Daniel's comment “Raven is often misunderstood.” If Martin has actually read FER for himself, has he understood what he has read?
Googling "F E Raven" I notice that www.brethrenarchive.org comes up at the top of the list. Clicking on it I see quotations from the writings of Mr Raven, but others from James Taylor Senior used to prove the former a heretic. This seems a strange way - proving one person wrong by using the writings of someone else as evidence!
Was Christ a real man? Mr Raven wrote this:
He is a real Man, body, soul, and spirit, but still God’s Son. (Ministry of F E Raven, New Series, volume 19, page 519.)
It has been argued elsewhere that ‘For FER the “spirit” was His own (divine) person’, but Mr Raven elsewhere explained what he meant by the "spirit" of the Son as Man:
It was the spirit of a man, but that man was Son of God. (Ibid, volume 8, page 264.)
A claim that “JT learnt from FER” needs proof; and I do not mean as based on something Mr Taylor said. Nor even from Roy Huebner, whose writings are possibly the source behind much of this. As to JT, he tried to lend support for his incarnational sonship doctrine by bringing Mr Darby’s name into it:
That he [JND] held and urged the eternal sonship of Christ as an accepted truth is true, but that he was satisfied with it in his later years is more than questionable. (J. Taylor, Letters, volume 1, pages 392-395 – 25th March 1933.)
I agree that Mr Taylor might have learnt from Mr Raven, and from Mr Darby for that matter, but he certainly did not learn to deny the eternal sonship of Christ from the latter, and evidence for learning from the former is based on a letter which was not written by Mr Raven, even though it appears in his volume of letters.
There is a comment on the page in question on brethrenarchive.org in which its writer disagrees with Mr Raven’s statement, “You cannot have two personalities in one.” However, Mr Raven is quite right here, and it was not “a denial of the truth.” The error that there are two persons in Christ is called Nestorianism, and it was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in AD 431.
Yet someone has denounced Mr Raven writing, “His fundamental false teachings on Christ’s manhood qualify him as an antichrist.” People need to be think before they press such serious charges on anyone, and to reach this kind of verdict. I do not maintain that everything Mr Raven ever said was correct, of course, but it would appear that some of his opponents might not be quite as sound in doctrine as they think they are.
Just one more point. Where in Mr Raven’s books of ministry is his “treatise” found in which he taught that “the Son only refers to our Lord in His incarnate form and not in eternity past” as suggested in one of the above comments? I find in the books that he used the expression “Eternal Son” numerous times, but am aware of the oft half-quoted-out-of-context sentence taken, not from page 52 of volume 1, the primary source, but from a secondary source containing, not simply the fact, but the opinion of his critic.
