 PLC
Publications A Passion for Christ The Vision that Ignites Ministry By Thomas F. Torrance, James B. Torrance and David W. Torrance
By Gerrit Scott Dawson From the moment I was re-introduced to the work of the Torrance brothers several years ago, something ignited in my soul. As I read, I felt like I held gold in my hands. Simultaneously, a hunger awoke and was satisfied. Ever was I directed to see a God higher and more wonderful than I had dared to imagine. Jesus Christ appeared to me through their words in the splendor of his glory and his all-embracing love. I was thrilled again with theology. Suddenly, doctrine mattered immensely, because it offered a path, not into esoteric musings, but into the very heart of the universe. So I introduce these essays to you with earnest anticipation. I believe they will fire up your passion for Jesus Christ. For they contain the truths that keep Christian faith vigorous. As you read, you may well feel, as I did, that you are seeing something very familiar as if for the first time. The gospel will shine with a new brilliance. For the doctrines of grace articulated in these pages take hold of us and do not let go. We may wrestle with them all night long, as Jacob with the angel, but in the morning we will be changed. Our very lives will be renamed by the blessing of seeing anew what it means that God has come to us in Jesus Christ. Such theology is a tonic for weariness to those who are laboring in the church. And it offers us all an opportunity to recover our confidence as we proclaim the gospel for a new millenium. The present need The church in the west is drowning. The tidal rush of a secular culture has long ago washed away the fortress that was Christendom. We no longer speak with authority, nor anything like a unified voice, and what whispers we do utter to our age are lost in the roar of its media sea. Prosperity unimaginable in earlier years has come to the west and to its Christians. But the very mass of our wealth threatens to push us under. We have all the resources for a vigorous church: books, buildings, education, and enormous technology for communication. But like the culture, we are swept along by the power of a consumerist age. We can't seem to find our feet. If we could brace ourselves against the Rock, of course, the church could rise against the tide, speaking the words of truth and shining the light of Christ's love to those who are adrift. But far too often, we have built our ministries upon shifting sand. We have allowed the issues of the moment to undermine us. Jesus' question remains the supreme concern of the church in every age, "Who do you say that I am?" And Peter's answer is the word we must speak, freshly and vitally to each generation: "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Such bedrock, deceptively simple truth eludes us, however, while we are captivated by a pair of questions from the culture that are now assaulting the mainstream church. The first is whether the Christ of the gospels and the creeds is really the Jesus who lived in history. The second is the problem of the inclusive love of God and the exclusive claims of truth in Christianity. We have to find bold, credible answers to these questions if we are to recover our vision and voice for the new century. The real Jesus The first question concerns our confidence that the Jesus presented to us by the gospels, "the Christ, the Son of the living God," is really the Jesus who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago. Is the Christ enshrined in our creeds and confessions really anything like Jesus of Nazareth? Or, can we find the "true Christ" who has been hidden for centuries under the agenda of the church? The church today is under increasing influence of those who would attempt to disentangle the "real" Jesus from the gospels. Far more than just the extremes of the Jesus Seminar have been raising these issues. For years now, our mainstream seminaries have been graduating ministers who have no confidence in the texts of Scripture they are to preach. Our historical- critical methods have deconstructed the texts but we have failed to put them, and our students, back together again. These new pastors leave seminary unsure of what Jesus said and did, and suspicious of the epistles which reflect on the theological meaning of the Jesus presented in the gospels. They have been saturated with trendy re-interpretations but parched for an in-depth knowledge of our heritage. This ignorance has opened the way for ancient heresies to return with new vigor in the church. Many contemporary ministers and Christians function with an Adoptionist christology. That is to say, we read and hear that Jesus was a man who connected with God so deeply and lived so authentically that he has been called the Son of God. He wasn't really God incarnate. Rather, Jesus the man discovered "the divine within" and related to it deeply. He is now an example and guide of what we can be in ourselves. When such christology is paired with the search for a Christ behind the gospels, we are left with a Jesus, and a God, who are ultimately unknowable. Hence, we are back to ancient Gnosticism where only the expert few have enough knowledge to disentangle the texts, read the clues and tell us who Jesus is. Of course, the results of such inquiries have too often offered a Jesus strikingly similar to the interests and ideologies of the inquirers. So, distressingly too often, we have proclaimed Jesus as a mere man. Such a view of Jesus can keep us comfortable in our culture. We can relate to the spirituality of the age, and remain safe in ourselves from the claims on us of God in Christ. But it will