GOD HAS SPOKEN!
Why? Why so much attention to Hebrews 2:10-18? Part Two
(Hebrews Eleven)
Hebrews 2:10-18 Hebrews 2:17: “Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.”
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965): He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those men who did not know who he was. He says the words, “Follow me!” and sets us to those tasks which he must fulfil in our time. He commands. And to those who hearken to him, whether wise or unwise, he will reveal himself in the peace, the labors, the conflicts, and the suffering that they may experience in this fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery they will learn who he is.
The Apostle Paul: For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
The Apostle John: Jesus said to them “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” . . . When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” . . . Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. [This saying of Jesus is atonement language related to his death and at the same time reflective of the Eucharistic celebration, the Lord’s Supper. These words call attention to the subterranean river of who Jesus was and is, what he did and does, that flows all through the Gospel of John, breaking out into the open from time to time.]
Introduction
We return to where we left off two weeks ago: “Why? Why so much attention paid to Hebrews 2:10-18?” We began then with the startling declaration that there are two quite different visions of Christianity implicit in the quotations from Albert Schweitzer and the Apostle Paul when seen in the light of their respective contexts. Paul, later in 2 Corinthians, could go so far as to speak of “another Jesus, . . . a different spirit, . . . a different gospel.” As we attempt to clarify these two competing visions the answer to our basic question comes into focus—Why?
Our key verse of course is Hebrews 2:17: “Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.” This text bears the Hebrew writer’s witness to his faith that the holy God, in Jesus, in his life, death, and resurrection for love’s sake, has taken into his own full personhood all about us that contradicts his very holy nature and suffers it out of existence that we might live in full fellowship with him—a truly “atoning sacrifice.”
Not everyone in the Church and its theological scholarship accepts the witness of our writer as well as that of Paul and John. The great question of “Why did Jesus die?” is being given different answers. You and I are not immune to the practical effects of this issue on our daily Christian lives.
As you remember, we began to look at the life and writings of a man whose ministry took place one hundred years ago, the British pastor and theologian P. T. Forsyth (1848-1921). His work gives us a historical perspective on these questions. Forsyth defined our question succinctly in the Congregational Union Lecture for 1909 in London that became his magnum opus published as The Person and Place of Jesus Christ.
In these lectures, Forsyth plainly and boldly opposed those who taught that “we must learn to believe not in Christ, but with Christ.” “Believe” is also a key word. His distinction is best understood in the context of his response to those scholars and their followers who taught that “the first form of Christianity was the so-called religion of Jesus.” Those scholars were inviting the Christian community to replace the gospel of Christ with the religion of Jesus—to be Christian was simply to follow the spirit and pattern of Jesus’ own faith and life. Theologically, the issue boiled down to “Was Christ a part of his gospel?” Life-imitation not faith-participation became the name of the game for some.
Last lesson we dealt with the two questions of “Who was Peter T. Forsyth?” and “Who was Peter Forsyth as a Liberal?” Today we confront the questions of “Why did Peter Forsyth change his theological stance?” and “What was Forsyth’s defense of the Apostolic Gospel?” We begin with a brief review of the first two questions.
First, “Who Was Peter T. Forsyth?” Born and raised in a frugal Scottish home in Aberdeen, his health was frail all his life. His early manifestation of academic ability enabled him to take a brilliant “first” in the classics at nearby University of Aberdeen. This was followed by a semester in Gӧttingen, Germany, sitting at the feet of Albrecht Ritschl who was a great attraction for aspiring students of theology. There he acquired a life-long interest in the national character of the German people and their theologians.
After some further academic work at Hackney College in London, Forsyth entered his career of twenty-five years in active pastoral ministry and then spent twenty of the finest years of his life as a professor of theology and Principal of what became known as New College, London. Known as “a Barthian before Barth,” he differed from Barth (1886-1968) on the place of reason in revelation and on the primacy of the moral, and possessed a greater appreciation of the virtues of “Liberal” theology.
