Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
And the basis of my assessment of Nee's ministry and his 'recovered' Little Flock is my own observation and insight. Nee grew up in an environment in which Westerners were widely and deeply feared and loathed. A millennia-old Oriental culture was in submission to the rough and oppressive barbarians, the so-called 'foreign devils'. Nee's selective description and thence prescription of a "normal" church allowed Chinese Christians to come out from under the despised foreign yoke, and they did by the tens of thousands.
As they streamed in, suddenly Nee found himself reversing field. Suddenly it wasn't local autonomy he saw, but consolidation. The Jerusalem Principle was discovered. "Get in Line" and "Handing over" were extracted from scripture. And so forth.
Nee's spiritual revelation and insight, so-called, was merely finding apparent solutions for temporal exigencies on the ground, and getting a few or ten or twenty verses to line up. And as conditions changed, the revelations changed. Lee did the same: whatever the situation seemingly warranted suddenly was promoted as a "flow from the throne", and "crucial principles" were either discovered and waved, or summarily ignored, depending on the weather and mood of the day.
Case in point: in the early 90s Lee received, and publicly used, the appellation "Shouters" because it was attached to something like 15 or 20 million believers who supposedly hung on his every word. Suddenly he'd take a name into his house, because it was irresistible. He'd deal with the problem later: maybe it was not a name, just a description?
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Westerners were widely and deeply feared and loathed, for good reason. Surely you know how the West pumped the Chinese with heroin under the threat of a gun? Many other bad things done. Based upon what they did, "foreign devils" is an apt description and we would have probably done the same thing in their same position.
Nee was anti-establishment and so was Christ, Luther, many others. That makes him somewhat of a hero.