I'm not a fan of any particular kind of constructive theology, T-Bone. Sometimes, when people ask me what faith community I come from, I tell them I'm a Free Range Baptist, I believe in baptism but I don't believe in cages!
Technical constructive theology has too many theories of post-modernism, etc., to suit my taste, but I like deriving the meaning of a text from what is written, not from reading alien ideas into what is written.
I'm not a fan of any particular kind of constructive theology, T-Bone. Sometimes, when people ask me what faith community I come from, I tell them I'm a Free Range Baptist, I believe in baptism but I don't believe in cages!
Technical constructive theology has too many theories of post-modernism, etc., to suit my taste, but I like deriving the meaning of a text from what is written, not from reading alien ideas into what is written.
Love,
Steve
thanks - I appreciate your thoughtful reply and I lean toward deriving meaning from the text as well....and I must say being afraid to commit to any one particular theological approach - I'm a free-range chicken.
TY Steve Lortz and T-Bone! Excellent posts. Well articulated and relevant to the topic.
IMO, there is no critical value to the "REV" or any worth other than to bolster Schoenheit and Lynn's MLM Jesus scams by plagiarism and personal hubris. It is another wierwillean ego trip couched in faux academics. They got real used to this "systematic theology" con and the money making structure involved in "teaching the rightly divided word" which was neither rightly-divided or Biblical.
Thanks Again for your time and the info you shared.
Three years ago, I was in intensive care for nearly a week because of a potassium overdose. I took some kidney and heart damage. About a year and a half ago, I was in the ICU again with pneumonia. Both the kidney and the heart damage were (what should I call it...?) made worse. I am now in congestive heart failure. My kidneys don't send the proper signals to my bone marrow to generate blood cells. For the past year-and-a -half I have been dying one red blood cell at a time, which has given me some interesting perspective on the physiology of spirit! Fortunately, I go into the infusion center from time to time, and if my hemoglobin falls below a certain point, they give me a shot which works as an artificial signal to make more blood. But I am still anemic, so I've been able to work (thinking and writing) at only about half speed. I used to use Sudoku puzzles to keep track of how efficiently my brain was still working, but I've become too slow for Sudoku to work any more.
I'm still auditing classes, though, for physical and occupational therapy. For the past few years I've been writing things required by the syllabuses, but, since I stopped taking classes for credit last summer, I can now write what I want. The last thing I wrote for school was a formal exegesis paper on 1 Corinthians 2:9-3:3, and I translated it from the Greek for myself. Translating Paul is like translating Groucho Marx. They play the same kinds of word games! And doing any real translating makes the scholarly farce of Stiffy's REV very, very manifest.
I am currently working on Out from within whom all things, and we all the way into him: Stoic Cosmobiology in 1:Corinthians 8:6 and a Quantum/Godelian Critique of Current Hermeneutics.
The first section is titled Absolute and Obsolete. Since the Enlightenment of the 17th century, Western intellectuals (theologians included) have been fixated on using logic to find a single absolute meaning for everything. "Absolute" means "free from imperfection" and should not be confused with vodka, though some people say Absolut is free from imperfection! Hermeneutics is the art of extracting a meaning from a text, and it's not just a Biblical thing. I first had to learn hermeneutics studying reactor plant control manuals! Hermeneutics is usually taught to literature majors. The hermeneutics of historical methodology is based on the idea that nothing "supernatural" in the Bible can be historically true. Such accounts are absolute fiction. These are the ideas at the heart of liberal protestant theology. The ideas of inerrancy and plenary verbal inspiration arose as a reaction against historical methodology, saying that every account of anything supernatural in the Bible, even the mythic elements, are absolutely true. These are the ideas at the heart of fundamentalist/evangelical theology. Both theologies pursue a single absolute truth. Scientists do it too in their quest for a unified field theorem.
In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein's theory of relativity, that 3-D space and time are not absolutes, but rather they constitute a relativistic 4-D continuum. Theologically, this wipes out the process theology of Spirit & Truth Fellowship, because if God is everyWHERE, then he is also everyWHEN. And it returns teleological cause to consideration, which means scientific explanations are possible for synchronicity.
In 1927, Heisenberg published his Uncertainty Principle which demonstrates that possessing certain kinds of information is mutually restrictive, that is, the more precisely we measure one thing, the less precisely we can measure some other related thing. This is reflected in theology in that, if we define a word too closely, it will lose power to communicate in some other way. I am reminded of many of the definitions Wierwille gave us. The hermeneutics he taught us in Power for Abundant Living worked very well within his system, but they made interpretations other than his own impossible. Stiffy fails to recognize this in their "22 Principles of Biblical Interpretation: How to Eliminate Apparent Bible contradictions" and Schoenheit failed to recognize it in his REV (I think I've somehow changed my font without knowing how I did it. Maybe it's Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work?)
In 1931, Godel published his Incompleteness Theorems which, roughly stated, say that for any logical system, there will exist statements in the language of the system that the system can neither prove nor disprove. No logical system can resolve all ambiguity. Power for Abundant Living could not, inherently, eliminate all apparent Bible contradictions.
The absolute is obsolete.
I am using Murphy-O'Conner's commentary on 1 Corinthians 8:6 to demonstrate, specifically, how features of contemporary hermeneutics have been obsolete for nearly one hundred years.
So... Raf... I am expanded my critique from Power for Abundant Living and the REV to theology as a WHOLE!
That's why I ain't been here for a while, but it is sure good to be back among my friends!
In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein's theory of relativity, that 3-D space and time are not absolutes, but rather they constitute a relativistic 4-D continuum.
LOL... so, in other words, the truth is akin to beholding jello. Hold too tightly to part of it, and some other part of it moves or slips through your fingers.
Yeah, I've heard (and knew) that quite some time ago.
On 2/1/2017 at 7:55 AM, Steve Lortz said:
Theologically, this wipes out the process theology of Spirit & Truth Fellowship, because if God is everyWHERE, then he is also everyWHEN.
Didn't know he/they were into "process theology." (Sounds rather odd, but given I've only watched a small handful of Schoenheit's video's, no comment aside from, it doesn't seem to be something obvious.)
On 2/1/2017 at 7:55 AM, Steve Lortz said:
And it returns teleological cause to consideration, which means scientific explanations are possible for synchronicity.
I'm not following the reasoning. Care to explain or say another way?
Up until Einstein's Theory of Relativity, people thought of time as something that happened in an absolute (free from imperfection) three-dimensional space. Time appears to move forward in a 3-D space. Einstein's theory conceived of space and time as being four dimension's of a relativistic space-time continuum. It's not easy to describe such a thing accurately except with mathematics, but I like to think of it as a loaf of bread whose four ingredients are the x-axis, the y-axis, the z-axis and time. If you move around in the loaf of bread, you move in time as well as in the three axes.
Process theology was originally invented in the early 1900s by Alfred North Whitehead. Process theology says that God's point of view in time is as limited as man's, that is, God created objective reality without knowing how anything was going to turn out.
When John, John, and Mark were writing "Don't Blame God" they rediscovered process theology. I don't think they plagiarized it. None of them read enough to "honestly" plagiarize something so complex. Also, if they HAD read Whitehead, they wouldn't have expressed their theology in such sophomoric ways.
John, John, and Mark said that God couldn't have foreseen the existence of evil, otherwise, God would be responsible for evil and people could blame him for it. However, there were deterministic factors so fine that people couldn't see them, but God could use them to tell that soldiers were going to dice for Jesus's cloak a thousand years before it happened. If that were the case, there would be no room for human beings to make any decisions at all. John, John, and Mark had me, along with several others, proof read the galleys for "Don't Blame God." They didn't take my critique seriously.
Since we live in a relativistic space-time continuum, if God is everywhere, then he also has to be everyWHEN. God sees all throughout the loaf. God's point of view is not limited to man's. God could not have created objective reality without knowing that evil would come to exist. John, John and Mark did not end up with a blameless God; they ended up with an IRRESPOSIBLE God.
Now-a-days, we think of cause coming before effect in time, since that's the way we see it. But it's not the "flow" of time that is limited, what's limited is our perspective within time. God necessarily limited our point of view of time to a single, instantaneous NOW so that we could make genuine decisions, so that we could have free will within the 4-D loaf. But God designed the loaf so that everything would turn out all right at the end, and everyone who wants to cooperate with him can cooperate, and those who don't want to cooperate don't have to cooperate. God built teleological (from the end) cause into the 4-D loaf. The way God wants things to end exerts causes backward through time as well as forward from the beginning. When I look back on my 67 years, I see how the way God wanted me to be NOW caused certain things to happen BACK THEN (and how I have survived certain death on three different occasions). I will bet Don't Worry Be Happy could say as much.
Ah. Thanks for the explanation. While I'm unfamiliar with the "Don't Blame God" piece mentioned, you brought to mind a related issue I read some time back on their site which to a certain degree, I probably agreed with. (And, as I just had to go look it up to refresh exactly what it was, I may as well offer a link to it.) Perhaps there is some aspect of the term "process theology" that can be viewed from a different angle then how it is typically presented on the Internet (which your post seemed to somewhat be aligned with), so I'll leave room to reconsider what all that particular labeling might include or intend to communicate.
Frankly, I'm not persuaded that Einstein's theory imposes some "everywhen" characteristic or nature upon God, which then goes on to be perceived as a "goes anywhere forward or backwards in time" possibility. Sure, from our static 3 dimensional vantage point, time appears measureable and moving one direction. But, in accordance with E's theory, were it possible to approach and equal the speed of light, time would appear to slow down and stop. If time is stopped (perhaps similar to an electron spinning around an atom?), then its appearance from a static vantage point can be everywhere. In the case of an electron, it evidently can be everywhere in its orbit at the same time. (One of the less mysterious oddities of quantum mechanics?) And while Science Fiction novels and movies might plainly allow "time travel" to go backwards, I don't see any support or indications of such possibilities in either Einstein's theory (which can "relatively" explain a forward jump) or in the scriptures.
Now, back to this:
10 hours ago, Steve Lortz said:
Process theology says that God's point of view in time is as limited as man's, that is, God created objective reality without knowing how anything was going to turn out.
That sounds to me about as much like a straw man argument as anything I might have every heard. Seriously? God's view is as limited as man's? What knucklehead with even half a functioning brain could ever "invent" or propose such a lunatic "theology"? (I know it's not anything you believe, Steve. So don't take that as anything personal.) Granted, as mentioned already, I haven't read the "Don't Blame God" piece. Given what I did read (see link above), I find it a bit hard to believe that any of the fellas you mention would be stupid enough to bite into and swallow that line of swank, much less endorse or promote it. Then again, the very notion that "God couldn't have foreseen the existence of evil, otherwise, God would be responsible... (yada, yada)" sounds near equally as absurd to me, so maybe in their zeal to sell themselves they've again stepped into some dogsheet.
