The Transcendence of God and the Ontological Nose

The Transcendence of God and the Ontological Nose

“He who planted the ear, does he not hear?

He who formed the eye, does he not see?”

Psalm 94:9

“God is spirit”

Words of Jesus, John 4:24

Consider the nose. We are all familiar with its form and function. It is a part of our respiratory system. With it we can smell flowers. But it also serves another less apparent purpose. It is evidence that God does not have a body.

God is an eternal spirit. This is his essence. Not only does he exist but he is the source of all existence, of all being. He is the creator. So everything that is, he made. He has never not existed. He is timeless. Without beginning and without end. Let us assume, for the sake of a thought experiment, that he has always had a nose. Not an acquired or created nose but a nose that is a part of his essential eternal nature. A timeless nose. At some point (this is awkward to state because God created time and is not in time), he had to ask himself “Why do I have this bodily projection with two passages in it? Why does it do the things that it does? I’ve just always had it.” The nose is ontologically co-existent with God. It is a complex piece of equipment. It has contouring and turbinates and little filtering hairs and all manner of built in capabilities. But the cosmos had not been created yet. Atmospheric gases had not been created yet. Proteins to form mucous had not been created yet. Atoms and molecules, for that matter, had not been created yet. Nor flowers to smell. God is Spirit so he had no need for these physical things. So the nose had no purpose. It had just been always there.

So one day god decided to make a man. And he decided to give the man this same bodily projection, this nose, and also give it a purpose. So God created atoms and gases and proteins. He made the man so he would require atmospheric gases to live. And gravity and metabolism and all manner of forces and principles to make the nose functional and purposeful. One might say that the entire creation was made to accommodate this nose. And God said to himself, “Now, this thing has meaning.” God gave the nose purpose and meaning but he always wondered why he had the nose in the first place.

This same scenario can be applied to the idea that God supposedly had a body as a part of his essence. What this scenario does is simply get the cart before the horse. The nose existed before it had any purpose. It categorizes God as created instead of creator. Critics might quickly reply that God had the nose because there was a spirit atmosphere and spirit gases and God breathed these spirit gases to survive. This means that God was contingent on something external to himself to stay alive. This is not a description of a necessary eternal spirit but of a created being. This is a mapping of the human condition onto God. It is a lèse-majesté. The idea that God is not dependent on a nose does not mean that God cannot “smell.” His sensory capabilities are infinite. He created odors and he knows everything about them, including how they would smell to the human nose. He just does not need a human nose to do this.

But what about Psalm 94:9? This is the kind of scripture that led Herbert W. Armstrong (HWA) to believe that God had a body. But it is human talk for humans to understand. What is technical for us in the created realm is allegory for God in the essential eternal realm. God does not have ears for the same reason he does not have a nose. He is not limited by waves propagated through a gaseous atmosphere that would strike a tympanum and activate hammer and anvil and be converted into the sensation of sound. We can be thankful that he is not limited by hearing as we know it because he would not be able to sort out the myriad of prayers directed to him every day. Those prayers would not even be transmitted across the vacuum of space. David used the term “hear” in Psalm 94 because that was what David understood and what would communicate to his readers. It is just an allegory for God’s actual absolute capability to sense and know all things. His ability to know transcends all physics and physiology based human sensory systems – hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, seeing. Another way of saying this is that God is not dependent on his own creation.

I do not believe that Herbert W. Armstrong intended to diminish God by teaching erroneously that God has a body. I think he just took anthropomorphisms at face value and moved on. HWA has left us no carefully reasoned exegesis that deals with the issue of anthropomorphism. He never addressed the topic of why if God had a human-like body, it did not create crippling limitations for him as he sustained the cosmos. And the idea of an anthropomorphic God was never challenged by members of the WCG so as to lead to a review and revision of the topic. The idea just never received the attention that it deserved because of circumstance.

It is blatantly obvious that the human body was designed to function in an earthly environment - an environment that came into existence when God created the cosmos. Why would God possess in his eternal essence a body that is earth adapted before there was an earth? Was his body designed for some environment? Who then designed his body for that environment? And who designed the environment? Was there something external to God that was already in existence – an environment that required a nose? If that is true, then God is not the creator of all things. Someone else greater than God was in the picture. This line of argument is called reductio ad absurdum.

