By Colleen Tinker
The Adventist Review announced that it would address a major Adventist doctrine every month for the next seven months. Last month, June, it featured the first doctrine: the mark of the beast. This month there is no article (at least not yet) featuring a significant Adventist doctrine, but there is a podcast addressing the second of seven core beliefs of Seventh-day Adventists. The podcast series, sponsored by the Andrews University Study Bible, is called “Digging Deeper”, and this second installment is entitled “The Trinity”. It features excerpts of interviews with four Adventist theologians and evangelists: Ty Gibson, the co-director of the independent ministry Light Bearers and the senior pastor of Storyline Seventh-day Adventist Church in Eugene, Oregon; Ekkhardt Mueller, associate director of the Adventist’s Biblical Research Institute; Ephraim Velasquez, president of the Inter-American Adventist Theological Seminary located in Puerto Rico; and Dennis Kaiser, an assistant professor of church history at Andrews University Theological Seminary and the annotation project editor for the Ellen G. White Estate in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Listening to each man explain and defend the Adventist Trinity, it was apparent that Adventism is fighting back against a persistent and growing movement within Seventh-day Adventism toward Arianism and anti-trinitarianism.
The energy behind the anti-trinitarian movement is the fact that the Adventist pioneers were almost all Arian or semi-Arian and anti-trintarian. Leaders are pushing back because Adventism claims to believe and teach the Trinity. Nevertheless, the view they promote is not the Three-In-One Who shares one substance—the classic Christian Trinity. While none of the four men interviewed ever articulated how the Adventist Trinity is different from the Christian Trinity, their arguments were clearly defending a different “Godhead”.
Because these interviews were somewhat complex, we will divide this review into sections and discuss each person’s comments separately.
Part 1: Ty Gibson and the designated Son
The podcast opened with a soundbite from Ty Gibson: “Jesus IS the Son of God for eternity past in that he was designated for that role. He voluntarily said, “I’ll be the one to go,” and the Father said, “Yes, you’ll be the one to go.” So Jesus is the One of the three who became the Lamb of God, the Son of God, the Firstborn of God.”
The opening statement of the program declared that Jesus was One of Three. Moreover, Gibson actually stated the Adventist belief (which Ellen White taught from the earliest days of Adventism) that Jesus volunteered for the job of becoming incarnate and dying on the cross, and that the Father gave him permission to do so. This understanding of Jesus and His relationship to the Trinity underlies Adventist theology, and it is embedded in the Adventist worldview. To an Adventist mind, the Three of whom Jesus is One are three separate individuals who together are called “God”. (Adventists often teach that these three are like a family bearing the name “God”.) Gibson’s further statements reveal this individual distinctiveness.
Gibson continued building a case for a Trinity using references from both Old and New Testaments, and then the moderator asked, “Some people say if we deny that He’s the literal Son [of God], then that’s the spirit of antichrist. So what do you say to people who say they believe that Jesus was created?”
Gibson said that the general problem between Adventist trinitarians and anti-trinitarians is “proof-text value”. The trinitarians, he said, insist the Bible proves that Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit are “co-eternal”. Others insist that their proof-texts reveal that “Jesus was begotten”.
Gibson clearly disagrees with the Arian understanding, but he creates his counter-argument by emphasizing the understanding of the Three being separate and somehow interchangeable if necessary. He said, “Imagine, going back before the incarnation of Christ, Jesus pre-existed in an eternal union of relational love with the Father and the Holy Spirit in eternity past. According to the New Testament, Jesus was predestined to that salvational role from eternity past. Paul will speak of [the fact] that Jesus was our Savior before the world began, and before we even needed him to be our Savior, He was designated to be the one from among the Godhead who would become incarnate and become our Savior.”
Gibson’s Trinity, however, does not reflect Scripture. While the Bible does say that Jesus was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8), He was not one among equals who was designated to be the Sacrifice. The human understanding of individuals united around a common name and purpose is not a description of the Trinity.
What about modalism?
