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My "current view of the Bible"? No "problen". My personal "Canon" of the New Testament Begins with Matthew and ends at Acts 28. I accept nothing Saul of Tarsus wrote in his personal communications to various "churches" in different cities, or to specific individuals, as being "the God-breathed Word and Will of God". Nor do I care about the other New Testament epistles or The Book of Revelation. I consider the teachings, actions, and mission of Jesus Christ to be the doctrinal and practical center of HIS Church, not the Pauline or any other epistles. Why should these letters be any more "God-breathed" than those referred to as The Apocrypha? You're expecting me to be believe the Canon of the New Testament is also God-breathed? As far as the Hebrew Old Testament, there are parts I believe are inspired (e.g. Psalms, Proverbs, the "Major" Prophets) and others that I feel exactly the same about as I feel about the Pauline Epistles. That's my current view in a nutshell T-Bone. Great question. I could go into lengthy explanations for the statements I made above, but I'd rather just respond to questions or comments or snide remarks if they should appear. Thanks for asking for our opinions T-Bone.

After thinking about one poster’s recent attempt at revising history...or was it creative writing....I dunno - whatever the he11 you want to call his perspective on PFAL ‘77 - - I thought I’d give it a try and will employ a great technique I learned from the “master “ himself by plagiarizing a little bit from the gospel crucifixion account: It was about the ninth session, and the whole mess was plodding along like it always did - and there was darkness over the whole class like it was in the beginning with audio and Beta tapes. wierwille said to himself “ i am finished - ain’t no way I can pull this off again” ; then he cried in a loud voice “I thirst!” - and immediately one of his assistants refilled his cup with Drambuie. looking down from the double-cross he liked to pull on his adoring fans he said “my peeps, behold thy teacher.” Then one of the ordained who stood guard, shook his head and said to himself “this truly is a waste of time.”

LOL‼️ Well done T-Bone.

Fat chance of TWI’s sexual assaults coming to light by the media - but your post got me thinking about the multiple methods of suppression in TWI. The abuse of power / sexual harassment have been a part of our culture for a long time. So I can understand the thinking of the victims in not coming forward in times past - being afraid of the backlash or the negative impact to their career, etc. But besides that - wierwille had several other methods to suppress word getting out about his sexual assaults. Things like “Lockbox” , adulation for the man of god, and even subverting the conscience of victims by saying things like “anything done in the love of god is ok”. Sorry - didn’t me to get off topic - but thought I should throw my 2 cents in.

Grace, have a practice in the area at the bottom of the Home page, called Testing 1 2 3. You can try out whatever you might need to do, there, or perhaps even find out some answers to other potential problems.

Go Ahead, Mike...............protest as much as you like But how are you going to protest FIRST-HAND, EYE WITNESS ACCOUNTS and DOCUMENTATION from Mrs. Wierwille? She was the dutiful wife who gave her accounting of events. She documented many things that stand juxtaposed to vpw's snappy bloviating. She, too, sat in Leonard's class......and then, her husband rushed home and started signing up people for that Oct 1953 class. Idolizing wierwille doesn't change twi's historical reckoning of its theft and plagiarism. TWI was a SPLINTER from Leonard's work and class-based ministry. It is an undeniable FACT.

"All attempts I’ve seen or heard of in splinter and stump groups running clone classes have had relatively minor results. Minor compared to the “good old days.” I could be wrong about this world-wide, but in my sphere of awareness, there has not been a single grad of any clone classes to rise up to the level of a WOW or a Corps candidate or a committed, serving clergy. All the big leaders are old PFAL grads, and the clone grads seem to be not inspired to drop everything and move the Word like Dr inspired HIS grads. If you know of one such hot clone grad, check on him or her in a couple years, and see how they are still cooking." One common fallacy in logic is to confuse CORRELATION with CAUSATION. Example 1: Hot chocolate causes death by freezing. People drink a LOT more hot chocolate certain months of the year, and those months also see an increase in people freezing to death. Coincidence? Obviously not! It's plain that the hot chocolate is causing the freezing. Example 2: Modern pfal attempts don't have the same effect on society as the old one did in the 1970s. In the 1970s, legitimate, rad Christians who were getting things done were recruited into twi, and turned into advertising shills for pfal. They did their thing (were rad Christians) and (falsely but with good intentions) claimed the reason they were so rad was due to twi and pfal, and to be equally rad, one had to take the class. Society has moved on since then. The rad Christians are in completely different forms now, with virtually none connected with splinter groups. But the difference in the results is seen as "the class isn't really the same and that's why the results differ so much." The real answer is that "the class" was more of the "ground" and not the "figure" of the paining. Rad Christians made the difference in twi, and the classes were more window-dressing and artificial benchmarks to measure progress. For those who forgot, "The Joy of Serving" was a commercial for pfal. "You have to serve people something-so serve them the 3 levels of the class, and outside of twi, there's no real answers for people." (The End.)

