Colleen and Nikki introduce a new series in which they will inspect in the light of the Bible each of the doctrines of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: Well, Nikki, we are doing something new, aren’t we?
Nikki: Yes, we are.
Colleen: We are doing a new series, and this one is going to be a little different from our previous ones. We are going to examine the 28 Fundamental Beliefs of Seventh-day Adventism. But I want to explain what we’re going to do. First of all, for those of you who have never been Adventist or for those of you who have, this isn’t just going to be looking at what’s wrong with Adventist beliefs. If you’re used to having a Bible study and you want to continue that, know that this will be that because, in addition to showing what’s wrong with the 28 Fundamental Beliefs, we’re going to look at the Bible for the answers to what each one of those beliefs should say and how we should be able to think of things like the word of God, who is God the Father, who is God the Son, who is Jesus, what is salvation, what is the gospel? Know that this will be a Bible study, but it will be more of a topical one based on these beliefs than going through a book. But in keeping with Ephesians 5, which we’ve just gone through, we are going to try to pull the curtain back and reveal what’s hidden in darkness. And this is really important to us, I think, Nikki, because we grew up in this.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And we were deceived by it, and we were in darkness, and we didn’t know that what we believed was tainted. That tainting is what we’re going to discuss today. We’re going to do a preliminary study, before we launch into each one of the belief statements, that explains the worldview through which Adventists understand their beliefs. When a Christian, an evangelical Christian, reads the Statements of Belief from the Adventist organization, they likely look at that and think, “Well, that looks pretty good to me.” But the problem is, the evangelical Christian doesn’t understand that there is a foundational worldview that’s different from theirs and the Adventists see these things differently. And here is the issue: It’s what you believe about the origins of everything that determines what you think about biblical truth. Most of us who now read the Bible for our source of authority look at Genesis 1 as our story of origin, and it begins with, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Now, Adventists will also affirm that, but Adventists have a little dirty secret that they don’t tell everybody. They have pre-history that’s not found in the Bible. It’s a different story of origins. How would you explain that story of origins, Nikki, briefly?
Nikki: So I always felt pretty privileged that the Seventh-day Adventist Church had this information that the rest of the world didn’t have –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – and I thought that this meant we knew God more. This is why I felt comfortable saying we were the closest to the truth, because we knew more of the truth than others, thanks to Ellen White –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – and her visions about what happened before God even created the earth. And the way I understood it, Satan, Lucifer, was very highly exalted. She goes into great detail about that. I think he was even the choir leader, wasn’t he?
Colleen: Well, somewhere I got that same impression. Not only that, I learned that he sang all four parts of harmony from his own voice box, so, whatever. [Laughter.] That’s what I thought.
Nikki: And he was a covering cherub over the ark that contained the Ten Commandments; right? And he became jealous when God elevated Jesus to be equal with Him. So already we have Jesus not eternally equal with the Father.
Colleen: Right. And more equal with Satan. If Satan could become jealous, they had to be sort of similar.
Nikki: Yes, because he was the head angel, and he had all of this – he just had a lot of privilege in heaven. And Jesus was Michael the Archangel, and so you can kind of – it was a little bit confusing, honestly, how the sonship of Jesus worked.
Colleen: It was confusing.
Nikki: But then Satan had a big campaign in heaven, and he was slandering God, and he was accusing Jesus of plotting to humiliate him, and he was telling everybody that these Ten Commandments were unfair and that God was unfair, that they were freewill beings and they should be able to do whatever they want.
Colleen: And can I just say, if those of you listening heard Nikki say the Ten Commandments were unfair in heaven, that’s what we believed. We didn’t believe the Ten Commandments were first given on Mt. Sinai. We believed they existed from all eternity in heaven, and the angels had to keep them.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Don’t ask me how honoring father and mother and not committing adultery applied to angels, but we believed that it was their law, because, of course, they had to keep the Sabbath.
Nikki: Yeah, which they also say was ordained and created at Creation.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It really doesn’t add up when you lay it all out. But then there was this war in heaven, and Satan was able to turn the angels against God, and then he put Him on this massive trial. God was helpless to punish Satan at the time because if He did it right then, people would think badly of Him. And so He needed to allow Satan to go out and show everybody and all the worlds – that’s plural – that He created that Satan really was evil so that when God did deal with Satan, everybody would cheer and know God was the good guy. Satan has put the character of God and the fairness of His law on trial, and God has allowed Satan to go out and do everything he’s going to do so that no one thinks poorly of Him in the end.
Colleen: So no one thinks poorly of God –
Nikki: Of God.
Colleen: – in the end, yeah.
Nikki: And then, at the end of this, when Satan’s finally kicked out of heaven, because by the way, God let him stay there and do all of this bad stuff because He was being patient and trying to convince Satan that he was sinning. Satan didn’t believe it at first, but he was eventually convinced, refused to repent, and then God kicked him out. And then the Father went to Jesus and said, “Let’s create humans.” And He actually said, according to Ellen, “We will create them to be able to talk to angels and to be able to hear from angels.”
