Review of Gospel, Church, and Ministry

In some quarters, Thomas F. Torrance has gained an undeserved reputation for theological abstraction and dogmatic exposition divorced from concrete Christian practice and ethics. This volume, the first of two in Wipf and Stock’s Thomas F. Torrance Collected Studies series, challenges that caricature by assembling a dozen practically-oriented writings of Torrance’s that previously were either unpublished (chap. 1), hard to find (chap. 2), or out of print (chaps. 3–12). The editor’s introduction by Jock Stein, a former student of Torrance’s, helpfully contextualizes, summarizes, and reflects briefly on each chapter. As he points out (p. 2), Torrance viewed himself as a missionary to secularizing, scientifically-minded Western civilization. He brought to that task what he had learned firsthand from his missionary parents in China: evangelistic fervor; passion for prayer; love for his Scottish Reformed heritage coupled with an embrace of interchurch cooperation; and commitment to incarnate the gospel in the thought-forms of the target culture in such a way as to transform it—the culture, not the gospel!—from the inside out, healing its incurvature in self-referential sin and error by opening it up to the objectivity of grace and truth in the person of Jesus Christ.    

Chapter One: “My Parish Ministry: Alyth, 1940–43” lays the descriptive, experiential foundation for the subsequent prescriptive, analytical essays. Here Torrance reminisces about his first pastorate, which he served while completing his doctoral dissertation and enduring the Second World War. The title of this chapter is somewhat misleading, since the narrative only pauses after 1943, when Torrance left Alyth for a stint in wartime chaplaincy, then resumes with his return to parish duties from 1945 to 1947. Rather than summarizing this chapter and its later, mostly chronologically-organized counterparts in isolation from one another, I shall arrange this review topically, linking incidents from Torrance’s account of his parish ministry with themes from the chapters following.

The Church’s Service in the World

In January of 1942, as the Allies gained ground in North Africa and lost territory in the Pacific, Torrance gave an address to a local Scottish presbytery meeting that sparked enough interest that it was published for distribution throughout the presbytery (pp. 42–44), here reprinted as Chapter Two: “The Church in the World.” In his address, Torrance insists that the church must be in but not of the world: on the one hand, the church must not be equated or merged with society; on the other hand, the church must not disengage from society. The first error has led to Christendom, to the church as sanctifier of the status quo, to classical liberalism’s whimsy of civilization’s evolution into the Kingdom of God on earth, and ultimately to the German church’s cooption by the Nazi regime. Torrance worries that the British state takeover of private industry for the sake of its war aims may be paving the way for a homegrown fascism, which the church must resist. The second error favors quietism and the Kirk’s nostalgic clinging to outdated inefficiencies in the fields of communication, education, and economics. The church must reform itself so as to serve as a perennial gospel gadfly to the government, schools, and businesses. In the latter two arenas, Torrance could draw on his own ministerial history: with the local schoolmaster’s blessing, he had offered instruction in Christianity to students (p. 38), while his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount to adults had inspired a local businessman to raise his workers’ wages higher than even the later government-mandated standard (p. 50)! Torrance concludes with a call for a churchwide recommitment to (foreign) mission and (lay) ministry.

The motif of the ministry of all believers recurs in Chapter Six: “Service in Jesus Christ,” originally published as part of a 1966 Festschrift for Karl Barth. Here Torrance holds together a variety of dualities that must not collapse into antitheses: all Christians are summoned to diakonia (service/ministry/deaconry) both because Christ is Lord of all and because Christ himself has taken the form of a servant. Just as Christ ministered to all humans (including the most undeserving and hostile as well as the seemingly worthy and welcoming) and to all their needs (both physical and spiritual), so should the church, too. The diaconate of all Christians neither excludes nor is excluded by the calling of some to the office of deacon, which exists to model and motivate the whole church’s service. That service is one of response to the Word, and so deacons represent the congregation’s heeding of the antecedent service of the Word as ministered by presbyters. And the church’s diakonia must spurn the satanic Scylla and Charybdis of which Torrance first had warned twenty-four years earlier: either the adoption of worldly power as Christendom 2.0 or the abandonment of people’s material needs to state services. He closes by identifying three crucial forms of Christian service: intercessory prayer; costly witness in the teeth of the world’s hostility; and reconciliation, especially among the divided churches. This third theme is one to which we will return below.

