The Necessity Problem
Ontological

T. F. Torrance

20th c. · after Athanasius & Campbell

Grounds salvation in Christ's vicarious humanity

The problem it faces

A purely forensic, transactional atonement leaves God's act external to us, and struggles to show how the cross actually heals human nature or reveals a God who isn't at war with himself.

The move it makes

He grounds salvation in Christ's vicarious humanity: the Son believes, obeys, and dies in our place and on our behalf from inside our fallen nature — so atonement is ontological union and healing, not a legal exchange with an angry Father.

The new problem it opens

Critics charge that the ontological account under-accounts for the forensic and wrath-laden texts, buying its coherence by relocating that data rather than explaining it — and assuming fallen humanity raises its own worries about Christ.

My notes

Torrance takes the work of Campbell and pushes in the point that there's no hidden God behind Jesus. Who we see in Jesus is who God is; full stop. Where Campbell had is "vicarious repentance", Torrance expands this to vicarious humanity. Federal theology had turned God's covenant into God's contract, and Torrance explicitly rejected this move.

More than this, Torrance claimed that Christ assumed *fallen* humanity, and sanctified it in the process. We can see some evidence of this in the miracles of Jesus, and how encounters with him resulted in healing, when according to Jewish law, it should have made Christ himself unclean. Healing flows from the Word of God through to humanity, so Torrance was big on union with Christ.

There was a brief period of time when I would have said I was a Christian Universalist (a la Robin Parry and David Bentley Hart). After having moved towards an Athanasian frame, while universal salvation is now a possibility (unlike in the PSA frame), it's no longer as important to me (though I certainly hope that all will be saved, and I think I have good reason from 1 Timothy 2:3-4). Torrance rejects limited atonement, but simultaneously rejects universalism on the basis that both are symptoms of the same disease: reasoning about grace by external logical necessity.

Where this sits

Upstream