Raising the Ruins (11 page)

The new teaching about Christ’s sacrifice and physical sin had a profound impact on the church’s literature inventory. In his book, Tkach Jr. said, “In 1989 we stopped circulating booklets that taught what we had come to believe was a flawed understanding of divine healing.”
²⁵
In truth, that process began immediately after the change was made in March 1987. It began with Mr. Armstrong’s booklet
The Plain Truth About Healing
. Upon making the change, Tkach Sr. explained,

The healing booklet will have to be temporarily withdrawn until edits and revisions reflecting this new understanding Jesus Christ has given to His church can be made. References in our literature to “physical sin” and Jesus’ body being broken for the limited purpose of paying the penalty for “broken physical laws” will also have to be revised.
²⁶

Three weeks after Mr. Tkach wrote that,
The Principles of Healthful Living
booklet and the reprint article, “The Plain Truth About Fasting,” were removed from stock. They also announced that Lessons 12, 23 and 25 of the correspondence course had been shelved in anticipation of being revised.

In 1988,
What Is Faith?
, The Plain Truth About Easter
and
The Wonderful World Tomorrow
were all discarded because of “incorrect” explanations on healing and Christ’s sacrifice. They were later revised and re-issued,
carrying Mr. Armstrong’s byline,
yet containing new doctrinal teaching that Mr. Armstrong would have rejected.

In
Mystery of the Ages
,
on pages 64-68, Mr. Armstrong discussed a dramatic personal example of healing that would either have to be re-worked or removed entirely, based on Tkach’s new teaching. The section on page 211, under the subhead, “Jesus Beaten for Our Healing,” discusses physical sin and healing as forgiveness of sin. On page 317 is a reference to healing and repenting of sin. Likewise, on page 319, Mr. Armstrong refers to the
laws
of health. All of these references would have to be removed for
Mystery of the Ages
to survive.

The ripple effect of this new teaching was huge.

“Messenger” Becomes “the Church”

Joseph Tkach Jr. would have us believe that when editors chopped all that material about “Elijah” out of the 1986
Mystery of the Ages
serialization in the
Plain Truth,
there was nothing sinister behind the deletion. It was just an innocent effort to condense the text into the allotted space. They
NEVER
dreamed that their
teaching
on the subject would ever change. Yet, the following year, the church’s Personal Correspondence Department (
PCD
) produced a form letter on the subject of the Elijah prophecy in Matthew 17. It read, “At the close of this present evil age, the message of ‘Elijah’ is again to be thundered to disobedient Israel as a witness and to prepare a people for Christ’s Second Coming.”
²⁷
According to the letter, the
WCG
was delivering this message. Mr. Armstrong wasn’t even mentioned. Yet most members would have been completely unaware of the new teaching, unless they happened to send a question to pcd about Matthew 17.

It wasn’t until early 1988 that Tkachism finally got around to explaining the new teaching to a larger audience. Tkach Sr. wrote, “Jesus said that ‘Elijah’ was to ‘restore all things,’ or get things ready. John, in his day, prepared those who listened to him .…”
²⁸
And what about the “other man”—the
latter-day
fulfillment of these prophecies? Tkach explained: “Just as Malachi prophesied of John the Baptist [Malachi 4:5-6] and just as the angel Gabriel expounded [in Luke 1:16-17], a people would be prepared for God. From the Ephesian era until now,
THE CHURCH OF
G
OD FULFILLS THAT ROLE OF PREPARING A PEOPLE FOR
G
OD
.”
²⁹
So John the Baptist was the first-century Elijah and “
THE CHURCH
” is the end-time Elijah! John prepared the way for Christ’s first coming, and
the church
prepares the way for His Second Coming. What began through John the Baptist, Mr. Tkach wrote, has “continued through the ages by the successive eras of the church of God.”
³⁰

Incredibly, this momentous change in doctrine was passed off on the membership
as if it were something we had always known and believed.
Mr. Tkach introduced the article by saying the church had often focused on the “general principle” of these end-time Elijah prophecies—“that of strengthening family relationships, instead of the vital primary meaning of those verses .…”
³¹
In truth, the church had actually focused on the primary,
very specific
meaning of those verses—
that they referred to Herbert Armstrong and the work God did through him in this end time.
But in February 1988, Mr. Tkach not only made the rejection of that teaching formal—he made it sound like Mr. Armstrong taught the same thing.

