Transcript
The particular theme for today's lecture is the person of the mediator. In the first lecture I pointed to the problem that comes from the analytical tradition of thought, out of which there are dichotomous ways of thinking which break up, disrupt and distort the very things we seek to know in any field of human inquiry. I pointed out that we isolate something from the matrix of natural or inherent relations to which we belong and we abstract the
external form of something from its being and tear the phenomenal surface of things from the objective frame where it is held together and which therefore disintegrates. Then I pointed to the damaging effects of this in our understanding of Christ and his gospel. It leads to a detachment of Christ from the context of God's covenant interrelation with Israel. It involves a detachment of Christ from God and subsequently a detachment of the gospel from Christ or a detachment
of Christianity from Christ. Over against that I suggested that the proper approach would be the consideration of something in terms of its actual relations which I called onto relations with other things. Onto relations have to do with those relations between things which are part of what things actually are and it should involve the consideration of something in its own irrational relations or its own inherent structure or its own controlling Now if I may illustrate that from
our modern scientific understanding, let me take the example of our understanding particles. In the classical science what we did was to chop up the world in infinite little bits, particles, an atomistic way of thinking and then we tried to connect them by their external relations which could only be causally determined relations. We came up with a mechanistic universe which has suffocated the human spirit and it is that way of looking at things which imposed this hard
causeless pattern upon our ordinary ways of life which has led to the radical dualism of our culture and the disintegration of form. But now instead of looking at things in that way, we've come to look at particles as continuously connected up in dynamic fields of radiation and here the interrelations between particles are part of what particles are. So that what we thought of as separated particles turns out to be something different. Most of the particles we
are concerned with are knots of energy within a dynamic field of force and so we understand particles in terms of on-toe relational structures. Now it's interesting that this way of thinking in terms of on-toe relational structures came first out of Christian theology. It came out of Christology and it developed in the doctrine of the Trinity. For example, the concept of person which is quite a new concept not found before Christianity. The doctrine of the
Trinity was something like this. A person cannot be understood in terms of his individual atomistic separability. The relations between persons belong to what persons actually are. So the persons can only be understood in terms of on-toe relations. Now that was governed by the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and which we think of God as a communion of love in which Father, Son and Holy Spirit mutually involve and cohere in one another in profound on-toe
relations of that divine communion. Now I can't go into the fact that it's those concepts that have so profoundly influenced modern thought but let me indicate it is precisely through James Clark Maxwell's application of his understanding of creation and incarnation to his understanding of the electromagnetic field which made him reject the atomistic mechanistic interpretation of radiation in favor of a dynamic field theory upon which at last Einstein has built the whole structure of modern physics. So
that when we are concerned with thinking in this kind of way and it comes at us from modern science, this is something that modern science owes to certain basic theological constructs that have long history and are rooted in classical Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity. Now when we apply today this way of looking at Jesus Christ or to the mediation of Christ which has been our theme, then we consider him in his on-toe relational
and historical interconnection with Israel and God's purpose of revelation and reconciliation worked out through Israel and that we've been doing in the last two lectures but we also come to consider Jesus Christ in terms of his own inner intelligibility, in terms of his own intrinsic logos and therefore in terms of his own inner structure as God and in one person. Now just to illustrate that again from modern science let me indicate the kind of thing we're
concerned with. Up till the end of the 19th century people talked certainly about atoms but then the whole structure of science tended to be one in which people said atoms don't really exist because after all we do not know things in themselves, we only know things as they appear to us and so under the influence of Kant, the impact of Kant upon modern science we have the conclusion given by Ernst Mach, the great champion of mechanical
science at the end of the that atoms do not exist, they are merely mental artifices, they are mental fictions that we use in the arrangement, the convenient arrangement of our terms and a conflict developed between Mach and Max Planck who had been struggling to understand the behavior of energy in packets and who began quantum theory and Max Planck insisted that we do know atoms in terms of what they are in themselves, they do exist and there
