Steve Lortz

I gave a great deal of thought to the subtitle to this thread... because I agree with the things you just posted, Raf. I respect your thinking, it's just that you and I have some different basic assumptions at this stage of the game... and de gustabus non est disputandum! In fact, I'm really glad you posted so that we could make sure that the air is clear and there is no animosity between us. I did think of you while I was writing this paper, because I chose to do it in a more journalistic rather than an academic style. My dad was a newspaper man, and that has always inclined me to trust you. This paper is actually the result of about 21 years worth of thinking and researching. Two things have impressed me the most. The first is how much the Old Testament has to offer on the subject. The New Testament writers didn't bother to make explicit all the connections because they took it for granted that their readers would already understand the connections. For instance, WHY Pentecost? To me it seems blatantly obvious, but none of the commentators I've read seem to make the connections, and neither do my professors... yet. And Wierwille's parroting of dispensationalism cut us off from considering anything as valuable that came out of the Old Testament or the Gospels. The second thing that has impressed me has been an appreciation of the massive impact of the Pentcostal/Charismatic movement on the whole world over the past hundred years or so. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (December 19, 2011) Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Christian Population p. 67, there were over 500,000,000 Pentecostals/Charismatics in the world at that time... that's over 500 MILLION! What was the highest estimate for grads of PFAL... about 100,000? That means there are over 5,000 Pentecostals/Charismatics for every single grad of PFAL!?! Wierwille's teachings on speaking in tongues, which he stole from J.E. Stiles, were like a little parasite, a tiny flea, riding on the back of an elephant. Not all of those Pentecostal/Charismatics know that they can speak in tongues, but ALL of them can, and many, many of them DO. To conclude that speaking in tongues is not real because of exposure to Wierwille's miniscule chicanery is to fly in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence. I stopped and thought about how many Pentecostal/Charismatics there are around apart from the people who were involved with TWI. In my extended family there are four nuclear families who speak in tongues. The other three, apart from my own nuclear family that was from TWI, came out of three DIFFERENT faith communities. I would have had to write this paper for mutual understanding in my own extended family, if for no other reason! I took a class on Christian ethics last May, and an incident that happened in that class also contributed to my decision to write this paper... The professor was African-American along with about half of the students. One of the African-American students wrote and presented a paper in class on race relations within the American church. The races came together during the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties, but afterwards they separated again... except for the Pentecostals. The student posed the following as a question for class discusssion: What are the Pentecostals doing right? I hadn't spoken before in any of my classes about speaking in tongues. It is a relatively taboo subject at the SOT because there have been arguments in the past about the subject. But in this case, I couldn't keep quiet. An African-American named Marcus and I had some remarkable interactions while I was a WOW in Tucson, in spite of our radical racial differences, demonstrating to each other the love of God. I know that happened because we each respected the fact that we both spoke in tongues. I related the incident in class, and all sorts of people started saying all sorts of things about tongues, because I had made it safe for them to do so. There is a need at the SOT for us to come to a common understanding of tongues based on what is actually written in the Bible. The title of my paper is What does the Bible really say (and really NOT say) about speaking in tongues? I take it for granted that what the Bible really says (my own translations from the Greek) are reliable, and that modern speaking in tongues is generally genuine, even though some people do it indecently or out of order. Those are premises from which I have started. Members of my intended audience and myself will not be able to come to any common understanding if we don't respect those presuppositions. If anyone wants to present arguments that the Bible is not inherently reliable, or that speaking in tongues is all delusional, well... that's a wonderful thing, but it's not what this thread is about, and that's why I deliberately subtitled it "NOT an argument with Raf..." :beer:/>/> Love, Steve

