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