Steve Lortz

The short answer is that Wierwille lied about SIT, interpretation and prophecy, and we believed him. I don't think Mark, Luke or Paul lied about tongues, interpretation and prophecy, but I have to admit that I don't currently understand exactly what they were saying about it. That's why I've been studying it for the past 18 years or so, and that's why I am submitting myself and my findings to the rigor of writing a bona fide masters thesis on the topic. Love, Steve

You make a wonderful presentation of the reasons why I think my project is going to take about two years to complete. I will be expected to examine ALL the sides, and present my reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with each of them! Love, Steve

That's called presenting your thesis statement, then, presenting the argument for your thesis statement. That's the way genuine doctors do it! Love, Steve

The article you references has only two citations, Vincent Bridges: "Paganism in Provence," Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition (2004). and Mortimer J. Adler, Great Books of the Western World Volume 3 (Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. 1952). I haven't had a chance yet to look them up in the library's databases, but I may well do that this evening. Love, Steve

That's okay, chockful! It wasn't after work, it was between classes! And I didn't even include Belle, our geriatric golden retriever, who sometimes plays the same game. Neither one of us can pick more than one foot up off the ground at once (synchronicly rather than diachronicly) which makes for some interesting low-speed chases that make me wonder about the elasticity of the space/time continuum :blink: Belle growls and barks at everybody she knows, wagging her tail joyously, because she wants everybody to know that her great-great grandaddy was the Big Bad Woof, and she can knock down any number of pigs' houses with her breath... Oh... to keep this on topic, my brother and I used to be able to talk to each other in Beagle before he died! Love, Steve

Thanks, waysider! I will check those out! Love, Steve

THOSE are the citations I wanted. What evidence do we have actually from antiquity that glossalalia (literally, tongue-talking) occurred before Pentecost? Remember the Bible itself never associated the phrase "ecstatic utterance" with tongue-talking. Bacchants' speech was not comprehensible because the purpose of Bacchanalia was to get drunk. Peter expressly says that those tongue-talking on the day of Pentecost were not drunk. I spent six years in the Navy. I have spoken incomprehensibly as a result of alcoholic consumption (most often, beer, but ocassionally vodka and hard cider, and some vile fluids we concocted from Kool-Ade and yeast). I speak in tongues. I know the difference. Do we have ANY descriptions dating from antiquity of ANY of the mystery cults that contain descriptions of tongue-talking? If so, I NEED 'em! Love, Steve

See my latest post on my thread in Doctrinal! Love, Steve

Sometimes I feel like kicking myself in the head until I'm senseless... When I came home from Acts class today, my wife and I went through a little routine we do. When I come in the front door I can walk straight across the parlor and go into the bedroom. In the bedroom, I can turn right and go into the kitchen. In the kitchen, I can turn right and walk into my "scriptorium" (home office). In the scriproium, I can turn right and walk back into the parlor. This is an old house, and the corner where the four rooms meet is where the fireplace and chimney were located before they put central heating in. So my wife is usually in the bedroom when I come in and I say, "I'm home!" She starts going through the kitchen and scriptorium to meet me while I go through the bedroom and the kitchen. We go around for a few times, calling out to each other, "Hey, where are you? I can hear you, but I can't see you!" Then one of us decides to quit playing and stops. As we were doing that this noon, It struck me that I could use trigonometric functions to diagram our game as a circle on polar coordinate graph paper. We weouldn't be able to see each other because our positions (points of view) on the circle were out of phase and both were dynamic and in parallel. When one of us stopped, that point of view became static, and the one with the point of view that was still dynamic would meet the other because the phase was no longer parallel. (That was all stuff I had to learn in order to keep from destroying the Pogy by paralleling two electrical turbo-generators out of phase.) While I was walking back up on campus for my afternoon Greek class, I was thinking that linear perspective, which was one of the keys to naturalistic representation in the Renaissance, has conditioned me to view things by default from a static point of view. (I learned that as an art major, in a galaxy far, far away, a long time ago.) When I got to class, and we started reviewing the advanced definitions of Greek tenses, it ALL fell into place... In English, we think of the passage of time from a static point of view... the Greeks thought of the passage of time from a dynamic point of view! This has no direct bearing on the immediate matter of this thread, but I know it's going to come into play somewhere before this thesis is finished. I want to kick myself in the head because now, I know, that I'm going to have to learn how to explain it! Thanks for your patience, ALL you fans! Love, Steve CORRECTION: Our points of view on the circle were IN phase until one of us stopped. That's when they went out of phase, and we could meet!

