Is Armstrongism Defined By Its Identity And Authority In A Lineage Of Ministerial Ordinations?

Classic “Armstrongism,” for want of a better term, teaches that the “True Church” is defined in its identity and authority by a lineage of ministerial ordinations (sometimes termed “apostolic succession”). Christ ordained the original apostles, who ordained people, who ordained people, yada-yada-yada, who ordained people, and at least one of those people personally ordained by the laying on of hands Herbert Armstrong. All of these people will have followed “true” Christianity, which means they were seventh-day Sabbatarian. They will not have descended from the supposed Simon Magus counterfeit religion, as Armstrong would elaborate, and at no point will there be a non-Sabbatarian in this lineage. 

This was the explanation given by Andrew Dugger, Jr and CO Dodd in their 1930s book “A History of the True Religion” (originally titled, “A History of the True Church”). Armstrong embraced this concept, and intensified it in the 1950s. See “Must God’s ministers be ordained by the hands of man?” (1960 version). The idea is that to be a “true” Christian minister, one must have been ordained by the literal action of a minister in that succession.

 
This is not my opinion. This is the teaching of your faith tradition. If you found a minister of a small congregation somewhere meeting on Saturdays and perhaps teaching a few doctrines traditionally associated with your faith tradition (Armstrongism), that would not necessarily mean that church is a “true Church of God” (or “branch of the Church,” the terminology preferred by some like the late Roderick Meredith). The minister would had to have been ordained in that discussed lineage. He couldn’t have been, say, ordained as a Presbyterian minister, looked at the Decalogue, and said, “Oh, wait! We should be observing the seventh day, not Sunday!” and then led his congregation to do so. Likewise, lay members of your faith tradition meeting without a minister could not say to you, “Hey, dude! You’re doing the job of a minister. We think God wants you to be a minister,” then all lay hands on you and declare you ordained, and have it be legitimate (in the eyes of your religion). You wouldn’t have ministerial authority, and your “congregation” would simply be a gathering of individual adherents to your faith.

It is this claim of ordinational lineage that gives the ministry of your faith tradition their legitimacy as a binding authority. Thus it is core to the claim of Herbert Armstrong being an “apostle,” “the Elijah,” etc. If that lineage does not in fact exist, then the claim of his authority is false, as is that of the ministry ordinationally descended from him.

Craig White of Australia has done decades of research in “True Church history,” and has sought to demonstrate the alleged linkage going here in North America. Whatever doctrinal commonalities the different Sabbatarian groups may have possessed (and doctrines can be transmitted or developed in the number of ways with no ordinational or organizational succession), he admits failure to find the requisite linkages.

 
From White’s writeup, A Note on the Seventh-Day Baptist Relationship to the Church of God:

Note Point 4: “4. if there is very little linkage between them and there is no evidence of ongoing sequence of laying hands upon subsequent leadership or elders from one era to the next, how does one know it is legitimate?…”

He acknowledges “no evidence” of the ordinational succession, and then asks the resultant question of how to evaluate the “legitima[cy]” of the Armstrongist “True Church” and ministry claim.

And here is the answer: Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 include a reference to a number of families claiming Levitical descent at the rebuilding of Jerusalem, but whose names are not listed in a registry of such descendants. This results in them being declared “unclean” and set aside from the functions and privileges of the priesthood (until objective verification could be had). Putting this in jurisprudential terms, this is a “precedent,” an event which sets out how situations like this ought to be handled. The “burden of proof” lies with the people claiming the succession exists. It does not lie with somebody challenging it.

