Last post... (I always say that...but...)

To the one or two or three people who have clicked on over to this blog in recent days... I no longer have interest in skewering people I've already been skewering for too long in the past. That's why I killed my last blog. I build up an audience then kill the blog. It somehow seems actually more empty when you have an audience. I'm thinking: go read the Bible! Me too!

Plus, I just censor myself when writing for a general, mainstream audience.

(But I did blaze a trail for using little images at the beginning of each post!)

That's not copywrited. The Boar's Head forum could use that idea. Blogs where it's difficult to see where one post ends and another begins.

I have a small community on different continents. We're involved with what church/seminary Christians would call 'cult' matter. Yet when we looked into theology we saw that our 'cult' matter corresponded with pure Calvinist theology. The difference with us and the church level is we made an effort to actually read the Bible. We thought all Christians did that! Innocent us. But we're use to such efforts. Our books include such bitch-hard reads as Thucydides to the Iliad (Odyssey too, but not as much of a slog of course) to Wealth of Nations and On War to Plutarch...the Bible itself...Shakespeare, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Plato, Gibbon, World History... Plus the 'cult matter', which is nothing more than a high form of experimental Calvinism. Rare. Very practical level material. Not for everybody, but available to anybody.

So Calvin himself, the Doctrines of Grace (we know what those are from practical experience), Classical Covenant Theology (we see it visually), Reformed Theology (the pure theology, we have discernment, we live it), it all was easy for us to find and 'see'. Because we have practical experience and hence real understanding of this doctrine we have more understanding of it than theologians and professors of Reformed seminaries.

So there are vanity issues with someone like myself entering the exoteric realm of church and seminary Christian. I just show up and the room starts to shiver with 'unease'. It's not my realm (Go ahead and snicker seminary boy and church leader fool...)

So, because I censor myself too much writing for the mainstream (it makes it all half-assed) it is empty for me.

It was useful when I was getting the measure of the church level realm in terms of theology. Seeing where you were all at. But fighting your exoteric, pack, white-blood-cell limits is empty activity for me. You can only bring me down. I can't raise you up. Only God can do that.

Read the Bible. I'm on my fifth dedicated complete reading. The first regenerated me. Look at the list of 7 rock foundation sources of doctrine in the right hand margin. The Watson is there to give an exoteric representative of the practical level. Don't underestimate the Bunyan. When you judge his book by other works of inspired imaginative literature it doesn't rise very high; but when you judge Pilgrim's Progress by works of theology and doctrine its unique worth manifests. It is on-the-mark 'visual doctrine'. Bunyan's book is also a needed rebuke to the mainstream of Christians who think that individual effort plays no role in the faith in general or in sanctification in particular. That's the argument that says: "Christian should have just stayed home." Neither is the faith about 'family' and 'visible church'. As powerful as those instututions (and the responsibility of family) are, it is just simply demonic to correlate being on the Way with family matters and visible church matters. If you find that hard to square, so be it. You don't have to destroy your family or your church. In fact, those are merely goodhouseholder issues. They should be a given. Just recognize that the goal is assaulting heaven (the Celestial City). Interesting that a cult person knows this, and the mainstream church types don't... - C.