Earlier, you asked me "What is genuine?" Now I'm asking you, "Were you deluded then, or are you deluded now? How can you tell?" Wierwille and the Way International were one of the most tiny blips in the twentieth century. Pentecostalism started with a handful of people and a pastor who had been rejected by every church hierarchy because he was black. Without central organization, specifically Pentecostal groups grew in size and number. In the 1960s, the Charismatic movement brought Pentecostal beliefs and practices into all the mainstream denominations. In the twentieth century, the Pentecostal/Charismatic section of Christianity grew more rapidly than any other part of Christianity, especially overseas. Today there are hundreds of millions of Pentecostal/Charismatics in the world. When we were involved with TWI, the leaders always tried to convince us that we were unique in the world, and the Spirit could only work through us. We thought we were the hot stuff, "taking the Word over the world." In truth, TWI was a tiny parasite hitchhiking on the back of a REAL movement that the Lord REALLY was using to spread Christianity over the world! No matter how many people Wierwille may or may not have led into tongues, it was all chump change compared to what was really going on. Even if Wierwille was a total fraud (which I think he was), and even if every single person who graduated from Power For Abundant Living was deliberately faking tongues throughout their whole time in the Way (which I do not think was the case), it probably would not have made a perceptible difference in the number of people speaking in tongues in the world. The faith community God has called me to (yes, there is a God, and I have no doubt that he called me specifically to this community) finds itself in somewhat of a quandry because some of the congregations in the community speak in tongues and some do not. One of the great emeritus leaders of the community, during a series of lectures, related his own experience of speaking in tongues (it was definitely not any kind of standard TWI experience), but said we need to return to sound doctrine on the subject. The problem is, nobody has produced any sound doctrine. I have not written this paper to persuade ex-Wafers, one way OR another. I have written it to help my profs, many of whom are younger than me. The Dean of the school has marveled at all the things God put me through to teach me this stuff, and my experience of TWI was less than a third of it. I can see why a person whose only experience of tongues came from their involvement with TWI could doubt it! Right now, I wouldn't trust ANYTHING that came out of Wierwille's mouth. But the world is now, and always has been, a vastly larger place than a cornfield in Ohio. Speaking in tongues is now, and always has been much more widely practiced than by the miniscule number of people who graduated from PFAL. The Holy Spirit is now and always has been more gobsmackingly powerful than any little cigar box Wierwille could try to cram it into. Love, Steve

I'd have to agree with your position entirely, waysider, that the Spirit does not give the utterance, if it weren't for my experiences with prophecy. And I don't mean TWI prophecy. I started paying attention to God about seven years before I ever heard of TWI or took the class. I held conversations with him, and he would answer me. At that time, I didn't know how to get answers from the Bible. Most of the time, he would answer me by prompting a question or directing my attention to something. But sometimes, he would have people speak words to me. And the words didn't need to be directed at me. There were times when I was sitting in a restaurant and I would hear somebody in the next booth over say exactly the words I needed to hear. The things we learned about prophecy in... what was it? the intermediate class?... were a batch of malarkey. But there were times during my involvement with the Way when I would just make some offhanded comment to somebody, and they would be astonished (existemi = "put out of place") that I had said exactly the thing they needed to hear. That has continued to happen to this day, even though I left TWI and TWI's kind of prophecy long ago. Those experiences DO correspond with the description of prophecy Paul set forth in I Corinthians 14, that if somebody hears you prophesy, they will fall on their face and say "God is in you of a truth!" I have heard many, many other Christians prophesy, even though they didn't realize that was what they were doing. How can that be explained? At present, science CAN'T explain it. However, science might be able to explain it if CERN is able to detect supersymmetry. At present, the closest science can come is the occurrence of "synchronicity", a seemingly meaningful coincidence. Acts 2:4 explained it by saying they spoke (laleo = "to speak") in tongues as the Spirit gave the utterance (apophtheggomai = “to speak one’s opinion plainly”). Prophecy works the same way, a person speaks words as the Spirit gives the utterance. How does the Spirit give the utterance? There are several places where the New Testament says that "out of the abundance (overflow) of the heart the mouth speaks". Whatever our hearts have too much of will flow out of our mouths. If our hearts are filled with discontent, then bitterness and frustration will flow out of our mouths. If our hearts are filled with thankfulness, then thanksgiving will flow out of our mouths. According to Romans 5:5, the love of God is poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit that was given to us. Speaking by the Spirit of God is simply allowing the love of God poured out in our hearts to flow out of our mouths without permitting our own thinking to interfere with the process. I KNOW from my own experience that is how prophecy works. The Spirit gives the utterance! And if the Spirit gives the utterance for prophecy, I am convinced it gives the utterance for speaking in tongues also. Is the mind capable of imitating other languages? I've watched enough episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway? to know that it can. But the things being said in those made up languages don't make any sense. I believe the things I am speaking in tongues make sense. I have not had a personal experience of someone knowing what a tongue means, but I have heard enough first person anecdotes (not hearsay mind you, but first person) to convince me that what is spoken in a tongue DOES make sense. You ask "What is genuine?" I fall back on the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience. You may well have been faking tongues during your involvement with TWI, but that doesn't mean everyone was... Love, Steve

