Fully Human in Christ

The Incarnation as the End of Christian Ethics

Speidell

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498296380
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Thomas F. Torrance's theology included a thoroughgoing, albeit implicit, ethic of reconciliation. It focused on the personalizing and humanizing mediation of Christ in all realms of life--including not only a supposed private dimension of human life but also the social, historical, and political structures of human society and even of the cosmos itself. This book builds upon that vision of a Christian ethic radically rooted in God's grace, which encompasses, sustains, and transforms the entire human and created order. A trinitarian-incarnational social ethic does not begin with our human causes, projects, and agendas, however noble they might be, but with witness to the reconciling person and work of Jesus Christ for us.

Chapter 1

The Soteriological Suspension of Ethics

in the Theology of T. F. Torrance

Introduction: Critique of Torrance’s “neglect of ethics”

T. F. Torrance’s theology reflected his broad concerns as a churchman, professor, author, editor, and minister of the Gospel.1 John Webster et al., however, have levelled the charge that he neglected ethics. I will argue that this criticism is wrong for three reasons:

1. Torrance intentionally suspended, not neglected, “ethics” — especially as an autonomous field of study and a human attempt at self-justification through morality, and yet one can read his entire theology as an ethic of reconciliation.

2. He clearly articulated a Christian ethic as theologically grounded in the incarnation and atonement and understood it as a reconciliation of all things in Christ (not only human relationships with God but also with others and even of the very space-time structures of the polis and the cosmos).

3. He specifically addressed concrete matters of personal, social, and political responsibility, such as women in ministry, abortion, God-language, truth-telling, and law — and whether or not one agrees with his conclusions, he concerned himself with these issues as human and theological concerns.

David Fergusson’s essay, “The Ascension of Christ,”2 criticizes “the relative absence of the ethical and political significance of the ascension, not least given its greater prominence in Barth. For Torrance, the divine-human relation tends to be largely a private one,” with only occasional hints of a “wider sociopolitical significance . . . Yet the important relations and movements in Torrance are, as it were, vertical rather than horizontal . . . His occasional excursions into Christian ethics tend to be confined to areas of private rather than social morality — for example, marriage and abortion. There is little about social justice, human equality, or the peaceable kingdom. The focus is generally doxological rather than ethical, whereas the royal Psalms and Jesus’ teaching of the kingdom point to ways in which these can be integrated.”3

During the original presentation of his paper, Fergusson cited John Webster’s criticism that Torrance “neglected ethics.” As Webster himself criticizes Torrance, the doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ evacuates humans of their own humanity: “To talk of justification is to talk of the way in which our being lies beyond us in the true man Jesus.”4 Webster levels two criticisms of the vicarious humanity of Christ, which is a cardinal doctrine in Torrance’s theology and will be the basis of my reply to his critique: “The first concerns the adequacy of an account of justification which does not underline the primacy of the moral . . . . A second question concerns the conception of the vicarious humanity of Christ . . . Stated very simply, the vigorous affirmation of solus Christus may well threaten rather than validate man.” He concludes: “The question poses itself: does Christ’s fraternity with the human race validate or invalidate our humanity?”5 We will revisit these themes throughout this essay: “the primacy of the moral” (in which case of course T. F. Torrance did “neglect ethics”!); and whether the vicarious humanity of Christ “may well threaten rather than validate man” or his “fraternity” with and for us might somehow “invalidate our humanity” (which is precisely the opposite of Torrance’s clear and explicit view of the vicarious humanity of Christ on behalf of our humanity).

