Raising the Ruins (16 page)

When you say, “We do not believe the doctrine of the trinity” without qualification, doesn’t that imply that the church rejects all forms and practices of the trinity? As far as unsuspecting members were concerned, putting Tkach’s “We do not believe the doctrine of the trinity” statement together with the November-December 1990
Good News
article (declared “null and void” privately, but not in a church publication), the church was teaching the very same thing it had
always
taught about the nature of God.

One former
WCG
member wrote Mr. Tkach Jr. about what he perceived to be two different messages coming from the church—one to outside organizations in the evangelical world and a different one to its own members internally. Tkach Jr. had this response:

You also enclosed an interview with Mr. Michael Snyder and Dr. Ruth Tucker. In order to understand the statements made in this interview, we must first comprehend the atmosphere in which the interview took place, the people involved, and the purpose.

Mr. Snyder is the spokesman for the Worldwide Church of God in relation to queries asked from sources outside the church. As such, he cannot answer questions directed at him by such sources with “in-house” terms, language, and phraseology. Dr. Ruth Tucker is a professor of the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Mr. Snyder had to address her questions in terms she would understand so that she could comprehend his answers.

Furthermore, it is an unfortunate fact that in the past some in the church chose to
phrase our beliefs
in ways that were not entirely correct. For example, the church has never believed in the concept of the trinity
as embraced by many other churches.
Quite frankly, those other churches cannot themselves agree on the exact nature of God. However, in our attempts to disprove their theories, we used some faulty reasoning of our own. This did not mean that we were wrong in rejecting the trinity doctrine, it merely meant that some of the proofs we tried to use to support our beliefs were invalid.
³⁷

Classic Tkachism:
While we have made some changes, there is no real change.
W
CG
members heard these excuses for
ALMOST
10
YEARS
!
We are not changing core doctrines—only re-phrasing our beliefs to be more accurate technically. The reason it sounds like major changes are being made when you hear interviews with outside organizations is only because of phraseology, not because there is any real change. We must use different terms with outside observers or else they wouldn’t understand.

Eventually, of course, the church’s official statements to its membership gradually caught up with what they had been telling outsiders all along. Five months after he unequivocally said that the
WCG
did not believe in the trinity, Mr. Tkach wrote,

The newly printed Statement of Beliefs of the Worldwide Church of God will be mailed to you soon. … Let me make a few comments about one portion of the Statement. In the statement about God, you will notice that the final sentence reads: “The church affirms the oneness of God and the full divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Someone may ask, “Does this mean we now accept the doctrine of the trinity?” No, it does not. The doctrine of the trinity in the Western Church attests the union of three Persons in one Godhead, so that the three are one God as to substance, but three Persons as to individualities. We do not accept that teaching; we believe that the word Person is inaccurate when referring to the Holy Spirit.
³⁸

In other words,
we have accepted the trinity, but don’t misinterpret that to mean that we have accepted the trinity.

In its August 1992 booklet
God Is …,
the church stated, “God is one being, one entity”—“the Holy Spirit is also God”—and “the Bible does reveal three entities within the one Godhead.”
³⁹
When referring to the booklet in the
Worldwide News,
Mr. Tkach wrote, “The doctrine of the trinity did not originate in paganism, as we have traditionally thought.”
⁴⁰
But did all these statements mean the church had now accepted the trinity?
Of course not,
they continued to tell the membership.

The following year, in August 1993, Mr. Tkach wrote, “Simply put, the Bible proclaims plainly and clearly that there is one and only one God. … When the Bible says that God is one, the word
one
does not refer to a ‘God family,’ but to one God.” A little further in the article, Mr. Tkach wrote, “The Bible teaching is that there is one God who is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
⁴¹

And yet, two weeks after that was written, Mr. Tkach reassured members, “In our practice and experience
nothing changes.
… What we didn’t previously understand was how to put our belief down on paper in such a way it didn’t lead to biblical and theological problems.”
⁴²
Even as late as 1993, they were saying, “nothing changes.”
They were only trying to get it completely accurate on paper.

Were it not for Tkach Jr.’s interview with Pat Robertson years later—where he admitted they realized the trinity was correct in 1989—it might
STILL
be safe to assume (within the church, of course) that the Worldwide Church of God
IN NO WAY
teaches the doctrine of the trinity.

The List Goes On

Mr. Tkach Jr. foisted off a number of other lies on the church membership, as evidenced by another letter he wrote to a member on March 16, 1992. On page 5, he said,

Those who minimize Christ and turn the focus on the gospel only to the millennial kingdom are not Christ’s ministers. They have glorified themselves and created an empty religion of human works and fascination with speculative details of prophecy and with labeling and judging others.
⁴³

Was he putting down Mr. Armstrong, who taught that the true gospel was a message God the Father sent through Jesus Christ about the kingdom of God? Not at all! “The true church has
always believed
that Christ is the central figure of the gospel,” Tkach Jr. wrote in the same letter. “You asked what the commission of the church is today. It is the same as Mr. Armstrong taught it was,” he continued. Yet, later he told the member that Matthew 24:14 was not the church’s commission—again giving the impression that Mr. Armstrong had always taught this himself. Finally, Mr. Tkach Jr. wrote, “Mr. Armstrong
DID NOT DE-EMPHASIZE
C
HRIST
! “
⁴⁴

That was in 1992. In his 1997 book, Tkach said Mr. Armstrong “programmed”
WCG
members “not to talk much about Jesus.”
⁴⁵
He said, “Rather than speak much about Jesus, we talked mainly about God. He was the Father, and He was in charge. … Throughout most of our years as a church, we struggled with theological inconsistencies about Him. We never developed a consistent doctrine of Christ … .”
⁴⁶
Again, he told a member that Mr. Armstrong did not de-emphasize Christ in order to reassure him, at that time, that they hadn’t really changed anything. And now? O
F COURSE
M
R.
A
RMSTRONG DE-EMPHASIZED
C
HRIST
!

