Steve Lortz

I took BIB2010 History and Literature of the Old Testament last semester. It's the current equivalent of a class I took at the same school 42 years ago. Most of the students were freshmen or sophomores, straight out of Sunday school. Most of them were shocked and amazed when I told them that I don't believe in Jesus because of what I read in the Bible, but I trust the Bible because the Lord who rescued me from going crazy led me to the Bible. That being said, I don't believe Paul was a con man. I also introduced the class (and the prof) to the communication theory we learned in Organizational Communications. There are five elements of complete communication: a sender, a message, a channel, a receiver and feedback. The sender has to properly encode the message in a form that will travel through the channel. When the receiver has received the message, he has to properly decode it. There are three possible sources for error: the sender may introduce errors while encoding, the channel may introduce errors in the form of noise during transmission, and the receiver may introduce errors while decoding. Even if the sender (God) encoded the original autographs of the Bible perfectly, we know that there have been a multitude of errors introduced during transmission of the manuscripts. And we all make decoding errors almost all the time. None of our interpretations would approach perfect understanding, even if we did have perfect manuscripts. The problem with inerrancy, especially the way Wierwille taught it, was to say that either ALL of it is true, or NONE of it is true. That is a false dichotomy. Love, Steve

The fact that the sound of spirit egeneto... ek tou ouranou, came out of heaven, indicated to anyone who considered, that the events of Pentecost were spiritual in nature, and of divine origin. Love, Steve

You nailed it, Rejoice, in modern terminology! Romans 11:20b says, "Be not highminded, but fear:" Being highminded is the same thing as arrogance, or EGO. The fear of the Lord is humility. It is recognizing that "You are God, and I am not." A person who doesn't properly fear the Lord thinks that he's as smart as, if not smarter than, God. Wierwille didn't fear the Lord, and he taught us that WE shouldn't fear the Lord. A person who doesn't properly fear the Lord thinks that God doesn't have anything to teach him. That's why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and the beginning of wisdom. That's why "ego negates spiritual discernment"! Love, Steve

You're right, Ham! Defining terms is always the first step in critical thinking. Most words start out with a literal meaning that takes on figurative significance. One of the first things to recognize about the "heaven" is that the ancients did not conceive if them as being invisible or immaterial. If you look up on a clear day, you see the heavens and their prinicple resident, the sun. If you look up on a clear night, you see the moon and the stars. Some of the stars seem to travel on the same path, night after night. Some of the stars seem to wander around. What are those things up there? What are they made of? Why do they move? Do they move of their own volition? Why do some of them move around with an order and predictability not matched by anything below the moon? Why do others seem to wander? There seems to be a perfect order, grace and harmony to the movement of the stars, the kind of order, grace and harmony we would expect of superior beings, such as gods. It's obvious that they are made of fire because they shine, but it isn't the ordinary kind of fire we experience here on the surface of the earth, because they don't go out. And the heavens are a place of perfect safety, because they are too high for the calamities of the earth and men to reach. That's one of the points of the story of the tower of Babel. Human beings can't reach the heavens on their own, to wreak havoc there as they do here. The literal meaning of "the heavens" is what you see when you look up at the sky, apart from the temporary manifestations of weather. The figurative meaning of "heaven" the dwelling place of diety, safe from the depredations so rife on the earth. The heavens were not generally associated with an afterlife. Immortal, immaterial "souls" were deemed, outside the cultures the Bible came from, to go underground to Hades, or the grave, upon death. The good guys went to a section of Hades called the Elysian Fields, a very pleasant place. Others went to less pleasant parts. Bad deities went to the worst section, called Tartarus. The souls hung out in Hades until they were ready to reincarnate. Before they went back into a body, they drank from the river Lethe, which wiped out all ther memories. For a soul to be chained to a body, inherently evil because of its materiality, was worse in the ancient Greco-Roman culture, than being in Hell. The ideas were gummed up by the generations of Christians that followed the first, but it was the writings of Augustine that set them in stone. Love, Steve

