God Was in Christ by D. M. Baillie

First published: New York: Scribner, 1948

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Essays; theology

Core issue(s): Atonement; Incarnation; Jesus Christ; reconciliation

Overview

All Christian spirituality is centered on Jesus Christ. Donald Baillie’s God Was in Christ is an attempt to understand who Christ is and the significance of his life. Some parts of the book deal with matters of particular concern to professional theologians; other parts are written with the educated, though perhaps theologically unsophisticated, general reader in mind. Baillie, a Scottish minister and theologian, aims to affirm the classic teaching of the Church about Christ and to do so in a way that makes sense. The book, however, is more than just an academic discussion. By exhibiting how Christian experience helps illuminate the nature and significance of Christ, Baillie calls the attentive reader to a revitalization of personal experience and to the fellowship and ministry of the Christian community.

Baillie begins his book with a survey of the theological situation of his day with regard to the doctrine of Christ. Gone are the days when liberal theologians could paint their confident portraits of the “historical Jesus” behind the Gospels. However, the rejection of this approach has not meant a return to precritical approaches to Christology. Things are different in two very important respects. One is an agreement on all sides that the full humanity of Jesus must be taken more seriously. Throughout theological history there has been a tendency to shrink back from or explain away some aspects of Jesus’s humanity, treating his life as “a divine life lived in a human body.” However, theologians who accept the deity of Christ have recognized that they must not let this doctrine push out a recognition that he was human. This has included an acceptance of limits on Jesus’ knowledge, an understanding of his miracles as “works of God in response to human faith for which all things are possible,” and a recognition of the human characteristics of Jesus’ moral and religious experience.

The other important factor on the theological scene, according to Baillie, is a new radicalism with regard to historical studies of the Gospels. Advocates of form criticism attempt by an analysis of the various literary forms in the Gospels to uncover the nature and content of early Christian preaching. However, they are extremely skeptical of attempts to get behind the preaching to discover anything about the historical Jesus. Rudolf Bultmann, a leading advocate of this approach, maintains that we can know “almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.” However, this radical skepticism is coupled with a strong confessional stance, claiming that what is important to us is the Christ of faith given to us in the Gospels, not any historical construct.

Baillie finds acceptance of the full humanity of Christ combined with skepticism about the possibility of historical knowledge to be an inherently unstable position. To hold that God has entered history in a concrete human life but to renounce the possibility of knowing what that life was like is intellectually unsatisfying. While agreeing that the “over-imaginative” liberal attempts at historical construction must be rejected, Baillie holds that the reaction against this program has moved too far in the other direction. If the “Jesus of history” is given up altogether, that amounts to a rejection of Christianity as a historical religion. What is the basis for a faith response if not the conviction that in the historical Jesus is a revelation of God? Historical facts are not sufficient for faith, but without them faith becomes an empty shell. Furthermore, skepticism of the type exhibited among the form critics is based on a number of assumptions that are not obviously true. Among these is the assumption that motives for passing on a story never include a desire to preserve a true account of events that really occurred.

If the need for a historical Jesus is accepted, it is still possible to imagine a different kind of problem: Why complicate the human Jesus found in history with the “theological mystifications” of traditional Christian doctrine? Why not simply regard Jesus as the supreme discoverer of God? Part of the answer, says Baillie, lies in the nature of God as described in Jesus’ teaching. Jesus described God as one who takes the initiative to seek us out and come to our aid. If this report is correct, we are led to reassess the idea of Jesus as a discoverer. Is God passively waiting to be discovered, or is he rather actively revealing himself in the life of Jesus? In the New Testament accounts, the witness of those who came into contact with him is unmistakably clear that whatever Jesus said or did, “it is really God that did it in Jesus.” The most striking example of this is in how Jesus’ followers describe his death on the cross. They spoke not of the love of Jesus but of the “God who sent him.” None of this makes sense unless we acknowledge some kind of identity between the revealer and the revealed. Christological doctrines are developed in an attempt to say how intimately God is involved in the “phenomenon of Jesus.” They answer the question, “Is the redeeming purpose which we find in Jesus part of the very being and essence of God?” The apprehension of God as one who comes to us in Jesus is given expression in the doctrine of the Incarnation.

