Transcript
Professor Thomas Torrance, who will lecture this afternoon on the topic, the priesthood of Jesus Christ. I think many of you are acquainted with Professor Torrance and his many writings. He's published works on Karl Barth's theology, on theological science, and in recent years he's published a number of books on the relationship between theology and modern science. He is a recipient of the Templeton Prize in Religion in 1978. He frequently visits us here in Princeton and we're always
happy to welcome him back. Professor Torrance. Thank you sir for your kindly welcome. I'd like to say a word to begin with on the fact that being British I am being brought up in Latin and Greek. I use language in its rather conventional way so when I use words like man and father and son I don't mean any disrespect to women. When I think in Latin or Greek of the moon, Luna or Thelene, I don't think
of the moon as feminine. When I think in Latin and Greek of the sun as Ilios or Saul, I don't think of the sun as masculine because I don't think mythologically, I don't project creaturely images into that and therefore I don't need to demythologize. Well I just say that because I use language then I think scientifically but I use them therefore as conventional ciphers in controlled ways and please I just say it at the beginning so
that you won't misunderstand me. Now then to the theme. When Karl Barth produced his dogmatics for one on reconciliation I was naturally very particularly interested in it and soon became worried about a feature of it. He speaks there about the triplex munus, the three fold office of Christ as prophet, priest and king but very quickly it seemed to me he slides over from the priestly function into the prophetic function so that the prophetic function as he
expounds on a justification tends to swallow up the liturgical or the priestly function of the ministry of Christ. I took this up with Marcus Barth and showed him there was a serious deficiency here and so he produced his little book on sacrifice which I published as one of the papers and occasional papers, Scottish Journal of Theology but later on I had time to take it up with Karl Barth himself and I said by this time three
other volumes had appeared and four and I said I told my problem here that he had really given formal and not much more than formal place to the priesthood of Jesus and then had tended to pass over it so that at the end when he came to speak of the ministry of the risen and ascended Jesus Christ there was no real place there for the heavenly intercession of Christ our the priest. For example I said you
don't make any real use of the epistle to the Hebrews and the objective is that I quote the epistle to the Hebrews a great deal I said granted but the argument of the epistle to the Hebrews the main point is not there and what you have there stressed is the humanity of God, God and his humanity turning toward man but the humanity of Jesus toward God that seems to be certain extent swallowed up and I said
well he said I didn't intend that so he said where does the problem lie and so then we discussed three volumes dogmatics and into four, four one it goes back a little deeper but nevertheless that is the point that I want to take up because I believe that it's at this point that we have to do a lot more thinking in modern and not least in Protestant theology about the atonement. I'd like to speak to you
then for a short time on what I call priestly propitiation, priestly penitence, priestly prayer and if I get time on priesthood and sonship. Priestly propitiation, now propitiation some of you who are well known know is a word that C.H. Dodd hated and he saw to it in the New English Bible that all concepts of propitiation should be checked out and he replaces them by expiation though that's only one side of it, one side of it
but even the Latin should have talked to him because propitiation means nearing and here we have a fundamental concept in the whole Bible, New Old Testament particularly and the New Testament, it's the concept that God draws near, he propitiates himself, he draws near graciously, he is propitious, he comes nearer to us and he calls us to come nearer to him to draw nearer to God and so that God's drawn near to us and our drawn near
to God are together a fundamental part of the reciprocity which God establishes between himself and us and the community reciprocity which he established within his covenanted relations with Israel and it is that propitiation of both drawing near both sides which comes to its fulfilment in Jesus Christ. There is a mutual relation here between God's drawn near and our drawn near to God, a mutual relation between the man word and the God word movement. Now of course
within that act, within that movement if God draws near to us and we are drawn near to him there must be paecular acts namely the undoing of guilt and downright acts of expiation and forgiveness. But let me look at it in the New Testament. In the New Testament and the Gospels we find in the background of the Jesus action towards sinners and the tax gatherers as they were called, this fact that the temple was constructed in
such a way that there was not only the holy place, the holy of holies and the holy place but there was a great wall around the outer court which was called in Greek the phragmas, the middle wall of partition, however it may translate and no one who was excommunicated, no one who was unclean and no gentile was allowed to go beyond that wall. No gentile was allowed to draw near to God and a tax gatherer excommunicated
