Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
If a person comes into your church meeting, looking for inspiration and truth, and to escape from the bondage of Satan, and we want to boil the idea of God down to "x" for them, then we should keep it simple. What truth encompasses the whole of scriptures? Maybe something like "love one another". Or "believe into Jesus Christ and be saved." This kind of command arguably pervades the whole story. I don't give that as the definitive answer here, but rather as what our message, and our answer, might reasonably look like.
But if our supposedly distilled truth is that God became flesh who became Spirit who became intensified to indwell the believer making them God in life and nature but not in the Godhead, you arguably end up cutting off a lot of scripture that you can't make conform to your theology...
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Since leaving the LCs I have gravitated toward the small, community "fundamentalist" churches. Usually affiliated with some larger body but largely operationally independent. I am the crusty old dude sitting in the back muttering to himself. But I receive them and they receive me, and the pastor occasionally invites me up front to pray for the offering, or some such. Or I take over the "Bible study" section for a few weeks.
If anyone asks me what my theology is, I tell them some variation of, "God loved us so much that He sent His only begotten Son that we might not perish but have everlasting life." Something like that. Boilerplate stuff. It's there in the Bible and most Christians seem to agree on its meaning. Plus it seems to have been put in there purposefully, to give some encapsulation to the whole story. And yes, it does say, "in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit", too (Matt 28:19, also e.g. 2 Corinthians 13:14). So I have no problem with 'formulaic' statements of the Christian faith as long as someone doesn't bash me on the head with it.
But if some intelligent, thoughtful 'seeking one' came in and said, "Who are the
bene Elohim of the OT? I see you saying that God sent His only-begotten Son, yet I see repeated references to multiple, divine offspring (Genesis 6, Psalm 82). I even see Jesus quoting some of these scriptures (John 10:34). So what gives with your 'only begotten Son' business?"
As long as they weren't being quarrelsome, and seemed to be genuinely seeking, you know what I'd probably say? "I'm working on that one."
Point is, I don't carry my doctrines to where I have to dismiss or ignore the scripture. If I don't understand something conceptually, that doesn't mean that I am a doomed sinner. I think that the collective witness of the church is stronger if we receive one another, and don't cross swords over things we are still working out (and yes, we are still working out stuff 2,000 years later). My individual witness is stronger if I don't pretend to be some Mr. Know-it-all with answers to every single question.
To go back to the subject of "Apologetic discussions regarding the teachings of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee", which I see helpfully displayed at the top of my computer screen, the problem of the teachings of WN & WL is that they're paradoxically too highly developed to bring along the basics like "love one another", and they are too simple to deal with all the complicated stuff in the Bible. The deep stuff. So there you are stuck in some weird limbo-land, chanting "Jesus is the living spirit/We must now proclaim", and pretending that you have arrived at some high peak of theology, at some kind of consummation of the divine revelation. That, my friends, is fantasy-land; I am looking at Melodyland versus Fantasyland. And right next to Disneyland - how appropriate.