[OBW]

Covert,

I was not suggesting that you simultaneously start all the threads, rather that you start one that is demonstrative. For example, in the first part of your opening thread, you say something about God's life and nature and that the LC does not seem to know what that is. So instead of concluding that the LC speaks about it but does not know what it is and calling them vainglorious and their extra-biblical sources as being Satanic, let's establish what the Bible says about the nature and person of God that is commanded as the example for our living. Once we have that established, then we can look at some of the things the LC says it is, or look at how well they do or do not live that life.

And we may find that we also need to take some time (in another thread?) to differentiate between the ritual, dietary, and righteous laws of God. Why? Because it would appear that failing at so many things may stem from the refusal to recognize that the righteous requirement of the law was not abolished even if the ritual and dietary laws were.

But even after doing these things, you can't just say that they are taking Lee's life (or his distorted version of God's life). You need more.

When that one has run out of steam, take another issue. Do it again and again. Let the weight of a collection of well-vetted conclusions speak for themselves rather than devising a catch-all that does not actually speak of the details. In a way, Lee did this same kind of thing in reverse. When you said that everything was just Christ and essentially taught us to ignore the actual attributes, benefits, etc., we ended up with a phrase rather than everything that was claimed to be there. You don't need grace, you just need Christ. I know it sounds almost impossible to stand in opposition to that kind of speaking because we know that in a sense it is correct. But grace was not spoken of with such details so that we would forget what it is and "just take Christ." Mercy was not something subsumed into Christ that we didn't need to understand because it was "just Christ" and we would naturally get it because of the "dispensing" of "God's economy." When you look at Lee's teachings in this way, maybe you can see the problem of turning many things into a grand narrative — whether substituting Lee for God or calling the group a cult. These grand narratives may include a lot. But we don't see the details. They are hiding behind a curtain. We see only the amalgamation and are unsure exactly what it is about. But if the details are brought out on their own, they will shine as nails to be driven into the coffin of Lee's teaching. Forget the coffin. Focus on the nails.

And remember that making a characterization of anyone or anything does not make it so. There are some "rules of the road" for doing the kind of analysis that we are trying to do. Among them are that we should not simply resort to name-calling of any kind. I mentioned ad hominems within the past couple of days. That is to make references to your opponent that have nothing to do with the discussion. Remember that even evil people can be right on a subject. Trying to win by slandering your opponent does not win the argument. It just terminates it by implying that the slander is relevant to the correctness of your position. Remember, for all the evil that Hitler did, he was not simply wrong on everything. Same goes for what they call "poisoning the well," which is to make irrelevant but disparaging remarks about the opposing position on the subject at hand. Soft minds will be swayed by the irrelevant remarks. The discussion will end without truly establishing that you are correct. Just that emotional sentiment is on your side.

And be careful not to "beg the question." I know that the term has become popularly used to mean "raise" or "suggest" a question. But it actually means that the speaker/writer is "begging" that the listener/reader accept the "question" (the thing being decided upon) as the reason to accept or dismiss evidence in the decision-making process. As an example, in The Normal Christian Church Life, Nee goes through his basis for establishing his one church per city rule known as "the ground of the church." But in that book, he does not deal with the verses about house churches. So in Further Talks on the Church Life, he comes to that issue and essentially declares that it does not mean what it seems to mean and the "ground" rule is not violated. In doing this, he essentially says that the accounts of house churches cannot mean what they seem to mean because of the ground of the church rule. In effect, he declared that the evidence that could damage his doctrine could not mean what it seems to mean because the "ground" rule insisted that it could not. For Nee, the evidence was not used to prove or disprove the premise but was dismissed as misunderstood because the premise was already decided and it could not be disproved but instead used to dismiss evidence.

While not exactly an equivalence, you could argue that every time Lee used the grand narrative of "God's economy" to retranslate, rewrite, or even dismiss scripture, he was engaging in a kind of circular reasoning, or begging the question. He was taking his self-proclaimed conclusion, "God's economy," as a basis for dismissing the proof for or against it — the scripture.

As for writing hastily, it would be better to forget that and slow down. Surely you have some kind of word processor at your disposal. Use it. Use its spell checker. read what you have written. Read it slowly. When you read it quickly we tend to see what we expect to see. Have you ever seen that sentence of grossly misspelled, nearly obliterated words that most people can tell you exactly what it was supposed to say after reading through it two or three times? The exercise shows that our minds are good at recognizing patterns and assigning logic to chaos. To turning repetitive electronic noise into a techno dance song with the words in Hindi, or a message from Mars. I'm not suggesting that your reader will figure out what you are saying, but that when you hastily proofread, you are prone to seeing what you think you are supposed to see instead of what is actually there. The point is that if you want your message read and understood, you need to make sure you really say it. Trust me. My first pass is seldom good enough to post. And when I have done it anyway, the comments about the things I didn't say (or didn't mean to say) are numerous.