PT Forsyth

Pathetic Christmases

Happy Christmas to all readers of Per Crucem ad Lucem. Here’s PT Forsyth singing his constant song, and reminding us again of why today the Church might sing Joy to the World, and of the ‘wonders of [God’s] love’ :

‘Without [the] cross and its Atonement we come to a religion of much point but no atmosphere, much sympathy and no imagination, much kindness and no greatness, much charm and no force—a religion for the well-disposed and not for the rebel, in which we love our neighbour, but not our enemy, and not our Judge; a religion for the sensitive, but not for the world. When the world-cross goes out of the centre of religion, religion in due time goes out of the centre of man’s moral and public energy. The public then goes past the preacher because he is not strong enough to arrest and compel them. He has too much to say and too little to tell. He hangs to his age by its weakness, and not by its strength. He does not reach its soul with such gospel as he has. The pathos of Christ takes the place of his power. We canonise the weak things of our Christian world in our haste for rapid success with the many. Religion becomes too aesthetic, too exclusively sympathetic, too bland, too naturalistic. Our very Christmas becomes the festival of babyhood, Good Friday the worship of grief, and Easter of spring and renewal instead of regeneration. To use the old theological language, under an obsession of culture and its pensive delicacies we become dominated by the passive obedience of Christ instead of His active. We treat the cross as a passion only, instead of a principle, or as a moral principle instead of a decisive deed. Christ becomes a pathetic, tender, helpful and gracious figure rather than a mighty … But the great dividing issue for the soul is neither the Bethlehem cradle nor the empty grave, nor the Bible, nor the social question. For the Church at least (however it be with individuals) it is the question of a redeeming atonement. It is here that the evangelical issue lies. It is here, and not upon the nativity, that we part company with the Unitarians. It is here that the unsure may test their crypto-unitarianism. I would unchurch none. I would but clear the issue for the honest conscience. It is this that determines whether a man is Unitarian or Evangelical, and it is this that should guide his conscience as to his ecclesiastical associations. Only if he hold that in the atoning cross of Christ the world was redeemed by holy God once for all, that there, and only there, sin was judged and broken, that there and only there the race was reconciled and has its access to the face and grace of God—only then has he the genius and the plerophory of the Gospel. If he hold to Christ as this head, then, whatever views he may hold on other heads, he is of the Gospel company and the Evangelical pale. Only thus has he a real final message for the age. Only thus is he more than one that has a lovely voice and can play well on an instrument for the ages’ pleasure and its final neglect’.

– PT Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 27, 73–4.

 

Aquinas, Luther and Calvin on the role of the priest in the eucharist

While in the current of writing a lecture on the Eucharist, I have been enjoying intincting – and, in some cases, re-intincting – into some great books: William T. Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ, Angel F. Mendez Montoya’s The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist, Stephen Sykes’ Power and Christian Theology, among them. William Stringfellow’s essay ‘Liturgy as Political Event’ is also wonderful. I’m also enjoying George Hunsinger’s The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let Us Keep the Feast, a book that deserves a very close read and is certainly among the boldest and most important studies available on the subject.

Hunsinger notes that Thomas Aquinas, who was among the most impressive of the pre-Reformation theologians, understood the role of the priest in the eucharist as in some sense mediating between Christ and the faithful. In other words, for Thomas, the priest was the central figure in the eucharistic sacrifice. So Hunsinger writes: ‘‘He [i.e., the priest] acted both “in the person of Christ” (in persona Christi) as well as “in the person of the church” (in persona ecclesiae) (ST 3.82.8). In the person of Christ, he consecrated the sacrament. In the person of the church, he offered Christ in prayer to God (ST 3.82.8). Whatever the priest did when acting in the person of Christ was taken up in turn by the people (ST 3.83.4). The priest’s union with Christ, however, was different than it was for the laity. “Devout layfolk are one with Christ by spiritual union through faith and charity,” explained Aquinas, but the priest was one with Christ “by sacramental power” (ST, 3.82.1). At his ordination the priest had received a special status, “the power of offering sacrifice in the church for the living and the dead” (ST 3.82.1). The priest was set apart from the people, and above them, by virtue of this sacramental power’ (pp. 114–5).