was a famous controversy there between Planck and Mach but as science developed lo and behold we began to understand the atom in its internal structure, its internal maker and as we began to understand atoms not simply in terms of their appearances, not simply in terms of so-called observational data but in terms of their intrinsic connections and structures then science took a realist approach and away from the positivist and conventionalist approach. Now it's exactly the same
switch in understanding we have to get back to to understand Jesus. The whole approach to the historical Jesus from the point of view of phenomenalist observationist science said we cannot understand Jesus in himself, we only understand Jesus as he appeared to the early church, to the appear to the early community and we can only understand and interpret that Jesus as he appears to us and has meaning for us but we cannot know Jesus as he is
in himself but you see that approach to the historical Jesus which lost the historical Jesus and which still dominates by and large biblical scholarship has been shattered root and branch in its foundations by the modern scientific approach in which we know things in their internal structures and allow them to disclose themselves to us so we know them as we allow their inherent rationality, their inherent logos to control our knowing of them. Now that's how we know
Jesus. We know Jesus in terms of his own inner intelligibility, in terms of the logos intrinsic in his very being, in terms of his own inner structure as God and man in one person and we can know him only out of himself as he reveals himself to us and creates in us the modes appropriate to know him and creates in us the concepts appropriate to him and that is why when the early church developed and sought
to know Jesus Christ in this way the knowledge of God in Christ forced them radically to reconstruct the very foundations of Greek culture philosophy and science and the terms being and person and relation and love were reconstructed and quite new concepts determined and controlled by God in Christ came into being. Now that is what we seek to do now in line with that classical approach to consider the person of the mediator. Now if you adopt a
dualist approach to Jesus Christ then right from the start your dualist approach cuts Jesus Christ in two into a divine aspect and a human aspect and then you start either from his humanity and try to get across to his deity or you start from his deity and try to get past with humanity or in modern language you have a Christology from below or a Christology from above and the strange thing is that each approach in the
end has to end up by denying itself and passing over into the other and so each extreme moves into the opposite extreme and there is no solution at all but when we approach Jesus in a different way then we seek to approach him in his own natural wholeness. We will not allow our presuppositions to break him up before we even ask questions of him. We allow him and his whole and divided reality to confront us and
to disclose us to himself as he is and our particular concern here is to disclose us to himself as the mediator as he who is both God and man in one and who mediates all our relations with God. Now the basic clue that came up here in the early church was that which was found in the father-son, son-father relation and one of the basic passages that affected the whole early Christology was that which we
find in Saint Matthew 11 and the Lucan parallel and indeed in Johannine parallels also that I quote from the Macean text, no one knows the father, no one knows the son but the father and no one knows the father but the son and he to whom the son reveals him. Now here we have a mutual relation of knowing and being between the father and the son or as the Johannine tradition puts it a mutual relation between
knowing and loving in the being of the father and the son. The father in hearing the son and the son in hearing in the father. Now the point that I wish to stress is this that the father-son relationship, the sonship of Christ falls within the being of God. Now you and I are sons or daughters in relation to God and we are creatures of God but our being children of God falls outside the being of
God because we are creatures and not divine but Jesus Christ is son of God in a unique sense because he is son of God within God so that the father-son relationship falls within the very being of God. Now that is the root of Christology of the early church and which we have formulated in the Nicene Constantinopolitan creed the 16th centenary of which we celebrate this year in June actually 381 AD. Now I don't wish today
to enter into that high Christology but I wish to point to three to indicate three points. First knowledge of God the father and knowledge of Jesus Christ the incarnate son arise together not one apart from the other. We don't know the father apart from the son for there is no father but the father of the son and we don't know the son apart from the father for there is no son apart from the son of the
father so that knowledge of God the father and knowledge of God the son arise together and as we know God the father or the son we are in a profound sense sharing in the mutual knowing of the father by the son and the son by the father. Now it is because we do not know the or the son except through Jesus Christ who reveals himself to us that in actual empirical and liturgical fact our faith in
