GREENWICH, DECEMBER 24TH, 1895
GREENWICH, DECEMBER 24TH, 1895
Dr. van Someren.
I have received your letter of November 10th, and am glad to reply to it. I am thankful that you have the little paper ‘The Person of the Christ’ — and have found any profit in it. Some have found fault with it, but I am more and more convinced that it presents only what is substantially right. That others might have put the points better is likely enough, but they have not done so. My use of the term ‘divine Person’ in reference to our Lord was not from any lack of faith or sense on my part that He is God, but to avoid the idea of His being God in such an absolute and exclusive sense as to trench on the unity of the Godhead. That ‘God is one’ may be said to be the backbone of Scripture, but in the New Testament we have the additional light that in that unity are three Persons all equally divine, and I should speak of the Holy Spirit being a divine Person in the same way as I should speak of the Son being so. I have no doubt that you know something of Greek and that in the use of a noun as a predicate it makes a distinction by the use or omission of the article, which [p. 112] we cannot so well make in English. When a noun is used as a predicate and has the article the preposition is reciprocal and the subject and predicate may be reversed, for instance it says “sin is lawlessness” — it may equally be said ‘lawlessness is sin’. When, however, the article is not inserted before the predicate the predicate is characteristic, and the preposition is not reciprocal. This is the case in the expression “the Word was God”, there is no article before God, God is characteristic of the Word but the expression is not reciprocal — for if God were the Word you would exclude the Father and the Spirit from the thought of God, and thus set aside the unity of the Godhead. It is only in this sense that I would apply the term ‘divine Person’ to Christ, in the same way that I would apply it to the other persons of the Godhead, viewing each in His distinctiveness and yet with the sense in the soul that each is as truly and characteristically God as the others. The passages in my paper in which the term occurs would not admit of the substitution of ‘God’ in its place. For instance ‘We have thus a divine Person presented’ — I mean here the particular person who became man. So too ‘the truth of a divine Person assuming human condition’ — in neither sentence could I rightly say ‘God’. The statement would not then be right. What I understand by ‘God has been manifested in the flesh’ is that all that God is (Father, Son and Spirit) has been set forth down here in words and works — all the fulness was pleased to dwell in Christ. I do not think that Deity and divinity mean the same thing in common language — the former applies exclusively to God as such. The latter is often used in a much more general sense as of writings, etc. I have no difficulty in saying that Jesus is God, but in the same way that I have referred to in the expression ‘the Word was God’. In all such statements the unity of the Godhead must be maintained in the soul. I think if you weigh the above you will see that there is no attempt to trespass on any ground other than that of what is revealed. G. W. Glenny (brother to my wife) was staying with me when your letter came and desired me, in writing, to give you his love.
With love in the Lord,
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. Raven.