“So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt . . . Moses seems rather idle, he just sits around and writes the Bible!” – title and lyrics from Keith Green’s album, circa. 1980
Author’s Note: This series is autobiographical to provide background for the books and articles you will find on this website. When the series is finished, I will provide a summation in a bio-page. Links to previous installments are found at the bottom of the article. –JWS, website creator.
The final years of the 20th Century were very productive in research and writing. My research took me into the heritage of the Celtic Church, principally the teachings of the Celtic saints of the Culdean era. This would have been medieval monks who taught doctrines which would have been Pelagian, Johannine and nativist, contrary to the imperial aspirations of the Holy Roman Empire. Whatever doctrinal and liturgical independence there was remaining of that branch of Christianity – it would have been found in the high country of Wales and maybe Scotland. I had discovered that my own ancestry descended from the tribal chieftains of that era. I coined the term “Cambrian” and began a process of transitioning my ministry from “Biblical Terranomics” to what would be later published as “The Cambrian Pesher,” a literary organ which continues to this day.
I taught my last classes at CWVL early in 1998 in anticipation of moving to North Idaho: the “mountains” to which I believed Jesus would have wanted His people to flee when they saw the “abomination of desolation.”
I had already discovered that the claim to sovereignty by the state legislatures amounted to idolatry. But for a few years, I tarried in Wichita, Kansas, to see if any movement by Evangelicals was possible to effectuate reform.
In 1991, the issues surrounding Operation Rescue during Wichita’s “Summer of Mercy” highlighted the inability of Evangelicals to grasp the importance of the Common Law on the question of abortion. For a brief period, I collaborated loosely with a jural society movement. My students Mark and Paula Drake promoted seminars through the Kansas Territorial Agriculture Society and through the years used various publicity stunts to increase public awareness of the increasingly rogue nature of current government officials. None take an oath of office in the form required by law.
The current irreverent attitude toward oath-taking in our culture, including in the churches, the institution of marriage, and so on – it should not surprise us that it has resulted in government officials who violate their oaths, as well, and with impunity attack our constitutional rights.
With a dominion theology, Churches could have done this if they were truly covenant communities. But the reality is that churches are not; they are social clubs.
I also published my final Biblical Terranomics on some hard-hitting topics:
One such was on “Presumption and the Sin of Uncleanness.” If you want to know why there can be no spiritual revival, you will want to read this:
Instead of a reaction in which Evangelical pastors might be motivated to look for ways to mitigate or even eliminate these sins, they simply shrugged their shoulders with a “Thank God for Jesus” mantra.
In response to my material, Rev. George Granberry, for example, could only offer this counsel during one of his Sunday morning sermons: “If you want to know why you need a Savior, read the Book of Leviticus.”
It is a fascinating phenomenon in terms of its perversity: the Evangelical inability to reform. Men who admire the leaders of the Protestant “Reformation” are not capable of reform themselves. It’s as if they have been inoculated against the truth.
The typical Evangelical response is to substitute the atonement of Christ in the place of obedience.
“Positional” sanctification takes the place of righteous living. Evangelical standards of holiness are limited to whatever the general culture demands to maintain public acceptance and respectability. It adds a little bit of extra prayer and other pieties, never mind that prayer is not righteousness in itself, but is effectual because of righteousness (James 5:16; Matthew 6:7). A sacrificial or penitential system which is used as a substitute for obedience or a cloak for antinomianism, is, by the Prophet’s definition, “witchcraft”:
Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.
For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.
1 Samuel 15:22-23 (KJV)
In considering the Prophet Samuel’s rebuke of King Saul as cited above, American Evangelical religion is both “Saulist” and “Paulist” in its antinomian orientation. Like King Saul, Evangelicals think that they can disobey God and make up for it with animal sacrifices. Like modern day Paulinists, they don’t even need to produce the expense of a sacrificial animal. The “blood of Jesus” covers it all! Evangelicals have been inoculated against the rebukes of the Holy Spirit. That is why “pointed” preaching does not change anything. In fact, demonism has overrun the churches.
Coming to that conclusion, I knew my usefulness among Evangelicals was forever done.
Some of my doctrinal positions developed later in the early 2000s would be anticipated in books I published during this period: Biblical Midwifery (1997, in which I introduced Grail theology and the doctrine of the Desposyni – years before Dan Brown’s DaVini Code) and The Mother Heart of God (1997, a pathbreaking systematic study of “the pneumatic role of the woman” – published serially years before Margaret Starbird’s “Divine Feminine” movement) which was a follow-up of my popular study Restoring the Foundations: Essays on Relational Theology, in which I used the doctrine of the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as a template for the structure and function of the earthly family: the earthly family is meant to image the heavenly family.
It can be found here or ordered on Amazon from Patriarch Publishing: Restoring the Foundations.
The notion of a married Jesus was first introduced in my study on “Presumption and the Sins of Uncleanness” mentioned above. Later, it would be developed into a book, Hierogamy & the Married Messiah. A print edition is not currently available.
One of the remedies for these sins was offered in the institution of plural marriage which I wrote early in the 1990s, then disavowed, and then picked up again at the turn of the century. Even though I tried to approach it in a responsible, scholarly manner, I was forever plagued by miscreants who used it for their personal ambitions: either by Christian leaders who wanted to discredit me to deflect my rebukes on other issues, or opportunists who used it for self-gratification. With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, that study took on a life of its own as it was pirated continuously. I finally surrendered copyright and gave permission to Clyde Pilkington at Patriarch Publishing House to produce the only edition of which I approve, which can be found here: Eros Made Sacred
My ambition for North Idaho would be to return to the land and start what I understood to be God’s calling upon Covenant men: to found a family abbey. My studies which anticipated this vision were published serially in The Family Spokesman. They would be collated into a larger study of a defense for men as priests to their own households which would come later.
Upon my arrival to Idaho, I would test the waters first. To my dismay, I would find the waters cold and full of piranhas.
(to be continued)
James Wesley Stivers, 10/29/23