Luther, of course, would radically qualify – or extend – this notion in his argument that the priest symbolised the priesthood of all believers, while possessing no special powers of consecration and sacrifice in and of himself. Luther stated:

‘Thus it becomes clear that it is not the priest alone who offers the sacrifice of the mass; it is the faith which each one has for himself. This is the true priestly office, through which Christ is offered as a sacrifice to God, an office which the priest, with the outward ceremonies of the mass, simply represents. Each and all are, therefore, equally priests before God . . . For faith must do everything. Faith alone is the true priestly office. It permits no one to take its place. Therefore all Christian men are priests, all women are priestesses, be they young or old, master or servant, mistress or maid, learned or unlearned. Here there is no difference unless faith be unequal’. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 35: Word and Sacrament 1 (ed. J.J. Pelikan, et al.; vol. 35; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 100–1.

Hunsinger, in Eucharist and Ecumenism, properly notes that Luther upheld the idea of grace alone by combining christological mediation with communal participation:

‘The believer and the community can be said to offer Christ by participating in Christ’s own self-offering, which in turn mediates them into eternal life with God. Inclusion in Christ’s priestly self-offering is at once the promise and the consequence of grace. At the same time, the place of the priest in the mass has been radically redefined. Christ the eternal priest does not operate in and through the visible priest, nor does the priest offer Christ as the invisible victim through the bread and the cup. The bread and the cup, for Luther, are the sacramental but not the sacrificial body and blood of Christ. That is, they are not the means of reciprocal self-offering to God by Christ, priest, and people. They are not the eucharistic means by which Christ is offered up. The bread and cup are simply a pledge of Christ’s faithfulness to his promises. It is not the priest but the faith of each believer that offers Christ to God. The role of the priest is simply to symbolize by outward ceremonies the one true priestly office, which is faith’. (p. 135)

The Reformed, following Calvin and the best of those who spoke in his wake, sought to witness to how the cross and the eucharist are held in a unity that does not violate but reinforces their distinction via two forms: The constitutive form is the cross while the mediating form is the eucharist. ‘The cross is always central, constitutive, and definitive, while the eucharist is always secondary, relative, and derivative. The eucharistic form of the one sacrifice does not repeat the unrepeatable, but it does attest what it mediates and mediate what it attests. What it mediates and attests is the one whole Jesus Christ, who in his body and blood is both the sacrifice and the sacrament in one. As the sacrifice, he is the Offerer and the Offering. As the sacrament, he is the Giver and the Gift. The Son’s sacrificial offering of himself to the Father for us on the cross is the ground of the Father’s sacramental gift of his Son to the faithful in the eucharist’ (Ibid. 151). As TF Torrance has shown in Theology in Reconciliation, the cross is the ‘dimension of depth’ in the eucharist. The eucharist has no significance in and of itself. Its significance is both derived and grounded in the cross. The cross alone is, as TF Torrance notes, the saving ‘content, reality and power’ of the eucharist. It is to this that the Reformed minister and church directs our gaze.

It was precisely such a position which led PT Forsyth, the theologian of the cross, in his lectures on The Church and the Sacraments, to offer the following statement:

The Lord’s Supper is the most complete and plenary of all the cultic ways of confessing the work of reconciliation, where the sin of humanity is conquered by the grace of God in a holy Kingdom. It is therefore the real centre of the Church’s common and social life. This should not be sought in social reunions, or ecclesiastical monarchy, or philanthropic cohesion, but in the spiritual region, in the worship, and the theology moulding it. For here we are summoned to what is our vital centre deep within all the individual wills that wish to unite, to what is the centre of the faith that makes the new Humanity, and to the goal which rounds all’. (p. 260)

 

 

Thinking about Anglicanism

I have a deep and abiding appreciation for Anglicanism, and for Anglican theology, fostered in no small part by a year that I spent as an undergrad studying at Ridley Theological College. But it is no news to anyone that Anglicanism finds itself in hard times. Not uniquely hard, nor uniquely for this time, but still hard. And it may be fair to say that the Anglican communion needs all the friends it can get at the moment. So I was struck by these stinging words from Thomas Merton:

‘The Church of England depends, for its existence, almost entirely on the solidarity and conservativism of the English ruling class. Its strength is not in anything supernatural, but in the strong social and racial instincts which bind the members of this caste together; and the English cling to their Church the way they cling to their King and to their old schools: because of a big, vague, sweet complex of subjective dispositions regarding the English countryside, old castles and cottages, games of cricket in the long summer afternoons, tea-parties on the Thames, croquet, roast-beef, pipe-smoking, the Christmas panto, Punch and the London Times and all those other things the mere thought of which produces a kind of a warm and inexpressible ache in the English heart’. – Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1988), 72.

