The following is an excerpt from the aforementioned essay in the book, "The Person and Place of Jesus Christ." Written by P.T. Forsyth. This book was recommended by Art Katz in his sermons on the incarnation. I purchased it a month or so ago and have not been able to read it at a very fast pace because there are so many pointed and hard hitting sections that I have to sit and think about them for a time.
"The tendency to ignore this distinction, (here Forsyth is referring to the notion that Jesus never "repented" even though he taught the severe necessity of it) and to make classic for Christians a type of faith in which sin is converted into immaturity or ignorance, and repentance becomes but regret-that tendency is at the root of all that does most to weaken and secularize the Churches today; and its exponents are moral reactionaries. They teach a paganism which, however refined in them, will not remain refined for long in those they persuade. Faith is ceasing among many of the religious to be penitential faith; and this is a lack that no mere spirituality (here I think Forsyth uses a more humanly religious 'spirituality' than he means biblical spirituality) can fill. It is a mere sympathetic faith, or a faith of heroics, like Peter's ignorant boast that he would never desert his Master. And it will have Peter's end.
No mere Faith in a Master can ensure that we shall not betray him under sufficient pressure. 'Though all men forsake Thee yet will not I.' 'I know not the man.' The boast was sincere enough, sympathetic and shallow enough. From a platform it would have swept the house. But Christ knew men. His deepest insight was into religious sophistication. And he put the avowal by him. He weighed it at its true worth. Then came the days of horror and humiliation, when Peter lay in a deeper grave than Christ. That is the kind of humiliation that is being prepared for a slight and facile faith. And the only hope for us then is in the Resurrection light upon the Cross. Our only hope is not simply in a deepened spirituality chastened by error. A chastened piety is not the Christian faith, else Martineau were its great modern prophet. Our only hope is to be rooted in repentance, grounded in forgiveness, established in a redemption, and quickened in a real regeneration. It is that we may be "regenerated to a living hope by the Resurrection of Christ from the dead" (1 Peter 1:3). I have used these words not as a mere quotation, but because they are Peter's own account of his experience of what made him a Christian for good. It was the word of the risen Savior 'Tell my disciples and Peter' that raised him from the lying and perdition of those awful days to a life he never lost. It was this that translated him into a confession deeper than that of his sin, that that same Jesus he had crucified was both Messiah and God (Acts ii. 36) It was no remembrance of Christ's teaching and no emulation of Christ's religion that brought that to pass.
Our talk of sin is palpably ceasing to be the talk of broken and contrite men. It has no note of humiliation in it. Our pious heart does not meditate terror. We are not frightened at ourselves. We have a softness, but not the sacred tenderness that comes from that humiliation alone. It has not the patience, the love of the brotherhood, the passion to serve the Church instead of correcting and scourging it, which come over the hearts of men taken from the jaws of death, nay raised from its abyss. Our speech of sin has not behind it the not of 'my sin, my sin!' And in consequence our thought and speech of Christ loses the authentic not of 'My Lord and My God." We do not know an 'eternal sin' and an awful Redemption, and therefor we do not know an Eternal Redeemer in the Christ we praise. That Redeemer must prevail; but his Kingdom and its service may be taken from us and given to others." pp. 53-54, printed 1909 by the Congregational Union of England and Wales, Memorial Hall, E.C. and Hodder & Stoughton Warwick Square, E.C.