If God couldn't have foreseen the existence of evil, then why did he have a plan of salvation prepared before times? Or, do they only intend to associate that with the fall of Lucifer? Perhaps you don't know. I certainly don't, and I'm not about to continue on in fabricating some plausible or defensible position of it for them...
However, as for this:
10 hours ago, Steve Lortz said:
God could not have created objective reality without knowing that evil would come to exist.
I disagree. But exchange the two words "could" and "would" (i.e., flip one for the other), and I'd give you the nod.
10 hours ago, Steve Lortz said:
God built teleological (from the end) cause into the 4-D loaf. The way God wants things to end exerts causes backward through time as well as forward from the beginning.
Back to this. Okay, though I plainly disagree with the "backwards" notion of it, I get how (and why) you tie it to teleological cause. But why suppose there is a necessity for anything being exerted "backwards through time" (or forwards, for that matter) if God is the all and ever present guiding hand at the helm? When "the end" is arrived at through or by way of the determinate counsel and foreknowledge God, doesn't that say all that we need to know, without any need to jump forward or backwards in time? Without a doubt there have been (and are more) clear and definitive "checkpoints" along the timeline to get there. What we lack and don't have a real handle on, is how (so to speak) God "steers the ship" to get there. So, not only do I think it's presumptuous to suppose God has any need to jump forward or backwards in time with "causation," I actually think it probably lessens or weakens the perception of His abilities to project and navigate towards the future. Which is more glorious: exerting causes backwards through time to insure the presence now of what is desire, or exerting causes now that insures the presence of it in the future? Which do you sail with?
I'll get back to this shortly- and before I forget, what I want to start with is this "process theology" business, which cg espoused with his "Pivot Point in History" thing, and some responses to that. It was actually espoused, with different names, by some people outside twi circles who liked a fuzzy, accessible God and were willing to demote Him to get Him there. The book "The Trivialization of God" (which I've never read) seems to have addressed that issue quite handily.
I also addressed some of this in the thread "What Does God Know?" at length.
Among other things, cg conflated "foreknow" (to know ahead of time) with "foreordain" (to force to happen ahead of time) and concluded that he was rejecting the former since he didn't accept the latter. I accept not everyone can understand some of the issues he raised- but if he didn't then he has no business trying to put himself forth as an authority on the subject.
I used to take the things John Schoenheit wrote seriously. I respect his scope of knowledge and his desire to go to the Word of God, but after receiving a little bit of training in actual, professional scholarship, I can't help but feel sorry for John, and all the rest of them.
Wierwille did not teach us how to read what the Bible says. He taught us his system, which made the Bible say what HE wanted it to say, that it is okay to sin as long as you don't become sin-conscious. Grace enables us to sin as long as we don't pay any attention to the fact that we are sinning.
Do you guys know what the word "delude" means? It comes from the Latin deludere, which means "to play off" or "to play away." To say that a person has been deluded means that the person "has been played" because he has believed a lie. Wierwille deluded us ALL for a time. Schoenheit's problem is that he has never recognized how he was played, and he continues to play other people the same way he was played. He's not doing it maliciously, he's doing it arrogantly.
Real scholars don't take a position, cherry-pick a few proof verses to support their position, and then ignore all the verses that don't agree with their presumption.
Real scholars write exegesis, which is the art of reading a meaning out from within the text instead of reading foreign meanings into it. To write exegesis, one takes a piece of scripture (sometimes called a "pericope" per-ICK-uh- pee) and then applies literary, form, textual, redaction, source and social/historical criticisms to the passage. After that, a scholar may or may not discuss intertextuality, how the pericope affects or is affected by other passages. We had to write four exegesis papers in the course of working on a masters degree (which I wasn't able to complete because of health reasons, but I did successfully write my four exegesis papers). Our papers covered pericopes of about 6 to 8 verses, and had to be 13 pages long, no more and no less.
It was a jarring experience to read Schoenheit's FAQ "Does God know every future event in human history?" I wrote a paper like that once, and my professor said he didn't even know how to go about grading it!
TLC, you asked, "That sounds to me about as much like a straw man argument as anything I might have every heard. Seriously? God's view is as limited as man's? What knucklehead with even half a functioning brain could ever "invent" or propose such a lunatic "theology"?"
Schoenheit wrote in the piece you referenced, "Once upon a time (biblically: 'in the beginning'), when God was all by Himself, He sovereignly chose to relate to mankind as His Word subsequently declares He does, that is, in a 'linear' relationship, experiencing time passing with us. His perspective is definitely far beyond our own ('With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day— 2 Pet. 3:8), that is, He sees the big picture that we as temporal beings cannot, but He makes it clear that He relates to us according to how we see time."
What Schoenheit is waltzing around here is his sentence "[God] sovereignly chose to relate to mankind...in a “linear” relationship, experiencing time passing with us." Schoenheit is saying here that God deliberately decided to experience time the same way human beings do. He COULD HAVE decided to experience time the way people outside of STFI think he does, but God decided to limit his perspective to man's, and therefore, does not know what's going to happen before it transpires.
Notice how Schoenheit says "a 'linear' relationship, experiencing time passing with us." A person's experience of time is not a one-dimensional line. It is a zero-dimensional, instantaneous NOW. Because God designed us to remember things, time seems to us to be linear, but it is not. God could just as easily, if it had suited his purposes, designed us to experience more than one NOW at a time, but we have to experience time as NOW, or we could not make decisions, that is, we could not exercise agency. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.
It's not a matter of predestination or free-will, it's a matter of mutual agency. God has agency, that is, he is free to do, and responsible for what he does. it is from agency that the sense of self springs. God made Adam and Eve both in his image, that is, he gave them both agency, the freedom to do, and responsibility for what is done. Not absolute agency, like God's own, but limited agency. No person is free to dictate the circumstances in which they find themselves, but every person is free to decide how they will respond in those circumstances. That's why it's called responsibility. As we pass through life, we can chose to align our agencies with God's, just like with speaking in tongues. We have to speak, to exercise our agencies, in order for the Holy Spirit to exercise its agency, to give the utterance. It is a matter of MUTUAL agency. Jesus exercised mutual agency with God when he said, "not my will, but yours be done" and voluntarily went onto the cross.
God designed us the way he did so that we could exercise mutual agency with him (he/she/it, whatever...) in CREATING creation! The 4-D space-time continuum IS Creation, and we get to he'p make it happen!
Schoenheit equates "in the beginning" with "once upon a time." That just ain't so... the Biblical equivalent of "once upon a time" is ''and it came to pass that..." "In the beginning" means "first of all..." It is not a reference to time, it is a reference to priority. The sense of "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" is "The first thing we have to consider is that Elohim created the heaven and the earth." This was in contra-distinction to the "Enuma Elish," which said that the heaven and earth were never created, but Marduk gave them the form they now have.
Schoenheit wrote, "[God] chose to relate to mankind as His Word subsequently declares He does, that is, in a 'linear' relationship, experiencing time passing with us." What does Schoenheit mean by "as His Word subsequently declares He does"? Does he mean there is a verse somewhere in the Bible that says God experiences time passing with us? If there is, why doesn't he cite it? If there isn't, then why is Schoenheit implying that there is? To convince people he knows what he's talking about, even though he doesn't actually? It's dishonest scholarship, something Schoenheit learned while he was being played by Wierwille.
Schoenheit went on to write, "[God] sees the big picture that we as temporal beings cannot, but He makes it clear that He relates to us according to how we see time." Schoenheit admits that God sees time in a way that we temporal beings cannot, but, in contrast, relates to us according to how we see time. Yes, it's true that God can relate to us the way we see time. He designed us that way. But there is no logical or textual reason to draw the conclusion that God doesn't know the end from the beginning. In fact, the text reads, "...I am God and there is no one like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done..." (Isaiah 46:9b&10)
MRAP, I don't know if you're reading this, but if you are, I hope it gives you some insight into Schoenheit's REV!
More about the 4-D space-time continuum along a different vector!
"Process theology" is what Alfred North Whitehead called it a hundred years ago. Today, it's called "open theism". The fact that Schoenheit doesn't read anything except his own stuff becomes obvious when we look at what others have written about open theism. Their thinking and writing is much less ham-handed than Schoenheit's. As far as I can see from Schoenheit's writing, he doesn't even have a name for the idea he's putting forward. There is plenty of discussion going on about this in the wider world, and Schoenheit doesn't even seem to be aware of it.
It's called "open" theism because it supposedly opens up the future and God's knowledge of it. In actuality, it crams God into the box of human experience. The conventional view of time is as a one-dimensional line arcing through a three dimensional space. God knows the future because he sees the whole, one-dimensional line. Open theism sees time in the past as a one-dimensional line arcing through three-dimensional space, but in the future, the line branches of in many possible directions. The distinction between NOW and any other place in time is that NOW is where all possibilities reduce to one.
The problem is, objective reality has demonstrated that time is not a one-dimensional line, branching or otherwise. Time is one of the components of a four-dimensional "solid". Time extends in all directions (not just forward and backward) through the "solid", just as do components in the x, y, and z axes. We don't see this at the human scale and at human speeds, but it has to be calculated for (using 4-D vector math) or global positioning satellites wouldn't work. Your Garmin couldn't tell you where to get off if all these obsolete notions of time were true.
If God is every WHERE... then he also has to be every WHEN.
The question of whether or not we can travel faster than the speed of light is very glamorous, because it makes for some very good science-fiction stories, but it's not the meat and potatoes of relativistic reckoning of time.
(SNIP)...In 1927, Heisenberg published his Uncertainty Principle which demonstrates that possessing certain kinds of information is mutually restrictive, that is, the more precisely we measure one thing, the less precisely we can measure some other related thing. This is reflected in theology in that, if we define a word too closely, it will lose power to communicate in some other way. I am reminded of many of the definitions Wierwille gave us. The hermeneutics he taught us in Power for Abundant Living worked very well within his system, but they made interpretations other than his own impossible. Stiffy fails to recognize this in their "22 Principles of Biblical Interpretation: How to Eliminate Apparent Bible contradictions" and Schoenheit failed to recognize it in his REV (I think I've somehow changed my font without knowing how I did it. Maybe it's Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work?)
In 1931, Godel published his Incompleteness Theorems which, roughly stated, say that for any logical system, there will exist statements in the language of the system that the system can neither prove nor disprove. No logical system can resolve all ambiguity. Power for Abundant Living could not, inherently, eliminate all apparent Bible contradictions.
...(SNIP)
The scripture twisting and double-talk in PFAL sold a lot of folks on the supposed "mathematical exactness and scientific precision" of the Bible; vp was an inept plagiarist as well – though he stole Bullinger’s work on interpreting the Bible – vp offered a different conclusion - that the Bible interprets itself (that interpretation becomes the word – but really it’s nothing more than vp’s interpretation); compare that to EW Bullinger’s How to Enjoy the Bible page 188 - after examining II Peter 1:20 no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation – Bullinger said it refers to the origin and source of scripture and not to its meaning or interpretation. vp’s promoting an inerrant Bible and that there’s only one correct interpretation of it leaves a PFAL student little option but to pay heed to what vp has to say about it all.
Years after leaving TWI I read Introduction to Biblical Interpretation by William Klein, Craig Blomberg and Robert Hubbard Jr. On page 72 they talk of how Christians often ask an important question for which there is no simple solution – which goes along the lines of asking why didn’t God in his providence insure that an inspired original would be perfectly preserved – indeed he left the transmission and proclamation of Scriptures to fallible and potentially rebellious human beings; I like the answer offered by the authors, and it goes along the lines of perhaps God did not want us to idolize a book but rather to worship the author of the book - God!
On 2/4/2017 at 1:02 AM, Steve Lortz said:
Up until Einstein's Theory of Relativity, people thought of time as something that happened in an absolute (free from imperfection) three-dimensional space. Time appears to move forward in a 3-D space. Einstein's theory conceived of space and time as being four dimension's of a relativistic space-time continuum. It's not easy to describe such a thing accurately except with mathematics, but I like to think of it as a loaf of bread whose four ingredients are the x-axis, the y-axis, the z-axis and time. If you move around in the loaf of bread, you move in time as well as in the three axes.
Process theology was originally invented in the early 1900s by Alfred North Whitehead. Process theology says that God's point of view in time is as limited as man's, that is, God created objective reality without knowing how anything was going to turn out.
(SNIP)...Since we live in a relativistic space-time continuum, if God is everywhere, then he also has to be everyWHEN. God sees all throughout the loaf. God's point of view is not limited to man's. God could not have created objective reality without knowing that evil would come to exist. John, John and Mark did not end up with a blameless God; they ended up with an IRRESPOSIBLE God.
...(SNIP)
Their limited view of God is kind of weird. When it comes to a reference of time and God I always think of God as the one who inhabits eternity (Isaiah 57:15); The NET Bible offers an interesting note on that verse – in Hebrew it’s “one who dwells forever” and is sometimes translated “the one who lives forever”. However, the immediately preceding and following descriptions (“high and exalted” and “holy”) emphasize his sovereign rule. More than likely it refers to God’s eternal kingship....in other words - God is all over this thing called time - he's in it...outside of it...permeates it...he's not having to wing it when a crisis pops up. He's always in charge. Being sovereign and not bound by time he knows the end before the beginning and can orchestrate it all as he sees fit.
Speaking of Einstein’s general theory of relativity I read something interesting that gets into multidimensional universes in Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe by Michio Kaku ( I think it’s not a bad thing to reevaluate one’s theology periodically – maybe take a cue from science how scientists are periodically revising what is known of the world around us - anyway ...) ( Some highlights from pages 11 and 12 ) Michio says in the late 1920’s Einstein’s general theory of relativity provided the best explanation of how our universe began. According to Einstein’s theory, the universe was born approximately 10 to 20 billion years ago in a gigantic explosion called the Big Bang.
However, Michio goes on to say there were many gaps in Einstein’s theory. Why did the universe explode? What happened before the Big Bang? Theologians as well as scientists for years have realized the incompleteness of the Big Bang theory, because it fails to explain the origin and nature of the Big Bang itself. Incredibly, the superstring theory predicts what happened before the Big Bang. According to superstrings, the universe originally existed in 10 dimensions, not the 4 dimensions (3 space and 1 time) of today…However, Michio states because the universe was unstable in 10 dimensions, it “cracked” into 2 pieces, with a small, 4-dimensional universe peeling off from the rest of the universe…If this theory is true Michio says then it means that our universe actually has a “sister universe” that coexists with our universe. According to Michio, the superstring theory explains the Big Bang as a by-product of a much more violent transition – the cracking of the 10-dimensional universe into two pieces.
Maybe theology is somewhat like the work of theoretical physicists. We look at the given data – the text – scripture – and try to piece together some ideas of an invisible world. Where is heaven? What is heaven? What is a spiritual being? If there was a 10-dimensional universe and it split into 2 – is that now the natural world and supernatural world? Don’t know. It's a lot of theory This stuff is fascinating and fun to think about though.
On 2/4/2017 at 10:36 AM, WordWolf said:
I'll get back to this shortly- and before I forget, what I want to start with is this "process theology" business, which cg espoused with his "Pivot Point in History" thing, and some responses to that. It was actually espoused, with different names, by some people outside twi circles who liked a fuzzy, accessible God and were willing to demote Him to get Him there. The book "The Trivialization of God" (which I've never read) seems to have addressed that issue quite handily.
I also addressed some of this in the thread "What Does God Know?" at length.
Among other things, cg conflated "foreknow" (to know ahead of time) with "foreordain" (to force to happen ahead of time) and concluded that he was rejecting the former since he didn't accept the latter. I accept not everyone can understand some of the issues he raised- but if he didn't then he has no business trying to put himself forth as an authority on the subject.
I read The Trivialization of God:The Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable Deity by Donald McCullough awhile back. Flipping through my copy I picked out a couple of highlighted notes that relate to this thread. On pages 16 & 17, McCullough speaks of how the scientific revolution tended to shove aside the mysterious…flattening transcendence into measurable data. He goes on to say in place of God, we now have control and explanation…I might add with PFAL we got an extra delusional dose – we were taught the law of believing would give us actual control over reality. Yes ! a manageable reality
The book covers a lot of ground but another page struck me as something I could relate to while in TWI. On page 141 McCullough talks about understanding holiness as ethical behavior trivializes it into moralism. When we lose sight of the religious or spiritual dimension – the sense of being separate unto God – we flatten the transcendent into a horizontal code of regulated behavior – turns the Christian life into something safe and manageable – insulated from God; the rod of legalism deflects the lightning shock of the holy God.
hey all, please excuse the wild formatting mess going on here - - geez copying and pasting has never been so difficult - tried to straighten it out the best that i could
Edited by T-Bone time...time...i always need more time !!!
Mr. Lortz, Thanks for the dissertation, I read it a couple of times, there's a lot to digest. As of this typing, I have not seen anything in your writing that changes my opinion of the validity of what John Schoeheit has done in the REV. Quite evident you are a learned individual on the Bible, it's what you do, not what I do. I would agree that anyone having spent any length of time in TWI would have ingrained certain of their doctrine, yet, if it was stolen from other scholars, well, that makes me more confident in the validity of the doctrine. You tend to portray Schoenheit as a VPW extension, I have not seen that, else wise, why did he leave TWI? Regardless, my concern, as stated numerously here in the GSC, is that I want to know if the words in the REV are trustworthy, period. I don't give a rat's foot about the authenticity and scholarly attributes of John Schoenheit, only that what I read is something that can be trusted. You can refute the man but do you refute the validity of what's been laid down in the REV and the adjoining commentary?
Thank you for what you wrote, especially the whole thing on time, etc.; something that I have pondered for decades (I am an old man you know}
Among other things, cg conflated "foreknow" (to know ahead of time) with "foreordain" (to force to happen ahead of time) and concluded that he was rejecting the former since he didn't accept the latter.
Sounds like something he coulda/woulda said, but I'm not familiar with it and can't recall when he did, or with what much of his teaching might have been around it. (In other words, if I heard it, perhaps I've forgotten most - if not all - of it.) Was it a sns tape? Furthermore, I didn't see mention of it in the other thread you linked to, so I don't know why (or how) you think it that relevant here. I'm also unfamiliar with the book you referred to "The Trivialization of God."
What Schoenheit is waltzing around here is his sentence "[God] sovereignly chose to relate to mankind...in a “linear” relationship, experiencing time passing with us." Schoenheit is saying here that God deliberately decided to experience time the same way human beings do. He COULD HAVE decided to experience time the way people outside of STFI think he does, but God decided to limit his perspective to man's, and therefore, does not know what's going to happen before it transpires.
I'm not persuaded that God needed to (or did) "choose" either of the options discussed there.
On 2/4/2017 at 5:39 PM, Steve Lortz said:
God could just as easily, if it had suited his purposes, designed us to experience more than one NOW at a time
Perhaps so, if time were some "dimensional" thing that can be moved around within. Maybe I'm just not convinced that's the case, or that it's even the best to think of it in terms of a "fourth" dimension.
On 2/4/2017 at 5:39 PM, Steve Lortz said:
No person is free to dictate the circumstances in which they find themselves, but every person is free to decide how they will respond in those circumstances.
To a degree, perhaps. But if man sits in darkness and is in bondage (i.e., enslaved) to his senses... how "free" is he, or can he really be?
On 2/4/2017 at 5:39 PM, Steve Lortz said:
The 4-D space-time continuum IS Creation, and we get to he'p make it happen!
Well, the "new age" spiritualists surely agree with that, and are eager to teach others how to make that happen.
MRAP - We are old farts together, you and I. I hope you are holding up as well as I am. One time, I wrote a haiku for credit in one of my Old Testament classes on the book of Ecclesiastes. It went like this:
I am getting old
fear God keep his commandments
old but not dead yet
You wrote, "I have not seen anything in your writing that changes my opinion of the validity of what John Schoeheit has done in the REV." That's a wonderful thing, MRAP! As they used to say "de gustibus non disputandum est," which means something like "it's silly to fight over matters of taste."
At one time (and for about 16 years) I had a tremendous amount of respect for Schoenheit's scholarship, second only to the respect I had for W@lter Cu^^^^ings. John and I served together on the writings of CES. I got to comment on the "22 Principles of Biblical Interpretation: How to Eliminate Apparent Bible Contradictions" before it was published. In 1996, I lost all respect for the "scholarship" Wierwille taught us in The Way International.
When Wierwille said he took all his commentaries out and burnt them, he was rejecting conversation with anyone who believed differently from the way he did, and he was encouraging us to do the same. After all, if they were wrong about (insert TWI doctrine here) how could they be right about anything else? But genuine scholarship IS conversation! The content of the commentaries is CONVERSATION about what the Bible says.
MRAP, you wrote, "You tend to portray Schoenheit as a VPW extension, I have not seen that, else wise, why did he leave TWI?" Schoenheit was fired from TWI by Martindale-era leadership for writing a paper that debunked all the excuses that TWI leadership used for practicing adultery. Schoenheit continued in all ways to "eat the fish and spit out the bones" or Wierwillian hermeneutics.
For me, the REV has no scholarly credibility at all, not because of who Schoenheit is, but because of what he does. Schoenheit is willing to consider different possibilities until he publishes something on a particular verse or topic. Once he has published, his opinion is set in stone. He will NOT EVEN CONSIDSER that something he has written might be deficient in any way. Once he has written it, it is "a 'deal breaker,' that is, something we consider non-negotiable in terms of having to agree on it with someone before we can work together with him." Schoenheit cannot work together with anyone who disagrees with anything he has already published. This was a "scholarly" habit Schoenheit picked up from imitating Wierwille.
