Does the church really need new knowledge in order to survive?

The one thing the Church of God is missing...

For decades in the Church of God movement knowledge only flowed from above, through the apostle, to the ministry and finally to the sheep.  Knowledge NEVER came from the sheep upwards.  Many tried through the decades and swiftly found themselves blackballed and disfellowshipped.  How presumptuous of them to know more than the apostle!

Preaching the Gospel has this up:

Some of the human leadership of the Church of God has managed to build a culture of hostility to new knowledge at a very time when there is a desperate need for new knowledge in the Church of God.

"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me; Because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children" (Hosea 4:6).

Could this apply to the Church of God today?

I have said there is a desperate need for new knowledge in the Church. What is that need? What do we need God to teach us that we do not already know?

I will mention three examples, though I could probably list many more. All three relate to problems in the Church of God, problems the ministry and membership do not know how to deal with. We need knowledge from God and from His word the Bible in how to remedy these situations, knowledge we apparently do not have. 

The first point he mentions is addiction in the church.  That one certainly is true.  Alcoholism is a huge problem in the Church of God movement and always has been.  Working in Pasadena for three decades exposed me to the rampant alcohol abuse of ministers and members, but particularly with the ministers.  For many years I got assigned to work the ministerial dining room during the Feast.  What an eye-opening experience that was! Watching ministers have to be almost carried out of the room because they were drunk was a shocking thing to see.

One is the problem of addiction in the Church. Some baptized Church of God members struggle with addictions to sins, addictions they have struggled with unsuccessfully for years and have still not overcome. These could be addictions to alcohol, drugs, sexual sin, gambling, over-eating, and many other things. In vain you may search a sermon list of a Church of God fellowship for a sermon series on how to overcome addiction with messages that are truly effective in helping members overcome their addictions. Why do ministers avoid this topic? Is it because they think addiction is not a problem? Unlikely. More likely, they do not have an answer, so they avoid the subject.

They don't talk about it because they themselves are addicts.  Others don't talk because their close friends are and they don't want to expose them.  Decades ago, a local minister in Pasadena knew there was a problem with alcohol in the church and sought to do something about it.  He knew how AA had helped many in the local community to maintain sobriety.  He started working with other churches and AA leaders to start a program.  It even made the news in Pasadena, until some jealous pissant at HQ went running to HWA about it. Considering HWA had an alcohol problem himself, he wasn't about to see this succeed, special when it came to cooperating with other religious organizations.

The Church needs new knowledge from the Bible on the subject of how members can overcome their addictions, knowledge that really gets results and bears good fruit.

What new knowledge from the Bible is going to change people in the church from being alcoholics? Sometimes the best thing they need to is to stop listing to self-appointed church guru's and take advantage of the myriad of groups that deal with this day in and day out. Those resources will do far more to assist church members than any "new knowledge" sought from the Bible that some minister newly discovers!

The next source of needed new knowledge is on how to get the gospel of Herbert Armstrong out into the world like he did. Not one single group today is even approaching the number of things HWA did in promoting his beliefs.  No world leaders are being contacted, no interesting TV programs are being produced that draw in members, nothing like this is being done by ANY COG leader today, no matter how much they squawk that they are.

Another problem is the lack of a wide-open door for preaching the gospel. Yes, the door is still open, but only a crack. We have had plenty of time since the breakup of Worldwide for faithful remnants of the Church to grow and become strong. But God has not given us a wide-open door as He gave Mr. Armstrong. Magazine circulation in the old days was about 7,000,000 or more, and growth in members and income for a time was about 30% a year. Now, typically for one of the larger organizations, magazine circulation is only about 250,000 or 300,000. Growth in membership and income is small, maybe less than 5% a year. Why? Why is the work not growing faster? At this rate, we will never get the work done in time.

Since the Worldwide Church of God imploded, the COG movement has been overwhelmed with so many splinter groups that are lead by narcissistic men who refuse to release control or cooperate with other COG's. None of them have even tried to find a "wide open door" to get their message through. Their TV programs are boring as hell.  Their magazines keep recycling articles from the mother church or something their guru wrote 20 - 40 years ago.  None of them have ever effectively imitated HWA and the WCG no matter how hard they try.  And...never will.

