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God Was in Christ An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement
Book by Baillie, Donald M.
230 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1948
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 29, 2017
Baillie begins by noting that docetism is impossible in modern theology. The emphasis, rightly or wrongly, is now on the humanity of Christ. Of course, he wrote this in the middle of the century, so some things might have changed. In this book we see push back against Karl Barth that is neither exactly from a liberal perspective nor from an overtly Reformed one.
In the first few chapters Baillie surveys the “Jesus of History/Christ of Faith” debates. One gets the impression he is annoyed (and rightly so) with the focus of them. He says by way of conclusion, “The Jesus of History….means simply and precisely: ‘Jesus as He really was in his Life on earth’” (Baillie 47).
Paradox of the Incarnation
One of the things that separates the Christian idea of God is not simply that God rewards those who obey him, but more that he gave the ability to obey him (121). He gives all that he demands.
True God and True Man
The language of “self-consciousness” of Jesus. Baillie says it has an unfortunate sound, as the NT was more concerned with God-consciousness than self-consciousness (125).
Aquinas’s language of the two-fold grace given to Christ (grace of habit, common to all men, and grace of union, common to Christ) is artificial. In any case, the NT speaks more of the grace of Christ given to us (128).
Positives
*Baillie attacks Karl Barth’s fear of saying historical things about Jesus (52-53). He says this leads to Barth’s having a theology of the Word of God (Logotheism) but not a theology of the Incarnation of the Son of God.
*Great analysis of Kenoticism. If Kenosis means God the Son emptied himself of all his divine properties, then the following seem to entail:
~1. What was the Logos doing in the universe outside of Palestine for those 30 years?
~2. We have a Theophany, not an Incarnation. God changed into a man.
~3. If he got rid of all his distinctively divine properties, then he has nothing left to identify himself as divine.
~4. The theory presupposes that divinity and humanity cannot coexist in the same person. Yet kenoticists also want to believe that Jesus in his Ascension and session at God’s right hand has both divine and human properties, so why does it obtain there and not on earth?
Negatives
*While Baillie does a good job in showing the limits of Form, Source Criticism, he never brings himself to blast it out of the water.
*Baillie never escapes the "tug" of liberal thought, in that he can't give a full-orbed deconstruction (demythologizing?) of Bultmann.
Conclusion
This book has a warm, reverent spirit. It contains several crucial insights and its discussion of kenotic theology is quite good. But in much of its understanding it is quite dated in light of recent New Testament studies,.
In the first few chapters Baillie surveys the “Jesus of History/Christ of Faith” debates. One gets the impression he is annoyed (and rightly so) with the focus of them. He says by way of conclusion, “The Jesus of History….means simply and precisely: ‘Jesus as He really was in his Life on earth’” (Baillie 47).
Paradox of the Incarnation
One of the things that separates the Christian idea of God is not simply that God rewards those who obey him, but more that he gave the ability to obey him (121). He gives all that he demands.
True God and True Man
The language of “self-consciousness” of Jesus. Baillie says it has an unfortunate sound, as the NT was more concerned with God-consciousness than self-consciousness (125).
Aquinas’s language of the two-fold grace given to Christ (grace of habit, common to all men, and grace of union, common to Christ) is artificial. In any case, the NT speaks more of the grace of Christ given to us (128).
Positives
*Baillie attacks Karl Barth’s fear of saying historical things about Jesus (52-53). He says this leads to Barth’s having a theology of the Word of God (Logotheism) but not a theology of the Incarnation of the Son of God.
*Great analysis of Kenoticism. If Kenosis means God the Son emptied himself of all his divine properties, then the following seem to entail:
~1. What was the Logos doing in the universe outside of Palestine for those 30 years?
~2. We have a Theophany, not an Incarnation. God changed into a man.
~3. If he got rid of all his distinctively divine properties, then he has nothing left to identify himself as divine.
