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Watchman Nee’s tripartite anthropology is the theological foundation of much of Chinese church pietism. And in the last post we saw how that works itself out in terms of how God’s will is discerned, and in terms of how much spiritual authority is given to intuition. But Nee’s anthropology also leads to even more implications for the Christian life…

Dying to one’s ‘self’

If the spiritual man is someone who is controlled by the spirit, it means that the faculties of the soul must be denied, it must be put to death. Just as the body is crucified and delivered from the dominion of sin, so also are we to die to our soul.

In his exegesis of John 12, Nee says this:

He [Jesus] compares himself to a grain of wheat. If it does not fall inot the earth and die it remains alone. But if he be crucified and die, he shall impart life to many. The one condition is death. No death, no fruit. No other way is there to bear fruit than through death.

Every one of his disciples must follow in his footsteps. He pictures the grain as representing their self life. Just as a grain is unable to bear fruit until the natural life has been broken through death. Here he emphasises the matter of fruitfulness. While the soul life does possess tremendous power it nevertheless cannot fulfill the work of fruit-bearing. All the energies generated in the soul including talent, gift, knowledge and wisdom, cannot enable believers to bear spiritual fruit. If the Lord Jesus must die to bear fruit so also must his disciples die in order to produce fruit. The Lord regards soulish power as of no help to God in his work of fuirt bearing.

Watchman Nee, The Spiritual Man, 1:189-190.

A kind of life may be generated from the soulish faculties – but it should not be confused with true spiritual fruit. Instead we must die to soulish things like our talents, gifts, knowledge and wisdom if God is to work in us!

Keith Lai writes that according to Nee,

The salvation of the spirit, with the freedom of the body, does not entail the defeat of the soul, which is also the source for sin.  Nee contended that after one has received Christ, the soul is still at work. That soul life is the carnal life.  If anyone, even a Christian, depends on his natural strength, like his own talent, eloquence, cleverness, attractiveness, and zealousness, he is depending on flesh and not the Spirit.  Even when he draws on these natural abilities to achieve a godly goal, he is led by selfish ambitions and not the Spirit.  Consequently, he still cannot please God. There is a need for the salvation of the soul.

But the salvation of the soul is a much more longer process than that of the spirit. In dealing with the soul, one has to deny oneself, just as Jesus said in Matthew 16: 24: “If anyone will come after me, let him first deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.”  To deny oneself, for Nee, means to “deny everything originating in ourselves-what we are, what we have, what we can do-and move entirely by Him, daily apprehending the life of Christ through the Holy Spirit.”  This also includes the willingness to embrace sufferings, as the Spirit requires. This is what Nee called “walk in the Spirit”. He insisted Christians should not use their own natural ability to cope with the trials.  Instead they should pray that: ‘Lord, I cannot handle it but Lord you handle it for me.’ Then we will act differently from what we normally can.  It is because Christ, who lives within us by his Spirit guides the action.

Keith Lai, “Influence of Pietism on the Chinese Church”, 25-27.

This means that planning, strategising, calculating resources and raising supporters are carnal methods for achieving God’s purposes. These reveal a dependence on the faculties of the soul – and not a dependence on the spirit. A truly spiritual man denies himself – and all the things that come from the ‘self’ such as his intellect, wisdom, knowledge. He dies to those carnal things – and instead lives by the spirit.

Keith Lai explains how a number of encounters early in Nee’s life impressed such an approach on him:

Nee’s Christian faith was nurtured by Dora Yu.  After he had dedicated himself to serve the Lord, Nee spent a year in Yu’s Bible School.  There he said Yu “taught him too to let God’s Word speak to his own hear and not merely – essential though that was – to store his mind with its text.”  Later, Yu introduced Nee to Margret E. Barber, who was a former Anglican Missionary.  Barber’s life had a tremedous impact on Nee.  Founded in his later writing, Nee said:

“I always thought of her (Barber) as a ‘lighted’ Christian.  If I did but walk into her room, I was brought immediately to a sense of God.  In those days I was very young and had lots of plans, lots of schemes for the Lord to sanction, a hundred and one things which I thought would be marvellous if brought to fruition.  With all these I came to her to try and persuade her; to tell her that this or that was the thing to do.  But before I could open my mouth she would say a few quite ordinary words – and light dawned.  It simply put me to shame.  My scheming was all so natural, so full of man, whereas here was one who lived for God along.  I had to cry to Him, ‘Lord, teach me to walk that way.’”

