to a new world, one “ruled by love,” where life prevails, and “Jesus is conqueror, king, Lord and God.”68
Still, there is no escaping the fact that the historical eschatology in these Easter sermons is somewhat triumphalistic. It is hard to believe that Torrance is taking history seriously when he claims in the middle of a war that the resurrection of Jesus means the “end of history,” the “end of time.” What we have is really a transposition of his individual eschatology. It is all about the “first fruits” of the new creation, with little thought given to the future resurrection of humankind.69 It is without the eschatological tension that is so much a part of the New Testament, the tension between the present and future, old creation and new creation. There is reference to a new world on the horizon, but it looks about as substantial as the eternity that we can receive into our hearts.
If one teaches only a timeless, triumphalistic eschatology, then something has got to give in Christian faith. Either one will fall into a docetic view of world history. “The news is not as bad as it sounds.” Or one will fall into a docetic view of Jesus and his history. “Jesus did not actually rise from dead.” “If he did, then why does history continue as it always has—filled with conflict, war, bloodshed, and every kind of evil?”
Yet Torrance does something to ensure that the believer does not fall one way or the other. The facile solution is to affirm the world’s history, its pain, and suffering; and then to affirm Jesus’ history in terms of those things. This is not his solution, for that would put into question the great impact of Christ’s resurrection. His answer is to look to the humanity of Jesus, to his historical life, his suffering, and his death. Paradoxically, that means looking toward the risen and ascended Christ.
B. Ascension
1. Incarnation and History
We can see this approach in his New Year’s sermon of 1941. “Here at the outset of a New Year in these terrible days in which we live . . . asking what the future will bring forth . . . what unknown lies ahead.”70 And the preceding days were the most terrible the country had seen. German air raids on British cities began in September 1940. They continued nightly, and within two months about 11,700 died, most in London.71 One of the most devastating attacks occurred on December 29th. The attacks left 1,500 fires raging in the city. The event is remembered as the “second fire of London.” It is only natural that people wondered what was ahead. Torrance responds with the words from Acts 1:7: “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in his own authority.”72 God hides the future from us in order to establish us in faith. Going “out into the blue”; this, he adds, is what faith is about.
More importantly, every year, even the darkest ones, are full of Jesus Christ. Ever since the advent of Christ, he explains, “time is no longer empty, but definitely full of God himself . . . full of Jesus Christ; even 1941 is filled with Jesus Christ . . . with “Bethlehem, the Cross, and Easter as well.”73 Jesus Christ is called the “shape of the future.” “Have therefore no tears,” he comforts his church, “for the future can only hold Christ for you.”74 There is no need to be troubled by war, mass destruction, or the sight of evil run amok in the world; these are not signs that evil has vanquished good or that Easter is meaningless. On the contrary, this “turmoil, this dispeace” are signs that evil is in its “last death throes,” as God comes to grips with it all in the history of this age.75
The task of trying to reconcile evil in the world with a good Creator is difficult, but it is far more difficult when the time of the world is reckoned to be full of God himself. But Torrance has an explanation: the incarnation. Jesus Christ provoked conflict from the moment he came into the world. That was to be expected. His advent represents judgment, the assertion of God’s holiness.76 This judgment explains why he came not “to bring peace but a sword” and to “cast fire upon earth.”77 This leads Torrance to interpret the violence between the nations as a violent reaction to God, because the “cross of Christ is flung into their midst.”78
However, the incarnate Christ turns the world against him in order to “triumph over” all the evil in the world. For Torrance, every “dark page” in the history of Europe “augurs the breakthrough of God” and the victory of the Christ.79 In order to strengthen their faith in this victory he directs his church, for the first time, to the Revelation of Jesus Christ. They are told not to look for a disclosure of times or seasons in this book, but instead for a “glimpse of the final triumph of his love and power.”80 Those hands that were nailed to the cross of Calvary by a sinful world are the same hands of the one who holds the “seven stars,” who is the “First and the Last.” There is “nothing in the world history to compare” to Jesus’ victory.81 It is he who “dominates the ages.” He is the “everlasting mountain” while “man’s systems” are the “shadows on the hillside.”82 “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in his own authority.”83 On New Year’s 1941, with no end to the war in sight, the pastor urges his flock to cling to Christ with all their faith, and then sends them away with the promise that when the “pageantry of history is over . . . Christ the conqueror will come from Edom” and then the darkness will be “turned into day.”84
This sermon differs substantially from others we have examined. While they have more to do with a realized eschatology, based on the power of the resurrection and the nature of eternity, this one contains an historical eschatology based on the incarnation and the cross. In his sermon on 2 Pet 3, Torrance described the resurrection as God’s “breakthrough in the realms of human bondage, sin and death,” but in the New Year’s sermon he tells us that every “dark page” in the history of Europe “augurs the breakthrough of God.” If we can say the eschatology in the first sermon is realized, then the one in the second is realist.
This historical eschatology, however, is not something entirely new in Torrance. The seeds for it had been sown at Auburn, but historical circumstances and the pastoral needs at Ayth caused it to spring up and bloom.
It hard to know for sure what Torrance means when he says time is full of Christ, full of Bethlehem, the cross, and Easter. From his Auburn lectures we know that he believes Bethlehem is where the eternal God truly entered time, where God truly became a man. Christ then fills time in a real way, but also in a way that is according to his nature: the God-Man-in-saving action. As a man Christ reveals God, for there can be no revelation to us until revelation takes “human form.” As God he is our redeemer. For Torrance, there is no way of knowing Christ outside his redeeming action. So to say our time is filled with Christ, must mean that our time is marked by the humanity of the incarnation, the suffering of the cross, the new life of the resurrection and the hope of the advent.
Jesus Christ filled time during his earthly ministry, but his exaltation is our assurance that he continues to fill time. We need to recall what he taught his students at Auburn: “Fundamentally, the function of the ascended and risen Lord Jesus cannot be anything than the dominating purpose of his incarnation and life on earth: the revelation of God to mankind and the redemption of mankind.”85 The risen and ascended Jesus Christ remains the God-Man, the God who entered time and took on human form. Thus time and human relations continue to have substance before God. We can say that the ascension makes possible a mirifica commutatio. Since Christ the God-Man has our time before him in heaven, he is thus able to fill our time here on earth. And, as we will discover, the church, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit are the means by which he does this.
2. Christ and the Individual
Torrance’s New Year’s sermon of 1941 tells us that he had begun to take the relationship between eschatology and history more seriously. Yet he did not allow individual eschatology to become swallowed by world history. He accents it. That is because the key to this relationship between eschatology and history is the personal history of Jesus. That means the cross, not just the power of the resurrection and the experience of eternity, will have to define individual eschatology.86 Torrance does not