A lot has been made of linguistic experts' inablity to discern patterns in the bulk of recorded speaking in tongues. Does this disprove that tongues IS a language? I think not... The genome project has mapped the DNA coding that regulates our lives. Yet at least 70% of the genome consists of gibberish called "junk DNA". At least 70% of the information that defines who we are and what we do appears to the expert scientists as gibberish... If that which is perfect has not yet come, when the Bible assures me that tonguers will cease, then how can we define what perfect prayer should look like, linguistically? Some people trust what the Bible (NOT Wierwille!) says about tongues. To other people, tongues seems like drunken behavior or delusion. It can't be "proved," one way or the other. Raf, you are willing to swear that you were faking it, and I accept that. I am also willing to swear that I am not faking it, and that I am not deluded, either accoring to the terms of the Diagnostic Standards Manual or the terms of Jeremiah 17:5-9. It makes me wonder why you are so intent on proving me wrong? Love, Steve

So, expert linguists have examined samples of SIT and determined that it has some language-like qualities, but most of it is just gibberish... Do we see anything else in creation that shares those properties? http://www.psrast.org/junkdna.htm

Did I every say considering your proposition is caving into satanic temptation? I think Wierwille's advocacy of closed mindedness was anti-biblical. Proverbs 18:13 says it's foolish and shameful to answer a matter [dabar - word AND deed] before you've examined it. Proverbs 15:28 says that the heart of the righteous studies to answer, but the mouth of the wicked pours out evil things. We're spozed to think about what we're saying, and in order to do that well, we have to deeply consider what our correspondents are saying. If we just give the Pavlovian responses Wierwille trained us to give, then our mouths are pouring out evil things. Please don't conflate the things I advocate with things that other people post on this thread! Love, Steve

I don't think your position has been effectively shut down, except perhaps by some people who don't want to seriously consider what you have to say. You have been honest about something we were trained to NOT be honest about, and even though I don't believe that my experience has been the same as yours, I can't deny that YOU are the expert on YOUR experience. Personally, I actually agree with chockful and excathedra, but I would be foolish not to consider the things that you and geisha have to say, and I would be unloving to treat either of you with any less respect than I would desire to receive from you. I had a blood pressure spike late in July. My doc doubled my dose of generic Paxil and added generic Zoloft to my regimen. I spent the month of August with the primary mission of sleeping whenever I needed to, and it took the whole month to get used to the adjustment. Maybe my mellowness is just the meds talking. I'm not glued to this the way I used to be back in the good old days of Actual Errors. It might be helpful if we address specific responses to specific people so we don't get inadvertantly perturbed. I don't think exaggeration or snarkiness are useful when peoples' feelings are running so hign. Probative questions are more useful than argumentative ones. We just need to respect each others' points of view, and not regard an expression of difference as a personal attack... ALL the way around. I am thankful for each and every one of you, and your willingness to engage in genuine dialogue! Love, Steve

I still think (remember) in KJV. If I'm not just reading for fun with the archaic English, but doing research, like we used to do with Young's and Bullinger's, I use Blue Letter Bible and KJV keywords, because that's what I remember. I like reading the NIV for devotional type stuff, to flush my thinking of some of the old TWI associations. We use NRSV at the seminary. It's gender-neutral language trips me up sometimes. During the past year, we were studying basic Greek, which is like reading the "See Dick and Jane run." books, if you're old enough to remember those. This fall, we began advanced Greek where we can use any references we want to use, and do our own translation of passages from the New Testament. We are currently working on Philippians 2:1-11. Where KJV has "If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies, fulfil ye my joy,", I translated it "If therefore what calling in Christ, if what consolation of love, if what fellowship of spirit, if what guts and compassions, top-off my joy," Where KJV has "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God," I translated it, "who in form of God beginning did not lead plunder the being equal to God." So I call my translation "the G&PV", or "the Guts and Plunder Version" Love, Steve

My Theology and Culture professor is named Robertson, and he will be my thesis mentor (a job I used to do for seniors at the high school where my "day job" was teaching 7th graders how to write persuasive essays), but he ain't THAT Robertson! Due to an unusual conjunction of circumstances, I can be as free as the breeze, and I know my profs will evaluate me on how well I do my research (REAL research, not TWI crap), and how I do the presentation, not on whether my conclusions agree with pre-conceived dogma. I can say that because I have written some pretty controversial class papers already, and I spend a lot of time hanging out with the profs during their office hours. I originally came to school as an undergraduate here in the fall of 1967. I have learned that several of my profs graduated in the spring of 1967, and we were like ships that passed in the night. We can talk about buildings and events and people who were significant on campus 45 years ago, like when the SDS people came over from the local state university to try to organize a leftist political peace movement, but were frustrated because there was already a well-organized religious peace movement on campus. Well, when these profs left in the spring of '67, they made a plan to come back and take over the seminary. They don't think they've succeeded, because they've pretty much been here on a day-by-day basis, but I haven't! I've been adventuring around for the last 45 years (only 7 in TWI, only about 9 with CES), and I see some BIG CHANGES that have happened here. Some of the younger profs are more radical (in a theological, not a political sense)than us old geezers, but we think that is a good thing, more open to changes we had to take risks to pioneer. Right now, right here, I think there is more openness to honest, thoughful re-examination than any other place I know of. I broke myself of spouting TWI jargon after I left CES. Sometimes that's what pains me so much when I read the latest thing John Lynn has put out. I am learning how to state the things I believe in the recognizable language of genuine scholarship, and I believe I will be successful, and will be allowed to be successful! Love, Steve

