Steve Lortz

Actually ALL of this has followed from an argument that same "certain poster" made. About ten years ago, when Actual Errors in PFAL was in full swing, he and I were engaged on another thread where that poster said that the senses referred to in Hebrews 5:14 had to be referencing the "spiritual" senses, and not our "5 senses". He claimed that the "5 senses" could not be relied on for ANY truth... only the "spiritual" senses. He based this on Wierwille's teaching that there are two realms, the spirit realm and the senses realm, and that the laws of the spirit realm supercede the laws of the senses realm. That got me to thinking: Does the Bible really teach that there are two different realms, a natural realm and a supernatural realm? Are there really "spiritual" laws that supercede the laws of nature? Can the things the Bible says be explained without resorting to a "two realm" model of reality? I started out by tracking aistheterion, the word translated "senses" in Hebrews 5:14, not just its uses in the Bible, but its uses in philosophy during the first century as well. After ten years of tinkering around, I think I can demonstrate that Paul did not subscribe to a "two realm" model, based on I Corinthians 8:4-7a. The literal translation is very simple, not much different from how it's translated in KJV. BUT, there's a difference in the sense translation... a WORLD of difference. Most of the three hours will be consumed in presenting, and answering questions about, what exactly the Stoics meant when they put the prepositions "out of" and "into" in conjunction. By the way, I Corinthians 8:6 illustrates the relationship between God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, all things and ourselves. I present on November 14th. I'll post more about the "one realm" model after that. Love, Steve

I believe I prophesied "for real" a couple of times during the seven years I was involved with TWI. Only one of the incidents was during a "believers meeting", the other didn't have anything at all to do with any of Wierwille's definitions or occassions. The reason I think each of those incidents was genuine was beacause both times, somebody listening did a modern cultural equivalent of "falling down on his face, he will worship God and report that God is in you of a truth." I don't think I ever did a genuine prophesy during the time I was involved with CES. I was just too confused about everything. One time, toward the end of our involvement with CES, some of us went to the hospital to "minister" to a woman who was in there with cancer. My wife prophesied and said something like, "This is going to hurt for a little while, but it will soon be over. You are coming home to be with me." All the other "believers" in the group were horrified, but a few days later, the woman died. I've prophesied on a number of occassions since leaving all involvement with all splinter groups. I don't even try to do it. It just happens spontaneously when I'm talking with somebody one-on-one. There is no formula. I usually don't realize I'm doing it until after it's all over. It doesn't surprise me anymore. Sometimes, these days, I become aware that I'm doing it in the middle of speaking. I hear people doing it all over the campus, both students and faculty, and they don't even realize that's what they are doing. I think prophecy is simply allowing your mouth to speak uncensored out of the abundance of the love of God that is in your heart. I think God does it at a level below consciouness, but I don't believe in the psychological definition of the "unconscious mind" anymore. I think the Bible uses the word "heart" to refer to the attitudes we have internalized through habit. All of the TIP clap-trap in TWI, especially at excellors' sessions, was heavy-duty censoring of what came out of our mouths. Love, Steve

Gotta agree with johnj and Raf on this. But I think there's another level or degree of pistis that I was ignorant of until a few days ago. I saw this while doing homework for Greek. In I Corinthians 14, where it says tongues are not a sign for believers, but for unbelievers, it could well be tranlated accurately that tongues are not a sign for Christians who are confident of their "faith", that is, that they have received the holy Spirit (promised in Joel), and that they WILL receive the Spirit of resurrection life (promised in Ezekeil 37) in the age to come, but rather tongues functions as a sign for Christians who are not yet confident of those things. When a Christian who is not yet confident that she or he has received the gift of holy Spirit promised in Joel, then speaking in tongues is supposed to help them build that confidence by reminding them of the promise. I think that's what I Corinthians 14:4 and Jude 20 are all about. And I no longer think that tongues are any more "supernatural" than circumcision was. Love, Steve

