Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
Notice that Christ never teaches, "Love God with your whole soul and strength, and love the church". No, he says, "love the individual person next to you." This is the balance that frees one from loving some mythical pie-in-the-sky "Christ" while despising all else.
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I'm going to continue this, using another referent as my touchpoint.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WitnessALot
So the truth competes with the need for social acceptance (i.e., approval from the crowd). When we were following Witness Lee, hanging on his every word, it wasn't really about a search for the truth; rather, it was about social acceptance within a highly particular social context. It was about holding on to all the benefits (community, belonging, purpose, etc.) that we derived from such social acceptance.
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In my case, I grew up on the frontier. We wrestled with the land to survive. Nobody was there to save you, it was you and that fencepost (and then the next, and the next). My parents faced the frontier, mostly alone, they survived and their survival meant that I got to wrestle with a fencepost, too. But the collective was always there - I speak English because I'm an extension of the English-speaking family. Same with culture, including religion - I got brought into a Baptist church at a young and impressionable age, and was told that the flames of hell were licking at my feet, unless I repented and believed. That fire was not my rugged individual creation, quite the contrary.
Kierkegaard's quote shows that this individual/collective issue isn't limited to the Asian Mind, but I'd argue that in the Little Flock/LC it took a decidedly Asian cast. Watchman Nee took the Western "individualistic" aspect as his fulcrum to reject the West on its own terms. He, like Luther rejecting the Catholics, was free to reject the Lutherans (and Baptists and Methodists), and create a local assembly more to his own tastes. He's thus widely attributed to the rise of indigenous Christianity in China. But the irony is that 100 years later, his exported variants are nothing resembling indigenous or 'local' Christianity - they're Chinese-flavored assemblies! The one who threw off the imperialist yoke became the imperialist.
As an example, to publicly criticize Mao Zedong in PRC today is to court complete social, political, and economic isolation and ostracism. It's socially unthinkable, even 50 years after Mao's death. Likewise, criticizing the "deputy God" in the LC was (and remains) akin to "rebellion against God". Even, I stress, when the "deputy God" had children who were molesting church members and taking their money. But in a western-flavored personality cult, it's not necessarily so. The International (nee Boston) Churches of Christ, formed by evangelist Kip McKean, had similar evidences of Lee-ish mind-control, except when the McKean children strayed from the group, the leader was removed, per the idea that "all scripture is to be applied to all members", even (!!) the Group Leader.
And that, to circle back to Kirkegaard, and
WitnessALot above, is the danger: the "truth" of the collective can be entirely against the purposes of God, but we rush pell-mell forward, anyways. The only real difference between the ICOC and the LC is that the first strayed from God in a Western-leaning individualist manner, but the latter took on a decidedly Asian turn.