In Memory of Our Brother, Thomas F. Torrance (1913- 2007)

There is No God Behind the Back of Jesus
Already in the New Testament the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel was concerned to counter just such a distortion of people’s understanding of God arising out of a damaged knowledge of him, and a divorce between belief in himself and belief in God the Father. He insisted that he and the Father were one (John 10:30), that what his Father had been doing hitherto he was contiunuing to do in an unbroken continuity of divine activity, he who had seen Jesus had seen the Father, so that there was no ground for anxiety or fear. What the father is and does, Jesus is and does. And what Jesus is and does, the Father is and does. There is in fact no God behind the back of Jesus, no act of God other than the act of Jesus, no God but the God we see and meet in him. Jesus Christ is the open heart of God, the very love and life of God poured out to redeem humankind, the mighty hand and power of God stretched out to heal and save sinners. All things are in God’s hands, but the hands of God are the hands of Jesus, in life and in death, are the same. That is to say, the ultimate destiny of humanity is bound up with Jesus Christ, for it is he who has come to invade and destroy the barrier of death and all that separates men and women from God. And it will be his voice, the voice of one through whom all divine judgement is channelled, the voice of Jesus, that will reach into the grave, and summon the dead into resurrection and life. For Jesus is himself the resurrection and the life with ultimate control over the destiny and future of each of those who believe in him.
That is the sense of the Holy Scripture to which the Early Church in the Nicene Creed gave precision, in its expression of the unqualified correlation in being and act between the Father and the Son. It declared that ‘the one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose Kingdom shall have no end’. In other words, God is inherently and antecedently in himself, and will be to all eternity, what he has revealed himself to be in Jesus Christ.
Therefore, God is not one thing in Christ and another thing in himself. He has not shown us one face in Jesus Christ but kept his real face hidden from us behind the inscrutability of his ultimate unknowableness. He has not sent Jesus Christ to be a mere messenger whose words and deeds of love he does not back up with the pledge of his own Being and Reality and Love. On the contrary, God has wholly and unconditionally commited himself to us in the Incarnation of his dear Son Jesus Christ, so that all that he eternally is and will be as God Almighty is pledged in Jesus Christ for us and our salvation. Jesus Christ and God are so utterly one in being and action that God does not, cannot, go back on Jesus Christ and his Cross. For that is who God is, he who came in Jesus Christ, and that is what God does, what Jesus Christ does.
Here we must remember the Ascension of the Lord Jesus and its saving significance. Complementing the Incarnation in which the ternal God himself condescended to be one with us in our hurt and creaturely disintegration in order to redeem us from all evil and to recreate us from within the ontological depths of our existence, and complementing the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus in which he accomplished this saving mission, is the Ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God the Father. There he who is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh ever lives as our High Priest who through the consummation of his self- sacrifice as the Lamb of God makes intercession for us. As such he in enthroned at the summit of all being as the reconciling centre of all things visible and invisible. He is none other than our Lord Jesus, the incarnation of the Love of God, in whom and around whom all things revolve in the relation of God to humanity and humanity to God, whose Kingdom, as the Nicene Creed affirms, will have no end. (Extracted from his essay titled The Christ Who Loves Us in A Passion for Christ: The Vision that Ignites Ministry, edited by Gerrit Dawson and Jock Stein. Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1999.)
Scripture Extract: 1 Corinthians 2:2-5 For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.
Prayer: Holy and Gracious Father, in your Son Jesus Christ, in his incarnation, resurrection and ascension all things hold together. In him you are truly for us and by the unifying power of the Holy Spirit, we are blessed to confess this. We thank you now for the life of Tom Torrance and we pray your peace for his family and friends as they now face his absence from them. Even so we look forward with joyful hope to the day of resurrection made certain in Jesus Christ our Lord. We thank you also for the remarkable witness of Tom to your goodness, love, power and grace. As we read Tom’s words again we are moved to worship you, O God as we can nearly hear the beautiful voice of Jesus bid his good and faithful servant, ‘Peace. Well done.’ Through Christ, with Christ, in Christ we pray. Amen.