“It might be the reason there’s a problem with excessive pastoral authority is a lack of interest in praying for one’s pastor. 🙂 Maybe?”

-Wade Burleson, eChurch Pastor, http://www.thewartburgwatch.com, 10/14/2013, 8:26 am

Before reading this third installment of the series–which concerns Wade Burleson’s extremely disturbing quote above, and which went wholly unchallenged by the purveyors of The Wartburg Watch, Dee and Deb, who laud and congratulate commenter, Eagle (former self-avowed atheist) on his upcoming baptism, while at the same time presumably sending the message that, in the interest of Dee’s brand of Christian love and solidarity, he may be forced to suck up some of the culpability for his pastor’s unholy tyranny should the situation arise.  And let it be known yet again, that neither Dee nor Deb to my knowledge offered one singe rebuttal to this quote; raised no hand of inquiry, nor even demanded a brief explanation.  And I am supposed to congratulate Eagle on his Baptism?  What am I to think, though?  Of course, that we should all acknowledge Christ and be free…but free from the exact same kind of tyranny which Wade declares in this quote and the exact same kind which Dee and Deb cannot fathom is actually tyrannical at all, for Wade after all is just such a kind fellow.  And of course we all know that the plumb line for TRUTH and LOVE, and the single greatest indication that a leader is a good leader is our subjective opinion of  how pleasant his demeanor is, and how many times he pats you on the shoulder and calls you “friend”.

Congratulations, Eagle.  Really.  I mean it.  Now, stop listening to Dee and Deb (and most definitely Wade) and continue on your journey to think for yourself.  Don’t let all the Wartburg love-bombing cloud your senses…because this is just what happens.  You feel all warm and fuzzy…and then WHAM! the next minute your spiritual “authority” is demanding that you stop forcing him to hurt you by disobeying his “divine calling” according to your pervasively depraved nature; and your blog queen friends are right next to him nodding with sympathetic looks and and murmuring, “He’s right, you know.”

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yes…before your read this third installment, be sure you’ve read the previous two.

I have mentioned before what I think Wade’s intention was in submitting this quote for all the world to see and wonder just how in the hell anyone who actually likes people could believe such a peculiar thing, but it bears repeating again.  What I submit Wade is doing here is attempting to draw a direct connection between the laity’s interest in prayer (by which he really means:  you’re not praying!) for their pastor and his level of authoritarianism.  This notion he presents, with his patronizing smiley face and the snarky “Maybe?”, as theoretical.  This is because even Wade knows, I hope, that there is no actual, empirical, objective, or even reasonable way to measure such a correlation:  prayer as it inversely relates to a given pastor’s degree of psychopathic narcissism or sadism.

Nevertheless, let’s take a gander at how it might develop should we buck the odds and attempt to make such a correlation, in accordance with accepted university-level research standards.  I have a doctorate, so I am familiar with such things to some extent.  Hmm…let’s see what I can recall off the top of my head.

First, of course, you would need to outline the experiment in a formal proposal for the purposes of securing funds, which…good luck on getting that grant money.  You may want to hit up Liberty University or the SBC for this one, because a secular college (that’s code for a college that actually has empirical standards for the execution of studies and demands valid statistical data in the analysis) will do little more than call security on you depending on how hard it is for you to take “no” for an answer.  But let’s assume you find some complicit institution which is sympathetic to your totally irrational epistemology.

Then you need a control group.  You’d need to get a pastor willing to fake authoritarianism, and a congregation willing to fake prayers.  So you’d actually need two control groups, then.  And in both cases, considering this is church we are talking about, one could make the argument that the control groups are organized around wholly unethical behavior which will likely lead to the affliction of emotional/psychological abuse on the part of certain test subjects.  Which I’m pretty sure disqualifies the study right out of the gate if my memory of Internal Review Board codes of ethics serves; not to mention you’d really be making more work for yourself because now you’d need to do two more studies–because the suspense would kill you–on the degree of abuse perpetrated on church members by pastors who fake leadership in the church (i.e. preach a bunch of shit they don’t really believe)  or members who fake prayer or an interest in prayer for their pastors (i.e. say they’ll pray for him while crossing their fingers behind their back) just so they can make a few bucks participating in a study on the psychology of and social relationships within a hyper-authoritarian Christian cult…a study which is, itself, abusive.

See how Wade’s innocent little remark only very lightly masks a vast, vast ocean of metaphysical and epistemological chaos?  I submit that there is no way a man who would make such a suggestion can be operating from a rational world-view.  That there are people out there who really believe such things acting as God’s proxy for real, life human beings should scare people.

Next, you’d need to identify the Pastor’s (the one in question) natural disposition according to accepted professional clinical standards and definitions/labels, and which has been vetted and reviewed by psychiatric experts.  That is, you would need a reference personality by which you could gauge this Pastor’s standard deviation from this reference to the degree the laity withdraws their “interest” in praying–and you’d need to, if you wanted to precisely measure Wades’ glittering jewel of philosophical insanity, make some kind of quantifiable distinction between an “interest” in prayer and actual prayer.  And so the study’s sample size would need to be limited to those pastors who have been professionally and clinically deemed to posses such a natural disposition…for there wouldn’t be much of a deviation to record if the natural disposition of the pastor was already that of a psychopathic narcissist.  And given the rise in popularity of neo-Reformation teaching and preaching, and the ubiquity of neo-Calvinist despots literally and figuratively littering the landscape of the modern American church, good luck in finding some genuinely compassionate elders.  Before you rounded up enough test subjects to make the study statistically valid, you’d run out of land.  You’d have to sample from other countries and that’s a whole new set of criteria you’d have to meet, as there isn’t necessarily reciprocity between domestic and foreign Review Boards, I’m afraid.  But you might get lucky.

So, as I was saying, you’d have to exclude your psychopaths, narcissists, borderlines, sadists, dependents, depressives, PTSDs, anxiety cases, schizoids, molesters, violent porn addicts, drunks, pharmaceutical dependents, and your general, run-of-the-mill assholes…all of which of course would require an extensive amount of professional vetting.  I’m not sure if you are familiar with the kinds of specialists you’d need wrangle into your corner in order to accomplish such a thing, but as Rodney Dangerfield once said, “I assure you, it’s not the Boy Scouts”.  And these psychiatric egg-heads don’t come cheap; get ready to grease a few palms and fork it over for expensive steak dinners and a more than a few hundred-dollar bottles of wine.  If you are an attractive female, you may need to consider, er, other ideas in order to curry favor with expert adjuncts should you find yourself running short of grant money.

(That was a joke, okay.  Just a joke.)

Then you’d need to both qualify and quantify “excessive pastoral abuse”, and also “prayer”…yes, yes I’m afraid you will.  You must understand that for the kind of exacting study Wades impressive divine musings demand you cannot leave anything up to the notion that certain ideas are just perfunctorily understood.  And so, yes, an equation for prayer will need to be produced by you and your fine research mentors for the purposes of generating the charts and graphs to fill your impressive end notes, first and foremost to cause an impressed murmuring among our esteemed reviewers, and second so we may understand just what we mean by “prayer” with respect to the study.  Which is important, believe me.  Will the monosyllabic prayer of our little three-year-old Cheerios munchers fit the bill, or do we require the solemn chanting of our more seasoned citizens?  Will the prayers of women be permitted for inclusion, or are we assuming that there will be far too little time a woman can give to the kind of prayer a mighty man of God requires, given the weight of his stature and unsearchable wisdom; and after all shouldn’t she be spending a little more time minding her biblical role and a little less time worrying about what a man with supreme God-like authority over her AND her husband (because, see, it’s in the bible) is doing to “abuse” her.  Scoff!  As if she could be in a position to know!  For if God doesn’t give PASTOR the grace to perceive his sins at times, how much less does the Almighty heed the insufficient sniveling of the weaker sex?

Next…what do you consider the direct influence of prayer upon the pastor to be, exactly?  What is the direct influence of a lack of prayer?  How do we define/quantify the direct influence of a lack of interest in prayer?  And then in light of this, how do you define and then how do you statistically subtract other factors which might affect the pastor’s disposition from the influence of prayer…such as stress, fatigue, marital strife, work load, personal health, medication, diet, doctrinal assumptions (e.g. maybe excessive abuse is not actually excessive nor abusive at all according to another pastor…maybe what Wade would define  as pastoral authoritarianism is just biblical as far as they are concerned), interpretive assumptions, vagaries concerning the definition of “authoritarian”, and, if your Mark Driscoll, sexual frustration and the influence of your extra sensory perception (ESP).

Supposing you were able to do all of that, and rule all of that out to an acceptable degree according to the standards of empirical research, you would still have the very, very formidable…nay, impossible task of proving beyond a statistically reasonable and and logical doubt that the prayer–since its direct causal influence is almost certainly unobservable (hence the needing faith part of Christianity)–was the single greatest factor acting upon the disposition of the pastor in question.  It is impossible to qualify as empiric that which is a function of an extra-sensory Being (God) unless He happens to show up in a flash of smoke and lightning at just the right time and on cue during the dissertation defense and and declare “Ta da! That prayer did that thing!”.  Which, I suppose He could do, but…unless the Ph.D. committee actually had faith enough in God in the first place, they likely wouldn’t believe Him anyway.

So what are we left with?  We are left with this:

“It might be the reason there’s a problem with excessive pastoral authority is a lack of interest in praying for one’s pastor. 🙂 Maybe?”

A statement which has absolutely no rational defense, no plausible means of validation by any empirical or reasonable standard, and should be rejected as nothing more than a churlish playing at Christianity.  The point of my facetious exercise in this post is simply to point out that this egregious statement of Wade’s should not in any way be given serious consideration as a legitimate perspective worthy of any sane person’s time.  He should categorically retract it and apologize for its utter offensiveness to anyone who has ever been abused at the hands of a self-absorbed, unbalanced despot, be it a parent, a spouse, a governmental leader, or a pastor.

But he won’t because God likes him better than he likes you.  It’s really just that easy once you get away from all the high-brow platitudes and the appeals to “right biblical exegesis” and “sound doctrine”.  It’s nothing more than a Christian caste system where PASTOR declares TRUTH for all of us…and we agree, or suffer a divine “fuck off” which shall surely run the gamut of physical and psychological horrors.

Still…I’m not done with this little Calvinist peach of a statement.  Stay tuned for part four.

“It might be the reason there’s a problem with excessive pastoral authority is a lack of interest in praying for one’s pastor. 🙂 Maybe?”

-Wade Burleson, Pastor, eChurch, Wartburg Watch (www.wartburgwatch.com), 10/14/2013, 8:26 am

I would again like to remind you, dear readers, that neither Dee nor Deb of the Wartburg Watch offered a single, solitary challenged to this comment by Wade.  These two run a “discernment blog”, ostensibly in the interest of pointing out abuse and abusive trends in today’s church.  And yet this?  Went utterly ignored by the self-proclaimed “blogging queens”.  And now, of course, where before we thought we knew the answer to this question, it seems we are left in an information lurch.  Just what, pray tell, are they the queens of?  Because for this comment to go unchallenged by either one of them leaves me a lot confused as to just what in the hell the point of their blog is anymore.  They rail against Steven Furtick in North Carolina for having a big house and, heaven-forbid, a “mega-church”, and yet allow Wade Burleson to walk away from his metaphysical/epistemological smoking car-wreck of tyranny while running blocker for him against the doctrine police.

