Steve Lortz

You are a very remarkable person, Gen-2! You seem to be living a life that nobody would believe if they read it in a work of fiction! I'm glad that we have met, if only virtually. Did I understand you properly that you didn't speak until you were seven? About a year ago, my wife was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, and we started seeing it all around us. (Nobody would believe my wife's life in a work of fiction either!) Is there a possibility that you may be manifesting some of the indications of Asperger's? I hope this exchange isn't too personal for a doctrinal thread, and I apologize in advance if it is Love, Steve

Thank you for moving the conversation along, geisha! I respectfully disagree about "to whom" the book of Hebrews was addressed. That is what dispensationalism teaches, but I no longer hold with that interpretation. I think the book of Hebrews was addressed to a group of Christians who had come to Christ from a Jewish background, and who were tempted to abandon Christianity because Jesus was not from the tribe of Levi. The "milk" the writer of Hebrews was teaching was that the Torah said Melchisidec was a priest, even though he was not a descendant of Levi. The "meat" the writer went on to teach was how Jesus is High Priest under the New Testament prophesied in Jeremiah 31:31-34. The main exhortation the writer makes is "Please don't stop believing!" I no longer believe the Church is a "wholly new thing" completely separate and discontinuous from Israel. I believe the Church is the believing remnant of Israel (Romans 11:5) under the New Testament promised to them in Jeremiah 31 (II Corinthians 3:6, Hebrews 8:8-12), with believing Gentiles grafted in (Romans 11:17-18) on the same basis as believing Israel, not by ethnicity, but by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8). All for now... You notice I use phrases like "I think..." and "I believe." That's because I know enough to know that I don't know it all. And yes, I agree, it IS all about the person of Jesus Christ! Love, Steve

Just out of curiosity, Gen-2, may I ask what was your own involvement with TWI? My wife and I started dating after she had gotten out. That was about the same time my step-daughter was going off to bootcamp at age 18. My step-daughter had been involved with TWI from the time she was six until she was sixteen. She has turned off to Christianity, and is exploring Buddhism. I can understand that, seeing as how her early views of Christianity were formed by TWI. I struggle to picture how things were different for her than they were for me, who came to TWI with a firm confidence in Christ already in place. If your experience is none of my business, I can appreciate that, and I'm thankful for the contributions you make here. The system of classes and nametags developed by TWI were indeed a flashy, fleshy counterfeit of genuine maturity. True maturity doesn't come from mindlessly sitting while somebody else drones on and on. It comes from exercising the mind and senses to discern both good and evil, that is to say, it comes from comparing and contrasting things, and coming to some sort of conclusion about a standard for judging right and wrong. I think the living Word of God provides that standard. I think the Spirit of God, at the present time, is the life of God as evidenced by the power to move, impressed with the human personality of Jesus Christ. The reason I believe this is because of the geometric meanings of the prepositions in I Corinthians 8:6. When I say the Spirit of God works in a person, I believe it IS the Lord Jesus Christ working. I think the working of the Spirit of God in a person is that person's primary witness, and it is subjective. I believe the written Word is a secondary objective witness a person can use to establish whether something he thinks is the Spirit of God working in him really is or not. I believe the written Word has integrity. The sense of II Timothy 3:16 is, among other things: All scripture is profitable for doctrine. All scripture is profitable for reproof. All scripture is profitable for correction. All scripture is profitable for instruction in righteousness. Maturity is a matter of learning common sense. The things I wrote in the previous two paragraphs require mental gymnastics to understand only if a person's mind was conditioned, as mine was, to automatically perform the fruitless mental gymnastics of TWI. Love, Steve

John 14:13&14 "And whatsoever ye shall ask in my [Jesus Christ's] name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it." Jesus Christ helped people. Wierwille just stole the credit. Love, Steve

