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Place, history and incarnation: On the subjective aspects of christology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2022

Alister McGrath
Alister McGrath*
Affiliation:
Oxford University, Oxford, UK
*
Corresponding author. Email: alister.mcgrath@hmc.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article engages Thomas F. Torrance's landmark work, Space, Time and Incarnation (1969), suggesting that his approach needs amplification in the light of recent studies emphasising the importance of the affective aspects of theology. The alternative framework of ‘place, history, and incarnation’ is proposed as a means of safeguarding the important subjective aspects of the incarnation, and the theological task of interpreting its significance. The article makes use of Simeon Zahl's account of ‘affective salience’ in developing this richer account of the significance of the incarnation.

Keywords

christologyincarnationhistoryplaceT. F. TorranceSimeon Zahl
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 137 - 147
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 For a recent elaboration of this theme, see Williams, Rowan, Christ, the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018)Google Scholar.

2 Torrance, Thomas F., Space, Time and Incarnation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), p. 4Google Scholar. See further his discussion in his christology lectures, given at New College Edinburgh over the period 1952–78: Torrance, Thomas F., Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), pp. 181–235Google Scholar, esp. pp. 217–19. For good assessments of Torrance's approach to the incarnation, see Luoma, Tapio, Incarnation and Physics: Natural Science in the Theology of Thomas F. Torrance (Oxford: OUP, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Molnar, Paul D., Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 124–35Google Scholar; Habets, Myk, Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2013), pp. 163–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, p. 11. For a defence of Torrance's ‘objective trinitarian participationism’, see Geordie W. Ziegler, Trinitarian Grace and Participation: An Entry into the Theology of T. F. Torrance (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017).

4 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, p. 16.

5 Ibid.

6 See also Torrance, T. F., ‘Newton, Einstein and Scientific Theology’, Religious Studies 8 (1971), pp. 233–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Torrance, scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein help theology to rediscover its ontological basis in the incarnation and the Trinity; see Luoma, Incarnation and Physics, pp. 107–8.

7 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, p. 58.

8 For the origins of this notion, see Belkind, Ori, ‘Newton's Conceptual Argument for Absolute Space’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21/3 (2007), pp. 271–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Philosophical theology, for example, often engages significant ahistorical conceptual questions relating to the incarnation and space-time. See e.g. Paul, Emily, ‘Incarnation, Divine Timelessness, and Modality’, TheoLogica 3/1 (2019), pp. 88–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Major recent studies of this issue include Larry W. Hurtado, Ancient Jewish Monotheism and Early Christian Jesus-Devotion: The Context and Character of Christological Faith (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017).

11 Such as Ziegler, Geordie W., ‘Is it Time for a Reformation of Spiritual Formation? Recovering Ontology’, Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care 11/1 (2018), pp. 74–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 77–80. Ziegler here draws extensively on Torrance.

12 On this important point, see Markley, Robert, ‘Objectivity as Ideology: Boyle, Newton, and the Languages of Science’, Genre 16 (1983), pp. 355–72Google Scholar; Daston, Lorraine J., ‘Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective’, Social Studies of Science 44/2 (1992), pp. 597–618CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Agazzi, Evandro, Scientific Objectivity and its Contexts (New York: Springer, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galison, Peter, ‘The Journalist, the Scientist, and Objectivity’, in Padovani, Flavia, Richardson, Alan and Tsou, Jonathan Y. (eds), Objectivity in Science: New Perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2015), pp. 57–75Google Scholar.

13 Gerhard Ebeling's criticism of the ‘experiential deficit’ in theology arising from what he considered to be an excessive objectivism should be noted here. Ebeling, Gerhard, ‘Schrift und Erfahrung als Quelle theologischer Ausagen’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 75/1 (1978), pp. 99–116Google Scholar.