Our second question follows, “Who Was Peter Forsyth as a Liberal? We use the term “Liberal” in relation to the 19th century, predominately German, biblical interpretation based on the primacy of reason that characterizes the modern period. Theologically, Forsyth started out as a convinced Liberal, that is, he then held to what he called “purely scientific criticism” following the methodology he learned in his classical studies.
Peter Forsyth remained a liberal all his life (1) in his concern for intellectual liberty, (2) in his insistence on the value and right of biblical criticism, and (3) in his concept of theology as Christian faith giving a reasoned account of revelation. Yet he later turned decisively against that Christianity which sought its accommodation to the modern mind as it “minimized human sin and guilt, scaled down the New Testament Christ and his cross to all-too-human dimensions, and regarded Paul as the perverter of an originally simple gospel.”
So what happened to Forsyth’s original Liberalism, that is, to his “purely scientific criticism”? This is our third question, “Why Did Peter Forsyth Change His Theological Stance?” This question will lead us into our fourth and last question, “What Was Forsyth’s Defense of the Apostolic Gospel?”
III. Why Did Peter Forsyth Change His Theological Stance?
In Forsyth’s famous sermon on “The Holy Father” to the Congregational Union at Leicester in 1896, he announced a new Forsyth. From “henceforth his themes were to be the holiness – the infinite majesty and utter purity – of God, the sinfulness of sin and the power of the cross by which God redeemed the world.”
What brought about his change? This was something that Forsyth did not speak about often in any great detail. It appears to have been not a sudden but a slow conversion with abiding results. It took place during his life as a pastor. Years after the change he did lift the veil a little and wrote:
There was a time when I was interested in the first degree with purely scientific criticism. Bred among academic scholarship of the classics and philosophy, I carried these habits to the Bible, and I found in the subject a huge fascination, in proportion as the stakes were much higher. But fortunately for me, I was not condemned to the mere scholar’s cloistered life. I could not treat the matter as an academic quest. I was in a relation of life, duty and responsibility to others. I could not contemplate conclusions without asking how they would affect these people and my word to them in doubt, death, grief and repentance. . . . Therefore these matters could not be things which were at issue in historic criticism alone. . . . It also pleased God by the revelation of his holiness and grace, which the great theologians taught me to find in the Bible, to bring home to me my sin in a way that submerged all the school questions in weight, urgency, and poignancy. I was turned from a Christian to a believer, from a lover of love to an object of grace.
Forsyth’s assertion that God turned him from a “a lover of love to an object of grace could be described as his “signature” confession of faith. It is all there, both then and now!
Thus we return to the issue with which we introduced this study--the distinction between believing “with Christ” and believing “in him” that relates to our topic, in particular, the role of Jesus’ death in our faith. We are turning more directly to the basic question of our present study--“Why so much attention to Hebrews 2:10-18?” What was involved in this distinction arising from the work of the 19th century German theologians that Forsyth confronted as well in British clothing?
Forsyth appreciated greatly and believed indispensable the work of historical critical scholarship; he characterized it as “the Holy Spirit’s gift of critical scholarship.” Yet his confidence as a theologian was not so much in some of scholarship’s “scientific” reconstructions, as it was in the living Word as witnessed to by “the Apostolic Gospel”--the whole Bible as a sacramental book, one that by the help of the Holy Spirit can mediate the grace of God. As he said, he was not looking for “a simple creed rescued from the Apostles.” So our final question is
IV. What Was Forsyth’s Defense of the Apostolic Gospel?
Christ’s work is the master-key to his person.
Interestingly and directly to the point is a statement found in the preliminary synopsis of Forsyth’s second lecture in The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, “The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ.” There the writer summarizes that “the real conflict is not between an infallible Bible and a fallible, but between a New Testament Christianity and one which believes it knows better.” In that chapter Forsyth puts the issue plainly:
There is nothing we are more often told by those who discard an evangelical faith than this—that we must now do what scholarship has only just enabled us to do and return to the religion of Jesus. We are bidden to go back to practise Jesus’ own personal religion, as distinct from the Gospel of Christ, from a gospel which calls him its faith’s object, and not its subject, founder, or classic only. We must [we are told] learn to believe not in Christ, but with Christ.
