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A. Edinburgh and Basil, 1934–1938

What were the formative influences on Torrance’s eschatology? One immediately thinks of Karl Barth’s theology, but one cannot underestimate the influence of Torrance’s teachers at the University of Edinburgh, where his theological education began (1934–37). The great figure there at this time, and the one who had the greatest impact on Torrance, was Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870–1936), who held the Chair in Systematic Theology.1 He published a number of books, most notably The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (1912), which became a standard text for a generation of divinity students. Mackintosh’s christocentric view of grace and his evangelicalism seemed to have made a lasting impact on his student. According to Torrance, it was Mackintosh’s doctrine of atonement that explained the nature of his teacher’s theology. The “nerve” of all his teaching, he writes, was “the forgiveness of sins provided directly by God in Jesus Christ at infinite cost to himself.”2 Torrance’s tribute to his teacher is appropriately titled “Hugh Ross Mackintosh: Theologian of the Cross.”

We should not gloss over Mackintosh’s influence on the development of Torrance’s eschatology. The cross is central to Torrance’s apocalyptic eschatology, as we will discover. Years later, Torrance will cite Mackintosh (along with another Scot, P. T. Forsyth) as one of those few modern theologians who were able to follow the Reformers in preserving the “eschatological tension of faith.”3

However, Torrance’s eschatology would develop into something very different in terms of form and content from what one finds in either Mackintosh or Forsyth. Whereas he would define eschatology as an objective application of Christology to history and the church, Mackintosh and Forsyth focussed on individual eschatology, which they interpreted in moral, psychological terms. And neither man showed much interest in the Apocalypse. From Forsyth’s pen came This Life and the Next (London, 1918), which examines “the effect on this life of faith in another.”4 Mackintosh’s weightiest contribution is Immortality and the Future (London, 1915). For him the criterion of truth in eschatology is “what is certified to the soul by faith in Jesus.”5 The way these men approached eschatology reveals the dead hand of German liberal theology. Forsyth had studied at Göttingen under Albrecht Ritschl; Mackintosh at Marburg under Wilhelm Herrmann.

By the 1930s, however, Mackintosh had developed a deep appreciation for Karl Barth’s theology, which represented a repudiation of German liberalism.6 Indeed Mackintosh would play a part in Torrance’s decision to do post-graduate study at Basel (1937–38) under Barth.7 There Torrance heard his series of lectures on the doctrine of God. These would become volume II.1 of the Church Dogmatics.8 It was probably Barth’s theological method that impressed Torrance more than anything. Barth treated the Word of God as the real and objective revelation of God himself, and understood dogmatics as a critical science. As a research project, Torrance chose the scientific structure of Christian dogmatics.9 However, Barth dissuaded him and advised him instead, on the basis of his pupil’s interest in the Greek Fathers, to write on the doctrine of grace among the second-century fathers of the church.10 Torrance agreed. That was in 1938. The fruit of his labour is The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers (Edinburgh, 1946). Eschatology has an important place here. Torrance concludes that the apostolic Fathers misunderstood the “radical nature” of New Testament grace and its distinct “eschatological character,” which sets believers free and translates them into a “completely new world.”11 But we are getting ahead of ourselves. These words were published in the mid-forties.

B. The Auburn Lectures on Christology, 1938–1939

The war interrupted Torrance’s doctoral research, but it was not the first thing to interrupt it. This was his stint lecturing at Auburn Theological Seminary in upstate New York. He had planned on returning to Basel after a summer break in Scotland, but his plans changed when John Baillie, a professor of divinity at New College, persuaded him to fill temporarily a faculty vacancy at Auburn.12 The seminary was long-regarded as a liberal institution. By 1938 it was at the vanguard of the so-called “New School” Presbyterianism, which positioned itself against the fundamentalism of the “Old School” Presbyterianism. Torrance arrived in the fall of 1938 and taught a full year of courses. Although he devoted most of his time to Christian dogmatics, he had to teach a whole range of subjects, including systematic theology, biblical theology and philosophy of religion.

1. Theological Method

So far, only his lectures on Christology and soteriology have been published.13 It is not Torrance’s finest work, as he admits. “They had been put together in a hurry when I was twenty-five years of age and were rather rough-hewn and jejune.”14 Nonetheless, they give us a precious insight into the genesis of his theology. Besides, these are the only lectures where you find “last things” discussed, albeit briefly. It is treated in the last lecture, titled “The Ascension of Christ and the Second Advent,” but it occupies just three pages in a 200-page book. But it is not just these three pages that interest us. It is Torrance’s whole Christology. For he would eventually define eschatology as a component of Christology: as the “application of Christology to the Kingdom of Christ and to the work of Christ in history.”15

McGrath correctly observes that Torrance’s lectures follow “broadly” the “structural framework and theological perspective” of Mackintosh’s The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (1913) and Forsyth’s The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909).16 Not only does he cite these men frequently, he uses their motifs as his starting point. “In any discussion of Christian Doctrines I believe that central place must be given to the doctrine of the Person and Work of Jesus Christ.”17 It is the unity of the two that he is after. Why? Because, in his view, there has been a tendency to examine the person of Christ (Christology) apart from the work of Christ (soteriology). Again, he has in mind Forsyth and Mackintosh.18 Forsyth treats the “person” of Christ under one title and his “work” separately under another: The Work of Christ (1910). As the title of his magnum opus indicates, Mackintosh had a great deal to say about the person of Christ; however, he did not have much to say about Christ’s work. Torrance would find a better model in Brunner’s The Mediator. Brunner underlines the need to see the person and the work of the Mediator as a unity.19 Still, Torrance believes his former teacher laid the proper foundation for Christology. In the preface to his first lecture, he writes: “Cf. H. R Mackintosh: ‘In point of fact it is at the Cross that the full meaning of God in Christ has broken on the human mind.’”20

