He was offered a position in religion at Princeton University, which he rejected in order to return home to Scotland before the start of World War II.

[11] After the war, he returned to his parish in Alyth and later became minister at Beechgrove Church in Aberdeen, following in the footsteps of his Hugh Ross Mackintosh, his former professor.

As a Reformed churchman and theologian, Torrance worked throughout his career for ecumenical harmony with Anglicans, Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics.

Torrance' ecumenical work with the Eastern Orthodox Church was recognised in 1973 when the Archbishop of Axum made him an honorary protopresbyter in the Patriarchate of Alexandria.

Torrance believed that Karl Rahner's work on the Trinity offered an opportunity for genuine ecumenical convergence between East and West, and between Catholics and Evangelicals.

He also made significant contributions to Reformed and Roman Catholic discussions of Justification by Faith and by Grace, and there is also much in Torrance's writing that could form the basis for fraternal dialogue between Christians and Jews.

This integration of doctrine began for Torrance with the Nicene homoousion (the idea that the eternal Son was and is one in being with the Father and Spirit in eternity and with us by virtue of the incarnation), and included the doctrines of the Trinity, Creation, Incarnation, Atonement, Eschatology, Pneumatology, the church and the sacraments as well as a theology of ordained ministry.

Interpreting each of these doctrines from within the perspective of an ecumenically open doctrine of the Trinity, with which most Roman Catholic and Orthodox theologians would substantially agree, Torrance forged an understanding of Justification by Grace that demonstrated exactly how and why Christ, in his uniqueness as God become man acting from within the human situation marked by sin and evil, overcame sin, suffering, evil and death once and for all both from the divine and the human side.

All of this was accomplished and demonstrated in Christ's resurrection and continues to be lived as part of the new creation in the Church, as the community is united through faith and hope with the ascended and advent Lord by the Holy Spirit, through partaking of the Sacraments and through preaching and teaching the Gospel.

Torrance famously argued for a non-dualist and non-monist view of theology and science in the school of the renowned physicist and theologian John Philoponos (490-570) whose thinking stood in stark contrast to Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thinking which Torrance believed was harmful both to science and to theology.

Torrance approved of Einstein, Maxwell and Polanyi in their attempts to hold together thought and reality, experience and ideas, instead of tearing them apart and believed that theologians could learn from this.

Such unitary thinking in science, Torrance believed, could help theologians overcome Kantian and Cartesian dualism.

When the cord is cut between idea and reality, then it is thought that the resurrection is only a mythological way of reflecting on the death of Jesus instead of as a description of a unique occurrence in his life history that enabled a true understanding of his person and work as recorded in the scriptures.

More than any theologian of the twentieth century, Torrance had a lively sense of Christ's continued high-priestly mediation of humanity to the Father through the Holy Spirit.

It is just this emphasis that enabled Torrance to take seriously the fact that there could be no created substitute for the man Jesus in his continued existence as the risen, ascended and advent Lord who, in his true humanity and true divinity, continues even now and until his second coming, to unite people humanly to himself as his body on earth (the Church) through faith and by grace.