T.F. Torrance in Light of Stephen Holmes (Part Two)
A initial and general (or umbrella) critique that might be leveled at
Torrance by “Third Wave” Trinitarians, is that Torrance’s day job as a
systematic theologian often gets mixed in to Torrance’s judgments as a
historian. Jason Radcliff is, I think,
quite right in his perspicacious summary when he writes “Torrance approaches
the Father’s as a dogmatician and not as a patrologist. In essence he reads and appropriates the
Fathers Christologically, not historically.”[1] And Morwenna Ludlow, in her absolutely
fantastic book on Gregory of Nyssa, makes the same judgment when she writes
that many make the mistake of using Torrance as a historian of Patristic
doctrine when in fact “[his historical work] is carried out on partly textual
grounds, but also in response to broader questions being discussed between
systematic theologians.”[2]
Now at this point many may well say: “well, so what? History is important because of how it allows
us to intervene in current discussions.
We all do history with an eye to the present.” And I agree.
But here we focus on the weakness of this approach, which can often skew
historical interpretations which in turn
have systematic consequences. I
should say up front that I greatly like Torrance: he is brilliant, incisive,
and a great historian. And many might
take some of the following potential observations to be merely nitpicking. All fine and well. He was,
after all, left out of Holmes’ narrative for a reason. Lest we forget the very specific and modest
aim of these blog posts: it is to discover areas where Third Wave
Trinitarianism might disagree with Torrance’s reading of history (again: we are leaving to one side Torrance’s merits as a
dogmatic theologian). This is not to
call Torrance a bad historian—far from it.
It is simply to acknowledge that interpretations of sources have changed
and evolved since Torrance, who often relied on older sources.
Those caveats laid out, the umbrella critique above might
manifest in a variety of ways regarding how Torrance interprets the
Fathers. As Ludlow puts it the danger is
many miss that, in fact, “a
debate about modern systematic theology is going on in the pages of what many
people have come to regard as textbook accounts of the development of early
Christian doctrine.”[3] In part this confusion is due to Torrance
himself who opens The Trinitarian Faith
by saying that by “let[ting] the patristic theologians … speak for themselves”
the reader will be illuminated by the church’s “one authentically ecumenical
confession of faith.”[4] Let us turn to then to the examples.
1.) The absolute priority of the Homoousion. It is difficult to
overstate the importance of the homoousion
[Greek for “of the same essence/substance”] for Torrance’s theology.
The homoousion means for
Torrance that “God himself is the actual content of His revelation, and that
God himself is really in Jesus Christ, reconciling the world to himself.”[5] And though in principle Torrance concedes
that the word “homoousion” is not
sacrosanct, “it proved to be of astonishing generative and heuristic power, for
it was so well rooted in the source of the Church’s faith that it was pregnant
with intimations of still profounder aspects of divine reality in Jesus Christ
pressing for realization within the mind of the Church.”[6] Indeed even a casual reading of The Trinitarian Faith reveals that the homoousion is its thematically
organizing principle.[7] In fact Patristic scholar Frances Young
comments as such that The Trinitarian
Faith “it is not chronology but logic that determines the sequence.”[8]
Again: the homoousion may
in fact be a linchpin for systematic theology (I personally have been helped
greatly by Torrance here), but unfortunately accentuating its importance as far
as understanding theological history
goes, is both anachronistic and distorting.
As R.P.C Hanson memorably put it, originally the Nicene homoousion “was not a flag to be nailed
to the masthead, a word around which self-conscious schools of theology could
rally,” but instead “an apotropaic formula for resisting Arianism.”[9]
Jon Robertson notes that there is truth to what Hanson says,
but he does not go far enough because he still assumes a fairly monolithic
“Arianism, with differences within that movement being arranged in a single
continuum, from ‘mild’ to ‘wholehearted.’”[10] But this is no longer supportable, since no
one seemed very happy to accept the epithet, and indeed even those who
initially supported Arius shied away from many aspects of his theology.
Indeed, one of the problems that arose was after the council
of Nicaea, despite everyone signing on (in apparent good faith) there emerged
three radically different interpretations all with legitimate claim to the
Creed: Athanasius of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Marcellus of
Ancyra. “As [R.P.] Vaggione has pointed
out, homoousious in its original
philosophical sense was used to explain the souls relationship to the divine,
and described a relationship between two entities that had some things in
common but were at least superficially different. If Eusebius had this philosophical background
in mind, it is just possible that he could take the term as fitting in with his
own view of the relation between Father and Son as made up of ‘likeness’ and
‘unlikeness.’”[11]
But even this dispute over Nicaea and the homoosion came late in the game. After Nicaea, as Lewis Ayres notes, it is fifteen years before we even hear about
the creed again. Everyone on all sides
feared that it carried too many Sabellian and materialist connotations. He continues: “the fact that those around
whom the debate was now to focus had been strong supporters of Nicaea gives us
one obvious reason why Nicaea’s creed seemed problematic and useless to many.”[12] Athanasius himself (Torrance’s hero, of
course, and ours as well) did not even begin to appreciatively use the homoousios and incorporate it into his
polemic against “Arianism” until the mid-350’s due to the “shifting climate of
the 350’s and the structure of emerging Homoian theology.”[13] Indeed even then though homoousios carries obvious import as a gloss, if we were to look at
sheer frequency Athanasius seems to prefer terms prefaced with idios (“proper”) or autos (himself) e.g. idios-uios
(proper son) or autos-dunamis (power himself).
As such neither the council Fathers of Nicaea nor Athanasius
himself were working with any determinate sense of ousia or homoousios
initially. “Homoousios is thus defended
not by reference to a detailed understanding of what the term implies in
itself, but by arguing that it is an important cipher for other words and
phrases.”[14] Thus, as we said, it is not that Torrance is
wrong in putting an ultimate systematic emphasis on homoousios, but as far as historical investigation goes, to do so
carries risks of glossing and oversimplification of a complex and very
intriguing story. Indeed, it is slightly
ironic when Torrance notes the homoousios
overcame all the latent dualisms that he tirelessly critiques, when
Eusebius of Caesarea could (admittedly slightly uneasily) affirm it. It is only due to the late theology of
Athanasius and others that the Creed of Nicaea was retroactively accepted as authoritative within the bounds of a
given Athanasian interpretation. We do a violence to the historical sequence if, having understood this, we then turn the history around and try to make homoousion its own grandfather by baptizing it as a gilded pathway of orthodoxy leading into the later Athanasian theology.
[1]
Jason Radcliff, “T.F. Torrance in Light of Stephen Holmes Critique of
Trinitarian Thought,” Evangelical
Quarterly, 86:1 (2014), 24.
[2] Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 25.
[3] Ibid., 37.
[4]
T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh:
T&T Clark, 1988), 1-2.
[5]
T.F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of
God: One Being, Three Persons (Edinburgh:
T&T Clark, 1996), 7.
[6] Ibid., x.
[7]
But Cf. especially 110-190.
[8]
Frances Young, “From Suspicion and Sociology to Spirituality: On Method,
Hermeneutics, and Appropriation With Respect to Patristic Material,” in E.
Livingston, ed., Studia Patristica (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 424.
[9]
R.P.C. Hanson, The Search for the
Christian Doctrine of God, 172.
[10]
Jon Robertson, Christ as Mediator: The
Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, and Athanasius of
Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 89
[11] Ibid., 89-90.
[12] Lewis
Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach
to Fourth-Century Trinitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University, 2004), 100.
[13] Ibid., 144.
[14] Ibid., 142-143.
Comments