Christ’s Assumption of Fallen Humanity

In the Theology of T.F. Torrance

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By

Daniel Cameron

T-381

B.A. Moody Bible Institute, 2013

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Final Paper

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Submitted to the faculty
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts
In Systematic Theology
at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
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Deerfield, Illinois
May 2014

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INTRODUCTION

T.F. Torrance (1913-2007) has been known as “one of the most significant English-

speaking theologians of the twentieth century.”1 Elmer Coyler says that there is a “growing

consensus that Thomas F. Torrance is on of the premier theologians in the second half of the

twentieth century.”2 Kye Won Lee calls him the “most consistent evangelical theologian in

our times.”3 Having died recently, not much work has been done on his theology, but if these

are the things that are being said about him then we must carry the torch as theologians and

do what we can to understand his theology and help others know about him. Since I do not

have the space to discuss the development of all of his theology this paper will be focused on

his theology of Christ’s assumption of our fallen humanity.

Ludwig Ott makes the claim that since original sin is passed down through natural

means Christ could not have assumed this humanity, since Christ was born of a virgin and of

the hypostatic union, and claims this as the view of Classical (Roman Catholic) Christology.4

Calvin seems to agree with this statement saying that Christ was “exempted from the 


1 Paul D. Monar, Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity (Vermont: Ashgate, 2009), 1.
2 Elmer M Coyler, How To Read T.F. Torrance: Understanding His Trinitarian & Sceintific Theology
(Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2001), 11.
3 Kye Won Lee, Living in Union With Christ: The Practical Theology of Thomas F. Torrance (New

York: Peter Land Publishing, Inc., 2003), 1.

4 Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (North Carolina: TAN Books, 1992), 110, 168, 170.

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common rule, which includes under sin all of Adam’s offspring without exception.”5 So the

question must be asked where does Torrance get this idea from? Torrance does use Calvin in

some of his arguments while still acknowledging that “Calvin did not work that out in the

detail that we would like.”6 Torrance uses what some think to be a less important source, the

patristic fathers. For Torrance this doctrine has a large and broad ancient support from the

patristics. Thus for Torrance it is critical that the church begins to recover “perhaps the most

fundamental truth which we have to learn in the Christian Church, or rather, relearn since we

have suppressed it, is that the incarnation was the coming of God to save us in the heart of

our fallen and depraved humanity.”7 Which means that the incarnation must be understood as

“the coming of God to take upon himself our fallen human nature, our actual human

existence laden with sin and guilt, our humanity diseased in mind and soul in its

estrangement or alienation from the Creator.”8 From these statements we see the urgency and

passion of Torrance to express and teach this doctrine to people, for he says

This is a doctrine found everywhere in the early Church in the first five centuries,
expressed again and again in the terms that the whole man had to be assumed by
Christ if the whole man is to be saved, that the unassumed is the unhealed, or that
what God has not taken up in Christ is not saved.9
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Thus this paper seeks to trace and define T.F. Torrance’s theology of Christ’s assumption of

our fallen humanity. Because he was so passionate about this topic, it is necessary in

studying Torrance’s theology to give this doctrine sufficient space10 in understanding

5 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007), 2.13.4.
6 T.F. Torrance, The School of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church (Eugene: Wipf & Stock,
1996), lxxxii.
7 T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1992), 39.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 I do not know that these pages will be sufficient space but I will be doing my best to exposit this

doctrine that Torrance held so near and dear to his heart.

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Torrance’s theology as a whole. I begin with a biographical section so that the background

and theological development of Torrance may be established. The second section will be an

examination of Torrance’s theology of Israel as the womb of the incarnation. The third

section will be an examination of Torrance’s view of the actual incarnation through Mary.

The fourth section will be an examination of the continuous union that happened throughout

Christ’s life on earth. The life of Christ led to a death on the cross and thus our examination

of the theology of Christ’s assumption of fallen humanity in T.F. Torrance will culminate

here.

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Biographical Information

Thomas Forsythe Torrance was born on August 30, 1913 in Chengdu, China to

Thomas and Annie Torrance (Chinese missionaries). Torrance began learning theology at an

early age and he recalls that his parents were his “first and best teachers in theology and that

still remains true.”11 Torrance was the oldest of 5 children, all of whom were born in China.

