Sharper Focus on Watchman Nee

Watchman Nee is well known among evangelicals in many parts of the world. Identified with the plight of underground Christianity in China, he became, especially among many Jesus people, a model for victorious Christian living under adverse social pressures.

Any leader who directly or indirectly founds 700 churches inevitably invites attention, and many persons were understandably curious about this remote Chinese personality and his “little flock” principles. The worsening political climate—Nee spent the last decade and a half before his death in June, 1972, in Communist work camps—spurred interest in his writings. His many small works, particularly those in applied soteriology, or salvation in practice, quickly gained for him an international following.

Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and other revolutionaries deplored Christian missionaries as foreign-controlled agents reflective of Western culture and interests, as imperialist spies and political propagandists. Actually, according to World Vision staffer Robert Larson, a long-time Hong Kong China-watcher, serious research will some day do proper justice to the Western missionary experience in China. “On balance,” he says, “most Western missionaries to China were every bit as dedicated to their mission as the committed Chinese Marxist is to his ideology today” (Wan-sui, Insights on China Today, p. 103).

As a Chinese national, Watchman Nee also raised questions about Western missionaries, but for very different reasons. Born on November 4, 1903, in Fuchow, Fukien Province, mainland China, Shu Tau Nee espoused an unsettling concept of the Church: more than one congregation in any given area, he said, is unbiblical. He soon ran into conflict with established mission agencies like the China Inland Mission, which, by the 1930s, sponsored about 1,300 missionaries and mission associates in establishing churches. Nee insisted that none but his “little flock” churches were authentic. After forming the first “little flock” in Foochow in 1923 he spearheaded a movement that in sixteen years embraced some 70,000 members in 700 congregations.

Nee expounded his doctrine of the Church in The Normal Christian Church Life, one of more than a dozen books now translated. The larger availability of Nee’s writings has precipitated insistent questions about his full doctrinal orthodoxy, not least his view of Scripture. According to James Cheung, Nee espoused an authoritative and inerrant Bible (Ecclesiology of Nee, p. 36). But Terry Jenkins, graduate research student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, insists that Nee blends evangelical and liberal views of revelation and Scripture.

Nee’s dynamic view of revelation is clear. Scripture he considers an inspired Book; revelation he depicts as ongoing. “Inspiration is given only once; revelation is given repeatedly.… Revelation means God again breathes on his word when I read it” (Ministry of the Word, p. 87). In other words, Nee does not carefully distinguish illumination from revelation. Revelation occurs anew when God enlivens Scripture and “the Holy Spirit imparts light to me” so that it becomes “as full of life as at the time when it was first written.” This notion, says Jenkins, leads Nee “to his particular concept of ‘enlightenment’ of which the key principle is ‘one inspiration but many revelations.’ ”

Nee thus subordinates the objectivity of revelation by elevating personal experience to dynamic centrality. Unlike Barth and neo-orthodox theologians, however, Nee does not sponsor a dialectical view of revelation. He insists on the uniqueness of scriptural revelation and on the Bible’s authority.

Nee’s concern is to emphasize Christian experience and life rather than mere doctrine. But in some passages he disparages truth over against life, and in others he so overstates the priority of spiritual commitment that the historical and factual aspects of the Christian faith are devalued. The “spirit and life” side of Christian concern is contrasted with physical interests that include “the letters and words … doctrine, knowledge, teaching, types and various truths of the Bible (Ministry of the Word, p. 85). This explains the maxim prevalent among Nee’s followers: “We need Christ rather than doctrine.”

Nee stresses the “spiritual” content of Scripture rather than its historical-grammatical interpretation. Jenkins points out Nee’s use of allegory and typology and his fanciful explanation of parables and names. Adam and Eve become types of Christ and the Church. The Bible is replete with hidden spiritual meanings. The result is a kind of “subjective hermeneutics,” which, says Jenkins, has the effect of frustrating the authority of Scripture.

Today many young people are in revolt against the religious establishment’s reduction of Christian commitment to mere institutional affiliation or to the espousal only of doctrinal commitments as the badge of Christian discipleship. For them, Christ’s lordship means that soul and body are to be put on the line for the risen Redeemer in all life’s decisions and deeds. But in this noble quest for a living faith they are easily tempted to disparage or to submerge what is equally integral to authentic Christianity, namely, its revealed truths and the historical factuality of the central redemptive events. Particularly in the American academic milieu, which by and large concurs with a secular naturalistic view of reality, contemporary Christianity needs to become deeply rooted in the biblical view of nature, history, and man. Watchman Nee, however bold was his testimony to Christ Jesus in a hostile environment, does not in his writings help much at this point.

Nee’s prolific writings need not on that account be avoided, nor should one lose sight of a brave witness for Christ in desperately difficult circumstances. He edited not only a church publication called Revival, later named The Present Testimony, but also The Little Flock Hymnal (these are untranslated). A cursory biography of the man lists among his writings dozens of small books and pamphlets already translated and published. If these are viewed not as definitive texts but as a stimulus to doing what Scripture teaches and demands, they perhaps can refine not only some of Nee’s positions but ours as well. A generation that is fascinated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters must not forget the Christian martyrs in Communist work camps. While they may flub in the fine points of technical theology, they may also teach us a great deal about practical discipleship.

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