Category Archives: James Torrance

Unlimited Atonement in a Reformed Theology as Told by James Torrance and John McLeod Campbell

Posted on by

James B. Torrance, brother of Thomas F. Torrance, offers a very nice and concise synopsis of the entailments of what me and Myk Habets (along with our various authors) have identified as an Evangelical Calvinism. JBT’s synopsis comes as he wrote the foreword for a book titled, So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian Atonement by George M. Tuttle. Here, JBT is explicitly referring to the themes of John McLeod Campbell’s theology, particularly as that developed as an alternative to the juridically/forensically framed understanding of the Calvinism that we find in Federal (Covenantal) theology; indeed, as that gets codified in the Westminster Confession of Faith, among other confessions and catechisms. As JBT notes, Campbell’s theology, as an alternative iteration of Reformed theology, indeed, a Scottish Theology, challenges the assumption that God primarily relates to humanity through a covenant of works, rather than a relation based on triune love, thus leading to an ostensible Christian spirituality that leaves the would-be saint always wondering about their standing before the Lawgiving God. With further pinpointed clarity, JBT, also shines a light on the implications of thinking of God’s relation to humanity through a Love-giving God, as that is resplendent in Campbell’s theology, and how that rightly alters the way the seeking person might approach God; indeed, as an adopted child in the loving and caring arms of the Father of Life who freely gave His life for the world, in His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. If you are looking for an alternative theology, Reformed even, that first sees God as Father, before Creator and Lawgiver, then what you will find in an Evangelical Calvinism might be just what you have been longing for.

Here is JB Torrance at some length:

A few years ago, while teaching for an academic year in the Vancouver School of Theology, I came across Dr. Tuttle’s doctoral dissertation in the library of the University of British Columbia, on ‘The Place of John McLeod Campbell in British Thought Covering the Atonement,’ and was so impressed by it that I encouraged him to have it published. McLeod Campbell was a remarkable Scottish theologian – thought by many to Scotland’s greatest – whose theology was hammered out on the anvil of his pastoral experience. Here was an invaluable study, not only of McLeod Campbell’s theology of atonement, but also of his influence on subsequent thought, not least on nineteenth century Anglican theology. Now Dr. Tuttle, from his own rich experience as a pastor and teacher in the training of men and women for the Christian ministry, has written this splendid study showing how McLeod Campbell’s theology is such fertile soil and so relevant for us today.

                As a young minister in Row in Dunbartonshire, Campbell was aware of a strong ‘legalistic strain’ in the religion of Scotland, coupled with an introspective lack of joy and assurance which he believed derived from the high Calvinism of his day, with its doctrine of a ‘limited atonement,’ that Christ did not die for all but only for an elect number. Generations of Scots had been taught to ‘examine themselves’ for ‘evidences’ of election. But this had produced an inward looking, too often guilt-ridden, attitude which contrasted so sharply with the joyful triumphant faith and assurance of the New Testament church. So he tells us he made it his early concern to give to his people ‘a ground for rejoicing in God’ by directing their minds away from themselves to the love of God the Father is revealed in the whole life of Christ, and supremely on the Cross.

                He soon came to see that our answer to the question of the extent of the atonement depends on our view of the nature of the atonement. The doctrine of a limited atonement, in the federal Calvinist tradition, especially taught by John Owen, the English Puritan, and Jonathan Edwards in North America, flowed from two convictions about the nature of God. The first that justice is the essential attribute of God, but the love of God is arbitrary, seen in his will to elect some individuals and send Christ to die for them. John Owen had taught that love is not God’s nature, but his will. This, Campbell saw, was not true to the New Testament and the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, that God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is Love in his innermost Being, and has created us and redeemed us in love and for love – for ‘sonship.’ With the ancient fathers, in their negation of Sabellianism, he saw that what God is towards the world in love, in creation and redemption, he is in his eternal nature, as the Triune God.

