Part One: Adventism—It’s Physical
MARTIN CAREY
“If only I lived closer to that well.” She sighed and lifted her clay water jar over her shoulder and stepped into the hot sunlight. It was high noon, and she hoped to be alone at Jacob’s well. Her life, it seemed, was an endless ritual of fetching water and avoiding the merciless gossips of Sychar.
Today would be the day when her rituals changed, when her worldview would be overturned. We’re not told this woman’s name, but her encounter with a weary traveler would change everything.
She was startled to see a strange man sitting by the well, looking straight at her, as if He had been waiting for her. “Give me a drink,” He said.
His speech and clothing told her He was Jewish. At first He didn’t make sense. He told her that He could give her living water that would never run out. She thought he was talking about water down deep in Jacob’s well. He insisted on His living water that quenches thirst forever. She insisted on receiving physical water for her thirst. Then He revealed that He knew of her five husbands, and she realized He was no ordinary visitor. She quickly changed the topic to an old religious debate about places of worship. Her town of Sychar stood near the mountains of Gerazim and Ebal, where ancient Israel had shouted across the valley, reciting the blessings and curses of the covenant (Deut. 11:26-29). She said, “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain (Gerazim), but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship” (John 4:20). That was His moment to give her a worldview-upsetting truth about worship:
“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:23).
True worship would no longer be centered in holy places but would only occur in spirit and truth. What did He mean? In the previous chapter, Jesus had met with Nicodemus, the brilliant teacher of the Jews, and refuted his very physical, unspiritual views of God’s kingdom. Jesus came as Light, to expose worldviews and bring down their spiritual strongholds. In that one statement to the Samaritan woman about true worship, He shook not only the foundations of the Samaritan and Jewish religious systems, but every religious system in history. Now in the twenty-first century, Jesus continues to challenge the foundational assumptions of our worship.
A Pillar of Adventism
The Seventh-day Adventist worldview has a central theme that shapes all of its doctrines, its worship practices, and the Adventist lifestyle. That central theme is the centrality of the physical. Physicalism as a secular philosophy generally holds that all of reality is composed only of matter, energy, and their interactions. Religious physicalism admits to some kind of spiritual reality, but describes spiritual things in very physical terms. Such religions emphasize what can be seen, felt, touched, and done in specific places and times. God, or the gods, live in physical places and have physical bodies. In this article, I will demonstrate how, in the Adventist worldview, physical reality is the pervasive and controlling theme that excludes spiritual reality. First, let’s look at the founders.
George Storrs was a Methodist preacher who is honored in the Adventist Pioneer Library website (https://www.aplib.org/george-storrs/) for good reason. In 1837 he read a tract by Henry Grew and became strongly opposed to belief in the immortality of the soul. Storrs published his Six Sermons in 1842, contributing to the movement known as Conditionalism. Conditionalists hold that immortality is only possessed by God, and not naturally possessed by created beings. Immortality, they argue, is only given by God at salvation; while the wicked have no immortal soul and are annihilated by God at the final judgment. Many conditionalists also believe that man does not possess an immaterial soul that survives physical death in a conscious state. Other conditionalists, however, believe in a conscious intermediate state that continues after death of the body (https://rethinkinghell.com/explore/).
Storrs denied that man possessed an immaterial spirit that was conscious after death, and his writings strongly influenced the Adventist founders. Adventist pioneer Charles Fitch corresponded with Storrs, crediting him with his new understanding of Hell and the state of the dead (https://www.aplib.org/george-storrs/). Many Adventist pioneers credit Storrs’s Six Sermons with their physicalist views on the state of the dead, including James White, J.N. Andrews, Joseph Bates, J.N. Loughborough, Uriah Smith, and A.W. Spalding (https://adventistreview.org/magazine-article/2106-50/). Storrs did not accept Adventist teachings on the Sabbath or 1844 but found common cause with Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Watch Tower Society, and wrote for his magazine.
Made In God’s Image
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Genesis 1:26).
That we are made in God’s image is a magnificent concept, but what does it mean? We know that in the ancient world, the kings placed many statues of themselves around their kingdoms to glorify themselves and to remind their subjects of who ruled them. In Genesis 1, God creates a new creature in His image, after His likeness, who is to rule over the world. We are given little detail on what aspects of God’s likeness are being imaged, and we discover that Adam and Eve never portrayed the image of God as He intended. We have to look elsewhere in Scripture, especially in the New Testament, to find the truest expression of God’s image.
Ellen White has a particular emphasis on this description of God’s image in Adam and Eve:
“And now God said to His Son, ‘Let us make man in our image.’ As Adam came forth from the hand of his Creator he was of noble height and of beautiful symmetry. He was more than twice as tall as men now living upon the earth, and was well proportioned. His features were perfect and beautiful. His complexion was neither white nor sallow, but ruddy, glowing with the rich tint of health. Eve was not quite as tall as Adam. Her head reached a little above his shoulders. She, too, was noble, perfect in symmetry, and very beautiful” (Story of Redemption, 20).