One of the hallmarks of genuine scholarship is peer-review. The idea of peer-review is to submit your work to unbiased eyes who will catch any oversights that you might have made. Wierwille was never humble enough to submit the things he wrote to peer review. TWI's Research Department was set up to either rubber-stamp the things Wierwille wrote, or to find ways to rationalize his errors. That was the environment in which Schoenheit's scholarly neuron-pathways were combed. Schoenheit's work on the REV has never been submitted to peer-review.
Schoenheit wrote, "Our goal is to eventually have an 'essentially literal' translation of the Bible that more closely represents biblical truth than any other translation currently on the market, and also one that is written in today’s English. We think we can do that because we believe a person has to understand the meaning of the text correctly to be able to translate it correctly. Furthermore, one’s theology always affects the way that person will translate the text. It is our assertion that there are theological issues that we understand more correctly than most translators, and thus our translation will reflect that theology."
Any person who has done any translation of anything at all will recognize that this philosophy of translation is bogus. The translation CANNOT come from the meaning; the meaning HAS to come from the translation of the TEXT. In Principle #6 of the 22 Principles, Schoenheit (conjointly with Lynn and Graeser) wrote, "Logic demands that words and verses must not be wrested out of context and made to mean something foreign to the original meaning of the text." Yet this is exactly what Schoenheit does with his "translations" for the REV.
The REV is plagiarism. For instance, in the REV "translation" of Ephesians 3, Schoenheit's words are mixed without distinction into the words of the ASV. You can't tell simply from reading which parts are the work of Schoenheit, and which parts are the work of the ASV translators. The REV would fail, and Schoenheit would be laughed out of the Society of Biblical Literature, for plagiarism.
HOWSOEVER, MRAP, it really doesn't make much difference which version you like. The mind of Christ that you have (1 Corinthians 2:16) can teach you whatever he wants you to learn, no matter which version you are using, or whether you have a version of the Bible at all. The mind of Christ used a "Reactor Plant Control Manual" and an "Engineering Department Operating Procedures" to teach me how to change the things that were in my heart trying to kill me.
It is our assertion that there are theological issues that we understand more correctly than most translators, and thus our translation will reflect that theology."
"we understand more correctly than most translators". Are you kidding me??? That's some serious ego. Wow.
Yep, JayDee, that's what the man wrote because that's what the man believes... in his heart...
In one way, I'm mad at him, but in another, I'm just very, very sad. He had a lot of potential, but he never took a critical look at Wierwille's hype, and he bought it, hook, line and sinker.... All of his scholarship is FATALLY flawed, because he thinks he knows what God wanted to say better than God himself did. And his arrogance has blinded him to that... :-(
Recenty Jerry Wierwi!!e has joined Sch0$nheit's ranks. He does have some very good academic credentials. I think this was a move on Sch0$nheit's part to add some "credibility" to STF if that's possible
Jerry has a blog and Facebook page if anyone's interested in checking him out.
As it did many/most (all?) others in twi's research dept. That said, it wasn't exactly a fault that he was about to let anyone else outrank himself in...
Sounds like something he coulda/woulda said, but I'm not familiar with it and can't recall when he did, or with what much of his teaching might have been around it. (In other words, if I heard it, perhaps I've forgotten most - if not all - of it.) Was it a sns tape? Furthermore, I didn't see mention of it in the other thread you linked to, so I don't know why (or how) you think it that relevant here. I'm also unfamiliar with the book you referred to "The Trivialization of God."
Care to explain?
He was rather clear and unambiguous about in his his 3-part tape set, "A Pivot Point in History. " Tape 2 said it twice, rather plainly.
"If God put Adam in the Garden foreknowing, foreordaining Adam would sin, then he foreordained Adam's fall. If God did that, there would have to be darkness in Him."
"If God foreknew-or forced or tracked or whatever you'd like to put as the word there" .
He conflated foreknowing a thing (previous knowledge) with foreordaining a thing (forcing it to come to pass) twice right there.
BTW, cg didn't do sns tapes, he did GWT tapes, remember?
The relevance was this- when unable to distinguish between relatively simple concepts like "foreknow" and "foreordain", they slammed into the Time Magazine question I mentioned before. According to Time Magazine- which is NOT a reputed theological agency- it is possible to reconcile any 2 sayings but it is impossible to reconcile all three of the following:
A) God is All-Knowing
B) God is Loving
C) Evil exists.
So, both js and cg resolved this one by deprecating God's Omniscience. I understand Time Magazine's staff being unable to unsnarl this one, but for any supposed Christian teacher to be unable-and continue to teach- is irresponsible, What makes this particularly galling is that a pair of 20-year olds were able to completely refute cg's "position paper" (his tape set) to the degree that he offered neither opposition to their reply nor hostility to it. (He understood full well how completely he was refuted-by people who would really have rather let the older folk do it and not step in themselves.)
Having to actually put forth a Biblical argument for God being Omniscient was entirely due to cg (and, apparently, js) putting forth the opposite, and a lot of drones just soaking that up like sponges and immediately turning around and teaching it.
That there are Christians not from ex-twi circles who are unable to work through this was made clear by the necessity of other Christians to address it- with books like the one I mentioned. "Open Theism" flat-out denies the Omniscience of God because they think what cg said- an All-Knowing God who does force Himself into EVERY situation would be an unjust God. I would argue exactly the opposite- that a God who forced Himself into all sorts of situations where He was not requested would be unjust.
cg's illustration of how this works was an analysis of Genesis 3, where he suggested that God Almighty legitimately didn't know what was happening and had happened, and His questions showed Him trying to find out what happened. I believe the verses show the opposite- and any parent who has had to talk through a punishment with a child can easily see how it worked, let alone anyone who can compare relevant verses about each moment in Genesis 3. cg used phrases like "WHEN ALL OF THIS CAME TO GOD'S ATTENTION" to explain what God didn't know and when He didn't know it-according to cg.
He was rather clear and unambiguous about in his his 3-part tape set, "A Pivot Point in History. "
Okay, thanks for the clarification. I suppose they were probably from a time after we weren't receiving his sunday teachings, which (as you correctly pointed out) were tagged "GWT."
14 hours ago, WordWolf said:
So, both js and cg resolved this one by deprecating God's Omniscience. I understand Time Magazine's staff being unable to unsnarl this one, but for any supposed Christian teacher to be unable-and continue to teach- is irresponsible, What makes this particularly galling is that a pair of 20-year olds were able to completely refute cg's "position paper" (his tape set) to the degree that he offered neither opposition to their reply nor hostility to it. (He understood full well how completely he was refuted-by people who would really have rather let the older folk do it and not step in themselves.)
Having to actually put forth a Biblical argument for God being Omniscient was entirely due to cg (and, apparently, js) putting forth the opposite, and a lot of drones just soaking that up like sponges and immediately turning around and teaching it.
...(long pause)
You were 20 years old at the time?
14 hours ago, WordWolf said:
That there are Christians not from ex-twi circles who are unable to work through this was made clear by the necessity of other Christians to address it- with books like the one I mentioned. "Open Theism" flat-out denies the Omniscience of God because they think what cg said- an All-Knowing God who does force Himself into EVERY situation would be an unjust God. I would argue exactly the opposite- that a God who forced Himself into all sorts of situations where He was not requested would be unjust.
Quite frankly, this just isn't an issue where I'm extremely familiar with the viewpoints of others. However, the issue itself is something which I have given much more thought to than I probably realize (as it appears that I have very, very deep rooted opinions on the matter.) Perhaps it is simply the result of my perspective on Genesis, and the whole of scripture... which can sometimes make it difficult to put a finger on.
Having said that, from what I have seen recently (here, and other places on the Internet) on it, it seems to me that it is terribly easy to set up the "opposing view" as a straw man of sorts, only to be blown down with some brand of intellectual logic or scriptural reasoning. If/when there is time, I wouldn't mind delving a bit deeper into this... but I'm inclined to think this probably isn't the right thread for it. (The other doctrinal thread that you linked to previously is probably much better suited for it, as is separates it from any sort of misguided support for this "REV" titled thread.)
14 hours ago, WordWolf said:
cg's illustration of how this works was an analysis of Genesis 3, where he suggested that God Almighty legitimately didn't know what was happening and had happened, and His questions showed Him trying to find out what happened. I believe the verses show the opposite- and any parent who has had to talk through a punishment with a child can easily see how it worked, let alone anyone who can compare relevant verses about each moment in Genesis 3. cg used phrases like "WHEN ALL OF THIS CAME TO GOD'S ATTENTION" to explain what God didn't know and when He didn't know it-according to cg.
If true (and I've no reason to doubt that it isn't), cg sounds ridiculous. A bit surprising though, that he wouldn't look at it or see it from the perspective of a parent, considering how much so many of his GWT teachings came across like he was speaking to 5 year olds....
“…So, both js and cg resolved this one by deprecating God's Omniscience. I understand Time Magazine's staff being unable to unsnarl this one, but for any supposed Christian teacher to be unable-and continue to teach- is irresponsible, What makes this particularly galling is that a pair of 20-year olds were able to completely refute cg's "position paper" (his tape set) to the degree that he offered neither opposition to their reply nor hostility to it. (He understood full well how completely he was refuted-by people who would really have rather let the older folk do it and not step in themselves.)
Having to actually put forth a Biblical argument for God being Omniscient was entirely due to cg (and, apparently, js) putting forth the opposite, and a lot of drones just soaking that up like sponges and immediately turning around and teaching it.
That there are Christians not from ex-twi circles who are unable to work through this was made clear by the necessity of other Christians to address it- with books like the one I mentioned. "Open Theism" flat-out denies the Omniscience of God because they think what cg said- an All-Knowing God who does force Himself into EVERY situation would be an unjust God. I would argue exactly the opposite- that a God who forced Himself into all sorts of situations where He was not requested would be unjust…”
== == == ==
WordWolf, after reading your post a few times (and trying to understand their position) I did a little checking on STF’s website and found this issue addressed in an article A Valid Question – About God’s Foreknowledge :
Quote
“…It is apparent that “on either side of the coin” our mind boggles. On the one side, we cannot possibly understand how God could know our choices before we make them, and yet we still have genuine free will. On the other side of the coin, we cannot fathom God’s ability to bring to pass prophecies as specifically as He does. But as stated in the above article, for us the “open” view is far more biblically sound and far more appealing than the “closed” view of God. It also makes God much more personal, powerful and present.
One major problem with the idea that God has absolute foreknowledge is that it renders His many dialogues with people like Abraham, Moses, Jonah, etc., meaningless, if not disingenuous.If God already saw in His foreknowledge that the Ninevites would repent, then He could not honestly convey to Jonah the possibility of them not repenting. If on the other hand, they were genuine free moral agents whose free will decisions could not be known absolutely until they were made, then God’s dialogue to Jonah is both honest and understandable.
