ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE, GREENWICH, DECEMBER 7TH, 1893
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE, GREENWICH, DECEMBER 7TH, 1893
Dear —, — I send you a few lines of comment on Mr. Hunt’s letter, which I return. Now in remarking on it I must say that judging it by its substance, apart from expressions of piety contained in it, the letter appears to me a deplorable performance, spite of its having taken some time to produce it. You can hardly wonder at my judging it severely when I consider that the fellowship with which Mr. Hunt is identified is based on the rejection of ourselves as heretics and blasphemers.
[p. 85] There is in the letter but little light as to his own thoughts, for he hides them under the veil of mystery, and contents himself with seeking to establish what I believe to be a wholly false principle as to the apprehension of the various relations and positions into which Christ has entered as Man, and His suitability for them. By a most improper use of the statement “no one knoweth the Son but the Father”, christians are virtually stopped from seeking to enter into the import of any particular relation or position which Christ sustains — for to do this they must of necessity look at such relation abstractly, i.e., in what it is in itself apart from other thoughts as to the Person who sustains it, because it is so revealed — and is the only way in which man (being finite) could take it in. In many cases it would not be possible to bring the thought of God as such into the particular relation — for how could it be said of God over all blessed for ever that He had ‘a head’ or was ‘perfected for ever’, or ‘entered in’, or is the ‘mediator between God and men’, or ‘the first-born among many brethren’. If anyone dares to speak of these things abstractly he is charged with dividing the unity of the Person of the Son. By such a notion all is shrouded in mystery, utterly and hopelessly obscured. Where the idea of unity of a person is got from I know not. It seems to me perfect nonsense. The idea of person does not bring in the thought of either parts or unity. A person is that person in every variety of relations into which he may enter. No one in his senses would accuse me of dividing the person of the queen because I said that in her home life she was seen distinct and apart from what she is as queen. It is two totally distinct ideas coalesced in one person, but which can be separately presented and apprehended. The fact is that those who have left us have no sense of the reality of the incarnation of the Son, and are fast travelling in the [p. 86] direction of the profane thought of M. Favez, their leader in France, that the Son of man is man united to the divinity. One sentence in Mr. Hunt’s letter has amazed me. He asks whether my statement that ‘the Son has become Man and as such, having died and risen, entered into relations in regard to men into which he could not have entered simply as a divine Person’ does not make a distinction as to the Person of the Son when entering into those relations. How any distinction as to person is deduced from this, I am at a loss to conceive, for ‘the Son’ (i.e., the Person) is the antecedent to the whole sentence. Had he said distinction as to form or condition I could have understood. Existing in the form of God Christ emptied Himself and took on Him a servant’s form becoming in the likeness of men. The phraseology in which Mr. Hunt couches his own belief such as God and Man one Christ, and God becoming the woman’s seed, is not the language of Scripture nor in my judgment conveys at all accurately the truth of Scripture. I just add that I adhere to my former comments on Mr. H.’s first letter. I consider his referring to a book in such repute as ‘Lux Mundi’ unworthy, as I do his presumption that a sentence of mine was different in meaning from remarks of Mr. Darby’s which he would not pretend to explain — and his quotation of John 3:31 in juxtaposition with 1 Corinthians 15:47 certainly gives the idea that he intended to substantiate the wrong force which the interpolation of the words ‘the Lord’ in the authorised version gives to the latter passage. I showed Mr. Hunt’s letter to Mr. B. and send you some independent comments of his — you will see that the point you refer to has struck him — that is how Mr. Hunt fails to carry on his thoughts as to Christ to death and resurrection, and it is intelligible, for how are [p. 87] you to bring in the thought of God in any subjective sense there though nothing could alter the truth of the Son’s Person? We are all well through mercy, and I trust you are so and the party at B. and remain with our love in the Lord.
Affectionately yours,
F. E. Raven.