My "knowing" would have inflated me like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon if I thought I could cram the Creator of the heavens and the earth and all things that in them are, the Father of Jesus Christ, the Raiser from the dead, into a stuffy little box I had made. Love, Steve

If any man thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing as he needs to know it. If he loves God, then he is known by God. Love, Steve

I have come to think of myself as a free-range baptist. I believe in baptism. I don't believe in cages. If somebody says he knows what God can or cannot do, or what God will or will not do, or who is or who is not "going to Hell", then it tells me that person is in a cage. People unwittingly get into cages when they try to put God in a cage. It doesn't work that way. People who try to put God in a cage wind up putting themselves in cages, instead. Love, Steve

I don't have time for an indepth post right now, but sometimes this stuff is just TOO MUCH FUN! Yesterday, while my wife and I were waiting in a doctor's examination room (it was a real medical doctor!), I was explaining to her what the Stoics meant by the hegemonikon. This morning, we were eating breakfast at McDonalds, and I started explaining why my coffee would cool down quicker if I took the lid off. That led us back into cosmology again. She still couldn't understand why the Stoics didn't just consider hegemonikon another word for "god". So I explained it again, and she came up with a song to help her remember: There ain't no god like the hegemonikon! There ain't no God like the hegemonikon! There ain't no god like the hegemonikon, "Cuz the hegemonikon ain't a god! In I Corinthians 8:5, Paul wrote that there ARE many gods! What are we to make of this if all words have to be representational in order to be true, something Wierwille learned from the fundamentalist protestants? The Stoic hegemonikon was above every god. By his us of the prepositions "out of" and "into" in verse 6, Paul implies that the God of Israel's shemah is to the other gods of verse 5 as the Stoics hegemonikon was to the all the other gods. Now at this point, some of you are muttering, "Steve, much study has driven you mad!" But I assure you, if you plot the frequency of occurance of words in this post, you will get a 45 degree slope! I've got to go facilitate my NAMI support group! Have fun! More later... Love, Steve

I don't think your poll is meaningless, Raf! I'm sure if we plotted the frequency of word occurrences, we would get a 45 degree slope! Love, Steve

I hope I haven't given you the wrong impression, geisha. The Lord has confirmed for me through my Coptic brother and friend in Christ that He is perfectly capable of teaching each of His people exactly what that person needs to know in order to do the job He has for her or him, in terms that person will understand, whether that person has access to a Bible or not. NOBODY is required to know Greek, or have a particular version of the Bible, in order to faithfully serve the Lord, unless the particular job Jesus has for a person to do requires a knowledge of Greek or a particular understanding of the Bible. One time, when we were putting a class together, a Roman Catholic woman came to us and said that God had told her to take the foundational class. She did, and when the class was over, she told us that God told her not to get involved with the organization, He just wanted her to take the foundational class. Why? I have NO idea. But I believed then and I believe now that she was following what the Lord was telling her to do. I have no doubt in my mind, geisha, that you are exactly where God wants you to be, and you are doing the job He wants you to do, and you are receiving every bit as much direction from Him as anybody else ever has. I'm not studying Greek so that I can lord it over other people. Some of the young students at the seminary view their time here as something they don't necessarily want to do, but they put up with it till they can get on with their lives. I view it as a reward the Lord is giving me for having put up with so many things I didn't necessarily want to do through the biggest part of my adult life (including but not limited to my time involved with TWI). I think the Lord wants me to write an interpretation of Acts 2. I think He's been preparing me since before I was born. My Pop was a newspaper man, who taught me that writing is a practical, as well as a fine art. Pop taught me that he regarded the pursuit of truth as something worth putting his life on the line for. Pop taught me many objective things, including how to aim an artillery piece! Mama dropped out of school at the end of the eighth grade, but when she was in the hills of Kentucky, she studied poetry. Not the goofy stuff. Classic poems. She taught me as a child about Jesus. She didn't preach sermons, she lived them. Whenever anybody in the neighborhood was sick or in trouble, she served them. Mama taught me subjective things about poetic knowledge and compassion and service. When I was on the boat, going crazy, and I called on God in the name of Jesus Christ, He began teaching me how to change the things that were in my heart. He didn't teach me in theological terms; He taught me in terms of thermodynamics, hydraulics, pneumatics and the six-factor formula of reactor kinetics. All of these things have to do with flow in a closed system; the flow of energy in the form of heat, the flow of water and oil in the form of liquid in the steam cycle and lube systems, the flow of steam in the form of gas in the steam cycle, and the flow of neutrons through the reactor core. He taught me in terms of atoms changing into other nuclides, and how energy is released in the process. He taught me in terms of storing energy and releasing it through changes of state. He taught me in terms of converting thermal energy into rotational mechanical energy, and then converting that rotational energy into thrust. After I got involved with TWI the Lord taught me that I could trust the Bible, but then He taught me that I could not trust ANY other man's interpretation of it. Now the Lord is teaching me how to interpret parts of the Bible for myself. Not so I can lord it over other people. Not because every Christian has to learn to do that in order to serve the Lord faithfully... they don't... but because I need to know how to do it in order to do the job He has set before me. That job is to translate the things He taught me on the boat into theological terms that other people can understand. And in order to do that, the Lord has given me the responsibility of doing an interpretation of Acts chapter 2, not according to Wierwille, not according to the traditions of Pentecostalism and not according to the received tradition. Nobody else that I know of has been tasked with that job. But I'm discovering that each one of my professors, though tasked with different jobs, have different pieces of the puzzle that I couldn't do my job without. I'm not the Lone Ranger. And you, geisha, just by being yourself, and doing the things you believe the Lord has called you to do, and saying the things you believe the Lord has called you to say, are serving God faithfully and offering irreplacable support for my effort. I can love you because I know the Lord loves me, and He loves you, and He wants me to love you, too! Love, Steve

