By Colleen Tinker and a Letter to the Editor
Letters to the Editor have always been one of the most popular features in Proclamation! magazine. In fact, the Letters section is the first thing most people read, if the random comments we hear reflect the general readership.
A few weeks ago we received an exceptionally thoughtful letter from a former Adventist reader (whose identity we are protecting at the writer’s request) from the east coast of the USA. It was so interesting, in fact, that we’ve decided to feature it in this week’s email. The writer’s compilation of Adventist cover-ups over the history of the organization reveals a pattern of deception that has shaped Adventism’s existence and reveals its true nature. The letter follows:
I want to thank you for the Spring 2018 Proclamation! The article I found most interesting was the testimony of Nancy Paige [available here]. The abuse, cruelty, and darkness to which Ms. Paige was exposed while an Adventist is truly horrifying. However, the account of how Arthur White helped her grandmother, Carrie Johnson, write her book about D. M. Canright was really informative. The “disappearance” of Canright’s diary is quite interesting, but not too surprising.
Indeed, the “disappearance” of Canright’s diary led me to think about some other coverups in the history of the SDA system. Consider the following information:
- The “shut door” writings of Ellen White, which spanned the years 1844 to 1851, were suppressed by the White Estate until the 1970s—a time of over 120 years. [In fact, Ellen White’s reference to the “shut door” concept in her first vision was edited out of that vision in the 1882 edition of Early Writings. In that version, the Adventists published an introduction claiming that no substantive changes had been made. To read the two versions and to obtain more details, See Dale Ratzlaff, Cultic Doctine, p. 146–149.]
- Most of the 1888 “Righteousness by Faith” writings of Ellen White were suppressed by the White Estate until the mid-1980s, when the late Robert Wieland of the 1888 Message Study Committee persuaded the White Estate to release them.
- The minutes of the 1919 Bible Conference were ordered to be withheld by General Conference President Arthur Daniells for 50 years.
- The original, unedited answers that Anderson, Froom, and Read gave Barnhouse and Martin during the Adventist/Evangelical Conferences of the mid-1950s (which answers were the basis for the book Questions on Doctrine) have never been released to this day.
- The work of the “Problems In Daniel Committee” which met from about 1961 to 1966 has not been released to this day. [In fact, Raymond Cottrell, who served on that committee, said at an Adventist Forum meeting in San Diego after his retirement, that the committee left no minutes and made no report but were instructed to continue to teach the investigative judgment based upon “traditional assumptions”. (See Dale Ratzlaff, Cultic Doctrine of Seventh-day Adventists, p. 198–200.)]
- Adventist leaders have never released information on the exact extent and nature of Adventist-ecumenical connections, not only in this country, but also around the world.
- Adventist leaders have never released information on the exact extent and nature of Adventist-Roman Catholic connections. The only two known examples of this connection were when Elder Beach gave the late Pope Paul VI a Seventh-day Adventist Church medallion in 1977, and when Beach arranged for a Roman Catholic priest to address and “bless” the 1990 General Conference (see below).
I am sure the examples of coverups and suppressions by Seventh-day Adventist leaders which I have listed above are not the only ones which have taken place throughout the history of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Perhaps some other former Adventists could provide some more examples of coverups of information by church leaders. I do believe, however, that these coverups vindicate Ms. Paige’s statement on page 6: “Adventist leadership intentionally covers the truth in order to protect its power, its money, and its reputation.”
It seems to me that these coverups are a clear violation of the ninth commandment against bearing false witness (Ex. 20:16).
Thank you for your ministry.
Sincerely,
A former Adventist
Enclosed in the envelope with the above letter was a photocopy of page 8 from the Adventist Review dated July 13, 1990. The page recounted the proceedings from the ninth business meeting conducted at the fifty-fifth General Conference session on July 10, 1990, at 3:15 PM. This account contained the introduction of T. J. Murphy, the pastor of the Saint Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Indianapolis as well as his prayer for the session. Following is the record of this unprecedented invitation for a Catholic cleric to attend and pray for a business meeting of the General Conference in session:
R. J. KLOOSTERHUIS: Before we begin our afternoon business session I would like to invite B. B Beach to come to the podium and introduce one of our special invitees.
B. B. BEACH: I am pleased to introduce to the assembly this afternoon T. J. Murphy, pastor of Saint Joan of Arc Church in Indianapolis, as an observer and official guest representing the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He is here to give greetings on behalf of the Roman Catholic church [Applause.]
T. J. MURPHY: During this occasion, the fifty-fifth world session of the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventists, I convey to you greetings and prayerful best wishes from the president, secretary, and members of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. I bring you personal greetings from the archbishop of Indianapolis, promising and assuring you that prayers are being offered within our community for the blessed successor this General Conference. It is a deep honor to be present as an observer of these momentous and Spirit-filled proceedings and deliberations. For it is the desire of the Savior Himself that His disciples might all be one so that the world may believe.