The Armstrongist ministry has long and strongly drawn a direct parallel between itself and the Levitical priesthood. No remotely experienced Armstrongist can deny this with a straight face. That said, I will include a few of my favorite examples to illustrate the depth your religion takes this. The reference to “Levites” in the Deuteronomy 14:28-29 discussion of “third tithe” was used to justify the use of the assistance fund to pay for home renovations of ministers. I even recall a minister at a WCG Feast of Tabernacles saying that it could be used to directly augment ministerial salaries because of this (though he denied it had ever happened). Much of the authority and prestige of the Armstrongist ministry comes from drawing such parallels. A UCG minister after the 1995 event even said that they could call themselves “priests” because of this if they so chose. Another minister, then still in WCG post-1995 but now pastoring for UCG, told me of how at WCG headquarters in Pasadena, since ordained ministry were called “spiritual Levites,” they went full-circle terminology-wise and referred to non-ordained church workers as “PHYSICAL Levites.” Armstrong himself took it so far as to even roll it over into a theory that many of his ministers were descended literally – genetically – from the Levitical line. 

(Here is a comedic story touching on this, involved security at the Ambassador campus. The writer is obviously very discontented with Armstrongism. It seems that security volunteers on the Sabbath were given a technical consideration of being “spiritual Levites” in order to justify their work on the Sabbath. As all good satire is based in truth, it demonstrates just how truly serious the Armstrong faith tradition has taken the supposed Levitical parallel. )

The Levite-“True Church” minister analogies go on and on, and every minister of the Armstrong tradition knows that.

Ergo, following the parallel laid out by the ministry of your faith tradition, it is on them or their supporters to show the lineage exists. And if that cannot be done – and up to now it has not been done – they are to be considered set aside, and their doctrinal and spiritual authority nonbinding.

Despite this, Armstrongist apologists not only seek to avoid the general issue, but actually play dumb on the whole matter. Note the following exchange on LCG’s “Tomorrow’s World” YouTube channel. “TommygunNG” is yours truly.

“HUMAN lineage” (emphasis added). Is that genetic or actional (by ordination)? This purposeful distortion of the issue is shocking in its audacity. Obviously, this being more of an outreach channel, LCG is attempting to hide the reality of their faith from the uninitiated – that is, prospective members. They will think in general terms about a lineage or succession, believing there’s nothing to what I asked, while members can CHOOSE to take it as referring to genetic reproduction in order to deny to themselves the disingenuousness. But in reality, all their muddling does is show the legitimacy of my point, and their own complete lack of a genuine answer. 

To their credit of sorts, at least they were attempting something vaguely substantive. When I asked a comparable question to LCG via Facebook Messenger in 2021, this one specifically regarding who ordained Armstrong himself, their only response was, “Mr. Armstrong explained his ordination in some of his articles, autobiography, etc.” On the other hand, UCG did not reply at all, and COGaWA only replied after a second message noting that they did not reply, with them saying, “Hello! Thank you for your message! We will personally reply to your message as quickly as possible. In the meantime, feel free to check out our website at […]!” Of course, no such “personal reply” ever came.

Even attempting to deny the direct applicability of the scriptural example (and thus losing much of the power and prestige in the ministry gained by the Levitical typology), the precedent sets the parallel in establishing the burden of proof for succession claims. Think about it. If a woman from your past claimed her child was the result of a union between the two of you, you would not simply accept her claim. You would demand affirmative proof that the child was yours. How much more important than the genealogy of a single individual is being sure that the doctrinal authority you believe you are bound to is the correct one? 

Today we have DNA tests to determine physical paternity. But unfortunately, there is no spiritual DNA test that can track ministerial ordinations. People have to rely on verifiable documentation for that. And unfortunately for your religion, the Armstrong faith tradition cannot even determine what elder(s) ordained Armstrong himself, let alone who ordained him/them, etc., back to the original apostles.

