My Dear Brother, -- I had rather explained things to you by word of mouth than in writing but will endeavour to comply with your wish. I hold nothing extraordinary, nor that any blessing given to us of Christ is matter of attainment but I am opposed to the taking up of things in such a way as practically to exclude faith and hope -- two of the essential elements of christian life.
The point as to divine righteousness is as to the force of 2 Corinthians 5:21. It is, as I understand it, the text of the ministry of reconciliation. It gives us the divine intent in Christ being made sin for us. Divine righteousness is to be displayed in us in Christ. We are to have a perfect state in a heavenly standing. God has secured this for us in Christ in glory and the moment he appears it will be absolutely true in us. So long as we have the flesh and sin I could not say it is absolutely made good in us, but it is made good in us morally as we walk in faith in the power of the Spirit. Hence it is not any way a question of attainment but of walking in the power of the Spirit in faith and hope. Paul looked to be found having God's righteousness.
In regard to eternal life, it seems to me that it is a kind of technical expression indicating an order and state of blessing proposed and prepared of God for man. With Paul it is viewed as a reward or end or hope, though the believer being called to it is to grasp it while on the road to it. With John it is present and moral (not in display) formed for us by the incarnation of the Son of God and we having entrance into it through His death. The Son, where His voice is heard, gives us the privilege and entry and freedom of this sphere of blessing which is expressed in Himself as a Man, the privilege of blessed nearness to the
Father, and of being the object of the Father's love and joy and delight. Hence the eternal life is in the Son. He is it. So that eternal life is objective and practical rather than subjective, a sphere and order of blessing. But not only does Christ give freedom of entry into this sphere, He gives also the Spirit as the capacity, the Spirit in the believer is life. Hence the believer has the freedom of entry and the capacity to enjoy this sphere of blessing which Christ has formed, and behind all he is born of God. This is no question of attainment but I am at the same time quite sure that there are many christians who are not morally in it, yet loudly claiming to have the possession of eternal life. Faith is not in exercise and they are not free of the world. I should be thankful if the Lord uses this to set your mind at rest.
Believe me,
My Dear Brother, -- I am glad to reply to your note. I believe that eternal life belongs by the voice of the Son of God to every real christian (as redemption and sonship) and that he is privileged to live in what the disciples saw manifested in the Son (as Man), viz., blessed nearness to the Father and consciousness of the Father's love and joy and delight -- where sin and power of death cannot intrude. More than this that the believer has in him the Holy Spirit -- the Spirit of life -- as the divinely given capacity to live in this blessing. Hence it is not conditional, or an object of hope only. The apprehension or enjoyment may of course be another thing.
Believe me,
My Dear Brother, -- Pardon the delay in replying to your letter. First as to 2 Corinthians 5:21. The subject here is reconciliation not justification. In Romans 3 and 4 where the question is of offences, justification through faith in Christ's blood is brought in, and the believer is justified now -- is accounted righteous, the righteousness of God is upon him. But in 2 Corinthians 5:21 the point is not guilt, but state -- this is met by reconciliation on the basis of Christ having been made sin for us, that we might become God's righteousness in Christ. Surely to become God's righteousness is more than to be held for righteous as in Romans 4. If it means anything it means that sin is to be completely displaced in us by divine righteousness and that cannot be until the Lord comes. Looking at the believer abstractly as in Christ, it may be true now, but the verse involves more than this -- the full result of Christ having been made sin for us.
Now as to eternal life that it is a sphere or condition of blessing is evident to all from such passages as John 4:14; John 6:27; John 17:3. It is in the Son. J.N.D. said over and over again that life was never said to be in us. It is given to everyone, the youngest believer in Christ, but it is in the Son, and the believer has the Spirit of life in him -- he is born too of God, has every element. Still the having eternal life is the result of the reception of the testimony as to the Son on which it is founded -- He that hath the Son hath life. John is seeking to lead those who believed in the name of the Son to the knowledge that they had eternal life -- he shows that the believer (babes and all) is in the light, is born of God and has the Spirit -- his object being that they, continuing in the testimony they had heard (the Father and the Son) might have the present experience of the blessing of eternal life.
Your affectionate brother,
10, CROOMS HILL,
My Dear Brother, -- Just a line to say that should the meeting on the 17th not come off, I would readily come over and see you -- or meet Lowe and yourself.
I have thought to add a word, not as asserting my thoughts, but because I judge brethren have been a little at cross purposes in the use of terms. There seems to me two ideas in John -- 'life' and 'eternal life' -- intimately connected yet distinct. Christ is the source and head of life -- and the expression and seat of 'eternal life'. As source of life He, by His word, communicates life to the believer -- by whom His word is, as one might say, assimilated (the work of God being there) and the believer lives by Him. "He that eateth me shall live by me". (John 6:57) "He that hath the Son hath life". (1 John 5:12) It is a dependent life, inseparable from its source though in us in the power and reality of the Spirit. But more than this, in being drawn to the Son, who as Son of Man has been lifted up, we are morally out of the world and the flesh -- in the infinite and eternal blessedness which is expressed and exists in Him as Man, in a new position and relationship which He has constituted for man before the Father, Whom He has revealed. We are 'in the Son' -- and He is the true God and eternal life. I am not saying if that is right or wrong -- but it is this sense that some of us have used the term 'eternal life' -- perhaps, in appearance, a little to the exclusion of life, certainly not intentionally. I say this in the hope of helping to clear up misunderstanding.
Ever your affectionate brother,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
My Dear Brother, -- If it be a question of meeting two or three brothers such as you name I could raise no objection. What I dreaded was a sort of formal meeting with brothers present whose minds were in a state of excitement. I do not think I could meet them without others being there who had been prominent at Witney.
You would hardly say that John was written to such as had conscious possession of eternal life, because he avowedly wishes that they may be conscious. I think there are two sides to the truth, the gift side and the appropriation side. It is undeniable that God has given 'eternal life' to every one that has the Holy Spirit, i.e., to every christian. The christian is 'in the Son', having left, morally, the flesh and the world, and there he has eternal life -- shares that blessedness which has been embodied in the Son, as Man, before the Father. But though this be true of every believer I think there are very many not awake to it -- and this I thought was the point at Witney -- they haven't it as part of their practical christianity, i.e., the enjoyment of it.
Christ is, of course, the source of life -- the last Adam -- a quickening Spirit -- and we all live by Him, but this is, I think, a different thought to His being the eternal life "which was with the Father". (1 John 1:2)
We have to exhibit the life of Christ here in patience and suffering -- but 'eternal life' is all blessedness, it is what is in the Son with the Father. I quite think with you that in John it is 'in the Son', and in Paul in the risen glorified Man.
Ever your affectionate brother,
My Dear Brother, -- Your putting 'formally' before me the proofs of the systematic character of evil teaching with which I am charged necessitates some reply as I suppose it to be on your part a preliminary to other steps.
Finding this I accept your disavowal of personal feeling and expression of unfeigned affection and I think I can avow the same toward you. It has been a trying experience to me to find myself in a position of antagonism toward you. I had thought after the meeting at Oliphant's more than a year ago that there was but little substantial difference of thought between us and I know of nothing which has since come to light to justify the extreme expression with which your letter closes.
In examining your letter I must first remark on the slender premises on which the charge of an evil system of doctrine is based: a passage from a letter -- a supposition of something said at a reading -- an expression from a paper written two years ago (as to which paper you spoke to me at the time taking no exception to it) an extract from a letter to a brother -- a statement at a reading: these are for the most part taken out of their connection: read in their place their meaning is clear enough, but stated by themselves their meaning may not be apparent. No brother can pretend to inspired accuracy of language and if a charge of heresy is to be based on such premises as these, no teacher would be safe. It is a human way of proceeding and not a movement of the Spirit of God and ought, I believe, to be resisted to the utmost. The practice of teachers watching one another to find out proofs of heresy is not of God. I do not for a moment pretend that my thoughts on the points in question are absolutely right or the thoughts of others absolutely wrong. I apprehend they are matters on which with patience
light might be obtained from Scripture: but I affirm that what I have expressed as to them at one time and another has had simple reference to each point in itself and is not the outcome of any system existing in my mind save the system of Scripture so far as it has been formed there.
Before referring to the main points of righteousness, relationship and life, I touch on some points of detail: as to life and its manifestation in the Son of God I need say but a few words. What you state has mostly reference to the testimony which He who was the Light of the world bore to the Father here, and it is with this that the responsibility of the world was connected. They could not be won by the greatest testimony that could be presented to them. The prominent thought in the gospel of John is the revelation of the Father in the Son with the gift of eternal life to those given of the Father to the Son and the promise of the Comforter. Eternal life is a subject elsewhere unfolded. I can only express here what I have felt in regard to statements advanced by others that to make eternal life (which in its main force in Scripture refers to purpose of blessing for man) to be descriptive of all that was seen in Christ is on the one side seriously to obscure His true Deity (which is the prominent subject in John's gospel) and on the other the real part which He took in human life in its conditions down here and which in death He gave up never to resume.
Another point is that of knowledge in connection with John 17:3, and here I have some difficulty in apprehending your meaning. You say that knowledge belongs to the revelation made and is received in faith and when so received is possessed: and again that the knowledge which is implied in the revelation made is received by faith and is a perfect thing in itself.
I admit and so does everybody that the revelation is complete and is received in faith and that knowledge
is inherent in the revelation. The revelation is received because it commends itself to the heart and conscience as God's word not because it is known and I am at a loss to understand the idea of knowledge being received by faith, and that as a perfect thing in itself Knowledge is in part and will always be so here (1 Corinthians 13:12) and is in proportion as the revelation is wrought in us by grace. All knowledge is in the revelation but certainly not yet in us. I doubt not that a man's spiritual stature is pretty much the measure of his real knowledge though all be his to be known. But I do not think this explains John 17:3.
The verse gives the form and character to us of eternal life and the 'know' means, I judge, the knowing which involves a kindred nature as "I know my sheep and am known of mine, as the Father knoweth me even so know I the Father", (John 10:15) though the objects must have been revealed to be thus known. I do not reject here the conclusion to which you seek to push me that the verse involves the presence of the Spirit in the believer.
This effort to make knowledge entirely objective I regard as very erroneous and tending to destroy the formative value of revelation. As to the expression 'moral state' or 'state of blessing' in connection with eternal life, I only remark that eternal life means for us a wholly new order of things for which we have to eat Christ's flesh and drink His blood and the seat of which is in Him who is the Resurrection and the Life.
As to what is implied in the distinctive names of the Father and Jesus Christ, His sent One, I say that as to what is distinctive, which was my point in my lecture at Quemerford, grace in its counsels and movements is what is distinctly connected with the Father's Name: while the accomplishment of those counsels belongs to the Son and for this end He has become Man and died and all judgment is committed to Him to secure His being honoured by all as is the Father. Your quotation from 1 Peter 1:17 is nothing to the
point -- it is simply that the God who judges according to every man's work is invoked as Father by christians.
Now I come to the main points of your letter, namely, righteousness, life and relationship: and here I am bound to say that the defect which is apparent in your apprehension of these subjects really disqualifies you for passing judgment on what I have put forward. But to begin with, the peculiar force of the expression "in Christ" (and I do not think 'with Christ' in your sense is found in Ephesians) as denoting the distinctive position of the church in connection with eternal calling in the heavenly places and in the ages to come is frittered away. Your enquiry 'Where in Scripture is "in Christ" or "in Him" used to denote our conformity to Christ in glory?' is in the face of Ephesians 1:4 perfectly astounding. At the same time our becoming the righteousness of God in Christ as the fruit of Christ's having been made sin for us is levelled down to the truth of Romans 4, and made to be a mere question of justification in respect of guilt eked out by a vague reference to new creation. In 2 Corinthians 5:21 the subject. is a wholly distinct one not of guilt but of state. Again by reasoning from nature, relationship and eternal life are made by you to be the consequence of new birth. I say they are the consequences of the gospel though a man must be born to see or believe the gospel. Relationship and eternal life do not belong to the old man but to the new, and though of the grace of God and received through the gospel they are true to the believer only in the having put off the 'old man' and put on the new and this is more than new birth.
But your system is ruinous for it cuts away the whole fabric of experimental christianity. Life and relationship are detached from the great characteristic truth of our salvation, namely, the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, in other words, from heavenly ground and heavenly state. The entry
by Christ's death and resurrection on to new and heavenly ground with consequent deliverance from flesh and the world, as well as the formation of Christ in the christian (as to which the apostle travailed again in birth in regard to the Galatians) by the testimony presented to him, is all swept away. For you all has been effected by new birth and yet as to relationship the testimony of Scripture is "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God" (Romans 8:14) and it is by the Spirit of adoption that we cry "Abba Father". I know the effort to exclude from John's writings the light of Paul's -- but in principle there is no difference between them. With John eternal life is in the Son (not said to be in us): the three witnesses to us are the Spirit and the water and the blood, and it is not until the Spirit is received that the results of redemption, the power and efficacy of the water and blood, are really known. The one who eats Christ's flesh and drinks His blood has eternal life.
Without indulging in any strong language I believe you to be wholly wrong; your doctrine appears to be new birth, perfect knowledge received as a whole by faith and then known by the Holy Spirit. I do not accept it: it savours to me far too much of Mr. Grant's system.
My Dear Brother, -- Referring to our conversation of yesterday I send a line to say that, while adhering to the substance of my letters to you of May 1st and 6th, and June 6th, 1888, there is an expression in that of June 6th which I would wish to withdraw -- it is as follows, 'if it means anything it means that sin is to be completely displaced in us by divine righteousness, and this cannot be until the Lord comes'. The sentence as it stands involves confusion between a state in us conformable to God's righteousness and that righteousness
in itself. In doing this I express my regret at any difficulty the expression may have caused in any mind, though the circulation of the letters is not my responsibility. What I had in my mind was, as I think the tenor of my letters shows, that the full answer in us to Christ having been made sin for us is in our being perfected after His order in glory. The difference in present application to the believer between 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Romans 3 and 4 seems to me the difference between a place in Christ in the holiest and a place of acceptance as at the brazen altar down here. Both belong in God's righteousness to the believer. That I ever held that any state in the believer constituted his righteousness before God I absolutely deny, Christ is made that to us of God.
I take the opportunity of adding a word in regard to eternal life. Were I now writing on the subject I should lay more stress on a point touched in my letter of June 6th, viz., the Son being in us as life in the power of the Spirit, and in connection with it the relationship of children (1 John 3:1) into which we are brought through redemption and as the fruit of the manifestation of the Father's Name by the Son to the men given to Him of the Father out of the world.
Believe me, etc.,
GREENWICH,
My Dear Brother, -- Mr. Stoney has sent on to me a letter of yours bearing no date -- nor am I sure to whom it is written -- but I feel I cannot allow it to pass without sending a line to remonstrate against the injustice both of its basis and of its reasonings and conclusions. All is based on extracts of letters obtained from me by a brother eighteen months ago, and these extracts (which you have not taken the trouble to authenticate) are treated as though they were a careful exposition of a
system of doctrine. I never knew a brother judged before on such premises. Then as to the reasoning, I venture to say that in regard to both subjects in question it is fallacious, and leads to unjust conclusions. Eternal life is said to be the eternal Person of the ever blessed Son of God. Thus the Son of God and eternal life are made strictly equivalent, and expressions used in reference to the latter are tested by their applicability to the former, I am sure such reasoning will not hold. On the one hand the Son of God is more than eternal life, He is God the Giver of eternal life -- and on the other hand expressions may be used in speaking of eternal life which cannot be applied to Christ personally. The righteous go into eternal life, you cannot here substitute Son of God. John in his first epistle declares unto us eternal life -- manifested in the Son of God -- in the character in which we possess it here. It is God's Son and we are in Him that is true. He is the true God and eternal life. It is what He is to christians. Eternal life viewed as a subject by itself has also other bearings. Further, as to divine righteousness. It is reasoned that because it is maintained that divine righteousness in its fullest sense sets and displays us in glory in the life and state of Christ, that therefore that life and state are held to constitute our righteousness before God. This latter idea is, I believe, Cluffism, but never had a place in my thoughts. The former I have no doubt is the truth, and gives the fullest place to redemption. The righteousness of God which is upon us (Romans 3) has reference to our responsibility, we are freely justified in His grace through redemption, but this is not beyond the brass of the tabernacle. The glad tidings of God's glory are far beyond the question of our responsibility, and through righteousness set us in a wholly new state and place for man -- and here we come to the gold of the tabernacle. It is the fruit of Christ having been made sin for us. This is 2 Corinthians 5:21. We
have a place and state in Him who is righteous and holy, in the holiest of all. Anyone reading without prejudice my letters to Mr. Bradstock would see that the tenor of them is that eternal life means for us an entirely new order of things which has come to pass in man in the Son of God having become Man and into which we have entrance through His death and in the Person of the Holy Spirit, the Son being our life, and that as to 2 Corinthians 5:21, the complete answer to Christ having been made sin for us is in our being perfected after His order in glory. And now I add a word or two as to the details of your letter. On page 2 you endeavour to make me say that Christ is a sphere, and by inference that Christ is a myth. What I did say is that eternal life is in the Son, He is it, is eternal life. As I have shown at the beginning of my letter I do not accept your method of reasoning as to eternal life and Christ, and I add here that if eternal life does not denote to the believer a new sphere and order of blessing he knows very little about it experimentally, "This is life eternal that they might know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent". (John 17:3) It is for us a wholly new order. The effort to charge me with Cluffism I wholly repudiate. I never had an idea that anything in us constituted our righteousness before God -- Christ is made that to us -- and I should have maintained this as strenuously as any. Hence the charge of undiluted Romanism means nothing, any more than the being robbed of a certainty as to reconciliation. The ministry of reconciliation is based on what has been done -- the death of God's Son, His having been made sin for us and hence reconciliation is ever 'now' though the state consequent on it, holy and unblameable and unreproveable, be in its consummation future. I suppose I have in my measure urged this as strongly as most. In conclusion I must say that the attacks made on me present ideas so foreign to my whole habit of
thought, are so erroneous in reasoning, and in violence are so utterly out of proportion to the offence given, or the weight of the person implicated, that I am unable to recognise in them the work of the Spirit of God, and am very grieved for those who have taken part in them.
Believe me, etc.,
I have thought it well, I trust before the Lord, to reprint, on my own responsibility, the text of my letter to Mr. O. of December 6th, 1889, adding some notes in explanation of points that in the text may not be quite clear, or may appear open to question. The text remains unchanged, save that the last paragraph is omitted for the reason that I believe some of the thoughts therein referred to have been withdrawn or modified. I take the opportunity of avowing in the most distinct and emphatic way that I never had in my mind the thought of separating eternal life from the Person of the Son of God, or of asserting that eternal life is, for a christian, any other than Christ. I would add that I have not been nor am without exercise of heart or sorrow before the Lord in regard to the strained and painful state of feeling existing amongst us; and I regret, on my own part, the measure in which it has been contributed to by obscure or defective expressions of mine which have gone abroad, taken from letters to individuals, or reports of readings. I can only say I wrote or spoke according to the light I had, and I have since sought to make all the amends in my power, without sacrificing the truth, by rendering explanation, I trust in patience, to all who desired it, both publicly, privately and by letter. Believing that what I have sought to maintain is substantially the truth as to christianity in its proper
heavenly character, such as it has been brought before us by those most highly esteemed, I have confidence that the Lord will care for the simple who desire God's will, and assure their hearts as to what is or is not of God.
The key to almost all that I have said lies in my objection to apply in an absolute way+ to the believer in his mixed condition down here statements in Scripture which refer to what he is, or what is true of him, viewed as in Christ.++ Such a practice results in the statements becoming mere dogmas, conveying
+That is, in such a way as to exclude every other thought about him.
