4. Eschatology as the Presence of the Kingdom of God
For Torrance, though, eschatology is not only about things in the future and about movement towards an end. It concerns things that are present, that have been realized. In a sense the end has already come with the incarnation of the Son of God. In him the glory of God has been revealed. Following Barth, Torrance insists that the incarnation is essentially a “movement of Eternity into time.”38 It means “God is present, actually present in Christ.”39 Christ is Immanuel, “God with us.” The incarnation makes Christianity “pre-eminently the religion of the Parousia of God, of an actual coming of God and of a real presence of God held together in the same thought: in Jesus Christ the Son of God.”40 But if Jesus Christ is not of God, then there is no presence of the kingdom of God in the world. The kingdom is only a hope, something wholly in the future. If that be the case, then Christianity is no advance upon Judaism, which still longs for the Messiah. Torrance laments the loss of faith in the presence of God in his own day, and he attributes this loss to a denial of the deity of Christ.
This presence of God in Christ, this coming of the kingdom, has negative and positive consequences. Negatively, it means the judgment of humankind. The coming of God in Christ presupposes a separation between humankind and God, one caused by humankind’s rebellion against God. This is the meaning of original sin. In short, the incarnation presupposes a fallen human nature. The incarnation tells us that God came to judge sin and put it away, to overcome that chasm between humankind and God. But the judgment that comes from the revelation of God in Christ is redemptive. It is not only a judgment of individual sins but a judgment of all collective attempts to build a kingdom of God apart from God. “It means ultimately the disqualification of civilisation and the great and magnificent tower of Babel.”41 All cultures of progress are doomed to fail in the end. This is why in his sermons on the Apocalypse Torrance shows a suspicion towards the “new world order” that emerges after the war and why, unlike many of his contemporaries, he will not be deeply disturbed by the crisis of civilization that will grip Europe in the middle of the century.
On the other hand, the incarnation means God takes time seriously and has a “gracious attitude” towards it. We are redeemed in time and with time, not from it or outside it. Time in fact, like human nature, is restored in the incarnation. It is even given “a place in Eternity.”42 Indeed Christ’s kingdom is really about a new time. “While Jesus came to overthrow the old order, he came to set up a new one, a new Kingdom, a new time.”43
As for the benefits of the presence of God, Torrance, relying on John’s Gospel, summarizes them as “Love,” “Life,” and “Light.” The incarnation is more than a sign of the fact that God loves us. It is the fact that God loves us, that he gives himself fully, that he holds nothing back from us. “In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col 2:9). The love behind the incarnation is a totally free act of God. However, God cannot be reduced to love (a tendency in modern theology). Love can be called the “bestowal of self” of God, but God’s self is the “prius” or “ultimate fountain” of this bestowal.44 The incarnation is the “real coming of God to man, in which God gives himself for and to man.”45 We think instantly that this means God loves us. He does; but that “for” must first be understood as something for our redemption. The love shown in the incarnation is a pure gift love; it is neither caused nor merited by its object. In sum, we can find no reason for this love because there is no adequate human analogy for it, as the New Testament writers discovered. The best word for it was “agape.” The incarnation forces us to acknowledge this love as arising from the “self-grounded will of God,” as an “ultimate fact” that “knows no ‘why?’”46 “If we do not see God’s incarnate love this way we risk betraying the central message of Christianity: Grace—the utter God-centeredness of revelation and redemption, the unconditioned coming of God to man in Christ.”47
If the incarnation is about love, it is about life too. For Torrance, the essence of human life is communion with God. Sin disrupted this communion, but the incarnation restores it. This, of course, does not happen immediately. The incarnation is the first stage in our redemption. This is followed by the remission of sins, the Spirit of adoption, the transformation into the image of Christ and the resurrection of the body. From this perspective, the resurrection is in a “real sense” the “completion of the Incarnation.”48 The incarnation also brings God to light. “I am the Light of the World” (John 8:12). Knowledge of God follows from the incarnation. It means God has accommodated himself to our senses by assuming a human form. Real theological knowledge is now possible, not through any human form but only through the specific form of Jesus Christ. The coming of God in the flesh compels us to think of God “exclusively” in terms of Christ.
But knowledge of God through Christ becomes actual only after we have heard and accepted the Word of God in faith and through the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God is the light that discloses God to us in the human form of Christ. More precisely, the Holy Spirit turns the “objective revelation of God in Christ . . . into a subjectively real revelation.”49
The incarnation, as the parousia of God, therefore has a “two-fold” meaning: as a witness both to God’s holiness and love. Christ is the incarnation of Holy Love. It is the incarnation of the God who in his goodness creates life but who in his righteousness can take life away. His holiness leads to the crucifixion of our sinful nature in the incarnate One; his love leads to the resurrection of our flesh through this same One. For Torrance, the “two-fold” meaning of the incarnation instructs us that we cannot understand the incarnation without the atonement; nor can we understand the atonement without the incarnation. This is why he believes a proper doctrine of atonement has to consist not only of Christ’s substitutionary work but of Christ’s “vicarious life of obedience to the Father.”50
The organic connection between incarnation and atonement explains the unity of the “Person and Work of Christ.” This relationship is also the linchpin of Torrance’s Christology and soteriology.
5. The Work of the Cross
Recall that Torrance began his lectures under the claim that it is at the cross that the full meaning of God in Christ has broken on the human mind. The cross is the principal work of Christ. This is good Reformed theology. But Torrance is not a typical Reformed theologian, since for him the cross stands for more than penal substitutionary atonement. More than any other work of Christ, it discloses the mystery of the person of Christ. “It is there [at the cross] in his sacrificial passion that the whole divine-human nature of Jesus’ Person as the incarnate Son of God is revealed to the understanding of saving faith. It is there at the cross that the meaning and the purpose of his incarnation really become revealed to us.”51