Quote:
Originally Posted by awareness
I guess you are right. ExLCers know full well about poor Christianity. Some of them, I suppose, like our brother Ohio perchance, gave that idea up after leaving the LC, and now no longer look on Christianity as poor, except here and there maybe ... like Lee's Local Church. To them, the ones that warmed back up to what Lee called poor, even Roman Catholicism isn't totally poor. It gave us our canon, and the creeds. That's not totally poor. Some see Evangelical Christianity as not poor.
So maybe they still hold Christianity as poor, but only Imperial Christianity, that was born with Constantine, they hold as poor, and that to them is when Christianity became poor. They hold the traditional Protestant view.
Not all of it was/is poor. In fact, those thinking Roman Catholicism made Christianity poor, stand on what the RCC founded : The Canon ; the selections of the books that make up our Bible ; that we now stand on as the very Word of God.
And that to them is the antithesis of poor. Problem solved. Christianity no longer poor.
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To Witness Lee, Christianity was a negative term. It meant that humans had constructed something other then what God intended for Christ. Lee's often repeated slogan for this was "Every 'anity' (sic) is a vanity." Ergo, for Lee Christianity is a vanity. God's intention was to constitute the church with Christ. Christianity was an aberration.
While Lee admitted there was an element of Christ in Christianity, as he explained it, in Christianity Christ was mixed with something it shouldn't be. Metaphorically he referred to this as "leaven".
When I was in the local church I was fully indoctrinated into this kind of thinking and I accepted it wholeheartedly. But historical research shows that non-Christ elements such as Hellenism were there from the beginning. And, the perfectionism implied in this kind of thinking is Neo-platonic and doesn't seem to be attainable in this world.