Saturday 4 January 2014

A Potted History of WCG

Virginia Commonwealth University sponsors a World Religions and Spirituality Project (WRSP) - an online resource on religious movements ranging from Adidam to Zoroastrianism, directed by David Bromley. Each section is authored by an academic who is qualified to comment. This makes it refreshingly different from the usual agenda-driven apologetic drivel that is common on the Web.

Given the readership of this blog, there is one particular entry that may be of interest.

Of course there's more available, but the only other COG currently covered appears to be a somewhat dated and formulaic piece on the PCG (April Seabrook, revised 2001). The project has its flaws - WCG isn't yet listed in the index for example - and coverage can hardly be called comprehensive (mainline churches seem completely absent thus far). Barrett's treatment of WCG is, however, as accurate and up to date as anything else you could find about WCG in such a concise form.

2 comments:

  1. Tkatch? How could that go unnoticed?

    The WCG was definitely not binitarian as Barrett states. The WCG was polythetistic like the pagan religions of the ancient Middle East. Since it involved two distinct gods numerically, one could refine the definition to bitheism.

    I recall that Ron Kelly gave a sermon after the 1995 reformation in Armstrongite theology about how the WCG had never been polytheistic. But he found the oneness or unity in the Godhead in the fact that God is a family. This does not cut it. One could call the Greek pantheon a family also. It does not define the kind of unity that would cause us to class Armstrongism as a monotheistic religion. Ironically, the polytheistic Herbert Armstrong always referred to the Trinity as pagan.

    Neotherm

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  2. I found the article very straightforward, unbiased and factually correct.

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