Bob seems oblivious to the obnoxious and this absolutely horribly produced and presented screed on the horrors of observing Valentine's Day. Of course, we would expect this just as we would expect "God Hates Football" that will precede the Super Bowl. Would it ever cross his mind to review it and conclude, "No, that sucks. Let me try again"
God forbid, well evidently He does, expressing love, appreciation, and emotions towards those one actually loves. He loves to be worshipped, praised, prayed to, obeyed, and paid, but a day He didn't think up expressing love towards those loved, and not Himself, not so much.Pagan religion is more real, fondly memorable, and very much more fun
Bob's God needs to lighten up...
And too...someone needs to explain to Bob the Babylonian, Sumerian, Assyrian and Canaanite origins of the Hebrew spun Old Testament practices and beliefs he carries over into his version of Jewish Christianity. Judaism and the God of the Old Testament did not spring from the vacuum of itself no matter how the tales are told.
25 comments:
Im disappointed in Bob. He skipped right over GROUND HOGS DAY and all of its dangers !
As a Christian who understands the history of most "pagan" holidays, I have NO problem whatsoever with any of my fellow Christians celebrating them.
Dennis wrote, "Judaism and the God of the Old Testament did not spring from the vacuum of itself no matter how the tales are told."
I would agree with this. Some aspects of the Hebrew festivals may derive from the repurposing of festivals observed by the Goyim. There is a good argument for the eating of unleavened bread in springtime being derived from a Canaanite agricultural festival. It was later referred to as Massoth among the Hebrews and combined with Pesah to form the Passover. (Julian Morgenstern, "The Origin of Massoth and the Massoth Festival", American Journal of Theology, 1917)
I am not an expert in ancient Hebrew theology, but my guess is that God repurposed an existing festival for use in the worship of Yahweh. That is, he overlaid an existing Hebrew festival that had some Canaanite connection with a new and holy meaning. If this is the way it happened, is that a scandal? I don't think so. It does address two issues, one of which you bring up:
1. The presence of un-Christian and innocuous derivations in a celebration (visualize Christmas) does not invalidate the repurposing of the festival by The Church for holy use. There are precedents in the Law of Moses.
2. This does not involve "the telling of tales" as you suggest in your comment above. I read that as your reference to the Judaic account of the holy days in the Torah. There is nothing fable-like about God repurposing an existing festival. There nothing tainted about the new meaning God attached to it. It is a non-fictional, narrative account of origin. The fact that it involved some pre-existing elements is of no rational consequence.
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Give Bob the shaft on V-Day! Pepper this comment section with zingers about his ignorance of Christian and pagan history!
Staying at a Holiday Inn on Jekyll Island for the FOT is NOT in the Bible either! While Bob Thiel's arm-waving presentation on this "pagan" holiday is certainly within the tradition of the old Worldwide Church, its relationship to the truth of the holiday's origins is tenuous at best.
According to History.com, the pagan origins of our modern observance of Valentine's Day are NOT as clear as Bob would have us believe. Their article on the subject notes that: "Lupercalia was an ancient pagan festival held each year in Rome on February 15. Although Valentine’s Day shares its name with a martyred Christian saint, some historians believe the holiday is actually an offshoot of Lupercalia. Unlike Valentine’s Day, however, Lupercalia was a bloody, violent and sexually charged celebration awash with animal sacrifice, random matchmaking and coupling in the hopes of warding off evil spirits and infertility." They go on to note that the name of the ancient festival (Lupercalia) can be traced back to the founding myth of the city of Rome (that Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf). see https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/lupercalia
In the Catholic Encyclopedia's article on the subject, we learn that there were a couple of Third Century Christian martyrs named Valentine. About the holiday itself, they go on to say that "The popular customs associated with Saint Valentine's Day undoubtedly had their origin in a conventional belief generally received in England and France during the Middle Ages, that on 14 February, i.e. halfway through the second month of the year, the birds began to pair...For this reason the day was looked upon as specially consecrated to lovers and as a proper occasion for writing love letters and sending lovers' tokens. Both the French and English literatures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contain allusions to the practice." see https://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=11880
If we are truly concerned with pagan influences on modern life and practices, then why don't we go after the really obvious stuff - like the names of the days of the week and the twelve months of the calendar that we use EVERY DAY? It seems to me that we could make a much stronger case for eliminating these vestiges of paganism than we could for a modern observance that falls on a different day and does not involve animal sacrifices, running through the streets naked or whipping women! Exchanging romantic notes and consuming candy hearts seems fairly tame by comparison, buy maybe I'm missing something that Bob is seeing very clearly!