That being said, Torrance’s Christology is patently different from Mackintosh’s and Forsyth’s. In their theological treatises the dead hand of German liberalism is again evident. The person and work of Christ tends to be conceived anthropocentrically, i.e. in moral and psychological terms.21 Naturally, both men ignore the ascension and second advent of Christ. Torrance’s approach, by contrast, reflects Barth’s influence.22 It is much more theo-centric. One gets a clear sense of the objective otherness of God. The real starting point is not our faith in God, though this is essential, but the Word of God—the concrete, historical actions of God in Christ as witnessed to in Scripture. Torrance underscores the notion that Christ is even the subject of faith. “Thus the central thing in faith, in acknowledgement of the Person of Christ is Christ’s own action, his encounter with us, he who has come to save us.”23

2. Christology and History

Torrance’s method of reckoning with Christ and his action is laid out in his introduction. Jesus Christ is the “immediate Object of believing knowledge and worship.”24 This includes knowledge of God the Father and the Holy Spirit. But Christ is not simply a mediator of knowledge of God, “he is himself very God of very God.”25 As much as Christology deals with a person who is ontologically and objectively real to faith, it deals with a person who is historically real. “The central object of the Christian Faith is to be found in a Person who was without doubt historical; and it was his life and work carried out under Pontius Pilate that has been the pivot of the world ever since.”26 Christology by definition has a close connection with time and history. The work of the person of Christ is redemption wrought out in history.

But Torrance is aware that modernity militates against such an idea. It has made the historical nature of Christ’s redemption into a “stumbling block” to faith in Christ. This is ironic, for modernity gave birth to a renewed interest in history. This led to the quest of the historical Jesus, a critical investigation into real life of the man who the church proclaims as Lord. This quest was predicated, though, on the idea, which stems from Lessing’s “ugly ditch,” that there is an unbridgeable gap between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history. However, this search for the authentic Jesus of history has only meant a reduction of the Jesus of history. The modern historian presents us with a great religious teacher but not one defined by his great acts in history: the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, and ascension. We hear about a great moral leader, yet one who in the end was swallowed up by history. But we do not encounter the Son of God in the flesh; the God-in-time who triumphs over history in the end.

Against this view, Torrance calls for a Christian protest “in the strongest terms.” Christianity declares that God has entered history, entered time, in Jesus Christ. And this means that “Redemption . . . has to be actualized in history and . . . mediated through history.”27 It even involves, as he will say later, the “reversal of history.” Theologians, therefore, must pay greater attention to the role of history. It must be seen as the “sphere of God’s operation and the medium of divine Redemption,” where the supreme fact is not a symbol of a transcendent world but the “Person of God in Christ.”28 However, Torrance does not call for a new philosophical study of history. That may only serve to undermine the Christian faith again. The new emphasis on history must begin with a greater appreciation of Jesus’ relation to ancient Israel. He does not think Christ can be known apart from the Old Testament; because in the Old Testament history is “not merely contingent.”29 History is the sphere in which God acts, acts for the purpose of redemption. It is here where history points toward Jesus Christ, the historical fulfilment of Old Testament hopes. That explains why Old Testament eschatology stresses the future, and why it is essentially messianic.

But God’s work in history did not end abruptly with the coming of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus Christ is also the Mediator between God and the whole world. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself”

(2 Cor 5:19). The world is reconciled to God through the cross, the supreme work of Christ, but the world still needs to be fully redeemed through Christ. Hence the ascension is a vital part of the work of Christ. It is from his heavenly throne that Christ actualizes his redemption in history. This is the meaning of the last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse. Moreover, the ascension gives the church the assurance that God is still “actually among us.” After all, it is a “fundamental dictum” of Christianity that “in Christ we have God in history.”30

When Torrance underlines the historical nature of Christ, one might assume he is on the side of American fundamentalists in their battle against the modernists. Not quite. He is on the side of certain European theologians. His understanding of Christ’s relation to history owes much to Barth and Brunner. This means that history alone does not bear witness to the divinity of Christ. Jesus Christ was and is in history, but he is not of history. History is a predicate of revelation, but revelation is not a predicate of history. The divinity and lordship of Christ are not subject to historical verification. The results of the “quest of the historical Jesus” have proven that much. The historian can at most see only “Christ in the flesh.” But, as Brunner put it, the “believer sees more than the ‘Christ after the flesh’ in the ‘Christ in the flesh.’”31 That is because the revelation of Jesus as the God-Man happens through faith alone.

3. Teleology

There is something else that gives Torrance’s Christology a strong eschatological cast. This is teleology. Christology is about God-in-time, God-in-Action. But this action is for a purpose, a telos (an end). That telos is the redemption of the world. Christ in history is Christ in saving action. We can only know Christ’s person from his work; his being from his action; his nature from his benefits. Torrance gets this epistemology from Barth, but also from Forsyth and Mackintosh. Citing the former, he writes: ‘Theologically, faith in Christ means that the person of Christ must be interpreted by what that saving action of God in him requires, that Christ’s work is the master key to His Person, that His benefits interpret his nature. It means, when theologically put, that Christology is the corollary of Soteriology.”32 Mackintosh saw it this way: “It is a feature of the best modern Christology that the person of our Lord has come to be exhibited as interpretable only through the medium of His redeeming work. There is a universal feeling that to know what He has done and does will reveal to us what He is.”33 In Torrance’s words, “He is the Redeemer—God; and apart from his Redemption we know really nothing of him.”34 Torrance also gives a nod to Cullmann’s christological principle.35 He claims that Christ “is to be understood functionally and not metaphysically, dynamically rather ontologically.”36

