James Denney

Logos announces the P.T. Forsyth Collection

It’s always wonderfully encouraging to see that PT Forsyth continues to be read. And while all of Forsyth’s major publications are easily and freely accessible in various formats, Logos are planning to make them available in one place in e-book form with their PT Forsyth Collection. Here’s the product description:

The P. T. Forsyth Collection brings together 24 works from this celebrated Scottish theologian and preacher. After studying at the University of Göttingen under the notable theologian Albrecht Ritschl, Forsyth went on to become one of the early twentieth century’s most influential theologians—his ideas are largely thought to have anticipated, and mirrored, the neo-orthodox movement of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner.

The P. T. Forsyth Collection includes Forsyth’s best-known works, including The Cruciality of the Cross, his strong plea for the orthodox doctrine of atonement, and The Justification of God, a moving collection of lectures written at the height of World War I, when many Christians were having trouble reconciling their faith in God with the horrors of war. In This Life and the Next, Forsyth studies the doctrine of immortality and its impact on our current lives. Christ on Parnassus contains lectures on the connection between art and religion. The still-popular Positive Preaching and Modern Mind contains advice to future ministers—advice still relevant for and needed by today’s teachers and preachers.

Also included is the The Holy Father and the Living Christ, Christian Perfection, and The Taste of Death and the Life of Grace, which were later reprinted in a single volume titled God the Holy Father, as well as The Principle of Authority in Relation to Certainty, Sanctity and Society, which was later republished as The Church, the Gospel, and Society.

Plus, there are works that examine the doctrine of Christ’s divinity, the connection between economics and the church, the ethics of war and Christianity, and much more. In the Logos Bible Software edition, all Scripture passages in the P. T. Forsyth Collection are tagged to appear on mouseover. For scholarly work or personal Bible study, this makes these resources more powerful and easier to access than ever before. Perform powerful searches by topic or Scripture reference—finding, for example, every mention of “resurrection” or “Mark 9:2.”

Forsyth buffs may also be keen to know that Logos also plan to make available the works of James Denney. Good stuff.

Seeing the world through Christian eyes

denney‘We know the world only as a sinful world, and we know the relation of Christ to it, experimentally, only as that of its Saviour from sin’. We must ‘stick to the actual’ and try to ‘understand and interpret what is, not to wander off into what might have been, as though it might find there truths sublime or more profound. The world we live in is the only world’. – James Denney, The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation (London: James Clarke & Co., 1959 [1917]), 181-2.

Denney on sanctification

Among the first of ‘Christian’ books that I ever read (many moons ago now) was Denney’s The Death of Christ. I recall that one of the most significant impacts of that book on me concerned not only the awesome subject matter, but Denney’s theological method. [The same thing impressed me in Calvin and in Barth]. Here was a theologian doing rigorous exegesis. [What I didn’t know at the time was that Denney was principally a NT scholar].  Anyway, I revisited that book recently and was no less impressed by it. Here’s Denney’s comments on Hebrews 13:12:

There has been much discussion as to what sanctification in such passages means, and especially as to whether the word is to be taken in a religious or an ethical sense. Probably the distinction would not have been clear to the writer; but one thing is certain, it is not to be taken in the sense of Protestant theology. The people were sanctified, not when they were raised to moral perfection – a conception utterly strange to the New Testament as to the Old – but when, through the annulling of their sin by sacrifice, they had been constituted into a people of God, and in the person of their representative had access to His presence. The word ἁγιάζειν in short, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, corresponds as nearly as possible to the Pauline δικαιοῦν; the sanctification of the one writer is the justification of the other; and the προσαγωγή or access to God, which St. Paul emphasizes as the primary blessing of justification (Romans 5:2 and Ephesians 2:18, 3:12), appears everywhere in Hebrews as the primary religious act of drawing near, to God through the great High Priest (4:16, 7:19-25 and 10:22). It seems fair then to argue that the immediate effect of Christ’s death upon men is religious rather than ethical; in technical language, it alters their relation to God, or is conceived as doing so, rather than their character. Their character, too, alters eventually, but it is on the basis of that initial and primary religious change; the religious change is not a result of the moral one, nor an unreal abstraction from it.

– James Denney, The Death of Christ: Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909), 220-1.

