c. 2007 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Stephen Flurry is on a mission to restore trust in a dead man who regarded the United States as a lost tribe of Israel, denounced the celebration of birthdays and predicted the world would end in 1975.
And he’s making progress.
At stake is the legacy of the late Herbert W. Armstrong, a 20th century televangelist who attracted millions of viewers and founded the 67,000-member Worldwide Church of God (WCG) before he died in 1986 at age 93. The denomination he left behind long ago renounced his unorthodox teachings as heresy.
But others _ most notably Flurry’s Philadelphia Church of God (PCG) _ are taking new steps to make sure he’s honored around the globe as an end-times prophet with irreplaceable insights.
“This was a televangelist from the 1980s who was on far more television stations than even some of the most popular religious personalities of his day,” says Flurry, president of Herbert W. Armstrong College in Edmond, Okla., and son of PCG President Gerald Flurry.
“He had a profound impact on the world … . We’re proud that we can uphold that legacy and keep his work and his teachings alive. It would be a tragedy to see those things disappear.”
The 6,000-member PCG is translating all seven of Armstrong’s books into five languages. The church is also sending complimentary English editions of five of the books to any who asks _ even shipping is free. All this stems from the PCG’s victory in a bitter, three-year copyright battle with the Worldwide Church of God. In 2003, the WCG gave up its rights to the books, as well as 11 booklets and a 58-volume Bible correspondence course, in exchange for about $2 million.
Now the battlefront has shifted to public relations. Flurry’s new book, “Raising the Ruins: The Fight to Revive the Legacy of Herbert W. Armstrong,” emphasizes how Armstrong’s hand-picked successor, Joseph Tkach Sr., and his allies “betrayed” and dismantled all that the world valued about Armstrong. It’s a high-profile challenge to the WCG’s official line, which renders the church’s 180-degree shift from “Armstrongism” as “a sign of God’s grace in action.”
By all accounts, repudiating Armstrong took a massive toll on the WCG. The denomination says it lost half its members, 95 percent of its 1,000-person staff, millions of magazine readers and its college in Pasadena, Calif.
But WCG leaders remain as determined as ever to warn against the dangers of Armstrong’s message. From Armstrong, “you get a very distorted view of Christianity,” says Michael Feazell, executive editor of the WCG’s The Plain Truth magazine and author of a 2003 book, “The Liberation of the Worldwide Church of God: The Remarkable Story of a Cult’s Journey from Deception to Truth.”
“You see it in a very legalistic framework. You see God as somebody who rewards and punishes based on your faithfulness to these specific doctrinal positions. There’s no concept at all of how grace works.”
In emphasizing the need for righteousness on the eve of Jesus Christ’s imminent return, Armstrong took Old Testament law to heart. He urged followers to abide by its dietary restrictions, to observe traditional Hebrew festivals, to mark the Sabbath on Saturday and to reject holidays which he understood to have pagan roots: Christmas, Easter and birthdays, to name a few.
Such practices aren’t necessary conditions for salvation in Armstrong’s view, Flurry says, but they are expected behaviors among those who desire a holy life. Elsewhere, Armstrong rejects the orthodox view of God as a Trinity _ Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He renders God instead as a family into which believers are adopted.
Armstrong’s trademark, however, was interpreting current events as biblical prophecies fulfilled. In 1941, for instance, he wrote in the May/June edition of The Plain Truth magazine: “Hitler now emerges as the BEAST of Revelation! … ARMAGEDDON is now just a short way off.”
Today, Gerald Flurry applies Armstrong’s methods in his “Key of David” television program. One recent episode featured him explaining the Palestinian quest for East Jerusalem as an end-times fulfillment of Zechariah 14:2, which says “half the city shall go into exile.”
What’s more, Armstrong’s track record of unfulfilled predictions doesn’t diminish his spiritual authority, according to the younger Flurry.
“That Christ is returning again was at the heart of Mr. Armstrong’s end-time prophecies, as it was with the apostle Paul or even Peter,” Flurry says. “Like them, Mr. Armstrong may have been off on the timing, but we don’t believe for one second that he was off on the reality that Jesus Christ is coming back in the years ahead.”
Similar efforts in American religious history to rebuild the ministries of charismatic leaders have perennially had little impact, according to David Harrell, professor emeritus of American religious history at Auburn University and an expert in 20th century televangelism.
But, Harrell adds, Armstrong wasn’t the typical televangelist of his day. He didn’t rely on miraculous healing, simple messages or entertainment as others did. In that sense, he was “almost in his own genre.”
“He was a figure who came out of the more cerebral form of radio broadcasting and early religious televising in which the message was the hook,” Harrell says. “His message was complicated, but also quite contemporary and newsworthy. … If someone listened long enough, it was an elaborate theological labyrinth and kept people interested by its complexity.”
Armstrong’s legacy had “momentum” into the 1970s, Harrell says, but prospects for a dynamic succession vanished when his son and heir apparent, Garner Ted, confessed to adultery and was excommunicated by his father.
At least three denominations have emerged since 1986 to bear witness to Armstrong’s legacy. One of them, the 22,000-member, Cincinnati-based United Church of God, an International Association, looks to Armstrong’s writings as an important lens for interpreting Scripture.
“A number of authors have written helpful material when it comes to understanding Scripture, including, and especially, Herbert W. Armstrong,” says UCG President Clyde Kilough. “He was a powerful voice in teaching the doctrinal distinctives of the church.”
Meanwhile, as Armstrong’s literature gets disseminated more widely, the WCG is answering allegations that it tried to keep texts, such as Armstrong’s signature work, “Mystery of the Ages,” out of print. The WCG fought hard to retain copyrights, Flurry alleges, because its leaders felt a professed “Christian duty” to suppress them.
“Our Christian duty was to point out what we thought the errors were,” says WCG president Joseph Tkach Jr. There were plans to publish annotated versions of the book, Tkach said, but they never came to fruition. At this point, Tkach says, “we feel no need to publish any further on it.”
KRE/JM END MacDONALD
Editors: To obtain photos of Armstrong, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.
