Steve Lortz

My handy dandy analog dictionary sez this: "charisma... 1: a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (as a political leader) 2: a special magnetic charm or appeal" Wierwille did have the ability to read a live audience and effectively play them. At least that was my experience of him. I never had any personal interactions with him. While studying 1 Corinthians I learned that, in Greek, the suffix ma attached to the end of the name of a thing indicates the result or effect of that thing. Charis (grace) + ma = "the result or effect of grace." In the Bible, a charisma is not a gift like a thing wrapped in a box setting on a birthday table or under a Christmas tree, but rather a favor that is done by the Holy Spirit for the benefit of the whole congregation through one member of that congregation. I don't think Wierwille's ministry was a favor for ANYBODY done by the Holy Spirit through HIM! I DO think there were many "leaves" on the tree that the Holy Spirit was doing favors through. Wierwille was hitch-hiking on the good-will generated by those leaves. My OD&D copy of Men & Magic sez this: "Charisma is a combination of appearance, personality, and so forth. It's primary function is to determine how many hirelings of unusual nature a character can attract. This is not to say that he cannot hire men-at-arms and employ mercenaries, but the charisma function will affect loyalty of even these men. Players will, in all probability, seek to hire Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, and/or Clerics in order to strengthen their roles in the campaign... In addition the charisma score is usable to decide such things as whether or not a witch capturing a player will turn him into a swine or keep him enchanted as a lover. Finally, the charisma will aid a character in attracting various monsters to his service." How ironic! The closest I ever came to Wierwille (it wasn't an interaction, Wierwille was just sitting there in a green without speaking or moving) was in the presence of Dave Arneson, co-author of the lines I just quoted from Dungeons & Dragons! Love, Steve

Thanks, Raf! :) More later... my activities of the day have exhausted me for now... Love. Steve

That's the $64,000 question, Raf! My own thinking is going places where I've never been before, and that's one of the reasons I'm glad YOU have chosen to go along with me on this journey. Another quote from Tolkien: The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it on weary feet, Until it joins some larger way, Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. Love, Steve

Another way to ask the question is this: Does the truth that the author of II Timothy 3:16 wrote pasa graphe theopneustos require plenary verbal inspiration? That is to say, Does the fact that Paul told Timothy all the Tanakh was given by inspiration of God mean that EVERY (plenary) WORD (verbal) of our evanglical-protestant canon was originally dictated by God in a perfect manner, jot by jot, tittle by tittle? Does it mean that the people (women as well as men) who were slapping ink on the parchment were mere automatons, channeling the Holy Spirit through automatic writing? Does it mean that the original autographs of the Bible could NOT have contained any contradictions? Does it mean that if we find a contradiction in the Bible, even one single one, then the whole thing is a tissue of lies, having no value to anyone except to con men and swindlers like Elmer Gantry and V.P. Wierwille? Love, Steve

Thanks for posting the entry on Luke from the Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Mark! "Luke probably remained close by Paul during his two-year imprisonment in Caesarea." That would have been a perfect time for Luke to have gone and interviewed Mary. Thanks again! Love, Steve

Indeed, waysider, indeed! Love, Steve

"Since the whole Bible is God-breathed, it cannot contain any contradictions, and if it contains even ONE contradiction, it will ALL fall to pieces." This is NOT a statement of objective fact. It is NOT a statement of self-evident truth. It is NOT a point of doctrine. It is NOT taught in the Bible itself. "Since the whole Bible is God-breathed, it cannot contain any contradictions, and if it contains even ONE contradiction, it will ALL fall to pieces" is a confession of faith. It is not a widespread or long-lived faith. It is peculiar to Christians and agnostics/atheists who come from a fundamentalist/evangelical background. The faith originated about 150 years ago or so, and became officially incorporated into church doctrine about 50 years later at the Fundamentalist Conferences. When Wierwille taught that the autographs (original writings) of the Bible were perfect as given, he associated himself and his followers with this particular article of fundamentalist/evangelical faith. Oddly enough, agnostics and atheists continue to hold onto this article of their faith long after they have rejected all the others. When Paul wrote "all scripture" in 2 Timothy 3:16, he was using a "shorthand" meaning "all the law and the prophets" as Jesus spoke of in Matthew 22:37-40, "37Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 38This is the first and great commandment. 39And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. 40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." The Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) consisted of the Law , the Prophets and the Writings. Paul's "all scripture" may well have been intended to include all three sections of the Tanakh. Those were the things Paul was declaring to be "God-breathed." In his thinking, he probably didn't include any of the writings that became what we call the New Testament. Were there contradictions in the Tanakh? OH, YES! The Old Testament contains a long epic that extends over many of its books. The epic is known as "The Doomed History of the Deuteronomist." It explains how and why all of God's promises to Israel came to nothing. The theology of the Deuteronomist was this: Israel's salvation was in the Exodus from Egypt and in the giving of the covenant on Mt. Sinai. Salvation was by grace and preceded the giving of the law. Keeping the law was to be the thankful response of the people to the salvation already received. If an individual broke the law, and did not make atonement, that individual was to be expelled from among the covenant people. Successes and failures are the result of faithfulness, that results in success, or disobedience, that results in failure. The disobedience of Israel as a whole resulted in the destruction of the northern kingdom and the exile of Judah to Babylon in 587 BCE. Since that time, the Jewish people have looked forward to a restoration of the Davidic kingdom, a restoration that has not yet come to pass. In the first century, the Pharisees were a group of people who sought to speed up the restoration of the kingdom by trying their best to restore obedience to the Deutronomic law. But the book of Ecclesiastes was ALSO included in the Tanakh, and it's theology is this: "11I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to the men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all." (9:11) "13And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the fruit of all his labour, it is the gift of God." (3:13) "13Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man." (12:13) The theology of the whole of Ecclesiastes contradicts the whole theology of the Deuteronomist! It was consciously, deliberately included in the Tanakh! Wierwille subtitles the book of Job "Victim to Victor," but that's not what it is. Job seeks an answer to the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?" but God NEVER answers the question! Instead, the book contradicts EVERY THEODICY! Job's miserable comforters put forth every reason possible why they think God would let bad things happen to good people, yet God said they had not spoken of him the thing that was right. Job contradicts EVERY THEOLOGY! Yet, it also was consciously, deliberately included in the Tanakh! Was Paul aware of these things when he wrote "all scripture is God-breathed"? You bet he was! He was a Pharisee of the Pharisees! We can't say where Paul stood on the scale of Old Testament scholarship in his day, but there's one thing we can be certain of, he was a better Old Testament scholar than anybody who is alive today! God breathed the contradictions into the Tanakh in order to foil people who try to put him into a box (systematic theology). There is a tension between KNOWING who God is and what he will do, and NOT KNOWING who God is and what he will do, and that keeps us from thinking we can control him. Systematic theology, especially of the fundamentalist/evangelical type, try to make God a prisoner of the ink words written on the paper pages. Wierwille's theology, developed to "resolve apparent contradictions in the Bible," turned God into a vending machine with no will of his own. How disgusting he and we were! How about it, Tzaia? Do these tensions make an interesting way of looking at things? Love, Steve

