PT Forsyth on the Bible

I have just started Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind by PT Forsyth. He certainly is an interesting fellow, and a different writer to what I expected. As promised in the forward as well he is very quotable. Here are some things that have stood out from what I have read so far:

But the preacher who tries to follow this advice will find himself in one great difficulty. The Bible may be his text book, but it has ceased to be the text book of his audience. The Bible is not read by the Christian, or even by the churchgoing public, as a means of grace greater even than churchgoing. Our people, as a rule, do not read the Bible, in any sense which makes its language more familiar and dear to them than the language of the novel or the press. And I will go so far as to confess that one of the chief miscalculations I have made in the course of my own ministerial career has been to speak to congregations as if they did know and use the Bible. I was bred where it was well known and loved, and I have spent my ministerial life where it is less so. And it has taken me so long to realize the fact that I still find it difficult to adjust myself to it. I am long accustomed to being called obscure by many whose mental habits and interests are only literary, who have felt but a languid interest in the final questions of the soul as the New Testament stirs them, who treat sin as but lapse, God’s grace as if it were but love, and His love as if it were but paternal kindness. At first I believed I was obscure, and I took pains to be short in the sentence and unadorned in style. But I found my critics still puzzled. And I have come to think the obscurity is at least in some degree due to the fact that while I am attracted by such matters beyond all else, I am often dealing with people to whom they are not only strange but irritating. They have applied to religion what William Morris applied to life, "Love is enough." They have given a Christian varnish to what in him was mainly pagan, but they have not really stepped out of his natural world. They have risen to locate the affections in God; but they have not realized faith as the inroad, the uprise in us of a totally new world, Christianity as a new creation, and the new life as a new birth. Grace for them is only love exercised on the divine scale, not in the divine style, not under the conditions of holiness and sin. They read in the heart more than in the Bible. (p.21)

The Reformation was not a reformation of theology, but of faith. It is remarkable how little of the theology it changed in its first stage. It was the renewed action, not of truth, but of grace. It was the greatest of evangelical revivals. That is why it re-discovered the Bible. It was not the Bible that lighted up grace for Luther, but grace to his needy soul lighted up the Bible. Biblical preaching preaches the Gospel and uses the Bible, it does not preach the Bible and use the Gospel. (p.23)

PS If you can't buy the book, it's all online with many of his other works linked to here (on the right sidebar). But if you are like me you may find his prophetic, rhetorical style frustrating as well as enlivening