The moderator next brought up the idea of “Oneness”, a belief that there is one God but three different “modes or expressions of one God”. Gibson’s response to this subject was interesting and subtle.
First he identified this view as modalism and defined it like this: “One solitary being who projects three different modes of expression. [It’s] rigid monotheism. In that view we’re encountering three projections but one being. There are branches of christianity that hold to that view.”
Next came one of Gibson’s revealing statements: “As Seventh-day Adventists [along with] other branches of Protestant Christianity, we don’t believe that there is one solitary self projecting three images. We believe there are three actual persons of the godhead that have an actual relationship with one another.”
Then Gibson launched into what was revealed to be the standard argument from all four theologians defending the “three actual person” model of the Trinity:
We don’t believe there is one God with three images; we believe there are three beings who are one God. The crucial difference is that in the modalism view, it’s impossible to conceive of love existing. In the covenantal view of the Trinity, love is conceivable because love by its very nature—love is a dynamic.
So a solitary person with no other beings in existence cannot experience love because love by its definition is other-centeredness. It’s reciprocal. It’s a relationship. One solitary being cannot experience any love. In our view of the Trinity—the Seventh-day Adventist view and the view held by other Protestant Christians, not all but many—the Father is a personal being, the Son is a personal being, the Holy Spirit its a personal being. They can converse; they love one another; they are friends; they have fellowship; they enjoy one another’s company, and they all—each of the three—are participating in different ways in the salvation of the human race. It’s an actual relationship of love.”
Gibson’s flowery description of the love within the Trinity lacked any sense of the holiness and transcendence of God. He made no suggestion of God’s incommunicable attributes of omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence nor of his attributes of wrath, mercy, grace, justice, and holiness. Rather, Gibson fought against “modalism” but portrayed a remarkably human-ish god defined by interpersonal rapport. He described a tritheism.
Even worse was his subtle but pointed suggestion (never actually stated) that the classic Christian understanding of God as one Being expressed in three persons was a form of modalism. For example, he claimed that the Adventist understanding of the Trinity was “held by other Protestant Christians, not all but many.” Furthermore, Gibson claimed that “there are branches of Christianity that hold to [the modalist, or ‘Oneness’] view.”
First, it is not true that “Oneness”, or modalism, is espoused by many Protestant Christians. Modalism (renamed “oneness” to avoid the stigma of heresy) was condemned as a heresy around 262 AD, and Protestant Christians are not modalists. Today “Oneness” adherents are mainly Oneness Pentecostals, Apostolic or Jesus’ Name Pentecostalism, and the United Pentecostal Church International. In fact, one of the first things apologists look at to determine whether or not a group is a candidate for the label “cult” or “new religion” is if it has an unbiblical doctrine of Jesus. Oneness churches are not considered Protestant churches but heretical sects.
Second, at the same time Gibson distanced Adventism from modalism, he subtly suggested modalism was common within Protestant Christianity. As we have seen, this claim is untrue. Since he never discussed the true Christian understanding of the Trinity, however, he has planted a strong suggestion in his listeners that the classic Christian view is a form of modalism.
Christianity holds to the belief that the Trinity is One Being expressed in three persons who are one in substance, purpose, and will. The Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM) website says this: “God is a trinity of persons consisting of one substance and one essence. God is numerically one. Yet, within the single divine essence are three individual subsisters that we call persons.”
Gibson, it seems, may be including this One Being sharing one essence but having three persons in his category of “modalism”. He is very clear that the Adventist “Trinity” is three beings who work together, play together, and love together; it is three separate beings who share an identity. In fact, this Adventist “Trinity” is the opposite of the Christian Trinity. Gibson, however, suggests that Adventism and Protestants hold the same view in common, while three expressions of One Being is modalism.
Ellen White’s Trinity
Finally, Gibson spent some time attempting to reconstruct Adventist trinitarian history. Co-founder James White had been an adamant anti-trintarian, yet in 1876, Gibson said, James said that Seventh-day Adventists “affirmed the full divinity of Christ. Therefore we are trinitarians in that sense.” He then said that Ellen White gradually began to endorse the Trinity, becoming increasingly clear during the 1880s–1890s and culminating in her “definitive work on the subject”, the Desire of Ages. (It must be noted that the Desire of Ages has been proven to have been largely plagiarized.)