Raf, you have named three names. The Society of Biblical Literature has over 8,500 members. Are you going to poll them all? If not, then how can you say a consensus agrees with Ehrman? If the evidence against Lukan authorship is so strong, then why is it convenient for Ehrman to call the author of Luke Luke? Raf, you wrote, "Then there's Eugene Boring, who, not surprisingly, uses Ehrman's language in referring to the author as "Luke" as a matter of convenience. He writes: 'The problematic historical value of patristic data regarding authorship of New Testament documents means the burden of proof is on advocates of its reliability.' In other words, "there's no evidence to suggest it wasn't Luke" is insufficient to conclude that it WAS." How much confidence can we place in Boring's statement "'The problematic historical value of patristic data regarding authorship of New Testament documents means the burden of proof is on advocates of its reliability.'" Why? in the case of Luke specifically? What evidence is there that the patristic data EVER presents conflicting accounts of Lukan authorship? Why should the "burden of proof" be put on the advocates of Lukan authorship when there is NO CONTROVERSY about Lukan authorship, as there is about the authorship of some other New Testament documents? Raf... you are a professional newsperson, and a good one. You have to write according to the standards of journalism, and your work is judged by those standards. I haven't read a lot of what you've written professionally, but I know from watching my dad at work that you have to be good or you wouldn't be doing what you are doing. I am working on a masters in Theological Studies. I am being trained by professional scholars to write up to professional standards. I had to withdraw from the thesis program because I no longer have the physical stamina or speed to complete a thesis within the parameters set for that program. But I DO have to write four exegesis papers. I did two of them last fall, and will finish the other two next spring. My work will be judged on whether or not I have written those four papers up to professional standards. I will pass or fail on the professional, scholarly quality of my writing. But it's not just the actual scribbling... I will be judged on the quality of my research, which means I have to set my argument into the context of the broader, on-going theological conversation. If I were to cherry pick my sources, limiting them to people who agree with me, the way you are doing with Ehrman, I would be failed, not just on the papers, but on the entire classes. And rightly so. My New Testament exegesis paper last fall was over Luke 18:18-30. Do you think I didn't study the question of Lukan authorship? Do you think I didn't include a brief assessment of the general state of that question in my paper? Do you think I would have passed if I hadn't? I passed. If you moved your postings over to the Questioning Faith forum because you didn't want to disrupt the integrity of this thread, then why are you continuing to argue on this thread? Love, Steve

For the benefit our our correspondents, there is a small group of scholars, the prime of whose activities was in 1970s, who hold that everything that has come down to us in the New Testament consists of fake stories promulgated by third or later generations of Christians. They contend that the Q source is the only authentic account of the earliest Christianity, which is convenient, since we have NO copies of Q. These scholars try to find Q by isolating everything that agrees in Matthew and Luke that also does not appear in Mark. Needless to say, the process is highly speculative and subjective. These scholars were those involved with the Jesus Seminar, which determined by vote which words Jesus spoke. The reason these scholars hold that everything in the New Testament is fake is because Schliermacher believed with the science of his day that there is no room in nature for the "supernatural". Therefore everything regarded as miraculous in the New Testament, including the resurrection of Jesus, (and human free will, by the by) are lies. This is the basis of liberal protestant theology, and the thinking of the scholars of the Jesus Seminar. Unfortunately for them, Neils Bohr described quantum mechanics in 1925, and since then, the Newtonian determinism at the basis of claiming the "supernatural" could not have actually happened has been demolished. There IS plenty of room in nature for human free will, and for the miraculous, and a "creation" is required by quantum mechanics. Is every story in the New Testament of the miraculous "true"? Probably not. But the resurrection of Jesus Christ is non-negotiable. As Paul said in I Corinthians 15:19&20 "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable, But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept." A consensus of the "Q people", as other scholars affectionately call them, may well agree with Ehrman's assessment that Luke did not write Luke-Acts, but these people do not speak for the majority of scholars. If you read a wide variety of commentaries, they all pretty much agree that there is NO EVIDENCE that Luke-Acts was written by anybody other than an apostolic companion named Luke. Whether it was the Luke of Colossians 4:14 is not certain, but it begs the question, if it wasn't the Luke of Colossians 4:14, what other apostolic companion could it have been? General scholarship is in agreement that Luke-Acts was written by a single man, a master writer and historian, whose was most probably one of Paul's companions named Luke. If you don't believe me, look it up for yourselves! Love, Steve

What is your source for saying scholarly concensus is behind Ehrman"? You made the claim that my two "assumptions" are "not true". Prove it. Love, Steve