Submitted by Neo

A Brief Meditation on the Transcendence of God

 A Brief Meditation on the Transcendence of God

In the early Nineties, a fellow member of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) told me that there were people he encountered at the recent Feast of Tabernacles who were alarmed at a new booklet titled “God is …” They felt the booklet foreshadowed disaster.  I had read the booklet and felt like the controversy was a tempest in a teapot.  But maybe this was a small sign of the times.  A year or so later, I checked out some tapes from the little library maintained by the local WCG congregation about the Doctrine of God.  The tapes were of a series of WCG Bible Studies given in Pasadena by Kyriacos Stavrinides.   I heard the tapes in early 1994 and they were revolutionary.  Stavrinides described the God as understood in the Christian movement, to my great wonderment, and that God was much different from the God of the WCG.  It seemed it was not a tempest in a teapot.  I thought it was going to be a watershed.  But that issue was eclipsed by many other issues and I do not know of any discussion of the Doctrine of God happening thereafter among the followers of Herbert W. Armstrong. Recalling this led me to this brief meditation.

It is natural for man to seek to understand God by use of analogies.   We compare God to a created being because we are created beings and that is what we understand.  This works well, within limits, because we are in the image of God to some degree.  But it is an error to believe that God is just like us only more powerful.  Here is a vignette of issues.  God is not alive.  Nor is he dead.  Humans can be alive or dead. God cannot be either.  He is existence itself.  He transcends the categories of life and death.  God is not limited by neurology.  He does not hear or see or smell or taste or feel.  Those are properties of the created human body.  He experiences things at a level that transcends our senses.  God does not have a body or internal parts.  If he had a beating heart that sustained his life, who would have made it for him – some superior God?  God is not dependent on anything – including internal parts. Even in the Christian movement, God is spoken of as omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient as if these words described transcendence.  Yet these are just human characteristics with Omni- added as a prefix to expand the scope of these words.  God is not just omnipresent – which means present everywhere.  God is not a “where” being.  He is not restricted by the concept of location.  God is also not restricted by time.  He is not a “when” being as we are.   God is not just omnipotent.  The human idea of being powerful involves something being stronger than something else.  The word contains an implicit idea of comparison.  God owns everything absolutely and does not need power to stake his claim.  God is not just omniscient.  He does not just know everything about every field of study.  He creates knowledge.  He transcends knowing.   God is timeless, location-less, limit-less.  This must be stated apophatically because we do not have the words.  All our words are rooted in humanness with its limitations.  It is a grave error to believe that the anthropomorphisms of an ancient Semitic tribal people, their particular analogies, tell us what God is in his essence.  They also thought that the sky was like a blue ceiling.  God gave us the ability not to understand his transcendence fully but to acknowledge it. 

So if you do not acknowledge God’s transcendence where does it take you?  Popular atheists like Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens argue from the perspective that God is like a demiurge from Gnosticism.  Non-transcendent but immanent demiurges do not create but fabricate using already existing materials and forces.  They do not create Ex Nihilo.  You never hear atheists arguing about how “being” originates.  They always start their debate with being, dimensions, stable forces, and objects presumed.  Atheists ignore the highway and just futz around in the weeds on the shoulder because that is all the farther science will take them. 

Or you end up making the mistake that Herman Hoeh and Rod Meredith made.  They believed that the Ten Commandments were God’s eternal spiritual law.  And so these Commandments and the statutes, laws, and judgments in the Mosaic legislation that expanded and refined the Ten Commandments just had to be in the New Covenant.  But why would the law of God from eternity, that reflected the nature of God himself, speak of adultery?  (God is sibi ipse ex, a law unto himself.)  What would that mean back before there were human beings and sex?   Humans and sex are not eternal – they were both created.  When this issue is raised you often get the answer that the law concerning adultery is really about loyalty or integrity or some other fundamental ethic.  This just proves that the law concerning adultery is really based on something more fundamental.   It is painfully obvious that The Ten Commandments are an instantiation of God’s eternal spiritual law specifically tailored for humanity.  They are not that law itself.  And God can put into effect or turn off instantiations as he sees fit.   God may have put into effect a collection of laws that govern the angelic realm that we cannot imagine.   All instantiations (Abrahamic, Mosaic, New Covenant, Angelic) are derived from his eternal spiritual law that pre-existed the Cosmos. 