And again, my comment?  Derided as mean-spirited, deceptive drivel.  My comment gets both barrels.  My comment, which calls Wade out on a categorically indefensible statement, utterly un-proveable, with no ties to reason or rationality…a product of a mindset completely bereft of any grasp of the physical world in which Wade operates and draws his living wages—at least philosophically and judiciously–and rooted in the rank acceptance of the Primacy of Consciousness model, which puts all VALUE (TRUTH and MORALITY) utterly outside of the human frame of reference.

Yeah, that’s Dee’s target these days.  Can we all pronounce “Master” correctly?  It’s “massa”, in case you readers over there at Wartburg forgot you were still a slave to he who is in the stead who owns you on God’s behalf.

I have said it before and I will say it again:  Wartburg Watch jumped the shark the day they decided that Wade should be the resident eChurch pastor for that site.  And once the thieves enter in and bind up the strong man…well, we know what happens to the house.  It needs a really good maid, PDQ.  And what was that Jesus said about making people twice as much the sons of hell as they were before?  Yeah…that’s pretty much where my thoughts are headed concerning any abused ex-Calvinist punching bag/drone (like I used to be) who enters into the majority of “discernment blogs” these days.

Dee’s response to my comment was knee-jerk, hyper-emotional, and completely predictable, as I have already mentioned.  Part of it implied that I had accused Wade of advocating domestic violence (“And if the wife had gotten her husband’s dinner on time she could have avoided that crack across her jaw. Just look what she made him do.”), which of course, I did not do at all.  I did, however, liken his accusation that a “lack of interest in prayer”–which must imply a lack of prayer, itself, by logical extension–as the source of pastoral authoritarianism to the idea that a wife can be, by Wade’s crooked “logic”, accused of being the root cause of her own spousal beatings if we decide this: to link violence against a victim with that victim’s own refusal (or obviously limited ability) to claim ownership of his/her tormenter’s sadistic personality disorder.  And of this, you can be sure.  I stand by my argument in this matter.  And further I declare that any Pastor, who is supposed to be in charge of compassionately leading God’s sheep into the safety and love and peace of their Heavenly Father, who engages in abuse and authoritarianism does not need prayer or an “interest” in prayer; he needs to have his ass fired, be publicly stripped of all his pastoral “privileges” and sent to a fucking psychiatrist.  Preferably one who is liberal with his criteria for admission, forced, into a state mental hospital.  Because anyone with that kind of ostensible trust and that kind of command over peoples lives and property who would abuse people’s trust like that is not a healthy man.  He is an evil man.  He is a man who needs a new personality, and/or to be put as far away from other human beings as the law allows.

That’s what he needs.

ANYONE who hears this kind of argument in their church…the one that Wade makes, should grab their kids and sprint to the nearest exit, like air to the vacuum of space.  And I mean STAT.

““It might be the reason there’s a problem with excessive pastoral authority is a lack of interest in praying for one’s pastor. 🙂 Maybe?”

Oh…for fuck’s sake!

This is how a Calvinist responds to ABUSE!!!!  And let me tell you something…it’s the same attitude I saw in SGM for years, and we all know how that church went down.  But do you think anyone in that church accepts responsibility for their evil actions?  Do you think anyone blames the “divine” doctrine.  I have not talked to all, but I’ve talked to several of my old SGM cohorts who are still in that mind-prison and I can assure you that they have absolutely zero appreciation for the level of manipulation and psychopathic teachings that led to the demise of that group’s credibility with anyone who looks to sanity and reason for their world-view.  In short, they just don’t see what the fuck the big deal is.  Seriously.

Folks, that is the kind of lightness with which Wade, I submit, himself takes these kinds of issues.  Issues like Pastoral abuse, which can take many, many forms…from physical, to psychological, to lying or being deceptive about church finances, to using people, to intimidation, to stalking people, to spying on people, to extort, and–as we who have a working knowledge of CJ Mahaney’s soiled history as President of SGM understand well–to blackmail.

Okay…moving away from my soap-box, whereupon I have appealed to my fellow-man/woman’s sense of moral decency to reject Wade and his teachings and his doctrine and his eChurch, I turn now to your sense of reason.  To that large and powerful brain muscle of rational thought that most people have (but many sadly choose to ignore), and one which has been trained to Olympic proportions by those who have spent a few minutes here and there ferreting out the logical conclusions of the Reformed doctrinal iron maiden.

One more thing, however, before I go there…let me just say that I will no longer subject myself to the emotional abuse I get from Dee over there at Wartburg Watch.  I have confronted her spiritual mentor, and as a consequence I have been privileged to taste several of Dee’s shit sandwiches, prepared a variety of ways.  It is no longer worth it…because shit sandwiches, while at first are a novelty and piquing,  just stopped being interesting a long time ago.  And besides that, at this point, let’s be honest.  My comments on her blog are just a red cape to Dee.  She doesn’t bother to think much, she charges and hopes she connects a horn to some flesh…there’s simply nothing rational about how she responds to me anymore.  And it isn’t kind of me to bait her by going there.  So, I guess my point is that from now on I’ll be discussing things only as an outside observer to the car crash that has become the Wartburg Watch.  I won’t actually be in the car.

