The Trinitarian of Thomas F. Torrance

Kate Helen Dugdale

Submitted to fulfil the requirements for a at the University of Otago, November 2016.

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ABSTRACT

This thesis argues that rather than focusing on the as an institution, social grouping, or volunteer society, the study of ecclesiology must begin with a robust investigation of the doctrine of the Holy . Utilising the work of Thomas F. Torrance, it proposes that the Church is to be understood as an empirical community in space and time that is primarily shaped by the perichoretic communion of Father, Son and , revealed by the economic work of the Son and the Spirit. The Church’s historical existence is thus subordinate to the Church’s relation to the Triune , which is why the doctrine of the Trinity is assigned a regulative influence in Torrance’s work. This does not exclude the essential nature of other doctrines, but gives pre-eminence to the doctrine of the Trinity as the foundational article for ecclesiology.

The methodology of this thesis is one of constructive analysis, involving a critical and constructive appreciation of Torrance’s work, and then exploring how further dialogue with Torrance’s work can be fruitfully undertaken. Part A (Chapters 1-5) focuses on the theological architectonics of Torrance’s ecclesiology, emphasising that the doctrine of the Trinity has precedence over ecclesiology. While the doctrine of the Church is the immediate object of our consideration, we cannot begin by considering the Church as a spatiotemporal institution, but rather must look ‘through the Church’ to find its dimension of depth, which is the Holy Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are a full and replete communion of Triune love, and the free outpouring of this love upon humanity, alongside the corresponding invitation to humanity to participate in the Triune fellowship, are key to understanding the transcendent foundation of the Church. The central motif which we will engage with is the idea of koinōnia, exploring the correlation between the divine koinōnia, and human koinōnia.

Part B (Chapters 6–10) lays out the implications of this key theological relationship for the order, structure, ministry and mission of the Church in the time between ’s two advents. This is because seeking to understand the external forms of the Church’s life without first considering it in its full theological relation to the doctrine of God results in a truncated ecclesiology. By taking this approach, the thesis shows how each

3 of these elements points forward to the consummation of God’s intentions for humanity, which is humankind’s full participation in the fellowship of the Trinity. The thesis concludes by comparing Torrance’s ecclesiology with representative samples of work from John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, Jürgen Moltmann and John Zizioulas, in order to situate Torrance as a conversation partner within wider theological dialogue.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a community (and lots of coffee—thanks to all the Nelson cafés who let me use your Wi-fi for hours!) to write a doctoral thesis. Profound thanks go to my primary doctoral supervisor, Revd Dr Christopher Holmes, for his feedback and encouragement throughout this process, particularly in moments of self-doubt, and also to my secondary supervisor, Professor Murray Rae for his involvement in the sometimes arduous process of thesis writing. In addition to my formal supervisors, the entire faculty of Bishopdale Theological College deserves applause for answering my questions, and allowing me to have the sunniest office.

A number of scholars made my research task much more enjoyable through assisting with their expertise and in conversation. In particular, I am grateful to Gary Deddo, David Fergusson, Myk Habets, , Chris Kettler, Bruce McCormack, Paul Molnar, Alan Torrance, Andrew Torrance, Robert Walker and John Webster for making the time to meet with a visiting antipodean PhD student. I also appreciated the assistance of Kenneth Henke in accessing archival material at the Princeton Theological Seminary Library, and for permission to utilise some of this material. Support in proofreading was undertaken by a number of people, to whom I am very grateful, especially Nick Gastrell who was the first to read the whole thesis.

This project was undertaken with a generous doctoral scholarship from the University of Otago, and a scholarship from Princeton Theological Seminary as part of the Doctoral Research Scholars Programme, which enabled me to spend a semester working with T. F. Torrance’s unpublished material. Travel assistance was received from Te Kotahitanga, which assisted with the costs of a semester in Princeton, NJ, and a study trip to and St Andrews, , and the Monastery of Bose, Italy.

Mum, Dad, Lisa and Abbey, as well as extended family and friends  thanks for supporting from afar. My highest appreciation, however, is to the household that encouraged me to start this process, and to be aware not only of what I was learning through the process, but of what God was doing in me. Andrew, Rebecca, Miranda, Ruby, George, Henry and Victor (as well as all those who have come and gone); thanks for being whanau and fellow-disciples in the fullest sense possible.

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CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 9

1.1 ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ...... 10

1.2 METHODOLOGY ...... 12

1.3 OVERVIEW OF CONTENT ...... 12

1.4 LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 16

1.5 STYLISTIC NOTES ...... 22

2 INTRODUCING T. F. TORRANCE AND HIS APPROACH TO ...... 25

2.0 CHAPTER ABSTRACT...... 25

2.1 A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF T. F. TORRANCE ...... 25

2.2 HOW TO READ T. F. TORRANCE: A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO THEOLOGY ...... 36

2.3 THE ECCLESIOLOGICAL TASK: WHY A TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY ...... 52

2.4 CHAPTER CONCLUSION ...... 55

3 THE TRINITY: A THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATION ...... 57

3.0 CHAPTER ABSTRACT...... 57

3.1 KEY INFLUENCES IN RELATION TO T. F. TORRANCE’S DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY ...... 57

3.2 THE REVEALING OF THE DOCTRINE OF GOD ...... 70

3.3 A COMMUNION OF FULLNESS—ONE BEING, THREE PERSONS ...... 80

3.4 A STRATIFIED STRUCTURE OF REALITY ...... 87

3.5 UNION AND COMMUNION WITH THE TRIUNE GOD ...... 95

3.6 CHAPTER CONCLUSION ...... 99

4 A DIACHRONIC ECCLESIOLOGY ...... 101

4.0 CHAPTER ABSTRACT...... 101

4.1 ONE CHURCH, THREE STAGES ...... 101

4.2 THE ANTICIPATORY EXISTENCE OF ISRAEL AS THE CHURCH IN THE ...... 107

4.3 THE CHURCH IN THE TIME BETWEEN ...... 116

4.4 THE CHURCH AS THE NEW CREATION ...... 125

4.5 CHAPTER CONCLUSION ...... 134

5 THE CHURCH OF THE TRIUNE GOD ...... 137

5.0 CHAPTER ABSTRACT...... 137

5.1 CHAPTER INTRODUCTION ...... 137

5.2 INTRODUCING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TRINITY AND THE CHURCH ...... 139

5.3 THE TRIUNE CHURCH ...... 146

5.4 THE MOTIF OF KOINŌNIA ...... 149

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5.5 THE PERSONS OF THE TRINITY AND ECCLESIOLOGY ...... 156

5.6 THE CHURCH AS A ‘COMMUNITY OF RECIPROCITY’ AND THE ‘SOCIAL CO-EFFICIENT OF THEOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE’ ... 178

5.7 CHAPTER CONCLUSION ...... 183

6 CHURCH ORDER IN THE TIME BETWEEN ...... 185

6.0 CHAPTER ABSTRACT ...... 185

6.1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE AND THE FORMALISATION OF CHURCH STRUCTURES ...... 185

6.2 ORDER IN THE TIME BETWEEN ...... 205

6.3 THE MINISTRY OF CHRIST, AND THE MINISTRY OF THE CHURCH ...... 210

6.4 THE CHURCH ‘IN VIA’ ...... 213

6.5 OUR RESPONSE TO GOD IN CHRIST ...... 221

6.6 CHAPTER CONCLUSION ...... 223

7 THE NOTES AND MARKS OF THE CHURCH ...... 225

7.0 CHAPTER ABSTRACT ...... 225

7.1 THE NOTES OF THE CHURCH ...... 225

7.2 THE WORD ...... 235

7.3 THE ...... 241

7.4 THE DOCTRINE OF THE MINISTRY ...... 264

7.5 CHAPTER CONCLUSION ...... 272

8 RECONCILIATION, AND MISSIONS ...... 273

8.0 CHAPTER ABSTRACT ...... 273

8.1 TORRANCE’S INVOLVEMENT IN THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT ...... 273

8.2 TORRANCE’S INVOLVEMENT IN THE ...... 289

8.3 TORRANCE’S INVOLVEMENT IN THE ORTHODOX–REFORMED DIALOGUE ...... 298

8.4 CHAPTER CONCLUSION ...... 307

9 COMPARISONS AND CONCLUSIONS...... 309

9.0 CHAPTER ABSTRACT ...... 309

9.1 JOHN WEBSTER ...... 309

9.2 KATHRYN TANNER ...... 320

9.3 JÜRGEN MOLTMANN ...... 335

9.4 JOHN ZIZIOULAS ...... 353

10 CONCLUSION ...... 369

10.1 SUMMARISING THE PROJECT ...... 369

10.2 THE WAY FORWARD ...... 377

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 388

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1 INTRODUCTION

The study of ecclesiology involves a wide range of questions. How is the Church to understand itself? Is it merely the natural result of people with a common belief system gathering together, or does it have a deeper, more transcendent, foundation? What is the purpose of gathering together? How should the Church conceive of itself in relation to the world? Who belongs to the Church? What should the life of the Church look like? These are all important questions, for as McGrath notes, “Ecclesiological questions break into ministry at point after point. What sort of body is the church? How does this understanding of what the church is affect what the church is meant to do?”1

The answer to the question ‘What is the Church?’ will depend upon the prior assumptions that one has made about how that question should be answered. This thesis will argue that rather than focusing on the Church as an institution or social grouping, we must begin the study of ecclesiology with the doctrine of God—an ecclesiology from above, instead of from below. When the Church focuses on itself as an institution, its attention is naturally more drawn to institutional aspects, such as form, organisation, and ‘how things are done.’ This approach of questioning the nature of the Church without considering it in its full theological relation to the doctrine of God results in a truncated ecclesiology.

Utilising the work of Thomas F. Torrance, this thesis will argue that the Church must be understood as an empirical community in space and time that is ultimately shaped by the Triune God, who is a perichoretic communion of the three divine persons. The Church will be shown to be far more than a mere human institution, for it is a divine work that gathers humanity into union and communion with the Trinity. Even though the Church has an empirical existence, its historical actuality is subordinate to its relation to the divine being of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

1 Alister E. McGrath, : An Introduction, 5th ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 375. It is noteworthy that McGrath refers to Torrance in relation to science and , and Torrance’s views on atonement, but he is not mentioned at all in McGrath’s section on the Church. This is not unusual, as Torrance does not tend to be a leading source in contemporary ecclesiology.

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1.1 Ecclesiology in the Twentieth Century There were a number of factors in the twentieth century that combined to make ecclesiology a key topic of theological dialogue. This theological renewal was pragmatically oriented, occasioned by a growing awareness of the Church’s calling to participate in God’s mission in ways appropriate to its context, but faithful to divine revelation. Diverse approaches to ecclesiology resulted, along with different ways of their categorisation.

It lies beyond the scope of this thesis to offer a full overview of twentieth century ecclesiology, and so instead we may briefly sketch some of the variant streams that emerged. Alister McGrath provides a helpful overview when he identifies the three different ways that the twentieth century Church interpreted the Ignatian aphorism, “Where Christ is, there also is the .” These streams gave primacy to either the sacramental presence of Christ, the presence of Christ through the Word, or the presence of Christ through the Spirit. McGrath also highlights three other categories of twentieth century ecclesiology, the Church as communion, the Church as the people of God, and the Church as a charismatic community.2

In a similar vein, Cheryl Peterson identifies the three ecclesiological paradigms of the twentieth century as word-event, communion, and missio dei. Her premise is that the Church should not begin by asking ‘What shall the Church do?’ but rather ‘Who is the Church?’ Peterson argues that before the Church can properly face the challenges of ecclesial life in the twenty first century, especially declining numbers in mainline denominations, it must first come to terms with its theological identity crisis, which it can do by returning to the narrative theology of the Book of Acts.3 This issue of theological identity is also approached in terms of the Church’s external relations by Bryan Stone, who suggests that in the twentieth century, the Church found itself “needing to radically re-negotiate its relationship to nations, culture, and empires in an increasingly post-Christendom world.”4 On one hand, there was a significant rise in

2 Ibid., 385–90. 3 Cheryl M. Peterson, Who Is the Church? Ecclesiology for the 21st Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 4. 4 Bryan P. Stone, A Reader in Ecclesiology (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 145.

10 missionary and ecumenical concerns, while on the other, globalisation forced the Church to re-evaluate both its internal and external relationships.5

These different pressures all forced the Church to confront its state of division, and then to engage in significant theological reflection. This is demonstrated by McGrath’s identification of the ecumenical movement, and Vatican II, as the two major ecclesiological forces of the twentieth century.6 The above examples, while far from exhaustive, represent significant diversity in theological and ecclesiological dialogue. However, the centrality of the doctrine of the Trinity for ecclesiology in the twentieth century is well documented; Ralph Del Colle notes, “the explicit thematization of the church in a trinitarian register would await the significant ecumenical developments of the twentieth century, a century that has resulted in a near consensus that the nature of church life and order is a matter of communio or koinonia.”7

The theology of Thomas F. Torrance is proclaimed in this ‘trinitarian register’, which was one of the other major developments of twentieth century theology. The extremes of this are noted by Grenz and Olson, who suggest that theology in the twentieth century can be viewed as a see-saw between God’s and God’s immanence, but that when we find the correct balance, we realise that “the God who addresses us from beyond—from the then-and-there—is the God who is with us in the present—in the here-and-now.”8 The re-centralisation of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the call for a more theological approach to ecclesiology, are the background to the material presented in this thesis. Although we will see that Torrance’s trinitarian approach to ecclesiology is not unique, an in-depth exploration of his work still has much to offer. This thesis will consequently fill an important lacuna in Torrancian studies, and furthermore, will show how Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology can be profitably engaged with both in the Church and the theological academy.

5 Ibid., 145–46. 6 McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 385. It can be argued that Vatican II is really part of the ecumenical movement, however it was only after Vatican II that the Roman Catholic Church found that many of the barriers that had inhibited its participation in ecumenical dialogue had been removed. 7 Ralph Del Colle, “The Church,” in The Oxford Handbook of , eds. Kathryn Tanner, John Webster, Iain Torrance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 253. 8 Stanley J. Grenz and Roger E. Olson, 20th-Century Theology: God & the World in a Transitional Age (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 315.

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1.2 Methodology The challenge of studying Thomas F. Torrance is well noted, given that he did not publish a systematic theology. Colyer suggests that this lack of systemisation of Torrance’s theology, alongside the density of his writing, means that to grasp Torrance’s integrative thought, or ‘architectonic structure’, one needs to work their way through the majority of his published corpus.9 This is a formidable task, but as the author discovered, a task which one cannot go over, under or around, but must go through. Familiarity with Torrance’s wider corpus allows the reader to grasp the interconnections between the various aspects of his work, and to draw conclusions that are faithful to Torrance’s intentions.

The methodology of this thesis will be one of constructive analysis, involving a critical and constructive appreciation of Torrance’s work, and then exploring how further dialogue with Torrance’s work can be fruitfully undertaken. Shaped by Torrance’s conviction that the direction of ecclesiological inquiry must proceed from above rather than below, this thesis will advance an understanding that the doctrine of the Church is not primarily derived from observable historical phenomena, but has the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as its ultimate reference. It is notable that no one has explored the constitutive relationship between these two foci of Torrance’s work, particularly given how explicit he is when he writes,

The doctrine of the Trinity belongs to the very heart of saving faith where it constitutes the inner shape of and the dynamic grammar of Christian theology: it expresses the essential and distinctively Christian understanding of God by which we live, and which is of crucial significance for the evangelical mission of the Church as well.10

1.3 Overview of Content This thesis will involve two sections. It will begin by developing the theological relationship between the Trinity and the Church, and then exploring the implications of this for the empirical life of the Church. Part A (Chapters 1–4) will focus on the

9 Elmer M. Colyer, How to Read T. F. Torrance: Understanding His Trinitarian & Scientific Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 16. 10 Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd, 1996), 10.

12 theological foundations of Torrance’s ecclesiology, emphasising that the doctrine of the Trinity has precedence over ecclesiology—or if described from the other direction, ecclesiology requires a ‘backwards reference’ to the Trinity. While the doctrine of the Church is the immediate object of our consideration, we cannot begin by considering the Church in itself as a spatiotemporal institution, but rather must look ‘through the Church’ to find its dimension of depth, which is found in the Holy Trinity.11 Part B (Chapters 5–8) will explore the implications of this approach to ecclesiology for Torrance’s understanding of Church order, the ministry of the Word and sacraments in the Church, and how this all shapes the Church’s understanding of missions and ecumenism in the time between Christ’s two advents. The thesis will conclude by comparing Torrance’s approach with the work of four other theologians, John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, Jürgen Moltmann, and John Zizioulas in order to situate our findings within a wider theological dialogue.

Part A: The second chapter will familiarise the reader with Torrance’s theology. A biographical introduction will concentrate on describing the influences that shaped his own commitment to Christ, and his personal sense of theological ministry as a missionary calling. This chapter will provide some helpful pointers on how to read Torrance’s work, with a particular focus on his scientific approach to the theological task. will be given for why the decision was made to focus on a trinitarian ecclesiology, as opposed to a solely Christological ecclesiology.

The third chapter will explore the contours of Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity. It will begin by examining the key influences which he draws from to develop his trinitarian theology, and will then consider the actual content of his doctrine of God, focusing first on how God has revealed himself in space and time, and then how this reveals the eternal being of God. Theological terms such as , hypostasis and will

11 Thomas F. Torrance, Preaching Christ Today: The and Scientific Thinking (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 57. By this phrase, Torrance means holding different elements together so that we see them in their full depth—in three dimensions, rather than two dimensions, as it were. In Preaching Christ Today, Torrance argues that Christ, the Trinity, and divine revelation need to be held together in order to grasp the “dimension of depth” of the truth to which they point—in failing to do so, modern theology suffers from a “persisting hangover of dualism.” This perspective of needing to hold the doctrine of the Trinity, and of the Church together in order to see the Church in its ‘dimension of depth’ is our undertaking throughout this project.

13 be defined, before honing in on the sense of God’s being as ‘being for others’, which is key to a trinitarian ecclesiology.

The fourth chapter will explore Torrance’s diachronic ecclesiology. He suggests that while there is only one Church, it has three different phases of existence: pre- incarnation as the people of Israel, the change that commenced with the saving events of Jesus’ life and the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost, and the coming new creation that will be revealed at Christ’s second advent.12 Each of these phases will be focused upon in turn, with particular attention given to the role that the doctrine of the ascension plays in Torrance’s ecclesiology. He insists that there is only one parousia which applies to both the first and second advents of Christ, between which there is an “eschatological pause,” the space in which the Church exists.13

The fifth chapter will integrate our separate discussions of the Trinity, and of ecclesiology, and forms the theological heart of the thesis. It explores the influence of Nicene trinitarian theology in Torrance’s work, and explicates the various ways in which he uses the motif of koinōnia to describe the relationship between the Triune God and the Church.14 This chapter will also unfold the distinctions between the persons of the Trinity in relation to ecclesiology—the love of the Father, the grace of Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Holy Spirit—and use this as the basis for describing the Church as a community that is created and sustained by God, correlative to the communion that God enjoys in the fullness of his Triune being.

Part B: The sixth chapter will discuss the temporal and anticipatory nature of order in the Church. It will explore the way in which Church order functions as a ‘scaffolding’ for the true existence of the Church in the time between, by means of a comparison with different historical perceptions of order. This will enable consideration of the distinctive difference between the ministry of Christ, and the ministry of the Church between the two advents of Christ, drawing from Torrance’s comment that Jesus

12 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 192. 13 Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 302–3. 14 For consistency, original transliteration has been left within quotes, but where the transliteration has been provided, we will follow the standard transliteration of koinōnia rather than koinonia.

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“sends [the Church] on an historical mission and determines for it an historical development, since it must live and work in the ongoing sequences and this-worldly forms of life as they develop among the nations and peoples and kingdoms of historical existence.”15

The seventh chapter will begin by commenting upon the Nicene attributes of the Church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic, before turning to consider what Torrance describes as the ‘marks’ of the Church—the Word, the sacraments, and the priesthood. The focus will be on how Torrance views the Church as the community of the Triune God in space and time, limited by the restrictions of this current age, but empowered by the Spirit as a foreshadowing of the eschaton. It will show how these elements of the Church’s life are gifted to it to enable its participation in the koinōnia of the Holy Trinity.

The eighth chapter will explore Torrance’s work calling for the renewal of the life of the Church, and his efforts towards theological ecumenism, again centred around the doctrine of the Trinity. Alongside his ministry in the Church of Scotland, this chapter will investigate different ecumenical dialogues to which Torrance contributed, particularly the Orthodox–Reformed dialogue on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. These different facets of his career will enable us to examine the missional impulse of his theology which is present in both his academic writings, but is filled out by some of his more informal publications and . This practical engagement will further exhibit the way in which Torrance derives his ecclesiology from the Trinity, and the ecumenical and missional implications of this derivation.

The ninth chapter will offer a brief comparison of Torrance’s work with the ecclesiology of John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, Jürgen Moltmann, and John Zizioulas. The first pairing, Webster and Tanner, are both English-speaking theologians who have engaged significantly with Barth’s work in the late twentieth, and early twenty- first century. They are sympathetic to, but not uncritical of ’s legacy; their work demonstrates the divergent strands of the way that Barth’s interpreters developed their own theology. The second pairing, Moltmann and Zizioulas, offer significantly more divergence from Torrance’s theological position than we find in

15 Torrance, Atonement, 295.

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Webster and Tanner. While both of these theologians also show the strong connection between the doctrine of the Trinity, and the doctrine of the Church, they tend towards social trinitarianism. Moltmann blurs the distinction between God and the world by suggesting that God needs the world, while Zizioulas and Torrance disagree on how to interpret the , which affects their understanding of the Triune being. Interaction with both sets of dialogue partners will continue to help us to situate Torrance’s work within the wider theological conversation.

Finally, the thesis will conclude in the tenth chapter with an overview of the arguments that have been advanced, summarising the contribution that Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology makes to both church and academy, and suggesting avenues for further fruitful engagement.

1.4 Literature Review In the course of any close engagement with Torrance’s work, regardless of what lens one uses to interpret his work or what question one asks, almost every major doctrine will need to be at least mentioned in passing, given the complexity of how interwoven doctrines are. Consequently, mentions of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the doctrine of the Church, are frequent in the secondary literature. Despite the recurrent appearance of these doctrines, especially in the secondary works which have focused on the trinitarian nature of Torrance’s theological oeuvre, or on elements of his ecclesiology, there has not yet been a comprehensive, full-length engagement with the relationship between Trinity and ecclesiology in Torrance’s thought. This is the contribution which will be made by this theological project; our literature review will thus be concerned with sketching the broad categories of the secondary works, and examining those that are the most relevant to this project. Works that are cited here without being cited as a source elsewhere will not appear in the final bibliography.

The first category is that of works which overview Torrance’s life and work. This includes biographies, and works which summarise his thought and become a work of systematic theology themselves. The initial works in this category are by Alister

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McGrath,16 Elmer Colyer,17 and Paul Molnar.18 McGrath’s work provides an historical overview of Torrance’s life and work, predominantly focusing upon the scientific side of Torrance’s theological work. While Colyer focuses on both the trinitarian and scientific frameworks that shape Torrance’s theology, it is Molnar who offers the most substantial systematic consideration of how, for Torrance the Trinity “is the central doctrine around which all other Christian doctrines gravitate and become comprehensible.”19 McGrath makes little mention of ecclesiology, while Colyer and Molnar both dedicate a chapter specifically to the doctrine of the Church in Torrance’s work.20 Of these three works, Molnar’s is the most useful in his substantial consideration of Torrance’s trinitarian theology. More recent works that also belong in this category are Elmer Colyer’s The Nature of Doctrine in T. F. Torrance’s Theology,21 and Myk Habets’ Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance,22 which both make a fruitful contribution to this panoramic type of approach to T. F. Torrance’s theology.

When we come to consider works that deal with specific areas of Torrance’s theology, we must recognise that his theological output can largely be divided into two streams; his dogmatic work, and his work on the relationship between theology and science. Although there is inevitably some overlap between the two, secondary works that explore elements of Torrance’s theology tend to focus on either his scientific- epistemological work, or his dogmatic work, and can be loosely categorised accordingly.

The second category of material to be examined is therefore Torrance’s work in the area of theology and its relationship to scientific method, the natural sciences, and questions of scientific philosophy and epistemology. Works in this category include

16 Alister E. McGrath, T. F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999). 17 Colyer, How to Read T. F. Torrance. 18 Paul D. Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 19 Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance, 31. 20 Ibid., 265–323; Colyer, How to Read T. F. Torrance, 242–82. 21 Elmer M. Colyer, The Nature of Doctrine in T. F. Torrance's Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001). 22 Myk Habets, Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013).

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David Munchin’s Is Theology a Science?: The nature of the scientific enterprise in the scientific theology of Thomas Forsyth Torrance and the anarchic epistemology of Paul Feyerabend,23 Jason Hing-Kau Yeung’s Being and Knowing: An examination of T. F. Torrance’s Christological science,24 Tapio Luoma’s Incarnation and Physics: Natural Science in the Theology of Thomas F. Torrance,25 Roland Spjuth’s Creation, contingency and in the of Thomas F. Torrance and Eberhard Jüngel,26 and Colin Weightman’s Theology in a Polanyian Universe: The Theology of Thomas Torrance.27 Although Torrance’s scientific material is not our primary concern and will only be briefly mentioned in this thesis, we will pay particular attention in the second chapter to the way in which Torrance’s development of a scientific approach to theology is shaped by, and in return shapes, his doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

The third category of material is Torrance’s work in the area of dogmatic theology, including the topics of the Trinity, , soteriology, , and divine revelation, among others. This category includes works such as Kevin Chiarot’s The Unassumed is the Unhealed: The Humanity of Christ in the Christology of T. F. Torrance,28 Titus Chung’s Thomas Torrance’s Mediations and Revelation,29 Dick Eugenio’s Communion with the Triune God: the Trinitarian Soteriology of T. F. Torrance,30 Eric G. Flett’s Persons, Powers and Pluralities: Toward a Trinitarian ,31 Myk

23 David Munchin, Is Theology a Science?: The nature of the scientific enterprise in the scientific theology of Thomas Forsyth Torrance and the anarchic epistemology of Paul Feyerabend (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 24 Jason Hing-Kau Yeung, Being and Knowing: An Examination of T. F. Torrance's Christological Science (Hong Kong: Alliance Seminary, 1996). 25 Tapio Luoma, Incarnation and Physics: Natural Science in the Theology of Thomas F. Torrance (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 26 Roland Spjuth, Creation, Contingency and Divine Presence in the Theologies of Thomas F. Torrance and Eberhard Jüngel (Lund: Lund University, 1995). 27 Colin Weightman, Theology in a Polanyian Universe: The Theology of Thomas Torrance (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). 28 Kevin Chiarot, The Unassumed is the Unhealed: The Humanity of Christ in the Christology of Thomas F. Torrance (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013) 29 Titus Chung, Thomas Torrance’s Mediations and Revelation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 30 Dick O. Eugenio, Communion with the Triune God: The Trinitarian Soteriology of T. F. Torrance (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014). 31 Eric G. Flett, Persons, Powers, and Pluralities: Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Culture (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2012). Flett utilises the model of the Trinity, and Torrance’s exploration of the God– world–humanity triadic relation, to develop a trinitarian theology of culture.

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Habets’ Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance,32 Man Kei Ho’s A Critical Study on T. F. Torrance’s Theology of Incarnation,33 Stanley Maclean’s Resurrection, Apocalypse and the Kingdom of Christ: The Eschatology of Thomas F. Torrance,34 John Douglas Morrison’s Knowledge of the Self-Revealing God in the Thought of Thomas F. Torrance,35 Robert J. Stamps’ The of the Word Made Flesh: The of Thomas F. Torrance,36 Andrew Purves’ Exploring Christology and Atonement: Conversations with John McLeod Campbell, H.R. Mackintosh, and T. F. Torrance,37 and Kye Won Lee’s Living in Union with Christ: The of Thomas F. Torrance.38 There is also a pending publication by Geordie Ziegler, Trinitarian Grace and Participation, An Entry into the Theological Thought of Thomas F. Torrance, which contains a chapter considering Torrance’s ecclesiology in relation to his doctrine of grace.39

The spread of topics here is wide, and shows the richness of Torrance’s material; in order to focus our review, we will focus on four works that contain material complementary to our consideration of Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology.

32 Myk Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009). 33 Man Kei Ho, A Critical Study on T. F. Torrance's Theology of Incarnation (Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008). 34 Stanley S. MacLean, Resurrection, Apocalypse, and the Kingdom of Christ, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012). 35 John Douglas Morrison, Knowledge of the Self-Revealing God in the thought of Thomas Forsyth Torrance (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). 36 Robert J. Stamps, The Sacrament of the Word Made Flesh: The Eucharistic Theology of Thomas F. Torrance, Rutherford Studies in Contemporary Theology (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2007). While there is a significant amount of ecclesiology contained in this work, the primary exploration is to do with the sacraments. 37 Andrew Purves, Exploring Christology and Atonement: Conversations with John McLeod Campbell, H.R. Mackintosh, and T. F. Torrance (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015). 38 Kye Won Lee, Living in Union with Christ: The Practical Theology of Thomas F. Torrance (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). In addition to these works that specifically focus on Torrance’s doctrine, there is an increasing range of comparative works as well, such as Paul Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), in which Molnar compares the work of Torrance and Barth with other contemporary theologians on the economic Trinity. 39 Geordie Ziegler, Trinitarian Grace and Participation, An Entry into the Theological Thought of Thomas F. Torrance (Fortress Press, Forthcoming in 2017). Ziegler furnished me with a copy of his chapter on ecclesiology, in which he discusses Torrance’s ecclesiology in relation to Torrance’s theology of grace. He attends to Torrance’s preference for the language of the body of Christ, the nature of order in the Church as constituted by its ontological relation to Christ, the Church as ‘place’, and the relationship between the ministry of the Church and the ministry of Christ. He concludes by focusing on the Word and sacrament in their relation to a doctrine of grace.

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Kye Won Lee’s work Living in Union With Christ: The Practical Theology of Thomas F. Torrance is a systematic analysis in which Won Lee argues that ‘union with Christ’ is the predominant unifying theme of Torrance’s work. He focuses on how the entire scope of Torrance’s theology can be defined according to the Christological pattern, paying attention to ecclesiology and sacramentology.40 Won Lee explores Torrance’s thought under the three categories of epistemological union, ontological union, and sacramental or eschatological union. The third category is comprised of three chapters on ‘Union with Christ’, ‘The Relation between the Church and Christ’ and ‘The Church as the Sphere of Union with Christ’, in which Won Lee discusses many of the same aspects of Torrance’s ecclesiology that are dealt with in this project. However, Won Lee approaches ecclesiology through the primary framework of union with Christ, rather than the doctrine of the Trinity, which results in material which is harmonious with, but different in structure to, the approach that we will take in this project. This thesis demonstrates that Torrance draws upon both Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity to develop his ecclesiology, but argues for the pre-eminence of the doctrine of the Trinity when considering the order of doctrines.

Alongside Won Lee, we must also consider Myk Habets’ work Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance, in which he contends that the Patristic concept of theosis is determinative for Torrance’s theology—even more so than the theme of union with Christ.41 Habets argues that the doctrine of theosis illuminates Torrance’s incarnational theory of the atonement, enabling him to simultaneously embrace his own Reformed tradition, while building bridges to both Eastern and Western theology.42 Of particular interest is Habets’ chapter on Torrance’s “pneumatological-ecclesiology,” in which he argues that it is primarily through , although it must be undergirded by Christology and the Trinity, that the Church is formed, as the individual believer participates in Christ. Habets’ material includes reflections on the nature of koinōnia,

40 Lee, Living in Union with Christ: The Practical Theology of Thomas F. Torrance, 8. One of the major strengths of Won Lee’s work is that he created a computerised database of topics within Torrance’s work, with the result that this thesis is a very comprehensive engagement with Torrance’s work, with footnotes that have extensive cross-referencing of Torrance’s published materials. 41 Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance, 1. 42 Ibid., 168, 97.

20 and the sacraments, but is once again a much briefer overview than this thesis will offer.

Another work that needs to be included in our discussion is Stanley Maclean’s work, Resurrection, Apocalypse and the Kingdom of Christ: The Eschatology of Thomas F. Torrance. Maclean outlines the “eschatological orientation” of Torrance’s early theology, with reference to his sermons at Alyth and Beechgrove, and his involvement in the World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission between 1948 and 1963.43 Maclean highlights that Torrance’s emphasis on the centrality of eschatology for ecclesiology is unique for his day, focusing on his argument that an eschatological orientation prevents the Church from conforming to the ‘old and crumbling’ age, because through union with Christ it participates in the new age.44 Maclean’s work offers some helpful insights in regard to Torrance’s ecclesiology as it exists ‘in between the times’; however his exclusive focus on Torrance’s early work results in a noteworthy lack of engagement with Torrance’s trinitarian theology—no mention is made at all of The Trinitarian Faith or The Christian Doctrine of God. Maclean therefore argues that Torrance’s eschatology is “christologically over-determined”—which results in such a literal understanding of the Church as the body of Christ that he neglects the Holy Spirit.45 This results in a thesis that is excellent in what it accomplishes, but which falls short of developing a full account of Torrance’s ecclesiology given the centrality of the doctrine of the Trinity to the theological task.

The final work that should be mentioned here is that of Dick Eugenio, Communion with the Triune God: The Trinitarian Soteriology of T. F. Torrance. Eugenio makes excellent use of Torrance’s unpublished sermons in this work, to connect Torrance’s soteriological doctrine of the Trinity, and his trinitarian soteriology,46 arguing that the telos of salvation is humanity’s participation in the Triune Life. Eugenio devotes a chapter to the distinct-but-perichoretic agency of each of the Triune persons, which are then integrated in a final chapter where he considers the relations of God in se, and

43 MacLean, Resurrection, Apocalypse, and the Kingdom of Christ, 190. He argues it is better to speak of the “eschatological orientation” of Torrance’s theology rather than “Torrance’s eschatology”, because it is scattered throughout his works, and “diffused through his early corpus.” 44 Ibid., 192. 45 Ibid., 199. 46 Eugenio, Communion with the Triune God, xx.

21 how humanity shares in “the primordial community of love.”47 Eugenio’s work makes excellent use of Torrance’s unpublished sermons to develop the theme of Triune communion, and the Church’s “enabled perichoretic participation in the triune life, love and communion,”48 in a way that is similar to the theological foundations which we will unpack in the first half of this thesis. However, Eugenio does not engage in significant work to do with the structure or forms that comprise the temporal existence of the Church in-between the two advents of Christ.

It is worth commenting here that the amount of secondary literature on T. F. Torrance has burgeoned, even in the three years since this project commenced. Matters have almost reached the stage where one could begin significant comparative analysis of the secondary material in its own right, which lies beyond the scope of this thesis. This thesis focuses on presenting the author’s reading and understanding of Torrance, and cites secondary material as support or to acknowledge where there is a difference of opinion. It must be recognised that much of the content and analysis of Torrance’s theology that is incorporated in order to undergird the specific findings of this thesis will be familiar to readers of the Torrancian corpus, given how intertwined doctrines are throughout his work.

Finally, it is also worth noting that there is also a challenge in evaluating Torrance’s wider reception that results from the relative lack of engagement with Torrance’s ecclesiology in volumes that survey both trinitarian theology and ecclesiology throughout the twentieth century. It lies beyond the scope of this work to evaluate this fully, but it is hoped that this work will generate further productive conversations, and will show that T. F. Torrance’s work has great potential to ongoing ecclesiological dialogue, as particularly evidenced by bringing Torrance into dialogue with other theologians in Chapter 9.

1.5 Stylistic Notes Because the scope of Torrance’s work is so broad, readers will be aware that he often makes the same point in a number of sources; therefore, where direct quotes or

47 Ibid., 156. 48 Ibid., 204.

22 examples are provided throughout the thesis, the reader is encouraged to be aware that such citations will be representative of many instances of a particular argument.

Readers will also note that this thesis will use gender-inclusive language when referring to humanity, however when directly quoting Torrance, will keep his original gendered terms. Torrance notes that where he has used “man” or “men” to refer to all people, he “used it as in the Bible, without any intention of excluding or being derogatory of the feminine sex.”49 In the same way, masculine gendered pronouns will be used with reference to the Triune God, in keeping with Torrance’s own stylistic preference, while simultaneously acknowledging the importance of his insistence that, “Gender belongs only to the creaturely world and may not be read back into God.”50 When referring to the Church, feminine gendered pronouns have been used when directly citing Torrance, but otherwise neutral pronouns are utilised.

Where unpublished sources have been used from the T. F. Torrance Special Collection, occasionally typos appeared in typewritten material. These have been corrected for clarity. Most mistakes in the originals were simply typographical errors, but where there was any uncertainty, the editing has been noted. There is also inconsistency within Torrance’s published material over the capitalisation of theological terms; in general, they are not capitalised within this thesis except in direct quotes. One notable exception will be the capitalisation of the Church, to refer to the one Church which is grounded in the Holy Trinity, and the non-capitalisation of ‘churches’, for the theological reason that there is really only one Church. The same inconsistency exists in Torrance’s material in regard to his use of Greek and Hebrew characters, or their transliteration; to aid the reader, these have been transliterated into the script.

During the course of my research, I was very appreciative of the approach taken by Tapio Luoma, another Torrance scholar, who comments upon the difference between scholarly criticism that affirms ‘I know better!’ compared with criticism that concedes, ‘I wish I knew better!’51 It is in the spirit of the latter that this thesis is offered in the hope that it will be of service to the Church of the Triune God.

49 Thomas F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), iii. 50 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, xii. 51 Luoma, Incarnation and Physics: Natural Science in the Theology of Thomas F. Torrance, 13.

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2 INTRODUCING T. F. TORRANCE AND HIS APPROACH TO THEOLOGY

2.0 Chapter Abstract This chapter will provide the reader with an introduction to the person of Thomas Torrance, and will note key elements of his approach to the theological task as a whole. It begins with a biographical introduction to Torrance, which is not incidental but is intended to show how Torrance’s upbringing and education strongly shaped his sense of a theological career as a missionary calling. Some suggestions will be made about how to read Torrance’s work, particularly identifying the key characteristics of his scientific approach to the theological task. Finally, we will explore in more detail the decision made by the author to primarily focus on a trinitarian ecclesiology, as opposed to a solely Christological ecclesiology, by considering the relationship between Christology and the Trinity in Torrance’s work.

2.1 A Brief Biography of T. F. Torrance Recognised as one of the most significant English-language theologians of the twentieth century by his biographers,1 Thomas Forsyth Torrance was both pastor and professor, exemplified by Colyer’s description of him as “a scholar’s scholar, a true theological heavy-weight,”2 and yet “a humble and godly disciple of Jesus Christ, deeply committed to and the church, and deserving of the appellation evangelical.”3 Behind Torrance’s prodigious number of publications lies a deep commitment to the Triune God, and to God’s people. We can most clearly explicate this through a brief glance at the biographical information that is available, not only in published sources, but also from Torrance’s unpublished autobiographical material that is held at Princeton Theological Seminary.4

1 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, xi; Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance, 1; Colyer, How to Read T. F. Torrance, 15. 2 Colyer, How to Read T. F. Torrance, 11. 3 Ibid. 4 I was given the privilege of spending a semester accessing this material in Autumn 2014, thanks to a generous scholarship from Princeton Theological Seminary as part of their Doctoral Research Scholars 25

Family Influence Born and raised on the mission field in until he was fourteen, when the Torrance family was forced to return to Scotland in 1928 as a result of severe religious persecution, Thomas Torrance was exposed to the cost of proclaiming the Gospel early in life. After leaving China, Torrance remained with his siblings and his mother in Scotland so that the children could continue their education, while his father returned to China for a further seven years. Torrance considers his mother, “the predominant theological force in our home,” whose “imprint upon my spiritual and theological development was incisive, profound and indelible.”5 The formative influence of these early years is seen in Torrance’s autobiographical reflection that,

I was deeply conscious of the task to which my parents had been called by God to preach the Gospel to heathen people and win them for Christ. This orientation to mission was built into the fabric of my mind, and has never faded—by its essential nature Christian theology has always had for me an evangelistic thrust. My father was a Presbyterian and my mother an Anglican, which imparted to my thinking a deeply ingrained blend of conviction that has always remained.6 The way that these evangelical and ecumenical themes emerge in Torrance’s own work will become clearer throughout this thesis. Torrance also attributes his maintenance of a strong personal faith throughout his life to the influence of his parents, commenting that “My belief in God was very vivid and strong, and always has been, due, I know, to the way in which we were brought up by our parents, and the sense of that pervaded their lives and our home.”7 We see here the personal and experiential basis for Torrance’s stance that the Christian’s ultimate beliefs—their deep subconscious assumptions about reality—arise through the “deep interlocking of faith, worship and understanding,” which takes place initially as children are nurtured

Program. Use of the archival material is limited, so I have restricted my citations to places where the material adds additional support or a slightly different angle to the material which is found in Torrance’s published material. 5 Thomas F. Torrance, “Itinerarium Mentis in Deum” (Box 10: Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection: Princeton Theological Seminary), 3. 6 Ibid., 1. Partially cited in McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 9. Torrance repeats the latter sentiment on page 3 of the same autobiographical document, specifically acknowledging that his mother’s Anglican background shaped his own ecumenical outlook. Torrance also dedicated one of his earliest books to his parents, describing them as “My First and Best Teachers in Theology.” See the first-page dedication in Thomas F. Torrance, Calvin's Doctrine of Man (: Lutterworth Press, 1949). 7 Thomas F. Torrance, “My Boyhood in China, 1913–1927” (Box 10: My Boyhood in China,Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection: Princeton Theological Seminary), 10.

26 in a Christian home, and then as they grow up and begin to participate in the fellowship of the Church.8 Torrance’s Christian upbringing was key to the nourishment of his faith, for as he remarks, “Belief in God was so natural that I could no more doubt the than the existence of my parents or the world around me. I cannot remember ever having any doubts about God. Moreover, as long as I can recall my religious outlook was essentially biblical and evangelical, and indeed evangelistic.”9

Education Torrance completed a B.A. in classics at the , before commencing theological studies at New College—also part of the University of Edinburgh—with the intent of preparing for missionary service in Tibet.10 McGrath describes the Scottish universities as leaders in British theology at this time, with Edinburgh being “the jewel in Scotland’s theological crown,”11 training young men for ordained ministry in the Church of Scotland. New College focused not just on academic success, but on developing well-rounded ministers who understood the nature of their call to preach Christ, and the demands of that call. Torrance reflects on how this was driven home to him at the start of his time at New College,

One of the first things I had to do was to write a short essay on ‘My Call to the Ministry’ prescribed to us by the Principal, the Very Rev. Professor Alexander Martin, who was to retire the following year. Each of us had a searching interview with him in which he discussed with us what we had written. He made it clear to us that as the centre of divine Revelation Christ must be the centre of all our theological studies, and the centre of Christian life which, in the words of and , he spoke of as ‘union and communion’ with Christ.12 The theme of participating in the union and communion of the Triune God became a pre-eminent theme in Torrance’s work, as will be evident in our consideration of Torrance’s ecclesiology. Although Torrance did not end up as a foreign missionary

8 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Framework of Belief,” in Belief in Science and in Christian Life: The Relevance of Michael Polanyi's Thought for Christian Faith and Life, ed. Thomas F. Torrance (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998), 24. Ultimate beliefs are the ‘basic beliefs’ which we gain through intuitive experience, which cannot be demonstrated by anything other than themselves (9–11). 9 Torrance, “Itinerarium Mentis in Deum,” 1. 10 Thomas F. Torrance, “Student Years—Edinburgh to Basel, 1934–1938” (Box 10: Student Years— Edinburgh to Basel, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection: Princeton Theological Seminary), 1. 11 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 22. 12 Torrance, “Itinerarium Mentis in Deum,” 9.

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(although he did return to visit China later in his life), these years at Edinburgh laid solid ground for his pastoral and theological career. Among his professors, Hugh Ross Mackintosh warrants particular mention. Torrance often quotes Mackintosh’s statement that “a theology which failed to sustain and encourage a missionary or evangelistic attitude was not a theology worthy of the name,”13 in connection with his realisation that an academic career as a theologian could allow him to serve God in as full a way as if he had served in foreign missions. Mackintosh was unrelenting in his insistence that all theology had to be applicable, and taught his students to test doctrine by asking, “Will it preach?” in order to consider how it would be received on the mission field.14 Mackintosh died shortly before Torrance’s final year at New College began, and Torrance was greatly disappointed not to hear his expository lectures on Karl Barth.15 Torrance reflects at length on Mackintosh’s influence on him, and Macintosh’s prescient sense about what the future held for Torrance,

I made a point of reading all Mackintosh’s books and all those of Karl Barth that were then available, and found myself becoming more and more deeply involved in the tide of theological renewal. It had always been my intention to be a missionary, but as I sat at the feet of Mackintosh the calling to engage in a theological ministry in the service of the Gospel began to force itself upon me— little did I realise then what this would lead to. Years later after I had become Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Dr Douglas Johnston, who had long been the General Secretary of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Christian Unions, wrote to tell me of a conversation between Mackintosh and Robert Wilder at the missionary conference held at New College in 1936. When Wilder spoke to Professor Mackintosh of my devotion to overseas missions, Mackintosh replied that while he was glad I had ‘all this missionary enthusiasm’, he was sure that ‘I was destined to be a theological professor in this or a similar College, and one day be Moderator of the Church of Scotland’! When I read that I found it to be very humbling, but also very reassuring in view of the fact that I had not been disobedient to God’s call in staying at home instead of going overseas. However, even as a professor of theology I have always tried to be a missionary.16

13 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 29–31. 14 Torrance, “Itinerarium Mentis in Deum,” 25. See also Torrance’s reflection on Mackintosh’s ministry, Thomas F. Torrance, “Hugh Ross Mackintosh: Theologian of the Cross,” The Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 5, no. 2 (Autumn 1987): 160–73. 15 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 32–33. 16 Torrance, “Itinerarium Mentis in Deum,” 19–20.

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These personal reflections are not peripheral to this thesis, but instead highlight a very important aspect of Torrance’s perspective of his calling that we need to keep in mind throughout the course of this project. Torrance viewed his theological work as a distinct calling to serve the mission of the Church.17 This ‘missional perspective’ will become evident as we unfold Torrance’s insistence that the doctrine of the Trinity has great evangelical and soteriological relevance, and must not be reduced to a scholarly doctrine, and also develop his view of the mission of the Church in more detail.

Torrance had planned to work extensively with Barth’s theology, despite the opposition of figures like John and Donald Baillie, who were also professors at New College.18 It is unsurprising that upon completing his studies, Torrance commenced doctoral studies in Basel under Karl Barth. He was chosen to participate in Barth’s Sozietät, a select study group of 12–15 students, which enabled him to become very familiar with Barth’s thought; Torrance was particularly impressed with the way that Barth subjected various texts to intensive questioning in order to uncover the truth contained in them.19 Although letters from the time show that Torrance was critical of elements of Barth’s teaching, feeling that it lacked a missionary and evangelical emphasis, Torrance would later affirm that Barth’s work had a much stronger missionary note than he had originally recognised. He refers to hearing Barth preach a series in Basel Jail, in which he laid such an emphasis on the saving love of God that Torrance had to conclude “Barth was certainly very missionary minded.”20

After a year in Germany, Torrance spent a year teaching at Auburn Theological Seminary, after which he rejected an invitation to teach theology at Princeton

17 We can see the influence of Karl Barth clearly here, for as Torrance notes, one of the developments throughout Barth’s theological career is the progression from pursuing theological studies in separation from the life and mission of the Church, towards the insistence that theology and the Church require each other. The latter position is the one which Torrance came to hold. See Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 1910–1931 (London: SCM Press, 1962), 201–04. 18 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 36–39. The regard which Torrance held John Baillie in, despite their differing opinions on Karl Barth, is obvious from an article Torrance wrote in memoriam of John Baillie. See Thomas F. Torrance, “A Living Sacrifice: In Memoriam, John Baillie, 1886–1960,” Religion and Life 30 (1961): 329–33. 19 Torrance, “Student Years—Edinburgh to Basel, 1934–1938,” 12–13. 20 Ibid., 14.

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University and returned to Scotland in light of the impending war. Although he would subsequently spend almost a decade in parish and chaplain ministry before returning to New College, this initial year as a faculty member was invaluable for Torrance, for as he reflects,

I myself benefited theologically and spiritually from that year in Auburn, for in having to prepare courses on the whole body of systematic theology, I was forced to think out my own theological convictions very carefully, and find the best way of expressing biblical and theological truth to people living in the modern world. I also came to realise how difficult it is for people, who had not been brought up like myself, really to grasp the significance and face the challenge of the Gospel. I learned an immense amount about people that year. It was with that deepening understanding of the cost of faith and discipleship that I learned something of how to be a theological teacher.21 It appears that Torrance developed early in his career as a theologian the “philosophical and theological judgements and attitudes which would stay with him for the rest of his career,” working out his theological convictions, and not wavering from them.22 Even though Torrance did not publish his major trinitarian works until late in his career, there is an incipient form of his trinitarian theology, consistent with these later publications, demonstrated throughout his early publications. This inner consistency of Torrance’s work is what allows us to undertake a systematic exploration of his work, without needing to engage in extensive research in order to trace the development of his trinitarian thought, although we must acknowledge the helpful contribution that this kind of study can make, as exemplified by Stanley MacLean.23

Parish Ministry Upon his return to Scotland from the United States, Torrance wished to enlist as an army chaplain, but was unable to do so until he had been ordained in the Church of Scotland for two years. He entered pastoral ministry “in order to bring a serious and

21 Thomas F. Torrance, “Auburn” (Box 10: Auburn, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection: Princeton Theological Seminary), 6. These lectures are published as Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002). 22 John Webster, Thomas Forsyth Torrance, 1913–2007, vol. XIII, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy (The British Academy, 2014), 418. This perspective on the stability of Torrance’s theological position was reiterated in a conversation I had with John Webster in St Andrews, Scotland, on 15 October 2015. 23 As was noted in the literature review, MacLean, Resurrection, Apocalypse, and the Kingdom of Christ, deals excellently with the period of Torrance’s early work, but fails to present a comprehensive view of Torrance’s ecclesiology due to its lack of engagement with his later trinitarian publications.

30 solid dose of reality to his academic reflection.”24 Inducted into his first parish at Alyth in early 1940, on the day of his ordination Torrance wrote the words of Jesus to his disciples in his Bible, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it to you” (John 15:16). He would later reflect that these words had remained a “great source of strength” throughout his ministry.25

In addition to preaching twice every Sunday, Torrance’s ministerial responsibilities were demanding.26 He prioritised house to house visitation of every member of his parish in Alyth, and reckoned this to be the most fruitful aspect of his ministry.27 Later on when lecturing at Edinburgh, he would refer to these house visits as the time when the deep significance of the Gospel for people’s needs had become real to him. Torrance recalls that he “was never able to separate lecturing in my Christian Dogmatics class in New College from showing something of the personal and pastoral thrust and power of the truths of the gospel.”28

The early stages of Torrance’s parish ministry reveal a deep conviction that the Church must never become a staid, insular institution, but is always to be on the move, always reaching outwards to gather more people into the community, as befits those who have themselves been gathered into union with Jesus Christ. It was at Alyth that Torrance

24 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 60. 25 Thomas F. Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, ed. Jock Stein, Thomas F. Torrance Collected Studies, vol. 1 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 30. 26 Ibid., 46. Torrance would preach two full sermons each week, many of which are preserved in Special Collections at Princeton Theological Seminary. Some of these are written in full and typed, although others that are handwritten are markedly more difficult to decipher. Torrance followed Mackintosh’s advice to write them in full, but notes that his mother preferred it when he would sometimes preach the evening sermon from notes only! 27 In a reflection published decades later in 1977, Torrance noted that if he was to start parish ministry again as a young minister, he would engage in Christ-centred ministry, focusing on and worship in, through and with Christ, give himself “more than ever to study and contemplation and to avoid committees like the plague,” make pastoral visitation central, and to continue to seek understanding of scientific advances in order to be able to understand the universe that God had created. See Thomas F. Torrance, “If I Were Starting Again,” New Pulpit Digest (March/April 1997): 64 28 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 35. This is backed up by the comment of David W. Torrance that both T. F. Torrance, and their brother James B. Torrance, continued to exercise pastoral ministry in their own ways throughout their teaching careers. See David W. Torrance, “Introduction: Discovering the Incarnate Saviour of the World,” in An Introduction to Torrance Theology: Discovering the Incarnate Saviour, ed. Gerrit Scott Dawson (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 1–2. This is a feeling echoed throughout much of the secondary literature that deals with Torrance’s work.

31 gave an address on ‘The Place and Function of the Church in the World’, which was turned into a pamphlet by the presbytery.29 While we will look at the content of this document more fully later, Torrance’s own summary reveals the fundamental way in which the need for the Church to engage in mission gave impetus to his ministerial calling, and desire for theological renewal.

If the Church does recover the vision, she will see that the great task of the Church is the redemption of the world and not a comfortable life in little, religious churches and communities. The Church simply cannot keep alive unless her eyes are upon the farthest horizons of the world, unless she keeps herself in line with the master-passion and the world-outlook of Christ who was the propitiation not for our only but for the sins of the world. It is for that reason that mission work does not arise from arrogance in the Christian Church—mission is its cause and its life.30

After the requisite two years in ordained ministry,31 during which time ruminations on war were never far from his mind,32 Torrance enlisted as a Church of Scotland ‘Huts and Canteens’ Chaplain. His work, which included the running and maintenance of a canteen for the soldiers, allowed him to become much more familiar with the soldiers in his care than normal regimental chaplains could, although Torrance “made a point of never pressing the need for Christian commitment on the troops, for I found that kind of thing was always best if it happened spontaneously.”33 As a chaplain, Torrance remained with the soldiers through some extreme warfare, so overwhelming that later on there was much which he could not recall with accuracy. However, he notes that, “throughout those harrowing days, I found that the influence of a Christian life on the soldiers in the midst of all that terror and carnage was very telling.”34

29 Published as ‘The Church in the World’ in Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 74–84. 30 Ibid., 43. 31 During this time, Torrance began to publish in 1940, with his first piece, Thomas F. Torrance, “Theology and the Common Man,” Life and Work: The Record of the Church of Scotland (1940): 177–178. This was a two-page piece appealing to the reader to be aware that every Christian is a theologian, and therefore it is vital to be aware of one’s theology. 32 One such example of war-related ruminations is an article published in The British Weekly, in which Torrance argues that we must be careful not to point the finger at Germany, or any totalitarian state, without also being willing to deal with the same problems in their different manifestations at home. See Thomas F. Torrance, “The Importance of Fences in Religion,” The British Weekly, 30 January 1941. 33 Thomas F. Torrance, “War Service” (Box 10: War Service, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection: Princeton Theological Seminary), 14. 34 Ibid., 53–54.

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It was during his army service that Torrance had the seminal experience that he often relates concerning the identity of being between the Father and the Son.

When daylight filtered through, I came across a young soldier (Private Philips), scarcely twenty years old, lying mortally wounded on the ground, who clearly had not long to live. As I knelt down and bent over him, he said: ‘Padre, is God really like Jesus?’ I assured him that he was—the only God that there is, the God who had come to us in Jesus, shown his face to us, and poured out his love to us as our Saviour. As I prayed and commended him to the Lord Jesus, he passed away.35 Torrance would later reflect, “I found that the fundamental theological questions were the very stuff of the deepest anxieties of the human heart, questions such as ‘Is God really like Jesus’?”36 This question has profoundly shaped Torrance’s theology, and as we will see, is particularly central to his trinitarian theology, for he insists that the God we meet in Jesus Christ is no different in se than ad alios—God is identical in his own Triune being, to how he meets us in Christ and the Spirit. Although Torrance would go on to write extensive theological treatises on the relationship between the theological and the economic Trinity, this simple anecdote profoundly demonstrates the evangelical significance of the Trinity. It is this type of deeply theological, and yet immediately practical thought, that strengthened Torrance’s acceptance of his calling “to be a theologian who could support the missionary and evangelistic work of the church.”37

Upon his return to Alyth after the war, Torrance resumed normal ministerial duties, completed his doctoral examination in Basel, and was married. He spent three more years in Alyth before being called to Beechgrove Church in , where he was inducted in November 1947. The transition from a rural to city environment took some adjustment, however Beechgrove offered new opportunities for ministry, such as

35 Ibid., 49. Quoted in McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 73–74. During the course of my research, I have had a number of conversations with other students who although unfamiliar with Torrance’s theological distinctives, can identify him as ‘the one who tells that story about the soldier and Jesus being like God.’ 36 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 84. While this is a theological relationship that appears throughout the whole corpus of T. F. Torrance, the best summary is found in Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), 56–67. Torrance also reflected in an interview much later, in 1990, that he did not regret his decade of parish ministry precisely because it was there that he learnt that the fundamental theological questions were to do with these deep human anxieties of the identity between God and Jesus. See Michael Bauman, Roundtable Conversations with European Theologians (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1990), 111–118. 37 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 83.

33 running a ‘Youth Fellowship’ for students and young professionals, where they discussed Christian truths and their impact on Christian life and thought.38 House to house visitation remained important, and Torrance found the proverb, “the spiritual level of the Church outside the home cannot rise above the level of the Church in the home,”39 to be as true in Beechgrove as it was in Alyth. In both parishes, Torrance was surprised by the strong reaction of his congregants, and particularly the elders, to the message of justification by faith in which Christ deals not only with our , but also removes any meritorious basis on which we think we deserve to be saved. This distressed Torrance greatly, but also made it clear to him how one of the greatest challenges to receiving the grace of salvation is the deeply ingrained notion of merit from our goodness that each of us has.40

An Academic Calling During his time at Beechgrove, Torrance started the Scottish Journal of Theology as a vehicle for the dissemination of Karl Barth’s work in the English-speaking world, which he maintained an active role with throughout his career. He was also heavily involved with the English-language reception of Barth, due to his involvement with translating and editing Barth’s Church Dogmatics into English alongside Geoffrey W. Bromiley.41 Torrance wrote a significant number of articles and books on Barth’s theology as well.42 However, whether one should call Torrance a Barthian remains a point of some

38 Thomas F. Torrance, “Aberdeen” (Box 10: Aberdeen, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection: Princeton Theological Seminary), 2. 39 Ibid., 5. 40 Ibid., 7; Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 40–41. 41 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 118–33. 42 Alongside his books Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 1910–1931, and Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), many of Torrance’s articles on Barth highlight the importance of Barth’s theological contribution—as an example, see Thomas F. Torrance, “Why Karl Barth Still Matters So Much,” Life and Work (June 1986): 16. In this article Torrance emphasised the importance of Barth’s re-centralisation of the “Godness of God in His Revelation,” and—more relevant to our project—the way that the loss of this had led to the secularisation of the Church in Germany, and is still present in any church where “a secularising ministry confuses moral and social renovation with the Gospel of redemption.” Torrance terms anyone unfamiliar with Barth’s theology “theologically illiterate,” even while concluding that the basic reason for his appreciation of Barth’s theology was really very simple: “What I like most about his theology is that it is evangelical to the core, for it is utterly faithful to the Gospel.” We may also note the way that Torrance took umbrage with what he saw as incorrect readings of Barth, exemplified in Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of C. Van Til, the New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner,” The Evangelical Quarterly 19 (1947): 144–49. Other articles include Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth: In Honour of His Seventieth Birthday,” Expository Times 67 (1956): 261–63; Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl 34 debate; it is probably best to avoid the title, and to simply conclude that Torrance built upon the foundation laid by his doctoral studies and further engagement with Barth’s work, but did not hesitate to challenge Barth’s theology when he felt it necessary.43 Particular points of divergence include Torrance’s view of natural theology compared to Barth’s complete rejection of it, and Torrance’s view of liturgy, sacraments, and episcopacy.44

In 1950, Torrance left Beechgrove to accept a position at New College as the Chair of Ecclesiastical History. He held this for two years, until he was appointed to the Chair of Christian Dogmatics (despite opposition from the Principal, John Baillie on the basis of Torrance’s pro-Barth tendencies.) McGrath reflects that, “The outcome of this transfer would prove decisive in terms of Edinburgh’s theological profile worldwide. If Baillie determined that profile in the 1940s, Torrance would determine it throughout the 1960s and 1970s.”45 Torrance’s relationship with New College seems to have been somewhat tumultuous, both because of his distinctively evangelical theological agenda, and due to his public prominence.46 While at Edinburgh, his teaching responsibilities included Christology and Soteriology, and the related area of Church, Ministry and Sacraments.47 It is worth noting that due to the bifurcated faculty structure of New College, the doctrine of God fell within the teaching responsibilities of the Chair of Divinity, so that Torrance was unable to teach or write at length on the

Barth,” Expository Times 66 (1955): 205–09; Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth,” Scottish Journal of Theology 22 (1969): 1–9; Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 12 (1956): 21–31; Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth: In Homage,” High Point College Review of Theology and Philosophy (April 1969): 5–12. 43 Habets shares this perspective, noting that Torrance rejects the ‘Barthian’ title, while remaining an “appreciative critic of Barth.” Habets, Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance, 12. 44 Douglas Farrow highlights that “Protestants can learn from Torrance something that Barth cannot teach them: a degree for respect for liturgy and sacraments and even for episcopal ministry. They can learn something else as well—something Torrance tried to teach Barth—namely, to find a place for natural theology and metaphysics within an evangelical framework.” See Douglas Farrow, “T. F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” First Things 238 (Dec 2013): 28. 45 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 90. 46 This comment is gained from conversations with David Fergusson (New College), Bruce McCormack (Princeton Theological Seminary), and Alan Torrance (St Andrews University.) 47 Torrance’s lecture material was edited for readability and publication by Robert T. Walker, resulting in his two most readable volumes, published as, Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008); Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).

35 doctrine of God, particularly the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, until after his retirement from lecturing at New College in 1979.

It would be something of a misnomer to suggest that Torrance retired, since he remained very active in theological scholarship and ecclesial dialogue after leaving employment at New College. His two major trinitarian publications, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons, and The Trinitarian Faith, were both published after his official retirement, but their content is not original material. These two books represent the mature clarification of Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity, and are entirely consistent with the embryonic thoughts that appear throughout his earlier works.

The Ecumenical Movement The final aspect of Torrance’s career that is of relevance is his involvement in the ecumenical movement, which began while he was at New College, and continued after retirement.48 During the 1950s and 1960s, Torrance participated in the dialogue between the and the Church of Scotland, served on the Faith and Order Commission, and attended various World Council of Church meetings. Despite this flurry of activity, McGrath argues that Torrance’s most important ecumenical activity began after his retirement from Edinburgh, for it was during these later years that he was instrumental in the dialogue between the Reformed and Greek Orthodox Churches, mirroring his theological focus at the time on trinitarian theology.49 This specific dialogue, as well as a broader consideration of the need for a theology of reconciliation, will occupy our attention in the eighth chapter.

2.2 How to Read T. F. Torrance: a scientific approach to theology Dogmatic Theology As we noted in our literature review, Torrance’s work can be loosely divided into two streams; his dogmatic work, and his work relating to theology and science. Although

48 The start of the modern ecumenical movement is usually dated to the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910, which as an interesting sidenote, was attended by Torrance’s father. It was after the Second World War, with the 1948 formation of the World Council of Churches, that the steady ecumenical momentum of the 1950s and 1960s began to develop. See Chapter 8 for a fuller discussion of Torrance’s involvement in the ecumenical movement. 49 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 94–102.

36 this thesis focuses on the dogmatic content of Torrance’s work, and so for the majority of the project we will not be working with his scientific material, this would be an incomplete work if we completely ignored the way in which Torrance’s scientific theology informs his approach to the theological task.50 In the following section, we will identify key characteristics of Torrance’s scientific theology that will guide our exploration of his trinitarian ecclesiology. Awareness of Torrance’s ‘big picture’ approach to the theological task will help us to be confident that our reading of a single aspect of Torrance’s work is consistent with his work as a whole, however our concern is not with the outcomes of Torrance’s work in the area of science and theology, but rather, as Molnar observes, how “even his dogmatic theology shows signs of his commitment to the scientific method.”51

Torrance considered himself to be a dogmatic theologian, more commonly described today as a systematic theologian. ‘Dogmatic’ is more apt than ‘systematic’ however, since Torrance was not concerned with constructing a logical or systematic structure for theological knowledge. Instead, his scientific approach to theology was very similar to a movement which emerged about two centuries before the birth of Christ, where dogmatikoi philosophers asked “the kind of questions that do yield positive answers and thus contribute to the advancement of knowledge.”52 Torrance argues that dogmatic, or positive, theology was the way that early Christians responded to the

50 Readers are directed to primary works such as Thomas F. Torrance, Theological and Natural Science (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), in which Torrance explores the relationship between theology and science with particular reference to James Clerk Maxwell and John Philoponos of Alexandria; Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Frame of Mind (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1989), which we have referred to elsewhere, but in which Torrance draws upon historical sources to show the revolution taking place in scientific thought, and the way that this interacts with theology; Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 337–52, where Torrance explores 'Theology as Dogmatic Science'. 51 Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance, 2. 52 Thomas F. Torrance, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge: Explorations in the Interrelations of Scientific and Theological Enterprise (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998), 267. It is informative to briefly note Torrance’s description of the historical development of the dogmatic approach: the post-Platonic ‘New Academy’ had many philosophers who were known as skeptics (skeptikoi) whose tactic was to ask lots of purely academic questions without requiring concrete answers. In response to this, from about 200BC, a contrasting philosophical movement developed that focused on asking questions about the actual world, and the answers to these questions were determined by the real nature of things. These philosophers were known as dogmatics (dogmatikoi). As a tangential but related point, Torrance accuses many in the ecumenical movement of asking the type of academic question asked by the skeptikoi, looking for answers that do not require one to commit to decisive change. See here Thomas F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980), 49–50.

37 spread of in Graeco-Roman culture; the incarnation was incompatible with Graeco-Roman philosophical dualisms, and was unable to be assimilated into the existing paradigms of belief. Early Christian theologians were required to develop a distinct Christian account of reality on the basis of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, so that dogmatic theology

must proceed to lay bare the essential relation of all the doctrines of the faith, and their integration within the one Body of Christ, within the whole structure of obedience to Christ. This is the interior logic of dogmatic theology… which can be studied and used as a norm or criterion for helping to shape the true form of each doctrine, for testing and proving the different doctrines to see whether they really fit into the essential structure of the whole.53 Dogmatic theology thus refers to a theology “that is forced upon us by the actual interaction of God with the universe he has made and by his intelligible self-revelation within that interaction.”54 It does not have the negative connotation of someone who is ‘dogmatic’, as in someone who refuses to waver from their beliefs which are based on received tradition or teaching, and have not been subjected to critical judgment.55

The Foundations of a Scientific Theology Torrance’s interest in the relationship between science and theology began early in his studies, influenced by , another New College professor who was attempting to think out the relationship between evangelical truth and modern science in his own research.56 When Torrance first began studying with Barth, he had hoped to complete a thesis on “a scientific account of Christian dogmatics from its Christological and soteriological centre and in the light of its constitutive Trinitarian structure.”57 Barth dissuaded him from such a mammoth task, and Torrance instead

53 Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 149. 54 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 50. “Forced upon us” does not have negative connotations here, but rather reflects that if God does not authentically communicate himself to us through his Word, then “we are thrown back upon ourselves to authenticate His existence and to make Him talk by putting our own words into His mouth and by clothing Him with our own ideas.” See further Torrance, Theological Science, 31. 55 For Torrance’s reasoning for the positive, scientific sense in which he qualifies dogmatic theology, rather than the negative sense of one who refuses to budge from received teaching and tradition, see Thomas F. Torrance, “Reformed Dogmatics Not Dogmaticism,” Theology 70 (1967): 152–56. Torrance also deals with the topic of ‘dogmatic theology’ as a positive science in Thomas F. Torrance, “Science, Theology, Unity,” Theology Today 21 (1964): 149–54. 56 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 34. 57 Thomas F. Torrance, “My Interaction with Karl Barth,” in How Karl Barth Changed My Mind, ed. Donald K. McKim (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986), 54. This article is not so much a theological 38 produced his thesis, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers.58 He went on to spend much of his career developing a ‘scientific theology’ or ‘theological science.’ The idea of a ‘scientific theology’ is best illustrated by a story related in McGrath’s biography. At the end of his year lecturing at Auburn Theological Seminary, Torrance was invited to teach theology at Princeton University. The hiring board insisted that it would need to be taught in a dispassionate way, rather than on a confessional basis. Torrance responded that he would like to teach theology as a science, but could not guarantee that there would be no conversions! He believed that the rigorous questioning and examining of the natural universe through the natural sciences could be profitably applied to Christian theology. He was accepted for the position to his surprise, however declined it in order to return to Scotland before the commencement of World War 2.59

The weight which Torrance gave to the scientific undertakings of his work is reflected by the fact that he regarded Theological Science as one of his most important works, alongside The Trinitarian Faith and The Christian Doctrine of God.60 Furthermore, the wider recognition of the significance of Torrance’s work on the relationship of science and theology saw him awarded the Templeton Prize in 1978.61 Keeping this in mind, there are three primary characteristics of Torrance’s scientific approach to theology that we will explore here: the kataphysic method, the rejection of dualism, and the importance of personal knowledge. These three characteristics are intrinsic to his approach to dogmatic theology.

summary of Barth’s work, as it is of the theological and personal interaction between Torrance and Barth. 58 Published as Thomas F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996). 59 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 57–58. 60 Ibid., 107. See also the chapters “Scientific Theology” and “Natural Theology” in Habets, Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance, 39–93. 61 “Previous Winners,” The Templeton Prize, accessed 4 November 2015. http://www.templetonprize.org/previouswinner.html. Torrance is described as “one of the first religious thinkers to win the respect of both theologians and scientists. His insights on the rationality of the universe attempt to provide evidence of God through scientific reasoning.”

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The Kataphysic Method Daniel Hardy observes that for Torrance, “the means to understanding must be in accordance with the substance of what is sought; epistemology must follow , just as form and being are inseparable in what is known.”62 How we know, and what we know, is to be dictated by the object of our enquiry. The purpose of scientific inquiry is “to discover the relations of things and events at different levels of complexity, and to develop our understanding and expression of them in such a way that their real nature becomes progressively disclosed to us.”63 In order for this to happen, Torrance turns to the ‘kataphysic method’, where each object of inquiry is studied kata physin, according to its own nature.64 Hence each discipline develops appropriate methodology in accordance with the object of its study.65 It is not that there is a generic method of scientific inquiry which can applied to any field of knowledge, but rather that the object being studied determines the specific questions that need to be asked of it—thus Hardy’s observation that epistemology derives from ontology. The kataphysic method opens up true scientific objectivity; disciplining one’s subjectivities, one enters into active engagement with the object, “prepared and ready for whatever it may reveal in the give-and-take of investigation.”66

Torrance is fond of describing humans as the “priests of creation,” designed to explore and discover the created rationality of the universe. The explorations of natural science are part of our obedience as created beings, and have a redemptive pattern.67 Torrance suggests that the rational unity of the universe is the correlate to the doctrine of one

62 Daniel W. Hardy, “T. F. Torrance,” in The Modern Theologians, ed. David Ford (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 167. 63 Torrance, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge, 265. 64 From the Greek kata physin: kata, ‘according to’; physin, ‘nature’. See Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 51. See also McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 141. For those in the twenty–first century church who are used to regarding science and theology as polar opposites, it is worth taking note of McGrath’s suggestion that one should translate the German term wissenschaft as ‘discipline’ rather than ‘science’ in order to avoid the limited associations of natural science. 65 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 13–17. 66 Torrance, God and Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9. Torrance also notes (9–11) the difference between scientific objectivity, and objectification. The first is to engage in appropriate scientific method, allowing the object to disclose itself to us, while the second is to understand the object not out of itself, but out of our preconceptions. 67 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 5; Thomas F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 128–139.

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Creator, while the contingent rationality of the universe points to the uncreated rationality of the Creator. The created universe has a genuinely open-ended, yet limited contingent freedom which derives from God’s unlimited freedom.68 However, although theology and the natural sciences are both rationally comprehensible, the correlation between them is limited, for “while theological science shares with other sciences a generally recognised scientific procedure of objectivity, theology has its own particular scientific requirements determined by the unique nature of its own particular object.”69

Theological study should therefore be “a positive and progressive inquiry into the knowledge of God proceeding under the determination of his self-revelation but within the limits of our creaturely rationality.”70 It involves a commitment to “act toward things in ways appropriate to their natures, to understand them through letting them shine in their own light, and to reduce our thinking of them into orderly forms on the presumption of their inherent intelligibility.”71 This is Torrance’s epistemological realism, or critical realism.72

The need to know God within the limitations of our humanity shapes Torrance’s argument that while God stands in a “transcendent and creative, not a spatial or temporal”73 relationship to the world, the incarnation is the actual coming of God into the “determinations, conditions and conceptualities of our world,”74 and thus

68 Torrance, Christian Frame of Mind, 50–65. 69 Torrance, Theological Science, 112–13. Earlier in Theological Science, Torrance unpacks the various factors of theological objectivity; the primacy of the Object, the givenness of knowledge of the Object, the Personhood of the Lord, the way in which the Object is a speaking Subject, and a God who acts in purposive action. See 34–43. 70 Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001), xiv 71 Torrance, Theological Science, 107. 72 An accessible chapter centred around the , which we will explore more fully later in this thesis, is Thomas F. Torrance, “Theological Realism,” in The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology, Essays Presented to D. M. MacKinnon, eds. B. Hebbelethwaite and S. Sutherland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 169–96. For secondary comment, see “Realist Theology,” in Habets, Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance, 95–121; Douglas F. Kelly, “The Realist Epistemology of Thomas F. Torrance,” in An Introduction to Torrance Theology: Discovering the Incarnate Saviour, ed. Gerrit Scott Dawson (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 75–102. 73 Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, Electronic Edition ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd, 1997), 60. 74 Ibid., 61.

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“appropriating to himself perceptibility and conceptuality, together with linguistic communicability.”75 The incarnation, as the unique locus of God’s self-disclosure, shapes the method of theological inquiry.76 It comes “breaking into the continuity of our human knowledge as an utterly distinctive and unique fact,”77 as both a historical and eternal event which can only be interpreted on its own basis.78 Thus, in scientific theology, the object—God—is actively making himself known, unlike in natural science, where nature which is passive in the process of inquiry. Consequently, theological knowledge is given—received, and not discovered;79 “we are never allowed to impose ourselves with our notions upon Him, but we are freed and lifted up as rational subjects in communion with God, and summoned to decisions and acts of volition in that communion, so that knowledge of Him arises and increases out of obedient conformity to Him and the way He takes with us in revealing Himself to us.”80

Rejection of Dualism Because scientific theology involves knowing God in accordance with the way that God has revealed himself to us, Torrance insists that this entails rejecting both epistemological and cosmological dualism.81 These dualistic tendencies developed within Hellenistic philosophy, where “Greek thought identified the real with what is necessarily and timelessly true, and discounted the sensible or material as deficient in rationality or merely contingent and accidental.”82 Despite the robust efforts of the Nicene fathers to promote a more interactionist view of God in relation to the world, the same dualistic tendencies, now with an insidious theological slant, re-emerged in

75 Ibid., 80. 76 Torrance, Theological Science, 97. 77 Torrance, Incarnation, 1. 78 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 26. Commenting on this further, see Yeung, Being and Knowing: An Examination of T. F. Torrance's Christological Science, 90. Yeung suggests that “this is the real sense of scientific knowledge and theological knowledge. We know the object and interact with the object but do not impose ourselves upon the object.” 79 Thomas F. Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998), 116–18. While there is some overlap, with ‘discovery’ being part of both, theological science in particular is shaped by the fact that we receive revelation, rather than discovering it. 80 Torrance, Theological Science, 97. 81 A concise discussion of Torrance’s rejection of dualism is published as a booklet, Alan G. Marley, T. F. Torrance in a Nutshell (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press Ltd, 1992). 82 Thomas F. Torrance, “Immortality and Light,” Religious Studies 17, no. 2 (1981): 149.

42 the work of Augustine,83 and came to influence modern scientific thought through the foundational work of figures like Galileo and Descartes. This led to the idea of an inertial system, or the extremes of , as well as causing a divorce between the ‘One God’ and the ‘Triune God’.84 It was not until the later work of Clerk Maxwell and Einstein, and their focus on the unification of geometry and experience, or of epistemology and ontology, that Torrance believes a more unitary outlook was once again predominant in scientific method.85

The history of scientific thought shows that as developments in science have required the adaptation of the paradigms within which knowledge of the natural world is sought and interpreted, the framework within which the world is understood has correspondingly changed. Torrance views the incarnation as the same kind of paradigmatic shift, asserting that God has really come into the world, and consequently can really be known by humanity. It is “an invasion of God among men and women in time, bringing and working out a salvation not only understandable by them in their own historical and human life and existence, but historically and concretely accessible to them on earth and in time, in the midst of their frailty, contingency, relativity and sin.”86 As we will explore in the fourth chapter, while the early Church viewed itself in continuity with the redemptive history of Israel, the incarnation signalled a revolution in the knowledge of God and the existence of God’s people.

83 Thomas F. Torrance, “A New ?,” The London Holborn and Quarterly Review 189 (1964): 277. Torrance notes that the idea of a sacramental universe saw the earthly and heavenly realms bridged by “Augustine’s theory of illumination and his doctrine of the Church as sacramental organism full of grace.” We will explore this idea of the Church as distributing grace, and a sacramental universe in the sixth chapter. However, Radcliff observes that although Torrance traces what he terms the ‘Latin heresy’ back to Augustine, along with Descartes and Newton, what can seem like a largely negative reading of Augustine is balanced out by the recognition that Torrance tends to rail against Augustinian thought rather than Augustine, and that his rejection of Augustine is far from wholehearted. See Jason Radcliff, “T. F. Torrance and Reformed–Orthodox Dialogue,” Kindle ed., T. F. Torrance and Eastern : Theology in Reconciliation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), Location 1090. 84Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 146. 85 Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, 23–25. The fight against dualism is an important and repetitive note throughout Torrance’s theology, particularly to do with his ‘genealogy of doctrine.’ Torrance argues that the train was derailed, as it were, by the consequences of dualistic thought and how they shaped the Church’s thought about God; however the historical causes are obviously more complex than just this one element, so that we should take this emphasis on dualism as something particularly characteristic of Torrance’s view of history. 86 Torrance, Incarnation, 8.

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This is where we see what it means to describe Torrance as a dogmatic theologian in the best sense of the word—he is committed to the positive content of theology, which has at its heart the coming of God into creation, nullifying any dualistic view of the relationship between God and creation. Such dualism is inconsistent with the biblical witness, and denies the reality of the incarnation, as was seen in the Gnostic sects of the early church, whose separation of creation and redemption “made mythological nonsense of the Incarnation.”87 When such dualism is prevalent in theology it results in a “doctrine of the immutability and impassibility of God,” which leads to “a deistic disjunction between God and the universe.”88 Against this view, Torrance promotes a unified cosmology and argues for an interactionist, relational view of the universe, where God interacts with the world of nature and history, yet remains transcendent to it.89 Consequently, “while the Incarnation does not mean that God is limited by space and time, it asserts the reality of space and time for God in the actuality of his relations with us, and at the same time binds us to space and time in all our relations with him.”90 As we will see, this is a key point in Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology, for the Church is the empirical body of Christ which exists in history and must be able to relate to the Triune God within space and time.

Torrance concludes that although theology has had to wrestle with re-contextualisation at the points in history where there has been significant upheaval in the prevailing scientific or cosmological perspective, the real issue is not the change in science or cosmology, but the assumption that there is a radical disjunction between God and the world.91 In this light, we can understand why Torrance considered his goal of unification (that is, the rejection of dualism) in both science and theology as a

87 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 62–63. Torrance elsewhere identifies the “infinite qualitative difference between God and man, eternity and time,” as the key presupposition behind the demythologisation of the incarnation—see Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson,” Journal of Theological Studies 15, no. 2 (1964): 477. 88 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 146; Thomas F. Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 3–4. 89 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Problem of Natural Theology in the Thought of Karl Barth,” Religious Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 1970): 121. 90 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, 67. 91 Torrance, “A New Reformation?,” 276.

44 missionary scheme, with significant implications for the ecumenical movement as well.92

Torrance explains that epistemological or cosmological dualism leads to a projected image of God that is not actually grounded in who God is. Both cosmological and epistemological dualism result in humankind’s attempts to “close the gap between the world and God,” which lead to the various approaches categorised under the title of natural theology.93 Natural theology is a result of dualistic ways of thinking; it flourishes whenever dualist modes of thought prevail, and where knowledge is derived through “abstract from sense-experience or deductions from observations.”94

As we have already observed, Torrance follows Barth in rejecting natural theology as an independent conceptual system which can reveal God to humanity. The key issue for Barth was that natural theology placed the knowledge of God in humanity’s power, a perspective strongly intertwined with Barth’s understanding that sin compels the search for human autonomy.95 For Torrance the problem inherent to natural theology is that since “nature by itself speaks only ambiguously of God,”96 natural theology can only point us to an abstract God, rather than the self-revealing Triune God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit.97 However unlike Barth, Torrance seeks to make use of select aspects of the tradition by reformulating natural theology, suggesting that it can function within the sphere of, and as a subsidiary to, divine revelation.98

In contrast to the various traditional approaches to natural theology, which “have all tried to establish some sort of bridge whereby thought can be invited to move

92 Thomas F. Torrance, “A New Vision of Wholeness: An Interview of Thomas F. Torrance, Given to Mary Doyle Morgan,” Presbyterian Survey (Dec 1980): 21–23. 93 Torrance, Ground and Grammar of Theology, 80. 94 Ibid., 75. 95 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 179-83. 96 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, 59. 97 Torrance, Ground and Grammar of Theology, 89. 98 Ibid., 87–98. This is the basis for Torrance’s agreement with Barth’s rejection of natural theology, although unlike Barth, Torrance does significant work to show how natural theology can operate as a subordinate subsidiary within divine revelation.

45 inductively from observational experience to God,”99 Torrance “does not attempt to build a logical bridge from the world to God on the basis of a logical bridge between experience and concepts… he operates with a different kind of epistemology, a different God-world relation, and therefore a different kind of argumentation.”100 Torrance argues that we cannot simply look at creation to find knowledge of God, but must look beyond creation:

When we concentrate our attention upon the universe itself, then, it gets shut up in itself, so far as our understanding of it is concerned, and thereby loses the range of depth in which its meaning as a whole is to be found. Even as a harmonious intelligible whole the universe can provide no explanation of its own inherent rationality. If we are to recover the meaning of the universe, and meaning of the universe as a whole, we must learn to look again beyond the universe, or look through the universe, to its transcendent ground in the uncreated Rationality of God.101 Torrance is not saying here that we can draw knowledge of the Triune God from creation. Throughout this thesis we will consistently develop Torrance’s insistence that God’s revelation is uniquely given to humanity through the Son and Spirit. This is why for Torrance, natural theology ceases to be an independent source of divine revelation. As it is “brought within the embrace of positive theology and developed as a complex of rational structures arising in our actual knowledge of God it becomes ‘natural’ in a new way, natural to its proper object, God in self-revealing interaction with us in space and time.”102 This does not mean that it can become a self-enclosed, formal system which lies at the heart of dogmatic theology; natural theology remains an open structure that is not complete in itself, but only has consistency “within the empirical conditions of actual knowledge of God.”103

As Colyer notes, Torrance’s reformulated approach to natural theology is significantly reworked from the classical understanding of natural theology, because of his insistence that natural theology must “give up its independent status and find its place

99 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 38. 100 Colyer, How to Read T.F. Torrance, 196. 101 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 34. 102 Ibid., 39. 103 Ibid., 39.

46 within revealed theology.”104 Torrance’s work diverges from traditional natural theology because of this insistence. Since natural theology is traditionally “the attempt to know God through reason without faith in the God of revelation,”105 Molnar disputes that Torrance’s approach should be categorised as natural theology, because it is “no longer natural theology in the traditional sense, which was, at least in broad terms, understood to mean ‘that at least something of God can be known from the natural order.’”106 Molnar suggests that Torrance should have instead described his project as a “theology of nature,”107 a suggestion which has some merit.

Torrance’s reformulation of natural theology may not be without its problems. As an example, Molnar argues that despite Torrance’s disdain for any approach which suggests that the universe is a source of true knowledge about God as he is in himself, there remain remnants of traditional natural theology in Torrance’s attempt to reformulate natural theology. This is despite Torrance insisting that natural theology has no independent status, even while he attempts to show that some aspects of natural theology could be fruitfully utilised in the light of divine revelation. Molnar is particularly unsympathetic to Torrance’s suggestion that the only way in which natural theology can function independently is through temporarily and artificially being bracketed off from the actual knowledge of God which is received through revelation.108 Molnar views this proposal as representative of the problems inherent in Torrance’s reformulated natural theology:

On the one hand Torrance insists that a natural theology cannot be bracketed at all, but must function within the ambit of revelation. But on the other hand his thinking suggests that creation itself cries for an explanation grounded in the Christian God and he believes that this ‘silent’ cry is a touchstone for discussion between theology and science.109

104 Colyer, How to Read T.F. Torrance, 199, which offers a summary of Torrance, Ground and Grammar of Theology, 76-78. 105 Paul D. Molnar, “Natural Theology Revisited: A Comparison of T.F. Torrance and Karl Barth,” Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie 21 (2005): 71. 106 Ibid., 70. 107 Ibid., 83. 108 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology., 42. 109 Molnar, “Natural Theology Revisited,” 78-79.

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However, in response to this critique from Molnar, McMaken observes that Torrance is consistently uninterested in “disconnecting his reformulated natural theology from its basis in Jesus Christ,” and only temporarily sets aside “certain theological affirmations in order to examine a topic at a purely conceptual level.”110 While McMaken agrees with Molnar that Torrance’s use of the term ‘natural theology’ is “something of a stumbling block,”111 he disagrees with Molnar’s critical reading of Torrance on natural theology and also with Molnar’s disputation of Torrance’s suggestion that natural theology can be profitably bracketed off artificially. McMaken thus dismisses the claim which Molnar raises, which is that Torrance suggests “the possibility of a natural knowledge of God,”112 and insists that for Torrance, the “silent cry of the created order for its Creator… does not provide any knowledge of the Triune God in whom the universe has its basis and origin.”113 While Molnar’s complaint about describing Torrance’s approach as ‘natural theology’ is worth acknowledging, McMaken’s reading of Torrance seems to be more consistent with Torrance’s commitment to the uniqueness of God’s Triune self-revelation, regardless of the theological theme being treated.

This discussion of natural theology also ties in to our previous discussion of the kataphysic method. For Torrance, all proper theological science is a posteriori, operating from the given knowledge of God’s self-revelation, rather than a priori, operating from what we observe in the world.114 Torrance provides a more fulsome explanation of the fundamental difference between science and theology in observing the world:

Natural science, of course, is concerned to explore and account for the ongoing processes of nature in their autonomous structures: that is, in their contingent reality as utterly different from the transcendent reality of God. Theological science is concerned to understand and interpret states of affairs and events in the created universe, in so far as they are dependent upon God the Creator and

110 W. Travis McMaken, “The Impossibility of Natural Knowledge of God in T.F. Torrance’s Reformulated Natural Theology,” International Journal of Sytematic Theology 12, no. 3 (Jul 2010): 331, fn. 40. 111 Ibid., 336 112 Ibid., 340. 113 Ibid., 334 114 Torrance, Theological Science, 32–34. Torrance suggests we must distinguish between genuine- theology and “mere paper theology,” the latter involving genuine argumentation but being “palpably unreal” because it does not derive from divine revelation.

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Redeemer, and are specifically correlated to his revealing and saving purpose in history.115 Natural scientists can investigate and explore the world which has a contingent rationality and freedom. However, natural scientists cannot investigate the world and discover the Triune God. By acknowledging these limitations of natural theology, Torrance is asserting that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity has primacy in defining how we know God, and who we know him to be. For Torrance, divine revelation, which God has given us through the Son and Spirit, is the only way to genuine knowledge of God as he is in himself.

If to really know God through his saving activity in our world is to know him as Triune, then the doctrine of the Trinity belongs to the very groundwork of knowledge of God from the very start, which calls in question any doctrine of God as the one God gained apart from his Trinitarian activity—but that is the kind of knowledge of God that is yielded in natural theology of the traditional kind.116 Personal Knowledge The final point which Torrance makes is that the human knower has a vital place in the knowledge of God. Alongside the kataphysic method, in which prior frameworks of understanding are consistently revisable in light of a deeper understanding of the object in question, and the rejection of any dualistic separation of God and creation, theological knowledge must be personal. While this was applied to the natural sciences through the work of Michael Polanyi,117 Torrance takes Polanyi’s insights further by arguing that theological knowledge is personal knowledge precisely because God reveals himself to us as personal being, the perichoretic communion of the three divine

115 Torrance, Christian Frame of Mind, 27. See also Divine and Contingent Order, in which Torrance addresses the issues of theology, science, and contingence. 116 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 89. 117 Thomas F. Torrance, “Michael Polanyi and the Christian Faith—a Personal Report,” Tradition & Discovery 27, no. 2 (2000–2001). Polanyi did not publicly identify himself as a Christian in his writing, but in this personal reflection, Torrance makes it clear that he knew Michael and Magda Polanyi to have a deep commitment to Christian faith. The same point is explicitly made in Thomas F. Torrance, ‘Answer to Prosch on Polanyi’s Convictions about God, Letter to the Editor,’ Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical 14, no. 1 (1986–7): 30. For one of the clearest examples of Torrance’s appreciation for Michael Polanyi, and the way that Polanyi argued knowledge had to rest on faith, see Torrance, “The Framework of Belief,” in Belief in Science and in Christian Life: The Relevance of Michael Polanyi's Thought for Christian Faith and Life, 1–27. For a further chapter that discusses the contribution of Polanyi and Einstein, along with others to Torrance’s understanding of the importance of personal belief, see ‘The Priority of Belief’ in Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, 41–73.

