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