quote: Well........After corps "training" my stereotype of twi was that if you step out of line just a little, you will be labeled a cop-out and might go to hell.
Impossible. Incorruptible seed means you don't go to hell...ever. If someone actually said that to you then they did, but that's not pfal.
johniam.......I know.
But then.......you never sat in those wierwille-veins-popping yellfests when all hell broke loose. Man, wierwille and martindale and others could really spit out some over-the-top fear manipulation by using scriptures such as "salt losing its savor" or "like a dog returning to his vomit" or "being loaded up with devil spirits like a new
boot in hell."
Believe it or not..........the wierwille of pfal was NOT the wierwille of corps training.
Seems like if you took PFAL and just lived on the field in VP's day, you stood a chance of having a pretty good experience with twi. If you went into the corps under VP, well... you were in for a rude shock in many respects.
Perhaps one of the biggest changes under LCM is that what the corps experienced, bled out onto the field almost immediately. Every standard presented as "corps level" soon trickled down to "adv class grad" to "fellowship coordinators" to "standing grads" standards. And then even to "new grads" standards. Ridiculous!!
Sometimes I wonder, if I had stopped my involvement with twi after taking PFAL, what would I believe today... probably just about everything I was taught in that class... I felt like I had been enlightened. I felt like I had been given answers I'd hoped for my whole life. I felt like I could do anything with my life, and help others do the same!
Of course, I was 20 years old. And I think that's how most 20-yr-olds feel, with or without the class...
quote: But then.......you never sat in those wierwille-veins-popping yellfests when all hell broke loose. Man, wierwille and martindale and others could really spit out some over-the-top fear manipulation by using scriptures such as "salt losing its savor" or "like a dog returning to his vomit" or "being loaded up with devil spirits like a new
boot in hell."
Believe it or not..........the wierwille of pfal was NOT the wierwille of corps training.
To be fair, I recall that during ROA 1980 VP did the ordination ceremony as part of one of the night's presentations. Of course he wanted to convey the seriousness of ordination into the Christian ministry. I remember him saying, "If you're ordained and you sleep in until 10AM, I hope you DIE!!!"
That got my attention, but from my 'being on the field' pov, the stuff about way corps and reverends that turned me off was not their occasional exhortations to be committed, it was the occasional arrogance; the 'I'm better than you' attitude.
quote: Well........After corps "training" my stereotype of twi was that if you step out of line just a little, you will be labeled a cop-out and might go to hell.
Impossible. Incorruptible seed means you don't go to hell...ever. If someone actually said that to you then they did, but that's not pfal.
Hell moved. Instead of being in the afterlife, it came here to earth. If you walked out on God(TWI) you got possessed, your family got possessed, your marriage/health/whaterever got destroyed--you know, the 'Greasespot by midnight' threat.
As far as PFAL, I am not a Christian, I believe there is life after death--not heaven for the good and hell for the bad, but a spiritual life...
As far as the trinity--I think Jesus is a Deity. People worship him, pray to him and get answers...Whether he is the same one as God, I don't know.
But I view trinitarians as having one god with a duo( or trio) nature, and non trinitarians as having duo gods, though they don't know what to to with Jesus--but still somehow they all have one God...and the holy Spirit is some nebulous, hard to define spiritual entity or energy or something...either part of God or not a god...
Even though I learned to respect authority at home, I was bombarded with it at twi. I rebelled some when I moved out of my parents' home, but not much. HOWEVER, it took me a long time to realize that I could respect authority and still stand up for myself (at work).
It took even longer for me to do that with twi.
I finally stood up to a creep of a boss and we had a good relationship, for the most part, after that. He even came to our car wash after the trucking company that we worked for moved. I loved taking his money. I wanted to charge him double.
Anyway, it was a few years after that, that I walked about from twi.
I question alot of what was taught in piffle. I still believe mostly what I was taught as a child.