49 persons. Since in theology the objective reality with which we are concerned is the Holy Trinity revealed to us in Jesus Christ, “the mode of assent and the nature of the conviction aroused is appropriately personal and not impersonal.”118

We must be careful to emphasise that theology is not primarily about humanity’s knowing of God, but rather the fact that we are first known by God. Our sinful human nature is estranged from God, alienated and unable to grasp the truth because of the dehumanising and corrupting consequences of sin on our rational minds. This is the consequence of sin, for humans are so turned in on themselves that “double vision results, in which human knowers are unable to trace the thought of God back to its proper ground in His reality."119 This is why Torrance is so emphatic that revelation and reconciliation must be considered together, for he believes that, “Men and women need to be reconciled with the truth if they are to know the truth, and they cannot really know it without becoming at-one with the truth, which cannot but involve radical self- denial and conversion on our part.”120 This prevents us from discovering God by ourselves, for the result of sin is that we are unable to know God except as he graciously makes himself known to us, simultaneously revealing himself to us, and reconciling us to himself. As we are invited to participate in fellowship with God, “the subject is given freedom and place before God, and yet in which the subject is summoned into such communion with Him that he can only engage in it with self-criticism and repentance.”121 As Torrance elaborates

If we are really to know God in accordance with his nature as he discloses himself to us, we require to be adapted in our knowing and personal relations

118 Torrance, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge, 12. Torrance also cites Kierkegaard as an influence on his stance that that because truth has been embodied in Jesus, we cannot know truth except for a personal encounter with Christ which calls out of us a faithful and obedient response. See Torrance, Incarnation, 25-27. 119 Torrance, Theological Science, x. Some of Torrance’s earliest comments on faith, rationality and philosophy can be found in Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of Leonard Hodgson, Towards a ,” The Evangelical Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1943): 237ff. 120 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 150. For further reading on Torrance’s view of the knowledge of God and the self-knowledge of humanity, see Torrance, Calvin's Doctrine of Man, 13–22; Thomas F. Torrance, “The Word of God and the Nature of Man,” in Reformation Old and New: Festschrift for Karl Barth, ed. F. W. Camfield (London: Lutterworth Press, 1947), 121–41. Torrance draws on Calvin—and Barth’s later development of Calvin—to conclude that it is only as humans know God that we can truly know ourselves; we are hostile to God because of the effects of sin, but God’s grace has come to us in Christ, setting us in a new relationship to God as we participate in Christ’s new humanity. 121 Torrance, Theological Science, 98.

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toward him—that is why we cannot know God without love, and if we are estranged without being reconciled to him. Knowing God requires cognitive union with him in which our whole being is affected by his love and holiness. It is the pure in heart who see God… Knowledge and vision of God involve cognitive union with him in accordance with his nature as holy love, in which reconciliation and communion with God through Christ and under the purifying impact of the Holy Spirit are progressively actualised in the renewal and transformation of human patterns of life and thought.122 Finally, we must acknowledge that personal knowledge is not subjective or individualistic. One of the problems of modern theology is that personal knowledge is not sufficiently related to the analogy of faith, so that the human assumes primacy in the God-human theological relationship.123 Torrance follows Polanyi again in his perspective that all belief has two poles—the subjective knower, and the objective reality which is independent of the knower. Objective knowledge arises as one looks away from oneself, and towards the other object,124 so that personal belief is not a subjective notion of faith or belief which emerges from the human mind as it tries to make sense of the world, but is “a basic act of recognition in which our minds respond to a pattern or structure inherent in the world around us which imprints itself upon them.”125 As Torrance explains further,

Personal being is, I submit, the prime bearer of objectivity, for that kind of relation is the relation in which persons as persons are. What we mean by personal being is precisely that kind of being which by its nature is oriented beyond itself, in the other, in God ultimately, and in other human beings relatively, that is, in other personal beings. Hence the person cannot be defined through exclusive reference to itself but through its relation to other persons, i.e. objectively.126

122 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 25–26. 123 Torrance, Theological Science, xiv. The analogy of faith, or the analogia fidei, is a principle introduced by Calvin that is “a movement of thought in which we test the fidelity of our knowledge by tracing our thought back to its ground in the reality known, in which we refer everything to God and not to ourselves.” 124 Torrance, “The Framework of Belief,” in Belief in Science and in Christian Life: The Relevance of Michael Polanyi's Thought for Christian Faith and Life, 10–12. 125 Ibid., 12. 126 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 110. A related article that fills out Torrance’s understanding of personal being, particularly in the sense of personal relations to others, is Thomas F. Torrance, “The Soul and Person of the Unborn Child,” (1999): 1–15, accessed February 15 2016, http://www.socu.org.uk/The%20Soul%20and%20Person%20of%20the%20Unborn%20Child.pdf.

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While we will return to this sense of needing to define persons in relation to other persons in future chapters, we may conclude our discussion of personal knowledge in theology by observing that the role of the knower in theology goes beyond the “truism that knowledge of an object is knowledge by a subject, for the subject has always had a logical place in knowledge.”127 This is because “when we think of the object as the living God who enters into living and personal communion with man through revelation and reconciliation then the place of the human subject in knowledge of God can no longer be excluded from the full content of that knowledge.”128 For Torrance, the personal element of theological knowledge is appropriate according to the kataphysic method, and also is in keeping with his non-dualistic view of the God– world–humanity relation.

2.3 The Ecclesiological Task: Why a Trinitarian Theology The final section of this chapter will offer some clarification about the research approach which has been taken, focusing on why we have engaged with the trinitarian nature of Torrance’s ecclesiology. A case could also be made that it would be more apt to focus on Torrance’s Christological ecclesiology, given that in some places he argues that the doctrine of the Trinity has primacy, while in others, he argues that all doctrines must be expressed with Christology at their heart.129 However, this is not demonstrative of inconsistency in Torrance’s thought, but it is to do with his insistence that, “the doctrine of Christ and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity belong intrinsically and inseparably together, and are to be coordinated in any faithful account of them.”130 There is no clear-cut division between these two doctrines, for they are incomplete without the other—the Trinity is constitutive for Christology, and Christology is always a corollary of the economic Trinity. As one who is both fully human, and fully

127 Torrance, Theological Science, 85. 128 Ibid. 129 As an example, in one of his earlier articles from 1958, Torrance says much more about the Christological re-orientation needed within , rather than referring to the Trinity. See Thomas F. Torrance, “The Mission of Anglicanism,” in Anglican Self-Criticism, ed. D.M. Paton (London: SCM Press, 1958), 199. 130 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 1–2.

52 divine, Christ’s divinity cannot be understood without the Father and the Spirit.131 This is a matter that will occupy our attention throughout the thesis, but in order to briefly ‘clear the ground’, we may explain the way in which Torrance gives doctrinal primacy to the Trinity, while still incorporating a robust Christology.

Torrance suggests that the doctrine of the Church arose in the light of two major veins of Scriptural teaching. The first of these was St Paul’s teaching on the Church as the body of Christ, and the second was the baptismal tradition, where the trinitarian proclamation is in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit.132 These must be held together, for “we cannot teach a doctrine of God and then add on to that a doctrine of Christ.”133 Any attempt to explicate the doctrine of the Church solely based on its current forms, or on the doctrinal formulations which have been produced by theologians throughout the ages, will ultimately fail to get at the heart of the being and mission of the Church. This is because the primary basis on which an understanding of the Church is to be sought, is not in the empirical Church itself, but rather from God’s self-revelation. As Torrance concludes,

The objective pole of the Church’s faith is the truth of God which has seized hold of it in Christ and His Gospel and will not let it go, truth over which it has no control but truth which makes it free and establishes it in the love of God. Hence the Church cannot but confess its faith in God, before God, with an unreserved endorsement of belief in the truth of Christ and his Gospel, as the truth with which its very existence is bound up as the Church, the one Body of Christ, and as the saving grace of God which constitutes the very of its message and mission.134 The very nature of the Church as the servant and body of Christ requires it to look to Jesus, the head of the body,135 however in knowing Christ, the Church knows the Triune God. This is why the incarnation is such a central doctrine in Torrance’s theological

131 Torrance, Incarnation, 174–75. One of the leading influences of this aspect of Torrance’s thought was Athanasius; while we will refer to a number of sources to do with Athanasius throughout this thesis, see in particular Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996), 250– 57, where Torrance explores the inseparability of Christocentric and Theocentric emphases within Athanasius’ theology. 132 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 253. 133 Thomas F. Torrance, The School of Faith (London: James Clarke and Co, 1959), xxi. 134 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 23. 135 Thomas F. Torrance, Conflict and Agreement in the Church: Order and Disorder (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996), 16.

53 oeuvre, and “faithful theological inquiry operate with positive reference to Jesus.”136 While the eternal nature of God is Triune, the incarnation is the heart of the way in which God has chosen to reveal himself to humankind, and is the one place where knowledge of God is actualised within space and time and made accessible to humanity. Torrance explains the relationship between Christology and Trinity in a precise way when he states that,

To speak about who Jesus was and is, to speak in ontological terms of his being and his work, means to speak of Jesus Christ as Son of God the Lord, and as son of David; but to speak of Jesus as Son of God means, in the same breath, speech about the Father and the Holy Spirit. No doctrine of the person of Christ in his divine and human being is possible, except in that eternal mystery and in that Trinitarian context.137 In the theological movement where we begin with the doctrine of God, and move from that to consider the doctrine of the Church, we are incorporating Torrance’s scientific theological method, especially the three characteristics which we have explored. We are utilising the kataphysic method, where the Church is to be known according to its true source, which is the Triune God who calls it into being. We are also rejecting dualism, in holding that the Church continues to be sustained by the active and ongoing work of God within space and time. Finally, we are emphasising the role of the personal knower in theological knowledge, by affirming that our knowledge of the Triune God is shaped as we participate in the life of the Church. By holding all of these elements together, we understand the Church to be the empirical body of Christ, viewed both in the light of God’s economic work through the Son and Spirit, and in the light of who the eternal God is in his own being. Our ecclesiology is prevented from becoming inappropriately subjective, for it retains its objective ground in the way that Jesus Christ reveals the transcendent God to us, as the one who “belongs both to the eternal world of divine reality and to the historical world of contingent realities.”138 This is why we have chosen to consider the pre-eminence of the doctrine of the Trinity for Torrance’s ecclesiology, which then properly incorporates Christology and pneumatology. This explicates our core assumption that the doctrine of the Holy

136 Torrance, Theological Science, 144. 137 Torrance, Incarnation, 164. 138 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 39. Torrance comments that theology which is divorced from its objective ground in God “inevitably degenerates into anthropology.” (37)

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Trinity is foundational for Torrance’s approach to the theological task. It is also worth noting that many of Torrance’s ecumenical works were published before he released his major trinitarian publications, which could be why sometimes Christocentric language is more dominant than trinitarian language.

2.4 Chapter Conclusion In this chapter, we have offered a brief biographical overview of Torrance’s life and ministry, highlighting his sense of a theological career as a personal vocation. Important features of Torrance’s theology have been introduced, which must shape our understanding of his theology, and are thus key to the continuing development of our argument. Finally, we have offered some introductory comment upon how Torrance develops his theological account of the relationship between the Trinity and the Church in such a way that we, as the human recipients of the Gospel, are made able to participate in the koinōnia of the Trinity, and on this basis, to live out our common life in such a way that others are also embraced within the Church, as the human correlate to the fellowship of the Holy Trinity.

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3 THE TRINITY: A THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATION

3.0 Chapter Abstract Our goal in this third chapter is to consider the doctrine of the Trinity as encapsulated by the phrase, ‘one being, three persons,’ and to examine how Torrance unfolds this concept. This will allow us to see how the doctrine of the Trinity is regulative for Torrance’s approach, not only to ecclesiology, but to the whole theological task. We will begin by discussing the key influences that Torrance refers to in developing his doctrine of the Trinity, including the implicit witness of Scripture, and the explicit references of the Patristic writers. We will then explore how the Trinity is progressively revealed throughout God’s acts in history, particularly through Creation, the covenantal redemption of Israel, and finally with the incarnation. After this, we will present an overview of the shape of Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity, with a particular emphasis on the correlation between the economic Trinity and ontological Trinity, or as Torrance prefers, the evangelical Trinity, and the theological Trinity.1 This will allow us to consider the koinōnia of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and God’s ‘being for others’, and to begin to point to the relevance of this for the following chapters. This chapter will highlight the fact that references to ‘the doctrine of God’ and ‘the doctrine of the Trinity’ are largely synonymous within Torrance’s work. For Torrance the doctrine of God is the doctrine of the Trinity.

3.1 Key Influences in Relation to T. F. Torrance’s Doctrine of the Holy Trinity Torrance observes that the doctrine of the Trinity is implicitly presented in Scripture’s witness to the revealing and reconciling work of God, and is then explicitly developed into doctrinal formulation by the Fathers. Although he does not undertake significant historical work to trace the chronological development of the doctrine of the Trinity after this period, he does highlight that the Reformation also is of key significance for the doctrine of the Triune God. Moreover, Torrance explores the contemporary

1 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 7.

57 relevance of the doctrine of the Trinity through selective mention of twentieth-century theologians such as Karl Rahner and Karl Barth, to whom we will refer as required.

Divine Revelation and Scripture The primary place that Torrance draws his doctrine of the Trinity from is Scripture; as he comments, “the Church must always turn to the Holy Scriptures as the immediate source and norm of all revealed knowledge of God and of his saving purpose in Jesus Christ.”2 However before we can ask, ‘What does Torrance think that Scripture says about the Trinity?’ we must first ask ‘What is Scripture?’ John Webster aptly comments that for Torrance, “questions about the nature and interpretation of scripture are subordinate to questions about divine revelation; bibliology and hermeneutics are derivative from principles about the active, intelligible presence of the triune God to his rational creatures.”3 Torrance appropriates the Patristic axiom that, ‘God can only be known through God’, and allows it to function as a theological aphorism in his own view of revelation. Since “God alone can name himself and bear witness to himself,” interpretation of Scripture cannot be reduced to deconstructing biblical texts, but must primarily be about hearing the Word of God.4 In short, God’s self-revelation “summons us to acknowledge the absolute priority of God’s Word over all the media of its communication and reception, and over all understanding and interpretation of its Truth.”5

Torrance argues that modern approaches to biblical criticism suffer from dualistic approaches that separate the historical and theological elements of the text, and impose external frameworks of interpretation upon the text which disregard its inherent unity.6 He dislikes this hermeneutical method, given that the New Testament

2 Thomas F. Torrance, Divine Meaning, Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995)), 5. In this work Torrance does not develop a full systematic account of Patristic hermeneutics, but offers representative samples of their work in order to illustrate “the way in which biblical hermeneutics is essentially a theological pursuit” (13). 3 John Webster, “T. F. Torrance on Scripture,” Scottish Journal of Theology 65, no. 1 (2012): 37. 4 Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology: The Realism of Christian Revelation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), 119. 5 Ibid., 13. This also means that our hermeneutical inquiries must take a self-critical form, “so that we may listen to [Scripture] and seek to understand it without imposing ourselves upon it.” Torrance, Divine Meaning, 7. 6 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 35–36. Torrance further argues that, “This kind of disintegration in evangelical and theological interpretation of the biblical witness to God’s threefold self-revelation, is 58 intentionally holds the historical and theological aspects of any text together. To see this we need only look at the Gospel accounts of the resurrection, which affirm Jesus’ historical actuality, but also cause us to see the empirical facts of his existence in their supernatural light.7 We may thus note that although the New Testament does not give us a formal doctrine of the Trinity, "it exhibits a coherent witness to God's trinitarian self-revelation imprinted upon its theological content in an implicit conceptual form evident in a whole complex of implicit references and indications."8 This leads Torrance to conclude that, "a theological interpretation of the New Testament Scriptures must be at once both Christological and trinitarian."9 Although we are constrained from offering a full exposition of Torrance’s doctrine of Scripture here, he helpfully summarises that Scripture does implicitly witness to the Trinity, for

the Holy Scriptures do not give us dogmatic propositions about the Trinity, but they do present us with definite witness to the oneness and differentiation between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, under the constraint of which the early Church allowed the pattern and order of God’s Triune Life to impose themselves upon its mind.10 Webster suggests that Torrance “is concerned only secondarily with scripture as literary-historical text and primarily with scripture as sign—that is, with scripture’s ostensive functions rather than with its literary surface or the historical processes of its production.”11 Torrance is more interested in what the text refers to, rather than the actual text itself. By describing Scripture as a sign, Torrance is insisting that we must not turn the written Word of God into an idol—instead, “biblical statements are to be treated, not as containing or embodying the Truth of God in themselves, but as pointing, under the leading of the Spirit of Truth, to Jesus Christ himself who is the Truth.”12 We will go on to explore further in this chapter the centrality of Jesus Christ

in its way not unlike what has been happening in modern culture in which the creative forces in human and social life have suffered severely from analytical forces of fragmentation and disintegration.” 7 Ibid., 46. 8 Ibid., 49. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., ix. For further information, see Myk Habets, “Theological Interpretation of Scripture in Sermonic Mode: The Case of T. F. Torrance,” in Ears That Hear: Explorations in Theological Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Joel B. Green and Tim Meadowcroft (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013), 43–69. 11 Webster, “T. F. Torrance on Scripture,” 37–38. 12 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 119.

59 to God’s self-revelation, but must briefly note here that because in Christ, word and deed are inseparable, Torrance describes the “union of uncreated Word and created Word”13 in Jesus Christ as “the real text of God’s self-revelation to mankind.”14 We are to look ‘through’ the New Testament, which is a secondary, signifying text, to the basic text of Jesus Christ’s obedient humanity,15 and through Christ, to the Triune God. It is God himself, through the incarnation of the Word, who we hear speaking through Holy Scripture. In the incarnation, God became a human, and spoke in human language. It is through the union of humanity and divinity in Christ that human language is made able, despite its finiteness, to "mediate God's Word to us in time through a oneness between Christ's human utterance about God and God's self-utterance to human beings."16

Another way in which Webster describes Torrance’s interpretative approach is as one of “semantically orientated interpretation,” seeking to look ‘through’ the Scriptures toward the objective reality which they signify.17 The focus is then not “thinking statements,” but “thinking realities through statements.”18 Our attention thereby does not primarily fall on the written text, but rather on the “truth content of their contents, the dynamic objective reality of the living Word of , the Son and the Holy Spirit.”19 This trinitarian interpretation of Scripture may seem to be rather convoluted, but Torrance submits that ‘indwelling’ the text is necessary in order for us to be apprehended by the knowledge of God which Scripture discloses. Scriptural interpretation seeks to hear the living voice of God by listening, rather than to dissect the text through exegetical analysis or deconstruction.20 In short, our focus should not be upon the written text, but the divine reality revealed in the text, for "it is through personal dwelling in Christ and interiorising his Word within us that we enter into a

13 Ibid., 91. 14 Ibid., 89. 15 Torrance, Divine Meaning, 7–10; Torrance, Atonement, 340. 16 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 40. See also Torrance’s comments on the difference between the union of God and man in the incarnation, and the way that this functions as an analogy for Scripture as both Word of God and word of man. Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of B.B. Warfield, the Inspiration and Authority of the Bible,” Scottish Journal of Theology 7, no. 1 (Mar 1954): 104–08. 17Webster, “T. F. Torrance on Scripture,” 53. 18 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 44. 19 Ibid., 37. Torrance terms this approach ‘depth exegesis’ and attributes his own use of it to William Manson. 20 Ibid., 39.

60 cognitive union with him as God incarnate," and that Scripture becomes a means through which God speaks personally and directly to us.21

This approach to Scripture is further illuminated by noting Torrance’s opposition to ‘evangelical fundamentalism’ and its static view of revelation. Rejecting the necessity of continually hearing God speak afresh to us by the Holy Spirit, this kind of fundamentalism instead operates with a rigid framework in which doctrinal beliefs are given “a finality and rigidity in themselves,” and cut off from God’s continuing work, “so that the Bible is treated as a self-contained corpus of divine truths in propositional form endowed with an infallibility of statement which provides the justification felt to be needed for the rigid framework of belief within which fundamentalism barricades itself.”22 This sort of reading, at its extreme, leads to the argument that we cannot know that God is a Trinity, because the terminology that we use does not appear in the Bible. Instead, Torrance argues that Scripture’s “imperfection comes under the judgment of the perfection to which it bears witness and in which it shares,”23 and urges us to look beyond the written words, and to “learn to trace back their objective reference beyond what is written to their source in the infinite depth of Truth in the Being of God.”24 This means that,

the meaning and truth of divine revelation conveyed to us through the Scriptures cannot be read off the linguistic patterns apparent in them or be deduced from the statements of the biblical authors as if they contained the truth in themselves, but may be discerned only by following through the semantic reference of biblical statements to the divine realities upon which they rest, and by thinking them out theologically within the whole organic frame of God’s revealing and saving activity as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.25 Torrance consequently views the whole of Scripture as witnessing to the Triune God, for it was written under the “creative impact of divine revelation.”26 The Gospels, with their written description of Christ’s life, ministry and teaching, show us the historical manifestation of God as Father, Son and Spirit, particularly in their account of Jesus’

21 Ibid., 38. 22 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 17. 23 Torrance, Atonement, 337. 24 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 109. 25 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 43. 26 Ibid., 35.

61 .27 The Fourth Gospel reveals the mutuality between Father, Son and Spirit, through Jesus’ ‘I am’ sayings,28 as well as through his discourse about the Holy Spirit on the night before the crucifixion. Throughout the , there are various references to the Triune persons, and forms of triadic expression—of which Torrance comments that although “they do not give us an explicit doctrine of the Holy Trinity, they do more than pave the way for it.”29 Torrance usually utilises the order of the Triune persons that is provided in the baptismal formula (Matt 28:19), of Father, Son and Holy Spirit,30 and observes that he ascribes “primary importance” to this order.31 As an alternative, he uses the order given in the doxological benediction of 2 Corinthians 13:14, of Son, Father, and Holy Spirit, for it is in this order that we come to know the persons of the Trinity.32 The different orders in which Scripture refers to the Triune persons show that they are “distinguished by position and not status, by form and not being, by sequence and not power, for they are fully and perfectly equal.”33 There is no ontological hierarchy within the Trinity for Torrance, the implications of which we will return to throughout this thesis.

It is important to note here that Torrance’s approach to Scripture, and how he views it as revealing the Triune God, is strongly correlated with his doctrinal position on the Trinity. While Torrance insists that he derives his doctrine of the Trinity from Scripture, we must acknowledge that there is an obvious interplay between Scripture and tradition in his work, and that at points it seems that tradition influenced Torrance’s reading of Scripture rather more than he lets on. As an example, Webster notes that although Torrance draws upon the Fathers to develop his doctrine of the

27 Ibid., 43. 28 Ibid., 48, 58, 71, 164, 95. 29 Ibid., 71. 30 This is the order taken in Chapter 6, ‘Three Persons, One Being’, in The Christian Doctrine of God, 136– 167. 31 Ibid., 137. Torrance also makes note of 2 Corinthians 13:14, 1 Corinthians 12:4–6, Galatians 4:4–6 and Ephesians 4:4–6. These are all explicit triadic formulations—but notably, the persons are mentioned in different orders, so that there is no sense of a hierarchical being developed. 32 Thomas F. Torrance, “A Sermon on the Trinity,” Biblical Theology 6, no. 2 (1956): serves as an example, as does Chapter 3, ‘The Biblical Frame’ in The Christian Doctrine of God, 32–72. These different orders demonstrate the difference between the ordo cognoscendi (order of knowing) and ordo essendi (order of being.) 33 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 176.

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Trinity, Torrance demonstrates a “curious lack of attention to the use of scripture in the pre-modern , and to its commentarial modes of theology.”34 This weakness is not only present in the way that Torrance interacts with the Fathers, as there is a significant lack of sustained exegesis throughout many of Torrance’s works, although this has been remedied somewhat by the publication of Incarnation and Atonement, which do an excellent job of direct Scriptural citation.

Webster identifies the real issue in Torrance’s use of Scripture as his “distance from inquiries into the pragmatics of scripture and Christian literary culture,”35 and consequent lack of interest in “portraying textual culture: how texts are produced, disseminated and appropriated.”36 Attention to the text itself tends to fall by the wayside because Torrance is so committed to focusing on that which the text refers tothe reality behind the words. Sarisky raises a complementary objection to Webster’s here, noting that although Torrance’s trinitarian approach to Scriptural interpretation aims to show how the Biblical text reveals God to us as Triune, it does not give enough consideration to historical or literary considerations, or to the human as the interpretive agent. Sarisky is concerned that reading Scripture from this a priori position limits the freedom of the text to speak, while the assumptions held by the interpreter may also constrain their interpretative ability.37 These are real concerns, and while they do not require us to dismiss Torrance’s trinitarian theology, it behoves the reader to be aware that this is part of a wider pattern for Torrance where he draws on sources and finds in them the support that he wants to. We will discuss this further in relation to Torrance’s use of patristic sources.

Patristic Influences Drawing on Scripture, and the apostolic tradition—the ‘deposit of faith’, which we will discuss in Chapter 6—Torrance attributes the formalisation of the doctrine of the

34 Webster, “T. F. Torrance on Scripture,” 59. 35 Ibid., 60. 36 Ibid. 37 Darren Sarisky, “T. F. Torrance on Biblical Interpretation,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 11, no. 3 (July 2009): 345. Also, see Bryan J. Gray, “Towards Better Ways of Reading the Bible,” Scottish Journal of Theology 33, no. 4 (1980): 301–15. This is another perspective on Torrance’s hermeneutical method, in which Gray argues that Torrance’s theological methodology can profitably be brought into dialogue with the hermeneutics of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.

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Trinity to the Fathers. Certain writers from this period stand out in Torrance’s work, and The Trinitarian Faith offers a detailed examination of both the Nicene, post-Nicene, and Constantinopolitan Fathers, and their varying perspectives on the Trinity. In The Trinitarian Faith, Torrance claims that he tries “to let the patristic theologians concerned, almost entirely from the Greek East, speak for themselves, without the intrusion of material derived from later sources.”38 The efficacy of this stated methodology is debatable, given that Torrance also notes that he seeks to “bring to light the inner theological connections which gave coherent structure to the classical theology of the ancient Catholic Church.”39 Because Torrance has a specific doctrinal aim in his selection of material for The Trinitarian Faith, it is more useful as a source which shows us the specific ways that he drew upon the Fathers to develop his own trinitarian theology, as opposed to offering an unbiased presentation of the Fathers’ thought.

While Torrance’s use of the Fathers is not our primary concern, we may note that Irenaeus and Athanasius are the dominant figures from whom Torrance draws in developing his doctrine of the Trinity.40 This is particularly dependent upon their Christology.41 Athanasius was certainly the most influential of the Fathers for

38 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 2. 39 Ibid. 40 ‘The Doctrine of the Trinity According to St Athanasius,’ in Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 7–20. Additionally, see the chapter ‘Athanasius: A Study in the Foundations of Classical Theology,’ in Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 215–66, in which Torrance traces Athanasius’ doctrine of God, doctrine of the Incarnate Son, and doctrine of the Holy Spirit, before turning to how these shape his theological method. This chapter is among the most helpful articles that Torrance wrote on Athanasius, particularly in relation to our explorations in this thesis, as it clearly shows many of the places where Torrance’s own theology bears close resemblance to the position held by Athanasius. Torrance highlights Athanasius’ insistence that we must maintain both the distinction of the world in relation to God, and yet its dependence on God (220–221), the epistemological centrality of the incarnation, and our knowledge of the internal relations of God which are key for genuine theological knowledge (222–224), the insistence that the incarnation falls within the life of God since it is the eternal Son that becomes incarnate, assuming our whole humanity in a vicarious manner (224–229), the importance of Christ’s mediatorial role in salvation, and how this shapes atonement (229–231), the inseparability of the Son and Spirit in terms of God’s being and work, and how this affects our participation in the life of the Trinity (231–239), and the approach where theological language and method must be shaped by its content (239–265.) 41 Torrance, Incarnation, 198. Athanasius, Irenaeus and Cyril are seen by Torrance as the representative figures of a Christological tradition which, by linking the incarnation and atonement, avoided the docetic tendencies of the Alexandrian School, and the ebionite tendencies of the Antiochene School. We will explore their significance further in Chapter 8, where we note that it is Athanasius’ perspective on the 64

Torrance in terms of trinitarian theology, particularly in his role in the Church’s reconstruction of epistemology and philosophy which cleared the philosophical ground for the formulation of the Nicene .42 Athanasius also provided the first formal statement on the relationship between Christology and the doctrine of the Spirit, which was a precursor of acknowledging the homoousion of the Spirit at Constantinople.43

Torrance cites Irenaeus as an example of how early confessions of faith and doctrine were not reached through logical deduction, but instead were understood to be “statements that are ordered and integrated from beyond themselves by their common ground in the apostolic deposit of Faith.”44 The Council of Nicea gathered in 325AD to counter the Arian teaching that the Son was a creature and therefore not eternally co- existent with the Father, among other theological issues. The of the Son was affirmed in the original , but it was not until post-325AD that the need to also affirm the deity of the Spirit became apparent. It was at the Council of Constantinople in 381AD, that the adapted Creed affirmed that both the Son and Spirit are homoousios—of the same being—as the Father,45 an event which Torrance considers “something of definitive and irreversible significance” for the Church.46 It is in this light that Torrance views the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as the “supreme Ecumenical Creed of Christendom.”47 It does not contain any ‘new’ truth, but functions

Trinity that Torrance utilises in seeking common ground for ecumenical dialogue between the Reformed and Orthodox Churches. 42 Thomas F. Torrance, “Athanasius: A Reassessment of His Theology,” Abba Salama 5 (1974): 186. Torrance also notes that even though Athanasius is associated with Alexandria—and benefited from the development of a philosophy of science there, along with the teaching of Clement and , he stands more firmly in the biblical-theological tradition of Irenaeus; thus Athanasius played a key role in articulating the Hebraic and Christian understanding of God in a way that was unfettered by Hellenistic philosophical categories. See Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 215–18. 43 Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of C.R.B. Shapland (Trans.), the Letters of St Athanasius: Concerning the Holy Spirit,” Scottish Journal of Theology 5, no. 2 (June 1952): 205–06. 44 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 76. For a fuller sample of Torrance’s engagement with Irenaeus’ teaching, take note of Thomas F. Torrance, “The Deposit of Faith,” Scottish Journal of Theology 36, no. 1 (1983): 128; Thomas F. Torrance, “Kerygmatic Proclamation of the Gospel: The Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching of Irenaios of Lyons',” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 37, no. 1–2 (1992): 105–121. 45 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 2–3. 46 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, ix–x. 47 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 17.

65 as an elucidatory doctrinal statement. Torrance supports this view of the Creed by citing Athanasius again, who viewed the Nicene Creed as standing in continuity with the apostolic deposit, the tradition of the Church, and the content of the Scriptures.48

Discussing Torrance’s use of the Fathers, Jason Radcliff has produced a work that does an excellent job of situating and constructively critiquing Torrance’s reading of the Fathers. Noting that there are three modern Protestant approaches that emerge from the ‘rediscovery’ of the Fathers—either to convert to Orthodoxy or Catholicism, to selectively adopt aspects of the Patristic literature as is done by the Emergent Church, or to re-appropriate the Fathers, and integrate them into one’s modern tradition,49 Radcliff places Torrance firmly in the third category, noting that Torrance’s “imaginative reconstruction” of the Fathers, is not that of a patrologist, but rather of a theologian who “uses them as theological conversation partners at the great ecumenical and historical table of Christianity.”50 Radcliff concludes that Torrance’s reading of the Fathers has significant evangelical and ecumenical potential as an example for those who want to re-appropriate the Fathers, but remain faithful to their own tradition. This is despite the fact that Torrance can be criticised for the way that he sometimes goes too far in amalgamating modern and patristic theology, especially with his tendency to make Athanasius sound like Barth.51 Radcliff’s analysis is that Torrance’s use of the patristic tradition deserves to be critically adopted, but that in doing so, one must be aware which elements of Torrance’s reading of the Fathers belong to his specific context, where he “reads the Fathers from a theological and Reformed evangelical perspective.”52 Radcliff particularly notes Torrance’s extended rejection of dualism, and his debate as to the correct reading of the Cappadocians, as

48 Ibid., 14; Torrance, “The Deposit of Faith,” 14. Torrance argues that through its emphasis on summarising Holy Scripture and the apostolic tradition into a creedal form, the Council of Nicea actually solidified the place of Scripture in the mind of the Church. 49 Jason Robert Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the : A Reformed, Evangelical, and Ecumenical Reconstruction of the Patristic Tradition (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 25-53. 50 Ibid., 55-56. 51 Ibid., 23, 193. 52 Jason Radcliff, “T.F. Torrance and the Patristic Consensus on the Doctrine of the Trinity,” in The Holy Trinity Revisited: Essays in Response to Stephen R. Holmes, eds. Thomas A. Noble and Jason S. Sexton (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2015), 78.

66 two specific points that should be revisited, and possibly set aside.53 This is a useful insight, but one that should not unduly concern the reader, as many scholars are susceptible to the charge of a biased reading of sources in some way.

Reformation and Modern Influences Torrance does not have much to say about the development of the doctrine of the Trinity during the medieval period, and when he does, it is usually to highlight the contrast between Reformation theology and Latin theology. Torrance views Latin theology as following Aquinas, beginning with a philosophical ontology, and then ‘adding on’ the Biblical idea of God. Due to the a priori framework of Aquinas, this concept of God was captive to the general concept of being, so that Torrance calls Thomism “the most determinist of all Christian theologies.”54

Alongside the Nicene period, Torrance views the Reformation as the other pivotal moment of doctrinal development for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The Reformation emphasised God’s being in his acts, and his acts in his being, returning to the biblical conception of the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ.55 We see this in the way that John Calvin is a key figure in Torrance’s thought.56 His influence on Torrance’s doctrine

53 Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers, 182-199, comprises Radcliff’s final chapter ‘An Assessment and Proposed Adoption of Torrance’. 54 Torrance, The School of Faith, lxxi. Some exceptions are found, albeit in passing. One such example is when in a review of a translation of Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences, Torrance highlights that Lombard placed the doctrine of the Trinity at the start of his doctrinal corpus, despite the fact that neither Aquinas, nor the Roman Catholic tradition followed his work in this direction. See Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of Peter Lombard, Sententiae in Iv Libris Distinctae. Editio Tertia. Ad Fidem Codicum Antiquiorum Restituta. Tom. I, Pars I: Prolegomena “ Scottish Journal of Theology 26, no. 4 (1973): 490. 55 Torrance, The School of Faith, lxxii–lxxiii. Torrance notes four categories of the Reformed doctrine of God: (1) God is only known as He gives Himself to be known through his Word, but he has actually done so in Jesus Christ, (2) The Creator God is entirely distinct from creation, but so all reality is dependent upon Him for its existence, (3) God has drawn humanity into covenant with himself, and continues to intervene in history in order to fulfil His covenantal promises, (4) It is Christ who governs our knowledge of God, so that we cannot define God according to some prior ontology, but only from Christology. Thus, we know God from the way that God is revealed in Christ, but this opens up into a much fuller understanding of the Triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 56 Among Torrance’s earliest full-length works is Torrance, Calvin's Doctrine of Man. Torrance remarks at the start of this work that Calvin’s theology has often been misinterpreted due to the use of “arid logical forms,” resulting in an oversimplification which “obscures the flexibility as well as the range and profundity of his thought.”(7) For further reflections on Calvin and Torrance’s exploration of his theology, see also Thomas F. Torrance, “Calvin on the Knowledge of God,” The Christian Century LXXXI, no. 22 (May 27, 1965):696–699; Thomas F. Torrance, “Introduction,” in A Calvin Treasury—Selections from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. William F. Keesecker (London: SCM, 1963), v–xiii; Thomas F. Torrance, “Our Witness through Doctrine,” in Proceedings of the 17th General Council of the 67 of the Trinity is evidenced by Torrance’s summary of Calvin’s ‘guiding principles’ which he uses to set the tone at the start of The Christian Doctrine of God. Torrance notes that (1) Calvin had a profoundly reverent attitude of mind, considering the being of God as “more to be worshipped than investigated.” It is not difficult to see the similarity with Torrance’s oft-used phrase, “The Trinity is more to be adored than expressed.”57 (2) Calvin rejects abstract questions about ‘What is God’, and instead asks, ‘Who is God,’ considering the concrete way in which God has revealed himself to humanity. Torrance also argues that we must focus on what God has done, not what he could have done, thereby rejecting any knowledge of God that does not derive from his manifestations in space and time.58 (3) Calvin maintains that since God alone knows himself, God can only be known through God, so that we cannot know the Triune God except through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Torrance also follows this approach, although he tends to cite Irenaeus as the originating source of this idea. (4) Calvin insists that to speak of God as Triune is to describe the very being of God, and is not just a way of thinking about God.59 Echoing this, Torrance argues that we are required to speak of God as Triune, since this is in accordance with how God has revealed himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Regrettably, despite the significant shift which took place in the doctrine of God at the Reformation, later Reformed theology tended to drift back towards mirroring the abstract nature of scholasticism, developing its doctrine of God in abstraction from the work of Christ, resulting in an impersonal and distant concept of God.60 This same tendency is present in the contemporary tendency to separate the ‘one God’ from the ‘Triune God,’ a move which Torrance also traces back to medieval theology.

Alliance of Reformed Churches Throughout the World Holding the Presbyterian Order, Princeton (Geneva: World Presbyterian Alliance, 1954), 135. 57 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 81, 151, 93. Torrance also illustrates the mystery of God’s being with his frequent use of an Athanasian quote, “Thus far human knowledge goes. Here the cherubim spread the covering of their wings.” 58 Ibid., 204. See also Thomas F. Torrance, “Predestination in Christ,” Evangelical Quarterly 13 (1941): 114, where Torrance attributes this point to H.R. Mackintosh. 59 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 10–13. See also the chapter ‘Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity’ in Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 41–76. 60 Torrance, The School of Faith, lxx–lxxix.

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In the contemporary context, Torrance attributes the re-centralisation of the doctrine of the Trinity to “the epoch-making work of Karl Barth,”61 observing that Barth discusses the doctrine of the Holy Trinity “with an insight and profundity not matched since the high zenith of Patristic Theology.”62 In Torrance’s reading of Barth, Barth’s emphasis upon the evangelical significance of the Trinity is vital because it sets Christian theology back upon a soteriological basis.63 Torrance mentions other theologians who followed Barth in his re-centralisation of the Trinity, including H.R. Mackintosh—who we saw in the last chapter was a key figure in Torrance’s theological education; and Karl Rahner, a Roman Catholic theologian who shares Barth’s rejection of any division between the ‘one God’ and the ‘Triune God.’64 Torrance suggests that figures such as these, rejecting the inherent dualism that such a division entails, have done much to recover the classical doctrine of the Holy Trinity.65 Torrance also derived great ecumenical hope from the fact that despite their divergent denominational backgrounds, Barth and Rahner reached very similar conclusions in their doctrine of the Trinity.66

61 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 9. See also Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 99–101, where Torrance notes that to separate the 'one God' and the 'Triune God' so isolates the doctrine of the Holy Trinity that it ends up divorced from salvation history. 62 Torrance, “Karl Barth,” 3. 63 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 9. It is worth noting that Torrance is careful in his own work to avoid the reduction of the doctrine of the Trinity to soteriology, in order to avoid any blurring of the distinction between God’s transcendent self, and God’s relationship to the world. In the next section we will explore the evangelical significance of the Trinity in Torrance’s work, and the way that this is grounded in the being of God in se, so that although soteriological outcomes are inherent to who God is, they are not necessary. 64 Ibid., 9–10. For Torrance’s evaluation of Rahner’s contribution on the doctrine of the Trinity, see ‘Toward an Ecumenical Consensus on the Trinity’ in Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 77–102, where Torrance evaluates Rahner’s statement that “the Economic Trinity is the Immanent Trinity and the Immanent Trinity is the Economic Trinity,” noting its limitations and suggesting some changes that could be made to deepen its ecumenical significance. 65 Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 4. Torrance also highlights that Barth tended to orient himself toward the Greek rather than the Latin Patristics. See Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth and Patristic Theology,” in Theology beyond Christendom: Essays on the Centenary of the Birth of Karl Barth, edited by John Thomson (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1986), 219. Torrance goes on in this article to highlight elements of Barth’s theology and their Patristic derivation. 66 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 286.

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3.2 The Revealing of the Doctrine of God We come now to the actual content of Torrance’s doctrine of God, or as it has been traditionally viewed, ‘theology proper.’ Torrance views the doctrine of the Trinity as “the innermost heart of the Christian Faith, the central dogma of classical theology, the fundamental grammar of our knowledge of God.”67 The doctrine of the Trinity signals one of the most startling mysteries and distinctive aspects of the Christian faith: God wants to be known by those whom he has created—humanity was created to be in relationship with their Creator. We will demonstrate how the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is full of redemptive significance, following Torrance’s proposal that since all that God does in love for humanity flows from his very being, then the transcendent doctrine of the Holy Trinity is to do with the “lofty yet down-to-earth truth of the Gospel.”68 Torrance wonderfully summarises this when he writes,

God is not some immutable, impassible deity locked up in his self-isolation who cannot be touched with our human feelings, pains and hurts, but on the contrary is the kind of God who freely acts and passionately interacts with us in this world, for in his own eternal Being he is the ever living, loving and acting God who will not be without us but who in his grace freely determines himself for us as our God and Saviour.69 For Torrance, the springboard from which we may plunge into the depths of the Holy Trinity is the incarnation, for while it is “in our understanding of the trinitarian relations in God himself that we have the ground and grammar of a realist theology,”70 it is the person of Jesus Christ who is the interpretative key to the Trinity. We can have no knowledge of the Triune God in abstraction from the concrete way that God has

67 Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 1. 68 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 8. 69 Ibid., 4. A development which is (loosely) based upon Torrance’s theology, and is quite helpful here, is a comparison of ‘Holiness as Separation’, and ‘Holiness as a Communion of Love’ in T. A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 209–24. Noble explores the implications of these two models, noting that the Fathers rarely associate ‘love’ with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Whereas Augustine developed the analogy of a rational soul (memory, understanding and will), leading to a doctrine of the Trinity as being, knowing and loving, Western theology tended to take Augustine’s analogy in abstraction from the oikonomia of God in history. Nevertheless, Noble traces the sense of the Trinity as a communion of love back to Augustine. Although Noble is focusing on the concept of holiness, he identifies Moltmann and Zizioulas as leading proponents of the social Trinity in the twentieth century, but is sceptical about the way they both find the basis for their own denominational ecclesiology in the Trinity. He appreciatively cites Torrance as an answer to his critiques of Moltmann and Zizioulas (see 215, fn. 41, and 218, fn.46). 70 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, xi.

70 revealed himself in the world; it is in God’s acts that take place within space and time that we learn that he is not a God who is far off and removed, but a God of redemptive love who is actively at work in history to fulfil his salvific purposes.71 It is thus with the doctrine of the incarnation that we take up our consideration of the Holy Trinity,72 following Torrance’s observation that,

It is certainly the incarnation of the eternal Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ which prescribes for us in Christian theology both its proper matter and form, so that whether in its activity as a whole or in the formulation of a doctrine in any part, it is the Christological pattern that will appear throughout the whole body of Christian dogmatics.73 We need to keep in mind that Torrance subsequently notes that while all theology must be expressed in relation to Christology, it cannot be reduced to Christology.74 This is a particularly relevant statement given that Christ is the epistemic key to knowledge of the Trinity as we explored at the end of the previous chapter, and will continue to explore here. We must simultaneously be careful not to divorce our knowledge of Christ from the knowledge of God revealed in the Old Testament, both through creation, and the redemption of Israel. We will therefore begin this section by briefly considering the partial knowledge of God revealed in the Old Testament, before turning to what we must say about God in the light of his full revelation as Father, Son and Spirit.

The Trinitarian Work of Creation While God has made himself known since the beginning of the world, creation by itself does not give rise to the personal knowledge of God that we receive through the Son and in the Spirit.75 Since there is no direct correlation of identity between God and what he has made, we cannot extrapolate about what God must be like on the basis of what the world is like. If we do this, we create a concept of a God who is quite different to

71 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 8. 72 Ibid., 29. 73 Ibid., 1. 74 Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology: Vol 1, the Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), xvii, also comments that not all theology is Christology, although the first volume of her Systematic Theology focuses upon the oneness, rather than the threeness, of God. This is in direct comparison to the argument we have been advancing, which is that Torrance advocates for the three- in-oneness of God, and never either the three or the one. 75 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 25.

71 the God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ. This is all stating again what we have already said about Torrance’s rejection of natural theology.

A helpful short dictum for thinking about the work of God in creation is Athanasius’ statement that that while “God was always Father, he was not always Creator or Maker.”76 The first is an ontological and uncreated relation of identity; the second is a contingent, created relation.77 The Fatherhood of God is intrinsic to his being—since God has always been Father, Son and Holy Spirit—but creating the world out of nothing was something new, so that God’s Fatherhood is not constituted by his relationship to creation. Again quoting Torrance, “While God was always Father and was Father independently of what he has created, as Creator he acted in a way that he had not done before, in bringing about absolutely new events—this means that the creation of the world out of nothing is something new even for God. God was always Father, but he became Creator.”78 Although we may name God ‘Father’ as the unbegotten source and creator of all that exists, this is quite a different sense from the way in which we must think of God as the unique Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, a distinct Triune hypostasis. Torrance takes his cue in this from another Athanasian quote that, “It would be more godly and true to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name God from his works alone and call him Unoriginate.”79

Creation is a trinitarian work, and to argue otherwise results in a curtailed understanding of the scope of God’s redemptive work.80 Even though creation is a ‘new’ act for God, Torrance considers it proper to God’s being, for it was not something that God was forced to undertake but an act that overflows from his being, an act of divine freedom and love. We will explore more fully the way that we must think of God’s Triune being as ‘being for others’ shortly, but it suffices here to note that both creation and incarnation reveal God's freedom to do new things outside of his own being without compromising his transcendence. Torrance thus rejects a concept of God as

76 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 87. 77 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 207. 78 Ibid., 208. Emphasis original. 79 Ibid., 49. Molnar makes some helpful observations about the significance of this quote for the theology of both Barth and Torrance—see Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit, 92–4. 80 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 8.

72 the '', or the 'Moved Unmover,' suggesting instead that since God can only be self-moved, we need to retain the "biblical concept of the freedom of God who, while remaining constantly the one who he is, is also the one who is eternally new and constantly surpasses himself in all that he does."81 The paradoxical way in which God is distinct from creation, yet has freely chosen to be present within it, is developed by Torrance’s focus of the strong connection between creation and covenant. While we will explore the idea of a covenant of grace that comes from the Reformed tradition in the next chapter, we may note here that Torrance observes that it is unsurprising that

"the creation and its history should bear the imprint of the Trinity upon it."82

We cannot divorce our consideration of the way that the Triune God is revealed in creation from the covenantal history of Israel, for it was in the light of their redemption that they viewed God’s creative acts. We can also not divorce it from the incarnation, for Torrance believes that when we view the divine act of creating through the lens of the incarnation, and see God’s free outpouring of love manifest in Jesus Christ, we find the basis on which we may—reverently—speak of a reason for creation. We consequently understand the Creator–creation relation in the light of the incarnation; the universe’s existence is upheld on the basis of God’s being as love.83 Because the divine love revealed in the incarnation lies at the very heart of God's being, then creation itself is to be understood by that very love.84 As Torrance summarises, “creation is proleptically conditioned by redemption.”85 Held together, creation involves humans being made in the image of God; the re-creation involves God taking on the image of humanity, involving incarnation and substitution.86

81 Ibid., 239. Emphasis original. 82 Ibid., 219. 83 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, 14. 84 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 209–10. 85 Ibid., 204. See also Myk Habets, “How Creation Is Proleptically Conditioned by Redemption,” Colloquium 41 (2009): 3–21; which is supplemented by the discussion in Habets, Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance, 145–61. Habets suggests that Torrance’s development of the way in which God’s ultimate intentions are revealed in the creation and actualised in the incarnation has been suggested previously, “but never worked out with as much acumen as it is by Torrance” (157). 86 Torrance, Incarnation, 39–40.

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Creation is the work of the whole Trinity, for as Torrance concludes, “the whole raison d’être of the universe lies in the fact that God will not be alone, that he will not be without us, but has freely and purposely created the universe and bound it to himself as the sphere where he may ungrudgingly pour out his love, and where we may enjoy communion with him.”87 At the same time, a properly trinitarian doctrine of creation should also note the hypostatic distinctions in creation as noted by Torrance: the love poured out by the Father, from whom the Son and Spirit proceed; the Son who demonstrates that God does not hold himself apart from the world, but comes so radically and fully into it that redemption and creation overlap, for God both becomes one of us in our littleness while maintaining his transcendent otherness; and the Spirit, who sustains the universe in both its contingence and its freedom.88

Israel’s Role in Anticipating the Triune God Having seen that creation is a Triune work, even though the internal relations of God’s being are not explicitly referred to in the Old Testament, we must next consider how the Trinity is pointed to in God’s interaction with the people of Israel. Israel was chosen to fulfil a purpose that transcended their own national existence—they were to be the primary conduit of God’s self-revelation. The image of Israel being ‘moulded’ is frequently used by Torrance, drawing on the metaphor of a potter who continues to mould the clay on his pottery wheel until he is happy with the finished creation; in the same way God continued to mould Israel throughout the centuries in such a way that their communal existence prepared the way for the incarnation to take place. Torrance directly explains what he draws from this metaphor, stating that “in [God’s] desire to reveal himself and make himself knowable to mankind, he selected one small race out of the whole of humanity, and subjected it to intensive interaction and dialogue with himself in such a way that he might mould and shape this people in the service of his self-revelation.”89 There is more to be said here about the preparatory role of Israel, but we will consider that in the next chapter in the context of considering Israel as a phase of the ecclesia rather than in terms of trinitarian anticipation.

87 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 94–5. 88 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 217. 89 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 7.

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Israel’s primary knowledge of God was drawn from the context of the covenant, and revealed to them through God’s redemptive works on their behalf. God was known to Israel both as their Creator and , but knowledge of God as he was in his own being was restricted by the demarcation that existed between God and the people. The mediatorial office of the priesthood was a visible sign of this sense of separation, and resulted in a strong reluctance to irreverently intrude into the mysteries of God. This was based upon God’s declaration to Moses that no one may see God’s face and live (Exodus 33:20).90 Late Judaism also veered further away from the positive knowledge of God revealed in his acts, instead holding God “to be so utterly transcendent that he is ineffable and unnameable, quite unknowable in the undifferentiated oneness of his being, so that any claim to know him in himself was rejected with horror as impiety.”91 This was one of the significant points of divergence between Judaism and the early Church, for while Judaism increasingly viewed God as far off, the Christian Church acknowledged the fundamental revolution that took place with the incarnation. God was no longer knowable only according to his external relations, for through Christ and the Spirit God’s internally differentiated being is revealed.92

We noted earlier, in our discussion of the way Torrance draws on Scripture to develop a doctrine of the Trinity, the trinitarian significance of Jesus’ using ‘I am’ language in the Gospel of John. Continuing in this vein, Torrance notes the clear link between God’s self-naming to Israel as Yahweh—‘I am’, and Jesus’ adoption of this language, as revealing the identity of being between the Father and the Son. In the OT, this self- naming is in the context of God’s covenantal redemption of Israel, where God is known through his actions to redeem Israel, but it was not until the Son’s incarnation that God could be known “familiarly and personally.”93 This is again strengthened by Jesus' own use of ‘I am’; in him, we meet God personally, and when Jesus Christ speaks, it is God who we hear speaking.94 There is no conflict between the which was vital to Israel’s faith, and the unfolding trinitarian revelation of the New Testament, so that

90 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 67. 91 Ibid., 66. 92 Ibid., 66–67. 93 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 14. 94 Ibid., 120.

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Torrance can insist, “Nowhere is there any suggestion either that this new revelation of God as Father, through Jesus Christ his Son and the Communion of the Holy Spirit, is given or received apart from God’s revelation of himself through the medium of Israel. Jesus himself was a Jew, and insisted that salvation is from the Jews, and that Jews know whom they worship while Gentiles do not.”95

The Incarnation and the Revelation of the Triune God On this basis, it is fitting to return to the centrality of the incarnation for our knowledge of God. We have noted that the Patristic emphasis on the incarnation as the key to knowledge of the Triune God is key for Torrance’s conclusion that there is no knowledge of God available to humanity unless God reveals himself to us. More specifically, Irenaeus’ describes Jesus as the ‘bridge’ between God and humanity; Christ is both fully God and fully human, so it is uniquely in him that there exists no gap between human knowledge of God, and God’s self-knowledge. Jesus is fully human, and yet his divine nature is “grounded in, derived from and is continuously upheld by what is called the ‘consubstantial communion’ within the Holy Trinity.”96 Christ’s being as the incarnate Son falls within the eternal Triune being,97 so that the explains how we can truly know God as he is in himself, through God becoming human.98 It is thus that Torrance terms the self-revelation of God through Jesus Christ as the “greatest revolution in our knowledge of God.”99 God is no longer far off and unknowable, but comes to us in Christ, condescending to be with us without losing his transcendence, drawing us into communion.

The following quote, although lengthy, summarises the doctrine of the incarnation well,

By the Incarnation Christian theology means that at a definite point in space and time the Son of God became man, born at Bethlehem of Mary, a virgin espoused to a man called Joseph, a Jew of the tribe and lineage of David, and towards the

95 Ibid., 67. 96 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 65. 97 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 75–77; Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 32–34; Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 1. See also Paul D. Molnar, “God's Self- Communication in Christ: A Comparison of Thomas F. Torrance and Karl Rahner,” Scottish Journal of Theology 50, no. 3 (1997): 75. 98Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 160. 99 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 3.

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end of the reign of Herod the Great in Judaea. Given the name of Jesus, He fulfilled His mission from the Father, living out the span of earthly life allotted to Him until He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, but when after three days He rose again from the dead the eyes of Jesus’ disciples were opened to what it all meant: they knew Him to be God’s Son, declared with power and installed in Messianic Office, and so they went out to proclaim Him to all nations as the Lord and Saviour of the World. Thus it is the faith and understanding of the Christian Church that in Jesus Christ God Himself in His own Being has come into our world and is actively present as personal Agent within our physical and historical existence. As both God of God and Man of man Jesus Christ is the actual Mediator between God and man and man and God in all things, even in regard to space-time relations. He constitutes in Himself the rational and personal Medium in whom God meets man in his creaturely reality and brings man without, having to leave his creaturely reality, into communion with Himself.100

Jesus Christ is the complete and true revelation of the eternal God, come within time and space. It is through Jesus Christ’s unique relationship to the Father that we are able to know God as our Father, and are invited into the communion of the Trinity. In the other direction, it is in the light of the Father’s love revealed through the Son, that we know God as the Creator who has freely chosen to be ‘for others’, and to act to reconcile and redeem his creation. Since Torrance argues that theological inquiry should know God in accordance with the way that his internal relations are disclosed to us through the incarnation,101 we must begin with the fact that,

It is only in Christ in whom God’s self-revelation is identical with himself that we may rightly apprehend it and really know God as he is in himself, in the oneness and differentiation of God within his own eternal Being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for what God is toward us in his historical self-manifestation in the Gospel as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he is revealed to be inherently and eternally in himself.102

100 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, 52. A short accessible Advent reflection on the incarnation can be found in Thomas F. Torrance, “The First-Born of All Creation,” Life and Work (Dec 1976): 12–14. Helpful secondary reflections on the centrality of the incarnation for Torrance can be found in Andrew Purves, “Who Is the Incarnate Saviour of the World,” in An Introduction to Torrance Theology: Discovering the Incarnate Saviour, ed. Gerrit Scott Dawson, (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 23–32; Elmer M. Colyer, “The Incarnate Saviour: T. F. Torrance on the Atonement,” in An Introduction to Torrance Theology: Discovering the Incarnate Saviour, ed. Gerrit Scott Dawson, (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 33– 54. 101 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 151. 102 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 1. See also Thomas F. Torrance, “The Christian Apprehension of God the Father,” in Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism, ed. Alvin F. Kimel Jr. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 120–43.

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This is the deep theological truth that Torrance refers to when he reminds us that there is no God behind the back of Jesus, demonstrating the evangelical significance of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. If there were, we could not help but live anxiously lest the God who we will meet at the end of the age is different from the God who meets us in Jesus Christ.103 Familiarity with the concept of the homoousion will be of great help in understanding this further. In simple terms, the homoousion affirms the absolute identity of being between the Father, Son and Spirit. It operates as an "exegetical and clarificatory expression," but also as an "interpretative instrument of thought."104 We noted earlier that it was at Nicea in 325AD that the homoousion of the Son and Father was affirmed. Torrance states that the homoousion stands for the Church’s assertion that Jesus Christ is,

Not a mere symbol, some representation of God detached from God, but God in his own Being and Act come among us, expressing in our human form the Word which he is eternally in himself, so that in our relations with Jesus Christ we have to do directly with the of God. As the epitomized expression of that fact, the homoousion is the ontological and epistemological linchpin of Christian theology. With it, everything hangs together; without it, everything ultimately falls apart.105 Sometimes when Torrance refers to the homoousion, he does so only with reference to the oneness of the Father and Son, with no mention of the Spirit. This is because the Council of Nicea initially only applied the homoousion to the Son, which is why Torrance sometimes focuses on how everything rests on the ‘mutual relation between the Father and Son’—it is not that the Spirit does not come into this, but rather that in terms of God’s , the Son reveals the Father to us first.106 Although the

103 Thomas F. Torrance, “Introduction,” in The Incarnation: Ecumenical Studies in the Nicene- Constantinopolitan Creed, ed. Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press, 1981), xvi. 104 Ibid., xi–xxii; Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 80. Torrance likens the homoousion to a jig-saw, because once we have seen the assembled picture, we can never ‘unsee’ it. For a parallel explanation of the way that Torrance views the homoousion, we may also cite his reflection on the contribution of Polanyi to theological knowledge; Torrance concludes, from Polanyi’s work, that “on the one hand, theological formalisation is seen as the equipping of our tacit beliefs with precise machinery that enhances their power; and on the other hand, theological operations are found to outrun the Church’s formalisations at any specific time and to anticipate new and more adequate modes of thought.” Theological formalisation both clarifies, and interprets. See Torrance, “The Framework of Belief,” in Belief in Science and in Christian Life: The Relevance of Michael Polanyi's Thought for Christian Faith and Life, 25. 105 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 160. 106 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 55. “Knowledge of God the Father and knowledge of Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of the Father arise in us together, not one without the other.”

78 homoousion of the Son was affirmed at Nicea, it was not until Constantinople in 381AD that the homoousion of the Spirit was affirmed. It was also in between these two major councils that the Council of Alexandria agreed to the statement, ‘one being, three persons’ in 362AD. The recognition of the Spirit as homoousios with the Father and Son was vital, for the Word and Spirit are not “ephemeral modes of God’s presence” or “transient media external to himself,” but are “the objective ontological personal forms of his self-giving and self-imparting.”107 The Spirit is not an impersonal force emanating from God, but is fully and equally God with the Father and the Son.

To conclude this section, we need to begin to look to the different roles of the Son and Spirit. While God is known “as he makes himself known to us through the revealing and saving agency of his Word and Spirit,”108 the Son becomes incarnate, but the Spirit does not. The mutual mediation of the Son and Spirit is a vital part of Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity. The incarnate Son is God veiled in human flesh; in comparison, the Spirit meets us in his direct objectivity as God, for he did not become incarnate as the Son did, so that our interaction with the Spirit within space and time is notably different from that of the Son. Jesus Christ was born of the Spirit, received the Spirit and offered himself to the Father through the Spirit. He now mediates the Spirit to us so that humanity may enter into communion with God.109 In the incarnate Son, "the eternal Spirit of the living God has composed himself, as it were, to dwell with human nature, and human nature has been adapted and become accustomed to receive and bear the same Holy Spirit."110 Developing this further, Torrance observes that the Spirit is a “transparent and translucent hypostasis,”111 who rather than being directly known in his own person, “hides himself, as it were, behind Christ.”112

The Spirit is the invisible light who lights up the face of God in Jesus Christ; without this light being ‘thrown upon’ Christ, we are unable to grasp the oneness of being and

107 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 3. 108 Ibid., 13. Torrance draws heavily on the work of Irenaeus, Hilary of Poitiers and John Calvin to develop this point. 109 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 61. 110 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 246. Also cited in Elmer M. Colyer, “Thomas F. Torrance on the Holy Spirit,” Word & World 23, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 162. 111 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 151. 112 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Christ Who Loves Us,” in A Passion for Christ: The Vision That Ignites Ministry, ed. Gerrit Dawson and Jock Stein (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 18.

79 act between the Father and the Son—this must be “reinforced and deepened by the indwelling illumination of the Holy Spirit.”113 This is where we find the ‘critical edge’ of the homoousion. It means that we can’t project “creaturely, corporeal or sexist” elements of Jesus’ humanity into the divine being of God.114 The actualisation of human knowledge of God therefore only takes place as the Spirit enables us to participate in the union and communion of the Trinity, through sustaining and upholding our finite creaturely selves, bringing us to our true telos of participation in the Triune life of God, while simultaneously preventing us from inadvertently creating an anthropomorphic theology.115 We will explore the import of the mutual mediation of the Son and Spirit for ecclesiology specifically in the fifth chapter.

We are enabled to know the Triune God in the movement from the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit, and enabled to respond to God in the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father.116 To conclude this brief consideration of the homoousion, we may cite Torrance’s comment that,

The doctrine of the homoousion was as decisive as it was revolutionary: it expressed the evangelical truth that what God is toward us and has freely done for us in his love and grace, and continues to do in the midst of us through his Word and Spirit, he really is in himself, and that he really is in the internal relations and personal properties of his transcendent Being as the Holy Trinity the very same Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that he is in his revealing and saving activity in time and space toward mankind, and ever will be.117

3.3 A Communion of Fullness—One Being, Three Persons Having considered the homoousion, and how God is revealed in space and time through the Son and the complementary work of the Spirit, we now turn our attention to a more systematic consideration of Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity. Our goal in the rest of the chapter will be twofold; first, to explore the theological vocabulary which he uses to explicate the doctrine of the Trinity, including hypostasis, ousia, and perichoresis. The

113 Ibid., 19. Further reflection on the analogy of light, or the theology of light, can be found in ‘The Theology of Light’ in Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, 75–108; Thomas F. Torrance, “The Light of the World: A Sermon,” The Reformed Journal 38, no. 12 (Dec 1988): 9–12. 114 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 158. 115 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 229. 116 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 147. 117 Ibid., 130.

80 second outcome will be a thorough survey of the relationship between the ontological Trinity, to do with the eternal being of God, and the economic Trinity, which is to do with how God has revealed himself in space and time. Finally, we will conclude the chapter with an exploration of koinōnia, or ‘communion’, the motif which is central not only to Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity, but for understanding how the Trinity shapes his ecclesiology.

Our exposition of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity throughout this thesis will be “intentionally circular,” as we shift between thinking about God in himself (in se), and God for us (ad alios). When we think of the whole Trinity, we are “subsidiarily aware” of the persons, and when we think of a particular person, we are implicitly aware of the whole Trinity.118 This is in keeping with Torrance’s observation that, “understanding of the whole is not built up from a prior grasp of its constituent parts, but in which the whole while understood out of itself is nevertheless understood with subsidiary attention to its parts, and the parts are properly understood in the light of the whole.”119

Excursus: The limitation of theological concepts and terminology Before continuing with the main thread of our argument, it will be helpful to engage in a brief but relevant excursus where we will note some salient points that Torrance makes about the historical development of theological terminology, and the limitations that must be kept in mind when utilising such language or concepts.

Torrance identifies the difference between the Hellenistic view of reality, with the dualism inherent in the legacies of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and , and the Christian view of reality, with its insistence that God himself had become one of us, as one of the primary challenges that early Christians faced in the proclamation of the Gospel. Hellenistic philosophy separated the sensible and intelligible realms, resulting in a disjunction between “action and reflection, event and idea, becoming and being, the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the temporal and the

118 Ibid., 34. 119 Ibid., xi. Torrance sees his account of the Trinity as being faithful to “the way in which the Holy Trinity is presented to us in the Gospel, if only implicitly, as a Whole but as a differentiated Whole.”

81 eternal.”120 In contrast to this, the Jewish view of reality, the foundation for Christianity, did not strongly separate the material and spiritual, and affirmed the real involvement of God in history.

We have already discussed the implications of the tension between these two cultures, but may further note that the clash of these two perspectives required the forging of new concepts and terminology which could be used by the Church to re-frame the Graeco-Roman understanding of reality.121 These were wrestled out by the Church Fathers in the course of their discussion about how to define and articulate Christian doctrine. Hellenistic vocabulary, such as homoousion, was reinterpreted in accordance with Scripture and the apostolic tradition, and given a distinctly theological slant. Rather than biblical Christianity being Hellenised, Hellenistic-thought forms were recast “to make them vehicles of the saving truth of the Gospel.”122 Torrance suggests that words like ‘being’, ‘word’ and ‘act’ no longer retained their Platonic, Aristotelian or Stoic uses, but came to mean something “radically ‘un-Greek’”, and it is this theological meaning that we must use to understand the Patristic writings.123 This process was one of the most significant contributions of the early Councils to the defining of Christian doctrine, leading to ‘open concepts’, limited by the spatiotemporal dimension of our world, but wide open to God.124

On the other hand, we must also keep in mind the limitations of using these terms, for they must continually be tested against God’s self-revelation:

Technical terms are a kind of theological shorthand which helps us to give careful expression to basic truths and their conceptual interconnections, as we noted earlier, in the passage of theological clarification from one level of understanding to another and back again. However, in the last resort they are no more than empty abstract propositions apart from their real content in the specific self-communication of God to us in his revealing and saving acts in history in which he has made himself known to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.125

120 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 47. 121 Ibid., 48. 122 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 128. 123 Ibid. 124 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, 18–21. 125 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 203.

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We have seen this in our discussion about the homoousion, a term which Torrance constantly utilises, comparing its formulation to some of the great historical scientific events. He does, however, acknowledge that the term is not sacrosanct, and must continue to be open to testing and revision in light of the divine reality to which it refers.126 The same applies even to our use of terms like ‘Father’ and ‘Son’; when we are using them to speak of the divine reality, we need to use them in an ‘imageless way’, where we do not engage in anthropomorphism, or allow creaturely images to intrude into our knowledge of God.127 Theological statements require “an interior and dynamic logic that enables them to correspond faithfully to and therefore set forth adequately the economic pattern of God’s saving acts in Jesus Christ;”128 they must derive from truly hearing the Word of God, rather than being “speculative constructs out of the Church’s creative spirituality.”129

Returning now to the main thread of our argument, we may proceed by availing ourselves of Torrance’s statement that God “makes himself known to us as a whole and not in partitive ways, so that we need to think in conjunctive and not in analytical ways of his Trinitarian self-communication to us.”130 Torrance never considers the one ousia (being) of God apart from the three hypostases (persons), or the three persons apart from the one being. God is only known as a whole, “in a circle of reciprocal relations,”131 and all three persons are worshipped together. Torrance only ever uses the language of ‘whole’ and ‘part’ reluctantly when writing about the Trinity, because Father, Son and Spirit are each wholly God; we never think of God’s being as an undifferentiated wholeness, but always of the three-in-one, God’s fullness of personal being.132 We noted earlier that even when the New Testament only mentions one or two of the

126 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 144; Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, ix 127 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 157. For a complementary mention of this, see Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 20–23, where Torrance notes that the Second Commandment helps us to understand this idea of imageless language, for the Jews were forbidden to make any creaturely image of God. Although descriptions of God are frequent throughout the Old Testament, those descriptions were descriptive rather than definitive. 128 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 52. 129 Torrance, Divine Meaning, 6. 130 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 114. 131 Ibid., 174. 132 Ibid., 24, 28.

83 divine persons, we must still keep in mind the whole Trinity. Offering a faithful account of the Trinity thus requires us to move between God’s Trinity and God’s Unity, not giving either precedence.133

In order to determine the specific way in which we are to think of God, we need to comprehend the meaning of ousia (being) and hypostasis (person). These were originally used as cognate terms in the original text of the Nicene Creed, where they both referred to ‘being’; however there was potential ambiguity around their interpretation—referring to the three persons as three divine beings inadvertently promoted tritheism. Their usage was then more carefully defined, so that ousia began to refer to the being of God, while hypostasis signified the distinctions of the three persons. Expressed in another way, ousia refers to being in respect of internal reality, and so had a primarily inward reference; while hypostasis has to do with the outward reference of being, and thus with the onto-relations which constitute the three hypostases.134 While ousia is to do with God's 'internal relations', and hypostasis is 'being as otherness,' both ousia and hypostasis are to do with God's being.135 In our technical usage here, however, ousia refers to the ‘one being’ while hypostasis refers to the ‘three persons’.

Ousia Ousia (being) is a key example of a theologically reinterpreted word. Torrance insists we should not understand God’s ousia in any metaphysical and static sense, or according to philosophical categories. Although we can speak of God's being as that "which is and subsists by itself,"136 the specifically theological usage of this term derives from God’s creative, revelatory and redemptive actions.137 Torrance follows Athanasius in this, who noted that ousia was derived from einai, (the verb ‘to be’), and then linked it with the divine statement, ego eimi (‘I am’). Utilising the definitive Jewish

133 Ibid., 27–28. Torrance’s use of the idea of moving from whole to parts, rather than from parts to whole, is linked with his understanding of Clerk Maxwell’s method in science—see Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, 51–53. 134 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 128–33. 135 Ibid., 131. 136 Ibid., 116. Ousia is used in this way to describe a metaphysical and static understanding of the divine being in Aristotle's Metaphysics, but was transformed by its Christian use. 137 Ibid., 4–5.

84 text of Exodus 3:14, Athanasius concluded that just as Yahweh’s redemptive acts in covenant with Israel reveal the dynamic nature of the Father, Jesus also appropriates this saying to himself in order to proclaim his salvific mission, revealing his shared ousia with the Father.138 Ousia came to refer to the shared internal reality of the Triune God, with a particular emphasis on God's 'fullness of Being', expressed in the identity of being between the Father, Son and Spirit.139

This focus on ousia as dynamic being is likely why we find relatively little in Torrance’s work that is concerned with the perfections, or the divine attributes. These derive more from Hellenistic philosophy than from God’s active work in the world, which is also why Torrance rejects the idea of , substances and energies.140 Where Torrance does mention the divine perfections, he is careful to ground them in God’s economic actions. Among these we may include omnipotence, which Torrance defines by what God has done in humbling himself in becoming incarnate—“omnipotence clothed in littleness,”141 rather than by what God could potentially do; impassibility, which is defined in the light of the crucifixion, for it is as one who is both fully God and fully human that Christ dies, and therefore God’s ability to suffer is demonstrated in this historical event;142 and immutability, which is not a static concept, but rather God’s “living immutability”143 as one “who is and always will be one and the same in his eternal faithfulness.”144

138 Ibid., 118–25. This Athanasian approach was more fully developed by Epiphanius of Salamis. Torrance also draws on William Manson, “The Ego Eimi of the Messianic Presence in the New Testament,” in Jesus and the Christian (London: James Clarke & Co, 1967), 174–83. 139 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 116–17. 140 Ibid., 123, 187–88; Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 37–39. 141 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 204, 15. 142 Ibid., 246–54. Torrance affirms that “the whole Trinity is involved in the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross,” (247) and that “the whole undivided Trinity is involved in our salvation, and thus in the central atoning passion of Christ, God the Father and God the Spirit, as well as , in their different but coordinated ways.” (252). It is not that suffering is part of God in se, but rather that through God’s condescension in becoming a human, he experiences suffering. This suffering cannot be attributed only to the humanity of Jesus without detaching the humanity of Jesus from his divinity, which would call the fullness of the hypostatic union into question, so that we must begin any question of whether God can suffer from the doctrine of the incarnation. 143 Ibid., 244. 144 Ibid., 236.

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Hypostasis In contrast to ousia, hypostasis (person) was developed by the Church as they tried to work out how to speak of the distinctions within the Godhead of the Father, Son and Spirit. The original use of hypostasis is from Hebrews 1:3, which refers to the Son as the image of God’s being; and its theological meaning was then filled out in association with the other biblical references to onoma (name), autos (oneself), and prosopon (face).145 Torrance defines the divine hypostasis as “self-subsistent self-identifying subject-being in objective relations with others.”146 We may never think of any of the divine persons independently; since they have their being in one another, neither Father, Son or Spirit may be known apart from the other two persons of the Trinity.147

This is where Torrance’s description of the Triune ‘onto-relations’ comes into play, without which we cannot properly understand the trinitarian hypostases. The three persons of the Trinity are what they are only in relation to each other—since they share the same ousia, each distinct person is simultaneously part of a whole, so that “the relations between the divine Persons belong to what they are as Persons—they are constitutive onto-relations.”148 The relationships between the three persons are therefore essential to God’s being—they are ontological relations, to do with the very being of God. This is most clearly viewed when considering the mutuality of the Father and Son, for the Father cannot be the Father without the Son, and the Son cannot be the Son without a Father. The Triune persons are persons-in-relation, not three individual persons, for Father, Son and Spirit share their "absolute identity of being."149

Perichoresis In order to understand these ‘onto-relations’ better, we must also define the term perichoresis, which is to do with the coinherence, or the mutual indwelling of the three

145 Ibid., 156–58. 146 Ibid., 156. 147 Ibid., 174. Torrance suggests that we should note Calvin’s use of the term in solidum to describe the internal relations of the Holy Trinity. Originally an expression used by Cyprian to refer to the way that “the episcopate is held in solidum by one and all alike,” Calvin adapts it to refer to the way that each of the three persons is in soldium God, and that the being of God in solidium belongs to the three persons. See Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 36. 148 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 157. 149 Ibid., 125. This is why Torrance comments that we are not to think of the relationship between ousia and hypostasis as the general to the particular.

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Triune persons.150 Perichoresis was first used as a verb to refer to the two natures of Christ, and then later as a noun, to refer to how the Triune persons contain each other without commingling. The key point is that they dwell in and with each other,151 for "the three divine Persons mutually dwell in one another and coinhere or inexist in one another while nevertheless remaining other than one another and distinct from one another."152 Perichoresis is therefore primarily a concept that deals with the inner relations of the Triune God. We will return to the implications of perichoresis imminently, but for now we note with Torrance,

‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Holy Spirit’ are found to refer not just to three interrelated forms in which divine revelation functions, but to three distinctly hypostatic or personal Realities, or objective self-identifying Subsistences of God’s Being and Activity. They are more than modes, aspects, faces, names or relations in God’s manifestation of himself to us, for they are inseparable from the hypostatic Realities of which they are the distinctive self-presentations of divine Being— the three divine Hypostases or Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit who in their differentiation from one another and in their communion with one another are the one eternal God.153

3.4 A Stratified Structure of Reality When we hold together ‘person’ and ‘being’ in the ways outlined above, we are thinking correctly of God as a "fullness of Personal Being," and a "transcendent Communion of Persons."154 The previous indented quote emphasises the importance of the description of God as ‘one being, three persons’. Neither one undifferentiated reality, nor three independent persons, the three persons who are in eternal communion with each other are the eternal God, and share in his work. “The one Being of God is the being of the Father who gave his Son in atoning sacrifice, the being of the Son who loves

150 Ibid., 168–70. Athanasius provided the basis for the doctrine of mutual coherence (without providing the specific vocabulary) which was not merely a linking of the distinctive properties of the Father, Son and Spirit, but fully mutual indwelling. Hilary of Poitier—who is a Western scholar but draws from Eastern theology due to his Eastern exile—develops this further by stating that the three divine Persons are uniquely able to contain each other, but we cannot think of this in the sense of physical objects and their ability to contain each other. 151 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 172. The earlier use is first attributed to Gregory Nazianzen, and the later use to Pseudo-Cyril and . Torrance elsewhere attributes the terminology of perichoresis to Gregory Nazianzen—Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 32–33. 152 Ibid., 102. 153 Ibid., 92. 154 Ibid., 104.

87 and gave himself for us, and the being of the Spirit who brings us into the Triune communion.”155

This way of thinking of God is vital for this thesis; however, before we turn to consider more fully the way in which God is a perichoretic communion of being, it will be helpful to consider how Torrance’s scientific theology interacts with his trinitarian theology. Despite the different perspectives of science and theology, dialogue is possible between the two,156 as they benefit from the modern advances that have been made in each discipline.157 We can do this through considering his development of a stratified structure of the knowledge of God, which is a ‘disclosure model’ that Torrance uses to reflect upon the multi-layered ways in which we are to think of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Athanasius calls it mania—a form of madness—when one thinks in accordance with their own preconceptions, rather than with the nature of reality,158 so that it is ‘theological madness’ to construct an image of God in abstraction from God’s own self- revelation. Once again we see the relevance of the Patristic axiom that “God may be known only through God.”159 However, because the theological task takes place in space and time, “theology always must make use of the forms of thought and speech that obtain in this world.”160 Scientific theology thus operates under the ‘double constraint’ of the self-revealing God who dictates both the content and the method of our knowledge of himself, and the created spatio-temporal reality within which we exist.161 When the limited correlation between the created, contingent rationality of the natural world, and God’s uncreated freedom is recognised, it allows science to proceed with its investigation of creaturely realities; and for theology to explore and seek to elucidate that knowledge which has been given to us in divine revelation.

155 Ibid., 132. 156 Torrance, Christian Frame of Mind, ix. 157 For a well-framed discussion on how scientific change has both been influenced by, and influenced Christianity, see ‘Theology and Scientific Development’ in Torrance, Theological Science, 55–105; ‘Christianity in Scientific Change’ in Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, 11–40. 158 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 48. 159 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 13. 160 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 46. 161 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, vii.

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In developing a structure of theological knowledge, Torrance draws on the process which takes place in natural science—where the scientist intuitively discerns the patterns which reveal an intrinsic order to the natural world, investigates them rigorously, and seeks to refine the concepts—and applies this to the structure of our knowledge of God, particularly in relation to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.162 This leads to a “stratified structure comprising several coordinate levels concerned with God as he is in himself, with the incarnation of his self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and with our receiving and articulating of that revelation.”163 This idea of a ‘stratified structure’ is appropriated from the work of both Einstein and Polanyi, and Torrance draws parallels between his stratified structure of theological knowledge, and the stratified structure of scientific knowledge that they present.164 He views this stratified structure as helping us to reckon with the fact that the incarnation is God's revealing of himself within space and time, without becoming "netted within the spatial- temporal processes of our world.”165

Theological realities must have an empirical correlate in our world, but while not every concept has a specific correlate, they are to be "integrated within a coherent system which at certain essential points must be correlated with the empirical world if divine revelation is to get through to us and have its way in our mind.”166 Developing on this need for a coherent system, Torrance identifies three primary levels of reality which are constantly cross-referenced with each other; there are theoretically an indefinite number of levels, but he considers three sufficient.167 Benjamin Myers describes these three levels as the levels of “tacit theology,” “formalised theology,” and “the meta- theological level.”168 The basic level is concerned with the intuitive grasp of reality that we gain as personal knowers. The secondary level sees formal expression given to that which we have recognised through experience. Finally, the tertiary level is where one

162 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 168–74. 163 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 83. 164 Ibid., 84. 165 Ibid., 82. 166 Ibid., 83. 167 Ibid., 84. 168 Benjamin Myers, “The Stratification of Knowledge in the Thought of T. F. Torrance,” Scottish Journal of Theology 61, no. 1 (2008): 1.

89 seeks to refine principles and patterns to as few as possible, in as simple a form as possible. The fewer concepts that exist at this level, the wider their applicability is.169 It is important to note that even the highest level is ‘open’ beyond itself, following Godel’s theorem that no logico-deductive system can be complete in itself. This is mirrored in theology, because “no dogmatic system contains its own truth referent.”170 Theological constructs must always remain open to constructive revision in the light of God’s self-revelation, but this stratified structure gives us confidence that humankind’s reception of revelation does genuinely correspond to the reality of God so that God is known according to his nature (physin), and according to his truth (aletheia).171

This perspective demands the recognition that this stratified structure is an a posteriori reconstruction, and by itself does none of the work of divine revelation. Consequently it must be held in tandem with the way that the actualisation of our knowledge of God remains entirely a divine work and only takes place through union with Christ and the Spirit.172 Torrance thus argues that movement between the levels is not simply a movement of thought, but is “a movement of personal response and commitment in worship, obedience and love in which a transformation of our mind or a spiritual reorganisation of our consciousness of God takes place.”173 As we will see, knowledge of God,

arises on the ground of our evangelical experience, knowledge, and worship of God in the life of the Church, deriving from the historical revelation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit mediated to us in the incarnate life and work of Jesus Christ, and directed to the transcendent mystery of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as he is in his one eternal Being.174 The first level is the “basic level”, also referred to as the “evangelical and doxological level”, or that of “incipient theology.” It is to do with our intuitive apprehension of knowledge through experience; at this level, the empirical and theoretical are

169 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 156. 170 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 86. 171 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 48. 172 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 83. 173 Ibid., 88. 174 Ibid., 83.

90 interwoven with each other.175 In theological terms, knowledge of God is found in the ongoing experience of the Church’s worship, communion and fellowship. This involves the proclamation of Christ, as witnessed in the New Testament, as well as our personal encounter with Christ in space and time. We only know God through sharing in his fellowship, and participating in the fellowship of the Church. As Torrance expresses this, “We learn far more about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, into whose name we have been baptised, within the family and fellowship and living tradition of the Church than we can ever say.”176 This is why the split between theology and experience is so devastating.177

The secondary level is the “theological level,” where the intuitive knowledge of the first level is organised and expressed with a focus on simplicity of expression. Concepts at this secondary level must both clarify the reality of the first level, and be testable by that prior intuitive knowledge.178 As Torrance writes, the theologian must

appropriate intellectual instruments with which to lay bare the underlying epistemological patterns of thought, and by tracing the chains of connection throughout the coherent body of theological truths, they feel their way forward to a deeper and more precise knowledge of what God has revealed of himself.179 At the secondary level, the inchoate or implicit knowledge of God as Triune, which is known from redemptive history and experience, is given explicit formulation as the doctrine of the Trinity. There is a strong focus on the acts of God within time and space, for it was the focus of the Patristic writers on God’s self-communication to us through the incarnation, in time and space, without ceasing to be God, which formed their understanding of God’s economic activity, so that this level has a strong soteriological bent.180 The homoousion is a key principle, because it signals the distillation of all that the New Testament has to say on the oneness of the Father, Son and Spirit,181 guides

175 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 156–57. 176 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 89. 177 Thomas F. Torrance, God and Rationality, 4. “Theology without experience is irrelevant and experience without theology is blind, the Church without theology can be little more than a blind leader of the blind.” 178 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 84. 179 Ibid., 91. 180 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 157. 181 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 94.

91 the movement from a preconceptual to conceptual understanding of the Holy Trinity,182 and allows our thought to pass from the economic to the ontological Trinity.183

The homoousion must be taken alongside the hypostatic union; together they allow us to advance first from the level of intuitive knowing to the theological level where we are concerned with the economic Trinity, and then enables us to refine our grasp of the doctrine of the Trinity as we move from considering the economic Trinity to considering the ontological Trinity, at the tertiary level.184 In moving between these three levels, a radical theological revolution takes place in how we think; rejecting epistemological dualism, we are convinced that "Jesus Christ the incarnate Son is one in Being and Act with God the Father. What Jesus Christ does for us and to us, and what the Holy Spirit does in us, is what God himself does for us, to us and in us."185

At the tertiary level, or the ‘higher theological level,’ the theory of the secondary level is revised, deepened and simplified, and formalised in “ultimate theoretic structures characterised by logical economy and simplicity.”186 The fewer concepts that exist at this level, the wider their applicability.187 In theological terms, we move from what has been revealed through God’s economic actions, and into the “Trinitarian relations immanent in God himself which lie behind, and are the sustaining ground of, the relations of the economic Trinity.”188 There is a strong focus on the epistemology and ontological structure of our knowledge of the eternal being of God.189 At this level we become even more aware of the finiteness of our capacity to know God, and to express what we know about God, particularly with the danger of inappropriate

182 Ibid., 98. 183 Torrance, “Introduction,” in The Incarnation: Ecumenical Studies in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, xx. 184 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 94. 185 Ibid., 95. 186 Ibid., 85. 187 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 156. As a simplified example, in physics when the nature of light and its role in the universe was better understood, a unifying theory could give coherence to two previously disparate models of light: one as a ray, for large distances, and one as a wave, when studying light at nanoscopic distances approximately equal to its wavelength. 188 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 99. 189 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 157–8.

92 anthropomorphism. The key theological concept which Torrance draws on at the level of the ontological Trinity is perichoresis, which we have already defined as the mutual coinherence of the three divine persons.

The three levels of this stratified structure of knowledge are ultimately governed from the higher levels to the lower levels. Although the truth-content is derived ‘from below’, for this is how God reveals himself to us in space and time, the truth content is ‘ontologically constituted’ from above, in accordance with revelation.190 This is because “in the hierarchy of theological truths it is the living God himself who is the supreme Truth who retains his own authority over all our inquiry and understanding.”191 Another way of expressing this is undertaken by Habets, who describes the movement from the first to third level as an epistemic movement, to do with our knowing, and the movement from the third to first level as a theological movement, to do with the being of God.192

The critical and constructive contributions of this model Torrance often states that “the truth of the Holy Trinity is more to be adored than expressed.”193 His conviction is that while God has genuinely revealed himself to humanity, although we truly apprehend God, we are incapable of fully comprehending God. God is not contained, as it were, by our knowledge of him. Consequently, this stratified model is not a ‘picturing model’, or a ‘theoretic model’ but a ‘disclosure model’;194 it does not derive from what we observe of God or our ideas about what God must be like. Because “not the representative, but the referential element is primary,”195 it is a model which allows divine reality to disclose itself to us, so that rather than the doctrine of the Trinity being moulded according to human categories of thought, we instead increasingly think of the Trinity in accordance with its objective reality.

190 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 87. 191 Ibid. 192 Habets, Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance, 38. 193 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, ix. 194 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 124–27. 195 Ibid., 126; Torrance, God and Rationality, 16–26.

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The first contribution of this stratified model is how it directs the way in which we may think of the relationship between the economic and ontological Trinity, by reminding us that the way in which God is revealed by his actions in space and time, is also who God is in himself eternally. When Jesus came among us as a man, he lived a real human life, but through this human life, he showed us who God was.196 There can be no other God besides the One we meet in Jesus Christ.197 Torrance argues that “while everything pivots upon the downright act of God himself in Christ, that act of God takes the concrete form of the actual historical man Jesus.”198 It is only through the incarnation that the inner relations of the Triune God have been ‘opened up’ to us, and we may know God as he really is in himself.

The second contribution of this model is that it reminds us that temporal ideas and concepts cannot be read back into the eternal life of God.199 This helps to prevent the danger of anthropomorphism, and advocates for critical awareness in using Torrance’s stratified model. We have seen that Christ is the epistemological centre for the doctrine of the Trinity, and that on the basis of his incarnation, we are also enabled to know the Spirit. However, while the homoousion assures us of Christ’s full humanity, and full divinity, it also has a critical function in preventing us from inappropriately reading aspects of Jesus’ humanity back into the eternal Trinity.200 Because the Son and the Spirit are both homoousios with the Father—and each other—we encounter the Spirit in his “direct objectivity” as God. The joint activity of the Son and the Spirit stops us reading material images back into God’s eternal being.201

The third, and most significant, contribution of this model is for the life of the Church. Ecclesiology is ‘worked out’ in space and time on the basic level, is heavily shaped by the secondary level, and is controlled by the tertiary level, so that this is a way of correlating the life of the Church with the being of God. We will return to this model and its ecclesiological implications at length in Chapter 5.

196 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 55. 197 Ibid., 5. 198 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 148. 199 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 97. 200 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 160–64. 201 Ibid., 165–67. See also Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, 8.

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3.5 Union and Communion with the Triune God The final element of Torrance’s trinitarian theology which needs to be highlighted is the idea of participation—the way in which humanity is enabled to share in the union and communion of the Triune God. Our focus at this point, however, will not be so much on our participation in the Triune koinōnia, but rather on the nature of God’s being which enables this participation. What needs to be made clear is the way in which the communion which humanity has with God derives from the fullness of communion that God is in his own being.

We have seen that God’s being is not to be thought of in static terms, as in the Greek philosophical sense of ‘essence’ or ‘substance’, and that Torrance instead argues that our knowledge of God is based on the incarnation of Jesus Christ. We have also discussed how creation and incarnation are both ‘new’ events for God; not new in the sense of an external factor 'added in' to God, but new as historical events that required a definite act. They are events that take place so that God can share his own life and love with us. We must thus think of movement within the life of God, which Torrance describes as the direction of God’s eternal life.202 God’s life has its own time—an eternal time which is different to created time in that it lacks the distinction of past, present and future, but a time which nonetheless has movement and constancy.