Let’s just pretend for a moment that Merton is not completely off the page here, and that most Anglicans really are like Jane Austen’s Mr Collins; is this all that we might want to – even feel compelled to – say about our Anglican sisters and brothers, few of whom I know enjoy ‘tea-parties on the Thames’ or anywhere for that matter, and about Anglicanism itself?

Forsyth’s assessment of Anglicanism has significantly more currency than that of Merton’s and, in true Forsyth style, he goes to the bottom of things. Forsyth locates the enigma and scandal of Anglicanism in the schism which occured at the time of the Reformation. Painfully aware that he may cause offense, and that he is stepping on toes long blistered, some of which like it so, Forsyth, addressing a British audience from the Free Church camp, recalls that it is the judgement of the chief branch of the Catholic family that Anglicanism is guilty of sponsoring (ongoing) schism in the church:

‘If it is denied that there was a schism, how is it that the put with so much learning (whatever insight) fails to convince? It fails to convince, on one side, Rome and the Greek Church (which know a good deal about schisms), and, on the other hand, ourselves (who are not ignorant of them). If the Anglican Church did not owe its existence to a schism from the Pope and, in connection therewith, to a schism from the great Church of the West, at least it came out there. By its detachment from European Christianity it acquired much of the insular spirit, which in a Church is the sectarian note. It seems extravagant, not to say harsh, to speak thus of a Church so great and even glorious. But I am only speaking the language it has taught us. Of course, it is a true Church and a noble, with a great glory both in past and future. Historically it is the mother of us all. And we should differ as Churches – respectfully, and not bitterly, like political parties or petty heretics. But, if it will insist on treating as sectaries and schismatics those outside itself in virtue of a succession now more than shaky to its own scholars – it must not be grieved if we interrogate its own history and explore it with the torch of the Gospel. It is a schism and a sect, which abjures the name because of its greatness just as the Norman raid is dignified as the Conquest, and claims to be the beginning of the true England and of English nobility. But it is not size that parts a Church from a sect. Indeed, the larger the Church the greater is the risk of corruption into a sect, by the spirit of ascendancy; while quite small “sects” may be full of the faith and love that make a Church. Most of the sects were, in their inception, nearer the actual conditions of the New Testament churches than the Churches were which they left. And, if the actual form, practice, and precedent of the New Testament Churches, as distinct from their Gospel, were decisive for all time, it is the sects that would be in the true succession, the true Churches. But, if a sect is the debasement of a Church, and if a Church is really debased only by moral faults, then the egoism, the pride, the spirit of ascendancy that gather these up is more likely to beset a great institution with a prerogative, a history, and vested interests. A Church becomes a sect when it develops the egoism which for the Church is moral marasmus and when it sees in its size, its splendour, and its domination the chief sign of its calling’. – The Church and the Sacraments, pp. 41–2.

Some classic Forsyth on the Church, its worship and its service

‘The greatest product of the Church is not brotherly love but divine worship. And we shall never worship right nor serve right till we are more engrossed with our God than even with our worship, with His reality than our piety, with His Cross than our service. It is well to dream and to talk much of brotherly love. But the brethren who love best and the love that loves longest are made by the Gospel. It is this they confess in loving, as they confess it in other ways also. Christian charity is not the sweet reasonableness of culture, nor is it natural kindliness of temper. To the lover of righteousness it does not come easy. It grows only on the stem of Christian faith, which is the tree of the Cross and its righteousness. The good live by faith and work by love. Never did Paul dream that his song of Christian love would be turned to belittle or to belabour the Christian faith on which alone it grows. The Church is the greatest product of history, and the greatest product of the Church is a holiness answering the holiness that made it, which is Holy Love. The first commandment of the Cross is “Be ye holy, for I am holy.” Its call is for the confession, worship, and service of that divine Holiness of love which is the spring of our Redemption. The service of God is the root, the service of man is but the fruit. True, by their fruits shall we know them; but not produce them. The fruits are the evidence, not the principles. Love does more to show faith than to produce it. Grace produces it. We live by that faith in holy Love whose fruit is to be a love not only kind, but, still more, holy’. – Peter T. Forsyth, The Church and the Sacraments (London: Independent Press, 1947), 25–6.

