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Science, Theology, Unity
By Thomas F. Torrance

It has been asserted that modern science and the scientific spirit are the creative achievement of the Reformation. That claim is not without its justification. The Reformers had a passionate belief in the truth and a readiness to sacrifice pleasant illusions and traditional preconceptions for the sake of the truth. They were determined to let the truth declare itself to them, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Out of this there grew a way of knowing in which people were determined to be real in their thinking, that is, to think in the way the facts compelled them to think, or to think in accordance with the nature of the given reality. That way of knowing, which now dominates the modern world, is what we call science.

Many people, of course, use the word " science" in a narrow sense, to refer only to the kind of knowledge we require in order to use things, and so they restrict "science" almost entirely to natural science. But the term "science" can be used in a more basic way to speak of the kind of knowledge we get when we seek to know something strictly in accordance with its own nature and activity. In this basic sense it is used of the social sciences as well as the natural sciences, and more properly of the pure sciences than the applied sciences.

I

In the basic sense, science refers to the kind of knowledge which is forced upon us when we are true to the facts we are up against.

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Here we do not think in the way we want to think, but in the way we have to think if we are to do justice to the "object" we are investigating. If a man in a restaurant insists that he sees pink elephants sitting at the other tables, you know that he has become temporarily irrational for he is not thinking in accordance with what is "out there." The rational person, free though he is, thinks as he is compelled to think by the external world. Science is a rigorous extension of that rationality in which we distinguish what is "out there" from our own subjective "images." In science we ask questions and answer them under the compulsion of what is "over against us," and so let our thoughts take shape in accordance with the nature of what we experience and under its pressure upon us.

Scientific thinking is not free thinking, but thinking bound to its chosen object, thinking which develops special modes of inquiry and proof appropriate to the nature of that object. Because a special science is bound to its own field in that way, it will not allow another department of knowledge working in quite a different field to dictate to it on its own ground, either in prescribing its methods or in predetermining its results. Rather does each science allow its own subject-matter to determine how knowledge of it is to be developed and tested, for method and subject-matter are not to be separated. Edmund Husserl, the great philosopher, used to speak of a positive science of this kind (e.g., physics) as a "dogmatic science." In a dogmatic science, the scientist holds to be true only what he is compelled to think, as he lets the pattern and nature of what he is investigating impose themselves on his own mind. He is not being dogmatical when he does that; he is humbly submitting his mind to the facts and their own inner logic. Thus the physicist is not free to think what he likes. He is bound to his proper object and compelled to think of it in accordance with its nature, as it becomes revealed under his questioning.

In the same sense, and in the same modern tradition that gave rise to modern science, Reformed thought has developed the science of dogmatic theology. In the set of theological disciplines, dogmatics is "the pure science" in which we are concerned to penetrate down to the basic realities about which we must give an account and which we are compelled to think out in accordance with their own nature and the basic principles we derive from them. In dogmatics, then, theology is bound to its given object, God's Word addressed to us in

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Jesus Christ, and develops its understanding of it in accordance with its nature and with the way in which it is actually disclosed to us in history. In dogmatics we do not engage in free thinking, or in arbitrary speculation, or in the invention of our own images, but in a thinking that is controlled and tested in accordance with the given facts and their own basic forms. The "facts," of course, are of a different kind from those which we have, for example, in astrophysics, as different as the nature of God is from the nature of a star. Hence the way of knowing and the way of demonstration employed by theology are very different from that of astrophysics. In its own field, dogmatics insists that the reason must behave in accordance with the nature of its divine Object, God in his self-revelation; to allow anything else would be quite irrational and arbitrary, and so unscientific.

II

When Reformed theologians at the end of the sixteenth century first developed positive theology as a dogmatic science (it was they who coined the term "dogmatics"), they rejected two primary principles in Roman Catholic theology. First, they rejected the idea that the criterion of truth is lodged in the subject of the knower or interpreter. In all interpretation of the Scriptures, for example, we are thrown back upon the truth of the Word of God which we must allow to declare itself to us as it calls in question all our preconceptions or vaunted authorities. The Reformed theologians had to fight for this on a double front: against the humanist thinkers who held the autonomous reason of the individual to be the measure of all things, and against the Roman theologians who claimed that the Roman Church (the collective subject) was the supreme judge of all truth. What Reformed theology did was to transfer the center of authority from the subject of the interpreter (Rome or the individual) to the truth itself.

Secondly, the Reformers rejected the idea that the definition of the truth belongs to the truth and is a necessary extension of it. This idea had long been developed by the Canon lawyers and then by the Nominalist theologians (who formed the great majority at the Council of Trent), and it remains inherent in the claim that, whenever the Roman Church officially defines a truth, the definition becomes an extension of the truth, and, as such, is so binding that acceptance of it is necessary for salvation. The Reformed theo-

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logians, however, insisted that definitions or formulations of the faith are only fallible human statements that are intended to point to the truth and must never be confused with the truth itself; they can only be regarded as symbols which are always subject to correction in the light of the truth itself.

