Space, Time and Resurrection 9780567682185

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To The Very Rev. Professor James S. Stewart

‘If Christ is not risen then our preaching is empty and your faith is vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God.’ (1 Cor. 15:14-15)

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Introduction to the Cornerstones Edition Paul D. Molnar Professor of Systematic Theology Department of Theology and Religious Studies St. John’s University, Queens, NY

It is right and proper that Thomas F. Torrance should be referred to as ‘arguably the greatest twentieth-century dogmatic theologian in the English-speaking world’.1 Anyone familiar with his classic landmark exposition of the nature and importance of the resurrection as an event within history (within time and space) in his volume Space, Time and Resurrection, first published by the Handsel Press in 1976 and in 1998 by T&T Clark, would consider this well-deserved praise. This book represented Torrance’s view of Christ’s resurrection and ascension as presented in his lectures during his tenure as professor at the University of Edinburgh within his detailed course in Christology and Soteriology. It is truly amazing to observe how brilliantly and with what exquisite depth of insight Torrance carefully links together the incarnation and resurrection throughout by stressing that these events could not be properly understood without their empirical correlates such as the virgin birth on the one side as ‘the act and mode of the Creator’s entry into his own creation as Man among men’2 and the empty tomb indicating Christ’s bodily resurrection on the other.3 In this respect Torrance was not just opposed to any sort of ebionite or docetic understanding of these doctrines,4 but his thinking also manifested the fact that one simply 1 See George Hunsinger (ed.), Karl Barth, the Jews, and Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2018), 178. 2 Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (hereafter STR) (Edinburgh: T&T  Clark, 1998), 59. As an act of God it obviously cannot be understood from a biological or historical perspective since it, like the resurrection itself, refers to a creative act of God  within history (ibid., 59–60). See also Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 94–104. 3 Torrance notes that the body of the risen Lord was a ‘spiritual body, but it was no less body because it was a body healed and quickened by the Spirit in which all corruption had been overcome’, STR, 141. 4 Torrance regularly rejected the ebionite attempt to understand Jesus from below as undermining his true divinity and the docetic attempt to understand Jesus from above as undermining his true humanity. See, e.g., Thomas F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ

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could not think rightly about Jesus Christ – and thus about incarnation, resurrection, atonement, revelation, ascension, the church and the sacraments or of God himself – if one separated or confused his true divinity and his true humanity. Thus, for instance, Christ’s atoning death on the cross was also intrinsically connected to these events since, in Torrance’s understanding, the pre-Easter Jesus was not simply a human being who was adopted into divine Sonship (Torrance would of course strongly oppose any sort of two-stage Christology, as did his mentor Karl Barth). Since Jesus’s enhypostatic being as the incarnate Word from the moment of his conception by the Holy Spirit meant that his genuine humanity existed precisely and exclusively as the humanity of the Word, one also had to acknowledge that his human existence had no independent reality since it was in fact anhypostatic. This meant that there was only one hypostasis with two natures after the incarnation. That ruled out any sort of monophysitism or Nestorianism in Christology and in understanding the church and sacraments as well. We will discuss more of this below. For now it is necessary to stress that, by holding these crucial doctrines together in a way that few have done as consistently, Torrance could explain exactly how Christ’s ascension and present activity as priest, prophet and king enables the divine/human Lord to continue interacting with us between the time of his first and second parousia through the power of the Holy Spirit sent at Pentecost. The really amazing feature of his dogmatic insights in this seminal volume is that the power of Jesus’s earthly life is explicitly seen as the very power of God the Son who was sent by his Father to become incarnate for the salvation of the world. He did so by himself assuming our sinful humanity into hypostatic union with his being as eternal Son so that, when seen in Trinitarian perspective, one can understand not only the significance of the birth of Jesus from the virgin and the necessity of the empty tomb but also his atoning reconciliation, his ministry, and his death, resurrection and ascension. These insights enable Torrance to offer a view of the sacraments that has been characterized as ‘the most creative Reformed breakthrough on the sacraments in twentieth-century theology, and arguably the most important Reformed statement since Calvin’.5

(Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 116, 120f.; and Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988; reissued Cornerstones edition, Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 111ff. 5 George Hunsinger, ‘The Dimension of Depth: Thomas F. Torrance on the Sacraments’, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T. F. Torrance, ed. Elmer M. Colyer (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 143.

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Torrance/Bultmann Torrance criticized Bultmann for not appropriately grounding his theology, especially his view of the resurrection, in a properly understood doctrine of God just because for Bultmann an ‘objective resurrection of Christ, outside of us and for us, is for him purely mythical’.6 Against this approach, Torrance emphasized that the gospel ‘lays the greatest stress upon the objective fact of the resurrection, while the “Christ in us” is a subjective actualisation of that real event through the communion of the Spirit’.7 Crucially, Torrance was not just objecting to the fact that Bultmann overtly reduced the historical event of Christ’s bodily resurrection to the rise of faith on the part of the disciples,8 but he was also objecting to the fact that he made faith the ground of Christian belief in the incarnation and resurrection. In truth, however, the only proper ground of faith ‘is the reality to which it is correlated as its objective pole’, and that reality is the incarnate Word who was and remains the unique subject of that event as well.9 This is precisely why Torrance insisted that the ‘raising of the Christ is the act of God, whose significance is not to be compared with any event before or after. It is the primal datum of theology, from which there can be no abstracting, and the normative presupposition for every valid dogmatic judgment and for the meaningful construction of a Christian theology.’10 This is a decisive insight partially because it leads Torrance to claim that the bodily resurrection of Jesus in time and space ‘has become once again, as in the New Testament and early Church, an issue of supreme importance, for what is at stake in it all is the fundamental doctrine of God and the rationality of the Christian universe’.11 For this reason Torrance refused to think of the resurrection as a violation of the laws of nature because such a view falsely presumes that one can understand this miraculous creative act of God which took place within nature by observing creation itself. That cannot be the case since, as a creative act of God, we cannot get behind nature to explain it. 6

Torrance, Incarnation, 287. Ibid. See also Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996; reissued Cornerstones edition, Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 153f.; and Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 188–90. 8 With Barth, Torrance forcefully insists that ‘ “None of the [NT] authors ever even dreamed, for example, of reducing the event to ‘the rise of the Easter faith of the first disciples’ ” ’, Torrance citing Barth, Church Dogmatics (hereafter CD) III/2, 452, in STR, 82–3. In light of Christ’s resurrection, then, everything ‘was seen to pivot finally upon the empty tomb’, STR, 83. 9 Torrance, STR, 19. 10 Ibid., 74. 11 Ibid., 65. 7

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It must be accepted as an ultimate, that is, an act that can only be understood from itself. That is why Torrance connects the resurrection to our knowledge of the Trinity, which itself is the ground and grammar of all theology. This does not undermine his statement that the resurrection is the norm for theology. Rather, it strengthens it, since as a creative act of God in history that very power of God is what, through the action of the Holy Spirit, enables us to know God as he truly is without having to attempt to leave the sphere of history itself; such an attempt is neither possible nor required in light of the revelation of God which actually took place in Jesus Christ himself. We must therefore accept the fact of Christ’s bodily resurrection as an act of healing human nature both physically (as with Jesus’s healing of the paralytic in Mk 2: 1–12; Lk. 5:17–26) and spiritually since Jesus first said to the paralytic that his sins were forgiven. This incident, Torrance maintains, was understood by the New Testament to have fallen within the power of the resurrection. It was indeed a miraculous act of God within time and space ‘demonstrating the divine power in the word of forgiveness’ which ‘reached its full reality in the healing and creative work of God upon the whole man . . . The word of pardon was fully enacted in our existence – that is why . . . St. Paul could say that if Jesus Christ is not risen from the dead, then we are still in our sins.’12 This thinking yields a number of monumentally important insights: (1) it leads Torrance to insist that justification as God’s act of ‘rejecting sin and the status of the sinner’ and ‘establishing the sinner once more as God’s child’ is not just a ‘declaratory act’ but ‘an actualization of what is declared’;13 (2) thus, the ‘resurrection tells us that when God declares a man just, that man is just’;14 (3) for this reason, whenever the Protestant doctrine of justification is understood ‘only in terms of forensic imputation of righteousness or the non-imputation of sins in such a way as to avoid saying that to justify is to make righteous, it is the resurrection that is being bypassed’.15 This is an enormously important point. If justification is understood merely as a ‘judicial transaction’, then the doctrine is misunderstood. This is the case because without ‘an actual sharing in his [Christ’s] righteousness [through union with him as the risen Lord through the power of his Spirit]’ our justification or righteousness would in fact be ‘empty and unreal’.16 That is why Torrance frequently opposed all legalistic attempts to explain our relations with God in connection with predestination,

12 13 14 15 16

Ibid., 62 Ibid. Ibid., 63. Ibid. Ibid.

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atonement and justification.17 It is exactly because Christ’s resurrection is an actual event of regeneration of Jesus ‘in the fullness of his humanity from corruption and death’ that ‘justification must correspondingly be a creative, regenerating event. A proper doctrine of justification and a proper doctrine of the resurrection hang together.’18 One might say that by holding together the doctrines of incarnation and resurrection Torrance could also maintain that ‘what Jesus Christ is in his resurrection, he is in himself. The resurrection was not just an event that happened to Christ, for it corresponded to the kind of Person he was in his own Being.’19 Torrance does not deny that we may seek to understand Christ in his humanity, but he does insist that ‘as soon as we confront him in the power of his resurrection our understanding of his humanity must be set within the fact of the whole Christ, as God manifest in the flesh, the Creator in our midst as human creature, come to effect the recreation of human nature from within its existence in space and time’.20 This vital insight explains why Torrance began his doctrine of the incarnation insisting that ‘when we encounter God in Jesus Christ, the truth comes to us in its own authority and self-sufficiency. It comes into our experience and into the midst of our knowledge as a novum, a new reality which we cannot incorporate into the series of other objects, or simply assimilate to what we already know.’21 Hence, he says, we ‘cannot compare the fact of Christ with other facts, nor can we deduce the fact of Christ from our knowledge of other facts . . . It is a new and unique fact without analogy anywhere in human experience or knowledge.’22 When we know Christ as he truly is, we therefore ‘know him in terms of himself. We know him out of pure grace as one who gives himself to us and freely discloses himself to us . . . by his own power and agency, by his Holy Spirit.’23 And what we know is that the ‘ultimate fact that confronts us, embedded in history and in the historical witness and proclamation of 17 See, e.g., Torrance, Atonement, 74f. and 112ff. Torrance argues that as sinners we use the law so that from ‘the point of view of faith, sin here is seizing the ethical imperative of God, making it an independent authority which is identified with human higher nature, so escaping God and deifying humanity – “you will be like God” ’, 112–13. That is why Torrance says, ‘the dialectic of sin always yields the legal outlook’ (ibid., 113) since instead of turning to God, one turns to the law and the observance of law and thus becomes self-reliant instead of surrendering to God’s forgiving grace. See also Paul D. Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 151ff. and 269ff. 18 Ibid., 63–4. 19 Ibid., 60. 20 Ibid. 21 Torrance, Incarnation, 1. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 1–2.