14 As Jeff Malpas notes, the idea of ‘place’ provides a ‘framework within which the complex interconnections of both subjective and objective spatiality’ can be understood. Jeff E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topology (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), p. 70. See also Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-Word (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993); Edward S. Casey, ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena’, in Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), pp. 13–52; John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 59–122; Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church (Oxford: OUP, 2007), pp. 231–52.

15 Simeon Zahl, ‘On the Affective Salience of Doctrines’, Modern Theology 31/3 (2015), p. 430. Zahl here refers to the tradition of reflection originating with George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (London: SCM Press, 1984), including works such as James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009); and Medi Ann Volpe, Rethinking Christian Identity: Doctrine and Discipleship (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). This approach is elaborated more extensively in Simeon Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience (Oxford: OUP, 2020).

16 Zahl notes in particular the study of Adam T. Biggs et al., ‘Semantic and Affective Salience: The Role of Meaning and Preference in Attentional Capture and Disengagement’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 38/2 (2012), pp. 531–41. Zahl notes some parallels between his approach and that set out in Mark R. Wynn, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life (Oxford: OUP, 2013).

17 Zahl, ‘Affective Salience’, p. 431.

18 E.g. Stephen C. Barton, ‘Eschatology and the Emotions in Early Christianity’, Journal of Biblical Literature 130/3 (2011), pp. 571–91. As Barton comments on p. 572, there has been until quite recently a failure to ‘take seriously the expressive and cognitive resources of the emotions and the realm of the experiential’.

19 Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, p. 97. In fairness to Torrance, some of these more subjective issues are addressed in his published sermons, such as Thomas F. Torrance, Preaching Christ Today (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1994).

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 99.

22 Note especially the discussion of ‘incarnation and subjectivity’ in Ola Sigurdson, Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze, and Embodiment in Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2016), pp. 92–148.

23 See esp. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 2002).

24 Rob Paton, ‘The Mutability of Time and Space as a Means of Healing History in an Australian Aboriginal Community’, in Ann McGrath and Mary Anne Jebb (eds), Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015), pp. 67–82.

25 See esp. Brueggemann, The Land. More recently, see Salim Munayer and Lisa Loden, The Land Cries Out: Theology of the Land in the Israeli-Palestinian Context (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012); Aron Engberg, Walking on the Pages of the Word of God: Self, Land, and Text among Evangelical Volunteers in Jerusalem (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

26 Torrance himself shows what some of his critics consider to be a surprising lack of interest in recognising the history of Israel in shaping christological reflection. See e.g. Martin M. Davis, ‘The Pre-history of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ in the Christology of T. F. Torrance’, In die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi, 50/1, a2045. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/ids.v50i1.2045.

27 A point explored in Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Mirror, the Window and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed our Vision of the Universe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). The concept of ‘theory-laden observation’ is important in this context: we may think we see things as they actually are, whereas we actually see them through an unconscious or unacknowledged theoretical lens, which is usually socially mediated. See Matthias Adam, Theoriebeladenheit und Objektivität: Zur Rolle von Beobachtungen in den Naturwissenschafte (Frankfurt am Main: Ontos Verlag, 2002).

28 Henry Mendell, ‘Topoi on Topos: The Development of Aristotle's Concept of Place’, Phronesis 32/2 (1987), pp. 206–31; Benjamin Morison, On Location: Aristotle's Concept of Place (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). For the notion in Plato's works, see Eleni Papamichael, ‘The Concept of Place in Platonic Ontology’, Agathos: An International Review of the Humanities and Social Sciences 7/2 (2016), pp. 7–33.

29 The Hebrew word māqôm is best translated as ‘place’, often referring to a locus of divine revelation such as Bethel (Gen 28:11) or the burning bush (Exod 3:5). See the important analysis in David Vanderhooft, ‘Dwelling beneath the Sacred Place: A Proposal for Reading 2 Samuel 7:10’, Journal of Biblical Literature 118/4 (1999), pp. 625–33. More generally, see Johann Gamberoni, ‘Māqôm’, in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, 16 vols, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren and Heinz-Josef Fabry (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1973–2018), vol. 8, pp. 532–44.

