Steve Lortz

"...if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought..." Gamaliel, Acts 5:38 Love, Steve

For a while after leaving even the splinters, my wife and I hung out with a couple who had done the same thing with the World Wide Church of God... Armstrong's movement that published "The Plain Truth" magazine. You are right, waysider... TWI was not special, and our involvement with it did not make us special. I have been open with my professors about my former involvement with TWI, and apart from a little curiosity, they don't seem to care. And that's fine by me! Love, Steve

I've been a fan of military history for just about all of my life, beginning with learning about Pop's experiences in WWII. I've read Keegan and Hanson. I bring this up because the real key to winning a battle is not killing all the individual enemy soldiers, as if you were playing a first person shooter video game. The key is to destroy the enemy's army as a WHOLE thing by breaking up its social cohesion. As long as an army's social cohesion is high, it will perform as a unit in ways that many of its individual members would not behave if left on their own. When an army's social cohesion dies, the army evaporates into the wind. The social cohesion of TWI was always very loose. It was based on the "leaves" on the tree being willing to put forth the extra effort to participate in twigs. Down at the twig level, the social cohesion was built on trust and the love of God. At the top, the cohesion was built on deception and manipulation. When Martindale tried to tighten up the social cohesion with oaths of personal loyalty, extending the deception and manipulation throughout the Way tree, that was too much for most of the people who were putting forth the effort. The bond of trust (misplaced as it was) that had kept the group together was gone, and the group dissolved, except for a very small group that was motivated by fear rather than trust. Love, Steve

If we examine the Greek for this verse more closely, Mark, and look at the context also, we find that the word oikonomia means "stewardship" or "management" here also, and not "a period of time." Verse 9 sets the context, God has made known to us the mystery of his will. Verse 10 tells us what that mystery was, that God would "head up" all things in Christ. "Gather together in one" is a very poor translation of the Greek anakephalaiosasthai. That word is a middle voice infinitive that can be translated literally as "to head up for himself." Our gathering together to be with the Lord is called episynagoge as per II Thessalonians 2:1. This is not the mystery that was first revealed to Paul. This mystery had to have been revealed to Peter before he could say on the day of Pentecost that God had made Jesus both Christ and Lord. The prepositional phrase "in the dispensation of the fulness of times" does not tell us WHEN God affected heading up all things in Christ for himself, but rather WHY. The preposition "in" of the King James version is translated from the Greek preposition eis. Now en is the Greek preposition for a static location. Eis is dynamic, and means "proceeding toward and all the way into." Eis could be thought of as "to hit the spot." The word translated times is kairos, which does not mean chronological time. Kairos means "the opportune moment", or "the decisive moment." Kairos is not a period of time, it is an instance. The fullness of a thing is that with which it is full. The fullness of a Hostess Twinkis is its cream filling. The fullness of opportune or decisive instances are opportune decisions. The passage could more accurately be translated "God made known to us the mystery of his will, proceeding for himself all the way into management of opportune decisions by heading up all things in Christ." Opportune decisions belong to God. By heading up all things in Christ, God gave Jesus the responsibility of managing God's property. As Lord, Jesus is God's steward of the cosmos. That's what the author of Ephesians is writing about in chapter one, not about any "period of time." Love, Steve

I like and come to Greasespot because it is a web of developmental relationships between people who shared some experiences that I do not share with most other people in my current life. Like Raf, I have been progressing beyond the place where my experience with TWI took me, and I like to discuss that with other people here. Though the new perspectives Raf and I have discovered are different in many regards, I still respect and value his intellectual integrity and the reflection he can give to the things I think. I have fun with ALL of you and regard you as friends, even if we disagree. Love, Steve

