What got healed?

From the perspective of the incarnation the answer is clear: it is the distortion of the fall and of human sin that lies behind this disruption or dichotomy between knowing and being, word and event, theology and history, and it is that very rupture in our human existence that God has come to heal in the incarnation. When the Word was made flesh, the rupture between our true being in communion with God and our physical existence in space and time was healed. It is precisely about this that the sacraments have so much to say in the unity of word and physical elements in the ordinances of baptism and eucharist. The sacraments are designed in the midst of our brokenness and dividedness to hold together in one, spirit and flesh, word and event, spiritual and material, until the new creation. Sacraments are thus the amen to the incarnation, the experienced counterpart to the Word made flesh. Here, then, in the Word made flesh we have truth in the form of personal being, truth in the form of concrete physical existence, truth indissolubly one with space and time, with historical and physical being. To demythologise the truth of its physical and temporal elements is to try to disrupt the incarnation, to attempt to tear apart the Word from the flesh assumed in Jesus Christ. Thus demythologisation belongs to the essential distortion of sin — the sin that brought about the dichotomy in us, that refuses to accept the limitations of our creatureliness in speech and language and in the thought forms of space and time, that wants to conceive the truth in some imaginary form of pure being instead of the form of human flesh which it has assumed once and for all in the incarnation. The relation of the kerygma to history belongs to the very essence of the Christian faith, for it is grounded in the unity of reconciliation and revelation in Iesus Christ, in his unity of word and act, person and work, in the union of true God and true man.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 296

<idle musing>
That ends our quick jaunt through Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ. I hope you enjoyed it. Maybe someday I'll tackle the next volume, but first, let's read through Scot McKnight's The Audacity of Peace. I'll start that tomorrow and go back to one post per day for it, since it's a shorter book.
</idle musing>

What's the point?

When Bultmann wishes to reinterpret the objective facts of kerygma, e.g. as given in the Apostles’ Creed, in terms of an existential decision which we have to make in order to understand, not God or Christ or the world, but ourselves, we are converting the gospel of the New Testament into something quite different, converting christology into anthropology. It is shockingly subjective. It is not Christ that really counts, but my decision in which I find myself. At this point one sees Bultmann’s involvement in the theological tradition of Schleiermacher and Ritschl that grew out of German pietism and subjectivism, and also in the tradition of the Marburg school of philosophy which tried in vain to break out of phenomenology by existential decision. Moreover, the existential decision with which Bultmann works is not that of Kierkegaard in which the fact and person of Christ is all determining, but that of the Roman Catholic but atheistic Heidegger, who took Kierkegaard’s idea, and altered it by abstracting it entirely from its objective ground in Christ and attaching it to a secularised notion Of tradition which he retained from his Roman Catholic upbringing.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 286–87

Who's the center here, anyway?

Or to put it in other words, according to Bultmann and Gogarten, modern men and women cannot understand history apart from our own responsibility for it; and apart from our responsible handling of it, there is in point of fact no history, for there is no history apart from the changes human beings have introduced into it. By our decisions we give the world its particular form, so that reality is now this changing history which we create, and beyond and apart from that there is nothing real for us.

Now quite frankly this is the biggest myth yet created by man — that we ourselves are the creators of all history, and that apart from the history created by human beings, nothing else is real! Man is the God of history! In view of this, it is clear that it is not the New Testament but Bultmann and Gogarten themselves that need to be radically demythologised! So long as they work with such inverted conceptions of history, scientific interpretation of the New Testament is quite impossible.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 285

An eschatology of Good News!

There can be no doubt, however, that the New Testament is pervaded with the joyful sense of God's actual presence in Jesus Christ, and with the realisation that the coming age has already broken into the present and overlaps it. That is precisely the good news of the gospel, that here and now in Christ Jesus God is present in all his royal power, not only to speak a word of pardon but actually to enact it and fulfil it in the liberation of the children of God. The account of the eschatology of Jesus as an apocalyptic eschatology of despair is simply not true—it was above all an eschatology of good news .—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 271

What will it be?

Once again the great dilemma is: either in Jesus Christ we are confronted by the eternal God in history, so that the person of the historical Christ as man and God is of utmost importance; or Jesus is only the historical medium of a confrontation between me and the act of God which summons me to decision, but in which I reach a self understanding which enables me to live my life bravely. Here christology passes away into some kind of existentialist anthropology.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 263

Is he God? Or only worthy of honorable mention?

