Tom Torrance’s theological debts are well known. Athanasius, Calvin, Barth, H R Mackintosh are primary influences on his understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, his lifelong exploration of the unsearchable riches of Christ, the incarnate, crucified and risen redeemer as these are revealed, bestowed and appropriated, in communion with the triune God of grace. I argued yesterday that every believer is a theologian, and promised a sample of Torrance. In fact three extracts from early in the book, The Christian Doctrine of God – the third is from H R Mackintosh, Torrance’s teacher.
The specifically Christian doctrine of God is thus inescapably and essentially Christicentric…..this does not mean that all our knowledge of God can be reduced to Christology, but that as there is only one mediator between God and man, who is himself both God and Man, and only one revelation of God in which he himself is its actual content, all authentic knowledge of God is derived and understood in accordance with the incarnate reality of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and is formulated in doctrinal coherence with Christology.
[Jesus Chrts] is not some created intermediary between God and the world but the very Word and Son of God who eternally inheres in the Being of God so that for us to know him as the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, is really to know God as he is in himself in his eternal Being as God and in the transcendent Love that God is. He is in himself not other than what he is toward us in his loving revealing and saving presence in Christ.
The contrast between Torrance’s careful if convoluted sentences and Mackintosh’s sharp lucidity is obvious – but the theological vision is equally Christ centred, and definitive of the Christian apprehension of God.
The words of Jesus are the voice of God. The tears of Jesus are the pity of God. The wrath of Jesus is the judgement of God. All believers confess, with adoring praise, that in their most sacred hours, God and Christ merge in each other with morally indistinguishable identity. When in secret we look into God’s face, still it is the face of Christ that rises up before us.
You can learn more about God, and more about the meaning of devotion and the God we adore, by reading the few pages from which these quotations come, than from a whole supermarket trolley of devotional pot-noodles !
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