A reader here sent me this appalling letter from Dr. Stavrinides to Herbert Armstrong detailing the long-held belief among church leadership that well-educated ministers and members were a threat to the organization.
When Charles Hunting presided over the Bricket Wood campus he did not take too kindly to Ambassador College men/ministers who were learning Hebrew and Greek and who looked up certain words and phrases HWA had "translated" and found that the words/phrases did not mean any such thing. Hunting had a two-fold disgust, one for men who decided to educate themselves in Hebrew and Greek and for them to turn around and call the church out for improper translations. Apparently, in Hunting's sight, all information that flowered from HWA'smouth and fingertips was God sent. We now know what a joke this idea was.
Then, to add more fuel to the fire, Stavrinides discusses how Raymond McNair was taking his baptism into question. McNair was always known to be an uppity jerk who took things to the extreme. Ratting out people to HWA was one of his favorite activities. Plus, the very idea that he took upon himself to stick his snotty nose into the baptismal status of Stavrinides is disgusting.
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Plus ça change... this is exactly how ministers in the splinters continue to operate to this day. They love to cut each other off at the knees to make themselves look taller by comparison. They politic with their President or Presiding Evangelist or Prophet, hoping to get ahead by making some other minister look bad. I can say with certainty that Gerald Flurry, Rick Shabi, and Gerald Weston are being fed constant falsehoods by the men underneath them jockeying for position. The reality of "God's government" in practice.
ReplyDeleteYes the Hebrew can have another meaning to what is commonly believed. Rosh = Russia is a glaring example.
ReplyDeleteMeshech =Moscow.
Oh and the New World Translation Bible of the JWs which they claim is endorsed by both Greek and Hebrew scholars. Not withstanding they cannot name those scholars or point to their authenticity.
Better to keep one’s nose clean and follow the party line than seek vain pursuits such as education lol.
Well, considering where he ended up......
ReplyDelete"For the fruits of the spirit are compliance, obedience, kissassery, agreement, yielding, capitulation and total agreement. Against which one's baptism can judged and found wanting, if need be, and conversion scorned."
ReplyDeleteDennis, you've just earned Post of the Day!
DeleteAnti-intellectualism was rampant in the church and its colleges. Professors with higher quality degrees and who were more educated were looked down on and mocked. Meredith was good at this. He thought he was brilliant because he had learned everything he knew from HWA and freshman-level Bible classes at Ambassador. He would have never lasted at any seminary or college for his know-it-all attitude.
ReplyDeleteI don’t care about Stavrinides baptism. I listened to his series of “studies” promoting the false Trinity doctrine inorder for Tkach and crooked son to become accepted by mainstream Christianity. I wasn’t impressed or convinced. All the historical records and scripture point to the straight forward teaching that there’s a Father and a Son. Mary became pregnant by the “power” of the Holy Spirit. That would make the Holy Spirit Jesus’s father. Stavrinides was a heretic!
ReplyDeleteTotally agree! ...and his arrogant repeated statements "That is a Non Question" hurt too... All Stavrinides did was regurgitate the old Catholic/Protestant "hypostasis" like this new wonderful truth! Shame on all of us for not rejecting him outright. You have a stronger stomach than mine, I listened to only the first 3 of his tapes, I couldn't take it. Good for you to survive that poison
DeleteBy 1971 the writing was most probably on the wall for Bricket Wood.
ReplyDeleteStavrinides signature is as egotistical as Herbert's.
As a matter of fact....Now I am curious as to eventual details of Stav's baptism. He only alludes to the "many miracles" he has done since being annointed a minister.....Yet doing this he raises the question if some "dispensation" had been granted and that he like HWA was baptized in another church without having been "re baptised into the Radio Church of God....
ReplyDeletenck
Herbert W. Armstrong was most unscientific. In science, one tests and retests things normally accepted as true, often based on new information. Truth remains truth because it stands up to rigorous tests.
ReplyDeleteHerbert was accustomed to dictating truth. Disagreeing, even based on new facts, put one's conversion in question. In extreme cases, he equated disagreement with him with blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
He fooled a lot of people. Many remain fooled even to this day.
If I were HWA I would set a policy: Keep all correspondences down to one page. In the military a commander wouldn't want to read three pages to get what could have been put onto one (bottom line up front) as we would say.
ReplyDeleteDoes this letter sound a bit like a child going to someone to fight their battles for them? What would have happened if he had just backed McNair up against the wall and had a "come to Jesus" meeting with him?
McNair would have turned around and squalled to Herbert that someone was being insubordinate. Stav was probably trying to avoid that outcome.
DeleteRSK...That is exactly what McNair would have done and probably did. There is a reason HWA reportedly called McNair, Buffy - which was short for buffoon.
DeleteThe evidence just keeps mounting: ....Herbert with a vehement countenance.......shall corrupt to an extraordinary degree.....cf Dan 8:23-25.
ReplyDeleteOh but the objection is he wasn't a king. Look at Prov 30:27: a king can simply be a leader.
Eliezer ben-Yehuda was largely responsible for the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language during the late 1800s. The revival didn't really take off until many Jews from the diaspora around the world began to resettle in Palestine, leading up to the 1948 revival of Israel as a nation. This was still in its early stages during the middle stages of Herbert W. Armstrong's ministry in the 1960s. Many of the nuances of Hebrew as used during the times of the Old Testament were not yet fully understood, yet HWA made many dogmatic statements based on his literal interpretation of the words, as opposed to any deep understanding of the culture of the early days of millennia past. Hellenization during the intertestamental period (think the Deuterocanonicals) gave rise to the usage of the Greek in which the books of the New Testament were written.
ReplyDeleteLiving languages are "living" because they are growing and evolving with the cultures which communicate through them. Part of a college prep high school course of decades ago used to be devoted to the study of Old English literature. I do not know if this is still true today. Any students from that era were painfully aware of the vast differences that 4-500 years in time made in a written (and spoken) language. This is not rocket science, and is easy to see and understand. It's appalling to realize the extent to which HWA insisted on dumbing down the membership of his church as a part of controlling their thought processes. One would have thought baptism would enhance thinking ability, not suppress it.