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.

Daniel Lamont, I think it was, once remarked that theologians should read more poetry. This insight into the nature of theological language has profound relevance for our contemporary concern with the problem of communicating the Gospel to modern man. Theology, as language about God, may be regarded in one sense as faced with an impossible task: ‘The maker and father of this Universe it is difficult to discover; nor, if he were discovered, could he be declared to all men.’ This hiddenness of the divine being is reflected even in the historical beginnings of the biblical revelation, in the cryptic tautology, ‘I am that I am’ (Exod. 3.14). Yet the fact of revelation was taken to mean, within Israel at least, not that the divine aseity was now compromised, but that this very self-sufficiency was revealed in terms of a purpose of love towards this people. The revelation was instrumental to the fulfilment of that purpose: the divine condescension used creaturely forms to communicate its truth and life to men. Therefore the theological language which sets forth this communicative revelation will be proportionately indirect or analogical.

Article VII of the Augsburg Confession of 1530 contains a definition of the Church the substance of which was adopted by most of the Protestant Confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the Articles of the Church of England and the Confessions of the Free Churches: ‘The Church is the congregation of the saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments rightly administered. And for the true unity of the Church it is sufficient to agree about the teaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments, nor is it necessary to have everywhere like human traditions, whether rites or ceremonies instituted by man.’

The twelfth century witnessed a memorable conflict between rationalism and authority, in the persons of Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux. It is, of course, erroneous to exaggerate these two extremes; by the one, reason was ultimately accepted as the servant of personal faith, and by the other, authority was founded on a basis of mystical devotion. None the less it remains true that both, in different directions, were guilty of the same dangerous tendency, that of abstracting one element from the wholeness of human personality, and of confining religion to the sphere of that one element; Abelard was too exclusively concerned with matters of the intellect, while Bernard directed an almost equally exclusive attention to the will; and the factor neglected and suppressed by both, which breaks through in Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs, and overwhelms Abelard in his affair with Heloise—the factor of emotion, of personal experience, of the deep springs of affection in the human heart—it was this forgotten factor which another school of theologians had the distinction of restoring to its proper place. The great Victorines took a saner and more balanced view of human nature. They studied man in his totality, and were willing to derive or at least expound their doctrine on the level of practical experience. They occupied a mediating position from which, with exaggerating either, they could give due weight to the claims of both reason and faith.

In the history of exegesis there have been few books within the Old Testament which have roused more vigorous controversy than the interpretation of the Book of Jonah. There was a time when one's orthodoxy could be quickly determined simply on the basis of opinions held regarding its historicity. Yet in spite of the stormy past it is a surprising fact that in modern times there has been a great unanimity of interpretation reached among Old Testament scholars. On the one hand, the attempt of the older expositors, such as Pusey and Orelli, to defend the book as literal history has been almost universally rejected as untenable. On the other hand, the allegorical interpretation of G. A. Smith has found few followers. Rather, the great majority of modern scholars have reached the conclusion that the book of Jonah is simply a narrative which the author used as a means of conveying a general truth in an interesting and effective manner. R. H. Pheiffer is typical when he calls it ‘a short story with a moral’. The spiritual message of the book is the lesson that God's love is not exclusively confined to Israel, but that Israel carries a responsibility of sharing it with others.

Among the many insights for which we should be indebted to Professor Rudolf Bultmann is the recognition that пίστις is for Paul at once active and passive. Simultaneously it is ‘faith’ and ‘obedience’. To be sure it receives the unmerited grace of God in a completely passive way, but at the same time it actively responds to that grace in obedience. By faith the believer accepted passively at God's hand a new freedom from sin heretofore unknown (Rom. 6.1–14), but in that very ‘act’ of receiving, he also by faith made himself obedient to God (Rom. 6–15–23). The one cannot be had without the other for they are absolutely inseparable.