The man from Grand Rapids

Following on from the sorry business of the child with a brain tumour who absconded (see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=proton), I realised that I did not have a clue what JW's were, apart from being people who were apt to pester one on one's doorstep.

So off to Google and then, via Wikipedia to Amazon, where I lighted upon the splendid book illustrated left, written by a professor of systematic theology at the Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan (see http://calvinseminary.edu/ or around gmaps 42.9298204,-85.5847972 where there seems to be quite a complex).

A book which started life in 1983 in Exeter as a paperback and was then bought for the Bradford Reference Library who had it converted to a hardback by the cunning insertion of thick grey cardboard into the paper covers. Plus a very loud notice inside the front cover, in red, prohibiting its removal from the library. From thence to me.

I now now that all four outfits, while claiming to be founded on both parts of our Bible, the old and new testaments, cannot really be considered to be part of the Christian community.  Each in their own way has added an additional volume to the corpus of revealed truth which takes precedence over the volumes which have gone before, the volumes which we know, love and have signed up for. All of them get into a terrible muddle about important things like the nature of the trinity (the sort of muddles which used to cause riots in Constantinople back in the early centuries of the Christian era) - and the author of this book, presumably a Calvinist, takes them very seriously to task. Fights them on their own ground.

All of them started out in the USA in the 19th century, seemingly from people with a Protestant, not to say Calvinist background. About the same time as we were having various evangelical & ecclesiastical revivals over here. But unlike over there, our revivals were more by way of the last wrigglings of something on the way out, the death throes, rather than any kind of a rebirth or renewal.

All of them hold to some very bizarre beliefs and it is hard to imagine how or why people would sign up to such stuff - say around 5 million of them, maybe half in the USA, taking the four cults together.

But the author is a sensible chap in other ways and understands that these cults do have something to offer which his own church, and others like it, do not. That they, for example, provide havens for certain kinds of needy or unstable people. So he provides practical guidance for those who seek to wean cultists back to the true faith, guidance which includes warning the lay off tricky theological disputes about such matters as the nature of Satan or the provision of ice cream in heaven. Leave that sort of thing to the professionals, although readers might care to see what Hašek has to say on the latter point (see, for example, p138 of the Heinmann English edition of 1973).

PS 1: I once knew a chap who made a point of inviting JW's in occasionally. He and and his wife would sit back with the vino while the JW's were invited to strut their stuff in the middle of the room, by way of an alternative to television. Whereas on the few occasions when I have had the chance, I just gave them the brush of.

PS 2: I remember the rather expensive looking Christian Science Reading Room in the Cambridge of my youth, although I don't remember ever getting a satisfactory explanation from my parents as to what it was all about. Perhaps like me until recently, they had written them off as cranks and not bothered to inquire further. But it does seem to have come down in the world as Google takes me to a rather scruffy blue shop at the wrong end of Regent Street (streetview 52.1998447,0.1267997), whereas the expensive looking shop I remember, all light brown oak paneling, was somewhere else, perhaps Sidney Street. According to my memory anyway. I shall have to make enquiries.