History and science do NOT demonstrate this to be the case! Genuine biblical speaking in tongues is deliberate and volitional. There is no biblical warrant for equating speaking in tongues with ecstatic utterance. The word "ecstasy" comes from the Greek word echstasis that is a noun form of the verb existemi. Existemi means "to put out of its place, change, alter" (Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, abr., s.v. "existemi"). Ecstatic utterance is that which proceeds from an altered state of consciousness. Both echstasis and existemi occur in the book of Acts. Echstasis is translated "trance" and is associated with receiving visions, not speaking in tongues. Existemi IS associated with speaking in tongues twice, Acts 2:12 and Acts 10:45. In both cases, it wasn't the speakers whose minds were put out of their place, but the people who HEARD them speaking in tongues. For several years now I've searched for possible pre-Christian incidents of speaking in tongues. I've only found two, one was the Pythoness who inhaled chthonic gases at Delphi, and the other was at the celebrations of the Bacchants that involved getting falling down drunk on wine. There have been people around the globe and throughout history who have developed numerous ways to induce altered states of consciousness, and sometimes people in such a state jabber senselessly, but there is no biblical warrant for associating genuine speaking in tongues with an altered state of consciousness. Biblical speaking in tongues is ALWAYS deliberate and volitional. The ancients were familiar with artificially inducing altered states of consciousness. The methods for doing so were considered part of the healing arts. They were called pharmakeia. According to Galatians 5:16-21, pharmakeia as a work of the flesh in opposition to the Spirit. Unfortunately, English translators chose to use "witchcraft" to translate pharmakeia, which throws our understanding WAY OFF. There are some Christians who think they have to get into an altered state of consciousness to speak in tongues. Those folks get all the news coverage, but they are not representative of the Pentecostals I know. History and science DO NOT demonstrate that speaking in tongues is wholly dependent on the mind and not the Spirit. Speaking of science and spirit, what do you think about supersymmetry, waysider? If dark matter and dark energy have the same complexity as the matter and energy apparent to us, then I can certainly feature that there could be invisible (dark?) intelligences co-occupying the universe with us. Of course the ancients had no concept of supersymmetry, so they had to use a metaphor of something else that could not be seen, but whose effects could be felt... wind, or SPIRIT!!!!! Love, Steve

