The Week of the Compass

I have enjoyed “meeting” Rick Floyd in the blogosphere (first introduced here), and I enjoy stopping by to learn at his blog every week. In fact, some of his posts about blogging helped tip me toward a new regard for this type of engagement.

This week, as we celebrate the most important of all weeks, it is especially appropriate to reflect on how Jesus poured himself out, and Rick’s paper “The Work of Christ in the Thought of P.T. Forsyth: Kenosis and Plerosis Revisited” reminds us who and what sets our bearings. This paper was also a great introduction to P.T. Forsyth for me as well. Rick has graciously given me permission to share his paper over the week, or you can get it in full over at Retired Pastor Ruminates.

Thanks, Rick!

The Work of Christ in the Thought of P.T. Forsyth: Kenosis and Plerosis Revisited


To talk of “the work of Christ” in the theology of P.T.Forsyth is not to refer to merely a section of his systematic theology, but to point to the heart of his theology. Forsyth's entire theological project looks to the cross of Christ as the decisive act of the Holy God. It mattered little what subject Forsyth approached in his writings, be it marriage, the arts, war and peace. He always returned again and again to the cross as his fixed point, his north star, his magnetic north. He used this navigational image himself: “The church must always adjust its compass at the cross.” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 62)

The term “the cross” functions as theological shorthand for Forsyth, as it did for Paul, to mean the whole dramatic activity of Christ culminating at Calvary and vindicated by Easter. “I desire to keep in view the Cross, the organic crisis of Christ's whole life, earthly and eternal, as God's one kerugma, as the burthen, key, consummation and purpose of Christ's whole person and mission . . .” (The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ, 83)

The cross for Forsyth is never merely an emblem of who God is, it is something God does, an act of the Holy God. It is constitutive for salvation rather than illustrative. It is the instrument that puts into effect God's holy love rather than a symbol that only shows God's love. Christ's death on the cross is nothing less than God acting:

He (Christ) was God, therefore, and His death was God in action. He was not simply the witness of God's grace, He was its fact, its incarnation. His death was not merely a seal to His work; it was His consummate work. It gathered up His whole person. It was more than a confirmatory pledge, it was the effective sacrament of the gracious God, with His real presence at its core. Something was done there once for all, and the subject doer of it was God. The real acting person in the cross was God.” (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 358)
We can see here that Forsyth's theology focuses on God as a personality, as one who acts, who is best understood not for who he is but rather for what he does, therefore not in metaphysical but moral categories.

And in the same way Forsyth's Christology focuses on what Christ does rather than who Christ is; his person is known in his work, which is the work of God. Soteriology controls Christology. It is only Christ in his cross that does justice to New Testament Christianity; his teachings alone do not make him an object of faith and worthy of worship. Forsyth inists that:

Faith is an attitude we can take only to God. God is the only correlate of faith, if we use words with any conscience. Faith in Christ involves the Godhead of Christ. Faith in Christ, in the positive Christian sense, means much more than a relation to God to which Christ supremely helps us. It is a communion possible not through, but only in Christ and Him crucified. It means that to be in Christ is to be in God. It means that the experience that the action of Christ with us is God's action, that Christ does for us and in us what holy God alone can do, and that meeting with Christ we meet with God.” (Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 6)

So in Forsyth's theology a two–nature Christology is replaced by a two–act Christology, with an act from the divine side and a corresponding one from the human side. The divine kenosis, or self-emptying, coincides with the plerosis, or self-fulfillment, of Christ.

Notes from Rick:

(This is the original paper that I presented at the United Reformed Church Centre at Windermere, England in May of 1998, at a conference: P.T. Forsyth: Theologian for a New Millennium. It was gathered with the other papers into a book by the same name edited by Alan P. F. Sell. It later appeared also as a chapter in my book When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement. Pickwick, 2000, Wipf and Stock, 2010.

Find Rick at Wipf and Stock too.