Today is PT Forsyth’s birthday.

This Life and the Next

While most of PT Forsyth’s books attracted the publishers’ ‘reprint’ buttons (sometimes up to 11 or 12 different publishers, as was the case with his Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching delivered in 1907 at Yale University and subsequently published as Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind), by 1946 all of his books were out of print. Since then, of course, thanks to Independent Press and Hodder and Stoughton and, more recently, to our good friends at New Creation Teaching Ministry and Wipf and Stock, many of Forsyth’s bests works have been resuscitated. But not – at least not yet (one lives by hope, after all) – his final book, This Life and the Next, which first appeared in 1918.

Of the readers of Forsyth, too few have read this volume and, of those, sadly very few have spoken highly of it. Not a few have indicated that the book represents Forsyth’s greatest literary flop, and even his spiral into ‘heresy’, dealing as it does with themes not often tackled by so Protestant of spirits, such as prayer for the dead and what we might refer to as a Protestant reappraisal of the doctrine of purgatory.

But I like This Life and the Next very much and, for those who have previously drunk deeply from other Forsythian wells,  I reckon that it brings together nicely many of the themes and questions with which he increasingly wrestled in the decade before his death in 1921.

Anyway, all that is just a round-about way of saying that I’ve now made it available as a pdf here, ready to join the other links I’ve already provided to a number of his other works. So take up and read; or, should that be, download and read!

From the sentiment of Christ’s babyhood to the fellowship of his death

A word of encouragement to those who may be preaching on Philippians 2.5–11 this week:

‘The centre of the Incarnation is where Christ placed the focus of His work—not at the beginning of His life, but at its end; not in the manger, but in the cross. The key to the Incarnation is not in the cradle, but in the cross. The light on Bethlehem falls from Calvary. The virtue lies in some act done by Christ; and He Himself did no act in His birth, but in His death He did the act of the universe. The soul of the Incarnation does not lie in His being born of a pure virgin; but it lies in the death of His pure soul and the perfect obedience of His will as a propitiation for the sins of the world. God was in Christ as reconciler, not as prodigy. The key to the Incarnation lies, not in the miracle performed on His mother, but in the act of redemption performed by Himself. Christ’s great work on our behalf was not in assuming our nature at birth, but in what He did with the nature we call assumed. Men were not redeemed by Christ being born as He was, but by His dying as He did. It is that which establishes His power over us sinners. It is that which makes His real value to our souls, because it is there that He atones, expiates, reconciles. It is that which gives chief value to His entrance in the world—not that He was miraculously born, but that He was born to die and redeem. The saving humiliation was not that of the manger but of the cross. It was a humiliation not inflicted or imposed, but achieved. And the self-emptying behind all was one to be explained, not by anything happening to Him in His humble birth, but by what happened through Him in His humiliating death. If He had not been born in that way, and yet had died as He did, He would still have been our reconciliation with God, our Redeemer from the curse, and our Saviour from the sin of the soul and of the race. The power of His Incarnation has become so weak among men, for one reason, because its explanation has been sought at the wrong end of His life. The wonder has been transferred from Good Friday to Christmas, from the festival of the second birth to the festival of the first, from redemption to nativity, from the fellowship of His death to the sentiment of His babyhood’. – PT Forsyth, God the Holy Father, 40–1.

Some good news

Some considerable time has passed since I completed writing my PhD thesis. Friday night saw me formally defend it in an oral exam known as a viva voce. In its most hoped for form, ‘the viva’ is a kind of friendly inquisition which involves a richly-rewarding conversation with two (or more) very qualified examiners, both of whom are encouraging and constructive in their comments, deeply perceptive in their questions, who assess a solid piece of work fairly and without unduly pushing personal agendas, and who pass the thesis without qualification or any further editing required. Mine was just such an experience with Tom Smail and Ivor Davidson.

