Raising the Ruins (14 page)

Later, after explaining how they had been taking a “serious look” at the church’s body of literature, Mr. Tkach wrote, “A manner of presentation that worked in 1959 may have less impact on a reader in 1989.” Understandably, he continued, this process of updating would be difficult for some church members.

I’m sure you feel, as I do, a certain nostalgic reluctance to revise or retire some of the booklets that the church has used for years and that we have all learned and grown from. But healthy change is a part of growth, something that has long been a vital part of the production of the church’s literature.
⁴¹

Mr. Tkach concluded by making this unbelievable comparison: “No one would argue that we should still be producing such booklets from the past as
1975 in Prophecy
or
Hippies—Hypocrisy and ‘Happiness.’”
⁴²

He actually equated the removal of
Mystery of the Ages
with discontinuing
Hippies—Hypocrisy and “Happiness.”
Mr. Armstrong finished
Mystery of the Ages
less than
three years
before Mr. Tkach removed the book. That he could even imply it was outdated in 1989 is truly ridiculous.

Mystery of the Ages
is not a pamphlet attacking a social evil that took place in 1963. Neither is it a booklet outlining prophetic trends in the lead-up to 1975.
Mystery of the Ages
is a 363-page book explaining the church’s
ENTIRE BODY OF BELIEFS
—
every major doctrine!
In fact, what’s most notable about the book is how
timeless
the content really is.

Mr. Tkach wrote, “I heard one man say, ‘But we’re taking Mr. Armstrong out of everything.’ How short-sighted and imperceptive!” Actually, that man, whoever he was, turned out to be quite the visionary. “Mr. Armstrong’s teaching will always be a part of us,” Mr. Tkach insisted, even though
Mystery of the Ages
,
The Incredible Human Potential
and
The United States and Britain in Prophecy
were already gone for good.
⁴³

The Real Reason

Putting together comments from Bernie Schnippert, Larry Salyer and Joseph Tkach, we now have these five reasons offered in 1989 for the removal of
Mystery of the Ages
:
1) content available in other literature; 2) too expensive; 3) distribution at near-saturation point; 4) content outdated; and 5) incorrect peripheral or incidental points.

Yet, the documented evidence points to one reason—and one reason only: Tkachism had
MAJOR
problems with the book’s doctrinal teachings by early 1988. Notice what Church Administration told the field ministry just a few months after all these excuses were given:

Apparently a number of ministers have recommended obsolete literature to prospective members. These recommendations include two books,
The Incredible Human Potential
and
Mystery of the Ages
,
and the booklet
The Book of Revelation Unveiled at Last
[discontinued in December 1988]. It obviously creates an uncomfortable situation when these [prospective members] are told that the recommended literature is not in print.

Please consult the updated lists of current literature that we publish twice a year before recommending a book or booklet.

In addition, it is inappropriate to photocopy and distribute obsolete articles. If the literature is not on our current literature index,
THEN IT SHOULD NOT BE USED.
⁴⁴

Now please again examine the five reasons they discontinued
Mystery
. You couldn’t logically cite any of those as reasons why someone could not at least obtain a photocopied version—or possibly borrow the book. The reason obsolete literature was not to be used,
under any circumstances,
is because it was doctrinally wrong! It was, as Tkach Jr. stated dogmatically,
in private,
later that year, “riddled with error.”

While working on this chapter, someone forwarded me an e-mail they had sent to the
WCG
on June 27, 2003, asking this question: “Why did the church really discontinue Herbert Armstrong’s teaching?”

Paul Kroll replied three days later: “[T]he reason the Worldwide Church of God had to discontinue many of them is because they were in error from a biblical perspective, and some were legalistic in nature.”
⁴⁵

Would to God they had been that honest in 1989.

“
One of our greatest challenges has been trying to explain these doctrinal reforms to outsiders while maintaining our credibility internally, and some groups have greatly hindered our efforts by their reporting.”

— Joseph Tkach Jr.

Transformed by Truth

On December 17, 1994, Joseph Tkach Sr. delivered a landmark sermon, bringing out into the open several far-reaching doctrinal changes that centered around a “new” (actually mainstream) understanding of the Old and New Covenants. According to his son, “[I]t once and for all convinced the skeptics within our own church that the changes were for real and that they were permanent.”
¹
Later, he wrote,

[M]any of our members didn’t believe that the changes they were seeing in the church were real. Just as evangelicals have a hard time believing that the Worldwide Church of God has moved into orthodoxy, many of our members had a hard time believing their church was moving away from its peculiar doctrinal distinctives.
²

Why would
their own members
have been skeptical about the changes being “for real”? Why would they find it difficult to believe the church was moving away from its past teachings?

It’s because after making the changes,
the Tkaches
then reassured the membership that
NOTHING HAD REALLY CHANGED
. And when rumors would circulate that more changes were coming, the Tkaches kept saying, “We will never change that”—right up to the point of actually making the change.

The change regarding the Old and New Covenants is one such example. Throughout 1994, Tkach Sr.
VEHEMENTLY DENIED
rumors that the church was on the verge of doing away with its teaching on Sabbath observance, the holy days and the law.