The Church is not some wholly new thing as Scofield claimed in his Reference Bible. When Paul wrote Romans 11, he was quite clear about that, "13Now I speak to you Gentiles. In view of the fact that I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I am glorifying my ministry 14if somehow I can provoke to jealousy those of my flesh and save some of them. 15For if their rejection results in the reconciling of the world, what will their acceptance result in but life out from among the dead? 16Now if the piece offered as firstfruits is holy, so is the whole lump of dough, and if the root is holy, so are the branches. 17But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive tree, were grafted in among them, and became a joint-partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree, 18do not boast against the branches. But if you are boasting, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you. 19You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in.” 20True. They were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by trust. Do not be arrogant but be in fear, 21for if God did not spare the natural branches, perhaps he will not spare you. 22Consider, therefore, the kindness and severity of God: severity toward those who fell, but God’s kindness toward you, if you continue in his kindness. Otherwise you also will be cut off. 23And they also, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. 24For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree?" (REV) Wierwille lied when he taught that this passage of scripture was addressed to "Gentiles" in general. If we read it carefully, we see that it is addressed to those believers in Rome who had come to Christ from Gentile backgrounds, as opposed to the Christians in Rome who came from Jewish backgrounds. The things Paul wrote in Romans 11 are addressed to you and me, if you were not a Jew before you became a Christian. As we see, according to the Bible, the Church is composed of believing gentiles grafted into the believing remnant of Israel. To state the case more completely, the Church consists of the believing remnant of Israel under the New Testament promised to Israel in Jeremiah 31:31-34, with believing gentiles grafted in on the same basis as believing Jews, by grace through faith in the resurrection and the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Dispensationalism obscures this truth, and screws up our understanding of EVERY PART of the New Testament. About 20 years ago I drafted a 32-page paper on this subject (with a 12-page annotated bibliography) titled Dispensing with Darby: For the Accuracy and Integrity of God's Word. I sent copies to Lynn, Schoenheit and Graeser. It wasn't something out of the blue. I had been working closely with them on the Dialogue newsletter and editing other written material for several years. Schoenheit's only response was a brief card, barely more than a sentence long, informing me that he was too busy to consider what I had written. Over the course of the next few months, in their monthly teaching tapes, they doubled-down on their dispensationalism. No longer feeling safe in using Wierwille's perverted explanation for the meaning of Romans 9-11, they proclaimed that Paul's thinking had been tainted while he was writing Romans because he had not yet been "broken of his Jewish mindset." That language was straight out of the Momentus training. In their scholarly humility (sarcasm!), John, John and Mark decided that they knew what Paul was writing better than Paul himself did when he was writing it! They narrowed the part of the Bible we can trust even farther by saying we couldn't count on the reliability of anything Paul wrote outside his prison epistles (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon), because it wasn't until Paul was taken prisoner in Jerusalem that he realized how screwed up Judaism and his self-identification as a Jew (Romans 11:1) had been. As far as I can see from reading the REV, Schoenheit has not revised ANY of his thinking. But he doesn't put his position out there in any obvious kind of way, either. The notes in his commentary seem like "oolies." In the Navy Nuclear Power Program, an oolie was a piece of factual information that didn't really matter, like "how many holes are there in the pressurizer blow-down head?" We would pose oolies and bet on who could and who couldn't answer them correctly, but the information made no difference whatsoever in how we operated the plant. Schoenheit's REV commentary contains many obscure and erudite facts, but he never uses his commentary to explain WHY he decided to interpret the scriptures the way he does. I have NO CONFIDENCE... zero, zilch, zip-point-squat... in Schoenheit's scholarship, because he refuses to submit it to any kind of peer review whatsoever. I have spent the last five years working on a master's degree in Theological Studies. I am not finished, by a long shot, but I've spent that time in daily, close association with people who are recognized professionals in the field. Two years ago, I switched out of the thesis writing track, because of my health concerns, but I am strongly considering going back on the track and writing a thesis if I can stay alive for a few more years. We write exegesis papers each semester in our classes. For an exegesis paper, we scout what reputable commentaries have to say about a particular passage of scripture, report briefly on what they say, then give our own interpretations. The process is very constrained. There is a formal way to present the material, and the paper can't be more than about a dozen pages long. We spend the whole semester working on the paper, making several drafts and critiquing each others drafts several times through the semester. At the end of the semester, we each have to give an oral presentation of our exegesis papers. This semester I am writing a paper on I Corinthians 2 for New Testament with a view to finding out what Paul means when he says we have the mind of Christ. For Old Testament I am writing a paper on Ecclesiastes 12, because I have reached the stage of life the Preacher was writing about/from. I am not writing these things to vaunt my own accomplishments. They are very, very minimal. Not even a blip on the radar screen so far. But I have developed a more than casual acquaintance with professional scholarship. If any of my instructors were asked to evaluate Schoenheit's work, I think they would rate him as an enthusiastic hobbyist who has developed some ability to look things up in reference works, but who has not built any skill at assessing or articulating arguments for or against his own positions. The REV is okay, but you'll learn more about dispensationalist interpretation from Scofield's reference Bible than you will from Schoenheit's work. By the way, I have watched Les Feldick's TV show, and I once spent a day at one of his live presentations. He is simply teaching from Scofield's notes. Love, Steve

