Bible Answer Man Broadcast ExcerptsTranscripts of Excerpts from the Bible Answer Man Radio Broadcast
January 5, 2010, 21:08-23:29 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: And Elliot, one of the things that has taken place publicly and is now being roundly disseminated through the internet is an open letter by seventy Christians who are openly asking Witness Lee and his followers, (Witness Lee, of course, [is] not alive anymore), but the movement to renounce their “heretical” teachings. And the first question that always comes to my mind when you see a letter like this is: how can seventy Christians be wrong? Particularly on something that these Christians know a lot about, and that is the nature of God. How could they have missed the import of Witness Lee’s words such that they’re saying, these words are downright heretical?
Elliot Miller: Well you know, Hank, when you ask that question, my response is that something that I personally find even more amazing than the idea that seventy Christians, and not just Christians but many of these people are leading scholars, apologists, thinkers, countercult workers—that they could be wrong; it’s to me even more amazing that I could be wrong. And I was wrong, you see, and so was Gretchen Passantino, our colleague who with me worked under Walter Martin here in the 1970s and who, with her husband Bob, did the original research on the Local Church movement, and they actually wrote the very first critique of it in 1975. And it was on the basis of our research primarily that the whole body of literature on the Local Church was built. And the quotations that appear in this open letter we’re very familiar with because we unearthed a lot of those. And so you know, to me, that they would be wrong only follows since they’re building their conclusions on our original work; and we were wrong.
January 5, 2010, 31:57-33:24 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Elliot Miller: But people who say (I’ve seen the complaint appear and it’s an understandable complaint), “Well, you at CRI tell us that you’ve researched it and it’s orthodox, but are we supposed to simply take your word for it when we’ve got these quotes staring us in the face that Witness Lee and the local church members have made?” And that’s a good point but now it’s no longer the case because the basis for our conclusions are all laid out, fully documented in this article and you can look at it for yourself.
But ultimately, you know it just comes down to the fact that in regard to the Trinity, they actually are bringing a corrective to a problem within Western evangelicalism and that is that we have sometimes got rather simplistic approaches to how we deal with the mystery of the Trinity—as if we can codify the entire doctrine in four simple statements and that it’s no longer a mystery—that even though for two millennia the best minds in the Christian church have struggled with this doctrine, now all of the sudden the countercult community in America has simply nailed it and it fits our little brief statements—one God and three Persons or three Persons in one nature, and if you deviate from that, now you’re in the realm of heresy. Well, no it’s not that simple.
January 5, 2010, 48:53-51:10 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Elliot Miller: But let’s understand the context of what they’re teaching and when you get the context of what they’re teaching. For example, Witness Lee says, on the one hand, the New Testament reveals that the Godhead is unique and that only God who alone has the Godhead should be worshiped, on the other hand the New Testament reveals that we, believers in Christ, have God’s life and nature and that we are becoming God in life and nature but will never have His Godhead. Okay, and I lay out all of these different quotes in which he teaches that we do not partake in the sovereignty of God, we are not to be worshiped and furthermore, we partake in His deity not with respect to eternity or the ontological nature of God but with respect to God’s economy, His salvation plan here on the earth which is a progressive manifestation of God first through the creation, then through Christ, then through the work of the Holy Spirit, and then through the church, and ultimately when the church is perfected. Our lowly human natures will be conformed into the likeness of His glorious nature. He became man that we might become like Him, that we might manifest God as perfectly as He does, that we might have an intimacy with the Triune God that is such that we perfectly represent Him. And He prayed, that they might be one even as We are one. Okay this is the kind of thing that the Local Church is talking about. They’re talking about things that we ourselves believe in, we just don’t use the same words for it. They’re not talking about us becoming like God in His eternal nature, becoming objects of worship, having sovereignty, becoming omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, no those are incommunicable attributes of God. What they’re talking about is exactly what we believe, that as we are perfected in His image, we will take on His communicable attributes and we will experience an intimacy with Him that is perfect.
June 10, 2010, 49:36-51:30 [ audio excerpt ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: Now, going to the present issue at hand with respect to the Lord’s recovery or the local churches, I started out reading a statement that people oftentimes quote with respect to what the local churches say regarding this sense of, we are God. I just quoted that to you.
And what I wanted to follow is to say to you that what is neglected is the qualifying statements that are made within the context of the local churches. “Nevertheless, we must know that we do not share God’s Person, and cannot be worshipped by others; only God Himself has the Person of God and can be worshipped by man.” Not only so, but as the author makes clear elsewhere, it is a great heresy to say that we are made like God in His Godhead. And that was the statement of Witness Lee, who is the primary proliferator of the Lord’s recovery around the world. And he goes on to write, “From eternity to eternity He [God] remains the same in His essence. But in His economy the Triune God has changed in the sense of being processed.” As such, believers are infused with the life of God and thus deified through a process involving regeneration, sanctification, renewing, transformation, conformation, and glorification.