Redemption is the telos of God’s action in Christ. But redemption involves more than the release from guilt, much more than what the individual can experience here and now. Teleology must not be anthropocentric, for it does not terminate in the soul of the individual. It also involves the reversal of history, a new time, a new heaven and earth. In fact redemption terminates in the glory of God. Torrance writes that “the primary object of God . . . is not salvation but the Glory of God, for God does not seek an end less than his own Being, else he would not be God. But the Glory of God includes our salvation, and we must learn always to think of God as at the Centre.”37 Since the glory of God is the real end or telos, then Christology must strive to give an account of those last things—resurrection, ascension, parousia, judgment—which extend beyond the scope of humanity’s present concerns and beyond the world’s myopic conception of what is possible. For these things centre on the Last One (Eschatos) who brings glory to God.

4. Eschatology as the Presence of the Kingdom of God

For Torrance, though, eschatology is not only about things in the future and about movement towards an end. It concerns things that are present, that have been realized. In a sense the end has already come with the incarnation of the Son of God. In him the glory of God has been revealed. Following Barth, Torrance insists that the incarnation is essentially a “movement of Eternity into time.”38 It means “God is present, actually present in Christ.”39 Christ is Immanuel, “God with us.” The incarnation makes Christianity “pre-eminently the religion of the Parousia of God, of an actual coming of God and of a real presence of God held together in the same thought: in Jesus Christ the Son of God.”40 But if Jesus Christ is not of God, then there is no presence of the kingdom of God in the world. The kingdom is only a hope, something wholly in the future. If that be the case, then Christianity is no advance upon Judaism, which still longs for the Messiah. Torrance laments the loss of faith in the presence of God in his own day, and he attributes this loss to a denial of the deity of Christ.

This presence of God in Christ, this coming of the kingdom, has negative and positive consequences. Negatively, it means the judgment of humankind. The coming of God in Christ presupposes a separation between humankind and God, one caused by humankind’s rebellion against God. This is the meaning of original sin. In short, the incarnation presupposes a fallen human nature. The incarnation tells us that God came to judge sin and put it away, to overcome that chasm between humankind and God. But the judgment that comes from the revelation of God in Christ is redemptive. It is not only a judgment of individual sins but a judgment of all collective attempts to build a kingdom of God apart from God. “It means ultimately the disqualification of civilisation and the great and magnificent tower of Babel.”41 All cultures of progress are doomed to fail in the end. This is why in his sermons on the Apocalypse Torrance shows a suspicion towards the “new world order” that emerges after the war and why, unlike many of his contemporaries, he will not be deeply disturbed by the crisis of civilization that will grip Europe in the middle of the century.

On the other hand, the incarnation means God takes time seriously and has a “gracious attitude” towards it. We are redeemed in time and with time, not from it or outside it. Time in fact, like human nature, is restored in the incarnation. It is even given “a place in Eternity.”42 Indeed Christ’s kingdom is really about a new time. “While Jesus came to overthrow the old order, he came to set up a new one, a new Kingdom, a new time.”43

As for the benefits of the presence of God, Torrance, relying on John’s Gospel, summarizes them as “Love,” “Life,” and “Light.” The incarnation is more than a sign of the fact that God loves us. It is the fact that God loves us, that he gives himself fully, that he holds nothing back from us. “In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col 2:9). The love behind the incarnation is a totally free act of God. However, God cannot be reduced to love (a tendency in modern theology). Love can be called the “bestowal of self” of God, but God’s self is the “prius” or “ultimate fountain” of this bestowal.44 The incarnation is the “real coming of God to man, in which God gives himself for and to man.”45 We think instantly that this means God loves us. He does; but that “for” must first be understood as something for our redemption. The love shown in the incarnation is a pure gift love; it is neither caused nor merited by its object. In sum, we can find no reason for this love because there is no adequate human analogy for it, as the New Testament writers discovered. The best word for it was “agape.” The incarnation forces us to acknowledge this love as arising from the “self-grounded will of God,” as an “ultimate fact” that “knows no ‘why?’”46 “If we do not see God’s incarnate love this way we risk betraying the central message of Christianity: Grace—the utter God-centeredness of revelation and redemption, the unconditioned coming of God to man in Christ.”47

If the incarnation is about love, it is about life too. For Torrance, the essence of human life is communion with God. Sin disrupted this communion, but the incarnation restores it. This, of course, does not happen immediately. The incarnation is the first stage in our redemption. This is followed by the remission of sins, the Spirit of adoption, the transformation into the image of Christ and the resurrection of the body. From this perspective, the resurrection is in a “real sense” the “completion of the Incarnation.”48 The incarnation also brings God to light. “I am the Light of the World” (John 8:12). Knowledge of God follows from the incarnation. It means God has accommodated himself to our senses by assuming a human form. Real theological knowledge is now possible, not through any human form but only through the specific form of Jesus Christ. The coming of God in the flesh compels us to think of God “exclusively” in terms of Christ.

But knowledge of God through Christ becomes actual only after we have heard and accepted the Word of God in faith and through the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God is the light that discloses God to us in the human form of Christ. More precisely, the Holy Spirit turns the “objective revelation of God in Christ . . . into a subjectively real revelation.”49

The incarnation, as the parousia of God, therefore has a “two-fold” meaning: as a witness both to God’s holiness and love. Christ is the incarnation of Holy Love. It is the incarnation of the God who in his goodness creates life but who in his righteousness can take life away. His holiness leads to the crucifixion of our sinful nature in the incarnate One; his love leads to the resurrection of our flesh through this same One. For Torrance, the “two-fold” meaning of the incarnation instructs us that we cannot understand the incarnation without the atonement; nor can we understand the atonement without the incarnation. This is why he believes a proper doctrine of atonement has to consist not only of Christ’s substitutionary work but of Christ’s “vicarious life of obedience to the Father.”50

The organic connection between incarnation and atonement explains the unity of the “Person and Work of Christ.” This relationship is also the linchpin of Torrance’s Christology and soteriology.