Colleen: And there you have it, Ellen White had her angels, and that’s all part of the story. You know what, Nikki, this story sounds more like Mormonism –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – than anything in the Bible. Mormons have a story of pre-history that’s remarkably similar. They believe that Satan and Jesus were both angels. They were brothers in heaven, and Satan became the bad guy and Jesus became the good guy. It’s not that different in Adventism. And you know, as we were thinking through this series, it dawned on me that what you believe about the origins of all reality determines where you end up on your journey. For example, because we as Christians are creationists, because we believe that God created a literal Adam and Eve, He made the human race in His image, this fact explains and illuminates the reality that Jesus came, God the Son became incarnate later in history, in order to pay the price for human sin. If we weren’t His creations, there would have been no vested interest in actually God becoming man, taking human sin, and dying for us and rising from the dead. Evolution does not set the stage for God becoming man, shedding human blood, and redeeming us and reconciling us to Himself. So the origins that you believe determine the outcomes of the story. And if you don’t believe that the Bible tells us the origins that are true for us, you will come to a different outcome. And here’s the thing with Ellen’s origins, God never tells us the story of the angels in Scripture. We don’t know their story of rebellion. We don’t know what happened in heaven. We only know that there is a Satan, that there was a Lucifer. We know that there was some kind of rebellion, that there are elect angels and that there are fallen angels. But God does not tell us the story that does not belong to us. Ellen tried to tell us a story that didn’t belong to us, and we end up with a whole different worldview and a whole different reality.
Nikki: And with different sympathies.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Because as she tells her story, she’s narrating the emotions and thoughts of Satan. She doesn’t do too much of that of the Father or of Jesus, just some. But she embellishes, and now you have this setup that has well-developed characters with emotional investments and a plot, and this is before we hit Genesis 1.
Colleen: And that is such a great point, Nikki. She really did create a character in Satan in the body of her work, and I know this intimately because this is how I grew up, this is how I saw reality, this is how I thought until I understood the gospel. She made Satan ultimately a tragic hero in the classic sense. When I was teaching English, I used to teach what I learned in school, that a tragic hero in literature is a person who ultimately dies because of a fatal flaw in himself, a fatal flaw he may not even be fully conscious he has. She has created a tragic hero out of Satan. She has made this angel, who was next to God, who believed God was unfair, who ultimately is not going to succeed probably, if we do our job right. He probably won’t succeed in turning the universe against God. But in the end, that Satan is forced, in the Adventist theme of things, to bear the sins of those who are saved and take them to the Lake of Fire. He ultimately dies being punished for our sins. Now, in the Bible, Jesus bears our sins and is punished for them. In Adventism, Satan does. And there’s always a feeling running through Adventist thought that, “Well, Satan will actually get the brunt of my wrongdoing, so whew. It’s going to be worse for him than for me.” But at the same time there’s this subtle sense of sorrow and sympathy, like, “I understand how Satan got there, and I kind of feel for him.” So before we look further at this idea of the worldview of Adventism that shapes how they understand and how they formulated their Fundamental Beliefs, I just want to remind everybody that if you want to write to us, you can write at formeradventist@gmail.com. We love hearing from you. We love hearing your questions, your reactions, your ideas, so feel free to write to us. And also, be sure you visit proclamationmagazine.com. There you will find links to our YouTube channel, you’ll find links to this podcast, you’ll find a donate button where you can donate to Life Assurance Ministries, and we do want to encourage you to write a review for this podcast if you find it helpful or interesting. Your reviews and your five-star confirmations wherever you listen to podcasts really do help our podcast to grow and to expand its reach. So we just are so grateful to all of you who are following us and listening to us, and we just want to encourage you to keep doing so. So, Nikki, now that we’ve sort of laid the stage with this whole business of the pre-history and the fact that Adventism has a foreign story of origins, which of necessity will lead us to a different conclusion than the biblical story of origins, I have a question for you.
Nikki: Okay.
Colleen: As an Adventist, how did you find that the Great Controversy shaped what you believed about Jesus and what the gospel was?
Nikki: Again, this goes right back to the pre-creation history that Ellen White gave us, that I felt so privileged to have. I understood Jesus to – actually, I thought of Him as having a body in heaven, and I thought of the Father as having a body in heaven too. But I thought of Him as someone who was trying to vindicate His father, trying to reconcile us to His Father, He was trying to accomplish a lot of different things almost on His own, because He had to go to the Father and plead with Him to let Him come to earth and redeem humanity. So there was already a difference of will between the Son and the Father, and God had to be – the Father had to be convinced to let Jesus come. And that it was all about Him coming to teach us how to keep the law, to show us that the Father is fair and that His law is just, and in dying on the cross – I would have said He came, He died on the cross to save me from my sins. I really meant He was opening a door for me to follow Him through, where He would be my example of how to uphold the law. And so that was a different gospel, and it was a different Jesus because you did not have a Jesus who was fully God. He was Michael the Archangel, He was elevated to equal with God, and they both had bodies before He was ever incarnated.