The Church needs new knowledge from the Bible on what changes the leadership and membership need to make in order for God to bless us with a wide-open door for preaching the gospel and the Ezekiel warning to Israel and the world. We have about 500 million people or more just in the nations of Israel to reach with that message, and we have barely scratched the surface. Blood guilt is on our heads - we become murderers in God's sight - if we fail to get that message out (Ezekiel 3:18). We talk endlessly about the sins of the nation - how 60 million or more unborn children have been murdered - but we do not consider that God may put the deaths of 500 million people on our heads if we don't warn them in time.

Since the church has spent 80 some years ignoring Jesus and anything he accomplished, how can we expect them to start now?  500 million people in Israelite nations do not need to hear more Armstrongite nonsense.  What good has it ever wrought?  Look at the mess it is today. It is like a harlot laying in a drunken stupor in the gutter, totally helpless and lost. 500 million people do NOT need the message that supposedly is lost by the present COG movement.

The third area he sees is the need for the church to have more "healings" in it.

A third area is healing. We have far fewer cases of miraculous healing than we had in Mr. Armstrong's day, especially in the early days of the work God did through him. Why? God is the same (Malachi 3:6, Hebrews 13:8). What are we doing wrong? We need to know. We don't know now, but we need to learn, and we need to learn the answer from God's word, the Bible, just as we learn all our doctrinal knowledge from the Bible.

The countless splinter groups out there today are filled with vain narcissistic men who are not about to give up their little empires to cooperate with other COG's.  It just irritates the hell out of all of them when too much Jesus enters the picture. God forbid if any member asked about grace, justification, and the things of the new covenant because living under the heavy thumb of the law has left them broken and wanting.

Yet, at the very time when the Church needs to learn new knowledge from God and His word, the Bible, many in the Church of God are busy building a culture that is against learning anything new. Members who come to the ministry to learn more of the truth of God and who want to learn something they did not know before and not just be reminded of old knowledge are rebuked instead of instructed. Those who want to learn something new are belittled. Those ministers or members who have ideas they want to share with the ministry - ideas for new knowledge they feel they have discovered in the Bible - are warned not to focus on new ideas. Their ideas are rejected outright, sometimes without any real examination, not because they are wrong, but only because they are different from the present traditions of the Church. 

This applies to Bob Thiel, James Malm, Dave Pack, Vic Kubik, Gerald Flurry, and all the other legalistic self-appointed leaders who have set themselves up as God's most important men.  Until the members kick these sorry men to the curb, they will NEVER be free.

The writer then makes this comment:

There is a myth in the Church that goes around that says that correction only comes from the top down. This is true if the correction means discipline or punishment or taking authoritative action. In God's way of life, correction in that sense only comes from the top down. But there is another kind of correction that comes in the form of respectful suggestions and advice given in private (whether asked for or not), and that does not always come from the top down.

When has church members voices EVER been heard in the Church of God?  From Herbert Armstrong on down to every single splinter group leader out there today, there has never been a single one of them that ever considered any suggestions or advice from the membership.

The writer then goes on to mock the Church of God Seventh Day for their so-called empty works because they refused some of Herbert Armstrong's demands to change their beliefs.:

Read Mr. Armstrong's autobiography. When he first came into the Church of God Seventh Day, he came as a lay member, not an apostle. He had not been ordained as a minister. Yet he offered doctrinal suggestions, suggestions that Church of God Seventh Day leadership did not accept and teach. One was the identity of the lost tribes of Israel. The other was a matter Mr. Armstrong did not identify in his autobiography, except that it was a correction to an error in Church of God Seventh Day teachings. My guess is that it was about our need to observe God's annual holy days and festivals.

But that Church rejected the new knowledge God was revealing through Mr. Armstrong, a lay member.

And God rejected that Church from doing a powerful work.

Why?

The person or group to do a powerful work, the person or group to whom God would reveal lost knowledge, had to say to the public, "Don't believe me, don't believe any man, believe God, believe your Bible". Why? Because the people who would hear the message were raised in false traditions. They had to reject their traditions and believe the Bible.

