[Dave]

Originally Posted by rayliotta

Perhaps it's all doctrine, and none of it's doctrine, all at the same time.

As a junior high school kid, I heard that Witness Lee was the Minister of the Age. I heard that kind of a lot. And I read Life-Study messages in which Witness Lee allegorized the minute details of which parts of which animals were considered "clean" and "unclean" in the Old Testament, and the measurements of this type of wood, and that type of gold, in the tabernacle, et cetera, et cetera, with all the minutiae endowed with a particular, spiritual significance...

So then I learned about the gopher of ambition, and next thing you know, there's yet another "Biblical type" in my head. Er, I mean, my spirit. Yeah, in my spirit. That's right. (Remember the doctrine of concentric circles? Wait, what? I'm getting dizzy... )

But then, I think I know where Witness Lee got the gopher metaphor. I think he was on a plane. Watching Caddyshack. Without the audio. Because he didn't want to buy the headphones.

You might be right about Caddyshack. I just don't know how he came up with the fact that the gopher was ambitious in that movie but without headphones he could have reached any conclusion.

3 circles. I drew that for many people and either brought them into the church or to Jesus esp in Santa Cruz. The details of the tabernacle...when I left the LC I started going to an AOG church and after a few months the pastor asked me if I would teach adult Sunday School. I said yes and went home and built a tabernacle in the wilderness out of felt and balsam wood. I used it to teach the adult sunday school class and it seemingly went quite well but in the end I couldn't go on simply because it didn't connect. I was talking allegorically trying to spiritualize it based on what we had learned from WL and other authors (F.W. Grant) to make it relevant and I am sure they may have been impressed but I didn't think it was connecting. I left. In a practical way I don't think in the environment of the LC it didn't connect either.