Steve Lortz

I had to answer that question for myself back when I walked away from TWI. I decided that, for myself, I needed to witness AGAINST The Way International, with just as much vigor and integrity as I had previously witnessed FOR the organization. To "witness" means simply to speak the things that we have seen and heard. Why does that matter to me? My Pop was a newspaperman. He had a plaque on the wall of his office that read "It's a newspaper's job to print the truth and raise hell!" There was a time when I was a kid, sitting in that office, when I heard people come in and threaten to fire bomb our house if Pop printed a story they didn't like. Pop stood up and said "You go ahead and do that! Every person in this room heard what you just said. When my house burns down, YOU'RE gonna be the FIRST people the cops come after!" And he printed the story. I thought, "Wow, Pop must think the truth is a valuable thing!" Speaking the truth matters, whether or not anybody ever believes it. Love, Steve

Hi! I really am Steve Lortz! I post under my real name! The things I have posted here are true to the best of my knowledge. Martindale propositioned a woman I personally knew. I heard it from her own lips. That's what turned me away from TWI in 1987. I knew then that Martindale was a lying predator. As time went on, I realized Martindale had been trained to become a lying predator by a lying predator, V.P. Wierwille. As I did actual RESEARCH into the things I had been taught in PFAL, I came to realize that the material in that class was a plagiarized pastiche of the odd "private" interpretations of Wierwille. There were a few truths that slipped through Wierwille's sieve and made it into the class, but it wasn't because Wierwille knew how to separate truth from error. It was because Wierwille himself was NOT able to separate truth from error. The Way International DOES NOT HAVE the greatest package of truth about the Word of God since the first century. The Corps training DOES NOT TEACH an in-depth spiritual perception and awareness. It deadens a person's ability to hear the Spirit of God by forcing her or him to listen to the creepy voice of a fleshly organization. There are numberless Christians walking by the Spirit in EVERY denomination that acknowledges that Jesus is Lord and that God raised Him from the dead. The Way International is no longer holding forth the Word of Life, rather it is hoarding the believers' ABS so the elite can live high on the interest it draws. When you leave The Way International, you do not become a greasespot by midnight, but you can discover that God and Jesus have loved you all along, and have provided for you beforehand, even for your act of leaving! Love, Steve

Yes, it sounds like The Way. It sounds like fallen human nature. This is not to excuse The Way or this other organization. We aren't called to walk by fallen human nature. Institutionalization screws up walking by the spirit. Love, Steve

I didn't mean to derail this thread. It seemed to me that death is one of the things "the idiom of permission" is used to excuse God of responisbility for. I also have a couple of other ideas, that can relate to the idiom of permission, but I'll start new threads for them, too. Thanks! Love, Steve

Really effective scatological humor requires a degree of sensitive circumlocution. Love, Steve

Sometimes a person can have an idea that turns everything he understands completely inside out. I think I experienced one of those ideas during the time I had decided it was time to throw out the TWI baby WITH the bath water, because the baby was in actuality a mis-begotten child of hell. Wierwille said that SOMETHING had to die in the day Adam and Eve sinned, or the Word of God would fall apart like a hand in a glove, or something like that. (As an aside, something DID die in the day Adam and Eve sinned... the animal(s) that died to provide God's covering for their sin, a fore-shadowing of Christ's death.) Adam and Eve didn't die in the day they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because of God's mercy and grace. The only reason ANYBODY has been alive for any amount of time since that day has been a gift from God. When God put the angel to guard the tree of life so that nobody could eat of it, it was because there is SOMETHING WORSE THAN DEATH... unregenerate immortality. I am more inclined now than I have ever been before to believe that Jesus' death on the cross was to accomplish the resurrection of ALL mankind, every single one of the people who have died. I am not a universalist yet, because I'm still inclined to think individual people can decide that they don't want to participate in the kingdom of God, but I think EVERYONE who has ever lived is going to get to make that decision for their selves. I no longer view death as being the worst thing that can happen to a person, the way I used to. Love, Steve

