The Church of God

Thursday, Oct. 9/08
I didn’t want to be combative and I didn’t want to argue. I was genuinely interested. I wanted to know more without attracting unwanted attention.

There was a knock on my door on Thursday night, around 8:30 I guess. I thought it was strange, since no one at work actually knows where I live except Jamie and Joy. Maybe it was them. Maybe it was Glenn or Krista. It was a couple of women with a survey. One look at the survey and I knew why they were there and they wouldn’t just be waved away. So I answered questions about what I believed about God, Jesus, and some specific Bible citations. The last question was something like “What do you want to know more about from the Bible” and the answers were even more constricting than the previous questions: the Bible is true, the existence of God, the image of God … Heavenly Mother… so I left it blank. They questioned this.

Them: “Have you studied the Bible?”
Me: “Yes I’ve read it. I was brought up Catholic so I’m familiar with that interpretation and I studied Medieval History and so have studied a lot about Christianity.”
Them: “Then you know about Heavenly Mother.”
Me: “The Mother of God?”
Them: “No, the wife of Jesus.”
Me: “Mary Magdelen?”
Them: “No.”

Wouldn’t you be intrigued? Is this some new feminist mother-goddess cult? God as woman? Genderless divinity? I should have known…I am in Korea after all. I had heard indirect comments about coworkers and friends being accosted by these evangelists. They are called the Church of God. They snagged me with a survey, spoke perfect English. I asked for reading material, they produced a Bible. Then one asked to use my bathroom and then we were sitting on my floor and I was being shown Bible passages. But not against my will. Like I said, I was interested. They were sly and not annoyingly pushy or preachy. They didn’t say until near the end they were Church of God, perhaps knowing their reputation among foreigners. And indeed had they mentioned it first off there’d have been no conversation at all.

So most of their evidence is semantic and metaphoric, and much of it comes from the Old Testament prophecies and from Revelation. They also pick and choose from Paul and stretch some Gospel stuff a little thinly. First off they are Christian. They believe in the Trinity and the death and resurrection, and transubstantiation, the whole bit. They believe that Jesus IS God, not just the Son of God, and this is one of many ways around the mathematical magic trick that is the Trinity. But each member of the Trinity has a female counterpart, a wife. The first citation they showed me was from the end of Revelations, something spoken to John by the seventh angel about “the Lamb and his bride.” They point out Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast, how heaven is like a wedding feast and wonder how can you have a wedding without a bride? They refreshed my memory of the basic structure of social interaction is the nuclear family, mother, father, and children. Without children there is only man and woman, and how can there be a Father without a Mother? They showed my sections of Genesis and other books where pronouns and possessive pronouns referring to God are plural, in the original Hebrew they assured me. This last thing of course is usually explained in terms of the Trinity, but given the other evidence, they must conclude that God was not alone at the time of Creation.

So according to Revelation and the OT prophecies which lay everything out so cleanly and clearly, they believe that after the Second Coming of Christ, the Heavenly Mother—the wife of God or wife of Christ or whatever—will herself be made flesh and come to Earth. This will be at the end of the Seventh Age (the Age of the Holy Spirit which is heralded by the Second Coming), and of course precede the Last Judgment soon to follow. It gets better. Guess what: Jesus has been and left again. In Korea in 1948. We are living in the Age of The Holy Spirit and we didn’t even know it. And within one generation from 1948, they figure about 100 years, Heavenly Mother will come as well. And the Apocalypse. But they didn’t dwell on the Hellfire at all actually, unlike Jehovah’s Witnesses.

They have an interesting symbolic theme regarding Passover which I found very interesting, theologically. The first thing is the blood. If you know the story of Passover you know it’s bloody. They explained that how does a mother who has lost her child early on recognize her own after many years but through a DNA blood test. So how do the Heavenly Mother and Father know their own but through their own blood running through us. (Oh this sounds juicy, please tell me how we’ve got a bloodline and who’s got it!) Through the Eucharist, though they don’t call it that, we can receive God’s blood and be recognized. (Darn, that was no fun!) They only take the body and blood once a year at Passover, which for them is fittingly the anniversary of the Last Supper, what Catholics call Holy Thursday. I think they said it was the thirteenth day of the first month of the Jewish calendar or something like that. There is of course the prophecies of Jesus being the ultimate sacrificial Lamb of all the lambs killed in the Jewish Passover tradition, and indeed Jesus was killed during Passover. Jesus thus made void that practice among others. The Church of God says this is the “new covenant” spoken of at the Last Supper, basically the abolition of Jewish Passover.

