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Old 05-13-2025, 01:49 PM   #23
TLFisher
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Renton, Washington
Posts: 3,548
Default Re: Does anyone still care?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Trapped View Post
My honest opinion is the reason is "time".

The open letter at the link above was a certain length long. LSM's response to it was very, very long. And meandering. And evasive and disingenuous. Or required inner knowledge of the LC in order to see where they were lying.

Who of the more than 70 scholars/leaders who signed the open letter has the time and energy to devote their unpaid resources to a group that refuses to listen and plays a never-ending game of dancing deception? I'm not aware of many.

Norm Geisler and Ron Rhodes, two of the signers, wrote a lengthy response to CRI's journal on the local church, which response contained many excellent points, but LSM just countered with an even longer evasive and disingenuous response. (several books' worth, if my memory serves me well).

The amount of time it takes to untangle LSM's wonky teachings and slimy tactics is prohibitive to....well....just about everyone.

We get people like Nigel Tomes who takes an exhaustive approach to methodically parsing through the false teachings, but he's the rare one. No one has that kind of time or even willingness to voluntarily submit themselves to reading through the ministry in order to counter it's twisted view. I've sat down a couple times to take some personal notes on a particular teaching so I can really understand where the problems were, but always came away from it like "I'm never doing that again.....what an exhausting expenditure of energy!" because it was like every other sentence contained multiple problems.

Also, the more specific and persistent someone gets, probably the more likely they feel they are to potentially face lawsuits from DCP. I wonder if the 70+ scholars/leaders banded together because they felt there was safety in numbers, but I wouldn't expect those same 70 to continue to coordinate together to continue pushing back on the local church. And so it would be up to a smaller group or an individual, and they would then probably feel more vulnerable to legal troubles, etc from DCP. Just a guess.

Also, aside from the lawsuits, the complaints of the open letter are theological disputes and....I don't know....a lot of letters would need to go out to a lot of aberrant groups out there. These kind of theological aberrations of the local church ("natures" of things) don't have a very big palpable impact and probably sink low on the list of other more pressing items.

Just my thoughts.

Trapped
I am along the same lines as Trapped. Brothers like Nigel Tomes are unique. Who has the time.
To answer the question, "does anyone still care?", I don't know the number, but many still care. We've read the open letter.
The Open Letter should have been responded to in humility, but it wasn't. The cesspool of pride that permeates LSM/LC, it's understandable why they are unable to respond in humility.
Instead Living Stream exhausted many words offering nothing of substance. Also just as Trapped stated, " evasive and disingenuous."
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