Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
Lee's interpretation ... brought Jesus, my Savior, down to earth, and right into my heart. Jesus was now living within me, as the Spirit, giving me life.
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I certainly would not deny your experience. It is as real to you as mine has been to me.
But having fun in third grade with paint-by-numbers doesn't mean that your destiny is to be the next Rembrandt. Singing "Jesus is the living Spirit, let us now proclaim" in the meetings may indeed have been fun, initially. However, to maintain that position dogmatically meant ignoring or explaining away a lot of scripture. Lee, ultimately, was about preserving his hermeneutic and thus his ministry. He could care less about you, the church, the scriptures, or the Spirit.
So Lee introduced us to the notion via the Word. "Now the Lord is that Spirit" and "the last Adam became the life-giving Spirit" and "Christ in you the hope of glory" and so forth. Eventually, though, to maintain this as a dogmatic truth we had to ignore a lot of other possible positions also suggested by those same scriptures.
How about, for instance, "The word of Christ dwelling in us richly" equivalent to "being filled in Spirit", both in the apostle Paul's references to the singing of the Psalms, which Psalms repeatedly and continually show us on intimate, first-person terms the relationship of the obedient Son with His Father in heaven? Hebrews 5:8 says "He learned obedience through suffering"; how much of the suffering of Jesus Christ in the flesh did Lee present, versus the "processed Triune God"? I argue not much, as it wasn't helpful to his (Lee's) ministry.
So you got the relationship of Jesus the life-giving Spirit within you, which was good, but you repeatedly (and on Lee's end, deliberately) missed the relationship of the obedient Son on earth with His Father in heaven, which is tragic.
Looking back, it seems as if Lee was all about conformity. Even the scriptures had to conform to him.