Pentecost is also a correlate to creation and the incarnation, for it marks a shift in how God is present to us in the world. As Torrance comments, "taken together these new decisive acts of God in creation, incarnation, and the coming of the Spirit, have breath- taking implications for our understanding of the unlimited freedom of God."203 Together these events demonstrate "the movement and activity of God towards the fulfilment of his eternal purpose of love," and reveal that his "eternal Being is also a divine Becoming,”204 or that "His Becoming is his Being in movement."205 On the other

202 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 241. On this, see ‘Origenism, Election, and Time and Eternity’ in Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit, 187–224, where Molnar explores Torrance’s refusal to read elements of God’s economic actions back into the ontological Trinity in any way that would suggest an eternal subordination or hierarchy within the Godhead, focusing on the work of the Trinity in terms of election. 203 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 208. 204 Ibid., 242. 205 Ibid. Another helpful article here is Thomas F. Torrance, “Kierkegaard on the Knowledge of God,” The Presbyter 1, no. 3 (1943): 4–7. Torrance discusses Kierkegaard’s understanding of being, and becoming, 95 hand, we must not doubt that God remains "who he is in the undeviating self- determination of his own Life and Activity,"206 and consequently understand that God’s economic actions flow from his eternal and unchanging life. Molnar observes here that the purpose and direction of God’s love do not constitute his eternal being, “simply because God loves only as he loves.”207

In our discussion of terms such as ousia, hypostasis and perichoresis, alongside our consideration of the Triune onto-relations, we have emphasised that God’s being is neither an undifferentiated oneness, nor three individual persons. God’s being is a communion of love, and is “essentially personal, dynamic and relational Being.”208 The three divine persons only ever have their being in each other, which is why we must think of their relations to each other as constitutive onto-relations—the Father is not the Father without the Son and the Spirit, the Son is not the Son without the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Spirit without the Father and the Son. The three Triune persons share a complete identity of being, and in this way, God’s ousia is revealed as "an ever-living ever-loving Being, the Being for Others, which the three divine Persons have in common."209 The Triune onto-relations are not selfish, but selfless love: they are relations of freely given reciprocal love.210

The other aspect that must be considered alongside the perichoretic onto-relations of the Trinity is the equality of the Triune persons. Torrance attributes the issue of , or a form of hierarchy within the Trinity, to the Cappadocians. Downplaying the personal sense of ousia, Cappadocian teaching led to tritheistic tendencies, and a weakened form of Athanasius’ statement that whatever we say of the Father, we may say of the Son and Spirit except ‘Father’. This lead to the idea that the hypostasis of the Father is uniquely the archē, the “Principle, Origin, or Source,” of the Trinity, which consequently means that the Son and Spirit have only derived deity from

noting that to speak of God ‘becoming’ is not to imply that God is developing toward perfection, but rather, “’becoming’ refers to the other side of being, to that which flows from being, to being in action in time,” (5 - emphasis original). 206 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 235. 207 Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit, 213. 208 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 124. 209 Ibid., 133. 210 Ibid., 165–66.

96 the Father, denying their full equality.211 However, Torrance views subordinationism as a heresy alongside and ,212 and strongly reacts against this aspect of the Cappadocian teaching.213 He responds by bringing the doctrine of perichoresis to bear on the idea of the divine monarchy, and insists that the monarchia speaks of the whole Godhead, rather than the Father only.214 However, there is some question around Torrance’s reading of the Fathers here, which can be exemplified by contrasting his work with the Orthodox theologian John D. Zizioulas who interprets the Cappadocians differently on this issue than Torrance. We only mention this in passing here because Zizioulas will be one of our dialogue partners in the ninth chapter. Zizioulas embraces the Cappadocian position rejected by Torrance, arguing that it is the hypostasis of the Father that is the archē and the monarchia within the Trinity.

Torrance’s conclusion here is that for the Triune God, “Being and Communion are one and the same."215 He further observes that since God is revealed to be a communion in himself, this is the basis for the communion that he establishes with us,

The real meaning of the Being or I am of God becomes clear in the two-way fellowship he freely establishes with his people as their Lord and Saviour, for it has to do with the saving will or self-determination of God in his love and grace to be with them as their God as well as his determination of them to be with him as his redeemed children. The Being of God is to be understood, therefore, as living and dynamic Being, fellowship-creating or communion-constituting Being, but if it is communion-constituting Being toward us it is surely to be understood also as ever-living, ever-dynamic Communion (koinonia) in the

211 Ibid., 181. See also Torrance’s evaluation of Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen and John Calvin on this in Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 14–20, 28–32. 212 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 115. 213 Ibid., 127. Torrance does highlight that Gregory Nazianzen disassociates himself from the description used by the other Cappadocians of the ‘modes of being’ of the Trinity, and the way that they viewed the Father as the ‘principle’ or ‘cause’—archē—of the Son and Spirit’s deity. 214 Ibid., 179. Molnar helpfully evaluates the difference between Karl Barth and Torrance in regard to subordinationism, particularly in terms of the obedience of the Son. Molnar reads Karl Barth as ascribing a hierarchy to God’s inner life, but argues—as we have here—that while Torrance agrees there is an ordering to the inner life of God, it does not involve any form of subordination, and does so on the basis of a strong incorporation of perichoresis which is lacking in Barth’s discussion at this point. See ‘The Obedience of the Son in the Theology of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance’ in Molnar, Faith, Freedom and the Spirit, 313–54. Torrance’s critique of Barth on subordinationism can be found in Torrance, “My Interaction with Karl Barth,” 60–61. Molnar argues that Torrance’s thinking is more consistent than Barth’s on this issue. 215 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 104.

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Godhead. By his very Nature he is a Communion in himself, which is the ground in the Being of God for his communion with his people.216 Consequently, because ‘being for others’ is who God is in himself, this is also how we are to understand God’s being in its relation to humanity. God's being is not constituted in its relationship to others, for the free outflow of his love towards us is determined by God's being ad intra.217 In other words, "We must think of his Being for others as grounded in the transcendent freedom of his own Being."218 God is a communion of love in himself, and it is on this basis, that he seeks and establishes a communion of love between himself and us in order to enable humankind to participate in the koinōnia of the Holy Trinity. God’s being is fellowship-creating and communion- constituting, but only because this is first who God is in his own eternal life. Since God’s being and acts are inseparable, we come to understand that,

the Love that God is, is not that of solitary inactive or static love, whatever that may be, but the active movement of reciprocal loving within the Being of God which is the one ultimate Source of all love. That God is love means that he is the eternally loving One in himself who loves through himself, whose Love moves unceasingly within his eternal Life as God, so that in loving us in the gift of his dear Son and the mission of his Spirit he loves us with the very Love which he is.219 Continuing to think in this same way, we also see that the incarnation and the ascension are two corresponding moments; in the incarnation, the eternal Triune love moves into history, most fully revealed at the Cross. In the ascension, the love revealed in the incarnation is shown to be grounded in the trinitarian koinōnia itself. Thus, theologia and economia are once more intertwined; God’s being and act are inseparable, seen in the trinitarian love for each other, and the trinitarian love that gives itself to us.220 The condescension of God to share in our humanity, and the lifting up of humanity through his Spirit to participate in the fellowship of the Trinity, gives a “Triune grammar” to our knowledge of God.221

216 Ibid., 124. 217 Ibid., 132. 218 Ibid., 131. 219 Ibid., 5. 220 Ibid., 164–65. 221 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 154–5.

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3.6 Chapter Conclusion As we have explored in many different ways, all that God is revealed to be in his actions towards humanity, is entirely consistent with who God is in his Triune self, as the three Persons who “dwell in one another, love one another, give themselves to one another and receive from one another in the Communion of the Holy Trinity.”222 The koinōnia of the Holy Trinity, and God’s nature as ‘being for others’, will be key to keep in mind as we continue to unpack Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology. This chapter has laid the theological foundations necessary for a deeper understanding of how the Triune nature of God constitutes the Church as the community of those who have responded to the love of God extended towards them. Because God is essentially a “Communion of Love,” then it naturally follows that he “not only creates personal reciprocity between us and himself but creates a community of personal reciprocity in love, which is what we speak of as the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.”223

222 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 163. 223 Ibid., 6.

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4 A DIACHRONIC ECCLESIOLOGY

4.0 Chapter Abstract Having explored the shape of Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity, we are now better positioned to grasp the inner coherence of his ecclesiology. This chapter will continue to draw upon the trinitarian foundations that have been laid, but will function as a long excursus by deviating slightly from the main thread of our argument to consider the broader historical strokes of Torrance’s diachronic ecclesiology. This tangent will allow us to more properly situate the following chapters of this thesis, in which we will clearly explicate the trinitarian foundations of the Church as it exists in the ‘time between’ the two advents of Christ. The chapter will begin with a brief exploration of the relationship that exists between the doctrines of creation and incarnation, and how this informs the Christian concept of space and time. It will then undertake a progressive historical survey of the Church which exists in three stages; its preparatory form in Israel, the shift that took place with the incarnation—creating the existence of the Church in ‘the time between’—and the future transition to the new creation.

4.1 One Church, Three Stages The history of God’s interaction with Israel recorded in the Old Testament, and what God is doing through the Church of the New Testament, are not two different redemptive actions. They are one unified undertaking, linked through the incarnation, to which the Old Testament stretches forward in expectation, and which the New Testament describes and explains. Torrance is emphatic that the Church cannot be considered in only its contemporary sense, or as having its beginning at the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Instead there is one continually existing Church that God sustains, comprised of all who have received salvation, whether they have gone before, or will come after the present day. There is a continuity that runs through the whole of God’s past, present, and future interaction with humanity, which is marked by periods of transition, dividing the historical life of the Church into three distinct stages.

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This approach is in keeping with the Reformed view of salvation history as one continuous historical movement of redemption with its centre in the incarnation,1 on the basis of which Torrance argues that systematic doctrine must be grounded in a comprehensive understanding of salvation history, the Heilsgeschichte, “the understanding of the Gospel in the light of the whole history of redemption.”2 This view of salvation history is also evident in some of the Patristic authors, who assumed there to be an inherent continuity between the Old Testament Scriptures and the revelation of Jesus Christ, as was noted in the previous chapter.3 Torrance describes this historic progression:

While there is only one people and Church of God throughout all ages from the beginning of creation to the end, there are three stages or phases of its life. It took a preparatory form before the Incarnation as in the covenant mercies of the Father one people was called and separated out as the instrument through which all peoples were to be blessed; it was given a new form in Jesus Christ who gathered up and reconstructed the one people of God in himself, and poured out his Spirit upon broken and divided humanity that through his atoning life and death and resurrection all men might be reconciled to God and to one another, sharing equally in the life and love of the Father as the new undivided race; but it is yet to take on its final and eternal form when Christ comes again to judge and renew his creation, for then, the Church which now lives in the condition of humiliation and in the ambiguous forms of this age, will be manifested as the new creation without spot or wrinkle, eternally serving and sharing in the glory of God.4

These three stages are separated by transition periods, signified by the incarnate advents of Christ on earth. Christ’s first advent marked the transition between the preparatory form of the Church in Israel, to the new form of the Church as it is gathered into union with Christ by the Spirit. His second advent will mark the transition from

1 Torrance, The School of Faith, lxv. While Torrance distances himself from Federal Calvinistic Theology because of its reductionist tendencies, which subdue the soteriological narrative into an inflexible systematic structure (as we noted earlier in our discussion of Torrance’s appropriation of Calvin), Torrance does acknowledge that one of the positive outcomes of Federal Theology was that through its historical perspective, particularly to do with the Covenants formed between God and his people, it gave rise to the concept of the Heilsgeschichte, salvation history. 2 Ibid. 3 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 279–80. Torrance specifically cites , Irenaeus, and Epiphanius in relation to this. Cyril of Jerusalem spoke of the ‘first Church’ when referring to the people of God in the Old Testament, and the ‘second holy Church’ when speaking of the Christian faith. Irenaeus’ emphasises the Church as spanning the Old and New Testament—two peoples who are gathered under Christ, their one Head. Epiphanius also held this view, connecting the Jewish people and the Christian Church with the self-revelation of the Trinity. 4 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 193.

102 the Church as an anticipatory sign of the telos of God’s redemptive and reconciliatory plan in the midst of a world tangled up with the effects of sin, to the full actualisation of that telos in the new creation. Because of the centrality of the person of Christ to these transitions, we must begin this chapter by seeking to understand him in accordance with the historical context in which he was born and lived and ministered. As Torrance suggests,

We should adopt a two-fold approach. On the one hand, we should seek to understand Christ within the actual matrix of interrelations from which he sprang as Son of David and Son of Mary, that is, in terms of his intimate bond with Israel in its covenant relationship with God throughout history. On the other hand, however, we should seek to understand Christ, not by way of observational deductions from his appearances, but in the light of what he is in himself in his internal relations with God, that is, in terms of his intrinsic significance disclosed through his self-witness and self-communication to us in word and deed and reflected through the evangelical tradition of the Gospel in the medium which he created for this purpose in the apostolic foundation of the Church.5 The previous chapter focused on the second part of Torrance’s statement, discussing the doctrine of the Trinity and how Christ is understood in the light of his internal relations with the Father and Spirit. In this chapter, we will begin by taking the approach recommended in the first part of this quote as we explore the Jewish context into which Christ was born, and the preparation for the fullness of salvation that was enacted amongst the descendants of Abraham. This will lead us into our discussion of the three historical phases of the Church’s existence.

Excursus: Space, time and the interaction of God with humanity in history Before turning our attention to the preparatory form of the Church in Israel, we first need to describe Torrance’s view of the way that God interacts with humanity in space and time. This is a continuation of our previous observation that the incarnation signals that God has not stood far off and removed, but rather has come into the very conditions of our world. While trying to work out how this could take place without affecting God’s being has caused a number of problematic views of space and time in the history of the Church, Torrance instead advocates for a ‘relational’ understanding

5 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 3.

103 of how God interacts with space and time. In advocating for this relational understanding, Torrance is seeking to return to a “specifically theological understanding of God to the world of space and time.”6

In his book Space, Time and Incarnation, Torrance deals with the “problem of spatial concepts” first in relation to Nicene theology, and subsequently in relation to Reformation and modern theology. Nicene theology had to contend with the ‘receptacle’ or ‘container’ view of space that was prevalent in Hellenistic philosophy, whether this was the Platonic sense of space as a formless medium in which events occur, as a type of mediator between this world and a transcendent world beyond space and time; the Aristotelian conception of space as something that was predominantly volumetric, and belonged in the category of quantity, and was finally defined in relation to the ‘unmoved Mover’; or the Stoic approach, which did not view space as a ‘container’, but as a body that creates room for itself—by making God out to be this ‘rational principle’, theology and cosmology became confused.7 The similarity in each of these was that space was determinate and finite, but anything limitless beyond this—‘the infinite’—was unknowable, so that for Christian theology to assert that God had become part of creation was viewed as quite absurd.8

In response to these Hellenistic perspectives, Nicene theology asserted that while on one hand, there is an absolute distinction between God and what he has made, on the other hand, we must reckon with the tangible presence of Jesus Christ in space and time. The only way to understand this paradox is by recognising that since God is the Creator of everything, including space and time, he “stands in a creative, not a spatial or a temporal relation, to it.”9 This is in direct opposition to the receptacle notion of space, particularly a perspective where God is thought of as ‘containing’ all things within himself, for “if God Himself is the infinite container of all things He can no more

6 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, vi. 7 Ibid., 4–9. 8 Ibid., 23. 9 Ibid., 3.

104 become incarnate than a box can become one of the several objects that it contains.”10 Torrance observes that instead in Nicene theology,

there emerges a concept of space in terms of the ontological and dynamic relations between God and the physical universe established in creation and incarnation. Space is here a differential concept that is essentially open-ended, for it is defined in accordance with the interaction between God and man, eternal and contingent happening. It is treated as a sort of coordinate system (to use a later expression) between two horizontal dimensions, space and time, and one vertical dimension, relation to God. In this kind of coordination, space and time are given a sort of transworldly aspect in which they are open to the transcendent ground of the order they bear within nature.11 There are a number of key points here which we have already begun to explore, particularly the way that creation and incarnation together shape a theological understanding of God’s relation to the world. If space is the “place of meeting and activity in the interaction between God and the world,”12 then we may draw on the doctrine of perichoresis—the mutual abiding and dwelling of the Father, Son and Spirit—here to affirm that since the Son abides fully in the Triune being, and yet also fully shares in our humanity, he constitutes the one place—topos—where we may truly know God, for in him divinity and humanity are united without confusion, change, division, or separation.13 Christ alone is the true nexus of the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dimensions, for he is free to become physically present within space and time, but continues to maintain a relationship to the Father and the Spirit that is distinctly different to ours, which enables Christ to mediate God’s presence to us.14

This language of the two dimensions is central to our consideration of ecclesiology, particularly because while the Church exists in space and time, it has its ultimate being in the Triune God, and so also exists—in a way appropriate to its creaturely status—at the intersection of the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension. The emphasis

10 Ibid., 39. The idea of space as a receptacle or container is what led to the theological suggestion that when the Son became incarnate, he had to leave something of himself outside his humanity—leading to the idea of the extra Calvinisticum. Torrance makes some helpful brief comments in Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of E.D. Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 23, no. 1 (Feb 1970): 92–94; Torrance, Incarnation, 213–28. 11 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, 18. 12 Ibid., 24. 13 Ibid., 15. Topos is being used in an ‘elastic’ sense here, while the definition of the two natures is derived from the . 14 Ibid., 14.

105 which Torrance places on the ongoing interaction of God with the world is of profound importance for his doctrine of the Church. This is the only way to grasp the supernatural nature of events like the incarnation, the crucifixion and the resurrection. These are events that involve the ‘breaking in’ of God to natural history, so that we must discard any sense of a transcendent God who does not intervene in human affairs. They instead point to God’s reordering of human history so that it is directed towards its telos of humanity’s participation in union and communion with God.15

We noted in the last chapter that God’s being can be defined as the divine koinōnia of the three divine persons who share an absolute identity of being. We also alluded to the way that God’s being for others, and the way that God enables humanity to participate in his own koinōnia is key to the existence of the Church, and will continue to explore this in more detail in the next chapter. However, there is one more related point that we must briefly note here, related to our discussion in the last chapter about the limitations of theological language. We must give careful consideration to the way in which we use creaturely, limited and temporal speech to speak of the transcendent and eternal God. Torrance suggests that speech about God is only true “on the ground of His interaction with the world He has created and within the relation that He has established between it and Himself.”16 This is where we find the role of a ‘community of reciprocity’ in receiving divine revelation, although we will reserve our fuller discussion of this for the next chapter. God’s Word is not known apart from these communities—that is to say, God’s Word is not known apart from the form that God gives the Church at any stage in history, whether this is in Israel, where God draws a people into a covenantal relation with himself, and throughout their long history causes his word and revelation to be embedded into their existence, or as the forms of thought and speech which developed in Israel are both fulfilled and transcended by the

15 Torrance, Theological Science, 334–7. Torrance is quite emphatic that a Christian approach to history must not be allowed to become a purely Christian interpretation of historical events, but should rather recognise the eschatological and teleological elements that become apparent when history is interpreted with reference to Jesus Christ, his person, and work. 16 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, 52–55.

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Word of God in Christ.17 The gathering of God’s people at any stage of the ecclesia is an active witness to God’s revealing and reconciling work.

4.2 The anticipatory existence of Israel as the Church in the Old Testament We now turn to consider the existence of the people of God in the Old Testament. There are two sub-stages that we must consider. The first chapters of Genesis describe what Torrance refers to as the ‘prelude to salvation history’—this includes the act of creation and the promise of future redemption from the effects of sin.18 Following this is the beginning of salvation history, which will require a more substantial discussion of the preparatory role of the people of Israel. God gathered them together and formed them as an instrument of revelation and reconciliation, so that through Israel all humanity might be reconciled to God. The following material builds upon our previous material regarding the self-revelation of God through creation and covenant in the Old Testament.

Creation Although the biblical narrative begins with an account of God creating the and earth, the Church “did not come into being automatically with the creation of the world or all at once with the establishment in the world of a human society.”19 Male and female were created to have perfect fellowship with God, with each other, and to live in harmony with their environment, and so it is only together that they can fully exist ‘in the image of God,’ reflecting his glory.20 To be fully human is to experience communion with God—or as Torrance suggests, “that which really makes man man is the bond between man and God.”21 Adam and Eve were created to live in this unbroken communion with God, but when they sinned as individuals, all humanity experienced the consequences with them.22 Sin hinders the divine–human communion, and

17 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 93. 18 Torrance, Incarnation, 38–40. 19 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 192. 20 Torrance, Incarnation, 38. 21 Ibid., 39. Remember that ‘man’ does not mean males only, but refers to humanity. 22 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 193–94.

107 therefore “entails a rupture within each between what a person is and what the person ought to be.”23 When this divine–human bond is broken, we are separated from each other, since communion is hindered not only between God and humanity, but also between human and human.24

The Scriptural narrative tells the story of human brokenness, and of our failed attempts to mend these broken relationships. “On one side it is the story of the atomisation of mankind, for the internal rupture results in individualisation and conflict. On the other it is the story of human attempts at re-socialisation, great attempts to mend the broken relations, to heal the internal rupture, to bind divided humanity together again, as at Babel.”25 These efforts come to nothing, for humanity is unable to heal itself. Despite the separation caused by sin, God does not abandon his creation and give it over to destruction, nor does he turn away and leave humanity to fend for themselves. Instead, God maintains a covenant of grace with creation, which has as its scope all people and nations, with the teleological goal of restoring all to communion with God.26 Although the revelation of God as Father, Son and Spirit is far from fully revealed at this stage of human history, God’s redemptive intentions are clearly visible, even if the method of their accomplishment has not yet been made plain. God created humans so that they might participate in the overflow of his eternal Triune life, the communion of love which God essentially is, and this purpose will not be thwarted. Furthermore, as we

23 Torrance, Incarnation, 39. 24 See Thomas F. Torrance, “The Goodness and Dignity of Man in the Christian Tradition,” Modern Theology 4, no. 4 (Jul 1988): 311–14. Torrance affirms that as beings dependent upon God for our existence, we are sealed by God’s creative Word for communion with him, and by extension, with each other. To be made in the image of God is not to do with our rationality, but rather the fact that man and woman together reflect the vertical relationship between God and humanity. This is the ground of human dignity—despite our fallenness, humans are created by God and called to be his covenant partners. The male–female relation is key to true human being for Torrance. For a tangential, but interesting read, see Thomas F. Torrance, “Donor Insemination for the Single Woman: The Animalisation of the Human Race,” Ethics & Medicine 7, no. 3 (1991): 37–38. Torrance utilises this point to illustrate his stance against the donor insemination of single women. He argues that donor insemination leads to the ‘animalisation’ of humanity, and disrespects the personal nature of human beings, and resultantly, the importance of personal intercourse. However, he is careful to insist that those who are not married are no less true human beings, for “they too have a positive inter-personal role to play within the man– woman complementarity of human society.” See Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of Marriage (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press), 5. 25 Torrance, Incarnation, 39. 26 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 287.

108 noted in the previous chapter, viewing the initial act of creation through the lens of the incarnation points us to the ultimate telos of the redeemed creation.

Abraham, Israel and the Exodus Despite the sins of Adam and Eve, Torrance insists that this did not involve the failure of the Church as a divine institution.27 The incipient form of the Church exists anywhere that God enters into a particular redemptive relationship with humankind, and so it is amongst the people of Israel that we see God initiate his redemptive actions. This is why Torrance describes the people of Israel as the preparatory form of the Church. God calls Abraham and sets him and his descendants apart in a unique divine– human relationship. The faithfulness of God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the preservation of their descendants through Joseph’s wisdom in Egypt testifies to the providence of God, and yet it is not until Abraham’s descendants have endured four hundred years of slavery that God initiates the historical events that will forge them into a distinct nation shaped by a unique covenantal relationship to the self-revealing and self-naming God, Yahweh, “I am.” God reveals himself to Israel in the context of freeing them from slavery, and it is on this basis that he claims them as his own. Israel’s covenantal identity as the people of God is shaped by the Exodus; this liberating redemptive event is far more significant for Israel’s knowledge of God than the act of creation, since it is through God’s salvation and redemption of Israel that he is known as their Saviour and Redeemer, and is the basis for the covenant formed at Sinai.28

The Old Testament describes the community, or gathering, of Israel as both ‘edhah and qahal. While the translation is not straightforward, since both are translated into the Greek terms synagōgē and ekklēsia, Torrance notes that qahal in particular emerges from the same root as qol, ‘voice’, which “suggests that the Old Testament qahal was the community summoned by the Divine Voice, by the Word of God.”29 Israel’s existence reposes upon the divine Word which calls them into being. Torrance further expounds upon the nature of Israel’s covenantal relation to God by noting that the doctrine of grace in the Old Testament involves both ḥesed (love) and tsedeq (righteousness), for although there is no one word used for grace in the Old Testament,

27 Torrance, Atonement, 343. 28 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 120. 29 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 286.

109 it is defined for us by the unsolicited, sovereign and gracious love of God towards Israel.30 The very existence of the covenant depended on Yahweh’s gracious and free choice to choose Israel as his own.

Torrance observes that two primary developments took place that help us to understand Israel’s history as “the prehistory of the Incarnation.”31 On one hand, divine revelation was given expression in a form that humanity could comprehend, while on the other hand, human understanding and language was also shaped to be able to articulate this divine revelation.32 This is very similar to how Torrance views the incarnate work of Christ, who is both the full revelation of God in a form that we can understand, but is also at work to reshape our humanity so as to be able to receive divine revelation. There are two elements that we must consider further here—the suffering that was entailed in Israel’s calling, and Israel’s formation as the medium of revelation and reconciliation.

Israel’s suffering We have noted that God calls Israel into covenant with himself on the basis of his redemption of them from slavery, and that their communal life is shaped in a way that lays the conceptual foundations for the coming of Christ. As the preparatory form of the Church, this is how the Abrahamic promise of blessing for all people is fulfilled. However, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the tension that exists between Israel’s desire to be ethnos, and their primary call to be laos. Israel could not consider themselves as an ethnos (a nation like the other nations surrounding them), without also being mindful of their call to be laos (a nation called and formed by the divine Word.)33 This results in continual conflict throughout Scripture, as Israel repeatedly turns to idolatry, and yet God refuses to let them go, because they were not elected as

30 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Doctrine of Grace in the Old Testament,” Scottish Journal of Theology 1 (1948): 55–65. Torrance traces the use of various Hebrew words for God’s love, noting that the translation of the LXX is somewhat impoverished, but that it is ḥesed that comes the closest to the NT charis. This was a discovery Torrance made early in his career, noting in his doctoral thesis that it was on the basis of God’s love that God chose to create a community of fellowship with Israel. See Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, 10. 31 Torrance, Incarnation, 41. 32 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 7–9. 33 Torrance, Atonement, 346; Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 12–15; Thomas F. Torrance, “Israel: People of God—God, Destiny and Suffering,” Theological Renewal 13 (Oct 1979): 4.

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God’s people for their own sake or on their own merit, but rather to serve the fulfilment of God’s revealing and redemptive purposes.34 Great love thus required both judgment and mercy, for “in that covenant-relation of truth and love Israel had to suffer, for it shattered itself on the unswerving persistence of the divine purpose of love. Israel suffered inevitably from God, for God would not let His people go.”35

This challenge to their own self-sufficiency led to Israel’s suffering, for the closer God drew to them, and the more he revealed himself, the more Israel’s rebellion increased. This was not easy, for “divine revelation was a fire in the mind and soul and memory of Israel burning away all that was in conflict with God’s holiness, mercy and truth.”36 God would not let Israel go precisely because they were to be the vehicle through which divine revelation was proclaimed and manifested.37 As divine revelation penetrated deeper and deeper into the very being of Israel, they found themselves unwillingly suffering, dying, and being made alive again,38 for they were:

A people invaded by divine revelation and progressively subjected to its molding and informing power in such a way that the responses which divine revelation provoked from it, whether of obedience or disobedience, enlightenment or blindness, were made instruments for its deepening penetration into its existence and understanding until there were forged structures of thought and speech in terms of which it became understandable and communicable. And so throughout Israel’s tradition the Word of God kept pressing for articulation within the corporate medium of covenant reciprocity, creating formal and empirical correlates of its own self-utterance through which it extended its activity in space and time, progressively taking verbal and even written form through the shared understanding and shared response that developed in this people. Thus Israel became in a unique way the bearer of the oracles of God, a church as much as a people charged with priestly and prophetic significance for all mankind and divinely destined for the universalization of its revelatory mission in the advent of God himself in space and time.39

34 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 195. 35 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 289. 36 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 7–9. 37 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 196. 38 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 10–12. 39 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 87. Make note of the phrase “a church as much as a people,” once again showing us the correlation of the people of God, with the Church.

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Note in passing the reference to Israel as a “corporate medium of covenant reciprocity,” which we will return to. God draws ever closer to Israel in and through their rebellion and rejection, causing their sinfulness to serve his purposes. This pattern is consistently demonstrated throughout the Old Testament. Torrance maintains that Israel’s continual rejection of God’s love, and repetitive disobedience to the covenant, was something that “in a profound sense it had to do so in our place and for our sakes,”40 or to put it more plainly, “Israel was elected also to reject the Messiah.”41 It was not that Israel did not recognise Jesus as the Son of God, but rather Torrance insists that “in the very act of perceiving the truth they insisted that it should not apply to them for they could not bear the Gospel.”42

Thus, Torrance observes that although from an external historical point of view Jesus was crucified because he would not accept a role as a national messiah, the theological reality is that Christ assumes the very depths of humanity’s estrangement from God, and it is there that he forges “a bond of union and communion between man and God in himself.”43 If the climax of human sinfulness is seen in Israel’s greatest rejection of God’s love and grace towards us—at the Cross—then how astounding it is that this same moment is taken and transformed into the mechanism by which humanity receives their greatest healing. It was in love and mercy that God refused to let Israel go despite their constant attempts to reject him, and thus Israel’s rejection and separation from God became the means through which God lovingly actualised reconciliation.44

Israel as the medium of revelation and reconciliation It is also apparent that divine revelation, and the community formed by that divine revelation, are inseparable, for divine revelation is communicated through the community’s life and speech. As Torrance explains,

40 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Divine Vocation and Destiny of Israel in World History,” in The Witness of the Jews to God, ed. David W. Torrance (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press, 1982), 89. 41 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 34. 42 Thomas F. Torrance, Conflict and Agreement in the Church: The Ministry and Sacraments of the Gospel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996), 65. Torrance notes that Paul describes this as Israel’s ‘holding down the truth in unrighteousness’, so that God allows them to be blinded. 43 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 30. 44 Ibid., 32–33.

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In order to be heard and understood, and to be communicable as Word, divine revelation penetrates into the speaker-hearer relationship within the interpersonal structure of humanity and becomes speech to man by becoming speech of man to man, spoken and heard through the intelligible medium of a people’s language. Thus the reciprocity formed by the movement of divine revelation takes the form of a community of reciprocity between God and man established in human society, which then under the continuing impact of divine revelation becomes the appropriate medium of its continuing communication to man.45 Israel is a ‘community of reciprocity’, formed by revelation in order to mediate revelation and reconciliation.46 To illustrate this, Torrance highlights the biblical theme of ‘the one and the many’. Israel was a servant people, called to a mediatory role on behalf of the nations, one on behalf of the many. Yet within the many individuals of this one people, one specific person was called –the ‘Servant of the Lord’ who “would fulfil in his own body and soul the covenant-will of God for his people, and fulfil the covenanted obedience of the people to God’s will.”47 Israel was drawn into covenantal relationship with God in order to provide a place for the Word to become flesh, and thus it is in Jesus Christ, the Suffering Servant, that we most clearly encounter “the mystery of the One and the Many.”48 Through the one person of Christ and his redeeming work, all are welcomed into the Kingdom of God. In Israel, we see “the election of one for the salvation of all,” while in Jesus “the election of one for all becomes salvation for all in the rejection of one for all.”49

We cannot write about the redemptive and reconciliatory existence of Israel without noting the wider context of redemption in the Old Testament.50 Torrance identifies three primary terms for redemption—each which has its own cognate terms. The first

45 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 86. See also Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 12–15. 46 The Mediation of Christ is Torrance’s most accessible work on the preparatory role of Israel for the incarnation, particularly in terms of the inseparability of reconciliation and revelation. The first part of the book deals explicitly with this, in the chapters, ‘The Mediation of Revelation’, and ‘The Mediation of Reconciliation’, in Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 1–46. 47 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 196. 48 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 266. 49 Torrance, Incarnation, 52. 50 See the chapter ‘Redemption in the Light of the Old Testament’ in Torrance, Atonement, 25–60. See also Torrance, The School of Faith, lxxxvii–xcv for a discussion of the threefold office of Christ in the specific context of Reformed theology, and Ibid., ciii–cvi, for the work of the Spirit in relation to the threefold office.

113 is padah, which focuses on “the cost of redemption and the nature of the redeeming act rather than upon the nature of the redeemer,”51 and is used to speak of Israel’s redemption out of slavery in Egypt. This speaks of freedom from the power of guilt, sin and judgment, and redeemed into victory and freedom. The second is kipper, which is to do with “redemption as the actual wiping out of sin and guilt, and so of effecting propitiation between man and God.”52 It has to do with the covering-over of sin, particularly by shed blood. Finally, we have gaal, or goel, which is the “concept of redemption out of bankruptcy, or bondage or forfeited rights, undertaken by the advocacy of a kinsman who is bound to the person in need not only by blood ties, but by a community in property.”53 The emphasis falls upon the relational aspect of the one who redeems—such as we see in the story of Ruth, and Boaz as her kinsman-redeemer. God himself is clearly described as Israel’s kinsman-redeemer in the Old Testament, for on the basis of the covenantal relation which he has established with Israel in initially redeeming them from slavery, he repeatedly redeems them from sin and delivers them from their enemies.54

These three strands of redemption are all present throughout the Old Testament, but converge most closely in the places where they are “associated with the new exodus and the work of the servant of the Lord,”55 which Torrance reads as anticipating the life and work of Christ. These three redemptive strands may also be correlated with the anointed offices of the prophet, the priest, and the king. Torrance argues that the Sinai covenant rested upon the double foundation of Moses, the prophet, and Aaron, the high priest; and that this covenant prepared the way for the kingdom, which was made manifest in Jerusalem under the Davidic dynasty.56 Thus, together, “prophet, priest, and king were made to point forward to the Messiah, the archetypal Prophet,

51 Torrance, Atonement, 27. Cognates given are pidyon, lutrousthai, lutron. 52 Ibid., 33. Cognates given are kopher, and the same as padah, the Greek terms lutrousthai and lutron. 53 Ibid., 44. 54 Ibid., 44–48. For a helpful overview of these three strands, and some further comment on the ways Torrance views atonement, see ‘Atonement: Thomas F. Torrance on the Atonement as Ransom, Priestly Atonement, Justification, Reconciliation and Redemption’ in Purves, Exploring Christology & Atonement, 199–240. 55 Torrance, Atonement, 51. It is important to note that the OT does not place these three concepts side by side and develop a full contrast of the nuances of each, but they are woven together both in the OT, and in the NT. 56 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 288–89.

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Priest, and King.”57 This is an excellent example of how Yahweh’s redemptive relationship with Israel generated appropriate concepts and forms, so that as a people their communal life became a “womb for the Incarnation.”58 Torrance produces a list of examples, arguing that this must include the “Word and Name of God, to revelation, mercy, truth, holiness, to messiah, saviour, to prophet, priest and king, father, son, servant, to covenant, sacrifice, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, atonement, and those basic patterns of worship which we find set out in the ancient liturgy or in the Psalms.”59

Ultimately, we must understand that Israel’s historical witness to Yahweh was gathered up and fulfilled in Christ. For Israel, the idea of God’s kingdom was closely tied to their identity as the people of God; a kingdom which would be fulfilled with the coming of their Messiah, but would transcend Israel’s boundaries to encompass every nation. There was no early sense of divergence from Judaism for Messianic Jews, for Jewish people who came to believe in Jesus as their Messiah saw themselves as standing in continuity with all that God had done historically in their midst. We can see the distinction begin to emerge however in the use of different linguistic terms. We have already discussed Israel’s sense of being a community called into being through the divine Word when Yahweh spoke to them at Mount Sinai.60 Old Testament authors used the term qahal to refer to the assembly of the people, rendered in Greek by ekklēsia, while Judaism itself came to prefer the Greek term synagōgē.61 Torrance thus suggests that “when the Christian Church came to refer to itself as the ekklēsia rather than synagoge (with one or two exceptions), it was clearly claiming to be the “Israel of God” in distinction from the Synagogue,”62 a development which appears to signal an emerging awareness of the distinctions between Judaism and Christianity. There is also the element here that ekklēsia does not refer to “any sociological or political sense

57 Ibid., 289. 58 Torrance, Incarnation, 43. 59 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 18. 60 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 286–87. 61 Ibid., 286. The New Testament use of ekklēsia to refer to the gathered people of God derives from the use of this term in the Septuagint where it “refers to the congregation regarded collectively as a people and as a whole, rather than to the actual assembly or meeting of the people. 62 Ibid., 285.

115 of assembly.”63 However, the actual schism between Jews and Gentiles is seen by Torrance as having its roots in the crucifixion, and as being exacerbated by the Roman overthrow of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It was the persecution of the Jewish people that solidified the discrepancy between Jewish believers and those who identified as Christians, a schism which has damaged our understanding of the atonement.64

Torrance clearly concludes that the historical contribution of Israel in preparing the world to receive the gospel cannot be ignored. As he firmly states,

The knowledge of God, of Christ, and of the Jews are all bound up inseparably together, so that when at last God came into the world he came as a Jew. And to this very day Jesus remains a Jew while still the eternal Son of God. It is still through the story of Israel, through the Jewish soul shaped by the hand of God, through the Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament and the Jewish scriptures of the New Testament church, that the gospel comes to us and Jesus Christ is set before us face to face as Lord and saviour.65

4.3 The Church in the Time Between The Relation of the Church to Christ in the Time Between As we have begun to demonstrate, Torrance highlights that “from the very beginning the Christian Church thought of itself as Israel in the new phase of its election marked by the Incarnation.”66 He affirms the importance of this, noting that “Christian religion is an essential development of the inner history and experience of Israel. By its very nature Christianity cannot cease to be Hebraic or Jewish.”67 It follows that the Day of Pentecost does not signal the ‘birth’ or the ‘founding’ of the Church; instead the Church only exists as it is grafted into the Covenant people of Israel.68 Jesus was born as a Jew, and so as Torrance simply states, “Christ cannot be understood without the Old

63 Ibid., 286. 64 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 37–38. See also the final chapter on 'The Atonement and the Holy Trinity', 99–126, where Torrance discusses at length the need to integrate the Jewish conception of one God, with the Christian understanding of the Triune God. This integration allows us to understand better the relationship between the atonement that takes place through the life of Jesus Christ, and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 65 Torrance, Incarnation, 43–44. 66 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 285. 67 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 28. See Torrance’s wider discussion of the way that the Jewish– Gentile schism hindered the development of the Church, 24–31. 68 Torrance, The School of Faith, cxix–cxii.

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Testament.”69 Echoing Jesus’ own statement about himself as the way, the truth, and the life from John 14:6, Torrance suggests that in the course of his interaction with Israel, God prepared a way of covenant-love, revealed himself as the truth, and bound himself, the Lord of life, into a relationship with his chosen people.70

Events such as the incarnation and resurrection—although we must take these as representative of the whole salvific career of Christ—forced themselves upon the first believers, “in sharp antithesis to what they had believed about God and in genuine conflict with the framework of secular thought.”71 It is thus that Torrance can comment that Jesus throws the whole history of Israel into “critical reorientation,”72 notwithstanding the further challenges that this posited to Graeco-Roman dualism. It was with the incarnation that a decisive transition took place in the mode of reconciliation and revelation, and so we come now to the first transition period, signalling the shift from the preparatory form of the Church in Israel, to its new form in Jesus Christ. Israel knew God through his acts of creation and redemption, but were longing for a Messiah, an anointed king whose presence would signal the arrival of the eschatological kingdom. Jesus was this Messiah, but fulfilled this role in a radically different way than had previously been conceptualised by the people of Israel. While “the Old Testament speaks of the Coming One, and the coming Kingdom; the New Testament speaks of the One who has come, and of the Kingdom as having arrived in Jesus Christ Himself.”73

Torrance prefers not to think of two disparate appearances of Christ, noting that the term parousia only appears in the singular form in the New Testament, and does not appear in the plural form until around the time of Justin Martyr, halfway through the second century. The apostolic witness only speaks of one advent (parousia) and one kingdom (basileia) of Christ. From this we derive that while Christ has two advents, he remains continuously present—as Torrance observes, “the term parousia was used in

69 Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 5. 70 Torrance, Incarnation, 45. 71 Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press, 1976), 17. Emphasis original. 72 Torrance, Incarnation, 38. 73 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 287.

117 the New Testament to speak of all three: the coming, arrival, and presence of Christ; and thus not only the presence of one who has come but of the presence of one who is to come again. His presence is an advent, and his advent is a presence.”74 Torrance thinks of this in connection with Einstein’s ‘relativity of simultaneity’, where “it is possible for one event in the physical world to have two different ‘real times.’”75 We therefore describe the time of the Church as the time between the two advents of Christ, which is established as an “eschatological pause” by the ascension.76 Torrance defines this eschatological pause as,

an interval in the heart of the parousia which makes it possible for us to speak of a first advent and a second or final advent of Christ. By withdrawing his bodily presence from sight and from historical contact, the ascended Christ holds apart his first advent from his second advent, distinguishing the first as his advent in great humility and abasement, and pointing ahead to his final advent in great glory and power, when the eschatological pause will be brought to an end and we shall see him as we are seen by him.77 The ascension is the correlate to Christ’s condescension in which he took on human flesh. Jesus Christ, who descended to the very depths, has ascended to the highest place, showing the divine endorsement of all that took place on the Cross. This assures us that everything which takes place in the life of Jesus Christ is eternally efficacious.78 During this eschatological pause, Christ is outside of time, but we cannot explain how this is so in physical terms,79 except to use the language provided by Scripture, where we are told that Christ is at the right hand of the Father in heavenly places, which suggests a position of power and authority.80 This is to be “functionally not

74 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 300. 75 Torrance, Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking, 70. 76 Torrance, Atonement, 302–03. 77 Ibid., 303. 78 Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 192–96. 79 Torrance, Atonement, 290. 80 Ibid., 287.

118 metaphysically interpreted;”81 Jesus is “historically absent and actually present,”82 absent in his incarnate body, but present to us through his Spirit.83

An important point here is the eternally enduring reality of Christ’s humanity, which we have already discussed. Since the incarnation is not something temporal or limited—“the involvement of the Son of God in our human and creaturely being, even after His resurrection, ascension, and parousia, must be maintained without reserve,”84—we come to understand that there is an ontological relation formed between Christ and the Church, not simply an external relationship.85 At an even deeper theological level, Torrance argues that there is “a relation of mutual indwelling between Christ and the Church which derives from and is grounded in the mutual indwelling of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”86

Two outcomes of this are highlighted by Torrance’s description of Jesus as the ‘humanising man’ and the ‘personalising person.’ As the ‘humanising man’—or, in more appropriate contemporary parlance, the ‘humanising human’, Christ redeems and reinstates our humanity, setting us in proper relation to God. As the ‘personalising person’, Jesus frees us from self-centred individualism, and restores us into the personal relations that are constitutive of who we are as human beings, although they are not constitutive in the way that the Triune relations are constitutive of the divine being.87 Together, these two outcomes show that Jesus restores us to proper relationship with God, and to proper relationship with each other. The Church is therefore not to be understood as another human gathering or society, for

there is no way through external organisation to effect the personalising or humanising of people in society or therefore of transforming human social relations… [but] through union and communion with Christ human society may be transmuted into a Christian community in which inter-personal relations are

81 Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 192. 82 Torrance, Atonement, 293. 83 Thomas F. Torrance, Royal Priesthood (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Ltd, 1955), 45; Torrance, “The Christ Who Loves Us,” in A Passion for Christ: The Vision That Ignites Ministry, 18. 84 Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation, 4. 85 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 40–41. 86 Ibid., 67. 87 Ibid., 67–70.

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healed and restored in the Person of the Mediator, and in which interrelations between human beings are constantly renewed and sustained.88

Furthermore,

It is apparent that the Church of Christ was not just the holy society founded to perpetuate his memory, or to observe his teachings, or to proclaim his Gospel, but that it inhered in his being as the Incarnate Son, was rooted in his humanity as the historical Jesus, and grew out of the fulfilment of his ministry in the flesh. The Church of the arose out of the indivisible union of the Messiah and the people of God he came to redeem and raise up; it grew out of the concrete way in which he lived his divine life within their human existence thereby transforming their whole way of life; it took shape and form in every act that he performed, and derived its essential structure from the way in which he fulfilled his ministry on their behalf.89

From this, it should be apparent that the existence and mission of the Church is intimately bound up with the Person of Jesus Christ, for “it was the kind of person Jesus was and the kind of mission he undertook which determined and gave form and structure to the messianic kingdom and messianic people.”90 He remains the Head of the Church which is his body, which is why Torrance appropriates Barth’s description of the Church as the “earthly-historical form of Christ’s existence,”91 or the “earthly- historical body of his own existence.”92 We do not refer to the Church as the body of the Spirit, for it was not the Spirit, but Christ who became incarnate. We will consider

88 Ibid., 71–72. 89 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 201. Note that when Torrance talks about the historical Jesus, he is emphasising the historical actuality of the incarnation of the Son of God, rather than a reductionist historical view of the human Jesus Christ. We see this in his insistence that, in Christology, we are not merely concerned with the historical Jesus, but rather with the Christ of faith, “a Christ in the flesh, yet that Christ after the Spirit.” This means that our Christology “will not start from a bare fact as such, but from a fact-in-meaning, a fact-in-interpretation, yet not a fact in my own interpretation although it must be one that I appropriate as my own, but a fact in the Light which God himself illuminates and gives me through the Holy Spirit.” See Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 7, 9. As Torrance explains further, “When atonement itself is not rooted ontologically in Christ or in God Himself, then it becomes what the Germans call Ereignistheologie, a theology of events. Thus the saving benefits of Christ in which we rejoice, becoming detached from His personal Being, rapidly degenerate into timeless events with no essential relation to history.” Torrance, God and Rationality, 63. 90 Torrance, Atonement, 350. 91 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 233. 92 Ibid., 34, 163, 229. Torrance footnotes this reference to Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2, 614ff. Elsewhere, he also makes the point that it is “not generally realised that it is Calvin and his successors who revived the doctrine that the Church is the living Body of Christ, a doctrine which Roman theology had set well into the background and well-nigh lost in its emphasis upon the juridical and institutional character of the Church.” See Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of Reformed Dogmatics, Set out and Illustrated from the Sources, by Heinrich Heppe. English Translation by G. T. Thomson. Allen and Unwin Ltd.,” Scottish Journal of Theology 5, no. 1 (March 1952): 84.

120 the distinctive relationship of the Father, Son and Spirit to the Church in the next chapter, but should give due weight to the ontological relationship between Christ and the Church here, given that it is Christ’s incarnate presence—or absence—that frames the time of the Church, although we will need to explicate the particular correlation between the Spirit and the Church also. Torrance comments,

There is but one Christ who is both the Head and the Body, so that the Body cannot exist apart from Christ, or be divided without dividing Christ. Thus the Church has no independent existence, as if it were anything at all or had any life or power of its own, apart from what is unceasingly communicated to it through its union and communion with Christ who dwells in it by the power of the Spirit and fills it with the eternal life and love of God himself. It is quickened and born of the Spirit; it is filled and directed by the Spirit, but in order that the Church may be rooted in Jesus Christ, grounded in his incarnate Being and mission, and in order that it may be determined in its inner and outer life through participation in his life and ministry.93 The Life of the Church in the Time Between How then, are we to think of the Church’s existence in this time between, given that it has transitioned from its preparatory form in Israel, and is gathered into union with Christ through his real ontological relationship with humanity. On one hand, through Christ’s death and resurrection, the new creation has “already interpenetrated the age in which we live, so that this is already the fullness of time."94 This means that “here and now in the ongoing life of the Church we live in the midst of the advent-presence of Christ, already partake of the great regeneration (paliggenesia) of the future, and share in its blessings with one another.”95 On the other hand, the Church lives “in the condition of humiliation and in the ambiguous forms of this age.”96 Torrance emphasises this in the way he continually points to the limited nature of the form and order of the Church in the current age. The time of the Church is “the age of faith and trust—where there is no sight but where there is faith.”97 The Church’s existence is one of tension, which Molnar summarises by commenting that for Torrance, “the church is not yet what it will be until Christ actually returns to complete the redemption of the

93 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 205. 94 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 160. 95 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 300. 96 Torrance, Atonement, 342. 97 Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 191.

121 world,”98 a phrasing which illustrates this tension nicely. However, this tension is only provisional, as the Spirit’s work reaches out towards the eschaton.99

The nature of the time between Christ’s two advents may also be illuminated by thinking about the way that Jesus often held apart his word and action in order to give time for people to respond. Jesus never manifested himself in such a mighty way that His majesty overwhelmed humanity’s ability to freely respond, for “in Him the eschaton had broken into the present, but if men had been confronted openly with the eschaton in the Word and Presence of Jesus they would have been faced with the final judgment.”100 Think here of Jesus’ parable of a King who goes into a far country, and spends time there before returning to his servants, or of the Markan account of the healing of the paralytic, where there is a gap between the pronouncement of forgiveness, and the miracle of healing, when Christ “deliberately held apart His Word of forgiveness and His Act of healing.”101 Torrance suggests that, “It was precisely that lapse of time or eschatological reserve between the Word of the Kingdom and its power that Jesus was concerned to preserve in His kerygma.”102 In Jesus, the consummation of all things has already taken place, but the Church does not yet experience this fully, for she “lives between the penultimate and the ultimate acts of the Heilsgeschichte.”103

Torrance notes that in terms of Christ’s incarnate ministry, we think of the salvation- events of Christ’s life as prophet, priest and king; but when we turn to the threefold office of Christ in the period between the two advents of Christ, we must think of them in the order of king, priest, and prophet, because “his kingly ministry is supreme from ascension to parousia.”104 Torrance then continues to explain the two moments that the Church lives between, and how this shapes the time between as an age of grace, a time when the kingdom is already realised, but not yet fully manifest.

The Church is redeemed not in Word only but also in power, and yet it waits for the redemption of the body. The new age has already overtaken it and through

98 Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance, 269. 99 Torrance, The School of Faith, cxxv. 100 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 159. 101 Ibid., 146. 102 Ibid., 159. See also 66–68. 103 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 17. 104 Torrance, Atonement, 265.

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the Spirit it stands on the resurrection side of the Cross, and yet it still waits for the day when the form and fashion of this world will be torn aside and the new creation will be revealed. The Church lives between those two moments, between the Cross and the parousia, between the Word of forgiveness and the final act of healing, between Pentecost and the resurrection of the body. In the mercy of God the Word of the Gospel and the final deed of God are partially held apart in eschatological reserve until the parousia. This is the age of grace, the age of kerygma, in which the Gospel is proclaimed to all, in which time and space are given for repentance and decision. But this is the age, too, when by the Holy Spirit, who inhabits the Church and energizes its kerygmatic ministry, all who believe in Jesus Christ may taste the powers of the age to come through sacramental incorporation into the new creation.105 The eschatological pause gives room for humans to make “personal relations in decision and faith and repentance, and so for the growth of personal communion in union and love.”106 Jesus has made room—chorein—for the Church, “freedom to believe, freedom to decide, and freedom to be obedient,”107 showing that “God takes seriously the relations of time such as human reactions, choices and decisions.”108 Torrance further observes that,

Jesus Christ bestows himself upon us in time, and in such a way that our faith and worship are not timeless, any more than they are spaceless. It is within our passing time that he has time for us, that he makes time for us, makes time for communion, for faith, for worship, for growth, for development, for advance. It is in the Church in history that Christ has time for us, for by the very act of his ascension he waits for us and makes time for us, in which we can hear the gospel, time in which we can repent, time for decision and faith, time in which we can preach the gospel to all nations.109 It is only because the Church partakes of all that Christ has done on our behalf, and continues to participate in his ongoing mission, that it can become what it is called to be, “a community of believers, a communion of love, a fellowship of reconciliation on earth.”110 It is also worth noting that we must be careful not to identify the historical existence of the Church as the sum total of salvation history, for salvation is bound up with the person of Christ, and not with the historical institution of the Church. Because

105 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 159–60. 106 Ibid., 146. 107 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 102. 108 Torrance, “Predestination in Christ,” 120. 109 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 102. 110 Torrance, Atonement, 363.

123 it exists in these two times, we cannot think of the Church’s existence in any way that “carries with it the notion of sinless perfection or deification.”111 This would have the effect of leading us into ecclesiological and the idea of the ‘mystical Church’ which has greater similarity to Platonic thought than to the biblical witness. As Torrance notes, “failure to believe that the Church is at once sinful and redeemed, until the redemption and resurrection of body, leads on one hand to the Catholic deification of the Institution, and on the other hand to the Novatianism of the sects.”112 The other language more commonly used here is of the visibility and invisibility of the Church— Torrance is adamant that in using these terms, the Reformers viewed the Church as “an ontological and eschatological reality,”113 because as the Creed states, credo sanctam ecclesiam, not video sanctam ecclesiam; the Church is seen by faith.

The import of this time between for the Church will be the focus of coming chapters, so we will not engage in further comment here. In Chapter 6 we will see that any discussion about the actual order of the historical Church between the two advents of Christ is “essentially ambiguous,”114 or “essentially eschatological.”115 The outward forms of the Church are characterised by the tension between the old and the new, the past and the future, for the Church exists and lives and fulfils its mission in the midst of the disorder of the old creation, while sharing in the new creation and the new order heralded by Jesus Christ. Accordingly, the Church must use “the patterns and forms of this age in the service of its new life in the risen and ascended Lord,”116 but when Christ is revealed, these historical forms will be cast away. In Chapter 7 we will consider the ministry of the Church, particularly through Word and Sacrament. The ministry of the Church has no independent function, but rests securely on the vicarious ministry of Christ who is present through the Spirit. Even though the fullness of the Kingdom has not yet been unveiled, the sacraments belong to the fullness of time, filled with

111 Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of the Realm of Redemption. Studies in the Doctrine of the Nature of the Church in Contemporary Protestant Theology. By J. Robert Nelson,” Scottish Journal of Theology 6, no. 3 (Sept 1953): 322. 112 Torrance, “Review of the Realm of Redemption,” 322. 113 Ibid., 323. 114 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 97. 115 Ibid., 98. 116 Ibid.

124 resurrection power, and are signs within time that point to the mystery of Christ in His Church.117

4.4 The Church as the New Creation Christ’s second advent as a transition and consummation of time The final stage in the Church’s life is still a future event, and one which Torrance does not write extensively about. The event which will precipitate this final transition will be the second advent of Christ. The incarnate Son does not cease to be incarnate, rather the unity of his humanity and divinity, two natures in one Person, is an eternal reality; this also means that there is no change in the message proclaimed by Jesus in his earthly ministry and that of the eschaton, rather the last things will signal the consummation of all that which has thus far been limited and imperfect. The Church will not receive its final form until Christ comes to judge all that he has made, and to renew creation.118 Thus, his second advent will herald the final consummation of history “in a great act of crisis in which all time will be gathered up and be changed.”119 Space and time will be redeemed from the consequences of sin and death, although time will continue in the new creation.120 When Christ comes, the present evil age will be judged, and the new time of the Kingdom will be fully inaugurated.121

This period of the Church’s life is best characterised by the idea of ‘fulfillment’, which for Torrance must be understood from both an eschatological and a teleological perspective. The final judgment will not bring out new events or responses to God, rather it will force both individuals and churches to face what they have been before. Churches will be revealed either as places of reconciliation and love, or as places of division and bitterness.122 This applies to the individual too; Torrance suggests that an

117 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 160. 118 Torrance, Atonement, lxi. 119 Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 197. 120 Ibid., 192; Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 85. Torrance argues that since Jesus became a human, and united the eternal and the temporal, redeeming time, then the dimension of time must endure into eternity. 121 Torrance, “Predestination in Christ,” 118–20. Torrance argues that just as eternity invades time, we must also think of predestination as an eternal act which comes into space and time at the specific moment of the incarnation. 122 Thomas F. Torrance, “What Is the Church,” Ecumenical Review 11, no. 1 (Oct 1958): 21.

125 individual’s experience in relation to God at the close of the present historical age will not be unexpected, rather “it will mean the consummation of their experience and relations with God.”123 In Christ, “the voice of divine forgiveness and the voice of divine judgment are one and the same. This unity belongs to the very heart of salvation mediated through Jesus.”124 However, the outcomes will be quite different, for “whether a man believes or not, the creative Word continues activity… some eat and drink salvation; others out of the same cup and the same plate eat and drink damnation.”125

For believers, the return of Christ is when we will no longer need faith that trusts in the unseen, for we will see Christ face to face. The final judgment for believers will therefore mean the actualisation of God’s victory over sin and guilt. In the present age, although our sins are forgiven in Christ, we are not set free from the penalty of sin, and remain captive to sin and fallen human nature. At the final judgment, the believer will be set free from the consequences of sin; fully reconciled to God, they will live in union and communion with God forevermore. Torrance notes that union with Christ, “necessarily carries with it sharing with him in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”126 Through the incarnation, Christ made our corruption and death his own, and through offering himself as an atoning sacrifice, and his resurrection, “Christ has set us upon an entirely different basis in relation to God in which there is no longer any place for corruption and death.”127

However unbelievers, those who have resisted God during their earthly lives will find themselves also standing before the judgment of God. Torrance notes that rarely do humans actually repudiate the Cross, but rather keep on evading it, which in the end

123 Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 197. 124 Torrance, “The Christ Who Loves Us,” in A Passion for Christ: The Vision That Ignites Ministry, 15. See also Torrance, “Introduction,” in The Incarnation: Ecumenical Studies in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, xvi–xv, for similar comments. Elsewhere, in a sermon on Revelation 6, entitled ‘Ordeal by History’, Torrance comments that the wrath of the Lamb is still the outworking of God’s love. This appears in Thomas F. Torrance, The Apocalypse Today (London: James Clarke & Co. Limited, 1960), 58–59, along with the sermon on Revelation 15–16, 'The Wrath of the Lamb', 123–33. 125 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 72–73. 126 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 299. 127 Ibid.

126 leads to the same results.128 They will encounter the holiness of God which will manifest itself as the wrath of God, “that is the resistance of God which his Holiness as Holiness cannot but take against unrepentant sinners.”129 Torrance does not write lightly of this, describing the rejection of God’s love as an absurd mystery.130 Even in judgment, Torrance still sees God’s mercy at work, noting that even though the Word of God always elicits a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ from us, in the event of unbelief, “Jesus intends that the judgment shall fall with a delayed action still leaving room and time for decision and faith.”131

Torrance suggests that when the final judgment comes, God’s judgments may very well take us by surprise, because they will not be based on our works but on the overflowing abundance of God’s atoning love. He applies this not so much to individuals, but to the corporate Church, suggesting that it will be better to be a Church that is aware of how desperately poor and needy it is and is willing to throw itself on the mercy and judgment of Christ, rather than one that proudly justifies itself by its own self and righteousness, and thus lives in disagreement with His love or in contradiction to the reconciliation that is worked out through the person of Christ.132

One of the other issues that we must consider here is the relationship between election and predestination. Torrance suggests that election refers to the “eternal decision which is nothing less than the Love that God himself is, in action,”133 or expressed another way, election is to do with God’s ‘being for others’. Again, Torrance affirms that “divine election is the free sovereign decision and utterly contingent act of God’s love… it is neither arbitrary nor necessary, for it flows freely from an ultimate reason or purpose in the invariant Love of God.”134 This eternal decision takes on a specific

128 Torrance, “Predestination in Christ,” 126. 129 Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 199. 130 Torrance attributes the “surd-like quality of sin” to H.R. Mackintosh, in Torrance, “Predestination in Christ,” 122, 27. He makes the point that evil cannot be explained rationally in Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, xiii. 131 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 65. 132 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 21. 133 Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, 132. 134 Ibid., 131. Torrance made much of the fact that “God did not need to be appeased in order to love us, for it is out of the very love God eternally is that he freely provided the atonement through which he reconciles us to himself, yet without in any way mitigating the judgment or compromising the wrath of his holy love against us and our sin.” This particular quote is Torrance offering a summary of the 127 historicity with the incarnation, as the fullest actualisation of that love.135 The doctrine of predestination is intrinsically connected with the doctrine of election for Torrance, and relates to the point that we have made about the eschaton as the actualisation of one’s prior decision in relation to God. Since election and predestination are both grounded in the eternal decree of God, and also with our election in and through Jesus Christ, then they must be thought of together.

In pairing predestination and election together, Torrance is responding to the unhelpful way in which determinist frameworks of thought have influenced the doctrine of election. Viewing predestination ‘as an absolute-temporal and absolute- causal prius, gave rise to very grave problems.”136 Torrance rejects these errors, whether that irresistible grace, or the idea that humans possess a completely independent and neutral free-will, and develops his own take on election on the basis that ‘union with Christ’, rather than predestination, is the central theme in Calvin’s theology.137 Election cannot be thought of as some impersonal divine determinism; but rather as the way that when an individual encounters Christ, they are for the first time made free to make a decision in relation to God. In encountering Christ, we are for the first time given freedom to say yes or no to God, and thus must think of this decision as intrinsically linked to the divine decision already made on our behalf in Christ.138

Without Christ, human free-will is not neutral but held in bondage to sin. Thus, although the incarnation happens at a specific moment in time, we know that what predominant theme of the teaching of John McLeod Campbell. See Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of Leanne Van Dyk, The Desire of Divine Love. John McLeod Campbell’s Doctrine of the Atonement,” in Scottish Journal of Theology 49, no.1 (Feb 1996): 125. 135 Given that the Cross is the climax of the incarnation, Torrance writes, “It is in the Cross of Christ that the utterly astonishing nature of the Love that God is has been fully disclosed, for in refusing to spare his own Son whom he delivered up for us all, God has revealed that he loves us more than he loves himself.” Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 5. 136 Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, 134. 137 Torrance, “Our Witness through Doctrine,” 134. “Predestination or election is important, but Calvin speaks about it as a rule in connection with certain controversies… but never as a basic doctrine in itself—except in so far as Christ is Himself the Elect One and the mirror of our election.” 138 For the full account of Torrance’s doctrine of predestination, see Torrance, “Predestination in Christ,” 108–41. It is clear that Torrance rejects any idea that God saves some and rejects some, repeatedly insisting that Christ died for all. A useful secondary article is Myk Habets, “The Doctrine of Election in Evangelical : T. F. Torrance as a Case Study,” Irish Theological Quarterly 73 (2008): 334–354. Habets develops his argument based upon T. F. Torrance’s rejection of the way Calvinism developed in ways unintended by Calvin, and presents a perspective more commonly known as ‘Evangelical Calvinism.’

128 takes place in Jesus’ incarnate life is grounded in the eternal being of God. Election is therefore grounded outside of space and time, in the eternal life and personal relations of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is in the same vein that Torrance explicitly rejects the doctrine of universalism, noting that it must remain only a possibility, rather than a logical necessity, commenting that, “the fallacy of every universalist argument lies not in proving the love of God to be universal and omnipotent but in laying down the impossibility of ultimate damnation.”139

Israel Torrance also believes that Israel has a continuing role in God’s redemptive plans, which is not replaced by the Church. It is his opinion that the Jews still have a role of testimony; they bear witness to God’s faithfulness in both judgment and mercy, they bear witness to the roots of the Christian faith, and they bear witness to the inherent antagonism of humanity towards God.140 He suggests that “Israel constitutes God’s sign-post in the history of world-events, pointing ahead to a culmination in his saving interaction with mankind in space and time,”141 but that their role “will become fully manifest only in the consummation of his Kingdom at the end-time.”142 Writing in 1950, Torrance highlighted the Holocaust, and the establishment of an independent Jewish state, as signs of the times, signs which tell us that God is about to act in history, although he is careful to note that we can’t know what God is about to do, but only that he is about to act.143 For Torrance, the establishment of Israel as a nation has brought to the fore once again their ongoing struggle between their self-understanding as laos

139 Thomas F. Torrance, “Universalism or Election?,” Scottish Journal of Theology 2, no. 3 (September 1949): 312. In this article, Torrance rejects the logical necessity of universalism, arguing the most logical thing for humans to do is to suspend our judgment about the consequences of evil, since we cannot know whether all humans will be saved or not. See also Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, xiii., where Torrance argues that to believe in either universalism, or a limited atonement, means that there must be a logical connection between the Cross and the forgiveness of sins—but this actually results in substituting the activity of the Holy Spirit with some kind of necessary logical relation. 140 Thomas F. Torrance, “Salvation Is of the Jews,” Evangelical Quarterly 22 (1950): 167–71. This is a view particularly shared by his brother David W. Torrance, who co-edited a number of works with Torrance, and whose views are summarised in David W. Torrance, “The Mission of Christians and Jews,” in A Passion for Christ: The Vision That Ignites Ministry, ed. Gerrit Dawson and Jock Stein (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 114–129. 141 Torrance, “The Divine Vocation and Destiny of Israel in World History,” in The Witness of the Jews to God, 105. 142 Ibid., 85. 143 Torrance, “Salvation Is of the Jews,” 172.

129 and ethnos, as a political nation-state, but also as the holy people called to covenant. Torrance argues that this ongoing tension will surely be used by God to ready Israel for all that must happen in order for eschatological and teleological fulfilment to take place.144 This signals some sort of eschatological imminence, for

The Christian Church and the Jewish Church are now harnessed together in the mysterious judgements of God for witness, service and mission in the accelerating rush of world-events towards the end-time, when Christ himself will come to take up his reign and make all things new.145

Having described the Jewish–Gentile split as the greatest schism in the Church, Torrance goes on to argue that the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile through Christ is vital for the wider mission of the Church. Much of Torrance’s perspective on Israel will be quite polemical, particularly in a twenty-first century context and its increasing distance from the horrors of the Holocaust.146 What can be widely appreciated about Torrance’s perspective on Israel, however, is his adoption of a Christological lens to view their historical existence, and future eschatological role. Torrance’s insistence that since Jesus was a Jew, we cannot understand him outside of this historical matrix is useful, and so is his insistence that there must be reconciliation between Jew and Gentile—but only ever in and through Christ, and not independently of the recognition of Jesus as Messiah.

Eschatology as a divine act Torrance rejects any sense that the eschaton only involves God acting in a way that terminates time, instead arguing that “the eschatological acts of God run throughout time to their end at the consummation of time; they are teleological as well as eschatological, for they are not just abrupt acts abrogating or terminating time, but

144 Torrance, “The Divine Vocation and Destiny of Israel in World History,” in The Witness of the Jews to God, 94–96; Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 13. 145 Torrance, “The Divine Vocation and Destiny of Israel in World History,” in The Witness of the Jews to God, 96. 146 I am thinking here of the way in which Torrance argues that there is a particular friendship between Britain and Israel, and when re-visiting the Holy Land after the modern State of Israel was formed, professed that it was quite a different spiritual experience than his earlier visits. See Torrance, “Israel: People of God—God, Destiny and Suffering,” 2–14. Evidence of the polemical response provoked by Torrance’s view on Israel that we have discussed here can be found in various published letters; see Colin Morton and Chris Wigglesworth, “Response to 'Mission to the Jews',” Life and Work (Jun 1989): 7, and Torrance’s later response, Thomas F. Torrance, “Tom Torrance's Reply on Israel,” Life and Work (Jul 1989): 33–34.

130 rather acts that gather up time in the fulfilling of the divine purpose.”147 God’s acts are both present and future, fully realised, but not yet fully unveiled. Whereas the Old Testament understood the kingdom of God to be a future event that would be realised apocalyptically, the New Testament transfers the emphasis from the future to the present, emphasising that the kingdom of God is already breaking into time.

This is able to take place because the eschaton is not so much an event as it is a person: Christ who is himself the first and the last, in whom redemption has already been accomplished, and who pours out his Spirit so that redemption is subjectively realised in each of us. In the one person of Jesus Christ, God and man are united through the Holy Spirit in such a way that eternity and time are united, “and though that union is inserted into our history with its limitations and relativities it is a union that is carried through the contradiction of sin and death itself into the resurrection.”148 Fallen time is already invaded by the completed redemptive work of Jesus Christ, but it is veiled behind the “forms and fashions [of history], so that we are unable to see it directly.”149 It can be glimpsed through the Spirit, but cannot be simply read off human history, for as Torrance puts it, ‘new time’ is “concealed” by old time, which is only visible to faith.

We have noted that the Church’s existence in the time between is characterised by the tension of experiencing the old, and anticipating the new. Torrance is careful to emphasise that the eschaton, or the full consummation of the Kingdom, is not something that can be inaugurated by human efforts; the primacy of the act belongs to God alone. Writing shortly before he took up army chaplaincy, Torrance reflected on the great danger of assimilating Church and society;

One of the greatest tragedies that ever happened in the religious and social history of this country was during and after the last war, when the Church deluded the people into thinking that the Kingdom of God would gradually develop upon the earth, produced out of the kingdoms of the world by the efforts of the world plus divine aid, and that there would come a time when the Church would be at home in this world, identified with a better order. People were thoroughly disillusioned, and they have left the kirk by the tens of thousands. The Church herself is largely to blame, because she did not have a

147 Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 151. 148 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 162. 149 Torrance, Atonement, 411.

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right understanding of her place and function in the world; because she failed to grasp the supernatural nature of her New Testament faith and vision.150 The Church had come to understand its divine mandate as developing the Kingdom of God through human effort, with a little bit of divine help, and when this was not addressed, trust in the institution of the Church dissipated. There is an inherent danger of this in any eschatology which overemphasises human agency in ‘causing’ the eschaton. Instead, we must continually return to the fact that the Church’s calling in the time between is to point, to hope, and to witness to the work of Christ in anticipation of its full consummation. When Christ returns again, all things will be made new; “even faith and hope will pass away but love will endure as the abiding reality of the Church in the life of God, when that which is in part shall pass away, and we shall see Our Lord face to face and know Him as we are known.”151

The Apocalypse Today To conclude this chapter, we will engage in a brief consideration of Torrance’s ecclesiology. It involves elements of both the time between the two advents, and the consummation of the Kingdom of God. There were notable differences between Jewish and Christian apocalyptic; the former had a predominantly negative view of the new age breaking in as judgment on the old age, while Christian apocalyptic emphasises the restoration heralded by the resurrection, and the overlap of the two ages.152 It is thus that is intrinsically related to Christology, since Jesus Christ himself is the Eschatos—“the last things have already overtaken the Church for in Christ all is fulfilled.”153

This is particularly elucidated in Torrance’s published sermon series, The Apocalypse Today, which contains sermons preached on the Book of Revelation at Alyth and Aberdeen.154 Torrance observes that the incarnation is the model for our

150 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 82. 151 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 20. 152 Thomas F. Torrance, “Liturgy and Apocalypse,” Church Service Society Annual 24 (1953): 4. 153 Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of the Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers: The Historical Development of Prophetic Interpretation. By Leroy Edwin Froom. Vols. I–III. ,” Scottish Journal of Theology 6 (1953): 209. 154 Torrance, The Apocalypse Today. Some of the material is edited and republished in Life and Work three decades later—see Thomas F. Torrance, “The Apocalypse Now 1: On the Book of Revelation,” Life and Work (Oct 1988): 19–20; Thomas F. Torrance, “The Apocalypse Now 2: The Gospel Depends on the Cross,” Life and Work (Nov 1988): 20–21; Thomas F. Torrance, “The Apocalypse Now 3: Babylon— 132 understanding of how God continues to be at work in history; just as God was fully present among us, but veiled, so the Kingdom of God has already broken into history. He explains further,

Apocalypse or Revelation 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. Apocalypse means the unveiling of the new creation as yet hidden from our eyes behind the ugly shape of sinful history… no doubt we are unable by mere outward inspection to trace the lineaments of the Kingdom of God in history, but it is nevertheless a fact that even now God governs and orders the course of the world.155 This is further illustrated by Torrance’s view of the millennium as described in Revelation 20; he argues that this is symbolic language which demonstrates the difference between our view of history, and God’s view of history.156 We “no longer look past history to its consummation, but look behind the process of history into its divine secrets.”157 This is metaphorical language that lets us glance behind the ‘black clouds of history’, and to acknowledge that all history is ultimately governed by Christ.158 In contrast to this language of veiling, Revelation 21 and 22 describe the fulfilment of the Kingdom, when we will see the completion of God’s intent for humanity, and the conclusion of the biblical narrative. Torrance shows that Revelation pictures the consummation God’s original intention to have fellowship with humankind, for

The Garden of Eden meant that God has made man to have communion with Him in a perfect environment, and that true human life is essentially life in such a perfect environment… the Christian hope is fulfilled only in a new and a new earth peopled with human beings living in holy and loving fellowship with God, with one another, and in harmony with the fullness of creation.159 The breaking in of the Kingdom heralds “the time of life abundant, of fulfilment, the time of the end that is also the beginning, the time that gathers up itself all things visible

Symbol of Worldly Power,” Life and Work (Dec 1988): 16–17; Thomas F. Torrance, “The Apocalypse Now 4: The Voice of Jesus Breaks Through,” Life and Work (Jan 1989): 19–20. 155 Torrance, The Apocalypse Today, 12–13. 156 Ibid., 163. 157 Ibid., 41. 158 Ibid., 166. 159 Ibid., 177.

133 and invisible in the perfection of communion with the living God.”160 But what is the nature of the Church’s existence in the current age? As the body of Christ—an analogy which will play a key role in this thesis—the Church is both sinful and redeemed. It shines forth the light of Christ only as it abides in him, and thus becomes the imperfect medium through which God is at work, on earth, and in history.

However, there is a very real evil power that stands against God and the Church, pictured throughout Revelation as a dragon, a beast, or a false prophet, which Torrance describes as a “demonic trinity.”161 The world-order that is created in opposition to God and in defiance of sin is named Babylon, an “imitation Kingdom of God.”162 Yet, despite this challenge to God’s authority, Torrance is emphatic that God is in control of history and is keen to ensure that the Church knows that it is not impotent within history, arguing that “the real cause of the world-disturbance is the prayer of the Church and the fire of God… all history moves at the impulse of prayer.”163 Even though it appears as if the rulers of the earth are free to do whatever they want; the Apocalypse prompts us to look past the chaos of this world to see that God is on his throne. It is in the midst of this conflict that the Church is called to bear witness, a task that will require much patience, and will cost the Church everything. Christ’s victory was won through the incarnation, through his entering into weakness, humility and death, and in the same way, it is only through patience endurance of suffering that the Church will overcome evil. God allows this for the testing of the Church, because “it is only in the testing of tribulation, in the trial of suffering that we can tell who are sealed with the blood of Christ and marked out as belonging to Him in heart and faith.”164

4.5 Chapter Conclusion

We have explored in this chapter the continuity and the transitions that exist within Torrance’s view of salvation history, and the existence of the Church. It is important to note that he thinks that there is a diachronic connection which endures throughout

160 Ibid., 164. 161 Ibid., 138. 162 Ibid., 140. 163 Ibid., 73–74. 164 Ibid., 65.

134 each of the three stages of the Church, for the Church is the people that God has drawn into relationship with himself. While Israel did not experience the fullness of union and communion with the Holy Trinity, and the existence of the Church in the time between Christ’s two advents is still a time of walking by faith and not sight, we have seen that the telos of history will be the full participation of humans in the eternal love of the Triune God, and the actualisation of this in space and time on earth. Torrance consequently reads the Old and New Testament as complementing parts of one redemptive story, and undertakes extensive work to show that without the people of Israel, the incarnation could not have taken place.

135

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5 THE CHURCH OF THE TRIUNE GOD

5.0 Chapter Abstract Having discussed Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity in its own right, as well as having explored his historical perspective on the doctrine of the Church, in this chapter we will bring integration to these elements of Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology, showing how it draws from and influences other aspects of his theology. While ecclesiology is not the most dominant theme in Torrance’s theology, it is one which shapes his view of the theological task since theology is to be done by and for the Church. We see this in his insistence that the Church is part of the doctrine of saving faith;1 “it is essentially evangelical doctrine, inseparably bound up with faith in the holy Trinity and with the saving operation of Christ through the Holy Spirit.”2 This chapter forms the theological crux of the thesis, by showing how the Church is constituted by its relationship to the Triune God, particularly through the motif of koinōnia. This will position us well for the following chapters which will discuss Church order, the ministry of the Church in the time between the two advents of Christ, and how this informs Torrance’s involvement in the ecumenical movement.

5.1 Chapter Introduction Torrance argues that Church history is not to be approached from the radical dichotomy which results in a closed world of cause and effect, for the Church is not merely an historical entity.3 Even though we have seen in the previous chapter that Torrance’s doctrine of the Church is concerned with the empirical and historical Church, and will continue to explore this at length in the rest of the thesis, the ultimate ground of the Church is the Triune God who is not constrained by space and time. Consequently, for the Church to really be understood as “the Body of Christ, as the sphere in which the risen Lord is present through his Spirit and mightily active through

1 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 252. 2 Torrance, Atonement, 358. 3 Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 1–5.

137 his Word,”4 the doctrine of the Church must include not only historical elements, but must reckon with the transcendence and eternality of God, therefore including apocalyptic and eschatological elements.5

Humanity is currently living in the period between the two advents of Christ, marked out by the first transition between the preparatory form of the Church in Israel and the new form of the Church in Christ, and the future transition between the time in which we now live, and the eschaton. In the previous chapter, we explored Torrance’s view that these transitions are produced by the incarnate presence of Christ within space and time. As we will continue to discuss, in the current period of history, Christ is ascended and at the right hand of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is sent from the Father, through the Son, to sustain the Church between Christ’s two advents. Torrance describes this time as an ‘eschatological pause’; it is not that God ceases to be at work in space and time, but rather that with Christ’s ascension, the Spirit—who cannot be considered in abstraction from Christ—is the form of God’s active presence at work in the world. In the time between the two advents, the Church simultaneously experiences the wonder of already living in the new age that began with the resurrection, and yet must embrace the challenge of that new age not yet being fully realised, as we saw in our discussion of Torrance’s eschatology.

In this chapter, the appropriateness of Walker’s observation that the unity of Torrance’s work does not arise from his logical development of doctrine, but rather “in the object to which his theology points, the incarnate Christ in the heart of the Trinity,”6 will become increasingly obvious. While the doctrine of the Church is the immediate object of our consideration, we cannot consider the Church in itself, but rather must look through the historical appearance of the Church to view it in its ‘dimension of depth’, which comes into focus only as we give due precedence to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. This foundational move is required for us to understand the true being,

4 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 25. 5 Ibid. 6 Robert T. Walker, “Introduction” in Torrance, Incarnation, xxx.

138 nature and mission of the Church. As Torrance succinctly states, “The Church does not exist by and for itself, and therefore cannot be known or interpreted out of itself.”7

5.2 Introducing the relationship between the Trinity and the Church Re-visiting Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity We have already established that the Christian doctrine of God cannot postulate about what God should be like or must be like, because its content is defined by God’s economic activity within space and time.8 Through the incarnate Son, “the eternal God ‘defines’ and identifies himself for us as he really is.”9 Jesus Christ is neither a “created intermediary,” nor an ordinary human who has a special relationship with the Father. Instead, Jesus “is both God and man in the fullest and proper sense,” so that the incarnation is “a real becoming on the part of God, in which God comes as man and acts as man, all for our sake.”10

This is helpfully summarised by referring again to the homoousion, the hypostatic union and perichoresis. The doctrine of the homoousion signals that Jesus is fully God, eternally coinherent with the Father and Son, and that Jesus is fully human, having assumed our fallen humanity. The hypostatic union describes how these two natures, divine and human, are unified in the one Person of Jesus Christ, without confusion, change, division or separation, and that through the dynamic union of these two natures throughout his life, Jesus restores and heals our fallen humanity, and makes us able to participate in his new humanity.11 Finally, perichoresis affirms the unity and Triunity of God, and that there is only ever one divine activity, “that of God the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit.”12 Father, Son and Spirit are affirmed as being homoousios with each other, thus deepening the Church’s understanding of the trinitarian onto-relations within the Godhead. God makes himself known to us in a

7 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 192. 8 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 204–5. 9 Ibid., 1. 10 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 150. 11 Torrance, Incarnation, 83. For a helpful overview of Jesus’ assumption of fallen humanity in Torrance’s work, see ‘Christocentric Theology’ in Habets, Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance, 163–95. 12 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 234.

139 whole and not in parts, so that we can never think of one of the persons without the others, or of God as an undifferentiated whole.

This is all in keeping with the fact that Torrance insists that while the Christological pattern” appears throughout “the whole body of Christian dogmatics,” every doctrine needs to correspond to the full revelation of the Trinity, for “the ultimate ground upon which our knowledge of Jesus Christ himself and of God’s self-revelation through Christ rests becomes disclosed as trinitarian.”13 It belongs to the essential faith of the Church that God is not far off and unknowable, but has really communicated himself to us, and given us access to participate in his own divine Life through the Word and Spirit.14 God’s self-revelation through the Son and Spirit, “creates the overall framework within which all Christian theology is to be formulated,”15 leading Torrance to conclude that the trinitarian perspective is essential to the theological task.

Torrance’s Christocentric trinitarian emphasis leads to the insistence that appropriate theological method holds together the economic reality of God revealed through his actions in space and time (God ad alios) on one hand, with God’s eternal being (God in se) on the other.16 This was seen in our repeated emphasis on the inseparability of the ontological Trinity, and the economic Trinity in Chapter 3. However, it will be useful to again note the ramifications of this for our theological method in this chapter. Torrance contrasts what he terms ‘mythological thinking’, which is projected from humanity onto our doctrine of God, with ‘theological thinking’, which is centred in God’s self- revelation.17 Torrance derives this from Athanasius’ evaluation of the Arians, who

13 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 1. 14 Ibid., 3. 15 Ibid., 2. 16 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 96–98. 17 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 48. Torrance draws this comparison from Athanasius, and suggests that it is the dualistic dichotomy between the sensible and intelligible realms that leads to quite a different form of theological statement. This mythological way of thinking is epitomised by , whose teaching that Jesus does not share in the eternal Godhead inevitably means that what Jesus reveals to us about God “is correlated to man’s own powers of conceiving (epinoiein), and not to the nature (physis) and reality (aleitheia) of God in himself.” Torrance also argues—in relation to a later period of history—that Reformed theologians such as Calvin “apparently succumb less than some others to notions of ‘mythology’ and ‘demythology’”, because they reject pictorial thinking of God, focusing instead on the primacy of the hearing of the Word. This is a passing but valid comment which Torrance makes in Thomas F. Torrance, “John Calvin's Values for Today,” Common factor: the belief in a highest common factor in opposing views 2 (1964): 24.

140 thought of God, kat’epinoian, out of themselves onto God, so that their theological statements were anthropocentric projections. Christians are instead to think, kata dianoian, away from themselves towards God.18 The latter approach once again reflects the epistemological centrality of the incarnation, for our understanding of God is formed “under the compulsion of his self-revelation in Jesus Christ.”19

The doctrine of the Trinity is thus seen by Torrance as enshrining,

the essential Christian concept of God: it constitutes the ultimate evangelical expression of the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ who though he was rich for our sakes became poor that we through his poverty might become rich, of the Love of God who did not spare his own Son but delivered him up for us all, for it is in that personal sacrifice of the Father to which everything in the Gospel goes back, and of the Communion of the Holy Spirit through whom and in whom we are made to participate in the eternal Communion of the Father and the Son and are united with one another in the redeemed life of the people of God. Through Christ and in the Spirit God has communicated himself to us in such a wonderful way that we may really know him and have communion with him in his inner life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.20 The Nicene-Constantinopolitan development of a Trinitarian ecclesiology We are now well set to map out the inner connections between Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity, and his ecclesiology in more detail. We have already introduced Torrance’s language of needing to ‘look through’ the Church to find its Triune dimension of depth; an alternate way of articulating this is to suggest that Torrance continuously ‘looks backward’ to the Trinity. This is not by any means an original approach—as we will see, it is particularly characteristic of the Fathers, of whom Torrance makes significant use, and in doing so situates himself firmly within the Great Tradition, with a notable

18 Torrance, Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking, 52. 19 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 49. A marked contrast to this Christocentric trinitarianism is found in the work of Katherine Sonderegger, who focuses on the ‘One God’ rather than the Trinity, and focuses on the importance of Christ’s deity over his humanity, and insists that in theology, not everything can be reduced to Christology. See Sonderegger, Systematic Theology: Vol 1, the Doctrine of God, xi–xxi. Another useful article on this topic is Thomas F. Torrance, “The Eclipse of God,” The Baptist Quarterly 22 (Oct 1967): 194–214. This also appeared in Torrance, God and Rationality, 29-55. Torrance traces major periods of cosmological change, and then focuses upon the shift that took place between the 14th and 16th century, identifying four major developments which influenced both science and theology, and shows how they lead to the problem of God being eclipsed by our own selfhood, so that theologians confuse divine objectivity with their own subjectivity. 20 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 2.

141 preference for Eastern theology.21 In this section, we will summarise Torrance’s view of how the doctrine of the Church was developed by the pre-Nicene and Nicene theologians. We will highlight that the doctrine of the Church was rarely considered of paramount importance, for the Fathers paid attention to the salvific content of the Gospel, and the nature of the Triune God, over their consideration of the Church as an institution or social grouping. This is an approach which is mirrored in Torrance’s ecclesiology, and his insistence that ecclesiology must be derived from the doctrine of the Triune God who has revealed himself to us in Christ.

Pre-Nicene ecclesiology In both Eastern and Western pre-Nicene theology, the doctrine of the Church was only mentioned incidentally. In the East, Athanasius and the Cappadocians emphasised union to Christ through the Spirit as the means which created union with other members of the body, while Basil stressed the indwelling of the Spirit in each individual and accordingly in the Church as a whole. The Church was defined by its Triune worship, and participation in the Triune koinōnia, so that Basil could state that through the Spirit, “the worshipping Church is, so to speak, the doxological correlate of the Triunity of God.”22 Torrance suggests that Hilary of Poitiers best exemplifies the development of the Western doctrine of the Church; influenced by the Eastern theologians he met during his exile, Irenaeus, Athanasius and the Cappadocians, Hilary had a strong sense of the Church as constituted and unified in Christ, but also distinguished between the Church as an empirical fellowship, and as a mystical body which was a more Western tendency.23

Returning to his favourite Father, Athanasius, Torrance notes that even though Athanasius does mention the Church, “it was always the objective reality of the self- revealing and self-giving of the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit that occupied the centre of his vision.”24 Given how influential Torrance felt Athanasius had

21 Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers, 54–158 offers a topical breakdown, by doctrine, and by writer, of Torrance’s appropriation of the Fathers. Particularly relevant are the topical sections on the Trinity (70–75) and the Church (85–88). 22 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 269, fn.58. Torrance is paraphrasing Basil the Great from a number of sources. 23 Ibid., 270. 24 Ibid., 268.

142 been on his own work, it is not surprising that Athanasius’ approach to the doctrine of the Church shapes a large proportion of Torrance’s approach to ecclesiology. We see this specifically in relation to their shared incarnational understanding of the atonement, which has ecclesiological significance. Since it is only as we are united to Christ through his incarnational atonement that we may truly participate in the life of God, and thus be formed into the one body of Christ,25 Torrance goes on to comment that it was this “early Christian understanding of the incarnation and atonement in their mutual involution in the one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, that gave rise to the classical doctrine of the Church.”26 Statements like this clearly reflect the Christocentric slant of Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity, which we have clearly explicated so far throughout this thesis; the ontological relationship between Christ and humanity is indispensable for T. F. Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology.

The Church in pre-Nicene theology was only a matter of importance insofar as it related to the ordering of the life and mission of the Church. Eastern theology subordinated issues to do with the life of the Church, such as organisation and jurisdiction, to the doctrine of God, so that an incipient Eastern ecclesiology developed “within an essentially Trinitarian understanding of the Church in which Church authority and government were construed in terms of κοινωνἰα rather than in terms of hierarchical structure.”27 On the other hand, while the Western Church initially resisted the re-incursion of dualistic thought, it retained a latent tendency from Hellenistic philosophy to think in dualistic terms. Torrance identifies Clement and Origen’s acceptance of the Platonic split between the physical and sensible, or the spiritual and eternal, as leading them to propose that the same gnostic split existed within the Gospel, and accordingly, within the Church. Clement and Origin argued that the temporal, visible and earthly Church was simply a “passing similitude of the real thing,” the invisible, spiritual and eternal Church.28 When this was integrated with Hilary’s distinction between the empirical and mystical Church, it laid the foundation

25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 278. 27 Ibid., 272. 28 Ibid., 276.

143 for the dualism that emerged later on in the developing Western doctrine of the Church. We will explore this later development in the next chapter as part of our survey of the development of Church order.