Here is what one of my profs calls "the hermaneutic circle": WHAT does it say (what is actually written)? > What DID that mean (to the people who originally wrote/read it)? > What DOES that mean (how would we put it in modern idiom)? > What does that mean TO ME (how should I apply what I've learned)? > How does this effect my understanding of other passages? That's not how Wierwille taught... According to Ricker-Berry, the passage in question (Acts 2:2a) reads "and suddenly came out of heaven [ouranou - heaven] a sound as of a rushing violent breath [pnoes - wind, spirit, breath]..." Wierwille wanted to remove as many supernatural elements from the Pentecost event as possible so that people would not expect them during session 12 of PFAL. He taught that the sound was simply the apostles inhaling, and since their mouths were above the ground, the sound seemed to come from heaven. Wierwille may have been right in downplaying spectacular expectations during PFAL, but he did so at the cost of twisting the words of the word, and muddying our understanding of what actually happened on Pentecost. In the first place, the poetic element... "as of a rushing violent breath"... refers to what the sound seemed like, not where it came from. The verse is pretty explicit... the sound came from heaven. It DOESN'T say the sound came from the apostles' mouths. There were as many cosmologies in antiquity as there were different philosophers, but that doesn't mean we are at a loss to know what was generally believed, and by whom. If a person believes, as I do, that Luke/Acts was written as a legal brief for Paul's trial before a magistrate appointed by Nero, then it appears to me that Luke was writing with a view to a well educated Roman official, and he would shape his language in terms such a person might understand. Yes, there were Platonists around at the time Luke wrote, but their concept of an immaterial cosmos inaccessible to the senses was not yet associated in the general imagination with "heaven." That didn't come until later with the neo-Platonists and Augustine. And well educated Romans of the period were instructed in the Stoic cosmology. "Heaven" meant the realm of fire, the orbit of the moon and above, which was the place where the gods dwell, since they are fire elementals. To say that the sound came from heaven would signify to Luke's reader that the events occurring on that day of Pentecost were of divine origin. Love, Steve

No questions... just one more actual error in PFAL. Love, Steve

According to ancient cosmology, there are four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Most of the earth is gathered in a sphere at the center of the cosmos because it is the heaviest element. A sphere of water called Oceanus covers the earth. Dry land is earth that sticks up through Oceanus. Next comes the sphere of air. It extends from the surface of Oceanus/earth to the orbit of the moon. We can tell that the air doesn't extend beyond the moon because we always see clouds pass in front of the moon. We NEVER see the moon pass in front of clouds. Beyond the air are eight great nested, crystalline spheres made of ether, or celestial fire, which rotate within each other. The first carries the moon, the second Mercury, the third Venus, the fourth carries the Sun, the fifth Mars, the sixth Jupiter, the seventh Saturn and the eigth carries the fixed stars. These etheric spheres are the eight heavens. In PFAL, Wierwille taught that the sound of a rushing mighty wind that came on the day of Pentecost was the sound of the twelve apostles inhaling (?), and it seemed to come from heaven because the apostles' mouths were above the ground. That just can't be. The heavens didn't begin at the surface of the earth. They began at the orbit of the moon. Love, Steve

Double post... sorry... Love, Steve

The fundamental thing that Wierwille taught was that the church is a new thing, completely seperate and discontinuous from Israel, whose very existence was kept secret until it was revealed to the apostle Paul. The truth is that the church is the believing remnant of Israel, under the New Testament promised to that remnant in Jeremiah 31, with believing gentiles grafted in on the same basis as believing Israel, by grace through faith. Wierwille's doctrine was NOT some truth that had been lost since the first century, it was a perversion invented by John Darby in the 19th century, and popularized by the Scofield reference Bible in the early 20th. There's a folksy TV teacher named Les Feldick who teaches almost exactly the same thing about "administrations" that Wierwille did. Feldick claims he has never received any formal training, that he got everything he's teaching just from reading the Bible. Well... he must be reading a Scofield reference Bible. I feel sorry for John Lynn, John Schoenheit and Mark Graeser. Every bit of the misery they've suffered, they've brought on their own heads, in spite of numerous and frequent cautions. They know too much in their own eyes to be admonished, even by the Bible itself. They know more about the Bible than God does! Love, Steve

groupthink

Thank you so much, Pawtucket! Some of the arguments I've been in here at Greasespot have changed the direction of my life and understanding of God as much as my initial involvement with TWI did, for the better. Thank you, again! Love, Steve

The "dancers" bobbing their heads in unison, with their pasted on smiles, is such an apt metaphor for TWI! Love, Steve