Considering what is at stake, God’s transcendence is well worth thinking about. 

Submitted by Neo

What Did You Sign Up For? – Part 2

 

What Did You Sign Up For? – Part 2

A Review of Herman Hoeh’s  “Which Old Testament Laws Should We Keep Today?” 

By Neo

Part 1 of this article (link) was concerned with how Herman Hoeh’s Model of Biblical jurisprudence differed from the orthodox Christian model.   A case was built in Part 1, based on the historical Christian view, that the eternal, moral law of God, that reflects God’s essential nature, was the source for both the OT litigation and the NT litigation.  For this reason the OT and NT litigation share principles but not all implementation features.  But the theme in Herman Hoeh’s Model was that the NT was derived from the OT and much of the Mosaic Law is binding on Christians and in its original form.  As Hoeh wrote, “The purpose of Christ’s teachings in the “Sermon on the Mount” was to magnify the Old Testament law, not annul it.”

The Problem of Defining “The Law of Moses”

The Mosaic Law is the law mediated through Moses from Yahweh to Israel.  This uncomplicated definition notwithstanding, it is a myth that the OT litigation was written by Moses as if he sat down and churned out text.  The Torah may be in the spirit of Moses or it may originate in his experiences but it is not a monolithic body of text written by a single author.  The Documentary Hypothesis convincingly identifies, based on language, at least four different sources of contribution.  Somewhere in history, perhaps in Post-exilic times, these fragments were redacted into the Torah.  Further, in parts of the Torah, Moses is referred to in the third person.  This makes isolating a unit of text to which we can attach the moniker “Law of Moses” a great challenge.  What constitutes the law of Moses may be traditional rather than paleographic. 

The Torah encompasses the first five books of the OT and is referred to as Torat Moshe.  In Judaism and Christianity, it is common to see the Torah as a unit consisting of sometimes 613 laws, including 100 sacrifices. But in spite of its acknowledged unity in principle, the Torah is also a literary composite.  So Herman Hoeh’s interpretation, to be discussed in the next section, of the organization of the Torah as a particular kind of composite is based on his hermeneutics.  His interpretation is not something that is incontrovertible or the only possible interpretation.   In his article, he explains how he divides the Mosaic Law into its elements. 

How Herman Hoeh Deconstructed the Law of Moses

Hoeh, similar to most Christians, had a high view of the Ten Commandments. He states of the Decalogue, “The Ten Commandments constitute the basic spiritual law which regulates human life.”  He later draws a distinction between the Mosaic civil laws and the ritualistic law.  Of the civil law, he states, “These statutes and judgments magnify the Ten Commandments.”  The civil laws, in his view, have special status because they are derived from the Ten Commandments.  He concludes, “The civil law of Moses expounds the Ten Commandments by revealing how the ten basic principles are to be applied.  We are to keep this part of the law, not in the strictness of the letter, but according to its spirit and intent.”  For him, the civil laws comprise the component of the law of Moses that is still in force and binding on Christians under the New Covenant and Christians must observe these laws with a new and avid heart. 

Hoeh uncouples the ritualistic law, essentially the sacrifices, from the civil law of Moses.  He asserts that sacrifices were not originally part of the litigation but were added later (Gal 3:17).  This means that the rituals can be canceled without affecting the validity of the civil law of Moses.  There are a number of flaws in this view: 

1.     The existing format of the text does not support the putative historical addition of the sacrifices at a later date (430 years later).  Sacrifices are not segregated into a single text block appended to the already existing textual body of the Mosaic Law.  

2.     The sacrifices are scattered throughout the text of the Torah and some occur even in Genesis and Exodus, before Sinai and well before the 430-year milestone.

3.     The sacrifices are just as validly derived from the Ten Commandments as the civil law of Moses.  At a minimum, the sacrifices are part of the liturgical and ceremonial implementation of the First Commandment from the Decalogue.  

