David C. Pack

All I got from this booklet is a better understanding of Pack's sect as a nasty, control-driven, authoritarian organization. You may be familiar with the parallels drawn between how fundagelical strains of religion treat their adherents and how habitual abusers treat their victims; this booklet is a crystal clear example of that.

The central question asked is "What is the Unpardonable Sin?" -- i.e. blaspheming the Holy Spirit, supposedly a sin for which no forgiveness can be issued. Pack’s answer is that, as a Christian, a little bit of God’s Spirit is inside you, and as long as you do not go against the Spirit willfully, you have not committed the Unpardonable Sin, and are in a position to be forgiven by God.

That may seem benign enough, but Pack of course is eager to spin it into that particular dystopian-level fascist territory that is Fundagelical Theology, marked by the Red Flags of Abuse.

The answer to the booklet’s central question features a chain of reasoning that gets progressively worse and more abuser-like. It starts by elaborating on what it means to be going against the Spirit willfully. See, as long as you do not go against the Spirit willfully, you have not committed the Unpardonable Sin. You will, of course, sin occasionally, and knowingly and willingly, but as long as you do not do so willfully, you're not doomed, just in spiritual trouble. If you happen to go with the inherently sinful Flesh, if, on occasion you are tempted by your inherently wicked human desires, you're still forgivable -- on the condition that you grovel enough. These are mere battles you lose, but keep your eyes on winning the war -- attaining Salvation. And you have to keep fighting the battles: sin and the devil are all around you, eager to tempt you, quite aside from your inherently sinful Fleshly desires. So life as a Christian is never finished; it’s a constant struggle, and you're never in the clear. "Christianity is an ENDURANCE TEST" (p. 26): You can trip at any time, and then you need Pack's help. Well, God's help through Pack's lense.

So far, so fundagelical. Scare-mongering and a general undermining of victims’ adherents’ self-esteem, with just a soupçon of moving goalposts -- the subjective, easy-to-manipulate distinction between sinning willingly and willfully.

But it gets worse. Having established that even true Christians can never be free from the threat of the unpardonable sin, Pack then goes on to list two ways of committing that Unpardonable Sin:

1. As "a deliberate choice to depart from God" (p. 26). Pack gives two use cases. One is going back to the World (that's christianese for "outside of our sect"), which means you lose "all desire to repent and change" (p.25), that is, you no longer want to continue grovelling as your former sect dictates. Another use case is resentment. Sometimes people who feel wronged will "believe themselves VICTIMS. Many times, this happens when a minister corrects one over issues that do not seem or feel right to the one corrected. Angry rebellion, leading to bitterness, can result." (p.25)
2. By living "the Christian way in a negligent manner" (p. 26) -- that is, less strictly than Pack's sect will want you to.

In other words, "the unpardonable sin involves willful, deliberate, premeditated sin, based on a clear and final decision to commit ANY kind of sin and to remain in it*." (p. 27)

Pack will have you believe that the key attribute there is the willfulness: rebelling like a petulant child against the hard, uncomfortable truth of God's Spirit and its inevitable clashes with the human Flesh. Even rebelling against your minister (i.e. Pack), also makes you “willful” like a child, at least in Pack’s eyes. That’s infantilizing, but not, I think, the worst thing about this. What I think is key is that any sin can be spun into an unpardonable sin. Not just leaving the sect, or refusing to accept Pack’s authority, though those certainly count. No, any sin that is judged to be willful, deliberate and premeditated. All based on Pack’s assessment of your willingness to repent/grovel. The control and authoritarianism on display are indubitably sect-level, and clearly abuser-level.

As a final step in his plan to keep his adherents meek and unrebellious, Pack outlines ways in which not to commit the unpardonable sin. These include, well, to walk in God's truth (whatever that is; Pack will perhaps explain in another booklet); to keep God's word (dependent on Pack’s interpretation -- see Pack's resolution to the saved-by-faith vs saved-by-works contradiction for an example); and to show repentance after sinning and a genuine desire to never give in again.

None of these answers are particularly clear (or clearly explained), nor do they translate into patterns of behaviour that offer a principled way of life. Except one, of course: follow Pack’s sect’s way of being a Christian, and grovel endlessly. Nothing else will help you. This, too, is part and parcel of the abuser’s handbook: keep your victims guessing, approval is based on ever-shifting goalposts, and it is only the abuser who can hand out said approval.

Finally, in addition to the main steps of Pack’s reasoning, the booklet also contains numerous digressions. These deal (among others) with what it means to be Saved (answer: it's an ongoing thing, only fulfilled in an unspecified future); who the True Christians are (answer: most "Christians" aren't; but Pack’s sect is! Stay away from those false Christians!); on what kind of baptism you should get, and how many, and whether that is even relevant (answer: Pack's sect has it right; others don't); and whether committing suicide counts as the unpardonable sin (answer: There is a chance that God might forgive you, but it's safest not to gamble on it.) All of these things need to be “defined” properly, of course: if Pack can get you to accept his way of thinking about things like Salvation and true christians, and about the way he argues his case (literal truth of the Bible; plucking verses from all over the place and pretending they’re about the same thing), you’re likely the kind of person that is receptive to Pack’s claims to authority.

