I've been reading Torrance's book on Calvin's view of humanity, including the image of God. I've also been reading Barth's Church Dogmatics on humanity.
I started to notice yesterday how much Barth was influenced by Calvin.
This worried me. Torrance was a fervent disciple of Barth. His claims regarding Calvin's theology are substantiated by a dazzling number of mostly one sentence quotations from Calvin's commentaries, sermons and his Institutes. But his account of Calvin's view of humanity is different to every other commentator on Calvin, and my own reading of Calvin simply hasn't picked up some of these elements. But it could be me... and all the other commentators.
Except the things that Torrance claims for Calvin are all present in Barth. In fact, reading the book on Calvin's view of humanity has actually helped me make more sense of Barth.
Thanks Torrance.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
For us untrained plebs, you need a flow chart to illustrate that blog.
Mind you it does explain the 'gentle reader' of the previous blog! :)
Synergy
Post a Comment