An Appeal to Mark Finley

COLLEEN TINKER |

This second quarter of 2024, the Seventh-day Adventist organization has published a new set of Sabbath School lessons entitled The Great Controversy. We have been doing weekly podcasts giving our former Adventist commentary on each week’s lessons—and of course, nothing within the Adventist worldview or assumptions has changed. 

Because I’ve become invested in exposing and correcting the contents of these lessons, I was doing some research on YouTube to see what various Adventist groups are saying about these studies. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, but I was startled to see how many Adventist channels are doing commentary on the Sabbath School curriculum: 3ABN has a panel discussing the lessons; Amazing Facts, Hope Channel, Hope Channel Brazil, Home Channel Zimbabwe, and many other including independent channels also have their own discussions each week.

Prominent among these Adventist channels is It Is Written featuring discussions on these lessons between associate speaker Eric Flickinger and lesson author Mark Finley. Mark Finley, formerly the host and director of It Is Written, was also the first Adventist pastor to do a satellite evangelistic series, Net ’95. Today he is Assistant to the President of the General Conference. 

As Finley introduced this quarter’s lessons on The Great Controversy, he stated that 2024 and 2025 have been designated for a massive great controversy campaign which will include the Adventist organization mailing “millions and millions” of full-version hard copies of Ellen White’s flagship book The Great Controversy printed in various languages around the world. Additionally, various online versions will also be available. 

Moreover, this quarter’s Sabbath School lessons are the result of General Conference president Ted Wilson’s direct request that Finley produce a series of Sabbath School lessons on the book The Great Controversy. In fact, Sabbath School quarterlies generally take two to two-and-a-half years to write and prepare for publication. Wilson, however, only gave Finley a three-month lead-time to write the entire set of lessons. 

Finley took the assignment—and the entire membership of the Adventist organization is now immersed in a re-indoctrination into the great controversy worldview. This is the overarching meta-narrative which contains and also conceals every unbiblical doctrine on which Adventism is founded. 

Implications

First, is seems apparent that Wilson’s idea to immerse Adventist members in The Great Controversy during their worldwide proselytizing push to put this book into millions and millions of homes was last-minute. Asking Finley to write this set of study guides, compressing the over-600-page book into thirteen sets of weekly lessons within three months was a huge task. Clearly this idea dawned on Wilson well into this project. 

Second, Ted Wilson and his wife have been releasing weekly videos of themselves reading and discussing The Great Controversy during the past months. Looking in from the outside, I believe Wilson has been working to refresh the members’ awareness of this central theme that summarizes Adventism.

Many of us have experienced countless Adventists saying to us, “Oh, I never read Ellen White! I don’t even know what she said!”

Others say to us, “I don’t believe Ellen White; everything I believe comes straight from the Bible.” 

Yet as we have been contending, the Adventist worldview is entirely extra-biblical. The Adventist physicalist view of the nature of man, the nature of the Trinity, and the nature of sin and of salvation is completely un-Christian, but Ellen White’s great controversy paradigm is the interpretive grid through which Adventists understand the Bible. They may not know that their view of reality is based on the visions of a nineteenth-century prophet, but it is.

In fact, since Desmond Ford’s 1980 revelation of his research which proved that Adventism’s central doctrine, the investigative judgment, is not biblical, and since Walter Rae’s publication of his research proving EGW’s plagiarism (released in 1982), there has been a movement away from directly teaching Adventists Ellen White’s original material. The doctrines have not changed, but there was a movement to teach them with updated language without the anchoring references to Ellen White’s sources. 

In other words, the last two or three generations of Adventists, particularly in North America and Europe, know the worldview of the great controversy but do not always know that their beliefs come straight from Ellen White. Instead, they are taught proof-texts that cause them to believe that the Bible is the one source of their doctrines.

Under the leadership of Ted Wilson over the past 24 years, however, there has been a persistent shift as Wilson worked to turn the organization back to its roots and to its dependence upon “the Spirit of Prophecy”. 

This most recent Great Controversy project undergirded by the deliberate teaching (or re-teaching) of Ellen White’s central book to the members shows us that Wilson’s goal is not merely to make proselytes. Rather, he wants to be sure that Adventists everywhere know and trust Ellen White and her great controversy revelation which defines the Adventist worldview. He wants an army of Adventists who are equipped to explain Adventism and answer questions when their non-Adventist neighbors receive those Great Controversy books. He wants true believers to be on fire for Adventism and to shepherd their non-Adventist acquaintances.

In fact, Wilson’s intentions are logical, given his commitment to Adventism. As he has said, people who don’t know Ellen White and her writings are likely not to remain Adventists. He needs to re-indoctrinate the membership in order to make them true believers! 

What Are the Lessons Teaching?

Mark Finley states that he has anchored each week’s lessons by giving the chapters from The Great Controversy which each week summarizes. In consummate double-speak, Finley states that by doing this, he is rooting these “Bible-based lessons” in The Great Controversy. 

The confusion is dizzying: the “Bible-based” lessons are rooted in the writings of an extra-biblical false prophet? This statement is irrational! Yet the underlying Adventist false views of the nature of man, of sin, of salvation, and of the Trinity are deeply formative. The average Adventist can’t explain HOW they arrive at their beliefs beyond citing proof-texts which fall apart when looking at their contexts; they need The Great Controversy and the whole Ellen Whit opus to anchor their own worldview to an actual source.

In other words, Wilson’s push to reattach Adventists to their “Spirit of Prophecy”—Ellen White’s deathless words, according to her—is making them more nearly “honest Adventists”. Members who know and trust Ellen White’s revelations understand their own Adventist identities more accurately, and they will remain more loyal to the organization. In fact, we might accurately say that reintroducing Adventists to the prophetess and her words will make them more cultic in their Adventism.

This immersion into historic Adventism, however, will have an effect on the members. It may cause them to ask their own questions about their beliefs as they see that their worldview is based not directly in the Bible but in Ellen White. 

Along with teaching EGW’s great controversy paradigm to the members, these lessons are also doing one other huge but subtle thing: they are specifically suppressing the context of the proof-texts Finley uses to make the studies appear “Bible-based”. 

Let me give an example.

In Wednesday and Thursday’s lessons in week five of the quarter’s studies, we find an almost-unseen but deliberate elimination of the core passage from Romans 3:23–31. Here’s how the elimination is accomplished:

Wednesday’s lesson opens with the command to read Ephesians 2:8, 9; Romans 3:23, 24, and Romans 6:23 and find out what these verses “teach about the plan of salvation”. We look here specifically at the Romans 3 passage. Verses 23, 24 say this: 

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus;—(Romans 3:23-24 LSB)

We learn here that redemption is in Christ Jesus, but we do not learn the means of that redemption. How does one access it? What did He do?

Then Thursday’s lesson opens with the command to read Romans 3:27–31 along with two other passages, and the question is: “What do these verses teach us about salvation through Christ’s righteousness alone?” Here are verses 27–31:

Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. Or is God [the God] of Jews only? Is He not [the God] of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since indeed God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that faith, is one. Do we then abolish the Law through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we establish the Law.—(Romans 3:27-31 LSB)

Here we see another passage that Adventists use to make the point that they must keep the law. It reinforces that justification is by faith and not works, but they read this to say that faith does not abolish the law. Of course, there is no discussion of the fact that the law is fulfilled! 

But the most egregious thing is that verses 25 and 26 are left out entirely:

whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith, for a demonstration of His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.—(Romans 3:25-26 LSB)

The heart of the passage was simply OMITTED!! This is the passage that explains the object of our faith and the mechanism by which God’s grace is extended to us! This is the passage that explains that God answered the only existential question. It wasn’t, “Is God fair? Did He give a law too hard to keep?” No! Rather, the question was, “Why hasn’t God killed the sinful race?” 

The answer? God always intended that He would be the One who took the penalty for human sin. He passed over the sins prior to the cross because He was coming in the person of the Son to be the Justifier of all who believe. He would take their sin and die their death and fully propitiate for human sin.

He would show that He was just because all that sin was fully punished. It was fully paid for and dealt with—and he was the Justifier because He Himself died and fully paid for their sin! 

