Marginal Christianity

"There is, then, an evangelical way to preach the Gospel and an unevangelical way to preach it. The Gospel is preached in an unevangelical way, as happens so often in modern evangelism, when the preach announces: This is what Jesus Christ has done for you, but you will not be saved unless you make your own personal decision for Christ as your Savior. Or: Jesus Christ loved you and gave his life for you on the Cross, but you will be saved only if you give your heart to him. In that event, what is actually coming across to people is not a Gospel of unconditional grace but some other Gospel of conditional grace which belies the essential nature and content of the Gospel as it is in Jesus. It was that subtle legalist twist to the Gospel which worried St Paul so much in his Epistle to the Galatians…To preach the Gospel in that conditional or legalist way has the effect of telling poor sinners that in the last resort the responsibility for their salvation is taken off the shoulders ...

  "There is, then, an evangelical way to preach the Gospel and an unevangelical way to preach it. The Gospel is preached in an unevangelical way, as happens so often in modern evangelism, when the preach announces: This is what Jesus Christ has done for you, but you will not be saved unless you make your own personal decision for Christ as your Savior. Or: Jesus Christ loved you and gave his life for you on the Cross, but you will be saved only if you give your heart to him. In that event, what is actually coming across to people is not a Gospel of unconditional grace but some other Gospel of conditional grace which belies the essential nature and content of the Gospel as it is in Jesus. It was that subtle legalist twist to the Gospel which worried St Paul so much in his Epistle to the Galatians…To preach the Gospel in that conditional or legalist way has the effect of telling poor sinners that in the last resort the responsibility for their salvation is taken off the shoulder...

“God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.” ( The Mediation of Christ , 94) This bold and bracing statement of Torrance’s may be too bold for some of us. It seems rather universalistic. Maybe not taking the biblical demand for f...

“The resurrection . . . means that God has established a real bond between his reality and ours in this world. In Jesus Christ he has made his divine reality to intersect and overlap with ours, so that we in Jesus Christ may actually and truly know God and have communion with him without having to take leave of the realm of our own this-worldly existence” ( Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ , 233). Human sin, our heinous refusal to live in relationship to God but rather to live by ourselves, for ourselves, and by our own power, sundered the reality of God from the existence we tried to carve out for ourselves to live and rule in. Heaven and earth, the realm of God and the realm of humanity were meant to overlap and interlock with each other in an organic unity, open to and receptive of each other with free and open concourse between the two. Sin separated these realms and hardened by difference between them into impermeable boundaries. Or so we thought . . . hoped. G...

Theological Journal – March 24 (Lent 2020) Torrance Tuesday – Atonement “One day a student called Harold Estes came into my rooms in the Dormitory to discuss an essay he had written on the atonement. He was a very gentle kindly person. It is he had spoke of the death of Christ simply as a demonstration of the love of God. He had been expounding something like what was known as a ‘moral influence theory’ of the atonement favoured by liberal thinkers but theological quite inadequate, as H. R. Mackintosh had shown us in Edinburgh. To help Harold I showed him a reproduction which I had of Grünewald’s famous painting of the Crucifixion , at Colmar, which is incredibly starkly vivid. I also showed him some of the enlargements of the painting, reproduced in a book I had with me, which focused on the fearfully lacerated flesh of Jesus which he suffered from the flagellation with thorns inflicted on him by the soldiers, deep wounds now blackened by the sun. Harold shrank back in horro...

“This . . . reconciliation encounters me telling me that I am already reconciled to God in Christ, already died for, redeemed and forgiven. It tells me that already the great positive decision of God’s reconciling love in my favour has been taken, and it can no more be undone than Jesus Christ can be undone, than the incarnation can be reversed or obliterated, or the cross made as if it had never taken place. . . . I am already included in the finished work and already part of Christ, for it was my nature, my humanity, my flesh of sin, that he assumed and made one with himself in his one person.” T. F. Torrance, Atonement , 167. This is the great evangelical truth and one thing we can sure we know about any other person we meet: they too are all that Torrance affirms in the above statement. Before, beyond, and above anything else we may think we know or feel about another, this is true about them. This the message of Lent Jesus tries to press home to u...

The Old Testament is in a rather bad odor in many Christian circles these days. That’s not news. “To reject the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the church rightly repudiated; to retain it in the sixteenth century was a fate which the Reformation could not yet avoid; but to continue to keep it in Protestantism as a canonical document after the nineteenth century is the consequence of religious and ecclesiastical paralysis....[T]o sweep the table clean and honor the truth in confession and teaching is the action required of Protestantism today. And it is almost too late.” So wrote Adolf von Harnack in his book Marcion . Recently evangelical pastor Andy Stanley promoted “unhitching” Christian faith from the Old Testament in certain respects (though not in Harnack’s thoroughgoing sense). And many other scholars, evangelical and non-evangelical), have claimed that the Old Testament is a mixture of divine and human words and ideas and we today must sort ou...

