Sabbatarian Patrick's Lutheran Charm

Jared Olar notes: I just noticed that this year Bob Thiel wasn't able to resist saying something about St. Patrick's Day. Back in March 2006 at Gary Scott's former XCG weblog, I shredded Bob Thiel's claims that St. Patrick was a proto-Armstrongist Sabbath-keeper, showing from St. Patrick's own words that he was a Trinitarian Catholic bishop (Google "Some Armstrongist Blarney" -- but you'll have to go to the cached pages). So the next year in March 2007, Bob Thiel "celebrated" St. Patrick's Day by complaining about St. Patrick being a pagan Trinitarian. But this year Bob is back to his previous pseudohistoricism -- St. Patrick and St. Columba and the Celtic Church in Scotland and Ireland were seventh-day Sabbatarians. (Don't be surprised if, as it was with his March 2007 anti-Patrick commentary, the historical sources he quotes -- well, actually he's just quoting another Armstrongist -- turn out to be misquotes and/or out-of-date scholarship.) Or maybe St. Patrick was a pagan Trinitarian Sabbath-keeper. . . .

One of Bob's sources (well, actually James McBride's sources, which Bob quotes) is interesting. James Moffatt is the guy behind the Moffatt Bible which bequeathed to us a peculiar fondness for calling God "the Eternal", and a top scholar in the creation of the 1952 Revised Standard Version. Is he misquoted?
One source James and Bob don't cite is Dugger & Dodd, where I first encountered the Sabbatarian Patrick legend (p.236) as a callow youth. Moffatt is naturally miles ahead of those "authorities", though I'm with Jared in agreeing that the whole thing seems totally shonky.

Also on the Patrick theme: The only official observance on the Lutheran liturgical calendar that diverges from Catholic/Anglican tradition is Reformation Sunday, and flicking through Evangelical Lutheran Worship I can confirm that March 17 indeed commemorates Patrick, missionary to Ireland. So where did the larrikins at Old Lutheran dredge up "Lutheran Charm Day"? There's got to be potential here for COGish adaptation of the church calendar... the possibilities are endless.

A favorite lie

Worth tracking down is the March 1 issue of New Scientist, with an enlightening article on those "missing links" our creationist brethren keep burbling on about.

"Yet the idea still persists that the fossil record is too patchy to provide good evidence of evolution. One reason for this is the influence of creationism. Foremost among their tactics is to distort or ignore the evidence for evolution; a favourite lie is "there are no transitional fossils". This is manifestly untrue."

The good news (which will never make the pages of The Good News) is that recently palaeontologists have struck back. Among the case studies highlighted in New Scientist:

• Velvet worms (linking arthropods to nematode worms)
• Lancelets (invertebrates on the journey to vertebrates)
• Fishibians (first cousins to those fish that crawled out onto the land in the Devonian)
• Synapsids (not mammals and not reptiles either...)
• Ceratopsians ("Of all the lies about transitional fossils told by creationists, none are as egregious as the claim that there are no intermediate forms among the dinosaurs... One striking example is the horned dinosaurs, or ceratopsians.")
• Rhinos ("All horses, tapirs and rhinos can be traced back to a common ancestor in the late Paleocene of Asia...")
• Giraffes (In the Miocene they all had short necks!)
• Ichthyosaurs (Lizard fish of the Mesozoic)
• Pinnipeds (Sea lions, walruses and seals descended from primitive bears - and there's a beautiful transitional fossil to prove it. Enaliarctos looked like a seal, but had long toes and claws)
• Manatees (there's a 50-million year old fossil manatee with four legs with feet.)

"Creationists simply have no answer for such irrefutable evidence."

Which explains all those brain-dead articles in the GN.

Preach it brother!

And ain't it the truth!

Wear this T-shirt design to Sabbath services and I guarantee you'll get noticed.

I can just see Lussenheide being escorted out of the building

;-)

Confronting Racist Hooey

Attempting to engage Dr Hoeh in meaningful dialog could be a challenge. Dr Hoeh was, as Ron Kelly observes, well... Dr Hoeh.

