[OBW]

While I understand most of Friedel's complaints back in #156, I think that in one way he misses the boat of Nigel's complaints against LSM and Witness Lee. In his point 4 he says:

Yet, I believe Mr. Tomes has done the Lord’s seekers a disservice; he has possibly done a lot of harm to the faith of some believers with his criticism of Witness Lee’s lack of Greek knowledge. Someone can pick up his vitriol and end up in the spiritual gutter with no hope and no interest anymore in the Lord; it has happened many times in the past and it can happen again when anyone decides to attack another believer and many are damaged due to the fallout. Sure, Witness Lee often lied and regularly exaggerated but in much of his ministry there is some merit, once you have eliminated the fluff and dross. That is, if you can get yourself to actually read it. I cannot.

First, this point is bookended with the claim that believers may have been harmed by suggesting Lee doesn't really know the Greek very well, then saying Lee's ministry is of "some merit, once you have eliminated the fluff and dross." How do you suggest that believers are even possibly aided by a ministry that requires everyone to know what needs to be ignored? How is it a disservice to point people away from a ministry that needs more than normal discernment to discover the "fluff and dross" (errors?) to find the merit?

I mean, if he cannot actually get himself to read it, how does he think it is going to help anyone else? And I suspect that Friedel is capable of figuring out what is not worthy of keeping.

But if it was really about how good Lee was at knowing Greek by himself, I might agree with him. But, like Nee before him, there is the assumption that Lee knows how to spot the right Greek scholars in each case and is therefore giving the best analysis in each such case.

So how do we toss Lee's word studies (or supplied word studies that fit his theology)? Why do we think we need them? Does anyone think that if we read the scripture as it is we are getting bad theology? If it says that we know something, do we really get something important out of "knowing" which source of "know" is being used (and whether there really is such a distinction)? Or love? Or Life? or Word? Almost none of those words "simply" mean what Lee said they do. It is an oversimplification. And in some cases creates distinctions that are virtually nonexistent.

And as has been pointed out by several, most recently by awareness, there is no meaning added to the Greek word for power due to the use of it as the word from dynamo which is, in modern usage, a power plant.

In short (too late) Lee didn't need to know Greek. He just needed the opportunity to make distinctions — real or imagined — so that he could seem to rise above others in the eyes of his loyal followers. It may be that Nigel has overstated some of it. But not much. It is not that there is clearly a better choice in all cases. But in many cases, it is true that Lee made unwarranted distinctions — less for improvement of scriptural/spiritual understanding than for isolating himself as a superior source of knowledge. No Lee did not claim to know Greek well. But he claimed to know how to choose between alternate theories by those who were. Yet in most cases, not even knowing about those alternate theories is actually a spiritually sound place to be.

God is love. Period. That is understandable. Don't need to parse Greek words.

And for God's economy, the worst thing about that one is that he simply said it was true because he said it. He claimed that a thorough study of the entire scripture would show him to be right, but couldn't muster even one example. But then in training after training, "God's economy" became the reason that words did not mean what they said. Or the reason to disregard whole sections of scriptural text. He never pointed out any of the places where "God's economy" (as he defined it) was supported, but instead where the overlay of God's economy required that we understand something not otherwise found in the text. It is the ultimate begging of the question. The un-established that manhandles everything else that did not fit into Lee's private theology.

For a man who openly admitted a lack of Greek knowledge, he surely used marginal word studies over and over to arrive at novel positions that continually isolated his group from Christianity. All as he worked his way from "just a preacher" to the MOTA.