As I said before in my last post, Torrance initially believed his vocation was to follow in his father's footsteps as a foreign missionary. It was only while studying at New College at the University of Edinburgh that he began to believe that his ministry might fall within the real of theological education.
In 1939 Torrance returned from a brief stint of teaching at Auburn seminary in New York (the content of those lectures can be found in The Doctrine of Jesus Christ) to a country on the verge of war. He initially attempted to enlist with the British Army Chaplains but was told that the waiting list was currently two years long. After a brief season studying at Oriel College in Oxford while finishing his doctoral dissertation begun in Basel, Torrance accepted a call to be pastor of a Church of Scotland parish in Alyth. He would serve there until 1947, though the time was interrupted by his service with the Allied Forces in Europe. After that he served for three years at the Beechgrove Church in Aberdeen before accepting a post at New College. Torrance's memoirs of that time in Alyth have recently been published, and are full of many reflections that give insight into his pastoral heart, such as what follows:
"I made a point of reading a passage of the Holy Scripture and praying in each home, relating the intercession as far as I could to their family life and circumstances of which I learned from their elder.... During those pastoral visits I used to recall the statement of John Calvin that the gospel should be preached privatim et domatim, privately and from house to house, and made that a major part of my ministry. I found that after I had visited people two or three times and read the Bible to them and prayed with them, they often opened their hearts to me. I learned more of the needs of peoples lives and souls in that way than I could have done otherwise, and it helped to make my preaching of the gospel and exposition of the Bible as personally relevant as possible. I recall on one occasion, for example, a lady member of the congregation hesitatingly told me that she had a vision of angels, but had never dared to tell any minister about it in case it was dismissed. When I told her that I believed her, and spoke a little of the ministry of angels, she was overjoyed in a way that deepened her faith and her own reading of the Holy Scriptures" (Gospel, Church, and Ministry 34).
T.F.'s time as a pastor serves as the background for his ministry at New College teaching divinity students and his writings as well. It wouldn't be correct to say that he was driven by 'practical' concerns - it's clear that the motivating force of his theology is the revelation of Jesus Christ in the Scriptures. But that was always done with an eye to the church and its ministry in the world. Nowhere is this more clear than in T.F.'s continued concern with making clear that it is through Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone that we come face to face with God. At key points in his pastoral ministry he encountered people who questioned whether or not God was really like Jesus, and the lasting impact of his work has been to answer that question with a resounding "Yes!" Here Torrance recounts an incident that took place in his service to the Allied troops during the invasion of Italy:
"When daylight filtered through, 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 there is, the God who has come to us in Jesus, shown his face to us, and poured out his love to us as our Savior.... The incident left an indelible impression on me. I kept wondering afterwards what modern theology and the Churches had done to drive some kind of wege between God and Jesus.... There is no hidden God, no Deus Absconditus, no God behind the back of the Lord Jesus, but only the one Lord God who became incarnate in him" (from T.F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography).
Torrance's work clearly has academic implications for any number of fields: the dialogue between theology and natural science, the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the interpretation of the Scottish Presbyterianism being just a few. But even within the most challenging of his works there is a clear pastoral trajectory which is in all true theological work in its service to the Church in its ministry in the world. I close with a passage I recently stumbled across about the importance of prayer in the T.F.'s work of training ministers while at New College:
"During my own years of teaching theology in New College... I used to ask myself two questions about students as they completed their training: whether they had tuned into knowledge of God in their studies so finely that they had attained a theological instinct for divine truth, and whether their conduct of public worship reflected the habit of private prayer. They were much more important for the holy ministry, I felt, than clever essays, profound learning, or brilliance in examinations. Fine-tuning of the human mind in the knowing of God and direct personal communing of the human spirit with God lie at the very heart of theological understanding, and bear decisively not only on the vocation of the pastor but on the vocation of the theological professor" (from "John Baillie at Prayer").
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