PERFECT THEOLOGY?

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The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified… John 12:23

In my attempt to understand this gap between the Jesus we meet in the gospels and the God portrayed in our culture, I have been drawn consistently to one key question: is God really like Jesus?

This was a foundational question for the theologian T F Torrance. A Church of Scotland minister and renowned scholar, Torrance’s thinking bridges the divide between the heights of academic research and the ground of everyday pastoral relationships. By his own account, his passion for theology was ignited while he was serving as a chaplain in the Second World War, with a question posed to him by a dying soldier.

I came across a young soldier (Private Philips), scarcely twenty years old, lying mortally wounded on the ground, who clearly had not long to live. As I knelt down and bent over him, he said: ‘Padre, is God really like Jesus?’ I assured him that he was – the only God that there is, the God who had come to us in Jesus, shown his face to us, and poured out his love to us as our Saviour.

This experience became the cornerstone of Torrance’s theological study. He describes a second occasion many year later, in Parish ministry, when the same question was posed to him. He writes that

‘I kept wondering afterwards what modern theology and the Churches had done to drive some kind of wedge between God and Jesus.

In many ways, Torrance made it his life’s work to heal this divide – to reconnect the church’s thinking about ‘God’ with the Gospel records of Jesus. He writes, ‘When we look into the face of Jesus Christ and see there the very face of God, we know we have not seen and cannot see God anywhere else or in any other way but in him, for he is God himself become human and there is no God except the God who has come and meets us in Jesus.’