Ronald V. Huggins

The best place to start is by getting hold of a New Testament and reading right through.  Don’t start with books about the Bible or books about Jesus, or even with a Study Bible.  Just with a modern language New Testament.  There are several that are good. But you want one that has good cross references.  A cross reference takes you to other places in the Bible where they talk about the same thing. To many cross references to start just get confusing.  That’s why the best New Testament is one that mainly has cross references when the New Testament quotes from the Old Testament.  That way you can go back and look at the quotations in their original context as a way of understanding the larger historic and prophetic significance of what the New Testament is saying.  The NIV (New International Version) is very good for this. 

The New Testament was written by nine or ten different authors. But in this post let me start with the authors of the Gospels and save discussion of the rest for a second post. The word “Gospel” means “Good News.” And so, when we speak of the Gospels we are talking about the “Good News” about Jesus according to Matthew, to Mark, to Luke and to John. If you want to learn about Jesus, then, the Gospels are the best place to start. But who were Mathew, Mark, Luke and John? Let’s talk about that: MATTHEW the son of Alpheaus (also called Levi), was a tax collector in or near the town, which Jesus used as home base for a time. Matthew was one of the men Jesus chose be one of the twelve Apostles.   MARK, who wrote what is usually considered the earliest of the four gospels, was the son of a Christian woman named Mary who had a large household in Jerusalem where the Christians met in the earliest days of the Church. He was also the cousin of Barnabas, the Apostle Pau...

Getting in on the world's great universal moralistic aspiration : Oneness as its own end, Oneness without God. "It is for freedom that Christ sets It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." Gal 5:1 I am more and more impressed as time goes on how Christ frees us not only from the sins of culture but also from its righteousnesses. At this point I am beginning to suspect that the righteousnesses of culture may well represent greater and more cruel forms of bondage, of servitude, of slavery than the sins of culture. When a person comes to Christ in faith and repudiates any reliance on his or her own righteousness, they must realize that one of the reasons this is essential is that the righteousness they are repudiating has been terminally compromised by the luxuriant moralistic fantasies that they have breathed in and embraced simply because of where and when they were raised. The...

"Years of Testing"? Okay, is Richard Rohr telling a whopper or is there some other explanation? Back in 1992 folks hadn't yet started to pretend that the Enneagram had ancient Christians roots, which meant Rohr still had to try to show somehow that the Enneagram was theologically compatible with Christianity, and the following quote shows how he did it: “A series of American Jesuits, above all Fr. Robert Ochs, ran into the model in Naranjo. After years of testing and theological scrutiny many Jesuits decided to take over the Enneagram as a means of spiritual direction...I first learned it in the early 1970s from a Jesuit spiritual director.”* The "whopper" seems to lie in the claim that the Jesuits spent "years of testing and theological scrutiny," before adopting the Enneagram. The problem however is seen in the actual chronology: End of 1970: Claudio Naranjo is in Chile with Oscar Ichazo, where he encounters Ichazo's modified Gurdjieffian ...

Someone just called my attention to a sermon on the Enneagram in a church called the Rivers Crossing Church. Never heard of the guy. I repeat what he says with running commentary just because it is so typical of the false things often said. When the pastor was informed of the problems related to his historical claims a couple of days (not by me but by another) he responded with the following theologically dubious brush off: "While we don’t want you to ignore the convictions that the Holy Spirit has given you, we also encourage you not to let your convictions become an obstacle to what God is doing in the lives of others."* This raises the obvious question: If the convictions really do come from the Holy Spirit, then how can expressing them get in the way of God's work? In any case, the email he brushed off included a warning that the claim about Evagrius was false, which was a statement about history not a conviction from the Holy Spirit.   Anyway, just for the re...

G. I. Gurdjieff Those who have not seen what he [Gurdjieff] is after in this book [ Meetings with Remarkable Men ] , and who read it just as a kind of autobiographical account, or as amusing escapades, can have no idea at all of the purpose of the book.   Or, if they expect to find in the book some part of his practical teaching, they also are mistaken, because it has no claim to contain that.   But what it contains is really very important, and hardly anyone has understood this.   It is probably that the time was not ready, had not come yet for this.   –J. G. Bennett [1] Our knowledge of the early life of George Ivanovich   Gurdjieff bottle-necks down to what has been described by James Moore as his “ahistorical, auto-mythopoeic” autobiography, Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963).” [2]   A key question in relation to the work is whether the so-called Sarmoung brotherhood with their remote monastery where Gurdjieff reports having spent tim...