4.     The Jews considered the Torah a unity.  They did not separate out the sacrifices from the rest of the Torah.  The Jews would still be offering animal sacrifices but for the fact that there is no Temple - the only place where such sacrifices may be legitimately offered.  

5.     The idea that the sacrificial law was added because of “transgression” does not indisputably point to the Mosaic Law having already been in force 430 years earlier.  Hoeh himself supports the idea that the Ten Commandments were in force before Moses and wrote a booklet addressing this.  This early ethical code is likely what was transgressed not the later Mosaic Law. 

6.     Galatians 3:16-19 is referring to the Mosaic Law being added to the Abrahamic Covenant (3:16).  Nowhere does Paul equate the “added” law to the sacrifices. Hoeh asserts the equivalency with insufficient exegesis in this article.     

While each of the points above could launch a useful study, point 6 above will now be examined further.  Paul writes in Gal 3:17:

“And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect.”

If Hoeh’s model is correct then the term “covenant” refers to the Mosaic Covenant and “the law” refers to the sacrifices in this verse.  This approach has irremediable inconsistencies.  How then could the sacrifices make the law of Moses of none effect?  The sacrifices were an integral part of the Mosaic covenant, were the means of reconciliation with God under the covenant, and foreshadowed the sacrifice of Christ.  From the surrounding text, Paul’s “covenant” refers to the Abrahamic Covenant and the “law” refers to the Torah known as the Law of Moses.  It is the Mosaic Law that seems to challenge or “disannul” the Abrahamic Covenant because Israel could not keep the Mosaic Law.  The Mosaic Law became a failure point for Israel.  Paul is saying that Israel’s losses under the Mosaic Covenant will not disannul the promises under the Abrahamic covenant.   It is participation by Jew and Gentile in the faith of Abraham that makes Christianity to be salvation for all people and not obedience to the culturally and racially bound Mosaic Law.   And Galatians 3:19 should be read as follows. Notice the expiration condition assigned to the Mosaic litigation:

“Wherefore then serveth the law (the Mosaic litigation)? It was added because of transgressions (under the pre-Moses rendition of the 10 Commandments), till the seed should come to whom the promise was made (Jesus); and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator (Moses)”.

Herman Hoeh, by separating out and removing the sacrificial laws from the Torah deconstructed the holistic law of Moses.  Paul said the law was a unity – if you want to keep one part of it, you must keep all of it.  It may be a literary composite but it is an ideological whole.  The inevitable conclusion is that the sacrifices were abrogated because they were a part of the OT litigation and the OT litigation was abrogated and replaced with the New Covenant by Jesus bringing his sacrifice and better promises. 

Hoeh’s Disposition of the Non-Sacrificial Part of the Torah or What Did You Sign Up For?

According to Hoeh, we are to remember and keep the law of Moses comprised of the commandments, laws, statutes, and ordinances.  He also argues for the inclusion of the judgments. All of these are binding on New Covenant Christians because they are rooted in the Ten Commandments.  These are the laws that are written on the heart under the New Covenant.  In addition to this cataphatic statement, Hoeh also has an apophatic statement, “Any other laws not included in Hebrews 9:10 were not a part of the rituals added because of sin!”    Hebrews 9:10 mentions “only meats and drinks and diverse washings and carnal (flesh) ordinances, imposed until the time of reformation.”   All else is still binding. 

So how should this play in the average Twenty-first Century Armstrongist congregation?  A case to consider: If a woman is menstruating she becomes unclean and can transfer this uncleanness to other people and physical objects.  This is not an uncleanness that can be washed away.  Everything she touches incurs a ritual necessity to be cleansed.  Of this type of uncleanness, God states “Thus you shall keep the people of Israel separate from their uncleanness, lest they die in their uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst.”  If somehow this uncleanness generated by female menstruation gets transmitted to the Tabernacle, people will die.  In some branches of Judaism, the easiest solution is to have the woman isolate herself in a menstruation hut for the period of time prescribed to become clean.  In the Hoehist model, this is an example of a requirement of the law that must be written on the hearts and minds of Christians under the New Covenant.  It is an extension of the Ten Commandments.  We could go into the fact that this same law states elsewhere that it is legitimate to purchase and keep Hebrew slaves.  But the point has been made.  Armstrongists do not keep the law that Herman Hoeh determined is binding on them.  My guess is that it is also not written on their hearts and their salvation is in grim jeopardy by Hoeh’s standards.  Did you really mean to sign up for this?