Notice another comment Joe Jr. made in his 1992 letter:

All people who have the Holy Spirit in them are part of the one true spiritual church because it is the Holy Spirit that puts one into the church (1 Corinthians 12:13). However,
Mr. Armstrong always believed
that there were true Christians who were not on the official membership roll of the Worldwide Church of God. He spoke of the Church of God (Seventh Day) members as true Christians, for example.
⁴⁷

Yet, in his book, Tkach said the
WCG
under Mr. Armstrong was “
adamant
that God had only one true church in the world, and we were it.”
⁴⁸
We “spent decades living in a cave, hurling big rocks—boulders, if we could lift them—at anyone who passed by our fortress,” he said.
⁴⁹
We taught that the “unregenerate would ultimately be annihilated”
⁵⁰
; that Sabbath-breakers “were condemned to the lake of fire.”
⁵¹

So in 1992, according to Tkach, Mr. Armstrong “always” believed there were true Christians in other churches. But in 1997, Tkach said Mr. Armstrong was “adamant” that his was the only true church.

One final example from Tkach Jr.’s March 16, 1992, letter to a
WCG
member:

Do you know what “British Israelism” is? It is a racist doctrine that sees the British Empire as the kingdom of God on Earth and the whites as God’s favorite people. Obviously this doctrine was more popular when England was more powerful! T
HE CHURCH HAS NEVER TAUGHT “
B
RITISH
I
SRAELISM
.” We have taught that descendants of Israel settled and populated much of Britain and the United States.
⁵²

This is a rare instance where Tkach Jr. actually got it right. Mr. Armstrong never used the terms “British-Israelism” or “Anglo-Israelism” to describe the church’s teaching. Indeed, you won’t find either of those terms in
The United States and Britain in Prophecy
—not once in 184 pages! Look for them in any other literature by Mr. Armstrong and you won’t find them.

Yet, notice what Mr. Tkach Jr. wrote in his 1997 book: “British or Anglo-Israelism is a doctrine of little interest to most evangelicals. Some with a seminary or Bible college background might remember it as an esoteric doctrine associated with sects and cults, but for those of us in the
WCG
is was [sic] the central plank of our theology.”
⁵³
Another remarkable contradiction.
In 1992, Mr. Tkach Jr. assured a church member that Mr. Armstrong never taught “British Israelism.” In 1997, Tkach Jr. told the world that “British Israelism” was the
WCG
’s
“CENTRAL PLANK
” doctrine. Now, all of a sudden,
EVERYTHING
Mr. Armstrong taught “sprang from this belief.”
⁵⁴
Why such a radical shift in Mr. Tkach’s recollection? Because now that the
WCG
has completed its transformation, it is safe to call Mr. Armstrong a racist. So in place of “United States and Britain in Prophecy” they insert “British Israelism.” That way Mr. Armstrong gets lumped in with all the others—many of whom actually are racist.

Their Greatest Challenge

By now you can see how convoluted and contradictory Tkach Jr.’s positions are. How could the explanation of Mr. Armstrong’s teachings change so dramatically between 1992 and 1997
when Mr. Armstrong died in 1986?
Mr. Armstrong left an incredibly thorough written account of what he believed and taught. But that has not stopped Joe Jr. from dramatically altering his explanation of those teachings—all depending on the
time period
and the
audience
he was addressing.

Notice what Mr. Tkach Jr. says in his book about the difficulty they ran into when trying to explain the many changes:

Some cult watchers, ministries, churches, and pastors can be more of a hindrance when it comes to helping individuals or aberrant groups break away from their cultic theology and practice. 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.
⁵⁵

The reason he blames outside groups for hindering their efforts to make doctrinal changes within the church is that they reported what was actually happening! This became problematic for Tkachism because they were telling these outside groups about all the changes—even telling them that more were coming—while at the
SAME TIME
telling their own members that nothing was changing! They
are the ones who hurt their own credibility—by
lying
.

In his book, Tkach Jr. explained how their church leaders, in the early 1990s, kept contacting evangelical groups in order to keep them apprised of the changes in the
WCG
: “As one thing led to another, we finally said, ‘You know, Hank Hanegraaff is a person we should talk to. We think he’d listen.”
⁵⁶
Greg Albrecht wrote a letter to Hanegraaff on January 5, 1994, and included with it an updated edition of the church’s
Statement of Beliefs.
He concluded his letter by requesting to meet with Mr. Hanegraaff. As Tkach Jr. wrote in his book,

A few days later Hank’s office called Greg to set up a meeting. From the first time we met, Hank recognized the enormity of our task [of changing the many fundamental teachings of the church] and understood that we were facing some tremendous battles. After thoroughly quizzing us about our faith and expressing satisfaction with our answers, he invited us to be guests on his radio program.
Our fellowship was not ready for that at the time.
⁵⁷

Can you believe that? Joseph Tkach Jr., Greg Albrecht and Michael Feazell had no qualms about pouring their hearts out to Hank Hanegraaff, as long as it was in private. But they weren’t about to go on the radio with their “we’ve joined mainstream Christianity” heart-to-heart. And why? Because
the membership wasn’t yet ready.
The members, remember, were skeptical—they didn’t even think the changes were for real! They heard Tkach Sr., all throughout 1994, deny that the church was about to do away with the law.

Then, on December 17, the membership finally heard the same news Tkach’s fellows told Hank Hanegraaff a year earlier—that the
WCG
had now joined mainstream Christianity.