Torrance grew up in an environment where a vivid belief in God was instilled in them from a

very early age.12 Throughout his childhood he attended missionary schools in china, but

when political tension in China rose the Torrance family was forced to move back to

Scotland. Once things calmed down in China Torrance Senior decided he needed to go back

and so he did meanwhile leaving his family in Scotland (1928). It was during this time that

Torrance “threw himself into his studies at Bellshill Academy, founded 1898, during the

11I. John Hesselink, “A Pilgrimage in the School of Christ,” (Reformed Review 38, no. 1, 1984).
12T.F. Torrance, Intinerarium Mentis in Deum, autobiographical memoir, I. qtd in Alister McGrath, T.F.
Torrance: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 13.
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years 1927-1931.”13 Torrance decided that he wanted to become a missionary and thus began

studying what he though we be most beneficial to his desire, and so beginning study in Latin

and Greek. But Torrance did his studying at Bellshill with the University of Edinburgh in his

sights.

In October of 1931 Torrance began his study at Edinburgh in the Faculty of Arts,

where he studied things such as metaphysics, moral philosophy, and philosophy of science.

He began his theological training when he entered New College (University of Edinburgh) in

October 1934. Edinburgh offered him an “outstanding environment in which to forge his

thinking.”14 New College was one of very few colleges at the time that could offer Torrance

the Bachelor of Divinity degree (this is comparable to the MDIV degree in America). It is

here that Torrance’s Christology began to take form under the influence and guidance of

Hugh Ross (H.R.) Mackintosh. Mackintosh was well known for his large work The Doctrine

of the Person of Christ, a book that “would remain a set text for Edinburgh divinity students

until the 1970’s.”15 Torrance took such detailed notes and annotations interacting with

Mackintosh that it takes up nearly 100 pages of hand written notes, showing the immense

impact that Mackintosh had on Torrance.16

After Torrance’s time in Edinburgh he took a research fellowship in 1936 which led

him to the middle east and through a series of events Torrance made the “necessary

13 McGrath, T.F. Torrance, 22.

14 Ibid.
15 Ibid, 29.
16 Ibid, 31.
 !5

arrangements to go to Basel and study with Karl Barth,”17 who happened to be highly

influential on H.R. Mackintosh.

Torrance moved to Basel in 1937 to study with Barth. When it came time for Torrance

to figure out a topic for his thesis Torrance suggested a topic on the “scientific structure of

Christian Dogmatics.” Barth quickly responded telling him no because he was too young for

a project so big. Torrance responded with expressing a growing desire to study the Greek

Patristics. Barth told him to write on the “doctrine of grace in the second-century fathers.”18

This is the beginning of the detailed knowledge of the patristics that Torrance had.

Israel

We must begin the analysis of Torrance’s theology of the humanity of Christ by first

attempting to understand Torrance’s interpretation of the history of Israel. In his

interpretation of Israel’s history we find “an extremely sophisticated form of the

Christological exegesis of the Old Testament that we find in the early church and in

Luther.”19 Torrance calls the history of Israel the “pre-history of the incarnation, which was

itself a profound movement of the Incarnation.”20 Through God’s election of Israel all that

God does now is done through Israel. Jesus Christ “not Israel, constitutes the reality and

substance of God’s self-revelation, but Jesus Christ in Israel and not apart from Israel, so that

Israel the servant of the Lord is nevertheless included by God forever within his elected way

17Ibid, 42.
18Ibid, 45-46. This work is what Torrance wrote on and it can now be purchased and read. see T.F.
Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1996 reprint).
19 Coyler, How to Read T.F. Torrance, 67.
20 T.F. Torrance, “Israel of God: Israel and the Incarnation” (Interpretation 10, no. 3, 1956), 307.
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of mediating knowledge of himself to the world.”21 Thus Israel is the “womb” of the

incarnation. “Jesus is born through the womb of Israel.”22

It is at this point that we begin to see the connection of Israel’s election with Christ’s

assumption of our fallen humanity. Because Israel is a fallen people, a people who have

continually rebelled throughout their history, God set up “his Kingdom in the midst of

estranged humanity.”23 Israel has become the one group of people “within the Adamic race

set apart for vicarious mission in the redemption of the many.”24 And as we know Israel is not

a people that are perfect or Holy or even capable of being in relationship with God and yet

“God assumes Israel in its sinful contradiction into partnership with himself.”25 Thus all that

happens in the redemptive history of Israel all takes place within the sinful existence of the

people of Israel. They have become the catalyst through which God reveals himself to all

humanity.