God the father is as Kuhlmann has pointed out a function of faith in Jesus Christ the savior because God has communicated himself to us in space and time through the incarnation of his word in Jesus Christ. It is in and through Jesus Christ that knowledge of God and knowledge of the son and of course knowledge of the Holy Spirit are controlled and determined. Now the second point I wish to indicate is that the father-son relationship
then since the father-son relationship falls within the Godhead we have to think of the son as God of God in the same way that we think of the father as God of God. Now in that context how do we look at the incarnation? If it is that son of that father who mutually in here in one another who became man in Jesus Christ then the incarnation falls within the life of God himself. The incarnation falls
within the life of God himself all that Jesus was and is and all that he said have to be understood as within the life of God who is himself the one God the creator eternal life and love. Now my concern as I've said today is not with the high Christology and the trinitarian doctrine that that involved but what in the light of that are we to say about Jesus Christ the mediator. Jesus Christ the incarnate son
is mediator in such a way that he belongs to both sides of the mediation relation. He is God of God and man of man. He is divine and human in one person very God of very God but very man of very man not two realities composed or composited together but one reality who confronts us as God and man. We do not think as Athanasius said that we ought not to think of the incarnation as God in
man that would be a as man so that Jesus Christ is holy God of God and holy man of man. Now that is a staggering fact and it reveals the incredible all-mightiness of God that God the creator could come among us as a creature as a man and yet remain God. Now it is as such that Jesus Christ is the bridge between God and man in the incarnate constitution of his person therefore he is the
mediator between God and man. As mediator he is mediation between God and man. He is himself not only the agent of atoning reconciliation he is himself atoning reconciliation. He is the chelosmos as Saint Paul says he is propitiation between God and man and man and God. Now in order to see the significance of this understanding of the mediator let us suppose that the bond of being between Jesus Christ the man and God the father is severed.
Suppose that Jesus Christ is not mediator in his being but is only a created intermediary and that the sonship does not fall within the divine being but falls outside the divine being within the created world then cut the ontological bond between Jesus Christ and God and what becomes of the gospel. Now notice this is something we do in scientific thought we say if A and B then C if A and not B what do we have
and that helps us to clarify our thought. So if there is no armed in being between Jesus and God what becomes of the gospel we'll take forgiveness. When Jesus on the pages of the gospel confronts the poor sinner and says daughter my son your sins are forgiven you what happens are these words of Jesus merely the words of a creature even the greatest of all creatures but how can a creature forgive sins as the jews said
how can this man forgive sin because they knew from their old testament revelation that forgiveness on God's part is a stupendous act that undoes the sin undoes the sin God puts the clock back he restores the years that the locust has eaten he undoes all the chaos and he restores everything to its original being how can a man forgive sin and they were right. And if you cut the bond between Jesus Christ and God then the
word of forgiveness is merely a creaturely word merely an act of courtesy but it does nothing there is no ultimate validity in the forgiving act and forgiving word of Jesus but if Jesus is God if he is one with the very being of God his word and his being and act are the word and being and act of God almighty then forgiveness is forgiveness of sin. Cut then the bond between Jesus and God and the bottom
falls out of the gospel of forgiveness but take the revelation of God in Jesus Christ cut the bond between Jesus and God and what becomes of that manifestation of God here we think of Jesus Christ as God manifesting himself toward us in love and graciousness but if the bond of being is cut between Jesus and God then that means that God is not in his own being what he is toward us what God is toward us
in Jesus he is not in his own being then what do you have then you can only have a relation of infidelity untrustworthiness between Jesus and God Jesus then is not in truth and reality God's self-manifestation God's self-communication he can only be some passing symbol that speaks about God but you have no idea whether or not it is rooted in God or terminates upon God in fact it doesn't if you cut the bond it
is merely a passing myth so cut the bond between Jesus and God and the whole ontological content of revelation collapses it does not exist but take the love of God so if you cut the bond between Jesus and God then what you have said is that God does not love us to the uttermost he does not love us to the extent in which he committed himself to becoming man and united himself with us in the incarnation
so God's love stops short of becoming one with us then what kind of a God is that what do we mean by the love of God because it is not an utter absolute love it is only a finite limited sort of love but what kind of God would that be no cut the bond of being between Christ and God and we are left with a dark inscrutable deity behind the back of Jesus Christ before which we
