Tuesday 6 March 2012

COGs as biblicist sects

It's not every day that a post-Armstrong COG sect gets a mention in a 'respectable' source.  Ever rarer that two such bodies get mentioned in despatches.  Enter Christian Smith, author of The Bible Made Impossible.  Smith, an evangelical Christian himself, launches a broadside at 'biblicism', the idea that the Good Book speaks clearly on all matters of faith and practice.  Case in point, various forms of sabbatarianism.
... Christians disagree.  Groups like Seventh-day Adventists, Seventh Day Baptists, the United Church of God, the Living Church of God, and the True Jesus Church, advocate a seventh, not first, day of observance of the Sabbath.
Spanky, of course, doesn't read much beyond selective news clippings garnered by his myrmidons, so probably isn't aware that his designer sectette (LCG) has been given a wee pat on the head.  The UCG is doubtless relieved they got the mention, and not the wooden-headed schismatics that recently dived off the deep end into the even more biblicist COGWA.

Nice to see that the True Jesus Church gets a mention among the riff-raff (SDBs excluded).  Their theology might be just as questionable, but at least they've emerged from a different cultural matrix, and without the standard American Adventist baggage (they have some nifty baggage of their own of course!)  With two and a half million adherents, they make the COGlets look like small potatoes.

2 comments:

  1. And yet, no mention of the Church of God Seventh Day?

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  2. "The True Jesus Church"...Heh, aren't they all...

    No matter how big or how small, they all claim to know everything about something for which there is no evidence - the supernatural.

    Might as well believe that the reason witches no longer exist is because the Xian church burned them all.

    Balaam was a real, actual, flesh and blood sorcerer with the power to curse a people. Yeah, and members of the WCG will reign on the earth for a thousand years. Right after they conquer the JW's and other adventists who make the same claim, of course.

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