Did Reggie White lose his faith?

I have been reading a lot of stuff about Reggie White, and the changing of his beliefs and statements made by him shortly before his passing. Reggie as an athlete did a lot of witnessing for the cause of Christ, and the many things that I have read recently have greatly disturbed me. It is my understanding that Reggie was raised Baptist. Did he fall away from the faith that he once had?

 

I thought that the name mentioned in the above sounded familiar :

quote:

Michael Rood completed his "A Rood Awakening" teaching tour in many cities of the United States in summer 2005. The five and a half hour seminars were based on an extensive PowerPoint slide show, with live narration by Rood and his companion Nehemia Gordon. The seminar closely follows the material found on Rood's DVD Raiders of the Lost Book. Rood is clearly thrilled that SkyAngel aired some of his programs since 2004, and he credits this for greatly increasing his following and attendance at seminars.

and:

Periodically throughout the seminar Rood takes pot shots at Christian churches, teachers, and especially pastors, who he says write SkyAngel broadcasting to ask that Rood be taken off the air because of his heretical teachings. This is the same kind of constant ridicule that Rood and other leaders heaped on the Church during his years in TWI.

http://www.uia.net/~messiah7/spl_RoodAwakEvalua.htm

 

I don't want to get this thread off topic from the start, so my question is, what were the changes that he made that caused him to believe as he did?

 

A better question might be, how well are the weekly broadcasts viewed, because that is primarilly a Christian audience.

 

Are you referring to this article:

http://www.uia.net/~messiah7/spl_RoodAwakEvalua.htm


If so, I am not sure that you read it in it's entirety. Here is a quote that troubled me:

Rood referred to evangelical churches when he said that we "inherited nothing but lies from our fathers" (Jeremiah 16:19). Rood closes the seminar by condemning all who do not require people to obey the Torah (such as the Christian Church) saying they do not have the truth and are not in the kingdom of God. According to Rood, Christian churches and ministers are those who say "Lord, Lord" but do not obey the Torah as Y'shua says, and so "miss the whole thing."

 

I posted this earlier on an other thread, but I think that it is pertinent in this discussion:

multiple quotes from an article:

Sara White marveled at her husband's passion for the truth. She had known Reggie since college and married him when she was just 21, yet he never ceased to amaze her. Here he was each morning, forsaking celebrity golf outings and easy speaking engagements, to spend hours and hours in solitude painstakingly translating Hebrew.

quote:

"He would come upstairs and say, 'Did you know, this, this and this?' " said Sara on Thursday, as the faint afternoon light peaked through the stained glass of the old Mariner's Church in downtown Detroit, where she conducted interviews for a forthcoming DVD about Reggie. "He would teach me what he learned. He found, first off, (that the) King James (Bible) was taken out of context, a lot. A lot of words were added. A lot of words were subtracted.

quote:

Reggie meticulously translated each word and then put it in context. Sara says he found alarming inaccuracies. Some of it was lost in translations, Hebrew being translated into Greek and then being translated into another language. Some may have been just simple errors, the product of an era before moveable type.
Some were not so honest, Reggie White believed.
"And so, that was what he was getting to – there were so many mistakes in the translations," said Sara while her sister nodded in agreement. "That is why he was so doggone eager to (translate it himself)."
Each day brought new clarity, new opinions and more dismay that so much of what Reggie had once preached he no longer believed. He began to wonder if he had been used and lied to by ministers. He regretted using his fame to raise so much money for various churches he felt weren't true to God.
He felt, he told NFL Films just four days before dying, "prostituted."

quote:

"Reggie felt like the churches had become polluted because they were following man's tradition instead of God," Sara said. "We felt like early on, (the) idea (of churches) was right, but then later on it was polluted because now, instead of going with what God was saying, they added to The Word. They added their opinions rather than just reading.

quote:

Now, in death, Reggie stands at odds with many Christians. Sara says he even stopped calling himself Christian and preferred to be known as "Believer" after studying the Torah.


The complete article can be read in it's entirety here:

http://ca.sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=dw-white020306&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

 

Reggie at one time, took some strong stands on some strong issues:

http://www.family.org/cforum/citizenmag/features/a0002619.cfm

 

quotes and links:

"I don't want to have nothing to do with Christianity," said White, who has been a minister since he was 17. "I do want to have something to do with the Jewish Messiah who died for my sins, but I don't want to have nothing to do with Christianity."


Said White: "To me, the church is doing major damage to society as a whole."

http://www.jsonline.com/sports/gen/mar02/26369.asp

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Rumors swirled that Reggie had strayed from Christianity; one circulated that he had even become a Muslim. But the truth was far from that. In the years that followed his football career, he found himself with more time to reflect and study. Says NFL Films producer Ray Didinger, who conducted the interview with White: "What happened is he just said to himself, 'I should know more than I do,' and he got into it deeper than he ever had before." White stopped preaching in order to do just that. He tackled Hebrew and began delving into the Torah. He and Sara twice toured the Holy Land with groups, but White went again without her in October 2003, when he became acquainted with Hebrew scholar Nehemia Gordon. When Gordon arranged for him to visit the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum to view the original Hebrew texts, he says in an e-mail that White choked up with emotion.
"This is the best day of my life," White said.
"Reggie, you won a Super Bowl," Gordon said. "Do you really mean that?"
White looked at him with a tear in his eye and said, "It was an answer to a prayer."
Working with Gordon via the telephone or during his visits from Jerusalem, White pored over the Hebrew texts from 8 to 10 hours a day back in North Carolina, not an especially easy task for someone who admitted he had always struggled with reading. According to Gordon, "Learning Hebrew enabled him to get the original word of the creator in its original language." White became increasingly disturbed by what he found, that there was scant commonality between the original word and what he had always been told. Sara says, "Reggie concluded that he had been lied to for so long by preachers and mentors," and that realization only heightened his urgency to get at the truth. The Whites stopped celebrating Christmas and Easter because they were "in the tradition of man." Quarrels erupted when Jecolia and Jeremy were ordered to throw out their Beanie Babies because White looked upon them as "graven images," but Reggie himself threw away any football trophy he had won that included a statue of a player. He told NFL Films some ministers with whom he had been acquainted began viewing him as a heretic.
"He did not want any form of sin in his house," Sara says. "He wanted to correct every wrong in his life and he wanted to do it today. Now! He was in such a hurry."

http://www.blackathlete.net/artman/publish/article_0818.shtml

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http://www.magnoliareport.com/diatribe28.html

 

I was referring to the article in post#2 of this thread. </font>[/QUOTE]Sorry GD. I misunderstood what you were referring to.