can only be terrified and afraid cut the bond between Jesus Christ and God and in the words of H .R. McIntosh Jesus Christ does not go bail for God there is no guarantee in anything that Jesus was and is as to what God is like now this is an immensely important pastoral problem how often in visiting someone a person has said to me Mr. Torrance will God really turn out to be what we believe him to
be in Jesus Christ I've had a chap say that to me on the battlefield when he had only half an hour to live is God really like that what is God like you see the schizoid tendencies of our life which I from God and as a manifestation of that we have deep anxieties in the human heart and which people cannot connect up Jesus with the ultimate being of God and the ultimate being of God can only
hold terror for them a dark inscrutable arbitrary deity and they can only paint harsh streaks upon his face from their own sinful conscience so the whole theological structure the whole pastoral relation the whole involvement of humankind in the love of God is destroyed if the bond of being in the mediator is severed but now look at it in a somewhat different way and this is the way that we find again and again the Aryans in the
early church looked at it in modern many many modern theologians look at it this way suppose that the sonship of Jesus Christ falls outside the being of God that Jesus Christ is ultimately external to God now I said this is the way the Aryans thought of it they said Jesus Christ is the logos of God he is a supreme creature he is the first of the creatures the supreme creature the supreme mediator by whom therefore God
creates the world and through whom God mediates his love and salvation and so on but Jesus Christ in the last analysis is not God he's a creature so you draw a line of demarcation between God and Jesus Christ and he is the acme of the creaturely world and so their dualist way of thinking posited an ultimate duality between God and this world and God does not even interact with this world in any way in such so
that he gives his own being to us or reveals himself to us all right if Jesus Christ then is a center outside God then the relation between Jesus Christ and God is only a moral relation only a moral relation now that affects everything if that is the case then salvation and atoning reconciliation are externally related to Jesus because if he is outside God then he is not really our savior because the only one who can save
is God the creator so that if Jesus is only morally related to God all he can do is to be a kind of leader that points us in a moral relationship toward God and then atonement comes to be understood in terms of an external moral or judicial transaction between God and Jesus for man's sake and if you pursue that further you'll find that the church and the sacraments that Christian life have to be understood only in
terms of moral relations the church is only an aggregation on moral grounds of people together a society externally and morally connected together and the sacraments in the life of the church are purely moralistic forms of behavior now i've been describing by and large a whole mass of modern protestant thinking a form of thinking that today even affects the roman catholic church because many roman catholic think in this kind of way now if this is the case
then salvation does not take place in the ontological depth of human being as we've been seeing it in God's relations with Israel there is there no profound transformation of human existence if Jesus is a saviour if he's a healer he does it to external means like a human doctor but if he is the creator he heals us by penetrating into the ontological depths of our being and recreating us from the very foundations of our existence we'll
then look at this in the opposite way the way in which we found to find it the great fathers of the church all say John Calvin looking at it first if in Jesus Christ God himself has come into our human being and united it to himself then atoning reconciliation falls within the personal being of the mediator the person and the work of Christ are utterly inseparable Christ and his gospel belong ontologically together incarnation and atonement are
one and inseparable the atonement the atoning reconciliation falls within the constituted structure of the incarnate son as mediator now ask yourself whether you tend to look upon the atonement as some external transaction between God and man worked out by Jesus or whether you look at atonement as taking place within the being of the mediator and there you will see whether you have ultimately taken the line of the Aryans or the liberals or you've taken the line
of the great christologies and the fathers of the church you see if Jesus Christ is really God and man united as we say hypothetically in one person then in his one person he holds God and man together but as we saw yesterday he became incarnate within our fallen humanity and becoming incarnate in our fallen humanity he takes our sin our guilt our violence our wickedness upon himself and in taking this flesh of sin upon him he
heals and sanctifies it from within so that as mediator he brings God and man together in such a way that the very coming together of God and man in the person of the mediator saves mankind and heals him and that has to work itself out in the space-time structures of existence and that's how we to understand the cross of Christ and the resurrection of Christ well then secondly the mediator mediation does not mean just the
