SpenerQuest Puts Another Quarter in the Joke Box. Wardrums Beat and Stormtroopers Gather

"Graduation, fiends forever."

David Bickel (Drb) Advanced Member Username: Drb Post Number: 858 Registered: 11-2009	Posted on Monday, January 18, 2016 - 8:47 am:       "Rev. Paul A. Rydecki said... I still think Hunnius puts it best regarding the relationship between redemption and justification (from A Clear Explanation - I can look up the page number if anyone needs it): We interpret those things that the Scripture contains regarding the redemption and reconciliation of the world (or of the human race) concerning the benefit gained and acquired through the death of Christ, and concerning the sufficiency of that merit of Christ—that it is sufficient for the whole world to be reconciled, justified and saved, if the whole world were to believe; that it was also intended for the world and acquired to this end, that all men should thence obtain salvation through faith. Meanwhile, God has never intended it to mean that it avails for justifying or for remitting sins without faith, through some sort of general remission of sins or justification, which is also supposedly done among those who never have faith, never had faith, or never will have faith. OCTOBER 7, 2013 AT 8:38 PM" Source: INTREPIDLUTHERANS.COM/2013/10/LAST-YEARS-LETTER-TO -PRESIDIUM-OF-AZ-CA.HTML Fine. I am reconciled to you, but I don't forgive you. No, I demand payment of your debt—in full. Pay up or else. But doesn't being reconciled mean peace and the non-imputation of sins? The quote looks partially Calvinistic. Calvinists like Charles Hodge say the atonement was sufficient for the entire human race but not intended to save the entire human race. Does this quote accurately reflect Hunnius in the context of the debate he was engaged in? If so, how sound was he on election? dawning realm Advent of the Crucified http://www.dawningrealm.org
Alan Lubeck (1431) Senior Member Username: 1431 Post Number: 1349 Registered: 11-2004	Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - 6:11 pm:       Professor Bickel asks the question: But doesn't being reconciled mean peace and the non-imputation of sins? Only according to Holy Scripture 1 Corinthians 5:19. But, hey, who needs the Holy Scripture when man's reason drives their teaching about God. Best wishes on those who subscribe to Rydecki's formula trying to discern whether they have been given enough justification in their reconciliation. They can no longer look to the Word of God alone for comfort, they must also have a special Easter Egg hunt to make sure they have found faith in their heart.
Paul Jecklin (Paul_jecklin) Member Username: Paul_jecklin Post Number: 57 Registered: 2-2015	Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - 7:56 pm:       “. . . . God has never intended it to mean that it avails for justifying or for remitting sins without faith, through some sort of general remission of sins or justification, which is also supposedly done among those who never have faith, . . . “ “AVAILS” may be an important word in this statement. Article IV: Of Justification. “Also they teach that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ's sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and that their sins are forgiven for Christ's sake, who, by His death, has made satisfaction for our sins. This faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight. Rom. 3 and 4.”
Paul Jecklin (Paul_jecklin) Member Username: Paul_jecklin Post Number: 58 Registered: 2-2015	Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - 8:05 pm:       “. . . . God has never intended it to mean that it avails for justifying or for remitting sins without faith, through some sort of general remission of sins or justification, which is also supposedly done among those who never have faith, . . . “ “AVAILS” may be an important word in this statement. Article IV: Of Justification. “Also they teach that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ's sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and that their sins are forgiven for Christ's sake, who, by His death, has made satisfaction for our sins. This faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight. Rom. 3 and 4.”
Rev. Guillaume Williams Sr. (Revhardheaded) Senior Member Username: Revhardheaded Post Number: 5286 Registered: 10-2004	Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - 8:34 pm:       I think I need a broader context, but yes, avails is an important word there. Also, as we do not subscribe unconditionally to everything Luther wrote, nor do we to the orthodox fathers. The Rev. Guillaume J. S. Williams, Sr God justifies the ungodly. Rom 4:5 And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness,

Bad Weather for Birds, Good Weather for Feeding Them

The robins have been acting like it was spring - all winter. We had an earthworm crawling across the road a few weeks ago. We had a little snow this week, but that melted away in hours.

Yesterday the cold was setting in and a mist began to fall in the late afternoon. By 3 AM, they tell me, the mist was freezing. When I walked Sassy this morning the frozen drops on the bushes looked like tears ready to fall.

Birds know all about weather changes, so they load up on food before the heavy rains, snow, or sleet storms arrive. If they feed during a storm, I figure the storm will be lasting. Normally they want to stay in their shelter with their feathers fluffed out for holding in the body heat.

Sleet is especially difficult for birds eating, because they count on bark holding insect eggs and pulpae.

