This weekend we received two emails from different Christian women who are dating committed Adventist men. They had gone online looking for information and help, and they appealed to us as former Adventists for advice. One of the women is dating an Adventist pastor’s son who has been involved in boards and directorships, and the other is dating a fifth-generation Adventist who doesn’t want to leave his religion.
Because the issue of Adventists dating Christians is a recurring concern, we will share one of these two letters this week along with our answer to her. In short, we never recommend that Christians marry Adventists thinking that they can bring the Adventist to out of his or her religion. Adventism and Christianity are not two different expression of the same thing; they are opposing worldviews.
On the other hand, if an Adventist learns the true gospel and trusts Jesus and leaves the organization but his or her spouse remains Adventist, we never recommend leaving the marriage. In such cases our position is that of Paul in 1 Corinthians 8:12–16: stay with the unbelieving spouse unless the unbeliever desires to leave. “For how do you know, O wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, O husband whether you will save your wife?” (v. 16).
The believing spouse can pray to love the other for God, and the unbelieving spouse, by staying, chooses to be in the presence of one born of God and indwelt by His Spirit.
Nevertheless, Christians need to understand that Adventism is not Christianity. They need to understand that the conflicts they experience with their Adventist loved ones are the fruit of opposing worldviews.
Below we share two letters: the first from a Christian asking for help, and the second is our response. The first has been edited slightly to protect identities.
Dear Former Adventists,
I am a 25-year-old professional working at a university. I am Christian who believes firmly that Christ is my one and only Savior. I want to take a moment to thank you for your website and all of the information and resources provided there.
I am contacting you because I am in a committed relationship with a God-loving 27-year-old professional man who is Adventist. It breaks my heart to read the testimonies on your website and to know the bondage that he and others experience, and although my boyfriend has not decided to leave the Adventist Church, my spirit senses his confusion and I am really concerned for his spiritual journey.
Now, as our relationship gets serious, he has talked to multiple Adventist pastors, and they do not approve of our relationship nor of the idea of us getting married. Although I agree that we must be in the same denomination to join our lives, he is very unsure about where to take this relationship because we are now adults, are almost at our one-year anniversary of dating, and the thought of marriage arises as we become stable in our jobs.
He says he feels he is to stay at the Adventist Church and that he has a mission there. So we cannot come to an agreement about where to go. He wants to stay at the Adventist Church, and I want to continue at my evangelical church.
I have shared with him some research on Adventism and EGW’s teachings and how they do not line up with Biblical truth, but I feel he is in bondage and doesn’t want to see how that information can be true. He cannot leave.
I have not forced or obligated him to stop attending because I have faith God will reveal Himself perhaps even while he is in Adventism and open his eyes, if this is His will.
In conclusion, I’d like to know if you could help 1) in prayer and 2) by suggesting what approach to take to help Him see that he is being led astray and that God’s wish is for him to be free.
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond!
Our Answer
Dear___________,
Thank you for writing. You are in a very difficult position, but the Lord is giving you the discernment to realize that Adventism is not merely a type of Christianity.
I understand that your friend is a “God-loving” man. I was that sort of Adventist as well. I loved being an Adventist, and I wanted to serve God. Here is the unpleasant truth, though: Adventism is not Christian. It is a deceptive religion that mimics Christianity, but it has a different gospel, a different Jesus, an unbiblical view of man, an incomplete atonement, and a scapegoat they identify as Satan who ultimately bears the punishment for the sins of the saved. It also has a false prophet and a belief that the seventh-day Sabbath is the mark of those who are saved.
Adventism grew out of the same mid-19th century milieu that spawned the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons. In fact, the Jehovah’s Witnesses claim some of the same forebears—called the “second Adventists”—that the Seventh-day Adventists claim. They also share some doctrines, such as their so-called “soul sleep” that actually is the belief in annihilation and that people cease to exist at death, dying like animals. They also share the belief that Jesus is Michael the Archangel.
