Steve Lortz

It's good to read from you again, Jerry, especially on Easter Sunday! I was driving home from Indianapolis today, where my wife, my sister-in-law and myself had been visiting a friend who is in the hospital recovering from some spinal surgery, very successfully. Well, while I was driving, I was thinking about raising a topic here in the doctrinal forums. I was wondering if it was really important enough to start posting, and if so, how to go about starting. My brother might say something like, "Great minds think alike!" But I might be more inclined to say, "If God can make one jack-a$$ speak, he can certainly make two do it at the same time." I think the Lord has been working in you today! I finished a bachelor's degree in May of 2011, and began working on a master's of theology in September of that same year. I wanted to learn enough Greek to be able to get a job teaching it somewhere. After finishing a year's worth of work on the non-thesis track, I decided to write a master's thesis presenting another interpretation of Acts 2. Right now, I'm in the second semester of a general history of Christianity class. We are coming into present times, and a considerable chunk of our class time goes to discussing current events in light of the things we read in our assignments. I'm writing a paper for class on how fundamentalism/evangelicalism progressed from the time Napoleon beat the Prussians at the Battle of Jena in 1806 to the present day. It's been very interesting studying what was going on in the '20s, '30' and 40s in the world at large while Wierwille was setting up his little carny side-show. In your post this morning, you brought up some of the things Wierwille called "apparent contradictions" between the four gospels and the book of Acts. These were the apparent contradictions that PFAL was supposed to teach us how to resolve. I haven't got time to go into it tonight; my blood-pressure meds are making me drowsy, but one of the things I've discovered is that "systematic theology" has gone out of style. Instead of flattening the Bible out by reconciling all the definitions and harmonizing all the points of view, multidimensional understandings can be acquired by studying what things we can learn from specific differences in the accounts. I gotta conk out, but I'm looking forward to writing about this some more and getting feedback from ALL of you! Love, Steve

A few weeks ago, we translated that passage from Philippians in Greek class. Your "sense translation" is most excellent, skyrider, only our professor used the word "sh!t"! The word Paul used there was NOT polite! Love, Steve

Because you're a squirrel who runs in wheels Love, Steve

I spent 6 years in the Navy. I only went up to E-4, because I had some attitude problems, but I qualified as an engine room supervisor on a nuclear submarine, so I was like a shift supervisor for the watch section's machinists mates. That was a number of years before I got involved with TWI. After I had taken PFAL and began participating in the organization's programs, I just assumed that its leaders were also trained in leadership. I wasn't disabused of that notion until I went into residence in the Corps training myself. It seemed to me that the leaders of TWI were praying for God to bless what they had already decided to do, which was how Wierwille defined walking by the flesh in foundational PFAL. What clinched the whole thing for me was after the reading of The Passing of A Patriarch. Everybody in the Corps knew that there was a problem among the Trustees. Everybody was wondering "What can we do to help fix this problem?" The Trustees kept having meetings, but never would get specific about what the problem was. Then Martindale came out and said the problem arose because the people on the field were too lax about how they were running PFAL. A leader's job is to take responsibility. When Martindale attempted to shift responsibility from the Trustees to the people at the twig level, who were doing the actual work, it was like scales fell from my eyes, and I could see what a hollow sham the whole Way tree structure was. Given the disrespect for authority Wierwille demonstrated throughout his life, he would NEVER have been able to submit to the discipline required to learn real leadership. Love, Steve

Which raises a couple of questions... why DO you participate on a site dedicated to connecting the dots and cult recovery?... and why do you advocate for things so many other people here find reprehensible? Love, Steve

You certainly hit the nail on the head, Tom! Love, Steve

One of the things I've had to come to grips with this past few years is the truth that God the Father and my Lord Jesus Christ don't give as much of a rat's a$$ about the doctrine of the trinity as Wierwille did. Jesus Christ has been perfectly capable of functioning as head of his body for the past, what, nearly 2,000 years or so, whether people thought he was God or otherwise. God and Jesus each knows who He himself is, and they both know how to sort mail. There seems to me to be only one incident where somebody supernatural stepped in to make sure a council decided doctrine a certain way, and that was when the Council of Chalcedon said that Jesus was both fully God and fully man. People don't realize that the alternative was for Jesus to be fully God and NOT fully man, which would have made him nothing more than a sock-puppet of God. I had a friend up on campus a few years back who came from Russia. We did not come from similar backgrounds, but we used to have wonderful times talking about God and the Lord, because we both knew we were dealing with the same guys. She told me one time she had been begging for the Lord to explain the trinity to her, and the Lord simply replied "I'm one of a kind." He wouldn't say "Yes!" He wouldn't say "No!" The idea that Jesus just left the Church drifting for a couple of thousand of years, while waiting for the Man of Gawd to come along and to receive the Word of Gawd as it had not been known since the first century, is LUDICROUS. And we were fools to believe Wierwille's shell game! Love, Steve