It took me YEARS to realize that I was afraid that something bad would happen to me when I left. I walked away from twi in 1994 and have not looked back. The ONLY bad thing that has happened in my life in all those years was my brother getting killed in a truck accident. The rest of my life has been so much greater than I ever dreamed while in twi. They spewed about the more abundant life....what a joke..... I have an abundant life NO THANKS to them or ANYTHING they taught.
To be fair, I recall that during ROA 1980 VP did the ordination ceremony as part of one of the night's presentations. Of course he wanted to convey the seriousness of ordination into the Christian ministry. I remember him saying, "If you're ordained and you sleep in until 10AM, I hope you DIE!!!"
And.....that was a public statement.
Now.....try to imagine what wierwille said BEHIND CLOSED DOORS to the corps or clergy.
The biggest thing I learned in PFAL was that Jesus Christs atonement covered ALL my sins not just the ones I could remember. that was a tremendous load lifted from my shoulders. {Still remember VPW making all those X's on the board}
And yes I still believe that and have had it affirmed many times since.
Me too MO. That was one of the biggies in my life too.
I am no fan of vp or pfal, and I’ve tried at times to come up with anything at all positive I got from twi. There is one thing I do remember that caused me to sit bolt upright:
1Cr 2:8 Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known [it], they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
Oh geez. I am writing this post remembering something along the lines of had the devil known it blah, blah, blah. Now I read “princes” plural, and so I realize there is a good chance it refers to the government and church leaders…
The entire rest of the class I was bored beyond belief and uncomfortable from the metal chairs.
As far as are the dead alive now, I don’t care. I trust God to take care of it. The trinity? I didn’t believe it to start with. At the same time, I know twi diminished Jesus a LOT. I am not through with this subject.
Beyond that, I have a lot of Bible in my head and still have many twi doctrinal “fleas.” A real chaff and wheat situation, which I continue to sort thru, much like a big fire and sifting through the ashes.
For those that think twi was a great thing, well I don’t suppose to be a judge of what others should think.
When I was a kid and took it for the first time, the fact that VPW was clearly from another planet (Ohio) than mine (California) made it interesting. He had the slicked back hair, the skinny little preacher frame. He looked like the preachers my Mom had talked about that she'd seen growing up in Illinois. So that part of it had a certain charm at the time. All that struttin' and hootin' was a kick. Literally, it was funny to me and lots of other people too. Not in a bad way, it was just funny.
I remember back in 1970, going to the Youth Advance that year at the Way Nash, and playing with a group at the SNS. We were there for a few week, and in those services, it was - to use a phrase from PFAL - "hottern' a firecracker!" There was lots of Ohio-like people there and the crowd was off the hook, as they say. VP's be smackin' his bible and his hair would get messed up "that's it baby! Don't tell me the bible's full of error!! It's God's WORD!!!" (smack smack smack). It was a lot of fun, with moments that were kinda over the top, in a good way. It was like he'd said in PFAL - if you get excited at sports event and love the bible, what's wrong with getting a little excited over it? He was. He was dealing. .
The two most interzesting parts for moi were, the segments on the new birth and the sonship rights, specifically that the quality of life a Christian was meant to live progressed from and out of who they were as children of God. It didn't make sense right off because for me the idea of developing that understanding strictly from the bible was a fairly new one. I had been raised Roman Catholic where doctrine wasn't solely based on a single source like the bible but rather was a blend of evolved ideas and beliefs. So that grabbed me.
Despite the fact that I took VPW as the sole authority for biblical interpretation for awhile, the idea of learning the bible and the spirit of God opening it up to me was from PFAL, too. The "he that has ears to hear" from the bible rang out pretty loudly to me at the time.
