Watchman Nee & Witness Lee — Doctrine of God
b2 — The Economy of God
Nature of God: God as Spirit
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“God’s substance is Spirit (John 4:24). The very essence of the almighty, all-inclusive, universal God is simply Spirit. God is the Manufacturer, and He intends to reproduce Himself as the Product; therefore, whatever He reproduces must be Spirit, the very substance of Himself.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 9)
Interpretation: God’s nature is not addressed through classical attribute categories but functionally: God is Spirit as substance and as the content to be distributed.
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“‘God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit.’ Again, the first ‘Spirit’ is capitalized and the second is not. We must worship God, who is the Spirit, in our human spirit.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 3 (John 4:24 quoted)
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“The three Persons in the Godhead are for God’s economy, the divine distribution, the holy dispensation. The Father as the source is embodied in the Son, and the Son as the course is realized in the Spirit as the transmission. God the Father is a Spirit (John 4:24), and God the Son, as the last Adam, was made a life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45).” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 7-8)
Interpretation: All three Persons of the Godhead are qualified as Spirit; this is the basis for the possibility of immanent indwelling in man.
Attributes of God: Almighty and All-inclusive
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“God, who is almighty and all-inclusive, intends to dispense nothing other than Himself to us.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 8)
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“God is exceedingly rich. He is like a successful businessman who has an enormous amount of capital. God has a business in this universe, and His vast wealth is His capital. We do not realize how many billions, countless billions, He has. All of this capital is simply Himself, and with it He intends to ‘manufacture’ Himself in mass production. God Himself is the Businessman, the Capital, and the Product.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 8-9)
Interpretation: Almighty power and infinite wealth are treated not as systematic attributes but as support for God’s capacity for self-dispensing.
Transcendence: The Invisible and Unapproachable Father
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“God the Father is the universal source of all things. He is invisible and unapproachable. How can God the Father, who dwells in unapproachable light (1 Tim. 6:16), be within us?” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 10)
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“The incomprehensible God is now expressed in Christ, the Word of God (John 1:1); the invisible God is revealed in Christ, the Image of God (Col. 1:15). So, the Son and the Father are one (John 10:30), and the Son is even called the Father (Isa. 9:6).” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 10)
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“Formerly it was impossible for man to contact the Father. He was exclusively God and His nature was exclusively divine. There was nothing in the Father to bridge the gap between God and man.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 10-11)
Interpretation: Transcendence here functions as the problem that the trinitarian economy resolves: the Father as source becomes accessible through the Son and the Spirit.
Trinity: Three Persons, One God
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“The Triune God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—is the very economy of the Godhead. Christianity during the past centuries has had many teachings about the Trinity, but the Trinity can never be adequately understood unless it is related to the divine economy.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 9)
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“We know that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not three different Gods, but one God, who is expressed in three Persons.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 9-10)
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“The three Persons of the Godhead are not three Spirits, but one Spirit. The Father is in the Son, and the Son with all His seven wonderful elements is in the Spirit.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 14)
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“Second Corinthians 13:14 shows the steps of God’s economy by the Trinity. ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.’ Love, grace, and communion are one element in three stages: love is the source, grace is the expression of love, and communion is the transmission of this love in grace. Likewise, God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are one God expressed in three Persons: God is the source, Christ is the expression of God, and the Holy Spirit is the transmission bringing God in Christ into man.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 10)
Interpretation: The Trinity is understood exclusively in functional-economic terms: not as an ontological mystery in itself, but as the means of divine self-communication. [TENSION with classical theology which also affirms the immanent Trinity independent of the economy of salvation]
God as Source and Dispenser of Himself
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“God’s economy is simply His plan to dispense Himself into humanity. God’s economy is God’s dispensation, which means nothing else than God dispensing Himself into the human race.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 8)
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“The goal of the divine economy is to dispense the Triune God in one Spirit into our human spirit.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 14)
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“The Father, as the inexhaustible source of everything, is embodied in the Son.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 10)
The Spirit as All-inclusive Means of Divine Communication
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“The Spirit of God in the Old Testament had only one element—the divine nature of God. As the divine Spirit, He did not have the elements of the human nature, the daily human life, the effectiveness of death, the resurrection, the ascension and the enthronement.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 13)
Interpretation: This implies a temporal development in the Spirit of God — not in His essence, but in His redemptive-historical content.
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“The Father is in the Son, the Son is in the Spirit, and the Spirit is in us as the very transmission of God, transmitting constantly all that God is and has in Christ.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 2 (p. 22)
Immanence: God Indwelling Man
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“This Holy Spirit today, with the fullness of the Father in the riches of the Son, has come into our human spirit and dwells there to impart all that God is into our very being. This is God’s economy, the divine dispensation.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 1 (p. 7)
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“God created us to be His containers in order to contain Himself. We are only empty containers, and God intends to be our only content.” — Witness Lee, The Economy of God, ch. 5 (p. 77-78)
Interpretation: Immanence is understood in a radical sense: God dwells in the human spirit as content. This goes beyond classical immanence doctrine and borders on a mystical participation model.