After more than a millennium of the saturation of society by Christian moral precepts and attitudes, ‘man’s devilry’ had become well-disguised, overlaid by a thin but effective veneer of moral respectability and social norms. Too many generations had been ‘born good’, born and baptized into the church with its moral code and expectations. The boundary between the redeemed and the unredeemed, grace and nature, had become difficult to discern. Compounded by a theology which viewed God in essentially aesthetic rather than moral terms and presented Christianity as ‘just human nature at its best’ and the kingdom of God as ‘just our natural spirituality and altruism developed’, the net result was a complete and utter loss of perspective on the reality of the human situation. So much of our religious teaching betrays no sign that the speaker has descended into hell, been near the everlasting burnings, or been plucked from the awful pit. He has risen with Christ … but it is out of a shallow grave, with no deepness of earth, with no huge millstone to roll away.¹

These are words of P.T. Forsyth as cited by British scholar, Trevor Hart. If indeed this present pandemic and the ramifications that now weigh upon nations are drumbeats for the spiritual ears of the church, how and what we hear will have lasting implications for now and the future.

Forsyth’s words a century ago was a plea to the church of his time that had lost reality. Reading those words again brings a jeremiad sense that the church of our time is in no lesser way infected with the same malady. When reality is lost, all else is lost. No matter how we dress, shape, build, and stir the church, it remains a church full of human energy and human distinctiveness. Deprived and absent is the uniqueness of the church bearing God’s eternal witness in spirit and in life—that is His Kingdom come, God’s ultimate reality.

Forsyth, in The Cruciality of the Cross, furthers this plea to the church:
The last reality, and that with which every man willy-nilly has to do, is not a reality of thought, but of life and of conscience, and of judgment. We are in a world to act and take the consequences. Action means and matters everything in the world. It occurs in a world constructed for action and for judgment upon it. The question is not about our views; nor is it about our subjective state – how do I feel? but of our objective relation – how do I stand? The last reality is a moral reality… It has to do with a moral situation, with the moral position of the soul to the race and the race to whatever stands for God. There lies the real unity of life. It is the question of the conscience and its Lord, of sin and righteousness, of the unholy and the holy.²

The presence of the Kingdom is the constant surging of God’s governing Presence in life, conscience, and judgment. God’s rule bears down on us and our lives dies a death that only by His command can we rise to live like Him. It’s not a life of imitation, but of transformation. It’s not a life of legalism, but a life free from ourselves.

In addition, Forsyth also writes,
…the first, last, and supreme question of the soul, of religion when it is practical, is not, “How am I to think of God? – He or It?” but it is, “What does He think of me? How does It treat me?” More positively it is, “How shall I be just with God? How shall I stand before my judge?” That is the final human question – how to face the eternal moral power. What is it making of us? What is He doing with us? What is He going to do? That is the issue in all issues. That question of judgment is where all other questions end.

Hence, these questions confront us here and now, and confront us He will. In a climate of such a crisis, our lives and souls are summoned to stand before such a final question—a question of eternal moral power.

^{1 Forsyth, Peter Taylor. Justice the True and Only Mercy, Essays on the Life of Peter Forsyth. Edinburgh. T & T Clark, 1995. Print. Page 22.}

^{2 Forsyth, Peter Taylor. The Cruciality of the Cross. New York. Eaton and Mains. Print. Pages 119-21.}