Torrance makes it clear that the revelation of God came “to Israel in such a way that it

intersected and integrated its spiritual and physical reality.”26 He wants to fight against the

dualistic model of God’s relationship to the world known as the “interactionist model.”27

Kevin Chiarot explains this well by stating that “Israel’s life and culture, their moral and

religious consciousness, their space and time, their concepts and modes of thought, and thus,

21 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 22-23.

22 T.F. Torrance, Incarnation (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008), 41.
23 Torrance, “Israel and the Incarnation,” 307.
24 T.F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1996), 196.
25 Torrance, Incarnation, 52.
26 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 15.
27 For more on this model and the relationship between theology and philosophy in T.F. Torrance, Karl

Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), 52-60.
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their very language itself, are all penetrated by the Word in its revealing activity. Revelation

is not simply an external word from beyond.”28

Because Israel is the womb of the incarnation and the place in and through which

God reveals himself, Torrance sees the need to make a distinction between Revelation and

revelation. In other words a distinction between Christ and Scripture. Because all of that

which exists in this realm (that is on earth) such as life, speech, space, time, etc. has been

affected by the fall. The Scriptures, because they are in the form of speech in this realm it

cannot be perfect and thus Jesus Christ is the only perfect Word from God, the only perfect

Revelation. “The Old Testament Scriptures do not hesitate to record that in the long history

of its partnership with God, in the mediation of divine revelation and reconciliation, Israel

proved to be disobedient and rebellious again and again.”29 Thus it is only in Christ “where

Israel’s, and thus our, estrangement and alienation are overcome.”30 For Torrance, Scripture

is revelation on the grounds that in our reading and apprehension of scripture we apprehend

and are united to the Revelation in Christ, sacramentally.31 Christ comes to us through fallen

speech in Scripture “pressing its way through the speech of our fallen flesh, graciously

assuming it in spite of all its inadequacy and faultiness and imperfection and giving it a holy

perfection in the Word of God.”32

28 Kevin Chiarot, The Unassumed is The Unhealed: The Humanity of Christ in the Christology of T.F.

Torrance (Eugene: Pickwick, 2013), 31.

29 T.F. Torrance, “The Divine Vocation and Destiny of Israel in World History” (Witness of the Jews to

God; ed David Torrance, 85-104, 1982), 89.

30 Chariot, The Unassumed is the Unhealed, 48-49.
31 “Whereas in Jesus Christ the divine Word and the human word are united within one Person, that is

hypostatically, in the Bible the divine word and the human word are only united through dependance upon and
participation in Christ, that is, sacramentally.” T.F. Torrance, Divine Meaning: Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 7.
32 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 139.
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It is in and through the fallen group of people known as Israel that God set out to

redeem his chosen people. God acted in and through a fallen mode of existence in order to

actualizing a union between God and man that is healing, that is a re-creating of the fallen

humanity that we are. Thus because revelation and reconciliation are inseparable within the

person of Christ, and human nature cannot be abstracted from the space-time that it exists in,

“Israel exists in a Christologically structured and organic relation with the Word, who is on

the road to becoming flesh in her existence. It is this fundamental framework which enables

Torrance to make the connections he makes.”33 Torrance is clear that God used this history of

Israel to reveal himself and give himself to them.

He used the suffering and the judgment of Israel to reveal the terrible nature of sin as
contradiction to God’s love and grace, to uncover the enmity of man in his persistent
self-will, toward God in his self-giving. But transcending all, God used this nation in
the ordeal of history and suffering to reveal his own infinite love and the undeflecting
persistence of his will to bring forgiveness and reconciliation, until his love achieved
its purpose of final union and communion of man with God in Jesus Christ.34
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Once and For All Union of God and Man35

Now that Torrance’s framework of the “pre-history” of the incarnation has been

mapped out this section will look at the moment of incarnation and thus the moment of union

between God and man.

Torrance examines the phrase “word became flesh” which comes from John 1:14.