++In Ephesians the believer is seen in Christ, according to the sovereign purpose and counsels of God who has raised Christ from the dead and set Him at His right hand by the working of His mighty power. Hence, as 'in Christ,' the believer is looked at as quickened together with Him by the same power of God. He is thus of a new order, morally of a new creation, which is outside the present creation or order of things in which he actually is, though the character and beauty of it are to come out in every sphere owned of God. In Romans the believer is, on the other hand, seen as alive on earth. He is justified, has peace with God, the Holy Spirit is given to him, he is dead to sin, and to reckon himself so and alive to God in Christ Jesus, and sin is not to reign in his mortal body to obey its lusts; he is dead to the law to be to Christ; not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, the righteousness of the law is to be fulfilled in him, and not a debtor to the flesh to fulfil flesh's lust; has to do with the groaning creation, though he has the firstfruits of the Spirit. It is the life of responsibility here, though carried out in divine power. Truths which view the christian in one aspect cannot be used to weaken the force of the truth about him in another aspect. A christian is of God in Christ, a new creation, where old things have passed away and all things become new, in which is neither male nor female; but the truth which describes him in that aspect does not describe what he is in himself. At the same time, what he is in Christ is for faith as positively true as what he is and is recognised to be in himself as a man down here in the world.
little sense of reality. This may be seen in regard to divine righteousness as spoken of in 2 Corinthians 5:21. The believer is in Christ, and as there,+ is become God's righteousness in Christ; but besides this, he still is in a condition here, in which the existence of sin and the flesh are taken account of++ (the Spirit lusts against the flesh), and this is wholly distinct from our state in Christ, to which divine righteousness in its fullest sense applies. Christ in glory is the full expression of divine righteousness, and to be there as He is, is that into which grace introduces us in Christ. Hence, Paul looked to be found in Him having the righteousness which is of God by faith+++.
The above in no sense weakens or sets aside the reality of the believer's present standing in Christ; it is his true position according to grace; but it needs to be borne in mind, that it is the position of the believer before God, distinct from his actual condition here with the consciousness of the existence of the flesh in him.
I may add a word of explanation as to the use of the word 'state'. I have commonly used it as indicating that which is true of us as new-created in Christ (as seen in the new man) apart from any question of the christian's walk here.
Next, as to eternal life. It was God's purpose in Christ++++ from eternity; it was, in essence, with the
+That is, as in Him.
++Not in a judicial way, but in fact.
+++I judge that 2 Corinthians 5:21, in its full scope, refers to the saints becoming in Christ in glory the witness or expression of God's righteousness; because that righteousness was displayed in setting Him there. A comparison of verse 21 with verse 17 shows that the passage has reference to new creation, and therefore the remarks in the second note apply. The believer is made the righteousness of God 'in Christ.' It is in no sense a progressive thing in him, nor dependent on his practical state or experience.
++++That is, as to us. See 2 Timothy 1:9,10; Titus 1:1-3.
Father in eternity,+ but has now been manifested in the only-begotten Son of God, who came here declaring the Father, in such wise as that the apostles could see it,++ and afterwards declare it by the Spirit -- but I regard it of all importance to maintain, clear and distinct from any purpose of blessing for man, the true Deity, the eternal Sonship of the Word. Eternal life is given to us of God, and is in God's Son -- for us it is the heavenly relationship and blessedness in which, in the Son, man is now placed and lives before the Father, the death of Christ having come in as the end before God of man's state in the flesh+++ "He that has the Son has life"; the testimony he has received concerning the Son is, by the Spirit, the power of life in the believer, he having been born of God to receive it.++++ He has also eaten the flesh of the Son of man, and drunk His blood. But at the same time, the believer still has part in seen things here (which the Son has not+++++ and all that is seen is temporal, and will come to an end. It has no part in eternal life though it may be greatly influenced by it. As to eternal life being a technical term, it simply referred to the fact of its having been a term in common use among the Jews without any very definite meaning. They frequently
+That is, in the Son, though I intended to convey this by the succeeding clause.
++The apostles are mentioned in the text because they were the inspired instruments of declaring what they had seen. Others also were with Jesus and saw Him to be the eternal life, who to the unbelieving eyes of men was only the son of Joseph, the carpenter.
+++This is not intended as a definition of eternal life but an endeavour to convey the thought that eternal life means for a christian a wholly new order of things, which is in its nature outside the world and seen things -- it belongs to another scene.
++++It might be added here that it is by the Son that the believer lives, he is in Him that is true, that is, in His Son Jesus Christ, who is the true God and eternal life.
+++++Though in the days of His flesh He had.
came to the Lord with questions as to it, and thought they had it in the Scriptures.
As to our relationship with God, whether of child or son, it is of gift, conveyed through the gospel. We are sons of God, through faith in Christ Jesus. Christ came to redeem that we might receive sonship. It is the full fruit and effect of redemption. Hence, it is in resurrection Jesus says to His disciples, "I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God". (John 20:17) The full consequences of redemption belong now to every one who has faith in the Person and work of Christ; none the less, the real entering of the soul on heavenly blessing, of which relationship is the highest part, is in the putting on of Christ, and demands "the renewing of the Holy Spirit, which has been shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour". (Titus 3:5) It is the Spirit of God's Son sent forth into our hearts that cries, Abba, Father.
I may add a few words in regard to new birth. It is an absolute necessity for man, if he has to do with God in blessing. It lies at the beginning of all -- without it a man cannot see, much less receive any saving testimony. It is the sovereign act of the Spirit of God. Peter and John both recognise that those who were really in the faith of Christ were born again of the word of God, or born of God -- a seed of God has been implanted in them from the outset. None the less, new birth of itself does not conduct into heavenly relationship or blessing.+ For this, something more was needed, namely, redemption, which in its full power, sets man in Christ in glory, and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, which fits man for the new order of things. Of course, these are now, through grace, the portion of the believer.
+On the other hand, the Son of God, who is the life of every believer, is the source of all life for men.
My Dear Brother, -- Referring to our conversation here on June 21st, I have thought it well to send you a few lines to indicate my position and feeling in regard to things which have lately transpired amongst brethren. And first I would say, that I am not in any way identified with the letter published at the end of a pamphlet entitled 'Be not deceived', which has been recently circulated. I have not read the pamphlet. I have heard others refer to the letter quoted in it, but I have neither seen nor read it, nor had I any part in its being written, nor did I know of it before it was printed; and as it has been withdrawn by the author, I do not feel called on now to read it. I esteem the writer highly as a brother, but I am sure he would not regard himself, nor care to be regarded, as a follower of mine. To still circulate the letter as though it had been written with my sanction so as to be an expression of my thoughts, is unjust. As to the idea of my having a following, I am not aware that I ever desired, or had, or courted such. I feel rather to stand in the position of one needing consideration when suffering under charges without truth, but often readily accepted, made and spread against me, and that by some whom I have, in time past, highly esteemed. As to anything I have said or written lacking in clearness (and of this others must judge) or tending to confuse, I have already expressed publicly my regret; but I think if my letter of December 6th, 1889, with the notes, be read with unbiased mind, its purport will be understood as seeking to lead souls into a more practical apprehension of the calling on high of God in Christ Jesus. No cherished truth is touched or given up, or its force lessened or unduly pressed. I can honestly say that I absolutely accept the teachings of our deceased brother Mr. Darby, which are circulated as if I were opposing them -- though I would use them as
a means of help and instruction for myself, and not as a standard of doctrine, for which I am sure they were never intended by the writer. I do not claim to have found new light, but I have desired as a servant of the Lord, and of the saints, to remind those who will receive it of truths well known, but apt to be let go. My wish is, in my measure, small as it may be, to serve the whole church of God on earth. I have plenty of defects, but I am clear in my conscience that I have desired no following; and I maintain that neither in heart nor fact do I hold or teach other than sound doctrine, nor have I done aught to justify the charges of heresy and blasphemy attempted to be put upon me, though never presented before the assembly here. I write this with difficulty and pain; but already divisions have begun, and though humbled under the hand of God upon us, I can with good conscience say that I love the Lord and His people, and reverence His holy Person.
Believe me,
My Dear Brother, -- I will endeavour to answer your questions, though it must be shortly, for I am much pressed.
(1) I should not like to say that Christ was not eternal life until after the resurrection, because all in which eternal life essentially consists in being and relationship was as true in Him before His death as after. Still it is when eternal life is in the heavenly, glorious condition, which the counsels of God purposed, that Christ is said to be "the true God and eternal life". (1 John 5:20)
(2) All I meant by 'in essence' was that it was not in form with the Father until the Son became Man, but, as I said, the being, and, in a sense, the relationship was there, but I judge the thought of eternal life always had man in view. The wonderful thing being that the Son should connect Himself with manhood (become Son of man), and that we should be brought into that which is morally divine.
(3) I do not like the expression 'exhibition of eternal life', but if used at all, it could only apply to Christ as He is now -- the last Adam -- the glorious Man. When here in the flesh He had taken part in the life and circumstances of the first man (though as to His Person, the second), and hence in that condition it was no question of exhibition of eternal life, but of its manifestation by divine grace to chosen vessels, and to this John refers in the beginning of his epistle. In John 3 the Lord speaks of Himself as "the Son of man which is in heaven", (John 3:13) though bodily He was on earth.
(4) In 1 John 5:20 you could not make 'Jesus Christ' and 'eternal life' reciprocal. It is predicated of Him that He is eternal life in the same way as He says of Himself, "I am the resurrection", (John 11:25) etc. Eternal life is a condition, but existing and expressed in such a way in a person, that it can be said of Him He is it. But then that same Person is the true God and the only-begotten Son.
(5) What I meant by condition in 1 John was heavenly condition of relationship and being before the Father, which was manifested in the Son, and which we have in having Him. This is the subject of the epistle.
(6) When I think of the only-begotten Son, I think of Him in His own peculiar glory (we beheld His glory as of an only-begotten one with the Father) and the Giver of eternal life. If I think of Him as the eternal life, I think of Him as the glorious Man, though
what gives its character to His manhood is what He was eternally and in a sense divinely.
(7) If we apprehend eternal life to consist in a condition of heavenly relationship and being, such as was ever in the Son, we can readily see that if He takes part in man's responsible life here on earth, the two things must be distinct. It is the difference between what He brought and what He entered into here, and this last He left to enter into a new condition wholly suited to what He brought. I do not quite like the sentence you quote as the substance of a letter written by me early last year.
Eternal life when Christ was here was still with the Father; but this life before men was wholly consonant with it, and in words and works He bore testimony to the Father. I add that I have never wished any letters of mine to be kept secret, but at the same time I very much doubt the propriety of all correspondence between brothers becoming public property. It will soon put an end to all liberty of communication between brethren.
Finally we must distinguish in our minds between the eternal Son and eternal life; for the Son is the object of our adoration and worship. He had part in seen things here, but looking at eternal life abstractedly, I should say it has not, either in the Lord or in us.
I do not accept the assertion of some that eternal life is an essential title of the Son of God. I am sure it cannot be maintained. I believe it to be a term indicating a condition, which, according to the counsel of God, was to characterise man, and which has now been made manifest by the appearing of Jesus Christ. That which was to characterise man was what had been in the Son eternally with the Father, and was in due time revealed in the second Man, the One out of
heaven. But what characterised the second Man could not include all that was true of a divine Person, as self-existent, having life in Himself, omnipotence, omniscience, and many other attributes of a divine Person; and yet it does include what He was morally in righteousness, love, holiness, truth and nearness to the Father. Hence I said it was an integral part of His Person, but such as could be connected with manhood -- could characterise the second Man and be communicated to men. I cannot see how there can be any difficulty in it. Christ is "the true God, and eternal life". (1 John 5:20) We see the same thing in "that which is born of the Spirit is spirit". (John 3:6) It partakes of the nature of the Spirit morally, but is apart from any question of divine attributes. The proper glory of the Son we shall see but could not share. I cannot imagine how anyone could think that the second Man covers all that is true of the Son; yet the second Man was out of heaven, as eternal life was with the Father. The only time that it is predicated of Christ that He is eternal life is 1 John 5:20, and then He is presented as the One who has come through "water and blood", (1 John 5:6) is thus separated entirely by death from the first man, and is before God as the last Adam, the second Man in the virtue and power of redemption.
We are in Him and He is eternal life as the full expression and revelation of it, besides being the true God.
I trust that the above may meet your inquiry.
The first remark I would make on Mr. R----'s letter is in regard to purpose as connected with eternal life. I fail to understand his difficulty. I suppose it was God's purpose that eternal life should be revealed as the condition of the second Man, and that we should have it in Him.
I am not surprised at his being unable to understand my statements as to eternal life, for we look at things from different points of view. As far as I can gather he regards eternal life as the life of the Son as a divine Person, as, in fact, equivalent to "In him was life", (John 1:4) while I regard it as a condition which, although ever existing essentially in the Son, is presented in Scripture as characteristic of the second Man. In fact, it is difficult for me to understand that he sees in Christ a real Man, the pattern (though the 'Firstborn') of the many sons God is bringing to glory. The failure to see the position of mediation which belongs to "the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5) is the cause of half the present difficulty.
I fail to find in any of the gospels the statement that Christ is eternal life. On the contrary, eternal life there refers without exception to something given to man, or into which man is to enter. In 1 John the object appears to be to unfold the eternal life, which had been revealed in Christ, in order that saints might know that they had it. I do not believe that the idea of its being an essential personal title of the Son can be maintained; not but what God's purposes of grace and eternal life for man were in Him. He has this glory, He is a quickening Spirit.
Now if eternal life means a condition which (though existing eternally in the Son) characterises the second Man, it is evident that the full revelation of it could not be until Christ was wholly separated by death from the first or responsible man lifted up from the earth. In His own Person He was of course the eternal life, the second Man, when here in the days of His flesh (and was manifested as such to the apostles), but the revelation was veiled by the part which He had taken in the responsible life of man on earth, "made in the likeness of sinful flesh", (Romans 8:3) so that He might become a sacrifice for sin; and this condition was real, so that He was a real Babe, grew in wisdom and stature, and
hence any displays of heavenly relationship and being were until after the cross moral. But in death He was wholly separated from the condition into which He had entered, and in resurrection He is the full and complete revelation of God's purpose -- the second Man, the eternal life.
As to the communication of eternal life, I have no question for a moment that a soul is spiritually alive as the result of new birth: still new birth is only a foundation, and is not necessarily in itself the reception of Christ. Eternal life is in Christ, and in receiving Christ eternal life is received, but it is in Christ (the second Man) "God has given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son". (1 John 5:11) He that has the Son has life. But eternal life is to live in Christ, and though it may be said that a soul in receiving Christ is alive in Him, there is no power by which the believer can be formed in the heavenly man until the Spirit is received. Hence in John 20 the communication of the Spirit was connected with the breathing of Christ. Eternal life for us is not simply 'a vital principle', but a new man.
As regards speaking of eternal life as a sphere or order of blessing, I think it is justified by such scriptures as John 4:36; John 12:25 and John 17:3; but it is as living in Christ we enjoy the sphere. I may speak of my home as being objectively my life, but I live in it.
The truth of relationship (as children) runs with eternal life, is in fact inseparably connected with it. In receiving Christ relationship is received, it is that of the second Man, and we are formed in it by the spirit of sonship.
I do not regard new birth and quickening as equivalent. In the first I believe a new foundation is laid by the Spirit in man through the word, while quickening is that a soul is made to live spiritually in the life and relationship of the second Man. In a word,
quickening is the equivalent of 'new creation', and the result of it is that the believer has passed out of death into life.
I add one word in regard to 2 Corinthians 5:21. My object in my letter to Mr. O. was to exclude from the passage any thought of mixed condition, and to show what was true of the believer abstractly, as in Christ, apart from any question of what he is practically here. Still 'in Christ' involves not only a spiritual but an actual quickening (1 Corinthians 15:22), and it is when the saints are in this condition of life that they will be fully the display of God's righteousness, though for faith they are already become that righteousness in Christ.
I solemnly and sincerely declare that I have never taught, nor thought of teaching, that 'eternal life' is not in its fullest aspect the inheritance of every true believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, directly that believer is born again, and I now state that it is and has been my belief and I have endeavoured so to teach, that the moment a soul receives Christ it is eternally connected and associated with all the infinitude of blessing and life purposed and given in Christ to the believer; but at the same time I believe that like Israel of old we must go in and possess the land and that the actual conscious possession and realisation of all that is comprehended in the words 'eternal life' is limited to the extent in which by faith Christ has been digested into the life of our own being and we thus, in our life down here, appropriate to ourselves heavenly blessings and live in the enjoyment and power of them; though the eternal certainty of them all is not affected by our want of realisation or intelligence. This is what I have sought to teach with a view to stirring saints up
to actual possession in experience, believing, as I do, that too often the facts of Scripture have been accepted without entering in sufficient measure into conscious possession of that which is our eternal portion. Anything which has been stated concerning any teaching which is contrary to what I have stated above is a misinterpretation of the meaning, as I never intended anything different. I fully and most distinctly believe that "Jesus Christ is the true God and eternal life" (1 John 5:20) though I would not say 'eternal life' means and comprehends all that is comprehended in the words 'the true God' nor do I think anyone will say so.
If any ambiguity of language has given rise to the misinterpretation of my belief I sincerely regret it as I have already stated in my published letters.
My Dear Brother, -- I send a line to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of 1st inst. entreating me for the Lord's sake and for the sake of those so infinitely precious to Himself to withdraw the word 'helpless' in my letter to brother
I gladly respond to your entreaty and have written to Mr. accordingly. I am sorry I ever used the word, as it gives an air of irreverence to the sentence, though I believe the context is sufficient to show that irreverence was not in my thoughts. I purpose to make this in measure public.
With love in the Lord,
GREENWICH,
My Dear O, -- I return you the enclosed papers. I am rather astonished at the way in which H. uses J.N.D. against me, for the truth of mediatorship in connection with life is what I have maintained, and I do not know how I could be said to leave out entirely the revealed truth that the life of which we are made participants is not 'the same' life which was proper to the Son of God in His eternal existence, though of the same moral qualities. I should have thought H. might have seen that this is really what I had maintained. What he meant about the eternal life being constituent in Deity I fail to understand, unless he means the same as I did in saying it was an integral part of His Person.
The way in which he strings together John 5:26 and John 17:2 is to me most extraordinary. I could not make "So hath he given to the Son to have life in himself" and "eternal life" to be the same. The former is what is proper to the Son (though because He is Man said to be given), and involves self-existence and the power to call the dead into life, while eternal life is what is given to us, and is what is true in Christ and in us, and does not involve self-existence or the quickening of the dead. Christ is Man, and the pattern of the heavenly family; at the same time He is a quickening spirit (in Him is life), and I could not draw a line between the two. So, too, in regard to 'eternal life' and the having life in Himself: but I see things in Scripture in certain connections -- life in Himself when the Son is seen as a divine Person in John's gospel -- and eternal life (which He gives) when He is seen as Man ("from the beginning", "handled", etc.) in connection with others, the pattern of the heavenly family, the children -- when He is manifested we shall be like Him. Hence I conclude that eternal life is a truth which is connected with man, whether in
Christ or in us; but, as I said, when I think of Christ, though I see certain things connected with Him as Man -- firstborn among many brethren, Head of the church, etc., and other things with Him as divine, such as life-giving, etc., I could draw no line between the human and the divine. I believe eternal life is what He is now as Man, but then it takes its character from what He was eternally as divine. But I believe eternal life to be the life of man according to the purpose of God and what has come out fully in Christ in resurrection, though manifested in Him even before. In a word, I believe eternal life to mean a new man in a new scene for man.
I should hardly connect John 1:4 with life-giving. T. in his paper quotes some beautiful remarks of J.N.D. on it, contrasting it with "the darkness is past and the true light now shineth". (1 John 2:8)
GREENWICH,
It is, I judge, a grave mistake to make any essential difference between eternal life as presented in Paul's writings and in John's. It is the same subject wherever presented. The apostleship of Paul was especially connected with eternal life. (See 2 Timothy 1:1.) It is evident that he unvaryingly connects it with the second Man -- Christ in glory. "The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ", (Romans 6:23) the One who has annulled death and brought life and incorruptibility to light by the gospel. We have in principle the same truth taught in John's first epistle, "God has given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son". Christ is seen in this epistle as with the Father (an advocate, etc.), and in the last chapter God's Son is carefully identified as Jesus Christ who has come through water and blood, and it is of Him that it is predicated "He is the true
God, and eternal life"; that is, as I understand it, in full revelation.
