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clear WORD OF GOD. Dissenters may go out of the Church, resorting
to a striving about Greek or Hebrew words (forbidden by God -- II
Tim. 2:14), but GOD'S CHURCH has been and WILL BE FAITHFUL with the
WORD OF GOD (Rev. 3:8). Where proved TRUTH (new to us) appears, we
shall ACCEPT IT. Where error is found, we shall CORRECT IT. But
God's Church also will HOLD FAST that which is proved TRUE.
After the booklet was published, however, word reached me that
some had not submitted their own contributions on the subject. I
was overseas when this report reached me. Immediately I telexed
Pasadena to withhold the new booklet from circulation until their
contributions to the combined study could be considered and
evaluated.
Meanwhile, this matter of the so-called "spiritual widows"
was bringing more and more insistent protest from many of our
ministers. The necessity, as we understood it, of telling an
increasing number of applicants for baptism that they could not
be baptized or received into the Church contrary to GOD'S LAW of
marriage was fast becoming a heavy concern to us all. Many of
these marriages involving a former marriage and divorce were
marriages of some years, with children -- happy marriages. Yet
God's Law seemed plain!
My son, Garner Ted Armstrong, came to me, heavily concerned
-- as we all were -- with this: "In the first century, when the
Apostle Paul wrote, Dad, divorce and remarriage problems were
rampant -- perhaps even worse than today, especially in Rome and
the Greek world. That's an established FACT of history.
Therefore, we know Paul was encountering these problems
continually, just as we are today. WHY, then, do we not read of
these problems and Paul's heartache in having to tell such
happily-married people they have to break up their marriage? Yet
we find no such experiences, either in the Book of Acts, or Romans,
or his two letters to the Corinthians, or others. WHY?"
This triggered a NEW APPROACH in our research. In the urgency
to FINALIZE this study for the definite answer before the worldwide
Ministers' Conference convening May 6th at Pasadena, I appointed a
special committee, including Drs. Herman Hoeh, Charles Dorothy,
Robert Kuhn, and Mr. Raymond McNair, and asked them to make an
intensified study of accounts of Paul's ministry in these areas
of the Gentile world and his letters to those countries.
We were all reminded of how many times I have said that nearly
always error results from an ASSUMED premise carelessly taken for
granted because it seemed too self-evident to even question. WHAT
could we have taken for granted? WHAT was the premise on which
everything was based?
First, we all had to bear in mind that we COULD NOT accept
mere arguments advanced by others outside the Church, resorting to
unclear meanings of Greek or Hebrew words and using human reason
to try to "prove" what they wanted to prove. Those arguments were
found false.
Some of the team researched further into Paul's letters to the