Trinity and Humanity

One of my favorite works of theology has become The Trinitarian Faith by T.F. Torrance. I am currently working my way through it for a second time, highlighting and underlining as I go. In this book Torrance goes line by line through the Nicene Creed and shows the Biblical basis for the Creed as well as the thinking of the Church Fathers who lived at that time and wrote the document.

To whet your appetite for the book, I offer this excerpt, taken from his discussion of the Creed’s statement about the Son and the Fathers’ writings about what the reality of Christ means for humanity.

Athanasius . . . insisted on the universal range of the vicarious work of Christ . . . due to the fact that it was not just a man who suffered and died for us but the Lord as man, not just the life of a man that was offered to save us but the life of God as man. . . . he never tired of asserting that what Christ accomplished . . . applied to all without any qualification. . . the profound interaction between incarnation and atonement in Jesus . . . has the effect of finalising and sealing the ontological relations between every man and Jesus Christ. . . he [Jesus] has now anchored human nature in his own crucified and risen being, freely giving it participation in the fullness of God’s grace and blessing embodied in him. Since he is the eternal Word of God by whom and through whom all things that are made are made, and in whom the whole universe of visible and invisible realities coheres and hangs together, and since in him divine and human natures are inseparably united, then the secret of every man, whether he believes it or not, is bound up with Jesus for it is in him that human contingent existence has been grounded and secured. ~ The Trinitarian Faith, pp. 182-183

~ Jonathan Stepp