Category Archives: Alan Torrance

On Being the Listening Church: How Dialectical Theology, Properly Understood, is Dialogical Theology

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What is dialectical theology? Barth is often referred to as a dialectical theologian; especially the earlier Barth. Some want to implicitly criticize Barth by asserting that because Barth was a dialectical theologian, he, eo ipso was a Hegelianizing theologian (i.e., putting Hegel’s dialectic to work for his theologizing). And yet, Barth is much more original than that. He was clearly a modern theologian, as is anyone who currently does theology in the 21st century. Even so, his methodology was to allow Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ to regulate his deployment of any other mechanisms he might have had available to him. That is to say, just as the best of the patristic fathers did with Hellenic grammars—evangelizing them into a non-correlationist salvation—Barth, I would argue, did with not just Hellenic grammars, but with his modern ones as well; whether that be with reference to Kant, Hegel, or whomever. For Barth, it wasn’t the tails of the philosophies or the grammars that wagged the dog, so to speak, but it was the “dog,” the Self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, who ends up wagging the tail of said and available intellectual grammars of the time.

We can see the aforementioned sentiment as that is illustrated by Barth in response to one of his contemporaneous detractors, Eric Peterson. Barth, while he took Peterson’s critique of his dialecticism seriously, believed that Peterson sorely misread him. Notice how Alan and Andrew Torrance, respectively, lift up the way Peterson was critiquing Barth on Barth’s deployment of dialecticism:

In his booklet “What is Theology?,” Peterson stresses that if “revelation is paradox, then there is also no theology,” and, if this is the case, “there is also no revelation.” While Barth had frustrations with Peterson’s reading of him, he still took his words seriously. . ..[1]

In response to Peterson’s critique, Barth writes the following:

The revelation of which theology speaks is not dialectical, is not paradox. That hardly needs to be said. But when theology begins, when we humans think, speak, and write . . . on the basis of revelation then there is dialectic. Then there is a stating of essentially incomplete ideas and propositions among which every answer is also again a question. All such statements reach out beyond themselves towards the fulfilment of the inexpressible reality of divine speaking.[2]

Peterson was afraid that Barth’s theological methodology left things in a contradictory wash, such that no genuine knowledge of God, and subsequent doctrines, could ever critically obtain. And yet as we see in Barth’s response to Peterson, Barth is operating with a theological ontology wherein subsequent theological epistemologies (in regard to how we know and speak of God, humanly) must operate with the type of deference towards the ineffable and living God, that is demanded; such that, at our best, in Christ’s mediation, we can only proximate knowledge of God, that is, on this side of the Eschaton. And so, for Barth, really, as we pressed in our own way, in our Evangelical Calvinism books, and in a thesis, Barth’s (and Torrance’s) dialectical theology is really more of a dialogical theology wherein we cry out and pray to our God who is Holy. It is this “cry” that becomes the theological developments the church has witnessed throughout her existence post-ascension and pre-descension at the second coming of Jesus Christ. The priority in this frame is on the fact that Deus dixit (God has spoken … and in fact, continues to speak). In this way, for Barth, proper theological development is a matter of being the ‘listening church,’ the ’responsive church.’ In this relational and prayerful and koinonial frame, for Barth, and many of us following, to know God is to hear from God; and then to speak with God, and con-versate in this type of triunely directed and Self-given marriage of Himself for us; and thus, for Himself, just as Christ is for the Father for us in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 235.

[2] Barth, Church and Theology, 299–300 cited by Torrance and Torrance, Beyond Immanence, 236.

The Miracle of Gospel Time and the Antidote it Provides for Our Political Time

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God’s covenant life of grace is the inner reality of the external creation and order that we are agents within as His creatures. This implicates everything; especially history, politics, theology, so on and so forth. God’s life of grace joins His life of eternal-time with the tangent of ‘calendar-time’ in such a way that the latter finds all of its predication in and through the former. One thing this does is that it at the same miraculous time universalizes and particularizes time and history all in the same go. That is to say, it so expands the horizons of the so-called space-time continuum that it ends up being an inane posture to think that our experiences of our personal-times could serve as the fulcrum for our perception of reality to begin with.