If we want to know what the original writers meant, we have to allow the theology to flow from the interpretation. If we interpret from our theology (which is impossible to avoid entirely), then we aren't discovering the writers original intentions, we are simply re-iterating what we already believe, and ascribing our own beliefs to the authors. The advanced Greek class is a seminar class, that is, each one of us prepares our own translations of a passage, then we present them and discuss why we decided to translate the passage the way we did. Each of us seems to see possibilities that the others didn't, and we learn from each other. It is the way committee interpretation works, just like the 95 scholars who worked on the ESV. Speaking of which, would 95 Catholic scholars have interpreted the Greek the same way 95 evangelicals did? Would 95 Orthodox scholars? Would 95 Coptic scholars. And there is a Coptic student at the school, though not in my Greek class. He's teaching us how to sing Christian hymns in Arabic, which is a lot of fun! He's studying Hebrew. The danger of committee translation is falling into group-think, as with any other type of team effort. We have freedom here to translate from the Greek without any dogmatic restraints. That freedom is not available to the students at Dallas Theological Seminary, and their translation suffers for it. Instead of taking an exam, each one of us in the class is required to pick a passage of scripture, interpret it, and spend three hours presenting and defending our translation. I chose I Corinthians 8:6. I present on November 14. I guarantee it's going to knock some socks off, and I'll give a play-by-play sometime thereafter. By the way, Paul DOES write about Holy Spirit in I Corinthians 8:6, and reveals some very interesting things about It (the word "spirit" is neuter in the Greek), even though the words pneuma hagion do not appear in the verse! Love, Steve

