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Alyth, Scotland 1940–1943

We must look to Torrance’s sermons if we wish to learn about his eschatology in the 1940s. The Apocalypse Today (1960), one of his most eschatological works, is actually a collection of sermons from this period. Torrance published a number of papers in this decade, but they contain relatively little in the way of eschatology. He probably did not intend on expatiating on the subject, but historical and pastoral circumstances dictated otherwise. The principles of it—Christ’s resurrection and ascension—were certainly in place at Auburn. Yet his eschatology flowers as he engages with the events of his time and the spiritual needs of his parish members. His sermons, he recalls, “seemed to reflect themselves in answer to concerns in the congregation.”1 This eschatology is not only deeply theological; it is also practical and pastoral. McGrath wisely observes that Alyth and Beechgrove were to Torrance what Safenwil was to Karl Barth.2

Although this eschatology comes from Torrance’s sermons, that does not mean we can discount it. If anything, reading his sermons brings us to the heart of his eschatology. For Torrance, the sermon was the supreme test for theology. He learned this point from his great teachers. Mackintosh had insisted that true theology is theology that can be preached. Barth had stated that “in conformity with its object, the fundamental form of theology is the prayer and the sermon.”3 It seems that years in the pulpit drove home these truths to Torrance. While lecturing on Reformation eschatology in 1952, he insists that “Grace today is the mighty Word of God, not a verbum (statio) but the sermo (active).”4

A. Resurrection

1. “The Personal Touch of the Risen Lord”

On March 20, 1940, Thomas Torrance realized his goal of becoming a minister for the Church of Scotland. He was ordained and inducted into the vacant charge at Alyth Barony Parish Church.5 Alyth is located about forty miles from Edinburgh on the north side of the Forth estuary, between Perth and Angus. Torrance remembers it as “a lovely old town,” with about 3,000 souls and a “distinguished church history.”6

He began his ministry of the Word at about the point he left off in his Auburn lectures, on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. His very first sermon was on Easter evening, and contains words taken straight from those lectures: “The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead dynamited the whole world.”7 Torrance could not have begun his ministry on a more fitting day on the church calendar. His preaching was essentially kerygmatic, and Christ’s resurrection is the ground of the kerygma. Luke 24, the basis for his first sermon, was one of his favorite chapters in the Bible. He would preach from it seven times.8 The essence of the kerygma should always remain the same, yet—as every minister knows—it has to be adapted to constantly changing socio-historical circumstances. Ideally, it should always come across as timely and new. And on March 20, 1940, when Britain was bracing itself for Hitler’s aerial onslaught, Torrance’s message must have come across just that way. “The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead dynamited the whole world; that is the only light in which to understand the gospel properly, and the light that shines on Easter day. It was the resurrection of the crucified Messiah that constituted the power of God that created the church; it was the resurrection that burst like a flash of lighting plumb down from above, that transformed the disciples and opened their eyes.”9

The dynamiting of the world begins at the personal, spiritual level. This happens through the “personal touch of the risen Lord” that “transforms everything into living reality,” that “turns the world upside down, that dispels darkness.”10 The touch of the risen Lord reveals among other things that our relationship to God is highly personal, “far, far more personal than our relations with one another can ever be.”11 Christ’s resurrection is really about the “acute personalization of all our relations with God and all his relations with us.”12

What accounts for this personal touch? The manhood of the risen Christ. So “what ever happened in the relations of man and God between the incarnation and resurrection” is not invalidated by Easter but, rather, “deepened and extended.”13 A “diffused spirit or ideal projection” could never give us a personal touch.14 We can have that touch only because Christ Jesus is sits enthroned at the right hand of the Father in heaven.

For Easter 1941, Torrance would preach two sermons on the resurrection; the first based on 1 Cor 15:17–18, the second on 15:20.15 In these sermons, Christ’s resurrection is the sine qua non of Christianity. “If Christ is not risen then you have nothing left worth calling a gospel.”16 “On the fact of the resurrection everything is suspended.”17 “Strike it out” and you have nothing left really, he adds.18 In response to those who believe they can cling to the cross for salvation, he answers: “you must have the resurrection to explain the cross.”19 Without the resurrection, Christ on the cross is, in his view, “dead being alone,” and to look for him there is to “seek the living among the dead.”20

“But now Christ is risen . . .” The Easter story “is essentially the great Christian message.”21 With these words, Torrance launches into his second sermon. It seems that he felt the men and women at Alyth had embraced a truncated version of Christianity, one that did not take seriously that “but” from 1 Cor 15:20. It is not enough for a Christian, he maintains, to have faith in the incarnation and cross of Christ. They “form only half the truth and in themselves mean nothing” apart from Christ’s resurrection.22

What was the whole truth that Torrance was driving at on that Easter evening? It is this. “The resurrection is the complete movement from God to God that passes through the lowest point of our humanity.”23 He uses a parabola to illustrate the doctrine. God descends to us, down to the pits of human experience—to guilt, death, hell—before he ascends in the resurrection. And the all-important turning point in the parabola is the “but” Paul used. Soteriologically, this turning point is also God’s “breakthrough in the realms of human bondage, sin and death.”24 God’s victory over these is an objective reality, but it has to become a subjective actuality for Christians. Otherwise, he argues, this great event will be a “mere story” for us. “Until you know the resurrection with power, till you’ve broken through with the risen Christ, you have not begun to know the real joy and liberty of the Gospel.”25