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the New Testament, is the mysterious duality in unity in Jesus Christ, God without reserve, man without reserve, the eternal truth in time, the Word of God made flesh’.24 It is just this union of God with us in our humanity, begun at Jesus’s birth, that ‘reaches throughout the incarnate life and work of Christ and is fully and finally achieved on man’s side and on God’s side in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ’.25 Hence, ‘it was a whole Christ who died for us and . . . it is the whole Christ who lives for evermore’.26

Bultmann/Schleiermacher At this point, it is worth repeating that for Torrance, Bultmann’s ultimate mistake in interpreting the resurrection was an inadequate doctrine of God. That inadequate doctrine of God led Bultmann ‘to reinterpret the objective facts of kērygma . . . in terms of an existential decision which we have to make in order to understand, not God or Christ or the world, but ourselves’.27 This in turn made it impossible for Bultmann to take seriously God’s self-revelation, which is itself identical with the actions of Jesus himself as the incarnate, risen and ascended Lord. There is little doubt that Torrance’s critique of Bultmann is linked to his critique of Schleiermacher, who also based faith on the strength of our reactions to the gospel instead of exclusively on the incarnate and risen Lord himself.28 Thus, Torrance cites Bultmann’s statement 24

Ibid., 3. Torrance, STR, 66. 26 Ibid. 27 Torrance, Incarnation, 286. 28 See Thomas F. Torrance, ‘Hermeneutics according to F. D. E. Schleiermacher’, Scottish Journal of Theology 21 (3) (September 1968): 257–67. Thus, among many other subtle  and profound insights, Torrance writes that Schleiermacher’s ‘critical idealism was the negative or obverse side of a very serious realism, for his doctrine of the feeling of absolute dependence on God was intended by him to be a decisive expression of the ultimate objectivity of God  . . .  But in point of fact it led his thought into the opposite direction for it posited such a dichotomy between the given and the not-given in God that Christian Doctrines were conceived to have their ground not in an activity of God within our actuality nor in any direct communication of truth, but in the emotions of the religious self-consciousness. Hence to understand God, man is thrown back upon the interpretation of his own feelings of dependence and his own self-understanding, while Jesus plays the part of a creative co-determinant in man’s religious self-consciousness,’ 264. Torrance concludes that this focus made it all too easy for Schleiermacher ‘to identify the invisibility of our own spiritual life with that of God and so to substitute human spirit in the place of God’s Spirit’, 265. Since God cannot objectively interact with us in the world, ‘what is given to us is an awareness of Him in the experience of the individual and of the community in the form of determinations of the religious consciousness’, 265. Ultimately, Torrance’s critique rests on his insistence that both biblical interpretation and theological thinking arise and move ‘not from a centre in ourselves but from a centre in God . . . theological 25

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in his Jesus Christ and Mythology that ‘ “The affirmation that God is creator cannot be a theoretical statement about God as creator mundi (creator of the world) in a general sense. The affirmation can only be a personal confession that I understand myself to be a creature which owes its existence to God.” ’29 Following upon this thinking and in accordance with his view that objective statements about God are mythological (expressions coming from us rather than statements governed by God himself acting in his Word and Spirit in history), Bultmann, according to Torrance, believed that such statements had to be understood as ‘existential statements’.30 This is no small matter since Torrance rightly concludes by asking, ‘if we can say nothing about God in himself or about what he does objectively, can we still give any content to his actions in relation to ourselves, and can we really say anything at all of God, even in analogical language?’31 Torrance’s answer was an unambiguous NO, because he recognized that Bultmann equated analogy with mythology instead of allowing his analogy to be shaped by the revelation of God in Christ in a way that took seriously the empirical (historical) correlates of revelation itself, namely, the historical Jesus as the Son of God who assumed our sinful flesh in order to heal our sin, and his actual resurrection from the grave as the objective factors which give meaning to our faith. Without going further here, we simply notice that for Torrance, unless the events of Christ’s life are grounded in his eternal being as the Son of the Father in union with the Holy Spirit, and unless we can know this scientifically (in accordance with his unique reality as God become man without ceasing to be God), we will never be able to understand the true meaning of incarnation, resurrection, atonement or ascension. My point here is that, throughout this volume, Torrance demonstrates with clarity and precision exactly how and why the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is indeed the basis for a proper understanding of the Trinity and of our relations with God. And as already mentioned, the doctrine of the Trinity for Torrance is the ground and grammar of theology. Thus, ‘it is the nerve and centre of them [doctrines] all, configures them all, and is so deeply integrated with them that when they are held apart from the doctrine of the Trinity they are seriously defective in truth and become malformed’.32 thinking calls in question every form of human thinking that seeks to establish from the side of man some congruence between man’s thinking and God’s reality’, 265–6. 29 Bultmann, cited in Torrance, Incarnation, 287–8. Notice the correspondence between this thinking and Schleiermacher’s grounding of theology in the feeling of absolute dependence. 30 Torrance, Incarnation, 288. 31 Ibid. 32 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 31.

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What all of this means is that any theology that fails to see that what Jesus Christ is for us, he is antecedently and eternally in himself, will also fail to understand the meaning of the incarnation and resurrection as Bultmann and Schleiermacher did. This is because unless there is this eternal and essential relation between the union of God and man on earth, and the eternal union of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in heaven, we are not assured either of real, or of eternal relations with God. Our salvation would have otherwise no ultimate ontological ground in reality. What God is toward us in Christ, and in him toward us, in his opus ad extra, he is eternally in himself in his opus ad intra.33

As a result of this, Torrance insists that something completely new happened in the incarnation, ‘even for God, for God the Son was not always man but now became man, became a creature, though without ceasing to be God . . . the relation of the incarnate Son to the Father did not arise within time. The life of Christ on earth was the obverse of a heavenly deed, and the result of an eternal decision, an eternal prothesis which God had purposed in himself from all eternity.’34

Responses to Torrance Before continuing, I would just note several reviews of Torrance’s book from around the time of its initial publication. E. L. Mascall wrote, ‘This is not the longest, but it is in my judgment the most important, of Dr Torrance’s recent works and, in view of the demand for a naturalistic and non-incarnational reinterpretation of the Christian religion, it has even more contemporary relevance than it had when it was written in 1975.’35 Another important and quite positive review by W. A. Whitehouse mentions that ‘the treatment throughout is thorough and explicit, straightforward and eloquent.’36 He notes that Torrance’s analogy from modern science (Einstein, Polanyi, Gödel), with its unitary and non-dualistic view of reality, is meant to help think about

33

Torrance, Incarnation, 177. Ibid. E. L. Mascall, Book Review of Space, Time and Resurrection, Scottish Journal of Theology 31 (4) (August 1978): 373–5, 373. 36 W. A. Whitehouse, Book Review of Space, Time and Resurrection, Theology SPCK 80 (678) (November 1977): 451–3, 452. 34 35

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the resurrection properly within ‘the space-time structures of the world’.37 H. Martin Rumscheidt, quoting from Torrance, said, ‘This book is primarily an attempt to give a theological interpretation of the Easter message of the New Testament writers taken as a whole, and within the New Testament’s own framework of thought which is itself the product of the radical reorientation in our understanding of God and the world grounded upon the incarnation and the resurrection,’ and concluded, ‘The eight chapters which follow are vintage Torrance: never easy but eminently worthwhile.’38 Christopher B. Kaiser observed that ‘each chapter rewards the careful reader with insights into hitherto unrealized possibilities within the deep structure of Christian faith’39 and while there are ‘many new and difficult ideas in this volume, and it requires slow, careful reading, . . . the more closely it is read the more sense it will make’.40 Kaiser also writes that ‘Torrance argues, in theology we must think of a “fallen” or “corrupted” space-time manifold due to the presence of sin’ such that these ‘need to be redeemed’.41 He then asserts that Torrance describes time’s fallenness as ‘ “running backward into nothingness” or “running away in the darkness of forgetfulness of the past” ’ and concludes that ‘this gives rise to an image of the Resurrection as an event that runs not backwards but forwards’.42 The implication of these assertions is that Torrance first considered the fallenness of space and time and then argued for a particular image of the resurrection. Kaiser was right to note Torrance’s new view of time and space and that Christ’s resurrection also meant redemption ‘from the curse of the law and reconciliation to God’ so that it ‘is the legal order of sin and death that is to be “reversed”, not time itself ’,43 but he was mistaken to suggest that these notions resulted from Torrance’s view of the fallen world. For Torrance it was the risen Lord himself who reconciled and redeemed time and space in his own personal life of active and passive obedience, who enabled the disciples and enables us now through the power of his Holy Spirit to grasp the true meaning of sin in light of the reconciliation and redemption as these have been enacted once and for all in him. This is what we apprehend as time moves towards final redemption when Christ comes again.

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Whitehouse, Book Review, 452. H. Martin Rumscheidt, Book Review of Space, Time and Resurrection, Journal of the American Academy of Religion XLVII (4) (December 1979): 689. 39 Christopher B. Kaiser, Book Review of Space, Time and Resurrection, Heythrop Journal 19 (3) (July 1978): 309–11, see 310. 40 Kaiser, Book Review, 311. 41 Kaiser, Book Review, 310, referring to STR, 88 and 130. 42 Kaiser, Book Review, 310–11. 43 Kaiser, Book Review, 311. 38

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Torrance’s key concepts At this point I would like to discuss several key concepts that Torrance offers in this book which when correctly interpreted lead to nothing short of a revolutionary understanding of God, Christ, revelation and redemption. Here I will discuss (1) Torrance’s aim in introducing his ‘new’ natural theology; (2) his stress on holding incarnation and resurrection together throughout, with the result that he insisted upon the empirical correlates of virgin birth and empty tomb; (3) his view of repentant rethinking of theology; (4) his view of Christ’s active and passive obedience and how that led him to question Barth’s ‘anxiety’ to preserve the freedom of grace by not focusing on Christ’s active obedience as he should have; (5) his stress on the importance of the ascension as the event that connects with Pentecost so that he can coherently insist that Christ is active now in the church and sacraments as our heavenly High Priest and mediator through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Torrance’s new natural theology Torrance himself raised the issue of natural theology in the preface to Space, Time and Resurrection by recounting his last conversation with Karl Barth in 1968. He wanted to get Barth’s reaction to the way he explained Barth’s attitude to natural theology to a Thomist or a physicist. He did so by referring to Einstein’s view of the relation of geometry to experience or physics. In short, he explained that geometry could not be detached from experience by making it an ‘independent conceptual system which was then used as a rigid framework within which physical knowledge is to be pursued’ and instead ‘must be brought into the midst of physics where it changes and becomes a kind of natural science (four dimensional geometry) indissolubly united to physics’.44 Torrance was keen to say that geometry was not just swallowed up by physics and thus did not just disappear but that it ‘becomes the epistemological structure in the heart of physics, although it is incomplete without physics’.45 He held that Barth treated natural theology in a similar way since he rejected it as a ‘praeambula fidei, that is, as a preamble of faith, or an independent conceptual system antecedent to actual knowledge of God, which is then used as an epistemological framework’ for interpreting ‘actual empirical 44 45

Torrance, STR, ix. Ibid. Emphasis mine.

