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