sink the church and leave desperate people to drown with us. We have to recover a theology that will invigorate us to preach the truth about who Jesus is. The scandal of particularity The second question is similar. How do we reconcile the exclusive claims of Christianity with our belief in the inclusive love of God? The concern is urgent in a culture where religious pluralism is a fact. People think and believe and worship in many different ways. Our culture, however, has urged us not to compare different beliefs for truth but to affirm the validity of any belief. We are urged to celebrate diversity at the expense of making any claims to truth. Religious matters are private, and not a matter of public inquiry or marketplace debate. This, of course, ensures that the west's true dominant world-view --consumerist materialism-- remains masked and in control of most of our decisions. By contrast, the particularity of Christianity is an offense. The very idea that God would reveal himself uniquely through incarnating in one historical individual is a scandal. The question is immediately on our lips, "But what about…" and we go on to name loved ones, friends, religions and ideas that are different than our own. It just sticks in our throats to consider that if one way is right, then the others are wrong, dangerously, perilously wrong. God loves everyone. Jesus Christ died for everyone. How, then, can we make judgements about others? To avoid this offense, many western Christians have adopted the culture's slogan that we are "people of faith." Faith in whom is not the issue-that kind of particularity is grating. Rather, what matters in our age is simply having faith in something, perhaps in yourself, or even faith in "faith." This benign approach offends no one at the time, but ultimately leaves people lost in themselves. The church has to learn how to say "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God" in this present generation. Of course we must say it in a way that accounts for God's love. We don't want to pound the uniqueness of Christ in a threatening way. Yet our desire to avoid triumphalism and be gentle has left us not knowing how to say No to the ever widening band of behaviors and ideas that are clamoring for "inclusive" acceptance in the church. Until we solve the exclusive\inclusive dilemma, our energy and confidence will continue to drain away. Our church will be built on sand that washes away in the flood of culture. Recently, a colleague of mine lamented, "I realized I have spent most of my ministry trying to help people feel comfortable amidst the challenges to the lives they have chosen. I have failed to call them out to new lives transformed in Christ." He, like so many of our pastors, has grown weary from working in his own strength with a watered-down, accommodating gospel. His life and ministry revived, however, when he recovered his confidence in the clarity of the Biblical declaration of who Jesus is. For, the gospel is still the gospel: the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. And the church may yet get our feet planted on the Rock and begin to stand against the waves of the culture. We may yet hold out lines of rescue to God's little ones who have lost their way. But we will need a daring theology to do so. This is what the Torrance brothers have given the church. They speak a daring, vital word that springs first from Scripture, then rises through the great patristic writers, the creeds, the Reformers, and the evangelical theologians who have followed. Like many great theologians, the Torrances have spoken not only to their generation, but also to the one coming up. Though the brothers are past three score and ten, their words remain young in the best sense: supple, strong and vigorous for the present moment. Before turning to the essays themselves, let us briefly consider two distinctive features you may anticipate reading in all their work which reply to these two critical question facing the western church. The oneness of Jesus with the Father It takes a bold faith to say so directly, "There is no God except the God who has come and meets us in Jesus." This unbroken oneness between Jesus and the Father fairly sings through the theology of the Torrances. They affirm over and over that in Jesus we have revealed nothing less than who God is, both in himself and toward us. Jesus was no mere man. He was, and is, very God in our midst. "When we look into the face of Jesus Christ and see there the very face of God," writes Thomas Torrance, "We know we have not seen and cannot see God anywhere else or in any other way but in him, for he is God himself come among us." That Jesus is the supreme revelation of God necessarily judges all other knowledge of God as inferior, as but seeing through a glass darkly in comparison. This creates judgement upon any notions of God we may hold that fall outside the biblical witness to Christ. But as bracing as that reality is, it is ultimately the best possible news. Because, this means that in Jesus, "we human beings may really and joyfully know God in his divine nature." Thus, in Christ, God "refused to be alone or without us, but insisted on penetrating into the heart of our sin and violence and unappeasable agony in order to take it all upon himself and to save us." Jesus is the exclusive, unique revelation of God. This news is joy beyond hope! God is like Jesus, and so we may be saved. God is the way Jesus is, and so we are not left alone in our lostness. God and Jesus are one, and so Jesus is "the very heart of God Almighty beating with the pulse of his infinite love within the depth of our lost humanity in order to vanquish