[OBW]

I will make a comparison to another current Christian writer and teacher — Brian McLaren.

Brian McLaren grew up in a branch of the Brethren (not sure which one). While he is nearly my age, he is quite steeped in the postmodern way of thinking. At some point, he began to take the church that he pastored in new directions. I would not say that those directions were bad.

And as he did that, he began to question many things. Not to destroy them, but to understand them. He has asked questions like "is it important to understand and declare to support substitutionary atonement to be a Christian?" Without getting into where he has finally begun to go with answers, I would assert that those questions are extremely important.

And they are not important because we need to get them right. They are important because it is often not so important that we get them right. And that is often his point.

But there are some things that he has asked and said that leaves big question-marks about him. He has asked whether it is important to bring a Buddhist to believe in Jesus or just to follow Jesus' commands while remaining a good Buddhist.

The problem is that the questions are not simply asked to get people to rethink the importance of things and put them in a perspective. They are too often asked in a way that implies an answer that is not acceptable. I would assert that, while substitutionary atonement is true and important, understanding it is not. His non-answer seems to imply that it might not even be true. When asked point-blank, he dodges and asks how anyone can question his position on it. But he never states it.

Lee sort of did a similar thing. He stepped into a time frame in which the ways that we practice our Christian life were being put to question. The old answers were Sunday morning meetings (and sometimes Sunday night and Wednesday night). Sometimes it included strong emphasis on the sacraments. But outside of the pentecostal/charismatics, it was mostly head knowledge and/or rituals. None of those are necessarily bad. But they are incomplete.

There was also a movement under way with some Protestants and even the RCC to have some kind of ecumenical unity. Lee came along and provided alternate answers for those things. And his answers led in a different direction. They led to the creation of another exclusivist sect.

But the response here has been to refer to some of what we got from Lee as "legitimate and powerful spiritual aspect to his ministry" and "genuine insights into the Bible and the Christian walk." My question is whether the things that you would now say are truly those things, are they what Lee was teaching, or alternatives that came about because something/someone got you to look at the whole thing from a different perspective?

Assuming that saying "spiritual aspect" means of the Spirit of God and not just "spiritual" in the way that the world refers to people who are into all kinds of weird religions, psychics, feng shei, yen/yang, what did we receive uniquely from Lee? I do not refer to him as a heathen poser. He was not ignorant of truly spiritual things. But he was virtually always one of those trying to promote himself, and almost always for the purpose of becoming something that it is not evident that he actually was. And much of it was so that he had position to try business venture after business venture to make money off a captive audience.

I am seriously skeptical of someone with those credentials being used in such a way as we seem to think (or at least have thought) that Lee was. Besides repackaging something that was not so unique (and sometimes just giving something common enough of a different packaging to hide its commonness), what did Lee provide that was so noteworthy and spiritual?

Is Lee's way of saying that he always used the entire Bible so special? Did we learn so much from it? Or did we just get pushed out of the old ways of taking things the way that others had already packaged it for us? Yes, he used a lot of scripture from all over the place in a lot of ways. But was he really showing us something special? Or did we just morph his insistence on "first mention" and other things like that into a willingness to challenge the status quo and look at more than one verse at a time?

In other words, do we really hold onto much, if any, of his unique teachings, or were we told of a different way to look at things. Then, even if we rejected his view, we had been freed (somewhat) from our old ways. Does any of this help the belly-feeder out of being refused? If Paul would have rejected him by the late 50s, what kind of teacher did we allow among us, and even more, to lead us, all the way up until 1997 (for some) and even beyond since his "continuation" just keeps doing Memorex repetitions.

I have never suggested that we got nothing. But did whatever we got that is of lasting value come from the special teachings of Lee and the LRC, or was it something else? Are we unwilling to let go of the idea that, while we gained some freedom from old ways, was the substitute truly better, or just a pot hole on the way to the true road?