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Magneton
Registered Member
Date Joined Aug 2001
Total Posts : 132
| Posted 3/12/2003 3:14 PM (GMT -6) |   | This site has seen a lot of debate concerning what God can do, and what is meant by omnipotence.
I've just started reading some of Thomas Torrance, and I like a lot of what he says. Here's a sampling of his views on omnipotence, quoted from Elmer Colyer, How to Read T.F. Torrance: Understanding His Trinitarian and Scientific Theology, pp. 152-154:
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Torrance contends that God's omnipotence, as revealed in Jesus Christ, actually conflicts with concepts of unlimited arbitrary power that humanity often constructs on the basis of worldly experience, absolutizes, and then attributes to God. "We must reject," Torrance declares, "all abstract notions of divine omnipotence, for omnipotence is not to be understood in terms of what we think God can do, defining it as potence raised to the nth power, i.e., as omni-potence, but in terms of what God actually is and actually has done." For this reason Torrance argues that every abstract question about what God can and cannot do and any discussion of God's power apart from who God is as Father revealed in Jesus Christ the Son is an empty movement of thought.
This also means that God is not defined in terms of omnipotence, but rather omnipotence is delimited by the nature and being of God the Father revealed through the incarnate Son. Here Torrance points out that God's power is in no way separate from or different from God's being or nature…
The almightiness of God is not some impersonal brute force that God exerts at a distance. Rather Torrance thinks it is intensely personal, for it is God himself in the midst of our world in its disorder and despair, God present in such a way as to preserve, heal, save, reconcile and redeem. The power of God is the power of the cross, the power to bring good out of evil, for God in the midst of the crucifixion of Jesus, the most heinous act of unfathomable evil, in love atoned for sin, redeemed lost humanity and raised Christ to life, thereby conquering destruction and death.
Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, p. 82
Torrance, Christian Doctrine, p. 204-205
ibid, pp. 222, 228
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What do you think of this view of omnipotence?
Magneton
We are servants rather than masters in mathematics. Charles Hermite
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Matthew Timothy Short
Huh?
Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 635
| Posted 3/12/2003 4:41 PM (GMT -6) | | I would prefer  it better, if omnipotent merely meant ‘possessing all power’, kind of uh ‘unconfined sufficiency  ’ sort of something another. Here’s my favorite part though, where "…humanity often constructs…an empty movement of thought."
Or in other words, I really enjoyed the read Magneton, thanks for sharing Thomas Torrance’s view of omnipotence.
God is Love,
Tim
2Ti 2:19…Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity... | | Back to Top | | |
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Terry_Baxter
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 187
| Posted 3/13/2003 4:59 AM (GMT -6) | | Hey Magneton,
I'm all for more grounded analysis and away from angels dancing on pins' heads. It certainly makes sense to me that, being humanlike we are, God has to bend down to explain Himself in terms we can understand. It follows that we should start and fill our discussions of His eternal attributes with how He has chosen to reveal Himself. I'm not sure it follows that we should end our exploration there.
To say 'every abstract question...is an empty movement of thought' isn't saying much; it's the way I feel about most theoretical arguments about the nature of time, the universe, and God.
But, do you think Torrance leads us toward an equally useless view? That is, the only way we can understand God is in what He has already done historically? That we can never extrapolate to principles about how and within what limits God acts?
If Torrance draws the line somewhere--we can go beyond the revealed acts of God to understand the general nature of God--I'd be curious to know where and why he draws the line before it all becomes mere 'abstract notions'.
Terry
"Be God's"
Edited for 1 typo and one object error.
Edited by - Terry_Baxter on 03/13/2003 3:16:59 PM | | Back to Top | | |
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Magneton
Registered Member
Date Joined Aug 2001
Total Posts : 132
| Posted 3/13/2003 10:00 AM (GMT -6) | | Terry,
Great question. Perhaps there are others on the board that have studied Torrance more, and could give a better answer than I could
Part of the difficulty – the source of mystery, according to Torrance, is that God doesn’t simply reveal propositions about God, but reveals himself as he reconciles, redeems, and transforms us. I'm finding this way of thinking quite powerful: that the nature of God as revealed in Christ is an indicator of the way he works in my life and the world, by entering into the pain and conflict to bring healing and reconciliation, rather than by activating some impersonal power source.
An example of ‘abstract notions' that he speaks about would be Euclidean geometry, which is a conceptual framework we use to characterize the universe, but which since Einstein has been found to be inadequate, since it doesn’t conform to the reality of the universe. Torrance is insistent on having an ontological grounding for the principles we use. He reflects on the genius of James Clerk Maxwell, who recognized the electromagnetic character of light. Maxwell, finding that Newtonian mechanics (separable particles in a “container” of space and time) was inadequate, developed a relational model (the relations between electric and magnetic fields). One of Maxwell’s very important ideas was what he called embodied mathematics. quote:
Looking back it would appear that Clerk Maxwell’s aim to present mathematical ideas to the mind in an embodied form, and not as mere symbols which for all their logical certainty or consistency were not true to nature, was a move away from the Newtonian way of bracketing mathematics and nature or geometry and experience toward that which Einstein demanded and put into effect in relativity theory, one in which mathematical and empirical elements are intrinsically coordinated. …
It was, I believe, Clerk Maxwell’s profound faith in God the Creator that prompted him to set in motion this great change in scientific approach. Natural science was a way of looking at the universe and its marvellous patterns of order which fascinated and absorbed him, but he believed that it was God who made the universe like that and endowed it with its harmony and rational beauty, and so there must be another way of looking at the creation, from the perspective of the Creator.
Thomas Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, pp. 53-54
Deriving our mathematics (or any field of study) from the nature of the universe rather than external principles is a key theme for Torrance. Colyer says that the fundamental axiom of Torrance’s theology is that “the nature of the object or subject-matter in question defines the methods employed in investigating it, the mode of rationality used in conceptualizing what is discovered, and the form of verification consonant with it.”
That Maxwell's breakthrough concerned the nature of light is very significant, because light is the only invariant structure in the universe, and thus the natural starting point for an understanding of the way things are.
I don't know if Torrance 'draws a line' as you have asked. He doesn't throw out Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics, for example, but recognizes that they are good approximations and have some utility within certain limits. There may in his thinking be similar useful approximations to the nature of God.
Jim
It is more godly and accurate to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his works and call him unoriginate. - Athanasius
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