Thinking about Jesus should really make us feel awe, because Jesus is awesome (in the truest sense of the word)… In his short book Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking T.F. Torrance shares a little bit about why he is in awe of Jesus:
It has been my custom since I was a child to read through the Bible once or twice a year, and when I come to the Gospels I am always overwhelmed with the thought that here in Jesus it is God himself who has come among us, not just a man indwelt by the Spirit of God like an OT prophet, but actually as a man. I can never get over this astonishing fact… What overwhelms me is the sheer humanness of Jesus, Jesus as the baby at Bethlehem, Jesus sitting tired and thirsty at the well outside Samaria, Jesus exhausted by the crowds, Jesus recuperating his strength through sleep at the back of a ship on the see of Galilee, Jesus hungry for figs on the way up to Jerusalem, Jesus weeping at the grave of Lazarus, Jesus thirsting for water on the cross – for that precisely is God with us and one of us….
The sheer humanity of Jesus is overwhelming. In fact its when I realized this (through historical Jesus study) that my faith made leaps and bounds. The fact that the God of the universe lived a fully human life, that he knows what it means to be human like me absolutely blows my mind.
I also love the fact that a theologian of the status of T.F. Torrance was in awe of God, that he never lost that his “heart” so to speak to his “head.” In fact the stuff in his “head” led him to even greater depths of worship in his heart. Truth leads to worship for T.F. Torrance and I would venture to say for the entire Torrance family. The Torrance family’s theology is one marked by intense intellectualism that is never divorced from faith and matters of the heart. If only all theologians learned from their example then theology wouldn’t get such a bad rap among certain segments of evangelicalism.
CWoznicki Think Out Loud 