Inspecting Adventism’s Beliefs—The Word of God | 100

Colleen and Nikki discuss the Adventism’s doctrine on the Bible. They find that this doctrine creates the foundation for their worldview called “The Great Controversy” . Transcription by Gwen Billington.

 

Nikki:  Welcome to Former Adventist podcast.  I’m Nikki Stevenson.

Colleen:  And I’m Colleen Tinker.

Nikki:  In our last episode, we discussed the history of how these beliefs came to be created, adopted, and eventually published.  And we talked about Ellen White’s story of origins and how it lays a foundation for everything else Adventism teaches.  If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, we encourage you to go back and check it out.  Now, fundamental to the discussion of Adventist doctrines is the reality that their beliefs are indivisible from this story of origins, which was allegedly given to Ellen by God.  And central to this story is her Great Controversy vision, which is the backdrop for every single Fundamental Belief we will examine in this series.  As time has passed on, the Adventists have been pressed by Christians to give an account of what they teach on various orthodox Christian beliefs.  While the 28 Fundamentals include statements on the Scriptures, the Trinity, salvation, and many other details of the Christian faith, when we scratch the surface of these statements, we’re able to see how they’re carefully crafted to conceal the non-Christian foundation that holds up the entire Seventh-day Adventist system with the glue of Ellen White.  Today we will begin by examining their first Fundamental Belief on the Holy Scriptures.  But before we get started, we want to remind you, if you have questions or comments for us, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com.  You can visit proclamationmagazine.com to view past issues of the magazine or to sign up for our weekly emails containing new online articles and other ministry news.  You can also find a place there to donate to the ministry if you’d like to do so.  And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and please, leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  Now, Colleen, before we launch into this particular belief, can you share with us what you thought about the Bible as a Seventh-day Adventist?  How did you interact with it, and what was your understanding of its value and trustworthiness?

Colleen:  You know, that’s an interesting question that I’ve been pondering for a while.  I actually did learn that it was God’s word to us and that it was true.  That had qualifications in my head, but I did believe that it was true in some way, and I can’t even explain that because as I got older and I began to have more and more questions about Adventism, ultimately I did come to believe that if the Bible didn’t support something, I had to see it as probably not true.  The Bible had to be true.  But at the same time, I really did believe that there were cultural biases in the Bible, that the Old Testament was full of stories that just look shocking to us today, like God killing the enemies of Israel and the mass murders of people that were considered enemies and David crying out for God to kill his enemies and avenge himself.  And I understood those passages to reflect a primitive mindset.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Isn’t it interesting?  Because now I look at it and I think, “Where did that idea that men were primitive come from?”  Because if we actually believe, as Adventists taught us, that creation is true, then God created a perfect, un-primitive man, so where did we get the idea that the Israelites were primitive?  But I did believe that.  So I learned that God revealed Himself and took care of them and required bloody sacrifices because that’s how they understood the world, it was how all the nations understood the world.  So there were definitely cultural biases for primitive, prehistoric or early historic man, and so the Bible reflected that.  And then in the New Testament there were things I couldn’t quite explain, like women covering their heads and women not speaking in church and what did Paul mean, and perhaps he was just, you know, reflecting the things of his day and making statements that were sort of a form of control over women.  I didn’t really understand what to do with some of that stuff, but over it all, bottom line, I believed that the Bible was inspired exactly the same way Ellen White was inspired.  And that was, God gave thoughts to the writers, and the writers were expected to record those thoughts the best they knew how from their primitive milieus, and maybe if God had given those same thoughts to more advanced people, it would have come out differently, but He gave them to primitive people, and we got a sort of tempered truth, truth that was given to people in thoughts that they then worked out in their own primitive understandings and language, so that essentially the Bible did have hard-to-understand things that might even be slightly erroneous.  That was kind of a long answer for the question.  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  No, but it’s interesting.  So with all of that in mind, how did you interact with the Bible?

Colleen:  Well, now, that’s interesting too because I couldn’t understand the Bible very well.  And I remember that most of my life I did feel like I needed to read it, it was a requirement for me, but I remember years and years of my life, while I was in school, being able to read almost nothing except the Psalms.  I could understand crying out to God for vengeance or moaning to God about the circumstances of my life, and the Psalms seemed to be where I would go because they didn’t seem as confusing to me.  But I didn’t read 1 and 2 Chronicles, I didn’t read very much of the New Testament, because it didn’t actually make sense to me.  The Psalms made sense.  Acts bored me to death, and I actually felt very bored and irritated.  I have no idea why, I couldn’t have explained it to you, but I felt irritated by the gospels –

Nikki:  Wow.

Colleen:  – which I find interesting now.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  What about you, Nikki?  How did you relate to the Bible?

Nikki:  Well, you know, I did believe that it was completely trustworthy.  I definitely would have said it was infallible.  I actually think I might have even said it was inerrant –

Colleen:  Interesting.

Nikki:  – but that would have been a situation where I was holding two dueling beliefs at the same time because I did believe that there were some mistakes or details that the disciples didn’t remember correctly –

Colleen:  Ahhh.

