Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
That's your response?
Sounds like the Riddler, "riddle me this Batman ..."
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It is like the Riddler, who was too smart by half. By the time he simplified all the variables down, he'd put himself in a box of his own creation.
Nee was so smart that he could read all the books worth reading, extract the good from each one, and simplify everything down to an easy-to-digest formula for the masses. Nee was too smart by half. Here, "tell it to the church" becomes the entry-point into Nee's normal Christian life. You have a line of text turned into a systematic formula which now becomes an ideational lock-box.
The church, here, can be the larger Christian audience; it can even be the Gentiles, for that matter. It means tell it in public. Tell it from the housetops. No more private covering. Look at the 'ekklesia' dismissed by the Ephesian city clerk in Acts 19:41. Full of Gentiles. Remember Jesus taught of "My church"; there was also a church which was not of Jesus. It meant gathering, assembly, convention of persons for some purpose, religious including but not exclusively Christian. Only with the passage of much time did it become exclusively associated with Christian assembly(s).
Instead with Nee we got an ontological entity which was defined as thus-and-such, and importantly, as NOT thus-and-such, and once you agreed with Nee's asssertion he then had a hook to manipulate you. The basis of Nee's church was that it was NOT the running dogs of the West, the Denominations. Of course resentment against foreign incursion and domination was high, and rightly so. The angry masses were waiting for a hero, waiting to throw off the imperialist yoke. Nee couldn't say, "Out with the foreign devils" because that was unchristian. So he said, "Out with denominations" - the Brethren of UK gave him the fixed point, or fulcrum, to lever the flock into his indigenous, local (and 'local' was by definition Chinese) pen.
Once he had his flock, and his boogeyman, he was off to the races. Suddenly he discovered the Jerusalem Principle - no more local autonomous church! (Lee used this trick 40 years later when he 'recovered the Body'). Nee then 'recovered' Handing Over, Getting in Line, Deputy God and so forth. Nee could pull the flock wherever he wanted; didn't matter if Early Nee contradicted Later Nee, if it contradicted the word of the Bible, if it contradicted what Nee lived out, or if it contradicted common sense and human conscience.
Nope - follow the Seer of the Divine Revelation, or the Boogeyman (who you assented to, either passively or overtly) might get you. Don't want to be like Christianity, do you? Okay, hand it over. Get in line.