I kicked myself out of the in-residence corp (16th) shortly after the reading of The Passing of A Patriarch. I thought it through, first, and had the reasoning and jargon down so pat that when I explained to the Corp Coordinater why I was leaving, he could only say, "That's certainly honest of you." And I hitch-hiked back home from Gunnison (at least I had learned how to hitch-hike). Love, Steve

One of the interesting features of the English Civil War period was that everybody was claiming to rule by one form or other of devine right. The U.S. constitutional ban of a state established religion was a response to the evils generated by a state religion in the ECW period. Love, Steve

If a person wants to understand how the ideas of individual freedom of speech, individual freedom of conscience and individual freedom of religion came about in the English speaking world, one would do well to study English culture during the 1600s, especially contrasting the reigns of Charles the first, Oliver Cromwell and Charles the second. All of them invoked God as justifying their right to rule, in radically different but uniformly detestable ways. Love, Steve

Thanks for sharing that, Tom! Love, Steve

When we use the word "body" today, we use it in the same sense as we use the word "corpse", because the pioneers of modern medicine learned about "the body" by dissecting corpses. When they wrote about "the body," they were writing about things they had observed in corpses. Medical literature and popular culture became suffused with the notion that a body is a corpse. I don't know exactly how Paul understood the word "body" (soma in the Greek), but I know how a majority of his readers understood the word, and it didn't have to do with corpses, except in an indirect tangential way. In the popular gentile culture of the first century, "body" was that property which enabled one thing to move another. For one thing to move another, the thing that was doing the pushing had to have "body," and the thing that was being pushed also had to have "body." And the things didn't have to be material. Since emotions are things that move us (e-motions) each of the emotions in a person was conceived of as having its own, separate body. If an ancient were asked to use a modern word to explain what he meant by "body," he would be more likely to pick the word "interface" rather than the word "corpse." This becomes interesting when we think about the Church being the body of Christ. Not that the Church is the corpse of Christ, but that the Church is the interface through which Christ moves the world! Love, Steve

I was watching a Mythbusters episode last night, where they were testing the myth that people only use 10% of their brains. They found out that people only use part of their brains at a time, but the particular part changes with the task being performed. So people use all of their brains, but never all at the same time. Most tasks take a little more than 10%, so that myth was busted, but the task that lit up more of the brain than any other, about 30-some-odd %, was STORYTELLING!!!!!! Storytelling fires up MORE of the brain than science does! I don't think we appreciate the value God puts on storytelling over science as a means for communicating truth! Love, Steve

"What is God's job, exactly?" I agree with the previous posters who have attempted to answer this question. I don't have any cut and dried answers, but I've seen something in the Word that has disturbed my complacaisance and roiled up my thinking. Ephesians 1:9&10 say, "9 Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself: "10 That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and on earth; even in him;" First, "the mystery of his will" does NOT mean a secret "Age of Grace." God kept a secret until after Jesus Christ was crucified. That secret was that He was going to promote Jesus to the position of "Lord" as indicated in Philippians 2:11. That secret was revealed on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:36). The phrase "gather together in one" is translated from a single word in the Greek, anakephalaioomai, which literally means "to head up for one's self." The preposition "in" in the phrase "in the dispensation of the fulness of times" Doesn't mean "inside of" It's the preposition eis which means "toward." The word "dispensation" in the Greek means "management." The phrase starts out, "toward management..." Management of what? The word "fulness" means "that with which a thing is full." The fulness of a Twinkie is its creamy filling. The word translated "times" is kairos, which Bullinger partially defines as "the opportune point of time." In military writings, the kairos was the point in a fight when the general made a decision that turned the outcome of the battle. "Times" could be viewed as "decisive moments." So, these verses from Ephesians show us that God kept it secret that He was going to head-up all things in Christ, toward management of that which fills the decisive moments, until after Jesus had been crucified. This is part of God's job that He delegated to Jesus Christ. What is "that which fills the desicive moments?" I can't say that I know. Ecclesiastes 9:11 assures us, despite Einstein's famous dictum, that God does indeed play dice with the universe. Objective reality is probabilistic rather than deterministic. This probabilistic nature is what allows for human beings to have free will, and for God to intervene in history. But how? Could it be through synchronicity?.. seemingly meaningful coincidences?.. the apparently significant connection between things that have no cause-and-effect relationship? "What is God's job, exactly?" I have more questions now than I ever had before. Love, Steve