The Church of God Seventh Day could not be used by God to preach that message because they weren't living it. They did not reject their traditions to believe the Bible. They rejected new knowledge - new knowledge God offered them through a lay member, Mr. Armstrong - in order to keep the traditions of their organization. In this they were like the Pharisees

The Church of God Seventh Day is doing a far better job of spreading the gospel than any COG is doing today. At least they focus upon Jesus, which the COG does not.

Read Mr. Armstrong's autobiography. When he first came into the Church of God Seventh Day, he came as a lay member, not an apostle. He had not been ordained as a minister. Yet he offered doctrinal suggestions, suggestions that Church of God Seventh Day leadership did not accept and teach. One was the identity of the lost tribes of Israel. The other was a matter Mr. Armstrong did not identify in his autobiography, except that it was a correction to an error in Church of God Seventh Day teachings. My guess is that it was about our need to observe God's annual holy days and festivals.

But that Church rejected the new knowledge God was revealing through Mr. Armstrong, a lay member.

And God rejected that Church from doing a powerful work.

Why?

Herbert Armstrong, even back then, was a loudmouth who demanded that his "new " understanding be accepted because he said so.  He never really sat down with any of them to explain things in detail and have a decent conversation.  His bloviating narcissism did not allow him to ever back down, even when they exposed his demands as wrong.

British Israelism has been so thoroughly debunked that no New Covenant Christian ever needs to concern themselves with the topic.  COG groups cannot stop teaching it because of they do then their entire belief system falls apart and they would lose control of their members.

Besides, COG7 has never been rejected.  They do fa ar better "work" with their members than ANY Church of God group does today.

The person or group to do a powerful work, the person or group to whom God would reveal lost knowledge, had to say to the public, "Don't believe me, don't believe any man, believe God, believe your Bible". Why? Because the people who would hear the message were raised in false traditions. They had to reject their traditions and believe the Bible.

This has proven to be a load of crap in the church.  The "don't believe me, believe your Bible" was never taken seriously in the COG.  The top-down leadership considered the members too stupid to understand the Bible and therefore had to  interpret it for them with hundreds of letters, articles, booklets, books, etc., specifically spelled out how members were to beleive as all the material proof-texted the Bible to fit the narrative the church needed to promote in order to be "called out". as special in the eyes of the members.

The Church of God Seventh Day could not be used by God to preach that message because they weren't living it. They did not reject their traditions to believe the Bible. They rejected new knowledge - new knowledge God offered them through a lay member, Mr. Armstrong - in order to keep the traditions of their organization. In this they were like the Pharisees who favored their traditions over the word of God (Matthew 15:1-9).

What absolute nonsense! 

The Church of God desperately needs new knowledge from God and His word, the Bible. And God can reveal that new knowledge through any ministers or members He chooses, just as He revealed new knowledge from the Bible to Mr. Armstrong before Mr. Armstrong started a new work or was ordained as a minister. God can do this by opening our minds to see what has been in the Bible all along, but we have not noticed it.

God does this through His Holy Spirit and through His word, the Bible. God speaks to us directly in the Bible, and through His Holy Spirit He helps us understand the Bible, one part at a time. And as we believe and try to obey what God reveals to us, He reveals more. But if we disbelieve, the help to understand stops, or is diminished.

This is how a Church of God fellowship can spiritually die. To be alive means to grow, in knowledge, in numbers, in power to do God's work. But if that organization builds an atmosphere of hostility and antagonism towards new knowledge, that is the exact opposite of an atmosphere of faith that believes what God says in the Bible when God teaches us something new.

There is not one single member of the COG that needs new knowledge through some minister.  We have an 80 some year history of the church destroying members lives by the ministery and leadership.  Why continue this farce? 

God gave Church of God Seventh Day time to repent. Mr. Armstrong fellowshipped with them for about seven years before he separated to do a Philadelphia work. But they did not use that time to repent and accept new knowledge from the Bible.

This is the same crap that Bob Thiel spews out today.  He claims he gave rod Meredith and LCG plenty fo time to correct their mistakes that he claimed they had in order to believe what he believes.  Meredith knew Thiel was a blithering idiot at times and refused to bow down to him. Meredith had to publicly rebuke Thiel for his utter nonsense.

In fact, God may already not be pleased and may be withholding from us the power to bring more people in for that very reason. He sees our hypocrisy, and He sees that we offend new people by our double-standard, and so He is not bringing them into the Church of God in any great numbers right now.