from church was not allowed to draw near either, he was unclean and so Jesus found himself having to do and preach the Gospel precisely to the excommunicated, to those sinners and public, publicans and sinners as they were called in the authorised version who were excommunicated. Now according to Jewish law you were to eat with them and associate them, Jesus did that, he ate with them, he drank with them, he went into their home. What is he
doing? He was by the way that he was behaving breaking down the middle wall of partition, he was enacting propitiation in himself, he was bringing God in himself into the existence of these excommunicated people and establishing them to table fellowship in communion with God. Now he did that deliberately and he told parables about that and of course we have that worked out in theologically in Ephesians 2 or take another example, take on the day of Pentecost
when Peter is preaching the Gospel of repentance and he calls upon the people to repent and be baptised and receive the forgiveness of sins for the promises to you and your children and to all who are afar off. Now what did he mean? Here they were within the temple, within the Fregmas and he said this promise of the Holy Spirit is to all you people who can draw near here but it's also to those people outside,
people far off. That's the language used in the Old Testament about people, Isaiah used it several times about people beyond the barrier. The promise is also to the Gentiles, to the excommunicated, those beyond the other side, to you and your children here and to those on the other side. Incidentally that's a proper understanding of that verse and when the Baptists and others say that far off has to do with adults and later generations that's just rationalisation
doesn't get away from the actual context. The fathers understood that. Well what we are concerned with in Jesus is an enactment in life and deed and word of propitiation in this mutual way. He is God incarnate who draws near to man and establishes such union with man that he brings man into the very presence of God. He enacts propitiation and it is that enacting of propitiation which of course is brought to its climax on the cross
of Christ. But now in order to see the piacular side of that look at it in this way. What we have in Jesus is the unconditional love of God communicated to people. Unconditionally God gives himself without respect to persons and this love of God incarnate in Jesus giving himself to those on all sides of the barrier unconditionally has the effect of judging them. If God communicates himself in his unconditional love to you then his unconditional love
is an unconditional judgement upon all that is not love. Simply by being unconditional love it is the unconditional judgement of God. Now so we have to look at propitiation in that sense. Now Jesus acted out that embodied that propitiation. How did he do that? What happens there? Well surely we have to think of Jesus on the one hand then as the giving of God himself in his utmost unrestrained uninhibited unconditional love but he is also man
in our place receiving the unconditional love of God in our place and therefore receiving the unconditional judgement of the love of God. Now this is something we can't express very well. The New Testament expresses that by using impossible expressions. For example the wrath of the lamb. Did you ever see a lamb angry? Did you ever see pure unadulterated love wrathful? It is precisely by being in its utmost purity of love that it burns and consumes, judges
what is not love. Now that Jesus enacts so that he is not only God's holy love drawing nearer to man because God will not hold himself aloof from man but he is also man in our place drawing nearer to God and so Jesus in our place submits himself to the judgement of the holy love of God offering himself in sacrifice to God. Jesus Christ combines both in himself and within the unity of his own incarnate personal
life so that he is himself propitiation, acutely personalised in its God-ward and man-ward aspects. This is the stress in the epistle to the Hebrews and the Jehanine writings in which we have the emphasis upon the identity of sacrifice and priest and in St Paul also where he is hellasmos, identity of work and person or Latin, identity of pons and pontifex, the bridge and the bridge maker. That is propitiation. Propitiation is to be understood then
as priestly mediation between God and man and man and God effected and actualised in the incarnate reality of Jesus himself and his relations with God and his relations with one another. It's actualised within the community of reciprocity which God creates between himself and man. Now let's just come think of that a little deeper one spec from a side where I call priestly penitence. Now this is the side of the atonement where we are concerned not so
much with the external transaction of juridical and judicial character so much as with the internal atonement between God and man and man and God. Now it is a fact unfortunately that in Protestantism by and large and in all Latin Christianity by and large the atonement is interpreted in terms of external relations between God and man and therefore in external judicial relations between God and man which are brought to its fulfilment on the cross. I once long