Gibson did not mention, however, that as late as 1905 Ellen White wrote of the Trinity: “There are three living persons of the heavenly trio; in the name of these three great powers—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—those who receive Christ by living faith are baptized, and these powers will cooperate with the obedient subjects of heaven in their efforts to live the new life in Christ” (EGW, Evangelism, p. 615, par 1, 1905).
Again in 1906 Ellen White referred to “the three great Worthies of heaven” (EGW, Sermons and Talks, Vol. 1, 10-20-06, pp. 363-367).
Part 2: Ekkehardt Mueller and the different Trinity
After Gibson’s interview, the podcast featured Ekkehardt Mueller, the associate director of the Adventist Biblical Research Center. The moderator asked Mueller why the issue of the Trinity has become such a big issue within the Adventist organization today.
Mueller replied that it has always been an issue (an admission that casts doubt on the identity of Adventism as “Christian”), but he posited three possible reasons it has become a front burner issue.
“First,” Mueller said clearly, “our [Adventist] understanding of ‘Trinity’ is not completely the same as other churches.” At least Mueller was honest enough to admit this fact. Gibson attempted to normalize the Adventist belief, but Mueller knows and stated the truth.
“Second,” he continued, “there may be the feeling that we are so different from other churches that we need to be different in the Trinity.”
Then Mueller stated that third, “there is the issue of our pioneers. They had problems in the beginning with questions of Trinity…it was an open question…I think the first generation of Christians was faced with the question: there is one God, and now there is Jesus. What do we do with that?”
Mueller strongly urged that people with Trinity questions be allowed to question. Adventists should be willing dialogue with questioners unless they are creating disunity and splitting the church apart, he advised.
Interestingly, his position, like that of the other theologians questioned, is far more open to discussion of Arian ideas and trinitarian questioning than Christians’ positions would be. The fact that Adventism does not hold to the classic Christian Trinity places them outside the parameters of Christian orthodoxy and leaves them without an established foundation of biblical truth from which to assess and guide members’ beliefs.
Finally, Mueller affirmed the same reasoning Gibson used to endorse the Adventist idea of “Trinity”: God is love. “If there were no Godhead,” he reasoned, “how could God be love? I mean, if there were no Trinity and there were only God the Father, how could He love if there is no counterpart? I think this is one of the strong arguments in favor of the Trinity apart from all the others.”
Certainly the argument that there must be different persons for God to be identified as “love” is a compelling argument. However, this argument does not describe the biblical understanding of “Trinity” that includes all of God’s eternal power and divine nature, His being One and the Trinity sharing one substance.
Once again, Mueller confirms the Adventist commitment to seeing three separate beings comprising the Trinity. They want a “loving” God, but they do not consider how justice, wrath, mercy, grace, omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience all help define the love of our triune God.
Part 3: Ephraim Velasquez: God is not a Triad
Ephraim Velasquez, the president of the Inter-American Theological Seminary in Puerto Rico, was the third man interviewed in this podcast. Velasquez developed his career in near Eastern archaeology, and he compared the Trinity to the pagan “triads” of ancient near Eastern cultures.
The moderator asked if the concept of a Trinity occurred in other ancient religions he studied.
“Not really,” Velasquez replied. “We have triads [in near Eastern religions] but not Trinity.” The difference between the two, he said, is that “triads describe three different gods. ‘Trinity’ speak of one God.”
He acknowledged that even in the triad systems, there are often “godheads”. “The male [of the triad] will be the one who begets the others. He has headship over the others.” The Roman god Jupiter, for example was the head of the triad including Juno and Minerva.
Velasquez acknowledged that, although triads were common in ancient near-Eastern religions, there were no examples of a Trinity among them.
