V. GENERATIVITY AND FOWLER’S SIX STAGES

Herbert W. Armstrong, an ambitious Iowa youth endued with remarkable ingenuity, persistence, and salesmanship, overcomes the handicaps of modest circumstances and lack of formal education to achieve success in the advertising world. Reduced to poverty by repeated business disasters, he discovers new meaning for his life through an intensive study of the Bible. He becomes involved in a tiny religious sect, is rebuffed by the sect’s hierarchy and decides to launch his own independent ministry.

In 1934 he begins weekly broadcasts over a low-power station in Oregon. Years of struggle and hardship follow. Then things begin to change. Time is purchased on additional West Coast stations…the East Coast, Europe, the world. The once-local Radio Church of God, soon to blanket the earth with 400 radio and television outlets and a slick magazine circulated free to three million people, is renamed The Worldwide Church of God in 1968. A flourishing college is established on three lovely campuses – two in America and one in England. Its chancellor, a high school dropout, has become an international figure, with access to heads of state and other notables. An unpromising venture begun on a shoestring has evolved into a $56 million per year operation of worldwide scope and influence. 32

Such in brief is Joseph Hopkins’ version of Howard Gardner’s definition of “the story.” To extend Hopkins’ synopsis: Troubled sect erupts in doctrinal crises and charges of immorality culminating in the ouster of heir apparent Garner Ted Armstrong and a two-year legal battle with the state of California from 1978 to 1980. After this, stability returns and Herbert Armstrong is established more securely than ever as sole leader of the WCG which he leads to even greater heights until his death in 1986 (See Appendix One).

On an outward, material level, this is an American success story. However, it is also an important faith story and it is helpful at this stage to apply James Fowler’s six-fold “stages of faith” theory. Not unblinkingly, however. Fowler’s effort to apply structural development theory to faith experiences often confuses the human spirit with the Holy Spirit and underestimates the human battle with the void, the sense of cosmic loneliness. Nevertheless his schema provides a helpful tool. In the preliminary stage of Undifferentiated Faith, for example, analogous to Birth and Infancy in child development, the parallel with the New Birth is obvious. Helpful also is his insight into conversion as a “primal fall into consciousness” where the overwhelming shock of the conversion experience can temporarily overwhelm the ego boundaries. Thus, Herbert Armstrong’s repeated “My life was worth nothing more to me,” “I was willing to give this worthless self to him” is matched by his preliminary stage and undifferentiated dabblings with fringe fundamentalism – Great Pyramid theories, miracle healing clays and a form of Anglo-Israelism.

As Fowler notes, the danger here is “failure of mutuality.” Without primary caregivers and mentors on the scene, the young child dies. In the religious life, the absence of mature spiritual guides is fraught with peril for the new convert. “Either there may emerge an excessive narcissism in which the experience of being ‘central’ continues to dominate and distort mutuality, or experiences of neglect or inconsistencies may lock the infant in patterns of isolation and failed mutuality.” 33 This fits with Herbert Armstrong’s faith development in the late 1920s. Without theologically competent peers or leaders to act as sounding boards it is hard to move to get past Stage 1, the “fantasy-filled, imitative phase in which the [convert] can be powerfully and permanently influenced by examples, moods, actions and stories of the visible faith of primarily related adults.” Armstrong’s interactions with the tiny, sectarian Church of God (Seventh Day) early detoured him from mainstream Christian theology. His chief task became a compulsion to find “the one, true church.” In his sweeping rejection of the mainstream, Armstrong fit into H. Richard Niebuhr’s paradigm of the extreme sectarian, as noted below, a religious figure in titanic struggle with the religious mainstream of “mottled Christianity.”