I am taking two classes this year, Literature and History of the Old Testament and Literature and History of the New Testament. During the first semester of OT we studied the history of Israel from "the beginning" whenever that was, until the return from the Babylonian captivity. In the first semester of NT we studied the intertestamental period (Maccabees), the gospels and Acts. During the coming semester we will study the prophets in OT and Paul in NT. In each class we have to write an exegesis paper during each semester. The exegesis papers are where we have to apply the interpretive skills we've been learning to specific passages of scripture. The exegesis papers are where the rubber meets the road. We are held to strict standards, and each paper must be between 3,700 and 4,000 words, no more and no less (you'll notice there's only 300 words worth of wiggle room). During the first semester I wrote on Deuteronomy 10:12-22 in OT. The title was What Does The LORD Your God Require of You? My NT paper was What Must I Do To Inherit Eternal Life? based on Luke 18:18-30. Since I finished Archaeology at the end of this past semester, I had no make up work hanging over me from the time I spent in the hospital a year-and-a-half ago. There wasn't going to be anything I HAD to do over the Christmas break, so I decided to explore the possibility of using part of I Corinthians 14 as the passage for my exegesis paper in NT this coming semester. I checked out a few commentaries before the library closed for the holidays, but after doing some initial reading, I realized that no part of I Corinthians 14 would be suitable for an exegesis because it couldn't be covered properly within the 3,700-4,000 word limit. Well... instead of doing that... I used the break to write a 10,000 word paper entitled What does the Bible really say (and really NOT say) about speaking in tongues? I learned one HECK of a lot! I will post a few of the highlights now, and discuss more as time goes by... Back in 1994 (twenty-one years ago, seven years after I left TWI) I decided to write A Partial Inventory of Things I Believe as of 1994 because of all the different things we were thinking about at CES, from Anthony Buzzard and from Dale Sides. These weren't articles to publish. They were just for me and my wife to figure out and come to agreement on exactly what we thought. One of the articles was on speaking in tongues. I realized that some of the things Wierwille and the offshoots taught could be substantiated from the scriptures, but many, many others could not be confirmed. One of the things I tried to do at that time was to define the primary function of speaking in tongues. Defining the primary function of a thing is an artifact of systemic analysis, which I learned to do in the Nuclear Navy. I arrived at this; the primary function of speaking in tongues is to enable a Christian to offer perfectly acceptable thanksgiving to God even though we know only in part. That was the best I could do at the time. There are many important things to learn about Pentecost from the OT, but we always wore blinders because of Wierwille's theology of administrations. The key to understanding Pentecost is Deuteronomy 16:10, "You shall keep the festival of weeks to the LORD your God, contributing a freewill offering in proportion to the blessing that you have received from the LORD your God." On the day of Pentecost recorded in Acts 2, Jesus's followers who were speaking in tongues were contributing a freewill offering (by means of Spirit) in proportion to the blessing that they had received (the gift of the Holy Spirit) from the Lord. The tongues as of fire over their heads indicated that the offering they were making was accepted. Amos 4:5 tells us some interesting things about freewill offerings. God is chiding Israel, [You] bring a thank offering of leavened bread, and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them; for so you love to do, O people of Israel! Leviticus said freewill offerings were to be made with UN-leavened bread. Leaven is often used as a symbol for hypocrisy. Thank offerings are to be free of hypocrisy! In our present unregenerate state, we cannot make perfectly acceptable thank offerings with our minds, because we are still contaminated with hypocrisy, and will be until Jesus returns and we are all changed. So one of the results of writing this paper is that I've redefined the primary function; the primary function of speaking in tongues is to enable a Christian to offer perfectly acceptable thanksgiving to God even though our minds are still contaminated with hypocrisy. This is possible because the Spirit, instead of our unregenerate minds, gives us the words to speak. I'm exhausted... more later... Love, Steve

Myth is truth expressed through simile and metaphor rather than through propositional statements. Myth expresses poetic knowledge. Depending on how a person defines "accuracy", poetic knowledge is more accurate than propositional knowledge because it is closer to human experience than propositional knowledge is. For instance, science can only speak about experiences that are repeatable, but reality is that nothing is ever genuinely 100% repeatable. In some very important respects, there are some aspects of ordinary human experience that science cannot address at all, or has very difficult times addressing. An example is neuro-chemisty. There are a number of illnesses categorized as mental. There are a number of drugs that do various things with the balances of neurotransmitters. Yet there is no way to "scientifically" match the drugs with the illnesses. To arrive at the proper prescriptions, the doctors have to resort to trial and error, and they have to rely on the patients' descriptions of their experiences (through simile and metaphor) to arrive at the proper drug and proper dosage. And it's DIFFERENT for EVERY patient! You make a distinction between myth and history. That's valid, but what is our definition of "history"? Have you ever heard of The Doomed History of the Deuteronomist? I can't say that I know much about it, but the Deuteronomist had distinct views about what constituted history that probably did overlap with ours in certain ways, but differed in others. For instance, there is no "Nimrod" in the historical record, but there must have been scores if not hundreds of Enmerkars. If the Deuteronomist rolled all those Enmerkars into one Nimrod, can we truly say then that there is no historical basis for Nimrod? I agree with you that Abraham is probably the first human being in Genesis that we would characterize as "historical", but I think there was an historical basis for the story of the flood, though not a worldwide flood of "Biblical" proportions. Sometime after the last ice age, Lake Agassiz flowed out and raised the level of the oceans by many meters. Doggerland in northern Europe was flooded and the basin of what is now the Black Sea may have been filled by a catastrophic inrush from the raising sea level. That event may have been the basis of the flood legends in Mesopotamia and Europe. The protagonist of the Mesopotamian myth (Mesopotamia is the land of Shinar in Genesis) was a fellow named Utnapishtim in the Gilgamesh epic. The protagonist of the Greek myth was Deucalion. I think Noah was a mythic refutation of the myth of Utnapishtim. I think it would be wonderful if a bunch of fundamentalists found an ark on top of Mount Ararat, and the name plate on it said "Utnapishtim" or "Deucalion." I agree with you very much that the fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis is very, very wrong, but I think there are other ways to interpret Genesis that can be very, very right. I like you, Raf, and value your input! You raise questions we all need to consider deeply. The fact that we may come to different answers to those questions doesn't detract from their value! Love, Steve P.S. - If you can describe quantum reality in terms other than those of mathematics or myth, I'd like to read what you come up with!!! :-) P.P.S. - I have some notes in my possession that I made some 40 or so years ago, when I was actively involved in the US Navy Nuclear Power Program, a good five or six years before I ever even heard of TWI, regarding the relation between myth and math!