It is clear now that if we give up the classical christology or even approach Jesus from a purely historical angle, the historical events which belong to the life and death of Jesus fall away as of no final significance. The great dilemma is this: either in Jesus Christ we are confronted by God, and by one whose person is himself of the utmost importance, or Jesus is in the end only a teacher, a religious genius, the greatest man that ever lived but who, before the absolute importance of timeless and eternal truths, sinks into only an honourable mention.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 261

What the Godness of God means

Sin, however, means the contradiction of the Godness of God — it is sin against his majesty and is counter to his self—giving in love. If sin is an attack upon the very Godness of God, upon God precisely as God, then by his very Godness, his eternal will as God to be who he is must and does resist sin — just in being God. To be God is to be opposed to the private self—assertion of man. There can be only one God who asserts himself to be supreme: as we read in the decalogue, ‘I am the Lord your God . . . You shall have no other gods before me . . . I the Lord your God am a jealous God’. When men and women assert themselves against the Godness of God they are actually asserting themselves to be God, and so placing themselves in direct contradiction to the Godness of God. God resists sin in the full Godness of God — that is the meaning of the wrath of God. That is the negative aspect of his holiness and love, the exclusive aspect of his majesty. God would abdicate from being God, would un-God himself, if he condoned sin.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 249

The wrath of God

But let us be quite clear about what the wrath of God means. It is the wrath of the lamb, the wrath of redeeming love. As such the very wrath of God is a sign of hope, not of utter destruction — for if God chastises us then we are sons and daughters, and not bastards, as the scripture puts it. Judgement and wrath mean that far from casting us off, God comes within the existence and relation between the creator and the creature, and negates the contradiction we have introduced into it by and in our sin. God's wrath means that God declares in no uncertain terms that what he has made he still affirms as his own good handiwork and will not cast it off into nothingness. Wrath means that God asserts himself against us as holy and loving Creator in the midst of our sin and perversity and alienation. God's wrath is God's judgement of sin, but it is a judgement in which God asserts that he is the God of the sinner and that the sinner is God's creature: it is a wrath that asserts God's ownership of the creature and that asserts the binding of the creature to the holy and loving God. And yet precisely as such, God's wrath is really a part of atonement, part of new creation, for it is his reaffirmation of his creature in spite of its sin and corruption. It is certainly a reaffirmation of it in judgement over against sin, but a reaffirmation that the creature belongs to God and that he refuses to cease to be its God and therefore refuses to let it go. God’s very wrath tells us that we are children of God. It is the rejection of evil, of our evil by the very love that God himself eternally is.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 250

Sin presupposes the nearness of God…

Sin presupposes the nearness of God.

We must go further and say: sin as severance from God presupposes a life-unity with the creator given by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God is God in his freedom to be present to the creature and to realise the relation of the creature to himself. The creature requires relation to the creator in order to be a creature. That relation is given and maintained by the Spirit of God who creates the existence of the creature, but of the creature as a reality distinct from God himself, yet as wholly dependent on God for what it is. There is between God and the human creature a double relation, a two-sided relation, in which the creator gives existence and life to the creature, and in which the Creature depends on the creator for existence and life. That twofold relation is a continuous relation from moment to moment. The human Creature, however, is made not only to have existence but to have fellowship with God, to have a relation filled with sharing in God's light, life and love.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 247

<idle musing>
What a fascinating thought! I've never looked at it that way before.
</idle musing>

Oh, how advanced we've become!

If Christ came today we would still crucify him, only no doubt with a greater refinement of cruelty than even the Romans were able to think of.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 246

<idle musing>
You know he's right! More's the pity.
</idle musing>

Two sides to the cross

It is a very significant fact that neither in the Old Testament nor in the New Testament do we have a deliberate attempt to formulate a doctrine of sin first in an independent or abstract way and then to show over against that background the grace and love of God in redemption. We must be careful therefore to let the gospel of forgiveness and redemption guide us throughout here. As we plant the cross in the midst of our understanding of human sin and estrangement, we remember that the cross has a light side and a dark side. The light side is the glory of the resurrection and its affirmation of man in Christ, and the dark side is the shadow the cross casts on man's inhumanity. It is in that duality of revelation at the cross that we really see into the depths of sin and guilt.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 245

Body, mind, and soul—true healing

At this point we are faced with two profound facts of which the New Testament is deeply conscious. First, the fact that when God in Christ comes to heal or save sinners in all their helpless distress, there takes place a struggle with evil will, a struggle which is waged between God and evil not only in the sinner’s heart, not only in their thoughts and desires, but in their bodily and spiritual existence, for the whole creaturely realm is the sphere of this struggle. Hence the Gospels see the closest relation between the spiritual and the physical. The wages of sin is death, as St Paul put it. Sin and physical disintegration and corruption are inseparable. The being and existence of man is under the sway of evil, and therefore even when Jesus heals people of physical distress he does so only through a struggle with evil will, with living and masterful evil power. Nowhere does Jesus heal as a human doctor, but always he heals as one who wrestles personally with evil and overcomes it through the conflict of his own holy will with the unholy powers of evil spirit.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 241

The depth of evil

But what vexes and distresses God in Christ is not simply the sickness and pain of humanity but the fact that it is engulfed in an abyss of fearful darkness, too deep for men and women themselves to understand and certainly too deep for them ever to get out of it — a pit of bottomless evil power. Mankind is entangled in sin not wholly of its own making, enmeshed in the toils of a vast evil will quite beyond it; it is chained in terror and is dragged down and down into the poisonous source or pit of evil. It is evil at its ultimate source, evil at its deepest root, in its stronghold, that God has come to attack and destroy.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 241

