# Witness Lee Witness Lee (Li Changshou, 1905-1997) was a Chinese preacher, coworker of [Watchman Nee](/codex/watchman-nee/), and the man who carried the local-church movement out of China and built it into an international body headquartered in Anaheim, California, under the publishing arm **Living Stream Ministry**. He is the author of the *Life-Study* series and the annotated *Recovery Version* of the Bible, and the source of nearly all the vocabulary that led countercult ministries to classify the movement as heretical for three decades. He is also the reason that classification was eventually reversed by two of the bodies that had made it. Distinguishing Lee from Nee is the first requirement of getting this subject right: the devotional writing Western evangelicals admire is Nee's, and the disputed formulations are Lee's. ## Biographical sketch - **Born** 1905 in Yantai (Chefoo), Shandong province, into a Southern Baptist family on his mother's side. - **Converted** in 1925 and shortly afterward left denominational Christianity, having concluded that the New Testament knows nothing of denominations. - **Joined Nee's work in 1932** and became his most capable coworker, effectively second in the movement through the 1930s and 1940s. - **Sent to Taiwan in 1949** as the Communist advance closed in, on Nee's instruction, to preserve the work outside the mainland. The Taiwan churches grew rapidly through the 1950s. - **Emigrated to the United States in 1962**, settling in Los Angeles and later Anaheim, where he founded Living Stream Ministry as the movement's publishing house. - **Life-Study messages**, delivered from 1974 onward, a verse-by-verse treatment eventually covering the entire Bible and running to well over a hundred volumes. - **Recovery Version**, a translation with an extensive footnote apparatus carrying his theology, completed for the New Testament in 1985 and the whole Bible in 1999, after his death. - **Died** June 9, 1997, in Anaheim, California. ## What he taught Lee's system is Nee's inheritance pushed much further and given a distinctive vocabulary. Four elements account for nearly all the controversy. ### God's economy and the processed Triune God Lee took *oikonomia* from [1 Timothy 1:4](/codex/1-timothy-1-4/) as the organizing category of scripture: God's economy is his plan to dispense himself into humanity to produce the Body of Christ. He then described the Triune God as **"processed"**, meaning that through incarnation, human living, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension God passed through processes that fitted him to be received by people. Critics heard a God who changes and develops, which contradicts divine immutability. Living Stream Ministry's answer is that the processes are predicated of the incarnate Son in his humanity and not of the divine essence. See [Divine Simplicity](/codex/divine-simplicity/) for the classical commitments at stake. ### The mingling of divinity and humanity Lee's characteristic formula, published repeatedly in his own words, is that **God became man that man might become God in life and nature but not in the Godhead**. The final clause is doing the entire load-bearing work, and Living Stream Ministry has always insisted on it: the believer partakes of the divine life and nature, from [2 Peter 1:4](/codex/2-peter-1-4/), without ever becoming an object of worship, a member of the Trinity, or divine in essence. Read with the qualifier, this is close to the Eastern doctrine of [Theosis](/codex/theosis/), which no one calls heresy. Read without it, and Lee's own habit of writing sentences like "we are God-men" and "we are becoming God" made it easy to drop, it sounds like deification in the flat sense. Much of the thirty-year dispute is a fight over whether the qualifier is a sincere theological boundary or a disclaimer. ### The Trinity Lee wrote of the Father, Son, and Spirit in ways that sounded to critics like **[Modalism](/codex/modalism/)**: that the Son is the Father, that the Lord is the Spirit from [2 Corinthians 3:17](/codex/2-corinthians-3-17/), that the three are "three stages" of one God for the purpose of dispensing. He affirmed the Nicene formula and denied modalism explicitly, and he also insisted on a "coinherence" so tight that the distinctions blur in his prose. The most defensible reading is that Lee is pressing **perichoresis**, the mutual indwelling of the persons, past the point where his non-technical vocabulary can carry the weight. The least defensible is that he taught Sabellianism. Both readings have serious people behind them. See [Trinity](/codex/trinity/) and [Trinity vs Oneness vs Modalism vs Arianism](/codex/trinity-vs-oneness-vs-modalism-vs-arianism/). ### The