Living Wittily

T F Torrance on incarantion and atonement II

When T F Torrance writes about theological science, and such complexities as the relations between space, time and divine and contingent order, you simply have to adopt the disposition of student trying hard not to get lost in the maze of erudition and the labyrinth of specialist discourse woven by a professor at ease in unfamiliar intellectual territory.

But when Torrance writes about such central doctrines of Christian faith as the trinitarian understanding of God, christology understood as incarnation, atonement and the resurrection reality of Jesus Christ ascended and coming, then we listen to a theologian preach, and encounter preaching that is soaked in the great doctrines of the faith, and these doctrines as the mere articulation of what it means to experience the reality of the living God, encountered in Jesus Christ.

So here's the next paragraph of Torrance, getting to the heart of the Gospel by a deep theological reading of Scripture. I repeat the last sentence of yesterday's extract. And as a wee forethought before reading it, hHowever new fangled we think theological exegesis is, Torrance was doing it 50 years ago in Edinburgh.

"And so the cross with all its incredible meekness and patience and compassion is no deed of passive and beautiful heroism simply, but the most potent and aggressive deed that heaven and earth have ever known: the attack of God's holy love upon the inhumanity of man and the tyrranny of evil, upon all the piled up contradiction of sin.

To see how that is so, watch what happened when Jesus was arraigned before Pilate and the Jewish nation. Jesus had never lifted a violent finger against anyone, and yet he became the centre of a violent disturbance that has shaken the world to its foundations. The incredible thing is this: the meeker and milder Jesus is, the more violent the crowd become in their resentment against him. The more like a lamb he is, the more like ravening wolves they become. By his very passion and suffering, by his meekness and grace and truth, Jesus imparted passion to his contemporaries and called forth violence from them until at last they laid violent hands upon him and dragged him off to the cross.

Jesus is the embodiment of the still small voice of God: he is the Word made flesh, the Word that is able to divide soul and spirit asunder. That voice, that Word of God in jesus penetrated as never before into the secrets of humanity and exposed them. The more he stood them, the more the power of God broke its way into the citadel of the human soul. Before the weakness and mercy of Jesus, before this compassion, all barriers are broken down, all the thoughts and intents of the heart are revealed. What wind and earthquake and fire could not do, Jesus did: he penetrated into the proud heart of man and laid it bare, and in so doing he produced the most violent reaction that culminated in his crucifixion. "

T F Torrance, Incarnation. The Person and Life of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 150-1.

T F Torrance on incarnation and atonement (I)

The theological legacy of T F Torrance has long been acknowledged as one of the intellectual treasures of Scottish theology. Some of his writing can be dense and hard to get on with; but much of it is theology that is deeply engaged with the living faith of the man who wrote it, and is written by a theologian who has thought downward into the depths of the grace and mercy of divine love. Torrance's best writing is a shining example of theology personally appropriated in the experience of the theologian and expressed in language unembarrassed by the commitment of faith. Below is a passage which to my mind expresses a very Scottish theology of the cross - I hear echoes of James Denney, P T Forsyth and Torrance's own teacher, H. R. Mackintosh, each of whom wrote out of the same reservoir of theological passion.

"In the incarnate life of Jesus, and above all in his death, God does not execute his judgment on evil dimply by smiting it violently away by a stroke of his hand, but by entering into it from within, into the very heart of the blackest evil, and making its sorrow and guilt and suffering his own. And it is because it is God himself who enters in, in order to let the whole of human evil go over him, that his intervention in meekness has violent and explosive force. It is the very power of God. And so the cross with all its incredible meekness and patience and compassion is no deed of passive and beautiful heroism simply, but the most potent and aggressive deed that heaven and earth have ever known: the attack of God's holy love upon the inhumanity of man and the tyrranny of evil, upon all the piled up contradiction of sin."

                                       T F Torrance, Incarnation. The Person and Life of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), p. 150.

