I hope this former preacher is pleased that although he's abandoned God, he's found the New York Times.
Wow. The full sweep. Just skip agnosticism, DeWitt. And forget as to physics you’re more likely wrong.
Certainly any violation of the 10 Commandments brings a rasher of trouble...but disobeying each and every clarifying command of Yeshua (even those spoken to one's heart but never explicitly written down) brings a seemingly endless parade of pain and disappointment.
I have known pain and disappointment (as result of my own stupidity). And I know the Way out of it.
I know of only one way to the Truth.
This minister has obviously never established a one-to-one relationship with God. If he had...he would never doubt the truth.
My prayer for him is that he may simply ask Yeshua to show him the Way.
Just a couple comments . . .
1. This guy was 41 and had been in the “ministry” for 25 years. That makes him 16 years old when he began his “ministry”. Bad wrong. Even Jesus was in his early thirties and fully mature.
2. The notion that people have a personal desire to serve people qualifies them to be in the “ministry”. Bad wrong.
3. Ignoring Biblical standards for [C]hurch offices leads to non-Biblical outcomes. This clown is a prime example. Hopefully, he won’t come out of the closet and announce that he was an oppressed gay all the while; in that case, he should look into all the apostate churches out there - they readily accept gay “ministers”.
So, I guess we’re all supposed to throw down our copies of the Word and surrender to the obvious secular lock on truth and irrevocable hypocrisy of the [C]hurch? Thank God that there is truth these people know nothing about.
P.S. I seriously doubt that this man ever knew God in the first place. The probable truth is that his self-service desires are simply out of gas and he’s tossing off his notion of God as false.
In some ways, this is a good thing. The lines are becoming clearer and these heretics and apostates are defining themselves as they reject the god they never knew. Denominations are doing the same, en mass.
ELMER GANTRY ALERT!!
Today, the money is in atheism.
To paraphrase a famous dialog,
Why did you switch to atheism?
Because that's where the money is!
For being such a minuscule part of our Christian country and society, they sure make a lot of noise, don't they.
They can't accept a simple deal : We will never try to convert them, and they can STFU!
In reading the article, and wondering what may have been left out, the former Pastor did not apparently have a mentor or close minister friend with whom he could go to when he had that reaction to the phone call. He also appears to be self-taught in his theology beyond what he was raised with. I wonder if he went to any works like those by Chesteron, Brown, Graham, in his studying to improve his understanding the basics of Christian faith? It appears that he felt that self-doubt meant disbelief, and in reading the authors mentioned, he when to those most focused on increasing his disbelief. Hopefully and prayerfully, he will find a way back to follow our Lord.
Sounds like the guy had been winging it far too long, and after a while you become confused as the tired old prayers that helped in the past don’t seem to cut it any longer. Too bad he didn’t reach for his Bible, instead!
I suppose this is a bit of a “man bites dog” story, hence its newsworthiness...such as it is.
Perhaps it would be best to simply keep one’s religious views to one’s self rather than trumpet them to the high heavens...so to speak.
I you leave you never were a part. IOW, this guy never was a believer. The Apostle John says so below.
1 John 2:19 They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.
This article brings to mind the UT exchange about religion and philosophy. I was thinking about both your comments, because Catholic priests have to take three years of philosophy education in college, followed by three years of theology; along with those, they study public speaking, counseling, a bit of business management, and so on.
If philosophy isn’t related to religion at all, this makes no sense. However, a good philosophy course will teach a person how to reason - some formal logic, how to weigh the authority of competing claims, a version of the scientific method. When a person has completed three years of philosophy and three years of theology (which program includes all the Bible studies, Patristics, and so on), he’s not going to go into a meltdown when “bad things happen to good people,” or when he learns that archaeology hasn’t specifically verified every darn thing in the Bible, or when he comes across the latest popular atheist screed.