The Week of the Compass III

This is section three of Rick Floyd's “The Work of Christ in the Thought of P.T. Forsyth: Kenosis and Plerosis Revisited” as we continue thinking about Jesus’ self-emptying this week.

Day three with the Reverends Floyd and Forsyth moves us distinctively toward grappling with the meaning of Friday. I enjoy learning different interpretations to the what and why of the cross. Although I go at this a little differently, I love how Rick Floyd keeps underscoring that “Forsyth's understanding of God in moral rather than in metaphysical terms leads him to the logic of the cross.” It is significant that Jesus’ stunning Friday work is a moral act and not ambiguous mystical accounting. He changed all of creation doing something! This fuels lots of my own understanding about participation—both Jesus’ and our own.

 

The Holiness of God 

Kenosis is a moral necessity for the God who is holy love. The holiness of God requires the divine intervention of the atoning cross against human sin. For Forsyth God's holiness is his defining attribute, God's very nature. He writes:

The holy law is not the creation of God but His nature, and it cannot be treated as less than inviolate and eternal, it cannot be denied or simply annulled unless He seems false to Himself. If a play on words be permitted is such a connection, the self-denial of Christ was there because God could not deny himself.” (The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, 79)

Here again we can see how Forsyth's understanding of God in moral rather than in metaphysical terms leads him to the logic of the cross. Human sin requires a real atonement. For Forsyth the wrath of God is not some arbitrary anger, but the response of the holy God to the very antithesis of holiness, which is sin. Divine holiness reacts to human sin with wrath and judgement. Forsyth's theology takes sin and evil with utmost seriousness. God can not tolerate sin. It threatens his very being: 

God is fundamentally affected by sin. He is stung and to the core. It does not simply try Him. It challenges His whole place in the moral world. It puts Him on His trial as God. It is, in its nature, an assault on His life. Its vital object is to unseat Him. It has no part whatever in His purpose. It hates and kills Him.” (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 366)

So God is not just love, but holy love at war with sin. Liberal theology knows only a benign mercy that overlooks sin without overcoming it. That is why it can do without an atoning cross. But a theology that takes God's holiness seriously must also take sin and evil seriously too and realize that they are at war. God must not only forgive sin, but destroy it by an atonement. During the First World War Forsyth wrote these words to describe the holiness of God and the power of His holy cross:

The great Word of the Gospel is not God is love. That is too stationary, too little energetic. It produces a religion unable to cope with crises. But the Word is this—Love is omnipotent for ever because it is holy. That is the voice of Christ—raised from the midst of time, and its chaos, and its convulsions, yet coming from the depths of eternity, where the Son dwells in the bosom of the Father, the Son to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth because He overcame the world in a cross holier than love itself, more tragic, more solemn, more dynamic than all earth's wars. The key to history is the historic Christ above history and in command of it, and there is no other. (The Justification of God, 227)

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.