The theology of T.F. Torrance is a catholic theology in the true sense. Not only has he been in conversation with theologians from East and West, from the Early Church to the contemporary leading theologians, but he is also catholic in the sense that in general his theological convictions are in agreement with the great doctrines of the Ecumenical Councils. In that light it is the more remarkable that on a few, though not unimportant, doctrines he is in disagreement with the mainstream theological tradition. One suc
h point is his conviction that Christ assumed a fallen human nature, whereas the standard doctrine maintains that Christ assumed an unfallen human nature. Torrance, of course, had good reasons for believing that his adjustment of the doctrine was necessary. In fact, one of Torrance’s core motives is his resistance against a logic of reconciliation in terms of ‘external relations’. Sin goes deeper than that; it’s a matter of ontology. Our very nature is deeply affected by sin. Therefore, Christ’s redemptive work must be conceived ontologically as well. He assumes not merely our human nature, but our fallen nature, corrupted by sin. By doing that, from birth to resurrection and ascension, he heals our fallen nature.
I’m very sympathetic to Torrance’s theological intentions. However, there are a few problems with his point of view. To make clear what I mean, I will have to appeal to soms logical distinctions. Despite his being acquainted with the latest developments in science, Torrance didn’t make use of contemporary developments in semantics and logic. I will raise a few questions that emerge in applying modal logic to Torrance’s proposal. That doesn’t mean that these problems are insuperable. To eliminate these problems, however, some additional work has to be made. That, at any rate, is what I’m saying.
Let us think about the conception of Christ’s human nature as a fallen nature. The way Christ’s human nature should be understood, is of course a matter of great complexity and intense debate. But what is ‘a human nature’? Roughly it is something like this: ‘a human nature is the set of properties which are essential for being human’. The qualification ‘essential’ is important in this respect. My ‘sitting in a chair’ is not the kind of (accidental and contingent) property that is essential. What we mean by ’essential’ is not even a universal property, but stronger than that: a property which the person or thing in question has in every possible world. If we apply this to the way Torrance views Christ’s human nature, it raises several questions. Does he mean bij ‘fallen nature’, that ‘being fallen’ is an essential property? That however seems very implausible, because it would make the Fall necessary, instead of contingent. Torrance certainly couldn’t have wanted to claim that. Or could perhaps the distinction of Thomas V. Morris between ’kind-essence’ and ’individual essence’ help here? If we, on the other hand, interpret the ‘fallenness’ of Christ’s human nature as an accidental property, we run into new questions as well. How are we to understand that a nature consists not only of essential, but also (partly) of accidential properties? Moreover, it seems that Torrance needs more than an accidental property for his claim that Christ heals our nature by assuming it, because it would make the healing accidental as well. That is in congruence with the mainstream christian tradition, but does it sufficiently express what Torrance wanted to claim: a kind of ontological healing?
In short, the way Torrance speaks of Christ’s assumption of a fallen human nature raises several questions in the sphere of (modal) logic and ontology. But then, there is more to ask. For example, how does the ‘healing’ work? Torrance, for example, speaks of ‘sanctifying’ and ‘perfecting’ our nature (Theology in Reconstruction, 248). Somewhat more specific, he says that Christ is in the position to ‘transfer what is his to our human nature in him’ (ibid., 246). In another passage, he focuses on our willing, saying that Christ ‘laid hold upon our wayward human will, made it his very own, and bent it back into obedience to, and in oneness with, the holy will of God’ (ibid., 157). Despite the vivid imagery, new questions arise. Is it correct to speak of human nature , not only as having a will, but as willing (cf. an intriguing post on Out of Bounds last month)? Moreover, even if we grant that Christ somehow ontologically bent our human will back, into obedience to God’s will, why don’t we see much more fruit in humanity, in the past and present? How can we account for that?
Once more, I’m very sympathetic with Torrance’s intentions. But for the moment I’m not quite sure whether it is possible to give a satisfying explanation of his particular way of construing Christ’s redemptive work.
Arjen,
Interesting. I see what you’re saying, but I think TFT would simply resist the kind of analysis you are using to interrogate his approach. What I mean is that I don’t think TFT would succumb to the pressures that an Aristotelian anthropology provides in trying to parse an theological anthropology. I see what you’re doing, but what your doing sounds more like analytical theology versus the modified continental style that TFT operated from. It seems to me that this is probably why TFT comes to different conclusions than the ones you might be here. I.e. Because his prolegomena resists the prolegomena provided by classical theistic contours of thought.
What do you think? Thank you for this thought provoking post!
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Some food for thought: http://derevth.blogspot.com/2007/08/reflections-on-fallen-ness-or-not-of.html
It’s a bit dated (4 years now, wow!), so don’t hold me to the details.
Bobby,
Thank you for your comment! I appreciate that. I was aware of Torrance’s hesitance with regard to the kind of analytic approach I’m using here. Maybe, it can help to make a few clarifying remarks.
