Confessions of a Would-Be Theologian

OlivetWatch: A new website

2023-09-07T12:22:00.003-07:00

A friend of mine pointed me at a new website called OlivetWatch.com, which has an interesting video on it. In that video, four different ex-members of David Jang's organization go on camera discussing their experiences with David Jang. Their faces and voices are obscured, which is regrettable but understandable: as I've said elsewhere, the one thing Jang doesn't seem to have skimped on is skeezy but expensive lawyers. (I've been on the receiving end of those nasty legal letters from Jang's folks, and I can affirm that the best investment I ever made was the $25 I spent on a "personal injury coverage" endorsement to my homeowners' policy.)

At any rate, check out the video on the OlivetWatch home page. It's worth watching, and I look forward to seeing what else ends up there.

A statement from Japan about David Jang

2018-11-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

I gather that there have been some developments lately in Japan with regard to David Jang. Several former members have come forward, and released a statement detailing their experiences with his organization.

It appeared in Japanese a few weeks ago, but the Kirishin website has now posted a translation into English.

The urgent statement by former believers of Jang Jae-hyung (Pastor David) and religious corporation “Ai no Hikari”, “Olivet Assembly” and other related groups.

We are former members of the “Community” who consists of believers David Jang whose real name is Jang Jae-hyung. We received a one-on-one Bible lecture (70 lectures) from a Korean missionary in the vicinity of our university and local station. This Bible lecture was based on a very general doctrine of Christianity, but in the final lecture, the history lesson, we learned the lessons titled “The Genealogy of Christ,” “Time and Date,” and “New Israel.”

The last history lecture was focused on the core doctrine that “there is already a Second Coming Christ after Jesus”. We were “guided” by missionaries to believe that this Christ was Pastor David. We were warned not to tell anyone this truth. These churches were called Tokyo Sophia Church, Tokyo Ephesus Church, Hongo Presbyterian Church (Hongo Shinjuku Ward, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Yamabukicho, Shinjuku Ward, Chiyoda Ward, Ueno, Ikebukuro, Waseda, etc.) belonging to “Nihon Kirisutokyo Choro Kyokai”(Japan Christian Presbyterian Church). We were cleverly guided by the lecture to realize that Pastor David, the supreme power of the Church, was a Christ. We devoted our life to the greatest task of building God’s Kingdom (the Kingdom of God on earth).

We had to hide everything in order to keep the Community not look like a heresy until the last day. We learned that if Pastor David was known as Christ, he would be arrested and persecuted and his history ceased. They said the Gospel of the New Testament was incomplete because “Jesus said in parables,” but the Gospel of David was called the “Eternal Gospel” preached by one who had mission of Christ. We were under the direction of David and the missionary, and we had to work at the relevant organizations and corporations, and have never been repaid. Through this statement, we would like to clarify the human rights violations and damages actually received.

Since 2003, Pastor David named his church community “Nihon Kirisutokyo Choro Kyokai”(Japan Christian Presbyterian Church). Before that, the General Assembly (headquarters) was located in Koganei City, Tokyo. Since 2002, the Community had wandered some rented building and changed its name from Tokyo Sophia Church to Tokyo Ephesus Church, and to Hongo Presbyterian Church. The believers were suffering from poverty, and the missionary lived on the loan and savings of new believers.
We raised money and paid a rent for church-related organizations across the country. Despite knowing the believers’ poverty, Pastor David said, “You have no faith, gather more believers.” He ordered us to contract for the building that were more good-placed and high-class. We had no ability to pay monthly rents of hundreds of thousands of yen, delinquencies and outstanding payments were common in many places. When we could not pay to the owners, they demanded eviction, but immediately we contract another high-class building to continue the church and the business. We were scared of urge from creditors for repayment of large loans. On the other hand, we were so tired mentally and physically to engage in building “the Kingdom of God.” So we somehow decided to “escape” and “resign” from the Community. Actually, there are many members who left this Community. Some people cannot testify because of their painful experiences, which are too deeply hurt by David or missionaries and cannot be told to others. Some people are afraid of retaliation and cannot cooperate.

The believers of the church, which is now called the “Ai no Hikari” (Light of Love) denomination, is composed of same missionaries and Japanese believers of that time. It’s nothing more than a change of name. Some of our members were responsible for the ministry (Christian worklabor) of “Christian Today”. “Go to the big church,” David instructed to us. This is because they cannot disclose the existence of their own churches, so if they are asked which church they belong to, it is necessary to prepare a church to answer temporarily. This was for not to be denied interview. They were instructed to go to Yodobashi Church (Wesleyan Holiness Church).

We would like to appeal to you about human rights violations and damages, focusing on the following contents.

The orders of the pastor David and the superior missionaries were absolute and we had to obey. We contracted a large amount of loans as a student. Mental pain was caused by domination.

The suffering caused by forced marriage (a way of looking like a Unification Church, Moonies’ arranged marriage) unpaid work at Christian Today, Inc., Verecom, Inc., Breathecast, Jubilee Mission, and ACM (now AM). There was no written contract, no explanation about guarantees and insurance. (Pastor David decided who works at which organization. The believers could not choose by themselves.)

We paid the tuition fee of Olivet University, founded by Pastor David, but we could take few lectures.

Each one of the believers are very pure people. Most of them are evangelized in their school days and do not know the world outside of the Community. They do not intend to hurt others. However, for the absolute obedience to David’s orders, no one can resist. They execute as he says. Even lying and wrongdoing are justified by the word of “obedience”.

One thing to note is that the appearance of the Community is a ordinary church based on the faith of Jesus Christ, but it also hides the presence of another Christ “David” (Jang Jae-hyung). We appeal to prevent secondary damage to youth so that they are not subject to similar damage, and we still strongly expect and demand the withdrawal of our colleagues still remaining in the Community and their rehabilitation into the society in the future.

I'm quoting it in full here, because statements like this have a tendency to go missing: Jang's got good lawyers, and he's not afraid to use 'em.

For folks observing from the outside, there's nothing really new here. It's the same story I've been hearing for the last six or seven years: folks were "evangelized" as teenagers or very young adults, and were taught that Jang was a second Christ. Convinced of this, they submitted unquestioningly to Jang, worked for little or no pay, moved where he told them to move, married whom he told them to marry, and ran up huge debts at Jang's direction but in their own names. And the whole while, they tried to present to the outside world a facade of success and prosperity.

The saddest part of this story is precisely that there's nothing new here. This is the same story I've heard dozens of times, from all over the world.

Nor does it take much imagination to see the parallels between what happened with these Japanese converts and the websites and organizations they started back in the early 2000's, and what has happened with Johnathan Davis and Etienne Uzac and IBTimes and Newsweek much more recently.

Jang is gonna Jang. It's just what Jang does.

Lessons learned looking for deer

2018-10-01T22:46:00.002-07:00

Lesson 1: Cover your face

Over the summer, our family was out camping, and we noticed a small herd of deer wandering through the campground. Our three kids figured they'd practice some stalking (they were pretty bored), so they put on their camo shirts and pants, and snuck off towards the three does and the forked-horn buck that were grazing about 100 yards from our campsite. The results were predictable - the deer were tame enough to let them get within about 20 yards, but too smart to let them get closer.

But afterwards, our eldest decided that he wanted to practice stalking me. The game was that I would pretend to just be staring off into space, occasionally looking around, and if anything he was doing was obvious, if I saw him making a clear movement or if something about his presence jumped out at me, he had to start over.

And I actually learned something while being stalked by an 11-year-old that I hadn't expected: his face and hands really showed up. He tried sneaking in on his belly, and from 20 yards I couldn't distinguish his camo clothes at all. But his pale face and bare hands were almost luminescent compared to the dark foliage around him, and were by far the most noticeable part of his body.

That was when I bought all three of us ghilly hats and camo gloves.

The hats look pretty ridiculous, and they fog up your glasses, but they hide your face well, break up your form, and maybe just as important, they keep out the mosquitos. (They're almost worth it just for that last.)

Lesson 2: Stop moving

When you spot a deer, the very, very first thing you want to do is simple: stop moving. Period. Freeze. Don't move a muscle, until you figure out what's going on and have made a plan.

Surprisingly, this can be harder said than done. My first instinct is apparently to shrink back behind the nearest cover. But that movement into hiding attracts a deer's attention, and has cost me several opportunities. In contrast, when I've just stayed still, even when the deer totally had me, it generally didn't spook.

When I was hunting down in southern Oregon this last September, Chris Zornes and I were approaching a watering hole where we were hoping to setup for the evening. We were early enough that we weren't expecting to find any deer there, but about a hundred yards out, we spotted five or six deer milling around the hole. They were all does and fawns, so far as we could tell, but we still didn't want to spook them off. We stayed at a distance until they appeared to leave, then moved closer.

About 40 yards out from the hole, downwind, I was moving from one clump of brush to another, when two does and a fawn suddenly walked out from some brush near the hole, and I was caught totally in the open, moving. This time, at least, I managed to freeze, and went motionless. The lead doe caught something, and stared at me, but didn't spook. When she looked away for a moment, I moved slowly to put a small tree between us. It wouldn't hide me complely, but at least it would break up my form. The three deer stayed there for several minutes before the lead doe finally got suspicious and cut a circle around behind us, to get downwind. She was about 10-15 yards away when she finally got a whiff of our scent, and then she (and the rest of the herd) bolted.

The next day, I didn't exercise as much control, and ended up blowing a stalk. I'd jumped a doe and a small buck, but the buck stopped about 80 yards away on a hillside, and after a few minutes, I watched him settle down under a tree. He had an excellent view of the country around him, but after some thought, I was able to work out a path that would keep me mostly downwind and mostly screened to within 30 yards, which is about my range for an ethical shot. So I got down on my belly, and started crawling. I'd closed to 50 yards, checking periodically to make sure he hadn't moved, when I had to cross an open area. There was some brush blocking his view of that opening, so I started slowly crawling forward. Several feet out, I glanced his direction, and realized that he'd stood up and moved a few yards. From this new vantage point, his view wasn't blocked at all, and he was staring right at me. Without thinking, I scooted back behind the nearest bush - maybe the dumbest thing I could have done. He looked at me for five seconds, and then disappeared up the hill. I don't know if freezing would have kept him from getting spooked, but pulling back certainly put the icing on the cake.

Lesson 3: Look for the other deer

When you spot a deer, before you do anything, look for the other deer around it. Usually deer aren't traveling by themselves, so when you see one, there are probably more. It's surprisingly easy to get so focused on the one you're looking at that you miss the others standing a few feet away.

This happened to me the only time (so far) that I've actually taken a shot at a deer. It was in a spike-or-better unit down in Oregon, and on our fourth day of hunting, Chris and I saw a small but legal deer standing a short ways off the road. We stopped his truck, and the deer didn't move. I felt a little awkward about shooting a spike - he didn't have spots, but he wasn't much more than a largish fawn. But it would have been my first deer, and I wasn't about to turn it down. So I got out of the truck, eased out my bow, and ranged him. 20 yards. This was going to be easy.

Then he started to move away. I wasn't sure how far, but he stopped after a few yards, and I guessed he was maybe at 25. I didn't want to take the time to re-range, so I put his shoulder blades between my 20 and 30 yard pins, and let fly. I couldn't quite tell where the arrow went, but he jumped and kicked, and ran about 10 yards before stopping and looking back.

I immediately grabbed for another arrow, to see if I could get a follow-up shot. Right as I nocked it, I finally noticed that he was being followed by another doe, and a much larger fork. They had been standing there in plain sight this whole time, and Chris and I had both totally missed them. Not being sure whether my first arrow had gone home, I didn't want to take a shot at the fork, so I ignored him, and tried to maneuver for a second shot on the spike. But while I was trying to get into position, they decided to move - quickly this time - and were gone.

We eventually found my arrow, and it was completely clean - no blood on it at all. Our best guess is that he was closer than I'd believed, and that I shot over his back: it must have touched him just enough to give him the willies and make him jump. But if I'd kept my eyes open, I would have seen the fork, and given their direction of travel, probably would have had time to range him correctly.

Lesson 4: Screen your form

When you're looking through the forest for deer, by far the easiest thing to see is movement. After that, it's something distinctive, usually their ears, sometimes their tail. But if the deer is motionless, in the shadows, and they're screened by some brush, they're surprisingly hard to see.

The only benefit is that this can also work in our favor. Animal brains recognize movement, and they recognize form, so when you move slowly (it has to be very slowly), and break up your form, you can make it much harder for them to realize there's a human standing there. When stalking a deer, if you keep something between you and your quarry - a rock, a tree trunk, a small bush - even if you're partially visible, you have a much better chance that the deer will look right past you.

To drive this point home, I recommend that you try sneaking up on someone in the woods sometime. (Not your wife. Not if yours is anything like mine and you don't enjoy sleeping on the couch.)

Down in Oregon, Chris and I had split up to do some still hunting - he was going to take one ridge, and I was going to take the other. An hour or so later, I saw that he'd crossed over onto my ridge, and was walking up towards me, maybe two hundred yards away. He sat down to glass, and I decided to see how close I could get before he spotted me. I knew it couldn't be very close, because I had to cross a whole bunch of open area, but I figured I'd give it a shot.

I approached him from the side, walking slowly, in the open sunlight. There was a small tree about 15 feet to his right, and I put that between us. As I walked he glanced a time or two in my direction, and I thought for sure he'd spot me, but he gave no sign of recognition, so I kept moving slowly, putting my feet down as quietly as I could. After 10 minutes or so, I was standing just 15 feet from him, behind the tree, and I had all the reward I could hope for when I stepped from behind the tree and watched him jump half out of his skin.

Absent a buddy who's not paying attention, try sometime to see how close you can sit to a well-traveled trail, without the hikers seeing you. I've had folks out scouting pass 10 yards from where I was sitting, lightly screened, without noticing I was there. (I've also been the guy feeling the surge of adrenaline when I realize there's another hunter sitting only a short distance away.)

Lesson 5: Watch your silhouette

I was still hunting one sunny morning when I spotted a deer's silhouette moving on the far side of some brush about 40 yards away, followed shortly by two more. I was out in the open, but in the shade, and I figured that the same brush screening them would screen me, so I slowly moved towards the only opening where they could come out. Several minutes passed, and they never appeared - and I never did see them again.

Only afterwards, when I was thinking about it, did I realize that even though (a) there was brush between me and the deer, and (b) I was in the shade, right behind me was a bright, golden, sunny field. Even through the brush, my moving and shaded silhouette would have stood out like a drag queen at church.

Lesson 6: Noise disappears faster than scent

Yeah, yeah, if you've read this far, you know this, right? So did I. But it's one thing to know it in theory, and another to actually watch deer react to your smell, while you're watching them.

Chris and I had decided to setup at a watering hole in southern Oregon - the same watering hole I mentioned above. We parked his truck about a quarter mile away, and walked in along the main trail, with the idea that it would be quieter than approaching through the brush on the other side. I expressed some concern that the deer coming in on this trail would hit our scent, but Chris (who has been hunting the area for close to 15 years) said, "Nah, I don't think that they pay too much attention to human scent around here. It's just too common."

We got close to the hole, and split up. Chris camped out on a hillside slightly above the hole, and I followed a deer trail up a small draw, moved about 15 yards out, and setup in some brush, well hidden.

An hour later, I watched a small herd of does come down another trail towards the hole. They were upwind of my position, but about sixty yards away, they hit our back trail, and every one of them immediately stopped. They milled around for about five minutes, looking for the human predators they could obviously smell, before deciding that a drink wasn't worth it, and they bailed.

About 15 minutes later, another herd came down the draw. They passed within 15 yards of me, still upwind, but then the lead doe hit my back trail. She nearly jumped out of her skin. She looked around desperately, trying to spot me, and then bailed. Oddly enough, the other three deer didn't immediately follow her. They milled around for a few minutes, afraid to go further, but reluctant to leave. One of the fawns actually put its nose down on the path I had taken, and began to follow it right up to where I was sitting. About then, the lead doe started wheezing loudly, from about a hundred yards back up the draw. It was a sound I had never heard a deer make before, and I can only imagine that she was warning them, insisting that they follow her and get out. They were obviously thirsty, because they didn't want to leave the hole without a drink, but eventually they took her warning, and disappeared. None of them ever spotted me, but there was no doubt they knew I was there.

We didn't see any bucks that night, but the lesson was clear: we should have cared more about whether a deer would smell us on the main trail, and less about whether they would have heard us in the brush. The noise would have been long gone by the time we were situated; but the scent lasted.

A grand unified theory of hunting

2018-10-01T16:08:00.001-07:00

I mentioned in my last post that animals are much better at knowing where we are than we are at knowing where they are. But we can also extend that thought slightly, as it presents the primary dilemma associated with hunting.

(1) If you want to see animals, you need to move.
(2) If you move, animals will see you.

All the different hunting techniques are just attempts to overcome this paradox.

Another way of looking at this is to say that hunting is an attempt to maximize your daily "encounter zone" (the daily acreage where you can detect a deer) while minimizing your "warning zone" (the daily acreage where a deer can detect you). Deer are better than you are at this, so your warning zone is normally bigger than your encounter zone. The real bugger, though is that most of what you can do to increase your encounter zone is going to increase your warning zone; and nearly every technique that decreases your warning zone is also going to decrease your encounter zone.

The idea that you have to be moving to see deer is basically just math, though it's empirically verifiable as well. If you pick some random spot out in the woods, and sit there, you're not going to see many animals. You're much more likely to see a deer if you engage in some counter-intuitive behaviors, like driving your truck slowly along logging roads, or even better, riding your mountain bike.

The reason is that deer don't move much during the day, and when they do, it's slowly. During daylight hours, a blacktail might only walk a quarter mile. (It'll move further at night, but that doesn't help a hunter.) If you can see that deer from 50 yards, the territory from which it's visible that day will amount to about 10 acres (440 yards * 100 yards = 44,000 square yards = 9.1 acres). In other words, there's only a 10 acre "encounter zone" with a randomly positioned stationary hunter, and your chances of your location intersecting with the deer's encounter zone is relatively small.

But if you're out mountain biking, and you cover 10 miles with the same 50 yards of visibility, you'll have put 330 acres of territory within your purview, so you've got a much larger encounter zone. Mathematically, there's simply a better chance that a deer will be in those 330 acres than that a stationary hunter's location will fall within the 10 acres from which a traveling deer can be seen. But because you're moving, and because deer are better at these things than we are, any deer will be able to tell you're passing by from probably 100 yards away - so your warning zone will probably extend to over 600 acres.

This is also why so many hunters are primarily road hunters. You really do see more animals that way. Over the last two seasons, I've laid eyes on 150 or so deer. Probably 100 of those were from a moving vehicle of some sort (auto, truck or bike), and maybe 40 were from when I was walking or still hunting. I've only seen maybe a dozen deer when I was setup somewhere, silent and quiet - despite having spent much of my time in the woods completely motionless.

Me, motionless

The problem is that when you're moving, the deer also see you. This goes back to how animals (including the two-legged variety) interpret their visual field. Long ago, evolution figured out that things which move are more relevant to our survival than things which don't, so our brains are hard-wired to pay attention to movement. When you're moving, you scatter more scent around; and you make more noise. So yeah, you see the deer, but all you see of them is black tails and white butts, disappearing into the brush.

So what do you do? Well, like I said, every hunting technique is just an attempt to get around the "10 acre problem". But each of them in turn introduces its own set of complications.