I scoop the sunflower seeds onto the platform feeder, paste peanut butter onto the window ledge, and scatter corn around the yard. The message is - This is a place to build a nest and have some children. When the babies start crying for food, I will have an ample supply of toxin free creatures to feed them. Birds can feed their children and get their supplements from my continuous bird-food stations.

Blue jays are notorious for attacking anyone near their nests. In Bella Vista, we had a blue jay nest just outside our window, perched in a bush. Team Jackson enjoyed watching them grow up , trying their wings, then disappear. I made a point of taking piles of sunflower seed to the parents. They watched me and never attacked, even when I got close to their nest. They were glad to get the spare food, thankful to their Creator, just as we should be. They sounded their beautiful bell-like calls to show their joy.

Bird Scouts

All summer long, your resident birds are assessing and re-assessing their options for the fall and winter. They are learning where feeders are and scouting out locations to roost on cold winter nights. Since those decisions are being made months before the first snow flies, it’s best that you help them along. Start training these birds now! Set up your feeders in a safe location and keep them full so those birds recognize your yard as a reliable source of food.

Super Secret Blog Capture Method - Borrowed from WELS

Blogger - What software do you use to capture social media content, etc for use in your posts?

Ichabod - I borrowed this method from WELS - I copy and paste.

Thanks Greg.  Your blog captures always look so good - I though you might have some super-secret method :)

As you've said in the past, many things have a short life on the web.  If you don't capture them, they seem to not be there when you look again.

***

GJ - Google Blogger had a software called Blog This! - and that made copying and crediting easy. However, that went poof so I fell back on the method I learned from Ski-and-Glende's sermon preparation - copy and paste. I simply highlight text and photos with the mouse, control-c, and then control-v in my blank blog space. I post the link, or embed the link in the title, trying to make it very clear where the verbatim quotation begins and ends.

I learned early that Lutheran bloggers erase the evidence very quickly once they are quoted or mentioned on Ichabod. Pictures often last only temporarily with copy and paste, so if I want the picture to be there always, I copy those graphics into my extensive file, then I copy the actual picture. Otherwise, links change and the picture becomes a big blank square - no location found.

Blogs open to great fanfare and close quietly, with everything erased. That is another reason to copy their best material. I use labels so that every post from that blog can be followed by clicking on the label list.

I enjoy promoting good and bad blogs. Few blogs last long. Having a blog is like having an alligator for a pet - it requires regular feeding. For that reason I have stopped blogging the Moline and Sassy blogs, unless there are special reasons. I simply copy Sassy posts here to her blog, because her foster mother likes to keep up with "the smartest dog we ever took care of."

News organizations welcome copying their stories - with the link taking readers back to the source. It is their right to demand only partial quotation, but regular news sources have never asked that. Yale Alumni Magazine is a separate enterprise, so they want only limited quoting. ChurchMouse is a great blog that does not want the complete copy and paste; it is also one of the few that tempt me to copy everything - but I resist.

Research on Ichabod
I have posted so many articles, -13,600 -  that finding them again is a chore. If I want to reclaim a graphic or link to an old article, I use Google to google them. Google owns Blogger, so posts enter the database at once.

That is good for me and bad for apostate Lutherans. Almost any search for a Lutheran topic will yield posts and graphics from Ichabod. I have heard complaints about this effect from all over. That happened again when I created three blogs for the local Evangelical college, to get them involved in social media. The newly assigned blogger complained that my blogs owned the topics and graphics, so I said, "OK. Then out-publish me."

Numbers
I noticed, from looking, that the college blogs were beyond 30,000 views already, which is pretty good for free media attention. The map showed that people all over the world were reading it.

Ichabod registers more than 4.3 million total views now. The recent big day had 8,300 views and the monthly total is around 60,000 views. I seem to have the only blog with a counter showing the numbers, even though I never intended to reach more than a few dozen people.

Impact
Faithfulness to the Word of God is directly related to the impact of a blog. Most efforts simply recirculate current bromides and repudiate Luther at every opportunity. Some - like SpenerQuest - are handy as toxic waste dumps. Whenever I want something entertaining to copy and paste, I click on LutherQuest (sic).

Practice Is Everything
I have learned so much from blogging for eight years that I could never teach all my hints to new bloggers. The most important one is "practice," or as the Germans say, "Practice is everything."

"Writing makes a precise mind." That bit of wisdom is quite valuable in theology. Being challenged is good for study. Making a point in writing is far more difficult that simply speaking about it. That is why so few pastors write out their sermons today. The ministers think they can get up and blab for 15 minutes, finding it easier to parrot what someone else has already committed to video or audio.

