Witness Lee



The Lord is not building His church in Christendom, which is composed of the apostate Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant denominations. This...is being fulfilled through the Lord's recovery, in which the building of the genuine church is being accomplished...Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, as well as Judaism, all [have] become an organization of Satan.

Witness Lee, born Li Changshou, was a delusional fraud Christian evangelist from Shandong Province, China, who claimed to have revealed all of Christianity's hidden/forgotten "high peak truths". Purportedly directed by God, he co-founded and led the Local Church movement from 1949 until his death in 1997, with the expressed purpose of establishing it as the "recovered church", i.e. the One True Church™ (does this sound familiar?). Influenced by fringe 19th/20th century Restorationists (such as Watchman Nee (1903-1972), John Darby (1800-1882), and G.H. Pember (1837-1910) ) and aided by outdated word-studies, he gradually concocted his own peculiar theology and foisted it on credulous true believers in Taiwan and in the United States.

Background, interpretive methods, and beliefs
Lee never attended a seminary or university; he taught himself Greek, knew next-to nothing about Hebrew, and was willfully ignorant of 20th century discoveries by biblical scholars. Despite his lack of training, Lee was a prolific writer and produced over 400 books and commentaries about the Bible and the Christian faith. Most of these publications were simply the polished transcriptions of his spoken messages given at conferences.

Consult any of his works, and you’ll find a peculiar mix of allegorical sophistry and rigid biblical literalism, interspersed with a bizarre mishmash of ill-defined terms, question-begging statements, cherry-picked/quote-mined Bible verses, unsubstantiated assertions, and huge jumps in logic. Instead of using sound historical-critical methodologies for biblical interpretation, Lee mainly applied dubious, , and numerological methods in order to mine the Bible for alleged deep/hidden meanings...meanings that most likely would have been foreign to the original biblical authors.

Amusingly, his naïve proselytes have mistaken his religious psychobabble expositions for something that’s profoundly deep and spiritual, and claim that it all came directly from God. They’ve even gone so far as to declare him the "minister of the age", right up there with the likes of Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. In reality, Lee was an obscure charlatan who subscribed to things like the gap theory, millennialism, dispensationalism, modalism, and "mingling"; the idea that Christians will become infused with God and transform into "god-men" hybrids like Jesus.

A small sampling of Witness Lee's insanity
Anyone familiar with (or science, logic, reason, etc.) will be able to spot the absurdities in the following examples:

Excerpt from Lee's mystical commentary on the story of Jesus feeding the crowd of 5,000 with the fish and 5 loaves (-21) –

Here's a nugget of wisdom from his "Life Study" of the Book of Colossians –

Concerning the significance of water –

Revealing the true nature of the sun, moon, and other celestial bodies –

Apparently, not only does Yahweh want to grant Christians salvation, he wants to transform them into demigods too –

This word salad has it all: numerology, typology, and allegory (in reference to – ) –

Last but not least –

Based on everything above, Witness Lee probably scored an 8.5/10 on the wacky-lunatic scale.

Selected publications

 * The Economy of God (1968)
 * The All-Inclusive Christ (1969)
 * The Knowledge of Life (1973)
 * ''A Deeper Study of the Divine Dispensing (1990)
 * ''The Triune God to Be Life to the Tripartite Man (1990)
 * The Life-Study of the Bible (1974-1994)
 * The Spirit within Our Spirit (1994)
 * The Recovery Version of the Bible (1991, 1999, 2003)