Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind
by P.T. Forsyth (Paternoster Press, 1998 reprint), 237pp, pb
$29.20 at Amazon (http://bit.ly/4rXnZw)
Observations
This work is a classic; a ‘must.’ Forsyth had a rare ability: the ability to not only think deeply and clearly, but to communicate so to others. You will certainly need to don your chest waders to work through his thoughts, but rest assured, where he is going is always worth the labor involved. He is often quite the quotable type, too, often distilling several paragraphs of thought into just a sentence or two. In sum, he is the sort of man with which you ought to keep company, preacher. And so, by way of review, we would all best be served for me to simply step aside and let Forsyth speak for himself. Enjoy.
Quotes
“… I will venture to say that with its preaching Christianity stands or falls.” (p.1)
“Where your object is to secure your audience, rather than your Gospel, preaching is sure to suffer.” (p.2)
“It is one thing to have to rouse or persuade people to do something, to put themselves into something; it is another to have to induce them to trust somebody and renounce themselves for him. … The orator stirs men to rally, the preacher invites them to be redeemed. … The orator, at most, may urge men to love their brother, the preacher beseeches them to be reconciled to their Father.” (p.2)
“We must all preach to our age, but woe to us if it is our age we preach, and only hold up the mirror to the time.” (p.5)
“The crown of literature [the Bible] is thus a collection of sermons. It is one vast sermon. It is so much more than literature, because it is not merely powerful; it is power.” (p.6)
“To preach Christ really means to preach the Cross where His person took effect as the incarnation and the agent of the atoning grace of God.” (p.13)
“… one of the great tasks of the preacher is rescue the Bible from the textual idea in the mind of the public, from the Biblicist, atomist idea which reduces it to a religious scrap book, and uses it only in verses and phrases.” (p.17)
“The Bible may be his text book, but it has ceased to be the text book of his audience. The Bible is not read by the Christian, or even by the churchgoing public, as a means of grace greater even than churchgoing. Our people, as a rule, do not read the Bible … Consequently they do not easily find the thing they like in the preacher who lives in his Bible. … Bible preaching then means that we adjust our preaching to the people’s disuse of the Bible. We have to regain their interest in it.” (pp.21-22)
“Biblical preaching preaches the Gospel and uses the Bible, it does not preach the Bible and use the Gospel.” (p.23)
“For the Gospel the Bible must be used. The minister must so live in it that he wears it easily. … the ideal ministry must be a Bibliocracy.” (p.23)
“… the preacher is the organ of the only real and final authority for mankind.” (p.25)
“Our supreme need from God … is not the education of our conscience, nor the absorption of our sin, nor even our reconcilement alone, but our redemption. It is not cheer that we need but salvation; not help but rescue; not a stimulus but a change; not tonics but life.” (p.35)
“The Church does not live by its preachers, but by its Word.” (p.38)
“… we must preach Christ, and not about Christ; … we must set the actual constraining Christ before people, and not coax or bully people into decision.” (p.42)
“The King alone can make the Kingdom.” (p.45)
“The victory which overcomes the world is not humane love but Christian faith.” (p.47)
“The one great preacher in history, I would contend, is the Church.” (p.49)
“It is only an age engrossed with impressions and careless about realities that could regard the preacher’s prime work as that of converting the world, to the neglect of transforming the Church. It is only such an age that could think of preaching as something said with more or less force, instead of something done with more or less power.” (p.50)
“No true preaching of the cross can be other than part of the action of the Cross. … We do not repeat or imitate that Cross, on the one hand; and we do not merely state it, on the other. It re-enacts itself in us.” (p.51)
“… the cure for pulpit dullness is not brilliancy, as in literature. It is in reality. It is directness and spontaneity of the common life.” (p.57)
“Preaching is ‘the organized Hallelujah of an ordered community.’” (p.59)
“… if preaching is a main part of the Church’s worship, it is a part especially of the minister’s own personal worship. It is for him an act of worship, in a far more intimate and real sense than anything he may do in the serving of tables, the organizing of work, of the carrying of help. Nothing tends more to lower the quality of preaching than a loss of this sense of the preacher’s part. Nothing will destroy public respect for it so fast as the preacher’s own loss of respect for it. And that respect is lost when, for the preacher himself, the preaching is more speech than action, when he feels its practical value to be more in what it leads to, than in what it is. If great art is praise, true preaching is so no less. Much preaching that is not popular is still true worship.” (pp.61-62)
“Your duty is not to be yourself. ‘To thyself be true’ is not a Christian precept.” (p.65)
