Leaderboard

This is important to understand. Joseph Campbell is an excellent pointer for this idea. Thanks, Rocky. Your contributions are always meaningful and contemplative, at least for me. This is all so important so understand. It seems to me awareness that narratives are crafted to develop meaning is important. One might (ought to) ask: Whose narrative? Is there an agenda? What images of ourselves and others must we create to accept or advance a narrative? Why are we creating these images? Do we have freedom of mind to look at ourselves and to see that we are conditioned, programmed, indoctrinated? Narrative can be a useful device. It can also manufacture and advance error. Can we first just observe before BELIEVING?

This morning I was thinking about the first time I sat through the PFAL class. That was some 48 years ago. The class was run in an apartment on Long Island. It was winter. The class instructor was a young gentleman with a beard and usually wore turtleneck sweaters. I use the term class instructor very loosely – but that’s how we referred to the role when I was in TWI…it might have been something just peculiar to our neck of the woods…I’ve also heard them referred to as class coordinator. Perhaps that’s closer to a correct description…since they functioned more like a class monitor - responsible to ensure classroom discipline. They are answerable to “the teacher” (wierwille and anyone else in TWI’s chain of command) in case of any mischief. But the concern isn’t over run-of-the-mill classroom high jinks. It’s always to keep students on task with …learning… I mean acquiring knowledge of the Bible… more like absorbing wierwille’s indoctrination process. My undivided attention and disabling any critical thinking skills I was developing in my young life was absolutely required – indicated by the “listening with a purpose” questions in my PFAL syllabus for that session. I still have mine – stored somewhere in our home’s upper-regions-of-the-don’t-know-why-I’m-still-holding-on-to-this-stuff - i.e., attic. “Listening with a purpose” is another one of those odd TWI-redundancies. Why else would I be listening to something if I didn’t have a reason for paying attention to it? All you hypnotists, cult-leaders, deprogrammers, psych majors and marketing execs don’t answer that! Save all your answers until the end of this thread . I think the real purpose of “listening with a purpose” questions was twofold. It got me to hang on every word of “the teacher” eagerly anticipating when he announced “the clincher”. And as a result, it also sidetracked most of my learning faculties with busy work. In The Way International, my learning curve might be better described as an indoctrination curve - the rate of progress in gaining experience or new skill…i.e., accepting a set of beliefs uncritically. This morning while thinking along these lines I got into a familiar mental riff of What-Ifs. Believe it or not I do appreciate a few things I got out of PFAL... I sometimes wonder what would have happened if wierwille didn’t hold it up as THE gold standard of biblical research…the best…the most reliable…the most respected source for biblical studies...…but I guess he may have imagined himself being in competition with mainstream Christianity… a false teacher has gotta do what a false teacher has gotta do…so through the concurrent catastrophe (an antonym for "miracle" ) of plagiarism, incompetence, ambition and delusion wierwille cobbled together PFAL. You know, since I left TWI, I have humbled myself many times over before family and friends admitting I was wrong for going whole hog on wierwille's dogma...Of course, a cult-leader’s ego would never allow themselves such a self-mortifying move…because that would dissolve the illusion of being “spiritually distinguished” - - head and shoulders above everyone else.…If he really had such well-meaning intentions to help others better understand the Bible – why wasn’t he honest about it? He could have said “Hey, check out the work of EW Bullinger – he really gets detailed in analyzing the Bible” or “I took this class by BG Leonard and learned a lot of stuff about the holy spirit. I’d like to have him teach his class to our church. I’ll put out a sign-up sheet for those interested and we’ll figure out what it will cost us to have his class here.” Being a technical minded person, I’ve always had a pragmatic approach to problem solving. I had a faith in God ever since I was a little kid growing up in a traditional Roman Catholic home. By using reawakened cognitive skills as tools to methodically dissect all the plagiarism, twisted Scripture, logical fallacies and mish mash of ideologies in PFAL, I recognized there were a few things I got out of the class. For one thing it demystified the Bible. That’s not to say wierwille did a great job of explaining what it said. It was more like listening to a musician give their rendition of a familiar tune – it was okay – but now some 48 years later I think I can do better. As a Christian…as a layman…as a survivor of a pseudo-Christian cult it was extremely difficult to come to terms with the intellectual, emotional, social, and financial setbacks of being in a harmful and controlling cult. It's okay to be a layman and have hobbies like systematic theology and hermeneutics. Funny to think that a sham of a class like PFAL got me started in all that. I thought of all this over breakfast while I was reading Thiselton on Hermeneutics: Collected Works and New Essays . So much for the road not taken, false starts, misdirection. The paths of theology and hermeneutics fascinated me way back then. But I followed the brightly colored road sign PFAL with its promise of a shortcut to that and more…There’s no saying I can’t backtrack and explore other paths now.