Coda – Hoeh’s Sabbatarian Hermeneutic

First, let me say that I am not suggesting that the Ten Commandments be done away with.  That seems to be the false alarmist statement that Armstrongists resort to first.  I believe in the Ten although I hold to a spiritual form of the fourth.   I also still follow a modern version of the Levitical dietary laws though not for theological reasons.  So, I am also not suggesting antinomianism – that anybody can do anything they want to.  If you come away with these ideas you have not read this article thoughtfully.  

In researching this topic, I came to have a feeling about why Hoeh struggled so fiercely to include parts of the OT litigation in the NT.   I believe he was strategically trying to build a protective wall around the seventh day. If he could claim that parts of the OT litigation survived the change in covenants intact, Sabbatarianism could be preserved and, in consequence, Armstrongism could be legitimized.  I developed this feeling from observing the many times that the arguments made by Hoeh seemed artificial or teleological. 

Another idea I became aware of was the derision that Armstrongists have for Christians.  Hoeh stated in this article, “Few religionists recognize the eternal binding authority of the Ten Commandments.”  It is a calumny against Christian denominations to claim that they do not recognize the Ten Commandments when all of mainstream and evangelical Christianity does.  But Armstrongists no doubt would claim that Christians do not recognize the Decalogue because they leave out the seventh-day sabbath.   So once again the seventh day becomes pivotal in the Armstrongist dissension from Christianity.

The answer to the question “Which Old Testament LAWS Should We Keep Today?” is “Only those that Jesus and the NT writings approve.”  Not the ones that Herman Hoeh supported through special pleading. 

Note:  Herman Hoeh, now deceased, became a Christian late in life as I understand.  The reviewed article is a version that was distributed in 1971.  My guess is that Herman Hoeh would not support the substance of his article after becoming a Christian.  I take Hoeh’s becoming a Christian all the renunciation of the article that is needed. 

In Christo Solo!

The Roots of Armstrongism in the First Century Jerusalem Church

 

The Roots of Armstrongism in the First Century Jerusalem Church

By Neo

Christianity at its inception was a form of Late Second Temple Judaism. Jesus was a Jew who preached a form of Judaism to Jews. Jewish factions worshipped together in the Temple and in synagogues. The Jews in one faction of Judaism followed a man named Jesus and believed him to be the Messiah.  Only years later would the name “Christian” be applied to this faction. The times were filled with expectations of the apocalypse. Judaists, in general, were waiting for the first coming of the Messiah to overthrow the world regime. And the Jews who were followers of Jesus were waiting for the second coming of the Messiah to overthrow the world regime. Everyone seemed to understand that something revolutionary was going to happen.

Within the Jesus faction, a man named James, the brother of Jesus, became the leader of the Jesus Movement. James was a Jew and held Jewish practice in high regard. Two other men who were also leaders, Paul and Peter, did not have the same commitment to Jewish practice. Paul was concerned that these practices would develop into a wall of division between Jews and Gentiles. Peter seemed to vacillate between the Jewish pole and the Gentile pole. At one point, Paul said to Peter “I said to Cephas (Peter) before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? (Galatians 2:14).” Peter who accompanied Jesus throughout his ministry and was very close to Jesus had set aside Jewish practice in his personal life. There was a tension between James on one side and Peter and Paul on the other with Peter functioning as a kind of liaison, purposely or by accident, between the two sides.

This tension culminated in a controversy over circumcision, the archetypical requirement in Jewish theology and practice. Circumcision represented the outward symbol of salvation as understood in Judaism. It symbolized the covenant made with Abraham. It was the indispensable sign that Yahweh was Israel’s God and Israel was Yahweh’s people. So it is easy to understand that some Jews would regard this as a necessary condition, exceeding in significance such conditions as the Sabbath or dietary restrictions, for belonging to the Jesus Movement. Within the Jerusalem Church led by James, a faction that has been called by some historians “the Circumcision Party,” came into sharp conflict with Paul. There is no definitive indication in the New Testament that James supported these people. But neither is there any indication that he tried to oppose this faction while it was incipient.   