The idea that an oikonomia can be considered a period of time goes clear back to the early Church fathers, even though the Bible NEVER uses oikonomia in that way. Oikonomia is used every time it occurs (7 times) to mean "stewardship-- an arrangement whereby one person manages another person's property." Earlier forms of dispensationalism were fairly innocuous, but the form Darby invented and Scofield popularized in his reference Bible is toxic, because it makes the cross of Christ of none effect to the Church. The thing that distinguishes Darby's dispensationalism is that it says the Church which came into being on the day of Pentecost recorded in Acts 2 is a wholly new thing, completely separate and discontinuous from Israel. "Rightly dividing the Word of truth" originally meant to discern the difference between promises that were supposedly made to Israel and promises presumed to have been made to the Church. Dispensationalists said that prophecies and promises made to Israel COULD NOT be applied to the Church. When the Romans put Jesus on the cross, they sneeringly put a sign up designating him as the king of Israel. What they failed to realize was that they were crucifying the actual king of Israel. If we read the accounts in Isaiah of the messiah as the suffering servant, we come to recognize that Jesus wasn't just being crucified as the king of Israel, he was being crucified AS ISRAEL HIMSELF. Let that sink in for a while before going on... If Jesus on the cross was standing in for the whole nation of Israel, and if none of the prophecies or promises regarding Israel can be applied to the Church, as the dispensationalists teach, then nothing that Jesus did on the cross can be applied to you and me in the Church today! All for now... more later... Love, Steve

I did indeed write, "There is a difference, TLC, between reasoning and rationalizing: reasoning -- the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way." And right there you stopped reading there to respond, "I don't see that anyone here has cornered the market on that yet." But you stopped too soon, TLC. My complete thought included a contrast to reasoning, "rationalize -- attempt to explain or justify (one's own or another's behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate. Rationalizing may be logical, but it fails to be reasonable because it is not sensible, that is, it's premises or conclusions do not accord with what is verifiable by the senses. The truth of a premise depends on how closely it accords with objective reality. The soundness of a logical argument doesn't just depend on whether or not it properly follows the rules of logic, it depends on the truth of the premises. A logical argument can be valid, but not sound if it depends on false premises. The argument that "the Bible contains no errors or contradictions because it is God-breathed" is not sound because, as is obvious to even the most casual of observers, the Bible DOES contain errors and contradictions. And many of the contradictions were purposefully intended by the writers and editors of the Bible. When Wierwille tried to "reconcile" the "apparent" contradictions, he often defeated the purposes of the original writers, and gummed-up our understanding of the scriptures even more than it had been gummed-up before we heard Wierwille's rationalizations. The author of 2 Timothy 3:16 said that all scripture (the Septuagint version of the Tanakh) is God-breathed. It would seem that the descriptor "God-breathed" meant something different to him when he wrote it than it does to fundamentalist/evangelicals (including the departed Wierwille) when they read it today. If you pay attention to what is being written here by Raf and others as well as by my self, TLC, without a knee-jerk defensive response, you will learn some things about how to think critically. Critical thinking was what the PFAL series, and especially the Corps training, was designed to eradicate. Love, Steve P.S. - Welcome, TLC, and good luck to you in our life-long task of separating truth from error!

There is a difference, TLC, between reasoning and rationalizing: reasoning -- the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way. rationalize -- attempt to explain or justify (one's own or another's behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate. The Bible says "all scripture is God-breathed." Fundamentalist/evangelicals in general, and Wierwille in particular, say this means that the Bible cannot be God-breathed if it contains any errors or contradictions. However, the Bible DOES contain errors and contradictions. Wierwille rationalized this by saying they are not real errors and contradictions, that they are only "apparent" until we figure out some way to make it seem as if they aren't real. But they ARE real... It seems to me, not based on reasoning from what the scriptures say, but from my own personal spiritual experience, that the Bible IS God-breathed. I cannot reconcile my actual experience of both the Spirit and the Bible with the fundamentalist/evangelical definition of what it means to be God-breathed. To say that the original autographs were perfect as originally given implies that they had a single meaning which is accessible to everybody. That defies the fundamental nature of language, that it operates by comparison in the form of simile and metaphor, and that the meaning a person draws from a particular statement will be colored by all of the person's previous experience. No verbal expression can be "perfect" in the sense implied by the fundamentalists. There are as many different meanings as there are recipients of the communication. Some of those meanings are bound to be erroneous. All of them, each and every one, will contradict another one to some degree. I am not trying on this thread to rationalize the fundamentalist/evangelical definition of what it means to be "God-breathed." I am trying to find a reasonable way to express what it means to be "God-breathed" that accords with my actual experiences of life (literally, how my cells work and have kept working even when they shouldn't have), of the Spirit and of the Bible. Raf doesn't agree with me, and I don't expect him to. His life experiences have been different from mine. I find his reasoning helpful because it gives me a counter-balance to keep me from going too far overboard, which I sometimes have a tendency to do. You are certainly welcome as much as any one else is, TLC, to participate in this thread. I find it an excellent exercise in learning to recognize and flush from my own thinking the rationalizations I learned from Wierwille. Love, Steve