ago had several times discussing this with students and I asked them, they objected to the way in which I related incarnation to atonement and they say that atonement has to do only with the cross of Christ, the death of Christ and they would press, they would say that atonement had to do with that very moment when Christ expired. You see it is then an external transaction. Now if it is an external transaction then there is something
immensely deficient there. Then the humanity of Jesus is merely an instrument that God uses. The hypostatic union doesn't count, it's not real for them and this is why the kind of ultra conservative fundamentalist doctrine of atonement is horribly deficient in its doctrine of the person of Christ because it doesn't really believe that when Christ became man God took our humanity upon him in the depths of our humanity in such a way that he penetrated into our
guilt and our sin from within not just by an external transaction. So that by and large this whole Western, Latin way and Protestant way of thinking of atonement is seriously deficient in tearing apart the piacular from the priestly and thinks in terms of the piacular act, even sage dard you see. I remember I was taught in Edinburgh by John Macintosh to think seriously about the fact that when Christ became incarnate he took upon himself the sarx
hamatias, the flesh of sin and this was reinforced in Khabar's writings but it was not until I had to write lectures about this I still remember very vividly in Auburn New York before the war in 1938 and I had been reading dogmatics to 1 and 2 where this was given and I was thinking of it and the whole depth of this of what took place in Jesus so overwhelmed me that the dogmatic, I found myself shaking
like that and the dogmatic fell out of my hand and I fell on my knees. I was never so overwhelmed I think at any aspect of the atonement as I was through seeing it from that point of view. That the atonement means that God himself has plunged into the midst of our violent guilty, wicked humanity and it is with that humanity that he has bound himself in a hypostatic union. But in binding himself to that humanity
it is atonement that he is bound himself to at the same time sanctifying it so that the union of God with man and the atoning paecular activity, the propitiated activity cannot be separated. The hypostatic union therefore is the very heart of propitiation and propitiation cannot be understood apart from this. Now in the Calvinist tradition here we have very serious problems, for example in Scotland when the first principal of Edinburgh University, Robert Rollock, who was trained by
Beezer and by Andrew Melville and to imbibe that horrible stuff called Ramesh logic. He came to expound Bissell's New Testament, Romans relations and so on. He wants to separate the active obedience of Christ from the passive obedience and he can only think of the passive obedience of Christ, namely Christ under judgment externally upon the cross. But the active obedience of which Christ throughout his whole life offers himself and sacrifice in our place, in our stead, that
he couldn't think. Why? Because at this point he was Nestorian and that is a deep problem of all Calvinist tradition, Calvinistic tradition. There tends to be a separation between God and man at this point and it is that Nestorian heresy that lies at the back of the fundamentalist interpretation of substitution and atonement as an external transaction. Now if you don't take it in that way, if you take that seriously, that here we have in Christ something
quite different in which God in Christ is getting at our problem, getting at our sin, getting at our guilt from within in the ontological depths of our being and they're binding us together, they're making atonement, they're bringing us together. Then part of atonement, an essential part of atonement has to do with the oneness of mind between man and God. And the actualization of that oneness of mind between God and man and God that is therefore belongs
to the innermost shrine of the atonement. Now this is something that is very deep in Calvin and it's something that I, again I want to talk to Barth about this, this is no reconnection, I said to him, you know from my point of view I wish you had written your commentaries not on the Heidelberg Catechism but on Calvin's Catechism because there are certain serious deficiencies in the Heidelberg Catechism which you don't get in Calvin's Catechism and
this is the very point, one of the very points that you get in Calvin but you don't get in Heidelberg at all. How would you look at that? Calvin says when he, for example he interprets, he descended into hell, the creed, he insists that Christ bore the judgment of God not only on his body but on his soul. In his innermost being he bore the judgment of God and in his innermost being he makes atonement. Let's
say atonement falls within the constitution of the incarnate mediator. He is therefore atonement. Now look, when you look at Jesus in that light then you've got to see that the cross is part of his penetration into the very darkest depths of our humanity. Take Auschwitz, Dachau, Belsen, pile it all together, Jesus is penetrating into the depths of that and taking it upon his own soul and how can he do that? Except back in the day when