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knowledge of God’.46 That, he believed, would distort actual knowledge of God. He concluded that Barth therefore did not simply reject natural theology completely but that he ‘transposed it into the material content of theology where in a changed form it constitutes the epistemological structure of our knowledge of God’.47 He explained to Barth that such knowledge could not function independently of revelation, though it is open to philosophical analysis. And he related this to Barth’s development of his own thinking in Church Dogmatics (CD) I/1 and II/1, where Barth replaced dualist thought ‘with an integrative mode of thought [that] enabled him to reject the Thomist split in the concept of God evident in the separation of the doctrine of the One God from a doctrine of the Triune God’.48 Torrance said that Barth fully agreed with his analysis and that he ‘must have been a blind hen not to have seen’ the analogy of geometry as Torrance explained it.

Analogy from geometry/new natural theology Two comments are in order here. Torrance’s desire to overcome dualism – that is, the split between concept and reality, between concepts and empirical correlates, between God and the world and between the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the one God – is extremely important and should be embraced. But the analogy from geometry is really problematic even on Torrance’s own presuppositions in this book and elsewhere. Simply put, while one may argue with Einstein that geometry is incomplete without physics or apart from experience, Barth never argued that natural theology was simply incomplete apart from revelation. Instead, he insisted that it was the activity of those who do not yet or no longer know the true God on the basis of faith, grace and revelation. While Torrance did in fact speak of natural theology as incomplete without revelation more than once,49 he also argued, with Barth, that our minds need to be healed through the reconciling grace of Christ so that we have the mind of Christ before we could know God accurately and in faith.50 Consequently, Barth and Torrance were not quite as much in 46

Ibid., ix–x. Ibid., x. Ibid. 49 See, e.g., Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1982), 34. 50 This is why Torrance, like Barth, applied the doctrine of justification by faith to our knowledge of God and claimed that ‘face to face with Christ our humanity is revealed to be diseased and in-turned, and our subjectivities to be rooted in self-will’; Theological Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 310. Torrance rightly contends that without Christ’s vicariously fulfilling our union with God as the reconciler, there would be no true 47 48

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agreement on this matter as Torrance thought. And his use of this analogy of geometry caused his own thinking to become somewhat inconsistent, because it led him to argue ‘natural theology can fulfill its proper function, but only in a changed form in which it constitutes the epistemological intrastructure of our knowledge of God’.51 Yet, the problem here is that natural theology by definition is the attempt to know God by relying on human nature and not exclusively on grace and revelation as both Torrance and Barth also insisted must be done in Christian theology. So, in a changed form, what was an effort of natural theology can only be a theology, that is, a proper use of human reason in knowing God from within revelation and by faith through grace. That, however, is no longer natural theology. So, Barth was right in insisting that natural theology has no proper function within the church and that one can either live by grace or attempt to base true knowledge of God on our own distorted reasoning when that reasoning functions apart from revelation and faith.52 There is no third way. It seems that all Torrance really wanted with his ‘new’ natural theology was a theology of human nature as reconciled in Christ and as enabled by the grace of God through union with Christ in and by the Holy Spirit.53 In any case, Torrance was at one with Barth in arguing that ‘since God has irreversibly incarnated his self-revelation in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, there cannot be two ways to knowledge of God, one in Jesus Christ and another behind his back, but only one way, through Christ and in his Spirit’.54

knowledge of God (ibid., 51). Indeed, Torrance rightly held that ‘from the perspective of the incarnation  . . .  it is the distortion of the fall and of human sin that lies behind this disruption or dichotomy between knowing and being, word and event, theology and history, and it is that very rupture in our human existence that God has come to heal in the incarnation. When the Word was made flesh, the rupture between our true being in communion with God and our physical existence in space and time was healed’ (Torrance, Incarnation, 296). 51 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 34. 52 Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/1, 173. 53 For a full discussion of this issue, see Paul D. Molnar, ‘Natural Theology: An Impossible Possibility?’ forthcoming in Participatio. Unfortunately, however, his statement that natural theology has a proper function to fulfil in the church has led others today to find a place for natural theology that neither Barth nor Torrance actually sought or found. That is not to say that remnants of the old natural theology were not still in evidence in Torrance’s thinking, as I have noted in ‘Natural Theology Revisited: A Comparison of T. F. Torrance and Karl Barth’, Zeitschrift Für Dialektische Theologie 20/1 (2005): 53–83. 54 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 34.

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Scientific theology On this basis, Torrance and Barth also agreed that the proper starting point for a scientific theology was the resurrection of Jesus Christ.55 And Torrance said to Barth that ‘unless that starting point was closely bound up with the incarnation, it might be only too easy, judging from many of our contemporaries and even some of his former students, to think of the resurrection after all in a rather docetic way, lacking concrete ontological reality’.56 With that remark, Barth forcefully responded: ‘ “Wohlverstanden, leibliche Auferstehung” – “Mark well, bodily resurrection” ’.57 Torrance went on to explain that this book would be his attempt to allow a kind of ‘ “theological geometry” and living experience of God through the incarnate and risen Son to operate together’ so that his theology of the resurrection would keep ‘ground and experience, theoretical and empirical ingredients in the Christian faith . . . intrinsically and inseparably interlocked’.58 55

Torrance, STR, x, 73. Ibid., x–xi. Torrance specifically mentions that while some of his students claimed to agree with Barth, in reality, ‘like Ernst Käsemann’, they actually developed ‘a docetic view of the resurrection’ (T. F. Torrance, Karl Barth, Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), 133). Interestingly, Jürgen Moltmann responded directly to Barth’s suggestion to him that to escape the one-sidedness of his eschatology in his Theology of Hope, he should allow ‘the doctrine of the immanent Trinity’ to ‘function as an expository canon for the proclamation of the lordship of Jesus Christ’ (Karl Barth, Letters 1961–1968, ed. Jürgen Fangmeier and Hinrich Stoevesandt, trans. and ed., Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 348). Moltmann indicated that he was following exegetical friends such as Ernst Käsemann, and in doing this, he attempted to ‘expound the economic Trinity’ in such a way that ‘in the foreground, and then again in the background, it would be open to an immanent Trinity. That is, for me, the Holy Spirit is first the Spirit of the raising of the dead and then as such the third person of the Trinity’, ibid. This view of the Spirit, however, is quite opposite the view Barth and Torrance advanced since for them the Holy Spirit was first the Spirit of the Father and Son in pre-temporal eternity and only then as such the Spirit of the raising of the dead. Many other contemporary examples could be adduced. Roger Haight for instance claims that since ‘the fundamental nature of the resurrection’ is ‘a transcendent object of faith’ therefore it would be better to say that ‘Jesus’ resurrection is not an historical fact, because the idea of an historical fact suggests an empirical event which could have been witnessed and can now be imaginatively construed’ (Roger Haight, Jesus: Symbol of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 124). He thus concludes that the resurrection ‘need not entail the assumption of his physical corpse . . . Identifying the resurrection with the empirical disappearance of the body of Jesus may be seen as a category mistake that tends to distort the symbol’ (ibid., 125). This is why Haight insists that his view of the resurrection ‘does not support the necessity of an empty tomb in principle’ (ibid., 134). All of this thinking is exactly what Torrance opposes because it detaches its explanation of the resurrection from its empirical correlates, and by doing so it ends presenting the resurrection as a myth symbolically described that is grounded in people’s experiences of faith and hope. 57 Ibid., xi. 58 Ibid. 56

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One can see clearly the result of keeping the theoretical together with the empirical in Torrance’s firm insistence throughout this book that docetic and gnostic thinkers operated with a radical dichotomy between the realm of God and the realm of this world which meant that the forms of thought and speech that we use in this world to speak of God must be treated as merely symbolic, for God in himself is beyond our knowledge. We do not know what he is but only know what he is not, as Basilides expressed it.59

Interestingly, Torrance elsewhere argued that both Athanasius and Hilary strongly opposed this thinking because they followed Gregory Nazianzen, who insisted that ‘if we cannot say anything positive about what God is, we really cannot say anything accurate about what he is not’.60 Importantly, this is precisely why Torrance could argue that the ‘resurrection is therefore our pledge that statements about God in Jesus Christ have an objective reference in God, and are not just projections out of the human heart and imagination, objectifying forms of thought in which we fashion a God in terms of the creaturely content of our own ideas’.61 When Torrance opposed Bultmann’s view that we could not know God in himself but only God acting for us, he was opposing precisely what he characterized as gnostic and docetic thinking.62

Holding incarnation and resurrection together It is noticeable that in this book Torrance invariably speaks of Jesus as the incarnate Word because in light of the resurrection of the historical Jesus, we know that the subject of the event of resurrection was in reality a unique subject. Unlike John Macquarrie, who takes as his starting point for his Christological reflections ‘the man Jesus, in the sense of a “human person” ’63 and contends that the earliest Christologies were adoptionist,64 Torrance’s 59

Ibid., 72. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 50. 61 Torrance, STR, 72–3. 62 Torrance specifically rejects Bultmann’s thinking about the resurrection as gnostic and by implication docetic, Incarnation, 294–5. For Torrance, ‘all docetic conceptions of the risen Christ are quite irrelevant to men and women of flesh and blood, and have no message to offer them in their actual existence’ (STR, 87). 63 John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press International, 1990), 312. 64 See Paul D. Molnar, Incarnation and Resurrection: Toward a Contemporary Understanding (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 363. 60