Nikki:  – which is why you could have two blind men in one gospel and only one in the other.  For some reason I allowed for some human error, but I would still probably have said it was inerrant, so that was pretty ignorant of me.  I believed that all of Ellen White’s precreation history and Great Controversy was in the Bible.  And so I thought that I could believe all of the things that were unique about Adventism without knowing her, because I didn’t read her.  So in the same way that she was able to shed additional light on Adam and Eve, who were in the Bible, and she could talk about their clothes of light or the rainbow snake with the wings –

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  – she had details that weren’t in the Bible, but Adam and Eve and the snake were in the Bible.  So I thought the same thing about the Great Controversy and the war in heaven.  I thought it was all in the Bible, she just had additional details to fill it out for us.

Colleen:  Yeah.

Nikki:  I really believed that all of the things that were unique to Adventism were sola scriptura, so I thought I could separate that.  I believed the book, the physical book, was holy and that I should not even put a pencil on top of it.  I believed that if my house was on fire, I would need to do everything I could before God to get my Bibles out of the house.

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  Yeah!  I did too.

Nikki:  [Laughter.]  But at the same time, I didn’t feel convicted to read it regularly and understand it because I didn’t think that was helpful for me, since I wasn’t as educated in Adventism as I thought I should have been and so I didn’t think I actually had the tools to understand the Bible, if that makes sense.  So I didn’t believe it was clear.  I believed I needed my Adventism to help me understand what I needed to.  I did read it, and as I got older I loved reading through the epistles.  But I just had this very strange – the Bible is really holy, be very careful how you treat it, but I didn’t live submitted to it, if that makes sense.

Colleen:  Right.  It totally makes sense.  And actually, I felt that way.  And I really realize now that the way I considered the actual physical book to be holy is idolatry.  I mean, I was idolizing and treating as holy something that came off of a printing press instead of understanding that the words inside represented a holy God and could not reflect error.  I didn’t understand it that way.

Nikki:  Yeah, there was some kind of a mystical element to it.  I used to treat it kind of like an 8 Ball.

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  If I knew I needed to hear from God and this is where God would speak, it was almost like, you know, shake the 8 Ball, flip it over, and look for the answer.  I would close my eyes and run my finger down the page and then open them and read and think, “Is this what God wants me to know?”  I just didn’t know how to read it.  I didn’t know hermeneutics until I was in college, and I remember asking my professor, “Why don’t they teach this to us in Sabbath school?”  And she was stumped.  She said, “I don’t know.”

Colleen:  Ha-ha-ha-ha.  I do now, but that’s very interesting.  And you know what?  I didn’t understand the hermeneutics either.  I didn’t know how to read it.  I never learned to read it in context.  I didn’t learn to read whole chapters at a time.  I believed that every command in Scripture was for me and every promise God made to every person could be translated as for me.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And every warning was for me.  And I do remember back in the ’70s, Glenn Coon had a series, kind of like a traveling series on the ABC’s of Prayer that was very popular within Adventism.  I think it was the ’70s, it might have even been a little earlier.  He taught that anything that God said to somebody in the Bible could be applied to you.  So for example, he would tell people, “If you are having lustful thoughts about a woman who is not your wife, remember what God said to the snake in the Garden of Eden, ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman,’ and you claim that promise for yourself, and God will put enmity between you and the woman you’re not supposed to lust after.”  Now, we know now that was a horrific way to read Scripture.  That’s not what that meant at all.  Of course, the Bible gives us commands against immorality, but that’s not the way to use the Bible.  But he taught a generation of Adventists to pray that way.  ABC, and the third “C” was to claim, and that was like, you find that promise and you apply it to yourself, and I believed that was true.  Any promise made to anybody could be for me.  So how did we get to this place with this crazy understanding of Scripture?  And you know, I don’t know how a modern Adventist might answer this, and I think it would depend on whether or not they were historic or progressive, but the fact is, every Adventist I know would have, consciously or unconsciously, that worldview in their background in understanding the Bible, that legacy of Ellen White.  Whether they think it’s her or not, it’s from her.  And we’re going to look at the first Fundamental Belief of Adventism today, and we’re going to discover how this Fundamental Belief really is patterned after Ellen White, and we’re going to use our little secret source.  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  We’re using the book Seventh-day Adventists Believe.  Now, this book is published by the Ministerial Committee of the General Conference.  It contains all the 28 Fundamental Beliefs.  Prior to this one coming out in 2018, after the General Conference added a 28th Fundamental Belief after having been only 27 between the years 1980 and 2005, after having added that, they published a new version of this book, but it’s interesting, the 28th Fundamental Belief was added many years before they actually wrote the updated book, and you still have the previous book at this point; right, Nikki?

Nikki:  Yes.  Yes, I’m using the 27, um-hmm.

