Past Masters: P.T. Forsyth
By David L. Larsen
In his classic recommendations for seminary curriculum, B.B. Warfield of old Princeton called for “scholar-saints” in our pulpits today. Few have better embodied that ideal than Peter Taylor Forsyth (1848-1921). Born and raised in Scotland, he served five English congregations and then in 1901 became principal of Hackney College in London where he served until his death. He was a prolific writer, an influential schoolman and a uniquely gifted preacher. His productive career has many lessons for us.
Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, as the eldest of five children in rather deep poverty, he was raised in a devout environment and nurtured within the bosom of the Congregational Churches of Great Britain under whose aegis he conducted his entire ministry. When once he forgot his daughter’s birthday he profusely asked her forgiveness and explained that there never were “presents” at any time in his upbringing. His mother took in boarders among whom was George MacDonald, later renowned for his clergy novels.
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Brilliant in his studies at Aberdeen, upon finishing he went to Germany to study a year with Albrecht Ritschl at Gottingen upon the recommendation of his friend and classmate, William Robertson Smith, the young Old Testament genius who had himself studied with Ritschl and was subsequently to become the center of great controversy in the Free Church of Scotland over his concessions to higher criticism and the Ritschlian denial of the substitutionary atonement.
Forsyth returned to assume pastoral responsibility having deeply imbibed German rationalism; he was a “fighting flamboyant liberal.” Even his dress shocked traditional sensibilities as he appeared in the pulpit in shepherd’s plaid trousers and a flaming red tie. His church was called “the Cave of Adullam.” He had moved from faith in God to faith in man.
In this time he married and became the father of his only child. One Sunday a month he preached to the children of the parish. He was a political activist after the model of F.D. Maurice, the Christian Socialist. But some new notes began to creep into his naturally gifted pulpit discourse. He preached an epochal sermon in Leicester on the holiness of God entitled: “God the Holy Father.”
While at Emmanuel Church in Cambridge his wife died and his never robust health collapsed. He was not the only preacher converted while he was in the ministry but in this time-frame he made what he called his “miraculous entry into the Christian life.” He abandoned Schleiermacher’s “feeling” psycholgism and Hegelian pantheism and broke with Ritschl over the atonement and justification. The Bible now became his starting point and not just the point of departure. He became a kerygmatic preacher — the Gospel was everything and at the center was the Cross of Christ. His classic work The Cruciality of the Cross expresses his new allegiance to a strongly evangelical soteriology.