I suppose it’s not surprising that pushback about Adventism’s position on the Trinity and the full deity of Jesus continues to come. This last week we received an email from a reader who referred to Erwin Gane’s 1963 thesis, “Ellen G. White on the Absolute Deity of Christ”, as evidence that, contrary to our position, the Adventist prophet endorsed the Trinity.
The reader defended Gane as an honest seeker of truth. He also questioned our position that Jesus could not have failed.
The interesting thing about the writer’s defenses and questions was the clarity of his underlying Adventist worldview. I could tell that, from his perspective, his viewpoints were logical and philosophically rational.
Understanding Scripture without the interpretive grid of Ellen White (even unconsciously) shaping one’s understanding, though, makes the Bible’s declarations clear and understandable. As long as one tries to reconcile Ellen White’s statements with Scripture, a person is left confused. One must decide what his authority will be: Scripture alone, or Scripture plus Ellen White’s commentary?
Adventists may claim they do not use Ellen White as a source of truth, but they will unconsciously read Scripture from her point of view unless they face the fact that she is a false prophet—and renounce her.
Because this tug-of-war between Scripture and Ellen White’s perspective is ubiquitous among Adventists (and because this is an internal dissonance all former Adventists must resolve), I am sharing the email and my answer below. The original email reveals Adventism’s lack of belief in the biblical teaching of a human immaterial spirit which is born dead and must be made alive—except in the case of Jesus. He alone was born as a human baby with a living spirit which did not need to be born again. This fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of man twists all of Adventism’s doctrines—including the nature of Christ and the nature of the Trinity.
Hi,
I have immense respect for Dr Gane who was my professor at PUC for two years [when I was] studying Daniel and Revelation primarily. He sought to interest me in becoming a minister which I never saw as my calling. Needless to say, he was instrumental in my life. I have never known a greater student of the Bible. His method was to compare Scripture with Scripture, letting the Bible interpret itself.
My last conversation with him was about the ordination of women as pastors. I knew for sure that his personal relationship with Jesus and his study of Scripture would reveal an answer that stood on a solid foundation. He surprised me when he said he could not answer this question and that he prayed that God would send a prophet that would give us the answer.
I mention this not do discuss the ordination of women, but to display his honesty in seeking after truth.
Did you read Chapter 14 in his thesis? Dr Gane firmly establishes a “traditional” view of the Trinity from Ellen White’s writings compared to the belief of three separate supreme beings or Gods plural that we would be led to believe by reading [Proclamation’s discussions of the Trinity].
My main question is: why would Satan try to tempt Jesus in the wilderness after His forty days of fasting if he did not believe he could deceive and have Him fall to his temptations as did Eve in the Garden of Eden? If there was NO chance of His falling to temptation because He was God incarnate, why would Satan try to tempt Him? I think that if there was no chance of His sinning, then why are we told that He was tempted in all manner as are we? We know that Satan also is a student of Scripture. He understood that he had a real chance to make Jesus fall, even as God incarnate, because this was God’s way—a way that meant even Jesus as God has a free choice and that His freedom to choose was not taken away in His transformation into a human.
It seems to me that Satan’s method was appealing to His intellect during His weakness after fasting. Satan used a very subtle approach to leading Jesus to succumb to the sin of pride.
Happy Sabbath!
Dear Reader,
Thank you for writing. I did read the chapter from Gane’s thesis which you linked in your email, and I do not see his establishing that EGW taught a traditional Trinity. To be sure, Ellen White contradicted herself often throughout her life; sometimes she wrote passages that sound very nearly orthodox; other times she betrayed her lack of understanding about the same subjects. The deity of Christ is one such subject.
The bottom line is this: Ellen White never endorsed the classic Christian Trinity. As late as 1905 she was referring to God as “the heavenly Trio” and “the three worthies of heaven” who HELP US keep the law. This endorsement of a unique view of the “Godhead” is exactly what Jerry Moon at Andrews seminary explained in his treatise of 2006: “The Quest for a Biblical. Trinity: Ellen White’s ‘Heavenly Trio’ Compared to the Traditional Doctrine”. I will link the PDF of this paper below.
