Quote:
Originally Posted by YP0534
I believe another "Lee" would have sprung forth eventually, if it weren't for the one we got.
It was inevitably going to happen under any "vision of the church" that was espoused.
In actual fact, there IS and cannot be a "vision of the church" in a "universal" sense.
Or rather, if there IS, it's just a denominational foundational principle looking for someone to flesh out the idea with another organization.
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My thoughts as well. This is why the discussion of Nee & Lee must be in a larger context, I'd argue; otherwise we go round in circles like dogs chasing their tails, and in 200 years they're going to be arguing about whether someone else is a prophet or a charlatan.
I believe God has allowed all this to transpire over the centuries. God has allowed the 'bamboozling visions' -- thanks
awareness -- to cloud and distract the believers from the simple call to love God, to believe in Jesus Christ, and to receive the person next to you (your neighbor) as if you were receiving Christ Himself. God has permitted the "vision of the universal church" to be espoused, with all of its consequences. But His call remains.
People like Bahkt Singh and Watchman Nee were trying to "go back to the beginning", and as such, to some degree we are their heirs. But to follow them, we have to leave them, and continue the journey, back to the beginning.
The Jews hearkened back to Moses as their sure foundation, but Jesus revealed Moses as a contingency of God's providential hand, and not the source of present reality. In Matthew chapter 19 Jesus referred them twice to "the beginning", before Moses (vv. 4,8). I believe we can free ourselves form the grip of the "vision of the universal church" only by going back to the beginning, to the call of Jesus in the gospels. The clarity and simplicity of that call is can be a salvation from the many grand "visions" that inevitably followed.