RE: The original purpose of this thread, when I was doing business consulting, we called it "pounding money down a rat hole". RE: other stuff on this thread, every single one of us had different experiences before, during and after our involvement with TWI, which is why I respect your position, Raf, even though I don't necessarily agree with every part of it. I just found out day before yesterday about the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, four sources to consider when looking for truth, 1.) Scripture 2.) Tradition 3.) Reason and 4.) Experience. That explained so much to me about the Wesleyan Holiness movement of the late-1800s that the Pentecostal/Charismatic movements of the 20th century came out of. I just spent my holiday break writing a 10,000 word paper on the topic. My experience of TWI was more similar to Broken Arrow's. Love, Steve Raf, my writing style is more journalistic than academic, and I wasn't confined to the requirements of a syllabus in writing my project over the break. I'm not turning it in for a class, but I'm going to let some of my profs read it. I think they will appreciate not having to grade it!

What IS myth? And why should it be inferior to propositional knowledge? And apart from the language of mathematics, can quantum reality be expressed as anything other than myth? Love, Steve

I finally finished the paper a few weeks ago. My doc tried to switch my blood pressure meds from pills to a patch. I had an adverse reaction that put me down for too much time. One of the greatest things I learned was how much later the writing was done than I had before imagined. The first few chapters of Genesis assumed the form in which we have them today after the Judean scholars had been carried off in 587 BCE. In some respects, the creation accounts in Genesis 1&2 are refutations of the Enuma Elish, which the exiled scholars would have seen performed every New Years Day during the 70 years they were in captivity at Babylon. The Enuma Elish was the Mesopotamian creation myth. While the Judean scholars were writing about the tower of Babel, they were right there in Babylon, seeing the great ziggurat before them every day. The last night before finishing my paper, I found a copy of a Mesopotamian story called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. Enmerkar was the founder of a small Mesopotamian empire... a city that ruled over several smaller towns. (There was no Nimrod in the historical records. Nimrod was a generic example of the multitude of founders of city states in the Land of Shinar. Enmerkar was such a founder.) Enmerkar was building a ziggurat, and he needed to get materials from one of his vassal towns, a place called Aratta. Enmerkar sent a messenger to the boss-man of Aratta saying "Send me this stuff I need." One of the things Enmerkar did was have his messenger sing the Incantation to Nidimmud, asking the god Enki to restore linguistic unity to the land of Shinar. What this tells us is that the rulers of city-state empires in Mesopotamia were having trouble whipping their subjects into line because of the linguistic differences within their empires. The fellow whole wrote the account in Genesis of the tower of Babel must have been poking his finger in the eyes of the gods of Mesopotamia, Nidimmud and Enki in particular, saying "It was OUR GOD who confused YOUR languages, just to give you trouble!" Well, it's been a lot of fun! Love, Steve

Raf, how can you say that assuming I am lying simply because you did is not presumptuous? Who is making an hominem attack on whom here? Love, Steve

It's interesting that you bring up "free vocalization!" Deuteronomy 16:10 says, "Then you shall keep the festival of weeks to the Lord your God, contributing a free-will offering in proportion to the blessing that you have received from the Lord your God." On the day of Pentecost recorded in Acts 2, the blessing people received was the gift of the Holy Spirit. The people who spoke in tongues that day were offering back to God in proportion to how He had blessed them, praying by means of the Holy Spirit. Since Deuteronomy calls for a free-will offering, then free vocalization would perfectly fit the criteria called for in Deuteronomy 16:10. If you judge me to be lying, Raf, because you lied, then you are being as presumptuous as Wierwille ever was! Love, Steve

