God Is a Proper Name

Theological writing is often ponderous, dull, fuzzy--or a mixture of all three. A different grade of theological writing distinguishes Donald M. Baillie's God Was in Christ (Scribner; $2.75), published this week.

Dr. Baillie, professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, has written only two books in his 60 years. But when he has something to say, he knows how to say it. Swiss Professor Emil Brunner, one of Europe's leading theologians, paid it a rare tribute: "It is rather exceptional that a book of dogmatic theology makes fascinating reading . . ." Union Theological Seminary's President Emeritus Henry Sloane Coffin gave it an equally rare garland: "First-rate . . . We have little really tiptop theology today, and this is tiptop."

Theologian Baillie's lucidity does not come from dodging complications. "Most of the great heresies arose from an undue desire for simplification," he dryly observes. He even tackles the place of paradox in theology:

"The attempt to put our experience of God into theological statements is something like the attempt to draw a map of the world on a flat surface . . . It is impossible to do this without a certain degree of falsification, because the surface of the earth is a spherical surface whose pattern cannot be reproduced accurately upon a plane . . . An atlas meets the problem by giving us two different maps of the world which can be compared . . . They contradict each other to some extent at every point. . . So it is with the paradoxes of faith . . . not because the divine reality is self-contradictory, but because when we 'objectify' it all our judgments are in some measure falsified . . . The higher truth which reconciles them cannot be fully expressed in words, though it is experienced and lived . . ."

First Grammarian. One central paradox of Christianity has always been the nature of Christ. Was He God or man or somewhere in a nebulous in-between? Theologian Baillie's orthodox answer includes both the "historial Jesus" and the "Christ of faith."

"The New Testament writers knew very well that [Jesus] was a man, and spoke of Him unequivocally as such . . . Moreover, Christianity does not teach that Jesus was 'a God.' Indeed if we are using language, in a truly Christian way, there is no such entity as 'a God.' There is only one God, and in the Christian sense there could not conceivably be more . . . Peter Damiani, the medieval divine, commenting on the words uttered by the serpent in Eden ('Ye shall be as gods'), remarked that the Devil was the first grammarian when he taught men to give a plural to the word 'God.' It should have neither a plural nor the indefinite article. It is a proper name."

Three in One. The deep feeling as well as the deep thought in Baillie's book is evident in his discussion of the Trinity:

"The God in whom Christians believe is . . . not merely the Creator, the Lawgiver, the wise and righteous Moral Governor, but something far more wonderful: He is the One who gives us what He demands of us, provides the obedience that He requires . . . But the whole experience of this . . . has come into our lives through . . . Jesus Christ. . . the one life which was wholly divine and wholly human . . .

"But what happened through Him did not come to an end when 'the days of His flesh' ended, though His disciples thought it would and were appalled . . . Very soon afterwards they made two great discoveries: that the divine Presence of which they had become aware while their Master was with them in the flesh had come back to them, and . . . that this experience . . . could come to anybody anywhere through the story of Jesus and their witness to its meaning . . . This was something new in mankind's knowledge of God. It could not have come if Jesus had not lived. It all depended on Him. And yet it was different from the experience of knowing Jesus in the flesh--not less, but greater, deeper, more universal, more transforming . . .

"Thus the paradoxical Christian knowledge of God inevitably came to be expressed in the trinitarian form: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, three in one . . . This seems impossible to systematize, and indeed it does not make sense until we remember the historical facts and experiences out of which it arose . . ."

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