Paul opposed the circumcision faction with Peter’s sometimes wavering support (Acts 15:8-9). (Jesus had pointed out to Peter his wavering tendency.) Paul understood the profound meaning of what the Circumcision Party was asserting. They were saying that salvation within the Jesus Movement could not be appropriated without circumcision. They stated explicitly, “Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.” The Circumcision Party added an Old Testament requirement to the salvation that was in Jesus, a physical requirement that had now become only a cultural tradition in the teaching of Jesus. Paul was not anti-Jewish. He wrote that everyone who followed Jesus was a spiritual Jew but he did not concede to modifying soteriology as it was understood in the Jesus Movement. Paul also stated that circumcision was of the heart and had a continuing spiritual meaning for spiritual Jews – but the physical requirement was no longer a part of the theology. Of the followers of the Circumcision Party, Paul stated, “Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace.”  Paul expanded the principle beyond circumcision to include justification by the law to the exclusion of Jesus.

I would have speculated that Paul’s attitude towards the body of Old Testament litigation would be relatively mild and accepting. He was, after all, “an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee.” The litigation was now no longer the pathway to salvation but a colorful collection of ethics, customs, and traditions. But there is a passage, Colossians 2:8-19, that reflects a much more intense and negative attitude on the part of Paul.  (New Revised Standard Version throughout the remainder of this paragraph.)  Paul starts in Colossians 2:8 by saying: “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe . . .” He is speaking of human traditions and pagan philosophies. But later he includes the Old Testament litigation in this category.  He says first, “. . . He forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.  He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.” This seems to be a reference to the litigation of the Old Testament.  How else could past sins be defined among the Jews? Sin is the transgression of the law. If there is any doubt about the reference he writes the following statement: “Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”  Only the Old Testament could contain foreshadows of Christ. Paul, by interweaving the Old Testament litigation into this passage that also refers to human traditions and pagan philosophies, places the now superseded Old Testament litigation, such as circumcision, in the same category as these worldly traditions and philosophies. 

Herman Hoeh stated years back that he had met an important person in Israel and explained to him the theology of the Worldwide Church of God.  I regret to say that I do not remember the Israeli’s name. But after hearing Hoeh’s description, the Israeli said, as I recall Hoeh’s account, “If your description is accurate, then the WCG is heir to the Jerusalem Church.” Hoeh indicated that he was gratified by that observation.  I believe the observation to be true. I would add a refinement. Armstrongism is heir, not to the Jerusalem Church proper, but to the faction of the Jerusalem Church known as the Circumcision Party.  

The Jerusalem Church seemed to fade out after the calamity of 70 AD.  Christianity expanded enormously in the Gentile sphere. The fervid conflict over circumcision is now long forgotten. But here and there, the principle behind salvific circumcision still finds traction. And those who sustain this ideology can rightfully claim ancient provenance and even invoke the name of the Jerusalem Church. But this claim to a high-born heritage must be understood in its theological context. 

Note:  It is worth mentioning that Paul and Peter were not antinomian. Christianity, correspondingly, is not antinomian.  In some quarters, that is a persistent calumny against the Christian Church. Both men believed in the law given in the Sermon on the Mount. Paul, in particular, was highly moralistic and explicit about moral rectitude in the opening chapters of Romans. Neither is the theme of this opinion piece antinomian. Those who are advocates of viewing the New Testament as just a patina on the Old Testament have a personal obligation to understand this issue if they claim to be Christian. The replacement of the Old Testament litigation does not equate to antinomianism no matter how often repeated.

 

Page from the Gnostic Gospel of Judas

The Contingent God of Armstrongism

by Neo

I do not believe that the human mind, no matter how much it might be augmented, is capable of deeply understanding God. So when we try to conceive of God, we always conceive of him differently than he actually is. God is mysterious. But this is not in tension with the idea that we may know God “through a glass darkly.” And this knowledge, though falling short of the reality, has definition. In this op-ed I will observe that the Armstrongist god belongs to a different class of being than the Christian God and is much more limited than the Christian God. This is best understood through recognizing that the Armstrongist god is a contingent being and the Christian God is a necessary being. 

