Formerly the Worldwide Church of God, GCI has experienced one of the largest changes in teaching of any Christian Denomination. In this video we examine their beliefs today. 00:00 Change in Beliefs 00:30 History of Grace Communion International 02:58 Core Teachings 03:12 God Family 03:45 Sacraments 04:23 Scripture 05:05 Creation & Evolution 06:41 Sin & Salvation 07:06 Predestination & Calvinism 07:43 Pentecostalism & Tongues, Word of Faith 08:35 Eschatology 09:07 Hell, Eternal Punishment, & Conditional Immortality 10:22 British Israelism 11:01 Marriage, Sexuality & Divorce 12:25 Abortion 12:55 Worship Style 13:37 Alcohol, Tithing 14:13 Sabbath 14:56 Festivals 15:32 Holidays 15:51 Food Laws 16:04 Day Christ Died, War, Voting 16:27 Church Government 17:06 Women in Ministry 17:19 Affiliations & Statistics
Christian Denominations explained in a neutral and concise way. Let's look into what these denominations have in statements of faith, published position papers, magazines, and websites and provide a concise, unbiased, and accurate description of the denomination that allows evaluation and comparison. Denominations and churches tend to have certain things that they focus on, and when you want to simply find out what they believe on other areas, you have to do a lot of digging. At Ready to Harvest, we've done the digging so you can have a detailed and information-dense description of much of the most important things a denomination teaches in a clear and short video.
When I was told of the corrections, I wasn't interested at all, because at the time I was at best agnostic, although I called myself a "seeker". However, it occurred to me that if people who were steeped in the old church government style of HWA were administering whatever the New Covenant brought into members' lives, it would contaminate the new version of the church. Even the best of the ministers would be fighting their own lifelong habit patterns, and their muscle memory (for lack of a better term) would occasionally surface from deep inside their minds and triumph. They would not have the skill set to do things in the way that those who had a lifetime of experience with this New Covenant approach could. I was also sure that some members and ministers were only reluctantly going along with it all. The entire experience looked to me to be not reliable in worst case, and second best at the very least.
ReplyDeleteEven the people who stuck with the original teachings had to wrestle with their consciences with regard to the situation. By leaving, they were going against the individual whom their divinely guided "Apostle" had appointed as his successor, allegedly under inspiration directly from Father God. They left the church to go off and persist in the original doctrines, guessing that Mr. Armstrong had made a mistake, or was too feeble to even realize what he had done.
It's been a messy battle ever since, and no breakaway super blessed group has emerged to take up the mantle and to carry on what Mr. Armstrong taught was the great commission for the church in the end times. And, the thing is, you can't credibly make the claim that O.G. Herbert W. Armstrong finished the work and the warning. He's lost in a sea of bogus deceased prognosticators, and really does not stand out in anyones memories.
It was all an illusion!
BB
I found their statement on Evolution vs Creationism and the blending of the two, which is a common evangelical apologetic, interesting. The reality of the evolution of all life, including human must be dealt with and yet to preserve the imagined truth of the Bible. The idea that the Bible and the sciences are compatible is a delusion on the part of Evangelicals. When having lunch with Joe Jr last year, after he had retired, I asked him or tried to engage him in a discussion on the reality of evolution. He would not and was not interested in doing so. I believe he blew up any in depth discussion with the concept that God can work through the process of evolution, which again, is not exactly what the scriptures portray. It's all apologetic for that which they can simply not admit to. The evolution of life, once it began, and that is a completely different question unrelated to the fact of evolution since it did begin, is not dependent on the agency of any Deity. It does quite nicely without it over deep time, which is another reality that few Evangelicals can grasp believing, or needing to believe, the nonsense of a young Earth etc.
ReplyDeleteDennis,
ReplyDeleteLike you, I accept the science of evolution. I believe that it provides the best and most comprehensive explanation of the diversity of life on this planet. It is foolhardy to ignore the geologic and fossil records. I have no interest in defending the evangelical apologetic on this subject, but it is certainly not incredible to believe that God could work through the evolutionary process.
As you know, there was a time when the scientific community rejected abiogenesis as absurdly irrational. Although we aren't there yet, I can imagine the right conditions and chemicals mixing to generate life. Like other scientists, I can also imagine life arriving here from somewhere else in the universe. Certainly, neither one of those possibilities preclude the possibility of God, nor do they necessarily render the existence of a Creator superfluous.
As for Scripture, all of this only presents a problem for Scripture if you: 1. propose that those writings are infallible and reject the notion that humans made a significant contribution to them, and 2. insist that everything within those writings must be understood as literal. I believe that Scripture was a joint project between God and humans, and that the human contribution to those writings was significant. I believe that Scripture was designed by God to function as a moral/spiritual guide, not as a history, geography, or science textbook (and that anyone who employs it in that capacity is going to have all kinds of cognitive dissonance swirling around him/her).
As you know, many brilliant cosmologists/physicists are working around the edges of our understanding of our universe and have proposed some tremendously complicated models to explain our present reality. Two things appear to me to be inescapable observations regarding all of this: 1. all known life seeks to perpetuate itself and is quite resourceful and tenacious in that pursuit, 2. something/someone compels us to explore and learn, and that presents all kinds of intriguing possibilities about cognition, awareness, and its source.
Since WCG leadership moved the church away from the old doctrines and towards evangelicalism, why does the church continue to exist in its metamorphosed GCI form? Its existence is superfluous, apart from being a memory box of the people in it, their collective life journeys and their friendships.
ReplyDeleteDennis @ 2:16:47
ReplyDelete‘Imagined truth of the Bible……..that the Bible and the sciences are compatible is a delusion……the evolution of life, once it began….is not dependent on the agency of any Deity…..it does quite nicely without if over time……’
Henry Quastler, Austrian physicist
commented ‘the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity…..when ever we encounter information that is required to build the most basic infrastructure or life forms, dna, computer programs, hieroglyphics and trace that information to its beginnings we come to intelligence and not a material source’.
Time is an observer not an ingredient.
For the greatest enemy of evolution is time and its inherent decay.
Scientists such as Allan Sandage, David Berlinski, Stephen Meyer, Arthur Eddington, Jay Richard’s, Guillermo Gonzalez, James Maxwell, Issac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Owen Gingrich, James Tour, John Polkinghorne and Werner Heisenberg among just a few, would indeed conclude that science and religious belief are highly compatible. Perhaps the most famous radical and rabid atheist of this past century Jean Paul Sartre later in life commented ‘ I don’t feel I am the product of chance, a speck of dust but someone who was expected prepared prefigured. In short a being that could only be here thanks to a creator…’ And Albert Camus, Antony Flew possibly the most famous and thoughtful philosophers of the twentieth century found their way beyond atheism, even beyond agnosticism to faith. Astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote ‘ his atheism was greatly shaken by recent scientific developments…..a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, chemistry and biology…..the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question’. I think we both would agree that the evangelical world needs to take a closer look at the sciences, they are not altogether incompatible .
I'll never forget the mental strain of some design projects while I worked in a lab. Yet the complexity in nature is at a much higher plane. So I can't believe that evolution or similar is somehow responsible for all the life forms on this planet. And the three dimensional programing in seeds? In my view, this 'God created via evolution' is just public relations by many churches. They don't want to lose potential members.
ReplyDeleteThat is a funny story about Joe Jr Dennis. Since his father had accepted evolution after a visit to the Epcott Center in 1987 which was widely publicized to the Church in its publucstions..... I know they talked about little and big evolution or something but evolution nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteBTW.... My personal belief is that many humans and Humanoids were around at Adam's time.... Yet God decided to work through one specimen to make his point on all.....
Nck