GREENWICH, JANUARY 29TH, 1891

^[p. 49] GREENWICH, JANUARY 29TH, 1891

My Dear Brother, — I return you R—’s papers. In the larger one there is nothing very new; we have had the same things in England. There are many statements in it as to Christ which I should readily accept in themselves apart from the object with which he makes them. But the defect which marks his paper is that he does not rightly divide Scripture. His object is to identify eternal life with the life of the eternal Son as a divine Person (in Him was life). If this were meant simply in reference to what the life is morally I would make no objection, but there is no hint with Mr. R. of any such limitation. As a consequence of this he confounds the revelation (in John’s gospel) of a divine Person, as such, with the unfolding (in the epistle) of the features of eternal life in the Son as man — that which is true in Him and in us. My conviction is that what the Son ever was in nature as divine gives its character to manhood in Him (and in us). But I do not believe that the Son has therefore ceased to have life in Himself in the conditions suitable to Deity. He is “The true God and eternal life”. The statements as to the Son in the gospel are not all to be merged and lost in the truth of eternal life. Mr. R — in his zeal for eternal life seems to me to be fast letting go the true deity of Christ. He says the eternal Son “Ever was, is, and ever will be in His own glorious Person and eternal being the eternal life”. The phrase is high-sounding, but where does he find it in Scripture?

In his little paper he evades the force of the scripture — ‘The second man is out of heaven’ — by saying that the Person who became second Man was from all eternity. The point of the scripture is the origin of the second Man, as the pattern of the heavenly family; and so it says immediately, “as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly”. Certainly ^[p. 50] he reads Scripture in a different way from what I do. He seems unable or unwilling to seize an abstract thought.
F. E. Raven.

PS — I add a further word in regard to the last paragraph. It is said (1 Corinthians 15:45-48) that the last Adam is “a quickening spirit”, and the second Man is “out of heaven”, heavenly. It need scarcely be remarked that Christ did not become a quickening spirit nor heavenly by taking manhood — for He was already such; but the last Adam and second Man is characterised by what was eternally true in the Person of the Son. This in no way touches the fact of His having actually entered on manhood in being “made of a woman” — though, I doubt not, it was of God in Him eternally purposed. — F.E.R.