Still hunting - walking very slowly and quietly - is an attempt to minimize your warning zone by keeping signs of your presence below the deer's "excitement threshold", while still covering enough territory to increase your encounter zone to something reasonable. This is probably my favorite sort of hunting, because you're doing something that requires skill and concentration, and your view is constantly changing.

Still hunting in southern Oregon

The downside is that a deer's excitement threshold is quite low. It's hard - harder than you would think - to keep a deer from seeing you if you're not absolutely motionless. Sound, scent and sight are all against you. I can only think of a few times, while still-hunting, that I was able to spot deer before they knew I was there, and it's no accident that they were all were in relatively arid southern Oregon. The forest we were hunting was open enough that I could see further than the deer could hear, and when the wind was right, I sometimes got lucky enough to notice the deer first. (Most of the time, of course, by the time I noticed them, they were either staring straight at me, or were disappearing through the tree trunks.) I've never managed to accomplish this in the much denser and louder undergrowth of western Washington. If you want to be quiet anywhere west of the Cascades, you have to be on a road or well-traveled trail - which is usually open enough that the deer are going to spot your unscreened movements well before you take any account of their screened, still, grey bodies. Or you end up traveling so slowly that you don't really open up your encounter zone very much. There's probably some sweet spot, but I haven't found it yet.

Stand hunting - positioning yourself in a tree stand or a ground blind and staying put - is an attempt to put yourself within the right 10 acres. You make your encounter zone huge during the scouting season, letting you make an educated guess as to where the deer are likely to be come hunting season. Your encounter zone while actually hunting is tiny, but assuming you remain still, quiet and motionless, your warning zone should be even tinier. (It will extend just a few yards upwind, and a quarter mile or so downwind.)

Setting up a tree stand

The main downside to this approach, if you're hunting western Washington blacktail, is that they're hippy deer. They go where they want, when they want, with no pattern I've been able to discern. I've been told you can set your clock with whitetails - if you see them nibbling a particular patch of alfalfa at 7:00 am today, you've got a pretty good chance of find them there at 7:00 am tomorrow. No self-respecting blacktail would ever let themselves get tied down to a schedule like that. They go anywhere and everywhere. It's not uncommon for a well-marked trail to get used maybe a couple times a week. That's a lot of time to be sitting in a tree stand.

The books will tell you, by the way, that blacktail do have certain patterns: that there are differences between feeding areas, daytime bedding areas, and night-time bedding areas; between trails used for traveling to feeding areas, those used traveling away from feeding areas, or those used for escape. These books say that with careful study, you can figure out which is which, and predict where blacktail are going to be.

Unfortunately, blacktail haven't read those books.

Spot-and-stalk hunting - trying to spot animals from a distance and then sneak up on them - is an attempt to increase your encounter zone via binoculars and careful positioning. Once you've spotted an animal and know where it is, you can focus your movements, and remain careful enough during your stalk to (help) ensure that the animal stays outside your warning zone.

The main downside to this approach is, "Have you ever been in western Washington?" This is what it looks like:

Or this:

Or this:

Yeah, good luck spotting and stalking with that.

To do reasonable "spot and stalk", I think you need to be in a place where you can see at least 10-20% of the land around you at 400 yards.

This is maybe a little thick for spot-and-stalk, but it's at least plausible

Most deer will still be hidden, but you've got a fighting chance. In most wild places in western Washington, you're gonna be lucky if you can see that much of the land around you at 50 yards. Some places, it's gonna be 5. There are locations where maybe you can try it - big, recent clearcuts - but you're restricted to glassing the edges of the cuts, which is pretty limiting. I've never seen a western Washington blacktail in a clearcut open enough to glass from a distance.

Road hunting basically says, "Screw it, I'm gonna make both my encounter and my warning zones so huge that if I get lucky, a deer might get confused and let me have a shot." I have a feeling that when deer hear a truck or a mountain bike coming down a logging road, or even a noisy hiker on a trail, they often conclude, "Nothing making that much noise can possibly be dangerous." Or maybe it takes them 10 seconds to make up their mind - but by that time, you're traveling fast enough that you've moved within the encounter zone.

A deer I saw while walking, which spooked as soon as I stopped to take its picture

The biggest downside to moving quickly is that the deer are always going to know you're there, and you're only sometimes going to know that they are. Deer hide really well - more on that in a future post - and in a western Washington forest, they're almost invisible until they move. If you're moving quickly, you're unlikely to see a screened, motionless deer. (Hell, they can be hard enough to see when you know they're there, and you've been staring at the spot for five minutes.) When the deer finally does move, it'll be heading quickly towards brush or other landscape features that it knows will screen its movements, and it's unlikely you'll get a shot off in time.

I should note that if you're in a vehicle and see some deer beside the road, if you keep going and don't slow down, the deer will often let you pass without moving. But if you stop, or try to get out and off the road, the deer will be gone in seconds. The only exception to this that I've seen is if the deer is a yearling without its mother. Then it'll sometimes remain still. The one actual shot I've taken at a deer - and blew - was of this sort.

Oddly enough, if you're moving slowly, but with just enough movement or sound that the deer can tell you're coming, they're more likely to spook than if you're moving quickly and noisily. I once watched my kids trying to stalk some deer at a campground. So long as the deer knew where they were, my kids could get fairly close: the deer didn't really care about all the noise and commotion. But when my kids tried to circle back some distance and approach from behind, the deer quickly locked in on the sounds of unknown origin, and bolted. Deer really don't like anything that gives the impression of trying to sneak up on them.

So what do you?

I don't know yet. Nothing I've tried has worked. Yet. But I've learned a lot about the details, and I'll have some comments on what precisely I've picked up in future posts.

Why hunt?

2018-09-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

One of the things I don't think I realized when I started hunting was just how much better animals are at hiding than humans are at finding them.

When I started hunting last year, some church friends gave me permission to hunt on 40 acres of their property. Their parcel is in a fairly rural area, and was recently logged. It's on a slope that backs up against a steep hill and provides access to thousands of acres of public land. It's a gorgeous hillside, with a perfect mix of deep timber, recent clear cuts, deciduous trees and evergreens, and lots of blackberries.

I've since spent most of my time in the woods focused on scouting and hunting that area - hundreds of hours, in all seasons, in all weather patterns, and using every technique I can think of.

The reason why is that there are animals there. There are bear and cougar and bobcat and coyotes.

It's full of deer beds, deer browse, and trees that the bucks have been knocking the snot out of.

There are enormous tracks and deep trails and huge piles of scat.

I've got three trail cameras out there, and I've been able to identify at least six different bucks, from tiny spikes up to really nice five points. Given typical buck:doe ratios, if there's that many identifiable bucks, it means that there are probably 30 or more deer somewhere on that hillside.

It's a rich, rich area.

And in all that time, I've seen exactly four deer.

Four deer. That's all. And all does.

Only once would it have been legal for me to take a shot, and they were gone before I could think. I never once drew back my bow with an animal in my sights.

The only way I can square what I'm seeing - the sign and the trail camera pics - and what I'm not seeing - actual animals - is that blacktail are really, really smart. I've come to the conclusion that if you’re in the woods, it’s generally a safe assumption that every animal for a quarter mile around knows exactly where you are.

Hunting is like playing hide and seek in a 27 million square foot house, with hiding places everywhere, trying to find someone who runs faster than Usain Bolt, hides better than John Rambo, smells better than a bloodhound, and moves as quietly as the grass grows. And who knows that his life depends on you never seeing him.

It's frustrating as hell.

And yet it's been an amazing experience. I’ve been a hiker and backpacker all my life, and have spent a lot of time outdoors, but I’ve never paid attention to the forest the way that I do now. Have you ever seen a billboard from a long distance off, and you can’t quite figure out what the picture is of? It’s just a blob of colors. But then you get closer, and suddenly it resolves itself into a recognizable image, and now you can’t not see it.

It’s that way for me with hunting. The woods were all one kind of big blob for me before. Now, I see signs of animals everywhere. I see where they’ve been walking. I see where they’ve been eating. I see where they’ve been sleeping, hiding, fighting and courting. I’m seeing the forest in three dimensions finally. I’m inside the woods in a way that I never was when I was just walking through them. If you’re a gardener, you know how different it feels to eat food you’ve grown yourself instead of just bought at the grocery store. It’s something like that: it turns out that the natural world has a texture and history, a structure and substance, that I had never understood.

When you’re sitting in a stand, the whole world feels different. You’re silent and still. You hear everything: the guy starting up his chainsaw two miles away, woodpeckers across the draw, a Douglas squirrel yelling at who knows what, crows arguing, leaves falling. You see birds flitting through the bushes, squirrels in every tree, chipmunks skittering across your boot. You know exactly where your scent is blowing, you notice every gust of wind, and grimace when it changes direction. But you’re not asleep, or even tired, because every moment you’re living in hope, you’re scanning the treeline, looking through the brush, listening with everything you can, waiting for that one moment - the one that in your heart of hearts you know you’re going to blow - when the deer you’ve been waiting for shows his head.

Some thoughts on blacktail hunting (from a total noob)

2018-09-30T06:42:00.000-07:00

About three years ago, I bought my kids a couple of toy bows - some of those $30 jobs that you can find at any sporting goods store, which pull maybe 15-20 pounds, and shoot about as straight as Liberace. We couldn't hit anything with them, but it was fun plinking around. As a kid myself, I had borrowed the tiny wooden longbow my own Dad had as a kid, and loved it, but I think it came with maybe 1-2 arrows, and I quickly lost those. So this was my first chance to actually experience anything like archery.

After a year or two, I was still enjoying it enough that I wondered what it would be like to shoot a real bow - something dangerous enough to actually warrant the anxiety Galena had been lavishing on the toy bows. I knew that real archers actually sometimes hit what they were aiming at, and I was happy to blame my repeated failures in that regard on my equipment.

So after some research, and on a weekend when Galena wasn't paying too much attention, I found myself walking out of our local bow store with a new Hoyt PowerMax and all the fixings.

Not surprisingly, I found myself actually able to hit stuff. Not at all well, mind you - I was shooting something like 8" groupings at 20 yards - but way better than anything I'd been able to do with the kids' bows. And I loved the thunk that the arrows made sinking into a target at high speed. It was cool.

I didn't know enough to know that I shouldn't be impressed at this grouping

After a month or so of that, I started wanting to shoot at more than just targets in the backyard. Which got me thinking about hunting.

I was pushing fifty, and hadn't hunted since a family friend took me a couple times in high school. But I remembered the feeling of excitement and power that came from walking through the woods with a weapon in my hand. And I figured that if I was going to try for a mid-life crisis, this was about as innocent a pastime as Galena could ask for.

The first problem is that I really had no idea where to start. I was a complete newbie - I couldn't tell you the difference between a blacktail, a whitetail and a mulie, and had no idea which ones lived anywhere near me. None of my friends hunted, and none of the hunters in my extended family lived close enough. Just reading the Washington state hunting regulations was an exercise in frustration. But I started watching Youtube videos, reading hunting websites, and hanging out on hunting forums, and that got me hooked.

In one sense, those resources were invaluable. I had no idea, for instance, that if you shoot an animal with a bow, you're not supposed to jump up and run after it. I'd always thought that an animal shot with an arrow would act roughly the way a human in a movie does, and fall down with a dramatic thump. It wouldn't have crossed my mind to think that they would nearly always simply run away, like they'd never been hit. And I was a bit surprised at how seriously the hunters on the videos treated the wind. I had some vague theoretical notion that animals had a better sense of smell than humans, but I had never thought to pay attention to which way the wind was blowing.

In another sense, though, the resources weren't all that helpful, for several reasons. First, the vast majority of deer hunting resources are targeted towards whitetail hunters. I haven't yet had a chance to go after a whitetail, but after two seasons of hunting Columbian blacktails, I can tell you that they ain't nothing like their eastern cousins. I'll get into the details in later posts, but suffice to say that techniques which work well on whitetails are nearly irrelevant to the sort of hunting available in western Washington. Second, and this is just what you'd expect, the videos are nearly always about successful hunts. At best they'll mention the months of scouting and the fruitless weeks spent in a treestand, or even throw them into a montage, but that's not what they show. And that gives you a very different feel for what hunting feels like when you're actually doing it, especially in an area where deer don't travel in herds, spend nearly all their time in thick undergrowth, and are unlikely to ever be seen in significant numbers.

So I've been thinking that I'd like to throw up a few blog posts about my experiences as a total newcomer to the sport. It should be obvious that these are not going to be the authoritative pronouncements of an experienced hunter. (I've been hunting for one and a half seasons, haven't harvested anything bigger than a rabbit, and have taken a single shot at a deer - a spike - and missed clean. I'm in no position to be giving advice to anyone.) It's mostly a way for me to collect my own thoughts, and maybe help other newbie hunters who were in the same spot I was. And if you happen to be reading this, and can spot something I'm doing wrong or have totally missed - please, chime in!

The value and the limits of unit testing

2016-01-31T13:30:00.001-08:00

Swyfft’s website (https://swyfft.com) is now live – for a certain definition of “live”, in this case, meaning the coastal counties of Alabama. Alabama is where we hope to get some good initial sales metrics, before we expand out to more states.

When I joined Swyfft back in April, depending on how you looked at it, the website was maybe 90% done, and maybe only about 10% done. I’m sure you’ve heard the old developers’ saying, “The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time. The last 10% takes the other 90%.” And that was certainly true here.

In addition to adding more features, one of the biggest things we’ve been working on since April is automating our testing process. My strong preference, whenever it’s feasible, is to rely heavily on pure unit tests, with all dependencies mocked out. It’s easier to isolate the code under test when you do it that way, it’s easier to get the tests running on your build server, and the tests themselves run a lot faster.

Unfortunately, that approach has limited utility at Swyfft. The main reason is that our system relies heavily on over a million rows of meta-data, spread over 20 or 30 tables. Many of our most critical tests can be summarized as, “Does this code interact correctly with this metadata?” And by definition, that’s the sort of thing you can’t do with pure unit tests.

Consequently, I’ve split up our automated tests into roughly three categories:

Unit tests. These don’t talk to the real database, and any dependencies are strictly mocked out (we use Moq for this).
Integration tests. The entry point for these tests can be anywhere from the API controller in the website, down to the lowest-level repository, but the key is that they actually talk to the real database – though other dependencies (such as Authorize.net, our payment processor, or IMS, our agency management system) are generally still mocked out.
Acceptance tests. The line between these and integration tests is a little fuzzy sometimes, as we still use the same testing framework for both (we recently switched from MSTest to xUnit). But basically, the idea is that we don’t mock anything out, and each test exercises the system from front-to-back, usually in defined flows. We use Selenium to drive a web browser for tests that involve the website.

This works. Mostly.

Don’t get me wrong – our testing infrastructure is critical to Swyfft, and we couldn’t have gotten where we are without it. The thousand or so tests that we run on each build are an invaluable safety net. But there are plenty of things we’re going to need to improve. A few of them:

Selenium is susceptible to random failures. About half of our test runs will trigger at least one unrepeatable Selenium test failure. We’ve tried different browser drivers through Selenium, and Chrome is maybe the least problematic, but every one I’ve tested seems to have similar problems, just to different degrees. Those random failures significantly decrease the value of having a build automation server: just because Jenkins rejects the build doesn’t mean anything if you know that there’s a 50% chance the build was rejected because of something that isn’t really a problem in your code.
The whole thing is really slow. I prefer my test automation suite to run in under 60 seconds. Anymore than that, and running the tests become something you do when you think you’re done coding, rather than something you do repeatedly as you’re ginning up a new feature or performing a quick refactor. And unfortunately, our tests take about 15 minutes to run on a fast machine. You can work around the slowness, and we do, but it really interferes with getting realtime feedback.
Keeping the DB in sync on our build automation server is a PITA. We could regenerate the DB for each run, but it takes about 15 minutes or so just to load the metadata, and the test runs are long enough already.
We’ve done almost nothing about JavaScript unit testing. The site is simple enough so far that we can get by with UI-level automation testing, but as the site gets more and more complex, that’s not going to be sufficient. We could probably get rid of half of our problematic Selenium tests if we were able to verify the JavaScript (or rather, TypeScript) code at one or two levels lower down the stack.

I’d be interested in hearing how other folks have solved these problems. Please let me know!

Swyfft is off and running

2016-01-25T20:12:00.000-08:00

For a little over a year, Swyfft, the company I joined last April, has been working to revolutionize homeowners' insurance. And we've got some seriously cool stuff going. Most of it I can't talk about - it's full of algorithms and analytics and patented this-and-that. But the result is straightforward enough: you go to our website, put in an address, and two or three seconds later, get a quote. I think we're the first insurance company to pull this off, and it's very cool.

Of course, a fast quote wouldn't be terribly helpful if it didn't also save people money. And we've got tricks up our sleeve there, too. Naturally, we can't save everyone money: claims are what they are. But Sean Maher, our very smart, nay, brilliant CEO (I'm not above bootlicking), has worked some magic there as well. And we think we can assess the sorts of risks a property is likely to face as well as or better than insurance companies who've had billions of dollars and decades trying.

Our systems, the piece that I'm most intimately involved with, have been more-or-less ready since late last summer. But the business side has taken quite a bit longer: negotiating the contracts, maneuvering through the regulations and licensing agencies, that sort of thing. But we're up and running now, and the response we've seen so far is promising and exciting.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and our initial market is small: coastal Alabama. But that's just the start. As we get initial metrics, and start to increase traction, we aim to be all over the Gulf Coast, and eventually, nationwide.

I love Swyfft, I love what I get to do every morning, and I can't wait to knock the socks off our industry.

Brief thoughts on Newman’s “Development of Doctrine”

2015-12-20T21:51:00.001-08:00

On p. 47 of Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman writes:

I have been arguing, in respect to the revealed doctrine, given to us from above in Christianity, first, that in consequence of its intellectual character, and as passing through the minds of so many generations of men, and as applied by them to so many purposes, and as investigated so curiously as to its capabilities, implicaitons, and bearings, it could not but grow or develop, as time went on, into a large theological system.

He’s correct on this point, I believe. Anything that impacts human beings is going to invoke human curiosity, and anything that claims to be as significant as Christianity will necessarily be the focus of a great deal of intellectual endeavor. I can’t imagine being human without some desire for consistency and coherency in what we believe, and I can’t imagine a human civilization without people who are focused on figuring out how each part of our social and intellectual worlds connects up to the other parts. If something big happens to humans – boom, humans are gonna start thinking about it. And arguing. And those arguments are going to get more sophisticated and subtle as time goes on, as flaws in earlier formulations become apparent, as various and sundry attempts are made to resolve the inevitable difficulties.
But Newman goes on to write:

…next, that if development must be, then, whereas Revelation is a heavenly gift, He who gave it virtually has not given it, unless He has also secured it from perversion and corruption, in all such development as comes upon it by the necessity of its nature, or, in other words, that that intellectual action through successive generations, which is the organ of development, must, so far forth as it can claim to have been put in t charge of the Revelation, be in its determinations infallible.

He’s wrong on this point, I think. He would be correct of the intellectual content of Christianity were its chief or most important characteristic. But if Christianity is the remnant and the witness to God having done something, and what God has done is more important than what we think or understand about what God did, then I can’t see any reason why God would find it necessary to preserve it from all perverson and corruption. As I understand Christianity, I can see how it would be important to shield it from a certain amount of perversion and corruption: what God is doing involves, among other things, making sure people learn about what God has already done. And there is an intellectual component to this. But it’s certainly not the only and probably not the most important component. Jesus said that all men would know that we were His disciples by our love for each other – and not, let us be clear, by the correctness of our theology. If that’s the case, I could see God being willing to put up with quite a lot of theological misunderstanding and wrongheadedness, for the sake of His people learning to be the sort of people He wants.

