Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind He Has Given Us a Valuable, Crafted Treasure to Stimulate Us to True Preaching
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POSITIVE PREACHING AND THE POSITIVE PREACHING MODERN MIND AND THE A Vintage Book for Modern Preachers Without doubt Dr Peter Forsyth’s book is one for contemporary MODERN MIND preachers. The writer himself was a grand preacher of the great eternities, but he spoke the language of his day and brought the realities of the gospel to his listeners and readers with power. In Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind he has given us a valuable, crafted treasure to stimulate us to true preaching. He was the man who said of true proclamation, ‘Revelation is the self-bestowal of the living God ... God in the act of imparting Himself,’ and added, ‘Preaching is the Gospel prolonging and declaring itself’ His primary emphasis was upon the nature of God as holy love, and he saw such love displayed in the Cross. At heart he burned with passion for the Atonement. More correctly, it was the Atonement which evoked such passion within him. His many books throb with this strong response to God’s grace. He says of himself, ‘It pleased God by the revelation of His holiness and grace which the great theologians taught me to find in the Bible, to bring home to me my sin in a way which submerged all school questions in weight, urgency and poignancy. I was turned from a Christian to a believer, from a lover of love to an object of grace.’ It is this sense and understanding of grace which pervades Forsyth’s writings. The book is not written only for preachers, but for all who seek to know fire in their bones from the reality of the Gospel. That is why all should read the man and his theology. P.T. FORYSTH New Creation Publications Inc. By the same Author POSITIVE PREACHING Peter Taylor Forsyth AND THE Cruciality of the Cross (The) MODERN MIND God the Holy Father & Other Sermons Justification of God (The) Marriage: Its Ethic & Religion P. T. FORSYTH Positive Preaching & the Modern Mind Preaching of Jesus & the Gospel of Christ (The) The Principle of Authority Soul of Prayer (The) Work of Christ (The) Revelation Old and New NEW CREATION PUBLICATIONS INC. P.O. Box 403, Blackwood, South Australia, 5051 1993 FOREWORD v First published in 1907 This edition, published in 1993 by New Creation Publications Inc., Australia, is a reprint of the 1907 edition FOREWORD National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data Forsyth, P. T. (Peter Taylor), 1848-1921. It is a matter of great satisfaction to re-issue P. T. Forsyth’s Positive preaching and the modern mind. Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind in an Australian printing. Having already republished his The Cruciality of the Cross, God ISBN 0 86408 162 6 1. Preaching. 1. Title. 251 the Holy Father, The Justification of God, and made the first publication of The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ, we find it good to bring a reprint of the present volume. This is particularly so because of the practical value of this work. The book was first a series of lectures delivered to a post-graduate audience; in fact, under the auspices of the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale University, 1907. The first edition of them was published in the same year in England by Hodder and Stoughton, and went through at least six impressions until 1964, mainly through the publishing of Independent Press. An American reprint of the 1907 edition was issued by Baker House Book Company in 1980. My own first encounter with Forsyth was in the early 1950s during theological training, and I have benefited greatly from him Cover printing and binding: over the past four decades and more, never ceasing to recommend Gillingham Printers, Adelaide him to class after class of my own students. Some see this present book as his greatest, though my personal preference is for The Cruciality of the Cross. Even so, Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind is, I think, unequalled in stimulating the jaded Printed at preacher, the one who is close to cynicism of the gospel because of his poor understanding and deficient preaching of it with consequent fruitlessness. NEW CREATION PUBLICATIONS INC. Coromandel East, South Australia www.newcreation.org.au vi Foreword FOREWORD vii Forsyth says of true preaching (p. 3): nation’s theological college in London, he deeply affected the many men who went through training under him. It is an act and a power: it is God’s act of redemption before it is man’s message of It was his books, articles and pamphlets which made an even it. It is an eternal, perennial act of God in Christ, repeating itself within each declaration of