You've hit a nail on the head here, geisha... if we can't get a handle on intention... we can make that verse mean whatever we like. Unfortunately, that's the whole crux of translation. The only way to get a handle on intention is to examine the verse in microscopic detail, down to whether an accent mark is grave, circumflex or acute, and whether the breathing mark is rough or smooth. Then we build our understanding of the intention of the wider context by doing the same thing to EVERY verse. We have spent several weeks in advanced Greek translating Philippians 2:1-11. Verses 6-11 are a song, and yesterday, we read it out loud in Greek, over and over again, until we could recognize the beat. It became apparent that the phrase at the end of verse 8, "even the death of the cross" as KJV puts it, was not a part of the original song, and that Paul had inserted it. The prof spent a couple of hours pointing out to us what some people in the first century understood by various terms in the song, and how those terms fit together, and it came home to us what a SHOCKING thing Paul was saying about Jesus Christ when he inserted the phrase "even the death of the cross," at least in the eyes of some of the first century believers at Philippi. It became very easy for me to imagine a riot breaking out in the congregation when Paul's messenger sang that part of the letter for the first time to the church, just like the riot that broke out when Stravinsky first performed his Rite of Spring. The issue Paul raised with that insertion was at the heart of the councils of Nicea, Constantinople and Chalcedon, and those councils FAILED to resolve it. All because of the placement of accent marks in six verses. Wars have been fought, and Christians have murdered their brothers and sisters in Christ, because the placement of accents in those six verses has been misinterpreted. I think the prof started the semester with this project to impress upon us a sense of responsibility as we make our translations. It certainly was NOT like any training I received in TWI! Love, Steve

After just finishing watching the BBC series I, Claudius, and having a passing interest in history, I would guess that Rosie has not and will not choose a successor. If you pick a successor, you've signed your own death warrant. If you keep your possible successors uncertain, they are too busy killing each other to try to kill you... Rosie knows how she beat LCM, and I don't think she'd let anybody get in a position to do the same thing to her. Just sayin... Love, Steve

I think this page contains very good summaries of many participants' positions, and it's good to have this discussion without any rancor. Since engaging Raf's position, I've come to consider that genuine speaking by the Spirit of God is allowing the mouth to speak uncensored out of the abundance of God's love in our hearts. This definition does not put SIT in the place of priority, but rather prophesy, as per I Corinthians 14. I think I Corinthians 13:1 indicates that if our attitudes of heart do not allow the flow of the love of God, then all our speaking in tongues becomes exactly what Raf calls free vocalization, senseless noise. If there's ONE thing that TWI did NOT do, it was to train us how to build an attitude of heart that would allow the love of God to flow. The thinking of each and every one of you has influenced my thinking, by the mercy and the grace of God! Love, Steve

The source I am using is Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, (abridged, copy of the 1909 edition, first published at Oxford), Simon Wallenberg Press, 2007. It isn't limited to Biblical Greek, but includes the koine used in all kinds of Hellenistic documents! It has about a quarter-page on the word allos (p. 35), very much in the style of the Oxford English Dictionary. Part of the entry reads: "II. more rarely like alloios, of other sort, different" Under alloios we find: "of another sort or kind" Alla, the conjunction indicating strong contrast. is a form of allos. The words "alien", "alibi" and "alias" all come to us indirectly from allos. The entry for heteros is nearly as long (p. 277). One of the main meanings is "one of two" but the following are also included in the entry: "II. put loosely for allos" and: "of other kind, like alloios" Juedes is right. Wierwille WAS all over the place, because the Greeks themselves were all over the place. Wierwille was wrong in implying he was employing a degree of accuracy that is actually impossible. Love, Steve

I used to teach writing to middle and high schoolers. You are a good writer, Raf! This is a gem of the writer's art! Love, Steve