When I first took PFAL I was taken in by Wierwille's enthusiasm and by his confidence. I didn't know enough to argue with him and he made what seemed to be sense at the time. By the time I left TWI I had seen enough made-up definitions of Greek and Hebrew words, references to documents that nobody else had seen, assertions that there just "had to be" a text that backed up one of his positions despite there being overwhelming evidense to the contrary, numerous mentions of what "the original" said when he also said there were no originals, twisting of verses and contexts that would have made a pretzel maker envious, screwy applications of obscure verses...that I threw it all out. If any of my current beliefs line up with PFAL it is purely by coincidence.
That was an awesome post. Very well put. Thanks. I feel the same way. But, your pig photo is VERY disturbing. Worse even than Vickles "pee pee time" avatar.
And, as far as the three things mentioned in the first post, I still believe them, however I too believe that we saints will be here in paradise on earth as opposed to being in the"air" forever. Another one principle in PFAL that has always been a major blessing to me when it comes to reading the Bible is that "punctuation is devoid of authority. "Verily I say unto you today, thou shalt be with me in paradise". OR, "Verily I say unto you, today thou shalt be with me in paradise". What a gem that was to me, for, there you have two doctrines, depending on where the comma is placed. Take out the commas which were never supplied before the English, and voila! "Verily I say unto you today thou shalt be with me in paradise". No immediate "life after death" found in that verse. Cool to me fore shore...
But, I always had a problem with this one:
"Ek ballo. Ballo-ball-ball, throw!" Now how does one get the English word "ball" out of the Aramaic word "ballo"? Is the word "ball" really a modern version of the ancient word "ballo"? Now to be fair, there are some old yet younger Greek words that have modern counterparts, such as the word "idiotes" and the word "idiot". But does "ballo" mean "ball" like the one you throw? Hmm....I dunno, I "trow" not...
Anyone care to tackle that one?
P.S.
And, I am so rusty on alla that, that "ek ballo" could have been Greek. But I had remembered it as Aramaic. Please feel free to correct me if I was wrong...
I remember him using the ballo, ball, throw thing when he was talking about lambano, which makes it weirder, but at the time I took it as the method that he used to remember his made-up definitions of dechomai and lambano.
I remember him using the ballo, ball, throw thing when he was talking about lambano, which makes it weirder, but at the time I took it as the method that he used to remember his made-up definitions of dechomai and lambano.
That was straight out of pfal.
"Lambano, lambano, la-ball-o, ball.." *pantomines a pitch* "throw it out there."
Even IN pfal, that sounded like nonsense to me.
Just keep changing syllables until it made sense to you?
Might as well speak of the ice cream the bedouins always eat.
"Desert, desert, dessert.." *pantomine dishing ice cream* "serve up dessert."
Makes about as much sense.
What makes this weirder is Bullinger made this same jump out of nowhere.
When I read that, I concluded that Bullinger, like most people, could pull stuff out of his
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Mark Clarke
I still believe those few things, with one qualification. We were taught we didn't go to heaven "right away" as you put it. But they were rather vague about what happens in the end. I believe we do
Catcup
Since leaving TWI, I have kind of devolved back almost to where my beliefs were just before getting into TWI. Although in my family we were raised Southern Baptist, we never believed Jesus was God.
GrouchoMarxJr
Unlike oldies, I believe that the majority of what was taught in pfal was wrong... However, as a Christian, I do believe in "eventual" eternal life and I believe that Jesus was the son of God and not
WordWolf
Since you asked....
My positions have been fairly consistent.
(I reserve the right to learn things over the years.)
However, some people have been fairly consistently MISrepresenting my positions,
so when asked, I will often clarify them.
[That's great! Many if not most of us have no problem with that.
Many of us learned that BEFORE vpw, twi and pfal, many did not, but don't begrudge
those who learned for having learned WHERE they learned.]
[There's a variety of positions here on that one, and all their holders consider THEIR position to"make perfect sense", and have their reasons WHY.
The Doctrinal forum is THE forum to discuss this one. You're welcome to visit it to read the
reasonings-from Scripture and otherwise-of the various holders of the positions.