In Fowler’s Stage 2, Mythic-Literal Faith – shaping a consistent narrative view of the world – is a major task. Fowler’s example here is Hal Lindsay whose Dispensational Premillennialism is a staple of the American religious landscape. Historians have noted how Herbert Armstrong’s view of prophecy as a “road map into the future” was an adaptation of this scheme. 34 Fowler also notes the preoccupation at this stage with perfectionism or “works righteousness.” Herbert Armstrong’s public bias toward Law is well-known and fits cognitive operations at this level. Indeed, Armstrong theology on Old Testament festivals and ordinances almost epitomized Niebuhr’s evaluation of extreme sectarians that in “emphasizing the character of Christianity as a new law for a select community they forget its gospel to all men.” 35 Yet sectarians can move along. Herbert Armstrong did not stand still. His zealous studies and evangelistic zeal tracing to his ad-man days in Chicago propelled him to Fowler’s Stage 3: Synthetic-Conventional Faith. The main trait here, says Fowler, is forming a “personal myth” usually in the context of clashes with “officially sanctioned sources.” Herbert Armstrong’s break with the Stanberry, Missouri headquarters of the Church of God (Seventh Day) in 1931 and the formation of the Radio Church of God in 1933 fits this paradigm.

Stage 4 is Individuative-Reflective Faith. The faith person, says Fowler, is “ready for something new.” It is also a time of “ascendant strength.” Herbert Armstrong by the mid-1930s had already worked out in written booklet form the core ideas that would distinguish his movement—the literal reign of Christ on earth; a penchant for prophecy and date-setting; Anglo-Israelism; devotion to Law, rejection of traditional Christian holidays and a strict Sabbatarianism. These ideas were distinctive of WCG teaching from 1934 to 1967. After Loma’s death in 1967, Herbert Armstrong did add new dimensions to his teaching though few, even among his followers, seemed to notice. He did become more philosophical, more sage. Fowler’s Stage 5 is clumsily articulated – the phrase Conjunctive Faith does not help – yet it can be argued that the need to “reclaim and rework one’s past,” opening up to “the voice of “one’s deeper self” roughly applies to an emotionally devastated Herbert Armstrong after Loma’s death in the 1967-70 period. It was just at that time he found himself stimulated and eventually rearoused by fortuitous contacts with former King Leopold of Belgium, a significant friendship with the State of Israel and joint participation between Hebrew University and Ambassador College on diverse projects in the Middle East. The Oregon pastor and the radio preacher became a world-travelling Sage. This is Fowler’s Stage 6, the period of Universalizing Faith. The writings of Herbert Armstrong in this period reveal a deep, heartfelt grasp of the plight of humanity as a whole, a sentiment not usually associated with sectarian fundamentalists. “I have traveled through a portion of China, and parts of India. Millions there are starving,” he wrote in the Ambassador College (UK) Prospectus for 1971-72. “Two thirds of the people on earth live in such destitution. I thought of the joyous World Tomorrow that is coming, and immediately the question came to mind, how can abundant well-being be brought to these teeming impoverished millions?”

Universalizing Faith means this: “Greatness of commitment and vision often coexists with great blind spots and limitations.” 36 The Sage can be as human as any of us. This is represented by Gandhi’s mistreatment of his wife, Luther’s attacks on the Jews, Martin Luther King’s reckless womanizing, and Herbert Armstrong’s notable temper tantrums (See Appendix Two). Yet it can be argued that he did reach Stage 6 in his own sectarian way. A pearl of great price in Armstrong theology had always been the need for the return of Christ to save us from self-destruction. His later theology (1970-1986) almost completely revolved around the philosophical scheme of life organized around the two principles of Give and Get. It was functionalist, it was simplistic, but it was Armstrong’s essential message in the two and one-half decades left to him of worldwide travel, celebrity interviews and public appearances. His penchant for staying with the story endowed him with one facet of grace, at the very least, the grace of consistency.

So the key question at this stage is: How could a sectarian leader with a host of punishing doctrinal diffusions – sabbatarianism, anti-Trinitarianism, misappropriation of the Elijah passages – how could this rural Oregon pastor have ended up approximating Fowler’s stage 6? For one, a fervently held premillennialism gave him a worldview that helped him transcend his blinkered sectarianism. This man really believed in the need and necessity for Christ’s return (See Appendix Three). For another, there was the transformative authenticity of his conversion experience. To understand this it is necessary to investigate James Loder’s transformational dynamic.

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ENDNOTES

Presented To: Dr. James Loder
For: CN 531 Faith and Human Development
Fuller Theological Seminary
Copyright © 2001, 2004, Neil Earle