WELS advocates plagiarism of sermons and protects those who copy from false teachers. But of course, how does one discipline a known false teacher who saves himself time by copying from another false teacher?

Notice How the Duggar IFB Quiverful Bob Jones Hyles Cult Resembles WELS in Its Practices, Secret Language, Abuse of Women and Children, and Deceptions

Notorious bachelor Bill Gothard, abuser of young women,
posed with the Duggar daughters.
Where did Josh meet his future wife Anna? At a Gothard event.

I was preparing to write a second post linking Lutherdom crimes when a regular reader wrote to me about a book -

I Fired God: My Life Inside---and Escape from---the Secret World of the Independent Fundamental Baptist Cult 

Kindle Edition

From her page:

Jocelyn Zichterman was born, raised, married into, and finally, with her family, fled the Independent Fundamental Baptist church. Founded by the fiery preacher Bob Jones, with several hundred thousand members, IFB congregants are told they must not associate with members of other Baptist denominations and evangelicals, with an emphasis on secrecy, insular marriages within the church, a subservience for women, and unusual child raising practices.

In I Fired God, Jocelyn Zichterman systematically details the IFB's disturbing history, exposing a cult-like atmosphere of corruption, greed, and abuse. Having been initiated into its innermost circles, Zichterman knows that the gentle demeanor America sees in the form of the Duggar clan on 19 Kids and Counting disguises the truth about the darker side of the church. 

With written documentation and sources so thorough that law enforcement has used her work as a foundation for criminal prosecutions, Zichterman exposes the IFB with revelations including:

- The disturbing world of abuse within the IFB and doctors and teachers who cater exclusively to church members and fail to report physical and sexual abuse

- The IFB-controlled Bob Jones University, which issues degrees of questionable value while making vast sums of money for its founders

- The way the IFB influences politics on the local, state, and national level, and protects its abusive culture under the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion.

***

GJ - This book put two things together for me - the extensive, overlapping financial network of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptists, and the parallels to Lutherdom.

• Bob Jones University (which gave Billy Graham an honorary doctorate), 
• Quiverful Movement (babies galore), 
• The Hyles connection with hundreds of abuse cases.
• The Duggar clan's secret language.
• Spying and reporting on each other.
• Phony doctorates (like Dr. Bob Jones and Dr. Paul Kelm).
• Parallels to WELS, the LCMS, the ELS, and the CLC (sic).

Caution - the author does not come out of this Purgatory a political conservative, after experiencing "conservative family values" masking incest, child abuse, and a network of deceptions.

The interlocking business aspect of this abusive cult is impressive. As Luther said, deception and greed rule the world. The IFB pretends to be independent, but the cult controls people, congregations, and escape attempts by having a file on everyone. They can build up a person and give him plenty of income, or they can make him a leper and deny him income, friendship, and family.

The author suffered horrible physical and sexual abuse from her father, sexual abuse from her brothers, and cult abuse from the IFB, her high school, her college, and the college where her husband worked until they walked out of the cult.

IFB and WELS are quite similar, in many departments. What makes an IFB or WELS person a professor? Answer - education in their inbred system, where similar poorly educated people have been allowed to rule the roost. This yields a dictatorial class of people who use their secret language to control everyone while they live lawless lives.

How did WELS happen to ignore decades of a District President abusing young girls in his own congregation? His entire district knew about it and used the information to have their own fun.

My wife and I enjoyed the Duggar programs at first but I became suspicious of the special language and the weird rules explained by Josh Duggar. I said to Mrs. I, "He does not have his heart in this. Look at his face while talking about defrauding the eyes."

The Duggar women glammed up later,
but in the early days they looked like cult Mormons on parade.

Some other Duggar terms and practices were - 

• No hand holding until engagement.
• Side hugs, because a regular hug is fraught with danger.
• No kissing until the marriage ceremony.
• "Nike!" - the girls ordering all the men not to look an attractive woman walking by, but to look at their shoes instead. Guffaw.
• The wife has to be totally available at all times for the husband's pleasure.

Where did all these special rules and words come from? Answer - Bill Gothard, whose seminars made millions of dollars while this bachelor kept a harem of beautiful young girls at his headquarters so he seduce them with his emotional support and blackmail. That does sound like the founder of the LCMS, Martin Stephan, does it not? And no one knew! Well, they knew about Stephan's adultery but they didn't know. Both stories are out there.

The Missouri Synod did not officially start until Stephan was robbed, kidnapped, and left to die in Illinois, where he did pass on later. So Walther founded the LCMS. Oh yeah, sure. Who got 700 people into ships when he was under house arrest for promiscuity and misuse of funds? Stephan did, not Walther. CFW was the betwitched or cynical follower who went along with the cult and kidnapped his own niece and nephew for the trip.

Spying, lying, and control are crucial in the IFB network and in WELS. Jack Preus compared WELS spying to the KGB, but that is unfair to the KGB. That was disbanded. WELS spying continues unabated.

Here is a partial list of SynCon abuses.

A totally controlled sect is a money machine, because everyone has to go to the seminars and buy the materials. Everyone has to work for nothing because they are serving the Lord.

Guilt, guilt, and more guilt is a great way to control people. Abusive families do this instinctively. The author's father was a sadist who tortured and killed their pets and abused all his children with savage beatings and humiliation. Any infraction was a horrible sin that had to be punished.

The school system for Bob Jones and IFB affiliates will sound familiar to WELS survivors. Girls were routinely humiliated in what is now called slut-shaming. That is one of the paradoxes of Pietistic Calvinistic cults like WELS. They act holier than thou and purer than the snows of Kilimanjaro, but they treat young women like dirt and think of wives as dumb slaves. 

Northwestern College had Score Reports, where the men shared intimate details about their dates. When one wife objected to the practice, her Circuit Pastor husband roared with laughter.

The author writes about the leaders encouraging abuse and enjoying it. That reminded me of Mequon faculty watching GA hazing rites and enjoy them all over again. Acceptance of abuse is what glues a cult together.

When John Brug was on the front page Christian News, his wife had no idea. She said, "I know about WELS, but it is getting better." Brug seems to be one of the WELS minders, whose job it is to keep Otten controlled. Every congregation and every pastor has a minder or two. Nothing happens without it being reported the the higher ups.

Pastor Jon Stern's enthusiasm about the Starr-Barefoot
gay ministry program is contagious.

Does anyone know what the District Presidents earn? And what about their perks like the winter vacation in the Carib? The Synod President's salary and benefits are none of your business, but all of your business is his business.

In Lutherdom, sin has nothing to do with the Ten Commandments. First Table - false doctrine? No problem. 

Second Table? Every pervert was forgiven 2,000 years ago. Adultery and homosexuality are only sins when getting rid of someone. In the leadership, even at headquarters - no problem at all. The radicals can do no wrong in Lutherdom unless they start drawing fire on the denomination. Even then, the leadership would rather promote the unrepentant, move them, and defend them.

But to question the synod? That is a horrible, unforgivable sin. In fact, even bringing up the problem is a sin, so any meeting or discussion will involve a denunciation of the despicable way in which it was brought up. We said, write a letter, but look at the horrible language, Eighth Commandment violations, and failure to follow Matthew 18!

The Abusive Sect Hates People Out and Demands Them Back

The author describes how the abusive leaders hated them out of the college and connected IFB business arrnagements, but the cult also demanded they come back as servile and repentant slaves to the organization.

I have seen so many cases where WELS pastors or laity were driven out, hated out, shunned and abused, only to see them work their way back in. They complained about the abuse, loudly, and went back for a second helping. Of course WELS loves to have troublesome pastors back, broken of their habit of dissenting. 

Every so often I see a prominent leaker of information announce in public he is so grateful to be in WELS and loves his fellowship so much. Truly, such evidence of mind control should draw iron tears down Pluto's cheeks (Milton).

The sub-cult of UOJ works the same way. One dentist questioned every assumption of UOJ, found himself completely pistol-whipped by Rolf Preus and others, and came back repentant and embracing UOJ. Now he is so nasty about UOJ, without being prompted or asked, that I had to block him on Facebook. I do not mind debating UOJ the rest of my life, but ridiculous and gratuitous insults are not welcome. If I missed that so much, I would post on SpenerQuest.

One Hundred Percent Gay Lutheran Church Petitions To Join WELS Again.

Mark Jeske and Mark Schroeder ousted the pastor and grabbed St. John Lutheran 
and its endowment fund.

How much more descriptive of WELS can this be? An abusive cult - definitely.

The Church Growth District President got rid of the pastor and congregation on a pretext while leaving Mark and Avoid Jeske untouched.

Jeske pals organized a grab of the property and endowment through the only members, two (2) homosexuals. The late Tim Niedfeldt was going to get the worship services on the Net, so the theft prevented his family from joining. Services stopped altogether until an ex-WELS pastor (now ELCA) was found to front the theft.

Names, addresses, phone numbers?

Now the two homosexual members--who worked with WELS to grab the property--want to join WELS again under the same DP who kicked the original members out for supporting the pastor.