One more thing about Passover. The first Passover happened during the Exile in Egypt, where the Jews, God’s Chosen People, were enslaved. Moses said “Let my people go,” Pharaoh said “Hell no,” and God said “I’ma plague your ass” and sent the seven plagues. The last plague was the Angel of Death and the Jews were instructed to smear lamb’s blood over the door of their houses so that the Angel of Death would “pass over” them. Now true to his word for ever more, disciples who have been marked by blood will be spared from plague and disaster. These women told me that over a million people are part of the Church of God and apparently they have never had disaster befall them. Even the ones in America during 9/11 or Hurricaine Katrina, even the ones in the 2004 Tsunami, they said they were not personally harmed. Now don’t get me started about why that’s bullshit.

There are some key ideas of Christianity that they didn’t highlight at all but maybe that’s because they understood me to be Christian. They do not have female ministers but the ministers are allowed to marry. Tell me what kind of church that believes in a Heavenly Mother wouldn’t allow for female ministers? I don’t like the emphasis on and sanctification of the heterosexual nuclear family unit. I find it difficult to believe that this has much of a following outside of Korea mostly because of the Korea-as-the-New-Jerusalem thing, and I guess it doesn’t because like they said, “over a million” people.

They stressed the importance of getting baptized quickly, first thing, and *then* learning about everything. (Ahem) When I pointed out that I had been baptized in the Catholic Church they showed me a passage in the Epistles about some Jews having been baptized by John the Baptist and how that didn’t count anymore after Jesus because they had to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. So I’d have to be baptized, they said, with the knowledge and acceptance of the Heavenly Mother. One of the women in fact said she was baptized three times in three different churches, chuckle chuckle, so it doesn’t matter how many times you are baptized, she said. (Bit of a pattern with her, is there?)

I haven’t given a whole lot of thought to my specific views on religion and spirituality in order to intone a creed for those who ask for a number of years. I like learning about religion, I like talking about it, I like experiencing it (for example attending a Baptist mass, or visiting a contemporary Buddhist temple). But I do actually steer clear of debate, with atheists especially, but also with any faithful. I ask probing questions more to to see if they can give me intelligent answers and satisfy my own curiosity, not for the purpose of their concession to any view I hold. (And I went nowhere near the issue of homosexuality and other such touchy subjects with my guests). But tonight I came to understand and be able to communicate something about how I think about spirituality. For the Church of God the way of salvation is to join the team and get others to join the team. You get on the team through baptism, and stay on the team through the Eucharist and evangelism. Lots of religions and sects and denominations are like that. This is not news. Some are more exclusionary than others. The other thing is about mindless ritual. Well, not mindless: there’s just plain too much mindfulness of it. It’s another way, along with joining teams, to convince yourself that you’re doing some good for yourself without actually doing anything. I don’t believe in life after death and I don’t believe that joining religious teams and having team meetings and performing team rituals is going to ensure any sort of benefit beyond a feeling of social belonging and, in the case of rituals, a sort of calming meditation.

Not revolutionary or particularly revealing to you; momentous for me to be able to begin to consolidate, understand, and be confident in myself. The conversation with the Church of God women was a catalyst I guess. They made offers about getting baptized and learning more (I don’t think they usual speak that long with anyone because they were almost at a loss when they finished preaching) and they invited me to a gathering next week at the church. I won’t go and I won’t answer my door for awhile unless I’m expecting someone. I feel bad for having led them to believe I was interested in becoming part of their church. I didn’t outright lie, I just didn’t show all my colours. My friend and former roommate Matt Sheedy was always talking about the importance of positive dialogue between representatives of different faiths. That was sort of the spirit I invited the women in with, but I failed because it was one sided. I assumed there would be frustration and negative feelings if I opened up about my non-belief and leftist social views. They may have been patient and reasonable if I had. They may also have spent more time on me, trying to plain old convert me to the Light of Christ.