From these verses, it would seem that learning to understand the scriptures is a gradual process which involves the development of habits of mind through practice. In the case of "exegesis vs. eisegesis" I think exercising our "senses" to discern both good and evil means to look at the actual words printed on the page and ask ourselves: "What does that say?" "What do I think it means?" and "How would that meaning line up with other things I think the Word says?" In a very real sense, it's impossible for a beginner to avoid reading "into" what is written, because understanding what someone has written requires a leap of imagination on the part of the receiver, and the reciever's possible responses are limited by his experience. For instance, when I was a kid, I thought the gift of holy spirit was Jesus' ghost, because I heard the preacher read "Holy Ghost" from the King James' Version, and I read into that phrase all the things I had learned about ghosts from Casper the Friendly Ghost comic books. Making the transition beteen "reading into" and "reading out from" is not a once-for-all, all-or-nothing proposition. It's gradual. It doesn't just require mental gymnastics, it requires that we PRACTISE at mental gymnastics! It's not one-size-fits-all. Each of us comes to the Word with different reservoirs of experience. That's why we need the Spirit of God to translate the words of the Word into terms that we, as individuals, can understand. We are mistaken when we think everybody's understanding of the Word has to be expressed in exactly the same words we use. But we have to be careful that we don't drift too far from the meanings of the words as written. It's not usually a case of black-and-white, but usually a case of figuring out what constitutes good judgment. All for now, Love, Steve

So far, I've confined myself pretty much to discussion of how Wierwille read foreign meanings into the words of Romans 9 through 11, and how he could well have been unconscious that he was doing it at the time. I want to move the discussion along now, though we may refer back to this PFAL incident from time-to-time as an example about which we've already discovered a few things. Some of you have already brought up the concept of milk and meat that the Bible uses to illustrate growth in learning, so let's go to Hebrews 5:11-14, "11 Of whom [Christ as an high priest after the order of Melchisidec] we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing. "12 For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. "13 For every one that useth [metecho to partake of] milk is unskillful [apeiros inexperienced] in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. "14 But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use [dia ten hexin through habit, skill as a result of practice] have their senses exercised [gymnazo to practice gymnastic exercises, to train, accustom] to discern both good [kalon the beautiful, right or proper] and evil [kakon embracing every form of evil].

Thanks for posting the link, Cynic, and refreshing and informing my recollections. You've made this thread much more interesting than I had anticipated by stirring Bullinger into the mix of exegesis and eisegesis. Apparently Wierwille was reading Romans 9-11 through the lens of Bullinger's ultradispensationalism. It's odd enough, in a class on reading what's actually written in the Bible, for the instructor to teach one thing and ignore what's actually written. More later... Love, Steve

If I remember PFAL correctly, Wierwille built up to the section on "to whom addressed" in the following way: He had just taught on Romans 8, concluding with verses 35-39, "35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? "36 As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long: we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. "37 Nay, in all these things we are more than conquesrors through him that loved us. "38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, "39 Nor heighth, nor dept, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Wierwille then had us turn to Romans 11 and read verse 22, "Behold therefore the goodness and the severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off." He pointed out these verses as an apparent contradiction in the Word of God and asked how we could resolve it. Then Wierwille raised the question of "to whom addressed" and delimited the possibilities by referring to I Corinthians 10:32, "Give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God." He drew our attention to the word "Gentiles" in Romans 11:13 and said that verse 22 was obviously addressed to Gentiles, not to Christians. He also taught that Romans 9:1 through 11:12 were addressed to the Jews. I think I've got the line of reasoning correct, though I may be off in some of the details after all these years. This is a very tight argument. It's not like Wierwille said to himself, "I'm gonna teach on 'to whom addressed.' What passage should I use for an example?" and he just happened to chose Romans 9-11. Especially since Romans 9-11 is addressed, not to "Jews and Gentiles", but to Christians at Rome who had come to Christ from Gentile backgrounds. When I was still being disabused of my faith in Wierwille's "research", I thought he was a clever con-man, and had carefully constructed this piece of misdirection. Now, I don't think Wierwille put it together at all. I think it's more likely that he simply plagiarized it, possibly from B.G. Leonard, and found it very useful for his own purposes. As far as the "apparent contradiction" is concerned, Romans 8 DOES say there isn't anything outside of ourselves that can separate us from the love of God that's in Christ Jesus, but it doesn't say we can't turn around and walk away from it because we've trusted in men, made flesh our arm, and turned our hearts away from the Lord. I don't think Christians can lose their salvation, because of I Corinthians 3:15, but DO NOT believe that grace is a license for those who are "spiritually mature" to sin. There are consequences. Love, Steve