This late 19th and early 20th century view of the religion of Jesus would not abide the atonement language of Hebrews 2, Romans 3, and I John 2 and 4, at least as we have interpreted it. Rather it would see Jesus’ death only as the final illustration of God’s love as exhibited throughout his life as visible in the Synoptic Gospels, and that centered in Jesus’ teaching ministry. Paul was said to be a “minority of one” who had constructed his Christ from other religious sources of his day—a syncretistic vision!
Even if, as Forsyth pointed out as early as 1905, Paul’s epistles reflect “’the common faith of the apostolic community’ and not just the idiosyncrasies of Paul,” the task for the critical scholar was still to get rid of the syncretistic crud that had been imposed by later followers on the life and teachings of Jesus as now known through proper scientific criticism, especially to remove those crude antiquated interpretations that had been layered over his death. The need was to get back to Jesus’ simple faith in God and his loving actions toward his fellowman in line with the Great Commandment (Mark 12:28-31).
But “Christ taught Paul in the Spirit,” wrote Forsyth, “as truly as he taught the disciples in the flesh.” Paul’s “we have the mind of Christ” meant “we have the theology of Christ.” As did Paul, Forsyth gloried in the Cross of Christ. For him, writes Hunter, “the real site of [Jesus’] greatness lies in what he did, in the cross where the real Jesus at last took effect, crowning and consuming the work his Father had given him to do.” With this “fifth evangelist,” as Forsyth called Paul, the writings of Peter, John, the writer to the Hebrews, and even the present form of the Synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all agree on the basics, that is, the Apostolic witness speaks with one voice as to the essence of who Jesus was and did! Of course expressions, analogies, and metaphors vary.
In Forsyth’s words, the New Testament records that the risen Christ turned the original “disciples into apostles. The Spirit came. The cross opened. These things were what made the Church, and not the teaching of Jesus.” All along Jesus was an inherent part of his own Gospel. As Forsyth explains, Jesus’
personal experience was greater than anything he said or could say to his public. . . . He received from none the Gospel he spoke. He found it in himself. Indeed it was himself. . . . He was part of his own Gospel. He could teach nothing without indirectly teaching himself.”
Forsyth concludes that in its first form as we know “the religion of Jesus” from the New Testament, it “was the religion of which Jesus was the object and not the subject. He was never regarded as the first Christian,” that is, as “a saint rather than a Redeemer” The first Christians were those who discovered with Paul that Christ’s love for us “urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”
Forsyth’s daughter, Jesse Forsyth Andrews, in a “Memoir” of her father in the 1935 reprint of her father’s, The Work of Christ, xvi, published originally in 1910, wrote that he was passionate about “the very core of the Gospel—the holiness of God, the sin of man, and the supreme value of the Cross.” His son-in-law came to regard him as truly “a prophet of the Cross.” Forsyth believed firmly in the holiness of God; for him the essence of God was holy love, not just love! The God of Hebrews’ “sacrifice of atonement” is a God of holy love. Biblical Atonement is based squarely on the holiness of God!
In my judgment, if you take away the vicarious, sacrificial atonement, you lose the holiness of God, and you are left with Jesus as an exceptionally loving moral teacher who climaxed it in the ultimate deed of death, an ultimate display of love, but with little to do with a holy God as such. Love is all after all, how one chooses to define it! Its proper biblical definition has to take into consideration not only Jesus’ life and teaching but also his death as atoning and his resurrection as life-giving.
There is no adequate definition of “sacrifice of atonement” apart from the holiness of God. Biblically the “Holy” stands not merely for “judgment,” but most of all for character “transformation”; the “holy” takes moral and ethical responsibility seriously and impacts our future hope. Forsyth would say, “holiness, with its eternal conquest, is the eternal thing in love itself, it is the only guarantee of love’s final victory.” Earlier in the same book he had written that “for God himself to be holy is to be God. His holiness . . . is not an attribute of God; it is his name, and being, and infinite value. But if the holiness does not go out to cover, imbue, conquer, and sanctify all things, if it does not give itself in love, it is the less holy.”
Conclusion
For the Son of Man came not to be served but to give his life a ransom for many.
