Channel C²

Posted by RudPersson on Sat - Apr 24 - 02:58am:

Hi all,

As indicated, I am over in Sweden visiting Rud and Birgit Persson. Yesterday and the day before Carl Olof Jonsson was also down and travelled with us to Denmark.

My wife Marilyn and I have been visiting in Canada, England, and in Sweden and Denmark. Tomorrow we go on to Berlin, Dresden, the Czech Republic, Munich and Austria. We are back to Canada on May 15 and to Mexico on May 23.

My trip north to Canada was to check on the work the University of Toronto Press is doing on my book, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Third Reich. It is to be published this fall, although with university presses things are always slow and it could be delayed.

I am starting a couple of other writing projects. One may be a cooperative venture on the Russells (Charles and Maria). Frankly, I think this is needed because there is so much more to learn about them and so many errors to be corrected. Much that is said about C. T. Russell is pure nonsense. For example, he was not a Mason as many would have it, and the winged suns on the Studies in the Scriptures were not taken from pagan sources (see Malachi 4:2) However, in working on this material I do not want to whitewash Russell; he had lots of warts.

I am also translating a work from Spanish which is most interesting. It shows that the Greek term theos was understood much more broadly than is our word God (or god) and that the Eastern Church and many of the early Christian fathers believed in the divinization of members of the Church. Sometimes they even said that members of the Church would become God. This is important for understanding christology and is practically ignored in the West by all schools.

Finally, Rud, Carl Olof, a very fine, well educated English brother, Kerry Wade,and I are very interested in developing a carefully researched work on Christian pacifism. Under the present international circumstances, we feel that that is necessary. As the late Mennononite scholar, John Howard Yoder, pointed out there are various pacifist positions and the matter of pacifism needs to be studied carefully in relation to the Just War Theory and the Crusader ethic.

Regards to all,

Jim