Even more, the unique Adventist belief in “pre-history”, that God exalted Jesus to the position of His Son at some time in the distant past before creation, that Lucifer became jealous, believing that he and not Jesus should have received the honor—this belief is startlingly smiler to the Mormon doctrines of pre-history.
Also interesting is the fact that, like the Mormons, Adventists have a prophet (Ellen G. White) whose visions established the religion’s worldview and doctrines. Also interesting is the fact that Mormon prophet Joseph Smith was murdered in June of 1844; Ellen White received her first vision late in the year 1844.
Adventism grew out of the Restoration Movement that believed important truths had been lost from the church, but that this movement would restore them. In fact, two of the founders, James White (the prophetess’s husband) and Joseph Bates were originally from the Christian Connexion, and they, like their religion, were openly anti-trinitarian. In fact, almost all (if not all) of the founders were anti-trinitarian and Arian or semi-Arian. They believed the Trinity was a “fiction” bequeathed by the Catholic church, as James White wrote. They believed Jesus had a time of origin from the Father, and they believed the Holy Spirit was a force that emanated from God.
The Arian, anti-trinitarian beliefs of the religion’s foundation still color the organization’s beliefs about God to this day. Although they have adopted a “trinitarian” statement of belief, they do not believe the classic Christian trinity is correct. The Adventist trinity does not share “substance”. In other words, their trinity is often described as a family of three. They are three distinct beings who share purpose and power and will, but they do not share substance. They still believe that Ellen White’s later explanation of the Trinity as being “the Three Worthies of Heaven” and “The Heavenly Trio” is the correct view, but they hide this internal belief from the public. In essence, the Adventist trinity is a tritheism of three separate beings rather than a Trinity who is one God expressed in three persons.
For example, Adventists believe that Jesus is no longer omnipresent because He has a body. Therefore, according to Ellen White’s writings, God sent the Holy Spirit to be omnipresent because Jesus could no longer be everywhere. In removing the attribute of omnipresence from Jesus, however, they remove His identity as God. Omnipresence is an attribute of God; if omnipresence is removed, what remains is NOT God.
Furthermore, God is spirit, as Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:24. He further said that those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth. Adventists, however, believe that God the Father possesses some sort of physical body, that their being in His image reflects His physical characteristics. Ellen White, in fact, wrote that God had a form like His Son’s. This physicalism leads to heresy at every level.
Implications of Adventism’s physicalism
The Adventist view of man is that he is a physical being with no “spirit” except breath. They say it is man’s breath that returns to God, not an immaterial identity that knows the Lord and remains with Him when the body dies. The resurrection, to an Adventist, is merely a re-creation of the original person: God will make a new body and essentially “download” the memory of the dead person from God’s mind and bring the new body to life. In other words, the resurrected person is not actually the same person that died but rather a recreation of that person. Thus, from the time of death to the time of resurrection, that person ceases to exist except as a memory in God’s mind.
Because Adventists don’t believe man has a literal immaterial spirit, the Bible’s teaching that man is born spiritually dead, disconnected from the life of God and unreconciled to Him, is mere metaphor. They believe people are born with “propensities” to sin, genetically transmitted weaknesses and ingrained patterns of sin that they inherit through their parents’ gene pools. Similarly, they believe that Jesus inherited Mary’s sinful tendencies as well and lived a perfect life to show us that we, too, can overcome sin if we pray enough and depend on the Holy Spirit enough.
Because of their belief that man is merely physical, they do not understand that humans are born spiritually dead, and they don’t understand the new birth. The biblical teaching that God gives us a new heart and spirit and that He seals us with His Holy Spirit of promise, making us entirely new and different people, is mere metaphor to them. They have no way to understand “new birth” without a belief in “spirit”. They may say one’s Adventist baptism is their “new birth”, or they may call it the moment a person decides to leave his previous beliefs behind and embrace Adventism, but what they call “born again” is not what the Bible describes as being born again.