And, of course, apart from a double standard, Athanasius of Alexandria, widely regarded as the greatest theologian of his time, would likewise be accused of heresy for suggesting that the Word was made man so that we might be made God. Not only so, but the Apostle Peter would be suspect for stating that we are partakers of the divine nature.
January 6, 2010, 6:30-12:25 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: Again, we’re talking about a movement that was originally founded by Watchman Nee and then his protégé Witness Lee helped spread this movement around the globe, literally. And in China today they are reproducing disciple-makers on a scale that is fairly unprecedented. When you look at this movement, many people will say, “Look, they call themselves the local churches. And therefore if you go into a particular locale, if you go to Charlotte, North Carolina or Los Angeles, California, they say there’s only one church; they believe in localism and therefore it seems to us that they’re calling themselves the only church.” Is that really what they’re saying?
Elliot Miller: No, it’s not and I have to say that unlike most countercult researchers on this particular point, I understood them way back in the 70s because I had read Watchman Nee’s book, The Normal Christian Church Life. And I understood what the teaching was all about. It’s just that I misunderstood how the local churches were applying Watchman Nee, and I thought they were taking him in ways that I now know that they were not. In other words, I was believing a lot of secondhand information about their behavior and their claims that I was getting from other researchers instead of going to the source itself and confirming these things.
But really, you know, what you have to understand here is that the underlying concern behind their teaching on localism, which is the belief that there’s one church in one city—is a desire to see unity in the Body of Christ and a desire to accept all believers as Christians. It’s not a desire to create a point of division where they’re the true Church and you’re not in it or to renounce you as a genuine believer. But they’re simply thinking deeply about the matter and they’re asking, what is the basis for unity? And Watchman Nee, in his writings, and Witness Lee, in his, came to the conclusion that the only proper basis for division among Christians is distance. In other words, in the city of Nanjing they cannot, for practical reasons, worship with Christians in the city of Shanghai. So there have to be two different churches there because they’re divided by space, you see. But any other division other than denying essentials, which they would certainly agree would be a reason for division—you don’t meet with people that deny Jesus Christ, that deny the gospel—but if we affirm essentials and if we’re in the same locality, why are we not in fellowship? Why are we not together? And so they said, therefore, there’s only one church in one city.
When God looks down on a city such as Charlotte does He go, “Oh, there’s my people, the United Presbyterians and then there’s the Presbyterian Church of America and then there’s the Southern Baptists and there’s the American Baptists and there’s the Assemblies of God … I’ve got so many churches in this city.” No, God doesn’t see our divisions, our distinctions that we have created for theological or aesthetic or whatever our reasons are for creating personality reasons. In fact Scripture defines such things as carnal. “You say you are of Paul, you say you are of Apollos, are you not carnal acting like mere men?” was Paul’s rebuke to the Corinthians who divided over personalities. And so, what they’re saying is, God looks down, sees one people and in a city there’s one church. That has been misinterpreted to mean that they are claiming to be the true church. Actually they believe all the believers in a city are members of that church. But they believe that we should meet on that basis of locality and that’s where the controversy enters.
A lot of people would say, no there are good reasons for Presbyterians to meet because they have certain beliefs about covenant and God’s sovereignty that unite them that they can agree and serve God and accomplish things. So there’s different perspectives about these issues and certainly I’m not saying that the Local Church group has all the answers or that the denominations are wrong. It’s a very complicated issue. But the fact is that they have a right to that opinion. It’s not a cultic belief, it’s a particular take on the basis for the Local Church, which we all have to come up with one position or another. They come up with a pretty biblically solid one; they can make a pretty solid biblical case for it. It’s not heresy. It’s not saying that you’re not a Christian or you’re not in the Church of Jesus Christ. They fully accept you—you go into their meetings, they will serve communion to you if you confess Jesus as your Savior. They’re not denying your salvation, they’re not denying your Christian standing nor or they denying the Holy Spirit is working in your life and using you. So there’s been a lot of misunderstanding about their beliefs on this subject.
January 6, 2010, 45:54-48:25 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Elliot Miller: And as you have said many times, Hank, it’s not that we support the fact that the Local Church has sued, on three different occasions over a three decade period, Christian groups. However, I believe that there are circumstances there that should at least evoke some sympathy with the Local Church’s situation. And even more importantly, as we point our finger at them for suing fellow believers, there should be four fingers pointing back at ourselves for making false allegations against fellow believers. And the truth of the matter is with regard to these lawsuits, they were never over theological differences, they were never over being called a cult theologically; they were over being charged with being involved in reprehensible, immoral behavior and often illegal behavior, extreme illegal behavior and abusive behavior.
