Forsyth consistently asserts that the Church’s faith rests not on some ‘subjective sanctity’ but on a ‘real principle’ – the objective work of Christ. This faith finds personal expression in his own experience of grace: ‘God has made life out of my shipwreck’, he says in his sermon on Ezekiel 37, ‘that is my experience. He has opened my grave and made me live; he has clothed my bones with flesh, and stirred me with life and hope; and if he has done that for me, then the incredible miracle is in principle done that saves the world.’ Here Forsyth gives voice to his conviction that he has been saved by that which saved the whole world. ‘It took a world salvation to save me, and what I know in this matter for me I foreknow for mankind.’ In other words, Forsyth is certain of his salvation because God has saved the world.

Now because Forsyth understands election both christologically and as related to God’s wider eschatological purposes concerning universal righteousness (as in Calvin, who in the Institutes deals with election at the end of Book Three, i.e. after he has expounded the persons and works of God), his doctrine of assurance avoids the anxiety-producing effects that have accompanied that Calvinist tradition that traces its roots through Beza and Perkins. Forsyth identifies that no matter how pastorally well-intended the federal theologians were, one result of decayed and pietistic federal Calvinism has been ‘a welter and a haze in which the soul turns for assurance from itself and its piety … to seek in the sacraments a stay and comfort which the elect found at a higher source’. Forsyth directs us to look to Christ in whom we are given the objective ground our election and so of assurance.