The following is a highly overlooked point, particularly with reference to Christian theology. What, or more pointedly, Who is theology’s control? The answer to this question drives what I attempt to be all about, when it comes to doing prayerful and dialogical theology. We could ask this question another way: is there an order, a taxis, to doing Christian theology; an order that takes into account a thoughtful and intentional theological ontology? These are important questions, and ones that I rarely see engaged with within the received theologies of much of evangelical Lutheran and Reformed theologies. It is just presupposed that there is some sort of vestiges theology available in the natural order; as if we might posit a general and special revelation: the former coming prior to the latter (and so, natural theology). But I would argue, au contraire, as does the great Scot theologian, Thomas Forsyth Torrance.
As we shall see later, in natural science, that is in the science of natural objects which have to objects of our cognition, when we known them, we can test our knowledge through experimental controls in which we force them to answer our questions. Moreover natural objects may be affected by our knowledge as they come under the coercive devices of our empirical methods of observation. But God is not subject to observation like that. He does not come under man’s command, and therefore we cannot put Him to the test or bring Him under the power of our controlled scrutiny. Nevertheless, here, as in all other genuine scientific knowledge, the method of knowledge must correspond to the nature of the object, so that where natural science has its controlled observation and experimental verification, we have to cast ourselves on the Grace of God and allow Him to determine the form of our knowledge will take, and the kind of verification appropriate to Him. Thus, for example, the kind of inquiry we have to direct to God that is in accordance with His nature as Divine Subject is rather of the nature of prayer, and never the coercive questioning we have to devise for mute and natural objects.[1]
This is how TFT develops what he calls his, theological science. He also calls it kata physin (according to the nature of) theology; and as mechanisms of this type of theology he will refer to a ‘stratified knowledge of God’ and/or an ‘epistemological inversion,’ wherein a knowledge of God, in a God-world order, sees the world’s antecedent, and inner-reality, in the triune God, as the ground and basis upon which a genuine knowledge of God might be arrived at. In this approach to theology there aren’t any hooks or ‘vestiges’ in the fallen created order wherein a philosopher or a theologian might stumble upon a discovery of the Christian God. For TFT, and for myself following, the only way the Christian God is known is after God. That is, as both Barth and TFT argue for verbosely, along with the early church fathers, only God reveals God. In this frame, the only mediary between God and humanity, humanity and God, is the Godman, the Theanthropos. It is here where an evangelical or kerygmatic knowledge of God fru-its; where the flower of God’s triune life for the world blossoms in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ. It is only as we know God as our Father, just as sure as the Christian is a Christian indeed, while in participation in the bosom of the Father in the Son, that a genuinely Christian knowledge of God might obtain; as we think from a center in God (that is, in Christ).
It seems to me that the above should be basic, a given for the Chrisitan way of theology. But surprisingly in the history of interpretation, and theological development, another way has unfolded. A speculative way; a way that attempts to synthesize the classical Greek philosophers, particularly, Aristotle and Plato, with Christian Dogmatics. Unfortunately, with the overemphasis on speculation provided for by appeal to the philosophers, theologians following this wake, end up providing a picture of God that is anything but personalist and relational. Indeed, in the 21st century such “theologians” mock the type of Christian theologizing that would come to think God in terms of Father of the Son; they call the proponents of such theologizing: theistic personalists (juxtaposed with their self-proclaimed classical and thus orthodox theology). But is the story these “theologians” self-narrate to their navels really the story of God for the world in Jesus Christ?
[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford/London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 38.