III

In steering a course between arbitrary individualism, on the one hand, and authoritarian dogmatism, on the other band, Reformed dogmatics was battling for the principle of objectivity that now governs all branches of disciplined, scientific knowledge. At the Reformation the principle of objectivity was given vivid expression in two doctrines: election or predestination and justification by grace.

Predestination means that in all our relations with God, in thinking or acting, we have to reckon with the absolute priority of God. By his very nature as God, God always comes first. Thus our loving of God depends upon his loving of us, or our choosing of God upon his choosing of us, and even our knowing of God depends upon his knowing of us. It is only by God that we can know God. That is the God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ. There are not two "Gods," one who comes to us in Christ, and some dark predestinarian "God" who acts behind the back of Christ and his Cross. In Christ, God's eternal Word or decree has become flesh, his eternal love has become man, and so divine election goes into action in Jesus. There is no other election than what we see operating in Christ's relations with sinners. Predestination, then, means that what God is toward us in Jesus Christ on earth and in time, he is antecedently and eternally in himself. The doctrine of predestination is corrupted when we project back into God the kind of logical or causal connections, or even the kind of temporal connections, which we have on earth, for then we make it into some kind of predeterminism or fatalism, which is very wrong, and quite un-Christian.

Justification by grace means that in all our relations with God, as moral or religious beings, we can never claim to have right or truth in ourselves, but may find our right and truth only in Christ. Justification by grace calls in question all our self-justification, for it tells us that whether we are good or bad we can be saved only by the free grace of God, whether we are old or young we can enter the Kingdom of God only like little children who do not trust at all in them-

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selves but only in their heavenly Father. But justification by faith in Christ is badly corrupted when we make our own "faith" the justifying cause, for then our own "faith" or our own piety usurps the place of Christ, and we are justifying ourselves. It is one of the great tragedies of Protestantism that so often justification by grace has been corrupted into a form of self-justification which easily serves to cover up gross unrighteousness. A striking example of that is the famous work of James Hogg, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which we see justification turned into its very opposite. This was exactly what the Reformers protested against in their day!

When we apply justification by grace alone to the task of theology or dogmatics, it means that we can never claim the truth for our own statements, but must rather think of our statements as pointing away to Christ who alone is the truth. Theological statements do not carry their truth in themselves, but are true only in so far as they direct us away from ourselves to the one truth of God. Justification by grace, therefore, will never allow anyone to boast of his orthodoxy or to dogmatize about his own formulations; for it means that all that we do is questionable and fallible. That is why justification is the most powerful statement of objectivity in theology, for it throws us at every point upon God himself, and will never let us repose upon our own efforts. There is thus an immense difference between dogmatics and dogmatism. The former expounds the realities of God's self-revelation in accordance with their own objective forms. The latter works with subjective prejudices and untested opinions.

IV

Now we have to ask how the Roman Church reacted to the dogmatic science of the Reformed theologians. In due course the Romans themselves began to engage in dogmatics, but they meant something very different by it. Dogmatics, in their view, was the systematic account of the historic statements of the Councils and Creeds (what Reformed theology calls "Symbolics"), and of the canonical definitions and authoritative pronouncements of the Roman Church on matters of faith. It was "dogmatics" of this kind that gave rise to the notion of dogmatism, that is, a way of thinking based on principles not tested by scientific questioning but backed only by the authority of the church.

In our day, however, Roman Catholic theologians have been try-

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ing to write dogmatics in the Reformed style, building up positive knowledge of God upon a biblical basis, and testing everything in it by reference to the Word and truth of God disclosed to us through the biblical revelation. In view of this, it is not difficult to see the far-reaching importance of the statement by the late Pope John XXIII, at the opening of the Vatican Council, when he drew a clear distinction between the substance of the faith and its many formulations. This means that the formulations of the faith find their justification only in so far as they serve the substance of the faith itself and are open to modification and correction in the light of it. If Roman theologians are prepared to take this seriously, then it would mean that a new Roman dogmatics and Reformed dogmatics could engage in real dialogue at last through common subjection of all our own ideas to the one truth and Word of God.

In such a dialogue, justification by grace alone would assume paramount importance, as we can already see in the dialogue between Karl Barth and Hans Küng. For Romans, justification will serve to call in question their authoritarianism; for Protestants, it will serve to call in question their free thinking individualism; for both, it will mean a readiness to submit to the masterful objectivity of the truth of God as it is in Christ Jesus.

If dogmatics is the positive science in which we bring to view the basic forms of theological thinking in accordance with which we are compelled to think, if we are to be faithful to the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ, then dogmatics properly pursued cannot but lead to agreement. Theological disagreements derive to a very large extent from an uncritical and unscientific approach to the basic forms of theological thinking. But if theologians in all the churches all over the world will determine to let their thinking be governed by the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ above everything else, then there would surely take place such an immense and powerful clarification of the basic forms of our theological thinking that we would be compelled into fundamental agreement that was both strictly theological and strictly scientific.