Thomas Torrance was internationally recognised as one of the foremost Christian theologians of the second half of the 20th century. He became the leading English-language exponent of Karl Barth, perhaps the most influential theologian of the whole 20th century. This unwavering commitment, however, meant that as relentless and prolific as he was, Torrance was never an uncontroversial figure.

Thomas Forsyth Torrance was born in China, of missionary parents. He studied at Edinburgh and then at Basle with Karl Barth in the late 1930s. After teaching for a year in America, in 1940 he became minister of Alyth. After also spending two years in war service, for which he was appointed MBE, he became minister of the famous Beechgrove Church in Aberdeen in 1945. He became professor at Edinburgh in 1950, initially in Church History but moved to Christian Dogmatics in 1952, where he remained until his final retirement in 1979.

His first major book was on the doctrine of grace in the Apostolic Fathers, signalling his lifelong affinity with them, rather than with those of the later Western tradition, but he became more widely known as a passionately eloquent disciple of Karl Barth. Along with G.W. Bromiley, he was asked to edit the translation of all the volumes of Barth's gigantic Church Dogmatic.

This was accomplished with remarkable competence and speed but did not hinder him from producing a long succession of books of his own. These concentrated on relating Barthian insights to the British situation, initially with particular reference to ecclesiological issues as part of the many inter-church conversations of the immediately postwar years. He also helped to edit Calvin's Tracts and Treatises and was also joint founder and editor of the influential Scottish Journal of Theology.

It was not until the latter part of his long career, as Barthianism declined, that he began to make what was probably his most distinctive contribution to theology. He became increasingly convinced that theology was best understood not as a man-centred speculative inquiry but as a science, whose nature and method must be determined by its given object, God's word in Jesus Christ. In this it has affinity with the physical sciences as they have come to be understood by Clerk Maxwell, Einstein and others, in contrast to the old dominance of Newtonian physics.

This approach was foreshadowed in his masterly paper of 1964, Theological Education Today, and in his growing enthusiasm for the work of Michael Polanyi and was developed in his book Theological Science, for which he was awarded the Collins Religious Book Award in 1969. A long series of books followed, extending well beyond the time of his official retirement, in which he strove to show that, learning from each other, theological and physical sciences could both be enriched. Frequently invoking the support of his beloved Greek Fathers, he maintained that the Western tradition in theology, unduly influenced by Aristotelian dualism, had encouraged a false dichotomy where, in Einstein's words, “Science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind”.

This approach did not win universal approval from Torrance's fellow theologians, partly perhaps because many of them were more sympathetic to natural theology than Torrance was, and so did not agree that theology must entirely rest on revelation, partly because their liberal leanings tended to explore the human condition more than divine revelation, and partly because they heard scientists argue that Torrance's view of science was not theirs.

Nevertheless, he did receive an honorary doctorate in science, lectured to scientific groups in many lands, and was made a member of honour of the International Academy of the Philosophy of Science. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in 1978, which gave special pleasure to Sir John Templeton because of their shared interest in theology and science.

As he claimed it should, this concern with science enriched rather than diminished his primary theological work. This was manifest in his two outstanding books, Space, Time and Incarnation (1965) and Space, Time and Resurrection (1976). His lecture on “The Theology of Light” (1980), will surely remain as a classical example of his method. His many special series of lectures in several countries made his insights increasingly accessible to wider academic audiences and continued undiminished well into old age.

Torrance was elected Moderator of the Church of Scotland's General Assembly in 1976 and used that role forcefully to express his own views. He insisted, when visiting the four ancient Scottish universities, on summoning their divinity faculties to hear his views on the deficiencies of their theological teaching. When invited to preach in Westminster Abbey to British and American jurists he spectacularly failed to impress and left them, in the words of Trevor Beeson, then the Dean of Winchester, “mystified”. Andm while at a personal level he was charming and gracious, ordinary Scottish congregations were often as bemused as the jurists in Westminster Abbey.

Torrance was undoubtedly one of the most significant theologians Scotland produced, though his influence declined as he resolutely refused to regard the works of Bultmann, Bonhoeffer and Tillich, who increasingly influenced a whole generation of Scottish clergy, with any seriousness. He once told a German PhD student who had spoken up for Bultmann: “You speak with the voice of the anti-Christ; please leave the room”. In the late 1970s he was still pleading with the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to devise a standard of belief which would allow ministers to be charged with heresy.

Yet few English-speaking theologians of his time have shown more powerfully how classical Christian faith shines by its own light, releasing humanity from introspective self-preoccupation and illuminating and inspiring our study of the natural world. His creative vitality and almost boyish enthusiasm, maintained right to the end, were also an impressive testimony to his own personal faith in the reality of the incarnate humanity of God in Jesus Christ.

Torrance is survived by his wife, Margaret, a daughter and two sons, one of whom, Iain, was Moderator of the General Assembly in 2003 and is now President of Princeton Theological Seminary in the United States.

Thomas Torrance, MBE, Professor of Christian Dogmatics, University of Edinburgh, 1952-79, was born on August 30, 1913. He died on December 2, 2007, aged 94