Short responses and analysis that stay tied to the available sources.
Witness Lee said James’s teaching “may be godly, but it is not God’s word.” Yet almost every line of James comes from Jesus first. To set James aside is to set Jesus aside, and pitting Paul against James misreads Paul, who was echoing Jesus too.
Witness Lee said Psalm 1 “was written wrongly with a wrong concept,” that in the verses of Psalm 19 praising God’s law David “was ‘Cain,’” that the book of Job has “no prayer or praise offered to God,” and that James’s teaching “may be godly, but it is not God’s word.” Here is each passage read plainly, beside his reading of it and the rest of Scripture.
Around AD 180, Irenaeus of Lyon described how the Gnostics sorted Christians into “spiritual” and “soulish,” met questions with a diagnosis instead of an answer, read a hidden meaning over the plain one, blamed sin on a foreign nature inside us, and held that their grace could never be lost. Witness Lee taught all five. Here are his words beside theirs.
Witness Lee said, “We should not preach the shallow gospel that Christianity preaches,” and called the gospel of sin, Christ’s redeeming death, repentance, and faith “a low gospel.” He preached divine dispensing as “the high gospel.” The “low” gospel is the one the apostles preached, and at its heart is a grace that frees people from slavery to sin.
Historic Christian traditions disagree about why, but they agree that someone who abandons Christ and never returns is not saved in the end. Witness Lee taught that such a person is still saved and only punished for a time.
Witness Lee taught that God became man to make man God, because dogs beget dogs. The analogy proves more than Lee himself would accept, and the pride it breeds runs opposite to the mind of Christ.
Witness Lee taught that some saved Christians will be excluded from Christ’s millennial kingdom and temporarily punished. Matthew, 1 John, and Lee’s own words tell a different story.
Lee called Christianity and all denominations fallen, yet the Recovery he built has the distinctive doctrine, centralized ministry, publication controls, and separate identity of a denomination.
Romans 8:11 says that the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead also gives life to believers’ mortal bodies. Yet Witness Lee says Christ’s resurrection “produced the life-giving Spirit.”
A response to Shepherding Words ↗’ account of the failed Daystar Motor Homes venture.