Colleen:  We’ll see that these books are really very similar, and the Fundamental Belief has not changed, but these books have whole chapters explaining to the Adventist members how to understand the Fundamental Beliefs.  Now, this is really significant because on their official website, the Seventh-day Adventist organization publishes their 28 Fundamental Beliefs, and you can find them.  You can go online and you can read them.  But the contents of this book are not anywhere I’ve been able to find online.  There’s no mention of this book in any public website or any public place.  This book is sold in Adventist Book Centers, and you can find it online through the Adventist Book Center, and I believe it’s even now on Amazon.  But the fact is, it’s not widely known, except within Adventism, that this book even exists.  So when Christians come along and want to examine Adventism and read their Fundamental Beliefs, they go online, they read the beliefs, and as we’ll show you, they’re carefully crafted to hide what they really believe.  But this book explains them, and it’s not even hard to see that everything they say in their Fundamental Beliefs is written to protect Ellen White.  So I’m going to go ahead and start by reading this first Fundamental Belief, and we’ll talk our way through it.  It’s called “The Word of God.”  “The Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, are the written Word of God, given by divine inspiration.  The inspired authors spoke and wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.  In this Word, God has committed to humanity the knowledge necessary for salvation.  The Holy Scriptures are the supreme, authoritative, and the infallible revelation of His will.  They are the standard of character, the test of experience, the definitive revealer of doctrines, and the trustworthy record of God’s acts in history.”  And that is the Fundamental Belief, and it’s followed by a list of texts, which I will just read the text addresses here, I won’t read the whole text.  Psalm 119:105, Proverbs 30:5-6, Isaiah 8:20, John 17:17, 1 Thessalonians 2:13, 2 Timothy 3:16-17, Hebrews 4:12, and 2 Peter 1:20-21.  Nikki, as I read this, there were some differences, weren’t there, between my updated version of this and your version from the 1988 version of the book.  Could you read the change that most stood out to you?

Nikki:  Yeah.  Well, there were several changes, but the one that really jumped out to me is in the last sentence.  It says of the Scriptures, “They are the standard of character, the test of experience, the authoritative revealer of the doctrines, and the trustworthy record of God’s acts in history.”  And what stood out to me was in your version it said that they were the definitive revealer of the doctrines, and I remember when they edited the Fundamental Beliefs, they edited their wording on Ellen White, who they once called an authoritative source for truth.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  How might these be connected?

Colleen:  I think that’s a really important change.  I didn’t realize until we were just sitting here doing this that this change had been made in this doctrine, and I think we can talk about it and make an accurate assessment.  Removing the word “authoritative” – and you know another thing that’s different?  Your version said “the authoritative revealer of the doctrines;” right?

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Mine says, “The definitive revealer of doctrines.”  It leaves out the article.

Nikki:  Wow.

Colleen:  And the thing about that is, the word “the” grammatically is a definite article.  It means not just any doctrines, it means the doctrines.  So they’re leaving it open for the change of doctrine, for the fact that they’ve added a doctrine, for the fact that doctrines might change.  They’ve taken out the definite article and just left it as doctrines, which could be fluid.

Nikki:  Yeah, this eliminates the closed canon and the sufficiency of the Scriptures.

Colleen:  Exactly.  And changing it from authoritative to definitive means definitive doesn’t have the last word.  Definitive just is saying the Bible defines what the doctrines mean.  To call it authoritative would mean the Bible itself would have to actually say that the doctrine is this instead of just defining what it means.  And they have to do this, to be really fair, because of the criticism they’ve received for Ellen White and for their deceptiveness.  They have to make this change because their Great Controversy doctrine, their doctrine of the sanctuary service and Jesus’ incomplete atonement are nowhere found in Scripture.  Scripture could never be said to be authoritative on those doctrines, but they’re changing that word now to say “definitive,” meaning we can show you from Scripture what this means, we’ll define it using Bible words.  It’s to protect themselves from being told, “You’re saying it’s authoritative, and this is not there.”  It’s very subtle, but it’s so typical.  It’s like what they did with Ellen White –

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  – and we’ll look at that more when we come to Fundamental Belief 18, but they changed that doctrine from saying she was a “continuing and authoritative source of truth,” in the 2000s they changed that to “she has prophetic – she speaks with prophetic authority.”  Well, if you unpack the words, there’s not much difference in what they actually mean to the members, but they can’t be criticized for using the word “authority” and “source.”  So that’s kind of what they’ve done here.  They’ve removed a place to be criticized.

Nikki:  They’re very careful.  They’re very careful with their words.

Colleen:  Well, that’s what the Adventists say about the Word of God.  And it’s just maybe important to mention one other thing before we look at what the Bible says about itself as the Word of God.  But the sentence, “In this Word, God has committed to humanity the knowledge necessary for salvation.”  There’s a problem with that sentence.  How would you define the problem, Nikki?

Nikki:  I think because I have so much in my head about what they teach, I can see that there is room there for Gnosticism and continued special revelation.

Colleen:  The Bible actually does not reveal knowledge necessary for salvation.  It reveals a person.  It reveals our sovereign God, the Lord Jesus, who became incarnate and came to us as a man, always fully God, who lived, died, and rose again to save us from our sin, to justify us, to bring complete atonement, and to reconcile us to God.  So the Bible’s primary purpose is not giving us necessary knowledge, and this might seem like nitpicking, but as we talk through the explanation given in this chapter, we’re going to see this is very intentional.  For Adventists, it’s that special knowledge that counts, the special knowledge that only Ellen White was able to give them, the special knowledge that sets them apart from all other religions because they have a unique doctrine of the sanctuary service, 1844, the Investigative Judgment, and the Great Controversy.  And that knowledge, according to Adventists, is the foundation and framework for salvation.

Nikki:  Yeah.  And the Scripture that supports all of Ellen White’s unique teachings are little nuggets, hidden treasures throughout Scripture that you’ve got to go in and mine and string together to support this special knowledge.

Colleen:   Well, Nikki, as you were studying, we each used a book that we’ve studied in the past.  I used Wayne Grudem’s book Bible Doctrine to see what he says and how he explains the authority and the character of Scripture, and which book did you refer to?