I'm not sure if I voted earlier in this poll, but looking at it again, I can't say I agree with any of the options... I think speaking by the Spirit of God is real. I don't think it works the way any of the options listed... TWI, CES/STIFI, denominational Pentecostals OR Charismatics... describe it as working. I took PFAL in 1980, which was my first exposure to the practice. I left TWI in 1987, associated with CES in 1989, and left association with ALL the offshoots in 1996. In 1994, I started composing an inventory of things I believed as of that date just to settle in my own mind all the different things I had been hearing from all sorts of different sources. One of the things I did was re-examine everything I could about speaking in tongues, including passages from the Scriptures I had never heard taught on, such as Deuteronomy 16:10&11,16&17. It is impossible to understand what speaking in tongues in Acts 2 is all about without considering the things that Deuteronomy 16 has to say about the purposes of the feast that came to be known as Pentecost. Nobody that I know of has put those things together. Several years ago, I began working on a master's degree at the seminary of the Church of God Reformation Movement (Anderson, Indiana). The ChoGRM was founded in the late-1800s as part of the Wesleyan Holiness Movement. The ChoGRM rejected all creeds as man-made and divisive, and therefore placed great emphasis on Christians and especially ministers being moved by the Holy Spirit. A man named William J. Seymour associated with the ChoGRM in Indianapolis before attending Charles Parham's bible school in Houston, Texas. Seymour took seriously the idea of being led by the Holy Spirit and went on to lead the Azuza Street revival that began in 1906, the foundational event in the birth of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the 20th century (including those of J.E. Stiles and V. P. Wierwille). ChoGRM itself did not become Pentecostal, though there are congregations that associate with ChoGRM who practice speaking by the Spirit of God. There are many within the ChoGRM who prophesy, even though they have no idea that is what they are doing. Seymour relied on experience rather than doctrine, and so we have a multitude of understandings about speaking by the Spirit of God that are often nonsensical and sometimes contradictory. I set out to write my master's thesis on this topic, but a year ago I was hospitalized with a massive overdose of potassium, and I have sustained residual damage sufficient to prevent me from completing a master's thesis within the constrains of the program. I think the Lord has called me to this time and place to teach the things that He has taught me, but we're going to have to invent a way to do it outside the formal process. I will probably write something like a very condensed master's thesis. My target audience will not be the current faculty of the seminary, but rather my fellow students who are of the up and coming generation, rather than my own. I can also say these things: I think I know what Luke and Paul meant by "speaking in tongues", I KNOW that I know what Luke and Paul meant by "prophecy", I have no clear idea what Paul meant by "interpret" and "interpretation". I don't think Luke ever wrote about what Paul calls "interpretation". Love, Steve

Well... I pray that it works again in this case! Love, Steve

The only things more that I really want to hear about Barnard are that he has been caught and convicted... Love, Steve

I think one of the lies that enabled Wierwille to pull this off was the teaching from the foundational class that there are two realms, the senses realm and the spiritual realm, and that the laws of the spiritual realm supercede the laws of the senses realm. If you learn to manipulate the laws of the spirit realm, you can control what happens in the senses realm. I know that's one of the things that stuck out for me when I took the foundational class. The advanced class was supposed to teach us how to operate the laws of the spirit realm, but it didn't, because there IS NO SUCH THING AS A SPIRIT REALM, and the Bible nowhere teaches that there is. If we study the word aisthesis and it's cognates, translated "perceive," "judgment" and "senses" we find that the Bible exhorts us to exercise COMMON SENSE. Wierwille taught us to ignore our common sense about what he was doing to us, and to strive to "acquire an in depth spiritual awareness and perception" that doesn't exist. Love, Steve

Looking back on my experiences of the time, from a perspective of 27 years after leaving, I have to say, WordWolf, I think you've hit the nail exactly on the head. VPW knew what he was doing. LCM never had a clue... Love, Steve

