Remembering Garner Ted Armstrong

A couple of days ago a long-forgotten memory surfaced—specifically of listening to a radio program in the 1960s, usually while driving home for lunch in Kansas City. It was a rather vivid memory, once it returned. But I could recover neither the name of the preacher nor of his organization; the name of the program, I was sure, had the word “world” in it. I was also sure that I would instantly recognize the name if only I saw it. Google. Now the world of religious radio broadcasting is vast—albeit it is almost buried under Religious TV Mountain that had risen in the decades since. Dozens of web sites later, I gave up. But Brigitte, in about five minutes, sent me a link to a list of television evangelists; I’d skipped that, focused, as I’d been, on radio. Well! Right there, under the As, right on top, was the name I had been looking for: Garner Ted Armstrong (1930-2003). The program was The World Tomorrow. And the organization, founded by Garner Ted’s father, Herbert W., was the Worldwide Church of God.

The World Tomorrow was my first-ever exposure to fundamentalist Christianity. I’d heard such programs briefly before, but never stayed to listen. Garner Ted Armstrong, however, caught my attention by his eloquence, by the power of his rhetorical skills, and the peculiar angle on reality that the Worldwide Church of God offered. Apocalyptic. Hence the program was strongly sprinkled with current world-wide news, the news themselves used as evidence of the prophecy that the elder Herbert W. preached. The world would soon be ending. But this end was being preached with a very high level of sophistication by Garner Ted. Quite wonderful if, for me, only as an illustration of what you could do with biblical material if you were diligent and, well, that word again, sophisticated.

What Garner Ted Armstrong taught me was the power behind a certain kind of firmly held belief—Biblical inerrancy—thus taking it as unquestioned truth that the Bible was literally the word of God. Ours was only to understand it and, then in turn, using only the Bible itself as our resource, to explain all modern knowledge so that it came to harmonize with the literal sense of the Word.

The fact that explanation, of that Word, was necessary—the authenticity of the other claim (It is the Word of God) not really questioned by Christian believers—the question that arose next in my mind was: whose interpretation is to be believed? There is an institutional explanation, held in Catholic doctrine for example, slowly hammered out over a couple of millennia. Garner Ted’s view on evolution sharply disagreed with that of Catholic teaching, for example. One man’s, or a father-son pairing’s, versus that of an institutional collective? Difficulties arise in either case. The collective transmission had begun to bother me long before the 1960s arrived. Garner Ted, therefore, helped me to modify my own views still further. Whatever the inspiration behind the Bible, was doctrinaire exposition of it really necessary? (A Lutheran impulse lurks within me.)

I was, to be sure, quite immune to Garner Ted, but pleased by his stance against modernity—and the joyful pleasure with which he deployed it—absolutely certain, as he was, of his own Biblical righteousness. Much harder sledding was still ahead for me, one who, taking “world” to be much larger—and likely to remain in place much longer—had to discover truth without an unfailing, written guidebook. The 1960s seem very long ago…