The Sisters of Sinai and Professor William Robertson Smith

Sheila's reading Sisters of Sinai by Janet Soskice. More about her in an earlier post I did here. Part of the story of these two remarkable women brings them into contact with Professor William Robertson Smith, a young professor of biblical studies at the Free Church College, Aberdeen, in the 1870's. His critical approach to biblical studies (rejection of Moses' authoriship of Deuteronomy for example), led to his deposition in 1881 from his professorship, a tragedy that ranks high on the list of religious own goals in Scotland.

Smith eventually moved to Cambridge where he encountered these two sisters, pioneers in the discovery and transcription of important ancient biblical and extra-biblical manuscripts. Robertson Smith died relatively young (48 years) of tuberculosis. Once or twice I've visited his grave in the little graveyard in Keig, Aberdeenshire, a peaceful, shaded incline facing out across the shire. During his trial before the church courts he made a now famous affirmation of what he believed to be the nature and authority of Scripture. It didn't satisfy his examiners' and critics' much more conservative convictions on the nature and authority of the Bible, though what he says is deeply indebted to the Reformers' theology of the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit as the sine qua non of biblical interpretation. But his defence remains one of the most eloquent and sincere statements of believing criticism in which faith and thought are held in a legitimate tension of spiritual integrity and intellectual honesty.

"If I am asked why I receive Scripture as the Word of God and the only perfect rule of faith and life, I answer with all the Fathers of the Protestant Church, because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God, because in the Bible alone I find God drawing near to men in Christ Jesus and declaring to us in Him His will for our salvation. And this record I know to be true by the witness of His Spirit in my heart, whereby I am assured that none other than God Himself is able to speak such words to my soul."

Smith, W. R., Answer to the Form of Libel now before the Free Church Presbytery of Aberdeen (Edinburgh, 1878).

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You can find out more about Smith on this website devoted to him. It contains the full text of a recent Aberdeen PhD which was supervised by Prof. William Johnstone one of our leading authorities on Robertson Smith and editor of a fine collection of essays about him.

Heaven does not laugh loud but it laughs last....(P T Forsyth)

My thanks to Jason who brought this quotation to my attention - it provides more than enough thought for the day.

Heaven does not laugh loud but it laughs last - when all the world will laugh in its light. It is a smile more immeasurable than the ocean and more deep; it is an irony gentler and more patient than the bending skies, the irony of a long love and the play of its sure mastery; it is the smile of the holy in its silent omnipotence of mercy.
(P T Forsyth, The Justification of God, page 206)

Alexander Whyte - truth as its own witness

Alexander Whyte was a saint - I know- those here in Scotland who trace their theology to the Reformation get edgy and nervous when someone is called a saint, their memory honoured, their written or spoken words cherished, their example held up as an inspiration. And anyway, Alexander Whyte would have denied the charge. His congregation loved him, but there were often complaints that he hammered on and on about sin, his own sins and theirs. Whatever he thought about himself was usually framed in a black border of sorrow for his own failings.

He lived in an age of convulsive social and intellectual change, in the nation, on the world stage, within the churches. His mind was generously open to truth wherever it could be found, but well enough anchored in convictions both evangelical and catholic to be both appreciative and critical. At key times in his life, and in the controversies of his Church, he exemplified what Paul calls 'this ministry of reconciliation'. No surprise then to come across words like those quoted below. Like an eminent consultant in moral and spiritual diagnosis, he knows the importance of preventive measures when it comes to controversy, difference the cause and toxic consequences of conflict. Truth is not a battle - but the basis on which peace is to be built - or to put it in Whyte's own words, characterised as usual by impassioned rhetoric verging on overstatement:

Oh the unmitigated curse of controversy! Oh the detestable passions that corrections and contradictions kindle up to fury in the proud heart of man! Eschew controversy, my brethren, as you would eschew the entrance to hell itself! Let them have it their own way. Let them talk, let them write, let them correct you, let them traduce you. Let them judge and condemn you, let them slay you. Rather let the truth of God itself suffer than that love suffer. You have not enough of the Divine nature in you to be a controversialist

For Whyte, the truth of God as revealed in Christ isn't only discovered in ideas and words, but in the extent to which those same ideas and words are embodied in a life truly reflecting the love of God in Christ. For a Christian, to defend truth unlovingly is a failure of discipleship, an invalid dislocation of priorities. Does anyone still read Paul Tournier, the Swiss psychologist much in vogue in the 1950's and into the 1970's? He once said there is a wrongness in those who are always right; that there are wrong ways of being right.

Whyte, according to those who knew and revered him, largely lived up to his non-controversialism as a theological peacemaker. For him truth if lived in obedience to God and held in love will be its own witness - and if it isn't held in love it is neither obedient to God nor, in the deepest moral sense, truth. You have to be a saint to believe that - and live it. 

Choosing Scotland's Future?

Today I'm at a theological colloquium on Scotland's Future. A wide range of people interested in theological reflection on issues raised by nationalism, devolution, independence and indeed the theological significance of those political processes which underlie forms of government, and such concepts as self-determination, freedom and national and cultural identity. The National Conversation and The Calman Report, and a response from a working group from ACTS (the Scottish ecumenical body), have created opportunity and context for such theological reflection.

No idea how it will go, what will come out of it. But Christians should have some informed and responsible sense of how political processes of change impinge on the wider community life - and should have a view of what that will mean for Christians looking to follow faithfully after Christ in a less than straightforward world.

Might report on it eventually - but not over the next couple of days - Advent itself has rather much to say about power, politics, identity and our human future. Would be interesting if today's colloquium kicked off with a robust reading of the Magnificat, eh?

Archbishop Robert Leighton (1611-1684) - a God-sent eirenicon for a violent age

One of the most attractive figures in the history of the Scottish Church was Archbishop Robert Leighton. In an age of theological extremes, inter-communal violence and intransigent "Christian" hostilities, he was a man of peace, a conciliatory spirit, to his opponents a man of compromise, to his admirers a God-sent eirenicon. The life and work of Leighton, and in particular the contrasting pieties of such as Leighton and Rutherford, the eirenic spirit of the former and the passion for Gospel purity of the latter, suggest fundamental differences in faith that were ultimately irreconcilable. Both men embodied in such a collision of contrasts, something of the tragedy of recalcitrant religion, when personal spiritual experience and its doctrinal confession are of such intensity that they can neither be questioned by others nor left unspoken, whatever the cost. Even if that cost is bloody conflict.

In the history of Scottish Christian piety, doctrinal collisions, spiritual suspicion, political conflict, ecclesiatical self-interest, are all the stuff of tradition formation - like tectonic plates grating against each other, now and then colliding and recoiling, only coming to an accommodation when the contrary energies are absorbed by impact, so theological traditions are shaped. And people like Leighton are far too often overlooked when the time comes to identify 'the movers and the shakers', and 'the significant players', the ones later history writers place centre stage.

Leighton, and his student Henry Scougal, are two men of moderate spirit, whose spirituality of peaceableness remains one of the glories of the Scottish Episcopal tradition. Here is Leighton, relegating historical research to its proper place:

But when all is said and done there is one only blessed story, wherein our souls must dwell and take up their rest: for amongst all the rest we shall not read...come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest: and never any yet that tried Him, but found him as good as his word.

The Works of Robert Leighton, with life by J. Aikman (1860), xvi.

Scotland has produced many important biblical commentaries over the centuries, and some of those now called 'pre-critical', remain as important historical and theological depositories illustrating how texts were received, interpreted and brought to bear on life. Amongst the most celebrated was Leighton's 1 Peter, almost continually in print for over three centuries. As devotional commentaries go, and as an example of Puritan exposition, it remains a milestone of practical divinity spelt out in exhaustive detail by one whose gentleness of spirit made all his writing pastoral before polemical.

Scottish Spirituality: Horatius Bonar, Victorian hymns and contemporary praise songs

The fierce Scottish presbyterian minister in the photo is Horatius Bonar (1808-1889). The Bonars were like a Presbyterian theological dynasty in Victorian Scotland. Horatius studied under Thomas Chalmers, Andrew edited Rutherford's Letters and the life of Robert Murray McCheyne, and other members of the Bonar family served the Kirk and then the Free Kirk as distinguished ministers.

Horatius Bonar was a popular devotional writer and one of Scotland's most prolific hymn writers. Some of his hymns are too sentimental, allowing emotion to dominate responses and eclipse the place of thoughtful doxology, weakening any literary impact as verse, and diluting that theological force which at its best in a good hymn both educates and inspires. Others were occasional and read now like what they are - poems so historically and contextually specific to their age that a later age lacks the right interpetive keys and needs to go looking for them. Others are long, theologically ponderous and even at times tedious in the writer's anxiety to spell out spiritual truth with serious devotional intent. But when Bonar's hymns are good, they are amongst the best. I reckon I've read most of the 600 or so he wrote, some of them only once! But some of them repeatedly, and several of them I think are so important they couldn't be displaced from the singing tradition of the Church in Scotland without serious deficit.

I say in Scotland, for Bonar's hymns reflect the deep piety of Reformed Calvinism of a very Scottish flavour, fired by theologically principled ecclesial disruption, shaped into verse which is unembarrassed in its use of Scottish idiom, and focused on Christ the Redeemer King who alone is Head of the Church and whose rights are supreme above all other claimants. His best hymns percolated into the hymnbooks of other denominations, though I suspect they are slowly but surely disappearing from use, even in Scotland. That's a pity. A Christian spiritual tradition at its healthiest has an enduring respect for those figures of the past, both great and unknown, whose piety and lived faith gives biographical shape to the faith. Yes the reformed church is always being reformed, and therefore changing and welcoming change, but with the qualification that Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever. And yes, those convictions about the sufficiency of Christ and the claims of His Gospel, forged for Bonar in the heat of Victorian scientific optimism colliding with pious triumphalism, have ongoing life-giving significance for the church today and always. But only when they are translated into convictional practices valid for a church seeking to be faithful to Christ, now, in a postmodern, post-Christendom, pluralist society where consumer capitalism, not Christian conviction, is the primary social and spiritual driver. Christ, who is not time-bound, dares us to follow Him, learning from the past and from the communion of saints, demands that together we discern His mind for us now, and trusting the One in whom all things hold together, invites us to accompany Him into that future which is the coming of God. Yesterday, today, forever - Jesus Christ the same - but those who follow Him do so in the changing contingencies, challenging contexts, and moral perplexities, of our own and the world's history.  

So yes, as disciples of Jesus we need now more than ever, hymns and other sung resources for contemporary worship, which reflect our contemporary malaise and our contemporary hopes, our contemporary anxieties and our contemporary search for peace, and which put into words and thought a faith resonant with the huge cultural shifts we are living through. But the word contemporary is a risky word, a word habitually dismissive of past insights, and easily overused as in the last sentence. But it is an important word, a reminder of how time bound we all are, and that our life together, our being time bound together, in this unstable and "fluxing" society, provides the context where we are now, in our own time, to hear Christ's call to follow faithfully after him. (Footnote: I owe the effectively descriptive word "fluxing" to Stuart.)

In worship I want hymns / praise songs / worship songs to encourage, envisage, enable such faithful following. Hymns that help me bear with the hard questions, because they are soaked with Gospel; hymns that know how to tell the triumph of the cross without the pretences of a discordant triumphalism; hymns that gather up Gospel grace and unsearchable riches of love, and help me behold the beauty and glory of that Triune community of love Who embraces the universe with mercy that is eternal in its faithfulness. I long for worship songs that don't forever encourage me to tell God what I feel about God, but enable me to respond from my deepest being to John 3.16 and Romans 8.38-39, which amongst other things are telling what God in Christ feels about all human beings, and why that mighty love is to be trusted. And if we must insist on "praise songs" as an alternative to "hymns", then let's also have "response songs"; songs that through the beauty of language and image, express certainties but don't forbid hesitations, celebrate beauty wherever it is found and lament and resist ugliness, and with equal passion let me sing songs that don't leave me hymning my own emotions, but invite me to share in the communal act of saying thank you to the great Giver of Gifts who is himself the Gift.

All of which, by a long and circuitous route, brings me back to Horatius Bonar. Whatever else the church today is called to be and do, it remains a baptised community centred on Christ and gathered round the table of communion, in company with God and with each other. And one of the hymns that best expresses the individual Christian's response to that gathering around the Lord's Supper is Bonar's "Here O my Lord, I see Thee face to face". Like much else in his writing, Bonar isn't so strong on the communal or the catholic (in the sense of universal). But in this hymn Bonar describes, and through the description invites, face to face encounter between the believer and Jesus, through actions perfomed together, of bread broken, wine poured out. The hymn is nearly always edited and the verses rearranged - acts of sympathetic improvement because in its original form it is disjointed. I've copied the original below - for myself, it has long been one of the prayers I have open at communion - if there's a hymn-book! That has it in it!!

The photo (above) of "The Hymns of Faith and Hope" is of the copy of Bonar's hymns I picked up in a wee secondhand shop a week or two ago, for the price of a fish supper! It's a bit worn, but dated 1876, when they knew how to make a book that would last, and would be worth keeping more than a century later.

Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face;
here would I touch and handle things unseen;
here grasp with firmer hand eternal grace,
and all my weariness upon thee lean.

This is the hour of banquet and of song;
this is the heavenly table spread for me;
here let me feast, and feasting, still prolong
the hallowed hour of fellowship with thee.

Here would I feed upon the Bread of God,
here drink with thee the royal Wine of heaven;
here would I lay aside each earthly load,
here taste afresh the calm of sin forgiven.

I have no help but thine; nor do I need
another arm save thine to lean upon;
it is enough, my Lord, enough indeed;
my strength is in thy might, thy might alone.

Mine is the sin, but thine the righteousness:
mine is the guilt, but thine the cleansing blood
here is my robe, my refuge, and my peace;
thy Blood, thy righteousness, O Lord my God!

Feast after feast thus comes and passes by;
yet, passing, points to the glad feast above,
giving sweet foretaste of the festal joy,
the Lamb's great bridal feast of bliss and love.

Posted By Jim Gordon

Thanksgiving Conference for Thomas Torrance

Yesterday I spent the day in two places - the M8 and New College, Edinburgh. I was four and a half hours on the M8 and 7 hours in New College attending the Thomas F Torrance Thanksgiving Conference. And the 7 hours in new College made the 270+ minutes on the M8 well worth it. But just to make sure blog visitors appreciate the rhetorical force of the comparison, the M8 without roadworks is like a slow release anxiety enhancer. The M8 with roadworks you have a choice - be miserable, be very miserable, or make sure you have good conversation partners in the car and a stack of your favourite CD's. Yesterday I had both.

On the way there in Andrew's car, the state of the central artery road system provided Graeme and I with an endless supply of discouraging and demoralising comment. Andrew's sanctification levels have thereby been considerably augmented. 

On the way home, driving my own car which has been having a holiday with Aileen, I discovered some of her CD's including a supply of Johnny Cash. The mixture of snarling defiance and sentimental regret, sung by one of the greatest Country performers of my generation kept my own levels of sanctification at least this side of going subterranean!

And it was worth it for the following reasons
I met Jason Goroncy, my virtual and blogging friend and now I can call him a real friend whose face I recognise, whose voice and accent I recognise, and who unfortunately is leaving Scotland for New Zealand three weeks after actually meeting me.. though I'm assured the move has been planned for some time.