It has been quite obvious for 24-years now that God is not pleased with the Church of God.  Never in the entire history of the church has the COG movement been so disjointed and filled with so many self-serving men whoa re deliberately lying to their members. 

The Armstrong version of the Church of God will NEVER be a great work again.  It thankfully is impossible.  No COG leader will ever do this.

The only two commands that Christians need to heed.  Not one thing more.  Sadly, neither of these two simple commands are evident in any of the COG's today.  They cannot love each other so how can they love God?

Armstrongism’s Assyrian Problem

Herbert W. Armstrong proclaimed that the key to prophecy was the identity of the British people as the principal, modern descendants, along with the Jews, of the Biblical patriarch Israel.  An important arc in this scenario is the identification of the German people, the agent used by God to punish Israel, as Assyria.  These two propositions make it possible for proponents to project Biblical prophecy dealing with ancient Israel and Assyria into the arena of modern nation-states and attaches meaning and relevance to World Wars 1 and 2.  The problem, for Armstrongists, is that the Germans are not Assyrians. 

An Exercise in Inconclusion

In the second volume of the Compendium of World History, which can be accessed via internet, Herman Hoeh makes his argument for Assyria as Germany.  An example of Hoeh’s model of historical interpretation is a reference to the writing of St. Jerome.  Hoeh claims that Jerome witnessed the Assyrians invading Europe as a collection of Germanic tribes.  But if you examine the source written by Jerome, this is not unequivocally the saint’s assertion.  Jerome cites some Germanic tribes that were causing trouble and quotes Ps 83:8: “Assur also joined with them.”  But does Jerome mean this Biblical reference figuratively or literally?  We can’t know.   The term “Assur” can be an epithet like the term “barbarian hordes.”

Moreover, Jerome lived circa 347 – 420 B.C.  We know from archaeology and genetics that Western Europe was invaded by the early forerunners of the Germans around 5,000 ya (q.v., David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past) and are called Steppe Pastoralists and identified with the Corded Ware people.  Consequently, we must classify Hoeh’s argument here, and his similar arguments elsewhere, as inconclusive. 

Hoeh also mentions the physical appearance of the Assyrians – they are Caucasians.  But he omitted an important issue – they depict themselves uniformly as brunette with curly hair, like most Middle Easterners and unlike modern Germans.  But there is uncertainty here as well.  Modern studies of pigments on Neo-Assyrian wall paintings in the palace of Ashurnasirpal II indicate that the Assyrians used just three colors: red, white and black (Li Sou, Digital Recolourisation and the Effects of Light on Neo-Assyrian Reliefs).  All hair and beards were depicted as black.  Proponents of the Hoeh viewpoint could easily posit that even blonde or red hair was depicted as black because of this limited palette.   This seems unlikely.  It is more credible that other hair colorations were not needed to reflect reality.  But here again, the debate does not converge on a conclusion.

A Genetic Deduction

Arguments about Assyrian identity based on ancient historical writings, Hoeh’s mainstay, are unverifiable and may be essentially hearsay from sources contemporary with the ancient authors.  An approach using Biblical exegesis that relies on the science of genetics can be more informative.  

The line of reasoning begins with recognizing that Y chromosome haplogroups (“haplogroup” means Y chromosome haplogroup throughout this text) are inherited in the masculine line and the approximate times of their emergence can be determined from mutational rates of change and the haplogroups are related to each other hierarchically.  Using this approach, Dr. Spencer Wells, a Harvard trained geneticist, determined that Abraham was haplogroup J.  This is because both the Jews and the Adnani Arabs claim descent from Abraham and both are haplogroup J.   This can be extended backward through earlier generations to Noah.  Noah, in Abraham’s masculine line, was haplogroup J.  The same would be true of Shem and Ashur (progenitor of the Assyrians according to the Clans of the Sons of Noah genealogy in Genesis 10) – both are haplogroup J.  From this, we may conclude that whoever the Biblical Assyrians are, they will be haplogroup J.  But the modern Germans are haplogroup R primarily.   They are descended from the Steppe Pastoralists that invaded Western Europe from northern Russia about 5000 ya.  Therefore, the Assyrians cannot possibly be identified with the modern-day German nation.  There are haplogroup J people among the Germans and in small numbers across Western Europe but they are not numerous enough to form the basis of the German nation.

