Did Watchman Nee Commit Plagiarism?

[Recovering]

Originally Posted by Zezima

Watchman Nee isn’t known outside of LSM circles

If I may offer a gentle corrective: Watchman Nee is somewhat known outside LSM circles but certainly not to the same degree or with anything like the same reverence as inside. For example, I was surprised (and at the time, delighted) to discover a chapter on Watchman Nee in Dave and Neta Jackson's Hero Tales, Vol II, which we were using for children's meeting in our small LC district. You can "Look Inside" on the Amazon page and see the chapter on Nee in the table of contents -- he's presented as the leader of the House Church movement in China. (Side note, toward the end of our time in the Recovery™, and my wife (especially) and I were a little weary of the Man in God's Creation and God's Calling in the Old/New Testament series, and my wife suggested using Hero Tales. To their credit, the brothers I coordinated with and the other saints involved with the YP/Children's work were fine with using this non-LSM book, and a couple of the other districts picked it up for their children's meeting, too.)

I've run into a handful of non-LC affiliated Christians who knew about Watchman Nee. One, a brother I have known and respected for a long time through mutual involvement in AWANA, told me he knew of Watchman Nee but warned me about his protegé Witness Lee. I asked him about Nee because I recognized the "Fact, Faith and Feeling" story he shared during an AWANA lesson. It was before I had any inclination to leave the Recovery™, so I was simultaneously delighted to hear of someone who admired Nee but at the same time very defensive about the warning against Lee. I gave that friend a copy of the LSM printing of The Normal Christian Life, but he never brought it up again, and the LCs were never an issue between us.

Another time (post LC exit), I found myself (in what was, for me, a surreal experience) with my daughter at a lunch table in a gathering of Anglican priests. I returned from a trip to the restroom to hear my daughter explaining to one of the priests that we used to meet with a church that followed the ministry of Witness Lee and Watchman Nee. Most of them had at least heard of Watchman Nee and maybe read something of his and knew him primarily as the founder of the Chinese House Church movement. But one man in particular had a real light of shock and recognition at the names Nee and Lee and knew exactly what my daughter was talking about. It turns out we knew his wife's sister and brother-in-law, who had caused the family a lot of concern by attending the FTTA together as a couple. He did not have a good impression of the ministry of Lee/Nee, having looked into it at the time. Incidentally, the couple in question is actually among the more level-headed and open FTTA graduates we know. They are serving full-time in a "GTCA" city somewhere now, but I was happy to hear that a lot of healing had happened in their family relationships since their graduation, and the family is much more at ease.

All this is to say that in my experience, I have bumped into a handful of people outside of the LSM associated churches who how know a bit about W Nee, but none really knew enough about him to know or care about his academic integrity.

But concerning plagiarism, I think that most of Nee's academic readers would recognize that he came from an Eastern honor-based culture and didn't really feel like he needed to be subject to the same kind of intellectually rigorous academic integrity that Westerners expect. That's not to excuse it, just to point out the difference in expectation. Just now, I am in the middle of reading a fascinating book by Nabeel Qureshi, "Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus", and he spends a lot of time talking about how Islamic writers rely on the transmission of authority from respected person to respected person. That seemed really familiar to me in the way I have heard brothers talk about Nee, Lee, and their spiritual predecessors. I know I'm not the first to point this out on this forum, but I think Eastern Islamic and Asian cultures have some important things in common. In that kind of honor-based culture, for example, they wouldn't really recognize the concept of plagiarism in the same way that Westerners do. And I guess readers of Islamic biographies or polemics would find Nee's and Lee's expositional styles pretty familiar and comfortable. In fact that laxity in academic integrity was a big part of what shook Qureshi's faith in Islam and eventually led him to Christianity. (That, and the friendship of a devout Christian, but that's a whole different topic)