In short, this booklet shows the Restored Church of God’s principles to be ugly fundagelicalism. Parallels with the behaviour of habitual abusers are legion: Pack, as well as that god of his, is in absolute control; you have to grovel before him; he will make you feel fundamentally inadequate; he will consider you a willful child for “rebelling” against him; he will judge you opportunistically by subjective criteria; and and the only way of saving yourself is to isolate yourself from other Christians and to become completely dependent on himself and his sect.


* As an aside, the italics and allcaps are common to the way Pack writes, because this is how he talks: watch any video of his where he talks at a camera explaining stuff, and he will speak intensely and stress individual words all the time, because his message is just THAT important.… (more)

In his position as leader of a fundamentalist splinter church, Pack has written a large number of pamphlets that are aimed at convincing non-believers of the various tenets of his sect: a literal six-day Creation, biblical literalism, an end that is nigh, and so on. Of course, Pack's sect is virtually alone among all the tens of thousands of Christian denominations in proclaiming the true gospel.

I imagine that Pack's conversion efforts are very important for his intellectual integrity, for as he says "I disproved evolution over 45 years ago* and had no choice but to act on this knowledge, if I were to remain an honest seeker of truth." (p. 8, emphasis original). So let's see how Pack tackles the task he has set himself in this pamphlet: showing that the bible is literally true. He adduces the following arguments:

1. Pack refers the reader to other booklets he's penned, especially Does God exist (which I reviewed here), since evidence ("proof") for biblical literal authority "is also inseparable from proof that God exists. In fact, each different proof that the Bible is the Word of God is also its own proof that there IS a God!" (p. 6, emphasis original).
   
2. Pack also assumes his conclusion: "Either the Bible is a book of truth from start to finish — and mankind should tremble before it — or, if evolution is true, the Bible must be judged false." (p.7). It is hard to disagree with Pack if you start from this position...
   
3. Scientists use words like "suggest" and "may" and talk about probability, whereas Pack's god talks in "dogmatic statements of the Bible" (p.7) that "inspire confidence" (ibid.).
   
4. Cause and effect: breaking the law has consequences; ergo, breaking Pack's god's law will also have consequences. This is a "cause and effect relationship that PROVES the inspiration behind His instructions" (p. 9, emphasis original).
   
5. The fact that Pack's breakaway sect claims to teach the real gospel, not a misunderstood and misguided version that the other flavours of Christianity teach
   
6. Prophecy in the bible: The book of Daniel (2ndC BCE) contains a retelling of some events in the centuries of struggles following the breakup of Alexander the Great's empire (4thC BCE), especially as they relate to certain 2ndC BCE crises they triggered in Jerusalem and Temple worship. Pack, who gives no dates for the book of Daniel, claims that it is a sign of divine authorship that it foresaw and accurately described these conflicts between Hellenistic Egypt and the Seleucid empire, as well as the destruction of Temple worship. He also claims that the prophecy then jumps forward in time a few centuries, first to the early Christian churches, then to the present day, with prophecies about the End Times that we are living in now, and that are going to be proven true Any Day Now.

There you have it. These are the reasons why, as Pack says, "[t]his booklet conclusively establishes [the bible's] divine authority" (p.25): non-sequiturs, false equivalences, irrelevant window dressing, misrepresentation of science and particularly evolution, and the skills of wishful thinking and pattern recognition.

Well, if this is what he has to offer, I see no reason to change my opinion of Pack's ideas as fundamentalist claptrap and low-hanging fruit.




* To this, Pack adds "If evolution is disproven, it is the very Bible account that is verified—validated—established—as the true record of how all life on Earth came into being." (p. 8).… (more)

Pack is one of those Christians: he is the leader of a fundamentalist splinter church called the Restored Church of God -- "restored", because their founder claimed to have arrived at true insights about Christianity that most churches since the beginning of the religion have missed. He also publishes pamphlets on how we're currently living in the End Times, on the literal truth of the bible, and on how bible verses show that Anglo-Saxons (i.e. America and Britain) are special receivers of blessings originally intended for Israel. Like I said, one of those.

As such, this pamphlet makes such large claims for itself ("absolute proof that God exists", such that "you will never again doubt the answer to this greatest of questions") that the whole thing gives the impression of desperation. To wit, Pack presents in this pamphlet, as "absolute proof" of the existence of his god, the following:

a) quotes from fellow creationists,
b) quote-mines from Darwin and others,
c) logical fallacies (assuming the conclusion, arguments from ignorance),
d) misrepresentations of science in general and thermodynamics and evolution in particular, and
e) incredulity that (his interpretation of) complexity in nature could have arisen through any other means than the conscious decision of an intentional, divine agent. Same goes for entropy and the regularity of the oscillation of quartz crystals: too complex to not have been created.

Of course, the reliability and the truth of whatever mythologized history and/or imagery the bible contains is a given.

One of those, indeed: Fundamentalist claptrap, relying on biblical literalism and arguments from incredulity. Low-hanging fruit.… (more)