You're right about one thing, teachmevp, Crist's teachings are EXACTLY why the Way is what it is. Wierwille taught error, the exact same errors Crist is teaching, without allowing anybody to ask questions. If we were allowed to ask questions of Crist, the way Raf asked questions of PFAL, it would be obvious to everybody that Crist is teaching the same errors Wierwille did. Yes this IS why the Way is what it is! Love, Steve

I'm sorry, teachmevp, but there is no "age of grace" in the Word of God. In Ephesians 3:1-3,6 Paul wrote, "For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you gentiles, If ye have heard of the dispensation (oikonomia = "management") of the grace of God which is given me to youward: How that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery... That the gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel:" God extended grace to believing gentiles, that they could be included with the remnant of Israel, inheriting with Israel resurrection life in the age to come, that they could also be members of the body of Christ along with believing Israel, and that they could share with the remnant of Israel of God's promise in Christ by the gospel. God showed this grace to Paul and made him responsible for managing the knowledge of this grace. That's why Paul says "the dispensation (responsibility to manage) of the grace of God which is given me to youward..." It is NOT a period of time... there are NOT two separate programs, one for a physical Israel on earth, and another for a spiritual Church in heaven. There is NOTHING called a "rapture" in the Bible. It is ALWAYS called a "gathering" together, and it's always applied to Israel. Members of the Church, which is the Body of Christ by the one flesh relationship of Genesis 2:24, are going to have to endure every bit as much tribulation as anybody else. Sorry, teachmevp, but Wierwille was a conman. Crist may honestly think he is telling the truth, but he has been swindled, just as surely as Wierwille swindled us. Love, Syeve

Philippians 3:17-19 "17 Brethren, be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an ensample. "18 (For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: "19 Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.) It may be technically accurate to say that Wierwille taught that "Jesus is not God," but that is not to say that what he did teach was correct. Wierwille was wrong about Jesus because he didn't go on and teach WHO JESUS IS. Jesus IS the Lord, and He IS the head of the Body. Jesus Christ IS the one and only Man of God of the world for this our day and time! . By saying that no prophecy of the Old Testament or Gospels could be applied to "this wonderful administration of the grace of God", Wierwille cut the Church off from the crucifixion. The crucifixion took place in the Gospels! Wierwille was an enemy of the cross of Christ at a much deeper level than he even appeared. And so are the people who still believe him. They begin by paying attention to earthly things, instead of heavenly. They become proud of things they ought to be ashamed of (and for some reason, Athletes of the Spirit pops up in my thinking here). They come to serve their own appetites the way they ought to serve God, and all their efforts result in utter worthlessness. Love, Steve

Well said, WordWolf. Very well said indeed! Love, Steve

The doctrine Crist is teaching was the invention of John Darby in the early- to mid-1800s. It depends on reading the meaning of "a period of time" into the word "dispensation". Dispensation NEVER means "a period of time" in the Bible. It means "management". The Bible sets forth a plan of "ages" using the word "aion", which the KJV translates "world". Darby's "plan of the ages" contradicts what the Bible actually says about ages. Darby taught that the Church is completely separate and discontinuous from Israel. In truth, the Church consists of the believing remnant of Israel, under the New Testament prophesied in Jeremiah 31, with believing gentiles grafted in on the same basis as believing Israel, by grace through faith in the resurrection and Lordship of Jesus Christ. If it is true that NO prophecy of the Old Testament or the Gospels can be applied to the Church, then the cross of Christ has NOTHING to do with the Church! Darby was wrong. Wierwille was wrong. Crist is wrong. Love, Steve