Hoeh was the brainiac behind much of what passed for theology in the HWA years. His doctorate was, like Meredith's, a joke, but he carried the bearing of an absent-minded scholar nevertheless. (I've been told that in later years he tried to drop the doctor title, painfully aware that it was an unearned pretension.) According to some accounts, it was Hoeh who flattered Armstrong into the role of "apostle": a rush of blood to the head that turned a dimwitted speculation into vicious dogma.

But Hoeh, who could at times appear a generous and tolerant soul, is also credited with systematizing the arcane nonsense of British-Israelism into a rigid system that injected virulent racism into the church. An arrogant intellectual confection for dotty Englishmen became - at least for some WCG ministers and members - the key distinctive of their faith. The identification was so close that government officials in New Zealand counted anyone who responded "British-Israel" as their religion on census night as Worldwide Church of God!

But, wonder of wonders, in his dotage Herman Hoeh appeared to convert to a form of "evangelical" Christianity, and added his imprimatur to the reformist agenda of the Tkach cabal.

So where did that leave such semi-canonical tomes as A Compendium of World History?

Correspondence between a Native American member, trying to make some sense of the tortuous path away from discrimination, and the architect of classic Armstrong doctrine, Herman L. Hoeh, is newly uploaded to Greg Doudna's site.

On a different tangent, David Wise, a member of LCG, is having a hard time with his employer, the Firestone tyre company, which has dug its heels in over holy days. Details here.

For what its worth, any good employer, IMHO, should be more than willing to accommodate the religious sensibilities of any good employee.

Rehab time

Pastor General Joe Tkach today announced that he was de-disfellowshipping Garner Ted Armstrong.

"Ted was a seriously misunderstood figure in our history," the WCG President-for-Life announced in a media conference held in a Glendora phone box. "He anticipated many of the changes we have subsequently made, and we have much to learn from him."

"So he screwed around," stated Michael Feazell, a senior official of the church, "so what? Now we're all crypto-Calvinists we understand that a moral lapse can't separate the elect from their eternal inheritance. We want to focus on the positive role Mr Ted Armstrong made over many years."

In a ceremony at the Glendora offices of the church, scheduled for March 17, a tribute to GTA is due to be unveiled - the Garner Ted Armstrong Memorial Birdbath. A sculpture shows Mr Armstrong holding two dice and a copy of Penthouse.

And then, as 10 years olds write at the end of improbable stories about ninja space monsters, I woke up!

Only to discover this story in the Daily Mail. Dear lord, how will Jared Olar react!

Something to give Melvin Rhodes prophetic palpitations?

Bob's Ph.D

From Bob Thiel's latest upload:

While I normally do not post corrections here to what blog posters say about the Living Church of God or me, today I thought I would comment on two I noted yesterday from a particular ”author” at a site that seems to bash the COGs (and no, not Gavin Rumney’s site this time).

Well, there's another nail in my reputation. But more interesting is the fact that Bob doesn't name the site he's taken umbrage at. Curious.

Anyway, to be fair to Bob, he's entitled to set the record straight. Here's what he says (in part):

I do have a Ph.D. and it is from the Union Institute & University. And Union is regionally accredited (the highest accepted accrediting standard in the United States for universities and colleges). I also have a Master of Science degree from the University of Southern California (which, of course, is also regionally accredited). I never was a student at Ambassador College. So to post that my academic credentials are from there is false.

And now it's my turn to set the record straight. I'm not "anti-COG" as such. A quick perusal of the recent posting on COG7 demonstrates that (or at least I'd have thought so). Or a check on what I've written about people like Pam Dewey. No Bob, not so much anti-COG as highly selective. Anti-hierarchic? Yes. Anti-manipulation? I hope so! Anti-junk theology? Guilty as charged. Anti-BI? Indubitably. I'd rather put it positively though: pro-critical thinking, pro-accountability...

It's just my opinion of course, but LCG appears to be hierarchic, manipulative and theologically challenged. But everything is relative, and compared to some other sects the Meredith faction is all sweetness and light.

Perhaps Bob himself might be construed as "anti-COG" for his bashing of all COG communities - other than LCG.

Caught by the camera is Bob in the company of the illustrious Dr Meredith (who, unlike Bob, has a shonky doctorate from you-know-where).

STP

The year is 1978, and the world is a different place.

No reality TV shows like Survivor Guatemala or Top Chef for starters. Paris Hilton is a building. Oh for the good old days!