                The second was that in the federal (covenant) scheme, law is thus prior to grace. God is related to all humankind by ‘the covenant of works (law)’ and only to some by ‘the covenant of grace’ in redemption. Hence atonement was construed in terms of the view that God would only be gracious if law was satisfied and sin punished, that is, by Christ fulfilling for the elect the conditions of the covenant of works (law). McLeod Campbell saw that this inverted the Biblical order, that grace is prior to law, that ‘the filial is prior to the judicial.’ Both creation and redemption flow from grace, and law is ‘God’s heart coming out in the form of law.’ Law is the gift of grace, reveals our need of grace and leads to grace. The Incarnation and the Atonement, which must be held together, are the Father’s act of sending his Son to fulfill for humankind the filial and judicial purposes of creation. Atonement is God’s act of grace in which he takes to himself for us his own divine judgments ‘in order that we might receive the adoption of sons.’ The filial purposes of creation and incarnation are secured by atonement. Hence atonement must be interpreted in terms of both the Trinity and the Incarnation, ‘retrospectively’ removing condemnation on past sin and ‘prospectively’ leading to sonship.

                In our own day, theologians like Barth, Rahner, Moltmann, Jüngel and von Balthasar have seen how Western theology has too often operated with concepts of God which owe more to Aristotle and the Stoic Lawgiver, than the New Testament, and has consequently drifted away from seeing the centrality of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. McLeod Campbell discerned this long ago, and saw its implication, both for the pastoral ministry and for our understanding of the doctrine of God, that the sufferings of Christ the Son on the Cross reveal the suffering Love of the Father. ‘He who has seen me, has seen the Father.’

                Dr. Tuttle’s book is profoundly relevant for the contemporary situation both theologically and pastorally in its concern to show that the Gospel is the Good News of God coming to restore to us our lost humanity, ‘to bring many sons to glory’ – and therefore good news for every creature.

James Torrance[1]

There isn’t much to add to this. Only that, to my chagrin, as I have been sitting with this above reality since around 2002, and more pointedly since in and around 2007, when I first started reading TF Torrance et al., becoming aware of this development within a Reformed theology, I can really only continue to shake my head. I see so many young and old alike continuously running full speed ahead into a Reformed theology that is indeed shaped by the juridical/legal parameters that Campbell, JBT, TFT, Karl Barth et al., in their own respective ways, have presciently offered a more biblically based alternative to. Whether this be at the scholarly level or popular level, no matter, theologians and laymen/women, continue to harp and joust back in forth; as if the Calvinist/non-Calvinist binary, black and white as it apparently is, in regard to sides, is the only way through this theological malaise. I continue to see the masses in evangelical and Protestant christianities hem and haw, as if they have found the golden scepter of theological truth; and this within, again, their respective binary of Calvinism/non-Calvinism—to boot, with all the theological imagination of a dodo bird (sorry, too harsh? . . .). May the Lord give more eyes to see and ears to hear that in fact God is Father of the Son first, before He is ever Creator. With this realization there is a theological hope that outstrips much of the pablum being fed to the people today. Kyrie eleison

[1] George M. Tuttle, So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian Atonement (Edinburgh, The Handsel Press, 1986), 6–7.

The Triune Worshippers against the Eunomians and Classical Liberals

Posted on by

Being a human coram Deo (before or in the presence of the living God), in regard to its telos or purposefulness, is underwritten by being a worshipper of the triune God rather than an as an idolater of a self-projected god of a unitarian and individualistic origination. So-called classical liberalism, much of which was in fact Teutonic or German in orientation, of the Enlightenment/ -post higher critical ilk, is of the latter instance. That is to say, higher critics of the New Testament so demythologized the NT of its reality in the Theandric person of Jesus Christ, that all that was left for Jesus to be, at best, was as an exemplar for others to find in themselves; in mimicry of Jesus’ example of what it meant to operate with a Father-God consciousness; in Schleiermacher’s zeitgeist, having a “feeling” of dependence upon a Father-God. To the point, the classical liberal was necessarily turned inward to the inward curvature of the soul, wherein all that was left to fill the gap between God and humanity, wasn’t the divine personhood of the Godman in Jesus Christ, but instead, the divine personhood resident in each human being as they cultivated the feeling they had for Godness; indeed, as that godness was resident within the environ of their own human being. In other words, once the classical liberal denuded Jesus of His eternal and triune deity, all they had left was some type of Arian-unitarian notion of God wherein the mediator between God and man, was a naked humanity purely predicated by being an abstract human enmeshed in the world processes of existential existence among the other animals alongside us.

