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Originally Posted by Jo S
I agree that Nee had a false concept of the human soul. But putting that all aside; if we can't know what the soul is why does Jesus command us to Love the Lord will all our soul? Surely if he commanded such a thing, he's implying you can know your soul.
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I had that thought some years after leaving the LCs. If Jesus said that you should love your neighbour as yourself, shouldn't you love yourself? How can you love your neighbour if you don't know what constitutes "yourself"? Likewise the soul, how can you lay it down if you don't know what it is? I don't mean semantically, but experientially.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jo S
I'm glad you bought her up. I read in Latent Power of the Soul a quote of Jessie Penn-Lewis that ... refers to the Body of Christ as a "her". Correct me if I'm wrong but Jesus Christ is male, right? Wouldn't making the head and the body of Christ as opposing sexes promulgate androgyny? Of course this all comes from the gnostic Roman Catholic "Sophian" doctrines that teach that the bride of Christ is also the body of Christ and this union of masculine and feminine creates a sort of "holy" spiritual union or matrimony. You can say this thought is very "Jezebelian" in nature. I touched on this is another thread but did not realize until now the origins of this influence within the LC's.
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I don't think Penn-Lewis or Guyon or Fenelon or others as 'wrong' per se, not having read enough to judge. But there is certainly danger in opening oneself to such spirits. The counterfeits are allowed entry when we are in ecstasy.
Let me give another example. A brother on this forum, awareness, has said that his regional elder MP told him, "You will take my personality as your own". Whose personality was he fronting? Witness Lee's. Who was Lee fronting?
Another example: while Witness Lee was telling the reporter in Seattle, "Here we are so free", his hatchet-man RG was in BM's face, telling him, "Here, we do what we are told". This kind of two-facedness went on all the time. Like a dysfunctional family with a "public face" and a "behind-the-scenes family life". Now what spirit was at work? In any case where humans are, there is reason to be cautious, but where we are dabbling in mysticism and subjective experience of spiritism, we should be doubly wary.
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Originally Posted by Nell
At some point Christians need to understand and acknowledge that there are two spirits. One is Holy. The other is not. I once witnessed a meltdown of a brother in a meeting. There were 50-60 people there who witnessed this. All the words he spoke were “right”. However, everyone there clearly knew something was “not right”. This brother wasn’t around much longer after what happened in that meeting.
This would have been the appropriate time for leadership to help all of us to understand what had happened...if leadership themselves understood what was going on. Instead, publicly it was ignored. Privately, I could never forget what I saw and I could never reconcile “release your spirit” with what I saw.
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