An application of the aforementioned notion on the relationship between eternity and time, as that is conjoined within the miracle of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, could be to use that as the basis for the Christian’s approach to matters related to politics, and everything else. In this time, in 2024 in America, we are currently faced with a POTUS election whose ramifications for time to come seem to circumscribe and even eclipse all of time, and all of reality for time to come. And yet in light of the miracle of the incarnation, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, such happenings are relativized by the greater and realer time of God’s time, God’s predication of the world in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. If nothing else, the greatness, the ineffableness of God’s in-breaking, and His continuous in-breaking, into this world, into “our” supposed time, ought to place all the fears and anxieties of these times into the womb of the Father where time in reality was first birthed for us in the Theanthropos, the Godman, Jesus Christ.

Here is how father and son duo, Alan and Andrew Torrance, write about these matters as developed in the theology of Karl Barth:

An additional positive point that comes up in Barth’s discussion of the moment is that the unity that God establishes between eternity and time is a unity with the whole of time—a unity that holds together in the past, present, and future in the oneness of God’s historical narrative. The idea that moments such as the moment of resurrection and the moment of faith are interconnected in the whole of time is again incomprehensible to us. This is because our thinking is caught up in and conditioned by the “stream of time,” preventing us from seeing the bigger theological picture sub specie aeternitatis. Insofar as we reduce history to our immediate experience of it, we close history off from the one who unites it as a whole. In so doing, we hold ourselves back from seeing that we are living in “the invisible New Age” in which “each moment in time is a parable of the eternal ‘Moment’.” As hard as this is to fathom, the fact that God, for Barth, unites Godself with history means that “every moment in time bears within it the unborn secret of revelation, and every moment can be thus qualified.” Time, he writes, “is swallowed up in eternity,” which means that flesh is swallowed up “in the infinite victory of the Spirit.” Therefore, every event in history must be understood according to the unity that the eternal God establishes with history and for history.[1]

These are deep considerations, but important ones if we as Christians are going to faithfully fulfil our role as witnesses to God’s meritorious works for us, for this world in Jesus Christ. It ought to keep us from being swallowed by the fear of the absolute immanentizing of this world, as if its own inner source and reality is all there was, is, and is to come. The point, ultimately, as this world, and all that happens within it are predicated by God’s life and redemption of this world, as this world has become God’s world, both as He originally created, and then recreated it from the flesh and blood, from the Eucharist of His life for the world as that has been eternally generate in the bosom of the Father by the hovering and creative movement of the Holy Spirit. The takeaway, for one thing, ought to be that nothing and nobody is greater than history’s reality as that reality has always already been such in the face (prosopon) of Jesus Christ. Christians have a hope and redound that this world currently needs in ways that this world does not understand without God’s Self-revelation and our witness to that as we repose in the surly concreteness of Christ’s life for this world. Ultimately, what I am getting at with all of this, is that we ought to continue to remain and “occupy” this land, this time, as God-worshippers. This is the basis and telos (purpose) of all of reality, of all of time as that has been gifted for us through God’s pre-destination for us, in His free and gracious election to not be God without us, but with us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. If knowledge of this reality reigns supreme in our movings and breathings we will offer this world, at this time, at God’s time for the world in Christ, a hope that the principalities and powers could only dream about in some sort of perverted parody of self-actualization.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 210.

Contra epistemological Arian[os]

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Too often, a stress on the centrality of the incarnation is dismissed, by liberals and conservatives alike and without clear argument, as “Barthian” or “Christomonist,” thereby giving them permission to function as epistemological Arians.[1]

What do Alan and Andrew Torrance mean: ‘epistemological Arians?’ They are simply noting that if there is some type of general independent free-floating ontological knowledge of God without being radically grounded in God’s own Self-revelation in the Son, the Logos of God, Jesus Christ, that in fact such knowledge would be something that is finally subordinate to God; something that was abstract and a thing that once was not but came to be, as that sparkled in the minds of a pure and abstract humanity. Abstract, because humanity’s knowledge of God would come epistemologically prior to God’s ontology as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (thus artificially implicating God’s ontology by imposing an abstract human and thus epistemological procrustean bed on God). That is to say, an epistemological Arianism operates from the notion that a knowledge of “Godness” can be conjured, a more accurate knowledge that is, without first encountering said knowledge through the reconciling and revelational work of God in Christ for the world.

