The author of what has been considered by many scholars as – ‘being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it’ – was written by Peter Forsyth, who fell in hard with the heterodoxy of Liberal Theology, the flavour of the day. Consequently, he was refused a number of appointments in his Congregational denomination for such theological leanings. However, Forsyth was an assiduous academic and loved the Scriptures and consequently delved - and I may add to use an A.W. Tozer quote, understood that "a man is not reading the Word of God, until he is alone with it."

Forsyth always retained a deep admiration for the academic precision and deep insights of the German writers  in the few years after his return to Aberdeen, he immersed himself in Scripture and was met by the living God  He emerged fundamentally gripped by the irrefutable reality of God’s grace revealed in his unique holiness, the dark reality of human sin, and, most significantly, God’s holy love demonstrated towards undeserving sinners through Christ’s once for all propitiatory sacrifice on the cross. Forsyth later described his conversion in this way:

It pleased God also 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. I was turned from a Christian to a believer, from a lover of love to an object of grace *

Forsyth became a robust critic of the liberal school of theology – the very ideology that had once dominated his ideas of God and His Kingdom, and what his friend and admirer J.S. Whale called, ‘that dilution and reduction of the gospel which leaves it a trivial, flabby thing.’

One of the chief outcomes of this Divine Encounter, was this lauded work, titled, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ is a timeless imperative for any student of theology.

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