The Unknown Webcast Will Feature Former WCG Member Discussing Armstrongism

Former member of the Worldwide Church of God, Mark Tabladillo,who is now a Director of Ratio Christi apologetics ministry, will be discussing Herbert W. Armstrong, Armstrongism, and why he left the church on The Unknown Webcast on August 24th.

Glynn Washington On Racism And Life In The Worldwide Church of God Culture

End-time prophecies? 

Memorizing the bible? 

Required church vacations your family can't afford? 

Snap Judgment host and creator Glynn Washington shares his experiences 

growing up in the apocalyptic religion the Worldwide Church of God. 

He tells the girls about believing the end of the world was imminent, 

the white supremacist roots of the group 

and how he was forbidden from dating outside of his race, 

and the book that began to change his thinking. 

If you have your own story about cults, high-control groups, manipulation, or abuse of power, 

leave us a voicemail at 513-900-2955, OR shoot us an email at trustmepod@gmail.com. 

FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM: @trustmepodcast @oohlalola @vibehigherbitch 

OR TWITTER: @trustmecultpod @ohlalola

Listen here: #39: Glynn Washington - The Worldwide Church of God

The Roots of Armstrongism in the First Century Jerusalem Church

 

The Roots of Armstrongism in the First Century Jerusalem Church

By Neo

Christianity at its inception was a form of Late Second Temple Judaism. Jesus was a Jew who preached a form of Judaism to Jews. Jewish factions worshipped together in the Temple and in synagogues. The Jews in one faction of Judaism followed a man named Jesus and believed him to be the Messiah.  Only years later would the name “Christian” be applied to this faction. The times were filled with expectations of the apocalypse. Judaists, in general, were waiting for the first coming of the Messiah to overthrow the world regime. And the Jews who were followers of Jesus were waiting for the second coming of the Messiah to overthrow the world regime. Everyone seemed to understand that something revolutionary was going to happen.

Within the Jesus faction, a man named James, the brother of Jesus, became the leader of the Jesus Movement. James was a Jew and held Jewish practice in high regard. Two other men who were also leaders, Paul and Peter, did not have the same commitment to Jewish practice. Paul was concerned that these practices would develop into a wall of division between Jews and Gentiles. Peter seemed to vacillate between the Jewish pole and the Gentile pole. At one point, Paul said to Peter “I said to Cephas (Peter) before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? (Galatians 2:14).” Peter who accompanied Jesus throughout his ministry and was very close to Jesus had set aside Jewish practice in his personal life. There was a tension between James on one side and Peter and Paul on the other with Peter functioning as a kind of liaison, purposely or by accident, between the two sides.

This tension culminated in a controversy over circumcision, the archetypical requirement in Jewish theology and practice. Circumcision represented the outward symbol of salvation as understood in Judaism. It symbolized the covenant made with Abraham. It was the indispensable sign that Yahweh was Israel’s God and Israel was Yahweh’s people. So it is easy to understand that some Jews would regard this as a necessary condition, exceeding in significance such conditions as the Sabbath or dietary restrictions, for belonging to the Jesus Movement. Within the Jerusalem Church led by James, a faction that has been called by some historians “the Circumcision Party,” came into sharp conflict with Paul. There is no definitive indication in the New Testament that James supported these people. But neither is there any indication that he tried to oppose this faction while it was incipient.   

Paul opposed the circumcision faction with Peter’s sometimes wavering support (Acts 15:8-9). (Jesus had pointed out to Peter his wavering tendency.) Paul understood the profound meaning of what the Circumcision Party was asserting. They were saying that salvation within the Jesus Movement could not be appropriated without circumcision. They stated explicitly, “Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.” The Circumcision Party added an Old Testament requirement to the salvation that was in Jesus, a physical requirement that had now become only a cultural tradition in the teaching of Jesus. Paul was not anti-Jewish. He wrote that everyone who followed Jesus was a spiritual Jew but he did not concede to modifying soteriology as it was understood in the Jesus Movement. Paul also stated that circumcision was of the heart and had a continuing spiritual meaning for spiritual Jews – but the physical requirement was no longer a part of the theology. Of the followers of the Circumcision Party, Paul stated, “Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace.”  Paul expanded the principle beyond circumcision to include justification by the law to the exclusion of Jesus.

