Quote:
Originally Posted by kisstheson
Your experience matches my experience, dear brother Ohio. I was always enthralled by all the "riches" Witness Lee could extract from the Bible by allegorizing. Surely we in the Local Churches had special access to riches hidden in the Word of God that the rest of Christianity knew so little about!
This article by dear brother Nigel is a "game-changer". While properly limiting the scope of his article in the section entitled "Some Caveats", Nigel proceeds to demonstrate how excessive, and how often arbitrary, was WL's approach to allegorizing. Nigel is ripping out a whole section of the bottom layer of LSM's "house of cards".
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Yes, brother
KisstheSon, you mention Nigel's section entitled "
Some Caveats", which is indeed necessary for his document, but not really for me. Having been thoroughly indoctrinated in his "
allegorizing ways," my pendulum has only moved from its extreme position back towards center. Many WL allegories like "
leprosy in the house" I had long rejected, but last night, possibly in a dream, I was rehashing the old WL method of allegorizing from Exodus? --
"Here we have the number 96, which is 8 times 12. The number 8 means this and the number 12 mean that. It is also 6 times 16. The number 6 is such and the number 16 is such and such ..."
In the WL scheme of things, nothing in the Bible was what was actually written down. It all needed proper "interpretation." It was all coded language, supposedly hidden in scripture by the Economical God who wanted it all encoded by the latest MOTA during these final days of His "recovery." Much of this "coded language" in the scripture had never yet been "seen" in church history, with the few exceptions like dear brother Athanasius.
The paper mentions Origen as the "origin" of Biblical allegorizing, and Romanism as the "
allegorizing-Nazis" in church history, but he leaves out the exclusive Brethren. Their liberal use of "
hate-allegorizing" launched into overdrive with George Muller. Listening to George V. Wigram (
a 19th century type of Benson Phillips and Ray Graver) et. al. one might think that every story in the O.T. was written with Muller in view. Amassing the volumes of exclusive rhetoric against Muller, one might think he was the most condemned man in all church history.
How dare the Lord answer any of his prayers!