it... And it is this act that is prolonged in the word of the preacher, and wider impact. His daughter, Jessie Forsyth Andrews, has written a not merely proclaimed. comprehensive memoir which is included in the volume The Work of Christ. Mrs Andrew’s husband has written of Forsyth: He adds (p. 57), He might have been a burning and shining light in almost any intellectual The Gospel spoken by man is the energizing of the Gospel achieved by God. Its firmament, but like St Paul he imposed upon himself the limitation, ‘I determined to authority is not that of the preacher’s personality, nor even of his faith, nay, not know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified’ . He was a even of his message alone, but that of the divine action behind him, whereof he theologian, but as a theologian he was sui generis, and totally unlike any himself is but as it were the sacramental element, and not the sacramental Grace. theologians with whom I was acquainted. As I came to know him more intimately there gradually grew up in my mind the conviction that he was a prophet—the greatest prophet of our times—a second Amos, an Amos with the vision of the The book sets before us a rich and even thrilling prospect, the Cross. And it is as the prophet of the Cross that I have regarded him ever since... For recovery of the apostolic dynamic through surrender to, and him the Cross was everything—’his rock, his reality, his eternal life.’ Apart from the historic act of redemption, there was nothing in Christianity that counted for proclamation of, the apostolic word. Forsyth needs to be read very much with him. slowly and the reader is required to ruminate. Soon, then, the jaded There is no doubt that Forsyth was a man of passion, and that spirit will be refreshed and the self-disappointment of the preacher his passion was for the holiness of God. He argued that God’s love, be replaced by the old yearning for the ancient fire in the bones and being holy, was necessarily wrathful against sin. Only the the belly. The old theologian’s advice and encouragement is atonement could reconcile sinful man to God, and God to sinful endless for the hopeful proclaimer of that apostolic word. man. He strongly resisted the humanistic bias in man to take God’s central place in theology. Today we need to hear again the trumpet The Rev. Noel Due’s biographical sketch of P. T. Forsyth1 which Forsyth blew so loudly and strongly. His prophetic word helps us at this end of the century to understand the man whose may sound strangely in our ears but it will quicken our thinking major works were published in its first and second decades. I and our understanding. would like to add a few details to this biography. Forsyth’s theological output was prodigious. He Forsyth made a deep impression on the theological understanding of his day. As principal of his denomi- 1 First published in The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ, NCPI, 1987 viii Foreword Biographical Sketch ix wrote some thirty books, and many more articles and pamphlets. Born in 1848, he served various Congregational Churches in BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH England, becoming Principal of Hackney College, Hampstead, and retained his post until his death in 1921. Linked with his name are IN 1909 Lord Morley, then Chancellor of the University of those of men such as R. W. Dale, James Denney, Leonard Manchester, dubbed Forsyth ‘One of the most brilliant minds of Hodgson, Canon J. K. Mozley and Emil Brunner. J. S. Whale in Europe’.1 In 1962 Emil Brunner, when invited in a television his foreword to The Work of Christ writes: interview to say who was the greatest of British theologians, named P. T. Forsyth.2 Likewise Karl Barth spoke in warm terms As one who began to read theology a year after Peter Taylor Forsyth died, I never 3 had the opportunity of sitting at his feet, nor the privilege of meeting him. My sense about Forsyth’s work, while J. K. Mozley stated that Forsyth was of what I missed has grown steadily as I have read and pondered almost everything perhaps English Christianity’s most powerful theologian in the that he wrote. sphere of dogmatics.4 What do we know of this man who has been the object of the New readers of Forsyth may find his style and manner of praise of the not insignificant names mentioned above? There is no thought not easy to follow. Yet the substance of his thinking will complete biography of Forsyth available, nor is there likely to be immediately grip many. Every sentence is rich with great one. He once said to this daughter: ‘I hope no-one will ever write a theological thinking, but that thinking is strongly related to our dreary full-dress biography of me!5‘ None has appeared, but we do human situation and our human need.