For those who may be interested, here’s an abstract of my essay:

‘This essay explores whether the notion of “hallowing” provides a profitable lens through which to read and evaluate the soteriology of British theologian P.T. Forsyth, and it suggests that the hallowing of God’s name is, for Forsyth, the way whereby God both justifies himself and claims creation for divine service. It proposes that reading Forsyth’s corpus as essentially an exposition of the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer is an invitation to better comprehend not only his soteriology but also, by extension, his broader theological vision and interests. Chapters One and Two are concerned with questions of methodology, and with placing Forsyth in the social context of his day, with introducing the theological landscape and grammar from which he expounds his notion of reality as fundamentally moral, and with identifying some of the key but neglected voices that inform such a vision. Chapter Three explores the principal locale wherein the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer is answered: in Jesus Christ, whose confession of holiness ‘from sin’s side’ justifies God, destroys sin and creates a new humanity. Chapter Four examines Forsyth’s moral anthropology – specifically, the self-recovery of holiness in the human conscience – and considers holiness’ shape in the life of faith. Chapter Five inquires whether Forsyth’s theology of hallowing finally requires him to embrace dogmatic universalism, and identifies what problems might attend his failure to so do and consequently threaten to undermine his soteriological program’.

Advent V: ‘He was born for the Cross’

Ralph Hotere, 'Towards Aramoana', 1982

‘That Cross was deep embedded in the very structure of Christ’s Person, because nowadays you cannot separate His Person from His vocation, from the work He came to do, and the words He came to speak. The Cross was not simply a fate awaiting Christ in the future; it pervaded subliminally His holy Person. He was born for the Cross. It was His genius, His destiny. It was quite inevitable that, in a world like this, One holy as Jesus was holy should come to the Cross. The parable was spoken by One in whom the Cross and all it stands for were latent in His idea of God; and it became patent, came to the surface, became actual, and practical, and powerful in the stress of man’s crisis and the fullness of God’s time. That is an important phrase. Christ Himself came in a fullness of time. The Cross which consummated and crowned Christ came in its fullness of time. The time was not full during Christ’s life for preaching an atonement that life could never make’. – P.T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 107–8.

Advent IV: Weighing the virgin conception

Today’s New Zealand Herald ran this image and its accompanying story about an Auckland church’s (St Matthews’) new billboard. I’m not really interested here in engaging with the controversy around the offensiveness or cleverness or otherwise of the image, or about how I feel about its defacement some five hours after it was erected. I am interested, however, in taking up the image’s and St Matthews’ (both St Matthews in fact, the apostle’s and the Auckland church’s) invitation to enquire about the Christmas event of Mary’s virginal conception, and about the Church’s ongoing proclamation of that event as part of the Good News for which it exists to bear witness.

So here’s my response to that invitation: The miracle of the virgin conception is a judgement against the possibility of the creature producing its own word of revelation and reconciliation. It is a judgement against us thinking that we can know God apart from God’s initiative, and that we might save ourselves apart from God’s bloody intrusion into our situation. It is the proclamation of God’s gracious and free decision to be God for us, to unveil for us, to reconcile us. And it is the proclamation of God’s gracious and free decision to save us, and that by becoming personally involved – literally enfleshed – in the deepest depths of creaturely experience. This is why it is Good News. In PT Forsyth’s words, ‘The Virgin birth is not a necessity created by the integrity and infallibility of the Bible; it is a necessity created (if at all) by the solidarity of the Gospel, and by the requirements of grace’. (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 14).

Forsyth on Christ’s complete and compendious act of redemption

forsyth-12There simply is never a bad time to read Forsyth, and it’s been a while since I posted any. So here’s a passage that I was meditating on just this morning:

‘The work of Christ does not simply face us as a landscape or a heroism faces us for our appreciation and description. His words might so confront us, but not His work underlying them and rising both to transcend them and suffuse them. It does not simply stamp itself on us. It is not only impressive, but dynamic. It makes and unmakes us for its own response, it creates (it does not simply elicit) the power to answer and understand itself. This we recognize when we say that our faith is not of ourselves, it is the gift of God by the Spirit. But we mostly mean this too vaguely, as if it were God’s gift by a second act of His Spirit distinct from the great, pregnant, and fontal gift of historic redemption in the Cross. We treat it as if it were a new departure and approach to us – that of the Spirit – forming another ‘dispensation’, and, therefore, an arbitrary influence upon us; whereas it is a part or function of God’s one pregnant deed and gift to us of Christ’s Cross, which has a faith-creating power intrinsic to it as the complete and compendious act of redemption; for redemption is really and at last faith-production’. – Peter T. Forsyth, The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ (Blackwood: New Creation Publications, 1987), 80.