What an impact this change must have had on the status of
Mystery of the Ages
—at that point still in circulation, though no doubt hanging by a thread. Right at the beginning of Mr. Armstrong’s final book, on page 9, is a section under the subhead, “The Elijah to Come.” In it, he again emphasized the duality of these specific prophecies—the first fulfillment being John the Baptist. Yet, as he so often explained, these prophecies also refer “to a
human messenger
preparing the way before Christ’s now imminent Second Coming, this time in supreme power and glory as Ruler over all nations!” That statement was now at odds with Tkach’s new teaching about
the church
being this “messenger.”

Mystery of the Ages
included another reference on page 251 about the “18 basic and essential truths” that were restored to the church through one man.

In chapter 6, we also discussed the significance of what Mr. Armstrong covered from pages 289 to 292 in
Mystery,
where he said “these prophecies have now definitely been fulfilled,” referring to Matthew 24:14, Revelation 3:7-13, Malachi 3:1-5, Malachi 4:5-6 and Matthew 17:11.
³²
(You will remember that all these prophecies were omitted from the 1986 serialization of the book.)

And then there is one final section at the end of
Mystery
, subheaded “Elijah to Come in Our Day.” Mr. Armstrong wrote,

John the Baptist was a voice crying out in the physical wilderness of the Jordan River, preparing the way for the First Coming of Christ, as a physical human being, to his physical temple at Jerusalem and to the physical people of Judah, announcing the advance good news that the kingdom of God would in the future be established. But also preparing the way before his Second Coming was a messenger of whom Elijah was a type. A voice crying out in the worldwide spiritual wilderness of religious confusion, preparing the way for the spiritual glorified King of kings and Lord of lords to come in the supreme power and glory of God to his spiritual temple, the church (Eph. 2:21), to actually establish the kingdom of God.
³³

In many ways, changing the prophesied messenger from Mr. Armstrong to the church undermines much, if not all, of the material in
Mystery of the Ages
.

Adding all these changes together, it’s no wonder Joe Tkach Jr., at the end of 1989, told my father that getting any further use out of
Mystery of the Ages
would be impossible.

Riddled With Error

Early on in
Mystery,
Mr. Armstrong spoke about the “Babylon of religious confusion,” and how the seven basic mysteries would reveal why the religious world is so confused.
³⁴
In his first chapter, on who and what is God, he explains how the ancient Babylonian mysteries worked their way into Christian dogma.
³⁵
In the fourth chapter, on civilization, Mr. Armstrong explained how our civilization started with Nimrod and how the pagan religions of this world began with his wife Semiramis.
³⁶
Yet, as we have already seen, the identity of Babylon had been watered down by Tkachism even before Mr. Armstrong died.

There is also material in
Mystery
identifying modern-day Assyria—they “settled in central Europe, and the Germans, undoubtedly, are, in part, the descendants of the ancient Assyrians,” Mr. Armstrong wrote.
³⁷

There are the many other “lesser” changes the
WCG
made, as we have discussed in the last two chapters. When Tkachism altered the
Elohim
definition in 1986, their new understanding contradicted the definition found in
Mystery of the Ages
on pages 50, 94 and 135. Their revised 1986 teaching on the human spirit, as it differs from the animal brain, is different from Mr. Armstrong’s explanation on pages 104, 105, 109 and 237 of
Mystery of the Ages
. In February 1987, editors removed all references in its holy day booklet to the Israelites killing the Passover lamb on the evening of the 14th of Nisan. This too contradicted what Mr. Armstrong wrote in
Mystery
on the bottom of page 53.