“The stark actuality of Christ’s humanity, his flesh and blood and bone, guarantees to us that we have God among us. If that humanity were in any sense unreal, God would be unreal for us in him. The full measure of Christ’s humanity is the full measure of God’s reality for us, God’s actuality to us, in fact the measure of God’s love for us. If Christ is not man, then God has not reached us, but has stopped short of our humanity – then God does not love us to the uttermost, for his love has stopped short of coming all the way to where we are, and becoming one of us in order to save us. But Christ’s humanity means that God’s love of our flesh and bone of our bone, really one of us and with us.” ( Incarnation , 185) “The miracle of Christmas” Karl Barth called it, this event we call incarnation or God’s taking on human flesh and living his life among us as a human being. And well he might! Yet the church has seldom grappled with what this really means. Oh, we count it as a mir...

“When the Protestant doctrine of justification is formulated only in terms of forensic imputation of righteousness or the non-imputation of sins in such a way as to avoid saying that to justify is to “make righteous”, it is the resurrection that is being by-passed. …justification is empty and unreal, merely a judicial transaction, unless the doctrine of justification bears in its heart a relation of real union with Christ. Apart from such a union with Him through the power of His Spirit, Christ would remain, as it were, inert or idle. We require an active relation to Christ as our righteousness, an active and an actual sharing in His righteousness. This is possible only through the resurrection; – when we approach justification in this light we see that it is a creative event in which our regeneration or renewal is already included within it.” (Torrance, Thomas F. – Space, Time and Resurrection ) “It is the resurrection that is being by-passed.” Bingo! Give TFT a prize! I...

This is a follow-up of sorts to an earlier Torrance Tuesday post on Bible Reading. It is from his Reality and Evangelical Theology (Westminster Press. 1981), 16,17,18). “Fundamentalism stumbles at the consubstantial relation between the free continuous act of God’s self-communication and the living content of what He communicates, especially when this is applied to divine revelation in and through the Holy Scriptures. It rejects the fact that revelation must be continually given and received in a living relation with God ­ i.e., it substitutes a static for a dynamic view of revelation. …The practical and the epistemological effect of a fundamentalism of this kind is to give an infallible Bible and a set of rigid evangelical beliefs primacy over God’s self-revelation which is mediated to us through the Bible. This effect is only reinforced by the regular fundamentalist identification of biblical statements about the truth with the truth itself to which they refer. …The living r...

Thomas Torrance was close to Karl Barth, studied with Barth, was a primary editor of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, and was asked by Barth to continue writing the unfinished Church Dogmatics (CD) after him. He has influenced many Anglo-American students to give Barth a fairer hearing than he was wont to receive in the Anglo-American world during much of the 20 th century. His book Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931 lists four traits that he believed made Barth a great theologian. #1 An Inquisitive Mind “Barth has the most searching, questioning mind I have ever known,” notes Torrance. He estimates that all the questions Barth raises would fill “hundreds of hundreds of pages.” Barth discovered that the liberal theology he had been taught had been exploded by him seeing many of his esteemed professors sign on in support of the Kaiser’s war policy in 1914. In reworking theology from the ground up he had to ask lots of questions! With them Barth sough...

During World War II Thomas Torrance, serving as a chaplain found himself comforting a mortally wounded young soldier. “Padre,” the dying soldier asked him, “Is God really like Jesus?” How would you answer him if you had been his chaplain? Torrance’s answer: “He is the only God that there is, the God who has come to us in Jesus, shown his face to us, and poured out his love to us as our Savior.” The young man died having heard that assurance. Why was Torrance able to give such assurance to that dying soldier? Many today would not be able to because they believe that God (the Father, to use Christian lingo) is fundamentally different than Jesus the Son. The former is, as I like to put it, the “God with a Scowl.” A morally over-scrupulous scorekeeper scrutinizing our every attitude and action ready, eager even, to rain judgment down on us when we misstep. Such is his disposition toward us. Jesus, such folk believe, is for us, loves us, forgives us, keeps us safe by inter...

Leave a comment Posted by  Bobby Grow  on September 5, 2016 I thought I would quickly share this from Dawson as well; on Barth’s doctrine of resurrection. For some reason I love this concept, it’s probably because it is so distinct from the usual ways I have thought of resurrection. As an evangelical resurrection has always been a touchstone related to apologetics and/or historiography in the field of higher critical Jesus Studies. It is more than refreshing to come across a theologian like Barth who simply approaches resurrection as a non-analogous  novum ; something for which all else in the created order hinges. It is refreshing to come across resurrection as a doctrine of re-creation, as if we must, as Christians, start all of our thinking about God and created reality (including ourselves) from there. This has to be one of the most ground breaking earth shattering things Barth has bequeathed to Christian theology; i.e. his doctrine of re-creation, or ...