Me, I say all those who claim to be Christians and how Trinitarian and non-Trinitarian positions
ARE Christians, and not "inferior" or "greater" ones based on that one issue.
Which puts me at odds with the general practice in twi...]
[Having studied out the matter to my satisfaction from Scripture, I found I came independently
to the positions Bullinger seemed to come to-
which are notably DIFFERENT from twi positions in several places.
And I think it's not that hard to see where Bullinger-and I- got our positions.
(Or, to answer the question directly, me and Bullinger both say what you said.)]
[What I believe Scripture shows, that I teach, no matter where I learned it.
I HAVE, however, divorced myself from the elitist attitudes inflicted upon me by various
organizations, primarily twi.
And welcome to the GSC.
We have a sticky at the top of this forum, with some free advice.]
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skyrider
johniam.......I know.
But then.......you never sat in those wierwille-veins-popping yellfests when all hell broke loose. Man, wierwille and martindale and others could really spit out some over-the-top fear manipulation by using scriptures such as "salt losing its savor" or "like a dog returning to his vomit" or "being loaded up with devil spirits like a new
boot in hell."
Believe it or not..........the wierwille of pfal was NOT the wierwille of corps training.
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hide comes to mind.
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TheHighWay
Skyrider... I'm right there with you...
Seems like if you took PFAL and just lived on the field in VP's day, you stood a chance of having a pretty good experience with twi. If you went into the corps under VP, well... you were in for a rude shock in many respects.
Perhaps one of the biggest changes under LCM is that what the corps experienced, bled out onto the field almost immediately. Every standard presented as "corps level" soon trickled down to "adv class grad" to "fellowship coordinators" to "standing grads" standards. And then even to "new grads" standards. Ridiculous!!
Sometimes I wonder, if I had stopped my involvement with twi after taking PFAL, what would I believe today... probably just about everything I was taught in that class... I felt like I had been enlightened. I felt like I had been given answers I'd hoped for my whole life. I felt like I could do anything with my life, and help others do the same!
Of course, I was 20 years old. And I think that's how most 20-yr-olds feel, with or without the class...
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johniam
quote: But then.......you never sat in those wierwille-veins-popping yellfests when all hell broke loose. Man, wierwille and martindale and others could really spit out some over-the-top fear manipulation by using scriptures such as "salt losing its savor" or "like a dog returning to his vomit" or "being loaded up with devil spirits like a new
boot in hell."
Believe it or not..........the wierwille of pfal was NOT the wierwille of corps training.
To be fair, I recall that during ROA 1980 VP did the ordination ceremony as part of one of the night's presentations. Of course he wanted to convey the seriousness of ordination into the Christian ministry. I remember him saying, "If you're ordained and you sleep in until 10AM, I hope you DIE!!!"
That got my attention, but from my 'being on the field' pov, the stuff about way corps and reverends that turned me off was not their occasional exhortations to be committed, it was the occasional arrogance; the 'I'm better than you' attitude.
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Bramble
Hell moved. Instead of being in the afterlife, it came here to earth. If you walked out on God(TWI) you got possessed, your family got possessed, your marriage/health/whaterever got destroyed--you know, the 'Greasespot by midnight' threat.
As far as PFAL, I am not a Christian, I believe there is life after death--not heaven for the good and hell for the bad, but a spiritual life...
As far as the trinity--I think Jesus is a Deity. People worship him, pray to him and get answers...Whether he is the same one as God, I don't know.
But I view trinitarians as having one god with a duo( or trio) nature, and non trinitarians as having duo gods, though they don't know what to to with Jesus--but still somehow they all have one God...and the holy Spirit is some nebulous, hard to define spiritual entity or energy or something...either part of God or not a god...
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johniam
.
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act2
dmiller,
IMO, you hit the nail on the head.
