Now this is of great importance for it is a refusal to allow a dualist basis and thought to determine the meaning of atonement. Incarnation and atonement are thought together for they co-inhere in one another. Incarnation is essentially redemption and redemption is essentially incarnational and ontological. Thus, the over-repeated stress on forensic and judicial issues in the atonement favored by the West is so much foreign to the Nicene theology for the Nicene concept of atoning salvation is at a deeper level.
Now here we have, I think, a fundamental problem of the Western understanding of redemption and let me put it in this way: If you take the Arian line that the Son is external to God and is not internal to the being of God, and that the relation between the Father and the Son is a moral relation, then you also take the Arian notion of redemption, that redemption is external to the being of the Son, between the being of the Son and us, and therefore is expounded only within a moral or a judicial relation. Now that seems to me, extraordinarily, to be, by and large, the main Western account of the atonement. –From the Audio Lectures of Thomas F. Torrance
Because of the reality of the manhood of Christ, the wholeness of his human nature and the incarnation, the atoning mediation takes place within the human being of the incarnate Savior in the ontological depths of the human and creaturely existence which he assumed from us in order to save us. So that here, creation and redemption come together. That is to say, the act of atoning redemption does not take place outside of Christ, between Christ and us sinners, to some sort of external, judicial or moral relation but falls within our being which Christ has appropriated and made his own.
Now this is the point of the greatest importance: Atonement is not an act done by God simply upon man. But certainly an act of God but done as man and therefore made to arise out of man’s being and nature as in a fundamental way, man’s act toward God and in this sense, it is priestly atonement.
“Since the Father-Son relation falls within the being of God, the incarnation must also be regarded as falling within the life and the being of God. A staggering concept. It also follows that the saving work of Christ, the atoning mediation and redemption which he carried out for our sake falls within his own personal being as Mediator or Incarnate Son. He himself is ‘hilasmos’. He himself is atonement. He is the great God and Savior, the one Mediator. Now the work of atoning salvation is then not one that takes place outside of Christ as something external to Christ or external to God. But as something that takes place within the incarnate life and being of Jesus Christ, the Mediator.” -From Audio Lectures by Thomas F. Torrance
I have been listening to audio recordings of lectures done by a great theologian, Thomas F. Torrance and at times, I enjoyed taking down notes word for word. What I share below is just a portion of the whole lecture. May I share this part:
Dichotomous Ways of Thinking
“From time to time there have arisen in the history of Western thought dichotomous ways of thinking which have damaged areas of our knowledge and not least, our knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. The effects of these dichotomous ways of thinking had been to detach Jesus Christ from God, to detach Jesus Christ from Israel and to detach Christianity from Christ himself.
“Now when this sort of thing happens the very essence of the Christian gospel is at stake. There takes place a disruption of the mediation between God and man. The Mediator, or rather our understanding of him, is torn apart and uprooted from God’s purpose in history.
“Now I could show you that this was the basic problem that afflicted the early centuries of the Christian church. For the Christian church and the rise and formulation of its theology struggled to preserve the New Testament doctrine of Christ as the one mediator. For example, the passage of Saint Paul in 1 Timothy 2:5 is found often in the early church — ‘there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave himself a ransom for all,’
“Now epistemologically, the problem we have to face in ancient or in modern times, can be put in this way: In the analytic tradition of thought, there takes place an abstraction of Jesus Christ from the matrix of natural or inherent relation in which he is found and then an abstraction from the external appearance of Christ from the objective frame of reference in which he is lodged.
Analytical and Abstractive Modes of Thought
“Now one can state that epistemologically as exactly the same problem we have had to face in modern times when we’ve had to turn away from the analytical and abstractive modes of thought that we have derived from a Newtonian, classical physics and have had to turn to another more dynamic, more holistic and relational way of thinking, to which where we have been directed through the work of James Clark Maxwell and Albert Einstein above all.
Onto-relations
“Now if we take what I would call or refer to as a proper approach, then we consider something in its relation with other things where the relation between things have to do with what the things really are. These are what I call ‘onto-relations‘. And secondly, we then consider things in terms of their inner rational structure or their internal relations and neither of these ways or considerations are separable one from the other.
“And it is precisely in these two determinations that our modern scientific knowledge for example, in particle theory or in astrophysics and our whole understanding of the universe and its expansion have been built up.
Onto-relational Context
“Now so far as our knowledge of Jesus Christ is concerned, this means on the one hand we have to adopt an approach to Christ in the onto-relational context in which he is presented to us, the matrix of interrelations in which he meets us in the historical and dynamic context of Israel. And second, an approach to Christ in terms not of his appearances but in terms of his own self-communication and self-presentation to us in the wholeness and integrity of what he is in himself as he meets us in the evangelical tradition of the New Testament and the church.
“Now when we adopt this kind of approach whether in natural science or in theology, we find that progress in understanding is necessarily circular. What we do is to seek to understand something in its own complex of intelligibility. We seek to penetrate into its own internal reality, in its own intrinsic logos, its own internal structure. And when we do that, we come up with a basic clue in the light of which everything then is re-examined and interpreted. So that we understand things not by reference to some external framework of thought but we understand things by developing a framework of thought that they themselves impose upon us out of their inherent rationality.
“Now you know when — this is an analogy that I find very helpful — when you are trying to piece together the dismembered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And you have found the picture that they all make. You cannot possibly mess it all up again and start your puzzle all over again as though you did not know the picture that they make. Now, that’s what happens in any scientific procedure. Once you got the basic clue, once you gain the basic insight, then you take all the pieces and you reconstruct them in the light of that driving insight. Now granted that the insight may have to be revised in the scientific inquiry, but nevertheless, it’s in the light of that basic clue that you make your discovery and once you’ve done that, you cannot go back upon it. Something quite irreversible has taken place.
“Now I submit that it is precisely that profound scientific procedure that took place, unwittingly if you like, so far as formal science is concerned in the New Testament itself and in the early church. Because what the apostles and the fathers did was to come upon a basic clue in the light of which everything else was interpreted and understood in its own inner rational structure. And everything became highly luminous in virtue of that. And this basic clue was the relation of Jesus Christ the Jew of Bethlehem and Nazareth to God the Father on the one hand and to the whole history of Israel on the other hand.
“And was in that interrelation that they found themselves coming to grips with the Logos, the intelligibility inherent in Jesus and in the light of that Logos, then the whole gospel fell into place, the baffling mystery of Jesus revealed itself to them in intelligible ways and what is more, they understood the relation between the gospel of the new covenant and the age-old message of God that had been worked out in historical dialogue with Israel through the ancient covenant.”
That’s the end of my notes. I hope to continue taking down notes as time permits. You may want to listen to this lecture at this link. Just sharing.