I agree, it was a leap for me to call the critic of the thoughts and intents of our hearts the "living Word", but I think it was a highly plausible leap, since the first line of the verse is "the word is quick', which means "the Word is alive." Sanctification was never directly a big issue in TWI, but it has been important to the denominations that sprang out of the Wesleyan holiness movement of the late 1800s. That set of denominations includes those of the Pentecostal variety which heavily influenced Wierwille in other areas of his theology. Many of those denominations teach that sanctification, which they view as a second work of grace, and often equate with receiving the Holy Spirit, comes at sometime later than water baptism. They think a person becomes holy all at once, and they have a dickens of a time dealing with how a person can still sin after they've spoken in tongues. Wierwille solved this problem by saying that sin doesn't matter anymore; it has all been covered by grace, and the problem is no longer sin, but sin consciousness. Instead of teaching us to look to the Spirit for guidance in using the words of the Word to overcome our sins (the fruit of the thoughts and intents of our hearts), Wierwille taught us we should just ignore our sins. I think God brings our sins to our attention by way of His Spirit. Even though I am definitely not trinitarian, I am coming to think it's appropriate to capitalize the word "Spirit" in some contexts, for reasons I will have to start a new thread to explain. God brings our attention to our sins by way of the living Word in order for us to deal with them and stop sinning. That way, God can bring us to sanctification in such a manner that we present our sanctification to Him as a deliberate service of love instead of a robotic reflex. It's a gradual process. God doesn't expect us to fix everything all at once. He knows the pace and order that's best for each of us as individuals, and He can give us custom-tailored guidance when we allow the Spirit and the Word to work together as what I have chosen to call the "living Word". Not that every sin is subtle and requires being "convicted by the Holy Ghost" to recognize. The fact that adultery is wrong is blatant to almost everybody, Christian or otherwise. I think the things we don't get fixed by the time we die will be fixed in the trash-fire of the age, our baptism of fire. Love, Steve