J. McLeod Campbell and P.T. Forsyth on Christ’s Vicarious Ministry

John McLeod Campbell

This Friday (11 September) I will be presenting a paper at the Christian Thought & History/Pastoral Theology Seminar at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies (University of Otago).

The title of my paper is ‘“Tha mi a’ toirt fainear dur gearan”: J. McLeod Campbell and P.T. Forsyth on Christ’s Vicarious Ministry’.

All are most welcome to attend. The seminar will take place in Seminar Room 4.C.11, 4th Floor, Arts/Burns Building between 15.00–1615.

What keeps Protestant’s silent?

individualism 1

‘What keeps us silent is not spirituality, as with the Friends [Quakers], and we need not flatter ourselves it is, but an overdriven individualism, which makes us proudly timid, and which in other forms is dissolving our churches into mere associations, not to say audiences’. – Peter T. Forsyth, Intercessory Services for Aid in Public Worship (Manchester: John Heywood, 1896), 6.

[Image: CartoonStock]

A Prayer from the Birthday Boy

Forsyth 9.jpg‘O Lord, thou knowest our frame, and rememberest that we are dust. Pity the sorrows of such as are torn by undeserved pain. Refresh all that are worn by perpetual care. Light up the faith of the dying. And comfort the bereaved with Thy regard. Deliver the souls of those who are bound in the chain of their own misdeeds. And send Thy Pentecostal power and joy to those holy ones who have the world’s sin for a great burden upon their souls. We bear all our fear, and sin, and sorrow to the Redeemer who bears them all before Thee, and by His intercession heals them all’. – Peter T. Forsyth, Intercessory Services for Aid in Public Worship (Manchester: John Heywood, 1896), 19–20.

The grace of judgement and the judgement of grace
rembrandt-van-rijn-christ-crucified-between-the-two-thieves-1653

Rembrandt van Rijn, 'Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves' (1653), drypoint and burin, National Gallery of Art, Washington

‘If a message of grace tell us there was and is no judgment any more, and that God has simply put judgment on one side and has not exercised it, that cannot be the true grace of God. Surely the grace of God cannot stultify our human conscience like that! So we are haunted by mistrust, unless conscience be drowned in a haze of heart. We have always the feeling and fear that there is judgment to follow. How may I be sure that I may take the grace of God seriously and finally, how be sure that I have complete salvation, that I may entirely trust it through the worst my conscience may say? Only thus, that God is the Reconciler, that He reconciles in Christ’s Cross that the judgment of sin was there for good and all’. – Peter T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 167–8.

Impressing or Confessing?

hillsong‘One reason why the Church does not impress the world more may be because we are too much bent on impressing it, more bent on impressing than on confessing. We labour on the world rather than overflow on it. We have a deeper sense of its need than of our own fulness, of its problems than of our answer … We are tempted to forget that we have not, in the first place, either to impress the world or to save it, but heartily and mightily to confess in word and deed a saviour who has done both, who has done it for ourselves, and who is doing it every day’. – PT Forsyth, ‘The Soul of Christ and the Cross of Christ’. London Quarterly Review 116 (1911), 193.

Forsyth on the current claptrap against theology

forsyth-13‘It is doubtful if anywhere so much ability is going to seed as in the pulpit, if so much toil, ingenuity, intelligence, and feeling are being wasted anywhere as in the thousands of sermons that go to their drawers as to their last cradle and long home, week by week, to haunt as feckless ghosts the preacher’s soul. Hence the restlessness that is observable in the ministry in various quarters, the sense of ineffectiveness, the desire to try a new soil with the same seed, in the hope that the Spirit may at last reward the effort and bring back His sheaves with Him. But it is not a change of sphere that is required most. That may but foment the unquiet, or else become the soul’s narcotic, It is a change of note that is needed, and a change that no new place can bring. If the lack is power, the cause of the lack is the absence of a definite, positive, and commanding creed which holds us far more than we hold it, holds us by the conscience, founds and feeds us on the eternal reality, and, before we can do anything with it, does everything with us. Every Church and every preacher is bound to run down without such a creed, and no amount of humane sympathy or vivid interests can avert the decline. In every direction, the Church is suffering from the inability to know its own spiritual mind, or to strike a stream from its own rock, and from its indisposition to face the situation or its impotence to fathom it. For a generation now we have been preaching that experience is the great thing, and not creed; till we are losing the creed that alone can produce an experience higher than the vagaries of idiosyncrasy, or the nuances of temperament, or the tradition of a group, or the spirit of the age … The current claptrap against theology is only an advertisement of the lack in religion of that passion of spiritual radicalism and mental veracity which will settle nowhere but at the very roots of things, and must draw its strength from the last realities of the soul’s intelligent life. The result of the defect is a vague sense of insecurity as to foundations and an insidious dubiety which, unconsciously to the preacher, conveys itself to his flock, and generates a malaise that nobody can explain’. – PT Forsyth, ‘Veracity, Reality, and Regeneration’, London Quarterly Review 123 (1915), 194, 195.

