Читать книгу Field Guide to the Wild World of Religion: 2011 Edition - Pamela J.D. Dewey - Страница 42

My interest in failed End Times Prophecy scenarios is not just academic. At one time I was an avid member of a group that was a key player in the End Times Prophecy Movement, the Worldwide Church of God (WCG), led by founder Herbert Armstrong. I have seen first-hand the havoc that can be wrought in the lives of those who get swept up in such obsessions.

When my husband, George, and I first became involved with the WCG in the mid-1960s, three of the main evangelistic booklets distributed by the organization were titled 1975 in Prophecy, The United States and British Commonwealth in Prophecy, and Will Russia Invade America? The 1975 in Prophecy booklet insisted that Christ was going to return to the earth to set up His Millennial Kingdom by 1975, and that prior to this would be a time of terrible trouble called the Great Tribulation. The other booklets declared that the popular prophetic scenario of the time, in which Russia would attack America as part of End Times events, was incorrect. Armstrong was adamant that the final “Beast power” described in Revelation and Daniel would be a united Europe under the leadership of a German leader, and that it would attack and defeat America, taking many Americans to slave labor camps in Europe. Most issues of Armstrong’s monthly Plain Truth magazine included articles that reinforced these scenarios, as well as other articles presenting many other doctrinal and daily living concepts.

We became official members of the church in 1968, and at that point learned of a prophetic detail that was not publicized in the non-member literature we had been receiving. The Church taught that its members were going to be miraculously transported three and a half years before the Second Coming to a Place of Safety, which was strongly speculated to be the site of the ancient abandoned city of Petra in Jordan. (If you have seen the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Petra is the site of the pink buildings carved out of the cliffs at the end of the film.) There the membership would be in special “training” for their roles as leaders in the Millennium, after their physical bodies were changed to spirit bodies at the Return of Christ.

The proofs offered for all these details of prophetic fulfillments were based on reasonings that I now realize to be quite common in the past 200 years. What I was not aware of was that many of the same elements used in Armstrong’s speculations had been used by many other self-styled prophecy experts, with only minor variations, to prove that The End would be in 1844, 1864, 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1925, and many other dates. I was further unaware that even Armstrong himself had dogmatically announced in one of the earliest issues of the Plain Truth, in 1934, that the prophetic time period known as the Day of the Lord would begin in 1936, with the Second Coming to follow shortly thereafter.

I was totally naïve regarding religion when I began studying the literature published by Armstrong’s ministry. I had never read any of the Bible, and had no historical perspective on religious movements which had preceded Armstrong. As many self-proclaimed prophecy experts do, Armstrong would couch his writings in a way that made you feel you were asking questions and getting solid answers from the Bible. In reality, what was actually happening was that he was feeding you the exact questions he wanted you to ponder, so that he could give you the narrow, canned answers he had prepared.

Looking back now, I can see that the proofs offered for these prophetic predictions were utterly speculative—and often utterly fallacious. But looking around at the current crop of prophecy pundits, I see that many, if not most, of them are using the exact same tactics to this day. And they are successful in gathering followings in the same way Armstrong’s teachings drew me into his organization.

Prior to 1972, many members of the Worldwide Church of God made choices about such things as family finances based on the expectation that they would not need family finances after 1972! Many gave large amounts of money to Armstrong’s organization in the belief that they were helping support his evangelistic efforts “in the gun-lap of preaching the Gospel.” Over the years, some even took out loans or mortgaged their homes and sent the money to Church headquarters, at Armstrong’s urging, based on his speculations. When 1972 came and went without the Tribulation starting, and without any hint of fleeing to Petra, many in Armstrong’s group were bewildered. But most were pacified by the excuses given for the prophetic failures, and many continued to sacrifice their own family’s security to support Armstrong’s ministry. Thus we stayed on with the Worldwide Church of God until 1978. At that point a major shake-up in the leadership at the Church headquarters disillusioned us totally, and we left to become part of a split-off group formed by Herbert Armstrong’s son, Garner Ted Armstrong. (For further details about our personal experiences in the WCG, see the Afterword: Personal from the Author.)

In recent years, I have found our experiences in the WCG were quite typical of the experiences of many others who have been swept up by enthusiasm for prophetic scenarios which claim to offer readers, as Armstrong bragged in the title of one of his booklets, The Key to the Book of Revelation. After studying the materials of a wide variety of other self-styled prophetic experts, I am fully convinced that none of them have that Key. They just seem to have the Key to wasting the time, money, energy, and enthusiasm of naïve people. I am not judging the hearts of any specific prophecy pundits—I don’t doubt that many of them believe their own hype. But I do question their methods, their reasoning, and their conclusions—which, in most cases, are just clones of those that have gone before, with only slight adjustments.

In the field of End Times Prophecy speculation, as in many other areas of life, the advice “Let the buyer beware!” is extremely applicable.