Anyone who can cite a Marx Brothers movie in a discussion of Revelation is OKAY in my book!!! Love, Steve

Hi, Raf! I have always respected your thinking, and have no problems with the decisions you have made. If I had the same experiences you have had, I may well have come to the same conclusions myself. This post should not be interpreted as argument against your position, but just raising questions with which I've also had to deal. I probably wouldn't have chimed in at all, but right now, I happen to be writing a paper for archaeology class on "Genesis as a conversational response to the Enuma Elish," so I've been thinking about the first 11 chapters of Genesis. Your post raises two questions to my mind. First, why should we privilege the PFAL definition of what it means to be God-breathed, or anything else from PFAL for that matter? And second, what exactly do we mean by "error"? That is, is it valid to privilege a post-Enlightenment definition of "truth" as propositional over the traditional definition of "truth" as poetic. After all, poetic expression is much closer to actual experience than abstract proposition. Propositional expression has proven very powerful for science and technology, but can we really say that hydrogen bombs are the best end products of human ingenuity? Is it really fair to hold the writers of Genesis, or the Enuma Elish for that matter, to standards of "truth" that would have been totally alien to their way of thinking? Love, Steve

Interesting thoughts, Twinky... Love, Steve

Right now, I'm finishing up a class I was working on before I was hospitalized last year. I've always enjoyed archaeology since I took an undergraduate course in it forty-some-odd years ago. My professor back then was Dr. Jeeninga (HE really WAS a doctor, and earned the respect he received) who founded archaeological studies at this school. It feels funny to be answering a question and to write, "Well, Dr. Jeeninga always told us..." to the young guy teaching the class. My memory of Dr. Jeeninga and the respect that he earned are the genuine items, of which the false persona Wierwille projected was a cheesy counterfiet! Coming back to a formal study of archaeology after all these years of observing it as an amateur, I find my view of the beginnings of the Bible to be vastly different from what they formerly were. The Bible was NOT written from scratch, neither was it written in a vaccuum. These are my best guesses at present: The Pentateuch was put into written form at Jerusalem during the reign of Solomon. There were many, MANY oral songs, stories, etc., in circulation about the origins of the community, and there were regional variations, as well. Solomon, or someone very close under him, set a task for the scribes at Solomon's scriptorium to collect, redact and correct the oral stories, and then to write them down. I think there were also a very few written documents that were used as sources. I think that's how Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers came together. Sometimes I wonder about Deuteronomy... At the time of Solomon, Jerusalem was NOT a cornfield in rural Ohio. I think the scholars at Solomon's scriptorium were a fairly cosmopolitan lot, familiar with the thought life of points east and west, Egypt and Mesopotamia. I think the first few books of the Bible were put together in some degree of conversation with the literature of the surrounding cultures. Does that mean I think the Bible is not God-breathed? No, it simply means I think God breathes in a much more nuanced way than we were taught in Sunday school! I will need to write a 10 page paper, and I think I'm going to do it on viewing Genesis 1:1-11:9 as a conversational response to the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth. Love, Steve

