Steve Lortz

One of the problems of fundamentalist/evangelical protestant thinking in general, and of TWI specifically, is narrowing down the meanings of terms to the point where they can't really be used in free-flowing conversation.

It's hard for me to see that narrowing the term "cult" is particularly useful. There are "cults" that are harmless, like the followings of sports figures or rock stars, and at the other extreme there are cults that are much more cold-blooded and vicious than TWI was, such as Scientology or Momentus. There are even spoof cults like The Church of the SubGenius!

The feature that distinguishes a harmless cult from a harmful one is whether or not the leaders are honest with the followers about what they are in for. The leaders of harmful cults make their followers deployable to a hidden agenda. The overt agenda of TWI was to take the Word Over the World. The hidden agenda was to provide money, power, adulation and sexual prey for Wierwille and the Trustees.

Love,

Steve

Things are moving slowly, what with my anemia and the end of the semester. Our semester final in Hebrew is Monday morning.

But they are moving. Here is the text of a letter I just sent a short time ago.

Dear Dr. Hawkins,

Dr. Lozano informs me that he will be teaching a class on hermeneutics for doctoral students in January. I asked Dr. Lozano if I could audit the class, and he told me I would need to seek permission from you.

I became interested in hermeneutics about ten years before I got into studying the Bible. I was engaged in the U.S. Navy Nuclear Power Program. We had two volumes that were to govern all of our activities, the Reactor Plant Control Manual and the Engineering Department Operating Procedures. Both books were several hundred pages long. Our watchwords were "verbatim compliance with posted procedures." That was one of the keys to the Navy's long record of safe reactor operations. We became intensely interested in the meanings that words convey, and their practical application. Our lives literally depended on it. Whenever we were involved in a potential loss of plant control, we had to be able to go before a board of officers and orally argue the justification of our decisions and actions from the texts of the operating manuals.

When I became attracted to actually researching the Bible, it struck me that it has much more integrity of meaning at multiple levels than any of our manuals ever had, but I knew that even our manuals necessarily contained what some people might consider contradictions and errors. A question that has been exercising me for some time has been how to counter the cognitive distortion of fundamentalist/evangelical protestant theology which says that the whole Bible falls apart, becoming nothing more than a tissue of lies, if we find even one contradiction or error in it. I don't think being "God-breathed" means what the fundamentalists/evangelicals think it means.

Since my recent bouts with pneumonia, I have been thinking in very concrete and personal terms about the relation between spirit and life as purposefully regulated flows of constituent elements. I've been thinking about John 6:63 where Jesus said "The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life." This makes me wonder about how thought, words spoken, can also be viewed as purposefully regulated flows of constituent elements. What are those elements? Images associated with symbols? Abstract ideas? How are the flows of those things regulated? Passages of scripture such as Proverbs 4:20-23 and Romans 12:2 lead me to think that the Bible has much to say on the subject.

I also intend to read Ferdinand de Saussure's "Course in General Linguistics" over the Christmas break to prepare for the class.

If it would be acceptable with you for me to attend Dr. Lozano's class on hermeneutics (I am not seeking any formal credit for attending), then I would appreciate it very much if you would let Dr. Lozano and myself know so.

Thank you very much!

Steve Lortz

All for now...

Love,

Steve

I think calling it "American Christianity" is painting with an over-broad brush. "Fundamentalist/Evangelical Protestantism in America"? That would be closer to the truth.

There are plenty of good Christians in every denomination in America, even some good fundamentalist/evangelical protestants, but the groups who joined in the fundamentalist movement of the early 1900s seem particularly prone to certain cognitive distortions.

I find myself being drawn to identify more with folks who came out of the Wesleyan Holiness Movement of the late 1800s, particularly those who recognize the workings of the Holy Spirit.

Love,

Steve

I didn't make it to the library today... maybe tomorrow...

Love,

Steve

Thanks for the reference, Mark! But my neuron-pathways were set up in the days of slide rules, manual typewriters and party lines. I was a teenager when the first transistor radios started coming over from Japan. I remember the days when vacuum tubes ruled the earth! I've been haunting the stacks at the Nicholson Library for decades, even when I wasn't taking classes at AU, and I love the smell of pulp. Besides, walking to and from the library counts as physical therapy for me. Treadmills bore me senseless!

Here is the work I did on John 6:63,

to pneuma estin to zoopoioun, he sarx ouk ophelei ouden: ta rhemata a ego lelaleka humin pneuma estin kai zoe estin.

Literal translation: the spirit is the one who is making alive, the flesh not helps not even: the sayings that I am speaking to you spirit is and life is.

Sense translation: The Spirit is the one who is making alive, the flesh does NOT help, not in any way: the sayings that I AM SPEAKING to you are spirit and are life.

Zoopoioun is a participle that I think is best translated by the phrase I've given. The double negative of ouk and ouden emphasizes the fact that the flesh does NOT help. Inclusion of the word ego puts extra-special emphasis on the "I" and the perfect tense of lelaleka puts emphasis on "I am speaking." The inclusion of the verb estin for both spirit and life points out the fact that they are being regarded here as two different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. They can't be translated as "spiritual life" or lively spirit". The subject of the last clause is plural, but the verbs used with spirit and life are singular. It might be possible to translate the last clause as "the sayings that I am speaking to you is one spirit and is one life, but in my opinion that would be overplaying the shift in number, and it doesn't make good English.

All for now... more later...

Love,

Steve

Thanks, waysider and Mark!