Torrance comments saying that by this “John is saying that Jesus Christ is himself the

tabernacle of God among men and women, himself the Word of God enshrined in the

33 Chariot, The Unassumed is the Unhealed, 83.

34 Torrance, Israel and the Incarnation, 308.
35 This is a chapter title from Torrance, Incarnation, 87.
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flesh.”36 But what is crucial for the argument is exactly what does John mean by the word

flesh (sarx)? Is it a Docetic Christ, that is he only appeared to be human? Torrance, being

rooted in the patristic fathers who were battling things such as this, now sets out to define

flesh so as to understand exactly who Christ was in his humanity. Torrance interprets this

verse saying that “John means that the Word fully participates in human nature and existence,

for he became man in becoming flesh, true man and real man.”37 If the revelation and

reconciliation cannot be separated in the person of Christ then Christ’s life had to be

reconciling. By our union with Christ in the incarnation Christ had to redeem and reconcile

that humanity to God. Otherwise what is the point of the incarnation if he becomes

something other than who we are. “It was certainly into a state of enmity that the Word

penetrated in becoming flesh, into darkness and blindness, that is, into the situation where

light and darkness are in conflict and where his own receive him not.”38 He quotes Romans

8:3 which says that Christ came “in the likeness of sinful flesh.” This can be seen at his

baptism “where he identifies himself with sinners, is baptized with the baptism of repentance,

and immediately is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness where for forty days he fasts and

is tempted in immediate fulfillment of his mission as made flesh of our flesh.”39 If Christ did

not assume our humanity then we are not healed. This idea for Torrance comes straight out of

the patristic theology he spent so much time studying. He quotes Gregory of Nazianzen

saying the “unassumed is the unhealed.”40

36 Torrance, Incarnation, 61.

37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid, 62.
40 qtd in Ibid.
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In his earlier work, Trinitarian Faith, we find Torrance mounting this argument

directly from the patristic fathers. He lays out arguments found in Athanasius and Cyril of

Alexandria quoting the work, Contra Appolinarius, which was written to debunk the heresy

set forth by Appolinarius that Christ only had the emotions and body of a human but his mind

was divine and thus he was something less than fully, truly human as we are. Torrance

referred to this heresy as containing “highly dualist notions.”41 Based on his knowledge of

the contra apollinarius arguments he comments that “since Jesus Christ is himself God and

man in one Person, and all his divine and human acts issue from his one Person, the atoning

mediation and redemption which he wrought for us, fall within his own being and life as the

one Mediator between God and man.”42 The atonement is grounded in the union of God and

man in the incarnation. It is in his early years when he taught at Auburn Seminary

(1938-1939) in New York that he said that the flesh that Jesus assumed “is not to be thought

of in some neutral sense, but as really our flesh.”43

But the question must now be asked so what? Jesus assumed our fallen humanity but

how does that heal it? How is it sanctified? Torrance is clear that this act of assuming “our

flesh the Word sanctified and hallowed it, for the assumption of our sinful flesh is itself

atoning and sanctifying action.”44 But it is important to note that while he assumed a sinful

flesh, Christ himself did not sin.45 In fact “by remaining holy and sinless in our flesh, he

condemned sin in the flesh he assumed and judged it by his very sinlessness.”46 But this

41 T.F. Torrance, Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 151.

42 Ibid, 155.
43 T.F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2002),
44 Torrance, Incarnation, 63.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
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obedience was not an easy obedience which is made clear by the loud cries and bloody sweat

of Christ in the garden.47 What Christ did was enter into the midst of our estrangement and

“penetrated into our sinful humanity,” and thus works out reconciliation and sanctification

“in the midst of our humanity and alienation,” thus “bending back” the sinful will of man

back into obedience to the Father.48 Torrance made a statement in his article “What is the

Church?” that is extremely clear as to his stance on this topic. He says that Christ was “made

in the likeness of the flesh of sin in order that he might condemn sin in our flesh, submit our

fallen humanity to the divine judgment on the cross, and so make expiation for our sin.”49

For Torrance this initial union that takes place in the virgin birth is a sanctifying and

healing union for “the unassumed is the unhealed.”50 For Christ to redeem and reconcile

humanity it has to be done within fallen humanity. As Paul says in Romans 8:3, “being in the

likeness of sinful flesh, he condemned sin in the flesh.” 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that “He

made him to be sin who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God.”