To the best of my current knowledge, I Corinthians 12:11 can be translated literally: and/but (weak conjunction) all these things (plural) energizes (singular) the one and the same spirit (neuter) dividing/distributing privately (attached to the previous verb) to each one (masculine) in the manner that he/she/it wills. "All these things" is the predicate of "energizes, and "the one and the same spirit" is the subject, the English sense would be "The one and the same Spirit energizes all these things." The phrase "dividing...wills" is a participle, a verb form used as an adjective, in this instance modifying the noun "spirit". If we place the phrase after "spirit" in the English sense, the sentence becomes; "The one and the same spirit, distributing privately to each one (or each man) as he/she/it wills, energizes all these things. If the word "wills" had gender in the Greek, it would settle the question decisively, since "spirit" is neuter and "each one" is masculine. Unfortunately, it's not as clear as all that, since the word "wills" doesn't carry any indication of gender. The phrase "in the manner that he/she/it wills" is adverbial, describing HOW the Spirit divides, so I would be inclined to translate the verse "And the one and the same Spirit, distributing privately to each one as the Spirit wills, energizes all these things." As far as allos and heteros go, heteros does carry a sense of "the other among two" and allos does carry a sense of "another of a different kind", but the Greeks never separated their meanings as radically as Wierwille did. Raf is right in pointing out that heteros was frequently used to mean "another among many", just as allos was frequently used without reference to "kind". Thank you all for your patience and your trust in me. I DO NOT WANT to bias my translations! None of us can avoid that perfectly, but I have certainly been put off of tendentious translation by Wierwille and company! Love, Steve

It would have been hard for TWI to ever "come clean" since Wierwille and his cronies were never "clean" to begin with. There were a lot of good-hearted people sucked into the organization over time, but I doubt that the top leadership was ever good-hearted. The top leaders were like vampires, battening on the good-will and credibility of the people they fooled. Love, Steve

I gotta backburner this... for maybe as much as a week... while I write a paper for one of my classes. Here are a few questions to think about and discuss: What does the Bible mean by a "sign"? How do signs function? What do the mark of Cain, circumcision and tongues (as per the Bible, not as per TWI) have in common? (and jokes are okay!) Love, Steve

My mom WAS born in 1919, thirty years before she bore me. She had curvature of the spine which developed about the time she was thirteen. She had to wear a body cast, and she couldn't make it up and down the stairs at her school at Louisville, so she dropped out at the end of the eighth grade. She attended a one-room schoolhouse in the hills, where they studied McGuffy's Reader. Her dad would visit her every weekend, and bring books from the Cabbage Patch Library. She read every book in that library with the exception of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She said she could never get into that. She memorized parts of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, all in the hills near E-Town. And she read her Bible. She kept learning all her life, because she never felt she had learned enough. In the fifties when I was a kid, Mama became friends with one of my sister's 2nd grade teachers. At that time, Indiana was saying every teacher had to get a masters degree to remain in her or his teaching job. My mother's friend was very busy, so she would bring books over and ask my mom to read them and write reports on them. My mom wrote a masters thesis, on an eighth grade education that began on the knee of Cornelius Harden Sharp, a retired tobacco farmer in the hills of Kentucky. So much for "the expertise of hill folk". LizzyBuzz and I went to see Lawless. It reminded me of so many stories my mom told about our own relatives in the hills! And, no, my experience was not that TWI appealed to hill folk so much as to young college students. :) Love, Steve

Hey, Raf! All you'd have to do to get a Masters of Skepticism certificate is go down and get Randi to sign one! That would be cool! I'd do it if I lived down there! Love, Steve

The fact that you are writing about things that are "personal and experienced" is not off topic, just as it's not off topic for Raf or geisha, or anyone else to write on this thread about what's personal and experienced to them. After all, Luke was writing about "personal and experienced" things that had happened in his and other peoples' lives. I WILL have to account for the personal and experienced things related in Acts. I have a model for how "speaking by the Spirit" works, that doesn't mainly rely on "supernatural" explanations. For want of any better way to refer to it, I call it my "Impression-Expression Flow Model. I'm going to have to include that in the thesis, but I'm debating with myself whether to do that as an appendix, or include it as a part of the text. If I'm not mistaken, Tom, the book you mentioned is Paul on Trial: The Book of Acts as a Defense of Christianity by John W. Mauck (2001). I am inclined to accept Mauck's conclusions. My copy is currently on loan to one of my professors. He has it on a special place on the bookself in his office, so I can retrieve it whenever I want to. (Loaning books to my professors is part of my strategy of preparing them for my thesis!) A doctor in the Computer Science department of the University owns and runs the Friendly Local Comic Book Shop. I actually spend a lot of time in the comic book shop talking with him about all kinds of things (comic books, the ins-and-outs of retailing, the ins-and-outs of teaching, our latest aches and pains, politics, etc.) and sometimes I pick his brain for strategic thinking in academia, even though he's not in the School of Theology! As Brenda Johnson would say, "Thank yew! Thank yew very much!" (sorry if that causes any Rivenbark flashbacks) Love, Steve

