Authors: Gerald Flurry
Then on February 9, 1988, Mr. Tkach Sr. said the “Elijah” prophecy referred to the church in
GENERAL
—
from the Ephesus era in the first century until now
. He didn’t even mention Mr. Armstrong as part of the fulfillment! And then in his letter to Dennis Leap, Mr. Tkach Jr. falsely stated that the
WCG
had
always
taught this, saying there had been “no fundamental doctrinal change in this area.”
Not Just an Analogy
In a 1991
Worldwide News
article by David Hunsberger, we find the same false impression perpetuated more than a year after Tkach Jr.’s letter to Dennis Leap. Hunsberger wrote, “[
Gerald Flurry
] says that Mr. Armstrong was the prophesied Elijah .…”
18
Yes, and so did Mr. Tkach—not to mention Mr. Armstrong, Gerald Waterhouse, and just about every other well-known
WCG
minister. Hunsberger went on to write:
Malachi foretold that an Elijah would come to prepare the way for the Messiah. Jesus said (and Mr. Armstrong taught) that this was fulfilled by John the Baptist, who prepared the way for the Messiah’s first coming (Matthew 11:14-15; 17:12-13; Mark 9:13).
Mr. Armstrong taught that he, with the church, was also fulfilling a
type
of the work in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ.
19
Here again you see the teaching watered down significantly from what Mr. Armstrong actually believed and taught. And like Tkach Jr., Hunsberger led the reader to believe that this was something the church had
always
taught—even under Mr. Armstrong. Later, Hunsberger wrote, “Mr. Armstrong drew an analogy between his own work and that of Zerubbabel, but he did not believe that Zechariah predicted an end-time Zerubbabel who would finish building the church .…”
20
That is completely false. Mr. Armstrong did not just draw an analogy between his work and Zerubbabel’s. He believed his work,
supported
by the church, was the fulfillment of a
VERY SPECIFIC PROPHECY
.
To make a change in doctrine is one thing. But to make it and then say there is no change is lying. And the reason people lie is to cover up something—to obscure the truth.
This is important to understand:
At that time
in the
WCG
, the Tkaches
did not want the members to know
they had made such a radical change in their interpretation of these foundational prophecies. So instead, they first watered them down and then tried to sell the membership on it by lying that Mr. Armstrong had always taught it that way. Once the membership accepted this, then the administration could go all the way with the change—and with little or no backlash from the membership.
“I Am Elijah”
The extent of Tkachism’s deceit is plainly evident in view of the way Tkach Jr. now remembers what the church used to teach about these end-time prophecies. Now that his motive has changed from trying to sell the church members on the changes to trying to paint Mr. Armstrong with the most extreme brush strokes possible, his descriptions are
TOTALLY
different. In his 1997 book, Mr. Tkach Jr. says, “Herbert Armstrong used to read Malachi 4:5-6 and say that it applied to him”
21
—not “him and the church” or “the church”—just “him.” Tkach then proceeded to quote pages 290-91 of
Mystery of the Ages
,
where Mr. Armstrong refers to several end-time prophecies that he believed he fulfilled, with the support of the church (the same section of
Mystery
that editors chopped out of the serialized version of the book
in 1986
).
Mr. Tkach continued, “Herbert Armstrong taught that he was the
REAL
fulfillment of this passage and that John the Baptist was merely an [sic] foreshadowing.”
22
But wait a minute! Didn’t Mr. Hunsberger say Mr. Armstrong taught that
John the Baptist
was the real fulfillment and that his own work was merely a “type” or an “analogy”?
Mr. Tkach elaborated further on Mr. Armstrong’s teaching: “After his first wife died and the idea started to play in Herbert Armstrong’s mind—as his own ego accepted the notion and certain people began to play on his ego—he began to accept that he was
personally
the Elijah.”
23
(Emphasis in original.) Mrs. Armstrong died in 1967! This is when these ideas supposedly started playing in his mind. How then does Mr. Tkach explain his comments from 1990—that Mr. Armstrong
DID NOT
“claim to be the exclusive fulfillment of the end-time Elijah office”?
