Mark Clarke

If you had properly read my post weeks earlier you wouldn’t have asked me that question. My complaint is that with my posts AND with PFAL you don’t read to understand, digest, and assimilate. You simply read with the intent to tear down. You don’t even understand what you are trying to tear down because you haven’t invested the time to understand it. I see you doing this over and over with me. How many times have I brought up the issue of looking at ALL the instances of a topic in PFAL before any analysis can be performed? How many times have you ignored this caveat? The answer is ALL of them. Should I re-post them? Should I show you EVEN MORE instances of this lack of reading my posts to the end of understanding them? There’s a fresh one, just posted last night ready for exposure. My complaint is that you are not taking the time to read my posts and understand them. I suggest you go back and read the last month’s worth of my posting. Only then can you discuss things with me in a thoughtful manner. I want you to quit this shallow pot-shot taking at whatever paragraphs of mine look tempting to you, while you ignore crucial passages that undercut your criticisms. You need to go back and read the “only rule” passages from the film class I have posed in the “snow” thread to understand why it is you have, AT BEST, multiple rules for faith and practice. Read all my recent posts on this topic and you stand a chance in understanding what an single RULE is and why you do not have one. Right now you obviously don’t. The thing you accuse me of doing, you are yourself doing in this very post. I told you that when I responded to your post I was discussing a different point, one which you still have not addressed. I know you keep saying you want to get back to it when you have the time. But then you completely ignore the rest of my post (#52) in which I did respond to your original answer to why VP taught the keys he did. Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I don't understand you. I said in my post with the question that bothers you, "By utilizing those keys he said we can get back to the Word as it was given by men of God who wrote by inspiration of the holy spirit. In contrast, you claim that the Scriptures are hopelessly lost, and only the revelation given to VPW restores that loss." My question was not so much "why did VP teach us the keys" as "why would he teach us keys to the Scriptures themselves if the knowledge of the Scriptures was irretrievably lost." I'm sorry if that wasn't clear, but I did clarify it in my last post, most of which you ignored, as I said. You say you want me to quit this "shallow pot-shot taking." My points are neither shallow nor pot-shots. They are valid questions that you continue to ignore. I want YOU to quit your false accusations. I have said repeatedly that I did not set out to tear down PFAL, and that I did spend years trying to make PFAL material fit. Yet you continue to repeat your claim that I don't know the material and that I'm only approaching it with a preconceived attitude of unbelief. And yet you offer no proof of it. If my logic is faulty show me where. Get specific. That's why I started those threads in the Doctrinal Forum, so they wouldn't detract from these threads in the General section. I told you, again, in the last post what I consider to be my only rule of faith and practice, since you specifically asked for my response. I even quoted my earlier post, in which I quoted from your reference to VP's "only rule." You never addressed it then, and still haven't now. I also responded to your desire for a single published book to be my only rule, which you have also not responded to. If you believe I don't understand what you're talking about, then show me where. It doesn't accomplish anything to just say, "All my previous posts give you the answers." I have addressed several of the points in your posts, and asked you specific questions about them, which you have not answered. Your accusing me of only trying to tear it down serves no purpose but to deflect and avoid the questions. Besides, even if I were trying to tear it down, if it's truly the God-breathed Word it would stand up to such "attacks."

Not all modern day Christians teach that. VPW was not the only one to teach that Enoch was moved, rather than taken to heaven. Most Bible teachers who believe that the dead are unconscious (which is a minority, but still not limited to TWI) hold the same view about Enoch, and it's not all that convoluted. Heb. 11:13 includes Enoch when it says "these all died" and John 3:13 says that no one has ascended to heaven but Jesus. Actually he did have a wife and kids, including Methusaleh, according to Gen. 5:21-22. Nothing is said about whether he drank wine or had a house, which isn't the point. If you compare the genealogies in Genesis, you see that no one except Adam died of natural causes during Enoch's lifetime. "That he might not see death" could easily mean that Enoch was moved so he wouldn't see anyone die. Another possibility is that it means that he was moved so he would not experience martyrdom, i.e., death at the hands of someone else. Either way, it is clear that he did die rather than get "translated" to heaven. Actually VP's teaching that the original sin was masturbation was in the Christian Family and Sex class, not PFAL. Don't know why Craig thought it worth talking about in his foundational class. That kind of stuff was usually reserved for grads.