Jesus bore the judgment of God to bear upon Jesus in his own soul, in his own mind, in his own innermost being and as such he is constituted atonement. Now let's look at that in terms of penitence and repentance because this is also how Calvin does it. I don't simply say because Calvin did it but because we are helped by him. Repentance is not simply repentance in word or feeling but something that is actualized in submission
of the sinner to the divine judgment and pardon. That was the repentance into which Christ was baptized of the Jordan, you remember he was baptized into it and so immediately driven into the wilderness and he fasts 40 days and 40 nights, he is undergoing vicarious penitence, vicarious judgment in his soul, he is wrestling with it for us like the scapegoat in the Old Testament driven into the wilderness on our behalf. Calvin says distinguish between poina and
poinatentia, penitence, repentance, poinatentia but there is poina and poinatentia. Now Christ bore in his physical existence, his life and in the infliction of death and the just judgment of God upon our sin and he in our flesh, in our physical reality submitted himself to that, he was fulfilling therefore his baptismal consecration into repentance in the fulfillment of the divine righteousness. But this is Calvin's point, Christ bore all that in his soul, he took the divine judgment
into his mind and innermost being acquiescing in it and accepting it willingly at the same time offering himself willingly to the Father. He entered us into the depths of judgment and sorrow for our sin in a way we can never do. He wrought out in our human nature and our human soul complete agreement with the Father in his righteousness and his condemnation of our sin, his grief and sorrow over our rebellion and alienation. It is in
that vicarious penitence and sorrow, poinatentia, which he bore upon his soul, that we are to think of his priestly activity. He met and responded to the judgment and vexation of the Father and he absorbed it in his own being. Now part and parcel of all that involves what the Greek calls metanoia. There takes place then a radical change of mind. In his incarnation Christ took upon himself not only our physical existence but upon our human mind.
Now this is the point where the early church struggled deeply. This is the problem of Apollinaris. No we couldn't have. Polinares sin is not just of the flesh, it's of the mind. How could he take our human mind? Not simply in its contingence but in its fallen character upon himself. But he did. That's the whole point of the rejection of Apollinaris. He takes our human mind in its alienation, its rebellion, its willful isolation from
God but in taking it into himself he at the same time heals it and sanctifies it and brings our human mind back into agreement with the divine mind. And so in the innermost being of the incarnate son, throughout the whole course of his life, Jesus converted the mind and will of a strange humanity back to the Father. And that was what the New Testament calls the great palingenesia, regeneration. Just a moment. The New Testament never once
uses the term regeneration of what goes on in here. Never once. Palingenesia refers only to what took place in the incarnation, whole incarnation, and to what will be fulfilled when Christ comes again. So that whole activity of Christ through his whole incarnate life, incarnate and atoning work, that is the great palingenesia in which he takes our humanity, he turns it inside out and converts it back to the Father. At the heart of that is this change
of mind and really radical metanoio. It was fulfilled in the holiness of Jesus' life, which we have called in one stream of Calvinist tradition, the active obedience of Christ, his perfect obedience to the Father, in the perfecting and offering to God of a human life and spirit, in the purity and simplicity of trust and love and devotion, and in the sanctity of prayer and praise and worship. And so we have to consider the whole incarnate life
of Christ as the fulfillment of the Covenanted Communion between God and man and man and God, which in Christ becomes our reality, our prayer, our life. Our oblation, our worship, our faith, and our perfect answer to God, the Father. Henceforth all Christian worship is only in the name of that Christ, effected through his priestly self-presentation before the Father. Now it is at this point of vicarious repentance, I think, that we really face up to the
radical notion of the priesthood of Jesus. Priest in our place, in vicarious sorrow and anguish, in vicarious trust and faith, in vicarious worship and thanksgiving. Now in my life as teaching theology, I have found at this place the people who have the greatest difficulty with the Atonement are the people who, like me, call themselves evangelicals, because they refuse to believe that Jesus took our place in humanity. Let's say in my human decisions, in my human sorrow,
in my human acts of worship, and my human act of personal commitment, Jesus took my place. When you read your Athanasius you'll find that he piles on the different prepositions in order to make this year on our behalf, in our place, in our stead, one after the other, in order to make sure that what we understand is that in the totality of our humanity, Jesus takes our place. Look at that. That's why those patristic scholars are
so crazy when they think of Athanasius in some sense Apollinarian. It's the exact antithesis of that, because he sees that part and parcel of the whole act of the Atonement is the renewing of our mind and therefore our worship in Christ, because he then is our worship and it's only in and through him that we may come to the Father and draw near to the Father. You can see how difficult that has been for the
