Forsyth on Liberal Christianity

Nearly every week in the ODT there is an article on the Opinion page from Ian Harris, a man who follows in the line of thinking of Lloyd Geering, and the Sea of Faith school of thinking (someone once said to me that they had their name the wrong way round; it should have been Faith at Sea).

Harris comes from the liberal Christianity approach, a line of philosophical thought that has been around for a good 150-200 years, and which has systematically cut the life out of Christianity, until it's a virtual corpse. They are good people at heart, except that their heart isn't quite in the right place. And because they use the same words as Christians, but mean something different (in fact can often mean several different things with one word) they're hard to pin down.

I've been reading a good deal of P T Forsyth recently - you'll find plenty of extracts from his work on one of my other blogs, The Daily Writer. Forsyth bore with the liberal thinking that went on in his own day - the late 19th century into the early 20th - but he saw through their philosophy. To give you an example of his thorough thinking in this regard, I'm going to quote a longish extract from his book The Cruciality of the Cross. This will give you not only an example of his thinking, but will clarify why he believed liberal Christians had got it wrong.  This extract begins on page 64 of the New Creations Publications edition. (I've included some paragraphing to make it a bit more readable on the computer screen, and you'll have to excuse the gender-biased language.)

"Let us see exactly where the point is, and let us be quite fair to the kind of liberal religion in view. It does not, of course, exclude God. It does not say that the religious development of man is a smooth or an automatic thing. Progress still needs the help of God, or whatever stands for God. It needs even the act of God. The origin of faith within man is an act of God. But the point is that this act is not a revolution in man, not a new creation, not a regeneration, not an absolute redemption but only a release, an impulse from God, the extrication of our best, a delivery of the innate spirituality and goodness of man with which history is in travail until now.

It is not a salvation from death but only from scanty life. [Love that use of the word, scanty!] There is no real critical life-and-death catastrophe in the moral history of the race; but what we have is a deep consistent progress, harmonious on the whole, each step attaching to the step before. We have the happy perfecting of those decent, just, or tender instincts which are the original righteousness of human nature, the gradual surmounting by moral culture of sense and self. God is our helper and no more. He is not [in] a real sense, but only [in] a figurative sense, our Redeemer. He helps us to realise our latent spiritual resources and ends. There is no break with self and the world, only a disengagement from an embarrassing situation.

[Having now summed up liberal Christianity, he continues] It should be clear that this is another religion from that of redemption; and it has no room or need for atonement. And if it be true, then Christianity is not so necessary as we were led to think. Its whole complexion has changed. Nothing so very serious has taken place. Things can be bad enough, but no so bad as all that. Human nature is very mysterious but there is nothing marvellous, miraculous, in God's relation to it, nothing perilled on an eternal edge, nothing like a new creation, nothing that needs much penetration or agony of holy thought.

Incarnation becomes a metaphor. These greatest words are felt so great and useful because they can be made to mean anything. Well, faith in the incarnation is bound to become a metaphor, and to sink, if we count it mere theology to take it seriously that God was in Christ reconciling the world [a reference to one of Forsyth's all-time favourite verses, from 2 Corinthians 5:19], and to press on to understand the mighty God thus hallowed in the atoning cross. It is bound to sink, so as to become the incarnation of man instead of God, if in the cross we see but the extreme suffering of the most loving man instead of the supreme act and victory of the most holy God.

If Christianity do [sic] not make a revolution in human nature we make a revolution in Christianity. A religion centring wholly in the graciousness of Christ, or His submission, or His spiritual insight can be no foundation for a commanding ethic or a triumphant faith. It lacks the virile note. Christ did not come as a grand spiritual personality, but as a Redeemer. It was not to spiritualise us that He came but to save us. Moral verve is bound to relax if the religion of the cross become but a hallowed addition to life's spiritual interests or touching moods, if we do not carry the stamp of moral crisis and personal decision for death or life. Ethic is bound to grow less strenuous, even while we bustle about ethical conduct, if the sublime ethical issue of the universe is not the marrow of our personal divinity and the principle of our personal religion.

We can find a strong foundation only in that centre where the holy God both bears our load and performs His new creative act. If in the cross we have but the greatest of love's renunciations instead of the one establishment of God's holy will, if we have but the divine Kenosis and not also the divine Plerosis, then the sense of God's presence in the cross, and in the Church, and in the world's moral war, is bound to fade." 