Anyway…Wade’s comment.  Yeah.  I mean…further on down the comment thread you see Wade equivocate on what he “actually meant” (though, he never concedes, as far as I can tell, that what he said, that is, the words he used in that particular order, which beg a clear and rank interpretation by anyone with a grasp of the English language, are simply just plain wrong, which to me is the only meaningful response; a complete redaction). But, like, whatever, you know?   I don’t particularly care to see Wade attempt to “correct” a statement that should be categorically rejected, full stop, and then stricken from the record; or held up for perpetual derision as an example of how a Pastor can lose all credibility in a single bound.  Any clarification of a statement like that must be, by definition as far as I’m concerned, not nearly enough to make it either functionally justified, nor moral, nor meaningful, nor sane.  Any attempt to clarify what I consider to be a psychologically abusive statement merely indicates that Wade doesn’t really get it at all, and thus is not in a position to understand either abuse nor authority and as such, is not in a position to comment on it ever (nor to be a Pastor).  An attempt to “clarify” psychological abuse/spiritual tyranny is merely an indication that the person doing the clarification is, very likely, uninterested in actually stopping abuse.  If the husband, after he cracks his wife across the jaw for his late dinner decides to “explain what he really meant”…well, this doesn’t make him all of a sudden a guy to be trusted to confront abuse. But this is precisely what Wade believes, I submit, in theory, even though he wouldn’t concede my example.  It is, however, the exact same idea.  And that’s Wade.  And Wartburg.  After all, why does any hyper-authoritarian Pastor need Wade to “explain” that the reason for his tyranny lands squarely in the lap of the laity?  He is just as much an emissary of God as Wade is, according to the doctrine.  Wade doesn’t need to play the middle man.  The abusive Pastor in Wade’s example can excuse his own evil behavior just fine all by his lonesome, thank you very much.

That’s my opinion on the matter and yeah…I went there.  Again.

*

What Doesn’t Logically Reconcile

So Wade draws this direct connection between the laity’s “interest” in praying (which means their actual praying…which means: you’re NOT PRAYING for PASTOR and that’s why he is such an asshole)…yes, between the laity’s interest in praying for their Pastor and the amount of ecclesiastical authoritarianism to which they are subjected.  Now, even though Wade draws a direct connection between these two actions, the “real” connection can only ever be purely theoretical.  Because anyone with even the minutest grasp of the real world can see that there is simply no objective nor empirical way to measure the correlation between the degree of one’s prayer and the degree to which his or her pastor is a psychopathic narcissist.

Allow me to explain how an attempted study might look and why it is doomed to fail…not that this makes any difference to a Calvinist.  Remember, to them, TRUTH cannot be learned but must be, somehow, divinely bestowed, and so there isn’t any pastor who would or could be bothered with any kind of empirical study in the first place.  By their own doctrinal definition, TRUTH happens to be whatever they say it is at any given moment, even if it directly contradicts a TRUTH declared just yesterday over morning coffee.  That is the width and breadth of Calvinist epistemology.  So, even if Wade understands that correlation is not causation it doesn’t mean that it applies to him as God’s proxy.  Correlation, like anything else, is whatever God “gives him grace to perceive”.  Which means simply, again, that whatever Wade declares is true is true, and any criteria anywhere in the world according to any measure of statistical consistency or objective reason or epistemological frames of reference or human context (metaphysics) is merely the devil, up to his old Garden variety tricks again, deceiving the depraved masses until God arbitrarily decides who He has already predestined to get saved again and again by “preaching the gospel to themselves every day”.

Get it?  Yeah. Neither do I. But remember, it doesn’t matter.  As long as it makes sense to Wade and any other neo-Calvinist authority standing in the stead of God, that’s all you need concern yourself with.

Okay…time’s run out for this morning’s edition of Reformed Fun and Hijinks, sponsored by http://www.wartburgwatch.com.

See you for part three.  Oh, and I haven’t forgotten about Cal Thomas’s terrifying sermon on how to compel moral behavior in America’s blind, barbarian masses through a despotic theocracy.  I have MUCH more to say about that in part three of the series.  Ta ta.

Here is the link to the e-Church sermon in question…Wade’s comment I will be discussing is at the top of the thread: http://thewartburgwatch.com/2013/10/12/echurchwartburg-10-13-13/

Wade Burleson, 10/14/2013, 8:26AM said:

“…Fascinating to me that the three messages challenging the modern concept of pastoral authority…have an average of well over 200 downloads to watch.  However, the message on “How to Pray for Your Pastor” has only 4 downloads–total.  A reduction of 98%.  It might be the reason there’s a problem with excessive pastoral authority is a lack of interest in praying for one’s pastor. 🙂 [smiley face] Maybe?”

(Comments in brackets and bold emphasis added)

Now, let’s take the most egregious and most salient statement out of the greater quote so that you can view it in all its unequivocal clarity:

“It might be the reason there’s a problem with excessive pastoral authority is a lack of interest in praying for one’s pastor.”–Wade Burleson

And again, just in case you are still blinking your eyes and scratching your brain case, wondering if you read that right (you did) let’s get Wade to give us an encore of his encore.

“It might be the reason there’s a problem with excessive pastoral authority is a lack of interest in praying for one’s pastor.”–Wade Burleson

Now, if you are like me, you kind of tilted your head sideways and thought that if maybe you read the words from a slightly different visual angle, you’d be able to process what in the hell Wade is trying to say here.

Then you tilt your head a different way and realize that the problem is not you, the problem is those words….in that order.  And you can scarcely believe what you are witnessing.  Did Wade Burleson, poster pastor for Compassionate Calvinism, actually just blame the the victims of the abuse for the abuse?!  Well, as you read through the comments thread and you see Wade equivocate like schoolboy caught smoking crack in the bathroom, you will notice his denunciation of this interpretation (in his own charitable way) in spades.  However, read the quote again.  I mean…I am not calling Wade a liar; perhaps he truly doesn’t mean in his heart what his words so clearly, I submit, declare, and declare with force:

THE problem with excessive pastoral abuse is the LAITY.

Friends, country-men, lenders-of-ears…this is what I have been talking about, and why a site like the Wartburg Watch is a place that is almost an abject educational necessity for those of us interested in seeing the evolution of tyranny from its innocent roots as merely a bunch of confused and slightly indignant-but-well-meaning people just trying to “learn to accept and love one another better while not playing the doctrinal blame-game”, become a full-fledged monstrosity of irrational and despotic metaphysical and epistemological assumptions.  And the fact that this comment by Wade went utterly unchallenged by Dee or Deb, and yet, my response was immediately condemned as mean-spirited and deceptive and whatever other irrational, knee-jerk pejoratives Dee could conjure up in the deep well of her emotionally-lopsided reason…well, this should speak volumes and volumes to the fact that indeed, it doesn’t take much time nor work for the very destructive ideas which led to the formation of Wartburg Watch in the first place to swallow that same site whole and spit out even more victims than before Wartburg even existed.

