Dr. Juedes: And that also means that the prophet or the prophecies really take the place of Christ as well, because who’s supposed to be lord of your life, you know?

Pawtucket: Mmhmm.

Dr. Juedes:  You know, the attention is really moved from Christ who, unfortunately we can’t see, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, to a person that we can see and that’s a critical belief that needs to be changed and replaced so that the prophet isn’t the intermediary between us and the Lord, but it’s Christ himself who serves as that. 

You know, and another basic belief of personal prophecy is that there is you know, divine inspiration of these prophets and that somehow they’re specially selected by God to get this.  In The Way prophets weren’t so prominent, but the Man of God certainly functioned as a prophet or as an apostle and you know, people submitted themselves to him and found out the hard way that that doesn’t work, but somehow it’s been carried over to CES, but instead of having the Man of God who’s the one who’s divinely inspired you have prophets or prophecies that are, but it’s the same basic problem underneath it, you know, it’s ascribing divine inspiration to men basically, or to women, depending how you look at it. 

So there are some core beliefs there and I think that’s where the critical thinking comes in, to really think through that and say, What’s underneath the bad practice?  And usually under the bad practice there’s bad teaching.  You know, like in Timothy it talks about sound doctrine, where he describes behavior.  Well, sound doctrine is more than beliefs or teachings.  It comes down to character and more basic assumptions underneath that.  So I hope that this crisis prompts that, you know.  Look, now when the splinter groups happened off The Way International, you know they did a little re-evaluating, but not really on the core things and that’s one thing I was disappointed at.

Pawtucket: Right.