Ehrman and Fredriksen

Bartman vs. Price?

John Shuck has posted the second in his series of interviews - Will the Real Jesus Please Rise?  The first was with Jack Spong.  This time it's with Bart Ehrman, the Second Horseperson of the Post-Enlightenocalypse, and author of that grate little book (grate being my preferred spelling in this case) Did Jesus Exist?  John is a great (as opposed to grate) interviewer, and asks a lot of the questions some of us would likely have asked ourselves given the chance.

Next horseperson off the blocks is Bob Price, with the podcast due to hit the Web around June 5.  As we all know the third horseperson is mounted on a dark horse, and that seems entirely appropriate for Bob.

And a heads up about Paula Fredriksen's new book Sin: The Early History of an Idea.  It's already out on Kindle, and due soon in hard copy.  How on earth did we end up with the demented self-fulfilling prophecy of total human depravity and original sin?  Fredriksen hauls the culprits into the dock.  Praise the lord, and let's hope they all - and especially that Augustine guy from Hippo - get consecutive eternal lifetime convictions!

The End just got postponed

Ten minutes of nuclear Armageddon and lo, the return of Christ.  By today - yes, right now, if not hours past - we should all we witlessing witnessing the Second Coming - at least according to super-prophet Ronald Weinland.  But, oops, it seems the Weinland Messiah was double-booked.

Hence our text for the day (1 Kings 18: 26-29):

26 So they took the bull that was given them, prepared it, and called on the name of Baal from morning until noon, crying, "O Baal, answer us!" But there was no voice, and no answer. They limped about the altar that they had made. 27 At noon Elijah mocked them, saying, "Cry aloud! Surely he is a god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened." 28 Then they cried aloud and, as was their custom, they cut themselves with swords and lances until the blood gushed out over them. 29 As midday passed, they raved on until the time of the offering of the oblation, but there was no voice, no answer, and no response. (NRSV)

No voice, no answer, and no response.  Not so much as a stray trumpet blast.  Luckily for Ron, he won't have to face the same fate as the prophets of Baal, other than a little biblically-sanctioned mocking.

So how, after predicting the big date and failing, then re-predicting and falling flat on your face yet again, can you recover your dignity and keep on with gathering the Lord's greenbacks?

Ronnie lays his heart open before the brethren.  No sign though that he's going to retire from the prediction business.  Nope, he's already hard at work on that next rambling sermon.  Oh dear, and all that nasty IRS stuff will have to be dealt with after all.

The New Believers

With David Barrett's new book on the WCG, The Fragmentation of a Sect, due for release at the end of the year, perhaps it's a good time to note his previous work in 2001, The New Believers.  Unfortunately you might now find it hard to track down, but here is a short review - which appeared on the original Ambassador Watch.  (The website for the book is still available at www.thenewbelievers.com.)

After reading The New Believers I'm relieved I wasn't suckered into a really weird cult. Worldwide was bad enough, but compared to some of the groups David Barrett discusses, WCG was downright well-balanced.

Barrett is English, and this large book (500 plus pages) is written with a British audience in mind. But don't let that put you off. Barrett's strength is as a sociologist, someone who is working in the field of alternate religions: as a result he is scrupulously fair to all concerned and generous-spirited. Unlike the more common material on sects, this isn't an "anti-cult" book, and Barrett isn't out to rally the troops to his own version of "the truth". The result is a thinking person's romp through an extensive list of bizarre and colorful "new religious movements". Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are there, along with Christadelphians and Exclusive Brethren, Bahai and the International Church of Christ. Those movements I can deal with, but when Barrett moves to Eckankar, Theosophy and the Aetherius Society: well, give me Herb's shaking jowls any day.

