Anti-intellectualism in the Church of God

 

Way back in the early days of the implosion of the church several websites were chronicling the demise of the church with the hundreds of self-appointed saviors that split off with their own "true" churches. In addition to Gavin Rumneys Ambassador Watch, Gary Scott's Commentary, analysis, and memories of the
XCG community and culture was an amazing blog detailing the craziness happening in the church, particularly when it came to Dave Pack. If you think our current exposés on Dave are a recent thing, it is not so. Dave has been exposed since the day he left the Living Church of God.

Real Christians Don't Wear Tweed · 25 January 03

In a recent journal entry, I wrote the following after having listened to a David Pack sermon:

I listen to this and I find myself thinking, “Do you try to be this stupid?” and last night, I realized that in a sense, he does indeed try to be that stupid. In avoiding formal education (other than the “education” at Ambassador) and not reading anything that in any way remotely challenges anything he thinks, Pack tries to be, at the very least, uneducated.

Armstrongism has always, by necessity, had an anti-education bias. As Mike Feazell wrote in The Liberation of the Worldwide Church of God, “Herbert Armstrong and scholarship did not mix well” (24), and this is clear from the glaring historical glosses, misunderstandings, and slipshod exegesis that permeate Armstrong’s writings. His linguistic proofs fall apart when anyone checks up on him in the Oxford English Dictionary, and his logical proofs are so shot full of assumptions that they’re closer to being cartoons than syllogisms.

But to know this, a bit of education is necessary. A minimal amount, granted, but education nonetheless. And so to keep people from straying and asking too many difficult questions, Armstrong simply declared “Satanic” all the disciplines that called his methods into question and there was no more problem.

Those who cling to Armstrong’s teachings also have to continue to promote his anti-education bias. David Pack, leader of the Restored Church of God, is no exception, and devoted an entire sermon to the topic: “A Leaven of Grave Danger” in which he explains a type of “leaven you have almost certainly never looked for.” According to Pack, this deadly “leaven,” which he calls “spiritual Ebola” (63:09) [1], is “intellectualism,” but in reality is simply higher education.

A significant portion of the sermon is dedicated to mockery of the image of an intellectual that Pack creates for his followers. “It’s almost funny when you look at them,” Pack says, continuing, “They’re so impressed with themselves, and yet they’re slaves to what intellectuals are supposed to be” (33:10). Pack here is referring to the stereotype of a university professor, with unkempt hair, tweed jacket, goatee, and pipe, who looks off into the distances when talking and talks in a lofty style that’s virtually inaccessible to non-intellectuals [2]. He points out that Einstein is a perfect example of this, making particular reference to his wild hair, which, according to Pack, is something of a standard for intellectuals now. He claims that this is a conscious stylistic choice, failing to realize that the reason Einstein (to continue his particular example) looked the way he did probably had much less to do with a conscious fashion decision than with the simple fact that he just had more important things on his mind than what his hair looked like. (It is said he also forgot to eat from time to time, realizing this only when his stomach pains were too strong to ignore.) Strangely, Pack admits that this a stereotype, but maintains the validity of the image.

Another characteristic of intellectuals, according to Pack, is the language they use. Intellectuals, he says, “speak what I call, and I didn’t think this up . . . the language of scholarship. The furthest thing from Plain Truth-style writing. Mr. Armstrong hated it, and every time it crept into the church, he hit it with the biggest hammer he could find” (33:29) [3]. Admittedly, a great deal of scholarly writing is somewhat obtuse, but it need not be pointed out that this in no way invalidates the subject matter.

The criticism that Pack makes of intellectualism that is most seriously erroneous, and most dangerous to Armstrongism, is his ridicule of using the works of other writers and thinkers to provide authority for one’s arguments. God, Jesus (listed separately as they are in fact two entities in the Armstrongian pantheon), and Mr. Armstrong didn’t do this, Pack reasons, and for good cause: they had sufficient authority and didn’t need backing from anyone else. On the other hand, those who have no authority must buttress their arguments with quotes from others, which Pack equates with the scribes of the New Testament and labels “name-dropping” and says is “having confidence in the flesh,” as described in Philippians 3.3.

He begins by quoting Matthew 7.28, 29 [4], explaining that the scribes “didn’t have authority, they had to quote an authority” (48:40). Rabbis had authority, and after listing several first-century writers, imagines a scribe, in making his argument, to say to himself, “If I drop Hillel, who’s going to disagree?” (49:40).

Later, he points out that God doesn’t do this either. Unfortunately, he’s being serious:

We serve a frank God. He doesn’t posture things in the language of scholarship, and then quote some other god, or several other gods. “Well, you know I’m God, but Buddha said this too, and Confucius, and you know if you study Taoism you’ll find he said some things similar to me. So look into them and you’ll see, you’ll realize that it validates me.” Can you imagine God if he was that way? Can you imagine? Can you imagine if God said, “Now, you know, remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. And you think I’m alone in this, check what Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu, the Hindu gods said.” I mean it’s ridiculous. God just says do things (54:34).

This bit of nonsense if humorous for a number of reasons. First, it’s a completely anthropomorphic image of God, in keeping with the Armstrongian tradition that states, among other things, that God has a “spiritual body” (whatever that might be) [5]. Secondly, to equate the Armstrongian God with the God of Christian orthodoxy is ridiculous enough, but to bring eastern religions into the mix only further shows his ignorance of the basic tenants of these religions. The scenario he creates is silly, but certainly not for the reasons he provides.

What he fails to realize is why scholars quote outside sources. It is, to some degree, a question of authority. It is intended to show that a given idea is plausible and conforms to already-accepted notions. Additionally, a quote is often applicable to a particular argument, and providing the name of the idea’s originator, far from being name-dropping, is a requirement to avoid plagiarism. These are basic, even obvious ideas to most, but Pack seems completely oblivious to these principles (except for the plagiarism issue, which is a constant thorn for him as he paraphrases Armstrong’s entire library).

Armstrong would never have quoted sources (except for Strong’s and a few commentaries) for three reasons. First, much if not most of his heresy was simply plagiarized, and providing sources would not have helped him hide the fact. Second, most outside sources contradicted what he taught. Indeed, the few times he might have quoted outside sources, he did so with derision, essentially saying, “Even these deceived idiots get it right from time to time.” The final reason, related to the first, is that Armstrong supposedly received all his ideas directly from the mouth (which, in an Armstrongian sense, can be a literal orifice) of God. Who needs more authority than that?

Asking questions in a Church of God has never really been encouraged, to say the least. While the WCG under Armstrong never had a catechism, as such, there were certain types of questions implicitly understood to be appropriate and others understood as unacceptable. It is not surprising, then, when Pack condemns the asking of questions in general, subsuming it under the notion of it being pagan, “classical Greek thinking.”

The “questioning syndrome” he calls it (39:07), and the problem is endemic in our society, according to Pack.

A lot of people like to ask questions. I see it on talk shows all the time. All these intellectuals. Now nobody has the answers, and frankly, when you listen to some of them, they haven’t even figured out the questions, but they love to ask them. And then ask the experts the answers. And of course nobody wants to know what God thinks (39:36).

The question of the intellectual integrity of any sort of “questioning” one might find on a talk show aside, this clearly shows Pack’s attitude toward curiosity. Lest there be any doubt about its evil, Pack traces the Fall back to questioning.

Like Armstrong, he finds the source of all our problems back in the Garden, with its mythical two trees and the fact that Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge instead of the Tree of Life. Pointing out that the tree of both good and evil knowledge, Pack says that God’s forbiddance was equivocal to God saying, “don’t even touch a mixture” of good and bad (78:40).

Yet how did the Serpent trick Eve into tasting the fruit? It “started asking questions” (79:34). “Clear cut directions became confusing” due to this (80:35). So, in short, the root of all evil is questioning — after all, if the devil hadn’t begun questioning, then Adam and Eve might not have fallen, according to this line of thinking.

It’s not the posturing, the tweed, and the quoting of authorities that comprise Packian intellectualism — it’s simply learning too much. Pack, around sixty minutes into his ninety-minute sermon, makes this switch with relative ease.

Referring to Ecclesiastes 1.18, which reads “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” Pack reasons that one can learn too much of the wrong thing and it increases sorrow (56:07). Pack then provides a verse that “proves with the increase of a tremendous amount of man’s knowledge, physical, carnal knowledge, there is sorrow” (56:28). Reading Daniel 12.4 [6] and pointing out the exponential rate of increase in today’s knowledge, Pack says that “a humanity that has never had more knowledge has never been more miserable” (57:32). This is an oft-used idea in Armstrongism, and is usually used in reference to humanity’s ability, through nuclear arms, to destroy itself completely. “Solomon’s wisdom was validated by Daniel’s prophecy” (57:39), he confidently reasons.

Certainly Pack has a point to a degree. These are anxious times, and a lot of it is due to the knowledge explosion and the resulting technologies of warfare. At the same time, the other advances are equally astounding: heart transplants, the eradication of certain diseases, the relatively high literacy rate in the Western world (compared to ages past), the movement toward more tolerant, humane treatment of prisoners — a few things that come to mind as I sit here typing that show our age is, in many respects, better than any previous period (at least in the developed world).

This is simply to point out that knowledge, like many things in the world, is a neutral thing, neither good or bad.

Yet Pack in the sermon is supposed to be talking about intellectualism, not about knowledge, which comes through education. Or perhaps they’re the same thing? Indeed, that is exactly what Pack has done at this point in the sermon (approximately two-thirds through): he has exchanged the stereotype, tweed-wearing, posturing intellectual for general knowledge. All the condemnation of the supposed hollowness intellectualism can now be heaped upon knowledge in general. Too much knowledge, Pack would be quick to point out, and knowledge about “the wrong things” (i.e., the wrong kind of knowledge, whatever that might be) — but knowledge, nonetheless.

From an outsider’s perspective, it’s clear what might comprise “wrong knowledge,” what might increase sorrow. The “wrong thing” would clearly be anything that shows Armstrongism for what it is — a farce. Sociology, psychology, and even history, studied “objectively” (and by that term I mean studied without the Armstrongian presumption that anything found in any given Introduction to Psychology would be wrong) would highlight the methods and means by which Armstrong induced people to join his sect and then kept them in. The sorrow that knowledge supposedly increases then becomes disillusionment — the feeling of being duped, that so many exiters of the WCG felt (and continue to feel).

More evidence that Pack is ridiculing education comes a bit earlier when Pack discusses the fact that Armstrong wasn’t perfect.

Sometimes Mr. Armstrong did things that were not absolutely grammatically correct. You have to trust me on that one. He didn’t care. His job was to communicate with people, and when you read it, it played and read well. It was tight. Very direct (46:37).

It’s interesting, to begin with, that Pack assumes his sheep are so uneducated that they have never noticed Armstrong’s poor grammar. They probably haven’t, because most members of the Restored Church of God are so enamored with Armstrong that they probably view him through smoked lenses — nothing the man did was wrong. It’s also worth pointing out that, in Pack’s mind, something can be “tight” and “very direct” and yet grammatically incorrect. Even though Armstrong’s “job was to communicate with people,” he didn’t care about grammar, nor should he have, according to Pack.

In making this grammar comment, though, Pack is making a much more dangerous claim. He’s essentially saying that even basic knowledge of grammar relatively unimportant. If something as relatively basic as grammar can be deemed unimportant for someone whose job it is to communicate, think how much more unimportant — even dangerous — higher education is for those whose job is not to communicate but simply to follow.

