Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
This is a distinct example of how one can be so much against WL, that he is willing to alter the basic truths of the Bible in order to reject every statement Lee has ever made.
How can one be part of the church, if not begotten of God? Is that not what tares are -- part of the church, but not born of God? Which aspect of the church includes the un-regenerated?
These are the kind of basic frustrations that ex-members face when visiting this forum. Many Bible teachers, apart from WL, have made similar statements as that which Igzy has quoted above. I certainly have no problem with it. If OBW's pastor had said it, he would have received it without hesitation.
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There you go again.
I would suggest that you did not read all of my post and understand it in full, but instead took a single "cookie" of the text and made it into something that stood alone. If all I had wanted to say was that you didn't have to be begotten of God (in the sense of salvation) to be in the church, I would have stopped after that opening point.
But further on I admitted that if all Lee meant was to say that you have to be saved to be in the church, then that was good. But if that was the case, then you wouldn't find that garbage only two paragraphs later. And if I were trying to find the good in Lee, I wouldn't need to go to the last chapter of some book, and read only one paragraph and stop reading. I wouldn't need to be careful that the importance of being begotten was to be essentially cast aside and an overlay of becoming part of the Trinity (the Quadrinity?) made to be the important thing about the church.
Do you think that Christianity is considered to be part of that Quadrinity in the understanding of the majority of the LRC faithful as the result of hearing or reading that particular portion? Since virtually nothing of Lee is ever just written, but first spoken, do you think that those that heard that message went away impressed by the fact that since they are begotten of God, they are in the church? I really don't think so. Just as Lee probably said that one sentence because he knew he had to, then spent the rest of the time talking about other things, the popcorn testimonies afterward, along with the talk at the dinner table the next day, was probably about being part of the Quadrinity.
My point was that the only truly sound thing in his statement was a warm-up for the second act. He didn't write the chapter to tell us that we needed to be begotten of God to be in the church. He said we need to be begotten of God to slide the obviously correct in ahead of the questionable so they could go down together. Like the little pill pockets we put medicine in for our 15-year-old Chihuahua so he won't try to spit it out.
And if the "medicine" was really good for us, then that might be fine. (I'm still not sure that tricking anyone into believing even something true is a good thing.) But we are not talking about medicine. We are talking about putting a bunch of some non-nutritive, inorganic substance into just enough food that you will take it, then become convinced that the non-nutritive portion is the most important part.
Once you do that, then your very correct statement about needing to be begotten of God becomes almost irrelevant. So if you had read the whole thing as a package, you might have realized that I did
not intend to suggest that Lee's one good statement, if taken alone, might not actually be good. Rather that it was part of a larger context in which its correctness became secondary to the garbage that it was being asked to support and convey.
As for what I think about the ones who teach at my church, including the senior pastor, I can assure you that I take exception to things they say all the time. I can give a specific example from the most recent sermon. My wife and I both considered it to be a very incorrect interpretation of scripture. But it did not teach anyone to feel superior, or to ignore righteousness.
The spiritual and moral significance of the things I take exception to from my current sources are in a completely different league from what I keep seeing here and recalling from my days in the LRC. I never heard all of Lee's teachings. I never read all of his books, even when there weren't as many. But the things that stand out in my mind from the time that I heard or read any of it back in the 70s and 80s are not the things that I want to be holding onto today. I don't recall much of the simple gospel, but rather the uber-wows of being God's chosen ones standing in for the majority of poor,poor Christianity that was all going to spend 1,000 years in a little dark closet.
Please read my posts as a unit, not like verses of scripture, all broken into discreet snippets to be understood alone. I do not say that the snippet Lee said was wrong. I say that contextually its correctness was misused and even lost in a sea of incorrectness. It becomes a lost ingredient in warmed over lentil soup.