Another reason for thinking the picture of Jesus as the supreme human pathfinder is incomplete, according to Baillie, is that it is bound up with an evolutionary philosophy of human progress. Christian faith has always regarded Jesus’ life as the center of history, the key event in God’s eternal plan. However, unless Christological doctrines are added, this conviction seems to collapse. We can regard Christ as a high point in human development, but without Christology we have a difficult time making his life the center of a story about divine action from creation to consummation.

Even if we accept the need for a Christology, the doctrine that Jesus is God and man is profoundly mysterious. How is it to be understood? Baillie rejects the claim that we can clarify the matter by denying that Jesus had a distinct human personality but was “divine Personality assuming human nature.” That account tends to lead to a denial of his real humanity. Baillie also rejects the theory that the Incarnation may be understood in terms of a temporary laying aside by God of the distinctively divine attributes. This theory describes a metamorphosis rather than an incarnation, and it seems to involve the claim that Jesus is not God and man simultaneously, but successively. Finally, Baillie argues against a Christology based on the model of leadership. This view leaves the essential Christological questions unanswered, including the question of who Jesus is and how he is related to God.

Baillie’s attempt to understand the Incarnation begins with the recognition that this doctrine contains a paradox that cannot be eliminated. In this respect it is not unique, however, for paradox crops up all through Christian theology. Paradoxes arise, says Baillie, from the fact that “God cannot be comprehended in any human words or in any of the categories of our finite thought.” We know God in direct personal relationship, but when we try to express our knowledge in theological statements, as we must, the statements fail to do justice to the reality. Doing theology is like “the attempt to draw a map of the world on a flat surface.” There is always a degree of falsification.

Paradoxes arise in several doctrinal statements, but a fundamental paradox that may help clarify our understanding of the Incarnation is what Baillie calls the “paradox of Grace.” The center of this paradox is the conviction of a Christian that “every good thing he does is somehow not wrought by himself but by God.” This is not an attempt to deny personal responsibility or freedom. The attribution of good works to God is accompanied by a profound conviction of freedom, and wrong choices are accepted as the individual’s responsibility. Yet the believer feels that good actions cannot be attributed to personal effort but to God’s grace. This does not mean merely that there is a division of labor with God doing part and the individual doing part. The good in our lives is “all of God.” This puzzling experience, says Baillie, furnishes our best clue to understanding the union of God and man in the Incarnation. The man who was God incarnate surpasses everyone in “refusing to claim anything for Himself independently and ascribing all the goodness to God.” What in other lives is a fragmentary and incomplete experience is in his life “complete and absolute.” He is the supreme illustrator of a paradox known to us in Christian experience.

For the Christian, Baillie states, God is the one who “makes absolute demands upon us and offers freely to give us all that he demands.” The attempt to attain goodness on our own is self-defeating, but when God takes possession of us, we are enabled to obey his commands. Paradoxically, when we are most fully possessed by him, we are most completely free and most genuinely ourselves. Similarly, in Christ we find one whose “self consciousness was swallowed up in his deep and humble and continual consciousness of God.” In all of his good works he looked not to himself but to the source of all goodness. While his goodness is clearly a human achievement, acceptance of the paradox of grace leads us to regard it as the “human side of a divine reality.”

The early disciples became convinced that with Jesus something new had entered the world. God was in Christ in a unique way and the reality of the divine presence that came into the world with Christ became available in fuller form through the work of the Holy Spirit. These experiential convictions come to be summed up in the doctrine of the Trinity. Baillie argues that the doctrine “arose out of the historical Incarnation” and “gives us its eternal background in the only possible terms.”

Traditional Christian teaching connects the work of Christ with the forgiveness of sins. For some people, talk about forgiveness seems irrelevant and unnecessary. Is it not better to forget about the past and go on to better things, rather than brooding over what cannot be changed? Baillie replies that the suggested approach is unrealistic; the person who is serious about doing right will inevitably brood over moral failure unless that person has discovered “some deeper secret” of dealing with failures. If we treat our sins lightly, Baillie believes that “we will not go on to better things, but to the same things over again.”

Only if our sense of moral failure can be regarded as a sin against God, says Baillie, are new possibilities opened. An abstract moral law cannot forgive us, but when we see ourselves as having violated a love that continues to press us and to offer forgiveness, we are able to be more concerned about God than about ourselves. When that happens, the door is open to “release and a new beginning.” Seeing God’s forgiveness, we are enabled to forgive ourselves and continue striving for better things without either taking our failures lightly or allowing them to undermine our physical and mental well-being.

