T.F. Torrance: The Womb of the Incarnation, pt 9

The New Covenant 

In the fullness of time, Jesus Christ is identified with the suffering servant. According to Torrance, the incarnation must be understood in this context, wherein the Son of God gathers up in himself the prehistory of the mediation of reconciliation in Israel and the concomitant intensification of Israel’s conflict with God. The “prehistory of the crucifixion” in Israel (cf. above) prefigured the suffering of Christ, the one true Israelite, who recapitulated in himself the plight of the suffering servant in order to stand in the gap, in the midst of Israel, on behalf of all humanity. As Torrance notes, from the moment of Christ’s birth, the road ran straight to the crucifixion (cf. Lk 2:34, 35). Beginning at Bethlehem, the contradiction between humanity and God was set for its fulfilment. The intense conflict between God and humankind, vicariously embodied in Israel’s historical dialogue with God, reached its climax in the incarnation of Jesus Christ (Torrance, 1992:29; 2008:50; Colyer, 2001a:67, 68). Torrance (1992:29, 30) continues:

Hence, throughout the earthly life of Jesus the fearful tension he embodied ... and the reconciling love of God which he incarnated, advanced toward their climax in the crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah, when all things in Israel and in humanity as a whole, were set within the frame of the new covenant of forgiveness and reconciliation through the body and blood of Christ. 

For Torrance, the Sinaitic covenant becomes “new” when it is finally cut deep into the heart of Israel’s existence, that is, into the “inner man. This is precisely what occurs in Jesus Christ (Torrance, 1956:309). Once the old covenant came to be enacted in the flesh of Israel in the person of Jesus, becoming a total “circumcision” that penetrated into the heart of the “inner man,” the new covenant was inaugurated and a new and living way to God was opened up in the humanity of the Son of Man. For Torrance, the ultimate self-giving of God to Israel, narrowed down in “historical particularity” to one particular Jew, meant the “universalization and transcendence” of the Old Testament form of the covenant, so that redemption takes on the cosmic dimensions of a new creation (Torrance, 2008:48, 52). Nevertheless, as Kruger (1989:45) notes, Torrance does not regard the “new” covenant as an abrogation of the “old”; rather, the essential pattern God established at Sinai (“I will be your God, you will be my people”) is fulfilled in the new covenant and raised to a higher level of intimacy and communion through the outpouring of the Spirit. 

Penetrating the Ontological Depths of Israel 

Torrance (1992:30, 31) notes that Jesus did not come as a “political” Messiah who would reshape the social, economic, and political structures of Israel. Rather than effect change at the surface level of Israel’s life, Jesus, as Son of God incarnate as Son of man, penetrated into “the ontological depths of Israel’s existence where man, and Israel representing all mankind, had become estranged from God, and there within those ontological depths of human being to forge a bond of union and communion between man and God in himself which can never be undone.” Torrance continues:

Jesus did not come, therefore, to reorganise the human, social and political structures on the surface level of Israel’s life, which could not touch the forces of evil underlying them but only provide them with a new disposition of structures to use for their own ends, for he knew that those forces of evil are most deadly when they clothe themselves with the structures of what is right and good. He came, rather, to penetrate into the innermost existence of Israel in such a way as to gather up its religious and historical dialogue with God into himself, to make its partnership and its conflict with God his own, precisely as they moved to their climax with the Incarnation, and thus in and through Israel to strike at the very root of evil in the enmity of the human heart to God. 

Rather than effect change merely at the surface level of human existence, argues Torrance, Jesus penetrated into the heart of Israel, gathered its conflicted existence to himself and, thereby, transformed it. At the cross, through the reconciliation between God and humanity wrought there, God encounters, suffers, and triumphs over the enmity entrenched in the human heart (Torrance, 1992:31). 