Nikki:  I went back and looked at Taking God at His Word by Kevin DeYoung.

Colleen:  And it was interesting because we both came up with very similar things, so that within Christianity, theologians and Christians and Bible teachers have a consistent understanding of what the Bible is.  Nikki, as you were studying, what did you discover were like four major teachings that the Bible gives us about itself?

Nikki:  So the Adventist Fundamental Belief says nothing about sufficiency, but Orthodox Christians know that the Bible is sufficient for everything that we need as believers.  God has revealed Himself fully inside Scripture, and the canon is closed.  We also know that Scripture is clear.  There are parts of Scripture that are a little harder to understand than other parts, and some people may be more gifted for teaching than other people, but when you use normal rules of reading, it is clear.  We don’t need a magistrate to tell us what Scripture means.  What we need to understand about God and what He did to save us is easy for anyone to understand.  Children in Sunday school can understand this, and what is interesting to me is that it’s inside of the more obscure, difficult-to-understand passages that Adventism builds its gospel message.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  It’s not in the clear.  It’s always in the confusing.

Colleen:  The obscure –

Nikki:  Yes.

Colleen:  – the apocalyptic language.  Yeah.

Nikki:  Yes.

Colleen:  That’s a great point.

Nikki:  And Christians are very clear on the authority of Scripture.  It is the last word.  The last word always goes to God.  We don’t ever allow the teachings of anyone else to take precedence over Scripture or even to interpret Scripture for us.  The Holy Spirit illuminates the Word of God.  One of the things that I thought was interesting that Kevin DeYoung said about the authority of Scripture is that “To trust completely in the Bible is to trust in the character and assurances of God more than we trust in our own ability to reason and explain.”  He directly connects how we see God and what we know about God with how we view Scripture and how we interact with it.

Colleen:  You know, I loved some summary statements that Wayne Grudem made about the sufficiency of Scripture, because that was a concept I had never heard as an Adventist.  Obviously not, because we had an extrabiblical prophet that commended Scripture to us, that gave us her permission and mandate to study Scripture, as if she were over it.  So I had never heard of sufficiency.  But it’s interesting.  This is one thing that Wayne Grudem said in his book, “Scripture contained all the words of God that He intended His people to have at each stage of redemptive history.”  I thought that was so interesting because when you think about the Pentateuch that Moses wrote, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, that was all His people needed, all that law, all that history, at the time it was written, and then, as the nation grew, there came the rest of the Old Testament, and then Jesus came, and then the apostles wrote down the New Testament.  And he continues, “Scripture contained all the words of God He intended His people to have at each stage of redemptive history and that it now contains everything we need God to tell us for salvation, for trusting Him perfectly, and for obeying Him perfectly.”  What this means is we don’t count any guidance from God equal to Scripture, we don’t add to Scripture, we don’t have prophets or writings that add to Scripture or are Scripture’s interpreter, no modern revelations from God that command our conscience, and we can’t add any more sins or requirements that are not included in Scripture.  And if you really take Scripture at its word, when you think about what Adventism has done to the New Testament with adding food laws that are not included in the New Testament for Christians, with the fulfilled law, when you think of Ellen White adding the whole Investigative Judgment, the whole business of Jesus up in heaven poring over the books, it becomes a very shocking thing to think of what Adventism has done, trying to say Scripture supports it.  What did you learn about revelation, general and special revelation, Nikki?  Because those things are really important for a Christian to understand, because the cults confuse them.

Nikki:  Well, he talked about general revelation under that fourth attribute, that the Scriptures are necessary.  He said, “General revelation is not enough to save us.  We cannot know God savingly by means of personal experience and human reason.  We need God’s word to tell us how to live, who Christ is, and how He saved us.”  So general revelation on its own tells us that God exists, but it’s this special revelation that reveals to us what we need to know of Him personally.

Colleen:  Yes.  And Romans 1:18-21 overtly states how people, even unbelievers who don’t know Jesus, can know that God is real.  Paul says that God’s divine nature and eternal power can be clearly seen in what has been made so that all men are without excuse.  And he further says that men knew God but suppressed that knowledge with their wickedness by refusing to acknowledge Him as God and refusing to give thanks.  So Scripture is very clear that creation reveals the existence of God and His power.  That’s not special revelation for salvation, but it is the general revelation that there is an almighty, eternal, sovereign God.  People who trust and believe that revelation will believe the truth about Jesus as God reveals it to them.

Nikki:  And we know that God gives us that in His word.  Like you said, this is our special revelation.  Well, orthodoxy says that the Bible is the Word of God, so that when we read this special revelation and we understand what we’re looking at, that these are the words of God Himself, we can trust them and believe them, but now, neo-orthodoxy comes along –

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  – and skews the Bible and the trustworthiness of the Bible, and it says the Bible isn’t the Word of God, the Bible contains the Word of God, or it becomes the Word of God, or maybe the event in which God speaks to us through the Bible, like when you open it up and say, you know, you’re going to claim that promise for yourself, then it becomes the Word of God.  So these are all neo-orthodoxy attempts to distance all of these claims of inspiration that orthodox Christians give the word.  And now the authority is a little bit different, and now you can tweak it a little bit, you can make it work with other things, and this is the position that Adventism has –

Colleen:  Yes!

