DIVINE

AND

Contingent

Order

THOMAS F. TORRANCE

T&T CLARK

EDINBURGH

T&T Clark Ltd

59 George Street

Edinburgh EH2 2LQ

Scotland

Copyright © T. F. Torrance, 1981

Preface to the new edition copyright © T. F. Torrance, 1998

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of T&T Clark Ltd.

First published 1981 by Oxford University Press

First published in paperback 1998 by T&T Clark Ltd

ISBN 0 567 08608 9

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

To

Carver T. Yu

Preface

If we are asked what we mean by speaking of events as ‘contingent’, we say ‘they just happen to be like that’. There is more to it than this, however, for contingent events have an elusive character which we indicate by adding ‘but they did not have to be like that, for they might have been very different’. It is in this fuller sense that the terms ‘contingent’ and ‘contingence’ are used in theology and in science, where they are applied not only to what things happen to be but to the kind of order or pattern they happen to have.

In the history of thought this fuller sense was bound up with the Judaeo-Christian conception that God freely created the universe out of nothing. This does not mean that he created it out of some stuff called ‘nothing’, but that what he created was not created out of anything. To think of the universe as having been brought into being in this way is to hold that the universe has been given a distinctive existence of its own, utterly different from God’s. We describe it as contingent for it depends on God entirely for its origin and for what it continues to be in its existence and its order. The baffling thing about the creation is that since it came into being through the free grace of God it might not have come into being at all, and now that it has come into being it contains no reason in itself why it should be what it is and why it should continue to exist. Indeed God himself was under no necessity to create the universe. This is the way Duns Scotus once expressed it: ‘The creation of things proceeds from God not out of any necessity whether of being or of knowledge or of will but out of pure freedom which is not moved, much less necessitated, by anything outside of itself so as to be brought into operation.’ (Quaestiones disputatae de rerum principio, q.4, a. l, n.3)

By contingence is meant, then, that as created out of nothing the universe has no self-subsistence and no ultimate stability of its own, but that it is nevertheless endowed with an authentic reality and integrity of its own which must be respected. By contingent order is meant that the orderly universe is not self-sufficient or ultimately self-explaining but is given a rationality and reliability in its orderliness which depend on and reflect ...