P. T. Forsyth

Peter Taylor Forsyth was born on May 12, 1848, in Aberdeen, Scotland. His father was a postman, and his mother was a devout woman. The family was poor. He was a bright and eager boy, who won a scholarship to the University of Aberdeen. He studied the classics and took first-class honors. He went on to study at the University of Göttingen, in Germany, where he came under the influence of the theologian Albrecht Ritschl. He returned to Britain and became a Congregational minister. He served in a number of churches, including Shipley, in Yorkshire, Hackney, Cambridge, Leicester and Manchester.

In his early ministry, he was influenced by liberal theology. He held the view that the Bible was to be read as a human book and that the essence of Christianity was an ethical ideal. He was a popular preacher, who had a gift for words. He moved in the circle of those who sought to modernize the faith. At the age of about thirty-five, however, he went through a spiritual crisis. He later said that he had been converted from a gospel of love to a gospel of grace. He said that he had been saved from the shallowness of a faith that took no account of sin and judgment. He came to see that the center of Christianity is the cross, in which God deals with human sin.

From that time, his theology changed. He became a champion of a view that put the cross at the heart of the faith. He wrote a number of books, which are among the most profound works of British theology of the time. The Cruciality of the Cross, published in 1909, set out his view of the atonement, in which he said that the cross is the decisive act of God, in which He puts away sin and reconciles the world. The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, published in 1909, was a study of the divinity of Christ. Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, published in 1907, was a series of lectures on preaching, in which he insisted that the preacher is the bearer of a gospel and not merely a speaker of opinions. His works were marked by a vivid style, rich with images.

He served as principal of Hackney College, in London, from 1901 until his death. He taught young ministers and shaped a generation. He was a man of fiery speech and of deep conviction. He had a piercing mind, which was able to see the weakness of the fashionable theology of the day. He criticized the liberal movement for its failure to take sin seriously. He was also a critic of the narrow orthodoxy of his time. He was a man who stood between two camps.

He did not receive wide recognition during his life. He was overshadowed by more popular figures. His style was dense and hard to follow, and he was a man who made few concessions to his readers. After his death, his work was rediscovered. The leading continental theologian Karl Barth, who rose to fame in the 1920s, had much in common with him, and Forsyth has been called the Barth before Barth. His writings have been valued by many modern theologians.

He was a man who suffered a number of personal sorrows. He lost his wife, Minna, in 1908, after a long illness. He was a man who had a deep sensitivity. He was often in poor health and he worked under great strain. He died on November 11, 1921, in London, at the age of seventy-three. His life shows the way that a man can be brought from a shallow faith to a deep one. His writings call the church to take sin and grace seriously.