PCG: They Didn’t Win in Court. They Bought Their Way Out—Then Edited Herbert Armstrong

The Philadelphia Church of God has spent more than two decades crowing that it “won” the lawsuit the Worldwide Church of God filed after PCG printed Herbert W. Armstrong’s writings without permission. That claim is not a misunderstanding. It is a sales pitch. PCG uses it to present itself as the church God miraculously protected and as the rightful heir of Armstrong’s work.

Gerald Flurry put the myth in print in the May 2003 Philadelphia Trumpet:

We have just won the greatest victory ever in the Philadelphia Church of God! It will probably be our most thrilling victory in this entire end-time work.

PCG was still repeating the same line years later, including earlier this year. The court record tells a different story. So does PCG’s own later editing of Mystery of the Ages—the book it claimed was too sacred to touch.What the courts actually decidedWCG first sued PCG in 1997 to stop PCG from distributing Armstrong’s works while WCG owned the copyrights. The court dismissed that first filing without prejudice, meaning WCG could sue again. It did. The second case ran until 2003. 

The reason for the suit was straightforward. PCG never asked permission. It copied Mystery of the Ages almost verbatim, swapped the copyright notice from WCG to Herbert Armstrong, and stripped out the warning against reproduction without permission. By the time of the Ninth Circuit decision, PCG had distributed about 30,000 English copies plus foreign-language editions. 

In 1999, the district court granted summary judgment to PCG and charged WCG nearly $300,000 in attorney’s fees and costs, but stayed payment pending appeal. That is the only stage PCG can honestly call a win—and it did not last.

On September 18, 2000, the Ninth Circuit reversed the district court 2–1. It held that WCG owned the copyright, that PCG’s wholesale copying was not fair use, and that the district court had to enter an injunction stopping PCG from distributing the book. PCG also had to pay WCG’s appellate costs. The case was sent back for a damages hearing. 

The Supreme Court declined to hear PCG’s appeal on April 2, 2001. In March 2001, a new district judge granted a preliminary injunction. From that point forward, PCG was legally barred from distributing Mystery of the Ages. The remaining question was not who owned the book. It was how much money PCG would have to pay WCG for having printed it anyway. 

WCG’s forensic economist later put the claimed “profits” denied to WCG at about $3.84 million, or $4.3 million with interest, based on PCG’s distribution of nearly 100,000 copies. The damages trial was scheduled, postponed, put back on the calendar, and pulled off again while the parties talked settlement. Those talks broke down in December 2002. Then, in early 2003, the case disappeared—not because a judge declared PCG the winner, but because the parties cut a deal. 

Attorney Helen Liggett summarized the record this way in 2007:

So the facts are, Worldwide Church of God sued Philadelphia Church of God and lost at the district court level, then won on appeal, then was awaiting an amount from the court as to how much PCG would have to pay WCG and instead took money from PCG to dismiss the case and let PCG restart publishing of HWA’s works and for damages that the court would have ordered PCG to pay.PCG didn’t win, it lost in court and was going to be ordered to pay WCG damages, but WCG and PCG agreed on an amount, so the judge never decided the damages issue. There is no way that can honestly be characterized as a victory for the PCG.

That is the case. Not a divine reversal. A purchase.WCG took the cheap exitJoseph Tkach Jr. had already told the public why WCG wanted the book buried. In Transformed by Truth he wrote that the church felt it was its “Christian duty to keep this book out of print … because we believe Mr. Armstrong’s doctrinal errors are better left out of circulation.” 

That was the moral posture during the lawsuit. WCG had repudiated Armstrong’s core teachings: British-Israelism, the God Family, Saturday Sabbath as a salvation issue, and the rest of the system it later branded heresy. After Armstrong’s death it pulled Mystery of the Ages, destroyed warehouse stock, and told critics the book was “riddled with error.” Then, when PCG printed it anyway, WCG went to federal court to keep those “errors” off the street.

By 2003 the posture had changed. WCG’s income had collapsed from roughly $170 million before the splits to about $25 million. The damages trial was still ahead. Enforcing copyrights against a swarm of Armstrong splinter groups and internet archives was expensive and leaky. So WCG sold. 

On January 16, 2003—seventeen years to the day after Armstrong’s death—the parties agreed that WCG would sell PCG the copyrights to Mystery of the Ages and 18 other Armstrong works for $3 million. PCG later said insurance covered about $1 million of that, leaving PCG a net cost of $2 million. The paperwork closed in March 2003. The injunction was vacated. The lawsuit was dismissed. No judge ever fixed a damages number. 

WCG officials called it stewardship. Chief financial officer Bernard Schnippert said the church had “found a buyer who’s willing to pay for material which [they] think is valuable,” and that the church “would never be able to make this amount in royalties” by publishing the works itself. In-house counsel Ralph Helge told ministers the $3 million offer was “substantial,” would bring “assured revenue,” and would end “further intensive, costly litigation.” Critics said the quieter truth out loud. Former WCG pastor Reginald Killingley put it this way: “They’re willing, in effect, to support what they condemn—to permit the perpetuation and promotion of heresy for the sake of money.” Phil Arnn of Watchman Fellowship called it an ethical problem: WCG had spent years insisting Armstrong’s doctrines were spiritually destructive, then cashed a check so a splinter group could put those doctrines back into circulation. 