I would have speculated that Paul’s attitude towards the body of Old Testament litigation would be relatively mild and accepting. He was, after all, “an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee.” The litigation was now no longer the pathway to salvation but a colorful collection of ethics, customs, and traditions. But there is a passage, Colossians 2:8-19, that reflects a much more intense and negative attitude on the part of Paul.  (New Revised Standard Version throughout the remainder of this paragraph.)  Paul starts in Colossians 2:8 by saying: “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe . . .” He is speaking of human traditions and pagan philosophies. But later he includes the Old Testament litigation in this category.  He says first, “. . . He forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.  He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.” This seems to be a reference to the litigation of the Old Testament.  How else could past sins be defined among the Jews? Sin is the transgression of the law. If there is any doubt about the reference he writes the following statement: “Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”  Only the Old Testament could contain foreshadows of Christ. Paul, by interweaving the Old Testament litigation into this passage that also refers to human traditions and pagan philosophies, places the now superseded Old Testament litigation, such as circumcision, in the same category as these worldly traditions and philosophies. 

Herman Hoeh stated years back that he had met an important person in Israel and explained to him the theology of the Worldwide Church of God.  I regret to say that I do not remember the Israeli’s name. But after hearing Hoeh’s description, the Israeli said, as I recall Hoeh’s account, “If your description is accurate, then the WCG is heir to the Jerusalem Church.” Hoeh indicated that he was gratified by that observation.  I believe the observation to be true. I would add a refinement. Armstrongism is heir, not to the Jerusalem Church proper, but to the faction of the Jerusalem Church known as the Circumcision Party.  

The Jerusalem Church seemed to fade out after the calamity of 70 AD.  Christianity expanded enormously in the Gentile sphere. The fervid conflict over circumcision is now long forgotten. But here and there, the principle behind salvific circumcision still finds traction. And those who sustain this ideology can rightfully claim ancient provenance and even invoke the name of the Jerusalem Church. But this claim to a high-born heritage must be understood in its theological context. 

Note:  It is worth mentioning that Paul and Peter were not antinomian. Christianity, correspondingly, is not antinomian.  In some quarters, that is a persistent calumny against the Christian Church. Both men believed in the law given in the Sermon on the Mount. Paul, in particular, was highly moralistic and explicit about moral rectitude in the opening chapters of Romans. Neither is the theme of this opinion piece antinomian. Those who are advocates of viewing the New Testament as just a patina on the Old Testament have a personal obligation to understand this issue if they claim to be Christian. The replacement of the Old Testament litigation does not equate to antinomianism no matter how often repeated.

 

Brenda Denzler: "...the day I was disfellowshipped, it felt like the earth literally weaved and wobbled under my feet"

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You

One survivor on "New Normals" and living through "apocalyptic" times that reveal who we really are.

BY BRENDA DENZLER

PUBLISHED MARCH 31, 2020  www.curetoday.com 

I have faced the apocalypse three times, now, in my life. I managed to come through the first two. Not unscathed…but I did survive. However, the world that I knew afterward was not the same one I'd known before.

The first time it happened I was 30 years old. When I was in my early teens, I'd joined a large fundamentalist religious cult that preached the end of the world by about 1975. Of course, that didn't happen, but personally, it more or less did. I wound up leaving the church in 1982 — getting kicked out actually. As I walked over to a neighbor's house the day I was disfellowshipped, it felt like the earth literally weaved and wobbled under my feet. It was a blow to lose the world I'd known for fifteen years. All the things I thought I knew, all the things I'd done because that was just what good, righteous people do…. All gone. Life went on, however, a new and different life than the one I'd thought I'd have.

The second time was in 2009 when I was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. Another little apocalypse, but this time it challenged not just my worldview and my way of being in the world, but my life itself. Like the first time, I survived this, too. I was lucky. But also like the first time, my life was never the same. This time, though, there was a name for what I was facing — a "new normal."

Today, I'm in the middle of the third apocalypse of my life: the COVID-19 pandemic. No…that's not quite right. This time "we" are in a little apocalypse, not just me by myself. And we're not in the middle of it at all — we've only just begun.

Our way of being in the world is changing every day. Things we thought we knew, things that we thought were truths and steadfast parts of our lives that we could pretty much rely upon, are being revealed as only provisionally true or frankly untrue. Almost everything is in flux for us now, like the ground that moved under my feet decades ago when my personal world shifted on its axis.

We will, however, find a collective new normal. Eventually. I've never liked the term. It makes it sound like everything gets OK again. It's maybe just a little different, but it's basically just like it was before. Before the world fell apart due to a belief system collapse or due to a cancer diagnosis. That's not true though. As many cancer survivors know, a "new normal" always means leaving something behind, something that you inevitably miss.

I miss the certainty and reassurance of being a fundamentalist — of having my world consist of blacks and whites, wrongs and rights cosmic checklists that I can mark off to make sure that I'm OK and in God's good graces. I miss the way I felt good before cancer, a feeling of well-being and the ability to do things that are now beyond me, not to mention the assumption (false though it was) that the future only holds more of the same.

Today, I also miss the way I lived before COVID-19. Coming and going as I pleased, knowing that if I went to the grocery store I'd be able to get whatever I needed, not worrying about whether my high-risk status dooms me to my worst nightmare: the choice between drowning in the waste products from my own COVID-infected, self-destructing lungs or having a tube pushed down my throat to try to force oxygen into me--or being denied that because I'm too old at 66. I worry about the safety of my family and my friends. I am scared senseless at the unnecessary magnitude of the economic collapse that threatens to bedevil us as surely as the late effects of cancer treatments.

I only know one thing for sure. It's a thing that most cancer survivors already know: What doesn't kill you, makes you. It doesn't make you stronger, or prettier, or healthier or more kind or charitable…. It just makes you more of whatever you already are.

We will find a new normal, once this global mini-apocalypse has passed (at least, in its extreme form). What that new normal will be like is up to us. We will lose something, for sure. We will have to mourn what we've lost. But there will be no going back. What we are left with will have to do; it will have to be - or become - good enough.

Take a look in the mirror. Take a look at everyone around you in your life. Take a look at the human race. We are in the process of becoming more of whatever we already are, and we're going to have to live with it for a long time. Let's do what we each can to make it our best. As John Denver said in his song, The Eagle and the Hawk, "reach for the heavens and hope for the future, and all that we can be and not what we are."

Be safe. Stay well. Help others.

Brenda Denzler

Is Grace Communion International a trusted theological voice?

Grace Communion International recently moved its world headquarters to Charlotte, North Carolina.  It is a time of opportunity for another fresh start and that begins with a new web site.

Here is one of the things they posted:

Grace Communion International places great emphasis on the gracious triune God (Father, Son and Spirit). Our pastors and the people they serve point others toward the Triune God so that union and participation with Christ happens.

We are inclusive informers, teachers, and pastor-theologians who pursue God’s Word (the written Word, the Holy Scriptures and the Living Word Jesus). It’s our quest to follow where He leads.

We are passionate about equipping, training, and proclaiming the relational nature of God. Our goal is healthy churches who want to be a part of God’s renewal.

We are intentional about developing leaders; and new, growing, and multiplying churches. We lead with belief into the liberated love and life of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Our consistent effort is high support, high challenge, and grace always.

Grace Communion International is a trusted theological voice, who has proven that we are willing to lose it all so that we may gain Christ. We see our people, and others who join us, embracing and sharing the love of God in genuine ways.

While GCI was certainly willing to lose it all, I just wonder about the "trusted theological voice" can really be trusted?

Many ask—“What are your distinctives—what makes you different, or superior?” The bottom line is that we aren’t in competition with other Christian churches. We are simply striving to be the healthiest expression of Christian church that we can be.

"Healthiest expression of Christianity?"

By the power of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit we seek to proclaim the Good News in all of our communication and in the way we interact with others. The Gospel about Jesus really is good news and that’s what you will hear and experience in Grace Communion International.

Autocratic Government and the Church of God's

Checkout this blog Edge Induced Cohesion  It has an entry on autocratic regimes and how the WCG compared to them.

 I have long been a student of autocracy and its workings, as my passionate commitment to egalitarian practices has made me a recognized and determined enemy of tyranny from my youth. Today a conversation about Saudi Arabia prompted me to think on how different autocratic regimes appear on the inside and on the outside. I have already commented about this phenomenon once before from the perspective of solidity [1], but I would like to examine the problem again from a different angle, and offer insights on how autocracy works in practice, and why it is not always recognizable as such to those who are themselves in autocratic regimes.

-----

However, I have within my circle of acquaintances someone who has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, and he tells a very different tale. He tells a story of kings and men making decisions by consensus in family councils, of a great deal of freedom in discussion, and a country where he felt comfortable and free. Such a Saudi Arabia is not the image I have when I think of the country. And yet I believe he is telling me the truth. That is because I have enough experience of my own in dealing with autocracies and how they work to understand that they are very different on the inside and on the outside. That is to say that they are a refracted mirror that appears very repressive for outsiders but very comfortable to insiders. The act of being granted inside status in such a regime (as my acquaintance was, by his ability to participate in the consensus-building family councils) itself makes the regime and how it operates feel and appear far less repressive and far less repressive. Indeed, what is autocratic can appear to be very egalitarian without losing its essential core of autocracy in how it appears to outsiders.

How is this possible? In fact, it’s very straightforward. That said, before I go into explaining the case intellectually, I would like to give a personal example that explains why the question interests me in the first place. I was born in the Worldwide Church of God during what was known to insiders as the period when Worldwide was “back on track” in the early 1980′s and what people like myself considered the “reign of the Ayatollahs”. (The relationship between the unholy theocratic autocracy of Iran or Saudi Arabia and that of the Worldwide Church of God, and many of its splinter groups, is not coincidental. Nor is my interest in it accidental.) Largely because of my own horrific childhood, I became driven to understand autocracy and tyranny and how it worked, and how I might avoid being its victim again, when I was able to speak up for myself and do something about it. It should be noted that my intense hostility to abuse of power and authority has tended to self-select me as an outsider when it comes to autocracy, as both those who support and those who rule in tyrannical regimes have tended to view me automatically and instinctively as an enemy.

Nonetheless, I have seen enough of how autocracies operate to realize that they are not what meets the eye. For outsiders to the Worldwide Church of God, the word “cult” gets thrown around a bit too freely. And when one examines the mental images of people drinking kool-aid in mass suicides, that is a bit over-the-top. But in an essential way (shared with, say, monarchies or theocracies in general) there clearly is a cult of personality in a vast majority of the Church of God culture. I do not share it, but I have suffered from it and I recognize it. Some truths cannot be spoken; some doors cannot be opened; some rails cannot be touched. When that is the case, one is dealing with an autocracy, regardless of its form of government. For the form is but the avatar; it is what is inside that matters. On the outside, the Worldwide Church of God (and many of its offshoots) have tended to seem like very barbaric autocracies. Marriages were broken up because someone had made an ill-advised marriage decades before conversion. Communication in sermon messages is, in times of crisis, often in code because some people know what is really going on but those people do not want others to know before their plans are complete and successful. People were told whether they could or could not wear make-up, how long their dresses had to be, how long their hair could be, what kind of sugar or flour they could cook with. Clearly this was an autocratic regime, and so it was.

But it did not appear so to those who were insiders. If you are an insider in an autocratic regime, you do not see the wizard behind the curtain. You do not feel your arms pulled by a puppeteer. Instead, you feel a very friendly atmosphere of meetings, hunting trips, conferences, frequent and friendly dinner conversations, golf outings, and the like. You see promotions through the ranks based on loyal service (which you do because you genuinely support what you feel as your party, your group, your organization). You see yourself supporting a group of orderly, orthodox men against rebellious upstarts or intellectual revolutionaries who want to destroy your order and bring chaos and heresy.

The rest of this interesting entry is here:  A Refracted Mirror: Consensus Building In Autocratic Regimes

Herbert W. Armstrong: Mr. Confusion by Roger Campbell 1971

Herbert W. Armstrong

Mr. Confusion

by Roger Campbell

1971

Back to the Bible Braodcast

Lincoln, Nebraska

Click on document to enlarge

Andie Redwine: What Happens on May 22?

Andie Redwine reflects on "The Day After May 21" and her experience with the same kind of lies when Herbert Armstrong made a similar prediction.;

Forgive my cynicism, but I’ve been through this before.

I grew up in a church where I was scared to death of Jesus coming back at any moment. Luckily, members of my church were going to be whisked away on the wings of angels to a place of safety while the rest of the world wished that they had heeded the voice of Herbert Armstrong, my cult leader.

I was always afraid that I wasn’t going to be among the faithful. And at six years old, this can be a pretty paralyzing fear.

The people involved in my church weren’t monsters. They weren’t unkind. They weren’t unintelligent. They had just been duped by a false prophet who used fear and mind control techniques to recruit and sustain a large money-making operation. In the name of God, Herbert took well-intentioned seekers of Christ and turned them into devoted followers. Followers of Herbert.

 This was before the Internet, but Herbert’s game before religion had been advertising. He created a magazine called The Plain Truth, he had a television show, and he was a prolific author (although a great deal of his work was allegedly plagiarized). And because this was before the Internet, there was very little ability to fact check any of Herbert’s ideas or background. 

And he was convincing as hell. In its heyday, Herbert’s Worldwide Church of God centered in Pasadena, California had congregations all over the world. New York. Sydney. Brussels. Bangkok. Amman. Chicago. Philadelphia. London. Paris. He was a go-getter.

Herbert was also an end-times prophet. Growing up under the threat of nuclear war, Herbert offered people a way to escape the coming apocalypse. His way. God’s way.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting in a rented hall listening to Herbert Armstrong. I thought he was God. His voice would be booming through speakers from a cassette tape, but I would be looking at the podium with an empty microphone and just know that God was speaking to me. Everyone around me gave the podium their undivided attention, and so I did likewise. I figured if the adults were taking notes and flipping through their bibles when this man spoke, he must be God.

Jesus didn’t come back the way Herbert had thought. And it was the fault of the congregation. It’s because we weren’t ready. The church had to get back on the right track. We were off course. Sinners in the hands of an angry Herbert, who could direct his ministers to throw us out of God’s church.

We were terrified of this. All of us. Terrified. It was the fear that Herbert created in us to hook us, and it was the fear that kept us coming back for more. If we left, we’d be obliterated. There would be no hope.

Read the rest of her story here:  What Happens On May 22?

Andie recently released a movie about life in a cult, Paradise Recovered