LSM’s Deification Doctrine—Biblical or Blasphemous? Nigel Tomes

[Nell]

Originally Posted by aron

I was there when it rolled out and I agree. Lee was continually trying to keep the saints in turmoil and off balance. Look at the pattern of "moves" and "flows" like the Young Galileans etc. Lee continually blew strong winds into the LC. Deification was merely the latest and greatest (they all were the latest and greatest, when they rolled out). Shock value is a good term, here.

It was institutional pentecostalism: we were always shouting at each other in meetings, and being told to get "stirred up" and so forth. So teachings that strained at the borders of orthodox theology was probably one of Lee's ways of keeping us on edge.

And I doubt it was conscious; at least I've seen no evidence that it was so. It was merely the product of a system of hyper-subjective mysticism that Nee inherited from Guyon, Penn-Lewis et al. The continual state of excitement, even occasionally frenzy (I saw it and participated) was a natural outflow of this. And how better to institutionalize excitement than with novel and exciting teachings? (Even if they weren't actually novel).

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Jesse Penn-Lewis. It seems she agrees with you to an extent and she clearly exposes the source of the problem as God's sworn enemy making a conscious effort to deceive all men. This quote describes exactly what happened with this errant teaching, and is, I believe, the real problem.

"All that is in any degree the outcome of the mind of the "natural man" (1 Cor. 2: 14) will prove to be but weapons of straw in this great battle, and if we rely upon others' "views of truth," or upon our own human conceptions of truth, Satan will use these very things to deceive us, even building us up in these theories and views, so that under cover of them he may accomplish his purposes. We cannot therefore, at this time, over-estimate the importance of believers having open minds to "examine all things" they have thought, and taught, in connection with the things of God, and the spiritual realm. All the "truths" they have held; all the phrases and expressions they have used in "holiness teachings"; and all the "teachings" they have absorbed through others. For any wrong interpretation of truth, any theories and phrases which are man-conceived, and which we may build upon wrongly, will have perilous consequences to ourselves, and to others, in the conflict which the Church, and the individual believer, is now passing through. Since in the "later times" evil spirits will come to them with deceptions in doctrinalform, believers must examine carefully what they accept as "doctrine," lest it should be from the emissaries of the deceiver." JPL - War on the Saints

Nell