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starting point is the fact that the ‘resurrection cannot be detached from Christ himself, and considered as a phenomenon on its own to be compared and judged in the light of other phenomena’.65 Instead, ‘it must be considered in the light of who Jesus Christ is in his own Person, in his own intrinsic logos, and indeed in the light of his divine and human natures’.66 Thus, he insists that we ‘cannot isolate the resurrection from the whole redeeming purpose of God or from the decisive deed of God in the incarnation of his Son’.67 It is important to realize that this position is based on Torrance’s holding together incarnation and resurrection in the way that does not happen in the thinking of Wolfhart Pannenberg and those who follow Pannenberg’s insistence that Christology cannot begin with Jesus in his divine and human natures but must begin with the man Jesus because the incarnation must be understood as the conclusion and not the starting point for Christology.68 By contrast, Torrance insists, It is because he who lives and acts in this situation is divine and human in one Person, that all he does in our fallen existence has a dark side and a light side, a side of humiliation and a side of exaltation – the one is the obverse of the other, but as the Mediator he has come to overcome our darkness and baseness and to build a bridge in and through himself over which we may pass into the light and glory of God.69

Hence, as the Son of God, Jesus Christ engaged with the ‘forces of darkness’ from the moment he became incarnate since ‘the whole of his life was a redemptive operation in our human nature where the forces of evil have entrenched themselves and seek to enslave us’.70 By living his life in complete obedience to the Father and in perfect communion with him ‘in the midst of our sin and corruption  . . .  from birth to death, he achieved within our creaturely being the very union between God and man that constitutes the heart of atonement, effecting man’s salvation and restoration to communion with God the Father’.71

65

Torrance, STR, 46. Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus – God and Man, second edition, trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1977), 279. See also Molnar, Incarnation and Resurrection, 262ff. 69 Torrance, STR, 46–7. 70 Ibid., 47. 71 Ibid. See also Paul D. Molnar, ‘Resurrection and Atonement in the Theology of Thomas F. Torrance’, in The T&T Clark Companion to the Atonement, ed. Adam Johnson (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 57–76. 66

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Cross/resurrection/reconciliation This understanding of incarnation, resurrection and atonement means that humiliation and exaltation were involved throughout Christ’s incarnate life in different ways and should not be thought of as two successive events following upon each other. In other words, it is because the Son of God came into our ‘lost and alienated being’ as ‘God with us’ that we are now with God. This is an important insight that runs through this volume: in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, God acted and acts both from the divine side reconciling us to the Father and from the human side as the Royal Priest who lives in perfect union with God for us. Torrance therefore argues that human exaltation is the other side of the crucifixion. The resurrection then is not merely understood as ‘something that follows upon the crucifixion but as the other side of it’.72 This is why the New Testament never presents the crucifixion apart from the resurrection, since it is in the resurrection that the significance of the cross was disclosed. Again, here it is crucial to see that Torrance never thinks of Jesus simply as a man who later was thought of as divine. Rather, he maintains that ‘as incarnate Son of God he confronts us as he in whom person and work and word are indissolubly one’ so that it ‘is his own person that he communicates in his words and deeds, while his words and deeds do not only derive from his person but inhere in it’. The upshot of all this is that Christ is nowhere presented in the New Testament ‘apart from the mighty acts of healing and forgiving that were wrought by him, but always and only with the Christ who is in himself the secret of his kerygma and whose kerygma is what it is because of its profound inner relation to his personal Being’.73 Importantly, Torrance also explains the event of resurrection precisely by keeping together the fact that the unique subject of the incarnation is the same unique divine-human subject active in the resurrection event. Torrance says, ‘This is why we can speak of the whole historical Jesus from birth to resurrection as sheer miracle or downright resurrection from beginning to end.’74 But this means that if you simply interpret Christ’s resurrection theologically and apart from Jesus’s history, you end up with mythology because, by marginalizing history, the resurrection would also be docetized. Further, any attempt to interpret the event from a merely historical perspective would mean that we had assumed that we have here ‘an ordinary historical

72 73 74

Ibid., 47–8. Ibid., 48–9. Ibid., 94.

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happening’.75 This false approach, Torrance notes, is regularly employed in the quest of the historical Jesus but is inapplicable here because that approach is ‘neither open-minded nor scientific, since it would foreclose the issue completely as to who Jesus Christ is, before we have even considered him in accordance with his nature and self-disclosure’.76 This leads Torrance to assert once more that the resurrection must be understood both enhypostatically (stressing Jesus’s full humanity as the incarnate Son) and anhypostatically (stressing that Jesus would not have existed apart from the Word or Son who became incarnate) because if it is only understood anhypostatically, then it will be interpreted as ‘some sort of super-history, touching our history only in a tangential way, and therefore not as really historical’.77 Of course it is only through the Spirit that we may understand the resurrection as God’s action within history as the unique subject of this happening.

Christ’s active and passive obedience Repeatedly, then, Torrance insists that ‘the resurrection is inseparable from the Person of the incarnate Son of God who constituted in himself as the Mediator the bridge between man and God and between death and life’. As such, he was our atonement ‘in life and death for our sin and guilt’.78 This view of Christ’s activity from the divine and human side leads to Torrance’s important stress on Christ’s active and passive obedience and to his distinct view that not only did God the Father raise Jesus from the dead, but Christ himself humanly and in perfect Amen to the Father also raised himself up in answer to the Father. That assertion itself expresses Torrance’s fundamental understanding that in Christ, God did not just come into a man and act instrumentally to save us from sin and death. Rather, God came as man and thus lived out for us what perfect communion with God really is so that, through the Holy Spirit after Pentecost, our union with Christ in his true humanity and divinity will enable us to live as part of that new creation. Consequently, Torrance can say that by ‘living in utter holiness as Son on earth he appropriated for and into our human nature the eternal Life of God’.79 One might say that Torrance’s explanation of Christ’s active and passive obedience, which itself is grounded in Jesus’s Person and work as revealer,

75 76 77 78 79

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 55.

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reconciler and mediator, is his distinct answer to what he perceived as Barth’s ‘anxiety not to obscure and weaken the character of the resurrection as “free pure act of divine grace” ’.80 Torrance criticized Barth’s discussion in CD IV/1, 303ff., because he said Barth placed his ‘emphasis upon the fact that in the resurrection the relation of the Son to the Father is that of pure obedience, subordination and subjection’.81 But in doing so, Torrance thought Barth played down ‘the idea that Jesus actively rose from the dead, but as Cyril of Alexandria once showed, the activity of Christ in the resurrection is essential to the unity of his person as Mediator’.82 For Torrance, ‘when the New Testament speaks of Jesus being raised up, it evidently refers not only to the resurrection of his body from the grave but to his being raised up as the appointed Messiah, the anointed Prophet, Priest and King’.83 Torrance explains these matters by referring to Christ’s passive obedience in that he was raised from the dead by the Father and he submitted to a real and complete death vicariously for us. For Torrance, ‘Passive resurrection is the counterpart to that abject passion, and corresponds to the “anhypostatic” aspect of the Incarnation and the dramatic aspect of redemption in which we are saved by the sheer act of Almighty God.’84 At the same time, because this passive obedience of Jesus was essentially a vicarious act in accepting the Father’s will, ‘it was also a positive and indeed a creative act, and as such is the counterpart to the “enhypostatic” aspect of the Incarnation and the priestly aspect of redemption in which we are saved through the human mediation of the incarnate Son’.85 In a real sense, these vital assertions represent Torrance’s correction of Barth’s anxiety about God’s free grace. Instead of thinking of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper more as ethical responses to God, Torrance placed an appropriate stress on Christ’s vicarious human activity as the one who sacrificed himself for us and as the eternal High Priest acting now from the divine and the human side through the Holy Spirit in the power of the resurrection to enable us to live as part of the new creation through the sacraments. In a powerful statement against Apollinarianism in worship Torrance asserted that if Jesus Christ in his human mind does not worship the Father with us and on our behalf, then his priestly ministry becomes absorbed in the majesty of his Godhead, and we are left without an effective mediation 80 81 82 83 84 85

Ibid., 32. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 51. Ibid.

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from mankind towards the Father. Then Christ himself, in the identity of Offerer and Offering, is not central to the liturgy and in the last analysis he himself is not our worship, so that we are inevitably thrown back upon ourselves to offer our own worship to the Father, worship of our own devising … The effect of this is to replace the humanity of Christ with our own humanity.86

Torrance insisted that Baptism must be understood ‘as the Sacrament of the vicarious obedience of Christ the Servant-Son’.87 Failure to acknowledge and give a proper place to the humanity of Christ in worship meant that either some sort of monophysitism had intruded with the result that other mediators would replace the one mediator, or some sort of Apollinarianism would intervene, in which case the human mind and rational soul of Jesus would not be properly stressed.88 That would result in a view of the incarnation in which God’s love ‘stopped short of union with us in our actual condition’.89 In worship, that would mean once again that we are thrown back upon ourselves and that would lead not only to Pelagianism with regard to salvation but also to self-justification both with regard to worship and with regard to knowledge of God. For Torrance, ‘liturgical monophysitism’ could only be overcome if the incarnation of the Son of God is ‘understood, not as the coming of God into man, but as God becoming man, coming among us as man and therefore of God as man doing for us in a human way what we are unable to do for ourselves’.90 Only by avoiding the ‘Apollinarian thesis that Christ had no rational soul or human mind, and the Nestorian thesis which held the deity of the Son apart from the priestly office of his humanity’ could we take with full seriousness Christ’s vicarious representation of us before the Father in the power of his Holy Spirit.91

Torrance and Barth: Prophet, Priest and King These insights are crucial because they explain why Torrance objected to Barth’s tendency to flatten out Christ’s specific mediation as Priest, Prophet and King by speaking more broadly of the humanity of God instead of 86 Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation: Essays towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East and West (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1975), 204. 87 Torrance, Karl Barth, 135. 88 See Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (London: SCM Press, 1965), 166–7. 89 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 201. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid.