Our experience over the years has shown that this is a potentially volatile subject that generates strong emotional responses from those who feel that it threatens their conception of God. Much love, wisdom and patience needs to be shown toward those who may be in this category…”
I marked in bold red the first portion of the above statement that I have a problem with. And to be honest – the problem just may be with my overall theological viewpoint – which has changed dramatically since I left TWI. This sort of ties in with the mentioning of the book The Trivialization of God earlier on this thread. I could be way off base here, but it seems (like vpw) cg and js appear to be quite challenged by certain theological paradoxes. The latter part of the quote that I also marked in bold red – further reflects their lack of humility as shown in their preface to the REV as quoted in an earlier post:
Quote
"…Our goal is to eventually have an 'essentially literal' translation of the Bible that more closely represents biblical truth than any other translation currently on the market, and also one that is written in today’s English. We think we can do that because we believe a person has to understand the meaning of the text correctly to be able to translate it correctly…”
== == == ==
I’ve stated earlier that I thought it was honest they said upfront their theology would influence their translation. The more I think about it though – is that really intellectually or academically honest? I mean, translating a text is partly the work of an interpreter – but given it’s a text that was written in an ancient time period, in different cultures, different locations, and in several different languages – should not the interpreter/translator strive to find out what the words and phrases originally meant in that entire context (original cultures, original languages, etc.)? And to that I also ask where are their credentials and peer reviews - that would indicate they are qualified to translate the text?
You know, i get it about wanting to make your own translation - as a student of the Bible I sometimes do that myself in working a passage. But maybe my approach is a little more stringent. I tend to think more like a scientist would than a theologian by asking what is written in the text. What is the raw data? From there we can get into theology but even then we should be aware of the difference from a simple statement of fact (for ex. the text here reads thus and so with variant readings of this and that from these other texts) to varying degrees of our mental process (for ex. this passage appears to address the same topic as that passage, this passage may infer this or that, sheer speculation - as in this passage may be talking about another dimension). I don't know how consistent a job I do here of expressing matters as sheer speculation, my opinion or whatever - but I think it is irresponsible of TWI and spinoffs for "teachers" to come off as know-it-alls, spiritually tapped in, or having the correct understanding of the meaning of the text.
And I think humility should always be the flexible frame of our thoughts. I think scientists for the most part may be a bunch of very humble folks. Science is always revising what we know of the physical world, with more and more accurate testing equipment always improving on the scientific method - observation and experimentation. My personal theology focuses more on the raw biblical data - and I tend to let that inform my theology; granted there's a lot of fuzzy areas - but I'm ok with that.
Getting back to God’s foreknowledge – I think to some degree we all make adjustments in our thinking in order to make sense of certain passages. The Scriptures were written by human authors yet they are supposed to be the very words of God. There’s the matter of trying to resolve passages showing Jesus’ humanity with verses that convey his deity. Another one is the sovereignty of God versus man’s freedom of will. I am sorry to cop out on you all but I do not – I cannot - offer any words of wisdom on any of this.
I choose to accept both sides of the biblical data as true. I’m not saying the issues can’t be resolved but given the situation as I see it (trying to wrap my mind around God) it is definitely a fun pursuit but will never be accomplished. Like the story of Augustine and the Seashell: he saw a boy scooping up the shore’s water in a seashell and carrying it to a small hole in the sand – Augustine asked the boy what he was doing and he replied he was bringing the entire sea into the hole.
Maybe it’s just me and my idea of God – but it seems like a rather odd and demeaning concept when js in his article on God’s foreknowledge suggests dialing down God’s omniscience… sovereignty…whatever – so that God doesn’t come across as disingenuous in his dialogs with others.
Maybe God does not tell all he knows or explains contingencies – but there are passages where he does.
“ 5 Then the word of the Lord came to me.6 He said, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?” declares the Lord. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel.7 If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed,8 and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned.9 And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted,10 and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.”Jeremiah 18: 5-10 NIV
== == == ==
And if a futurist’s interpretation of the book of Revelation is valid (which is how I interpret it) then God has already painted himself into a corner. Guess we’ll have to wait and see how things pan out – to see whether or not he is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, etc.
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Steve Lortz
MRAP - We are old farts together, you and I. I hope you are holding up as well as I am. One time, I wrote a haiku for credit in one of my Old Testament classes on the book of Ecclesiastes. It went lik
Steve Lortz
Thank you for your friendship, Raf! Three years ago, I was in intensive care for nearly a week because of a potassium overdose. I took some kidney and heart damage. About a year and a half ago, I
Steve Lortz
Some thoughts regarding Schoenheit's REV: In the 1600s, Descartes proposed an idea as the very basis the scientific method, to begin by finding a fundamental truth (which was assumed), to proceed
Steve Lortz
I'm not a fan of any particular kind of constructive theology, T-Bone. Sometimes, when people ask me what faith community I come from, I tell them I'm a Free Range Baptist, I believe in baptism but I don't believe in cages!
Technical constructive theology has too many theories of post-modernism, etc., to suit my taste, but I like deriving the meaning of a text from what is written, not from reading alien ideas into what is written.
Love,
Steve
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T-Bone
thanks - I appreciate your thoughtful reply and I lean toward deriving meaning from the text as well....and I must say being afraid to commit to any one particular theological approach - I'm a free-range chicken.
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DontWorryBeHappy
TY Steve Lortz and T-Bone! Excellent posts. Well articulated and relevant to the topic.
IMO, there is no critical value to the "REV" or any worth other than to bolster Schoenheit and Lynn's MLM Jesus scams by plagiarism and personal hubris. It is another wierwillean ego trip couched in faux academics. They got real used to this "systematic theology" con and the money making structure involved in "teaching the rightly divided word" which was neither rightly-divided or Biblical.
Thanks Again for your time and the info you shared.
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Raf
Welcome back, Steve. Did I miss a post where you explained where and how you've been?
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Steve Lortz
Thank you for your friendship, Raf!
Three years ago, I was in intensive care for nearly a week because of a potassium overdose. I took some kidney and heart damage. About a year and a half ago, I was in the ICU again with pneumonia. Both the kidney and the heart damage were (what should I call it...?) made worse. I am now in congestive heart failure. My kidneys don't send the proper signals to my bone marrow to generate blood cells. For the past year-and-a -half I have been dying one red blood cell at a time, which has given me some interesting perspective on the physiology of spirit! Fortunately, I go into the infusion center from time to time, and if my hemoglobin falls below a certain point, they give me a shot which works as an artificial signal to make more blood. But I am still anemic, so I've been able to work (thinking and writing) at only about half speed. I used to use Sudoku puzzles to keep track of how efficiently my brain was still working, but I've become too slow for Sudoku to work any more.
I'm still auditing classes, though, for physical and occupational therapy. For the past few years I've been writing things required by the syllabuses, but, since I stopped taking classes for credit last summer, I can now write what I want. The last thing I wrote for school was a formal exegesis paper on 1 Corinthians 2:9-3:3, and I translated it from the Greek for myself. Translating Paul is like translating Groucho Marx. They play the same kinds of word games! And doing any real translating makes the scholarly farce of Stiffy's REV very, very manifest.
I am currently working on Out from within whom all things, and we all the way into him: Stoic Cosmobiology in 1:Corinthians 8:6 and a Quantum/Godelian Critique of Current Hermeneutics.
The first section is titled Absolute and Obsolete. Since the Enlightenment of the 17th century, Western intellectuals (theologians included) have been fixated on using logic to find a single absolute meaning for everything. "Absolute" means "free from imperfection" and should not be confused with vodka, though some people say Absolut is free from imperfection! Hermeneutics is the art of extracting a meaning from a text, and it's not just a Biblical thing. I first had to learn hermeneutics studying reactor plant control manuals! Hermeneutics is usually taught to literature majors. The hermeneutics of historical methodology is based on the idea that nothing "supernatural" in the Bible can be historically true. Such accounts are absolute fiction. These are the ideas at the heart of liberal protestant theology. The ideas of inerrancy and plenary verbal inspiration arose as a reaction against historical methodology, saying that every account of anything supernatural in the Bible, even the mythic elements, are absolutely true. These are the ideas at the heart of fundamentalist/evangelical theology. Both theologies pursue a single absolute truth. Scientists do it too in their quest for a unified field theorem.
In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein's theory of relativity, that 3-D space and time are not absolutes, but rather they constitute a relativistic 4-D continuum. Theologically, this wipes out the process theology of Spirit & Truth Fellowship, because if God is everyWHERE, then he is also everyWHEN. And it returns teleological cause to consideration, which means scientific explanations are possible for synchronicity.
In 1927, Heisenberg published his Uncertainty Principle which demonstrates that possessing certain kinds of information is mutually restrictive, that is, the more precisely we measure one thing, the less precisely we can measure some other related thing. This is reflected in theology in that, if we define a word too closely, it will lose power to communicate in some other way. I am reminded of many of the definitions Wierwille gave us. The hermeneutics he taught us in Power for Abundant Living worked very well within his system, but they made interpretations other than his own impossible. Stiffy fails to recognize this in their "22 Principles of Biblical Interpretation: How to Eliminate Apparent Bible contradictions" and Schoenheit failed to recognize it in his REV (I think I've somehow changed my font without knowing how I did it. Maybe it's Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work?)
In 1931, Godel published his Incompleteness Theorems which, roughly stated, say that for any logical system, there will exist statements in the language of the system that the system can neither prove nor disprove. No logical system can resolve all ambiguity. Power for Abundant Living could not, inherently, eliminate all apparent Bible contradictions.
The absolute is obsolete.
I am using Murphy-O'Conner's commentary on 1 Corinthians 8:6 to demonstrate, specifically, how features of contemporary hermeneutics have been obsolete for nearly one hundred years.
So... Raf... I am expanded my critique from Power for Abundant Living and the REV to theology as a WHOLE!
That's why I ain't been here for a while, but it is sure good to be back among my friends!
Love,
Steve
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TLC
LOL... so, in other words, the truth is akin to beholding jello. Hold too tightly to part of it, and some other part of it moves or slips through your fingers.
Yeah, I've heard (and knew) that quite some time ago.
Didn't know he/they were into "process theology." (Sounds rather odd, but given I've only watched a small handful of Schoenheit's video's, no comment aside from, it doesn't seem to be something obvious.)
I'm not following the reasoning. Care to explain or say another way?
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Steve Lortz
Up until Einstein's Theory of Relativity, people thought of time as something that happened in an absolute (free from imperfection) three-dimensional space. Time appears to move forward in a 3-D space. Einstein's theory conceived of space and time as being four dimension's of a relativistic space-time continuum. It's not easy to describe such a thing accurately except with mathematics, but I like to think of it as a loaf of bread whose four ingredients are the x-axis, the y-axis, the z-axis and time. If you move around in the loaf of bread, you move in time as well as in the three axes.
Process theology was originally invented in the early 1900s by Alfred North Whitehead. Process theology says that God's point of view in time is as limited as man's, that is, God created objective reality without knowing how anything was going to turn out.
When John, John, and Mark were writing "Don't Blame God" they rediscovered process theology. I don't think they plagiarized it. None of them read enough to "honestly" plagiarize something so complex. Also, if they HAD read Whitehead, they wouldn't have expressed their theology in such sophomoric ways.
John, John, and Mark said that God couldn't have foreseen the existence of evil, otherwise, God would be responsible for evil and people could blame him for it. However, there were deterministic factors so fine that people couldn't see them, but God could use them to tell that soldiers were going to dice for Jesus's cloak a thousand years before it happened. If that were the case, there would be no room for human beings to make any decisions at all. John, John, and Mark had me, along with several others, proof read the galleys for "Don't Blame God." They didn't take my critique seriously.
Since we live in a relativistic space-time continuum, if God is everywhere, then he also has to be everyWHEN. God sees all throughout the loaf. God's point of view is not limited to man's. God could not have created objective reality without knowing that evil would come to exist. John, John and Mark did not end up with a blameless God; they ended up with an IRRESPOSIBLE God.
Now-a-days, we think of cause coming before effect in time, since that's the way we see it. But it's not the "flow" of time that is limited, what's limited is our perspective within time. God necessarily limited our point of view of time to a single, instantaneous NOW so that we could make genuine decisions, so that we could have free will within the 4-D loaf. But God designed the loaf so that everything would turn out all right at the end, and everyone who wants to cooperate with him can cooperate, and those who don't want to cooperate don't have to cooperate. God built teleological (from the end) cause into the 4-D loaf. The way God wants things to end exerts causes backward through time as well as forward from the beginning. When I look back on my 67 years, I see how the way God wanted me to be NOW caused certain things to happen BACK THEN (and how I have survived certain death on three different occasions). I will bet Don't Worry Be Happy could say as much.
I hope this helps, TLC. Thanks for asking!
Love,
Steve
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TLC
Ah. Thanks for the explanation. While I'm unfamiliar with the "Don't Blame God" piece mentioned, you brought to mind a related issue I read some time back on their site which to a certain degree, I probably agreed with. (And, as I just had to go look it up to refresh exactly what it was, I may as well offer a link to it.) Perhaps there is some aspect of the term "process theology" that can be viewed from a different angle then how it is typically presented on the Internet (which your post seemed to somewhat be aligned with), so I'll leave room to reconsider what all that particular labeling might include or intend to communicate.
Frankly, I'm not persuaded that Einstein's theory imposes some "everywhen" characteristic or nature upon God, which then goes on to be perceived as a "goes anywhere forward or backwards in time" possibility. Sure, from our static 3 dimensional vantage point, time appears measureable and moving one direction. But, in accordance with E's theory, were it possible to approach and equal the speed of light, time would appear to slow down and stop. If time is stopped (perhaps similar to an electron spinning around an atom?), then its appearance from a static vantage point can be everywhere. In the case of an electron, it evidently can be everywhere in its orbit at the same time. (One of the less mysterious oddities of quantum mechanics?) And while Science Fiction novels and movies might plainly allow "time travel" to go backwards, I don't see any support or indications of such possibilities in either Einstein's theory (which can "relatively" explain a forward jump) or in the scriptures.
Now, back to this:
That sounds to me about as much like a straw man argument as anything I might have every heard. Seriously? God's view is as limited as man's? What knucklehead with even half a functioning brain could ever "invent" or propose such a lunatic "theology"? (I know it's not anything you believe, Steve. So don't take that as anything personal.) Granted, as mentioned already, I haven't read the "Don't Blame God" piece. Given what I did read (see link above), I find it a bit hard to believe that any of the fellas you mention would be stupid enough to bite into and swallow that line of swank, much less endorse or promote it. Then again, the very notion that "God couldn't have foreseen the existence of evil, otherwise, God would be responsible... (yada, yada)" sounds near equally as absurd to me, so maybe in their zeal to sell themselves they've again stepped into some dogsheet.
If God couldn't have foreseen the existence of evil, then why did he have a plan of salvation prepared before times? Or, do they only intend to associate that with the fall of Lucifer? Perhaps you don't know. I certainly don't, and I'm not about to continue on in fabricating some plausible or defensible position of it for them...
However, as for this:
I disagree. But exchange the two words "could" and "would" (i.e., flip one for the other), and I'd give you the nod.
Back to this. Okay, though I plainly disagree with the "backwards" notion of it, I get how (and why) you tie it to teleological cause. But why suppose there is a necessity for anything being exerted "backwards through time" (or forwards, for that matter) if God is the all and ever present guiding hand at the helm? When "the end" is arrived at through or by way of the determinate counsel and foreknowledge God, doesn't that say all that we need to know, without any need to jump forward or backwards in time? Without a doubt there have been (and are more) clear and definitive "checkpoints" along the timeline to get there. What we lack and don't have a real handle on, is how (so to speak) God "steers the ship" to get there. So, not only do I think it's presumptuous to suppose God has any need to jump forward or backwards in time with "causation," I actually think it probably lessens or weakens the perception of His abilities to project and navigate towards the future. Which is more glorious: exerting causes backwards through time to insure the presence now of what is desire, or exerting causes now that insures the presence of it in the future? Which do you sail with?
Edited by TLCcorrected sp of "process"
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WordWolf
I'll get back to this shortly- and before I forget, what I want to start with is this "process theology" business, which cg espoused with his "Pivot Point in History" thing, and some responses to that. It was actually espoused, with different names, by some people outside twi circles who liked a fuzzy, accessible God and were willing to demote Him to get Him there. The book "The Trivialization of God" (which I've never read) seems to have addressed that issue quite handily.
I also addressed some of this in the thread "What Does God Know?" at length.
Among other things, cg conflated "foreknow" (to know ahead of time) with "foreordain" (to force to happen ahead of time) and concluded that he was rejecting the former since he didn't accept the latter. I accept not everyone can understand some of the issues he raised- but if he didn't then he has no business trying to put himself forth as an authority on the subject.
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TLC
Interesting you have a thread on the topic, thanks for pointing it out. I'll try to look it over in the next day or two.
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Steve Lortz
Lots of good fun on this thread!
I used to take the things John Schoenheit wrote seriously. I respect his scope of knowledge and his desire to go to the Word of God, but after receiving a little bit of training in actual, professional scholarship, I can't help but feel sorry for John, and all the rest of them.
Wierwille did not teach us how to read what the Bible says. He taught us his system, which made the Bible say what HE wanted it to say, that it is okay to sin as long as you don't become sin-conscious. Grace enables us to sin as long as we don't pay any attention to the fact that we are sinning.
Do you guys know what the word "delude" means? It comes from the Latin deludere, which means "to play off" or "to play away." To say that a person has been deluded means that the person "has been played" because he has believed a lie. Wierwille deluded us ALL for a time. Schoenheit's problem is that he has never recognized how he was played, and he continues to play other people the same way he was played. He's not doing it maliciously, he's doing it arrogantly.
Real scholars don't take a position, cherry-pick a few proof verses to support their position, and then ignore all the verses that don't agree with their presumption.
Real scholars write exegesis, which is the art of reading a meaning out from within the text instead of reading foreign meanings into it. To write exegesis, one takes a piece of scripture (sometimes called a "pericope" per-ICK-uh- pee) and then applies literary, form, textual, redaction, source and social/historical criticisms to the passage. After that, a scholar may or may not discuss intertextuality, how the pericope affects or is affected by other passages. We had to write four exegesis papers in the course of working on a masters degree (which I wasn't able to complete because of health reasons, but I did successfully write my four exegesis papers). Our papers covered pericopes of about 6 to 8 verses, and had to be 13 pages long, no more and no less.
It was a jarring experience to read Schoenheit's FAQ "Does God know every future event in human history?" I wrote a paper like that once, and my professor said he didn't even know how to go about grading it!
TLC, you asked, "That sounds to me about as much like a straw man argument as anything I might have every heard. Seriously? God's view is as limited as man's? What knucklehead with even half a functioning brain could ever "invent" or propose such a lunatic "theology"?"
Schoenheit wrote in the piece you referenced, "Once upon a time (biblically: 'in the beginning'), when God was all by Himself, He sovereignly chose to relate to mankind as His Word subsequently declares He does, that is, in a 'linear' relationship, experiencing time passing with us. His perspective is definitely far beyond our own ('With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day— 2 Pet. 3:8), that is, He sees the big picture that we as temporal beings cannot, but He makes it clear that He relates to us according to how we see time."
What Schoenheit is waltzing around here is his sentence "[God] sovereignly chose to relate to mankind...in a “linear” relationship, experiencing time passing with us." Schoenheit is saying here that God deliberately decided to experience time the same way human beings do. He COULD HAVE decided to experience time the way people outside of STFI think he does, but God decided to limit his perspective to man's, and therefore, does not know what's going to happen before it transpires.
Notice how Schoenheit says "a 'linear' relationship, experiencing time passing with us." A person's experience of time is not a one-dimensional line. It is a zero-dimensional, instantaneous NOW. Because God designed us to remember things, time seems to us to be linear, but it is not. God could just as easily, if it had suited his purposes, designed us to experience more than one NOW at a time, but we have to experience time as NOW, or we could not make decisions, that is, we could not exercise agency. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.
It's not a matter of predestination or free-will, it's a matter of mutual agency. God has agency, that is, he is free to do, and responsible for what he does. it is from agency that the sense of self springs. God made Adam and Eve both in his image, that is, he gave them both agency, the freedom to do, and responsibility for what is done. Not absolute agency, like God's own, but limited agency. No person is free to dictate the circumstances in which they find themselves, but every person is free to decide how they will respond in those circumstances. That's why it's called responsibility. As we pass through life, we can chose to align our agencies with God's, just like with speaking in tongues. We have to speak, to exercise our agencies, in order for the Holy Spirit to exercise its agency, to give the utterance. It is a matter of MUTUAL agency. Jesus exercised mutual agency with God when he said, "not my will, but yours be done" and voluntarily went onto the cross.
God designed us the way he did so that we could exercise mutual agency with him (he/she/it, whatever...) in CREATING creation! The 4-D space-time continuum IS Creation, and we get to he'p make it happen!
Schoenheit equates "in the beginning" with "once upon a time." That just ain't so... the Biblical equivalent of "once upon a time" is ''and it came to pass that..." "In the beginning" means "first of all..." It is not a reference to time, it is a reference to priority. The sense of "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" is "The first thing we have to consider is that Elohim created the heaven and the earth." This was in contra-distinction to the "Enuma Elish," which said that the heaven and earth were never created, but Marduk gave them the form they now have.
Schoenheit wrote, "[God] chose to relate to mankind as His Word subsequently declares He does, that is, in a 'linear' relationship, experiencing time passing with us." What does Schoenheit mean by "as His Word subsequently declares He does"? Does he mean there is a verse somewhere in the Bible that says God experiences time passing with us? If there is, why doesn't he cite it? If there isn't, then why is Schoenheit implying that there is? To convince people he knows what he's talking about, even though he doesn't actually? It's dishonest scholarship, something Schoenheit learned while he was being played by Wierwille.
