Alan Torrance

Critical insights into Kierkegaard's influence on Barth's theology. Karl Barth was often critical of Søren Kierkegaard's ideas as he understood them. But close reading of the two corpora reveals that Barth owes a lot to the melancholy Dane. Both conceive of God as infinitely qualitatively different from humans, and both emphasize the shocking nearness of God in the incarnation. As public intellectuals, they used this theological vision to protect Christocentric faith from political manipulation and compromise. For Kierkegaard, this meant criticizing the state church; for Barth, this entailed resisting Nazism. Meticulously crafted by a father-son team of renowned systematic theologians, Beyond Immanence demonstrates that Kierkegaard and Barth share a theological trajectory--one that resists cynical manipulation of Christianity for political purposes in favor of uncompromising devotion to a God who is radically transcendent yet established kinship with humanity in time.

Interpretations of human nature driven by scientific analyses of the origin and development of the human species often assume metaphysical naturalism. This generates restrictive and distortive accounts of key facets of human life and ethics. It fails to make sense of human altruism, and it operates within a wider philosophical framework that lacks explanatory power. The accounts of theistic evolution that seek to redress this, however, too easily fail to take sufficient account of the unique contribution of interpretations from a specifically Christian epistemic base. The latter involve a Christological and, hence, eschatological approach which is intrinsic to the interpretation of human nature in light of the purpose and intentionality of the Creator. Phenomenological approaches to the nature of humanity lack the categories to distinguish between human nature as the object of divine intentionality and its present dysfunctional and, ultimately, subhuman state

Acts of Christian forgiveness that run counter to natural inclinations and ethical intuitions raise questions about the nature of human identity and the basis of moral theology. An assessment of the biblical and theological warrant for Christian forgiveness challenges the ethical misappropriation of the language of covenant, torah and righteousness to that of contract, law and justice. The argument is made that forgiveness should be seen as normative—indeed, obligatory rather than supererogatory. A theological account is then provided of the conditions under which our natural inclinations are transformed so as to facilitate an orientation of forgiveness. It is argued that the doctrines of the incarnation and human participation in the mind of Christ are axiomatic for interpreting the Christian life and thus moral theology. This leads to the conclusion that a combination of ‘reconciled exemplarism’ and ‘semantic externalism’ is key to the exposition of Christian ethics – the language of which tracks God’s historical engagement with humanity rather than denoting immanent, ethical categories.