Dave Pack promotes himself as the worlds greatest theologian, writer and TV preacher. Pack claims to have written all of the booklets that RCG puts out. When he got humiliated a few years ago for accusations of plagiarism in his blatant copying of HWAs booklets, he set about reediting everything.
One of the booklets he claims to have written was one on the trinity. It is a typical COG mishmash of anti-trinitarian mumbo-jumbo that need serious scholarship updates.
However, Did Dave actually write it? Sources says he did not and has lied about it. The person who rote it has commented on the Rightly Divining The Word of Truth blog. The owner of the blog read Dave's book on the Trinity and wrote a small entry about it. In the comments that followed a person admitted that he wrote it and not Dave.
The person also admits that the research was poor.
chrome says:
I worked for Pack for about 3 1/2 years, and wrote most of RCG’s original “Trinity” booklet (which Pack later expanded into a book after my departure). Very enlightening times, to say the least, although there was nothing even remotely “enlightening” in what I was “inspired” to scribble in that booklet. In the few times that I have picked it up since leaving church and religion behind, I have found myself appalled at the level of ignorance and arrogance that it exudes.
Another comment had this to says:
I can’t help but notice the lack of grace, and mercy in Mr. Pack’s messages.
That has been the fundamental problem with Pack's cult. Grace and mercy are not words to be found in the Restored Church of God. It has ruined families, broken up marriages, financially ruined members and then cast them out when the money dried up, spiritually damaged people who were sincere, and has created a culture of fear and distrust. The more Dave opens his mouth the more ungodly he gets.
Nobody would have to worry about the trinity doctrine if the Xians had not made Jesus into God. But, they didn't have any choice, really, because they had already made out that humans are in possession of "sinful flesh" because of the sin of Adam. So Jesus could not have been human or else he would have been in possession of "sinful flesh"...which means he couldn't have saved anybody, not even himself.
ReplyDelete"Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive".
Grace and mercy are not words to be found in the Restored Church of God.
ReplyDeleteNot only Restored, I'm afraid. Grace is a very dangerous word in many COG's - too "Protestant" a word for some members. Yet it's very Biblical.
The Protestant's grace is to Armstrongism as the Jew's sabbath is to Catholicism. Never the twain shall meet.
ReplyDeleteYou killed Christ? No problem, he had it coming anyway. You want to raise Jesus in less than 72 hours? Get thee behind me, filthy sinner!
Even for a believer, it is very difficult to accurately describe any of the elements of God without imposing our human limitations.
ReplyDeleteI believe that it was very wrong for the Armstrong movement to place such severe limitations on the Holy Spirit, since He is portrayed numerous times in the New Testament as displaying emotions typical of a person, but not capable of being experienced by a force. The HS is plainly interactive with the heart or soul of humans, accurately reading and then transforming, thus indicating sentience.
If you believe that the Holy Spirit is simply a force, it leads to lack of understanding of His role, and almost demands that something replace that transformative role. In the case of Armstrongism, the placebo, or replacement, was absolute authority, government from the top down. There is a problem with absolute authority, in that it causes behavior modification which is not based on free will, but on ministerial coercion. This is valueless as compared to the Christlike
behavior which results from transformation of the heart.
WCG always bragged about proper understanding of this issue, but presented a theology which is spiritually inferior to proper understanding of the triune nature of God. All 3 elements of God are presented throughout scripture. Why deliberately diminish one of them?
BB
So, the Shema prayer should read, "hear Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is Three?
ReplyDeleteThis is from Deut. 6:4 which says, translated:
"Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God is one Yahweh".
In fairness to the Trinitarians, a 4th century doctrine, by the time the book of Acts was written in the second century, Christian were already thinking of the holy spirit as a person separate from Yahweh.
In the doctrine of the Trinity, you have chaos and confusion regarding the Spirit.
ReplyDeleteIn the doctrine of the Trinity, the Father's Spirit is most definitely NOT the Father. No, no, the Father's Spirit is somebody else. In the doctrine of the Trinity, Christ's Spirit is most definitely NOT Christ. No, no, Christ's Spirit is somebody else. Such is the Spiritual chaos of the Trinity.
Do you really believe it makes sense to insist the Father's Spirit is not the Father but is in fact someone else who is not the Father? Do you really believe it makes any sense to say one person (Person No. 3) begat baby Jesus but someone else turned out to be Jesus' father? (Person No. 1).
ReplyDeleteJesus said "I and the Father are one." The trinity teaches a uniplural, or triune God. There is nothing confusing about it. Since all are one, it makes perfect sense to call Jesus God, Father God our Savior, and the Holy Spirit can be the Spirit of God, or the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Think of it this way: If God the Holy Spirit is Jesus' Father, and all three are one, then God is still Jesus' Father.
ReplyDeleteWhat is usually meant by a spirit? A sentient being composed of spirit. You can't have "unoccupied" spirit, some nondescript substance just floating around, like air or ether. That would be ridiculous, and without personhood or some sort of life, it would also be dead, just as flesh and blood unaccompanied by personhood or animalhood would be dead.
To see what happens in the absence of belief in the trinity, all you have to do is look at the ACOGs and see what is sorely lacking! That tells the whole tale, right there.
Armstrongism teaches against the trinity based on two main points: 1) Personal pronouns are not used for the Holy Spirit in the ancient Greek. and 2) Triune "gods" occasionally appear in paganism.
If you do a topical study of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, you learn that the functions demand personhood. And these cannot be explained away by assuming "personification" (as is used with "wisdom" in the OT.)
BB
So Jesus God sacrificed himself to himself so that he himself could say to himself to "forgive them they know not what they do".
ReplyDeleteWith all that confusion, I'm not surprised that they did not know what they do...did...whatever.
Even though I understand the doctrine, such as it is, it doesn't make much sense to me for several reasons.
ReplyDeleteWe all have two complete brains. One on the left side and one on the right side and they are joined by the corpus callosum allowing them to communicate. Back in the 50's and 60's, they severed the cc in patients who suffered from severe seizures. That created bi-une people. Odd to think about. But in a sense, we're all bi-une people. I mean, have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost's cc's been severed, or are they still intact? Under any circumstances, it doesn't really mean that much. Even split-brain people still aren't really two people. I guess in the trinity sense, tri-une would really mean one brain in three different bodies, like the borg. Fine, so far as it goes, but then there's the whole Father & Son thing, which is either an obvious fiction (adoption) or else means the nature of god is totally alien to us. As if the whole borg thing weren't already?
What difference does it make if you believe in the trinity or not? What difference does believing anything about the nature of god really make? I'm waiting for the doctrine of Left Trinty Wartism. That's the belief that god has a wart on his left cheek with exactly three hairs growing out of it. All those who believe that it's on the right cheek, or has a different number of hairs growing out of it, or that it's actually a mole, not a wart, or that it's on his butt cheek, not his face cheek, well, all of those people are heretics. Nobody holds any beliefs about the status of god's warts, so why should other statuses be so vitally important to hold any particular belief about? I don't get it. If you get to heaven, you can figure all that trivia when you get there. And given the fact that the trinity describes some unintelligible alien creature that probably has all kinds of warts and probably octopus arms too that we just don't know about yet, even more reason not to worry about it, and just wait till you get there to find out.
Or better yet, send us an email with a jpg after you get there. Come to think of it, I never understood why there weren't tables and diagrams in the bible. They could have put them in the back where they put all the maps.