And then there was one night... I had stayed late after twig to talk with the coordinator and his wife. Everybody else was already gone. I was walking to my car parked in a dark lot across the street, when a guy came up to me waving a knife. I knew I was too far away from the car to make a run for it, especially since I had locked the doors (that was in the days before unlocking things with electronic remotes). So the guy came up to me brandishing his knife in my face, and he said "I've got power in this knife!" I thought, "Holy smoke! I can say ANYTHING I WANT TO SAY to this guy! He wants to kill me. I CAN'T offend him any more than he's already offended." So I said "I've got a spirit in me, and it's got more power than your knife has." That set him back, and he asked what I meant. I started some spiel about God and holy spirit. He said, "That suff don't work with me. I'm a child of the devil." I asked, "Did you go to Sunday school when you were a kid?" He said, "Yes." "Did you ever confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus?" "Yes." "Did you ever believe with your heart that God raised him from the dead?" "Yes." "Well then, you CAN'T be a child of the devil because you were already a child of God. The devil's just pulling you leg." We had a good talk, and I invited him to come to twig. He never came, but at least he didn't knife me! Love, Steve

When I was a WOW in Tucson, our family used to go out to a popular local park on Sunday afternoons to invite people to come to our Sunday evening twig meeting. One Sunday, we were getting ready to go, and I thought "I think I'll take my stationery kit with me." Then I thought, "No, I don't want to do that. I'm going out to talk with people, not to write letters." THEN I thought, "Wait a minute... maybe that was God telling me to take my stationery kit." So I took it. I was wandering around the park, and all of a sudden, I had to use the bathroom REAL bad. I made a bee-line to the closest restroom, and barely managed to plop my butt down on the seat before my bowels cut loose with one of the biggest, most explosive movements I've ever experienced. So there I sat, congratulating myself that I had made it in time, until I realized that there WASN'T ANY TOILET PAPER in the stall! What could I do???? Then I noticed... there was my stationery kit in my hand... I wondered, "Will that work?" And by golly, it did!!!!!!!!! Sometimes I have related this as an incidence of God's loving providence. Love, Steve

I don't know if the incident was one of Wierwille's delusions (deceptions), but I do remember him mentioning Karl Barth in the context. Karl Barth would NOT have failed to recognize Wierwille's gussied up dispensationalism for what it was, and would not have been taken in by it. Barth specifically rejected the idea of biblical inerrancy, believing it elevated the Bible above Jesus Christ Himself. I doubt the veracity of the whole incident. Wierwille may have found Barth's name appealing to drop because Barth was a noted rebel against German protestant liberalism, though that did not mean what Wierwille apparently thought it did. Love, Steve

Well put, WordWolf, very well put! Love, Steve

I looked through all the pictures. Everything looks just the way it did, except for the numbers. I remember going over the grounds picking up cigarette butts and other litter so that "devil spirits" wouldn't have any place to hide. Little did we know the demonic infestation in the leaders' lives! It doesn't have to look devilish, red horns and tails or heavy metal rock band, to be devilish! Love, Steve

When I was in the Navy forty years ago, we had to learn operating and casualty procedures. Our examinations were oral, and we would be presented with fictional, hypothetical situations. We would be graded on the responses we gave. When I was studying business management thirty years ago, the profs would give us fictional, hypothetical case studies to analyse and comment on. The advantage of fictional, hypothetical case studies is that they allow people to consider a highly complex situation with all the extraneous material stripped away. They allow the student to focus on the essentials of the case, without being distracted by the accidentals. Fictional, hypothetical case studies are most useful when considering problems that don't have any easy, yes-or-no answers. I am persuaded that the book of Job is a fictional, hypothetical case study examining the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?" I would give Wierwille an F for his "Victim to Victor" analysis, wherever he cribbed it from. What evidence do we have that Job is fiction? One thing to consider is its literary form. The main arguments are presented in the form of didactic poetry, with brief prose brackets at the beginning and the end. Chapters one and two are prose prologue. The book is poetic from the beginning of chapter three to verse 42:6. Verses 42:7 through the end constitute a prose epilogue. The Old Testament doesn't ordinarily use poetic form to present straight history or biography. The book makes extensive use of irony, which is even more apparent in the Hebrew than in the English, or so I've been told, not reading Hebrew myself. One definition of irony is using words in such a way that they imply a meaning in opposition to their literal meaning. As you can imagine, the use of irony in the Bible raises problems for fundamentalist literalism. Despite all the comforters' religious blather, their use of which God does not agree with, Job receives no definitive answer to the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" In my opinion, the whole point of Job comes down to verse 13:15a, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him..." I think this verse was one of the things Jesus was considering in the garden of Gethsemene. It's interesting to note that the account of creation given in Job contains elements that do not appear in the Genesis account. I don't think God allowed a real Job (or his kids and servants) to suffer on a bet made with the adversary. The book has to present Job as suffering, but it doesn't want to give away the punch line, that we cannot yet understand why bad things happen to good people. So the bet with the adversary is presented as a literary device in the prose prologue. Job also receives his reward, not in the poetic, teaching section of the book, but in the prose epilogue. CES was so intent on the idea that God is not responsible for evil that they ended up with a God who is totally irresponsible. I think that was a logical extension of Wierwille's (or was it Bullinger's?) idiom of permission, and I don't think it's accurate. Love, Steve