Add to this the discontinuation of literature. In September 1987, the
WCG
removed
The Incredible Human Potential
from circulation—offering no explanation for the move, except that “much of the material” existed in other available literature.
³⁸
The United States and Britain in Prophecy
,
as we covered at the beginning of this chapter, made it through a significant revision in 1986, but then dramatically shrunk in 1987 and finally disappeared in 1988. And
The Wonderful World Tomorrow—
another major book written by Mr. Armstrong—had a fourth of its content cut in 1987 because of the “considerable savings” it would bring the work.
³⁹

All
these changes,
all
these massive cuts in literature, happened
before
mid-1988. One could hardly describe this as a slow awakening to a new understanding. These men were pushing their program just as hard and as fast as they possibly could without revealing their full intentions.

It’s no wonder the status of
Mystery of the Ages
had reached a critical crossroads for
WCG
officials by that time.
Mystery of the Ages
,
as of mid-1988, was the church’s best-known, most-requested book. On the other hand, Tkachism believed it was “riddled with error.”

What would the Tkaches do?

“
We have more than 120,000 copies of Mystery .… Should we, as we are about to do with the Easter booklet, destroy all existing stock of these books and order new printings of them?”

— Dexter Faulkner

Memo to Joseph Tkach Sr., April 18, 1988

According to Joseph Tkach Jr., the reason the church put
Mystery of the Ages
“on hold” in the spring of 1988 was because “[t]here were enough historical errors,” “other kind of errors” and “misinterpretations of scripture” that it needed to be corrected before the book could be used again.
¹

Of course, even before the book was officially “on hold,” it had become unpopular within the circle of decision-makers in Pasadena. June 7, 1987, was the last time the book was ever offered on the church’s television program. (It was a summer re-run that brought in more than 37,000 calls requesting the book. The original program, which aired on January 25, 1987, generated 59,000 calls—the fourth-highest response ever. As an aside, the highest weekend response ever came as a result of the January 26, 1986, tribute to Mr. Armstrong—one in which
Mystery of the Ages
was the literature offered.)

The July 21, 1987,
Pastor General’s Report
updated the ministry on the library book program. Members had been working on the project since mid-1986 and had distributed nearly 5,000 copies of
Mystery of the Ages
to U.S. libraries. In December of that year, the church newspaper informed members that
Mystery
was now available in Norwegian and French.
²
The Spanish and Italian versions became available in February 1988.
³

This, from what we could find, is the last mention of
Mystery of the Ages
in any of the church’s official literature. For most of the church membership and field ministry, it completely disappeared from view for more than a year.

At headquarters, however, there was no hotter topic than
Mystery of the Ages
throughout 1988. It was discussed in numerous meetings, interoffice memos and internal reports.

120,000 Bad Copies

On April 18, 1988, Dexter Faulkner, Editorial Services manager, sent an interoffice memo to Mr. Tkach Sr., drawing attention to incorrect teaching about Christ’s sacrifice in
The Wonderful World Tomorrow
and
Mystery of the Ages
. He attached photocopied pages from the
Mystery
section, “Jesus Beaten for Our Healing.” Mr. Faulkner wrote,

We have more than 120,000 copies of
Mystery
that contain the statement [about Christ’s sacrifice]. Replacement cost would be around one dollar per copy. Shipping costs would be substantial because of the weight of the book.

Should we, as we are about to do with the Easter booklet, destroy all existing stock of these books and order new printings of them?
⁴

We have no record of whether Mr. Tkach responded to Faulkner’s query by memo or verbally, if at all. But we can still piece together a pretty accurate record of what happened. Three weeks after the memo, in Bernie Schnippert’s “Literature Coordination Report”—sent to department heads, regional directors and those involved in producing and distributing literature—we find that
Mystery of the Ages
had been put “on hold” in all languages, so that its content might be revised.
⁵
The following week, employees were told that, because of its “on hold” status,
Mystery
“should not be distributed.”
⁶

Then, on June 2, Mr. Schnippert lowered the boom on those 120,000 copies remaining in stock:

“All softbound copies of
Mystery of the Ages
in English, German, Norwegian and Spanish should be discarded immediately because they contain passages that do not correctly reflect the church’s teaching about Christ’s sacrifice.