5. The Work of the Cross

Recall that Torrance began his lectures under the claim that it is at the cross that the full meaning of God in Christ has broken on the human mind. The cross is the principal work of Christ. This is good Reformed theology. But Torrance is not a typical Reformed theologian, since for him the cross stands for more than penal substitutionary atonement. More than any other work of Christ, it discloses the mystery of the person of Christ. “It is there [at the cross] in his sacrificial passion that the whole divine-human nature of Jesus’ Person as the incarnate Son of God is revealed to the understanding of saving faith. It is there at the cross that the meaning and the purpose of his incarnation really become revealed to us.”51 The cross may be understood as a “cross-section” of the life and ministry of the incarnate Son.52 It signifies Christ’s vicarious death for our sins, but it stands equally for the Son’s vicarious life of obedience to God the Father. On this score, Jesus’ entire life is a vicarious offering for us. “The Cross is the outworking of a decision that constitutes the Person of the Mediator himself in the incarnation.”53

For Torrance, the problem with the penal-substitutionary model of the atonement is that it gives the impression that God’s redemption is merely a legal transaction, that God’s redemption has no material basis in the person of Christ. In his view, the only way to correct this is by taking into consideration Christ’s whole life, so that his atoning work begins at birth, increases in intensity in correlation with maturation as a real person, until it reaches a climax at Golgotha. To help us conceive the person and work of Christ together, the incarnation and the cross, Torrance—borrowing Mackintosh’s words—would have us think of the work of Christ as his “Person-in-movement” or his “Person-in-saving action.”54 As well, Torrance draws attention to the unity of this action. Christ’s saving actions should be understood, then, as “one supreme comprehensive act of God’s Self-humiliation from the Cradle to the Cross.”55

Yet Torrance does not stop at the cradle. How could he, if he insists that Christ is “very God of very God,” the actual coming of God in flesh and time? Thus the cross discloses not only the “secret” of the person of Christ. It discloses the “secret” of God. The great news revealed is that the cross of Christ is “eternal in the heart of God.”56 As Torrance learned from Barth, our understanding of God can be neither greater nor less than what Christ is for us and does for us. This means the whole work and person of Christ is best understood as a manifestation of the act and being of God. “The Act of God in Christ on the Cross must be thought of in accordance with his Being which is itself God’s reality in action, for it is in the Cross that there was manifested his supreme self-assertion as Holy God and God’s supreme self-bestowal as Holy Love.”57

Eschatology is ultimately about the glory of God. Even the cross of Christ, in Torrance’s view, is a witness to this. The holiness and love of God that comes to us in Christ may be understood as “the Dominion and Communion of God,” which is the essence of the kingdom of God.58 Still, the news of the arrival kingdom of God, the gospel, is really the establishment of the kingdom of God through the act of God the Father in Christ. And nowhere is the holiness and love of God, his dominion and communion, greater that at the cross of Christ. “It is here in fact that God both gives himself in his Holiness to men and asserts himself in his Holy Love to be for mankind.”59

The cross stands for God’s judgment of sin. It is the sure evidence that God in his holiness will not tolerate forever the presence of sin in his creatures. The cross, then, is God’s holiness in action, his self-assertion in the face of man’s rebellion and private self-assertion. And God succeeds. He effectively asserts his holiness by putting to death Christ, man’s representative and substitute before God. At the cross the holiness of God is revealed in all its truth and in all its glory. The judgment of the cross is also paradoxically a revelation of the love of God. For this judgment is the first act in God’s atonement for sins. The cross not only reveals how far we have fallen away from God, but also how close God has come to us. It testifies that God is no longer against us, that he has not abandoned us. It shows that he has made the greatest stride towards the reestablishment of his “Dominion” over us and his “Communion” with us.

6. The Resurrection: fulfillment of the Person and Work

It is understandable that the lecture on the resurrection of Christ is near the end of the series. Its location, though, belies its importance. For Torrance, the resurrection is actually the starting point in Christology. With Barth he believes that it is in the light of the resurrection that the person of Christ is truly comprehended.60 He is not concerned with the “how” of Christ’s resurrection. Like Christ’s virgin birth, he sees it as an absolute miracle. There is no natural cause behind it. Torrance pursues the significance of the resurrection for understanding Christ’s person and work. The significance is that the resurrection illuminates and validates the person and work. In his view, it was the resurrection of the crucified Jesus that convinced the first disciples that this man was not just another prophet of Israel, but the Lord Jesus Christ and Son of God. “It is in the Resurrection that Christ comes out of his Incognito, as it were, and we behold his transcendent glory; it is at the Resurrection that we learn the real secret of Christ’s Person to be not human but divine.”61 When the disciples recognized Jesus as divine, as Lord and Son of God, the events of his life took on a whole new meaning. They became revelatory and redemptive. “The significance of the resurrection . . . lies in the conjunction of Person and Work of Christ . . . Some have preferred to discuss his Person and teaching, some have laid emphasis on his work almost exclusively. The truth is that are rightly seen only together in their proper perspective and significance here: at the Resurrection.”62

They are seen together because they are really brought back together in the resurrection. From an historical perspective, the cross marks the separation of the person and his work, a break in the unity of the incarnation and atonement. By becoming a sacrifice for sins the person is lost to death. The resurrection, however, reunites the person and work of Christ.