Nikki:  – as it moves through all of these other Fundamental Beliefs.  And you’ll find – if we go back, and as we go back and look through this chapter that fleshes out that first Fundamental Belief –

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  – we see that there is nothing in here about the sufficiency of the Scriptures.  There is nothing about the clarity of the Scriptures.

Colleen:  No.

Nikki:  A lot of these things that are orthodox statements of truth about God’s word are completely missing in order to accommodate the neo-orthodox position of Adventism.

Colleen:  Which makes Scriptures somewhat relative to our personal experience with them or to an outside source.

Nikki:  When I was learning how to read Statements of Belief from other churches after I left Adventism, somebody wisely said to me, “You’re not only looking for what’s there, you’re looking for what’s missing.”  And what’s missing from this Adventist Statement of Belief is the inerrancy of Scripture, and we’re going to see that on display, without overtly being stated, when we look through this chapter.  And then the other thing is when we think about Scripture and our view of it, we have to look at what Christ’s view of Scripture was.  How did He read it?  What did He say about it?  And that is where we then approach Scripture from.

Colleen:  It’s interesting that it wasn’t until I had sat in a Christian church under a really good teacher for several years that I began to understand that Jesus confirmed the authenticity of the Old Testament.  He never, for example, treated the story of Jonah as an Adventist pastor had once said in a Sabbath school class I attended, where he said, “Well, the story of Jonah is more true than if it actually happened.”  No.  Jesus referred to Jonah as a historical figure that really happened.  Jesus constantly quoted the Old Testament and used the Old Testament to show what He was here for, what He was doing, the nature of the Jews, who they were, He treated and referred to the Old Testament as God’s eternal word that was historically accurate.  That was a shock to me, and I began to understand that because of how Jesus treated the Old Testament, I could believe it.  I didn’t have to think it was just legendized or mythologized stories of ancient people who didn’t quite understand reality.  No, Jesus considered the Old Testament authoritative and historical.

Nikki:  Down to the grammar.

Colleen:  Exactly.  So when we look through this book that explains the Adventists’ belief on the Word of God, I just have to say the first thing that stood out to me in this chapter is they are explaining general revelation to explain their relationship to the Bible.  And it almost sounds right, but in this they have a paragraph where they say, “Some people see the evidence of God,” and they use texts from the Bible, “‘The heavens declare the glory of God’…the sunshine, the rain, the hills, and the streams all testify of a loving Creator.”  So they are saying nature reveals the existence of God.  Now, we talked about that already as an orthodox position.  But then they say this, and the Bible never says this.  They say, “Others see evidence of a caring God in the happy relationships and extraordinary love between friends and family members, husband and wife, parents and children.”  Now, it’s not that those things don’t reveal some aspect of God’s attributes that He can share with His creation; it’s that the Bible doesn’t say that is how we know God.  And because they have taken something the Bible doesn’t say, “We can see the evidence of God in the relationships between humans,” they then go to the next logical step, which says these facts, then, mean that they can see these same things causing great damage: “The same rain can turn into a rushing flood that drowns families; the same lofty hill can crack, crumble – and then crush.  And human relationships often involve jealousy, envy, anger, and even hatred that leads to murder.  The world around us gives mixed signals, presenting more questions than answers.”  And here it is, Nikki: “It reveals a conflict between good and evil, but does not explain how and why the conflict started, who is fighting, why, or who will ultimately win.”  What have they just said?

Nikki:  They have now just laid their foundation of the Great Controversy within this first Fundamental Belief.

Colleen:  Yes.  And they are saying the Bible reveals the existence of the Great Controversy, but doesn’t tell us everything about it.

Nikki:  So it’s insufficient.

Colleen:  Yeah.

Nikki:  Right out of the gate.  They also say, “In love God gave a special revelation of Himself to help us get answers to these question,” these questions that are generated in us, you know, as we see this evil.  They say, “Through both the Old and New Testament He disclosed Himself to us in a specific way, leaving no questions about His character of love.”  Now, if you guys joined us last week, you know that the origin story that Ellen White gives us is that Satan accuses God of not having a loving character, of being unjust and unfair and unkind.  And now God is on trial before all the worlds to see whether or not He has a loving character.  In their doctrine on the Holy Scriptures, they’re now talking about the Great Controversy.

Colleen:  Yes.  And laying this belief that the Bible is the revealer of this controversy, which is not yet decided – that’s a heresy.  They also go on to say – and I find it interesting because of the choice of wording – about the Bible, “Every book, either through symbol or reality, reveals some phase of His work and character.  Jesus’ death on the cross is the ultimate revelation of God’s character.”  But they use the phrase that the Bible reveals “some phase of Jesus’ work.”  That’s not scriptural talk, that’s Ellen White talk.  They are referring to her saying that Jesus has phases in His saving work.  He had the phase of the cross.  He has now entered the phase of the Investigative Judgment that began in 1844, of Him being up in heaven going through the books and deciding whose sins are confessed and whose are not.  Ultimately He will have the phase of being finished and putting the sins on Satan, the scapegoat.  The Bible never speaks of Jesus’ work having phases, but this is written right into the explanatory doctrine of how to read the Bible.

Nikki:  When I got done with this chapter, all I could think was, “This is a giant, deceptive punt.”  They have just punted the ball to support all of the unique Adventist doctrines that are coming.

