One problem is that Wierwille hand-picked Craig Martindale as successor president, whose sexual victimization, corruption, and breach of contract against Frances Allen were found to be viable claims in court in 2000 and settled privately.
The group itself, The Way International, may be coming along in its theology but this is a flashing red warning siren that pursuit of truth is not the only thing going on. Same sex problems happened to WCG but it reformed and renamed itself (GCI) faster than TWI has come along.
The truth is that there's certainly an improvement in the heavenly state when Christ returns, but there is also a heavenly state right now known as Paradise and Abraham's bosom as others point out. I understand TWI agrees with Eccl. 12:7 that the spirit returns to God, but for it to speculate further against its consciousness requires grappling with the other passages.
Churchgoers who don't look into it get confused with the instant-gratification message that death automatically means "the highest heaven". Because I believe it's heavenly in its experience, it's not wrong to call it "heaven", but because there is a greater heaven to come it's more accurate to call it an intermediate state and the presence of Christ, as Ligonier rightly points out (the second quote above looks like someone else). But when they see the Bible using more moderate language than they've been "sold", they often overcompensate and deny all consciousness instead of admitting it's a different kind of consciousness than we are familiar with.
But people who go a fully unconscious soul-sleep route, under any name, have a whole lot of verses to deal with, like Paul's desire to be with Christ, that are not easily parried and that are not persuasive in the Greek workarounds that have been proposed for them.
One problem is that Wierwille hand-picked Craig Martindale as successor president, whose sexual victimization, corruption, and breach of contract against Frances Allen were found to be viable claims in court in 2000 and settled privately.
The group itself, The Way International, may be coming along in its theology but this is a flashing red warning siren that pursuit of truth is not the only thing going on. Same sex problems happened to WCG but it reformed and renamed itself (GCI) faster than TWI has come along.
The truth is that there's certainly an improvement in the heavenly state when Christ returns, but there is also a heavenly state right now known as Paradise and Abraham's bosom as others point out. I understand TWI agrees with Eccl. 12:7 that the spirit returns to God, but for it to speculate further against its consciousness requires grappling with the other passages.
Churchgoers who don't look into it get confused with the instant-gratification message that death automatically means "the highest heaven". Because I believe it's heavenly in its experience, it's not wrong to call it "heaven", but because there is a greater heaven to come it's more accurate to call it an intermediate state and the presence of Christ, as Ligonier rightly points out (the second quote above looks like someone else). But when they see the Bible using more moderate language than they've been "sold", they often overcompensate and deny all consciousness instead of admitting it's a different kind of consciousness than we are familiar with.
But people who go a fully unconscious soul-sleep route, under any name, have a whole lot of verses to deal with, like Paul's desire to be with Christ, that are not easily parried and that are not persuasive in the Greek workarounds that have been proposed for them.
You and u/Kensethfan2 might prefer to expound at u/TheWayInternational, which I set up to be more friendly to such discussion.