The moral: Don’t be an epistemological Arian. (it is sort of heretical and such)

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 153.

Against Cultural Christianity and Christian [Inter]Nationalism: With Reference to Alan and Andrew Torrance

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Things remain politically charged in the world, clearly; especially during this season of time as we lead up to the American presidential election in November. Ever since Trump, in 2016, it seems the balance of powers in the world have been disrupted, to a point that they are no longer willing to conceal their movements. These are indeed, trying and confusing times for Christians. Many simply want nothing to do with the politick, which is very understandable. Personally, I have grown weary of such things as well. And yet as Christians we are to be salt and light in the world. Indeed, we are emissaries of the Most High and Holy triune God. Even as we journey in this far country, even as our souls grow weary, to the point of fainting and exhaustion, as Christians (those in union with Christ), we operate with a Spirit anointed resurrection power in the humanity of Jesus Christ. It is from this power, the personal power of the risen Christ with whom we are participants, that we have overcome the principalities and powers of this world. Ultimately, our citizenship (literally in Greek, our “politic”) is in heaven; in the city of God. And yet because God is grace and beauty He continuously condescends, irrupts, and disrupts our dusty frames, our fallen world, and shouts “behold, I come with great tidings of great joy which shall be for all the people. . .. Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.” He has not left us as orphans, and He has not left this creation without hope or a Savior all encompassing.

The aforementioned ought to conjure something. It ought to make us recognize, as Christians, that every sphere of this world, including ourselves, belongs to the triune God in the risen Christ. That there is no place where His life, Immanuel, does not own the cattle on a thousand hills. This entails something for us, as participants in this type of Kingly life; i.e., that we have the most important voice in the world, in regard to who we represent, and who we bear witness to in all spheres; not least of which is the political. Father and son, Alan and Andrew Torrance, have the following to communicate as they reflect on the political theologies and themes present within the works of S∅ren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, respectively.

In chapter 3, we considered ways in which the Enlightenment subverted the gospel message. Whereas Kierkegaard exposed the impact of post-Enlightenment construals of reason on Danish theology, Barth exposed a parallel confusion in German cultural Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus)—one that provided fertile soil for the emergence of German nationalism. A key factor in this was the two kingdoms doctrine that was inherent in nineteenth-century Lutheranism and had shaped Christian thought in both Denmark and Germany. Its effect was to inoculate the people’s cultural and political commitments against any challenge from acknowledging the lordship of Jesus Christ and it did this by dichotomizing allegiances into the sphere of personal piety and the spheres of the state and culture. Christ’s lordship belonged to the former, the effect of which was to make it a spiritual lordship. This gave rise to an attitude of dual allegiance which was supported by a series of parallel dichotomies between law and grace, state and church, the secular and the spiritual—distinctions that would find further support, as Anthony Thiselton has argued, in Neo-Kantian dualism. The resulting division of allegiances meant that the lordship of Jesus Christ found itself circumscribed by more foundational loyalties to the state, to the nation, to the realm of the law, and thus to the culture.

