All Posts in Category "Experts"

The Experts Speak contains the testimony of six expert witnesses who studied the local churches and the teaching of Witness Lee. Five of them testified in court in the Lee v. Duddy; the sixth was not asked to testify at the trial but wrote a statement titled “Libel and the First Amendment.”

An index to the testimony in The Experts Speak with links to relevant portions on specific topics.

This Preface to the printed volume of The Experts Speak describes the contents of the book and how it is structured.

The “Meet the Experts” section of The Experts Speak gives basic profiles of the six experts who studied the local churches and the teachings of Witness Lee for the Lee et al v. Duddy et al case concerning The God-Men.

The “Introduction” to The Experts Speak presents the historical background of Lee et al v. Duddy et al and describes the role of the expert witnesses in the case.

Dr. J. Gordon Melton, Director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and author of the standard work Encyclopedia of American Religions, testified that SCP had completely misrepresented Witness Lee and the local churches and had made many false and damaging accusations in its book The God-Men. [Note: Dr. Melton is currently Distinguished Professor of American Religious History at the Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University.]

Dr. John A. Saliba, a Jesuit priest and Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Detroit-Mercy, testified that SCP adhered to a principle of attacking and destroying anyone with whom they did not agree and that the accusations of cultic behaviors made in The God-Men were false as regards the local churches and the teachings of Witness Lee.

Dr. Eugene Van Ness Goetchius, formerly Professor of Biblical Languages in both the Episcopal Theological School and Philadelphia Divinity School, testified that The God-Men intentionally misrepresented Witness Lee’s teachings on the authority of the Bible and morality and that the members of the local churches were “extremely family-oriented.”

Dr. Rodney Stark, Professor of Sociology and Comparative Religion at the University of Washington and co-author of the model of conversion that Neil Duddy claimed to have used to perform a sociological evaluation of the local churches, testified that Duddy had missed the model’s entire point and had altered it maliciously. [Note: Dr. Stark is currently Co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion and Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University.]

Dr. H. Newton Malony, Senior Professor of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, conducted a study of local church members to assess the claims of sociological deviance made in The God-Men. He found those claims to be without basis. [Note: Dr. Malony retired from Fuller in 2009.]

Dr. Edwin S. Gaustad, formerly Emeritus Professor of History at University of California, Riverside, wrote a statement criticizing self-appointed vigilante groups such as SCP and the damage they cause to the reforming impetus inherent in Christianity.

The full text of Dr. J. Gordon Melton’s booklet An Open Letter Concerning the Local Church, Witness Lee, and The God-Men Controversy, written and published by Dr. Melton after the conclusion of Lee v. Duddy. After giving a general background of the local churches based on Dr. Melton’s research as the leading authority on contemporary American religious groups, this booklet shows The God-Men‘s twisting of Witness Lee’s words in four key areas—propositional revelation, morality, rationality and use of the mind, and personal versus biblical authority. Based on SCP’s blatant misrepresentation of Witness Lee’s teaching, Dr. Melton recommends that The God-Men and any writing based on it be discarded.

After the end of The God-Men case (Lee v. Duddy) in 1985, Dr. J. Gordon Melton, one of the expert witnesses in the case, wrote and published An Open Letter Concerning the Local Church, Witness Lee and The God-Men Controversy. Dr. Melton demonstrated conclusively that The God-Men had misrepresented Witness Lee teaching and recommended that it, and any other writing based on it, be discarded.