T. F. Torrance Audio Lectures

Here is a great series of lectures that Thomas F. Torrance gave in 1981 at Fuller Theological Seminary: http://www.gci.org/av/tftaudio

These are an absolute must to listen to for anyone serious about pursuing a career studying/teaching historical, systematic, or philosophical theology!  I warn you that they are very dense, and you’ll be tempted to stop listening but see it through, and really get your mind around Torrance’s thought.  I don’t agree with everything he says, but it is well worth the intellectual exercise!

Most of the lectures consistently deal with metaphysics and epistemology while touching on practically all areas of theology: A history of science and theology, The doctrine of God, Trinity, Incarnation, Creation, Atonement, Calvinism, Holy Spirit, Ecclesiology, Sacraments, etc.

He provides a great critique of Calvinism in Lecture 4:
“By reading back into God temporal, causal, and logical relations from our experience in this world, Calvinism was forced to connect the relative apparent distinctions: between believing and unbelieving, obedient and disobedient, to the absolute decree of God. That’s to say, it interpreted the distinctions between ‘believing’ and ‘unbelieving’ or the ‘apparent’ and ‘non-apparent,’ in terms of the absolute framework of space and time which constitute the all controlling mind or sensorium of God in the Newtonian language.

Now this entailed an ultimate ‘No’ and an ultimate ‘Yes’ in God. In fact it involved a staggeringly schizophrenic concept of God. And out of this comes the doctrine of limited atonement on the one hand or universalism on the other hand. Both twin heresies of the one fundamental mistake. Now the problem we have here, is that of logical-izing and causal-izing relations with God in which we are found to be shut up either to universal necessary salvation on the one hand, or to limited salvation on the other hand….

When the grace of election is interpreted within a dualist and a determinist framework of thought governed by the primacy of number, for example the Newtonian concepts of space and time and logical causal connection in which time and motion are transmuted into mathematical and logical relations, then the basic equilibrium of thought is disrupted, and the result is a soft contradiction and a disruption in the doctrine of election or predestination. In fact, in that context, the notion of predestination is actually turned on its head, for it now becomes a sort of mythological projection into God of culture-conditioned and creaturely connections, namely the kind of temporal-causal connections which we think obtain within the creaturely realm. And that is, as I said, is an intolerable anthropolization of God.”