It's 2:00 am and I can't sleep. My mind isn't racing, or even revving, so I know it's not symptomatic of a mood swing into hypomania. I decided to get up and write. LizzyBuzz can't sleep either, but she's laying in the bed rubbing the belly of one of the cats. I'm sixty now, and maybe I'm just getting too old to handle caffeine. Do you guys (and gals, too, I don't want to be unconsciously sexist here) watch Mythbusters? I think they set a great pattern for Bible scholars. When they test a hypothesis (myth) they have several possible outcomes: "Confirmed", "Plausible", "Plausible But Not Probable" and "Busted". Our stats prof says those outcomes are related to what he calls the "Hypothesis", "Null-Hypothesis" and "Alternate Hypothesis", but I still haven't figured out exactly what he means when he says that. Sometimes, when I'm tracking through the Word trying to detect the differences between what I think I know and what I actually DO know, I feel like I'm one of the Mythbusters. I think I'm more like Adam Savage than I am like Jamie Hyneman. Bob - Thank you for citing your source for "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." You did it in a very exegetical manner. We have to use the APA (American Psychological Association) style manual when writing for the classes I'm taking, and the APA is veeeeeery picky about citations and references, so I'm much more aware of them than I formerly was. I used the quote, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics" in a paper I wrote for stats class last week. I tracked it down to an article Mark Twain wrote, but he attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli, and NOBODY knows where it really came from. In your post of 2:01 pm yesterday, Bob, you wrote "Wierwille was not an eisegete all the time. Here he screwed up." I agree. Most of what Wierwille preached was true, and a lot of what he taught was also. When a friend of mine put a green card in front of my face and asked "Which of these benefits would you like to receive?" I picked the one about "separating truth from error." I forget exactly how it was worded. Well, I learned a lot about separating truth from error in PFAL, but I've also learned a heck of a lot more about doing it since I left TWI, and EVEN MORE after leaving CES/STFI. One of the things I think Wierwille was very right in preaching was that the integrity of the Word is always at stake, even though he hashed it to pieces with his practice and his teaching. The idea that the Word has integrity resonated with me and still does. My Pop was a newspaperman, and he's the one who taught me words can have integrity, by the way he lived his life. I remember sitting in the news room one day, as a boy, when some people came in and threatened to firebomb our house if Pop ran a story they didn't like. Pop stood up from his chair behind his typewriter and said, "You go ahead and do that! Every person in this room heard what you just said, and if my house burns down, guess who the cops are gonna come lookin' for!" My little eyes got big and round, and I thought "The truth is worth an awful lot to Pop!" There WERE times when we went to bed with a bunch of blankets stacked beside a bath-tub full of water, and when we got older, my brother and I kept a pistol in the side room. One time I asked Pop, just for form's sake, if he wanted to take the class, and he said "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." I was soooo relieved then, and even more relieved after TWI began falling apart. When I was an anti-Trustee firebrand, preaching against them in the woods at ROA '87, I kept Pop informed of what I was doing. I like to think he was proud of me, but at that time he was still recovering from a massive stroke. At least I got all the relatives I talked into taking PFAL back out again, and a few good old friends to boot. As I said, the idea that the Word has integrity (wholeness) resonates with me, more so than the idea that the Word is inerrant. One of the first things I do when I teach seventh-graders how to exercise judgment is to make them go to their dictionaries and compare and contrast the definitions of "objective" and "subjective." Something that is subjective depends on the mind. Things that are objective are independent of the mind. I then teach them that I believe what is objective is real because it has integrity, meaning it is whole, and it is persistent, while my subjective experience of that reality is only partial and discontinuous. That's one of the reasons I am more inclined toward Stoic cosmology than to neo-Platonic cosmology, which says that subjective experience is real and the objective cosmos accessible to our senses is illusory. Stoic ethics make me gag, though. I teach the seventh-graders objective reality has integrity (wholeness) because the God who created it has integrity (wholeness). In logic, the touchstone for the value of a proposition is whether or not it accords with objective reality. I teach the students that objective reality is true, because its Creator is true. I don't believe it's possible to reconstruct the original autographs. I don't think it would do us much good if we could. But I DO believe a person can connect with the integrity of the written Word, and in so doing, learn to understand, accept, and revel in a proper relationship with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. I hear LizzyBuzz snoring now. I think I'll go back in, put my CPAP mask on, and see if I can fall asleep! Love, Steve

You're right, Jeff. He was at heart abusive and controlling. I don't know if I would say he was a sociopath, since I'm not a psychiatrist, though some of his actions would certainly seem to fit that diagnosis. But if his alcoholism was self-medication to deaden the remorse he felt, that would point away from sociopathy. He also went to great lengths to rationalize his behavior, to himself even, and I don't think a true sociopath would do that. After our branch was excommunicated in 1987, a few of us got hold of a bootleg copy of PFAL. We tried to go through a session using the "pause" and "rewind" buttons asking three questions: "What exactly did he say?" "What does that mean?" and "How does that line up with the scripture that we know?" I don't think we made it through a full 30 minute session. PFAL is larded with things that just don't make any sense. The verses Wierwille used often meant very different things from what he was teaching. For a long time, the teaching he did on "to whom addressed" stood out to me, since Wierwille chose to use for an example a passage of scripture where he violated the very principle he was preaching! I could only conclude that Wierwille was just a deliberate con man. In 1996 I was confronted with the deceitfulness of my own heart, and began to think that Wierwille also may have allowed himself to be deceived. As I studied things out, I realized that Wierwille, in PFAL, had removed from our consideration the one thing that could have guarded us against the deceitfulness of our own hearts. What was that thing? Well... on with the thread! Wierwille taught that fear is believing in reverse, that the thing you fear is gonna getcha, that fear always encases, always enslaves, always binds, and that fear is always wrong. How do those things line up with objective reality? Fear is an emotion. Emotions are feelings that move us, that prompt us to do things. Love prompts us to bond. Depression prompts us to shut down. Sorrow prompts to mourn. Joy prompts us to express elation. Anger prompts us to lash out. These are all good and necessary things to do, given the particular situation. I think God designed them into us so that we could live the kinds of lives He wants us to live. Fear is also a good and necessary response that God built into us. Fear is the emotion that moves us to get into right relation with the object of our fear. The right relation with a rattlesnake is outside of striking distance. The right relation with the IRS is to have our filings accurate and on time, and our taxes paid up (and soon to have health insurance also, it seems). The fear of God is the feeling that moves us to get into right relation with God. The fear of God is the proper response to His majesty as expressed in creation: to the starry sky on a clear, dark night, to the intricacies of DNA, to the profound hunt for the "God" particle. The right relation with God is the frame of mind that says, "You are God, I am not. It means what you want it to say, not what I want it to mean. Not my will, but yours be done." The fear of God is the emotion that moves us to submit the thoughts and intents of our hearts to the criticism of the living Word. Wierwille did not keep the fear of God before his eyes (he did not pay habitual attention to the fear of God). He allowed other emotions, such as pride and lust and greed, to overwhelm the fear of God. He did everything he could, he rationalized, he drank, he sought the approval of crowds, he gave vent to his boundless sexual desires, all to deaden the fear of God. The opposite of the fear of God is high-minded arrogance. A person who habitually ignores the fear of the Lord thinks more highly of himself than he ought to think. This is how the NIV translates Psalm 36:1-4, "1 An oracle is within my heart concerning the sinfulness of the wicked: There is no fear of God before his eyes. "2 For in his own eyes he flatters himself Too much to detect or hate his sin. "3 The words of his mouth are wicked and deceitful; he has ceased to be wise and to do good. "4 Even on his bed he plots evil; he commits himself to a sinful course And doesn not reject what is wrong." It doesn't say he was never wise. It doesn't say he never did good. It says he has CEASED to be wise and do good! That's all I can post for now. I'll be back later. Love, Steve

They DO hold Advanced Classes in a cornfield near Arkham. People go to the class, but somehow or other, nobody's ever known of one coming back! :o Love, Steve

Constantine wasn't the first to damage the "church," and he certainly wasn't the last. Did Wierwille do as much damage as Constantine? I don't think so, but that's just because Wierwille had such a paltry following compared to Constantine. I think, on a one-to-one basis, Wierwille was much more destructive than Constantine. Love, Steve

I posed a question in the original post of this thread: Why would Wierwille preach so adamantly the importance of getting "to whom addressed" correct, and at the same time, so totally screw up the passage he used as an example? We've seen why and how the heart is deceitful above all things, and we've seen that the problem this presernts can be overcome by submitting the thoughts and intents of our hearts to the criticism of the living Word. But we've come only about half way. Why would a person want to submit the things that seem sooo right... sooo clean... sooo wonderful... to ANYBODY'S criticism? Love, Steve