A bit more thread-keeping... Usually when you write, Raf, you are SPOT ON! But in this case, I think you've allowed your passion to make you miss the mark. I can understand that. I remember how I felt when I first learned that people I had trusted had lied to me about the Bible and about God. That was a long time before I got involved with TWI. I was a little more cautious than many during my time in the Way, and still am. An assumption is a guess that a person makes when she/he has to take a decision with incomplete information. Making assumptions is NOT a bad thing. We ALL have to do it because none of us ever have 100% COMPLETE information. The keys to dealing successfully with assumptions are, first of all, to be AWARE of your own assumptions. Then, as soon after the crisis is over as possible, and you have time to collect more information, FIND OUT whether or not your assumptions were correct. I learned these things as a result of formal training in Nuclear Power School and in Prototype Training. On our exams we would be given problems with incomplete statements of the initial conditions, but the instructors never pointed out to us whether the information was or was not complete. We had to learn to recognize that for ourselves. We always had to state what assumptions we were making, and our answers would be correct if they lined up with our stated assumptions. Why did they train us this way? Because in the engineroom, if we received indication of a casualty, we had to immediately take initial action to fight the casualty. We couldn't wait to make decisions. We had to make them instantly, so we trained to do that, even without complete information. As soon as the casualty was under control, the first thing the watchstander did was to find out if his assumptions had been correct. If they had been correct, everything was hunky-dory. If the assumptions had been incorrect, then further action would be required to minimize damage and restore the plant to at battery conditions. In the scholarly world, we don't have to take instant decisions. We are expected to gather sufficient information before delivering our interpretation. When we deliver our interpretations, we are expected to state where our information has been incomplete, and suggest how we might acquire a more certain understanding, if possible. That is the same in the humanities (the world of poetic knowledge expressed as simile and metaphor) as it is in the world of "hard" science (the world of propositional knowledge stated in mathematics). (I am using first person in the previous paragraph because I AM receiving the training of a professional scholar. I AM part of the scholarly community, more so than Wierwille or other leaders of TWI ever were or are.) In journalism, responsible writers sometimes find it necessary to conceal the sources of their information. In scholarship, writers are required to reveal ALL of their sources in order to accept responsibility, or run the danger of committing plagiarism whether intentional or not. So, what were my sources when I wrote the things I did about Luke? My first New Testament exegesis paper was What Must I Do To Inherit Eternal Life? Luke 18:18-30. I had eight sources listed in the bibliography, but I'm only going to use one of those, a commentary, in this post, and two other sources that I didn't use in my exegesis paper. The commentary is: Bock, Darrell. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, Luke Volume 1, 1:1-9:50. Grand Rapids: Baker Books. 1994. The other two sources are: Ehrman, Bart D. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. Majeski, Kimberly. BIST 6210 class discussion covering Luke 1. Anderson, IN: Anderson University School of Theology. November 2, 2015. ----- Lets start with your last sentence first: "2. It assumes "Luke" wrote the gospel. No serious, unbiased scholar believes that." The phrase "serious, unbiased scholar" is a tell that this is not a statement of objective, doctrinal content, but rather a tendentious confession of faith. Unbiased scholars do not exist, no more so than unbiased journalists do. The things is, scholars are expected to be aware of their own biases, to take them into account, and express them in setting forth their argument. Unlike the work of journalists, scholarly work subjects bias to intense scrutiny and discussion. By saying "No serious, unbiased scholar believes that." you are implying that you have examined all scholarship and that anyone who disagrees with your bias CANNOT BE taken seriously. How about Bart Ehrman? On page 137 of The New Testament he wrote,"All these features are found in Luke 1:1-4. The author (whom I will continue to call Luke for convenience) indicates that ..." That's ALL Ehrman said about the authorship of Luke in his chapter on the gospel of Luke.... "for convenience..." If you read the introduction to Bock's commentary, you will find the same thing I did in examining a number of commentaries. There is no internal evidence attributing the authorship of Luke-Acts to a person named Luke. However, scholarship from patristic times forward has universally held the author to be an apostolic companion named Luke. There is NO evidence that anyone ever taught that there was an author other than a "Luke." It is not certain whether the Luke of patristic tradition was the same as the Luke of Colossians 4:14, but there is NO evidence precluding the possibility either. If Ehrman had any evidence that Luke was not written by Luke, he would have presented it, convenient or not. There is no evidence that Luke-Acts was written by anybody other than somebody named Luke, and there is strong probability that the Luke who wrote Luke-Acts was Paul's companion mentioned in Colossians 4:14. ----- "The notion that Luke interviewed eyewitnesses to the events in question assumes two things that are not true. 1. It assumes Luke made this claim. Read the verses. He does not make this claim." Luke 1:1&2 (NRSV) say, "1Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account [diegeomai] of the events that have been fulfilled among us, 2just as they were handed to us by those who were from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word," Luke never made the claim that he himself was an eyewitness, but let's look at what Bock had to say: "The verb diegeomai in the NT speaks of both oral and written accounts... so whatever type of narrative Luke alludes to in 1:1, it is not clear whether the sources are oral or written or both." (p. 53) "We should not think of Luke as a student locked up in a library, especially since written material was so rare in the ancient world. Here was an inquiring student, who took in whatever he could, oral or written." (p. 61) Regarding Luke's use of the word akribos, "carefully" in verse 3, Bock wrote, "Some commentators see this as a description of how Luke wrote his material (i.e. modifying graphai) rather than as a description of his investigation. But the word order of the sentence makes this connection less likely. So, Luke's study is the fruit of a careful and thorough investigation that went back to Jesus' birth." (p. 62) Who better to interview in a careful and thorough investigation that went back to Jesus' birth than Mary, his mother? Orthodox tradition that can be traced back to the 8th century holds that Luke painted the first icon, a portrait of Mary, during or after his interview with her. Dr. Majeski teaches the New Testament, both at the introductory level to freshmen at the University, and at an advanced graduate level at the School of Theology. She is a serious scholar, though she will be the first to say that she is biased, and will explain her biases in more excruciating detail than you want to hear. She has also presented at the SBL convention and writes a blog. She is taken seriously by N.T. Wright, who invited her to dinner with his circle of friends at the SBL convention. She has a selfie of herself with N.T. Wright to prove it! Her field of specialty is the role of women in the NT... not feminist-gender theology, but examining the things people like Mary, Martha, Lydia, Phoebe, and Priscilla thought and did. Dr. Majeski recently adopted an infant son, and motherhood is now having a strong influence on her thought. I attended her graduate level NT class on Monday, Novenber 2, when she was covering the first chapter of Luke. She makes a convincing case that the only place Luke could have gotten his information about Mary's visit to Elizabeth, and about Jesus' visit to the Temple at the age of twelve would have been from Mary, and how the incident recorded in Luke 8:19, where Jesus denied his earthly family, would have been seared into Mary's memory and would have been an important part of her testimony. ----- So... " The notion that Luke interviewed eyewitnesses to the events in question assumes two things that are not true. 1. It assumes Luke made this claim. Read the verses. He does not make this claim. 2. It assumes "Luke" wrote the gospel. No serious, unbiased scholar believes that." Are you still willing to stand on the soundness of what you wrote, Raf? Love, Steve

