MZTV 1118: Must One Understand What One Believes?

James Coram, the president of the Concordant Publishing Concern, wrote an article in Unsearchable Riches magazine in 2000, attempting to discredit my position at the time (which continues to be my position) that one must understand what one believes, namely, that death is the absence of life rather than the continuance of life in another form.

It seems incredible that such an argument could arise, but it had become the position of the Concordant Publishing Concern and its founder A.E. Knoch that one could hold a position opposite of the truth without compromising one's belief IN that truth. In his zeal to include as many members as possible in the body of Christ (the foundational tenet concerning which is the death of Christ), Mr. Knoch adopted this absurdity and codified it in an article titled, "The True Basis of Fellowship." The thrust of the article was that fellowship must center around behavior rather than teaching. Correct teaching was, apparently, dispensable.

The critical mistake made by Mr. Coram throughout his 2000 article was the conflation of THOROUGHLY understanding a subject with understanding the subject itself. In other words, Mr. Coram assumed that—in the case of death—one's misapprehension of certain particulars of death would not and could not derail one's understanding of death itself. At no point in the article did Mr. Coram face the unfortunate fact that billions of people fail to understand what death IS, let alone grasp any certain particular concerning it.

So assumed is the fantastical notion that death is popularly understood to be the opposite of life, no practical distinction is made between truth and error. Such a mistake, while hoping to do good, in fact accommodates our greatest Adversary, Satan, who developed and infused into humanity doctrines of demons (the Immortality of the Soul and the Trinity) to ultimately destroy the importance of the faith of Christ in entering the death state. The result is that billions throughout the ensuing centuries who have claimed to believe in the death of Christ do not, in fact, believe it at all.

Martin Zender Answers James Coram: http://martinzender.com/MZTV/Martin_Zender_Answers_James_Coram.pdf

MP3: http://martinzender.com/MZTV/MZTV1118_Must_One_Understand_What_One_Believes.mp3

Martin's homepage: https://www.martinzender.com