First, the kind of logic I’m applying is not Aristotelian. I’m using contemporary modal logic. I can understand the connection in thought with Aristotle, since that was the dominant interpretation of medieval and later scholasticism. In fact, Torrance himself is a representative of this line of thought. However, recent research made clear that medieval logic was in fact an emancipation of the old ‘Greek’ logic. I know that Torrance’s criticism of scholastic theology reaches far more than this and I do agree with a lot of his remarks. However, it´s simply not true to state that a scholastic approach is equivalent with Aristotelian philosophy.
Second, in one of his books (I think it is Theology in Reconstruction) Torrance speaks of the task of systematic theology as the ´hard work´ of thinking out the systematic connections of the different christian doctrines. If that is true, one can´t avoid posing the kind of questions I raised. The intentions of TFT are clear, as the quote on your blog shows. But my question remains, whether it´s the best way to conceptualize these intentions. I have my doubts about that.
Anyway, thanks for engaging in this discussion!
Arjen
Hi Arjen,
Thanks for the post (and the link!). I’ve been doing some thinking on this topic as of late, as well, and it seems to me that most everyone who argues for Christ’s human nature as ‘fallen’ would agree that this property is accidental and not essential to human nature — i.e. to what it means to be a human person. Either they’re being terribly inconsistent in arguing for fallenness anyway, or there is another place where they get traction.
I think that (pace Torrance) Ian McFarland is probably right to suggest that Gregory of Nazianzen’s maxim the unassumed is the unhealed is wrongly applied to fallen human nature in this discussion. He suggests that if the effects of the Fall are damaging to human nature, then they are by definition not constitutive of it. Christ could then assume an unfallen nature that is completely like ours (no docetic theophany), but without the marr of sin. (McFarland suggests ‘fittingness’ as an alternative: God did not need to choose death on a cross to save us, but it was fitting that He did so. Likewise, God need not have assumed a fallen nature to redeem, but in His Son He did so because it was appropriate to the work of representation. This, as you’ll know, relies in turn upon an argument that the catetgory ‘fallenness’ need not entail ‘sinfulness’ by necessity.)
I think this is right, but it’s also important to further interrogate one’s doctrine of the atonement to determine whether “like we’re supposed to be,” rather than “like we are in this unnatural state,” is sufficient for Christ’s vicarious substitution. Further, what does Paul mean when he says that Christ was “made to be sin” and “became a curse” for us? If he’s taken on sin in an unnatural and improper fashion, in order to put it to death on the cross, is this materially different from saying that the same sin is unnatural to the rest of us?
Best to you.
@Travis: thank you for supplying the link. It seems to be not dated after all. In fact, it offers some interesting remarks about (bad) physiology.
@ Darren: thank you for bringing in the quotes of McFarland. I hadn´t heard of him or of his writings, but what you wrote here, sounds very promising. What you add about the doctrine of the atonement is an important point. If substition has to be more than ‘role-taking’, it should be anchored somehow ontologically.
I hope your upcoming dissertation will provide us with more clues for a solution!
Arjen,
1) I wasn’t suggesting that the logic you were using was Aristotelian, but that the anthropological distinctions you are supposing are (e.g. essence/accident). On second thought though, these are terms that provide, at least, a heuristic value insofar as they provide grammar for us to try and make the kinds of parsings that we must (or must we?) in this type of discussion.
2) I also wouldn’t want you to think that I was saying that scholasticism and Aristotelianism are necessarily linked, lock-step (although there were some scholastics who were heavily Thomist or Aristotelian). Ironically the case can be made that Torrance himself is Thomist; at least I’ve seen McCormack suggest this.
3) I am all for using modal logic; I think my comment was a little sloppy and quick (like this one
). My concern has more to do with what I mentioned in my first point here. And that brings me back; what makes working through essence-property-accident categories the best way forward for working through this discussion? Is it because this is the best we’ve got in terms of articulating and thinking anthropology?
Anyway, I still have more thinking and reading to do in this area; but on the face, as it stands, I follow TFT and his ontological theory of the atonement.
Thanks, Arjen!
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Arjen, I would like to ask a few questions, but go easy on me because I don’t know much about this stuff.
you said, “But what is ‘a human nature’? Roughly it is something like this: ‘a human nature is the set of properties which are essential for being human’.”
In your use of essentials and accidents, I am understanding you to say that sin is an accident because Adam was a human before the fall, he did not need the fall to become human, therefor ‘corruption from sin’ would not be a necessary part of being a human.
I wonder though, is there not room for the possibility that sin, though being accidental, marred humanity so deeply, even in the mind, or the ‘will’ has been affected by, and so therefor has caused an ontological shift it what it means to actually be human after the fall? Therefor now it would be essential, though that was not always the case?
