More Quotable P.T. F.
September 22, 2012
I have not provided any quotation from Peter Taylor Forsyth for a few weeks. So here are two to reflect on. The first makes me think that maybe, just maybe, P.T.F. is the one man in post-apostolic history who could have said something worthwhile within the character limits of a tweet. I truly believe he could have raised the genre above the level of a fortune cookie. The second is the opening paragraph of his praise of the much maligned "churchianity." The problem he is critiquing sounds, once again, remarkably contemporary.
"To be the slave of Christ is to be the master of every fate." Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, p. 49.
"I have been complaining.... that Christians do not know their Bible. But even if they did, the preacher would still be at a loss in another way. He has to face the modern man's neglect of the Church no less than of the Bible. He meets impatient reformers who take a tone of superior realism, and coarsely speak of Church life and the edification of believers as a mere "coddling of the Saints." He lives in an age when the Kingdom of God engrosses more Christian interest than the Church of Christ, and Christian people are more devoted to the busy effort of getting God's will done on earth than to the deep repose of communion with God's finished will in Christ. It is characteristic of much of the Christian activity of the last half-century that it aims not so much at a Christocracy, where Christ has a household and is master of it, as at a Christolatry--a mere latria of Christ, where he is worshipped mainly through the service of the public. It is needless to point out to the student of the New Testament how flatly this contradicts its genius. And it is useless to urge the point with those who treat the New Testament as archaeology." PPMM, p. 50.
"To be the slave of Christ is to be the master of every fate." Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, p. 49.
"I have been complaining.... that Christians do not know their Bible. But even if they did, the preacher would still be at a loss in another way. He has to face the modern man's neglect of the Church no less than of the Bible. He meets impatient reformers who take a tone of superior realism, and coarsely speak of Church life and the edification of believers as a mere "coddling of the Saints." He lives in an age when the Kingdom of God engrosses more Christian interest than the Church of Christ, and Christian people are more devoted to the busy effort of getting God's will done on earth than to the deep repose of communion with God's finished will in Christ. It is characteristic of much of the Christian activity of the last half-century that it aims not so much at a Christocracy, where Christ has a household and is master of it, as at a Christolatry--a mere latria of Christ, where he is worshipped mainly through the service of the public. It is needless to point out to the student of the New Testament how flatly this contradicts its genius. And it is useless to urge the point with those who treat the New Testament as archaeology." PPMM, p. 50.
