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  1. Well, it's been over 50 years since I first heard these things, but as I recall, it was covered in what we used to call the "13th" session of PFAL. After the 12th session, in which students *manifested*, there was a separate session on the unforgivable sin. Supposedly, this involved the seed of Satan being irreversibly instilled into people. Born again of the wrong seed, as it were. It was supposed to be the polar opposite of the new birth, and quite different from possession, which could be exorcised. There was lots of talk about many of the people of great influence being "seed boys", and, therefore, irredeemable.(prominent scientists, actors, musicians, world leaders and so forth) Of course, it freaked out lots of people and negated the euphoria of session 12. That's probably why it was eliminated and not revisited until it resurfaced in the Advanced Class teachings. I think it might be included somewhere in the original PFAL collaterals. edit: You can't really accept it as being possible without first believing in "once saved, always saved" because of the element of permanence. It's hard to look back at some of this stuff and not laugh at what a chump I must have been.
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  2. And speaking of imagination, Ryan Holiday shared some insight on a YT short recently:
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  3. Questions about the identity of Jesus Christ are almost as old as Christianity itself. The gospels and epistles are, at least in part, a rebuttal to early claims about exactly who Jesus was, both before and after his resurrection. He's the Son of God. Why? In Mark it's at his baptism. In Luke and Matthew it's by virtue of him not having an earthly father. In John it's a relationship that predates his birth. All answers are Biblically defensible. The inescapable conclusion from the gospels: he is the Son of God. But John is the only gospel that explicitly appears to make the case that he is actually God as well (although John would probably be denounced as a heretic for claiming that the Father is in any way greater than the Son). The Trinity as a doctrine developed over time. That Christ was a being who existed prior to his earthly life can reasonably be deduced from the writings of Paul. We in TWI made the mistake of thinking there was something Biblically unreasonable about a doctrine like "the incarnation," as though there were no Biblical support for it. To the contrary, the Biblical support is strong and must be addressed for a Socinian model (his existence began at conception/birth, just like ours) to hold water. It should be noted that the biggest controversy around the time of Nicea was whether Jesus pre-existed as God or as an angel. That he was "just a man" was not even a finalist. You could (and we did) make a Biblical case that because he is not God (John 14:28) and he was not an angel (Hebrews 1), then he must have been a man, although an extraordinary one. But the case for Jesus as God is far from non-existent. And the case for Jesus as a pre-existing angel is perhaps even stronger (that's the Jehovah's Witness position). For what it's worth, I find it interesting that after he became an agnostic, Bart Ehrman (very recently) began subscribing to the belief that the earliest Christians were Arian (that is, they believed Jesus to be an angel prior to his birth, "the firstborn of all creation" in a very literal sense. My personal belief is that you can't get to one answer because there isn't one answer at the core of the argument. Finding out what the Bible says about who Jesus really was is complicated, perhaps irreparably, by the fact that the Bible's writers don't seem to agree with each other on the subject.
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