But it is also taught in John that that eternal life which was with the Father had been manifested to the apostles. Now, though this unquestionably refers to the days of Christ's flesh, it is distinct from what He was in His own Person, and had ever been, though this now gave its character to manhood. He was when here the last Adam, the second Man, though not yet clothed according to the counsels of God, in a condition commensurate with what He was spiritually in life. What was morally life in Him was what He was with God in spiritual being and relationship (as well as Himself being God), but this was for the moment clothed in a condition pure and immaculate in itself, but not commensurate with the spiritual being. The truth of His humanity is clearly seen in the meat-offering; there was pure humanity -- the fine flour mingled with oil -- the divine and spiritual principle. Hence with the Lord here, there was, as we see in the garden and elsewhere, "The days of His flesh".
Now what came under the eye of God and before the eyes of men, apart from fruits and power of the anointing of the Holy Spirit for service and glimpses of divine glory, was the perfect setting forth of man (and in a sense Israel too) after the flesh. Every detail of life down here was pervaded and governed by the spiritual principle which men knew not of -- the divine nature. What they saw was man after the flesh in divine perfectness before God, and thus everything in Christ was light; there was no part dark. But all this perfectness as man here after the flesh, in which Jesus abode alone, was to end in death, that not only might He become the sin-bearer, but in resurrection enter on manhood in a glorious condition suited to what He ever was and had been in heavenly being and relationship, even when here after the flesh.
Now this condition of heavenly being and relationship
to which, in Christ, all after the flesh was, so to say, subjected, was made manifest by divine grace to the apostles, together with the Father's name. They saw that though Jesus had a condition in the flesh here, with the relationships and obligations connected with it, He was at the same time "the Son of man which is in heaven", and it was confirmed and verified to them in His resurrection. Hence there was the revelation to them of eternal life in its true heavenly character in God's Son.
Thus we see how in itself eternal life was outside all after the flesh, so that what was after the flesh could be laid aside, while the human soul remained, and the Son of man which is in heaven could take life again as Man, but not as after the flesh, but in a totally new condition suited to what He ever was as out of heaven; and thus He is said to be eternal life.
Now all this is utterly confused by such a statement as that He never ceased to be the exhibition of eternal life from the Babe in the manger to the throne of the Father. The exhibition of eternal life is reduced to the lowest and weakest point of man after the flesh. Christ is not honoured by it; and the perfect setting forth (in the power of the divine nature) of man after the flesh is ignored in order to connect the display of eternal life with the details of human life down here -- the life of the first man -- instead of apprehending the truth conveyed in the fine flour mingled with oil of which the memorial was burned with the sacrifices.
All that is now passed; Christ can never be known again after the flesh, and the out-of-the-world heavenly condition of relationship and being in which eternal life consists is now fully revealed in Christ, in whom it ever was both essentially and in the purpose of God. He is declared to be eternal life, as He is the last Adam and the second Man, all fully revealed in His risen glorious Person.
GREENWICH,
My Dear Brother, -- Looking at things from the divine side I do not think there is any intermediate state between being dead in trespasses and sins and being quickened together with Christ -- for God's work is looked at as one whole, and with Him is no such thing as time. Looked at, however, on the realisation side, I can understand a person being in the Romans 7 state (truly born again) before it could be said to be alive to God in Christ -- I doubt if this last could be said until the Spirit is received -- for it says "if any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of his" -- still new birth is morally life, for the new-born soul appreciates what is of God -- but life by which I enjoy the new relationship and scene in which grace has placed me depends on the power of the Spirit of Christ working in the new man in the believer, without it is no such thing as liberty -- I cannot view life in any complete way apart from the relationships and scene which are proper to it, and which are for the heavenly. I have no present intention of visiting Dublin. I am not sure that they would be all well pleased to see me.
Believe me,
GREENWICH,
My Dear Brother, -- I return your letter. I think Mr.
Hornsby misunderstands my position in this business.
At the Witney meeting I was a learner rather than a teacher, though I cannot say there were many from whom I got help. It was becoming clear to me that the term 'eternal life' meant for us a wholly new order of relationship, object, knowledge, and blessing, as well as a new being suited to it, outside this scene
of sight and sense, and that this had been brought to light in the Son having become Man; and further, that it had its full revelation as an actual condition in and for man in Him as the risen and glorified Man. But I saw also that He was in His own Person more than this, for He was the Quickener, the Giver of eternal life. I do not find in Scripture that the term 'eternal life' is employed, save in connection with manhood, either in the Son or us. When the Son is viewed, as in the gospel, as a divine Person, other terms are employed, such as "in him was life". Now while eternal life has its application to us (what is true in Christ and in us), such terms as I have mentioned would not. Morally there is no difference between life as eternally in Him and eternal life, but it is evident that divine life must be in a way affected by coming into manhood, must connect itself with qualities (obedience, subjection, dependence, etc.) which have no place in the proper life of God.
I believe the truth is that, on the one side, the Son, as God, is one with the Father, having life in Himself, and able to quicken; and on the other, as Man, is the pattern of the heavenly family (the second Man out of heaven), and here it is that the truth of eternal life comes in, though what characterises Him now as Man is what He ever was essentially with the Father. I think this maintains the glory of His Person, and shows the character of our blessing. I am printing something in regard to the charge of prevarication which will, I hope, be out next week.
Your affectionate brother,
As I gather the truth, Christ is the last Adam -- a life-giving Spirit (1 Corinthians 15:25), and the second Man (1 Corinthians 15:47). As the last Adam He stands alone as
Head; John 17:2; 1 Corinthians 11:3. He gives life (who but God could do this?). As the second Man He is the pattern of the heavenly family -- "as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly", 1 Corinthians 15:48. Hence, when I view Him thus (though in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily), I think of Him in connection with the family -- of what is true in Him and in them; 1 John 2:8. "As he is, so are we in this world", 1 John 4:17. And this in itself does not involve all that is true of a divine Person, as self-existence, having life in Himself, etc., etc., or it would be true also of us, which is impossible. Christ is the second Man, and there is that which we have in common with Him. We "are all of one", Hebrews 2:11. But then He is more -- as well as being eternal life He is the true God (1 John 5:20), and in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead, every divine attribute. There is that which He has in common with the Father (John 5:26); though He as Son is the eternal source of it. I cannot imagine how anyone could think that "the second Man" covers all that is true of the Son, yet the second Man was out of heaven.
As regards the second passage underlined, I judge we have Jesus presented as the last Adam in the virtue of redemption in John 20:22; 1 John 5:6; the One coming, not by water only, but by water and blood (the Spirit also bears witness), and He is the second Man, for when He is manifested we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. In resurrection (1 Corinthians 15) He is revealed as last Adam and second Man, though ever such in His own Person, for the second Man is "out of heaven".
I have felt the desire on my own part, and as due to those with whom I am in fellowship, to state the light in which the late most sorrowful division,
and matters which led up to it, present themselves to my mind.
I have been greatly tried in it all by the unreal position in which I have myself been unhappily placed by the writings of those who have left us. In December, 1889, in writing to Mr. Stanley, I expressed my feeling that the attacks made on me were utterly out of proportion to the weight of the person implicated.
As to my own sense of things, I was not a distinguished teacher, but simply a brother who had desired to search things out for himself from Scripture, and who was not unwilling to state what he had gathered in the presence of brothers equally or better versed in the word than himself.
I had long been dissatisfied with the way in which certain terms in Scripture were commonly handled, it appearing to me that they had in many minds simply a dogmatic force with little clear understanding of their moral import. (In saying this, I have no thought in any way to weaken the positive force of Scripture statements, or to make their authority to the soul to be dependent on state, or on the understanding of the things they reveal.) This seemed to be specially the case in reference to divine righteousness and eternal life -- the former of which merely went beyond the question of our responsibility and guilt, while the latter conveyed at the utmost but the idea of the divine nature in the believer.
As it gradually became clear to me that in its full sense and display divine righteousness is connected in Scripture with Christ in glory, and the believer as a new creation in Him -- and that eternal life implies not only a divine nature but a new and heavenly being, formed by the Holy Spirit in the believer, and also the relationships, objects, knowledge, and sphere proper to it, outside this scene of sight and sense -- I doubt not that I blundered in expression, which I much regret. I was not disposed to print or publish
anything on these subjects, being hardly confident in my own mind. Certain remarks made at readings, at Witney in particular, were reported abroad, often entirely out of their connection, and I received in consequence some letters of inquiry, which I answered readily, according to the best light I had.
I had no system of doctrine nor the faintest idea of propounding any.
After a strong expression had been used at a brothers' reading in London, in reference to a remark of mine, I wrote a letter to Mr. Oliphant, in answer to one from him, giving my thoughts on various points which had been in question, and in regard to which an agitation was going on; this letter was read at the close of a meeting, in December, 1889, of sixty or seventy brothers, at Mr. Hewer's, and, as far as I remember, little or no exception was taken to it. Mr. Oliphant was pressed afterwards for copies, and, with my consent, he printed it together with some extracts from correspondence with another brother. This was the first paper printed with my consent. Questions having been raised on various points in this paper, I thought it well to reprint the text of my letter to Mr. Oliphant, with some explanatory notes, and prefaced it with an expression of sorrow for the measure in which the painful state of feeling existing amongst us had been contributed to by obscure or defective expressions of mine. This was done in March last, the paper having first been submitted to many brothers of weight. Subsequently to this, being still further pressed for a simple statement of my thoughts, I wrote and printed the paper 'Eternal Life', with which I circulated the printed letter of July 2nd, which I had been urged to put out by a valued brother. I trust that consideration of the above will dispel any notion that I have been holding the position of a teacher pressing some new system of doctrine, and will prove that I have been ready enough all through to act in subjection to my brethren.
I think that I have through grace received light on these subjects, and have sought in my measure to help others. Whatever defective statements I have made have been on the road to light, and my unwillingness to withdraw formally expressions objected to, which I may have used in correspondence, has arisen from fear of compromising what I believe to be the truth.
The virulence and. persistency of the attacks made on me, and the unhappy readiness betrayed to seize on expressions in letters to individuals, on casual and unguarded statements, and on details of conduct, to fasten on me evil intent, should, I think, have satisfied anyone that the attack was not of God, not the fruit of the Spirit of Christ.
In conclusion, I would earnestly beg that it may not be thought that I have viewed with indifference all the sorrowful work of scattering that has been going on. For two long years and more I have been under exercise and pressure which few can understand but those who have passed through it. Nor can I claim to be without reproach in the matter, for the use of expressions capable of misconstruction, and possibly defects in conduct (the effect of human weakness in circumstances of exceptional difficulty) have given a handle to the enemy of which he has not been slow to avail himself to discredit the truth, and further the work of scattering. As to all this I am humbled before the Lord, but I could not make this confession without recording my conviction that the conflict has been for the truth, from which the mode in which divine things have been handled amongst us, apart from any failings of mine, has exposed us to be turned aside.
I append a statement of the matter on which a charge of prevarication or evasion against me has been based. Those who read it must form their own judgment as to the justness of the charge.
Major M., in a published paper, entitled 'Divine Righteousness and Eternal Life', made the following statement: That 'He (Christ) never for an instant ceased to be the exhibition of it (eternal life) from the Babe in the manger to the throne of the Father'.
Writing to a brother at Ealing, in June, 1889, I commented thus on this statement: -- 'Then again as to life, he says that Christ never ceased to be the exhibition of eternal life from a Babe in the manger to the throne of the Father. Think of a helpless infant being the Exhibition of eternal life, whatever might be there. Infancy and all connected with it does not find place in John. It is simply there "The Word became flesh". The fact is there is a tendency to lose sight of the truth that as well as being eternal life Jesus was God, and exercising divine prerogatives down here, "The Word was God"; and further that in taking part in human life down here (the life to which sin attached) He took part in that which in Him was brought to an end judicially in death, and this assuredly was not eternal life'.
Some time after, another paper by Major M. appeared, entitled 'Is the Snare Broken?' and beginning as follows: '"Fancy a helpless Babe an expression of eternal life". The above in reference to our blessed Lord is taken from a circulated document among christians'.
The discrepancies between Major M.'s sentence and mine, and the strictures in his paper on a word (fancy) which I had not used may be thought matters of secondary moment, or attributable to misunderstanding. What is important is that Major M. had not seen my letter which had not been circulated, and yet the sentence was set in inverted commas as a quotation, and was said to be taken from a circulated document among christians. His conduct as to this and other matters arising out of it, came seriously under question at Ealing.
When Mr. Snell, through Mr. Barker, asked in March last if it was true that I had owned myself the author of the sentence printed by Major M., I replied, 'I am not aware that I ever penned the sentence supposed to be mine -- it is for Major M., who I believe is the author of the paper in which the sentence appears in inverted commas, to prove whence he derived it'.
A few days later when asked by Mr. Barker to put him in a position to deny not only that the sentence as it stood but that any such sentence ever came from me, I gave him in the following paragraph (3) of my reply of March 20th, the purport of my comment in the letter of June, 1889: --
'When an earlier paper of Major M.'s appeared, in writing to a brother at Ealing, I pointed out the monstrosity of an assertion of the Major's that the Lord never ceased to be the Exhibition of eternal life from a Babe in the manger to the throne of the Father. It was no question of what was there in the Babe -- God manifest in the flesh, eternal life, and all else; but of what He was the exhibition, for Major M. meant in detail. He was as a Babe the Exhibition of infancy in its helplessness, for all else, though there, was for the moment veiled, and it was His glory, for in being made of a woman, becoming Man, He came truly and really into humanity in its conditions here, grew and increased in wisdom and stature'.
I was not at liberty, while Major M. was being pressed at Ealing for many reasons to withdraw his paper, to make known the text of my letter, and indeed it was at the time out of my power, not having a copy: nor was I willing, by making public a particular sentence apart from its context, to supply the material for another pamphlet of the character of those that were being issued from the Ealing depot; I had learnt by bitter experience the use to which expressions taken out of their connection could be turned.
To assume that I had anything to conceal is wholly unjustifiable. Save that, in deference to an appeal from a brother, I have withdrawn the word 'helpless' (not that I used it in any sense but as descriptive of the true condition of infancy) I adhere as firmly as ever I did to the refusal of Major M.'s statement implied by my sentence; and further, when, in July last, the letter to Ealing was returned to me with permission to use it as I pleased, I furnished an extract to anyone who desired it, and it is thus my own words have become known. I am sorry that my letters have given colour to a charge of prevarication. I can only say I had no intent to prevaricate or evade.
ETERNAL LIFE
I doubt if the truth of eternal life in its connection with either christians or Israel can be rightly understood without an apprehension, on the one hand, of the general force with which the term is employed in Scripture, and on the other, of its modifications in connection with dispensations. To use the term, in the literal meaning of the words, would convey little definite idea, since we are conscious that every living soul has an eternal existence with God or without God. But if we first look at the subject as referred to in the Old Testament we shall be helped in apprehending its moral force. The Old Testament, though it may give us glimpses of resurrection and heavenly hopes, in general occupies us with the world as the scene of man's responsibility and God's moral government; hence, as to the judgment and penalty of sin, whatever may have been involved, it did not go beyond death, i.e., the cutting off of man's life here; and that death was thus dreaded by saints we find with
Hezekiah, "I said in the cutting off of my days, I shall go to the gates of the grave: I am deprived of the residue of my years. I said, I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord, in the land of the living: I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world" (Isaiah 38:10, 11), and so continually in the Psalms. Now it is in the Old Testament that we have the first allusions (prophetically) to eternal life. They are contained, as has been often pointed out, in Psalm 133, "For there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore"; and in Daniel 12, "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt". I do not think it can be contested that the thought in these expressions is of a life of continued blessing here on the earth in the favour and under the government of God consequent on the power of sin being broken, and creation delivered from the bondage of corruption. Now we know that this will be brought about by Christ as the fruit of redemption (the creation awaits the revelation of the sons of God), and will be enjoyed by the godly remnant in Israel, they being born again of water and of the Spirit, and the law written in their hearts, and by many among the Gentiles. They will be in the conditions of human life down here, while the foundation of their moral being will be the new birth. Christ will be the source of their life as of all life for man. The ministry of all earthly blessing will be to them through Christ as David's Son, and consequent on His having entered within the veil, as the High Priest, and come out to them. Heaven will pour out by the Spirit its blessings on the earth. Under such conditions will eternal life be known by the earthly saints. I have referred to this because it seems to show that eternal life stands in contrast to human life marred by sin and under the power of death which is its present condition here.
When we come to the New Testament we find the thought of eternal life evidently having a certain place in the minds of the Jews; and in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) though connected by the Lord with the coming age, the testimony as to it does not generally go, in its scope, beyond life and blessing in this world. I have said 'generally' because the Lord spoke in Matthew 19:29, and parallel passages, not only according to what had been predicated in the Old Testament, but according to His perfect knowledge of the fulness of the words.
But when we come to the later writings of Paul (Timothy and Titus) we not only find peculiar prominence given to the truth of eternal life, but a scope and bearing connected with it, such as is not found in the Old Testament or hardly even in the synoptic gospels, though the same thought remains of a life and state of blessing in contrast to man's transitory life here under the power of sin, and liable to death. It is shown as promised of God that cannot lie before the world began, connected with a purpose and grace given to us in Christ Jesus before the world was, and Paul speaks of himself as apostle according to the hope of it. But what gives to it its peculiar and distinctive character, and even contrast to the thought in the Old Testament, is that it is life 'in Christ Jesus' -- the risen, glorified Man, the heavenly Man in contrast to the earthly, the new man in contrast to the old. Eternal life is to be known and enjoyed in Him in the glorious scene into which He has entered as Man, in the virtue and power of redemption. "As he is, so are we in this world". The consequence of this is that we must connect eternal life now with the new and heavenly condition of man in glory, as is seen in Christ glorified, instead of (as will be the case hereafter) with man in human life and circumstances down here.
Now when we consider the application of this to the believer we must bear in mind that the new and
heavenly Man, with which eternal life is connected, is distinct and apart from the life and circumstances of men down here. This is clearly seen in Christ, whose life is taken from the earth. It is as the risen glorified Man He is said to be the true God and eternal life.+
Hence new birth, always necessary if man has to say to God, does not wholly bring in that of which I have spoken. Christ, the heavenly Man, must be received, and that too through the testimony to a work by which He has removed, as before God, all that we were morally in the flesh that every one believing in Him might not perish but have eternal life. Thus we begin in Christ, having received Him, and live in Him where He is, in the Spirit, not in the flesh -- we begin thus as babes, and by the ministry of Christ to our souls, increase and grow up in Him, and Paul always looks to our being full grown in Him; but it is evident that this, in itself, is distinct from human life, circumstances and relationships here below. It is a life which has its source and spring and seat in Christ, and in which the believer, in the power of the Spirit, realises by faith the new and heavenly being which he is in Christ for God, in which he grows from the babe to the man, and in which he will be perfected in glory according to the image of the heavenly. It is Christ.