When assessing the danger intellectualism (read: a broad education) presents to members of the Restored Church of God, Pack is surprisingly accurate regarding the potential consequences:

I have almost never seen anyone catch the virus of intellectualism recover. I liken it to spiritual Ebola. it just eats them up. They never make it back. They become impressed with themselves. [. . . ] I have watched mind after mind that I knew and loved simply corrupt right in front of me. It’s an incredible, it’s a terrible thing to see (63:09, 83:23).

This is the real danger: members who are infected with “intellectualism” can’t recover because they realize recovery means a return to a certain kind of closed-minded, uneducated thinking. Once you read all the proof that the world is round, it’s difficult to pretend otherwise, no matter how much you might want to. Education is the Toto of Armstrongism, showing us the social, economic, and (most importantly) psychological mechanisms that make membership in such a sect not only plausible but also, from a member’s point of view, inevitable.

What can we do about this, though? Pack’s answer is the same as has been offered through the centuries by leaders of cognitive minorities: build a ghetto, complete with walls and heavy locks. “All of us should lock ourselves in a spiritual safe, which is God’s word,” (14:42) Pack says, and for once, its difficult to disagree with him. When you believe differently than most everyone else around you, it’s difficult to maintain plausibility of those conflicting beliefs. Minimizing contact with anything anti-Armstrongian, then, is the only answer, and this would exclude certain disciplines that encourage critical thinking or show Armstrongism for what it is.

This notion is so important that Pack both began and ended the sermon with it:

There is a spirit of intellectualism. It is linked to the cancer and leaven of heresy and doctrine, so says Christ. And if it enters you, brethren, it will sweep through you and destroy you. You cannot stop it any more than you can stop it in a loaf in your oven.

On the other hand, there is simplicity in the truth of God. There is simplicity in Christ. Fight losing it. Fight losing it, and thereby remain unleavened (85:03).

Since “doctrinal leaven spreads” (47:23), it’s best not even to touch it if you want to remain an Armstrongite.

As could be expected, we learn quite a bit about Pack himself, apart from his beliefs, from this sermon. It is perhaps the ultimate irony that throughout this sermon attacking education, Pack consistently shows his own lack of education.

For example, Pack seems unaware of the basic principle that the meaning and social status of words change through time. In this vein, he doesn’t consider the fact that words in the King James Version often had different meaning four centuries ago. Language change is a rudimentary observation, and one which Pack certainly would not disagree with, for in following the Armstrongian tradition, he often “modernizes” passages as he reads them aloud (for example, reading “you” where in fact “thee” is written). Yet he seem to forget this when reading Philippians 3.8.

The King James reads, “Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.” Pack, picking up on the word “dung” and making a case that God and Christianity is essentially “frank,” basically says that the Bible is so “frank” that it even uses profanity when necessary. Obviously he is equating “dung” with the word “shit,” and this would require that the word “dung” mean the same thing in 1611 as it does now. If it did, then perhaps other, contemporary versions would also translate this as “dung.”

Here’s how it’s presented in the New International Version: “What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ”

The New Revised Standard version reads, “More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.”

The KJV’s “dung” here is translated the more socially acceptable “rubbish.” Pack doesn’t acknowledge that it’s not always translated “dung,” though, because that undermines his point. My point, on the other hand, is that he doesn’t even have a point because he fails to realize how the English language has changed, and what is socially ungraceful now was not necessarily so in 1611.

At another point in the sermon, Pack makes reference to the fact that the word “piss” is in the Bible. He doesn’t provide scriptural backing for this, but a quick search reveals the following citations: 1 Samuel 25.22, 34; 1 Kings 14.10, 11, 21; 2 Kings 9.8, 18.27; and, Isaiah 36.12. An interesting study would be to look at what the word “piss” meant in 1611 and compare it to today’s vulgar meaning. (Given my lack of research material, I cannot do this. However, given the fact that the word appears in Shakespeare’s plays, a rough contemporary of the Authorized Version, and the fact that the relative, modern freedom of speech did not exist in Elizabethan England, it seems reasonable to assume that “piss” hardly had the crude connotations it does now.)

As a final example, Pack shows that he doesn’t know the basic problems with the creation account presented in Genesis.

Most people, if I may use the vernacular, blow off the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. “It’s too simple. It’s not intellectual enough. There’s no scholarship in it. There was just eight verses about a snake and a couple of folks and a couple of trees.” Very basic. Very simple. Very short. Absolutely a synopsis (82:30).

Scholarly criticism of the creation account (as a historical, factual explanation for the origins of the universe) does not fall back on silly accusations like, “It’s not intellectual enough.” Instead, it compares the account with the geological evidence and finds it wanting. Or it points out logical inconsistencies (i.e., light is created before light sources). But it doesn’t make such shallow pronouncements as Pack accused it of.

I am not suggesting that Pack is an idiot. Indeed, a dolt couldn’t manipulate and control people as he does. Also, I am not saying that Pack is completely uneducated. He is, after all, a college graduate, and he has a very high level of quite specialized knowledge. However, the knowledge he possess and the education he acquired is considered, by and large, to be bogus by the rest of the world, and as such, he is comparatively uneducated.

As in most of his sermons, Pack shows us in “A Leaven of Grave Danger” his abusive, controlling leadership style. As pointed out earlier, he speaks approvingly of Armstrong hitting things with “the biggest hammer he could find.”

More disturbingly, however, he shows his tendency to dehumanize those under him. Regarding Philippians 3.2 [7] he says,

So many today who want to be considered Christian, and focus on love [8], don’t ever want to hear language that sharp, that blunt. You know, one of the hallmarks of Mr. Armstrong was that he said things exactly as they were in the Bible. If I walked up to you and I said, “Do you know, there are some people who want into this church, and they’re dogs.” I, I know a couple of ministers I’ve had to disfellowship, I said that, and I said to you, “You know what? They’re dogs.” Would you not be offended? And yet, that’s exactly what the Bible says (16:30).

Any minister who calls individuals “dogs” with such obvious glee is hardly worthy of being called a minister. Yet Pack’s tendency to dehumanize people even extends toward his followers, whom he continually call sheep. As he is the shepherd, this makes him the only one in the analogy who’s human.

Pack also likes to remind listeners, both through connotation and denotation, that he’s in charge — he’s the leader, and they’re the followers. He makes the rules: “If I have one rule that fits you and one for the rest of the church, you now KNOW I will NOT give my life for you” (18:21). He decides what people need to hear: “The moment I tell you what you want to hear, you ought to never follow me again” (17:42). And again, there’s his disturbing obsession (for he makes the analogy in every sermon I’ve heard) with the shepherd and sheep.

In “A Leaven of Grave Danger,” Pack offers outsiders little hope that things might ever change in his particular Church of God. Following his commands, Pack’s followers are building ever higher walls around them and inoculating themselves to the true nature of Armstrongism and their particular leader.

Notes

1) Time references are to the Real Media version downloaded for the Restored Church of God’s web site and are usually approximate. 

 

2) It’s interesting to note that the image Pack creates of an intellectual is a male image — pipe, tweed jacket, messy hair — illustrating the inherent sexism of the Armstrongian culture. This is heightened by the fact that throughout the sermon, the examples he gives always involve males. 

 

3) This also serves as an illustration of the Armstrongian/COG dictatorial, abusive leadership style. 

 

4) And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 

 

5) In another sermon, called “Asleep in the End Times,” Pack actually goes so far as speculate that it’s possible that God might sleep from time to time — not from necessity, mind you, but simply from the pleasure of sleeping. I was disappointed, though, that Pack didn’t continue and speculate about what God might dream. 

 

6} But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. 

 

7) Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision. 

 

8) The derision in Pack’s voice at this point is more than a little disturbing.

Posted by Gary Scott

Filed under RCG