The first step in the hermeneutical cycle is to find out exactly what is written. I will probably translate the verse sometime before tomorrow afternoon.

The next step will be to examine what the verse meant to the person who originally wrote it. That's where questions about the authorship will arise, waysider. This step will also include looking at the verse in it's immediate context, which Mark has already started to do.

The third step is closely aligned with the second step, what might the passage have meant to the people who originally heard it? Many scholars think the Johannine community was in Asia minor, centered on Ephesus. That could get VERY interesting!

Pursuing both the second and the third steps of the hermeneutical cycle will require me to go to the library and consult the commentaries, which I will do tomorrow afternoon and evening.

By Monday, I should be prepared to begin some preliminary integration!

Thanks, all!

Love,

Steve

I just woke up from my nap, and I find my thought has progressed again. Before I went to sleep, my intent was to describe the hermeneutical cycle the way I learned it, which I still intend to do, but upon waking up, I realize I can also describe the hermeneutical cycle as a regulated purposeful flow. The significance of that will become plain as we go.

The hermeneutical cycle begins with analytic consideration of a part, in this case, John 6:36. The analytic questions are these; what is actually written? what did that mean to the person who originally wrote it? and what did it mean to the people who originally read it? The cycle then moves to integrative consideration; how does the new understanding of the part contribute to a new understanding of the whole? After that, then the cycle continues on to the next difficult verse.

What I realized when I just woke up is that the hermeneutical cycle itself can be described as a flow of thought purposefully oscillating between the modes of analytic and integrative. Since breath can be seen as a purposefully regulated flow, and life itself can be seen as purposefully regulated flow, the hermeneutical cycle can be seen as living thought, purposefully breathed.

I think that is a very concentrated dose, of what I've been trying to think through. What do you guys think? Is this screwed up in some way I haven't yet noticed?

Love,

Steve

I have paused in this discussion because of the place I am at in the hermeneutical cycle regarding John 6:36...

"It is the spirit that quickeneth [makes alive]; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life."

I've been thinking about the questions "what are words?" and "how can they be considered to be breathed?" When I woke up this morning, the words of John 6:36 were on my mind. I couldn't remember if they were real, or just my imagining, so I looked the verse up in the Blue Letter Bible, and behold! they WERE real! Now all I have to do is figure out what they mean(t).

If I were practicing systematic theology the way Wierwille did, I would find a way to make John 6:36 mean what my system says it SHOULD mean, to support my system. The single difficult verse would have to be interpreted in light of the many clear verses. But I am not practicing systematic theology, I'm practicing constructive theology, so I resort to the hermeneutical cycle. The fact that I don't clearly understand John 6:36 means also that my understanding of the whole is not yet adequate.

Unfortunately, my morning meds are kicking in, and I'm too drowsy to continue right now. More later!

Love,

Steve

One thing that I never knew until I went back to school recently and took a class on it is that there are TWO doctrines of the Trinity, the economic doctrine and the ontological doctrine.

The economic doctrine of the Trinity simply says that everything we receive from God the Father we receive through the Lord Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit, and everything we offer to God the Father we offer through the Lord Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit. The economic Trinity is Gad as he has chosen to reveal himself to us. A person can pretty much take any passage from the Bible regarding the relationships between us, God, Jesus and the Spirit at face value.

The ontological doctrine of the Trinity is God as he is in himself. The first thing everybody says about the ontological Trinity is that it is ineffable, which means we can't say any effing thing about it. They then go on to produce volumes of information about something which cannot be talked about.

The Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) attempted to settle all arguments about the relations between God and Jesus by saying that Jesus had two natures, one human and one divine, the two natures cannot be said to mix or mingle, and the two natures cannot be said to be divisible or separable. The decision of the Council didn't say what the relationship was... it just said you can't argue about it. Since then, Christianity has managed to maintain what little unity it has by singing the doxology without examining too closely the meaning of the words being sung.

Wierwille screwed up our understandings of the relationship between God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit by teaching that Jesus is out of the loop, seated at God's right hand, and everything we receive from God we receive either through the vending machine of our believing or through the man of God of the world for this our day and time. The holy spirit is little seed that God plants in each one of us which we have to feed and water by speaking in tongues.

Jesus is and always has been the Head of his body! When Wierwille taught that PFAL was the Word as it had not been known since the first century, he was denying that the Lord Jesus has had a hand in anything that's been going on for the last 2,000 years, and that just ain't so.

Love,

Steve

... snip ...

My suspicion is that you're not going to come up with a useful meaning of "God-breathed" if that's the criteria for a useful meaning.

I could be wrong.

I've been giving this a lot of thought lately, even before I started this thread. And not just because of being involved with the Way decades ago, but from seeing how many young peoples' understandings of the Bible are screwed up today by the fundamentalist/evangelical protestant notions of plenary verbal inspiration, and that the whole Bible falls apart, becomes nothing more than a tissue of lies, if even one single contradiction or error is found in it. Because... as is obvious to even the most casual of observers... the Bible is FULL of contradictions and errors.

But it has been equally as obvious to me from the first time I ever went to Twig, that something about the Bible is "God-breathed." And that was even before I had heard the phrase "God-breathed,"

A lot of things started coming together for me on October 30th, the date of the first entry on this thread. Since then, I've been struggling how to articulate this sunesis. One of the things I've been doing from time to time is stopping in at a particular prof's office and chatting with him, because he's usually the only prof in his office before 8:00 am (when my Hebrew class starts). Our conversations are brief, but I recap my thinking to him, and he comments on it. I've never had him for a class, so it's like getting feedback from a fresh perspective. This morning I went to his office, primarily to bum a cup of coffee out of the pot he keeps there, but in the process, I was able to articulate some of the things I'm going to write below...