But there still remains to be considered the way in which eternal life is presented to us in the writings of John. I doubt if a complete idea of what eternal life is can be gathered from any single statement, as very often two sides of a truth are shown separately in Scripture, and this appears often to be the case in John's gospel. For instance, in John 3, we have the statement that the Son of man must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, pointing
+So declared to be in full revelation, but ever such as to the essential glory of His Person.
to the judgment in the cross of man's moral condition in the flesh, and the removal thus of the distance that stood between God and man by reason of sin, so that man might be in the presence of God, revealed in the Son, consistently with divine righteousness. Thus we have one side of the truth connected with the free gift of eternal life, and in chapter 4 we have the other, the water that Christ gives, the well of water in the believer springing up unto eternal life. Christ formed and living in the believer in the energy of the Holy Spirit. Man as in the flesh here is completely set aside. As the fruit of redemption he finds himself in a new and blessed order of things with a new and suited being, and an energy within given of Christ. We have much the same thing in John 20. Redemption being accomplished Christ first announces to the disciples the new and blessed place of association with Himself in the presence of His Father and their Father, and His God and their God, which He had secured for them. He afterwards breathes on them, communicating to them the Holy Spirit, to be the energy of life within them, while they waited for the risen glorious condition in which they would be fully conformed to Himself. Thus again we see the two sides of the truth. It may be added that in John truths are seen in their nature and principle, or as we might say abstractly, rather than in the mode in which they connect themselves with saints in spiritual growth. The blessings which are peculiarly ours, and the divine nature of which we are partakers, are thus shown to us in their own proper characteristics without modification because of the actual condition of saints.
It may be added further that with John eternal life is seen in its essential nature rather than in form, and this, whether as in Christ, or as given to believers -- and it is for this reason I judge that we do not find quite the same line taken in regard of growth, though the principles are the same. Eternal life is given, and is
in the Son, and we have it as having Him. We are in Him, though not yet out of the old condition here, save morally by His death, and we live by Him in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is not so much with John the question of stature, or of our being perfected, as of eternal life in its principle and nature; hence with John it is viewed as present.
Eternal life has been spoken of as consisting in the 'out-of-the-world heavenly condition of relationship and being', in which the Lord was here alone in the world. (See 'Bible Treasury', 1867.) This condition has its full display and perfection in the Son as the risen glorious Man out of death, in which, as Son of man, He had glorified God. 'He is the true God, and eternal life'. Eternal life is in the Son. But as to what eternal life is essentially (in relationship and moral being) it was ever with the Father in the Person of the Son, and manifested in Him to His disciples here in the days of His flesh, though they also saw and handled the Lord in His risen condition. It was ever an integral part of the Person of the Eternal Son,+ but such as could according to the divine counsels be connected with manhood and be imparted to men. But we must remember that in addition to this is the incommunicable glory of His Person as the only-begotten Son. The apostles, however dull they may have been as to intelligence, contemplated His glory as of an only-begotten one with a Father. Some of them were eye-witnesses of His majesty on the holy mount. We, real and blessed as is our completeness in Him, worship Him as One in whom dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Further, the Lord prayed for all those whom the Father had given Him that they might be with Him where He is so as to have the unspeakable blessedness of beholding His glory, which the Father had given Him, for He loved Him before
+In moral qualities and characteristics, but not in itself, involving attributes proper to deity.
the foundation of the world. All this maintains before the soul the peculiar proper glory of His Person, which every christian heart would cherish above and distinct from all the blessing into which he is himself brought in the Son. 'He is the true God, and eternal life'.
It is evident that the above statement of what eternal life consists in, involves a wholly new sphere for man, and a new man in that sphere. The garden of Eden would not have suited an 'out-of-the-world heavenly condition of relationship and being'. It belongs to and demands another scene and order of things. Hence, when for the first time the Lord refers to the subject (in John 3) He speaks of "the Son of man which is in heaven", though bodily He was then on earth. And when in John 17:3 He describes its form and character for us now that He is in glory, He says, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent". I think the above is sufficient to show how essential the idea of a new sphere, or order of things, is to the consideration of eternal life. In fact, the truth of eternal life as a present blessing cannot be grasped without it. Now eternal life was essentially ever in that sphere in the Son with the Father, nor did it cease to be so when it was manifested here, though there was another side to the Person of Him in whom it was manifested, in that He had entered into human life in its earthly conditions. But now eternal life has its full and perfect expression according to the counsels of God in Him as the risen glorified Man with the Father, and we are in Him there. We see thus with John the two great thoughts, a new and heavenly Man and a new sphere for man, and both to be realised and enjoyed by the soul that has received Christ now, even before he has done with his earthly existence here.
The way in which eternal life is given to us, is not
yet in the glorified condition which properly belongs to it, but in the power of the Spirit and in faith; we are not yet perfected. It must be remembered that for us eternal life consists in a new man, and not simply in a new vitality. It is a new creation in us by the quickening power of God.
I add a word to show how, in God's ways, righteousness is intimately connected with life. There is a divinely formed state which accords with the believer's standing, as may be seen in the expression, 'justification of life', in Romans 5. This is manifestly beyond justification from offences.
The latter refers to us as men down here. We are justified in the scene of our responsibility, where we had been guilty, and, as a consequence, have peace with God. But divine righteousness in its fullest sense is seen in that the One that was in death for the glory of God, is now the living Man in the glory of God, in a state wholly suited to that glory. Christ went to the Father, and the disciples saw Him no more. The ministry is now of the Spirit and righteousness in the light of the glory of Christ; and we, for whom He was made sin, have life in Him there, are a new creation in Him, and as such become God's righteousness in Him. The full expression will be in our being with Him in the same glory from whence the ministry of righteousness has come. We have the justification of life. We are alive to God in Christ, and in being so, are the expression of God's righteousness in which man has been set in glory.
This is the full height of the gospel, the answer to Christ having been made sin for us.
I might have said something as to the effect and influence of eternal life in the character and walk of the believer -- for he that saith, he abideth in Him, ought himself also so to walk even as He walked -- but I forbear not wishing to lengthen the paper.
GREENWICH,
My Dear Brother, -- I think some minds attach to the words 'in an absolute way' quite a different force from what I do. I have explained it as meaning 'so as to exclude every other thought'. And if you apply this to the text you quote, you will see the force of what I say -- "as he is so are we in this world". This is evidently viewing the believer abstractly. i.e., according to what he is in the Son -- if you apply it in an absolute way it would make it mean that we are like Him as He is in glory -- while the fact is that we are still living and walking 'in flesh' here, and by faith. In the same epistle we read "it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is". You could not say absolutely of a believer 'he cannot sin' yet John says of one born of God "he cannot sin" because he views the believer abstractly as born of God. The same thing applies to 2 Corinthians 5:21 and to other passages which speak of the believer as 'in Christ'. He is a new creation in Christ, a man of a new and heavenly order -- but he has not yet done with old creation and its order -- so that in my point of view, to apply new creation truths in an absolute way would make nonsense of them. They are none the less positively descriptive of what the believer is in Christ. It presents itself to me in something of the way we see, in dissolving views -- the new one has come into view before the old has completely faded away. Hence the mixed condition. Two things are true to a christian: the calling and the way -- the calling abides eternally -- the way comes to an end when we reach Christ where He is. I trust that this may tend to make things clearer.
Your affectionate brother,
GREENWICH,
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
he reads Scripture in a different way from what I do. He seems unable or unwilling to seize an abstract thought.
P.S. -- 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.
My Dear Brother, -- I thank you for the enclosures to your letter. I am sorry that I am unable to do anything for you in regard to the printed papers of December 6th and March 21st, they are sold out and the type broken up. I send you now three copies of the paper of July 3rd.
What I have understood by the expression 'our standing in Christ' current amongst us, was that we were before God ranged under a new head in whose acceptance we stand. But then there is a corresponding subjective state of soul produced by the quickening power of God, so that we are alive in Christ -- are new created in Him -- and this, one can hardly call standing, and I have spoken of it as state. It is state that corresponds to the standing.
I think there is a distinction between what we are and what we have in Christ. We are in Christ a new
creation -- of a new order, heavenly, as He is. We have in Him redemption, peace, acceptance, etc.
Believe me,
P.S. -- Both 'standing' and 'state' in the way we use them are human terms.
My Dear Brother, -- I was glad of your letter which was an encouragement to me. I think you have acted wisely at Rathmines in the position you have main-. tamed. At Westland Row they have gone beyond their proper function as an assembly and it will only involve them in difficulty. I had seen something of Mr. Hennessey's thoughts previously in letters he had written. He blunders because he does not see that the thought of eternal life is taken up from the Old Testament -- and that it means "the blessing" (Psalm 133) for man -- though it must needs have had a peculiar place in Christ, who came here at the consummation of every thought of goodness for man -- and we have it in having Him. Mr. H. insists that eternal life is actual vitality, and that it is by faith. If such were the case, where does new birth come in? He seems to me to ignore the necessity of new birth. Then he makes 'eternal life' to be the actual life of Christ when here after the flesh. It is Major Macarthur's error. If it were true there could have been no real death. I call it shocking doctrine. I believe too that he would hold that it was the life of the Son before incarnation, which is profanity -- for who knows anything of the divine life, save morally. His expression 'God in flesh' in his letter of February 2nd is in my judgment very wrong and unscriptural. I wish for his own sake he could be silenced.
I have looked over your reply -- and have run out a few words in pencil as I think they may lead to question. I understand you mean in general by 'life' the result of new birth. The letter seems to me alright, but I do not think you will convince Mr. H. in his present mood. The spirit abroad is that of fanaticism, I think what you say as to John 3:36 and John 6:53-56 is right. A man comes, so to say, to the death of Christ for life (though if he does so it is really divine drawing) and keeps in touch with that death all the time that he is here. As to the correspondence between Paul and John I should connect rather with quickening than with new creation (the latter though evidently coincident, compare Ephesians 2:5 and 10, seems more connected with walk) and save as to aspect (in our case quickened by the Son, in the other together with Christ) I see no difference between John 5 and Ephesians 2. I think the result of quickening is that we are of a new order, of a new nature according to Christ. I think that Paul connects the blessing of eternal life with the thought of full conformity to Christ in glory in the full place and condition of sons according to eternal counsel (Ephesians 1:4,5). John connects it with the relationship of children which we have in a world which knew not Christ and knows not us (John 1:10 - 12 and 1 John 3:1) and it supposes the divine nature. The thought of the divine nature in 2 Peter seems different and practical. I see nothing about eternal life as to those absent from the body. It stands in Scripture in connection with saints on earth in or under Christ, and in full conformity to Christ in glory.
I enclose you some thoughts in regard to 'soul' and 'life' which kindly return when done with. I have not a copy. Also some of the answers to Dr. Evan's allegations.
With love in the Lord,
My Dear Brother, -- I am sorry that yours of the 3rd should remain unanswered so long, but I have been away in the Isle of Wight.
I cannot very well answer the points raised in your note without looking carefully into them, and comparison of the use of words in the Old and New Testament always presents some difficulty, the language and conceptions are so different.
'God in flesh' is an expression that I do not at all like. The Son of God, the Word, became flesh, and His body is the temple of God, and God has been manifested in the flesh, but none of these seem to me to warrant the expression 'God in flesh'. If it were simply a thought as to what was there morally I should not object, but as to actuality the flesh was the veil which hid the glory of God. It remains true of God "Whom no man has seen nor can see", Deity and humanity were and are united in the Person of Christ, the union of the two is of course inscrutable, but I do not believe it lay 'in flesh', so that we could say 'God in flesh'.
As regards the pneuma it is evident that in Scripture it stands distinct from psuche (see 1 Thessalonians 5:23). I could not connect pneuma with the beast. It is true in God as well as in man; 1 Corinthians 2:11. Such appears to me from 1 Corinthians 15:45, 46, to be the natural, earthy, or animal condition, so to say, and is common to man and beast, only that in the case of man it was 'living' as breathed in of God. It seems to me that psuche may in its use sometimes cover pneuma, but if the latter is distinguished it is since consciousness in man in which he can withdraw from the outward and can have to say to God; 1 Peter 4:6; Romans 8:16. But these things all require looking into patiently.
Thank you for the extract you sent me. I have seen the manifesto of those who went out at Rathmines. It is a poor affair.
Your affectionate brother,
My Dear Brother, -- In our way of speaking 'quickening' has often been used (after the analogy of nature) as the first movement in the soul -- as the equivalent of 'new birth'. It has, I think, a different force in Scripture. It is used, I think, about eleven times in the New Testament and means making alive the dead for blessing (spiritually or physically), see John 5:21; Ephesians 2:5; Colossians 2:13; 1 Corinthians 15:22; and the significance of it is that those quickened live before God after a new order. A dead man never lives again after the old order. A man quickened is of the heavenly order in spirit now, and in body hereafter. New birth has hardly this force but refers directly to the kingdom in which men live after the order of man on earth. It is no use attempting to adjust the two expressions as to point of time. The importance is in seeing their moral distinction. I return your enclosures.
Believe me,
P.S. -- I fear Mr. H. means no good.
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
My Dear Brother, -- I am very glad indeed that you have written to me in reference to Mr. G.'s construction of statements of mine -- but first I have a right to ask
that you should not adopt other people's constructions of my statements. In this way anything and everything may be grossly perverted. For instance, in a printed letter of his which I saw, he would make it appear -- because I have used the expression 'in essence' or 'essentially' -- that I have talked of 'essences' in reference to Christ. Now anyone a little versed in language would know that the two expressions are commonly used with quite distinct force and sense. It is the effort to fasten on me a term or idea which, applied to the Lord, is offensive.
I have not by me the paper of his to which you refer -- but I think I can show you where he is at fault. He seems unable or unwilling in his mind to distinguish, in regard to the second Man, between the form and habit (Philippians 2:7,8) of manhood -- and what gives character morally to the manhood. The first (the form and habit -- the real human soul) Christ took of a woman and it was 'perfected' in resurrection, the second (what gives character to the manhood) He brought into it -- hence as incarnate He was the living and true bread from heaven -- the second Man is "out of heaven". The same distinction we have to make as to ourselves for we are 'heavenly' in nature as is the heavenly (holy and without blame before God in love) while still here in the form and habit and condition of the earthy.
I think the above will answer the points you have put to me -- Mr. G.'s assertion of what I believe I wholly refuse. All that he says seems to me marked by assumption and ignorance.
I am at the same time exceeding sorry for the mischief he has caused in your meeting.
With love in the Lord,
My Dear Brother, -- I will do my best to answer your questions according to such light as one has on Scripture.
(1) It seems to me that all the statements as to eternal life in John's gospel are really grounded on the death of Christ and the gift of the Spirit (see John 3:14, and John 4:14). John 5 seems to give the rights of His Person (Son of God) and John 6 the great truth of incarnation -- and as to these, they were there before or after death -- John 20:17 - 22 surely means the same thing -- but I would not wish to weaken the force of the 'now is'. It seems to me that the Lord in John recognises nothing save the heavenly things He brought which however involved the power of the Spirit (John 6:63). How far Christ fulfilled when here the office of the Spirit I cannot say -- the Spirit another Comforter.
(2) A soul is not quickened by faith. It comes into salvation by faith and receives the Spirit. This latter is on the responsibility side. When the soul is once there, i.e., in salvation, God can and does view the whole thing as His own work (Ephesians 2:5), for indeed He was foremost in it. I do not think the gospel and new birth are ever mixed up in Scripture. It appears to me that those who are in the faith of the gospel are told that they are born again, i.e., that the real foundation in them is of God.
(3) 2 Timothy 1:10 is the great truth that life and incorruptibility have been brought to light by the glad tidings entrusted to Paul. It appears to me that this refers to an actual heavenly conviction of life in a man. This life came out in a moral way in Christ as a Man here and the eyes of the apostles were opened to see it. They saw it because they were in His company(saw Him, too, in resurrection). It was a different thing from the testimony addressed to the world, and could
be discerned only, I judge, by those familiar with Him.
(4) I do not think John by his testimony takes us into Canaan -- his great thought is eternal life here on earth though it is heavenly -- "He that eateth me even he shall live by me", comes after "he that eateth my flesh", etc. I think that as being here we have to appropriate and to be abidingly in touch with Christ's death so that we may be in the sense of deliverance -- and at the same time such appropriates and enjoys and digests the heavenly grace expressed in His incarnation and thus lives on account of Him.
(5) Life in Colossians 3:3, 4, refers, I think, to life in the sense of its sphere, associations, objects, joys, what we live to -- and these for the believer are hid with Christ in God. The object is to lead the mind there -- and hence I should rather say it is objective though it involves our being quickened.
(6) I believe the expression 'this life is in His Son' conveys an abstract thought, viz., that it is life distinct and morally apart from what we are and have naturally as men down here. I believe it to refer to what there is in actuality in the Son and not yet in actuality in us -- to the relationship and knowledge in which eternal life practically consists and into which faith enters. He that has the Son has life.
(7) "The Spirit is life" (Romans 8:10), I take to be potential. He cannot be life in any objective sense -- Christ is this -- but He is the answer in the believer to what is true for him in Christ. I would connect it with John 4:14.
(8) I believe John 12:59 refers to Psalm 133:3, and I think the same idea is found in 1 John 2:8. Commandment is, so to say, the ordinance of God -- what He has ordained, what it has been in His will to establish, and to this faith bows.
(9) I entirely agree with you. Eternal life is connected with manhood in Scripture -- but what in the second Man gives character to manhood was ever
in essence in the Eternal Son. I say 'in essence' because it was not in human form or condition.
(10) I think life is used in Scripture in two distinct though connected senses -- both in implied contrast to death morally, first in the sense of blessing and thus given, and secondly in the sense of character, i.e., what is moral, and in connection with this of what is inherent in God.
The close of your letter was an encouragement to me. Many statements of mine have been thought bad because opposers did not see the sense in which I was using life. On the other hand I am convinced that in their own minds is an entirely wrong thought as to life. They conceive of it as the life of the Eternal Son and as something having a substantive existence so that it can be communicated as water into a vessel, thus virtually setting aside the reality of quickening and ignoring the truth that the Eternal Son who was in the form of God now lives as man. The fulness of the Godhead resides in Him bodily.
I thank God there is general readiness to receive me in England.
With love in the Lord,
I was encouraged at . The brothers there were very hearty. There are some who will not have what for God has been effectuated in Jesus -- the bringing to an end of the old man, and the bringing in of the new. I suppose one must make up one's mind for conflict till the end.
As regards what you say as to John, I believe we. have there what is essentially heavenly, i.e., what is out of heaven, and what is out of heaven is heavenly and cannot change its character. It does not bring before us the exaltation of man in virtue of redemption,
as does Paul, but the moral excellence of what has come forth from heaven -- the living bread and the Father's love. Hence eternal life is to know the Father and Jesus Christ His sent One (not exactly His glorified One), and into all this heavenly grace which has come out of heaven we enter while we are here; but it does not lose its heavenly character; and by Christ's death we are free from the system in which flesh has its life. I think that to enter into and enjoy what is essentially heavenly, as having come thence, is greater privilege than to enter into the divine counsels which have their place in Christ in glory, which is more Paul's line. If a concordance were consulted I take it heaven would be more often found in John than in Paul, only with the former it is more what comes thence, but without changing its character, and with the latter, what goes there. This may be rough, but I think it gives the idea.
My Dear Brother, -- Just a line to thank you for your note of the 22nd and for the suggestion contained in it. Though I should naturally be a little shy of Westland Row I should not be unwilling to visit Dublin -- if the way were otherwise clear, but I could hardly say at present that I see it so -- for next week I am going, D.V., to a meeting at Newcastle and may stay a bit elsewhere on my way back to London. Should I see any possibility of getting to Ireland I would let you know. Had you been coming over here I should have been glad to see you.
I trust things are quieting down as I think they are generally in England.
With love in the Lord,
I am extremely sorry to hear of having been so poorly and being still so weak. Even when there is not acute pain I think weakness is a trying experience, but perhaps to some of us it is needful -- giving us opportunity of proving the sympathy of Christ. One comfort is, we shall not always be weak, for we shall live by the power of God. I think weakness is what is best suited to one's present mixed condition.
We began the fortnightly meetings last evening, and had a good time on the armour in Ephesians 6. I look for the mercy of God.
Hebrews 12 has come home to me (referring to the illness of one of his children), and I think with you that God in a sense prepares us for what we have to pass through, though perhaps when we come to the point we are sometimes spared it.
