Could I get some help decoding this? It's an amazing read, not I'm not following some of it.

[TrogL]

http://tedhaggardblog.com/2013/12/12/suicide-evangelicalism-and-sorrow/

This is written by an Evangelical for Evangelical consumption, so I'm a bit left out in the cold. I particularly need translating...

"In the past we would try to argue that Evangelical leaders who fall...were not adequately submitted." (see also below)

"when Bill Bright led me to the Lord when I was 16, I learned that I had become a new creature, a new person, and that I did not need to be concerned about anything in my past, that it was all covered by the blood" also, below in the comments " is the Blood enough,"


...and in the comments...

"Unfortunately, their public response is that they want to keep from compromising with sin. Grace does not compromise with sin. Grace deals with sin and robs the law of its power."

"The grace of God will always violate mans sense of justice." Note, I'm probably working off a different definition of "Grace".

"Does the Bible not tell us that we believers acting under the Lordship of Christ are His physical presence in the world today?" - Where??

"i know is revamping the way many christians look at the sin/grace model that we have construed in evangelical circles. 'While we were still sinners, Christ died for us…'" (I can't even tell where the thought actually begins or ends in near word salad)

"are we silencing God like he was silenced between Malachi and the birth of Christ".

"we are so indoctrinated that God is fatalistic and deterministic" (this is in the middle of ivan's long, excellent comment about 1/2 way down - amazing that he's so down on Prosperity Gospel. Is this Calvinistic influence?)

"I am a submitted man, but not to random people. " (Haggard responding to a comment)

"Jesus is the king of love and sits on the throne of your heart if you allow him to rain unconditionally" (Freddie "Shofar" Montoya - 2/3 of the way down)

"a lot of people who would probably consider themselves panning a little toward the NAE slant of the thought/spiritual process"

"we did not step out into full-time ministry until September 1st of this year after an apostle came
back into our lives" (HEH near the bottom)

[cbayer]

1. I heard this kind of stuff on the radio a lot during my road trip this year.

I felt like I was hearing a foreign language.

Clearly these words and statements have some meaning, but it appears to be in a code that only those on the inside understand.

In the end, I find myself without any interest in trying to understand it. It feels cultish and weird.

How have you been TrogL? Don't see you around much.

[TrogL]

2. I've been posting here and there

Very, very busy at work and Craftygal's been sick so I don't have a lot of time for posting rants like I used to.

[cbayer]

3. So sorry that Craftygal has been sick.

Has your health been good? Any retreats this year?

[TrogL]

5. Was just at a choir retreat

God knows why, they rented a Christian camp somewhere out in the boonies in the middle of winter and promptly got us all snowed in, except I (and a lawyer friend) had to venture out to deal with stuff.

My other *cough* retreat is no longer happening. They raised the rates at the facility so high we could no longer afford it.

Instead, we've been going out to my boyfriend's farm. It's isolated and the neighbours have been either warned, don't give a damn or are into it themselves. It gets Craftygal out of the house but medically supervised (he's a retired nurse/social worker) and the dogs love it there.

[cbayer]

10. Snowed in. I have both positive and negative memories of times I was snowed in.

Sorry about your other retreat. I recall that you really enjoyed that and I truly enjoyed reading about them. Glad you do have a refuge, though.

I've relocated to Mexico for now and am loving it here. Quite different than your side of the North America.

[mike_c]

4. full fledged raving religious lunacy....

Ravings of the religiously insane. And sophomoric misspellings, e.g. rain/reign.

[TrogL]

6. OK, that makes a little more sense

The Advent Carol service contains an anthem, something about "let Your tears rain down upon us". Thought it had something to do with that.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. The Rorate Coeli

"Drop down ye heavens from above
And let the clouds pour down righteousness..."

Wonderful setting of the Latin words by Palestrina, but the only YouTube video of it that I can find is by what looks like a high school choir in the Philippines.

[TrogL]

17. This is the version we use

http://saturdaychorale.com/2012/12/08/drop-down-ye-heavens-the-advent-prose-choir-of-queens-college-cambridge/

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. We used that chant as the Introit for our Advent Carol Service

but we've sung the Palestrina as an anthem some years.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. A few guesses:

"submitted" means "submitting to the will of God" - someone who isn't 'submitted' is over-proud.

"covered by the blood" means forgiven by God because Jesus's blood was shed, literally and symbolically.

In the comments - expect less coherence here, since Haggard is a professional writer on Christianity, while these are amateurs.

"Grace does not compromise with sin. Grace deals with sin and robs the law of its power" - I have no idea at all what "robs the law of its power" means here.

"The grace of God will always violate mans sense of justice." God is so forgiving that we think bad people get away with things. Maybe this is what "robs the law of its power" was saying?

"silenced between Malachi and the birth of Christ" - last book of the Old Testament, and where the New starts. In an evangelical culture where what the Bible, as collated by certain Christians, says is central, a gap of a few centuries between accepted 'books of God' indicates people weren't listening to God, I suppose.

""I am a submitted man, but not to random people. " - this seems to indicate he'll 'submit' to a group of powerful ministers too.

[Act_of_Reparation]

13. "The grace of God will always violate mans sense of justice"....

Sounds to me like the commentator is saying God's justice supersedes man's justice; that no matter what judgments man makes on Earth, God gets the last laugh.

[TrogL]

8. The article where I found the link explains a bit

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nakedpastor/2013/12/what-ted-haggard-almost-said-but-didnt/

[pscot]

9. Gibberish

God bewildered gibberish.

[Jim__]

11. I don't know what he means to say.

But, I definitely take something away from this:

... The lead overseer actually told me, “Brother Ted, we do not believe in this psychological mumbo-jumbo, but we need to send you to therapy for the sake of the public. Then when you get home, we’ll get this demon out of you and your family and sweet Miss Gayle will be just fine.” I thank God for the therapy. It answered 30 years of prayer. I became the man I had always prayed to be because of the process I went through during the crisis. Though I do believe there is a need for deliverance in some situations, for that sincere overseer, the world is way too flat.

He needed some form of psychological therapy. Based on the rest of the article, I'm not sure if he's saying that if he had been practicing his faith properly, he wouldn't have needed the therapy, and that evangelicals should reform their practices so that these problems can be healed by the faith.

But, he does acknowledge that the therapy was what he needed. To me, that is the essential message.

[TrogL]

12. He appeared to make it quite clear (at least to me)

...that there needs to be a place for psychiatric therapy (and other medical intervention) in Evangelical thought and practice - that God can work through man.

He is one of the many reasons why I started my website (link at bottom). I'm glad he's come to his senses and is reaching out. Whether his audience will listen is another matter.

I was particularly struck by "for the sake of the public". Appearances over reality - a common theme in authoritarian circles.

[Igel]

14. Some suggestions.

"Submitted" and "covered by the blood" are correct above. Christ's blood "covers" our sins and hides them from God, so that we're not punished for them.

God's grace robs the law of its power. That's pretty much pure Paul. Death is the wages of sin, because sin is the trangression of the Law and is defined by the Law. It's not possible to bear the law, to observe it perfectly and live in the law. You can only die in the Law because there is no forgiveness--perfect obedience or death. By robbing the Law of its power, death, the rigor of the law, the moral strength, can be retained, but we're given chance after chance to do better.

God's "justice" always violates man's justice--and we see that in Jesus' parables. God is not interested in punishment, however human societies (to a greater or lesser extent) demand punishment for breaking its norms. If karma is "the universe will get you for that," God's "justice" is more like "you've really screwed up, but you've decided to change so it's all forgiven." This is harshly at odds with vindictiveness found in many ideologies. At the same time, there are things that people view as just but which God, depending on the sect and belief system, views as seriously wrong. So my sect was strongly Sabbatarian, which most people find ridiculous.

Paul says that the church is the "body of Christ" while Jesus is the head. We are to do his will. That pretty much leads to the inference that Jesus' actions in the world today are through the body of believers who have submitted to God's will. "Outworking" is a fairly common word in this context.

The "revamping" part I don't get. He doesn't say how he's revamping anything.

"Between Malachi and Christ." Most traditional Xian thought has Malachi as the last prophet in the Tanakh, the last prophetic voice in Israel until Jesus. Between Malachi and Jesus there were no prophets, no messengers sent. After a spurt of apostolic activity--which most of the "apostolic fathers" slighted by new sects and even Protestants--there's the question as to why there haven't been obvious apostles or prophets that speak with God's voice. Some have argued that God's said his piece and is content; some have argued that they're around and ignored; some have argued that the church's sinfulness or disrespect have caused them to falls silent (like that ever happened in ancient Israel). Some have argued that mainstream Xianity has little to do with God or Jesus, so there's not really a question to be answered. Meh.

Not sure about the "fatalistic and deterministic." Perhaps a bit of deistic thought in there? "Do X and you'll reap Y" kind of mechanical-universe thinking? Dunno. Depends on details not in the text that aren't familiar to me.

A "submitted Xian" is submitted to Jesus and the Father. Not to whomever comes along and says, "Follow me." Perhaps if a leader shows through works and speech that he is faithful to Jesus the guy will "submit" in some secondary sense to that leader.

"Rain" is a typo. It happnes to the best of us.

NAE is the National Association of Evangelicals. I have no clue what their slant on things is. They have a website. I don't think they existed when I was in my odd little church.

Oy, "apostle." That's a nuisance. Some tend to think there's a kind of hierarchy. There are various elders or ministers, preachers. They do their work like good little drones. But what's needed before launching any kind of large effort is an "apostle," somebody specifically charged and sent with a particular message, kind of message, task to perform. That person is then taken to have some sort of special gift or some special revealed knowledge (how it's revealed and what "revealed" even means largely depends on the sect involved, from hallucinatory vision to a sudden insight of some sort). In extreme cases the apostle might not even recognize he's an apostle at first. But often it'll take a strong message or personality to motivate people to stop piddling with whatever ministry they're in and "step out in faith" to take on a larger, often riskier, role. CYA among some groups is to say that there's an apostle that's moved you to this.


Hope it helps. Evangelical cant hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.

[TrogL]

16. So it's not just me

I was hoping there'd be something like a master codebook somewhere, but I suspect each little sect has their own code and it would be an endless task trying to keep it all straight.

If you're baffled, then I don't feel so bad.