Church of God (Seventh Day) history shows that the early ministers of that denomination held ordinations from mainstream non-Sabbatarian protestant churches. CG7’s founders were simply ministers who became involved in the Millerite/Adventist movement and adopted seventh-day Sabbatarianism. Few if any came in as Sabbatarians. The same can be said of most of the lay members. They were not “rebaptized” upon this change in their practice. The whole claim of such a lineage preceding the formation of what became CG7 did not exist until the 1920s. Dugger himself claimed in a 1926 article that his “first insight” on the idea came from an event in 1922:

More here from Richard Nichols’ history (from Friends of the Sabbath)

History simply does not bear the claim out, and in fact points against the claim. Contrary to the impressions given by people like Herman Hoeh, there are no (known) ordinational linkages between them and any sort of Sabbatarian line back to antiquity. A clever and perhaps typical example of an attempt to give this unfounded perception is found in LCG’s booklet on the subject, discussed above in the YouTube screenshots. In a particularly odd case of attention to detail, it attempts to mislead readers into thinking Roswell Cottrell, a Seventh Day Baptist who entered the Millerite/Adventist movement in 1851 and became a leading figure in the movement, was a “long time Sabbatarian minister” at the time of his entrance. The truth is, while his family has a long Sabbatarian history (back to the 1630s) and his father John was a former in SDB minister who entered Adventism the same year, he himself was not apparently ordained until 1854 – that is, already within the Adventist movement, and two years after his father’s death. (Plus, at age 34, he wouldn’t have been a “long-time” anything!) The apparent intent is to imply to the initiated reader that the supposed “True Church” ordinational succession might have entered Adventism through him. Yet without a prior ordination, it obviously could not.

Speculative thought: I have to wonder if the writer actually intended critics to look into the fellow and find his family’s descent from European nonconformist groups often mentioned in “True Church” histories. The problem, though, is that actual attention to detail and a refusal to simply accept their unfounded presumptions defeats the effort. (Good try, though.😁)

And thus, based on the Ezra 2/Nehemiah 7 precedent and the most basic of common sense, your religion’s claim of exclusively being “true Christianity” and that the teachings of your ministry — INCLUDING THAT OF HERBERT ARMSTRONG — ought to be disregarded as authoritative in the sense traditionally held in Armstrongism. This does not mean that you or they are or were wrong about any other given point of biblical doctrine. It’s simply means that you are not bound before God to believe those ministers, and thus are free to study doctrinal questions and arrive at different conclusions. You are not bound to Herbert Armstrong, WCG, or their legacy. 

In a very real sense, I personally do not care what days you rest for worship. I do not care what you believe about the state of the dead. I do not care whether or not you doctrinally allow or prohibit makeup or interracial marriage. I can even sadly tolerate the denial of civic duty among many Armstrongists and Armstrongist fellowships (it is a free country, after all). What I do care about is that people are feeling held to a faith tradition – that is, Armstrongism – which bases its doctrinal authority over adherents on a fundamentally flawed and false premise [fraud, perhaps?]. And thus, I will confront its adherents with the historical reality and the scriptural precedent laid out here. 

I was an Armstrongist (WCG 1988-95; UCG 1995-2000; ICG 2000-01), as you are now. I do know what you believe. I understand your take on John 6:44. I understand how powerful it is believing that you have been given a special opening to knowledge. But I will put this to you: Jeremiah 17:9 - “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it.”

What I present to you is not my opinion or my specific doctrinal conclusions. It is historical fact and scriptural precedent. It is my hope that you will look into this matter and consider it objectively. A deceived man does not know he is deceived. No matter how deeply you intuitively believe something, it can still be wrong. If you look at this objectively, you will understand. 

Contact me on TruthSocial at @LTWalker03 to respond.

Cats, Guns, and National Security

===

NOTE: If an Armstrongist minister ever denies the ordinational succession claim and/or its centrality to the defining and operation of their supposed “True Church,” ask him if there is even a serious possibility that his church might possibly recognize as a “true” minister someone claiming to be a minister, but definitely without such succession. If he says that it is at all possible, then the hold on members that the Armstrongist ministry claims is gone. His church will be no better than any other Christian denomination. Anyone will be free to leave their current church and be declared a “minister,” and members will be free to follow him or any other professed minister – or none at all. The Armstrongist minister and his church will have no justification on those grounds for denouncing the new “fellowship.” On the other hand, if he says that here is no chance that the succession-free minister would be so recognized, then he is essentially yielding the point.

Lee Walker