James B. Torrance. Worship, Community & the Triune God of Grace. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997. 130pp. Reviewed by Virgil Warren, Manhattan, Kansas.
James B. Torrance. Worship, Community & the Triune God of Grace. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997. 130pp. Reviewed by Virgil Warren, Manhattan, Kansas.
In November 1994, James Torrance, professor emeritus of systematic theology at the University of Aberdeen, presented the Didsbury Lectures in the Nazarene Theological College, Manchester. InterVarsity Press offers these lectures in written form with a preface and appendix added by the author.
Worship is the central concern of the volume, which brings the author to emphasize the nature of God particularly as trinitarian and gracious. Worship is described as “our participation through the Spirit in the Son’s communion with the Father” (p. 15; cp. 21). We “worship the Father through the Son in the Spirit” (p. 22). We “participate through the Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father” (p. 59). “The real agent in all true worship is Jesus.” Granted the ambiguities in such phraseology as “participation through the Spirit” and “Jesus as the only true agent,” we nevertheless see that Christ’s “priesthood” is not simply in regard to something completed; it is the sole ongoing basis for perpetual relationship to God, in life generally and in worship especially.
The burden of Chapter 1 is that in worship we do not come to the Father on our own but in Christ. The former approach Torrance calls “unitarian worship,” while advocating the latter—“trinitarian worship.” There are two forms of the unitarian view, one found in the older modernism, where people are urged to immediate relationship to God (Harnack). The other found in the existential view, which acknowledges the past salvific work of Christ, but does not involve him as priest in the present worship of the Father. The incarnational trinitarian model wants to involve identification with the finished work of Jesus as savior and the present person of Christ as priest.
Chapter 2 focuses on the vicarious humanity of Christ, which serves both in the God-manward movement and in the human-Godward movement. “Our response in faith and obedience is a response to the response already made for us by Christ to the Father’s holy love, a response we are summoned to make in union with Christ” (pp. 53-54). According to Reformed theology, in the first movement human repentance comes in response to God’s logically prior forgiveness as based on the substitutionary goodness of Christ. In like manner, human worship of God is already fulfilled in Christ, who embodies substitutionary humanity and does substitutionary worship. Humankind joins in that substitutionary worship.
Chapter 3 deals with the ordinances in the context of worship. Both baptism and the Lord’s Supper are post facto signs of what has already happened in the work of Christ. Baptism is a participation in the vicarious baptism of Jesus where he set his fact to the cross and its vicarious baptism of blood. The Lord’s Supper is similarly a participation in that vicarious baptism of blood realized at the other end of the Lord’s earthly ministry.
Chapter 4 integrates the feminist debate into this larger upward relationship to the Father, especially as it impacts worship. Of course, the historical use of Father by Jesus himself and the church had nothing to do with the distinctives of male sexuality. Insofar as the church has unwittingly drifted into adding those connotations to the analogy, Torrance agrees with the feminist concerns. However, the feminist answer can choose the wrong road by attacking the doctrines of the trinity and the incarnation (p. 106). Christians do not approach God as an unknown but as one in fact revealed in such a way that Father and Son are the realities in that revelation. Neither do we talk about God merely as creator, redeemer, and sanctifier because those truths put in ultimate position do not do justice to the personal communion between the persons of the triune God. Adding motherhood to Fatherhood is another approach that would not likely help the feminist concern anyway if we can learn anything from ancient Canaanite religion. Among other things, that emphasis created the adverse effect by bringing sexuality into deity and emphasizing it. The result was a perversion of worship and human living that attended the fertility cults.
The current feminist pattern follows a recurrent one in the history of the church. It takes a valid New Testament idea and detaches it from the person of Jesus and the gospel of grace, attaching it to the self instead. It ends up attacking the original doctrines of the Bible—in this case the trinity and the incarnation. God and his will get replaced by the projections of human self-understanding with humankind left adrift on a sea of subjective relativity.
In the Appendix the author comments further on the feminist issue by differentiating between similes, metaphors, parables, analogies, and name. Ultimately readers of the Bible are to understand Father as meaning what Jesus put into it. That understanding “evacuates all biological, male, patriarchal, sexist content . . . ” (p. 153). The emphasis falls on the interpersonal element in Father: person, communion, love (p. 124).
The power of these essays is somewhat affected by the reader’s attitude toward the Reformed theology that informs the larger context. Torrance does as good a job as anyone in “interpersonalizing” an aspect like worship while apparently working within a system that is driven by legal concepts like vicariousness and federal headship. The approach sets aside the impersonalism of Greek ontology (p. 51) but adopts in its larger context the impersonalism of legal process. Having entered that context, it is difficult to portray a satisfying interpersonalism in selected particulars. It would seem preferable to understand the system itself in interpersonal terms and then emphasize interpersonal realities in contrast to contractual ones, as Torrance wants to do (p. 54, etc.).
Despite such issues in the larger field of thought, there are important reasons for reading a book of this sort and this quality. Although a serious reader will find much here to agree with, his main endeavor is not to decide whether he agrees at each point, but to learn as much as he can from the experience. The concern to set more specific matters in the full context of Christian understanding is itself instructive. Too frequently the habit is to be eclectic and treat specifics as discrete items; Torrance’s example is a healthy antidote to piece-meal thought. Another value comes from being exposed to the broad categories that theological reflection must have in place and keep in focus. A world-class scholar can integrate a wide range of insights and draw on a vast array of resources. Finally, a good writer stimulates thoughts that are not part of his own presentation; they may in fact be in contrast to it. Either way, progress comes in the understanding of matters that would not move forward without the experience.
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