Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
...we were ignorant of the OT text. WL said, "There's nothing here. Move along." And we were ignorant, and believed him, and went on. If we'd lingered there, singing the psalms as Paul twice encouraged us to do, including in WL's beloved epistle to the Ephesians, then we might actually have "apprehended with all the saints, what is the height, breadth, depth", etc...
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Today I argue that Lee made 3 errors in viewing the scriptural conjunctions of Old and New Testaments. He had a historically-developed lens, that of reaction to Protestantism, which was itself a reaction to Catholicism, which was a reaction to Eastern Orthodoxy, which was (probably, I am stretching here) a reaction to the nebulous and swirling heterodoxies of early Christianity. So Lee had a clearly post-Protestant lens, and was far, far away from the social and intellectual milieu in which the writers and readers of the Jesus era sought meaning, but he didn't see it. He thought his lens was pure, handed to him by God Himself. Watchman Nee, "raised up by God", had supposedly gone beyond all possible bias and ignorance. All the conceptual veils had been rent before Nee.
And culturally, Lee had an Oriental lens, which picked up on certain characteristics of the text and ignored a lot or the rest. For example, he said that the epistles to the churches in Asia in Revelations 2 & 3 showed that all churches "should be exactly identical". That is a clearly Asian cultural reaction, of trying to maintain order, which necessitates uniformity. Individuality should be not only repressed, but sought out and crushed. Why? It threatens order. So anyone in Lee's Local Churches who tried to think, and persisted in this dangerous habit, got branded as "independent", then "rebellious", or "leprous", or "ambitious" or similar castigations.
Third, Lee had a personal lens. He somehow thought that he was the unique "close follower" of the "seer of the age" Watchman Nee, and like Nee he'd been somehow elevated into the position of a "Spritual Man", with all traces of the fall somehow transformed away. The only things left for him were service and transfiguration. So Lee could engage in all kinds of manipulations and conspiracy mongering, all the while being white as snow. I bet he really believed that. But probably David Koresh also thought that he really was the last prophet of the Seventh Day Adventist spin-off group called the Branch Davidians.
We all have some subjectivity, bias, ignorance, and are partly veiled. We sloooowly remove the bondage of "self" and "old man" by seeing Jesus before us, there in both the OT and NT texts. It is a process: today I seem to focus (fixate? obsess?) on fringe stuff that seems to give me life, or at least sustain my interest, and I like writing about it here. But I have my own biases: the "rugged individual", the "free-thinker", the "cultural elite" etc. I know this. Hopefully, nonetheless, my thoughts here make some sense to others who don't share my biases (in my mind, I actually was clearly and logically following
bearbear's theme of a "supernatural worldview", but that may not be evident. I spun it off from his thread for just that reason). I believe the dialogue between the Jewish and Christian texts is very rich, and we have merely begun to understand it. It is slowly opening before us, and it richly rewards those who sustain interest in its streams of life. There is a "divine and supernatural light", a real "supernatural worldview" there. The fleeting references in the NT, pointing to the Old, suggest deep, profound, and rich conceptual connections. We have hardly exhausted them.