Torrance on Luke 2.40

I had pre-ordered my copy of Torrance’s Atonement, the second half of TF Torrance’s posthumously published dogmatics lectures from his time at New College in the University of Edinburgh, and finally received it shortly before Thanksgiving. A year or so ago the publishers generously sent me an advanced copy of the un-proofed text of the first half, Incarnation, so that I might be one of the first to review it (my review is accessible online). While I picked-up a copy of the published volume shortly after it came out, I had been putting off returning to it until the publication of the second volume. So, once Atonement arrived on my desk I began reading Incarnation with the intention of reading the two volumes back-to-back. So, you can expect to see snippets from these two volumes posted from time to time in the near future. Here is the first:

Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Robert T. walker, ed.; Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic and Paternoster, 2008): 105-6:

"What happens in the incarnation is the union of God and man. At last in the midst of our fallen humanity, within and in spite of our estrangement from him, God comes in his love and binds us to himself forever. God and man meet in Jesus Christ and a new covenant is eternally established and fulfilled.

"That takes place in the union of man and Go din the infant and maturing Jesus, in a growing in wisdom and stature both toward God and toward man. It is a growing which reaches its first stage when Jesus is twelve years of age, when according to Jewish law a son passes from infancy to the state of adult responsibility, and when the child himself confesses with his own lips the word of God sealed in his flesh in circumcision. Then Jesus is found in his Father’s house, not only answering the required interrogations but proposing them himself to the doctors of the law. Brought up from his mother’s knee in the Old Testament scriptures he has already entered into a wonderful fullness of divine wisdom. The second stage is reached when, after years of toil at the carpenter’s bench as the ben-bayith, the son of the house, taking his place along with Joseph as bread winner in the family at Nazareth, Jesus at last reaches the age of thirty, the age when under the Old Testament regulations a man might enter upon the active life of the priesthood. At that point in the fullness of time, Jesus steps forth among mankind, deliberately entering into active and living solidarity with his fellow men and women, in order to bring the union between himself and sinners to its completion in the mission of mediation upon which he has been sent by the Father."

Coincidently, this is my 400th post here at DET.