So, yes…a little confused at first, I am, and so are you (but deep down, perhaps not really…we understand the roots of how Wade sees humanity).  It’s like…you know there is something vastly wrong with a statement like this…and you know that it isn’t just wrong in one way, but its wrongness and evil spread and fill the sky like countless branches on a tree used for lynching.  So there are thoughts all going in a thousand different directions and you sit and think and think about…okay, why is this so evil, and where does one even start to lay down a counter-argument to such debauched thinking?  There are plenty of places to begin, each one seemingly as good as another.  But then you notice that within the purely blatant and obvious meaning of those words in that order are layers and layers of nuanced theology, each stratum more putrid than the next.  And so you dig to the bottom, trying to find the root which gives life to the poisonous vine you see above the dirt, which is but the flower of violence…the concluding fruit of what is really a deep, deep philosophy.  A very well-rounded and very reformed philosophy.

And this is what I was able to come up with as a quick response.  I realize it is inadequate as a systematic rebuttal to Wade’s statement, but the reason I only hinted at the myriad of ways you could defy such a belief while highlighting  its frustrating effect on me, was to get Wade and others to understand that, yes, of course, there were indeed logical and and organized avenues of answering  Wade’s false assertion, but the first logical response should be one of abject offense and anger.

“The reformed get-out-of-jail-free-card.  The pastor is merely a sinner saved by grace.  If you only prayed for him…”

Okay…wait.  Break.  It’s always a him, isn’t it?  And that of course is the first sign of tyranny within the ranks of “God’s chosen people”:  a caste system based on the possession of external genitalia (among other things).  That is a sure sign that you are walking into a philosophy which operates in a vacuum of reason, and without any objective plumb line of morality and value…and there can be only one:  life.  And the sex of that life simply cannot rationally matter.  Now, certainly, this isn’t to suggest that the Calvinists don’t have some use for the “weaker sex”; surely, male copulation is a divine right not to be refused by women under any circumstance (within marriage, of course, they are quick to point out, as if that makes it any less disturbing…and, listening to some Calvinist pastors, I think I finally understand why some define marriage as institutionalized rape), so the male supreme ecclesiastical authority do have an orthodox “biblical role” for boobies, but they only really talk about that at the marriage retreats (or, if your Mark Driscoll, whenever).  Anyway…back to my response:

“If you only prayed for him more, none of this unpleasantness would would have happened.  Your lack of prayer is probably why God did not give him the “grace to perceive”.  If you just showed a little more interest maybe the pastor wouldn’t have to force you into right behavior.  If you just got with the program, and admit that all your pastors’ sins in the area of authority are due to your lack of compliance [to his supreme and infallible will as God’s proxy]…well, you wouldn’t be so miserable, now would you?

And if the wife had gotten her husband’s dinner on time maybe she could have avoided that crack across her mouth.  Just look at what she made him do.” 

(Comments in brackets and bold emphasis added)

Coming soon: part two

A lot of irons in the fire, here.  I’m currently in the middle of two series’ with respect to the Wartburg Watch (www.wartburgwatch.com)–one concerning the relatively recent E-Church sermon by Cal Thomas (it’s horrifying…the sermon), and this one concerning the decline of Dee and Deb’s site from a formidable and encouraging discernment blog to a fairly innocuous entity interested in what I would describe as “light” criticism of abuse in the church.  A categorical bulwark for Reformed doctrine, the Wartburg Watch is currently incapable of unveiling and challenging the roots of the ideas that drive the violence and the hypocrisy.  This is in large part thanks to their resolute determination to affirm Wade Burleson categorically (for some reason), which means he is off the table as far as criticizing ideas is concerns.  And if Wade is off the table, then so must be his doctrine.  For like I said, Dee and Deb cannot or will not make distinctions between bad men and bad ideas.  Wade is very likely a good man with bad ideas.  The problem, of course, is that eventually, bad ideas manifest into action, and that is when bad men DO bad things.  It is only a matter of time, as history has witnessed.  Thus, to me, the logical rout for a discernment blog to take is to defer talk of personality traits to other places and times, at least for the most part, and in the interest of actually discerning and destroying abuse, its evil spawn (other abusers), and the ideas which premeditate it, instead focus on the the bad ideas themselves, even if they  happen to come from Wade Burleson.

And this is precisely where I intend to go next.  Wade’s comment under the thread of his E-Church service this past Sunday or Wartburg Watch (10/13/2013) wherein he describes–theoretically (he says “maybe?”, at the very end of the comment, though I suspect that to him, there isn’t much “maybe” about it…but I could be wrong)–the direct cause and effect relationship between the laity’s lack of an “interest in prayer” and “excessive pastoral authority” I would categorize as an abusive statement.  At the very least, the implications are psychologically detrimental because they offer a cause which cannot be in any sense objectively verified, and thus, provide no way for the laity to reasonably validate the level of the efficacy of prayer, should they take steps to foment an “interest”.  To me, this is clearly psychologically abusive.  But that’s me.

Believe me, there is much to be said about Wade’s comment, and I have written much about it.  It is a  smorgasbord of telling doctrinal information with respect to the heavy Reformed roots of Wade’s philosophy.  For a critic like me, it is the gift of manna in its most pure form.  It is the proverbial gift which keeps on giving, and I intend to give back.