Denney on prayers for the dead

Recent days have seen a turning of my attention towards James Denney who was a good mate of PT Forsyth’s and an extraordinary NT scholar. One thing that impressed me today in my reading were his comments on praying for the dead. While Forsyth defends the practice on christological grounds, Denney does so on grounds creational and experiential.

I do not think it is any use telling people not to pray for the dead; you might as well teach them not to think of them or love them, or indeed tell them roundly that after death there is nothing at all. I think most people who pray at all do pray for the dead … Certainly the absence of any example of it from the Bible is remarkable, especially taken with the life and death urgency of all the Bible does say: but a great many things must be lawful that the Bible says nothing about – things covered by the word of Jesus, “If it were not so, I would have told you” – a saying which always seems to me to justify yielding … to any instinct of the nature which is made in God’s image, and cannot be simply delusive in the things of God.

It seems to me odd that the long-held practice of praying for the dead has all but disappeared in Protestant circles (or at least in the circles in which I move). No doubt there are decent historical reasons for such abandonment, but understanding history never justifies history’s poor actions. [As an aside, recall that Denney’s comments – ‘I think most people who pray at all do pray for the dead’ – were not only made by a staunchly-Reformed Protestant, but were written just over a hundred years ago].

What both Denney and Forsyth are seeking to urge is that in Jesus Christ, the living and the dead remain unforgettably and indestructibly united in love for each other, and in a common hopeful sharing. It is not anthropology, therefore, that holds the communion of saints together on both sides of death, but Jesus Christ as Lord of both the living and the dead. Therefore, do not the saints on earth have an obligation in the gospel to pray for those who have died, and who indeed form the largest part of the race? Such prayer helps to bear witness to the Church’s unity and catholicity, and indeed to the theo-organic unity of the race itself under its new Head, himself risen from the dead. To pray for the dead signals a refusal to believe the lie that the state of a person remains fixed at death, and functions as a sign of hope in the God who raises the dead to life. To pray for one who is dying, and then to continue praying after they die – without missing a beat – is not to deny the reality of their death so much as it is to faithfully trust in the God who knows his way out of the grave.

Denney on reading our Bibles too much

I’m currently writing a paper on James Denney, specifically Denney’s understanding of pastoral ministry gleaned as it was not only by some seriously-deep engagement with the NT, but also from critical reflection on his time in two pastorates. I hope to post on some of these reflections soon, but for now consider the following confession, made all the more radical coming from the pen of one whose scholarly and personal devotion to the NT (in particular) was unquestionable:

‘Does it ever occur to you … that we read our Bibles too much, and that it might do us good to read none for a twelvemonth, just as it would do some people good if for as long they read nothing else? I have sometimes felt weary of the very look and sound of the New Testament; the words are so familiar that I can read without catching any meaning, and have to read again, far oftener than in another book, because I have slid a good bit unconsciously’. – James Moffatt, ed., Letters of Principal James Denney to His Family and Friends (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921), 81.

Mercy comes to us through judgement

Just spent a long weekend up in the Scottish Highlands salmon fishing, watching my 2-year-old daughter ceaselessly enjoy herself, reading Denney’s brilliant commentary on 2 Corinthians, drinking great whisky, and enjoying the rich company of some special friends. Does it get any better than that! Anyway, in the spirit of sharing all good things, here’s just one (long) paragraph of Denney’s extended discussion on 5:18–21 that was too good not to share:

‘No one who has felt the power of this appeal will be very anxious to defend the Apostolic Gospel from the charges which are sometimes made against it. When he is told that it is impossible for the doom of sin to fall on the Sinless One, and that even if it were conceivable it would be frightfully immoral, he is not disquieted. He recognises in the moral contradictions of this text the surest sign that the secret of the Atonement is revealed in it: he feels that God’s work of reconciliation necessarily involves such an identification of sinlessness and sin. He knows that there is an appalling side to sin, and he is ready to believe that there is an appalling side to redemption also a side the most distant sight of which makes the proudest heart quail, and stops every mouth before God. He knows that the salvation which he needs must be one in which God’s mercy comes through, and not over. His judgment; and this is the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. But without becoming controversial on a subject on which more than on any other the temper of controversy is unseemly, reference may be made to the commonest form of objection to the apostolic doctrine, in the sincere hope that some one who has stumbled at that doctrine may see it more truly. The objection I refer to discredits propitiation in the alleged interest of the love of God. “We do not need,” the objectors say, “to propitiate an angry God. This is a piece of heathenism, of which a Christian ought to be ashamed. It is a libel on the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose name is love, and who waits to be gracious.” What are we to say to such words, which are uttered as boldly as if there were no possible reply, or rather as if the Apostles had never written, or had been narrow-minded unreceptive souls, who had not only failed to understand their Master, but had taught with amazing perversity the very opposite of what He taught on the most essential of all points the nature of God and His relation to sinful men? We must say this. It is quite true that we have not to propitiate an offended God: the very fact upon which the Gospel proceeds is that we cannot do any such thing. But it is not true that no propitiation is needed. As truly as guilt is a real thing, as truly as God’s condemnation of sin is a real thing, a propitiation is needed. And it is here, I think, that those who make the objection referred to part company, not only with St. Paul, but with all the Apostles. God is love, they say, and therefore He does not require a propitiation. God is love, say the Apostles, and therefore He provides a propitiation. Which of these doctrines appeals best to the conscience? Which of them gives reality, and contents, and substance, to the love of God? Is it not the apostolic doctrine? Does not the other cut out and cast away that very thing which made the soul of God s love to Paul and John? “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” “God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us … Him that knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf” That is how they spoke in the beginning of the Gospel, and so let us speak. Nobody has any right to borrow the words “God is love” from an apostle, and then to put them in circulation after carefully emptying them of their apostolic import. Still less has any one a right to use them as an argument against the very thing in which the Apostles placed their meaning. But this is what they do who appeal to love against propitiation. To take the condemnation out of the Cross is to take the nerve out of the Gospel; it will cease to hold men s hearts with its original power when the reconciliation which is preached through it contains the mercy, but not the judgment of God. Its whole virtue, its consistency with God’s character, its aptness to man’s need, its real dimensions as a revelation of love, depend ultimately on this, that mercy comes to us in it through judgment’. (pp. 200-2)

Denney on repentance

‘Repentance is an adequate sense not of our folly, nor of our misery, but of our sin: as the New Testament puts it, it is repentance toward God. It is the consciousness of what our sin is to Him: of the wrong it does to His holiness, of the wound which it inflicts on His love. Now such a consciousness it is not in the power of the sinner to produce at will. The more deeply he has sinned, the more (so to speak) repentance is needed, the less is it in his power. It is the very nature of sin to darken the mind and harden the heart, to take away the knowledge of God alike in His holiness and in His love. Hence it is only through a revelation of God, and especially of what God is in relation to sin, that repentance can be evoked in the soul … All true penitents are children of the Cross. Their penitence is not their own creation: it is the reaction towards God produced in their souls by this demonstration of what sin is to Him, and of what His love does to reach and win the sinful’. – James Denney, The Atonement and the Modern Mind (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 88-89, 90.

Books on the Atonement

In the year of his passing (1917), the great James Denney’s The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation was published. Commenting on books written on the atonement, he penned the following:

‘Of all books that have ever been written on the atonement, as God’s way of reconciling man to Himself, McLeod Campbell’s is probably that which is most completely inspired by the spirit of the truth with which it deals. There is a reconciling power of Christ in it to which no tormented conscience can be insensible. The originality of it is spiritual as well as intellectual, and no one who has ever felt its power will cease to put it in a class by itself. In speculative power he cannot be compared to Schleiermacher, nor in historical learning to Ritschl, and sometimes he writes as badly as either; but he walks in the light all the time, and every thing he touches lives’.

Of course, the first half of the twentieth century saw some wonderful work done on the atonement. Forsyth’s The Cruciality of the Cross and The Work of Christ, and Denney’s The Death of Christ, being of, to my mind, the best. And in the previous century, Erskine’s The Brazen Serpent stands out alongside McLeod’s Campbell’s work.

But what of the second half of last century, and the first years of this one? What are the works that do (and should) stand out? Of whose work could it today be said, ‘There is a reconciling power of Christ in it to which no tormented conscience can be insensible’?

What works would you nominate?: Moltmann’s The Crucified God? Smail’s Once and For All? Torrance’s The Mediation of Christ? Gunton’s The Actuality of the Atonement? Bingham’s Christ’s Cross Over Man’s Abyss? Stott’s The Cross of Christ? Morris’ The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross? Schmiechen’s Saving Power? … ? What works would you nominate, and why?

Moreover, who is writing of the atonement today not as an onlooker but as one who has been there, and is there still?