Colleen: Yeah! That was my understanding too. And I actually remember sitting in junior high in Bible class – they taught us a lot of Bible doctrines in Adventist school when I was back in Adventist school, in junior high. And when I say “Bible doctrines,” I really mean “Adventist doctrines,” because that was what they taught us in school. And they taught us it was from the Bible. They taught us the proof texts to support those Adventist doctrines, so we thought we were hearing the Bible, but it was really Adventism. And I remember over the years thinking of Jesus as sort of a meek, mild, weaker, almost pitiable version of God, like “poor Jesus,” [with a childish voice] “poor Jesus.” He was kind of like for children. He came and He died, and He was so badly treated. I didn’t understand that His death was actually a propitiation for my sin. I understood that His death was somehow making it possible for me to avoid being eternally annihilated if I were able to keep the law. He died so that I could somehow avoid that second death, that annihilation, which I thought was the second death. So it was a confusing belief, but He embarrassed me the older I got. I didn’t like saying His name. And as far as the gospel went, I couldn’t have defined it. I knew it included Jesus dying for my sins, sort of as an example, and I also understood that it included keeping the Sabbath, the law, but I couldn’t have just given you a definition of the gospel, and interestingly, I found out that even today when I ask people who are questioning their Adventism to define the gospel, I haven’t found one who can.
Nikki: Um-hmm. I think I somehow sometimes would conflate the Adventist message with the gospel. It depended on who was asking. If a Christian asked me what the gospel was, I could say, “Well, Jesus came and died for my sins.” But I remember knowing from way back, junior high I think is maybe when I was taught, that the Adventists had a very important remnant last-day message.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And that it really wasn’t the gospel of good news. It was a warning. We had a warning for the people that God was coming to judge the earth, and He was looking for a faithful people, and we were to be the ones to teach the world how to be faithful and how to keep the Ten Commandments, especially the Sabbath, because Babylon had stolen the Sabbath, and so I have heard people say that the gospel is the Three Angels’ Messages.
Colleen: Oh, yes, that’s true. And Ellen White said that it was. And for those of you who don’t know what the Three Angels’ Messages are, it’s essentially the text Revelation 14:6-9, and one might ask, why those three angels? Because there are angels right before them and there are angels right after them, but somehow those three angels are the Three Angels’ Messages, and Adventists have taken those verses and have made them say they teach the seventh-day Sabbath – worship God who created the heaven and the earth – and they say that means you have to worship on the seventh day because that’s what He did, He rested on the seventh day when He created the earth, come out of her my people – that would be Babylon. Babylon would be the false religions that have adopted the pope’s Sunday Sabbath, and those who worship the false god in Babylon will receive the Mark of the Beast, which they say is worshipping on Sunday. So out of those Three Angels’ Messages, they have contrived something that’s not there. But if you understand Ellen White’s Great Controversy vision and her worldview, then every Adventist can see that.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: They’re taught it’s there, and they’re told why it’s there. And they believe what they’re told because they don’t know how to read Scripture in context, and they don’t know the gospel, so they don’t have any lens for which to understand the word of God.
Nikki: Wouldn’t you say too that even if they’ve never read Ellen White, especially if they’re multigenerational, they are raised from their infancy to understand these Adventist distinctives, almost before anything else in the Bible?
Colleen: In fact, Nikki, let’s just do a little recount of the history of how Adventism was formed and how Ellen White became who she was, and then let’s talk a little bit about how Adventists instill this worldview into their children and into their converts because understanding this is going to be important for understanding how these doctrines actually hide but endorse the false teachings of Adventism. And if any of you listening have never been Adventist, it’s going to be really important for you to understand what we’re saying because you will encounter Adventists, and it’s really important to know that when they sound like they’re talking about things that you believe, there are questions you need to ask them because there’s a different way of understanding those things just below the surface. The Great Disappointment, which many of you have heard about, happened in 1844, and that was when William Miller, who was a Baptist preacher, he had predicted that Jesus would come on October 22, 1844. Obviously, Jesus didn’t come. And the people that were waiting for Him to come that night, many of them repented afterwards and went back to their churches. William Miller himself ultimately repented of having set the date. But there was a group of people who decided, no, we can’t be wrong; we just got the event wrong, the date was right. And those people ultimately became the Adventists. And it’s so interesting that from 1844 onward, there was this little cluster of people who distilled out of the Millerite movement, largely people who we would call non-Christian, primary among whom, when we think about the Adventist history, were Joseph Bates, James White, who ultimately became the husband of Ellen Harmon White. Her middle initial was “G,” and we now know her as Ellen G. White. James White and Joseph Bates were from a group called the Christian Connection, and you can look this up online, you can Google it. The Christian Connection is anti-Trinitarian, and James and Joseph Bates were anti-Trinitarians. So were the rest of the founding Adventists, including J.N. Andrews, for whom the seminary is named. He was one of the founders. And Ellen White herself, though she grew up in a Methodist family, she became a nontrinitarian as she interacted with these early Adventists. Now, Nikki, would you talk to us a little bit about Ellen White’s early years? How did she become Ellen White when she was Ellen Harmon?
Nikki: Well, Ellen was born in 1827 in Maine, and she was originally Methodist, like you mentioned, until her family was disfellowshipped for following William Miller. She had her nose broken when she was nine years old. She was said to be disfigured for life. She laid unconscious for three weeks, and she was not expected to live. And for some reason she was medically frail for the rest of her life because of this incident.
Colleen: I think it’s so funny, Richard sometimes says, “This was perhaps the first time a false prophet was stoned before she gave her first false prophecy.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Anyway – [Laughter.]
Nikki: After that she became very depressed. She didn’t want to live. She quit school because she couldn’t study. And in 1840 when she was 13 years old, she heard William Miller for the first time. And his message terrified her. She couldn’t sleep, she would have nightmares, and she would pray and pray and pray to be protected from this second coming and this judgment that was going to come.
Colleen: Which is how I felt about it when I grew up thinking about the second coming. It terrified me.
Nikki: So many people, so many people have been terrified through her ministry. She perpetuated this. So she had great insecurity about her salvation. Well, she had a conversion experience at a Methodist campmeeting where William Miller was speaking, and apparently it was common at these events for people to just fall unconscious during whipped-up prayer sessions.
Colleen: Doesn’t that tell you something about them? I mean, this is not the gospel.
Nikki: Yeah, it’s not. And I got this information, by the way, from D.M. Canright’s book, Life of Mrs. E.G. White, Seventh-day Adventist Prophet, Her False Claims Refuted. If you haven’t read it, please buy it and read it.
Colleen: Oh, yeah.
Nikki: This is an incredible book.
Colleen: He was a contemporary of the Whites. He lived in their home, he worked with them, and he knew them personally.
Nikki: Yes, and it’s so easy to read. It’s just his experience with them. So he said that she would fall unconscious with the power common then, so again, this was a part of their religious experience. It was not unique to her. She attended prayer meetings constantly. Her family also did. They accepted his predictions. And after the Great Disappointment, like you said, there were leaders who confessed that it was a mistake and left, but White, Bates, Holt, Andrews, and Ellen held that it was correct.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And that was October 22, 1844, and then just a couple months later, in December of 1844, Ellen began having her visions, and she had them almost daily, certainly weekly, for a time.
Colleen: And just by the way, I find it fascinating – I can’t draw any conclusions from it, but I do find it fascinating, that Joseph Smith in the Mormon movement died in September 1844. Ellen White had her first vision four months after Joseph Smith died. It’s just interesting to me. I can’t prove anything from it, but the fact that they both have these similar pre-histories and the fact that the prophetic voice died in Mormonism then and Ellen White took it up in the Adventists and that there’s this similarity between the two is just fascinating.
Nikki: Yeah, it is. Well, it was interesting to me that people were doubting her vision at first. They assumed it was just religious revelry or that she was hallucinating, and even Joseph Bates blamed her health. And I was surprised to discover too that even Ellen White sometimes doubted her own visions. They scared her –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – which to me indicates that there was something spiritual going on, not just that she was deceptive or making it up. There was something that was going on that was scaring her.
Colleen: Yes. She even sometimes wondered if the devil was giving them to her.
Nikki: So she married James in 1846 when she was only 19 years old. So this young woman 13 years old is terrified by William Miller –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and then she’s married by 19 years old into this religious cult that came out of that failed vision.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: So it was interesting also that it wasn’t until 1846 that the Sabbath was added, and I found it very interesting that that did not originate from Ellen.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: That came from Joseph Bates, who actually, like I said, he didn’t believe all of her visions, but he went to her and her husband. He told them about the Sabbath. Hmm, they weren’t sure they believed in the Sabbath, but by the end of it, by the end of their discussion, he affirmed her visions and she affirmed his Sabbath.
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting? A little “you do this for me, I’ll do that for you,” and it was a symbiotic relationship.
Nikki: And so began this pattern of using Ellen’s visions to support the doctrines of various men.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: I didn’t know that. I thought all of this, you know, came from her.
Colleen: Right. That’s how we are led to believe it, but it’s not true. She only endorsed, through conveniently-timed visions, what these other people came up with, who were not Christian.
Nikki: Right. So I have a list here of some of these doctrines. Do you want me to share those?
Colleen: Yes, please.
Nikki: Okay. So some of the doctrines that did not come from her were, obviously, the second advent, that came from Miller, and the Sabbath from Bates, but he said that they were to keep it from 6 p.m. to 6 p.m., that was the time, that was the holy time. And after this she had a vision that Jesus took her to heaven, opened up the Ark of the Covenant, pointed to the Ten Commandments, there was a halo around the fourth, and it was confirmed. And as Canright points out, isn’t it fascinating that Jesus didn’t at that point say, “Hey, Ellen, but you guys got the 6:00 to 6:00 wrong; it’s actually sundown to sundown.” He did not correct her.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: So then J.N. Andrews comes and corrects that with the Sabbath. He says it’s sundown to sundown. The sanctuary doctrine came from Crosier, the Three Angels’ Messages from J.N. Andrews, the two-horned beast as the United States, J.N. Andrews, the sleep of the dead actually came from first-day Adventists.
Colleen: Isn’t that fascinating! And who are the most well-known first-day Adventists who to this day hold to the state of the dead that the Adventists believe in?
Nikki: Would that be the Jehovah’s Witnesses?
Colleen: Absolutely. Jehovah’s Witnesses claim some of the same founders that the Adventists, Seventh-day Adventist’s, claim. And they both derive from the movement that can generally be called “Adventists.” Jehovah’s Witnesses are the most famous first-day Adventists, and the Seventh-day Adventists are the most famous seventh-day Adventists.
Nikki: That’s interesting. Yeah, that’s really interesting. So then a lot of the different aspects of how the church worked, men came to Ellen, Ellen gave them testimonies to the church or visions, from the way that they got money from the people, whether it was systematic benevolence, which I had never heard about before –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – or tithe, or Ingathering came from a Mr. Wayne. Even the way that they did their printing, that they promoted their printing, came from Haskell. When they needed money for the sanitarium at Battle Creek, the men went to her, asked for a testimony, and this was interesting. So she wrote to the church and said that God wants them to send money for this project, He showed her this. But James was away, and he was very upset about this when he got back because he wanted to control and decide and design and manage the project. So he made them tear everything they’d already started down, costing the church $11,000 –
Colleen: My goodness.
Nikki: – made her write in another testimony that she shouldn’t have done the last testimony, but now this testimony is correct, and they proceeded at that point. So she would have a word from God, God would show her things. He wouldn’t show her things correctly. It all worked in favor of whatever powerful man was asking her to do this.
Colleen: And I want to say, can you spell false prophet?
Nikki: Ugh, yeah.
Colleen: When we look at this time frame and we see the role of Ellen White, I think it’s interesting to notice how Adventism developed its doctrines. Now, one of its primary tenants from the very beginning, with Joseph Bates and James White and J.N. Andrews, was that they were not going to have a creed. Creeds were bad because, well, think about the creeds. We have the Nicene Creed, we have the Athanasian Creed, we have amazing historical creeds in the Christian tradition that establish fundamental biblical doctrines. But these men were not Christian, and they did not subscribe, for example, to the reality that Jesus Christ is eternally almighty God the Son.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So they couldn’t subscribe to the Christian creeds, and they mocked Christian creeds, and said, “We’re not going to have a creed. Our only creed is the Bible.” And then they proceeded to take the Bible out of context and to create their own system of beliefs. Now, I find this very interesting. Growing up Adventist, it was a very carefully taught thing in my Bible classes in Adventist elementary school that Adventists don’t have a creed, and we were proud of it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Did you learn that, Nikki?
Nikki: You know, I don’t remember them teaching me that, but I do know that I believed creeds were Catholic.
Colleen: Yes, yes. That’s a bad word, like crosses are Catholic.
Nikki: Um-hmm. Um-hmm.
Colleen: We didn’t have a creed. And they decided from the beginning they would not have a creed, and they would always qualify whatever they said about their beliefs by making it fluid so that if the Holy Spirit came and moved among them and convinced them that they needed to take a new view of something or add a new belief, that was permissible. So in that sense, I think they tried to say, “This is not a creed.” But you know, it’s so fascinating because it’s just a lie. If you look up “creed” in Merriam-Webster, the first two definitions of “creed” are “A brief authoritative formula of religious belief,” or, number two, “A set of fundamental beliefs.” Isn’t that so funny?
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: The definition of a creed is exactly what Adventists have, a statement of fundamental beliefs! But they tell their members, “Oh, this isn’t a creed.” But it is a creed! Absolutely defined –
Nikki: They like to redefine everything, don’t they?
Colleen: Um-hmm. We have these early Adventists, after the Great Disappointment, getting together, deciding they have to figure out what really went wrong, and figuring out that instead of Jesus coming to earth, something else had to happen, so that’s where they came up with the idea of the Investigative Judgment, which we’ll talk about more when we come to that doctrine as we go through this book. But it’s interesting, by 1848 – remember, the Great Disappointment was 1844. By 1848 these men had worked together enough and had become coalesced enough that they had come up with some belief statements. In the book Light Bearers to the Remnant, which is an official Seventh-day Adventist book of denominational history, they had this little account, and I just have to read it here because it confirms what you said, and it makes it really, really clear where their beliefs came from. This is what it said, “The beliefs were hammered out as the result of Bible study, discussion, and prayer. Much of the time, Ellen White testified, she could not understand the texts under discussion and the issues involved. Yet she later remembered that when the brethren who were studying came to the point where they said, ‘We can do nothing more,’ the Spirit of the Lord would come upon me, and I would be taken off in vision and a clear explanation of the passage we had been studying would be given me, with instructions as to how we were to labor and teach effectively.” And the book continues, “Because the participants ‘knew that when not in vision I could not understand these matters, they accepted as light direct from heaven the revelations given.'” Those were Ellen’s own words. So there are several things about this statement that reveal what’s going on. Number one, these men hammering out the doctrines are reading Scripture and not understanding it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Well, Nikki, what’s the first thing that happens when you understand the gospel, trust Jesus, and are born again?
Nikki: The Holy Spirit illuminates the word of God.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: But they weren’t looking for the message of Scripture. They were looking for proof for what they were coming to believe.
Colleen: Exactly. And then Ellen White admits she couldn’t understand Scripture, which also is a very clear indication that she was not born again and did not have the Holy Spirit illuminating God’s word. And the third thing here that’s so significant is that she was taken off into vision, told what the passages mean, the men accepted it as straight from God, and they established as their beliefs things that were contrary to Scripture. So we have in this brief account, in Adventism’s own book of history, the clear understanding that these people were not Christian, did not understand the Bible, and did not establish biblical doctrines.
Nikki: You know, I’ve had people tell me that they believe they can believe the Fundamental Beliefs without believing in Ellen, that they can be an Adventist and that all of those beliefs are based on Scripture alone. But if that was the case, there was no need for these visions.
