Critical Readings and Wrong Turns: The Restored Church of God
Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 12:54PM | by Otter Every now and then I have to ask myself again what it is that I intend at Riparian Church, and what purpose my critical readings of Christianity and culture serve. (Once I got a note telling me sharply that they serve the purpose of my father the devil. My father is a lawyer. Insert your own joke here.)
Really, it has to do with helping to sort out the enormous psychological and intellectual problems caused by giving God's weight and force to claims fobbed off on the rest of us.
Witness The Restored Church of God.
The RCG is a spinoff or splinter (they would probably say the continuation of the purity of) the Worldwide Church of God, Herbert Armstrong's organization.
And this is one of those really strident samples of Thus-saith-the-LORD-ing that makes me think it's worthwhile to keep putting all this in perspective. People like this need to be understood, if only because the claims they make put the rest of us on the wrong side of a relationship with God.
And to me that's a claim that imposes greatly on people and deserves therefore sober attention.
David C. Pack: Let him who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Briefly, Armstrongism divides "human tradition" from divine teaching (encompassed in the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible), understood in a broadly Reformed way as speaking in simple tones.
So for example Armstrong and the RCG teach that Saturday is the Sabbath... good so far. Having the Sabbath on Sunday is a tradition of men, whereas the Bible sets it on Saturday. Gotta go with God on that one, say Armstrong & Co.
And we should be clear that this is an authority issue. Most followers of Armstrong would probably say that it's not the day of the week that matters so much as the authority one uses to get there. Choosing the traditions of men over the Word of God (as they define it) adulterates the thinking of a person, leaving them open to all sorts of error and untruth. (These words are so important it makes the hair on the back of my brain stick up. More on truth and error in a minute.)
If it were just a matter of little legalisms like the day of the Sabbath, we might be content to let the RCG do its weird-thing without saying a word about it: Amish in coats and ties, doing nobody any harm.
But the commitment to their view of scripture becomes the anchor for a chain of reasoning that imposes pretty impressively on people who want to know the truth about God.
For instance:
Matthew 16:18 is the evidence that there is, on this planet, one true church. David C. Pack, leader of the Restored Church of God, claims in his website video:
Christ's church has been recognizable to those knowing what to look for. This church has existed unbroken for all these centuries. It can be found in history and traced to the present day. But how is it identified? For instance, some know the seventh day sabbath is commanded: is any sabbath-keeping church good enough?
Hint: No.
The Sabbath is of course the tip of the iceberg, but Pack puts the reader on notice that there is only one right answer here, and to get it wrong is to miss God's Truth:
For two thousand years, almost everyone has been looking in the wrong place for God's church. The True Church was called out of this world, out of its religions, creeds, customs, beliefs, and traditions... This has made it more difficult for traditional historians to locate it. Unlike historians within the church, they simply did not know where to look or what to look for. Since the Bible states that the whole world is deceived (Revelation 12:9); and blinded (2 Corinthians 4:4); as well as cut off from God (Isaiah 59:1-2), it is evident that civilization as a whole could never be greatly influenced by the truth or by the true church that always strove to uphold it.
This truth is therefore small, and the size of traditional Christianity is evidence that it is not the Real Thing.
From scripture, he demonstrates that you can identify the true church from the following criteria:
How many churches can you name that are small, persecuted, not of this world, and to the point of being hated because of it?
None of the churches on the religious map, Pack argues, fit these criteria. (Along the way he misunderstands the word "catholic" to imply a large church. Roman Catholicism is out of the running based on this misunderstanding. With more than a billion practitioners, Catholicism can't possibly be right.)
Unsurprisingly, obedience to "the plain truth of God's word" (the sixty-six book version) is the most important test.
Unity, adherence to "the truth" (see above: adherence to the plain truth of God's word), separation from the world because of its adherence to the Truth, and persecution then become the marks of the true church.
Sound familiar? Yeah. I know.
Based on a sort of shaky reading of John 17:22-23, he argues that
There is no room for disagreement in a church that is this unified. These verses describe a perfect oneness through the truth [there's that word again...], the same kind that the Father and Christ enjoy. It is this kind of unity that allows true Christians to be in them, to be in Christ and in the Father.
If I can point out just one irony, it's that nothing ensures disunity like an insistance that unity leaves no room for disagreement. You can't quiet the human mind that much, and scripture is interpretive by its nature. I give Pack's church less than twenty years before this unity fractures.
Pack goes on to illustrate the nature of this unity. The church in Acts 2 of course was possessed of this unity "over doctrine." (He derives this from a smattering of unity-words at the end of Acts 2.) He reads the story of Eden as a parable of what happens when one mixes "good and evil," truth and error, which results in death, an ingenious purist reading of the story.
In Part Four of the video series, he insists that the church consists in a single building (a metaphor evidently for one "organization," the true "House of God"). All other houses (churches) are the houses of men.
You should be starting to guess where you can find the true Church: Pack da house.
He gets a few predictable shots in at the Roman Catholic Church on the grounds that it was the Pope's house, not God's; and he gets a few shots in at the Reformers on the grounds of their disunity (and is apparently utterly unfazed by the ironic fact that every fractious preacher of the Reformation made more or less the same argument).
He spends a tremendous amount of time showing that the gospels' desire for unity is violated by "error," or doctrinal disputation.
Obviously, the whole purpose of this is to short-circuit history. Anything that adapts to culture (at least in ways that Pack himself hasn't adapted) is compromise. Any interpretation that acknowledges the complexity of scriptural hermeneutics is error, far from God's truth. (Luther said that the Holy Spirit is the best of writers, but then contradicted himself by saying that He always wrote in the plainest possible language.)
"The truth" is measured against Pack's interpretation of the whole teaching of scripture (summarized in Part 2 of the video series). Never mind that he might interpret badly: the plain meaning of scripture is, well, plain.
And of course, the True Church is, well, Pack's church.
And this is just ego, sanctified, really. The self and its opinions, so long as you call it "biblical interpretation" or "right doctrine," make a fine god of the self.
Reader Comments (5)
When Christians act like this toward each other, it's no wonder so many outsiders think they're nuts.
It's also no wonder why so many insiders become outsiders.
Natalie, when you write about Christians acting "like this," what do you have in mind? That sort of gun-to-the-head hermeneutic? "It's our way or a highway to hell"?
I had wondered what was guiding the topic choices at Riparian, so it was fun to read that you are
That sounds a good goal. Can you elaborate on “claims”? Whose claims? Which claims?
Sooz, the topic choices at Riparian Church are guided by whatever I happen to be thinking about. ;)
Any truth-claim that invalidates your experiences or puts a stress on them would be a "claim."
Which ones interest me? Just the ones swimming across my radar.
Gotcha. Thanks, that's very clear.
A request for a future Riparian Church topic? Explore the relationship between truth and experience. That would be a 1,200-word essay, double-spaced, posted by 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. No comma splices, please. (Unless comma splices are good. Is this a "safe place" to confess I'm not sure I know what a comma splice is?)