Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
Those are propositions that we can surmise, but I don't see how we can ever answer conclusively in this life. It is precisely our actual epistemological status of uncertainty about metaphysical matters like God's will that Witness Lee took advantage of when he claimed to KNOW God's eternal purpose. We were fools to relinquish our uncertainty for the pot of certain gold at the end of Lee's rainbow.
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Of course we were looking for something better. Unity and spirituality have good aspects that were attractive. The Lord's Recovery has good aspects. There were worse ways we could have taken. "What we really needed" is a phrase that requires an ultimate answer. Our minds are too puny for more than intimations of such things at best. But, yes we could have done better.
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"That good" implies that you have a yardstick with which to measure such things. My yardstick is full humanity or human rights as I will explain below.
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From this I take it that you are measuring the Recovery against "everyone else's teaching." That's a lot of teaching. It would probably take many lifetimes to read and understand all that. But yes, the Nee/Lee system has errors. And here is one error that I cannot ignore. The capacity to reason is a fundamental human right. Forbidding reason by the practitioners of a system prevents them from realizing their full humanity. That's was a fatal flaw in the Nee/Lee system. Any system that forbids reason makes an unreasonable claim on us that we are free to reject. That's why I left the local churches.
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While I believe it is safe to say that we look at some of this differently, I don't think we really disagree.
As for "everyone else's teaching," I think that once you toss the outliers (like Nee and Lee) despite the somewhat broad variety in emphasis and even position on things like Calvinism v Arminianism, style of baptism, and a whole host of secondary issues, I may not prefer them all, but I do not have the problem with their teachings and their methods that I do with Lee and the LRC. And a lot of it can be wrapped into what you called the denial of the human right to think (my paraphrase). And that is a big one.
And once you are allowed to think for yourself, it becomes obvious that the reason they didn't want you to think because the only reasons you would pick them over almost any other Christian group were things that you would disagree with if given the opportunity to think.
So they had to shame you into thinking you were unspiritual if you even considered disagreeing with them.