Plan B: The Ultimate Lèse-majesté Argument of Armstrongism

Terraforming Unfinished Planets.  Credit: Dalein Ballard

Plan B

The Ultimate Lèse-majesté Argument of Armstrongism

By Scout

“Known from eternity are to God all the works of him” (Bible Hub literal translation of Acts 15:18)

 

I do not believe that Herbert W. Armstrong ever set out to depreciate God.  I believe he felt that certain ideas had been revealed to him and on the strength of that supposition he published those ideas as the solutions to the mysteries of the Bible.  Since he ran an autocratic organization, his ideas were never subject to review.  This scenario is a cliché in the history of religion.  But that is my best explanation for what I am about to relate. 

There is a theme that runs through Armstrongism of characterizing God as much less powerful than he actually is.  The theme originates in a pre-occupation with the Old Testament description of God.  In the Old Testament, God is often characterized as an anthropomorph with the inherent limitations.  This was a rhetorical means of communicating with ancient peoples.  It was not intended to be a realistic portrayal of the essential ontology of God.  Those who believe it is a realistic portrayal eventually run into logical dilemmas.  

And to shore up this errant doctrine of God, the frequent reaction is to form a redoubt comprised of many Lèse-majesté Arguments, made directly or by implication: God in his essence is reliant on a functional body, God is in spacetime, God has race, God has gender, God is not absolute but relative, God is contingent and not necessary, the image of God mentioned in Genesis 1 is physical (See end note 1), God does not know the future and, finally, we, too, can become just like God.   In short, God is like a super-human and has human-like successes and setbacks just like us.  He is of our category; he is just more powerful.  He is just the biggest kid on the block.  Such Lèse-majesté Arguments are a blatant mischaracterization of the uncreated and absolute God. 

The Theatrical Script

In the pages of the Mystery of the Ages (MOA), Herbert W. Armstrong’s magnum opus, there is described a great drama.  I will summarize it here.  God created an unfinished Cosmos.  It is full of planets in disarray.  The planets needed to be terraformed. (This is an interesting conjecture on HWA’s part since the MOA was published in 1985 but the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992.  The existence of exoplanets may be the only “prophecy” HWA was right about. It was probably inadvertent.  It is a conclusion that probably stems from a lack of knowledge about astronomy.)  God intended the angels to go throughout the Cosmos and finish the creation.  HWA wrote, “So the angel potential was to take over the entire universe – to improve and finish the billions of physical planets surrounding the uncountable stars, many of which are suns (MOA, p. 90)”.  But the angels rebelled and God then realized when this happened that he needed a better solution.  So, he decided to create man, a reproduction of himself, and train him to do the work where the angels failed.  HWA wrote, “God THEN purposed to reproduce himself, through humans, made in his image and likeness…” (MOA, p. 94, caps mine).  HWA’s statement does not invoke the issue of God’s antecedent and permissive will but is a matter purely of God’s state of knowledge and foreknowledge.  God took a risk and lost because he did not know what was going to happen. 

Man is clearly Plan B – an afterthought.   He was not on the agenda until after the angelic debacle.  God did not foresee the problem and changed his plan to accommodate new circumstances.  God was not in control but reactive – like a human.  God is subject to risk. 

The Theological Analysis

This scenario proposes a very different God from the Christian God.  The Christian God is absolute and transcends our small human ideas of power and control.  But in HWA’s God we have a God who can experience failure, whose plans can be wholly subverted.  This putative lesser God does not know the future in contravention to what James stated in Acts 15:18. He was caught by surprise by the angelic rebellion and had to fall back and regroup.  The result was the innovation of a new sentient creature called a human being that was not originally intended.  

So, HWA’s timeline for this scenario is non-Biblical.  Jesus was slain for us, for human sin, from the foundation of the Cosmos (Rev 13:8).  God knew at the beginning there would be humans and these humans would need forgiveness through the sacrifice of Christ.  Whereas, HWA postulates that mankind was created as a course correction much later than the foundation of the Cosmos.  Acts 15:18 tells us that God knew all of his works at the outset of the Age (See also end note 2.).  This indicates that he is absolute.  He will do what he will do.  He is what he is. And nothing in the created realm can derail or contravene that.  To argue otherwise is to engage in Lèse-majesté Argument.

