for what it lacks, that christocentism that is so typical of Torrance. The experience of eternity is central, but the resurrection of Christ is not the sole condition for this experience.
3. Death and the Afterlife
The nunc aeternum is also Torrance’s answer to concerns about death and the afterlife. One would expect a heightening of these concerns during a time of war. Christians of all stripes have traditionally viewed death as the gateway to eternal life with God. Later, Torrance would write enthusiastically about Calvin’s Psychopannychia, which is a defense of that traditional view. For Calvin, death promises a better state than anything in the present. But Torrance tries to show how the future state can be a present possession. Preaching from John 14:19, he argues that these words contain the promise of a new life in the present. Christ’s resurrected life can be a “present power in the believer,” “not simply a fact outside of us.”43 And this life is no ordinary life but one in which the “Eternal” is a “present possession.”44 It is not necessary, he concludes, “to wait for a great change at the end of life.”45 When “Eternity comes into the soul” the “bitterness of death” is behind and “the power of the endless life becomes our experience.”46
4. Resurrection and History
In the summer of 1940, Britain was bracing itself for a German invasion. It was a dark time in history, even darker than the summer before, but you would be hard pressed to know this from reading Torrance’s sermons. They are primarily concerned with the timeless truths of the gospel and with the soul’s relationship with Christ. Here we can gauge the influence of Mackintosh.
The soul’s relation to Christ is important, of course. But what does a minister of the Word say during a time of war, when historical events are making a mockery of God’s love and justice? What does he or she say about last things in the midst of terrible things?
To be sure, Torrance does not ignore the historical situation. It seems to have inspired an early sermon on peace. The world will never give us peace, he says. Its offers of peace are as “as shallow as the German offers of peace.”47 Besides, the source of the “dispeace” in the world is the human heart. “Each man carries a troubled kingdom within him”—in “passions,” “conscience,” and “desires.”48 The real war is in our hearts, between us and the heavenly Father. The only answer is to “look Christ squarely in the face” and “allow him to be the Sovereign and King.”49 Then we will enjoy true peace and the “calm of eternity.”
What about this Nazi menace to Britain? It is the kind of question that must have stirred in the heads of his parishioners. Torrance’s answer: “If your hopes and desires are lodged in the altitude of Eternity, you’ll be above the clouds and storms” of the world.50
These last words tell us a lot about Torrance’s earliest sermons. They do not have much to do with eschatology in the usual sense—with future things and the afterlife. The eschatology in them can be described as a timeless, presentative eschatology. One could also call it a “radical eschatology.”51 It has its roots in Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans. This commentary had a strong eschatological orientation, but not the kind Christians were used to. It had nothing to do with the future. Instead, it had to do with an “Eternity-time” dialectic. These two things are absolutely different (as God and man). Yet in the Word of God “Eternity” breaks into time. In Barth’s words, the “moment” is the “eschatological moment . . . which is no moment in time.”52 In this sense, every moment in time can be the end-time.
However, Torrance’s eschatology is more christocentric than that found in Barth’s Romans (although this could be an echo of the christological turn that eventually occurred in Barth’s eschatology). For Torrance, then, the resurrection of Christ is what allows us (generally) to experience eternity in the present.53 Although the resurrection is an event in time, it is timeless in the sense that we can participate in it at any time, and no particular time is more propitious than any other time for this.
This kind of eschatology has biblical warrant, especially in the Fourth Gospel. But the Bible, including the Fourth Gospel (cf. 6:39, 40, 54), also relates eschatology to history. To ignore this fact is to condone, in Moltmann’s words, a “blinkered disregard of world history and the history of nature.”54
It would not be long before Torrance began to ponder the relationship between Christ and history. When tons of bombs from the Nazi Luftwaffe were raining down on British cities in the summer of 1940, it would not be enough simply to tell people to take the “wings of the spirit” and to soar to the high “altitude of Eternity.” Besides, if we recall his Auburn lectures, we should expect more than a time-less eschatology from Torrance. He asserts that Christianity has to do with “God-in-Time, with God-in-Action” in relation to men. Consequently, redemption “has to be actualized in history and must be mediated through history.” Indeed, he insists that salvation is not “intelligible or even accessible to us” if it is not “historically conveyed.”55
We see the change in his Easter sermon from 1941. There is no change in the subject of the message. It is still centered on the resurrection of Christ. “This broken world is living on the wrong side of the Easter day,” he declares.56 In other words, he saw the world stuck in the dark between Good Friday and Easter. Consequently, the world seeks its own “man-made, humanistic” solutions to “evil’s tragic dominion.”57 What the world desperately needs, he concludes, is for the miracle of the resurrection “to knock the very bottom out of the world.”58
However, he is convinced that the resurrection has really “broken through the spokes of history,” that eternity has “intersected our beggarly time.”59 Thus not only do we have eternity in our hearts but an “Eternal axle in the wheel of history.”60 Still, Easter means triumph. The axle indicates that we can “take to the wings of the spirit” and “ride triumphant” into the kingdom of God.61
The historical implications of the resurrection are more pronounced in the Easter sermon of 1942. He returns to Luke 24, and begins with a metaphor for the resurrection that must have aroused people’s attention. “No atomic revolution can compare to the complete transformation that this Easter awakening means for a broken, darkened world.”62 And by 1942 the world was broken and dark indeed, more so than it had been a year or two earlier. It was very likely a time too when men and women were beginning to suspect that evil is an eradicable part the world, that death is indeed the “final verdict” of history. Yet, in spite of the dire situation, Torrance was not about to give up on the Easter story. It was time to look more deeply into it, for in his mind only this story could provide a real basis for hope in the midst of darkness. “At the death of Jesus the final verdict of history seemed to be: death ends all. Nothing can stop evil and wickedness—the world rolls on and on, inexorably on; not even God can stop it, for the Son of God is destroyed in the maelstrom of evil and death like any common son of man.”63
But in the bodily resurrection of Christ, he adds, we have an event “that completely shatters the whole frame of history” and “breaks in upon the uniformity of nature.”64 And all this can only mean that “cause and effect” and all “the rigid laws of the universe are snapped and broken forever.”65 Still, however, the resurrection is pictured as an epochal, vertical breakthrough. The only difference is that instead of eternity coming into our world, it is the kingdom of God. It “comes plumb down from above and intersects our world at right angles.”66
For the folks at Alyth all this must have sounded fantastic, far removed from the “personal touch” of the risen Lord and the “calm of eternity.” But Torrance’s purpose was to make the gospel the Word for his time. Thus he brings his sermon to a close with these words: “The resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ means the end, the end of our world-this wicked warring world of bloodshed, cruelty and sorrow; it means the end of history, the ruthless triumph of unrighteousness; it means the end of time.”67
On