No such breakthrough will occur, however, until we are taken to the edge of our thoughts, beyond the limit of what we consider possible. That is because the resurrection is “totally incomprehensible by any human standard.”26 We need to “make room for the supernatural,” Torrance pleads, so God can “knock a hole in the midst our world” with the force of “Eternity.”27 Easter is a miracle. It is the miracle of miracles. The world is not the same since Jesus rose from the dead. The resurrection is what separates Christianity from all other religions. Indeed, from Torrance’s perspective, it is not even proper to call Christianity a religion. Christianity is “a person.”28 The resurrection of Jesus Christ, we must not forget, was the resurrection of a man, who is “bone of our bone . . . flesh of our flesh.”29 Because he is risen, this man Jesus can be the personal presence of God to us. That is why he ends this Easter sermon with the great news that Christ is risen not only “for you, but . . . so that he can be near you.”30

2. “Nunc aeternum”

The resurrection of Christ also opens up an encounter with “Eternity.” “Eternity has come plumb down from above and intersected our beggarly time,” allowing us to “take to the wings of the spirit.”31 This language too goes back to Auburn, where the incarnation is viewed as the entry of eternity into time.

The best illustration of this type of eschatology is found in Torrance’s sermon on 2 Pet 3:8. The entire third chapter from Second Peter is one of the best sources of primitive Christian eschatology. It is a defense of the return of Christ—and its cataclysmic impact—in response to doubts about his return. But Torrance shows no interest in these things. Instead, his message is about meeting the eternal God in the midst of time. “With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day.” The real value of this verse, then, is that it enables us to see the world from God’s point of view, which is infinitely different from our view of it. If this is done, we will have wings with which “to soar above tensions and limitations of a temporal world.”32 How is this so? The first part of this verse applies to God’s being. “One day in the Divine Mind overrides all finite thinking; for every day has its roots in eternity.”33 It is natural to break time into future, present, and past. But Torrance thinks this distorts the real truth about time, because with God every moment is the eternal moment, the eternal now. This is what is meant, he explains, by the words: “He is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb 13:8). God is indeed the eternal one, but eternity should not be conceived as duration without end. It is better to see eternity as a vertical extension, not a horizontal one. “With God you do not live in the past or the future—but in the eternal now. Each day is as a thousand years; each day is crammed with eternity.”34 Since every moment is of the “utmost importance” to God, it should be of like importance to us. “‘Now is the day of Salvation’; each day you make history, for each day is loaded with destiny.”35 If we look upon time from God’s perspective, every moment can be a moment in eternity, in the presence of God. “Do not crowd tomorrow into your today; don’t divide up your life with yesterday, today and tomorrow. Rather, carry Eternity with your today.”36 Here then we have the first wing needed for our flight.

“A thousand years as one day” refers to the second wing. Torrance is convinced that sin distorts time. It makes the days long. “Sin is sin against the infinite majesty of God and therefore in its guilt; and when God opposes you, your conscience burns and time becomes endless.”37 That is why one day can feel like a thousand years. But when we are justified before God and thus free to remain in his presence, time can fly by without us realizing it. Still, we feel small against the backdrop of history. Perhaps that is why Torrance urges us “get inside Eternity” to find “God’s view,” for then “you’ll see that the whole panorama of history which unfolds before your eyes is all meant for you.”38

Although we can talk about the two “wings” of time separately, Torrance insists we need both “to fly.” In other words, the two parts of the verse must be “telescoped” together like “twin spectacles” in order get God’s view of the world. “It is only in the supreme effort in which we look through both at once that we get a proper perspective which will transfigure this flat world of time into the bold relief of eternity.”39

Torrance was not just interested in changing attitudes. His real aim was evangelical, to bring people into a life-changing encounter with the living God, with eternity. What is more, we can detect a “theology of crisis” in his words. He tells his church that if they heed his advice they will be brought to a “moment of decision” in which they will be “confronted by God Himself.”40 As such it will be a moment like no other. It will not be fleeting, like the passing moment of illumination created by a bolt of lightning. “This moment is an eternal crisis, an eternal moment; for you find that eternity has become your contemporary; contemporaneous with every instant of your life, impinging on you at every moment. Face to face with God, faith has reached out and in an everlasting decision grasped eternity and thrust it in its bosom– and now a thousand years are as a day and a day a thousand years.”41 In conclusion, he calls them to “seize both these truths in the hand of faith” so that “God will plant eternity in your heart.”42

This sermon is remarkable for what it lacks, that christocentism that is so typical of Torrance. The experience of eternity is central, but the resurrection of Christ is not the sole condition for this experience.