The resurrection represents eschatological fulfillment. For it shows Christ to be not only the source of our redemption but also the fulfillment of it. The resurrection means “power . . . triumph . . . victory.”63 Christ is the one who rose from his sacrifice on the cross “triumphant in the Kingdom of God.”64

7. The Ascension: The Continuation of the Person and Work

It was Torrance’s intention to describe the full import of the resurrection on the person and work of Christ. Unfortunately, most of the lecture material on the subject is lost. However, we do learn something about the significance of the resurrection, but this comes in the next—and last—lecture: “The Ascension of Christ and the Second Advent.” In choosing to expound on the ascension, Torrance knows he is going against a tendency in modern theology to neglect the ascension. For example, Forysth and Mackintosh ignore the subject altogether, while Emil Brunner downplays its significance. For Brunner, the ascension means that “He has His Face turned in the other direction, away from us. The story of Christ has now reached an end.”65

For Torrance, by contrast, the story of Christ continues with the ascension. Indeed it must continue by this way if we really believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Faith in the resurrection entails that Jesus Christ continues to live as God and man. But on top of the biblical witness to this “Continuous Living Reality,” Torrance finds ontological reasons. It is obvious, then, that Christology for him is not only functional. With the Nicene Fathers he argues that this hypostatic union of God and man is one that “was/is eternal and never-ending.”66 Theology as Christology therefore can continue. It means too that eschatology is not simply a matter of conjecturing about the future, but is about what Christ is doing and will do.

Christian theology, centred in the Lord Jesus Christ, can have a proper place only where the reality of his human nature continues. Just as there only can be revelation to us where revelation takes human form, because humanity cannot think outside of itself, so here where the form and reality of Christ as God-Man continues, . . . there theology as Christology must persist in its efforts to gain a clear understanding of the risen and ascended Lord Jesus and all that he means for us in the Church and the world.67

Since the ascension is about the life and ministry of Jesus after the resurrection, Torrance prefers to speak of the “risen and ascended Lord Jesus” (cf. Eph 1:20). Recall that the cross had to be seen in conjunction with the incarnation, in order to comprehend the person and work of Christ in his humiliation and in his past. Likewise, we must think the resurrection and ascension together in order to comprehend his person and work in his exaltation—in his present and his future.

This is not to deny any difference between the revelation that comes from the resurrection and the one that comes from the ascension. The object of faith, Christ Jesus, remains the same, and the ascension is within the “same realm of revelation as that enjoyed by the disciples of Jesus before and after his resurrection.”68 There is a difference, however, in the mode of apprehension of Christ, due to the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. Excepting Paul’s Damascus road experience, the ascension tells us that Christ is no longer visible to the naked eye, but only through the eye of faith, which is a work of the Holy Spirit—Christ’s “other self.”

For Torrance, the function of the risen and ascended Christ is no different substantially from the function of the incarnate Christ on earth. This is nothing less than the revelation of God to humankind and the redemption of humankind. The ascension reveals that Christ has returned bodily to the throne of God, confirming that Christ and his saving work on earth have their beginning and end in God. It can be understood as the “visible experience given to the disciples to assure them, as Jesus Christ on earth, he for ever is and will be in and with God in Glory.”69 It reveals that there is “a MAN in heaven today” and that all that constitutes our humanity in terms of mind, body, spirit, and relationships has been raised and carried up into heaven by Christ. Christ was, is, and always will be close to us; and thus he is truly qualified and ready to function as our compassionate High Priest before God the Father.70

The ascension gives us the knowledge also that time has a place in eternity. Christ’s heavenly session means time is “real for eternity,” not “illusory.”71 In asserting this Torrance is challenging Kant’s philosophy of time. Kant probably did not regard time as an illusion, but he did insist that time is an “internal sense” that applies only to phenomenal reality. Therefore, whatever that does not affect our senses, such as eternity or God, cannot be in time. For Torrance, the ascension means not only that time is real for the eternal God; it also means time has been redeemed. We can now look forward to a redeemed time in the kingdom of God. Indeed the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church indicates that this new time has already “invaded” this present fallen, sinful time.

Above all, the ascension reveals that Christ is God’s “Right Hand.” The ascension should dispel any lingering doubts about the deity of Christ, and especially doubts that Christ is the “Act” and “Being” of God. Just as the incarnation confirms the humiliation of God in Christ, the ascension confirms the exaltation of God in Christ. God in being and act is none other than Christ in his person and his work. “What Christ IS, God IS, because Christ IS God’s Right Hand.”72 The ascension guarantees that there is no other God hiding behind Christ, “no dark spots” remaining in the revelation of God, in the being and act of God. If the incarnation and cross show the humiliation and weakness of Christ, then the ascension shows us that the “act of Christ is actually the very omnipotent action of God-and that there is no other power or ‘potence’ in God which has not and is not revealed in Christ.”73

In order to explain how the ascension is part of Christ’s redemptive work, Torrance employs the three offices of Christ, the triplex munus, which have been important in Reformed dogmatics.74 Taking Christ to be Prophet, Priest, and King, permits one to think about his redemptive work as a unity with differences. In light of the resurrection, he defines the teachings of Christ as the work of his prophetic office, and his humiliation and cross as the work of his priestly office. Christ’s kingly office is fulfilled through the ascension, but Torrance prefers to call this office his “Royal Priesthood,” since he is a King still carrying out the work of redemption for the cosmos.