Church. For example, if you take the liturgy of the Church and compare it say to the doxologies of Athanasius on a silver, where again and again the doxology is not only through Christ and in him, but with him, with him, because he prays with us on our behalf. And that's the point that Calvin makes. I shall come to that in a moment. Calvin's commentaries on Isaiah 53 and his sermon on Isaiah 53, where he says that
Christ took our place and where we are unable to say our Father or to pray, he puts his prayer into our dirty mouth and he says, our Father, he prays with us, with us where we are, in order that we may pray with him. And it's only that mutual with is involved that you take seriously the through him, for our sakes and in him. But that with is cut out of the Church, except, interestingly enough, buried
in the old Roman mass, resurrected in Second Vatican Council, comes from the 5th century. I don't know why it was rubbed out of the Greek literature, though you still get it in some of the Cyrilline and Anaphorism, but there it is. And all Protestantism leaves it out. Now, it's at this point, therefore, when you ask a question whether he says, well, I must make my decision, my personal decision. Faith is my act which I must give
myself to him. All right? That person only believes in a partial substitution, doesn't really believe that atonement is so profoundly substitutionary that Christ takes your place even in human act. But that is precisely the point of priesthood. It's as man Christ is priest, and as man taking our place that he is priestly. And therefore, it's precisely these points that we have to recover our understanding of the atonement. Let's say, and this is my problem with Bach,
you see, the tendency, he didn't mean it, that the humanity of God, God toward man, and you see, this was stressed and stressed because people said, God is so utterly removed from man, and he wanted to obviate that. The humanity of God toward man tends, therefore, to oust the fact that here in Jesus, we have man toward God, the Godward aspect of our humanity in the heart of atonement. Now we come to the third point I
put down, and this is what I call priestly prayer. And here again I refer to what Calvin has to tell us here, not least in those commentaries I mentioned, sermons on Isaiah. I don't think sermons are yet translated, they are yet being translated and published. See, think of it in this way, this is certainly an aspect that is very strong in our Scottish traditional theology. Think of the sermons that are being offered of Christ in which
he prays for us, not only with his words, but with his life, in which he pleads with his life and his lifeblood for sinners, the prayer of priestly self-sacrifice. Here we are concerned with the active obedience as well as the passive obedience of Christ, for it is prayer translated into his physical existence, lived out before the Father in the unspotted existence of a human life, and then poured out on the cross. And it remains prayer
identical with his personal being and his resurrection and ascension, in which he presents himself to the Father in our humanity, and presents us in himself to the Father as those whom he has brothered, redeemed, consecrated, and therefore as sanctified children of the Heavenly Father. It is toward this that all the redeeming and atoning work of Christ reaches out in fulfillment in worship at the mercy seat, in worship at the throne of God. Now of course it
is this aspect that is particularly evident in the worship and sacramental life of the Church. If I were to refer again to Calvin, if you look at book 2 of the Institute, you will see very little in book 2 about what Protestantism is called the doctrine of atonement. There he is concerned with the whole incarnational aspect that he gets from Aranaeus and Athanasius and the whole doctrine of recapitulation and so on. But when he comes to
the Eucharist, there you get some of the finer statements in the whole history of theology and atonement, but in the Eucharistic context. And that is the way it was in the early Church. Why? Because here we are concerned with atonement as the servant pouring out his soul, an offering for sin. We are concerned with the atonement as the intercession of Christ, with his whole being in life and death. He who is our advocate and who in
our name and in our place ascends to the Father and is himself therefore what the Bible calls the surety, our advocate, our high priest before God. And our prayer therefore is only in union with him. Now it is this aspect of atonement tied up with prayer and priesthood which I think is fundamentally omitted in our understanding of worship. But if you take the life of Christ, why did he resort to prayer? Here was God become man
in all man's weakness and all our alienation from God and in our place he holds on to God. And it is at this very point therefore that the devil wants to sever the bond between man and God. If he could possibly break that bond, this is the point of the temptation. Then of course everything is undone. And therefore the prayer of Jesus in the wilderness, the life of Jesus, penitential actions of Jesus are holding on to