repairing of external relations between man and God but that men and women are saved through being taken into the inner relation of God's own life and being incarnate in Jesus Christ let me repeat the incarnation falls within God's own life as God staggering as that may be then the atoning work of God in Jesus Christ falls within the being of God's own person and work and then it has his ultimate validity and nothing can shatter it
the whole bond between heaven and earth is anchored in the mediator if then Jesus Christ in Jesus Christ God and man are hypothetically united in one person then the human nature of Jesus Christ is far from being overwhelmed preserved and confirmed now just think of that for a moment think of the fact that modern Protestant theology has for 100 years sought to stress the humanity of Jesus and we have 150 years of the quest of historical
Jesus but what's happened the more we have pursued the humanity of Jesus in that way the more Jesus slips through our fingers like sand until in the end historical Jesus is thrown out the door and all you have is some kind of mythological construct all that you can establish as Bultmann said is that there was an someone we don't really know his name who was crucified and upon his pilot that's all you can actually establish by
that kind of method Jesus is gone why is it that when you start pursuing an understanding the mediator from below in terms of his humanity you lose his humanity but if you think of Christ as one in whom the human nature the humanity of Jesus is forever ontologically bound up with God in such a way that God does not the presence of God does not mean the diminishment of the humanity of Jesus and the presence of
the humanity of Jesus does not mean the diminishment of God's reality then the humanity of Jesus is preserved and conserved as in no other way so it is this high Christology that preserves for us the humanity of Jesus and it's of that we shall be thinking particularly tomorrow but now let us think of the significance of this in several respects if Jesus Christ is himself the mediator let's say he is himself God the Son God the
Word by whom all things are made and in whom all men cohere then he is God in his own person becoming man if that is the case Jesus Christ is the personalizing person now let me explain that many people have extreme difficulty in as we can see in the early church in the modern times of understanding how in Jesus Christ we have one person when we have the person of God the Son become man and yet
we have the human personality of Jesus so is the human personality of Jesus merely an outward mask of the person of God or is Jesus really a human personality somehow symbolically related to the person of God if you have the person of God becoming man and Jesus do not have two persons but no that's not the way to look at it who do we have in Jesus we have the creator himself the source of human being
the one person of God become man now when he becomes man when he took our flesh of the Virgin Mary far from overriding our personality he establishes it this is personalizing person so your person and my person these are personalized persons we have our personal being in relation to other persons and as I said earlier that interrelation between persons is part of what persons are but our persons are creaturely persons but here in Jesus you have
the source of all personal being and when he becomes man far from overriding or depersonalizing humanity he personalizes it so that in Jesus we have the one full and authentic person that ever existed he is then the center the creative and redeeming and reconciling center for all personal relations here we have in and through Jesus the utter creative power the absolute love of God at work in personal relations personalizing others the incarnation if you like is
the acute personalizing of all God's relations with Israel and with mankind to the in and through Jesus we are confronted in a personal way in which the most intense personal experience results or look at it in this way our problem is that we are less than persons our problem is that we have an image on the one hand which is somehow torn apart from a reality on the other hand so that person for us and yes
we can understand therefore the Greeks and the Latins who took the concept of the of the mask of the actor to be used for person because our personalities are masks I ask myself sometimes who am I Tom Torrance am I the one that my wife thinks me to be am I the one that my mother and father understood me to be am I the one that I think myself I am all of these are wrong what
I am is that what I am before God he alone knows me in a way I don't know myself and no other one knows me because I am such a mixed up hypocritical creature I am the person that I am and that is what a human personality is but here in Jesus we have the one true authentic person the one utterly sincere person the word sincere as you may know comes from the Latin without wax because
if you created you had an alabaster vase and you wanted to sell it and with a crack in it you carefully put wax in it so that no one saw there was a crack in it a perfectly sincere vase is one that has no hidden cracks masked over now Jesus is like that he is the one person that has no schizoid tendencies in him no insincerity no darkness utter transparent and truth and he is the only
