No other doctrine was as important to Thomas Torrance as christology. As Walker notes in his foreword, his christology is the ‘starting point and centre of all his thinking’ (p. x). Torrance spent decades professing this christology at New College, Edinburgh. Now thanks to Walker's skill and hard work we have those lectures in one impressive volume. Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ is the first substantial christology from an English-speaking theologian since H. R. Mackintosh, Torrance's teacher, gave us The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ in 1912.

Incarnation is dogmatic theology. The term dogmatic is repugnant to a lot of people today, but, for Torrance, dogmatic theology is not theology that is high-handed. It is scientific theology. This is theology that is done ‘in accordance’ with the ‘nature and activity’ of its object of study, namely Jesus Christ (p. 4). This also means that dogmatic theology is fundamentally biblical.

The title for this volume is well-chosen. It encapsulates the contents. The hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in Christ is the key to Torrance's christology. For Torrance, this union is ontological and historical. Yet it is still a great ‘mystery’ which can only be disclosed from God's side. No amount of examination of the historical Jesus can lead us to the divinity of Christ.

For Torrance, the hypostatic union explains God's revelation and redemption. We can never comprehend God but, since the Word became flesh, we can surely apprehend God and talk about him. That is because in Christ there is even a union of ‘creaturely language and God's own godly language’ (p. 193). Only God can save us from sin, death and destruction. But he can do that only by becoming one of us, by taking on our human nature completely. We must bear in mind, Torrance points out, the words of Gregory Nazianzen: ‘the unassumed is the unredeemed’ (p. 62).

It is not enough, though, to concentrate on the person of Christ. We must give equal consideration to his life. Torrance insists repeatedly that the being of Christ and the work of Christ must be understood in mutual relation. Thus classical christology has to be interpreted ‘soteriologically and eschatologically’, for the advent of Christ is about the ‘breaking in of the eschatological kingdom’ (p. 20). In other words, the patristic emphasis on the incarnation must be integrated with the Reformation emphasis on the cross of Christ.

Incarnation is clearly a christology from above; indeed a christology at its highest. ‘In the Word become flesh . . . Jesus Christ is God’ (p. 67). For Torrance, this is an awesome truth that becomes abundantly clear once, by the grace of God, we yield to it. Torrance certainly did. In this book (as in all of them) he exudes a faith in Christ's divinity scarcely equalled in modern times.

Yet incarnation is also a book about us. That is because the great story of humankind – its tragedy, its hopes, its triumphs – is fully revealed in Jesus Christ. He reveals God's nearness to us; yet also our distance from God which has brought God's judgement upon us. Christ bridges that distance, but not by acting as a third party. The hypostatic union means, instead, that he substitutes his sinless nature for our corrupt human nature. As a result, we are all judged in him but also elected to salvation in him.

In another sense, there is nothing of us in this story of Christ. Incarnation contains, we might say, an anthropology from above. God's assumption of human nature may lead us to assume erroneously that humanity in general has been deified. This is why Torrance takes pains to assert the uniqueness of Christ's human nature by means of the doctrine of anhypostasis and enhypostasis. These classical terms are used to assert that the human nature of Jesus Christ has no independent existence apart from its union with the person of the divine Son.

Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ is offered as a ‘readable, accessible and comprehensive introduction to Torrance's theology’. It succeeds on these lines. Walker displays a clear, confident understanding of the central themes as well as the nuances in his theology. Yet he keeps technical discussions to the periphery. He assists the reader by including a detailed eight-page synopsis, a thirty-page introduction and a six-page glossary.

On the other hand, theologians who are already quite familiar with Torrance's theology will not find a lot that is new in this work – although they will no doubt appreciate the book's readability and scope. Moreover, much of what purports to be new is not new at all. We are told that the long addendum (almost fifty pages) on eschatology has ‘never . . . been revised for publication’. This is not true. It was published in the Evangelical Quarterly in 1953 (vol. 25). In spite of these problems, we eagerly await Walker's forthcoming volume on Torrance's doctrine of the atonement.