~4. The theory presupposes that divinity and humanity cannot coexist in the same person. Yet kenoticists also want to believe that Jesus in his Ascension and session at God’s right hand has both divine and human properties, so why does it obtain there and not on earth?
Negatives
*While Baillie does a good job in showing the limits of Form, Source Criticism, he never brings himself to blast it out of the water.
*Baillie never escapes the "tug" of liberal thought, in that he can't give a full-orbed deconstruction (demythologizing?) of Bultmann.
Conclusion
This book has a warm, reverent spirit. It contains several crucial insights and its discussion of kenotic theology is quite good. But in much of its understanding it is quite dated in light of recent New Testament studies,.
December 3, 2020
A Professor at St. Andrews during the first half of the twentieth century, Baillie was a well educated and respected theologian and teacher. This book is interesting for a number of reasons. To me, it is an extended argument against what he sees as overreach by some of his contemporaries. Baillie seeks to restore understanding to what he sees as a logical, simpler, and more orthodox view of religion. Early on, he puts Karl Barth in the crosshairs:
“Yet the reaction is even more violent in the theology of Professor Karl Barth. The whole of that remarkable enterprise of modern theological scholarship the attempt to write the life of Jesus and to reconstruct His personality, is in Barth’s view quite irrelevant to Christian faith. The idea that faith is in any sense based not he impression made by the personality of Jesus is completely mistaken.”…”Does Barth mean that any faith which the disciples had in Jesus during His ministry was based simply on the miracles, including the Transfiguration, and that this was quite sound and normative? That seems strangely at variance with our Lord’s own teaching about the relation of faith to signs and mighty works; which is perhaps an illustration of Barth’s curious lack of interest in the teaching of our Lord.”
In later passages, he seeks to align to other thinkers:
“According to Bishop Gore: ‘He shrank from making dogmatic statements. Plainly He preferred to stimulate the minds of His disciples to discover the truth for themselves.’ Again: ‘No teacher ever showed more belief than our Lord in the capacity of the ordinary man to think rightly, if he be only sincere and open-minded. He did not, except rarely, use the dogmatic method. It would seem as if He feared to stunt men’s growth from within thereby. That may be a one-sided overstatement, but is it not historically truer than Heim’s account of the leadership of Jesus in the days of His flesh?”
“When His early followers spoke of His death on the cross as a supreme expression of love for men, it was not so much of the love of Jesus that they spoke as of the love of God who sent Him.”
Ultimately, the book is challenging and probably only for students of theology or with a deep interest in Christianity and New Testament thought. Baillie ends with a beautiful, and thoughtful message, and one that captures his theology:
“To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.”
See my other reviews here!
“Yet the reaction is even more violent in the theology of Professor Karl Barth. The whole of that remarkable enterprise of modern theological scholarship the attempt to write the life of Jesus and to reconstruct His personality, is in Barth’s view quite irrelevant to Christian faith. The idea that faith is in any sense based not he impression made by the personality of Jesus is completely mistaken.”…”Does Barth mean that any faith which the disciples had in Jesus during His ministry was based simply on the miracles, including the Transfiguration, and that this was quite sound and normative? That seems strangely at variance with our Lord’s own teaching about the relation of faith to signs and mighty works; which is perhaps an illustration of Barth’s curious lack of interest in the teaching of our Lord.”
In later passages, he seeks to align to other thinkers:
“According to Bishop Gore: ‘He shrank from making dogmatic statements. Plainly He preferred to stimulate the minds of His disciples to discover the truth for themselves.’ Again: ‘No teacher ever showed more belief than our Lord in the capacity of the ordinary man to think rightly, if he be only sincere and open-minded. He did not, except rarely, use the dogmatic method. It would seem as if He feared to stunt men’s growth from within thereby. That may be a one-sided overstatement, but is it not historically truer than Heim’s account of the leadership of Jesus in the days of His flesh?”
“When His early followers spoke of His death on the cross as a supreme expression of love for men, it was not so much of the love of Jesus that they spoke as of the love of God who sent Him.”