What does it mean for ANYTHING to be God-breathed? What does it mean for SCRIPTURE to be God-breathed? How does God breathe words?

Luke 6:45 says "A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good: and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh."

Did Luke write those words? It doesn't really matter whether he or someone else did. Did Jesus say those words? NO!!! He couldn't have! He DIDN'T SPEAK ENGLISH! But he may well have expressed a sentiment similar to the one implied by those English words.

Are the words of Luke 6:45 literally "true"? No. What kind of "treasure" can there be in a literal heart? How could such a treasure be distinguished as "good" or "bad"? Doesn't the "abundance" or "overflow" of the heart literally consist of blood? Does blood usually spurt out of peoples' mouths?

The words of Luke 6:45 are metaphoric. They express poetic knowledge. Is the poetic knowledge expressed in the verse true? Yes it is. In modern language, Jesus is describing what we would call "Freudian slips" or in the realm of political speech, "gaffs".

Were those words God-breathed?

The mouth is like a sentinel valve for the heart. "Sentinel valves are simply small relief valves installed in some systems to warn of impending over pressurization." I have just re-stated the same poetic truth of Luke 6:45 in a simile, a different form of poetic expression conveying the same poetic truth.

Were the words I typed God-breathed? I cannot confirm as much, but neither can I deny it.

The last part of Romans 5:5 says "...the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us."

Our "hearts" are full of words. If we have conditioned our hearts with the proper words, by habitually thinking the things God would have us think, then the love of God can flow into our hearts, interact with the words with which we've filled our hearts, and flow out of our mouths to where other people can hear them. Other people can hear God talk to them through us, and KNOW that it's God talking to them. That's what it means in I Corinthians 14:24&25 where it says "²⁵But if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or one unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all: ²⁵And thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth."

That's what it means for God to breath words. More about the implications this evening after I come back from mood management group.

Love,

Steve

It was God’s plan before the creation of the world, that humankind’s fingerprints would not be found on humankind's salvation.

... snip ...

Are you saying that Jesus Christ was NOT a human being?

Love,

Steve

The pneuma hagion concept presented in PLAF (The Wonder Class) is that God had a purpose for everything He said, where He said it, to whom He said it, yada, yada, ad infinitum. This makes it look more like it was hammered out by a bunch of ad hoc committee members or reddit regular posters, one upping each other with comments about OP's mom.

.....................................

Edited because words are supposed to have spaces between them and stuff.

The "pneuma hagion concept" presented in PLAF (The Wonder Class) it technically known as plenary verbal inspiration. I don't think Wierwille plagiarized it because he didn't realize he needed to plagiarize it. It was what he learned in the church he grew up in. Like fish being unaware of water, etc. etc. etc.

Plenary verbal inspiration has only been around for about 150 years, and it is peculiar to fundamentalist/evangelical protestants.

Most Christians have never considered that the scriptures being God-breathed required plenary verbal inspiration.To reject the Bible and God and Jesus because the Bible doesn't live up to a recent cognitive distortion (that there are no contradictions or errors in the Bible) is to fall prey to the same cognitive distortion (that the whole Bible falls apart if there is even one single contradiction or error in it).

It also indicates a severe deficiency in understanding how to hear the Holy Spirit. That was something Wierwille seriously promoted, listening to him and ignoring the Spirit of God.

Love,

Steve

Pardon me for saying so but you're not exactly strengthening your case for the pneuma hagion concept.

Ya know what I mean, Vern?

That all depends on what you mean by "the pneuma hagion concept", Earnest!

Love,

Steve

Could you expand upon that statement? Are you suggesting that the contradictions were a design feature of the Bible? I know one way we dealt with Biblical contradictions in TWI was to call them apparent contradictions and contort ourselves to harmonize the conflicting sections or verses. This does not seem like waht you are saying. (Other groups do the contorting as well, it wasn't unique to TWI)

Yes, there are lots of examples of contradictions being deliberately written into the Bible! One of the clearest to see and understand is the contradiction between 1 Samuel 16:14-23 and 1 Samuel 17:1-58, regarding how David originally came to Saul's attention. In chapter 16, Saul's servants sent for David to do music therapy on Saul when Saul was in a depressive mood swing. Chapter 17 is the famous story of David and Goliath, when David comes to Saul's attention for an entirely different reason. David begins as a complete stranger to Saul in both of these stories. They can't both be "true". Why would the writers of 1 Samuel put them both in their book, side by side?

There were probably occasional odd writers in Israel prior to the reign of Solomon, but it was only during his reign that the government became wealthy enough to establish an "industrial strength" scriptorium, where a full time staff was fed in order to crank out all sorts of material. It's almost certain that one of their first projects would be to produce a narrative confirming Solomon's legitimacy to the throne, hence 1 and 2 Samuel. The story of David and Goliath would be one of the cornerstones of that narrative, but there was only one problem. The time when David came to power was only a little over 40 years before the time Solomon's scriptorium began operating. The events of David's rise to power were still part of living memory, and Solomon's writers couldn't just throw all of that away. There were still plenty of people who could say "That just ain't the way it was!" So to compromise, the writers included the popular, glorious story of puny David's victory over the hulking Goliath... but they introduced it with the truth, about David coming to Saul to minister through music. And if that wasn't enough, the writers of the narrative revealed in 2 Samuel 21:19 that it wasn't David, but rather Elhanan who killed Goliath. Notice that the words the brother of in that verse are in italics. They aren't there in the Hebrew.