Mr. Tkach gave a sermon in Pasadena on April 30, 1994 (a tape of which was later played in all
WCG
congregations), in which he denounced “rumormongers”:

They have no compunctions at all about exaggerating. Like I read from this list of rumors that are going around: We’re going to start keeping Christmas, and we’re changing the Passover, and we’re making changes to please the Protestants to get accreditation. … [W]e’re going to do away with the Sabbath, we’re going to do away with the holy days and we’re going to do away with the law.
³

At the Ambassador College commencement exercises on May 20, 1994, Mr. Tkach quoted Ted Koppel, who said, “What Moses brought down from Mount Sinai were not the ten suggestions. They are commandments.” Mr. Tkach said,

Notice he used the word
are
and not
were,
because they are still in existence today, in spite of what others accuse us of saying—“that we are doing away with the law and the commandments of God.” Again I say, “garbage.”
⁴

In an article written around that same time, Mr. Tkach assured the church membership that

we are also committed to upholding and walking in all the ways of God, including the observance of the Sabbath, the fourth of the Ten Commandments, as well as the annual festivals, during which we celebrate God’s plan of redemption and salvation of humanity through Jesus Christ.
⁵

Later that year, on November 12, Mr. Tkach made several more strong statements in a Pasadena sermon: “Yes, we should keep the law”; “I’m not trying to minimize the importance of the law”; “I’m not trying to minimize the importance of the Sabbath.”
⁶

Three weeks later, speaking in Washington,
D.C.
, Mr. Tkach asked, “Does this mean that we are no longer obligated to obey the law?” His answer: “God forbid!” He later said, “Christ is saying the New Testament gospel is not contrary or contradictory in any way, shape or form to the Old Testament law.”
⁷

Then, on December 17—
just two weeks later,
and after a string of denouncements against those spreading “lies” and “rumors”—Mr. Tkach
did away
with the church’s teachings on clean and unclean meats, tithing, the Sabbath, holy day observance and the law. This, according to Tkach Jr.’s book, is when skeptics in the church
finally
knew that the changes were for real.

Is it any wonder why church members might have thought such changes would never take place?

Mass Exodus

After Mr. Tkach’s “Old Covenant/New Covenant” sermon, some 20,000 people left the Worldwide Church of God. Many of them settled into the newly established United Church of God—originally headed by David Hulme. In his resignation letter to Mr. Tkach, Hulme wrote,

Several months ago you told me, “This church has been far too Old Testament, but I couldn’t tell the members that. No, not for five years.” I was surprised at the time, but not knowing what you meant exactly, I let it aside. Since then I have noticed that you have often responded with a categorical denial to the accusation that there is an agenda of doctrinal changes. Yet in discussion with one minister last December you described the change on tithing from gross to net (announced in the December 6, 1994, pgr) as simply a “stepping stone” to voluntary tithing. This certainly sounds like an agenda. As you know, many have feared that “agenda” involves a move into the Protestant mainstream.
⁸

Mr. Hulme had been a headquarters insider for some time—for many years heading up the communications and public affairs department in Pasadena. In fact, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mr. Hulme was often the one who contacted outside organizations to inform them of the “positive” changes in the church. The church, at that time, desperately wanted to remove the “cult” label many outside groups had pinned on it. So Mr. Hulme would not have been considered an ultra-conservative by any means. Early on, he was very supportive of the church’s changes—at least judging by his comments as the church’s spokesman. Yet, by 1995,
even he
concluded that the Tkaches had an agenda from the beginning. Hulme continued,

The fact that [Mr. Armstrong] chose you on the basis of continuity of doctrine and practice when in fact you believed very differently, in my mind casts serious doubt whether he would have appointed you if he had known your beliefs. That you differed so much from your predecessor explains why almost every doctrinal and administrative change caused me to inform you that something was very wrong. It is only in the light of your comments about Richard Plache and Al Carozzo, however, that I have put it all together. Apparently you and I were not agreed in the first place. I thought you were upholding Mr. Armstrong, but it now appears you were not. By your own admission you were simply biding your time.

No wonder that my many protestations about radical change were never answered, and the changes proceeded as if no input had been given. And yet you continued to insist that nothing had really changed very much. Why? Prior to December 1994 did you feel it expedient to create the impression publicly that nothing had really changed in the church’s view of the law? Was the time still not right?
⁹

As we noted at the end of chapter 6, Tkach responded by admitting there was an agenda, but that it was
Christ’s
agenda. As if Jesus Christ would repeatedly try to deceive
WCG
members with lies and hypocrisy.

Please Be Honest

Three months after my dad was fired, Dennis Leap, a
WCG
local elder serving in Buffalo, New York, resigned from his post and joined the Philadelphia Church of God. He sent a letter to the
WCG
brethren in his area to apprise them of why he was leaving. In his letter, Mr. Leap gave three reasons for his departure: 1) the
WCG
’s discontinuation of
Mystery of the Ages
; 2) drastic changes in fundamental
WCG
doctrines; and 3) the
WCG
’s compromise with the truth in order to win favor with the world.

