Richard Bauckahm provides an influential and generative proposal regarding the church’s early acceptance of high Christology. His work, which makes use of a framework he entitles divine identity, has influenced not just biblical scholars but also theologians. In this paper, I assess Bauckham’s divine identity framework according to its usefulness for contemporary dogmatics. I do so by contextualizing Bauckham’s work, arguing that it primarily has a Motlmannian—rather than an early church—provenance. Interpreting Bauckham in this context illuminates his proposal’s implications for the doctrine of God, revealing a rejection of divine impassibility and an implicit social trinitarianism. This fact means that theologians committed to more traditional accounts of the God-world relation should incorporate Bauckham’s framework with caution. I propose two constructive paths to how they might do so.