Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
...while I don't find anything entirely wrong about this short devotional by TAS, I do think that it misses the point in two ways. First, it is too focused on a mark on the bark of a tree in a large forest that is what Paul is trying to speak about. Second, with or without the first miss-focus, I believe that the goal is too ethereal and almost totally impractical. Not that ethereal is entirely wrong, or that the practical is everything, but that if there is no practical, it does not matter how right your ethereal is.
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I didn't really make the second point of actual and practical working-out of one's salvation, but my "focus on Christ instead" option would (hopefully) bring the reader there. But the first point was exactly what I wanted to say, but less inflammatory (ha-ha). There really seems to be a mis-emphasis. Now, we all do that, but when a teacher does it, and even codifies it, as WL did, it can really go bad places. So I was rather strong against TAS' emphasis, especially coming from the LC tradition. We majored in the minors and ignored the majors. One-half of a verse would get a page of small-print footnotes. But when you look at the context of the actual verse, it really didn't imply that. But the half-verse was convenient for some abstraction which made the speaker look good and made the hearers feel good, but not much to do with the Jesus of the gospels.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
TAS is of a tradition that, like Lee, Nee, and many others, is too focused on isolated spirituality and not on the full gospel of "Christ with man" to reclaim us as those bearing his image in the world here and now. Not just in the New J. And until then, not just in meetings.
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The focus can cause one to say, "Gain Christ!!!" over and over, then go home, satisfied, "What a good meeting that was! So enjoyable!!" Thinking that shouting Paul's words and we have his "lofty" experiences transferred. Perhaps not what
TAS or
StG was doing but the similarity is there. How do we not know that James' "True religion is to visit widows and orphans and keep oneself unspotted from the world" isn't the height and depth and breadth of Christ? I mean, isn't that in line with Jesus' teachings? Doesn't that possibly count every bit as much? Not to promote James per se but rather, there are many views of this marvelous person, through his disciples, and the various testimonies of the impact he made on them.
And "Isolated spirituality" was right. I thought that I was on the express train to Overcomer Land but where was the outflow into a darkened world? There was a fundamental mis-orientation there.