Nee/Lee — Prolegomena
Watchman Nee and Witness Lee place the knowledge of God at the center as a hermeneutical and epistemological problem. In The Knowledge of Life, the issue is not intellectual theology or doctrinal systematization, but rather the internal method by which God reveals Himself through the life He plants within the believer. The core question is epistemological: how does the human being know God—from without through His works, or from within through divine life?
Knowledge of God as Internal Revelation
Nee and Lee draw a sharp distinction between external knowledge (God’s doings, His ways) and internal knowledge (God Himself). The basis for this epistemology is God’s own life:
When we are regenerated, His Spirit, containing His life, enters into us that we may have the capability of knowing Him from within. This knowing of Him, on the one hand, gradually increases with our inward growth of life, and, on the other hand, it also causes the life within us to grow. Because God has given us His life, we can know Him. The more His life grows within us, the more we know Him.
This reveals a fundamental hermeneutical principle: knowledge of God grows through life, not through doctrine alone. Revelation is not a set of truths but a living reality that works from within.
Three Degrees of Knowledge
The epistemological structure moves through three phases: knowing God’s deeds (external), knowing God’s ways (the logic of His actions), and knowing God Himself (internal). The second degree is where Nee’s hermeneutic emerges—the reader recognizes God’s principles of action:
Hebrews 8:10-11 says also: “I will put my laws into their mind…all shall know me, from the least to the greatest of them.” By this verse we see that all who receive the inward law under the New Testament can know God Himself.
This “inward law” is not a written rule but the working revelation of God’s nature in the consciousness of the believer. That is purely hermeneutical: the text of life-in-God must be read through the sense of it.
Internal versus External Knowledge
Nee distinguishes two fundamentally different modes of knowledge through a simple example—sugar versus salt. The first mode is external (someone tells you the difference), the second is internal (you taste it):
For example, suppose we put some fine, white sugar side by side with some fine, white salt. In outward appearance, both are white and fine, and it is difficult to distinguish between them. We may ask someone to tell us which is sugar and which is salt, but this knowledge comes from the teaching of others and is outward, objective, and general. It can also be mistaken. Yet if we simply taste them, we immediately can taste which is sweet and therefore, is sugar, and which is salty and therefore is salt. We do not need others to tell us.
This is epistemologically revolutionary: taste is a valid source of knowledge of God. Not reason alone, but internal sensory modes reveal truth.
Spirit as Consciousness of Truth
In Chapter 7, Nee explains how one comes to know the Spirit. The difficulty is that Spirit is abstract, so one must take detours through life, law, peace, death—each with its own consciousness:
The life of the Spirit of life spoken of here is the life of God Himself, which is the highest life; therefore, it is the richest in consciousness. This life within us causes us to be full of spiritual consciousness, enabling us to sense the spirit and the things of the spirit.
The Spirit is knowable through consciousness. This is the hermeneutical key: what feels true? Consciousness itself is the grammar of revelation.
Truth as Reality
Finally, Nee presents the Holy Spirit as the “Spirit of Truth”—in the original, “Spirit of Reality”:
In John 14:16-17 the Lord tells us that the Holy Spirit who comes to dwell in us as the Comforter is “the Spirit of truth.” Hence, the Spirit of God dwelling in us is also the Spirit of truth. The word truth in the original text means reality. Therefore, the Spirit of God, who dwells in us as “the Spirit of reality,” causes all that God and Christ are to be reality within us.
This closes the epistemological circle: revelation transforms abstract truth into living reality. The hermeneutical task is thus not to explain what God says, but what God truly is in the consciousness of one indwelt by His Spirit.