And if it isn't enough to look at just a few contradictions in Samuel, there also seems to be an irreconcilable error. 1 Samuel 13:1 (KJV) reads "Saul reigned one year; and when he had reigned two years over Israel..." The verse literally reads "A son of one year was Saul when he became king, and two years he reigned over Israel" in the Hebrew. What does that mean? It makes for some interesting thinking!

The earliest characters in the Tanakh are counter-mythological, to attack the myths of the sixth-century BCE Babylonians, among whom the descendants of Solomon's scribes had been exiled. The poetic truths these characters reveal are truths about who the LORD God is, and how he works. Beginning with Abraham, I think, and proceeding through characters like Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Joshua, we have legendary characters. I think there were real people at the heart of these stories, but the characters took on exaggerated characteristics as the stories were told through generation after generation. It is very hard to read them as if they were the kind of people we know and are. But when we come to David, the writers can't get away with just foisting off the legends. They have to include the truth, too. From there, things become more and more concrete.

The theology of the Deuteronomist was that curses surely follow disobedience and blessings surely follow obedience. And that's not just in the book called Deuteronomy. The Deuteronomist's hand can be seen from Genesis to Second Kings, as well as in other places. And yet the Wisdom literature, particularly Ecclesiastes, contradicts the Deuteronomist. The book of Job contradicts EVERY SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY!

Why!?!

So that Wierwille could not turn God into a vending machine without doing obvious violence to the integrity of the Word of God.

Systematic theologies are those in which a system for interpreting the text takes precedence over the text itself. Systematic theologies say "The few difficult verses must be understood in light of the many clear verses." But a genuine constructive theology says, "The few difficult verses are a sign to you that the many clear verses are not really as clear as your system would make them out to be. Constructive theology does not try to harmonize the difficult verses, the contradictions and the errors. Nor does constructive theology hide from them. Constructive theology asks "What can this teach us? What can we learn from this?"

All for now... more later...

Love,

Steve

Intentional contradiction does not equate with something being God-Breathed. We find this technique being used frequently in modern writing, as well. We call it irony.

There is a LOT or irony in the Old Testament! The entire book of Jonah is ironic!

And why shouldn't God be able to breath out irony as well any modern writer breaths it out!?!

Love,

Steve

I am not a mental health care professional. I became interested in the subject of mental health care when my wife began having psychotic episodes during 2000. She was diagnosed primarily with bipolar mood disorder 1, and after a couple of years of fiddling around with different meds and doses, we (she, her docs and I) brought it under control. She's also been diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome, mild OCD, PTSD from a dog attack when she was little, and she was sexually molested by a trusted "friend" of the family when she was a girl. In the process of coping with these things, I learned that I also suffer from bipolar mood disorder, but the milder version, not as extreme as hers.

Moods are controlled by the balances of several chemical neurotransmitters in the brain. The balances shift in accordance with circadian and other rhythms, and with external factors that can impinge. Moods can be plotted as swings between highs and lows, an oscillating flow of chemical balances and their results. The feedback systems designed into the body ordinarily maintain mood swings within a band regarded as normal. With bipolar 2, my mood swings can go beyond the normal band into categories designated as hypomania and depression. These swings are not psychotic. My wife's mood swings, if we don't keep proper maintenance of them, can go into full blown mania or clinical depression. I am currently on 40mg of Paxil per day. Paxil is a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. It dampens my mood swings and keeps me from getting too depressed.

The Biblical exhortation to mental health care is Proverbs 4:23, "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life." Keeping our hearts doesn't just mean guarding or protecting them. It also means keeping in the sense of house-keeping... watch over and look out for what's going on in your heart... clean it out when it starts to look like you've been breeding cats in it (to quote the old Chief of the Boat). Heart-keeping requires regular maintenance.

Some time ago, Elizabeth and I became involved with the National Alliance on Mental Illness. We both took their Peer-to-Peer and Family-to-Family classes together. For a number of years I facilitated a biweekly NAMI support group meeting, until my stamina failed with the potassium overdose two years ago. Since I came out of the hospital back in August, I've been attending a weekly mood management therapy group to work on avolition, the feeling of "I don't want to do this. I don't want to do anything." I've been diagnosed with anemia also since April, which makes me lethargic, which is very similar to depression. In order to do my heart-keeping, I've had to dive deep into it, identifying and considering the sources of feelings. Is my serotonin low? Do I need to deal with the symptoms of mood swings that still happen in spite of my meds? Is the oxygen to my brain low? Do I need to get my O₂ concentration back up into the 90s? Have I been eating too much sugar? Am I angry with someone? Who might it be? And why? Am I angry with the author of the book I'm reading? Am I angry with Elizabeth? Am I angry with me? Am I angry with God? Am I afraid of something? If so, what? And what can I do to alleviate that fear?

Or am I suffering from cognitive distortions?

"Cognitive distortions are simply ways our mind convinces us of something that just isn't true." These are things I learned in my mood management group, but if you doubt me, google it...

