TheEvan

I've lost track of Ellen (6) and I don't remember her maiden name. Anybody? Ellen, dear, are you out there? My daughter is applying to Brown for grad school and I've got general questions. You did go to Brown, nay? Evan

Heh! Nice to see yyou. If you peek in here again, exound a bit on your experience "unschooling". We've finished our homeschooling and we networked with many doing the same. I read about unschooling and found the concept interesting and a bit troubling.

Total shock! Oh Rum, my old friend! I am so sorry for your loss.

Lombardi-Gras begins!

I think VP would have felt intimidated by Koestler's intellect and academic achievements Apparently Koestler was a highly intelligent monster. I don't think "highly intelligent" fits the old cornfield preacher. I enjoyed the article. Strange person, that.

Rum, Didn't we take Christmas (or Thanksgiving) meal together in Keene that year? Would have been '75. It was at the home of a fine New England lady. I remember the Yorkshire pudding, which I viewed with a mixture of interest & horror. We had, among other things, BBQ turkey yesterday. Here's my recipe: This is a nice alternative to traditional roast turkey, which I associate with dry, bland and stringy breast meat. It has the added bonus of freeing oven space for those other dishes you need to prepare for a holiday feast. 1 turkey 1 pint of fresh Creole seasoning vegetables (such as Guidry’s Fresh Cuts, found in the produce section). 1 lb andouille sausage, diced. 1 bottle of Jack Miller’s or similar BBQ sauce. Stubb’s original is acceptable, but do not use a dark caramel sauce like KC Masterpiece. The flavor definitely clashes with turkey. 1 small can of frozen limeade concentrate. Prepare by cutting the turkey in half bilaterally. This will require a heavy sharp knife, strength and patience. Poultry shears will help in some places. Sauté seasoning vegetables and sausage until the onions are clarified. Make deep cuts in the thighs and breast meats and stuff with sauté mix. Also stuff the mix under the skin wherever possible. Reserve the remaining sauté mix. Wrap each half with 4 layers of wide heavy-duty Reynolds foil (other brands won’t hold up to the fire). Place on grill, bone side down, for about 2 hours on a medium fire. Be careful when placing them on the grill that you don’t tear the foil. Combine the reserved sauté mix with BBQ sauce and limeade concentrate. After two hours of cooking, turn each half (now meat side down), make a small opening on the sides now facing up, and pour in BBQ sauce-limeade-sauté mix. Reserve the remainder to serve tableside. Close up the slits. Cook for about one hour. The turkey will not need much carving as it will have fallen to bits by now. Place the undignified mess on a platter as is, or if you’d like to get fancy you can separate the meats from the bone and arrange nicely on a serving piece. Either way, enjoy. In retrospect, test with a thermometer. Those times could have been reduced about 25%

WG: I'll do my best with it. Again bear in mind I don't speak for Calvinism, though I do believe in their doctrine of election as I understand it. I find their approach to articulating their beliefs pedantic at times, sometimes very much so. I hope you find my less precise language will contain something useful to you. The elect do not go to heaven "no matter how bad they are". Nor do they go to heaven "no matter what". They must hear the gospel, be enlightened to their wretched state and need for a Savior, repent and believe. They are then heaven-bound, not on the merit of their election, but on the merit of Christ's sacrifice alone. That said, election says that a response of faith to the gospel is a work of the Holy Spirit, not because some enlightened soul woke up one day and thought it grand idea to repent and be saved. There are some erroneous responses or beliefs about predestination/election. Some take it as "whatever will be will be". For them, "faith" is an impersonal, stoic thing. They adopt a sort of religious fatalism. Why try? Why witness? After all, whatever will, will be, right? This wrong. Though man is not the master of his own destiny, the scripture still makes each person responsible for their own soul. Furthermore, God is not arbitrary, as many have depicted him. That is another wrong take on election & predestination. Nothing about God is arbitrary. Everything is according to a specific plan, for his purposes and glory. That we fail to understand his ways doesn't make him arbitrary. In summary, salvation is shown as being God's work in Christ Damnation is shown as being man's own work and responsibility. But then again I'm not really a calvinist. (My good calvinist friend calls me a 3.75 point calvinist, but I wouldn't know :) )

I can understand your sentiment...but it isn't, really. Now I don't say this from a Calvinist perspective, not being one myself. But it really does matter if God meant predestination or if he meant simply foreknowledge that seems like predestination. If we (our 'free will') are the hinge upon which salvation rests, if God has made his move and now is waiting for us to make ours and has placed his workings in a subordinate role to our action or faith, then our walk is fraught with uncertainty, as it well should. I have good reason to be uncertain about myself! But if God's plan is entirely in his hands and he will call you, save you and guide you until Christ be perfected in you then you can rest easy knowing he is in charge. He will be faithful to complete what he has begun. This is where the peace that so many are missing rests.

This performance is, if anything, more amazing. Here, Goran is doing a fabulous job of what must be the most difficult of all on guitar: bringing out the different lines of fugue with clarity and separation. Follow Bach's ingeneous chromatic inner lines as they move from the low to middle voices and finally the top voice. Oops, can't figrue out how to embed a YouTube clip. The link works anyway.

Charlie Musselwhite? Sure enough! He's something of a blues legend. Here's my contribution from a stone cold virtuoso: Goran Krivokapic - Bach Violin Sonata III Allegro Assai (arranged for guitar)

Marvelous! I found it at cyber hymnal

I'll look forward to it. It's a lovely text but unfamiliar.

I know it not...