Even though I learned to respect authority at home, I was bombarded with it at twi. I rebelled some when I moved out of my parents' home, but not much. HOWEVER, it took me a long time to realize that I could respect authority and still stand up for myself (at work).
It took even longer for me to do that with twi.
I finally stood up to a creep of a boss and we had a good relationship, for the most part, after that. He even came to our car wash after the trucking company that we worked for moved. I loved taking his money. I wanted to charge him double.
Anyway, it was a few years after that, that I walked about from twi.
I question alot of what was taught in piffle. I still believe mostly what I was taught as a child.
It took me YEARS to realize that I was afraid that something bad would happen to me when I left. I walked away from twi in 1994 and have not looked back. The ONLY bad thing that has happened in my life in all those years was my brother getting killed in a truck accident. The rest of my life has been so much greater than I ever dreamed while in twi. They spewed about the more abundant life....what a joke..... I have an abundant life NO THANKS to them or ANYTHING they taught.
Sorry if this is somewhat off topic.
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skyrider
And.....that was a public statement.
Now.....try to imagine what wierwille said BEHIND CLOSED DOORS to the corps or clergy.
:blink:
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Catcup
Yes, just imagine, and then multiply the intensity.
Then, when coming from LCM, quadruple that.
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oldiesman
Me too MO. That was one of the biggies in my life too.
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skyrider
So......in today's twi, when they speak of a "kinder, gentler ministry"....
Maybe, or maybe not........you can halve the intensity of the LCM wannabes.
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another spot
I am no fan of vp or pfal, and I’ve tried at times to come up with anything at all positive I got from twi. There is one thing I do remember that caused me to sit bolt upright:
1Cr 2:8 Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known [it], they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
Oh geez. I am writing this post remembering something along the lines of had the devil known it blah, blah, blah. Now I read “princes” plural, and so I realize there is a good chance it refers to the government and church leaders…
The entire rest of the class I was bored beyond belief and uncomfortable from the metal chairs.
As far as are the dead alive now, I don’t care. I trust God to take care of it. The trinity? I didn’t believe it to start with. At the same time, I know twi diminished Jesus a LOT. I am not through with this subject.
Beyond that, I have a lot of Bible in my head and still have many twi doctrinal “fleas.” A real chaff and wheat situation, which I continue to sort thru, much like a big fire and sifting through the ashes.
For those that think twi was a great thing, well I don’t suppose to be a judge of what others should think.
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excathedra
i would kinda like the dead to be alive so i could talk to them
i do have faith and hope of seeing them again
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Bumpy
Whaaaat 'bout tonight!
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excathedra
you're a nut !!!!!
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socks
I learned lots of big things in PFAL.
When I was a kid and took it for the first time, the fact that VPW was clearly from another planet (Ohio) than mine (California) made it interesting. He had the slicked back hair, the skinny little preacher frame. He looked like the preachers my Mom had talked about that she'd seen growing up in Illinois. So that part of it had a certain charm at the time. All that struttin' and hootin' was a kick. Literally, it was funny to me and lots of other people too. Not in a bad way, it was just funny.
I remember back in 1970, going to the Youth Advance that year at the Way Nash, and playing with a group at the SNS. We were there for a few week, and in those services, it was - to use a phrase from PFAL - "hottern' a firecracker!" There was lots of Ohio-like people there and the crowd was off the hook, as they say. VP's be smackin' his bible and his hair would get messed up "that's it baby! Don't tell me the bible's full of error!! It's God's WORD!!!" (smack smack smack). It was a lot of fun, with moments that were kinda over the top, in a good way. It was like he'd said in PFAL - if you get excited at sports event and love the bible, what's wrong with getting a little excited over it? He was. He was dealing.
.
The two most interzesting parts for moi were, the segments on the new birth and the sonship rights, specifically that the quality of life a Christian was meant to live progressed from and out of who they were as children of God. It didn't make sense right off because for me the idea of developing that understanding strictly from the bible was a fairly new one. I had been raised Roman Catholic where doctrine wasn't solely based on a single source like the bible but rather was a blend of evolved ideas and beliefs. So that grabbed me.