The archaeogenetic data supporting the analysis of this problem could be much better and I expect that it will be in the future.  There is no large inventory of ancient Assyrian genetic data. A few excavations from Turkish sites are useful (de Barros, et al).  It is unfortunate that this data comes from the far northern frontier of the Assyrian Empire and may not represent the main ancient Assyrian demographic.   In these small samples, both haplogroup J and haplogroup G are present.  Haplogroup J is what our exegetical approach above would predict for the Assyrians and that haplogroup is present and more numerous but the sample is very small.  Haplogroup G represents the early Farmers that originated in Anatolia and spread through much of Europe prior to the invasion by haplogroup R.  (Otzi, the mummy from about 5,000 ya and found in the Swiss Alps, was haplogroup G.)  One could argue that the Assyrians were an outlier group of haplogroup G people from Anatolia until further corroborative information for haplogroup J comes in, but that would also not support Hoeh’s construction of the Assyrian identity.  A finding of haplogroup J also supports the prevailing historical/cultural understanding that ancient Assyrians were Semites who spoke a dialect of Aramaic.  It is uncertain if the modern Assyrians, with a mix of haplogroups, are actually connected to the ancient Assyrians.

The Upshot

Herman Hoeh’s teleological approach to history was to create an alloy of traditional belief, myth and historical fact to produce an account that supports the past domination of the world by British-Israel.  But this alloy has proved to be brittle in light of modern genetic findings.  The present evidence, which should further solidify in the future, is that the Assyrians of the Biblical account were haplogroup J whereas modern Germans are haplogroup R in the main.  I would expect Armstrongists to readily accept the validity of Biblical genealogy but balk at the science of genetics.  But, then, the challenge to the proponents of Hoeh’s view is to demonstrate the invalidity of the science of genetics in a credible way.  This will never happen.  We may reasonably conclude that the identity of Assyria as Germany is a chimera and cannot provide a key to understanding Biblical prophecy. 

On Miracles and Miraculous Interventions

When something happens you just can't explain, and it is attributed to divine intervention, that is considered a miracle. 

When something happens you just can't explain, and it is attributed to a demon, that is considered a problem. 

When something happens you just can't explain, and you are an atheist, that is considered a scientific unknown. 

Miracles and interventions have been reported for eons and for generations. The story above is an example of what many consider could be an actual miracle. Skeptics would easily dismiss it, perhaps stating the cardinal shown was trained, or loose, or was raised with humans. The interpretation of what is or is not considered a miracle almost certainly varies from person to person. What one person knows in his heart is a miracle, another person could easily dismiss. Which leads me to believe miracles are usually deeply personal and proven personally. 

Then there are the reported miracles that you find in scripture - some of them seemingly impossible. From Elijah's chariot to Balaam's Donkey to Noah's ark, the stories of extremely public - and powerful - miraculous events are all over the Old Testament. Stories of the Exodus, the Plagues seem unbelievable, especially since no one in our generation has seen anything even remotely like the stories tell. 

Interestingly enough, the miracles in the New Testament are more personal. Water converted to wine. Fish and bread multiplied. Healings of the blind and the lame, and the epileptic, sanity restored to the insane, and of course, the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. And of course, the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the foundation of hope in all who profess the Christian Faith. 

Focusing on the story above, here we have what could be considered a legitimate miracle. Yet for those who adhere to Armstrongism, this was not supposed to happen, because the person who passed is supposed to have been placed in soul-sleep. A typical Armstrong follower would assume that a demon transformed itself into a cardinal with the intent to deceive. However, on the other side, if this was an actual miracle, it would confirm that what we thought was the case isn't how any of it works. Then again, if you show this to an atheist, you could think of 200 reasons why this is a naturally occurring event. (It liked her perfume?)

How is it that you view the story above? How do you view miracles and miraculous events? Have you ever experienced one? Do you believe miracles and miraculous events are actual occurrences or complete coincidence of random fortunate events? How do you believe? Have your beliefs changed in any way since or because of Armstrongism? 

Please provide your insight in the comments below if you feel so inclined.

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