God at all costs and taking away the cross alone. And at the end on the cross of Christ they say to him, if you are the son of God, come down from the cross. He won't do it because he is still continuing this whole act of intercession on our behalf before God. And so the cross is then an enacted prayer on our behalf. Now that is what we have in the Eucharist. And we have in reaction
to the Roman misunderstanding of the Lord Supper also had equal misunderstanding of the Lord Supper in this aspect of the Eucharist. Let's say the whole thing of the epistle of Hebrews tends to be missed out of the Lord Supper. Now here we have problems in Protestantism and there are serious problems. You see, unfortunately while Luther wrote a more interesting book before the Reformation on the epistle of Hebrews, his lectures, after the Reformation he didn't. He thought
of epistle of Hebrews as the right Jewish book. And to this day there isn't a decent little commentary anywhere on the epistle of Hebrews. Modern times, Michael, but nothing significant. But if you take the Calvinists or the Anglicans, especially the Calvinists, and sometimes the Congregationalists, you have some of the greatest works that are precisely based on the epistle of Hebrews. Certainly Calvin's commentary on the epistle of Hebrews is one of the most important of them all,
all his commentaries. Now there you get the heart of this relation between atoning, interceding prayer of Jesus and our worship. And when we worship God, it is in that Christ that we worship. We have no other worship but him. And therefore when we draw near in the Eucharist, what we do, nothing in our hands we bring. The bread and wine is put into our hands. We come before God only with Christ and only taking shelter in
him because he is the one who has ascended to the Father and stands in for us in his whole priestly mediation. And it's only in him, the priest, that we can be drawn near to God and worship him. Now one final point. In the New Testament, all this is radically converted into the terms of the Father-Son relationship. Now we can understand that in this way. If you take the Old Testament account of priesthood, you find
that the real priest, the natural priest, in Israel was the firstborn. He was the priest, the natural priest. And to this day that's the so in Jewish tradition. So it's the firstborn at the Passover who takes on the shawl and who conducts the worship. But in the Old Testament covenant, covenantal ordinances, the firstborn were redeemed from priesthood. And they paid a shekel to redeem the firstborn. And in place of the firstborn son, there was put an
institutional priesthood. So you've got the Nevitical priesthood, which is an institutional priesthood in place of the real priesthood. The real priesthood being the flesh and blood. Priesthood equals sonship. Now the New Testament is transposed back from institutional priesthood into the real priesthood. But now we are all firstborn in Christ. That's why the epistle of the Hebrews use that expression, the church of the firstborn. Because we are all in and through this son made, the firstborn of
God. That's a priest of God. What we have here in all this language of the Old Testament, New Testament, if you're concerned with atonement, has to be drawn into the father-son relationship. And within that relationship and the whole relationship of the father and the human family that we are then to understand the issue of the priestly mission of Christ. I think John MacLeod Campbell was next to Dan Scotus, probably one of the greatest Scottish theologians
ever was. But the essence of John MacLeod Campbell is precisely here, where all understanding of the atonement was rigorously worked out in terms of the father-son relationship. And as a mutual relationship from the son to the father, as well as from the father to the son, from man toward God, as well as from God toward man. And God forgive the Church of Scotland. They chucked him out because they thought this was heresy. Well, it was
heresy if you take the Westminster Confession of Faith. But it was a condemnation of the Westminster Confession of Faith. Now, I believe that this is one of the points where that whole way of thinking, merely a judicial, impersonal understanding of atonement has to be torn up and rethought. And I think that John MacLeod Campbell, this point, is one of the people who can lead us into rethinking the whole thing. That's exactly what Jesus did. And the
New Testament, St. Paul's language about huia thesia, the adoption, adopted into the family of God, and adopted in and through. Adoption is just another side of reconciliation, the obverse of atonement. And to be a son of the Father, to draw near to the Father, that is to pray, to worship, that is to be a priest. For God is our Father. We can say with Jesus, who says with us, our Father, who art in heaven. That is
what atonement is all about. And without atonement, you cannot really say, Father, our Father. Thank you. We have to be, or need to be at this point. But Dr. Torrance has consented to take a few questions, and we'll spend 10 or 15 minutes in a question period, if there are questions that you'd like to ask. Professor Torrance, excuse me, but the rest of what you were saying is that we need to see the atonement more in
terms of the entire act of incarnation, rather than as what occurred on Calvary at one point in time. And yet it seems to me, as I look at the New Testament, that this is what Jesus calls his hour, the hour for which he has come. It seems to me that also in the Epistles of Hebrews, though they speak of the continuing intercession of Christ, still it is the blood of Christ, related to that moment of his
