Not docetic

A warming piece from the Confessing Reader

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. (1 Corinthians 15.17)

[T]he resurrection of Jesus is to be thought of as the recreating and restoring of man into the same sphere of real being as that to which we human creatures belong, and is, as such, an historical happening in continuity with the whole historical happening of Jesus, the incarnate Son. If the resurrection is not an event in history, a happening with the same order of physical existence to which we belong, then atonement and redemption are empty vanities, for they achieve nothing for historical men and women in the world. Unless the atonement through the resurrection breaks into, and is real in, our historical and physical existence and continues to be valid as saving power in our earthly and temporal being, it is ultimately a mockery. That is why all docetic conceptions of the risen Christ are quite irrelevant to men and women of flesh and blood, and have no message to offer them in their actual existence. It is for this reason that eschatology, with the heart taken out of it in the denial of a genuine resurrection, is meaningless, and without relevance to the on-going life of the world. Everything depends on the resurrection of the body, otherwise all we have is a Ghost for a Saviour.

Space, Time and Resurrection, Thomas F. Torrance, p. 87

I read Torrance years ago, and was pleased to be reminded of this bit of 'reality-theology'. The very same line of thought could well be used to connect this same Christ to his work as creator in Gen 1, methinks.