"Early Nee" vs. "Later Nee"

[kisstheson]

Dear ones,

I have been reading through the new and revised edition of dear brother Angus Kinnear’s book Against the Tide, his biography of dear brother Watchman Nee. I was surprised (and somewhat comforted!) to learn that someone else also saw a difference between the pre-1948 “early Nee” and the 1948-and-onwards “later Nee”. (1948, is, of course, the year in which WN resumed his ministry after a six-year interruption.) Maybe dear brother UntoHim and I are really onto something here!

(In the quotes shown below from Against the Tide, the bolding was added by me and does not appear in the original.)

Concerning the strong emphasis on submission to “deputy authority” from 1948 onwards, brother Kinnear writes:

“But the slogan ‘Bow to Authority’ was in fact to become a new and, to many, very disturbing feature of the work from now on. To us today it seems so entirely out of character with his past teachings and way of working that one wonders if it could possibly have originated (as a few have thought) in a change in mind in Nee himself, or whether, at a time when he was spiritually vulnerable, he was caught off balance by the enthusiasm of others.” (p. 233)

Concerning the new teaching from 1948 onwards regarding working according to “the Jerusalem line”, brother Kinnear writes:

“Watchman Nee had himself been meditating along these lines and readily agreed. Jerusalem, he pointed out, became just such a centre . . . ‘Our failure in these few years is that we have had no structure of the work corresponding to the principle of Jerusalem. We should concentrate fellow workers for ministry in regional centres until local churches are fully established and thereafter transfer whole communities to other parts – unless, as in the Acts, the Lord arranges a persecution to scatter them abroad.’ . . . This statement appears a startling reversal of Watchman’s earlier insistence on the local churches’ complete independence of apostolic (that is, worker) control. It is from this point in fact that the tighter authoritarianism makes itself felt throughout the movement, to become after liberation a feature of the churches outside China.” (pp. 231-232)

(All quotes are taken from Angus Kinner, Against the Tide, Kingsway Publications, copyright 1973, revised edition 2005.)