Yes I saw your post. In my response to the original post in the snowstorm thread, I was addressing a different point, about how textual criticism shows that the overall message is not "irretrievably lost." Besides the points I made there, I think you are still contradicting yourself. If "the original understanding of the ancient manuscripts was utterly lost and catastrophically irrecoverable" then there would be nothing VP or anyone could do to recover it. That's what irrecoverable means. If, on the other hand, God could guide him in how to recover the understanding of the Scriptures using keys from the Scriptures themselves, then the understanding was not "utterly lost and catastrophically irrecoverable." You can't have it both ways. Now since you insist that it was God's guiding VPW that was the only way to recover the "lost" understanding of the Scriptures, then do you maintain that no one before him had any understanding? I know you don't, since you have stated that it was how VP put it together that was unique. So he got understanding from various Biblical scholars of the past. Logically, then, the understanding was not "utterly lost." At the most it was muddled, which I will grant you. But throughout history, any time anyone wanted real answers from the Scriptures without the spin of any denomination, they were there to see with only a little digging. As for the reasons he taught the keys, you stated that one of them was, "To give us a way we could REtrace or REsearch his work." Then logically, we should be able to follow the same steps and get the same results. In some cases we do, but in many others, when we retrace his steps we find gaping holes in his logic and conclusions. This would not be a problem if we were talking about someone who was not considered anything more than a Bible teacher. But if you make the claim that his writings are God-breathed Word and replace the Bible, then they must be held to a higher standard. Granted, we were told that research was not to come up with something new, but to “see again what God showed him." I believe that was why it took so many of us so long to see through the errors. But when we used the very keys he taught, and let the Bible speak for itself rather than reading into it the preconceived ideas we learned in TWI, we started to see the errors. I maintain that VP taught some reasonable principles in how to let the Bible interpret itself, but in many instances failed to use them or used them incorrectly. You keep insisting that I don't understand "only rule for faith and practice AS IT WAS DEFINED IN PFAL." I said way back in one of my earliest posts on the Snowstorm thread: What part of this do you consider a "multiple non-rule"? The "rule" is the God-breathed Word as it was originally written by inspiration of God. The overall message that was communicated through those writings is still able to be found. Many have done so, without the errors in demonstrable fact that VPW had throughout his writings. God's Word does in fact fit "like a hand in a glove" but sadly, PFAL does not. You said in the doctrinal thread, "On the threads here I am most interested in proving to grads that they do not know the material, hence most of their complaints against it should be held off and and a new look warranted." My response still holds: "To prove that I don't know the material, would you not have to respond to my questions and demonstrate the errors of my logic? If you can do that, be my guest. Weigh your truth against my error."

Not only that, but even when someone isn't consciously faking it, there is no guarantee that it's genuinely of God. There are instances of non-Christians speaking in "tongues." Someone could say it's not really speaking in tongues if it's not of God, but that's like saying counterfeit money isn't really money. Of course it isn't, that's what makes it a counterfeit. But if it looks like Biblical speaking in tongues, but isn't, then it's a counterfeit. I don't remember where or when it was said that it couldn't be counterfeited, but I'm reasonably sure there was no Scripture reference given.

For those of us who are not familiar with Gödel's incompleteness theorem, could one of you summarize it?

Thanks, WordWolf, for posting those quotes. This illustrates a foundational error that many, not just VPW, make in dealing with the Bible. They start with an assumption, and then try to fit it with the Scriptures. When it doesn't fit, they'll try anything to make it fit rather than considering that their primary assumption was false. The primary assumption was that Jesus was taken to the Temple for his Bar Mitzvah. The Bible never mentions that. In the summary article about these Actual Errors, under #10 (which deals with this question), it says that somebody in the discussion claimed that, "In the PFAL book, Wierwille never directly states that Jesus went to Jerusalem to undergo a bar-mitzvah ceremony. He only states that illegitimate children were considered men at the age of 12 instead of 13." Yet here we see in Mike's quote above, that he did in fact state it. It also says that, "The bar-mitzvah ceremony originated in the Middle Ages, so could not have been carried out in Jesus' time. Nonetheless, it is possible and likely that there was some recognition of a 'coming of age' at age 12 or 13." But any coming of age ceremony is beside the point. The Bible passage in question specifically says: Luke 2: 41 Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover. 42 And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. 43 And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. Had VP simply allowed the Bible to speak for itself rather than injecting his assumption about the Bar Mitzvah, there would have been no question, nothing for him to puzzle about for years, and no reason to cite a missing document about how they treated illegitimate children at the time. Granted, the point VP was making was about how they didn't believe in Jesus because they looked at his circumstances. And that may be true, but the whole thing about going to Jerusalem when he was 12 had nothing to do with that. So now we're expected to believe that God Almighty gave VP revelation which leads him to misinterpret and contradict clear Scripture in order to make his point? This would go against the command to "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God." It would also go against VP's own standards. He himself said to test things against the Scriptures to see if they line up. He taught some valid principles, but unfortunately did not utilize them himself in many cases.