A New Hope

2015-01-09T13:58:00.001-08:00

Over the last several years, David Jang’s community has offered a variety of explanations for the concerns that have been raised about the community’s teachings. These explanations have generally involved increasingly creative ad hominem attacks – just suing folks was getting boring, I guess – and have tended to move from, “Nobody ever taught that Jang was a second Christ and anyone who says so is a liar,” towards, “Well, it sort of happened, but it was only a few folks out on the fringes.” As more and more documents have accumulated, however, even that latter claim has become increasingly implausible. As I wrote elsewhere:

The evidence I’ve laid out in my last three posts indicates more-or-less conclusively that the belief was present from the lowest to the highest members of the group, was spread across at least four continents [ed: now six], and continued for many years. Several people have told me that every member of their particular local branches believed Jang to be the Christ, and this in an organization which emphasized communication and control… Quite a number of folks have told me that they had sent David Jang letters or emails in which they laid out their belief in him as the Christ. All this taken together makes it hard to believe that this teaching was was happening entirely without Jang’s connivance.

Given this background, a debate taking place in the comments section of another recent post has been enlightening, as it introduced a new swirl of explanations, at least one of which I had not previously heard. In this debate, an anonymous member of Jang’s community with the handle of “Guestememo” was challenging, well, pretty much anything I’d ever written or done, ranging from my tenure at Zango (he thought it reflected poorly on my ethics), to my church attendance (he suspected it was spotty). He appeared to know a great deal about Jang’s background, including details of his involvement in the Unification Church, along with the names and identities of obscure Korean associates I’d never heard of. I’ve also heard from several ex-members that this sort of public defense never happens without Jang’s authorization, so my assumption is that Guestememo was in all likelihood writing with Jang’s approval, perhaps even with Jang’s active participation.

When I asked him to comment on the quite substantial evidence showing that the problematic teachings had been common throughout the community, he responded with this post:

Ken, it is productive that you asked. I think we are going toward the end of this long debate.

It’s very important to understand these 2 points:

In Jesus’ teaching in John 21, he says, “Feed my lambs,” which talks about Peter taking the role of Jesus Christ in shepherding His (Jesus’) sheep. It’s not about Christology (not that Peter himself is becoming a savior) - but rather about roles. The Christ refers to the Savior who saves us from the sin. But the Christ you are referencing in the messages is similarly talking about a role or a place - it's not about salvation (soteriology) or Christology. This is interpreted using a typological approach in hermeneutics. Another example of this is in Ephesians 5, where it is written that husband and wife are to be like Christ and the church. The husband is in the role of Christ for the family - serving and sacrificing. This does not mean that the husband saves the wife from sin. For us, salvation is complete through Jesus Christ and no other Christ is needed. Therefore, this is not about Christology or soteriology at all - but rather, it is about a ROLE one holds.

These particular lectures are very contextual. When we answer to those who have questions on eschatology, there are 2 ways to interpret the Bible: in a literal way or a spiritual way. For those who do not take things literally, eschatology can be very confusing. These lectures were designed in order to protect these types of confused people - especially in the Asian context where there are many gods and cults. Frankly, protecting these people is a very big challenge in many regions and many people have lost their Christian faith, having it replaced with cult beliefs. Conclusively, these contextual messages were only used in these special contexts.

Broadly speaking, these lectures were very limited and were given in a special situation. Even so, these could cause confusion if people do not understand them properly so teaching these messages was discouraged and these were never accepted at the church as a whole, and were certainly never part of any official doctrine adopted by the church.

About things like “time, times, and half a time”, there’s no one who actually believes in dispensationalism in the church; you can check among the accusers and will see that no one actually believes in it. Why were these messages only taught around the perimeter? In these fierce situations, among cult groups and extreme liberal groups attacking many people with their own dispensationalism, a few missionaries had to actually create their own dispensationalism to counter theirs. These views were never part of any core doctrine. That’s the context in which this happened. We don’t hold a dispensational view. This was not official doctrine and was not accepted from the denomination, but only given to face the challenges from cults and to prevent people from falling into them. So I hope you do not misunderstand these lectures.
Some lecturers believed these were the best hermeneutical methods available against cults and extreme liberals. These were never used to say that he is the savior - the messages were taught very differently from that perspective.

This was all already cleared more than 10 years ago. Moreover, this all took place in parachurch small groups before the church was actually formed. It’s not something that people accepted as a whole from my understanding.

The basic church doctrine is very healthy and orthodox.

I don’t care whether you believe this or not, but you can just check and see.
As far as I know, Borah was actually a very good Bible teacher. And she was a great testifier of the Gospel who said Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation in her confession. (http://www.christianpost.com/n... — "I could never teach a Bible study with this intent because I have never believed nor confessed that David Jang is the 'Second Coming Christ.'"

Lin responded to Edmond, saying, "Like many other evangelicals, I affirm the Second Advent is the literal and personal return of Jesus Christ," she said. Lin also cited a verse in the Book of Acts stating, "This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.")
I want to conclude this with this verse that came to my heart:

Romans 14:1-22 So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who does not condemn himself by what he approves.

I feel like our debate is just like this passage.

So that’s interesting.

The first thing worth noting is that everything Guestememo says presumes that the various documents and testimonies that have come to light over the last several years are genuine, and not the forgeries or lies that Jang’s community had originally claimed they were. To be sure, there wasn’t much question about this, but I suppose that admitting as much counts as progress.

The second thing is that Guestememo is doing a lot of hand-waving here, tossing around theological jargon like a first-year seminarian. But even after I’ve read the post repeatedly, I can’t quite figure out how introducing concepts like “typology”, “eschatology”, “dispensationalism” and so forth advances his argument, or really even makes any sense. I saw some of Jang’s academic transcripts recently, in which he shows himself to be a solid “B” student; I’d probably give this effort a C+.

Beyond that, Guestememo makes several points, which I think can be fairly summarized as follows:

When folks in these lessons referred to Jang as “Christ”, they were referring to Jang’s role, not to his identity.
These teachings were necessary to help folks who might otherwise be attracted to cults.
It only happened on the outskirts, in very specific situations.
All this happened more than 10 years ago.
Now that this has been explained, the debate can end and we can all be friends.

I’ll try to respond to these points individually.

It Was About Jang’s Role

I suppose I could get behind the idea that the official lessons which describe Jang as Christ were referring only to his role rather than to his identity. This probably was the way that folks like Borah conceived of him: at least, there’s no hint in the written or audio lessons that they thought of Jang in Chalcedonian terms, as God incarnate. Some chats and documents refer to him as “King”. One member told me recently that “everyone considered him to be superhuman,” and that sounds pretty typical. On the other hand, some went quite a bit further. One document clearly speaks of Jang in soteriological terms, making repeated reference to the “sacrifice” of “Christ David”. Another calls him “Lord”, the earliest Christian confession. Other former members have said that they would pray in Jang’s name, or even thought of him as God.

However, even putting those stronger claims aside, I don’t know that it really helps Guestememo’s case to draw this distinction between role and identity. If you’re a Christian, and you’re teaching that somebody besides Jesus of Nazareth is playing the role of “the Christ”, something has gone badly wrong. Period. You can try to draw all the distinctions you want and trot out whatever technical theological language you think might impress or confuse folks, but if your community can produce or even tolerate that teaching for more than two seconds, it’s clearly gone off the rails. And if you don’t think that’s so - well, that’s pretty telling too.

It Was Combating Heresy

The idea that these lessons were necessary to combat heresy is just nuts, straight up. I’d be more polite if I could, but I can’t quite bring myself around: this isn’t the sort of explanation that calls for politeness. If you read through the numerous documents that have been made public, there’s no hint that this was their purpose. Nor does the claim make sense on its face, since it boils down to saying that they needed to teach heresy to fight heretics. Despite the fact that they keep offering it, this is perhaps their least persuasive in a long line of implausible explanations.

It Was on the Fringes

I’ve said before that it’s hard to say just what percentage of Jang’s community believed that he was a second Christ. It was certainly less than universal - when someone hadn’t made the confession, folks would whisper, “He doesn’t know about Pastor David”. But neither was it just a few missionaries on the outskirts. It probably did make a difference where you were: one former US member estimated that perhaps only a third of the community believed it, while Chinese members have insisted to me that everyone in their local community had made the confession. Even one of the folks who supposedly “didn’t know about Pastor David” told me that he had, in fact, been taught this - he just didn’t buy it. I’ve talked to a lot of former members over the years, and I can’t recall anyone who joined before 2006 who hadn’t at least encountered this teaching. What is beyond any serious dispute is that it was taught on every continent (except Antarctica), for many years, and by folks from the lowest to the highest levels of the organization.

It’s Ancient History

I believe I was the first of Jang’s critics to acknowledge that he had called a halt to the teaching of the history lessons in 2006, nine years ago. (So it wasn’t really “more than 10 years ago”, but I won’t squabble over the details.) That said, I’ve had two people tell me that at least some current members have acknowledged that they still believe Jang to be the Christ. I suspect that this is an increasingly marginal position in the community at large, but it doesn’t yet seem to be extinct. And I have no idea what Jang’s inner circle continues to think.

The bigger problem is the community’s ongoing ethical failings, which are quite certainly not ancient history, and which go well beyond their continued denials and dissimulation about the second Christ teaching. Ben Dooley has documented repeated violations of US labor and immigration law. Lots of people have told me that members were encouraged to lie to family, in the hopes of getting money out of them. The group has continued to lie, well beyond the point where it has any point, about the nature of the community’s interrelationships. (Does anybody really doubt anymore that Jang controls the Christian Post, or that the IBTimes leadership takes orders from him?) Former members who speak out continue to be bullied and threatened. Most eye-opening, OSHA issued a $2.35MM fine to Olivet last April for repeatedly and willfully exposing its students and other workers to lead and asbestos. I could go on. This is not a community that Christians should trust.

Let’s Be Friends

As for whether we can all be friends now - well, there was a point in time when I hoped that Jang’s community would choose the path of honesty and repentance. I was confident that if they did, they would be greeted with reconciliation and rewarded with fellowship. I’m probably one of Jang’s most dogged critics, but I would have welcomed them with open arms had they decided to come clean and engage the world honestly. I still would. But I see little sign that this is afoot.

I appreciate the attention that Jang and his inner circle are paying to my criticisms, but in the end, it’s not my judgment that they need to worry about.

A statement from the Spencers

2015-01-02T16:58:00.001-08:00

As I mentioned in my last post, Aida and Bill Spencer, two Gordon-Conwell theology professors, recently published an article on their Scriptural Truths blog that resulted in some controversy. This article, written by Martin Zhang, one of Bill’s students, was a thoughtful and irenic but ultimately critical analysis of the various concerns that have been raised about David Jang and his community. Since their blog was hosted by the Christian Post, one of the media outlets controlled by David Jang, it was not at all surprising that not just this post but their entire blog was immediately removed.

I reached out to the Spencers to get more information, and this was their response, which I publish here with their permission.

Dear Ken:
Thank you so much for saving our blog and keeping it on line. Below is a letter that we sent to Ted Olsen that gives you some background information.
The post that you read was an experiment. It was brought to our attention that Christian Post is affiliated with David Jang. We were told that Jang’s group was recruiting orthodox evangelical Christians to give indirect endorsement, in other words, we were legitimizing the movement by our presence on the Christian Post, even though we knew nothing about the group. Several of our students in Korean and Chinese churches mentioned concern about David Jang and cited Christianity Today’s article. Martin Zhang, one of our students, who has now returned to China, wrote a paper on David Jang’s movement for Bill’s class, Contemporary Theology and Theologians. Bill and I guided him through several revisions until we found a version that was kind and fair. We put it on our blog at 5 p.m. last Friday to see how Christian Post would respond:
Would they allow the article?
Would they respond and clarify?
Or, would they strike out the article or the entire blog?
For example, they could have said: “This rumor has been plaguing us for years. We are glad to be able to respond to this once and for all. Neither David Jang nor anyone in our movement is claiming that Pastor David is the Second Coming Christ. Such a statement would be blasphemous. David Jang, his teachers, and his movement simply see him as a faithful servant of Jesus.” This is the opportunity we provided them.
Instead, as you know, in two hours this specific blog and all our blogs have been eliminated. “Manage your blog” no longer comes up when we go on the site. Only David Jang’s face, the picture on this particular blog entry, remains under “Church and Ministry.” They were very thorough.
In an email to us, the blog editor, Stephanie Howell (10:15 p.m. Friday), told us we had violated “The Christian Post terms and conditions.” Under blogs.christianpost.com/faq.html it says:
“Any bloggers seeking to level criticism against a particular pastor, leader and/or ministry cannot be posted on the blog section.” Also, CP Blog “will not tolerate material deemed to criticize pastors’, leaders’, churches’ and ministries’ characters rather than a methodology or system of principals, rules or methods for regulating a given discipline. Materials criticizing the methodologies of pastors, leaders, churches and ministries must cite evidence from an official record and/or source.”
However, over the years, we had already published several blogs about heterodox movements with no difficulty at all, such as: “Is the Holy Spirit Really Walking Around in Human Form Today in Africa?” on Olumba Olumba Obu and his Brotherhood of the Cross and Star (11/10/12) and “Shinchunji Heresy Challenges Church in South Korea and Elsewhere” on Man Hee Lee (by a Korean student, Doo Min Cho).
The benefit of the Christian Post is that they provide promotion of individual blogs. That is why when we had each individually been invited to write a blog on the Post, we had decided to do one together, which we have been doing for the last three years, since Feb., 2012. I (Aida) am Professor of New Testament and Bill is Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (Aida at Hamilton, Bill at Boston campuses). We have numerous Asian students who we encouraged to publish on such topics as “What Should Chinese Christians Do in the Midst of Current Persecution?” (also by Martin Zhang) on our Christian Post blog and critiques of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and Man Hee Lee’s Shinchonji in Africanus Journal which we edit (www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/Africanus-Journal.cfm).
By doing this experiment, we knew we might be risking losing our platform through this massive machine. The cost of losing our blog, which we really love doing, was less important than testing for the truth. We wanted to make sure we were not being used to promote heterodoxy. We were trying to keep another Sun Myung Moon from rising up inside Christianity. A simple denial by the group might have helped put the issue to rest.
By the way, Martin did do original translations of pieces in Chinese. He did extensive work. He has also written a bio on Jang which we did not publish with the Post entry for reasons of length, but Christianity Today might want to do it (see attachment). We have subscribed for decades to Christianity Today.
Sincerely yours,
Aída and Bill

The Spencers also forwarded me an email thread in which Stephanie Powell from the Christian Post offered them this explanation:

Hi there,

I hope you had a Merry Christmas. This evening, your blog "The Mystery of David Jang (Jang Jae-Hyung)", written by Martin Zhang was brought to our attention. Because of the controversial content we unpublished your article. It violates The Christian Post terms and conditions (please view this link to read our terms and conditions http://blogs.christianpost.com/faq.html)

If you don't mind, may I ask who is Martin Zhang and how are you connected to him?

We appreciate you contributing to The Christian Post Blog section us for all these years and hope to have you continue.

After a response from the Spencers that largely repeated what they said above, she responded with this polite but fiirm email:

Thank you for your email. We understand confusion can of course occur when you do not know another organization well enough, and we believe that by conducting some obscure "test" you have come to a further misunderstanding and false conclusion. We will be sad to close down your blog but will of course do so considering there is clear mistrust - which is sad as we are two organizations built in the love and grace of Jesus. And for the record, no one in our COMPANY has ever said or claimed that David Jang is a so-called "Second Coming Christ". Only Jesus is Christ, as clearly indicated by our statement of faith. We hope that in the future you can get to know us more, see the evidence of our fruit (the content on our website) and judge us on that rather than the misinterpretation of an obscure "test", and God-willing, later we can work together as brothers in Jesus for His Kingdom.

I’ve reached out to the Christian Post for additional comment, and will include their response if I hear back.

An Ironic Wrinkle in the David Jang Saga

2014-12-26T19:34:00.001-08:00

So this was interesting. Earlier today, Ted Olsen forwarded this link to me:

http://blogs.christianpost.com/scriptural-truths/the-mystery-of-david-jang-jang-jae-hyung-24495/

It was a link to an article – published on a Christian Post blog, no less – examining the claims about and accusations against David Jang, and coming to some reasonably skeptical conclusions.

I immediately started to read the post on my cell phone, but in the five minutes it took me to get to a computer, the link started turning up a blank page, and indeed, it looks like the entire Scriptural Truths blog got deleted. Luckily, I was able to save the page from my cell phone to a PDF, and it’s now available here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-XDVS0sdeUEcl81Z0xnR3JjbHM/view?usp=sharing

I was previously aware of most of the material (indeed, it seems to quote from some of the documents I’ve previously made public), though I believe that some of the translations into English were new. It also appears that the author had access to independent sources within David Jang’s community, though what his own ties to the group may have been are not clear.

Given how sensitive Jang’s community is to criticism, I’m hardly surprised that it got taken down; I’m more surprised that it got published at all, and I’m sure there’s a fascinating story there. Before this, I had no idea who Aida and William Spencer were (a quick Google search reveals that they’re theology professors at Gordon Conwell), nor do I know who “Martin Zhang” is. If anybody has more information along those lines, please reach out to me!

The full text of the original blog post follows.

-------------------------------------

The Mystery of David Jang (Jang Jae-Hyung)

By Aida and William Spencer

December 26, 2014 | 4:46 pm

Guest blog by Martin Zhang

Why A Mystery?

David (Jae-Hyung) Jang is an influential yet controversial figure especially in Eastern Christianity. On the one hand, he is the founder and international president of Olivet University (OU), a professor of theology at Olivet Theological College and Seminary (OTCS), the 88th president of Denomination General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Korea, founder of Christian Today, Christian Daily Korea, Christianity Daily, founding team member and former senior advisor of the Christian Post, North American Council Member of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), president of the Holy Bible Society (HBS) and president of the World Olivet Assembly (WOA).[1] He is a very distinguished and industrious religious leader.

On the other hand, sources show that David Jang was a follower of Sun-Myung Moon for 31 years, and was a major leader of the Unification Church (UC) until 1998, in which year he resigned as professor of Sun Moon University. Moreover, former members of his present group, the Young Disciples of Christ or the Davidian Community, have testified that they were given lectures and eventually led to confess David Jang is the “Second Coming Christ.”

No evidence shows that David Jang himself has claimed publicly to be the “Second Coming Christ,” and he himself has also denied that he has claimed to be the “Second Coming Christ.”[2] However, witnesses from Korea, Japan, China, Singapore and America are unanimously pointing to one thing: Some followers of David Jang induce people to confess that David Jang is the Second Coming Christ.

What’s the Possible Fact behind the Controversy?

What, then, is the fact lying behind the controversy? There are at least three possibilities: 1) All those former members are either telling the truth or lying; 2) David Jang is either telling the truth or skillfully lying (he did not explicitly claim publicly, but privately accepts his followers’ teaching); and 3) both the former members and David Jang are telling the truth and neither is lying (only some of David Jang’s followers are teaching heretical doctrines which are neither created by nor known to him).

