Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
The collection for the poor of Jerusalem was not incidental, to be ignored, as the first few chapters of Acts and Jesus' "give and it shall be given" and "store up treasure in heaven". .. Paul was right in the middle of it, and preaching this "economy of God" to every church.
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In post #311 I jokingly referenced the "lost writings of Paul" with 2 Cor 8 and 9 as examples. In the LC, when we'd read about the collection for the poor we'd say, "That's not God's economy", or about the Jerusalem pillars asking Paul to only remember the poor, and his eager assent [!] and then we'd say, "Sorry, not God's economy", or reading the first chapters of Acts, the selling of properties and giving to the apostles, who distributed proceeds to the widows, and we'd say, "Not the Normal Christian Church Life of Watchman Nee." No, in the LC we were on a mystical plane, above the actual doing good to others. In fact if someone made issue it was called "dead works". In FTTA we were told point-blank, "Don't waste your time".
Instead, we focused on a half-verse, 1 Cor 15:45(b), and on writings not penned by Paul, probably not even read by him (John 1:14, Rev 1:4). Somehow this WL construction was the revelation of the age, and yet Paul gave no evidence of teaching this as "God's economy". What an impressive confidence game - we'd fly cross-country or from foreign locales to sit in front of this supposed Seer.
I'm not in agreement with the teaching, but I'm definitely impressed that such a rank con job got pulled on so many otherwise intelligent folks. The genius of the plan was that the incessant shouting made one oblivious to the fact that the slogans we shouted had little Biblical basis. Those warm fuzzies derived from group shouting were probably not the Holy Spirit but something else, verified when we overlooked plain Bible verses, even chapters of Paul's writings, and turned a blind eye to repeated gross sin in the leadership. This doesn't seem like restored or recovered Christianity at all, but some perverse invention. I think of Walter Martin's quote (paraphrased): "The worst cults are those that most closely imitate genuine historical Christian faith expressions when they're actually nothing of the sort".