Which books are in the LSM bibliography?

[james73]

Something I find difficult with books from LSM is the lack of bibliography and referencing - both on an individual book level and in general.

I am reading Walter Wink's excellent Powers trilogy (thanks Aron for the headsup on that one!). What I enjoy so much about the writing is not only Wink's great insight, but also his scholarly nature. As many leading theology writers, he references almost every idea and concept which is not his own, with 50+ footnotes per chapter. He points out pros and cons of other points of view, treating even his own ideas objectively and sometimes even defeating his own arguments! This is true confidence and scholarship at work.

By contrast, Lee's works are built on sand. With no referencing or bibliography (other than the usual "shoulder-mounted canon" of Guyon, Luther etc) how are we to trust the work, or build on it, or discuss it, or research if further? Theology like this should never be taken on faith, and it is poor practice to ask readers to trust the author in this way - if for no other reason than it makes it impossible to check for mistakes or wrong thinking.

I feel it is entirely legitimate to call upon LSM to address this situation, and to at least provide a "bibliography" of the "thousands of books" Lee and Nee used. Because otherwise, how do we know which have been read; which have been read and discarded; which have been read and included? Is there any such bibliography in existence?

Furthermore, since Lee & Nee's passing away, many thousands more books have been written. Let's say we take Lee's writing about "looking forward not back" (see below) as "gospel", that we take it on faith he read all the important books and distilled them for us, that we accept we shouldn't look back at these old writings (I don't agree with this, just saying, even if we DO agree with Lee...): then what about all the new books coming out day by day? Is someone at LSM distilling those for us too? In the spirit of transparency and academic achievement, if this is the case, a list would be useful.

Consider this an "open letter" to LSM to begin referencing future works more rigourously; and to publish a bibliography of the "thousands" of books Nee & Lee read, with an indication of their use.

Elders' Training, Book 04: Other Crucial Matters Concerning the Practice of the Lord's Recovery
Witness Lee
Chapter 1, section 2:
From Brother Nee through our sixty year history, we have gone through those books. I do not mean that starting from Brother Nee we have read through all the books. This is impossible. However, mainly through Brother Nee's work of looking through thousands of spiritual books and expositions, the Lord's recovery has gone through all those old writings. Brother Nee... was the top selector. Among the many books he looked into, he was able to make a quick selection of the books which were useful. This is why I say the Lord's recovery has gone through all those old writings as a collective unit. Although I did not study in a Bible institute or a theological school, I am able to give you an analysis of the so-called theology in today's Christianity. Many of these old writings are very good, but some of them are not good and are misleading, distracting, holding back, and some even destroy the faith.

...

The meeting hall in Anaheim was designed to have a big library downstairs. I intended to fill this library with all the classical books from the church fathers' writings down to the present time. I also intended to have three or more readers, who would read all these books on certain major subjects such as the Triune God. They would read these books, make notes on them, and if needed even xerox certain paragraphs from them. Then whenever we write something for publication, we would not need to spend much time going to the books themselves. All we would have to do would be to go to our notebook. This would save us a lot of time in our writing. Then the news went out that there was a kind of trend. The saints thought we were going back to the old doctrines and some even came to me and said, “This is good because this shows people that this is not only Witness Lee's writing, but all the writings of Christianity are here.” When I heard this, I immediately made a decision to stop what we had intended to do. I had even bought a set of writings in Latin on microfiche which was quite expensive, and we had built a table for reading this microfiche, but after I made this decision we returned it. The reason why I stopped what we had intended to do was because I saw the peril that this would bring the recovery back. We would not be going onward but going backward. Gradually, however, we collected the needed reference books, and whatever was needed we collected.

EDIT here's a funny local church style bibliography, I had attached a screenshot but it didn't come out right, you can see it here: http://www.callingonthelord.org/quotes/quotes.html#22