Raising the Ruins (17 page)

“Not long before he died, Herbert Armstrong told my dad that some things in the church needed to be changed. He didn’t make a list of the changes he had in mind, he simply said that ‘things needed to be changed.’”

— Joseph Tkach Jr.

Transformed by Truth

After everything Mr. Armstrong said about
Mystery of the Ages
before he died—“most important book since the Bible”; “best work of my 93 years of life”; “the most valuable gift I could possibly give to you”—the fact that the Tkaches retired the work 2½ years after his death says a lot about what they really believed all along about Mr. Armstrong’s teachings. But to retire the book
and then blame its removal on Mr. Armstrong,
after all those glowing, public remarks, shows how far Tkachism was willing to go in order to deceive and lie—even if the lie was unbelievably absurd.

In 1990, Joseph Tkach Sr. said, “Mr. Armstrong himself told me that the book contained errors and that he needed to rewrite it.” But, according to Tkach, Mr. Armstrong died before he could revise the book. “I felt that there was so much valuable truth in the book that we should continue using it anyway,” Mr. Tkach said.
¹
So according to the 1990 version of the story—get this—it was
Mr. Armstrong
who wanted the book shelved and
Mr. Tkach
who wanted to keep it in circulation! “After a while,” Tkach continued, “I realized that the errors in the book could make the whole subject seem unreliable, and I had to do what I perhaps should have done to begin with.”

As for Mr. Armstrong’s profuse praise for the material in the book, Tkach said he “made some very strong claims regarding the book. He even called it the most important book since the Bible. This was an overstatement.”
²
Yes, in the very
same article,
Mr. Tkach said Mr. Armstrong
OVERSTATED
the book’s importance when it was released, yet
fully realized
there were errors in it and that it needed to be rewritten.

What Mr. Tkach failed to mention in that 1990 article is that
he too
got “carried away” in his praise for the book. On January 16, 1986, the day Mr. Armstrong died, Mr. Tkach called
Mystery of the Ages
Mr. Armstrong’s “most powerful and effective book.”
³
Ten months later, when he introduced the final installment of
Mystery
in the
Plain Truth
serialization, he wrote, “Mr. Armstrong
did not underestimate
the importance of this last work .…”
⁴
He said that 10 months
AFTER
Mr. Armstrong died. In 1990, Tkach made it clear that Mr. Armstrong
DID
overestimate the book’s importance.

That Mr. Tkach would change his views about the book from 1986 to 1990 is one thing. But how could
Mr. Armstrong’s
views change? He was
DEAD
! Either he thought the book might be the most important since the Bible or else he considered it flawed and in need of a rewrite. It can’t be both!

In his 1986 article, Mr. Tkach Sr. called
Mystery of the Ages
Mr. Armstrong’s “last will and testament, to be passed on to those who would value it. … He loved and respected his readers and, in a figurative sense, he remembered you in his will.
⁵

All these comments were made
after
Mr. Armstrong supposedly told him the book
CONTAINED ERRORS
and
NEEDED TO BE REWRITTEN
. But in 1990, in response to criticism for removing
Mystery
from circulation, Mr. Tkach wrote,

As I said, before he died, [Mr. Armstrong] told me that the book had errors and should be rewritten. The truth remains the truth, of course. The errors were the problem. But he did not get the chance to rewrite it. So what was I to do?
How could I before God continue to print the book, knowing it contains errors, and knowing Mr. Armstrong told me that he wanted to rewrite it?
⁶

The thing is,
before God,
HE DID CONTINUE PRINTING THE BOOK
! He distributed it around the world for
TWO AND A HALF YEARS
! What’s more, even after this supposed conversation with Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Tkach referred to
Mystery of the Ages
as “powerful” and “remarkable,” saying it was Mr. Armstrong’s “last will and testament.” He never once mentioned this conversation with Mr. Armstrong until four years after he died—
after
he had already discontinued the book—and
after
he had received criticism for doing so.

Don’t blame me,
Mr. Tkach responded to the critics.
I’m only carrying out Mr. Armstrong’s final wishes
.

How absurd is that?

Mr. Armstrong Behind the Changes?

Picking up on his father’s sudden recollection four years after the fact, Tkach Jr. made even more sweeping statements in 1991. In a personal letter written late that year, he told a former
WCG
member, “On his deathbed, Mr. Armstrong himself commissioned my father to look into
the very changes we have made
. Therefore, we are following the wishes of Mr. Armstrong and, more importantly, God.”
⁷
By that point in time, numerous changes had already been made and much of Mr. Armstrong’s literature had either been revised or rejected.
And the Tkaches were actually trying to convince members that Mr. Armstrong had commissioned Tkach Sr. to make these changes
.

The following year, in November 1992, Mr. Tkach Sr. sent a video to all
WCG
churches in which he further elaborated on the supposed deathbed conversations he had with Mr. Armstrong. Here is what Mr. Tkach told the membership nearly
seven years
after Mr. Armstrong’s death:

A number of these [changes], whether you want to believe it or not that’s immaterial, I can’t lose any sleep over that; I know what transpired with Mr. Armstrong.

When we were talking about a number of these issues, I said to Mr. Armstrong, “What you’re bringing up here is really heavy, heavy information. It’s a shame that we can’t tape record this and preserve it for posterity.”

And he said, “Well, okay.” No, first he asked me why.

I said, “Well I know my limitations. I won’t remember everything we’re talking about.” And I said, “Secondly, even more important, the people won’t believe me!”

And so he acquiesced for a second and said, “Go ahead, get a tape recorder.” So I went around into the kitchen and as I was dialing for the radio studio or tv, I don’t remember, to ask someone to bring a tape recorder down, I heard his faint voice calling me back.

