The transparent Spirit

A belated Pentecost thought, courtesy of T.F. Torrance - quotes are all from "Theology in Reconstruction", 253-258.

The office of the Holy Spirit in the Church is not to call attention to himself apart from Christ but to focus all attention on Christ, to glorify him, to bear witness to his deity, to testify to his mind and will, and in him and through him to lead us to the Father.  He is God the Spirit by whom we know God, for he is God the Spirit by whom God bears witness to himself.  Transparence and self-effacement thus belongs to the very nature and office of the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son, who is known only as the Father is known through the Son and the Son is known in the Father, and who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified as himself very God.

It is worth tugging at some of the threads in this quote to make sure we've understood them.  Note that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified because he is himself God, true and full God; but he is not worshipped in the attention that we pay to him, but the attention that we pay by him to the Son, to Jesus Christ as he leads us to the Father.  The Spirit is known, and known as God; but he is not known in himself, but only as he himself makes known the Father and the Son.  Torrance summarises this by referring to the Spirit's transparence.  He doesn't mean to imply by this any sort of insubstantiality, as if the Spirit could be 'seen through' because of his weightlessness and lack of solidity.  We are dealing with the almighty, personal God when we are dealing with the Holy Spirit.  The point is simply that the divine office of the Spirit as he is revealed to us in the Gospel is to make Christ known, and through and in him the Father.  His almighty power is shown, not in itself, but in showing us the almighty power of the Father and the Son.

What really strikes me about the way that Torrance utilises this concept is that he sees the transparence of the Spirit as in some sense a transferrable quality.  In thinking and speaking of God, we utilise human forms and concepts, which in themselves "are quite opaque as far as their reference to God himself is concerned."  We simply don't have the ability to stretch our language up to God.  "This is where the transparency of the Spirit comes in, for to be genuine our witness must be shot through and through with the uncreated light of God's self-revelation."  We need the Spirit to make our words transparent to God's reality, to make them bearers of God's own light - something we can't do by ourselves.

Torrance extends this description of the transparency of the Spirit to Scripture - the perspicuity of the Scriptures means the fact that the Spirit causes the biblical witness to be transparent to divine reality - and baptism - in which we are meant to look "through the rite to Christ and his Gospel... Without Sacramental transparence Baptism becomes blind and meaningless."

We need - desperately need - the work of the Holy Spirit to make anything that we do with reference to God genuinely valuable and meaningful.

We recall too that this transparence comes from the Holy Spirit, from his own self-effacing nature and office in hiding himself, as it were, behind the Face of the Father in the Son and behind the Heart of the Son in the Father, yet revealing the one Triune God by letting his eternal light shine through himself to us.

For those about to lead worship

Jesus Christ is our worship, the essence of it and the whole of it, and we may worship God in Spirit and in Truth only as we are made partakers of his worship.

Thus T.F. Torrance, in Theology in Reconstruction, 249.

Torrance's point has at least a two-fold application.  Firstly, we cannot make an acceptable offering to God by ourselves.  All our worship is soiled by our sinfulness, and inadequate as a response to God's greatness and his grace.  We cannot possibly come of ourselves to appear before God and honour him.  Remember Nadab and Abihu?  Outside of Christ, our very worship of God deserves and attracts his wrath.  So if you're about to lead worship, please remember that you cannot do it - that you depend on Christ to pour out the Spirit so that what you do might be real, genuine, acceptable.  Worship is not within your powers, and leading others in worship is something that should make you tremble.

But second, an acceptable offering to God has been made, in our human nature, by our Brother the Lord Jesus Christ.  Because he appears in heaven before God, as our great High Priest, there is human worship which is sinless and holy, and which genuinely honours the Father.  And because that worship exists, we can come to worship - not as if we were offering something alongside Christ's offering, but as we are joined to him by the Spirit in faith our own inadequate worship is clothed in his great act of worship, and made to participate in it.  There is nothing for us to add, because he has done it all; but we may participate, because he has gone ahead of us.  So if you're about to lead worship, remember that what that means is directing people to Christ, who is the real worship leader, and resting in him and his perfect worship yourself as you lead others in doing so.

Why follow Torrance?

In my previous post I attempted to sketch out T.F. Torrance's approach to theological knowledge.  Here I just want to outline a few reasons why I think this, or something very like it, is a good model for thinking about how to do theology.

1. Christ is central.  It is a sound theological instinct to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ in every aspect of thinking about God, to take every thought captive for obedience to him.  In Torrance's structuring of theological science, Christ is the focus at every level, and indeed he is the link between doxological piety and theological reflection.  He is our assurance that we are dealing with a real, objective truth - he is God in his revelation.  He is the one who ensures that our thoughts do not fly off into ungrounded speculation.  It is all about the Lord Jesus Christ, all the way through.