“We discourage the position of those who are impatient of the sermon, who walk out when it comes on, or who paralyse preachers by a demand for brevity before everything else. I speak of those who do so on the ground that they go to Church to worship God. I should like to say here that in my humble judgment the demand for short sermons on the part of Christian people is one of the most fatal influences at work to destroy preaching in the true sense of the word. How can a man preach if he feel throughout that the people set a watch upon his lips. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but the preacher is not a wit. And those who say they want little sermon because they are there to worship God and not hear man, have not grasped the rudiments of the first idea of Christian worship … A Christianity of short sermons is a Christianity of short fibre.” (pp.68-69)
“… Christianity can endure, not by surrendering itself to the modern mind and modern culture, but rather by a break with it … Culture asks but half a Gospel; and a half Gospel is no Gospel.” (p.82)
“… revelation is distilled from the Bible rather than dissected …” (p.85)
“Men will still hear of the soul if it be a true soul that speaks …” (p.86)
“… let the religious public … respect the dignity of the ministry. Let it cease to degrade the ministry onto a competitor for public notice, a caterer for public comfort, and a mere waiter for social convenience or religious decency. Let it make greater demands on the pulpit to power, and grasp, and range, and penetration, and reality. … Let it come in aid to protect the pulpit from that curse of petty sentiment which grows upon the Church, which rolls up from the pew into the pulpit, and from the pulpit rolls down upon the pew in a warm and soaking mist.” (p.92)
“Do you realize that it was the severity of Christ that made the agony of Christ, His love of God’s holy law more even than of His brother men.” (p.97)
“Preach more expository sermons. 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. It is thus you will get 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.” (pp.103-104)
“I will say that the Church suffers from three things. (1) From triviality (with externality). (2) From uncertainty of its foundation. (3) From satisfaction with itself. And to cure these the Gospel we have to preach prescribes – (1) For our triviality, a new note of greatness in our creed, the note that sounds in a theology more than in a sentiment. (2) For our uncertainty, a new note of wrestling and reality in our prayer. (3) For our complacency, a new note of judgment in our salvation.” (p.106)
“The Church … is a communion of saints and lovers, a company of believers, a fellowship of spiritual realists. It is there first to feed the soul with eternal reality, to stablish, strengthen, and settle the soul upon the Rock of Ages.” (p.109)
“The minister is more strongly induced to be the friend and comrade of his people than their moral authority and guide. And he is tempted to care more (as the public care more) for the happy touch in his preaching than the great Word.” (p.114)
“What we need is not so much something pious as something positive which makes piety. We need fewer homilies upon ‘Fret not,’ or “Study to be Quiet,’ fewer essays on ‘the Beauty of Holiness,’ or other aspects of pensive piety. And we need more sermons on ‘Through Him the world is crucified to me, and I to the world,’ or ‘Him who was made sin for us.’ There is the real incarnation, the emergence of God’s reality, the reality of God as an energy.” (p.114)
“The reality of life is Christ – and not Christ’s beauty, pity, or self-sacrifice, but His love as God’s holy grace, His moral mercy, moral judgment, moral atonement, and moral victory of redemption. To that we must return, if all the world go on and leave us.” (pp.117-118)
“It is better and safer to pray over the Bible than to brood over self. … What really searches us is neither our own introspection, nor God’s law, but it is God’s Gospel, as it pierces us from the merciless mercy of the Cross and the Son unspared for us.” (p.120)
“We can never fully say ‘My brother!’ till we have heartily said ‘My God!;’ and we can never heartily say ‘My God’ till we have humbly said ‘My Guilt!’ That is the root of morality reality, of personal religion, and social security.” (p.123)
“The preacher who is but feeling his way to a theology is but preparing to be a preacher, however eloquent he may have become.” (pp.124-125)
“The Gospel … is the final interpretation of life.” (p.167)
“… the man who forgives easily, jauntily, and thoughtlessly, when it is a real offence, is neither natural nor supernatural but subnatural. He is not only less than God, he is less than a man.” (p.185)
“… the effective preacher must not be afraid of paradox.” (p.185)
“The supreme Christian gift is not eternal truth but eternal life …” (p.191)
“Man’s chief end is not to make the most of himself, but to glorify a holy God by the holiness which alone can satisfy holiness. And that is what sinful man can do only in the power of the atoning holiness of Christ.” (p.200)
“The best use we can make of our freedom is to forgo it, and to sign it away to to one whose work and joy it is to create in us a freedom we can never acquire.” (p.212)
Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind by P.T. Forsyth (Paternoster Press, 1998 reprint), 237pp, pb; $29.20 at Amazon (http://bit.ly/4rXnZw)
Observations
This work is a classic; a ‘must.’ Forsyth had a rare ability: the ability to not only think deeply and clearly, but to communicate so to others. You will certainly need to don your chest waders to work through his thoughts, but rest assured, where he is going is always worth the labor involved. He is often quite the quotable type, too, often distilling several paragraphs of thought into just a sentence or two. In sum, he is the sort of man with which you ought to keep company, preacher. And so, by way of review, we would all best be served for me to simply step aside and let Forsyth speak for himself. Enjoy.