Schoenheit went on to write, "[God] sees the big picture that we as temporal beings cannot, but He makes it clear that He relates to us according to how we see time." Schoenheit admits that God sees time in a way that we temporal beings cannot, but, in contrast, relates to us according to how we see time. Yes, it's true that God can relate to us the way we see time. He designed us that way. But there is no logical or textual reason to draw the conclusion that God doesn't know the end from the beginning. In fact, the text reads, "...I am God and there is no one like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done..." (Isaiah 46:9b&10)
MRAP, I don't know if you're reading this, but if you are, I hope it gives you some insight into Schoenheit's REV!
More about the 4-D space-time continuum along a different vector!
Love,
Steve
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Steve Lortz
"Process theology" is what Alfred North Whitehead called it a hundred years ago. Today, it's called "open theism". The fact that Schoenheit doesn't read anything except his own stuff becomes obvious when we look at what others have written about open theism. Their thinking and writing is much less ham-handed than Schoenheit's. As far as I can see from Schoenheit's writing, he doesn't even have a name for the idea he's putting forward. There is plenty of discussion going on about this in the wider world, and Schoenheit doesn't even seem to be aware of it.
It's called "open" theism because it supposedly opens up the future and God's knowledge of it. In actuality, it crams God into the box of human experience. The conventional view of time is as a one-dimensional line arcing through a three dimensional space. God knows the future because he sees the whole, one-dimensional line. Open theism sees time in the past as a one-dimensional line arcing through three-dimensional space, but in the future, the line branches of in many possible directions. The distinction between NOW and any other place in time is that NOW is where all possibilities reduce to one.
The problem is, objective reality has demonstrated that time is not a one-dimensional line, branching or otherwise. Time is one of the components of a four-dimensional "solid". Time extends in all directions (not just forward and backward) through the "solid", just as do components in the x, y, and z axes. We don't see this at the human scale and at human speeds, but it has to be calculated for (using 4-D vector math) or global positioning satellites wouldn't work. Your Garmin couldn't tell you where to get off if all these obsolete notions of time were true.
If God is every WHERE... then he also has to be every WHEN.
The question of whether or not we can travel faster than the speed of light is very glamorous, because it makes for some very good science-fiction stories, but it's not the meat and potatoes of relativistic reckoning of time.
Love,
Steve
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T-Bone
The scripture twisting and double-talk in PFAL sold a lot of folks on the supposed "mathematical exactness and scientific precision" of the Bible; vp was an inept plagiarist as well – though he stole Bullinger’s work on interpreting the Bible – vp offered a different conclusion - that the Bible interprets itself (that interpretation becomes the word – but really it’s nothing more than vp’s interpretation); compare that to EW Bullinger’s How to Enjoy the Bible page 188 - after examining II Peter 1:20 no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation – Bullinger said it refers to the origin and source of scripture and not to its meaning or interpretation. vp’s promoting an inerrant Bible and that there’s only one correct interpretation of it leaves a PFAL student little option but to pay heed to what vp has to say about it all.
Years after leaving TWI I read Introduction to Biblical Interpretation by William Klein, Craig Blomberg and Robert Hubbard Jr. On page 72 they talk of how Christians often ask an important question for which there is no simple solution – which goes along the lines of asking why didn’t God in his providence insure that an inspired original would be perfectly preserved – indeed he left the transmission and proclamation of Scriptures to fallible and potentially rebellious human beings; I like the answer offered by the authors, and it goes along the lines of perhaps God did not want us to idolize a book but rather to worship the author of the book - God!
Their limited view of God is kind of weird. When it comes to a reference of time and God I always think of God as the one who inhabits eternity (Isaiah 57:15); The NET Bible offers an interesting note on that verse – in Hebrew it’s “one who dwells forever” and is sometimes translated “the one who lives forever”. However, the immediately preceding and following descriptions (“high and exalted” and “holy”) emphasize his sovereign rule. More than likely it refers to God’s eternal kingship....in other words - God is all over this thing called time - he's in it...outside of it...permeates it...he's not having to wing it when a crisis pops up. He's always in charge. Being sovereign and not bound by time he knows the end before the beginning and can orchestrate it all as he sees fit.
Speaking of Einstein’s general theory of relativity I read something interesting that gets into multidimensional universes in Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe by Michio Kaku ( I think it’s not a bad thing to reevaluate one’s theology periodically – maybe take a cue from science how scientists are periodically revising what is known of the world around us - anyway ...) ( Some highlights from pages 11 and 12 ) Michio says in the late 1920’s Einstein’s general theory of relativity provided the best explanation of how our universe began. According to Einstein’s theory, the universe was born approximately 10 to 20 billion years ago in a gigantic explosion called the Big Bang.
However, Michio goes on to say there were many gaps in Einstein’s theory. Why did the universe explode? What happened before the Big Bang? Theologians as well as scientists for years have realized the incompleteness of the Big Bang theory, because it fails to explain the origin and nature of the Big Bang itself. Incredibly, the superstring theory predicts what happened before the Big Bang. According to superstrings, the universe originally existed in 10 dimensions, not the 4 dimensions (3 space and 1 time) of today…However, Michio states because the universe was unstable in 10 dimensions, it “cracked” into 2 pieces, with a small, 4-dimensional universe peeling off from the rest of the universe…If this theory is true Michio says then it means that our universe actually has a “sister universe” that coexists with our universe. According to Michio, the superstring theory explains the Big Bang as a by-product of a much more violent transition – the cracking of the 10-dimensional universe into two pieces.
Maybe theology is somewhat like the work of theoretical physicists. We look at the given data – the text – scripture – and try to piece together some ideas of an invisible world. Where is heaven? What is heaven? What is a spiritual being? If there was a 10-dimensional universe and it split into 2 – is that now the natural world and supernatural world? Don’t know. It's a lot of theory
This stuff is fascinating and fun to think about though.
I read The Trivialization of God: The Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable Deity by Donald McCullough awhile back. Flipping through my copy I picked out a couple of highlighted notes that relate to this thread. On pages 16 & 17, McCullough speaks of how the scientific revolution tended to shove aside the mysterious…flattening transcendence into measurable data. He goes on to say in place of God, we now have control and explanation…I might add with PFAL we got an extra delusional dose – we were taught the law of believing would give us actual control over reality. Yes ! a manageable reality
The book covers a lot of ground but another page struck me as something I could relate to while in TWI. On page 141 McCullough talks about understanding holiness as ethical behavior trivializes it into moralism. When we lose sight of the religious or spiritual dimension – the sense of being separate unto God – we flatten the transcendent into a horizontal code of regulated behavior – turns the Christian life into something safe and manageable – insulated from God; the rod of legalism deflects the lightning shock of the holy God.
Trivialization of God
= == ==
hey all, please excuse the wild formatting mess going on here - - geez copying and pasting has never been so difficult - tried to straighten it out the best that i could
Edited by T-Bonetime...time...i always need more time !!!
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MRAP
Mr. Lortz, Thanks for the dissertation, I read it a couple of times, there's a lot to digest. As of this typing, I have not seen anything in your writing that changes my opinion of the validity of what John Schoeheit has done in the REV. Quite evident you are a learned individual on the Bible, it's what you do, not what I do. I would agree that anyone having spent any length of time in TWI would have ingrained certain of their doctrine, yet, if it was stolen from other scholars, well, that makes me more confident in the validity of the doctrine. You tend to portray Schoenheit as a VPW extension, I have not seen that, else wise, why did he leave TWI? Regardless, my concern, as stated numerously here in the GSC, is that I want to know if the words in the REV are trustworthy, period. I don't give a rat's foot about the authenticity and scholarly attributes of John Schoenheit, only that what I read is something that can be trusted. You can refute the man but do you refute the validity of what's been laid down in the REV and the adjoining commentary?
Thank you for what you wrote, especially the whole thing on time, etc.; something that I have pondered for decades (I am an old man you know}
MRAP
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TLC
Sounds like something he coulda/woulda said, but I'm not familiar with it and can't recall when he did, or with what much of his teaching might have been around it. (In other words, if I heard it, perhaps I've forgotten most - if not all - of it.) Was it a sns tape? Furthermore, I didn't see mention of it in the other thread you linked to, so I don't know why (or how) you think it that relevant here. I'm also unfamiliar with the book you referred to "The Trivialization of God."
Care to explain?
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TLC
I'm not persuaded that God needed to (or did) "choose" either of the options discussed there.
Perhaps so, if time were some "dimensional" thing that can be moved around within. Maybe I'm just not convinced that's the case, or that it's even the best to think of it in terms of a "fourth" dimension.
To a degree, perhaps. But if man sits in darkness and is in bondage (i.e., enslaved) to his senses... how "free" is he, or can he really be?
Well, the "new age" spiritualists surely agree with that, and are eager to teach others how to make that happen.
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Steve Lortz
MRAP - We are old farts together, you and I. I hope you are holding up as well as I am. One time, I wrote a haiku for credit in one of my Old Testament classes on the book of Ecclesiastes. It went like this:
I am getting old
fear God keep his commandments
old but not dead yet
You wrote, "I have not seen anything in your writing that changes my opinion of the validity of what John Schoeheit has done in the REV." That's a wonderful thing, MRAP! As they used to say "de gustibus non disputandum est," which means something like "it's silly to fight over matters of taste."
At one time (and for about 16 years) I had a tremendous amount of respect for Schoenheit's scholarship, second only to the respect I had for W@lter Cu^^^^ings. John and I served together on the writings of CES. I got to comment on the "22 Principles of Biblical Interpretation: How to Eliminate Apparent Bible Contradictions" before it was published. In 1996, I lost all respect for the "scholarship" Wierwille taught us in The Way International.
When Wierwille said he took all his commentaries out and burnt them, he was rejecting conversation with anyone who believed differently from the way he did, and he was encouraging us to do the same. After all, if they were wrong about (insert TWI doctrine here) how could they be right about anything else? But genuine scholarship IS conversation! The content of the commentaries is CONVERSATION about what the Bible says.
MRAP, you wrote, "You tend to portray Schoenheit as a VPW extension, I have not seen that, else wise, why did he leave TWI?" Schoenheit was fired from TWI by Martindale-era leadership for writing a paper that debunked all the excuses that TWI leadership used for practicing adultery. Schoenheit continued in all ways to "eat the fish and spit out the bones" or Wierwillian hermeneutics.
For me, the REV has no scholarly credibility at all, not because of who Schoenheit is, but because of what he does. Schoenheit is willing to consider different possibilities until he publishes something on a particular verse or topic. Once he has published, his opinion is set in stone. He will NOT EVEN CONSIDSER that something he has written might be deficient in any way. Once he has written it, it is "a 'deal breaker,' that is, something we consider non-negotiable in terms of having to agree on it with someone before we can work together with him." Schoenheit cannot work together with anyone who disagrees with anything he has already published. This was a "scholarly" habit Schoenheit picked up from imitating Wierwille.
