waysider

Didn't you pay attention at twig the other night? It's all about our lack of believing. It's our fault. We need to start speaking in tongues more. Taking a dump? No excuse. You can SIT while you s*it. And don't forget Ephesians. Reading that sucker 10 times a day is simply not enough. Strive for 25 or 30. I know you can do it. I'm believing for you.

Would any of us have joined The Way if we had known what was in our futures?

There is a ton of good information in that video. The extraneous noises distracted me at first but made me focus more on what is being presented. It's a gem.

Yeah, they weren't too keen on that. Had to pick apart every little thing, looking for faults (real or imaginary).

"I'll take 'Because it's a cult' for $500, Alex."

We were advised that we would be labeled a cult because of our belief in the "Jesus Christ Is Not God" doctrine, completely ignoring the reality there are cults that aren't even Christian, or otherwise religion oriented in any way. It wasn't our Biblical beliefs that defined us as a cult, it was our crazy lifestyle and propensity for commune-like living arrangements.

In general terms, what I remember is how we scrambled to come up with believable rationalizations we could give to outsiders that would clarify why we were not like the people at Jonestown. We downplayed any similarities.

It's not going anywhere. :)

A spiritual epicenter; Yeah, in FellowLaborers, this concept played a big role. We were told that HQ is the spiritual epicenter and, because we were also in Ohio, what we did and "believed" had a spiritual impact on the whole *cough* ministry. In fact, there was an incident I have cited here previously involving the abrupt (though temporary) discontinuation of the whole program. We were told that, because of our shortfalls as a group and lack of proper "believing", Word Over The World and the future of the ministry was in jeopardy of failing. No condemnation though. Long story made short, we were given a second chance to prove our worthiness, contingent on our unwavering obedience to leadership. Fun times abounded. (Said no one......... until decades of nostalgia clouded their memories of reality)

"What do you guys think? Is this screwed up in some way I haven't yet noticed?" Yes, it fails to question the author's credibility .

"some mad minds who will not adhere to God's word call The Way a cult as they did Jesus Christ." I didn't know one person could be a cult all by himself. Interesting.

In most cases of bullying (the adult type, not the "mean kid on the playground" type) the most effective way of coping is not "standing up to it", but rather removing oneself from the source.

Do people even realize he sometimes surrounded himself with bodyguards? Do they know he would sometimes dispatch thugs to "have a word" with dissenters on the field?

GUTS

I never stood up to VPW because I never interacted with him. I did, however, stand up to leadership, including the limb leader. It cost me a lot. People who know me in real life are probably chuckling because my obstinance was usually the very thing that got me in trouble. It's a mistake to assume that no one pushed back. As Rocky pointed out, there were lots of people who stood up against the system. Their voices were squelched in the process. Remember, too, at the time, most of us had no idea the problems we saw were widespread and systemic. No, I don't see it as a problem of lack of guts. Lack of common sense, sure, but not a lack of guts.

"They just go along with the standard doctrine of the church of their choice, feeling they have nowhere else to go." That's what I meant by getting on the bandwagon.

I think that's called "getting on the bandwagon".

I don't know if this will help. PFAL was filmed in 1967. In one of the sessions, VPW says, "When Christ returns, he'll be coming back as King of King and Lord of Lords. He'll be coming back as Lord God Almighty!" This is a trinitarian viewpoint. I took PFAL in the summer of 1972. By that time, the "Jesus Christ is not God" doctine was being promoted. So, I would say it was sometime within that 5 year stretch. As class instructors, we were told to smooth over students' questions by stating that VP used to be trinity oriented but new research had changed that and he merely had a slip of the tongue. I asked why he didn't just rerecord that session and was told that the session was so perfect as it was it couldn't be duplicated with the needed correction. I call B.S. on that. I think what happened is VP latched onto this new (to him) stance in order to make his product both unique and controversial. edit: wording and spelling

There is a fundamental problem with the logic of this. It first assumes that those "proper" words have been authored by God to begin with. That takes us back to square one.

Jargon is a common characteristic of cults and exclusive groups. It lets the participants feel they have special knowledge, an edge over the outsider. (If you had spent more time in S.I.T. with your lift list, you would have already realized this.)

Public humiliation. (or fear of it) It's powerful and it's effective.

I had never heard the terminology "plenary verbal inspiration" so I took a quick peek online. To my layman's mind it pretty much conveys the same thing as "God had a purpose for everything He said, where, how, why and so on." Maybe I'm missing something.... It wouldn't be the first (or last) time. From what you have posted, I deduce you: 1.) Accept the obvious reality that contradictions exist. 2.) Are of the opinion the contradictions don't negate the possibility of the scriptures being divinely inspired Please correct me if I've misunderstood your position. As to the matter of our current and most recent generation hearing/ignoring the Holy Spirit/Spirit of God: Though that is an interesting topic in an of itself, unless it relates to the broader topic at hand, I don't see the relevance. We're not talking about a divine connection in the present, we're talking about a divine connection from times that are long gone by. edit: darn fingers don't want to cooperate tonight.

The pneuma hagion concept presented in PLAF (The Wonder Class) is that God had a purpose for everything He said, where He said it, to whom He said it, yada, yada, ad infinitum. This makes it look more like it was hammered out by a bunch of ad hoc committee members or reddit regular posters, one upping each other with comments about OP's mom. ..................................... Edited because words are supposed to have spaces between them and stuff.

"There were probably occasional odd writers in Israel prior to the reign of Solomon, but it was only during his reign that the government became wealthy enough to establish an "industrial strength" scriptorium, where a full time staff was fed in order to crank out all sorts of material. It's almost certain that one of their first projects would be to produce a narrative confirming Solomon's legitimacy to the throne, hence 1 and 2 Samuel. The story of David and Goliath would be one of the cornerstones of that narrative, but there was only one problem. The time when David came to power was only a little over 40 years before the time Solomon's scriptorium began operating. The events of David's rise to power were still part of living memory, and Solomon's writers couldn't just throw all of that away. There were still plenty of people who could say "That just ain't the way it was!" So to compromise, the writers included the popular, glorious story of puny David's victory over the hulking Goliath... but they introduced it with the truth, about David coming to Saul to minister through music. And if that wasn't enough, the writers of the narrative revealed in 2 Samuel 21:19 that it wasn't David, but rather Elhanan who killed Goliath. Notice that the words the brother of in that verse are in italics. They aren't there in the Hebrew. And if it isn't enough to look at just a few contradictions in Samuel, there also seems to be an irreconcilable error. 1 Samuel 13:1 (KJV) reads "Saul reigned one year; and when he had reigned two years over Israel..." The verse literally reads "A son of one year was Saul when he became king, and two years he reigned over Israel" in the Hebrew. What does that mean? It makes for some interesting thinking! The earliest characters in the Tanakh are counter-mythological, to attack the myths of the sixth-century BCE Babylonians, among whom the descendants of Solomon's scribes had been exiled. The poetic truths these characters reveal are truths about who the LORD God is, and how he works. Beginning with Abraham, I think, and proceeding through characters like Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Joshua, we have legendary characters. I think there were real people at the heart of these stories, but the characters took on exaggerated characteristics as the stories were told through generation after generation. It is very hard to read them as if they were the kind of people we know and are. But when we come to David, the writers can't get away with just foisting off the legends. They have to include the truth, too. From there, things become more and more concrete." Pardon me for saying so but you're not exactly strengthening your case for the pneuma hagion concept. Ya know what I mean, Vern?

I didn't say God shouldn't be able to use irony. What I did say is that there are plenty of examples of irony in secular writing. That means the Bible doesn't hold exclusive rights to irony or any other figure of speech.