A little bit of definition (exploration of the limits of meaning)... Raf posits a boundary that exists between what is "historical" and what is... what?.. non-indicative?...improbable?... ahistorical?... never happened?... stories, legends and myths? Mark posits a boundary that exists between what is figurative (or mystic) and what is literal. I am proposing that the boundary between what we take as poetic and what we take as propositional is not as sharp and distinct as protestants have taken it to be since the Enlightenment. There is a spectrum of, what shall we call it?... degrees of probability/possibility?... between the extremes of being 100% poetic and 100% propositional. In English, the place on the spectrum is indicated by the use of modal verbs. Hebrew communicates it by combining functions of form (Imperative, Jussive and Cohortative) with functions of prefix and of word order. In the Greek, it's expressed by use of the subjunctive mood. Raf, in one of your previous posts (#13 on this thread), you referred to the Bible as consisting of "stories, myths and legends." I think those are useful categories for topics under consideration, but I would modify it in the following way: Stories can be mythical or legendary or historical. Every narrative is a story, no matter how indicative it might be. Myths are stories based on poetic knowledge presented by means of similes and metaphors. Myths do not pretend to be presenting propositional knowledge. A myth can be regarded as true or false, or of any value in between, according to how well it accords with objective reality. The definition of the word "true" is not limited to the definition of logic, but includes such aspects as "fitness" and "power to show". So... we see and talk about three categories of stories based on degree of indicativeness... histories, legends and myths, all the time recognizing that the difference is not qualitative, but quantitative. There are degrees of editing done in every historical account which makes it necessarily different from the actual event. The figures of every myth need to represent something recognizable to somebody. Even dreams. There has to be an actuality for the symbol to symbolize! The stories of the Bible consists of stories of three types: 1) Myths, which are statements of poetic rather than propositional knowledge, which are not based on actual people or occurrences, an example from American history would be Paul Bunyan. 2) Legends, which are probably based on people or events that actually occurred, but around which stories have grown that point to important qualities or characteristics of the person or event. Many legends have grown up about George Washington. Washington is a legendary figure in our history. 3) Histories. President Obama is an historical figure. He actually exists. He has actually done things. But if we read two historical stories (biographies) about President Obama from different authors, how likely are they to agree? Even if they are both by people who agree with Obama's politics? I think Abraham is probably the first historical human being mentioned in the Bible. I think Adam and Eve were responses to the human progenitors in the mythical Enima Elish. Consequently, they would also be mythical. The primary truth presented in the early chapters in Genesis is not that God clumped a ball of mud together and inflated it, but that there is one, and one God only, who is responsible/free. She/he/it made humanity in her/his/its image by enduing humanity with responsibility/freedom. The desperate wickedness in the heart of mankind is to escape responsibility toward God by substituting itself for God. That is the poetic TRUTH expressed in the myth of Genesis. That, and the promise of the seed of the woman who would set things right. Before Abraham, there were Noah and Nimrod who may have been real people, but not in the form the Bible presents them. Archaeology tell us that there were many catastrophic floods in the prehistory of Mesopotamia (the land of Shinar) that people could have escaped from in their boats. Those many intrepid boatmen may have been consolidated into Utnapishtim of Sumerian legend, and transcribed into Genesis as Noah. There were many, many founders of Mesopotamian city-states whose primary responsibility was to build a house for the city's god. Those founders had trouble collecting taxes from the rulers of their vassal towns because of the differences in their languages. The authors of Genesis consolidated those many founders into one, Nimrod, and poked their fingers in the eye of Sumerian mythology by saying "You may have taken us captive to Babylon, but it was OUR God, YHWH, who confused your languages!" So there may have been Noahs and Nimrods, but not in the same sense as Abraham. I think Abraham WAS a specific individual who left Ur and received a promise from the one God that Abraham would have a seed, and that through his seed, all the families of the earth would be blessed. Otherwise, the things we have about Abraham are legendary. I think that there may have been a small group of people who left Egypt under the leadership of a man whom we have come to know as Moses. There is much that is legendary about Exodus, but the story became the essence of covenant salvation to the nation of Israel. It defines salvation for the rest of the Bible, including the New Testament. The book of Judges relates the adventures of a number of individuals who really existed. Who were they? Were they members of tribes that came from Egypt, or were they leaders of native Canaanite groups who bound their lives together with the growing Israelite movement? Good questions! Our knowledge of their lives is more legendary than historical. Then we come to Samuel, Saul, David and Solomon. Here we change from people, knowledge of whose lives is primarily legend, to other people, our knowledge of whose lives is primarily historical. There were still some legendary and a few outright mythic characters after Solomon. By the time of the Maccabees, however, Jewish writing was split into two major types: historical, like the books of the Maccabees, and apocalyptic, which was almost entirely, consciously figurative. Then we come to the New Testament, that contains two major types of writings, gospels and letters. The apocalyptic book Revelation was also included. Gospels are neither biographies, nor histories, nor theological proclamations... but they contain elements of all three. Acts describes the movement of the gospel beyond Jerusalem and Judea. In this respect, the biographical element shifts eventually to Paul. Nobody ever doubted the historicity of Jesus before the 19th century. People might have thought he was a failed Jewish messiah, or a fool, or a quack, but nobody doubted that he really lived. In 1835 David Strauss began the search for the historical Jesus in his book, Life of Jesus, that purged the gospel accounts of all "supernatural" elements. Most scholars still believe that there was an actual human being who lived in Galilee in the early first century CE, whose adventures form the kernel of the gospels, but there are some scholars who propose that there never was a Jesus, that the "man" was completely the construct of a conspiracy of cult mongers, or a fictional personification of a Gnostic Redeemer. There is more historical evidence for the life of Jesus than there is for many of the characters of antiquity whose actuality we take for granted. The fact that the writings of the 1st century authors were collected into what became a single volume doesn't negate the fact that they were originally independent sources, along with a few others we can identify such as Q and the independent Matthew and Luke sources. What John used as sources, we do not know, but they didn't directly include Mark and Q. Luke declared that he gathered information from eyewitnesses. Those eyewitness had to include at a minimum Mary, the mother of Jesus herself, Peter, and Paul... personal interviews... PFAL may have been a load of Wierwille crap, but that certainly doesn't mean the New Testament itself is! The few completely indicative, completely propositional statements a person needs to believe in order to be a Christian are that 1) Jesus was a real human being who really died, and 2) God really raised him from the dead by giving him the Spirit of resurrection life, never to die again! These things are not optional. Everything else is. The reason Paul wasn't re-teaching in Acts and his letters the information included in the gospels was partially because he taught that information in person. His understanding of the gospel period of Jesus' life was probably most similar to that of Mark. The thing that converted Saul, the Pharisee of the Pharisees into Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles was the fact that he became convinced, to the bottom of his soul, that Jesus Christ had been resurrected ALL BY HIMSELF! The age to come had NOT begun with the general resurrection of all of Israel, but with the resurrection of a SINGLE MAN! That upset EVERYTHING Saul thought he new about Judaism (and Saul thought he knew it ALL). Paul could no longer see Jesus Christ as being limited to the Davidic messiah of Judaism, but as the promised seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent, as the promised seed of Abraham through whom all the families of the earth will be blessed! Do I believe that Jesus was a real man who died a real death, and who God raised from the dead? Yes I do. What else do I believe about the Bible?... about life itself? What does it matter? And that last question, "What does it matter?" is the real substance of questioning faith. Love, Steve

A little bit of thread-keeping... That's the difference between "systematic theology" and "constructive theology", waysider. Systematic theology comes up with a system to interpret the scriptures, and if there is a conflict between the system and the text, the text has to give way to the system. Systematic theology says, "The difficult verse must be interpreted in light of the many clear verses." Constructive theology says "The existence of a difficult verse leads us to question the clarity of our interpretation of the many verses that seem clear. Perhaps they are not really as clear as we would like for them to be. They might mean something entirely different from what we think." Love, Steve

