Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
Gubei, you are right. At the same time WL attacked Lang's book Churches of God which addressed the matter of church eldership and church autonomy. Lang had written the book out of the same Brethren environment which the Recovery faced at the time. Lang ably expounded from scriptures in order to address many deficiencies which developed among the Darby exclusives. These truths were extremely dangerous to the system developing under LSM, hence the need for WL to enact a coordinated assault via quarantines upon all the proponents of the book and the truths within which were slowly spreading.
Like you, for the same reasons, "my evaluation of WL is mixed" also. For these reasons, the "ground of locality" is also paradoxical to me. I see the ideal beauty of it in the N.T., and at the same time, I see its ugly fruit in church history. Hence, the Spirit of God never made it prescriptive in the N.T. It happened, it was wonderful, it was recorded, it ended.
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Ohio,
I understand what you say. But, let's think about this. The Spirit of God never made Trinity prescriptive in the N.T. And then, historically, there have been a lot of debates on that. But the truth is not over.
Actually, whether we take the ground of locality or not, the practical aspects of our Christian life won't change much. In this ever-getting busier modern society, most of our Christian activities are restriced to our personal life and limited fellowship with other Christians. But, my point of taking the ground of locality is that the truth is for oneness of Christians.
It's easy to criticize the ground of locality, but how about other models presented by other posters here? Despite the repeated denial of others, their actions of presenting something (i.e. Igzy's "freemovement model" and Hope's "congregationalism model of The Southern Baptist") is to preseting a kind of prescriptive something which also should be evaluated by the yardstick they used to criticize the ground of locality. I do not think they passed the evaluation.
Gubei