I think it's important to keep straight which of Tom's stories (and stories are GOOD things) we are referencing. He has the story about someone who heard tongues they identified as Aramaic, and he has the story about the beliefs of people in the hills. The story about tongues may very well be "real", that is, something that occurred in objective reality, but I will have to reference my sources in this thesis, so I'm pretty much restricted to sources the evaluation committee will find reasonable from a scholarly point of view. It isn't something EVERYBODY has to. It's something I have to do to be admitted to the club of "masters", meaning other teachers deem me capable of responsible teaching. If I have a masters degree, I will be acceptible as a teacher at accredited schools, and that was my original goal. To be able to get back into teaching seventh graders. RE: Tom's story about hill people - My mother was born in 1919 in Louisville, KY. During the depression, she was sent to live on a relative's tobacco farm in the hills near Elizabethtown. She spent her teen-age years as a hill person. Her dad was a-religious, but her mom was a Methodist. When I was a child, we attended a trinitarian Church of Christ, where we sang the doxology at the end of every service, "...praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen!" When I got involved with TWI in my early-thirties, and I told her the church she attended (the same one I attended as a child) taught that Jesus is God, she thought the idea was preposterous. I distinctly remember her saying "It says Son of God, not God the Son!" Those aren't apochryphal stories. It's part of hill culture! Love, Steve

Raf, my Pop was a newspaper man, and he had a motto hanging on the wall: "It's a newspaper's job to print the truth and raise hell!" I think he would be proud of the job you're doing! Love, Steve

The ideas we think about have histories of terms and ideas. In AD 380, the Emperor Theodosius was ignorant of the history of terms and ideas behind the conflicts that were going on in the Christianity of the time, so he was able to declare that anyone who disagreed with his interpretation of the Trinity was a "demented" and "insane" heretic. In AD 2012, John Lynn is ignorant of the history of terms and ideas behind the doctrine of the Trinity, so he is able to declare, Over in the "Isolation" thread in "About the Way", johniam was asked to elaborate on what he meant by a "TWI TRAINED believer" and he replied, Instead of deciding to remain ignorant, I went to work on a masters degree at a school that loosely adheres to the traditional idea of the Trinity, and I have learned some of the history of the terms and ideas behind the doctrine of the Trinity. To my delight, I found that the professors were NOT as doctrinaire as Wierwille would have had us believe (at least at THIS school). I learned that the full doctrine of the Trinity was not worked out until the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. It looked very much like Jesus Christ was going to be considered as a sock-puppet of God, until the Council surprisingly adopted the two-nature view of Jesus Christ. That's what "dyophysite" or "duophusite" means. If it weren't for the doctrine of the Trinity, we would never have been taught that Jesus was actually a human being, as well as the IMAGE of God. Since reflecting on it, I have realized my position is NOT that Jesus was dyophysite, but that the Holy Spirit is dyophysite. You know what I can do with this knowlege? I can talk to my profs without thinking they are insane, and without them thinking I'M insane. I can talk to them in ways John Lynn will never be able to, unless he repents and starts to learn some real truth! Enough for now... defining my thesis statement was more than enough work for one day! "Hell on Wheels" is about to come on! Love, Steve

I am convinced lot's of things people take for granted today would floor Paul! Don't be concerned that you can't see where I'm headed, Raf. Neither can I! That means we're probably going to get somewhere that neither one of us can presently imagine! You know, my dad was a newspaper man. Newspaper writing is a different thing from scholarly writing, so I'm really glad to have you reviewing my writing also! I'm gonna sign off for the day, and do some things I've got to get done before Hell on Wheels comes on! Thank you all! Love, Steve