T.F. Torrance: Evangelical Theologian

As I begin my work here in St Andrews and as I also start to use this medium to communicate to friends and family what it is I'm up to here, as great place to start is the person is the subject of my study here - T.F. Torrance.  As I've shared elsewhere, a part of what I feel is the Father's call on my life and ministry has to do with this particular person, and as I've been spending time in his biography I've been reminded why that is so.  For the next few posts, what I'll do is draw attention to certain parts of his life and ministry.

 A young T.F. Torrance

In reading Allister McGrath's wonderful biography of Torrance and also in a recent conversation with my supervisor, I've been reminded of the evangelical heritage and thrust of Torrance's ministry.  Torrance was born to missionary parents who worked in the Chengdu region of China (roughly south-central China).  Torrance's father, also named Thomas, was inspired by a visit from David Livingstone to a nearby Scottish parish to consider mission work.  Torrance senior was to spend the greater part of the rest of his life in China.  His work began in 1896 with the China Inland Mission and later he worked with the American Bible Society where he met his wife, Annie.  The work in China was set on the backdrop of a particularly tumultuous period of Chinese history, and among the political struggles that took place Christian missionaries were often persecuted or martyred.  In 1927 the Torrance family fled Chengdu because of threat of persecution in their area and during their escape by ship came under small-arms fire. 

Torrance was profoundly affected by the faith of his parents and it was a gift that oriented his life and ministry.  He writes:

Through my missionary parents I was imbued from my earliest days with a vivid belief in God.  Belief in God was so natural that I could no more doubt the existence of God than the existence of my parents or the world around me.  I cannot remember ever having had any doubts about God.  Moreover, as long as I can recall my religious outlook was essentially biblical and evangelical, and indeed evangelistic.  I used to read three chapters of the Bible every day and five on Sundays which meant reading through the whole Bible each year.  My father who could repeat by heart the Psalms and some of the books of the New Testament (the Epistle to the Romans, for example) encouraged us children to memorise many passages of the Holy Scriptures which I greatly appreciated later in life.  Family prayer sled by my father on his knees and the evangelical he taught us to sing nourished our spiritual understanding and growth in faith.  I can still repeat in Chinese, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.'  I was deeply conscious of the task to which my parents had been called by God to preach the Gospel to heathen people and win them for Christ.  This orientation to mission was built into the fabric of my mind, and has never faded - by its essential nature Christian theology has always had for me an evangelistic thrust. 

It was to that end that Torrance commenced theological studies at New College in Edinburgh.  He hoped to follow in his father's footsteps and return to the mission field in China. 

 H.R. Mackintosh's

The Person of Jesus Christ

Torrance's training at New College deepened his theological convictions.  Under the teaching of a great Scottish theologian named H.R. Mackintosh, Torrance found himself taught by someone who often ended a survey of a particular Christian doctrine with the question, "How would that be received and understood on the mission field?"  Mackintosh's teaching affected Torrance deeply, and the mark he made upon the young TF is visible throughout his life. 

Mackintosh also, however, gave Torrance a different vision for his vocation.  As Torrance excelled in his studies and won awards and fellowships, he began to articulate a new way of understanding his calling: 'theological ministry in the service of the gospel.'  And it was to that end that Torrance left Scotland in 1937 to study with the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth.

As I have been reading through TF's writings in much greater depth, I am reminded of all of the ways that this "evangelical and evangelistic" thrust to his work is present from the beginning to the end of his corpus.  In his writings, in his teaching (which had the effect of leading to the conversions of at least a handful of theology students), and in the witness of his life, Torrance maintained a strong sense of the missional impulse of the Gospel.  In his dialogue with the natural sciences (something I'll blog about later), it's clear that Torrance views his work as serving in the church's ministry to the Western mind and all of the ways in which it had built unnecessary barriers between the physical sciences and theology.  In whatever ways God calls me in ministry forward, I feel some comfort in placing myself at the figurative feet of someone whose writings have at their heart a healthy, evangelical heart. 

*Quotes, dates, and details from Torrance's life all come from Allister McGrath's T.F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography