New Explorations in Theology

The Ascended Christ and the Ministry of the Church

Joseph H. Sherrard

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830849215
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Christ has ascended. Yet his work continues.Much has been made of a "missional" view of the church in recent theological literature, but largely overlooked in this discussion has been the contribution that T. F. Torrance, the late Church of Scotland minister and theologian, can make to this discussion. Addressing this lacuna, theologian and pastor Joseph Sherrard considers how Torrance's theology can inform the church's understanding of its ministry and mission—in particular, his appeal to the church's participation in the ascended Christ's threefold office as king, prophet, and priest.Through the ministry of the church, Christ is still at work.Featuring new monographs with cutting-edge research, New Explorations in Theology provides a platform for constructive, creative work in the areas of systematic, historical, philosophical, biblical, and practical theology.

1

Dualism and the Doctrine of God

T. F. TORRANCE’S TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY AND THE GOSPEL WITHIN WESTERN CULTURE

THE MISSIO DEI AND THE DOCTRINE OF GOD

In our introduction we noted the recent appearance of a number of arguments for the fundamental importance of the category of mission within the discipline of systematic theology. These attempts are often gathered under a single descriptive heading: missio Dei. This term and the conceptual framework attached to it, often (apparently erroneously) traced back to Karl Barth,1 describes the fundamental conviction that unites all these recent projects. In Transforming Mission, a foundational text for both strands of biblical and theological reflection upon mission, David Bosch describes the conviction in this way: “Mission was understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It was thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology. . . . As far as missionary thinking was concerned, this linking with the doctrine of the Trinity constituted an important innovation.”2

Yet recent work has questioned to what extent these proposals were ever properly grounded in the doctrine of God. In his analysis of the genesis of the term missio Dei and its historical development, Flett offers a critical assessment of the missio Dei’s development and history: “Both the decisive force and fatal flaw of the missio Dei rests in its relationship to the doctrine of the Trinity. As propounded to date, the concept is deficiently Trinitarian, and the wide range of its contemporary problems is a direct result of this single lack.”3 In Flett’s analysis, the relation between various missio Dei proposals and the doctrine of God was primarily defensive and apologetic in nature, rather than robustly constructive: “The doctrine of the Trinity plays only a negative role, distancing mission from improper alignments with accidental human authorities. This afforded a needed corrective to the phenomenological approach to mission so compromised by the colonialist endeavor, and established a theological means for distancing a local church from her host culture, that is, identifying her as a missionary community.”4

This claim is certainly vindicated by a survey of the literature that surrounds the missio Dei. While many of the recent proposals that connect God’s triune life with the church’s practice of mission are quite helpful and elegant, there is a certain thinness to their accounts of the doctrine of God. Let us take as an example of a significant milestone in missional reflection upon the Trinity: the work of Lesslie Newbigin. The value of Newbigin’s work on this topic, found first in the pamphlet Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission and then later expanded in The Open Secret: Sketches for a Missionary Theology, is difficult to overstate. Newbigin, in many ways ahead of the “trinitarian revival” of the second half of the 20th century, cleverly applies elements of basic trinitarian theology to key problems facing the church in the face of secularism’s advance. There is little that one can find to criticize here. Yet it should be noted that Newbigin’s work is devoid of any deeper reflection on God’s immanent life and how the conclusions he draws about the economic activity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to be understood and coordinated within that light. Bosch’s Transforming Mission demonstrates a similar reticence to speak about the relation between the claims about God’s economic activity and God’s immanent triune relations.

We should not lay blame at the feet of a missionary and a missiologist for a failure to apply the tools of systematic theology. But we should nonetheless ask, with Flett, that the claims of missio Dei theology be given greater scrutiny as they relate to the church’s theological tradition, and that the missional resources already available might be supplemented even more so that possible error is identified and corrected. There have been recent gestures in this direction,5 but I would argue that more can be done to draw from the church’s tradition. T. F. Torrance is an underutilized resource that can make a significant contribution to this conversation. As we have already discussed, Torrance’s life was informed and shaped by missional concerns, and these concerns in turn shaped his work. In this chapter, we will make explicit the deep resonances between Torrance’s thought and the concerns of missio Dei theology, bringing the two into fruitful conversation.

Our objective in this chapter is therefore two pronged. First, we will demonstrate how Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity is informed by missional concerns. The content of Torrance’s trinitarian theology is supplied by theologians from the catholic tradition of the church such as Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea. But Torrance’s appropriation of these sources is shaped by his distinctly modern concerns about the intelligibility of the gospel in the West and his concern for the church’s mission. Second, we will also demonstrate how Torrance’s doctrine of the Trinity is an important, constructive voice in the articulation of the church’s participation in Christ’s reconciling work.

THE SHAPING OF TORRANCE’S TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY

In 1980, Torrance published what would be the first of three books on the Trinity which were in many ways the culmination of his theological career. This book, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, is at first glance a somewhat curious approach to the doctrine of the Trinity. The first four of the six chapters of Torrance’s book have comparatively little to do with the doctrine of the Trinity, but are instead a survey of the intellectual conditions of science and theology in the West. Throughout these chapters, Torrance is particularly attentive to what he calls in the preface to the second edition “the two great dualist cosmologies of the past, the Ptolemaic and Copernican-Newtonian, and to the non-dualist cosmological outlook arising out of the radical change in the basic rationality of science which we owe to Einstein.”6 In the final two chapters, however, the discussion pivots to the nature of Christian theology and to the doctrine of the Trinity. Far from a digression, these final chapters are in fact integral to Torrance’s understanding of his attempt in the book “to clarify the trinitarian structure of Christian theology.”7 Torrance moves naturally from an analysis of the dualistic intellectual conditions of Western culture to a discussion of the Trinity.

The progression of Torrance’s argument in The Ground and Grammar of Theology gives us a view into the concerns that shape his doctrine of the Trinity. Torrance’s trinitarian theology was not developed in an intellectual vacuum, but rather emerges in coordination with other concerns—in particular, the problem of dualism. Recent studies of Torrance’s theology have helpfully demonstrated the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity in his thought8 as well as the nature of his handling of the patristic sources that provide the substance of Torrance’s doctrine of God.9 But in their inattention to the concerns that accompany this doctrine, a more complete understanding of Torrance’s trinitarian theology has been occluded. In what follows, we will first demonstrate the significance of the problem of dualism for Torrance’s theology and then follow how this influence shapes his doctrine of the Trinity.

Dualism. The theological career of T. F. Torrance was worked out in the context of the collapse of Christendom in Europe, and Torrance committed his considerable theological ability to a winsome and formidable presentation of the Christian faith within these social and intellectual conditions. In contrast to contemporaries with similar fundamental concerns—for example, Lesslie Newbigin—Torrance focused his response not on the advance of secularism but instead on the intellectual conditions of Western life and the dualistic philosophy he perceived to be a cause of its problems.

One would be hard pressed to find a work of Torrance’s that did not contain an explicit or implicit reference to the concept of dualism, and this is particularly evident whenever Torrance deals with the doctrine of God. In the aforementioned The Ground and Grammar of Theology, Torrance states his overwhelming concern with “dualist modes of thought that drive a wedge between Christ and God, and correspondingly between the message of Christ and Christ himself.”10 In The Christian Doctrine of God, Torrance draws attention to the problem of “the menace of the dualist structure of thought.”11 And in The Trinitarian Faith, Torrance describes how “the biblical teaching about God’s providential and saving activity in history, and the Christian message of incarnation and redemption in space and time, had to struggle with the underlying assumptions of a dualist outlook upon God and the world in order to be heard aright and take root.”12 Thus in each of the volumes on the Trinity that come at the climax of Torrance’s theological career we see evidence of his concern with the problem of dualism.

Torrance’s focus on dualism clearly springs from his concern about the mission of the church. In a speech which Torrance gave to the Scottish Church Theology Society (later titled “Preaching Christ Today”), Torrance gives what he calls “a plea to return to Christ-centered teaching and preaching.”13 Speaking out of his concern with the plight of the church in the West, Torrance identifies dualism as one of the most significant contemporary obstacles to the proclamation of the gospel: “We are still in the midst of this struggle to maintain the supreme truth of the unbroken relation in being and act between Jesus Christ and God the Father against insidious dualist or dichotomous ways of thinking.”14 An oft-recounted story from Torrance’s experience as a WWII army chaplain further demonstrates the extent to which this concern shapes his thinking on the church’s proclamation of the gospel. In the aftermath of a battle in Italy, Torrance came across a mortally wounded nineteen-year-old soldier. As he lay dying, the young man asked Torrance, “Is God like Jesus?” Reflecting upon the encounter, Torrance wrote, “I assured him that he was—the only God that there is, the God who had come to us in Jesus, shown his face to us, and poured out his love to us as our Savior.”15 This event, and another like it from his time as a pastor in Aberdeen, was formative for Torrance: “When I thought about that afterwards, I asked myself, what has been happening, what has come in between Jesus Christ and God to obscure God from people?”16 Torrance’s answer? “The insidious effect of dualism.”17

The overall shape of Torrance’s theology is polemically, or perhaps better put evangelically, directed at the problem of dualism in the theological and scientific culture of the West. But despite the importance of the term for Torrance’s theology and its ubiquity within his corpus, it can at times be difficult to identify precisely how Torrance utilizes the term dualism. We can begin with a definition that Torrance approved, which is found in the endnotes to Belief in Science and in Christian Life. There, Torrance provides this description:

Dualism: the division of reality into two incompatible spheres of being. This may be cosmological, in the dualism between the sensible and an intelligible realm, neither of which can be reduced to the other. It may also be epistemological, in which the empirical and theoretical aspects of reality are separated from one another, thereby giving rise to the extremes of empiricism and rationalism. It may also be anthropological, in a dualism between the mind and body, in which a physical and mental substance are conceived as either interacting with one another or as running a parallel course without affecting one another.18

These realms may either be clearly separated or perhaps touching upon one another in a limited sense. But whether they are “adjacent to one another but with a clear gap between them” or “touching one another tangentially,”19 they are, according to Torrance, fundamentally separate and therefore dualist.

Other interpreters offer differing definitions of Torrance’s understanding of dualism, all focusing upon t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Alan Torrance
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: T. F. Torrance as a “Missional Theologian”
• 1 Dualism and the Doctrine of God: T. F. Torrance’s Trinitarian Theology and the Gospel Within Western Culture
• 2 The Lord of Mission: The Threefold Office and Ascension of Jesus Christ
• 3 The Mission of the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology, Mission, and the Deposit of Faith
• 4 The Ministry of the Ascended Lord: The Church’s Participation in Christ’s Kingly Office
• 5 The Ministry of the Ascended Lord: The Church’s Participation in Christ’s Prophetic and Priestly Offices
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• New Explorations in Theology
• Notes
• Praise for T. F. Torrance as Missional Theologian
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright