“The weight of evidence leads to the conclusion that 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 35, which says women should be silent and not speak in the church, was not part of the original God-breathed Word, but was written by a copyist who had strong feelings about women’s participation in Christian meetings.”
It shows that the accuracy of the text has not been compromised as it has been passed down through the ages.
How do traditions begin? lol in the CESpool sorta like that....
It's that First Century church - yanno Didn't VPW say He was gonna run the church like it hadn't been run since the first century? And they learned from him, so naturally - now that they realize the "1st Century WAY" thewy can see that it's time once again - in our day and time - to start doing a few revisions. Oh those lost originals,.... they had all those copyists coming in after them. naughty copyists, thaey all added that verse!
It's hard for me to watch John S. teach. He's so upbeat and peppy! ...even when the things he's teaching are contradictory.
CES touts the "integrity" of God's Word, yet they constantly violate that integrity in their teachings, as did Wierwille.
"Integrity" means "the state of being whole or entire". In the poem of The Blind Men and the Elephant, the elephant itself had integrity, though none of the blind men were interested in finding out exactly what that integrity was, by listening to each other or by feeling around for themselves.
The greatest Biblical expression of the integrity of the scripture is II Timothy 3:16, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine,for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness"
This verse is a single sentence with one subject, "all scripture". The sentence is compound, though, in that it has two verbs, "is given" and "is profitable." The second verb tells what all scripture is profitable for: for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.
If we tease apart the complexity of this sentence, we see that the second part of it can be restated accurately as "all scripture is profitable for doctrine, all scripture is profitable for reproof, all scripture is profitable for correction, all scripture is profitable for instruction in righteousness." This verse says that ALL scripture is profitable for ALL FOUR of these things.
Yet the dispensational imperative to "rightly divide" slices and dices the Word of God like a veg-o-matic in a television infomercial.
Principle #15.c. of CES' 22 Principles reads "The Church Epistles are written from the perspective of doctrine (right belief and practice), reproof (where not believing or practicing rightly) and correction (where teaching error). Romans (faith), Ephesians (love) and Thessalonians (hope) are doctrinal epistles. 1&2 Corinthians and Philippians are reproof epistles. Galatians and Colossians are correction epistles."
Now, I'm not bringing this up just because Principle #15.c. is an error. There's error in all of us. I'm bringing it up because it demonstrates that CES is blind to its own contradictions, and blind to its own circular reasoning, and that's why I had to stop following them over ten years ago.
I pointed out this contradiction to John L., Mark G. and John S. individually at the time, in excruciating detail, and their response was pretty much "so what?"
Once they've published a doctrine, they aren't willing even to consider that it might be erroneous. Not only in this matter of Principle #15.c., but especially in their most bedrock doctrine, the Administration of the Sacred Secret.
All the miseries of CES/STFI, they've brought upon themselves, because they are not willing to submit their theology, much less the thoughts and intents of their hearts, to the critique of the words of God's Word.
Love,
Steve
P.S. - Even though Principle #15.c. states that Romans is a doctinal epistle, we can't trust it for right belief and practice because when Paul wrote it, he had not yet been broken of his Jewish mindset.
II Tim 3:16 becomes a non-issue when one cherry picks what one chooses to believe is scripture. I don't have any problem with cherry picking if everyone is allowed to cherry pick. However, one whole Sower was dedicated to how it's somehow godly to walk away from a relationship if someone chooses different cherries - as those cherries are not the right cherries if they're not the same cherries as STF-I's choice.
It's hard for me to watch John S. teach. He's so upbeat and peppy! ...even when the things he's teaching are contradictory.
I have to say that I think he's an excellent teacher and that he, more than anyone else, is responsible for my interest in the bible. I've never met him but I've been exposed to his style on a CES class my friend sent me and on his STF videos.
Note that I did not request that my friend send me this class but she wanted me to listen to it. (Truth be told, I came thisclose to dumping it in the garbage before I even listened to it but that's another story). But when I finally did listen to it, gosh darn it if I didn't find it extremely interesting! I listened to the whole thing and loved it. I found the presntation he did (together with his sister, Susan) to be first rate.
While I was listening to that class last summer and for sometime after that I believed almost all of it and the parts I didn't fully believe (or understand) somehow seemed plausible.
And then I found this web site.
So anyway that class got me excited about the bible, even if I don't believe much of it anymore.
found the presntation he did (together with his sister, Susan) to be first rate.
So anyway that class got me excited about the bible, even if I don't believe much of it anymore.
That was undoubtedly part of what was released as "the class". I've got the set of CDs along with everything else CES had produced before 2005. A bit off-topic, but sister Sue is on the "elder advisory" team on JAL's new gig. I guess that means JWS and sis haven't patched things up yet.
Another interesting tidbit is that what JWS teaches concerning a women's role in the church is very different than the former(?) idea that a woman's sole purpose is to keep him happy while he goes about studying the word.
I have to say that I think he's an excellent teacher and that he, more than anyone else, is responsible for my interest in the bible. I've never met him but I've been exposed to his style on a CES class my friend sent me and on his STF videos.
It's not hard for me to watch John S. teach because it makes me angry. It's hard because it makes me sad. I had some interactions with John in the early-'80s when I was working on a track game designed to help people learn the books of the Bible. I experienced a very enlightening moment with him when I realized I didn't know what the purpose of the Old Testament was. When I asked Schoenheit about that, he told me that God had the Old Testament written so that Jesus would NOT have to learn by trial and error. The only person who ever really needed to understand the whole Old Testament was Jesus Christ.
In my opinion, Schoenheit was one of the most able researchers to come out of TWI, and definitely the bravest. It was John who wrote the research paper exposing adultery as a biblical sin back in the dawn of the fog years. In the early-'90s, he was instrumental in CES re-examing a lot of things we had been taught in TWI, but CES has two flaws: First, once they publish a position, they will never re-examine it, even in the light of further learning. Second, they believe that if they can rationalize what they teach, it has to be right, even if it contradicts what's expressly written in the Word. They magnify their logic above the Word.
So was it a family-issue fight or a diagreement on doctrine?
Neither. Sue/husband have backgrounds in finance. A finance committee was formed for the purpose of helping the ministry keep everything above board. After careful review, a list of recommendations were made by the committee. 18 months later not even one had been acted on. Sue/finance committee felt their time had been wasted and said so. Sue shared her concerns (as is the way in CES) with a number of partners. CES locked Sue out and denied access to financial records and so on. That made her mad. JWS couldn't understand why she was so upset. I explained to him that it's a bad idea to waste people's time. He seemed stunned that it would be an issue.
It was John who wrote the research paper exposing adultery as a biblical sin back in the dawn of the fog years.
Yeah, I read about that, and I applaud his intent. But what strikes me is...did somebody really need to write a research paper to convince everyone else that adultery is wrong according to the bible? I mean, it says it right there.
Neither. Sue/husband have backgrounds in finance. A finance committee was formed for the purpose of helping the ministry keep everything above board. After careful review, a list of recommendations were made by the committee. 18 months later not even one had been acted on. Sue/finance committee felt their time had been wasted and said so. Sue shared her concerns (as is the way in CES) with a number of partners. CES locked Sue out and denied access to financial records and so on. That made her mad. JWS couldn't understand why she was so upset. I explained to him that it's a bad idea to waste people's time. He seemed stunned that it would be an issue.
Yeah, I read about that, and I applaud his intent. But what strikes me is...did somebody really need to write a research paper to convince everyone else that adultery is wrong according to the bible? I mean, it says it right there.
The damaging thing wasn't the body of the paper. The eye-openers were in the appendices where Schoenheit took a dozen-or-so excuses for practicing adultery and shot them full of holes. Those excuses weren't something Schoenheit pulled out of thin air. They were excuses that Way leaders had used on the people they were abusing. We got to read the tripe that was coming out of Wierwille's and others' mouths when they thought nobody would ever find out.
The damaging thing wasn't the body of the paper. The eye-openers were in the appendices where Schoenheit took a dozen-or-so excuses for practicing adultery and shot them full of holes. Those excuses weren't something Schoenheit pulled out of thin air. They were excuses that Way leaders had used on the people they were abusing. We got to read the tripe that was coming out of Wierwille's and others' mouths when they thought nobody would ever find out.
Very interesting. That paper must have been quite a revelation for a lot of the Way folks.
Yeah, I read about that, and I applaud his intent. But what strikes me is...did somebody really need to write a research paper to convince everyone else that adultery is wrong according to the bible? I mean, it says it right there.
I asked him about that in 1988 at the first Chicago conference. According to him he had to research the whole thing to have an opinion about it. I was dumbfounded. But that's JWS.
Very interesting. That paper must have been quite a revelation for a lot of the Way folks.
VERY few people inside TWI ever knew that the paper existed.
I think it was done sometime around the reading of The Passing of A Patriarch. The Way Corps had been told that the Trustees were screwed up, but nothing specific had been brought up. Not even a breath about the adultery. Members of the Corps were just told to keep their mouths shut about anything and everything. This was at the time when NOBODY knew who was calling the shots at HQ, Martindale or Geer.
Schoenheit had made a few copies and sent them to people he knew and thought he could trust, mostly from his Corps experience. When "leadership" found out about the paper, they ordered ALL copies to be sent to HQ unread, where they were destroyed. Anybody who had anything to do with the paper was fired, even if they didn't act on what was revealed in it. This was before the practice of "mark and avoid" had been developed, but the quickest way to get "possessed" was to read the paper or talk about it. It was only after Lynn and some of the other ex-leaders went on tours around the country exposing what had happened to them, that existence of the paper became widely known among ex-wafers.
In short, leadership successfully suppressed the paper within TWI.
VERY few people inside TWI ever knew that the paper existed.
If nothing else, TWI leadership certainly had its containment procedures down pat. They would probably be successful in the field of public relations. :)
If nothing else, TWI leadership certainly had its containment procedures down pat. They would probably be successful in the field of public relations. :)
To what do you think they owed the success they DID have?
To what do you think they owed the success they DID have?
I think that's been covered extensively on these boards. :)
Regarding the OP, when I recently asked my friend about 1 Timothy 2:11-12 ("A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.") she came back at me with a very similar argumment saying that it was not part of the original text, but was inserted by a copyist.
I asked him about that in 1988 at the first Chicago conference. According to him he had to research the whole thing to have an opinion about it. I was dumbfounded. But that's JWS.
Interesting. In many ways that marks a characteristic of a good researcher. An analytic mind, a scientific process, and a trust in those things. It leads one towards discovering what scripture actually says about something regardless of popular opinion or pre-conceived notion.
But sure - of course from a moral fabric and common sense, the conclusion is a no-brainer.
Principle #15.c. of CES' 22 Principles reads "The Church Epistles are written from the perspective of doctrine (right belief and practice), reproof (where not believing or practicing rightly) and correction (where teaching error). Romans (faith), Ephesians (love) and Thessalonians (hope) are doctrinal epistles. 1&2 Corinthians and Philippians are reproof epistles. Galatians and Colossians are correction epistles."
Now, I'm not bringing this up just because Principle #15.c. is an error. There's error in all of us. I'm bringing it up because it demonstrates that CES is blind to its own contradictions, and blind to its own circular reasoning, and that's why I had to stop following them over ten years ago.
Steve,
I think this viewpoint is pretty much TWI oriented, and was prevalent throughout Corps teachings and University of Life.
From the way I understood it, however, it was taught that each epistle contains doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction on it's own. However some have a primary focus due to need of being reproof or correction such as you listed above.
Now I'm not sure I buy into that whole teaching at all. To me it makes no sense that the sections on love, gifts, and the one body appear first in a reproof epistle? The lame logic for that presented was that if you really were living the book of Romans, you'd be doing those things automatically. Yeah, BS. People do automatically what they are taught and trained to do. And arguably those doctrinal sections comprise the greater portions of Corinthians.
I think the underlying premise was off. The letters weren't organized into a canonization until much later. I say take them with a grain of salt on their own to a specific church, and if it all adds up to a complete picture, more power to you.
I think the underlying premise was off. The letters weren't organized into a canonization until much later. I say take them with a grain of salt on their own to a specific church, and if it all adds up to a complete picture, more power to you.
Yeah, the order of the books aren't even in chronological order for this whole doctrine/reproof/correction to come into play.. Oh well, more holes than swiss cheese yet they still want to stay in the boat. All I can do is wave and say I warned ya.. Enjoy the swim!
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Ham
Interesting. One *compromise* like this, and pretty soon, ces will be replete with dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria..
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waysider
Which one, indeed!
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Gen-2
How do traditions begin? lol in the CESpool sorta like that....
It's that First Century church - yanno Didn't VPW say He was gonna run the church like it hadn't been run since the first century? And they learned from him, so naturally - now that they realize the "1st Century WAY" thewy can see that it's time once again - in our day and time - to start doing a few revisions. Oh those lost originals,.... they had all those copyists coming in after them. naughty copyists, thaey all added that verse!
Which verse next?
Let's make a list....
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Steve Lortz
It's hard for me to watch John S. teach. He's so upbeat and peppy! ...even when the things he's teaching are contradictory.
CES touts the "integrity" of God's Word, yet they constantly violate that integrity in their teachings, as did Wierwille.
"Integrity" means "the state of being whole or entire". In the poem of The Blind Men and the Elephant, the elephant itself had integrity, though none of the blind men were interested in finding out exactly what that integrity was, by listening to each other or by feeling around for themselves.
The greatest Biblical expression of the integrity of the scripture is II Timothy 3:16, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine,for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness"
This verse is a single sentence with one subject, "all scripture". The sentence is compound, though, in that it has two verbs, "is given" and "is profitable." The second verb tells what all scripture is profitable for: for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.
If we tease apart the complexity of this sentence, we see that the second part of it can be restated accurately as "all scripture is profitable for doctrine, all scripture is profitable for reproof, all scripture is profitable for correction, all scripture is profitable for instruction in righteousness." This verse says that ALL scripture is profitable for ALL FOUR of these things.
Yet the dispensational imperative to "rightly divide" slices and dices the Word of God like a veg-o-matic in a television infomercial.
Principle #15.c. of CES' 22 Principles reads "The Church Epistles are written from the perspective of doctrine (right belief and practice), reproof (where not believing or practicing rightly) and correction (where teaching error). Romans (faith), Ephesians (love) and Thessalonians (hope) are doctrinal epistles. 1&2 Corinthians and Philippians are reproof epistles. Galatians and Colossians are correction epistles."
Now, I'm not bringing this up just because Principle #15.c. is an error. There's error in all of us. I'm bringing it up because it demonstrates that CES is blind to its own contradictions, and blind to its own circular reasoning, and that's why I had to stop following them over ten years ago.
I pointed out this contradiction to John L., Mark G. and John S. individually at the time, in excruciating detail, and their response was pretty much "so what?"
Once they've published a doctrine, they aren't willing even to consider that it might be erroneous. Not only in this matter of Principle #15.c., but especially in their most bedrock doctrine, the Administration of the Sacred Secret.
All the miseries of CES/STFI, they've brought upon themselves, because they are not willing to submit their theology, much less the thoughts and intents of their hearts, to the critique of the words of God's Word.
Love,
Steve
P.S. - Even though Principle #15.c. states that Romans is a doctinal epistle, we can't trust it for right belief and practice because when Paul wrote it, he had not yet been broken of his Jewish mindset.
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Tzaia
II Tim 3:16 becomes a non-issue when one cherry picks what one chooses to believe is scripture. I don't have any problem with cherry picking if everyone is allowed to cherry pick. However, one whole Sower was dedicated to how it's somehow godly to walk away from a relationship if someone chooses different cherries - as those cherries are not the right cherries if they're not the same cherries as STF-I's choice.
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soul searcher
I have to say that I think he's an excellent teacher and that he, more than anyone else, is responsible for my interest in the bible. I've never met him but I've been exposed to his style on a CES class my friend sent me and on his STF videos.
Note that I did not request that my friend send me this class but she wanted me to listen to it. (Truth be told, I came thisclose to dumping it in the garbage before I even listened to it but that's another story). But when I finally did listen to it, gosh darn it if I didn't find it extremely interesting! I listened to the whole thing and loved it. I found the presntation he did (together with his sister, Susan) to be first rate.
While I was listening to that class last summer and for sometime after that I believed almost all of it and the parts I didn't fully believe (or understand) somehow seemed plausible.
And then I found this web site.
So anyway that class got me excited about the bible, even if I don't believe much of it anymore.
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Tzaia
That was undoubtedly part of what was released as "the class". I've got the set of CDs along with everything else CES had produced before 2005. A bit off-topic, but sister Sue is on the "elder advisory" team on JAL's new gig. I guess that means JWS and sis haven't patched things up yet.
Another interesting tidbit is that what JWS teaches concerning a women's role in the church is very different than the former(?) idea that a woman's sole purpose is to keep him happy while he goes about studying the word.
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soul searcher
So was it a family-issue fight or a diagreement on doctrine?
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Steve Lortz
It's not hard for me to watch John S. teach because it makes me angry. It's hard because it makes me sad. I had some interactions with John in the early-'80s when I was working on a track game designed to help people learn the books of the Bible. I experienced a very enlightening moment with him when I realized I didn't know what the purpose of the Old Testament was. When I asked Schoenheit about that, he told me that God had the Old Testament written so that Jesus would NOT have to learn by trial and error. The only person who ever really needed to understand the whole Old Testament was Jesus Christ.
In my opinion, Schoenheit was one of the most able researchers to come out of TWI, and definitely the bravest. It was John who wrote the research paper exposing adultery as a biblical sin back in the dawn of the fog years. In the early-'90s, he was instrumental in CES re-examing a lot of things we had been taught in TWI, but CES has two flaws: First, once they publish a position, they will never re-examine it, even in the light of further learning. Second, they believe that if they can rationalize what they teach, it has to be right, even if it contradicts what's expressly written in the Word. They magnify their logic above the Word.
Sad.
Love,
Steve
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Tzaia
Neither. Sue/husband have backgrounds in finance. A finance committee was formed for the purpose of helping the ministry keep everything above board. After careful review, a list of recommendations were made by the committee. 18 months later not even one had been acted on. Sue/finance committee felt their time had been wasted and said so. Sue shared her concerns (as is the way in CES) with a number of partners. CES locked Sue out and denied access to financial records and so on. That made her mad. JWS couldn't understand why she was so upset. I explained to him that it's a bad idea to waste people's time. He seemed stunned that it would be an issue.
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soul searcher
Yeah, I read about that, and I applaud his intent. But what strikes me is...did somebody really need to write a research paper to convince everyone else that adultery is wrong according to the bible? I mean, it says it right there.
Sounds like pure politics.
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Steve Lortz
The damaging thing wasn't the body of the paper. The eye-openers were in the appendices where Schoenheit took a dozen-or-so excuses for practicing adultery and shot them full of holes. Those excuses weren't something Schoenheit pulled out of thin air. They were excuses that Way leaders had used on the people they were abusing. We got to read the tripe that was coming out of Wierwille's and others' mouths when they thought nobody would ever find out.
Love,
Steve
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soul searcher
Very interesting. That paper must have been quite a revelation for a lot of the Way folks.
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Tzaia
I asked him about that in 1988 at the first Chicago conference. According to him he had to research the whole thing to have an opinion about it. I was dumbfounded. But that's JWS.
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Steve Lortz
VERY few people inside TWI ever knew that the paper existed.
I think it was done sometime around the reading of The Passing of A Patriarch. The Way Corps had been told that the Trustees were screwed up, but nothing specific had been brought up. Not even a breath about the adultery. Members of the Corps were just told to keep their mouths shut about anything and everything. This was at the time when NOBODY knew who was calling the shots at HQ, Martindale or Geer.
Schoenheit had made a few copies and sent them to people he knew and thought he could trust, mostly from his Corps experience. When "leadership" found out about the paper, they ordered ALL copies to be sent to HQ unread, where they were destroyed. Anybody who had anything to do with the paper was fired, even if they didn't act on what was revealed in it. This was before the practice of "mark and avoid" had been developed, but the quickest way to get "possessed" was to read the paper or talk about it. It was only after Lynn and some of the other ex-leaders went on tours around the country exposing what had happened to them, that existence of the paper became widely known among ex-wafers.
In short, leadership successfully suppressed the paper within TWI.
Love,
Steve
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waysider
I never heard of the paper until I read about it here on GSC.
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soul searcher
If nothing else, TWI leadership certainly had its containment procedures down pat. They would probably be successful in the field of public relations. :)
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Steve Lortz
To what do you think they owed the success they DID have?
Love,
Steve
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Ham
Same here
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soul searcher
I think that's been covered extensively on these boards. :)
Regarding the OP, when I recently asked my friend about 1 Timothy 2:11-12 ("A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.") she came back at me with a very similar argumment saying that it was not part of the original text, but was inserted by a copyist.
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chockfull
Interesting. In many ways that marks a characteristic of a good researcher. An analytic mind, a scientific process, and a trust in those things. It leads one towards discovering what scripture actually says about something regardless of popular opinion or pre-conceived notion.
But sure - of course from a moral fabric and common sense, the conclusion is a no-brainer.
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chockfull
Steve,
I think this viewpoint is pretty much TWI oriented, and was prevalent throughout Corps teachings and University of Life.
From the way I understood it, however, it was taught that each epistle contains doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction on it's own. However some have a primary focus due to need of being reproof or correction such as you listed above.
Now I'm not sure I buy into that whole teaching at all. To me it makes no sense that the sections on love, gifts, and the one body appear first in a reproof epistle? The lame logic for that presented was that if you really were living the book of Romans, you'd be doing those things automatically. Yeah, BS. People do automatically what they are taught and trained to do. And arguably those doctrinal sections comprise the greater portions of Corinthians.
I think the underlying premise was off. The letters weren't organized into a canonization until much later. I say take them with a grain of salt on their own to a specific church, and if it all adds up to a complete picture, more power to you.
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soul searcher
I don't know how it was presented, sourced or referenced in TWI but I'm sure you're probably aware that that came from Bullinger. (See page 1660 of the Companion Bible: http://levendwater.org/companion/The%20Companion%20Bible%20-%20Bullinger/index.htm )
Edited to fix the link. If doesn't work go here: http://levendwater.org/companion/index_companion.html , click The Companion Bible link, then click Romans.
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TrustAndObey
Yeah, the order of the books aren't even in chronological order for this whole doctrine/reproof/correction to come into play.. Oh well, more holes than swiss cheese yet they still want to stay in the boat. All I can do is wave and say I warned ya.. Enjoy the swim!
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