I conclude with a prayer from our liturgy, a prayer we can voice from all our hearts. “Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. In Your mercy, keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.”
Knowing Ellen White’s teaching that the Roman Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon, that Sunday-worship is the mark of the beast, and that the apostate Protestant churches that worship on Sunday are following the deception of Rome, knowing that she teaches that the second angel’s message of Revelation 14:8 which says Babylon has “made all the nations drink of the wine of the passion of her immorality” is a statement that Rome and the papacy have made Christians drink the wine of Sunday-worship—knowing these things, as Adventism does, it is startling that they invited a Catholic cleric to open a business meeting of a General Conference session.
Conclusion
The writer of the above Letter to the Editor has pointed out several glaring coverups which Adventism has allowed to disappear from people’s memories. Like the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists have covered up public statements and even revisions of Ellen White’s books to conceal some of her more troublesome statements.
In fact, two other significant cover-ups were the recordings of the private meetings between Walter Rae and the White Estate and the Glacier View meetings in 1980 where Desmond Ford shared his research proving that the investigative judgment cannot be supported from Scripture.
Walter Rae presented his findings in a secret meeting demonstrating that Ellen White plagiarized large portions of The Desire of Ages. The recordings of the meeting were never released although Rae was promised that the church would inform the membership about these facts. When years passed and his research was ignored, Walter Rae finally published his findings in the book The White Lie.
It is a fact that the full extent of Ellen White’s copying has never been admitted.
The recordings and transcripts from the Glacier View meetings were also to be kept secret. Someone leaked a copy of the proceedings, however, and ultimately mimeographed copies of the transcripts were leaked to Adventists and spread throughout the membership. (See Dale Ratzlaff’s Truth Led Me Out, p. 63–68 for more details.)
At the end of the day, however, it is not the internal deceptions and public coverups that show Adventism to be a false religion. Rather, it is their doctrines, their dependence upon an extra-biblical prophet who writes biblical commentary which twists the identity of Jesus, the nature of man, the nature of sin and salvation, and which obscures the penal substitutionary atonement which was completed on the cross. Oh, Adventism will say that Jesus “accomplished” atonement on the cross, as George Knight explains in his annotations in the reprinted “Adventist Classic Library” version of the infamous book Questions on Doctrine published in 1957 to answer Walter Martin’s and Donald Barnhouse’s questions about Adventist theology.
In fact, Knight says this on page XV of the “Introduction to the Annotated Version” of this 2003 reprint published by Andrews University Press:
An atonement completed on the cross was problematic because Adventists tended to refer to the atonement in terms of the anti-typical Day of Atonement, which they believed had begun in 1844. Froom and his colleagues resolved the confusion between the evangelicals’ use of the word “atonement” and the Adventist terminology by speaking of the atonement “accomplished” on the cross and the atonement that was then currently being “applied” in the heavenly sanctuary. Thus Christ had made a complete sacrifice of atonement on the cross and had been working out the fruits of that atonement in His heavenly ministry. The Adventist conferees believed themselves to be safe in making that verbal adjustment because Ellen White had used the word atonement in a similar fashion.
Adventism will knowingly and deliberately deceive in order to appear to hold accepted Christian doctrines. It deliberately deceives because it wants to appear to embrace the biblical gospel in order to protect its image and to cement its power base.
Adventism cannot fix its deceptive nature, however, without utterly renouncing its foundation and it extra-biblical prophet. In reality, the organization itself cannot truly change. Rather, individual Adventists must personally encounter the living Christ and the biblical gospel and believe.
The coverups our letter writer lists are only an example of the reality that is Adventism. Even its members do not really know what this organization does to protect its image and to cement its power base.
Adventists, like every other person, face a crisis of belief: do they want to know truth, or do they prefer to keep their Adventist illusions?
The gospel is free to everyone. The Bible is nearly universally available, and God will never trick us. He calls men and women everywhere to repent and to believe that the Lord Jesus has made propitiation for human sin with His own sinless blood. Truth is in God’s word, and the Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment (Jn. 16:8-11).
“This is the work of God, that you believe in Him who He has sent” (Jn. 6:29).
“Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts” (Heb. 4:7b, Ps. 95:7f).
Jesus, not Adventism, is all that is necessary for salvation. Believe, and pass today from death to life (Jn. 5:24). †
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Thank you and Amen. Blindness and deception are horrible traits Adventist leadership continue to cling to. What is sickening to me is, while they have the veneer of truth, purity and holiness, they are damning not only themselves but also the flock under their watch. That deception I find completely evil. A perfect example of gaining the world and losing the soul. I truly pray that the Adventist blinders will fall off and they repent with godly sorrow not to be repented of.
Yes. The deception is deliberate, and it is horrifying when we really look at it. I pray as well for the Lord to expose and break the spirit of Adventism and to plant its people deeply in His word of truth!