At the conference I met and spoke with several others including a Church of Scotland minister from Cyprus who is a friend of Steve Chalke, which led to interesting discussion about Torrance on Atonement; a retired minister who experienced Torrance's lectures halfway through his degree (1949-52), and whose preaching had been sustained by fires ignited over two brief years of Torrance dogmatics; Robin, a key player in Paternoster publications and someone whose theological awareness of 'what's going on' and 'what works' is both impressive and generously shared; Stuart the Edinburgh post-grad (not my Word from the Barricades friend and colleague), with whom I shared coffee, brief discussion of high falutin theology and memories of standing together at Hampden on that Saturday when Queen of the South gubeed Aberdeen 4-3; several other friends I already knew but had a chance to talk to while juggling a plate of chicken tikka sandwiches, a cup of coffee and a mini choc muffin!

Registered members were given a complementary copy of Torrances new book on the Incarnation, beautifully produced by Paternoster / IVP, and already slotted in to be my main reading during Advent in a month's time - on which I'll blog. This, and a second volume on Atonement to be issued next year, contains much of Torrance's lectures on dogmatics, revised and rewritten over the years and now issued to a wider audience, edited by Bob Walker who is uniquely qualified to do this sympathetically, thoroughly and as one who knows the peculiar excellencies of Torrance's mature theology.

Then there were the papers, all of them good, a couple of them outstanding, and at least one contribution from a recently retired minister that was deeply moving and reminded me how it could be that any of us ever thought we might just be able, by the grace of God, to preach such a Gospel, serve Christ in his Church, and express in pastoral care the self-giving love of the Triune God, incarnate in Christ crucified and risen, and actively redemptive throughout Creation, in the power of the Spirit. 

The epilogue to such a full day was a Pizza and Wispa night watching the fitba with my son Andrew, home from Uni and reminding me of the importance of self-indulgence. As if.....

"here's tae us, wha's like us" - Is there a Scottish spirituality?

 
An area of increasing interest for me is the way a spiritual tradition grows out of its native soil, and takes on the characteristics of its environment. The question of what is distinctive, even unique, in a spiritual tradition depends on the particularities of context - historical, political, cultural, religious - perhaps even geographical.

The term "Scottish piety" (not sure about the continuing usefulness of the ubiquitous descriptor "spirituality") needs some clarifying.
Is there a uniquely Scottish stream of Christian faith as it has been experienced, thought and lived? If so what gives Scottish piety its distinctive flavour?
What in the Scottish context, over centuries, shaped and gave specific Scottish content to Christianity in Scotland, as through processes of revolution and evolution, it developed and changed?

And what is meant by piety? In Scotland, amongst other things the impact of religious experience, doctrinal developments and doctrinal fixity, the role of the Kirk in discipline, worship, liturgy and community and people's experience of all of these. But also the relation of people to Bible, prayer, preaching and the hard to measure extent that such piety and faith exerted on and influenced daily life.

All of this - but even then, "Scottish piety" remains unsatisfactory as a catch-all. For Scotland itself has a religious history and representation as varied as its own georgraphical landscape - Prebyterian and Catholic, Episcopal and Dissenting, Highland and Lowland, West and East - and in all this variety a gift of fractiousness that made fragmentation inevitable, bringing both blessing and loss.

The research part of my current sabbatical is focusing on how to explore all this in a way that will help Scottish Christians to 'look to the rock from which we are hewn". Such an exercise involves a long ponder about what in our tradition, our way of following Christ, is of lasting significance and value, what can be appropriated and what now needs to be relinquished, in order to clarify what faithful following of Christ means in contemporary Scotland. If context is decisive in how a tradition is formed, it is also decisive in how that tradition changes, adapts and stays healthy. Quite straightforward really - not!

A subsidiary interest is the way Scottish Baptist communities have emerged, developed, declined and yet continue to feature within the Scottish ecclesial landscape. Again, the focus of my personal interest is the way Scottish Baptists have experienced, thought and lived out their way of following Christ. The suggestion there is such a disctinctive thing as "Scottish Baptist piety" might be even more contentious. And for that very reason even more interesting, as a route to self-understanding and renewal for communities sharing in the experience of decline, and badly needing to recover confidence in a Gospel which never promised us a rose garden - or an assured place at any table, political or religious, other than the one where bread is broken and broken hearts are healed.

Anyway, that's what I'm about these days.