The truths taught by the Brethren were accepted by Christianity in America, mainly through two persons. The first was D. L. Moody, who was a great evangelist in America in the nineteenth century. His teachings were all taken from the Brethren. Hence, the theology taught by Moody Bible Institute is based on the truths from the Brethren. The second person was Dr. C. I. Scofield. He was a well-known pastor in America who compiled and edited a reference Bible in which he adopted the teaching of the Brethren in almost ninety percent of the notes. Some of Scofield’s contemporaries founded a seminary in Dallas, Texas, and its teaching of theology is based on Scofield’s views. Hence, these two influential seminaries in America teach the Brethren theology.
From the second century until the nineteenth century, the study of theology was traditional. When the Brethren were raised up, however, they studied the Bible, consulting traditional theology, but they were not bound by tradition. As a result they received much light. It is regrettable that from the end of the nineteenth century until today, nearly a hundred years, the receiving of light has ceased, and the theology of the Brethren has become traditional. What does it mean to be traditional? To be traditional is to receive what has been passed down from our predecessors without seeing any new light from the Bible.
In China, however, the Lord raised up a person to receive new light. In 1920 Brother Watchman Nee was saved, and in 1922 a small gathering was raised up in his hometown. That was the first church in the Lord’s recovery in China. For the past sixty years, our attitude has been to receive the help from our predecessors and to try our best to diligently research and study God’s Word. In these sixty years the Lord has continually given us new light. For instance, the Western missionaries used the vague expression three persons, one body in reference to the Trinity, but no one explained what this meant. There is even a picture in the Eastern Orthodox Church portraying a person with one body and three heads. Later we discovered that this understanding was not according to the Bible, and we labored to study all the explanations and expositions concerning the Triune God in the Old and New Testaments.
In 1962 I arrived in America and began to release the results of the forty years of our studies. My intention was to lead the believers to experience the Triune God and to enjoy all the riches of Christ. I quoted Colossians 2:16-17: “Let no one therefore judge you in eating and in drinking or in respect of a feast or of a new moon or of the Sabbath, which are a shadow of the things to come, but the body is of Christ.” Eating, drinking, feasting, and new moons are but shadows; the body is of Christ. I said that Christ is the reality of all the positive things in the universe; He is our real food, our real drink, our real clothing, our real feast, our real new moon, and our real rest. He is also our real air and real abode. I was opposed and condemned as being pantheist because I said that Christ is all things. Since I also taught the saints to follow the inner sense of life in all matters, some condemned me and said that I was a mystic from the Far East. Their arbitrary view and criticism were based on their theology.
What the missionaries from the West expounded influenced the truths that we initially released in the local churches. Gradually, we traced the truths back to the Bible. We read the Bible and studied the original Greek text. I used an interlinear Bible of Greek and English, purchased various reference books on the Greek text, and studied in depth the meaning of the Greek words in the Scriptures. In my home there are close to one hundred sets of books by different writers who are authorities on the Bible. For instance, there is a German writer named Gerhard Kittel whose work, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, specializes in New Testament word studies. He expounded, word for word, the Greek words used in the New Testament. There are ten volumes in this set. One Greek word can have eight to ten pages of explanation, expounding in detail the classic usage of the Greek word, how it was used during the time of the Lord Jesus on the earth, its fundamental usage in the Bible, and its common usage by the Greeks. Nevertheless, we still examined this detailed information in light of the divine revelation. The footnotes in the Recovery Version were written according to this principle. We first studied the text of the Bible, and then based on our spiritual experience of the past decades, we produced footnotes and the Life-studies.
The truths that we heard and preached, from the beginning until today, are not bound by tradition. Instead, these truths have been identified according to the standard of the Bible. Not only so, we have studied the Bible thoroughly for decades. I dare not say that I have studied every word in the Old Testament, but I can say that I have studied every word in the New Testament. I wrote books that contain what I have gained from my studies according to a scholarly standard in which every finding is grounded with evidence. Although neither Brother Nee nor I studied in a seminary, no one can say that we do not know theology. We both advanced by standing on the shoulders of our predecessors. I share these things with you so that we may know the history of the truths among us.