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

perspective” as one of the four leading themes in Torrance doctrine: Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, edited by Robert T. Walker. To support his claim, Walker includes a nearly fifty-page addendum on the subject.

17. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic, 466.

      1/ Prologue: From Edinburgh to Auburn, 1934–1939

      A. Edinburgh and Basil, 1934–1938

What were the formative influences on Torrance’s eschatology? One immediately thinks of Karl Barth’s theology, but one cannot underestimate the influence of Torrance’s teachers at the University of Edinburgh, where his theological education began (1934–37). The great figure there at this time, and the one who had the greatest impact on Torrance, was Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870–1936), who held the Chair in Systematic Theology.1 He published a number of books, most notably The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (1912), which became a standard text for a generation of divinity students. Mackintosh’s christocentric view of grace and his evangelicalism seemed to have made a lasting impact on his student. According to Torrance, it was Mackintosh’s doctrine of atonement that explained the nature of his teacher’s theology. The “nerve” of all his teaching, he writes, was “the forgiveness of sins provided directly by God in Jesus Christ at infinite cost to himself.”2 Torrance’s tribute to his teacher is appropriately titled “Hugh Ross Mackintosh: Theologian of the Cross.”

We should not gloss over Mackintosh’s influence on the development of Torrance’s eschatology. The cross is central to Torrance’s apocalyptic eschatology, as we will discover. Years later, Torrance will cite Mackintosh (along with another Scot, P. T. Forsyth) as one of those few modern theologians who were able to follow the Reformers in preserving the “eschatological tension of faith.”3

However, Torrance’s eschatology would develop into something very different in terms of form and content from what one finds in either Mackintosh or Forsyth. Whereas he would define eschatology as an objective application of Christology to history and the church, Mackintosh and Forsyth focussed on individual eschatology, which they interpreted in moral, psychological terms. And neither man showed much interest in the Apocalypse. From Forsyth’s pen came This Life and the Next (London, 1918), which examines “the effect on this life of faith in another.”4 Mackintosh’s weightiest contribution is Immortality and the Future (London, 1915). For him the criterion of truth in eschatology is “what is certified to the soul by faith in Jesus.”5 The way these men approached eschatology reveals the dead hand of German liberal theology. Forsyth had studied at Göttingen under Albrecht Ritschl; Mackintosh at Marburg under Wilhelm Herrmann.

By the 1930s, however, Mackintosh had developed a deep appreciation for Karl Barth’s theology, which represented a repudiation of German liberalism.6 Indeed Mackintosh would play a part in Torrance’s decision to do post-graduate study at Basel (1937–38) under Barth.7 There Torrance heard his series of lectures on the doctrine of God. These would become volume II.1 of the Church Dogmatics.8 It was probably Barth’s theological method that impressed Torrance more than anything. Barth treated the Word of God as the real and objective revelation of God himself, and understood dogmatics as a critical science. As a research project, Torrance chose the scientific structure of Christian dogmatics.9 However, Barth dissuaded him and advised him instead, on the basis of his pupil’s interest in the Greek Fathers, to write on the doctrine of grace among the second-century fathers of the church.10 Torrance agreed. That was in 1938. The fruit of his labour is The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers (Edinburgh, 1946). Eschatology has an important place here. Torrance concludes that the apostolic Fathers misunderstood the “radical nature” of New Testament grace and its distinct “eschatological character,” which sets believers free and translates them into a “completely new world.”11 But we are getting ahead of ourselves. These words were published in the mid-forties.

      B. The Auburn Lectures on Christology, 1938–1939

The war interrupted Torrance’s doctoral research, but it was not the first thing to interrupt it. This was his stint lecturing at Auburn Theological Seminary in upstate New York. He had planned on returning to Basel after a summer break in Scotland, but his plans changed when John Baillie, a professor of divinity at New College, persuaded him to fill temporarily a faculty vacancy at Auburn.12 The seminary was long-regarded as a liberal institution. By 1938 it was at the vanguard of the so-called “New School” Presbyterianism, which positioned itself against the fundamentalism of the “Old School” Presbyterianism. Torrance arrived in the fall of 1938 and taught a full year of courses. Although he devoted most of his time to Christian dogmatics, he had to teach a whole range of subjects, including systematic theology, biblical theology and philosophy of religion.

      1. Theological Method

So far, only his lectures on Christology and soteriology have been published.13 It is not Torrance’s finest work, as he admits. “They had been put together in a hurry when I was twenty-five years of age and were rather rough-hewn and jejune.”14 Nonetheless, they give us a precious insight into the genesis of his theology. Besides, these are the only lectures where you find “last things” discussed, albeit briefly. It is treated in the last lecture, titled “The Ascension of Christ and the Second Advent,” but it occupies just three pages in a 200-page book. But it is not just these three pages that interest us. It is Torrance’s whole Christology. For he would eventually define eschatology as a component of Christology: as the “application of Christology to the Kingdom of Christ and to the work of Christ in history.”15

McGrath correctly observes that Torrance’s lectures follow “broadly” the “structural framework and theological perspective” of Mackintosh’s The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (1913) and Forsyth’s The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909).16 Not only does he cite these men frequently, he uses their motifs as his starting point. “In any discussion of Christian Doctrines I believe that central place must be given to the doctrine of the Person and Work of Jesus Christ.”17 It is the unity of the two that he is after. Why? Because, in his view, there has been a tendency to examine the person of Christ (Christology) apart from the work of Christ (soteriology). Again, he has in mind Forsyth and Mackintosh.18 Forsyth treats the “person” of Christ under one title and his “work” separately under another: The Work of Christ (1910). As the title of his magnum opus indicates, Mackintosh had a great deal to say about the person of Christ; however, he did not have much to say about Christ’s work. Torrance would find a better model in Brunner’s The Mediator. Brunner underlines the need to see the person and the work of the Mediator as a unity.19 Still, Torrance believes his former teacher laid the proper foundation for Christology. In the preface to his first lecture, he writes: