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CHRISTIANITY: Time for (another) paradigm change? Hello!
I’m Don Winterstein, author of this website. I retired about 10 years ago from a career in scientific
research. After earning the PhD in physics from the University of Michigan I did research in seismology, a branch of geophysics,
for 25 years. Now my interests have largely switched from science to religion. God was my first love, the person I
committed to before I got into science. Carrying out my commitment to God at this point requires a larger share of my time
and attention than before, and partly for this reason scientific research for me has become a thing of the past.
My life has been replete with religious experiences. By religious experience I mean spiritual interaction with
a spiritual person, most importantly but not exclusively with God. By God I mean the triune God of Christianity. My spiritual
interactions with God have been with the Holy Spirit or the Father, but not Jesus; in other words, they have been with God
as spirit, not God as man. I had a particularly intense series of interactions with God more than 40 years ago. It
involved intimate encounters lasting perhaps an average of two hours a day over a period of about 20 months. These encounters
shaped and dominated my life. Until quite recently I had no reason to make these experiences public, but now, as I see
things, God is insisting that I do so. I describe these experiences in My revelation. (Extrapolations contains
a much shorter version.) Subsequent to this revelation of God, after spending two years, ten months and eighteen days(!)
in the US Army, I studied science and became a professional geophysicist. For scientists, communication involves sharing
ideas or information on matters that are always publicly accessible. That is, if a scientist makes a claim, anyone who has
the appropriate resources can check out that claim for himself or herself. As a scientist I am therefore reluctant to divulge
my private revelation, because no one can check to see whether it is valid or not. Nevertheless, almost all of God’s
special messages to people came first to prophets privately, and only then did those prophets make them known publicly.
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My revelation is quite different from previous Judeo-Christian
revelations, and I believe most people will find it shocking and offensive. But even if it offends everyone, I must divulge
it because that is what God asks of me. It may help, however, for me to explain why I think God wants to make this
information public. Briefly, I believe that God intends to use it to establish a new paradigm for Christianity. Four thousand
years ago God established a paradigm through Abraham. In Abraham God went from being a god above all the others to being the
Only One. Later, through Moses, the God of Abraham remained the Only One but revealed himself as a stern lawgiver. Two thousand
years ago Jesus changed the paradigm: God went from stern lawgiver to loving father. Now I believe God is once more changing
the paradigm for many of those who love him. Under this new paradigm God becomes loving husband more than loving father. All
these paradigms have always been simultaneously valid, but as circumstances changed down through time, different paradigms
have come to the fore and dominated. Why should God now want to be regarded more as a husband than as a father? I can
think of three major reasons and many lesser ones. I discuss these in more detail in My revelation and in my book, but here is a brief outline of my three major reasons: First,
in my revelation God reveals himself powerfully as a husband who is active as a person in today’s world. It has been a while,
in my opinion, since God has asserted himself vigorously in our world, and I think he feels that now is the right time and
my revelation is the right way to reassert himself. Second, many people feel that traditional Christian sexual morality
lacks a rationale in today’s world. Consequently they are ethically adrift concerning that aspect of life. A paradigm that
takes God to be husband establishes a spiritual reference frame for sexuality that has implications for all human sexual relations.
Third and possibly most important, God as husband becomes naturally compatible with scientific discoveries concerning
the origin of the world and its life forms. Scientific discoveries such as the great age of the world and the extinction of
huge numbers of species in the distant past are not going to go away. Eventually most people will recognize that these findings
are well-established. If Christians do not have an intuitive way of grasping how these facts might be compatible with the
God they love, they'll face never-ending assaults on their faith that are sure to weaken it. Some intelligent Christians
with backgrounds in science have in fact made peace with these scientific discoveries, but I know of no one who actually assigns
God a credible, intuitively understandable motive for creating living beings in the way we now know they were created. That
is, if God is almighty, and if his purpose is to be a loving father to his human children, what possible reason could he have
had for creating those children in such an indirect and inefficient way as through organic evolution? From the fossil record
we see that life forms seem to come into existence and then often pass out of existence haphazardly, as if they had no purpose.
Atheists seize on this fact to support their belief that no intelligent being was in charge of creation. Seeing God
as husband rather than as father makes this mode of creation not only understandable but necessary. A man does not marry a
daughter, or a sister he has grown up with; rather, he seeks a woman who came into existence independently of himself. Therefore
God gives the creation free rein to drift at will, intervening only if and when he sees that its direction is no longer consistent
with his objectives. This necessary independence of the creation elegantly and compellingly solves what to some people
is theology's thorniest problem: why a good God allows so much evil in the world. Evil comes because God does not pull on
the reins, and he doesn't pull on the reins because to do so would thwart his primary objective. God requires a specific
outcome—namely, a wife whom he can love and marry; but he lets her come into existence as independently from himself as he
can. That is why Earth's organisms appear to have emerged haphazardly. This mode of creation is clearly not as efficient
as the mode presented in the first chapters of Genesis, but it is the only way that God can obtain a proper wife. If he did
things in the way a literal reading of Genesis says he did, the people he creates would always be his children and could never,
collectively, be his wife. The inefficiency of this creation process accounts for the very long times required to complete
it. What might a "wife of God" be? My book treats this concept in several places (see Sexuality of God, "Sex and worship" and Towards
corrected models of the world), but it's worth introducing the topic briefly here in order to cut down on likely misconceptions.
First of all, the divine marriages are real marriages, so God as husband interacts sexually with his wife as one would expect
him to do in a real marriage. But God is spirit, and his marriages are spiritual. Sexuality therefore needs to be redefined
and generalized to apply to spiritual beings such as God. (See My
revelation for details.) God's wife is nearly always a large group of people, such as the nation of Judah in the
Old Testament. The people respond to God as a unit so that they become, in his eyes, a single person. The apostle Paul's description
of the "body of Christ" is appropriate here. Although the body has many diverse members who are individual humans, they become
one in Christ, and Christ can interact with them as if they were a single person. Old Testament prophets such as Hosea, Jeremiah
and Ezekiel exercised similar concepts when referring to the nations of Judah and Israel as God's wives.
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What I think of the Bible I am confident that the
major stages in the development of God’s people are correct as recorded in the Bible, because I have lived them. I believe
God inspired the Bible, but I do not believe the Bible is inerrant. For the most part I won’t say which passages I think
might be in error, because I don’t know for sure. But I suspect in some cases the inspired writers imposed a divine
interpretation on events that were not historical but were in the category of local myth. The creation accounts in
Genesis are prime candidates. In some cases the inspired writers were so deeply enmeshed in narrow cultural frameworks that
their teachings are colored by them to a degree that makes some of the teaching inapplicable in our time. I think some of
the New Testament writings, for example, were so dominated by the framework of Moses’ laws that, to be meaningful, they
need to be restated in our day. Biblical inerrancy seems to me to be a wasteful concept, because those who believe
the Bible is inerrant cannot agree on how to interpret it. Of what value is inerrancy if people can't agree on interpretation?
The value of the Bible is the power it has in human lives, not some abstract quality such as inerrancy. A consequence
of belief in inerrancy is that people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy debating points that probably should be
skipped over. That said, something like the concept of biblical inerrancy has been very valuable as an aid to communication
among Protestant believers. If people take the Bible to be the ultimate authority in matters of faith and practice, then they
have a common basis for sharing and discussing ideas and beliefs. Still, in order for the Bible to have this value it doesn't
need to be regarded as inerrant but only authoritative. Is the Bible the word of God? I believe the Bible is not the
same as the word of God, and New Testament usage would certainly back me up on this. The word of God is something like God’s
power to influence human lives and world events. Passages of the Bible can become the word of God when they influence
lives. The prophecies of Jeremiah brought me to God, so at that time they emphatically became the word of God for me. Many
of the prophetic writings have been my favorites ever since. A Bible sitting unused on someone’s shelf definitely
is not the word of God, and passages of the Bible that have no influence on particular listeners or readers are not the word
of God for those people. Perhaps I should add that, when God first came to me as I was reading the prophecies of Jeremiah,
I very much believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. I've sometimes wondered, if I had not so believed, whether
God would have come to me through it in the way he did. My tentative conclusion is that he would have, because the power of
the text was there for me whether I believed the whole Bible was inerrant or not.
