In the text below, John McKenna reviews "Theological and Natural Science" by Thomas F. Torrance, a preeminent Protestant theologian who has made great contributions to the theological study of science. Taking each chapter in turn from a collection of essays that "represent more than thirty years of explorations," McKenna considers the work Torrance has done concerning "the relationship of the Word of God with the substantial contingency of the world." The review places a central importance on Torrance's regard for the 6th century Alexandrian John Philoponos, arguing that re-reading this ancient Grammarian can help relate "a Theological Science to a Scientific Theology."

John McKenna is a "Christian theologian deeply interested in the relationship between science and theology." He has taught in various universities and seminaries both nationally and internationally. He serves as Doctrinal Advisor to the Worldwide Church of God and Vice-President and Professor of Biblical Theology at World Mission University. He is also Adjunct Professor in Old Testament and Hebrew at Azusa Pacific University. He is also Adjunct Professor in Old Testament and Hebrew at Azusa Pacific University and Associate Academic Dean at World Mission University in California.

--Editor =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-

THEOLOGICAL & NATURAL SCIENCE

By

Thomas F. Torrance (Wipf & Stock: Eugene, Oregon, 2002)

Reviewed by Dr. John McKenna, Worldwide Church of God, Pasadena, CA

In his preface to this collection of his later essays, gathered together here by his son, Thomas Spear Torrance, Professor Thomas Forsyth Torrance seeks to rehearse the arguments he has made over the years on behalf of the 6th century Alexandrian John Philoponos. Here he sets the Alexandrian into strong resonance with his countryman, James Clerk Maxwell, and in so doing argues that the Church needs to take a long and hard look at its condemnation of Philoponos as she seeks to relate her theology to the natural sciences developed in our modern civilization. These essays represent in this way more than thirty years of explorations Torrance has made into the relationship of the Word of God with the substantial contingency of the world. As such, we are readily aware of an amount of repetition and overlap in the content of the essays. But if we do grasp the direction in which Torrance would point his readers, I do not believe any apology is necessary. The theological science and the scientific theology for which he argues throughout their concerns possess a relational unity we only grasp with much reinforcement and encouragement. I will attempt in fact to review these contents so that certain emphases in all their repetition and overlap are brought as fully to light as possible.

In chapter one, Professor Torrance seeks to explore the development of scientific method as we find it laid down at the Academy of ancient Alexandria. This method is represented by the works of John Philoponos as one utterly committed to understanding anything 'according to its nature'. This is the primary and fundamental principle employed by the Grammarian at the Academy, one which served him with great fruitfulness in his efforts to take seriously in the ancient world the significance of the Logos of God upon the science of his day. It is this principle, Torrance argues, that allows the science of Philoponos to resonate with that of Maxwell and later even Albert Einstein, whose epistemology is shaped and formed in our time under the weight of this principle. Because of this, Torrance can see Philoponos' light and impetus theories as forerunners to Maxwell's dynamical field theory for electromagnetism and Einstein's gravitational theory, reason enough to suspect that we would helped by removing the Anathema from off the works of the Alexandrian.

When Philoponos took seriously for the physics of the world the incarnation of the Logos of God, he had laid hold of the 'reason incarnate in existence' that Einstein later proclaimed as the realm of wonder and awe where religion and science must be understood as helpers to each other. The nature of our understanding of the nature of the world had to be grasped in the depths of this kind of reality, if we were guard against abstract or existential mistakes about them. The nature of both had to be respected without divorcing them utterly from one another. A relational unity obtains that requires both differentiation and integration. Torrance can identify this case with the theology he found in his mentor Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian. Barth sought always to understand the dynamical nature of the covenanted relationship between God and His People in His Creation in terms of the Being of God in His acts in history and the acts of God in His being with His Logos or Word in the history of the Creation. It is perhaps fair to think that Einstein never read Barth and Barth never read Einstein because of the lack of understanding between theology and science in their times. Perhaps a better understanding would have led them to a better integration of things. The Anathema of John Philoponos may have some significance in this case, who without confusing the Logos of God with the logos of the universe, sought to understand the contingency that was fundamental for grasping the reality of their natures.

A lecture I heard Tom give at the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton forms the second chapter of the book. I sat beside my old physics teacher, John Archibald Wheeler, listening to Professor Torrance express his deep appreciation of the science of Einstein, the great legend. The point of this appreciation is centered on Einstein's grasp of the importance of the 'why' question in physics---(warum die Natur so und nicht anders ist) . The 'warum' of the universe must become vital to us for real progress to be made. John Wheeler has called the scientific community to seek to do 'meaning physics' because of the importance of this point. We cannot be content merely with knowing 'how' the universe goes, but we must be able to penetrate into its meaning, where both moral and physical laws are found inherently in the nature of the universe. Such concerns have driven out into the open of our scientific consciousness the need to explain what ought to be and what is not self-explaining, when the substantial contingency of the rationality and intelligibility of the universe demands explication from beyond itself. It is this kind of epistemology that is demanded as we seek to explore with our modern cosmologies a rational unity in the world.

