T.F. Torrance and the Atonement (Croall Lecture #2.1)

Downtown Edinburgh's iconic
monument to Sir Walter Scott

There's never enough time to say everything you want to say in a lecture, and such was the case for Bruce L. McCormack's second installment in the Croall Lecture series in Edinburgh.  He opted to cut out the material on T.F. Torrance, knowing that he could present it in a special seminar on Friday afternoon.  So I'm calling this "Lecture 2.1," as in McCormack's new typology of the atonement Torrance fits along with Athanasius and G.W.F. Hegel (read more).  This first type, you will recall, is described as "theories which order the work of Christ to a metaphysical concept of his person."

Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007) taught at New College and was a personal friend of McCormack, who began his teaching career at New College in 1987.  And so it is fitting for the latter to return to the Edinburgh confines to address Torrance's thought.  For those of my friends currently studying Torrance (and there are many of them), McCormack sounded like he is drawing primarily from works published in T.F.'s lifetime -- he mentioned The Trinitarian Faith as particularly important -- and not from the posthumously volumes of Torrance's New College lecture cycles, Incarnation and Atonement (edited by Robert Walker, who was in attendance).  He suggested that, because these lectures were begun early in Torrance's career and spanned a number of decades, he is not entirely sure how to make use of them with respect to the work that T.F. actually published in his lifetime.

The ground of Torrance's soteriology is the often-envoked concept of homoousios, the fourth century doctrine that Jesus Christ is "of the same substance" as God the Father. The two are not merely related or similar in kind, not two members of a common genus, but identical as to their essence (the one, divine essence).  Torrance is known for his enthusiasm for the theology of the ancient Fathers, and here he relies more upon Athanasius than on Karl Barth.  But it is important to recognize that he is not seeking a repristinization of the ancient and Eastern doctrine of deification.

In contrast with much of Protestant orthodoxy over the previous four centuries, Torrance insists that God's dealing with our guilt alone (where Calvin's attention was turned) is insufficient.  Men and women need more than a change in our forensic status before God -- we also need a real, ontological transformation, a change that affects us at the very core of what it means to be God's creatures.  Our nature itself is corrupted, and that is the root of human sinfulness with which the work of Christ must deal.  Until that nature is restored, we remain dead in sin.

McCormack laid out his take on Torrance's view of Christ's mediatorial work as occurring in two major movements (and this aspect will be familiar to students of Barth): 1) the movement from God to the human, and 2) from the human back to God. The hypostatic union between the divine and human natures in Christ is itself an atoning union.  The human condition is healed and converted back to God.  Torrance would say that women and men are "humanized" back to our proper relationship to our Creator.  This much accounts for the divine movement.

What of the corresponding movement of the human?  Torrance described this in terms of Christ's vicarious humanity, his representation of us -- not forensically, I think, but ontically, by becoming one of us.  Jesus made the perfect response of faith to the divine initiative, "believing for us" and repenting in our place (at his baptism in the Jordan, for example).  He so restores our humanity from its corrupted state that he enables us, in our own turn, to respond in faith and repentance.

From what I have read and heard of Torrance's theology this seems to be a very good distillation of some key themes.  It makes for an interesting combination of post-Chalcedonian, two-natures Christology, pre-Chalcedonian priorities, and some of Barth's themes.  Personally, I find it quite important to include ontic transformation alongside forensic justification (that must be the Wesleyan in me), and Torrance seems to be onto something in the way that he does this.  Christ both believes for us, and enables us to believe; he both repents for us (cf. Luke 23:34), and enables us to repent.  This casts the pistis Christou debate -- whether Christ has faith (or "faithfulness"), and faith that saves us -- in an interesting dogmatic light.  My concern would be that, as Torrance conceives it, this doctrine is born from an overly "Athanasian" understanding of the subject of the Incarnation.  Offhand, I don't see that this would be a deal-breaker; other ways of viewing the Incarnation may just as easily permit the same sort of ontological healing.  But more on that in another post.

The National Gallery of Scotland, with
New College on the hill behind it

It seems evident that Torrance fits well in this first type as McCormack has defined it, alongside Torrance's theological patriarch, Athanasius of Alexandria.  The work of Christ is explicated viz. a "metaphysical" doctrine of his person.  In other words, the Incarnation itself -- the uniting of corrupted humanity with perfect divinity -- is thought to undo that corruption and turn soiled hearts back to God.  The life and witness of Christ have didactic and recapitulatory roles (he both examples faith and repentence for us, and also does these vicariously in our place), culminating in the cross as an event of the Son's human obedience and faith.

As another example of a theory oriented by a metaphysical concept of Christ's person in his hypostasized oneness with the Father and with creatures, Torrance's view of the atonement raises questions with respect to the ontological questions that seem to be driving McCormack's project -- namely, how we can speak of the full life and death of Jesus, including all the rawness of his humanity, as an event in the life of God?  How is this something that God is in God's second mode of being, and not merely something God does?  This is the locus of McCormack's friendly critique.

One of the more interesting critiques (which spawned discussion after the lecture) was that, for as much as Torrance relies upon terms such as "ontological union" and "ontological healing," these phrases are not accompanied by a fully worked-out divine ontology that would make sense of them.  Unlike Barth in Volume II of the Church Dogmatics, in other words, Torrance didn't commit himself to working out his own theological ontology that would underpin the way in which he talks about the person and work of Christ.  Instead, his use of classical terms such as "homoousios" and "penetration" (with respect to the relation of the two natures in Christ's hypostatic make-up) shows that what Torrance is working with is, in fact, ancient metaphysics.  And so his soteriology is subsumed by a metaphysically derived conception of Christ's person.

I'm curious to hear what those who have read more Torrance have to say about this judgment.  From my limited exposure it comports with the sense I have had of Torrance, and my belief that at this point -- perhaps more clearly than anywhere else -- he departs from Barth.  (Interestingly, Robert Walker seemed to confirm as much, suggesting in the ensuing exchange that in ontological matters Torrance simply wasn't Barthian.)

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Croall Lectures: Series Index
Lecture 1: The 'Perils' of Penal Substitution
Lecture 2: The Incarnation As Saving Event

Lecture 2.1: T.F. Torrance and the Atonement

Lecture 3: 'Let Justice and Peace Reign'
Lecture 4: 'After Metaphysics'
Lecture 5: The Cry of Dereliction in Scripture
Lecture 6: The Humility of the Son (Part 1)