Colleen:  Yup, exactly.  They’re not actually dealing with Scripture in this explanation.  They’re dealing with how to preserve Ellen White’s authority in the face of a Bible that reveals itself as God’s final exact words that He wants us to know.  You can’t have an extrabiblical prophet if the Bible is authoritative, sufficient, clear, and necessary.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  But they are trying to preserve Ellen while making the Bible fit around her.

Nikki:  And as they present the conflict as being one of questioning God’s character, they move in to the focus of the Scriptures.  And they get to a place where they talk about the purpose of the cross, and they say, “Jesus’ death on the cross is the ultimate revelation of God’s character.  The cross makes this ultimate revelation because it brings together two extremes: man’s unfathomable evil and God’s inexhaustible love.”  And they say, “The cross reveals a God who allowed His only Son to be killed.”  So here again, it’s not describing Ellen White’s special knowledge, but we have the cross revealing God’s character.  We don’t have propitiation, we don’t have justification, we don’t have reconciliation.  We see God’s character.  And then we also see a God who allowed His only Son to be killed.  In Adventism, God did not predetermine that His Son would be the Lamb who was slain.  He did not send His Son to be the Savior of the world in Adventism.  In Adventism, Jesus went before God three times and pleaded with Him to allow Him to come and save humanity.  So He allowed Jesus to die.

Colleen:  That’s very upsetting to me.  The more distance I get from Adventism, the more deeply upsetting it is to me, how they have thoroughly twisted the doctrine of Scripture, the doctrine of Jesus, the doctrine of who we are, the doctrine of our Triune God, they’ve twisted every single truth to preserve their extrabiblical prophet.

Nikki:  They go on to say that Jesus “is at the center stage of the cosmic drama.  Soon His triumph at Calvary will culminate in the elimination of all evil.”

Colleen:  “Cosmic drama,” there’s the Great Controversy again.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  That’s never what the Bible emphasizes.  There’s no Great Controversy as Adventism explains it.  Jesus’ work at the cross is finished.  And to say that the work at Calvary will culminate in the elimination of evil is to support the Adventist belief that Jesus did not complete His atonement at the cross.  Jesus absolutely defeated Satan at the cross.  Now, we have not yet been glorified and taken to live with Him eternally, but we, when we trust Him, are eternally alive and reconciled to Him and with Him.  That is finished.  What He did on the cross was finished.  There’s no finishing going on.  But they’re writing that into the explanation of their understanding of Scripture.  It’s also interesting to me that when they talk about the authorship of Scripture, they make this statement, “The Bible writers claimed they did not originate their messages but received them from divine sources.”  Nikki, do you catch that?

Nikki:  Yeah, yeah, “Divine sources,” plural.

Colleen:  Plural.  Now, that’s stuck in the middle of a paragraph, and the rest of this Fundamental Belief explanation generally refers to the Holy Spirit inspiring the writers, but this word “sources” in there is intentional.  Why do you think?

Nikki:  Because there are multiple ways that they got their special knowledge, their special revelation.  They don’t just credit God.

Colleen:  No.

Nikki:  And it was interesting to me that there were no biblical references to back up the fact that Bible writers claim this.

Colleen:  That’s right.  And Ellen White repeatedly spoke about the “handsome young man” who spoke to her –

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  – and her angel who guided her.  She had messages from angels.  They are allowing for and preparing the readers to understand that their special truth has angels at the source, and the Bible does not have angels as the source.  It’s God’s word.  It’s also significant, where they talk about the inspiration of Scriptures, that they actually come right out and say it – I learned this in school – “Divine revelation was given by inspiration of God to ‘holy men of God’ who were ‘moved by the Holy Spirit.’  These revelations were embodied in human language with all its limitations and imperfections, yet they remained God’s testimony.”  And then here it is, “God inspired men – not words.”  That’s the Adventist position.  God did not give the words of Scripture because God, they cannot say, gave the words of Ellen White.  She even said angels gave them.  But this is an Ellen White definition of inspiration: God inspired men.  Significantly, they have included a helpful quote, two actually, from Ellen White in this chapter, so we understand that this is actually from her.  Here’s the quote: “The Bible is not God’s mode of thought and expression.  Men will often say, ‘Such an expression is not like God,’ but God has not put Himself in words, in logic, in rhetoric on trial in the Bible.  The writers of the Bible were God’s penmen, not His pen.  Inspiration acts not on the man’s words or His expressions but on the man himself, who under the influence of the Holy Ghost is imbued with thoughts.  But the words receive the impress of the individual mind.  The divine mind and will is combined with the human mind and will, thus the utterances of the man are the Word of God.”  Nikki, why does she make this convoluted explanation of inspiration?  This is not how Christians understand inspiration.

Nikki:  She’s trying to deal with the fact that she had error in her own writing.  She’s allowing for error in the Scriptures when she writes this.  The book also asks the question, “Were the prophets as passive as tape recorders that replay exactly what is recorded?”  So we have these kinds of strawman arguments –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – that they’re launching up there, and then they’re using Ellen White to knock them out of the park.

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  And the fact is, this idea of mechanical inspiration or the tape recorders, that’s a strawman argument, and Kevin DeYoung deals with that.  “The orthodox teaching on Bible inspiration is not mechanical writing.  The evangelical position is called ‘concursive operation.’  God used the intellect, skills, and personality of fallible men to write down what was divine and infallible.”  This is Kevin DeYoung.  “The Bible is, in one sense, both a human and a divine book, but this in no way implies any fallibility in the Scriptures.  The dual authorship of Scripture does not necessitate imperfection any more than the two natures of Christ mean our Savior must have sinned.”