In short, “the concept of the Trinity in the New Testament is unique and is the contribution of the Christian religion.”
While Velasquez demonstrated some of the differences between pagan triads and the Christian idea of Trinity, he betrayed his Adventist understanding in his last quotation: “the God of the Bible presents ideal relationships between them and us creatures.” To be sure, there are three Persons within the Trinity, but they cannot be rightly defined as “them” without eclipsing the fact that there is One God, and the three persons share one substance. This sentence reveals that Velasquez also holds to the tritheistic understanding of the Adventist Trinity.
Part 4: Dennis Kaiser and Confusion about Trinity and the Holy Spirit
The final interview featured in this podcast was with Dennis Kaiser, assistant professor of church history at Andrews University. The interviewer asked him if the doctrine of the Trinity “is still relevant for people waiting for Jesus to come.”
Kaiser affirmed that one’s view of the Trinity is “very relevant,” and then admitted that he used to be anti-trinitarian. He explained that he finally realized that “in order to express unselfish love, I need at least one other person to show this love to.”
He continue by explaining what Gibson and Mueller had also explained: that in order for God to be love, there had to be more than one person.
“No divine person draws attention to Himself but always points to the other one,” he said. “[It’s a] reciprocal relationship…So that we have three persons who are utterly unselfish in their relationship to one another so that they are truly one.” He goes on to say that the fruit of the Spirit can be summarized as a statement of other-oriented love.
Kaiser then reveals his Adventist perspective:
It’s interesting that when Ellen White talks about the end, she says that as Christians, as Adventists, we have the task to proclaim the gospel in the whole world, and the end will come (Mt. 24:14). And she says there’s only one thing that can accelerate the gospel commission like nothing else can do it, and that’s when the fruit of the Spirit is manifested in the life of the believers. [The success of the gospel preaching at Pentecost], of course, is the result of the Holy Spirit’s work, but it also echoes the results we saw that at Pentecost…when the believers, when the disciples decided, “We no longer want to control the other ones, but we want to serve the other ones…”
Now that [kind of relationship] is not something that we can produce; we need the Holy Spirit for that.
In that sense, a belief of God as it is presented in the biblical understanding of the Trinity—because there are different understandings, and I don’t agree necessarily with other views and models of the Trinity—but if we have a biblical understanding of the Trinity, I think it will help us become prepared for the work that we have to do in this world.
Kaiser’s somewhat confusing words reveal his biases. First, he grounds his Trinity/Holy Spirit conclusions on Ellen White’s words.
Second, he interprets the Acts 2 story of the Day of Pentecost and puts words into the apostles’ mouths that Scripture does not speak. In the quotation above, Kaiser said that the amazing conversions when Peter preached that day were partly the result of the Holy Spirit’s work, and partly the result of the disciples deciding, “We no longer want to control the other ones, but we want to serve the other ones.”
This declaration is pure assumption. Scripture nowhere suggests that the disciples had been controlling one another nor that they decided NOT to control but to serve one another. This sentence is entirely speculation and does not arise out of the biblical text. Its only purpose is to lay the groundwork for Kaiser’s conclusions that the Trinity models interpersonal love and mutual submission, and that people can reflect the Trinity’s model in order to fulfill their gospel commission. He never hints that any of this gospel success depends upon believing in the Lord Jesus and His shed blood for sin, and he does not connect modeling the Trinity with the effects of being born again and indwelled by the Holy Spirit.
Third, Kaiser, as did Mueller, revealed that his Adventist understanding of the Trinity is not like others. He argues that a “biblical understanding of the Trinity” is necessary in order to do the work of proclaiming the gospel—the Adventist gospel—but he admits that what he calls a “biblical understanding” is different from “other views and models of the Trinity”. In other words, Kaiser acknowledges that the Adventist “Trinity” is not the same as the Trinity most Christians worship.
Kaiser also believes that those who are anti-trinitarian should be patiently taught. After all, they have historical reasons for their concerns.