Despite the fact that I took VPW as the sole authority for biblical interpretation for awhile, the idea of learning the bible and the spirit of God opening it up to me was from PFAL, too. The "he that has ears to hear" from the bible rang out pretty loudly to me at the time.
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Oakspear
When I first took PFAL I was taken in by Wierwille's enthusiasm and by his confidence. I didn't know enough to argue with him and he made what seemed to be sense at the time. By the time I left TWI I had seen enough made-up definitions of Greek and Hebrew words, references to documents that nobody else had seen, assertions that there just "had to be" a text that backed up one of his positions despite there being overwhelming evidense to the contrary, numerous mentions of what "the original" said when he also said there were no originals, twisting of verses and contexts that would have made a pretzel maker envious, screwy applications of obscure verses...that I threw it all out. If any of my current beliefs line up with PFAL it is purely by coincidence.
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TheHighWay
As always, Oak... extremely well said!
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waysider
I learned you can re-use disposable coffee cups.
( If you can find a way to get the lipstick stains off 'em)
I mean--------REALLY!-------------Who'da ever thunk it?
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J0nny Ling0
ExWaycorps,
That was an awesome post. Very well put. Thanks. I feel the same way. But, your pig photo is VERY disturbing. Worse even than Vickles "pee pee time" avatar.
And, as far as the three things mentioned in the first post, I still believe them, however I too believe that we saints will be here in paradise on earth as opposed to being in the"air" forever. Another one principle in PFAL that has always been a major blessing to me when it comes to reading the Bible is that "punctuation is devoid of authority. "Verily I say unto you today, thou shalt be with me in paradise". OR, "Verily I say unto you, today thou shalt be with me in paradise". What a gem that was to me, for, there you have two doctrines, depending on where the comma is placed. Take out the commas which were never supplied before the English, and voila! "Verily I say unto you today thou shalt be with me in paradise". No immediate "life after death" found in that verse. Cool to me fore shore...
But, I always had a problem with this one:
"Ek ballo. Ballo-ball-ball, throw!" Now how does one get the English word "ball" out of the Aramaic word "ballo"? Is the word "ball" really a modern version of the ancient word "ballo"? Now to be fair, there are some old yet younger Greek words that have modern counterparts, such as the word "idiotes" and the word "idiot". But does "ballo" mean "ball" like the one you throw? Hmm....I dunno, I "trow" not...
Anyone care to tackle that one?
P.S.
And, I am so rusty on alla that, that "ek ballo" could have been Greek. But I had remembered it as Aramaic. Please feel free to correct me if I was wrong...
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Oakspear
JL:
I remember him using the ballo, ball, throw thing when he was talking about lambano, which makes it weirder, but at the time I took it as the method that he used to remember his made-up definitions of dechomai and lambano.
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WordWolf
That was straight out of pfal.
"Lambano, lambano, la-ball-o, ball.." *pantomines a pitch* "throw it out there."
Even IN pfal, that sounded like nonsense to me.
Just keep changing syllables until it made sense to you?
Might as well speak of the ice cream the bedouins always eat.
"Desert, desert, dessert.." *pantomine dishing ice cream* "serve up dessert."
Makes about as much sense.
What makes this weirder is Bullinger made this same jump out of nowhere.
When I read that, I concluded that Bullinger, like most people, could pull stuff out of his
gluteus maximus when he wanted to.
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Danny
Lets see the best thing I learned in pfil
was if you have red drapes and it sits there
like a duck the fear in you heart will kill
you kids.
It has been a disgrace for me to be here
with you this day.
And I walked out lifted my hand and said I
believe God could heal me
but I don't believe in your Jesus.
Better be planing a good brain washing because
vp is fixing to screw you up.
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gladtobeout
Ditto for me.
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