My profs don't fit into any of those categories, nor are they evangelical protestants, nor fundamentalists. The group came out of the Holiness Movement of the 1880s, so it has some parallels with the Wesleyans, however, this particular group rejected all creeds as man-made and divisive. There are all kinds of Christians in our classes, including a Quaker "pastor" and a Coptic Egyptian. It's more fun than a barrel of monkeys! but it does have its own form of rigor. Today's Theology and Culture presentation/seminar was on post-modern deconstruction (in favor of, cuz that particular prof is younger than I am). Love, Steve

Nah... don't let it go... back burner it... You know those "stretchers" you can use in your shoes to make 'em fit better? I've had my language and my mind stretched so many times in so many ways (of which my experience with TWI was only a minor part) that I sometimes astonish myself. Now, if I had written that sentence in the Anglo-Saxon alliterative style (think Beowulf), I REALLY wouldn't have expected you to understand it Love, Steve

Working on my paper, I came across this, from James D.G. Dunn's The Acts of the Apostles (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press, 1996, p 26) regarding the people who, in Acts 2:13, thought the apostles were full of new wine: "...the manifestations of the Spirit are not self-evident in themselves, but ambiguous and capable of different interpretations. Eph. 5.18 [And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit;] plays on just the same ambiguity." Apparently in antiquity, the explanation for tongues was not "self-delusion", as some might argue here, but "drunkeness". The point is, the Bible itself nowhere claims that tongues are an "irrefutable proof". Some people accepted tongues as a "sign", but that will take a whole other post to get into. Love, Steve

"...in most cases, a genuine example of speaking in tongues should be more likely to produce an earthly language than a heavenly..." I have a hard time understanding questions that mix probability with a statement of absolute position. The idea of probability, by itself negates absolute deterministic statements... or so it seems most probable to me... Love, Steve

SIT? YOU be the judge!?! Love, Steve

I Corinthians 8:6 doesn't contain the word "spirit", but the use of the prepositions "out from" (ek) and "into" (eis) imply a concept the Stoics called "tonic motion", and attributed to the spirit which informs all of the cosmos, and transmits the logos (the will of the hegemonikon) from the hegemonikon (the mind of the cosmos) throughout the cosmos. I am what we are learning in Theology and Culture to call a "social outlier"! That's part of the reason I think it's gonna take me a couple o' years to write this puppy! Love, Steve

...not much time right now, more details as time permits... Love, Steve

I know that if I DON'T question everything, the committee that evaluates my thesis WILL :o Love, Steve

Back in 1994, beset by the bewildering buffet of strange doctrines being offered by CES, I started writing "A Partial Inventory of Things I Believe as of MM/DD/YYYY". I stated as clearly as I could, in my own words, the things I believed, and the reasons why I believed those things. I left off writing that partial inventory when the rate of change in the things I believe exceeded the rate of my writing. At the time, I re-examined what I thought about tongues in light of scripture. I came to the conclusion that tongues is always prayer and praise to God, and it IS NOT PROFITABLE for ANY OTHER purpose. All the reasons Wierwille gave for speaking in tongues, except for "it gives thanks well", were bogus. I think you are right, waysider, when you write, "Speaking in tongues is seen by some as being a claim ticket to the package. At least, that's what VPW led us to believe." Wierwille did, and he was wrong... Love, Steve

Wierwille taught SIT is irrefutable proof. He was wrong. The Bible does NOT teach that SIT is irrefutable proof. Certain biblical characters accepted SIT as a "sign", but that doesn't mean SIT is a supernatural "proof", anymore than circumcision is a supernatural "proof". And, Raf... I hope nobody thinks I'm attacking YOU! This is a discussion that has, in my opinion, been long overdue! And I give you credit for having the chutzpah to start it, and the tenacity of purpose to continue ramrod-ing it! Love, Steve