3. Death and the Afterlife

The nunc aeternum is also Torrance’s answer to concerns about death and the afterlife. One would expect a heightening of these concerns during a time of war. Christians of all stripes have traditionally viewed death as the gateway to eternal life with God. Later, Torrance would write enthusiastically about Calvin’s Psychopannychia, which is a defense of that traditional view. For Calvin, death promises a better state than anything in the present. But Torrance tries to show how the future state can be a present possession. Preaching from John 14:19, he argues that these words contain the promise of a new life in the present. Christ’s resurrected life can be a “present power in the believer,” “not simply a fact outside of us.”43 And this life is no ordinary life but one in which the “Eternal” is a “present possession.”44 It is not necessary, he concludes, “to wait for a great change at the end of life.”45 When “Eternity comes into the soul” the “bitterness of death” is behind and “the power of the endless life becomes our experience.”46

4. Resurrection and History

In the summer of 1940, Britain was bracing itself for a German invasion. It was a dark time in history, even darker than the summer before, but you would be hard pressed to know this from reading Torrance’s sermons. They are primarily concerned with the timeless truths of the gospel and with the soul’s relationship with Christ. Here we can gauge the influence of Mackintosh.

The soul’s relation to Christ is important, of course. But what does a minister of the Word say during a time of war, when historical events are making a mockery of God’s love and justice? What does he or she say about last things in the midst of terrible things?

To be sure, Torrance does not ignore the historical situation. It seems to have inspired an early sermon on peace. The world will never give us peace, he says. Its offers of peace are as “as shallow as the German offers of peace.”47 Besides, the source of the “dispeace” in the world is the human heart. “Each man carries a troubled kingdom within him”—in “passions,” “conscience,” and “desires.”48 The real war is in our hearts, between us and the heavenly Father. The only answer is to “look Christ squarely in the face” and “allow him to be the Sovereign and King.”49 Then we will enjoy true peace and the “calm of eternity.”

What about this Nazi menace to Britain? It is the kind of question that must have stirred in the heads of his parishioners. Torrance’s answer: “If your hopes and desires are lodged in the altitude of Eternity, you’ll be above the clouds and storms” of the world.50

These last words tell us a lot about Torrance’s earliest sermons. They do not have much to do with eschatology in the usual sense—with future things and the afterlife. The eschatology in them can be described as a timeless, presentative eschatology. One could also call it a “radical eschatology.”51 It has its roots in Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans. This commentary had a strong eschatological orientation, but not the kind Christians were used to. It had nothing to do with the future. Instead, it had to do with an “Eternity-time” dialectic. These two things are absolutely different (as God and man). Yet in the Word of God “Eternity” breaks into time. In Barth’s words, the “moment” is the “eschatological moment . . . which is no moment in time.”52 In this sense, every moment in time can be the end-time.

However, Torrance’s eschatology is more christocentric than that found in Barth’s Romans (although this could be an echo of the christological turn that eventually occurred in Barth’s eschatology). For Torrance, then, the resurrection of Christ is what allows us (generally) to experience eternity in the present.53 Although the resurrection is an event in time, it is timeless in the sense that we can participate in it at any time, and no particular time is more propitious than any other time for this.

This kind of eschatology has biblical warrant, especially in the Fourth Gospel. But the Bible, including the Fourth Gospel (cf. 6:39, 40, 54), also relates eschatology to history. To ignore this fact is to condone, in Moltmann’s words, a “blinkered disregard of world history and the history of nature.”54

It would not be long before Torrance began to ponder the relationship between Christ and history. When tons of bombs from the Nazi Luftwaffe were raining down on British cities in the summer of 1940, it would not be enough simply to tell people to take the “wings of the spirit” and to soar to the high “altitude of Eternity.” Besides, if we recall his Auburn lectures, we should expect more than a time-less eschatology from Torrance. He asserts that Christianity has to do with “God-in-Time, with God-in-Action” in relation to men. Consequently, redemption “has to be actualized in history and must be mediated through history.” Indeed, he insists that salvation is not “intelligible or even accessible to us” if it is not “historically conveyed.”55

We see the change in his Easter sermon from 1941. There is no change in the subject of the message. It is still centered on the resurrection of Christ. “This broken world is living on the wrong side of the Easter day,” he declares.56 In other words, he saw the world stuck in the dark between Good Friday and Easter. Consequently, the world seeks its own “man-made, humanistic” solutions to “evil’s tragic dominion.”57 What the world desperately needs, he concludes, is for the miracle of the resurrection “to knock the very bottom out of the world.”58

However, he is convinced that the resurrection has really “broken through the spokes of history,” that eternity has “intersected our beggarly time.”59 Thus not only do we have eternity in our hearts but an “Eternal axle in the wheel of history.”60 Still, Easter means triumph. The axle indicates that we can “take to the wings of the spirit” and “ride triumphant” into the kingdom of God.61

The historical implications of the resurrection are more pronounced in the Easter sermon of 1942. He returns to Luke 24, and begins with a metaphor for the resurrection that must have aroused people’s attention. “No atomic revolution can compare to the complete transformation that this Easter awakening means for a broken, darkened world.”62 And by 1942 the world was broken and dark indeed, more so than it had been a year or two earlier. It was very likely a time too when men and women were beginning to suspect that evil is an eradicable part the world, that death is indeed the “final verdict” of history. Yet, in spite of the dire situation, Torrance was not about to give up on the Easter story. It was time to look more deeply into it, for in his mind only this story could provide a real basis for hope in the midst of darkness. “At the death of Jesus the final verdict of history seemed to be: death ends all. Nothing can stop evil and wickedness—the world rolls on and on, inexorably on; not even God can stop it, for the Son of God is destroyed in the maelstrom of evil and death like any common son of man.”63

