second advent naturally leads us into a consideration of things that have not happened, that are wholly in the future. But Torrance does not venture to speculate on details surrounding the second advent. This should not surprise us. As indicated above, his theology is governed by a scientific realism. This, though, does not rule out divine revelation. Calvin believed that God in his revelation must accommodate himself to our feeble human capacity. Torrance agrees. Revelation must take a “human form,” since the human mind cannot “think outside of itself.” The “consummation of faith,” then, “does not lie completely within human knowledge and experience here and now. This is where we trespass on eschatology or the fulfilment of our hope in Christ which transcends earthly existence in the form we know it here and now.”90 To be sure, a Christian theologian also has the Spirit of God and faith to assist him; yet Jesus Christ is both the source of the Spirit and the object of faith. So any discussion about the Christ who will come again must, if it is to be real theological talk—and not speculation or mythology—be anchored to this man Christ Jesus who has risen and ascended.
This is why Torrance turns to the apocalyptic side of eschatology. For him the language of the Apocalypse is not the stuff of mythology. Rather, it points to the second advent of Christ, whose coming is revealed in his ongoing work of redemption. “The future reality of which they speak is continuous with the work of Christ on earth, with our knowledge and experience of him here and now today.”91
Conclusion
This lecture by Torrance on the ascension and the second advent is one of the shortest in his Auburn series, yet it is the most original and visionary. He takes Christology beyond the boundaries set by contemporary theologians such as Forsyth, Mackintosh, and Brunner. Barth may have pushed the boundaries with his lectures on the Apostles’ Creed in 1935 and his section on “The time of revelation” in Die Kirchliche Dogmatik II/1, but even he had not given much thought to the work of the risen and ascended Christ, or to the nature of the second advent itself.
Torrance left Auburn in the summer of 1939. He would not return to academia until he accepted the Chair in Church History at New College in 1950. In the meantime he was a parish minister for the Church of Scotland and a chaplain briefly in the British Army. Yet his theological activity did not cease. Indeed the horrors of war, the threat of communism, and the general crisis of civilization that marked this period became a crucible for Torrance’s Auburn Christology, especially for that remarkable last part of it. In the pulpit at Alyth and on the battlefield of Italy, Torrance would have to cling tenaciously to the idea that “there is a MAN in heaven today,” Christ the God-Man, who is truly “reigning over the kingdoms and nations of the world and working out his redeeming purpose for redemption.” But he would do more that just cling to an idea; through deeper biblical and theological study he would explicate the meaning of it.
The lecture on the second advent is one of the few times Torrance discusses last things, as traditionally understood. There is an epistemological reason for this. As long as we live in the time of the church the “consummation of faith” is beyond our ken. Eschatology, then, if we define it strictly in terms of the last things, is bound to be an uncertain dogmatic science. But Torrance does not cease from thinking about eschatology. That is because he redefines it accordance with his Christology and soteriology. It becomes less about the “end time” and more about the “between the times,” the time between the ascension and second advent, the time of the church, the time of grace.
The second advent remains important, but it is something that approaches us and something that we move towards. But this approach, this movement is not something that happens on the plane of history as we know it. The second advent is about Christ, the risen Lord and King who has ascended above the plane of history. His sudden advent would mean the reversal of history as we know it. Christ represents the new creation and the new age. The eschatological tension is therefore dual: it is “between the new and the old here and now,” and “between the present and the future.” That is why instead of the second advent Torrance will tend to speak of the one parousia—as a coming-and-presence of Christ—with two particular moments. Christ’s kingdom, therefore, is not merely a future reality. It is equally a present, hidden reality, which unveils itself in the church—through the Spirit, the Word, and the Sacrament. Yet the full unveiling of Christ and his kingdom is reserved for the final parousia. But, as we will see, there are also practical and historical reasons why Torrance redefines eschatology.
1. “Professor Mackintosh made a profound and lasting impact on my spiritual and theological development . . . [He] had a vast and commanding sense of the grace of the Eternal” (Torrance, “Student Years,” 4).
2. Torrance, “Hugh Ross Mackintosh,” 162.
3. Torrance, “The Modern Eschatological Debate,” 45, 50.
4. In the same vein is John Baillie’s And the Life Everlasting (1934), which is about “an inquiry into the nature of and grounds of Christian hope of eternal life” (ibid., 5).
5. Mackintosh, Immortality, 128.
6. See Mackintosh’s Types of Modern Theology, where he devotes the final chapter to the theology of Karl Barth. Unlike some in his day, Mackintosh clearly expected Barth’s influence on the Church to increase. For him the great benefit of Barth’s theology is that it “forced men to take Revelation seriously, with a revival of faith as a consequence” (ibid., 253). It has been argued that Mackintosh’s theology, with its strong emphasis on the free grace of Christ, anticipated Karl Barth’s theology. This is the thesis of J. W. Leitch. See A Theology of Transition: H. R. Mackintosh as an approach to Karl Barth.
7. Torrance, Karl Barth, 121.
8. It seems that these lectures left a lasting impression on Torrance. Near the end of his career he revealed that CD II/1 was his favourite section of the Dogmatics. This is after he told Michael Bauman in an interview that Barth’s “doctrine of God is simply the best thing of its kind.” Michael Bauman, Roundtable, 112.
9. McGrath, T. F. Torrance, 45.
10. Ibid., 46.
11. Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace, 139.
12. The seminary nailed its colours to the mast when it came out with the “Auburn Affirmation” in 1927. Baillie had also done a stint of teaching at Auburn. The campus closed in 1939, and the seminary moved to the campus of Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
13. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ.
14. Torrance, Royal Priesthood, 43.
15. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ, ii.
16.