Israel Elected to Reject the Messiah 

As God drew a “circle of reconciling love” around Israel, notes Torrance (1992:32), it was separated from all other nations and brought into a unique partnership of covenant love with God. Israel was called to be the “earthly medium” and “human counterpart” of both divine revelation and reconciliation. Israel, therefore, was given a “vicarious mission and function” for the purpose of the reconciliation of all mankind. Yet, just as the mediation of revelation triggered an ongoing, agonising struggle in the life of Israel, so also did the mediation of reconciliation. Torrance continues:

[I]n the progressive embodiment of his self-revelation to Israel and in his patient remoulding of its existence and life in the service of divine revelation to all men, God became locked in a profound struggle with Israel. The Word of God pressed hard upon Israel throughout its history, informing its worship with the knowledge of the living God and impregnating its way of life with divine truth, thereby evoking obedience but also provoking disobedience, in order to lay hold upon both as the instrument of its ever-deepening penetration into the inner recesses of Israel’s being and soul and understanding, thus preparing Israel as the matrix for the Incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ. 

According to Torrance, God gave himself to Israel and assumed the nation into covenant partnership with himself, thus revealing, in the midst of the people, God’s will to be humanity’s God despite human sin. Even in the face of Israel’s rejection, God bound himself to the people in covenant love, so that Israel was unable to escape its covenant partnership with God. As Torrance argues, Israel was called to be the “covenanted vis-à-vis” on earth in the movement of God’s reconciling love for all humanity (Torrance, 1992:32).  

Israel’s persistent attempts to break free of its covenant partnership with God, however, merely intensified its recalcitrance and sharpened the tension between God and humanity. As Torrance (1992:32, 33; cf. 2008:49) observes:

In that state of affairs the mediation of divine reconciliation to all mankind in and through the people of Israel could be worked out only in the heart of its conflict with God in such a way that its deep-seated human estrangement from God became the very means used by God in actualising his purpose of love to reconcile the whole world to himself. 

According to Torrance, human resistance and estrangement were incorporated into God’s gracious plan for the reconciliation of humankind. Noting that this is one of the ways of God that is difficult for us to appreciate, Torrance finds something quite similar after the Last Supper, when the disciples denied and abandoned Jesus when he was taken prisoner by the authorities. Out of fear for their lives, the disciples left Jesus utterly alone, separating themselves from him by an “unbridgeable chasm of shame and horror,” for they had forsaken and betrayed the very love whereby he had bound them to himself. Yet, in enacting the new covenant for the remission of sins by giving them his body and blood in the bread and wine of the Holy Supper, Jesus meant the disciples to understand that even their denial of him (e.g., Peter; Mt 26:34) was the very means by which he bound them to himself. The disciples finally realized, therefore, that Jesus’ passion was not for the holy saint but, rather, was precisely for the sinner. As Torrance argues, “It was their sin, their betrayal, their shame, their unworthiness, which became in the inexplicable love of God the material he laid hold of and turned into the bond that bound them to the crucified Messiah, to the salvation and love of God forever” (Torrance, 1992:33, 34). 

For Torrance, this is surely how we must understand God’s election of Israel to be the bearer of divine revelation and reconciliation. Urging that we clap our hands over our mouths and speak with fear and trembling within the forgiving love of God, Torrance (1992:34) asserts that “Israel was elected also to reject the Messiah”:

If the covenant partnership of Israel with God meant not only that the conflict of Israel with God became intensified but was carried to its supreme point in the fulfilment of the Covenant, then Israel under God could do no other than refuse the Messiah. 

In Jesus Christ, it is revealed that the election of one for all becomes salvation for all in the rejection of one for all. The events surrounding the cross of Christ reveal what was happening to Israel in its election by God. According to Torrance (2008:52):

The election of Israel as an instrument of the divine reconciliation, an instrument which was to be used in its very refusal of grace so that in its midst the ultimate self-giving of God might take place, meant, then ... that Israel was elected to act in a representative capacity for all peoples in its rejection of Christ.  