There are different lists of of cognitive distortions, some of them going up in number as high as 50, but this is a common list, and it's the one we use in our group:

"Cognitive distortions that lead to anxiety and worry [and I include fear and anger]

1. All-or-nothing thinking - looking at things in black-or-white categories, with no middle ground

2. Overgeneralization - generalizing from a single negative experience, expecting it to hold true forever

3. The mental filter - focusing on the negatives while filtering out all the positives, noticing the one thing that went wrong, rather than all the things that went right

4. Diminishing the positive - coming up with reasons why positive events don't count

5. Jumping to conclusions - making negative interpretations without actual evidence, acting like a mind-reader or fortune-teller

6. Catastrophizing - expecting the worst case scenario to happen

7. Emotional reasoning - believing that the way you feel reflects reality

8. 'Shoulds' and 'should-nots' - Holding yourself to a strict list of what you should and shouldn't do - and beating yourself up if you break any of the rules

9. Labeling - Labeling yourself or others based on mistakes and perceived shortcomings

10. Personalization - Assuming responsibility for things that are outside of your control

These cognitive distortions are not simply passing thoughts. They are things we repeat over and over again to ourselves until they become unthinking habit. They become embedded in our attitudes of heart. They are the heart's deceitfulness above all things that the diligent heart-keeper needs to be aware of.

-----

"Since the Bible is God-breathed, it CANNOT contain any errors or contradictions. If there is even one single contradiction in the Bible, then the WHOLE thing falls apart."

Here we have two cognitive distortions, all-or-nothing thinking and overgeneralization, from the very get-go of fundamentalist/evangelical protestant theology (mid-to late-1800s). First, that there are no errors or contradictions in the Bible, and that a single one would destroy the value of the whole. Neither of these things is true.

Next... our experience of Wierwille...

Wierwille was a man who talked about Jesus and the Bible. He was also a fraud and a liar. And he fooled us... or at least I can honestly say he fooled me.

The cognitive distortions of our experience with Wierwille...

Since Wierwille was a fraud and a liar who talked about Jesus and the Bible, ALL people who talk about Jesus and the Bible are frauds and liars... or just fools. Including all the people who originally wrote the books that became the Bible... they were ALL frauds and liars. Here we have overgeneralization and labeling.

There is plenty of evidence that the Bible is full of contradictions and errors. There is also evidence that many of the contradictions are purposeful. But instead of exploring what those purposes might be, we are going to ignore that evidence. These are the cognitive distortions of the mental filter and minimizing the positive.

All the scholars who agree with my position are serious and unbiased. Any scholar who disagrees with me is frivolous and biased, especially those Christian scholars! How can they be serious and unbiased? They are ALL frauds and liars or fools. How do I know that these things are true? I feel it. These are examples of emotional reasoning, believing that the way you feel reflects reality. Not to mention the mental filter and minimizing the positive.

I SHOULDN'T have been fooled by Wierwille. I will guarantee that I am never fooled again, by rejecting anything that anybody who is talking about Jesus or the Bible says!

I love you all. Each and every one!

Steve

Misrepresenting what other posters say will be construed as against the house rules

Ad hominems are just poor, illogical arguments

Keep it on topic people!

Note the post at the top of this forum from a few years back: anyone may post here - Atheists, Agnostics, Buddhists or anyone else who does not currently define themselves as Christian or as a bible literalist may post here

Thank you, Captain... er... Mod Kirk!

I intended this thread to go below the surface, and to question WHY we believe the things we believe, as well as WHAT. That's why I originally posted it on the "Questioning Faith" thread.

There are questions and statements on this thread that can trigger worry, anxiety, fear and anger. None of it is personal. I count you all, EACH and EVERY ONE of you as a friend, as a companion through the very difficult experience of being fooled by Wierwille, and as people who have each others' best interests at heart, even though we may from time to time misinterpret what those best interests are. EACH and EVERY ONE of us has unique reasons for believing what we believe, and none of those reasons are without value. I just got home from my Wednesday afternoon mood management group. I always enjoy being there because I know I am safe. It would be nice if everybody could feel safe here, and my intentions are to question deep things without being threatening. Questioning deep things is threatening enough in itself, without us resorting to the dysfunctional means of persuasion we learned in TWI!

As part of my effort, I have refrained from making knee-jerk reactions to posts. I spend some time reading or watching TV or playing with my toy soldiers before responding, in order to maintain some perspective. We are ALL going to say things that we later feel like fools for having said. We are all going to see people say things and think "What sort of fool is she (or he)?" But I assure you, nobody posting on this thread is a fool!

The particular article of faith this thread questions is the fundamentalist/evangelical protestant belief that "Since the Bible is God-breathed, it CANNOT contain any errors or contradictions. If there is even one single contradiction in the Bible, then the WHOLE thing falls apart."

I expect the range of on-topic subjects to be very broad, starting with "what does it mean for ANYTHING to be 'breathed'" and only expanding from there.

All for now... and thanks again, Mod Kirk!

Love,

Steve

If you don't want me to argue authorship on this thread, you really need to stop counterarguing authorship on this thread.

I don't understand why you have a hang-up about the authorship of Luke-Acts. There are parts of the NT whose authorship is very much open to question, especially Paul's pastoral epistles, and serious ecclesiological issues are influenced by who the author of those letters might have been. The name of the author of Hebrews seems to have been deliberately suppressed by the early church, possibly because she was a woman (see Priscilla's Letter: Finding the Author of the Epistle Hebrews by Ruth Hoppin 2009). The gospel of John is definitely not the product of a single author, John, though it may have been written by a group that grew up around the testimony of John. As far as I know, there has never been any controversy over the authorship of Luke-Acts. Tradition has held from the earliest days that the author of Luke-Acts was a man named Luke who had some kind of connection with Paul. We cannot be certain whether that man was the Luke of Colossians 4:14, but what difference would that make? No one has ever put forward a claim that it was anyone other than a man named Luke who had a connection with Paul. No one.

