For me, the supreme truth of
Christianity is that in Jesus I see God. When I see Jesus feeding the
hungry, comforting the sorrowing, befriending men and women with whom no one
else would have had anything to do, I can say, "This is God."
It is not to say that Jesus is
God. Time and time again the Gospel of John speaks of God sending Jesus
into the world. Time and time again we see Jesus praying to God.
Time and time again we see Jesus unhesitatingly and unquestioningly and
unconditionally accepting the will of God for himself.
Nowhere does the New Testament
identify Jesus as God. Jesus did not say, "He who has seen
me has seen God." He said, "He who has seen me has seen the
Father." There are attributes of God I do not see in
Jesus. I do not see God's omnipotence in Jesus, for there are things
which Jesus did not know. I do not see God's omnipotence in Jesus for
there are things which Jesus could not do (A Spiritual Biography, 1977
Edition, p. 56).
We believe in evolution, the
slow climb upwards of man from the level of the beasts. Jesus is the end
and climax of the evolutionary process because in Him men met God. The
danger of the Christian faith is that we set up Jesus as a kind of secondary
God. The Bible never, as it were, makes a second God of Jesus.
Rather, it stresses the utter dependence of Jesus on God (Commentary on
Luke, p. 140).
To speak of the pre-existence
of the Son is to say that God did not begin to redeem men when Jesus came into
the world, but that throughout all ages the redeeming power and the
sacrificial work of God has been at work. To speak of the pre-existence
of the Son means that the love which was demonstrated on Calvary is an eternal
movement of the heart of God to men (The Mind of Paul, p. 59).
I do not think William Barclay
was a Christian. In his autobiography he clearly states that he was not a
Trinitarian. He did not believe that Jesus is God. He denied the
doctrine of the Vicarious Atonement. He also denied the Virgin Birth of
Christ, and his view of the Holy Spirit fits no discernible orthodox
definition in the history of the Christian Church.
Needless to say, Barclay did
not believe in the inerrancy of the Scriptures. Had he done so he would
have believed the above-mentioned doctrines because they are taught in
Scripture. Thus, I feel that William Barclay was not a believer because
by no reasonable understanding of the Bible could he be called one. It
is the Bible which makes it impossible to claim this man as a fellow believer
without emptying Christianity of its basic content (The Bible in the
Balance, p. 45).