What style-manual are you using? It would seem you should be able to use material from this site as primary source material, if not as secondary. If you are required to use material from peer reviewed articles, and you are working with a due date, it would probably be best to have a reference librarian help you search something like Academic Search Premier or ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials as soon as possible. I think if I were trying to place TWI within a larger context of history of religion in America, I would try to show it as an offshoot of the practices of the Jesus Movement. It's theology was an idiosyncratic pastiche of Reformed Theology and Dispensationalism with a little bit of Pentacostalism thrown in, but the practices that enabled it to grow were cribbed from the Jesus Movement. Hope this helps! Love, Steve

Make friends with a good reference librarian. Have them help you look for information about TWI in the databases of peer reviewed journal articles... That's the best thing I can think of. It would be the most most thorough and up to date... far better than a Google search! Love, Steve

Now you're making ME curious, krys! I would love to hear details about how your thinking is evolving! Love, Steve

LizzyBuzz and I had a good time out last night. Over dinner we reviewed all our misunderstandings of each other during the first five years or so of our marriage. That covered the period of time from when we got married to the time we had to walk away from John Lynn and all his works as a result of the Momentus debacle. Here is the opening of a a paper I wrote for Archaeology: ---- Genesis as a Response to Mesopotamian Cosmogony How are we to understand 2 Timothy 3:16 when it tells us that all scripture is theopneustos, or “God-breathed,” especially with regard to Genesis? Does it mean that Moses, during breaks from trekking around the desert with the children of Israel, would sit in his tent with a quill in his hand transcribing what the Spirit of God dictated to him, jot by jot and tittle by tittle? Does it mean that God began with a series of ontological propositions about the Divinity’s self, and had Moses weave those propositions into a rather quirky, even if inerrant, description of a reality that we cannot square with that we find by our senses? Was Genesis composed in an intellectual vacuum? Does the truth that Genesis is “God-breathed” mean that we should be able to interpret every word of it in terms of our present cultural understanding? Are there no references or allusions in Genesis to the thought-life that was current at the time of its composition, references or allusions that require a more than casual knowledge of antiquity to comprehend? In a classroom discussion on the Documentary Hypothesis, Gilbert Lozano compared the composition of the Pentateuch to the construction of a Mennonite quilt. When Mennonite women decide to make a quilt, they come together as a group and work together as a team. Each woman contributes material. Sometimes the material is whatever fabric is handy. Sometimes the fabric may have special significance. Each woman works on a particular part, but the resulting pattern is not disorderly. It becomes a beautifully integrated design. No individual woman takes credit for the quilt. In fact it can be very difficult to distinguish which parts were sewn by different women, except for examining minute characteristic variations in the needlework. So Lozano suggested that the Pentateuch was composed in a similar manner, not by an individual, but by a relatively large number of people working over quite a long period of time as writers and redactors. Many of the writers weren’t coming up with “original” material, but making a more permanent record of stories that had been in circulation since time immemorial as oral traditions. Probably none of the earliest writers expected their texts to be stitched together with other writers’ material to form a verbal quilt. It seems likely that the scribes of Solomon’s scriptorium in the tenth century BCE began the process of collecting stories relating to Israel’s early history and writing the material that became 1 and 2 Samuel in order to justify Solomon’s claim to the throne. It became imperative after the exile in the sixth century BCE for the scholars of Israel to preserve their national identity and to explain the doom that had befallen them. They accomplished these things by a very thorough redaction and integration of Israel’s national library. If we are to take it that the result is God-breathed, then we need to recognize that the Spirit of God was working in each of the writers, not by possessing those persons, but by using their unique experiences and understandings to express what God wanted to be expressed. We also need to recognize that the Spirit of God was working in each of the redactors, too, to select and re-interpret the material in such a way that it expresses a beautifully integrated design. It does not appear that the Spirit accomplishes God’s designs without the willing cooperation of at least some of the people involved. It would seem that the composition of Genesis as we know it was the outcome of a great conversation, a conversation that happened between people of different cultures over a number of centuries in a variety of countries. The question becomes, how can archaeology help inform us as to the scope and depth of this conversation. By finding expressions similar to those of Genesis in the remains of other cultures contemporary with the composition of Genesis, we can gain some insight into how the Israelite redactors’ ideas were similar to, and how they were different from, the ideas of the surrounding nations in which Israel had become embedded. We can find some of the fabric that the redactors of Genesis re-purposed to contribute to the pattern of their quilt. But what sort of material should we be looking for? (The paper goes on for a further 8 pages comparing and contrasting the Enuma elish and Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta with the first few chapters of Genesis. I could have done the same thing with the flood stories of Atrahasis and of Gilgamesh, but that would have made my paper too long. ---- Raf, you wrote, "If you look at the stories myths and legends as LESSONS, you can glean something from them." That's an understatement. The previous sentence is also an understatement. The entire Bible consists of stories (some of them historical, some of them not), legends (stories that may not be historical, but have grown up around historical characters) and myths... extended similes and metaphors that express poetic truth rather than propositional fact. There are a few "historical" facts thrown in from time to time, but they are historical as per the requirements for history in antiquity, the requirements in force at the time of the writing, not as per the requirements for history today. The whole point of the Bible is to "lesson" us about the nature of God, the nature of humankind, and the nature of the relationship that mankind has with God through the man Christ Jesus. You also wrote, "That Jesus walked is probably history. That he walked on water is probably not." In this, you are more astute than the liberal protestant theologians. They would say "It is impossible that Jesus could have walked on water. Therefore this is a story invented by the early Christians to persuade us that there really was an historical Jesus. We need to have a vote on whether or not Jesus ever actually existed." Your statement agrees with modern science (since 1925) in that "miracles" are not impossible, just highly improbable. It IS highly improbable that Jesus historically walked on water. Does that mean that he actually did or actually didn't? We cannot be certain. We have to decide what we're going to believe. Your statement would be scoffed at by evangelical protestant theologians who have already decided and declared what we are supposed to believe and what is lunatic heresy. ----- I am more convinced than ever that this is the best forum for my question... "The Bible CANNOT be God-breathed if it contains any errors or contradictions. If it contains even ONE contradiction, then it ALL falls to pieces." Neither of these are statements of self-evident truth. They are both propositions of faith. I am questioning whether faith in either of these two statements is warranted. You are a paragon, Raf, of the kind of person I want responding to my question, because I know you will NOT ALLOW me to engage in any verbal manipulation. You will hold my feet to the fire. Notice, that the problem raised by this question has not existed in general Christianity, and did not exist prior to the 19th century. It is a problem raised by evangelical protestants which came about as a response to a problem raised by liberal protestants in the 19th century. ----- Next time, "what IS the Word of God?" or "what exactly is it that Christians canonize?" Love, Steve