Robert Jewett, in his A Chronology of Paul's Life (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), makes a strong case that Luke WAS a member of Paul's entourage during the "we" sections of Acts, even though Jewett favors the chronological material from Paul's letters over the chronology of Acts. And Jewett states his reasons for doing so. If Luke was indeed a member of Paul's party during the many days the party was at Caesarea (Acts 21:10), Nazareth was only about forty miles away, a four day walk round trip. It would have been relatively easy for Luke to interview Mary, if she was there. If Mary was elsewhere, possibly in Jerusalem, it would have been even easier.

While Luke does NOT say he was an eyewitness to the events recorded in his gospel, he does say that he relied on traditions handed down by eyewitnesses. There is nothing in the language of Luke 1:1&2 that precludes Luke from having received some of those traditions from the eyewitnesses themselves.

Do I think Luke-Acts was "God-breathed"? That depends on how we define "God-breathed." If we accept the fundamentalist/evangelical protestant definition as "being without error or contradiction, the inclusion of which even a single one would destroy the trustworthiness of the whole", then NO! Luke-Acts contains many, many errors and contradictions.

If we accept that "God-breathed" means "most useful for making sense out of what is happening", or "most useful for equipping people to do good works", then YES, I DO believe Luke-Acts is God-breathed.

I don't understand how you are using the phrases "arguing authorship" and "counterarguing authorship". It would seem that you are the person counter arguing Lukan authorship...

Peace, friend! :-)

Love,

Steve

A brief excursus...

"Life is sweet..."

That is a metaphoric statement of poetic knowledge.

The truth of the statement cannot be "scientifically" tested...

Because it's a METAPHOR!

But it is TRUE!

You can have a general idea as to the sense of the statement, but you have no idea exactly what the phrase means or how true it is unless you were a member of the crew of the USS POGY in the early- to mid-'70s.

It was a thing we said on the boat! All of us said it from time to time. We all knew what it meant, and it couldn't be exactly expressed in any other way. But we all knew it was true. And it was counter-sensual. There was nothing "sweet" about conditions on the submarine!

And the Bible is just like that!

All for now...

Love,

Steve

Writing was an interesting proposition in antiquity, Mark, very different from what we think of as writing today. Reading and writing were both done orally, almost always, and only rarely was either a solitary activity. People who could read silently were so extraordinary that others would visit them just to watch them do it. Reading and writing were both done at parties. The hostesses of the society would invite important people over to their homes for the evening, and part of the entertainment might well be a popular writer reading from his work. There was no TV, you know. "Books" were not "published" the way they are today. Actual copies would be very few and far between. The writers' works became known though the readings at parties. The same thing happened clear up through the 18th century CE.

When a writer worked on a piece, he would invite a few friends over whose knowledgeability and taste the author trusted (there were women writers, too, I'm just stuck with English pronouns). The writer would try things out on his friends and gauge their reactions. Notes were probably taken by an amanuensis using a stylus on a tablet covered in wax. The styluses are frequently found in the archaeology of Roman administrative centers. One end is pointed for scribing and the other end is flat for making corrections by smoothing the wax. After the author was set on what he wanted to say, the amanuensis would make a "clean copy" in some other medium to be sent.

Official, respectable works were written on scrolls. Scrolls had gravitas. Codices, books like we have them today, a bunch of pages sewn together on one side, were considered to be inferior to scrolls, sort of like the way we regard 3-ring binders. The letters of Paul were collected in codex form, probably because that's how he sent them out in the first place. It seems that all the early Christian writings followed the codex fashion set by Paul, and as Christianity spread through the empire, so codices gradually replaced scrolls.

The written copy, however, was not considered to be the real message. The real message would be the performance given by the courier. There were no microphones or loudspeakers in antiquity. The Greek and Roman cultures had developed sets of broad gestures that could be used to make the meanings plain all the way out to the edges of the crowd where hearing was difficult. The performance of a letter was as much a stylized dance or mime as it was "reading" the words. Before a writer sent a letter, he would coach and rehearse the courier on the gestural component of the message. One of the reasons Paul seems so vague to us in some passages is probably because we have no idea what visual cues he gave to the courier to make those passages clear in the original auditory/visual performance.

A congregation would save the copy that had been sent to them. A "reader" would watch over all the congregations scriptures and read from them at the congregation's parties (the things that turned into "church services") from time to time. Sometimes copies of a codex might be made (a VERY EXPENSIVE process) to share with another congregation, or copies might be made because the original copy was wearing out.

Take Paul's letter to the Romans as an example. Paul probably got together with Timotheus, Lucius, Jason, Sosipater, Tertius and Phebe (Romans 16:1, 21-23) over the course of several evenings at the house of Gaius. Paul presented ideas to the group, and they helped him hammer out exactly what he wanted to say, and how he wanted it said. After those meetings were over, Tertius took the wax tablets with his notes on them and wrote out the letter using ink on a codex. After Paul approved the clean copy, he met with Phebe and coached her on how he wanted her to present the message to the congregation at Rome. Phebe took the letter there and performed it in front of the whole assembly. Phebe left the copy when she went home, and a member of the congregation who could read (a VERY small percentage) took charge of it. Most of the material at the gatherings would be verbal transmission of the oral tradition, but as written material in the forms of gospels and other letters proliferated, "reading" of the material to the mostly illiterate members of the congregation gradually overtook oral tradition.