double post... sorry

Scholars are pretty much agreed that Paul originally wrote Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Thessalonians, Philippians and Philemon... Ephesians, the Pastorals (1&2 Timothy, Titus) and Colossians are considered Deutero-Pauline, possibly written by members of Paul's school, but not by Paul himself. Hebrews and the "Acts of Paul and Thecla" have been attributed to Paul, but few take those attributions seriously today. There is growing interest in the idea that Hebrews was written by Prisca. Some people like to think that 1st Timothy was written by Paul, but 2nd Timothy definitely wasn't. All three of the Pastorals have always been treated as a unit, which presents a difficulty for those who think Paul actually wrote 1st Timothy. There are some who mark significant resemblances between the theology and vocabulary of 2nd Timothy with those of Ignatius. Ignatius is believed to have died sometime between 98 an 108 CE. He would probably be familiar with the gospel of John. But if he is the author if 2nd Timothy 3:16, then the "all scripture" he was referring to would have been the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, in the Greek Septuagint version (which was not a single volume). This is also what Paul referred to as the things that were written "aforetime" in Romans 15:4. The verse from Romans could just as accurately be translated " "And whatever was pre-written was written for us to learn from, that we through patience and comfort of that which was written might have hope." It is extremely doubtful that ANYBODY writing that early in the Church thought of their writings on a par with the Tanakh, including Paul himself. There are places where Paul says he is writing something the Lord wants him to write, but I can't think of any place off the top of my head where he says we should regard everything he writes as from God, just because he, Paul, is writing it. We make a very big mistake today when we think that the Bible is God's primary way of communicating with people. When we do that, we think God's primary way of communicating with us is through a medium that can readily be used by con men like Wierwille to take us captive and make merchandise of us. But during the time before the books of the New Testament were written, when the Church was growing and becoming established, THERE WAS NO WAY FOR GOD TO COMMUNICATE WITH THIS CHRISTIAN OR THAT CHRISTIAN THROUGH WRITTEN WORDS. God's primary way of communicating with people was through the Lord Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit! And that is STILL the primary way God does it. The Bible is a SECONDARY means of communication, and the intent of the New Testament is to put some controls on people who are not using Holy Spirit responsibly. Do I think the Bible is God-breathed? Yes I do, but not in the same sense as the fundamentalist/evangelicals. I think the "Scripture" is a set of writings peculiarly adapted for the Lord Jesus Christ to teach people by means of the Holy Spirit. That does not require plenary verbal inspiration, it does not require inerrancy. The Bible does not dissolve into a tissue of lies because of a single error or contradiction. Paul himself tells us to beware of people like Wierwille, and to avoid them by all means. Love, Steve

DWBH asked, "Why? What is your reasoning behind these writings? What is your objective in posting them here?" TLC responded, "Why purport that my reasons are any less honorable or noble than yours? Maybe you'd see they aren't if you'd ever ditch the already prejudiced attitude. But as I said once already, if everyone sees it as you do, I have no problem with bowing out." You deflected, TLC, but you didn't answer DWBH's question... What IS your objective in posting here? Love, Steve

If you want to learn the truth about such things, TLC, you can always google them. On the "God-breathed?" thread, when Raf pointed out your sloppy research, you responded, "Given the speed at which I searched, found, and scanned it, it wouldn't surprise me if it fell short on substance. Doesn't mean there isn't more (as in better) substance out there, I simply didn't spend much time looking for it. Allowing for such possibilities leaves the door open. Why do you ask questions about things when you don't want to spend the energy it takes to find the real answers for yourself? Love, Steve

