Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
I believe that Nee and Lee were foolishly believing that Chinese culture somehow was the answer to being Christ-like. They probably didn't even recognize it is such. How much do we do the same (meaning we, generally, as Americans). We believe that capitalism is the Christian method of economics. We think that being independent and doing things for yourself is a Christian virtue. And thinking that my thoughts are better and therefore right (every man does what is right in his own eyes).
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I know the discerning reader will take my previous remarks (post #279) and say that they know of Americans who were devoted to their non-LC parents, and Asians who were indifferent to non-LC family. True, but the generalization stands, as does Lee's remark that corn-fed Midwestern boys were larger than their Asian counterparts. There is always the small Iowan boy and the large boy from Shandong province in China. But on average if you make remarks about size within different populations, people will understand. Generalizations exist because there are observations behind them.
I believe that we all read things with a subjective cultural lens. We behave individually, but in so doing we at least partly act out values that we absorbed from our parent culture. Watchman Nee found a vision of the "normal church" in the text of the NT, and to some degree it was arguably truer, scripturally, than the European/American model that had been imported on Chinese soil. But he also read into it his ideas of what was normal. And "everyone line up with the person in front of you", for example, was probably a value derived from his societal heritage. In America he'd have been laughed out of the room, but in China it was taken as from God.
And I think that Witness Lee abandoning John Ingalls, his "closest co-worker" for his profligate son Philip is neither shocking nor incongruous if you remember the ingrained values he brought with him into the "glorious local church". Family was family and church was church. With the Caucasians, the local church would easier over-ride family ties. Even though he encouraged us to call one another "brother and sister", Lee clearly valued his son Philip more than his "brothers" Max Rappoport or John So or Bill Mallon. And the rest of us essentially lived in a personality cult, as we had to take his values (Philip Lee over John Ingalls and Bill Mallon) as our own.
To
OBW's post, the fact that Nee and Lee didn't see the Asian-ism of their interpretive position becomes a big problem. With Nee and Lee, the Maximum Brother (them) must be right at all times, else the whole collective enterprise will be in peril. An alternative, I believe, is not to become racist or xenophobic and decry the Chinaman Lee while asserting my own American-isms as the (superior) solution, but to realize that we
all have bias. We all have interpretive predispositions. The person who thinks that (s)he alone is "cutting straight the word of the truth" will be the most deviant. Lee insisted on being that designated "straight cutter" -- so he and his followers went right into the ditch.