Movements of Grace

The Dynamic Christo-realism of Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the Torrances

McSwain

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498272711
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

To Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the Torrances, grace is not an abstract truth; it is reality itself. By God's revelation in Jesus Christ we are given the blessed assurance to know that all human beings are included in the humanity of the Savior. And in Christ we discover the movements of grace, a double movement at once God-humanward and human-Godward, all by the Holy Spirit. These theologians were keen to remind us that Christ's ongoing mediatorship includes all appropriate human responses to God. In fact, only by grace and in union with Christ do we have true response-ability. It is this going with the flow of the Holy Spirit en Christo that makes Christo-realism so dynamic and life-giving.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Ambassadors of Reconciliation

Thomas F. Torrance (d. 2007) completed his PhD, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, under Karl Barth after the war (1946). He, along with Geoffrey Bromiley, was the editor for Barth’s Church Dogmatics as translated into English. Perhaps Torrance’s greatest contribution to theological studies was his penchant for transcending the East-West divide in the church by pulling together common themes in sources otherwise found under the unfortunate rubrics of “Catholic” and “Protestant.” Much of Torrance’s work is founded on his patristic heroes, notably Irenaeus, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and the Cappadocian fathers. With his acute knowledge of pre- and post-Reformation theology, Torrance, unlike many Calvinists, is able to properly contextualize Calvin as standing on the shoulders of these patristic predecessors, especially when it comes to Christ’s solidarity with all of humanity.

James B. Torrance (d. 2003) was also a student of Barth, and with his older brother he contributed mightily to the field of Calvin studies. Like Tom at Edinburgh, James spent years at Edinburgh and Aberdeen teaching a thoroughly Reformed brand of theology that was nevertheless by its very nature ecumenical. Together the Torrances articulated tirelessly how God in holy love created every human being for filial purposes and how, because God loves us more than he loves himself, God pursues us in the Spirit, giving himself to re-create us in the Son and to reconcile everyone to the Father. Because we belong to God by virtue of creation and redemption, taught the Torrances, trying to live for ourselves is an exercise in futility.

While under the supervision of James’s son, Professor Alan Torrance, at St. Andrews, I had the pleasure of getting to know James and his wife, Mary. Happy memories abound from my times in James and Mary’s parlor, sipping tea and talking theology. Of all the things we discussed, the phrase that has stuck with me most poignantly is James’s saying “We must give everyone his humanity.” What did he mean? That we must recognize in every person his or her true humanity as it is defined by Christ—his or her union with the Son of Man Jesus Christ, in the way Paul sets it forth in Colossians 1, Romans 5, 2 Corinthians 5, etc. Every one of us must be defined, not by our Christian action or inaction, but first and foremost by our ontological solidarity with the Second Adam. And we would never want to give Adam more effective influence over the human race than Christ!

It was this theological perspective that gave James not a little influence with leaders in the South African church when it came to the struggle against apartheid. As ambassadors of reconciliation, the Torrances passionately believed that we must always begin with the end in mind. We move from reconciliation to reconciliation. Not only are we all reconciled to God; we are all ultimately reconciled to each other. That is the unavoidable reality. We can either go along with this economy of grace, learning to be “eschatological activists,”1 or we can resist it, bringing destructive consequences to our relationships with God and one another. Compelled by Christ’s love, we preach the good news so that all might freely choose to live into the reality of God’s love for every human being: You are reconciled to God, and so, we beseech you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. . . . Do not receive the grace of God in vain. . . . Today is the day of salvation! (2 Cor 5:18—6:2).

My introduction to the writings of the Torrances was Tom’s The Mediation of Christ. I am not sure if it was the difficulty of the content, my lack of an appropriate interpretive framework, or just the need to get used to Torrance’s complex writing style, but I found reading the first part of the volume much like being on a train screeching slowly out of the station. However, once I began to catch the clickety-clack of the Torrance rhythm, my train ride turned into an exhilarating adventure across the landscape of God’s grace. Again, regaining the ontological perspective of the Fathers, Tom is always helping us to think of God’s relationship to humanity within the framework of the wondrous exchange articulated by Calvin and derived from Irenaeus and Athanasius: “This is the wonderful exchange which out of his boundless kindness he has entered into with us: by becoming Son of Man with us he has made us sons of God with him.”2

For the Torrances, as we shall see, this exchange involves much more than a simple transfer of static properties, for being and act are constantly interpenetrating one another, and the divorce of the two can be nothing short of disastrous for the church. For example, we would not want to speak of being made one with Christ as daughters and sons of God without giving proper attention to Christ “becoming sin” and the Son of Man’s death and resurrection for our sakes; we would not want to preach a message of the world’s salvation that is “soft on sin” or did not call people to repentance or could not be refused (as in universalism or other determinist constructs); and finally, we would not want to fall prey to an overrealized eschatology that does not account for the prevalence of evil in a redeemed universe.