Throughout this theater developed by HWA, it seems like God’s first goal is to refurbish the Cosmos. Angels did not make the cut so he created man so he could have the needed reliable workers to do this. It is not a plan about sentient creatures becoming partakers of the divine nature but about getting a remodeling job done.  The theology of human salvation is just an expedience.  This, of course, makes no sense because God can at any time refurbish the Cosmos in an instant by fiat.  If he created by fiat, he can refurbish by fiat.  If God involves sentient creatures in this refurbishing, it is to give them the “dignity of causation”, a term used by C.S. Lewis.  What Lewis means is that God could do it all himself but wants man to participate in causation and thereby accords man the dignity of meaningful involvement.  But the “dignity of causation” focuses on the developmental destiny of the sentient creatures, not the remodeling job as portrayed in the MOA.  

So, HWA’s conjectural theater has no Biblical traction.  And it is the ultimate Lèse-majesté Argument against God because if strikes at God’s ontology and his plan of salvation.  This theater denies God absoluteness for the following reasons:

1.     God does not know the future: He is not omniscient.  Prophets cannot validly predict because God doesn’t know what is going to happen himself. 

2.     God can therefore be surprised: He can suffer unforeseen reversals and setbacks. 

3.     His plans can be foiled by his creatures: Not only can his creatures surprise him but can cancel or modify his plans. 

4.     God cannot achieve what is best: His original plan involving the angels was best (it was first conceived and put into action) but he had to replace it with an inferior Plan B involving human beings.  God cannot bring about what is best but may have to pursue the sub-optimal. 

What Difference Does It Make?

Late in the last century, I got some notes from a WCG Ministerial Conference.   The notes were on file at the Roy Hammer Library at Ambassador College, Big Sandy.  I was particularly interested in explanations about pre-Adamic Man made by Herman Hoeh.  I read the notes and found them interesting but they did not add any additional archaeological information to what I already knew.  Hoeh did say something that I readily accepted at the time but is quite alarming now.  He said that God could not have created Adam without preliminary experimentation.  God worked like human engineers who must create progressively more complex models in order to finally arrive at a final design.  The fossilized remains of pre-Adamic man are the remains of these preliminary models.  Apparently, some of his efforts were not successful because some lines of development were terminated in the fossil record.  Though I was too naïve to understand it back then, this is nothing less than an assertion that God is a limited being – limited to the processes of human engineering and fabrication.  He is a trial-and-error god.  Lèse-majesté arguments like this, though supportive of HWA’s Plan B scenario, erode our belief in the greatness of the absolute God.  

A further issue is prophecy.  Millerite derived denominations in many cases have a pre-occupation with prophecy. Given this history, it is ironic that Armstrongism cancels the capability for predictive prophecy at the divine level.  If God does not know the future, such as HWA describes in the MOA, how can God inspire predictive prophecy?  Think for a moment. The Armstrongist Doctrine of God does not permit the existence of predictive prophecy.  This is a show-stopping inconsistency inherent in the theology of Armstrongism.  And the odd view that God is insufficient to sustain a prophetic capability is in accord with the general theme of Lèse-majesté in Armstrongism.  This is a form of Hyper-Arminianism where God not only does not determine the future but also does not know it.  And it further leaves dangling the various references to Godly foreknowledge and foreknowing contained in the New Testament. 

Summation 

God is great.  God is absolute. He transcends all the knowledge we have of reality. He does not just know reality exhaustively, he made reality.  He “speaks” or wills and things come into existence.  He is not bound by time. He knows what we call the future.  If he did not know the future, there would be no such thing as a prophet.  The anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament, while it is rhetorically useful in conveying ideas in a way that we humans can understand, limits God in capabilities to the point that it makes untenable and illogical the proposition that God is creator of all ex nihilo.  That anthropomorphic language is poetry not ontology. Mankind is not Plan B.  There is no Plan B and never will be.  That is just a big, old Lèse-majesté Argument.  (See end note 3).

 

Note 1:  While the image of God is often cited by HWA’ followers as a reference to the shape and form of God, this is not what HWA actually stated.  He said that man was made to become, “the character image of God and also in the likeness or form and shape of God.” (Mystery of the Ages, 1985, p. 102) The term “character” is broad in its scope and can refer to many attributes.  While the idea of the image of God as form or shape conflicts with Christian belief, the idea of character may not, depending on how it is defined. 

Note 2: Though Acts 15:18 may be translated literally as, “Known from eternity are to God all the works of him”, the word for eternity in Greek is “aionos”.  This may be also translated as “age”.  David B. Hart in his New Testament translation renders this phrase as “known from an age ago”.  In any case, it is a clear statement that God has foreknowledge of all his activities no matter what timeframe is considered - activities that for us from our perspective in time would be future. 

Note 3: Many times, Armstrongists will read material like this that exalts God and will term it “atheistic”. How this illogical idea can be asserted is a “mystery of the ages”.