ABSTRACT
In the first three chapters that constitute Part I of the book, we establish the claim that God’s self-disclosure in Torrance’s theology, instead of taking the form of immediacy, is the revelation and mediation of the incarnate Son Jesus Christ. We discuss the nature of Christ’s revelation and mediation in Chapter 1. Our discussion shows that Christ, being fully God and fully man in one person, culminates and fulfils the two-way movement, sets the union and communion of divine and human action as the normative pattern of revelation and mediation. We turn to dualism in Chapter 2, the treacherous threat to Christ’s revelation and mediation in Torrance’s opinion. Our analysis shows that Arian dualism and Newtonian dualism relegate God’s self-disclosure in Christ by separating the Creator from the creation irreconcilably. To Torrance the chief problem of dualism lies in the erroneous approach of interpreting Christ’s revelation and mediation; it gravitates the focal point from the centrality of God to humanity. On this note, Torrance advocates realism as the appropriate remedy as it pivots on responding in accordance with the nature of the self-disclosure of the objective reality. By building upon the theological foundation of Barth and taking the cue from the advancement of Einsteinian-Polanyian science, a realist epistemology of theological science is postulated. Thus, in Chapter 3, we examine Torrance’s understanding of scientific inquiry as the appropriate human action of knowing God in Christ. As Torrance has provided the answer to the human action, the question now is what will constitute the divine action of the normative pattern of revelation and mediation, particularly after the ascension of Christ. It is with the intent to examine Torrance’s response to this question that we enter into Chapter 4, the beginning of Part II of the book.