You are forgetting, there is another category of scholar. In fact, the most honest scholars don't fall into either of your two categories. You speak of those who start off believing, and those who start off not believing. What about those who start off looking for answers, and do not decide whether to believe or not until they have fully examined it? This is how the Bereans were described in Acts - they "searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so." You continually accuse anyone who disagrees with you of not knowing what's in the PFAL material, despite the fact that many of them have demonstrated otherwise. I studied that material for years, wanting desperately for it to fit. But things like the points in question on this thread just did not fit, no matter how much I wanted to believe in Wierwille and his teachings. I didn't halt my research at the first sign of an error, nor have I approached it with the intent to disprove it because I'd made up my mind not to accept it. Again, these are not doctrinal issues on which we disagree. I can see how that would take a lot of time to study and understand. But these are simply matters of verifiable fact that he had wrong. You seem to imply that I am not correctly understanding what VP wrote. Clarify then for me: Did he or did he not say that 'thoroughly' meant outwardly thorough, while 'throughly' meant inwardly - an "inside job" as he called it? If he did in fact say it, then do you dispute that any dictionary that has archaic definitions will confirm that there is no such distinction? Did he or did he not say that dechomai meant to receive subjectively, while lambano meant to receive into manifestation? If he did in fact say it, then do you dispute that any Greek lexicon including Bullinger's will confirm that this is not what the words mean? Did he or did he not say that OT believers had holy spirit UPON them, while in the NT they have holy spirit IN them? If he did in fact say it, then do you dispute that there are OT records which speak of holy spirit IN, as well as NT records that speak of us having spirit UPON (see post #2 for references)? You say your methodology is to begin by accepting that PFAL is "God-breathed." Giving you the benefit of the doubt, how then do you handle these questions? Even Wierwille explained apparent contradictions in light of his having accepted that the Bible was God-breathed. He didn't just ignore them. In your study of PFAL, surely you must have had to deal with matters such as these. Once you accepted it, how did you deal with these questions? What other "rules" am I playing by that you can't accept, other than simple reading? My goal is not to tear PFAL apart. It will either stand or fall on its own merit. If it is indeed God-breathed, it will stand up to closer scrutiny and prove itself. If it isn't, it will fall apart. To prove that I don't know the material, would you not have to respond to my questions and demonstrate the errors of my logic? If you can do that, be my guest. Weigh your truth against my error. I responded to this in the "only rule for faith and practice" thread.

I believe I did understand his teaching. He taught us keys to how the Bible interprets itself (in the verse, in the context, where it was used before, etc.). By utilizing those keys he said we can get back to the Word as it was given by men of God who wrote by inspiration of the holy spirit. In contrast, you claim that the Scriptures are hopelessly lost, and only the revelation given to VPW restores that loss. I don't believe VP himself ever claimed that, but even if he did, you can't deny that the first five sessions of the class are detailed examples of using these keys. If we can't get back to the "original" Word as God gave it from studying the Bible using those keys, then why did he spend all that time teaching those keys and how to use them?

Actually, you didn't decline. You said, "I'm very disinclined to do so." (Refer to the quote of your post above.) Since part of your reasons involved a judgment of whether I would be willing to invest the time, I responded to that judgment. I also responded to your other reasons in hopes that you would see that I would welcome any explanation of your "method." It was not my intention to be rude, but to give you an opportunity to present your reasoning rather than accepting what others were saying about you. I did not "act as if you were brought into the decision" but replied to your objections and re-extended my invitation. I moved it here since it deals more with doctrinal issues and would have further detracted from the snowstorm thread where it started. I also understand that it can look like you are losing the debate if you have no comeback, "as if you are here and engaged." That's why I responded to your reason about methodology, and invited you to at least make some kind of statement about your methods. And I did so in posts directly addressed to you, not behind your back. But you have now declined the invitation, albeit indirectly in a post to someone else. That's your choice. But please don't accuse me of being rude, or of not being interested in seeing a new perspective. You say you continually offer one, but I haven't seen it in any of your posts to me. If you feel Steve misrepresented you, why not correct the error? Still, you're entitled to post or not post wherever you wish.