But why did this separation of the realm of the church from that of the state and culture not weaken rather than strengthen cultural Protestantism? After all, cultural Protestantism held to a synthesis and confusion between faith and cultural affiliation. Their separation, one might assume, should encourage persons to avoid any syncretism. It is important to recognize why this is not the case. As Barth saw with such clarity, when theologians endorse a system of dual loyalties with different sets of obligations (in this case, to the state and also to the church), what is perceived to be the broader field of obligation tends to become foundational, constituting thereby a procrustean bed that determines the extent or boundaries of faith and thus the lordship of Christ. What the history of cultural Protestantism and “civil religion” illustrates is that when it is assumed that the “spiritual” is not allowed to inform the “worldly,” or that participation within the church should not interfere with political allegiances (i.e., that we should “keep Christianity out of politics”), the person of Christ and the Bible are bracketed out of the evaluation of the so-called worldly sphere and thereby the duties and obligations that characterize everyday life. The problem is then compounded when this dual allegiance finds theological endorsement in the insistence that Jesus Christ is Lord only over the spiritual realm of personal piety, but that God has a separate and different purpose for the sociopolitical domain. That has the effect of ascribing divine endorsement to the dictates that emerge within the political or secular realm. Romans 13 is frequently cited, eisegetically, in support of this move.[1]

I think the most important focus to grab from the above is to avoid the neo-Kantian dualism of abstracting the sacred from the secular, and vice versa. In the economy of God, the Kingdom of Christ, the great divorce between heaven and a fallen earth has been put to death in the crucifixion, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. The world, as both Kierkegaard and Barth would argue, just as the Torrances have fruitfully underscored for us, is no longer the sphere of the devil and his minions, but instead, it is the domain of the Word of God. There is no quadrant where Christ is not prime over all; where He is at once elevated and condescended for us by the Spirit, even as He has always forever freely chosen to be God with us, and not without us; to be God in us, and not merely outside of us. It is Immanuel’s veins that have brought times of refreshment to a world committed to a futility of its own sublapsarian making.

Ultimately, as Alan and Andrew Torrance have reported for us, as they have engaged with Kierkegaard’s and Barth’s theologies, respectively, what remains always the truth: is that Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords! This is not merely an ethereal Platonic form in the heavens, but instead a concrete reality as Christ in-breaks, by the Spirit, into the world afresh anew. Even as He is the firstborn from the dead, the firstfruits of God, it is from this place of primacy that the Christian has the elevation, even as we are constantly being given over to the death of Christ, that His life might be made manifest in the mortal members of body, to proclaim that Jesus is Lord, without remainder. This is against a cultural Protestantism that seeks to “win” by the weapons of carnality, and instead it is by a unionizing with the living Christ in the triune God wherein Christians go out in power; even if such power appears weak and foolish to the world and church writ large.

 

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 150–1.

The Christian Living as the “Doctrine” of Christ: Against Speculative Theologies

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He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. I John 5:12-13

This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. John 17:3

 

I share the above passages to illustrate the type of posture the Christian ought to have before God. It is a more sure word of confidence; a boldness that invites us to the banqueting table of God’s throne room of grace. Many other passages could have been adduced, but the above should suffice for our purposes.

Isn’t it interesting that the supposed dominant mode for doing theology (I’m referring now to theological methodology), the so-called classical way (via antiqua), would have us speculate about God, rather than boldly know and proclaim Him; to ourselves, as the Church, and the world, that He is King and Savior? As Moses, by the Holy Spirit has written (my paraphrase): “the secret things belong to God, the things revealed belong to us.” And yet the classical way of doing theology would tell us that there is a deep dark cloud of apophaticism surrounding God; a cloud that would apparently suggest to us that we are to speculate about the whatness of God, even before the whoness. But God introduces us to Himself as the Son of the Father, in the deep bond of affectionate Holy Spirit fellowship. Indeed, there is the mysterium Trinitatis, and the reality of the Godman, the mystery of the incarnation and hypostatic union is indeed just that. But that mystery comes as a person, not as a what-thing to describe before we know His dearly beloved name.

You see, I am not the only one who thinks this way. Our Danish brother, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, shares very similar thoughts. Here is how father and son, Alan and Andrew Torrance describe those thoughts in the Dane’s thought:

In his theology, Kierkegaard primarily uses the language of paradox functionally to maintain that God’s relationship to creation not only transcends but also challenges what we can comprehend with our limited minds. This is not to imply that his use of paradox was merely functional; it was also theological—grounded in an understanding of who God is and who we are before God. Nevertheless, as we shall consider in this section, he did deploy his paradoxical Christology to address some key problems that he associated with Danish cultural Christianity.