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allowing the specific actions of the human Jesus who rose from the dead to personalize us through his presence to us, with us and in us, in the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. In Torrance’s view, while Barth properly stressed Christ’s threefold office as ‘Prophet, Priest and King’ in CD IV/1, he appeared to allow his view of the ascended Christ to be ‘swallowed up in the transcendent Light and Spirit of God, so that the humanity of the risen Jesus appeared to be displaced by what he called “the humanity of God” in his turning toward us’.92 Torrance mentioned to Barth that he had expected to find a ‘careful account of the priestly ministry of the ascended Jesus’ in CD IV/3 as offered in the letter to the Hebrews, with a stress on ‘the heavenly intercession of the ascended Christ’, which would have corresponded well with Barth’s own consistent stress on the vicarious humanity of Christ.93 Torrance suggested to Barth that by not offering this account of Christ’s priestly ministry, some were led to ‘a “suspicion of docetism” in what Barth had written about the ascended humanity of Jesus’ and that this ‘inevitably raised questions in some quarters about how he really regarded the humanity of the pre-resurrection Jesus!’94 Torrance mentioned that it seemed to have led Hendrik Berkhof ‘to advocate something like a Sabellian doctrine of the Spirit, so that eventually the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was not allowed to have its primary and constitutive place in his account of the Christian Faith’.95 Torrance also objected to Barth’s overly sharp distinction between water Baptism and Spirit Baptism in CD IV/4, claiming that he seemed to have ‘slipped back into a mode of thought which he himself had sharply rejected in earlier volumes’.96 Torrance traced that dualistic perspective to CD IV/1. Barth responded that this was unintentional and suggested that Torrance might ‘rewrite those parts of CD IV to make them consistent with the rest of his theology!’97 In any case, Torrance’s approach to the 92 Torrance, Karl Barth, 134. Torrance was careful to explain that Barth also had a powerful sense of ‘the new humanity in Jesus Christ’ and of ‘Baptism as the determining starting-point of Christian obedience in response to the vicarious obedience of Jesus Christ’ (ibid., 22–3). Torrance concurred with Barth’s desire to stress Christ’s bodily resurrection, saying, ‘If Jesus Christ exists no longer as man, then we have little ground for hope in this life, not to speak of the hereafter. It is the risen humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ that forms the very centre of the Christian’s hope in life and death, for it is in him incarnate, crucified and risen that as St Paul tells us the whole universe of visible and invisible realities consists’ (ibid.). 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. See n. 56. This is the very criticism, of course, that Barth was levelling at Moltmann for not employing a properly conceived doctrine of the immanent Trinity. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 133–4.

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church and sacraments was based on his view that ‘if the Son in his essential nature is one with the Father within the eternal being of the Triune God’, then the incarnation must be regarded as falling within the life of God, and that the atoning work carried out by Jesus Christ must be thought out in terms of his internal relation to God, that is, as taking place within the incarnate Person of the Mediator and as the reconciling operation of the hypostatic union inserted into our estranged humanity.98

This once again was his answer to Barth’s ‘anxiety’ mentioned above. For Torrance, ‘The “anhypostatic” aspect of the Incarnation and redemption emphasizes that all is due to the grace of God alone – there would have been no “Jesus” apart from the Incarnation of the Son – the “enhypostatic” aspect emphasizes the fullness and integrity of Jesus’ human life and agency in the incarnate life and work of the Son.’99 All of this, then, explains the importance of Torrance’s view that from God’s side the cross is God’s righteous condemnation of our sin while from humanity’s side it is Christ’s High-Priestly Amen to the Father’s judgement. So a proper doctrine of satisfaction, in Torrance’s view, is one that is conceptualized not as fulfilling legal requirements in making amends for sin but as God’s good pleasure ‘in the obedient self-offering of the incarnate Son, manifested and expressed in the raising of the Son from the dead and in a refusal to allow him to see corruption’.100 Therefore, satisfaction is ‘not  the divine satisfaction in death, as compensation for violated law, nor only the  satisfaction in the fulfilment of divine righteousness, but satisfaction of the Father in the Son who has fulfilled the Father’s good pleasure in making righteous atonement’.101 It is in this sense that while some might view Torrance’s assertion that Christ’s resurrection ‘is to be regarded as his own act

98 Ibid., 206. Emphasis mine. Torrance offers a brief but compelling account of how the biblical concept of the ‘Servant-Son’ should function and indeed how in part it did function also for Barth in ibid., 206–7. 99 Torrance, STR, 51. 100 Ibid., 52. 101 Ibid., 53. This Christological understanding of atonement as substitution negates the idea espoused by some that all ‘ “standard atonement images harbor or actually model unjust suffering and divine violence” ’ and that the ‘ “logic of satisfaction atonement makes God the chief avenger or the chief punisher  . . .  It makes God a divine child abuser” ’, J.  Denny Weaver, ‘Christology, Atonement, and Peace’, unpublished ms., cited in George Hunsinger, The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let us Keep the Feast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 292.

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in taking again the life that he had laid down’102 as an ‘instrumentalist’ view of the matter, Torrance roundly rejects just such a view precisely because the incarnate Son was both passively and actively obedient to the Father for us. Hence, Jesus ‘denied to death any natural right over man – rather is death “the wages of sin” (Rom. 6:23). Death is no more proper to human nature than sin is. Man is made for God, and God is life: therefore death is unnatural.’103 Torrance conceptualized the hypostatic union as ‘a living and dynamic union which ran through [Christ’s] whole life’. Jesus ‘maintained union and communion with the Father’ and the ‘resurrection means that this union did not give way but held under the strain imposed not only by the forces that sought to divide Jesus from God, but the strain imposed through the infliction of the righteous judgment of the Father upon our rebellious humanity which Christ had made his own’.104 This leads to the powerful assertion that ‘the resurrection is thus the resurrection of the union forged between man and God in Jesus out of the damned and lost condition of men into which Christ entered in order to share their lot and redeem them from doom’.105 Let us now briefly discuss Torrance’s eschatology as it relates to the connection of the resurrection and ascension.

Resurrection and ascension Taking his cue from John Knox and John Calvin, Torrance placed great emphasis on the importance of the ascension. Torrance strongly objected to Bultmann’s view of eschatology because it suggested that redemption takes place when time ends; in other words, it is a timeless event. Instead, Torrance insisted that our justification in Christ took place under the law, but apart from it. That meant that as sinners under the law our relations with God took the form of ethical and legal relation. This is what was redeemed by Christ from within his own person as the life-giving new man. Christ redeemed our time; he did not abolish it. That is why for Torrance it is so important to realize that the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in the Person of the 102 Ibid. An instrumentalist view of the matter would subvert the fact that all along the line God acted as man; such a view opens the door to the errors of both universalism and limited atonement (Torrance, Karl Barth, 236–7). 103 Ibid., 54. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. This for Torrance is the significance of Jesus’s cry of God-forsakenness on the cross as reported in Mk; he truly experienced our lost condition both as God and as man and in turning to his Father with his further statement, ‘into your hands I commend my spirit’ as reported in Jn, we see additional examples of his active and passive obedience. See, e.g., Molnar, Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity, 155.

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incarnate Son endured our sinful alienation but survived it since Christ rose bodily from the dead. Christ lives presently as the ascended Lord who directs us back to the events of his life, death and resurrection as well as his message as embedded in the New Testament, to hear him speak even now. With the ascension Torrance presents his eschatological view that the church really is the body of Christ on earth and that our lives are hid with Christ in God.106 His view of the church as the body of Christ was meant to emphasize that it is our union with Christ now risen and ascended into heaven (that side of created reality that is inaccessible to us apart from God’s own action of disclosing himself to us) through the Spirit and in faith that allows us to share now in the new humanity of Christ and ultimately in the relations between the Father and Son in eternity. This means that as part of the new creation which is exemplified in the church’s actions in Baptism and the Eucharist, the former as the beginning of the Christian life and the latter as its constant renewal, we are already perfected in him. However, because Christ deliberately initiated an interval between his first and second parousia, this is experienced now in the world which is passing away and moving towards its final fulfilment in the redemption when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead. Thus, Torrance will say, Because the Church is already participant in that new creation, i.e. in the millennium time of the resurrection, the Kingdom of the risen and ascended and advent Christ already knocks at the door of the Church. That happens above all at the Holy Supper, where the risen Lord is present, in Eucharistic Parousia, and where we taste already the powers of the age to come.107

Hence, ‘as often as the Church partakes of Holy Communion in the real presence or parousia of Christ it becomes ever anew the Body of the risen Lord’.108 Torrance notes that when believers die they are with Christ in his immediate presence to them. But when this is regarded on the ‘plane of history and of the on-going processes of the fallen world, the death of each believer means that his body is laid to sleep in the earth, waiting until the redemption’.109 He thus maintains that looked at ‘from the perspective of the new creation there is no gap between the death of the believer and the parousia of Christ, but looked at from the perspective of time that decays and 106 107 108 109

Ibid., 99–100. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 102. Ibid.

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crumbles away, there is a lapse in time between them’.110 How then are we to think of these two times, the passing time and the coming time of the new creation, together? Torrance insists that this can be properly done ‘exclusively in Christ, in the one Person of Christ in whom human nature and divine nature are hypostatically united, and in whom our human existence and history are taken up into his divine life’.111 Thinking Christologically in this way, Torrance rejects the ‘mythologizing of biblical eschatology’, which to him means rejecting any ‘fixation’ of the Kingdom of Christ ‘within the old structures’.112 Consequently, Torrance opposes any idea that we could therefore imagine Christ ruling a thousand years (millenarian thinking) once again as a servant. Such a view fails to take account of the fact that when Christ comes again ‘it will be with all his unveiled majesty and power, all the manifest glory of the new creation’; it also misunderstands the nature of the resurrection and the fact that atonement now is a completed work. Thus, when ‘Christ comes again it can only be to make all things new and to reveal what he has already done and is even now working in and under and with all world-events’.113 It is then that ‘the vast cosmic significance of the incarnation of the Word, and of the reconciliation through the sacrifice of Christ, and of the resurrection of our human nature in him, will be made clear and manifest to all, and we shall know as we are known’.114 In the meantime, it is as the ascended and advent Christ that he continually intercedes for us in his priestly ministry as the Royal Priest. But it is also important to realize that with the ascension ‘Jesus Christ was fully installed in his kingly Ministry’.115 His prophetic ministry began with the incarnation while his kingly ministry started with his public ministry. Torrance maintains, however, that even as the High Priest who offered himself ‘in sacrifice for our sins’ to the Father, ‘he was King, crowned with thorns, but King because of the Cross and through the Cross’.116 Importantly, Christ as the Royal Priest exercises his utterly unique function as the Apostle sent by God in the incarnation to reconcile us to God from the divine and human side. Thus, ‘Jesus is not Priest in the sense that what he does symbolizes or bears liturgical witness to something else, to what God does’.117 Here, Torrance emphasizes that Jesus Christ ‘is the Son of God, 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 103. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 106. Ibid. Ibid., 114.

