Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
Remember, dear readers, that Satan loves to divide. He is the prince of division. What is the issue of all Watchman Nee's teachings on the church? Division after division. How many thousands of christians are no longer associating with one another, because of Mr. Nee's teachings? I believe they have been duped to take their eyes off of Jesus.
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Now, it may seem ungrateful, and disrespectful, to equate Watchman Nee's teachings with Satan. Surely the Mr. Nee was a dear brother, the latchet of whose shoes I may be unworthy to unloose, to quote John the Baptist. True.
But what was the basis of Mr. Nee's understanding of the church? Was he not looking through the lens of a corrupt history? Was not his understanding warped by centuries of "church tradition"? Or was his understanding of the word he translated "church" the same as the understanding of those first century believers, whose "church life" he sought to emulate? I daresay no.
Let me give two examples for my thinking. First, at the close of the Medieval Period, with the simplistic idea of "Heaven" versus "Hell" guiding their labors, the early Bible translators into English ran into problems. What to do with words like "Sheol", or "Hades", or "Paradise", or "the pit", or "the grave"? Not so easy. Your pre-existing concepts may force you into uncomfortable linguistic compromises in order to render the ancient parlance into your own.
Second, what about the word translated "saints"? The centuries-old Catholic tradition of "sainthood" affected (distorted from the original) the modern understanding of the word. To be a saint in the 20th century meant something rather different from what it meant to the recipients of Paul's epistle to the Corinthians. So Witness Lee tried to "recover" the word back to its original meaning, and usage.
Likewise, the word "ekklesia", I suspect, meant something different to Watchman Nee from what it had meant to the people who wrote, and read, the New Testament. Mr. Nee's understanding of the "restored" or "recovered" or "normal" New Testament church got distorted by the lens of history.
Therefore I disagree with his attempted recovery, and his teachings probably helped fuel further divisions among the saints, which we label "Great Lakes churches" and "Brazilian churches" and "Living Stream churches" and so forth. The supposed "recovery" was merely a continuation of a long-standing trend of Satan dividing the believers into separate, adversarial and antagonistic groups.
A church is just a meeting of believers, no more and no less. The meeting may be for prayer, for Bible study, for exhortation, to preach the gospel, to remember the Lord, or some combination thereof. The church is a temporary confluence (assembly) of redeemed sinful humanity for the purpose of rememberance, of acknowledgment, of following and serving, for instruction, and praising of the resurrected and enthroned Savior Jesus, to the Father God's glory, through work (operation) of the Holy Spirit. To hold the church as something in and of itself to be an object of one's attention, affection, focus, teaching, labor, or affiliation, is to raise up an idol to compete with God. This is why I quoted Deuteronomy 32, with "gods recently arrived", "which are not god". Only the Lord Jesus should be equated with God. Nothing else.
"And with those words he dismissed the 'ekklesia'". Acts 19:41