Resurrection, Apocalypse, and the Kingdom of Christ. Stanley S. MacLean

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СКАЧАТЬ in a communion service from 1942.87 Christians today, he says, can easily go off course, like the Christians at Corinth, especially when the church is in a “muddle,” as a result of the tumult in the world. Therefore he encourages people to come to the communion table; for this is where they can get re-centered, find their “spiritual bearings” and “set the course” of their souls toward Jesus Christ.88 By what means? The cross. It has been “flung into our midst.” It causes tumult in the world, but it also provides spiritual direction for believers. Using navigation as a metaphor for the Christian life, he writes: “the Cross is our compass, the Holy Spirit our sextant and the Word of God our chart.”89 It is only fitting that his final word of advice is to follow Christ by taking up his cross daily.

      But taking up the cross means living more by faith, than by the experience of eternity or the “personal touch” of the risen Christ. It means following the hidden Christ as well as the revealed Christ. Besides, for Torrance, these two are found together. Luke 24 is about the experience of the glorious risen Christ, but it is also about the “shadow Christ,” who dwells in the “dark” and is encountered only through faith. His point is that the Christian journey through life is a lot like the journey of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. The individual Christian journey is filled with the “shadow Christ” or the hidden God who inhabits the places of spiritual darkness. He urges believers not to cower when caught in terrible situations. After all, God dwells in them; though he can be found through faith alone. “The truth is that faith can see only in the dark.”90 Yet it does truly see.

      Talk about eternity does not suddenly disappear from Torrance’s sermons, but it takes on new eschatological meaning. If the shadow Christ tells us that God is hidden as well as revealed, then eternity too must be hidden as much as it is revealed. It is as much a promise as a present experience. This truth comes out in a sermon on Philippians, dealing with the basic tensions in the Christian life, including that between time and eternity. Torrance exhorts believers to “stop having a double mind” and to ‘subordinate everything to the kingdom of God.”91 There is no suggestion that the eternal kingdom is now within our grasp. Indeed in the first months of 1942 it probably never looked farther away. Rather, the kingdom is tied up with the future life. There is a call, then, to recover the New Testament “sense of eternity,” epitomized in Paul’s words to the Philippians. It means reaching out for eternity. “Everywhere in the New Testament . . . human destiny is stretched out beyond our imagination, stretched out to eternity.”92 And “that is what we need to do.”93 But that is naturally going to create an “inescapable tension,” he warns, exactly like the kind Paul refers to. “There is a vision of the life Beyond, of Eternity that will always throw us into an inescapable tension—in a straight between the two.”94 This sense of eternity is linked to faith, as faith always contains a “future reference” and is always about “living beyond our range.”95

      Here faith is understood somewhat existentially, as a function of the tension between time and eternity. On the other hand, Torrance sees it as a function of the life between two great times, the ascension and second advent. The whole situation leads Torrance to compare Christians to “arrows” that are shot from God’s bow in the direction of their target, the kingdom of God.96 The second advent adds both substance and hope to faith. It also creates a sense of urgency. The time-between, after all, is a time of grace, a time for spreading the gospel, for hearing and responding to it. “The Church must capture again today . . . this note of the utmost urgency of the Gospel.”97 For the kingdom of God “draweth nigh.”

      For the many Christians who equated the coming of Christ’s kingdom with peace and prosperity, their faith in the coming of this kingdom must have been battered in the 1940s.98 But Torrance assures them that their hopes will be fulfilled with the final advent of the Judge and Savior. “Come it certainly shall, when the terrible tide of evil now let loose upon the earth will be utterly destroyed by the immediate presence of the majesty and judgement of God.”99 Then there will be “no Hitlers” to terrorize the world. As for salvation, Christians can hope for more than peace, progress, and brotherhood. This is because Jesus will return “with all the fullness of his perfect manhood” to establish the new heaven and new earth.100

      3. Christ and the Church

      Concomitant with the new emphasis on Christ and history in Torrance is an emphasis on the church in history. The church is the principle means by which Christ fills time and “gives shape to the future,” for individual Christians and for the world at large. How so? Torrance did not discuss the church in his Auburn lectures, but they contain two seminal statements. The church is “the visible ‘incarnation’ of Christ on earth in lieu of his very Self,” and the “ascended and enthroned Lord Jesus” uses her “for his work of redemption . . . on earth and in history.”101 By the 1950s Torrance will have in place a highly developed ecclesiology, and one with a strong eschatological orientation. But the roots of that ecclesiology are found in Auburn, and its development takes place during those tense first years at Alyth.

      Torrance’s early doctrine of the church is modest. It begins with an exhortation to recover the New Testament model of the church.102 There is a focus on those four basic features mentioned in Acts 2.42: the teachings of the apostles, fellowship, Holy Communion, and prayer. In his view, the modern church—in particular the Church of Scotland—was barely distinguishable from the state and the prevailing culture. He faults it for having “degenerated” to a point where it was a “bulwark of national order and life.”103 This represented a double tragedy for him. The church was out of touch with the kingdom of God, and she was powerless to make a real difference in the world. She is so deeply “identified with the present shape of the nation that she can’t change it . . . can’t strike at the heart of contemporary civilization, culture and society. [S]he has substituted public spiritness, philanthropy, good citizenship for what the New Testament calls the Kingdom of God.”104

      How should the church relate to the surrounding society? Taking a lesson from the parable in Matt 13:33, he maintains that the church should be to society as the “leaven” is to the “loaf.” The church is not the kingdom of God in visible form. It is instead an “instrument” of the kingdom of God. As such, it should be the “greatest disturbing factor on earth.”105 The church is always tempted to “settle down” in the world but, for Torrance, that is something it must never do. The reason is the kingdom of God “can’t be domesticated.” He calls the attempt to do so the “greatest sin.” Why? It “betrays” Jesus’ resurrection. Yet everywhere this sin was apparent to him, and so were the consequences. “Any wonder,” he says, “God has raised up utterly ruthless men in Europe to shake us out of our religious self-complacency and self-satisfaction.”106 “If the church won’t shake up the world . . . then God will shake the world in another way.”107

      What is the secret of the leaven that enables the church to affect the whole of society, “life at all points”? It is the power of Christ’s resurrection. In his Easter sermons this power made the “Eternal a present possession,” but here it turns the world upside down. It is the “most revolutionary power” on earth. It is a power of judgment as much as life. Torrance calls it the “living, disturbing, fermenting, revolutionary, recreating word of the living God.”108

      The leavening effect of the church on the society is tied up with the task of evangelism. The church, we recall, lives between two great times, “between the ascension of Christ and his second coming.” So there is another reason the church cannot settle down and let “let her roots go down into the soil” of the world.109 It is an evil-filled world, and no matter how great the church’s impact on the world, this world cannot be remade into the kingdom of God. The church can find no “continuing city here,” and thus it is incumbent upon her to be a pilgrim church till the advent of Christ.110

      4. The Lord’s Supper

      Torrance’s doctrine of the church and his new eschatological orientation is reflected in his understanding of the Lord’s Supper. Let us go back to his very first sermon for Easter 1940 (Luke СКАЧАТЬ