WORSHIP, COMMUNITY, AND THE TRIUNE GOD OF GRACE

James B. Torrance

paternoster press

© James B. Torrance 1996

First published 1996

by Paternoster Press, P.O. Box 300, Carlisle CA3 0QS, U.K.

The right of James Torrance to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the U.K. such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Torrance, James

Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace

I. Title

232.8

ISBN 0-85364-702-x

To my dear wife Mary

who has helped me to see the meaning of

being in loving communion

with God and one another

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Worship—Unitarian or Trinitarian?

2. The Sole Priesthood of Christ, the Mediator of Worship

3. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper: the Way of Communion

4. Gender, Sexuality, and the Trinity

Appendix

Human Language for God, Simile, Metaphor, Parable, Analogy, Name

Preface

It was a unique privilege to be invited to give the Didsbury Lectures in the Nazarene Theological College, Manchester, in November 1994, on the theology of worship. I have long thought and taught that the right road into Christian theology is taken by reflecting on Christian worship in the light of the Bible. The Bible is supremely a manual of worship, but too often it has been treated, particularly in Protestantism, as a manual of ethics, of moral values, of religious ideas, or even of sound doctrine. When we see that the worship and mission of the Church are the gift of participating through the Holy Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father and the Son’s mission from the Father to the world, that the unique centre of the Bible is Jesus Christ, ‘the apostle and high priest whom we confess’ (Heb. 3:1), then the doctrines of the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, the ministry of the Spirit, Church and sacraments, our understanding of the kingdom, our anthropology and eschatology, all unfold from that centre. If out of the confessional (kerygmatic) statements of the Bible, come doxological statements, Christian dogmatics unfold from reflection on doxology. True theology is done in the presence of God in the midst of the worshipping community. The ‘two horizons’ of the Bible and our contemporary church life fuse in worship, as at the Lord’s Table, when we seek together, in a life of communion, to comprehend with the saints of all ages the triune love of God in Christ.

This is why it was a joy to offer these lectures in the Nazarene Theological College which is such a warmhearted, believing, worshipping community. The Wesleys sang their theology ...