Colleen:  That’s a great quote.  It helped me when I first heard Elizabeth Inrig refer to the hypostatic union of the Lord Jesus and humanity.  He was perfect in every way, even though He had a mortal body when He was on earth and has a glorified one now.  But that hypostatic union, which we cannot explain, was not imperfect, and the Scriptures are God’s word.  He used men, but He supervised the words.  Adventism denies that.  Adventism says He did not give the words, the words were the men’s words, and that’s how they can explain that there are places that need to be edited for current use, because they no longer apply in the way they meant to those early primitive writers.  But that’s not what the Bible is.  The Bible is God’s word.  And it claims that for itself.

Nikki:  Colleen, in your edition, when you read those Ellen White quotes, did they in any way introduce who they were quoting?  Because in my book when they would quote Ellen White, they never said it was Ellen, ever.  There was a footnote, and if you were willing to be studious and go look and see, okay who did this, several pages over, you could find out it was Ellen, but they never let the reader know now that they were quoting from their prophet.

Colleen:  Very good point.  It doesn’t in my version either.  They have the quotes, they have a footnote, but they do not say who they’re quoting.  You have to actually dig into the footnotes to find that, and the casual reader might not do that.  They also said that – it’s fascinating to me now to read this – “God faces this problem in His attempt to communicate divine truths to sinful, limited humanity.  It is our limitations that restrict what God can communicate to us.”  So they’re saying God used limited people who were sinful, who couldn’t completely understand God, to write out the revelations of God and that we are the limitation of what God can communicate to us.  No, God has no limits.  He absolutely and perfectly can communicate what He wants to say to anybody, even if they’re mentally ill or immature or developmentally disabled.  God is never limited by our limitations.

Nikki:  This statement: “This is the type of problem God faces in His attempt to communicate divine truths.”  They’re limiting God and they’re not understanding illumination –

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  – or His sovereignty or His power to open eyes and open ears.  Nothing’s a problem for God.  Problems do not exist without His permission.

Colleen:  Exactly.  [Laughter.]  And He always provides the solution for the problems that He permits to exist.

Nikki:  And just by the way, God Himself created language.

Colleen:  He is the Word.  Jesus is the Word.  Absolutely.  And He was in charge of the words at Babel, and He’s in charge of Pentecost, where the curse of Babel was reversed by the Holy Spirit coming into believers. 

Nikki:  It was interesting to me to see, as the authors talk about the process of inspiration, they say that the Ten Commandments specifically are of divine not human origin because God is the one who wrote them.  So these other words of Scripture are not as much of divine origin because humans were a part of it, but where He wrote the Ten Commandments, now we have divine inspiration, divine origin, and it cracked me up when I got further through the chapter and they actually said that the Bible never teaches about degrees of inspiration, that’s just not – that’s speculation.

Colleen:  But it is taught that way to an Adventist.

Nikki:  That is exactly what they’re saying when they say that the Decalogue is more divine than any other part of Scripture.

Colleen:  Right.  And Scripture itself denies that.  Scripture itself says, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.”  Scripture never allows us to see one part of itself as less inspired or less of God than another.  It’s all from Him, it’s all His word.  It’s also interesting that this book on the first Fundamental Belief says that “The Holy Spirit gave the writers of the Bible special insights so that they could record events in the controversy between good and evil which demonstrate the character of God and guide people in their quest for salvation.”  Well, can you count the heresies in that statement?

Nikki:  [Laughter.]  No, but there sure is a big load of them, huh?

Colleen:  Uh-huh.

Nikki:  The great controversy between good and evil – there we go again.

Colleen:  Exactly.

Nikki:  And I just keep thinking of people who have said to me over the years, “Well, I can believe all of the Fundamental Beliefs without Ellen White.”  No, no.  They’re not orthodox.  They’re not Christian.  You can believe them and think you’re separating her, but you’re not believing orthodoxy by separating her and believing them.

Colleen:  Absolutely.  And this quote I just read clearly talked about the Bible being a guide for people who are in a quest for salvation.  That’s not what the Bible teaches.  The Bible never calls itself a guide, and it never says we are on a quest for salvation.  God saves us.  God foreknows, elects, chooses, predestines us.  God reveals Himself to us.  And the Bible is not a guide.  The Bible is God’s revelation to us of Himself.

Nikki:  You know, we’ve talked about this a lot as we’ve walked specifically through Hebrews, Colossians, and Ephesians.  We’ve said this is written for believers who are living from salvation.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  This is not a book guiding us to learn how to be saved.  It’s a very different approach to the Word of God.

Colleen:  I have to say, there’s another thing here under the chapter’s subhead which is “The Authority of the Scriptures,” ironically enough from an Adventist perspective.  They have this paragraph, which really horrified me when I read it.  “So, without reservation Christ accepted the Holy Scriptures as the authoritative revelation of God’s will for the human race.  He saw the Scriptures as a body of truth, an objective revelation, given to lead humanity out of the darkness of faulty traditions and myths into the true light of a saving knowledge.”  End of sentence.  My goodness, Nikki, a saving knowledge of what?  It just simply calls knowledge saving.  Not to mention that this paragraph says that Christ accepted the Holy Scriptures not as the body of truth or God’s objective revelation of Himself, but a body of truth, an objective revelation.  Those are indefinite articles, “a” and “an,” meaning there could be more than one.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  A body of truth, an objective revelation.  And furthermore, Christ never accepted the Scriptures.  That is the wrong relationship.  He was not in relationship of, “Well, I think I’ll accept them or maybe I won’t.”  No.  Christ is the author of Scripture.  He came as a man and confirmed Scripture, not accepted it.

