Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
[Witness Lee used] his freedom to interpret, as a lever to remove everyone else's freedom to interpret. His freedom of speech negates that of everyone else..
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In my last few posts, we saw how this has been played out multiple times in the post-Protestant world: new religious groups which say they're Christian, and seem to have a strong interest in the Bible and its story of God's redemption in Jesus Christ. Yet their insistence that one individual's interpretation is the penultimate word, at the expense of everyone else's, creates a very non-Christian environment, and the church becomes a personality cult, a self-contained, self-referential pseudo-Christian world that shuts off the outside and gets stranger and stranger as the decades pass.
In the case of La Luz del Mundo, the current apostle Naason Garcia is in prison for the next 18 years, for perversions that would make the most permissive, liberal unbeliever recoil. Yet the group continues to regard him as apostle. No corrective mechanism is available.
In the case of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the leader, Lee Man-hee believes that he is the embodied Paraclete, the new John the Baptist, who is to usher in a new heaven and new earth.
In the case of Felix Manolo, group members hold that he's likewise the "last messenger" who's to bring the end of history. But he didn't bring the end of history - he died like everyone else. When he died, his son and then grandson were then to carry on the supposed vision of the age. The vision becomes circular and self-referential - that Felix Manolo is the last messenger with the vision of the age to restore the church. The vision of the age, is that this is the vision of the age. Round and round we go...
In Witness Lee, the "greatest apostle since Paul", when he died, there was to be no more apostle, but a group of "blended brothers" who carried on the supposed vision, that he was the greatest apostle, as Ron's promoting. Pretty much identical with Felix Manolo et al. To keep the vision going, the biblical basis is abandoned.
In every case, by focusing exclusively on the interpretation of one person, the collective goes into a ditch. Eventually, sin is tolerated, ignored, covered up. Everyone is expected to get in line, to obey the latest message, no matter how ill-founded. No one else can think, or act independently, "turn off your mind" we were advised.
[**What if there are other interpretations? In my case, reading the Bible I could see that "the economy of God" is probably "give to those who cannot repay you, and you will be rewarded in the resurrection." Jesus comes to this theme continually, and Paul spends two chapters on it (2 Cor 8 and 9), and continually references this in his other epistles, in his exhortations for the collections for the poor of Jerusalem. Yet where is the space for raising this possible interpretation, in the so-called Recovery?]
Also, Paul writes that there is no longer female or male, slave or free, Jew or Greek, but all are one in Christ. With Paul, you either believe into Jesus, or not. Oneness is based on faith, not on any other criteria, external or internal. Yet these groups that want Felix Manolo or Witness Lee or someone to be the Final Prophet, create these false dichotomies. If you are in agreement on the position of the supposed Messenger of God, you are in, you are one of Us. If you don't get the vision of the primacy of Brother X, then you are out, you are one of Them. This creates a false Us/Them narrative that Paul never wanted. This is the opposite of his "no Jew no Greek" rhetoric.
These groups have more in common with those who think Haile Selassie is incarnated Christ, or ones in the Unification Church, who think the same of Sun Myung Moon, than with Lutherans, Baptists or Congregationalists, or any other Protestants. These pseudo-Christian personality cults use the Protestant lineage as a recruiting basis, but once committed, new members find that it's not Protestant or really even Christian at all.
But by then, they're convinced by the incessant narrative that everyone else is doomed, nobody else cares about you but the group, there's no other place for you, you are "wrecked and ruined" (Recovery parlance) for anything else, etc etc. It gets weirder and weirder, less and less Biblical, yet you stay. The constant Us/Them rhetoric cuts off avenues of escape.
**the "economy of God" idea is a sidebar, but shows how only allowing one person to interpret the Bible cuts us off from our God-given gift of thinking for ourselves. The supposed revelation of the supposed oracle of God shuts us off from the recovered Protestant tenet of every person being able to read the Bible for themselves, and discern its meaning.