James B. Torrance (brother of Thomas F. Torrance) describes this type of unitarian way, with reference to Adolf Von Harnack and John Hick:

Model 1: The Harnack (Hick) Model. The first model . . . is that of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism, given classical expression by Adolf Harnack [sic] in his 1900 Berlin lectures Das Wesen des Christentums, or What is Christianity? Recently Professor John Hick has sought to revive it in an adapted form. According to this, the heart of religion is the soul’s immediate relationship to God. What God the Father was to Old Testament Israel, he was to Jesus, and what he was to Jesus, he was to Paul and still is the same to us and all men and women today. We, with Jesus, stand as men and women, as brothers and sisters, worshiping the one Father but not worshiping any incarnate Son. Jesus is the man but not God. We do not need any mediator, or “myth of God incarnate.”

In Harnack’s own words: “The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son.” Jesus’ purpose was to confront men and women with the Father, not with himself. He proclaimed the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of mankind, but not himself. “The Christian religion is something simple and sublime.” It means “God and the soul, the soul and its God” and this, he says, must be kept “free from the intrusion of any alien element.” Nothing must come between the child and his heavenly Father, be it priest, or Bible, or law, or doctrine, or Jesus Christ himself! The major “alien element” which Harnack has in mind is belief in the incarnation, a doctrine which he regarded as emerging from the hellenizing of the simple message of Jesus.

This view is clearly unitarian and individualistic. The center of everything is our immediate relationship with God, our present-day experience. The Father-Son relationship is generic, not unique. With this interpretation, all the great dogma of the church disappear:

    • The doctrine of the Trinity. We are all sons and daughters of God and the Spirit is the spirit of brotherly love.
    • The incarnation. Jesus Christ is not “his only [unicus] Son, our Lord,” but one of the class of creaturely sons of God. Sonship is not unique to Christ.
    • The doctrines of the Spirit, union with Christ, the Church as the body of Christ and the sacraments. Jesus did not found a church. He proclaimed the kingdom of God as a fellowship of love.

This liberal reconstruction made deep inroads and accounts in measure for the moralistic view of Christianity—where Jesus is the teacher of ethical principles, and where the religious life is our attempt to follow the example of Jesus, living by the golden rule, “doing to others as you would be done by.” With this moralistic, individualistic understanding of God and the Christian life, the doctrine of the Trinity loses its meaning, in fact disappears—and with it all doctrines of atonement and unconditional free grace, held out to us in Christ.[1]

For students of theological history what should be evident is the way that history repeats itself; albeit in different dress and grammar. At base, there is only so much space for the human wit to innovate ‘under the Sun.’ In other words, the issues the Protestant or classical liberals presented the Enlightened and post-Enlightened world with were, by and large, the same issues the early church Fathers, like Athanasius, Irenaeus, Cyril et al. were faced with by the Arians, Eunomians, and the many other traditional heretics we know of today.

The key to genuine worship of the triune God is that first the person must confess the fact that there is a triune God. Once this confession has been made, not in abstraction, but from within the depths of Christ’s vicarious confession for us—as He lamented with and worshipped the Father for us, in the breath of Holy Spirit—the potential worshipper can simply repose in the bosom of the Father, and worship from within the center of God’s life as that is the Only Begotten. Once this move is understood, indeed as the move of God for the world in the Theandric person of the eternal Son, Jesus Christ, we are no longer thrown upon ourselves (as TFT was wont to phraseize), but upon the mercies and graciousness of the living God; indeed, the living God who truly is, Immanuel, God with us. The classical liberals were too taken by their own moment in history, indeed an Arianizing and Eunomianizing moment, and as such, like the Vienna Positivists, lived and breathed in a vacuous turmoil of their own making. To be sure, they would have had it no other way; that is, until they went to stand before the living God. Now like the Rich Man they gnash their teeth as they remember the poor man, Lazarus, and realize that he had found and been found by the narrow way of the living God’s kingdom in the risen Christ.

All that is left for the unitarian, the Arian and Eunomian, the classical liberal worshipper of God is to first worship their own innards, and then attempt to project those onto the feelings they themselves discern as the Holy drip of God’s Fatherly life built into the immanent frame of their own deified lives, as it were. What a tragedy indeed.

[1] James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic Press, 1996), 25–6.