Nicene-Constantinopolitan theology Torrance maintains that Nicene-Constantinopolitan ecclesiology was non-dualistic, seen in its assertion “that through the sanctifying and renewing presence of the Holy Spirit, the empirical Church is the Body of Christ.”29 There was no sense of only the spiritual Church being the true Church, or of any separation between the visible and invisible Church. Nicene theology operated “with an internal ontological relation between the Person and work of Christ, and thus with an internal relation between the Church and Christ of a dynamic and ontological kind established through the reconciling and incorporating activity of the incarnate Son and the communion of the Holy Spirit.”30 There is a real, dynamic relation between the Triune God, and the Church which is formed in history, which cannot be separated out into divergent aspects that are either temporal or eternal, or alternatively physical or spiritual. This trinitarian approach may be contrasted with non-trinitarian theologies such as Arianism, for when Christ only has a moral or external relation to the Father, this real ontological relation between God and the Church is lacking, so that the Church is merely “a community formed through the voluntary association of like-minded people.”31 Over against this,

It was made abundantly clear that in accordance with its apostolic and catholic faith the Church regarded itself as wholly centred in the Lordship of Christ, and his reign as the enthroned and exalted Kύριος Χριστός who was and is and ever will be coequal and coeternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the supreme sovereignty and power of the Holy Trinity. In the life and mission of the empirical Church on earth it was the kingdom of Christ that was predominant, for all power in heaven and earth had been given to him, and things visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly, were subject to him. They had in any case been created by him as the Word of God. What gave concrete shape and structure to the faith of the Catholic Church was the incarnation, the economic condescension of God in Jesus Christ to be one with us in the concrete realities

29 Ibid. Emphasis original. 30 Ibid., 277–78. 31 Ibid., 277.

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of our human and social life, and his saving activity within the structures of our creaturely existence in space and time.32 The primary challenge which faced the Fathers was how to communicate the Gospel into the context of the Graeco-Roman world. It is helpful to remember that the Patristic writers were not theologians in the professional sense in which we use the term today. They were not employed by universities as full time teachers of theology. The majority were pastors or bishops, whose primary concern was for the people of God, and the wider life and mission of the Church. This is why trinitarian doctrine was thought out in a context of faith and godliness, for it was a matter of worship, and not just intellectual assent.33 All this combines to show that it was rare in Nicene theology for the organisation, or structure, of the Church to be considered an essential matter of faith.34

As the “pattern and order of God’s Triune Life” imposed itself upon the Church, resulting in trinitarian ways of thinking, something took place in these early centuries which was “of immense significance for the whole life, worship and mission of the Church.”35 Torrance maintains that the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, with its trinitarian content, has “a fundamental orientation and theological structure of a conceptually irreversible nature,” which “belongs to the very esse, and not just to the bene esse of the Church, and as such constitutes the intellectual as well as spiritual basis upon which the whole historic Church throughout the centuries rests.”36 Even though

32 Ibid., 273–74. 33 See the chapter entitled ‘Faith and Godliness’ in Ibid., 13–46; adapted from Thomas F. Torrance, “The Open Texture of ‘Faith’ and ‘Godliness’ in the Church’s Confession,” Aksum, Thyateira: A Festschrift for Archbishop Methodios of Thyateira and Great Britain, ed. George Dion Dragas (London: Thyateira House, 1985), 143–158. 34 Ibid., 270–71. Torrance notes the earliest example of someone who focused on the outward organisation of the Church was , who insisted that the Church was unified through discipline; this was in keeping with his understanding of the ‘rule of faith’ as a set of formal propositions. Cyprian also wrote in a similar vein, but gave supremacy instead to the corporate episcopate as the marker of Church unity, seeing it as a ‘sacrament of unity.’ 35 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, ix. 36 Ibid., xi. The term esse refers to being, while bene esse refers to that which is beneficial for one’s wellbeing. Torrance is making it clear by his use of these terms in this context that the trinitarian foundation of the Nicene Creed is essential for the very being of the Church. Without it, the Church does not have the right foundation. However, this statement must be contextualised by the fact that the Creed is not itself the essential foundation of the Church, but God is. See also Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 7, where Torrance comments, “Christ is Himself the essence of the Church, its Esse. That fact immediately 145 the doctrine of the Church was not included in the original text of the Creed at Nicea, and merely mentioned in a list of appended heresies, Torrance notes that when the Council of Constantinople amended the Creed to explicitly affirm the homoousion of the Spirit,37 thus bringing the doctrine of the Trinity to full expression, the time was also right for the Church to be included among the articles of saving faith. This was a development which was in keeping with the Church’s early trinitarian baptismal tradition, so that the inclusion of the Church in the Creed was a result of “the Church’s matured convictions about the Holy Spirit and the Holy Trinity.”38 Torrance therefore maintains that within the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed,

the clauses on the Church do not constitute an independent set of beliefs, but follow from belief in the Holy Spirit, for holy Church is the fruit of the Holy Spirit, the result of his sanctifying activity in mankind, and as such is, as it were, the empirical correlate of the parousia of the Spirit in our midst. If we believe in the Holy Spirit, we also believe in the existence of one Church in the one Spirit. Belief in ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’ is thus regarded in the Creed as a function of belief in the Spirit, or rather of belief in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.39 As time passed, the Church had increasing need to confront questions of doctrine, faith, structure and order, and therefore had to work out how “to take root and develop within nations and societies which had already been shaped by patterns of culture and codes of law.”40 The question of church order thus became paramount, the development of which will be the focus of our next chapter.

5.3 The Triune Church Torrance holds strong convictions about how the doctrine of the Trinity “expresses the essential and distinctively Christian understanding of God by which we live, and which

relativises and makes ultimately unimportant these endless and tiresome discussions about what is of the esse or the bene esse or the plene esse of the Church”. 37 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 191–97. After the Council of Nicea, some controversy did arise after 350 AD with the claim that the Holy Spirit was a creature. The theological response to this meant that in the lead-up to the Council of Constantinople, the doctrine of the Spirit’s deity was deepened, particularly through a developing emphasis on the homoousion of the Spirit as a parallel to the homoousion of the Son. 38 Ibid., 264. We will say more about the Trinitarian baptismal formula in our discussion of the sacraments in Chapter 7. 39 Ibid., 252. 40 Ibid., 273.

146 is of crucial significance for the evangelical mission of the Church as well.”41 An ecclesiology based on order, ministry, practices, or varying doctrinal formulations—in short, on anything temporal—fails to get at the theological underpinnings of the Church’s being and nature, for the primary basis on which an understanding of the Church is to be sought is not in the Church as an institution, but in God’s Triune being. We must begin with the doctrine of the Trinity, and from that point move to engage with ecclesiology, as the structure of this thesis shows. The term ‘trinitarian’ is an absolute term for our knowledge of God, for

If God is triune in his nature, then to really know God means that we must know him in accordance with his triune nature from the start… that means we must know him as the Triune God who within himself has relations between Father, Son and Holy Spirit; so that for us to know that God, we must know him in a mode of understanding on our part appropriate to the Trinity of Persons in God. There must be a ‘trinitarian’ character in our knowing of God, corresponding to the trinity of relations in God himself.42 The Church and the stratified structure of knowledge It is all very well for Torrance to state that we are to employ a Trinitarian mode of understanding, but it is then left to the reader to unpack what this actually means for his ecclesiology. This is part of the task which lies before us, especially given the lack of a full-length treatment in the secondary Torrance literature, although we have noted those works which devote a chapter to the ecclesiology of T. F. Torrance.

In order to explore this trinitarian understanding more fully in relation to ecclesiology, we must return to Torrance’s ‘stratified structure of reality,’ with its three cross- referenced levels; the tertiary level which is that of the ontological or theological Trinity, concerned with the essential Triunity of God’s being and its perichoretic nature; the secondary level, to do with the economic or evangelical Trinity, concerned with how God reveals himself to be Triune through his actions in space and time; and the basic or primary level, the ‘evangelical and doxological level’ of incipient theology, where knowledge of God is received within the ongoing experience of the Church’s worship and fellowship. The tertiary level is where theological principles are refined to as few as possible, in as simple a form as possible, in order to operate as a tool of

41 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 10. This quote was used in the introductory chapter, but it is fitting to use it again here. 42 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 148.

147 formal clarification for the lower levels, and thus has a regulatory function. This stratified structure explicates the multileveled way in which Torrance views the theological task.

We take up here the third point which we briefly identified in the third chapter as one of the contributions that this model makes to our ecclesiology. When we apply this stratified model to ecclesiology, we see that ecclesiology is ‘worked out’ in space and time on the basic level, is heavily shaped by the secondary level, and is controlled by the tertiary level. By ‘controlled’, we mean that the ultimate reference point for ecclesiology is the ontological being of God, which is the content of the tertiary level. However, this is not known to us without reference to the person of Jesus Christ, through whom God reveals himself in space and time, which is the concern of the secondary level. Epistemic primacy is given to the tertiary level, but since this trinitarian framework of theological knowledge is never divorced from the incarnation, there is a constant dynamic interplay between the doctrine of the Trinity at the tertiary level, and Christology at the second level, which together influence the doctrine of the Church at the basic level.

Exploring this from the other direction, since the basic level is concerned with the intuitive grasp of reality that we gain as personal knowers in the community of faith, then the secondary level is of a more theological nature, where the intuitive knowledge of the first level is organised and expressed into systematic propositions. However, although the Gospel means we begin at the basic level of our experience, the three levels of this stratified structure of knowledge are ultimately governed from the higher levels to the lower levels.43

The relationships between the three levels are illustrated by Torrance’s preference for the biblical metaphor of the Church as the body of Christ. The experience of the Church for humans is on the basic level, but the doctrine of the Church itself is a secondary- level concept. Christ is God incarnate within space and time, and through its relation to him, the Church exists in space and time, but works out its ontological relationship to Christ on the secondary level. Nevertheless, because Jesus Christ may only be

43Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 87. Even the highest level is ‘open’ beyond itself, following Godel’s theorem that no logico-deductive system can be complete in itself. This is mirrored in theology, because “no dogmatic system contains its own truth referent.”

148 understood in the light of the eternal Trinity, the body of Christ analogy ultimately derives from the ontological being of God at the tertiary level. The pre-eminence of the tertiary level maintains the primacy of the “Trinitarian relations immanent in God himself which lie behind, and are the sustaining ground of, the relations of the economic Trinity.”44 Consequently, it is in the light of the tertiary level that we must judge our statements about God, and experience of God, in order to be as faithful as possible in how we speak about God within the Church.45 The outcome of this is that a solely Christological ecclesiology fails to ground the doctrine of the Church in the ontological Trinity. Once again we see that even though Torrance often describes the relationship between Christ and the Church in a way that seems to point to a Christological ecclesiology, such comments must be situated within his wider trinitarian framework. This shows us how Torrance’s stratified structure of knowledge is able to help us clarify the inner structure of his thought about the relationship between the Trinity and the Church.

5.4 The motif of koinōnia We have explored in the first half of this chapter the way in which Torrance sought to stand in continuity with the Fathers by giving the doctrine of the Trinity precedence over the external forms of the Church. We have demonstrated how this approach is reflected in Torrance’s scientific approach to theology, highlighting how his stratified structure of theological knowledge can be applied to ecclesiology. We must now turn our attention to the concept of koinōnia, which is the central motif in Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology. This will equip us to better unfold his theological way of thinking about the nature of the Church.

The eternal mystery and purpose is set forth in Jesus Christ Torrance selects three terms from the New Testament, which he utilises to show how Scripture situates Christ’s incarnation, life and ministry, death, resurrection and ascension within God’s eternal purpose.46 These terms are mystērion, prothesis, and koinōnia. Each has a primary and a secondary usage in Scripture. Torrance argues that

44 Ibid., 98-9. 45 Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, 37–39. 46 Torrance, Incarnation, 161–62.

149 mystērion refers primarily to the union of God and humanity in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and secondarily to the union of Christ and his Church through the Spirit. This mystery is related to prothesis, God’s eternal purpose. The primary sense of prothesis is the eternal purpose of God which is set forth in Jesus Christ, and then reaches out to its fulfilment and consummation in the Church, so that the secondary sense of prothesis is the way that the Church sets forth, or proclaims, the mystery of Christ in the time between, which it does particularly through Word and Sacrament.47 Finally, the term koinōnia has the primary sense of humanity’s participation in Jesus Christ’s completed work of atonement, and the secondary sense of the fellowship or communion which exists between members of Christ’s body. Together, these terms summarise the teaching of Ephesians 1 and 2, where through Christ and in one Spirit, we have access to the Father.48

We will revisit these three terms in the following section of this chapter, and present them in relation to the distinctive work of each of the three persons of the Trinity, utilising Torrance’s suggestion that mystērion relates primarily to the Son, prothesis primarily to the Father, and koinōnia primarily to the Spirit.49 For now, we will focus on the motif of koinōnia as the overarching theme which Torrance utilises in relating the Church to the Trinity. This will show us how the relation between the Trinity and the Church is more than a relation of likeness, and consequently more complex than simply suggesting that the relations between humans in the Church mirror those of the Triune God, although this is true in a simplistic sense. Torrance is critical of those who use the social model of the Trinity to talk about the shape of human life, a criticism which we will highlight in our comparisons in Chapter 9. Instead of a relation of likeness, Torrance prefers the concept of participation—humans are really drawn through the Son and in the Spirit into the union and communion of the eternal Trinity. It is through an actual relation to Christ on the basis of the incarnation that humanity is able to participate through the Holy Spirit in the union and communion of the Holy

47 Ibid., 168–70. 48 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 2. 49 Torrance, Incarnation, 174. We will be cautious around the use of a doctrine of appropriation in order not to suggest that the persons ever work in isolation from each other.

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Trinity. Torrance is adamant that this ecclesial motif is faithful to the New Testament, to the apostolic tradition, and to the Fathers’ teaching. As he observes,

Since God the Father has communicated himself to us through the saving economy of his Son, the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ, it is the incarnate Son who naturally constitutes the real focus for the doctrine of the Trinity, and the regulative centre with reference to which all the worship, faith and mission of the Church take their shape: from the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit, and to the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit. It is correspondingly the New Testament teaching about the Church as the Body of Christ incarnate, crucified and risen, that provides the immediate focus and controlling centre of reference for a doctrine of the Church founded and rooted in the self- communication of the Holy Trinity. It was a Christocentric doctrine of the Church along these lines, reached under the constraint of God’s revealed nature as the consubstantial communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in one indivisible Trinity, that was brought to fruition in the mind of the Church through the work of the great Greek theologians of the fourth century, but as a by-product of their determination to preserve the evangelical substance of the faith.50 To unfold Torrance’s use of koinōnia, we will explore the ‘threefold communion’ and the ‘two dimensions of koinōnia’, which are parallel models that are to be utilised in understanding Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology. He starts with the language of a ‘three-fold communion’ through which humanity is able to participate in the fellowship, or communion, of the Triune God. Although Torrance uses fellowship and communion interchangeably, he appreciates the Orthodox perspective that ‘fellowship’ is a superficial translation of koinōnia, and observes their preference for ‘communion.’51 This three-fold communion is the primary structural undergirding of Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology, and shows how he maps out the connections between the Triune God, and the Church as a community which God calls into being within space and time. We will then approach the discussion from another angle, by explaining the two complementary dimensions of koinōnia. These are the vertical dimension—concerned with humanity’s relation to God—and the horizontal dimension—which is to do with humanity’s relation to each other on the basis of the vertical relation which has already been established between God and humanity.

50 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 263. 51 Thomas F. Torrance, “Trinity Sunday Sermon on Acts 2:41–47,” Ekklesiastikos Pharos 52 (1970): 194.

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The threefold communion Torrance explains his concept of a threefold communion by beginning with a description of the consubstantial communion of God in se, Father, Son and Spirit, who form an eternal perichoretic communion of love. The eternal love of the Godhead—the love which is the Triune Godhead—overflows and is embodied in our humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. This takes place through the hypostatic union, for in Jesus Christ, divine and human nature are united throughout his whole atoning work, in his life, death and resurrection. Christ has healed our humanity, and made it possible for humans to participate in the communion of the Spirit. The same Holy Spirit that is the bond of love within the Trinity, pours out the love of God within the church, so that through the communion of the Spirit, the Church is made able to participate in the eternal love of God. The Church is formed as a community of love on earth as it participates through Christ and the Spirit in the communion of the Trinity.52

The theological basis for this threefold model is that through Christ’s incarnational atonement, believers are united to God, so that they “organically cohere with and in him as one Body in one Spirit.”53 This is a realist view of union with Christ which Torrance shares with Irenaeus, who is also adamant that communion with God takes place in “the most realist sense,” for in Christ there is “a soteriological and ontological unification of people in whose midst God himself dwells through the presence of his Spirit.”54 Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human; in him the eternal relations of the Triune Godhead assume an economic form, yet remain immanent, “thus opening out history to the transcendence of God while actualising the self-giving of God within it.”55 In a corresponding way, through the Spirit God unites us to Christ, “in such a way that his human agency in vicarious response to the Father overlaps with our response, gathers it up in its embrace, sanctifying, affirming and upholding it in himself, so that it is established in spite of all our frailty as our free and faithful response to the Father

52 Torrance, Atonement, 360. A more imaginative analogy of the threefold communion model is offered by Kye Won Lee, who alikens Torrance to Ben Hur as the champion of the Trinity, who has perichoresis, the hypostatic union, and koinōnia as the three wheels of his chariot—see Won Lee, Living in Union with Christ: The Practical Theology of Thomas F. Torrance, 317. 53 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 254. 54 Ibid. 55 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 101.

152 in him.”56 Our reading of Torrance here is supported by Hunsinger, who acknowledges that for Torrance, Christ’s vicarious humanity is the point of contact between the Trinity and humanity, for “we share in the communion of the Trinity as we are joined to the person of the incarnate Son by virtue of our participation in his vicarious humanity.”57

Let us think this threefold model out more fully by focusing on how Torrance describes the communion of the Trinity as flowing into and shaping our human life. The relationship of being that exists between Father, Son and Holy Spirit is eternal, but has become embodied in our humanity through the incarnation. Through the hypostatic union, the uniting of divine and human nature in one person, the relationship between the Father and Son has been concretely embodied in an earthly-historical sense. Because of the vicarious nature of Jesus’ life and work, our human nature is drawn into this relationship, so that through his assumption of human nature in Jesus, God “has once and for all assumed human nature into that mutuality and opened his divine being for human participation.”58 Torrance consequently views it as being directly through the life of the incarnate Son that the Holy Spirit has “accustomed himself” to dwell with humanity, and “adapted human nature to receive him and be possessed by him.”59 The incarnate Son accomplishes atoning reconciliation in his own person, and this is actualised in individuals through the work of the Holy Spirit.

This threefold communion model explicitly incorporates both trinitarian and Christological foci, and helps us to shape our thinking about the unequivocal way in which Torrance sees the doctrine of the Triune God as shaping the doctrine of the Church, for “the Church is the work of the three divine persons.”60 It is not simply that all humanity is part of the Church, for Torrance is clear that the Church is composed of those who have been baptised in the name of the Trinity, and more decisively, those who “live in faith and obedience to him.”61 As individual believers are incorporated

56 Ibid., 103. 57 George Hunsinger, “The Dimension of Depth: Thomas F. Torrance on the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 2 (May 2001): 166. 58 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 101. 59 Ibid., 102. 60 Torrance, Atonement, 360. 61 Ibid., 362.

153 into the living body of Christ through the Holy Spirit, this creates a new dynamic, divine dimension in the world.62 To fill this understanding of koinōnia out further, Torrance describes the Church as the “universal family of God”, adopted as God’s children; the “community of the reconciled”, who are united to Christ and through him find redemption, and the “communion of the saints” who are filled with the Spirit in such a way that they may be sent out in power “to live out the divine life and love among humankind as the bodily instrument and image of Christ in the world and the one comprehensive communion of the Spirit.”63 Although Torrance uses the phrase ‘to live out the divine life’ here, it seems best to aim for consistency in using the language of ‘witness’, as it avoids the danger of confusing divine and human agency, while still fully encapsulating the way that the Church is called to proclamation. We must not confuse the koinōnia of the Church with the koinōnia of the Triune God; these remain distinctly different communions.

The two dimensions of koinōnia We now turn to the other way in which Torrance approaches koinōnia, which is to do with its two dimensions—the vertical, and the horizontal. Pre-eminence is given to the vertical dimension, which is the three-fold communion model that we have just explored. This is how Torrance views humanity as participating in the eternal koinōnia of God, through Christ and the Spirit. However, the complement to the vertical dimension is the horizontal dimension, which is the communion formed among humanity that is correlative to their participation in the communion of the Trinity. As God communicates himself to humanity in a movement of love, this creates a circle of loving and knowing, which in turn generates a reciprocal community of love, the Church.64 These two dimensions are inseparable from each other, for as Torrance clarifies,

It is only through vertical participation in Christ that the Church is horizontally a communion of love, a fellowship of reconciliation, a community of the redeemed. Both these belong together in the fullness of Christ. It is only as we share in Christ Himself that we share in the life of the Church, but it is only as

62 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 254. 63 Torrance, Atonement, 362. 64 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 178–85.

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we share with all saints in their relation to Christ that we participate deeply in the love and knowledge of God.65 Here we must keep in mind that when Torrance says ‘in Christ’, he is referring to the work of atonement through which we are given to participate in the fellowship of the Trinity, rather than the work of Christ in distinction from the other two persons of the Trinity. Although it was the Son who became incarnate, the Father and Spirit were still at work and present throughout his whole incarnate life, even unto his death.66 Torrance further suggests that we should think of love being the Church’s “participation in the humanity of Jesus Christ for he is the love of God poured out for mankind. In him it is rooted and grounded in love, and in him it becomes itself a communion of love through which the life of God flows out in love toward every human being.”67 Although we may not directly apply the perichoretic onto-relations of the Trinity to humanity’s relationships, the Christian concept of the person is still shaped by this idea, so that to be a person is to be in community.68 As Torrance explains,

Here there arises again the distinctively Christian concept of the person, deriving from the community of love in God and defined in onto-relational terms in which the inveterate ego-centricity of the self-determining personality is overcome, which demands and gives shape to a new and open concept of human society.69 These two dimensions of koinōnia when taken together further support Torrance‘s perspective that the Church “represents that area within humanity where the love of God is poured out by the Holy Spirit and where men and women are given to share together in their life on earth, and within the social cohesions of humanity, in the overflow of the divine Life and Love.”70 This sense of the Church being the place where the love of God overflows is yet again demonstrative of Torrance’s ecclesiology,

65 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 9–10. 66 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 252–53. 67 Torrance, Atonement, 374–75. 68 Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture, 50–51. Torrance relates this to Clerk Maxwell’s scientific insistence that “the relations between things, whether so-called objects or events, belong to what things really are.” The alternative to an understanding of ‘person’ shaped by the doctrine of the Trinity, is that which was “logically derived from the notions of individuality and rational substance and not derived ontologically from the Trinity.” See Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 285. 69 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 287. 70 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 16.

155 because it exemplifies the backward reference that is necessary to understand the true nature of the Church as that which does not exist independently of the Triune God. The Church reposes upon God’s eternal purpose in creating humanity to share in his own life and love, which is grounded in God’s ousia as ‘being for others’, for “if he were not Love in his innermost Being, his love toward us in Christ and the Holy Spirit would be ontologically groundless.”71 However, since God is not dependent upon, nor is his essential nature changed, by his relationship with humanity, his choice to be the God who creates and loves is “sheer gratuitous grace… the transcendent freedom of his self- determination in love for us.”72 This makes it all the more startling that God was not required to create, but still freely chose to create. His being is being for others.

In this section, koinōnia has been shown to be a central motif in Torrance’s ecclesiology because it helps us to map out the way that he views the relationship between the Triune God and the Church. God is a koinōnia, a rich and full communion of love within himself; but a love which freely overflows, for God’s being as love is a being for others. The Church is thus created as a creaturely community that is formed and sustained through the love of God, which is manifested through Christ and the Spirit. The Church has a creaturely form of koinōnia, which reflects the divine koinōnia. It is only as we participate in this creaturely koinōnia that we are given to know God in the depths of his divine koinoinia. Christ “identified Himself with us, made Himself one with us, and on that ground claims us as His own, lays hold of us, and assumes us into union and communion with Him, so that as Church we find our essential being and life not in ourselves but in Him alone.”73

5.5 The Persons of the Trinity and Ecclesiology This motif of koinōnia involves all three persons of the Trinity, and so we must now move from considering the Trinity as a whole, and how humanity participates in the Triune communion, to a more nuanced investigation of the distinctive economic work of each of the three persons. We have already noted that there is only ever one divine activity which Father, Son and Holy Spirit all partake in, seen in Torrance’s emphasis

71 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 4. 72 Ibid. 73 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 9.

156 that the one ousia (being) of God is not truly known apart from the three hypostases (persons), for God is only known as a whole, “in a circle of reciprocal relations.”74 Each of the Triune persons is fully, equally and wholly God, and since they have their being in one another, neither Father, Son or Spirit may be known apart from the other two persons of the Trinity.75 We may recall Athanasius’ statement here that whatever we say of the Father, we may say of the Son, except to name him Father—this applies no less to the Spirit.

Nevertheless, as we briefly noted earlier, there are distinctions within the inherent oneness of the Triune God which it is possible to explore in regard to the economic activity of the Trinity. Although this approach may seem somewhat partitive, it will provide a more indepth understanding of how the Church is the work of the three divine persons. Therefore, although we speak of differing acts of the Triune God these are not independent acts, but acts-in-relation, just as the persons are never independent persons, but persons-in-relation, as is summarised by Torrance’s focus on the onto-relations of the Triune persons. Again, we should not think so much of ‘parts of a whole’, but rather of each Triune person as being whole God of whole God. In support of this, we may cite Gunton’s observation that Torrance has comparatively little interest in how each person of the Trinity is “distinctly themselves,”76 which means that, “all the questions which should be asked of this consistent, creative, and important doctrine of God center in some way on the relation between the one and the many.”77 This is a helpful remark, because even though we will discuss each of the persons individually, this is always within the wider framework of the whole Trinity, so that each person is only ever a person-in-relation, and acts-in-relation to the other members of the Trinity.

Of further help to this approach in which we consider the three persons, is Torrance’s understanding of the traditional doctrine of appropriation, or attribution. Various forms of the doctrine of appropriation have existed throughout the centuries,

74 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 174. 75 Ibid. 76 Gunton, “Being and Person: T. F. Torrance's Doctrine of God,” in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T. F. Torrance, 127. 77 Ibid., 129.

157 attributed particularly to Augustine, and then later, to Hugh of Saint Victor, Richard of Saint Victor and Peter Abelard. Appropriation is a “theological procedure in which a feature belonging to the nature of God, common to all three persons, is specially ascribed to one of the divine persons.”78 However, Torrance finds fault with the traditional approach to “the so-called ‘law of appropriations’ brought in by Latin theology to redress an unbalanced essentialist approach to the doctrine of the Trinity from the One Being of God.”79 In the context of this quote, Torrance is reacting against the way that in Latin theology, qualities or acts of the Trinity as a whole, became constitutive of a particular Triune person.

Nevertheless, Torrance does not dismiss the doctrine of appropriation completely. Instead, he specifically chooses to draw upon Barth’s approach. For Barth, the doctrine of appropriation must go hand in hand with the doctrine of perichoresis; McIntosh observes that for Barth these are the “two hermeneutical principles of the concept of triunity,” which are complemented by each other. When Barth speaks of the “Trinity in unity,” he relates this to the doctrine of appropriation, and when he speaks of its complement, the “unity in Trinity,” he relates this to the perichoresis of the Trinity.80 This is why even though Barth speaks of the threeness of God as “God the Creator, God the Reconciler, and God the Redeemer,”81 he also argues that, “no attribute, no act of God is not in the same way that attribute or act of the Father, the Son and the Spirit.”82

We see this commitment to maintaining the tri-unity of God demonstrated by the rules which Barth establishes for a doctrine of appropriation; he takes his first two from traditional Roman , advising that first, “the appropriation must not be arbitrary,” – not every triad, or grouping of three, may be related to the Trinity.

78 Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of Saint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 312. 79 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 200; Eugenio, Communion with the Triune God, 26, notes that although Torrance is negative towards the doctrine of appropriation in this specific citation, “his trinitarian theology in general and his trinitarian soteriology in particular indubitably employs the doctrine as a hermeneutical principle, most especially in that he follows Barth’s procedure.” 80 Adam McIntosh, “The Contribution of Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Appropriation to a Trinitarian Ecclesiology,” Trinitarian Theology After Barth, ed. Myk Habets and Phillip Tolliday (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 222-223. 81 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, The Doctrine of the Word of God, 2nd ed, trans. G.W. Bromiley, eds. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 362. 82 Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 362.

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Second is the requirement that “the appropriation must not be exclusive.” Where a quality or act is appropriated to one of the triune modes of being, it does not then become uniquely constitutive of either Father, Son or Spirit. Finally, Barth adds a third rule which is that “appropriations must not be invented freely. They are authentic when they are taken literally or materially from Holy Scripture, when they are a rendering or interpretation of the appropriations found there.”83

Torrance considers Barth’s approach as useful in enabling us to carefully think out the distinctions between the persons in a way where we remember that “in all these acts each Person who is himself whole God acts without any surrender of his distinctive hypostatic properties.”84 For Torrance, as for Barth, the doctrine of appropriation functions at the economic, or evangelical level of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. However, far more common in Torrance’s work than the division of creation, reconciliation and redemption, which Barth uses, is the doxological approach, where he discusses the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. This is the approach we will take in what follows. Eugenio rightly notes that “although Torrance accepts a trinitarian economic subordination, he repudiates any talk about priority or superiority that is read back into the Trinity in se.”85 Thus in the following discussion, each section must be considered as part of the whole, undivided work of the Triune God.

The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ Salvation through the person of Christ Salvation is worked out in the whole life of Christ, from his birth to his crucifixion and resurrection, for Jesus’ obedience was the undoing of the first Adam’s disobedience.86 This, as we note throughout this thesis, is the true content of grace, the decisive act of Jesus Christ, as by the means of the incarnate union of his humanity with his divinity,

83 Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 374. 84 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 200. 85 Eugenio, Communion with the Triune God, 27. 86 Torrance, Incarnation, 72–82. Torrance emphasises that the hypostatic union is to be understood as dynamic rather than static; the union of God and humanity in the one Person of Christ which is lived-out throughout Christ’s whole life shows that the dynamic hypostatic union is essentially soteriological.

159 our sinful and broken humanity was both judged and healed.87 Jesus is both the one who elects and the elected one, the God who chooses, and the human who is chosen, the spoken word of God, and the one who offers a perfected human response to God’s word. He lived not just as man, but as a man, in such a way that he converted humankind from its rebellion against God, to “glad surrender.”88 This is the primary sense of mystērion, the union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ which is necessary for humanity’s union with Christ to be enabled. It is only through Jesus that humankind is restored to being sons and daughters of God, able to be God’s image-bearers.89 Torrance consequently maintains that the work of salvation is accomplished throughout the whole life of Jesus Christ, culminating in the concrete events of his death and resurrection as the decisive moment of transformation, for “in the dying and rising of the body of Christ, the old was translated in the new and the new was grafted into the continuity of the old.”90 Christ does not just proclaim salvation, but is himself our salvation, so that

the message of Christ must be regarded as more than a message of who he was and what he has done for us, for it is so integrated with him that it is itself the saving Word and power of God constantly at work among his people precisely as Word, and effectively operative in the faith of the Church, anchoring it and giving it substance in the Person of Christ as Saviour and Lord.91 This view of atoning reconciliation through Christ’s vicarious humanity, and the import of this for the faith of the Church, is one of the central tenets of Torrance’s Christology. He finds its pattern in the Old Testament, where although there are two covenant

87 Although we refer to Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, in various places, it is worth noting here that the Introduction and Conclusion to his published doctoral work do a magnificent job of highlighting the development of charis within the Old Testament, the New Testament, and in the apostolic writings. 88 Torrance, Incarnation, 113–15. 89 Ibid., 115. 90 Torrance, Atonement, 348. Here we may notice the critique raised by Andrew Burgess in his comparison of Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance’s ascension theology; Burgess notes that for Barth, the cross is the culmination of Jesus Christ’s assumption of our humanity, while for Torrance, the ascension appears to be the culmination of Christ’s assumption of our humanity. It is in the ascension that Christ presents our humanity - which has been restored to obedience through Christ’s recapitulation—to the eternal Father. Burgess ultimately concludes that Torrance does not appear to actually diverge much from Barth’s view of the incarnation, or Jesus’ ascended ministry, but does highlight that there seems to be an inconsistency within Torrance’s own ascension theology, particularly in relation to his adoption of Irenaeus’ ascent/descent model. See Andrew Burgess, The Ascension in Karl Barth (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 109–34. 91 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 260.

160 parties, they are unequal. Israel could not independently fulfil the requirements of the covenant,92 so God provided a means of covenantal response for them, exemplified on an individual level by the provision of a ram to replace Isaac (Gen 23:1–19), and at a corporate level, in the establishment of the Israelite priesthood. This pattern is fulfilled in the new covenant, where the ‘third dimension’ is the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ in whom God has provided a means of response that not only deals with the external requirements of the covenant, but heals and renews our very humanity. Jesus Christ is both God and human, not only mediating God to us, but also the mediator of our response towards God. 93 Furthermore, Christ assumes our whole humanity, including our minds, for as Gregory Nazianzen argues, if he had not done so, we would be alienated from God in our mind, alienated from God, and unable to think aright of him.94 The whole human had to be assumed by God, in order for the whole human to be saved—as Nazianzen also states, “that which is unassumed is unhealed, or unredeemed.”95

Here we must refer to the doctrine of anyhypostasia and enhypostasia— complementing each other, they insist that Christ’s human nature does not exist independently of its union with God, but that it is a full and genuine human mind, will and body. Jesus’ human nature is not assumed into his divine nature, but rather into his person, the hypostatic union of his divinity and humanity.96 However, it is important for this project to note that while Jesus assumes a specific, individual humanity, he assumes this humanity in ontological solidarity with humanity. He shared with us a “solidarity in terms of the interaction of persons within our human and social life, in personal relations of love, commitment, responsibility, decision, etc.”97 This is why we

92 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 73–81. 93 Ibid. 94 Torrance, Christian Frame of Mind, 6–11. See also Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 184–88, where Torrance describes the Son of God as entering “into the heart of our creaturely being and into the inner recesses of the human mind, in order to save us from within and from below, and to restore us to undamaged relations of being and mind with himself” (188). 95 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 39; Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 250. 96 Torrance, Incarnation, 84–85, 228–233. 97 Ibid., 231.

161 may think of salvation not only as to do with our reconciliation to God, but also with our reconciliation to each other.

The Church as the Body of Christ This content which focuses on the work of the person of Christ may appear to be more in the realm of soteriology rather than ecclesiology, but these cannot be held apart. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ in establishing relationship between God and humankind is more than just a message about who God is, or what God does for individuals. This draws from our previous discussion about the existence of the Church in the time between, where we highlighted the importance of the ontological relationship that is formed between Christ and the Church through his assumption of humanity. Through Christ, humans are drawn into union with God, and therefore into union with each other—“personal union and corporate communion”98—which provides the basis for Torrance’s assertion that describing the Church as the ‘body of Christ’ is the most appropriate analogy, of all those that Scripture uses. This image is informed by other analogies for the Church, but helpfully “holds most of them together within itself.”99

Torrance views it as the most apt because “it is the most deeply Christological of them all, and refers us directly to Christ Himself, the Head and Saviour of the Body.”100 Such language, referring to the Church as a ‘body’, is analogical: it describes the nature of the Church without requiring strict adherence to physical or biological categories. The analogy can be stretched to serve its theological purpose, so that we speak of the Church as the body of Christ without inappropriately projecting a human understanding of embodiment onto the being of the Church. Once again we see the importance of using theological language imagelessly. Torrance explains further what it means to say that this is an analogical relationship, noting that the relationship between Christ and the Church is,

not a metaphorical relationship, though it does partake of metaphor and figure, but a real relation established in Grace, whereby the Church in all its unlikeness is given to be like Christ through sharing in His image, and in all its utter difference yet to be one with Christ through participation in His Spirit. This relation of likeness and unlikeness, of difference and yet of some kind of

98 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 9. 99 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 6. 100 Ibid.

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identification, which is not just figurative but reality, is a true analogical relation.101 By using this analogy, we are expressing the doctrine of the Church in terms of its internal relation to Christ, “for it is in Christ and his inherent relation to the Father and to the Holy Spirit that the essential nature of the Church is to be found.”102 Jesus’ assumption of our humanity is key for a trinitarian ecclesiology, because it emphasises that believers are incorporated into Christ on the basis of his death and resurrection, and are given to share and participate in his risen humanity, and through him to participate in the fellowship of the Trinity. The Church is the body of Christ precisely because of Christ’s assumption of humanity,103 so that this analogy is “no mere figure of speech but describes an ontological reality, [the Church is] enhypostatic in Christ and wholly dependent on him.”104 To phrase this another way, the Church is constituted of “all who are reconciled to God in one body through the Cross and are made one in Christ, united with his humanity in such a way that he now comprises both in himself, their humanity and his own, as ‘one new man’, for he is in them as they are in him.”105 Torrance relates this to Jesus’ prayer in John 17 where he asks that the oneness that he has with the Father might be extended to include believers, albeit in a way appropriate to our created status.106 It is through Christ’s vicarious life that the Church comes into being; he is the “ontological ground and the unifying core of the Church which he appropriated to himself as his own peculiar possession.”107

The union of the divine nature and the human nature in Jesus Christ signals that, “it is not due to some external relation in moral resemblance to Christ that the Church is his Body, but due to a real participation in him who is consubstantial with God the Father.”108 However, as we have repeatedly emphasised, this is not just participation in Christ, but participation in the fellowship of the Triune God, for “through the

101 Thomas F. Torrance, “Ecclesiology Lecture 1: The Being and Nature of the Church” (Box 29: The Being and Nature of the Church, Thomas F. Torrance Special Collection: Princeton Theological Seminary), 5. 102 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 264. 103 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 231. 104 Ibid., 248. See also Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 29–35. 105 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 267. 106 Ibid., 265, fn.38, 39. Drawing on Athanasius. 107 Ibid., 290–91. 108 Ibid., 265. Torrance draws on Athanasius for this insight; see footnote 37.

163 communion of the Holy Spirit the Church is united to Christ and grounded in the hypostatic union of God and man embodied in him, and through Christ and in the Spirit it is anchored in the consubstantial union and communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity.”109 Furthermore, although the relationship between Christ and the Church is modelled on the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ, it is important to note that this union with Christ, “is not one of nature but one of adoption and grace effected through the gift of the Spirit who comes to dwell in us as he dwells in God.”110 It is a relation of difference, rather than of direct identity, so that we must think of the identification between Christ and the Church as “the amazing identity of grace.”111 Nevertheless, despite this difference, this analogous relationship helps us to further ‘think out’ the form of the Church, for it is made up of many creaturely persons, who even though they are formed into ‘one body’ by the Spirit, remain “differentiated in their individuality.”112

Finally, the emphasis upon Christ, rather than the Church, remains paramount. When we describe the Church as the body of Christ, we must emphasise the phrase ‘of Christ’ rather than ‘body of.’ Torrance comments that,

The advantage of this expression is that it does not focus our attention upon the Church as a sociological or anthropological magnitude, nor upon the Church as an institution or a process, but upon the Church as the immediate property of Christ which He has made His very own and gathered into the most intimate relation with Himself; and it reminds us that it is only the Body of which He is the Head, and is therefore to be subject to Him in everything.113 Different aspects of the Church’s relation to Christ As a way of elaborating on the relationship between Christ and the Church, Torrance identifies four aspects of the Church’s relation to Christ that help to fill out our understanding of this relation.

109 Ibid., 278. 110 Ibid., 265. 111 Torrance, “Ecclesiology Lecture 1: The Being and Nature of the Church,” 5. 112 Torrance, Atonement, 369. For further discussion on the hypostatic union in relation to the union of Christ and the Church, see Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 184–186. 113 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 7.

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1. The crucified Christ

Through Jesus’ assumption of humanity, and the dynamic nature of the hypostatic union, fallen humanity was judged and healed, which came to its culmination when Christ submitted to the judgment of the Cross, making “expiation for our sin and guilt by bearing it all vicariously in the sacrifice of Himself, He the just for the unjust, that we might be made righteous in Him.”114 The Church continues to be a body of sinners who are justified in Christ, but remain subject to fallen time and sinful nature. Torrance recalls H.R. Mackintosh’s teaching that Christians are sinners redeemed by Christ, with a mediated relationship to the Father.115

2. The risen Christ Just as Christ died on the Church’s behalf, he also rose on the Church’s behalf, for “the Church which is His Body will surely and certainly follow Him in the resurrection.”116 As the body of the risen Christ, the Church already shares in his resurrection, while still awaiting its own. On one hand, this is a promise about the eschaton, but is also to do with a partial realisation here and now, for “it is an evangelical declaration of what had already taken place in Christ, and in him continues as a permanent triumphant reality throughout the whole course of time to its consummation.”117 Torrance insists that while the Church should live free from its sinful past and tradition, on the basis of the resurrection, it often “lives as though it were still bound hand and foot by the grave- clothes of the past,”118 “crusted over with secularism and [going] about in the shabby second-hand clothing of a transient age.”119 The Church which has grasped the reality of the resurrection is called to live in a way that anticipates its own resurrection.

3. The ascended Christ The church in the ‘time between’ is the body of the ascended Christ who has ascended into heaven and is hidden from sight. We have already explored what this means for the Church, but it is worth noting three specific points that Torrance makes about the

114 Ibid., 13. 115 Torrance, “Review of the Realm of Redemption,” 322. 116 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 14. 117 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 299. 118 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 14. 119 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 224.

165 ascension in regard to how it affects the relation of Christ to the Church. First, it declares the distinction between Christ and the Church and the distinction between their ministries. Secondly, it reveals Christ’s refusal to be separated from his Church, for the ascended Christ has poured out his Spirit on his Church, anointing it as his ‘servant in history.’ Finally, the ascension also causes the Church to look backwards to the historical Christ, so that we do not encounter Christ apart from his incarnate life, death and resurrection, and only in this light look forward to the day when Christ will return in power and glory.120

4. The advent Christ

The Church that lives within history needs to “look beyond all history to find the fullness of its life in the coming Lord and in the unveiling of the new creation.”121 Anticipating the consummation of all things shapes the Church’s historical self- awareness, as it constantly confesses its sin and receives forgiveness, anticipating Christ’s judgment of the living and the dead, and the renewal of all He has made. As the Church of the advent Christ, the Church knows that “although it is already one Body with Christ through the Spirit, it has yet to be made one Body with Him in the consummation of His Kingdom.”122 The Church that lives in the time between the ascension and the eschaton is to be characterised by its joyful expectation of Christ’s return to make all things new, and commitment to bear witness to that anticipation.

These four elements point to the historical shape of the life of the Church, which we need to explore in much more depth. We will return to this issue in the next chapters as we explore the order and ministry of the Church; but first, we must continue our main discussion by considering the person of the Father, and the person of the Holy Spirit.

The Love of the Father We have already established that to describe God as Father can refer to either the whole Godhead, or to the person of the Father. Eugenio notes that Torrance’s soteriology is unusual in referring to the salvific work specific to the person of the

120 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 14–15. 121 Ibid., 15. 122 Ibid.

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Father,123 which can be extended to also suggest that the Father has a specific role in relation to ecclesiology. However, the specific work of the Father is less visible than the economic work of the Son and the Spirit; Torrance reminds us that although God is the Source of all being, he “directs us in our knowledge of him not to some superessential realm beyond the space-time universe which he has brought into being out of nothing but to his unceasing interaction with us in the midst of our creaturely and historical existence where in his loving purpose he makes himself known to us as our God and Father.”124 We must certainly speak of the Father, but we are limited in what we may say of the Father’s distinctive work, particularly in between the two advents of Christ.

While God is described in the Old Testament as Israel’s father, and binds himself to them in covenant as their God, it is only through the incarnate Son that the loving nature of God’s fatherhood is fully defined for us. It is through God’s self-giving and self-revealing in his Son that we come to know the Father. Time and time again, Torrance repeats that we do not know the Father except through the Son, for it is the love of the Father and the Son for each other that reveals to us the love of God.125 This love is not a self-contained and selfish love, but a fullness of love that overflows, a generous love. In giving us the Son, the Father “reveals that he loves us to the uttermost with an eternal Fatherly love.”126 The love of the Father is given its fullest content in the crucifixion of the Son, “for it is in that personal sacrifice of the Father to which everything in the Gospel goes back.”127 This is supported by the clear soteriological concern of the Nicene clauses on the incarnation—as Athanasius commented, “Worshipping the goodness of the Father and amazement at the saving economy of the Son belong inseparably together.”128

It is the love of the Father who gives us all things that lies behind the Father’s prothesis, the eternal purpose which is set forth through the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit to enable humanity’s participation in God’s own Triune life, which then leads to

123 Eugenio, Communion with the Triune God, 83. 124 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 138. 125 Ibid., 59. 126 Ibid., 55. 127 Ibid., 2. 128 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 148. Citing Athanasius, see fn.5.

167 the formation and existence of the Church. In the incarnation, the Father does not send the Son as a gift to humankind as something external to the divine being, but rather, “the fact that Jesus Christ is the incarnation within our alienated human being and perishing existence of the eternal Son of the eternal Father means that the message of reconciliation, salvation and redemption does indeed have divine content and eternal validity.”129 The historic mission of the Son is an event that flows from the eternal Triune being of God. In Christ, “God turns towards men and women and wills to be one with them, and in him they are turned wholly towards God to be one with God.”130 This is not two different movements but one integrated movement of electing love. God freely decides to give himself in love, but a love which demands a response from humanity.131 The love of the Father is therefore “the steadfastness of love and grace even in judgment, of electing love even in condemning sin.”132 This means that everything we see revealed in the grace of Jesus Christ, is identical with the love of the Father.133

The Communion of the Holy Spirit We come now to the work of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, which has historically been among the weakest doctrines in the Church.134 Torrance comments that,

The mission of the Spirit sent from the Father in the name of the Son as the Spirit of truth is to convict people of the truth as it is in Jesus, in judgment and mercy, to enlighten, inform and strengthen the Church through serving the centrality

129 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 142. 130 Torrance, Incarnation, 109. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid., 113. 133 Torrance, “A Sermon on the Trinity,” 42. 134 Torrance, The School of Faith, xcv. Torrance argues this is because the early tended to pass over the Holy Spirit in order to focus on the Church, and the fruits of salvation. Torrance himself is sometimes accused of having an underdeveloped pneumatology due to the emphasis that he places on Christ for our knowledge of God, but when one integrates all the different trinitarian material that is contained throughout his corpus, this accusation is seen to be unfounded. See a discussion of this charge in Gary W. Deddo, “The Holy Spirit in T. F. Torrance's Theology,” in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T. F. Torrance, ed. Elmer M. Colyer (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 81–114. This is followed by T. F. Torrance’s response, in Torrance, “Thomas Torrance Responds,” in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T. F. Torrance, 311–14.

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of Christ and deepening its understanding of his teaching and person as the incarnate Son of the Father, the one Lord and Saviour of humanity.135 The inseparability of the work of the Son and the Spirit will be obvious in any discussion of the work of the Holy Spirit, for union with Christ is correlative to the communion of the Spirit.136 It is only through Christ’s incarnate assumption of our humanity that we are redeemed and saved, and yet without the Holy Spirit this not actualised in us as individuals, and we are unable to participate in the fellowship of the Holy Trinity. We can express the distinctiveness of the Spirit in another way, by recalling that even though the Son is the Word made flesh, humankind can only hear that Word as we share in the Spirit through whom the Word became flesh.137 Torrance further elucidates the difference between the way in which the Son and the Spirit are at work,

While the incarnate form of the Son provides our knowledge of God with its controlling and shaping principle, it is a knowledge mediated through the Son which we may have only through the activity of the Holy Spirit and as in the Spirit we participate in the Son and through him in God.138 Earlier we noted that to speak of God as Father could apply either to the whole Godhead, or specifically to the person of the Father. The same applies to our consideration of the Holy Spirit, for the whole Godhead is Spirit, but the Holy Spirit is also one of the three distinct persons of the Trinity. To speak of the Triune God as Spirit describes his personal being (ousia), for God is Spirit “in utter differentiation from all created nature.”139 The Hebraic understanding of ‘holy’ evokes a sense of something transcendent, unapproachable and wholly ‘other than’, but since it is paired by Scripture with the term ruach, which has a distinctly “active and concrete sense,”140 the Scriptures reveal that the Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force acting upon humanity, but rather God, “personally and objectively present meeting and speaking with his

135 Torrance, “The Christ Who Loves Us,” in A Passion for Christ: The Vision That Ignites Ministry, 19. 136 Torrance, The School of Faith, cvi–cxviii. 137 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 61–62. 138 Ibid., 64. 139 Ibid., 207. 140 Ibid., 192. Torrance notes that both ruach and pneuma literally meant wind or breath, but that classical Greek lost much of that original emphasis, although the Hebraic sense was retained in the biblical use of pneuma.

169 people.”141 ‘Spirit’ is not simply a reference to God’s agency, revealing an impersonal way in which the Father interacts with humankind. Instead it is through the Spirit that God creates our relation to him, “by the presence of his Spirit within us as a relation of himself to himself.”142

The Person of the Holy Spirit, “no less than the Son is the self-giving of God: in him the Gift and Giver are identical.”143 It is through the Holy Spirit that “God makes himself open to our knowing,” as the reciprocal action to the fact that through Jesus Christ, humanity has been made open to the possibility of true and genuine knowledge of God.144 The Spirit “marvellously gives us access to the intrinsic intelligibility of God, while nevertheless preserving inviolate the ultimate mystery and ineffability of his divine being.”145 As Torrance elaborates further,

The Spirit is not just something divine or something akin to God emanating from him, not some sort of action at a distance or some kind of gift detachable from himself, for in the Holy Spirit God acts directly upon us himself, and in giving us his Holy Spirit God gives us nothing less than himself.146 We have already explored the way in which belief in the Church is the correlate of belief in the Holy Spirit, for “the doctrine of the Church is a function of the doctrine of the Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son.”147 Consequently, the Church is considered by Torrance as “the manifestation in humanity correlative to the gift of the Spirit, the sphere described by God’s people where God’s Spirit is at work,” for “no doctrine of the Church can neglect the doctrine of the Spirit.”148 Our understanding of this is deepened by thinking of the incarnation, and of Pentecost, as complementary events. Pentecost was not the beginning of the Church—given that Torrance views the people of Israel as part of the Church—but rather the moment of its transformation

141 Ibid., 103. 142 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 60. 143 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 201. 144 Ibid., 214. See ‘The Epistemological Relevance of the Holy Spirit’ in Torrance, God and Rationality, 165–192; without the Spirit we cannot speak of God in any true and faithful way. 145 Ibid., 215. 146 Ibid., 191. 147 Ibid., 9. 148 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 16.

170 into the body of the risen Christ through the Spirit.149 Once the people and structure had been prepared, the Spirit was poured out on the Church as the “effective counterpart in us of his self-offering to the Father through the eternal Spirit. In other words, Pentecost must be regarded, not as something added on to atonement, but as the actualisation within the life of the Church of the atoning life, death and resurrection of the Saviour.”150

Through the outpouring of the Spirit, God causes the Church to “participate in his own divine life and love,”151 which constitutes it as “the unique ‘place’ where access to the Father through the Son was grounded in space and time among the nations of mankind.”152 It is the sanctifying presence and activity of the Spirit that forms the Church, joining us to Christ, and giving us access to the Father.153 Through the communion of the Holy Spirit “the Church shares in the incarnate mystery of Christ, and through his power and operation within it that the Church as the Body of Christ is progressively actualised among the people of God.”154 Humanity is brought into the union and communion of the Trinity—the vertical dimension which we have previously discussed—which has as its parallel the creation of unity among believers, or the horizontal dimension of koinōnia. As Torrance explains further,

We have communion or κοινωνια in the mystery of Christ, and are made members of his Body. The personalising incorporating activity of the Spirit creates, not only reciprocity between Christ and ourselves, but a community of reciprocity among humankind, which through the Spirit is rooted in and reflects the Trinitarian relations in God himself. It is thus that the Church comes into being and is constantly maintained in its union with Christ as his Body. This is the Church of the triune God, embodying under the power of the Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, the divine koinonia within the conditions of human and temporal existence. For the Church to be in the Spirit in an objective and ontological sense, is to be in God. It belongs to the nature and life of the Church in space and time to partake of the very life and light and love which God is. It is thus an imperative inherent in the being of the Church ever to keep the unity

149 Torrance, Atonement, 353. 150 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 190. 151 Ibid., 254. 152 Ibid., 278. 153 Ibid., 257. 154 Ibid., 291.

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of the Spirit in the bond of peace, and thereby to mirror in itself the oneness of the Holy and Blessed Trinity.155 The work of the Spirit is to uphold creatures and bring them to their true telos of participation in the koinōnia of the Triune God.156 Just as Christ received the Spirit in his humanity, we were made able to also receive the Spirit, and “to have the Spirit dwelling in us is to be made partakers of God beyond ourselves.”157 Reconciliation is much more than the restoration of a holy relation between God and man; but rather “the eternal communion of love in God overflows through Jesus Christ into our union with God and gathers us up to dwell with God and in God.”158 The end goal of reconciliation is not only atonement, but our participation in the “very light, life and love of the Holy Trinity.”159 Note again the reference to the Church as a community of reciprocity, which we shall refer to in the final section of this chapter.

It is important to note that even though Torrance suggests that that “our ‘deification’ in Christ, through the Spirit, is the obverse of his ‘inhomination’”,160 he is careful to quantify what he means by the phrase ‘deification’, translated from the Greek theosis or theopoiesis. It is not that we are made divine or become , for theosis “refers to the utterly staggering act of God in which he gives himself to us and adopts us into the communion of his divine life and love through Jesus Christ and in his one Spirit, yet in such a way that we are not made divine but are preserved in our humanity.”161 This is seen in the Patristic emphasis that the immediate presence of God sustains, rather than overwhelms, creaturely being.162 As Torrance also states, “All of grace means all of man, for the fullness of grace creatively includes the fullness and completeness of our human response.”163

155 Ibid., 251. 156 Ibid., 229. 157 Ibid., 189. 158 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 64. 159 Ibid., 66. 160 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 189. For a fuller discussion of theosis, see again Habets’ Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance. 161 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 64. 162 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 227. 163 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, xii.

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Through the active presence of the Holy Spirit, our focus is lifted beyond ourselves as we are enabled to be “partakers of God beyond ourselves” and “even share in the inwardness of God himself,”164 but not in any way that transgresses the bounds of our humble and creaturely status. We must always be careful to retain the absolute distinction between the Holy Spirit and the human spirit. It is through the work of the Son and the Spirit that God reveals himself to us, unites himself to us, and therefore unites us to himself, and to each other, since “the eternal love of God was incarnated in Jesus Christ, and because the Father sends us His Holy Spirit in the name of Christ.”165

The Church’s relation to the Son and Spirit in the time between Christ’s two advents Our discussion of each of the three persons has continued to fill out our understanding of the Trinity as a whole, for as we consider the three persons, we only ever consider them in relation to each other. However, we need to briefly comment on the mutual mediation of the Son and Spirit in relation to the Church—which is really a continuation of our discussion of the work of the Spirit—particularly in the time between Christ’s two advents. It is through this mutual mediation that the Church is made the place within space and time where humankind can meet with God.166 The activity of the Son and Spirit are inseparable but distinguishable from each other, and “constitute the two-fold way in which the one incomprehensible God communicates himself to us, grounded in and issuing from the transcendent and undivided reality of the three divine Persons.”167

This mutual mediation takes place as Christ comes to us, and the Spirit outworks in us the capacity to receive what Christ has done on our behalf; our objective union with Christ on the basis of the incarnation, is subjectively actualised in us by the Spirit’s indwelling.168 This takes place through the work of the Son and Spirit together,

164 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 208. 165 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 128. Another helpful discussion which parallels our discussion of the relationship between the Triune persons and the Church, is Torrance’s discussion of the Triune persons in relation to the role of humanity in the universe. The article is also structured under the trinitarian headings of the love of God, the grace of Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Spirit—see Torrance, “The Goodness and Dignity of Man in the Christian Tradition,” 315–22. 166 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 108. 167 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 101. 168 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 67.

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in Christ, for it is in hypostatic union that the self-giving of God really breaks through to man, when God becomes himself what man is and assumes man into a binding relation with his own being; and in the Spirit, for then the self-giving of God actualises itself in us as the Holy Spirit creates in us the capacity to receive it and lifts us up to participate in the union and communion of the incarnate Son with the heavenly Father.169 The reader will recall Torrance’s insistence that the time of the Christian Church transitions to something new at the moment of the ascension, for the resurrected Christ has transcended space and time without ceasing to be human, and is with the Father in ‘heavenly places.’170 In the last chapter we noted that in the time between his first and second advents, Jesus Christ is absent in his historical and incarnate existence, and yet present in a real way, through the Spirit. Although the Church is primarily described as the body of Christ, for “it was not, after all, the Spirit but the Son who became incarnate and gave Himself for the Church and affianced it to Himself as His very own,”171 Christ imparts the Spirit to the Church, in order to unite it to himself as his body, “but in such an interior ontological and soteriological way that Christ himself is both the Head and the Body in one.”172

We further noted that we must think of the ascension as creating an ‘eschatological pause.’ This eschatological pause is not to do with God’s absence, nor does it suggest that God is not in control. All history is to be understood in the light of Christ, for he “suborns and bends all world events to serve God’s saving purpose,” both retrospectively, in the present, and in the future.173 In this eschatological pause, which is the time between Christ’s two advents, “the realm of grace is not yet dissolved by the realm of glory.”174 The kingdom of God has not yet fully been unveiled, so that the Church must truly walk by faith, not sight.

Finally, but no less important, this eschatological pause determines the Church’s mission in history, and its relation to Jesus Christ. Torrance asserts that while the Church is “rooted in the incarnation,” through the Son’s incarnate assumption of our

169 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 100. 170 Torrance, Atonement, 287–88. 171 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 17. 172 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 277. 173 Torrance, Atonement, 297. 174 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 59.

174 humanity, the Church is “maintained through the operation of the Spirit.”175 He often uses the language of our needing to look back to the historical Jesus, for it is through Christ’s concrete historic works that we are saved and brought into union with God,176 and yet this only ever takes place as the Spirit renews afresh our union to Christ. Torrance describes the Spirit as Christ’s Alter Ego—that is, their being and activity are inseparable so that the Spirit “glorifies Christ and acts in his place.”177 Torrance also cites Athanasius’ statement that, “while Christ is the only Eidos or ‘Form’ or ‘Image’ of Godhead, the Spirit is the Eidos or ‘Image’ of the Son.”178 Through the Spirit who unites us to God and to each other, the Church is made more open to God, and “is thus more and more universalised or ‘catholicised’ as the one Body of him whose fullness fills all in all.”179

The Controversy In all of our speech about the Trinity we must reckon with the difficulty of knowing what theological terms mean, a problem which is particularly acute in relation to identifying the difference between the begetting of the Son and procession of the Spirit. These are terms for which we have no other frame of reference except revelation. There are three basic relations within the Trinity, which were “referred to by the Church Fathers as ‘fatherhood’ or ‘unbegottenness’, ‘sonship’ or ‘begottenness’, and ‘procession’ or ‘spiration’.”180 These terms suggest that there is a distinction in how the Spirit is related to the Father, and how the Son is related to the Father, and how the Spirit and Son are related. However, we cannot explain these differences using human logic or comparison, for these terms

175 Torrance, Atonement, 359. 176 It is important to note that Torrance does not agree with the approach which investigates the ‘historical Jesus’ from an observational and phenomenal perspective; generally when Torrance uses this phrase, he is referring to the incarnate Son, and his life, ministry, death and resurrection. Rather than searching for the Jesus of history, we must “allow Jesus to disclose himself to us in the light of his own intrinsic Logos and in terms of his own internal relations.” In other words, we must understand the incarnation in the light of the Triune relations, as we have been emphasising throughout this thesis. See Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 51. See also the way Torrance relates the ‘search for the historical Jesus’ to the phenomenalist approach of modern science in Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 278– 82. 177 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 249. 178 Ibid., 194. See fn.10. 179 Ibid., 292. 180 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 193.

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denote ineffable relations and refer to ineffable realities, of which we know only in part through the incarnation of the Father’s only begotten Son in Jesus, through the teaching of Jesus about his Father and the gift of the Holy Spirit, through his breathing the Spirit upon the disciples after his resurrection and his pouring out of the Spirit upon the Church after his ascension. But what do ‘breathing’ and ‘pouring’ or ‘proceeding’ mean beyond indicating divine actions which in their nature are quite incomprehensible to us? As Karl Barth pointed out, we can no more offer an account of the ‘how’ of these divine relations and actions that we can define the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and delimit them from one another.181 These terms, despite the difficulty that they present, strongly influence the next aspect of a trinitarian ecclesiology that we need to consider at this point. This is the historical controversy over the filioque, which arose when the Western church “un- ecumenically” inserted a clause into the Creed to the effect that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.182 The issue was to do with the procession of the Holy Spirit, and whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, or from the Father and the Son. Western theologians felt that if the Spirit did not proceed from the Father and Son, then this suggested the subordination of the Son to the Father, although Torrance notes that they followed St. Augustine, holding this view “in a modified form according to which the Spirit is understood to proceed from the Father principally.”183 In response to this, Eastern theologians felt that if the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and Son, this “appeared to posit two ultimate Principles or archai”184 in the Godhead, and so worked from the perspective that the Spirit proceeds from the Father only, basing this upon the difference between the “eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father, and the historical mission of the Spirit from the Son.”185

In response to the schism that the filioque clause generated, Torrance suggests that a much better solution is available, which would have allowed the Church to avoid the

181 Ibid. 182 Ibid., 186. The perspective stated in this section is one of the places where we may view the maturation of Torrance’s thought; in his earlier work, he discusses the importance of the filioque clause for Reformed theology, suggesting that it both helps to remind us that the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, and so we cannot separate their work, and also that it requires us to renounce any form of natural theology or revelation. He does not acknowledge any ecumenical error in this earlier work. See Torrance, The School of Faith, xcvii–xcix. 183 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 186. 184 Ibid. 185 Ibid.

176 historical East–West schism. The key, Torrance argues, is that the Son and Spirit both proceed from the ousia of the Father, referring to the shared being of the whole Godhead, rather than from the hypostasis of the Father, the specific person.186 In Torrance’s opinion, this is much more faithful to the Athanasian doctrine of coinherence, for “since the Holy Spirit like the Son is of the being of God, and belongs to the Son, since he is in the Being of the Father and in the Being of the Son, he could not but proceed from or out of the Being of God inseparably from and through the Son.”187 The following quote, although admittedly lengthy, offers a full explanation of Torrance’s solution to the filioque controversy.

It is when we apply the concept of perichoresis rigorously to this doctrine of the Holy Trinity together with the concept of the triune Monarchia that it becomes possible for us to think through and restate the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father in a way that cuts behind and sets aside the problems that divided the Church over the filioque. If we take seriously the understanding of the Trinity in Unity and the Unity in Trinity in which each Person is perfectly and wholly God, and in which all three Persons perichoretically penetrate and contain one another, then we cannot but think of the procession of Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, for the Son belongs to the Being of the Father, and the Spirit belongs to and is inseparable from the Being of the Father and of the Son. In proceeding from the Being of the Father, however, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the One Being which belongs to the Son and to the Spirit as well as to the Father, and which belongs to all of them together as well as to each one of them, for each one considered in himself is true God without any qualification. The Spirit proceeds perichoretically from the Father, that is, from out of the mutual relations within the one Being of the Holy Trinity in which the Father contains the Son and is himself contained by the Spirit. Thus the procession of the Spirit cannot be thought of in any partitive way, but only in a holistic way as ‘whole from whole’ (ὅλος ὅλου), that is, as proceeding from the wholly coinherent relations of the three divine Persons within the indivisible Being of the one God who is Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity. 188 The result of this is that it is theologically correct to use the expression ‘from the Father and the Son’, but also to use the expression ‘from the Father through the Son.’ This only applies, however, if we understand that the Spirit proceeds from the whole Godhead,

186 Ibid., 179. Elsewhere Torrance comments on how the Athanasian doctrine of coinherence helps to undercut the filioque issue, for “there is no suggestion, then, either that there is more than one Source of Deity or that somehow the Son is less than the Father if the Spirit does not proceed from the Father as one who is proper to the Being of the Son.” Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 20. 187 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 188. 188 Ibid., 190.

177 not only the person of the Father, thus emphasising the full perichoretic equality of the deity of the three persons. Torrance thus contends that returning to the Nicene doctrine of God provides the “ground for deep doctrinal agreement that cuts beneath and behind the historical divisions in the Church between East and West, Catholic and Evangelical, and [points] the way forward for firmly based ecumenical agreement in other areas of traditional disagreement.”189

We must further conclude that the processions within the Trinity are “incomprehensible mysteries which are not explicable through recourse to human modes of thought,”190 and so we must think of them in imageless ways—so, for example, to say that the Son is begotten cannot be understood using the metaphor of human birth.191 Thus, we affirm that there are real relations within the Trinity, such as ‘begetting’ and ‘proceeding’, but we maintain apophatic reserve in our speech about God, and do not seek to explain how these relationships function.192

5.6 The Church as a ‘community of reciprocity’ and the ‘social co-efficient of theological knowledge’

This chapter has been focused upon explicating the key theological relationship that exists between the doctrine of the Trinity, and the doctrine of the Church. We have explained how God communicates himself to humanity through a threefold communion of love, and that this vertical dimension of koinōnia creates a correlative horizontal dimension, a koinōnia among humanity, which is the Church. For Torrance everything depends on the reality that God actually interacts with his creation, so that in giving us access to his inner fellowship, there is genuine reciprocity between God and humans, which itself creates reciprocity between human and human. Another way of summarising this exchange is that “through personal interaction with us God creates personal reciprocity between us;”193 however God’s interaction with us never falls

189 Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 5. 190 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 157. 191 Ibid., 158. 192 Ibid. 193 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 179.

178 under human control, and thus “retains its incomprehensibility and mystery as grace.”194

In this final section of this chapter, we will explore further the role of the Church by focusing upon Torrance’s reference to the Church as a ‘community of reciprocity’. We highlighted in passing the way that Israel was formed as a covenant community of reciprocity, to which we may now add Torrance’s comment that for Israel, the vertical covenant bond of love which God established between himself and Israel, became manifest in Israel as a ‘brotherly covenant’ among the Israelites. In Israel the vertical and horizontal dimensions intersect.195 We have mentioned that the Church is formed as a community of reciprocity through the work of the Spirit. Torrance argues that as humanity is drawn into the twofold movement of divine revelation, where God speaks to humanity, and where humanity is correspondingly enabled to hear and receive and respond to divine revelation, the resultant reciprocity between God and humanity results in a community which itself “under the continuing impact of divine revelation becomes the appropriate medium of its continuing communication to man.”196 Torrance maintains that,

It belongs to the very heart of the Gospel that by his Triune Nature as a Communion of Love in himself, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God is the kind of God who as a fullness of personal Being in himself not only creates personal reciprocity between us and himself but creates a community of personal reciprocity in love, which is what we speak of as the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ living in the Communion of the Spirit and incorporated into Christ as his Body. It is this triune God who lives and is actively present in the fellowship which he creates with others whom we believe to be the God of infinite personal care for each of us his dear children and for every created being.197 Because the Church participates in koinōnia with the Trinity, and therefore with each other, it is through its fellowship and gathering that the Triune God is truly made known. Torrance notes that “God through the Incarnation and the Apostolic witness has ordained that we receive His Word through the historical communication of other men, so that the communication of the Word and the growth of the Church as historical

194 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 101. 195 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 13. 196 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 86. 197 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 6.

179 community are correlative.”198 Each new generation of the Church stands in the great tradition that stretches all the way back to the New Testament writers, and their understanding of the Old Testament.199 The proclamation of the Word is always “conditioned by the hearing and understanding of all the generations that have gone before.”200 Elaborating further, Torrance comments that biblical hermeneutics, as the act of learning to hear God’s communication to us, also prepares us—and heals us— for communication with one another. “It is in this openness towards God’s self- communication that we learn to be open toward others.”201

It is this sense of the Church as a social and historical community which causes Torrance to describe it as the social co-efficient of theological knowledge, which fits with his stance that there is a corporate dimension to doing theology, for a “society or community provides the semantic frame within which meaning emerges and is sustained.”202 By this, Torrance means that the Church is the “cultural milieu within which our understanding is nourished, and within which new thoughts and fresh glimpses of reality are born.”203 It is through participation in the community of the Church, and taking part in the horizontal dimension of koinōnia, that we learn how to relate experience, patterns of meaning and acts of identification to each other. Torrance draws on Polanyi here, stating that within the shared experience of the Church, an individual may move beyond subjective knowledge and experience, to that which is objective, because the really objective is that which is shareable.204 This is objective, kataphysic knowledge, because the object of theology remains the subject. Torrance further observes when writing about the nature of catechetical instruction, that “Christian instruction requires the community of others. It does not properly take place in isolation, but only in the midst of the Church, that is in the whole fellowship of

198 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 70. 199 Torrance, The School of Faith, lxvii. 200 Ibid. 201 Torrance, Divine Meaning, 11. 202 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 103. For a wider exploration of Torrance’s thought about social co-efficients of knowledge, see Flett, Persons, Powers, and Pluralities, 139–216. 203 Ibid., 102. 204 Ibid., 104–12.

180 life and mission and preaching and worship, for it is only in the essential integration of the Truth with being and action that it can be either received or communicated.”205

This also relates to Torrance’s insistence that theological knowledge is personal knowledge; since God’s being is personal being, then the nature of the Truth is personal and relational. Revelation was embodied in human form in Jesus Christ, and must be communicated in a way appropriate to the nature of the knower as a human being. This continues to take place in space and time through the communication of other people who also exist in space and time, although—as we will see in our discussion of kerygma in coming chapters—the Church’s proclamation is filled with Christ’s presence through the Holy Spirit, so that it is actually Christ who, “communicates Himself personally in and through the historical Church where the Word is historically communicated to us by others, and where through them He comes Himself immediately in direct and personal address.”206

In the following quote, the connection between participation in the space-time structure of the Church, and also in the eternal communion of the Trinity, interact with each other to deepen our understanding of the role of the Church in the way that we are made able to think properly of God.

It is within the communion of the Spirit we learn obedience to God’s self-giving in Jesus Christ, and instead of being conformed to the cultural patterns of this world are inwardly transformed through a radical change of our mind, that we are able to discern the will of God and acquire the basic insights we need if we are really to develop our knowledge of him in a clear, articulate way. That is to say, within the interpersonal life of the church as the body of Christ and its actualization of corporate reciprocity with God in the space and time of this world, we find not only that we ourselves are personally assimilated into the onto-relational structures that arise, but that our minds become disposed to apprehend God through profoundly intelligible, although non-formalizable (or at least not completely formalizable) relations and structures of thought. We are spiritually and intellectually implicated in patterns of order that are beyond our powers to articulate in explicit terms, but we are aware of being

205 Torrance, The School of Faith, xxxi. See pages xxxii–xlii for Torrance’s identification of particular principles which apply to Christian knowledge, many of which we have already addressed throughout this thesis, to do with the personal nature of truth, and the ‘conversion’ that is demanded of the knower. 206 Ibid., xxixiv.

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apprehended by divine Truth which steadily presses for increasing realization in our understanding.207 As a final comment to this section, it is worth highlighting that even though the Church is a community that is called into being by the Triune God, the knowledge of God that arises in the Church is genuine but fallible. In our discussion on the Patristic view of faith in the third chapter, we noted that faith is not primarily to do with subjective human belief, but rather is assent to an objective reality, involving acts of intuitive recognition and apprehension of reality. Torrance draws this perspective into play when discussing the Church as a community of believers, for while a contemporary understanding of this phrase tends towards the ‘free association’ of individuals who may choose to believe in Christ, Torrance argues that the New Testament description of faith is not to be understood as arising from the will of the believer, but from what Christ has done, and “it is because faith shares in His one covenant that all the faithful are covenanted, and bound together in Him, as one Servant of the Lord.”208 Thus Torrance’s comment that theological persuasion involves bringing others to the point of assenting to divine revelation, where “ they must think only as they are compelled to think by the nature of the divine realities themselves, and there they must engage in a critical judgement in which they test the persuasive statements in the light of that to which they refer.”209

Humankind is incapable of persuading each other about the existence of God, which is why the Church is the place of dialogical theology, where God declares himself to humanity, while enabling us to respond to him, and to each other.210 However, our conversations about God must never be detached from conversation with God, or else dialogical theology becomes dialectical, “more concerned with a consistent system of ideas than with real conversation with the living God.”211 Theological knowledge arises from its embodiment in the Church, and must be “joint-thinking, thinking-in- fellowship,”212 so that our thinking is informed by our interaction with each other;

207 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 49. 208 Torrance, “Ecclesiology Lecture 1: The Being and Nature of the Church,” 7. 209 Torrance, God and Rationality, 201. 210 Torrance, The School of Faith, xlvii. 211 Ibid., xlix. 212 Torrance, Atonement, 377.

182 however it is also shaped by the many other social, historical and cultural environments that humans live and participate in. It will inevitably be distorted by human frameworks and other social dimensions.213 Because the Church is the sphere where reconciliation and revelation continue to be worked out, and theology is formed and lived, it is imperative that the Church constantly “brings its teaching and preaching and worship to the criticism of God’s word in order that though repentant self-denial it may be conformed in mind and understanding to the mind of Christ.”214 This has significant implications for the ecumenical movement, which we will elaborate on in the eighth chapter.

5.7 Chapter Conclusion This chapter has explored the theological relationship between the Trinity and the being of the Church, seeking to demonstrate that for Thomas F. Torrance, speech about the Church is always subsidiary to speech about the Holy Trinity. This is succinctly summarised when he writes that the Church is “the empirical community of men, women and children called into being through the proclamation of the Gospel, indwelt by the Holy Spirit in whom it is united to Christ and through him joined to God. Far from being a human institution it was founded by the Lord himself and rooted in the Holy Trinity.”215 Through exploring the motif of koinōnia in an indepth fashion, looking at the different ways that Torrance draws this out, as well as delving further into the doctrine of the Trinity and how it relates to ecclesiology, we have shown that the Church is Church in the most theological sense, “when it looks away from itself to its objective source and ground in the Godhead, and dwells in the Holy Trinity, for it is in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that the Church and its faith are rooted and grounded.”216

213 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 119. 214 Torrance, Atonement, 379. For further consideration of the interaction between ‘Doctrine and Community’ in Torrance’s material, see Colyer, The Nature of Doctrine in T. F. Torrance's Theology, 93– 128. 215 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 253. 216 Ibid., 268.

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6 CHURCH ORDER IN THE TIME BETWEEN

6.0 Chapter Abstract In the first half of this thesis, our concern has been to map out the theological structure of T. F. Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology. In the second half of this thesis, we will turn our attention to how the doctrine of the Trinity influences the visible life of the Church in the time between the two advents of Christ. This chapter will explore how we are to think theologically and practically about Church order, beginning with an evaluative survey of the different historical views, before turning to discuss the way that order is shaped by our participation in the life of the Triune God and must therefore be shaped by the divine love. The import of this discussion of order will be demonstrated by commenting upon the difference between the ministry of Christ and the ministry of the Church, and how this shapes the mission of the Church in between Christ’s two advents.

6.1 The development of doctrine and the formalisation of Church structures What is ‘order’? Torrance has a well-developed sense of the tension between the Church’s ontological and dynamic relation to Christ on one hand, and its limited and temporal nature in the time between on the other hand. Although it is Christ who is the “controlling center of the church’s life, thought, and mission in the world today,”1 the Church requires certain structures because of its spatiotemporal existence. This leads Torrance to identify two aspects of order, “the aspect that derives from the nomos-form of historical succession on the stage of this world, and the aspect that derives from the new being of the Church in the risen Lord.”2 Illuminating these two aspects, the image of ‘scaffolding’ is helpful; order is like scaffolding built to support the true structure of the Church, which will be torn down when the building is complete. There is a true order which is to do with the Church’s ontological relation to Christ, and a temporary order which is to do with the

1 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 9. 2 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 71.

185 historical forms and patterns of the Church’s life. The latter will be cast off when Christ returns to fully establish the new order of the new creation.3

Although the Church is already the body of Christ, sharing in his new humanity through the communion of the Spirit, it lives and works in the disorder of the current time, and thus requires this scaffolding that ‘frames the shape’ of its teleological participation in the koinōnia of the Triune God.4 Order can therefore never assume an independent or static validity that is separated from the Church’s participation in the Triune koinōnia. The establishment of historical forms and structures is not the end goal in and of itself, but rather as Torrance explains, the “purpose of this order is to make room in the midst for the presence of the risen Christ so that the Church’s fellowship becomes the sphere where the resurrection of Christ is effectively operative here and now.”5 The forms of the Church point beyond themselves to the new creation, and reflect the tension between the new and the old, as well as embracing past, present and future,6 so that we must think of order as both “essentially eschatological,”7 and “essentially ambiguous.”8 The incarnation represents the intersection between the old, damaged order of the current world, and the new and redemptive order of the Christian message, and as such, when we consider order in the Church, we must always keep in mind the creative reordering that takes place through the revelatory and reconciliatory work of Jesus Christ.9 “Apart from that eschatological perspective, order is dead for it does not serve the resurrection, and does not manifest either the love of Christ or His coming again to reign.”10

Torrance defines order as everything that stands opposed to anomia, to sin, lawlessness and disorder.11 Even though God’s creative intentions were revealed in the

3 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 98; Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 82. 4 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 97. 5 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 67. 6 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 98. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 97. 9 Torrance, Christian Frame of Mind, 21. 10 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 68. 11 To see how Torrance develops the concept of order/disorder in relation to theology and natural science, see ‘Contingence and Disorder’ in Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order, 85–139; ‘The Concept of Order in Theology and Science’, in Torrance, Christian Frame of Mind, 17–34; Thomas F. Torrance, 186 original act of creation, sin meant that disorder entered the created order. However, God does not let the world disintegrate into non-being, but continues to sustain it in God’s mercy and faithfulness. As Torrance explains,

When God made the world He made it in order and everything was set in its due proportion. But through the lawlessness of sin the world fell out of proportion, out of order, and was threatened with sheer chaos. Were it not for the persistent fact of God’s purpose of love the world would destroy itself; but in His Covenant mercy God holds the world together in spite of its chaos.12 In the Old Testament, order is primarily understood in its negative sense as judgment upon disorder, but in reality, the Mosaic law points beyond itself to the new economy which is revealed with the incarnation of Jesus Christ.13 Although the current period of history, in which the Church lives in the tension of fallen time and new time, is characterised by the related tension between order and disorder, we must remember that Christ “through his Spirit has also bestowed his presence upon us in the Church, so that the Church on earth is the place of Christ.”14 It is the presence of Christ through the Spirit that causes creation to become rightly ordered; to use our earlier language of the two dimensions, order is bestowed afresh upon the horizontal by its interaction with the vertical.

Since oikonomia speaks of the ‘ordering of a household’, when we consider the incarnation as God’s way of coming into our world, then we see that order is something which is enacted from within, not without. The physicality of the incarnation also reminds us that the Church cannot be reduced to something that is only spiritual without ignoring its “stark actuality and corporeality,” for “the continuity of the Church is a somatic continuity, and its order within that continuity is of a somatic kind.”15 This is why, when we speak of order, we are able to refer to the structures and formalised approaches that characterise the life of the Church, without reducing the life of the Church to these structures. We must always keep in mind that the Church is an empirical body that has a real relation to Christ in space and time, and through him

“The Ought and the Is: Moral Law and Natural Law,” Insight: A Journal of the Faculty of Austin Seminary, special ed. A Festchrift in Honor of George Stuart Heyer, Jr (Spring 1994): 49–59. 12 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 13. 13 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 99. 14 Ibid. 15 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 70.

187 participates in the fellowship of the Holy Trinity; the Church must accordingly submit all it is and does to the Triune God.16 Thus, order in the Church is the “co-ordinating of the life of the Church in its fellowship, worship, and mission in the service of the glory of God.”17

There is much more to be said about Torrance’s view of order in the Church, and the way that this is shaped by his view of the Church as a community that is constituted by its participation in the fellowship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In order to do so, it will be useful to contrast this with a brief initial survey of Torrance’s perspective about how Church order has developed throughout history. Although Torrance does not offer us a thorough historical consideration of the matter, he does discuss the apostolic period, the Patristic-Nicene period, and the Reformation as periods of particular import. According to Torrance, it was not until after the Nicene period that the Church began to focus on external structures as a matter of primacy rather than the Triune God, and even though this had damaging effects in both the Eastern and Western Church, the Reformation saw the Church regain a sense of the centrality of Christ, and the doctrine of God, shaping the theological traditions that Torrance draws from. It is worth noting that in what follows, Torrance’s Presbyterian lens is clearly demonstrated, resulting in a rather biased—although not altogether unfair—view of ecclesial history.

Apostolic foundations ‘Church order’ is not really something which we can describe in a well-defined and concrete sense in relation to the apostolic period. Instead, we may think of the apostles as formulating an embryonic trinitarian ecclesiology, for although doctrine was not yet formally explicated, their way of life embodied the values and teaching of the community formed around Jesus Christ. We can approach this by returning to the motif of koinōnia which is so central to Torrance’s ecclesiology, noting his comment that the apostolate is “the nucleus of the koinonia, the communio sanctorum, the communion of the saints. It is the koinonia of those who all together have koinonia in the mystery of Christ.”18 This motif of koinōnia is once again shown to lie at the heart of Torrance’s

16 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 135. 17 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 13. 18 Torrance, Incarnation, 172.

188 ecclesiology, although as this chapter will establish, it often appears to be more of an ideal than a reality when we look at the shape that the life of the Church has actually taken.

However, there is more to be said here about this embryonic form, and so we must turn our attention to the unique role of the apostles, for it is clear that “Jesus intended to leave behind a community with a structure and form and leadership, a community with a ministry shaped on the pattern of his own, and that while all were called to be disciples and to engage in a ministry of witness to him, some were given special responsibilities and a special commission of pastoral care over his flock, endowed with an authoritative office to act in his name.”19 Just as the Father sent the Son, and anointed him with the Holy Spirit, Jesus breathed the Spirit upon the disciples, and commissioned them “as apostles to act in his name, thereby linking their subordinate mission with his own supreme mission.”20 Jesus is Apostle “in the absolute sense,” while the apostles are empowered and sent out as his witnesses, not to proclaim their own message, but to proclaim the revelation of Jesus Christ. This is the “peculiar function of the apostles, to be the link between Christ and the Church, the hinge on which the incarnational revelation objectively given in Christ was grounded and realised within the continuing membership of the Church.”21 While the Church is related supernaturally to Christ in the Spirit, it has its historical relation to Christ through the apostolic witness.22

We have already noted in an earlier chapter that the early Church saw itself very much as a continuation of the people of Israel. By examining the fundamental and unique role of the apostles, we see how the Church is “constituted by Christ to be the receptacle of the Gospel proclaimed and handed on by the apostles.”23 Torrance explains that there is an “essential and fundamental translation”24 that takes place between Jesus’ self- witness, and the witness of the Church, which takes place through the apostles.

19 Torrance, Atonement, 356. 20 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 286. 21 Ibid. 22 Torrance, Atonement, 394. 23 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 257. 24 Torrance, Atonement, 357.

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Although Jesus had many followers, it was the twelve apostles who he gathered around himself, taught a new way of life, commissioned to go out as his representatives, and consecrated as his servants, who form the nucleus of the Church, “within which his own self-witness was integrated with inspired witness to him and translated into the appropriate form (i.e. the New Testament Scriptures) for its communication in history.”25 The apostles are thus commissioned as the “recipients of revelation and as ambassadors of reconciliation.”26

Torrance outlines the process of the disciples’ growth from being ordinary fishermen and tax collectors, to those appointed to be the ‘hinge’ between God’s revelation in Christ, and the human transmission of that revelation. First, Christ appoints twelve disciples from among his wider group of followers, and teaches them what it means to live according to the values of the Kingdom of God. Eventually there comes a crisis point, when the disciples must either choose to deny themselves and follow Christ fully, or to cease following altogether. Their decision to follow Jesus means that he begins to explain his divine identity to them, although they do not fully comprehend what he says to them at this point. These twelve apostles, chosen to represent the twelve tribes of Israel, lived and travelled with Jesus, were given to share in the messianic secret, and were sent out even before his crucifixion to participate in his ministry. Torrance remarks that, “the disciples are apostles or trained plenipotentiaries of Christ, specially trained in order to be authoritative transmitters of his own kerygma, so that whoever hears them, hears Christ himself. But this training of the apostles entailed a training both in word and deed.”27

However, there comes a moment in Jesus’ ministry where even the disciples must abandon him. They could not journey with Christ to the Cross, for he alone could stand

25 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 286. Torrance talks about the ‘twelve’ and places great emphasis on the significance of this number, for the 12 apostles represent the 12 tribes of Israel. This does raise the question about Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. However, this is answered by the way that Torrance emphasises that the apostles had been with Jesus throughout his ministry, and highlights that when a replacement was chosen for Judas, it had to be from among those who had been an eye-witness of Jesus since the day of his baptism, through until his ascension. See Torrance, Incarnation, 15–16. This is backed up by the way that Torrance accepts the direct substitution of Matthias for Judas, in Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 27, where he observes that the apostles did not have hands laid on them, and neither did Matthias when he was appointed to replace Judas. 26 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 135. 27 Torrance, Incarnation, 22–23.

190 forth as the representative and substitute for all humanity. Nevertheless, even in the disciples’ denial of Christ, God is at work, for after his resurrection, the disciples remember what Jesus had said to them at the Last Supper, and realise that despite their abandonment of Jesus in the hour of his greatest suffering, they have been atoned for through Christ’s sacrifice.28 It was necessary for them to abandon Christ, but through his death and resurrection, sin has been destroyed, and humanity redeemed from the power of death.29 Just as it was only in the light of the resurrection that the apostles understood who Jesus truly was, their written accounts only fully disclose the messianic identity of Christ in the light of his death and resurrection.30

The twelve apostles who were at the Last Supper and entered into the new covenant with Christ have a unique role, for they represent the transition between the twelve tribes of Israel, and the new kingdom of God. “The longed-for age of salvation had come when the tribes would no longer be scattered but be gathered into one.”31 The theme of ‘the one and the many’ is again prevalent, for the twelve disciples were twelve living stones who had been called to follow Christ; they were anticipatorily united to him, so that the Last Supper may be thought of as an incipient gathering of the Church,32 anticipating a new way of salvation, which was objectively realised through Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, and subjectively actualised when the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost upon those gathered to pray in the Upper Room.

Torrance is insistent that a key facet of the apostolic role is that they were eyewitnesses of the incarnate life of Jesus, so that their testimony is controlled by “the actual history of Jesus, who he actually was and what he actually did.”33 It is on this basis that they

28 Ibid., 156–60. We will discuss the nature of the Last Supper, and the way it is transformed from mere memorial to an act of participation in the next chapter. 29 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 203. 30 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 44. Torrance is referring to the Synoptic Gospels here; elsewhere he makes it clear that the Gospel of John reveals Jesus as God from the start. 31 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 203. 32 Torrance, Atonement, 352. 33 Torrance, Incarnation, 15–16. He comments, “They do not claim anywhere that what is historical is the tradition itself, but that the tradition is historical because it conforms to the actual history of the existence, words, and deeds of Jesus. The last thing they would dream of implying is that their own experience or theologising has created the history to which they bear witness, or is superimposed upon it, and that they are really moving in a world of spirituality and piety which is not essentially tied down to historical fact. Moreover, according to their witness, it is not only their experience of Christ which is 191 are given unique authority to be Christ’s representatives; just as the Son was sent by the Father, the apostles were sent by Christ to the world.34 Through their personal experience of walking with Jesus and hearing the words of God from the incarnate Word of God, the apostles are equipped by the Spirit to translate Christ’s words into their own words about Christ. Their ministry had no validity on its own; rather it was only as Christ was present authenticating himself in their ongoing ministry.35 This is how the apostles serve as the hinge between Jesus’ self-witness, and the witness given to the Church in Scripture and tradition. In describing their role as a ‘hinge’, as we noted earlier, Torrance is observing that the apostolic witness is where the vertical reference, and the horizontal reference meet. The apostolic witness has a vertical reference to Christ, and a horizontal reference in communicating the truth of Christ to others. The apostles are the first to fulfil the Church’s kerygmatic function, for the self- revelation of Jesus Christ is articulated through the apostles, and passed on to us in the medium of the New Testament Scriptures.36 The apostles have a unique and unrepeatable role in the transmission of revelation,37 for through them, the Holy Scriptures came to constitute “the divinely provided and inspired linguistic medium which remains of authoritative and critical significance for the whole history of the Church of Jesus Christ.”38

Finally, here we should also note that although the apostles had a unique role in the translation and transmission of revelation, Torrance notes that they did also act as presbyters who ministered the Word and sacraments, as well as having pastoral oversight. These elements of their role were passed on, but “when separated from the apostles’ unique ministry, they inevitably assumed another and subordinate character.”39 The tasks that were passed on came to include the role of presbyters, bishops, prophets, teachers, shepherds, and leaders, and while none of these roles

tied down to the historical factuality of what he was, but that what Jesus did himself was governed and determined by what he was in actual history.” 34 Torrance, Atonement, 342. 35 Ibid., 349–58. 36 Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 1–3. 37 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 43. 38 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 92–93. 39 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 31.

192 retain apostolic authority in the sense of the Twelve, they take place “within the sphere of the apostolic commission, and under apostolic authorization.”40 This will be more fully examined in the next chapter in our discussion of the ministry and priesthood.

The early Patristic period We continue our brief survey of order by turning to the Patristic period, after the first generation of believers, but before the formulation of the Nicene Creed. As we have noted throughout this thesis, the early development of Christianity was marked by the strong commitment of the Church fathers to speak as faithfully as possible of God’s self- revelation, rather than being concerned with developing a formal ecclesiastical structure. Torrance thinks it noteworthy that there are very few writings on the nature and function of the Church from the early centuries, which is significant because it shows a situation where Christ and the Spirit “occupied the unqualified centre of Christian faith and life empirically as well as spiritually.”41 During this period, the development of the doctrine of God was paramount in terms of theological focus.

Although there was no formal set of doctrinal propositions taught by the early Church, there was a body of material, the ‘deposit of faith’, which was recognised and taught as authoritative before the Creeds were formulated. This was not a systematic theology, but rather the amassed knowledge of those who had walked with Christ, heard his teaching, and passed it on to the next generations of believers. It was not to be regarded as something different from the self-revelation of God in the incarnation, but was the continuing way in which God gave a concrete, unchanging form to God’s self-revelation which became a historical foundation for the Church. This was the process of

the living and dynamic Word which was at work in the foundation and growth of the Church (Acts 6.7, 12.24, 19–20; cf. Col. 1:5–6) communicating himself through the Spirit in the witness and preaching of the Apostles, letting his self- revelation take definitive shape in the Apostolic mind and embody itself in the Apostolic mission, in such a constituting way that the identity and continuity of the Church and its teaching in history became inseparably bound up with it (cf. Rom. 6.17).42

40 Ibid., 32. The laying on of hands was the sign of one being set apart for such roles, but it was not seen as a sacramental action. 41 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 254. 42 Torrance, “The Deposit of Faith,” 2.

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The New Testament witness, alongside the wider apostolic tradition was the content of this deposit of faith, “the unrepeatable foundation on which the Church was built, and to which the Church was committed ever afterwards to refer as its authoritative norm for the understanding and interpretation of the Gospel.”43 This apostolic tradition allowed the Church to interpret Scripture “in accordance with their objective intention in God’s self-revelation and thereby to discern how each expression of the Gospel taken from the Scriptures fits into the coherent pattern of its essential message.”44 Irenaeus in particular thought of the apostolic tradition as a “continuously rejuvenating force;”45 describing it as a “coherent body of informal truth,”46 which had an “intrinsic order or structure reflecting the economic design of God’s redemptive action in Jesus Christ and the essential pattern of the self-revelation of God the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit.”47 As the source which shaped the life of the Church, it was trinitarian in nature.