I used to teach Humane Letters to seventh graders. I had a section on aesthetics, or the art of how we use our senses. The section was based on the three occurrences of aisthesis and its cognates in the Greek New Testament (Luke 9:45a, Philippians 1:9 and Hebrews 5:14). As time went by and I developed the section, the emphasis shifted from aesthetics to judgment. We had a class on formal logic, but we taught nothing explicitly about judgment, without which, logic is like a ship without a rudder. For the students, I defined judgment as paying attention to what you are paying attention to, and thinking about what you are thinking about, mental activity. At one point, I would ask the students to give a one word definition for the opposite of aesthetics or judgment. The opposite of the definition would be failing to pay attention to what you are paying attention to, and failing to think about what you are thinking about, mental inactivity... or, in one word... BOREDOM! Boredom is a state of mind, and is not inherent in any subject. Subjects can be dull... sometimes DEADLY dull... but when that is the case, we simply need to pay MORE attention to what we're paying attention to, and to think MORE SHARPLY about what we're thinking about. Was PFAL dull? Yes and no. As far as intellectual content went... it was VERY dull, but as far as emotional ambiance went, it was VERY exciting. And that was part of its appeal. Intellectually, we were lulled into a suspension of critical thinking, emotionally, we were caught up in the scripted, uniform enthusiasm of the grads; "I'm so EXCITED!" Instead of responding to the dullness of the material by paying more attention and thinking more sharply about the content of PFAL, we were distracted by all the phoney, stage managed "excitement". It was very hypnotic. So people's perceptions of PFAL varied considerably, based on the individual's experience and how much the person was swayed by the deliberate psychological manipulation. But as far as the marketing of PFAL, perception WAS everything. What ever truth there was in PFAL was incidental to putting over the scam. Did Wierwille separate religion and true Christianity? Yes he did... he gave us a definition of God and our relation to Him (through the MOGFODAT) that was extremely religious, and separated Wierwille's followers (us) from true CHRISTIANity. Was the Bible the written standard for faith and practice? How about the ten commandments (all of which can be found in Genesis before Mt. Sinai, and in the New Testament afterward as well)? How about the Sermon on the Mount? You know, II Timothy 3:16 says All Scripture is profitable for doctrine, ALL Scripture is profitable for reproof, ALL Scripture is profitable for correction, ALL Scripture is profitable for instruction in righteousness. So why did Wierwille teach us that we should ignore things like the Lord's Prayer, and the admonition of Romans 11:20 to not be high-minded, as Wierwillle was, but to fear the Lord, as Wierwille did not. We could show people from the Scripture that "Jesus isn't God," But could we show them from the Scriptures who Jesus actually IS??? Did we even know ourselves? Do we know now??? Not if your learning has failed to go beyond what you heard in PFAL! Was the adversary's cage rattled? Maybe... but it was NOT because of the prevailing PFAL. The adversary was promoting Wierwille's error just as much as Wierwille was. Was that what made us a cult? No, a cult is an organization that makes its followers deployable to a hidden agenda. When Wierwille used us to stroke his narcissistic ego (some in detestably vile ways), when he used us to satisfy his lust for money and material possessions, when he trained and used us to promote his multi-level marketing scam, with Dale Carnegie material no less... those were the things that made The Way International a CULT! That was what it was in substance, a cult. That's what it still is in substance, a cult. And no amount of perception can ever change that substance. Love, Steve

There is preaching, and there is teaching, and they weren't always the same thing, especially in PFAL. When Wierwille preached in PFAL, he often said things that were quite true, like "The integrity of the Word is always at stake!" Yet when he taught, he often taught the exact opposite, like "We have to rightly divide the Word of Truth." To divide the Word of Truth is by definition, to destroy its integrity. In PFAL, Wierwille had a section where he preached on how important it is to get "to whom" correct, and he was right about that. But as he taught in the very same section, he used Romans 9-11 as an example, and taught that Romans 9:1-11:12 is addressed to Israel while Romans 11:13-36 is addressed to Gentiles. All we would have had to do would have been to actually READ that section of Romans to see that the WHOLE thing was addressed to the Christians in Rome, and Wierwille was lying through his teeth. I can't speak for anybody else, but I can certainly say I never caught Wierwille's deception until much later. When Wierwille spoke truth about God, and people believed it, God was able to work with those people. As we stayed with TWI and became more and more indoctrinated with Wierwille's errors, God was able to do less and less with us. At least that's how it seems to me. God has ALWAYS been a good guy. Wierwille... not so much... Love, Steve

I think you are probably right! Love, Steve

I sincerely doubt that TWI or any of its offspring will ever again grow the way it did in its hay day. There are lots of once popular cults that are now deader than door nails. The message of PFAL was dated when Wierwille recorded it. None of his later attempts to re-record it, like in 1977, were successful. None of the TWI material can speak to people today the way it spoke to us in the late-'60s, '70s, and early-'80s. Some "cults", like the Mormons, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah's Witnesses survived the deaths of their founders and continued to develop and grow. The Way International did not. It ceased to develop, and imploded. As I have often said, Dave Arneson's invention of recreational role-playing has had, and will continue to have, a vastly more widespread, profitable and loving impact on society and culture than Wierwille's cult. These guys are just engaged in a role-playing game... but it's not as much fun as D&D. Love, Steve

"...the steadfast refusal of reality to cooperate." What a WONDERFUL thing! Love, Steve