P T Forsyth on Atonement and Times of Crisis
December 29, 2008
Yesterday afternoon, I came across a little book which, to be honest, I had forgotten I owned: The Justification of God by P T Forsyth, a series of lectures on the theodicy delivered in 1916 at the height of the First World War. It is vintage PTF, packed full of insight and quotable passages. Here is part of his argument regarding the impotence of the church:
The bane of modern and current religion is in the practical loss of the idea so closely identified with Love's might, majesty, judgment, and glory -- the idea of the holy. Either it is lost, or there is substituted for the moral meaning of it the aesthetic, and for the ethical the seemly; so that the response is but reverence instead of real worship, attrition instead of repentance, an extreme regard to religious decorum and good form...but no equal regard for the type of life.....And the root of this error , which taints and flattens the whole field of religion, is the abeyance of an atonement as the foundation of our faith, the atmosphere of our worship, and the principle of our life....If such an atonement [as the judgment of God] become otiose to our faith (as is increasingly the case), the note of the holy, i.e., the moral, must fade from it; and we are left with little beyond a piety either aesthetic, mystic, or sentimental, but too easy for judgment, too feeble for the control of civilisation, and fit only to become a branch of its culture. And the man of mere culture is shut out from the best it is in him to be.
Forsyth was writing at a time of terrible slaughter and, perhaps ultimately more than that, a time when European imperialism was in deep crisis and when the European domination of the world was about to be broken decisively. It is arguable that we stand at a similar juncture at the moment. Thankfully, there are not the catastrophic military conflicts on American and European soil today that Forsyth had in mind when he wrote in 1916, but the current economic situation clearly indicates the end of a twenty year domination of world economics and politics by America, and the rise of new powers. However strong America remains, she will not be unchallenged as the world's premier economic and military force in the future. As the religions of Forsyth's day -- the formalism and setimentalism that merely baptised culture -- was shattered by the First World War, so the this-worldly religion in America must either come to an end or continue only by an act of sheer willpower in the face of all the facts as a sad and anachronistic idiom for worldly ambition. And how can the church speak? By developing theories of Christian economics? By finding Christian idioms for reasserting worldly power? By conceiving of God as a giant American entrepreneur or, perhaps more to the point in evangelical circles today, as a giant guy who's just slightly too old to be sporting that soul patch and talking about `today's youth'? Or by placing the cross, with its judgment on us all, again, and again, and again, at the centre of its life and testimony?
Here's how Forsyth ends the chapter I have already quoted. Talking of a religion which places human beings at the center (whether formal, mystic, or sentimental -- what PTF call `egoist religion'):
It is the absolute self-delusion which ends in moral madness, because it shrinks, beyond everything else, from a habitual self-reference to the Cross as the judgment seat of Christ, and a constant correction there. Christ's servants, and not His comrades, we are, His property by heavenly purchase, and not simply His poor relations nor His weak allies. A religion whose ethic is not founded in its forgiveness, which is not a daily repentance but a constant self-satisfaction, and which only abets by sanction the passion for power of unredeemed man, is a daily invitation to judgment. And we are now learning what judgment is. We have descended into hell.
The bane of modern and current religion is in the practical loss of the idea so closely identified with Love's might, majesty, judgment, and glory -- the idea of the holy. Either it is lost, or there is substituted for the moral meaning of it the aesthetic, and for the ethical the seemly; so that the response is but reverence instead of real worship, attrition instead of repentance, an extreme regard to religious decorum and good form...but no equal regard for the type of life.....And the root of this error , which taints and flattens the whole field of religion, is the abeyance of an atonement as the foundation of our faith, the atmosphere of our worship, and the principle of our life....If such an atonement [as the judgment of God] become otiose to our faith (as is increasingly the case), the note of the holy, i.e., the moral, must fade from it; and we are left with little beyond a piety either aesthetic, mystic, or sentimental, but too easy for judgment, too feeble for the control of civilisation, and fit only to become a branch of its culture. And the man of mere culture is shut out from the best it is in him to be.
Forsyth was writing at a time of terrible slaughter and, perhaps ultimately more than that, a time when European imperialism was in deep crisis and when the European domination of the world was about to be broken decisively. It is arguable that we stand at a similar juncture at the moment. Thankfully, there are not the catastrophic military conflicts on American and European soil today that Forsyth had in mind when he wrote in 1916, but the current economic situation clearly indicates the end of a twenty year domination of world economics and politics by America, and the rise of new powers. However strong America remains, she will not be unchallenged as the world's premier economic and military force in the future. As the religions of Forsyth's day -- the formalism and setimentalism that merely baptised culture -- was shattered by the First World War, so the this-worldly religion in America must either come to an end or continue only by an act of sheer willpower in the face of all the facts as a sad and anachronistic idiom for worldly ambition. And how can the church speak? By developing theories of Christian economics? By finding Christian idioms for reasserting worldly power? By conceiving of God as a giant American entrepreneur or, perhaps more to the point in evangelical circles today, as a giant guy who's just slightly too old to be sporting that soul patch and talking about `today's youth'? Or by placing the cross, with its judgment on us all, again, and again, and again, at the centre of its life and testimony?
Here's how Forsyth ends the chapter I have already quoted. Talking of a religion which places human beings at the center (whether formal, mystic, or sentimental -- what PTF call `egoist religion'):
It is the absolute self-delusion which ends in moral madness, because it shrinks, beyond everything else, from a habitual self-reference to the Cross as the judgment seat of Christ, and a constant correction there. Christ's servants, and not His comrades, we are, His property by heavenly purchase, and not simply His poor relations nor His weak allies. A religion whose ethic is not founded in its forgiveness, which is not a daily repentance but a constant self-satisfaction, and which only abets by sanction the passion for power of unredeemed man, is a daily invitation to judgment. And we are now learning what judgment is. We have descended into hell.