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God himself come to us as Priest, Priest sent from God, Apostle-Priest, as well as Priest qualified to act for us through his incarnational solidarity with sinners’.118 Christ thus makes atonement in a way that the Aaronic priesthood could not just because his priesthood is grounded in his ‘own endless life’ while the Aaronic priesthood functioned ‘on the ground of legal ordinance’.119 Here is where resurrection and ascension must be held together because the very existence of the church as the body of Christ ‘turns upon the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in Body and His ascension in the fulness of His Humanity’.120 Christ ascended ‘wearing our resurrected humanity in His ascension’ precisely as the one who descended to experience death for us and to ascend in his own resurrection from the dead.121 Since Christ ascended to the Father as the Word made flesh, he can and does act as the Word of God to us and as the human word of obedient response to God for us. In that way, he is and remains the one mediator between us and God the Father. This, of course, occurs here and now through the action of the Holy Spirit.122

Church as the body of Christ While Torrance is extremely careful in his understanding of the church as the body of Christ by insisting that while the church and Christ are one because of God’s gracious acts of incarnation, reconciliation, resurrection and ascension, it cannot mean that the two are identical. For that reason, Torrance firmly rejects any notion that the church is an ‘extension’ or ‘continuation’ of the incarnation; it most certainly must not be understood as the ‘reincarnation of the Risen Lord’. The church is his body in union with him through the power of the Spirit.123 Torrance insists that the church ‘is not Christ continued, the Incarnation continued’ because the ‘Cross stands between. In being the Body of Christ, the Church meets her Lord; she does not prolong Him, but she expresses Him here and now. She does not replace 118

Ibid. Ibid. 120 T. F. Torrance, Royal Priesthood: A Theology of Ordained Ministry, second edition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 43. 121 Ibid., 39. In this regard Torrance forcefully rejects the interpretation of Jn 3:13. and Eph. 4:9f. ‘in terms of the myth of the Heavenly or Primal Man’ as offered by Bultmann, Käsemann and Schlier because he maintains that the language of descent and ascent here is ‘indigenous to Judaism and Christianity’ and it comes ‘from the habit of speaking of ascent into the Holy Place and descent from it, and in the second place from Baptism’ (ibid.). Torrance contends that it is the language of Jewish liturgy that is employed here in the context of incarnation and ‘not gnostic mythology’. 122 Torrance, STR, 118. 123 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 31. 119

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Him, but makes Him visible, demonstrates Him without being confounded with Him.’124 The church becomes the body of Christ by being baptized into his death; the church therefore ‘no longer belongs to itself. It belongs to Christ as his Body.’125 All of this is extremely important, and it stands in stark contrast to the view of Robert Jenson who also used St Paul’s image of the church as the body of Christ but claimed that Christ’s body now is whatever Christ uses to make himself present to us. Since for Jenson that is the bread and cup of the Lord’s Supper, he says that ‘Sacrament and church are truly Christ’s body for us’ and therefore Jesus ‘needs no other body to be a risen man, body and soul’.126 He even says that ‘the church is ontologically the risen Christ’s human body’.127 This is precisely the confusion that Torrance wishes to avoid when he insists that in the ascension ‘Jesus Christ who rose again from the dead in his full Humanity has withdrawn His Body from us, out of the visible succession of history, and He waits until the day when He will come again in Body to judge and to renew the world’.128 That is why Torrance also asserts that we must speak of the church as Christ’s body as it is united to its heavenly Head through the power his Holy Spirit with ‘eschatological reserve’. Christ is surely present here and now through the power of his Spirit, but thinking in a properly eschatological way, we must recognize that while the church is already one body with Christ since ‘that has once for all taken place in the crucifixion, resurrection and in Pentecost’, nonetheless, ‘the Church is still to become One Body. Between the “already One Body” and the “still to become One Body” we have the doctrine of the ascension and advent of Christ, the ascension reminding us that the Church is other than Christ, while sanctified together with him.’129 The advent reminds us that the church’s existence between Christ’s first and second coming ‘is under the judgement of the impending advent, while already justified in Him. Thus the Church is summoned to look beyond its historical forms in this world to the day when Christ will change the body of our humiliation and make it like unto the Body of His Glory (Phil. 3.21).’130

124

Ibid. Ibid., 33. 126 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology Volume 1: The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 206. 127 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology Volume II: The Works of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213. 128 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 45. 129 Ibid., 46. 130 Ibid. 125

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The event of ascension Unlike theologians such as John Macquarrie who said of the ascension that it ‘is perhaps best understood  . . .  as an event in the consciousness of the disciples rather than in the career of Christ himself ’,131 Torrance insists that the ascension is linked to the incarnation and the saving acts of God as the other side of the incarnation. Following Barth, Torrance argued that the ‘resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ are two distinct but inseparable moments in one and the same event. The resurrection is to be understood as the terminus a quo, its beginning, and the ascension as its terminus ad quem, its end.’132 Any reduction of the ascension to an event within the disciples’ consciousness would, in Torrance’s thinking, undermine the fact that Christ acted as revealer and reconciler and will act as redeemer at his return. It would also undermine the fact that Christ is present to us now in the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but also as the one who enables us to know, love and worship God in union with him in his true humanity and true divinity. Take away the fact that Christ exists as the ascended Lord both in his true divinity and true humanity, and our connection with the triune God is lost.

The extra Calvinisticum In connection with Jesus’s ascension, Torrance considers ‘ “the Calvinist extra” ’. The question concerned whether the eternal Son really entered within our existence in space and time in the incarnation in such a way that ‘he left the bosom of the Father or left the throne of the universe’.133 Or should we hold that while he did become exactly what we are ‘flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone’ within time and space, he nevertheless ‘continued to rule the universe as the Creator Logos by whom all things that are made are made’?134 Torrance maintains that both Patristic and Reformed theology have always argued that while the eternal Word did enter time and space ‘not merely as Creator, but as himself made creature’, he did so without ceasing to be ‘what he eternally was in himself, the Creator Word’.135

131 132 133 134 135

Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought, 409–10. Torrance, STR, 123, citing Barth, CD IV/2, 150. Ibid., 124. Ibid. Ibid.

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Torrance asserts that Lutherans rejected the Calvinist extra because, like medieval theologians, but unlike the Fathers, their thinking functioned with ‘a receptacle view of space as the place containing within its limits that which occupies it’.136 Torrance flatly rejected the receptacle or container view of space because it both led to a mutually conditioning view of God’s relations with us and distorted the fact that God remains God even as he acts within the sphere of history because nothing can contain him. Since the Lutherans accepted the container concept, they interpreted the Calvinist position as implying that ‘only part of the Word was contained in the babe at Bethlehem  . . .  and that something was left “outside” (extra)’.137 While Torrance argued that the Lutherans were right to want to maintain that God was fully incarnate in Christ, their rejection of the Calvinist extra caused problems. Employing the receptacle notion of space would constrain one to think of the kenosis (self-emptying) as ‘the emptying of the Son of God into a containing vessel’, thus creating unnecessary and unacceptable problems.138 Torrance maintained that the same difficulties arose in connection with the Eucharist, causing problems about how to think of Christ as ‘contained in the host, in every part of it, and in a multitude of hosts at the same time’.139 Kenotic theories held that in the incarnation, the Son either shed or restricted those properties that were incompatible with human existence. This, unfortunately, came to mean that kenoticists related God’s immensity ‘to the finite receptacle – finitum capax infiniti’ and that this ‘usually meant the extension of the human receptacle to contain the divine, e.g. in the doctrine of the ubiquity of the body of Christ, which could hardly avoid a form of monophysitism’.140 Luther himself ‘tended to reduce history to a vanishing point’ and that led to ‘a radical disjunction between the divine and the human in which there was no interaction between them’. In effect, Torrance says that is ‘the same sort of answer now given by the “demythologizers” ’ who today relate divine being to space and time ‘only tangentially at the point called “Jesus” whose historical existence is then only a sort of springboard for a constant leap in existential decision that leaves history behind’.141 Torrance’s own solution to these difficulties is to hold that ‘the Logos was totally incarnate – nevertheless he remained wholly himself . . . He became man without ceasing to be God’.142 The solution, then, is a relational view of 136 137 138 139 140 141 142

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 125. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 126.

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God and space and time rather than a receptacle view because, as already noted above in connection with the resurrection, the unique subject of these events must be allowed to shape our thinking about them. Using the receptacle view will always lead to monophysitism or to Nestorianism. This whole question, Torrance contends, arises ‘in an acute form when we come to the ascension of Christ, of Jesus who is very Son of God, and who ascends from man’s place to God’s “place” ’.143 This leads Torrance to claim that in the Old Testament, the Temple ‘was the place where God put his Name’ but that ‘Jesus Christ is that Temple of God as a living reality on earth and among men where God has put his Name, and where he has appointed us to meet him’.144 How then are we to think of the ascended Christ? Torrance argues that, just as in the incarnation we have to think of God becoming this man Jesus without ceasing to be God, so in the ascension we must ‘think of Christ ascending above all space and time without ceasing to be man or without any diminishment of his physical, historical existence’.145 This indeed is what we mean, Torrance says, when we say ‘Christ is “in heaven” ’. But, he says, we also mean more than this, for Christ actually ‘transforms “heaven” ’ since ‘something quite new has been effected in the heavenlies which must alter its material content in our understanding of what heaven is’.146 Heaven, rightly understood, ‘is the “place” where Christ is in God. Hence we can speak of Christ having a “heavenly place” in God far beyond anything we can understand and far beyond our reach.’ But since through his Spirit Christ makes himself present to his church on earth, it ‘is the “place” where God

143

Ibid., 127. Ibid., 128–9. 145 Ibid., 129. 146 Ibid. Like Barth, Torrance defines heaven as the ‘sum of the inaccessible and incomprehensible side of the created world, so that, although it is not God himself, it is the throne of God, the creaturely correspondence to his glory, which is veiled from man, and cannot be disclosed except on his initiative’ (ibid.). Against Bultmann’s idea of eschatology, which of course refers to ‘the last Word and final Act of God in Christ’ at the end or ‘consummation in the final parousia’, Torrance forcefully maintains that it does not refer to God acting ‘at the end of the world, where the world ends or ceases’. He asserts that Bultmann’s eschatology is hampered by his ‘radical disjunction between this world and the other world of God’ and thus disallows genuine interaction between God and us within time and space. For that reason, Torrance criticizes Bultmann for adopting Heidegger’s notion that we must somehow ‘leap beyond the boundary of being’ to reach ‘the source of being – although how that is possible when it is a leap into nothing is a puzzle’ (STR, 150–1). See Torrance’s extremely insightful and illuminating review of Heidegger’s Being and Time in the Journal of Theological Studies XVI (2) (1964): 471–86. His insistence that Kierkegaard was not the father of existentialism as is commonly supposed and his illustration that Heidegger himself never quite escaped the subjectivism he sought to overcome are just two of many breathtakingly powerful explanations of how problematic Heidegger’s thinking really was and is from a theological perspective. 144