The reason TWI originally flourished was because Wierwille was a narcissistic, sociopathic con man. Every other factor was incidental to that one. TWI fell apart soon after Wierwille died because he NEVER raised anybody up as an alternate leader, but surrounded himself with incompetent sycophants. The current leader of TWI came to that position because she also is a narcissistic, sociopathic con woman, but she doesn't have the same set of skills that Wierwille used to build the organization. Her skill set was in the sack instead of on the main stage at the Rock of Ages. ----- I Corinthians 2 has intrigued me for some time now. A few years ago I wrote a paper on 1 Corinthians 8:1-6 which deals with knowledge. A little over a year ago I wrote a 38 page paper on I Corinthians 12-14, and it strikes me that an understanding of 1 Corinthians 2 is foundational for both 1 Corinthians 8:1-6 AND 1 Corinthians 12-14. I intend to write my exegesis paper for BIST 6220 this semester on 1 Corinthians 2. There is one thing I can say for sure though, based on the research I did for 1 Corinthians 8:1-6, the cosmology the Corinthians held and understood was Stoic, not Platonic. When Wierwille taught that there are two realms, the spiritual realm and the senses realm, and that the laws of the spirit realm take precedence over the laws of the senses realm, he was blowing Platonic bovine fecal matter! The literal meaning of "spirit" is "air in motion." Things that have air moving in and out of them are alive. Things that no longer have air moving in and out of them are dead. So the word "spirit" took on the figurative meaning of "life-force", or "that which makes something otherwise dead alive." What 1 Corinthians 2 means needs to be re-thought. Love, Steve

Raf... you have a very good ability to boil things down to their basics, which is one of the reasons I have always valued your input, even if it doesn't necessarily agree with mine. It's a skill you've had to develop as a news writer, where your deadlines are daily (or minute-ly in this digital age!) instead of over extended periods as in academic writing. My position is A and C, I believe the "Bible" is God-breathed even though it contains "factual" errors and contradictions. I put the words "Bible" and "factual" in quotes because I think the actual definitions of those things are not as straight forward as we often take them to be. Position D, that the Bible does not contain factual errors or contradictions, is an error that fundamentalist/evangelical Protestantism (and the plagiarist, spiritual hitch-hiker Wierwille) fell into as a result of mistaking the Bible, rather than the Spirit, as God's primary means of communicating with people... and a God-awful error it is, too! In post #13 on this thread, Raf, you wrote "If you are going to tie your faith in the inspiration of the Bible to a belief that this book is an accurate telling of events that took place in history, without error or contradiction, then you are going to be walking on a very fragile faith." You are right! And that's why fundamentalist/evangelicals always seem so idiotically defensive. But my faith in the inspiration of the Bible doesn't rest on those things. During the holiday season of 1973 I was going to go crazy if I wasn't able to change something, but there was nothing I could change. I had already lost control of my breathing, beginning to hyperventilate. I wasn't particularly religious at the time but I called on God to help me... as a last resort... expecting nothing... as I did so I remembered that somewhere Jesus had said if we asked anything in his name he would do it... and I finished my request "in the name of Jesus Christ." Immediately, my breathing returned to normal, I began to calm down, and SOMEBODY not material began teaching me how to change the things that were in my heart. He taught me using the things around me, the things of the engine room of a nuclear-powered submarine, things involving the purposefully regulated flow of component elements to affect the transfer and transformation of energy. Poetic knowledge of poetic truth. It wasn't until six years later that the same Spirit led me to the Bible... not IN TWI... but THROUGH TWI. I didn't lose my faith in that Spirit when I took PFAL, though I have to admit I got distracted for a couple of decades... and I didn't lose my faith in that Spirit when I realized the errors of PFAL. They were Wierwille's errors, not the Spirit's. I learned how to translate the truths the Spirit had taught me from terms of the engine room to the terminology used in the Bible. Since then, I have also learned how to translate those truths into terms of the mental health professions. In order to reconcile proposition A, that the Bible is God-breathed, with proposition C, that the Bible contains factual errors and contradictions, I have to radically change the way I understand what it means for something...ANYTHING... to be "God-breathed." I'm working to get there, but I have not yet arrived. I think I have the concept, but I'm working on articulating the words. It's easy for me to see that the purposefully regulated flow of the component elements of each and every cell in my body can be regarded as God-breathed through the instructions encoded in the DNA. Yet God is capable of interrupting and redirecting those flows if He/She/It (the word "Spirit"is feminine in both Hebrew and Greek) wills. If that were not the case, I would have been dead three times over in the past nine years. The fact that I am alive can be regarded as being God-breathed. I am exploring the concept of regarding my stream of consciousness as purposefully regulated flows of component elements, the flows of thought in the form of words. Those flows are partially regulated by the information encoded in the DNA of our nervous systems, and partially by the language systems we learn as infants, but there is a degree of quantum indeterminacy, and the flows of thought are not DETERMINED by our DNA and our language. We have a high degree of freedom to think as we choose, to purposefully regulate the flows of our thoughts. That is what responsibility is, and I think that's what the Bible means by "the image of God." Failure on the part of a person to properly regulate the flows of her/his thoughts results in improperly regulated behavior, which the Bible calls sin, and which we are more apt to regard as mental illness. I think there is a degree to which God can "breath-into" the flows of our thoughts. I think that is what inspiration and revelation are... and I have received both... not like Wierwille taught in the advanced class... it was more like a heightened perception, like the Spirit pointing something out to me and saying "pay attention to this"... It was not what TWI taught,k but it was real. I can picture the Spirit breathing-into the flow of thought of a person writing, but that's a far, FAR different thing from the plenary verbal inspiration of fundamentalist/evangelicals. A big key lies in John 6:63 where Jesus said "The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life." The feature that spirit and life share is that they both consist of purposefully regulated flows of component elements. Receiving the poetic truth expressed in John 6:63 depends on recognizing the words Jesus had spoken as purposefully regulated flows of thought in the form of words. It does not depend on whether those words are factual (propositionally accurate) or, taken as a whole, internally consistent. ----- What else did I want to say? I guess I'll remember it later... Love, Steve

