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Originally Posted by aron
How Does This Relate to Local Church Discussions?
It is to ask a question, which I have not seen anyone answer yet, despite my repetitions: if it is okay for Luther to leave Catholicism, why not also for Nee to leave Luther's Protestantism? And why not for Dong Yu Lan (et al) to leave LSM's movement? All I ever see is the subjective "It was okay for Luther, and Nee, but not for Dong Yu Lan." In other words, I can do it but you can't. Why? Because.
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It was OK for Luther to leave Catholicism from his point of view not the RCs point of view. It was OK for Nee to leave Protestantism from his point of view not many missionaries point of view. Of course it's OK for Dong Yu Lan to leave the LSM movement but they don't think so.
Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
The Resoration History usually runs thus: "Mankind dwelt in darkness, then God raised up (Watchman Nee, Ellen White, Mary Baker Eddy) to bring us the recovered truth in these last days". The LSM version of this has, for example, Luther "recovering" justification by faith in the 16th century, then Brethren Assemblies with their OT types, then Mary MacDonough recovering the three parts of man in 1922, then Nee recovering the ground of the church. My point was that Origen covered types and anti-types with arguably greater depth and sophistication than Govett and Panton ever did, and Erasmus wrote on the Paul's "three parts of man" four centuries before MacDonough did. And the book I cited was quite well-known in Europe in the first decades of the 16th century.
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The common currency of restoration/recovery and their step-child remnant movements is that God specially selected them and gave them special light and they conveniently make church history match this position. They put themselves in a select stream of history. But if you look closely at the "new light" they supposedly have you'll find that many Christians before them "saw" the same things in the Bible.
What happened when Witness Lee came to the U.S. in the 1960s with his package of new light is he was met with 3 things:
1) Spiritual hunger especially among young people who had a willingness to hear new things
2) A general ignorance of Biblical truth among Christians
3) Many Christians dissatisfied with their existing "church life" experiences
So his teachings and practices of seemingly new things were not actually new but they were new to the people hearing them. Eventually some of these people realized that the new light he claimed to have were just rehashed Brethren and inner life teachings.