James B. Torrance on a Gracious Calvinism rather than a Legal Calvinism: How an Ecstatic Christology Corrects an Immanentized Christology

Posted on by

One of the benefits of reading published PhD dissertations is that often the doctoral supervisor, of whomever you happen to be reading, will write the preface to the publication. In the case of the book I’m just starting by M. Charles Bell—Calvin and Scottish Theology: The Doctrine of Assurance, which is Bell’s published dissertation submitted to the University of Aberdeen in 1982—James B. Torrance, Bell’s supervisor offers a brilliant summation of the state of affairs present in the Reformed church in Scotland at the time of its writing. Torrance’s précis surveys the nature of Calvinism in Scotland, and how it developed a legalistic rather than gracious character. This is quite stunning, particularly as it aligns so well with a central impetus for our offering of Evangelical Calvinism. We of course took the language of Evangelical Calvinism from James’ brother Thomas, which we found in his book Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell. It encouraged me to read James’ foreword to Bell’s book, it is in keeping with the critique presented by his brother in his book: Scottish Theology. As such I thought I’d share it at length.

JB Torrance’s Preface is only about two pages in length, so I thought I would transcribe the whole thing. I will follow up on it with some of my own closing reflections. Torrance writes:

James Denny, the beloved Scottish theologian and New Testament scholar, used to say that in the ideal Church all our theologians would be evangelists and our evangelists theologians. He was echoing the langue of Plato’s Republic that in the ideal State all our politicians would be philosophers and our philosophers politicians.

This ideal is one to which our Scottish Church has often aspired but perhaps too seldom realised. Yet when one thinks of the names of churchmen studied in this book — John Knox, Samuel Rutherford, Fraser of Brea, Thomas Boston, the Erskine brothers, John McLeod Campbell and a host of others — we see that these men were preachers of the Gospel of grace and scholars who sought to use their minds to understand the meaning and the implications of grace and to be ready to give an answer to those who ask a reason for their faith.

In all ages, issues have emerged which have tended to obscure the meaning of grace, and Scotland is no exception. But in all ages, God has raised up faithful witnesses to call the Church back to her foundations in Christ. In the early eighteenth century, Thomas Boston, reflecting on ‘the legal strain’ in Scottish Calvinism, which he detected early in his ministry, wrote in his Memoirs, ‘I had no great fondness for the doctrine of the conditionality of the covenant of grace.’ He sensed that much of the ‘legal preaching’ of his day was far removed from the doctrine of the unconditional freeness of grace taught by Calvin and the first Reformers—from the twin doctrines of sola gratia, that ‘all parts of our salvation are complete in Christ’ and that faith means ‘union with Christ our Head’. Where had this ‘legal strain’ come from in a Calvinistic land like Scotland? The issue came out into the open in the so-called  ‘Marrow Controversy’ a few years later when the General Assembly, to the dismay of Boston and his evangelical friends, condemned the teachings of a Puritan work entitled The Marrow of Modern Divinity by an Edward Fisher. Boston had come across this book in his parish ministry, and it had opened his eyes to the meaning of grace and the assurance of faith.

A century later, another Scottish preacher and theologian, John McLeod Campbell, wrote in his Reminiscences how as a young minister he was deeply disturbed by the introspective, joyless, legalistic religion of many in his day and in his own congregation in Rhu in Dunbartonshire, and tells us that he made it his early concern to give his people ‘ a ground for rejoicing in God’ by calling them back to the freeness and universality of God’s grace. He felt that the major reason for his people’s introspective lack of joyful assurance was the high Calvinistic doctrines of election and limited atonement, and the resultant calls for self examination for ‘evidences’ of election — not least in participation for coming to the Lord’s Table. His earliest concern was therefore to direct their faith away from themselves to the love of God in Christ in whom we are forgiven and who calls us to ‘joyful repentance’.

Dr Bell, in this excellent book, carefully examines the doctrines of atonement, faith and assurance in the teaching of Calvin and then of a long remarkable succession of Scottish preachers and theologians, to show how joyful assurance flows from an awareness of the universality and unconditional freeness of grace. This has too often been obscured by unfortunate elements in the development of Scottish Calvinism — the restriction of grace and the Headship of Christ as Mediator to the elect, by the doctrine of ‘a limited atonement’, by subordinating grace to law, by notions of ‘legal repentance’, by confusing the concept of ‘covenant’ with that of ‘contract’.