On one level, the content of the deposit of faith was simply the Gospel, on another level it was to do with the reception of that Gospel through the apostolic tradition. It was the embryonic understanding of what came to be formalised in creedal statements. We have noted that the pre-Nicene tradition was “characterised by a deep intertwining of faith and godliness, understanding and worship,” which gave rise to the evangelical convictions held by the Church in response to the revelation of God through the Son and in the Spirit.48 Consequently the deposit of faith was inseparable from the living substance of the Gospel, and was given to the Church for the purpose of “informing, structuring and quickening its life and faith and mission as the Body of Christ in the world.”49 The Fathers believed that only within the living tradition of the Church could the saving event of Christ be appropriated and mediated, through the Spirit to the world.50 Torrance continues this theme by teaching that theological truth is “not given

43 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 286. 44 Ibid., 289. 45 Ibid., 286. 46 Torrance, “The Deposit of Faith,” 12. 47 Ibid., 6. 48 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 44. 49 Ibid., 259. 50 Torrance, “The Deposit of Faith,” 5–6.

194 in an abstract or detached form but in a concrete embodied form in the Church.”51 This is because “it is to the Church that God has entrusted the deposit of faith, to the Church that he has given his Holy Spirit, and in the Church that he has provided us with the ministry of the Gospel and all the other means through which the Spirit works.”52

The deposit of faith developed in connection with the full life and experience of the Church. As a body of teaching, it was not separated from the ongoing koinōnia of the Church, so that Church order in the Patristic period was primarily to do with proper belief in Jesus Christ. As Torrance summarises,

While the deposit of faith was replete with the truth as it is in Jesus, embodying kerygmatic, didactic and theological content, by its very nature it could not be resolved into a system of truths or a set of normative doctrines and formulated beliefs, for the truths and doctrines and beliefs entailed could not be abstracted from the embodied form which they were given in Christ and the apostolic foundation of the Church without loss of their real substance.53 The Nicene Creed The apostolic tradition served as the impetus for the emergence of the earliest creedal formulations, but it was the need to universally define orthodox belief in response to various heresies like Arianism that gave rise to the Nicene Creed. We have already pointed out Torrance’s view that the Nicene Creed was not a set of systematic propositions imposed upon the gospel, but rather arose “in compulsive response to the objective self-revelation of God.”54 Torrance makes a determined effort to justify his view that the Nicene Creed was not an intellectual construct, or a human initiative to give some clarification to doctrine. Instead, he insists that the explicit formalisation of the “whole body of belief implicit in the apostolic tradition” arose under the compulsion of divine revelation.55 This is why time and time again Torrance insists that

51 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 33. 52 Ibid., 32. Torrance goes on to quote Irenaeus’ claim that, “Where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and every grace: but the Spirit is truth.” 53 Ibid., 260. 54 Torrance, “The Deposit of Faith,” 7. Elsewhere, writing in 1941, Torrance notes that the Apostles Creed “was never a conclusion, but always a confession,” a phrase which he argues is demonstrative of the kind of theological thinking needed in the Church, where our shared confessions should not be about the lowest common denominator, but rather about “focusing those impelling convictions which we have captured from the Mind of Christ for this day and generation.” See Thomas F. Torrance, “We Need a Decisive Theology before We Can Restate the Creed,” The British Weekly, May 15, 1941. 55 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 46.

195 the Creed expresses what the Fathers felt they had to say about God. Consequently, the Nicene Creed represents a distillation of Christian beliefs, and a form of order that is trinitarian in nature.

Torrance joins a number of the later Patristic writers in considering the formulation of the Nicene Creed as second in significance only to the apostolic tradition of the Church.56 The important thing that we need to incorporate here is his analysis that the real content of the Nicene Creed was not found in “analytical theological statements, but in a doxological declaration of embodied truth and embodied doctrine.”57 Because the Creed developed under the constraint of divine revelation, Torrance notes that the “integration of the basic convictions on which the Church had always relied in its worship and mission into a coherent pattern gave sharpness and precision to the Church’s interpretation of the NT Gospel.”58 Nothing new was added; instead the basic convictions of the Church about the Gospel, and the God who is at work in and through the Church were clarified.59 The Nicene fathers saw their theology as being faithful to their reception of God’s self-revelation, since long before the Creeds were formalised, the early Church was aware of God’s Triune nature. Thus, Torrance suggests that the “doctrinal formalisation of the faith was recognised as relying on what the Catholic Church had always believed and intuitively known to be true.”60 Since the early Church tradition, before being given formal conceptualisation at Nicaea was trinitarian in nature, Torrance states that “Trinitarian worship and Trinitarian faith thus provided the implicit controlling ground both for a faithful restructuring of the life of the Church and for a godly renewing of its understanding in the Mind of Christ.”61

The period between the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople is described by Torrance as “theologically turbulent,”62 as the Fathers sought to further clarify the Gospel, and

56 Ibid., 14. Torrance cites Hilary, Athanasius, Basil, Theodoret and Gregory Nazienzen as examples of those who shared this approach. 57 Torrance, “The Deposit of Faith,” 16. 58 Ibid., 14. 59 This perspective on the clarification of implicit beliefs is the same view that is reflected in Torrance stratified structure of reality, alongside his assent to Michael Polanyi’s focus on acknowledging the role of the human knower, and beliefs which are properly basic. 60 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 46. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 288.

196 to “provide the Church with a structural framework within which its members could meditate upon the Holy Scriptures, worship the Holy Trinity, proclaim the Gospel of forgiveness, reconciliation and sanctification, and so fulfil its mission in obedience to the command of Christ.”63 At every point, those assembled for these Councils sought to be consistent with the deposit of faith, and to demonstrate fidelity to the apostolic tradition as expressed in Scripture. The Fathers wrestled “with the Holy Scriptures to express what they were compelled to think and hold within the context of the apostolic tradition under the impact of God’s self-revelation through the Word and Spirit of Christ, and on that basis alone, to confess their faith in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”64

The Nicene Creed formalises the doctrine of the Trinity as the foundation of the Church—as we noted in the last chapter, Torrance argues that it acts as a regulatory tool by which the being, life, and mission of the Church can be evaluated for their faithfulness to their divine foundation. While there was always the risk that the truth presented in the Nicene Creed could be detached from its embodied form in the Church, and turned into an independent conceptual system,65 as happened with Tertullian who viewed the deposit of faith as a “fixed formula of truth for belief,”66 this did not eventuate. Furthermore, while it is clear that Torrance holds the Patristic authors in high regard, and views the Nicene Creed as normative for Christian belief, he is careful to subjugate the Creed to divine revelation. The Nicene Creed as a theological statement was never considered to be equal to the apostolic kerygma,67 but these early councils were important as the first ecumenical gatherings of Church leaders with an explicit focus on clarifying doctrine. The important thing to note is that they gathered in a context where faith, godliness and worship informed doctrine and praxis. Their concern was to develop right theology, focusing on who God was, rather than the specifics of church order in and of itself.

63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 289. 65 Torrance, “The Deposit of Faith,” 15. 66 Ibid., 15–16. Torrance does note that even though Tertullian’s understanding of the deposit of faith had become legalistic, we should not be so hasty to dismiss him that we do not notice that his own beliefs were still entwined with the life of the worshipping church. 67 Ibid., 12–13.

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Medieval theology Although the Church remained largely focused on the doctrine of the Trinity, and defined itself in relation to that, it must also be noted that Torrance perceives the positive trinitarian advances of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan period to have been complicated by the lingering effects of dualism which “remained latent in the social and legal structures of organised life in East and West,” and increasingly affected the life of the Church.68 As the differences between East and West solidified, Eastern theology became more mystical, “theocentric and contemplative in nature,” while Western theology “became more anthropocentric and pragmatic, and indeed more juridical.”69 The doctrine of the Trinity, and disagreement over the filioque was discussed in the last chapter, so we will not elaborate on it at length here, besides noting that Torrance considers it the “crucial issue, which aggravated every other.”70

Both Roman Catholic and Orthodox allowed the introduction of secular categories, whether juridical, sociological or political, “into the constitution and life of the Church in such a way as to overlay the essential and intrinsic nature of the Church with non- evangelical and non-theological elements.”71 Torrance traces this back to the initial rift of the Church from Judaism, and thus from the wider story of God’s redemptive actions, so that Christians “adapted themselves more readily, and too easily, to the socio-legal framework of empire centred in Rome or Byzantium.”72 Rather than changing the structures of civil and legal life, as it had done with Hellenistic philosophy in the Nicene period, the Church assimilated them into its own life, which negatively influenced it.73 Because the Church was thought to embody divine truth in its physical and

68 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 31. Helpful insights into clarifying Torrance’s thinking can often be found in book reviews which he wrote, where he tends to interpose his own theological views with his comments upon the work he is reviewing. He helpfully identifies in one such review that the two basic problems which affected the doctrine of the Church, particularly in the West, were “the deep change that came over the conception of the Church’s structure, with the assimilation of early patristic concepts to pre-Christian and non-Christian Roman law (e.g. with Leo the Great), and the problems connected with the fusing of the Augustinian concepts of the Church with the Neoplatonic and Ptolemaic cosmology.” See Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of M. Schmaus, A. Grillmeier, L. Scheffczyk. Handbuch Der Dogmengeschichte,” Scottish Journal of Theology 26 (1973): 101. 69 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 33. 70 Ibid., 36. 71 Ibid., 19. 72 Ibid., 27. 73 Ibid., 33.

198 institutional structures, the Church itself came to represent theological authority, “for the expression of the mind of the Church in its dogmatic definitions was held to be the expression of the nature of the Truth.”74 Torrance also suggests that the medieval tension between temporal and spiritual power resulted in a “system of hierarchical structures and constitutional authorities.”75 Consequently, the Church began to emphasise its double nature as both ‘mystical body’, and ‘juridical institution’, and enshrining this view in canon law,76 rather than viewing itself as a community constituted by its participation in the koinōnia of the Holy Trinity.

In this context where the Church as an institution was overemphasised, “the traditional Faith tended to be codified in the rational structures of the Church and Grace tended to be institutionalized in canonical forms for its easy ministration to the multitudes.”77 The Roman Catholic Church particularly saw itself as “an organised and juridically structured society endowed with ecumenical authority and supreme jurisdiction,” so that it lost the universal sense of the koinōnia of the Church.78 Most theological treatises focused on ecclesiastical and papal power, and scholarly emphasis fell on canon law rather than theology proper, so that proper theological consideration of the relation between the doctrine of God, and the doctrine of the Church was lacking. In this light, Torrance finds it unsurprising that while the Roman Catholic Church gave rise to Christendom, it did so by insisting on its own primacy at the expense of its relationship with the Orthodox Church, and later on, with the Reformation Churches.79 In contrast to this, Torrance commends the Greek Orthodox Church for retaining a sense of koinōnia in its historical existence, and being able to do so because it finds “its life and light beyond itself in Christ and in the Holy Trinity.”80

74 Torrance, The School of Faith, xlv. 75 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 31. 76 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Orthodox Church in Great Britain,” in Texts and Studies (London: Thyateira House, 1983), 253. 77 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 7. 78 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 34. 79 Ibid., 34–35. 80 Torrance, “Trinity Sunday Sermon on Acts 2:41–47,” 193–94. In his article Torrance, “The Orthodox Church in Great Britain,” 254–59, Torrance highlights the ways that the growth of the Orthodox Church in Great Britain could contribute to the wider Body of Christ. Torrance identifies the way that the Orthodox Church maintains the inner relation between the doctrine of the Trinity, the ministry, and all 199

Torrance comments that even though the beginnings of the modern scientific approach to theology can be traced as far back as Anselm, medieval theology generally did not follow his emphasis on the conformity of reason and Truth,81 operating instead with the basic assumption of a ‘sacramental universe’, within which the particular form of the Church “as sacramental institution… was related as redemptive microcosm to the microcosm of the whole universe.”82 The outcome of this was that by the end of the Middle Ages, Latin theology frequently denied that what God is towards us as the incarnate Word, and communicated to us by Scripture, is who God is in God’s own being;83 a split that Torrance identifies as incredibly damaging for Christian theology. Roman theology became dialectical rather than dialogical, and was thus “subordinated to a philosophical ontology.”84 This dualistic theology is what allowed a dualistic view of the universe, and the Church as a sacramental institution that bridged the gaps within that universe to come to the fore, instead of giving Christ his rightful pre- eminence as the one mediator between God and humanity. Medieval theologians believed that the pattern of the Kingdom of God could be read off the historical consciousness of the Church, just as the eternal pattern of nature could be read off the physical world through the natural sciences. This static medieval view of history was radically revolutionised with the Reformation affirmation that the living God of the Bible is actively at work in space and time.85

of life; their unswerving faithfulness to tradition, enabling defence against internal heresy and external attack; and the value of their highly theological liturgy with its emphasis upon the resurrection. 81 Torrance appreciates the twofold nature of Anselm’s work as highly committed to rational thought, without departing from worship, and calls attention to how “it is the most carefully disciplined and scientific theology without ceasing in the fullest sense to be prayer.” See Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of F.C. Schmitt (Ed.), S. Anselmi Opera Omnia,” Scottish Journal of Theology 9, no. 1 (1956): 89. 82 Torrance, The School of Faith, xlv. 83 Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy,” Scottish Journal of Theology 39, no. 4 (Nov 1986): 469. A critical response to this article, while remaining appreciative of Torrance, is by Farrow, “T. F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy,” 25–31, who argues that both Barth and Torrance have overstated the existence of the ‘Latin Heresy’ (Farrow doesn’t believe there is such a thing), and develops the consequences of this for ecclesiology from a Roman Catholic perspective. Farrow is clearly writing with Roman Catholic concerns in mind; his response to Torrance is biased towards arguing for traditional Catholic doctrines, including his argument that both the Virgin Mary, and the Church, must be “real agents in the narrative of salvation” (31). 84 Torrance, The School of Faith, xlv. 85 Thomas F. Torrance, Kingdom and Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock), 2–3.

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Reformation Theology It is apparent that Torrance views the doctrine of the Church as being revolutionised in the same way as the doctrine of God was in the Reformation. Although the Roman Catholic Church began to attempt internal reform,86 it had made this near-impossible by enclosing itself within “the ramparts of papal authority and canon law.”87 The temporal order of the Church was inseparable from divine order, and the Church was viewed as the harbinger of the Kingdom. The Reformation was a reaction against the immovable structures of Roman Catholicism, involving a genuine search for the Church’s renewal as the body of Christ.88 The Reformation involved a move away from defining ecclesiology according to secular power structures, and a move towards “understanding of the Church through primary reference to Christ as its authoritative King and Head even in its visible constitutional life, and therefore through reference to the Church as the community of believers following Christ and looking to him for salvation.”89 This was not a shift from one static position to another, but rather a renewal of the call for the Church to be ever-reforming, ecclesia semper reformanda.90

Despite the immovable structures of Roman Catholicism, the tension between the “Church as community of believers,” and the Church which governed civil society, could not be maintained in the face of a return to the Biblical sources.91 Reformation theology embraced the understanding of the Church as the body of Christ, “the earthly- historical form of his real presence indwelling the community of the faithful.”92 The centrality of the incarnation also lent itself to this, highlighting that since the Word of God became incarnate and shatters our frame of historical continuity, the Church

86 Torrance notes that the Council of Trent tried to carry through a course of spiritual reform, but didn’t recognise the difficulty that its self-enclosed structure added to this process. See Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 38. 87 Ibid., 37. 88 Ibid., 38. 89 Ibid., 36. 90 Torrance, “Our Witness through Doctrine,” 137; Thomas F. Torrance, “Anglican–Presbyterian Conversations,” The Presbyterian Record (July–August 1957): 19. 91 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 38. 92 Ibid., 37.

201 cannot embrace a view of history as the “irreversible unfolding of certain eternal forms… through the institution of the Church on earth.”93

The nature of the Reformation shift in the view of the Church, and Church order, may be illustrated through a brief discussion of the idea of the ‘means of grace.’ This is not an insignificant issue, for as Torrance notes, the historical debate over the means of grace is one of the issues where Church “conflict is most acute and agreement is most difficult.”94 In the medieval period, grace was not understood as the self- communication and self-giving of God to humanity, but rather as “the communication of healing power which indirectly makes us participate in God,”95 a substance or gift controlled by the Church and administered to the congregants by the priesthood. Grace was therefore an “intermediary reality between God and man which holds God himself apart from us.”96

The Reformers reacted against this notion of grace as a substance subject to the institutional Church’s hierarchy and structure. In place of “the systematic conception of a sacramental universe with its doctrine of an inherent relation between the structure of Being and the immanent forms of the rational understanding drawn from philosophy, Reformed theology substituted the doctrine of the Covenant of Grace drawn from the Biblical Revelation.”97 Embracing this relational and covenantal theology, with the systemic principle of the fulfilment of one covenant of grace in Jesus Christ—covenant always subordinate to Christology, so that it can’t become an overarching principle—the Reformers’ theology stood in stark contrast to the Roman concept of a sacramental universe.98

Instead of a dualistic separation, the correspondence between God and creation “is construed in historical and dynamic terms,” for it has to do with the fact that the Triune

93 Thomas F. Torrance, “History and Reformation,” Scottish Journal of Theology 4 (1951): 282. 94 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 7. 95 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 99. 96 Ibid. 97 Torrance, The School of Faith, l. In his doctoral thesis, Torrance also observes that the use of charis in the New Testament is best understood as a mixture of the Hebrew aheb, and hesed, the unconditional and unsolicited love and favour of God towards his people. See Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, 10–20. 98 Torrance, The School of Faith, lv.

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God really interacts and intervenes in human history.99 Consequently, because “the gift and the Giver are one,”100 grace is not a quality detachable from God, but rather, “properly understood grace is Christ, so that to be saved by grace alone is to be saved by Christ alone.”101 Torrance claims that “Christ Himself is the objective ground and content of charis in every instance of its special Christian use.”102 This insistence on the nature of grace as God himself, rather than a mediated substance, was part of a wider theological move that stressed the self-revelation of God.103 In this way, grace is not just about receiving salvation, but about being enabled to participate in the very fellowship of the Triune God. This relates to what we said earlier about the Church as a community of reciprocity, for the covenant of grace is relationship-establishing by nature, and thus marks out the way that dialogue between God and humanity can take place.104

Reformed theologians understood that grace is not the Creator–creation relation “construed in terms of efficient causality,” but the very self-giving of God which takes place through the incarnation, for “it is such a self-communicating of God to man that man is given access to, and knowledge of God in his own inner life and being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”105 The Reformation returned to the Christological emphasis of the early Councils, but rather than faltering where the early Councils had—in not carrying through “the results of its work in Christology into the whole round of the Church’s thought and life,”—the Reformers applied this Christological correction especially to soteriology, the Church, and mission, which resulted in rethinking salvation, sanctification, and the sacraments.106 Reformation theology consequently demonstrates a shift back towards understanding the true nature of the Church as

99 Ibid., li–lii. 100 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 238. Torrance attributes this to Barth, in Andrew Walker, “Interview with Professor Thomas F. Torrance,” in Different Gospels (London: Hodder & Stoughton), 48. 101 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 238. 102 Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, 21. 103 Torrance, The School of Faith, xlvii. Torrance also attributes the difference in theology to different ways of thinking—Reformed theologians placed far more emphasis on hearing the Word of God than medieval theologians did. 104 Ibid., l–lii. 105 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 100. 106 Torrance, “A New Reformation?,” 279–80.

203 related to the Trinity, rather than as a merely historical institution, for “the doctrine of the Church as the community of believers livingly united to [Christ] as His Body through the Spirit received its first great formulation since patristic times.”107 This was the replacement of Roman canon law by “the ancient patristic and conciliar concept of ministry and authority through communion or koinonia which took an essentially corporate form,”108 signalling a much more trinitarian understanding of Church order.

The other thing that we must note that the Reformation contributed to an understanding of ecclesiology was the doctrine of justification. Torrance prefers to emphasise justification by Christ alone, rather than justification by faith; this places the emphasis solely on the work of Christ, instead of involving any of our acts, or faith as something that we must feel or create within ourselves.109 This then involves a further distinction between objective justification and subjective justification; objective justification is what has taken place in Christ, through his assumption and sanctification of our humanity, through his active and passive obedience. Subjective justification is the translation of God’s mighty act into human life, which takes place through humankind’s union with Christ.110 In soteriological terms, justification does away not only with our sins, but also with our natural goodness and our natural knowledge. In terms of ecclesiology, justification does away with all tradition by forcing it to conform to Christ, and thus forces all systems and orders to be examined by the same criterion, since Jesus Christ alone has primacy.111

107 Ibid., 281. 108 Torrance, “The Orthodox Church in Great Britain,” 254. 109 Thomas F. Torrance, “Justification,” in Christianity Divided: Protestant and Roman Catholic Theological Issues (London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962), 286–95. Torrance discusses at length the passive and active obedience of Christ, and objective and subjective sanctification. These are themes addressed throughout his work, particularly in Incarnation and Atonement. 110 For a fuller discussion of objective and subjective justification, see Thomas F. Torrance, “Justification: Its Radical Nature and Place in Reformed Doctrine and Life,” Scottish Journal of Theology 13, no. 3 (Aug 1960): 225–246. This article also appears in Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 150-168. 111 Ibid., 295–303. See also ‘Cheap and Costly Grace’ in Torrance, God and Rationality, 56–86, in which Torrance notes the challenge that a doctrine of justification presents to us. “Justification is at once the most easy thing and yet the most difficult thing to understand, for it is the most easy and yet the most difficult to accept. It is easy because it is so utterly free, and therefore so cheap in the sense that it is quite without price or condition; but it is so difficult because its absolute freeness devalues the moral and religious currency which we have minted at such cost out of our own self-understanding. It is too costly for us. Justification by grace alone is equally difficult for the man in the parish and the man in the university” (p71).

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Torrance views Reformation theology as a reaction against the of human traditions over the freedom of the Word and Spirit, particularly involving the re- emphasis of God’s active, redemptive, intervention in history. Seeking to be faithful to Scripture, and the Creeds of the ancient Church, the Reformation involved a Christological correction of the doctrine of the Church, rejecting the medieval view of the Church as a dualist mystical body and hierarchical institution, and instead affirming the Church as the body of Christ on earth, formed by God’s Word and Spirit.112 Torrance notes that while the Lutheran Church considers order to be adiaphora, and therefore not doctrinally determined, and the Anglican Church views order as part of the historic tradition of the Church, but not necessarily a matter of the faith, for the Reformed Church, Church form and order is a matter de fide.113 The particular shape that takes for the Reformed Church is what we will explore in the next section, as we explore Torrance’s view of order in the time between.

6.2 Order in the time between We now turn to a more detailed exploration of Torrance’s view of order, and how it is shaped by the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. This material will continue into the next chapter, where we will focus on the ministry, word and sacraments as explicit examples of Church order. We return again to the procedure which we have utilised in the doctrine of the Church, not considering the Church merely as a historical institution, but looking through the historical forms to the eternal being of the Triune God, in whom the Church coheres and from whom the Church derives. In the same way, we look through the Church’s temporal form and order to its true being and nature, as the working out of Torrance’s deep commitment to continually ground all that he says about the Church in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

At the start of the chapter, we introduced the metaphor of scaffolding, suggesting that the forms of the Church, which it utilises in the course of its obedience to Christ, are

112 Thomas F. Torrance, “What Is the Reformed Church?,” Biblical Theology 9 (1959): 51–54. 113 Ibid., 55. Torrance continues in this article to develop elements of Church order, particularly the Church’s dual condition of humiliation and glory, and the necessity of its servant form, as well as comments specific to the Reformed view of ministerial order and succession. We have not cited these at length here as the position Torrance unfolds in this article has been developed throughout this thesis, using other sources.

205 given to it for the time between the two advents of Christ, and will be removed when the building is completed at Christ’s second advent. Over against the disorder and chaos caused by sin, the Church is the place where men and women are genuinely able to meet with God, and so it is vital that the order, or the visible life of the Church, reflects the trinitarian being of the Church. At the risk of repeating ourselves, although the Church exists in space and time, its real grounding is found in its ontological relation to Christ and the Holy Trinity. As Torrance observes,

As united to Christ in his incarnate reality the Church constitutes the sanctified community within which we may draw near to the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit and share in the eternal life, light and love of God himself. That was surely the primary truth embedded in the mind and worship of the Catholic Church in the fourth century, and was rightly given precedence over all questions of external form, organisation and structure. If it was, as they believed, the empirical Church that had been incorporated into Christ as his Body, then the real structure of the Church was lodged in Christ himself, and had to be lived out in space and time through union and communion with the risen, exalted and advent Lord whose kingdom will have no end.114 Structural and juridical forms must never stifle the Church’s mission, for although the Church is sent into history, it is “sent not to be fettered by the limitations and patterns of history but to use them for the work of proclaiming the Word of God.”115 It is “not to be legalized in its life, but to use the patterns and forms of the law of this age in the service of its new life in the risen and ascended Lord.”116 In thinking about its patterns and forms, the Church needs to ensure that these temporary structures are subject to its real nature, the creaturely koinōnia which is constituted by participation in the Triune koinōnia. Torrance describes Church order as a “luminous sign” within the world which, when subordinated to Christ’s real presence, manifests the true being of the Church as the body of Christ, as far as this can be within history.117 Church order is a matter of faith, even though it uses these temporal forms; the Church must never become institutionalised in a way that prevents it from serving the Gospel.118

114 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 275. 115 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 71. 116 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 98. 117 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 82. 118 Torrance, “Review of the Realm of Redemption,” 323; Thomas F. Torrance, “Why I'd Turn the Kirk Upside Down,” The Scotsman, May 17, 1977.

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Ordered according to the Triune love Since order is to support, rather than stifle, the Church in its mission, Torrance argues that the Church is to be ordered according to the love of God which we share in through our participation in the divine koinōnia. The Church’s order and ministry are dynamic, not static, since its “faith is always proleptic, looking forward to a fullness which has not yet been manifest.”119 Living within the limitations of this age, the Church “must make use of schēmata without being schematised to them,”120 instead having “an ordering correlative to the law of love in the Holy Spirit.”121 We have unpacked throughout this thesis the way in which Torrance shows that the love of God is constitutive for the Church, since there is no other reason for God acting in creation and redemption besides God’s own sovereign decision. It is this divine love that lies behind any visible ordering or structure in the Church, for

behind and beyond the rites and the gifts there breaks in God’s love which is to be lived out in the power of the One Spirit. All of the historical patterns of the Church’s life will pass away but love will not pass away. That love is already given to the Church in its communion with Christ and as such its manifestation in the ordering of the Church on earth is an expression of the coming Kingdom.122 The constancy of the doctrine of the Trinity as a reference point for the theological task of ecclesiology reflects that although Christian doctrine has been adapted throughout history in order to reflect shifts in ways of thinking, its “essential imagery and basic conceptuality” has not changed.123 Furthermore, since the real nature of the Church is derived from the Triune love, then the visible ordering of the Church must witness to this constancy. Recalling our discussion about the Church as the body of Christ in the last chapter, since Christ is the head, and the Church is merely the body, the Church is called to point to God, rather than engage in self-promotion, or becoming absorbed in its own existence.124 The Lord has established the Church as the place on earth where humans may meet with the love of God, and so it is vital that its visible life reflects its

119 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 61. 120 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 99. 121 Ibid., 100. 122 Ibid., 65. 123 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 47. 124 Torrance, Atonement, 379.

207 true being as a community composed of those who have been drawn into the union and communion of the Trinity through the work of the Spirit and Son. Torrance draws on Calvin here, who argued that doctrina and disciplina must overlap; “the dogmatic and ecclesiastical forms of the Church, the inner and outer, so to speak, may well be distinguished but they cannot be separated.”125

Returning to the sense of disorder as anomia, the chaos caused by separation from, and rebellion against God, we may recall that even though the OT Law pointed to God’s judgment on disorder, it was incapable of redeeming humanity from the consequences of sin. It is exclusively through the person, life and work of Jesus Christ that the Church is redeemed from this disorder, but not “by external obedience and conformity but by inner and outer sharing in his life.”126 Structure and order are not simply something anthropocentrically imposed upon the Church, but should instead be understood in terms of participation, and koinōnia. “The order of the Church’s ministry is the ordering of its life and work through participation in the obedience of Christ.”127 The “essential pattern” of the Church is the death and resurrection of Christ, which is “sacramentally enacted in Baptism and Holy Communion,” and mirrored in “the historical life and experience of the Church in judgment and resurrection.”128

Participation in the Triune love and koinōnia must be emphasised in order to prevent Church order becoming about external requirements and structures. It must instead be about our participation in the obedience of Christ, for “all order in the Christian Church is a participation in his obedient humanity—whether that order be an ordering of its daily life, daily worship, daily fellowship, or daily mission. The whole of the Church’s life is ordered through participation in the ordered life of Jesus Christ, the new Adam, the head of the new creation.”129 This is the work of the Spirit in the time between, for it is only through the Spirit that humanity is able to participate in the koinōnia of divine love that is the Triune Being of God, and thus only through the Spirit that the Church may live out the love of God in space and time. There is a definite order

125 Torrance, “Our Witness through Doctrine,” 136. 126 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 97. 127 Ibid., 93. 128 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 62. 129 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 96.

208 given to the Church, a “mutual ordering of the Church in love,” which takes place through the Spirit. This is an order where, “the Church serves Christ, is obedient to the Spirit, and engages in the mutual edification of love.”130 Torrance suggests that this love is “the very esse of the Church given to it through union with Christ,” which “manifests itself in the Church in the form of self-denial, suffering and service,”131 for in the Church, “everything must be subordinate to love, in which each serves the other and is subject to the other.”132

As Torrance comments further,

It is the Spirit who is the law of the Church’s ordered life; not the Spirit as a new law of nature, not the Spirit as the soul of the Church, not the Spirit as a new immanent norm in the development of the Church through history, but the Spirit who gives the Church to share in the obedience of Christ the head of the body and who is other than the Church, its Lord and King, but who in economic condescension has come to be obedient to the Father from within the Church, that the Church may share in an obedience not its own, and in an order that is new to it, indeed against its own nature; an order from beyond the Church’s own being but in which it is given to participate by the Spirit.133 In the last chapter we noted that Torrance considers the Church to be particularly correlated with the work of the Spirit, who is poured out at Pentecost and subjectively realises the objectively fulfilled work of Christ among humanity. As the Word is spoken by the Spirit in the Church, we have a relation of two parts; the Lord calls and addresses humanity, who offer obedience and faith as their response through Christ.134 It is through the Spirit that the Church participates in union and communion with God, and thus through the Spirit that the Church is given to participate in the ongoing work of

God.

130 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 67. 131 Ibid., 66. 132 Ibid., 67. A somewhat tangential, but still interesting article by Torrance is Thomas F. Torrance, “Violence in Society: An Examination of the Destructive Forces Inherent in Modern-Day Society,” Independent Broadcasting 13 (1977): 15–18, where Torrance argues that the reason for the current ecological problems is the kind of society that we are, which results from the kind of science that we practise. The crossover point with the current discussion of order is Torrance’s claim that we must press forward into the reconstruction of human society which emerges from the re-ordering of the love of God revealed in the incarnation. 133 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 97. 134 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 24.

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6.3 The Ministry of Christ, and the Ministry of the Church Our discussion so far in this chapter has demonstrated the trinitarian nature of Church order, highlighting the importance of the motif of koinōnia, and participation in the Triune love. We may now continue to build on this as we think about how Christ is present in the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel, examining the differences between Christ’s ministry, and the ministry of the Church.

Torrance argues that the validity of the Church’s ministry is entirely dependent on God’s active presence, for

The church is the bodily and historical form of Christ’s existence on earth through which he lets his word be heard, so that as the church bears witness to him and proclaims the gospel of salvation in his name, he himself through the Spirit is immediately present validating that word as his own and communicating himself to people through it.135 The most straightforward way to understand how the Church’s ministry in the time between is a genuine participation in Christ’s ongoing ministry is to examine Torrance’s use of the concept of kerygma, or proclamation. The New Testament kerygma has the person of Jesus Christ at its very heart,136 framed by reference to the incarnation. The incarnation involved Jesus, “declaring that what he proclaimed was actually being fulfilled as current reality in and through his proclamation of it.”137 This is only understood when one reads the historical and theological elements of the Gospel accounts in tandem, for Jesus Christ is described to us in the Gospels not simply as a historical character, but rather, “the whole account of Jesus Christ is illuminated, shaped and permeated with the glory and revelation that break out clearly in the resurrection.”138

This interpretation is found most clearly in Jesus’ own disclosure of his identity, which took place in a veiled fashion through his miracles and teaching, although it is explicitly revealed to the disciples by the Spirit.139 Jesus taught about the nature of the Kingdom

135 Torrance, Atonement, 279. 136 Ibid., 13. 137 Torrance, Incarnation, 20. 138 Torrance, Atonement, 13. 139 Ibid., 19–20.

210 of God, did miracles that demonstrated the power of the Kingdom of God, and heralded the arrival of the Kingdom of God through his incarnate presence in history. There is an inseparable relation between Jesus’ teaching, and his acts, for his preaching and his miracles both point to his divine identity. The parables confronted humans with the Word of God, and then are worked out on the Cross in such a way that they are “inserted as a reality into our history and life.”140 Because the eternal Word is not merely speech, but also power and act, it had to be communicated “in saving acts, in miraculous signs,”141 so the miracles not only proved Christ’s divine nature, but confronted humans with God’s mighty power. Both the parables and miracles of Jesus’ historical ministry point to the crucifixion and resurrection where Word and Act are combined in the most intimate way.142 All that Jesus taught and did during his life witnessed to who he was, however it was only in the light of the resurrection that his acts were revealed to also be acts of God at work among humankind.143

Our model for the nature of the Church’s witness in our context, is found in the apostolic witness. We have already referred to the way that the apostles had journeyed with Jesus Christ, heard his words, seen his deeds, and were given understanding about the true meaning of the parables. They were called by Jesus to be “specially authorised and competent witnesses and proclaimers of the kingdom.”144 Their ministry after Jesus’ ascension was an extension of his own kerygma; however it is not the actual act of preaching or evangelism that is in view, but rather the way in which Jesus himself is present through the Spirit in the apostles’ proclamation of the Gospel. This is why the witness of the apostles is so vital, for as the hinge between Christ’s own revelation, and the embodying of that revelation in the written Scriptures, their teaching continued to repose on Christ’s own kerygmatic presence. The apostles’ proclamation is thus understood to be Christ’s own self-proclamation,145 which is the basis of all kerygma.

140 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 157. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., 158. 143 Torrance, Incarnation, 161–62. 144 Ibid., 23. 145 Ibid., 24–5.

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Torrance further defines kerygma as “objective, sacramental preaching with an eschatological result such that the original event (Christ crucified) becomes event all over again in the hearer.”146 Just as the Word was ‘made flesh’ in the incarnation, through kerygmatic proclamation, the same Word is ‘made flesh’ in the ongoing life of the Church. Torrance further describes kerygma as “itself in the highest sense sacramental act,”147 for the living Word fills the witness of the Church so that it is able to refer to the Triune God in a way which transcends its own creaturely limitations. The sacramental action of the Church is to reveal the mystery of the Kingdom,148 but the mystery of the Kingdom is the person of Christ. Christ himself is present when the Word is declared, as both “its material content and its active agent, for in and through the Church’s witness to him he proclaims himself and is present and active for our salvation.”149 This is why, as we will see in the next chapter, the New Testament clearly links kerygma and baptisma, “for they [share] the same semantic reference to the saving reality of Christ and his Gospel.”150

Although Torrance’s language around kerygma is predominantly Christocentric, this is simply related to the way in which the incarnation is central to the ontological bond formed between Christ and the Church. The proclamation of the Gospel by the Church is intrinsically trinitarian, for while Christ is its content, the proclamation takes place through the Holy Spirit in a way where it has a tangible effect within space and time, and it is actualised among humanity. Kerygma is thus,

the proclamation of the Christ-event, but such proclamation that by the Holy Spirit it becomes the actualization of that event among men. It is such proclamation that in and through it the living Christ continues to do and to teach what He had already begun before and after the crucifixion. Kerygma is the Word of the Kingdom that cannot be conveyed in mere speech, but is used by God to intervene Himself in the human situation as He who once and for all has wrought out His final act in the death and Christ, so that through kerygma the Church is continually being called out of history to become the very Body of Christ, and by the communion of His Holy Spirit is given to

146 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 72. 147 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 209. 148 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 158–59. 149 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 83. 150 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 294.

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taste the powers of the age to come and to stand already on the side of the resurrection.151 In conclusion, the difference between the ministry of Christ and of the Church is that the Church is “a ministry of redeemed sinners, whereas his ministry is that of the redeemer.”152 The Church does not save, for Jesus has already accomplished that once- and-for-all in his own person; it can only point to the One who does.153 As Torrance explains,

The Church participates in Christ’s ministry by serving Him who is Prophet, Priest, and King. The ministry of the Church is related to the ministry of Christ in such a way that in and through the ministry of the Church it is always Christ Himself who is at work, nourishing, sustaining, ordering, and governing His Church on earth…throughout the whole prophetic, priestly, and kingly ministry of the Church, it is Christ Himself who presides as Prophet, Priest and King, but He summons the Church to engage in His ministry by witness (μαρτυρία), by stewardship (οἰκονομία), and by service (διακονία).154

This is why it is so important, as Deddo notes, that our union with Christ is not merely moral, psychological, volitional or telic, but is a real union through which we are invited into real participation in Christ’s ministry.155 While Christ is absent in body yet present through the Spirit, the Church is called to proclaim the Word. It takes on the role of a servant, not pointing to itself, but pointing to Christ, and must embrace the call to suffering that results from the proclamation of the Word of God,156 for in the Kingdom of God, “humility and service displace competition and achievement.”157

6.4 The Church ‘in via’ We now need to think further about how the concept of the ‘time between’ shapes Torrance’s understanding of the order and ministry of the Church. Our enquiry

151 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 158. 152 Torrance, Atonement, 357. 153 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 251. 154 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 37–38. 155 Gary W. Deddo, “The Christian Life and Our Participation in Christ's Continuing Ministry,” in An Introduction to Torrance Theology: Discovering the Incarnate Saviour, ed. Gerrit Scott Dawson (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 139, 143–48. 156 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 61. See also Torrance’s sermon on Revelation 10, ‘The Word of God and Time’ in Torrance, The Apocalypse Today, 79–87. 157 Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, 24.

213 continues to focus on how the Church lives within space and time as the body of Christ, participating in the union and communion of the Holy Trinity. It is certainly not that Christ has left the Church to fend for itself, for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity encourages us to think that the incarnate, ascended Christ is “historically absent and actually present;”158 his physical body is absent, yet he is present through the Spirit.159 We have noted that this creates an ‘eschatological pause’ between Christ’s two advents, and this pause determines the way in which the Church is to engage in its mission.

Excursus: Reformation Eschatology and Ecclesiology We pause here to note the content of Kingdom and Church, where Torrance compares the eschatology of three Reformed theologians, , which he deems an ‘eschatology of faith’, Martin Bucer,160 which he deems an ‘eschatology of love’, and John Calvin, which he deems an ‘eschatology of hope.’ He particularly interacts with the doctrine of the Church as it is developed by each of these theologians, although there is a much closer correlation between his own ecclesiology, and Bucer and Calvin’s work, than with that of Luther. Bucer’s ecclesiology emphasised “the life of the Church in terms of a communion of love having its source in the activity of the divine love both in creation and in redemption,” which is formed as humans are reconciled to God through Christ, and made able to participate again in the divine love,161 and thus empowered to live out the communion of love among humanity.162 Bucer thus stresses love more than Calvin, although Calvin’s eschatology and ecclesiology are both more Christocentric than Bucer’s.163 Although Bucer shares Torrance’s emphasis on the divine love—which we have seen is a key element of Torrance’s focus on koinōnia— there are numerous points at which Torrance’s evaluation of Calvin’s work reveals the strong connection between Torrance’s and Calvin’s ecclesiology.

158 Torrance, Atonement, 293. 159 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 45. 160 Spelt by Torrance as Martin Butzer; we have adopted the more popular English spelling here. 161 Torrance, Kingdom and Church, 74–75. 162 Ibid., 81. 163 Ibid., 89. See Torrance, The School of Faith, lix–lxv, for the shape that the Christological correction of Reformed theology took.

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Calvin’s central motif of union with Christ, and our sharing in his new humanity, is applied to the Church as the body of Christ, growing up in him throughout time.164 Through faith, we “participate in the motion of Christ’s resurrection and ascension,”165 and look forward in hope to the advent of Christ. Torrance notes that election and eschatology—“pre-destination and post-destination” are twin doctrines for Calvin,166 and it is between these two that “the whole life of the Church on earth is to be understood.”167 The ascension is key to this for Calvin, for Christ is already enthroned, even though “He has not yet erected before the eyes of men that throne from which His divine majesty will be far more fully displayed than it now is at the last day.”168 In Christ all is already renewed, but this must be transferred to the Church which is his body by virtue of its union with Him.169 Calvin views the Church as a structure already completed, but which reaches forward to the advent of Christ,170 so that we must think of the old age and new age as overlapping.171 All of this is very similar to our description of Torrance’s ecclesiology.

There are some other similar points between Torrance and Calvin which we may briefly note here. Calvin also views the Old Testament ‘Church’ as the prelude to the New Testament Church, paralleling Torrance’s three-stage ecclesiology;172 the Church experiences tension because of its existence in the overlap of the ages;173 the sacraments are seen by Calvin as belonging to the time between the two ages, as the way which Christ gives Himself to us within the limitations of space and time— involving both nearness (union with Christ) and separation (eschatological distance);174 Calvin describes order as “essentially ambiguous,”175 for its structures

164 Torrance, Kingdom and Church, 94–95, 100–04. 165 Ibid., 103, quoting Calvin’s Commentary on Hebrews 6.1. 166 Ibid., 105. 167 Ibid., 108. 168 Ibid., 109, quoting Calvin’s Commentary on Matthew 25.31. 169 Ibid., 116. 170 Ibid., 109. 171 Ibid., 118. 172 Ibid., 117. 173 Ibid., 121. 174 Ibid., 126–31. 175 Ibid., 136.

215 now will pass away at the return of Christ, so that in the here and now, it acts as ‘scaffolding’176—language which Torrance directly uses, as we saw earlier in this chapter; and finally, Calvin emphasises that the Church should be engaged in ecumenical activity.177 This brief summary shows that Torrance’s ecclesiology stands quite firmly within the Reformed tradition, particularly that of Calvin.

We return here to the eschatological pause, the period when the Church lives in two different times. The relationship between the Church and time is highly important, because the Church is bound up with space and time. On one hand, the Church exists in ‘horizontal time’, time that is marked by the consequences of sin. However, Jesus lived within our time, and has redeemed it from “its guilt and irreversibility, its decay and corruption,” through his new humanity,178 and so on the other hand the Church is oriented to this ‘vertical time’, in which it shares in the new humanity of Christ through the Spirit. The Church is both temporal and eternal, limited by the historical existence of this world and bound by fallen time, yet through the Spirit, it participates in redeemed time that has been sanctified through its union with Christ. Given that these two times overlap, Torrance’s eschatology does not anticipate an act of God which brings an end to the current age, but involves an ongoing sense of how the eternal acts within the temporal. The two times overlap, for all of God’s acts are both teleological and eschatological. They are enacted within time, and gather up time, in order to serve the final outworking of the divine purpose.179

This has all been discussed already from a number of different angles, and we return to the issue of the overlap of the ages in order to consider what this means for the mission of the Church. While it is ultimately oriented to redeemed time, the Church continues its mission within fallen time, so that Torrance describes this time as a period when the Church must walk by faith, and not by sight. We are separated from seeing God clearly by both our senses, and by time—

176 Ibid., 138. 177 Ibid., 164. 178 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 101. 179 Torrance, Atonement, 308.

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In the here and now relation to Christ, what stands between us is the veil of sense, so that although we communicate with him immediately through the Spirit, he is mediated to us in our sense experience only through the sacramental elements. In the relation between the present and future, what stands in between us is the veil of time, so that although we communicate with him immediately through the Spirit, he is mediated to us only through temporal and spatial acts of sacramental communion with us in the Church until he comes.180 Since the Church has immediate communion in the Spirit with the risen and ascended Christ, in this ‘eschatological pause’ there will always be a sense of imminence and urgency, as if the final advent is about to break in.181 However, this veiling is a vital component of understanding the Church’s order and ministry, since it is this veiling that creates the “time between revelation and decision, time between decision and act, time between present and future, time for the gospel.”182 The eschatological pause has been given to the Church primarily for Gospel proclamation, and is a time that God has allowed in God’s grace so that the world has time to repent.183 The Church is a witness, anticipating the second advent of Christ, in keeping with the nature of the ‘new time’ of the resurrected Christ to which it is oriented,184 even in this period of history “where it has time to work, and time to obey him… time to exist and carry out its mission.”185

Just as God is always gathering people into communion with himself, as we saw in our discussion of the vertical and horizontal koinōnia of the Church in the last chapter, so too the Church is called to live out its historical life in such a way that people are drawn to join this communion. Resultantly,

It is therefore the mission of the church to bring to all nations and races the message of hope and by the witness of its word and life to summon them to the obedience of the gospel, that the love of God in Jesus Christ may be poured out upon them by the Spirit, breaking down all barriers, healing all divisions, and

180 Ibid., 310. I do not believe Torrance intends to suggest through the use of sacramental language here that an individual can only meet with Jesus through the sacramental rites of a Church, but rather is emphasising that in the time between the two advents of Christ, we do not meet with Jesus in his incarnate humanity, for our relationship to God is one of walking by faith, since he is veiled from our sight. 181 Ibid., 304. 182 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 102. 183 Torrance, Atonement, 304. 184 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 50–51. 185 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 102.

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gathering them together as one universal flock to meet the coming of the great shepherd, the one Lord and saviour of all.186 The distinctiveness of the Church in relation to the world Torrance was emphatic that the Church must maintain its distinctiveness in relation to the world, an element of his ecclesiology that did not change throughout his ministry. We can see this with reference to one of his earliest publications. In 1942, shortly before he became a chaplain, Torrance presented and then published a message to his local presbytery entitled ‘The Church in the World’.187 In it, Torrance makes two key points that must be kept in mind when thinking of the relationship between the Church and the world. First, the Church must retain its distinct nature, for it has both a unique message, and a unique function, which cannot be naturalised or merged with any form of social order. However, despite its distinct message and function, the Church requires a worldly form, and “must look to her methods and to her organization, for she must have some outward form through which she can translate her message to society; and through which she can have a purchase upon the State.”188

Torrance viewed the state of the Church with dismay. We see this in his disappointment that “the Church has identified Christianity with Christendom,” exemplified by the belief that good behaviour makes one a Christian, so that “a Christian life is hardly distinguishable from good citizenship or public-spiritedness, or philanthropy, or humanitarianism.”189 We also see it in his accusation that the supernatural nature of the Kingdom of God has been reduced to a generic idea of civil life. The Church “has become so much a part of ordinary society that she finds herself unable to raise society,”190 while on the other hand, the Church as an institution has become identified with the status quo, so that rather than pioneering and forging new ways, “many look to the Church for a defence of the old order of things, social and political.”191

186 Torrance, Atonement, 343. 187 This was particularly relevant given the wartime footing which the United Kingdom was on, and so copies were sent to each congregation in the Presbytery in the hope that it would spark discussion. 188 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 75. 189 Ibid. 190 Ibid., 76. 191 Ibid.

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Given this state of affairs, Torrance argues that the body of Christ “must be prepared for a thorough overhaul of her whole shape and form, for a radical alteration in her organizations and methods.”192 The first half of the twentieth century was a time of immense change, and so Torrance argued that the “tempo of the times” required the Church to make drastic changes, not simply to keep up, but to leap ahead.193 Torrance’s challenge to the Church is clear, asking it to regain a sense of its calling to be the ‘leaven’ in the loaf since, “It is not the Church’s business to be the bulwark of the old order; rather it is her business to throw the whole into ferment and upheaval.”194 The very nature of the Church, looking towards, and longing for the new creation, means that it “cannot but be fundamentally destructive and revolutionary over against the ‘fashion of this world.’”195 Because the Church’s ultimate existence is grounded in God, and not in itself as an earthly institution, it “has no right to identify herself with the social order here or with any political system, far less with the ‘status quo’.”196 The very nature of the Christian Church is that it is “always on the move, always campaigning, always militant, aggressive, disruptive, revolutionary.”197 The Church must first and foremost recognise its distinctive nature and character, and its inherent separation from the norms of society, and indeed, the world.

Furthermore, the Church must refuse to become merged in ordinary social life, in order to show “that there is a world of difference between being Christian and just being nice and gentlemanly.”198 Although it is good for the Church to engage in serving the world through social activity, by itself this will never solve the problem of evil, which can flourish just as well under a good order, as under an evil order. There is thus for

192 Ibid., 80. 193 Ibid. 194 Ibid., 76. 195 Ibid., 77. 196 Ibid., 79. 197 Ibid. See also Torrance’s reflection on the way that Jesus rejected every institutional system based on power, and instead correlated the Church with the Kingdom of God, “giving it an open eschatological dimension which builds into it a meta-institutional and meta-canonical orientation making it quite unlike anything else on earth.” Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 40. 198 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 78. See also Torrance, God and Rationality, 117–119; Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 271–75, in particular the discussion about the need for the Church to be emancipated from ‘built-in obsolescence’ by helping the community to advance through creating new paradigms, rather than maintaining the existing community paradigm.

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Torrance an immovable discrepancy between the body of Christ, and any form of political, social or economic order.199 The nature of the ‘time between’ is that while the Church, if alive and with a right focus on the Gospel, can continue to witness in a way that supports a new order, that new order must not be associated with the Church, or else the Church will lose its ability to curb that new order if it becomes evil.200 Torrance acknowledges that the Church must let its voice be heard “wherever there is evil in the industrial or the economic order, in the political or international sphere, or in the social fabric of ordinary life,”201 but it is clear that he views this as secondary to the Church’s primary task of proclaiming the Gospel.

Similar themes to this pamphlet are also found in Torrance’s preaching from this time. In his sermon series on Revelation, which we discussed in the fourth chapter, Torrance notes the temptation to create a “so-called Christian civilization without Jesus Christ.”202 While there is no innate harm in human collective efforts, we must be careful not to worship the community or society, over the worship of God, as takes place in communism, or totalitarianism. Torrance continues by stating that “when the Church begins to stress community and social cohesion… it is a sign that she is losing her true grip upon the living God and is binding herself together in a collective magnitude in order to make up for internal spiritual bankruptcy.”203 To worship the Christian community as an independent entity, rather than as a communion sustained by its communion with God, is to engage in idolatry, a temptation that the Church must avoid.

199 This is particularly clearly illustrated in Torrance’s sermon on Revelation 14, ‘The Triumph of the Gospel’ in Torrance, The Apocalypse Today, 111–22. Torrance argues that the Church cannot “come to easy terms with the contemporary order, for the God of love is in her midst and by the preaching of the Cross He smites the image of human empire and intervenes with mercy and truth in every form of human existence and action, economic, social, political, international” (117). See also Torrance’s sermon on Revelation 19, ‘The Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth’ (150–60.) 200 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 82. Torrance reflects further that during, and after, World War I, the alliance of the Church and State in Germany, and the resultant tension between the Gospel, and ‘Kultur’ in Germany, had led to Germany becoming thoroughly pagan. He does not comment specifically on the German Church in the Second World War. 201 Ibid., 81. 202 Torrance, The Apocalypse Today, 109. 203 Ibid., 145.

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6.5 Our response to God in Christ Throughout this thesis, we have referred in various places to the mediatorial role of Christ, who both ministers the things of God to humans, and represents humans to God. We have acknowledged that Christ is both our representative, and our substitute. He is our representative, in that he represents our response to the Father, and he is our substitute, who stands in our place. By themselves, neither concept is salvific, but when held together, they help us to understand the saving significance of the incarnation.204 This is an appropriate place for us to briefly consider the aspects of Christian life to which this applies. In The Mediation of Christ, Torrance spells out the significance of Christ’s vicarious humanity in five areas—faith, conversion, worship, the sacraments, and evangelism. A brief synopsis of this discussion will help us to see how he sees Christ’s standing ‘in our place’ as being worked out in the context of the Christian life.

Torrance argues against the idea that ‘faith’ is something we possess independently, instead affirming that it is only as our weak faith is encircled by, and grounded upon God’s faithfulness, that we can be truly faithful. In the Old Testament, God held Israel to covenant faithfulness through God’s own unswerving faithfulness; in the New Testament, Jesus “steps into the actual situation where we are summoned to have faith in God, to believe and trust in him, and he acts in our place and in our stead from within the depths of our unfaithfulness and provides us freely with a faithfulness in which we may share.”205 As we are yoked to Jesus, he shares our burden of placing our trust in God, by allowing us to share in his vicarious faithfulness.206

The same applies to conversion, where we must allow Jesus to stand in for us in answering to God. We share in Jesus’ vicarious repentance, for he laid hold of us in the depths of our sinful enmity to God, and bore God’s judgment in our place, resulting in our regeneration—paliggenesia.207 Although this contradicts our contemporary notions of repentance and conversion being our individual decision, for Torrance, “our

204 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 80–81. 205 Ibid., 82. 206 Ibid., 84. On the understanding of faith as grounded in God’s faithfulness in Christ, see Thomas F. Torrance, “One Aspect of the Biblical Conception of Faith,” Expository Times 86 (1957): 111–14. 207 Ibid., 85.

221 new birth, our regeneration, our conversion, are what has taken place in Jesus Christ himself,” so that we share in his vicarious conversion.208

Faith and conversion could be considered rather more individualistic aspects of the Christian life; however, Torrance also affirms that corporate elements of the Church’s life only take place through Christ’s vicarious humanity. In his incarnate life, Jesus “embodied in himself in a vicarious form the response of human beings to God, so that all their worship and prayer to God henceforth become grounded and centred in him.”209 We cannot approach God with any sense of our own innate worthiness, but can only approach in the name of Jesus Christ alone, in whom our worship, prayer and offerings to God are taken up and presented to God. We recall here our invitation to pray the Lord’s Prayer in, through and with Jesus Christ.210

We will attend to the sacraments in more detail in the next chapter, but here we may briefly note Torrance’s description of the sacraments as “divinely provided, dominically appointed ways of response and obedience of a radically vicarious kind.”211 Baptism and the eucharist direct us away from ourselves to Christ, and are actions to which we can add nothing; although we are commanded to participate in them, “they are nevertheless not sacraments of what we do but of what Christ Jesus has done in our place and on our behalf.”212

Finally, Torrance notes that in evangelism, we must proclaim the central mediatorial role of Christ, who demands that we renounce ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. Torrance argues that when the Gospel is proclaimed as being dependent on an individual human decision ‘for Christ’, then we are preaching a Gospel of conditional, rather than unconditional grace. Instead, we must preach the Gospel in such a way that the vicarious humanity of Jesus is affirmed, where to repent and believe is to trust in

208 Ibid., 86. 209 Ibid., 87. 210 Ibid., 88–89. 211 Ibid., 89. 212 Ibid., 90.

222 the sufficiency of what God in Christ has done, rather than continuing to ask whether our faith is adequate enough to save us.213

There is one more aspect of Church order that we must cover here, although it is not included in this discussion in The Mediation of Christ, which is the role of catechism. Torrance argues that catechisms set forth doctrine in such a way that it becomes seed which bears fruit in the next generations of the Church; keeping the Church consistent with its apostolic foundation, and not insulated from the vagaries of changing contexts. Torrance also comments that the Catechisms should be “set forth as far as possible in the universal language of the Church, and apart from the particular characteristics of any one Church and age,”214 and yet remain open to their continued testing for faithfulness to the apostolic kerygma and .215

6.6 Chapter Conclusion Our discussion of Church order has established that for Torrance, the nature of Church order must derive from the ultimate ground of the Church which is the Triune God. The Church must be ever reforming, because it needs to continually evaluate the characteristics of its ongoing life in space and time with reference to this source. Because the Church, existing between the two advents of Christ, has both a real union with Christ, and yet lives awaiting the fullness of its redemption, it has no independent ministry of its own, but instead it participates in the ministry of Christ through the Spirit. It is to be ordered according to the love of God, which is given to the Church

213 Ibid., 92–95. 214 Torrance, The School of Faith, xi. Torrance further demonstrates a marked preference for the Reformation catechisms over those of the Westminster assembly, arguing that they are more universal, more Christological, less rationalistic, and do a better job of focusing upon the primary work of Christ, rather than the response of humanity. He critiques all the Catechisms though, noting that none of them develop a full enough diachronic account of the Church—as we saw in the fourth chapter of this thesis that Torrance himself does—nor do they focus enough on the whole incarnate life and ministry of Jesus Christ, and how this informs the mission of the Church (see pages xii–xxi.) In the same vein, he notes that while Reformation preaching was focused upon Christ, and upon demonstrating Christian love in service to one’s neighbours, post-Westminster, Protestant theology began to focus upon the inward, subjective religious experience (see pages xlvii–xlix.) 215 Ibid., xii.

223 through the gifts of the Spirit, is operative in the mode of servanthood, and thus reaches towards the telos of the Kingdom.216

216 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 66.

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7 THE NOTES AND MARKS OF THE CHURCH

7.0 Chapter Abstract In the previous chapter, we discussed how Church order acts as a temporal scaffolding for the Church’s existence in the eschatological pause between the two advents of Christ. In this chapter we will first discuss the notes of the Church, defined in the Nicene Creed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic. These are to do with the essential being and nature of the Church, because they derive directly from its trinitarian and Christological foundation. We will then turn our attention to the marks of the Church; the Word, the sacraments, and the ministry. Building on the last chapter, where we saw that Church order is intrinsically related to the koinōnia of the Church, we will discuss the role that each of these elements has in the ongoing life of the Church. We will see that they are no less related to the central motif of koinōnia, but have a different and temporary function, to do with how we participate in the union and communion of the Trinity.

7.1 The Notes of the Church Throughout this thesis it has been demonstrated that for T. F. Torrance, the Church is the “place in space and time where knowledge of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit becomes grounded in humanity, and union and communion with the Holy Trinity becomes embodied within the human race.”1 Knowledge of God is innately linked to the gathering of the Church, the body of Christ. We have also observed that even though the Church is ultimately grounded in the being and work of the Triune God, the Church in via must contend with the limitations of its existence in space and time, as it looks forward to the second advent of Christ and the fullness of its redemption, and it is this dynamic which we are concerned with in these later chapters.

One way in which we may separate out Torrance’s different ways of thinking about the Church’s life is to identify the difference in his thought between the ‘notes’ of the Church and the ‘marks’ of the Church. Torrance uses these terms in his own way, since

1 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 256.

225 what he describes as ‘notes’ or ‘attributes’ or ‘predicates’ are more commonly referred to as the ‘marks’ of the Church. For Torrance, however, the four notes of the Church are the four essential ecclesial attributes defined by the Nicene Creed, which are “first of all attributes of Christ himself, but attributes in which the church shares through its union and communion with him.”2 Unity, holiness, and apostolicity “do not denote independent qualities inhering in the church, but are affirmations of the nature of the church as it participates in Jesus Christ and are strictly discernible only to faith.”3 This reflects the trend which we have already identified in Patristic theology, where organisation and structure were not paramount in the development of “a definite ecclesiology,”4 but the nature of the Church as it derived from the being of God was centralised.

These four notes are distinct from what Torrance refers to as the marks of the Church. The marks are visible elements of the Church’s life, such as the “word of God purely preached, the sacraments of the gospel rightly administered, and godly discipline,” which “indicate where the true church is to be found; they do not define it or describe it but point to it.”5 The difference here is that the ‘notes’ describe the being of the Church, while the ‘marks’ describe the temporal life of the Church. We will come to these later in the chapter, but we turn now to explore initially the unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity of the Church, focusing on how these four notes fill out our understanding of the relationship between the Triune God who is transcendent over all space and time, and the Church which lives within space and time. Because they are first and foremost attributes of the Triune God, they derive from the being of God to shape the being of the Church.

Oneness For Torrance, “the oneness of the church derives ultimately from the triunity of God… as in God himself there is one holy fellowship of love, so there is only one holy fellowship of love in the church, the counterpart on earth to the unity in God of Father,

2 Torrance, Atonement, 380. 3 Ibid. 4 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 255. 5 Torrance, Atonement, 380–81.

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Son and Holy Spirit.”6 This quote summarises all that we have said about the way that Torrance uses the motif of koinōnia in relation to ecclesiology thus far. Central to the oneness of the Church is its ontological relationship to Christ, for through his incarnational atonement, humanity is united to him and formed into one new body. Through union with Christ, the Church participates in the communion of the Trinity. Its unity, or oneness, does not arise from the similarity of the members, but comes from their shared participation in the fellowship of the Holy Trinity. This means that the Church in every manifestation in space and time is “intrinsically and essentially one,” since it exists wherever Christ and the Spirit are active.7

To illustrate the oneness of the Church, we may turn to the account of the Spirit being poured out in Acts 2. Torrance describes the Holy Spirit as “the principle of multiplicity as well as unity, but he is the principle of unity in the heart and wealth of all multiplicity.”8 Despite the diversity of nations represented in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost, the Spirit was poured out regardless of language, gender, nationality, or socioeconomic background, unifying the multitude of Jewish believers. This is clearly intended as the antithesis to the separation of the nations that took place at Babel in Genesis 11—where sin divided, the Spirit reconciles and reunites.9

Furthermore, there is an ahistorical aspect to the oneness of the Church, which Torrance clearly brings out in his diachronic approach to ecclesiology, emphasising that even though it has existed in three different stages, there is only ever one Church. It is the same God who is at work in both the Old and New Testament, speaking through the Old Testament prophets to Israel, coming among us in Christ, and continuing to speak through the New Testament apostles to the Church. Many of the Church Fathers—including Cyril of Jerusalem, Irenaeus and Epiphanius—use this point of continuity to emphasise the unity of the Church, which although it has existed in different forms, in different stages of history, is nonetheless gathered up as one in

6 Ibid., 381. 7 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 279. 8 Torrance, Atonement, 383. 9 Ibid.

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Christ.10 The Church has an earthly and historical form, but also has an eschatological form which is yet to be fully revealed.11

The oneness of the Church thus encompasses both the visible Church and the invisible Church, or to use alternative terms, the Church militant, and the Church triumphant. The empirical Church is in view in the Nicene Creed, and traces its existence back to the “sovereign self-giving of God in his Spirit, who through his Word calls the Church into being and by his own breath makes it alive with the very life of God.”12 Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that even though oneness is an essential attribute of the Church, the historical life of the Church rarely reflects this, as seen in the competition between different church denominations. Torrance is realistic about this state of affairs but passes negative judgment upon it, observing that “for the people of God to allow the divisions of the world to penetrate back into its life, is to live in disagreement with its own existence, to call in question its reconciliation, and to act a lie against the atonement.”13 This comment has substantial ramifications for our discussion of the sacraments later in this chapter, and in our discussion of the Church as a reconciling community in the next chapter.

Holiness Just as the oneness of the Church derives from its participation in the communion of the Holy Trinity, the holiness of the Church also originates from the way in which the Church is “drawn into the holiness of God himself, into the fellowship of the Holy Trinity, partaking of that fellowship through the Holy Spirit.”14 Holiness as an essential attribute of the Church is not to do with the purity or morality of the human members, but rather it is the presence of the holy God which hallows the Church.15 Holiness is given to the Church from its head, Christ, and is not something ‘achieved’ by the members of the Church.16 We must recall once again the ontological relationship

10 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 280. Torrance’s diachronic ecclesiology is strongly grounded in the Patristic view of the continuity between Israel and the Church. 11 Torrance, Atonement, 384. 12 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 279. 13 Torrance, Atonement, 382. 14 Ibid., 385. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 387.

228 forged between Christ and the Church through his assumption of humanity. Christ sanctified and healed our fallen humanity throughout his life, and while we are justified and made holy as individuals, this holiness is extended to the Church as a whole because of our participation in the divine koinōnia. In this sense, holiness is an essential attribute of the being of the Church, and a fully realised reality.

However, we must also reckon with the fact that just as the historical life of the Church doesn’t demonstrate oneness, so too the life of the Church often misses the standard of holiness. On one hand, the Church is “called out of the world and separated from secular society for fellowship with God.”17 It is not a society or community like any other, for it has been “set apart as a spiritual house and a royal priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”18 On the other hand, the Church also stands in solidarity with the sinful world, and is in need of constant sanctification and healing.19 As the body of the crucified Christ, the Church must continually submit itself to the judgment of the Cross, since “this side of the final judgment, the Church in history is ever found to be in the wrong, and must ever be put in the right,”20 so that “until Christ comes again the church constantly needs the cleansing of Christ and the fire of divine judgment.”21

God “seeks and establishes fellowship with his human creatures, coming into their midst always as the Lord whose awful presence among them opposes and judges their impurity and sin, yet in such a way that he does not annihilate them but gathers them to himself within the embrace of his covenant mercies and grace.”22 As the Spirit comes among the Church, it is both judged, and justified,23 for the Spirit causes God’s holiness “to bear upon [the Church] in conviction and judgment of its unrighteousness.”24 This fits with our earlier identification that Torrance considers the Church to be particularly a work of the Holy Spirit; therefore, even though the historical life of the Church does

17 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 280. 18 Ibid., 282. 19 Torrance, Atonement, 373. 20 Torrance, “Review of the Realm of Redemption,” 322. 21 Torrance, Atonement, 388. 22 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 281. 23 Ibid., 282. 24 Ibid.

229 not demonstrate this essential attribute of holiness, the Church is still essentially holy because it is sustained by the Holy Spirit. While individual members of the Church should aim to live a holy life, holiness as a measurement for morality is not the goal; instead, individuals should aim to live out of their personal union with Christ in such a way that “their personal holiness, and all the qualities of the divine life and love found in their lives, are the fruits of the Holy Spirit.”25

Catholicity Following oneness, and holiness, we come to the Church’s catholicity, which Torrance defines as “its participation in the immensity of God, in the plentitude and fullness of the divine life in Christ, and in the universality of the Holy Spirit. It is the counterpart in the life of the church in space and time to the whole fullness of God.”26 While the simplest definition of catholicity is ’universality’, there is a particular theological understanding of catholicity which is intensified by the prior attributes of the Church, one and holy. As Torrance explains, “to be catholic the Church must be one and holy, for unity and holiness interpenetrate each other in the essential nature of the Church as the Body of which Christ is the organising Head, and which through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is united to the one and only God, the Holy Trinity.”27 The Church is seen as catholic when viewed through the unifying lens of “its faith in the Holy Trinity.”28 However, Torrance also notes the difference in the understanding of catholicity between East and West, which derives from a different understanding of the relationship of the Church to the Holy Spirit. Torrance suggests that the Western Church views itself as possessing the Spirit, and is so able to dispense the Spirit. In contrast to this, the Eastern Church views itself as possessed by the Spirit, and thus is able to reach out beyond its own bounds in the power of the Spirit.29

25 Torrance, Atonement, 387. 26 Ibid., 389. Torrance notes elsewhere that the term ‘catholic’ seems to have been a nickname given by the Gnostics (those who promoted a ‘secret knowledge’ necessary for salvation) to those who believed in the universal scope of Christ’s redemptive work—see Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 16. 27 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 283. 28 Torrance, Atonement, 392. 29 Torrance, “Trinity Sunday Sermon on Acts 2:41–47,” 194–95.

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Developing his own understanding of catholicity, Torrance insists that it is to do with the Church’s “identity, continuity, and universality,”30 for through union with Christ, “the Church is itself the fullness of him who fills all things.”31 Catholicity

refers to the intensive wholeness and fullness of the Church in Christ, to the coordination of the Church, everywhere, in every place, and throughout all space and time, with the wholeness of Christ himself. The catholic Church does not live out of itself but out of Christ; nor does it derive inspiration from its own spirit but only from the one Spirit of the living God. It does not act in its own name and authority but only in the name and authority of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But throughout all its life the intensive oneness or wholeness of the Church in Christ unfolds as under the imperative of the Holy Spirit it seeks to be obedient to its commission to proclaim the Gospel to all mankind.32 This evokes thoughts of growth, and outreach, and the fact that the analogy for the Church as the body of Christ must be unconstrained by biological limitations. In the next chapter we will discuss the growth of the Church as the body (soma) of Christ which reaches out to its fulfilment (pleroma), in an expanding ingathering. Used in this way, the metaphor of the Church as the body of Christ is unconstrained by biological realities; hence, Torrance argues that we must think of the ‘body of Christ’ as an expanding ingathering, where “the Body (soma) presses out in expansion toward a fullness (pleroma) in the love of God in all its height and depth and length and breadth which more and more gathers into itself men and women from the ends of the earth.”33 Torrance concludes that this movement from “the intensive concretion of the new humanity in Christ to its extensive universalisation in the fullness of Christ who fills the whole creation,”34 is the mission of the Church, for

Jesus Christ has sent His Church out among the nations to be a fellowship of reconciliation, bearing the divine Word of reconciliation to all men, and bringing healing to it in all its conflict and strife. That is what the Church is meant to be as the Body of Christ, a community of reconciliation ready to bring

30 Torrance, Atonement, 389. 31 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 285. 32 Ibid. 33 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 17. See also Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 23–42. Torrance explains the intensive growth that takes place within the body of Christ, and the extensive growth as the body reaches out geographically and spatiotemporally, focusing on the ‘hinge role’ of the apostolate, which we have already explored. 34 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 21.

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to men the healing of the Cross, and to live out in their midst the reconciled life drawing them into its own fellowship of peace with God and with all men.35 We will consider more fully in the next chapter the way that the mission of the Church interacts with its nature as a community of reconciliation; for now we note that as the catholic Church, the Church embraces both this age and the age to come, so that what it is here and now, reaches out to the eschaton, through the Spirit. The universal range of the Church is why catholicity is intrinsically related to ecumenicity, as we will see in the next chapter.36

Finally, there are two complementary aspects of catholicity that Torrance identifies which are useful for our discussion here. The first is the ‘catholicity of extension’, referring to the Church’s essentially missionary nature as it participates in the movement of God’s love that flows through Christ and the Spirit to the world, breaking all barriers and boundaries down so that all may be reconciled to God.37 In the context of the early Church, to affirm the catholic nature of the Church was in direct contrast to gnostic teaching which denied the universal range of the atonement.38 To be catholic in this sense is to be “faithful to the apostolic tradition in believing that Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of God died and rose again for all people irrespective of who they are.”39 The second aspect is that of ‘catholicity of depth’, which is an understanding that the wholeness of the body of Christ is supreme to the individual members. “Catholic means that Christians are first members of Christ and therefore of the body of Christ the Church, and as such and only as such are they individual Christians in their own sphere and duty and private existence.”40 This is in keeping with Torrance’s emphasis that it is on the basis of our participation in the divine koinōnia that we experience creaturely koinōnia with one another.

35 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 17. See also Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 20–23, where Torrance also talks about the Church living out the reconciled life on order to participate in the mission of reconciliation. 36 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 15–16. 37 Torrance, Atonement, 391–92. 38 Ibid., 389. 39 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 284. 40 Torrance, Atonement, 391.

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Apostolicity Given that the catholic Church is “to be understood as embracing all dimensions of the people of God and their existence throughout space and time,”41 it becomes apparent just how closely catholicity and apostolicity are related. The Church’s apostolicity is specifically “to do with the continuing identity of the Church as the authentic Body of Christ in space and time.”42 The apostolicity of the Church rests on its unchanging foundation; since the Triune God does not change, so also “the Church of Christ is one and the same today with what it was in its apostolic foundation.”43 The apostolic Church is the Church that seeks continuity with the words and deeds of Christ, as recorded through the apostolic tradition.44 Apostolicity is consequently a criterion which bears on the oneness, holiness and catholicity of the Church, for each of these repose on the “continuity of the one holy catholic Church with Christ who through the apostles founded the church on himself.”45

We have already examined the role of the apostolate as the hinge between Christ’s self- witness, and the witness to Christ recorded in Scripture. The apostolic Church does not depart from this original apostolic foundation, which was established as Christ caused the whole fact of his Person, Word, and Life to be unfolded through the apostolic mind, and embodied in the apostolic mission. Therefore, when we speak of apostolicity, we are referring “to the character and imprint of its distinctive apostolic origin, and to the nature of the Church as continuously embodying the apostolic witness and testimony in its life and mission, for it is through faithful transmission of the preaching and teaching of the apostles that the Church is itself constantly renewed and reconstituted as Christ's Church.”46 As an example of ‘adding’ to the apostolic foundation, Torrance accuses the Roman Catholic Church with calling its apostolicity into question in its mid-

41 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 283. 42 Ibid., 287. 43 Ibid. 44 Torrance, Atonement, 393. 45 Ibid. 46 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 287.

233 twentieth century announcement of the dogma of Mary’s physical assumption into heaven.47

Apostolic succession is primarily to do with “succession in the unity of knowing and being, of word and deed, of message and ministry.”48 It is only on the basis of this primary sense of apostolic succession, that we may speak of the secondary sense of apostolic succession, which is how the Word is “extended and mediated to a corporeal world by such physical, historical events as the Bible, Preaching, Sacraments, the physical society of the members of the Church, the historical communication and edification, and all that entails from age to age.”49 Consequently ministerial succession is not to be thought of as anything other than a sign, for “the historical succession of ecclesiastical representatives is not identical with the real succession of the corporate participation of the Church in the ministry of Christ, and can only point to it and signify it, important and indeed essential as that succession on the plane of history is.”50

Summarising Comments on the Notes of the Church This discussion of what it means to affirm one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is useful in helping us to grasp Torrance’s interpretation of Nicene ecclesiology in more detail. Each of these four notes is derived from the being of the Triune God, and on this basis, is to do with the essential being of the Church. This can be correlated with the two aspects of order that we identified exist in Torrance’s work, the order that comes from the historical life of the Church, and the order that derives from its new being in Jesus Christ. Torrance refuses to separate these out into any dualistic doctrine of the Church; instead he defines the Church with ultimate reference to the Triune God, while simultaneously acknowledging that the historical period in which the Church exists between Christ’s two advents will necessarily involve a constant struggle between what the Church essentially should be, and how this is actually lived out. Molnar supports this with his observation that because Torrance grounds his ecclesiology in the Trinity, he rejects any idea that the true Church exists as “some mystical reality

47 Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of Edmund Schlink (Ed.), Evangelisches Gutachten Zur Dogmatisierung Der Leiblichen Himmelfahrt Mariens,” Scottish Journal of Theology 4 (1951): 91–96. 48 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 69. 49 Ibid., 70. 50 Ibid., 41.

234 behind or above time, space and history; for that would undercut the realities of the incarnation and the atonement,” while also rejecting “any reduction of the church to its historical form of existence; for that would imply the legalistic view that ignores our justification by faith.”51

7.2 The Word We now turn our attention from the notes of the Church, to the marks of the Church. Torrance suggests that since the Word and sacraments “span the whole life and mission of the Church in the last times,” it is in their light that we should “articulate our understanding of the ministry of the Church, of its order, and of the nature of its priesthood functioning through that order.”52 We will accordingly begin with the preaching of the Word, followed by the ministry of the sacraments, and will then consider the priesthood; keeping in mind Torrance’s definition of these ‘marks’ as indicators that shape the life of the Church in the time between the two advents, and which point to the presence of the true Church.

Purves comments that if “‘practical theology’ is something like ‘a theology concerned with action,’ then the theology of T. F. Torrance is most assuredly, as theology of the God who acts, practical theology.”53 Our investigation in these remaining chapters highlights the practical nature of Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology in terms of its relevance to the life of the Church. We will see that because the real grounding of the Church is found in its participation in the koinōnia of the Holy Trinity, then consequently, the marks are temporal forms that are given to the Church for the sustenance of its life between the two advents; they will pass away at Christ’s return. We will show how each of these elements of Church life serves to make us aware of the Triune God’s presence in the life of the Church.

51 Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance, 269. 52 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 63. 53 Purves, Exploring Christology & Atonement, 250. Purves continues by observing, as we have throughout this thesis, that “the locus of practice is, of course, God. The practices of the church and ministry are derivative, best understood as our participation in God’s ministry through union with Christ by the gift of the Holy Spirit.” See 249–253 for Purves’ full comment.

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In beginning with the role of the Word, our concern is not Torrance’s full doctrine of the Word, but rather to focus on the role of the Word in the life of the Church, particularly through preaching. We will begin by briefly revisiting our earlier discussion of Torrance’s doctrine of Scripture as the basis for what Torrance says about the place of the Holy Scriptures and their exposition.

The Word in the Life of the Church In our earlier discussion on Scripture as a source for Torrance’s trinitarian theology, we started by asking what Scripture is. We noted that we need to interpret the Scriptures ‘in depth’, penetrating through their literary surface to the dynamic objectivity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God himself is the reality to which the Scriptures witness, for despite the rich diversity within Scripture, “they are found to have a deep underlying unity in Jesus Christ the incarnate and risen Lord, who is the dynamic center and the objective focus of their creative integration.”54 The starting place of the doctrine of the Word is therefore the eternal Word who became incarnate, the person of Jesus Christ in the full, unbroken union of his divine nature and his human nature. It is the Word of God (Jesus) who is in command of his Church.55

Since the Scriptures are “grounded and structured through the incarnation in the very Logos who inheres eternally in the Being of God and are the vehicles of his address to mankind… we must learn to trace back their objective reference beyond what is written to their source in the infinite depth of Truth in the Being of God.”56 We are thus reckoning with “both the eternal Word of God transcendent in history, and also the Word which in the Church of Jesus Christ has assumed historical form.”57 While the Word and Truth remain transcendent to the form that they take in space and time, the very nature of the incarnation as a historical and personal event means that this revelation must be able to be communicated, and received afresh, in each generation of the Church.58 There must exist a “community of reciprocity” for it to be proclaimed

54 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 106. 55 Torrance, “Review of the Realm of Redemption,” 323. 56 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 109. 57 Torrance, “History and Reformation,” 285. 58 Torrance, The School of Faith, lxvi–xlvii.

236 and heard in.59 This ties into our earlier discussion of the Church as the ‘social co- efficient of theological knowledge’, given Torrance’s insistence that the Word of God can only be correctly heard and interpreted in the ecclesial context of worship and fellowship. We cannot gain the ability to discern between Truth, and our own perception of the Truth, unless we hear the Word of God spoken to us in the fellowship of faith. The Church is the community that gathers around the Word of God.

It is only as we allow ourselves, within the fellowship of faith and through constant meditation on the Holy Scriptures, to come under the creative impact of God’s self-revelation that we may acquire the disciplined spiritual perception or insight which enables us to discriminate between our conceptions of the Truth and the Truth itself. This is not a gift which we can acquire and operate for ourselves alone but one which we may have only as we share it with others in common listening to God’s Word and in common adoration and worship of God through the Son and in the one Spirit.60 The Word and the Preacher The preaching of the Word is not simply about communication, but must involve the whole event of reconciliation which is objectively grounded in Christ, and is actualised through the Spirit who enables humans to hear and know divine truth, drawing humanity into union and communion with the Triune God.61 In order to consider further how this takes place, we must turn to the role of the preacher. Torrance’s autobiographical material has much insight to offer us here. We already noted his recollection that the ability to visit people in their homes and read Scripture together allowed him to preach on Sundays in a much deeper and personal way than he would have been able to otherwise.62 We may also cite here Torrance’s ministerial contribution to the monthly parish newsletter at Beechgrove in November 1948. In the transcription of a message that he had preached on the texts of Jeremiah 7:2 and 2 Corinthians 5:20, Torrance describes the role of the preacher as an ‘ambassador’ who declares God’s Word to the people gathered. The preacher is responsible to proclaim the Gospel in faithfulness to the Word of God, rather than pandering to what the

59 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Word of God and the Response of Man,” Bijdragen: tijdschrift voor filosofie en theologie 30, no. 2 (1969): 178. 60 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 120. See also Torrance’s specific comments about the role of the Word in the life of the Anglican Church, Torrance, “The Mission of Anglicanism,” in Anglican Self- Criticism, 206–07. 61 Torrance, The School of Faith, xxiii; Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 88–91. 62 Torrance, Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking, 55.

237 congregation wants to hear. Torrance then descriptively expresses his perception of the relationship between the Word of God, and his role as the preacher:

As I prepared to come into the House of God, I donned black robes, to blot myself out as it were, so as not to attract attention to myself, but to be in the hand of God, solely the servant of His Word, the voice of one crying the Word of God. Moreover, before I came into the pulpit this morning I was preceded by the Bible. It is because the Bible is here that I stand, black-robed, behind it, to be a voice that God may use to make this Book speak aloud so that all may hear. My duty here is entirely one subordinated to the Word. My sole business as preacher is to translate the Bible into the language of the day, to expound God’s Word, so that it lives and speaks as a contemporary word relevant to our human situation. Of course, it is really the Holy Spirit who animates the Word of the Bible and makes it the living contemporaneous Word of God speaking to us here and now; but that is done through the preacher as an interpreter sent by God to bring the Word out of the historical situation into the living present.63 The preacher is not to draw attention to himself, but to direct men and women towards God, for the ministry of preaching is always subordinate to the Word of God, and the voice to be heard is not primarily that of the preacher but of the Lord Jesus Christ. Torrance is careful to emphasise the necessity of the preacher bringing his congregation “face-to-face with God in Jesus Christ, for it is only God in Jesus Christ who can forgive and heal—only God in Jesus Christ who can reveal the ultimate truth to us about himself.”64 Although the preacher is to translate, and make plain the relevance of the Bible to the congregation, his words and explanation have no power except as the Spirit gives them illumination. The supreme example of the role of the preacher is found in the ministry of John the Baptist, who pointed away from himself to Christ, and then fades into the background as his disciples recognise that Christ is the Messiah.65 The preacher thus proclaims the Word of God, and his human words are taken up by the Spirit who gives them utterance as the living Word.66 The weight falls

63 Thomas F. Torrance, “Ministers Notes,” November 1948. Box 20: Beechgrove Church Publications (Thomas F. Torrance Special Collection: Princeton Theological Seminary), 2–3. 64 Torrance, Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking, 56. 65 Torrance, “Ministers Notes”, November 1948, 2–3. 66 Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of the Oracles of God: An Introduction to the Preaching of John Calvin. By T. H. L. Parker. Lutterworth Press. 12s. 6d.,” Scottish Journal of Theology 1, no. 2 (1948): 213. In this review Torrance appreciatively critiques this book for presenting preaching as “the act of obedient service in the Church which makes room for and gives audible articulation to the Word in her midst,” and also for emphasising the objective nature of preaching, in that it must let the Word of God speak for itself, regardless of the preacher’s message.

238 entirely on what God does through the preaching of the Word, rather than on the role of any individual who preaches.

A similar perspective is expressed in another unpublished document written by Torrance entitled ‘Theology and the Church’, where he writes,

Preaching is the great Sacrament of the Word in which certainly more is done than said, for it is the Presence of Christ that makes it a sacrament, but in which the speaking of the Word has a place of supreme importance, for without it there would be no sacrament at all, and no Presence of Christ to listening ears and believing hearts. Thus in preaching the Church believes there takes place a supreme spiritual act in which the whole of the Church’s worship and obedience is centred. It is the preacher’s task to give utterance to the Oracles of God, to proclaim the Word of the Cross, in which the living Christ comes Himself and acts. The preaching of the Cross, says St. Paul, may appear foolishness to the world but it is the very power of God; it is the re-enaction of the Word of the Cross in saving power. The Preacher himself cannot make it so; it is the Holy Spirit who reproduces through his speaking this living Word. The preacher is but the earthen vessel of the Holy Ghost.67 This is an appropriate way in which to think about the role of preaching in the Church, for it emphasises the way that God is at work in the Church through the Spirit, and directs us through the visible forms of Church life back to the Triune foundation of the Church. This way of thinking also shapes the role of the hearer, for since the proclamation of the Word reveals a “living God who creatively interacts with man in the world and makes himself known to him,”68 we are called to submit our minds to the “self-evidencing Reality of God,” for our faith is simply assent with the divine reality, which exists objectively beyond the human individual.69 Unless the transcendent authority of the Triune God over Scripture, the Church and doctrine is recognised, and our own inadequacy and deficiency acknowledged, one cannot hear the Word of God and submit to its demands.70

In his desire to emphasise the utter humility of the preacher, Torrance claims that a preacher should be “ashamed when he is praised, for applause tells him that he has preached in vain: he has drawn attention to himself, and has failed to point men away

67 Thomas F. Torrance, “Theology and the Church” (Box 22: Theology and the Church, Thomas F. Torrance Special Collection: Princeton Theological Seminary), 14. 68 Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, 98. 69 Ibid., 99–100. 70 Ibid., 19.

239 from himself to the Lamb of God.”71 However, this comment is limited in scope because it makes the stark assumption that those who congratulate the preacher only do so because their ‘ears have been tickled’; whereas it could be possible to have listened to the preaching, been genuinely excited by what is preached, and be responding to the preacher, recognising the preacher as a conduit of God’s Word. It is likely that Torrance would be unlikely to take offence at a response of gratitude which recognised that through the preacher, God’s Word had been heard and responded to by an individual.

The best published example of the breadth of Torrance’s preaching is his set of published sermons When Christ Comes and Comes Again.72 These sermons were gathered not as “a book about preaching but a book presenting some of the material that should be preached.”73 In the first section, ‘The Advent of the Redeemer,’ Torrance focused on the events of Christ’s life, including the incarnation, the crucifixion and resurrection, and the anticipation of the Second Advent. In the second section, ‘The Word of the Gospel’, Torrance preached on core tenets of the Gospel, including John the Baptist and his proclamation of Christ as the Messiah, the need for humans to be born again and to take refuge in Christ, the healing work of God which takes place both in supernatural and in natural miracles, such as the sacraments, and the need to be familiar with the voice of the Good Shepherd. In the third section, ‘The Foundation of the Church’, Torrance deals with the nature of the Church, with sermons on the fact that the Church is constituted by Christ’s presence, the way that the Kingdom is advanced by holy suffering, the fact that the Triune God invites us to approach him, and cleanses us through the work of the Son’s life, and the need for the fellowship of the Church to continually be cleansed and sanctified. In the fourth section, ‘The Faithfulness of God’, Torrance considers the unswerving steadfastness of God, the patience and mediation of Jesus, and the nature of the Trinity as a Trinity of love. This brief synopsis allows us to see how theologically exhaustive Torrance considered preaching needed to be.

71 Torrance, “Ministers Notes,” November 1948, 2–3. 72 Thomas F. Torrance, When Christ Comes and Comes Again (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996). 73 Ibid., 8.

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7.3 The Sacraments We turn now to consider how Torrance’s sacramentology is shaped by the trinitarian foundation of his ecclesiology. Since it is between the two advents of Christ that the sacraments are given to the Church, the tension of the Church existing in the ‘time between’ the old age and the new age continues to shape Torrance’s thought here. Although the Church is a new creation, risen with Christ in the new age of the resurrection, it still wears the body of sin, death and humiliation of the old age. The sacraments are how the Church is enabled to participate in the union and communion of the Holy Trinity in the current time of history, since their temporal nature arises from the fact that they will not be needed in the eschaton.

It is appropriate to place the sacraments after the discussion of the Word, for they cannot be separated from the Word in the context of the Church’s life. “The Word is itself the all-inclusive Sacrament of the Word made flesh which through the Spirit begets the Church as Body in with Christ. It is because the Word is given this nature that through the Spirit it sacramentalises the Sacraments.”74 Expressed in another way by Torrance, “It is because Christ comes to us as the Word and gives us His real presence through the Word and so unites us to Himself that Word and Sacrament belong inseparably together. Both lose their significance and efficacy when separated.”75 As we will explore, it is the incarnate Christ who is the true sacrament; in him, there is no separate act of God and act of humanity, but rather the combination of these, which Torrance refers to the third dimension of the union of God and humanity in Christ. It is his “new humanity risen from the dead and eternally in union with God, which is the substance or the matter of the Sacraments.”76

74 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 75. 75 Ibid., 76. 76 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Place of the Humanity of Christ in the Sacramental Life of the Church,” Church Service Society Annual 26 (1956): 3. In this article Torrance argues that both “forensic and liberal theologies” fail to grasp union with Christ properly, and thus fall short of enabling adequate depth in the understanding of Word and Sacrament. He describes ‘forensic’ accounts as those which focus only upon salvation as realised the death of Christ, and not his whole person, while ‘liberal’ accounts are those Romantic-influenced idealistic reconstructions of Jesus that deny the realism of his message, and reduce the challenge that he presented to sinners (see p9 in particular).

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What are the sacraments? The term ‘sacrament’ does not appear in the New Testament, which simply refers to baptism and the Lord’s Supper as two regular events that took place among the early Christian community. They are very similar in nature, as illustrated by the New Testament’s use of interchangeable language when describing them. Torrance argues that this shows that “Baptism and Eucharist are just as parallel, and just as one, as in Christ and Christ in us.”77 We will begin by discussing their shared nature, before turning to discuss their distinctive aspects.

Although our consideration of the sacraments must be grounded in what the New Testament tells us about their celebration in the early Church, it is helpful to examine the language that Torrance uses. While theologians traditionally have used the terms res (reality) and signum (sign), Torrance dislikes the static connotations of these terms; he instead insists that ‘sign’ must have a dynamic sense, for in this case, “sign is essentially event, the worldly form which the Christ-event assumes in action, the point at which Revelation embodies itself actively in history.”78 Rather than res and signum, Torrance prefers the terms ‘mystery’ and ’seal’ since they make it clear that the sacramental relation “can no more be explained positively and put into precise rational terms than the hypostatic union which is stated by the Church only in negatives.”79

The Latin term sacramentum is a translation of the Greek mystērion, paralleled by the Greek mysterium. In describing the sacraments as mysteries, we must remember Torrance’s emphasis that the primary mystery which the New Testament refers to is “the indivisible union of God and man in one Person,” Jesus Christ.80 Consequently, the sacraments are only mysteries in a secondary or derivative sense. However, they do not only point to Christ, but are also means of his presence, so that as a sign, each sacrament “represents only in the concrete act of re-presenting.”81 Torrance prefers not to engage in detailed metaphysical speculation about the sacraments, which necessarily includes the rejection of debates on matters which he disputes, such as

77 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 156. 78 Ibid., 161. 79 Ibid., 142. Torrance is following Calvin in his preference for mysterium over res. 80 Ibid., 141. 81 Ibid., 140.