It's good to see some activity on this thread! From January 11th to the 15th I participated in an intensive doctorate level class on hermeneutics, or how we derive meaning from a text. I had to receive special permission, since I have not yet finished my master's degree. I was invited to attend by Dr. Lo$ano who taught the class, because of some discussions we had in the Hebrew class I had been taking from him. It was quite a time, but I didn't want to write anything about it till now, because I wanted some time to get over the rush and let things settle in. Perspective is everything. There were six of us students in the class: an older female African American who reminded me very much of my mother, three active pastors, one of a Friends congregation and two of Wesleyan congregations, another fellow of an age similar to my own, and myself. Dr. Lo$ano is a middle-aged professor who was born and raised in Columbia, and who is currently writing a commentary on second Isaiah. We didn't use any theology books in the class. (The way it worked, the participants read the books on the reading list before the class started, and were assigned to write brief reports on specific texts. During the in-residence week of the class, the students presented their reports and everyone discussed them. After the in-residence class, the students were to write their final papers for the class based on the week's worth of discussion.) The main text was "Is There a Text in This Class?" by Stanley Fish. Fish is known as a professor of law, who has also specialized in interpreting John Milton. I didn't have to do all the readings or present reports, since I was only auditing the class, but I got to participate fully in the discussions, and was able to bring some issues to the table from the years I spent teaching humane letters to seventh-graders. Dr. Lo$ano (he is a REAL doctor, you know!) kicked off the week by reading "Shakespeare in the Bush" by Laura Bohannon out loud, with his Columbian accent, and we got into lively discussion of Bohannon's experiences of trying to explain Hamlet to the Tiv. Google it... it's a good read! Some of the texts were counter arguments to Fish's ideas about readers' response. One was "Is There a Meaning in This Text" by Kevin Vanhoozer. Dr. Lo$ano told some funny stories about these authors meeting each other at various conferences, and the snarky remarks they would make to each other! There were three main issues explored during the course of the week; looking for meaning BEHIND the text (or authorial intent) by examining the historical and literary contexts of the writer, looking for meaning IN the text by examining the genre and the forms, and looking for meaning IN FRONT of the text by examining the historical and literary contexts of the audience (or the reader's response). At the very beginning of the class when we were introducing ourselves, I told them that my exposure to hermaneutics did not begin with the Bible but in the Navy Nuclear Power Program (see post #159 on this thread). At one point, one of the students was saying something about how difficult it is to come up with sufficiently precise definitions, and I stated something from my mechanical background that seemed perfectly obvious to me, but after the other students heard it, they sat there dumbfounded for a moment, and then started smacking their palms against their foreheads. If you have a bolt that has to go through a hole, and the size of both the bolt and the hole are identical, you cannot drive the bolt through the hole. You just can't do it. In order to put the bolt through the hole, the bolt has to be slightly smaller than the hole.The difference between the size of the bolt and the size of the hole is call the "tolerance." The tolerance can be measured with a feeler gauge. If a machine's parts are intended to move in relation to each other, that machine is said to be "articulated" (jointed). If the machine's parts are too close in dimension, if there is not enough tolerance, the parts will not move. SUFFICIENT TOLERANCE IS NECESSARY FOR ARTICULATION. If the definitions of our words are too tight, we can't use those words to articulate thought. Wierwille made his definitions too tight. My other great contribution to the class came as Dr. Lo$ano was leading a discussion of how we all have interpretive lenses that influence the meanings we read out from a text. He was having us do a thought experiment where we were all wearing red glasses. As an aside, I mentioned that in the original written version of "The Wizard of Oz" the Emerald City wasn't really green, but the Wizard made all the city's residents wear green colored glasses. That blew him away! It was all part of the Wizard's deception! The upshot of the class was that there is not one single meaning to the text of the Bible or to any part of it. The meaning that each person takes away from their experience of the Bible will be as uniquely individual as the individual herself is! In post #13 of this thread, Raf, you wrote "If you are going to tie your faith in the inspiration of the Bible to a belief that this book is an accurate telling of events that took place in history, without error or contradiction, then you are going to be walking on a very fragile faith." That is very, very true! Which brings me to another thing I've been thinking about an error made by Luther and propagated throughout Protestantism. "Sola scriptura (Latin ablative, "by Scripture alone") is the Christian [--Protestant -- Steve] doctrine that the Bible is the supreme authority in all matters of doctrine and practice." This doctrine has led to the erroneous belief that the Bible is God's PRIMARY means of communicating with people. But the truth is that God's primary means of communicating with people is THROUGH THE LORD JESUS CHRIST BY MEANS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. The Bible itself is only SECONDARY. I can see communication through Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit as being inerrant, but not the Bible by any means whatsoever! All for now... my hemoglobin numbers are too low, I am anemic, but the medics say I am describing myself as asymptomatic. That means I don't perceive myself as short of breath, light-headed or fatigued... they warn me that I may really be feeling those things, but I've done it for so long, that it feels normal to me now. Talk about how we interpret the meaning of our experience from the stories we tell ourselves! I'm thankful for my friends... and I count you all as my friends! Love, Steve

