Free Raising the Ruins by Gerald Flurry Page A

Armstrong’s successor more bluntly, saying he “did not speak well and I didn’t realize how little he understood the doctrines.” 25
    In light of Tkach’s sketchy educational background, it’s astonishing how often Tkach Jr. and Feazell have found occasion to ridicule Mr. Armstrong’s lack of scholarship. But if Mr. Armstrong was uneducated, where would that leave Joseph Tkach?
    The Real Church Historian
    In a 2002 deposition, we pointed Tkach Jr. to the statement about Mr. Armstrong’s lack of seminary training and disciplined study of church history and then asked, “Could the same thing be said of your father?” 26 That question caught the younger Tkach completely off guard.
    “No,” he stammered, “not as precisely as that, no.” 27 According to Tkach, his father spent more time studying church history than Mr. Armstrong. He later said that Mr. Armstrong “read mostly on philosophy,” 28 as if Joe Jr., who was born the same year Mr. Armstrong turned 59, knows everything the founder of the church read . When he spoke and wrote, Mr. Armstrong did, at times, refer to the written works that had made an impression on him. But how Tkach Jr. took these many comments to mean he read mostly philosophy, I’ll never know.
    In his Autobiography, Mr. Armstrong discussed his earliest plunge into the study of church history. His wife had challenged him to prove the biblical truth on the question of the Sabbath. In response to her challenge, he “spent a solid six months of virtual night-and-day, seven-day-a-week study and research” trying to prove that Sunday was God’s day of worship. “I even studied Greek sufficiently to run down every possible questionable text in the original Greek.” 29 He used Robertson’s Grammar of the Greek New Testament . He also relied upon a number of other commentaries and Greek and Hebrew lexicons. He delved into several encyclopedias—Britannica, Americana, as well as the Jewish and Catholic encyclopedias.
    “I read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, especially his chapter 15 dealing with the religious history of the first four hundred years after Christ,” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “I left no stone unturned.” 30
    From that alone, you get the impression he read quite a lot more than just philosophy.
    In Mystery of the Ages , Mr. Armstrong wrote, “Scholars and church historians recognize that events in the early Christian Church between a.d. 50 and 150 can only be seen in vague outline—as if obscured by a thick mist.” 31 To support his conclusions, Mr. Armstrong relied upon the noted English scholar Samuel G. Green in his Handbook of Church History. He quoted from William Fitzgerald’s Lectures on Ecclesiastical History, William McGlothlin’s The Course of Christian History and Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church.
    In his booklets The Plain Truth About Easter and The Plain Truth About Christmas, Mr. Armstrong relied on Alexander Hislop’s The Two Babylons.
    Mr. Armstrong’s study of church history is also reflected in the many writings he produced on the subject. In Mystery of the Ages , his longest chapter by far was titled “Mystery of the Church.” He also wrote an eight-part Plain Truth series in 1979 on the “Proofs of God’s True Church” and a 1984 booklet, Where Is the True Church? Included among his more than 1,500 radio broadcasts is an eight-part series on “The True Church.”
    Add to that the comprehensive works of Mr. Armstrong’s students: Dr. Hoeh’s booklet A True History of the True Church and article “Amazing 2,000-Year History of the Church of God,” Dr. C. Paul Meredith’s book on the development of false Christianity, Satan’s Great Deception, and Ron Kelly’s thesis, “History of the Church of God.”
    Tkach Jr. boasted that his dad “read books” about church history, some of which weren’t even published until after Mr. Armstrong died. Among the works Tkach Jr. cited were those of Methodist minister