Wednesday, November 11, 2026

It is the 11th of November 2026. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of the Scottish congregationalist preacher and theologian P.T. Forsyth. Perhaps there’s a good reason for that- I’ll let you decide. But in his own time he dared to buck the orthodoxies of both the left and the right. He also tried to answer what is perhaps the hardest theological question and to do so during the most cataclysmic event in modern Western history.

Peter Taylor Forsyth was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in May of 1848- the year of Revolutions. He died on this, the 11th of November, in 1921, on the third anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. The Forsyth family belonged to the local congregational church, and he was reared in the faith. He studied the classics as a young man and began to study the Bible as literature. The more he read, the more he realized the high stakes of its claims. After studying at Aberdeen, he went to the University of Gottingen, where he studied under Albrecht Ritschl. This was the heyday of higher criticism and theological liberalism in a Europe that seemed generally confident and optimistic in its outlook. Forsyth imbibed this theology and returned to the United Kingdom, where he spent some time in London training for the ministry. By 1876 the young Forsyth was a pastor in Bradford in the North of England, where he gained a reputation as an eccentric young preacher. But something happened- in his own words: “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.”

He would write of this again, saying “I was turned from a Christian to a believer, from a lover of love to an object of grace.”

However we might understand it, the tenor of his preaching and teaching changed as did its center. Gone were the lofty questions about the kingdom of God- at least in the abstract. He came to believe that the act of preaching was where Christ met his people. And no longer a Christ who was the exemplar of human possibility, but now as the God-man who has descended to us- to take sin seriously and face death on the cross.

In 1901 he was called to be the principal at Hackney Theological College, where he spent the rest of his career teaching and writing on the implications of his new theology. His would be a theology of the cross. He would give lectures at Yale that were published as “Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind” (in this he insists that the sermon is not a lecture or pep talk but the delivering of God’s grace through the message of the cross). In 1909 he published his The Person and Place of Jesus Christ and The Cruciality of the Cross.

His work centered on the cross as the answer to the increasingly relevant question of the problem of evil. The Great War (World War I) shattered the optimism of the last century, and the question of how a Good and powerful God could permit evil-the question of “Theodicy” or the questioning of the righteousness of God became central. And for Forsyth, this most difficult question- asked amidst the most devastating War in modern history- took him back to the cross. In 1916, midway through the war, he published three books. The first: The Justification of God claimed that God’s character can only be judged through the action at the cross- not in human progress or theological platitudes. The second: The Soul of Prayer was a devotional work dedicated to centering prayer not as divine wishing but as communion with God. The third was The Christian Ethic of War. Written mid-war, he argued that pacifism was untenable and that Jesus’ ethical statements alone couldn’t support a political statement. Once again he pushes his readers to see divine love and the violence of the Cross. He would argue that war could be necessary in the pursuit of justice and liberation.

As the coming decades divided much of the church between “Right and Left” or “Modernist” and “Fundamentalist,” Forsyth would be looked at with suspicion. Some have argued that only Karl Barth would later have the success that eluded Forsyth in engaging both sides. Today we remember that theologian and preacher and teacher who dared to ask the question of the problem of evil and, amidst World War I, found his answer in the cross. Peter Forsyth died on this, the 11th of November, in 1921. Born in 1848, he was 73 years old.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and Matthew 24:

32 “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. 33 Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it[d] is near, right at the door. 34 Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. 35 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 11th of November 2026 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man counting down from the year 1948… he’s pretty sure he figured out the date- he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who thinks famous guys called “P.T.” really run the gamut of vocations… I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.