Having just finished a draft of chapter for my thesis, I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about Forsyth’s encouragement to his North American hearers (in Positive Preaching) to ‘read Ibsen’ … and enjoying life with my 5 week old daughter.

Forsyth saw in Ibsen one who identified the problem with humanism as lacking ‘moral realism’. In words that seem to suggest that Forsyth saw Ibsen’s work functioning not unlike the ‘natural’ conscience, he writes: Ibsen ‘has not “found Christ,” but he has found what drives us to Christ, the need Christ alone meets. He unveils man’s perdition, and makes a Christ inevitable for any hope of righteousness.’ Forsyth laments not only that Ibsen never read Kierkegaard more closely, but that while critics with the judgment such as Ibsen and Nietzsche do not grasp the revealed answer to the question, ‘the Church with the revelation does not critically grasp the problem, nor duly attend to those who do’.

He continues: ‘Therefore [the Church] cannot adjust its revelation to the age. It is too occupied with the comfort of religion, the winsome creed, the wooing note, and the charming home. It does not realise the inveteracy of sin, the ingrained guilt, the devilry at work, and the searching judgment upon society at large. God’s medicine for society burns as it goes down. And we need a vast catastrophe like a European war to bring home what could have been learned from a Christian revelation that gave due place to the element of saving judgment in the Cross of Christ.

Hence, thrice on the one page does he entreat his North American hearers to ‘read Ibsen’, who, more than any dramatist gets ‘closer to life’s moral realities’.

Forsyth praised Ibsen for having ‘enough conscience to know the nature of the human burden’ but lamented that Ibsen lacked the insight to ‘bear it’ or, more importantly, to ‘roll it upon another’. Ibsen’s tragedy is true, but not tragic enough, not real enough. This is because Ibsen lacked one who could ‘create in him the repentance which alone must create personality out of such chaotic material as he found. He had the conscience to feel the sin of the world, but not the power of remedy.’

For the sake of the former, Ibsen, and those prophets like him, must be read, and re-read. But to not read on would be to not tell the whole story. For whereas Nietzsche and Ibsen could only identify the problem, Forsyth, like Paul and Luther before him, points us to Christ. And whereas in Ibsen we see a longing for home, only Forsyth’s gospel of blood-soaked grace can finally bring us there. ‘The practical solution of life by the soul is outside life. The destiny of experience is beyond itself. The lines of life’s moral movement and of thought’s nisus converge in a point beyond life and history … The key is in the Beyond; though not necessarily beyond death, but beyond the world of the obvious, and palpable, and common-sensible. (Yea, beyond the inward it really is.).’

Questions for further thought:

Is Forsyth’s portrayal of Ibsen accurate? Is human drama, or any art form for that matter, able to serve the necessary revelatory purpose that Forsyth insists that God alone can? What of preaching, even when God himself enters the pulpit? Who are the Ibsen’s today? What are they saying? How are they saying it? Does tragedy operate as a point of contact between the divine and the human? If so, how? Why do Christians seek to reproduce tragedy in art? Are they being honest when they do so? Do Christian artists betray an inadequate theology of Holy Saturday? Forsyth said that in Ibsen, ‘as for all of the rest of the tragic poets, guilt is the centre of the tragedy’. What is the relationship between guilt and tragedy? Forsyth and Ibsen identify the source of guilt in different places. For Forsyth, it lies in holiness, and that unclothed in the atonement. For Ibsen, in human self-analysis. How does this shape their respective views of tragedy? ‘Ibsen’s is a dismal lesson, but one that the age and the Church alike much need if only it were properly read to them, as Ibsen does not.’ We commend Ibsen for pointing toward our need of redemption. Do we need these experiences to react against in order to see our guilt? Is Ibsen still able to speak to this generation about their human condition orhave his plays become archaic and elite? What is it about tragic art that allows human persons to express solidarity with one another? ‘Ibsen makes very much of the social responsibility of the individual as the person which only society can make him to be.’ Brand is at the mercy of his experiences by the end of the play but is he a victim? Is Brand a hero or a villain? What insights does tragedy (and comedia) offer that intimate a Beyond in which the play might continue?

Any thoughts on Forsyth and Ibsen would be most appreciated.

Also, for those who might be interested, the Ibsen Festival is on this year (August 24 to September 16). The Nationaltheatret will present 30 Ibsen productions from 15 countries all around the globe, boasting approximately one hundred events during the four festival weeks. More info can be found here, here and the program here. Anyone want to sponsor a student to go?