Webster’s early criticism of Torrance’s view of the vicarious humanity of Christ appears in two essays on the concept of the imitation of Christ.6 Webster asks: “If Christians are what they are by virtue of their participation in the benefits of God’s saving acts in Christ, then what room is left for human ethical activity in our account of what makes a person into the person he or she is?” (Webster here blurs the issue of our identity in Christ before God with our psycho-social identity that we forge for ourselves though personal agency and moral action.) The New Testament imitation motif “may help us hold together the derivative character of human morality and its character as a human project involving choice, conscious allegiance and deliberation.”7 He charges certain Protestant theological ethics (of which Torrance is a prime example) with the claim that “the subject as agent with duration through history all but vanishes, displaced by the sole agency of Christ.” (Here he fails to grasp that the vicarious humanity of Christ renders our own faithfulness and obedience both possible and necessary: we may and we must, both in union with him.) “The core of the debate,” he rightly summarizes, “is thus whether we allow any intrinsic connexion between Christological-soteriological affirmations and affirmations about human morality.”8

Webster notes the Protestant anxiety and criticism that an emphasis on imitatio Christi fails to “root ethics in soteriology,” but he counters that “Christ’s action is more than vicarious: it is evocative, it constitutes a summons to a properly derivative mimesis.” He cites Karl Barth’s view that the actions of persons in Christ “‘correspond’ to Jesus Christ’s own acts . . . [B]ecause of their gracious participation in God through Christ, Christians are enabled to act in such a way that their acts correspond to the acts of the Saviour.”9 Such action is derivative but nonetheless analogous, enabling “policy-formation for those whose lives are bound up with that of Jesus Christ” and explicating the “kinds of divine activity” in concrete circumstances that humans should imitate through “individual choice, obedience, and action.”10

In these two early essays, Webster begins his criticism that Barth’s theology deals more adequately with ethics than does Torrance’s. In a later essay,11 he makes explicit the contrast between Barth’s and Torrance’s treatment of human agency by noting Torrance’s critique of Barth’s view of believer’s baptism, which Torrance considers “deeply inconsistent” with “the vicarious character of Jesus’ obedience in his own baptism.” Torrance views “the acts of Jesus as solely vicarious,” Webster avers, whereas “Barth sees them as representative acts which are nevertheless more than simply completed events containing proleptically our involvement: they are ‘really an imperative’ (CD IV/4:67).” Webster concludes that Barth’s view of grace “does not furnish us with excuses for inaction . . . a kind of dependence where our actions make no significant contribution to the fabric of our lives.”12

Webster then establishes a substantial treatment of Barth’s moral theology in two monumental books.13 In Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation, he summarizes the contrast he sees between Barth and Torrance on human agency and ethics:

Though at many points Barth will say similar things, his real divergence from Torrance concerns the covenantal character of the relation between God and humanity, which Barth sees as ethically fundamental (in that it affirms the inalienable difference-in-relation of God and humanity), but which is obscured in Torrance’s exclusive stress upon the vicarious character of Jesus’ being and act in relation to humanity. In Torrance’s account of the matter, Jesus’ humanity threatens to absorb that of others; in Barth’s account, Jesus’ humanity graciously evokes corresponding patterns of being and doing on the part of those whom it constitutes.14

Paul Molnar better captures, however, the basic similarity and essential agreement of Barth’s and Torrance’s Christian ethic without posing these odd dichotomies embedded in Webster’s reading:

For Barth and Torrance there is only one possible choice that is enabled and required by the risen Lord himself, and that is to choose him and thus to exercise free obedience . . . The essence of faith then is to accept as right what God has done for us and in us. This takes place in and through the Holy Spirit acting for us and in us. While Torrance does not develop his thought on this subject explicitly with respect to Christian ethics in any sense as thoroughly as Barth has, he nonetheless would agree that true human knowledge and action are possible because they find their meaning outside themselves and only in Christ.15

One should note that, unlike Karl Barth in Basel, T. F. Torrance in Edinburgh taught theology and not ethics, the latter being relegated to New College’s Dept. of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology — a dualism that no doubt bothered Torrance more so than his critics!16 Nonetheles...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• A Personal Introduction
• Chapter Summaries
• Personal Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: The Soteriological Suspension of Ethics
• Chapter 2: Incarnational Social Ethics
• Chapter 3: A Christological Critique Of
• Chapter 4: A Trinitarian Ontology Of
• Chapter 5: The Humanity of God
• Chapter 6: Theological Anthropology
• Appendix A: A Radio Interview with Todd Speidell
• Appendix B: God, Woody Allen, and Job