Wierwille taught that Adam and Eve were three part beings: body, soul and spirit, and that their spirit must have died on the day they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, since their bodies and souls didn't die on that very day. I submit that "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" is NOT a literal statement about the timing of their deaths, but an intensifier of the truth that from the day of their disobedience, they could be certain that they would die. Man is a soul animated by breath (or spirit). If Adam's "spirit" had died on the day of disobedience, if he had stopped breathing, then the soul that Adam was would have died within three minutes or so. I currently think that the image of God is the responsibility and the concomitant freedom to make moral decisions. I no longer believe that there is a "senses realm" and a "spiritual realm." I think that spiritual activities are all part of a unitary cosmos. I do not think the Bible ever uses the word "spirit" to indicate the substance of a parallel, immaterial cosmos inaccessible to the senses. Some people think the truth that Eve was deceived and Adam wasn't makes Eve culpable. I don't think so. The other day, I heard a fellow considering that Adam might have been right there beside Eve while the serpent tempted her, not saying a word. If that had been the case, then Adam was using Eve as a guinea pig. He didn't know if he would die right away from eating the fruit, so he let Eve do it first. If Eve would have died, Adam would have said to God, "That durned woman you gave me went and ate the apple. Now she's dead. Make me another one!" As it was, when Adam saw that Eve didn't die right away, he ate also. Love, Steve

I no longer believe that man was originally a three part being, consequently, I no longer believe in Wierwille's definition of salvation. Genesis 2:7 "7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul [nephesh chai]." Notice that the verse DOESN'T say God formed man's BODY from the dust of the ground. It says God formed MAN of the dust of the ground. Then air began to move in and out of Adam, and he BECAME a living soul. A person who is drawing breath is a living soul. What happens when a person stops drawing breath? Leviticus 21:11 "11 Neither shall he [the high priest] go in to any dead body [nephesh muth = “dead soul”]…" Numbers 6:6 "6 All the days that he [a person who vowed the vow of a Nazarite] separateth himself unto the Lord he shall come at no dead body [nephesh muth = “dead soul”]." Numbers 19:13 "13 Whosoever toucheth the dead body [nephesh muth = “dead soul”] of any man that is dead [muth = “dead”], and purifieth not himself, defileth the tabernacle of the Lord; and that soul [nephesh = “soul”] shall be cut off from Israel…" The Greeks and other gentiles in the ancient world believed that man was a two part being, a material, mortal body animated by an immaterial, immortal soul. That wasn't the worldview of the authors of the Old Testament. To them, when the air stopped moving in and out of a soul, that soul died. In Numbers 19:13, we see a living soul get into trouble for touching a dead soul, and not washing up afterward. The literal meaning of spirit (ruach in the Hebrew, pneuma in the Greek) is "air in motion". All breath is spirit, air in motion, but not all spirit is breath, air moving in and out of a soul. Breath is so closely associated with being alive that "spirit" took on the figurative meaning of "life", especially as evidenced by the power to move. Genesis 3:19b "19b ...for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." The Bible always associates identity with a soul's dust component. There's a heck of a lot more, but that's enough for now. Love, Steve

CES/STFI doesn't remind me so much of the Titanic as it does of Gilligan's Island. Only they aren't on a real island. It's an island in their own minds only, but they still can't escape from it. Love, Steve

Who are these "they" who give people ocean liners? Love, Steve

There's a difference between preaching and teaching. Preaching is calling attention to the subject, teaching is getting into the nuts and bolts of how to understand the subject. In terms of fly fishing, preaching is the lure, teaching is the hook. Wierwille preached a lot of things that were true about Jesus Christ and God, but what he practised and taught were far different and just self-serving. There were a lot of people at the twig level who were honestly doing their best to love God and help his people. God was able to work with and through those people. But as people advanced through the "Way tree of learning," we were manipulated into turning our hearts to serving the MOG and away from serving the Lord. The truths that Wierwille preached as a lure were Noble. His practices and teachings were as Base as they could be. Love, Steve

I, also, caribousam, would like to know what specific good STFI is doing. Is Schoenheit still, in Momentus language, "killing the victim before the victim kills him"? Love, Steve