There is nothing our Church in Scotland more needs to recover in this pragmatic and restless age than this understanding of ‘the unconditional freeness of grace’ given to us in Christ. A proper doctrine of grace flows from a proper doctrine of God, who prime purpose for humanity is legal rather than filial, who needs to be conditioned into being gracious by human obedience and repentance? This call to a proper doctrine of God sounds out clearly in this masterly study of our Scottish inheritance. But it is relevant, not only for Scotland, but for all of our churches whose roots are in the Latin West.

James B. Torrance[1]

This could summarize what we have been attempting to do with our Evangelical Calvinism books. James and Thomas Torrance have both been taken to task by someone like Richard Muller; he claims their historiography in regard to this period is off, as such, as corollary, he wants argue that their theology, in general, is also off. I.e. that this “legal” reading of the history of Reformed theology is awry and destitute of actual reality when we carefully examine the theologians of this period. Interestingly, as Bell, it appears, and Thomas in his book on the period have demonstrated Muller is wrong. But the proponents of Muller would argue that what I just did there is circular; i.e. appeal to James Torrance’s endorsement of his doctoral student’s work on the period. Likewise, I could assert that their critique is circular based upon Muller’s own biased reading of the period.

But getting beyond such pedantic things what I really want to highlight is what James highlights in his précis; i.e. the idea that we need to recover the gracious evangel of God’s Triune life given for the world in his dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. This is what I continuously am hoping to accomplish through posts here at the blog, and through the books Myk and I have been producing (two more are slated). I am not interested in presenting a fluffy concept of grace, like an easy-believism or something, but a concept that isn’t a concept at all but instead a person, Jesus Christ.

As much as modern day proponents of the ‘legal’ Calvinism that James speaks of attempt to retrieve the past, what they are unfortunately doing is giving the church a Gospel that is No-Gospel; a concept of God’s relation to the world that is primarily based upon a legal set of decrees , and thus a spirituality that is performance based and too introspective. What I’m hoping to present to people, through engaging with the Torrances, Barth, something like Bell’s book, etc. is the idea that the Gospel is an ecstatic reality given to us in and through the objective reality of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ. ‘Legal’ Calvinism cannot give you an ecstatic Jesus, at least not in its spirituality; this is because their doctrine of limited atonement does not allow for that. Their concept of limited atonement necessarily forces the individual to focus on themselves, on a daily basis. That’s what produced things like English Puritanism, and it’s why the Marrow Men arose (what JBT references in his précis) as a contravening voice; a voice that the ‘legal’ Calvinists knew they’d have to put down quickly.

Evangelical Calvinism is distinct from Federal, ‘Legal’ Calvinism precisely at the point that we think God in Christ. We think from God’s Self-revelation in personalist terms rather than legal terms; in genuinely covenantal terms (think of how Barth uses that), rather than quid pro quo contractual terms of the sort that you’ll get in the covenant of works and grace construct. Unfortunately this ‘legal’ type of Calvinism continues to pick up steam among the populace in the church through movements like The Gospel Coalition or the Young, Restless, and Reformed. This is too bad. They are creating a generation (beyond just craft beer drinking, cigar smoking, tat wearing) Christians who will be pressed up against a conception of God who is more a ‘Law-giver’ than he is a ‘Lover’; this precisely because of the type of underly-evangelized Aristotelian metaphysics they have retrieved in and through their engagement with the scholastic Reformed of the Post Reformed Orthodox period (16th and 17th centuries in particular).

But there is another way, even in the history. This is why JB Torrance was so excited by his student, Bell’s, work; and it’s something we should all be excited about. Any time we can understand God’s grace in personal, Triune, loving ways we should be shouting such news from the roof tops; and we should in the process be challenging other presentations that point people in the wrong direction.

 

[1] James B. Torrance, “Preface,” in M. Charles Bell, Calvin and Scottish Theology: The Doctrine of Assurance (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press, 1985), 5-6.

