If you are an underliner like me, when you read T. F. Torrance, your page gets pretty marked up. Even when I don’t agree with the great Scottish divine, it’s hard not to be impressed by the intricacies of his thought. Here’s a gem I found while reading Torrance on Calvin’s doctrine of the knowledge of God. The line in bold jumped off the page and sucker punched me.

Thus one of the outstanding marks of Calvin’s theology is that he is able to hold objectivity and personalism closely together, whereas in much modern theology they tend to fall apart with disastrous consequences. As Calvin saw it, it is only when we allow the Truth of God to retain his own majesty in all our knowledge of him, and when we allow God himself to preside in all our judgments about him, that we may be truly personal ourselves and have personal relations with one another, whereas he who ceases in this way to speak with God unlearns even the art of speaking with his neighbor. (from “Knowledge of God and Speech about Him according to John Calvin,” in Theology in Reconstruction).