one who can be the source of genuinely personal relations and therefore he alone can mediate between God and man and mediate and reconcile in love or think of that in still a cognate way Jesus Christ is the mediator of our humanity not one of us this is a line which I've just been saying is the man he ought to be I am not the man I ought to be and somehow because there is this gap between
what we are and what we ought to be strangely we have moral relations if there were no gap between what we are and what we ought to be we would have no moral obligations so that the kind of moral obligation we have in our fallen humanity belongs to the fact that we are not the men that we ought to be but the more we try to be the more we distort concepts of ethics and morality and
justice and that's our problem in the modern world and in society but in Jesus you have the only man who was and is the man he ought to be you say you cannot say to a cow come cow be a cow because a cow is a cow but you can't say to a man or a woman come be the man or be the woman you ought to be because they aren't but you can't say that to
Jesus because he is and was and ever is the man he ought to be and it is because in him the gap between the is and the ought have been healed that he can humanize us he is not only the personalizing person but he is the humanizing man the one man that really humanizes us or look at it in this way if Jesus Christ is the source the creator source of all being in heaven and earth
and all humanity and every man inheres and has his being in him and if it is that word that logos who became incarnate in Jesus and if in Jesus the divine and the human natures are one if there's only one person here is both God and man that Jesus in his human humanity in his human being is the ontological ground and the source of every person's being every man every woman's being whether he is a believer
or not whatever race of family he comes from his humanity is rooted and grounded in the humanity of Jesus so that when you preach Jesus and confront men with Jesus you're confronting men with the source of the very humanity as men and women and that's how he mediates between God and man there's only one mediator between God and man the man Christ Jesus and therefore it is in quantum homo as Augustine said insofar as he is
man that he mediates this not simply insofar as he's God but it is in the union of his deity that he becomes this creative source which I've called a personalizing person or the humanizing man now that is a message not only for the Christian church but for all our society think of what it means for the doctrine of the church as the body of Christ think of what it means for the whole understanding of communion of
persons in Christ sharing in the one indivisible communion of father son and holy spirit in the fullness of the communion of the divine love but think of what it means also for our society you see modern society has been afflicted by the atomistic way of thinking of the Newtonians and the ancient Greeks I spoke earlier about how Newtonian thought chopped up the world into infinite particles and then tried to connect the particles together and it organized
the particles together in external causalist and determinist ways although I also spoke about how that collapsed with radiation under the work of James Clark Maxwell now after Newton or along Newton John Locke applied that to human society human society has been looked at as infinite number of individuals individual means in Latin which you chop up and cannot chop up anymore they are the ultimate atoms of the human of humanity so that humanity is made up of
of human atoms which are then externally connected together and organized in the social contract so just as Newton organized the world through its external causal relations so Locke and those followed him organized human societies through external contractual relations and how that has affected your American constitution and society as it affected ours but combine Locke and Newton together and what you have you have the Marxist society the causalist determinist society but into the heart of both comes
Jesus and he disrupts both and just as he has disrupted the whole merely mechanistic interpretation of nature so we have to allow him to disrupt the merely organizational understanding of human society and inject into it the dynamic onto relational structures that we have only from Jesus who mediates to us the love the personal love of God which God is in his own eternal being in and through Jesus then we have a message which transforms our church
and understanding in the whole reconciled community participating in the love of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit but from the church this is a message which should transform all our society and transmute society into community centering in and determined by the personalizing and humanizing incarnate Son of God the Mediator. Let us pray. Oh God we are dumbfounded before the magnitude of thy love Thou thyself has not held thyself aloof from us but has become
one of us. Join thyself to us in our littleness and in our estrangement in order to gather us broken divided humanity together into one in Jesus that we may share in the life and love which thou eternally art as Father Son and Holy Spirit mediate to us in a new way through this Jesus communion with thee and communion with one another and through him to thee the Father and the Holy Spirit one God eternal. Be our
worship and thanksgiving. Amen.