Participatio, James B. Torrance, Alan Torrance, Limited Atonement, and Evangelical Calvinism

Posted on by

Participatio is the peer reviewed online theological journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship (I had the honor of being a copy editor and assistant editor for Participatio for a couple volumes), and they just came out with their latest volume. This latest volume is actually an issue dedicated to Thomas Torrance’s brother James B. Torrance, a virtuoso theologian and churchman in his own right. I would like to encourage all of my readers to head over to their website, and give this JBT volume a read. To whet your appetite I would like to offer a quote from the Introductory essay written by James’ son, prof (Dr) Alan Torrance (he is professor of theology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland). Not only do I want to offer this quote as something to pique your interest in the whole of the volume, but I also want to use the material in the quote as a bit of a springboard to talk about something that is core to what Myk Habets and I have called Evangelical Calvinism; as you all know by now, Thomas Torrance, and James Torrance (no less) have provided all kind of impetus and trajectory for the shaping of Evangelical Calvinism (in fact Myk and I stole that language from Thomas’ book Scottish Theology).

The following is a quote from Alan Torrance about an experience that his dad, James Torrance had (early on in his career) as he was asked to share the pulpit with two stalwart theologian-pastors of that day, Martin Lloyd Jones (who JBT served as youth pastor for), and James I. Packer; he found himself in a bit of a quagmire as he staunchly disagreed with his two elders on the issue of the extent of the atonement (both Jones and Packer, of course, affirm the classically held Reformed position that Jesus only died for the elect … more commonly understood in popular parlance as ‘limited atonement’). Here is what Alan Torrance writes of that experience:

Third, there was his “black day.” JB was profoundly involved in evangelical circles and he never ceased to regard himself as an evangelical. He was president of the IVF while studying philosophy in Edinburgh and went on to lead the largest mission ever organised by the Christian Union in Scotland. While in London, he worked alongside Martin Lloyd Jones as his youth pastor. All of this culminated in what he described as possibly the most influential (and distressing) experience of his theological development. He was invited to be a keynote speaker at a massive evangelical conference in London alongside James Packer and Martin Lloyd Jones. At this event, the subject of limited atonement came up — a topic that had been little discussed in post-war evangelical circles. My father found himself outnumbered on the platform when he offered an emphatic rejection of limited atonement, insisting that the God who became human loved and forgave his enemies just as he told us to love and forgive our enemies — seventy times seven, that is, unconditionally. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and those who deny Christ “reject the Lord who bought them.” What distressed him most was the fact that Martin Lloyd Jones supported limited atonement. As he once explained to me, it was this event that led him to devote most of the rest of his career to analysing the elements that had led to the emergence of a doctrine that he, like his missionary father, regarded as a heresy — one that tragically misrepresented the character of God, the integrity of the incarnation and the nature of God’s mission to the world in Jesus Christ. It meant that we could no longer tell people that God loved them or that Christ died for them. Indeed, ultimately, on this understanding, no-one could ever be sure, this side of the eschaton, that they were loved by God or that Christ died for them. [read the full volume here, this quote was taken from Alan Torrance’s Introductory essay to this volume]

What a significant insight into James Torrance’s life and theological development! This is one of the distinguishing factors between us (as Evangelical Calvinists) and classically (so called) Reformed proponents. We believe along with James Torrance (and Thomas) that Jesus Christ in his vicarious humanity and as the ontological ground of all of humanity in the Incarnation assumed the humanity of all people in a very particular way as the man from Nazareth. As such it is impossible for the Evangelical Calvinist to ever conceive of the idea that God only loves some people, some of his creation enough to die for them. Indeed, the logic of our position requires that God loves all of humanity as much as he loves himself, for he has chosen to not be God without us as he elected our humanity for himself in his dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. You see the dilemma then: if Jesus in the incarnation truly assumed humanity and serves as the ground the condition upon which all of humanity holds together (by the ‘word’ of his power see Hebrews 1), then it would be utterly impossible to even consider the idea that Jesus only died for just a few out of the mass of humanity; this would lead to the idea that there is some sort of rupture within the life of God (if in fact he truly did assume humanity in the incarnation, and he did so because of who he is as Triune love).

James Torrance is an Evangelical Calvinist par excellence; alongside, of course, his bother Thomas Torrance. I hope this insight from James’ son, Alan, helps to make clearer why he is such an important person and thinker for us Evangelical Calvinists.