Mr. Tkach told Mr. Leap in 1990 that “some have gone much further than Mr. Armstrong himself did in such labeling.” In 1997, Mr. Tkach had now swung to that very extreme. Mr. Tkach continues with this amazingly vivid recollection:
In the sixties we would say that
WCG
was doing an Elijah-like work. In the seventies we said that Herbert Armstrong himself was fulfilling the role of Elijah. … In the last two years of his life, in several sermons, he was even more explicit when he said directly, “I am Elijah.” When Ron Kelly, one of our longtime ministers, heard Mr. Armstrong say this, he confessed to me, “I was alarmed when I heard him say, ‘I am Elijah.’ I could handle, ‘I’m in the role of Elijah.’ But ‘I am Elijah’—what did he mean by that?”
24
Some five years or so after all these sermons in which Mr. Armstrong supposedly said, “I am Elijah,” Joe Jr. told Mr. Leap that Mr. Armstrong taught this: 1) these prophecies were fulfilled
by the work;
2) he was not the exclusive fulfillment of the Elijah office; and 3) his calling could be
compared to
or
illustrated by
the work of Zerubbabel or Elijah. Even as late as October 1994, in another personal letter, Mr. Tkach Jr. wrote, “Mr. Armstrong taught that he was fulfilling
the role
of Elijah.”
25
Now,
of course, Mr. Armstrong is supposed to have said, in “
several
sermons” no less, that “I am Elijah.” He apparently believed, in a very literal sense, that he “was
personally
the Elijah.”
In actuality, there are no sermons where Mr. Armstrong said anything like that. What Mr. Tkach now says in his book, in an effort to make Mr. Armstrong look like a wild-eyed, cult-leading fanatic, goes much further than anything Mr. Armstrong ever believed or taught.
On the other hand, what Tkach Jr. said in 1990—all but removing Mr. Armstrong from those end-time prophecies—also misrepresents the truth of what the church once taught. What Mr. Armstrong believed is clearly explained in his co-worker letter from March 19, 1981.
The question is, why opposite explanations—
both of them false
—in 1990 and 1997? Well, in 1990, Tkach Jr. was trying to keep members from leaving the
WCG
. So he gave the false impression that they were only emphasizing something that
Mr. Armstrong himself taught
—which he didn’t. Since that is of little concern today and since they have aligned themselves with other evangelical groups that consider Mr. Armstrong a heretic, Tkach now makes Mr. Armstrong out to be a crackpot—one who supposedly said, “I am Elijah—
personally.”
The Trinity Doctrine
On March 6, 1998, Pat Robertson interviewed Joseph Tkach Jr. and Greg Albrecht on his television program,
The 700 Club
. They talked about the
WCG
’s doctrinal transformation. In describing the changes that took place early on, Mr. Tkach Jr. said, “
Starting in 1989,
we
REALIZED THAT THE TRINITY WAS CORRECT
and that it’s the only logical and historically [sic] way to explain that God is one in three.”
26
For background, let us briefly examine what Mr. Armstrong taught on this subject. In
Mystery of the Ages
,
he wrote, “The trinity doctrine limits God to a supposed three Persons. It destroys the very gospel of Jesus Christ!”
27
In
The Missing Dimension in Sex
,
he said, “God is not merely one Person, nor even limited to a ‘trinity,’ but God is a Family.” He then said, “The doctrine of the trinity is false. It was foisted upon the world at the Council of Nicaea.”
28
Based on what Tkach Jr. told Pat Robertson, they realized Mr. Armstrong was wrong and that the trinity was correct in 1989.
In 1990, Philip Stevens wrote an article for the
Good News
titled “Who Was Jesus’ Father?” Somehow, this statement managed to sneak by
WCG
editors: “The concept of a trinity is nowhere found in the Bible. … The trinity hides from man God’s plan of salvation. The trinity doctrine maintains that the Godhead is a closed unit into which no one else can enter.”
29
Three months after that article appeared in the
Good News,
Michael Snyder wrote a letter to Watchman Fellowship, a cult-watching organization based in Arlington, Texas. Mr. Snyder said,
The question of God’s disclosure to humanity is still open and the church awaits further scholarly discussion in the field of dogmatics concerning this topic. The article “Who Was Jesus’ Father?” from the November-December 1990
Good News
has been declared officially null and void with respect to church doctrine.
