Quote:
Originally Posted by Cal
There is nothing wrong with the idea Christ is the life. The Bible teaches this. The question is what does that really mean, how should we view it and what it says about how we should believe and live.
When I analyze the LR, I look for clues of how they went wrong, and one conclusion I have come to is they value knowing life more than knowing God. You can't just say one equals the other and that's that, because if that were true then why not just talk about knowing God? That's what the Bible teaches to know. The Bible never tells us to "know life."
The Greek word for "life" is zoe, which in Greek means the highest form of life. This can imply life as an essence or life as something lived out. But it doesn't imply, to most people, personality. The word "God" is definite. It implies everything about God including his personality. "Life" can be taken as something impersonal, especially when emphasized in the way the LR does.
Yes, God is life and his life includes his personality. But that's not the mindset of the LR. Their mindset is that life is a force that is somewhat impersonal, as if God is mindless and everything about him comes "spontaneously, automatically" from his life without even Him having to think. It tends to make us view him as less than a person. And that's what I observe in the LR. Ideas like the "processed God" and the "all-inclusive dose" do the same thing.
I'm talking about tendencies here. It's not black and white.
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If what you are describing by making this distinction between God and divine life is a situation in which the term "life" in this context was abused, I heard Witness Lee do that and wondered about it when I was there. The "Unchained" videos deal with that problem in various ways. Witness Lee stripped the Christian life of its ethical content and that content is based on God's personhood. I see that.
What I am insisting is that what happened there was an abuse of what Jesus means by the word in John 14:6, 11:25 and elsewhere. "The Life" is the life of Christ which is a life that perfectly integrates righteousness and compassion. It's not the life of a MOTA and his zombie followers.