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Thank you for your friendship, Raf! Three years ago, I was in intensive care for nearly a week because of a potassium overdose. I took some kidney and heart damage. About a year and a half ago, I was in the ICU again with pneumonia. Both the kidney and the heart damage were (what should I call it...?) made worse. I am now in congestive heart failure. My kidneys don't send the proper signals to my bone marrow to generate blood cells. For the past year-and-a -half I have been dying one red blood cell at a time, which has given me some interesting perspective on the physiology of spirit! Fortunately, I go into the infusion center from time to time, and if my hemoglobin falls below a certain point, they give me a shot which works as an artificial signal to make more blood. But I am still anemic, so I've been able to work (thinking and writing) at only about half speed. I used to use Sudoku puzzles to keep track of how efficiently my brain was still working, but I've become too slow for Sudoku to work any more. I'm still auditing classes, though, for physical and occupational therapy. For the past few years I've been writing things required by the syllabuses, but, since I stopped taking classes for credit last summer, I can now write what I want. The last thing I wrote for school was a formal exegesis paper on 1 Corinthians 2:9-3:3, and I translated it from the Greek for myself. Translating Paul is like translating Groucho Marx. They play the same kinds of word games! And doing any real translating makes the scholarly farce of Stiffy's REV very, very manifest. I am currently working on Out from within whom all things, and we all the way into him: Stoic Cosmobiology in 1:Corinthians 8:6 and a Quantum/Godelian Critique of Current Hermeneutics. The first section is titled Absolute and Obsolete. Since the Enlightenment of the 17th century, Western intellectuals (theologians included) have been fixated on using logic to find a single absolute meaning for everything. "Absolute" means "free from imperfection" and should not be confused with vodka, though some people say Absolut is free from imperfection! Hermeneutics is the art of extracting a meaning from a text, and it's not just a Biblical thing. I first had to learn hermeneutics studying reactor plant control manuals! Hermeneutics is usually taught to literature majors. The hermeneutics of historical methodology is based on the idea that nothing "supernatural" in the Bible can be historically true. Such accounts are absolute fiction. These are the ideas at the heart of liberal protestant theology. The ideas of inerrancy and plenary verbal inspiration arose as a reaction against historical methodology, saying that every account of anything supernatural in the Bible, even the mythic elements, are absolutely true. These are the ideas at the heart of fundamentalist/evangelical theology. Both theologies pursue a single absolute truth. Scientists do it too in their quest for a unified field theorem. In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein's theory of relativity, that 3-D space and time are not absolutes, but rather they constitute a relativistic 4-D continuum. Theologically, this wipes out the process theology of Spirit & Truth Fellowship, because if God is everyWHERE, then he is also everyWHEN. And it returns teleological cause to consideration, which means scientific explanations are possible for synchronicity. In 1927, Heisenberg published his Uncertainty Principle which demonstrates that possessing certain kinds of information is mutually restrictive, that is, the more precisely we measure one thing, the less precisely we can measure some other related thing. This is reflected in theology in that, if we define a word too closely, it will lose power to communicate in some other way. I am reminded of many of the definitions Wierwille gave us. The hermeneutics he taught us in Power for Abundant Living worked very well within his system, but they made interpretations other than his own impossible. Stiffy fails to recognize this in their "22 Principles of Biblical Interpretation: How to Eliminate Apparent Bible contradictions" and Schoenheit failed to recognize it in his REV (I think I've somehow changed my font without knowing how I did it. Maybe it's Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work?) In 1931, Godel published his Incompleteness Theorems which, roughly stated, say that for any logical system, there will exist statements in the language of the system that the system can neither prove nor disprove. No logical system can resolve all ambiguity. Power for Abundant Living could not, inherently, eliminate all apparent Bible contradictions. The absolute is obsolete. I am using Murphy-O'Conner's commentary on 1 Corinthians 8:6 to demonstrate, specifically, how features of contemporary hermeneutics have been obsolete for nearly one hundred years. So... Raf... I am expanded my critique from Power for Abundant Living and the REV to theology as a WHOLE! That's why I ain't been here for a while, but it is sure good to be back among my friends! Love, Steve