By Retired Prof
The Painful Truth is full of big reasons to doubt that Herbert W. Armstrong was a true apostle: illicit sex and excessive alcohol, failed prophecies, lavish spending of tithes and offerings on personal luxuries, and so forth. But sometimes the little reasons count for something too.
During the 1959-60 school year at Ambassador College I knew nothing of his bouts with incest and alcohol. I didn’t find out about his long history of false prophecies because he hid his past prognostications and focused our attention instead on 1972-75. He did show off his lavish spending when he invited groups of students over for short visits. For example, in his opulently paneled and furnished mansion he demonstrated for us a color TV, at that time a rare and precious object. He explained that all this extravagance was not wrong, because circumstances forced him to live that way. He needed to make a good impression on leaders of the business world he might have to deal with on behalf of the church. I confess to harboring seeds of skepticism when I entered Ambassador, and this presentation should have nudged them to germinate. Nevertheless, I tried to suppress my doubts and accept his explanation.
One thing that raised doubts I couldn’t suppress was a trout stream. Yes, I know trout streams per se carry no biblical weight. The bible never mentions any, and for good reason: the holy land is too warm for them. But hear me out.
That fall on the Ambassador campus Armstrong had an artificial one built, a winding concrete channel with rocks and gravel in the bottom, over which water flowed down from a man-made spring for fifty yards or so into a wide concrete pool. The water was pumped through a pipe back up to the spring to flow down into the pool again in a continuous circuit. The workmen who built the streambed configured one of the bends wrong and water sloshed over onto the lawn, but that didn’t bother me much. The foreman who oversaw construction was the one guilty of error, not the “apostle” who commanded it. After that bend was jackhammered out and reconstructed, the stream was quite pretty and I enjoyed it a great deal. It was stocked with rainbow trout, and many were more than a foot long. I often dreamed of fishing in a real stream like it where the fish were that large and that plentiful.
Its beauty lasted through the short southern California winter. When the weather warmed up, those lovely trout one by one turned belly-up and died. Rainbows, like other trout, are a cold-water species. Even I, a freshman hillbilly from Arkansas, knew that much.
The death of those fish bothered me a lot. It didn’t stem from a mere glitch in executing the plan; it bespoke appalling ignorance in forming it. If Armstrong really did get divine guidance in every decision, why hadn’t god told him to refrigerate the water? On the other hand, if god didn’t actually direct all his decisions, but merely granted him insight to sift and winnow the words of others and cull out nuggets of wisdom, why hadn’t Armstrong read a fisheries book or consulted an expert on aquaculture?
I could find no answers to those questions that supported the proposition that Herbert W. Armstrong was an apostle of god.
Of course I was guilty of gagging on the gnat of an ignorant mistake and swallowing the camel of the deadly sin of greed, but there were extenuating circumstances. The gnat was tiny but raw and scratchy, whereas that camel was well greased with rhetoric and force-fed through an authoritarian funnel.
I remember that trout stream very well, also the fatal error on behalf of the trout. It was a highlight of the campus and very beautiful.
The stream was still there when I was a student, although I believe that there were different types of fish in it in 1966-68. Someone I met years later who had never been in the church told me that he had been a hippie during that time, and liked to visit the Ambassador campus at night while tripping on acid. The lights, the stream, and the girls were part of the attraction.
I had a Eureka moment about HWA’s supposed inspiration and God-given infallibility one Friday night at Bible Study in the AC gymnasium. He read some of the wives the riot act for daring to sell stainless cookware, telling prospective buyers that aluminum broke down in the food. He told them if he knew specifically who was telling this “lie” that he would disfellowship them immediately. Now, anyone who has ever stewed tomatoes in a dull aluminum pan knows that by the time they are done, the pan will be nice and shiny. Just where does the dullish oxide go? You got it, you’re eating it with the tomatoes! Yet here is someone, allegedly an apostle no less, threatening people with disfellowshipment and presumably the Lake of Fire for repeating a scientific truth. I have to say I lost whatever respect I ever had for the man that Friday night. 1972-75 did the rest.
BB
BB,
I remember reading about the aluminum cookware edict some years ago. I remember how I wished I’d known that story years earlier to throw back at an Amway-selling church member who told me about a stainless steel vs aluminum dem he attended!
Although I don’t remember the details, once while researching something in HWA’s Autobiography (PT version) I noticed the time he claimed to have spent studying “health” was longer than his intensive six-month bible study…
Hoss
“I noticed the time he claimed to have spent studying “health” was longer than his intensive six-month bible study…”
Herbie wanted his “junk” in good shape. Typical of these cog ministers. Especially the old coots that marry before a year is up after their first wife dies.