I have a copy of Stiles' The Gift of the Holy Spirit. I think, over the summer when I'm not taking any classes, I'll take advantage of the resources at The School of Theology where I'm studying to see if I can trace any lines from the Azuza Street Revival to Stiles. Love, Steve

I'm taking a course called The Christian and Old Testament Theology by Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., and learning all sorts of interesting things I never noticed or considered before. In one lecture, he passingly mentioned Jeremiah 23:30. Here it is in several translations: Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, saith the LORD, that steal my words every one from his neighbor. (KJV) See, therefore, I am against the prophets, says the LORD, who steal my words from one another. (NRSV) "Therefore," declares the LORD, "I am against the prophets who steal from one another words supposedly from me..." (NIV) Interesting, no? Love, Steve

Nah... it's just that GreaseSpot doesn't require us to attend every meeting Love, Steve

I didn't mean to imply that there was NO distinction between Paul and James, but the differences between their views on "Law and Grace" or "Works and Faith" were not so divergent as they have been made to seem by Luther, and especially exaggerated by dispensationalists. The early Church saw no reason to exclude either the book of James OR the book of Romans. According to James Dunn's Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, there was a spectrum of positions in the first century Church, and Paul and James were at the acceptable extremes of that spectrum. The spectrum was based on how people interpreted the confession "Jesus is Lord." At Paul's end, people stressed the lordship of Jesus more than his humanity, and at James' end people stressed the humanity of Jesus more than his Lordship. Beyond Paul, the Gnostics held the unacceptable view that Jesus had not really been human. Beyond James, the Ebionites held the unacceptable view that Jesus was nothing more than another prophet. Dunn posits that Peter was the person the Lord had at the center, who kept the Church from flying apart into two separate Christianities, one Jewish and one Gentile. If that had happened, things would be very different indeed! Paul was acknowledged as apostle to the Gentiles. James was acknowledged as leader of the Jewish part of the Church. Peter's ameliorating actions may have been viewed very differently by others (possibly including the Lord) from the way Paul portrays them in Galatians. It's interesting to note that the problem Paul seems to be addressing in the book of Romans is conflict at that city between Christians from Gentile and from Jewish backgrounds. While Paul argues forcibly in his writing that ALL have been concluded under sin, and ALL have been saved by grace through faith, it was probably Peter's practical ministry in Rome, while Paul was under house arrest, that kept the Christian community there from disintegrating into a failed movement. Sometimes, Peter kept aspects of the law to please James' faction, and that didn't sit well with Paul, but Paul HIMSELF kept aspects of the law to please James when he made his trip to Jerusalem. Salvation was never earned by works in the Old Testament, despite the fact that some factions of second temple Judaism misinterpreted it that way. Jesus didn't come to do away with the law, but to fulfill it. The Church is not some wholely new thing, but the believing remnant of Israel under the new (renewed) covenant of Jeremiah 31:31ff, with believing Gentiles grafted in on the same basis as believing Jews, by grace through faith. People are saved by faith and not by works. They always have been, even in the Old Testament! But if people are not willing to do the good works they've been saved to do, it raises some serious questions, and SHOULD. As always, I have tremendous respect for your thinking, Jerry, and the thought provoking questions you ask me! Love, Steve

I agree with geisha. And the same thing goes for David in the OT. We don't have such an unflattering portrait of any other ancient ruler! Love, Steve

