The Cruciality of the Cross
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
The Cruciality of the Cross is a strong plea for the orthodox doctrine of atonement, expiation, and propitiation. Forsyth views forgiveness through the atonement as essential to evangelical Christianity in respect to the New Testament Gospel, the Christian experience, and modern thought. He devotes a chapter to each of these themes and closes with a chapter on the moral meaning of the blood of Christ. “An evangelical Church has stood, and stands, not only for the supreme value of Christ’s death, but for its prime value as atonement to a holy God, and as the only atonement whereby man is just with God.”
Top Highlights
“Have our Churches lost that seal? Are we producing reform, social or theological, faster than we are producing faith? Have we become more liberal than sure? Then we are putting all our religious capital into the extension of our business, and carrying nothing to reserve or insurance. We are mortgaging and starving the future. We are not seeking first the Kingdom of God and His holiness, but only carrying on, with very expansive and noisy machinery, a ‘kingdom-of-God-industry.’ We are merely running the kingdom; and we are running it without the cross—with the cross perhaps on our sign, but not in our centre. We have the old trade mark, but what does that matter in a dry and thirsty land where no water is, if the artesian well on our premises is going dry?” (Pages 39–40)
“Procured grace is a contradiction in terms. The atonement did not procure grace, it flowed from grace” (Page 78)
“For we have lost the sense of sin, which is the central issue of all ethic because it turns on the relation of the conscience to the conscience of God. And apart from sin grace has little meaning. The decay of the sense of sin measures our loss of that central Christian idea; and it is a loss which has only to go on to extinguish Christianity.” (Pages 31–32)
“We have to do in the New Testament with the person of Christ and with the cross of Christ. And in the last issue with the cross of Christ, because it is the one key to His person.” (Page 4)
“The truth of Christianity cannot be proved to the man in the street till he come off the street by owning its power.” (Page 4)