“All hardbound copies of
Mystery of the Ages
should also be discarded.”
⁷

Roger Lippross,
Plain Truth
production director at the time, later indicated that this action was indeed taken. He said it was common, even under Mr. Armstrong’s leadership, to withdraw literature from circulation for one of two purposes: to either retire or revise the publication. “In either case,” he said, “the remaining inventory copies, but not archive, personal and research copies, would be disposed of .…”
⁸

Mr. Tkach Jr.’s recollection of these events, however, is much less vivid. At his 1998 deposition, he said that, from what he remembers, distribution of the book continued “until we almost ran out.”
⁹
Later, after reviewing some of the documents quoted above, he said, “I really wasn’t always aware of when they discarded it or when they didn’t.”
¹⁰

Temporarily Out of Print

Though Mr. Tkach Sr. signed off on destroying the 120,000 “bad” copies, he initially gave the impression he wanted the book to be revised and printed again.
¹¹
Thus, in June 1988, Mail Processing designated the book’s status as
TOUT
—temporarily out of stock.
¹²
Those who requested the book were given written notice saying it was currently out of print and being revised for re-distribution sometime during the first half of 1989. In its place, they offered the booklet
Your Awesome Future.

In July, the future plans for the book were explained further: “Last week, we decided to move the production of the core version of this book [
Mystery
] up to the No. 7 spot on the core production schedule. This will allow us to get this book back in print in all languages by early summer of next year.”
¹³
The “literature core” was an initiative Mr. Tkach kicked off in 1987 to make the church’s most important literature, about 50 titles, available in eight different languages. Their goal was to produce seven titles per year. Now that it was in position number 7,
Mystery of the Ages
was on the fast track, so to speak, to being revised.

In the rush to stay on schedule with the revision, on July 8, Lowell Wagner, in Editorial Services, distributed a questionnaire attached to a photocopy of
Mystery of the Ages
to a number of people who worked with the church’s literature and in the letter-answering department.
¹⁴
He encouraged recipients to thoroughly review the book and to answer a number of questions like:
Does this literature contain any misstatement of doctrine or fact? Does it leave any false impressions, create any misunderstandings, or generate questions it doesn’t answer? Does it contain any statements likely to cause unnecessary offense? Does this literature contain any unnecessary or irrelevant material you feel should be deleted before reprinting? Is the literary style interesting and pleasing overall?

How incredibly revealing this questionnaire should have been to those editors who read it. Herbert W. Armstrong
FOUNDED
their church!
Mystery of the Ages
was his life’s greatest work. Yet 2 ½ years after he died, Tkachism circulated this audacious questionnaire asking ministers if they thought the material in
Mystery
was “interesting” or “pleasing.”

Years later, when asked why the questionnaire was distributed to the ministry, Tkach Jr. replied, “Rather than just have a few people give input on the errors they find, it was helpful to have a larger group of people comment on the errors they found.”
¹⁵

It wasn’t sent with the intention of salvaging
Mystery of the Ages
at all. It just provided a way for Tkachism to get more headquarters personnel involved in ridiculing Mr. Armstrong’s teachings.

More Changes

Meanwhile, changes in fundamental doctrines discussed in
Mystery of the Ages
kept barreling out of headquarters. In the summer of 1988, Mr. Tkach Sr. set off this bombshell:

[W]e must also be willing to face the fact that the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence indicates that there do exist bones, bones like those of humans, that date to a time
before
the creation of Adam. These bones apparently belonged to creatures that had an appearance like man’s. … We should realize that it is not outside the realm of possibility that God created animals shaped like man in the times before the great destruction that preceded the re-creation. Nor is it impossible that these same creatures had certain skills for building.
¹⁶

At the time, Dr. Herman Hoeh had been giving lectures before
WCG
ministers about “pre-Adamic” times. Another minister, Richard Burky, also advocated this idea of man-like builders who lived before Adam, in his paper that later circulated under the title “Creative Development.”

