Regarding Ron Kangas' assertion that Witness Lee is the greatest apostle since Paul, I pointed out in post #78 that multiple post-Protestant groups claim this for their leadership. Even, Sincheonji Church of Jesus uses the phrase: "In every age, God sends one leader with the vision for the church in that age." Of course, in the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, that one unquestioned leader is Lee Man-hee, along with his revelation of the New Heaven New Earth.
But by definition, there can't be multiple valid claims to have the one vision for an age, or likewise to one apostle/revelator/oracle for that vision and age. There are then two possibilities here: either they're all frauds, or all but one is a fraud. They can't all be true: just like the New Testament with Jesus, there may have been multiple claims to Messiahship, but there could only be one true Messiah, by definition.
Assume Ron Kangas' argument that God gives one person per age the vision of that age. So, in his version, the final version includes the stipulation that "I have the vision of the age", and subsequently that self-styled oracle dies, and the age turns (!!) and there are no longer any spiritual giants left. That's what we were told in 1997 when WL passed. As time goes on, in order to prop up "the vision", things get odder and odder, and biblical pretense is all but abandoned.
Never mind (they tell us) that there's no biblical basis, and even the OT "types and shadows" the wordsmiths typically fall back on can't support the latest "turn of the age" idea... BP, RK & the Blendeds took over, post WL. Then at some point, RK says that since Paul there's been no such church leader, and based on the person and character of the Greatest Apostle, there's clearly no peer in sight.
Ok... so I randomly found 4 other candidates for Greatest Apostle, aka Minister of the Age, or MOTA, some of whom look (ahem) a lot like WN & WL. Assuming there is such, which is genuine, and which are frauds? Forget theology for the moment, just look at their person, constitution, and character. First off, we can disallow the one who's in prison for molesting young women and girls. I know that his fervent followers say they're being persecuted for their faith and their testimony, but I question the basis of their faith or their testimony.
https://www.latimes.com/california/s...angeles-prison
Same with Nee - excommunicated multiple times by his own (!!) hand-picked lieutenants for ethical malfeasance, restored by Witness Lee's machinations - "How did you feel" when you excommunicated him, WL asked - then finally admitting in court to making pornographic films. Too many glaring issues here for MOTA-hood.
Same with Lee - nepotism, shunting church members' savings into for-profit business run by his children, then asking them to consider it a gift, when the promised "35% return on investment"(!!) never materialized, and even the original "investment" itself had long vanished. Unqualified to oversee a NT-based local church gathering, much less MOTA-hood (unless part of the "vision of the age" is "cover the MOTA", but you can see how absolutely horrific that gets immediately).
Now we've thinned the ranks... we've got Felix Manolo and Lee Man-Hee as remaining aspirants. Again, assuming there's actually one vision per age, ignoring theology, and just looking at their character & person, which of these two proposed apostles has the Genuine Vision and the Genuine Restored Church? The whole thing gets murkier, the more one examines them... neither looks promising... both act peculiar, with multiple 'red flags' signifying probable cultic activity and mindset...
I'll leave it with this: we typically don't see these self-styled revelators coming out of the Orthodox Churches. There, precedent set by previous generations restrains the madness of the would-be oracle of God, or at least keeps them from gaining sizable followings. It's with the spiritual heirs of Martin Luther that it seems to blow up into collective madness. Back to my first point: that the "each can read and interpret the Bible for themselves" has a clear downside: what if one's interpretation of the Bible is that they're the MOTA, with the vision of the age, and everyone else should get in line (per WN)?
In the Orthodox churches, they can't get much traction, but in the fragmented post-Lutheran world, you get these pseudo-Christian ministries that feign orthodoxy, but are quite otherwise. But by the time the leader is in jail for crimes, like La Luz del Mundo, it's already hit critical mass hysteria, and it's too late for rationality - hundreds of thousands supplicants traveling to Guadalajara to pray for their blessed leader who's being martyred for his Vision. The LSM is the same - by the time Daystar hit, they said, "He's God's anointed, don't question the MOTA". Today, if you ask for WL bona fides, they'll point to global training centres, multimedia websites, thousands of messages, hundreds of titles published, dozens of churches assembled, as if any of that meant validity. If that were truly the case, the Mormons would win and Brigham Young would be MOTA.