T.F. Torrance on Science and Theology

‘When the scientist inquires into the nature of the world, he does that not by looking at God but by looking away from him at the world, but when the theologian inquires into the nature of God as he has revealed himself he does that not by looking at the nature of the world, which God has created out of nothing, but by looking away from the world to its Creator. The scientist and the theologian thus move in opposite directions. The scientist is concerned with the created or contingent universe, so that he does not reckon God among the data with which natural science is concerned. And that is of course consonant with a proper theological understanding of the nature of the universe which God has created as a reality utterly different from himself but which he has endowed with a created rational order reflecting his own transcendent rationality.’ (T.F. Torrance, Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking, 48-49)

Cosmological Contingency and Logical Necessity: G. Florovsky and T. Torrance

This lecture was delivered in April 2011 at the Orthodox Theology and the Sciences Conference held in Sofia, Bulgaria.

By Matthew Baker
Fordham University, New York, USA

After long neglect, Fr Georges Florovsky is now finally again being talked about. Over the past two years, conferences have been held in five countries, a society has been established at Princeton, and articles are appearing in various journals – all dealing with Florovsky's thought and influence.

Some of this talk is highly critical. Some argue that Florovsky's neo-patristic hermeneutic must be, not extended, but transcended, left behind, if Orthodoxy is to rise to the needed engagement with modern culture. Given the crucial place of the sciences in the birth of the “modern,” it is interesting, to say the least, how little engagement with scientific thought one finds among these critics.

In contrast to these critics, the work of Alexei Nesteruk has recently shown us how contemporary physics and Orthodox theology in a distinctly Florovskian vein may be brought into deep and fruitful interaction. But there is another figure upon whose crucial contributions Nesteruk explicitly builds, who has also not yet received the interest deserved from the Orthodox. Of all 20th century theologians, T.F. Torrance's offering to theology-science dialogue is the most estimable, and informed by a profound engagement with the Greek Fathers. In a certain sense, the two approaches of Torrance and Florovsky are joined in Nesteruk's attempted neo-patristic synthesis of theology and physics.

This exchange is not one Nesteruk inaugurated. After meeting, probably at the first WCC assembly in Amsterdam, 1948, Florovsky and Torrance corresponded occasionally into the 70's. Torrance's published works also contain positive remarks on aspects of Florovsky's thought.

In the context of theology-science dialogue, however, it is on the theme of the contingency of creation that Torrance most frequently repairs to Florovsky for insight. In what follows, then, we will consider Florovsky and Torrance's contributions to our understanding of created contingency in theology and science, and then conclude by asking what, if anything, the respective approaches of these two theologians have to offer to one another as well as to the wider enterprise of Church theology.