It's interesting to note that in the original Bible demons DO NOT POSSESS people... people POSSESS demons! A lot of misunderstanding comes from the way the King James translators interpreted some phrases from the Greek. There are places where the New Testament says a person was "demonized." That didn't mean the person was turned into a demon, it simply meant a person was being influenced by a demon. King James often translates it as a person "having" a demon, and that introduces the idea of "possession." Somehow or other, the idea got turned around to people being "pwned" by demons. I am certainly no expert, but I can't really see any way to distinguish what the Bible calls being demonized from schizophrenia... for whatever that thought is worth... Love, Steve

A point of curiosity, Raf... I cut my hermeneutical teeth, not on the Bible, but on the Reactor Plant Control Manual and the Engineering Department Operating Procedures. Both were volumes a couple of inches thick, and we were expected to operate the plant "in verbatim compliance with posted procedure". An "incident" was defined as any occurrence that involved a potential loss of plant control. Whenever there was an incident, there would be an incident review, in which a board of officers would interview every person involved in the incident, and examine their decisions and actions in light of the operating procedures. The cause of the incident would be discovered, and action would be taken to see that the incident would not be repeated. A report of the incident review would be forwarded to Naval Reactors. Every month, a series of formal procedural changes would be sent from Naval Reactors to each Engineering Department to update the procedures based on experience, and to keep the procedures uniform throughout the Navy's nuclear-powered fleet. The procedures constantly required interpretation, which meant discovering the concrete meaning of what had been written and applying that meaning in specific situations. And we had to be able to argue those interpretations with serious consequences at stake. There have been times in my life when I have earned my living by doing technical writing, that is, writing product descriptions, installation instructions and operating procedures. Customer safety and satisfaction depended on how well I wrote. I never made a living at it, but I have had several games published, and I've contributed to several others. The rules systems for games are simply procedures for having imaginary fun. But there are people we used to call "rules lawyers" who can spoil the fun by using the technicalities of the system to negate the spirit of the game (huh!?! games can have a "spirit"? and I don't mean TWI's "debbil spurts"). Have you every written procedures, Raf? Have you ever tried to devise a "fool-proof" procedure? If so, I'd like to know what philosophy you used when you were writing them. Thanks! Love, Steve