So I went back and said, “Yes sir.”

He said, “On second thought, let’s not do it.”

I said, “Well, may I ask you why?”

He said, … “The people, God’s people, His precious chosen people, are going to have to take it on faith, if they truly are converted.”
⁸

Mr. Tkach wanted this conversation recorded because he
didn’t think the people would believe him
. So what Mr. Armstrong supposedly spelled out for him must have been
MAJOR
doctrinal changes. Later in the video, Tkach said,

Some of those things were so far over my head it’s only within the last few years that they’re beginning to come back. And that’s what he told me. He said, “When it’s time for you to remember a certain point, God’s Spirit will bring it back as if we were just discussing it.” And that’s how things just come.
⁹

Brilliant! It would all unfold just like it did with Jesus Christ’s disciples, who couldn’t understand certain things until after the Spirit of God filled the church on Pentecost in a.d. 31. The problem is, Mr. Tkach had received God’s Spirit decades before these deathbed discussions. He had spent his entire adulthood in the Worldwide Church of God. He was well aware of the church’s body of beliefs. That Mr. Armstrong’s deathbed comments were so far over his head doesn’t necessarily speak well of his overall grasp of doctrine.

What Tkachism told the
WCG
membership in 1992—nearly seven years into their administration—is this: On his deathbed, Mr. Armstrong commissioned the Tkaches to look into the “very changes” that had been made, which is pretty specific. What Mr. Armstrong brought up was such “heavy, heavy information” that Mr. Tkach wanted to tape record the conversation. Furthermore, the reason it took several years for Mr. Tkach to make the changes Mr. Armstrong supposedly wanted made is that the deathbed comments were “so far” over Tkach’s head, they simply did not start coming back until years later.

Riddled With Error

In that same video, Mr. Tkach also made some
UNBELIEVABLE
comments about
Mystery of the Ages
.
He said,

The same thing with
Mystery of the Ages
. We do have that on tape—where he [Mr. Armstrong] admitted that it was “
RIDDLED WITH ERRORS
.” We have it on tape where he began to extol the book and everything else when he was offering it to the student body as their textbook. And he told them that unfortunately the thing went to the printer before it could be properly edited and remove a lot of
our misunderstandings
in it. And it got printed.
¹⁰

This was a sad case where the elder Tkach could not keep his lies straight. This happened quite a lot in those days, especially when Mr. Tkach would veer away from sermon notes someone else had prepared.

The video Mr. Tkach referred to was of Mr. Armstrong presenting the book to the sophomore class at Ambassador College on September 9, 1985, about four months before he died. In it, Mr. Armstrong was nearly overcome with emotion when he asked, “Will you forgive me if I get a little bit of a thrill that this is done; that this book is out now? Today is a pretty big day in my life when I can hand copies of this book out to each of you.” He spent quite a bit of time during that speech explaining how
Mystery of the Ages
came to be. He said he wanted the students’ education to be as “complete as possible.” Mr. Armstrong explained how some of the material in the book was from other books and booklets he had written while some material was brand new. He said, “The Bible is like a book that had been sort of cut up into about 2,000 or 3,000 pieces and you have to get them all put together in the right order or you can’t understand them. This book puts them together.” Later, he said
Mystery of the Ages
covers the “main thread” of the Bible. Reading it, he said, would “make the Bible plain and clear and understandable.” He recommended that the students read the book a second and third time, saying that they wouldn’t get the full meat of its message after just one reading.
¹¹

In a co-worker letter written just three days after Mr. Armstrong’s address, he said, “Since last December I have been working diligently on the largest and most important book of my life. In real fact I feel I myself did not write it. Rather, I believe God used me in writing it. I candidly feel it may be the most important book since the Bible.”
¹²
More than two months later, Mr. Armstrong called
Mystery of the Ages
the “best work” of his 93 years of life.
¹³

Mr. Armstrong
never said,
or even remotely
implied,
that the book was “riddled with error.” In 1992, Mr. Tkach made the embarrassing mistake of attributing this infamous statement to
Mr. Armstrong
when, in fact, it was said by
his own son
.

Caught in a Tangled Web

In the letter Tkach Jr. wrote to Dennis Leap on April 20, 1990, he said, “Mr. Armstrong commented shortly after [
Mystery of the Ages
] was published that the book was
outdated
and
needed to be rewritten
when he was up to the task.”
¹⁴
Mr. Armstrong began distributing the book just
four months
before he died. It was his newest, just-published book—and yet, sometime during his last four months, the Tkaches say he supposedly discovered it was “outdated”? Actually, when Mr. Armstrong first handed out the book to the sophomore class at Ambassador, explaining that he had relied on various other writings of his to help produce parts of the book, he said,

Much of it’s been
rewritten
. It’s all been reorganized and
updated
. It had to be different from any book ever written before. It had to contain parts of several different books that we had. But we had no book that I thought was fitting .… There were some things in other booklets. But there were
some things too that weren’t written at all
and weren’t in any book that I wanted in.
¹⁵

In truth, Mr. Armstrong
NEVER
said the book needed to be rewritten. What he said was that more material could be
added
to the original text. Here is what he wrote in a letter to those who requested
Mystery of the Ages
:

Since writing the book, I have written another booklet that well
could be the opening chapter of this book.
And indeed,
MAY BE IN FUTURE EDITIONS
. It is on the mystery of the Bible itself. This booklet is titled
The BIBLE—Superstition or Authority? … and Can You Prove It?
Can you prove that the Bible is indeed the very Word of God, and the supreme authority in life, in right and wrong, by which every person ever born will be finally judged?

I feel sure you will want to read this new booklet, especially in connection with
Mystery of the Ages
.
¹⁶