Now, I will limit my criticisms to Wade’s ideas only, and not to his person.  I do not like to make the connection between ideas and the definition of the human being who proffers them because that gets into sticky legal territory…not to mention that since I cannot read Wade’s mind I cannot judge his intentions, and thus it would be uncharitable of me to somehow claim that Wade is, himself, a sinister, evil jerk.  I cannot say that and I won’t.  Certainly, I have yet to speak to anyone or read a comment by anyone who knows Wade who even comes close to describing him as anything but a kind sort; humble and long suffering.  And with me, he has been, I must admit, gracious and kind in his speech.  He is also NOT a demagogue from what I can tell…and there is simply no way I can truthfully declare HIM an abuser.  That is something I cannot possibly argue…I want to make that clear.  And thus, understand that, regardless of what you might conclude from my posts, I reject any claim that this is, in fact, what I am declaring.  I am not.  I am discussing the doctrinal roots and broad philosophical and theological implications of his ideas, and how they might hypothetically manifest themselves in practical application by both pastors and laity.

In other words, though I cannot judge Wade, because I don’t really know him, I can judge his words and what I think they belie and how I suspect they might affect the teaching, behavior, and leadership style of the ecclesiastical authority.   I will offer an expose on what I believe his word choices symbolize with respect to Wade’s Calvinist roots, and why his teaching should be avoided at all costs, because, like I said before, Wade may be nice and kind, but his doctrine, I submit, is fundamentally evil.  And my primary point in all of this is this:  Wade’s ideas, I submit, are pure Reformation interpretive premises with respect to epistemology and metaphysics.  But I also submit that Wade, in service to a humble and kind heart, may function himself at some level of contradiction to his ideas, and may either not know it or not concede it…or something else.  Who knows?  Like I said, I am not going to pretend to know the man’s mind or intentions.  Just his doctrine.

But back to Dee and Deb and Wartburg Watch in general.

My premise is that ideas drive behavior…and this I submit is axiomatic.  There is always a reason which serves as the catalyst for the actions of man (man is conceptual being).  Behavior may be consistent or inconsistent with a given philosophical school of thought (e.g. Systematized Calvinism/Lutheranism: neo-Reformed theology), but this does not change the fact that the school of thought is, in fact, codified and organized to completion. If one accepts such a philosophy as orthodox, then they are on the hook for it, particularly when they defend all of their actions and behavior, ultimately, by appealing to it.  If they reject it on some level, then they must explain which parts they reject and why; and then explain how this does not contradict their concession of its “absolute orthodoxy” entirely.  Then and only then are they no longer on the hook for the destructive manifestations of the ideas they declare as absolute truth.  Whether indirectly or directly responsible for abuse in the church will depend…however, it is ultimately irrelevant how nice or inconsistent-to-abusive-outcomes some men are as a function of how they apply what they declare as TRUTH systematized and divine.  If there is fallout and abuse from the ideas, and the leadership does not reject outright those aspects of orthodoxy which can be seen as responsible for the abuse, and then explain their capricious and inconsistent understanding of the pure doctrine, then as far as I am concerned, they are culpable for the outcomes of what they confess as TRUTH.  Perhaps not legally culpable or directly culpable, but culpable as those who disseminate ideas which must logically conclude, when implemented in accordance with the cohesion of their epistemological roots, in humanity’s suffering, exploitation, and destruction.

And so on this level, the level of ideas–the level of doctrine–I submit that Dee and Deb’s apparent categorical support of Wade Burleson must then be considered a categorical support of his Reformed theology.  For there is no distinction made or indeed, allowed, on the Wartburg watch as far as I can tell.  Doctrine has been deemed by them as inadmissible in the discussion of why abuse happens in the church.  This is nothing more than a declaration that all doctrine then must be morally pure, and thus is beyond reproach.  That if we just got the right kind of men involved in forcing people into right behavior on God’s behalf, all the time and trouble abuse causes would vanish in a sea of altruistic, vapid notions of “love” and “tolerance”.  Aaaaaaand….we all know that life just doesn’t work this way. We all know that in the end, absolute ideas (the notion of the Primacy of Consciousness) will not suffer humanity to limit them.  And very quickly the right kind of men become the wrong kind of men right before our eyes.  I have seen it, and it is a disgusting and terrifying thing to watch.

This has always been the loophole for tyranny:  the notion that men, not their ideas, do bad things.  Ideas are good.  Men are bad.  Hello, Platonism.  We missed you; though we understand you were never really gone.

The Wartburg Watch then is the quintessential “new boss” which is, as Roger Daltry so famously sang, “the same as the old boss”.  Truly, they are exhibit A.   And this leaves me in an uncomfortable position, and one I need to tread carefully.  On the one hand, I do not believe nor am I saying that either Dee, or Deb, or Wade are directly responsible for abuse.  They are not abusers nor are they abusive people.  But I am forced to believe and opine that they are indirectly responsible for abuse because they all seem to me to categorically confirm what I argue are abusive ideas…that is, ideas, when afflicted practically upon people in their individual lives, must demand abusive outcomes in service to the root assumptions.   You see, Reformed doctrine demeans and diminishes the moral and physical worth of human beings, and further I unreservedly declare and argue that this should be obvious.  I declare either a rank liar, or a self-deceived shill, or a pure-bred ignoramus anyone who attempts to deny this; for how can one assume God’s absolute sovereign control and not apprehend how this must diminish man to the level of utter irrelevance (without appealing to “mystery” or “paradox”…which is not a rational argument, it is the lack of one…it is NO argument)?  How can God be in complete control of one who, as a person, claims to be independently valuable (have truth and morality in and of themselves) and is thus existentially equal?  It is impossible.  For man who is “less than God” in value and existence can never be in a position to claim their own individual relevance in light of an absolute (infinite) God.  Next to God, man is a worthless non-issue.  This is a fundamental presumption of not only neo-Calvinism, but of practically every Protestant and Catholic denominational school of thought in the world.  And thus this:  that the doctrine the Church concedes must demand man’s removal from the existence equation if TRUTH can be absolutely true should hardly be earth-shattering news to Christians.