The problem with mega-churches (one of which I attend occassionally) is that there are too many people involved. The problem with home fellowships (one of which I run occassionally) is that there are too many people involved. The problem ain't the number, the problem is THEY'RE PEOPLE! One time, the seventh-graders were asking me why they had to read the Iliad. They had gotten to the point where they were beginning to suspect that it wasn't a story of good guys versus bad guys (there are no perfect heroes in the Iliad, and no perfect villians either) and that the story was not going to end "and they all lived happily ever after." I pointed out to them that we learn how to deal with situations in life through the stories we hold in our minds. The Iliad is a whole bunch of stories about deeply flawed characters trying to do the best they knew how in very difficult circumstances that they couldn't control. Then I asked them, "Who are WE, if we aren't deeply flawed characters trying to do the best we know how in very difficult circumstances that we can't control?" We were a Christian school, and we related the subject matter to the Bible as we taught, but we never taught the Bible the way we taught the Iliad for two reasons. First, we were an interdenominational school. We had what we called "primary" and "secondary" doctrines. We would teach the primary doctrines, but we left instruction in the secondary doctrines to the children's parents and religious leaders. If I remember rightly, the primary doctrines were pretty close to the apostles' creed. Second, the students thought they already knew all the right answers about the Bible from their Sunday school lessons. At that age, they couldn't very well grasp that the characters in the Bible were also deeply flawed people, trying to do the best they knew how (in spite of God telling them from time-to-time that they DIDN'T know best) in very difficult circumstances they couldn't control. We taught the heck out of the Iliad, and hoped that the students would at some time take the things they learned reading about Achilles and apply them to reading about David. The earliest churches were organized as home fellowships because that's how nearly everything was organized in those days. The secular elders who governed a city were the heads of the households of the city. The elders of the church in a city were the heads of household who ran "twigs" in their homes. When the church elders began squabbling among themselves, as we have seen happen in TWI and its offshoots, either they would elect an overseer for the city's officially recognized twigs (the "metropolitan bishop"), or someone from outside the city, that the elders respected, would appoint one of them as bishop. Organization really couldn't spread too much farther than a city and its environs in those days because of the inadequacies of communication. I think there was a power struggle between the counsels of church elders and the metropolitan bishops in the cities toward the end of the first century, and I think the bishops won. Before that, baptisms and communions were conducted at the twig level by the elder of the twig. After that, baptisms and communions were not sanctioned if they weren't performed by the bishop. I think the motivating factor for the struggle was "who get's to control distribution of the abundant sharing?" As for miracles, I think God uses miracles like a writer uses figures of speech. A figure of speech is an apparent violation of the laws of grammar that an author uses to draw the reader's attention to something the writer wants to emphasize. I think signs, miracles and wonders are apparent violations of the laws of nature that God uses to draw our attention to the things He wants us to pay attention to. I've experienced miracles before I got involved with TWI, during the time I was involved, and after I left. I think there were a lot of signs, miracles and wonders around PFAL in the early days, because Wierwille was preaching a lot of truth, even though his teaching and practice contradicted what he preached. In my experience, as a person rose through the ranks of TWI to the level of Corps training, and as Headquarter took more and more remote control of what was being said and done in the twigs, the signs, miracles and wonders dried up. Love, Steve