death, that they connect with the redemption. Can you comment on the importance of that particular act on Calvary in terms of the atonement process as distinct from the entire life of incarnation? Well, I'm not as distinct from it. You see, you can't separate the word and the person and the act of Christ. With us, you separate these. With Christ, you can't. They are one. And therefore you can't separate what he did at any point from the
whole of his life off of what he was. It was Christ dying, Christ shedding his blood, who saves us, not the blood of Christ, not the act as such, but Christ as such doing this, God incarnate as such doing this. And it's in the inceptibility of person, word and act. Now, here's the point. Tomorrow I'm going to speak about another problem we have in modern theology and that is the fact that we can't understand certain things
because of the framework of our thought. Now, at this point, let's see this. You see, in the Newtonian outlook, we think in terms of separated particles and therefore of atoms externally organized. That's the way we think. And therefore all events are thought of in terms of external transactions, like two billion balls hitting one another. Now, in the middle of the 19th century, you had something who radically changed all that by one of the greatest scholars, Claude
Maxwell, who said, No, nature doesn't behave like that. We are concerned with a continuous dynamic field and you cannot separate particles. In fact, you have vibrations without the vibration of matter. You know, it's taken nearly a hundred years to fill the graphs. It's difficult to grasp it. Now, we have the same problem still. Because of our Latin tradition about to grasp this question of eternity. Because we want to break it up in external events and then
organize it together externally. But you can't do that. The whole life of Jesus is a continuous dynamic field, an indivisible field from beginning to end. It has its configuration points, it has its climate. The self-giving of God in love to man, pressing through Christ reaches its ultimate points in the cross of Christ, the ultimate judgment, the ultimate self-giving of God. But it's not in distinction to it, but in culmination of and therefore fulfillment of
the whole incarnate life. Therefore, in my teaching, I've always got, at the beginning of the second year, people to write, not always, but for most of them, I've got to write an essay on incarnation and the atonement. Because if they can see that connection, then they have broken through this gap. But if they were scientifically trained, I'd go and make them read Clark Maxwell's The Calvary Incident as the climax or culmination, to use your words, of
the incarnation event. One has to look at it in ways. You take the name of The Calvary Incident about abasement and exaltation. But the fact that they use this term of abasement and exaltation precisely on the cross. Let's see, abasement and exaltation are involved in one another. And look at it in that way, you see, the cross begins with the birth of Jesus. And also the resurrection begins with the birth of Jesus. The cross, the birth
of Jesus, right away, and this is made quite clear in the Gospel, the sword shall pierce through your own heart also, and all that sort of thing, is set to the rising and falling of many. Here, the incarnation is the cross, connected in the midst of our humanity. And Jesus had to live that out. And how his whole life was straightened until this baptismal was lived out and fulfilled. But also the resurrection begins there, the new
life, the virgin birth of Jesus begins there, the new humanity, because in taking our fallen humanity, there's also a sanctification and renewing of it right from the start. So you can't think of one following another, as it were, in split space and time in our Newtonian mode. You have to think of them as involved mutually in one another, and yet having their climaxes, their configuration. So there's a whole way of thinking here, a way of thinking,
which we have to recover. And I think the best way to recover this way is, quite frankly, to rethink, with the help of the scientists, how we now really think. Because there is no doubt about it. So we have habits of mind that are determined by Newton and not the Bible. Take Paul's fundamentalism, or take Calvin's predestination of absolute particulars. This tied up with Newton's notions of absolute space and time. You've got to sort all that
out. It's not biblical. And rethink and think in a way, a propagate of origin, you say, a way worthy of God. There's no respect. I'm about the most radical in logic, because I want to attend. I want to attend to our fundamental modes of thought. Professor Torrance, let me play a few thoughts with you here and ask you to respond. It's part of what our reform and evangelical theology has been about, with its focus on event
and conceptualized theology, been a fear of mysticism. When we begin to talk about with Christ, in Christ, Christ in us, does that move us toward what I feel that you're talking about here, something that's much more mysterious but holistic, that's behind the conceptualization as something that we can say we believe in versus a movement that we're a part of? Can you speak to, are there changes going on today, not only in science, but in Christian experience?