Possibility One

First, let us examine the testimonies of the former members. These witnesses claim that they are usually approached by members of the Davidian Community (under the name “Young Disciples of Jesus” [YD]) who are called “guides” (author’s translation). They are invited to a free Bible study and taught forty lessons which are called “forty Taos.” Attendees usually receive at least one lesson per day. After finishing these lessons, attendees report they are asked questions that lead them to the conclusion that David Jang is the Second Coming Christ.

Brother EN, who joined YD in 2001, recalls, after the “Forty Taos” they had a celebration party for him. At the party, their leader, a Korean sister, asked him: “What differences do you feel in this place?” EN answered: “Genuine love. Very warm.” She replied, “Only those who have faith can understand the difference. At that time, by his faith, Peter recognized Jesus was the Christ, what do you think?” EN answered, “Jesus is with us.” She asked again, “Only those who have faith can see, do we have love?” EN answered, “Yes.” She then asked, “The one who has greater love is Msni (David Jang). If Christ has come, he must be very special. All these ‘Forty Taos’ you have listened to were written by him, which is the highest revelation. So, what do you think?” He finally understood what she expected him to answer, and said, “Msni is the Christ.” Then everyone applauded, and praised aloud, “Thank the Lord, thank the Lord.”[3]

Esther (Ma Li) and another girl were asked the same question after they had listened to the “Eschatology,” “Time and Date,” and “New Israel” lectures. Zhang Naiwen, Esther’s teacher, asked them: “Who is Rev. David?” Being completely convinced, Esther answered without hesitation, “The Second Coming Christ!”

Then, based on Matthew 7:6, she and other members were told not to tell anyone else. She reports both of them were told that they were reborn. They signed the member card and were declared members.[4] Former leaders of the Davidian Community from Korea and Singapore shared similar experiences. [5] Those who joined them were soon required to work for affiliated companies and to give money to the Community. EN finally left the Community, but was identified as the one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back, therefore not fit for the kingdom of God.[6]

Since those former members are from different countries yet are telling very similar if not the same stories, we may conclude that although it is possible that all of them are lying, it is unlikely. This writer would need more evidence to be convinced that all of those witnesses are lying.

Possibility Two

Now let us consider the second possibility. Is David Jang telling the truth or is he a skillful liar? Sources show that David Jang was a follower of Sun-Myung Moon for 31 years, and he was a core member of the Unification Church. He was charged with promoting Unification Theology. It was said that he first denied his long time experience in the Unification Church, then reinterpreted his years in the Unification Church (e.g., he was not teaching Unification Theology, but saving people from the Unification Church), and finally wrote a letter of repentance.[7] This writer cannot help but wonder what really happened to David Jang.

Was he actually a follower of Sun-Myung Moon? Sources show that David Jang was married among 1,800 couples in a mass wedding presided over by Moon in February 1975. One of the qualifications for participating in Moon’s mass wedding was to believe Sun-Myung Moon was the Second Coming Christ.[8] Did Mr. Jang believe that Sun-Myung Moon was the Second Coming Christ? If so, when did he change his mind? How did that change happen? David Jang definitely has a great testimony to tell. God may use his testimony to lead more Unification Church members back to God.

On the other hand, some participants in the “Forty Taos” series have reported that, based on Matthew 7:6, members were taught not to share the teaching with those who are biased, lest they may not believe what they say and turn back to accuse them.[9] These claim that David Jang was following the strategy in this teaching when he denied that he claimed to be the Second Coming Christ, perhaps following the example of Sun Myung Moon, who for a long time did not reveal himself to be the “Lord of the Second Advent.”

However, even if David Jang’s experience in the Unification Church is true, and even if he used to accept people believing him as the Second Coming Christ, if he has genuinely repented, all evangelical Christians would be more than willing to embrace him as a brother in Christ. We were all someone else before we accepted Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord, just as the Apostle Paul says, “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rom 5:20). However, all of us would really want David Jang to share his spiritual journey openly before all could embrace him as our brother with complete confidence and without any concern.

Possibility Three

How about the third possibility? Is it possible that David Jang was a genuine orthodox Christian from thebeginning or has genuinely repented from the Unification Church, but his followers somehow came up with the teaching that David Jang is the Second Coming Christ which was unknown to him? Before discussing the possibility, let us first take a look at the teachings reported of David Jang’s followers.

What Are These Controversial Teachings?

According to a sermon preached by one of David Jang’s followers Pastor Paul, God restores the fallen world through three periods of time. He cites Mark 4:28, “first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.” These three images represent the Old Testament era, the New Testament era, and the era of (another) New Covenant respectively. The Old Testament era was an era of law; the New Testament era was an era of Gospel, and now we are entering a New Era, which is another Gospel era, oriented by the Second Coming Christ’s teaching, which is the eternal Gospel.[10] In the New Testament era, Jesus separates the era of “the stalk” and the era of “the head.” Jesus taught in parables. The one who separates the ear of “the head” and the era of “bearing fruit” will be this Second Coming Christ who preaches the Eternal Gospel crystal clearly.

David Jang’s sermon “Time and Date” divides the history of the world by millenniums. Genesis covers the first two thousand years. The last figure in Genesis is Joseph, who is the image of Jesus. Joseph was sold by Judah, but he finally forgave Judah. The rest of the Old Testament also covers two thousand years. Jesus Christ separates the Old Testament and the New Testament. Jesus was also sold by a Judah (Judas), but he also forgave him. Therefore, David Jang concludes, there is a great change every two thousand years. Now we are at another point of the two thousand year period. God chose Israel in the Old Testament era. He chose Christians in the New Testament era. God is going to choose a New Israel for the coming new era. These are the 144,000 people in Revelation 7.[11] They are not the only people who are saved, but they set a model for the Kingdom of God. We can become one of the 144,000. In Revelation 1:7, we read, “He is coming with the clouds”: “‘The clouds’ mean witnesses, not real clouds.” Being caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in 2 Thessalonians means experiencing an inner change in our lives. The sermon argues that the kingdom of heaven is not in heaven, but on earth.[12]

How can one become one of the 144,000? Another sermon teaches, if one signs the member card of this movement, that one will be counted.[13] Who, then, can sign the member card? Testimonies of former YD members report that, although they might be directed in different ways, all finally were convinced and confessed that David Jang was the Second Coming Christ. And then they were told that that day was their “re-born day.” Then they would sign the member card.

The testimonies of the former believers seem to accord with the sermons. What is the problem with these teachings?

What’s Wrong with Their Teachings?

According to the testimonies of former followers of David Jang, those who confessed David Jang to be the Second Coming Christ were called re-born.[14] It appears that the problem of the Davidian groups is in their soteriology (doctrine of salvation). However, this is probably not the main issue. As explained in the sermon “Eschatology,” adherents do not claim that only those who follow them or believe in David Jang are saved. Those who sign the member card are among the 144,000 who are “the first fruit.” Technically, “reborn” is not an accurate word, since it might suggest they do not rely on the cross for their salvation. This is not these former adherents’ complaint.

The major problems appear to be with the movement’s Christology[15] and Eschatology.[16] In the sermon “Time and Date,” Jesus is said to have used mainly parables to preach the gospel, thereby contrasting him with the Second Coming Christ who will proclaim the Eternal Gospel plainly. Human history has been divided into 2 millenniums (creation to Joseph) + 2 millenniums (Joseph to Jesus) + 2 millenniums (Jesus to the Second Coming Jesus). Therefore, their arguments seem to be that there is no question of the date of the Second Coming. It has to be the second millennia A.D. “The era of the fruit is right in front of us,” Pastor Borah Lin assures us.[17]

If the Second Coming Jesus has already come, then the logical question would be: Who is he? In “Time and Date,” Pastor Borah does not appear to ask, “when will Jesus come,” but “who brings the Eternal Gospel?” The assumption is that the Second Coming Jesus is not Jesus of Nazareth but another. Since the Second Coming Jesus is already on earth, the Rapture that Paul describes in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 cannot be a literal rapture. One possibility would be that it is an internal change, as described in “Time and Date” and “Eschatology.”[18]

Once one accepts such teachings, if asked, “Who do you think Pastor David Jang is?” one is reported to be guided by questions to the conclusion that he is the Second Coming Jesus, because all the sermons studied are said to be have been written by him. Therefore, he is the one who explains this “Eternal Gospel” in such a plain way.

Such a teaching, of course, would contradict both the Bible and the Creeds of the early church. First, concerning the date of the Second Coming, Jesus Christ said, “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32).[19] Therefore, any person or group declaring to know the date must be mistaken. Second, Jesus told his disciples, “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:3). Moreover, right after Jesus’ ascension, the angels said to the disciples, “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). It is very clear that the same Jesus will come back. The Nicene Creed also confesses that “He (Jesus Christ) shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead.”[20] Anyone or any group who declares that the Second Coming Jesus is not the same Jesus must be heretical. The Nicene Creed confesses that Jesus Christ is “God of God…very God of very God.”[21] The Chalcedonian Creed also confesses that Jesus Christ is “consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead.”[22] If we accept a conflicting teaching that the time of the Second Coming of Christ can be known, and the “Second Coming Christ” is not the same person as Jesus of Nazareth, we would have to admit at the same time that what is reported in the New Testament that Jesus and the angels told the disciples was not true. This would diminish Jesus to either an intentional liar or a mistaken person who honestly said something that was not true. In either case, Jesus could be anyone, but not fully God, since he was not perfect. But the Scriptures tell us he was the “unblemished” sacrifice for our sin (Heb 9:14). Last but not least, although the Davidian Community teachers are not reported to have specifically taught that salvation belongs only to them, by identifying those who have left their movement as not fit for the kingdom of God, they are implying such a theology, which apparently contradicts the biblical teaching that, through believing Jesus Christ, we are saved (John 3:16; Rom 4:24).

Back to the Third Possibility

Former believers testified that they were told that the “Forty Taos” and other sermons were written by David Jang, which was key in leading them to conclude that David Jang is the Second Coming Christ.[23] While they report that Davidian teachers did not directly teach that, witnesses testify, they were asked “two plus two equals?” questions to let these listeners themselves come up with the answer “four,” but “no one said ‘four’ directly.”[24] Did David Jang really write these sermons to declare himself the Second Coming Christ or are those teachers mistaken in their interpretation of his instructions?

If David Jang wrote these sermons with such an intention, it would be impossible for us to accept his teaching as orthodox. Therefore, it would be best once more for David Jang to explain what he really believes and intends to convey in his sermons, in his teaching, and in the interpretations of his instructors and their followers. If David Jang did not write any of the sermons, and he neither believes the above, then his followers may be promoting heretical teaching in his name. This is a very serious problem, because his followers would be making up sermons to lead people to confess that David Jang is the Second Coming Christ, and be claiming that the sermons were written by him with this intention.

Ben Dookey in his article in Mother Jones claims that David Jang knew his followers were spreading the message.[25] If this charge is not true and Rev. Jang is really opposed to such a monstrous interpretation, our plea is that he clearly forbid anyone in his movement to make such a blasphemous claim and even expel those who continue to do so.

Conclusion

We certainly do not want to see an innocent person wrongly charged. At the same time, we cannot call anyone who is heretical in his or her teaching our dear brother or sister in Christ. That is why we wrote this article, with a hope that David Jang would help us clear up the mystery by answering the questions raised in this article by sympathetic but puzzled and inquiring Christian people.

[1] David Jang, “Biography of David Jang,” accessed Sept. 22, 2014, http://www.davidjang.org/biography/profile.

[2] Michelle A. Vu, “Sources in ‘Second Coming Christ Controversy’ Face Scrutiny,” Christian Post, Aug. 19, 2012, http://www.christianpost.com/news/olivet-university-sources-in-second-coming-christ-controversyface-scrutiny-80176/pageall.html. Accessed Sept. 22, 2014.

[3] EN, “The Testimony of EN,” in Clear the Fog & Reveal the Truth, by K.Y. Cheung Teng (Hong Kong: Concern Group on Newly Emerged Religions, 2008), http://www.cgner.org/Books/TS001/TS001.pdf.

[4] Ma Li, “The Inerasable Memory,” in Clear the Fog & Reveal the Truth, by K.Y. Cheung Teng (Hong Kong: Concern Group on Newly Emerged Religions, 2008), http://www.cgner.org/Books/TS001/TS001.pdf.

[5] Davidian Watcher, “Important: Full Text of the Testimony of A Former Pastor of the Davidian Community,” Collections on the “Davidian Community,” Sept. 22, 2008, http://dqac.blogspot.com/2008/09/blog-post.html. Accessed Sep. 22, 2014. Ted Olsen and Ken Smith, “The Second Coming Christ Controversy: More Leaders Speak Out,” ChristianityToday.com, Sept. 12, 2012, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/september-web-only/david-jang-second-coming-christ-singapore.html. Accessed Sept. 22, 2014.

[6] EN, “The Testimony of EN.”

[7] Davidian Watcher, “Discussion on Rev. Jang Jae-Hyung’s Ministry in the Unification Church (I),” Collections on the “Davidian Community,” Dec. 1, 2007, http://dqac.blogspot.com/2007/12/blog-post.html; Davidian Watcher, “Discussion on Rev. Jang Jae-Hyung’s Ministry in the Unification Church (II),” Collections on the “Davidian Community,” December 1, 2007, http://dqac.blogspot.com/2007/12/blog-post_01.html; Davidian Watcher, “Discussion on Rev. Jang Jae-Hyung’s Ministry in the Unification Church (III),” Collections on the “Davidian Community,” Dec. 1, 2007, http://dqac.blogspot.com/2007/12/blogpost_9742.html.

[8] K.Y. Cheung Teng, An Analytical Study on the Continuous Controversies Stirred Up by David Jang, trans. Kitty Lau and Elaine Yip, Sept. 9, 2012, http://wiki.cgner.org/index.php?title=An_Analytical_Study_on_the_Continuous_Controversies_Stirred_Up_by_David_Jang. Accessed Sept. 22, 2014.

[9] H. T., “I Will Never Forget Them,” Research on Young Disciples of Jesus, May 31, 2008, http://ydwatcher.blogspot.com/2008/05/ht.html. Accessed Oct. 7, 2014.

[10] Paul Zhao, “Time and Date,” accessed Sept. 22, 2014, http://wiki.cgner.org/index.php?title=DJC01031. Pastor Borah preached the same sermon on July 20, 2002. See https://drive.google.com/drive/#folders/0B-XDVS0sdeUENUU2WWpzUG15Mnc/0BXDVS0sdeUEZXRCa1JHeFNJdU0. Accessed Sept. 23, 2014. We are not sure if they are the same person or not.

[11] Provided by Former YD Member, “New Israel,” accessed Sept. 22, 2014, http://wiki.cgner.org/index.php?title=DJC01031. For similar sermons on “New Israel” preached by followers of David Jang in English and German, see Preachers of the Davidian Community, “New Israel,” 2002-2006, https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-XDVS0sdeUENEtGaWo2eXUxZHc&usp=sharing. Accessed Sept. 22, 2014.

[12] Provided by Former YD Member, “Eschatology,” accessed Sept. 22, 2014, http://wiki.cgner.org/index.php?title=DJC01005_B.

[13] Provided by Former YD Member, “Four Spiritual ‘Taos,’” accessed Sept. 22, 2014, http://wiki.cgner.org/index.php?title=DJC01006_B.

[14] Ma Li, “The Inerasable Memory.”

[15] “Christology” is doctrine concerned with revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

[16] “Eschatology” is doctrine of the last things or the final events of humanity.[17] Pastor Borah, “Time and Date,” July 20, 2002, https://drive.google.com/drive/#folders/0BXDVS0sdeUENUU2WWpzUG15Mnc/0B-XDVS0sdeUEZXRCa1JHeFNJdU0. Accessed Sept. 23, 2014.

[18] Provided by Former YD Member, “Eschatology.”

[19] See also Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2007), 1194.

[20] “Nicene Creed,” accessed Sept. 23, 2014, https://www.ccel.org/creeds/nicene.creed.html.

[21] Ibid.

[22] “Chalcedonian Creed,” accessed Sept. 23, 2014, https://www.ccel.org/creeds/chalcedoniancreed.html.

[23] K.Y. Cheung Teng, Clear the Fog & Reveal the Truth (Hong Kong: Concern Group on Newly Emerged Religions, 2008), 16, 118, http://www.cgner.org/Books/TS001/TS001.pdf.

[24] Ben Dooley, “Who’s Behind Newsweek?,” Mother Jones, March 2014, http://www.motherjones.com/media/2014/03/newsweek-ibt-olivet-david-jang. Accessed Sept. 23, 2014.

[25] Ken Smith, “David Jang Summary,” Confessions of a Would-Be Theologian, Jan. 6, 2014, http://blog.wouldbetheologian.com/2014/01/david-jang-summary.html. Accessed Sept. 23, 2014.

Azure: What to use, what to avoid

2014-10-06T10:06:00.001-07:00

Azure is clearly the second-tier choice for cloud services these days, well behind Amazon Web Services, but (so far as I can tell) still well ahead of Google Cloud and all the other players. But since I’ve been building Payboard’s infrastructure on the Microsoft stack – Visual Studio 2013 is pretty nice, and C# remains my favorite language by a significant margin – Azure was a natural choice.

Since making that choice, Payboard has processed some 30 million events from our customers, with several hundred thousand more coming in every day. That’s pretty small beer compared to some folks, but it’s not insignificant, and it’s given us a chance to stress test Azure in the real world. In the process, I’ve developed some strong opinions about what works well in Azure and what I would at all costs avoid the next time around. What follows here is just the experience of one team – so caveat developor.

Azure Websites: Thumbs up

Azure Websites aren’t suited for every task, with their main limitation being that they can’t scale up beyond 10 instances. But if you’re not going to bump up beyond that, they’re very nice. We haven’t had any reliability problems to speak of, and they have very nice rollout stories. My favorite is their git integration: once you get it setup, you just push to Github, and that’s it. Azure notices your push, builds it, runs all your unit tests, and then if they succeed, pushes it to the website automatically. Very handy, and a nice workflow.

Azure SQL: Adequate

SQL Server is a great database, and I’m not at all sorry that we went with it. But Azure SQL starts getting spendy if you’re pushing any significant traffic to it at all, and it has some weird limitations that you won’t find in standalone SQL Server. (The one that’s bit me most recently is that it doesn’t support NEWSEQUENTIALID() – good luck keeping those clustered indexes defragmented.) Like SQL Server in general, it doesn’t have a great scale-out story: you can do it, it’s just a significant PITA. And finally, Azure SQL seems to have a lot of transient connectivity errors. At least half a dozen times a day, we simply can’t connect to the DB, sometimes for upwards of several minutes. MS insists, quite correctly, that you need to wrap every attempt to write to the DB in a retry block. But sometimes the errors last longer than your retry block on a busy server can reasonably be expected to continue retrying. My recommendation: if you’re building a financial application, or any application where you simply can’t afford to lose data, don’t use Azure SQL.

Azure Table Storage: Adequate (barely)

Azure Table Storage is insanely cheap, unbelievably scalable, astonishingly reliable, and if you’re using it the way it was intended, blazingly fast. It’s also missing a whole host of vital features, and is extremely brittle and thus painful to use in the real world. It’s not quite as bad as the “write-only datastore” that I initially dismissed it as being, but it really needs some TLC from the Azure team. For a good sense of what it’s still missing after years of neglect, check out of the UserVoice forums. Despite all that, if you’re willing to repeatedly pivot and re-import your data into ATS, it can be fairly effective. It’s basically a really cheap place to dump your log data. If you need to read your log data back, you can do it, you just need to be willing to repeatedly copy your data into a whole bunch of different tables, with each table having a separate partition key/row key schema. That’s more-or-less acceptable when you have a few million rows of data; it’s a lot less workable when you’ve got a few billion. It would be better if I’d been able to get the 5-20K rows / second imports that Azure advertises; unfortunately, even after a lot of tuning, I haven’t been able to get more than (sometimes) 1000 rows per second. (I’m sure that there may be ways to do it faster – but the fact that I haven’t been able to figure it out after a lot off effort goes right back to my point about brittleness.)