Contingency

A contingent being is one that in essential some way depends on external conditions for its existence. A necessary being has no such dependencies but is self-existent. This latter statement is brief and apophatic but I will focus on ontological contingency in this op-ed rather than God as a necessary being. Armstrongism has no document titled “The Doctrine of God.” Its ruminations on God are scattered through booklets, magazine articles, and homiletic messages. So I will rely on my 30 years of experience as an Armstrongist and some internet research to describe the Armstrongist notion of god.

The Armstrongist god is a contingent being. Under this proposition, imagine how the universe started. There was nothing but an empty universe – space with no contents. God lived there but in a spirit realm or dimension. He resided somewhere in the “sides of the north” as viewed from the location of the yet-to-be-created earth. God, in this scenario, is so much a part of the physical universe that GTA stated that you could get into a rocket ship and fly to where god is, if you had enough time. To theologians and philosophers, this means that the Armstrongist god is immanent in the universe but not transcendent.

God as creator populated the empty container of space with celestial bodies. One, in particular, earth, he made habitable for biological creatures. But an issue is that the empty space in which god lived already had properties. It just did not have material objects. It was dimensional and was pre-made to accommodate the laws of nature that we know. Empty space is not the same as nothingness. God did not create spacetime – he had always lived in spacetime. The Armstrongist god is then dependent on eternally existing spacetime – as if it were a divine uncreated environment. But now we know that spacetime is not divine but physical. Spacetime reacts to gravity. This dependency on the spacetime environment means that the Armstrongist god is a contingent god.

A further example is that Armstrongists assert that their god always had a body (see the Mystery of the Ages, pp. 46-47). The human body is patterned after the body of god. So, bodily parts were an inherent part of his eternal essence. This means that god had teeth before ever envisioning the idea of eating. It was like he wondered what the hard, white things were in the unusual orifice we call a “mouth”. So, he started with teeth which had no purpose, they had just always been, and had to make something that they could be used for. So he invented this idea of nutrition and made this stuff called food so that these hard things in his mouth could have something to cut and grind up. The surfaces of these eternally existing hard, white things were already designed to cut and grind. So the engineering design of the teeth encouraged him in a certain direction in his creation. So the Armstrongist god is contingent on an eternally existing bodily construction with its already engineered mechanics.

A myriad of such examples could be constructed but two should be sufficient to arouse some reflection and questioning in the minds of those who accept the notion of the Armstrongist god. But in summary, the Armstrongist god did not create his environment or his body but he is dependent on these external elements. This dependency makes the Armstrongist god not necessary but contingent. Armstrongism does not account for where these external and eternal elements, both highly engineered, might have originated or what their status is in the divine realm. Given the Armstrongist model of a contingent god, one might speculate these elements were created by another superordinate being who is necessary.

There is in Gnosticism a kind of postulated being that matches the description of this kind of contingent god. This category of this created but powerful being is called a Demiurge. The definition below is from the Wikipedia article on the Demiurge:

In the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy, the demiurge . . . is an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe.
The Gnostics adopted the term demiurge. Although a fashioner, the demiurge is not necessarily the same as the creator figure in the monotheistic sense, because the demiurge itself and the material from which the demiurge fashions the universe are both considered consequences of something else. Depending on the system, they may be considered either uncreated and eternal or the product of some other entity.

Many human religions have adopted a demiurgic view of god. And this view is particularly popular among atheists like Dawkins and Dennett because it is a much easier target to attack. This is because their arguments are rooted in materialism and the demiurgic god is mostly involved with the material universe. But this contingent god is not God as understood in Christianity. Consequently, many atheists begin their pleadings with a category error.

Who Cares?

Humans have differing perceptions of god. Does this mean that how we conceive of the Christian God is a matter of choice? For instance, the God of Calvinists Christians is much different than the god of Arminian Christians. Also, sociologists Paul Froese and Christopher Bader (“America's Four Gods: What We Say About God--And What That Says About Us”, Oxford University Press, 2015) determined by a survey that Americans attribute one of four different personality profiles to god: The Authoritative God, Benevolent God, Critical God, and Distant God. Because the view of God, both theological and popular, is varied, this does not abnegate the fact that there is a revelation of God contained in scripture – a revelation that permits broad agreement in the Christian movement on important divine attributes. For example, Calvinists and Arminians both believe that God is not contingent but necessary.