The circumstances under which Paul wrote Galatians were VERY different. His "babes in the Word" were being subverted by those hypocrites from Antioch! If they want circumcision, then let 'em tear their own nuts off! That's what Paul actually meant in Galatians 5:12! He could very well be a hothead at times, even if he has been translated to sound otherwise!

All for now!

Love,

Steve

There is a thing we've been taught to do at Anderson University (all the way from freshman introductory Bible courses to grad school exegetical papers) called the hermeneutic or the exegetical circle.

When we are considering a passage of scripture, we start with the question, What exactly was actually written? If we are mistaken about what was written, how can we be confident of the meaning we that derive from it?

The second question is, What did this mean to the person who originally wrote it?

Next we ask, What would this mean to the people it was originally addressed to?

And finally, What lessons can we draw from this today?

When the Protestants of the 1500s cried "scriptura sola", there were some unintended consequences. One such is the impression that all scripture has but one writer, and that just isn't true. The meanings behind all scripture may well have been inspired by the same God, but the people who did the actual writing and editing were all unique individuals in unique life situations, and the ways they expressed the ideas being given to them by the Holy Spirit were peculiar to those conditions.

Protestant theology, especially evangelical protestant theology, tends to homogenize the writings, to make them all the same, when there is very, VERY much to be learned from studying the differences. A big case in point would be the gospels. There are four of them for reasons, and attempts to harmonize them destroy the depth perception of Jesus that we get from "quad-ocular" vision. Harmonizing the gospels does nothing but make Jesus just too flat.

How this stuff comes into the discussion on this thread is this: Paul wrote things about the law to the Romans that are different from the things he wrote about the law to the Galatians. Are these differences "contradictions," in a sense that would negate their "god-breathed-ness"? or are they differences in Paul's own expression, brought on by frustration at the seeming mindlessness of the Galatians, Paul's own "babes" in the Word?

Our professor of L&HOT and Hebrew has the highest regard for Paul. He is not a scribe or Pharisee seeking to trip Paul up. He actually has a compassion for Paul that most of us miss, because Paul ALSO was a deep scholar of the Tanakh.

Another way this idea comes up is in the question of whether or not the writer of Acts could have known Paul personally. The theology that is attributed to Paul in Acts seems to differ from the theology Paul expressed in his own letters, and there are serious difficulties to squaring the chronology in Acts to the chronology in the letters. These differences do not prove that Luke could not have been one of Paul's companions at various times. Luke had his own theological agenda that he was promoting to his audience which was different from the theological aganda Paul was promoting to the readers of his letters.

Luke was also willing to emphasize certain parts of Paul's journeys and de-emphasize others, in order to fit the events into Luke's narrative of how the gospel moved from Jerusalem to Rome. None of these things argue against Luke having a personal acquaintance with Paul.

All for now... more later...

Love,

Steve

I left out one important factor in my description of life as flow... none of the flows are random or pointless. They ALL have purpose!

Love,

Steve

The motion of breath is not random. It is an oscillatory or reciprocating flow of air into and out of the lungs. The literal movement of breath goes much deeper than just the lungs though. Molecular oxygen is carried by the blood from the lungs to the cells, and the O₂ returns from the cells to the lungs in the form of CO₂. The life (nephesh) of the flesh is in the blood. Within the cell, sugar and oxygen are burnt in a highly regulated manner, which produces a flow of electrons through the intermediary of ATP (adenosine triphosphate). The flow of electrons powers the flow of all other movement and processes in the cell, in each and every cell.

It is the movement, the regulated flow of chemicals and energy, that constitutes life. A corpse and a living being are made up of exactly the same chemicals in exactly the same relationships. The difference between a corpse and a living being is the ability to move, which is the sum total of all the micro-flows at the cellular level. A being dies when the micro-flows stop. When I passed out a few months ago, I did so because the oscillatory flow of air into and out of my lungs was interrupted. This in turn interfered with a sufficient number of micro-flows in a sufficient number of cells that my body was not able to maintain consciousness. If I had been by myself, all movement would have been interrupted, and I would have died. As it was, I received medical attention in enough time to save my life. All the flows were restored.

Life is the ability to move. The movement of life consists of the interaction of highly regulated flows. The ancients understood all these flows as wind or breath or spirit.

In Genesis 2:7, when the figurative Lord God figuratively breathed the figurative breath of life into the nostrils of the figurative man, the authors and editors were saying that the life-force that imparted movement by its own movement to the whole of the universe, also imparted movement by its own movement, life by its own life, to human beings.

That's a heck of a lot better than the Enuma Elish, the creation story told contemporaneously in the town where the authors and editors of Genesis 2:7 were working, that Marduk created human beings by mixing dust with the blood of a rebel god slain for that purpose, so that human beings could be forced to do the work that the gods didn't want to do.

All for now...

Love,

Steve

We had a brief discussion in Hebrew class this morning that touched tangentially on some of the issues raised here. A lot of the workload of teaching scripture at the School of Theology falls on two professors, the teacher of Literature and History of the Old Testament and the teacher of Literature and History of the New Testament. There is a running gag in the school about how much the teacher of L&HOT despises Paul. He is the same professor who teaches the Hebrew class.

