Quote:
Originally Posted by Hope
Benson and I had a lunch with Brother Lee and an older bachelor man from Waco. He had been visiting some of our meetings and came to hear Brother Lee. Brother Lee showed him much respect and engaged him in fellowship. Afterwards he told Benson and I that the brother was surely a man of spiritual depth and was very complementary of him.
As I came to know brother Lee more, I did notice a difference between his public persona and the way he treated different individuals. Publicly, sometimes he got into hyperbole. He would say something extreme and some of the more extreme personality types would take off with it. Publicly he enjoyed stirring the pot and poking his thumb in the eye of official Christianity. When challenged on any level, public or private, he way over reacted, and a fight was surely on.
I have a hard time believing he was so complicated to have come up with a method of teaching and behavior in order to create a system for enriching himself or enshrining himself as an uncontested, anointed, God-man, who was God’s man of faith and power for this hour. But it did happen! How he, the local churches, the so called “recovery” got from that simple meal in a one room efficiency with three young people to La Palma headquarters is quite a story.
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Thinking about how many experienced the "early Lee" in the U. S. A., I read a story on Watchman Nee and the influence of neo-Confucianism, noting a similar "early Nee - later Nee" phenomenon. Here is a quote below from the article.
Quote:
Confucian political philosophy has two opposite characteristics. It can be used by a person without authority to challenge the person in the position, requiring his/her virtue to match the position. It can also to be used by the people in the position to reinforce their authority by asking people to submit, because the emperor represents Heaven. In the same way, when Nee has not had authority in the church, he challenge existing authorities, including denominations, institutions and liturgy, by criticising them from the perspectives of the legitimacy of power and purity.
When Nee has been in the leadership of the Little Flock Movement, he has asked the follower to submit to his deputy authority, because he has disclosed God’s will. Being in the leadership, Nee was “worshipped” by his followers, as an emperor was described as a sage. From this perspective, this perfectly explains the reason Nee has two opposite models of ecclesiology: the Antioch Model challenged the existing power in the church, while the Jerusalem Model emphasised submission to the authority.
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You saw this dichotomy, of the initially humble bondslave, so gentle, but once in power you saw the autocratic despot. Witness Lee told us that China was "virgin soil" for the Holy Spirit to move, but he was incorrect. It was fallen and corrupted human soil, like any other. Same polluted soil, just a different flavor.