[aron]

I think I started on the idea of the incessant drumming of a "New Christ" in the LC veering dangerously toward a "different Christ" which Paul warned against. My argument was primarily twofold: first was from Amcasci's testimony where he got excited for Jesus, almost went into the "Children of God" cult, then ended up in the Local Church of Witness Lee. Basically he was young and enthusiastic and naive. His title of his essay was "Zealous and misled" and I felt that the zeal of the impressionable new ones might lead them to be taken by "different Christ" than the ones the apostles preached.

I showed a quote from the LSM on the Wiki "Local Church Controversies" where they essentially blamed the "cult" label on the post-Jonestown hysteria. WL was putting out "new and fresh" Christ and it got lumped in with the cults. I made the point that the reason WL got a following in the Jesus Movement days was because he was pushing something new, which was attractive, and the reason he got called cultic ten years later was because he was pushing something new, which now wasn't socially popular. The cultural pendulum had swung and Lee and Company were on the wrong side of it.

Then I switched gears and asked if Christ got old somewhere, that He had to become new? Was this a mis-reading of the NT accounts? Were perhaps we, the Old Creation, supposed to become new? Christ became flesh on our behalf, and as such was the Last Adam, and took oldness to the cross, but once crucified did it have to happen again and again?

Or was the "new Christ" of WL just a re-labeling that would make the Madison Avenue merchandizers envious?

But really I was just thinking aloud. I tend to paint in broad brush strokes conceptually, and by the time you get to poking my ideas publicly they often deflate. So I'm not on record as accusing WL of selling a "different Christ" but rather that there's danger, and we should examine his "new Christ" paradigm carefully.

And lastly I noted that the "new and fresh" Christ in the LCs didn't seem to care about the poor, and tolerated the elevating of persons above the flock, with the attendant lording over, and seemed to be pretty tolerant of public abuses by leadership (who were today's "Moses" and "Noah" and got a special pass, it seemed). So there was some grist for the mill.

But I'm not sure if I started anything positive. It's like the "cult" thing, it seems to have such a large subjective element involved in the evaluation that arguing for one side or another might be fruitless contention. So I apologize if I seemed to be taking a definitive side. I was just presenting an argument for public evaluation.