Raf has summed up the thrust of what I am saying on this thread very concisely. The key part of Raf's statement that I want to examine now is "if you believe the Bible's testimony of itself that all scripture is God-breathed" What is the testimony of II Timothy 3:16? Is it what evangelical Protestantism (including Bullinger and Wierwille) has held it to be? In the first place, when Paul wrote that passage in a letter to Timothy, he wasn't including any of the writings of what we would call the New Testament. And it is further uncertain what exactly would be included in the "all scripture" because there is a strong possibility that the canon of the Hebrew Bible was not yet settled at the time Paul wrote. What did Paul mean by "all scripture"? Only one thing is certain, he could NOT have meant "the Bible as it will be known in the 19th century, King James English and all." And even though Paul could probably read the Tanakh in Hebrew, Timothy probably used the Septuagint. The King James English of the entire passage (II Timothy 3:14-17) introduces the notion of perfection, but it isn't perfection of the written word, rather it is perfection of the "man of God". It doesn't mean that the man of God is without contradiction or error. It means that the person who would serve God can be fully equipped to perform every good work she or he might be called upon to do. I believe Paul was putting the emphasis of the word "all" on "is profitable for" and not on "is God-breathed". Bullinger wrecked the understanding of many when he taught that all scripture is profitable for three things only, and that different parts of scripture are profitable for different things. I think II Timothy 3:16 could be properly understood as "The whole Old Testament (God-breathed as it is) is profitable for doctrine, the whole thing is profitable for reproof, the whole thing is profitable for correction, the whole thing is profitable for instruction in righteousness." You, know, nobody that I am aware of taught that II Timothy 3:16 means "the whole Bible is perfect" before the 19th century... the 1800s. Some people started doing so as a response to the liberal protestant theology that began coming out of Germany in that century. Liberal protestant theology is based on Newtonian determinism, that is to say, that anything supernatural is completely ruled out as contrary to the laws of nature. (Newtonian determinism has since been found to be an inaccurate description of reality.) Liberal protestant theology holds that every account of anything supernatural happening in the Bible has to be a false story made up by the early Christians to persuade other people to believe something that never happened. The idea of Biblical inerrancy was formulated to refute the foundation of liberal protestant theology. Unfortunately, the foundation of inerrancy is just as flawed as the foundation of liberal protestant theology. Evangelical protestant theology, that the Bible was perfect in its original autographs, is just as wrong as liberal protestant theology, that all accounts of the supernatural in the Bible are lies. The notion of inerrancy became a tenet of evangelical protestantism at the Fundamentalist Conferences of the early 1900s, along with dispensationalism. Evangelical protestants have taken it so far as to say that things obviously figurative, like the two different, mutually contradictory accounts of creation in the first few chapters of Genesis HAVE TO BE believed as literally factual, even though they are blatantly FIGURATIVE, and were never intended by the authors to be taken as "true". So... "I think the bottom line, in my opinion, is that if you believe the Bible's testimony of itself that all scripture is God-breathed, then you must conclude that it can contain errors and contradictions and still be God-breathed." I don't believe it is "the Bible's testimony of itself that all scripture is God-breathed" in the evangelical protestant sense. It was Paul's testimony to Timothy that the law, the prophets and the other writings, all of it, was profitable in equipping the person who wants to serve God. The reason they are all profitable for serving God is because it was God himself who gave them. Notice, I did NOT say it was God who WROTE them. He didn't write them, he BREATHED them. Different things entirely! All for now... Yesterday was our 24th anniversary (me and LizzyBuzz), and we are going out tonight to celebrate! Love, Steve

I agree with everything you said in your post, Raf. There's only one thing in the Bible that has got to be a statement of reality, only one thing that a person has got to believe, and that one thing is that God raised Jesus from the dead. When I was 24 years old (1973), I was losing control of my life, literally and on the spot. I had already lost control of my breathing, and was hyperventilating. I wasn't a religious guy at the time. I was exploring the spirituality of C. G. Jung. I had read the Bible once as a class assignment, but I didn't understand it, and I didn't believe it was anything special. I had been in the process of losing control for two years, but this time, I knew I was going over the edge... As a last resort, because there was NOTHING else left that I could do, with no expectation of results, I cried out loud, "God help me..." ...as I did so, I remembered somewhere Jesus had said he'd do whatever we asked if we asked in his name... "...in the name of Jesus Christ." Immediately, my breathing returned to normal, I gradually calmed down, and SOMEBODY began teaching me how to change the things in my heart that were driving me crazy. It was not a "religious" experience. Whoever it was, he was teaching me in terms of steam engines and the six factor formula of reactor kinetics. I remember looking up one verse in a concordance during the next 6 1/2 years. It was John 15:13, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."That was the extent of my "biblical research" during that 6 1/2 years. It was as far as my capacity and inclination would take me. I did not go to any church, though I was interested in finding out more about the group called Unity. I learned that I sometimes got results when I prayed in the name of Jesus Christ. I wondered why that should be so. I read a book called "Real Magic" by Isaaac Bonewits (whom I later became acquainted with... Google him... he was an interesting character). It was from Bonewits' book that I learned what Wierwille taught in PFAL as the law of believing. According to Bonewits, the name of Jesus Christ was a focus that worked for me personally to amplify the power of my believing. One time, in 1978, I experienced the peace of God that passes all understanding. When I first went to twig in 1979 (partly because I thought it might be associated with Unity, which I still wanted to learn more about), the lady doing the teaching taught on Philippians 4:6&7. I was astonished! Here was something in the Bible that I knew from experience to be true, spiritual and useful! I had NEVER before heard anybody teach anything like that from the Bible! I thought to myself, "These people know something I want to find out more about!" Eventually I signed up for PFAL. I was willing to listen during that first encounter with PFAL, even though I was still slightly skeptical. Sometime during the eleventh session, it dawned on me that we were going to be called on at some point to speak in tongues. That didn't freak me out as much as it would have if I hadn't seen the grads in my twig speaking in tongues decently and in order. I knew I wasn't going to be called on to put on a Pentecostal-style show. During break, I went to an unoccupied restroom across campus from the classroom where PFAL was running, and I spoke in tongues in the restroom stall, just to make sure I wouldn't be embarrassed by inability when the time came. That was in July of 1980. Sometime later, I think it was in October, I was reading along in the Old Testament when I made a guess as to what a specific Hebrew word would be in a particular passage. I looked it up in a concordance, and I was RIGHT! I had taken my first step in learning to read the Bible for myself with understanding! It was that experience that sold me on the Bible, and PFAL. Decades later, here we all are... I never realized the role Jesus Christ has been playing in all of this until after I had shed the things Wierwille taught about the "absent Christ." I believe the Bible is accurate where it says that God raised Jesus from the dead. 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." Not only are you right, I will go you one farther and say that such a person would be walking on a delusional faith. Unfortunately, that's exactly what we see too many evangelical protestants doing. As I told one of my profs in a class about 4 1/2 years ago, "I don't believe that Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me so, I believe the Bible because the Lord who loves me led me to it." That was for the benefit of my fellow students who came from evangelical protestant backgrounds. I know the prof would have loved to say it himself, but he couldn't because he was the prof. I however, being only a student, could say anything I dang well pleased! The first eleven chapters of Genesis are, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating things that has ever been written, not because it is "history" as the evangelical protestants would have it, but because it is a conversational response to Babylonian history/myth. I think the Pentateuch was put together in the form we have it now by Jewish scholars who had been exiled to Babylon. I think they retold the history/myths of Babylon, but replaced the motives and actions of the Babylonian gods with the motives and actions of YHWH. The differences between YHWH and ALL of the surrounding gods are STARK! STARK! STARK! I don't think anybody can understand what Genesis 1-11 is really saying without at least a cursory knowledge of 6th century BCE culture in Mesopotamia. Is it full of what we could call contradictions and errors? Yes, indeed! Can it still be God-breathed in the sense that The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien-breathed? I think so... In a very real sense, I am not arguing. The conclusions I've come to are based on my experiences. My experiences are the only ones I can speak from, and they don't invalidate any other person's experiences. This is more an exercise in articulation rather than an attempt to persuade. There are still more truths from your post, Raf, that I want to comment on, but not right now. More later... Love, Steve

