Robert McAfee Brown paraphrases Forsyth by saying," Christ did not "preach the Gospel"; he became a gospel to preach. (emphasis Brown's)15

Forsyth believed that preachers should preach to their age without merely preaching the age. Preaching can keep its contemporariness by centering on God's eternal act on the cross. In keeping the cross central, Christ works through the preacher to develop the faith of those who are already Christian. Forsyth lamented that there are many preachers who "scheme how to cover and capture the world's mind rather than to develop that of the Church; how to commend Christ to those who are not Christian [more] than how to enrich Him for those that are."16

If Forsyth views the cross of Christ as the final seat of authority, and uses the cross as the hermeneutical norm for his theology, that authority ought to be manifest through both the person and the proclamation of the preacher.17 It is Forsyth's contention that, "It is authority that the world chiefly needs and the preaching of the hour lacks -- an authoritative Gospel in a humble personality."18 He decries the sentimentality with which the modern mindset tended to view the Bible and religion. He blames much of this sentimentality upon "The loss of a real positive authority, the loss of an objective grasp of the world's moral crisis in the Christian Centre of the Cross."19 In sentimentalizing the cross, the Bible, and the atonement, the focus has shifted from God to humanity.

At the same time the church was sentimentalizing its religion, according to Forsyth, it ceded its authority to science. He says:

When a modern mind asks us for help to a footing we still turn to men of science, to men often who evidently never in their lives read a theological classic or an authority on moral philosophy, who indeed might scout the idea, and we ask them to assure the inquirer, with a certainty beyond ours, that things promise well for a soul.... Is it not a nervous and pusillanimous Christianity, devoid of self-respect? How can we hope to regain the influence the pulpit has lost until we come with the surest Word in all the world to the guesses of science, the maxims of ethic, and the instincts of art.20

One uses the Bible to preach the gospel rather than using the gospel to preach the Bible. "We do not treat the Bible aright, we do not treat it with the respect it asks for itself, when we treat it as a theologian, but only when we treat it as ... the preacher in the perpetual pulpit of the church,"21 asserts Forsyth. Neither do preachers treat the Bible with the respect it deserves when they sentimentally pay homage only to its beauty and its precepts. Instead, Forsyth encourages preachers to concentrate on the content of the Biblical message.22

In preaching long expository passages, Forsyth maintains, "one get(s) real preaching in the sense of preaching from the real situation of the Bible to the real situation of the time. It is thus you make history preach to history, the past to the present, and not merely a text to a soul."23