Importantly, neither EGW nor Adventism endorses that the three Persons of their Godhead share substance. They claim they share will, purpose, commitment, and name, but NOT substance. Yet all three persons must share all the attributes of God equally or they are not God. For example, Jesus cannot have given up His omnipresence because He took a body; that would render Him no longer God. It’s not enough to say a person is “all God” because they share a name and a purpose and a location; God is defined by His attributes, and losing any attribute means the person is not God.
I find it interesting and telling that Erwin Gane spent his effort attempting to reconcile Ellen White’s writings with themselves as well as with Scripture in order to endorse Adventism’s Trinity. His reasoning betrays that his authority had to include Ellen White. He had to make her reconcile with Christian doctrine. He couldn’t hold her loosely and ask himself if the Bible alone would reveal something different from what she taught. Instead, he had to wrestle with her writings to make them compatible not only with what he saw in Scripture but with themselves.
His desire that God would send a prophet to settle the women’s ordination question further exposes his internal foundation. Scripture alone was not enough for him. Instead of praying that God would reveal His truths within His word, he prayed for extra biblical revelation. This attitude is normal within Adventism, and it betrays the traditional reality of the religion: it does not understand nor teach being spiritually born again by belief and trust in the finished work of Jesus’ shed blood and His resurrection. If those things were what Adventists believed, they would have no further need to validate EGW or to pray for further revelation. Hebrews 1:1-3 would be enough.
No, Erwin Gone did not teach, nor did Ellen White, a traditional Trinity.
And yes, Jesus was tempted as we are, of course! But there was no chance that He would sin; He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). He came to do God’s will with the human Body God gave Him for the purpose of dying a perfect human death for human sin (Hebrews 2; 10:5–7). It was Jesus’ perfect sinlessness—a sinlessness that was the result of His spiritual life from the moment of conception—that qualified Him to be our Substitute. He did not become sinless because He resisted sin; rather, He resisted sin because He WAS SINLESS. He was born spiritually alive—the only human ever born who was spiritually alive and did not need to be born again.
Jesus was not tempted as we are in order to show us how to resist sin. He was tempted as we are, Hebrews tells us, in order to be our sympathetic High Priest (Heb. 2:17, 18). He suffered every sort of temptation and humiliation any Christian ever suffers—and He suffered so He could strengthen us in our own suffering. He was not our example for resisting sin; He was our SUBSTITUTE.
Satan is arrogant, and of course He tried to make Jesus fail. He had been able to make the perfect Adam fail; he was arrogant enough to try to make the Son of Man fail. But Jesus had two natures, and in some mystery which is not revealed to us, we know that God cannot sin. Jesus’ singular identity as God the Son and Son of Man meant that he was ensured of being able to avoid sin. There is a tension here we cannot resolve, but we can know that both things are true because Scripture says both things: God cannot be temped by evil, and Jesus was tempted as we are.
He differed from us, though, in that He was “without sin”. As Adventists we understood that phrase simply to mean He didn’t sin. In fact, it means much more: He did not have the inherited spiritual death that is the human legacy in Adam. He was WITHOUT sin. Sin had no appeal for him; His temptations were far more intense than any we endure; He took the sin of the human race and suffered its consequences for us. But again, thank you for writing!
Resources:
- Rick Barker: “Going Deeper into Adventism’s Trinity Doctrine”
- Erwin Gane: The Arian or Anti-Trinitarian Views Presented in Seventh-day Adventist Literature and the Ellen G. White Answer chapter 14
- Jerry Moon: “The Quest for a Biblical Trinity: Ellen White’s ‘Heavenly Trio’ Compared to the Traditional Doctrine”
- Kaspars Ozolins: “Theological Scoffing—Taking On Progressive Adventism and their Trinity”
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Colleen, you are as brilliant as you are kind. This should be a conversation. I hope the letter-writer replies, who is also kind. There are some “doctrines,” some Bible truths that Christianity has had to iron out over the centuries because of the other-worldliness of God and our inquisitive, but fallen minds. But if Christ could have faltered in sin while inhabiting flesh, then he could have fallen before the incarnation, and worse, he could become prey to Satan even in his resurrection! The thought of that is preposterous. There is no surety in a Jesus who is susceptible to sin.
Thank you, Sabbathcomplete. You are absolutely right. A fallible Jesus would give us no surety.
And thank you for the work you have done to expose the dangers of sabbatarianism within Christianity at large!