To be the sphere in which the Son of God freely allowed himself to be crucified meant that Israel could only fulfil God’s gracious purpose by rejecting Christ and condemning him to death. This is not to suggest, Torrance argues, that God made the Jews guiltier than others; rather, through them, God exposed humanity’s hatred of grace, drawing it out at the cross in all its intensity, so that Christ, as the Lamb of God, might take away the sin of the world in “holy and awful atonement.” According to Torrance, Jesus bore the infinite guilt, not only of Israel, “but of all mankind revealed in the guilt of Israel,” thereby acquitting and justifying the ungodly, Jew and Gentile alike, and even bearing away the guilt of those who, representing all humanity, actually carried out his terrible crucifixion (Torrance, 2008:53). 

As Peter announced on the Day of Pentecost (cf. Acts 2:23), the rejection of the Messiah is exactly what God intended in his determination to deal with sinful humanity at its worst, even at the point of its ultimate denial of the saving will of God. At the cross, Jesus took upon himself all the sin and guilt of Israel, including Israel’s scorn and rejection. According to Torrance, if Israel was blinded in its role as the servant of God (cf. Is 42:19), and, hence, could not help but react as it did, it was blinded for the sake of all humanity. “The Jew” vicariously represents our own rejection of God, so that reconciliation might also be ours. The ultimate refusal of God which took place in Israel was the very means by which the loving God achieved final victory over sin, for by the cross, humankind was reconciled to God (cf. 2Cor 5:19). As Torrance notes, “Our indebtedness to the Jew and our faith in Jesus Christ are inextricably woven together in the fulfilled mediation of reconciliation” (Torrance, 1992:34, 35; 2008:49, 50, 53). Therefore, Jesus must not be detached from ancient Israel or the incarnation from its “deep roots in the covenant partnership of God with Israel.” To detach Jesus from ancient Israel, argues Torrance, is to obscure the nexus of relationships within which God’s self-revelation in Christ becomes intelligible. If we are to know Jesus Christ, we must seek to understand him “within the actual matrix of interrelations from which he sprang as Son of David and Son of Mary, that is, in terms of his intimate bond with Israel in its covenant relationship with God throughout history” (Torrance, 1992:3, 23; cf. Colyer, 2001a:69).

T.F. Torrance: The Womb of the Incarnation, pt 8

Intensification of the Covenant 

According to Torrance (1992:75), the institution of the cultic liturgy, set out in the Torah and interpreted by the prophets, reinforced Israel’s separation from other nations as “a people imprinted with a priestly character and invested with a vicarious mission” as mediator of divine revelation and reconciliation. This was not, however, a mere formal rite designed to guarantee propitiation between God and the people. Torrance writes:

[T]he covenanted way of response had to be worked into the very flesh and blood of Israel’s existence. It had to be impregnated into its understanding and sculptured into its very being. It had to be built into the reciprocity between God and Israel and be allowed to control the whole pattern of its life and mission in history. 

 

For Torrance (1960a:121), the covenanted way of response had to be “translated from the realm of symbolic ritual into the actual existence of His people,” for the covenanted way of response was never intended to be a dead liturgy or an empty ritual. He continues:

The worst thing that could be done with such a covenant would be to turn the symbolic ritual into an end in itself, as a means of acting upon God and bending His will to serve the ends of men. That is precisely what Israel tried to do again and again, so that God sent the prophets to protest against their use of the Cult and to demand obedience rather than sacrifice. 

As Purves (2001:63) notes, by its very nature, the covenanted way of response was intended to be written on the hearts of the people and incorporated into their existence in such a way that Israel was called to pattern its entire life after it. Similarly, notes Colyer (2001a:100), if Israel was to be a light to the nations as mediator of revelation and reconciliation, the vicarious way of response provided the people by God had to be embodied in Israel as a whole, that is, in the totality of Israel’s existence as a people charged with a priestly and vicarious life and mission. 