For those of us with a WCG background, the main interest in this book will be Barrett's keen observations of Worldwide and its daughter churches. In fact he devotes the final section of his book to the WCG as a case study, as well as referring to it throughout the book. In doing so he gifts us with the rare ability to "see ourselves as others see us". In the concluding chapter, "Schism of a Sect", he tackles the phenomenon of a church disintegrating following the death of its leader. As an outsider you might expect him to get some of the detail wrong, but no, this is a meticulous piece of research. And, wonder of wonders, it is also highly readable. A small sampling:

Armstrong was often photographed in Plain Truth and elsewhere with great world leaders - kings, princes, politicians, prime ministers, presidents - which gave him kudos and credibility. According to some former senior members, these photographs were intended to show Armstrong's importance by the circles in which he regularly moved; but very often, it seems, the great world leaders had no idea who this short, elderly man was, who asked to be photographed shaking hands. Garner Ted Armstrong disapproved of his father's many trips, calling them "the world's most expensive autograph hunt".
On many occasions Armstrong, as Chancellor of the Ambassador Colleges, is alleged to have effectively "bought" meetings and photographs by making donations to charitable causes supported by a world leader.
...
The Worldwide Church of God has always been very authoritarian, very "top-down", a classic case of establishing and maintaining "the purity of the truth." In sociologist Roy Wallis' words, "its protection... requires extensive control over those to whom access [to the truth] is permitted" - i.e. church membership... As senior leaders, powerful, ambitious men, constantly jockeyed for position in the hierarchy, they would suddenly find themselves demoted or even disfellowshipped  for what often seemed trivial reasons. Six months or a year later they might be back in favor, and the person who had fired them might himself be in the wilderness. One reason for all the many variant offshoots today is the unresolved grievances and lack of trust between people who had worked together for decades.
...
Joesph W. Tkach died in September 1995, and his son, Joe Jnr (now known as Joseph Tkach) became Pastor General. According to a leading member of one offshoot church, Joe Jnr had effectively been running WCG for some years, under the figurehead of his sick father - a close parallel to the Armstrongs in the 1960s and early 1970s. But where Garner Ted Armstrong had been ousted from the Church, Joe Jnr, according to many internal sources, had been the one to push through all the changes in the Church.
...
Although Joseph Tkach had been appointed the successor by Armstrong, the continuing power of the leadership in WCG did not rest on the succession of personal loyalty alone. Armstrong had also enforced a strict top-down form of Church government, and this continued after his death. The Church leadership had its authority directly from God, and must be obeyed even if it was wrong (1 Peter 2:18). This was why so many loyal ministers struggled with their consciences so long to teach what they were told they must now teach, even if they personally still believed the old teachings. Some members... believe... they must remain in that Church even if it is now teaching what to them is outright heresy.
...
The majority still held to the teachings of Herbert W. Armstrong. The Tkaches rejected his teachings, but because of their position were able effectively to hijack his Church... If the Tkaches had left the Church Armstrong founded, they could have left the majority of members to remain true to those teachings within the organization founded on those teachings. That would, some feel, have been a more satisfactory, even a more honest, resolution.

Others have set out to chronicle the fortunes of the Worldwide Church of God, but each has had a very clear personal agenda. Joe Tkach and Mike Feazell are, for example, apologists for their reforms. David Barrett has no such constraints. Indeed, the current Pastor General will take little joy from Barrett's analysis. The 18 000 word WCG section of The New Believers is something special. It is an insightful and compassionate overview of the travail the church has gone through.   

And, if Barrett is right, the soap opera is destined to continue well into the foreseeable future and beyond.

AW back up

The archives of the Ambassador Watch blog, which ran from mid 2006 through January 2010, are now back online.

Defragging the WCG

The Worldwide Church of God "experience" has garnered little attention from sociologists up till now, despite offering a rich and diverting history.  In fact for years the WCG, founded by high school dropout and ad man Herbert W. Armstrong, provided unintentional 'soap opera'-style entertainment quite unparalleled in any other similar-sized sect.  Amusing to those on the outside, deeply distressing to those on the inside, and life-altering to those painfully working their way from the centre to the margins and beyond.

Those who have written in any depth on the WCG have largely been caught up in apologetics of one sort or another, pleading for the defence, or throwing stones from inside other glass houses. Ex-members have had a tendency to (ahem, small clearing of throat) gloat over the ongoing pratfalls that have seen a once dynamic, thrusting religious movement reduced to a bare shadow of its former presence.

Where would you find a serious study of the WCG, its leaders and its leadership dilemmas?  Dilemas that have spawned an uncountable number of sub-sects, each aping the original movement in different ways?  Sadly, nowhere.

But that's about to change with the impending release of The Fragmentation of a Sect: Schism in the Worldwide Church of God.  Authored by David V. Barrett, a meticulous and fair-minded observer who has been 'on the case' for many years, this 350 page study is due for release from Oxford University Press in December.