Azure Service Bus: Thumbs Down

Uggh. When we decided to switch over to an asynchronous queuing architecture for our event imports, we initially went with Azure Service Bus, mostly because it was newer (and presumably better) than Azure Storage Queues, and because it offered a notification-based approach for servicing its queues. Unfortunately, it was neither reliable nor scalable enough. We suffered through repeated outages before switching over to Azure Storage Queues. In addition, it basically doesn’t have a local development story. You have to use a real Azure instance, which is annoying and a PITA if you ever need to develop disconnected. (MS does have a Service Bus instance that you can install on your local machine, but at least as of this writing, it’s badly out-of-sync with the Azure implementation, and doesn’t work with the latest client library off of nuget.)

Azure Storage Queues: Thumbs Up

Very fast, very scalable, and rock solid. It’s poll-only, but that’s not hard to wrap. It has very large maximum queue sizes, which mostly makes up for the fact that its maximum message size is only 64K. On the whole, recommended.

Azure Worker Roles: Thumbs Up

They do what we need them to do. I still think that they’re more difficult to use than they need to be – I wish I could use Kudu with them, to enable the same “push to git” workflow that works so nicely with Azure Websites – but I guess I don’t mind the flexibility that comes with requiring me to go through a separate publishing step. And once you get them configured, they’re easy to scale up and down. (I especially like the option to scale them up or down automatically based on queue size.)

Azure Managed Cache: Thumbs Down

Azure’s in-house cache implementation is slow and unreliable. When we finally abandoned it, we were experiencing multiple outages a day, and even when it was working, we were averaging about 300 ms / lookup, which was unacceptably slow for a cache. Not recommended.

Azure Redis Cache: Adequate

Redis is, indeed, as blazingly fast as you’ve heard. Our lookups often take less than 10 ms, which is kind of hard to believe, when you consider network latency and everything else. Unfortunately, after an initial period of stability, we’ve lately been having several (brief) outages a day. It’s just a cache, and we’ve wrapped our Redis cache with a (briefer) in-memory cache, so this hasn’t been crippling, but it’s not what you like to see. In addition, I have some gripes with the recommended StackExchange redis libraries – the basic problem being that they don’t provide any automatic reconnect after a connection issue. Yes, you can wrap that, but it seems like the sort of thing that ought to be handled for you by the library itself.

“502 Bad Gateway” error on Azure Websites

2014-07-25T07:50:00.001-07:00

I ran into a strange problem the other day. It made perfect sense as soon as I understood what was going on, but I was scratching my head about it for a while, so I thought I’d document it here in case anybody else runs into it.

I recently switched Payboard’s website over to use the new Azure redis cache, instead of the native Azure Managed Cache Service. We’d been running into all sorts of problems with the Azure Managed Cache, with requests to the cache averaging over 400 ms – way, way, way too slow for a cache system. Once we switched to redis, our average request time dropped to under 25 ms. Not perfect, but much better.

The only problem was that certain requests to the website started (randomly, it seemed) returning “502 bad gateway” errors. This had me quite puzzled. I was able to definitively track it down to our use of redis – as soon as I switched back to a simple in-memory cache, the errors disappeared. And when I switched back to redis, they started showing up again. However, none of these errors were showing up in our site’s error logs – they weren’t getting caught by any of the error handling attributes that we decorate all our controllers with, like so:

    /// <summary>
    ///     Log unhandled exceptions
    /// </summary>
    public class PayboardApiErrorHandlerAttribute : ExceptionFilterAttribute
    {
        private static readonly Logger logger = LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger();

        public override void OnException(HttpActionExecutedContext exceptionContext)
        {
            try
            {
                var exception = exceptionContext.Exception;
                var exceptionMessage = exception.CompleteMessage();

                string userName = null;
                if (HttpContext.Current != null)
                {
                    userName = HttpContext.Current == null ? "" : HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name;
                }

                var origin = "";
                var ctx = exceptionContext.ActionContext;
                if (ctx.Request.Headers.Contains("Origin"))
                {
                    origin = ctx.Request.Headers.GetValues("Origin").FirstOrDefault();
                }
                var content = ctx.Request.Content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result;
                var ipAddress = ctx.Request.GetClientIp();

                var message =
                    string.Format("Controller: {0}; Url: {1}; User: {2}; Origin: {3}; IpAddress: {4}; Error: {5}; Content: {6}",
                        exceptionContext.ActionContext.ControllerContext.Controller.GetType().Name,
                        exceptionContext.ActionContext.Request.RequestUri,
                        userName,
                        origin,
                        ipAddress,
                        exceptionMessage,
                        content);
                var prefix = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(userName)
                    ? "Anonymous WebApi Error: "
                    : "User-visible WebApi Error: ";

            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                logger.Error("Error logging error - and yes, that's as circular as it seems: " + ex.CompleteMessage());
            }

            base.OnException(exceptionContext);
        }
    }
}

Because we weren’t seeing any errors in these controllers, that made me think that it must be something on Azure’s side. After the bad experience we’d had with the Azure Managed Cache, and given that Azure’s redis cache offering is still in preview, it seemed a real possibility. I just couldn’t figure out why an error in the redis caching system was causing our site to return a “bad gateway” error. The only explanation I could come up with was that perhaps both our site and the redis cache were using the same ARR instance, and maybe ARR was getting confused. That didn’t seem likely, but it was the only idea I had.

But after some playing around, I was able to reproduce the error – or at least, an error – on my dev machine, on the same pages. And it turns out that it was my fault (it usually is).

The problem is that I was using JSON.NET for serializing objects that I was sending to the cache. Unfortunately, I had it configured incorrectly. I was setting my JSON serializer settings like this:

var jsonSerializerSettings = new JsonSerializerSettings
{
    ReferenceLoopHandling = ReferenceLoopHandling.Serialize
};

And it should have been like this:

var jsonSerializerSettings = new JsonSerializerSettings
{
    ReferenceLoopHandling = ReferenceLoopHandling.Serialize,
    PreserveReferencesHandling = PreserveReferencesHandling.All
};

In other words, I was telling it to serialize reference loops, but I wasn’t telling it to only include one instance of each object reference in the graph. As a result, whenever I tried to serialize (say) an EntityFramework object graph that included reference loops (for instance, a Customer object which contained a list of Events, each of which in turn contained a reference back to its parent Customer object), it would try to serialize the whole damn infinite loop, which resulted in a stack overflow.

And here’s the key. You can’t catch a stack overflow exception. You just can’t. It simply crashes your app domain. You don’t even get a chance to log it. Your app just goes bye-bye. Of course, IIS recovers from this and continues to serve more requests, but it plays all-to-hell with the current request. But this is the key part: if you’ve got a load balancer sitting in front of your web app, the load balancer isn’t even going to see an HTTP 503 error, or any sort of HTTP error. It’s just going to see that its TCP connection to the web server dropped. And in that case, it only has one option, to return a “502 Bad Gateway” error to the browser.

As soon as I figured that out, I fixed my serialization code, moving it all into a separate class so that I could unit test it, and all was well.

At any rate, that’s a bit of a long story, but the key lesson is this: if your website is simply failing to return requests (without even a 5xx error), or if the load balancer in front of your website is returning “502 bad gateway” errors, suspect a stack overflow exception somewhere in your code. That, and write more unit tests.

That’s all. Carry on.

In Defense of Mozilla

2014-04-05T12:59:00.001-07:00

I’m no fan of JavaScript. It’s a language that has been pushed far beyond anything its creator could have envisioned, and it shows. But there’s still something to be said about a language that has become the foundation of the modern Internet. And there’s something to be said for having been the dude who invented the whole thing.

That’s why it was not at all surprising that Mozilla’a board recently appointed Brendan Eich, their long-time CTO and the inventor of JavaScript, as their CEO.

It was a bit more surprising that the same board then turned around and fired him only a few days later. The sin for which Brendan Eich was removed is that six years ago, he had made a donation to Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that defined – or rather, acknowledged the reality – of marriage as one man and one woman.

Now, there’s lots that ought to dismay us in this episode, none more worrisome than the fact that this decision was taken in the name of tolerance and diversity. In a blog post announcing this decision, Mozilla wrote:

Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. We welcome contributions from everyone regardless of age, culture, ethnicity, gender, gender-identity, language, race, sexual orientation, geographical location and religious views. Mozilla supports equality for all.

That’s an odd way to frame removing somebody because of his political and (presumably) religious views. On the contrary, this decision makes it abundantly clear that there are certain religious views – namely, those of any orthodox Jew, Muslim or Christian – which are not at all welcome at Mozilla. I'm still trying to understand how neither Mozilla’s board nor Eich’s detractors didn't see the irony there. Their blinders are more complete than I would have suspected.

This decision also raises concerns about the possibility of any real dialogue with folks on disparate sides of the issue. Mozilla’s logic would have made a certain sense if Brendan Eich had been a neo-Nazi or a member of the KKK, if his position had been so exclusionary and repellant that no quarter should be given, no compromise possible or desirable. This is apparently what Mozilla’s board believes, that opposition to gay marriage is a moral outrage, an evil so pernicious that it truly can be rejected in the name of diversity and tolerance.

That’s silly, of course. Even Barack Obama, until roughly a year ago, claimed the same perspective for which Brendan Eich was sacrificed. (Nobody believed him, but I don’t think that changes my point.) I don’t know what percentage of folks worldwide are opposed to same sex marriage, but I’m guessing that it’s well north of 75%. One may be forgiven for regarding dubiously any claim to universal tolerance and cosmopolitan diversity which rejects tout court three out of every four human beings on the planet. As Inigo Montoya said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

In short, if you think a witch hunt, purge, or inquisition is in order, that’s your business. But have the guts to call it by its right name, and don't pretend you're being tolerant.

But there’s another part of this decision that we ought to respect.

Mozilla took these actions because they felt that, as a corporation, they needed to support a particular understanding of morality. It's a highly idiosyncratic and provincial understanding of morality, of very recent origin and dubious provenance. It is an understanding of morality that I do not share. They were disingenuous and hypocritical to wrap their decision in the language of diversity and inclusiveness. But I very much affirm their desire, as a private corporation, to take actions based on what they believe to be moral, just and right.

This is nothing new. That's precisely what folks on the left have been arguing for decades that companies need to do. Corporations need to act according to the precepts of basic morality. They need to treat employees with respect and pay them a living wage. They need to take proper care of the environment. They need to act, in other words, as if they had a moral obligation to society. Corporations are not - or should not be - amoral agents. They are moral actors, and need to act as such.

And I agree. Corporations do have an obligation to justice. They cannot be indifferent to concerns about human flourishing. They must be concerned with the environment and society in which they are placed, and must give due weight to these considerations, even when they may affect the bottom line.

But consider this. This is nothing more than what Hobby Lobby wants to do, the same Hobby Lobby who is routinely mocked by the left for its lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act. Hobby Lobby’s owners want their company to act in a way that they believe is moral, right and just, and reflects an appropriate concern for human flourishing. It’s entirely legitimate to argue that these beliefs do not, in fact, promote human flourishing. But it’s a very strange argument to hear from my friends on the left recently, that corporations cannot have beliefs about morality and should not act in a way that reflects moral concerns. That argument might make sense if these same people hadn't been making exactly the opposite argument right up until the moment Kathleen Sebelius decided that free birth control was more important than religious liberty.

To be clear, I don't always know, in any specific case, whether a given religious freedom claim should be allowed to prevail, whether the actor in question is a company or an individual. In general, though, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act - passed almost unanimously by both parties - provides a good framework for deciding these questions. It says, in effect, that the government can't impose a burden on the expression of religious beliefs (even in a religiously neutral law) unless it (a) has a damned good reason to do so, and (b) can't get the same result any other way. So the government can outlaw human sacrifice, even if it impinges on the free expression of Aztec religious beliefs. But it can't, say, outlaw the use of peyote in Indian religious ceremonies. (That last was the case that got RFRA passed.)

Now, clearly, if Hobby Lobby was claiming that they get to decide whether women can get birth control, that would be an overreach. But despite what you regularly hear from the left, they aren’t. Actually, (a) Hobby Lobby is perfectly fine with paying for contraception and already does, (b) the only "contraception" they have an issue with are drugs that probably work by causing abortions, and (c) Hobby Lobby's objection is not to women getting those drugs, but to Hobby Lobby being forced to pay for them. Well, that's a different matter, and I expect the Supreme Court to find rationally. Hobby Lobby - and the Green family - has a genuine religious interest, there's no compelling government interest, and even if there were, there are lots of other ways to accomplish it.

On the other hand, I would expect the courts to find very differently in a case involving Jehovah's Witnesses who objected to an insurance policy covering blood transfusions, or to a Christian Scientist who objected to paying for insurance policies at all. In those cases, there is a genuine religious interest - I don't want to deny that there isn't - but there is also a compelling governmental interest, and regrettably, there may not be any other way to accomplish it.

I’m not saying that any given First Amendment claim to religious freedom or to primacy of conscience should always prevail. I am saying that it should be considered, and given due weight, even if the entity making the claim is a for-profit corporation. This is exactly what the Mozilla Corporation believed it was doing; and that is why I want to affirm their desire to do so, even though (in this particular case) their actions were silly, dangerous and counter-productive, precisely on their own terms.

That’s Gotta Hurt

2014-04-02T16:39:00.001-07:00

David Jang’s community has been having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.

First there was the Guardian article which outlined the connections between David Jang and Newsweek, and then, in a fit of political correctness, tried to convince everyone – with daunting success – that Johnathan Davis’ opinions about gay reparative therapy were newsworthy.

This was followed, much more damningly, by a Mother Jones article which laid out some pretty solid reasons for being concerned about the cavalier attitude towards immigration and labor laws evinced by both IBTimes and Olivet University. And of course, these articles resulted in a great deal more chatter back and forth over the Interwebs, with responses ranging from thoughtful to inane and naive.

But the really bad news landed today. According to the Hudson Valley Reporter, Olivet University (or, I suppose more precisely, its management company, Olivet Management LLC) got hit with a $2.3MM fine from the Department of Labor for “exposing its employees to asbestos and lead during a renovation.”

Ouch.

I have to imagine that Olivet is going to contest the fines – because from everything I’ve seen, Jang’s community tends to run their budgets pretty close to the red line, and only make it from month-to-month by depending heavily on donations from students and community members (and more troublingly, from community members’ families, who aren’t necessarily told the truth about how their money is going to be spent). Unless IBT and Newsweek are rolling in a lot more cash than you’d think online news publications are likely to throw off, it’s going to be difficult for Olivet to come up with the money to pay this fine.

This enforcement action also raises the interesting question of the precise relationship between Olivet Management, LLC, and Olivet University. For instance, if Olivet Management declares bankruptcy (which definitely seems within the realm of possibility) can the DOL go after Olivet University for the money? Some very expensive lawyers are probably coming up with some very expensive opinions on that topic right now.

If the concerns raised by the recent Mother Jones article have any merit (and I’ve seen independent evidence that suggests they do), this may not be the first time that David Jang’s community has played fast and loose with federal labor laws. Now that they have the attention of the Department of Labor, they may want to rethink that habit.

Touchy

2014-04-02T00:39:00.001-07:00

An independent journalist by the name of Ben Reeves posted a very interesting story today about his job writing articles for IBTimes, the proud new owners of Newsweek, and (I would guess) the primary revenue engine behind Olivet University’s recent expansions.

Compared to the recent Mother Jones piece, Ben’s story didn’t break much new ground, but it was interesting to read about his experiences. It’s been clear for a while that David Jang and Olivet and IBTimes were closely intertwined, and the documents Ben included in his story were further evidence of that. Similarly, the chats and emails he reproduces had some worthwhile details, including a – supposed – recent massive spike in revenues for Olivet University.

I was a bit mystified by this comment from his article:

Nevertheless, intimate connections between the founders of a company and a university run by an evangelical religious group aren’t a problem in and of themselves, however distasteful this may seem.

I’m glad he acknowledged that having well-educated Evangelical Christians running a business wasn’t necessarily a problem, but it was surprising to me that he assumed his readers would find the whole idea repugnant. If that really is how most folks view religiously committed folks these days – well, in the end, First Amendment protections are only as good as the society that values them.

But aside from that, the most interesting part of the article, I thought, was how Olivet responded when they found out that Reeves was working on the story. Reeves said that he initially sent them this list of questions:

1) Can you provide us with copies of your most recent student handbook and Ministry Practice Handbook?
2) Please describe the relationship between Olivet University and IBT since the company’s foundation in 2006.
3) What was Johnathan Davis’ role at the school?
4) How is Etienne Uzac connected to the school? What is his current role, and has he ever served as an officer of the university?
5) Your course catalogue states that one purpose of the journalism program is to teach students how to “apply Gospel values” to the news. What are Gospel values and how should they be incorporated into the news?
6) How do you define “ministry” with respect to internships?
7) What is the Ministry Practice Program and how does it work?
8) How long must students intern through the Ministry Practice Program?
9) What companies are students in the Ministry Practice Program authorized to intern at?
10) Were Olivet University students interning at IBT through the ministry practice program paid? What were their duties at the company?
11) What are the demographics of Olivet University’s student body? How many students are there, and where do they come from?

Olivet’s response was telling. Rather than trying to answer the questions, they immediately sent for their attorneys. Ben received this message a few days later:

Dear Mr. Reeves:

This firm serves as litigation counsel to Olivet University (“Olivet”). It has come to our attention that you intend to publish a news article about a supposed connection between Olivet University and International Business Times (“IBT”). It has further come to our attention that your news article will include false and defamatory statements about Olivet and false and defamatory statements about the supposed connection between Olivet and IBT, including insinuations that Olivet has used IBT for improper purposes and/or to further its own agenda. Any such false statements would be unlawful and would cause immediate and irreparable harm to Olivet.

Wow. That’s touchy. Olivet’s assumption is that any article published about them “will include false and defamatory statements”. If you didn’t know better, you’d almost think they had something to hide, and were desperately trying to use their lawyers to make sure the information didn’t get out.

Who’s Behind Newsweek?

2014-03-31T10:24:00.001-07:00

The reporting behind Ben Dooley’s Mother Jones story on IBTimes, Newsweek and David Jang is phenomenal. Very, very in-depth. You can tell that he’s been working on this story for years.

I should note that while my sources and Ben’s overlap to some degree (for instance, the Chuas), it’s quite clear that he has other sources I’ve never had any contact with. But it’s significant that they tell basically the same story. For instance:

As a new member, Anne started with "basic" Bible study focused on traditional Christian concepts. But as the courses progressed, Jang's name popped up with increasing frequency. Parables related by the pastor appeared side by side with the teachings of Jesus and other biblical characters. "We listened to him a lot," she told me. "We memorized the articles."

The lessons all seemed to lead toward some larger revelation. After completing the final reading, another former member told me, her tutor drew a question mark on the page and asked in a whisper, "Do you know who is the Second Coming Christ?" She hesitated for a moment before responding, "Pastor David." "They make you confess it," she told me, "like Peter did to Jesus Christ." The secret of Jang's true identity, she was told, must be protected because nonbelievers would "kill the Second Coming Lord as they did the first one."