As God drew nearer to Israel in reconciling love, Israel’s sin was not only revealed but also intensified. As Torrance notes, this was not an accidental feature of the covenant: “[God] used the suffering and judgement of Israel to reveal the terrible nature of sin as contradiction to God’s love and grace, to uncover the deep enmity of humanity in its persistent self-will before God in his divine self-giving.” The intensification of Israel’s sin was incorporated into the “full design” of the covenant, Torrance argues, for “it was the will and the way of God’s grace to effect reconciliation with man at his very worst,” that is, in a state of stiff-necked rebellion against God. “In that ordeal,” notes Torrance, “the word and the cult were not mere letter and liturgy, but were worked out into the very existence of Israel,” as indicated in Deutero-Isaiah (Chapters 40-55) and Jeremiah (Torrance, 1992:28, 29; 2008:47). In this regard, argues Scandrett (2006:59), Torrance sees a connection between sin and human suffering, for Israel’s condition of enmity and rebellion against God was always the occasion for its suffering. For Torrance, notes Scandrett, sin may be regarded as the “disease,” with suffering the inevitable “symptom,” from which Israel (and all humanity) needs to be healed. 

As Torrance argues, in unswerving love for Israel, God worked out a way of reconciliation that did not depend on a worthy response from humanity, but made Israel’s sin and rebellion the means by which he bound it to himself in “unsullied communion.” God used the history and suffering of Israel to reveal his infinite love for humanity and to serve his unrelenting purpose of forgiveness and reconciliation, until his love achieved its ultimate purpose of final union and communion of humanity with God in Jesus Christ (Torrance, 1992:28, 29; 2008:47). More succinctly, Torrance shows how a sovereign and gracious God can use even human sin as a means of further address to his people (cf. Kruger, 1989:60). 

The great sign of the covenant was circumcision, notes Torrance, whereby the covenant was “cut into the flesh” of the people as the sign that the promises of God would be fulfilled in the life of Israel only as the word of God was “translated into its flesh,” that is, into its very existence. Circumcision was the sign that the covenant had to be written into the heart, in the “‘crucifixion’ of self-will” and the “putting off of ‘the enmity of the flesh.’” Astonishingly, however, the more God gave himself, Torrance argues, the more he forced Israel to be what, in its sin and self-will, it truly was: a “rebel.” Because the self-giving of God intensified the enmity and contradiction between Israel and God, Torrance argues that Israel was, in fact, “the suffering servant.” Israel suffered as it was broken, remade, and realigned into conformity with the covenant will of God. For Torrance, the whole concept of the “suffering servant” represents the activity of God, whereby he begins “to draw together the cords of the covenant” between himself and Israel (Torrance, 2008:47-52). 

The Servant of the Lord 

Israel’s corporate role of suffering servant is gradually associated in the mind of the people with one individual who identifies himself with the nation’s suffering. Torrance sees the vicarious embodiment and mediation of the covenant beginning to come to expression in the Isaianic “servant of the Lord,” as particularly and poignantly illustrated in Isaiah 53. Here the mediatorial and priestly figures of Moses and Aaron respectively, and the notions of guilt-bearer and sacrifice for sin, are conflated to provide the “interpretive clue” for the intercessory and vicarious role of the servant in the redemption of Israel (Torrance, 1992:75, 76; 2008:51, 52). For Torrance, notes Scandrett (2006:55, 56), this is the “penultimate stage” of mediation in Israel and reflects Torrance’s image of the “ever-deepening, spiral movement” of divine revelation (cf. Torrance, 1992:8). Torrance’s treatment of the Isaianic material, argues Scandrett, demonstrates his understanding of the “unifying and narrowing thrust of the Old Testament toward the ultimate goal of the Incarnation.”  