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and man are appointed to meet’. While God meets us in our place in the incarnation, in the ascension we meet in ‘God’s place’.147 For Torrance, our human place is defined ‘by the nature and activity of man as the room which he makes for himself in his life and movement’, while ‘God’s “place” is defined by the nature and activity of God as the room for the life and activity of God as God’. We speak of God’s time and place ‘in terms of his own eternal life and his eternal purpose in the divine love, where he wills his life and love to overflow to us whom he has made to share with him his life and love’.148 God’s time is defined by ‘the uncreated and creative life of God’, while God’s place is defined ‘by the communion of the Persons in the Divine life – that is why doctrinally we speak of the “perichorēsis” (from chora meaning space or room) or mutual indwelling of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Triunity of God’.149

Closing comments Importantly, as we come to the end of our discussion of Torrance’s splendid work, we return to where we began, that is, with his stress on the fact that the ascended Lord directs us back to the Scriptures and the Apostolic teaching of the early church as the place where he continues to make himself known and where he interacts with us now through the Spirit. This is why Torrance says, ‘By withdrawing himself from our sight, Christ sends us back to the historical Jesus Christ as the covenanted place on earth and in time which God has appointed for meeting between man and himself.’150 Ascension thus means that ‘the historical Jesus is the one locus within our human and creaturely existence where God and man are hypostatically united, and where man engulfed in sin and immersed in corruption can get across to God on the ground of reconciliation and atonement freely provided by God himself ’.151 Because God continues to speak to us and interact with us in this way, Torrance asserts that ‘because it is the historical and risen Jesus who is ascended, what Jesus says to us, the Jesus whom we meet and hear through the witness of the Gospels, is identical with the eternal Word and Being of God himself. Jesus speaks as God and God speaks as Jesus.’152 Ascension, therefore, means first that we cannot know God by attempting to transcend time and space because 147 148 149 150 151 152

Ibid. Ibid., 131. Ibid. Ibid., 133. Ibid. Ibid., 133–4.

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that is not how God has chosen to make himself known. Second, this means that the ascension is ‘the opposite of all demythologizing, for demythologizing means that we have to slough off the space-time involvement of the Word and Act of God as merely our own projecting and objectifying mode of thought . . . [it] means that we have to try to get to know God in a timeless and spaceless way.’153 Here once again Torrance insists, with power, intelligence and with a deep meaning otherwise unavailable, that we have true knowledge of the triune God only through God but, in light of the incarnation, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, only as that knowledge is mediated through the historical Jesus who is God’s act and being for us. Thus, God himself has in reality ‘set aside all other possibilities for us [for knowing him], no matter how conceivable there were a priori’, and we must ‘derive our knowledge of God a posteriori from him who is constituted the Way, the Truth and the Life – there is now no other way to the Father. We cannot and must not try to go behind the back of Jesus Christ, to some kind of theologia gloriae reached by direct speculation of the divine majesty.’154 We may think rightly here, then, about God and God’s interactions with us in time and space only through the power of the Holy Spirit uniting us to Jesus Christ and thus to the Father. That is precisely why Torrance repeatedly and rightly insists that proper theology always involves repentant thinking and rethinking since all knowledge of the truth in theology involves ‘an offence which reaches its climax in the Cross’.155 What Torrance means by this is that in the realm of theology and personal knowledge we are in fact ‘severed from the truth . . . and can only know it when [we are] reconciled to the Truth in [our] own being’.156 This, because ‘the epistemic relation is grounded upon atoning acts and is completed in the reception of forgiveness’. Thus, Torrance maintains that we must not attempt to make it easy for people to believe and understand, because in reality, that ability can only come to them as something new when they hear the Word of God in Scripture. In this regard he says, ‘If there were no offence, we would find nothing new in the Scriptures, hear nothing we could not and have not already been able to tell ourselves.’157 The truth that God discloses to us in grace cannot be cheaply had since it is not something that we can ‘assimilate into what we already know, without a 153

Ibid., 134. Ibid. 155 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 29. This is why Torrance insists that to think properly about the resurrection in faith by holding together our subjective commitment ‘to objective reality’, a ‘repentant rethinking and structural recasting of all our preconceptions’ is required (STR, 19). 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid. 154

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logical reconstruction of all our preconceptions and a repentant re-thinking of what we already claim to know’.158 It is that repentant thinking that always follows the logic of grace, which means that it always allows Christ himself as the reconciler and redeemer to have the first and final word in enabling our knowledge of the truth in faith and through the power of his Holy Spirit. The fact that we cannot go behind the back of Jesus Christ to know God shapes how the ascension functions for Torrance in connection with the incarnate, risen and advent Lord of heaven and earth. He maintains, As it is the pouring out of the Spirit that links the historical Jesus with the ascended Lord, so it is through the Communion of the Spirit that we can think these things together, that is, think of the ascension both as actual historical event, in which Christ departed from man’s place, and as the transcendent event in which he went to God’s place.159

In this way, we can rightly think of Christ as both historically absent and historically present so that it is through the Spirit that ‘Christ is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, and we who live and dwell on earth are yet made to sit with Christ “in heavenly places”, partaking of the divine nature in him’.160 That participation was the goal of the incarnation: to be ‘with Jesus beside God, for we are gathered up in him and included in his own self-presentation before the Father’.161 This means that ‘through the Spirit we may already have communion in the consummated reality which will be fully actualized in us in the resurrection and redemption of the body’.162 There is of course the ‘danger of vertigo’ here, Torrance maintains. And that means that there is the danger of portraying this communion with the crucified, risen and ascended Lord either mystically or pantheistically by identifying our ‘own ultimate being with the divine Being. This would be the exact antithesis to what the Christian Gospel teaches, for the exaltation of man into sharing the divine life and love, affirms the reality of his humble creaturely being, by making him live out of the transcendence of God in and through Jesus alone.’163 In other words, it is only by sharing in the humanity of Jesus, which he took from us and sanctified, ‘that we share in the life of God while remaining what we were made to be, men and not gods’.164 158 159 160 161 162 163 164

Ibid. Torrance, STR, 135. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 136. Ibid. Ibid.

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Before ending this discussion, I would just like to briefly explain that for Torrance we normally have this relationship with God in Christ through the action of the Spirit in the ‘Word and Sacrament’.165 In Baptism and the Eucharist the church serves Christ ‘within the time-form of this age’ but also ‘lives in the new age through being made to participate in him the Head of the new creation’.166 The sacraments, Torrance maintains, belong to the ongoing history of this world, which means that they include ‘tangible and corruptible elements of this world, water, bread and wine, that are used’.167 Eschatologically speaking, the ascension means that ‘Christ holds back the physical transformation of the creation to the day when he will return to make all things new’.168 That does not mean that he cannot and does not directly forgive sins and continue to heal in the same miraculous way that was displayed before his ascension. He might even answer prayer for direct miraculous healing. But his physical withdrawal from the world does mean that ‘there is no appointed programme of anything like “faith healing” or miraculous activity of a kindred sort’.169 We have already seen that Torrance rejects Bultmann’s view of eschatology because he thinks Bultmann believed that meant the end of the world ‘or the boundary of being where we have to take the existentialist leap of decision’. Indeed, this idea of an ‘eschatological event’, Torrance thinks, is the ‘antithesis of what the New Testament means, for in it, eschatology is constituted by the act of the eternal within the temporal, by the acts of God within our world of space and time’.170 The biblical view of eschatology does not just present God’s acts ‘as abrupt acts abrogating or terminating time, but rather acts that gather up time in the fulfilling of the divine purpose’.171 This crucial distinction allows Torrance to speak of the final act of God within an ongoing work, but this act ‘is still in arears so far as our experience and understanding of it are concerned’.172 This ultimate completion of God’s purposes for creation has yet to be manifested. It is Christ himself who is the first and last, but since the ascension ‘his eschatological operations are veiled from our sight’ because we still live in the ‘time-form of this world’.173 Torrance insists that New Testament eschatology is neither simply ‘realized’ nor ‘futurist’ but ‘one

165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173

Ibid., 148. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 149. Ibid. Ibid., 151. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 152.

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in which both realized and futurist elements are woven together all the time in Christ’.174 In fact, Torrance contends, against much modern interpretation, that when one artificially tears these elements apart, ‘the idea of a delayed parousia is begotten, and then projected back into early Christianity’.175 In this context, Torrance argues that Christ’s final parousia ‘will be more the apocalypse or unveiling of the perfected reality of what Christ has done than the consummating of what till then is an incomplete reality’.176 Torrance stressed that Christ’s humanity was brought into an ontological relation with all creation such that ‘all men are upheld, whether they know it or not, in their humanity by Jesus Christ the true and proper man’ who in his cross and resurrection ‘overcame the degenerating forces of evil’.177 He opposed views that were ‘ “world-denying” in character’ and emphasized Christ’s bodily resurrection as ‘the pledge that the whole physical universe will be renewed, for in a fundamental sense it has already been resurrected in Christ’.178 Some comments are necessary here. While the church is indeed the body of the ascended and advent Christ on earth through the power of the Holy Spirit, the relation of the church to Christ is ‘governed also by the distance of the ascension and the nearness of the advent. This is the “eschatological reserve” in the union between Christ and his Church’ in which the church now carries out its work and of which it must finally give an account ‘to Christ when he comes again’.179 Since there is a mixture of good and evil in the church as it moves forward toward Christ’s second coming, ‘it is yet to become One Body with him’ even though it is ‘one Body with Christ through the Spirit’. Thus, the church is ‘not yet wholly in itself what it is already in Christ’.180 It is this eschatological reserve that means that while the church ‘is constantly summoned to look beyond its historical forms to the fullness and perfection that will be disclosed at the parousia’, it ‘must never identify the structures it acquires and must acquire in the nomistic forms of thisworldly historical existence [in relation to the moral law, for instance] with

174

Ibid., 154. Ibid. For Torrance, ‘the ascended and advent Christ impinges upon every moment of our Christian life and work in history’. That is why the ‘parousia is always and inevitably imminent, and why expectation of it in New Testament times could never give way to disillusionment but could only be constantly renewed’ (ibid., 153). Failure to recognize this has ‘misled scholars in unduly stressing the idea of a “delayed advent” which allegedly forced the early Church to alter its whole eschatological outlook and to adjust its life and mission accordingly’ (ibid.). 176 Ibid., 152. 177 Ibid., 155. 178 Ibid. 179 Ibid., 156. 180 Ibid. 175

