Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
I cannot accept this approach by OBW because I have seen too many in their "relearning" process mess the whole thing up. They rejected all they had in their LC tenure, entered the vast marketplace of Christian and pseudo-Christian products, and ended up far worse.
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While I am not sure that it is the relearning process that is the problem, I do understand your concerns.
One thing I will say about it all is that more important than pure doctrines — or even more loosely held doctrines — is the problem with the notion that "we have the best ones and everyone else is a pathetic mooing cow (if not the whore of Babylon)." That is the most dangerous part of the LRC teachings — all of them — and the thing that needs dumping more rapidly than the septic system on a motor home after a long vacation in the mountains. The problem is that we have a two edged sword that can divide soul from spirit and joints from marrow, but can't divide truth from hyperbole. And if you can't parse-out the hyperbole, then the teaching underneath is questionable.
(I think that the problem with people who go of the deep end is that they feel that they were just too sure about all the LRC stuff to think that it was just plain wrong. And rather than just admit that we bought a bill of goods, we determine that it was really right in theory, but wrong as practiced, so either give up as personal failures, or blame God for letting it happen.
But we don't blame God for the Anglicans, RCC, Methodists, etc. we blame people who dupe other people. But we weren't duped. we just had bad leaders trying to run the perfect system.)
We were taught for years that the "better" that you can know it and say it, the better it actually is. That was the excuse for the peculiar lexicon. It was our way of saying it better.
And when your goal is to have normal Christian fellowship and everything that comes out of your mouth is "Oh, the wonderful processed triune God burning through my human spirit with the sevenfold intensified spirit," or some other hyperbolic gushing, just sort of leaves everyone else either rolling their eyes or slowly backing away and looking for the door.
True fellowship is a matter of mutuality. It is hard to have mutuality when there is a zealot in the midst. They tend to "bah humbug" at the mutuality and push for fanaticism. The point of mutuality is the "ones" in Ephesians — and mainly Christ. Too much other stuff and mutuality becomes strained. It is true among those who are not following a MOTA.
And holding LRC teachings generally means holding the position of a sort of zealot because of the hyperbole that is wrapped into so much of it. Even the way we talked about otherwise normal stuff was full of hyperbole. Everything had too many adjectives. Constantly.
We have no idea what normal is. And while The Normal Christian Life may have had some good stuff in it, most of it was not really very normal. It wasn't really about life while being a Christian, but about being a Christian in spiritual things in a better way, but not very much about normal daily living as the image of God.