Forsyth on liberty, truth and thinking for yourself

forsyth-12A few days ago, I posted a cartoon which included the caption [from the lips of a teacher]: ‘When writing your essays, I encourage you to think for yourselves while you express what I’d most agree with’. The post drew a thoughtful response from Andre who suggested that the cartoon raised a number of important questions, including one about ‘whether the command to “think for yourselves” isn’t also a product of late-capitalism, a variant of the command to enjoy’. I’d been thinking about Andre’s statement when I re-read Forsyth’s 1908 essay on ”The Love of Liberty and the Love of Truth’, an essay, I think, which contributes an essential mix into the issues that the Andre raises, and which I will keep pondering:

‘The New Testament knows nothing explicitly of the liberty to pursue truth. That blessing is of science and the modern age. It is not religious in its historical origin. And, in so far as it is religious at all it is the inevitable, but indirect result of another and greater liberty, which is that of the New Testament, the liberty that truth must pursue because truth first creates it. Free thought is not a primary Christian interest’. (p. 160)

‘… freedom is a thing entirely conditioned by the nature of its authority, of the reality to which it answers and owes its being’ (p. 161)

‘… theological freedom must always be limited by the Gospel that makes a Church a Church, makes it live, and makes its life free. Theology in a university, as an academic science, has a freedom (and a feebleness) which it can have in no Church. A Church of free thought would be no Church at all, but the most sectarian of sects, and the most scholastic of schools. There is something almost boyish in the aggressive use of a pulpit for free thought propaganda’. (p. 162)

‘The Church of a real Gospel is called to something more than a vague zeal for liberty as an unchartered freedom. It is called to throw its weight upon the positive Evangel which makes it free. For liberty itself could become an idol, and could be used for a cloak to hide the poverty of our faith, and to express a sympathy too soft to be firm or true’. (p. 168)

‘It has been said that the creeds represent extravagances and eccentricities imported into a simple Christianity. But to the historic eye it is rather the other way. They represent on the whole the growing corporate life which normally shed the raw Gnostic extravagances of youth. Unfortunately they came to be canonised in perpetuity, and used as means of oppression and obscurantism by their epigoni. And it was to prevent such abuse that churches arose in which the form of faith was non-confessional, based on an honest evangelical understanding, which was declaratory at most, and not exclusive … But of course if such trustful freedom became an evangelical failure, there is a natural danger that many minds would for practical purposes turn from an internal to an external authority, and would return to the idea of a brief and revisable creed which should be of obligation, as the only means of saving the Churches from dissolving into star dust and luminous mist’. (p. 170)

Forsyth: Sunny Love or Solemn Grace?

forsyth-10‘The old layman demanded depth at any cost, for which he was willing to pay the inward price and meet the preacher half way; the new demands simplicity at no cost at all, and will have everything brought, cooked and flavoured, to his door. Simplicity for him is not what clears a concerned conscience, but it is what speaks the language of his business or consecrates the voice of his bosom. It is the Gospel deposited at his private address, without effort of his, for family use; it is not a Gospel which he travels miles of spiritual preparation to hear, and which might cost father, mother, wife, or child. He does not dig for it as for hid treasure – the ministry is there for that purpose, in the preparing of sermons. And the ministry fails because it either has to dig alone, or it is discouraged to do more than hoe the ground, and then finds nothing to make it more than a carrier and turn it to a prophet. In church going many hope at most to be impressed, and at least to have a treat: what they fear is to be humiliated – broken up, cast down, taught an obedience, frightened about their soul, and born again. Theirs is a cordial faith rather than a joyful – as the New Testament understands joy. It is a faith of the heart rather than the conscience, a faith in sunny Love rather than solemn Grace’. – P.T. Forsyth, ‘Lay Religion’. Constructive Quarterly 3, December (1915), 781-2.