If that could be the case, then I think that would go around McFarland’s point, quoted by Darren, that Christ’s assumption of the fallen nature was ‘fitting’, because what it means to be human after the fall would mean to partake of a bent ‘will’, one that was not created bent, but never the less was, and so now that is how it is. Therefor Torrance would still be right in standing with Nazianzen, because if Christ did not assume a bent will, then He did not assume the will that we share in as humans and therefor would leave us separated from God.
What do you think?
Hi Cody,
Thanks for your comment. I can see what you’re aiming at. You want to make sure that the effect of sin will not be downplayed. However, the modal terms ‘accidental’ and ‘essential’ function somewhat differently. ‘Essential’ means not only that we are talking about an unchangeable property, but – even stronger than that – a property which is the case in every possible world. So, we are speaking about a defining characteristic of someone or something.
But, you might ask, doesn’t that lead us to an underestimation of ‘sin’? That’s not the meaning of ‘accidentál’, however. Before commenting here, I was reading about a man who was beaten, humiliated and so forth in his youth, by his father. These are facts with tremendous consequences. It deeply influences the way one behaves, thinks, feels, etc. However, ontologically spoken, things could’ve gone differently. In that way these events are ‘accidental’. He could have had a loving and caring father. That’s the sense of ‘accidental’. So, it must be clear that ‘accidental’ doesn’t have the meaning of being less serious or important.
So, according to me, we can maintain that sin is an accidental property, while at the same time maintaining that sin has enormous consequences for human beings. Sin indeed affects our willing, thinking, behaving, our position vice versa our Creator, etc.
I hope I made my position somewhat more clear with these explanations.
Best wishes!
Arjen, thank you.
I feel like the consequences of sin are far greater than the example you gave of someone being beaten and then acting different because of that. It seems as though sin has done something ‘ontological’ because humans are now born ‘into’ a state that leads them to commit acts of sin. I don’t think there has ever been a human, besides Christ of course, that has lived without doing such things, and I can guess that there never will be. Scripture seems to be clear on this face, that’s the reason we needed a savior, because we are basically helpless.
I say this because it just doesn’t seem like your position is really giving due credance to the fact that we are born with something actually wrong with us. We cannot control it. This state is the reason for death, sickness, suffering, and the fact that we are alienated from God, and therefor commit acts of sin. This would point towards an ontological shift in what it means to be human to me.
Could you elaborate on how these things are possible using your model?
Cody, I sympathize with the desire to speak of an ontological effect of sin upon the human condition. There is a great deal of value, both theological and pastoral, in the affirmation that “sin is not just what I do, but what I am.”
That said, sin is also very much what we do and that for which we are responsible, as creatures who rebelliously turn away from our Creator. So in terms of the metaphysics of human nature, I also think it’s important to specify that any ontological change brought about by sin is utterly foreign to human existence as it is created by God. Sin is a disruption, and intrusion and a rupture, and not the way things are supposed to be. If we make humanity too fundamentally altered, we risk suggesting that God as Creator is ultimately the author of sin (God forbid!) or that his creation has been not just marred, but fundamentally undone. I’m not comfortable pressing my doctrine of humanity quite that far.
In short: I think that we can affirm both a real, ontological change in human existence brought about by the human person’s sinful turn in upon herself, and that this change remains alien (“accidental,” if you like) to her read human existence as a creature of God.
Both Cody and Darren, thanks for joining once more in this discussion!
@ Darren: I fully agree with your stance, nicely summarized in your ‘in short’. That is precisely the point of the essential-accidental distinction.
@ Cody: you are certainly right about the example I gave. I mentioned it as an illustration of ‘accidental facts’, which are nevertheless desastrous. I don’t want to say that sin has no ontological effect. It has. Let me try to elaborate that with regard to our will. I would say that ‘having a will’ is an essential property of human beings. But that’s not to say that we are still able to exercise that will in a good way. In fact, I believe our possibilities of willing are restricted to choices which are not completely good. Some may be very bad, others may be less bad, but in either case the option of always willing the G/good with the right motives is not in our reach. That is, according to me, an (dare I say it: accidental) ontological fact.
@Darren and Arjen, thank you both so much for your explanations. Very helpful.
I was wondering though, and this going back to my origional point. Arjen, when you try to get around Christ assuming a ‘fallen humanity’ in the incarnation, by saying that He can be fully human without the ‘accidents’ of the ‘mar of sin’ because that aspect is not ‘essential’ to what it means to be a human doesn’t really sound that solid to me. I wonder, if we agree that sin has caused an ‘ontological’ problem, though being an ‘accident’ upon the good creation of God, by causing an ontic problem does it not somehow then cause humanity to be other than what it was created to be? Therefor one could say that ‘falleness’ is actually now ‘essential’ to what it means to be human after the fall, since the problem is ontological? And therefor in order to become human Christ must take up that humanity that has been broken and marred by sin?
I mean, yes humanity was not created to be that way, but it has ‘become’ that way. In it’s ontological depths, humanity has been corrupted, and since there is only one humanity, and that is the one that is corrupted, then doesn’t that have to be the one that Christ assumes in the incarnation?
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