During the First World War he served as a chaplain to the forces and what he witnessed led him to take a pacifist position, a subject on which he wrote extensively for the rest of his life.

[5] His third marriage was to Hélène Jeanty, a Belgian widow whose husband had been killed by the occupying Germans in World War II.

She outlived Raven, dying on 9 October 1990 and, continuing the charitable work during her lifetime, left £150,000 to Christ's College to support medical students from overseas.

[17] He won the James Tait Black Award in 1947 for his book English Naturalists from Neckam to Ray.

[19] Historian Peter J. Bowler has written that Raven's book The Creator Spirit, "outlined the case for a nonmaterialistic biology as the foundation for a renewed natural theology.