Forsyth: Theologian of the Cross

It is half-a-century since Peter Taylor Forsyth gave the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale in 1907 and three dozen years since his death in 1921 at the age of seventy-three. Of the forty-five years of his ministerial life twenty-five were spent as pastor of Congregational churches in Bradford, London, Manchester, Leicester, and Cambridge respectively and twenty as principal of Hackney College, Hampstead. Like many another man of genius, his influence has been greater since his death than it was during his lifetime. Indeed, if he was a prophet to his own generation, he may be said to be even more so to us in our mid-century situation. His mind and his message are preserved for us in his numerous writings, and it is impossible not to be stimulated and challenged by a personality of such intellectual energy and vision who gloried so wholeheartedly in the Cross of Christ.

His literary style is, as his daughter has remarked, a vexed question (Memoir prefixed to The Work of Christ, London, 1938, p. xxvi). His contemporary, James Denney, for instance, felt that the peculiarity of his style was such “that only people who agree with him strongly are likely to read him through” (Letters of Principal James Denney to W. Robertson Nicoll, London, n.d., p. 97), though he also expressed the judgment (in 1908) that Forsyth “has more true and important things to say … than any one at present writing on theology” [op. cit., p. 118]. It is not that his style is clumsy or slipshod; indeed, there is no theologian more quotable than P. T. Forsyth. Words, however, fascinated and enthralled his mind to such an extent that it seems to have become almost second nature for him when taking up his pen to express himself in epigrams. Of course, a good epigram in itself is an excellent thing: it adds distinction to a theme and may serve to clarify a whole argument; and at the same time it cries out for quotation. But when arguments and even complete books are composed very largely of epigrams piled one on top of another it is hardly surprising if the reader, however willing, finds the fare offered him excessively rich and sweet, with the result that after a while his zest for the feast diminishes. Let him persevere, however, and he will be edified and enriched; for he would be much mistaken to conclude that Forsyth’s style had the effect, like a rich sauce, of covering over an impoverishment or superficiality of thought.

Not Always Evangelical

Forsyth did not hold the evangelical faith from the beginning. “With a great price have I procured its freedom,” he wrote [The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (London, 1909), p. 255]. And in his Lyman Beecher Lectures he spoke as follows: “There was a time when I was interested in the first degree with purely scientific criticism.… It also pleased God by the revelation of His holiness and grace, which the great theologians taught me to find in the Bible, to bring home to me my sin in a way that submerged all the school questions in weight, urgency, and poignancy. I was turned from a Christian to a believer, from a lover of love to an object of grace. And so, whereas I first thought that what the Churches needed was enlightened instruction and liberal theology, I came to be sure that what they needed was evangelization” [Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, London, 1907, pp. 282f.]. While Forsyth’s theory of Scripture continued to be somewhat liberal, his use of it was strongly evangelical. He realized that criticism “is a good servant but a deadly master” [The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, p. 49].

The Gospel of grace he emphasized as “God’s act of redemption before it is man’s message of it.… Only as a Gospel done by God is it a Gospel spoken by man. It is a revelation only because it was first of all a reconciliation.… It is an objective power, a historic act and perennial energy of the holy love of God in Christ; decisive for humanity in time and eternity; and altering for ever the whole relation of the soul to God, as it may be rejected or believed” [Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, p. 6]. He discerned that “every great revival in the Church has gone with a new sense of Christ’s vicarious redemption” and that the Reformation was “the greatest of evangelical revivals” [Ibid., pp. 195, 37]. “I am afraid we must part with the idea that there is no narrowness in Christianity,” he declared on another occasion. “… The Gospel is as narrow as Christ, and Christ is as narrow as the Cross” [Missions in State and Church, London, 1908, pp. 201f.].

