The most magnificent and most educated Church of God leader to ever exist in human history talks about the struggles he goes through to write his booklets. His brain is such an awesome machine that it constant is coming up with new ideas and concepts. It is then initially important o him to add those new revelations to his booklets. It is an awesome task and only he is the one able to do it.
I’ll tell you an interesting story. When I wrote my literature, I found something. It’s just the way my writing is. If I were like Mr. Armstrong, I probably would not need to do this. He was a great writer. I’m an okay writer who worked hard and you know, kind of got better. That’s the way I would describe myself.I would write a booklet and then I would come back through and make another pass, and I would see certain things I couldn’t see when I wrote it. I would give the pages to my wife and she would install them. Then she would hand me the booklet again, and I would read through it again and see things that time that I couldn’t see because the other things I had installed blinded my ability to see it. I would continue to read it. It was a lot of work, believe me. Those who think the literature…“How did you write it all?…don’t realize I read and reread…and I am not a fast reader…I read and reread, just in editing my literature, anywhere from 10 to 40 times—6,000 pages—so you can do the math; that is just the books and booklets.I would, eventually, know that the book or booklet was done when I could not read through and find anything else; then I said, “That is it. Print it!” That usually was six or seven times. The longer ones, I would sometimes add more parts. Whenever I did that, I would read all the way through a book. For instance, Anoint Your Eyes started at two hundred (and I think) sixteen pages and ended up 270, because I would always want to add other things to it. That’s a little different situation.Some of the earlier booklets I went through many more times, because I just wasn’t a very good writer in my opinion, and you know, Why The Restored Church of God? I edited 44 times. That was the first booklet, but I got better, I had to or I would have been dead soon, or my wife would have been……
7 comments:
This is a pretty good indication that he doesn't have the talent and should just give up writing entirely.
After all, how hard can plagiarism be?
RCG insiders who later left will attest that nearly all the early booklet rewriting was done by Mrs. Pack, not her husband.
Pack had many ghost writers back in RCG'S early days.
Pack had many ghost writers back in RCG'S early days.
Yes, there are a number of online PDFs that have no by-line. Over at the Painful Truth site some years ago, one of the RCG ghostwriters responded to an article.
There are all those reworked and rewritten WCG booklets with variations on the original titles. HWA set the "Philadelphia standard" for journalism.
David Pack has the spiritual “gift” known as “automatic writing.” This “gift” can produce a lot of literature that is not worth reading. Often, after umpteen edits, the whole book just needs to be deleted anyway so it does not contradict the latest countless hours of demonic noise full of dozens of “proofs” that the old ideas of HWA were in error.
Gerald Flurry even had to edit half a dozen times over the years the stuff that he had plagiarized and said was delivered by a “mighty angel” (US postman?) and is the “little scroll” mentioned in the book of Revelation. As the evil spirits moved Gerald, he even edited and changed HWA's major writings and teachings.
Thousands of people could have read their Bibles through from cover to cover a number of times if they had not been so busy warping their minds by reading the writings of demoniacs on the so-called COG scene.
6.24PM I envy people who have read the bible without reading someone elses take on it first. Even after many years, I still have to struggle to see the scriptures with their plain meaning, free from others influence of their interpretation. After avoiding reading a certain book in the bible for a long time, I always see it differently when I finally go back to that book. I wish I had read the whole bible before reading Herbies bible correspondence course.
You made a point so very well, 3:42, one that I've been stating for many years now, and it is so good to hear it from someone else.
Normally, in accumulating knowledge, we humans tap into a wide variety of sources that are available to us, we evaluate them, and a picture emerges, often based on a consensus of what the experts have to share, and flavored with our own life experiences.
Several departures have come into play with our knowledge of the Bible, or theology in general. First is that most of us did not have an extensive base of information or Biblical knowledge at the time we first heard the teachings of Herbert W. Armstrong. Many people over the centuries since Gutenberg made it possible for the Bible to be mass disseminated, have sought after not what man can tell us about the Bible, but what God has to share. So, a specific type of teacher, a "man of God" similar to those found in Biblical times, has a natural sort of appeal. The concept of the maestro, the master or teacher, is known in many fields. After all, how can there be learning without a teacher?
Herbert Armstrong put together or systematized scriptures in a particular way. He said that he taught what is in the Bible. In so doing, he made the Bible say things that differ from the mainstream of theological scholarship in many key ways. And he claimed that his knowledge and authority came directly from God. In that, he was no different from many other teachers and leaders of both smaller and larger groups. Others have also systematized the Bible into a recognizable package, and their followers, in their minds, make those systems greater than the man who taught them. If you ask any of them, they will tell you that they believe "the Bible", that they are "obeying God", that their prayers have confirmed what they were taught, or that they are qualifying. They say that they don't follow "a man".
Of course, it makes people ask many questions when, believing that correct interpretation of the Bible and tuning one's lifestyle to that, one is given "special" understanding of prophecy, and then that prophecy not only does not pan out, but also becomes virtually impossible to be fulfilled in the manner or on the timeline that it was taught. That refers back to the pattern of obedience which was said to provide the keys, or criteria as to what would cause God to reveal his plans to one teacher or group, and not all the others. If the interpretation of the prophecy has failed, the rest of that man's systematization of the Bible has failed with it.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend my own personal path, but I'm awfully glad that it worked out that I spent several decades as an atheist and agnostic. Those years cleaned the slate enabling me to approach the Bible, and theology in general, with a somewhat clean slate, and a fresh perspective. It's nice to be able to do this with academic freedom, without the restrictions and penalties artificially imposed by one of the lesser teachers of our times.
BB
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