Nikki:  So this is why we so often say that Adventism has a different Jesus.  They describe Him differently than He’s described in Scripture, and Scripture is His testimony about Himself.  It’s almost like slander.

Colleen:  It is.

Nikki:  To completely change who He is and how He thinks and what He does, they have no authority for that.  He has told His own story.

Colleen:  That’s right.  And finally, at the end of this chapter, the author makes a few other comments that, if you understand Adventism, they’re very significant.  One of them is, “Yet, those open to the illumination of the Spirit of God, those willing to search for the hidden truths with patience and much prayer, will discover that the Bible evidences an underlying unity in what it teaches about the principles of salvation.”  Once again the author is describing Scripture as a thing that contains hidden truths, like that secret knowledge: With patience and prayer, if you search for these hidden truths, you’ll discover that the Bible has an underlying unity.  But we aren’t searching for hidden truths!  The Bible is a revelation, not a mine that we have to dig into.  It’s a revelation of God, and His Spirit reveals it to us when we trust Him.  This is an evidence to me that Adventists as a whole – I’m not speaking of individuals – are not Christian.  The Bible is very clear that when God sends the Holy Spirit, He makes the words of God, the words of Jesus, clear to us and teaches us what is true.  These doctrines reveal a belief that the individual has to dig and seek and search, almost for Gnostic knowledge that gives them special aptitude to be saved.  And this section even has that phrase Adventists use, “An understanding of this ‘progressive revelation’ contributes to an understanding of the Bible and its unity.”  And as we’ve spoken of in a past podcast, the Adventist use of “progressive revelation” is not the way Christians use that term.  Progressive revelation in Scripture means God gives us, as I quoted from Grudem earlier, everything we need at every point in history.  He successively has revealed His will to us through the ages.  That’s progressive revelation.  There’s never any untruth that changes into truth.  But Adventism believes, because of Ellen White, that there is this idea of progressive revelation which means even though their prophet started out with some really heretical statements that even Adventism admits were wrong, she grew as time went on and had progressive revelation on what was real.  That’s completely made up, and the Bible is not an example of Ellen White-ish progressive revelation.

Nikki:  Well, they’re definitely using this chapter of this book to prepare the reader to receive or to accept their view on Ellen White and her gift of prophecy.  Even when they describe how other writers were inspired to write, they only pulled from the genre of prophecy.  They talked about visions and dreams and all of these different things and described that as the entire method of how the Bible was put together.  They gave extreme authority to prophets and their visions, and then they said that they were only the method that God chose to use, so all of these prophets who were inspired and given visions are speaking God’s words.  So now we’re set up that when we get to Ellen White and she’s having visions from God –

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  – anything she says is God’s word, and she’s just the method.  We just see this kind of overemphasis on prophecy and the prophets all through their doctrine on the Scriptures, and we see so many holes and so many things missing related to the orthodox teaching on the Scriptures.

Colleen:  That’s true.

Nikki:  You know, one last thing I just want to say about this is Adventism does everything it can to leave room for errancy in Scripture, and one of the ways that they are arguing for that without actually coming out and saying it is to say that as the Bible has been translated over the years in all the different languages, of course there’s been error in how it’s translated, and so they don’t properly represent the orthodox view of inerrancy.  Orthodox Christians say that the Scriptures are inerrant in their original language.  We’re not saying every version or every language that it’s been translated into is inerrant –

Colleen:  Right.

Nikki:  – but in the original language that God gave, the Hebrew and the Greek, is inerrant, and we say that because Jesus said that.  And so I just wanted to point that out because it doesn’t accurately reflect orthodox position.

Colleen:  And I want to say as we close, if you aren’t sure if you can believe the Bible, if you’re not sure if there are errors in it or if it really can apply to you today, then I want to invite you to first deal with the Lord Jesus.  Because when we know who He is, when we understand that He took our sin to the cross, that He died for us, He paid the price of our sin and was buried and was risen again on the third day according to Scripture, so that when we trust Him, we can pass from death to life and He seals us with His Spirit, when that happens, Scripture becomes a new book, and it’s completely clear that it is inerrant, infallible, and it reveals the truth about our God and about who we are.  My deepest prayer when I pray for Adventists is that God will reveal to them the darkness of Adventism and pull them out, but not just pull them out, but plant them deeply in His word, and that’s my prayer for you.  If you haven’t experienced knowing His word is true, please deal with the Lord Jesus and know that He desires for you to know the saving faith that will have you become an adopted son of God, passing out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved Son.

Nikki:  If you have questions or comments for us, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com.  You can visit proclamationmagazine.com to view past issues of the magazine or to sign up for our weekly emails containing new online articles or other ministry news.  You can also find a place there to donate if you’d like to, and please don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts.  Join us next week as we look at the second Fundamental Belief on the Adventist Godhead.

Colleen:  See you then.