What problems did he set out to address? One problem Kierkegaard sought to challenge was the kind of abstract speculating about Jesus Christ that distracted persons from lives of discipleship. For him, this was not only problem in his immediate context, but one that hindered much of the history of Christological reflection, right from the very beginning when Jesus’s contemporaries—including the disciples—struggled to understand his true identity and vocation due to their predetermined theological commitments. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, this penchant for abstraction is especially evident in theologians who act as though the heart of Christianity is to be found in doctrinal statements. Not only did this move tend to take Christianity out of the hands of less-educated members of society, but it turned Christianity against them—it changed Christianity into an intellectual luxury that was barely within their means. He writes:

Theory and doctrine are a fig leaf, and by means of this fig leaf a professor or clergyman looks so portentous that it is terrifying. And just as it is said of the Pharisees that they not only do not enter into the kingdom of heaven themselves but even prevent others from entering, so also the professor prevents the unlearned man by giving him the idea that it depends on doctrine and that consequently he must try to follow along in a small way. This, of course, is to the professor’s interest, for the more important the doctrine becomes, the more important the professor becomes as well, and the more splendid his occupation as the greater his reputation. Generally speaking the professor’s and pastor’s spiritual counselling is a hoax, for it is calculated to prevent people from entering the kingdom of heaven.

For Kierkegaard, there is a tendency in Christian scholarship to become so preoccupied with transposing Christian truths “into the sphere of the intellectual” that Christian ignores the Truth who stands right in front of them, calling them to leave their nets and follow him. For him, this tendency distracted persons from understanding the essence of Christianity. As he saw it, where there is no Christian living, there is no Christian understanding: “When the truth is the way, being the truth is a life—and this is indeed how Christ speaks of himself: I am the Truth and the Way and the Life.” If a particular kind of theological discourse becomes detrimental to the liveliness of a person’s discipleship, then something has gone very wrong.

At various points in his writings, Kierkegaard became so caught up in his critique of the intellectualization of Christianity that he ended up being critical of any amount of reflection on Christian doctrine. Indeed, in one journal entry, he goes so far as to write “I do not have a stitch of doctrine—and doctrine is what people want. Because doctrine is the indolence of aping and mimicking for the learner, and doctrine is the way to sensate power for the teacher, for doctrine collects men.” From what we have seen, he clearly had more than a stitch of doctrine, and he did not want to advance a theology that fell out of line with Christian orthodoxy. Nevertheless, he believed that the intellectual emphasis on theological digging and probing was a misplace priority. In Kierkegaard’s perception, there was no immediate need for so much attention to be given to progressing theological understanding. In many respects, he seemed to think that he would be fine with nothing more than what Richard Baxter referred to as “mere” Christianity. Indeed, in his view, the ongoing speculative pursuit of theological progress was leading to regression.[1]

It isn’t that doctrine is bad for Kierkegaard, as the Torrances rightly inform us; it is that finding life in the development of doctrine as an end in itself becomes a bad (an idol).

As I read this what this suggests to me, because I think Kierkegaard’s thinking is right, is that the Gospel never presents us with a request to speculate about it/Him. The Gospel always already confronts, contradicts, alleviates, and ascends us into the presence of the living and triune God. The Gospel doesn’t present us with a blackhole when peering towards God, but instead, to the sunshine of healing in His wings in the face (prosopon) of His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. This is who I see when I look towards God. I don’t see a space between me and the heavens, such that I am asked to become a chain-builder, linking together this piece and that piece, that I might finally arrive at the first cause of “beatific vision.” Why would a Christian theologian ever think this is the way to approach God? As if we are in some sort of two-storied reality wherein the ladder to the next story comes through demi-urgic like thoughts conceived of by the most genius people on planet earth.

 

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 87-8.