Thinking about John 6:63 where Jesus said, "The sayings I am speaking to you are spirit and are life." How can sayings be spirit and life? If we recognize the factor common to both spirit and life, that they each consist of purposefully regulated flows of constituent elements, then we need to examine "sayings" as purposely regulated flows of constituent elements. What are those elements? How do they flow? How is that flow regulated? To what purposes? It seems to me that "language" is the best word for an overall descriptor of what I'm thinking about. It seems that language is not a simple, but rather a complex set of flows occurring simultaneously on multiple levels. At the most basic level (above the individual cell) we have the flow of electrical charges along neuron pathways. At the highest level we have the flow of "meanings" or "understandings". Language is primarily a social phenomenon, that is, for full communication to take place, there needs to be a loop between a sender and a receiver that allows for feedback. Among the things a brain needs to be able to do in order for language to exist are: 1. To register sensations 2. To remember sensations 3. To imagine, that is, to be able to hold the image of a thing not present 4. To associate, that is, to form and remember links such that one image evokes another image. Learning a language is a social thing that a child does from an early age by observing and imitating the people around it. The child learns to associate abstract sounds with the images of particular items, then learns to generalize the sound to other, similar items. The child learns to form the sounds herself, and looks to feedback from her examples to improve, and come up to the standard. All for now... Love, Steve

I am reminded of the "hold harmless" agreements we were pressured into signing once the Momentus "training" was underway. They were attempts to keep people who were harmed by Momentus from suing. I don't think they were legally binding because no one was informed about the true nature of the "training" before the signing. Victor Barnard was one of the star pupils of the Momentus weekend I underwent, and we see how much good it did him! About a year and four months or so after I took Momentus, I realized I was under the curse of Jeremiah 17:5 because I had sworn to observe the Momentus hold harmless agreement. I got up in front of a congregational meeting of about 60 people (including John Lynn) and publicly repented of my foolish (Galatians 3:1) sin against the Lord. It seems that every cult leader manipulates her or his followers into making thoughtless promises, and then PREACHES how we DARE NOT go back on a promise we've made to God. Baloney... all we ever have to do when we've made a mistake (committed ourselves to the wrong thing) is to change back to being committed to the right thing! That's what repentance is! Love, Steve

Dr. Hawkins gave me permission to attend the class. I've started reading de Saussure's course. What I've learned so far is that de Saussure views language as a social construct that engages both the associative and the imaginative faculties in the minds of those who participate. The questions that exercise me are "what is it that flows?" and "how is that flow purposefully regulated?" Love, Steve

One of the problems of fundamentalist/evangelical protestant thinking in general, and of TWI specifically, is narrowing down the meanings of terms to the point where they can't really be used in free-flowing conversation. It's hard for me to see that narrowing the term "cult" is particularly useful. There are "cults" that are harmless, like the followings of sports figures or rock stars, and at the other extreme there are cults that are much more cold-blooded and vicious than TWI was, such as Scientology or Momentus. There are even spoof cults like The Church of the SubGenius! The feature that distinguishes a harmless cult from a harmful one is whether or not the leaders are honest with the followers about what they are in for. The leaders of harmful cults make their followers deployable to a hidden agenda. The overt agenda of TWI was to take the Word Over the World. The hidden agenda was to provide money, power, adulation and sexual prey for Wierwille and the Trustees. Love, Steve

Things are moving slowly, what with my anemia and the end of the semester. Our semester final in Hebrew is Monday morning. But they are moving. Here is the text of a letter I just sent a short time ago. All for now... Love, Steve

I think calling it "American Christianity" is painting with an over-broad brush. "Fundamentalist/Evangelical Protestantism in America"? That would be closer to the truth. There are plenty of good Christians in every denomination in America, even some good fundamentalist/evangelical protestants, but the groups who joined in the fundamentalist movement of the early 1900s seem particularly prone to certain cognitive distortions. I find myself being drawn to identify more with folks who came out of the Wesleyan Holiness Movement of the late 1800s, particularly those who recognize the workings of the Holy Spirit. Love, Steve