ground of locality, applied Nee's one-church-per-city teaching became, under Lee, the practical identity of the movement: the local churches are *the* church in each city, and denominational Christianity stands on divisive ground. In its sharper expressions this was heard as a claim that other believers, while saved, are not properly gathered, which is the ecclesiological exclusivism that most affected converts and their families. ### Distinctive practices - **Pray-reading**, praying scripture aloud phrase by phrase rather than studying it discursively. - **Calling on the name of the Lord**, audible repeated invocation, from [Romans 10:13](/codex/romans-10-13/). - **Life-Study** as the ordinary diet of the congregations, which in practice makes one man's commentary the shared lens. ## The classification fight This is the part with apologetic value, and it is covered in full at [Local Church Movement](/codex/local-church-movement/). In outline: - **1977-1981**, the Spiritual Counterfeits Project publishes *The Mind Benders* and then *The God-Men*, alleging heresy and cultic practice. - **1980-1985**, Lee and the local churches sue SCP and author Neil Duddy for defamation. SCP's counsel withdrew, SCP filed for bankruptcy reorganization, and **no defendant appeared at trial**. The 1985 California judgment finding the book false and defamatory was therefore uncontested, which is a materially weaker thing than a verdict on the merits and is routinely reported as though it were the stronger thing. - **2001-2007**, Living Stream Ministry sues Harvest House Publishers and authors John Ankerberg and John Weldon over the *Encyclopedia of Cults and New Religions*, seeking $136 million. The Texas courts ruled against Living Stream, and the litigation ended June 18, 2007 when the Supreme Court declined the case. - **c. 2006**, Fuller Theological Seminary, after roughly two years of study and dialogue, declares the teachings of the local churches "unequivocally orthodox" on God, the Trinity, the person and work of Christ, scripture, salvation, and the unity of the church, and states that critics had grossly misrepresented Lee. - **January 9, 2007**, more than sixty evangelical scholars and ministry leaders from seven nations sign an open letter asking Living Stream to repudiate specific statements of Lee's and to renounce the use of litigation against critics. - **December 2009**, the Christian Research Institute devotes an entire issue of the *Christian Research Journal* to a reassessment, cover-titled "We Were Wrong," withdrawing its earlier criticism after a six-year study. - **Immediately after**, Norman Geisler and Ron Rhodes publish a detailed rejection of the reassessment, and the question remains open in the countercult world to this day. ## How to assess him Three judgments the codex holds distinct: 1. **On the creedal essentials**, the case that Lee is heretical is weak. He affirms the Trinity, the deity and full humanity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, the authority of scripture, and salvation by grace through faith. Two serious investigations that went looking found orthodoxy. 2. **On theological precision**, the case against him is strong. A teacher who must be read with a standing qualifier in order not to sound like a modalist and a deificationist has a prose problem that is also a doctrinal problem, because most readers will not supply the qualifier. 3. **On conduct**, the litigation record is the gravest charge and the one the 2007 open letter pressed hardest. Suing critics for $136 million is not a theological error, and no finding of doctrinal orthodoxy addresses it. Holding all three at once is the honest position, and it is more useful apologetically than either the cult verdict or the exoneration on its own. ## See also - [Watchman Nee](/codex/watchman-nee/), his mentor, whose reputation is regularly conflated with his - [Local Church Movement](/codex/local-church-movement/), the movement, the doctrines, and the classification dispute in full - [Theosis](/codex/theosis/), the orthodox doctrine his God-man language most closely resembles - [Modalism](/codex/modalism/), the charge most often brought against his Trinitarian language - [Trinity](/codex/trinity/), the doctrine at issue - [Trinity vs Oneness vs Modalism vs Arianism](/codex/trinity-vs-oneness-vs-modalism-vs-arianism/), comparative table of the positions - [Divine Simplicity](/codex/divine-simplicity/), the classical commitments his "processed" language strains - [Jehovahs Witnesses](/codex/jehovahs-witnesses/), [Mormonism](/codex/mormonism/), the movements a cult classification normally groups a body with - [World Religions](/codex/world-religions/), comparative-religion master hub