Quote:
Originally Posted by NeitherFirstnorLast
Chapter 1 Cont'd: On Lee's Warning Against Scrutiny of his movement.
"Nonetheless, as we begin our examination, we are well aware of Witness Lee's viewpoint on such an undertaking:
'In my entire Christian life I have never seen one Christian who, when he criticized and opposed the local churches, was ever blessed by the Lord from that time forth. I have observed that all those who have opposed the church life have become backsliders. There has not been one exception. Let them all be put to shame and turned backward. It is not a small thing.... If you hate the local church, you will have no more growth in life. There will be no rich reaping and no rich harvest.' (WL, Christ and the Church Revealed and Typified in the Psalms, 1972 pg 199).
|
Lee's mentality was to take the basic truth of the Church (and the local church) and identify his movement solely with it. Therefore to oppose his movement was to opposed God's very Church.
Well, of course, any Christian who genuinely opposed the idea of the Church itself would experience a decrease of blessing. What's fallacious about Lee's mindset is he reserved the status of Church only his movement and the groups in it. It was a kind of bait and switch mentality, what I have called equivocation--playing two or more meanings of a word or idea to an advantage.
It would have been the same error for him to say to oppose his teaching was to oppose salvation itself, since he believed his teaching embodied the idea of salvation better than was ever uttered. He didn't exactly make that error (though he came close), but he did make the same error with the matter of the Church.
As to Lee's never "seeing" anyone blessed by the Lord after criticizing his movement--was he omniscient? Really was he even paying attention? Few people's awareness of what was really going on around him was more limited than Lee's. And even if he was aware what went on outside his little world, would he have judged it objectively? I doubt it. His pattern and the pattern of his followers is to ignore their own failures and nitpick those of others. He saw exactly what he programmed himself to see.