Heresy

I'm sorry, there's no two ways about it. Joseph has been de-fellowshipped for heresy.

I've done my best to get him to change his mind. But we've been discussing this since the debate broke out over coffee after this evening's worship, and I really feel there is nowhere to go.  The argument was over the interpretation of Rev 9 that I gave in the sermon.

 ¹And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.

 ²And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

Now the disagreement was quite simply this - that if there was smoke "as of a great furnace" coming out of the bottomless pit, then in my view clearly the furnace was floating in mid-air within the bottomless pit, at a measurable distance from the surface. Otherwise how could the smoke have got to the top by now?

But Joseph's contention is that this is being overly literal. In Joseph's view, the furnace is actually at the infinitely-deep hypothetical bottom of the bottomless pit, and the smoke has been rising for ever, which is why it's just reached the top of the bottomless pit.

To which I point out, if the pit's bottomless, it's bottomless. It is not that the pit has a bottom that is infinitely far down - the bottom doesn't exist at all.

But Joseph replies that here he stands - at the theoretical bottom of a bottomless pit - and he can do no other.

For the meantime, Joseph is suspended and de-fellowshipped, while the Doctrine committee considers under precisely which part of Biblical interpretation he has fallen.

I can see already that it's going to be a bad summer for heresy.