Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
Igzy has postulated that the LC’s “ground” teaching is a circular fallacy if it is about unifying all believers in all assemblies within a single city under one eldership and therefore one primary set of teachings and practices. You appear to agree, but ask “what is the church?” I like that question and have included the question in my hypotheticals. But until I reread Igzy’s post, my first question was “why do we even assume that there is anything doctrinal about ground relative to the church?” The answer is because Igzy said we would assume it to be so.
I think that Igzy has started by taking the ground of the church as taught, and the church as understood by the LC and shown that as a line of demarcation, the doctrine of the ground cannot operate. Since that is how it is actually carried out, the doctrine defeats itself, although its followers cannot see that. While I had trouble sticking with his line of reasoning (mostly because I kept forgetting that he was simply assuming the LC doctrines as correct) I ultimately see what he is saying.
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Mike,
Yes, this is what I was getting at, more or less. That is, preceding from the assumption that the LC practice of locality is viable, one can prove it is
not viable.
It's not viable because depends on the required acceptance of an arbitrary set of elders as being indeed those whom God has set over the whole city. Since there is no way to prove with any degree of certainty that these elders actually have the position they claim, their assumed authority is fairly open to question and objection. Since these (LC) elders would never consider any objection legitimate, they are in fact imposing a unreasonable and indefensible requirement on the Christians in the city, and thus causing division. The model is self-defeating.
This glaring flaw in the doctrine has not been so evident because the LC has never had much competition from other groups in the same city claiming to be the church in the city. But that has begun to change. Now there are several cities which host more that one group claiming to be the city-church there. Which one is legit and how does one know? The LC model cannot answer this question, because it can't do the heavy-lifting real world problems require. When competing groups have appeared they have simply been brushed aside. The LC attitude has been "we thought of this first so we're the real thing" or "we follow the true apostle or "we have the best doctrines." These are decidedly unscriptural evidences of legitimacy which you would expect from a movement or denomination, not a legitimate church. The LC model has really only ever been a means to "we're-it-your-not" oneupmanship for churches in their movement, not a model for actually addressing all the problems which a genuine city church, if it could exist, would address.
Their model does not work because it is fundamentally flawed. But that doesn't mean you could not have a city-church. It just mean you have to give others the freedom to set up other "city-churches" in the same city. As soon as you insist on a particular leadership, you are imposing an arbitrary and unreasonable requirement on others.