TF Torrance was and remains the inspiration for what me and Myk Habets have called Evangelical Calvinism (after TFT). Torrance maintains that the evangelical Calvinism he affirms was really just representative of a Scottish development that unfolded concurrently alongside the development of Westminster Calvinism. Torrance argues that the themes he elevates as representative of an evangelical Calvinism are all present within the history and development of Reformed theology in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Some would want to assert that TF is overreading the history, and eisegeting it through a Barthian lens. But this is misplaced. Yes, TFT was a (doctoral) student of Barth’s; yes, TF affirmed much of Barth’s theology (particularly election); but Torrance’s reading of the Reformed tradition, as he makes clear in his book, Scottish Theology, is a critical reading of the Reformed heritage as that developed in the Scottish motherland. Even if what TF says about Reformed theology sounds like strange teaching, that is only because (if you think so) you have been indoctrinated into the faulty supposition that the Reformed tradition is pretty much a monolithic machine—as that has been distilled in so-called Post Reformed orthodox theology. TFT is simply understanding that the Reformed trad is multivalent, and fulsome with multiple lines of development that aren’t as manageable as some would like to imagine.

In the following we have TF discussing the entailments of what he considers an evangelical Calvinism contra the Federal/Westminster Calvinism which he believes did untold damage to the Reformed tradition, particularly in TFT’s native Scotland (but elsewhere as well). You will notice as you read this that Torrance essentially counters all of the points of a Westminster Calvinism by offering biblically rich themes as those have come to light in the Self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Since TF is committed to allowing Scripture speak for itself, as it is regulated by the reality of Jesus Christ, he ends up trafficking in themes that focus on God’s universal and unilateral love, as that is fitting to who God is as triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So, you should notice, then, the type of alternative prolegomenon that TFT is working from as he arrives at his kerygmatic-rich notions vis-à-vis dogmatic points. Here is Torrance:

. . . Several comments on this understanding of Christ’s sacrifice may be in place. While traditional forensic language is used, the atoning sacrifice is not to be understood as fulfilled by Christ merely as man (which would imply a Nestorian Christology), but of Christ as the one Mediator between God and man who is himself God and man in one Person. This means that ‘the joyful atonement made between God and man by Christ Jesus, by his death, resurrection and ascension’, is not to be understood in any sense as the act of the man Jesus placating God the Father, but as a propitiatory sacrifice in which God himself through the death of his dear Son draws near to man and draws man near to himself. It is along these lines also that we must interpret the statement of the Scots Confession that Christ ‘suffered in body and soul to make the full satisfication for the sins of the people’, for in the Cross God accepts the sacrifice made by Christ, whom he did not spare but delievered him up for us all, as satisfication, thereby acknowledging his own bearing of the world’s sin guilt and judgment as the atonement. As Calvin pointed out in a very important passage, God does not love us because of what Christ has done, but it is because he first loved us that he came in Christ in order through atoning sacrifice in which God himself does not hold himself aloof but suffers in and with Christ to reconcile us to himself. Nor is there any suggestion that this atoning sacrifice was offered only for some people and not for all, for that would imply that he who became incarnate was not God the Creator in whom all men and women live and move and have their being, and that Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour was not God and man in the one Person, but only an instrument in the hands of the Father for the salvation of a chosen few. In other words, a notion of limited atonement implies a Nestorian heresy in which Jesus Christ is not really God and man united in one Person. It must be added that the perfect response offered by Jesus Christ in life and death to God in our place and on our behalf, contains and is the pledge of our response. Just as the union of God and man in Christ holds good in spite of all the contradiction of our sin under divine judgment, so his vicarious response holds good for us in spite of our unworthiness: ‘not I but Christ’. . . .[1]

The reduction should be clear: TFT’s understanding of Reformed theology is Christ conditioned, and explicated from that vantage point. As a result, an emphasis on God’s love for the world, just as He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, stands at the fore of TF’s thinking when it comes to a theory of the atonement, and its soteriological implications. This is at odds, of course, with Federal theology’s framing of a God-world relation as that is provided for by the legal contract of a Covenant of Works/Grace. Federal theology, as TFT presses, thinks God in terms of a pure being, and thus in categories that are metaphysically juridical and thus impersonal by nature. As a result, as TF also intones, since this notion of God relates to the world through impersonal, distant, and abstract decrees, when Christ comes to the world, under these conditions, Christ becomes simply an instrument in the hands of a wrathful Father. One significant Christological implication of this, as TF shows, is that the work of God in Christ is ruptured from the person of God in Christ, and thus we end up with a Nestorian-like dualism at play in Jesus of Nazareth.

You would hope by now that classical Calvinists would have come to realize the many errors of thinking God in decretal terms. You would have hoped that these same people would have repented of this by now, and turned to what TFT is describing and developing with reference to an Evangelical Calvinism. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. That’s okay, some types only go out by prayer.

[1] T. F. Torrance: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell, 18-19.