[aron]

Originally Posted by Ohio

...this is all too common with some Christian teachers in their attempts to package the expanse of scripture within their own limited hearts.

With the Lee/Nee ministry we were supposedly exempt from this limitation because Nee read so many books. We were told of his vast library, from which he extracted the wheat and discarded the chaff.

So the limitations of Nee were perhaps not as egregious as those of others. Remember how we heard the word "balanced"? How Nee had a "balanced ministry"?

The problem with Nee, and later by extension Lee, wasn't that they were limited. It is that was that we got taken by the pretense that they were not limited, that they had "all-inclusive" ministries. One-stop shopping. Just read Lee and you will get your complete, Recommended Daily Allowance of divinity.

So then the shortcomings, the limitations, the defects and errors snowball without correction. You get one ministry which is beyond the correcting forces of the ekklesia's multiple witnesses, and which attempts to subsume the whole witness of the ekklesia.

I think "God's economy" has something to recommend for it. After all, Paul wrote the phrase in his epistles. But look what happens when you try to measure the whole Bible by your understanding of one phrase.

Originally Posted by Ohio

...I was thoroughly convinced that "God's Economy" was the consummate view of scripture, whereas it was really just one of many "peep holes" through which teachers have viewed the whole. It seems every congregation and denomination has latched on to a few of these "peep holes"...The real tragedy is that all these different views become sources of conflict instead of complimentary insights into the whole of God's word.

Right. This is essentially what I was saying above. The ekklesia has the real balanced, complementary view. And Jesus gathers His ekklesia together, not via one man's ministry, or one theological viewpoint, but via 'the Body building itself together'... without pruning and limitation you get something analogous to a cancerous cell taking over (dominating) its host body, when only Jesus should be the "all in all". None of us is qualified to infiltrate the entire Body. None of us should presume that our peephole into the revelations of God's Christ should dominate the entire conversation.

Originally Posted by Ohio

...I used to think that WL's Life Study was a "verse-by-verse study of the Bible in the way of Christian experience," but so much has been discarded by WL as irrelevant. For example, WL has a hundred messages about proper Christian service, yet he has totally missed the matter of "good works." So much of his ministry was skewed in the direction of self-serving interests...

Faith instead of good works.

Dispensing instead of obedience.

Paul's oikonomia instead of Jesus' oikonomia.

Note that the first items listed are not wrong. But when they dominate the conversation it weakens and loses its reflection of God. It loses balance; it loses the natural tension of allowing different "voices" in the conversation. And that is how you end up with a study of the Psalms in which the vast majority of the text is simply set aside as "natural", i.e. of no value. It is not studied; it is rather dismissed without study. The "verse-by-verse study of the Bible" becomes a study of only those Bible verses which match the viewpoint at hand.