I hear that a 'keen critic' of mine takes exception to the idea of God dwelling among men save in the eternal state, in any other sense than that Christ is reigning. My point was taken from Leviticus 16, that the tabernacle remains among the children of Israel on the ground of the blood being carried into the holiest, and we find in the Old Testament abundant testimony to Jehovah dwelling among them. The last word in Ezekiel is "Jehovah is there", and I think two ideas are continually presented, viz., Jehovah their God and David their king. Jehovah and His Christ. The two may be in one Person, but they are distinct thoughts, and the association of ideas in each case is distinct.
I stuck at the point you refer to in the paper. My thought is this, that it is of divine perfection that when a divine Person comes into the place and form of a servant obedience is there; but I cannot carry back the idea of obedience to One "existing in the form of God" -- though I see the place relatively of the Father and the Son,+ and it appears to me in Philippians 2 the Spirit of God will not bring in obedience and humbling until He had emptied Himself. There may have been the capability, but I doubt if obedience could be spoken of as characterising a divine Person as such.. .. It is of all importance to maintain that in order to take a servant's form He emptied Himself.
GREENWICH,
My Dear Brother, -- I had yours of January 18th in due course and, curiously enough, the same mail brought me one from Glenny from Sydney. He seems to be feeling his way there. He speaks of there being plenty of interest in the word there, though there is no particular gift in the meeting. The arrival of Edwards and Klein in New Zealand will have its effect. Edwards is a man who has been used a good deal in England. I never heard him, but others say that he can preach beautifully. I do not think the difficulty that some feel has reference so much to the preaching as to the mode of carrying on the work -- the sort of fever heat, the hymns, the after meetings and so on. I trust they may be kept in sobriety and conscious that God's work must be done in divine power.
I am very thankful to learn that things have quietened down in the Colony -- as in England. Those who have left make no secret now that the attack was really meant for J.B.S., and unwillingly admit that, as far as
+See letter, November 23rd, 1898, on page 147. -- ED.
the United Kingdom is concerned, it has grievously failed. I am convinced that it has been a conflict with the sort of materialism which had crept into Evangelical christianity through the effort to bring divine ideas within the comprehension of the natural mind. I can understand man's mind being able to grasp the idea of sins and forgiveness but the moment we come to the positive character of our blessings in Christ, the human mind has no ability. This would be admitted in terms -- but the way in which it has been insisted that Christ manifested eternal life to the world shows that in the thought of those who spoke thus, it was possible for man to understand the things of the Spirit. There is little outward change in the position of things in England. One hears occasionally of one and another coming back and sometimes of one and another leaving, but this is sure to be the case when people are acted on by so many influences. Captain Barton rejoices I hear that they have no large gatherings together. I should rejoice that they are more common with us than they used to be for I think the coming together of brothers for readings in different parts of the country is a wholesome check on individual peculiarities, and I think any labouring brother worth anything would be glad of them. We are, D.V., to have a meeting at Park Street the end of this month. It will be over before you receive this. A good many have been invited and I trust we may have a good time. Abroad there does not seem to be much movement save that I believe there is still some recovery both in France and Italy. They are having a sort of conference at Novi, and Oliphant has gone down to it. Germany and Switzerland still seem to be shut up. Some time since I was told by Gibbons of Newport that the result produced on his mind by a conversation with Dr. Rossier was that Lowe's course in England was determined by the fear of having to break with the foreign brothers, for they had pretty well made up
their minds to break altogether with England. It is certain that there has long been an unhappy feeling abroad in regard to England. Dr. R. said that they had not translated anything of J.B.S.'s for twelve years.
I am sorry to hear that you have been troubled with your throat. It is trying to get it out of order for it is liable to produce a weak point afterwards. I hope that after the rest you will be able to use your voice again. The winter has been a very trying one in England, though we have through God's mercy escaped sickness. J.B.S. wears wonderfully and seems able to carry on his work.
I trust your wife and children are fairly well, and remain with love in the Lord.
Your affectionate brother,
As regards your question as to the distinction between 'the kingdom of God' and 'the kingdom of heaven', the two expressions strike me as follows, viz.: the kingdom of God refers to the moral sway of God as such; a man must be born again to see or to enter into it. Our souls as christians are under the influence of what God is morally, as revealed in grace. Hence the Son could say when here, "the kingdom of God is among you", and we read in Romans that "the kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit". These are the portion of the soul under the moral sway of God. I think the tenth leper (Luke 17) who returned to Jesus to give glory to God in a sense illustrates it. The kingdom of heaven refers (it appears to me) to constituted authority, as the Lord said, "All power has been given me in heaven and upon earth". It seems to carry out the principle indicated in Genesis 1:17, 18, viz., that the earth should be in the light and under the rule of heaven.
What God has established in heaven consequent on
redemption is to illumine and rule on earth. Hence hereafter the heavenly city is the seat and vessel of light and rule; the nations walk in the light of it. We as christians are in the kingdom of heaven; we are of the day, in the light and under the rule of Him who in heaven is made Lord and Christ. I do not know if this will tend to make the matter any clearer. I think I can see the distinctness of the two things.
April 23rd, 1892. I am glad to send you a line in regard to my short visit to the north. I think I may say it turned out happily and I trust for mutual good. On the Saturday and Sunday at 5 -- we had readings on Romans 5 and Romans 8, which seemed to be much appreciated and helped, I think, in some measure out of old grooves of thought.. .. On the Monday we had the largest gathering. I tried to show from 1 Corinthians 3 the importance of recognising the temple of God (where the living oracles are), and that saints are stones in it, and that the result of so doing is that we get light on the word. I showed how it was led up to in chapters 1 and 2 -- that Christ was all for God -- wisdom and power, and man nothing, and that for the apprehension of the wisdom of God we need to be in touch with a new scene (perfect) and characterised by a power beyond and outside of man's mind (to be spiritual).. .. In the evening I took up the place of hope and faith with a christian.
June, 1892. I am glad you wrote to me on the points mentioned in your letter, because although I do not think they are my originating, I am probably more responsible with regard to them than . I cannot say that I regret so much as some do questions of this kind being
raised, as any hard and fast system of interpreting Scripture is in my judgment undesirable, and if matters are freely talked over I am sure what is not of God will not stand.
I should not for one moment be inclined to contest the position that the word of Christ in Matthew 16:18 refers to His assembly in its full extent. It is that which He, rejected of His people, would build on the revelation and confession of Himself as the Son of the living God. Hence it takes in all saints from Pentecost to the coming of the Lord -- in other words, the whole period during which in our point of view the church has been on earth, and it will come out perfected in glory. But I cannot think that J.N.D. could have intended that we should find no present status for the assembly in Matthew 16. On the contrary, I have often heard him identify Matthew 16 with 1 Peter 2, and surely a spiritual house, a holy priesthood to offer up sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ, is true of the saints now. In the same way the whole building, fitly framed together, grows to an holy temple in the Lord; but saints are already God's temple. They have that status and privilege. Though statements in Scripture may leave room for what may go on during an extended period, I doubt if it is the bearing in which truths are in general presented to us in the New Testament. I have heard it said that New Testament scriptures do not usually contemplate things beyond the lifetime of those addressed. The ten virgins who went forth to meet the Bridegroom are here when the Bridegroom comes. So the assembly that Christ builds would (as appears to me) have place here consequent on Christ's rejection, and the gates of hell could not prevail against it. The gates of hell are hardly in heaven. So that I think we are justified in taking our thought of Christ's assembly from Matthew 16.
As regards Matthew 18:20, I take the passage in
its connection with the chapter, and the subject of the chapter seems to me the ordering of conduct in the kingdom of heaven. In the main the instruction in the chapter refers to individual conduct (see verse 35). The assembly, as having a voice, is brought in only incidentally in reference to a particular individual difficulty. The "again" of verse 19 seems to me to take up a point additional to the "moreover" of verse 15. It refers to two of them agreed as touching anything they should ask in Christ's name, and on this follows the statement that where two or three are gathered together to My name, there am I in the midst. You may say, that is Christ's assembly, and I should not dispute it, but it appears to me that verse 20 is given as encouragement for those agreed in verse 19, and that the two or three in the former refers to the two in the latter. I should not like to stereotype the two as the assembly, though surely they must be in the truth of it, for nothing else is really recognised; but I should be sorry for the simplicity of the passage to be marred. It is a matter of fact in your letter you apply the passage to two or three gathered to Christ's name in a day of ruin, who certainly cannot be said to be the assembly, though acting in the truth of it, and this in principle is really all that is contended for. What is of value to us in a day of ruin had its value also when all was in order.
My Dear Brother, -- I send a line in reply to yours to say that, as regards my movements, I shall not be likely to be away from Greenwich this month. I may probably run away for a few days in the beginning of July and we may all be away for the month of August, but otherwise I am to be found here at any time and
should be very glad to see you. If a bed were any convenience we would give it you.
I thank you for the paper you sent me and think that the article on eternal life fairly represents the common idea of Evangelical Christians on the subject. What the high churchman connects with baptism they connect with faith -- but the main idea of life in itself is the same. I am not sure if J.A.T. is clear of this idea. I think your strictures on his paper are just, what he says does not alter my judgment. In the first epistle, John is speaking of what was from the beginning what they had seen, and hence (whatever it might be essentially) the thought of eternal life is connected with Christ as Man and the expression "which was with the Father" does not disprove it to my mind. It is to me a moral expression. I believe the common conception of life, as something having a substantive existence, is a material idea and not the thought of Scripture. The word 'zoe' is used in certainly three senses: (1) a blessing -- a gift, i.e., relief from the judgment of death or the passing out of death into what is morally life; (2) morally, as character or moral being, the effect of quickening -- in this sense Christ the living bread is the life of the soul; and (3) as energy. If Christ be in you the Spirit is life, but none of these senses gives the idea of a something substantive. As to God, He is -- as to us we live spiritually, because we have been made alive in our souls by God's power. It is the difference between the Creator and the creature, though morally we become partakers of the divine nature.
The word 'bios' appears to me to refer to natural life and is used for 'living', in the sense of that on which natural life is dependent, i.e., substance or circumstances. It is used in the Septuagint chiefly in Job and Proverbs in the sense of man's life on the earth "his days". In Song of Songs 8:7 it is "substance".
I do not very much think there is any immediate
prospect of my coming to Dublin. And the more I think of their paper at Westland Row the worse I regard it, but I am very thankful there are those there that do not approve it. I am very glad you are going on happily at Rathmines.
With love in the Lord,
I remember a question being asked on the Saturday morning (Quemerford) as to the kingdom. For my own part I cannot see much relation between the kingdom and the house. The assembly is Christ's, and He gives the keys of the kingdom showing that He is supreme in it. Peter was a stone for the assembly, and received the keys of the kingdom -- but the assembly is a structure of a new kind (built), and the kingdom regards us individually. We come in by the word; we come into the order that rules in the kingdom.
My Dear Brother, -- Glad to have a line from you and thank you for the enclosures to your letter, though to me the matter is now of the past. As regards your reference to J.N.D. as to 'new birth' I have had the same thing pointed out before in his writings. It is difficult to use what he may have said, in opposing each particular error, in a general sort of way. That new birth is not apart from faith everyone would admit. But faith is not natural to man, and if faith precedes new birth then faith is the
work of God -- and is thus really new birth, i.e., the beginning. This appears to me to be really J.N.D.'s point. He is contending against the idea of faith being an 'intellectual process' and he speaks of faith as a work wrought by God in the soul, and again that faith is 'that by which we are thus born'. Thus with him evidently faith is the work of God in the soul. The main idea is that all began with God and that is how new birth is continually brought in in John.
We are well through mercy. We have just had G. Cutting here for ten days and much enjoyed his visit and I trust there is some blessing as the result of it.
I hope you are well and remain,
In regard to your questions, I think that Scripture speaks guardedly of "Christ in you", though it is what one may call proper christian state. In this way it is used in Romans 8, "If Christ be in you", and he tells you what then characterises -- "the body is dead", etc. But it is to the Colossians he speaks of "Christ in you". In the Galatians He was not formed, but they had the Spirit. Every christian has accepted the testimony of Christ as Saviour, but I think it is when they apprehend Him as the only Man before God, the pattern to whom they are to be conformed, that Christ is formed in them. This may be hindered, as with the Galatians; but till then I doubt if it can be said, 'Christ in you'. I do not say it is attainment, for it is the proper starting-point for attainment.
I think in Galatians 2:20 the apostle personifies in himself the true christian state. Romans 8:2 indicates the way in which we have life now with God --
not, so to say, in the actuality of heavenly life, but in the Spirit, who has that character to us, "The Spirit of life in Christ Jesus", so that we can be, in a sense, with God outside and apart from our mere outward, natural life down here.
The questions which you have heard raised are not very formidable ones. As regards my having said that Christ died to law -- I have heard it said ever since I came into fellowship -- Christ was made under law. He bore the curse in being hanged on a tree, and by death He passed out of its application and curse, and in resurrection He entered on a condition of life as man to which law does not apply. "The law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth", and Paul had died to law in being crucified with Christ. I do not pretend to speak with inspired accuracy, but I think to say that "Christ has died to law" sufficiently expresses one's sense of the truth. I suppose the objector would hardly say He has not died to law.
As to the other question, the thought of Christ living in him is, it appears to me, individualised by Paul. I admit the title of every believer to reckon himself alive to God in Christ; and in his having the Spirit of Christ, Christ is his life, and in principle it is true that Christ is in him, as he is in Christ; but what I understand by Christ living in Paul is that he was so practically in the realisation of death to all that in which flesh lives, that Christ in the power of the Spirit was the spring in him of affections, thoughts, desires, of all in which life morally consists. I do not think this is true of every christian. I do not think it was so with the Galatians, but it is the proper christian state.
We have come to an end of the meetings here, and I think there is but one feeling prevailing -- that the Lord has been with us, and that we have in consequence had light and help. You will have heard what we read (Colossians and Hebrews), and the impression produced on me is that each time we read these epistles we get an increased sense of the Person, and thus in a way become less distinctly doctrinal. Now I think there is a general feeling that the truth comes before us at these meetings in a more distinct way as bringing to light the living associations in which we are set by the Spirit of God. Many old notions which had obtained place and currency are being exploded, but the living organisation which the truth reveals is coming out in their place. I was led to speak on the first afternoon on the connection between light and love, in that light not only exposes man, but reveals God, and that the more we are in the light the more conscious we are of the love.
I do not think any writings make one feel one's spiritual feebleness like John's.. I have certainly not written to any one that the Lord had the nature of a man before He became Man, though I certainly hold that what characterises Him morally as Man was of Himself, and not from Mary.
I took up, or rather sought to bring out, the glory of Christ as presented in the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John -- official as connected with the assembly and the kingdom in Matthew 16 -- moral as connected
with the administration of grace to men, and His service in heaven in Luke (Luke 12); and personal (the Son in distinction to the Father) in John. You may well suppose the handling was poor enough, but I trust it may serve to excite more interest in the Scripture, and lead to increased knowledge of the Lord.
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
My Dear Brother, -- I have received your letter of 10th inst. and send a few lines in answer to it. As far as I have an understanding of Scripture on the subject, it seems to me that there is a measure of confusion between two things which are presented in distinctness in Scripture -- viz., Eternal Life -- and the work of God in the soul by which eternal life is apprehended and entered on. The first of these (eternal life) as presented in Scripture comprises two essential elements, viz., relief from death (morally or physically), and introduction into positive blessing ordained of God, earthly or heavenly. In Psalm 133 we see the earthly in the blessing commanded in Zion -- the restoration and unity of Israel -- in John 17:3 the heavenly in the knowledge of the Father and the Son. It is evident that in either case there must be a state of soul produced in the saint suited for and corresponding to the blessing, and this is the work of God. For the christian we see the elements of this work in John 3:4. They consist in new birth, faith, and a well of water in the believer.
(1) New birth -- for it is evident that God must begin, there being nothing in man to be trusted -- no anchoring ground so to say for truth.
(2) Faith in the Son of man lifted up (for the condemnation of sin in the flesh) in which the love of God to the world has been revealed.
(3) The well of water -- the Spirit of life -- in the believer which springs up into eternal life.
Thus we have the work of God in the believer by which, though still on earth, he enters into heavenly things -- eternal life. All this is, so to say, summed up in chapter 5, in which we find that the hour now is where the (spiritually) dead hear the voice of the Son of God, speaking in their souls, and they that have heard live -- and in chapter 6 we find the soul entering into eternal life in the enjoyment of the love expressed in the incarnation and death of the Son of man which has placed what is divine and heavenly within the reach of its appropriation (eating). Thus we have the truth of eternal life solved -- and now God abides in us and we in Him. There is, so to say, the reciprocity of life and spiritual affections as far as can be between God and a creature. I trust that the above may at any rate make my thought plain.
With love to the saints,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
My Dear Brother, -- I send you a line in answer to your letter, but in what I write you must understand that I am not speaking dogmatically but only stating how things present themselves to my own mind. It appears to me that in breathing into man's nostrils the breath of life God gave to man a moral existence -- different from all the rest of the creation -- man became
a living soul. The word 'soul' in the first use of it referred in itself, I imagine, to the natural part of man, his natural life as made out of earth (1 Corinthians 15:45 - 47), what he had in common with the beast (only that he was a living soul by the breath of God). Soul came afterwards to denote the individuality as seen in the expression "the soul that sinneth it shall die", i.e., the person actually sinning. From that I fancy it came to be used to distinguish the moral from the material part of man, and is commonly so employed by the Lord. A man is identified before God by his moral being; and the moral part (of necessity maintaining the man's identity) is held by God in eternal existence and if man dies (converted or unconverted) is again clothed in a body. I should not myself confound this with the term 'inner man' which is, I think, the ideal or faith existence of a christian in connection with unseen things.
With love in the Lord,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
My Dear Brother, -- As far as I understand it, I think the unity of the Spirit is in the nature of an abstract thought. It is what would be realised if every saint were in the consciousness by the Spirit of his relationship to Christ and to every other saint. It is unity which exists not in the flesh, nor by outward agreement, but in the Spirit -- and it involves therefore the setting aside of the flesh. The secret and power of the unity remain here in spite of all failure -- and there has ever been the opportunity and responsibility to
return to it -- but as a matter of fact it was early marred and has never since been realised in its completeness. You could not speak of the unity of the Spirit in heaven -- where the Spirit alone will be the power of the life and activities of saints. I trust the above may help, and remain,
Your affectionate brother,
It is very good of you to say what you do as having been helped by my ministry. I am sure I often feel tried with its poverty, though in the intelligence of divine things I am conscious of having been helped of God; and certainly I have found more opening among saints than I could ever have thought of. The Lord's ways are inscrutable. He uses whom He will. I cannot undertake to explain the sentence you quote from the reading on 1 Corinthians 10, for I do not understand it myself, although as I write it dawns upon me that I was deprecating the practice of connecting the Lord's table with discipline, i.e., putting people away, and I maintained that the Lord's table brought in responsibility in regard to our own associations (i.e., reflectively) and not in reference to dealing in discipline with others (i.e., objectively). I think this explains the sentence.
I am unable to understand the idea of 'free will' in any but a divine way, and then only in the sense that He does absolutely what He wills. It is not a free choice between good and evil for He cannot do evil by reason of what He is. 'God is love'. I do not believe that any creature ever was made with free will, i.e., to do good or evil as it chose. Such an idea is altogether beyond the place of a creature. If God
makes a creature He makes it for His will and if it moves away from the place and conditions in which God has set it, it is evident that another and antagonistic will has come into operation. The creature has left its orbit. How this came to pass in the case of Satan we are not told. With man it came through temptation. He listened to another voice than God's and will came in. I suppose the beginning of departure was self-confidence. Adam did not know that he could not stand in the presence of evil without divine support. The moment he hearkens to any other voice save God's for direction he fell. Man then began on a new line governed by a will that was not God's. He might under certain influences be capable of good impulses and actions (as we speak) within certain limits, but he was not ruled by God's will but practically by the influence of what was around him. He did not refer to God because he had lost Him. Return to God is followed by return to His will; Romans 2. To the christian the Spirit is given to maintain him in God's revealed will, which is in general the ground of man's responsibility and in the case of Israel hereafter the law will be written in their hearts. Though man is in heart departed from God and will has come in, we have in looking at things morally to remember that other elements than will have to be taken into account. There is conscience which can be appealed to and aroused where a man may not be really converted, as Felix, and allied to this is the fear of consequences. Then there is the effect of early training and of natural affection. But all this does not alter the fact that man is not naturally directed by the will of God, and when the question is raised with him he is in principle and will opposed to God. In fact it needs a divine work of grace in him to overcome the resistance of man's will, to draw him to Christ, and in the case of the one who has been brought to Christ, the instant he departs from the law of the Spirit he is
really in contrariety to God though he might still from various influences do many things commendable before men, but he is not ruled by God's will. And this is in principle sin. Grace is sovereign and unmerited. It overcomes the resistance of man's will, but in order that a moral result may be produced in its objects it works through man's conscience and sense of responsibility. We see this illustrated in Luke 15 and in the case of the dying thief.
