[aron]

The Christian faith settling onto on an Asian cultural substrate explains what's been puzzling. The Antioch model of localism being overturned by the Jerusalem model of centralism, for example, coincides both with the people's need to be free from external control by the west, and then coordinated and managed from within, concurrent with Nee's own path of being a righteous seeker defying corruption to being the authority holding it. First, he defied authority, then he embodied it, and neo-Confucianism gave him the template and operative thrust for each. I don't think he ever did this deliberately any more than a fish feels 'wet' when it swims. He just never knew anything else. The NT had to adapt to the east, not vice versa. Likewise, Guyon, Penn-Lewis, and Keswick were fodder for a local variant.

Second, look at the apparent illogic of simultaneously saying you have 3,000 Christian classics guiding you and saying you have no peers, no contemporaries, once Leland Wang was removed. That's an average of 1.5 individual works per year for 2.000 years, and that copious fountain of guidance dries up all of a sudden? Not logical, unless your personal arc changes from 'learner' to 'sage'. Then, it makes sense, as it fits the narrative: the dutiful student becomes the master. He listens to everyone, then he listens to none.

And the inscrutable sage, locked into a higher truth, can pan the Bible, put his ne'er-do-well children onto the church, and we all look at one another and say it's part of God's mysterious plan. Then, the sage dies and we either continue via our personal relationship based on devotion (see, the blendeds) or we declare our own unique inscrutable truth, just as Lee did before (see, Mssrs Dong, and Chu).

Suddenly, what was unrelievedly queer, and oddity piled on top of oddity, makes perfect sense, and comes together in a quite satisfying way. Our old friend human culture never left us - it was there, just neatly hidden.

One final thought: the NT also had an inscrutable sage, named Jesus. His disciples clearly didn't get it, repeatedly flummoxed by his wisdom. But Jesus was singular in type, quality and scope, by definition. He was the Christ - there was no other. But neo-Confucianism gave a back door to the 'deputy God' character. Was it coincidental that Eastern Lightning and Lord Changshou cults emerged from the Shouters? I rather doubt it.