The Key To The Saviour

The Cross of Christ, as the focal and finishing point of redemption, was very rightly his major theme. Thus he wrote: “Only the redeemed Church, the Church that knows the forgiveness, has the key to the Saviour. His blessings are the key to His nature; they do not wait till the nature is first defined. No philosopher, as such, has the key, no theologian, no scholar, no critic; only the believer, only the true Church. And we have it where the evangelical experience has always found its forgiveness—in the Cross. Our faith begins with the historic Christ.… We begin, in principle if not in method, with Christ the crucified.… The prime doer in Christ’s Cross was God. Christ was God reconciling. He was God doing the very best for man, not man doing his very best before God. The former is evangelical Christianity, the latter is humanist Christianity” [The Cruciality of the Cross, London, 1948, p. 17]. Again: “You do not understand Christ till you understand His Cross.… It is only by understanding it that we escape from religion with no mind, and from religion which is all mind, from pietism with its lack of critical judgment, and from rationalism with its lack of everything else” (Ibid., p. 26). “Most of the failure to recognize the divine greatness of Christ,” he declared, “arises in the end from a moral failure to appreciate Him as personal Saviour; and that failure rises from a defect in the estimate of the sin from which He saves. A lofty ideal is not mighty to save.… The theology of such a Gospel opens only to a Church of broken and converted men. Only the saved have the real secret of the Saviour” [The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, pp. 73, 219].

Grace And Judgment

Forsyth had a clear recognition of the truth that the grace of God has full significance only in association with the judgment of God. “Do preach a Gospel where salvation is in real rapport with deep guilt and redemption with holy judgment,” he urged [Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, p. 154]. Indeed, he boldly proclaimed the Cross to be the seat of final judgment: “It does not avert the great last judgment, it is the action of that judgment.… The justified have the last judgment behind them” [Ibid., p. 347]. This dynamic evangelical perspective could do much to revitalize our prosecution of the Gospel task today. Let him expound the subject further: “The judgment at the end of history is only the corollary of the judgment at the centre of history.… The mainspring of missions is not the judgment that will fall, but the judgment that has fallen in the Cross.… The absolute ultimate judgment of the world took place in Christ’s death. There God spoke His last word—His last endless word. The last moral reality is there, the last standard, the last judgment. The last judgment is behind us. The true judgment-seat of Christ, where we must all appear, is the Cross.… There, too, the judgment of our sins fell once for all on the Holy One and the Just. The judgment Christ exercises stands on the judgment He endured. He assumes judgment because He absorbed it. Salvation and judgment are intertwined; they are not consecutive” [Missions in State and Church, pp. 16, 61f., 73].

Forsyth was an outspoken, though charitable, antagonist of the theology of liberalism, which he himself had once espoused. To it he opposed what he termed “positive” theology. Thus he affirmed: “The first feature of a positive Gospel is that it is a Gospel of pure, free grace to human sin. (And you will find that liberalism either begins or ends with ignoring sin or minimizing it.) The initiative rests entirely with God, and with a holy and injured God. On this article of grace the whole of Christianity turns.… A liberal theology has most to say of God’s love, a positive of God’s mercy. The one views God’s love chiefly in relation to human love, the other chiefly in relation to human sin. In relation to sin chiefly—because a positive Gospel is a revelation of holy love.… The liberal theology, as I am describing it, is fatal to the old faith.… It reduces mercy to a form of pity by abolishing the claim of holiness, the gravity of sin, and the action of an Atonement.… It makes the Cross not necessary but valuable; not central but supplemental; not creative but exhibitive; a demonstration but not a revelation; a reconciliation but not a redemption” [Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, pp. 211ff.]. Again: “The final tendency of ‘advanced theology’ is backwards. Like Moliere’s ghost, it has improved very much for the worse.… We cannot take the resurrection Gospel and leave the resurrection fact. So also with the Cross; and so with the Person of Christ.… We reduce the New Testament to a piece of tradition; and in so doing we surrender the protestant position to the catholic” [The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, pp. 133, 182, 103f.].