242 how the eucharist contains the real presence of Christ.82 Instead, he chooses to describe the relationship between the sacrament and the reality—the sign, and the thing signified—as an analogical relationship, which once again involves both identity and difference.

Each sacrament is “analogous to the thing signified, and corresponds appropriately to its nature,” both pointing “to what Christ has done and does for us,”83 and at the same time, is a means of our participation in Christ’s atoning work. Torrance recommends that we should think of each sacrament as “a sign with a meaning,” in which according to Christ’s promise and command, the outward sign and inward reality are indivisible.84 This way of describing the sacraments is different to the Augustinian tradition which views them as “outward and visible signs of inward and invisible grace,”85 and is why Torrance maintains that the elements—whether water, bread, or wine—are instrumental, and not just symbolic.86 Consequently the sacraments are not just ‘confirming ordinances’, but ‘converting ordinances’.87

When we view the sacraments in this way, we come to understand (using Hunsinger’s language) that the perfect tense of salvation has been accomplished and perfectly realised in Christ; and that through his vicarious humanity and the union that we have with him through the Spirit, that objective salvation is subjectively realised in us.88 The sacraments are miracles—not of the type where a natural event takes place in a supernatural form, such as miracles of healing, but of the type where a supernatural

82 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 122–25; Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 137. As an example of this kind of thinking which Torrance prefers to avoid, he notes that the interplay between ‘Platonic dualism and Aristotelian phenomenalism,’ caused the eucharistic rite to be viewed as containing a hidden mystery. In its crudest form, the Roman Mass was seen as a “repeated sacrificial immolation of Christ,” so that the priests had “sacerdotal control” over the Eucharistic elements. The Roman Church was thus forced into “highly artificial explanations as to how the body and blood of Christ are really present through the bread and wine which are circumscribed in their place on the altar or in the mouth without being confined to them, while they are contained in the whole host and each part of the host and in a thousand hosts at the same time,” leading to the doctrine of , while priests were seen as mediators that built a bridge between God and humanity through re-enacting Christ’s sacrifice through presiding over the Eucharistic Mass. 83 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 141. 84 Ibid. 85 Torrance, The School of Faith, 122. 86 Hunsinger, “The Dimension of Depth,” 169. 87 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 96. 88 Hunsinger, “The Dimension of Depth,” 161.

243 event takes place in a natural form. It is the sacramental miracle that Torrance believes is the ‘greater kind of miracle.”89

Merely participating in the rites of the sacrament is not salvific, for they must be filled with the Spirit. The Church does not control the efficacy of the sacraments.90 Instead, truly belonging to the Church comes from participation in Christ and the Spirit, and is revealed by the lived-out obedience of true belief. As Torrance writes, “Participation in the Sacraments is not in itself a guarantee of salvation, for along with sacramental communion there must go the whole building up and ordering of the Body in the love of Christ. When the Sacraments are taken in conjunction with the bodily obedience they involve, they reveal the true form and order of the Church.”91

The sacraments and koinōnia The sacramental relation for Torrance is intrinsically tied up with the koinōnia-motif which is so central to his ecclesiology. It is in Christ that the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the divine koinōnia meet, and so it is from Christ that the sacraments derive. They are pledges of our participation in the union and communion of the Triune God. As we participate in the secondary mystery of the sacraments, we are actually participating in the primary mystery of union with Christ through the Holy Spirit.

The primary mysterium or sacramentum is Jesus Christ himself, the incarnate reality of the Son of God who has incorporated himself into our humanity and assimilated the people of God into himself as his own Body, so that the sacraments have to be understood as concerned with our koinonia or participation in the mystery of Christ and his Church through the koinonia or communion of the Holy Spirit.92 By placing our discussion of the sacraments within our wider discussion of koinōnia, we are equipped to understand how Torrance views them as more than symbols. As signs that are pledges of our full participation in the koinōnia of the Triune God, the sacraments “point beyond to a fullness which, as signs, in the conditions of our fallen

89 Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 150. Torrance relates the ‘new openness’ in the Church to the work of the Spirit, to the post-Einsteinian scientific paradigm, arguing that “the spontaneity of the Spirit in the Church, always creating new forms and breaking open old systems, could be more readily grasped as part of the post-Einsteinian world.” See Thomas F. Torrance, “We Have Broken Free From a Closed Universe, Interview with Bryan Cooper,” The British Weekly & Christian World (21 Sept 1979): 7. 90 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 18. 91 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 64. 92 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 82.

244 world, they cannot altogether contain.”93 They are eschatological mysteries, because our union with Christ is only partially revealed here and now, but will be fully realised in the future. Through participation in the sacraments, one receives Christ’s pledge of their future and fully realised participation in the telos of all creation.94 The emphasis is not so much on “the future of the reality but the future of its full manifestation, so that the eschatological tension involved in the sacraments is the tension between the time of a present but hidden reality and the time of the same reality revealed in the parousia.”95

In order to better understand how the sacraments are to do with our participation in the divine koinōnia, we need to revisit Torrance’s incarnational understanding of the atonement. In Christ’s assumption of humanity, he becomes as we are, sharing our “sinful and distorted existence…our personal darkness and mental alienation from God… our lost and contradictory existence,”96 healing the rupture between God and humanity, and forging an ontological bond between himself and humankind. As we are united to him, and share in his new and risen humanity, we are made able to participate in the eternal communion of the Holy Trinity. We must think of our union with Christ as correlative to, but different from, the hypostatic union. It is a real union, but involves an asymmetric reciprocity, for God remains transcendent and free even as he enters into a bond of irreversible love with humanity.97 The administration of the sacraments also involves a union between divine and human action, but in such a way that the significance of the rite is not found in the human action, but rather in the divine event that stands behind the human rite and impinges upon us—in other words, with the

93 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 161. 94 Torrance, Atonement, 297. 95 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 163. 96 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 41. 97 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Place and Function of Reason in Christian Theology,” Evangelical Quarterly 14 (1942): 38–41. Torrance notes that the hypostatic union gives us the “perfect pattern of the connection between the truths of Christian theology… [it] becomes a sort of category which describes the peculiar relatedness found throughout the whole body of theology, and not elsewhere.” Torrance also applies the hypostatic union to explain the relationship between divine decision and human decision in his doctrine of predestination. See Torrance, “Predestination in Christ,” 127–31. For further reflection on this topic, see also Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of the Biblical Doctrine of the Church. By William Robinson,” Scottish Journal of Theology 4 (1951): 433–37.

245 whole atoning work of Christ.98 Our own human response is only ever able to be offered to God in Christ.

Although the language which we are using here is certainly Christocentric, the reader should recall the way in which we have demonstrated that Torrance’s Christology involves understanding Christ in the light of both his internal relations to the Father and Spirit, and the external matrix of historical relations through which his ministry had a specific context. On one hand, the sacraments have their “ultimate ground in the Incarnation and in the vicarious obedience of Jesus Christ,”99 and in abstraction from these historical events are merely empty rituals, and yet on the other hand, they cannot be separated from the Triune reality without losing the mystery of their “infinite recession in the Word that is in the bosom of God and is God.”100

Torrance also explains the relationship between the sacraments and koinōnia with reference to the traditional Reformed emphasis on the covenant of grace. The inward form of the covenant is our union with Christ through the communion of the Spirit, leading to our participation in the fellowship of the Holy Trinity. The outward form of the covenant is the sacraments, described as “signs which mark out the sphere of God’s self-revelation and self-giving to His people, and the seals of His real presence and of His faithfulness in fulfilling in them all His promises.”101 The centrality of the Trinity is key to both the inner and outer forms, for as Torrance writes,

The whole substance of this Covenant of Grace in its outer and in its inner form is Jesus Christ Himself, so that it is in accordance with the Person and Work of Christ, His Nature and His Mission, that the whole life and faith of the people of God in the economy of the New Covenant is to be understood. The New Covenant is in the Body and Blood of Christ, the Communion of the Spirit is Communion in the mystery of Christ, and the people of God, in its covenanted communion in Christ through the Spirit, is the Body of Christ. Everything is directed towards Christ and in and through Him to the union and communion of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.102

98 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 83. 99 Ibid., 82. 100 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 164. 101 Torrance, The School of Faith, lvi. 102 Ibid., lvii.

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This way of speaking of the sacraments as related to our participation in the union and communion of the Trinity emphasises that we cannot consider the sacramental rites in and of themselves, but only ever in relation to the reality which they signify, which is the union of God and humanity in Christ. This can be explained by the metaphor of looking through a window—we look at what lies beyond the window, rather than at the pane of glass itself. The only time we notice the glass is if it somehow obscures our vision.103 In the same way, we are to look ‘through’ the sacramental rites, and to understand them “not in relation to what we do but in relation to what God in Christ has done and will do for us.”104

By now it should be clear that our knowledge of God is deepened through partaking of the sacraments, which are given to the Church as it exists between the two advents of Christ, to help it walk by faith and not by sight. This is in keeping with our continued insistence that true theological knowledge only arises in the koinōnia of the Church. We may also specifically note here the two dimensions of koinōnia, the vertical koinōnia that we have with God, and the correlative horizontal koinōnia of the Church. On one hand, the Church exists in its vertical dimension, already fully participating in the new creation, justified and holy as it shares in Christ’s self-sanctification.105 On the other hand, the Church exists in its horizontal dimension as a pilgrim people. It is composed of sinful men and women, who await the day of their redemption, and are currently subject to the limitations and frustrations of fallen time.106 These two elements of the Church’s nature are inseparable, and in Torrance’s thought illustrate why, “it is most important to hold Baptism and the Lord’s Supper closely together; if they are allowed to fall apart, the essential relation between the finished work and the future consummation tends to be radically misunderstood.107 As Torrance explains further,

Whereas Baptism is all-inclusive and final, the Eucharist is the continual renewal of that incorporation in time. The Eucharist cannot be understood except within the significance of Baptism, although the once-and-for-all

103 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 110–11. 104 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 127. 105 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 12. 106 Ibid. 107 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 146.

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significance of Baptism bears upon history only through the Eucharist. We must say, therefore, that strictly speaking there is only one sacrament, and that Baptism and Eucharist belong to this indivisible whole. It is the sacrament of the Word made flesh, of the Christ-event, which includes the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the same Word which sacramentally becomes flesh in both Baptism and the Eucharist, and it is in that action of the Word becoming flesh that they have their underlying and indivisible unity.108 The two-fold nature of the Church, and the two sacraments At this point, we must also incorporate Torrance’s eschatology into our discussion of the sacraments. Thinking of the Church as embodying a reality that fully exists in the present, but is not yet fully unveiled means that the Church involves a “sort of a hypostatic union between the eternal and the temporal in the form of new time.”109 The sacraments demonstrate that there is “a union between the Church in history and the new creation as an abiding union here and now even in the heart of the world’s estrangement.”110 Until the day when Christ comes again, “the sacraments have to do with the breaking of the Christ-event into time here and now, and with our participation in the new creation.”111

Even though Christ has withdrawn himself from our sight, the sacraments are the “miraculous and active signs” through which the mystery of the union between Christ and the Church are embodied in space and time.112 The sacraments are therefore the “concrete form” of the Church’s “communion with Christ through the Spirit.”113 The water, bread and wine are “visible, tangible and corruptible elements of this world,” while simultaneously being signs of the new order which is veiled from our sight but which we participate in through the Holy Spirit.114 The sacraments are how Christ “nourishes, sustains, orders and governs his people” within history.115 One day they will become obsolete, for at the parousia, when Christ is fully unveiled, the sacraments

108 Ibid., 156. 109 Torrance, Atonement, 410. 110 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 163. 111 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 162. 112 Ibid. 113 Torrance, Atonement, 305. 114 Ibid., 306. 115 Ibid., 279.

248 will pass away, as will faith and hope, and “agape-love only will abide as the eternal being of the new humanity in righteousness and truth.”116

Torrance further expounds upon the relationship between the sacraments by reference to the relationship between incarnation and atonement, suggesting that

If Incarnation and atonement are to be understood in terms of each other, the same is true of Baptism and Eucharist in terms of one living, saving operation of reconciliation and unification. But if Incarnation and atonement are to be distinguished as dual moments in one movement, similarly Baptism and Eucharist enshrine a corresponding duality. Both Sacraments belong to the fullness of time and have to do with the whole Christ clothed with the Gospel of reconciliation and resurrection, but in Baptism we have particularly to do with the objective and perfected event, and in the Eucharist we have to do particularly with participation in that completed reality in the conditions of time within which the Church engages in the mission of the Cross.117 If we continue to work with baptism as the unrepeatable sacrament of justification, and the eucharist as the regularly repeated sacrament of sanctification, then we see that together these sacraments give expression to the ontological and the eschatological relation which the Church has to Jesus Christ.118 Baptism is the sign that Christ has already made the Church his body, so that in him it is presented to the Father as pure and spotless, while the eucharist is given for the constant renewal of the “body of sinners waiting for the redemption of the body of sin and death, living in the midst of estrangement and the dividedness of mankind,”119 as a means for the Church’s unity to be preserved and visibly manifested.120

We have described the sacraments as the outward form of the covenant of grace which God establishes with us, which has the communion of the Spirit and our participation in the koinōnia of the Trinity as its inward form. We turn now to a brief consideration of the individual sacraments, first baptism, followed by the eucharist.

116 Ibid., 136. 117 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 258. 118 Torrance, Atonement, 307–08. 119 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 260. See also Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 84. 120 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 64.

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The sacrament of baptism, and the ‘once-for-all’ nature of the Church’s incorporation into Christ The rite and the reality of baptism The NT authors creatively reinterpret OT concepts and rituals in the light of Christ, which could happen because “the reality in Christ is not bound by the ancient shadow or image; that was only a signitive pointer to the reality and now that the reality has arrived it interprets itself.”121 In the Old Testament, circumcision was the sign of the covenant; in the New Testament, baptism is the sign of the covenant.122

Jewish baptism developed as a rite of repentance, symbolic cleansing and conversion.123 This understanding shaped John’s baptism with its messianic anticipation,124 which in turn was transformed through Jesus’ baptism. By Jesus’ “taking over baptism from the Baptist he transformed it through submitting to it and made himself its real content.”125 On this basis, our understanding of the sacrament of baptism must first focus upon Jesus’ own baptism, where he “identified himself with sinners in obedience to the Father’s will that he should make righteousness available for ‘the many.’”126 It was a public declaration of his mission as our representative and substitute, bearing the judgment of sin.127 In credal terms, Christ’s vicarious baptism is the ground of ‘one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.’128 Baptism is therefore concerned with the “whole historical Jesus Christ from his birth to his resurrection and

121 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 95. For some helpful unfolding of what Torrance means by something being sacramentally signitive, see his comments on the way in which early church art communicated theology, in Torrance, “History and Reformation,” 279–81. 122 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 122. 123 Thomas F. Torrance, “Proselyte Baptism,” New Testament Studies 1, no. 02 (Nov 1954): 150–51. Torrance references circumcision, baptism, and sacrifice as the three signs required for Gentile proselytes who wished to join the people of faith; Judaic baptism unto conversion was a once-and-for- all action, unlike the repeated Jewish practice of ritual cleansing. 124 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 108. 125 Torrance, Atonement, 307. 126 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 85. 127 Ibid. 128 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 293.

250 ascension,”129 for all the mighty acts of his life are part of the same saving event.130 As a result,

We look through the rite of baptism in water, administered according to the dominical institution in the Triune Name of God, back to the corporate baptism of the Church at Pentecost which stands behind the baptism of every individual, and through that baptism in the Spirit back to the one vicarious baptism with which Christ was baptised and hold it in steady focus as the primary fact which gives baptism its meaning.131 This helps us to comprehend why Torrance is not really concerned with the baptismal rite in and of itself, but with the reality behind the rite, “the event that stands behind it and that impinges upon us through it.”132 This can be illustrated through his contrast of the New Testament term baptisma with the more common Greek term baptismos. Baptismos referred to a generic and repeatable rite of cleansing, while baptisma seems to have been coined as a unique Christian term, referring to the unique saving event of Christ’s baptism.133 Jesus’ baptism is vicarious and substitutionary, reaching its fullness at the Cross, while the disciples’ baptism is one of “repentance and renewal” which comes to its fullness at Pentecost.134 In the same way, Jesus Christ is baptised “actively and vicariously as Redeemer,” while the Church is baptised “passively and receptively as the redeemed Community.”135

129 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 82. 130 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 113. 131 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 88. 132 Ibid., 83. 133 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 110–11; Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 293–94; Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 95–100. When dualistic tendencies infiltrate a doctrine of baptism, then baptisma becomes divorced from baptismos, and significance is given to the rite rather than to the reality. This can create error in a number of different directions, which Torrance identifies on one hand as Tertullian’s emphasis on the subjective aspect of faith, where he lays the stress and responsibility upon the individual’s actions in baptism, or at the other end of the spectrum, Augustine’s view of the sacraments as containing, and therefore conveying grace. This is an apt place to also note Torrance’s criticism of Karl Barth over the later development of his doctrine of baptism. An excellent summarising article is due to be published later in 2016 in a pending volume of Participatio, entitled “Actualism, Dualism, and Onto-Relations: Interrogating Torrance’s Criticism of Barth’s Doctrine of Baptism.” Written by W. Travis McMaken, it explores the simultaneous development of Torrance’s rejection of dualism, and Barth’s publication of his material on baptism, concluding that Torrance’s accusation of dualism within Barth’s baptismal theology is not sustainable. 134 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 165. 135 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 87.

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While “ritual and ethical acts have their proper place,”136 the use of baptisma rather than baptismos emphasises the saving act of God as the actual content of baptism, in place of the ritual act which is not in itself efficacious.137 Christ assumes our humanity in order to save and heal us, so that we might participate in union and communion— in koinōnia—with the Triune God. This is why it is appropriate to say that “we are baptised,” for baptism is “administered to us in the Name of the Triune God, and our part is only to receive it, for we cannot add anything to Christ’s finished work.”138 Our adoption as children of God on the basis of Christ’s incarnational assumption of our humanity, our sanctification through his own self-offering, and our rebirth and regeneration as children of God should not be considered as cause-and-effect, where they happen to us as a subsequent result of what took place in Christ, but rather as a “realisation or actualisation in us of what has already happened to us in him.”139 This is also why baptism is “once and for all and cannot be repeated,” for “repetition would be tantamount to crucifying the Son of God afresh.”140

When we baptise in the name of the Trinity, we are reminded of the concrete event of Jesus’ baptism, where the distinct Triune persons are clearly seen—the Son is baptised, the voice of the Father speaks, and the Spirit is manifested as a dove.141 The early Church considered this to be “the public proclamation of his divine Sonship,”142 as opposed to the adoption of a human to be the Son of God. This also illustrates, from a different angle, the trinitarian foundation of Torrance’s ecclesiology, for it means that “the Church has imprinted upon it through holy baptism the seal and character of the Holy Trinity, and as such it is to be honoured and revered.”143 We are not simply

136 Ibid., 83. 137 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 127. We must therefore be very cautious of speaking of either faith, or baptism, as salvific in themselves. While the New Testament does so occasionally, we may only do so “with the greatest reserve.” 138 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 88. A helpful article to refer to also is Thomas F. Torrance, “Another View of Scripture,” Ministers Forum 139 (1991): 2, in which Torrance presents a one-page overview of his view of baptism, particularly emphasising that baptism is about what Christ has done for us, and not about whether humankind believe. 139 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 89. 140 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 295. 141 Ibid., 193. 142 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 85. 143 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 253.

252 baptised in the name of Christ, but in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each with their own distinct characteristic. As Torrance elaborates,

Baptism is concerned with the eternal love of the Father and with His gracious decision to reconcile us in His Son, and to adopt us as His children; and it is equally concerned with the sanctifying and renewing work of the Creator Spirit. Thus Baptism in the name of the Father speaks of the prevenient love of God, and tells us that long before we learned to love and believe in Him He loved us and chose us to be His own; and Baptism in the name of the Holy Spirit speaks of the supernatural presence and work of God, telling us that our coming to love Him and our learning to believe in Him are the creative work of the Holy Spirit within us.144 Being baptised into the name of all three Persons also signals our invitation to participate in the koinōnia of the Triune God. Baptism is not simply about identification with Christ’s death, but the whole Triune work. It is “the sacrament of initiation into that communion and of participation in the relation of the Son to the Father.”145 Furthermore, through this participation, Christ’s life is “a reality in which we come to participate, not just a model to which we are conformed.”146 Torrance clearly summarises,

We do not baptise ourselves but are baptised in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. On the ground of what Christ has done for us and in accordance with his promise, we are presented before God as subjects of his saving activity, and are initiated into a mutual relation between the act of the Spirit and the response of faith. Faith arises as the gift of the Spirit, while it is through faith that we may continue to receive the Spirit, and it is in the Spirit that God continues to act creatively upon us, uniting us to Christ so that his atoning reconciliation bears fruit in us, and lifting us up to share in the very life and love of God, in the communion of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.147 This also means that baptism is essentially corporate, for it can only take place in and through the Church; it may be a new experience for individuals, but it is not a ‘new baptism’. Rather it is initiation into the one baptism which is shared by Christ and the Church, objectively fulfilled in Christ, and subjectively actualised in the Church by the

144 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 128. 145 Ibid., 123. 146 Hunsinger, “The Dimension of Depth,” 162. 147 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 103.

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Spirit, so that, like the covenant that God established with Israel, it is a covenant both of ‘the one and the many.’148

Furthermore, all that we have said about baptism taking place in and through the Church is important for our understanding of who may be baptised. As the Church obeys Christ’s command to baptise in water, “others are added to the Church that they may share in what has already taken place for them,” so that “the Baptism of the individual, child or adult, is not a new Baptism, but an initiation into and a sharing in the One Baptism common to Christ and His Church.”149 It is only as little children, freely trusting in the sufficiency of God’s work in Christ, that we enter the Kingdom. Since the reality of baptism is found in Christ’s obedience, and not in our obedience, then infant- baptism should not present any difficulty, for “it is then seen to be the clearest form of the proclamation of the Gospel and of a Gospel which covenants us to a life of obedience to the Father.”150 On this ground, Torrance insists that infant baptism is a sign of the way God deals with us, bringing us new life and continual growth through the Holy Spirit.151 He reads Acts 2:14–19, and the promise made to those gathered, “to you and your children”, as referring to the children of those who were there present that very day, rather than only to future generations. Just as Gentiles were now included in the promise of access to the Father through Christ and the Spirit, so were children, regardless of age.152

Gathering up our discussion of trinitarian baptism, we conclude that it is a sacrament of what God has already done in Jesus Christ, “in whom he has bound himself to us and bound us to himself, before ever we could respond to him,”153 but it is also a sacrament of what God continues to do by his Spirit in uniting us to Christ, so that Christ’s faithfulness and his obedience become the ground of our own faith.154 In this way we

148 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 120–21. 149 Ibid., 115. 150 Ibid., 125. 151 Ibid., 129. 152 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Bible's Guidance on Baptism,” Life and Work (Sept 1982): 17. 153 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 103. 154 Ibid.

254 participate in the saving benefits of union with Christ that flow from belonging to the community of God’s people, for

the remission of sins, the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come, belong together to the very core of that mystery, for they are the saving benefits that flow from union with Christ through one baptism and one Spirit, and are enjoyed in one Body. They are not benefits that we may have outside of Christ but only in Christ, and so they may not be experienced in separation from one another for they cohere indivisibly in him. Nor may they be enjoyed in the experience of separated individuals, but only as individuals share together in the one baptism of Christ and his Spirit. People are certainly baptised one by one, yet only in such a way that they are made members of the one Body of Christ, share in his benefits as a whole, and share in them together with all other members of Christ’s Body.155

Finally, the eschatological element means that the full unveiling of our participation in the divine koinōnia awaits the eschaton. Our participation in the fellowship of the Trinity is both present and future—the Church’s incorporation into Christ is secure, but this is a reality that is not yet fully revealed in space and time. As Torrance concludes, “the really significant event in Baptism is a hidden event; it recedes from sight in the ascension of Christ and waits to be revealed fully at the last day.”156 This lines up with our understanding of the sacraments as a gift to the Church in the time between the two advents of Christ; they point to a reality which is already fulfilled, but yet to be fully unveiled.

Excursus: The Church of Scotland Special Commission on Baptism From 1953–1963, Torrance served as the Convener for the ‘Special Commission on Baptism’ which met for over a decade. This was originally intended to be a three-year study, which it was anticipated would generate a careful theological report, a popular report, and study guides.157 Each year, the panel assigned research tasks to members, who then presented their findings to the Commission for further discussion, revision

155 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 297–98. 156 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 167. 157 Thomas F. Torrance, “Minutes of the Special Commission on Baptism, 27 October 1953” (Box 90: Special Commission on Baptism, Minutes and Correspondence, 1953, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection, Princeton Theological Seminary), 1.

255 and collation at an annual ‘drafting conference’.158 Each year an interim report was presented to the General Assembly, written by Torrance, along with the Commission’s secretary, John Heron.

Challenges arose early on; consulting presbyteries found it difficult to understand the dense theological material, and the hermeneutical approach taken,159 while others felt that the difficulties arose from the fact that the Church was still deeply entrenched in the ‘subjective approach to baptism’, which asked questions about issues such as the psychological changes that took place with infant baptism.160 The difficulty of the material can undoubtedly be attributed, at least in part, to Torrance’s key role in writing the reports! It seems to have been a fairly constant battle between the desire to provide a full Scriptural and theological analysis of the work undertaken, and the need to finish in a timely and accessible manner. 161

Work continued through the next few years, with interim reports submitted on the Scriptural material in 1955, the Patristics and Early Church in 1956, the Medieval and Reformation Churches in 1957, and on the Church of Scotland in 1958 and 1959. A final report was provided to the General Assembly in 1960, to which presbyteries could respond before the 1961 General Assembly. The Church of Scotland ‘Barrier Act’ of 1697 required the ratification of presbyteries before any change to a core doctrine could be made, so in 1962, the Report was ‘sent down’ to presbyteries for consideration. Finally, in 1963, although the General Assembly did not adopt the Report with an official act of the Assembly, they “commended it to the earnest and

158 Thomas F. Torrance, “Minutes of the Special Commission on Baptism, 30 November 1954” (Box 90: Special Commission on Baptism, Minutes and Correspondence, 1954, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection, Princeton Theological Seminary), 1. 159 Thomas F. Torrance, “Minutes of the Special Commission on Baptism, 4 November 1955” (Box 90: Special Commission on Baptism, Minutes and Correspondence, July–December 1955, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection, Princeton Theological Seminary), 1 160 Ibid., 2. 161 Thomas F. Torrance, “Minutes of the Special Commission on Baptism, 19 March 1956” (Box 92: Special Commission on Baptism, Minutes and Reports, 1956, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection, Princeton Theological Seminary), n.p. The minutes note that the Convener’s Draft needed to be “drastically reduced in bulk by the omission of all but the most important of the referenced quotations, in order to make the Report to the Assembly as simple as possible.”

256 prayerful consideration of ministers, office-bearers, and members,”162 seeing it as a conclusive statement of the Reformed doctrine of baptism held by the Church of Scotland.

The content of both the interim reports, as well as the final report, bears significant similarity to the material that we have presented on Torrance’s doctrine of baptism. While we have not cited these reports at length, since they are co-authored by others, they reflect a significant investment of time and effort at a point halfway through Torrance’s academic career, and it is clear that much of the content can be attributed to him.163

Eucharist and the continual renewal of the Church’s participation in Christ While baptism is to do with the completeness of the Church’s incorporation into Christ, the eucharist illuminates our understanding of the Church as a ‘pilgrim people’, sinners awaiting the full realisation of their redemption. Of the two sacraments, the eucharist is particularly shaped by the eschatological pause between the two advents of Christ, because it is given for the continual renewal of the Church.164 If we think of baptism as signalling that we are permanently united to Christ, and enabled to participate through the Spirit in the koinōnia of the Trinity, then the eucharist is to be thought of as showing that we simultaneously require that union to be renewed afresh each day. This is why Torrance describes the eucharist as “the Sacrament of our continual participation in Christ”, or alternatively, the “Sacrament of Sanctification.”165 God has not left his Church alone to grieve at the foot of the Cross, or looking up into heaven after the ascension, but instead has provided the eucharist “for the renewal and maintenance of its life and faith,”166 and as a “foretaste of the Kingdom of God.”167

162 “Extract from the Records of General Assembly, 'Adopting the Doctrine of Baptism' May 23 1964” (Box 95: Extract from the Records of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection, Princeton Theological Seminary). 163 The Interim Reports can be found published as T. F. Torrance and the Special Commission on Baptism, Interim Reports, and Reports (General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1955–1963). 164 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 12. 165 Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, 150. 166 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 167. 167 Torrance, The Apocalypse Today, 179.

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The rite and the reality of the Eucharist There are a number of Jewish traditions that influence the eucharistic tradition, particularly the Passover meal. 168 When reading the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper, we must also consider how the “resurrection inevitably modified the character of the meal,”169 creating a whole new dimension to the disciples’ participation in the Last Supper.170 As the disciples stood on the other side of the Cross,171 and reflected on Christ’s suffering, they realised that the Last Supper had been designed for their remembrance, as “a sacramental counterpart to His atoning death.”172 If there had been no resurrection, the meal would have remained as a sombre memorial, but on the basis of the resurrection, it became a celebration of God’s salvific work in Jesus Christ. The eucharist draws from Jesus’ actions at the Last Supper, but is distinct from it because it does not only remember the historical pre-crucifixion meal but also celebrates the resurrection; it is “a historical action in remembrance of Christ, after the fashion of the Last Supper, and a Messianic Meal with the risen Lord, joined together in one.”173

The eucharist must be interpreted in light of the wider life and ministry of Jesus, particularly his miracles of feeding large crowds, his teaching and parables with eschatological overtones, and his provocative actions in eating with those excluded from table fellowship.174 Torrance pays special attention to Jesus’ behaviour at meals, noting that “these distinctly Messianic acts of Jesus at meals, especially in the light of His teaching about the divine constraint put upon the outcasts to come in and fill the house and partake of the Great Supper, are very important.”175 The Lord’s Supper was

168 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 134–5. Torrance highlights the aspects of its original context in Exodus, its theological elaboration at Mt Sinai, the development of its celebration throughout Jewish history, and finally Jesus’ messianic celebration with his disciples. He also mentions the Jewish Kiddush, which was a meal marking the beginning of the Sabbath, the Chaburah, which was a regular meal of fellowship, and the practise of ‘erub, where a common dish or loaf was used as a symbol of unity in fellowship. Torrance suggests that Jesus would have set aside a piece of bread and cup of wine for the Messiah at the start of the meal, in keeping with the tradition, and then used that at the end of the meal to share with his disciples, drenched in Messianic significance, while using the phrases that are now the for the eucharistic rite. 169 Ibid., 136. 170 Ibid. 171 Ibid., 170. 172 Ibid., 168. 173 Ibid., 136. 174 Ibid., 135. 175 Ibid.

258 not an eschatological meal exclusively reserved for holy people, but rather a celebration of the One who had come to the “poor and the outcast, the weary and the heavy laden, the publicans and sinners,” in order to nourish them with eternal life.176

We must also consider the practice of the Church as recorded in Acts, the instructions of Paul to the Church in Corinth, the teaching of the to the Hebrews, and the allusions to the eucharist in the Book of Revelation.177 These all create the biblical context from which the theology and practice of the eucharist is drawn, based upon the whole Christ-event, including “His Incarnation, obedient life, His Self-sacrifice for us on the Cross, His Self-offering to the Father in His ascension on our behalf and His eternal advocacy of us or intercession on our behalf.”178 This is why the New Testament teaching on the eucharist becomes skewed when the emphasis falls on the rite, because the rite is interpreted either as a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice, or is thought “to only have a moral meaning evoked by its symbolism in the response of the participants.”179

Torrance describes the eucharist as “essentially a prayer and hymn of thanksgiving, dramatic prayer acted out in the broken bread and poured-out wine.”180 The words of Christ himself, referring to his body broken, and blood shed on behalf of humanity, shows that “the stress should be laid upon the taking and eating and drinking, that is, in communicating in the body and blood of Christ.”181 The divine action which is the real content of the eucharist is pictured by the physical actions of the minister.182 However, we should maintain reverence in our exploration of how the sacramental union takes place through the eucharist, for as the consecrated elements are eaten,

176 Ibid., 169. 177 Ibid., 136–37. 178 Ibid., 144. 179 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 108, 131. The key issue is a damaged understanding of the God– world relation, which affects thinking about creation and incarnation. Both Catholic and Protestant misinterpretations stem from this, with the result that the emphasis falls either on the outward rite, or the inward experience of the individual. 180 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 148. 181 Ibid., 185. 182 A somewhat obscure but quite illuminating article is Thomas F. Torrance, “Comments on Eucharistic Practice in the Church of Scotland Today,” Church Service Society Record 5 (Summer 1983): 17–18. Torrance offers some brief observations about the need for the minister to visibly demonstrate both the breaking of bread and pouring out of wine, and the theological need for the eucharistic service to finish with thanksgiving, and to incorporate eschatological anticipation.

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“there is enacted a true and substantial union, an ontological union, between Christ and His Church.”183 The only union of a closer nature is that between the persons of the Trinity. This is why Torrance argues that the eucharist is such an important action for the Church in the time between Christ’s two advents.

It is in the Eucharist, then, that the Church really becomes the Church, both as the ontological and eschatological reality and as the extension into history of the visible sacramental fact which is the Church’s existence on earth. It is both the filling of the Church with its divine mystery, and the manifestation of that mystery within history without its ceasing to be mystery.184 The eucharistic presence of Christ is anticipatory and limited, for although he is really present “under the veil of bread and wine,” his power, majesty and glory are not fully revealed, in order to give the Church time to fulfil God’s will before the second advent.185 In the tension between the new creation, and a “world which continues in estrangement and alienation,”186 the Lord’s Supper “is given to teach us that while we are complete in Christ, yet we are engaged in a battle with the contradictions and divisions that mark the empirical history of our fallen world.”187 Torrance reminds us that this is why we pray, ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven’ at every eucharistic celebration.188

The Eucharist and the Church The eucharist is given to the Church for the time between the two advents, where it both exists in its eternal reality as the Church triumphant, but lives within time as the Church repentant. In the eucharist, the Church communicates in the real presence of Christ, but also receives his judgment on the passing forms and fashions of the world.189 We may understand this better by relating the eucharist to the eschatological pause. The eucharist is given to the Church,

As a sacramental measure for operation between the ascension of Christ and His coming again; an institution that very clearly reveals that our Lord

183 Ibid., 188. 184 Ibid. 185 Ibid., 139. 186 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 258. 187 Ibid., 259. 188 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 139. 189 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 52.

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contemplated a long period of waiting before He returned, a long period in which the Church would have time to grow and develop in union and communion with Him. Thus in the sacramental mode of operation He not only declares His Word and truly performs what He declares, but performs it in such a way that its final fulfilment is yet to take place in the consummation of the Kingdom.190 Having described baptism as our participation in the whole Christ-event, Torrance elsewhere describes the eucharist as having “sacramental significance as communion… as continual participation and renewing in this complete event.”191 This is efficacious only as “by the act of the eternal Spirit the believing Church is given to step over the eschatological boundary, and to partake of the divine nature.”192 In the eucharist, we see that the new creation is constantly breaking into this world to enables the Church’s “continual participation and renewal in that complete event throughout all the contradictions and abstractions of fallen time.”193 It is therefore not an act of memorial, or a rite of mystical repetition; instead, through our participation in the eucharist, we partake of Christ, participate in Him, and therefore become conformed to him.194 “Christ’s own human nature is risen and exalted to the right hand of the Father, and it is in that incorruptible human nature that we are given to participate so that we have perpetual reconciliation and communion with God,”195 with the result that the Spirit brings us to our true telos of participation in the koinōnia of the Triune God.196

Torrance describes the eucharist as “the sacrament in which we receive wholeness into our earthly tensions,”197 which reposes on the living, growing unity of baptismal incorporation into Christ, so that it is not “merely a cognitive sacrament, but an effective sacrament through which Baptismal unity is ever being inserted anew into the flesh and blood of our broken and divided humanity.”198 However, while the Church

190 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 146. 191 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 219. 192 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 187–88. 193 Torrance, Atonement, 413. 194 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 139. 195 Ibid., 144. 196 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 229. 197 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 199 198 Ibid., 261.

261 is already perfected through union with Christ, it lives within fallen space and time and is therefore “unable to realize that perfection in its wholeness here and now.”199 This raises obvious difficulties around the question of ecumenical Intercommunion, for “it is precisely in Holy Communion that we have to do with the centrality of Christ and His atonement directed to the faith and order of the Church.”200 As Torrance observes,

The Church that partakes of Holy Communion seeks to be renewed in it as a fellowship of reconciliation, but for that very reason it must be prepared to act out that which it receives at the Holy Tables, and to live the reconciled life refusing to allow the sinful divisions of the world to have any place in its own life. The Church that nourishes its life on earth by feeding upon the Body and Blood of Christ must live out in its own bodily existence the union and communion in which it participates in Christ. Holy Communion by its own innermost nature and by its whole intention and purpose requires the Church to work hard to eliminate its division, to resolve to seek reconciliation with all from whom it is estranged. It is just because unity is God-given that the Church cannot throw it down in the dust or allow it to be trampled upon but must cultivate it as a holy gift and of the very essence of its salvation in Christ.201 The Eucharist is a corporate event, not a private rite, and has to do with the New Covenant, for the many share in the one loaf and drink the one cup of wine, as signs of their reconciliation to the one Lord and God, Jesus Christ. “It is the Sacrament of the communion in the Body of Christ and is therefore rightly celebrated with the whole Body of the Church in heaven and earth.”202 This is why working towards Intercommunion was so important to Torrance. At the Eucharist, “each is a deacon to the other at the Holy Table, and serves him in love.” We are both to serve each other, and receive from each other, in humble service. At the Lord’s Supper, the koinōnia of the Church is made manifest, for it “enshrines not only the mutual relations in love of the members of Christ’s Body but a two-way relationship between the spiritual and the physical, the invisible and the visible.”203

The Liturgy There is one final element to be included in our discussion of the sacraments, which is the role of liturgy. Torrance encouraged the study of the history and theology of the

199 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 172. 200 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 123. 201 Ibid., 119. 202 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 151. 203 Ibid.

262 liturgy, in order to understand how it is related to the Gospel, arguing that the liturgical patterns “point beyond themselves to participation in the divinely-provided approach of God to man in which He lifts man up to share with him in His own divine life and love.”204 Vital to our understanding of liturgy is the vicarious humanity of Christ; we must be careful not to emphasise the majesty of Christ in such a way that we lose sight of his humanity, lest we misconstrue worship as something that we can offer on our own.205 When liturgy is detached from the humanity of Christ, it risks becoming psychologically motivated.206

Torrance also highlights the close relationship between liturgy and eschatology. We recall here that for Torrance, apocalypse is to do with the fact that the Kingdom of God is already fully realised but is veiled behind the forms of sinful human history. Eschatology is thus to do with the tension between the old order and new order, or with defiance against God railing against the breaking-in of God’s reign. In the time between the ascension and the parousia, we experience the contradiction between the new and the old age, which at times may seem as if the Church is simply suffering and dying without reason, but the apocalypse unveils our eyes to see that Christ reigns over all history, and over the life of the Church.207 Paradoxically, “this unveiling can be described only in the language and forms and symbols of this present age;”208 but when we reach the point where this language fails, and we must look beyond the present age to the eschaton, “eschatology makes use of the language of liturgy.”209

Continuing this analogy, Torrance states that the earthly eucharistic liturgy is an echo of the heavenly liturgy; using a musical analogy, he describes it as “counterpoint, not the canto firmo.”210 Thus, although we cannot know the perfected new song that is sung by those who have been redeemed, the Church’s imperfect liturgy is taken up through

204 Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of Joachim Beckmann, Quellen Zur Geschichte Des Christlichen Gottesdienstes,” Scottish Journal of Theology 12, no. 1 (1959): 109. 205 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 287–89. 206 See also here Torrance’s excellent chapter, ‘The Mind of Christ in Worship: Problem of Apollinarianism in the Liturgy,” in Ibid., 139–214, where Torrance explores the vicarious assumption of humanity, and the mediatorial role of Christ in all our worship and prayer. 207 Torrance, “Liturgy and Apocalypse,” 5. 208 Ibid., 7. 209 Ibid., 5. 210 Ibid., 14.

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Christ and the Spirit—hence the central moment of the —to sacramentally anticipate the full glory of the marriage supper of the Lamb, and the day when all humanity will be brought into the fellowship of the Church.211 As Torrance concludes,

True Christian liturgy is not only open toward heaven, leaving room for the Advent presence of the risen Christ, but is open to the whole world of men, in prayer for their salvation, and to the whole of creation in prayer for its renewal.212

7.4 The doctrine of the ministry We come now to the last section of this chapter, where we will look at the general and specific priesthood of the Church.

Jesus Christ, the true priest As with our discussion of the Word and sacraments, the doctrine of the ministry must be derived from Jesus Christ who is our eternal high priest. We have already explored the relationship between Christ’s ministry and the ministry of the Church, and so here we will limit our discussion to the more specific discussion of the priesthood. This is not only about the ordination of some to Word and Sacrament, but must also include the corporate priesthood of the whole body of Christ.

In the Old Testament, the priesthood was not instituted by humans, but rather functioned within the covenantal relationship as a divinely instituted response to God’s redemptive actions. Priests mediated God’s words, and witnessed to his revealed will.213 Torrance suggests that all priestly action was “essentially witness... God is not acted upon by means of priestly sacrifice. Priestly action rests upon God’s Self- revelation in His Word and answers as cultic sign and action to the thing signified.”214 When we come to the New Testament, these two elements are both fulfilled in Jesus Christ, who “insists on the subordination of priesthood and priestly function to God’s

211 Ibid., 14–15. 212 Ibid., 16. 213 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 3–7. Torrance notes that the tension of priest and prophet throughout the Old Testament represents an effort to separate the sacrificial priesthood from the mediation of the Word. 214 Ibid., 3.

264 sovereign initiative and royal grace.”215 Because Jesus is both fully God, and fully human, both aspects of priesthood have been fulfilled in him. Jesus is both priest and victim, offer and offering. God in Christ did what we could not do for ourselves, and “offered on our behalf a human obedience, a human response, a human witness and a human amen, so that in Him our human answer to God in life, worship, and prayer is already completed.”216 Any offering we could make is displaced and set aside by Christ’s priestly offering, as in the doctrine of justification. In his ascension, Christ eternally offers himself before the Father through the Spirit, interceding for us and “presenting us in Himself,” and as the corresponding movement from the Father towards us, Jesus is our continuing assurance of divine peace and love.217

The priesthood of the whole Church There is a distinction to be made between the priesthood of the whole Church, and the specific ordination of some. Torrance states his view of the priesthood in sacramental terms, where the priesthood of the whole Church derives from baptism, and the particular priesthood derives from the eucharistic fellowship.218 Baptism is the sacrament of the “general or corporate priesthood,” which is the sacrament of our once and for all incorporation into Christ. “All who are baptised into Christ are baptised into the Royal Priesthood, so that it is baptismal incorporation that gives us the rock foundation for a doctrine of order.”219 Torrance is cautious, however, about the term ‘priesthood of all believers,’ because he feels that it conveys a “ruinous individualism.”220

The Church’s participation in Christ’s ministry is corporate, because the whole life of Christ is given to the whole Church, but the relationship of Christ’s ministry and the Church’s ministry is not to be thought of as ‘the less to the greater’, or the ‘part to the whole’. Christ’s ministry is unique, and the Church participates in his ministry, as we

215 Ibid., 8. 216 Ibid., 14. 217 Ibid., 15. 218 Ibid., 82. 219 Ibid., 74. 220 Ibid., 35, fn.1.

265 saw in the last chapter, in a way appropriate to its creatureliness.221 The ascended Christ is king, priest, and prophet, and from his heavenly session, through the Spirit, “the Church is sent out into history in the name of Christ, to serve Him.”222 Power, or ‘the power of order’ is given to Christ, and devolved to those he calls to act in his name.223 The Church’s corporate priesthood accordingly has the servant-ministry of Christ as the model for its service. We have noted that there is no proposition of an identity of being or an identity of ministry between Christ and the Church, but only identification “on the ground of His servant-ministry on the Cross.”224 The Church must take up its Cross, but does not die or suffer on behalf of the world in a substitutionary capacity; rather the Church is called to identify with the guilt of the world and to stand in solidarity with sinners in prayer, intercession, sympathy and compassion.225

Just as Christ came into the world to serve, fulfilling the Isaianic expectation of the suffering servant, the Church is also called to suffer. While the Church does not prolong his ministry, it bears witness to Christ’s servanthood in its own life, modelled after the relationship of a disciple to his Master, or a servant to their Lord, or the apostles to Christ.226 In the time between it does not yet wear a crown of glory, but a crown of thorns like Christ’s, so that through its “suffering witness” on earth, as it allows itself to be “broken in its own body and to shed its own blood for Christ’s sake and the Gospel’s,” and as it is “inwardly and outwardly shaped by His servant-obedience unto the death of the Cross,” becoming “ready to be made of no reputation,” it will come to a point where “it is ready to participate in Christ’s own ministry.” 227 Even while it must

221 Ibid., 36. 222 Ibid., 86. 223 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Eldership in the Reformed Church,” Scottish Journal of Theology 37, no. 4 (Nov 1984): 511. 224 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 83; Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 101; Torrance, The School of Faith, lvii–lviii. Torrance illustrates the different ways of thinking about the relation between Christ and the Church through the doctrine of Totus Christus—while the Roman Church saw this as referring to the whole corpus mysticum, the Church in heaven and on earth which embraces Christ, ‘gives birth’ to him, and mediating him to each generation, the Reformed church saw it to refer to Christ alone, who refuses to be without his Church and therefore takes it into union and communion with Him. The Roman Church viewed the Church as having an actual role in the continuing salvific work of Christ, while the Reformed Church emphasises that the Church does not participate in the act of redemption. 225 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 19. 226 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 84. 227 Ibid., 86–87.

266 embrace the limitations of creaturely existence, the Church is proleptically participating in Christ’s eschatological exaltation.

The ordination of some to Word and Sacrament Torrance also notes some believers are to be set aside for the “special ministry” of teaching, preaching and administering the sacraments. This is a ministry that continues in faithfulness and dependence upon the apostolic tradition, and can never be separated from the apostolic revelation, lest it become what Torrance terms “a ‘fundamentalism’ in regard to the ministerial institution, parallel to ‘fundamentalism’ in regard to the letter of the Scripture.”228 This “special institutional priesthood” is a gift of the Lord to the Church in the time between, like the eucharist, for “the corporate priesthood of the whole Church endures on into the new creation, transformed in the likeness and glory of Christ, but the corporate episcopate will pass away.”229

Torrance is against a hierarchical understanding of the ordained priesthood, for since the earthly priesthood is analogical to, although not identical with, Christ’s heavenly priesthood, to introduce a notion of hierarchy or monarchy into the priesthood “isolates the episcopate from the Body and makes the Body hang upon a self- perpetuating and self-sufficient institution.”230 Since Christ’s priesthood is the hypodeigma (pattern) upon which the priesthood of the Church is to be modelled,231 Torrance explains further that,

through the Spirit there is a direct relation of participation, but in form and order the relation is indirect. The priesthood of the Church is not a transcription in the conditions of this passing age of the heavenly Priesthood of Christ. No transubstantiation or fusion between the two is involved. The relation is truly sacramental and eschatological.232

228 Torrance, “What Is the Reformed Church?,” 61. 229 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 97. 230 Ibid., 92. In an article from early in his career, Torrance urges the Anglican Church to remove the separation between the episcopate, and the corporate life of the Church, contending that modern Anglicanism had given the episcopate a position as an “ultimate criterion of spirituality” which betrays the best of Anglican heritage. See Torrance, “The Mission of Anglicanism,” in Anglican Self-Criticism, 200–01. 231 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 95. 232 Ibid., 97.

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The priesthood is ordered by the eucharist, so that the central moment of the rite of ordination is not actually found in the laying on of hands, but rather when the one being ordained celebrates the eucharist, for “it is as Christ fills the hands of the presbyter with the bread and wine that his ordination is properly realised and validated.”233 A doctrine of ordination must be developed in this context, where the episcopos “presides over the fellowship of the Church by exercising the ministry of Word and Sacrament, but in such a manner that he is to be accounted a steward (oikonomos) of the mysteries of God and an able minister (hupēretēs) of the Spirit.”234 Those ordained to the particular priesthood of the Church, “receive their commission or orders not from the Church but for it, for their commission has its sole right in the gift given by Christ and in offering the gifts given by Christ in Word and Sacrament.”235

Torrance offers a threefold understanding of the corporate episcopate. The foundation is the priesthood of the whole body through baptism, and within this corporate priesthood, each is to minister to each other. We see this in the eucharist, where “spiritually and theologically every one is a deacon at the Lord’s Table,”236 for there the Church ministers to each other, and is dependent upon one another. The second level is a modification of the all-inclusive priesthood which serves the body in Word and Sacrament. The charisma of the deacon within the ordained priesthood is “to prompt and shape the response of the congregation in life and worship,”237 while the charisma of the presbyter “is to minister the Word and Sacraments and to shepherd the flock.”238 Finally, the episcopate is given, “not as a higher priesthood but as a special gift for the oversight of the priesthood.”239 Since the priesthood is ordered by the eucharist, this means that a bishop has no more sacramental authority than a priest.240 In the early Church, Ignatius pointed to the bishop as a “focal point of unity,” but this was only in a spatiotemporal sense, since it is the Church’s relation to Christ that is the real basis of

233 Ibid., 81. 234 Ibid., 77. 235 Ibid., 41. 236 Ibid., 100. 237 Ibid., 102. In the Reformed Church, this is traditionally the role filled by an elder. 238 Ibid. 239 Ibid., 99. 240 Ibid., 79.

268 its unity.241 Pre-Nicene Eastern theology embodied this better than Western theology, for while the episcopate was given a central place, it was not a position that had inherent power or control. Bishops were merely servants and stewards, while the Church was “wholly subject to the sovereignty of the Spirit.”242 This is in contrast to both the Roman Church, which Torrance argues separated institutional continuity from the continuity of the apostolic tradition, and the Anglican Church, which has been more interested in defending the outer shell, rather than the inner kernel, of the apostolic tradition.243

Roles of priestly service, or authority in the Church are for “edification and not for destruction,” for those who operate in them are “nothing more than servants of Christ, and, at the same time, servants of the people in Christ.”244 The ministry functions through the Spirit, who is the gift of Christ to the Church, since as we have seen, it is “Christ Himself who is the one Priest, and men are ordained only in the sense that He gives them to share in His Priesthood.”245 Their work is not efficacious because of their effort or merit, but rather because Christ has called them and equips them with his Spirit. As those ordained to the ministry of Word and sacrament proclaim the Gospel, the Spirit is present, actualising what is declared.246 We may thus think of the deacon as the leitourgos who leads the congregation in worship, the priest or presbyter as the shepherd who feeds the flock through Word and Sacrament, and the bishop as watchman who looks after the priesthood.247

Elders or deacons? It is necessary here to briefly note what Torrance has to say about the Reformed eldership. The Reformed Church instituted the office of elder in the sixteenth century, out of a conviction that laypeople not ordained to Word and Sacrament should take

241 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 253. 242 Ibid., 273. 243 Torrance, “What Is the Reformed Church?,” 58, 60. Torrance suggests that the Anglican Church define validity by institutional conformity, while the Reformed define validity by doctrinal conformity to the apostolic teaching. 244 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 91. 245 Ibid., 81. 246 Torrance, Atonement, 280. 247 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 102–03.

269 part in the moral and judicial government of the Church. Initially elders were elected on a yearly basis, although an Act of the General Assembly in 1582 saw elders now “appointed, admitted and commissioned for life.”248 Issues arose over terminology, with the Westminster Assembly rejecting the term ‘presbyter’ for the elder, but this term continued in common parlance, with a division between teaching presbyters and ruling elders.249 Torrance notes that there is “no clear evidence in the New Testament for what we call ‘elders’, let alone the theory that there are two kinds of presbyter.”250 Presbyterians are unique in how they interpret the biblical texts that they claim justify the office of elder, so that elders can only turn to Presbyterian tradition, and not Scripture, for understanding their calling.251

However, Torrance proposes that a constructive approach can be found by recognising that it is not as if there are no biblical grounds for the kind of ministry exercised by the Presbyterian eldership. Alongside the ordination of some to Word and Sacrament, there should be “others who are ‘ordained’ to a complementary ministry within the congregational life and activity of God’s people.”252 If ministers are charged with ministering the Word and sacraments to the people, Torrance sees elders as also associated with the eucharist, fulfilling a corresponding movement “from the people toward God.”253 Elders are not consecrated to administer the Word and sacraments, but “are to be regarded among those who have been solemnly set apart and sanctified for holy office within the corporate priesthood of the Church.”254 The nature and function of the Presbyterian eldership is very similar to the biblical description of deacons, whose role was to assist in serving communicants at the Lord’s Supper, to take Communion to the housechurches, and to distribute goods and alms brought as an offering to the poor.255 Torrance thus suggests that “what we call ‘elders’ are really

248 Torrance, “The Eldership in the Reformed Church,” 503. 249 Ibid., 507–08. 250 Ibid., 508. 251 Ibid., 509. 252 Ibid. Torrance puts ‘ordained’ in citation marks, as the traditional sense of ordination involved ‘the power of order’, which is not part of the office of an elder. Elders are not to operate in ‘authority’, but rather in ‘charity’, not offering ‘the service of the Word’, but ‘the service of response to the Word.’ 253 Ibid., 510. 254 Ibid., 514. 255 Ibid., 511–12.

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‘elder-deacons,’”256 and calls the Church of Scotland to subordinate its own tradition to Scripture. Such a return to Scripture would deepen the complementary nature of the “presbyteral ministry of the Word and Sacrament and the diaconal ministry of shared obedience to Christ,” embracing a fuller sense of diakonia as service.257

Women in Ministry While it was not until 1966 that the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland allowed for women to be elected as elders in full equality to men,258 Torrance reacts strongly against the traditional interpretation of the Scriptures which would assign a secondary place to women in the Church, particularly in the issue of whether they may be ordained. He quotes Paul’s argument from Galatians 3 (“There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, or male or female”) as the basis for his position that “in Christ there is no intrinsic reason or theological ground for the exclusion of women, any more than of Greeks or Gentiles, from the holy ministry, for the old divisions in the fallen world have been overcome in Christ and in his body the Church.”259

Since the incarnation is so clearly for Torrance to do with the assumption of our whole humanity, then he insists that it must include the healing of any inequality or division between male and female; we cannot argue that the incarnation was in any way dependent on the masculinity of Christ, but should consider his assumption of human nature as being on behalf of both male and female.260 Despite the predominantly

256 Ibid., 512. 257 Ibid., 517. Also relevant here are Torrance’s comments about the historical tension soon after the Reformation, which emerged between the bishops of the Kirk, who were subject to the Presbytery and the Assembly, and the King’s desire to insert his own Erastian bishops into the mix, a move which the Scottish Church rejected. See Torrance, “What Is the Reformed Church?,” 56–58. 258 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 48. Published as a chapter in Gospel, Church and Ministry, this article which was originally published in Touchstone Magazine, provoked a response from Patrick Reardon who took issue with Torrance’s theological and historical findings—interestingly, given Torrance’s strong Orthodox connections, Reardon wrote from an Eastern Orthodox perspective. A correspondence between the two was published in another issue. See Thomas F. Torrance, “The Ministry of Women: An Argument for the Ordination of Women,” Touchstone Magazine Fall 1992 (1992), http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=05-04-005-f#at; Patrick Henry Reardon, “Women Priests: History & Theology—a Response to Thomas F. Torrance,” Touchstone Magazine Winter 1993 (accessed February 1, 2016) http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=06-01- 022-f#at; Thomas F. Torrance and Patrick Henry Reardon, “On the Ordination of Women: A Correspondence between Thomas F. Torrance and Patrick Henry Reardon,” Touchstone Magazine Spring 1993 (accessed February 1, 2016) http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=06-02- 005. 259 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 206. 260 Ibid., 208.

271 masculine language that we use to describe the Trinity, particularly Father and Son, Torrance argues that when we use human language to speak of the divine being, it is important to beware any anthropomorphic tendency. When we use human words that are associated with gender in a theological way, they “may not be governed by the gender by which linguistic or cultural convention they have in this or that language, for sex belongs only to creatures and may not be read back into the being of God as Father.”261 Torrance is theologically supportive of the ordination of women.

7.5 Chapter Conclusion This chapter has examined the notes of the Church and the marks of the Church in between the two advents of Christ. While the notes of the Church are to do with its essential being, which is derived from the Triune God, this chapter has shown that while the marks of the Church are temporally instituted for the Church as it exists between the two advents of Christ, each of them, and indeed order as a whole, is ultimately grounded beyond the spatiotemporal limitations of history, through the hypostatic union of Christ, in the Triune being of God himself. Thus, the Word, the sacraments, and the ministry are gifts to the Church to enable its participation in the union and communion of the Trinity, in the time between Christ’s ascension and parousia.

261 Ibid., 212.

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8 RECONCILIATION, ECUMENISM AND MISSIONS

8.0 Chapter Abstract This chapter will continue to build upon our consideration of the Church’s life in the time between in order to demonstrate how the trinitarian perspective that we have considered shapes the practical applications of T. F. Torrance’s ecclesiology. We will explore the missional and ecumenical aspects of Torrance’s work, and his insistence that for the Church to be able to fulfil its calling to be a reconciling community, there must first be reconciliation within the Church. The internal reconciliation of the body of Christ is vital for the proclamation of reconciliation to those who are external to the body. This chapter will be divided into three sections; Torrance’s involvement in the ecumenical movement, work as an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland, and his role in spearheading the Orthodox-Reformed dialogue on the Holy Trinity.

8.1 Torrance’s Involvement in the ecumenical movement At the end of our biographical introduction to Torrance in the second chapter, we referred to his involvement in the ecumenical movement. During the 1950s and 1960s, Torrance participated in a bilateral dialogue between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, served on the Faith and Order Commission, and attended various World Council of Church conferences.1 McGrath comments that this period was the “high-water mark of the ecumenical movement,” but suggests that even though Torrance attended a number of official events, his main contribution “lay not so much in his personal participation in the bilateral conversations of the time, but in his rigorous exploration of the fundamental theological principles which he considered to be the necessary basis of such dialogue.”2 Much of this theological work has been gathered in the volumes Theology in Reconciliation, Theology in Reconstruction, and the two volumes of Conflict and Agreement in the Church.

1 Torrance also offered reflection on other bilateral dialogues. For examples, see the Thomas F. Torrance, “Anglican–Methodist Reconciliation,” The British Weekly, Feb 28, 1963. 2 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 95.

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A brief overview of the history of the ecumenical movement Torrance identifies a number of historical issues which have contributed to the historical lack of unity, or ecumenicity, in the Church. The earliest tension was whether Christianity would remain a Jewish sect, continuing to promote its distinction and exclusivity, or whether it would embrace inclusivity and the proclamation that the Gospel is for all humanity. The Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) affirmed that the Gospel had been preached to the Jew first, so that although it must reach out to the whole world, it could never do so independently of its historical and spiritual Jewish foundation.3 As we have already noted, events led to the Jewish–Gentile schism, which Torrance argues “constitutes the deepest ecumenical problem for the whole Christian Church.”4

The second issue is related to, but is a later development of this Jewish–Gentile split. Torrance observes that the detachment of Christianity from its Jewish roots allowed the Church to adapt itself too easily “to the socio-legal framework of empire.”5 Not only did this involve the dualistic aspects of culture and structure that we have examined throughout this thesis, but as the Church experienced rapid growth in the bifurcated Graeco-Roman world, it could not help but become entangled with that world. Although the Fathers did much work to reconstruct the dualistic foundations of a Hellenistic worldview, which Torrance regards in an overwhelmingly positive light, this philosophical dualism remained latent, and eventually crept back in, leading to the Western Church’s hierarchical structures, and its synthesis of spiritual and temporal power.6

The strict hierarchical organisation of the Western Church produced further ecumenical problems given that the Roman Catholic Church held Roman Catholic structure to be an essential part of the Church’s nature.7 We discussed this, and the nature of the Reformed reaction earlier, in our overview of doctrine and order at the start of Chapter 6, but can note further here that the Reformation was both positive

3 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 24–27. 4 Ibid., 27. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 27–34. 7 Ibid., 35.

274 and negative in terms of ecumenicity. On one hand, it re-embraced the centrality of the Church as the body of Christ, and a community of believers, but on the other hand, gave rise to an ever increasing number of Church splits and schisms, so that Protestant Churches still continue to entrench themselves in a separatist fashion over matters of doctrine and practice.8 The Reformation failed to overcome the “deep tension between theological catholicity and institutional universality,”9 which Torrance attributes to socio-political, theological, and scientific factors.10

This is where we come to the twentieth-century ecumenical movement. Torrance views the modern ecumenical movement as a continuation of the original intent of the Reformation, which was to seek the biblical and theological renewal of the one Church.11 In one of his clearest articles on the subject, “We are Learning Together,” he views the Reformation, the Evangelical Revival, and the ecumenical movement as similar, describing the latter as “a continuation of the other movements… and the blending of them together… a great revival not so much after the pattern of D.L. Moody or John Wesley as after the pattern of the Reformers like Luther and Calvin and Knox.”12 Positive progress has been made in recent decades, especially from the Roman Catholic side at Vatican II and the release of documents such as Lumen Gentium,13 however there is still a long way to go to reach the ‘unity of the faith.’ Nevertheless, Torrance considered the ecumenical movement “the most distinctive feature of

8 Ibid., 39. 9 Ibid., 41. 10 Ibid., 42–44. In another letter to the editor, taking umbrage with some claims that had been made in a theological bulletin, Torrance emphatically argues that the contribution of the Reformation was not so much the return to the doctrine of the Church, but rather the Christological and soteriological correction of the doctrine of the Church. See Thomas F. Torrance, “Catholicity and the Reformed Tradition, Letter to the Editor,” Bulletin of the Department of Theology, World Alliance of Reformed Churches 2, no. 1 (1961): 4–8. 11 Ibid., 41. 12 Thomas F. Torrance, “We Are Learning Together: The Ecumenical Movement, Another Great Movement of the Gospel,” Life and Work (Aug 1954): 197. 13 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 39. Torrance suggests that the contribution of Lumen Gentium is that it rethinks the nature of the Church, “in which primacy is accorded to the essential mystery of the Church in Christ and its actualisation in a universal community of people structured in the love of Christ, over the juridical structure of the Church as a hierarchical organisation of world-wide authority and power.” While Torrance puts his own gloss on it here, it is clear from the familiar language that he uses that he views Lumen Gentium as moving closer to a position which is more like his own ecclesiology. See also pages 58–67.

275 twentieth-century Christianity.”14 He had great hopes for the future of the ecumenical movement, although he was realistic about the danger of obsolescence;15 however believed that if the Church retained the missional outlook which was such a strong impetus in the ecumenical movement, this could be avoided.16 There is a strong relationship between the communal understanding of witness and mission, and Torrance’s relating of ecumenism and evangelism, which we will turn to consider in our upcoming discussion of the need for a theology of reconciliation.

Torrance’s contribution to ecumenical theology Torrance understands there to be a strong connection between the catholicity of the Church, and its ecumenicity; developing from its original Greek usage, referring to the ‘world community’ or ‘inhabited earth’, oikoumene took on a “distinctively Christian and theological slant in reference to the all-embracing people of God, the universal Church, which is the somatic correlate in space and time to the Kingdom of Christ which shall have no end.”17 Grounded in the incarnation, through Christ who reconciles all things in and through himself, catholicity and ecumenicity both refer to the “inner wholeness or essential universality” of the Church, “even when there is no extensive world-wide manifestation of universality,” anticipating the eschaton.18 Torrance consequently views the aims of the ecumenical movement as an imperative, given the division within the Church, which simultaneously functions as a vision of what the Church will become at the eschaton, the universal people of God.19

The overall shape of Torrance’s participation in the ecumenical context emerges in his response to Karl Barth’s suggestion that the Amsterdam 1948 World Council of Churches Conference should adopt the method of examining theological agreements to discover what disagreements were contained, and then examining those

14 Ibid., 15. See Torrance’s overview of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century, particularly in relation to the Protestant Churches and the Roman Catholic Church on pages 47–70. 15 Ibid., 70–81. Torrance noted that unless the Church became familiar with the deep shifts taking place in the scientific perspective, and able to respond to these, not only in doctrine, but in its fundamental way of being, it would become increasingly disconnected from society. 16 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 198. 17 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 16. 18 Ibid., 17. 19 Ibid., 20.

276 disagreements in order to reveal their concealed agreements. Barth posited that this approach would have the effect of demonstrating that “disagreements were but differences within a total unity.”20 However, after the Faith and Order Conference which he attended at Lund in 1952—Torrance served on the WCC Faith and Order Commission from 1952–1962—he noted that while this approach had helped to expose the differences between Churches so that they could be talked about, the continuing comparison of different traditions actually cemented those differences in place, preventing confessional unity.

In response to this, Torrance reasoned that instead of engaging in a simplistic comparison of differing theological traditions, “what was wanted was a theological method whereby we could think together our one faith in the one Christ, beginning with the very centre, with Christ Himself, and proceeding on this Christological basis seek to think through our differences in regard to Church, Worship and Sacrament.”21 Despite the Christocentric focus of this statement, what Torrance is calling for is simply a return to the doctrine of God, for it is only as every doctrine is thought of in relation to the others that churches “will reach back to the most ultimate truths and put to a Christian test even their doctrine of God.”22 This is consistent with what we’ve explored about how Torrance undertakes theology. The object of inquiry—the Triune God—remains subject, dictating both the method and content of theological knowledge. Ecclesiology must be studied within the context of trinitarian faith, because the doctrine of the Holy Trinity has doctrinal precedence over the doctrine of the Church.

Alongside our constant re-iteration of the importance of the Trinity for Torrance, we have also constantly held before us the way that the Church is called to bear witness to the work of God in the eschatological pause between Christ’s two advents. Through its ontological relationship with Jesus Christ, the Church is formed as the body which has Christ as its head. This is what Torrance refers to as the “ontological unity” of the

20 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 202. 21 Ibid., 228. See also Torrance, “Anglican–Presbyterian Conversations,” 19, 36–37, in which Torrance describes a shift needed in ecumenical dialogue, focusing on the need to set any discussion upon the basis of having our being ‘in Christ'. 22 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 200.

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Church. On the basis of its ontological unity with Christ, the Church is also given a “dynamic unity”, a unity in its mission.23 The Church is actively called to participate in Christ’s mission of reconciliation, and so is sent into the world “in order to bring healing and reconciliation to the great multitudes who are alienated from God and divided from one another in estrangement and conflict.”24 However, while Torrance is content to speak of the Church as “called to continue the mission of Christ,” he steadfastly insists that this must not be understood as “prolonging His atonement or continuing His redeeming work.”25 The Church’s mission is not something that it undertakes independently, but instead flows from the work that God has done in forming the Church. It is only as God is actively present in the Church’s kerygmatic proclamation that the witness of the Church has any divine validity. Expressing this another way, Torrance also comments that, “by taking its rise from God’s mighty acts in reconciling the world to himself in Christ, the Church is constituted ‘a community of the reconciled’, and in being sent by Christ into the world to proclaim what God has done in him, the Church is constituted a reconciling as well as a reconciled community.”26

Torrance suggests that the best language to describe the Church is therefore as a ‘fellowship of reconciliation’, for through the Church’s participation in the vertical dimension of koinōnia, it is formed by God as “a communion of love, a fellowship of reconciliation, a community of the redeemed.”27 To belong to the Church is to participate in the koinōnia which derives from its eternal counterpart in the koinōnia of the Holy Trinity, which causes the Church to exist as a ‘community of reciprocity’ and the ‘social co-efficient of theological knowledge.’ Whatever language we choose to use, whether mission, witness, or proclamation, these must be tasks of the whole community of reconciliation, not only of a few isolated individuals. In support of this, Torrance suggests that the marriage relationship between a man and woman is an act

23 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 22–23. 24 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 17. 25 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 12. 26 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 7. 27 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 9.

278 of witness, developing a parallel between the union of man and woman in Christ, and the reconciliation of God and humanity.28

Torrance further notes that although it is as individuals that we are baptised and reconciled to God, and then reconciled to each other, the New Testament has much more to say about our corporate gathering and witness than our individual witness, a point creatively described when he insists that there is no such thing as a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ Christian.29 As Christians are joined in union to Christ, they become “a witness to the Truth in a profound sense because he is in the Truth and the Truth is in him. He has a relation to the Truth which Paul calls “communion” (koinōnia) and which John calls “abiding” (menein).”30 Those who have been reconciled to God through the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit are brought into horizontal communion with each other on the basis of their vertical communion with God, so that the Church becomes the community of the reconciled.31

The need for a theology of reconciliation The theological task of reconciliation The influence of this perspective of the Church as a community of reconciliation, or a reconciling community, on Torrance’s whole approach to the theological task is apparent from the foreword to Theology in Reconciliation, which begins with the statement that, “Any theology which is faithful to the Church of Jesus Christ within which it takes place cannot but be a theology of reconciliation, for reconciliation belongs to the essential nature and mission of the Church in the world.”32 Torrance also develops this in relation to his Reformed roots, noting that theological studies must be ecumenical. Since theology is “the dialogue of the one Covenant people with God… [then] a theology that is not essentially ecumenical is a contradiction in terms.”33 Furthermore, a theology that is not concerned with the proclamation of the Gospel will

28 Torrance, “The Christian Doctrine of Marriage,” 3–15. See also Thomas F. Torrance, “A Comment on the New Morality,” Salt and Light Periodical 2, no. 1 (Spr 1964): 17–20, in which Torrance argues against the idea that the Christian vision of marriage can change to suit a change in ethics. 29 Thomas F. Torrance, “Answer to God,” Biblical Theology 2, no. 1 (1951): 10. 30 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments, 71. 31 Torrance, “Answer to God,” 11. 32 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 7. 33 Torrance, The School of Faith, lxviii.

279 not be ecumenical, for only through “actual engagement in the mission of the Gospel can we produce, as a parergon, a doctrine of the Church in which our differences are lost sight of because they are destroyed from behind by a masterful faith in the Saviour of men.”34

The calling of theologians to equip the Church for witness to the work of divine reconciliation is then elaborated upon further by Torrance:

It is incumbent upon theology, therefore, to find ways of overcoming disunity within the Church as part of its service to reconciliation in the world, but also to come to grips with the divisive forms of thought and life in human society wherever the Church is planted and takes root, so that the children of God everywhere may share in the unity of the creation restored in the Incarnation of the Word and the community of the reconciled in the Church may become identical with all mankind.35 This quote illuminates one of Torrance’s most fundamental convictions about his calling as a theologian, which is that the task of theology must be shaped by the Church’s existence as a reconciling community. We discussed in an earlier chapter the way that Torrance’s missionary heritage influenced his own sense of having a theological vocation. We can draw deeper connections here, for since his father was Presbyterian and his mother was Anglican, Torrance was well aware of the need for unity and co-operation on the mission field, in order for the proclamation of the Gospel not to be hindered by internal Church politics. As an example, Torrance recalls that although his father did not agree with his mother’s support for bishops, “he was by no means a narrow-minded Presbyterian for his outlook had been considerably widened on the mission field, as well as in College, through association and friendship with members of other Churches.”36 Torrance’s father also attended the Conference on Evangelism in Edinburgh in 1910, which is viewed as the start of the modern ecumenical movement. In the light of these formative influences, it is unsurprising that Torrance insists on the close relationship between ecumenism and evangelism, and the need for internal reconciliation in the Church. Torrance further credits his own

34 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 19. 35 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 7. 36 Torrance, “Itinerarium Mentis in Deum,” 3.

280 involvement in the ecumenical movement with exposing his “Presbyterian spectacles,” and bringing his “bigoted prejudices” into the light.37

Torrance’s perspective on sinful state of the Church’s division Throughout this thesis, we have clearly shown Torrance’s belief that the life of the Church should point “to the great Consummation when even faith and hope will pass away but love will endure as the abiding reality of the Church in the life of God, when that which is in part shall pass away, and we shall see Our Lord face to face and know Him as we are known.”38 Since the Church’s life should anticipate as best it can the new creation, when there will be no division or discord, we may understand why the current state of disunity within the body of Christ is such a serious issue. The world does not see one Church that bears witness to the Triune God, but rather multiple Churches that are separated from each other. God’s work of reconciliation is complete, but the fact that the Church is divided among itself ‘acts a lie’ against its proclamation of God’s work of reconciliation.

It is important to make the distinction here between what we might term ‘essential division’ and ‘contextual division’. The essential division which challenges the Church’s witness is found in the fact that the consequence of sin is the rupture of relationship, and that the Church can only bear imperfect witness to reconciliation in its own life because it is hindered by the limitations of sin. Even though Christ’s work of reconciliation is already complete, and will be revealed completely in the eschaton, the Church is unable to live this out completely here and now. However, God still graciously uses the Church’s witness and so fills it with his own Spirit that despite its imperfection, it still points to God’s work of reconciliation.

There is another element to division, which emerges from the same consequences of sin, but is more of a contextual issue than an ontological issue. Torrance lays the charge against the Church that it has so laid itself open to “relativism, secularism, and

37 Thomas F. Torrance, “Thomas Ayton's 'the Original Constitution of the Christian Church',” in Reformation and Revolution: Essays Presented to the Very Reverend Principal Emeritus on the Sixtieth Anniversary of His Ordination, ed. (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1967), 274–75. 38 Torrance, “What Is the Church,” 20.

281 syncretism,”39 that it exhibits the same “fragmentation and pluralism” that are characteristic of modern secular culture.40 On one hand, Torrance sees this as the consequence of the timing of the Reformation; while Europe was dividing into clearly demarcated nation-states, the movement for Reform simultaneously resulted in many nationalistic and doctrinally divided churches, rather than one Reformed Church.41 The contextual division of the Church also arises from the assimilation of Christianity to frameworks of thought that are incompatible with the Gospel, which is the primary cause of the majority of the theological and ecclesiological divisions that exist today. Today, in “a world fraught with deep divisions in its social and cultural existence, profound inter-national and inter-racial cleavages, sharp political and ideological confrontations,” the Church continues in the same disunity.42

However, identifying these causes of division allows us to grasp Torrance’s perspective that churches do not really differ in “their essential relation to Christ,” but rather in the way that faith has been expressed and communicated in “divergent cultural traditions.”43 As a result of this, understanding the historical development of theology is vital, because as Torrance notes, “certain theological conceptions, even of a basic

39 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 241. 40 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 150–51. Torrance notes that although humans tend to be concerned about the surface level fragmentation that creates “social and institution transition,” this is a sign of a much deeper shift going on in the basic structures of thought and knowledge. Torrance notes that the Western world has experienced three major shifts; the introduction of Ptolemaic cosmology with its deep philosophical dualisms between the sensible and intelligible; the introduction of Newtonian cosmology, which involved the dualism between absolute space and time, and the events that take place within space and time; and finally, the introduction of Einsteinian cosmology, which thoroughly rejected dualism. Of these three, the last scientific revolution offers the most opportunity for dialogue to Christianity, for it involves “a non–dualistic outlook upon the universe which is not inconsistent with the Christian faith, even at the crucial points of creation and incarnation.” The salient point here is that while this deep revolution has taken place, there is a delay between the revolution of thought, and the revolutionary restructuring of human life. This delay is why Torrance views the contemporary scenario as one of fragmentation and pluralism, as noted in Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 267–71; Torrance, God and Rationality, 4–6. 41 Torrance, “A New Reformation?,” 292. Torrance comments further that as the churches in each country developed their own traditions, the patterns of faith, worship and order became more determined by non-theological factors, so that “the Protestant Church tended to become a servant of public opinion, an expression of the national and cultural consciousness of the people, instead of the manifestation of the one Body of Christ entrusted with a revolutionary message of reconciliation that cuts across all the divisions of mankind and through proclaiming one equal love of God gathers all men without respect of colour or race or class into the one fold of the one Shepherd.” 42 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 22. 43 Ibid., 8.

282 kind, were thrown up in the process of historical development clothed in forms that were conditioned by a particular culture, but which are now in need of clarification.”44

Earlier in the thesis we utilised the image of ‘scaffolding’ to describe the temporary nature of Church order, as a gift to the Church in the time between the two advents which will pass away at the eschaton. However, the unfortunate reality is that Church order and structures often represent the “fossilization of traditions that have grown up by practice and procedure, and have become so hardened in self-justification that even the word of God can hardly crack them open.”45

Torrance argues that to only accept another part of the Church on one’s own terms “not only manifests the divisive spirit of the sect, but implies both a Pelagian doctrine of sin and a doctrine of God which is unbiblical, while Catholicity itself is impugned.”46 The only way forward is, as it so often is for Torrance, one of repentant rethinking. It is “in the saving work of Christ as well as in His Person that we must look for the oneness which God bestows upon us, and which alone can solve our theological and ecclesiastical divisions, for in the heart of those divisions there is sin, and not least the sin of refusal to acknowledge it.”47 This is where Torrance applies the kataphysic method to evaluate ecumenicity. Since in Torrance’s scientific approach, the doctrine of the Trinity dictates the questions that we ask about ecclesiology, then

the basic and central concepts are thrust forward more and more into their commanding position, close to the heart of the faith, as manifestations of its very substance, while other concepts, important and necessary as they may be, fall towards peripheral significance, and some actually fall away altogether after having fulfilled their transitory functions.48 Torrance’s response to division: the centrality of the Trinity Torrance calls the Church to a ‘New Reformation’, which draws on historical awareness, scientific advances, and is recommitted to unity, to preach salvation by

44 Torrance, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge, 326. 45 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 165. 46 Torrance, “Review of the Realm of Redemption,” 324. 47 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 13. 48 Torrance, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge, 327. Torrance explores at the length the contribution that scientific method can make to the ecumenical movement in Torrance, God and Rationality, 112-134.

283 grace alone.49 Torrance’s hope was that this approach of re-centralising the Trinity would allow for the simplification of doctrine, by making it clearer which concepts were part of the “inner core” of theology, and which only had “temporal or peripheral significance,”50 with the result that the Church would regain “an ecumenical significance which it has not had since the seventh century.”51 The gift of ecumenical encounter is that it allows us to reflect upon how our own reading of Scripture, and our own theological positions, have been conditioned by the Church tradition in which we have participated,52 but it is hard for the Church to engage in this self-reflexive critical process, because “by its nature it embodies, and carries over from the past into the present, a vast development of tradition.”53 Nevertheless, doctrines must be critiqued in the light of how faithful they are to the Triune revelation of God, on the shared ecumenical foundation which Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Churches all have in common in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed.54 Torrance also suggests that if we were to apply the doctrine of justification by grace to dogmatic theology, bringing all of our thinking to the Cross, it would lead to truly scientific and theological thinking, resulting in the fundamental agreement of the Churches.55

However, Torrance does offer some explicit suggestions to each of the three major branches of the Church. He suggests that the Orthodox should resist taking an immovable stance within the Athanasian–Cappadocian tradition, but instead embrace the Athanasian–Cyrilline axis which would allow healing between the different Orthodox divisions. Roman Catholics should embrace the Greek patristic

49 See Torrance, “A New Reformation?,” 275–94. This article has been referred to in several other footnotes, but is an excellent shorter piece that integrates Torrance’s view of the history of scientific development, and the contribution of the Reformation to scientific development, and suggests a way forward for the Church today. 50 Torrance, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge, 282. See also Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 154. Torrance comments that “To give ontological and controlling priority to the oneness of God’s self-revelation through the Son and in the Spirit, the one comprehensive Truth from which all other truths derive and to which they all finally refer, cannot but have the economic effect of purifying and simplifying theological truths, if only by disclosing that, while relatively few have really central significance, others have but an off-centre or merely peripheral significance.” 51 Torrance, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge, 283. 52 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 8. 53 Torrance, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge, 328. 54 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 8–9. 55 Thomas F. Torrance, “Theology and Science: Dogmatics Key to Church Unity,” The Scotsman, 10 February 1964.

284 understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity, and Christ’s vicarious humanity, which would allow them to overcome the difficulties of dualism in the life of the Church.56 Protestants should look beyond the pluralism of society, and the fragmentation that this introduced into the Church, to the wholeness of the Church that is grounded in Christ, thus escaping cultural relativism, and a dualistic Christology. Finally, each of these churches must return to the central doctrine of the Trinity, and embrace the grounds for unity that this offers us.57

The potential danger here lies in focusing so much on the historical shape of the Church and the contemporary challenges of division, that we forget that while the Church exists within the finite and concrete conditions of space and time, it is sustained by the Triune God who exists outside space and time, and that is where we must seek to understand the true nature, and basis for unity, of the Church. This is the danger that has faced the modern ecumenical movement since its inception.58 This is one of the ways in which Torrance’s insistence that we must look first to the Trinity, rather than to the Church, is so useful; it safeguards ecumenical dialogue from veering into anthropocentric concerns if we are able to consistently keep before us Torrance’s view of the “obligation of unity,”59 and his statement that “the Church really is the one Church of Christ when it looks away from itself to its objective source and ground in the Godhead, and dwells in the Holy Trinity, for it is in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit

56 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 10. See also Thomas F. Torrance, “Ecumenism and Rome,” Scottish Journal of Theology 37 (1984): 59–64, in which Torrance suggests some specific changes that the Roman Catholic Church needed to undertake in order to move forward in ecumenical dialogue. 57 Ibid., 10, 13. Torrance further argues that we need unified thinking not only in terms of denominational divisions, but also in ethnic and geographic divisions. He comments that in “a movement of reconciliation Eastern and African ways of thinking, which are more at home, in their own distinctive ways, with natural coherences, intrinsic connections and dynamic transformations, can be of real help to Western people in overcoming the disintegration of form and life that results from the imposition of artificial systems of external connections upon everything we seek to apprehend and use.” 58 Torrance identifies two potential errors that might occur; (a) The weakening of Christology, so that Christ is set to the side, and the significance of the incarnation is reduced; instead inwardness of spirit is promoted, as is true of much , and (b) Allowing the Church to obscure Christ, which is most obvious where the Church is seen as an extension of the incarnation, or where the Church focuses on itself more than Christ. Both these errors, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, lead to the same result—the centrality of Jesus Christ is lost, the Trinity no longer is in focus, and instead is displaced by humanity, or abstract principles. The ecumenical movement must constantly be wary of both these extremes. See Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 12–16. 59 Thomas F. Torrance, “Changed Outlook of Christians: The 'Obligation' of Unity,” The Scotsman, January 29 1964.

285 that the Church and its faith are rooted and founded.”60 Churches must listen to each other, and “think out every doctrine into every other doctrine,” so that they may be enabled to “get behind the secondary questions which are the immediate causes of our divisions.”61 This issues a distinct challenge to the body of Christ to free itself from having adopted so many of the “forms and fashions” of the world that it is “too committed to the world and too compromised with it to be able to deliver the revolutionary Word of the Gospel with conviction and power.”62

Eucharistic thinking This language of a trinitarian basis for unity is developed in a number of different ways by Torrance; here we shall consider as an exemplar his call for ‘eucharistic thinking.’ In our discussion of the sacraments, we highlighted Torrance’s correlation of baptism with the reality that through Christ and the Spirit humans really participate in the koinōnia of the Trinity. We also highlighted that the eucharist points to the fact that even though the Church is divided now, there is a fullness of reconciliation that will be manifest in the Church at the eschaton. The recovery of the “eschatological character of her true being” is vital if the Church is to live out her divine mission in the world.

Sacramental thinking “entails an entirely different conception of validity from worldly or historical validity,”63 and this type of thinking helps us to understand why Torrance suggested that ecumenical thinking should be thought of as eucharistic thinking, “not that primarily in which we offer of our own traditions and efforts toward a common pool, but an ever-new and thankful receiving together of the Body of Christ.”64 While Torrance did write about the need to consider the Church’s oneness in terms of our baptismal unity,65 he developed a sustained argument on the basis that the eucharist is given to the Church in between the two advents of Christ. The full unity of the Church is conditioned by the parousia, so that unity will not be reached within fallen time.

60 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 268. 61 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 200. 62 Ibid., 223. 63 Ibid., 199. 64 Ibid., 243. 65 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Way of Reunion,” Christian Century 71 (1954): 204–05.

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Consequently, just as each individual receives a fragment of one loaf, so “in the receiving of this one sacrifice and its unity into our multiplicity healing is given for our divisions.”66 This also means that, just as in the diversity of fragments of a loaf which eschatologically become one, no single historical tradition may claim that it has correctly received and interpreted the whole of divine revelation. No temporal structure or form may be said to belong to the esse of the Church, for there is no warrant for insisting that these will endure into the new creation.67 The Church is both under judgment, and risen with Jesus Christ—it can only live this out by refusing to conform to the patterns of this world, and constantly being renewed by the resurrection in the power of the Spirit.68

Jewish and Gentile reconciliation Torrance also offers repeated comment on the need for healing of the schism between Jew and Gentile, observing that “Jews and Christians must come together in the Messiah, if the world is to be reconciled,” but acknowledging that we cannot encourage reconciliation between Jew and Gentile if all the Jews see is the rivalry between different Christian groups.69

Continuing on to make some specific comments about the Jewish–Gentile schism, Torrance warns against trying to change Jewish people into Gentile Christians, instead acknowledging that we must not impose Western religious culture on their faith, but rather enable them to worship God in their own language and culture.70 Instead, offering some suggestions on evangelism, Torrance suggests that Christians can engage in witness with Jews (and Muslims) first through the question of God in relation to suffering; and secondly in relation to the sense of divine destiny that both Jews and Muslims carry with them.71 He relates more than once the story of visiting Yad Vashem

66 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 197. 67 Ibid., 205. 68 Ibid., 63. 69 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 46. 70 See Torrance’s comments in Thomas F. Torrance, “God, Destiny and Suffering,” The Healing Hand, Journal of the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society (Summer/Autumn 1977): 15. 71 Ibid., 9–11. Torrance further suggests that we should think of the struggle between Jews and Muslims as a struggle between brothers, in response to which Christians must bring their understanding of “the bearing of the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection and the Advent of Christ on the destiny of mankind.”

287 in Jerusalem, and a conversation that he had with his Jewish guides about how God was present during the Holocaust, suggesting that the blood of the covenant is a sign of God’s faithfulness to Israel. Torrance believes that it is in this way that Christians must explain the Cross to the Jewish people, for “unless they can relate God to their suffering, there will be no way for Jews to find reconciliation with the Arabs or other peoples.”72

The other helpful comments that Torrance makes here are to do with the detachment of the Church from Israel. On the issue of geographical primacy in the Church, he suggests that since we tend not to take Paul’s teaching about the importance of the root (Israel) over the branches (the Church) seriously, we deny that ‘Jerusalem’—by which Torrance means Israel—is the true centre of the Church. It is on this basis that Torrance argues that the issue of geographical primacy—for example of Rome or Byzantium—is “a false problem that arises only when the Church loses its real centre in its relation to Israel.”73 The other interesting comment that Torrance makes is that if Protestant and Orthodox churches were to think out more deeply the doctrine of the Virgin Mary, recognising that Mary is the chosen representative of Israel, who bears the Messiah, and thus has an intrinsic role in the mediation of revelation and reconciliation, and to do so without detaching her from her Jewish context, then we might find a way forward that both avoids furthering the Jewish–Christian schism, and also avoids Roman Catholic dogmas such as Mary’s assumption into heaven.74

Although our discussion in this section has focused more on Torrance’s theology of reconciliation, rather than his actual involvement in the ecumenical movement, we have done so in the light of McGrath’s observation that this was Torrance’s more significant contribution. We will pay attention to a more practical example of Torrance’s involvement in the third section of this chapter, when we come to the Orthodox–Reformed dialogue on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. For now, we turn to Torrance’s service as an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland.

72 Ibid., 13. 73 Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of Bernard Lambert, Le Problème Oecumenique,” Scottish Journal of Theology 16, no. 1 (1963): 104. 74 Torrance, “The Orthodox Church in Great Britain,” 258–59. For further comment on the way that the Roman Catholic assertion of the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary from 1950 calls the apostolicity of Roman Catholicism into question, see Thomas F. Torrance, ‘A Machine Grinding Out its Dogmas’, Church Times (21 May 1993), 10.

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8.2 Torrance’s Involvement in the Church of Scotland Torrance is clearly a Reformed theologian, although he brings his own “catholic, broad and generous” interpretation to the Reformed tradition.75 Torrance served as an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland throughout his life, and retained a special interest in the history of Scottish theology.76 He became aware of the need to critically re-interpret the history of his own denomination, despite his great love for it, and repeatedly emphasised that the Reformed Church is only subject to the Word and not to its own tradition, and therefore must avoid exalting “the Reformed tradition to a place of irreformability like that of Roman tradition.”77 As an academic theologian, it is unsurprising that Torrance also issued challenges for an increase in theological faithfulness to the Church of Scotland throughout his career, which is in keeping with our observations about the tenor of his involvement in the ecumenical movement.78

Moderator of the Church of Scotland McGrath thinks it “perhaps inevitable,” that Torrance became the Moderator of the Church of Scotland in 1976–1977; we have already referenced in our introductory material the conversation between Hugh Ross Mackintosh and Robert Wilder where Mackintosh predicted that one day Torrance would be the Moderator of the Church of Scotland. Despite the one-year limit of the position, which was intended to limit the influence of any one individual, Torrance did what he could to inject serious theological reflection into the life and thought of the Church.79 During his Moderatorship Torrance made a particular point of visiting the four Scottish universities that trained clergy for ordained ministry in the Church of Scotland, as well as undertaking a number of

75 Habets, Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance, 19. 76 Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology: From to John Mcleod Campbell (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996). 77 Torrance, “What Is the Reformed Church?,” 60. See also Torrance, The School of Faith, lxix–cxxvi, where Torrance provides an overview of the doctrinal tendencies that the Reformed Church displays in regard to the doctrine of God, the doctrine of Christ, and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Torrance also identifies Thomas Ayton’s work as a source of Scottish tradition which avoided the extremes of either side on the Presbyterian–Anglican, Scottish–English divide, and comments that he often uses this work to develop his own thinking—see Torrance, “Thomas Ayton's 'the Original Constitution of the Christian Church',” 273–97. 78 Thomas F. Torrance, “What is ‘the Substance of the Faith’?” Life and Work (Nov 1982): 16–17. In this article, Torrance bemoans the seeming inability of the General Assembly to insist upon ministers’ affirmation of the ‘substance of the faith’—that which is contained in the Nicene and Apostles’ Creed. 79 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 101.

