Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
My point is that perhaps WL wasn't necessarily a snake oil salesman, as much as he was trying to fulfill his "church" mandate. The Living Stream Ministry, the full-time training, all of that came out of the requirements for the collective. WL's cultural predisposition wasn't the individual looking for the Spirit to guide him home. Instead his primary "vision" was the collective, and so he worked for the collective, and was willing to lie, to cover-up, to manipulate people, and to lift himself above the flock. Because he felt that was what the collective needed to go forward. All this was required for "good order in the church." So that was where the Deputy God teaching came from, and the idea of unquestioning obedience to the one in front of you.
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The Body of Christ is a kind of symbol or metaphor (or illustration, type etc...) in the Bible, meaning the expression is not a statement describing Church as an physical entity. We can pay attentin to the fact that the seven gold lampstands in Rev. is a kind of symbol of churches. WL has made this point clear by saying that "The churches, sygnified by the seven golden lampstands,..." in his footnote of Rev. 1:20
But, when we comes to the matter of the Body of Christ, WL's teaching on it gives us the impression that he is describing the Body of Christ not as a symbol but as a physical entity. In the footnote of Eph 1:23, he says the Body of Christ is.... an organism. If I had been in the position of him in the matter of putting together footnotes of the bible, I would have said like this... "the Body of Christ is a symbolic expression of an organism, putting emphasis on the functioning of church members for the expression of Chris...", but interestingly, WL seems to stick to the direct statements by just using the copula "is".
Additionally, even though WL says the head of the Body of Christ is Christ, sometimes he also says there is such members as a Seer (Watchman Nee), deputy authority, promient apostles..., which leads us to the conjecture that the Head, the Christ, can be seen through this "special" brothers. We know the resultant outcome. "Just follow those brothers, not asking back or suspecting" etc.
To my best knowledge, this kind of sad predecament has been warned by a famous theoloian. Søren Kierkegaard. He emphasized the single individual before God. You can check his teaching here ->
http://sorenkierkegaard.org/single-individual.html
I opine that "Being collective" has been over-praised among the LCs, and part of it was due to Asian mind of WL and other Asian brothers, I do not know how much they contribute to this result, though.