Resurrection, Apocalypse, and the Kingdom of Christ. Stanley S. MacLean
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“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.