And Dee and Deb, having made it clear to me on their blog that doctrine is not what they consider to be the driving force of abusive behavior in the Church have severed the link between religious ideas and religious abuse; that man does not in fact act according to his assumptions–in stark contradiction to a panoply of historical (and logical) examples to the contrary–means that ideas presented on the Wartburg Watch are, again, above reproach in any deep, philosophical, theological sense of the word.

In their rush to condemn my “mean-spirited” attacks on Wade Burleson, Dee is never shy to proclaim loudly that they do not believe that all Reformed pastors are abusers…and the implication, as I take it, is that I do.  Of course, this is yet another typically superficial knee-jerk reaction common to a person who is not interested in any real discussion of the matter, but is simply an appeal to the notion of “my blog…you aren’t allowed to say that here”.  Fair enough.  I’m a Libertarian capitalist.  But let’s just cut the bullshit.  Dee simply refuses to be truthful about what I believe because I submit that she thinks the ends justify the means.  As long as she is acting “in love” (which, to her, is utterly devoid of any rational, observable standard from what I can gather), she is  completely sanguine in doling out abuse in service to her “absolute truth” of “love” without the fetters of any pesky rational definition.  Because she loves Wade, her abuse is just fine.  And she would never qualify it as abuse in the first place.  Remember, ideas are not abusive, people are.  Intentions then, are either pure or not pure…the doctrines behind the intentions and thus the behavior are irrelevant.  Her intentions are good, so she will act in any damn way she pleases towards people like me; people who don’t agree with her divinely-bestowed “truth” and attack Wade’s doctrine.

Of course I do not believe every Reformed pastor is an abuser.  But this is purely subterfuge, anyway.  Whether every Reformed pastor is an abuser or not is irrelevant to the larger and serious issue of abuse in the church as a reality.  Reformed theology, followed as a consistent flow of ideas to action in direct service to its foundational metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions will lead to abuse in the church because the logic inexorably goes there. And this truth is born out by the regaling of tales and woes of abuse by literally dozens of people–who are suffering or have suffered in Reformed churches–on Dee’s own blog!  So the problem, yet again, is that Dee and Deb have made the assumption, despite all of the evidence to the contrary dancing and twinkling right before their eyes on a blog that they own and operate, that a doctrine which demands the destruction of humanity in service to its absolute “truth” and “moral purity” will not actually lead pastors and teachers of such a doctrine (appointed by God to “stand in the stead”) to behave in ways that destroy/abuse humanity; and thus, to debate doctrine is useless, and even worse, unloving and “mean-spirited”.  A Pastor or any other person then, by definition, is utterly removed from their ideas, is my point.  So if there is abuse in the church by the leadership, it doesn’t actually have anything to do, incredibly, with what the leadership believes the “infallible Word of God”  demands is their duty and calling in Christ to act as God’s proxy in doling out his divine and exclusive will without any respect to individual human application and context.  And thus if there are poignant and unequivocal attacks targeting the abuse, according to Dee and Deb it cannot possibly be directed towards doctrine which they have somehow deemed a non-issue and thus functionally non-existent; but it must be, and can be none other than, a direct attack on the person.  Thus, all my attacks on Wade’s doctrine are interpreted by Dee as a personal attack on Wade the man, and literally NOTHING else.

I submit then, that Dee and Deb operate in this endeavor of “discernment blogging” on purely an emotional level, and in the long run this unfortunately makes them ineffective in actually preventing abuse by spiritual tyrants.  They only see behavior, not ideas.  This may make for a great shoulder to cry on, and, to Reformed preachers like Wade Burleson, makes them wonderfully vigilant allies who will defend his peculiar doctrine to the bitter end, it appears.  And in the short run, it makes them look good…keeping all the meanies like me away; but again, ultimately it does little or nothing to address the problem.  This is a shame, and something I lament, because obviously Dee and Deb have a massively popular blog with a following to be envied by any blogger–exponentially more influential in this respect than mine–and yet the overall effect is nullified by the very same notions that allow abuse to happen in the first place.  But this is just not what the Wartburg Watch is about, and I wanted it to be…so I lingered longer than I should.  My pain is thus my fault in this.  I was too obtuse to see what Dee has been shouting at me for months.

She doesn’t give a shit about what Wade believes.  Duh.  She literally could not have been clearer.

As long as Wade continues to be a nice and charming person, Dee and Deb will not allow people like me to speak freely about the doctrine that forms his approach to all matters in the church and in the world.  They do not see church leadership through the prism of theological assumptions as I do.  Simply put, they do not believe doctrine is all that important.  Mean-spirited demagogues like me are stopped and frisked.  But evil ideas flow to and fro with all the impunity of a diplomat.  This is a mistake.  For to not evaluate the little old lady next door through a prism of her metaphysical/epistemological assumptions is one thing; but to deny the importance of this approach when evaluating someone who declares themselves specially called by God to hold authority over other human begins is disastrous.

Hence the sad and heart-wrenching decline of the Warburg Watch.  By taking doctrine off the table as a legitimate target of grievances, Dee and Deb have unwittingly thrown open the doors to new and greater trauma, I submit; and for an even greater degree of abusive thinking to take root in the church.  If people cannot appeal to the inconsistencies of the doctrine and the evil to which it thus must inexorably perpetrate upon the Lord’s people, the I would ask them by what standard can they ever hold their leaders, called by God, accountable for the abuse? For abuse can only be qualified as abuse if it violates some standard of morality and truth which we can all, as human beings, apprehend and agree upon, otherwise, our religion is pure mysticism.  And therefore the idea of what constitutes moral or immoral treatment of human beings must be rooted in standards of GOOD that can be observed by humanity as a natural function of their existence and their ability to observe and organize their surroundings.  But since Reformed theology makes it clear that defining standards of GOOD/VALUE/TRUTH are the sole purview of the pastors, where exactly can a layperson turn to for an injunction?  For relief?  Since they, by Reformed definition, cannot be in a position to recognize TRUTH on their own, the unfortunate layperson cannot even categorize what they are going through as abuse.  For that label, being a subsidiary of morality, is one that only the Pastor can use. 

