and “blew the top of” the disciples’ world. Yet Torrance refers also to that other form of eschatology that we have been examining, one that runs on the horizontal axis of time or history (cf. Luke 24:27, 44ff.). Holy Communion, he says, is the “right place to understand the whole movement of history through the Old Testament” as it leads to the death of Christ on Good Friday. From one angle, the vertical, the resurrection discloses the abrupt “end of history” (i.e., man’s fallen, corrupt history); but from another angle, the horizontal, it discloses the teleological movement in history towards redemption.
These two kinds of eschatologies, one on a vertical and the other on a horizontal axis, are found in several early communion sermons. In the first, the Lord’s Supper is called a “place of vision,” a “tabernacle of eternity.”111 It is a place of vision—much like the first Easter communion—because the “veil of sense is torn aside” and we get a “direct encounter with God.”112 It is not a mystical vision either, because, as 1 John indicates, God “got a footing in history.”113 The bread and wine remind us of God’s incarnation, and that a meeting with him is possible only among “worldly things,” and that our faith is “anchored in solid fact.”114 Moreover, the elements are not just bare reminders. Through them faith penetrates the “unseen . . . to touch and handle things there.”115
The most instructive communion sermon is the one titled “The three tenses of communion.”116 Here Torrance explains how the two dimensions of eschatology, the vertical and horizontal, are united in Christ. Relying on three New Testament passages, Torrance shows how the Lord’s Supper telescopes Christ’s past, present and future work of redemption. Through it the “past becomes alive in the present” and the “future also comes into the present.”117 The central point is that through Holy Communion we get a “real sense of the fulfillment of all the promises of Christ.”118 That is because it stands between—and is conditioned by—two great acts of redemption in time: Christ’s sacrificial death and his second advent. For Torrance, the future aspect of communion is underlined in St. Paul’s words of institution. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes.”
Just prior to this sermon on communion Torrance devoted a sermon to the second advent.119 Here his concern is to show how that event bears on the present. His lesson is commensurate with his earlier one on the church in the world. The return of Christ ought to embolden Christians to go into the world to “proclaim the Lord’s death.” The proclamation begins at the Lord’s Table where we “take on the standards of Jesus Christ.”120 That means we are “pledged to fight against the world,” as Christ did, until the day when he “shall come in power and take up the reign of government.”121
Imitating Christ’s struggle with the world, becoming the church militant, involves taking up the cross—not the sword. The vision of the Lord’s coming, he says, is what inspired Paul and the other disciples to go out and proclaim the Lord’s death with such “confidence and daring in spite of persecution.”122 Their minds were fixed, he tells them, as much on the future as on the past.
5. The Ascension
The development of Torrance’s eschatology, from a quite triumphalistic one to a cross-centered one, is linked to his increasing focus in this period on the ascension of Christ. The ascension of course is predicated on the resurrection of Christ, but in his earliest sermons he construes the resurrection in terms that obviate the former, in ways that suit a timeless, realized eschatology. The resurrection is “the complete movement from God to God that passes through the lowest point of our humanity.” “It means the end of history, the ruthless triumph of unrighteousness. It means the end of time.” But when faced with a war-torn world, Torrance knew he had to qualify the triumphalism of the resurrection with the eschatological reserve implicit in the ascension. This meant applying the lesson from Auburn about “the MAN in heaven today” who, because our humanity and our time are real for him, is still graciously carrying out his redeeming work through the church and history. The ascension backs the promise to the distraught that Christ is the “shape of the future”; it backs the promise that he will come again in history to bring an end to all its conflicts. It even explains why the world, notwithstanding the resurrection, is gripped by suffering and spiritual darkness.
The importance of the ascension is attested in a sermon Torrance gives on the subject in the spring of 1942, a sermon that harks back to his Auburn lecture. Following John 16:7, he discusses the benefits of it. The ascension ensures that we have a “spiritual” relationship” with Christ, that he is real in our hearts. Second, it forces us to encounter him as “the crucified” one, instead of just the risen and transcendent one. “Jesus Christ refuses to be known, refuses to have any relations with man apart from the cross. He will be known, worshiped and adorned only as the one who went to Bethlehem, Gethsemane and Calvary.”123
This is the case because the Holy Spirit makes the cross “contem-poraneous”—“now confronting us and demanding our faith, trust, and participation.”124 For Torrance, the “secret” of Jesus is “locked up in the experience of the Cross.”125 But if Jesus had not ascended, we would forget about the cross and never learn this secret.
The third benefit is that we might know him as the “very right hand of God.” The “right hand of God” is a biblical expression for God’s authority and power, which, according to Psalm 110, is shared with the Messiah. This is the greatest advantage of the ascension for Torrance. Through it, the divinity of Christ is attested to faith. At Auburn, he put it this way: “What Christ IS, God IS, because Christ IS God’s Right Hand.” That means there is “no work, no Word, no Will, no Judgement of God other than the act and word and will and judgement of the Lord Jesus Christ.”126 In his view these acts are all manifestations of the power of God (cf. Mark 14.62). “Christ himself IS the ‘omni-potence’ of God.”127
There must have been many Christians at Alyth parish in 1942 who longed for a baring of the right hand of God in Old Testament fashion (Pss 2:9; 110:5f.), for a triumphal display of Christ’s Lordship, of his wrath against evildoers (cf. Luke 9:54). Yet Torrance controverts this view of God’s “right hand.” He calls it a “false picture,” one that is about “almighty force” and rooted in a very un-Pauline definition of justice. God’s “sword of justice” has been wielded on the cross.128 Jesus ascended to the Father, so we could “learn that God’s right hand is revealed at Calvary” and to realize that the crucifixion is an “act of God . . . an act of Eternity.”129 God’s right hand is Jesus’ hand nailed to the cross. In spite of the evil enveloping in the world in 1942, Torrance assures his church that “God is reigning over the world.” But what sort of God? What sort of reign? It is the “Lamb of God on the throne,” he adds, “the Lamb that bears the sins of the world . . . that can be angry with the wicked,” yet whose “holy living will shall be done.”130 And it is precisely because he reigns over the world with a “cross in his heart” that we can be assured he is essentially love.131
The “right hand of God” is an anthropomorphism but, in Torrance’s view, the scarred hands of Jesus are not. The ascension, then, not only verifies the divinity of Christ; it verifies his humanity too. As Mark 14:62 tells us, it is the Son of Man who now sits at the right hand of God. “The Ruler and King of the Universe is none other than the Man who suffered on the Cross.”132
But all this, however, puts faith through a trial. Although faith is not sight, it still “sees.” In order to see more and better, it seeks understanding: fides quaerens intellectum. How, faith will inquire, does Christ from the throne of God rule over the world and redeem it? How, when this world is in shambles, when Christ is not present in the world? Is Christ the true Redeemer? Is God really as Christ is? Or is there a hidden right hand to God?
For Torrance, the revelation of Christ is proof there are “no dark spots” in God.133 However, if he cannot account for the great dark spots in the world (and in 1942 there were many), if he cannot show how all the evil in the world is working