One of the problems with building a theological distinction between Paul and James is that the whole of the early Church, from Gentile backgrounds as well as Jewish, didn't see such a distinction. Paul and James were regarded as equally valid for reading in the churches. The great antagonism between proponents of grace and proponents of works didn't come into being until Luther published his ideas about Romans, and even then, the issue wasn't about salvation itself, but rather about how much time Christians would have to spend in purgatory before progressing on to heaven. It seems to me that the real fallings away from the apostles' original teachings involve things that we don't even think of as controversial today, like, when and why did people no longer expect new converts to speak in tongues when they came up out of the baptismal water? Love, Steve

OMG!?! :blink: What'll we do if the Word, as written in the first century, doesn't line up with the Word, as it hasn't been known since the first century? :unsure: Love, Steve

That's a very good exposition of inerrancy, geisha! Unfortunately too many fundamentalists tend to view it much more narrowly. I took a basic Old Testament course last year, and some of the younger students from more conservative backgrounds had trouble reconciling the truth that the book of Job is fiction. The hypothetical nature of the poetic section of Job allows the author (God) to state the essentials of the situation without being distracted by the accidentals. I have gained a much deeper appreciation for the Old Testament than I had while in TWI, and I find "The Doomed History of the Deuteronomist" to be as epic and moving as any of the great themes of Mediterranean or Northern literature. Love, Steve

Besides that, the name of the type of artillery piece called a "mortar" doesn't come from the same Latin word we get "mortal" from. It comes from the Latin "mortarium" which was a vessel used, along with a pestle, to grind material. The cannon was called a "mortar" because its barrel was very short and very wide, causing it to resemble a mortarium. TWI = Teaching While Ignorant Love, Steve

Sooo... what's wrong then with Trimm doing it? Love, Steve

What makes you so certain that the gospel of Matthew wasn't written to the Church, John? Because the Doctor (he wasn't really a doctor, you know) said so? Who says that "I never knew you!" was part of the law of Moses rather than part of Jesus Christ's fulfillment of that law? Matthew was written well after the day of Pentecost BY a Christian TO a group of Christians, probably from a strongly Jewish background, but accepted as authoritative by the whole early Church. The pericope in question was probably included because there were already leaders in the first century Church who had fooled THEMSELVES into believing they were serving the Lord when they were actually serving their own bellies, as Wierwille and many of his followers did. The book of Romans ALSO includes this passage, "Be not highminded, but fear: For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee." (Romans 11:20b-21) My GOODNESS! How Wierwille perverted the Scriptures to make it sound as if that verse were not addressed to Christians! But if you read the section carefully, you can see it was addressed to Christians from Gentile backgrounds. Romans 8 says nothing outside of ourselves can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord, but it doesn't say we can't willingly turn our hearts away from the Lord. And our hearts are just deceitful enough to convince us we are still serving the Lord, even when we've turned our hearts far from Him. The "moral superiority" you write of is the "highmindedness" Romans warns us against. It is the highmindedness that Wierwille lusted after, and that we learned as arrogance from him. It's not enough for a person to think he's corrected the damage Wierwille did to him just because he doesn't drug and rape young women himself. To find a twig that's just like it was in the good old days is not enough for him to say he's left the bad things behind. Wierwille made fools of us! We have to go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that foolishness has been well washed away! Love, Steve

Their research is fake, and their character is polluted. Love, Steve

In my explorations beyond the confines of The Way International's theology, I came across the writings of James D.G. Dunn, whom I've come to regard as one of the best New Testament scholars of the late-20th, early-21st century. Dunn occassionally mentions "the lust for certainty", by which he means jumping to conclusions because we want to know MORE than we possibly CAN know. Wierwille certainly fed our lust for certainty. According to Wierwille, you had "to know that you know that you know that you know". We didn't really know more... we just thought we did. We learned intellectual arrogance from Wierwille. If it weren't so pathetic,it would be hilarious, the way the serial cult-leader wannabes of Christian Educational Services/Spirit & Truth Fellowship International/The Living Truth Fellowship try to make their thinking sound scholarly when its all built on Wierwille sand. It's ALL as phoney as Lynn's smile, and they try to continue trading on our lust for certainty. What's really sad is, they don't realize how wrong they are, and they refuse to acknowledge the damage they do, because their intentions ARE "good". You're doing well, OldSkool. We've been following your progress as you post here at GreaseSpot, and you're going through natural readjustments of thinking. Some of us here have come to believe that the world is a much safer place when we actually trust God's care for us instead of our own ability to believe. Scarey things can happen in the real world, but not with as much certainty as they do in Wierwille's lala land. Love, Steve