But in the bodily resurrection of Christ, he adds, we have an event “that completely shatters the whole frame of history” and “breaks in upon the uniformity of nature.”64 And all this can only mean that “cause and effect” and all “the rigid laws of the universe are snapped and broken forever.”65 Still, however, the resurrection is pictured as an epochal, vertical breakthrough. The only difference is that instead of eternity coming into our world, it is the kingdom of God. It “comes plumb down from above and intersects our world at right angles.”66

For the folks at Alyth all this must have sounded fantastic, far removed from the “personal touch” of the risen Lord and the “calm of eternity.” But Torrance’s purpose was to make the gospel the Word for his time. Thus he brings his sermon to a close with these words: “The resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ means the end, the end of our world-this wicked warring world of bloodshed, cruelty and sorrow; it means the end of history, the ruthless triumph of unrighteousness; it means the end of time.”67

On this view, though, Easter is about the judgment of the world rather than the birth of a new one. Thankfully, he does not end there. He points to a new world, one “ruled by love,” where life prevails, and “Jesus is conqueror, king, Lord and God.”68

Still, there is no escaping the fact that the historical eschatology in these Easter sermons is somewhat triumphalistic. It is hard to believe that Torrance is taking history seriously when he claims in the middle of a war that the resurrection of Jesus means the “end of history,” the “end of time.” What we have is really a transposition of his individual eschatology. It is all about the “first fruits” of the new creation, with little thought given to the future resurrection of humankind.69 It is without the eschatological tension that is so much a part of the New Testament, the tension between the present and future, old creation and new creation. There is reference to a new world on the horizon, but it looks about as substantial as the eternity that we can receive into our hearts.

If one teaches only a timeless, triumphalistic eschatology, then something has got to give in Christian faith. Either one will fall into a docetic view of world history. “The news is not as bad as it sounds.” Or one will fall into a docetic view of Jesus and his history. “Jesus did not actually rise from dead.” “If he did, then why does history continue as it always has—filled with conflict, war, bloodshed, and every kind of evil?”

Yet Torrance does something to ensure that the believer does not fall one way or the other. The facile solution is to affirm the world’s history, its pain, and suffering; and then to affirm Jesus’ history in terms of those things. This is not his solution, for that would put into question the great impact of Christ’s resurrection. His answer is to look to the humanity of Jesus, to his historical life, his suffering, and his death. Paradoxically, that means looking toward the risen and ascended Christ.

B. Ascension

1. Incarnation and History

We can see this approach in his New Year’s sermon of 1941. “Here at the outset of a New Year in these terrible days in which we live . . . asking what the future will bring forth . . . what unknown lies ahead.”70 And the preceding days were the most terrible the country had seen. German air raids on British cities began in September 1940. They continued nightly, and within two months about 11,700 died, most in London.71 One of the most devastating attacks occurred on December 29th. The attacks left 1,500 fires raging in the city. The event is remembered as the “second fire of London.” It is only natural that people wondered what was ahead. Torrance responds with the words from Acts 1:7: “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in his own authority.”72 God hides the future from us in order to establish us in faith. Going “out into the blue”; this, he adds, is what faith is about.

More importantly, every year, even the darkest ones, are full of Jesus Christ. Ever since the advent of Christ, he explains, “time is no longer empty, but definitely full of God himself . . . full of Jesus Christ; even 1941 is filled with Jesus Christ . . . with “Bethlehem, the Cross, and Easter as well.”73 Jesus Christ is called the “shape of the future.” “Have therefore no tears,” he comforts his church, “for the future can only hold Christ for you.”74 There is no need to be troubled by war, mass destruction, or the sight of evil run amok in the world; these are not signs that evil has vanquished good or that Easter is meaningless. On the contrary, this “turmoil, this dispeace” are signs that evil is in its “last death throes,” as God comes to grips with it all in the history of this age.75

The task of trying to reconcile evil in the world with a good Creator is difficult, but it is far more difficult when the time of the world is reckoned to be full of God himself. But Torrance has an explanation: the incarnation. Jesus Christ provoked conflict from the moment he came into the world. That was to be expected. His advent represents judgment, the assertion of God’s holiness.76 This judgment explains why he came not “to bring peace but a sword” and to “cast fire upon earth.”77 This leads Torrance to interpret the violence between the nations as a violent reaction to God, because the “cross of Christ is flung into their midst.”78

However, the incarnate Christ turns the world against him in order to “triumph over” all the evil in the world. For Torrance, every “dark page” in the history of Europe “augurs the breakthrough of God” and the victory of the Christ.79 In order to strengthen their faith in this victory he directs his church, for the first time, to the Revelation of Jesus Christ. They are told not to look for a disclosure of times or seasons in this book, but instead for a “glimpse of the final triumph of his love and power.”80 Those hands that were nailed to the cross of Calvary by a sinful world are the same hands of the one who holds the “seven stars,” who is the “First and the Last.” There is “nothing in the world history to compare” to Jesus’ victory.81 It is he who “dominates the ages.” He is the “everlasting mountain” while “man’s systems” are the “shadows on the hillside.”82 “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in his own authority.”83 On New Year’s 1941, with no end to the war in sight, the pastor urges his flock to cling to Christ with all their faith, and then sends them away with the promise that when the “pageantry of history is over . . . Christ the conqueror will come from Edom” and then the darkness will be “turned into day.”84