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My book I wrote “Are the Vessels Worthy?”
in the mid 1990s to help Christians overcome challenges of materialism. Parts of it are autobiographical. I abandoned it in
the late 1990s because I couldn’t find an audience. I realize now the book lacked something important: While
it was based on my personal revelation, it said very little about that revelation. Now that I have divulged details of my
revelation, perhaps my book will take on value for some. I need to change a few parts of the book, because I no
longer fully agree with them. In most cases it’s just the wording, in other cases it’s the sense as well.
I’ll be working on revisions over the coming months. But in general nothing I've written on this website should
be regarded as chiseled in stone. In all my writing I regularly go back and change things. The parts that should
change least are those that give details of my spiritual experiences. One of the great things about Web publishing
is that, if an author finds he's used poor wording or made a factual error, he doesn't need to defend what's written or apologize
for it, he can just go in and fix it! For this reason I'd appreciate your comments and criticisms. If you can make
a case that I've misstated something, I'll very likely heed your point of view and modify the text. What I guarantee
is that, at the time of writing, I did the best I could. Are the Vessels Worthy? Part
1: Preface Are the vessels worthy? Jesus
Why believe in Jesus? Part 2: Why
believe Jesus’ miracles? Enervating doubt and mindless belief Part 3: Where I am coming from Part 4: Evil Religion and science Part 5: Religion and science Postscript
on evolution Part 6: Sexuality
of God Sex and worship Part 7: Sex and worship Knowledge of God and the purpose
of life Part 8: Knowledge of God and the purpose of life Marriage of the Lamb Part
9: Marriage of the Lamb My creed and my state of mind Part 10: Towards corrected models of the world Part 11: Towards corrected models
of the world Belief and conversion Part 12: Belief and conversion The next step “What
must I do to be saved?”
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Brief bio About the author: facts and dates. Donald
F. Winterstein (Memoirs
with pictures.) 1937................Born in Auburn, Washington, USA. 9/52-6/55........Attended high school at
Concordia College, Portland, Oregon. (Concordia prepared students for the Lutheran ministry.) 9/55-6/57........Attended
junior college at Concordia. 12/56...............Dramatic religious "conversion" (Where I am coming from, My revelation)
9/57-Fall, 1958.Attended Concordia Senior College, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Fall, 1958..........Fasted 42 days, got
expelled from college (Where I am coming from, My revelation). 1958-1960........My revelation. 8/60-6/63..........Served in Germany
as draftee in US Army. 9/63-6/64..........Earned BA in English with minor in religion at Valparaiso University, Indiana.
9/64-6/69..........Earned MS in solid state physics, University of Idaho. While getting physics prerequisites out of
the way I took upper level courses in philosophy, psychology, history, anthropology, plant physiology and economics. Phi Beta
Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi. 9/69-6/72..........Earned PhD in high energy/cosmic ray physics with minor in astronomy at University
of Michigan. 6/72-6/73..........Postdoc in cosmic ray physics at University of Leeds, England. 9/72..................Married
Chen Sie-Hua (“Juty”), a Chinese woman with MS in mathematics. We have a son, Wayne, and a daughter, Connie, both
in their early 30s. Juty has taught math part-time in community colleges. 1/74-5/99..........Research in seismology
at Chevron Oil Field Research Company. Since 1970 I have published numerous papers in scientific journals. (List of geophysical publications.) 5/99...................Retired from Chevron and from geophysical
research. 2002..................Diagnosed with prostate cancer. Present: Listed as "Living
Legend" by Society of Exploration Geophysicists, a professional society with about 30 000 members Chairman,
California Rare Fruit Growers, Orange County chapter (>200 members) Past president and current treasurer, Orange
County Organic Gardening Club (>70 members) I devote most of my time to caring for 90 or so fruit trees (not
all "rare"), many kinds of berries and many veggie plots in my garden of edibles. Three times a
week I also go on 4-5 mile hikes in nearby hills. Contact me I welcome communication.
Send comments and questions to dfwinterstein@msn.com. Please include a key phrase of the selection you are writing about
so I will be able to find it quickly. Don Winterstein
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