According to White, Adam was over 12 feet tall; both were well-proportioned, and were beautiful in appearance. White adds another non-Biblical detail—Adam and Eve were not actually naked but clothed in robes of light that concealed their naked bodies. White’s portrayal of Adam of Eve reminds us of the Greek and Roman divinities, not real humans. The Bible’s portrayal of the first humans, on the other hand, shows us noble but humble persons with no special powers. Adam and Eve were not shining, superhuman gods as we find in pagan religions. In Adventist literature, however, the glory given to Adam and Eve is closer to myth.
If the image of God is physical, then man’s body was fashioned after God’s body, after His physical form. His body must resemble ours, with hair, hands, feet, etc. White describes a vision where she speaks with Jesus about the Father:
“I saw a throne, and on it sat the Father and the Son. I gazed on Jesus’ countenance and admired His lovely person. The Father’s person I could not behold, for a cloud of glorious light covered Him. I asked Jesus if His Father had a form like Himself. He said that He had, but I could not behold it, for said He, ‘If you should once behold the glory of His person, you would cease to exist’” (EW ).
Elsewhere in White’s writings, Adam and Eve’s intelligent and noble characters are expressed in their strong, perfect, symmetrical bodies. However, after the fall, “physical, mental, and moral degeneracy prevailed throughout the human family” (EGW, RH 1874). For White, the image of God is inseparable from physical strength, perfection, and beauty. Restoring Edenic perfection will require the building of superior bodies through an Edenic diet and lifestyle. Backwards to Eden is the hope of Adventism.
White assures us that the first humans also had strong mental and spiritual capacities, including free will and individuality. She also asserted that all those capacities of the soul are only functions of the brain and body. Thinking and worship, therefore, are the electro-chemical actions of the brain, and subject to the brain’s physical properties. As much as we cherish our free will and independent thinking, White’s physicalist worldview tells us that our mental freedom is limited by our heredity, diet, toxins, and thousands of physical factors.
The Tyranny of the Physical
Counsels on Diet and Foods is an Ellen White compilation of quotes on health that has produced much anxiety for serious Adventists. One’s eternal destiny was in question by one’s choices of what one ate, and rules for diet were equivalent to laws of God. Controlling appetite was the key to overcoming sin and spiritual health. The first sin was about our desire for food:
“Adam fell by the indulgence of appetite; Christ overcame by the denial of appetite. And our only hope of regaining Eden is through firm self-control” (CD 167).
In that statement, Ellen White reframes the story of the Fall, subtly different from the Genesis account. In Genesis 3, the serpent offered that the forbidden fruit would give them powers, make them like gods, knowing good and evil. Appetite was a minor motivation in Genesis, but not for Ellen White. For her, the desire for food and its powers over the mind became paramount. It is truly ironic that White’s health message promises that certain foods will give us superior powers of perception and spiritual understanding. The original temptation in the garden always returns in very subtle, attractive messages.
Ailments of the body or mind are are understood as evidence of a violation; disease reveals moral fault:
“Disease never comes without a cause. The way is prepared, and disease invited, by disregard of the laws of health” (CD 122).
Under that assumption, whenever I see someone suffering illness, I will suspect secret sins. “Hmm, I wonder what she has been eating or drinking. Disease must have been invited.” It is difficult to feel compassion for others’ suffering, or to deal with one’s own guilt with such a mind set.
Growing up Adventist one learns that food has power to shape one’s soul and character. This included the fear that eating meat transfers an animal’s nature into one’s own human soul:
“I have been instructed that flesh food has a tendency to animalize the nature, to rob men and women of that love and sympathy which they should feel for everyone, and to give the lower passions control over the higher powers of the being.” (CD 382).
We are to assume that the “animal nature” arouses the “lower passions” that destroy our love and sympathy for others. Aside from the very dubious pseudo-science she is promoting, there is nothing of this reasoning in the word of God. Loving one another as Christians is possible for those whose sins are forgiven, who know they belong to Jesus.
Love and hate are not controlled by what we eat or what we do with our bodies. Christian love has much better reasons, and comes from a lofty, spiritual source:
“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” 1John 4:10-12
The physicalist worldview of Adventism has created a distorted reality that reduces our humanity to physical appearances and physical powers, and it reduces God to a being more like us. In part two of this article, we will look at how Adventism’s physical worldview shapes its theology and how Jesus’ worldview of spirit and truth destroys the tyranny of the flesh. Ellen White’s physical false gospel makes life painfully complex and anxiety-ridden. In contrast, Jesus gave us profound, magnificent truth that could be grasped by an intellectual like Nicodemus, and by the guilty, ignorant woman at the well. Worshiping in spirit and truth brings liberation.
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Interesting to learn some new things about Adventism. As with many religions, their views about the relationship between spiritual and physical, divine and human, immortality and consciousness, reality and eschatology are so different from the straightforward and satisfying worldview of Christianity. Thank you, for contributing this.
P.S. I thought that WWCG was Sabbatarian, too (Storrs and Russell).