Someone recently asked here, if WL's "Economy of God" made any inroads in Christianity. Did it get taught in any seminars? Did any influential Christian teachers or thinkers validate the work, and recommend it?
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Originally Posted by aron
Paul never even read the Apocalypse, so how can the "seven-fold intensified Spirit" be part of this "God's economy"? You're left with the notion that nobody but WL truly understood God's economy - not even Paul... 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"..
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Imagine if a graduate student wrote a paper showing that this was "God's economy" as promoted by Paul in the NT era: "Incarnation, inclusion, intensification"... The professor would probably ask, where do Paul's epistles cover these aspects? What basis makes one think that Paul was urging Timothy to stress this theological construct?
The student might respond, "We're shaped like a glove, and a glove is meant to contain a hand", and other folk syllogisms. Do you think the professor would give that an "A", and push it to get published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society? I doubt it. I don't even think it would make much of an impression as an undergraduate paper. The problems are obvious. Why would Paul be teaching something that only John wrote, and that much later? How does this make sense? How do your folk analogies, derived from other sources, transpose themselves back onto Paul's epistles?
Yet we never asked these questions in our meetings, since we were roaring at each other - "Ohhhhhh, I'm a man - I'm the center of the uuuuniverse!" and "when weeee exercise our spirit, our vision is so clear!" There was no place for objective critical response. It was a contest to see who could be more "on fire" and "positive" and so forth.