Implications of Thought
Torrance’s scientific theology could be especially helpful today in the debate over whether election constitutes God’s triunity or whether the triune God eternally elects us without exhausting his being in his actions for us as Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer. Torrance’s thinking, following Barth, clearly comes down against any idea that God’s eternal being is constituted by his relations with us in history. And that is precisely one of the factors that makes his thinking so compelling to so many today. More than any theologian of the twentieth century, Torrance had a lively sense of Christ’s continued high-priestly mediation of humanity to the Father through the Holy Spirit. It is just this emphasis that enabled Torrance to take seriously the fact that there could be no created substitute for the man Jesus in his continued existence as the risen, ascended and advent Lord who, in his true humanity and true divinity, continues even now and until his second coming, to unite people humanly to himself as his body on earth (the Church) through faith and by grace. His is a biblically informed and patristically grounded theology that will serve the ecumenical church for many years to come just as the theology of Karl Barth, his mentor continues to do.
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