This sermon differs substantially from others we have examined. While they have more to do with a realized eschatology, based on the power of the resurrection and the nature of eternity, this one contains an historical eschatology based on the incarnation and the cross. In his sermon on 2 Pet 3, Torrance described the resurrection as God’s “breakthrough in the realms of human bondage, sin and death,” but in the New Year’s sermon he tells us that every “dark page” in the history of Europe “augurs the breakthrough of God.” If we can say the eschatology in the first sermon is realized, then the one in the second is realist.

This historical eschatology, however, is not something entirely new in Torrance. The seeds for it had been sown at Auburn, but historical circumstances and the pastoral needs at Ayth caused it to spring up and bloom.

It hard to know for sure what Torrance means when he says time is full of Christ, full of Bethlehem, the cross, and Easter. From his Auburn lectures we know that he believes Bethlehem is where the eternal God truly entered time, where God truly became a man. Christ then fills time in a real way, but also in a way that is according to his nature: the God-Man-in-saving action. As a man Christ reveals God, for there can be no revelation to us until revelation takes “human form.” As God he is our redeemer. For Torrance, there is no way of knowing Christ outside his redeeming action. So to say our time is filled with Christ, must mean that our time is marked by the humanity of the incarnation, the suffering of the cross, the new life of the resurrection and the hope of the advent.

Jesus Christ filled time during his earthly ministry, but his exaltation is our assurance that he continues to fill time. We need to recall what he taught his students at Auburn: “Fundamentally, the function of the ascended and risen Lord Jesus cannot be anything than the dominating purpose of his incarnation and life on earth: the revelation of God to mankind and the redemption of mankind.”85 The risen and ascended Jesus Christ remains the God-Man, the God who entered time and took on human form. Thus time and human relations continue to have substance before God. We can say that the ascension makes possible a mirifica commutatio. Since Christ the God-Man has our time before him in heaven, he is thus able to fill our time here on earth. And, as we will discover, the church, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit are the means by which he does this.

2. Christ and the Individual

Torrance’s New Year’s sermon of 1941 tells us that he had begun to take the relationship between eschatology and history more seriously. Yet he did not allow individual eschatology to become swallowed by world history. He accents it. That is because the key to this relationship between eschatology and history is the personal history of Jesus. That means the cross, not just the power of the resurrection and the experience of eternity, will have to define individual eschatology.86 Torrance does not forget the lesson he learned from Mackintosh, that it is at the cross that the full significance of God in Christ becomes clear to the human mind. The cross gives Christians direction in the world, an eschatological orientation. This is underscored in a communion service from 1942.87 Christians today, he says, can easily go off course, like the Christians at Corinth, especially when the church is in a “muddle,” as a result of the tumult in the world. Therefore he encourages people to come to the communion table; for this is where they can get re-centered, find their “spiritual bearings” and “set the course” of their souls toward Jesus Christ.88 By what means? The cross. It has been “flung into our midst.” It causes tumult in the world, but it also provides spiritual direction for believers. Using navigation as a metaphor for the Christian life, he writes: “the Cross is our compass, the Holy Spirit our sextant and the Word of God our chart.”89 It is only fitting that his final word of advice is to follow Christ by taking up his cross daily.

But taking up the cross means living more by faith, than by the experience of eternity or the “personal touch” of the risen Christ. It means following the hidden Christ as well as the revealed Christ. Besides, for Torrance, these two are found together. Luke 24 is about the experience of the glorious risen Christ, but it is also about the “shadow Christ,” who dwells in the “dark” and is encountered only through faith. His point is that the Christian journey through life is a lot like the journey of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. The individual Christian journey is filled with the “shadow Christ” or the hidden God who inhabits the places of spiritual darkness. He urges believers not to cower when caught in terrible situations. After all, God dwells in them; though he can be found through faith alone. “The truth is that faith can see only in the dark.”90 Yet it does truly see.

Talk about eternity does not suddenly disappear from Torrance’s sermons, but it takes on new eschatological meaning. If the shadow Christ tells us that God is hidden as well as revealed, then eternity too must be hidden as much as it is revealed. It is as much a promise as a present experience. This truth comes out in a sermon on Philippians, dealing with the basic tensions in the Christian life, including that between time and eternity. Torrance exhorts believers to “stop having a double mind” and to ‘subordinate everything to the kingdom of God.”91 There is no suggestion that the eternal kingdom is now within our grasp. Indeed in the first months of 1942 it probably never looked farther away. Rather, the kingdom is tied up with the future life. There is a call, then, to recover the New Testament “sense of eternity,” epitomized in Paul’s words to the Philippians. It means reaching out for eternity. “Everywhere in the New Testament . . . human destiny is stretched out beyond our imagination, stretched out to eternity.”92 And “that is what we need to do.”93 But that is naturally going to create an “inescapable tension,” he warns, exactly like the kind Paul refers to. “There is a vision of the life Beyond, of Eternity that will always throw us into an inescapable tension—in a straight between the two.”94 This sense of eternity is linked to faith, as faith always contains a “future reference” and is always about “living beyond our range.”95