And in these days when it is theologically fashionable, not to say respectable (though meaningless in terms of scriptural reality), to distinguish between “the historic Jesus” and “the risen Christ,” designers of religious thought may with advantage be reminded of Forsyth’s pungent comment that “to divide up the personality, and detach the heavenly Christ from the earthly Jesus, is not a feat of criticism so much as a failure of religion, or an intellectual freak and a confession of unfaith” [ibid., p. 177].

A Plea For Theology

How relevant to our present theological climate also are his remarks on the prevalent depreciation of so-called “propositional” or “dogmatic” religion. “The prime need of religion today,” retaliated Forsyth, “is a theology. No religion can survive which does not know where it is. And current religion does not know where it is, and it hates to be made to ask. It hates theology.… When preachers denounce theology, or a Church despises it for literary or social charm, that is to sell the Cross to be a pendant at the neck of the handsome world. It is spiritual poverty and baldness, it is not the simplicity in Christ, to be sick of grace, judgment, atonement, and redemption” [The Cruciality of the Cross, pp. 27f.]. He referred incisively to “mere theological liberalism, which, in the effort to discard dogma, only substitutes philosophic dogma for theological” [Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, p. 248], and to “laborious scholars living at a date so remote as our own, working often with more psychological acumen than personal faith, and working under a bias against apostolic interpretation” [The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, p. 127].

The Church And Missions

Finally, Forsyth has important things to say about the missionary activity of the Christian Church. The quotations that follow are from his neglected but notable volume entitled Missions in State and Church: “What goes deepest to the conscience goes widest to the world. The more completely we feel sin to be condemned in the Cross the more power and commandment we have to carry the absolution to the ends of the earth.… You may always measure the value to yourselves of Christ’s Cross by your interest in missions. And it is a safe test of the Spirit’s presence in a Church.… One reason why the Church is too little missionary abroad is that it is not a missionary Church at home. It is established on good terms with its world instead of being a foreign mission from another.… The missionless Church betrays that it is a crossless Church; and it becomes a faithless Church, an unblest Church, a mere religious society, and finally, perhaps a mere cultured clique.… Missions are a debt on every Christian individual.… It is not optional to pay our debts.… The man who repudiates his debts is bankrupt; the Church that disavows missionary sympathy is bankrupt in evangelical grace and universal faith. The decay of evangelical faith is fatal to missions” [pp. 18, 19, 251, 254f.]. And I cannot forbear to quote from a delightfully satirical passage in the same book on “globe-trotter” creeds. “Have you not met that class of people called ‘globe-trotters?’ he asks. They have time and means, health, curiosity, and interest, easily excited. They travel much, some incessantly. Their world is a plexus of hotels connected by rails.… They have seen the outside of many lands, and cities, and men. Their creed has a certain breadth which they parade. It is as easy as it is broad.… As it is with these grievous people, so I say it is with the creeds that sacrifice everything to breadth, and are interested in all faiths alike. They do not send missions, they do not help missions. They are globe-trotter creeds, cosmopolitan but not universal. They are, in the world of mind and belief, what these rich tramps, these returned empties, are in the world of movement …” [pp. 209ff.].

Some Other Works

Of other works from Forsyth’s pen not referred to above mention may be made of The Church and the Sacraments, The Soul of Prayer, The Justification of God, Theology in Church and State, Faith, Freedom, and the Future, Socialism, the Church, and the Poor, and Rome, Reform, and Reaction. Had space permitted, much more might have been said about various aspects of his thought and activity. But sufficient has, I hope, been said and quoted to demonstrate something of the power, the penetration, and the originality of Forsyth’s mind, the depth of his faith, firmly anchored to the Cross of Christ, and the profit and stimulation which may be expected from the reading of his works. Through their writings it is always possible for us to sit at the feet of the great ones of the past, and that is a privilege to be highly prized.

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes is former secretary of the Church Society of the Church of England and former vice-president of Tyndale Hall in Bristol. He holds the B.D., M.A. and D.Litt. degrees. He is a frequent contributor to religious periodicals.

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