The Continuous Union in the Life of Jesus51

Torrance moves beyond the initial union of God and man in the incarnation and now

speaks of the continued union of God and man in the life of Jesus Christ. Jesus lived out that

sinful flesh in a life of perfect faithfulness. He is the Faithful One. It is important, before

discussing the acts that were done in the life of Christ, for Torrance to ground the being of

Christ and the saving act of Christ (the person and work of Christ). He reaches back to the

47 Ibid, 64.
48 T.F. Torrance, “Atonement and the Oneness of the Church” (Scottish Journal of Theology 7, no. 3,
1954), 247.
49 T.F. Torrance, “What is the Church?” (Ecumenical review 11, no. 1, 1958), 13.
50 qtd. in Torrance, Incarnation, 62.
51 This is a section title in Ibid, 105.
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word used by the Council of Nicea in describing Jesus’ relation with his Father,

homoousios.52 This is the “ontological and epistemological linchpin of Christian theology.

With it, everything hangs together; without it, everything ultimately falls apart.”53 In order

for Christ to have assumed our fallen humanity, in order to heal it and redeem it, Jesus must

be God. He cannot be a “third party,”54 but must be God who alone can atone for and heal

our broken humanity. This grounds and connects the person and the work of Christ. In order

for Jesus to act as Savior he must in fact be God.55 This homoousios must go two ways. Jesus

Christ must be homoousios with the Father (in the divine being) and he must be homoousios

with us (in human nature) because only at this point is “there a real revelation and therefore a

knowing of God which derives from the eternal Being of God as he is in himself.”56

To say that Christ is homoousios with humanity and homoousios with Divinity is not

to say that the human nature of Christ is homoousios with the Divine. Rather it is here that

the hypostatic union comes into play. “In Christ the homoousion is inseparably bound up

with the hypostatic union.”57 That is to say that Christ is one substance in divine nature and

one substance in human nature that is mysteriously united in the person of Christ without a

mixing of the two natures.58 The connection of the two is in Christ,59 and together they

52 That is the “one substance” shared by the Father and the Son.
53 T.F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2005), 160-161.
54 “Jesus Christ steps into the situation where God judges mankind and where mankind contradicts

God. He steps in not as a third party but as the God who judges man, and steps into the place of man who sins
against God and is judged by God.” Torrance, Incarnation, 110-111.
55 “What he is and does as the Son of the Father falls within the eternal Being of the Godhead.”

Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 54.

56 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 214.
57 T.F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 253.
58 This is a blatant attack against Eutychianism which says that the two natures of Christ mixed so that

they were indistinguishable, the divine overwhelming the human. This heresy was condemned at the Council of
Chalcedon in 451 A.D.
59 Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, 253.
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express the “supreme truth that God himself is the content of his revelation.”60 This all flows

out of the fact that the “life and acts of Christ in the body and the being and person of the

eternal son who is God,”61 are inseparably linked.

Torrance grounds his theology of the hypostatic union and the inseparability of the

incarnation and atonement in the theology of the Patristic fathers. He says commenting on

the patristics:

The incarnation was seen to be essentially redemptive and redemption was seen to be
inherently incarnational and ontological. Union with God in and through Jesus Christ
who is of one and the same being with God belongs to the inner heart of the
atonement.62
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It is the union that happens in the incarnation that is “wrought out in the atonement,”63 that is

we are reconciled into a perfect oneness with God finally in the atonement. It is possible that

this physical union and atonement could be come to be thought of as impersonal. Torrance

says that “this is a serious misrepresentation, for it overlooks the fact that the incarnate Logos

Christ acts personally on our behalf from within the ontological depths of our human

existence which he has penetrated and gathered up himself.”64 He comments on Melito of

Sardis’s view of the atonement saying that the “atonement is something done…within the

ontological depths of the incarnation, for the assumption of the flesh by God in Jesus Christ

is itself a redemptive act and of the very essence of God’s saving work.”65 It must be said that

60 T.F. Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
2000), 104.
61 Torrance, Divine Meaning: Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics, 263.
62 Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, 159.
63 T.F. Torrance, Conflict and Agreement in the Church: Order and Disorder (Eugene: Wipf & Stock,