30 See e.g. Donald J. Verseput, ‘Jesus’ Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Encounter in the Temple: A Geographical Motif in Matthew's Gospel’, Novum Testamentum 36 (1994), pp. 105–21; Mikeal C. Parsons, ‘The Place of Jerusalem on the Lukan Landscape: An Exercise in Symbolic Cartography’, in Richard P. Thompson and Thomas E. Phillips (eds), Literary Studies in Luke-Acts: Essays in Honor of Joseph B. Tyson (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), pp. 155–71. For the wider theme of the importance of place in John's Gospel, see Jerome Neyrey, ‘Spaces and Places, Whence and Whither, Homes and Rooms: “Territoriality” in the Fourth Gospel’, Biblical Theology Bulletin 32/2 (2002), pp. 60–74.

31 Brueggemann, The Land, p. 5.

32 Ibid., pp. 5–6.

33 Marc Augé, Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992). See further the useful discussion of such ‘lieux anthropologiques’ in Emer O'Beirne, ‘Mapping the Non-Lieu in Marc Augé's Writings’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 42/1 (2006), pp. 38–50. O'Beirne notes that Augé's critera for distinguishing lieux and non-lieux seem impressionistic, unclear and unstable.

34 Edward Welch, ‘Marc Augé, Jean Rolin and the Mapping of (Non-)Place in Modern France’, Irish Journal of French Studies 9 (2009), pp. 49–68.

35 The importance of this point is clearly demonstrated by recent works of New Testament scholarship, even if the outcome of this exploration remains contested: see e.g. James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996); Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003); Darina Staudt, Der eine und einzige Gott: Monotheistische Formeln im Urchristentum und ihre Vorgeschichte bei Griechen und Juden (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012); Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008); N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (London: SPCK, 2013).

36 Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (New York: OUP, 2004); Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011). For the concern that this process entails reduction and distortion, see John R. Morris, ‘Chalcedon and Contemporary Christology: A New Direction for an Ancient Christology’, Angelicum 75/1 (1998), pp. 3–46.

37 See esp. the neglected study of Morna D. Hooker, ‘Chalcedon and the New Testament’, in Sarah Coakley and David A. Pailin (eds), The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 73–93.

38 For comment on this text and the problem of its authorship, see Dominique Salin, ‘The Treatise on Abandonment to Divine Providence’, The Way 46/2 (2007), pp. 21–36.

39 For a more philosophical reflection on this point, see the influential paper of Arthur N. Prior, ‘The Notion of the Present’, Studium Generale 23 (1970), pp. 245–8. For a defence of Prior's argument that the present is ‘the real’, to be set against two realms of unreality (namely, the past and the future), see David Jakobsen, ‘A. N. Prior's Notion of the Present’, in Argiro Vatakis, Anna Esposito, Maria Giagkou, et al. (eds), Multidisciplinary Aspects of Time and Time Perception (New York: Springer, 2010), pp. 36–45.

40 Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19th and 20th Century Western Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

41 Hermann Minkowski, ‘Raum und Zeit’, Jahresbericht der deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 18 (1909), pp. 75–88. For a good introduction to this concept, see Howard Stein, ‘On Einstein–Minkowski Space-Time’, Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968), pp. 5–23.

42 Arthur S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge: CUP, 1928), p. 34.

43 For Merleau-Ponty's reflections on Eddington's views, see Jacques Merleau-Ponty, Philosophie et théorie physique chez Eddington (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1965).

44 Einstein, letter of 21 March 1955, in Albert Einstein–Michele Besso Correspondence, 1903–55, ed. Pierre Speziali (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 537–8.

45 P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1963), pp. 37–8.

46 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 18. Kierkegaard's allusion to the incarnation here can hardly be overlooked.

47 For an excellent reflection on Bultmann's concept of kerygma, see Gerhard Ebeling, Theologie und Verkündigung: Ein Gespräch mit Rudolf Bultmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1962), pp. 19–82, 109–14.