In chapter three, Torrance explores this kind of contingency. He would show us how overcoming the dualistic splitting apart of the intelligible and sensible dimensions of the realities of the universe, inherited from Greek Science and its marriage to Christian Theology, allows us to grasp afresh, according to its true nature, the truth of God's real dialogue with us in His Creation. He sees Philoponos as understanding the Cosmos of God's 'Good' Creation out of nothing as possessing a substantial and real contingent order and nature, so that the appearances or the phenomena of our experience cannot be explained by the use of either 'necessary' or 'accidental' ways of carving up reality. Philoponos in this way developed 'field' and 'particle' interactions in the development of his understanding of light and impetus with which Maxwell and Einstein can both be seen to resonate. The profound relationship between mathematics and physical law or nature is inherent in their efforts to grasp the reality of the 'field' and the 'particle'. Today, when we are struggling to resolve this problem still, contingency remains a challenging and vital concept for our progress. To integrate them into a unified field would indeed give a whole window onto the nature of the universe. Philoponos' dynamical views of the relationship between the 'whole' and the 'parts' not only effected his concept of the Creation, but also his concept of the Creator, the Word become flesh of God. The condemnation of his Christology reflects upon our misunderstanding of the dynamical ways that we may think about the relationship between the Creator and His Creation.

Here, the Christian doctrine of Creation out of nothing and the Incarnation are both important both for understanding the Light that God is and the light that is fundamental to the nature of the Creation and the experience of Mankind within this world. Torrance refers to thinkers such as Kurt Gödel, George Cantor, and Alan Turing to help us understand the compelling character of contingency upon our thought. The orders, unity, and complexity of the nature of the Creation are bound up with the speaking of this Creator. Its light and matter have been invested with a power we must respect, but this power is bound up with the power of the nature of the Creator. We need to be able both to differentiate their natures from one another while learning to integrate them into a whole that rests ultimately upon the life of the Word of God for them. With the works of thinkers as different as Soren Kierkegaard and Ilya Prigogine, we are led to understand that the nature of 'created time' has not been properly integrated into our struggle to find correspondence or complementarity between the physical nature of the universe and its mathematical properties. Here, Torrance points us to the notion of the 'redemptive' character of time for us as well as its irreversibility and ability to perish. It is within this struggle that we may appreciate the dynamical aspects of the thought of Philoponos, where uncreated realities assume a vital relationship to created realities and that which is inherently perishable may not perish.

To this character of Creation then we may seek to grasp the moral order of the universe as well as its physical nature. We may take seriously the question 'why' (Warum?). We may seek in this light to integrate what is or what is merely possible with what ought to be. Real authority, says Torrance, is bound up with the freedom to pursue this 'oughtness' in both science and theology. Science is certainly right to answer Wheeler's call for 'meaning physics' in our time.

Chapter four is an address given at Kings College, London, entitled Contingent and Divine Causality'. Again, the contingency of world reality is to be understood as a substantial reality over against any notions about the 'accidental' or 'necessary' nature of the universe. In this lecture, Torrance points to Richard Sorabji of Kings College and Shmuel Sambursky of the Hebrew University on the works of John Philoponos. Because of these scholars, Philoponos has begun to get the kind of attention that he deserves.

The concept of 'necessity' that we find in the world and the kind that we do not find in the world is vital for any understanding of the contingency of the world. In the Middle Ages, bound up with the idea of the Creator as the Unmoved Mover and First Cause, impassible and immutable in Himself, Christian Theology married to Aristotle's physics and Ptolemy's Cosmos, both Thomas Aquinas and Isaac Newton could conceive a kind of mythological relationship between the physical nature of the world and the world's relationship to God. Newton well knew that his mechanical universe with its absolute space and time could not apply to the Beginning of the world. He left ambiguous the relationship between the Beginning and the Mechanics of this world. But when we take seriously the doctrine of Creation out of nothing along with its affirmation in the Incarnation, however much the mystery remains, the ambiguity does not. As far as the relationship between God and the world is concerned, the only 'necessity' about which we can speak is the 'necessity' that belongs uniquely to the freedom of God's Being and His Act in Being with His Creation. There is this 'created necessity' that is bound up with this 'uncreated necessity' of the Free Will of the Creator whose nature's power to cause cannot be read off the surfaces of the created necessities we discover within His Creation. When these 'necessities' are confused with one another, much misunderstanding can occur, especially between theology and science. When we do not confuse them, however, and seek to respect both the contingent necessities found within the orders and freedoms of the Creation and the unity created by the Will of God Himself, then we can see clearly what Professor is after and his appreciation for the epistemic poise in the science of Maxwell and Einstein. They respect the contingency of the world as it comes for us from God Himself.

