[Cal]

"God wants nothing but Christ" is one of those unfortunate Christian maxims that easily get misapplied by people who tend to take things to extremes, Lee being one of those.

In the first place, the Bible never says God wants nothing but Christ. It says that Christ should have preeminence and have a name above all other names. You can't have preeminence unless there are things to have preeminence over. You can't have a name above other names unless there are other names.

So, in an absolute sense, "God wants nothing but Christ" is flat-out false. At best it is actually, or should be, simply a way of emphasizing that Christ is center of God's work and that he should get the glory for it. Lee pushed it to mean that God wants nothing but Christ as the inner soul/spirit content of the Christian life and the church. But it is uncertain what this really meant. Where do our souls go if we become Christ? I don't think Nee or Lee really knew what it meant. But it sounded good. It had that no compromise, take no prisoners attitude that they though reflected absoluteness for God.

Really it's just inaccurate and extreme.

This is one reason Lee had to declare we are Christ and we become God, because he already established that God wants nothing but Christ, and since it's pretty obvious we are not going to just disappear the only way to be consistent was to say we become God. Viola! Problem solved.

Unfortunately he won the battle but lost the war, ushering in all the strange psychological problems that come with trying to determine if something about me is "Christ" or me. Lee even himself at the end of his life lamented how difficult "living Christ" was, (Jane wrote about this in her book, I believe), most likely because what he imagined it to be was nothing God had in mind in the first place.