Forsyth on the difference between ‘Liberal’ and ‘Positive’ theology

 

While a liberal theology may or may not bear little trace of Christian experience, a positive Gospel, Forsyth contends is ‘given as a power to our Christian experience’. It is at bottom a theology of conversion, and not of being merely academically convinced. With echoes of Anselm, Forsyth avers that Positive theology is ‘faith giving a reasonable account of itself; it is not reason shaping, amending, or licensing faith … Its datum is in history, not in thought. It has the stigmata of the Cross on its heart’. While Liberal theology is doctrinaire, dogmatic, intellectualist and concerned with truth, Positive theology is more devout, pneumatic, evangelical and moral. Liberal concerned with life; the liberal is more doctrinaire and concerned with truth. The latter is ‘part of the religion’, the former, ‘a view of the religion’.

[The image comes from another Anselm, Anselm Kiefer, and depicts his 2007 work, ‘The Five Wise Virgins’]

Liberal theology lacks a sense of timing

‘To what shall I liken the basic principles of [liberal] theology? Is it not like a clock which is so cleverly constructed that the hands move from right to left instead of from left to right?’ – Karl Barth, ‘Letter from Barth to Thurneysen, 18 May 1924’, in Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914-1925, 183.