1996), 267.
64 Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, 156.
65 T.F. Torrance, “Dramatic Proclamation of the Gospel: Homily on the Passion by Melito of

Sardis” (Greek Orthodox Theological Review 37, no. 1-4, 1992), 155.
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Christ is one with us and like us, in that, he assumed a fallen human nature and entered into

our estranged condition, under God’s wrath and judgment. “He came to be one of us, and one

with us in that condition, in order to save us and deliver us from the bondage and corruption

of sin under the divine judgment.”66 Yet on the other hand he us unlike us in that by taking

our fallen humanity in himself he condemned sin and “overcame its temptations, resisted its

downward drag in alienation from God, and converted it back in himself to obedience toward

God, thus sanctifying it.”67

It is important to understand how exactly Christ condemned sin in the flesh. Kevin

Chairot has broken down Torrance’s argument by events in the life of Torrance and for the

sake of length we hit upon the major events in the life of Christ to attempt to grasp Torrance’s

argument.

Torrance maintained an affirmed that Christ remained sinless throughout his entire

life. Christ condemned sin in our flesh in his passive and active obedience. In his passive

obedience “he submitted to the divine judgment upon us,” and through his active obedience

Christ “took our place in all our human activity before God the Father.”68 Thus Christ’s

obedience is the condemnation of sin. The remaining sinless and holy in a humanity of

sinfullness is healing. Christ’s obedience was “astonishingly real in our flesh of sin.”69 For

Torrance, here, Luke 2:52 comes into play. Christ “grew” in wisdom and knowledge. In the

66 Torrance, Incarnation, 205.

67 Ibid.
68 T.F. Torrance, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition” (Reformed Review 54, no. 1,

2000), 6-7.
69 Torrance, Incarnation, 64.
 !15

Greek this has the sense of beating something into a specific form. So for Torrance Christ

“beat his way forward by blows.”70

The first big event in the life of Christ that we will look at is his baptism. Besides the

public acknowledgment of Christ as the Son of God it is “his solemn anointing or

consecration as the servant who in obedience to God is to be led as a lamb to be the sacrifice

for the sins of the world.”71 This baptism marked the beginning of the long road to calvary in

which the entire time Christ is mediating God to us and fighting for us and “beating” back

and restoring us back to true humanity. Christian baptism means anything because it is

grounded in the person of Christ. This baptism points to his birth (birth from the Spirit) and

points forward to his death and resurrection (entering the water and rising out). Thus

Christian baptism is “lodged in Jesus Christ himself and all that he has done for us within the

humanity he took from us and made his own, sharing to the full what we are that we may

share to the full of what he is.”72 Our baptism must rest in the foundation of his assumption

of our fallen humanity for in submitting himself to baptism he “identified himself with the

people of God concluded under sin that through union with them in one body he might make

their sin his own.”73

This baptism was thus a baptism into repentance. “For as the Lamb of God come to

bear our sins he fulfilled that mission not in some merely forensic way…but in a way in

which he bore our sin and guilt upon his very soul which he made an offering for sin.”74

70 Ibid, 64, 106.

71 Ibid, 69.
72 Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, 294. italics mine.
73 Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 198.
74 Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 84-85.
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Because as humans we are unable “through our own free-will to escape from our self-will for

our free-will is our self-will. Likewise sin has been so ingrained into our mind that we are

unable to repent and have to repent even of the kind of repentance that we bring before

God.”75 Thus Christ had to in his life repent for us.

Since our repentance is impossible apart from the vicarious repentance of Christ our

faith is nothing apart from the vicarious faith of Jesus Christ. It is important if we are to see

Christ as the substitute of all of our human responses to the work of God then we

must think of Jesus as stepping into the relation between the faithfulness of God and
the actual unfaithfulness of human beings, actualizing the faithfulness of God and
restoring the faithfulness of human beings by grounding it in the incarnate medium of
his own faithfulness so that it answers perfectly to divine faithfulness.76
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Thus it is a two fold faithfulness for it shows the faithfulness of the divine and re-institutes

the faithfulness of man. This idea is grounded in Galatians 2:20. Torrance interprets this verse

to say “the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith, the faithfulness of the Son of

God.” (pistis Christou Iesou) It is this faithfulness of Christ that must inform our responses

that we do muster forth such as repentance, faith, worship, “conversion and personal

decision, worship and prayer, the holy sacraments, or the proclamation of the Gospel: ‘I, yet

not I, but Christ.”77

Torrance makes the point that the temptations of Christ mean nothing if he was not

able to succumb to or evade them. Jesus had to obey in temptation that is true temptation, not

some fake temptation.