Moreover, the “fundamental antinomy” (Scandrett, 2006:60) between Israel’s sin and God’s holiness will be gathered up and reconciled in this one individual, for, as Torrance (1992:75, 76; 2008:51, 52) argues, the servant of the Lord is the “hypostasised actualisation” of the divinely provided way of covenant response set forth within the flesh and blood existence of Israel; that is, the entire covenanted way of response is gathered up in this one individual (cf. Scandrett, 2006:56).  Moreover, Torrance sees a messianic role envisioned for the servant, wherein both mediator and sacrifice, as well as priest and victim, are combined in a form that is both representative and substitutionary, as well as corporate and individual in its fulfilment. 

For Torrance, the Isaianic writer is struggling to articulate a vision wherein the servant of the Lord is identified with Israel as a whole, the divine Redeemer (goel) is identified with the Holy One of Israel, and the roles of Servant and Redeemer are combined and spoken of together.  Torrance argues, “It is as though the prophet wanted to say that the real servant of the Lord is the Lord himself who as goel-Redeemer has bound himself up in such a tight bond of covenant kinship with Israel that he has taken upon himself Israel’s afflicted existence and made it his own in order to redeem Israel.” For Torrance, this implies an actual state of incarnation which finally takes place within the matrix of Israel in the birth of the Son of God to the Virgin Mary (Torrance, 1992:76; cf. Colyer, 2001a:100). Thus, while Israel itself is the suffering servant, assumed into oneness with the word of God, in the servant songs of Isaiah, it is evident that the word becomes one with Israel, becoming more and more “one Israelite,” for that is the only way in which the word assumes human nature and existence into oneness with itself. For Torrance, therefore, the suffering servant is primarily to be understood as “the Word” identifying himself with Israel, and becoming “one particular Israelite, an individual person, the Messiah” (Torrance, 2008:51, 52). 

As Scandrett (2006:61) notes, Torrance clearly identifies the suffering servant of Isaiah Fifty-Three with Jesus Christ. For Torrance, the suffering servant acts from within the ontological depths of Israel’s troubled, sinful existence and, therefore, “vicariously” on behalf of Israel, that is, “as Israel in a participatory sense” (Scandrett, 2006:63). As Scandrett rightly emphasises, “The Servant’s suffering moves beyond the forms of Israel’s covenanted way of response to penetrate the essential disjunction which exists between God and Israel because of sin” (emphasis in original) and, thereby, “binds” himself to Israel in such a way as to reconstitute the nation’s relation to him so that “their true end is fully and perfectly realised in unsullied communion with himself (Torrance, 1992:29). As will be shown below (cf. Chapter Six) the servant’s participatory, ontological penetration into the depths of Israel’s existence in order to bind the nation to himself in communion is paradigmatic for Torrance’s understanding of the atoning reconciliation of Jesus Christ. 

For Torrance, argues Scandrett (2006:57, 58), the repeated juxtaposition of the Isaianic servant of the Lord and the Holy One of Israel is of new and critical importance in regard to divine revelation in Israel. “Most remarkably,” notes Scandrett, it juxtaposes God and humanity in a single individual. Moreover, it brings together the legal and sacrificial  dimensions of Israel’s life [as represented by Moses and Aaron], which, together, form the “two complementary poles” of the people’s entire existence, as encompassed in the covenanted way of response in Israel. “In emphasizing the juxtaposition of these entities as pointing beyond itself toward a single reality,” argues Scandrett, “Torrance’s basic commitment to the centrality of the Incarnation is once again made clear.” In addition, the juxtaposition of the servant of the Lord and the Holy One of Israel brings together in an unprecedented way the liturgical concepts of Mediator and Sacrifice with the moral and legal concept of Redeemer. For Torrance, argues Scandrett, this marks a “stunning development in the mind of Israel regarding the character and role of the Messiah as a Mediator between God and humanity.” This “new combination of forms” by which the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ can be apprehended shows the “progressive, unifying, and narrowing character” of God’s self-disclosure to Israel, wherein the Servant of the Lord and the Holy One of Israel are brought together, as the “ever deepening, spiral movement” (cf. Torrance, 1992:8) of revelation progresses toward its goal in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.