Colleen: That’s right. I think Adventists say that, that they can believe the 28 Fundamentals without Ellen, because they don’t understand that they’re seeing the 28 Fundamentals through an unbiblical grid.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And that is the legacy of Ellen White. Even if Adventists have never read her, they are taught from infancy on how to believe this worldview. So by 1848 they had actually come up with eight basic concepts that defined their views, and these were the eight: The imminent second coming; the twofold ministry of Christ in the heavenly sanctuary (more about that when we get to the Investigative Judgment); the seventh-day Sabbath; now, notice number four, right in the middle of their beliefs, God’s special supernatural enlightenment through Ellen White; five, the duty to proclaim all Three Angels’ Messages; six, conditional immortality and death as a dreamless sleep; seven, the timing of the seven last plagues; and eight, the complete, final extinction of the wicked after the millennium. Now, it’s interesting that that was 1848. It wasn’t for another ten years that Ellen White had her Great Controversy vision. And that vision became the framework on which the entire Adventist worldview was built and held together. All of those original doctrines were included in that vision, with a lot of other details that were added as she had this revelation from her accompanying angel. Adventists formally incorporated in 1863. Even though they decided not to have a formal “creed,” they did decide to summarize their beliefs in an organized structure. So in 1872 they had their first printed version of their beliefs, 25 by this time, and in 1889 they first published them and put them out there for all the Seventh-day Adventists, not just something hidden up at headquarters. It’s interesting that after Ellen White died, in the early part of the 20th century, the Adventist church in Africa asked for a more complete statement which would help government officials understand who the Adventists were. And at that time, 1931, four Adventist leaders, including the General Conference president, came up with the first official Fundamental Belief statement, and there were 22 of them. Those 22 stood as the Fundamental Beliefs of Seventh-day Adventism until 1980. At 1980 General Conference session, they officially affirmed the 27 Fundamental Beliefs and published a book that explained them and stated them, and in 2005 they added another so that now there are 28 Fundamental Beliefs. And that is the history of how Adventists came up with their creed, to be sure, even though they don’t call it a creed.
Nikki: And I want to say, one of the most interesting things to me about all of these repackaging of the Fundamental Beliefs is that they spend a significant amount of time hammering out the words of each of these Fundamental Beliefs. I remember in 2005 when they added the 28th Fundamental Belief. And I remember that they spent a lot of time –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – working out the words in that. And I’ve noticed that they will drop words or add words.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And it seems like they are working really hard to cover up any kind of exposure that these Fundamental Beliefs might point to.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: So I know one of them was that Ellen White was a “continuing and authoritative source of truth.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And they changed that after people said, “Wait a minute. What do you mean “source of truth”?
Colleen: They’ve changed it to say she has “prophetic authority.” That was only done in 2015. That’s a recent change.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s a cover-up. It doesn’t mean there’s any change in their attitude towards her, it just means there’s a change in how they talk about her, so people can’t say, “‘Source,’ she’s a ‘source,’ that means she has scriptural authority,” which actually she does, but they refuse to admit it.
Nikki: Yeah, they absolutely believe it. And she – it’s all over her writings that she believed that.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And in fact, G.A. Irwin, President of the General Conference from 1897 to 1901, wrote in 1911 that Ellen White – actually, they called her writings the Spirit of Prophecy, as you know.
Colleen: Absolutely. They still do, um-hmm.
Nikki: He said, “It is from the standpoint of the light that has come through the Spirit of Prophecy, Mrs. White’s writings, that the question will be considered, believing as we do that the Spirit of Prophecy is the only infallible interpreter of Bible principles, since it is Christ through this agency giving the real meaning of His own words. So they do what they can to cover up how much of a source Ellen White really was for them so that when someone reads that, they’re not going to read exactly what they mean by it. And they did the same thing on their stance with the Scriptures. One of their earlier doctrines on the Holy Scriptures is that it was the full revelation of God’s will. Well, they had to take that out because now Ellen White has added the health reform, dress reform, Sabbath-keeping, so in order to hold her up, they had to lower the authority of Scripture.
Colleen: They say she is the infallible interpreter of truth, not the full revelation of truth. But it’s the same thing because Adventists all learn this. They learn the worldview that Ellen White established. They learn the Ellen White hermeneutic for looking at Scripture, and they don’t even know it’s from Ellen. They don’t even know that Christians don’t see the words in Scripture the same way. This is intentional, it’s clever, it’s very well crafted, and it’s almost invisible. It’s almost invisible, except when you look at Scripture and you understand what it says about Jesus, the light starts to come on, and you start to see Adventists can’t see what it’s actually saying.
Nikki: That’s was one of the things that was surprising to me. I’ve shared on here before shortly after I had my son I really wanted to understand what we believed. Just that sentence betrays a lot, doesn’t it –
Colleen: Yes! [Laughter.]
Nikki: – what we believed? It wasn’t personally owned, it was what do we corporately say about this and that?
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And so I went to my mother-in-law, who was a pastor’s wife and knew Ellen White very well and knew the Bible, and I said, “I want to study this. Where do I read all that stuff about what happened, the war in heaven and all the pre-Creation stuff?” because I wanted to start at the beginning, that’s the logical beginning.
Colleen: Because origins determine the end.
Nikki: Yeah. That’s where it all starts. You start at A and then you get to Z. And she said, “Nikki, it’s not there.” They don’t tell us what’s the Bible and what’s Ellen.
Colleen: No, they don’t.
Nikki: It’s all one and the same.
Colleen: That’s right. So, Nikki, how does Adventism perpetrate this worldview on its children?
Nikki: I found an article that was helpful in explaining this. They do this so many ways, but this is a pretty current article that was found on adventistworld.org. It was written by Linda Mei Lin Koh, if you want to look it up, and she writes about how to pass on the Adventist faith to children.
Colleen: Isn’t that so telling, the “Adventist faith?” Christians have faith in Jesus, saving faith in Jesus. No, but Adventists have “Adventist faith.”
Nikki: Yes, this is about teaching the Fundamentals. This is the Fundamental Beliefs, and she says it doesn’t need to be difficult. So she begins with a study that came out by George Barna’s research, and he asserts that by the age of 13 a child is pretty much who they will be for the rest of their life in terms of their beliefs and their values and their morals. And I realize that this is not an Adventist research group, but I do want to say there are so many adults who come to faith. We cannot eliminate the power of the Holy Spirit to change the heart and the life of a person.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: The Holy Spirit doesn’t only have until 13, but I just wanted to say that. So she begins with that, and then she adds an Ellen White quote saying that it’s really important that we teach our children because they are more open to these things.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: So here are some examples on how to teach the Fundamentals, okay? She begins with food. This is a Fundamental.
Colleen: Of course, food. [Laughter.]
Nikki: She tells them that during mealtimes Mom can ask the children what they like or dislike about their meal, and then they can all discuss the importance of making good choices because our body is the temple of God.
Colleen: Oh, goodness. And that’s why Adventists almost all have disordered eating.
Nikki: So you have these little ones, who are incredibly – we are most impressionable in these young, early ages, who are hearing this. They hear all of truth and reality from their parents; right?
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And they’re hearing about how to eat. These same kids might grow up and say, “Yeah, I never read Ellen White.”
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: But they know how to eat; right?
Colleen: Which is no meat.
Nikki: Exactly. And depending on how, you know, devout you are, maybe no dairy either.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: So then she also offers an app for your phone that will let you play games, you can learn about Ellen and the pioneers of the Adventist Church, and she encourages them to watch movies with them. One is called Tell the World: The Inspiring Story of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and she says that this highlights the Advent Movement and the role of Ellen White in the founding of our church. And again, I want to remind our listeners, this is how you teach children –
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: – the Fundamentals of their faith.
Colleen: This is actually brainwashing.
Nikki: Yes, it is. Then she says to use storytelling to teach about matters of finance, and she tells the story of a father who talks about a family who was poor and didn’t know where they’d get their next meal from, but they prayed and they paid their tithe anyway, and the next day there was food at the door. So now we’re telling stories of miracles to support giving money to the church even if you can’t feed your children. She moves on to spiritual gifts, and she says to involve children in real life experiences. I have to read this quote. She says, “Getting our children and teens involved in real-life experiences is another effective way of teaching the beliefs of the church. For example, when you teach about spiritual gifts, get your children to identify their spiritual gifts, and then encourage them to serve in church programs and other community projects. If Justin has the gift of singing, let him join the children’s choir to sing at a senior citizen home on Sabbath. For Maria, who is gifted artistically, let her help paint the backdrop for Vacation Bible School.”
Colleen: Of course.
Nikki: Again, they’re stealing words of Scripture. They’re calling talents “spiritual gifts.” There’s no list in Scripture for a spiritual gift of singing or art. But this is causing them to feel like they’re doing God’s work that God gifted them to do to go and promote the Adventist message. So listen to her examples for teaching them how to grow in Christ. She says that they need to be involved in prayer activities, like popcorn prayers or musical prayers. And then she says, “Take your children to the park or bus stop on Sabbath to share some tracts with others and show them how and what to say when they give a tract to someone.”
Colleen: Oh, my goodness.
Nikki: Again, fundamentals of their faith.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: So this one is the most horrible one.
Colleen: Okay.
Nikki: She says, “Capitalize on current events to teach Bible truths.”
Colleen: Oh.
Nikki: “Today’s children are bombarded with a lot of bad news from the media that may cause anxiety and fear. This is the most conducive time for parents to draw their children’s attention to Bible truths and our beliefs.”
Colleen: Oh, my.
Nikki: Use newspaper clippings (under your discretion, of course) about recent tragic events and have your children read them. Allow them to ask questions and lead them to explore how this fits into the big picture of the great controversy between God and Satan. Relate these events to the promise of a better home with Jesus in heaven. For those who died, explain to them about death as taught in the Bible and the church’s position regarding what happens to those who die.” We know that’s soul sleep.
Colleen: They cease to exist!
Nikki: So use them – while they’re feeling fearful and anxious, use that moment, capitalize on that moment to tell them about this great controversy between Satan and God and the fact that when you die you just sleep in the dirt.
Colleen: Nikki, this is horrible. This is a brainwashing tactic.
Nikki: And there are so many people who have memories of being terrified –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – of these things. And you know, I have to say, this to me goes beyond spiritual abuse –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and this enters into psychological abuse.
