A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

breaks down the barrier that Plato and the Neoplatonists maintain between the
material and immaterial worlds (and Barth rejects Plato’s dualism as does
Torrance). Unlike many theologians who write about science, Torrance is
immensely respected by natural scientists, and in 1978 he was awarded the
prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
One of Torrance’s major academic interests has been the Trinity, particularly
the final formulation of the doctrine in the fourth century. So it was fitting for
him to be asked to give the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary
in 1981 on the sixteen hundredth anniversary of the Council of Constantinople of
381. Here was his chance in retirement to explore a subject close to his heart.
The lectures were written up in an expanded form in The Trinitarian Faith,
published in 1988.
Torrance’s thesis is that the relationship between Father and Son, as
expounded at Nicaea, ‘is the supreme truth upon which everything else in the
Gospel depends ... It is on the ground of what God has actually revealed of his
own nature in him [Jesus Christ] as his only begotten Son that everything else to
be known of God and of his relation to the world and to human beings is to be
understood.’ 2 The bishops meeting at Nicaea confirmed a doctrine that had
always been inherent in the Church’s teaching. Torrance is therefore one of those
theologians who sees the Nicene Trinity not as a new concept hammered out in
the specific context of the fourth century, but as an eternally living truth that
needed defending from those who tried to subvert it.
In the debates that raged during the fourth century, Torrance’s hero is
Athanasius. While many scholars have tended to be more sympathetic to the
intellectual Cappadocians, Torrance sees them as having taken a wrong path by
implicitly given superiority to God the Father over Jesus the Son and the Holy
Spirit. 3 For Torrance it is Athanasius who again and again gets things right, and
Torrance accords him the accolade of ‘a scientific theologian’ who proceeds in
theology in the same way that natural scientists would in their field. Even if
Athanasius was let down by his successors, Torrance argues that enough of his
teaching persisted, mediated in some of its aspects through Epiphanius, for it to
triumph at the Council of Constantinople. 4 Despite the attempts by Arians and
others to destroy God’s revelation of himself through Christ, the bishops,
meeting first at Nicaea and then, after much more thought on the Holy Spirit, at
Constantinople, safeguard what God the Father has revealed through the Son and
Holy Spirit.