WCG had other options. It could have held the copyrights, licensed the titles, and collected royalties for as long as the copyrights lasted. It could have kept the works out of print, as Tkach said Christian duty required. It could have published annotated editions under its own control. Instead it took a lump sum, walked away from ongoing property rights in those 19 titles, and let PCG restart the Armstrong publishing machine.

That is not courage. It is a cash-out. A church that claimed Armstrong’s teachings were false still monetized them, then left the field.

And it did not even sell the whole library. The deal covered 19 items: seven books, eleven booklets, and a 58-lesson correspondence course. Armstrong wrote thousands of other pieces—Plain Truth articles, Good News articles, booklets, letters, broadcast scripts. Those copyrights stayed with WCG, later renamed Grace Communion International. GCI still holds a large share of Armstrong’s intellectual property even while teaching that the man was a false teacher and that his system was unbiblical. The institution that “disproved” Armstrong remains a landlord of Armstrong. Then PCG started altering the book it called "inspired"PCG’s public story is that it rescued Mystery of the Ages from destruction and preserved Armstrong’s words. That story collapses as soon as you compare the 1985 text with the edition PCG issued after it owned the copyright.The most important deletion is not subtle. On page 245 of the original, Armstrong wrote:

No prophets are mentioned as having either administrative, executive or preaching functions in the New Testament Church. 

 

PCG cut that sentence from its 2003 edition. Researcher Robert Kuhne documented related passages that PCG also stripped or planned to strip, including Armstrong’s statement that the Church is built on Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles, and this line from page 350:

All teaching came from Christ through the apostles — and a few times Christ communicated to apostles via the prophets (of which there are none in God’s Church today since the Bible for our time is complete).

PCG did not hide the motive from its own ministry. In the October 21, 2004 Pastor General’s Report, Stephen Flurry explained the edit in language that should end any claim of textual fidelity:

We removed that sentence from the 2003 version, not because we are doing away with Mr. Armstrong’s teachings, but because of what God has added to the Church since Mr. Armstrong died—the revealed truth that there is, in fact, a prophet guiding the Church today who also serves an administrative and executive position within the Church.

He added that there were “no prophets in the Church during the Philadelphia era—throughout the entirety of Mr. Armstrong’s ministry—but God has since revealed that there is one leading His people during the Laodicean era.” Rather than write a new section into Armstrong’s book, PCG “felt it best to preserve the text as closely as possible to the original and simply strike that sentence and then let our other literature, like That Prophet, reflect the Church’s new teaching.” The next printing, he said, would also cut the parenthetical on page 350. That is not preservation. That is retrofitting.

Armstrong’s sentences were a problem for Gerald Flurry because Flurry claims to be “That Prophet,” a man with administrative, executive, and preaching authority over the church. Armstrong said the New Testament Church does not run that way and that there are no such prophets in God’s Church today because the Bible is complete. Those lines had to go so PCG literature would not contradict PCG government.The irony is blunt. PCG spent six years in court insisting that Mystery of the Ages was so essential to its faith that suppressing it violated religious liberty. After it bought the copyright, it treated the same book as a draft that could be silently corrected to match Flurry’s office. WCG had been accused of rewriting Armstrong to bury him. PCG rewrote Armstrong to enthrone a successor Armstrong never appointed.The myth and what it is forPut the pieces together and the “greatest victory” slogan is doing institutional work.

PCG printed a copyrighted book without permission. A federal appeals court said that was infringement, not fair use. An injunction stopped the presses. A damages trial was coming. PCG then paid millions of dollars—$3 million on the face of the settlement, about $2 million after insurance—to buy the copyrights and make the case go away. That is a commercial settlement after a legal loss, not a court victory. 

WCG, having told the world it had a Christian duty to keep Armstrong’s “errors” out of print, sold those same writings because $3 million in hand beat the cost and uncertainty of holding the property, collecting royalties, or fighting every copy on the internet. It abandoned the moral claim that justified the lawsuit and kept the rest of Armstrong’s catalog anyway.

PCG then edited the crown jewel of that purchase so Armstrong would no longer say there are no New Testament-style prophets running the church. The book that supposedly proved PCG was Armstrong’s faithful remnant was altered to prove Gerald Flurry is a prophet Armstrong said the Church does not have.

None of that requires a theological verdict on Armstrong, Flurry, Tkach, or anyone else. The paper trail is enough. PCG did not win the lawsuit. It lost on the law, bought the inventory, and then changed the inventory. WCG did not protect the public from teachings it called heresy. It sold the rights, took the money, and left the contradictions standing.