But in the pocket universe of COGdom, dire events are afoot.

Garner Ted Armstrong is about to be out-Machiavellied by Stan the Man. The women of the WCG are days away from being declared whores if they use lipstick. The recently divorced apostle is about to declare a doctrine of Petrine primacy - making himself a type of pope. Spanky Meredith is destined to blow a foo-foo valve at Wayne Cole on the stage of the Ambassador Auditorium (put up them dukes) to cries of "shame! shame!"

And the STP would rise and fall before many of us had even registered that it was there.

The STP?

It was officially the Systematic Theology Project, but there were plenty of unofficial designations, including Slide Toward Protestantism.

As far as I know it never got beyond its published "first draft" before the reactionary elements in the church, freshly blooded from deposing GTA, clubbed it into a bloodless pulp.

You may have thought till now that the only reappearance of this document would be in the third resurrection. But fear not, gentle reader. Lo, after these many years, the original STP is yours to download. Be advised, we're talking about a hefty PDF file of 400 odd pages here (some odder than others) - not a booklet.

Thanks Bill!

Of course, it's not exactly riveting reading. Former Auckland pastor Jack [the Boot] Croucher claimed he never read it because it put him to sleep. Not enough CAPS and exclamation marks (!!!!) I guess.

But still, this is a glimpse of the WCG as it might have been. And if events had turned out differently, who knows how all our lives might have been affected.

Read an earlier post on the STP here.

March 18 and the Weinland Wind-Up

Bob Thiel notes, over on his blog, that February is now past and there's precious little out there to corroborate the Weinland fantasies.

Which is very true, though I'd add that there's an equally impressive track record of disconfirmation for Dr. Roderick C. Spanky's "three to five years" routine which, it seems, he's been blathering on about since the 1950s. I guess Math isn't his strong suit.

Ronnie, however, committed the cardinal sin of not hedging any bets. The End is datable. In a perverse way it makes him less a slimeball than the greasy prevaricators who run the larger tithe-farming operations.

But, as Alfred E. Neuman is famous for saying: "What me worry?"

Bob reminds us that, according to Weinland, the dread 1290 days of prophecy begins March 18. (The 1335 days, as previously reported here, supposedly began February 2.)

So, do you think Ron is worried at the apparent inability of the Eternal to fulfill his part of the Doomsday bargain? It's certainly not a polite thing for He Whose Name Is Faithful and True to fail to turn up on time for his own apocalypse.

Do you think his tithe payers might be having second thoughts?

In that March 18 also marks my birthday, I shall be specially alert to the import of the date this year. In fact, I'll probably have to consult with Dennis Diehl as to whether this "coincidence" gives me an inside running on being one of the Two Witnesses.

Now if only I knew where to pick up a designer sackcloth shirt...

And now a message from Yahweh

Dateline Rio: Oh strike! Jesus gets zapped from on high. Here's a link to the Daily Mail.

And while we're dealing with the topic of wrath, why not take a Meredithesque moment to reflect on the godly benefits of spanking. Here in New Zealand the practice was recently made illegal, but the conservative "Christian" types have been whining and moaning, gibbering and wailing ever since about their "right" to "discipline" their kids. It's doubtful even this story in USA Today would convince them otherwise.

On a different tangent, Felix Taylor reveals the existence of a brand of ex-WCG member I'd despaired of ever finding: a liberal Catholic. Conservative Catholic converts aren't uncommon, as witnessed by Jared Olar's occasional informative comments, but Janice is somethin' else, and a breath of fresh incense! Check out Felix's blog.

Ekklesia

One of the earliest and best information sites on WCG has been updated. Bill Ferguson's Ekklesia was hugely influential at the time of "the changes", and Bill advises: "I've cleaned up all the broken links (at least the ones I've found so far) and will be reconfiguring the site to be the new home of the ekklesia mailing list."

In the mid-90s Ekklesia was one of the first WCG-related websites I discovered as I got up to speed with Internet technology. Others around at that time were Mark Tabladillo's site, the Painful Truth, and Dee-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's Exit and Support monstrosity. The original Ambassador Watch and Missing Dimension sites (now defunct) owed an awful lot to Bill's inspiration.

Bill is one of the good guys, and there's a lot of value on offer at Ekklesia. Definitely worth bookmarking!