Because they do not believe in the human spirit, they can only understand the Holy Spirit as the source of righteous influences that one perceives, as their general conference president Ted Wilson has said, through the frontal lobes of the brain. Thus they MUST practice and teach the “health message”. The Adventist belief that they should be vegetarians (at the very least that they should never eat meat considered “unclean” in the levitical laws) and preferably vegans is connected to their belief that they can only perceive the Holy Spirit if their bodies and minds are healthy and free from pollutants that would inhibit their mental clarity.
In other words, although Adventists teach their “health message” in terms of longer life and disease resistance, the REAL reason they enforce and teach it is that they believe they cannot be as spiritually perceptive if they eat meat or indulge in stimulants such as alcohol and caffeine (another characteristic that echoes Mormonism). Furthermore, since they believe they do not continue to exist after death, they do everything possible to live longer and more healthfully to put off the inevitable moment when they cease to exist.
At the heart of the Adventist message is the belief that Jesus did not complete the atonement at the cross. They believe, as their doctrine of the investigative judgment teaches, that Jesus completed the Sacrifice, but that His blood continues to be applied to human sin in heaven as people confess their sins. Jesus, their doctrine teaches, is investigating the records of every person who’s ever lived and claimed to be believers. If those believers have any unconfessed or forgotten sins, Jesus’ blood does not cover those sins. At the end of this judgment, Jesus will finally place all the confessed sins of believers on Satan who will carry those sins out of the heavenly sanctuary into the lake of fire where he will be punished for them. In other words, although they would never articulate this fact so clearly, Satan is their final sin-bearer who cleanses heaven of the sins of the redeemed.
What your boyfriend doesn’t know
If your boyfriend is actually open to understanding his Adventism, he may be open to reading the book of Galatians every day for a month and asking God to teach him what He knows he needs to learn. He may also be helped by reading some of our materials and perhaps watching some of our conference YouTube videos. However, most Adventists, especially those deeply embedded, are not willing to know the dark reality of their religion. In fact, most Adventists don’t fully understand their beliefs.
I believe that the greatest need of your boyfriend is the real gospel. The Adventist “gospel” is undefined and vague; most Adventists cannot articulate it. The simple gospel that Jesus died for our sins according to Scripture, was buried, and rose on the third day according to Scripture (1 Cor. 15:3-4) is simply not what Adventists believe. They believe that the Sabbath is the mark of those who love God, that when Jesus returns, those who are ready to go to heaven with Him WILL BE KEEPING the seventh day. Those who go to church on Sunday, they believe, will have the mark of the beast. They see the seventh-day Sabbath as the seal (or the sign of the seal) of God, and Sunday church-going as the mark of the beast.
Your boyfriend may say he doesn’t have to keep the Sabbath to be saved, but ask him if he might lose his chance of salvation if he gives up the Sabbath. That would likely yield a different answer. Yet if one cannot gain salvation by keeping Sabbath, one cannot lose it by not keeping it. In fact, though, Adventists believe they MUST keep the seventh-day Sabbath.
Adventists are not taught the new covenant, and they believe that the Ten Commandments are eternal, existing in heaven before the creation of the world. They do not understand what it means that Jesus fulfilled the law. They say “fulfilled the law” refers to the “ritual laws”, not the “moral laws”. They do not understand that the Ten Commandments as the very words of the old covenant (Ex 34:27, 28), and they do not continue in the new. Instead, in the new covenant we have the indwelling Holy Spirit and the Law of Christ which is the Law under which Christians live! The moral requirements of the old covenant do not carry over into the new covenant because the Law of Christ is a new law! Although both the Ten Commandments and the Law of Christ share many moral requirements, it is not the Ten Commandments that we keep in the new covenant. We now serve the Lord Jesus, and the morality required of Christians is far greater than the morality articulated in the old covenant (see Matthew 5 through 7).
Your boyfriend does not understand that the fourth commandment pointed to Jesus; as Paul said in Colossians 2:16-17, it was merely a shadow of the good things to come; the reality is Christ.
