Resurrection, Apocalypse, and the Kingdom of Christ. Stanley S. MacLean

target, the kingdom of God.96 The second advent adds both substance and hope to faith. It also creates a sense of urgency. The time-between, after all, is a time of grace, a time for spreading the gospel, for hearing and responding to it. “The Church must capture again today . . . this note of the utmost urgency of the Gospel.”97 For the kingdom of God “draweth nigh.”

      For the many Christians who equated the coming of Christ’s kingdom with peace and prosperity, their faith in the coming of this kingdom must have been battered in the 1940s.98 But Torrance assures them that their hopes will be fulfilled with the final advent of the Judge and Savior. “Come it certainly shall, when the terrible tide of evil now let loose upon the earth will be utterly destroyed by the immediate presence of the majesty and judgement of God.”99 Then there will be “no Hitlers” to terrorize the world. As for salvation, Christians can hope for more than peace, progress, and brotherhood. This is because Jesus will return “with all the fullness of his perfect manhood” to establish the new heaven and new earth.100

      3. Christ and the Church

      Concomitant with the new emphasis on Christ and history in Torrance is an emphasis on the church in history. The church is the principle means by which Christ fills time and “gives shape to the future,” for individual Christians and for the world at large. How so? Torrance did not discuss the church in his Auburn lectures, but they contain two seminal statements. The church is “the visible ‘incarnation’ of Christ on earth in lieu of his very Self,” and the “ascended and enthroned Lord Jesus” uses her “for his work of redemption . . . on earth and in history.”101 By the 1950s Torrance will have in place a highly developed ecclesiology, and one with a strong eschatological orientation. But the roots of that ecclesiology are found in Auburn, and its development takes place during those tense first years at Alyth.

      Torrance’s early doctrine of the church is modest. It begins with an exhortation to recover the New Testament model of the church.102 There is a focus on those four basic features mentioned in Acts 2.42: the teachings of the apostles, fellowship, Holy Communion, and prayer. In his view, the modern church—in particular the Church of Scotland—was barely distinguishable from the state and the prevailing culture. He faults it for having “degenerated” to a point where it was a “bulwark of national order and life.”103 This represented a double tragedy for him. The church was out of touch with the kingdom of God, and she was powerless to make a real difference in the world. She is so deeply “identified with the present shape of the nation that she can’t change it . . . can’t strike at the heart of contemporary civilization, culture and society. [S]he has substituted public spiritness, philanthropy, good citizenship for what the New Testament calls the Kingdom of God.”104

      How should the church relate to the surrounding society? Taking a lesson from the parable in Matt 13:33, he maintains that the church should be to society as the “leaven” is to the “loaf.” The church is not the kingdom of God in visible form. It is instead an “instrument” of the kingdom of God. As such, it should be the “greatest disturbing factor on earth.”105 The church is always tempted to “settle down” in the world but, for Torrance, that is something it must never do. The reason is the kingdom of God “can’t be domesticated.” He calls the attempt to do so the “greatest sin.” Why? It “betrays” Jesus’ resurrection. Yet everywhere this sin was apparent to him, and so were the consequences. “Any wonder,” he says, “God has raised up utterly ruthless men in Europe to shake us out of our religious self-complacency and self-satisfaction.”106 “If the church won’t shake up the world . . . then God will shake the world in another way.”107

      What is the secret of the leaven that enables the church to affect the whole of society, “life at all points”? It is the power of Christ’s resurrection. In his Easter sermons this power made the “Eternal a present possession,” but here it turns the world upside down. It is the “most revolutionary power” on earth. It is a power of judgment as much as life. Torrance calls it the “living, disturbing, fermenting, revolutionary, recreating word of the living God.”108

      The leavening effect of the church on the society is tied up with the task of evangelism. The church, we recall, lives between two great times, “between the ascension of Christ and his second coming.” So there is another reason the church cannot settle down and let “let her roots go down into the soil” of the world.109 It is an evil-filled world, and no matter how great the church’s impact on the world, this world cannot be remade into the kingdom of God. The church can find no “continuing city here,” and thus it is incumbent upon her to be a pilgrim church till the advent of Christ.110

      4. The Lord’s Supper

      Torrance’s doctrine of the church and his new eschatological orientation is reflected in his understanding of the Lord’s Supper. Let us go back to his very first sermon for Easter 1940 (Luke 24:30f.). There he draws attention to the fact that the revelation of the risen Christ in Luke is centered on the breaking of bread. It is the basis for a “realized” eschatology, one on a vertical axis, so to speak. Christ’s resurrection meant that eternity came “plumb down” and “blew the top of” the disciples’ world. Yet Torrance refers also to that other form of eschatology that we have been examining, one that runs on the horizontal axis of time or history (cf. Luke 24:27, 44ff.). Holy Communion, he says, is the “right place to understand the whole movement of history through the Old Testament” as it leads to the death of Christ on Good Friday. From one angle, the vertical, the resurrection discloses the abrupt “end of history” (i.e., man’s fallen, corrupt history); but from another angle, the horizontal, it discloses the teleological movement in history towards redemption.

      These two kinds of eschatologies, one on a vertical and the other on a horizontal axis, are found in several early communion sermons. In the first, the Lord’s Supper is called a “place of vision,” a “tabernacle of eternity.”111 It is a place of vision—much like the first Easter communion—because the “veil of sense is torn aside” and we get a “direct encounter with God.”112 It is not a mystical vision either, because, as 1 John indicates, God “got a footing in history.”113 The bread and wine remind us of God’s incarnation, and that a meeting with him is possible only among “worldly things,” and that our faith is “anchored in solid fact.”114 Moreover, the elements are not just bare reminders. Through them faith penetrates the “unseen . . . to touch and handle things there.”115

      The most instructive communion sermon is the one titled “The three tenses of communion.”116 Here Torrance explains how the two dimensions of eschatology, the vertical and horizontal, are united in Christ. Relying on three New Testament passages, Torrance shows how the Lord’s Supper telescopes Christ’s past, present and future work of redemption. Through it the “past becomes alive in the present” and the “future also comes into the present.”117 The central point is that through Holy Communion we get a “real sense of the fulfillment of all the promises of Christ.”118 That is because it stands between—and is conditioned by—two great acts of redemption in time: Christ’s sacrificial death and his second advent. For Torrance, the future aspect of communion is underlined in St. Paul’s words of institution. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes.”

      Just prior to this sermon on communion Torrance devoted a sermon to the second advent.119 Here his concern is to show how that event bears on the present. His lesson is commensurate with his earlier one on the church in the world. The return of Christ ought to embolden Christians to go into the world to “proclaim the Lord’s death.” The proclamation begins at the Lord’s Table where we “take on the standards of Jesus Christ.”120 That means we are “pledged to fight against the world,” as Christ did, until the day when he “shall come in power and take up the reign of government.”121

      Imitating Christ’s struggle with the world, becoming the church militant, involves taking up the cross—not the sword. The vision of the Lord’s coming, he says, is what inspired Paul and the other disciples to go out and proclaim the Lord’s death with such “confidence and daring in spite of persecution.”122 Their minds were fixed, he tells them, as much on the future as on the past.

      5. The Ascension

      The