Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
Wait a minute, I thought Christmas was supposed to be about Christ's birthday. So why people are unwrapping gifts for themselves? How is that not hypocritical. And would you let someone hang a pentagram up in your home or church? If not then you are also hypocritical because why should you allow one pagan symbol such as a decorated tree and not any pagan symbol? I think you know in your heart you would not accept a pentagram symbol in your home or church but you would gladly accept a Christmas tree because you have been taught that it means something Christian when in fact it has been as pagan as a pentagram all along.
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I was in the Local Church for 20 years and completely, totally rejected all things Christmas during that time. Please refrain from saying what I would and would not gladly accept in my home since you don't know what you are talking about.
My point which you continually ignore, is that Witness Lee's stance towards Christmas is completely opposite his stance on deification.
Christmas has a pagan history so we must be absolute to reject it.
Deification also has a pagan history, but WL simply redefines it.
Does that work for Christians who redefine Christmas to be "an opportunity to share on Jesus incarnation"? Nope, once pagan, always pagan.
What about deification, the heart of the pagan religion, the heart of idolatry. Nope, as long as there is a caveat somewhere that although Witness Lee is being deified that doesn't make it idolatry then it is OK.
Once I went to Taiwan and the pagan festivals were very clearly not treated in the same way. So whereas you might look at Christmas lights as merely pretty colored lights that are nice in the dead of winter, Witness Lee condemns them as pagan. Yet, the lantern festival is fully enjoyed by everyone in Taiwan including the saints without any suggestion that its pagan roots condemns it.
In your mind the Local church is so pure from Pagan practices, but for those of us who lived in the church in Taiwan (I was there for 8 years) we saw a completely different side of Witness Lee that completely ignored pagan and sinful practices (Chinese New Year is celebrated by drinking whiskey and playing poker all night with money given in red envelopes).
How do you explain this? I have come to the conclusion that Witness Lee's teachings were designed to serve Witness Lee. In the US he knew that Christmas was a big holiday, if he could get all the saints to ignore their family and spend the time at his training, 10,000+, each paying a $50 fee, then he could make $1 million a year with two trainings. It would be even better when you throw in "training materials". Soon, the Recovery Version at $100 a pop would be a very big money maker (every single member, more than 10,000 needed a copy -- another $1 million).
But when interest in him began to wane and he risked becoming irrelevant he would instigate a firestorm over nothing. "The Son is the Father", a statement clearly designed to be perceived as heretical, but then explained away in the fine print. This was done over and over with Deification being the last and greatest example.