God was in Christ : An essay on incarnation and atonement
by Donald Macpherson Baillie
Category: Atonement

"How much can we really know about what happened in Palestine nineteen centuries ago, by way of making it a basis for our faith? Occasionally that question has broken out in quite extreme forms, suggesting the answer that Jesus may never have existed at all as an historical person. But now, apart from such absurd freaks of scholarship, we are confronted in a new way with the question whether we can know enough about Jesus to enable us to build a Christology upon Him. It is by challenging us with that question--not by giving us an assured result--that Form Criticism has become a momentous factor in creating the situation which exists for Christological thought to-day. It will make a great difference to the problem of Christology whether we accept or reject the claims of this new historical radicalism."--Chapter 1, page 27