2. It doesn't leave behind or disparage the pre-conceptual knowledge of God in Christ.  It can be easy for theologians, who have wrestled with 'the Trinitarian grammar', to look down on the 'simple faith' of the average worshipping community, and to regard the piety of the average Christian as something that needs to be supplanted by a refined conceptual apparatus.  There is no supplanting in Torrance; rather, it seems to me, his system rightly puts theological science at the service of doxological piety.  The real knowledge of God, if you like, does not happen only as we progressively ascend the levels of theological purity; it happens on the ground, in praise and worship and preaching and sacrament.  There is no superior knowledge of God open to the theologian; just the same knowledge expressed conceptually.

3. It maintains that we do have real knowledge of God in himself, but that we approach this knowledge through God's revelation.  I think this is key.  In Torrance's stratified model, knowledge of God is not restricted to knowledge of the economy - that is to say, the work of God toward us in creation and redemption.  Rather, through the economy, we are enabled to see and understand something of God's life in himself.  God is not collapsed into his works, but neither is his life separated from his works.  It is the fact that Christ himself is truly God as well as truly man which makes this connection possible.  We see, as we reflect on Christ, the real inner life of God - the processions which stand behind the missions.  But we are not encouraged to speculate about this; we are encouraged to learn about God where God has elected to teach us, in the face of Jesus Christ.

For these three reasons, and probably more, I think Torrance is helpful here, and I'd commend his scheme to anyone.

Theological science, with T.F. Torrance

T.F. Torrance sees theology as a science.  This does not mean that theology proceeds by a method analagous to the natural sciences; for Torrance, the essence of a true science is that it allows the nature of the object being investigated to determine the method of investigation.  A science is radically open to external, objective reality, to the point of allowing that reality to determine the very approach to knowledge.  Theological science, for Torrance, is at one level similar to natural science - it approaches an objective reality and makes enquiry about it - but on another level utterly distinct from natural science - because the nature of the object investigated in theology is unique, and therefore the approach must be unique.

Torrance maintains that the object of theological science is primarily Jesus Christ, 'God in his revelation'.  It is in Christ that God makes himself objective for us, in our human sphere, in our space and time and history.  Theological science, then, must allow Christ to shape its investigations.

Theological knowledge, Torrance maintains, occurs at three levels; he is drawing here on the work of Michael Polanyi.  At the most basic, but also most important, level, God is known in personal experience, through the believer's encounter with Christ and through the liturgical and ecclesial life.  This knowledge of God is not conceptually refined, being rather lived than analysed, but it is profound - the person who encounters God in Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit is caught up in a deep, albeit implicit, knowledge of who God is.  The focus here is Christ, and the awareness of genuinely seeing God in Christ.

Christ remains the focus at the second level.  Here the believer's experience of Christ is analysed and clarified conceptually.  For Torrance, the process of doctrinal development which culminated in the Counicll of Nicaea represents the paradigmatic move to the second level.  Aware that in Christ she encounters God himself, the church moves to conceptualise this knowledge.  The homoousion - the genuine identity in being between Christ and the Father - is central here.  It allows a movement from an informal knowledge that God was at work in Christ to a conceptual understanding of the missions of the Son and the Spirit in the Triune work of redemption.  That is to say, through the homoousion the believer is able to conceptualise the work of the economic Trinity clearly, and what was implicit in the experiential knowledge of the first stage is made explicit; an experiential knowledge of the Trinity becomes a doctrine of the Trinity.

At the third level, further conceptual clarification takes place.  Once again, the homoousion is central and the person of Christ is the focus, but at this level we are driven to understand that it is not simply God in his relations to us that is revealed in Christ, but that if Christ is truly of one being with the Father then we are shown God in himself.  The immanent life of God must be the ultimate foundation of God's work towards us; the processions of the Son and the Holy Spirit are revealed as the ontological ground of the missions in the work of redemption.  A further clarification of our concepts occurs at this level, and indeed a simplification as we move through the works of God to consider their ultimate ground in the very being of God.

Two things are particularly critical for Torrance in this account.  Firstly, Christ is central throughout.  For Torrance, the homoousion is the central commitment of Christian metaphysics.  It is through the genuine oneness of Christ with God the Father that we can be confident that our experience of Christ leads to true knowledge of the real God.  We are not, in the Lord Jesus, having to do with a reality outside of God which may or may not point towards God, but with God himself in his revelation.  It is because of the homoousion that we can move from the evangelical experience of God's presence and work in Christ to the conceptual clarity that is provided by the doctrine of the Trinity, both economic and ultimately immanent.  The homoousion means that we are not speculatively reaching up toward God in our conceptual analysis, but we are (as genuine theological scientists) following the nature of the object presented to us.

