The Formation of Sects and the “Anxiety of Influence” : A Case Study of the World Mission Society Church of God and Its Offshoots

Richard Niebuhr, in his seminal church-sect theory, conceptualized religious groups along a continuum between “church” and “sect.” According to this view, churches tend to affirm and integrate with broader society, whereas sects seek a purer religious experience and withdraw from social entanglements. However, such a binary model does not sufficiently account for the complex and intentional strategies that sects often employ―strategies marked by both succession and rupture in relation to the parent body. The World Mission Society Church of God (WMSCOG), which broke away from the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1964 and grew around the charismatic figure Ahn Sahng-hong in Busan, exemplifies such a case. After Ahn’s death in 1985, WMSCOG elevated six of his writings to the status of “books of truth”(眞理冊子), treating them as canonical religious texts. Despite Ahn’s prolific authorship―he left behind approximately 28 known texts―WMSCOG excluded works that suggest theological continuity with Seventh-day Adventism, reveal doctrinal development, or relate to contentious issues raised by schismatic groups. Notably, rival offshoots that emerged after Ahn’s death present their own competing “books of truth” and assert their own claims to orthodoxy. This study examines whether the fragmentation of WMSCOG can be understood not only through sociological typologies but also through psychological frameworks. Drawing on literary and religious critic Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, this paper applies Bloom’s six “revisionary ratios” as a methodological lens to explore how WMSCOG’s doctrinal and textual strategies―such as denial, misreading, reduction, and departure―function as psychological defenses. These strategies reveal both a continuity with and rupture from their Seventh-day Adventist origins and among internal schisms. Due to space limitations, the scope of this paper focuses specifically on the doctrinal modifications centered on the “books of truth” and the rhetorical and theological tactics employed by WMSCOG and its offshoots.