Kasier said, “When [Adventists who don’t believe in the Trinity] discover that the early Adventist pioneers—and we believe God led them—that they didn’t believe…they say, ‘How could they be wrong on such a fundamental issues as the Trinity?’ So they reject the Trinity as well. I think we should encourage them to continue to study.”
Kaiser says he is compiling “a collection of original documents of periodical articles, of letters, of correspondence from different parts of the world within Adventism where people can actually read these documents for themselves. Reading these documents for themselves [will] show them how people thought, what people understood. For example, [they will read] Ellen White’s trinitarian statements. People grew in their understanding of Jesus, of the Holy Spirit, of their relationship, or of these three divine persons. People studied and grew in their understandings during Ellen White’s life, decades before she died. And it happened under her auspices.”
Again Kaiser reveals his Adventist view: the Trinity is “three divine persons”, and the founding Arianism of the Adventist pioneers is explained away by saying they “grew in their understanding”. Never does he—nor do other Adventist spokespeople—ask themselves why God’s prophetic mouthpiece (EGW) and His prophetic last-day church was born into heresy. If those Adventist founders were really Christians, if God truly spoke to them and led them, why did they not receive the validation of the biblical Trinity?
Kaiser concludes with three steps to help anti-trinitarian Adventists to change their views. First, he says, Adventists need to help them “create a fascination and excitement with Scripture.” They need to begin to see the “picture of God” that emerges from Scripture, and they need to see “how they relate to one another.”
Second, he believes, these questioning Adventists need to develop “an appreciation, I think, for the Adventist pioneers.” God didn’t lead to to “everything in the beginning…they continued to study, and they grew in their understanding.”
In fact, those early Adventists were drawn away from the Protestant churches. They started with the truth, but they left it for Adventism. God didn’t raise up an anti-trinitarian organization as the prophetic fulfillment of His end-time promises.
Third, Kaiser says, they need to have “an appreciation for the writings of Ellen White.”
Part 5: Summary
All four of the scholars on this podcast confirmed that Adventism believes in a different Trinity from Christianity. While all of them were guarded, never explicitly explaining the differences between their own beliefs and those of Christianity, they did reveal that they disagreed with Christian tradition regarding the triune nature of God.
While acknowledging that the organization has a crisis within its ranks of people moving toward anti-trinitarianism, they never truly acknowledge that they believe not in a Trinity but in a tritheism. In fact, their internal crisis of anti-trinitarianism is a logical outgrowth of the fact that Adventism’s founders were almost all anti-trinitarian, and Adventist doctrines were developed while those men and their prophetess held anti-trinitarian beliefs.
Further, these interviews confirmed that within Adventism, Bible study is not the bottom line for understanding the nature of God. Adventists must also read Ellen White and develop an appreciation for her writings.
In 2006 the Journal of the Adventist Theological Society published an article by Jerry Moon in its Spring issue. Jerry Moon is the chairman of the church history department at the Andrews University Theological Seminary in Berrien Springs, Michigan. His article was entitled, “The Quest for a Biblical Trinity: Ellen White’s ‘Heavenly Trio’ Compared to the Traditional Doctrine”. In his 20-page document Moon discusses the history of trinitarianism in Adventism and concludes that Adventism does believe in a different Trinity from that of Christianity.
Ellen White’s “Heavenly Trio”, the “Three Worthies of Heaven”, are the correct and biblical Trinity, he asserts.
In essence, Adventist scholarship agrees: their version of the Trinity is not Christianity’s Trinity. Instead, although they attempt to use Christian words and arguments to camouflage it, they believe in a tritheism of distinct beings. Adventists will not affirm that the three Persons of the Trinity share substance. They are distinct.
In fact, Adventism cannot accept the Christian Trinity for two reasons. First and foundational, if they embraced the biblical One God with three Persons, they would lose Ellen White’s theological authority. She is the one who endorsed and taught that the Trinity was three distinct beings.
Second, Adventism cannot have a Trinity sharing One Substance because that view would alter its entire great controversy framework. For God to be One Substance, they would lose their pre-history story of Jesus volunteering to be the one to go to earth. They would lose their story of Lucifer being jealous because God chose Jesus to be exalted to the position of His Son.
