Open - Interactive Letter to The Co-Workers in The Lord's Recovery

[Trapped]

Originally Posted by Jay

I think every teacher and theologian should be questioned and scrutinized. Otherwise their words would have no value. It's possible Nee/Lee were wrong in some of their doctrine and theology. It's possible they were right as well. If they are wrong once does that mean all of their writings are wrong? If they are right once, does that mean all of their writings are right?

I agree every teacher and theologian should be questioned/scrutinized.

From the perspective of a saint within the local church, to find out that even one of Nee/Lee's doctrine is wrong is earth shattering. And because their teachings are sold in the local church as things like "the pure riches", and even who they are as persons are sold as "the minister of the age" and "God's delegated authority on the earth".......then as I said, particularly given such high lofty claims, if one thing is wrong, then at a minimum it immediately puts all of their other teachings at least up for question.

No, getting one wrong does not mean all others are wrong. Each teaching has to be evaluated on its own merit. And getting one right doesn't mean all others are right. The apostle Paul was pretty smart in 1 Thessalonians when he said to "test all things". Everything needs to be tested. The problem is, when each thing of Lee's start getting tested, lots of them fall apart pretty quickly.

The problem, though, Jay, is that each teaching in the local church is not discrete and unconnected. The way things are taught, and the amount of errors there are, it is a monumental task to genuinely test the teachings. Every single little thing has to be questioned and verified, because so little of it can be trusted. I won't go into detail, but even when you write things on this site, it's difficult to respond to you because you bring in so many things that, when you are in the local church, are taken as hard truths, that are actually off from what the Bible says. But the effort to go through systematically and show how assumption X and assumption Y are really unfounded or in error is prohibitive. The amount of threads and strands that need to be untangled is massive. And so that thick web keeps people ..... well ..... trapped.

Trapped

P.S. I'll give one example, which I think someone else already brought up to you sometime in the past couple days. The thought of life and the tree of life. The concept of "life" has taken on a life of it's own in the local church, and it's not what the Bible means by "life". For example, there is no such thing in the Bible as "a sense of life" or "a sense of death".

So a saint might come on this site and say "all that matters is that we have a sense of life". Sounds simple. But it's not biblical. The saint is confident that it's biblical, because, don't you know? God only cares about life! Read Genesis!

But that's based on a faulty belief that "God told Adam and Eve to only eat the tree of life". The teaching that flows from that faulty belief is that "God only cares for life" and then it flows from that that "we just need to care for the sense of life".

But you won't find a single verse in Genesis that says God told them to only eat of the tree of life. What Genesis says is that God told them they could eat of ANY tree in the garden, just not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Genesis 2:16-17
16 And the LORD God commanded him, “You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die."

There's a huge difference between "eat of ANY tree except one" versus "eat ONLY one".

But a typical saint almost won't believe their eyes when they are shown this. It changes too much of what is tangled up throughout Lee's teaching. If it's not true that "we should ONLY care for life", and if they cannot go by "a sense of life" anymore, then what do they go by?

Well, they've got to use their mind to test teachings, and they've got to be the mature believer mentioned in Hebrews 5:13-14 that discerns between good and evil. But this is hard, and it feels like a big responsibility, and this feels foreign to what they are used to in the local church.

And yep. It is hard, it is a big responsibility, and it is foreign. But it's what God wants His sons to be able to do.

And this tangled mess gets multiplied a thousand times over when trying to go through what is taught in the ministry. But as mature believers, we are supposed to test, really test, it all, hold fast to what is good, and not hold to the bad. It's the not holding to the bad in Lee's ministry that the saints don't know how to do. You are a little unique in that you are willing to say you don't agree with some things, which is good. Just keep applying that critical thinking to all of it in the ministry, even the stuff you think could never be wrong.