You know, TrustAndObey, when I originally decided to get a masters degree, it wasn't because I wanted to prove anything in theology. It was because I wanted to be hirable for a teaching position. I had taught Humane Letters in a school that was just starting up, but as the school grew, the original faculty was gradually replaced by people who had bona fide masters degrees in their fields. I first looked into getting a masters degree in education, but the adviser told me that it wouldn't do me much good. Wherever I looked for a job, there would be hundreds of younger applicants with more academic credentials and more experience than I would have, and the opportunities open to me wouldn't be worth the number of hoops I'd have to jump through. So I looked into the School of Theology. A masters degree would qualify me to teach, and if I studied Greek, it would give me a subject that would be in demand in the kinds of schools I would like to teach at (classical). So, for my first year at the SOT, I was studying on the non-thesis track. Then I took a remote-learning class taught by Walter C. Kaiser who used a "promise-plan" as his framework for organizing the material of the Bible, instead of dispensationalism or covenant theology. It seemed to me there was a hole big enough to drive a truck through in his thinking regarding the day of Pentecost. Kaiser said words to the effect, "Here in Acts 1 we have an arrow pointing forward, and over here in I Corinthians we have an arrow pointing backwards, and something happened in between." But he never addressed exactly what that thing was. Now, back when I was flushing my thinking of Wierwille's dispensationalism in the mid- to late-'90s, I had to do a lot of thinking about Pentecost. In PFAL, Wierwille said Peter could not have meant "This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel." Peter must have meant this is LIKE that which was spoken by the prophet Joel, because, according to Wierwille, there could be NO prophecies from the Old Testament or from the Gospels regarding the administration of the mystery, or as Lynn & co. like to put it, The Administration of the Sacred Secret! So back then, I started studying all the OT prophecies (or promises, if you will) that came to pass on the day of Pentecost. When I heard Kaiser's words, I knew that I would have to write up the things I had learned about Pentecost. So I set the process in motion last fall to switch from the non-thesis to the thesis track. This past week, I had brought my thinking to the point where I could present a preliminary proposal to my thesis advisor, and we began planning the process I would need to go though. There's nothing unusual about the process. It's the same process every student who wants to write a thesis goes through. The process is in place so that other schools, where a student might go to pursue further masters degrees or a doctorate (which I definitely will NOT do), or school boards that might want to hire a person, will be assured of the quality of the student's work. So there it is in a nutshell, if you want somebody to pay you a check to teach, you have to be reliably credentialed. Otherwise, you have to rely on what you can convince people they should put in your coffee can, and pray for God to send you billionaires... BORED BILLIONAIRES... who will be "blessed" by the errors you unwittingly teach. Love, Steve

Not long ago, I read A Political History of Early Christianity by Allen Brent. Among other things, he described Octavian/Augustus' transition from the republic to the empire in terms of modern political theory and language, and then described the same events in the concepts and language that the Romans actually used at the time. Surprise! The book of Revelation turns out to be a political manifesto saying Jesus Christ, not the Imperial Caesar, is Lord. All the talk about astronomical phenomena used in Revelation was also used in Roman politics. Disorder in the heavens indicated disorder on the earth. The Romans believed they were living in an IRON Age (corruption and decay as in "rustbelt"), and that Octavian was going to inaugerate (thus "Augustus") a new GOLDEN age. John the Revelator argued that Jesus Christ, not Caesar, was going to start a new age, "the age to come". The province of Asia, which contained the churches to whom John addressed the book of Revelation, was the hotbed of emperor worship, as the cities competed for imperial favors. Even if we think, as some do, that Revelation was written in the 90s CE, about 20 years after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, it's still possible to read it as historical (the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 598-7 BCE, as well as the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and a possible future fall of Jerusalem). Babylon is definitely code language for Rome, a city that sets on seven hills. It is even possible that the wounding and healing of the beast was a reference to "Nero Revividus". There is a heck of a lot more to Revelation than ANY video preacher has put together! Love, Steve

What's it been? A little over 5 months since I posted this? Last Thursday, I had an appointment with my thesis adviser. I showed him a one page (12 pt type, double-spaced, one inch margins) description of what I want to do (the main points of my interpretation of Acts 2). He decided it would fall into the category of "Biblical Studies." Therefore, I need to complete a year's worth of Old Testament studies, and after that, another year's worth of New Testament studies, before I can even begin to write. ( I have already been reading and surveying possible source material). After I start writing, in the fall of 2015, I will have three semesters (not counting summer breaks) to complete the writing. That means I will finish my genuine masters thesis in December, 2016. This is not unusual. It's just the ordinary amount of work a person needs to do to become recognized as a bona fide master, qualified to teach. Taking PFAL in all its forms hundreds of times,and running the Corps program at Emporia for a few years, doesn't qualify ANYBODY to teach... Love, Steve

True dat! (but I might be wrong) Love, Steve

Maybe this will stir things up a bit... Romans 7:10-13 "10 And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. 11 For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me. 12 Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. 13 Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful." The other day, in Advanced Greek, we were translating documents, not from the Bible itself, but from other Hellenistic documents, specifically a section from the Didache, and a couple of spells that have been found, one for catching a thief, and the other for finding a good looking woman. The prof was teaching us about Hellenistic religion, and how they conceived of their lives being controlled by powers, dominions, etc., which were instruments of Fate. The most powerful aspect of Fate was death. In order to defeat the powers and dominions, and ultimately death, a person needed to be subject to a "Lord" such as Issus, who was more powerful than anything else. That's what "kurios" (Lord) meant in Hellenistic religion. The prof demonstrated to us how Paul was using the concepts of Hellenistic religion in Romans 6&7. Paul was speaking of "sin" as though it were one of the Hellenistic powers or dominions. The prof showed us how "sin" takes something holy, like the law, and turns it into mega-sin. As soon as we know a law, if we then begin to use that law to judge, even ourselves, then our use of that law is usurping the function of Jesus Christ as Lord. The prof defined "sin" in Romans 7 as "bondage to the delusion that we know as much as God does." It was what Adam and Eve wanted, the knowledge of good and evil so that THEY could judge, like God! It is the desperate wickedness of the heart in Jeremiah 17:9. If anybody thinks that they are qualified to say who is and who is not a Christian, if anybody thinks that they are qualified to say who is and who is not "going to hell", then that person is in bondage to the delusion that he or she knows as much as God does. That's why I Corinthians 8:2 says that if any man thinks that he knows something (absolutely, without a doubt), he doesn't know anything yet as he ought to know it (taking into account that he could very well be mistaken). But I could be wrong! Love, Steve

