My Mentor: William Barclay

William Barclay (1907-1978) is visiting with me this morning as he has done many, many times over the last 58 years!  I was 17 years old when we were first introduced.  My boyhood pastor, J. Kenneth Mart, introduced us when I wrote him about my sense of call to the  Christian ministry.  I was in the military at the time, stationed on the island of Crete.  Ken suggested I begin my education right then and there using William Barclay’s 17-volume Daily Study Bible Series.  I followed his recommendation, purchasing a volume or two at   a time until I had the complete set.  Through the years Barclay has been my constant companion and I have introduced him and his Daily Study Bible Series to many others along the way. 

Barclay was a Church of Scotland minister and Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow.  He decided, as a professor, to dedicate his life “to making the best biblical scholarship available to the average reader.”  The result was the Daily Study Bible in which Barclay went verse by verse through his own translation (he was a Greek scholar) of the New Testament, listing and examining every possible interpretation, and providing all the relevant background in layman’s terms. The series is still available and if you want to know about the New Testament, I recommend you start with Barclay’s Daily Study Bible.  Barclay also wrote about 40 other books including The Mind of Jesus, Letters to the Seven Churches, and A Spiritual Autobiography.

Barclay described himself as a “liberal evangelical” and has often been criticized for some of his “modernism” by the “more religious than you are” folk.   Barclay was skeptical concerning the Trinity: for example “Nowhere does the New Testament identify Jesus with God.”  He wondered about the miracles of Jesus and the virgin birth.  He was a pacifist:  “war is mass murder.”  He believed in universal salvation:  “I am a convinced universalist.  I believe that in the end all men (people) will be gathered into the love of God.” He wrote, “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.”  

Now you can understand why “the more religious than you are” folk are frustrated with my friend William.  One of these “know it all” folk writes that Barclay was a “false prophet” who had a defective view of the death of Christ, a defective view of the person and nature of Christ and that he was unscripturally tolerant of the belief and unbelief of others.  Oh, my!  Oh, my!  I cut my scriptural teeth for 58 years on Barclay’s Daily Study Bible.  He is, and will forever be, one of my most favorite visitors and one of my dearest friends, for he encouraged and helped me to love God with all my heart, with all my soul,  and with all my mind.