Susan Chua, another former Community member, gave me a similar account. Indeed, every ex-Community member I spoke to either said they believed Jang was the Second Coming or said they were aware that others believed it. But Jang himself has repeatedly denied that he is the Second Coming and discouraged his followers from using the term. Several investigations by the heresy committee of the Christian Council of Korea concluded there was "no evidence" to indicate that he had made such claims, and in 2009, a Korean court sanctioned a newspaper for saying that Young Disciples taught that Jang was the Second Coming. In the Times, Davis and Uzac vigorously dismissed the idea that they considered Jang the Messiah.

I asked Anne whether she ever heard anyone in the Community publicly refer to Jang as Christ. "No one said directly," she replied. "But I think he was. Just like I ask you, 'Two plus two equals?' The answer is four. They only said, 'Two plus two.' No one said four directly." Back then, did she believe it was true? "Yes," she said. "With all my heart."

As folks get more and more interested in who’s controlling Newsweek, the media response has mostly centered around the Guardian’s report that Jonathan Davis endorsed gay reparative therapy. But that’s a sideshow. The biggest long-term impact will necessarily center around the story’s allegations that Olivet and IBTimes have repeatedly encouraged their students and/or employees to work in violation of their visas and for almost no money.

But if there's room for interpretation in the F-1 rules, the regulations for F-2 visa holders, such as Anne, are quite clear: They may not work, on campus or off—not even in unpaid internships. Yet Olivet officials appear to have instructed these visa holders to do just that. "If every single person attends all ESL classes and other major courses, we can't really find enough workers for each ministry on campus," Lydia An, an employee in Olivet's finance office, wrote from her official Olivet account on January 2012. "We cannot let everyone on campus to focus on study only…We've came to a decision that F-2 students should focus on ministries more while F-1 students study in classes for 2011 winter quarter. Rooms and food will be provided free of charge as long as F-2 students work and maintain a certain work performance in a ministry."

That makes no sense, says Anna Stepanova, an immigration lawyer who has worked on F-1 and F-2 visa cases: "There are no F-2 students," she said. "They're dependents. They accompany F-1 students. They're not supposed to work."

Tracy Davis says An's email referred to cooperative child care. "This is an email that's talking to married students in the context of family work and child rearing," she said. "If you put the word 'family' in front of this word 'work,' it's not talking about work where you get a W-2. It's talking about family work and shared child care."

Susan Chua, who says she was dispatched to the San Francisco offices of the Christian Post after coming to Olivet on an F-2 visa, says that doesn't reflect what she was told. For believers like her, she says, working in the Community's businesses was simply another way of serving the Lord. "Whether they came to US with F-1 or F-2 visas, the majority of them were devoted members to the community and their belief system. They were going to work extremely hard and sacrificially and obediently and joyfully for the building of the ark—the various ministries in the whole community."

"There was no concept of pay at that time in the community," Chua added. "You were feeling obligated to donate and contribute instead of receiving. The little money given by the ministry office you were working in was to cover bus fares and cheap meals in [Olivet's] Student Union."

Another former student told me, "The members suffer. They are young, naive, believe the teachings. After some time they find themselves without money, because they donated what they had. And they work basically for free…The visa thing and being far from home makes things more complicated."

I should note that Tracy Davis’ explanation of this particular incriminating email – that the “work” was “family work” – makes little sense, as the email clearly refers to maintaining “a certain work performance in a ministry”. Sometimes the denials issued by Jang’s community do them more harm than good, I think.

At any rate, read the Mother Jones article. It’s very good.

“An Account Of”

2014-03-08T14:29:00.001-08:00

Several years ago, I spent some time wondering where the phrase “an account of” came from, or at least, why it had recently seemed to reach such prominence. I never did figure it out, and it’s a question that’s been sitting in the back of my mind ever since.

I was reading a passage from Gregory of Nazianzus today – his famous critique of Apollinarianism – when I ran across this sentence:

“Further let us see what is their account of the assumption of Manhood, or the assumption of Flesh, as they call it.”

Or in Greek:

“Τις δε και ο λογος αυτοις της ενανθρωπησεως, ιδωμεν, ειτουν σαρκωσεως, ως αυτοι λεγουσιν.”

In other words, the phrase “an account of” is really just a translation of the famous Greek stand-by, “logos”.

Well, that makes sense. And you learn something new every day.

Geoff Tunnicliffe is stepping down

2014-03-07T15:52:00.001-08:00

I just spotted the news on Christianity Today that Geoff Tunnicliffe, the head of the World Evangelical Alliance, is stepping down, to make room for “younger leadership”.

The skeptical side of me wonders if this has anything to do with the minor fiasco over the WEA’s cancelled General Assembly in Korea. Or with Tunnicliffe’s controversial and extensive ties to David Jang.

Or maybe it’s just a normal turnover of leadership.

Still, I think the WEA would definitely be healthier if they were able to achieve more distance between themselves and Mr. Jang. It seriously is not good that a man whose followers long hailed him as a second Messiah is that close to an organization this important.

Ruth Boorman Eulogy

2014-02-07T08:33:00.001-08:00

[My grandmother Ruth Boorman – the last of my grandparents – died on February 2, at the age of 95. I read this at her funeral yesterday.]

In 1928, a little girl by the name of Ruth Elizabeth Reed had reached the advanced and distinguished age of 10. She lived with her parents and siblings on the family farm in the small town of Elliott, Iowa, near the cousins and friends she loved. Her favorite possession was a wide-brimmed hat with an entirely superfluous and beautiful yellow ribbon.

One Sunday afternoon in August, after a hot and breathless day, Ruth’s father was about to begin his evening chores, but something in the sky caught his attention. He watched closely for a few moments, then turned and ordered his family into the root cellar. The tornado arrived only minutes later. Ruth was left gasping for breath as the pressure differential sucked the air out of the cellar, all the while watching her dad brace himself with everything he had against the door. When the chaos and terror subsided, and her family finally emerged, it was to scenes of devastation. Their house had been shifted off its foundation, the barn was gone, and the outbuildings had been destroyed. A newspaper account said that three of their neighbors were killed, and scores wounded. They found little Ruth’s wide-brimmed hat with the yellow ribbon in a nearby tree, damaged beyond repair.

When my Grandma told this story years later, she was typically self-deprecating. The loss of the farm meant hard times for her parents, she knew, especially on the eve of the Great Depression. But, she said, “I was just a little girl, and to me it was all a great adventure.”

In many ways, those two poles represent her life. It was marked throughout by hard times. But the times were never so hard that they stopped being an adventure. The tornado that forced her father off his farm and into odd jobs and manual labor meant that she got to play with new friends in the town park. Her family eventually moved across the country from Iowa to Oregon, but along the way there were cute boys on the train she could flirt with. She was the new girl in Henley, Oregon, but of course that meant new classes, community dances, and a new and remarkably persistent suitor. Five children meant struggling to put food on the table, but also a full and lively house, and fodder for later stories. They lived in a tar paper shack in Tionesta, but with a family and as members of a community that looked out for each other. When her husband’s pumice business went under, it was followed by a move to Ashland, a new church, a new house, and a chance to start over. A retirement to a tiny mobile home in a Grants Pass trailer park meant entertaining grandchildren and getting her husband out of the house so he could hunt and fish to his heart’s delight. Her final move to assisted living in Longview meant a smaller apartment, a loss of independence, a smaller world; but also, a new audience for her stories, a well-earned opportunity to rest, and the chance, for a change, to let someone else care for her.

My Grandma Ruth was a tall and proud woman. She and Clarence never had much money, but they were responsible with what they did have, and they raised their children in a tradition of thrift and discipline and honesty. In the early 1950’s, with five children and a failing business, things were especially tight. Grandma once told me about walking through the general store in Tionesta, down to her last few dollars, trying to find something to feed her family, something she could afford. The store owner figured out what was going on, and walked over to the aisle where she was standing. “Ruth,” he said gently, “I want you to put this on credit. It will be all right.” Before she left, he gave her a large box of Roman Meal cereal samples, and that was her family’s breakfast for the winter. Later, when the simplest course would have been to declare bankruptcy and walk away from their debts, she and my grandfather declined the easy way out, and over the next 10 years paid back every creditor in full.

My Grandmother was not a great cook; it was not a skill she could have put to any use. Her raw ingredients were venison and cans of green beans and sometimes a mess of trout or a wild goose. It was rare for anything fancier than a casserole to emerge from her kitchen.

She could be stern sometimes, but she was never harsh. My brother Keith tells me that he never once heard her speak critically of anyone. She loved her children, and grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. But her temper was not particularly warm, and she did not gush over them or jump at the chance to spoil them. The present she gave me for my sixth birthday was typical: a simple King James Bible. The only hint of ostentation was my name inscribed in gold letters on its forest green cover. It was always on the pew next to me as a child, and is still on my bookshelf at home.

But the gift of a Bible was typical for other reasons besides simplicity. She was a great reader, and my own love of books can be traced at least partly to her influence. She opened up her bookshelf to me, and over the years, I made my way through every one of her large collection of Agatha Christie novels. The Bible was also appropriate because she was a believer, and the matriarch of an extended tribe of believers. She never wore her faith on her sleeve - she was a good Baptist, even if she eventually forgave her daughter for marrying a Pentecostal - but she loved her savior, and she brought her children up in the training and admonition of the Lord. In the many pictures she left behind, it is not difficult to tell which ones were taken on a Sunday, because everyone is dressed for church.

Just yesterday, I found some brief notes she left behind in a book I had given her some years ago. In these notes, she was clearly thinking of her own life when she wrote:

[The people of my generation] were for the most part able to live responsible, respectable lives. Caring for their loved ones, serving where needed with their communities, holding down the fort as it were. Decent people that we never hear of - and they like it that way.

That was my Grandma. Never flashy, often stubborn, determined to be good, but equally determined not to make a fuss over it. She loved us, and cared for us, and we loved her. We will miss her.

David Jang Summary

2014-01-16T08:46:00.001-08:00

Over the last two years, I’ve done several deep dives into the theological distinctives of David Jang and his community. There was a lot of detail in those posts, and it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. So I think it makes sense to summarize briefly my theory about David Jang’s community.

To a great extent, and certainly within the hearing of any outsider, David Jang and his churches teach recognizably orthodox Christian doctrine. If you visit any of their churches, you will find nothing obviously amiss.
However, until 2006, within this reasonably orthodox framework, the highest leaders in David Jang’s community encouraged a very heterodox teaching that David Jang was a key eschatological figure worthy of the title “Second Christ”. This belief was not universal but was very widespread, being taught explicitly or implicitly to new members in (at least) Asia, Europe, Africa, North America and Latin America.
Although David Jang probably (and privately) continues to claim a role for himself more significant than any mainstream Christian would be comfortable with, he has never explicitly claimed to be “Christ”. He currently disavows this teaching entirely, but there is evidence that he knew others were making this claim on his behalf and allowed them to do so.
Since 2006, the community has ceased to actively promote the doctrine of a “second Christ”, though some members have made it clear as recently as 2012 that they still believed Jang to be Christ.
David Jang and his community initially denied outright that this teaching had ever occurred, have continued to minimize and obfuscate its extent, and respond harshly and even viciously to silence anyone who brings it up.

So that’s the theory. But is it true?

You know – I think it is. Perhaps not in every particular. There may be nuances which I’ve missed or mistaken, and the evidence for some claims is more solid than for others. (I have the most questions around #3.) As I gather more information, I may need to revise portions of it. I first wrote this summary almost two years ago, and have continued to revise it periodically, as additional evidence came to light. I will continue to do so. But as it stands, it’s my best explanation of the facts as I have them.

Of course, I may be wrong. There may be other theories which cover the facts as well or better. Maybe the 20 or so people who have made this charge are just lying. Maybe they think they’re telling the truth, but badly misunderstood what they were told. Maybe Jang’s leaders just went horribly off the rails, and kept Jang so completely in the dark that he honestly knew nothing about it. Maybe they intercepted all the confessions people sent to him. Maybe this is all just some huge misunderstanding.

Maybe.

I’ve done something over the last year and a half that I had never imagined I would do: I’ve all but accused a significant figure in American Evangelicalism of serious heresy, and done it in a public forum where I was confident he and lots of other folks will hear about it and pay attention to it. This is a very sobering thing to do. Given the fate of Jang’s other critics, I continue to share my sources’ fears of retribution, that I’ll be on the receiving end of more personal attacks or even a lawsuit. And even more, I have worried throughout that I might be wrong, that in leveling these charges I have been slandering the name of good Christians and needlessly stirring up dissent and division in the body of Christ.

But even with those risks, I cannot stay silent. The evidence for the key charges seems to me not just strong, but indisputable. And the charges are serious enough that I feel eminently justified in bringing them to the attention of the Christian world at large.

And I suppose that’s why I’m bothering to wade into this fight again, after a year of sitting on the sidelines. I’m worried about the fact that despite the extensive evidence, many mainstream Christians continue to have close ties with Jang’s community. It is true that many have withdrawn. Around the time of the original Christianity Today article, Al Mohler and Daniel Akin removed themselves from the Christian Post board. The sale of Bethany University to Jang’s Olivet University eventually fell through; and Lifeway declined to sell them their Glorieta conference center. But many other groups and individuals have continued their affiliation. The World Evangelical Alliance is only the most notable and worrisome example. Walker Tzeng, a senior leader in Jang’s community, is on the board of both the Association for Biblical Higher Education and the National Association of Evangelicals. Richard Land, the president of Southern Evangelical Seminary, has continued on as the Executive Editor of The Christian Post. Will Graham (Billy Graham’s grandson) and Joel Hunter (megapastor and occasional spiritual advisor to the President) continue to allow themselves to be listed as a part of the CP’s “senior editorial advisors”. Donald Tinder, a former editor at Christianity Today, teaches at Olivet University, along with many other Christians whose orthodoxy is unquestionable.

I would feel very differently about Jang’s community if they were honest, transparent and apologetic – in a word, repentant – about what had occurred. But given the extent to which the group continues to dissemble about their past, and their scorched earth tactics against their critics, I am uncertain as to why any orthodox Christian would continue to lend them their support. Their chances of playing a constructive role in the body of Christ seem diminishingly small so long as they have not mastered simple honesty.

You will of course need to make up your own mind. But whatever your conclusion, I and everyone else involved will certainly need your prayers.

David Jang’s Defense

2014-01-08T23:57:00.001-08:00

The numerous blog posts I’ve dedicated to David Jang’s community have probably made this abundantly clear, but I suppose it’s time I say it outright: I don’t trust David Jang.

It wasn’t always this way. I was thrilled back in 2011 when I heard that Olivet University was negotiating to buy my poor, defunct alma mater. I had never heard of Olivet, but I was impressed with their website, and loved their focus on using technology to evangelize the world. But an off-hand comment by one of my fellow alums made me look deeper into the school, and into the community with which it was associated; and something - it was hard to say what - didn’t quite seem right. But I didn’t start to worry until Olivet came out with a new Bethany website, in which they blatantly lied about what was happening. And then they bizarrely threatened to sue me for pointing this out, and it went downhill from there. In subsequent blog posts, I laid out my growing concerns about David Jang’s community and its growing influence amongst American Evangelicalism. This research culminated in a pair of articles in Christianity Today - co-authored with the wonderful Ted Olsen - reporting on accusations that David Jang’s community believed him to be a “second Christ”.

In my day job as a programmer, I’ve learned to depend on a concept called “code smell”. Coding is as much about aesthetics as anything else, and after many years of swearing at code, I’ve learned to use how a codebase “feels” as a rough shorthand for how reliable and well-architected it will prove to be. It’s a feeling you learn to trust.

After several years of researching David Jang’s community, I think I’ve developed a similar sense of smell. And I don’t trust David Jang. Nor do I trust his community, their practices, their websites, their avowals, or their denials. Sometimes I have very good reasons for this, sometimes reasons that I haven’t yet talked about publicly. Sometimes it’s more of a hunch or gut feeling. But the end result is the same: I’ve learned to look askance at nearly anything David Jang or his community says promoting or defending themselves.

Let me give you an example of what I mean.

Among the thousands of documents that I’ve received from former members, some of the more interesting are those in which David Jang attempts a defense of his community against criticisms of the sort that I’ve leveled. I’ve placed these documents in a Google Drive folder. The oldest (which I’ve called 2004a) is undated, but based on internal evidence seems to be from between 2003-2005. Two others (2008a and 2008c) are dated to August 2008; and another appears to be from c. 2008, though the precise time is uncertain. (I should note that three of the documents do not explicitly identify David Jang as the speaker, but their content leaves room for no reasonable doubt as to who was talking.)

In these sermons, David Jang responds to a variety of criticisms of his community. Some of these criticisms are, in my opinion, well-founded, but concern aspects of the group that I haven’t focused on, such as their practice of arranged group marriages (what David Jang refers to as “Holy Matrimony”).

Other criticisms appear to me to be less well-founded, such as the allegation that the group doesn’t believe in Jesus, or that Jang taught that the cross was a failure. That last is an allegation which I’ve seen frequently made by the various Asian investigations, but none of the ex-members to whom I’ve spoken confirmed it, nor have I seen any reference to it in any of the thousands of documents which these former members have provided. One possibility is that this was an interpretation -- or misinterpretation -- of Jang’s theology which gained currency only in Asia. Not being able to speak any Asian languages, I’ve been somewhat limited in my ability to independently review the primary source material in Korean, Japanese or Chinese. But in the many, many sermons of Jang’s that I’ve read, he gives abundant evidence of having a strong faith in the person and work of Jesus, and in the efficacy of the cross. I have zero quarrels with that aspect of his theology.

At other points, however, David Jang attempts to defend his community against allegations very similar to those that I have leveled, namely, that the community believed they were the 144,000 of Revelation 7, and (more worrisome) that they were being led by a “Second Coming Lord”. Those of you who’ve been keeping up with my blog should recognize both of those claims by now.

The defense which he mounts against these allegations is quite interesting, and worth examining at length.

First, David Jang effectively confirms that his group did in fact teach that they were the 144,000 of Revelation 7 (a teaching clearly reflected in the New Israel documents). In 2008a, Jang describes a conversation he had with one critic:

Then, after then, [the critic] brings out a different card, you taught New Israel. 144,000 - it's not in the Bible. Did the lecturer make this? Actually, it is written in the Bible. YD say they are 144,000. Isn't it something that you should compliment? Should we not teach that there will be election/selection of God? Should we not teach about it? They say the center of the world is Jerusalem and Moscow. All the denominations say they are the center of the world. Center of the world is China. Why do you say something like that? In that way, you lead the history. We will become 144,000 before you Jesus and we'll lead. We will become your 144,000 and we'll lead your people. Will Jesus say no? Can we do this? Jesus will of course say, do it right away. He will never say who gave you that kind of authority?

Note that Jang doesn’t deny that the group taught this. Rather, he tries to downplay its significance, saying in effect that it is OK because every denomination does this (though that is hardly the case). And besides, he continues, when we actually do lead all of Christianity, Jesus is hardly going to complain that we did such a good job for him. As a defense of a rather problematic ecclesiology, Jang’s response doesn’t really work: but it does provide additional confirmation of what other sources and documents had already made clear, that he knew about the “New Israel” teachings, and affirmed them, at least in their broad outlines.