Second, the three levels of theological knowledge strengthen and support one another.  They are interrelated through Christ, who is central at every level.  In particular, the 'higher' levels do not leave behind the pre-conceptual, doxological knowledge of God in Christ; in fact, this basic experiential Christianity remains the most important level of theological knowledge and the most profound.  Whatever conceptual clarifications may take place, they cannot displace or undermine the life of faith and the implicit theology expressed in piety and worship.  Perhaps we might say that whilst the third level provides the ultimate conceptual grounding for the other levels, there is a sense in which the first level provides the existential ground for the others.  Ontologically, of course, the ground for all three is the Lord Jesus Christ in his reality as the revelation of God.

I want to unfold some of the implications of this approach in another post.  If you want to dig into Torrance more in the meantime, this little sketch is heavily reliant on 'The stratification of knowledge in the thought of T.F. Torrance' by Benjamin Myers (Scottish Journal of Theology 61(1): 1-15).

The visible church

The distinction between the visible church and the invisible church plays various different roles in different theologies and ecclesiologies.  Basically the idea is that the church as we see it in the world and in history, the empirical church, is not wholly identical with the church as it exists in the sight and plan of God, the spiritual church.  This distinction may serve to justify the relative impurity of present churches - it sometimes functions, for example, as an argument for mixed congregations in which it is known that many are not living as disciples despite their attachment to 'the church'.  It can also function as an apologetic for the ruined and divided state of the church catholic - the visible church is by schisms rent asunder, but the invisible church is nonetheless one and whole in Christ - which can unfortunately make efforts towards visible unity seem a waste of time.

At one level I think the distinction is certainly necessary.  The New Testament seems to call for it, whenever it acknowledges that there will be eschatological surprises over who ultimately is found to belong to the church.  And it seems inevitable conceptually - I am reminded of Screwtape's advice that the newly converted patient should be put off church by keeping his mind on the deeply unsatisfying reality of his neighbours assembled in church rather than on "the Church as we (demons) see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners."

But does this idea also have dangerous implications?

In The Trinitarian Faith Torrance suggests a particular genealogy for the distinction between the visible and the invisible church.  For some of the early Fathers of the church - he particularly mentions Origen and Clement of Alexandria - there was a similar distinction between the physical/sensible gospel and the spiritual/eternal gospel.  Influenced by Platonic dualism - with its rift between the visible/invisible, temporal/eternal, physical/spiritual, and its clear preference for the latter in each of these dualities - there was a tendency to see the incarnation, in all its visible/temporal/physical nature, as pointing towards a better invisible/eternal/spiritual gospel, of which it was a passing sign.  The danger here for Christology is hopefully obvious, but what if - as Torrance suggests - this is also the source of the idea of a visible and invisible church?  What would be the consequences?

Torrance suggests that this distinction "opened the door for the identification of the real Church with a spiritualised timeless and spaceless magnitude, and for the ongoing life and mission of the empirical Church to be regarded as subject to the laws that control human society in this world." (276)  In other words, the visible church - being no longer regarded as itself the Body of Christ, but only at best as a rough approximation of or signpost to his spiritual Body - is run as if it were just another human society.  The reality that the church - meaning the local congregation here and now - exists because its members have been baptised by one Spirit into the one Body of Christ, through whom they have access together to the Father: all that is lost, or is in danger of being lost.  In practice, the presence and reality of the Spirit with(in) the people of God here and now is downplayed or neglected; human efforts to maintain and organise the church are substituted for a dependence on God's Spirit.

I don't know my Patristics well enough to know if Torrance's account is correct; I find it plausible from the little that I do know.  I wonder what it would look like in our churches to resist this dualism.  A higher doctrine of the church?  Actually, I would guess, an understanding of the church that sees it not as an add-on to the gospel but as an intrinsic part of the gospel.  And then a lived reality of church which leans much more heavily on the presence and work of the Holy Spirit uniting us to Christ in the here and now.

The gentle God

One of the things about God that I wrestle with is his determination to make me into a human being, a person.  It often seems like this great project of his leads down long, winding roads which surely don't get to the point, or at least don't get there very quickly, and involve me in lots of heartache along the way.  I wish he would short-circuit the process.

Why, for example, does God not just kill off sin in us the moment we first turn to him?  Why does he not make vocation blindingly clear to us the moment we first ask?  Why does he let us, individually and collectively as families and churches, muddle through decision making processes and get it wrong more often than not, when he could just signpost the way clearly - with a voice from heaven perhaps?

I think at least part of the reason is that God will have his human creations as humans, as real relational counterparts to himself.  This does not imply, as more liberal theology has always thought, that God gives human beings radical autonomy, that they stand outside his sovereignty, that they are able to ultimately defy his will.  No, God is God.  But he is God with us in a particular way.