Staying to make a difference
I also went through a time of believing I could remain Adventist and “make a difference”. This idea is a deception, however. First, Adventism does not teach the gospel. It has a false prophet who is still upheld as God’s prophetic mouthpiece; it has a false gospel, a fallible Jesus, and an unbiblical view of man. If one truly understands that Jesus has already completed every single thing necessary for propitiating for our sins before God, one cannot remain Adventist. It would be a betrayal of the Lord Jesus!
The Adventist Jesus is not the eternal, almighty Yahweh of Scripture as Jesus identified Himself throughout the book of John. One cannot teach “grace” inside an organization that denies the reality of God’s grace by espousing a false trinity, a false Jesus, and a “gospel” that demands keeping the law. Furthermore, once one realizes that one’s offerings and tithes pay for the salaries of Adventist pastors to teach this false worldview and to evangelize unsuspecting people into membership, it becomes an integrity issue to stay.
Implications of a “mixed marriage”
Even closer to home, if a non-Adventist marries an Adventist, the Adventist will almost certainly insist that their children be raised Adventist. Ellen White said that parents will be judged by God if their children are not Adventist. The manipulation and pressure that occurs when the Adventist feels the intense guilt and drivenness that demands his or her children are raised “in the truth” becomes a serious wedge in the family.
You have already felt the push-back that comes from the Adventist authorities when an Adventist wants to marry a “non-Adventist”. In fact, this push-back reveals that Adventism is not Christian at the core. True Christians do not oppose marriage to other true Christians. Adventists KNOW that Christians have different beliefs; their religion is not Christianity but a cleverly disguised deception designed to look Christian.
When an Adventist marries a non-Adventist, it marginalizes him (or her) inside the organization. In fact, your boyfriend is likely expected (and probably also expects) to convert you to Adventism. Observant Adventist pastors will not perform marriage ceremonies for a “mixed marriage” between an Adventist and a non-Adventist Christian. If your boyfriend does marry you as a non-Adventist, it may limit his own ability to rise higher in the ranks of Adventism. Children of “mixed marriages” are subtly marginalized within Adventism, and the non-Adventist spouse is seen as an unbeliever who either needs to be converted or guarded against.
I pray that your boyfriend may be open to know the true gospel and to meet and trust the true Jesus. I also pray that you will entrust this relationship to the Lord Jesus and ask Him to show you what is real and true. Ask Him to give you His mind and discernment. If your boyfriend is unwilling to leave Adventism, he likely does not know Jesus, and your marriage would be one of increasing turmoil and spiritual battles, especially as children join your family. As painful as it is to consider, I cannot recommend that a Christian marry an Adventist.
The Lord sees you, and He knows His plans for you and for your boyfriend. Trust Him. Even if this relationship does not continue into marriage, the Lord will not waste what He has taught you through this.
I am attaching some links below that may be helpful to you.
In Jesus and with prayers for you,
Colleen Tinker
Resources
- What Is Seventh-day Adventism?
- Unborn Dehumanized
- Jesus Is Not An Old Covenant Priest
- The Covenants: The Continental Divide of Biblical Interpretation
Videos
- May 4–10, 2024 - May 2, 2024
- We Got Mail - May 2, 2024
- April 27–May 3, 2024 - April 25, 2024
This is so true, Colleen. I’m married to a staunchly loyal SDA, but I left the SDA organization over a decade ago. Thankfully, we never had children in common, just his and hers from previous marriages. We still love each other, but there is very little to keep us connected to each other any more. We don’t even live together, which is fine for both of us.
I wish I had read this kind of information before I married him. I don’t know if it would have changed my mind, because he’s a really good man, but it certainly would have given me a much better understanding of what Adventists believe. There wasn’t much information about Adventists back in 1989, which was several years before the easy accessibility of internet.
As it turns out, and I’ve had to learn this the hard way, Adventist belief affects EVERY area of the marriage, including financial. My husband has never believed in saving money in a retirement account, because evidently Ellen White spoke against such. I think he’s pretty sorry about that, now that he’s over 70 and losing his youthful vitality to hold a job.
There are so many other areas that are affected, too. Keep up the good work of giving this kind of guidance to young people who are thinking of marrying an Adventist.