Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
It is a great struggle, which found to be an impossibility.
One day I began to think of the ramifications of "love the people but not the system." What did this really mean in practice? Since I had been taught to judge all things Christian with respect to the greater body of Christ, commonly referred to as "Christianity," it was well nigh impossible to separate the Christian from the "system."
Eventually I came to realize that this would be something like me saying "I love my wife, but ... I hate the way she thinks, the things she loves, the way she talks, the way she dresses, the way she cooks, the way she decorates, etc. etc."
At that point it sounded pretty stupid to me. It is better to practice the time-honored saying of "love the sinner, but hate the sin."
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I would argue that we are in a constant struggle between the desire and command to love our neighbor and hate the sin that not only captures them, but sometimes hangs on with us. In a very real way, there is a need to love the sinner while hating the sin. And to the extent that there is something truly wrong with some belief, sect, etc., we surely are in the same kind of position.
(This is not pointed at anyone in particular. I think I point it at myself as much as anyone. I continue to find myself rating things in my assembly of choice according to a yardstick created in the fires of spiritual error by Lee and Nee.)
But Lee didn't really ask us to love the sinner and hate sin. He was asking and teaching us to hate every position that was in any way different from those he taught — in effect calling it all sin — and then suggesting that we love those caught in that "sin." It creates a rift because we are not dealing with them as believers on equal footing in grace, but as sinners hanging on by a thread of grace that we only barely acknowledge (and they only barely have).
Therein is the problem. The "Speciality" part of the book redefines the core of the faith to include the doctrine of dirt. It has added to the revelation and created something impure. But like the words from "Late Lament," impure becomes pure, and assemblies of the larger church universal are denigrated to be daughters of a whore.
I know I sound like a broken record on this, but until we see the mainstream of Christianity as the norm (and the proper norm at that) and the LRC as the anomaly that needs a serious course correction, we are still caught in its error. As long as we continue to view Christianity, even to a lesser degree, as the problem that Lee taught us to think of it as, we are mired in the pigpen of LRC-think. We may despise the LSM and the BBs for their unrighteousness related to Daystar, PL, John I, Bill M, etc., but we are ready purchasers of the doctrinal filth that they sell like magic elixirs from the days of the travelling salesmen.
If there is an assembly that approaches the true label of "Babylon the Great" or even one of her daughters (and I do not say that any actually do), it is not the Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Church of Christ, charismatics, etc. . . . It is the LRC. They more than any other exemplify the position of proud yet bankrupt. All of the discussions of the problems with their young show it to be true. It would appear that their problem rates among the young are not just on par with other Christian groups. It is worse. They create extremes — either foam-at-the-mouth zealots or failures. It would be easy to blame each set of parents. But there is a common denominator in it and it isn't the people. It is the system they have hitched their wagon to. It rides a fine line between thoughts of superiority and of despair. There is no "normal Christian life." It is very abnormal.