My Dear Brother, -- I am glad to send a few lines in answer to your letter, not as laying down the law on the subject on which you write -- but as giving you what seems to me to be the teaching of Scripture on the subject. I may begin by saying that if 'the communication of divine or spiritual life' in 'new birth' is understood to designate that initial and effectual work of the Spirit in the soul of man which forms the point of moral affinity with God, and is therefore the point of departure for any blessing into which that soul may be ultimately conducted, I should have no objection to the expression, and should not certainly quarrel with it -- though it is undeniable that Scripture does not speak of 'life' in direct and immediate connection with new birth -- thus in our doing so I think there is considerable danger of disconnecting life, in our thoughts, from the One in whom man is or can be justified -- and who as having borne the judgment of death that rested on man is now as last Adam a quickening Spirit towards men. I apprehend that though, in any case, man must be born again, yet that life connects itself now with faith in Christ's Person (as raised again for our justification)
and the consequent communication of the Spirit of life. The believer is thus made alive in the Spirit, is after Christ's order. Not only is the person forgiven but God has now His end, the believer is now for Him, and His love is known. That Scripture connects the truth of life with Christ and subjectively with the Spirit cannot, I think, be contested. Christ gives the water that in the believer is a well of water springing up to eternal life. He quickens whom He will. He is the bread of life. He came that the sheep might have life. He gives His sheep eternal life. He breathed on the disciples the breath of life. He has annulled death and brought life and incorruptibility to light. The last Adam is a quickening Spirit. And as to the place of the Spirit subjectively we have the well of water springing up to eternal life. It is the Spirit that quickens, the flesh profits nothing. The Holy Spirit was communicated (as a breath of inward life). He is the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. If Christ is in the believer the Spirit is life. We live in the Spirit and of the Spirit reap eternal life. Such is, as I judge, the present form that quickening takes. I need hardly say that the above refers to life giving, the communication of life, i.e., of the power by which we live. There is another point of importance and that is the food of life by which we are sustained in life, and there it is Christ (not the Spirit) and eating Him we live because of Him; and in view of this I cannot see any possible danger of getting into an incarnation of the Spirit. Of the place and necessity of new birth I believe that I have as strong a sense as any -- without it we are nothing nor could be anything -- but I do not care to put it in the place of that which Christ came that we might have, and which He has made effectual in us in
the communication consequent on reception of the Spirit of life. The point at which Israel may be said to live in the millennium will be, I judge, when by the coming of the deliverer out of Zion ungodliness is turned away from Jacob, the law is written in their hearts and they are freed of death and its power. Death is swallowed up in victory. I imagine they will be born again before the tribulation. At the same time if anyone said that the exercises of the Psalms are the exercises of a soul spiritually alive I should readily enough accept it, but they are not free of death. With love in the Lord to Mrs. Hoare and yourself, also to Miss Evans.
Believe me,
My Dear Brother, -- I thank you for your letter -- and agree substantially with what you say -- and readily accept the counsel which you offer, but at the same time I think I can truly say that the object before me in what I have sought to maintain has not been to carry a point -- but to resist what I believe to be a wrong and commonly prevalent thought in many minds in regard to what is spoken of as the communication of life in new birth. I believe the idea in communication of life was, in its first use, substantially right and employed in opposition to the Wesleyan notion of new birth as an effect produced by preaching that might appear and disappear, but as time has gone on new birth has come to convey to many minds the idea of the communication of life as a distinct and substantive quantity, and thus the true work of the Spirit in the soul is clouded. I believe new birth to be the
work of the Spirit in man's moral being by which, so far as it goes, moral affinity to God is begotten in the man, which is evidenced by a craving after God, but which leaves the person still undelivered and under the judgment of death, and from this state he has to find relief and life in Christ. I trust I may have the pleasure some time of seeing you at Weston. With kind love in the Lord to Mrs. Hoare and yourself.
Believe me,
I return the enclosed, which gives no good reason for departing from what we have been accustomed to hold as to the seven churches. Paul sees the ruin of the assembly as a professing body as much as John. (See 2 Timothy.) John carries it on to judgment to make way for "the things after these", and eventually gives the judgment of the great whore before the marriage of the Lamb. But when the Revelation was written the seven churches in Asia existed and stood in the normal relation of the church to Christ, and to the Spirit. They were not in judgment, but threatened with it. Taking the extended view of the seven assemblies there must come a moment when Christ alters His position, and His body is taken, and all the arguments in the world would not convince me that this makes no difference to the professing body. The house will be left desolate, and christendom will no longer stand in any present relation to Christ or the Spirit. Judgment comes in and other things begin to operate. When the twenty-four elders are round about the throne the "things after these" have taken the place of "the things that
are", i.e., of the assembly on earth in its relation to Christ. I do not believe that the church is any longer owned in any sense, and it cannot be proved.
Mr. Darby used to say that such an experience as that described in Romans 7 in which the desires were entirely right and the practice wholly wrong never really occurred. He used to speak of it as a christian's estimate of the experience of a soul under law. The soul is born again, and is looking to its own conduct as the ground of acceptance, and hence sees God as a judge, as you say. Justification is, speaking generally, that you are righteously relieved of judgment. There is no longer imputation of sin, and you are free of death (as God's judgment), for Christ has been raised for your justification. It is, I think, in the apprehension of Christ as last Adam, and of the justification of life through Him as such that you see that you are gone as to all that you are morally in the eye of God. Here it is that I think we pass out of death into life, and it is as in life, in the power of the Spirit, that the soul really learns the completeness of Christ's work through which it has been brought where it is. We ought, in a sense, to learn Romans 6 and 7 in order to enter on chapter 8, but most of us have to learn 6 and 7 after we have known something of 8, though I question if we are really established in chapter 8 till we have learnt chapters 6 and 7, and I do not think we learn deliverance until we have learnt the reality and power of what we are to be delivered from, so that deliverance should become a necessity to the
soul. We have to know what the 'body of sin' and 'the body of this death' mean before we really enter into deliverance by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
My Dear Brother, -- I am glad to reply to your letter and to give you as clearly as J am able the thought which 'inner man' conveys to my mind. Undoubtedly there is in every man a 'within' and a 'without', i.e., what a man is in heart and mind -- and what he is in appearances and the two may not correspond -- the latter being often a blind to the former, but this does not explain to my mind the force of the Scripture expressions 'inner man' and 'outward man' -- I do not think they are used save as speaking of saints -- I do not agree with the thought in the article you sent me on the subject. The writer virtually makes the body the outward man. I doubt if a body is a man. I think the expression 'outward man' refers to the man (the christian) as to what he is in mere outward life in the world -- which perishes. But his real self or identity with God is the inward man -- that in which God has formed his soul in grace -- and this is renewed day by day -- and is to be clothed with the house out of heaven. I do not think the inner man is simply the natural faculties of heart and mind common to men but, so to say, a new moral being really formed in the christian by divine power, and true for faith, and which as before God is really himself. I trust the above will make my thought clear,
With love in the Lord,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
Dear --, -- I am not acquainted with Mr. Hunt (whose letter I return), but certainly what he says does not produce a favourable impression on me. It gives me the idea of disingenuousness. His allusion to an infidel book (which he should know nothing about) as though what was accepted amongst us were tending in that direction, does not approve his letter to my judgment -- nor do I understand for what purpose he writes to you at all, save that you should accept his dictum -- for explanations on the issues involved are in his view inadmissible. He will not himself pretend to explain what Mr. Darby means in saying that 'the state described in the Psalm 16 is that of man considered apart from God' -- and yet would convey to your mind that it is something quite different in force from my statement that 'Christ is viewed as man distinct and apart from what He is as God' in that and other passages. He quotes 1 Corinthians 15:47 according to the authorised version (the second Man is the Lord from heaven) in a form which he must know is wrong, and which begs the question at issue -- all this appears to me unworthy. As regards the main point of the letter, I affirm that the Person of the Son is what He ever was and is eternally and unchangeably as divine -- the Son in distinction from the Father and the Spirit. But the Son has become man, and as such (having died and risen) He has entered into relations in regard to men into which He could not have entered simply as a divine Person -- such as 'first-born among many brethren' -- 'second Man' -- "mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus" -- "Head of the body" -- "High Priest", etc., etc., and Scripture in presenting Him to us in these positions speaks abstractly, i.e., limits itself to what is appropriate to the particular
position in hand, and does not in so speaking cover all that is true of the Person who has entered on those positions. I cannot. imagine any thoughtful person contesting this. But further, besides presenting God to man in His pathway here, Christ presented man in perfectness before God, and this is the view in Psalm 16, and further, as Son of man, the woman's seed, He bore the judgment of death that rested on man -- by man came the resurrection of the dead. How can you import the thought of God, as such, into all this in any subjective sense? though all was effected and could only be effected in One who is in Person divine. It is really irreverent and profane. The truth is that the moment those who have left us commit themselves to anything, they betray only painful inability to grasp divine thoughts. You may not care to send my letter to Mr. Hunt, but I have thought it best to speak plainly as to his letter to you. I trust you are all well, and remain with love in the Lord.
Faithfully yours,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
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.
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
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
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,
I am glad to reply to your letter, and to share with you any little light I have on the word. John 6:53-57 is a very interesting passage. I should not say that verse 53 is a sinner eating for salvation. It seems to me that the Lord is showing (while still living on earth) that His death would come as a test, and if not eaten would prove that they had no life in them. I fancy that the first true evidence of life in the Spirit is the appropriation of Christ's death. It is felt by the soul that it can no longer be in communion with the world in which sin reigns, and in which the flesh finds its life, and it appropriates Christ's death as that which is morally suitable to itself. It is its suited food -- and this appropriation becomes habitual. Then comes the eating Him as the living bread by which I am supported in life outside the course and order of this scene. The flesh and blood seem to me to be more akin to the passover than to the brazen serpent. (See verse 4). I think the prominent idea in it is grace rather than condemnation. It is undoubtedly the privilege, and, as to life, the necessity of every believer, but I fear that many christians know but little of it. Anyway, there can be no eating but in the power of the Spirit of life. The Israelites in Egypt ate the flesh on the night of the passover, but they could not drink the blood. The blood was for God. Now we eat the flesh, and drink the blood, for every claim of God has been met, and the Spirit given.
I am glad to send you a few lines in answer to your note. The idea of "spiritual" in 1 Corinthians 2 is as to the question of perception, as evidently the mind of man is not competent in things entirely beyond the range of its powers, and hence the necessity of the spiritual man for entering into God's things. The thoughts connected with the "temple" and the "body" in 1 Corinthians are that they are privileges proper to christianity, and to which christians can therefore ever return. The truth of the temple (i.e., of the Spirit being here) shuts out man as such as to all his importance, he is not to be gloried in; and the thought of the body brings in the positive place of the saints to be descriptive here, by His grace and gifts, of another Man -- the Christ. One man is put out, and another brought in. 1 Corinthians gives us the present responsible place of the saints. Ephesians shows us their place in the thoughts and counsel of God; hence everything begins from the Head and the body, and the temple is seen as going on to completion, and there is added in a kind of supplementary way the present status of saints as built together for a habitation of God by the Spirit. 1 Corinthians takes in general the present responsible side of the truth and Ephesians the counsel side.
What is in question is not the Person of Christ but the mode of apprehending what Scripture presents. In God's ways in grace many thoughts are brought before us, as eternal life, High Priest, Prophet, Mediator, Son of man, Christ, Last Adam, Second Man, etc., each of which has its distinctiveness and value and measure, and must be so apprehended by us, for we know in part, but all centred in the Person of the Son. But to me His Person stands out clear and
distinct amid all these official glories, and Scripture does not confound these glories with the truth of His Person, though they all have their lustre from it. There is "My glory". As regards the question of death with Christ, I think the ground on which we die is that our old man has been crucified with Christ. I think my history as a responsible child of Adam was ended for God in the cross where my sins were borne, and hence when I see this I am entitled to die under the eye of God. I was dead in sins, but as made alive in the Spirit I die to sin. But I do not think I am dead to sin save as I account myself dead to it. So too I put off the body of the flesh because of the circumcision of Christ. I do not think the thought of having died in Christ is right as a present thing.
I believe the testimony of Scripture to be that Christ, while in Person divine, did not take here the place of God but of Man (Mark 10:18; John 8:40) and of servant. He came not to be ministered to but to minister. Still being in Person divine, and He could not be less, Jesus could speak with the authority of God, as we see in John 2:19; John 8:58. But He spoke and did nothing from Himself, and in this place and state as Son of man in the power of the Holy Spirit which was in Him without measure. He spoke the Father's words, and did the Father's works. Thus God was manifested in the flesh. I believe this to be the Lord's own account of Himself, and the testimony to Him of the Spirit. The miracles which He did as anointed with power attested His word and approved Him as man. But He could not be such a man without being God. He, existing in the form of God, emptied Himself, and took on Him a servant's form, becoming in the likeness of men, and as Man
humbled Himself in obedience. But at the same time it was the Person of the Son that did this and became identified with manhood. Now I would not be prepared to say that in becoming Man He did or could divest Himself of attributes that properly belong to His Person (see Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:3), though when here in the place of man we do not see Him in the exercise of those attributes, but in the truth of the state and place He had taken. How this could be is beyond human power to say. I hardly conceive love to be an attribute of God, but rather what His nature is substantively.
The real point in the case is the question of Philippians 2:7. I really prefer the authorised version, for the expression 'emptied Himself' suggests to the English mind -- 'emptied of what?' and I question if this can be definitely answered.. .. I should not like, in the face of John 8:58, to say that He emptied Himself of the status of God. I am sure it is better left alone. But behind all this the question remains, Was Christ here as Man or as God? I am content to take the testimony of the apostles to Jew and gentile on which christianity was founded (Acts 2:22; Acts 10:38; Acts 13:32 - 39), and I need not say that they knew He was in Person divine, "The word became flesh", the Son revealing the Father; I think I am as distinct about that as any, and that adequate evidence of it was given; but none the less it remains true that His glory was veiled, and that He entered here into all that was suitable to man and to the servant, that God might be glorified in the Son of man, and I am not inclined to surrender this. I trust things may make for peace and not disturbance. I am content to be in the shade, and to wait on God. I know of no divergence of thought between myself and J.B.S.
As to the trouble at -- - they shut out -- - and those with him because the latter will not own them as Christ's assembly. I for one utterly repudiate that kind of church pretension. It seems to me that the only justification for our being apart from the outward order of christendom is that we are morally in the truth of Christ's body, and that the order of christendom is inconsistent with it; but we are certainly not standing apart from it to set up pretension to be Christ's assembly, or indeed any pretension at all, for if we are not morally in the truth we are the worst sect going, and if we are in the truth we shall not care to set up any pretension, because we know that we have the truth.
I think that in approaching the subject of atonement we must remember that of necessity Scripture regards man here on earth from God's standpoint, and that is with the sentence of death on him from God, and nothing could free him of that sentence save death having been borne for him. This has been effected in Christ, who has tasted death by the grace of God, and the blood is the witness that death has been suffered. Hence God can have to say to man here in grace. He sets forth Jesus a mercy-seat through faith in His blood. But then death, though the penalty resting on man here, is not the bearing of the wrath of God, for which sin calls, nor the real clearance of sin from before God, though without shedding of blood is no remission. Hence in the nature of things, I think we must distinguish between death and the wrath of God, which in man's case is the second death, the lake of fire. Now I believe that Christ in being made sin bore the wrath
of God which, as I said, death is not, and drank the cup of wrath to the dregs. And sin having thus been removed, He entered into death, the governmental penalty of sin, in perfect love and obedience, so that man down here might not only enjoy forgiveness, but be freed from the penalty under which he lay. And further, the state in which man sinned against God has been removed, and in such a way as that God has been glorified in its removal; hence man can now be in a new state before God for God's glory.
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
Dearest Reynolds, -- I have sent both papers on to Mr. Wood, filling up the small one with the names of the stocks which he had proposed. I was glad of your remarks as to Hull and am pretty much of your mind -- I think that Young and those with him showed how little the breach of fellowship weighed on them by immediately breaking bread. I blame them for this more than for separating, for I can conceive it possible that the state of things in a meeting may come to be intolerable, and that, without those who separate being able to make out a convincing case to others outside the place. It was so at Barking. But I am dead against the sort of ecclesiastical pretension that has marked G.H. meeting. In continuing to break bread they went on as though the fellowship at Hull had not been broken and then declare Young and those with him disqualified in a lump for the Lord's table because they refused to own them as Christ's assembly. Where shall we get to if this is approved? As I am not going to Scarborough, and Oliphant is, I should like you to see a letter or two which have
passed between us so I send them. It is too monstrous to think that we are to be wrecked over a miserable local trouble.
With love in the Lord,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
Dearest Reynolds, -- Thank you very much for your letter. I think they are a bit unmerciful in Scotland in the way of meetings, but I trust that your strength may be equal to it and that your visit may be greatly blessed. I fear that Hull may be a very serious difficulty for I think their act of G.H. declaring Young and those with him (in a lump) as disqualified for the Lord's table on the ground they give will be very hard for many to swallow. I try to keep out of it but Oliphant began it with me last evening at the brothers' reading and I had a trying conversation with him. I had a regular battle with him in the reading after, he strongly contending for ecclesiastical ground and I maintaining that according to 2 Timothy the basis of our fellowship was moral (following faith, love and peace with those calling on the Lord out of a pure heart), and refusing to allow that brethren could assume to be the assembly or were gathered on the ground of any particular truth, as if so they would be a sect. I fully admitted that in our fellowship we had no guide but the light of Scripture as to the assembly. I fear that Oliphant is strongly tinged with ecclesiasticism and that this is the root of the contention. I think I had the sense of the meeting with me though I may likely hear of hints of Bethesda ground, denying the truth of the one body, etc., etc.
Curiously enough in the meeting a brother came out pat with the idea that the one body was our system of meetings in intercommunication with one another. I am exceedingly sorry for the attitude of Oliphant. He is losing influence in London. Give my love to Telford and his wife and with the same to yourself.
Believe me,
What I see is that the assembly is actually here both vitally and responsibly, that is, as Christ's body and God's house. All would allow that the body is here in completeness (co-extensive with the Spirit) and that christendom has the responsibility of the house, hence my objection to the assumption by any company of christians of assembly status, etc. Even in early days before ruin came in, I imagine that there were comparatively few who entered into the proper privilege of the church as united to Christ, and hence I can see no reason why those privileges should not be enjoyed by a few now, but they are spiritual and do not necessitate the assumption of assembly status; but I do not believe we could enjoy them but as having departed from iniquity. This is of all moment. As to Matthew 18:20, I believe it was spoken for the saints when the assembly was in order, but I judge it would stand equally good for two or three now in the truth of the assembly, and apart from evil in a day of ruin. We constantly and I should say rightly come together in the faith of it, but I doubt if it was intended to constitute the two or three "the assembly" as referred to in verse 17. It seems to me that verses 19 and 20 are a distinct point from verses 15 to 18.
