Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Grace Journal
Volume: GJ 08:3 (Fall 1967)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

Theology in Reconstruction. By T. F. Torrance. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1965. 288 pp. $5.00.

This volume written by the Professor of Christian Dogmatics in the University of Edinburgh is a most stimulating and challenging study. The fifteen chapters are essays written by the author in the course of dialogue with modern thought analyzing the basic intellectual challenges to the Christian church. A careful perusal of these essays will be most rewarding to theologians who also seek to be relevant in our modern dialogue.

The idea of reconstruction in modern theology has usually been associated with strange and heretical doctrines which have no scriptural justification nor creedal affirmations from the past. Dr. Torrance finds validity in the concept of reconstruction, since theological statements do not carry their truth in themselves, but are true only in so far as they direct us away from ourselves to the one Truth of God. Theologians must never sit loose to their prejudices, but must allow the objective Word from God to man to stand in judgment over all their concepts and definitions. The Church must never stand aside from what is going on in the world for it is only within the world, and not outside of it, that she lives and acts and speaks, and fulfills her mission. The Church is forced to think through her convictions particularly in times of change in the cosmological viewpoint of the world. The basic Apostolic truth must be expressed in conceptual forms that will communicate answers to the perplexities of modern thought.

The Church will fail and inevitably be flung aside if it takes the road of subjectivity in its work of theological reconstruction. This only offers a Christianity as some sort of self expression of the human spirit. The author cannot see any reformation coming to its fulfillment and taking its place within the thinking of man except that which is wholly committed to belief in the Creator and Redeemer God, and which takes seriously and realistically the stupendous fact of the Incarnation, and except that which develops its theological understanding not by means of its own artistic creations, but through rigorous and disciplined obedience to the objective reality of the Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ.

The reconstruction restates and preserves the truth of the ecumenical creeds and Reformation in order to speak meaningfully to the modern debate. Evangelicals will be disappointed that Dr. Torrance has not interpreted the authority of Scripture in terms of the inerrancy and infallibility of the written word. The principle of the omoousian does indeed mean that in Jesus Christ in our flesh and history we have in person the eternal Word of God,...

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