Ok, so, to sum up where I'm at now: I obviously don't believe there is such a thing as "god-breathed." Clearly these writings are not history. To the extent that they are sincere, they are an attempt by flawed men to understand the will of a God whose attributes evolved over time. In doing so, they fell all over each other. "I am the Lord! I change not! Except for that thing. I changed on that thing. Oh, and the other thing. It was a different time. But I didn't change! You know, just, times changed." Some of their musings turned out to be wonderful and stood the test of time. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is, understood properly, better than any other law man could come up with. "Here's the correct way to handle a runaway slave" is less worthy of admiration. There's also an extent to which this book is an effort by some people to control other people. There's nothing to admire there. I would never say there's nothing good in the Bible, just as I would never say there was nothing Biblical in TWI. I would say that whatever is good in the Bible is good because good men put it there. And what is bad is God's fault. Just kidding. Wanted to see if you were still reading. What is bad in the Bible is bad because the men who put it there were bad, or wrong, or mistaken, or evil, or... human.

I'm just kind of trying to soak this thread in. It casts a rather wide net (either that, or I don't get the point). So here's my journey, in a nutshell: I thought TWI had it right. I thought Wierwille had it right. Not because some voice in his office made him a promise or sent him a snowstorm in early October. I actually didn't know that story. I thought he had it right because of the stream of logic (including the many flaws therein that I failed to recognize at the time). But a lot of what happened here at GSC forced me to let go of the framework I had built up to stave off criticisms of the Bible. I think most of us have that framework in common, at least at some point in our lives. What we chose to do with it is individual, but we're here on this site because we accepted TWI's assertions at one point. You know what I'm talking about: there are no errors or contradictions. The first century church had it right, got corrupted, and we've been dealing with the repercussions ever since. The apostles all fit in a Honda. (They were of one accord. Get it?) Then came the great James debate, and my holier-than-thou effort to reconcile Galatians and James against certain people's determination to yank James from the canon. I gave it my best, but in retrospect I feel I fell short. My premise was wrong. Galatians and James do contradict each other. A lot. They don't even agree on fundamental terminology. They use the same words to mean different things. Reconciling them is exhausting work precisely because James and Paul are not just discussing different topics, but they are doing so in a way that establishes neither of them truly grasps the other's point. I finally realized that there are... contradictions? No, I preferred to call them paradoxes: two ideas that coexisted even while seeming to contradict each other. We are saved by grace. We are saved by works. It depends on what you mean by saved, grace and works. And then came the Actual Errors thread: the notion that Wierwille's writings were God-breathed was contradicted by a simple application of Wierwille's definition of God-breathed to his works. Wierwille's books could not be God-breathed if they did not meet the criteria his books set for what God-breathed means! Blah blah blah. And then someone pointed out, hey Raf, using that logic, you can't establish that the Bible is God-breathed! And that turns out to be true, using the same logic. The only way out was to use a different logic: The Bible could still be God-breathed if Wierwille was wrong about what God-breathed means, what characteristics a God-breathed document would exhibit. So now I'm looking at the Bible as a collection of writings by people who did not always agree with each other. Some other things became clear later on: Paul all but calls the author of Luke a flat-out liar. Whoever wrote Mark was barely familiar with the geography of Palestine. Job... JOB! This story could not be literally true unless God was unspeakably capricious and cruel. Who among you would compensate a man who lost his dog by giving him a new dog? Yet God compensates Job with a new wife and children. What-what-WHAT? Does God know everything? Did He know from before the dawn of time that I would scratch my left forearm as I typed this post on Nov. 9, 2017? And not only does he know everything that will happen, he knows everything that WOULD have happened had we all made different choices about everything? Do you have any idea how many contingencies (parallel universes) each person would trigger on an average day by choosing one thing over another? God knows ALL those contingencies? [Yes, I posted before I finished my thought. You didn't really want me to drone on and on, did you? We all know where this story ends...]