and do away with everything that separates us from God." The answer to the question posed to the church about who is the real Jesus is emphatically answered by the Torrances. The real Jesus is God incarnate, and he is "mediated to us in the Holy Scriptures." The New Testament bears witness to this revelation in such a way that we are lifted into realms of thought and understanding beyond anything we might create on our own. It is not behind the texts, but through the texts that Christ comes to us. For the Torrances, there can be no tearing apart of the historical Jesus from the theological Christ. The Scriptures are to be interpreted holistically. Through the words of the New Testament, the Holy Spirit reveals to us Jesus. So, throughout the essays in this book, we discover a great love and reverence for the Scriptures. As but one example, watch for the lovely cascade of Scriptural portrayals of Jesus in David Torrance's essay on "Sharing in the Ministry of Christ." Our culture asks the church "Who is Jesus?" The Torrances answer resoundingly: he is the Christ Jesus of Scripture, God with us. In him we see the Father, and we discover in the giving of Jesus' life for us that "God loves us even more than he loves himself." The vicarious humanity of Christ The complement to the oneness in being between the Father and the Son is the oneness of the Son with our humanity. Jesus was, and is, fully human, bone of our bone and flesh our flesh. Jesus lived in solidarity with the human race, and by fully assuming human being, he has embraced every one of us with his love. This is the doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ. What he was in himself as a particular human being, he was on behalf of every human being. Thus, when I am united to Christ, I am given to participate in his humanity, in all its sinless obedience, outreaching love and perfect communion with God. So, the exclusive nature of the revelation of God in Christ, which the church may never compromise, preserves the most inclusive love of God possible. I can hear the passion in James Torrance's voice whenever he speaks of "the all-inclusive humanity of Christ." Christ takes what is ours and gives us what is his. In this "wonderful exchange," Christ assumes our place and gives us his place. He takes to himself our sin, our brokenness, our anxiety, our alienation from the Father, and our sentence of condemnation. In return, he gives to us his righteousness, his wholeness, his peace, his oneness with the Father and his declaration of eternal life. Our humanity is restored in the humanity of Christ. One on behalf of the many, he has taken the human condition to the cross, died with it and then been raised in new life, the life of a restored humanity. Now, at the right hand of the Father, Jesus continues in this work. He continues to take our feeble prayers and make them his own. He continues to offer on our behalf even the very response to this grace which we should offer but cannot ever adequately offer. He stands in for us even now. For the humanity of Christ continues. He is still God incarnate, even in his glorified life in heaven. Like his oneness with his Father, Jesus Christ's oneness with our humanity "is a final reality enduring endlessly into eternity." This electrifying concept of the continuing vicarious humanity of Jesus provides the answer to the exclusive revelation\inclusive love dilemma. Jesus is the one unique and sufficient revelation of God. But that exclusive word offers a triumphant, resounding gospel to all people. In Jesus, our humanity has been gathered up, redeemed, and restored. Imagine if someone found a cure for a terribly debilitating disease, an illness which heretofore could only have its symptoms managed, not its root cause cured. When once this wonderful cure became available, it would diminish the place of all the other symptom controllers. In fact, people might lose jobs and companies even go out of business. The cure would make mere salves unnecessary. Of course, those who had made their living through the old medicines might protest. And those comfortable with the old ways of managing the pain might be resistant to change. But all of this would pale in comparison to the new reality: the disease has been cured! And imagine further if this wonderful treatment could be made available to all people worldwide without discrimination. The exclusive nature of its curative power would be an all inclusive joy for humankind. This illustration is a shadow of the jubilant news of the gospel. Jesus Christ who is God has laid hold of our humanity, so taking it into himself, that he returns it to us restored beyond its original condition. From this astounding starting point, the rest of the life of the church unfolds. The human role is to participate now in the life of Christ Jesus in his relationship as the God\Human with his Father. As you read the following essays, you will see how the truth of who Jesus is works out in our preaching, our worship, our ministry, our prayer life, even our relationships with the people of Israel and our own families. The Torrances' descriptions of what the incarnation really means for us, in language that is often theological poetry, create a passion for Christ. Here is a lifeline to the Rock for a drifting, drowning church. Here are answers to the difficult questions of the hour. The Triune God of Grace is presented with urgent clarity. Personally, their thought has changed my life and re-energized my ministry. I believe that as you read, your life and ministry will be ignited in a bright flame of faith as well. |
|
To order A Passion for Christ call 1-800-368-0110 Resources index · Home |
|
