Peter Taylor Forsyth, also known as P. T. Forsyth, (1848–1921) was a Scottish theologian.
The son of a postman, Forsyth studied at the University of Aberdeen and then in Göttingen (under Albrecht Ritschl). He was ordained into the Congregational ministry and served churches as pastor at Bradford, Manchester, Leicester and Cambridge, before becoming Principal of Hackney College, London (later subsumed into the University of London) in 1901.
An early interest in critical theology made him suspect to some more 'orthodox' Christians. However, he increasingly came to the conclusion that liberal theology failed to account adequately for the moral problem of the guilty conscience. This led him to a moral crisis which he found resolved in the atoning work of Christ. The experience helped to shape and inform a vigorous interest in the issues of holiness and atonement. Although Forsyth rejected many of his earlier liberal leanings he retained many of Adolf von Harnack's criticisms of Chalcedonian Christology. This led him to expound a kenotic doctrine of the incarnation (clearly influenced by Bishop Charles Gore and Thomasius). Where he differed from other kenotic theologies of the atonement was the claim that Christ did not give up his divine attributes but condensed them; i.e., the incarnation was the expression of God's omnipotence rather than its negation. His theology and attack on liberal Christianity can be found in his most famous work, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909), which anticipated much of the neo-orthodox theology of the next generation. He has sometimes been coined the 'Barthian before Barth', but this fails to account for many areas of divergence with the Swiss theologian's thought.
While many of Forsyth's most significant insights have largely gone ignored, not a few consider him to be among the greatest English-speaking theologians of the early twentieth century.
In his Christian Theology: An Introduction, Alister E. McGrath describes Forsyth's Justification of God (1916). The book
represents an impassioned plea to allow the notion of the “justice of God” to be rediscovered. Forsyth is less concerned than Anselm for the legal and juridical aspects of the cross; his interest centers on the manner in which the cross is inextricably linked with “the whole moral fabric and movement of the universe.” The doctrine of the atonement is inseparable from “the rightness of things.”[1]
In his Theology and the Problem of Evil, Kenneth Surin points to Forsyth's Justification of God as offering a theodicy based on the cross. God can be justified for creating a world with so much pain and suffering “only if he were prepared to share the burden of pain and suffering with his creatures.” Surin concurs with Forsyth.[2]
Forsyth wrote The Justification of God,[3] while the first world war was killing ten million and wounding another twenty million from around the world.[4] Through the lens of biblical faith, Forsyth saw even “a world catastrophe and judgment of the first rank like the war” as “still in the hand and service of God.” [5]
Before the start of World War I, widely held views about God and human progress muted the theodic question. “Popular religion” had preached a God whose sole purpose was “to promote and crown [human] development.”[6] The “doctrine of progress” (first formulated by Abbé de Saint-Pierre) dominated Europe.[7] But as Forsyth observed, the war's “revelation of the awful and desperate nature of evil” exploded these optimistic views and raised the theodic question about the goodness of God to full force.[8]
There was no theodicy extant to which Forsyth could turn. In spite of his extensive theological studies, he could find no satisfactory “philosophical theodicy or vindication of God's justice.”[9] From this, Forsyth concluded that "no reason of man can justify God in a world like this. He must justify Himself, and He did so in the Cross of His Son."[10] Forsyth began formulating what he called "God's own theodicy"[11] with Romans 1:17: "the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith".[12] There he found the righteousness of God revealed in the Christ who "is the theodicy of God and the justifier both of God and the ungodly."[13]
[Christ] brings God's providence to the bar of God’s own promise. In Christ, God is fully justified by Himself. If any man thinks he has anything to suffer in the flesh, God more. In all their afflictions He was more afflicted.[14]
For Forsyth, "God's own theodicy" stood in contrast to theodicies devised by humans.[15] God's own theodicy provided Forsyth no philosophical answers to why in God's "creation must the way upward lie through suffering?"[16] "The tactics of providence cannot be traced," but "His purpose we have, and His heart. We have Him."[17] God's own theodicy is a theodicy of reconciliation and relationship, a theodicy that enables trust in God in spite of unanswered questions.
Forsyth's understanding of "God's own theodicy" as enabling a right relationship with God rather than a philosophical justification of God contrasts two alternative connotations of the word 'theodicy'. Theodicy derives from the Greek words theos ("God") and dikē, which can be translated either (a) just (and its derivatives justice, justified, etc.)[18] or (b) right (and its derivatives righteousness, righteoused, etc.).[19] Righteoused is an obsolete verb meaning “made righteous.”[20] A theodicy designed to justify connotes rational arguments.[21] But a theodicy designed to righteous connotes relationship. In the Bible righteousness is primarily relational.[22]
(Forsyth died in 1921, and dates after that are re-prints of earlier publications)