It is the concept of evangelical repentance, derived from Calvin, that helps us to move past potential gnostic or dualist tendencies. The connection of this concept to Barth’s teaching that humanity must hear God’s “No” to sin inside God’s “Yes” to humanity is hard to miss. For in the statement “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34 RSV), spoken to those immediately present and to all of us whose sins put Christ on the cross, we can hear God’s indictment against our sinfulness in the context of his overall affirmation of us. In order to avoid a conditional gospel, the Torrances insist with Calvin and Barth that we must preach about sin only as the implicit back side of a positive statement. To do otherwise is to risk making grace the exception to the rule—an exception applicable to us only when certain conditions are met—at which point grace is no longer grace!3

However, as we come to understand who Christ is and the hypostatic union intrinsic to his person, we will begin to grasp, by the Holy Spirit, the onto-relational dynamic of Christ’s life and, by God’s grace, our own. In response to God’s unconditional love will learn how to be people of gratitude in the midst of our broken lives, people of hope in the midst of our fallen world. We will learn to walk by faith and not by sight, all the while assured that we are indeed “hidden with Christ in God.”

Much credit is owed to Tom for courageously reintroducing the ancient concept of theosis to Protestants. Recognizing theosis for what it is and what it isn’t provides us a trinitarian basis for proclamation and an epistemological capacity for response that maximizes the place of the Holy Spirit in evangelism. It has been my experience that, yes indeed, theosis will preach!

I hope that the following chapter will provide a good entry point to the Torrances, so that readers will find their hearts singing with the good news that truly is good news. The Torrances surpass even Barth in their emphasis on the ongoing vicarious humanity and high priesthood of Christ, and the effect is to give us a fresh impetus to preach the gospel in Christ so that others might receive it in Christ.

1. A phrase borrowed from two of my other St. Andrews mentors, Trevor Hart and Richard Bauckham. See Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology in Contemporary Context. As complementary to the themes of my book, I also recommend Bauckham’s God Crucified and Hart’s Faith Thinking, along with two of Hart’s essays, “Humankind in Christ and Christ in Humankind: Salvation as Participation in Our Substitute in the Theology of John Calvin” and “Irenaeus, Recapitulation and Physical Redemption.”

2. Calvin, Institutes 4.17.2, quoted by T. F. Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, 179. Cf. two other versions of this truth: from Irenaeus, “Out of his measureless love our Lord Jesus Christ has become what we are in order to make us what he is himself” (Against Heresies 5 pref., quoted by T. F. Torrance, ibid.); and from Athanasius, “God became man so that man might become God” (On the Incarnation 54).

3. Someone might object that, contra the theologians above, Paul preaches the bad news first in Romans 1–3. Douglas Campbell’s monumental work The Deliverance of God (Eerdmans, 2009) has recently provided a clear understanding of how to read and interpret Romans retrospectively, demonstrating how Paul always wants to preach and receive the gospel from solution to plight, not the other way around.

Chapter 1

Preaching Jesus Christ as the Gospel of Grace and the Ground of Faith

A View from the Evangelical Theology of T. F. and J. B. Torrance

Jesus Christ is the gospel. This pithy phrase is echoed by many in the Protestant evangelical world, but rarely understood in all its fullness. Undoubtedly Jesus Christ is who the gospel is all about; through him we receive grace. Yet what about the idea that Jesus Christ is grace in his person? It is my purpose in this chapter to unpack this loaded statement and to apprehend the riches of the grace that is Christ Jesus. Few in recent years have done more to focus our attention on the idea that Jesus Christ is the embodiment of grace than the brothers T. F. and J. B. Torrance.1 We will turn to the Torrances at every point in our journey as we seek to grasp the meaning inherent in the concept that Jesus Christ is the gospel of grace. Having established a working understanding of what it means for Jesus Christ to be grace in his own person, we will then consider some suggestions with the Torrances on how the gospel of grace can be proclaimed in an “evangelical,” as opposed to an “unevangelical,” way.

This chapter is dedicated to those of us who are especially interested in the field of evangelism and are keen to proclaim a Christo-centric gospel to this and subsequent generations. As ambassadors for Christ, we can announce the accomplished fact that in Christ God has reconciled the world to himself, and instead of counting our trespasses against us, has embraced humankind at enormous personal cost. This declaration of what God has done for the world, however, must never lose its performative element; that is, it is meant to evoke a response in peop...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Ambassadors of Reconciliation
• Chapter 1: Preaching Jesus Christ as the Gospel of Grace and the Ground of Faith
• Chapter 2 Introduction: Grace in the Face of Evil
• Chapter 2: The “Yes” of Reality and the Meaning of Grace in Barth and Bonhoeffer
• Chapter 3 Introduction: “Go with the Spirit!”
• Chapter 3: Prayer as Grace
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Bibliography