The Gospel of Truth Confronting Our ‘Happily Sick’ Selves

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The Gospel is a Gospel of offense. Christ in the assumptio carnis doesn’t only explain God to us from within Himself and the triune life (Jn 1.18), but He explains who we are as fallen human beings vis-à-vis the holiness and person of the living God. The Gospel doesn’t allow us to remain comfortable with our sins; the Gospel doesn’t allow us to find companionship with our evil, dark and depraved hearts. The Gospel is the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life; as such, it puts us in our place. For the natural [hu]man this causes squirming, it challenges our base desires at their very root; the desires we’d rather live our live-long days with. But the Gospel pronounces a disruptive and loud, No! Gracefully, the Gospel doesn’t just take us to the dark side of our fallen condition; it dialectically, and at the same time, elevates us into the Light and Life of God.

Read along as father and son duo, Alan and Andrew Torrance explain how this looks in the theology of Kierkegaard:

To analyze Kierkegaard’s position more precisely, there are primarily two ways in which he considered Christ to be offensive. The more obvious of the two ways is that Christ proclaims a deeply countercultural message. While Jesus ultimately brings good news to the world, not everything he says will be immediately appealing, especially to elite members of society. For Kierkegaard, this point should be obvious to any sincere reader of Scripture. The reason Christ’s message is unsettling is that so many of us are content with the shape of our sinful lives. In the grip of “the sickness unto death,” we define ourselves according to our own finite ends in a way that is dead to God and in “the state of deepest spiritual wretchedness.” As Climacus puts it, the sinner exists in a state of imprisonment in which he “holds himself captive,” and in this state, he is oblivious to the sickness that accompanies his overly positive view of his life. When caught up in sin, it is extremely difficult to notice, let alone take seriously, our state of despair. We are happily sick, so when the true world-changing gospel message is spoken into this situation, it cannot simply be taken as a message that supports us in our daily lives. When God assumes human form, God does not settle in with us in our “sickbed,” nor does God comfort us in our sinful ways. Rather, God reveals Godself by acts of revelation that seek to deliver us from sickness. Anti-Climacus writes:

Christianity did not come into the world as a showpiece of gentle comfort, as the preacher blubberingly and falsely introduces it—but as the absolute. It is out of love that God so wills but it is also God who wills it, and he wills as he wills. He will not be transformed by human beings into a cozy human god; he wills to transform human beings and he wills it out of love.[1]

We will pick up with the ‘second way’ next time. Suffice it to say, Kierkegaard is onto what should appear to be the obvious: i.e., as fallen creatures we are more than comfortable with our fallen ways. Indeed, as fallen creatures, we aren’t even really aware that we are in fact, sick; more biblically, dead! As the Christology of Kierkegaard underscores, outwith Christ’s penetration into the soil and slum of our souls, we would simply run head-long, with glee, into the eternal abyss. But God’s love is greater than our blindness; and because God is gracious, He elects our humanity for Himself in Christ, and gives us His vicarious eyes. He gives us His eternal Light that we might see Light, and come to recognize the darkness that we so gleefully inhabit outwith His disruption into our humanity.

As an aside: the aforementioned has another implication. It implicates the way knowledge of God does or doesn’t work. If Kierkegaard’s theology is true on this front (and I think it is), this entails that fallen creatures left to themselves have no capacity in themselves, other than to see their darkness as light. Indeed, left to themselves, fallen humanity will construct God and gods in their light, which in fact, of course, is only their darkness in the end. The fallen creature needs God’s Life to assume theirs; bring their life up into His; and it is then only from that inhabitation that fallen humanity is elevated into a status and capacity, through union with Christ by the Spirit, that they can come to think and speak God’s thoughts Deus dixit (‘after He has spoken’). Natural theology simply doesn’t have the chops to offer a theological ontology/epistemology/anthropology that brings a fallen humanity into a genuine and viable knowledge of the living God. Christ alone remains the only mediator between God and humanity whereby fallen humanity can become adopted and elevated humanity as participants in and with Christ’s vicarious humanity for them/us.

Many other implications to be visited, but this will have to suffice for the moment.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 77.