Especially in understanding the debates between Einstein and Niels Bohr may we gain some appreciation for this point. The development of General Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory as One Unified Theory is an effort to integrate the causality of a continuum with the non-causal and statistical nature of particularity in the world. Einstein insisted upon causality in the ultimate theory. Bohr could settle for an uncertainty principle and a principle of complementarity bound up with indeterminism. Torrance sees the debate as a movement away from dialectical entanglements and into a supra-causality that respects the real contingency of the universe. The unity of the world possesses a wholeness that belongs, beyond itself, to the will and reason of the Creator's Nature and Being as Word. Today, Einstein's longing for a unified field may not be shaped by anything he could imagine, but his longing is justified with all the efforts of our modern scientific culture. We can easily pray with Torrance for the being of our knowing and the knowing of our being to experience a deepened understanding of this wholeness and unity, when the Creator's interaction with the Creation is better grasped by our mathematics and our imaginations. The dynamics of the relations between God and the world are to be found in Mankind in an integration of both levels of reality---the whole and the parts as one reality.

Chapter five explores then the possibilities of our access from within the Creation's order of the Creator. Knowing God is not the same as knowing the Universe. Each is known strictly 'according to its nature', the divine as divine reality, the natural as natural reality. Torrance again turns to Alexandria and the dogmas of the sciences developed there, the scientific theologies of Athanasius, Cyril, and Philoponos especially. Against the polytheism and Aristotelianism popular in the Graeco-Roman Empire, the biblical doctrine of God as One God and the Creator of the one cosmos as contingent upon His will in its form and content allowed Christian Theology to develop over against the Ptolemaic Cosmology and Physics common among thinkers. John Philoponos especially attacked the understanding of the Cosmos as Eternal and the notion of the divinity of the logos of the heavens, with its fifth substance, to think of the whole of the heavens and the earth as one created reality as coming from the hand of the Word of God. The split between the intelligible world of the heavenlies and the sensible world of the temporal realities experience on earth was to be denied our understanding of the Cosmos as the Cosmos of the Logos of God. In this attack, Philoponos developed a theory of the created light of the Cosmos as bound up freely and contingently with the uncreated light of God Himself. It was in accordance with this light that Philoponos also conceived of his impetus theory of motion, which would become so influential with the works of Copernicus and Galileo and Newton. But most importantly, it allowed the Alexandrian to conceive of a real relationship between the uncreated Spirit of God and the created spirit of Mankind in the Cosmos. It was in this way that we must seek to understand the correspondence between the Eternity of God and the Time of Mankind in the world. Obviously, he called for what we may speak of as differentiation in unity in order to grasp the dynamical relations here. We must distinguish the one from the other without divorcing them from each other. The creative power and creativity of the Word of God must be understood, in this case, from Beginning to End.

It is my belief that the difficulty in understanding the dynamical nature of this correspondence that eventually saw Philoponos condemned by the Byzantine Church in the East. The dynamics of integrating the whole of the divine nature with the whole human nature in the Person of Jesus Christ, according to Philoponos, sounded in the ears of others like Tritheism or Monophysicism. My book The Setting in Life of 'The Arbiter' by John Philoponos argues that this is mistake of epoch making proportions. Professor Torrance has helped overturn this mistake in our time, when he relates Philoponos beyond Galileo and Newton to Faraday and Maxell and Einstein. One wonders with him that, if Barth and Einstein could have read one another, how much further we would be along in developing a capacity to relate a Theological Science to a Scientific Theology. When I visited Tom most recently in a nursing home in Edinburgh, he wondered out loud what Barth would think of the direction in which he has taken his understanding of his Church Dogmatics. Surely, the physical and mathematical nature of the universe, unable to explain their meaning to us, must come to be grasped in all of their depths as the universe which Barth believed was the universe of the Word of God!