But while a screwy ecclesiology can be dangerous, it isn’t really heretical - though it is worth noting that the only groups I’m aware of that that have claimed to be the 144,000 are all groups that have departed from Christian orthodoxy (such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses). On the other hand, the second charge, that of believing in the advent of a “second Christ” or “Second Coming Christ” or “Second Coming Lord” would, I believe, raise orthodox eyebrows semper, ubique et ab omnibus. (And of course, it is the “New Israel” teaching that provides the context for the “second Christ” teaching, because the second Christ will both bring into being and be acclaimed by this 144,000.)

In the case of this second allegation, it is the specifics of what David Jang denies and what he does not that is the most interesting. In 2008a, Jang responds to the charge by repeatedly denying that he has ever used the phrase “second coming lord”:

I've never even used this word once, second coming lord. If there is any record, bring it out. I graduated from this famous theological seminary, but then enemies, they sent spies and they stole our notebooks and things like that. Secretly, they said, he is the second coming lord. It's very comical.

And again:

They said we don't believe in Jesus and regard Christ as failure, therefore, we believe in me, in pastor. So a second or third Christ must come out. That's why they believe in me. We said, we don't believe in the second coming lord; we don’t believe in this term. There was a great fight. So they said, we don't believe in Jesus or the cross and Pastor is the second coming Lord. Is this Christianity? Do we belong to Christianity? Some people say they want to meet us and identify whether we are Christian or not. We are! Are we not? Why don't you guys answer? If they say something like this, I was almost about to faint.

And again:

Why do you attack me? Then you guys say, we are similar to the Unification Church, but what kind of relationship do we have with them? We have no relationship at all! They don't believe in Jesus or the cross! They believe in the Second Coming Lord, but we believe in Jesus and the cross and we don't even use this word, second coming lord.

And again:

So I sent the legal document to the three people. I am not the second coming lord. You should know this. I sent the legal document to them.

His insistence upon denying the precise phrase “second coming lord” is worth noting, and it relates to what I’ll call “denial smell”. Read his words carefully (doing your best to work around the awkward translations, which aren’t his fault). Neither in these documents, nor in any of the other denials that I’ve seen from him around this time period, does he actually deny that the group taught that they were to expect a “second Christ” or “second Messiah”. He denies that the group uses the phrase “second coming lord”, and he denies that he ever taught that he was the Christ, but (so far as I’ve seen) he does not deny that he or others taught about a generic “second Christ”, nor does he deny that others have taught that this is who he was. Taken by themselves, these omissions are quite possibly innocent; but in the larger context, possibly not. Like I said, denial smell.

This emphasis on the exact phrase is interesting, because as it turns out, the language that members of the group used about Jang seems to have varied quite a bit: the most common terms I’ve seen are actually “King” (or “King David” or “the great King”) rather than “Christ”, though I’ve also seen “Christ David”, “the head of the Church”, or “the one who is to come”. The only places I’ve seen the specific phrase “second coming Christ” or “second coming Lord” in primary sources originating with Jang’s community (as opposed to his critics) is in a series of documents that came from one particular Chinese source; in comparable places in the English-language documents, the phrase “second Christ” or “second Messiah” is usually used. So in the absence of further evidence, I’m perfectly willing to grant that David Jang is speaking the truth when he insists that he has never used the phrase “second coming lord”. Whether that denial is adequate is another matter.

At least one reason for questioning its adequacy is that David Jang basically does affirm that his group assigns to him a position and an authority that ought to make any Christian leader nervous. In 2004a, Jang quotes a critic who, in a meeting with another senior leader, made the following accusation: “It seems you guys believe in your pastor more than Jesus.” Jang continues the story:

Then this one senior member said, what's wrong with it? Their eyes became so big. This is it. That senior member said, because our pastor believes in Jesus so well, I can go to Jesus through him when I follow Jesus. My pastor and Jesus are one. Do you know in Catholicism, they say the pope is like a king. He has a big crown, a big robe, fine linen and this cane. When you are a phd, you wear this robe and it's very difficult to walk. You are very holy and majestic because you're like a king. They put on a really high hat. It's like 50 centimeters higher. They look so tall. Big cross. I'm the delegate of the authority of Christ on earth, he said. But then they don't criticize them or regard them as ugly.

Note that Jang appears to quote with approval this senior member’s affirmation that “My pastor and Jesus are one.” His defense of that claim is to compare himself to the Pope: since Catholics believe the Pope exercises the authority of Christ on earth, he basically says, why are you complaining about my followers when they do something similar? That is a defense which ought to appeal neither to Catholics (who believe the Pope to be unique in this regard) nor to Protestants (who don’t believe that about anyone). But more than that, the logic of the comparison only works if Jang saw himself as standing in a relationship with Christ that was almost - or perhaps absolutely - without peer. (I have also been told that he continues to use this analogy when explaining his role to insiders.)

The other thing that should make folks approach Jang’s denials with a “hermeneutic of suspicion” is that he explicitly encourages his listeners to lie about their beliefs. In 2008b, Jang is discussing Prov. 26:4-5, and describes a confrontation between some critics and one of Jang’s followers. The question at issue was whether he had attended a specific church - my guess is that the reference is to the Unification Church, but I don’t know that for sure. The follower had denied attending this church, but eventually changed his story. Jang defends the initial lie this way:

Did you go to that church? No, I didn't. But they were fighting and they thought we were winning. Then this person answered different and said I did go to that church. Then the enemies responded that you said before you didn't go to that church but now you said you went, so you are a liar. This person was confused. But then I said you did something good. I showed him this verse. [Prov. 26:4-5]. So to the person who said this church is bad, you can say you didn't go to that church. But if a person thinks the church is good then you can say you went to the church. What does this mean? If you have this evil motive of fabricating and making up and criticize then you can say that I didn't go to that church you think of. But I did go to the church that taught me faith, Christ, the precious blood - I went to that church. Then this person suddenly gained strength and speaks well. I went to that church but I didn't go to that church.

In other words, if you’re dealing with critics who are asking with malicious motives, Jang says, it’s OK to lie to them.

With that in mind, it’s worth reading this particular denial offered by Jang in 2008 to one of the Asian investigating committees:

I give praises for the grace of Jesus Christ. By the grace of Jesus Christ, I accepted Jesus as my one and only Savior, and since I was forgiven of my sins, I have never abandoned faith in Jesus Christ. Also, I have never preached any other gospel other than that of Jesus Christ. Furthermore I have never taught that I am Christ. I clearly confess that there is no other way than through Jesus Christ to receive salvation and gain freedom.

This denial is more direct and succinct than the ones offered privately to his own community, and also more general. Among other things, it doesn’t perseverate on any specific term, and says specifically, “I have never taught that I am Christ”. Nevertheless, if one is inclined to be suspicious, you’ll note that in between its affirmations and denials, there’s still an awful lot of wiggle room - denial smell again. Look at it this way: every statement in that paragraph is perfectly consistent with the concerns that I’ve raised in my recent blog posts. Even if you assume that every conclusion I’ve drawn about Jang’s group is true, that paragraph above would be technically accurate - as technically accurate as it would be misleading.

Now, all that was back in 2008, and I don’t believe David Jang would offer precisely the same defense today. After the Christianity Today articles in 2012, the evidence became overwhelming that at least some members of his community had in fact believed that he was a second Christ. And from what I understand, from talking both to former members of Jang’s community and to other researchers, David Jang and his leadership have more recently begun to offer up a limited acknowledgement that some very small number of people in the group did in fact believe that he was a “second Christ”, though he has disavowed any responsibility for those beliefs. The explanation that he and other leaders are offering for this, I am told, is that it was a small and isolated problem, the result of some enthusiastic missionaries misreading some of the group’s eschatology lessons. Tracy Davis’ quote in the New York Times is emblematic of this: “People somehow insinuated that though no one explicitly told them”. I’ve been told by former members that internally he blamed the confusion on Borah Lin, whom he accused of teaching eschatology incorrectly. There are also a couple of videos of a Korean press conference in which Jang apparently addresses the question. I haven’t found an English translation of what he says, but I’m told that he simultaneously acknowledges and minimizes the problem.

Not having access to direct quotes from Jang, I can’t say with any certainty exactly what truth there is in this cluster of new explanations, though I can make a few comments. On the one hand, it is quite possible - indeed, it is virtually certain - that members were confused by the teachings they received. In the ambiguity and secrecy surrounding this belief, and in the absence of a public creed, they assumed David Jang to be even more significant than their leaders had told them. The lessons, for instance, for all their insinuations, never claim that David Jang is divine in any Chalcedonian sense; and yet it’s quite clear that some members prayed to him, worshiped him, believed that they could communicate spiritually with him, and even thought of him as God incarnate. Others thought of him as a “second Jesus”, which is almost certainly not what Borah Lin and other leaders had in mind, as the key concept in the lessons is Christ - a title - rather than Jesus - a name.

On the other hand, it’s not really plausible to claim that the problem (in either its confused or semi-official capacities) was isolated, either geographically or organizationally. The evidence I’ve laid out in my last three posts indicates more-or-less conclusively that the belief was present from the lowest to the highest members of the group, was spread across at least four continents, and continued for many years. Several people have told me that every member of their particular local branches believed Jang to be the Christ, and this in an organization which emphasized communication and control. (As David Jang once said, rather memorably, “We know all things together, so in Pusan in Korea, when someone farts, everyone in Seoul knows.”) And quite a number of folks have told me that they had sent David Jang letters or emails in which they laid out their belief in him as the Christ. All this taken together makes it hard to believe that this teaching was was happening entirely without Jang’s connivance.

And there, we get to the heart of the matter. The heart of Jang’s defense seems to be that he didn’t know that any of this was happening. Even with my doubts, I can’t say precisely what David Jang knew or when he knew it, so for the moment, let’s grant this explanation in its rough outlines. Given that, what I would really like to know is how Jang reacted when he became aware of what his followers were saying about him. I have heard from several sources that he scolded those who believed he was Christ, and there’s no doubt that by 2006 he had put a stop to the teaching of the history lessons. But again, there’s that denial smell. For even with that acknowledged, there’s little evidence that David Jang ever mounted a firm, vigorous and decisive response to the undoubted presence of heterodox beliefs in his group. If I’m wrong, and if David Jang did actually mount such a campaign, he could do a great deal to re-establish his credibility by talking openly and honestly about what happened. Rather than minimizing and misleading, attacking and suing, he could allow a free and transparent investigation into the the history of his community’s beliefs and practices, including access to the group’s email and document archives. Until that happens, I confess that I have a hard time taking much that he says on this topic at face value.

For comparison purposes, try to imagine that you were a Christian leader who heard credible reports of such beliefs in your organization. Can you imagine that your response would be other than white-hot and immediate? Imagine what you would say: “I’ve heard that some of you are spreading the idea that I’m some sort of Christ or King or what-not. That is not true, you should all know better, it’s not just heretical, it’s blasphemous, it’s evil and filthy, and if I hear anything more about it, you’re out the door, because I won’t have anything to do with that kind of nonsense. And you’re all going to march out of here right now and make sure everybody knows exactly that. Have I made myself clear?” And would you not then go out of your way to lay the teachings, their causes, and your response open to the outside world? And then publicly and repeatedly repent of any behaviors or teachings that had led to the error? And be immensely grateful to any external or internal critic who had helped to identify what was going on? Would you not do this, if for no other reason than to save your own soul, so that it wouldn’t be smirched with such a foul blasphemy when you one day stood before your Lord?

Do I need to bother to point out that this is not exactly how David Jang has reacted? Instead, his response was first to deny the allegations completely and cover them up; and when that became untenable, to minimize them. And throughout, he or members of his community have viciously attacked his critics, and have repeatedly threatened legal action (and repeatedly carried through on their threats) against even the mildest criticism. I am not aware of a single critic or former member who has gone public who has not been threatened with a lawsuit: my sources have very good reasons for wishing to remain anonymous. Last year, Ted Olsen and I were each threatened with lawsuits, and the Christian Post published an article about me that could reasonably be described as libelous. Other critics have been subjected to vicious public attacks. (Quite wonderfully, several, including yours truly, have been accused of being in cahoots with the North Koreans. I’m not making that up.) Numerous Korean and Japanese Christian news organizations have been sued. Other journalists or newspapers investigating Jang’s community have also been threatened, and I know at least one English-language journalist that was thus bullied into staying quiet.

As Jang says in 2008a:

So now, we should sue them and after the trials, we have to punish them. We have many organizations so if they compensate, they should compensate a lot. After one is over, another organization will sue them again so all their lives they will be sued… So from here, there, in Japan, you have to sue them with laws. Then they will be silent.

Or in 2008b:

So why are these guys saying this? We should just sue them and get it over it.

Or in 2008c:

They have this faithfulness that what they're doing is correct. They are in the limit of 666. When they challnege and attack us, we have to settle it well and attack back and think of them are amalekites and then you have to follow them until the end and kill all of them.

This is not how a responsible Christian leader behaves.

And that is why I do not trust David Jang.

The Community's Understanding of David Jang

2014-01-07T16:37:00.001-08:00

One of the things that first confused me about David Jang’s community when I first started researching them is the wide disparity between the claims that their critics were making about their beliefs, and what Jang’s community themselves say that they actually teach. I remember reading all these people saying that Jang’s group was teaching that Jang was a second Christ (or “second coming Christ”); but whenever I asked any current members about their group’s beliefs, they unanimously insisted that they didn’t teach this, that they never had taught this, and that their community is perfectly orthodox.

As I said, this left me confused. And my initial conclusion was that the critics must be wrong, and I argued as much publicly. How could a group deny something that, if true, had to have been absolutely central to their belief system? If they actually believed their leader was the Messiah, why wouldn’t they just come out and say it? Like I said, it didn’t make any sense.

But then the first ex-member contacted me. And then another. And then another. And then lots, lots more. I think I’ve probably talked to something like 20 former members, but I’ve actually stopped keeping track, because it doesn’t seem important anymore to document every contact or take detailed notes on every conversation. Every former member I’ve talked to who was a part of the group before 2006 (at least a dozen of them) has told me fundamentally the same story. And the story is basically this.

Prior to 2006, they’ve told me, many and perhaps most members did in fact believe that David Jang was a second Christ. But it wasn’t normal for them to talk about it openly, even amongst fellow insiders. And the leaders, I’ve been told consistently, would almost never quite come out and say it. But when it came time to induct new members who were believed ready, a core member would sit down with the initiate and walk them through a series of lessons that were designed to bring them to a confession of faith in David Jang as a second Christ. Again, these lessons would never precisely come out and say it: but they left little doubt as to the conclusions they wished the new member to draw. (These lessons included the “New Israel” and “Genealogy of Christ” documents which I’ve recently analyzed.)

One source described it this way to me:

[T]he missionary on chage teach it until the studend hear certain number of messeges and is ready to hear "the truth" they certanly don't teach you that Jang is the second coming christ, directly... it's an inderect teaching, they allways are telling you this great word comes from our great pastor david!! And at the end when you hear the history messages about "new israel" and "christology" the missionary whrite a question mark ?? And ask you, do you know who is the second coming christ? And you ask, is your pastor, the david one? And the missionary will ask you, not you shall tell me, do you know or not? So after you get it from all the shocking thing, if you got the messeges correctly you will answer is Pastor David the second coming christ... they make you confess it, otherwise is not valid, you shall confess it like peter did it to Jesuschrist... and after you confess it, they will tell you, but shhhh, don't tell it to anybody, is a secret, we don't want that the world will kill the second coming lord as they did it to the first one.... we shall protect him...

Another source I interviewed said that after several weeks of directed Bible studies, her mentor walked her through one of the lessons which pointed towards Jang being a “second Jesus” (her words). These are the notes I took in my conversation with her (with “A” and “B” replacing the names of my source and her mentor respectively to preserve my source’s confidentiality).

[T]hen B finally asked, “What do you think about that?” A didn’t really follow what she meant, and said so. B had a sort of surprised look on her face and said, “So you don’t understand?” So A responded, “So are you saying that...?” And B responded, “No, really, absolutely.” Then B told about how an angel came to his mother, and how he is here to fulfill the ministry that Jesus didn’t complete. David was here to complete God’s work on earth. A didn’t believe her, but then they prayed, and then had lunch together. A says that she should have gotten up and left, but she didn’t.

Later on, at the conference, A asked B about it [David Jang being the Christ] again, and B would say it pretty much straight up. And she talked to some people at one of the Christmas retreats, and the girl was talking about how PD appeared to her in her sleep, hovering above her bed, and gave her an assignment. His spirit would float into their rooms.

Edmond Chua, the former editor of the Singapore edition of the Christian Post, wrote this in a chat session (CT described this, but this is a fuller version of the quote):

I made my confession on September 6, 2005, in the wee hours, just after midnight
I made it to Susan, who was my teacher
she then had me write a letter to Jang thanking him for bringing me into the Kingdom of God
this was after a long series of messages that evening
and explanation and counselling
...
I think Susan asked me so who is Pastor David?
And I probably said something like He is the Second Coming Christ!
I fully believed it
the '12 steps' Basic Bible studies I learned just seemed to point that way
it was very logical and deep
for the first time I felt that I knew the love of God
intimately
strange as that may sound, considering who Jang is

Ma Li, a former member from Beijing whom I interviewed at length, wrote this description of her experience.

On that day, we studied for a long time, ZNW did not permit us have slight wander time, and she drew pictures, wrote something on the white board, and asked us to make sure we were clear about what she was talking.… In the end, they added the clues in the “New Israel” which gives further reasoning, which said that David Jang will be the 'second coming Christ' who could clearly explain the 'eternal gospels'; hence those who have had the luck of following him and understanding the 'gospels' he was talking about would be the New Israel’s, and will write the new history of the 'Eternal Gospels', which will added right after the New testimony.
I was totally attracted by what she was talking, the way to analyze human's history, and the gospels relates to the future of the human beings. However, I am the person without any religion backgrounds, which meant that I didn’t have any previous theory to compare and analyze, and so was happy with ignorance; because I suddenly found myself became a selected person, who is living in the New time, and will write the new history.
Surprise, exciting, on the fortune I thought I had. Even though I had not learned the Bible for the previous years, I could meet 'Christ's fellowship' during the first time I learning it. When ZNW looked at me and LLJ seriously and asked us: "Have you understood? All the content?" I answered firmly: "Yes". Then she asked me separately: "Who is the Pastor David?" I answered without thinking, just followed what I heard just now and answered: "The second coming Christ!" She said 'shhh' calmly, and then, 'Dont tell others'.
I felt like a little bit like cold waters had been poured on my head: why could she be so calm? Isn’t this a big event? And it is such a great thing! But the cold feeling soon disappeared totally, because to be 'New Israel' was such a big blessing, that I would like to sacrifice myself to protect it.
ZNW then told LLJ and me formally: "You are born today!" I didn’t know what was meant by 'born'; but my feelings told me that it was a good thing. ZNW then explained that as soon as we understood the 'gospel', the new life starts; and are our 'birthday of spiritual lives'; and each day today on the followed years would be our new lives' birthday, which should be remembered.
My feelings of being surrounded by the big happiness could not been explained, and I appreciated it so much, that I could neither laugh nor cry, just jumped and ran to the kitchen and told Haiyang (HY) who is preparing the breakfast for the second day 'I was born!'
'Really?'
'Really!'
'So fast, and you are so much blessed'
'is it?'
'Yes!'
Within few minutes, the whole Center knew that LLJ and I had been born, and we filled the 'Body Card', NaWenZhang (ZNW) announced us as 'Bodies', and others sang the song of 'Blessing Song'. We got blessings and encouragement from each one, and LLJ and I were standing on the right and left side of the ZNW, while others joking calling ZNW was our 'mother' because she fed us, and joked to let us call her 'mother'. ZNW did not accept because she was shy. XZ asked us to sleep earlier, and said to us in mystery way: "You might have dreams in the night, and see what you will dream of."
However, we could not sleep at all. In the sisters' rooms, LLJ and I talked all the time. LLJ was not as excited as me, and seemed she was holding back something. I was too self-centered at that time, and did not understood what it was, but thought if I was happy, she must be happy too. After the lights were turned off, Jifang Bing and TT Lu came in, after hearing LLJ and me discuss about the three gospels and the conclusions, they joined in our discussions.

