LSM versus Christian teaching, 1965 - 2015

[aron]

Originally Posted by aron

On another thread, I challenged another person to find one minister that Witness Lee acknowledged between the years 1945 - 1995. That's 50 years. As far as I know, there were none.

The poster challenged me to come up with someone that Witness Lee should have listened to. I gave some names, and my reasons:

1. They spoke Greek and Hebrew, and could access the text themselves, without Vincent or Vine or Wuest to coach them. Not a minor thing, to actually be able to read the text yourself.

2. They also learned from one another, and none of them presumed to be God's sole mouthpiece on earth. Lee with his various scandals easily showed fruit (to me) that he was not the end-all and be-all he claimed, and was thus a charlatan presiding over naifs and dupes.

Now, are there any ministers out there between the years 1965 and 2015 worth listening to... or is the LSM the only source of truth and light? I'd like to open the floor..

One of my referenced scholars was Daniel Boyarin, and this was challenged because he's not Christian. But I responded that he's influenced the contemporary discussion.

Like the poster Ohio, I got interested in church history, to better understand how we got here. Some time ago, I was reading about the Chalcedon Rift (4th Ecumenical Council, 451 AD), six centuries before the Great Schism, and came to the conclusion that the church had lost its way (they were arguing over the meaning of the word we'd translate ‘nature’, as pertaining to Christ). Then I was considering the loss of the Jewish heritage and its effect on thinking in the Christian church, and came across Boyarin’s “Border Lines”. It was an astonishing work.

More recently I’ve been reading two books by Oskar Skarsaune, a Norwegian Christian scholar. One's called “In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity” and the other is an edited book called “Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries”. Here's a quote from the preface to the second work, which shows Boyarin's impact on contemporary discourse of the origins of Christianity.

(also note how Skarsaune speaks to point #2 in my original post, about not being dogmatic in one's assertions, and being willing to learn from others' views).

Originally Posted by Skarsaune

In the early stages of this work, our common perception was that we were concerned with a category of people who by their very existence somehow refused to take in in the reality of what was happening around them – the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity. Then, in 1999, Daniel Boyarin published his intriguing book Dying for God: Martyrdom and the making of Christianity and Judaism, in which he challenged the paradigm of the parting ways in a groundbreaking manner.

In 2003 a new book appeared; challenging the traditional paradigm already in its title: The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Eary Middle Ages (ed. A.H. Becker and A.Y. Reed), a conference volume based on a joint Princeton-Oxford conference in 2002. These were not the only publications to signal a shift in scholarly attention… prior to any of these, Simon Claude Mimouni had published his magnificent survey Le Judeo-Christianisme ancient: essays historiques (1998). One could add several more titles to these, including Boyarin’s own follow-up of his pioneering work mentioned above: Border Lines: the Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (2004).

With regard to the present volume, the process behind which has been quite independent of any of the above projects, this has meant that while we were at work, a paradigm shift was going on around us. From the marginal position described by Visotzky, Jewish believers in Jesus and Gentile Christian Judaizers moved to the very center of scholarly interest. The present volume, however, is not meant to be a programmatic programmatic statement of scholarly debate about old and new paradigms. There is hardly any one position in regard to this question among the contributor of this volume. What unites us is a common conviction that the phenomenon of Jewish believers in Jesus has its own significance in the history of Christianity, and also for the history of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

Neither authors nor editors think of this volume as a definitive history of Jewish believers in Jesus during the early centuries (first to fifth centuries C.E.). Nor have the editors made any attempt at unifying and streamlining the points of view expressed in the different contributions. We have regarded it an advantage that the book contains more than one opinion on some of the problems treated. There is, at present, no established scholarly consensus on the different themes treated in this volume. This goes for the many large as well as many of the smaller questions. In this way it’s hoped that this volume, rather than summing up current scholarship, may in some measure contribute to it. A continuation of this history through the centuries until our own time is at an early stage of planning. This is a report on plans, not a binding promise.

My point is this: if you want to see the face of Christ, read the works of those who can help you see. Even those who don't agree with you, and with whom you don't fully agree. I completely disagree with much of Boyarin, starting from but not limited to his refusal to accept Jesus' resurrection from the dead. But he thinks differently from me, and forces me to think differently in response. As a result, I feel that my opinions are more grounded, not less grounded. Again I say this is what Watchman Nee did - he availed himself of disparate sources. Nee didn't have to agree with everything he read, but he was willing to use different materials to help him see Christ.

Contrast this to the "sickbed theology" of LSM, which says, if anyone reads from other sources, they might get 'poisoned' spiritually, or 'confused'... what an admission of weakness!