The sixth chapter integrates directly the life and thought of John Philoponos in Sixth Century Alexandria in a short essay. Torrance rehearses again Philoponos' reliance upon Athanasius and Cyril, and upon Basil of Caesarea as well. A full bibliography of recent work and some 16th century translations is provided here. It is claimed that the science developed by Philoponos undergirds what we are presently experiencing in our modern scientific culture. But we will not realize all the potential of the possibilities here until we are willing to take seriously the relationship of the Incarnation of the Logos of God to the Creation of God. Again, creation out of nothing, the rational contingency of the substantial intelligibility of its reality, and the need for transcendent as well as immanent orders open beyond the contingent to the non-contingent reality of God Himself must be respected in our thought. The created light of the universe and the fundamental impetus of motion in the world belong to a unity as bound up with the Uncreated Light and Power of the Creator. This Logos of this Light is embodied in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, who as the Son of His Father participated with Him in the Beginning. In this way, the Wisdom and Word of God are found as One God, Creator of the All. This is the foundation upon which Philoponos sought to build his understanding of the architecture of Moses' confession of the Creation. Torrance argues that this foundation is nothing but the Orthodox Confession of the early Church. Tom quotes my translation of a letter Philoponos wrote to the Emperor Justinian, where we can clearly understand Philoponos not as a trashiest or heretical monophysite, but as a scientist a Christian believer seeking to integrate the Incarnation with the Triune God as the Creator of the Cosmos. It continues to amaze me that so much misunderstanding prevails about Philoponos even with us today. John Philoponos sought to develop his science 'according to the nature' of any reality to which we are called to attend, and the nature of the Creator and Redeemer of the All that created reality is must be attended to through the One Reality that is the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father by the Spirit of the Holy God.

Chapter seven repeats the argument Torrance makes for the strong resonance of Philoponos' thought with that of James Clerk Maxwell at the Pascal Centre in Canada. Torrance once more lays down the fundamentals for developing a real grasp of the depths of our 'scientific methodology'. The reader will appreciate by this time the importance of the principle of 'according to nature' in science. The dynamical way in which epistemology and cosmology and God are to be related to one another would establish a correspondence or complementarities between them that takes the knowing of our being quite beyond any self-centered notion we might like to retain about the wholeness of the universe in relations with Man and God. An open-structured dynamic is to be contemplated in which each 'nature' is respected for what it actually is in relationships with one another. The regulative impact of the created and creative character of relations between the contingent and the non-contingent requires an attention that we must not allow to escape our attention without real consequences. Mythologies, phantoms, and aberrations of every kind and all sorts can occur without this attention. Our being and existence in this world very much depends upon a proper understanding of the relationship between our theology and our cosmologies, etc.

Then chapters eight and nine give the reader personal accounts of Professor Torrance's relations with Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian physical and social scientist escaped from Communism to the West, and the Vatican. Torrance considers Polanyi to have made a major contribution towards our understanding of Einstein's Relativity Theory and the role of the transcendent in the ontological and epistemological aspects in the character of our scientific methods. His work with the Vatican has made him hopeful that, like the Greek Orthodox Church, Rome will eventually lift the Anathema from off of Philoponos. These go a long way towards understanding our need for understanding the relationship between a Scientific Theology and a Theological Science. I like to think that what Professor Torrance has accomplished does take the Church Dogmatics of Karl Barth in a direction that will interest readers, beyond his contradiction of 'natural theology', into a real appreciation for the epistemic poise Barth attempted to maintain throughout his work and its value in relationship with our scientific culture. Certainly, Torrance is right to call for the better understanding of these relations.

For many readers, many Greek terms like much mathematics can make this book seem daunting. Also, we are in the process of correcting errors in going from the essays of lectures to book form. In any case, Philoponos cannot make for easy reading. Torrance does not make for easy any more than Barth or Einstein make for easy reading. Some exercise of human will is required. But I believe that the many insights found in this book will reward any reader for such use of his or her attention.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This discussion list, SOPHIA, is hosted by Metanexus Online . The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Metanexus or its sponsors.

Metanexus welcomes submissions between 1000 to 3000 words of essays and book reviews that seek to explore and interpret science and religion in original and insightful ways for a general educated audience. Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for acceptable essays. Please send all inquiries and submissions to editor@metanexus.net. Metanexus consists of a number of topically focused forums (Anthropos, Bios, Cogito, Cosmos, Salus, Sophia, and Techne) and periodic HTML enriched composite digests from each of the lists.

Copyright notice: Except when otherwise noted, articles may be forwarded, quoted, or republished in full with attribution to the author of the column and "Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science". Republication for commercial purposes in print or electronic format requires the permission of the author. Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 by Metanexus Institute.

To unsubscribe from this list: Send an email message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.METANEXUS.NET. In the body of your email, write: UNSUB SOPHIA. This method requires verification by an email sent to your address.

Published   2004.05.13