Crackpot Bob and Malachy

The crazier the conspiracy theory, the more Crazypot Bob secretly believes it.

 

Problem Child: Bobby Thiel - The Early Years?

The Roots of the Living Church of God's conflict with Little Bobby Thiel. 

 

How to Deal with Disgruntled Church Members / Biblically

Part Ways with Them

When dealing with disgruntled members, what happens if none of the proposals above work? What happens if members pray for the disgruntled members, reach out to them and seek to listen to them and understand the root of their dissatisfaction, find relevant solutions and extend forgiveness, but to no avail?

In fact, this is very likely. One would hope that disgruntled members will eventually stop being disgruntled and be reconciled to the church, but with all human and heavenly efforts combine, there is no such guarantee.

This issue can be brought to a Board meeting or a Members meeting. As a united body, the church will be called upon to decide what to do about the disgruntled member, still humbly seeking a mutual settlement of the matter and reconciliation.

Unfortunately, if this final measure is unsuccessful, the church must be prepared to let this member go, treating them as a “publican or a heathen. If all reasonable efforts are made to resolve the matter, but with no success, then the disgruntled member may have to be asked to renounce his/her membership in the church.

 The truth is there may be members who are disgruntled about foundational doctrines of the church, which evidently cannot be adjusted to suit their whims and fancy.

Similarly, some may have personal vendettas that they refuse to release, so for the greater good of the church body, they may have to be seen as an unbeliever and, therefore, no longer a member of the body. Leaders who understand human nature and the power of the evil and negativity from this one disgruntled member to spread within the entire body of believers and shake the church’s very foundation must be prepared to take a stand.

The Eternal Dance: Armstrongism in Contention with Nicene Christianity

Fair use

The Eternal Dance

Armstrongism in Contention with Nicene Christianity

By Scout

“Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance,

and there is only the dance.”  T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton”

 

Dance is my analogy for the relationships between the God Persons in the Trinity.  Everything that we say about God is an analogy.   We know only the created realm and he dwells in the uncreated realm.  When we think of him or describe him, we use the earthbound categories that we know.  We talk only in symbols, in metaphors.  The whole of creation is his poem.  He is not just the tribal God of the ancient Hebrews. He is the sovereign uncaused first cause of the reality that we know.

I am going to briefly examine some of the conclusions concerning the Doctrine of God drawn by the early church around the time of the Council of Nicaea and a few centuries thereafter.  I am going to compare these conclusions to the classical Armstrongist Doctrine of God. In this essay, as I speak about God, I am limited to analogical language and I understand that. In accord with Analogia Entis, it is the most that I or any of us can attain to.   I will start with co-equality.  

What Trinitarian Co-Equality is Not 

I used to think that God in his divine nature was comprised of three identical persons joined together in some essential way.  And at some point, the three in conclave decided that one would be Father, one would be Son and one would be Holy Spirit.  But since they were all identical, this organization was simply a matter of arbitrary election.  So, the Father Person could have been the Son Person and the Son Person could have been the Father Person, for instance, and that alternate arrangement would have been just as valid as the present arrangement.  My naïve model of these divine interpersonal connections is not the model advanced by Nicene Christianity. 

Father, Son and Holy Spirit

The Nicene Model is that the Father eternally generates (begets, Greek “monogenes”) the Son (John 3:16) and the Holy Spirit proceeds (John 15:26) from the Father.  A post-Nicene modification, originating in Spain, added “and the Son” so that the Holy Spirit was asserted to proceed from the Father and the Son (John 15:26).  This addition is what separated Eastern Christianity from Western Christianity.  The point is that the Divine Persons are not undifferentiated.  They are not equal in the sense of being exhaustively identical.  They are equal in ontology (existential essence).  But differ in interpersonal relationship and economy (role, activity).  

