Quote:
Originally Posted by Freedom
Our culture is central to who we are. We cannot function socially without understanding how to function as part of our culture. The Bible does not tell us that we need to ‘drop’ our culture. It only tells us that in Christ, individual cultures don’t matter and are not recognized.
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I'd modify the last sentence a bit. I think that the Bible does recognize culture, and likewise we are able to recognize our culture. But as we recognize it, it fades away, because it's not what God is after. It is a process. Ha-ha.
In other words, we see and acknowledge our culture(s), but we're now able to do so with the 'mind of Christ', and it begins to loose its pernicious grip. Little by little. More and more, we are able to see Christ on the one hand, and culture on the other. And we begin to let go. We recognize it and simultaneously begin to recognize that it doesn't matter that much.
Contrast that to WL, who
didn't recognize (his) culture, and thus it became the proverbial elephant in the room. Invisible, unnoticed and unremarked, but crushing everything.
Somehow he thought he'd gotten past culture, and convinced us of that, but it therefore had us in a death-grip. Literally. It killed the church life dead.
The way that you can really see what culture did to the LC was those places where it butted up against the Bible. Culture won, every time, hands down. No contest. Elsewhere, we pretended that we had no culture but 'heavenly culture' and no mandate except scripture. But the tentacles of culture actually permeated everything.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NewManLiving
But the real issue here is LSM's emphasis on their definition of oneness. For all their High Truth and inner-life speaking, in practice they are extremely outward-centric people. Very systematic in their philosophy and adherence to LSM formula. Instead of becoming God in life and nature they become more akin to bobble heads; Absorbing vast amounts of knowledge in the hopes that this will "dispense" God into them.
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The vast amounts of knowledge that was absorbed was from one limited man. Prolific, yes, but extremely limited, and in more ways than one.
There is a vast amount of knowledge and wisdom in the Body. An essentially unlimited supply of the Spirit. Yet we limited ourselves to the knowledge and wisdom of a single fallible, peculiar minister. By analogy, one can read the same third-grade primer 86 times, but it isn't somehow transformed into a college textbook. It still is what it is.
So our oneness was in limiting ourselves to what was put forth by an ex-Southern Baptist, ex-Bretheren Charismatic Bible teacher from Yantai, Shandong China. When Jesus talked about the "narrow way", I don't think that's what He had in mind.