Geordie Ziegler has examined the theme of grace as an entryway into the theology of T. F. Torrance. The choice of theme is not arbitrary, for Torrance's own doctoral thesis under Karl Barth examined how, by the time of the apostolic fathers, the meaning of grace had become problematically detached from Jesus as its personal referent and turned into a concept increasingly formalised by all manner of tendentious definitions and qualifications. Torrance by contrast, developed a person-centred, trinitarian theology of grace deeply impacted by his patristic studies, informed by dialogue with Anglican and Roman Catholic ecclesiology, and which also made the contribution of Karl Barth far more accessible to the English-speaking world. In this way he became one of the most ecumenical of recent Protestant theologians.
By asking the right questions at the right moments, Ziegler steers his exposition in a clear, linear way, using fresh turns of phrase to highlight Torrance's meaning and guide his readers through the multiple levels of complexity and at times circularity of Torrance's many writings. Ziegler sympathetically engages with Torrance's use of technical terms, including homoousios, perichoresis, anhypostasia/enhypostasia and onto-relations, showing how they function as cognitive probing tools to help the church genuinely apprehend (though by no means fully comprehend) the self-revelation of God even to fallen humanity.
In this way, Torrance reconstructs, for example, the doctrine of atonement, not as a legal problem to be solved but as the grounding of God's eternal love within our fallen humanity. Torrance rejects both limited atonement and universalism as inappropriate logical-causal schemes denatured of the Spirit. In their place, he offers a response to grace that is neither determinist nor Pelagian, but set within the priestly service of Jesus our brother and kinsman. By and large, however, with its overemphasis on forensic metaphors and the penal element, theology in the West has failed to realise the extent to which atonement has redeemed the whole moral order and set it on a new basis.
In describing the church and sacraments through the lens of grace, Ziegler highlights Torrance's preference for descriptions of spontaneous, loving service over theories of apostolic succession or extension of the incarnation, which tend to conflate Christ and church and aggravate the temptation to put clergy and various hierarchies on an undignified pedestal. Regarding the sacraments, Torrance does not so much take sides in the traditional debates, for example, between transubstantiation and memorialism, as to see them as twin sides of the same dualist coin. In the former, grace is assimilated to objective causality; in the latter grace becomes captive to the believer's subjective understanding. In their place, Torrance offers a focus not on how we receive God's presence but on that presence receiving and acting upon us as we worship.
Last and by no means least, Ziegler shows how for Torrance, the mediatorial role of the humanity of Christ offers a trinitarian correction to the whole subject of Christian formation, where too often the language of application has become ubiquitous, as if God's agency has become inert and the pressure now is on us to apply, apply, apply. Torrance is at his best in reminding us that all the way along ‘Christ's faithfulness undergirds our feeble and faltering faith and enfolds it in his own’ (p. 271).
Critics have charged that Torrance's emphasis on the grace of divine agency has reduced human responsibility to a cipher. In a careful response, Ziegler acknowledges genuine difficulties, including Torrance's repeated use and even coining of abstract terms, a lack of concrete description, a seeming lack of interest in or guidance on matters of specific ethics, public policy or even spiritual formation itself. Yet in presenting a high christology which concentrates on the humanity of the Son of God, Torrance has opened up a profound relational space for our inclusion in both the giving (from above) and the receiving (from below) of divine love. It is a legacy well worth building on for theology's future and one to which Trinitarian Grace and Participation adds its own discerning contribution.
Inevitably perhaps, entryways cannot exhaust all significant features of a complex structure. One aspect of Torrance's theology of grace left unexamined is his reconnection (post-Barth) of the rationality of grace to the study of rationality in natural science. Torrance's extended engagement with scientists and theorists, including Michael Polanyi and David Bohm, broke new ground in challenging both the epistemological naivety of secular dogmatists as well as modern gnosticisms indifferent to questions of scientific cosmology or historical hypothesis and verification. In honour of this contribution Torrance was awarded the Templeton Prize for progress in religion in 1978.