The central work of the priestly office is the cross. Therefore, even in his kingly office Christ bears the effects of the cross. “Jesus, yes, he Jesus, is now at the right hand of God holding the reins of the world in his hands, the hands that bore the imprint of the nails hammered in them on the cross.”75 This fact reveals the humanity of Christ the King, but it also determines the mode of his redemption in the world. Humankind will not be redeemed by means of the progress of civilization. It will be redeemed along the pattern of the cross. Redemption means ultimately redemption from suffering, but redemption takes place through suffering first.

It goes against the gospel to think that Christ’s redemption of the world can take place without serious interruptions in the world’s so-called development, without judgments upon the evils in the world. This cross-view of world redemption will come sharply into focus in Torrance’s sermons on the Apocalypse in 1946, just after his experience as a war-time pastor and army chaplain. Yet the rumblings of war in Europe in 1939 forced him even then to ponder the relationship between the ascended Christ and the course of history. “We may not now understand all that happens and can happen in the world of today offers; it is black—and when has it been blacker than this moment? [i.e., 1939]—but of this we are assured by the Ascension that the Lord Jesus Christ is reigning over the kingdoms and nations of the world and working out his redeeming purpose for redemption.”76

If God elects Christ Jesus to carry out the redemption of the world, then Christ elects a special people by which he fulfills this mission. This is the church on earth and in history. Here Torrance describes the church as the “visible incarnation of Christ on earth in lieu of his very Self”77—although later, during the 1950s, he will inveigh against the “Catholic” idea that the church is a Christus prolongatus, or extension of the incarnation.

As the “visible incarnation of Christ,” the church must conform to Christ and share in the sufferings of his cross; not as atonement, but as a judgment and chastisement in preparation for an existence lived in the power of the resurrection. Just as Christ identified with us as sinners, we are called to identify with him in his humiliation on the cross. Redemption for the church involves encountering the man on the cross. Knowledge of Christ also involves the cross, for Christ “still is the Crucified One though risen from the dead.”78

Here we have a genuine theology of the cross. Christ has risen in triumph, power, and victory; he has ascended in glory to the throne of God, where he is now God’s “Right Hand,” Christ the King. However, the church and individual believers cannot yet know Christ as this glorious King. Until his coming again, they can only know him as the Crucified One, as their Lord and Savior through faith.

The church lives, in Barth’s words, “Zwischen die Zeiten,” between the time of the ascension and the second advent. It is a time of grace, a sign of God’s patience, in order that the world will exercise repentance. Otherwise, divine judgment would be immediate: Christ’s “Advent Presence would decide things finally there and then once and for all.”79 As in primitive Christianity, the central message of the church today should be “repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.”

Christ’s visible absence from the world is not a sign he has abandoned the world, that he no longer loves it. On the contrary, he ascended for the sake of the church and the world, so that he could reach the whole world through the church with the message of the gospel.

8. The Second Advent

We have finally come to a traditional topic in eschatology. However, Torrance did not leave us with much to reflect on—just three pages. Still, we get to the heart of his eschatology, since eschatology (like theology in general) has to be centered on Christ and his actions. It is mainly about the Eschatos (Last One), not the eschata (last things).

There are several ways to approach the second advent. In line with Torrance’s earlier stress on the unity of the person and work of Christ, we may look at it as the final act of that “Person-in-saving-action.” Or, in creedal terms, we may think of it as the coming of the Judge of the living and the dead. Here Torrance prefers the theocentric terms he used to describe the cross of Christ. The second advent is the “self-impartation of God” and the “self-assertion of God.” Again, these movements imply the redemption of God through “the bestowal of himself in holy love” and of the judgment of God “through his holy self -assertion.”80 But these are not a set of isolated movements in God; they are connected with God’s earlier movements in Christ. God’s holy self-assertion at the second advent is the “final reaction” of God against sin.81 It will be a reaction through Christ, on the ground of his cross, because he is the one who has ascended to the “very Throne of God,” where God has entrusted all power and judgment to him.

Apart from the ascension of Christ, the church has no basis for its hope in Christ’s return—nor either in the resurrection of the dead or the new heaven and earth. Although Christ delays his return, Torrance is confident that Christ “will come again in like manner” to his ascension before the disciples. The primary meaning of this “in like manner” is not cosmological but Christological and soteriological. It means Jesus will return as the crucified and risen Lord, as the man who was born of a virgin, who was crucified, left to die, and then buried, but who rose bodily from the grave. Soteriologically, Christ’s return will mean the “fulfilment of all his saving and redeeming life and work.”82 Like his other redeeming acts, this act will also have a relation to time and history. In this case, however, the sudden return of Christ will bring an apocalyptic end to history. It will bring to pass its “final consummation in a great act of crisis in which all time will be gathered up and changed.”83 The crisis will be generated by the appearance of Christ, for this means that eternity will break into time. The whole effect will be a sudden “catastrophic” judgment and redemption of our corrupt time. “When Eternity enters time, Eternity with which there is no past, present, future, it must travel in and through time and gather it all up into a great catastrophic crisis in which time will pass away in its fallen condition, but judged, and slain, as it were, and a new time will be born in the Kingdom of God.”84

One can find grounds in the bible (Mark 13 and par.; 2 Pet 3) for a catastrophic end to the world, but this notion that it will be the consequence of eternity entering time is Torrance’s own extrapolation. His argument is based on his earlier assertion that the key fact about the incarnation is the movement of eternity into time. The ascension does not abrogate this new connection made between eternity and time; it only reaffirms that time is real for eternity, not an illusion.

