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The Christology of D. M. Baillie

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

J. H. Hick
Affiliation:
Cornell, New York

Extract

The purpose of this article is to appraise the Christological suggestion offered by the late D. M. Baillie in God Was In Christ (1948), to the effect that the Incarnation was the supreme instance of ‘the paradox of grace’. I propose, first, to define, from the standpoint of credal orthodoxy, the central task of Christology; second, to remind the reader of the features of Baillie's thought in this field; third, to offer a criticism of his theory in the light of the desideratum noted in the first section; and fourth, by distinguishing two different aspects of the problem of the Incarnation, to suggest wherein lies the positive value of D. M. Baillie's contribution.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1958

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References

page 2 note 1 The word ‘divine’ can of course be used unambiguously when the context indicates clearly that ‘the divine x’ means ‘God's x’, as when one speaks of the divine love or the divine purpose. To apply ‘divine’ as an adjective to the deity would be to use it meaninglessly—as in the celebrated but vacuous pronouncement, ‘The divine is rightly so-called.’

page 4 note 1 This does not appear to be a true instance of paradox in the sense in which Baillie has defined the term, namely as ‘a self-contradictory statement’ (p. 110). (The formula is a condensation of the fuller definition which he quotes from Father Sergius Bulgakov, in which a paradox, or antinomy, is described as a statement which ‘simultaneously admits the truth of two contradictory, logically incompatible, but ontologically equally necessary assertions’ (pp. 108–9, quoting Bulgakov, , The Wisdom of God, p. 116 note))Google Scholar. That God created all things ex nihilo is not a self-contradictory statement; it does not contain within itself logically incompatible components. It is ‘paradoxical’ only in the sense that it is empirically unverifiable and therefore de fide.