Oh, I think this is true, very true. You take even the very notion of the person who's undergoing radical change, because one of the points I've referred to Clark Maxwell again, which influenced him in breaking free from a mechanical interpretation of nature, was the fact that the doctrine of the person was one in which the relations between persons are part of what persons are. They are person-constituting relations. Now that, you see, we lost through Thomas
Aquinas to John Locke, and therefore our whole notions of society and person are quite wrong. And the concept of union with Christ and personal relations, that has been seriously damaged. But you know, the incarnation and the atonement together heal the notion of the person, so that part of the atonement is a recovery of the personal relation. And you can't do that if you separate incarnation from atonement. And it is precisely an interrelation. Mysticism is a little
different. You see, granted that when we want to put everything into judicial categories and therefore into hard conceptual categories, we are afraid of the fact that God is greater than we can ever conceive. You see, our theology is so poor that even the best of it, even the Bible can't contain God. The very notion of containing the Word of God, that's nonsense, you see. God is infinitely greater than the Bible can ever contain. Therefore, in grasping
God, in knowing Him, we know Him, and grasping is one who is much greater than we can grasp, but that's the mystical element, to acknowledge the fact that the truth that we grasp is independent of our grasping of it, that it reaches out far beyond what we can contain in our mind, but into which we are geared. How can we be geared except by incarnation? Therefore, when mysticism cuts itself off from the incarnation, and it all
goes wrong, you can see this in Martin Buber, bless him. He tried hard, but he lapsed back into mysticism, so he has this mysticism and tumbled into late German idealism. If only he could have accepted the incarnation, his own Jewish thought would have been fulfilled. And I think that this is still true. We have to think this out very readily. No, I think to the point that part of the atonement is, part of the cross is
that our mental concepts, our ways of thinking as sinners are broken and renewed. Or let me put it another way. You see, I said before that we Westerners tend to think in terms of external relations. Now, you think in terms of external relations, then you think in terms of moral relations. Take a man like James Denning, a Scottish Protestant scholar. Well, he tends to expand the atonement in moral terms. Now, he wanted to get rid of
the hard legalism of the covenant theology, federal theology, so he transferred it into moral terms. But the whole moral relation needs to be, needs atonement. And Denning couldn't understand that. Let's say, I'll take the epistle to Hebrews, even the heavens had to have the blood of Christ spoke of them. Let's say all our spiritual and moral realities themselves, atonement is so profound that the whole moral order needs to be cleansed and set upon a new basis.
Now, if you look, that is a profoundly mystical point. As I said, it's our Macintosh against Denning. And when Denning, you see, when he comes to write on Romans 6, he says, I can't make anything more than a judicial relation out of this. Poor Denning. He doesn't understand the ontological relation with Christ at this point. Because he would have taken it back himself. I mean, he was such a marvellous person. Let me ask another question. We'll
take one more question. As we think then of atonement and putting it in the context of movement on or into the likeness of Christ from one degree of glory to another, would you speak about the nature of the incarnation of the atonement as it relates to the concept of sanctification as movement as well as status from one degree of glory to another? What would that look for us here with Christ? Well, I think one should look
at it in this way. What took place in Christ? Because it was an act of God in the contingency of our existence. It's not the most glaring effect of God becoming a contingent, being an act in our contingency. That is one control. And yet the identity of the person and work of Christ, namely the atonement, doesn't once and for all. But he is the atonement, he is the appreciation, he is the atonement. That's what is continuing.
So we have to think of it in two moments. The once and for all and the contingency. And in a way that's why we have to think back to the once and for all. Once and for all participation in the once and for all act of Christ. Holy Communion are a continual communion, a continual union of Christ who go together in neither two seconds or as part, together, to epic and death. Now we at the moment,
we can't do this very well. Physically, because our eyes can't track the light, we split space and time. And that will be a problem. And this problem is created in the last night. But actually they cannot split. They are continuous. Now theologically we've got to think of them as continuous, not in terms of split. And at this point, therefore, we have to try and recover the unity of the once and for all and the continuing. Now
this was my point about being a boss. That the risen and ascended Christ remains our high priest and the whole church has to be looked at and correlated in its mission and its worship and its ministry to the heavenly international Christ.