This is the passage that contains the message of what Jesus did and why He came—and in typical Adventist fashion, author Mark Finley totally OMITTED it and used the surrounding verses to do lip service to God’s grace and law-keeping! 

Using The Great Controversy as his reservoir of truth for these lessons, Finley tries to make the case that Adventism believes in sola Scriptura in the spirit of the Reformation. 

No! This egregious elimination of the core of the Romans 3 passage alone disqualifies Adventism as believing in Scripture alone! Believing in Scripture alone means believing and embracing every word of Scripture, paying attention to context and grammar and the first audience and knowing that the words can’t mean something different when applied to us! 

Clearly Adventism does NOT believe in Scripture alone; it holds itself OVER Scripture, emboldened to submit the Bible to the worldview established by an extra-biblical nineteenth century prophet! They will even leave out the heart of the propitiatory sacrifice of the Lord Jesus in order to preserve their Adventist view of God’s character as described by EGW! 

Adventism doesn’t love the blood of Jesus shed for us on the cross. It prefers a sterile, “nice” God who graciously forgives without the need to repent of one’s sins at the foot of the cross. It prefers an Example Jesus who suffered in silence and showed us how to obey God without complaining. Adventism distances itself from Jesus’s blood and our complete dependence upon it. 

Dishonest or Deceived?

In the timeless words of Dale Ratzlaff, founder of Life Assurance Ministries, “There are two kinds of Adventists: the deceived and the dishonest.”

I ask the author of this quarter’s Sabbath School lessons this: are you deceived, or are you dishonest? 

Finley, born in 1945, is not a life-long Adventist; his father was Catholic and his mother was Adventist, but Finley didn’t become Adventist until his twenties. Yet he has spent most of his life working in Adventist ministry. He is smart and educated—and well-versed in Adventism. 

Working as he does with the general conference president, he knows the internal machinations of the organization. He knows the politics and struggles and compromises, the manipulations and even the gaslighting that is done within the organization to maintain control. 

He also knows what sola Scriptura means historically—and he KNOWS that Adventism cannot exist without the authority of Ellen White! Further, he knows that if he actually used every word of Scripture contextually, those living words would contradict the Adventist “gospel”. If he didn’t know this fact to be true, it would never have occurred to him to edit Romans 3:23–31 by separating the passage into two days’ lessons, thus obfuscating his omission of verses 25, 26— the cross of Christ! 

So I ask again: are you deceived or dishonest?

I appeal to you—and to every Adventist who has rationalized defending Adventist doctrine by claiming biblical support for its underlying heresies—submit your Adventism to the Lord Jesus. Lay your intellectual arguments at the foot of the cross and admit that you have refused to trust Jesus and His word ALONE. Ask the Lord to show you what is real and true, and repent of having taught thousands of Adventists to hold onto an extra-biblical prophet—a false prophet at that! 

My prayer for you—and for all Adventists—is David’s prayer in Psalm 51. I pray that the Lord will grant you the grace of seeing your sin of defending an indefensible religion. I pray He will grant you repentance for having deceived thousands of unsuspecting people who believed you were teaching what the Bible said.

The Lord is faithful. When we trust and believe in Jesus’ once-for-all sacrifice, He causes us to pass from death to life. He forgives us, and He seals us with His Spirit. 

My prayer is that you, with David, will be able to pray:

Against You, You only, I have sinned 
[And] done what is evil in Your sight… 
Create in me a clean heart, O God, 
And renew a steadfast spirit within me.

Psalm 51:4a, 10

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Colleen Tinker

Colleen Tinker, the editor of Proclamation! magazine, and her husband Richard left Adventism in 1998 with their two sons, Roy and Nathanael, who were in grades six and ten. They have co-led the Former Adventist Fellowship since 1999. Colleen, a graduate of Walla Walla University, is a former high school English teacher and also the former managing editor of Adventist Today magazine. Colleen became the stepmother of Roy and Nathanael in 1989, and in 2008 she adopted them. Romans 8:15-17 has assumed new depth and significance for her and Richard since she and her sons chose to claim each other legally and permanently. She and Richard share an office and a commitment to sharing the gospel of the true Jesus with all of those seeking a way out of the bondage of the false gospel of Adventism.

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