We had a little time to kill this morning, while waiting for some of the students to show up, so one of my classmates asked the professor what he has against Paul. The prof said that in Galatians Paul presents a very dim view of the law, and uses what seems to be an inappropriate analogy between law/grace and Haggai, Ishmael/Sarah, Isaac. Our prof pointed out that Paul's view of the law presented in Galatians can very easily be understood as a contradiction of the view presented in Romans. He attributed this contradiction to the fact that Paul was so pi$$ed (and that's good Pauline language) at the Judaizers when he was writing Galatians, that his anger bled over into the things he wrote about the law itself. When he finished explaining, and was beginning to transition back to teaching Hebrew, he remarked "How do you teach THAT to these kids [who come from evangelical protestant backgrounds, who have been taught plenary verbal inspiration]?"

The Church of God Reformation Movement has no association with the Assemblies of God. CHoGRM came out of the Wesleyan Holiness Movement of the late-1800s, and never got involved with the Fundamentalist Conferences of the early-1900s. CHoGRM regards creeds as man-made and divisive. The movement is no longer as anti-denominational as it was in the beginning, and has taken on aspects of a Wesleyan interdenominational denomination. The SOT takes a high view of scripture, as per the scale I set up earlier on this thread, even though it does not as an institution believe in plenary verbal inspiration. It is a big issue in the whole University now, how to express our respect for the Bible to new students without having to gloss over the Bible's obvious shortcomings that the youngsters' Sunday schools never addressed.

So, yes, I am partially motivated to explore these things from the viewpoint of ex-wayfers, but I am also motivated in part to find a way to express these things that is accessible to people from other evangelical protestant backgrounds as well.

-----

If we want to consider what a word means, we need to go back to it's original literal meaning, and from there, we can examine the poetic knowledge that can be derived from it by use of simile and metaphor. the first word we will look at is breath (ruach in the Hebrew, pneuma in the Greek) which can as properly be translated as "wind" or "spirit." Wind is "air in motion." Breath is air that is specifically moving into and out of a... what?... in Greek or English we would say "body"... in Hebrew we would say nephesh or "living being" or "soul."

In antiquity, they didn't have a lot of monitors to tell whether a person was dead or merely unconscious. They didn't even know what the pulse meant. The only way to distinguish between life (the ability to move) and death (the utter lack of ability to move) was whether or not breath (or wind or spirit) was moving in and out of the person. Spirit was so closely associated with life and its absence with death, that the word took on the figurative meaning of "life-force," or "that whose motion imparts the ability to move." All the other figurative meanings of "spirit" or "breath" are derived from this one.

I've got to go keep an appointment. More later...

Love,

Steve

I first went to a twig meeting at Muncie, Indiana, in the fall of '79 and took Foundational PFAL at a fairly large video class at Indianapolis in July of '80. I think I had gone to Rome City for some occasion or another in the meantime. I went to the ROA in August of '80 right after I took the class.

I recount these things so you can see where and when my initial impressions of TWI were formed. To me, there were the local fellowship whose members I had come to trust, and the larger organization which seemed well established and well organized. There were people who warned me that TWI was a cult, but that seemed incredible to me, given what little I had been exposed to. Over the next couple of years, I saw people come and go at the local level who had varying degrees of credibility and "adherence to the Word," but I attributed their shortcomings to them personally, and not to the organization as a whole.

My impression of Wierwille during the video class was that his presentation was a little dated, but not so different from that of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, whom my mother used to watch on the television. I knew that some of the things Wierwille said about science were wrong, but I swallowed the things he said about the Bible, what he taught along with what he preached. I was exposed to his 1980 stage persona within a month of sitting through the video class, so his more laid back, avuncular style was what I pictured when I thought of him. If I remember rightly, there was already speculation about who would step into his shoes when he retired, and I thought Walter C. would be the natural choice.

In 1985, I was coordinating the twig in Newport, Minnesota, and we ran a foundational class at the twig level. That fall I also entered into residence at Emporia with the 16th Corps. After HoHo ReLo I was transferred to Camp Gunnison, and while I was there, a number of things began to dawn on me. First, I realized that the leaders of TWI I had been exposed to were getting together, planning what they were going to do, and then afterward thanking God for blessing what they had already decided to do, just like Wierwille had described as "walking by the flesh" in the foundational class. Next I realized that our performance on Lightbearers was being judged by numbers, and not by quality, and that the number of green cards signed didn't really count as much as the Corps trainee's ability to pay tuition. And THEN came the Corps Night when Geer read POP. From that point on EVERYTHING was open to question. At the end of the block, I dropped out of the 16th Corps and went home to Indiana, not because of things going on in the ministry, but because I couldn't scrape up my tuition without having to go overboard with my spiritual partners, and because my mom and dad were both sick and needed somebody to stay with them. The coordinator of the East Central Indiana Branch in Muncie welcomed me and invited me to twig coordinator meetings during the next year that we were still together.

I lost all confidence in Martindale's leadership when he blamed the problems of TWI on the people who were running classes on the field. He said we were not being strict enough in enforcing the guidelines. The first thing this told me was that Martindale was not willing to take responsibility for the performance of the organization he was leading. The second thing was that Martindale didn't have the foggiest notion of what it took to run a foundational class on the field. That was when I began to question Wierwille's abilities. How could such a god-fearing, spiritual man have picked such a loser as Martindale to carry on his work?

That's when I began to understand that it wasn't the charisma or credibility of Wierwille or Martindale that caused TWI to grow. It was the charisma and credibility of the local leaders on the field. Wierwille and Martindale were hitch hikers on our shoulders! Wierwille and Martindale were making merchandise out of OUR integrity!

Wierwille may have had some charisma when he put on his grandfatherly, spiritual stage act, but Martindale had NO charisma whatsoever.

That's what it looked like from my point of view.

Love,

Steve