Quote:
Originally Posted by VoiceInWilderness
At first WL meant to be filled with the actual Word. Then his writings became "better than" the Word. It is better to be filled with the "interpreted word" or the "digested word" rather than the pure word.
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I honestly think that Lee considered everything he taught to be from the actual Word. From the beginning to the end. But as we have begun to see in other discussions, both Nee and Lee incorrectly understood what the Word was teaching. They passed on their culture as the best Christian living. And they bought into some of the most divisive teachings of prior generations as teachings of unity.
I am convinced that Lee believed what he taught. And that he was blinded by his bias and culture to seeing the true teachings of the Word. This is seen most evidently in the idea that the Christian is not to do anything but just let life do it for you. This is not taught anywhere. But Lee taught it because his own experience was that he couldn't recon himself dead (for example).
Why did he despise the book of James so much? Probably because it pierced through his lack of growth in character. So spirituality had to become a substitute for character and righteousness.
He made a big deal of the Sermon on the Mount as being the Kingdom's Constitution, yet how much of his teaching in other places refused the idea of hungering and thirsting for righteousness and instead hungering and thirsting for dispensing so that one day righteousness would just happen without thinking about it. If that is the way it actually works, you don't have to think about it, much less hunger and thirst for it.
And I am becoming more and more convinced that even Nee's writings are polluted with somewhat less obvious substitutions. Nee may never have taken the positions that Lee did, but he still had a skewed vision of the Word of God. It is never more evident than when reading Authority and Submission (Spiritual Authority). His obvious mishandling of the Word of God in the opening chapter opened the doorway for him to create a false overlay for the rest of the book — the idea that authority and submission are some overarching principle to understand everything else by. But the verses he uses in the first chapter do not mention authority. So Nee retranslates power into authority. Not an A = B fact. Not even an A = B, and B = C, therefore A = C fact. Instead a replacement because he said it was so. But it is not. Yet we bought it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by VoiceInWilderness
The Hunky Dory parable helped us to enjoy the word. It eventually led to problems because we didn't go on from there. There was this unwritten concept that we should just eat the Word but not try to do any of it unless the leadership said to.
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This little parable was cute. The whole of it created the impression that the Word of God was not to be considered, pondered, reasoned with, or learned, but just absorbed by eating. And eating was declared not to be learning about it, or studying it, but simply chewing on it.
I do not know when that was first published in The Stream, but if the time I saw it was the original, it was no earlier than late 72 if not early 73. And the mode of "eating" was never more obvious than the times of morning watch when verses were seldom read more than once, then chopped into one to three word fragments and "eaten" by repeating those little bits, punctuated with "Oh Lord," "amen," "hallelujah," or other similarly short phrase that is not part of the verse until you have spent sufficient time turning a meaningful sentence into a few paragraphs of unintelligible pureed soup.
You can say that the ingredients and nutrients are there and that it therefore represents "eating" the Word of God. But that is true only if the metaphor of eating the Word is meant to be milked for every possible similarity to eating that you can find. If it meant that the collection of words into sentences and paragraphs and whole discourses of thought are of no real consequence and the random slicing and dicing and rearranging and repeating of them with other words interspersed is of benefit to us, then what was actually written was really not important.
And using any collection of random words should be able to achieve the same result.
Unfortunately, that is sometimes what Lee thought. Maybe not because he didn't like what it actually said, but because he was blinded by what he wanted it to say, and therefore did not take due care for what it actually said.
And when your only solid base of truth — the Word — has been obliterated into puree, how do we ever really understand what it is that the Word is speaking to us? Or it is accepted as really meaning whatever Lee said? We were convinced that considering the words as words in phrases, sentences, and paragraphs was anathema to the correct understanding of it all, so we did not challenge anyone's rendition of anything. Or rather we only challenged everyone except Lee. For Lee, it was time to shout "hallelujah" rather than actually read it and ask "where did you get that?"