Quote:
Originally Posted by Drake
Generic perhaps but not without substance.
I'm glad you asked because I was willing to let it go at that thinking it might just be me. But since you forced me to think about it.....
Like the articles found in the Washington Post I know a hit piece when I read one. I have seen many hit pieces from the economic professor Tomes and this is but another one of his twisted weaves.
And there is merit to looking at the forest and not just the trees. . . .
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I would agree that sometimes there is something in the forest that is not seen tree-by-tree.
But when you are trying to determine the value of something as significant as the line of reasoning that Nee used to put A&S/SA into the Christian landscape, it is worthwhile to actually see where he starts and how he goes through it. If you simply note that it seems spiritual, or that it "hangs together," that might not be enough. I did some significant review of the first couple of chapters several years ago and came to see that if you just brush through the first chapters and accept the little that they say as true, the rest follows. But if you take the time to ask whether that little in the first chapters is actually sound (logically, grammatically, spiritually, biblically, etc.) there were some problems that had to be overcome to continue on to the rest of it. And without those chapters and their groundwork, you never get to rest.
Besides, when you insist on viewing it from 40,000 feet, you miss that there are details that just aren't quite right. Like declaring that no one had the position to complain or do anything about certain persons because they had some "position." Only God could deal with them. That is simply not true. The Bible is full of stands against that.
But if you start by agreeing that the declaration that there is "authority and submission" in the verses in chapter 1 of the book, then you have bought Nee's false word substitution.
And it is in the trees. You need to show why the first chapter is even correct before you get to the rest. It is because authority and submission is given such a high and lofty place that Nee goes on to chapter 2. And then what is in chapter 2 is so important that you can now go on to chapter 3. If you are just taking it all in isolation without any critical thinking, then it probably is cohesive and has a good "forest" kind of effect. But when you start at the entrance to the forest and find pine beetles attacking the pines, and labels on the Aspens declaring them to be White Oak, then you begin to wonder if you are following a marine biologist on a fact-finding trip through the woods. He may make it all fit together and look pretty, but it is full of factual errors. He may think the beetles are simply symbiotic with the trees. And that anything with a white bark is a White Oak.
And that coconuts are migratory.