When properly understood, Forsyth’s distinction with which we began these two studies, namely, believing “with Christ” or believing “in Christ,” is not a mutually exclusive one. But viewed historically, the distinctions do point to two continuing visions of what Christianity is, one in line with the apostolic witness as focused in Hebrews 2:5-18 and similar texts, and the other, Forsyth’s words, represents those who are “a lover of love” after the pattern of a critically reconstructed Jesus.
We suggested in the first of these two studies that the famous musician, scholar, and missionary doctor Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was to some degree an example of the latter view. If I can trust my memory, as I sat in a class in 1959 with Tommy Torrance, who at the time was the leading English speaking Barthian scholar, he explained to us that Schweitzer’s Christianity was the result of his exposure of mind and heart to the Gospels’ record of Jesus from which he caught the “spirit” of Jesus and lived it out in his uniquely admirable way as his life in Africa showed. His life of service was an attempt to share this “spirit” of the Jesus, who, as Schweitzer concluded,
says the words, “Follow me!” and sets us to those tasks which he must fulfil in our time. He commands. And to those who hearken to him, whether wise or unwise, he will reveal himself in the peace, the labors, the conflicts, and the suffering that they may experience in this fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery they will learn who he is.
The great expositor of “the religion of Jesus” in Forsyth’s day was the zenith of the Liberal theologians Adolf Harnack (1851-1930) in his What is Christianity (1904). He expounded the message of Jesus in terms, of “the kingdom of God and its coming,” “God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul,” and “the higher righteousness and the commandment of love.” Yet even Harnack as he began his famous presentation did not hesitate to admit that
What is Christianity, is impossible as long as we are restricted to Jesus Christ’s teaching alone. We must include the first generation of his disciples as well—those who ate and drank with him—and we must listen to what they tell us of the effect which he had upon their lives.
Marcus Borg (1942-), a contemporary New Testament scholar, theologian and author, retired after a distinguished career at Oregon State University (1979-2007), is a major figure in \o "Historical Jesus" historical Jesus research and interpretation and has been a popular lecturer in mainline churches across America. I view him as a theologian brilliantly able to have his cake and eat it too—what he tosses out the front door as history, he brings in the back door as metaphor. Although one cannot adequately represent a scholar’s thought by quoting a few snippets, I will try. Marcus Borg writes that while that for centuries “Christians have seen Jesus’ death as the very purpose of his life,” that is, “it had saving significance and makes our salvation possible,” he is “skeptical that we can trace a salvific understanding of his death back to Jesus himself.” He does not “think that Jesus saw his own death as a sacrifice for sin”; Jesus death is rather a “a powerfully true metaphor for the grace of God.” For Borg, the Easter faith is not about the empty tomb, but consists of the reality that “the followers of Jesus, both then and now, continued to experience Jesus as a living reality after his death.” Marcus Borg’s favorite Easter story is Jesus’ appearance to the two disciples on the Emmaus Road. For him, this account is not about “reporting a particular event on a particular day, visible to anybody who happened to be there, but as a story about how the risen Christ comes to his followers again and again.” The story is “a metaphorical narrative with rich resonances of meaning.” Jesus then and now is “the decisive revelation of what a life full of God is like. He is the incarnation of the word and wisdom, the compassion and passion, of God. He is thus a lens through which we see what a life filled with God’s Spirit looks like.” How far is this, really, from “the religion of Jesus” of the 19th century Liberal theologians? In many ways the contrast we have been pointing up between Forsyth’s believing “with Jesus” or “in Jesus,” between “the religion of Jesus” or “the Gospel of Christ,” and between “lover of love” or “an object of grace,” we can focus on the question of whether as Christians our attention is more on “our experience of God” than on “the God of our experience”! Is this the Achilles heel of our life and thought as Wesleyans?
There is no scripture text more relevant to or important for the question raised by this contrast than Hebrews 2:5-18!