Mr. Armstrong called these kinds of arguments by another name: “
FENCE-STRADDLING THEISTIC EVOLUTION
.”
¹⁷
God is Creator, but He’s operating on a trial-and-error basis—using evolution, you might say, to sort of refine His product
.

It goes without saying that these theories markedly contradict huge sections in
Mystery of the Ages
.
¹⁸

Mr. Tkach followed up his theistic evolution theory with another whopper two weeks later. In chapter 6, we noted how shifting the focus of the commission to “feeding the flock” turned the church inward. Predictably, it wasn’t long before Tkachism rejected the gospel commission entirely.

“Just what is the ‘great commission’ of the church of God?” Tkach Sr. asked in August 1988. He continued,

Has God given His church a great commission to preach the gospel to the world, and another, secondary or lesser commission to feed the flock? Is there in reality a “first” commission and a less-important ‘second’ commission?
¹⁹

Later, he wrote, “It may surprise some to realize that the phrase
great commission
is nowhere found in the Scriptures. Nor are the phrases
first commission
or
second commission
found in Scripture.”
²⁰

But they are found,
and scripturally explained,
in chapter 6 of
Mystery of the Ages
. The first, and great, commission of the church is to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God; secondarily, it is to “feed the sheep”—to spiritually nourish the body of Christ.
²¹
Mr. Armstrong believed that while both aspects of the dual commission worked together hand in hand, first priority had to be given to preaching the gospel. He often told members that their individual spiritual development depended upon how much their hearts were in the work—the first commission—of the church.

Mr. Armstrong wrote
Mystery of the Ages
with the “gospel message to the world” in mind. As the
WCG
continued its turn inward, such works became expendable.

Ambassador College Crossroads

When Mr. Armstrong decided to close the Ambassador campus in Big Sandy, Texas, he said it was because he wasn’t about to pursue accreditation. He also said more resources were needed for the first commission of preaching the gospel to the world.
²²

Since Mr. Tkach began his pastor generalship with an entirely different focus—one that did not put top priority on the first commission—you can see why he so quickly reversed Mr. Armstrong’s decision to close Big Sandy. The first commission needs were not as important to him as they were to Mr. Armstrong.

It didn’t take long for Mr. Tkach’s radically different views on accreditation to be exposed either.

While Mr. Armstrong did not discuss accreditation specifically in
Mystery of the Ages
,
he certainly addressed the subject of education in this world compared to Ambassador College. Right at the start of his book, on page 1, he wrote that “higher education in the Western world has sought to erase the mystery by giving its virtually unanimous acceptance to the theory of evolution.”
²³
Because of this false premise, he explained in the “Preface,” higher learning has not been able to solve the greatest of all mysteries:
WHO AND WHAT IS
G
OD.

Disproving evolution was a critical point on which Mr. Armstrong’s personal conversion hinged. It was one of two disturbing challenges he confronted early in life, during an intensive six-month study. That study culminated in the beginning of the worldwide work God would raise up through him. “And let me add here,” he wrote in
Mystery of the Ages
,

that my study of God’s revelation of truth has never ceased. Later Christ used me in founding three liberal arts colleges—including one in England. Through constant study, teaching and collaboration with spirit-minded faculty members in theological courses, my mind has remained open. And knowledge of God’s revealed truth has increased.
²⁴

This was the model on which Mr. Armstrong established Ambassador College. It was a character-building institution, with the Word of God as its foundation.
²⁵

These are some of the reasons Mr. Armstrong was dead-set against accreditation. He did not want the approval of men if it meant lowering God’s standard at the college. He would much rather be
un
accredited before men than to compromise with God’s Word. Indeed, as we have seen, he was prepared to
close
Big Sandy entirely should Texas law require certified schools to become accredited!