In fact, the ascension of Christ refers to the movement of all human “conditions”—including time—into eternity, within the realm of “God’s sovereign purpose.”85 But if this is really the nature of the case, then Torrance is stuck with an inconsistency. The effect of the second advent does not correspond to the effect that the incarnation and ascension had on time. How can one say that eternity “has no present, past or future” and thus must “gather” these all up at the end, if the God in Christ represents eternity, and the ascension of Christ is the sign that eternity is forever united to time? It seems that the significance of the ascension for the second advent is not commensurate with its christological and soteriological significance.

Like the first advent of Christ, the second will be a “self-bestowal and self-assertion of Christ.” It will be the “final revelation of God’s Love and Holiness in the Advent of Christ which completes the incarnate revelation . . . and the redemption accomplished in Christ Jesus.”86 This second self-assertion of Christ will be the final judgment of sin in the world. But those who are in Christ need not fear condemnation for their sins, since these have been atoned for by Christ’s death. However, the self-assertion of Christ will effect in them both the immediate eradication of those sins the sanctifying Spirit has not destroyed and the cancellation of all “penalties incurred” from remitted sins.

The advent of Christ will also be the end of the time of grace, the time for repentance and of God’s patience. There is no assurance of universal salvation.87 Sinners who “resist” Christ and “persist in their resistance” to the end cannot expect one last offer of grace from God but only a final self-assertion or judgment from him. Indeed this will be the “Apocalypse of the Wrath” that leads to condemnation.88

The faithful in Christ, on the other hand, can look forward to God’s final self-bestowal, the final revelation of his love. After God has asserted himself against all the remnants and effects of sin in his people, he will consummate the union he has with them in Spirit “with his very Presence.”89 They will be transformed “in the twinkling of an eye,” and so the need for faith will cease.

Of course, any talk about the second advent naturally leads us into a consideration of things that have not happened, that are wholly in the future. But Torrance does not venture to speculate on details surrounding the second advent. This should not surprise us. As indicated above, his theology is governed by a scientific realism. This, though, does not rule out divine revelation. Calvin believed that God in his revelation must accommodate himself to our feeble human capacity. Torrance agrees. Revelation must take a “human form,” since the human mind cannot “think outside of itself.” The “consummation of faith,” then, “does not lie completely within human knowledge and experience here and now. This is where we trespass on eschatology or the fulfilment of our hope in Christ which transcends earthly existence in the form we know it here and now.”90 To be sure, a Christian theologian also has the Spirit of God and faith to assist him; yet Jesus Christ is both the source of the Spirit and the object of faith. So any discussion about the Christ who will come again must, if it is to be real theological talk—and not speculation or mythology—be anchored to this man Christ Jesus who has risen and ascended.

This is why Torrance turns to the apocalyptic side of eschatology. For him the language of the Apocalypse is not the stuff of mythology. Rather, it points to the second advent of Christ, whose coming is revealed in his ongoing work of redemption. “The future reality of which they speak is continuous with the work of Christ on earth, with our knowledge and experience of him here and now today.”91

Conclusion

This lecture by Torrance on the ascension and the second advent is one of the shortest in his Auburn series, yet it is the most original and visionary. He takes Christology beyond the boundaries set by contemporary theologians such as Forsyth, Mackintosh, and Brunner. Barth may have pushed the boundaries with his lectures on the Apostles’ Creed in 1935 and his section on “The time of revelation” in Die Kirchliche Dogmatik II/1, but even he had not given much thought to the work of the risen and ascended Christ, or to the nature of the second advent itself.

Torrance left Auburn in the summer of 1939. He would not return to academia until he accepted the Chair in Church History at New College in 1950. In the meantime he was a parish minister for the Church of Scotland and a chaplain briefly in the British Army. Yet his theological activity did not cease. Indeed the horrors of war, the threat of communism, and the general crisis of civilization that marked this period became a crucible for Torrance’s Auburn Christology, especially for that remarkable last part of it. In the pulpit at Alyth and on the battlefield of Italy, Torrance would have to cling tenaciously to the idea that “there is a MAN in heaven today,” Christ the God-Man, who is truly “reigning over the kingdoms and nations of the world and working out his redeeming purpose for redemption.” But he would do more that just cling to an idea; through deeper biblical and theological study he would explicate the meaning of it.

The lecture on the second advent is one of the few times Torrance discusses last things, as traditionally understood. There is an epistemological reason for this. As long as we live in the time of the church the “consummation of faith” is beyond our ken. Eschatology, then, if we define it strictly in terms of the last things, is bound to be an uncertain dogmatic science. But Torrance does not cease from thinking about eschatology. That is because he redefines it accordance with his Christology and soteriology. It becomes less about the “end time” and more about the “between the times,” the time between the ascension and second advent, the time of the church, the time of grace.

The second advent remains important, but it is something that approaches us and something that we move towards. But this approach, this movement is not something that happens on the plane of history as we know it. The second advent is about Christ, the risen Lord and King who has ascended above the plane of history. His sudden advent would mean the reversal of history as we know it. Christ represents the new creation and the new age. The eschatological tension is therefore dual: it is “between the new and the old here and now,” and “between the present and the future.” That is why instead of the second advent Torrance will tend to speak of the one parousia—as a coming-and-presence of Christ—with two particular moments. Christ’s kingdom, therefore, is not merely a future reality. It is equally a present, hidden reality, which unveils itself in the church—through the Spirit, the Word, and the Sacrament. Yet the full unveiling of Christ and his kingdom is reserved for the final parousia. But, as we will see, there are also practical and historical reasons why Torrance redefines eschatology.

1. “Professor Mackintosh made a profound and lasting impact on my spiritual and theological development . . . [He] had a vast and commanding sense of the grace of the Eternal” (Torrance, “Student Years,” 4).