Appendix: Forsyth on the Incarnation
Unity of being need not be denied [Chalcedon], but it will be approached and construed on those ethical lines which alone consist with personal relation and explain it. The Church has worked long on the old lines which were laid down by pagan thought rather than by final revelation in a person: perhaps, when we have worked in this new and living way as long, then we may expect results for which we are not yet prepared but which we can already forefeel along the line of the true method. The moral and experimental method in theology will give us, from its congeniality with the source of our revelation in a personal Saviour, results as great and commanding in their sphere as did the application of the other experimental method of induction so appropriate to natural science. Taking this moral method we seem shut up to one of two theories. If the incarnation was the result rather than the cause of Christ’s moral action then it was the result either of a great and creative moral decision of his before he entered the world—which preserves his pre-existence, and seems to require some form of kenosis. Or else it was the result of the continuous and ascending moral action in his historic life, wherein his moral growth, always in unbroken union with God, gave but growing effect to God’s indwelling; while the final and absolute union took place when his perfect self-sacrifice in death completed his personal development, and finally identified him with God. . . . In either of these cases everything turns on moral action (either in the world or before it), whose historic consummation was in the cross and its redemption. Either the cross was the nadir of that self-limitation which flowed from the supramundane self-emptying of the Son, or it was the zenith of that moral exaltation which had been mounting throughout the long sacrifice of his earthly life, it was the consummation of the progressive union of his soul with God. I do not see why we may not combine the two movements, as I shall hope to show. But in either case the supreme moral act of the cross is the key to the nature of the process. There the new moral value was really introduced into Humanity, and if the incarnation did not take place for that purpose it has no sense or end. The new element was introduced, it was not evolved. An evolutionary incarnation is none; it is but blossom. The element of miracle must be there. The following outline is that of Kevin L. Anderson, Hebrews: A Commentary In The Wesleyan Tradition, New Beacon Bible Commentary (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 2013), 5-6. I. Hearing the Apostle and High Priest of Our Confession: Hebrews 1:1—4:13 A. Hearing God’s Word in These Last Days: Jesus the Merciful and Faithful High Priest (1:1—2:18) 1. We Must Heed God’s Definitive Revelation in the Son (1:1-2:4) 2. Jesus Perfected as a Merciful and Faithful High Priest (2:5-18) a. The Humiliation and Exaltation of Jesus (2:5-9) b. Jesus Identification with Humanity (2:10-18). B. Hearing God’s Word Today: Jesus the Apostle and High Priest of Our Confession (3:1—4:13). II. Jesus’ Superior High Priesthood: Hebrews 4:14—10:18 III. Call to Persevering Faith and Acceptable Worship: Hebrews 10:19--13:25 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, first complete edition, ed. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 487. The first English edition was in 1910. For the German see Geschichte der Leben-Jesus Forschung, Zweite, neu bearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage des Werkes “Von Reimarus zu Wrede” (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1913, [1906]), 642. 2 Corinthians 5:21. John 6:53, 60, 66. 2 Corinthians 11:4: “For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough.” We saw in our last lesson that the key phrase was “the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” The same Greek term, hilastērion, occurs in Romans 3:25. The related term hilasmos appears in 1 John 2:2 an 4:10. We discussed these terms relating to “atoning sacrifice” on January 5, 2014, in lesson seven, “Jesus” (2), on Hebrews 2:10-18. P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909). Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 35. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 41. A. M. Hunter, P. T. Forsyth (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974), 71. This is a delightful biography that I found on my shelf not long ago. Hunter saw the same issues alive in his day that Forsyth saw in his. Hunter was Professor of Biblical Criticism at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. P. T. Forsyth, Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1907), 281. This book contains his Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale University in 1907. Hunter, P. T. Forsyth, 15. Hunter, P. T. Forsyth, 17. This sermon may be preserved in his The Holy Father and the Living Christ (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1898 [1897]). In 1894 Forsyth’s wife died followed by four difficult years for his health as he lived alone with his daughter Jesse. In 1898, his marriage to Bertha Ison gave him a new lease on life. In 1899 he addressed a great Congregational Assembly