If God loves us and wants to forgive us, why should we bring in the idea of an atonement? Baillie’s reply is that there is an important difference between “good-natured indulgence and a costly reconciliation.” One misinterpretation of divine forgiveness is that God passes off our sins lightly because they do not matter much to him. It is because God cares about us so deeply, says Baillie, that forgiveness becomes “the costliest thing in the world.”

The story of Jesus, says Baillie, “makes us willing to bring our sins to God, to see them in His light, and to accept from Him the forgiveness we could never earn.” The realization that “God was in Christ” allows us to respond to God’s grace and receive his work of reconciliation. Without God’s initiative we are locked in an inescapable trap of individual self-centeredness. Through Christ God breaks down the obstacles that stand in the way of a new kind of community built on love. To those who experience this love, God commits the message of reconciliation. Central to that message is the story of “what God has done in Jesus Christ.”

Christian Themes

One of Baillie’s main themes as he discusses the nature of Jesus is that we must recognize Jesus’ deity without minimizing his full humanity. Therefore, he rejects claims that Jesus was a deity who assumed human nature, rather than became a part of humanity. He also rejects that idea that God set aside his divine qualities while he was incarnated as Jesus; a concept that implies that Jesus was not both man and God, but rather man or God.

Baillie felt that the Christian experience of recognizing God as the source of every good act is a clue to help us understand how Jesus could be both God and man. All good in human life is produced by God, and therefore perfect goodness would mean that God was perfectly present. Christ’s life was the very life of God and at the same time the life of a man.

Although God is the source of every good act, Christians also have the free will to sin and, therefore, need God’s forgiveness. In the New Testament, the belief that God wants to forgive sins comes together with the belief that atonement is costly in the conviction that God has provided a means of expiation in Christ.

Baillie points out that while there is no agreed on account in the New Testament of exactly how the sacrifice of Christ brings about reconciliation, it is clearly regarded as a work done by God. We find no contrast between the love of Christ and the wrath of God or suggestion that God is appeased by the cross. Instead it is “God’s merciful attitude towards sinners” that is behind the whole process. Baillie suggests that the cross is part of an “eternal divine sin-bearing.” It reveals on the historical plane the costly nature of divine forgiveness. This does not mean that the cross is simply a symbol of something else, but that it is part of something larger that is not “confined within any one moment of time.”

Christ, according to Baillie, is the one who offers himself to God without limit. To do so means “at the same time to love men without limit and so carry the load of their sins.” Historically, it was Jesus’ love for sinners that most caused offense and brought him into conflict with the authorities. Avoiding the cross would have been possible if he had been willing to give up the activities that aroused such hatred. However, Jesus knew that what they opposed was the very essence of what he was called to do; it was the very same as what God does. Jesus’ suffering for sinners is an aspect of the suffering of God, who loves sinners with an “inexorable love.”

When we see how Christ has submitted to the worst because of a love that would not give up, it makes us realize how serious a matter our own sin is and how willing God is to forgive us. Thus, it is through Christ, Baillie states, that we are able to know the seriousness of our sins and ask for forgiveness. Recognition that “God was in Christ” furnishes the means by which we are enabled to break the bonds of selfishness and enter a new kind of community.

Sources for Further Study

Baillie, Donald M. The Theology of the Sacraments and Other Papers. Edited and with a biographical essay by John Baillie. New York: Scribner, 1957. Donald Baillie’s brother, John Baillie, assembled this collection of five lectures on sacramental theology along with an essay on freedom of the will and a lecture on the preaching of Christian doctrine.

Baillie, Donald M. To Whom Shall We Go? New York: Scribner, 1955. A collection of twenty-five of Baillie’s sermons.

Fergusson, David, ed. Christ, Church, and Society: Essays on John Baillie and Donald Baillie. New York: T & T Clark International, 2004. An excellent series of essays compiled by a theology professor at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. The essays address myriad aspects of the Baillies’ theology, spirituality, philosophy, and politics. Includes bibliography and index.

Newlands, G. M. John and Donald Baillie: Transatlantic Theology. New York: P. Lang, 2002. A theological biography that follows the brothers’ thinking and development. Includes a bibliography and index.