And in each case they sought to meet with these people and reason with them and show them the evidence to support their position. And these people refused to meet with them. In fact in the most recent case, it was Harvest House that initiated a lawsuit against the local churches, not the local churches who initiated the lawsuit against Harvest House for the book, the Encyclopedia of Cults and New Religions by John Ankerberg and John Weldon. And so the issue here is that demonstrably false allegations have been made against this group. They’re a serious defamation of character.
And whereas we in the countercult community have righteously responded against the infringement of our own constitutional freedom of expression and religion to be able to call a group a cult, I don’t see any of us, until right now on the Bible Answer Man program, calling on ourselves to be responsible when we do research and make allegations of groups and accountable if we’re making false allegations that are injurious to them, that ruin their reputations. That, in the case of the local churches, their kids were forced out of schools, people lost jobs, they suffered great humiliation. And that was just in America.
January 6, 2010, 40:29-45:52 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: Well, Elliot Miller points out that in 1985, Gordon Melton, founder of the Institute for the Study of American Religions, published an open letter himself concerning the local churches, Witness Lee, and The God-Men controversy—a controversy over a book titled, The God-Men. And he writes,
During the past year I, like many of you, have become concerned about the lawsuit between the Local Church led by Witness Lee and Spiritual Counterfeits Project … and the publisher of their book, The God-Men. I was at first concerned that a Christian body like the Local Church would take fellow Christians to court, until I discovered that the leaders in the Church had exhausted all less severe means to have the book withdrawn and its errors acknowledged.
Recently, I was asked by the Local Church to begin a more rigorous investigation of its life and belief than I had been able to do in previous years while I was working on my Encyclopedia of American Religions…
Part of my study of the Local Church involved the reading of most of the published writings of Witness Lee and lengthy depositions of Neil Duddy and Brooks Alexander of Spiritual Counterfeits Project. The experience proved among the more painful of my Christian life. As I began to check the quotes of Witness Lee used in Duddy’s book, I found that The God-Men had consistently taken sentences from Lee’s writings and by placing them in a foreign context, made them to say just the opposite of what Lee intended. This was done while ignoring the plain teachings and affirmations concerning the great truths of the Christian faith found throughout Lee’s writings. I also took note of the ludicrous attempt to equate the Local Church’s practice of pray-reading with the use of mantras in Eastern religions. They bear no resemblance whatsoever.
As I read the depositions, especially that of Duddy, I was appalled to discover the number of substantive and libelous charges made against Lee in The God-Men, which were based entirely upon the unconfirmed account of a single hostile ex-member…
The mistakes and misrepresentations in the book are so frequent and so consistent that it strains credulity to suggest that The God-Men is merely the product of poor scholarship.
So here you have one researcher writing an open letter saying, at first I was very concerned about the lawsuit but afterwards, I was more concerned about the libelous charges made against the Local Church movement and Witness Lee.
Elliot Miller: That’s right, and at the time I dismissed that because J. Gordon Melton has a reputation among people in my field as being a “cult apologist.” In other words, he’s come to the defense of the Unification Church or different groups in different situations, and so we have just easily been able to dismiss anything he’d say. However, he went on in his book and he actually gave his own documented analysis of where they had taken Lee out of context in four different instances to prove his charge that they had deliberately taken him out of context. And the proof was there in 1985.
And when I read that, I just at the time, it was like—I responded to that the way I’m afraid a lot of people in my field are going to respond to my article today—and just said: he’s got to have that wrong, but I don’t have time to look into this but surely he’s wrong. I mean, SCP is a very respected group and they’ve been very careful about everything else they’ve published. Just as people today will say, “Yeah, but there’s 70 scholars, those are 70 respected scholars; they’ve been very careful about everything they’ve published.”
And so this is how we perpetuate error is that we pass over obvious challenges to a position, documented challenges to a position that we ourselves have the means to look into and confirm or deny. But we just pass it by and continue to support maybe out of a feeling of collegiality, brotherhood with other people in our field are under attack by this group because they’re suing them. So let’s not be confused with the facts. Let’s keep this feeling of camaraderie going among people in our field, our besieged field of countercult ministry.
Well, that’s not a philosophy that can be described as, Truth matters. And so that’s why I feel right now we’re at a paradigm shift in the countercult community where we have got to learn from this experience and not keep repeating these kinds of behaviors if we want this form of ministry to be viable, valid and ongoing, vital in the Body of Christ.
All audio clips are © Christian Research Institute and used by permission.
Print This Page