My contention with was that Matthew 18:20 contemplated an actual meeting together of saints, not a fellowship, and that as the ground for our fellowship in a day of ruin we must go to 2 Timothy 2:22 where we find that the foundation of it is moral and not ecclesiastical. The Lord's table properly represents the fellowship, that is, of all the saints in a place -- as one body in the fellowship of Christ's death. But this can now only be seen in Scripture -- not now in practice. It is a great thing to be in the light of it, and as far as we are concerned, in the fellowship of Christ's death. I feel sure brethren have to get away from formalism and ecclesiastical moorings, and to remember that the church is in ruins.
I will endeavour to answer your questions according to such light as I have. I think that in the history of a soul (I do not for the moment speak of new birth) the first thing is that it is enlightened, in other words it receives by faith the testimony of Christ, and has thus the place of a son before God (though not yet conscious of it), because God's purpose for us is sonship. I need hardly say that without a work of God in us we never should have received light. Thus the first step is gained. The soul is in the light of Christ, and in Christ in the eye of God. Then the Spirit is received by whom we cry, Abba, Father -- but as yet Christ has not been formed in us, but all is secured to us in the Spirit given, and we are not in the flesh but in the Spirit. The receiving of the Spirit is the proof that we are in Christ, God's seal on a man's faith. Then begins by God's power in us (which is well described in the two passages you quote from the Synopsis) a work by which a life, a character, a moral condition of being -- a new man is
produced in us (Christ formed in us) so that it can be said of the believer that he is quickened together with Christ, is new-created in Christ Jesus. He is in Christ, and Christ in him. This is what I should speak of as the proper christian state, i.e., viewing state as the work of God, and not in the sense of practical condition. It is a state which faith accounts as our true state before God. Christ now lives in the christian, but this is by the Spirit, for in our present actual condition down here we live for God only in the Spirit; but there is the nature or being that is suitable -- the new man created after God in righteousness and holiness of truth; but this is not exactly life, in the sense of power to live in the relationship in which God has set us. The difference between 'in Christ' and 'in the Spirit' to me is that the one marks our position before God as in a new Head, the last Adam, and the other our state; we are not in the flesh but in the Spirit. This never ceases to be true down here though it may be, and is, true of a saint before he is said to be quickened together with Christ. I think that Romans 5, where we have the thought of peace with God, does not give us christian state as I understand it, but rather the blessings in which God has been pleased through redemption to make Himself known (righteousness, peace and joy), and which are now the portion of the one justified in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The question of the previous meeting (brothers' reading) came up, the point being to know where we are and why we are there. I maintained that the existence of a fellowship as distinguished from actual coming together in assembly was what really marked us off from Bethesda. who. by the course they took at
Bethesda, repudiated the idea of fellowship. Further, that the original and only possible ground of fellowship here is that of calling on the name of the Lord, the obverse being the fellowship of His death; that the difference now is that as it is incumbent on every one that "names the name of the Lord to withdraw from iniquity", we now have to look for those "that call on the Lord out of a pure heart". The truth of the one body I hold to be light and privilege for those gathered in fellowship, and it is realised in our being together in assembly. I do not know that anything was advanced against it save that the one body was said to be a bond of fellowship, a sort of ecclesiastical formation, in which case I maintained that we should be a sect.
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
Dearest Reynolds, -- I am glad that you are back again from your labours in the north and trust you are not much the worse. I am most thankful for your ministry there for there are many good men who would appreciate it. But the Scotch mind is inclined to be material and hard -- and this does not make a promising soil for heavenly truth. But I think that if they are a bit hard they are in general just. I have not the least objection to the reprinting of the little paper from the Voice if you think it worth it. I will gladly share in the expense or indeed bear it. We had a great crowd at Brixton last evening -- the room quite full -- and I am thankful to say the meeting passed off very quietly. The question of the previous meeting came up -- the point being to know where we were and why we were there. I maintained that the existence of a fellowship as distinguished from actual coming together in assembly was what really marked
us off from Bethesda who by the course they took at Bristol repudiated the idea of fellowship. Further, that the original and only possible ground of fellowship here was that of calling on the Name of the Lord, the basis being the fellowship of His death. That the difference now was that it is incumbent on every one that names the Name of the Lord to depart from iniquity as we now have to look for those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. The truth of the one body I held to be light and privilege for those gathered in fellowship and it was realised in our being together in assembly. I do not know that anything was advanced against it save that the one body was a kind of fellowship, a sort of ecclesiastical formation, in which case I maintained that we were a sect. Oliphant seemed to me rather in a fog, and I think he has to break free from ecclesiasticism. I trust the meeting may lead in the direction of peace. I fancy very many were thankful for it. I am just off to Horsham for the day.
With kind love,
The attack on my lecture, which seems to me entirely uncalled for, is easily answered. The allegation is that I should have taught that Christ was only a channel of the grace of God to man. The answer is that the allegation is a deduction or inference, and that I never said nor thought anything of the kind. The omission of special reference in the lecture to the deity of Christ is explained by the fact that the subject of the lectures being 'The Church' Christ was spoken of in them naturally in that relation, assuming that my hearers were as assured as to the true deity of Christ as I am myself. Paul might have been arraigned on the same principle for omitting in the epistle to the Ephesians any statement of the deity of Christ or for
saying to the Corinthians that to us (christians) there is one God the Father and one Lord Jesus Christ. I hardly need to answer the various questions raised in the letter as to the Lord's words and actions here -- they are an effort of the human mind to prove to itself the deity of Christ.. .. I have little doubt that in seeking to meet error on one side, error was plunged into on the other, and I judge it has arisen from want of appreciation of the Lord's own statement of Himself in Luke 4 and the apostle's testimony as to Him in Acts 2 and Acts 10. It was on this testimony that christianity was founded and by it the first thoughts of christians as to Christ were formed, but I grieve to say that this is dismissed, in the latter being said to be 'the lowest character of testimony to the Son'. It is no wonder then that the truth of the real human identity of Christ is missed -- the horn of salvation raised up in the house of David -- the vessel of divine grace, so that there could be the anointing with the Holy Spirit and power, the going about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him. Thus it was that the grace of God was presented to man in a Man, all in the pathway of obedience, and it is in Him as Man that the connection is maintained in the line of promise, and that risen and exalted, He (Christ) is given as Head to the church His body, the fulness of Him that fills all in all. That the One in whom all this was true was Himself in Person divine, the Son revealing the Father, who could while here being Himself divine speak, subject to the Father's will, with the authority of God, and that abundant testimony was borne to Him by the Father, and by the works which He did is what every true christian sees and delights in, but nonetheless the truth remains that He was come from God and went to God, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself not imputing their trespasses. It seems to me that the first principles of the truth of
Christ have not been learned in the Spirit. Paul brought out in testimony the truth that Jesus was the Son of God, but this does not set aside the first testimony of the apostles, and John's gospel is given that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, and while I reverently accept the second, I am not going to give up the first. The greatest proof to one of the deity of Christ is the fact that He was such a Man as could receive the Spirit without measure.
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
Dearest Reynolds, -- Thank you for the return of Anglin's letter and enclosure -- I have returned Young's letter to Anglin and have ventured to copy part of your remarks (not that relating to A. himself). I return the proof of the little paper -- I have altered a word -- I feel a little shamefaced at being put out in such company but the little extracts from J.N.D. and J.G.B. are very good indeed. The truth of the body is in danger at this moment. I have had a long and trying letter from J.S.O. in which he shows that he has but little sense of the body being simply the vessel of the Spirit, but seeks to make its existence the basis of what he calls corporate responsibilities, which as far as I can see is attaching to the body the responsibilities of the house. It seems to me quite sad, and all this to maintain that we are gathered in fellowship on the ground of the one body. I return your draft letter. I am quite pained to hear about Springer and am quite in sympathy with your appeal. I go, D.V., to Plymouth on the 27th for a week.
With love in the Lord,
GREENWICH,
My Dear Brother, -- I am sorry for the delay in answering your letter of the 24th inst., which has arisen from my having to leave home for Plymouth. In answer to your question I should say that if a man intended to deny the Eternal Sonship of Christ I certainly should not care to remain in fellowship with him -- for "the Son" is the name that conveys to me the idea of the distinct personality of Christ; John 5:19,20; 1 John 4:14. The expression 'the Word' is much more a moral idea, and is really taken up from philosophy -- though a peculiar significance is given to it by the Spirit of God. On the other hand I fear a little of speaking of the Eternal Son as 'in relationship' lest the thought be extended according to human ideas in which we rightly regard a son as in a position of inferiority to a father. The eternal relations subsisting between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are entirely beyond our knowledge.
Believe me,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
Dearest Reynolds, -- I think I am entirely in accord with you in regard to Hull. I wrote a week or two since to young Kolkenbeck who is there and told him that what I believed would be acceptable to the Lord would be a complete surrender on all sides of all ecclesiastical pretension, and a general humbling each house (family) apart, and an earnest looking to the Lord that He would in due time provide some ground
for the restoration of fellowship. I am wholly averse to the existence of two camps in the place, and brethren going in to judge between them. It is too human and the idea of ceasing to break bread for a week or two seems to me of no use, and unmeaning. I have had another long letter from J.S.O. in answer to mine in which there is much about the principle of the one body but it confirms me in the impression that his idea of the one body is ecclesiastical, that he fails to apprehend the mystery of the gospel and to distinguish between the house and the body. I am glad they have approached you from Belfast and should be glad to hear of your going there. While away I had a characteristic letter from Kernahan (asking as to things recently agitated in London) in which he says that he accepts the ipse dixit of no man! I wonder you are not a little afraid of attempting Germany again, but I suppose it might not be so bad if you only went to Vohwinkel. I had a very good time at Plymouth and think that the meetings there and at Devonport are prospering. I had also a good meeting at Newton Abbot. We had some of the brothers from St. Ives at Plymouth for part of the time. Recent occurrences there have served to wake them up a bit. Champney also stayed while I was there. I trust you are all well, and with love in the Lord, remain,
Your affectionate brother,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
Dearest Reynolds, -- I am very glad that you have written as you have to Mr. Wood. I have no doubt whatever that he is an upright man, but we cannot be trustees merely in name. I shall be glad when an
opportunity offers of comparing the estate as it now stands with that on which duty was paid. I am much obliged for the enclosure to your letter. It is certainly a revelation. The Lord's table is put in the place of the Lord's supper and the 'assembly' appears to be held together by an ordinance. It is a sort of mixture of ecclesiasticism and sacramentalism, the moral element seems to me to be wholly wanting. I can hardly imagine that we are called upon to sanction such ideas. I send you Oliphant's letter to me and my reply (I hope you may be able to make it out). I had a second letter as long as the first to which I have not replied, for it seems to me without point. I do not think that Oliphant has any just idea of either house or body. In his second letter he is driven to the idea that Scripture gives two aspects of the body. I have heard of two aspects of the church, but this is certainly a new idea, where got from in Scripture I know not. I am very sorry for the position he has taken up. J.B.S. seemed quite out with him. We had a pretty good reading last Tuesday. J.B.S. seemed fresh and clear in mind. If D. O'Kolski should come to the meeting at Vohwinkel, he will be a help for he knows English perfectly. I knew him in England. Hope you are well and Mrs. Reynolds and her sisters.
With love in the Lord,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
Dearest Reynolds, -- I return you the extract from Bousfield's letter. I have ventured to retain a copy merely for my own satisfaction. I had a visit on
Wednesday from Oliver (Croydon) and F. Cavanagh. It appears that a sister (a servant girl) has come up there in service from Hull. She brought a letter from Banfield. She had only been at Hull (having come from Lincolnshire) a month or two before the division. They hesitate what to do. I should not be greatly distressed if they received her without the thought of settling the Hull matter. Many thanks for the booklets. I should like to share the expense and will write to Morrish.
Ever yours affectionately,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
Dearest Reynolds, -- I return you your letters and thank you for sending them. I heard at the same time from Kernahan and have answered him that though I would be glad to go to Belfast I have a long outstanding debt to Portsmouth which I must pay off at Easter. I need hardly say that I would have been pleased enough to go with you. I went to the meeting on the marriage of R. Edwards yesterday and we had a serious and good time. J.B. S. spoke on Psalm 107, they that go down to the sea in ships, etc. He bringeth them to the desired haven. His point was that people get what they seek. Afterwards Oliver got hold of me to tell me that the brothers at Croydon and South Norwood had had a solemn meeting over Hull, and the letter they had had, and came to the conclusion that it was very doubtful if the Lord had not been displaced in the meeting by their conduct before ever the division took place. They had seen Bousfield and urged on him their giving up on this ground. He wanted some of them to go to Hull with him and to press it on the brothers there.
In the afternoon I went to Redhill. Mrs. Lewis was there and seemed pretty well. I have had a statement of the estate from Mr. Wood but have not had time yet to look at it. I hope you will not go to Germany in weather like this.
With love,
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
Dearest Reynolds, -- The enclosed came to me this morning and I hasten to send it on to you. I have heard nothing more from Belfast, and I should think that their meeting at Easter will hardly come off. I had heard from Hull, young Kolkenbeck wrote to me last week, and I trust from what he says that they have judged their course. I trust, too, they may have judged their act of discipline. I wrote to Kolkenbeck expressing a hope that they would not be too hasty in the way of reconstruction, as it was possible that there were certain elements that would be better sifted out if they were in future to go on in peace. I sent on the cheque to Mr. Wood. The account he sent me was simply a copy of what you had let me have. One wants to see how things now stand in comparison with what they were at the time of Mr. Lewis's death. I suppose Mrs. Lewis will be getting some interest from the money invested in stocks. I imagine there will be a pretty heavy bill to pay to Mr. Wood. I trust that this severe weather may moderate before you go to Germany.
With love in the Lord,
My Dear Brother, -- I was glad to have a line from you and thank you for the object with which you write. I do not think that I shall get to Ireland in the Spring, in fact, I have declined an invitation to go to Belfast, being under promise to go at Easter to Portsmouth. It may be that opportunity may offer for crossing over later on in the year, and if so, I would try and pay you a visit. If I could I should like to spend a little time in Ireland. My visits hitherto have been but flying ones. I have had a copy sent me of the pamphlet to which you refer -- but have not had an opportunity of reading it -- so many things crowd in that it is difficult to find time to read much of what is written. As regards the three days in John 1 and 2 they seem to me to be pretty clearly marked. The third day is evident enough in chapter 2 and bears upon it the power of resurrection in which Christ turns the water of purification into the wine of joy. The previous day from verse 43 of chapter 1 witnesses the establishment of relations between Christ and the godly remnant of Israel (as seen in Nathanael) -- and the preceding one sees the close of John the baptist's testimony, in Christ becoming a gathering point, and Simon Peter a sample stone of the assembly. It is in this way that the three days present themselves to me. I am sorry that you are so pressed in business it becomes so absorbing and in that way injurious to the soul. I trust that God is permitting you to find happiness in domestic life. We are all well through mercy.
With love in the Lord,
...And now in reference to your question as to Ephesians 2. The statement in that chapter is clearly of what God had by His power effected in the saints. He had (as is seen also in Colossians) quickened them together with Christ. In referring to it my point was to show what it is in which this is displayed. Evidently the first thought is that Christ risen is the centre and point on which all is formed; then we stand associated with Him a heavenly band. We have (conscious of His love) appropriated Him in what He is to God as risen from the dead, and thus we live together with Him Godward in love. (See chapter 1:4.) It may be said that this is mixing up what is in a sense experience with the power of God, but I think that the result of God's work is viewed as a whole in Ephesians, the fruit and effect of His power working where nothing was but death, and producing a result suitable and sufficient for Himself. It is seen there in its full extent, and is what is true in principle in all christians, though not realised by all. I trust that this may simplify the matter.
I look upon Philippians 2:6 as the place taken by Christ in the fact of assuming a servant's form; it was, so to say, an act of mind in taking the servant's form. I really prefer the authorised version, "He made himself of no reputation". It was not only that He assumed the form but the mind suited the form.... -- - accuses me of not holding the real humanity of Christ, because I will not accept his idea of a complete man, 'spirit, soul and body', distinct from Deity. He seems to me to have no idea of the Son becoming Man and giving a spirit to manhood, in fact of the incarnation.
It is with the greatest pleasure and satisfaction that I send you a few lines to convey to you a sense of the privilege accorded me in having increasing sympathy and interest in the service which our blessed Lord has entrusted to you. I feel that the great point of late years was that the truth which the Lord had opened up by Mr. Darby should be maintained. Many made the mistake that it was to be guarded by insistence on the letter. I believe that the true way was in its being made good in the Spirit's work in souls, and here I see the great value of your perseverance and service. I desire nothing better for myself than to be enabled to continue according to the measure of grace on the same lines. I thank the Lord for the energy in which He supports you for what is needed both in the way of interest and inquiry in truth and in imparting to others.. .. We are having readings each afternoon at 3.30, in which I am seeking to awaken as far as I can some sense of our true place in assembly as Christ's companions -- but they are not very quick learners -- and it may be that I am but a poor expounder.
In trying to make plain my thought (as to the expression 'Lord's table') I may premise by saying that I do not believe that the truth of it is found outside our fellowship. My fear is in the assumption of it by brethren as giving a kind of ecclesiastical status when morally they may be very little in the reality of what it implies. It is a truth which, in the present state of the church, must be apprehended abstractly, i.e., in, its normal character, as being the proper fellowship for all christians in any given place. It is the fellowship of Christ's blood and body (His death). In this sense the thing in its true character
can never be restored, and the attempt to lay claim to it by any body of saints appears to me undesirable. I think the point now is to be morally in the fellowship of Christ's death. I believe it is of all moment in these days to be in the sense of the ruin of the church, and to get away not only from unrighteousness, but from all pretension, and to get to the Lord, and to follow righteousness, love and peace with all those that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. I trust that this describes the fellowship of brethren, and I am sure that the nearer we are to the Lord the more truly we shall be in the fellowship of His death, and thus really partakers of the Lord's table. To attempt to apply in these days 1 Corinthians 10:16,17 in a literal way would, I think, put brethren in the place of the assembly.
Our meeting ended too late yesterday for me to send you anything. We were together from 3.30 to 7.30; though I cannot regard the meeting as a glorious triumph, for one would have desired to carry the truth with more absolute conviction, I think it has ended in the way most conducive to the peace of the saints. There was the giving up of charges of heresy, the admission of misunderstandings, and in result we parted in peace. There was long discussion on many points, but it became evident that the point on which all turned was distinguishing personality from the idea of pure Deity in the case of the Lord. We insisted on this as that on which the truth of the incarnation depends and on the complete identification of the Person with the state He took. So that it was very distinctly a personal humanity, but the Person still the same though the state was changed. Our allowing that He spoke and acted as Man according
to the place and state He had taken seemed to clear away much of their difficulty. It is evident to me that some have gone astray in the endeavour to make out Christ from man, instead of learning what man is (according to the divine thought) from Christ.
I am very glad of your letter as giving me some authentic news of Mr. Stoney. Since I wrote you last I heard rumours of an accident, and hardly knew what to think of it. I can understand the shock you received in seeing him fallen, and though the injury is a bruise, a severe bruise after eighty cannot be a slight matter, and having to lie in one position must be very wearing. I am only thankful for where you are. I am sure that my heart and that of a great many more will be lifted up to God for him and for his recovery, as we can in nowise afford to lose his service. Meantime, I pray that he may have much comfort from the Lord.
As far as I understand Colossians 1:22, it would appear that the statement as to presenting is abstract, i.e., a statement of the purpose involved in the reconciling apart from the question of time. It is as good for Christ now as it will be in the future. His point is to present us that, and I think it is effected as His death is realised spiritually in us. The 'holy' must be practical or there would be no reality in it. It is the nature of what we are as new created, it is like the new man after God, and nature governs the practice.
I had a telegram this morning from S -- -, 'Restless night, about same, end approaching', -- (J.B.S.) + ...
+It was a year and a half after this that he was taken to rest.
