Quote:
Originally Posted by awareness
Andrew stormed out here making audacious claims that he was going to do an extensive study of Dr. Lilly's book, to prove that it's fallacious.
But he never got to it. Before leaving, what he reduced to was calling the book, and me, names ... like evil and wicked...
|
An interesting parallel with Andrew and some Lee-ites I interacted with a few years ago: when I responded to their posts in a regional church forum in England, and I demonstrated a less-than-reverent attitude to Witness Lee's work, and called them on their incessant use of voluminous quotes from Lee versus writing one simple sentence of their own, they began to get pretty nasty. They said I was an evil person with a dark heart, etc. They told me I had been ambitious in the Local Churches but had been thwarted and now I was out spewing venom, and seeking to stumble others and draw them after myself and so forth.
I was kind of shocked. I mean, I had no idea I was such an evil creature! Simply because I had disagreed with Lee's theses, and treated his ideas critically like any other author, suddenly I was, to them, the most vile of men, and a despiser of God's authority.
My point is that perhaps both Andrew and these Lee acolytes held that their particular author held some special position, above our ability to critically appraise it. So to Andrew, as to them, it was "plain" that everything put out by this person was self-evidently true, and all which critiqued it was patently absurd, and anyone who persisted in "not getting it" was therefore willfully obtuse, and immoral, to some degree.
In other words, if the author was perceived by them to be God's special anointed oracle, then by treating that author's ideas like that of any redeemed and fallible sinner (think of Peter's repeated and well-documented failures, even AFTER the day of Pentecost) we were actually rebelling against the throne of God Himself.
Or so I suppose. Anyway, I was struck by the parallel experience of how an attempt at mature and civil discussion of the theology of the author in question, on its own merits, quickly degenerated into name-calling, in both cases.