75 Ibid.
76 Ibid, 82.
77 Ibid, 98.
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Unless we take seriously at this point the fact that Christ assumed our will, the will of
estranged man in an estranged Adamic human nature, in order to suffer all its
temptations and to resist them and to condemn sin in our human nature, and then to
bend back the will of man into oneness with the divine will, it is difficult to give the
temptations of Christ their full place, and therefore the human obedience of Christ in
struggle against the onslaught of evil and sin its full proper place in atoning
reconciliation.78
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Union with Christ on the Cross. The condemnation of sin in the flesh (as stated in

Romans 8) “takes place supremely on the cross, but the cross reveals what was taking place

all the time in the incarnate life of the Son.”79 The cross is the climax of the condemnation of

sin in the flesh where the Son submits himself to the condemnation and judgment we

deserved. He did this by sinlessly assuming our God forsakenness. Because this union is

achieved he can take us into the “hell into which the son descended, it achieves its end in the

resurrection of man out of hell and the exaltation of man in Christ to the right hand of

God.”80 It is at this point that the fallenness of man is overcome completely. The

“dehumanisation” of humanity because of sin is overcome and we are now “set on a new and

acutely personal relationship to God, that is, reconciled to God in Jesus Christ.”81

Theological inquiry cannot hurry past that terrible cry of God-forsakness of the Man
on the Cross; for it is there that we are carried to the extreme edges of our existence,
to the very brink of the abysmal chasm that separates us from God. It is there that we
see the end of all our theologizing, in sheer God-forsakeness, in the desolate waste
where God is hidden from us by our sin and self-will and self-inflicted blindness and
where, as it were, God has died out on us, and is nowhere to be found by man.82
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78 Torrance, Incarnation, 212.
79 Ibid, 112.
80 T.F. Torrance, Atonement (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009), 150.
81 Ibid, 166.
82 Gerrit Scott Dawson, “Far as the Curse is Found: The Significance of Christ’s Assuming a Fallen

Human Nature in the Torrance Theology.” pg 55-74 in An Introduction to Torrance Theology: Discovering the
Incarnate Saviour. ed. Gerrit Scott Dawson. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2007), 73.
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Conclusion

From my research it is clear that at the center of Torrance’s theology rests this idea

that “the unnassumed is the unhealed.”83 Israel was the elect people of God, God chose to

enter into relations with a fallen group of people and it is within and through this group of

people that Christ entered into sinlessly assuming that fallen flesh. Since the incarnation and

atonement (person and work) are inseparable Christ, necessarily, had to assume that fallen

humanity in order to bend it back to himself in his passive and active obedience culminating

on the cross and ending with the ascension of Christ to the right hand of God. We sought to

trace and define T.F. Torrance’s theology of Christ’s assumption of our fallen humanity and

that, we have done, all the way from his historical exegesis of the history of Israel through

the once for all union in the incarnation, to the continual union in the vicarious life of Christ

leading all the way to the final condemnation of that falleness in the man on the cross.

As a theologian, Torrance entered into a conversation that he saw in the patristics and

attempted to bring that back to life, and it is this conversation that I hope to continue in as I

develop as a theologian. And I am able to do this because

In Jesus Christ the Son of God entered into my rebellious humanity, laid hold of the
human nature which I had alienated from the Father in disobedience and sin, and by
living out from within it the life of the perfectly obedient Son, he bent my human
nature in himself back to the obedience to the Father. Standing in my place, in life and
death, not only to be questioned but to give a faithful and true answer, he answered
for me to God: even in the terrible descent into my God-forsakenness in which he
plumbed the deepest depths of my estrangement and antagonism, he reconstructed and
altered the existence of me, by yielding himself in perfect love and trust to the
Father.84
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83 Torrance quoting Gregory of Nazianzen in Incarnation, 62.
84 Dawson, “Far as the Curse is Found,” 73. Note that the italics are my words. I change them from
third person personal pronouns to first person pronouns to emphasize the personal application.
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