Thanks for your input, Mark, and Raf! One of the reasons I considered and finally decided to post this question on this particular forum is this... The position of fundamentalist, evangelical protestants is this: "If it's God-breathed, it can't contain any contradictions, because God is perfect, and as such, he cannot contradict himself. And it's ALL God-breathed, so if there is ONLY ONE CONTRADICTION, then the WHOLE thing falls apart." It seems to me that this is not so much the statement of a self-evident truth as it is a statement of faith. It would appear that it is a statement of faith that former fundamentalist, evangelical protestants continue to hold even after they have lost faith in the Bible and God. It is faith in this statement that I am questioning on this thread. My interest in this question stems from much more than my former involvement with TWI and its offshoots. For the last four-and-a-half years I have been involved with furthering the education of youngsters in the Bible. Those coming from a fundamentalist, evangelical protestant background have difficulties, sometimes severe difficulties, dealing with the objective fact that, as Raf has so aptly put it, "The Bible contradicts itself. A lot." So, where am I going with all this? First, a poem from Tolkien: All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not touched by the frost. That's a quote from the chapter "Strider" in The Fellowship of the Ring. The Holy Spirit used that piece of scripture to guide me during the 6 1/2 years before I realized I could read and understand what the Bible says, and the much longer period before I realized who the Holy Spirit actually is. I wandered before I got involved with TWI, I wandered while I was involved with TWI and its offshoots, and I have continued to wander to this day. I was wandering as I walked to the Credit Union last Friday. I am going to wander in the rest of this post... but I was NEVER lost, the Holy Spirit has been with me all the way. Our first peregrination will be, not into the topic of what does it mean to be God-breathed, but into "what does it mean to be breathed?" What IS breath? How does it work? Breath is an oscillatory motion. Air moves back and forth between two extremes. One of those extremes consists of the lungs. The other extreme is the atmosphere. But the oscillatory motion goes deeper than that. Oxygen is carried away from the lungs as molecular oxygen, O2 and back to the lungs in the form of CO2. But the oscillation goes deeper than that! In the process of cellular respiration, electrons flow back and forth to power the other processes that comprise life itself. The ancients didn't know all the scientific facts of cellular respiration, but they knew the truth of it. the LORD God breathed into man's nostrils, and he became a living being. The life of the flesh is in the blood. One expression of life is oscillatory motion. The literal, concrete definition of "spirit" is "air in motion", the same as "wind" or "breath". Literal spirit (breath) became so closely associated with life that the word took on the figurative meaning of "life-force". It's possible to view the motion of wind as random, but the ancients did not do so. The Hebrews viewed the motion of wind as being subject to the will of the Spirit. The Stoics developed a whole science of tonic or spirit motion, which bore some similarities to oscillatory motion. When Jesus said "God is Spirit" in John 4:24, he wasn't saying "God is a bunch of air blowing around." Jesus was saying, "Whatever it is that God is composed of, it is life-giving and it is in oscillatory motion. It is also related to all this other Spirit stuff we're talking about." All for now... my oscillatory motion is dampening... Love, Steve

For all these years, I was intimidated by Hebrew, but when I started taking the class, I was shocked and amazed by how EASY it it! Much easier than Greek, yet vastly different from English. Hebrew HAS NO TENSES! NO PAST, PRESENT OR FUTURE! Action is either completed or not completed. Some words have their completion in the past, others in the future. There is a grammatical "switch" that changes future to past, and past to future... but there is no concept of action completed at the present time! Just think how THAT blows "perfect in the original autographs" out of the water! Love, Steve

Securing atonement through the sacrifice of a lamb was a ritual action that pointed forward to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. God never "changed his mind" about how to deal with "mankind". Stop and think about it. If the church is completely separate and discontinuous from Israel, if none of the promises to Israel can be applied to the Church, then Jesus' death on the cross has nothing to do with the Church. Indeed, if Wierwille was correct about Romans 9-11 being addressed to Israel and to Gentiles, then Romans 10:9&10 is addressed to Jews ONLY! Dispensationalists are enemies of the cross of Christ, just like it says in Philippians 3:18. Love, Steve

That and marketing... it wasn't really Word Over the World, it was PFAL Over the World... :( Love, Steve

