BOOK OF THE WEEK (4)

I have to confess that this week’s Book of the Week has been something of a challenge for me and didn’t turn out to be quite what I was expecting! I also have to confess that until a few weeks ago I had never even heard of P T Forsyth who was, apparently, a fairly influential Scottish theologian in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Having read that Forsyth’s book ‘Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind’ was, in one evangelical preacher’s opinion, “the greatest book on preaching ever written”, I thought I had better take a look and found a copy in a Bible College library. For those of you not familiar with Forsyth there is some interesting information about him on the Christian History Institute website. Reading that helped me see why I found his book such hard going. To be fair, I had read that “Forsyth is an acquired taste and has a love of paradox as well as a great intensity and depth of thought.” The content of the book was actually given as The Lyman Beecher Lectures on preaching at Yale University in 1907

The paradox for me was that Forsyth , who does not believe in the verbal inspiration of Scripture and is non-committal, but I suspect unbelieving, on the question of the Virgin Birth, has such a high view of preaching and not in an academic or liturgical sense. Indeed, he had consciously moved away from the aridity of theological academia and liberalism and there is an undoubted passion in his commitment to preaching, often missing in those who have a higher view of Scripture than he professed.

He certainly believed in expository preaching - another paradox given his theological stance. “Preach more expository sermons”, he urges. “Take long passages for texts. Perhaps you have no idea how eager people are to have the Bible expounded and how much they prefer you to unriddle what the Bible says, with its large utterance, than to confuse them with what you can make it say by some ingenuity.” (p113)

For me, an interesting emphasis of Forsyth, no doubt reflecting his churchmanship, was the ideao f preaching being a sacrament. Not a perspective I come across very much in the circles I move in. Listen to how he describes preaching. “The preacher’s place in the church is sacramental. It is only an age like ours that could think of preaching as something said with more or less force, instead of something done with more or less power”. (p54 - italics are Forsyth’s)

Let me give you two more quotes, the first of which I hope will be accepted by my brothers on the other side of the water! “The Bible is like the US (if you will pardon this glancing light?), the richest ground in the world for every variety of ‘crank’ “(p27)

The second highlights the paradoxical position of Forsyth with regard to Scripture yet has much to teach us about preaching. “the true minister ought to find the words and phrases of the Bible so full of spiritual food and felicity that he has some difficulty in not believing in verbal inspiration.” (p26)

This book is certainly not light and easy reading but I am glad I persisted to the end. In among the quaint turns of phrase, philosophical concepts and, to my mind, somewhat muddled theological thinking, there are some gems here worth unearthing and reflecting on, though it wouldn’t be in my Top 10 books on preaching.