NeoT noted: "but my guess is that God repurposed an existing festival for use in the worship of Yahweh. That is, he overlaid an existing Hebrew festival that had some Canaanite connection with a new and holy meaning. If this is the way it happened, is that a scandal? I don't think so. It does address two issues, one of which you bring up"
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Classic apologetic. It is not a God that repurposes. Humans do that. It's not a scandal. It's just what humans have done for Millenia when the need for a new set of beliefs, political upgrades or better control of arises.
Any change in any religion can be justified by the concept of "God can repurpose"... old out of date or controversial, or totally unacceptable beliefs and practices with new and holy meaning, andis to me cosmic game playing. I'm certainly not going to bank on a God/Jesus that can't make up his mind or waits until late in the game to change the rules. One real God should produce on real consistent truth and not some ever changing and evolving tale.
The concept of "repurposing" is just rewriting the text to fit one's current views, or perhaps a way to admit the real origins of beliefs but "we can fix that embarrassment". The rewriting of the no longer acceptable views/beliefs is just the way beliefs evolve at the hands of humans. A God has nothing to do with it.
When I was presented with the apologetic during the Tkach changes in WCG that "Jesus had worked a miracle in the Church", my only and obvious conclusion was that this God, or in this case, Jesus, was a trickster and couldn't control or present His own true beliefs without chaos and confusion of which I was assured He was not the author of. My second thought was "Could not this Jesus have spoken up earlier and save a lot of people a lot of grief and confusion?" Evidently not. One could never trust a "calling" into a "truth" again. Nor should they in the first place I suspect. At least that is my real and practical experience in all things truth which is plain as you know.
The root problem is that some people take the two great commandments of Jesus, and pit them against each other rather than understanding that they are mutually complimentary.
Hate to be crass, but in Armstrongism the prevailing attitude was "I'm going to keep the law to show God how much I love him! F*%k people! The question becomes, how can perfect love for God be practiced in a way which hurts his children? That was the Pharisee's problem. No, Love for God and love for fellow man must be balanced with one another, one demonstrating or reflecting the other!
Doesn't Bob know that the Hebrew feast days are also rooted in paganism?! The Jews stole those festivals from the Cananites.
"Doesn't Bob know that the Hebrew feast days are also rooted in paganism?!"
Since Bob has no real theological education outside of some booklets and reprint articles of Armstrognism he has no idea that the Jewish feast days have early roots in the Canaanite festivals around them. Any student of the Bible learns this in their first year of Old Testament studies.
UCG indicated in some articles several years ago that ANY act of love on February 14 = keeping valentine's Day, and thus is wrong.
From Good News Jan-Feb 2014: "What about showing love on Valentine's Day if I'm not doing it for pagan reasons? Isn't that okay? No, because the expression of that kind of 'love' is still rooted in a former pagan holiday."
In other words, don't love God on Feb. 14. Don't love His Law that day.
Loving evil.... well, it appears that's wrong, too. It's still love, right?
So what's a human to do?
Dennis wrote, "Any change in any religion can be justified by the concept of "God can repurpose"... old out of date or controversial, or totally unacceptable beliefs and practices with new and holy meaning and is to me cosmic game playing."
In a way you are right and in a way you are wrong. First, how you are right. God does not "repurpose" in the sense of changing his mind as a human would repurpose something. God is immutable and knows all his works from the beginning (Acts). It is only from our human perspective, locked in sequential moments of time, that God appears to change. So, your criticism has foundation. If you took that meaning from what I said, then my expression was inapt.
Next, how you are wrong. Given that we are limited to the human spacetime perspective, God does appear to us to repurpose. The Flood was a great meteorological event in the ancient Middle East that wiped out some villages and drowned some people. It was about punishment. But in the NT we find that the Flood was a symbol of the baptismal waters that lead to life. The Greek word for repentance (metanoia) contains the concept of change in purpose. And, also, Jesus said one day all things will be renewed. God can take something and reuse if for some other purpose. The Bible contains many more examples. God can change matters as he sees fit. Nothing gets better without change and that subset of change called repurposing.
The idea that it has to be done right the first time with no further changes required or God is not God is, alas, not the way reality works. We can hypothesize why there is change in the created domain, but we cannot prove our separate and opposing views.
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Sooner or later someone somewhere in an ACOG is going to realize that the pagans ate food and drank water!
Bob has no real theological education outside of some booklets and reprint articles of Armstrognism
Although the accreditation of the conferring school and the scholarly value of his ThD thesis may be questioned, Bob did put a lot of effort into his study of church history. And of course it is likely to have been biased to support the Armstrongist view of history.
I think the point is valid though; the "church" has abandoned divinely appointed times (the holy days) with the argument that they were "fulfilled", "no longer served a purpose", "were replaced", etc, while taking pagan festivals and rebadging them. And it must be admitted that, to the public at large, these festivals, after the Catholic Church repurposed them, are very popular, and to retail, very profitable.
And, years ago, I was surprised to find there is a Jewish equivalent to Valentine's Day; it's around the time of Passover.
Feast goer the thing is UCG loves to pick on Valentine's day but they still celebrate birthdays.
Does Bob Thiel have a medical condition that causes those strange hand gestures?
Hoss,
Jesus Christ fulfilled the meaning of the Holy Days - they all pointed to him and his work. He was the actualization of them. As Paul said, they are the shadow - Christ is the reality. Originally, Christ was preached out of the Torah and other writings of the Old Testament (there was no New Testament as we know it for many, many years). We know that Jewish Christians continued to observe them in Jerusalem (as required by Scripture) until the catastrophe of 70 A.D. (when it became IMPOSSIBLE to observe them according to the scriptural formula).
I think that Christians who have no knowledge or experience of those days are missing out on some valuable spiritual insights, and I don't believe that there is anything inherently wrong in a Christian celebrating them. The problem arises when we try to claim that their observance is required under the terms of the New Covenant. There is value in reminding Christians of their Jewish roots and how those elements of the Old Covenant pointed to Christ. Herbert Armstrong's grave error was his insistence that the requirement for their observance carried over into the terms of the New Covenant.
Finally, the Armstrong narrative about "pagan" holidays does NOT hold up under closer scrutiny. While many of our modern holidays do have pagan elements, the overwhelming majority of modern observances belong to the Christian era, and they are celebrated in a Christian or secular fashion (mostly secular these days). Indeed, the narrative about repurposing pagan holidays does not apply to all of those days, some of them are clearly inventions of the Christian Church. In fact, I've never heard a reasonable explanation offered by anyone as to how our celebration of Christ's advent or resurrection could be characterized as inappropriate or evil. Moreover, most Christians continue to celebrate the Eucharist in some shape, form or fashion; and the majority of Christians still celebrate Pentecost. In other words, the narrative regarding the "paganism" of Traditional Christianity has been greatly exaggerated by Armstrong and his followers.
JMAC don't put down Bob for the hand gestures that's not cool.
Why 9:21? It is distracting when he is speaking and his flouncing hands are flapping around, it is actually a way of diverting attention away from his lack of preparation.
10:02 Because all you guys do is put down Bob pick on someone your size bub.
10:04 "Because all you guys do is put down Bob pick on someone your size bub."
None of us would be picking on Bob if he was actually a follower of Christ and a Christian.
What he has done has lied his way into a position he is totally unqualified for.
Rod Meredith never ordained him specifically because of his narcissistic attitude so he had to self-appointed himself as a church leader.
Herbert Armstrong would have kicked his whiny little ass to the curb for his insubordination.
Ever notice how most people who attempt to defend a minister or splinter group seem to be just barely literate?
From Ex 23:14-16; 2Chr 8:13; Zech 14:16; Eze 45:21,25; Acts 12:3; Acts 20:16; Col 2:16-17: Three feasts, Nisan 14-20, Pentecost, FOT/Ingathering, and the weekly sabbath will be observed in the New Covenant age because they (not Christ) were, when Paul wrote, foreshadowing the future. The other point Paul made in Colossians is only the body of Christ, the church, should judge itself and not let outsiders do any judging.
"Feasts" in Lev 23:2 should be "fixed/appointed times" which include the three feasts and the weekly and annual sabbaths. There is no Hebrew/Greek evidence of "seven feasts".
"None of us would be picking on Bob if he was actually a follower of Christ and a Christian."
Cant agree with that. Bad presentation is bad presentation. Sloppy scholarship is still sloppy. Just because a speaker, writer, or producer generally advocates for something I might agree with doesnt mean they get a pass for shitty work.
bad presentation
I wonder what it would be like to be in a CCOG home group? Are they all silently snickering but are afraid if they make a comment someone will snitch? Or do they openly comment on his presentations? Anyone know? - I won't snitch on you!
Though this bodacious blog accuses COGs of not preaching Jesus, why don't comments consider, WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do?) Would Jesus celebrate Christmas, Easter, and Valentine's Day? Would Jesus ever think, Well, My death fulfilled all that, now it's time to have some fun?
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