48 Following Huw Price, ‘The Flow of Time’, in Craig Callender (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time (Oxford: OUP, 2011), pp. 276–311, esp. p. 277.

49 J. M. E. McTaggart, ‘The Unreality of Time’, Mind 17 (1908), pp. 456–74. McTaggart set out these two approaches a decade before Einstein's formulation of the general theory of relativity. For comment, see Kevin Falvey, ‘The View from Nowhen: The McTaggart–Dummett Argument for the Unreality of Time’, Philosophia 38 (2010), pp. 297–312. Falvey here draws on Michael Dummett's defence of McTaggart against the complaint of ‘indexical fallacy’; see Michael Dummett, ‘A Defense of McTaggart's Proof of the Unreality of Time’, Philosophical Review 69/4 (1960), pp. 497–504.

50 See Simon Saunders, ‘How Relativity Contradicts Presentism’, in Craig Callender (ed.), Time, Reality and Experience (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 277–92; Christian Wüthrich, ‘The Fate of Presentism in Modern Physics’, in Roberto Ciunti, Kristie Miller and Giuliano Torrengo (eds), New Papers on the Present: Focus on Presentism (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2013), pp. 91–131. On this approach space-time is interpreted as being the totality of events (the ‘Block Universe’), within which all events have the same ontological status, being equally real irrespective of when they occur. For an alternative approach, see Tim Maudlin, The Metaphysics within Physics (Oxford: OUP, 2007), pp. 104–42.

51 Donald Williams, ‘The Myth of Passage’, Journal of Philosophy 48 (1951), pp. 457–72. For reflection on this point, see Peter J. Riggs, ‘What Do We Feel When We “Feel” Time “Passing”?’, Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research 3 (2012), pp. 1064–73; Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), pp. 37–55.

52 For the argument, see Brian Leftow, ‘A Timeless God Incarnate’, in Daniel Kendall, Stephen T. Davis and Gerald O'Collins (eds), The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God (Oxford: OUP, 2002), pp. 273–99. See further Paul, ‘Incarnation, Divine Timelessness, and Modality’.

53 For the wide range of philosophies of time encountered in Augustine, see Jason W. Carter, ‘St. Augustine on Time, Time Numbers, and Enduring Objects’, Vivarium 49/4 (2011), pp. 301–23 (correcting earlier works, such as Hugh M. Lacey, ‘Empiricism and Augustine's Problems about Time’, Review of Metaphysics 22/2 (1968), pp. 219–45).

54 See the restriction of reality to what is known by physics in Alexander Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). See further Massimo Pigliucci, ‘New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 37/1 (2013), pp. 142–53. For the theological aspects of Mary Midgley's important criticism of scientism, see Alister E. McGrath, ‘The Owl of Minerva: Reflections on the Theological Significance of Mary Midgley’, Heythrop Journal 61/5 (2020), pp. 852–64.

55 E.g. L. S. George and Crystal L. Park, ‘Existential Mattering: Bringing Attention to a Neglected But Central Aspect of Meaning’, in Alexander Batthyany and Pninit Russo-Netzer, (eds), Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology (New York: Springer, 2014), pp. 39–51.

56 See Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York: Routledge, 1999); Crystal L. Park, Kristen E. Riley and Leslie B. Snyder, ‘Meaning Making, Coping, Making Sense, and Posttraumatic Growth following the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks’, Journal of Positive Psychology 7/3 (2012), pp. 198–207.

57 There is an important interplay between the construction of narrative identity and human embodiment. See Roy Dings, ‘The Dynamic and Recursive Interplay of Embodiment and Narrative Identity’, Philosophical Psychology 32/2 (2019), pp. 186–210.

58 Zahl, ‘Affective Salience’, p. 430.

59 Ibid., p. 432.

60 Joanna Collicutt, The Psychology of Christian Character Formation (Norwich: SCM Press, 2015), pp. 63–72. For theological reflections on the trope of attachment, see Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, pp. 101–8; Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), pp. 58–105.