Moreover, they would lose their central understanding of Jesus being our example of how to keep the law and overcome sin. Further, if Jesus truly shares substance with the Father and the Spirit, then Jesus would still be omnipresent even though He has a glorified human body, but Adventism says he is not. If Jesus shares substance with the Father and the Spirit, then He did come with a spiritual advantage when He came to earth. Adventism says He did not have any advantage over us.
If Jesus shares substance with the Father, then He could not have failed in His mission, yet Adventism says he could have, and furthermore they say God risked the existence of the Trinity by sending Jesus. This Adventist understanding would not be possible if they believed in the biblical teaching of the Trinity.
Adventism is desperately trying to hold its membership together around their unique definition of trinitarianism. They face a battle that can never be resolved, however; Adventism was birthed in anti-trinitarianism, and its doctrines were founded on a different trinity.
Even though they have illegitimately appropriated the word “Trinity” to describe their view of God, they actually believe and teach a different god. Adventism has a different, fallible Jesus, and they have doctrines that fall apart when one learns the eternal, unchanging, holy nature of the true God.
In spite of their attempts to sound like mainstream Protestant Christians, Adventism by definition is not Christian because its god is not the God of Scripture. It’s “plan of salvation” is not the biblical gospel. Because their religion is built on this flawed tritheistic foundation, they will always have internal struggles over this doctrine, and they will never be able to teach the truth about the nature of man or of the nature of God.
Christianity exists only on the rock of our unchanging triune God—our Father, His Son, and the Holy Spirit—who share one substance and who rescued us from ourselves and who save us through Jesus’ blood of the eternal covenant (Heb. 13:20).
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4–5).
Sources:
- Digging Deeper: “The Trinity” (July 2018), podcast.
- Slick, Matt, “What Is the Trinity?”, 11/24/08 Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry.
- Theopedia, “Modalism”
- “What churches identify themselves as Modalist?” Christianity.
- Tinker, Colleen, “Discovering the Adventist Jesus”, Proclamation!, March/April, 2007, p. 13.
- Moon, Jerry, “The Quest for a Biblical Trinity: Ellen white’s ‘Heavenly Trio’ Compared to the Traditional Doctrine”, Journal of the Adventist Theological Society, 17/1 (Spring 2006): 140–20, 2006.
For further reading:
- Adventism’s Fundamental Belief #2—Trinity or Tritheism
- Adventism’s Fundamental Belief #3—The Father: Spirit or Body
- Adventism’s Fundamental Belief #4—The Son: Seated or Judging
- Adventism’s Fundamental Belief #5—The Holy Spirit: Person or Force
- What is Seventh-day Adventism?
- Jeremy Graham’s website with excellent research on the Adventist Trinity
- April 27–May 3, 2024 - April 25, 2024
- We Got Mail - April 25, 2024
- April 20–26, 2024 - April 18, 2024
I am somewhat encouraged to see SDA leaders, Mueller in particular here, being more up front about the fact that their concept of a “trinity” or “godhead” differs from the Christian doctrine of a Trinitarian God. As a lifelong SDA, I was very adept at being somewhat evasive on these issues when talking to outsiders. I certainly was not alone in my evasiveness as it is a cultural characteristic, a defensive reflex.
I am continually dumb founded when SDA leaders will tell me that Adventism doesn’t really teach the things I was taught throughout Adventist gradeschool, high school, undergrad and graduate schools. Typically they will only back down in their denials after I show them official SDA literature or text books….or in one case the deniers own words in his own published books!
I believe we could have much more productive conversations with SDAs if both sides were candid about what they truly believe and teach and where there are differences. Then, and only then, could we have meaningful conversations about the very real differences between Adventism and orthodox Christianity and which belief system is better supported by the biblical evidence.
You are so right, Chris! And that’s an amazing anecdote…showing an SDA leader his own words in print to “prove” that he’s not being honest in his claims.