Other former members whom I am not at liberty to quote directly have told me very similar stories about their confessions that David Jang was the Christ, sometimes to very senior leaders of the community. And a surprising number of them have told me that they sent written copies of these confessions to David Jang himself.

As I’ve said, there’s substantial evidence that the group stopped teaching these lessons around 2006. But even after that, there was apparently confusion amongst members as to what they were supposed to believe. One former member told me that around 2007 or 2008:

I was kind of exposed [to the “second Christ” teaching], but by another member, he told me in a conversation
one simply told me, like a comment and stop talking, it was weird. It was even more weird I didn't ask him before hand, he just popped up the topic. It was like that, I was a "lamb" learning and I felt I wasnt able to ask things.
He said something like:
You know, PD is Christ.
I thought he was crazy.
So I asked to leaders.
And they just asked me "What do you think?"
They never said yes or no
just tried to put it into my mind making me to answer myself

Another member was frustrated at Jang’s subsequent denials, and said, in reference to a particularly difficult choice:

And i accepted that time bc hey made me believe jang was christ
If not i wouldnt do it
And then ...
And jang denied he is the christ?
So many years of my life believing a lie?
Everyone where I worked believed it
And now he is dening?
It was a shock for me

All of this goes some way towards explaining why I was so confused. Jang’s community - and Jang himself - have genuinely adopted the language and to a great extent the content of orthodox, mainstream Christianity. There are very real and important differences in this respect between Jang’s community and, say, the Unification Church. If you compare Jang’s sermons fairly with those of Sun Myung Moon, you’ll find that Jang’s messages inhabit a very different world of discourse: no teachings about a “Divine Principle”, no references to him invading the spirit world to finish Jesus’ work, no talk of “True Parents”. My Southern Baptist friends would find nothing objectionable in at least 99% of what I’ve found in Jang’s sermons, whereas I can hardly go a paragraph in one of Moon’s sermons without finding something to raise my theological hackles. Yes, many of the group’s members and senior leaders did in fact believe and teach that David Jang was a second Christ; but that belief was never formalized into anything like a public creed, and however unorthodox and dangerous it may be, it seems to have been awkwardly inserted into an otherwise reasonably orthodox theology. Jang’s identity really was secret, certainly the biggest and most important secret in a community that seems to have more than its share.

One way of the ways of bridging this gap between an orthodox soteriology (say) and a highly unorthodox Christology seems to have been a novel application of the New Testament principle of “Now and Not Yet”. At least some members may have believed that while David Jang would eventually be proclaimed Christ, this hadn’t yet happened: it was something that was going to happen, but only if they did their jobs and got on with making the Kingdom of God. And until then, they were eager to enter fully into the life and community of mainstream Christianity, so as to eventually lead it altogether. David Jang’s identity thus wasn’t something that should be proclaimed, at least, not yet; the rest of the Christian world would acknowledge it soon enough and in its appropriate time. Until then, to reveal it too soon was to risk becoming a “Judas”, endangering their leader’s mission and their leader himself.

That David Jang was to be crowned king or anointed Messiah only at some point in the future may have been what many members believed (and is implied in many of the lessons). But there is no doubt that others went a great deal further. Edmond Chua says that he prayed to David Jang, and thought of him as God. Others have said that they felt like they could communicate spiritually with him. I mentioned in a previous blog post that I have a very personal document from a current member, something like a journal entry, which repeatedly refers to David Jang as “Christ”, and is full of praises for a man the author clearly regards as divine. Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to reproduce that document more specifically to preserve the confidentiality of its source. I’ve recently seen portions of several similar documents, from a different author, which I am also not at liberty to fully describe or quote from. However, I can say that in these documents the writer unambiguously refers to David Jang in Messianic terms, for instance, as “the One who is to come” or “the King”, and at one point, even expresses a desire to worship him.

I was recently shown portions of a chat session from 2005 in which someone identified as “[SF]Tracy” makes the following comment about Africa “receiving her King, at long last”:

[Praise Report!] God has given me a special reason to rejoice. Pastor announced earlier this week that he would pay for me to go with him to Kenya for the retreat taking place there December 2005! Thank you Pastor David for this opportunity!! ^^ I feel like all of Africa is already dancing in anticipation of receiving her King, at long last. And I am overwhelmed to be a witness to this historic event. Thank you again and again…

Tracy’s reference to Africa’s “King” is, I suppose, technically ambiguous. However, since Africa has had a Christian presence for just about as long as there have been Christians, it seems pretty unlikely that anyone reading it would have understood “King” to refer to anyone other than the David Jang who is apparently about to make his first visit to Africa. (And even in the unlikely event that “King” refers to Jesus rather than Jang - what, it’s only when Jang gets there that Africa is going to become Christian?) It is also worth noting that Tracy Davis, the President of Jang’s flagship Olivet University in San Francisco, told the New York Times, “People somehow insinuated that [Jang was a messianic figure] though no one explicitly told them”. One does wonder how they could have gotten that impression.

Other documents make it clear that members considered Pastor David to be, at the very least, a uniquely significant teacher. One document from 2006 describes the newly established Olivet University this way:

Now, the time is changing and in order to be a leader at all, someone must train at Olivet. Because Pastor will train leaders himself when they come to Olivet, the learning our members receive here is another dimension from the world like the difference between clouds and water in a lake.

The group also sometimes describes itself as playing a role parallel to the early apostles. For instance, in a lesson on how to evangelize, members are reminded of the importance of keeping good notes:

When we write down the messages we must do it with awareness of history. The future generations are going to look at out notes and they will see this is what they studied and learned.... the letters of apostle Paul became part of the NT. You think he knew? It’s not like that. Later the future generation and the Holy Spirit, because in the letters there was such precious meaning, it became part of the bible that the next generations could read. Even our notes, the future may look at it.

This desire to preserve the group’s early teachings as something approaching holy writ is probably the explanation for some of the stranger documents I’ve seen. In March 2004, for instance, David Jang visited California, and spent time with some members of the group. They apparently recorded and later transcribed some 13 pages of Jang’s ramblings, so that future generations might be able to share in such edifying pronouncements as:

Do you know about our history? We should know our history. Do guys teach these things in SD? Tennis player, I should play tennis with them before they go. SF and here is so different. It feels like I came to a different country. There is like jet lag. Atmosphere and climate is different. It’s really strange. Same state. In America, it’s 50 countries. In California, even within same state, I drove all the way down from Vancouver, it was so difficult…

And there’s more. But after a while, more evidence just becomes more evidence. And if this isn’t enough to convince someone that the group has very shaky foundations, I can’t quite imagine what will.

I should reiterate that this belief was not universal amongst members of the community, even before 2006; and indeed, some members from that time seem to have been kept entirely in the dark about what the others believed. I’ve heard this sort of thing from lots of people, but most recently one of my sources wrote this (names changed):

the one I hear that didn't confess that Jang was christ was A, the one that did Jubilee mission for a while... I knew it because B told me that... oh he doesn't know about Pastor...

To return to the question with which I opened this post, given that the belief was present and encouraged, why was it never openly proclaimed? My suspicion is that the community’s tradition of secrecy, circumspection and studied ambiguity was largely pragmatic. I think they knew instinctively that they would have difficulty recruiting new members, and probably even in retaining some existing members, if it was clear to all and sundry that they regarded their leader as a second Messiah. It’s also pretty clear that they were aware of just how controversial such a claim would be, and knew that if wind of it reached the larger Christian world, their group would have difficulty attaining its larger goals. As one of my sources wrote:

David or Borah tell you, “Don’t write this down, if it gets outside…” then there will be “misunderstanding.” They had in mind to censor this from the beginning. They keep all the “history” messages private and do not allow any copies of these controversial messages to be distributed. This is not even revealed to people such as Wagner and the like.

Another motivation may even have been that members of the group harbored greater aspirations for their “King David” than David Jang harbored for himself. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

David Jang and the “Genealogy of Christ”

2014-01-04T18:12:00.001-08:00

In my last blog post, I analyzed the various sermons entitled “The New Israel” that were given at different times and by various leaders from David Jang’s community. In this post, I’ll be walking through another set of documents from the “History Lessons” his community used to give to new members, these with the title “Genealogy of Christ”. In the process, I’m going to need to do a deep dive into some weird corners of eschatology and Biblical numerology, so I have to ask you to bear with me. I really am heading somewhere, and (I think) somewhere important.

To start off, let me briefly describe the six instances of the lesson that I have. They range from 2001 to 2005. Two of them are in German; one is a rough set of Japanese notes, with an English translation; the rest are in English. I received these lessons over two years from four independent sources, sometimes including the same document from different sources.

As befits messages delivered by at least four different speakers, in at least three different locations, times and languages, there are differences between the various documents. But the similarities significantly outweigh the differences, and there is no doubt that they all share a common, well, genealogy. To take just a few examples, they all focus their attention on Matthew’s genealogy of Christ and entirely ignore Luke’s; they all see Matthew’s 14/14/14 generational pattern as critical; they all compare the resulting 42 generations to the 42 months/1260 days of the prophecy in Daniel 12; all but the oldest (critically) describe Jesus’ ministry as fulfilling 1293 of the 1335 “days” mention in Daniel 12:12; and they all strongly imply that the remaining 42 days which Jesus’ ministry left undone will be completed by Jang’s community, if not by Jang himself.

I’m bothering to point all this out to drive home my conviction that the documents taken as a whole genuinely represent a consistent teaching of the community, at least over the years in question.

Obviously, the best way to get a sense of what these documents teach is to go read them yourself, and I encourage every interested reader to do so. But I thought I’d summarize what they have to say, and highlight some of the more, well, interesting theological moves that they make.

Despite their names, the documents that comprise this lesson don’t really focus on the genealogy of Christ in any normal sense, though they do use the 14/14/14 generational scheme of Matthew’s genealogy as a way to introduce the Messianic number 42 (i.e., 14+14+14=42). This is important, because it’s how they connect Matthew’s genealogy to the “1260 days” – i.e., 42 months - of Daniel 12. As 2005b puts it:

Let’s say I am waiting for someone, when is he going to come. When is that time? So Daniel 12, there is this saying, when is Christ going to come. There is an answer to this. It says after 42. The number 42 comes out. When number 42 is all fulfilled, Christ would come. Then, as soon as they read Matthew 1, they are really amazed.

Jesus came after 42 generations. This is the fulfilment of the prophecy of Daniel.

The idea being there, of course, that Daniel 12:7 says the end will come after “a time, times and half a time”, which is widely understood to mean three and a half years, i.e., 42 months. Nor is Jang’s group the first to point out the connection between Matthew’s 14/14/14 schema and Daniel 12:7.

I suspect - though I’m no expert - that Jang’s group is also not the first to make the second theological move: that of connecting the second number of the Daniel 12 prophecy, namely, the “1290” days of 12:11, to Jesus’ life and ministry. If Jesus was born after “1260 days”, and was 30 years old when he began his ministry, then that makes for “1290 days”. As 2004b says:

*1260 - it was Jesus coming to this earth (baby Jesus) and 1260 was fulfilled by his coming

*1290 - was the number (1260 + 30 years later) when Jesus started public ministry – fulfillment of 1290

And 2005a:

Moving on, all four documents say that since Jesus’ public ministry lasted for three years, then “1290+3” actually gets us to 1293 days. And that’s important, because it means that Jesus’ ministry actually left another 42 “days” unfulfilled out of the 1335 total days mentioned in Daniel 12:12 (e.g., 1335-1293=42). The Japanese notes (2004a) very helpfully include a diagram:

2005b doesn’t have a diagram, but is working with the same ideas:

1335 days. When was Jesus born? He was born in 1260.

Do you understand? Daniel prophecied that Daniel would come after a time a time and a half. 42. HE came finally. Then how long do you have to go for the temple to be recovered completely.

1335. This was the prophecy of Daniel. If you go up to here then you will be blessed. Don’t you want to be blessed like this. Christ finally came. He lived for 30 years. 30 years of Private life, he lived 33 years. So then what remains is 42.

Their math is as impeccable as their interpretation is implausible, but it’s their next theological move that’s critical.

After introducing this problem of the “missing” 42 years, the 42 years that Jesus was unable to finish, the lessons then make a startling suggestion. Perhaps those 42 years are supposed to be fulfilled by someone else, or some other group. Or maybe even their group.

2005b makes the connection explicit. Although it doesn’t quite say, “We’re the ones that are going to fulfill the missing 42 years,” it leaves no room for doubt as to how it’s going to play out:

The time has come. Actually going around the big circle came back. The time that we have been waiting for has come. We must make this remaining History. What remains? The 42 remains.

The ones who go up to this. Now we have got to look at the History of our Church. It started in 1992. It was a historical time. How old were you. You lived with no thoughts. At that time, it was our spiritual conversion. Really, there were so many spiritual things that happened.

2004b follows the same pattern, but starts by asking a question:

Everyone, who will fulfill the remaining 42 years of history?

And then immediately answers:

This time, right now, this is the time to fulfill this remaining history.
Pastor, taught us what the true life of Jesus Christ was. He taught us that his cross was great victory and not failure. He was the one who testified amazing obedience, sacrifice and love inside of Jesus Christ. And he was the one who let us know that this is the time of emergency. And that there is the history that remains. And the time has come to fulfill this.

I don’t see any way to read those paragraphs except: “Who will fulfill Jesus’ unfinished ministry? Pastor David will!”

This interpretation is confirmed by numerous passages later in the documents, which describe the group’s own (past and future) history in terms of precisely those “missing” 42 years. 2005b says that the “42” self-understanding was revealed over time:

Riught now we are speaking of the 42 year History.

The first 7 years. 1992-2000, for the first seven years, Pastor never spoke of 42, no one would have come. At that time, he only spoke of 7 years. Just go seven more years.

And during those initial seven years, it was the members’ close connection to David Jang that made the difference:

There is this Grace of the HS. Because they were all close to Pastsor. When we are close, when we are away, we lose all our strength.

In 2004b, “Pastor Deborah” described their community’s current status with a reference to the “first 14 years”:

So following Pastor, people who wanted to follow the will of God started to increase, so now our church has become 12 years. So first 14 years is almost over. 2 years remain.

And 2005b uses a typology found commonly amongst the lessons, that of dividing up the 14 years into “stalk, head and fruit”:

Now, among the 42 years, we are going in the 1^st of the 14 years. We are going on the 1^st of the 14 years. It is stalk head and fruit. Right now, we are going on stage of stalk. We are thankful that we came right now within the first 14 years. Those who go until the 1335 will be blessed. It will be thirty years from now.

So what does all this mean? And what is its significance? Anybody who’s actually made it this far has to know that there are few areas where there is more disagreement amongst Christians, or more creativity and diversity of interpretation, than eschatology. So let’s grant that David Jang’s group has a weird eschatology, and thinks that some obscure apocalyptic numbering scheme refers to them. David Jang himself has said repeatedly that the only real difference between his group and most Christians is in their different understandings of what the end times mean. There are lots of Christian groups with weird eschatologies whose fundamental orthodoxy has never been impugned. Who cares?

Well, for starters, most Christian denominations don’t believe that they are the specific group that is being called upon to initiate the end times; nor am I aware of any that have dated the initiation of said end times to their pastor’s birthday. Against a shifting backdrop of weird eschatologies, that one stands out as particularly notable. And more than that, particularly dangerous. If you want to manipulate impressionable young people, that’s a pretty good way to start.

But even putting that aside for the moment, it’s critical to understand that for Jang’s group, at least in these lessons, eschatology is Christology; and nobody thinks that Christology is a secondary issue. You can get a sense of this just from the great emphasis these lessons place on David Jang, and on his 43rd birthday (October 30, 1992) being the turning point which initiated the final 42 years. But it’s also critical to note that in the group’s reading, the number “42” is inherently Christological. It was 42 generations that have brought about Christ; and it is new 42 years that will anoint a second Christ. 2005a calls this figure the “second coming Jesus”:

What was JS supposed to accomplished? He was supposed to accomplish 1260, 1290 and 1335. all this prophesies in numbers were supposed to be accomplished.

We must know about the second coming Jesus. The 2^nd coming son in the continuation of Christ. it is like running a relay.

We first need to know how far the first runner went up to. The second one continues from the point and finishes the race. We need to know how far Jesus went.

If Jesus finished his running, the second son does not need to come. However, he will come to finish what Jesus did not accomplish.

2005c says that “the second Christ” – “der zweite Christus” - will pick up where the first left off:

Wir müssen die Geschichte verstehen.

Es war eine Prophezeihung, aber im bestimmten Punkt dieser Prophezeihung endete Jesus, weil Er umgebracht wurde.

Also in diesem Punkt, in dem Er aufgehört hat, wird der zweite Christus anfangen.

In English:

We need to understand the history.

It was a prophecy, but at some point this prophecy stopped referring to Jesus because He was killed.

So at this point where he left off, the second Christ will begin.

This “Christ”, 2005c goes on to say, will emerge from the “New Israel”, which in this context is clearly code for Jang’s community:

Jeder fragt über das zweite Kommen von Christus.

Wie wird es sein?

Wird Er ein Mensch mit langem Bart sein.

Nein, der zweite ist ein Mensch, der das fortführen wird, was Jesus angefangen hat.

Ein Mensch, der die neue Welt öffnet.

Ein Mensch, der mit Neuem Israel ist, der ist Christus.

Der Neue Israel.

Von dort kam Christus.

In English:

Everyone asks about the second coming of Christ.

What will it be ?

Will He be a man with a long beard?

No, the second is a man, one who will continue what Jesus started.

A man who opens the new world.

A man who is with the New Israel, this is the Christ.

The New Israel.

From there came Christ.

It is worth pointing out that this is also the fundamental message of other important documents, such as the “Two Stone Tablets” lesson from Borah Lin, which collapses Christology not just into eschatology but also into ecclesiology. This second Christ is the head and center of the renewed Church (i.e., David Jang’s community), which is also the Second Coming.

The first Messiah God sends. God sent him. That is Jesus. He has come. But his own people did not receive him. They rejected him. He will come again. Messiah will come again. This is prophesized. How will the second Messiah come? We need to carve it out like the first one. The second Messiah needs to be made on this earth… The Kingdom of God and the great body of Christ needs to be established and from their Christ will come out. . . Who is that one Christ? The one who started this body of Christ, the one who becomes the center of that body of Christ, becomes the Christ.. . The body that makes the Kingdom of God is the body of Christ. That becomes Christ. That is why we need to make and establish it.

That we need to establish the Kingdom of God is pretty close to heretical, in and of itself. To say that in doing so, we somehow create a “second Messiah” is not pretty close to heresy. It’s heresy, straight up, no shaker. It’s not a pedantic debate over some obscure detail of timing, like those interminable pre- or post-trib debates that haunted my youth. No, this is as fundamental as it gets. In Christianity, there only gets to be one Christ, and that job is already taken.