A decade later, Torrance gave the Moderator’s closing address to the 1976 Church of Scotland General Assembly. Chapter Seven: “The Church in the Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century” opens with a fresh caveat against Christian capitulation to totalitarianism—not now in the form of fascism, as he had feared during World War II, but of Marxism. Even during the war, he had witnessed the spread of Marxist thought among British troops, which bore fruit in an increasingly secularized and socialized Britain thereafter (pp. 59–60). Now he reads two signs of the times as announcing the ideological bankruptcy of Marxism: first, the advance of science beyond the deterministic, materialistic models of the past undermines the alleged scientific basis for Marxism; secondly, the rise of countercultural spiritualities and Pentecostalism put the lie to Marxist claims that only physical wellbeing truly matters. The church has an opportunity to nudge society towards a freer, more humane social order, Torrance urges, if only every Christian would act as a missionary and witness. (Hear the echoes of his 1942 and 1966 writings!) He recalls the examples of the early church and the Reformation, when ordinary believers spreading the Word of God radically reshaped society. To that end, and in continuity with his own pastoral practice at Alyth (as noted below), he stresses that Kirk ministers must devote themselves anew to the preaching of Scripture and the visitation of parishioners. In hindsight, Torrance was quite right to anticipate the collapse of European Communism—the Berlin Wall fell thirteen years later—but his hopes for a freshly reinvigorated Church of Scotland have gone unrealized thus far.

Holistic Healing in Christ

As noted above, Torrance saw the church’s service, like her Lord’s, as involving ministry to both body and soul. He returns to this theme in another Church of Scotland Moderator’s address, this one given in 1977 to the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society (EMMS). Chapter Eight: “God, Destiny, and Suffering” opens with his recollection of how the EMMS assisted him when he was a student touring the Middle East. Though he does not mention it in his address, he had sought to work in concert with physicians at Alyth so as to minister holistically to parishioners (pp. 36–37, 52, 62–63). Instead, he uses the occasion of his EMMS address to reflect on his recent return visit to the Middle East, including Jerusalem’s Holocaust Memorial and Church of the Holy Sepulcre, and the role that Christians might play amid the conflicts between Israelis and “Muslim Arabs” (under which heading Torrance mistakenly includes the people of Turkey, who are not Arabs but Turks). He observes that both Jews and Muslims carry a sense of divine destiny tied to geography—in the former case, the reclamation of the Promised Land; in the latter case, the reconquest and expansion of the Dar al-Islam. A faithful Christian witness to both groups centers on the relationship between God and suffering. To Muslims, Christians who for centuries have suffered under Islamic domination must continue steadfastly to insist that God has not remained impassive but has identified with us in the Incarnation. To Jews whose suffering in the Holocaust has called into question God’s character and very existence, Christians likewise must speak of the Crucified and Risen One. In both groups, Christian medical ministry opens hearts for the evangel. And to both groups, Christian division makes the gospel ring hollow. Torrance prescribes Protestant support of Eastern Orthodox believers, not proselytism of them, and ecumenical efforts to heal the breaches in the body of Christ for the sake of a united witness. A half-century later, Torrance’s diagnoses and proposed treatments remain relevant.

Reordering the Church

Torrance’s ecumenical spirit sprang from familial soil. Both he and his father before him were Scottish presbyterians who married English episcopalians. The Anglican women in T. F. Torrance’s life bracket his time at Alyth: his mother stayed with him for the first year of his pastorate (pp. 29, 46) and his last two years there featured his wedding to Margaret Spear (in 1946) and the birth of their eldest son (in 1947). Between these bookends, Torrance makes sure to comment on his eighteenth-century Alyth predecessor’s proposal to unite the presbyterian and episcopal churches (pp. 31–32) and his generally good relations with the local Scottish Episcopalian minister as well as the presbyterian “Auld Kirk” minister (Torrance’s appointment was to a Free Church congregation), both of whom participated in his ordination (pp. 30, 33, 52). Torrance happily notes the reunion of the Aulds and Frees (p. 38) and his own endeavors toward a presbyterian-episcopal union (p. 32). Multiple chapters in this edited volume take up the issue of church order with a view to overcoming division through renewed attention to Christ and Scripture.

Chapter Four: “The Meaning of Order” (originally published in 1959) sets church order within a cosmic and Christological framework. As Creator, God has established the world’s order, and against the invasive disorder of sin, God is reordering the world in Jesus Christ. This reordering encompasses both space and time. In his ascension, Christ has carried created spacetime into heaven itself. Church order exists in the polarities between heaven and earth, the old age of sin and the new age of Christ. These polarities open up space for the ascended Christ to be with us on earth in the church and the eucharist, as well as time for us to repent and believe the gospel. Yet the tension between old and new, above and below, also means that church order—including apostolic succession—cannot be absolutized, for it partakes of both the disorderly past and the reordered future. Taking its bearings from the historical Christ revealed in the Gospels, church order can only conform to his servant posture now while it awaits the glory to come. Torrance’s relativization of historical expressions of church order prepares for his forthcoming proposals to alter that order in light of advances in biblical exegesis and theological understanding.

