An email, from deep cover to deep cover

Here's an email I wrote to a person who is under deep cover. I thought it would be interesting to just archive it here.

Since you're familiar with the Companion Bible and Figures of Speech Used in the Bible - and can see their worth (with discernment of course) - I'm wondering if you ever spent some time listening to Arnold Murray. He's very off-the-ranch and totally unmentionable in the mainstream, for various reasons, but he's also not a bad gateway into the faith in that the main thing he imparts is to read the Word of God *complete* over and over and over.

If on the other hand you've never heard of Murray don't make the mistake of googling him and learning that he's a racist neo-nazi gun-toting yahoo from the deep South.

In California his satellite show was a strange animal, but I have to say he made the call (by simply reading the Word of God) that became effectual for me back more than a decade now.

Of course when you then learn doctrine you realize Murray inhabits something close to a Celtic grail realm, which is OK, whatever hooks the imaginative rebels we can be. And so you find Calvinism, if you're hardcore for the truth.

I also have a background in what Christians would call a cult, and which it is, for 90% of the people involved with it (and I mean *real* cults, as in isolated groups, recruitment, various control methods, money, leaders worshiped, etc.) but the language itself is really a high form of what the Puritans called experimental Calvinism; it is called the Fourth Way. Sometimes called the Work. Ouspensky would be it's main source. Knowing that language made me able to see Calvinism at the practical level. Classical Covenant Theology even.

But these are all development things. Things you go through prior to connecting with the truth. This is why seminaries can be so dangerous. They give people who have yet to really develop in life and in terms of engaging influences and so on a sense that they *know*, and then of course they inevitably careen off the tracks getting 'original' or getting bored with the truth (which they aren't yet able to see or value to begin with) and they then carry that combination of ignorance and arrogance (i.e. the person who doesn't get the joke so then thinks it's a bad joke and the person who told it is an idiot, you know, one of those invincibly unreachable, unteachable types) that can cause so much mischief regarding biblical doctrine and so on.

I read the PuritanBoard and you read these people who teach, teach, and admonish, and reprove and so on (many of them young theonomists too, unfortunately, for the record) and then they go to another thread to discuss culture or whatever and you see that their main influence there is Battlestar Galactica or something similar. I'm talking about pretty much all of them. The grown-ups even.

Engaging higher influences is like climbing a mountain (or a ladder, choose your metaphor). You have to get understanding of each level before you can move on up. Sometimes you engage a 'summit work' first which lets you know the mountain itself exists (like when you're young and you read the Odyssey or the Apology of Socrates or something), but inevitably you have to start at the ground level and climb upward. Art, music, history, imaginative literature, philosophy, science, religion. You find the summit works eventually (a rare occurence, professors of literature for instance even take the Iliad and a comic book at the same level, for the most part). The Bible is beyond-summit level. But at that point you're able to recognize that and to value it.

Meanwhile the mainstream Christians see myself and others like me (there are others like me, I know....*four* of them in seven years of being on the internet...one in England, one in Australia, one in Maine, and one in Australia who moved to Canada). Everybody else freaks out.

I say "Read the Bible complete seven times, make it your goal!" and they say: "What is that some esoteric, occult number?"

"OK, pick your own number!" Hey...ha ha.. um....sorry to bother you...

Just in case there may be somebody coming upon this blog after searching one of the names or things mentioned above and will find it interesting to see them all mentioned together...