Quote:
Originally Posted by Igzy
Lee ran with this idea of "natural concepts" to the point where a natural concept was anything but his proprietary "God's economy" theology.
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Everyone here agrees that not every word of the Psalms has to be a "word of Christ" per Col 3:16 or a word of "spirit and life" per John 6:63. Many psalms are shown to be revelatory of Christ by NT reception, some seem iffy at best. But given clear and repeated NT citation we'd do well to at least consider Christ, and not reject out of hand simply because the author of the psalm was a sinner. If that were our metric what would happen to the Bible!
Or that the psalm's author expresses "fighting words" or "judging words" - what of the sobering scenes in the NT of the Judgment Seat of Christ, or the clear spiritual struggles portrayed?
"Then there was war in heaven; Michael and his angels struggled against...." . . should we think that here the NT author was expressing vain, pre-NT concepts, or that the angel Michael in heaven should 'turn the other cheek' and love his foe? Hardly. So, why a knee-jerk dismissal of such spiritual principles when we see physical struggle or judgment referenced in OT psalms? Why not take a moment or two and consider the unseen, eternal spiritual world(s) beyond the temporal physical one (2 Cor 4:18; cf 1 John 2:16,17)?
On a related note, coming to
Igzy's quote above, it's long seemed to me that there were two "untouchables" in the Bible for Lee: one was Jesus Himself, and the second was Paul. Jesus is obviously the sinless Lamb of God, but Paul has a special place because of Lee's cultural and social yardsticks: Paul was the untouchable one, the apostle of the age, so-called, and everyone else had to "get in line" behind Paul. Paul was positionally untouchable, per Lee's oriental cultural/societal understanding. Social cohesion, shared meaning, values, and purpose - here, the church as Lee imagined it - needed a center. Thus, to Lee, Paul couldn't be seen making doctrinal error. Peter could err, and did, as James could, and as John could, but not Paul. Nor by extension could Nee (except for the early book "Spiritual Man", largely plagiarized from the unbalanced Penn-Lewis). Lee was consistent from Day One: proper church order meant one person had to step up and be Deputy God and everyone else had to arrange their spiritual, social, mental and behavioral worlds around that fixed point. I heard that concept reinforced a million times while in the LC. Everyone got it. Nobody forgot it. It was ingrained, unquestioned local church culture.
Now, how does that play out when we come to Psalms? Lee with his "Economy of God" metric could weigh psalms in the balance and find them wanting. But nobody could ever weigh or critically evaluate Lee; none put him in the same scale he put everything else in, including the Bible. Lee was positionally untouchable: he'd cavalierly dismiss the "vain concepts" and "natural thinking" of the writers of scripture, but nobody could ask if he ever suffered from the same malady.