Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
History is partly parochial. Our limitations should be acknowledged. But Nee's history was supposed to be all-encompassing, and thus we Westerners swallowed it as if it were not an Asian reaction to Western imperialism, but as if it were an account of objective reality itself.
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I think that the reason that many of us took the "recovery" history and theology hook, line and sinker is because it seemed more complex and nuanced than what we'd been used to. Nobody ever talked in my Baptist church about the 1,000 year kingdom in Revelations 20:1-6. But there it was... six verses in a row kept repeating it: 1,000 years! So even in my suspicious mind, I had to admit that Lee and the Local Churchers had something I hadn't seen. In my Fundamentalist church I don't remember anyone talking about the distinction between Babylonian captivity and Egyptian captivity, and between the wilderness and the good land of Canaan. Etc etc.
Probably, what had happened was that, over centuries, the religious narratives had become "boiled down", and reduced, so whether it was the RCC/Eastern Orthodox liturgical cycle or the Fundamentalist Protestant "justification" dogmas, the story repeated in every Sunday morning service had become small and simple. Not much was needed to prop it up. The Bible we were familiar with was a small set of familiar tropes (the 4 gospels, a few epistles, some OT history types) and that was good enough, so we were told. "Believe and you will be saved", I heard over and over.
Along came Lee with his Brethren background and we were snowed under with verses. Believe me, other than vague references to "tribulation", they never talked about the book of Revelation in my community church! Who wants to read about plagues of fire and boiling heat and vapors and smoke? We knew it was there, but nobody wanted to look at it. So a lot of the Bible was basically off-limits. Same with history. Everything that didn't fit into our parochial views was basically put in a closet and marked "do not open."
Then Lee came along and seemingly blew everything up. In reality he just gave us a bigger box. But it was still a box. It still had edges, with an injunction "do not go beyond this point." It was actually still parochial. But we were told it was all-encompassing. No culture here; no self, no reaction to previous cultural modes. Just pure God. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
That's why Lee & Co were able to keep the sheep in their fold: they convinced us that everything outside their box was "fallen human culture" and everything inside it was pure recovered truth. And even when it started to taste bland like cardboard, we just had to keep saying, "Yum, yum."
Now, it's dawned on me that my own writings may reveal me as merely a "bitter ex-member", trying to tear down God's building. Maybe it is my wild, individualistic American culture reasserting itself. Maybe I'm merely reacting to what I see as Oriental cultural imperialism. But even if so, my Western cultural upbringing surfacing through my writings doesn't mean that Nee's Eastern culture didn't surface through his, right? I argue it's the opposite: that when we look at the world, including our religious world (ideas, behaviors, groups), we'll evaluate what is "normal" and "abnormal" based on culturally-derived norms. We'll filter our experiences for meaning based on culturally-instilled values. That proposition shouldn't be too shocking -- why do we think that Nee and Lee were somehow immune from this?
We got tricked by a "confidence game", and it was effective because the one gaming us, our new Prophet, was more assertive than we were, and waved more Bible verses in the air than we were used to seeing. So we thought that we were submitting to God, but were actually submitting to the thought-world of our Prophet; but which world, we were constantly reassured, had no vestiges of fallen human culture! And when that fallen human culture did eventually and undeniably reveal itself, it was too late. We were in: we'd fervently declared that we were "wrecked" for Lee's Local Church, and felt that there was no longer any way out.
Again, this view is a arguably a culturally-derived one. "The group is all and in all" is very Asian; the idea that the individual only has value in the group, by the group, and for the group. But if you don't recognize the source of that idea it will hold you and never let you go.