in Boston on “The Evangelical Principle of Authority.” One who heard Forsyth later wrote: “In Forsyth’s address the Council reached its climax. It was a passionate plea for the Cross as the central thing in our Christian faith. He spoke as a man inspired. He flamed, he burned. . . . When Forsyth had spoken, instead of discussing what he said, the audience rose and sang, “In the Cross of Christ I glory’” (18-19). Forsyth, Positive Preaching, 281-283. It would be profitable to present Forsyth’s approach to the Bible for his theology was biblically based. In fact he was twenty years ahead of most biblical scholars of his day. The Bible for him was “a sacramental book. Both it and the church were made something in them, but before and above them – the historic grace of God, revealed first to old Israel and consummated in Christ and his cross. For the gospel was an experienced fact, a living Word, before it was a written one.” Hunter, P. T. Forsyth, 32. Forsyth, Positive Preaching, 281-283. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 33. In particular, R. J. Campbell’s “New Theology” published in 1907. Hunter, P. T. Forsyth, 68. Hunter, P. T. Forsyth, 32. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 44. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 36. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, xv. The synopsis in the table of contents may have been supplied by someone other than Forsyth himself. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 35. See lesson seven, “Jesus” (2), on Hebrews 2:10-18 (January 5, 2014). Hunter, Peter Forsyth, 38. Hunter, Peter Forsyth, 38 Hunter, Peter Forsyth, 39. 1 Corinthians 5:16. Hunter, Peter Forsyth, 39. Galatians 6:14: “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” Hunter, Peter Forsyth, 70-71. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 125. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 36. See the Appendix for an insight into Forsyth’s Christology. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 59-60. The insistence of many New Testament scholars on translating Rom.3:23, “faith in Jesus Christ,” and like passages as “the faith of Jesus Christ” may in part at times be motivated by the attempt to define Christianity in terms of believing “with Jesus” rather than “in Jesus.” 2 Corinthians 5:14-15. A recent Point Loma Nazarene chapel guest spoke powerfully to the student body on “God’s essence is love.” I missed his saying “holy” as well, for biblically “God’s essence is holy love.” More than in their worship viewing God as “awesome” and singing of his “Majesty,” our younger Christian generation needs to be impressed with the holiness of God as in essence calling for ethical responsibility for the whole of life; the Bible calls it “righteousness”! P. T. Forsyth, This Life and the Next (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1948 [1918, the last of his books]), 47. Forsyth, This Life and the Next, 29. Mark 10:45. This saying of Jesus was not accepted as authentic by many scholars in Forsyth’s day, and even in ours. 2 Cor. 5:21; 1John 2:1-2; 4:10. Against the views of the liberal Protestants whose works he sketched, Schweitzer believed he had found the real historical Jesus. Jesus was an apocalyptic figure who preached the coming of the kingdom of God as understood in contemporary Jewish apocalyptic thinking. But Jesus was mistaken as he tried to provoke the intervention of God and bring an end to history. Thus he was crushed. While Jesus’ apocalyptic views were destroyed, his “spirit” lives on and the Christian is called to share it. Uncertain about traditional Christianity, Schweitzer emphasized the ethical side of life and the necessity for discipleship. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 642. Adolf Harnack, What is Christianity? Trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2nd ed., revised, 1904), 55. The book consists of his lectures at the University of Berlin during the winter-term 1899-1900. The German, Das Wesen des Christentums first appeared in 1900. I have no knowledge of the extent to which this work was in Forsyth’s mind when he wrote The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909). Certainly he had read it and probably possessed the German edition. Harnack, What is Christianity? 11. Marcus J. Borg, N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (New York: Harper One, 1999). The quotations are from pp. 79-81, 140, 135. Borg, Wright, 135, 134, 242. Forsyth, Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 231-232. A. M. Hunter, P. T. Forsyth (1974), discusses this briefly on pages 79-80. The criticism brought against Forsyth that his Christology was that it “confronts us with a paradox no less tremendous than that of the Chalcedonian formula about the two natures. How can we have united in one historic personality absolute God and relative man?” Hunter comments that “let it therefore be granted that Forsyth does not remove the paradox. Yet let it also be claimed that as he states it in moral and personal terms and grounds it on evangelical experience of Christ, it is a once more faithful to the New Testament and much more intelligible to modern man.”
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