of John Milbank as a sort of anti-Torrance engaged in an equal-yet-opposite endeavor:

The dramatis personae of Milbank’s genealogies (Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart) are rather different from those of Torrance (Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzus, Calvin) but the underlying method is somewhat similar.  Like Torrance, Milbank’s method has the tendency to create not only theological heroes, but genealogies of villains which are connected by some fundamental theological or philosophical loyalty (compare Torrance’s ‘Platonist’ line of Origen, Basil, and Gregory of Nyssa, with Milbank’s ‘Aristotelian’ villains, such as Duns Scotus and Descartes). … [T]he structure of such genealogies is to give structure to Christian history, to delineate the contours of the development of Christian doctrine: they often presuppose a period of decline in Christian theology beyond which one has to stretch to a better age.[13]

Thus to peer at Torrance’s work with a critical eye to some bits of his historiography is not to single him out.  It is indeed to take an especially interesting—because especially nuanced—case to understand how systematic theological decisions can affect historical reading.  Thus in the next post we turn specifically to how Torrance’s prioritization of the homoousion may or may not affect his reading of the tradition.  This is not done in the presupposition that once this exercise is complete, history will stand clear and bare before us.  Historical reconstructions are inevitably contestable.  Yet this does not mean that accuracy is impossible to aim at, merely that there is no "once for all" goal line.  Historical investigation, like morning prayer, is an activity that must be repeated again and again to plunge in to its riches, and expose its missteps.

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[1] Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 33.

[2] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol.1 trans. Geoffery Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1991), 23.

[3] For one among many instances of this critique, cf. Sarah Coakley, “Does Kenosis Rest on a Mistake?: Three Kenotic Models in Patristic Exegesis,” in C. Stephen Evans, ed. Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God (Oxford: Oxford University, 2006).

[4] Jon Robertson, Christ as Mediator: The Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, and Athanasius of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11-37.

[5] Daniel Castelo, The Apathetic God: Exploring the Contemporary Relevance of Divine Impassibility (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 10. 

[6] Gavrilyuk, Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 172.

[7] Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being With God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), 10-11.

[8] Ibid., 154-155.

[9] Sarah Coakley, “Eastern ‘Mystical Theology’ or Western ‘Nouvelle Theologie,’? On the Comparative Reception of Dionysius the Areopagite in Lossky and de Lubac,” in George E. Demacopolous and Aristotle Papanikolau, eds., Orthodox Constructions of the West (New York: Fordham University, 2013), 125-142.; cf. 130-131:  “The notion of the West that Lossky then puts forth as the unacceptable alternative to his Eastern view, is— I would suggest— equally revealing of his own Western, Parisian context of the 1930s and ’40s. For it is hard, again, to read this anti-Western polemic without at least some echoes of the emerging Catholic resistance in France to rigidly rationalistic readings of Thomas and to the myth of a pure nature that could exercise itself in the pre-revelatory building of philosophical foundations for faith.”  Cf. Paul Gavrilyuk, “The Reception of Dionysius in 20^th Century Eastern Orthodoxy,” Modern Theology 24:4 (October, 2008): 707-724; cf. 714: “It appears that Eastern Orthodox theologians are fighting the ‘misguided West’ with ammunition borrowed from the enemy.”

[10] Colin Gunton, “Augustine, The Trinity, and the Theological Crisis of the West,” Scottish Journal of Theology, vol.43 (1990): 33-58.  Reprinted in Colin Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology 2^nd ed. (New York: T&T Clark) 30-56.

[11] Catherine LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and the Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), 1-205.

[12] Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought  (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2000); Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundations of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism. Trans. Darrel L. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1983).  Cf. Paul DeHart, Beyond the Necessary God: Trinitarian Faith and Philosophy in the Thought of Eberhard Jüngel (Atlanta: American Academy of Religion, 1999), e.g. 12: “for Jüngel, the philosophical and theological conception of God’s simplicity is centrally implicated in the collapse of traditional theistic models in post-Cartesian metaphysics.” 

[13] Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, 270-271.