You hit the nail on the head, Gen-2! I wrote, "I can't say every thought and intention of my heart is evil. Neither can I say that every thought and intention is good. I cannot trust my heart... by itself... to sort out my evil intentions from my good! What a fix I find myself in!" The solution to my problem IS in Hebrews 4:12, "For the word of God is quick [ALIVE] and powerful [ABLE TO DO THINGS]... and is a discerner [kritikos CRITIC] of the thoughts and intents of the heart." The living Word critcizes the thoughts and intents of our hearts. The living Word tells us which of the things coming out of our hearts are okay, and which are abominations, even though they all seem to be equally right and clean in our own eyes! But... just what do I think the living Word is? Is the living Word cramming my mind with a freight-load of retemories in King James English without having the slightest clue as to what they really mean? Is the living Word some leader reaming my a$$ with the words "renew your mind" foaming out of his mouth between sprays of spittle? Is the living Word ME, telling everybody else what's good for them? No, no and double no! I think the Word lives where the words written in the Word agree with the things the Spirit of God is working in a person's mind and heart. Three places in the Bible we are told, "in the mouth [singular] of two or three witnesses [plural] shall a matter be established" (Deuteronomy 19:15b, Matthew 18:16b and II Corinthians 13:1b). The mouths of multiple witnesses become singular where they agree. I think the primary witness that God gives us of Himself are the things He works in us subjectively through His Spirit. I think that is the basis of the individual relations that He so enjoys with each of us. I think that is how He directs our attention to the things He would have us to change in our walks. I think that's how He lets us know the things He wants us to do. The unique things He has so carefully trained each of us and equipped each of us to do. I think the written Word is a secondary, objective witness He has given us so that we can check the things we think He might be telling us by way of Spirit. I think the Word lives as a person exercises judgment, as he or she compares and contrasts what's coming to him by way of Spirit with what's coming to him by way of the written Word. If we magnify the written Word and ignore the Spirit, we fall into Phariseeism and legalism, as TWI did. If we magnify the Spirit and ignore the written Word, we fall into emotionalism and spiritualism as CES did with personal prophecy. To strike the balance between legalism and license, that is, to walk in the Spirit, requires that a person be equally humble to the written Word and the Spirit working within him where they agree. That's when the living Word can criticize the thoughts and intents of our hearts. David knew as much, "Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." (Psalm 139:23&24) Love, Steve

Paul, I think, had this special quality. He had to learn how to think like a Stoic gentile to state his gospel in terms they could understand. The homework is going pretty well. I learned how to make histograms manually about thirty years ago. The hard part is learning how to do it using MS Excel. I know some of you young pups and those of you who use Excel on the job will think I'm awfully backward, but my neuron pathways were set back in the days of sliderules! Love, Steve

I don't think Bob had any particular person in mind, Roy, when he wrote what he did. I certainly wouldn't associate your posts with "bashing". I think I would be hard pressed to find a kinder heart here at Greasespot than yours. Thank you for the example you set here of humility! Love, Steve

So... where were we? Oh, yeah... Why does Jeremiah 17:9a say the heart is deceitful above all [other deceitful] things? Just a few more verses... Proverbs 12:15 "The way of a fool is right in his own eyes; but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise." Proverbs 16:2 "All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weigheth the spirits." Proverbs 21:2 "Every way of man is right in his own eyes: but the Lord pondereth the heart." The heart is deceitful above all things because everything that comes out of a person's own heart seems right and clean to that person. Why? Because the values reflected back to us from our hearts are the values we originally fed into them through our habitual thinking. My heart is so deceitful, it can convince me I am still serving the Lord, even when my heart itself is in gross disobedience to him! And one of the features that make the heart sooooo deceitful is the fact that there ARE good things, even in a heart whose attitude is predominantly evil, and evil things in a heart that is predominantly good. I can't say every thought and intention of my heart is evil. Nor can I say every thought and intention is good. I cannot trust my heart... by itself... to sort out my evil intentions from my good! What a fix I find myself in! That's as far as I can go for the next few days. Remember, our basic quest is to find out why Wierwille would read foreign meanings into Romans 9-11. I have to devote some time to homework for a statistics class I'm taking, but I'll be reading the thread, and posting brief responses from time to time. As Tim Gunn would say on Project Runway, "Work it, people, work it!" Love, Steve

I don't know if you had any experience with Momentus, but the response you describe is very exaggerated by the Momentus training. Love, Steve

I don't think there's any need for anybody to be bashing anybody. I think some people "bash" here at Greasespot for two reasons. 1) Bashing was what Wierwille did, and taught us. Wierwille's bashing never turned into flame wars, though, because nobody was ever allowed to talk back, and 2) Many people here are justifiably angry because they've been lied to, by a variety of groups and individuals, and feel frustrated because they can't express their anger directly to those who did the lying. Those things being said, Bob, I enjoy discussing things with you, even though... perhaps because of the fact that... we disagree on some points. I'm looking forward to addressing some of the other topics you brought up when the time and place are right. Love, Steve

