Does LSM Hold to Apostolic Succession?

[awareness]

Originally Posted by aron

I keep thinking of recent poster amrkelly's remarks that he had 'sight', or 'discernment', to understand Nee's gift to the Body.

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.

Maybe Andrew is just a big talker, like his hero Watchman Nee.

[aron]

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.

[awareness]

Aron, some years back trying to see if the local church had changed I joined a local church forum on yahoo groups.

For a couple of months I was just a lurker. Then I started posting innocent teaser posts, to see what would happen.

But all I got was cut and paste answers quoting from Life-Studies.

So I got things stirred up when I asked if the forum was a computer generated algorithm. Then we had some real discussions.

Things went well until I revealed I was an ex-local churcher. Then I got banned from the forum.

I went round and round with the forum moderators, one of them putting me back on the forum, and the other kicking me off.

I even reached out to Ron Kangas thru email, who said he tried to help me but had no power over the forum.

The good moderator told me that local churchers were told to stay away from ex-local churchers ... and that's why I got banned.

So I joined to find out if the local church had changed, and found out that it hadn't.

[aron]

Originally Posted by awareness

But all I got was cut and paste answers quoting from Life-Studies..

Now I remember why I wanted to write the earlier post! Let's think about Peter, our template for the fallible believer. I love Peter's story because there I see something of us all. As I've said, Peter didn't fail more than the rest, but his failures were simply well-documented.

Let me give four representative samples: "Lord, this will never happen to you!" after Jesus foretold His death and resurrection.

Then, seeing Jesus walking on the waves and asking for His command to come, and looking down once he'd gotten out of the boat, and becoming frightened.

On the mountain of transfiguration: "Lord, it is good that we are here. Let's build three booths, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah!"

Later on, going fishing with the brothers, and ignoring the Lord's hungry and lost sheep.

In each case Peter had seen something, then took his eye off the ball, and whiffed. I was thinking that maybe there's a pattern here. First, let's say we get a revelation from God. In Matthew 16, for example, Peter realized that Jesus was the promised Christ of God. In my case, like the prodigal in Luke, I was on my hands and knees fighting with pigs, when suddenly I got a revelation of my Father's house. I heard the name of Jesus, and recognized the call of the Shepherd, and got up and began to return home.

Good, right? But then what happened? Then, inevitably, at some point, I took my eye off the ball, and whiffed. I stumbled, and failed, again and again. The light became darkness, and how great was the darkness! Suddenly I heard, "Get away from Me, Satan!"

I think that to some extent this is a good picture of our spiritual journey. Arguably only the Lord Jesus Himself had a journey of pure, untrammeled light. The rest of us as redeemed and reborn sinners have struggled with residual darkness, at least in part. We had to see what we were apart from God -- helpless and hopeless failures -- before we could know and appreciate the phenomenal depth of God's mercy and grace toward us who believe.

And this is where the fellowship of the saints really comes in. In the assembly we get exposed and we repent to each other; we can be 'right-sized', and can be restored to the narrow path of life. But Nee & Lee built a system immune from correction. The system's revelation was supposedly not from the word, but rather to God's so-called 'oracle'; for example, Lee called Nee "The seer of the divine revelation in the present age". Their program was built on a necessary infallibility of this seer; whose vision was accountable only to God -- "even when he's wrong he's right", was the slogan I heard. So correction became impossible, and even when we sensed that the emperor had no clothes on, we just shouted all the louder, How fine they are! Such garments! Fit for the King's wedding! Etc.

I joined to find out if the local church had changed, and found out that it hadn't.

What I've begun to understand, years out of the Nee & Lee system, is that the word of God is a blinding light, greater than we can bear. The Spirit, given without measure, is more than our feeble vessels can contain, and easily overwhelms our faculties. Paul wrote, "We can only see dimly, and in part", and if Paul acknowledged this, how much we all! We're redeemed sinners, reborn from the death's darkness, and in our emergence to the light we may occasionally lack in perception. At some point we're like Peter: our eye strays from the luminous path and back to more familiar terrain. In effect, once we've gone to the light, we may stumble, somewhat, back to darkness.

And so the Bible becomes a book of knowledge; telling us merely something of God's attributes, or His move in history. Instead of the blinding light of life we have dull shadows of knowledge. We still think we're okay, and are contented, until God corrects us, like when Jesus rebuked Peter. But, suppose we build a system which necessitates our immunity from correction? What then? Then we won't change. We might get some light, and then retreat to the shadows, and simply stay there. I think that Nee & Lee had surely some light; they were believers. But they subsequently built systems predicated upon not being corrected. And if no correction, then no change. And the "local churches of the Lord's recovery" system was likewise unable to change.

When Nee said he wanted to evangelize China, and presented to his listeners an organizational plan for its accomplishment, he was taking his eye off the ball. When Lee said that if we just did such-and-such we'd each gain two new ones in a year, and within 19 years of taking this "new way" we'd recover the whole earth, he was taking his eye off the ball. In both cases they looked to what men might do for God, instead of looking at what God had already done. Instead of seeing the kingdom of God shining in His Holy Word, they instead tried to build a facsimile. Like the young man in Luke 15 who remembered his father's house, suddenly they interposed their idea upon God's revelation: "I know what I'll do: I'll go and become a servant. I am not any more worthy of being a son." The church became a place where we tried to do something for God, instead of a celebration of what God had already done for us in Jesus Christ. And mere knowledge replaced the ineffable glory of the coming Spirit.

Again, we all do this. We all occasionally superimpose our familiar concepts upon God's blinding light. We all end up in the shadows, sometimes. The problem with the Nee & Lee system is that it was dedicated to avoiding this inevitable fact. Supposedly they had a special commission straight from God's throne and were exempt from human adjustment. And thus their inevitable errors, immune from correction, became great.