Quotes
“… I will venture to say that with its preaching Christianity stands or falls.” (p.1)
“Where your object is to secure your audience, rather than your Gospel, preaching is sure to suffer.” (p.2)
“It is one thing to have to rouse or persuade people to do something, to put themselves into something; it is another to have to induce them to trust somebody and renounce themselves for him. … The orator stirs men to rally, the preacher invites them to be redeemed. … The orator, at most, may urge men to love their brother, the preacher beseeches them to be reconciled to their Father.” (p.2)
“We must all preach to our age, but woe to us if it is our age we preach, and only hold up the mirror to the time.” (p.5)
“The crown of literature [the Bible] is thus a collection of sermons. It is one vast sermon. It is so much more than literature, because it is not merely powerful; it is power.” (p.6)
“To preach Christ really means to preach the Cross where His person took effect as the incarnation and the agent of the atoning grace of God.” (p.13)
“… one of the great tasks of the preacher is rescue the Bible from the textual idea in the mind of the public, from the Biblicist, atomist idea which reduces it to a religious scrap book, and uses it only in verses and phrases.” (p.17)
“The Bible may be his text book, but it has ceased to be the text book of his audience. The Bible is not read by the Christian, or even by the churchgoing public, as a means of grace greater even than churchgoing. Our people, as a rule, do not read the Bible … Consequently they do not easily find the thing they like in the preacher who lives in his Bible. … Bible preaching then means that we adjust our preaching to the people’s disuse of the Bible. We have to regain their interest in it.” (pp.21-22)
“Biblical preaching preaches the Gospel and uses the Bible, it does not preach the Bible and use the Gospel.” (p.23)
“For the Gospel the Bible must be used. The minister must so live in it that he wears it easily. … the ideal ministry must be a Bibliocracy.” (p.23)
“… the preacher is the organ of the only real and final authority for mankind.” (p.25)
“Our supreme need from God … is not the education of our conscience, nor the absorption of our sin, nor even our reconcilement alone, but our redemption. It is not cheer that we need but salvation; not help but rescue; not a stimulus but a change; not tonics but life.” (p.35)
“The Church does not live by its preachers, but by its Word.” (p.38)
“… we must preach Christ, and not about Christ; … we must set the actual constraining Christ before people, and not coax or bully people into decision.” (p.42)
“The King alone can make the Kingdom.” (p.45)
“The victory which overcomes the world is not humane love but Christian faith.” (p.47)
“The one great preacher in history, I would contend, is the Church.” (p.49)
“It is only an age engrossed with impressions and careless about realities that could regard the preacher’s prime work as that of converting the world, to the neglect of transforming the Church. It is only such an age that could think of preaching as something said with more or less force, instead of something done with more or less power.” (p.50)
“No true preaching of the cross can be other than part of the action of the Cross. … We do not repeat or imitate that Cross, on the one hand; and we do not merely state it, on the other. It re-enacts itself in us.” (p.51)
“… the cure for pulpit dullness is not brilliancy, as in literature. It is in reality. It is directness and spontaneity of the common life.” (p.57)
“Preaching is ‘the organized Hallelujah of an ordered community.’” (p.59)
“… if preaching is a main part of the Church’s worship, it is a part especially of the minister’s own personal worship. It is for him an act of worship, in a far more intimate and real sense than anything he may do in the serving of tables, the organizing of work, of the carrying of help. Nothing tends more to lower the quality of preaching than a loss of this sense of the preacher’s part. Nothing will destroy public respect for it so fast as the preacher’s own loss of respect for it. And that respect is lost when, for the preacher himself, the preaching is more speech than action, when he feels its practical value to be more in what it leads to, than in what it is. If great art is praise, true preaching is so no less. Much preaching that is not popular is still true worship.” (pp.61-62)
“Your duty is not to be yourself. ‘To thyself be true’ is not a Christian precept.” (p.65)