2. Torrance, “Hugh Ross Mackintosh,” 162.

3. Torrance, “The Modern Eschatological Debate,” 45, 50.

4. In the same vein is John Baillie’s And the Life Everlasting (1934), which is about “an inquiry into the nature of and grounds of Christian hope of eternal life” (ibid., 5).

5. Mackintosh, Immortality, 128.

6. See Mackintosh’s Types of Modern Theology, where he devotes the final chapter to the theology of Karl Barth. Unlike some in his day, Mackintosh clearly expected Barth’s influence on the Church to increase. For him the great benefit of Barth’s theology is that it “forced men to take Revelation seriously, with a revival of faith as a consequence” (ibid., 253). It has been argued that Mackintosh’s theology, with its strong emphasis on the free grace of Christ, anticipated Karl Barth’s theology. This is the thesis of J. W. Leitch. See A Theology of Transition: H. R. Mackintosh as an approach to Karl Barth.

7. Torrance, Karl Barth, 121.

8. It seems that these lectures left a lasting impression on Torrance. Near the end of his career he revealed that CD II/1 was his favourite section of the Dogmatics. This is after he told Michael Bauman in an interview that Barth’s “doctrine of God is simply the best thing of its kind.” Michael Bauman, Roundtable, 112.

9. McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 45.

10. Ibid., 46.

11. Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace, 139.

12. The seminary nailed its colours to the mast when it came out with the “Auburn Affirmation” in 1927. Baillie had also done a stint of teaching at Auburn. The campus closed in 1939, and the seminary moved to the campus of Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

13. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ.

14. Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 43.

15. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, ii.

16. McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 51.

17. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 1

18. It is quite probable that he also had in mind John Baillie’s The Place of Jesus Christ in Modern Christianity. Baillie opens his study by stating that “there is no part of traditional religious belief which gives rise to so much complexity in the minds of the men of our time as does the part bearing on what is traditionally been called the ‘Person and Work of Christ’” (ibid., 1). He explains that people in his day still revere the person of Jesus but have great difficulty accepting the doctrine of the “Trinity and the Incarnation and the Atonement” (ibid., 1). For Baillie, the answer lies in making these doctrines more acceptable to the sceptics instead of expounding them as the miraculous works of God, which is what Torrance does.

19. Emil Brunner insists that neither the Christmas message nor the Easter message can be ‘separated from the other, for both mean this, that God comes” (Brunner, The Mediator, 409). However, Brunner responds to the other problem in Christology, the tendency to subordinate the person of Christ to his work (ibid., 407–9).

20. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 1.

21. John McConnachie (1875–1948), who is recognised as the earliest exponent of Barth in Scotland, describes Mackintosh’s Christology as following in the tradition of the great German liberal theologians Herrmann and Ritschl. McConnachie was in a position to judge. He had also studied under Herrmann. For his views on Barth and Mackintosh, see his book The Significance of Karl Barth, 120–21.Torrance adopted from Mackintosh the idea that Christ’s “work is but his Person in action,” but for Mackintosh this idea is discernible chiefly in Christ’s “ethical supremacy”, not in his historical actions. What this means is that Christ “inspires a new ideal of character and conduct,” which we cannot possibly acquire apart from his help (Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person, 326).

22. On his voyage to America, Torrance brought with him Die Kirchliche Dogmatik I/1 & I/2.

23. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 18.

24. Ibid., 1.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 2.

27. Ibid., 4.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Brunner, The Mediator, 156.

32. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 13.

33. Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person, 321.

34. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 184.

35. “When it is asked in the New Testament ‘Who is Christ?,’ the question never means exclusively, or even primarily, ‘What is his nature?,’ but first of all, ‘What is his function?’” Cf. Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament, 4.

36. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 165.

37. Ibid., 18.

38. Ibid., 74.

39. Ibid., 142.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., 77.

42. Ibid., 78.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., 86.

45. Ibid., 83.

46. Ibid., 87.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., 78.

49. Ibid., 100.

50. Ibid., 151. In the Scottish Reformed tradition he sees these two aspects of atonement represented by R. W. Dale and John McLeod-Campbell respectively.

51. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 165.

52. Ibid., 153.

53. Ibid., 151.

54. Ibid., 149.

55. Ibid., 85.

56. Ibid., 153.

57. Ibid., 168.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., 169.

60. Barth had stated that “the whole life and death of Jesus are undoubtedly interpreted in the light of His resurrection” (Barth, Credo, 96).

61. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 189.

62. Ibid., 187.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 188.

65. Brunner, The Mediator, 156.

66. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 190.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid., 191.

69. Ibid., 193.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 192.

72. Ibid., 193.

73. Ibid., 194.

74. The offices of Christ have their basis in the Old Testament, but Calvin was the first to distinguish the three offices and to give them a role in a systematic theology. See Institutes, II, 15. Ever since, Protestant theologians have in general recognized the validity of the offices, even though they have had great difficulty finding agreement on their function, interrelation, and even their number. Given the neglect of the ascension in modern Christologies, it is no surprise that the offices of Christ fell into desuetude with it. Torrance did, however, find inspiration for the recovery of the offices in Barth’s Credo. For a good general survey of the offices of Christ, see Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 356–66; 406–11; also Emil Brunner, Dogmatics, vol. 3, 271–307.

75. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 194.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid., 196.

80. Ibid., 197.

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid., 196.

83. Ibid., 197.

84. Ibid., 197.

85. Ibid., 192.

86. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 198.

87. A number of years later, Torrance would write an article in refutation of J. A. T Robinson’s case for universalism. See “Universalism or Election ?” 310–18.

88. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 199.

89. Ibid., 198.

90. Ibid.

91. Ibid., 198.