One of the hallmarks of genuine scholarship is peer-review. The idea of peer-review is to submit your work to unbiased eyes who will catch any oversights that you might have made. Wierwille was never humble enough to submit the things he wrote to peer review. TWI's Research Department was set up to either rubber-stamp the things Wierwille wrote, or to find ways to rationalize his errors. That was the environment in which Schoenheit's scholarly neuron-pathways were combed. Schoenheit's work on the REV has never been submitted to peer-review.
Schoenheit wrote, "Our goal is to eventually have an 'essentially literal' translation of the Bible that more closely represents biblical truth than any other translation currently on the market, and also one that is written in today’s English. We think we can do that because we believe a person has to understand the meaning of the text correctly to be able to translate it correctly. Furthermore, one’s theology always affects the way that person will translate the text. It is our assertion that there are theological issues that we understand more correctly than most translators, and thus our translation will reflect that theology."
Any person who has done any translation of anything at all will recognize that this philosophy of translation is bogus. The translation CANNOT come from the meaning; the meaning HAS to come from the translation of the TEXT. In Principle #6 of the 22 Principles, Schoenheit (conjointly with Lynn and Graeser) wrote, "Logic demands that words and verses must not be wrested out of context and made to mean something foreign to the original meaning of the text." Yet this is exactly what Schoenheit does with his "translations" for the REV.
The REV is plagiarism. For instance, in the REV "translation" of Ephesians 3, Schoenheit's words are mixed without distinction into the words of the ASV. You can't tell simply from reading which parts are the work of Schoenheit, and which parts are the work of the ASV translators. The REV would fail, and Schoenheit would be laughed out of the Society of Biblical Literature, for plagiarism.
HOWSOEVER, MRAP, it really doesn't make much difference which version you like. The mind of Christ that you have (1 Corinthians 2:16) can teach you whatever he wants you to learn, no matter which version you are using, or whether you have a version of the Bible at all. The mind of Christ used a "Reactor Plant Control Manual" and an "Engineering Department Operating Procedures" to teach me how to change the things that were in my heart trying to kill me.
God bless you, Bro!
Love,
Steve
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JayDee
"we understand more correctly than most translators". Are you kidding me??? That's some serious ego. Wow.
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Steve Lortz
Yep, JayDee, that's what the man wrote because that's what the man believes... in his heart...
In one way, I'm mad at him, but in another, I'm just very, very sad. He had a lot of potential, but he never took a critical look at Wierwille's hype, and he bought it, hook, line and sinker.... All of his scholarship is FATALLY flawed, because he thinks he knows what God wanted to say better than God himself did. And his arrogance has blinded him to that... :-(
Love,
Steve
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JayDee
Recenty Jerry Wierwi!!e has joined Sch0$nheit's ranks. He does have some very good academic credentials. I think this was a move on Sch0$nheit's part to add some "credibility" to STF if that's possible
Jerry has a blog and Facebook page if anyone's interested in checking him out.
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TLC
As it did many/most (all?) others in twi's research dept. That said, it wasn't exactly a fault that he was about to let anyone else outrank himself in...
Edited by TLCLink to comment
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WordWolf
He was rather clear and unambiguous about in his his 3-part tape set, "A Pivot Point in History. " Tape 2 said it twice, rather plainly.
"If God put Adam in the Garden foreknowing, foreordaining Adam would sin, then he foreordained Adam's fall. If God did that, there would have to be darkness in Him."
"If God foreknew-or forced or tracked or whatever you'd like to put as the word there" .
He conflated foreknowing a thing (previous knowledge) with foreordaining a thing (forcing it to come to pass) twice right there.
BTW, cg didn't do sns tapes, he did GWT tapes, remember?
The relevance was this- when unable to distinguish between relatively simple concepts like "foreknow" and "foreordain", they slammed into the Time Magazine question I mentioned before. According to Time Magazine- which is NOT a reputed theological agency- it is possible to reconcile any 2 sayings but it is impossible to reconcile all three of the following:
A) God is All-Knowing
B) God is Loving
C) Evil exists.
So, both js and cg resolved this one by deprecating God's Omniscience. I understand Time Magazine's staff being unable to unsnarl this one, but for any supposed Christian teacher to be unable-and continue to teach- is irresponsible, What makes this particularly galling is that a pair of 20-year olds were able to completely refute cg's "position paper" (his tape set) to the degree that he offered neither opposition to their reply nor hostility to it. (He understood full well how completely he was refuted-by people who would really have rather let the older folk do it and not step in themselves.)
Having to actually put forth a Biblical argument for God being Omniscient was entirely due to cg (and, apparently, js) putting forth the opposite, and a lot of drones just soaking that up like sponges and immediately turning around and teaching it.
That there are Christians not from ex-twi circles who are unable to work through this was made clear by the necessity of other Christians to address it- with books like the one I mentioned. "Open Theism" flat-out denies the Omniscience of God because they think what cg said- an All-Knowing God who does force Himself into EVERY situation would be an unjust God. I would argue exactly the opposite- that a God who forced Himself into all sorts of situations where He was not requested would be unjust.
cg's illustration of how this works was an analysis of Genesis 3, where he suggested that God Almighty legitimately didn't know what was happening and had happened, and His questions showed Him trying to find out what happened. I believe the verses show the opposite- and any parent who has had to talk through a punishment with a child can easily see how it worked, let alone anyone who can compare relevant verses about each moment in Genesis 3. cg used phrases like "WHEN ALL OF THIS CAME TO GOD'S ATTENTION" to explain what God didn't know and when He didn't know it-according to cg.
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TLC
Okay, thanks for the clarification. I suppose they were probably from a time after we weren't receiving his sunday teachings, which (as you correctly pointed out) were tagged "GWT."
...(long pause)
You were 20 years old at the time?
Quite frankly, this just isn't an issue where I'm extremely familiar with the viewpoints of others. However, the issue itself is something which I have given much more thought to than I probably realize (as it appears that I have very, very deep rooted opinions on the matter.) Perhaps it is simply the result of my perspective on Genesis, and the whole of scripture... which can sometimes make it difficult to put a finger on.
Having said that, from what I have seen recently (here, and other places on the Internet) on it, it seems to me that it is terribly easy to set up the "opposing view" as a straw man of sorts, only to be blown down with some brand of intellectual logic or scriptural reasoning. If/when there is time, I wouldn't mind delving a bit deeper into this... but I'm inclined to think this probably isn't the right thread for it. (The other doctrinal thread that you linked to previously is probably much better suited for it, as is separates it from any sort of misguided support for this "REV" titled thread.)
If true (and I've no reason to doubt that it isn't), cg sounds ridiculous. A bit surprising though, that he wouldn't look at it or see it from the perspective of a parent, considering how much so many of his GWT teachings came across like he was speaking to 5 year olds....
Edited by TLCLink to comment
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T-Bone
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WordWolf, after reading your post a few times (and trying to understand their position) I did a little checking on STF’s website and found this issue addressed in an article A Valid Question – About God’s Foreknowledge :
I marked in bold red the first portion of the above statement that I have a problem with. And to be honest – the problem just may be with my overall theological viewpoint – which has changed dramatically since I left TWI. This sort of ties in with the mentioning of the book The Trivialization of God earlier on this thread. I could be way off base here, but it seems (like vpw) cg and js appear to be quite challenged by certain theological paradoxes. The latter part of the quote that I also marked in bold red – further reflects their lack of humility as shown in their preface to the REV as quoted in an earlier post:
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I’ve stated earlier that I thought it was honest they said upfront their theology would influence their translation. The more I think about it though – is that really intellectually or academically honest? I mean, translating a text is partly the work of an interpreter – but given it’s a text that was written in an ancient time period, in different cultures, different locations, and in several different languages – should not the interpreter/translator strive to find out what the words and phrases originally meant in that entire context (original cultures, original languages, etc.)? And to that I also ask where are their credentials and peer reviews - that would indicate they are qualified to translate the text?
You know, i get it about wanting to make your own translation - as a student of the Bible I sometimes do that myself in working a passage. But maybe my approach is a little more stringent. I tend to think more like a scientist would than a theologian by asking what is written in the text. What is the raw data? From there we can get into theology but even then we should be aware of the difference from a simple statement of fact (for ex. the text here reads thus and so with variant readings of this and that from these other texts) to varying degrees of our mental process (for ex. this passage appears to address the same topic as that passage, this passage may infer this or that, sheer speculation - as in this passage may be talking about another dimension). I don't know how consistent a job I do here of expressing matters as sheer speculation, my opinion or whatever - but I think it is irresponsible of TWI and spinoffs for "teachers" to come off as know-it-alls, spiritually tapped in, or having the correct understanding of the meaning of the text.
And I think humility should always be the flexible frame of our thoughts. I think scientists for the most part may be a bunch of very humble folks. Science is always revising what we know of the physical world, with more and more accurate testing equipment always improving on the scientific method - observation and experimentation. My personal theology focuses more on the raw biblical data - and I tend to let that inform my theology; granted there's a lot of fuzzy areas - but I'm ok with that.
Getting back to God’s foreknowledge – I think to some degree we all make adjustments in our thinking in order to make sense of certain passages. The Scriptures were written by human authors yet they are supposed to be the very words of God. There’s the matter of trying to resolve passages showing Jesus’ humanity with verses that convey his deity. Another one is the sovereignty of God versus man’s freedom of will. I am sorry to cop out on you all but I do not – I cannot - offer any words of wisdom on any of this.
I choose to accept both sides of the biblical data as true. I’m not saying the issues can’t be resolved but given the situation as I see it (trying to wrap my mind around God) it is definitely a fun pursuit but will never be accomplished. Like the story of Augustine and the Seashell: he saw a boy scooping up the shore’s water in a seashell and carrying it to a small hole in the sand – Augustine asked the boy what he was doing and he replied he was bringing the entire sea into the hole.
Augustine and the Seashell
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Maybe it’s just me and my idea of God – but it seems like a rather odd and demeaning concept when js in his article on God’s foreknowledge suggests dialing down God’s omniscience… sovereignty…whatever – so that God doesn’t come across as disingenuous in his dialogs with others.
Maybe God does not tell all he knows or explains contingencies – but there are passages where he does.
“ 5 Then the word of the Lord came to me. 6 He said, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?” declares the Lord. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel. 7 If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, 8 and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. 9 And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, 10 and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.” Jeremiah 18: 5-10 NIV
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And if a futurist’s interpretation of the book of Revelation is valid (which is how I interpret it) then God has already painted himself into a corner. Guess we’ll have to wait and see how things pan out – to see whether or not he is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, etc.
Edited by T-Boneclarity
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