The author has either met or corresponded with many of the big names in the movement, whether in the Tkach-led rump remnant or some of the flakier one-man breakaways.  He wrote The New Believers back in 2001, which focused in its final chapter on WCG as a case study.  That was clearly just the appetiser.  Here's the publisher's description of the new volume.

In the mid-1930s an unsuccessful American advertising executive, Herbert W. Armstrong, founded a millenialist, Sabbatarian Christian sect with a heterodox theology. Over the next half century, despite a number of setbacks, scandals, criticisms, and attacks from former members and anti-cultists, Armstrong's organization, the Worldwide Church of God, grew to around 100,000 baptized members with a world circulation of over six million for its flagship monthly magazine Plain Truth. In January 1986, Armstrong died. His successor changed most of the Church's distinctive doctrines, leading it towards an increasing convergence with mainstream Evangelical Christianity. This revision created a massive cognitive dissonance in ministers and members: should they accept or reject the authority of the Church leadership which had abandoned the authority of the founder's teachings? Groups of ministers left the religion to form new churches, taking tens of thousands of members with them. These schismatic churches in turn faced continuing schism, resulting in over 400 offshoot churches within little more than a decade.

In this major study David V. Barrett examines the processes involved in schism and the varying forms of legitimation of authority within both the original church and its range of offshoots, from hardline to comparatively liberal. His book extends the concepts of rational choice theory when applied to complex religious choices. More important, he offers a new typological model for categorizing how movements can change after their founders' death, including schism, and explores the usefulness of this model by applying it not only to the Worldwide Church of God, but also to a wide variety of other religions.

Features

• The first sociological study of Worldwide Church of God offshoots
• Proposes a new typological model for categorizing various outcomes to new churches on the death of their founder

Now I don't know about you, but I'm excited by this project, which began as a PhD dissertation (in Sociology of Religion at the London School of Economics.)  It's a chance for some of us to take a disciplined look, adding insight to hindsight, at where we've come from, and perhaps learn some new things about ourselves - as well as "our former association" - at the same time.

If you've been crazy enough to follow my blog posts since Ambassador Watch days, or have kept up to date through The Journal, you'll know that David's book has been years in the making.  This is one publication every thinking member and ex-member will want - I'm tempted to say need - to have.

More information to follow as it becomes available.

The First Horseperson rides forth from Elizabethton

Hark!  The drum of hoofbeats at dusk.  'Ware, 'ware, 'ware, pilgrim; hide yourself quickly, the horsepersons are four, and the first is even now upon us, clad in purple.

John Shuck has posted the first of four radio shows in podcast form, each featuring a different revelatory rider.  And lo, wearing faded purple, mounted on a princely steed, is none other than John Shelby Spong.

Spong may have retired years ago from the office of Episcopal bishop, but the fire still burns.  Begone ye cloistered academic critics, peering down your delicate snooters at one you do not deem your peer, this sage's words are worth a thousand dry, self-promoting monographs.

No, seriously, this is a great bit of audio.  Do give it a listen.

But quick!  For the second rider soon approaches, thin-lipped and intense, splattered in muck to the bridle with the severed heads of his enemies bouncing from his buckled belt.

Bart Ehrman under friendly fire

Bart Ehrman must be regretting his decision to take on the subject of Jesus mythicism.  It's not that he's done so, but how he's done it.  His book Did Jesus Exist? was a sloppy bit of work that did him scant justice.  I'm still not convinced Ehrman has done much more than skim-read much of the material he critiques - particularly Doherty's Jesus: Neither God Nor Man.

It's not that the mythicists shouldn't be challenged; they clearly should.  And if they're genuine scholars (as many of them are) they would surely welcome the engagement.  But Did Jesus Exist? has turned out to be a disappointment all round, doing little more than stirring up a hornet's nest of largely justified indignation.

Now it seems he's also getting walloped from the historicist centre-ground.  Both Stephanie Fisher and Maurice Casey (author of the somewhat stroppy and high-handed Jesus of Nazareth) have levelled some pertinent criticism at Ehrman's assunptions and insinuations.  Jim West has the details.  Interesting to note that Ehrman refused to allow this criticism to appear on his blog, calling it "mean spirited."

Which seems a bit rich given the approach he takes in his own book.


Jesus of Nazareth