Colleen: I agree. If you grow up and are terrified with things that you don’t even understand where the terror is coming from, for example, I’ll just refer to my teens when I literally could not go to sleep at night until 2:00 in the morning, sometimes later, because I was so fearful that I may have committed the unpardonable sin without intending to and that I might have an unconfessed sin, I might have spoken a secular word on the Sabbath, and I was racking my brain and begging God not to kill me, not to condemn me for an unconfessed sin. I was 15 when I was doing this. If a person grows up to adulthood still feeling anxious and fearful about current events and whether Jesus is going to come in that little black cloud in the sky that will get bigger and bigger, and there He’s going to be, and am I ready? People go to counseling for things like this.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And the process of counseling tries to separate the emotion from the information so that you’re not inappropriately responding to stimulus in your own life.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: This brainwashing is deliberate, it’s effective, it’s known by people. You take a person in a traumatized position, with all those stress hormones running through their bodies, with deep fear, and you tell them what you want them to believe, and they will always associate that belief when something triggers that fear.
Nikki: Even if they don’t know where it came from, even if they can’t remember, if they’ve never read Ellen.
Colleen: So this is how they recommend teaching children. You know, it’s interesting, I remember hearing my fellow Adventists saying, so proudly, “Well, we Adventists have Cradle Roll, where we actually have curriculum for our babies and toddlers. Christians just have day care and nurseries.” But I realize now, that’s the best time to brainwash children.
Nikki: Yeah, and she actually touches on that too. She says that you can use different songs. She actually recommends My God Is So Big and Who Made the Beautiful Rainbow to teach them about Creation and then have them roleplay Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments and talk about the importance of obeying God and our parents.
Colleen: Of course.
Nikki: There’s nothing here about who Jesus is.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: There’s nothing here about what He did.
Colleen: The gospel is completely missing.
Nikki: There’s no glory for God. There’s no Christ exalting. There’s no inerrancy or trustworthiness of Scripture. None of that is there. These children are being taught the scary, unique fundamentals of Ellen White.
Colleen: That’s right. They’re being given her worldview so that when they read the Bible, they will read the Bible through her eyes. And the Fundamental Beliefs that we’re going to go through in the next few weeks are reflecting that worldview. They’re not reflecting biblical truth. As we start this series, going through these Fundamental Beliefs, we wanted everyone who hears this to understand a couple of things. Number one, we do not hate Adventists. Every one of us, Nikki and I both, every former Adventist that I know, has some Adventist family and friends that they’re still praying for, that they love very deeply, that they want to know the gospel. We are doing this not because we hate Adventism and want to expose it. We are doing this because we love Adventists, and we love the Lord Jesus. His gospel has transformed us, has given us hope, has removed our fear, and we want our loved ones, our Adventist loved ones, to know Jesus as well. And before we go through these Fundamental Beliefs, it’s really important for people to understand that we as Adventists were taught a worldview that we didn’t know we were taught. So if you’re a former Adventist or a questioning Adventist and you’re hearing us, please know that you hear the words of Scripture in a certain light because of the way you grew up, even if you never read Ellen. It took me a long time to figure this out. But I look now at the Fundamental Beliefs, and I realize every single one of them is tainted because my head was Adventist, and I never understood that these Fundamental Beliefs were reflecting Ellen White and a false worldview. She is at the core. Her Great Controversy worldview is the lens through which we understood everything. And we want Jesus to be clear. We want to show who He is and that these Fundamental Beliefs obscure Him and, in fact, do not teach Him. But He is real, His gospel is real. He went to the cross, He paid for our sin, He broke the bonds of death, He broke the curse of the law, and He’s given us new life when we believe in Him, and we want that for each one who hears this.
Nikki: And I want to add to that that when I was an Adventist, I believed – as I was leaving, as I was looking at things, I believed that I could just pluck out the Adventist parts of what I believed, because I had the gospel, I just had all of that extra-special stuff that I talked about at the beginning of the podcast. But I realized that I couldn’t just pluck out pieces of Adventism and retain anything, because even the gospel message that I understood as an Adventist was different from what Christians believed, and I didn’t know that. I thought we shared the gospel, we just had some extra stuff. But everything that she taught, about God, about why Jesus came, about our very need, was different, different from what Scripture teaches clearly. And it was upsetting, it was upsetting to think that I had been told what Christians believed, and I was lied to, even about that.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I want to encourage people to just hang in there with us, even if you’re certain that you believe like we do. Hear us out, and just hear what we believe, because maybe we don’t believe what you do. And maybe it’s a good idea to examine us against the word of God, and I would also encourage anyone who has not yet listened to our podcasts on Hebrews, Colossians, and Ephesians to try to do that alongside this series –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – because that will lay a foundation that will truly expose what we are going to look at in the weeks ahead.
Colleen: We want you to know Jesus, and if you haven’t repented of your sin and trusted Him, it’s not too late. Today if you hear His voice, enter His rest. He’s waiting, and He loves you, and He’s died for you, and He’s calling you. If you hear His voice, respond. Don’t forget to write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Visit proclamationmagazine.com, and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and write a review for us wherever you listen to podcasts. And we look forward to walking through these next few weeks with you, and we encourage you to hang in there with us and to ask the Lord to show you what He wants you to know as we proceed.
Nikki: Bye for now.
- Inspecting Adventism’s Beliefs—God the Holy Spirit | 114 - October 17, 2022
- Inspecting Adventism’s Beliefs—Unity in the Body of Christ | 113 - October 17, 2022
- Inspecting Adventism’s Beliefs—The Remnant and Its Mission | 112 - September 7, 2022