Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
Yes that would be a contradiction wouldn't it. Would you say that Witness Lee believed the true church was invisible for 1700 years? I think he has made reference to various denominations being part of God's unique move, or "the Recovery".
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This is where his theology was fuzzy and inconsistent.
Nee and Lee desired to define what a practical church was because they wanted to be able to claim their groups were indeed churches (and possibly so they could claim others were not). The problem is although they came up with a definition, it is not one the Bible defines, it is one manufactured by focusing on certain patterns in the Bible (local churches) and making them rules, while ignoring other patterns in the Bible (house churches, regional churches, and that the Bible does not clearly define what a "practical church" is, nor ever asks us to discern what one is).
Their advantage, if you want to call it that, is that they felt they could confidently claim their groups were churches and other groups were not. Their disadvantage was that they became strident and ultimately sectarian and even divisive.
They also became ultimately absurd. Lee probably wouldn't have said that the Church was not visible before the localism of his movement. Yet that was the upshot of his doctrines, because he claimed that the Church could only be expressed through local churches. Well, if the church can only be expressed through local churches, then that means without local church nothing of the Church could have been expressed.
So which was it? If the Church was seen before localism, then localism is not required to express the Church. But if localism is required to express the Church, then it was not seen before localism: ergo, no Church seen on earth for centuries.
This is know as
reducio ad absurdum, taking an idea to its logical and absurd conclusion, and thus showing it to be most likely false.