289 significant international trips, including a visit to the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church to initiate the theological dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed that will be explored in the final section of this chapter.

To help us understand the approach of Torrance to this appointment, we may turn to a number of sermons which were delivered in his capacity as Moderator, and were then published. One such example is his inaugural Moderatorial address in 1976. Responding to the rise of what he described as “militant ‘theologies of liberation’ which have assimilated the prophetic passion of Jewish , and the revolutionary nature and impetus of the Christian message, to Marxist theology,” Torrance reflected that this combination of Christianity and Marxism had no real future, for it would not correspond to humanity’s demands for an open, free society or their deep spiritual hunger.80 Noting that the Church was in a “deep spiritual crisis,” Torrance argued against simply changing the outward forms of Church life, suggesting that “tinkering about with the institutional structures of the Kirk will only affect superficial patterns of religious behaviour.”81 He insisted that the only way to genuinely answer the human needs which the Church was not currently meeting, was to place the staggering reality of the incarnation at the centre of ecclesial life once more.82

In another example, preaching to the 1977 General Assembly at the end of his time as Moderator, with Colossians 1:13 as his text, Torrance reflected that he had “tried to call the Church and Nation to put Christ and his Gospel of reconciliation in the centre, so that from that centre we may take our bearings and shape the course of our mission in his Kingdom.”83 This is another key sermon which clearly lays out Torrance’s theological thinking in a straightforward way, consistent with his academic publications, but written in a simpler style. Torrance gives the Gospel of reconciliation a central place. Christ’s pre-eminence rests on the “ultimate ground of identity” between the Father and the Son, and therefore on the Son’s pre-existence to creation. In the act of becoming a human, the Creator did away with all “disorder, decay, disease

80 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Transforming Power of Jesus Christ,” Life and Work 32, no. 7 (July 1976): 8. 81 Ibid., 9. 82 Torrance, “We Are Learning Together,” 8. 83 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Pre-Eminence of Jesus Christ,” 89, no. 2 (1977): 54.

290 and death.”84 Furthermore, because all things were created for Jesus, the Church was created for him, and the bond between Christ and the Church “has been made concrete” through his incarnation, passion and resurrection. As the body of Christ, the Church is “inwardly and organically so bound up with Christ that the Church is his expression in our world of time and history.”85 Torrance spoke forthrightly to his Presbyterian colleagues about the challenge that this issued to the Church, asking:

Are we ready to set Christ and his Gospel so entirely in the centre of everything in the Kirk, that all other questions such as differences between the Church of Scotland and the Methodist Church, or between Presbyterians and Episcopalians, are regarded as subordinate and peripheral, in comparison? Or sharper still: Is the Church of Scotland more concerned with the transcendent glory of Christ or with the glory of the national Kirk? Is the Kirk to be primarily an expression of Scottish nature and culture, or Presbyterian tradition, or is it truly and above all the expression of Jesus Christ as his Body?86 This sermon expresses a theme consistent in Torrance’s wider body of work. If placing Christ at the centre and subordinating all things to him, then all things must be reconciled to each other. The Cross does not only reconcile humans to God, but must shape all things, including producing unity between Churches. This meant that the Scottish Kirk should not allow its national or doctrinal identity to have primacy over the proclamation of the Gospel.87

The Urgent Call to the Kirk While it is clear that Torrance was concerned with the internal reconciliation of the Church, he was also concerned that the local life of the Church should emphasise the centrality of Christ. This is particularly evidenced in a document that he released with

84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 54–55. Emphasis original. This was not a new theme for Torrance, but was one that he raised over a decade earlier, in his article Thomas F. Torrance, “Put First Things First: Queries to Assembly on Church Union,” The Scotsman, May 27 1966. He addresses the historical developments that led the Reformed Church to embrace rigid tradition rather than the constant reformation of the Spirit in a more academic article, Torrance, “History and Reformation,” 286–91. It is helpful to note that Torrance does not only aim this sort of comment at the Reformed Church, asking a very similar question of the Anglican Church—see Torrance, “The Mission of Anglicanism,” in Anglican Self-Criticism, 194–208. 87 In an earlier article published at the end of the war, Torrance called the Church to put the Cross back at the head of the theological task, removing every false Christian ideology. The power of the Cross is not the story of a good man laying down his life for his friends, but rather God himself on the Cross, which alters the whole situation—including our much-cherished doctrinal affirmations! See Thomas F. Torrance, “In Hoc Signo Vinces,” The Presbyter 3, no. 1 (1945): 13–20.

291 three others—P.P Brodie, W.B. Johnston and D.F.M. MacDonald (two other former Moderators, and the Principal Clerk to the General Assembly),88 entitled ‘Urgent Call to the Kirk’,89 which was prompted by the 'discouraging situation of decline in the Church of Scotland, evidenced particularly by a drop in attendance. This report challenged the current state of the Church, proposing that the,

erosion of fundamental belief has sapped its inner confidence, discarding of great Christian convictions has bereft it of vision and curtailed its mission, detachment of preaching from the control of biblical Revelation has undermined its authority as the Church of Christ, neglecting in teaching the truth of the Gospel has allowed the general membership to become seriously ignorant of the Christian Faith. With this loss of evangelical substance the Kirk fails to be taken seriously, while increasing stress upon formal and socio-legal structure has the effect of making the institutional Church get in the way between Christ and the people of the land.90 Although it had four primary signatories, the tone and language is quite distinctively Torrancian, and this excerpt closely mirrors the themes of Torrance’s wider calls for the renewal of the Church. Recognising the same, R.D. Kernohan, the editor of Life and Work,91 commented that “it read like a censored theological dispatch from Professor Tom Torrance. The other three… seemed to have toned it down without changing the style.”92 The document called “upon the Kirk to commit itself afresh to Jesus Christ and his Gospel and to carry out an evangelical rebuilding of its faith, life and mission,”93 emphasising relational evangelism, rather than a resurgence in institutional schemes for growth. Every congregation needed to reprioritise missions and evangelism. The

88 “'Group of Four' Ask Kirk to Change Direction,” Life and Work (Jun 1983): 11. 89 Thomas F. Torrance, “T. F. Torrance Society Website: Urgent Call to the Kirk,” (accessed 15 February 2015) http://www.tftorrance.org/call-to-kirk.php. Unfortunately, the bibliographic information that appears on this website appeared to be incorrect, citing the letter as written during Torrance’s Moderatorship from 1976–1977. All the material related to the Urgent Call to the Kirk in the Special Collections at Princeton Theological Seminary is dated to 1983 or later. Confusion over the particulars of the Urgent Call is also apparent in published material, for example, David J. Randall viewed the Urgent Call as summing up much of Torrance’s message as a theologian, but could not remember its publication date, and suggested that it was four former Moderators who had circulated the paper (See David J Randall, “T. F. Torrance: Reflections of a Parish Minister,” Theology in Scotland 16 (2009): 152.) While these are trifling details to highlight, it does show that the Urgent Call is not widely known. 90 “T. F. Torrance Society Website: Urgent Call to the Kirk.” Similar themes can be found in other articles published by Torrance, including Thomas F. Torrance, “A Serious Call for a Return to a Devout and Holy Life,” Life and Work (Jul 1979): 14–15. 91 Life and Work is the monthly journal of the Church of Scotland. 92 R.D. Kernohan, “Analysis of a Diagnosis,” Life and Work (Nov 1983): 14. 93 “T. F. Torrance Society Website: Urgent Call to the Kirk.”

292 vision was for each presbytery to develop missional strategies appropriate for its own context, so that mission would become a regular and vital part of each parish’s activity. Alongside this, the writers of the Urgent Call hoped that there would be a recommitment to the holy calling of ministry, along with an increased commitment to regular pastoral visitation, not just to the sick, but for pastoral evangelism.94 The text of the Urgent Call concluded,

This call for a repentant return of the Church of Scotland to Christ clothed with his Gospel is unashamedly evangelical and theological, for the grave crisis facing the Church is essentially spiritual. Only through spiritual and evangelical renewal will the Church of Scotland meet the compelling claims of Christ upon it to carry the Gospel to the millions in our own land who have not been gathered into the fold of Christ but who are desperately hungry for the bread of life.95 The Urgent Call was presented to the 1983 General Assembly, who commended it to the “prayerful consideration of Presbyteries and Kirk Sessions.”96 While the Moderator that year, Dr J. Fraser McLuskey was appreciative for the “note of realism,” sounded by the Urgent Call,97 it proved to be a polemic document, as evidenced by some of the correspondence that T. F. Torrance subsequently received. While Torrance sent out a letter to the early signatories after the General Assembly, in which he stated that he considered its reception a success, and urging everyone to do all they could to keep things moving in their own Kirks and Presbyteries, not everyone felt the same way. One minister’s response is fairly typical, writing directly to Torrance, “I had hoped that the ‘Call’ would bring out some sense of vision and purpose; instead I found only an evasion of responsibility and a trivialising of issues… there was no sense of a Church girding itself for mission, only a hope that we can keep the show going for a bit longer.”98 Another minister, reporting on a meeting to discuss the Urgent Call at a local level wrote, “All present were very happy with the sentiments of the CALL itself, and

94 Thomas F. Torrance, “Summary of the Urgent Call to the Kirk [Typewritten Document],” (Box 96: Urgent Call to the Kirk—description of, instructions, May 1983, Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection, Princeton Theological Seminary). 95 “T. F. Torrance Society Website: Urgent Call to the Kirk.” 96 Torrance, “Summary of the Urgent Call to the Kirk [Typewritten Document].” 97 J. Fraser McLuskey, “From the Assembly to Skye—Via Dublin and Atlanta,” Life and Work (Oct 1983): 14. 98 Quotes taken from various letters (Box 96: “Correspondence from Churches and Church Organisations June–July 1983,” Thomas F. Torrance Special Collection, Princeton Theological Seminary.)

293 would not wish in any way to be disassociated from it. But there are some misgivings regarding the practical course of action which might flow from it.”99

While some individuals were wholeheartedly supportive, others were wary despite agreeing with the concerns expressed about the state of the Church of Scotland. Some took umbrage with the presumption of declaring that the Church of Scotland was in such dire straits, noting that there was no affirmation for those parishes that were doing a good job and not experiencing decline, while others welcomed the Call as sounding an important note in this regard. Still others considered the challenge to return to the Gospel too simplistic, and argued that it needed to have a stronger note of social justice, while still others disliked the statement that there had been “an erosion of fundamental belief”, arguing that this statement had the potential to introduce still more division into the Kirk. There was also frustration from those who already been involved those in previous calls for renewal, feeling that their message and methods had not been taken seriously.

Life and Work is a less biased, and therefore helpful tool in evaluating the response of the wider Church of Scotland to the Urgent Call. Two issues (November 1983, and to a lesser extent, March 1984) dedicated a significant amount of print space to the response. The editorial comment to the November 1983 issue suggested that for the Church of Scotland, it was “not a time for recrimination but for general and constructive repentance. There is no need to hunt down heretics but a very real need for leadership and mutual encouragement in the faith,”100 a comment which T. F. Torrance appreciated in his March 1984 article, “The Tide has Turned.”101 However, although Torrance had commented ten months after the 1983 General Assembly that he was encouraged by the progress which had taken place, the Urgent Call failed to gain significant long-term traction, evidenced by Torrance’s comment five years later that the Urgent Call had been “shrugged off” by most committees and Presbyteries.102 The Urgent Call is an example of Torrance’s commitment to a strong theological underpinning for local Church life, and clearly reveals “commitment to the spiritual

99 Ibid. 100 R.D. Kernohan, “Editorial Comment,” Life and Work (Nov 1983): 5. 101 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Tide Has Turned,” Life and Work (Mar 1984): 15. 102 Thomas F. Torrance, “Where Is the Church of Scotland Going?” Life and Work (May 1989): 26.

294 renewal of the Church and his passion for Christ,”103 but it was unsuccessful in provoking widespread and permanent change within the Church of Scotland.

Life and Work: The Crises of the Church Another example of Torrance’s involvement in the Church of Scotland is available by examining articles which he wrote that were more accessible to a lay audience, for they offer a fuller picture than his more theological works alone provide. An excellent exemplar of Torrance’s of the Church’s search for relevance, and his disgust at the way that he perceived the diminished centrality of Christ had affected the life of the Church, can be found in a series of three articles published in Life and Work in 1990. The series was entitled “The Real Crises.” In the first article, “The Kirk’s Crisis of Faith,” Torrance argues that because of the Church’s obsession with being relevant, little attention is paid to the actual content of the Gospel, with Christianity “reduced to being not much more than the sentimental religious froth of a popular socialism.”104 Torrance reiterates, as he has elsewhere, that at the Council of Nicea, and during the Reformation, it was the Deity of Christ that was at stake, but adds in this article that it is the same struggle that the Church is confronted with today, for “the more the distinctive doctrines of divine revelation are set aside in the obsession of the Church to be socially relevant, the more the Church disappears into secular society.”105

In his second article, “The Crisis of Morality”, Torrance suggests that the moral decline of society is caused by the same issue of Christ’s displacement, through a “strange hesitation to apply the truths of Christ and his Gospel directly to the moral and social problems of the age.”106 The Church has divorced its moral law from theological truth,

103 Colyer, How to Read T. F. Torrance, 28. 104 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Kirk's Crisis of Faith,” Life and Work (Oct 1990): 15. This is not a new point—Torrance observed in 1950 that any evangelistic technique which forgets that the Gospel has already been made relevant to humanity through Jesus Christ will not be effective in Gospel proclamation. See Thomas F. Torrance, “A Study in New Testament Communication,” Scottish Journal of Theology 3, no. 3 (1950): 298–313, also published in Conflict and Agreement: Ministry and Sacraments. 105 Torrance, “The Kirk's Crisis of Faith,” 16. Although somewhat tangential, Torrance’s comments elsewhere help us to grasp the seriousness with which he made comments such as this. Torrance urges the Church not to be scared into translating Christianity into acceptable contemporary language and social involvement, but instead, “to follow the example of the Greek Fathers in undertaking the courageous, revolutionary task of a Christian reconstruction of the foundations of culture: nothing less is worthy of the Christian Gospel.” See Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 271. 106 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Crisis of Morality,” Life and Work (Nov 1990): 15. Torrance also argues that we must beware the danger of moral inversion; the replacement of deep evangelical conviction by a sense of “consciously meritorious involvement in socio-political issues.” He sees this as a sign of the 295 with the result that morality is no longer grounded in creation and redemption, but in the ethic of human wellbeing. This has resulted in the prioritisation of utilitarian values, with the result that “the institutional Church keeps coming between the people and Jesus Christ,”107 for rather than the Gospel being trusted as a transformer of human culture and society, the Church has become enslaved to political ideals.

Although the first two articles refer primarily to the doctrine of the incarnation, Torrance draws out the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity for ecclesiology in his third article on “The Crisis of Community.” Arguing on the basis of the first two articles that the Church must take radical steps to regain its distinctiveness, he presents the need to recognise that there is significant divergence between a political society which relies upon legislative compulsion, and the Christian community which is formed through participating in the divine koinōnia of the Holy Trinity. It is not that the Church should be thought of as standing ‘against’ the world, but rather that in the radical call of Jesus Christ to take up our crosses and follow him, conformity to the Risen One is likely to result in conflict with the status quo.

Torrance further points out that “any decentralising of the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity in the life and faith of the Church leads to the crisis of community and the depersonalisation of society that we experience today.”108 He then goes on to tie community and mission together, as this quote demonstrates:

The crisis of community is a crisis of mission. The Church is not sent into the world to exist as a comfortable community, but as a community embodying the mission of God’s reconciling love to all mankind. Since Jesus Christ is the propitiation not for our sins only but for the sins of the whole world, missionary activity that proclaims Christ as the one Mediator between God and man, does not arise from any arrogance in the Church… The very existence of the Christian community and its missionary proclamation of Christ as the Saviour of the world belong inseparably together. Where there is no mission, there is no community, for the community arises and continues to spread in being sent by Christ to carry the Gospel into the uttermost parts of the earth in evangelical transformation of human life and society. Where there is no engagement in that

soul atrophying, so that people search for meaning externally. See Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 276–78. 107 Torrance, “The Crisis of Morality,” 16. 108 Thomas F. Torrance, “The Crisis of Community,” Life and Work (Dec 1990): 17.

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mission the community severs itself from the very reason and purpose for its existence, and plunges into crisis.109 Elsewhere, Torrance utilises the same comparison of society and community, suggesting that the Church “is the medium by which society is transmuted into community. Indeed, the Church as such is precisely the new community in the heart of our human society.”110 Such a transformation is inherently disruptive, for “the Church, if it really undertakes to become what it is intended to be, a new community, will inevitably disrupt the society in which it lives. As the Church gives corporate answers to God, it becomes the community that exercises a disruptive and radically fermenting force in society.”111 Torrance suggests that the Church is both salt, as a preserver, and ferment, bringing change. The Church is simultaneously the most radical, and the most conservative force in society. It is only as the Church disregards the status quo, and the forms and fashions of the world, that the Gospel will be preached and the Church truly live out its calling as a new community.112 Once again the centrality of the Church’s ontological relation to Christ is vital, for

in virtue of what takes place in the Church through corporate union and communion with Jesus Christ as his Body, the promise of transformation is held out in the Gospel, when society may at last be transmuted into a community of love centring in and sustained by the personalising and humanising presence of the Mediator.113

Frustration with Church Structures Torrance was also frustrated with the way in which the centralisation of church administration had impeded local parishes and presbyteries. Torrance viewed the General Assembly and its committees as a negatively top-heavy structure, suggesting that responsibility for evangelism and finances in particular should be handed back to local presbyteries (a proposal also made in the Urgent Call to the Kirk.)114 He published an article entitled ‘A Right-About Turn for the Kirk’ in Scotland which directly criticised the General Assembly, but also published a version in the United States in which he

109 Ibid. 110 Torrance, “Answer to God,” 13. 111 Ibid., 14. 112 Ibid. 113 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 72. 114 Thomas F. Torrance, “A Right-About-Turn for the Kirk,” Presbyterian Record CV, no. 10 (Nov 1981): 32.

297 withheld from commenting on specific national features and widened the scope of his criticism, simply calling for the “devolution of responsibility from central administration to life at the parish and presbytery level.”115

Chief among his concerns was the Church of Scotland’s process of Union and Readjustment, uniting some parishes, and closing others. Torrance felt that while some adjustment was necessary to respond to the population shifts that had taken place, the closure of parishes had far exceeded any expansion. He commented quite harshly in 1981 that “It is now abundantly clear that Union and Readjustment has been strangling the Kirk…. It is probably to U. and R. alone that one could put down the sad decline in membership.”116

8.3 Torrance’s Involvement in the Orthodox–Reformed Dialogue The final aspect of Torrance’s career that we will consider in this chapter took place after his retirement from New College. This final period of his career deserves significant attention, particularly in the light of McGrath’s suggestion that Torrance's “most important ecumenical activity” took place after his retirement from New College in 1979, during the dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches on the Holy Trinity.117 This was a theological dialogue at the inter- Church level, which is illustrative of how Torrance hoped that the doctrine of the Trinity could lead to genuine ecumenical accord.

The official dialogue was initiated on the basis of personal relationships and a “deep theological rapport” that Torrance had previously established through his prior involvement with Orthodox theologians in ecumenical contexts, particularly Archbishop Methodius of Aksum.118 Formal contact between the Patriarchate of Alexandria and the Church of Scotland began in 1970, with Torrance being ordained a

115 Thomas F. Torrance, “Reconciliation in Christ and His Church,” Biblical Theology 12 (1961): 12. 116 Torrance, “A Right-About-Turn for the Kirk,” 31. 117 McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 102. 118 Thomas F. Torrance, ed. Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 1, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), x. Torrance also served with a number of Orthodox theologians on the Faith and Order Commission on Christ and his Church.

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Protopresbyter of the Greek Orthodox Church in 1973.119 The dialogue was first proposed in 1977, and concluded in 1992, when a statement was issued summarising the accord that a group of Orthodox and Reformed theologians had reached on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The papers from the dialogue have been published in two collections edited by Torrance, as Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches.120

Torrance’s appreciation for the Orthodox Church is obvious.121 Orthodox theologian Matthew Baker observes that Torrance is one of “a very small category of Western theologians of his time engaged in a deep and significant dialogue not only with the ancient Fathers of the East, but likewise with contemporary Orthodox theologians.”122 While Orthodox–Reformed dialogue had existed since the 1960s, Torrance felt strongly that this dialogue had a “rather different objective” from these other conversations.123 When he made his first international visit as Moderator to the Middle East in 1977, Torrance carried with him a letter written by Professor Jan M. Lochman on behalf of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, formally suggesting that explorations begin towards establishing a theological dialogue between the Orthodox Church, and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.124 This letter was presented to

119 Interestingly, 1973 was the Year of St Athanasius, which Torrance celebrated in Addis Ababa with Archbishop Methodios of Aksum. See Matthew Baker, “Interview with Protopresbyter George Dion. Dragas Regarding T. F. Torrance,” Participatio 4 (2013): 37, for reflection on how unusual this honour was. 120 The first three consultations of a preparatory nature are in the first volume, while the next three of a more formal nature occur in the second volume, published as Thomas F. Torrance, ed. Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 2, 2 vols., vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1993). 121 Torrance, “God, Destiny and Suffering,” 12. In this particular example, Torrance highlights his appreciation for the Orthodox’ faithful witness and “tenacious adherence to Christianity,” in the face of persecution in the Holy Land, their faith and commitment to hold properties in trust for the future proclamation of the Gospel during this persecution, and for their modern re-emergence as a missionary force. 122 Matthew Baker, “Introduction,” Participatio 4 (2013): 3. 123 Torrance, Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 1, ix–x. Torrance notes that contacts formed during the early Ecumenical Movement were key to this, beginning with the World Missionary Conference (Edinburgh, 1910) and progressing with the first Faith and Order Conferences (Lausanne, 1927 and Edinburgh, 1937). It was at the first WCC meeting (Amsterdam, 1948) and the third Faith and Order Conference (Lund, 1952) that serious dialogue began to take place. He notes his own involvement in the Lund Commission on Christ and His Church, which Professor Chrysotomos Konstantinides—the Metropolitan of Myra—had also participated. 124 For the full text of the letter see Torrance, Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 1, xi–xiv. The observation in Baker, “Introduction,” 4, is also useful, noting how unusual it was 299

His Holiness Dimitrios I, the Ecumenical Patriarch, and discussed by Torrance with other Heads of the Greek Orthodox Church during his trip, who received the suggestion positively.125 The proposal was for “formal theological consultations, recognising the shared “’theological axis’ of Athanasian/Cyrilline theology,” that had influenced both Greek Orthodox and Reformed theological history.126 This was an outworking of Torrance’s view that the Church must undertake historical studies and ecumenical studies together, in order to fully understand the historical development of the Church.127

Theologians from both Churches would enter into “fruitful exchange,” since a dialogue that began with the Holy Trinity would be significant “for the whole Church Catholic and Evangelical in East and West.”128 This would allow the dialogue to “cut behind” the disagreements of East and West, and to clear the ground for fuller agreement on other doctrinal issues.

The dialogue began with a five-day consultation in July 1979 in Istanbul, which focused on “method and the underlying assumptions that gave rise to divergence in doctrinal formulation and in the structure of the ministry.”129 The only paper published from this initial gathering was Torrance’s “Memoranda on Orthodox/Reformed Relations,”130 which contains two separate documents, in which he acknowledges the existence of ‘contextual division’—as we defined earlier—between the Orthodox and Reformed Churches. Torrance observes that while the Reformed Churches had arisen

for Torrance to begin his international visits as Moderator by travelling to meet Eastern Orthodox patriarchs rather than to another Reformed community. 125 Baker, “Interview with Protopresbyter George Dion. Dragas Regarding T. F. Torrance,” 39–40. Dragas relates that prior to the official proposal being made to His Holiness, Torrance had asked Dragas to read over and revise Torrance’s initial memorandum. When Dragas found significant difficulties from the Orthodox perspective within the document, Torrance asked Dragas to rewrite it as if he was a Reformed theologian requesting dialogue with the Orthodox. Torrance then revised it further himself, and presented both his original, and the revised version, to Patriarch Dimitrios! 126 Torrance, Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 1, x. 127 Torrance, The School of Faith, lxviii. Torrance states that this call for ecumenical conversation and consideration applies to Evangelical and Catholic churches, Western and Eastern churches, and between Jews and Christians. 128 Torrance, Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 1, xv. 129 Ibid., xxi. 130 Ibid., 3–18.

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“through the exigencies of history and changing cultures,”131 developing in a “different cultural and historical milieu”132 to the Orthodox Churches, both were nonetheless committed to belief in the unity of the one Church.

Torrance also points out that while the Reformed Churches had been influenced by the Western–Augustinian tradition in some areas, including the doctrine of grace, sacramentology, and understanding of the Church, it had followed Calvin’s Eastern orientation in the doctrines of the Trinity, Christology, soteriology and eschatology.133 Torrance uses this to highlight the Reformed Church shares the Orthodox conviction that “sharing in the worship of the Father, which Christ himself is, is the heart of the Church’s Eucharistic worship and communion, and that it is from that centre that the life and activity of the Church on earth are nourished and directed.”134 While the Reformed understanding of apostolic faith and apostolic practice had resulted in significant differences in “ethos, practice and order,” from the Orthodox Church, it was clear that there was a deep agreement in the necessity of the Holy Trinity for shaping all doctrine.

Torrance had proposed that discussion should begin with the Trinity, followed by the doctrines of the Son and the Spirit, and then the eucharist.135 He felt that the Athanasian–Cyrilline approach was the best one to take, particularly given its deep grasp of the vicarious humanity of Christ, which is vital to Torrance’s own approach. Torrance hoped that this would allow the dialogue to “cut behind the difference

131 Ibid., 3. 132 Ibid., 4. 133 Ibid., 3–18. Stamps also engages in some critical comparison of Torrance and Calvin’s sacramentologies, evaluating Torrance’s claim that they both have Eastern sources in common, but concluding that they actually have different starting points. Stamps believes that although Torrance rejects Western-Augustinian presuppositions, his eucharistic theology is closer to Western sources than Eastern sources. See Stamps, The Sacrament of the Word Made Flesh: The Eucharistic Theology of Thomas F. Torrance, 239–65. 134 Torrance, Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 1, 6. See also Torrance’s contrast of Protestant and Orthodox worship in Torrance, “Trinity Sunday Sermon on Acts 2:41–47,” 196–99, where he notes that Protestant worship tends to be about expressing ourselves before God and is therefore shaped by contextual patterns and habits, but if worship is truly about participating in something transcendent to ourselves—as the Orthodox believe—then “it is in and through worship that we can transcend our differences and be united with one another.” 135 Torrance, Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 1, 10.

301 between East and West over the ‘Filioque’ clause,”136 although Dragas notes that ironically, the filioque issue was never actually discussed in the dialogue.137 Torrance notes that rather than the Antiochene teaching which tended to be ebionite, or the docetic tendencies of Alexandrian theology, this “middle stream” of Christology ran from Irenaeus, to Athanasius, to Cyril, which became the foundation for orthodox Christology.138 By drawing on this middle stream, the dialogue managed to avoid the potential dualisms of the Antiochene/Alexandrian schools, and Chalcedonian/non- Chalcedonian theology.139

This links in with Torrance’s approach to the ecumenical movement and his call for a theology of reconciliation; he felt that reaching agreement in foundational doctrines would cause the emergence of “a common basis for agreement on the questions of authority in the Church and in the formulation and development of Christian doctrine,” agreement that was significant not only Orthodox and Reformed, but also for the wider division between the Eastern and Western Churches, and the Roman Catholic and Evangelical Churches.140 Torrance believed that the denominational particularity of the Orthodox–Reformed dialogue would result in something of much wider ecumenical significance.

The second consultation took place in February 1981 in Geneva, recognising that the conversation was still “of an interim preparatory nature.”141 Participants from both sides repeatedly emphasised the centrality of the Triune God, stating that while agreement could be reached on issues such as communion in the Church, the process must begin “not from the doctrine of the Church and the authority of its ministry but from a centre deep in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity,” and only as agreement was reached there, could the implications for other doctrines be thought out.142 On this basis, the third consultation in Chambésy in March 1983 focused on the “trinitarian

136 Ibid., 11. 137 Baker, “Interview with Protopresbyter George Dion. Dragas Regarding T. F. Torrance,” 42. 138 Torrance, Incarnation, 198. 139 Torrance, Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 1, 11. 140 Ibid., 12. 141 Ibid., xxii. 142 Ibid., xxiv.

302 foundation and character of the Faith and of Authority in the Church,” centred around the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed,143 for which Torrance prepared a similarly- named paper included in the published collection of papers from the dialogue, in which he explored the idea of ecclesial authority from a trinitarian perspective, focusing on the Fathers such as Athanasius, Cyril and Nazianzen.144 It was agreed during this final discussion that “a deep consensus among the participants had emerged,” on the basis of which Torrance prepared a summary draft which would be used to orient the anticipated official dialogue of the future.145 This was published as Agreed Understanding of the Theological Development and Eventual Direction of Orthodox/Reformed Conversations Leading to Dialogue.146

At the end of these three consultations, each delegation returned to their governing body to seek permission to move forward, the Greek Orthodox to the fourteen autocephalous Orthodox Churches,147 and the Reformed to the World Association of Reformed Churches, representing 143 autonomous denominations, comprised of some 60 million church members.148 The first three consultations were viewed as preparatory consultations, while the second series of dialogues were of a more formal nature since they were officially approved, and attended by mandated representatives.

The official theme for the fourth, fifth and sixth consultations was ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity on the Basis of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.”149 The first official consultation took place at Leuenberg, Switzerland, from 7–11 March 1988. Both sides presented historical overviews of their own Church bodies, although the main body of discussion focused on differences in the understanding of the Trinity as expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Ecclesiological considerations were mentioned as necessary, but it was decided that these would be the subject of a later conversation. It also seems that there was some concern from the Orthodox about the Reformed

143 Ibid. 144 ‘The Trinitarian Foundation and Character of Faith and Authority in the Church’ in Ibid., 79–120. 145 Ibid., xxvi. 146 Ibid., 157–58. 147 Ibid., xxvii. 148 Ibid., xiii. 149 Torrance, Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 2, x.

303 using the dialogue as an opportunity for proselytising, as Torrance notes that there was common agreement that this should not take place!150 Torrance presented a paper on the ‘Triunity of God,’ in which he systematically traces the development of thought from Athanasius, through to Basil, the Gregories and Didymus, Epiphanius and the Council of Constantinople, and then evaluated their influence on the development of the doctrine of the Trinity within the Church’s theology and worship.151

On the basis of the agreement reached in Switzerland, George Dragas and Torrance drafted a Working Document on the Holy Trinity,152 which was presented to the delegates of the next consultation at the Moscow Patriarchate in October 1990. The process of writing this document is described as “interesting” by Dragas, who felt that Torrance’s tendency was to allow his perspective to dominate, thus watering down the Orthodox position. In particular, Dragas identifies the way that Torrance pits the ‘Athanasian–Cyrilline approach’ against the ‘Orthodox–Cappadocian deviation’ as an issue, given that the Orthodox do not interpret the Fathers in this way.153 Along with papers on the Biblical and Patristic doctrine of the Trinity, and consideration of the Trinity in the Church’s worship, the Working Paper on the Holy Trinity was revised and affirmed as the Agreed Statement on the Holy Trinity. It needed some minor linguistic adaptations, which were undertaken by a smaller group of delegates at Chambésy, Geneva in 1991, however this brought to light some further issues needing clarification, so that the final form of the Agreed Statement was reached at the third official consultation near Zurich in March 1992.

The Agreed Statement should be read in tandem with two other documents. The first of these is the Historical Agreement by Reformed and Orthodox on the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity,154 in which Torrance identifies the most significant features of the

150 Ibid., xiii. 151 Ibid., 3–37. 152 Ibid., xiii–xix, contains the draft text of this document. 153 Baker, “Interview with Protopresbyter George Dion. Dragas Regarding T. F. Torrance,” 39–42. We will not return to this issue at length here as comment was already offered when we considered Torrance’s reading of the Fathers, particularly the Cappadocians, as exemplified by the contrast between Torrance and Zizioulas. 154 ‘Historical Agreement by Reformed and Orthodox on the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’ in Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 110–14.

304 consensus which has been reached on the Trinity. These include the insistence that ‘one being, three persons’ must be understood in a personal way, the agreement that the monarchy refers to the whole Godhead so that there is no subordination in the Trinity, the way that this then shapes the understanding that the Spirit proceeds from the shared ousia of Father, Son and Spirit, and finally, offers an ecumenical approach which does not move from the one to the three (as in the West), or from the three to the one (as in the East).

The second supporting document is entitled Significant Features, A Common Reflection on the Agreed Statement.155 This document identifies three particular aspects of the Agreed Statement as important. First, the limitations of human language for describing divine realities are acknowledged. The need to think in a spiritual way when considering spiritual realities is stressed, particularly with terms like ousia and hypostasis, for they are not to be thought of in their ordinary sense, but only as they point beyond themselves to the content of divine revelation.156 Second, is the understanding of the monarchy which the Agreed Statement proposes, which understands monarchy as belonging to the whole Godhead, and the Being of the Father, rather than the Person of the Father. This is particularly important regarding the schism over the filioque, given that “the doctrine of the Monarchy that is not limited to one Person, and the doctrine of the perichoresis of the three Divine Persons, or their reciprocal containing of one another, when taken together, may help towards a fuller understanding of the Mission of the Holy Spirit from the Father and gift of the Holy Spirit by the Son.”157 This approach avoids any sense that the Spirit proceeds from two archai which was what the Eastern Church had felt the need to avoid historically. The third point also related to this second point, which was the anticipated ecumenical significance of the Agreed Statement, which acknowledged that the Statement neither follows Latin theology which moves from the Oneness of God to the Three Persons, nor Greek theology, which moves from the three Persons to the Oneness of God, but rather

155 ‘Significant Features, a Common Reflection on the Agreed Statement’ in Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrine Agreement, 123–26; Torrance, Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 2, 229–32. 156 Torrance, Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches 2, 230. 157 Ibid., 231.

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“cuts across mistaken polarised views,” as a statement “on the Triunity of God as Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity.”158

Also helpful for understanding Torrance’s particular perspective on the Agreed Statement, is the Commentary on the Agreed Statement. Dragas notes that this commentary “was pretty much all a work of Tom but was respectfully received by the full commission,”159 which may be why it was not included in Theological Dialogue Between Orthodox and Reformed Churches, but published in another book of Torrance’s, Trinitarian Perspectives.160 In this final Commentary, Torrance highlights certain aspects of the Agreed Statement which largely line up with his own perspective, including God’s self-revelation as Triune, the way in which theological terms must be used, the mutuality of the eternal relations between the persons, the way in which we must think about the order of the persons, the mutual indwelling and shared monarchy of the three persons, and the way in which we are to understand ‘one being’ and ‘three persons’ to bear upon each other. There is no need to explore this at length here as it is congruent with Torrance’s trinitarian theology as it has been unfolded throughout this thesis.

It is difficult to fully evaluate the contemporary significance of this dialogue, and the official statements released. However, it is notable that contemporary Orthodox scholars like Matthew Baker consider other Torrancian works, such as Divine Meaning, as having more significance for Orthodox theologians than the Reformed–Orthodox dialogue. This judgment is on the basis that the Agreed Statement on the Holy Trinity “has received neither official acceptance by the holy synods of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches nor a wide reception by Orthodox theologians,”161 despite being jointly issued by the representative Orthodox and Reformed theologians who took part in the dialogue.

While, as Baker notes, the Reformed/Orthodox dialogue has not had much lasting impact, it is an area of Torrance’s theological output that still offers significant

158 Ibid., 232. 159 Baker, “Interview with Protopresbyter George Dion. Dragas Regarding T. F. Torrance,” 42–43. 160 Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement, 127–43. 161 Baker, “Introduction,” 6–7.

306 potential for the Church. Dragas’ comment that, “it was a general and balanced agreement on initial points, which was not accepted as if it clarified all problems or questions,” helps us to contextualise the significance of this particular dialogue. The statements released should not be regarded as all-encompassing documents, but as offering a foundation from which further dialogue may proceed.

8.4 Chapter Conclusion This chapter has sought to fill out Torrance’s view that ecumenism and evangelism are intertwined, exploring his theological stance on the ecumenical movement, and how this is related to his view of the Church’s mission. It has done so by further exploring the notion of the Church as those reconciled to Christ, who then participate in Christ’s work of reconciliation, which in turn requires reconciliation within the body of Christ. This has required it to draw heavily on sources other than Torrance’s main published works, paying particular attention to his involvement in the ecumenical movement as well as his calls for reform within the Church of Scotland. While the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not always directly in view, this chapter has drawn on the theological work of the previous chapters to draw out the particular implications of both the explicit and implicit implications of the doctrine of the Trinity within Torrance’s ecclesiology when it is applied in a more practical fashion.

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9 COMPARISONS AND CONCLUSIONS

9.0 Chapter Abstract In this penultimate chapter, we will draw together the various strands of this thesis in order to offer some comparative conclusions, and to point to the implications of this theological project. We will contrast Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology as it has been presented in the preceding chapters, through interactions with John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, Jürgen Moltmann and John Zizioulas. The first pairing, Webster and Tanner, are both English-speaking theologians who have engaged significantly with Barth’s work in the late twentieth, and early twenty-first century. They are sympathetic to, but not uncritical of Karl Barth’s legacy; their work demonstrates the divergent strands of the way that Barth’s interpreters developed their own theology. The second pairing, Moltmann and Zizioulas, offer significantly more divergence from Torrance’s theological position than we find in Webster and Tanner. While both of these theologians also show the strong connection between the doctrine of the Trinity, and the doctrine of the Church, their approaches are that of social trinitarianism, resulting in elements of their theology that stand in direct contradiction to Torrance. Interaction with both sets of dialogue partners will help us to situate Torrance’s work within the wider theological conversation. It should be noted from the start that these comparisons are not intended to be a comprehensive engagement with the entire body of work produced by Webster, Tanner, Moltmann, or Zizioulas but instead take up representative texts that have been carefully selected in order to situate Torrance’s work in a broader theological conversation.

9.1 John Webster Introduction John Webster’s chapter ‘On Evangelical Ecclesiology’ appears in Confessing God, the sequel to Word and Church.1 It constitutes the majority of his section on ‘Church and Christian Life’, placed together with chapters on ‘hope’ and ‘evangelical freedom’. This

1 John Webster, Word and Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001). In this collection of essays, Webster cites Torrance quite extensively on his doctrine of Scripture, hermeneutics, on the incarnation, and on the relationship between the ministry of Christ, and the ministry of Church.

309 brief evaluation will compare Webster’s dogmatic approach to the doctrine of the Church with Torrance’s ecclesiology as it has been presented in this thesis. It will be shown that the foundational theological moves that these two theologians use to describe the relationship between the Trinity and the Church are very similar. The parallels will be presented under the sub-headings of (a) the primacy of the doctrine of the Trinity, (b) the importance of communion ecclesiology, (c) the distinction between God’s perfection and the creaturely community of the Church, (d) the way that the social and historical life of the Church is enabled by the Spirit to bear witness to God’s work of reconciliation, and (e) the Church’s proclamation as response to God’s Word.

Webster divides this chapter into two sections. The first section is headed, ‘The Church and the Perfection of God’, in which he argues that ‘evangelical ecclesiology’ has the task of demonstrating that the Church is grounded in God’s self-determination “to be God with his creatures.”2 Since fellowship with God is the final outcome of the gospel, then as Webster argues, the Christian community is a necessary implicate of the gospel. In the second section, entitled ‘The Visible Attests the Invisible’, Webster explores the kind of visibility that the Church has, arguing that because the ultimate ground of the Church is the Triune God, this divine foundation must shape the particular kind of social and historical visibility that it has as a creaturely community which exists in space and time. These two sections mirror the two sections of this thesis, where we began with the theological relationship between God and the Church, and then turned to examine how this shapes the historical, empirical life of the Church.

Ecclesiology is grounded in the Trinity Webster begins by questioning whether the Christian community is necessary or accidental to the gospel, which he frames by asking, “Are gospel and church extrinsically or internally related?”3 Defining the gospel as the triune grace shown in God’s works of creation, reconciliation, and completion, he submits that the Church derives from the plenitude of God’s own life, the rich personal communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God wills, effects, and perfects “a creaturely counterpart to the

2 John Webster, “On Evangelical Ecclesiology,” in Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II (London; New York: T&T Clark International, 2005), 153. 3 Ibid.

310 fellowship of love which is the inner life of the Holy Trinity.”4 Webster, like Torrance, insists that,

A doctrine of the Church is only as good as the doctrine of God which underlies it. This principle—which is simply the affirmation of the primacy of the doctrine of the Trinity for all Christian teaching—means that good dogmatic order prohibits any moves in ecclesiology which do not cohere with the church’s confession of the triune God and of the character of his acts.5 This is where we find one of the most essential similarities between Webster and Torrance—they both ground their ecclesiology in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Webster begins from the theological conception of God’s perfection, noting that if one begins with the economic Trinity, the “relation-in-distinction” of the gospel and Church is at risk of being misconstrued.6 This phrase ‘relation-in-distinction’ exhibits the central thrust of Webster’s understanding of the relationship between the Triune God, and the Church. Relation refers to the genuine fellowship between God and creatures, but this is a fellowship that involves distinction because of the fundamental asymmetry in the relationship, which results from the drastically different nature of divine action and human action.7 In comparison, Torrance does not commonly use the language of ‘God’s perfection,’ preferring to speak of “the trinitarian relations immanent in God himself,”8 but the theological premise is the same—both Torrance and Webster argue for the epistemic and ontological primacy of God in se.

The importance of communion ecclesiology The key question that communion ecclesiology asks, according to Webster, is “What is the relation of the church as creaturely communion to the perfection of the divine communion of Father, Son and Spirit?”9 This thesis has demonstrated that Torrance asks this same question, shaping his answer around the central motif of koinōnia, although he never explicitly identifies himself as belonging to this thematic approach to ecclesiology. Webster is also positive about communion ecclesiology, describing it

4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 156. 6 Ibid., 157. 7 Ibid., 154. 8 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 99. 9 Webster, “On Evangelical Ecclesiology,”159.

311 as the most important ecclesiological trajectory of the past forty years.10 This ecclesiological trend will be considered further in the second half of this chapter.

Both Webster and Torrance, having first argued that ecclesiology must be grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity, explicate how this doctrinal relationship functions through a threefold structure. Torrance articulates a ‘threefold communion’ when discussing the connection between God in se, and the Church which is formed as the creaturely communion which is correlative to God’s Triune communion. Webster writes instead of “three interlocking doctrines,”11 naming the doctrines which are integrated into the relationship between the Trinity and the Church. Although the language Webster and Torrance use is different, the theological implications are the same, including an emphasis on the importance of the incarnation for restoring the communion between God and humanity, and the nature of the Church as the corporate embodiment of salvation.12

To demonstrate this more clearly, we must revisit our material from the fifth chapter. The reader will recall that Torrance begins with a description of the consubstantial communion of God in se, Father, Son and Spirit, who are an eternal perichoretic fellowship of love. Webster identifies this as the Christian doctrine of God, “the Trinity, conceived as a koinonia of divine persons.”13 The next move Torrance makes is that the love of God in se overflows to be embodied in humanity in the person of Jesus Christ by means of the hypostatic union, in whom divine and human nature are united. Christ’s atoning work has made it possible for humans to participate in the communion of the Spirit. Webster identifies this as the doctrine of salvation, which has the end of “the reintegration of human persons in communion, both with God and with others,”14 which does not take place simply by divine fiat, but through the “incarnational union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ.”15 There are significant parallels here once again in the way that Torrance and Webster both emphasise the significance of the

10 Ibid., 158. 11 Ibid., 160. 12 Ibid., 173. 13 Ibid., 160. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid.

312 incarnation for our understanding of atonement. Finally, Torrance states that as the Holy Spirit pours out the love of God within the Church, the Church is formed as a community of love on earth by its participation through Christ and the Spirit in the communion of the Trinity. Through Christ’s assumption of our humanity, humankind is enabled to participate in the communion of the Holy Spirit, who is the bond not only between the Persons of the Trinity, but between God and the Church.16 This is where Webster identifies the doctrine of the Church, as the “gathering of the new humanity into communion with God in Christ,” which takes place through the incarnation.17 He argues that “in the church’s communion, salvation is not so much confessed as bodied forth; the church is saved humankind, the social reality of salvation.”18

Maintaining God’s perfection In all of this, it is clear that Webster and Torrance are focused on thinking correctly about dogmatic structure and theological architectonics. This is seen in Webster’s question as to whether communion ecclesiology inadvertently compromises God’s triune perfection, and so in doing so, disturbs “the fundamental asymmetry of Christ and the church?”19 The same concern is seen in Torrance’s emphasis that ecclesiology is a derivative doctrine. Torrance unambiguously argues that ecclesiology derives from Christology, because it is Christ who is the content of our objective knowledge of God; but as this thesis has robustly demonstrated, Christology is always to be understood in light of, and downstream from, the doctrine of the Trinity. We are reminded again of the helpful contribution that Torrance’s stratified structure of knowledge makes to how we think of doctrinal precedence. The highest level of God in se, is definitive for all theological formulations, and all our experiences within the Church must be correlated to it. Christology is a function of the second level of the three levels which Torrance identifies, which is cross-referenced with both the highest level, of God in se, and the lowest level, of the Church’s experience of receiving revelation.

Webster also avoids any compromising of God’s perfection by focusing on the immanent Trinity and not the economic Trinity in relation to ecclesiology. He suggests

16 Torrance, Atonement, 360. 17 Webster, “On Evangelical Ecclesiology,” 161. 18 Ibid., 160–61. 19 Ibid., 162–63.

313 that we are to think of ‘two movements’ within God; the first is the self-replete life of the Triune God. The second movement is a derivative movement, “a further movement in which the fullness of God is the origin and continuing ground of a reality which is outside his own life.”20 This means that in the relationship between the Triune God and the Church, distance and difference are as essential as union—this is “a mutuality ordered as precedence and subsequence, giving and receiving, and so from which any identification is excluded.”21

Torrance describes this dissimilarity by applying a Chalcedonian lens, or the doctrine of the hypostatic union, to the doctrine of the Church. Just as Jesus Christ has two natures, divine and human, so the Church has two natures. The divine nature is Christ himself, present through the Holy Spirit, while “the human element is the body which composes all creatures who believe and are incorporated into Christ, sacramentally incorporated, but are never anything else in themselves but human and creaturely.”22 The Church’s union with Christ is one of “adoption and grace” rather than of nature, as the Spirit of God comes also to dwell in us.23 This is all to do with the right relationship between God and humanity; Webster thus argues that koinōnia is best translated as fellowship, not as participation, in order to safeguard the essential distinction between the Creator and the creature.24 We also identified earlier Torrance’s appreciation for the Orthodox preference of translating this as ‘communion’ rather than fellowship, and understand that although he switches between the language of fellowship and participation at various times, he repeatedly qualifies his understanding of participation; as humans, we only participate in the fellowship of the Trinity in a way appropriate to our created status, which is never independent of Christ. Consequently, this difference of terminological preference is not a point of particular variance between Webster and Torrance, as both place high value on maintaining the essential difference between the Creator, and the creation, while emphasising the reality of humankind’s relation to the Triune God.

20 Ibid., 166–67. 21 Ibid., 170. 22 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 44. 23 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 265. 24 Webster, “On Evangelical Ecclesiology,” 170.

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There are two related outcomes for ecclesiology which Webster identifies as a result of this distinction between God and the Church. The first is that ecclesiology is not accidental, but is a necessary implicate of the gospel. The second is that “ecclesiology may not become ‘first theology’”25—in other words, “gospel and church exist in a strict and irreversible order, one in which the gospel precedes and the church follows."26 This is the answer to Webster’s question which we identified earlier about how the Church is related to God’s own life. The Church is a creaturely community which is outside God’s Triune life, but its origin is internal to God’s own life, for it flows from God’s own perfect, holy love. This is a movement of grace that “sanctifies creatures for fellowship with the Holy One.”27 By pairing the doctrines of election and holiness— resulting in an understanding of the Church that is primarily to do with its nature as the assembly of the elect, and only secondarily with ecclesial sanctity—Webster argues that we retain God’s perfection, and acknowledge the distinction of the Church from God.28

The Visible Attests the Invisible Having established that a doctrine of the Church must be grounded in the perfection of God, Webster then acknowledges that we must be careful not to end up with an ecclesiology which does not have an enduring, active form in space and time. There is “a real ecclesial horizontal which corresponds to the incarnational and soteriological vertical.”29 Webster is concerned to give a proper account of the Church’s visibility and invisibility, so that we end up with an “orderly account of the relation between God’s perfection and creaturely being and activity.”30 This has also been the focus in the second half of this thesis, in our concern to demonstrate how for Torrance, the temporal nature of order within the Church is shaped by the derivation of ecclesiology from the Trinity.

25 Ibid., 154–5. 26 Ibid., 154. 27 Ibid., 167. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 174. 30 Ibid., 175.

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The question Webster raises in the second half of his chapter is what kind of visibility the Church has. He is not concerned with how to identify between “true believers and hypocrites,”31 but rather with “the church which has form, shape and endurance as a human undertaking, and which is present in the history of the world as a social project. The church is visible in the sense that it is a genuinely creaturely event and assembly, not a purely eschatological polity or culture.”32 There are two points to be considered here.

First, we note that Torrance and Webster both ground the doctrine of the Church in the particular work of the Spirit; which means that once again, “in ecclesiology we are within the sphere of the perfection and sovereignty of God.”33 We must avoid any semi- pelagian tendency here, as if to suggest that by their own efforts humanity could have established the Church. Webster insists that the triune work of reconciliation is grounded in the eternal purpose of the Father, established by the Son who overcomes the alienation between God and humanity, and is then applied to humanity by the Spirit, “in the sense of making actual in creaturely time and space that for which creatures have been reconciled—fellowship with God and with one another.”34 The Church is quite clearly seen to be the work of the triune God. We have already seen Torrance develops this same argument with reference to the prothesis of God’s eternal purpose, which is set forth in the mystērion of the incarnational union of God and human in Jesus Christ, through which humans have koinōnia with God and with each other.

The second point Webster raises is that because the Church is consistently dependent upon the work of the Spirit for its existence, we must speak of the Church’s acts as “acts of attestation or witness.”35 This is a way to describe “the permanently derivative character of the work of the church.”36 Chosen and brought into existence by the dynamic activity of the Triune God, everything the Church does and is must point

31 Ibid., 179. 32 Ibid., 180. 33 Ibid., 181. 34 Ibid., 180. 35 Ibid., 183. 36 Ibid.

316 backwards to this divine election.37 Torrance makes a similar theological move in his insistence that God himself is the constitutive reality of all the Church does in space and time, which consequently requires us to be careful around how we speak of the Church’s acts. As Webster succinctly expresses this dynamic, “Testimony is astonished indication. Arrested by the wholly disorienting grace of God in Christ and the Spirit, the church simply points.”38 This is why the life of the Church has such a particular kind of visibility, for the saints elected by God for fellowship with himself share a common life that is to be “determined at every point of its life by the shockwaves which flow from God’s reconciling work.”39

Throughout this thesis, we have reminded ourselves of Torrance’s claim that the Church does not exist for itself, instead being called to bear witness to the Triune work of reconciliation by being a reconciling community. He insists that the role of the Church is the role of a servant who does not point to oneself, but to Christ, which reveals the difference between the ministry of Christ the redeemer, and the ministry of the Church as the community of redeemed sinners.40 In keeping with this separation, Webster also warns against synthesising Christology and ecclesiology,41 a separation served by the language of witness, because it makes clear the separation between the creaturely ministry of the Church, and the divine work of the Triune God. Acknowledging this essential difference means that we avoid the “transference of agency from God to the church.”42 As Webster further notes,

God may choose to act through creatures; in doing so he elevates the creature but does not bestow an enduring capacity on the creature so much as consecrate it for a specific appointment. And in its acts, the creature remains wholly subservient, ministerial and ostensive. The ontological rule in ecclesiology is therefore that whatever conjunction there may be between God and his saints, it is comprehended within an ever-greater dissimilarity.43

37 Ibid., 184. 38 Ibid., 185. 39 Ibid., 169. 40 Torrance, Atonement, 357. 41 Webster, “On Evangelical Ecclesiology,” 174. 42 Ibid., 186. 43 Ibid., 171.

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This means that the phenomena that make up the life of the Church—“words, rites, orders, history and the rest,” are not themselves constitutive of the Church, but rather “the church becomes what it is as the Spirit animates the forms so that they indicate the presence of God.”44 This is not dualistic but rather reflects the appropriate doctrinal precedence of God’s perfection, through the acknowledgement that “the Spirit’s life- giving and revelatory agency is fundamental to the church’s being, including its visibility in space and time.”45 As Webster continues further, “The church is by virtue of the being and acts of another; and its acts are enabled by and witness to the one to whom the church owes itself and towards whom it is an unceasing turning.”46 This again accentuates the distinction between the Church, and that which it points to; the active witness of the Church “is an ostensive, not an effective, sign.”47 It is only as God himself is present in the creaturely forms of the Church’s ministry that it becomes a true sign.

Proclamation as response The short length of his chapter limits Webster’s ability to fully engage with the topics that have occupied our attention for the last three chapters, where we have examined how an ecclesiology derived from the doctrine of the Trinity then shapes the nature of Church order, the ministry of Word and the sacraments, and the ecumenical awareness of the Church. However, Webster does briefly comment that the proclamation of the Word, and celebration of the sacraments are “the concrete forms of the church’s attestation of the gospel.” They do not ‘realise’ Christ’s work, but are a reference to God’s being and work; they are “the church’s visible acts which let God act.”48 Utilising the motif of koinōnia means that the eucharist cannot be “a retrospective memorial of an absent event, or an illustration of an inner spiritual transaction; rather it is communion: participation in Christ, salvation present and operative and not simply indicated.”49

44 Ibid., 181. 45 Ibid., 183. 46 Ibid., 186. 47 Ibid., 185. 48 Ibid., 186–87. 49 Ibid., 161.

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Webster has more to say about the ministry of the Word than the sacraments,50 doing so with reference to Revelation 1, where the seer John hears a voice speaking, turns to see who it is, and then falls before Christ who has spoken. Just as John turns to hear the voice speaking, the Church also turns, and in doing so, “receives its appointment to a specific task: it is summoned to speech.”51 Proclamation is therefore a responsive act, for as Webster maintains, “the church speaks because it has been spoken to. Only because there is a word from this son of man—only, that is, because there is a Word of God—is there a word to be uttered by the church.”52 This is done not just through doctrinal affirmations about Scripture, but rather in the constant movement which is intrinsic to the Church’s being: “that ceaseless turn to the voice of its Lord, and that echoing act of witness.”53 The Church hears the Word of God through Scripture, “the elect, consecrated auxiliary through which the living one walks among the churches and makes known his presence.”54 It then proclaims this living Word in dependence, but never independently.

Concluding Reflections “On Evangelical Ecclesiology” is an accessible chapter that neatly summarises how Webster views the relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity, and the doctrine of the Church, and is the kind of succinct work that makes one wish that T. F. Torrance had written something similar. This first comparison has shown that there are significant similarities between Webster’s description of an ‘evangelical ecclesiology’, and the content of Torrance’s ecclesiology. By way of a conclusion, Webster proposes that evangelicals must offer what they have received in their own tradition, to the wider Church; but this will only happen if evangelicals can return to the deep traditions which they belong to, and “demonstrate the supreme ecumenical virtue of acknowledging that we also need to change.”55 Torrance would have approved of such a call for the Church to be ever-reforming, semper reformanda. Webster and Torrance both emphasise that koinōnia ecclesiology is key to ecumenical dialogue, for it is not so

50 Ibid., 187. 51 Ibid., 190. 52 Ibid., 188. 53 Ibid., 191. 54 Ibid., 189. 55 Ibid., 192.

319 much a set of doctrines as a shared approach to theology which has a definable ‘family resemblance’, procuring freedom from inherited doctrinal straitjackets, and offering the chance “to develop a richer ecclesiology untrammelled by inherited traditions.”56

9.2 Kathryn Tanner Introduction Our comparison of Webster and Torrance demonstrated that there is significant convergence in their work. In particular we highlighted the way in which they assign the doctrine of the Trinity a fundamental place in the development of ecclesiology, which enables the development of a doctrine of the Church which is relatively free from anthropocentric elements of the received tradition. We may now add the voice of Kathryn Tanner into this conversation. Much of Tanner’s material is similar to Torrance and Webstershe draws specifically upon Torrance in a number of places, and her foundations are both Christological and trinitarian.

It is important to note that despite this similarity, Tanner does not simply replicate Torrance’s theology. While the core premises of their theological structure are the same, our interest in this comparison lies in the way that Tanner develops elements that Torrance only dealt with somewhat perfunctorily. Neither her brief systematic theology, Christ, Humanity and the Trinity, nor its sequel, Christ the Key, pay sustained attention to ecclesiology, but the key relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity, and the life of the people of God is present nonetheless.57 Pauw describes this element of Tanner’s work as an “incipient ecclesiology.”58 In what follows, we will focus on Tanner’s exploration of our union with God in Christ, and the consequences of this for the shape of human life, both in terms of humanity’s relationship to God, and relationships with each other, taking care to note where there are Torrancian influences. We will also acknowledge Tanner’s disenchantment with social

56 Ibid., 159. 57 Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), vii, notes that Christ the Key takes the “heart of the theological vision” presented in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, and applies it in a less systematic fashion to “otherwise tired theological topics.” 58 Amy Plantinga Pauw, “Ecclesiological Reflections on Kathryn Tanner's Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity,” Scottish Journal of Theology 57, no. 2 (2004): 221.

320 trinitarianism, drawing upon her critique of the various ways in which contemporary theologians seek to evaluate human life with reference to the doctrine of the Trinity.

God as gift-giver: increasing unity with God The common theme throughout Tanner’s work is the idea of God as gift-giver; “God as the giver of all good gifts, their fount, luminous source, fecund treasury, and store house.”59 She focuses upon how God gives gifts to humanity, and the way that humans are themselves made “ministers of divine beneficence,” called to witness to God’s goodness.60 Tanner describes this in historical terms. Throughout history, God increasingly brings the world into closer unity within himself. This must happen because God is able to gift the world with the abundant fullness of his Triune life, “only to the extent the world is united by God to Godself over the course of the world’s time.”61

The way Tanner develops this contains significant parallels to Torrance’s diachronic ecclesiology wherein he views the Church as a unified body that has three different phases throughout history. The first phase is that which Torrance describes as the “preparatory phase before the Incarnation,”62 seen in the calling of Abraham, and the covenant formed between his descendants and God. Tanner also draws upon the covenant fellowship between God and Israel, but highlights that in this historical period, God’s gifts are external to God, rather than the communication of his own divine being.63 Even though God gives himself as gift to Israel, “unlike trinitarian relations, these covenant relations are still, however, relations at a distance.”64

The second phase of the Church in Torrance’s account begins when the Church is given a new form through Jesus Christ, who “gathered up and reconstructed the one people of God in himself, and poured out his Spirit upon broken and divided humanity.”65 The

59 Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 1. 60 Ibid., 79. 61 Ibid., 2. 62 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 193. 63 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 42-43. 64 Ibid., 45. 65 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 193.

321 incarnation is the key transitory event for Torrance, and also for Tanner, who comments that the incarnation is how God removes the distance inherent in the Old Testament’s covenantal relations. In Jesus, God undertakes to “relate to us in a less external way than God does in covenant relations with us.”66 God (the Word) unites himself to what is not God (through Jesus’ assumption of humanity) in such a way that what is not God (humanity) is made God’s own (because it is united to God fully in the hypostatic union.) Humanity and divinity are united in Christ in such a way that God can fully give the gift of himself to that which is not God.67 In the present age, the ’overlap of the ages’, this is only imperfectly realised, but in the eschaton, humans will realise the fullness of the union with God which they already partially experience.

At this point we must note that Tanner views the God-world relationship as fundamentally asymmetrical; while God freely gives the world all that he has to give, that which is not God cannot receive this in its fullness, for “creatures are not of the same essence or substance as God and therefore the Persons of the Trinity cannot communicate to creatures what they communicate to one another.”68 This is why the incarnation is unique; Jesus is the perfect embodiment of God’s goodness in the world, and “lives out in a fully human form the mode of relationship among Father, Son and Spirit in the Trinity,”69 in a way that we cannot do because of our sin, and our temporality. It is only through Christ that we are incorporated into the life of the Trinity, specifically in the place of the second person of the Trinity. We will return to this point shortly.

The third phase of the Church according to Torrance is the “final and eternal form when Christ comes again to judge and renew his creation.”70 The telos of history cannot be hurried along by humanity’s efforts, but must wait for the parousia of Christ, when God’s judgment and lovewhich are inseparablewill be utterly revealed. Tanner also notes that in the current time “a gap exists between the results of world processes and the world’s consummation, a gap to be bridged by a God with the power to reverse

66 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 46. 67 Ibid., 47. 68 Ibid., 42. 69 Ibid., 19. 70 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 193.

322 those results.”71 However, for Tanner, “the central claim of eschatology must not refer to what happens at the end,”72 for what is really important is the character of our new relationship to God, described as eternal life. Returning to the language of gift-giving, Tanner notes that “eternal life is itself a greater gift (and brings in its train greater gifts) than the relationship with God that creatures enjoy simply as creatures.”73

Tanner’s Doctrine of God This discussion of the similarities in the way that Tanner and Torrance both draw on history to describe the relation of God to humanity is useful in allowing us to note some explicit similarities between their work, however, it also leads us into the next area of Tanner’s theology that we must deal with, which is her doctrine of God. It should be starting to become obvious that for Tanner, the incarnation of Jesus Christ is a central focus. She shares Torrance’s stance that it is uniquely through the incarnation that we are enabled to know the Triune God, and explicitly cites Torrance’s influence when making the point that,

The whole of who God is for us as creator and redeemer, which in its varied complexity might simply overwhelm and mystify us, is found in concentrated compass in Christ. Christ in this way provides, we shall see, a clue to the pattern or structure that organizes the whole even while God’s ways remain ultimately beyond our grasp.74 In support of her point here, Tanner cites Theology in Reconciliation where Torrance highlights Athanasius’ emphasis that theology must proceed from the starting point of God’s “economic condescension to us in Christ.”75 She also cites from Divine Meaning, where Torrance draws on Irenaeus’ discussion of anakephalaiosis, his understanding of Christ’s recapitulation in the descent and ascent of the incarnation. 76 Athanasius and Irenaeus are both key Fathers from whom Torrance draws. Tanner herself frequently draws on the Fathers, although she notes that Christ the Key is “highly ecletic in its use

71 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 99. 72 Ibid., 104. 73 Ibid., 109. 74 Tanner, Christ the Key, viii. 75 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 260. 76 Torrance, Divine Meaning, 121-3.

323 of the history of Christian thought… [intending] to show the fruitfulness of a kind of internalizing of the history of Christian thought for its creative redeployment.”77

While Torrance makes use of the doctrine of perichoresis as a regulative principle for his doctrine of the Trinity, Tanner rarely refers to perichoresis, and when she does, she is usually critiquing the way that social trinitarianism makes use of the concept. She notes that in a “progressively political trinitarian” approach, perichoresis has to carry a heavy load that has not been shown to be compatible with an emphasis on the economic subordination of the Son;78 suggests that perichoresis is sometimes little more than a projection of what the theologian already thinks perfect mutuality and relationality should look like;79 and is at risk of being reduced to a ‘way of being’ that humans can replicate, despite their finitude.80 She makes no significant mention of koinōnia and commits little energy towards explaining the notion of a human community that derives from the Triune communion. We will explore the work that she does undertake in this direction when we consider her ecclesiology specifically.

Despite not sharing the same central motif of koinōnia as Torrance, there are still significant comparisons with Tanner that are valuable dialogue points. We begin by noting their parallel use of the language of descent and ascent, to describe the two movements that take place in the incarnation. The first movement is one of descent as the Son and the Spirit are sent into a sinful world for the sake of humanity’s reconciliation to God. This movement of descent does not involve two separate acts, “one moving from Father to Son, and the other from Son to Spirit,”81 because “the Spirit is what gives Christ the ability to carry out the mission upon which he has been sent; he is therefore never without it. Everything Christ accomplishes for us is accomplished via the Spirit.82 The Son and Spirit are intertwined in the “mission of redemption that they undertake from the Father.”83 The corresponding second movement is one of

77 Tanner, Christ the Key, ix. 78 Ibid., 218. 79 Ibid., 223. 80 Ibid., 231. 81 Ibid., 162. 82 Ibid., 165. 83 Ibid., 172.

324 ascent, for once the Son and Spirit have accomplished their mission they return to the Father. As we noted in our discussion of Tanner’s explanation of God’s gift-giving, we are included in the ascent of the Son and Spirit to the Father, so that all the goods of the Father become ours.84

At the heart of this dual movement is the doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ; we can almost hear Torrance speaking through Tanner’s observation that since the humanity Jesus assumes is our fallen humanity that struggles with sin, then “each aspect of Jesus’ life and death, moreover, is purified, healed and elevated over the course of time, in a process that involves conflict and struggle with the sinful conditions of its existence.”85 Tanner explains that she believes that “the connection between incarnation and atonement disrupts ‘external forensic and juridical’ accounts of the atonement,” and also highlights Torrance’s influence on this aspect of her work by commenting that he emphasises this argument more strongly than she does.86 The consequence of all this is that we see just how central the incarnation is for Tanner, as the means of humanity’s union with God through union with Christ as empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Tanner also notes that baptism and the eucharist offer us a way to understand the dual movement of descent and ascent. In baptism we are made one with Christ before we ever demonstrate that unity in our lives, just as Christ chooses us before we ever choose him. The eucharist “repeats in miniature the whole movement of ascent and descent, going to the Father and receiving from him, through Christ in the Spirit.”87 In contrast to this, Torrance doesn’t associate baptism and the eucharist with descent and ascent, instead describing baptism as a one-time sacrament through which we are incorporated into Christ once and for all, and the eucharist as a gift for the continual renewal of the Church in the time between the two advents.88 Tanner offers a criticism of Torrance here, suggesting that along with Josef Jungman, he tends to “associate assent to the Father so exclusively with the humanity of Jesus that they overlook return

84 Ibid., 160-172. 85 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 27. 86 Ibid., 29. 87 Tanner, Christ the Key, 200. 88 See the discussion in Chapter 7.3 on the sacraments.

325 as part of a divine trinitarian movement as well.”89 Tanner’s critique is seen to be overstated when one considers the careful way in which Torrance develops the doctrine of mutual coinherence, and the mutual mediation of the Son and the Spirit in the economy, as we presented particularly in Chapter 3.3 and Chapter 5.5.

In our discussion of Torrance’s presentation of the economic taxis of the Trinity, we saw that he maintains the traditional pattern of the movement of descent as from the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit, and the movement of ascent as in the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father.90 He views these prepositions and their specific order as describing how “the distinctive mode of operation by each of the three divine Persons is maintained,”91 even while the being and activity of the Trinity remains unified and indivisible. In contrast, Tanner is less concerned about maintaining the specific economic order of the persons, arguing that “because they both come out and return together [from the Father], either Son or Spirit can be viewed as the hinge of the whole movement, at the end, so to speak, of the coming out and return.”92 Thus, Tanner argues that we can describe the pattern of descent and ascent as either “F>sp>S>sp>F (with an emphasis on the Son), or “F>s>SP>s>F (with an emphasis on the Spirit), because it is both at once.”93 However, despite Torrance’s insistence on maintaining the traditional pattern, in comparison with Tanner’s fluidity in how we must describe of this economic order, the difference is a matter of language rather than content; there are consequently only minor discreprancies between Tanner and Torrance on their view of the perichoretic coinherence of the three persons.

Humanity’s participation in the Trinity In order to maintain the fundamental asymmetry between the divine and the human, Tanner proposes that God must give us something that we cannot inherently possess.94 This is what takes place in Christ, who is the perfect image of God and yet also fully human; Jesus is “more than a paradigm… he has become for us the very means” of our

89 Tanner, Christ the Key, 200, fn. 97. 90 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 196. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Tanner, Christ the Key, 195. 94 Tanner, Christ the Key, 7-8.

326 participation in the Triune life.95 Tanner defines participation as “sharing in something that one is not,”96 which helps us to recognise the difference between the way that Jesus as the second person of the Trinity participates in the divine life, and the ways that we as created humans participate in the divine life. Jesus is the image of God in a unique way, since he shares fully in the divine nature. By contrast, humans can image God in either a weak sensethat is, simply the fact that we derive our life and being from Godor a strong sense, where God gifts to us that which is not ours by nature.97

It is the latter sense that Tanner draws on when developing her account of the relationship between the Trinity and humanity. In this ‘strong sense of participation’, our lives take on a trinitarian shape, not because of who we are intrinsically, but only as we remain in continuous connection to the Word. As Tanner reflects, “if we image the relations among members of the trinity, we do not do so in and of ourselves, because, for example, the relations among our own creative capacities imitate those of the persons of the trinity. We image them instead by way of an actual close attachment to them.”98 In other words, the incarnation does not change God’s being by fully assimilating our humanity into the divine nature. God remains fully God, even though the incarnation unites humanity and divinity in Jesus Christ. Through the hypostatic union, humanity’s relationship to God is changed, but only as long as we remain in dependent fellowship with God. To return to the language of descent and ascent, Christ descends into our humanity, and becomes one of us and one with us. In this way, humanity is unified with Christ through the Spirit, and thus in his corresponding movement of ascent, we are brought to God in Christ. To understand how Tanner explains this second movement we must recall the language of gift-giving which is prevalent in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity. We saw that God is the giver of all good gifts to humanity, which he gives to humanity by bringing them into union with himself. Tanner subsequently explains the way that God is not changed, but humanity is changed through union with God, when she writes,

95 Ibid.,14. Tanner also notes that Jesus “does not just have the divine image within himself through participation but is it, and therefore his humanity can neither exhibit the divine image in an imperfect way nor lose it.” (35) 96 Ibid., 7. 97 Ibid., 8-17. 98 Ibid., 142-143.

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In the language of the ancient Church, God is not going anywhere when God becomes human; we are being brought to God, assumed into the divine trinitarian life. God is doing what God is always doing, attempting to give all that God is to what is not God.99 Although Tanner suggests that we are “assumed into the divine trinitarian life,” this is awkward wording that belies her wider theological stance, and risks blurring the absolute distinction between God and humanity. This is not her intent. Her work consistently emphasises the necessity of humankind remaining in constant communion with God, through Christ and in the Spirit, which is why when Tanner describes our unity with God, or our participation in the Triune life, she is not suggesting that humans become divine. It is helpful to note the issue with this phrasing of being “assumed into the divine trinitarian life,” and to instead hold in the forefront of our thought Tanner’s actual perspective which is similar to that of Torrance, that there is an asymmetry to the hypostatic union, so that God is “free to enter into intimate community with us, without loss to the divine nature, without sacrificing the difference between God and us.”100 It is only ever in Christ that we participate in the Triune life. As a member of the Trinity, Christ’s divinity is not affected even while through his assumption of humanity, our humanity is transformed. Tanner directly draws on Torrance to make this point in her own work, citing his statement that, “because the presence of God is creative, instead of excluding or overwhelming what is human, it posits it, upholds, and renews it.”101 The Triune God does not “make itself over in a human image of community,” but rather “makes over human life in the trinity’s image by way of our entrance into its own life through Christ.”102

Tanner’s Ecclesiology We come now to consider the relationship between the Trinity and Tanner’s incipient ecclesiology. Tanner acknowledges that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are unified in action, albeit in their different modes of being—the preferred term of Karl Barth which Torrance rejects, preferring to talk of the three Triune persons who are constituted by their relations with each other—and then asks what this means for our relations with

99 Ibid., 15. 100 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 11. 101 Tanner, Christ the Key, 297, citing Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 155. 102 Ibid., 235.

328 each other. How are humans to live as a result of our connection to the life of the Trinity? The following quote helpfully introduces us to some of the major ecclesiological points that Tanner believes are implied by our assumption into the Trinity through our union with Jesus Christ:

We are united with one another, we form a community, the church, as we are united in Christ through the power of the Spirit. This is to be a universal community in that the whole world is at least prospectively united with Christ in and through the triune God’s saving intentions for the whole world that has always been the object of God’s gift-giving, from the beginning. We are brought together in this community without overriding the particularities of our persons; we are united with one another as what we are and remain in our differences. Thus, the Holy Spirit unites us in Christ even as the Holy Spirit encourages the uniqueness of our persons by a diversity of gifts of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit respects our differences while uniting us in Christ in the same way that the Holy Spirit respects and maintains the differences between Father and Son even as it attests to and bears the love of the Son back to the Father.103 This is as close as Tanner comes in either Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity or Christ the Key to developing a formal doctrine of the Church. We can quite clearly identify some similarities with Torrance here. They both hold that humankind are formed into the Church only as each person is united to Christ through the Spirit, so that the ground of our union with each other is our union with God. They also both hold that the scope of redemption is the whole cosmos. Finally, they also both note the unity and diversity of the Church; even though there are significant differences between humans, the Spirit brings us into unity with God and one another, while retaining our diversity.

Tanner dislikes the approach of modelling human relations directly on trinitarian relationsas we will shortly examine but this does not mean that she has nothing to say about what the life of the Christian community should embody. She contends that “we are to be for one another as God the Father is for us through Christ in the power of the Spirit,”104 because “human community is to reflect the structure of God’s own relations with us.”105 However, Tanner stops short here of arguing for a direct correlation between the Trinitarian relations, and human relations; she is uncomfortable with the way that some theologians have applied the social model of

103 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 83. 104 Ibid., 79. 105 Ibid., 81.

329 the Trinity to the doctrine of the Church, particularly given that most proponents of social trinitarianism tend to be more concerned with political, than distinctly ecclesiological, outcomes.

Tanner deals with this issue in both Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, and Christ the Key. In the former, her first reason is that the social trinitarian approach downplays the difference between divine trinitarian relations, and finite human social relations. Tanner is emphatic that we need to respect “the creature’s finite boundedness.”106 The second reason is that this approach loses a realistic sense of the capacities of human relations by trying to force them into trinitarian modes, since humans are only capable of experiencing fellowship with God as an external form of relationship, rather than sharing coinherently in God’s being.

Tanner offers a more extended critique in her chapters on ‘Trinitarian Life’ and ‘Politics’ in Christ the Key, where she negatively evaluates attempts to use the doctrine of the Trinity to “establish how human societies should be organized” and as an “indicator of the proper relationship between individual and society.”107 Tanner is adamant that “figuring out the socio-political lessons of the trinity is a fraught task,”108 not least because of the varied interpretations which can be derived from the doctrine of the Trinity. The chief problem in basing human relationships on the Trinity is that there are essential differences between God and humanity. Tanner identifies three specific challenges that arise when drawing on the doctrine of the Trinity to describe what human relationships should look like.

The first challenge is the limitations of our knowledge of the Trinity. “What we are puzzled about – the proper character of human society – is explicated with reference to what is surely only more obscurethe character of the divine community.”109 Because we use human language and concepts to speak of the Trinity we must recognise that “God is not very comprehensible to us,” and so our interpretation of what an account of the Trinity means for human life offers “little more than what the

106 Ibid., 81–82. 107 Tanner, Christ the Key, 207 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid, 222.

330 theologian already believes.”110 This is where Tanner’s critique of the way in which social trinitarianism uses the concept of perichoresis may be situated, as we have already identified.

The second challenge is that much of the content of the doctrine of the Trinity simply cannot have a direct application to humanity because of the “essential finitude of human beings.”111 This particularly applies to the different forms of relationality that exist between the Triune persons, and the forms of relationality between humans. When one divine person acts, all the divine persons act; however humans are never this closely intertwined with other humans. We only ever know other humans incompletely and mediately.112 As Tanner notes, human finitude “seems to require the policing of boundaries between themselves and others that breaks off relationships.”113

Finally, the third challenge Tanner observes is that the trinitarian persons can give and receive without cost; for humans, giving and receiving involves loss and gain. “Direct translation of the trinity into a social program is problematic because, unlike the peaceful and perfectly loving mutuality of the trinity, human society is full of suffering, conflict, and sin.”114 At its worst, trinitarian community is presented to humanity as a fanciful ideal, and humanity is simply left “with no clue as to how we might get to it.”115

Of these three challenges, it is the absolute separation between divinity and humanity that presents the most significant challenge to applying the model of the Trinity to human life. This is easily answered by gathering up our discussion of Tanner’s work thus far, for it is Jesus Christ who is the solution. For Tanner, humans are not called to imitate the Triune relations, but to participate in them,116 which we can only do through the Son, the second person of the Trinity. This is why Tanner argues that Christology is more helpful than the doctrine of the Trinity for making observations

110 Ibid, 223. 111 Ibid, 224. 112 Ibid, 224-226. 113 Ibid, 227. 114 Ibid, 228. 115 Ibid., 229. 116 Ibid.

331 about the proper character of human relationships.117 All humans are incorporated into the Trinity at the same point, through the Son. This Christocentric approach, which leads us into the Trinity, does not require us to find ways around the irreconcilable differences between God and humanity, because humanity and divinity are joined in Christ. This is a ‘strong form’ of participation in the life of the Trinity: “humans do not attain the heights of trinitarian relations by reproducing them in and of themselves… but by being taken up into them as the very creatures they are.”118 Humankind can only share in the trinitarian relations by way of our union with Christand only do so imperfectly “because of our finitude and our sin.”119

The Nature and Mission of the Church In Tanner’s opinion, Jesus’ relations to the Father and Spirit do not show us what relationships among humans should be; they show us how to relate to the Triune God as created humans.120 “The trinity itself enters our world in Christ to show us how human relations are to be reformed in its image.”121 The question that concerns us in this final section is the nature of the Christian community and how it participates in the redemptive mission of God while it awaits the eschaton. We may commence our inquiry here by noting Tanner’s insistence that while there is an analogy between the Trinity, and the nature of the Church, this is not an exclusive analogy; we might derive the same understanding of the kingdom of God from any other number of doctrines. She insists that the principles of the kingdom that are more important than which doctrine they are derived from.122 As God communicates his gifts to us, “we, in short, are sanctified and serve the ends of trinitarian love. Human beings become in this way the administrative center of cosmic-wide service.”123 God does not need anything from us, but the world does, which is why our union with Christ and the Spirit, through which we are given to participate in the dynamic life of the Trinity, results in an “active

117 Ibid, 208. 118 Ibid, 236. Tanner’s lengthy discourse on the difference between weak and strong forms of participation in the Triune life is found in her chapter ‘Human Nature’, in Christ the Key, 1-57. 119 Ibid., 245. 120 Ibid., 243. 121 Ibid, 234. 122 Ibid., 242. 123 Ibid., 61.

332 fellowship or partnership with the Father.”124 Through union with Jesus Christ, our lives come to be incorporated “within the workings ad extra of the Trinity.”125 Participation in the Triune life of God is not simply about adoration, but is about our active engagement in the Triune mission, and,

sharing in God’s own dynamic trinitarian life of indivisible threefold movement as that dynamism is extended outward to us, to include us, in this triune God’s relations with us in Christ. Eternal life means a community of life with God in Christ, a community of action in which we are taken up into Christ’s own action for the world. As Jesus does the life-giving work of the Spirit, we, in virtue of our union with Christ, are to do the same. Eternal life turns attention, then, not just to the benefits we are to receive through Christ—our being healed, purified, elevated by Christ in the power of the Spirit—but to our active participation in Christ’s own mission.126 Tanner is insistent that Christians are empowered by Jesus’ own ministry to be ministers of divine beneficence to each other.127 This is related to the language of descent and ascent, but the order “is initially reversed for us, since we enter into it at the point of Christ’s return to the Father.”128 Consequently, the eucharist provides us with a model for ministry, where the minister “distribut[es] outwards, to others, the gifts of the Father that have become ours in and through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit,”129 as an overflow of the fullness of Father, Son and Spirit. We must first receive from God ourselves, in order to be able to give God’s good gifts to others. Tanner again does not see any need to differentiate between the sending of the Son and Spirit here, arguing that humans are sent “from the Father to become the image of the Son in the world by way of the power of the Spirit, or from the Father to live a Spirit- filled life with Christ in his mission from the world.”130 Whichever way we describe this, “the Christian experience of service to God’s mission for the world… assumes a properly trinitarian shape.”131 This is all very similar to Torrance’s view of the mission of the Church as participation through the Spirit in the ongoing work of the Triune God,

124 Ibid., 70. 125 Ibid., 67. 126 Ibid., 120–21. 127 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity ,79. 128 Tanner, Christ the Key, 197 129 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 80. 130 Tanner, Christ the Key, 205. 131 Ibid., 206.

333 and not something which the Church ever does independently. When the Spirit is at work through us, Tanner suggests that our acts attain a particular extrospective shape, so that we should live ‘eccentrically’—looking beyond ourselves, and paying attention “to what is being done by God for us.”132 The mission of God involves,

bringing in the kingdom or new community that accords with Jesus’ own healing, reconciling, and life-giving relations with others. Jesus’ relations with Father and Spirit make his whole life one of worshipful, praise-filled, faithful service to the Father’s mission of bringing in the kingdom; that is to be the character of our lives too, both in and out of church, as we come to share Jesus’ life.133 Concluding Reflections In this comparison of Tanner’s ecclesiology with Torrance’s ecclesiology, we have seen that there are several key similarities. The most fundamental of these are Christological, for both Tanner and Torrance insist that we only know God through the incarnation, and both understand atonement as taking place through Christ’s vicarious humanity. Tanner is generally appreciative of Torrance’s work, although she is oddly critical with her suggestion that he places too much emphasis on Christ’s humanity. Placing these two theologians side by side throws their work into sharper relief, acting as a tool which allows us to see any internal inconsistencies in a clearer light, and also helping us to appreciate the subtleties of their work in a more nuanced fashion.

The main point on which Tanner and Torrance diverge is in the scope of their accounts of the relationship between the Trinity and the Church. Although she and Torrance both draw on the Fathers, Tanner draws her trinitarian theology primarily from the Gospel narratives and how they describe the relationship between Father, Son and Spirit. Overall, she does less work to develop a formal doctrine of the Trinity, and consequently less work to ground the doctrine of the Church in the doctrine of the Trinity, than we find in Torrance. This is related to her wariness about social trinitarianism, and the ways in which it can be manipulated, for example, to support divergent political visions. She reacts critically to the suggestion that the Christian community should be modelled after the social relationships within the Trinity, and also gives more attention to explaining the pitfalls of this approach than Torrance does.

132 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, 73. 133 Tanner, Christ the Key, 240-241.

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Her dislike of social trinitarianism also explains why Tanner makes little use of perichoresis and koinōnia as regulative ecclesiological motifs, whereas they are central for Torrance. Instead of focusing on these technical theological terms, Tanner instead focuses on the idea of God as gift-giver, who brings humanity into union with himself in order to be able to give them good gifts, including participation in the union of the Holy Trinity. This language does not conflict with, but rather complements, Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology.

9.3 Jürgen Moltmann Introduction Tanner’s critique of social trinitarianism will be of use as we turn to our next dialogue partner, Jürgen Moltmann. Just as much of Torrance’s theology is related to his experience in parish ministry and wartime chaplaincy, Jürgen Moltmann’s theology also stems from his wartime experience. Moltmann acknowledges the biographical element’s influence upon an individual’s theology, and seeks to highlight this in his work.134 In the same way that Torrance’s missionary upbringing shaped his commitment to serve the mission of the Church as a theologian, Moltmann’s experience of suffering gives rise to the eschatological and liberation foci of his work. Captured and held as a prisoner of war for almost three years, it was in the POW camp that Moltmann turned to God and began his theological journey. He reflects that his experiences of death in the war, the acknowledgement of the German peoples’ guilt, and “the inner perils of utter resignation behind barbed wire” became the foundations of his theology.135 This led to the consistent themes in his theological oeuvre of “God as the power of hope and of God’s presence in suffering.”136 For Moltmann, suffering intrinsically shapes one’s theology, because “it is in suffering that the whole human question about God arises.”137

134 Jürgen Moltmann, Experiences in Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 2000), xviii. 135 Ibid., 4. 136 Richard Bauckham, “Jürgen Moltmann” in The Modern Theologians, ed. David Ford (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 147. 137 Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, Press, 1993), 47.

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The material that will be presented in this comparison has been selected to offer the most salient comparison of Torrance’s and Moltmann’s work as is possible. We will begin with a brief exploration of the role which eschatology plays in Moltmann’s ecclesiology. This will allow us to describe the contours of Moltmann’s doctrine of God, in order to evaluate how he relates the doctrine of the Trinity to the doctrine of the Church. Our focus will then turn to elements of the Church’s visible life, with the goal of highlighting key similarities and differences between Moltmann and Torrance.

Moltmann’s focus upon eschatology Through this thesis, although we have identified the various arguments about which element of Torrance’s theology holds the governing role, we have posited that his Christocentric doctrine of the Trinity is constitutive for his approach to the theological task. When we come to ask the same question of Moltmann, we see that it is not the Trinity, but eschatology that is constitutive of Moltmann’s approach to theology, and particularly a Christocentric approach to eschatology. This is particularly exemplified in his first trilogy; Moltmann notes in the introduction to the reprint of Theology of Hope that he had “tried to see the whole of theology in a single focus,”138 combining “eschatological redemption and historical liberation in a single coherent perspective of the future.”139 For Moltmann, eschatology is not simply to do with the ‘last days’ or the eschaton since,

Christian faith lives from the raising of the crucified Christ, and strains after the promises of the universal future of Christ… hence eschatology cannot really be only a part of Christian doctrine. Rather, the eschatological outlook is characteristic of all Christian proclamation, of every Christian existence and of the whole Church.140 Christians draw upon the promises of God as their ‘sure foundation’ for the future, which they look to and long for. This eschatological hope should shape the present, which is why liberation and freedom, and promise and hope, are such persistent elements of Moltmann’s theology. These pre-eminent components of his theology are why Moltmann emphasises that the Christian understanding of salvation must not be limited to individual reconciliation with God, but must also involve “the eschatological

138 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, trans. James W. Leitch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 11. 139 Ibid., 11. 140 Ibid., 16.

336 hope of justice, the humanizing of man, the socializing of humanity, peace for all creation.”141 His eschatological vision is for the whole cosmos. Although the eschatological element is also present in Torrance’s work, it is worked out differently. Torrance is not a liberation theologian, and so while he argues, for example, that the call of the Church is to be an ‘expanding ingathering’ which reaches out to the ends of the earth, his ecclesial language is subtly introspective in the sense that it is to do with people being gathered into the Church, whereas Moltmann’s language is consistently more extrospective. This should not be taken as suggesting that Torrance has less concern for those who do not belong to the fellowship of God’s people, but rather that Moltmann’s language is broader and more inclusive. However, this creates problems for Moltmann as we shall see.

Moltmann’s Doctrine of God As we turn to the contours of Moltmann’s doctrine of God, it is necessary to keep these themes of promise and hope, eschatology and liberation, in mind. Moltmann undertakes an extensive criticism of Christian monotheism,142 and rejects both the Western ideas of “God as Supreme Substance” and “God as Absolute Subject.”143 He rejects the “traditional” approach of beginning with the one God, and then moving to the three persons, arguing that in order to properly understand the tri-unity of God, “we must dispense with both the concept of the one substance and the concept of the identical substance,” and focus upon the perichoresis of the divine persons.144 This is in keeping with Moltmann’s reaction against moral and monotheistic interpretations of the New Testament, which reduce God to a single divine subject. Instead, Moltmann begins with the historical life of Jesus as narrated in Scripture, and moves from that towards a doctrine of the Trinity,145 highlighting the way in which the New Testament

141 Ibid., 329. 142 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 129-148. In these pages Moltmann engages with the challenges presented by the heresies of Arius and , as well as demonstrating the limitations he perceives in the work of Tertullian, Barth and Rahner. 143 See Moltmann’s description and critique in Ibid., 10-19. 144 Ibid., 150. It is worth noting that Moltmann uses this term in a perjorative sense. He operates with a negative genealogy of trinitarian history which is biased because of his own perspective. 145 Ibid., 19. Moltmann states that the Scriptures offer “testimony to the history of the Trinity’s relations of fellowship, which are open to men and women, and open to the world.”

337 proclaims “in narrative the relationships of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, which are relationships of fellowship and are open to the world.”146

Moltmann refers to koinōnia and perichoresis as key concepts for his doctrine of the Trinity, but does not make as consistently explicit use of them as we find in Torrance’s work. The doctrine of perichoresis is utilised to explain that the three persons are not three different individuals, nor are they three modes of being of the one God; they are the coinherent Triune persons.147 Hunsinger makes the helpful observation that instead of attempting to do equal justice to both God’s oneness and God’s threeness, Moltmann consistently pits them against one another.”148 Furthermore, Moltmann offers an interesting critique of the word ‘persons’, believing that describing the three Triune persons as persons, hypostases, or ‘modes of being,’ suggests “that they are homogenous and equal [and] blurs the specific differences.”149 He therefore proposes that we should apply different words to each of the three persons in order to avoid modalism, and asserts that “no summing-up, generic terms must be used at all in the doctrine of the Trinity. For in the life of the immanent Trinity everything is unique… we can only really tell, relate, but not sum up.”150 Aside from the confusion that would result from such a move, Moltmann does not emphasise the way in which the language of person emphasises the personal nature of the knowledge of God, which is a key contribution that ‘person’ makes to Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity.151

Although he notes the way in which the Cappadocian understanding of aitia or archē might be profitably used within trinitarian doctrine, Moltmann is cautious about doing so.152 Ultimately, Moltmann argues that this emphasis tends to lead to tritheism,

146 Ibid., 64. 147 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 175. 148 George Hunsinger, “The Trinity and the Kingdom. By Jürgen Moltmann,” The Thomist 47, no. 1 (Jan 1983): 131. 149 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 189. 150 Ibid., 190. 151 Readers should recall our earlier discussions of the influence which Michael Polanyi’s work had on Torrance in this regard. 152 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 166. He only does so cautiously, noting that “if we talk about an order of origin within the Trinity, we must underline its uniqueness and its incomparability when contrasted with any order of origin which is thought of cosmologically.” The benefit of arguing for the Father as the archē is that it emphasises the uniqueness of the Father, contra the Son and the Spirit, however we must be careful not to blur the difference between the Son’s generation and the Spirit’s procession.

