A Loud Absence: T.F. Torrance in the Light of Stephen Holmes (Introduction)
“But wait a minute,” I hear you saying. “The Trinitarian renaissance was all about returning to the earlier tradition! Looking back to Cappadocian
personalism, or Richard of St. Victor’s proto-social analogy for the Trinity.” Well, yes.
But the difference is that Third wave trinitarianism has gone a bit meta
and has begun looking at how innaccurate historical tropes were themselves used to posit
and ballast constructive theological judgments about the course of history, thus affecting the subsequent shape of current thought.
I myself have undertaken such a project in my Th.M. Thesis, for what it is worth. Thus the third wave is self-consciously
historical: not just a “return to the Fathers” for new examination, but a “return
to the initial return to the Fathers” in order to understand what argumentative
goals, methods, and presuppositions were being used to account for the ensuing
skewed history and theological judgments—what Cyril O’Regan has recently called
“The anatomy of misremembering.”[2]
One of the latest efforts on this front of “Third Wave”
Trinitarianism is Stephen Holmes’ much discussed The Quest for the Trinity,[3]
which has turned into a centerpiece for contemporary Trinitarian debate, much
as one of its inspirations, Lewis Ayres Nicaea
and Its Legacy[4]
did a decade ago. Holmes’ book is
notable because he pulls no punches in his historiographical claims: “I argue
that the explosion of theological work claiming to recapture the doctrine of
the Trinity that we have witnessed in recent decades in fact misunderstands and
distorts the traditional doctrine so badly that it is unrecognizable.”[5] And that “I see the twentieth century renewal
of Trinitarian theology as depending in large part on concepts and ideas that
cannot be found in patristic, medieval, or Reformation accounts of the doctrine
of the Trinity. In some cases, indeed,
they are points explicitly and energetically repudiated as erroneous—even
occasionally formally heretical—by the earlier tradition.”[6]
There are few that have been left unscathed by this
Third-Wave historiographical blade. In
particular Colin Gunton, Catherine LaCugna, John Zizioulas, and Jürgen Moltmann
have been challenged in their theology precisely because the inner historical
hearts collapse on themselves under scrutiny, though many others are cited as
well. As Bradley C. Green writes of
Colin Gunton, for example, “his critiques of Augustine [and the subsequent
Augustinian history] are by no means adventitious to Gunton’s oeuvre but constitute his arguments in
an essential manner.” As such, if the
historical arguments fail, Gunton’s theology has cut off the branch it stood
upon.[7] This is ironic, argues Green, for ultimately Augustine could have been a valuable ally for many of Gunton's own theological sensibilities.
A noticeable absence among the wounded—which shouts again in
its silence in Holmes’ work—is the figure of T.F. Torrance. In fact the only time he shows up is in a footnote citing his essay on John Calvin’s theology.
So why the silence?
As with all arguments from silence, this is a tentative guess, but
Torrance’s work is more cautious and historically grounded than many other
systematic theologians who worked in the 20th century. In other words: Torrance simply does not fit in any neat, straightforward manner into the critique leveled by Holmes and others, and so
is left aside for the sake of more interesting (and freely roaming) critiques of the Trinitarian revival at large.
But this leaves us with what I think is an interesting question:
how is Torrance’s historical work on
the Trinity affected by current revisions in scholarship?
Like any enterprise, Patristic, Medieval, and
Reformation history themselves have changed over the years. This is particularly true for slightly more than the last half-decade in Patristic scholarship: lost texts have been found
and translated, texts once thought to belong to one author have found their
true home under the pen of another (say, attributing Basil as the author of
“Epistle 38” instead of Gregory of Nyssa, as is now commonly thought), and just
as importantly scholarly “tropes” which were directing historical inquiry such
as “Hellenization” or “Eastern and Western types” of Trinitarianism, even the
concept that “Arianism” is a proper designative label for anti-Nicene theology,
have been increasingly exposed as vacuous and over-generalized concepts that
are often less than useless.[8]
Indeed one of the overlooked narrative keys, in my opinion
(which I am currently writing a paper on, so if you are interested keep me
accountable and it might see the light of day!) is the importance that specific
contexts of the Patristic renaissance of the 20th century—with la Nouvelle theologie, the Russian Sophiologists
and their rejection in the neo-Patristic synthesis, and the Greek “Class of the
1960’s”—had on later Trinitarian reception of the Church Fathers. As we will see in our following post (spoiler
alert?) some of Torrance’s judgments about Cappadocian theology—particularly
Gregory of Nazianzus, may have “more to do with the 1980’s, than the 380’s,”[9]
when Torrance was in a debate with John Zizioulas regarding the most
perspicacious way to read the Theologian.
Thus the question we will briefly look at in our next post: how is Torrance
affected by current research? Is he also
cut by the blade of Third Wave scholarship?
In a word (or two): No. And also,
yes. He is not (completely) susceptible
to things like the illicit and overdrawn “East vs. West” division (more on that
in the next post), and he does not, like Moltmann and so many others,
completely misunderstand the tradition of God’s apatheia. So where, if
anywhere, does he run afoul of recent research?
Where would he be an ally? To
those questions we will turn. Though I will say this again, what we will be concerned with is Torrance as a historian, not necessarily as a constructive dogmatic or systematic theologian.
[1] Sarah Coakley, “Afterword: ‘Relational
Ontology,’ Trinity, and Science,” in The
Trinity and an Entangled World, 191.
[2] Cyril O’Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar’s Response to
Philosophical Modernity Vol. 1: Hegel. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2014).
[3]
Stephen R. Holmes, The Quest for the
Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History, and Modernity (Grand
Rapids: Inter Varsity Press, 2012).
[4]
Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An
Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University,
2004).
[5] Holmes, Quest for the Trinity., xv.
[6] Ibid., 2.
[7] Bradley G. Green, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton
in Light of Augustine (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2011) 9.
[8]
For a brief introduction cf. Sarah Coakley, “Introduction: Disputed Questions
in Patristic Trinitarianism” Harvard
Theological Review 100:2 (2007): 125-138.
[9]
Jason Radcliff, “T.F. Torrance in Light of Stephen Holmes Critique of
Trinitarian Thought,” Evangelical
Quarterly, 86:1 (2014), 32.
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