Son of Free Church minister John Baillie (1829–1891), and his wife, Annie MacPherson, he was born in the Free Church manse in Gairloch, Wester Ross, on 26 March 1886. A leading theologian, he held academic posts in the UK, USA, and Canada. His brother Donald Macpherson Baillie was Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of St. Andrews and his other brother Peter Baillie served as a missionary doctor at Jalna, India. Raised in the
Calvinist tradition, Baillie studied divinity at
Edinburgh University. After graduating he undertook further studies at both
Jena and
Marburg in
Germany and then went to teach in
Canada and the
United States. He gained a D.Litt. on the theory of religion from Edinburgh University in 1928 which formed the basis of a book published in the same year. He was a
professor at
Edinburgh University from 1934 to 1959, serving as principal of
New College and dean of the Faculty of Divinity from 1950 to 1956. He was
Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1943. In 1958 he was awarded an honorary doctorate (D. theol. h. c.) by the University of Jena on the occasion of the university's fourth centenary. He was appointed a
Chaplain in Ordinary to the King in 1947. Baillie wrote
A Diary of Private Prayer (1936), regarded as a devotional classic. But his most important contribution to theology was an exploration of the relationship of the knowledge of God to spiritual and moral experience. He served alongside of
John T. McNeill and Henry P. Van Dusen as a general editor of the Library of Christian Classics series, which includes modern translations of the writings of Christian theologians and thinkers such as
Aquinas,
Augustine,
Calvin,
Luther and other
reformers and early
church fathers. As Convener of the Church of Scotland's General Assembly's "Commission for the Interpretation of God's Will in the Present Crisis" ("The Baillie Commission"), reporting to the Assembly 1941 to 1945, Baillie helped the Church to think through its approach and mission to the post-war world. In 1948 he, and
Isobel Forrester, and his brother, Donald, formed the
Scottish Churches Ecumenical Association, which in 1950 merged with the Dollarbeg group which had organised ecumenical conferences since 1945. Shortly after his death in 1960, the series of
Gifford Lectures he had prepared for the 1961–2 academic year was read by
John McIntyre and
Thomas F. Torrance and published by Oxford University Press. ==Family==