Yes, thank you, Freedom. Finally we have something central to this topic to really chew on
Quote:
Originally Posted by Freedom
The following are points of concern to me that come to mind about the gospel that Lee taught:
• Lee consistently de-emphasized salvation as an event and overemphasized salvation as a process.
• Lee instilled doubt as to what kind of gospel “other” Christians believe in.
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I think what is in view here is "God's Complete Salvation", which is an update on "God's Full Salvation". Let's discuss this in detail.
"Salvation as an event" and "salvation as a process" will be what Witness Lee calls "judicial redemption" and "organic salvation" respectively. "Judicial redemption" is Lee's equivalent to "penal substitution atonement" (PSA) and does not require more elaboration.
"Organic salvation" consists of the following steps or groups of steps:
- Regeneration (the end result of judicial redemption)
- Renewing of the mind
- Sanctification
- Transformation
- Conformation
- Glorification
Renewing, sanctification, and transformation concern the soul and happens concurrently.
I'm not quite sure even after reading Lee what he understands as conformation ontologically. At any rate, the Bible verse used to underpin this step is Rom. 8:29. I suppose what he meant is that renewing, sanctification, and transformation results in being conformed to the image of Christ.
Glorification is for the physical body when the Lord comes back as per 1 Cor. 15.
This process is "organic" in terms of growth towards maturity.
Stripped down, this model is not very different from the very, very, very standard Western model of regeneration --> sanctification --> glorification. All that Lee did was to split sanctification into three aspects and have them merged into conformation before glorification on that day.
What Lee did was to accuse Christianity of having abandoned the full truth of salvation and dumbed it down to "going to heaven/hell". To a large extent Lee was correct, especially given the televangelism of the 80s. So Lee said he "recovered" God's complete salvation although the truth is that it was never really lost but only very few people have access to it. The man in the pew doesn't know it. All he knows is that he believes in Jesus and is waiting to go to heaven. This, Lee calls the "low gospel". Thus, Lee was simply parroting the millennia old "deification (or, glorification) is the goal of soteriology".
All over evangelical Christianity, people are now talking about what happens after initial redemption.
A lay thought can be found here:
http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/...-not-a-formula
A recent PhD thesis:
http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/219/1/BCB_C...nal.pdf?DDD32+
This is actually state-of-the-art contemporary discourse in certain quarters of evangelical Christianity. I was actually encouraged by a couple of lecturers who knew my LC background to do my post-graduate studies on deification as the goal of soteriology from a Johannine perspective but I am not all that interested in that topic. What I'm saying is: this is quite standard and not all that revolutionary. No scholars will bat an eye.