T.F. Torrance commented on the Patristic understanding of the Holy Spirit thus: "If it is only the almighty who can be infinitely gentle, the Holy Spirit may well be characterised as the gentleness of God the Father Almighty."  The way God governs his human creation is through the gentleness of the Holy Spirit.

When we think of the Spirit we usually reach for the dramatic things: Philip whisked away to Azotus, missionary endeavours directed by audible voices from God or prophetic words, healings, tongues of fire.  That the Spirit did and does these things is undeniable, to those who take the Scriptures seriously.  It is not for nothing that he is associated with fire.

But he is also dove.  He is also breath.  He is gentleness.

The Spirit of the Creator God is not in the business of continually over-riding the will and the thought and the judgement of the creatures he made.  He gave us those things!  And he wills that we should use them, that we should be trained in life and godliness, not just magically transformed into the final product.  He wants us to be people.

When faced with a difficult decision, I want God to take it out of my hands.  Lord, just make it clear to me.  Show me your will in a way that I can't dispute or question.  Instead he usually leaves me to pray and think and chat it through with others - and then make a call.  He wants me to be a human being.  Part of that is using my created faculties.  Part of it is also trusting him in a bigger, deeper way: not trusting him to signpost everything in my life, but trusting him to hold me whether I get it right or wrong, trusting him to gently weave even my nonsense into his greater story.  To trust, I suppose, not just the fire of the Spirit's immediate and obvious leading and equipping, but also the Spirit brooding over the waters, the gentle breath of the Spirit in the everyday and the normal.

I feel the burden of responsibility that comes with being human.  I would often prefer it if God would just over-ride my humanity.  But instead he gently takes our very human processes and practices and faculties and softly but surely brings us into his way, through our mistakes and failings as often as not.

Knowledge in the Spirit

"In Jesus Christ God has embodied in our human existence the mutual knowledge which the Father and the Son have of one another and in the Holy Spirit he gives us communion in the mutual relation of the Father and the Son and thus makes us share in the knowledge which the Father and the Son have of one another."

Thus T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 55.

That's a pretty dense sentence, and in urgent need of some punctuation, but there are two truths here that Torrance is getting at which are of vital importance for us.

Firstly, in the incarnation of the Son, God has given us a point of access, a way in which we can truly know him.  In the context of his discussion, Torrance is making the point (drawn from Irenaeus and particularly Athanasius) that God can only be known from himself.  An attempted knowledge of God that began from created things would not get far; it could only really be speculative.  But there is a problem: we can't know God in himself.  Because he is beyond creation, beyond our way of being, he is also beyond our knowing.  God overcomes this problem (for we surely can't overcome it) by making himself present in Christ.  Now we have, within the human world of space and time, a genuine way in - not to an abstract knowledge of God as Creator, but to the relational knowledge which Father and Son have of one another in the eternal Godhead.  Jesus relates to his Father as he always has done eternally, but now he does so as a man, and in so doing establishes the 'objective' knowledge of God for us all.

Secondly, the out-poured Holy Spirit unites believers to Christ, such that they share in that relationship between the Father and the Son.  They know themselves to be alongside Christ as brothers, adopted as the children of the Father.  Being involved in this relationship, believers necessarily have knowledge of God.  But note again: this is knowledge of God which is also knowledge from and through God.  The Spirit, if you like, establishes the 'subjective' knowledge of God for us who believe, by involving us in the relationship between the Father and the Son.

The central thing, I think, which is implied by the incarnation on the one hand and Pentecost on the other, is that there is no second hand knowledge of God.  To know God is to be involved in God's own self-knowledge.  This is very clear biblically in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16.  Only the Spirit knows the deep things of God, and he knows them in the way that a human's spirit knows the deep things of that human person.  And yet, we have the mind of Christ; we are made, by the Spirit, to participate genuinely in this self-knowing of God.

What we celebrate at Pentecost is not just power, not just mission, not just the church, but God catching us up into genuine relational knowledge of himself, into the very relationship and knowledge of the Father and the Son in the eternal Godhead.

Good news.

Being orthodox

Loosely based on the first chapter of T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith.

Because God makes himself known in Christ, to whom the Holy Scriptures bear authoritative witness, there are definite boundaries to our knowledge of God - if we stray beyond the witness of Scripture and the person and work of Jesus Christ (which I have deliberately made co-extensive in the diagram), we do not truly see God; we are heretics.  But if we are orthodox - looking to the Scriptures to see Jesus, expecting that in him we will see God revealed - then we gaze into the infinite depths of the being of God.  We can know him truly, but in knowing him truly we see that we can never know him exhaustively.  There will always be more to know, and yet we don't look to one side or the other to find it: the 'more' is in the depths, not to the sides, and we must continue to focus our gaze on Jesus Christ through the Scriptures.

Orthodoxy is closed to anything that departs from the Biblical Christ, but infinitely open to the God revealed in Jesus as we see him in the Bible.