338 subordinationism, or an undifferentiated monotheism, and posits instead that the theologian should “remove the concept of the First Cause from trinitarian doctrine altogether, and to confine oneself to an account of the interpersonal relationships.”153 As a related comment on the issue of the filioque, Moltmann argues that a change in the creedal text will not heal the East-West schism; instead suggesting that we must “find a common answer to the question about the relationship of the Son to the Holy Spirit and of the Holy Spirit to the Son.”154 Moltmann’s suggestion is that humans should talk about “the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father of the Son.”155 He argues that the Father is not called Father “because he is the Sole Cause and because all things are dependent on him,”156 but is called Father because he is always and only the Father of the Son, and that this should be highlighted in our speech about the hypostasis of the Father.

This is in keeping with Moltmann’s emphasis on the mutuality and equality of the Triune persons, and the way in which the Church is to be characterised by the same relational equality. Moltmann does offer his own take on relations of origin within the trinity, suggesting that all three persons are a focal point for the unity in the Trinity in their own ways. “The Father forms the ‘monarchial’ unity of the Trinity,” while the perichoretic unity of the three persons is “concentrated round the eternal Son,” while the “uniting mutuality and community proceeds from The Holy Spirit.”157 Although Moltmann claims that this approach aligns with the perichoretic unity of the Trinity, Torrance would almost certainly reject this internal structure because it conflicts with the mutual coinherence of God in se, and comes close to a sort of doctrine of appropriation for the inner relations of God. As we saw earlier, Torrance follows Barth in his approach to the doctrine of appropriation, and the economic taxis of the three persons. The prominent issue is that for Torrance, a form of the doctrine of appropriation can only function at the economic or evangelical level of the Holy Trinity,

153 Ibid., 189. 154 Ibid., 182. 155 Ibid., 185. 156 Ibid., 183. 157 Ibid., 178.

339 and not at the theological or immanent level of God’s ontological being in se, as it seems to for Moltmann.

The mutual, reciprocal relationship between God and the world The element of Christ’s incarnate life which Moltmann focuses on is the Cross, which is in keeping with his focus on God’s presence as a form of hope in suffering. Moltmann argues that the Cross stands at the centre of the Trinity, and illustrates this by referring to Rublev’s icon of the Trinity. “Just as the stands at the centre of the table round which the three Persons are sitting, so the cross of the Son stands from eternity in the centre of the Trinity.”158 Bauckham succinctly helps us to grasp the significance of the Cross for Moltmann’s theology, commenting that its centrality is what leads Moltmann to develop his understanding of the ‘trinitarian history’ of God; “God experiences a history with the world in which he both affects and is affected by the world, and which is also the history of his own trinitarian relationships as a community of divine Persons who include the world within their love.”159 It is through the Cross that God’s openness to the world is made clearest; Moltmann argues that the Cross does not just involve the incarnate Son, but also the Father and the Spirit, and that therefore suffering is not merely external to God, but affects God’s very being.

Moltmann’s position here reveals both agreement and disagreement with Torrance. In positive terms, Torrance appreciates Moltmann’s insight that the whole Trinity is involved in the Cross, although he notes that Moltmann’s “somewhat tritheistic understanding of the unity, rather than the oneness, of the Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit, in spite of what he intends, damages this insight.”160 Torrance also cites Moltmann when he notes that in the Cross we are “led to distinguish between Christ the Son of God and God the Father, while at the same time we think of Christ and worship him as our Lord and God.”161 In support of this point, Torrance notes Moltmann’s comment that it is through Christ’s death and his experience of godforsakenness “that our understanding is opened to the Trinity.”162 Unless we could

158 Ibid., xvi. 159 Richard Bauckham, “Jürgen Moltmann,” 149. 160 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 247, n.39. 161 Ibid., 54. 162 Ibid., 54 n.81.

340 understand this as the way in which God was actually able to enter into our suffering even unto death, without destroying his ‘Godness’, we could not understand how what took place on the Cross is salvific. For Torrance, the Crucifixion only makes sense because God is Triune, for the incarnate Son is crucified, both in differentiation from the Father and Spirit, but still remains in “unbroken oneness with the Father and the Spirit in being and activity.”163 In this way Christ is both our representative and our substitute.

However, the disagreement between Torrance and Moltmann emerges with Moltmann’s insistence that the God-world relation must be reciprocal, because it is living. He states this in axiomatic fashion: “What God means for the world was expressed in the doctrine of the opera trinitatis ad extra. But this doctrine was incapable of expressing what the world means for God.”164 In other words, Moltmann is positing that God needs the world. God is in some way dependent upon the world for the fulfilment of his divine happiness. This leads Moltmann to observe that the world,

puts its impress on God too, through its reactions, its aberrations and its own initiatives. It certainly does not do so in the same way; but that it does so in its own way there can be no doubt at all. If God is love, then he does not merely emanate, flow out of himself; he also expects and needs love.165 As an extension of this vein of thought, Moltmann also blurs the absolute distinction between the Triune God and creation, exemplified by comments such as,

Creation is a part of the eternal love affair between the Father and the Son. It springs from the Father’s love for the Son and is redeemed by the answering love of the Son for the Father. Creation exists because the eternal love communicates himself creatively to his Other.166 As Hunsinger explains, Moltmann’s “claim is simply that the world was created to satisfy God’s needs… the fatal move here, of course, is the idea that God’s love requires something external, that it is not self-sufficient.”167 Richard Bauckham describes this as Moltmann’s form of , which for Moltmann is “a way of expressing an

163 Ibid., 247. 164 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 98. 165 Ibid., 99. 166 Ibid., 59. 167 Hunsinger, “The Trinity and the Kingdom. By Jürgen Moltmann,” 135.

341 intimacy of relation between God and his creation, which does justice both to the divine immanence in creation and to the divine transcendence beyond creation.”168 However, for Moltmann this is not an indiscriminate assimilation of the world into God; as Bauckham comments, “panentheism in Moltmann’s understanding is a movement towards the goal of the future in which ‘God will be all in all.’”169 There are a number of critiques of this, such as the accusation that Moltmann’s panentheism “provided the groundwork for some to secularize the missio Dei,”170 but these lie beyond the scope of our comparison of Moltmann and Torrance.

Torrance explicitly rejects classical panentheism in the form of the ‘Moved Unmover,’ “a panentheistic Deity who is not detached from the ongoing process of this world and is not the transcendent Lord of space and time [and has an] of inextricable attachment to the world.”171 He also rejects Moltmann’s particular form of panentheism with his insistence that there is “no necessary relation between God and the world which he has freely created, for God does not need the world to be God.”172 The difference between Moltmann and Torrance here can be illustrated with reference to Torrance’s stratified structure of reality, where he argues that the tertiary level of God in se, governs the economic actions of God in history at the secondary level, and our experience of God’s actions at the basic level. If the same model were to be applied to Moltmann’s theology, he would see the levels as having a two-way interaction. Moltmann would stillrightlyascribe primacy to the top-down model where the tertiary level governs the lower levels, but would argue for a stronger reciprocal movement from the basic level to the tertiary level than Torrance does. This is because Moltmann holds that for the relationship between God and the world to be truly mutual, God must change in his inner being. Here he is not just concerned with epistemology, but ontology.

168 Richard Bauckham, The Theology of Jürgen Moltmann (London; New York: T&T Clark, 1995), 243. 169 Ibid., 244. 170 David E. Fitch and Geoffrey Holsclaw, “Mission Amid Empire: Relating Trinity, Mission and Political Formation,” Missiology: An International Review 41, no. 4 (2013): 391. 171 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 239. 172 Ibid., 207. Also see 4, where Torrance states that God “does not need relation to us to be what he is as the living acting God.”

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Consequently, Moltmann affirms Rahner’s thesis, but chooses to “surrender the traditional distinction between the immanent and the economic Trinity,”173 because of his view that the relationship between God and the world is one of mutualityalthough not fully reciprocal mutualitybecause God’s inner life is affected by God’s outward actions in history. Joy Ann McDougall observes here that Moltmann “reformulates Rahner’s axiom by emphasizing the identity between the loving relationships of the trinitarian persons with the world and the essence of the divine life.”174 We see this expounded further in Moltmann’s explanation of God’s freedom, which is not the type of sovereignty where “freedom means lordship, power and possession.”175 Instead God’s freedom “belongs to the language of community and friendship… His freedom is his vulnerable love, his openness, the encountering kindness through which he suffers the human beings he loves and becomes their advocate.”176 Where for Torrance, God’s freedom is his freedom to become human in Christ and to impart himself to us through the Spirit, all without ceasing to be the transcendent God who is free bcause he needs nothing,177 the understanding of God’s freedom which Moltmann promulgates here is not the absolute freedom of God in se. Moltmann ends up suggesting that because God’s freedom is found in relationship to others, then the God-world relation is necessary for God to be God. Moltmann is so committed to the openness of God that he ends up ‘reducing’ God’s Godness.

Relating the doctrine of the Trinity to the doctrine of the Church While Moltmann recognises that there are many different ways in which a theory of the church can be developed, whether from experience, sociologically, historically, or in religious comparison, he argues that the theological doctrine of the church must take seriously its claim to be “the church of Christ... [that] does everything in the name of the triune God.”178 However Moltmann also claims that Christology is to be “the dominant theme of ecclesiology. Every statement about the church will be a statement

173 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 160. 174 Joy Ann McDougall, “The Return of Trinitarian Praxis? Moltmann on the Trinity and the Christian Life,” The Journal of Religion, 83, no.2 (Apr 2003): 183. 175 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 56. 176 Ibid. 177 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 152-153. 178 Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 5.

343 about Christ.”179 Our investigation of the relationship between Christology and the Trinity for Torrance’s ecclesiology bears fruit here, for in the same way that they function in tandem in Torrance’s work, they function in tandem in Moltmann’s work. We may note the consistent attention that Moltmann gives to the person of the Holy Spirit in relation to ecclesiology, so that we must understand his Christology and pneumatology as functioning in tandem with his doctrine of the Trinity, and inseparably in relation to ecclesiology.

To understand the way in which Moltmann relates the doctrine of the Trinity to the doctrine of the Church, we can begin with his own vision, “to understand the triune God as the God who is community, who calls community into life and who invites men and women into sociality with him,” for it is only on this basis that “the community of Christ is permitted to see itself as an earthly reflection of the divine Triunity.”180 Moltmann rejects the psychological doctrine of the Trinity, and develops a social doctrine which is based on salvation history.181 Moltmann is in agreement with Torrance that the fellowship of God’s people is related to the divine perichoresis, since “the history of God’s trinitarian relationships of fellowship corresponds to the eternal perichoresis of the Trinity.”182 However, Moltmann’s focus falls much more upon the egalitarian nature of the Christian community. He argues that the doctrine of perichoresis necessarily entails rejecting any notion of a hierarchical trinitarian monarchy. Instead, “the perichoretic at-oneness of the triune God corresponds to the experience of the community of Christ, the community which the Spirit unites through respect, affection and love.”183

The liberationist themes of Moltmann’s theology are also evident when he describes the nature of the Christian community, insisting that because God is revealed most clearly to humanity in his suffering and weakness at the Cross, then “the glory of the triune God is reflected, not in the crowns of kings and the triumphs of victors, but in the face of the crucified Jesus, and in the faces of the oppressed whose brother he

179 Ibid., 6. 180 Ibid., xv. 181 Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 157. 182 Ibid. 183 Ibid., 157-158.

344 became. He is the one visible image of the invisible God.”184 The perichoretic unity of the Triune God does not correlate with either a human who claims lordship over others, or a solitary human being without relationships.

It is not the monarchy of a ruler that corresponds to the triune God; it is the community of men and women, without privileges and without subjugation. The three divine Persons have everything in common, except for their personal characteristics. So the Trinity corresponds to a community in which people are defined through their relations with one another and in their significance for one another, not in opposition to one another, in terms of power and possession.185 This is a consistent theme in Moltmann’s ecclesiology. Moltmann argues that the Church needs a reform, “from a religious institution that looks after people into a congregational or community church in the midst of the people, through the people and with the people.”186 He further suggests that the Church’s vision must be for “free decision in faith, voluntary sociality, mutual recognition and acceptance of one another and a common effort for justice and peace in this violent society of ours.”187 It is in response to this that Karen Kilby raises a significant critique of Moltmann’s social trinitarianism, based on the issue of projection. Kilby argues that since social trinitarians begin with the three persons, they then must describe how the three are bound together into oneness; in order to define perichoresis, Kilby argues, they take the best of the things that bind humans together, whether love, mutuality, empathy, and project a perfected version into God’s being.188 She suggests that in his social doctrine of the Trinity, “much of the detail is derived from either the individual author’s or the larger society’s latest ideas of how human beings should live in community... social theories of the Trinity often project our ideal onto God.”189 As we saw earlier, Tanner agrees with Kilby’s critiquespeaking specifically of using social trinitarianism as a source for political insight, Tanner notes that when a theologian based their understanding of trinitarian terminology on their understanding of humans and

184 Ibid., 198. 185 Ibid. 186 Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, xiii. 187 Ibid., xiv. 188 Karen Kilby,” Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81, no. 956 (Oct 2000): 441. 189 Ibid.

345 society, “the account of the trinity loses its critical edge on political questions and begins simply to reflect the theologian’s prior political views.”190

The Nature of the Church We have indicated the way that Torrance views the four essential ecclesial attributes as “first of all attributes of Christ himself, but attributes in which the church shares through its union and communion with him.”191 This helped us fill out his trinitarian ecclesiology as we moved from considering the being of God to considering the being of the Church. Moltmann agrees with Torrance on the necessity of relating these attributes to God, stating that these statements about the Church are “integrated components of the confession of the triune God, and cannot be detached from [their creedal] context.”192 He continues his explanation by observing that the oneness, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity of the Church derive from the fact that it is the Church of Christ; these are not characteristics which belong to the Church, but are instead received from Christ through the Spirit.193

The difference between Torrance’s and Moltmann’s takes on the notes of the Church is the ways that they apply these attributes. Torrance argues that because they are derived from the being of God they are to do with the essential being of the Church, and acknowledges that the period between Christ’s two advents will involve a constant struggle between what the Church essentially is, and the flawed forms of the Church’s visible life. Moltmann has the same theological approach, but it is intrinsically shaped by his emphasis on the historical realisation of eschatology in the form of liberation. He describes the four notes of the Church as statements of hope, which point to the eschatological and messianic fulfilment of God’s promises, and statements of action, which the Church ought to seek.194 He consequently explores each of the four attributes in order to highlight their implications for how the Church is to be known in the world,

190 Tanner, Christ the Key, 223, directly citing Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection,” 442. 191 Torrance, Atonement, 380. 192 Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 337. 193 Ibid., 338. 194 Ibid., 339-340.

346 under the headings of unity in freedom, catholicity and partisanship, holiness in poverty, and the apostolate in suffering.195

This all elucidates Moltmann’s stance that for the Church to understand itself, it must find its bearings within the trinitarian history of God. “Without an understanding of the particular church in the framework of the universal history of God’s dealings with the world, ecclesiology remains abstract and the church’s self-understanding blind.”196 The Church participates in God’s dealings with the world, and so gains knowledge of its place.197 The trinitarian history is to do with the “gathering, uniting and glorifying of the world in God and of God in the world,”198 in the light of which, Moltmann contends that the Church “is not in itself the salvation of the world, so that the ‘churchifying’ of the world would mean the latter’s salvation.”199 Instead, the church serves, “and is like an arrow sent out into the world to point to the future.”200 The church is called to eschatological witness which can only be understood within the missio dei. “The goal is not the glorification of the church but the glorification of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit,”201 a comment mirrored by Torrance’s insistence that the Church takes on the role of a servant, pointing to Christ.202

Particular aspects of the Church’s visible life Moltmann views the Church as representing the ‘eschatological exodus’. The Church is not to escape society into a ghetto-like ‘holy huddle’, but rather is to embody the “beginning of liberation of the whole of enslaved creation for its consummation in glory.”203 Moltmann acknowledges that the forms of the Church’s “fellowship and public functions, and the shape of its order and ministries, are not merely externals and inessentials; they are no less important than the word and the sacraments.”204 In

195 Ibid., 342-361. 196 Ibid., 51. Moltmann explains that we need integrative thinking, which understands events within history, and experience as part of a whole life. 197 Ibid., 53. 198 Ibid., 60. 199 Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 328. 200 Ibid. 201 Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 11. 202 See the earlier discussion of the Church’s role in witness in Chapter 6.4. 203 Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 83. 204 Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 290.

347 practical terms, although the church lives in the tension between the claims of Christ and society, it must not “adopt its social order from the way in which the society it lives is run… for it has to correspond to its Lord and to represent new life for society.”205 Consequently, while the Church will reflect its particular environment, it must not passively accept the societal imprint passively, for Moltmann argues that church order is “part of the church’s living witness,” and must be geared towards the new creation.206 Here we may think again of Torrance’s admonition that the Church has “no right to identify itself with the social order here or with any political system.”207

Moltmann and Torrance both emphasise the necessity of order in the Church, and agree that this true order must be derived from the Church’s ontological relation to the Triune God. They also both argue for the perichoretic equality of the Triune persons, and yet still end up with slightly different emphases in the form of the Church which derives from this. In order to further explicate this, we will conclude by providing a brief discussion of Moltmann’s approach to the Word, the sacraments, the ministry, and the relationship between the Church and Israel.

The Word Where Torrance focuses on the Word as preaching, in the context of Word and Sacrament in the life of the Church, Moltmann focuses upon the broader framework of gospel proclamation. Moltmann suggests that we cannot limit this to the “public discourse of a preacher” but must allow for a much wider range of approaches, all geared towards “proclaiming a promise and liberating by story-telling.”208 The gospel is to do with the eschatological liberation of all things, and so through the Spirit this light is thrown back onto history, which gives rise to a ‘messianic fellowship’, a community which Moltmann claims “narrates the story of Christ, and its own story with that story, because its own existence, fellowship and activity springs from that story of liberation.”209 This is obviously at odds with Torrance’s stance that the Christian community’s existence derives from, and corresponds to, the Triune being of

205 Ibid., 106 206 Ibid., 292 207 Torrance, Gospel, Church and Ministry, 79. 208 Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 206 209 Ibid., 225.

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God; for Torrance, the Church derives from the God who liberates and sets his people free through the work of Christ and the Spirit, and not from the story of liberation as Moltmann holds.

Torrance embraces the traditional forms of church, and much of his theology is to do with the correct structure, and working formally towards ecumenical rapprochement. By contrast, Moltmann argues that this ‘messianic fellowship’ cannot embody any of the traditional forms of the Church, whether the exclusive voluntary fellowship, or the state church, or the public form of Christianity. It must be a community free from the prevailing social systems, which instead seeks to proclaim liberation through “actions of hope in the fellowship of the poor, the sad, and those condemned to silence... the truth of the proclamation is recognizable from the freedom it creates.”210 This is a freedom that “realizes the possibilities of the messianic era,” and offers the space to humanity to live a “life which takes on a messianic character.”211

The Sacraments Torrance suggests that it is Jesus Christ who is the primary mystērion and that baptism and eucharist are only mystērion in a secondary sense. Moltmann argues that the terms mystērion, or sacramentum, refer not to baptism or the Lord’s Supper, but to “the divine eschatological secret,”212 and unlike Torrance, rejects a solely Christological understanding of mystērion, arguing that the mystērion in its New Testament sense “spreads beyond Christology and flows into pneumatology, ecclesiology and the eschatology of world history.”213 Consequently Moltmann calls for a trinitarian understanding of mystērion, which emphasises the Spirit as an eschatological gift in history, pointing to the new creation.214 Proclamation, the sacraments, and the charismatic gifts of the Spirit are to be understood as “the ‘signs and wonders’ of the history of the Spirit who creates salvation and brings about the new creation, and who through Christ unites us with the Father and glorifies him.”215

210 Ibid., 225-226. 211 Ibid., 225. 212 Ibid., 202 213 Ibid., 204 214 Ibid., 205. 215 Ibid., 206

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When it comes to dealing with the two sacraments, however, Moltmann and Torrance are surprisingly similar in the way that they describe the relation between baptism and the Lord’s Supperwhich is Moltmann’s preferred term. Torrance notes that both baptism and the eucharist “have to do with the whole Christ clothed with the Gospel of reconciliation and resurrection,” but specifies that baptism is to do with the objective and complete event, while the eucharist is to do with humanity’s ongoing participation in that event,216 Moltmann affirms their inseparability, although he takes a slightly different approach in describing this, suggesting that,

Just as baptism is the eschatological sign of starting out, valid once and for all, so the regular and constant fellowship at the table of the Lord is the eschatological sign of being on the way. If baptism is called the unique sign of grace, then the Lord’s supper must be understood as the repeatable sign of hope. Baptism and the Lord’s supper belong essentially together and are linked with one another in the messianic community.217 The Ministry Moltmann observes that the primary form of ministry in the Church is that which is given to all members of the community, who are corporately a prophetic, priestly and kingly people.218 Although the traditional justification of ministry was one God, one Christ, one bishop and one church, Moltmann argues that this “unified hierarchy reflects a clerical monotheism which corresponded to contemporary ‘political monotheism’, but which is in contradiction to the trinitarian understanding of God and his people.”219 When the trinitarian understanding that Moltmann espouses is allowed to govern ecclesiology, then the essential tasks of the community are kerygma, koinōnia and diakoniaproclamation, fellowship, and service.220 Even where one person may be called to a particular task, they are neither higher, nor lower, than the rest of the charismatic community. Moltmann acknowledges here the pre-eminence of one’s baptism; ordination does “not confer any higher dignity than baptism and merely gives specific form to the person’s special call.”221

216 Ibid., 258. 217 Ibid., 243. 218 Ibid., 300; see extended discussion in Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 191-202. 219 Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 305. 220 Ibid., 307. 221 Ibid., 314.

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This results in a different doctrine of the ministry than Torrance. While Torrance affirms that baptism is the sacrament of the corporate priesthood, since he dislikes the term ‘priesthood of all believers’, Torrance argues that there is a distinction between the priesthood of the whole Church, and the specific ordination of some, and relates this ‘select ordination’ to the eucharist. Some are set apart for teaching, preaching and administering the sacraments, although Torrance is careful to emphasise that these roles of authority are for “edification and not for destruction,” for those who operate in them are “nothing more than servants of Christ, and, at the same time, servants of the people in Christ.”222 Nevertheless, Moltmann pays significantly more attention than Torrance to the concrete ways in which members of the Church must engage in witness that is not simply proclamation of what God has done in Christ, but is instead active affirmation of the difference that this makes for humankind.223

Israel While this is not a predominant element of the Church’s visible life, it is worth noting, for both Moltmann and Torrance relate the salvation of Israel to eschatology and the way in which the Church is to participate in God’s redemptive work. Moltmann agrees with Torrance that Israel is “Christianity’s original, enduring and final partner in history.”224 He also rejects replacement theology, stating clearly that “the church is not the organization that succeeds Israel in salvation history. It does not take Israel’s place.”225 In eschatological terms, Moltmann comments upon the enduring theological specificity of Israel which is particularly accentuated by their modern possession of the land,226 and posits that the parousia will not take place without Christians and Jews being in fellowship with one another, because “the still unfulfilled promises of the Old Testament must be transplanted into the soil of the new.”227 This is in keeping with Torrance’s call for the schism between Jewish and Gentile people to be healed, in

222 Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 91. 223 Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 150-196. 224 Ibid., 135. 225 Ibid., 148. 226 Ibid., 137-144. Moltmann notes that the modern state of Israel is “a foretoken, but an ambiguous one” (149). 227 Ibid., 138

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Christ, because it hinders the proclamation of the Gospel.228 Moltmann and Torrance both have an eschatological perspective on the corporate salvation of Israel; Moltmann holds that when Israel comes to faith in Christ it will be “the external sign of the transition from messianic world mission to the messianic kingdom,”229 a view paralleled by Torrance’s comment that to expect the parousia means that one must also actively hope for the conversion of the Jews.230

Concluding Reflections Moltmann and Torrance both develop a trinitarian ecclesiology, but diverge in the different aspects which they emphasise. They have different theological methodologies; Torrance begins with divine revelation as recorded in Scripture and draws on the Fathers’ doctrine of the Trinity to develop his doctrine of God, while Moltmann draws on the biblical narrative, but develops his doctrine of God in alignment with his eschatological and liberationist concerns. This results in different expressions of the relationship between God and the Church. Torrance is concerned with the ontological relation between the Triune God and the Church, and argues that the fellowship of the Church is correlated with but absolutely distinct from the Triune fellowship. Moltmann places the Cross at the centre of the Trinity and argues that the history of the Trinity shows that God is open to the world, so that the relationship between God and the world is not one of utter distinction, because God needs the world, and God can be affected by the world. In the final evaluation, Torrance’s approach is more theologically robust and avoids the danger of remaking God in our own image as one who has needs external to his own being. Although Moltmann’s liberationist approach highlights the importance of the Church bearing practical witness to the hope and promise of the gospel, the way in which he blurs the distinction between God and creation is theologically inadequate because of the way in which it distorts the nature of the relationship between God and the Church.

228 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 45–46. 229 Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 129. 230 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 285.

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9.4 John Zizioulas

Introduction Our final dialogue partner is John Zizioulas. As one of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, he is particularly well regarded by non-Orthodox theologians, leading Rowan Williams to suggest that Zizioulas may be “the most widely read Orthodox theologian in the Western milieu.”231 Zizioulas makes a significant contribution to Orthodox theology by drawing upon the Patristic writings, and recontextualising them for the Orthodox Church, especially in the areas of anthropology, ontology, and ecclesiology. He was particularly active in the ecumenical movement, bringing key elements of Orthodox theology into the various dialogues which he was involved with. We shall see the regard in which Zizioulas’ trinitarian ecclesiology is held when we interact with “The Church as Communion,” a keynote lecture which he gave at the World Council of Churches Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order in Santiago de Compostela in August 1993, where the key theme was koinōnia.

The relationship between Torrance and Zizioulas is not easy to define. On one hand, Torrance was instrumental in Zizioulas’ introduction to the English-speaking world, and Zizioulas spent three years as Torrance’s teaching assistant at the University of Edinburgh. They are both proponents of communion ecclesiology, maintaining that the Church’s being derives from the Triune God, and shaping their discussions around the central notion of koinōnia, or communion. On the other hand, while there was relatively little explicit written interaction between them, there is a tacit debate between Torrance and Zizioulas which “runs as a sub-current throughout their respective writings on the Trinity, person and nature, and the Cappadocian Fathers.”232 The exchange between them largely centres around their different readings of the Cappadocian Fathers, for it is these differences that illuminate the variances in their approaches to a trinitarian ecclesiology. We will begin by comparing their doctrines of God, identifying similarities and differences, and then turning to their ecclesiology.

231 Rowan Williams, “Eastern Orthodox Theology” in The Modern Theologians, ed. David Ford (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 584. 232 Baker, “Introduction,” 4.

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First though, we note that where Moltmann’s central theological concern was eschatology, with its corresponding themes of promise and hope, Douglas Knight suggests that Zizioulas’ central theological concern is,

human freedom and the relation of freedom and others. Freedom is not restricted, but enabled, by our relationships with other persons, Zizioulas argues, for the community in which God includes us is the place in which our personal identity and freedom come into being. God is intrinsically communion and free, and his communion and freedom he shares with us.233 This quote signals that for Zizioulas, freedom is not simply the arbitrary freedom to do whatever one wants without considering the consequences for others. Instead, freedom is to be free of restricting necessity, and is also intrinsically connected with relationality. God’s being is communion, and as he brings us into that communion, we are made free for relationship with others while retaining our own unique specificity. It is the twin themes of communion, and otherness which are intrinsic to personhood, and therefore to a trinitarian ecclesiology in Zizioulas’ account.

Zizioulas’ Doctrine of God Key similarities Farrow contends that, “neither Zizioulas nor Torrance consider themselves innovators”234 when it comes to the doctrine of God. They both draw on the Fathers as their primary source, and agree that the focus of the Patristic period was on the doctrine of God, with barely any doctrinal development regarding the being of the Church. Zizioulas notes that the primary question that the Fathers sought to answer was not if God existed, but how God existed.235 However, both Zizioulas and Torrance inadvertently communicate their own theological positions in their adoption of the Fathers. Zizioulas was “one of the most prominent stars” of the 1960s “‘neo-patristic’ synthesis… a movement responsible for the rediscovery of the patristic notion of the person in Orthodox theology.”236 In Being as Communion, Zizioulas draws on the

233 Douglas H. Knight, “Introduction” in The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church, ed. Douglas H. Knight (London; New York: Routledge, 2016), 1 234 Ralph Del Colle, “'Person' and 'Being' in John Zizioulas' Trinitarian Theology: Conversations with Thomas Torrance and Thomas Aquinas,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 1 (2001): 73. 235 Ibid. 236 Athanasios G. Melissaris, “The Challenge of Patristic Ontology in the Theology of Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 44 (Spring 1999): 486.

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Fathers, and uses their language, concepts and arguments in order to develop his own understanding of correct Orthodox theology. This is paralleled by our observation early in this thesis that Torrance’s claim to let the Fathers speak for themselves in The Trinitarian Faith is somewhat inefficacious.

Nevertheless, their shared use of the Fathers leads us to the most important similarity between them, which is the commitment that God’s being is communion. Zizioulas is adamant that to speak of God is to speak of communion; “the being of God is a relational being: without the concept of communion it would not be possible to speak of the being of God.”237 He expounds further that to speak of God’s ‘substance’ is to speak of ‘communion’; “the Holy Trinity is a primordial ontological concept and not a notion which is added to the divine substance or rather which follows it.”238 Torrance would have no difficulty with these general claims, as we have explored throughout this thesis, and explicitly find in his statement that for the Triune God, “Being and Communion are one and the same."239

The next similarity is that Torrance and Zizioulas both emphasise the absolute distinction between God and creation. Zizioulas affirms that “between God and the world there is total ontological otherness: God’s being is uncreated, while that of the world is created, that is, contingent.”240 The distinction between God and his creation is a consistent theme in Torrance’s work, as is the contingency, or dependence, of creation. Readers familiar with Torrance’s material focusing on the relationship between theology and science will recognise this idea of the contingent world.241

Another similarity is that Torrance and Zizioulas both argue that the only way to truly overcome the divide between God and the world is through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who unites God and humanity in himself. Zizioulas describes the God-world relation as hypostaticit is only in and through the Son that the absolute distinction is

237 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 17. 238 Ibid. 239 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 104. 240 Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 17. 241 Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order, vi-vii. Torrance describes the universe as “contingent for it depends on God entirely for its origin and for what it continues to be in its existence and its order.”

355 bridged.242 Zizioulas explains this as an “ontology of love understood in a personal way,” through which God and the world “can be united without losing their otherness.”243 Torrance also affirms that it is only through Christ as the unique mediator that humans are united to God and able to participate in the communion of the Trinity. He develops this through the two models of koinōnia which we explored in Chapter 5, where the Triune love of God in se is embodied in Jesus Christ, and thus made accessible to humanity through the overflow of the Holy Spirit.

This leads us into the final similarity that we will observe with regard to Torrance’s and Zizioulas’ doctrines of God, which is the inseparability of the economic work of the Son and the Spirit. Zizioulas notes that this has traditionally been a weakness of Orthodox theology, so that the question of how to bring pneumatology and Christology into a “full and organic synthesis” is “one of the most important questions facing Orthodox theology in our time.”244 He concludes that the question of doctrinal priority remains a theologoumenon; “as long as the essential content of both Christology and Pneumatology is present, the synthesis is there in its fullness.”245 Zizioulas comments that only the Son becomes incarnate and enters history, while the Spirit remains discarnate, and is in many ways beyond history, so that “when [the Spirit] acts in history he does so in order to bring into history the last days.”246 We also see this affirmation of the mutual work of the Son and Spirit in Torrance’s material. Torrance observes that the Son becomes incarnate to form an objective union with us in history, and then in the eschatological pause which is created by the Son’s ascension, the Spirit is at work, subjectively actualising humanity’s union with Christ. The Church is “rooted in the incarnation,” through the Son’s incarnate assumption of our humanity, and is “maintained through the operation of the Spirit.”247 Whichever language is used, the Son is involved in the work of the Spirit and the Spirit is involved in the work of the Son.

242 Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 30. 243 Ibid., 29. 244 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 126. 245 Ibid., 129. 246 Ibid., 130. 247 Torrance, Atonement, 359.

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Key divergences We turn now to the differences that emerge, first in methodology, and then in content. In methodological terms, Torrance argues that that the Nicene Creed formalised what the Fathers “had to say about God,” and arose “in compulsive response to the objective self-revelation of God.”248 Torrance appeals in an almost romantic fashion to the “distinctive mind or phronēma of the Catholic Church,” and suggests that this mind was what the Fathers appealed to “informing theological judgments and making conciliar decisions.”249 In contrast to Torrance, Zizioulas’ argument for the methodology behind the development of the doctrine of the Trinity is noticeably more grounded in the experience of the Christian community. Zizioulas maintains that it was the “ecclesial experience of the Fathers” in the eucharist, that led to the affirmation of God’s being as communion.250 Since “the being of God could only be known through personal relationships and personal love,” this understanding of the divine ontology “came out of the eucharistic experience of the Church.”251

However, the difference in content is far more significant, and exploring this will occupy the bulk of our attention in this section. The most notable divergence between Zizioulas and Torrance is to do with their conflicting interpretations of the Cappadocian Fathers. The discrepancy centres around how the relationships between the Triune persons are to be understood. The issue is not over their understanding of personhood, because they both maintain that the concept of ‘person’ developed in accordance with the doctrine of the Trinity.252 The issue instead is whether some form of causality is present in the relationships between the Triune persons. To understand this, we must briefly trace Zizioulas’ train of thought as to how the Patristic writers

248 Torrance, “The Deposit of Faith,” 7. 249 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, ix. Readers may revisit the extended discussion of this element in Chapter 3.1. 250 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 16. 251 Ibid., 16-17. 252 In Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 102, Torrance argues that the doctrine of the Trinity gave rise to the “new concept of person, unknown in human thought until then, according to which the relations between persons belong to what persons are.” Zizioulas echoes Torrance when he states that “the concept of the person with its absolute and ontological content was born historically from the endeavour of the Church to give ontological expression to its faith in the Triune God.” See Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 16.

357 developed the concept of person, because this will help us to understand why he explains the relationships between the Triune persons in the way that he does.

According to Zizioulas, ancient Greek thought was shaped by the concept of ontological monism, where the being of God and the being of the world existed in unbreakable unity.253 To be a person was to have something added to one’s being; the vocabulary of prosōpon was associated with the idea of wearing a mask within the theatre,254 while hypostasis meant one’s nature or substance. Zizioulas also observes a similar tendency in Roman thought, where the idea of persona was not a reference to the being of the person, but rather one’s varying relational roles; “persona is the role which one plays in one’s social or legal relationships, the moral or ‘legal’ person which either collectively or individually has nothing to do with the ontology of the person.”255 Soh Guan Chin helpfully summarises that “while Greek ontology did not permit the concept of persons to have any absolute ontological reality Roman thought did not even understand person from the perspective of ontology.”256

This understanding of personhood was obviously untenable with the Church’s ability to say that “God is Father, Son and Spirit without ceasing to be one God.”257 Zizioulas argues that a revolution in thought had to take place in what was understood by personhood. Two basic presuppositions had to come into existence in order for this revolution to happen: “A radical change in cosmology which would free the world and man from ontological necessity,” and “an ontological view of man which would unite the person with the being of man, with his permanent and enduring existence, with his genuine and absolute identity.”258 The Greek Fathers were uniquely positioned to do this, drawing on the biblical outlook of Christianity for the first presupposition, and on the Greek interest in ontology for the second.259

253 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 16. 254 Ibid., 31. 255 Ibid., 34. 256 Soh Guan Chin, A Trinitarian Covenantal Theology of the Church, Kindle ed. (Lincoln: iUniverse Press, 2000), Location 807. 257 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 36. 258 Ibid., 35. 259 Ibid.

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As a result of this change in thought, hypostasis became associated with ‘person’. For Zizioulas, personhood is to do with one’s being, and includes freedom, uniqueness, and relationality. This is what separates the ‘person’ from simply being an ‘individual’, for an individual is not necessarily a person. This resulted in two significant philosophical changes. The first is that ‘personhood’ is no longer understood as a category which gets added to a concrete entity, such as one might put on a mask in the theatre in order to play a part. Instead, a person “is itself the hypostasis of the being.”260 The second result is that being by itself is no longer considered as an absolute category, because “from an adjunct to a being (a kind of mask) the person becomes the being itself and is simultaneously – a most significant point – the constitutive element (the ‘principle’ or ‘cause’) of beings.”261

This is all rather oblique, but becomes clearer when we return to the concept of communion. Zizioulas argues that in order for the concept of communion to be ‘personal’, and not simply another way of talking about an abstract ‘substance’, communion must derive from a hypostasis. He proposes that,

Just like ‘substance,’ ‘communion’ does not exist by itself: it is the Father who is the cause of it. This thesis of the Cappadocians that introduced the concept of ‘cause’ into the being of God assumed an incalculable importance. For it meant that the ultimate ontological category which makes something really be, is neither an impersonal and incommunicable ‘substance,’ nor a structure of communion existing by itself or imposed by necessity, but rather the person.262 Recalling the importance of freedom for personhood, Zizioulas argues that God demonstrates his ontological freedom precisely by “the way in which He transcends and abolishes the ontological necessity of the substance by being God as Father, that is, as He who ‘begets’ the Son and ‘brings forth’ the Spirit.”263 Zizioulas clearly ascribes pre-eminence to the notion of hypostases within trinitarian doctrine; so much so, that Wilks suggests that personhood, rather than ontology, is the primary concern of Zizioulas’ trinitarian writings.264 Zizioulas views his trinitarian theology as correcting the Western approach, although his definition of this is somewhat unnuanced, which

260 Ibid., 39. 261 Ibid. 262 Ibid., 18. 263 Ibid., 44. 264 John G. F. Wilks, “The Trinitarian Ontology of John Zizioulas,” Vox Evangelica 25 (1995): 64.

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“identified the being, the ontological principle, of God with His substance rather than with the person of the Father,”265 and therefore “led us to see the term ousia, not hypostasis, as the expression of the ultimate character and the causal principle (archē) in God’s being.”266

As Guan Chin helpfully perceives, Zizioulas argues that the hypostasis of the Father, as distinct from the Son and Spirit, must be the cause of the Triune communion, because, “to say that God is substance would mean a return again to the Greek monistic and necessarian cosmology which would mean that God is not free but has to be and has to act in accord with some compulsory ontological restraints.”267 By emphasising that it is the hypostasis of the Father that is constitutive of the Triune being as communion, Zizioulas reveals his commitment to the personal nature of the Triune communion. For being to be personal, it must come from a distinct, concrete hypostasis, and result in distinct, concrete hypostases.268 Also commenting upon this element of Zizioulas’ work, Melissaris notes that “a consistent theological notion of personhood demands that ultimacy be given not to an abstract, impersonal principle, such as relatedness, but to a personal first cause of the existent.”269

This extended discussion of Zizioulas’ understanding of personhood has been necessary to highlight the variance between Torrance and Zizioulas with regard to their view of the relations of the Triune persons. Zizioulas’ claim that the Father is the “’cause’ both of the generation of the Son and of the procession of the Spirit,”270 is where Torrance most obviously takes umbrage with Zizioulas’ work. Torrance does not share Zizioulas’ position that the Son and Spirit proceed from the hypostasis of the Father, arguing instead that they proceed from the shared ousia of the Godhead, which results in an understanding of the divine monarchia being grounded in the whole Godhead, and not simply in the person of the Father. Torrance attributes to ‘being’

265 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 41 n.35. 266 Ibid., 88. 267 Guan Chin, A Trinitarian Covenantal Theology of the Church, Location 1613. 268 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 19. 269 Melissaris, “The Challenge of Patristic Ontology,” 488. 270 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 41.

360 what Zizioulas attributes to the ‘persons’;271 he insists that “if one is to speak of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit from the Person of the Father this is not to be equated with the causation of their being, but only with the mode of their enhypostatic differentiation within the one intrinsically personal Being of the Godhead.”272

This is a point of vital importance for understanding Torrance’s trinitarian theology, and draws upon our earlier discussion of the filioque towards the end of Chapter 5.5. We saw that Torrance’s solution is to hold together his understanding of the divine monarchia with the concept of perichoresis, which together allow Torrance to insist that each triune person is wholly God, and yet also experiences complete mutual coinherence with the other two persons of the Trinity. On this basis, Torrance continues, we can affirm with both East and West that the Spirit proceeds ‘from the Father and the Son’ and ‘from the Father through the Son’. The Spirit proceeds from the whole Godhead, which refutes any notion of causality, or of superiority and inferiority within the immanent Trinity.

Furthermore, because each of the persons is whole of a whole we must not speak of causal relationships when considering the immanent Trinity. This explains why for Torrance, Zizioulas’ perspective that the hypostasis of the Father is the cause of the Son and Spirit is “inevitably subordinationist,” for “no matter how one describes it a distinction is being drawn between underived and derived deity, between superiority and inferiority in degrees of deity.”273 We may also note here Molnar’s contribution, which is to highlight Torrance’s emphasis on the homoousion as the key concept he uses to explain the equality and shared identity of the three persons of the Trinity, and consequently allows him to avoid modalism, tritheism and subordinationism.274 It follows that for Torrance, “any claim that the Father is the cause of the Son and the

271 Del Colle, “’Person’ and ‘Being’ in John Zizioulas’ Trinitarian Theology,” 78. 272 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 179. 273 Del Colle, “’Person’ and ‘Being’ in John Zizioulas’ Trinitarian Theology,” 76. See also Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, 238. 274 Paul D. Molnar, “Theological Issues Involved in the Filioque,” in Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Myk Habets (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 37.

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Spirit has to involve an element of subordinationism and to that extent a negation of the homoousion of the three persons.”275

Zizioulas responds to Torrance with the argument that Torrance’s understanding of perichoresis, which necessarily entails rejecting causal relationships within the Trinity, makes the Cappadocian Fathers “look logically inconsistent, as they teach both causality and coinherence in divine being.”276 This critique is helpful because it brings to light what is really at stake in the debate between Torrance and Zizioulas, namely, their differing interpretations of the Cappadocian Fathers, a matter which has generated a significant amount of secondary literature but lies beyond the scope of this thesis.277 In order to draw the threads of this brief sketch together, we may utilise Radcliff’s summary that the scholarly debate came to be be less about the Cappadocians vs. Athanasius, or about Cappadocian vs Cappadocian, and instead became more about Torrance vs. Zizioulas.278 It is more useful for us to simply

275 Ibid., 338. 276 Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 136. 277 While there are scholars who support either Zizioulas or Torrance, there are quite a number who observe that neither Zizioulas or Torrance is wholly correct in their reading of the Cappadocians, a reading which we are sympathetic with. We may cite two examples here. The first is from George Dragas, who suggests that the difference here can be understood with reference to the two texts of the Nicene Creed, which in the 325AD version read “ek tes ousias tou Patros” but was amended in the 381AD version to simply read “ek tou Patros.” Torrance preferred the earlier form, Zizioulas preferred the later form, but Dragas argues that “there is no contradiction between these two formulae, and both Torrance and Zizioulas read too much later modern debate into the phraseology of these two formulae… [Zizioulas and Torrance both] say more about the Trinity ad intra than is warranted by the patristic tradition, Torrance because of his emphasis on ontological unity and Zizioulas because of his emphasis of the ontology of person.” See Baker, “Interview with George Dragas,” 44. A second example is that of Nikoloas Asproulis who compares Torrance’s and Zizioulas’ positions on the divine monarchy, and evaluates their readings of the Cappadocian Fathers, particularly Gregory Nazianzen. He concludes that while the debate revolves around the prioritisation of personhood over substance, and whether the archē of the Trinity belongs to the hypostasis of the Father or the whole Godhead, both Torrance and Zizioulas have definite interpretative slants—even errors—which shape their individual readings of the Fathers, especially Gregory Nazianzen. See Nikolaos Asproulis, “T. F. Torrance, John Zizioulas, and the “Cappadocian” Theology of Divine Monarchia: A Neo-Athanasian or Neo-Cappadocian Solution?” in T. F. Torrance and Eastern Orthodoxy: Theology in Reconciliation, Kindle ed (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), Location 4668. 278 Radcliff, Thomas F. Torrance and the Church Fathers, 139, as part of a longer section on the Cappadocian distinction, 134–40. Radcliff observes how Torrance sees the Cappadocians as diverging from the Patristic consensus, and highlights the contrast between Zizioulas and Torrance’s readings. Further select readings on this debate, and the interaction between Torrance and Zizioulas, include Eugenio, Communion with the Triune God, 166–70; Colin Gunton, “Being and Person: T. F. Torrance's Doctrine of God,” in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T. F. Torrance, ed. Elmer M. Colyer (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 129–34; Thomas F. Torrance, “Thomas Torrance Responds,” in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T. F. Torrance, ed. Elmer M. Colyer (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 362 highlight their differing conclusions as summarised by del Colle; “Torrance develops an ontology of God’s triune Being; Zizioulas, an ontology of divine personhood.”279

Zizioulas’ Doctrine of the Church We come now to explore the way that Zizioulas’ doctrine of God shapes his ecclesiology. He confesses the importance of thinking rightly about God, commenting that since the Church “must herself be an image of the way in which God exists… the Church must have a right faith, a correct vision with respect to the being of God.”280 This quote is crucial for noting the main difference between Zizioulas and Torrance’s ecclesiology. Zizioulas draws a ‘straight line’, as it were, from the Trinity to the Church, while Torrance is much more nuanced about how he develops the relationship between the Triune communion, and the correlative creaturely communion that is the Church. Behr offers this critique in relation to Zizioulas, noting that the problem of “juxtaposing the Trinity and the Church… communion ecclesiology sees the Church as parallel to the ‘immanent Trinity’… this results in a horizontal notion of communion, or perhaps better parallel ‘communions,’ without being clear about how the two intersect.”281 As we have seen, Torrance is careful to explain that the two dimensions of koinōnia are uniquely related through the person of Jesus Christ.

The point at which Zizioulas’ anthropology becomes useful for his ecclesiology is when he explores the nature of the new birth. Zizioulas argues that “salvation is identified with the realization of personhood in man,”282 which only takes place in the Church. Humans must be translated from the “hypostasis of biological existence” into a new “ecclesial hypostasis.” This is what takes place in “baptism as new birth… baptism leads to a new mode of existence, to a regeneration… and consequently to a new ‘hypostasis.’”283 In order for human persons to be free from ontological necessity, and thus made true persons, one’s hypostasis must be constituted by “an ontological reality

314–18; Najeeb G. Awad, “Between Subordination and Koinonia: Toward a New Reading of the Cappadocian Theology,” Modern Theology 23, no. 2 (Apr 2007): 181-204. 279 Del Colle, “’Person’ and ‘Being’ in John Zizioulas’ Trinitarian Theology,” 79. 280 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 15-16. 281 John Behr, “The Trinitarian Being of the Church,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 48, no.1 (2003): 68. 282 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 50. 283 Ibid., 53.

363 which does not suffer from createdness.”284 This is an eschatological reality for humanity, and so Zizioulas’ argues that even while humans may realise their “ecclesial hypostasis” now, we still need a third ontological category, that of a “sacramental or eucharistic hypostasis,”285 which embraces the eschatological element of one’s new personhood.

However, this idea of the ecclesial hypostasis leads us to note the different ways in which Torrance and Zizioulas understand what it is to say that the Church is the body of Christ. Torrance argues that this is the most apt analogy for the Church, where through an ontological relation established in grace, the Church is made one with Christ despite its unlikeness and difference to him. On the basis of Christ’s assumption of humanity, the Church is comprised of all those who are united to him through the Spirit. Christ remains uniquely the head, and his followers remain the body. Zizioulas demonstrates a different understanding of the Church as the body of Christ. He develops this in reference to the inseparability of Christology and pneumatology, insisting that Christ is a “pneumatological being, born and existing in the koinonia of the Spirit.” Consequently, Zizioulas argues that “we must stop thinking of Christ in individualistic terms and understand Him as a ‘corporate person,’ an inclusive being.”286 Expressing this another way, he states that “the Church becomes Christ Himself in human existence, but also every member of the Church becomes Christ and Church.”287 Zizioulas’ language here risks eradicating the distinction between Christ and the Church, and therefore highlights another significant difference between Torrance and Zizioulas. Torrance explicitly disavows the notion that Christ is only a person in relation to the Church, arguing that while we may say “Christ is the Church… that proposition cannot be reversed, so as to make Christ the predicate of the Church.”288 This position is clearly incompatible with Zizioulas’ claim that every member of the Church becomes Christ, wherein Zizioulas risks minimising the absolute uniqueness, supremacy and sufficiency of Jesus Christ.

284 Ibid., 54. 285 Ibid., 50. 286 John Zizioulas, “The Church as Communion,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1994): 6. 287 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 58. 288 Torrance “What is the Church?” 9.

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The One and the Many Zizioulas declares that since Christians “believe in a God who is in His very being Koinonia,” then “ecclesiology must be based on Trinitarian theology if it is to be an ecclesiology of communion.”289 This is common to both Torrance and Zizioulas, and does not require any further explanation. In this final section, instead of exploring the forms and structure of the Church as we did in our previous comparisons, we will instead address the issue of the ‘one and the many’ as it is illuminative of a key principle for Zizioulas.

Zizioulas emphasises the way in which the Orthodox church argues for the importance of the local Church, holding that there is no dichotomy between the local church or the universal Church.290 From his perspective, Roman Catholicism gives precedence to the one Church, while Protestantism gives precedence to the local community. Instead, Zizioulas’ calls for a ‘middle way’ in ecclesiology where, “the ‘many’ must have a constitutive and not a derivative role in the Church’s being; local and universal must somehow coincide.”291 Developing this further, Zizioulas states that “the nature of God is communion,”292 and argues that “there seems to be an exact correspondence between the trinitarian theology, as it was developed particularly by the Cappadocian Fathersespecially St Basiland Orthodox ecclesiology.”293

Zizioulas continues, “there is one Church, as there is one God. But the expression of this one Church is the communion of the many local Churches. Communion and oneness coincide in ecclesiology.”294 Each local church is made a full Church through the Holy Spirit, and must not become ‘submissive’ to a “universal Church structure.”295 The Orthodox Church works this out through the synodal system, and the ministry of primacy.296 This is why the ministry of episkopé, or the bishop, is so important. Orthodox synodality requires every province to have one ordained head, who cannot

289 Zizioulas, “The Church as Communion,” 6. 290 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 133. 291 Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 38. 292 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 134. 293 Ibid. 294 Ibid., 135. 295 Zizioulas, “The Church as Communion,” 10. 296 Ibid., 11-12.

365 be replaced by a form of collective ministry; and yet also requires the ‘one’ to be in relation to the ‘many.’ In short, “the multiplicity is not to be subjected to the oneness; it is constitutive of the oneness.”297

The implication of this position is mainly geared towards the division that has resulted from varying forms, structural organisation, and different interpretations of the ministry in history. Zizioulas argues that regardless of contextual circumstances, neither the baptismal structure nor the eucharistic structure of the Church can be changed. Consequently, Zizioulas argues that

Instead of trying to recognise each other’s ‘orders’ as such, the divided communities of our time should rather try to recognize each other as ecclesial communities relating to God and the world through their mysteries in the way that is implied in the mystery of Christ and the Spirit. This is not a matter of ‘confessional’ agreements, but of a more existential rapprochement to which divided Christendom is called.298 More specifically, Zizioulas draws on koinōnia to support his vision for Church unity, suggesting that it can,

help us to overcome traditional dichotomies between the institutional and the charismatic, the local and the universal, conciliatory and primacy. This concept, if it is used creatively in ecclesiology, would destroy all legalistic and pyramidical views of ministry, authority and structure in the Church, which hinder progress towards unity.299 Although the language which Torrance uses is different, we can conclude that he would agree with the theological imperatives which Zizioulas presents here. Torrance also calls for an ecumenicity that is grounded in our shared unity through koinōnia with the Holy Spirit; a Christological and pneumatological approach, rather than one based on those elements of the Church’s visible life which divide us. However, Torrance’s ecclesiology is notably more open to ecumenical dialogue.

Concluding Reflections We have seen that both Torrance and Zizioulas are proponents of communion ecclesiology, drawing on the theme of koinōnia in their respective bodies of work. This

297 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 136. 298 Ibid., 246. 299 Zizioulas, “The Church as Communion,” 16.

366 has been highlighted through exploring the way in which they both draw on the Fathers, their shared affirmation of the absolute distinction between God and creation, the importance of the incarnation for the divine work of reconciliation, and the inseparability of the economic work of the Son and the Spirit. We also saw that Zizioulas and Torrance both draw on the idea of koinōnia in their calls for ecumenical agreement in the Church.

We then turned our attention to their divergent theological methodologies, noting that Zizioulas gives much more precedence to the eucharist in shaping his theology than Torrance. Our most robust discussion was to do with Zizioulas’ understanding of the triune persons, and his insistence that in order for ousia to be personal, it must derive from a unique hypostasis; this is the basis for his argument that the triune communion is grounded in the person of the Father, in differentiation from the Son and Spirit. We then noted Torrance’s strong reaction against Zizioulas’ view of the Triune communion; Torrance argues that to say that the Son and Spirit derive from the hypostasis of the Father introduces causality into the immanent Trinity, which negates the homoousion of the three persons.

This lead into our major criticism of Zizioulas in relation to Torrance. We observed that in referring to the Church as an image of God’s existence, he draws a much more direct line from the being of God to the being of the Church. This is outworked in a number of ways, but we highlighted in particular how Zizioulas understands what it is to describe the Church as the ‘body of Christ.’ Where Torrance views this as a metaphor which involves union with Christ despite humanity’s unlikeness and difference to him, Zizioulas eradicates the distinction between Christ and the Church by arguing that because of the joint work of the Son and the Spirit, on one hand, the Church becomes Christ, and on the other, every member of the Church becomes Christ. Where Torrance is exceedingly careful to maintain the uniqueness of Christ even though it is in Christ that the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the Church meet, Zizioulas blurs the lines with his view of the relationship between God’s being and the being of the Church.

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10 CONCLUSION

10.1 Summarising the Project The work undertaken in this final chapter will offer a summary of the argument that has been presented in this thesis, emphasising the original contribution that this thesis has made, and identifying some potential avenues for further engagement. We began this project with the acknowledgement that in order to answer practical questions about the visible life of the Church, one must first answer the question ‘What is the Church?’ Our approach was even more basic, however, as we argued that one must first identify and critique their evaluations about how this question should best be answered. The position that has been put forth was that in order to correctly answer the question, ‘What is the Church?’, we must begin with the doctrine of God, rather than focusing on the Church as an institution or organisation. It is only by recognising that the empirical Church has a transcendent foundation that we are properly able to answer questions about its visible life.

As a means of considering this question, this thesis has engaged with the work of Thomas F. Torrance, unfolding the way in which he views the historical actuality and empirical existence of the Church as intrinsically derived from the gathering of humanity into union and communion with the Triune God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are a rich, full communion of Triune love, and the free outpouring of this love upon humanity, alongside with the invitation to humanity to participate in the Triune fellowship, are key to understanding the transcendent nature of the Church.

The thesis was divided into two sections. In the first half, we explored the theological relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity, and the doctrine of the Church, showing that the doctrine of the Trinity is constitutive for Torrance’s perspective of the being and nature of the Church. In the second half, we laid out the implications of this key theological relationship for the order, structure, ministry and mission of the Church in the time between Christ’s two advents, showing how each of these elements points forward to the consummation of God’s intentions for humanity, our full participation in the fellowship of the Trinity. In this final section, we will summarise

369 the content and conclusions of this thesis, making note of avenues which have potential for further fruitful work.

Exploring the wider contours of T. F. Torrance’s theology In the second chapter of the thesis, we established the foundations for our engagement with Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology by acquainting ourselves with the main characteristics of his approach to the theological task. Given the close attention that we would be paying to the work of this particular individual, a brief biographical overview was provided, which made clear the pastoral and evangelistic thrust of Torrance’s academic theology. This established important parameters around the work that was undertaken in the following chapters, as it highlighted the way in which Torrance views his theological work as immensely practical, and thus relevant to human life. Although our ability to fully engage with Torrance’s prodigious output in the area of science and theology was limited, we also identified the characteristics of this area of his work which are salient to our consideration of his dogmatic theology. This included his preference for the kataphysic approach, with its accent on allowing theological method to be dictated by the nature of the Triune God whom we are considering, the rejection of dualism, and the importance of personal knowledge.

Finally, we briefly qualified the decision to give precedence to the doctrine of the Trinity over the doctrine of the incarnation as the key premise behind Torrance’s ecclesiology. It was argued that because Torrance views the being of God in se as determinative of all God’s actions ad alios, including the incarnation, then the doctrine of the Trinity, although inseparable from the incarnation, has primacy. Torrance does not give undue supremacy to the Son over the Father and Spirit, but focuses upon the incarnation as the key to our knowledge of the Trinity, because it is in and through Jesus Christ that the Triune God makes himself known to us within the objectivities of the created world. This last point was returned to repeatedly throughout the thesis, and was particularly helpful as a methodological clarification, by helping us to recognise that whenever Torrance uses solely Christological language in a sustained fashion, this is inseparable from his trinitarian theology, even when the doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly referenced.

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The next two chapters dealt with the doctrine of the Trinity, and the doctrine of the Church, as disparate topics, before they were clearly integrated in the fifth chapter. We began our sustained theological interaction with Torrance’s work in the third chapter, focusing upon his doctrine of the Holy Trinity. We demonstrated how Torrance weaves together various sources from Church history, particularly the Patristic period and the Reformation, in addition to the modern work of Karl Rahner and Karl Barth, to develop his doctrine of the Trinity. The majority of the chapter was given to discussing the content of Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity, including the historical preparation of Israel, leading to the full revealing of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We considered the way in which God makes himself known to humanity, through the mutual mediation of the Son and the Spirit, which we did by evaluating the way in which Torrance uses theological terminology like ousia, hypostasis, perichoresis, and homoousion.

As part of our consideration of the doctrine of the Trinity, we also introduced Torrance’s stratified structure of theological knowledge, and examined how this disclosure model is used to describe the correspondence between the ontological Trinity, the economic Trinity, and our received knowledge of God. Utilising his definition of a disclosure model as “a conceptual construct forced upon us by the intrinsic intelligibility of some field as we inquire into it, and it is developed as a theory through which we seek to let the structures of that field disclose themselves to us,”300 we saw that while this model does not ‘create’ or ‘systematise’ theology, it clarifies that the Trinity is not shut-up and self-contained, but a rich fullness of ‘being for others.’ This is characteristic of both God’s own life, the perichoretic communion of the three Triune persons who are constituted by their relations to each other, and also of God’s relations to humanity, as seen in his establishment of communion with humanity, and enabling of humans to participate in the fellowship of the Triune life.

In the fourth chapter, we discussed Torrance’s historical perspective of the Church, and his insistence that there has only ever been one people of God—one Church—but that there have been three different phases of the one Church’s existence. We simultaneously observed the parallels between Torrance’s view of the Church, and his

300 Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 125.

371 view of how God has increasingly revealed himself throughout history, culminating with the complete revelation of God’s trinitarian nature in the New Testament. This chapter was divided into three sections. In the first section, we showed how the scope of God’s redemptive work begins with the whole creation, and is narrowed through God’s establishment of covenant with Israel. Even Israel’s rebellion and consequent suffering are utilised to prepare the way for the incarnation. In the second section, we considered how God’s covenant fellowship with Israel is intensified in the unique life and ministry of Jesus Christ, who assumes fallen humanity in order to bring humans into relationship with himself, culminating in his death and resurrection, and the pouring out of the Spirit. Through the Spirit, the apostles are commissioned to the unique role of laying the foundations of the Church. On the basis of their witness to Christ, and through the continual giving of the Holy Spirit, the Church is equipped to bear witness to Jesus Christ in the period of history between his ascension, and his future return, a period which Torrance describes as an ‘eschatological pause.’ We drew on Torrance’s eschatology to explain this term, for even though the Church must deal with the limitations of the current age, it is already participating in the new creation which was inaugurated with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There was thus significant overlap between the second and third section of this chapter, which dealt with what Torrance has to say about the new creation as the final stage of the Church which is yet to be realised. We saw that each of these stages is leading towards the telos of history, the full participation of humans in the eternal love of the Triune God, and the actualisation of this in space and time on earth.

The Trinity and the Church: The motif of koinōnia The fifth chapter was the capstone of the first half of the thesis, integrating the content of the first three chapters. Incorporating our discussion of his scientific and dogmatic methodology, we focused upon understanding how Torrance views the Triune God as the ultimate ground of the Church. Highlighting once again the doctrinal precedence of the Trinity in relation to ecclesiology, we acknowledged the consequent need to look ‘through’ the external appearance of the Church, whether institution, community, or people, and to instead look at the divine foundation of the Church. We utilised Torrance’s stratified structure of knowledge again, this time to clarify the inner structure of his thought about the relationship between the Trinity and the Church.

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Even though the Church exists within space and time, and is constrained by these limits while it awaits the second advent of Jesus Christ, it is brought into existence and sustained through the unified work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Although the Triune persons are completely perichoretic in their being and work, we are able to reverently speak of the distinctions appropriate to each of the persons-in-relation. Noting the limitations of this potentially partitive language, we nevertheless undertook a discussion of the love of the Father, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, focusing the thread of our argument by investigating how Torrance utilises the terms mystērion, prothesis and koinōnia.

As a continuation of this, we explored further how koinōnia functions as a central motif in Torrance’s ecclesiology. The Trinity in se is a rich communion of love, replete and needing nothing beyond itself; however, because God’s being is also ‘being for others’, as we had explored in the third chapter, God’s love freely flows to humanity and creates a human community that is the creaturely correlate of the divine koinōnia. Torrance uses koinōnia language in two ways; first, he describes a ‘threefold communion’ between the Trinity and the Church. The eternal love of the Godhead overflows into humanity through the hypostatic union of Jesus Christ, and so humanity is incorporated into the fellowship of the Trinity through union with Christ, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. The other complementary way in which Torrance utilises koinōnia is to talk about its two dimensions—the vertical dimension, which is how humanity is given to participate in the fellowship of the Trinity, and the corresponding horizontal dimension, which is the community formed among humanity as a result of their participation in the Triune love. The Church is a community which is formed on the basis of our participation together in the life of the Trinity, and thus becomes a ‘community of reciprocity’ or the ‘social co-efficient of theological knowledge’, the place where God’s love is poured out, and can be known among humanity. This discussion concluded the first half of the thesis by making it clear that the existence of the Church derives from our relation to the Triune God.

The visible life of the Church: shaped by koinōnia Having established the theological relationship between the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and the doctrine of the Church, the second half of the thesis further developed the implications of this relationship for the empirical life of the Church in between

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Christ’s two advents, an approach which appreciated Torrance’s comment that since everything in the Kingdom of God must be understood with reference to the incarnation and ascension, “to study the mind of the Church throughout the ages upon these decisive events of the Kingdom will help us to think through the many related questions with which we are faced today, and indeed to do it in a truly ecumenical fashion.”301

In order to be able to think about specific elements of Church practice, we began the sixth chapter by thinking more theologically about the nature of order and structure. Torrance argues that the Church requires certain forms of order in the eschatological pause between Christ’s two advents; these are not intrinsic to the Church’s being, but will pass away at Christ’s return. Torrance uses the metaphor of scaffolding to describe the role of order, for scaffolding supports the structure of a building while it is being built, but when the building process is finished, the scaffolding is torn down and removed. In a similar way, the forms of order and structure are not essential to the true being of the Church, but are necessary for support in the historical period where the Church lives in the ‘overlap of the ages’. This is a clear way to understand what Torrance means when he calls us to look ‘through’ the Church to the Triune God. Historical forms and structures are never to assume independent or eternal validity, but instead, point beyond themselves to the ultimate ground of the Church—as Torrance pithily suggests, the Church must use them, but not abuse them.302 The Church is to be visibly ordered in a way which, even though it is temporal, witnesses to the Triune love. In this way, the life of the Church retains its essential character of participation in the Triune fellowship, even though that is only imperfectly realised here and now.

As an outworking of the distinction between the true nature of the Church, and the temporal structures that are required by its existence in both fallen time and new time, we considered the difference between the ministry of Christ and the ministry of the Church. The Church has no independent ministry of its own, but instead is called to

301 Thomas F. Torrance, “Review of Ernst Staehlin, Die Verküngdigung Des Reiches Gottes in Der Kirche Jesu Christi: Zeugnisse Aus Allen Jahrhunderten Und Allen Konfessionen, Vols 1–2,” Scottish Journal of Theology 9, no. 1 (1956): 90. 302 Torrance, “History and Reformation,” 290.

374 witness to what Christ has already done through his life, death and resurrection. Even in using the terminology of ‘witness’, we must careful not to divorce this from the ongoing work of Christ through the Spirit, as modelled by the apostolic kerygma. The apostles’ proclamation was Christ’s own self-proclamation, for he was present through the Spirit giving the apostles’ speech about him divine validity. We affirmed that in the contemporary context, even though the Church is separated from Christ by both the veil of sense and the veil of time, it is to live out its common life in a way that people are drawn to join its creaturely form of koinōnia as a form of witness. We also noted the dangerous temptation for the Church to identify itself too closely with the world, under the guise of making the Gospel relevant. The Church must always resist assimilation to the status quo of public society.

Having considered the theological framework of order, in the seventh chapter we considered the essential attributes of the Church—its oneness, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. These were identified as interrelated attributes of the Triune God, which the Church shares in through its union and communion with Christ through the Spirit. We then turned our attention to specific traditional elements of the Church’s life, particularly the preaching of the Word, the sacraments, and the priesthood. We evaluated the way that Torrance describes these as indicators of the presence of the true Church, temporal forms given for the sustenance of the life of the Church in between the two advents of Christ. We further discussed the way that these elements of the Church’s life are corporate—the Word of God must be proclaimed within the community of God’s people in order to be interpreted correctly, while the sacraments are given to the whole Church to be celebrated together in the gathering of the Christian community as part of our worship.

Throughout the seventh chapter, we continued to emphasise the way that these elements of the Church’s life point to our participation in the Triune koinōnia. We saw that even though the sacraments are described as a mystery, the primary mystery is Jesus Christ himself, so that the sacraments are only a ‘secondary mystery.’ As we partake in them, we participate in the mystery of Christ and his Church, which helps us to understand the way in which Torrance does not view the sacraments as mere symbols, but as gifts to the Church through which we really participate in the fellowship of the Trinity. There are two sacraments, which derive from the one reality

375 of our participation in the Triune koinōnia. Baptism is a sign of our once-and-for-all incorporation into Christ, while the eucharist is a gift for the continuing renewal of the Church’s life. Related to this understanding of the sacraments is the nature of the priesthood; Jesus Christ is the true priest, and the human priesthood only derives from Christ’s priesthood. Although there are some people who are specifically ordained for the ministry of Word and the sacraments as a matter of order, the whole Church is constituted as a corporate priesthood through its union with Christ, and participation in the communion of the Holy Spirit.

In the eighth chapter, we continued to focus on the visible life of the Church in a different way. We considered how the trinitarian emphasis of Torrance’s ecclesiology shaped his view of the mission of the Church, and his involvement in the ecumenical movement. We engaged with three different aspects of his work, including his ministry in the Church of Scotland, his involvement in the wider ecumenical movement, and the key role he had in initiating an official dialogue on the Holy Trinity between the Greek Orthodox and Reformed Churches. This chapter was where we were able to further investigate Torrance’s argument that by grounding ecclesiology in the Trinity, we can relativise many of the issues that have caused division in the Church. We noted the potential, and the relative limitations, of his suggestion that by focusing on the Trinity as that which unites us, the Church can embrace the call to be a community of reconciliation, and thus more effectively participate in Christ’s reconciling mission.

The conclusion to this thesis’ main presentation of Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology was offered in the ninth chapter. We compared Torrance’s work with representative samples of work from John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, Jürgen Moltmann and John Zizioulas, showing how each of these theologians develops the relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Church. This dialogue interacted with theologians who are sympathetic to Barth’s legacy, and also with those who do not situate themselves so specifically within the Barthian tradition but tend towards social trinitarianism instead. Some of our insights from these comparisons will be drawn on in the following reflective conclusions.

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10.2 The way forward It is clear that for Thomas F. Torrance, ecclesiology cannot be separated from the doctrine of the Trinity without negative consequences for the life of the Church, and the fulfilment of its mission. The final task before us is to more fully unfold some of the implications of this perspective, in order to offer some potential avenues for further fruitful consideration. We noted at the start of this project, and have continued to show throughout the material presented, that although most of Torrance’s material is geared towards the theological academy, he undertook his theological calling in service to the Church and its mission. To honour this intent, we will offer reflection both on how this thesis advances our understanding of Thomas F. Torrance’s work, but also the ways in which it has practical implications for the life of the Church. Our final reflections in this section will be offered under the sub-headings of the contribution that this thesis makes to (a) Torrance studies, (b) wider theological scholarship, (c) communion ecclesiology and Church unity, and (d) the life of the Church, before we close by briefly pointing to some directions for further study.

Contribution to Torrance studies This thesis has contributed to our understanding of Thomas F. Torrance’s work by exploring an aspect of his work that has not yet been the subject of a full-length treatment. As an initial—though incomplete—marker, the value of this area of Torrance’s theology is able to be measured by the way that a number of the secondary works devote a chapter to the area of ecclesiology, as we highlighted in the introductory literature review. Thus, by exploring the relationship between Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity and the wider contours of his doctrine of the Church, we have integrated two areas of his theological output which are notable individually, and strengthened in relation to each other.

Care was taken throughout this thesis to approach and explain the material in a way which was understandable without being unnecessarily technical. We also sought to avoid the often-repetitive nature of Torrance’s writing by streamlining our exploration of his work, utilising the tacit awareness which is gained through prolonged exposure to a scholar’s work, in order to clarify his main themes. This investigation will consequently be of use to a wide range of scholars; both by intersecting with, and

377 expanding upon much of the existing secondary material on Torrance, and by serving as an accessible introduction to some key tenets of his theological vision.

Contribution to wider scholarship It is a difficult task for the author to offer a neutral conclusion about the wider significance of this work, given the intensity with which this study has consumed my attention for the past three years. The sheer amount of time which has been occupied by seeking to understand Torrance on his own terms means that my own theological position is currently slanted, naturally, towards that which has been the biggest influence of my own formation during this period. However, there are some comments that can be made here about the significance of this thesis and its exploration, for wider scholarship.

Torrance’s work is surprisingly underappreciated in the wider theological academy. One particular example is the lack of any mention of Torrance in Stephen Holmes’ The Quest for the Trinity, in which he explores the revival of trinitarian doctrine in the twentieth century, but views many modern approaches as mishandling the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. This lack of mention was raised in a volume of essays which sought to respond to Holmes, and in his response to these essays, Holmes’ noted that his omission of Torrance was characteristic of the lack of mention in the “story of Trinitarian renewal” which Holmes learnt at King’s College, London. Holmes acknowledges that he should have incorporated Torrance into his initial publication.303

However, the recent increase in secondary works, and in works in which Torrance’s work is brought into dialogue, signals that this lack of engagement is changing. It is certain that his New College lectures have influenced an entire generation of pastors and theologians—a clear example of this is seen in the work of pastoral theologians such as Ray S. Anderson, and the reflective comments offered by Kettler and Speidell

303 Stephen R. Holmes, “Response: In Praise of Being Criticized,” in The Holy Trinity Revisited: Essays in Response to Stephen R. Holmes, eds. Thomas A. Noble and Jason S. Sexton (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2015), 151-153. Holmes takes the chance here to briefly raise his concerns about Torrance’s redefinition of historical terms, and notes his concern that Torrance’s use of terms like homoousion is not theologically robust enough. However, Holmes has acknowledged his lack of proficiency with Torrancian theology, and we should note that this comment is not made as an extended critique of Torrance, but rather as part of a brief response which primarily deals with other theological points. Holmes’ critique of Torrance here needs extended elaboration before a robust response may be offered.

378 in their introduction to a Festschrift for Anderson, in which they describe Anderson as a theologian who had “an incarnational theology that thinks concretely about the ministry of Christ,” making explicit reference to Torrance’s description of Jesus as the Personalising Person.304 These secondary works are now beginning to bear fruit in yet another generation of theological scholarship. Torrance’s work is also extensively cited in works such as Michael Jinkins’ Invitation to Theology, which is an introductory level text that makes the rich depths of the theological tradition accessible to students.305

The influence of Torrance’s work has been further extended by the recent publication of Incarnation and Atonement, his Edinburgh lectures edited by Robert T. Walker, on the topics of Christology and Soteriology. However, while there is some material that deals with ecclesiology towards the end of Atonement, there would be significant benefit if a similar volume was to be published comprising a more fulsome collection of Torrance’s ecclesiology lectures, such as those that are available in the Thomas F. Torrance Collection, held in Special Collections at Princeton Theological Seminary. While many of these have been published as articles or chapters in Torrance’s other works, their systematic development, together with editorial commentary, would be an invaluable source for the theological academy.

In terms of specific ecclesiology, a thesis like this also can be used as a filter for critically constructive reflection on theological works of a less academically rigorous nature. In the twenty first century there continues to be significant growth in the publication of books that deal with Church-related topics, such as growth and leadership strategies, dealing with the increasing apathy of many contemporary cultures towards Christianity, or the search for a relevant Gospel. However, many of these books do not contain sustained theological reflection, and so by highlighting the importance of grounding the practical elements of a doctrine of the Church in the doctrine of God, the

304 Todd H. Speidell Christian D. Kettler, “Introduction,” in Incarnational Ministry: The Presence of Christ in Church, Society, and Family, ed. Todd H. Speidell Christian D. Kettler (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 2009), xiv. An essay offering analysis of Torrance’s influence on Anderson is expected to be published in a forthcoming volume of Participatio. 305 Michael Jinkins, Invitation to Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001). Jinkins extensively quotes a number of theologians from the Torrance family, and in the author’s opinion, provides an introductory level work that does an excellent job of introducing many of the contours of their approach to theology, including many of the key trinitarian and ecclesiological themes that have been discussed in this thesis. He identifies Torrance’s work The Trinitarian Faith as one of the most helpful contemporary works on the idea of perichoresis.

379 approach taken by this thesis offers a ‘yardstick’, as such, for the evaluation of the theology contained in works of a more popular nature.

Following on from the further point, Torrance’s work also offers significant potential for engaging theologically with the rise in charismatic and Pentecostal churches in recent decades, as has been demonstrated by Alexandra Radcliff in her recent book, The Claim of Humanity in Christ: Salvation and Sanctification in the Theology of T.F. and J.B. Torrance.306 In this thesis we have begun to move in this direction, seeking to develop a robustly theological understanding of the particular work of the Holy Spirit in relation to the life of the Church in the time between the two advents of Christ. Torrance comments that the resurgence of belief in the Spirit is a reaction against the Church’s temptation to substitute the power of the Spirit with worldly power. He suggests two things that we must keep in mind. The first is to do with the Patristic formula, “from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit,” which is parallel to the contemporary re-appreciation that God is at work here and now, interacting with the world that he has made. While Torrance warns against the Pentecostal tendency to only concentrate upon the phenomenal acts of the Spirit in space and time, he posits, secondly, that by also reminding ourselves of the other side of the Patristic formula— “in the Spirit, through the Son, and to the Father,” we are reminded to lift our vision away from the phenomena of the Spirit, to the mystery of the Triune God in his own being.307 This is a helpful corrective to some of the untheological excesses of the charismatic movement.308 At the same time, Torrance’s position would also benefit from a reciprocal dialogue with contemporary Pentecostal theologians by becoming more open to experience that is reflected upon theologically. Habets suggests that Torrance’s general rejection of anything he considers is because he “adopted a partial and inaccurate definition of mysticism, which leads him to an a priori exclusion of mystical elements.”309 This is also noted by Radcliff, who suggests that because the Torrances emphasise that humanity can both know and experience God,

306 Alexandra S. Radcliff, The Claim of Humanity in Christ: Salvation and Sanctification in the Theology of T.F. and J.B. Torrance, Kindle ed. (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016). 307 Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 289–93. 308 This observation is made by one who is deeply grateful for the Pentecostal Church and the charismatic movement, but is also concerned to see it remain faithful to the self-revelation of God, and aware of the whole tradition of the Church, not merely the Book of Acts. 309 Habets, Theology in Transposition, 141.

380 their scholarly theology would benefit from “a greater openness to and consideration of the mystical and experiential aspects of the Christian life.”310 This does not necessarily have to undermine Torrance’s scientific theology where an object is known in accordance with its unique reality. We know God through being reconciled to him, an experience which deals with who we are essentially as human beings. While one’s subjective individual experiences should not be allowed to dictate one’s knowledge of God, this experiential aspect fits well with what Torrance describes as the corporate, primary level of the stratified structure of humanity’s knowledge of God.

Finally, Torrance’s work in developing a theological science has been widely explored elsewhere, and is appreciated particularly for its methodology. One aspect of this that deserves specific mention here is his stratified structure of knowledge, and the inherent potential in Torrance’s development of cognitive tools. This theological ‘disclosure model’ could be of significant use in teaching theological students how to critique and evaluate different theological sources. Rather than teaching students to evaluate texts and traditions through a lens such as the ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’, Torrance’s stratified model offers a much better lens for theological interpretation. It does this by explicitly acknowledging the challenge of ensuring that our finite, human statements about God correlate as far as possible with the transcendent reality of the Trinity, and by proposing a way forward that allows for the cross-referencing of our individual and corporate experience, with the revelation of God in space and time, with the reality of God in his own being. On this basis, we are able to further think out the relationship between God and humanity, and critically evaluate our theology as a faithful—or unfaithful—response to the Triune revelation. The task of theology is to serve the Church by seeking to clarify and test its speech and knowledge in relation to the Triune God, but also to heed Torrance’s call that the Church must be ever- reforming, willing to submit its own life to the judgment and mercy of Jesus Christ. This model, as one sample of Torrance’s theological method, offers a way forward in doing this.

310 Radcliff, The Claim of Humanity in Christ, Location 5552.

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Contribution to the dialogue about communion ecclesiology and Church unity At the start of this chapter we noted Webster’s comment that communion ecclesiology is one of the most important theological trends over the past four decades, and that Torrance’s material can be classified as belonging to this ‘theological family.’ In defining communion ecclesiology, Doyle, a Roman Catholic theologian, appreciatively notes that communion ecclesiology

represents an attempt to move beyond the merely juridical and institutional understandings by emphasising the mystical, sacramental, and historical dimensions of the Church. It focuses on relationships, whether among the persons of the Trinity, among human beings and God, among the members of the Communion of Saints, among members of a parish, or among the bishops dispersed throughout the world.311 In contrast to Doyle, a more critical, but simpler, view of communion ecclesiology is offered by Healy, who argues that,

communion ecclesiologies relate the primary reality of the church to the Trinity as such. The true identity or reality of the church lies in its participation in the inner-trinitarian koinonia or communion. That is, this participatory relation is at the same time the mode of our salvation, which is therefore realized in an ecclesial and communal form.312 According to both of these definitions, the material that has been discussed in this thesis fits within the wider definition of what a communion ecclesiology is. Consequently, while Torrance’s relating the doctrine of the Church to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is far from original, this thesis makes a valid contribution to the ongoing dialogue within communion ecclesiology, by opening up Torrance’s work,

311 Dennis M. Doyle, Communion Ecclesiology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2000), 12. Doyle’s work focuses upon Roman Catholic communion ecclesiology, but his definition is sufficiently broad; he notes particularly in regard to his own tradition that that “Catholic theologians cannot interpret either Vatican II or communion ecclesiology apart from each other.” (2) 312 Nicholas M. Healy, “Communion Ecclesiology: A Cautionary Note,” Pro Ecclesia 4, no. 4 (1995): 442. See also pages 449–50, where Healy notes that the variety of communion ecclesiologies—he identifies at least four different approaches, which all call for a different type of reform in the Church—each derive from an implicit narrative which the theologian has constructed about the historical identity of the Church. Healy elsewhere illustrates that there are at least six different ways of developing a communion ecclesiology, sounding the same note. In this second work, he is arguing that ‘blueprint ecclesiologies’— theological models of the Church—are misguided if they are a) not wiling to dialogue with other models, and b) are not worked out with primary reference to the practical life of the Church and its tasks of witness and discipleship. See Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6–8, 26–51.

382 highlighting the salient relationships that exist between the doctrine of the Trinity and his ecclesiology, and thus situating him as another voice in this ongoing ecclesial conversation. It is worth noting at this point that Torrance would have viewed the joining of his voice to the conversation as a positive contribution, given his own commitment to position his theology within the Great Tradition of the Church.

One further point may be noted here, although we must be careful not to give Torrance’s work more weight than its due. Given the centrality of the koinōnia motif in Torrance’s work, it is encouraging to see the way that this became a pre-eminent theme in the ecumenical movement later in the twentieth century. Koinōnia was selected as the theme of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order held in Santiago de Compostela in 1993. Throughout the conference, a number of different perspectives on koinōnia were offered, and different discussions held about what this could mean for the life of the Church. There was a consistent hope expressed throughout the gathering that the theme of koinōnia would provide further opportunities for church unity to flourish. This is the same understanding that we have identified in Torrance’s ecclesiology, that the being of the Church is not primarily an institution or an organisation, but rather is a creaturely koinōnia that correlates in appropriate ways to the Triune koinōnia, which gives us a substantial theological argument for the need for unity. Although there is no clear line of connection between Torrance’s work, and this development in the Faith and Order Commission, it does signal that Torrance was not simply a voice calling in the wilderness, but instead affirmed a theological perspective that has become increasingly appreciated. Ecumenical dialogue moved in a direction which Torrance would have celebrated.313

The other area of unity which is related to this, and is worthy of further engagement, is Torrance’s perspective on the schism between Israel and the Church. Although Israel’s geographical claim is contentious, Torrance emphasised in a joint statement after the Evanston meeting of the WCC that his concern for the Jewish people was ‘’wholly biblical and is not to be confused with any political attitude towards the State

313 For the full report of proceedings, see Thomas F. Best and Günther Gassmann, eds. On the Way to Fuller Koinonia: Official Report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994).

383 of Israel.”314 At the same time, he acknowledges that because revelation takes spatio- temporal forms, we cannot detach Israel from their land without it resulting in an ethical, abstract Judaism.315 Although there are marked difficulties in the geo-political and religious debates around the modern nation-state of Israel, there is significant opportunity for positive interfaith dialogue to emerge between Jews and Christians, given that the apostolic and prophetic foundation of the Church was laid in a Jewish context. Perhaps Torrance’s perspective could offer a middle way that is neither the extreme of replacement theology, or Zionism on the other hand, but instead affirms the preparatory role that the Jewish people played in preparing for the Messiah, and appreciates Torrance’s belief that the spiritual people of Israel will yet experience future redemption, given his eschatological position that “to expect Jesus Christ means to hope for the conversion of the Jewish people, and to love Him means to love the people of God’s promise.”316 This would be a fitting response to his critique that the schism between Israel and the Christian Church is the most significant schism in the body of Christ, and observation that unless this schism is healed, the Gospel is hindered in taking root.317

The life of the Church Although this thesis has certainly been geared towards the academic theologian, care has been taken throughout to honour Torrance’s own sense of participating in the mission of God throughout his theological career. He took care not to divorce his theology from the life of the Church, and it is thus fitting to conclude with some reflections of a more pragmatic nature. While ecclesiology must be solidly grounded in the doctrine of God, it must also be able to show its practical relevance to the communal life of the Church.318

314 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 284. 315 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 16–17. 316 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 285. 317 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 45–46. 318 This point is made well in Gary D. Badcock, The House Where God Lives: Renewing the Doctrine of the Church for Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 336. Badcock develops his ecclesiology along similar lines to Torrance, arguing that even though the Church is both visible only by faith, and visible as a place in space and time, ecclesiology must begin by embracing the mystery that the Church is “born from God’s primal decision that issues in the incarnation of the Son and in the sending and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, so that it comes into being not only as people of God, but also in one action of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the body of Christ and the temple of the Spirit. Apart from these, there is, 384

The simplest, and yet most profound contribution of T. F. Torrance’s trinitarian ecclesiology, is the reminder to look beyond the external forms of Christian life and beyond the contextual debates about doctrine, and to fix one’s eyes instead upon the God who calls the Church into being and sustains it in relationship with himself. This directly counteracts our contemporary tendency to focus upon the individual unit of the parish, or the congregation, and instead to remind believers that to belong to the Church is not primarily about belonging to one’s congregation, or even to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, but is to belong first and foremost to the Triune God. As Torrance repeatedly emphasises,

the whole raison d’être of the universe lies in the fact that God will not be alone, that he will not be without us, but has freely and purposely created the universe and bound it to himself as the sphere where he may ungrudgingly pour out his love, and where we may enjoy communion with him.319 The fact that we are invited into the communion of the Holy Trinity also has profound implications for our relationships with other humans. Just as God’s being has been shown to be ‘being for others’, so too, our lives should be characterised as ‘being for others.’ The only way in which the Church can do this is to follow Christ; for individuals to give their lives in following the example of Christ’s servant nature, “each spending our life in the service of the love of God toward all.”320 Jesus Christ obediently embraced the way of the servant, even unto death; through his life, the new order of creation is revealed. As we participate through the Spirit in Christ’s obedient humanity, we are not only saved, but enabled to live out the Gospel of reconciliation. In Christ all divisions and separation are overcome, so that Torrance may state,

Participation in Christ carries with it participation in one another, and our common reconciliation with Christ carries with it reconciliation with one another.321 However, we often fail to demonstrate this reality in our common life, as is illustrated by the scandal of division within the Church. Jesus has made participation in the fellowship of the Trinity accessible to both Jew and Gentile, male and female, and has in the strictest possible sense, absolutely no basis for either an ecclesiology as a doctrine of the church or any adequate theology reason for the continuing existence of the church as a human reality.” 319 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 94–95. 320 Torrance, Atonement, 375. 321 Ibid.

385 broken down every barrier that exists between them.322 Yet, the modern Church is not predominantly a unified community of those who have been reconciled to God, because “fragmentation and pluralism in the Church reflect fragmentation and pluralism in our secular culture.”323 While, as we saw, there is a genuine need to adapt our communication of the Gospel to be relevant to specific languages and cultures, the Gospel itself is of unchanging relevance, so that Torrance views devising new methods of evangelism as a somewhat pointless exercise!324 The true relevance of the Gospel is found in the way that the work of Christ is directed to humanity’s deepest need, since, “In Jesus Christ the Truth of God has already been made relevant to man and his need, and therefore does not need to be made relevant by us.325

This has the follow-on consequence of reminding us that in an era when we are surrounded by predictions of the Church’s decline, God is in control. It is not our job to ‘prop up’ the Church, but rather to work out our call to participate in God’s mission in faithfulness. We must trust God not only for the sustenance of God’s people, but that he will bring the Church to the fullness of unity. This has significant potential to change our perspective on evangelism, so that the focus is not on the numerical growth of our congregations, but becomes about celebrating the work that God is doing among us, rather than boasting about the work that we have done for God.

We have traced throughout this thesis the way that the Church is a creaturely communion that corresponds to the Triune communion; however, this has particular consequences for the way that we relate to those whom we disagree with. While the things that separate Christians from each other should not be dismissed as irrelevant, whether at the level of individuals, communities or denominations, the theological approach of focusing on the Triune God, rather than the Church as an institution, calls us to recognise that those dividing issues are secondary to the fact that we are united through our participation in the fellowship of the Trinity.326 Again, as Torrance writes,

322 Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, 68, referring to Ephesians 2:13–22. 323 Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 151. 324 Torrance, Conflict and Agreement: Order and Disorder, 223. 325 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 26. 326 A short but helpful example of the way that this can be done at a more accessible level than we find in many of Torrance’s works, is Martyn Atkins, “What Is the Essence of the Church?,” in Mission-Shaped Questions: Defining Issues for Today's Church, ed. Steven Croft (London: Church House Publishing, 2008), 386

The primary constitutive facts, then, are the one faith and one baptism, coordinated to the activity of the one Spirit, the one Lord and the one Father. The true Church is marked by its unity and holiness, and by its fidelity to the Holy Trinity. One Church is to be understood strictly in that context of belief in the Holy Trinity.327 It is in this spirit that we conclude with the prayer offered by the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order, which echoes so well Torrance’s own vision for the life of the Church.

O God, holy and eternal Trinity, We pray for your Church in all the world. Sanctify its life; renew its worship; Empower its witness; heal its divisions; Make visible its unity.

Lead us, with all our brothers and sisters, Towards communion in faith, life and witness So that, united together in one body by the one Spirit, We may together witness to the perfect unity Of your love.

Amen.328

16–28. Atkins argues, in brief, that theology should be read through the lens of missiology and will produce ecclesiology—in other words, developing the theological perspective that the nature and life of the Church derives from the Triune Godhead. The theological argument is similar, but there is a much clearer missiological slant to this chapter than found in Thomas F. Torrance; this reflects the purpose of the book, which was produced by the Church of England to reflect on the need for both traditional, and new expressions of the Church. 327 Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 263, where Torrance refers to Irenaeus’ citation of Paul in Ephesians 4:4–6. 328 Gassmann, On the Way to Fuller Koinonia: Official Report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order, xii.

387

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