So, the poor abused layperson who has been told they are nothing and nobody and no good for years by their Reformed pastor might turn to Wartburg Watch, as so many have.  For relief.  A shoulder to cry on.  But when they look up they will see that on the other shoulder is the very face of their torment…happy, healthy, and flourishing under Dee and Deb’s succor and their longing gazes of sublime adoration.

I am thinking…nay, I will post this under a new category:  The Wartburg Watch Watch.  I thought it appropriate since I seem to spend so much time defending myself from their knee-jerk emotional responses to my comments over there; as well as helping myself on many occasion to a large serving of Wartburg Watch Fodder and Folly Casserole in service to my own blog’s content.  It is a treasure trove these days; a precious-gem mine of wonderful cautionary exposes.  And also, it is educational for me.  I mean this in all humility:  I find that sometimes yes, I can actually communicate better, and my infinite time in the moderation corner (we’ve been having some great keggers over here, by they way…if Dee ever tosses you into this motley crew, bring beer money)  has helped me see that. So, I can thank them for a few things, both personally and “professionally”–that is, as a writer dabbling in the subjects of philosophy and spiritual tyranny.

For those of you who want the complete context of what prompted this post, I suggest you visit http://www.wartburgwatch.com and go to the comments thread under the recent Wade Burelson E-Church post.  Wade makes an…er, well, very interesting remark which naturally I took issue with and attacked accordingly, because, I guess you could say that that’s how I am.  And yes, if you read it, you’ll see that I “went there” and you’ll also see what I mean by this and you’ll also see that I’m unapologetic about “going there” and think that “going there” is inevitable when the egregiousness of the statement to which you are responding basically drop kicks you directly “there”.

Dee reacted with a predictably uber-emotional knee-jerk reaction and made all sorts of unsubstantiated and false accusations about my heart and my intentions and my “spirit”…which, shrug, I expected that much.  I also expected her to not post it because by now I understand that that is how she is.  What I didn’t expect was for Wade Burleson, himself, to take up my cause and basically call Dee out on her hypocritical natural instinct to decide for me what my intentions were or were not, and essentially tell her that he wears big boy pants and can take it and give it back (with all the added charm and grace of…well, of Wade; he really does have quite a fetching disposition).  And Wade is and was right…though, his rationale…hmm, I’m going to talk about that later.  You can read it for yourself over there, just go down a bit and you’ll see the scripture reference he uses (uses the example of Shemei and King David).  At any rate, Wade was right and seeing him stick up for me was pretty awesome.

I was, like, this close [index and thumb together and one eye squinting] to not even commenting because I realize that I have totally  misjudged what Wartburg is going for as a blog; and understand that I have been trying to go in a direction over at that site that is just not what they are about at all.  Oh…what foolishness we engage in when we convince ourselves that we are helping people.  What we really need to understand–and I know this will sound jaded and cynical, but I’m of the real world and let’s be honest, the real world makes people cynics and jaded like gravity makes them hit he floor when they trip–anyway, what we really need to understand is that the people we help or want to help in understanding how doctrine affects the behavior of spiritual despots are vaaaaastly, almost infinitely, outnumbered by the people on these “discernment blogs” who simply don’t give a shit about that at all.  And that means we can all breath a sigh of relief, shrug off our illusory responsibility to “them” which can be counted usually on a couple of hands at most, and stay away from these blogs and the inevitable abuse we will suffer at the hands of those who proclaim themselves  moderators of “discerning abuse”, without a blush of irony.

They. Don’t. Give. A. Shit.

They do not make a connection between bad men and bad ideas.  Thus, they have a blog that is really good at pointing out who in Christianity these days is a big old meany, but not necessarily why they are a big old meany.  They are a fine shoulder to cry on, and a place to gather and vent “outrage” at the blindness of these wicked overlords/the CJ Mahaney’s of the world…but the root of the calling out of this behavior by these moderators and blog hosts extends no further than:  “that was a bad thing to do, mister, and you should know better”.   And when you ask them, “Well, since they (the meany Pastors) believe this, can you explain why they should “know better?”

That’s when you are told that you should just be quiet and just love people more.   That you should stop pretending to “understand God” and should quite “telling people what they think”.

Because,you, dear reader, must understand, that love, undefined and without a standard by which it can be known, is somehow the “thing” which these Christians truly believe will magically make all intentions good and all doctrines beside the point.

So, this little post is dedicated to what I call Dee and Deb’s fall TO grace…a little tongue in cheek reference to the ironically quite evil “doctrines of grace” as codified and systematized by Reformed Protestantism and specifically, and most purely and abusively, by today’s American Neo-Calvinist movement.  And I do categorize Wade Burleson as being part of this movement.  He is a quintessential Calvinist in his theology, I submit, and the fact that he is quite a nice man cannot and should not and will not absolve him of his responsibility to defend his doctrine rationally.  This he cannot do, because the doctrine is irrational…an anathema to reason.  And thus, can only be apprehended at the expense of humanity, never in service to it.  You see, nice occurs only in spite of reformed doctrine, as I have said numerous times in the past.  It is not canonical nor is nice orthodox, as a cursory review of Protestant history will verify.  And also, nice is a relative term.  Wade is “nice” to me (I suspect only to a point, though).  And Dee is not nice to me at all now, but she is nice to Wade.  My point is that Wade and Dee may be nice here and there, but Reformed doctrine is always evil.

Gotta run…back with part two in a bit