I never quite got around to writing anything in here yesterday. I was more interested in reading, I guess. Saturday afternoon we went to the Malden public library’s book sale and got a few things — about 15 books for something like 8 dollars. Not a bad deal, I guess. One of the books I got was by Martin Marty entitled, The Glory and the Power and it’s about fundamentalism in the world, specifically in the three monotheistic religions. I’ve finished the sections on Christian fundamentalism and on Jewish fundamentalism, and now I’m reading about Islamic fundamentalism, which I find to be a little slower going and less interesting simply because I know less about Islam that I do about Christianity and Judaism.
One interesting thing I found was the distinction between traditionalism/orthodoxy and fundamentalism. While the two might share a similar, conservative theology, the fundamentalists differ because they fight back. They see modernity encroaching on their world and taking away some aspect of it, and they fight back.
This brings up another interesting point: fundamentalism, while it stresses certain “fundamentals” and traditions, is a strictly modern phenomenon. Granted, they feel that they’re returning to a pre-modern, pure theology, but modernity is the stimulant that gets it all going. Without modernity we can have no fundamentalism.
Reading about Christian fundamentalism, though, I found some striking parallels with the theology of the Armstrongian Worldwide Church of God. To begin with, fundamentalists tend to be premillenial dispensationalists, and although for a while I really got tired of Dad throwing that word around, “dispensationalism” is the perfect description of Armstrongian theology. It is nothing but — it is, in many ways, at the very core of his worldview.
Another similarity is in the “chosenness” of fundamentalists:
It only takes a little imagination to see how powerful premillenial ideas were and can be in fundamentalism. Do you seek a distinctive idenity? Here is a teaching that separates you from other Christians, Protestants, and even evangelical conseratives. Do you need the feeling of being inside? With dispensationalism, you can read the newspapers with a knowledge and perception denied other believers who have no guide to apparently plotless or contradictory events. . . .1
That seems the perfect description of the WCG of old — and the current PCG, GCG, CGI, LCG, etc.
And it also explains why Armstrong was so afraid of people reading material he hadn’t written, or at least approved. The “weak-minded” WCG member might read this and think, “Hum, here’s someone saying the exact same thing as Mr. Armstrong. Here’s someone claiming exclusive knowledge and [more frightening for the believer], here’s someone explaining this whole process. And if this explanation can be made of fundamentalists, then what happens if this Martin Marty turns his keen eye toward the WCG?” Of course I did point out and want to stress that only the “weak-minded” WCGer would think this. Someone thorougly “converted” (or indoctrinated, or socialized) will simply put this off as another satanic deception.
1 Martin Marty. The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern World. 51, 52.