Another asset which Barclay exploited was his deafness. He "could not hear a brass band" without his hearing aid. A highly disciplined man, he slept only five hours a night. When he was writing he would turn off the hearing aid and thus escaping all intrusions concentrate absolutely on his work.

In reply to questions about writing Barclay said, "The hardest sentence to write is the first -- begin. Concentrate on the work of the moment as if it were the only job in the world. Distrust waiting for inspiration -- get on with it. Never stop reading. Be systematic, don't jump about. John Wesley read every sermon to a maiden servant in his house. If she did not understand it, he struck it out and rewrote it. Strive for clarity. Never say anything to which you cannot attach a definite meaning."

William Barclay was the only child of middle-aged parents who were strict in his upbringing. Born in Wick, Scotland he grew up in Motherwell, a suburb of Glasgow, an industrial shipbuilding city with a population of a million. Young Willie's father was a bank manager in the Bank of Scotland. He and his wife were members of the Free Church of Scotland in which he served as a lay preacher -- in Gaelic.

Willie felt called to preach at the age of twelve. Later he entered the divinity school of the University of Glasgow. Trinity College was its oldest faculty, founded by the Pope in 1451. Shortly before his graduation and ordination at the age of 24, his mother died of cancer.

Barclay was called as pastor of Trinity Church of Scotland in Renfrew, another Glasgow suburb. It was a community of shipbuilders in which unemployment was very high during the years of the Great Depression. He said that twelve of his seventeen elders had no jobs. There was only one professional family in the working-class congregation of 1050 members. When I asked how he learned to communicate so clearly he attributed it to that fourteen year pastorate. He told me, "it was communicate or perish." His tenure in Renfrew also included the war years when the Nazis bombed the area. 2000 people were killed in his community in one evening raid.

Barclay resigned his only pastorate in 1946 when he was invited to join the faculty of Trinity College, his alma mater. It was only in the closing years of his teaching career that he was given the Chair of Divinity. He said that no man would be added to a Scottish theology faculty unless he had a dozen years of pastoral experience (an obvious weakness in most American seminary faculties).

Barclay was 39 years old when he began teaching. I studied with him as a graduate student when he was at the height of his powers and remained a correspondent more than eleven years, contributing to his official biography by Clive Rawlins.

In considering William Barclay's theology we will want to remember he had that Gaelic trait of being able to hold two opposing ideas in his mind at once. As an example, he would lecture or write on St. Paul's view of Christ's death on the cross as a vicarious substitutionary atonement. However in a graduate seminar he would make it plain that this was not his own view of the atonement. Barclay personally subscribed to Abelard's moral influence theory of the atonement.