The breaking of these links is hard to us -- and I am very thankful for all tenderness of affection -- but if we could see all we should see that in the Lord's light, he has finished his service -- long and diligent and devoted service -- and is about to be taken to rest; and according to his own saying the Lord shows His sympathy in drawing us to His own side. For myself I can say that there is no one on earth whose ministry and self have produced so lasting a moral effect on me as Mr. Stoney. It is a great figure removed from us whose place no one on earth can fill.
GREENWICH,
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
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,
It is, I think, clear that the church is viewed in two lights -- as identified with Christ in the presence of the Father (all of one), He being Firstborn of many brethren, and as the vessel in which God sets forth the riches of His grace; and I think it is in this latter line that the thought of the body and the bride comes in. The church is Christ's fulness, and the vessel (in Him) in which God shows the exceeding riches of His grace. Jew and gentile are reconciled to God in one body, but they are also one new man created in Christ Jesus. Christianity, as in the thought of God, becomes increasingly wonderful to me, and I can fully echo the thought that one is only in the infancy of it. Had it been maintained according to God, what a wonderful thing it would have been in the world! Certainly it was wiser on the part of the enemy to corrupt rather than to oppose it.
Our subject in the main was the lordship of Christ and the sphere of His administration. I contended that this belongs to that course of things in which the will of God consists, and that we must remember that
if He is Lord to faith He has been rejected here, and that we have to be with Him in the things in which He is. We do not know Him after the flesh.
As regards last Thursday (Greenwich reading in Philippians 1 to end), I am glad that you said what you did. It leads me to reconsider the point, and certainly one must attach importance to what the apostle says in 2 Corinthians 5, "willing rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord". I daresay I spoke too strongly, but what was in my mind was that while here we are in the activities of Christ's body, which is hardly the case when we are with the Lord. Anyway, if we are taken before the Lord comes it is a comfort to know that we enter on what the apostle desired, and are with the Lord instead of being absent from Him. But then we shall be out of the path of testimony and responsibility. I am rather thankful to have taken up the Psalms at Hazelville. I think that I see my way more through the first part of them.
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
My Dear Brother, -- I was away from home at Birmingham when your letter came, which will account for the delay in answering it. In reference to the point on which you write, I am inclined to think that though a meeting would undoubtedly be badly affected by the existence in its midst of sin that had not been brought to light it could hardly be on the responsibility of the assembly. If the saints were dependent, I imagine that God would bring it to light and then the assembly must judge it or the Lord would not go on with the assembly.
This was the case with Israel. They were allowed to feel their weakness but the Lord did not judge them if they judged the evil. I do not understand that in ordinary cases, confession on the part of the assembly is called for, but some case of evil existing may be the means of bringing home to the assembly some state of things which has been allowed and which calls for humbling and confession before God -- but as to all these things, it is impossible to be guided by rule -- souls must feel what is true and right before God.
With love in the Lord,
It has been on my mind for some time past to send you a few lines to let you know what is going on in connection with the 'testimony of our Lord', so far as it comes under my observation, for I am sure of your great interest in what is going on, though you are yourself shut out from the activities save in spirit and mind. So far as I see, a great and general interest is maintained in the truth, and the old ideas of 'standing and walk' have given way to an apprehension of God's purpose in Christ and of the moral state in the believer which is the answer to that purpose and the effect of the light which has been brought to man. The experimental side from Egypt to Canaan, especially the bitter waters of Marah, the brazen serpent and Jordan, are now subjects of much attention, and seen, I think, in their true light as the line by which we approach God's purpose as to the church in Christ. It is on this line that ministry arouses interest. That there is here and there a certain amount of disaffection in one and another is indeed true; but I think it arises from the defect of clinging to dogmatism and ecclesiasticism, and failure of apprehension of the
'living stone'. They do not, I judge, know, save in terms and doctrine, the true foundation of christianity, the Father and the Son, they lack an acquaintance with the Persons, and in the affections proper to that acquaintance.... Our readings in London are largely attended. We are still reading Matthew; we began chapter 17 last time, but harped back on the church; we held that the structure was built up in the divine nature -- love; the foundation being the revelation of Christ as the expression of that nature, and hence the gates of hell could not prevail against it.
I have been spending two or three days in Birmingham. Our subjects in the afternoon readings were deliverance (Romans 6 to 8) as necessary to the new position of the believer in Christ in regard to God.. . and in the evening the raising up of man, as seen in John 5 by the light in the heart of the Father and the Son, and the absolute separation of the saints from the world by the Spirit of truth (John 14), with a view to fruit-bearing (John 15), and the unfolding to them of the Father's things in which the Son was glorified (John 16).
I can hardly think any one could put such a construction on Philippians 2. He (Christ) certainly left His first estate to take a servant's form, becoming in the likeness of men; the Word became flesh to dwell among men, but I do not understand this to mean that He relinquished attributes that properly attached to His Person, though I believe that in becoming Man He entered into the reality of the place He took as Man, and that Scripture can and does view Him (when seen in relation to men) distinct and apart from what He is as God, though what He is as divine gives its character to all.
My Dear Brother, -- I return you the paper you sent in your letter of March 2nd which I duly received. I have read it and (though I am not much of a critic) it seems to me sound and good. The only thing that struck me in any other way was that it was perhaps necessary to guard a little more carefully the proper divine relationship of the Son and the Father -- for though the relationship into which in christianity we are brought has its character from that which was eternal, it is not identical, since in order that this relationship might subsist for us the Son emptied Himself -- in mind took a place lower than that of God in which He could say "My Father is greater than I" -- but the taking of this place could not set aside the truth and reality of His eternal relations with the Father, hence we have "no one knows the Son but the Father" -- and yet it was that emptying Himself which alone could make the relationship of sons a possibility for men. Thus I should hardly be prepared to go so far as to say 'it is the eternal relationship of Father, Son and Spirit' and then that men might be brought into this relationship. There is one other point that I will refer to. I hardly care for the expression 'He took human nature into union with Himself'. I do not like the term 'union' in this connection. It is hardly the scriptural way of speaking of the incarnation. There it is "became flesh", "took part of the same", "took upon him the form of a servant", etc., etc., none of these passages convey the thought of union, but rather identification of a Person with a state or form assumed. I have merely noted the above as points which struck me. Things go on in the main quietly in England. There is fellowship, and I think that confidence is gaining ground. The brothers who have been disaffected remain much where they were. W. Turpin has not been to any meeting for some weeks, but has not, I
believe formally withdrawn. Those most intimately acquainted with him do not believe that doctrine is the real cause of his disaffection. J.S.O. is much the same -- not happy but finding himself without support among those in fellowship. I fancy that brethren are tired of the matter of Hull. I hear nothing at all of it. J.B.S. is for the time revived and quite himself in mind though still feeble in body. I have not yet found an opportunity of talking to Morrish about your projected periodical -- but will do so, and will see if I can find time to give you a paper, but I am fairly hard worked one way and another. Reynolds is for the time looking after the Voice, and I try to give him a little help in it. I am very sorry about Capper. His going off into this notion shakes confidence in one who should be a father. I do not much like the term 'testimony' for a title -- it is hackneyed and has become conventional. I should prefer some such simple title as 'A word for the moment', anything unpretentious. I am sorry for the trouble with regard to the room and trust that some way may be found out of the difficulty. Is there no brother that could put up a room? It is such a gain and comfort to have a room for yourselves. I have much repugnance to a room used for all sorts of purposes. It becomes in a sort of way unclean. I am glad to hear what you say of your boy George; I trust that he and your and their children are well and may be a comfort to Mrs. Stewart and yourself. Children are as arrows in the hand of a mighty man. They are his strength. I have comfort through God's mercy in my children. My eldest boy is in fellowship -- and there is nothing in any of the remainder that would disqualify me for being an elder, but I can take no credit. It belongs under God to the wife.
With kind love in the Lord,
We had a reading last evening at -- - and they proposed 'the new man' in Ephesians 4. I tried to point out how after the epistle has given us a place in the heavenlies the great point all through is the presentation of God here. In chapter 2 we get Jew and Gentile builded together for an habitation of God by the Spirit; in chapter 3 the saints are seen filled into all the fulness of God, and in chapter 4 we have the new man created after God in righteousness and holiness of truth. It is to me a wonderful thought.
My Dear Brother, -- I was glad to have a line from you and tidings of your welfare -- and am interested to learn something of your changes in business -- and that they leave you more free for the things of the Lord -- this is a very great gain. I think that I had heard of the marriage of your sister, perhaps from your brother whom I saw in London. I hope your mother keeps well. I judge from what you say that things are changed at Dublin now -- when one of the signatories of the Westland Row notice expressed to me his regret at having put his name to it, I felt that the notice was not worth much. The time may arrive when I may, if the Lord will, pay a visit to Dublin, and should hope then to see you. Things are generally quiet in England -- our fortnightly readings in London draw to a close tonight. They have been largely attended and much appreciated. We had a very good meeting lately at Quemerford -- and I think that all there found refreshment and profit. The painful fact is that we get no sort of help on the part of those who have been prominent as champions of orthodoxy.
I am thankful to say that through God's mercy my wife, children and self are well.
With love in the Lord,
SCARBOROUGH,
My Dear Brother, -- I have been intending to send you a few lines in answer to yours of the 25th. I return the letter from G.H. I am sorry that an agitation has begun in Sydney -- though I suppose the questions raised are likely enough to affect the whole Australian continent. The extract of the letter from the brother at Orange is curious, as showing the way that things come to be mis-stated. Firstly the Holy Spirit is only with 'us as indwelling the believer'. It was maintained that the manner of the Spirit's dwelling here was shown in John 14:17 (He continues with you and shall be in you) -- and that His function in the believer was quite distinct from His function or operation in the house -- but I would have thought that anyone would have admitted that His being in the house was dependent on His being in believers, for when they go the Spirit is no longer here. The second point is that 'we are not gathered to the Lord on the principle of the unity of the body' -- now it has been strenuously maintained that the recognition, in the soul, of saints being one body in Christ is of the last importance in our being gathered together. What has been resisted is the idea that the truth of the one body, or indeed any particular truth, is the basis of the fellowship in which brethren are found together, for this fellowship rests on moral foundations as in 2 Timothy 2:22. The third point is 'that we break bread in the holiest not in the wilderness'. I do not know anyone
who has said this -- but it is difficult for me to understand that where Christ in the midst of the assembly sings praises to God it can be anything but the holiest -- and it would be difficult to realise that in the praises which Christ leads there should be the bringing up of the question of sins. All these things tend to show how little the truth of Christ in the assembly is realised. I hardly know what to advise as to seeing Mr. Oliphant, he has a certain place amongst us, and one would wish that he should not fail of any respect due, but I hardly think that you will get much help from him. We are still enjoying our stay here. I saw Mr. Stoney this morning and found him very bright and cheerful.
With our love in the Lord,
The matter as to which you write is one on which many minds are in perplexity. I think it may arise from the failure to distinguish between the christian looked at in the light of a responsible man here, and in the light of divine purpose. In the former light he is viewed as justified and sealed by the Spirit, and is to be ruled by the Spirit and not by the flesh. This is not exactly a question of nature, but of rule, and is the ground taken up in Romans and Galatians. But when the christian is looked at in the light of divine purpose, i.e., as a son or child of God for which he has been wrought by the Spirit of God, then the thought of nature comes in. He is chosen to be before God holy and without blame in love. He has put on the new man which is created after God in righteousness
and holiness of truth. He is righteous as Christ is righteous. By nature I understand to be meant that by which a person or a substance is characterised so as to be morally what he is; but you cannot talk of the nature until you have the person. If a person is characterised by the divine nature that is his nature and that only. Sin and the flesh may be there but they no longer predominate so as to characterise. The body of the flesh and the old man have as to their domination been put off and hence I decline to admit the idea of two natures in the christian because I do not see it to be the teaching of Scripture, though very conscious that if a man say he has no sin he deceives himself. But sin is not the nature of the child of God and in that light I am entitled by faith to regard myself.
SCARBOROUGH,
My Dear Brother, -- The questionable words in my previous letter were 'recognition in the soul' -- I am very sorry that you should have had to write about them. We bad very good meetings on Saturday at Leeds. I should think 300 or 400 were present from twenty different meetings. In the afternoon we looked at the difference between responsibility and privilege as regards the christian and I think that there was profit. In the evening they made me give a lecture. We return home on the 18th, D.V., and after that I trust that I may see you. With our love in the Lord to Mrs. van Someren and yourself.
Believe me,
SCARBOROUGH,
My Dear Brother, -- I have been wishing to send you a line but the constant interruptions to which I am liable here have sadly interfered with my opportunities. I am very sorry that your early starting will prevent my seeing you again at this time, for we shall not be home in time on Friday to enable me to come to Miss Stewart's, but I do hope I shall have grace to bear you in mind privately, for I can feel for and with you in the difficulties to which you will be exposed on your return to Australia. I trust that you may find from the Lord both wisdom and grace to meet them.. It is pretty plain to me that so soon as any man seeks to make any move forward in divine things he finds all sorts of things tending to thwart him, and the exercise is good, for we learn in it the sufficiency of the Lord and of the truth. Our stay here is virtually at an end -- and I hope that we have in every sense gained by it. We finished with meetings in the afternoon and evening today and a tea between. Some 150 were present -- and I trust and think that there was profit. Mr. Stoney remains about the same, deeply interested in all that is going on. You may have opportunity at some time to send me a line as to what is going on in Australia. May the Lord help His saints there, I am sure they need it at this time. With love in the Lord from my wife and self to Mrs. van Someren and yourself and best wishes.
Believe me,
The matter in reference to which you write is one that has at one time or another exercised most. I think I may say that when I came into fellowship for a man to insure his life was considered a reproach and
outside of the path and ways of brethren. It means that a man definitely sets aside a part of his income in order to assure the payment of a certain sum after his decease. As the duration of life is uncertain it must be more or less speculation and speculation on that which is in the hands of the Lord seems to me very undesirable for a believer, though, of course, justifiable enough in the eyes of man. It appears to me to have the effect of withdrawing so much of a man's substance (of which he is steward) from the Lord's control; which I should hardly think is well. If after a man has answered every demand which God has permitted to come upon him, he still finds himself in possession of a surplus, I can understand his devoting it for the benefit of those belonging to him -- but this is different from the artificial means of life insurance and need not take a man out of the place of dependence. But all these things form part of our discipline and discover how far faith in God is real with us -- and certainly God has His own ways of caring for His people outside of the ways of human prudence. May He give you wisdom in this and in all things.
I am beginning to get into the thick of things in London and am thankful to notice the apparent absence of any contentious spirit. I trust that through God's mercy we may be allowed a moment of quiet. The fortnightly readings are being looked forward to with a good deal of interest and there is general satisfaction at Romans being taken up. It has brought home to me the importance of resurrection, as the great principle of God's actings in blessing. It is by resurrection, first in Christ, then in those that are Christ's, and then figuratively in Israel, that God will set aside the whole existing order of things which is under the power of Satan, sin and death. In Romans 3
righteousness is the basis; in chapter 4 Christ is risen on the ground of righteousness; in chapter 5 we get the setting forth of all that is established in the Lord Jesus Christ for man, in contrast to sin and death, and we are in the light of it; then in chapter 6 we accept death to sin and account ourselves alive in the One risen from the dead; it is a wholly new order.
GREENWICH,
I do not think that anyone can read the first three chapters of Romans carefully without seeing that what is prominent is man's moral state of which his conduct is the evidence. It is a sum up to show the state of the first man before God brings out the second. It is true that Christ was delivered for our offences but our justification is in Him risen, and I take it that it is on this ground that the believer receives the gift of the Holy Spirit. So few seem to me to take into account the fact that not only is man a sinner but that death is on him as regards his state here, and it is on the ground of that judgment having been borne in Christ that man is justified in the eye of God. As Mr. Stoney has put it, the man that was under judgment has gone in judgment and by the faith of His death I come into the light of all that is in Him as risen, peace, reconciliation and eternal life.
ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE,
My Dear Brother, -- I am really glad for the passage you have quoted from J.N.D. for it confirmed what was in my mind on the point in question. It appears to me that the faculties which are suited to our conditions
of life in this world -- such as memory, the power of reasoning and drawing conclusions, etc., will not be suited to a scene in which we shall know as we ourselves have been known. I imagine that a glorious body involves faculties of a different order in which we shall not recall our earthly course as memory now can -- but we do not know much about it. When Christ presents to us at the judgment-seat His estimate of our earthly course, I judge that is the end of it. What we apprehend then will be by the Spirit. Deuteronomy 8:2, 3 has certainly no application to heaven but refers to lessons which we learn here.
With love in the Lord,
I return the little paper into which I have suggested to bring a few more words, having regard that it is partly intended for christians outside ourselves. Amongst ourselves the mischief is that while in a sense the terms are accepted the great reality is so little appreciated and for the want, I think, of deliverance. I think that we but poorly enter into the meaning of Christ's death. We had the question of Romans 3 up again on Tuesday. I said the question was not the righteousness of God in all His acts, all would admit this, but of the righteousness of God as revealed in the gospel and that this was (in the words of another) in that 'the man that was under judgment is gone in judgment'. Some tried to carry on the thought of righteousness to resurrection in the case of the Lord. I maintained that in the word of redemption which was the will of God the thought of righteousness as between divine Persons is inappropriate. They tried to limit Romans 3 to sins instead of seeing the end of the man (blood) and hence they are not clear in their apprehension of the second man.
I am very thankful to have had my attention turned to Romans. I see that the epistle is not intended to give us the terms of the gospel, but to show to us God's purpose in it, to bring the light of Himself into the soul of man. Hence in chapter 3 we have the righteousness, which is the foundation in the soul, and in chapter 4 it is faith (not works) which links the soul with the God of resurrection and our Lord Jesus Christ, and in fact with the world to come, in which we have a footing, in "Christ raised for our justification". Our justification has reference to God and to that world in which Christ is supreme, and hence we accept death here.
We did not seem able to escape the subject of the house and the body.... I had deprecated the idea of the matter being brought up at the meeting, but plunged us into it by raising the question of whether responsibility (collective or corporate) was connected with the house or the body. I maintained that the body was Christ's body, the vessel of the Spirit, and that a true idea of the body did not go beyond the work of the Spirit in saints; that if there were responsibility as to the body it must belong to the Head, and that the light of Scripture as to the body (the mystery) was given us to enable us intelligently to carry out our responsibilities in the house. Some seem to fear that something is being taken from them. They have been accustomed to depend on mere statements without apprehending their import. They divorce the baptism of the saints by one Spirit into one body from the baptism of the saints individually by the Spirit, instead of seeing that the fact of our all receiving one and the same Spirit must of necessity form one body. They have an idea
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
July 7th, 1888.
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
July 11th, 1888.
F. E. RAVEN.
F. E. RAVEN.
December 24th, 1889.
F. E. RAVEN.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
October 12th, 1890.
October 29th, 1890.
October 29th, 1890.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
November 21st, 1890.
F. E. RAVEN.
(Notes have been added on pages 43 and 45 because of questions raised)
January 17th, 1891.
F. E. RAVEN.
January 29th, 1891.
F. E. RAVEN.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
F. E. RAVEN.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
May 25th, 1891.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
February 29th, 1892.
F. E. RAVEN.
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
December 26th, 1892.
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
March 3rd, 1893.
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
May 10th, 1893.
F. E. RAVEN.
Your very affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
July 25th, 1893.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
August 29th, 1893.
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
December 7th, 1893.
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
November 8th, 1894.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
November 21st, 1894.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
December 5th, 1894.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
December 17th, 1894.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
December 29th, 1894.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
January 9th, 1895.
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
January 22nd, 1895.
Affectionately yours,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
January 25th, 1895.
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
January 30th, 1895.
Ever your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
February 14th, 1895.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
December 24th, 1895.
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
GREENWICH,
April 4th, 1896.
Yours affectionately in Him,
F. E. RAVEN.
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
August 29th, 1896.
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
September 7th, 1896.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
September 16th, 1896.
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.
October 29th, 1896.
GREENWICH,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. RAVEN.