From these varied views, one might conclude that the idea of god is indeterminate for most people and that any notion of god will do. And for that reason, the Armstrongist god is just as valid as the Christian god. But this rejects the broad areas of agreement, based on Biblical exegesis, among denominations in the Christian movement. Given the state of knowledge in contemporary theology, there is no reason for a denomination to adopt the retrograde idea of a contingent god. And the boundary between a necessary god and a contingent god is, perhaps, the lowest threshold separating Christianity from non- Christian religions. That is why this issue is worth caring about.

Progressive Revelation and Contingency

I believe it is likely that the ancient Hebrews believed that God had a body. I also believe that they cast him in the role of an ancient Semitic Warrior God or Storm God. We can now see, with the New Testament available, that God’s characterization by Old Testament writers was anthropomorphic but to them it was realistic and they wielded the pen. As Dr. Peter Enns has stated, “God let his children tell the story.” The Logos resolved this problem by coming to earth himself and delivering a message about the nature of God. For this reason, a progressive revelation of God can be seen across the Old Testament and New Testament with the final revelation in Jesus himself.

In these opposing views, we have God as spirit (John 4:24) in the New Testament at one pole and God with a body in the Old Testament at the other pole. Armstrong used a hermeneutic of integration, rather than the hermeneutic of progressive revelation, to reconcile these two strongly divergent viewpoints. Armstrong innovated a novel non-Biblical concept that made God contingent, perhaps inadvertently. Armstrong asserted that god was of “spirit composition” which made it seem like god was composed of some kind of ethereal substance. (This also gave God locality which contradicts the Christian belief that God is omnipresent.) God is not made of spirit but God is, rather, a spirit. The concept of “spirit composition” does not occur in the Bible.

God as a theophany may appear to human eyes but that appearance does not imply he is made of some kind of visible “spirit substance.” Does God require eyes composed of some kind of spirit substance in order to be able to see? First, eyes would be a limitation to God. His sensory capabilities transcend anything we know as humans with our five senses. Second, if he requires eyes, then he is like a sighted created being, dependent on the functioning of internal organs to live. To assert that God is composed out of spirit substance with various organs is to assert that he is contingent and not necessary.

In the last analysis, Armstrong integrated the Old Testament characterization of God as having a body with the New Testament revelation of God in Jesus. He did this instead of simply accepting Jesus and his word as the ultimate and final revelation of the necessary God. My guess is that he did not use this hermeneutic simply to create the heretical concept of a contingent god. I believe he did it to achieve consistency between the Old and New Testaments concerning the nature of god and inadvertently cast god as contingent. We are now unable to ask him about his decisions.

(For the terms “spirit composition” and “spirit substance” see, for instance, Armstrong’s booklet “What Science Can’t Discover About the Human Mind”, 1978. In his “Mystery of the Ages,” Armstrong wrote that god is “composed of spirit.” The verb “compose” is transitive, requires a subject and object, and leads to the question “Who composed God of spirit?”)

Closing Remarks

Nobody knows the scope of God’s grace that he would extend to those who believe in a mischaracterization of him. Any judgment is above our pay grade and involves factors that I have not addressed. One could make the “Thief on the Cross” argument. The thief knew nothing about contingency and necessity yet Christ received him. But how many of us are really in that thief’s circumstances?

Even though God is unknowable in his fullness, there are some obvious errors that can be avoided. For instance, is it reasonable, based on the Bible, that the Christian god could be contingent in view of John 1:3 that states “All things (panta, Greek, meaning “all”) came into being through him?” It only takes a little reflection to understand that God created spacetime and is not captive to it.

There are enough relevant and incisive questions concerning contingency that I believe that the Armstrongist groups should review their beliefs about God, with consideration given to existing Christian dogma, and that their doctrine of god should be documented. And they should start by understanding that God is a necessary being, not a contingent being.