I can speak only for myself, excie, but I can identify with what you're saying. I started working on my masters degree in theology about a year and a half ago, and I've found real Christianity to be so much broader and deeper than the things we did, or thought of ourselves, in TWI. A few years back, it was easy to get into good doctrinal discussions on Greasespot, when we were trying to sort out the truth and the error that we learned in PFAL. But it doesn't seem that way anymore. People have settled into what they want to think, and that's just that. You wrote "after all my years on here, i still don't want to leave" I'm thankful for the people I've gotten to know here, and feel that we've shared a lot of experience, even though we may not have been at the same time and place while involved in TWI. Wierwille and other leaders were awful hypocrites, but I know there were people in the twigs who really did love me with the love of God, and I loved them too. I miss that! Meanwhile, the immediacy of my involvement recedes father and farther into the past... Here's to you, excie! I'm glad to have spent some time with you! Love, Steve

Hi! I'm only stopping by briefly. My internet access is limited right now (no... I'm not in jail! :) )I've got some things to post later about my presentation on I Corinthians 8:6, which is tangential to this discussion, but I wanted to say "Hi!" I am arriving at the conviction that there is NO doctrine that is not potential heresy, and there is NO "faith community" that is not a potential cult... Love, Steve

How familiar are you with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Geisha, what the Diagnostic Standards Manual formerly called Asperger's Syndrome? Love, Steve

Do you realize this is EXACTLY what I Corinthians 8:6 says? If the Alexandrian apologists of the 2nd century had held to a Stoic rather than a Platonic cosmology, I Corinthians 8:6 would be understood to mean exactly what you've written! But those apologists didn't. They assumed Platonic definitions for "cosmos", "spirit" and "logos", and failed to recognize what I Corinthians 8:4-7a implies about the relation between spirit, logos and the cosmos. Consequently, confusion multiplied, and instead of cutting through confusion, the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries ossified the confusion, "condemning" fellow Christians to hell and burning them at stakes for disagreeing over arguments that are INCOMPREHENSIBLE. Does Jesus require YOU to come to an understanding of I Corinthians 8:6? NO! It is manifest that He has already taught you that truth. Has Jesus called me to come to an understanding of I Corinthians 8:6? YES, He has! The very same Jesus who saved you, and whom you worship so beautifully! He put the desires in my heart that have led me, through my whole life (including the brief 11% of it I spent involved with TWI), to this time and place with the set of skills I have in order to do the job that He has set before me. Is my thesis (of which my analysis of I Corinthians 8:6 is only a part) going to revolutionize Christianity? I sincerely doubt it. It will probably be bound and set on a shelf in the university library to slumber with all the other theses. If I wrote it up in a popular style as a book, it wouldn't sell, and multitudes of talking heads would rise up to denounce my heresy. I could start another cult, but I've already had enough of that crap! But I think that someday, Jesus is going to have another job for somebody else to do, and that person will need to read the stuff I'm writing in order to do that job. I've had fun writing this! I've had Duck Soup on in the background. Love, Steve

You weren't the Lone Ranger in that, Raf! I really hope you're having fun and doing well now. I am on a much better balance than I was back then! Love, Steve

Thanks for bringing Jerry Barrax to my remembrance! He and I met each other on the old CES forums before the organization shut them down. We had some good times trying to bring the errors of CES to their attention. You had the tenacity, RAF, and bull-headedness it took to plow through all the BS being relentlessly spewed by certain parties. Thanks again! Love, Steve

I don't think your time and energy were wasted, Raf. The Actual Errors in PFAL thread is the only effort I am aware of to systematically examine the errors of the things Wierwille taught. It was something Lynn, Schoenheit and Graeser SHOULD have done, but didn't. Issues you brought up have shaped my thinking to this day! I THANK YOU for the time and energy you put into what you did then, and the time and energy you are putting into what you are doing now! Love, Steve

My own brother died of cancer in 2006. I can very well understand what you are saying. You and I may disagree about some things, but that doesn't mean we aren't sympatico at a deeper level. Love, Steve