Here faith is understood somewhat existentially, as a function of the tension between time and eternity. On the other hand, Torrance sees it as a function of the life between two great times, the ascension and second advent. The whole situation leads Torrance to compare Christians to “arrows” that are shot from God’s bow in the direction of their target, the kingdom of God.96 The second advent adds both substance and hope to faith. It also creates a sense of urgency. The time-between, after all, is a time of grace, a time for spreading the gospel, for hearing and responding to it. “The Church must capture again today . . . this note of the utmost urgency of the Gospel.”97 For the kingdom of God “draweth nigh.”

For the many Christians who equated the coming of Christ’s kingdom with peace and prosperity, their faith in the coming of this kingdom must have been battered in the 1940s.98 But Torrance assures them that their hopes will be fulfilled with the final advent of the Judge and Savior. “Come it certainly shall, when the terrible tide of evil now let loose upon the earth will be utterly destroyed by the immediate presence of the majesty and judgement of God.”99 Then there will be “no Hitlers” to terrorize the world. As for salvation, Christians can hope for more than peace, progress, and brotherhood. This is because Jesus will return “with all the fullness of his perfect manhood” to establish the new heaven and new earth.100

3. Christ and the Church

Concomitant with the new emphasis on Christ and history in Torrance is an emphasis on the church in history. The church is the principle means by which Christ fills time and “gives shape to the future,” for individual Christians and for the world at large. How so? Torrance did not discuss the church in his Auburn lectures, but they contain two seminal statements. The church is “the visible ‘incarnation’ of Christ on earth in lieu of his very Self,” and the “ascended and enthroned Lord Jesus” uses her “for his work of redemption . . . on earth and in history.”101 By the 1950s Torrance will have in place a highly developed ecclesiology, and one with a strong eschatological orientation. But the roots of that ecclesiology are found in Auburn, and its development takes place during those tense first years at Alyth.

Torrance’s early doctrine of the church is modest. It begins with an exhortation to recover the New Testament model of the church.102 There is a focus on those four basic features mentioned in Acts 2.42: the teachings of the apostles, fellowship, Holy Communion, and prayer. In his view, the modern church—in particular the Church of Scotland—was barely distinguishable from the state and the prevailing culture. He faults it for having “degenerated” to a point where it was a “bulwark of national order and life.”103 This represented a double tragedy for him. The church was out of touch with the kingdom of God, and she was powerless to make a real difference in the world. She is so deeply “identified with the present shape of the nation that she can’t change it . . . can’t strike at the heart of contemporary civilization, culture and society. [S]he has substituted public spiritness, philanthropy, good citizenship for what the New Testament calls the Kingdom of God.”104

How should the church relate to the surrounding society? Taking a lesson from the parable in Matt 13:33, he maintains that the church should be to society as the “leaven” is to the “loaf.” The church is not the kingdom of God in visible form. It is instead an “instrument” of the kingdom of God. As such, it should be the “greatest disturbing factor on earth.”105 The church is always tempted to “settle down” in the world but, for Torrance, that is something it must never do. The reason is the kingdom of God “can’t be domesticated.” He calls the attempt to do so the “greatest sin.” Why? It “betrays” Jesus’ resurrection. Yet everywhere this sin was apparent to him, and so were the consequences. “Any wonder,” he says, “God has raised up utterly ruthless men in Europe to shake us out of our religious self-complacency and self-satisfaction.”106 “If the church won’t shake up the world . . . then God will shake the world in another way.”107

What is the secret of the leaven that enables the church to affect the whole of society, “life at all points”? It is the power of Christ’s resurrection. In his Easter sermons this power made the “Eternal a present possession,” but here it turns the world upside down. It is the “most revolutionary power” on earth. It is a power of judgment as much as life. Torrance calls it the “living, disturbing, fermenting, revolutionary, recreating word of the living God.”108

The leavening effect of the church on the society is tied up with the task of evangelism. The church, we recall, lives between two great times, “between the ascension of Christ and his second coming.” So there is another reason the church cannot settle down and let “let her roots go down into the soil” of the world.109 It is an evil-filled world, and no matter how great the church’s impact on the world, this world cannot be remade into the kingdom of God. The church can find no “continuing city here,” and thus it is incumbent upon her to be a pilgrim church till the advent of Christ.110

4. The Lord’s Supper

Torrance’s doctrine of the church and his new eschatological orientation is reflected in his understanding of the Lord’s Supper. Let us go back to his very first sermon for Easter 1940 (Luke 24:30f.). There he draws attention to the fact that the revelation of the risen Christ in Luke is centered on the breaking of bread. It is the basis for a “realized” eschatology, one on a vertical axis, so to speak. Christ’s resurrection meant that eternity came “plumb down” and “blew the top of” the disciples’ world. Yet Torrance refers also to that other form of eschatology that we have been examining, one that runs on the horizontal axis of time or history (cf. Luke 24:27, 44ff.). Holy Communion, he says, is the “right place to understand the whole movement of history through the Old Testament” as it leads to the death of Christ on Good Friday. From one angle, the vertical, the resurrection discloses the abrupt “end of history” (i.e., man’s fallen, corrupt history); but from another angle, the horizontal, it discloses the teleological movement in history towards redemption.

These two kinds of eschatologies, one on a vertical and the other on a horizontal axis, are found in several early communion sermons. In the first, the Lord’s Supper is called a “place of vision,” a “tabernacle of eternity.”111 It is a place of vision—much like the first Easter communion—because the “veil of sense is torn aside” and we get a “direct encounter with God.”112 It is not a mystical vision either, because, as 1 John indicates, God “got a footing in history.”113 The bread and wine remind us of God’s incarnation, and that a meeting with him is possible only among “worldly things,” and that our faith is “anchored in solid fact.”114 Moreover, the elements are not just bare reminders. Through them faith penetrates the “unseen . . . to touch and handle things there.”115

The most instructive communion sermon is the one titled “The three tenses of communion.”116 Here Torrance explains how the two dimensions of eschatology, the vertical and horizontal, are united in Christ. Relying on three New Testament passages, Torrance shows how the Lord’s Supper telescopes Christ’s past, present and future work of redemption. Through it the “past becomes alive in the present” and the “future also comes into the present.”117 The central point is that through Holy Communion we get a “real sense of the fulfillment of all the promises of Christ.”118 That is because it stands between—and is conditioned by—two great acts of redemption in time: Christ’s sacrificial death and his second advent. For Torrance, the future aspect of communion is underlined in St. Paul’s words of institution. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes.”

Just prior to this sermon on communion Torrance devoted a sermon to the second advent.119 Here his concern is to show how that event bears on the present. His lesson is commensurate with his earlier one on the church in the world. The return of Christ ought to embolden Christians to go into the world to “proclaim the Lord’s death.” The proclamation begins at the Lord’s Table where we “take on the standards of Jesus Christ.”120 That means we are “pledged to fight against the world,” as Christ did, until the day when he “shall come in power and take up the reign of government.”121

Imitating Christ’s struggle with the world, becoming the church militant, involves taking up the cross—not the sword. The vision of the Lord’s coming, he says, is what inspired Paul and the other disciples to go out and proclaim the Lord’s death with such “confidence and daring in spite of persecution.”122 Their minds were fixed, he tells them, as much on the future as on the past.

5. The Ascension

The development of Torrance’s eschatology, from a quite triumphalistic one to a cross-centered one, is linked to his increasing focus in this period on the ascension of Christ. The ascension of course is predicated on the resurrection of Christ, but in his earliest sermons he construes the resurrection in terms that obviate the former, in ways that suit a timeless, realized eschatology. The resurrection is “the complete movement from God to God that passes through the lowest point of our humanity.” “It means the end of history, the ruthless triumph of unrighteousness. It means the end of time.” But when faced with a war-torn world, Torrance knew he had to qualify the triumphalism of the resurrection with the eschatological reserve implicit in the ascension. This meant applying the lesson from Auburn about “the MAN in heaven today” who, because our humanity and our time are real for him, is still graciously carrying out his redeeming work through the church and history. The ascension backs the promise to the distraught that Christ is the “shape of the future”; it backs the promise that he will come again in history to bring an end to all its conflicts. It even explains why the world, notwithstanding the resurrection, is gripped by suffering and spiritual darkness.

The importance of the ascension is attested in a sermon Torrance gives on the subject in the spring of 1942, a sermon that harks back to his Auburn lecture. Following John 16:7, he discusses the benefits of it. The ascension ensures that we have a “spiritual” relationship” with Christ, that he is real in our hearts. Second, it forces us to encounter him as “the crucified” one, instead of just the risen and transcendent one. “Jesus Christ refuses to be known, refuses to have any relations with man apart from the cross. He will be known, worshiped and adorned only as the one who went to Bethlehem, Gethsemane and Calvary.”123

This is the case because the Holy Spirit makes the cross “contem-poraneous”—“now confronting us and demanding our faith, trust, and participation.”124 For Torrance, the “secret” of Jesus is “locked up in the experience of the Cross.”125 But if Jesus had not ascended, we would forget about the cross and never learn this secret.

The third benefit is that we might know him as the “very right hand of God.” The “right hand of God” is a biblical expression for God’s authority and power, which, according to Psalm 110, is shared with the Messiah. This is the greatest advantage of the ascension for Torrance. Through it, the divinity of Christ is attested to faith. At Auburn, he put it this way: “What Christ IS, God IS, because Christ IS God’s Right Hand.” That means there is “no work, no Word, no Will, no Judgement of God other than the act and word and will and judgement of the Lord Jesus Christ.”126 In his view these acts are all manifestations of the power of God (cf. Mark 14.62). “Christ himself IS the ‘omni-potence’ of God.”127

There must have been many Christians at Alyth parish in 1942 who longed for a baring of the right hand of God in Old Testament fashion (Pss 2:9; 110:5f.), for a triumphal display of Christ’s Lordship, of his wrath against evildoers (cf. Luke 9:54). Yet Torrance controverts this view of God’s “right hand.” He calls it a “false picture,” one that is about “almighty force” and rooted in a very un-Pauline definition of justice. God’s “sword of justice” has been wielded on the cross.128 Jesus ascended to the Father, so we could “learn that God’s right hand is revealed at Calvary” and to realize that the crucifixion is an “act of God . . . an act of Eternity.”129 God’s right hand is Jesus’ hand nailed to the cross. In spite of the evil enveloping in the world in 1942, Torrance assures his church that “God is reigning over the world.” But what sort of God? What sort of reign? It is the “Lamb of God on the throne,” he adds, “the Lamb that bears the sins of the world . . . that can be angry with the wicked,” yet whose “holy living will shall be done.”130 And it is precisely because he reigns over the world with a “cross in his heart” that we can be assured he is essentially love.131

The “right hand of God” is an anthropomorphism but, in Torrance’s view, the scarred hands of Jesus are not. The ascension, then, not only verifies the divinity of Christ; it verifies his humanity too. As Mark 14:62 tells us, it is the Son of Man who now sits at the right hand of God. “The Ruler and King of the Universe is none other than the Man who suffered on the Cross.”132

But all this, however, puts faith through a trial. Although faith is not sight, it still “sees.” In order to see more and better, it seeks understanding: fides quaerens intellectum. How, faith will inquire, does Christ from the throne of God rule over the world and redeem it? How, when this world is in shambles, when Christ is not present in the world? Is Christ the true Redeemer? Is God really as Christ is? Or is there a hidden right hand to God?

For Torrance, the revelation of Christ is proof there are “no dark spots” in God.133 However, if he cannot account for the great dark spots in the world (and in 1942 there were many), if he cannot show how all the evil in the world is working for good, and is evidence of Christ’s continuous rule and redemption, then Christians will begin to believe there is indeed a hidden hand to God—or worse, no hand and no God at all.

Torrance does meet this demand, and he does so without subordinating Christ to history, metaphysics, or ontology. There is no need to. Christology is based on the reality of Jesus Christ, as the incarnate, risen, and ascended God-Man, and on the illuminating work of his Spirit.134 Further, through the study of Christology we can “gain a clear understanding of the risen and ascended Lord Jesus, and all that he means for us in the Church and the world.”135

This brings us to Torrance’s sermons on Revelation.

C. The Apocalypse: Sermons on Revelation I

1. Christ and the Soul

Of all the sermons Torrance preached, the best known and most original are his published collection on Revelation, titled The Apocalypse Today. It appeared in 1959, but the sermons within were first delivered during the war and just after it while Torrance was a minister at Alyth parish. Needless to say, The Apocalypse Today gives us the best picture of his eschatology in the 1940s. Under sixteen thematic chapters, it covers the whole of Revelation.

Torrance apparently had no intention of ever publishing these sermons but did so “at the request” of many friends and students who longed for “a fresh and straightforward account of the meaning of the Apocalypse for today.”136 “For today” really stood for days that were a throwback to the first century of the church. The 1950s were not as bloody as the 1940s but they were still years of “world distress and conflict,” when people experienced the “plagues of war and the tyranny of oppression.”137 There was no shortage of literature on Revelation in this period, but it was not very good at relating the contents of this book to the present. Roughly, there were two kinds. First, there were the exegetical commentaries, notably R. H. Charles’s monumental two-volume work, which focused on the meaning of the Apocalypse for yesterday, for first-century Christians.138 There were the expository commentaries that tried to make the Apocalypse relevant, but this usually involved extracting the timeless, spiritual truths from the husk of historical and eschatological material.139 Apart from these, one was left with, in Torrance’s words, the “fantastic interpretations of the sects.”140 These interpretations tried to relate the Apocalypse to the modern world, but failed because they took the images and symbols of the book too literally.141

However, The Apocalypse Today does not contain the whole story of Torrance’s engagement with Revelation. Most of the sermons in it originate in 1946, though several originate in 1942.142 Some sermons underwent significant changes by the time they were published; some early sermons never made it into book form.

His first three sermons are not in The Apocalypse Today. This is not surprising, since they are not in line with the historical nature of its eschatology. In the first chapter Torrance defines Apocalypse this way. “[It] is the unveiling of history already invaded and conquered by the Lamb of God. Apocalypse means the tearing aside of the veil of sense and time to reveal the decisive conquest of organic evil by the incarnate Son of God.”143

Those first three sermons, by contrast, reflect Torrance’s early eschatology at Alyth; one that is personal, ahistorical, and rather existentialist. The first one was delivered in 1940 and is about the “Lion and the Lamb” in chapter 5:5ff. “What’s the meaning of this vision?” he asks. He finds three meanings in it. One, it refers to the “liberation of life . . . the sense of the absolute release.”144 Looking deeper, he understands it as an escape from “the bonds of some narrow obsession that blots out all sunshine.”145 Second, there is “salvation in the vision,” salvation for the “hopes you cherished [that were] broken . . . desires of the spirit [that were] broken.”146 Finally, it means “God’s judgement of sin.”147