[UntoHim]

***I wrote this post yesterday, and it's pretty much a day late and a dollar short at this point, but I'm going to put it up here anyway because it fits in with the general theme of the thread.****

Excerpts from the Athanasian Creed:
We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; And yet they are not three Gods, but one God. But the whole three persons are coeternal, and coequal. So that in all things, as aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.

Thankfully, many Christian churches and ministries over the past number of decades have returned to giving more dependence upon, and emphases in the major Christian creeds. It was only during the "liberal" period of the 19th and early 20th centuries that mainstream Protestantism turned away from these creeds, and this turning away resulted in many of the aberrational and heretical forms of liberalism so prevalent to this day.

What many of our brothers and sisters today don't seem to realize is that these creeds were not an attempt to formalize or codify the major teachings/doctrines of the faith per se, but rather as a reaction to so many of the aberrational and heretical theachings that had taken hold in the first couple of centuries of the church. Most of these heresies were some form of perversion of the biblical revelations of the Trinity and the Person of Jesus Christ, as related to us by the Lord Jesus himself in the gospels, and the Scripture writing apostles in the balance of the New Testament. By the dawn of the third century, there were already numerous "apostles" wanting to "recover the original meaning of the scriptures" (sound familiar?)

Subscription to (I use this term loosely) the major Christian creeds can serve as a protection against many of the common heresies, especially those against the Gospel, the biblical view of the Trinity and the Person of Christ. They are not designed to answer any and all deep theological question regarding the nature of the Trinity (NO extra biblical writing can do this), however they can serve as a fencing, as it were, keeping our teachings and beliefs within the pale of sound biblical borders.

It should be noted, especially for our purposes on this forum, that most aberrational or heretical teachers attempt to lead their followers as far away from the orthodox view of the Trinity as related in the major creeds, and Witness Lee was no exception. What part of "We stand outside of and apart from historical, organized, institutionalized Christianity" did anybody not understand? (from localchurch.org) Not only did Lee attempt to "stand outside of and apart" from the orthodox teachings of historical Christianity, he lead his followers to believe that he, and he alone, could bring his followers back to a "recovered" understanding of the major doctrines of the Faith, including, and especially, the understanding of the nature of the Trinity.

The bottom line, at least insofar as can be related in this short post, is that one only need to compare and contrast Witness Lee's teachings regarding the Trinity with the biblically orthodox view as related to us in the major creeds, for one to come to the conclusion that Lee's teachings do not reflect a biblically orthodox revelation or sound understanding of what was related to us in the Gospels, or in the writings of the original apostles.
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