Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking

Theology Today, Apr 1996 by Rogers, John B Jr

Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking. Thomas F. Torrance, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1994. 71 pp. $5.99.

In these two lectures on christology, we have a valuable contribution to the renewed conversation about the Trinity from Edinburgh's former professor of Christian dogmatics. With welcome freshness, Thomas Torrance shifts the focus in the discussion from ourselves to God, from our self-will to God's freedom and faithfulness, from our attempts to name and control God to God's gracious self-giving and self-naming in Jesus Christ.

In "Preaching Christ Today," Torrance shows that the affirmation that Jesus Christ is "truly God, truly human" expresses the very essence of the gospel. Jesus Christ is God's freely chosen way of being for us and with us as God. Jesus Christ is God's own self-being, God's own self-expression. God is not one thing in Jesus Christ and, then, "behind Jesus' back," something unknown and quite different that we name and describe to suit ourselves.

"Incarnation and Atonement" underscores the unity of Christ's person and work. Jesus' incarnate life-the very fact of Jesus Christ-is itself redemptive. Christ is not just a means of salvation we choose to acknowledge or not, thus leaving the burden of redemption on our own shoulders.

This book will help pastors clarify what is at stake, and at risk, in the current debate about how we respond to the God who meets us in the scandalously particular person of Jesus Christ-a gospel to which, Torrance argues, the modern scientific world is more open than is a church still struggling to free itself from the outdated relativism of the Enlightenment and, we might add, from ideological captivities too numerous to list.

John B. Rogers, Jr., Covenant Presbyterian Church, Charlotte, NC.