Question:  Dear Greg,

            I have some questions that I have not been able to understand about Armstrongism.  It is my experience that Armstrong followers will tell you that you must “prove all things with scripture”, “test everything”, and that the Bible is not open to “human interpretation”.  However, most of their religious doctrine is based upon  human interpretation.  This is especially true when you consider the main reason for their following some of the ancient Israelite customs and Mosaic laws—they believe that they are descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, but cannot prove it using Scripture.

            There are 613 laws of the Old Testament but they pick and choose which ones they keep.  They criticize other Christians for celebrating Christmas because they say scripture does not support it, yet they cannot support their Anglo/Israelism.

            They criticize the materialism of Christmas yet exchange gifts during the Jewish Feasts—which also cannot be supported by Scripture.

            They say that not one jot or tittle of the law has been abolished yet they believe sacrifice and circumcision, etc. have been abolished.

            They say they are Christians yet do not follow Christ.  Does the Scripture not say that Jesus was greater than Moses and not that we are to follow the teachings of both?  Why do they completely ignore history that has traced Christianity back to the time of the Apostles?

            I would really like to have a better understanding of how such intelligent and reasonable people can be so blinded to the obvious false doctrine of the Armstrong teaching and the hypocrisy.  I have a good friend of mine who is a Seventh Day Adventist and a deacon in his church.  We often talk about religion and the Bible.  One day I asked him why they believe in Sabbath keeping and unclean foods but not the other Jewish holy days, etc.  His response was that Jesus kept the Sabbath.  Of course my response was that Jesus kept all of the law perfectly, including the Jewish holy days and that he was the only one capable of doing so.  He could not say anything.  I then told him that anything he does for God is a good thing but that I did not believe that church leaders should teach people that they had to do these things as a means of salvation.

            Thank you for your help, insight and prayers.

            In Christian love,

            Whitney

Answer:  Dear Whitney,

            The entire hermeneutic of Armstrongism is based upon the idea of approaching the Bible with presuppositions that are already “given” because H.W. Armstrong said so.  H.W. Armstrong did say, “Don’t believe me, believe the Bible” but in reality his technique lured nominal, unschooled and unsuspecting individuals into selected texts of the Bible that appeared to prove his point.  Often that point, if accepted, invalidated much of Christianity (such as the Jewish Sabbath, Jewish holy days and Jewish dietary laws).  Once someone accepted such prooftexting as valid Biblical interpretation they were left to wrestle with the fact that H.W. Armstrong was saying things few, if any other Christians were saying.  So, who was right?

            Once the next step was taken, i.e. H.W. Armstrong is right and everyone else is wrong, then biblical interpretation and Bible study simply became whatever H.W. Armstrong felt a particular passage of scripture meant.

            You may know of the court case in which Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Watch Tower Society, was on trial for mail fraud (he had claimed that his “miracle wheat” would produce ten times as much as regular wheat).  During the trial Russell continually claimed divine revelation and insight derived from the Bible.  The prosecutor finally asked Russell to prove what he was claiming from the Bible.  Russell cited a passage, which the prosecution turned to, read aloud and then noted that the passage did not say what Russell said it did.  Russell said that the English version the prosecutor was reading was a bad translation and that the original Greek text supported Russell’s interpretation.  The prosecutor asked Russell if he was a Greek expert and Russell, under oath, said that he was.  The prosecutor then arranged for a professor of Greek to come to the courtroom as an expert witness.  With the witness standing by, the prosecutor asked Russell to read from a Greek New Testament.  Russell of course could not.  Russell was convicted of perjury and fraud.

            Armstrongism relies on similarly subjective interpretation.  Armstrongism starts with “what Mr. Armstrong always believed” and then takes the unwitting and untrained person on a meandering and eclectic proof text journey of the Bible.  This “journey” avoids all the “land mines” that would disprove the already accepted presupposition.  Clear passages about the gospel of Jesus Christ are ridiculed as “Protestant”—some being noted as “difficult scriptures” that adherents to Armstrongism learn to interpret so that they do not overturn Armstrongism.

            Strict Armstrongism believes not only that Christians should observe the Sabbath and Jewish holy days, but that Anglo-Saxons are in fact the lost tribes of Israel.  Therefore they believe the old covenant is not only to be kept because it was never “done away with” but also because Anglo-Saxons are modern-day descendants of the twelve tribes.  This idea of British-Israelism is combined with certain distinctives of classic dispensationalism for the Armstrong view of prophetic events and eschatology.

            As far as history, it’s not so much that Armstrongism ignores history, but it

1) discredits Christian history because, after all, the Christians in history were not “true” Christians—they did not keep the Sabbath, holy days and had lost their identity (as the “lost” tribes); 2) revises history.  Armstrongism invented/fabricated/or at the very least distorted the actual beliefs and practices of obscure groups and individual Christians by claiming that they were in fact tiny enclaves of “the truth”--before, as they claim, Herbert Armstrong came along and restored the truth that had virtually been completely lost (except for a few individuals, because Christ said that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church).

            So why do otherwise normal, intelligent and sometimes brilliant people fall for E.G. White, Charles Taze Russell, L. Ron Hubbard, Brigham Young, etc., etc.?  We do know that many of these people are sincere and that they are simple deceived and enslaved by a philosophical worldview that is in opposition to biblical truth.

            You gave a good answer to the Seventh Day Adventist.  As H.W. Armstrong was fond of saying (in this case what he said was absolutely true): the Sabbath and Jewish holy days of the old covenant stand or fall together.  Of course, this shows the lengths to which Armstrongism will go to defend the Sabbath and holy days!  This is what distinguished him from the Seventh Day Adventists and from all orthodox Christians.  What H.W. Armstrong apparently did not know is that they absolutely do “fall” (in terms of salvific requirements) together.

            In Christ,

            Greg Albrecht