I hope this is the appropriate place for a discussion of this question! I don't really view it as a consideration of doctrine so much as a consideration of meta-doctrine. The question has interested me for some time, but I wasn't able to articulate it fully until today. I can pose the question now as a result of three activities in my life impinging upon each other. 1. My physical health has become much more fragile in the last six months or so. I am on oxygen. I have emergency antibiotics to take immediately if I think I'm coming down with a cold. My kidneys are not sending the proper chemical signals to my bone marrow to tell it to generate more blood cells. Consequently I have anemia that varies from day to day. Sometimes, when I'm getting a good supply of oxygen to my brain, everything is fine. Other times, when I'm not getting sufficient O2 to the ol' grey matter, my thinking is sluggish, and my movements are erratic. I wear a "Help" button on my wrist in case I find myself incapacitated. This morning I had Hebrew from 8 am till 9. While I was sitting there, I had to ask myself, am I up to translating these sentences off the cuff along with the rest of the students? I had to assess the speed of my mind. It wasn't good enough. This afternoon, I walked 6 blocks (round trip) to make a cash deposit at the Credit Union. Before deciding to leave home, I had to assess what I'd have to do to make it back. I knew places where I could cross the street with a light, and where I could sit if I needed to, The biggest question was, will I be steady enough? will I fall down somewhere along the way? I decided to go, and even though there was a time or two when my feet stuttered, I did okay. I've had to become extremely conscious of everything that is going on inside my body (including when I poop and when I only fart), and WHY it's happening. I'll tell you what I was thinking about during the walk... but first, the other two activities... 2. I decided to take Hebrew this fall. I've ALWAYS been intimidated by it before, probably because I can't do fancy calligraphy, but one of the first things I found out was that I don't have to do fancy calligraphy. Hebrew has a very simple "block" or "square" style that is easy enough for me to do with mechanical pencils on lined paper. It also has a cursive script that our prof uses on the board. It's simpler than English cursive. I took a couple of years of Greek between the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2013, so I have some experience to make comparisons. I was surprised to find out that Hebrew is NOT an inflected language, which means parsing it is much simpler than parsing Greek. Greek definitions are like saltine crackers, flat, precise and regular, with a modicum of flavor and a functional minimalism. Greek definitions are fragile like crackers, too! Hebrew definitions are like fruitcakes, multi-dimensional masses of possibilities, with fruit and nuts and other less identifiable things mingling in an irregular melange. Hebrew definitions will outlast mankind. The meaning of a Hebrew word, whether you are trying to find the right one to use, or trying to figure out how to translate one from a text, depends on how you slice the definition. Slice it one way, and the meaning will be entirely different than if you had sliced it another way. 3. The AU School of Theology is not and never has been fundamentalist The Church of God Reformation Movement (Anderson, Indiana) never participated in the fundamentalist conferences of the very early twentieth century. Therefore, the SOT has never taught that "the Word of God was perfect in the original autographs." Likewise, the SOT has never been caught up in dispensationalism. Some of the professors hold with inerrancy. Others do not. They have agreed to disagree on that topic. But students come to AU from many different denominational backgrounds, and the ones who come from evangelical protestant faith communities often find it jarring that so many of the things they were taught about the Bible in Sunday school just aren't true (those Sunday school teachings do not accord with objective reality). Evangelical protestants (called "fundamentalists" before 1925) teach that since all scripture is God-breathed, and God is perfect, there can be NO CONTRADICTIONS in the Bible. If there is only ONE contradiction in the Bible, then the whole thing falls apart, it cannot be God-breathed, and NONE OF IT is true! This is something we all have to be aware of, and be caring for, when we deal with students who have not been here long enough to realize that the SOT is deliberately teaching that the love of God trumps doctrinal purity. ----- So, what was I thinking about as I staggered toward the Credit Union? Before I set out, while considering how reliable my gait might be, I thought of dynamic balance as opposed to static balance, the sort of thing a bicycle manifests. I googled it without finding much, but I found A LOT about the relation between static and dynamic STABILITY. Apparently it's a subject of interest among airplane designers. A plane is statically stable sitting on the ground. When a plane is in flight, there are many multi-dimensional forces acting on the plane. When a plane is moving along at a steady pace and height, with a steady attitude, it is considered to be dynamically stable. When anything happens to change any of those many, multi-dimensional forces, the plane enters into an oscillating movement. It swings back and forth in some direction. There can be three degrees of oscillation: dampened oscillation that gradually returns the plane to dynamic stability, recurring oscillation whose amplitude neither grows nor shrinks, and driven oscillation where the amplitude feeds back into itself until all control is lost. So there I was intently focused on my internal processes so I wouldn't keel over on the sidewalk, thinking in terms of oscillation, when it dawned on me. Everything going on in me, from the air entering and exiting through my nose and mouth, to the cellular respiration where electrons are carried back and forth to power the chemical functions in each of my cells, in my brain and muscles, ALL OF IT, consists of oscillating motion in dynamic relationships. Those motions are generated and balanced by TENSIONS, contradictions of levels of energy that produce and direct MOVEMENT. Life IS NOT static! It's very nature is imbalance and movement. The God of the Hebrews was NOT static! The imbalance and movement of life in creation is a direct reflection of the imbalance and movement of the Creator. If the Bible is God-breathed, it could NOT be static! The words of ink may sit there statically on the paper, but the ideas behind those words are in imbalance and produce flow... the flow of ideas. Not only is the Bible full of contradictions, the very language of it is necessarily contradictory. Poetic knowledge is much more real than propositional knowledge because poetic knowledge is directly drawn from concrete human experiences, expressed in similes and metaphors. Contradiction (tension) is automatically part of the expression of poetic truth because no comparison (simile or metaphor) has a 100% correspondence to objective reality. Propositional knowledge is an expression of relationship farther abstracted from direct human experience. The language of propositional knowledge is mathematics, and as far as scientists have gone into such things as the Higgs Boson, quantum mechanics and string theory, their math still doesn't have a 100% correspondence to objective reality either. Where did the idea of a static God who cannot contradict himself come from? Not from the Hebrew Bible, that's for sure! It came from Greek philosophers who defined perfection as static balance (that lacks the ability to move or be moved). Greek philosophers would have found Genesis 1:2b, "...the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters..." SCANDALOUS! The idea that God can be a living thing is STILL scandalous to far too many people. The idea that his Word, the flow of ideas behind the ink on the paper, can be a living thing is almost inconceivable. All for now... more later... I love you ALL, and am thankful for your companionship through all of this! Steve

Just for the sake of clarity, Wierwille didn't teach dispensationalism in the tradition of E.W. Bullinger. Bullinger was the father of ultra-dispensationalism, which goes something like this: A dispensation is a period of time when God deals with man in a certain way. When God changes his mind about how to deal with man, the new dispensation is in and the old dispensation is out (I feel like Heidi Klum on Project Runway!). But the change in "administrations" cannot come before the revelation of the change. The administration of the mystery could not begin until the "revelation of the mystery" to Paul... Therefore, the present administration did NOT begin on the day of Pentecost described in Acts chapter 2, but at some later date (exactly when is a point of contention). The dispensdationalism taught by Wierwille probably came from whatever source B.G. Leonard was using in his class. Lynn and Schoenheit are functional ultra-dispensationalists, even though they hold that the church administration began on the day of Pentecost, because they teach that God could not reveal the SACRED SECRETTM before Paul was "broken of his Jewish mindset" (Momentus terminology) after he was captured in Jerusalem (Acts 21). Therefore, we are free to ignore whatever we want to suppress that Paul wrote to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians and Thessalonians! If you find all this confusing, though, don't worry, GET A CHART AND GET A LIFE!TM Love, Steve