Chapter Five: “Consecration and Ordination” (dated to 1957) plunges into an exegetical study of the consecration of priests, kings, and prophets in the Old Testament and the consecration of the apostles and those whom they ordained in the New Testament. Torrance relates his findings to the effort to unite presbyterian and episcopal churches (pp. 126, 134, 134–35 n. 7) and to a doctrine of ordination that keeps ecclesial authority and its continuity firmly subordinated to Christ’s Lordship (pp. 128–39).

Chapter Nine: “Eldership in the Reformed Church” (first published in 1984) aims to correct the tradition among Reformed churches of having elders whose office is distinct from both presbyters and deacons. Torrance traces its historical pedigree and scriptural support, determines that the latter is lacking, and observes that Presbyterian elders perform the duties that the New Testament associates with deacons. Out of commitment to ever reforming in accordance with God’s Word and for the sake of removing an obstacle to the harmonization of church order across denominations, Torrance counsels that Presbyterian eldership be merged with the diaconate. Here again, as in Chapter Six (which he cites on p. 190), his high regard for deaconry emerges.

Chapter Ten: “The Ministry of Women” (originally a 1992 publication) argues the case for women’s ordination. Just as in Chapter Nine Torrance had sought to reform Reformed tradition in light of Scripture, so here he seeks to reform nigh-universal church tradition in keeping with New Testament evidence that women were apostles, prophets, teachers, deacons, and co-workers with male Christian leaders. Again, just as in Chapter Nine he aimed to realign Reformed tradition with majority church tradition, so now he aims to realign majority church tradition with earlier church tradition as represented by a Roman catacomb painting of Priscilla co-leading a eucharistic celebration alongside male presbyters. (Torrance also cites on p. 205 a ninth-century painting of a pope’s mother that labels her “EPISCOPA,” which he interprets as “woman bishop,” although he grants that the term “was evidently used at times to refer to the wife of a bishop.” He does not consider the likelihood that in this instance the term is being used to refer to the mother of a bishop.) And just as in previous chapters he subordinated the church’s authority to the incarnate Christ who reorders all creation, so here he spells out the implications of Christ’s saving assumption of human nature en toto—not simply Jewish or male human nature, though Christ came as a Jewish male—for the re-creation of God’s image in male and female equally. It is not the case, therefore, that only a man may image Christ at the Lord’s table any more than that only a Semite may do so. The exclusion of women from ordained ministry is, then, merely a matter of alterable ecclesial convention; it lacks a Christological basis. Though it goes unmentioned in this chapter, Torrance had a personal connection to this debate: one of the schoolgirls in his Alyth Bible classes was ordained in the Kirk years later (p. 38).

Ministry of Word and Sacrament

A final theme that I wish to highlight from this collection of essays is Torrance’s twin ministerial passion for the Word preached and taught and for the Lord’s Supper celebrated. In Chapter Seven above, I noted that his call for Church of Scotland ministers to proclaim the biblical gospel both from the pulpit and from house to house had a precedent in his own pastorate. His Alyth memoir records how he sought to visit every parishioner’s home early on in his ministry and how doing so helped him to make his Sunday sermons (and later his New College dogmatics lectures) more relevant to his hearers (pp. 33–35, 41–42). For example, amid World War II he recognized that his flock was anxious and grief-stricken, so he preached a sermon series on the book of Revelation that proved so popular that it was published some years later as The Apocalypse Today (p. 39). His home visits made an impact on the parishioners, too: in one instance (pp. 34–35), he recounts how he exorcized a man using Psalm 51! As with the Word, so with the sacrament: Torrance not only offered Holy Communion at church every quarter but also took it to his parishioners in their homes (pp. 46–47, 60–61). Chapters Four and Nine above already have expressed the eucharistic trope in his writings. It recurs in the final three chapters to be surveyed below.

Chapter Three: “The Humanity of Christ in the Sacramental Life of the Church” (first published in 1956) trumpets Torrance’s signature doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ as the anchor of a proper sacramental understanding. Christ himself is the true and final Priest, excluding any autonomous sacerdotalism on the part of the clergy. Christ has regenerated our birth and infancy by his own recapitulation of these life-stages, and in pedobaptism our children are given to share in this reality. Christ’s crucified and resurrected flesh is the source of our life, and in the Lord’s Supper we receive nourishment from his life-giving humanity. These staples of Reformed theology have suffered neglect due to a rationalistic reduction of Christ’s atonement to forensic categories (as found in the Canons of Dort and popular evangelicalism) and various Pelagian reactions to it (such as in classical liberalism). Torrance critiques the modern liturgical movement as being motivated by nostalgia rather than by a thoroughgoing doctrine of Christ’s vicarious humanity. He urges as a remedy the recovery of sacramental insights from the early church and early Reformation.