Steve Heefner hasn't lived in New York since the '70s. He was a disc jockey in California before he got involved with TWI and went back there after he split from TWI. Last I heard he was still a DJ in CA, but that was some time ago.

At least they weren't trying to dance! PS - Thanks, Waysider, for that Firesign blast from the past! You know what's sad? They were better musically than the "real" video!

What surprises me is that they use the phrase "Word Over the World." That used to be copyrighted - I distinctly remember them having the little © next to the phrase on their logo (or was it ®?). Just out of curiosity, I went to TWI's website, and noticed they don't have that logo on their site. And on their Terms and Conditions page (the one with all the legalese saying what you can't do with the material on their site) there is no mention of the phrase "Word Over the World." Does anyone know if they no longer have a copyright on that phrase?

Waysider, Thanks, I read Mike's comments in the snowstorm thread. I was asking about whether he ever provided any rebuttal in this "Actual Errors in PFAL" thread.

Who teaches, or script reads, or "talks" at the Sunday Night Services now? Do they have anyone that they think is a "dynamic teacher" or whatever?

Mike, if you go back and read the first post of this thread, you'll find I did quote nearly all of your post, and replied to several of the points. The only line I didn't include in my quote was the last one about you wanting to get back to my post about a single rule of faith and practice (which, by the way, you still haven't done). Here it is in its entirety: I believe I demonstrated in my first post that I was not "expecting" any particular answer and was wanting to know how you deal with the issues in question. I still ask, what invalid inquiry principles am I using? This is not a kangaroo court or any other kind of court. You made the claim that PFAL is the God-breathed Word. So in examining it, how do you explain these apparent contradictions? You said "a large amount of time would be involved on your part and you're not willing to invest in it." First of all, how can you judge what I'd be willing to do? I've already invested a lot of time looking into these issues and others. If you have an explanation for these apparent contradictions, I'd like to hear them. Second, how much time does it take to explain, when reading plain English would appear to directly contradict points in PFAL? Raf accused you of dodging the question. Why not prove him wrong, and respond to my questions?

Raf, you have a typo error 4, which kind of distracts from your point: Just thought I'd bring it to your attention. BTW, did Mike ever offer rebuttals anywhere in this thread? I've only been reading the summary article.

Ask and ye shall... http://www.greasespotcafe.com/main2/editor...ant-living.html I wish I had a million dollars.... (heck, it was worth a try!) ;)

Actually, TWI counts its beginning from the first broadcast of Vesper Chimes, not from the time God allegedly spoke to him. Small point, but worth mentioning for accuracy's sake.

From the snowstorm thread: So please demonstrate what methods you use to determine that Wierwille was right when he said there was a difference between 'throughly' and 'thoroughly', when he gave definitions of lambano and dechomai that are found nowhere else, not even Bullinger, and when he said there was a distinction between holy spirit IN, in the NT, and holy spirit UPON, in the OT.

From the snowstorm thread: So please demonstrate what methods you use to determine that Wierwille was right when he said the KOG is over all but the KOH is defined by the personal presence of the King on earth, when a simple reading of the verses shows that the two phrases are synonymous and used interchangeably.

So that's why I started the threads in the Doctrinal Forum. Please demonstrate what methods you use to determine that what most people see as blatant errors are not.

Thank you, Geisha! The "more abundant life" is not about getting material abundance any more than "believing" is about believing "for" stuff rather than believing the words of God and of Jesus.

So if not all the characteristics of the larger would be in the smaller circle, then they are not interchangeable. But when you see how both phrases are used, they are obviously referring to the same thing. Besides, there are references to the Kingdom of God being "nigh" or "near." This can't be talking about simply the overall reign of God. Steve gives a good explanation of how the term is used.

There are a couple of verses where he is called "God" in a representational sense. but the phrase "God THE SON" does not appear anywhere in the Bible. Neither does "God The Holy Spirit" for that matter.

No matter how you define the terms, any philosophical premise that speaks of a difference or distinction between "Kingdom of God" and "Kingdom of Heaven" must then explain why they are used synonymously and interchangeably in the Gospels. The point I am making in this thread is really that simple.