Keith Lai, “Influence of Pietism on the Chinese Church”, 33-35.

And already you can see that in Nee’s theology, the faculties of thinking, reasoning etc. themselves are seen as carnal in-and-of-themselves – not just sin, not just sin-damaged thinking. They take on an entirely subordinate role in the spiritual man – but it is so subordinate that it effectively negates those God-given faculties!

Being broken by the Spirit

Nee describes the process of the soul being put to death, and the spirit taking control as a process called being ‘broken’.

In The Release of the Spirit, Nee uses the language of the ‘inner man’ (the spirit) and the ‘outer man’ (the soul, and then the body). God indwells us in our spirit – but there is a problem: the outer man traps and smothers the spirit.

When God comes to indwell us, by His Spirit, Life and power, He comes into our spirit which we are calling the inward man. Outside of this inward man is the soul wherein functions our thoughts, emotions and will. The outermost man is our physical body. Thus we will speak of the inward man as the spirit, the outer man as the soul and the outermost man as the body. We must never forget that our inward man is the human spirit where God dwells, where His Spirit mingles with our spirit. Just as we are dressed in clothes, so our inward man “wears” an outward man: the spirit “wears” the soul. And similarly the spirit and soul “wear” the body. It is quite evident that men are generally more conscious of the outer and outermost man, and they hardly recognize or understand their spirit at all. We must know that he who can work for God is the one whose inward man can be released. The basic difficulty of a servant of God lies in the failure of the inward man to break through the outward man.

Watchman Nee, The Release of the Spirit, I.

How can the spirit be released, so that the inner life can shine forth? Nee’s answer is that the outer man must be broken:

Yet due to the distractions of the outward man, their spirit does not seem to function properly. It is basically because their outward man has never been dealt with. For this reason revival, zeal, pleading and activity are but a waste of time. As we shall see, there is just one basic dealing which can enable man to be useful before God: brokenness.

Watchman Nee, The Release of the Spirit, I.

This experience of being broken is crucial in Nee’s understanding of the Christian life. It is a lifelong process, and many experiences of being broken may be needed for the outer man to be put to death. Keith Lai writes that,

Nee was aware that to walk after the spirit is life long process. Throughout this process, it is important for every Christian to reach many breaking points, by which he becomes aware that he can no longer do anything out of natural abilities, but has to depend on Christ. It is through these “broken” experiences that the soul will be broken, and the spirit will take control as a result.

Keith Lai, “Influence of Pietism on the Chinese Church”, 28.

For this breaking to occur, the Christian must first place himself willingly in the hands of God by full consecration. And then the Holy Spirit works to break the outer man using external means – circumstances and crises that force us to see our reliance on our own knowledge, intellect, wisdom - and which make us give these up in order to depend wholly on God.

It is not by the supply of grace to the inward man that the Holy Spirit breaks the outward. Of course, God wants the inward man to be strong, but His method is to utilize external means to decrease our outward man. It would be well nigh impossible for the inward man to accomplish this, since these two are so different in nature that they can scarcely inflict any wound on each other. Accordingly the nature of the outward man and that of external things are similar; thus the former can be easily affected by the latter. External things can strike the outward man most painfully. So it is that God uses external things in dealing with our outward man.

Watchman Nee, The Release of the Spirit, VI.

Nee places a very high value on this personal and present discipline of the Holy Spirit – so high in fact, that he compares it negatively with the Word!

Once you yield yourself to God, this discipline will meet your need to a far greater extent than that of the Word. It is not just for the learned, the clever, the gifted; no, it is the way for every child of God. The supply of the Word, the grace of prayer, the fellowship of the believers—none of these can substitute for the discipline of the Holy Spirit. This is because you need not only to be built up; you need also to be destroyed, to be delivered of all the many things in your life that cannot be brought over into eternity.

Watchman Nee, The Release of the Spirit, VI.

And so once again we see how Watchman Nee’s anthropology leads to a unique vision of the Christian life – one which rejects carnal reliance on one’s own abilities, and which learns this through being ‘broken’ again and again by the Spirit. And for many this will be a compelling vision!

But is that really what we are meant to do with our intellect? with wisdom? with knowledge? is faith really opposed to these things? Or has Nee simply assumed that these ‘lesser’ functions cannot be spiritual?

And could Nee’s emphasis on the subjective and present work of the Spirit end up replacing the historic yet objective foundation of the gospel in the confidence of believers?

[ PS: how have you seen this in the things that Chinese Christians say and do? ... and how have you seen it in how missions work is done? ]