Ultimately, the book is challenging and probably only for students of theology or with a deep interest in Christianity and New Testament thought. Baillie ends with a beautiful, and thoughtful message, and one that captures his theology:
“To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.”
See my other reviews here!
May 23, 2024
This book is well written and engaging to read. It was also very thought provoking. Baillie is certainly right in arguing for the need for a historical Jesus without discarding Christology and the earlier chapters of the book are not too bad.
However, when Baillie moves on to the positive argument he wishes to make in the book, there are serious weaknesses, such that it would be difficult to recommend that anyone read this book.
One of the key insights which Baillie wishes to put across is the 'paradox of grace'. Baillie describes it as follows: 'Its essence lies in the conviction which a Christian man possesses, that every good thing in him, every good thing he does, is somehow not wrought by himself but by God' (p. 114 in Faber & Faber paperback). Whether this is really a paradox may be questioned, but that statement is not so bad so far as it goes.
The problems come when Baillie seeks to apply this paradox to the incarnation. Baillie appears to end up arguing that Christ was the man in whom this paradox of grace was most fully seen, i.e. God worked so much in Christ that he could be said to be God incarnate. Here's one example: '… it may be said that the Incarnation did not come earlier in human history because man was not ready to make a full response. Therefore when at last God broke through into human life with full revelation and became incarnate, must we not say that in a sense it was because here at last a Man was perfectly receptive? (p. 149)'
It's difficult to see this as orthodox theology but rather it appears to be (as others have also noted) a form of adoptionism. Now Baillie does appear to use orthodox language elsewhere, but one is left wondering whether in these cases he is simply using what he might call 'mythical' language, and the adoptionist language is his real view. He does, after all, at one point speak of the incarnation's eternal and heavenly antecedents as being 'obviously figurative and symbolic' (p. 151).
Baillie's treatment of the atonement is equally dissatisfying and seems to completely miss the idea of substitution. Instead he makes the atonement primarily about Christ's suffering as a result of sin, rather than for or in the place of sinners. To top off the unorthodox theology, he also throws in some questioning of the doctrine of impassibility for good measure (pp. 198-199)!
All in all, it is an engaging read but not a book I could recommend.
However, when Baillie moves on to the positive argument he wishes to make in the book, there are serious weaknesses, such that it would be difficult to recommend that anyone read this book.
One of the key insights which Baillie wishes to put across is the 'paradox of grace'. Baillie describes it as follows: 'Its essence lies in the conviction which a Christian man possesses, that every good thing in him, every good thing he does, is somehow not wrought by himself but by God' (p. 114 in Faber & Faber paperback). Whether this is really a paradox may be questioned, but that statement is not so bad so far as it goes.
The problems come when Baillie seeks to apply this paradox to the incarnation. Baillie appears to end up arguing that Christ was the man in whom this paradox of grace was most fully seen, i.e. God worked so much in Christ that he could be said to be God incarnate. Here's one example: '… it may be said that the Incarnation did not come earlier in human history because man was not ready to make a full response. Therefore when at last God broke through into human life with full revelation and became incarnate, must we not say that in a sense it was because here at last a Man was perfectly receptive? (p. 149)'
It's difficult to see this as orthodox theology but rather it appears to be (as others have also noted) a form of adoptionism. Now Baillie does appear to use orthodox language elsewhere, but one is left wondering whether in these cases he is simply using what he might call 'mythical' language, and the adoptionist language is his real view. He does, after all, at one point speak of the incarnation's eternal and heavenly antecedents as being 'obviously figurative and symbolic' (p. 151).
Baillie's treatment of the atonement is equally dissatisfying and seems to completely miss the idea of substitution. Instead he makes the atonement primarily about Christ's suffering as a result of sin, rather than for or in the place of sinners. To top off the unorthodox theology, he also throws in some questioning of the doctrine of impassibility for good measure (pp. 198-199)!
All in all, it is an engaging read but not a book I could recommend.
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