Quote:
Originally Posted by Freedom
Before I get into the specifics of Nee’s teaching on humans having a “latent power” in their soul, I wanted discuss how he arrives at this conclusion. Chapter 1 of “The Latent Power of the Soul”, is full of speculation by Nee, as well as an extremely literal interpretation of Genesis 1-3. Nee argues that because God gave Adam dominion over the whole earth, it would have necessitated him to be much more powerful that we are today. Consider the following excerpt from chapter 1:
I’m sure that Adam had different capabilities that we have now, however, isn’t it a bit much to say that he had power “a million times over ours”. How does Nee know this? It is nothing but speculation, and it may or may not be true.
To further show what kind of “power” Adam had, Nee then goes on to say that in order to name all the animals it would have required incredible brain memory. He also discusses the size of the Garden of Eden and what it would take to manage it:
Like I said, all of this speculation may or may not be true, and the bottom line is that it’s just speculation. Genesis doesn’t leave enough details in order to arrive at these type of conclusions.
After all this speculation on what kind of “power” Adam had, Nee discusses what happened to it after the fall:
So Nee went from saying that Adam had this extraordinary power, to claiming that this power is now immobilized and even still resides in all of us in that immobilized form. I don’t know about anyone else, but I see all kind of problems with this kind of argument. I really have no interest in speculating on what kind of capabilities or power Adam had, and I think it’s fair to say that we will never know. To make the claim that this “power” still resides in us in an “immobilized” form seems a bit far-fetched to me.
|
Nee was a young man when he wrote this. Sure he might have been brilliant. But all young men are prone to far-fetch fantasies.
And he was obviously writing under the spell of Penn-Lewis, as he quotes her over and over again, as an authority on these matters. And Penn-Lewis was too far-fetched to use as springboard.
As a result Nee couldn't help but be far-fetched. And I think that's being kind. As I think all this latent power of the soul is actually a little tetched. But it suits Nee's sense of specialness, by condemning all of man's religions as products of the latent power of the soul. At this point Nee was a budding MOTA.