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the essential forms of its new being in Christ himself ’.181 This same analysis applies to individuals who live in ‘eschatological reserve’. That is why ‘the believer finds his reality and truth not in himself but in Jesus Christ risen and ascended, and therefore coming again’ and must be ‘summoned to look away from himself to Christ, remembering that he is dead through the cross of Christ but alive and risen in him. His true being is hid with Christ in God’.182

Criticisms While this groundbreaking book has received the recognition it deserves as a landmark volume over the years, some questions have been raised. These cannot be dealt with in any detail here but are worth mentioning. It has been said that Torrance’s ‘eschatology becomes less biblical as it becomes more christocentric’ and that applies especially to Torrance’s ‘doctrine of the church as the Body of Christ’.183 Given what was said above, it seems clear to me that Torrance’s doctrine of the church as the body of Christ is exactly right just because it is so thoroughly Christocentric. Torrance insisted, as we have seen, that in the New Testament, realized and future eschatology are held together in Christ. Therefore, his thinking about the ascension in particular was quite faithful to what he called biblical eschatology. If Jesus is the way, the truth and the life as Torrance repeatedly affirmed and if there is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ, then Torrance was quite right to keep to Christology as the door to understanding the Trinity and our new life as it takes shape in union with the risen Lord. The claim that Torrance ‘presses the Body image too far, so that the relationship between Christ and the church becomes too close’ and that this debilitates ‘the doctrine of the final judgment’184 fails to take account of the reasons why Torrance rejected identifying the church as Christ’s body with Christ as its head, as happens when the church is thought of as an extension or continuation of the incarnation. The key indication that these criticisms miss the important distinction without separation between the church and the risen Lord that Torrance so carefully deployed is illustrated in the statement that ‘is difficult, 181

Ibid., 157. Ibid., 157–8. 183 Stanley S. MacLean, Resurrection, Apocalypse, and the Kingdom of Christ: The Eschatology of Thomas F. Torrance (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 196. 184 Ibid. Torrance follows Calvin’s eschatology in refusing to separate final judgement from the fact that ‘Christ comes not for the destruction but for the salvation of the world’, Kingdom and Church: A Study in the Theology of the Reformation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996), 107. 182

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after all, to imagine Christ judging his own body’.185 Torrance nowhere claims or even implies that Christ is coming again to judge himself. Rather, he thinks of the fact that since Christ was the Judge judged in our place,186 therefore reconciliation, justification and redemption are in reality completed events in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of the coming Lord. At the redemption, as we have seen, Torrance thinks that what was completed there and then once and for all will be disclosed and that Christ will call us to account for what we have done. But that always means that, even in our best actions upbuilding the kingdom on earth, we remain unprofitable servants who rely entirely upon Christ’s forgiving grace even as he judges us.187 The very notion that Christ would be returning to judge his own body undercuts both the once-for-all nature of the events that took place in his personal history as the one mediator and his present High-Priestly mediation. It also mistakenly identifies Christ with the church. Torrance adamantly opposed identifying the church with Christ or separating it from Christ, just as he opposed monophysitism and Nestorianism since these problematic views invariably lead either to universalism or limited atonement.188 He also opposed Apollinarianism, as we have seen. Perhaps most surprisingly, Torrance has been criticized for opposing what he called the ‘Latin heresy’ partially because it supposedly plays loose with the word heresy and partially because it allegedly ‘makes a sound ecclesiology – hence also any real ecumenical advance – more or less impossible’.189 Indeed, it has been said that there ‘is really no such thing as the Latin heresy’.190 The astonishing nature of these claims is that they miss Torrance’s central point, which was to trace all dualistic thinking with regard to the main doctrines of the church, especially the incarnation and atonement as well as the Trinity, back to the heresy of Arius in the fourth century. All of Torrance’s theology is based on the fact that a sound ecclesiology and genuine ecumenical advance are only possible when the Nicene faith is taken as seriously today as it was in the fourth century. As seen above, this meant above all that a proper theology had to take seriously both Jesus Christ’s true divinity and true humanity in 185

Ibid. See esp. Torrance, Atonement, 148 and also 75, 124–5 and 145. Thus, ‘Jesus Christ is in himself the hypostatic union of the judge and the man judged . . . in Christ Jesus the judge is one person with the man judged. Christ was thus God the judge, and yet the sin-bearer who bore our judgement and the penalty for our sin in his own life and death,’ 148. 187 Torrance, STR, 157–8. 188 For a discussion of some of these issues, see Paul D. Molnar, ‘Thomas F. Torrance and the Problem of Universalism’, Scottish Journal of Theology 68 (2) (May 2015): 164–86. 189 Douglas Farrow, ‘T. F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy’, First Things, December 2013, 25–31, 29. 190 Ibid. 186

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their union without confusion, separation or mixture to understand not only the incarnation and resurrection but also God himself and the meaning of the church as the body of Christ. Thus, it was appropriate to speak of the Latin heresy which appeared in different ways among those who thought docetically about the incarnation and resurrection, with the result that they ended up conceiving a deistic God behind the back of Jesus Christ with damaging results. That was certainly true in modern theology with Descartes, Newton and Kant. But it was also true with Bultmann and Tillich since each in their own way allowed their epistemologies to be shaped by ‘external, symbolical or merely moral relations’ instead of the internal relations disclosed by Christ himself and through the Holy Spirit. Such thinking, Torrance insisted, ‘resulted in a serious loss of direct contact with reality’.191 What Torrance opposed, with Karl Barth, was the idea that was axiomatic for Arius, namely, that we could not know God in his internal relations and that God could not interact with us directly in history in the incarnate and risen Lord. Torrance rightly saw that the habit of dualistic thinking embedded in Western culture (but not absent in the East in Hellenic thinking) tended to cut the ground out from any seriously scientific theology precisely because in each of those thinkers their presuppositions made it impossible to know God’s internal relations, on the one hand, and to acknowledge that what God is in the history of Jesus Christ he is in himself, on the other. This approach from a centre in ourselves instead of from a centre in God as he meets us in his Word and Spirit always leads to a misunderstanding of all Christian doctrines. Having said this and having seen the difference it makes when one thinks from a centre in God provided in the incarnate and risen Lord, it is even more astonishing to read that Barth and Torrance both have ‘misdiagnosed the problem and misconstrued the solution’.192 Farrow mistakenly thinks both Barth and Torrance ‘falsely conflated person and work’.193 Yet that is tantamount to saying that both Barth and Torrance reduced the immanent to the economic Trinity. It is clear from what was said above that Torrance certainly never did that. But it is also the case that Barth never did that either. Finally, it has been said that ‘Torrance’s theology  . . .  will depend for its meanings not nearly so much upon the observable reality of Christ, that which history would expressly record, as upon the unobservable theoretical side, or upon the interpretation of that historical reality by the theology of 191 192 193

Torrance, Karl Barth, 218. Farrow, ‘T. F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy’, 29. Ibid.

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the Church’.194 There are two serious problems embedded in these remarks. First, Torrance, as we have seen, will never separate the historical Jesus from his being as the incarnate Word because his humanity had no existence independent of its existence in the Word. Second, Jesus’s deity is not simply the ‘unobservable theoretical side’ of the historical Jesus but the true eternal deity of the Father’s Son who condescended to become incarnate for us and for our salvation. To suggest that this reality of Jesus as God is ‘theoretical’ implies that Jesus’s true deity is the product of the community’s reaction to Jesus and is thus somehow grounded in the church’s theological assessment of this historical figure. Nothing could be further from the truth as such a view would, in Torrance’s thinking, be nothing short of a form of what he, with Barth, regularly labelled ebionite Christology or Christology that is grounded in the community’s reaction to Jesus instead of in Jesus himself as the incarnate Word.

Conclusion In a work of this breadth and depth, it is impossible to cover every important idea presented by Torrance. But I hope I have said enough to show the enduring value of this book which is by now surely a classic. It is just because Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word that Torrance took space and time seriously in his understanding of Christ’s resurrection, ascension and second coming as, in these historical events, God acted not only to enable our knowledge of God in his inner relations as Father, Son and Holy Spirit but also to interact with us in history. Thus, wherever we find theologians searching for a view of God and Christ by attempting to fit Christ into some presupposed anthropological, philosophical or even theological perspective, there we have a theology that has gone wrong. Such a theology is no longer scientific because it does not allow the unique subject (Jesus Christ himself) of the events attested in the Bible (incarnation, cross, resurrection and ascension in particular) to shape one’s theology. All of this is based on the premise that one simply cannot know God the Father or our reconciliation and redemption from the divine and human side by abstracting from the historical Jesus himself in his true divinity and true humanity as the exclusive source of that knowledge. For that reason, one cannot know the meaning of God’s love for us in abstraction from the demonstration of that love in the life of the historical 194 Robert J. Stamps, The Sacrament of the Word Made Flesh: The Eucharistic Theology of Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2007), 49.

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Jesus Christ. That insight was powerfully explained by Torrance when he wrote, ‘True love of others is generated in the heart of the believer by the Holy Spirit; but the Holy Spirit operates in that way in and through us as our eyes are fixed unselfishly on the Lord Jesus Christ.’195 He meant, of course, that in the incarnation God so loved us in an act of grace which did indeed reconcile us to himself so that it is God in Christ who freed us and still frees us to love God spontaneously such that ‘we cannot really love our neighbours by trying to love them’, since any attempt to get to God by ethical means would be ‘nothing short of a secret cult of the self ’. Such an approach ignores our justification by faith and by grace in the incarnate Word by starting ‘from ego-centricity’ and by cultivating ‘a refined form of selfishness’.196 This is why Torrance rightly insists, in opposition to any claim that ‘the love of God and the love of neighbour are one and the same thing’,197 that I cannot love God through loving my neighbour. I can love my neighbour truly and only through loving God. To love God through loving my neighbour is to assert that the Incarnation is not a reality, the reality it is, that relation to God is still a mediated one. To love God through my neighbour is to move toward God. It does not know a movement of God toward man.198

Once this is understood, one will see exactly why Torrance consistently affirmed that reconciliation and redemption are mediated to us only through Jesus Christ himself, in whom they were personally enacted from the divine and human side. Then one will also understand why Torrance rejected any form of self-justification and self-sanctification; he did so because he took the incarnation and resurrection seriously as the enactment of the love of God which frees us to live as part of the new creation.

195 Thomas F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 89. 196 Ibid. 197 See Paul D. Molnar, ‘Love of God and Love of Neighbour in the Theology of Karl Rahner and Karl Barth’, Modern Theology 20 (4) (October 2004): 567–99, 574, citing Rahner’s Theological Investigations, Vol. 6, 233. 198 Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 88–9.

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