The brothers back then had to look at the data and come to a conclusion. Arius was insufferable. Arius elevated the transcendence of the one God (1 Cor 8:6) and correspondingly diminished Jesus. Constantine wanted everyone to speak the same thing.  It hardly mattered what it was.  The brothers knew that God was eternal and unchanging (Malachi 3:6).  And whatever “beget” meant, it did not mean that eternal Jesus (Hebrews 7:3) was created like the Arians asserted. So, they concluded that Jesus had been generated by God from eternity.  God always was and Jesus always was by divine nature.  And that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son eternally.  So, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three beings that are indistinguishably the same.  They are different in that they naturally and eternally exist in a community defined by different interpersonal relationships.  “Father” is not just a moniker.  The designation is based on the fact of begettal.  They are together one essence and one God but have different economies.  The Nicene view resonated well with the Biblical data concerning divine personhood, ontology, Monotheism and economy.  

The Nicene Model may seem awkward.  But is not because the Bible is a spurious document and Christianity is a spurious ideology as atheists would claim.  It is because human language and categories are not adequate to the task.  Yet, we should resist the temptation to tame all this complexity by imposing human simplicity on it.   That is what classical Armstrongism has done and I will turn there next. 

Family By Itself Means Bitheism

The first WCG minister that ever visited with me was a pastor of the local WCG congregation.  A few years after we talked, he left the WCG and started a Unitarian denomination.  He was regarded by the WCG as a rebel and a heretic.  But, actually, he was a reactionary.  he went back to the early roots of the Armstrongist denomination.  The first leader of the Church of God Seventh Day was Gilbert Cranmer and Cranmer was a Unitarian.  The Church of God Seventh Day was Arian like the earlier Adventists. Unitarianism and Arianism had a profound, nontrinitarian influence on the formation of WCG theology.  And a theme that runs through Unitarianism and Arianism is the subordination of Jesus in his capabilities and his scope.  

Armstrongism is not just Trinitarianism with the subtraction of the Holy Spirit to form a Binitarian theology.  Armstrongism asserts a different kind of relationship between the Father and the Son.  Armstrongist belief is that the Father and the Son form an expandable family to which other sons will be added through the salvation of Christians.  But the family model is based in the biological human family where each member of the family is a separate person.  Any connection between members is only matter of agreement in viewpoint and is not ontological.  In the Armstrongist family model, the Father does not eternally generate the Son and the Holy Spirit is like an energy of God and not a personal being. Armstrongism claims Monotheism in the sense that God is one family.  This assertion is internally inconsistent because the family relationship does not provide for the unity of persons at the level of essence.  God may be like a family but that is not the full picture.  Family is a weak and limited analogy. The Trinity transcends family because of its special unifying relations as already described.  

Armstrongism is actually a form of polytheism.  The subcategory of polytheism involving two gods is referred to as Bitheism.  Armstrongism is not Binitarian because it proposes no concept of unity at the level of essence among the God Persons. Binitarianism is a form of Monotheism and Armstrongism is not Monotheistic.  Further, Armstrongism proposes that one day there will be millions of gods who are god-as-god-is-god. 

So Armstrongism took a step forward by declaring that Jesus is God and abandoned its Arian roots in the Church of God Seventh-Day.  But it took a step backward into polytheism by proposing that the unity in the God Persons is only the family relationship modeled on human biological connections.  Family just doesn’t cut it.  

In the Last Analysis: My Two Cents

What difference does it make?  If we must deal in analogies, can we say that one analogy is better than another?  Maybe, at the end of the day, the Arian Model is just as good as the Nicene Model because they’re both just analogies for something that transcends our understanding.  While that reasoning has an appeal, it is not the whole story.  There is a pattern.  The Anti-trinitarians are typically one-off, likely small, religious groups that harbor many other beliefs that are a departure from orthodoxy.  They emphasize works and they have a diminished view of Jesus and the grace he brought to us.  Any organization that systematically downplays the role of Jesus is not going to lead anyone to a good outcome.  Not only is the Nicene Model a better fit to the Biblical data, something we should value, it tends to not co-reside with odd beliefs.