LOL! Tolkien is another written artifact I've studied for decades. A couple of years ago, I was startled to realize that if you take out the "he said"s, Aragorn and Gimli sometimes speak in the alliterative style of Anglo-Saxon verse. I don't think Tolkien did it deliberately. I think he learned the style "by heart" translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc., and it just seemed natural to him that those characters would speak in that style. None of the hobbits ever did, that I've noticed! Thanks, Gen-2! Love, Steve

Matthew 12:35 "A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things." Luke 6:43-46 "For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. For every tree is known by his own fruit... A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good: and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh. And why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? Not everybody has the same attitude of heart. Some people have predominantly good attitudes of heart. Some peoples' attitudes of heart are mainly evil. Why the difference? I submit that people who habitually discipline their minds to dwell on good things internalize those things, and learn good "by heart." The people who allow their thoughts to habitually dwell on evil things learn evil "by heart." What's this business about "treasure"? Matthew 6:21 "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." "Treasures" are things we attach value to. If we attach certain values to things, as a matter of habit, our hearts will attach the same values to those things. If we habitually rationalize twisting the words of the Word to make them say what we want, then our hearts will tell us that it is good and clean to twist the words of the Word. If we habitually rationalize drugging and raping young girls, then our hearts will tell us that it is good and clean to drug and rape young girls. If we habitually rationalize that we are serving the Lord when we do these things, then our hearts will tell us that we are still serving the Lord, even if we aren't. More later. I'm gonna go spend time with one of my sisters that I haven't seen in a few months. We need to talk about what we're gonna do with our Mom. Love, Steve

Thanks for pointing me to those verses, geisha. I hadn't noticed them before. "Heart" is either leb or lebab, and they talk about people turning their hearts away from the Lord and the words of the covenant. I do think they can be connected to Jeremiah 17:9a through Jeremiah 17:5, "Thus saith the Lord; cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart [leb] departeth from the Lord." I think the use of leb in 17:5 sets the context for the use of leb in 17:9a. We'll look at this some more later on. Love, Steve

"CONN, MANEUVERING, Make turns for 25 knots, Aye!" and after the engines came up to speed, "CONN, MANEUVERING, Making turns for 25 knots." at which the phone talker in CONN would reply "MANEUVERING, CONN, Making turns for 25 knots, Aye! I didn't really care if Admiral Rickover was proud of me. I just didn't want him MAD at me! My first exposure to the need for good hermaneutics, to recognizing the difference between exegesis and eisegesis (though I didn't know those technical terms at the time), was the requirement to operate the power plant in "Verbatim Compliance with Posted Procedure." The Reactor Plant Control Manual and the Engineering Department Operating Procedures were together about five times as long as a Bible, and we had to be ready at any time to go before a board of officers and justify our decisions and actions from exactly what was written in the manuals. I expect I didn't find my experience with TWI to be as nit-picky and oppressive as some others did because of my previous experience in the nuclear power program. Your service as a Marine still commands my respect. My Pop was a Major in the National Guard who fought in Italy during WWII. He had to have some non-combat-related surgery, and his replacement was killed in the landings at Anzio. My step-daughter spent 12 years as a cryptologist in the Navy. She had to learn how to deal with some of the issues peculiar to females that you brought up in your post. She never had to stand any masts that I know of, but if she did, she was never busted for anything. She is very petite, and looks a lot like the picture you post, but then again, she outwitted a serial rapist when she was 16 years old, and had to go testify against him when he was finally caught. She is one tough cookie. She went on a date once with the French Foreign Legion! Hey! Maybe your dad was the A-ganger who had to go diving in the #1 Sanitary Tank! Did he ever tell you any sea-stories like that? Love, Steve