LETTER 1929

LETTER 1929

My Dear Brother, — Of course what is advanced is J.N.D. and F.E.R.’s earlier statements. I am assured the Lord’s hand is steadily over the enquiry instituted and that through it He will be better known — He will become greater in our eyes and ourselves less. This will be true gain. I believe many have a conception of God, of the Deity, which implies that He is finite; it is assumed unconsciously that He is compassable by the human mind, is held as such in it. With most, I fear, there is but little idea of what is presented in revelation or declaration — the magnitude and inscrutability of what lies behind it. Romanists picture the Father, Son and Spirit in a material way and make Mary ‘the Mother of God;’ the Deity is thus blasphemously reduced to the level of man’s mind. The Trinity comes definitely into view at the Lord’s baptism, centering, as to revelation, in Christ as Man; in Him only could God — being what He is — come within man’s range. The “fulness” dwelt there, and yet God (in His essential being and form) remains “invisible”, dwelling in unapproachable light, etc., but He is in Jesus and known by the believer ^[p. 266] to be there and thus the heart is bowed — he worships the Father, he worships God. God remains God and man (I mean the believer) remains man; I do not speak of man’s place toward God in Christ, which is a concurrent subject, but of One of the Divine Persons becoming Man, so that God is there — in One personally known and personally loved — God is there in all that He is, known, and in a Man with whom the disciples were familiar, and so worshipped; so the Son is said to be “the true God”.

JND clearly held to our Lord’s ‘eternal sonship’, but he seems to have had a remarkable subconsciousness that Scripture treats of sonship as applying to Him as in the flesh as Man only (see Notes and Comments, Volume 7, page 7); indeed all his comments on John 1 - John 3, pages 1 - 68; also Volume 2, page 423. But in his teaching he held strongly to the Lord’s eternal sonship, associating it with His eternal personal existence; it seems to have been in his mind as unquestionable, without reconciling the unqualified statements of the Lord as to the Son implying relative inferiority to the Father, as in John 5 and Mark 13. It seems to me that the statement in the ‘Creed’ that our Lord was begotten before the worlds is just, if sonship prior to incarnation is held. It is not meant to imply that He had a beginning, as I understand, for the ‘Creed’ asserts that He had not, but that something had happened, so that He could be regarded as Son. The only such occurrence spoken of in Scripture, as far as I can see, is the incarnation — our Lord’s birth. As thus in manhood here He is owned as God’s Son, but in such a way and under such circumstances as to make it perfectly evident that He was a divine Person, ‘equal with God’. “The Son”, therefore, is rightly employed to designate His Person. If we say, ‘The Father eternal, the Son eternal, the Spirit eternal’ we express the Eternal Trinity, but we are not saying that these designations were formally applicable before the incarnation: the Persons were there.

I am beginning to see that all God’s operations as revealed in Scripture had the incarnation in view, and that what is conveyed in “the Word”, “the Son”, “Wisdom” was there in principle or in an anticipative way; whatever the instrumentality or instrumentalities employed, the Person to be known as Son was acting — all in view of God’s counsels. The service was thus mediatorial. J.N.D. says, Christ was Son in creation as in redemption. This is intelligible as sonship is ^[p. 267] viewed anticipatively. There can be no doubt that Proverbs 8 is anticipative of Christ as Man from the allusions to the habitable earth and the sons of men.

Affectionately in Christ,

James Taylor.

PS — John 17: 5, 24, show plainly that relationships, glory and affection proper to divine Persons ever existed, but I do not see that Scripture warrants names or designations being given to Them as may be given to Them as seen in revelation. J.T.