ABSTRACT
For Christians, the Bible is the divinely inspired human product of the early Church’s attempts to make theological sense of divine action, and human responses to divine action, culminating in the person and work of Jesus Christ. As such, it functions as a mediatory witness to historical events whose authority is not imposed from outside, but is intrinsic to the biblical texts themselves: Christians experience, understand and judge these particular accounts of Jesus as more powerful, comprehensive and truthful than any other account available to them. From the start, Christian theologians recognised that apprehension of the alethic truth claims embodied within Scripture required a theological hermeneutic capable of penetrating beneath the surface of the biblical texts and engaging with the ontological reality of God’s actions in history to which the texts bear witness. As a result, the Christian tradition developed retroductive models of its understanding of God, in the form of creedal statements which it recognised as the most powerful, comprehensive and alethically truthful explanatory accounts of the nature and actions of God currently available to it. At the same time, in recognising its creeds as the fallible products of human endeavour, it accepted the need to subject them to ongoing iterative refinement. The history of ‘dogmatic’ or ‘systematic’ theology is the history of the ongoing attempts of Christian theologians, working within the paradigmatic Trinitarian framework grounded in the Bible and articulated by the Ecumenical Councils, to deepen both its understanding of God and its understanding of the intellectual warrant for its theological assertions (Webster et al. 2007). In this chapter we will explore one instance of this ongoing history. As previously noted, the work of the Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance constitutes the first major exploration of the interface between Christian doctrine and critical realism. We will focus on his account of the epistemic basis and intellectual warrant of Christian truth claims rather than the material substance of his theology, concentrating especially on his magnum opus, Theological Science, delivered as lectures in 1959, though not published until 1969 (Torrance 1969). In comparing and contrasting the respective epistemologies of theological science and the natural sciences, Torrance sought to under-labour for the Christian community by reaffirming the inherent intelligibility of its classical Trinitarian doctrines and thereby recalling it to its proper object of worship.