Nor I, though I recognize only a smattering of Gaither songs & hymns. I just found this. You folks have been having fun and I didn't know! A bit more contemporary than most submissions here, but this is a fave. Fourth stanza. O Cross that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee; I lay in dust life’s glory dead, And from the ground there blossoms red Life that shall endless be.

Body or Bride? Yes.

It gets old, doesn't it? We are now back on after having been without power for 9 days following Gustav. We got phone/cable/net back on the 10th day, but some are still waiting, going on 3 weeks. It got old after day 7. Before that it was lots of fun. But heat, exhaution & stress take their toll.

Keith, I think the short answer is that deviant sexual predators have an uncanny 'nose' for the vulnerable, those whose fences aren't solidly in place. People that have been abused simply don't have the equipment to escape on their own and the abuser senses this. It's heartbreaking to think that the most fragile...those on need of gentlest treatment, instead got carefully set up and abused in the most callous manner. I loved the book. I, too, was able to identify a great many characters in the drama. I had lots of red flags about Der Veg but kept getting stopped by thinking similar to what Kris expressed. And I wasn't being abused. Abuse submerges you in a unique 'fog' that makes clear thinking nigh impossible.

What an interesting read! The further I go the 'engrossder' I get. The heartbreaking child-beating vignette, though billed as fiction, was only partially so. Though the names are different, I remember the house, the people (the details are there, down to the fingernails), everything. His getting tossed from the way in 79 makes for gripping reading. What an awful cult.

Gosh, what a great find, Seth. Thanks for posting that. It's funny to see my name in print like that. Obviously Jay is a thoughtful guy and I think he's a fine writer. Despite his description I never beat up people in 8th grade, but I did fall in with a tough crowd when I moved to Wichita from the Bay Area (having recently lost both parents to suicide) to live with my grandfather. I was in 8th grade there for less than 6 weeks before my grandfather shipped me off to military school. I believe that Jay was in ministry with John Juedes for a time, but I don't know where he is now nor what he is doing. I always meant to apologize to him for my role in dragging him into the way. But perhaps he, like I do, sees it as part of God's sovereign plan that the Lord has used to weave together the people we have become.

Actually, bride, your position is closer to Calvinist soteriology than you might think. The Calvinist view of salvation maintains that if the ongoing sanctification (your "being saved", if you will) is not in evidence, then the initial receiving of Christ was a sham, a religious self-deception. They see soteriology in its totality from foreordination and election, though initial faith and subsequent sanctification to ultimate salvation in the end. Same totality as you declare, somewhat different particulars. I would only take issue with "three salvations". There is only one salvation Christ came to bring to his sheep and it is a complete salvation. As you said, we are not saved by our doctrine, but by faith in Christ alone. Romans 3:25 "Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, "

Great post, Chuck. There are a number of competing theologies on salvation and they all seem to have good support, biblically. I'll not address that here. The fact that you are having a "faith crisis" can be a most wonderful thing, as it certainly was for me. My uncertainty and anguish literally drove me to my knees. In the end I got an assurance I never had before and in many ways that was the real start of my life of Christian service. I no longer thought I was saved because of what I believed, but I knew I belonged to God because He is the one who gave me the assurance. That experience gave me separation from my old Way beiefs like no other experience. My advice is to continue to seek God in prayer. He will answer. Good (if sometimes uncomfortable) journey!

nice leica

Sunesis or others, can you recommend anything on the topic that deals with the state of the dead biblically? I'm particularly interested in something that answers the annhilationist and 'soul-sleep' positions we learned in Der Weg. We have a home fellowship with a mix of former Way and never Way. A wonderful 'never-Way' man brought up this very question and a brief discussion ensued. I've been meditating on it and the word-picture of Lazarus being 'in the bosom of Abraham' resonates with me. So I'm interested, not that I expect to solve the problem and declare a written-in-stone doctrine, but in seeing the value of the orthodox position. (I've often described my post-Way journey as a long, slow slide into orthodoxy) Preacher, folks can engage in 'dueling bibles' till kingdom come and only sow discord and never solve a thing. Why is doctrine so important? How important should it be? Must we have a certain doctrinal statement for every possible point? I think not and I think it is a mistake to think there are no mysteries that will remain unsoved. No wonder the apostle wrote "GREAT is the mystery of godliness..."

Well gee, you're welcome. :)

Lots of nice comments. To many I'd simply say 'ditto'. Don't get caught up in semantics, though. If I wanted to get technical I suppose I'd say that tongues is a gift that is manifested when you haul off and speak in tongues. I think the methodology used to 'lead people into' tongues in PFAL is flawed because it emphasises mechanics (which are quite absent from scriptures) at the expense of simple faith. Notice I said 'faith' and not your believing. No wonder we are left doubting. I think having a faith crisis in the wake of The Way is normal and healthy if not particularly comfortable. At the root of your uncertainty is the fact that you were told these things by a flawed person who passed himself off as a holy man of God. It was 'predigested' and you are unsure because the knowledge didn't come to you by the Holy Spirit. When I had my faith crisis I was literally driven to my knees in desperation. I admitted to God that I really didn't know anything any more, even if I was saved. I begged Him to show Himself to me and let me know if I were saved or not. I'll spare you the whole testimony, but I will say that God did give me an assurance of salvation and it wasn't through speaking in tongues. I no longer have a person to doubt, because my assurance came from the Lord himself. I can tell you I've been a different person since and that my ministry to others began in earnest that day. There is no formula. Ask God for an answer. He delights in answering his seeking children. I will pray for you.