My experience of reading P T Forsyth

I attended a quadruple book launch tonight at Knox College, having been asked to say a few words on the experience of reading P T Forsyth, who is the subject of two of the books, both by Jason Goroncy. (Kevin Ward is the author of the other two books.) 

I felt a bit ill at ease amongst a bunch of academics, and having decided to speak without reading from notes, since I assumed that the other speakers would also do so, was surprised to find that all five of them used notes extensively, even though all of them are University level teachers. Well, there had to be an odd man out somewhere.

Anyway, it was never intended to be a long speech, and it wasn't. In fact, I probably missed out some things I intended to say, and muddied the ones I did say. Never mind. I don't claim to be good at speaking in public - I thought of trying to act the role of myself as a public speaker, but I'm not sure that I got there. This post then, is an attempt to tidy up what I really would have liked to say.

So...P T Forsyth - the emphasis, I think, is on the second syllable: For-syth. (Much more Scottish that way.) I'd never heard of Forsyth until a couple of years ago, perhaps, and even then only came across him on Jason Goroncy's blog, where he now has his own subject heading. At first I got the impression that he was some old fogey of a theologian that Jason had cottoned onto; I didn't realise at that point that Jason had two books in the pipeline focusing on Forsyth, and more than that, had done his thesis on him, and more than that still, was virtually one of the world's experts on him. Read his first book on Forsyth, called Hallowed be Thy Name, and you'll see what I mean. Jason has a breadth of understanding of both the man and his theology that's occasionally mind-blowing. Well, actually mind-blowing most of the time.

Anyway, I kept noticing references to Forsyth on Jason's blog, and occasionally read a quote from Forsyth that was included in a post. And then there was more and more about the man - mainly because Jason's book was coming closer and closer to being published, and he was doing a good deal of promotion for it - naturally. But I still didn't take much notice of Forsyth himself, or of what he'd written. The first time I actually copied anything from Jason's blog (onto Evernote, my clippings 'file') was in July this year, when he wrote about the second of his two Forsyth books: Descending on Humanity and Intervening in History: notes from the pulpit ministry of P T Forsyth.  Something in that post clicked with me, and I began to sit up and take notice of the old theologian. (Not Goroncy, Forsyth.)

Then, two or three months ago, I was trying to work out a better theology of the atonement - not by myself, but in relation to arguments that had surfaced twice on the Net in regard to it over a couple of weeks. I spoke to Jason about it and he suggested having coffee and talking, and when we did he handed me a copy of Forsyth's The Work of Christ, and suggested I read it. I took it away, and did read it - some of it twice (and because of the nature of Forsyth's style, some of it more than twice; I'll explain why in a minute).

It was exactly what I needed. It wasn't as if Forsyth was coming up with a completely new theology of the atonement - there's no such thing, really - but he brought such clarity and such a personal viewpoint to what he had to say that it was as if I was getting hold of it for the first time, and in a way that was immensely satisfying to my miniscule theological brain. He also clarified the whole aspect of God's holiness - something that's exceedingly important to him - and the place of Christ in the whole business - another one of his great themes. In doing so it helped open up for me a different way of thinking about Christ, something that I've also needed to do for many years.

Forsyth isn't an easy writer to read (though Jason says that the more you read him the easier it gets). I can't quite put my finger on the reason for this, but I wonder if it isn't partly the fact that he's Scottish. I have the same problem with George MacDonald, another Scottish writer. Both of them use the English language in a way that's slightly odd. It's something about the sentence construction, I think, rather than the words they use, because these are straightforward enough in general. MacDonald is perhaps more difficult than Forsyth; some of his sentences verge on unintelligibility as he leaps from thought to thought. Both he and Forsyth seem almost to turn the sentences inside out, put things back to front from your normal expectation. It's impossible to describe, but no doubt someone more able than yours truly could do it.

However, I worked hard at reading The Work of Christ. Fortunately Jason gave me a copy rather than lending me one; it's now littered with markings. I wrote notes on some sections as I read them, and even though it felt at the time as though I wasn't grasping what he had to say, it seems that I did. He's obviously a better teacher than I suspected. The way he hammers home a point works; he revolves around and around it until he's sunk it in. As I think about other theology in the course of my normal reading/writing, I find Forsyth's name keeps coming to mind, and what he said about matters.

