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.
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.
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