“We discourage the position of those who are impatient of the sermon, who walk out when it comes on, or who paralyse preachers by a demand for brevity before everything else. I speak of those who do so on the ground that they go to Church to worship God. I should like to say here that in my humble judgment the demand for short sermons on the part of Christian people is one of the most fatal influences at work to destroy preaching in the true sense of the word. How can a man preach if he feel throughout that the people set a watch upon his lips. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but the preacher is not a wit. And those who say they want little sermon because they are there to worship God and not hear man, have not grasped the rudiments of the first idea of Christian worship … A Christianity of short sermons is a Christianity of short fibre.” (pp.68-69)
“… Christianity can endure, not by surrendering itself to the modern mind and modern culture, but rather by a break with it … Culture asks but half a Gospel; and a half Gospel is no Gospel.” (p.82)
“… revelation is distilled from the Bible rather than dissected …” (p.85)
“Men will still hear of the soul if it be a true soul that speaks …” (p.86)
“… let the religious public … respect the dignity of the ministry. Let it cease to degrade the ministry onto a competitor for public notice, a caterer for public comfort, and a mere waiter for social convenience or religious decency. Let it make greater demands on the pulpit to power, and grasp, and range, and penetration, and reality. … Let it come in aid to protect the pulpit from that curse of petty sentiment which grows upon the Church, which rolls up from the pew into the pulpit, and from the pulpit rolls down upon the pew in a warm and soaking mist.” (p.92)
“Do you realize that it was the severity of Christ that made the agony of Christ, His love of God’s holy law more even than of His brother men.” (p.97)
“Preach more expository sermons. 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. It is thus you will get 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.” (pp.103-104)
“I will say that the Church suffers from three things. (1) From triviality (with externality). (2) From uncertainty of its foundation. (3) From satisfaction with itself. And to cure these the Gospel we have to preach prescribes – (1) For our triviality, a new note of greatness in our creed, the note that sounds in a theology more than in a sentiment. (2) For our uncertainty, a new note of wrestling and reality in our prayer. (3) For our complacency, a new note of judgment in our salvation.” (p.106)
“The Church … is a communion of saints and lovers, a company of believers, a fellowship of spiritual realists. It is there first to feed the soul with eternal reality, to stablish, strengthen, and settle the soul upon the Rock of Ages.” (p.109)
“The minister is more strongly induced to be the friend and comrade of his people than their moral authority and guide. And he is tempted to care more (as the public care more) for the happy touch in his preaching than the great Word.” (p.114)
“What we need is not so much something pious as something positive which makes piety. We need fewer homilies upon ‘Fret not,’ or “Study to be Quiet,’ fewer essays on ‘the Beauty of Holiness,’ or other aspects of pensive piety. And we need more sermons on ‘Through Him the world is crucified to me, and I to the world,’ or ‘Him who was made sin for us.’ There is the real incarnation, the emergence of God’s reality, the reality of God as an energy.” (p.114)
“The reality of life is Christ – and not Christ’s beauty, pity, or self-sacrifice, but His love as God’s holy grace, His moral mercy, moral judgment, moral atonement, and moral victory of redemption. To that we must return, if all the world go on and leave us.” (pp.117-118)
“It is better and safer to pray over the Bible than to brood over self. … What really searches us is neither our own introspection, nor God’s law, but it is God’s Gospel, as it pierces us from the merciless mercy of the Cross and the Son unspared for us.” (p.120)
“We can never fully say ‘My brother!’ till we have heartily said ‘My God!;’ and we can never heartily say ‘My God’ till we have humbly said ‘My Guilt!’ That is the root of morality reality, of personal religion, and social security.” (p.123)
“The preacher who is but feeling his way to a theology is but preparing to be a preacher, however eloquent he may have become.” (pp.124-125)
“The Gospel … is the final interpretation of life.” (p.167)
“… the man who forgives easily, jauntily, and thoughtlessly, when it is a real offence, is neither natural nor supernatural but subnatural. He is not only less than God, he is less than a man.” (p.185)
“… the effective preacher must not be afraid of paradox.” (p.185)
“The supreme Christian gift is not eternal truth but eternal life …” (p.191)
“Man’s chief end is not to make the most of himself, but to glorify a holy God by the holiness which alone can satisfy holiness. And that is what sinful man can do only in the power of the atoning holiness of Christ.” (p.200)
“The best use we can make of our freedom is to forgo it, and to sign it away to one whose work and joy it is to create in us a freedom we can never acquire.” (p.212)
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