Mr. Leap was the first
WCG
minister to leave the church after my dad and Mr. Amos were disfellowshiped. So it was big news for our little church. And I’m sure it bothered
WCG
officials in Pasadena. Joseph Tkach Jr. decided to answer Mr. Leap’s letter himself on April 20, 1990. He wrote,

Your first point concerned our discontinuing distribution of
Mystery of the Ages
.
… This book was discontinued because we have more economical ways of providing
exactly the same message
to subscribers and members. The doctrinal message of the book
is not being changed or stopped.
¹⁰

Would Jesus Christ say the “exact same message” of the book was being disseminated four months after firing two ministers and saying the book was “riddled with error”?

Tkach Jr. continued scolding Mr. Leap, “[D]on’t pretend to others that you are continuing to follow Mr. Armstrong’s way. Please be honest about it.”
¹¹
How ironic that statement turned out to be. It is now clear that this accusation is precisely what
Tkachism
was doing at the time Joe Jr. wrote his letter—dishonestly giving the impression they were continuing in Mr. Armstrong’s steps. Tkach Jr. wrote, “[N]one of the ‘seven mysteries’ explained in [
Mystery of the Ages
] has been changed or deleted.”
¹²
The book was riddled with error and had too many doctrinal flaws to be reprinted or even revised, yet Tkach Jr. said that
NONE
of the seven mysteries had been changed or deleted?

Jesus Christ would not have given that false impression.

Assigning Scriptures to Names

The Tkaches were also dishonest and deceitful with the way they changed the teaching about assigning scriptures to names. Seven months
before
Mr. Armstrong died, Mr. Tkach Sr. identified Mr. Armstrong as the prophesied Elijah who came in this end time to restore all things.
¹³
He reconfirmed this teaching shortly
after
Mr. Armstrong died, when he listed the “18 Truths” in the church’s newspaper, the
Worldwide News
. In that article, Mr. Armstrong is referred to as “someone who would come in the spirit and power of Elijah” and who restored “all things to the church.”
¹⁴

Then, as we noted in chapter 7, on February 9, 1988, Mr. Tkach explained the end-time Elijah prophecy much differently than anyone in the church
ever
had. He said “the church” now fulfills the role of the end-time Elijah
¹⁵
and palmed it off on the membership as if it were something we had always known and believed.

On January 3, 1989
,
Mr. Tkach took it a step further—saying it was “not appropriate” to assign scriptures to Mr. Armstrong as though his leadership was prophesied in the Bible. In his 1990 letter to Mr. Leap, Tkach Jr. explained what his father meant by saying it was inappropriate:

The intent was not to question whether the end-time Elijah prophecies were being fulfilled. Indeed, church literature had mentioned over a period of many years that these prophecies were being
fulfilled by the “work.”
Mr. Armstrong, as human leader of the church, obviously was primary in accomplishing the prophesied task. H
E DID NOT
, however, claim to be the exclusive fulfillment of the end-time Elijah office. …

Mr. Armstrong
illustrated
his calling and work by
comparing
it with the work of Elijah and Zerubbabel at times. Lessons can be illustrated by these comparisons. B
UT, SOME HAVE GONE MUCH FURTHER THAN
M
R.
A
RMSTRONG HIMSELF DID
in such labeling .…

It may surprise you to learn that it has never been a doctrine of the church that men’s names should be applied to scripture. No member of the church has ever been required to believe that Mr. Armstrong was “Elijah” or “Zerubbabel” to be in good standing. Mr. Armstrong would have bristled with indignation had anyone tried to require that! He knew the difference between an illustration and a doctrine .…

While we have attempted to curtail speculation about individuals fulfilling specific prophetic roles, there has been
NO FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINAL CHANGE IN THIS AREA
. It has
always been known
that both Joshua and Zerubbabel were typical primarily of Christ.”
¹⁶

First of all, while Mr. Armstrong certainly acknowledged the indispensable role of the church in
supporting
him, he did, nevertheless, teach that his specific office and role was prophesied in Scripture, as reflected by the following passage:

Remember, God does things in dual stages. … As John the Baptist prepared the way, in the physical wilderness of the Jordan River for the first coming of the human Jesus (both man and God), then coming to His material temple, and to His physical people Judah, announcing the Kingdom of God to be set up more than 1,900 years later, so God would use a human messenger in the spiritual wilderness of 20th-century religious confusion, to be a voice crying out the gospel of the Kingdom of God, about the spiritual Christ, coming in supreme power and glory to His spiritual temple, to actually establish that spiritual Kingdom of God. …

Has this happened, in your days, and has God brought you into this prophetic fulfillment as a part of it?

Has
anyone else
done it?
¹⁷

As Mr. Armstrong explained in
Mystery of the Ages
,
it works like an organized team—with the coach and the players mutually depending on one another. But there is just one leader—one apostle. And for many years, the church taught that many prophecies referred to Mr. Armstrong’s office and work
directly
—and then to the church secondarily, or indirectly. The Tkach administration confirmed this fact before and after Mr. Armstrong died.