The self-giving of the incarnation

But if we really take the biblical view of God, then we must think of God the Father as sending the Son into our lost existence, into unutterable humiliation in order to be really one with us. We must think of God as determining himself freely to be our God, directing himself freely to share in the profoundest way in our frail life, in all its limitations and weaknesses, and even in its lostness, all in order to be our God, and to gather us into fellowship with himself. But in this act of unspeakable humiliation, God was not simply using the humanity of Christ as his organ or instrument, while he remained transcendent to it all. He himself actually came, the immutable God, humbling himself to become a creature and to suffer as a creature our judgement and death, and throughout all that to maintain his sovereign freedom and initiative, even when he gave himself up to the death of the cross, in an offering as unreserved in his self-giving as it was majestically omnipotent and free in its act of grace.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 227

The permanence of the incarnation

Therefore the hypostatic union means that Christ continues to exist as man, risen man and true man even now at the right hand of God, and that he will come again as man, and that it is through this man, as Paul said on Mars Hill, that God would judge the world. That preservation of the human nature of Christ in and through death, resurrection and ascension, is of fundamental importance for the doctrine of atonement, for Christ's heavenly sympathy and intercession, for the sacraments, and for his advent and final judgement. It is of absolute importance for the saving relevance of the gospel of the risen Christ to us who remain creatures of flesh and blood.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 209

The incarnation is an act of God's grace

The first thing to be said, is that the hypostatic union must be looked at only from the perspective of God’s amazing act of grace, in which God the Son freely descended into our human existence, and freely assumed human being into oneness with his divine being. That was an act of sheer grace. He did not need to do it. He did not owe it either to himself or to man to do it; it is an act grounded only in the pure overflowing love of God. It is in no sense a two-sided event, for even though there is within it, in the unity of divine and human natures, act of God and act of man, the whole act of incarnation, including all the divine and human acts within the hypostatic union, is grounded solely and entirely and exclusively in the act of God's grace.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 206

Atonement is not an end in itself

On the other hand, atonement is not an end in itself, any more than the judgement of sin and the expiation of guilt are ends in themselves. The purpose of atonement is to reconcile humanity back to God so that atonement issues in union between man and God, but it issues in union between man and God because the hypostatic union is that union already being worked out between estranged man and God, between man's will and God's will in the one person of Christ. It is the hypostatic union or hypostatic at-onement, therefore, which lies embedded in the very heart of atonement. All that is done in the judgement of sin, in expiation of guilt, in the oblation of obedience to the Father is in order to bring humanity back to union with God, and to anchor that union within the eternal union of the Son and the Father, and the Father and the Son, through the communion of the Holy Spirit.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 196

God veiled himself

In Jesus Christ, God has come in the humble form of a servant, veiling his divine majesty, for we could not look on the face of God and live. If God came openly in his glory and majesty, we would be smitten to the ground in sin and death; the last judgement would be upon us, with no time to repent, no opportunity for personal decision in faith. The very humanity of Christ is the veiling of God; the flesh of sin, the humiliation and the form of a servant, the death of Christ all veil God — and so God draws near to us under that veil in order to reveal himself, and save us. It is sometimes asked if God could not reveal himself to us apart from or without Christ, without the humble form of a servant. But if revelation were to take place apart from the veiling of Christ, or in a form totally unknown to us, it would disrupt the conditions of our world and of our humanity, and instead of saving us, it would mean our disintegration. No, the very humanity of Jesus Christ makes salvation possible, for here in the man Jesus, God comes alongside us as man and within our historical existence with its temporal relations, choices and decisions, he acts there upon us personally through word and love, through challenge and decision.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 194

Assuming the whole nature of humanity

He who reveals God to man, and reconciles man to God, must be both God and man, truly and completely God, and truly and completely man. If the Son was to redeem the whole nature of man, he had to assume the whole nature of man; if in the Son man is to be gathered into the fellowship and life of God, it must be by one who is truly and completely God. Only he can be mediator who is himself the union of God and man, only he can be pontifex who is himself the pons.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 190

If Christ is not God, then?

If Christ is not God, if God is not fully and wholly present in Christ and identical with Christ, then God does not reconcile the world to, himself, and the work of Jesus is not eternally valid, but is only temporal and contingent and relative. If Christ is not God, then the love of Christ is not identical with God's love, and so we do not know that God is love. We may know that Christ is love, but if he is not really God in the complete sense, then all we have in Jesus Christ is a revelation of man, of humanity at its noblest reaching up into the clouds. If Christ is not God, then we do not have a descent of God to man. Thus as the obverse of the fact that Christ's real humanity means that God has actually come to us and dwells among us, Christ's deity means that God himself has come to save us. The dogma of the humanity of Christ asserts the actuality in our world of the coming of God, and the dogma of the deity of Christ asserts the divine content of our knowledge and salvation, the objective reality of our relation to God himself. The dogma of the deity of Christ means that our salvation in Christ is anchored in eternity: that it is more sure than the heavens.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 188