30
He later told the group, during a phone interview, “At one time the church lacked adequate scholarship and resources to fully understand how God’s disclosure to humanity had a relationship to the church activity on Earth. Now, we have reexamined it and we have come to see that it is an open question.”
31
Of course, these declarations were made to outside organizations that were pushing for doctrinal reform in the
WCG
. As far as the church membership goes, very few, if any, would have known that the
Good News
article had been declared “officially” null and void.
Mr. Snyder also referred Watchman Fellowship to a study paper on the trinity written by the church’s Greek scholar, K. J. Stavrinides. It was printed in the January-February 1991
Reviews You Can Use,
which was sent to
WCG
ministers only. Dr. Stavrinides wrote, “The Worldwide Church of God teaches the full divinity of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—the biblical foundation for all trinitarian discussions.”
32
That is about as trinitarian as you can get. Yet, in that same issue, Mr. Tkach Jr. assured the ministry that the church’s position on the trinity had not changed, but rather its
explanation
for disproving it.
Around the same time, in the spring of 1991, David Hulme and Michael Snyder, his assistant, took part in discussions with the faculty at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. During his presentation, Mr. Hulme said he had been invited to explain the church’s position on a “number of things” and to update them on the “changes” in the
WCG
. He said he wanted to take them through “some of the more important changes that have occurred in the last four to five years.” When he got to the subject of the trinity, Mr. Hulme relied on Dr. Stavrinides’ paper mostly, quoting several paragraphs from it, concluding with,
Even though the Worldwide Church of God considers
some
positions on the trinity to be heretical (for example, all forms of Arianism), it sees the Eastern, Western, Protestant, and Modernist views of the nature of God as genuine attempts to reach a deeper understanding of God’s nature.
33
As you might imagine, with these types of comments being made to those
outside
the church, all sorts of “rumors” and “gossip” began swirling on the
inside
.
Was the
WCG
about to accept the trinity?
some wondered. Fortunately for members, Mr. Tkach Sr. stepped forward to set the record straight. Toward the end of the summer of 1991, he wrote an article in the church’s newspaper titled “How Do You React to Change?” The article reflected much of the
WCG
’s latest discussions with
Truths That Transform
, Watchman Fellowship and the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Mr. Tkach clued the membership in on the church’s new position on man’s destiny to not become God. “No human being can be equal with God,” Mr. Tkach explained.
34
“Our inheritance is to be children of God, definitely the supreme pinnacle and crowning glory of God’s creation,
but not literally to be God himself.”
Later, he explained, “We are, and will be, members of the family of God. But even when we are changed, we will still be distinct from the eternal, uncreated, without beginning, supreme and sovereign God.”
35
Just so the reader knows, Mr. Armstrong
NEVER
taught that man was destined to be on God’s level, insofar as rank, position or experience. He taught that we would be on God’s level in the same way a newborn son is on the same level as his human father—all members of
one family.
But Mr. Tkach said it was now inappropriate to use the father-son analogy to define our relationship with God.
In drawing these distinctions between man and God, the stage was now set for closing off the Godhead to three beings in one. As Mr. Armstrong correctly noted, the trinity limits God. It does away with the family of God.
At the end of his article, Mr. Tkach answered the critics (such as the
PCG
) who were saying the
WCG
was rejecting all the doctrines that made it distinct and different from Protestant churches. He then listed a number of distinctive doctrines that still made the
WCG
unique. Incredibly, included in the list, is this emphatic statement on the nature of God: “We
DO NOT BELIEVE
the doctrine of the trinity. “
36
Never mind that in a personal letter to Watchman Fellowship, Michael Snyder declared a
Good News
article “null and void” because of its comments in opposition to the trinity doctrine. Nor that, according to Snyder, the subject of “God’s disclosure” was now an “open question” in the church. Neither did Mr. Tkach mention that the church now taught the “full divinity of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—the biblical foundation for all trinitarian discussions”—as Dr. Stavrinides had explained to the ministry months earlier. Nor did he draw attention to the fact that David Hulme had been involved in several discussions with trinitarians at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.