Torrance is married to Morag Ann (née MacHugh), who is manager of the information technology unit at the University of Aberdeen. They have a son, Hew, and a daughter, Robyn, both university students.
He is editor of the Scottish Journal of Theology. In 2001 he was appointed a chaplain-in-ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen in Scotland. He has served as president of the Aberdeen Association of University Teachers and was convenor of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland’s Committee on Chaplains to the Forces (1998–2002). He is a member of the international dialogue between the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Orthodox Church.
He was elected as moderator of the Church of Scotland in May 2003 and will complete his term in May 2004. As moderator, he has made a recent trip to Iraq, and will leave on April 16 for a three- week official visit to China.
Born in Aberdeen in 1949, Torrance was educated at Edinburgh Academy and Monkton Combe School in Bath. He received the Master of Arts degree from the University of Edinburgh, the Bachelor of Divinity degree from St. Andrews University, and the Doctor of Philosophy degree from Oriel College, Oxford University.
A minister in the Church of Scotland, Torrance served the parish of Northmavine in the Shetland Islands for three years prior to becoming lecturer in New Testament and patristics at Queen’s Theological College, Birmingham, in 1985. He then moved to the University of Aberdeen to his current position, and in 2001 was named dean of the Faculty of Arts and Divinity.
Torrance is the author of Christology after Chalcedon and Ethics and the Military Community, coeditor of Human Genetics: A Christian Perspective and To Glorify God: Essays on Modern Reformed Liturgy, and editor of Bioethics for the New Millennium. He has contributed numerous articles and book reviews to theological journals.
The first seminary founded (1812) by the Presbyterian General Assembly and the largest of the 10 theological seminaries of the 2.5-million-member PC(USA), Princeton Seminary educates the largest number of candidates for the professional ministry in the PC(USA), as well as students representing 90 other denominations in the United States and overseas. 
