Well, the Reformation is over.
Everything that could possibly have been written on the essential teachings of Christianity have been written. The greatest minds of the ages have thoroughly dissected the bible, and no one can claim ignorance of it's truths based upon the volume of work smart and pious people have done. All the knowledge left to know in sanctification is what the Reformers have said, key verses, bible languages, and how to control our bodily passions. We can be confidant of our disposition before God.
Or should we?
Is it possible that that the greatest Christian minds of the past 1800 years have had it all wrong about what God considers righteous faith in Him? Is it possible that most of the scores of books that have been written, the countless sacrifices that the zealous have made, the ceremonies, and nearly every product of Christian conclusions about real faith worked over the millennia, in nearly every denominational stripe, have been motivationally wrong? It is possible that we don't understand this because the most important truths about Christ are just too simple and accessible to reason, their grave implications too obvious, and therefore reaches too deeply and demands too much of us? Are we missing a single truth about the bible that can be equally horrifying as it is joyous, and so penetrating that if preached rightly it would produce the same quality of faith from believers and the same quality of murderous outrage from unbelievers as existed in 1st century Judea?
The Pest Control Technician's Guide to Christian Faith is an attempt to strip off the church jargon, the academic literary formulas, and the years of theological and sentimental posturing of the common Christian work and let the world see for the first time in so long the cake under all the man made, excess icing placed upon Christian truth. What is real Christian faith? Not what conclusions and assumptions are right and which are wrong. Not which theological bullet point is supported by scripture and which is not. This is not another book taking up another defense of important yet comparatively inconsequential truths, such as the errors of notions of salvation through works and the corporeal presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Rather, the book discards the irrational assumption that one can have a faith honorable to he Messiah by only believing in Him through right facts but not necessarily for a factual reason. The thesis is simply that in real faith, conclusions about God and the bible are just as important as our premises; those premises being both our presuppositions and the evidence we bring forward to substantiate them.
This may sound like a relatively innocuous revelation, but when examined closely it leads one to implications about faith which reach to the very theological foundations of Christianity. The Pest Control Technician's Guide to Christian Faith, written by an unknown, common believer, and a stranger to the pulpit and halls of academia, can be nothing short of an earthquake to traditional biblical exposition, and can overturn and ruin the power of what has become only a man-made system for personal enrichment and self-aggrandizement. A Church which once attracted and people by nothing more than it's power to present and back up the reality of historical and spiritual truth, now a cause for shame to believers and revulsion to unbelievers as it can do nothing more than promote itself.
Is a second reformation for the church possible, but this time not based upon the rediscovery of the importance of faith in justification, but a biblical rediscovery of how faith is to be justified? A rediscovery of the nature of righteous biblical faith?
Bruce K. Silverthorne was born in Jacksonville Florida in 1957. His mother was a homemaker and his father a business executive. He has one brother and two sisters. Silverthorne started his career in the pest control industry in 1982. In 1986, he began working with the Multinational Force and Observers, a peacekeeping mission in Egypt, as their exterminator for the Sinai Peninsula.
After 8 years in the Middle East, he returned home to Jacksonville with his Coptic Christian wife, Josephine, and his four year old son. He was converted to Christianity in 1996.
He established Silverthorne Systems Co., a pest control business, in 1995 after thirteen years in the industry.