Chapter Eleven: “Preaching Christ Today” is an address by Torrance to the Scottish Church Theology Society (SCTS), which he had helped to found in 1943, on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. He makes three main points: first, our preaching and teaching of the gospel must not bifurcate the historical Jesus from the doctrinal Christ. Such a split is based on outdated pre-Einsteinian scientific positivism. Torrance is particularly exercised against Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologization program. The Alyth memoir sheds light on the personal background here: shortly after Torrance’s return from his chaplain’s duties, he discovered that a onetime supporter of the SCTS was eager to shed all association with the Society and Torrance himself lest the taint of “Barthianism” prevent his gaining a professorship in Scotland. This same former friend became an avowed Bultmannian and, together with a likeminded colleague, joined the faculty of Glasgow University—much to the chagrin of Torrance, who had pushed for a pro-Barth appointment there (pp. 63–64). Torrance’s second point is that true gospel preaching presents Christ as the very revelation of God in the flesh, holding together his full deity and full humanity. This was the truth that the ancient church affirmed in the Nicene Creed, and this is the truth that must be contended for today against obsolete dualistic scientific thinking. Torrance rejoices in the then-current trinitarian renaissance and hopes that “bringing Christian understanding of the personal relations within the Holy Trinity to bear upon social relations and structures” will result in “their radical transformation and liberation from fascist and Marxist suppression” (p. 244). Here he alludes to political concerns voiced decades earlier in Chapters Two and Seven. His third point is that Christian preaching must be crucicentric: it is the Christ who, in his vicarious humanity, wholly took our place in repenting, believing, and suffering who is our Savior. Torrance retells the story of his visit as Church of Scotland Moderator to the Holocaust Memorial and Church of the Holy Sepulcre in Jerusalem (pp. 245–47; see Chapter Eight above) and shares how he best grasps the unconditional grace of Christ when celebrating the Lord’s Supper (pp. 251–52, in lines that echo his Alyth memoir, pp. 46–47). He reflects on how this message of justification sola gratia is offensive even to “would-be evangelical people” (p. 254). Torrance speaks from experience: when he had preached through Romans at Alyth, one of his elders, who had been converted under D. L. Moody, had taken offense at the unconditionality of grace. Before long the man inexplicably died, still scandalized by the minister’s message (pp. 39–41). Torrance concludes by interceding for all believers, clergy and laity alike, to become witnesses and proclaimers of the gospel, recalling his summons in Chapters Two, Six, and Seven.      

Chapter Twelve: “Legal and Evangelical Priests: The Holy Ministry as Reflected in Calvin’s Prayers” (from a 1997 publication) revisits one last time the ministry of Word and sacrament. This chapter seconds Chapter Five’s approach to Old Testament sacerdotal passages as applicatory to Christian ministers. Torrance extracts prayers from Calvin’s commentary on Malachi and analyzes them to illuminate priestly ministry in the church. Calvin underscored that priesthood includes the teaching of sound doctrine under the authority of Christ. Torrance adds that priests (hence today’s pastors) act as messengers both from God to people and from people to God. Lastly, Torrance turns from the ministry of the Word to that of the sacrament, claiming that Calvin sees the eucharist as a repeated memorial offering of Christ’s singular sacrifice before God. The end of this chapter thus functions as an example of the retrieval of the Reformation’s sacramental insights that Torrance proposed in the conclusion to Chapter Three.    

Taken together, this collection deepens our appreciation for Torrance’s churchmanship. The manifold contributions for which he is famous—to dogmatics, historical theology, ecumenism, the dialogue between science and theology, and the Anglophone reception of Barth—flowed not from mere intellectual curiosity or selfish ambition but from his heart to see the church revitalized and the world evangelized. While some of his hopes have come to pass (e.g. the fall of European Communism) and some of his fears have not (e.g. the rise of a fascist Britain), a number of the issues that he addressed remain unfinished business: totalitarianism, Islamist militancy, Israeli-Arab hostilities, church divisions, resistance to women in ministry, and the dechristianization of the West beset us still. (Re)familiarizing ourselves with Torrance’s proposals and, even more importantly, embracing his same passion for mission in the name of the one Lord Jesus Christ will enable us to serve our generation as he did his.