And while I was reading The Work of Christ I also began to read Jason's first book, Hallowed be Thy Name. This is quite hard work too - for me. I'm not incapable of reading theology, and taking in theological terms, but it makes my brain ache a bit at times. Still reading the two books in tandem meant that I was cross-referencing Forsyth's thinking, and this was immensely helpful.  Of course Jason's book is about much more than the Forsyth's view of the atonement, but everything in his book connects, so that you begin to feel you're getting to know how Forsyth looks at things. I've got a long way to go yet, but it's an interesting journey.

Forsyth doesn't like to give concrete examples; you might almost say he writes at a kind of abstract level. Some things, which are probably unexplainable, he doesn't trouble himself to explain. At least not in The Work of Christ. I'm the kind of reader who needs some 'pictures' to get a hold of, some stories to back up the theology. As far as I can remember there's only one story in the whole of The Work, and it's a vivid one about a railway worker who saves two trains from colliding by lying down between the tracks and manually working the switch, when the lever that should do the job has jammed. But having used that story, Forsyth then proclaims, pretty much, that it doesn't suffice for what he's trying to say.  And he's right. But for the kind of reader I am, it's a help in terms of feeling as though there was something to hold onto in the book.  (Incidentally, he also says at one point that if you haven't bothered to do some philosophy then it won't be surprising that you don't understand theology.  I thought this was just a little sniffy of him, but I jotted a note on the page about it, and carried on reading.)

Theological writers in general, I guess, don't tend to make connections with the down-to-earth. That's perhaps not their job, but it may also explain why I've found some of them very hard work. Newbigin, whose book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, I re-read this year, is an exception; he beds his theology in the real world in a way Forsyth doesn't appear to do. However, I may be being unjust to Forsyth. At least, while he sometimes appears to use some words in a different way to the rest of us (which may be a result of his philosophical training), he doesn't change their meaning entirely. I remember reading a small amount of a book by Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and being astonished by the cavalier approach she seemed to take to the English language. Words changed meaning at the drop of a hat, as far as I could tell. 

Forsyth is consistent in his use of language, at least. You just have to work out why he's using a particular word ('moral' was one I kept tripping over) in such a way. Once you've got hold of that, you can keep moving forward. 

Well, this was intended as a kind of statement of what I would have said if I'd had plenty of time at the Book Launch, and had brought notes with me that were clearly written out. So if you were at all bamboozled by my speech earlier, hopefully this will help make more sense of it.

Local Hero

Local Hero is one of those quirky Bill Forsyth movies that never go where you expect, and keep leading you up paths that turn out to be red herrings. No character in it can be said to be straightforward, even the main character, Mac, played by Peter Riegert. He’s supposed to be a tough wheeler and dealer for a big oil-company, but he proves just as soft as all the rest. Burt Lancaster has an odd role as the chief of the company, who spends most of his time on his own, or with his therapist, a man whose absurd agenda doesn’t quite seem to match that of his client. The rest of the cast are typical Forsyth characters, people who seem unwilling to go quite in the direction a typical story would take, which consequently often leaves the audience shaking their head at the weirdness of it all.
There are daft scenes at every point. Half a dozen fishermen stand around talking to Mac, with a toddler in a pram amongst them. Mac asks who’s child is it. The men look to one another in turn. Are they indicating that it could be anyone’s child, or that they don’t know, or that they’re not even sure what the child is doing there? We never find out, because the scene cuts and moves to something else. The publican turns out not to be the publican, even though he runs the hotel, and cooks the meals, and acts as barman. He’s also the local accountant, and a bit of a wheeler-dealer himself. The priest is black, with a Scots name, a man who doesn’t quite seem to know what he’s doing in this out of the way place. A young girl dressed in ragged jeans, with her hair spiked up, and a painted face, wanders in and out without remark by anyone else – except when she starts to chase the Scotsman who works for the oil company in Aberdeen. Then it turns out she already has a boyfriend – in the local band. The main female character spends most of her time in the water, like some nymph, or silkie. An unidentified person buzzes past on a motor scooter almost every time someone steps into the street. The publican and Mac agree to exchange their lives in a tipsy moment and then carry on as normal the next day. An old guy does impressions of famous film stars for another old man – all the impressions look the same – and the other old man gets them wrong every time. And the ending is a slap in the face for the audience, with Lancaster swapping places with Mac, and Mac arriving back home in Texas with two pockets of sea shells. Suddenly the film stops.
The film is well known – there are plenty of reviews on IMDB – but isn’t much seen. As someone notes, the film score is better known than the film.