Two Conferences with Opposing Legacies
KASPARS OZOLINS | Assistant Professor of Old Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
This year marks a significant milestone for two religious movements: Seventh-day Adventism and Christianity. In July, Adventists from all over the world will gather in St. Louis, Missouri, for their sixty-second General Conference session. The Adventist organization is now approaching 170 years in its official existence (the first General Conference took place on May 21, 1863 in Battle Creek, Michigan). Another milestone will be marked by Christianity this year, one ten times as long as 170 years, namely 1700 years. Baptists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and other Christians from all over the world will be gathering in Istanbul in October this year to mark the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene creed. This creed is often recited weekly in Christian churches as a key part of the liturgy. It is recited at seminary convocations and graduations (including those of my own institution). Excerpts are found on Christian apparel and many a Bible bookmark. It is instantly recognizable to millions. This short creed, sometimes misunderstood and sometimes maligned, is considered by many to be the most important Christian text outside the Bible.
We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
A brief history of Nicea
After the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the church, founded at Pentecost, rapidly grew to soon include people from all over the Roman empire. The book of Acts details how the gospel spread from Jerusalem throughout Judea, then Samaria, up north into Antioch (in present-day Turkey), and beyond (through the missionary journeys of the apostle Paul). In the second century, Christianity became established throughout the empire: from Gaul (present-day France), to Carthage in northern Africa; from the Arabian frontier lands to Armenia, where it became that country’s official faith in 301 AD. With the advent of the fourth century, another significant development in Christianity took place: it went from being a persecuted religion, to one that was officially tolerated (religio licita) throughout the empire, with the edict of Milan in 313 AD.
However, along with the advent of religious toleration came much more pluralism and doctrinal confusion. In fact, the famous Arian controversy began five years later in 318 AD, when Arius, an Alexandrian church leader, taught that the Son necessarily had a beginning, since everything that is begotten must have a beginning. These ideas were even put down to song, teaching congregations that “there was a time when the Son was not.” Bishop Alexander vigorously opposed his teaching, but controversy spread, and soon the whole empire was engulfed in this dispute, leading to the convening of the Council of Nicea (a town near Constantinople in present-day Turkey, the capital of the eastern Roman empire).
The significant outcome of the Nicene conference was to clarify that the Son is homoousios, a special piece of Greek terminology which explains that Jesus Christ is of the same essence and nature as that of the Father. This clarification, as it turned out, made all the difference in the world because it firmly situates the Son as Creator in the Creator-creature dichotomy. No wonder, then, that the words of this creed, and the special language used, is considered by many Christian theologians to be the most important and consequential outside the Bible.
Adventist beginnings and anti-creedalism
A very different religious context gave rise to a very different conference in 1863 with the birth of Seventh-day Adventism. This birth occurred in America that had experienced the negative effects of Charles Finney’s self-help preaching in the early 1800s (his activity resulted in the so-called “burned-over districts” which became a spiritual breeding ground for blatantly unbiblical ideas). One monumental influence of Finney’s work was the rise of new religious leaders and their novel religious ideas: Joseph Smith and Mormonism. William Miller and Adventism. Ellen G. White and Seventh-day Adventism.
A few decades after the Great Disappointment of 1844, and in the middle of a devastating Civil War, the first General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists took place in 1863 in Battle Creek, Michigan. The conference was chaired by James White, husband of Ellen G. White. The opening minutes of the conference explain the delegates’ purpose in gathering together:
For the purpose of securing unity and efficiency in labor, and promoting the general interests of the cause of present truth, and of perfecting the organization of the Seventh-day Adventists, we, the delegates from the several State Conferences, hereby proceed to organize a General Conference. [emphasis added]
As will become clear, “present truth” for Adventists was of a kind that launched their movement far away from the legacy of Nicea, a foundational conference for Christianity that had taken place a millennium and a half earlier than the one at Battle Creek. Almost a decade later, Adventists published their first statement of belief (in 1872) in decidedly anti-creedal terms. The opening words are notable and are worth quoting at length:
In presenting to the public this synopsis of our faith, we wish to have it distinctly understood that we have no articles of faith, creed, or discipline, aside from the Bible. We do not put forth this as having any authority with our people, nor is it designed to secure uniformity among them, as a system of faith, but is a brief statement of what is, and has been, with great unanimity, held by them.
One sometimes hears in Christian circles the slogan “no creed but the Bible!” which therefore might make one sympathetic to the Adventist claim to reject creeds. The Adventist website states this in even more attractive terms: “Upholding the Protestant conviction of Sola Scriptura (‘Bible only’) these 28 fundamental beliefs describe how Seventh-day Adventists interpret Scripture for daily application.”
However, despite the clarification in the 1872 statement, one struggles to pin down just how exactly the current 28 fundamental beliefs of Seventh-day Adventists differ appreciably from the term “creed.”
The true reality is that Adventism is not opposed to creeds in the strict sense, rather it has positioned itself from its very beginnings as presenting a new system of beliefs in contrast to a particular creed: the ancient Nicene creed. Thus, Adventist anti-creedalism turns out to be nothing more than anti-Nicene creedalism. Furthermore, this system of beliefs, far from not “having any authority with our people,” has ben used repeatedly to enforce “compliance” throughout the global organization.
Adventism is anti-Nicene
The original (1872) Adventist statement of beliefs clearly reveals their anti-Nicene foundation, beginning with their doctrine of God:
[T]here is one God, a personal, spiritual being, the creator of all things, omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal, infinite in wisdom, holiness, justice, goodness, truth, and mercy; unchangeable, and everywhere present by his representative, the Holy Spirit.
This statement needs to be carefully considered, both in terms of what it affirms, and also by what it leaves out. Notice that it makes no claims about the Trinity, nor does it speak anywhere about the divinity of the Holy Spirit or the Son. The language “a personal, spiritual being” could potentially mislead some into thinking that Adventists are speaking of the same God as Christians. In fact, the reality is that the Adventist God is not omnipresent without “his representative, the Holy Spirit.” And he is not omnipresent because he possesses a body, something that early Adventists (such as James White) couched in the language of “a personal, spiritual being.”
This is abundantly evident from the publication Personality of God, published by James White in 1861: “What is God? He is material, organized intelligence, possessing both body and parts. Man is in his image.” This blending of the spiritual and the physical is even more clear in White’s jarring and blasphemous description of the Adventist Jesus:
What is Jesus Christ? He is the Son of God, and is like his Father, being “the brightness of his Father’s glory, and the express image of his person.” He is a material intelligence, with body, parts, and passions; possessing immortal flesh and immortal bones. [emphasis added]
As I have noted elsewhere, James White’s language of “body, parts, and passions” is taken straight from the famous Reformed creeds, yet in such a way as to blatantly contradict it. Here is the wording of a number of influential confessions:
- The Lutheran Augsburg confession (1530): There is one Divine Essence which is called and which is God: eternal, without body, without parts.
- The Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles (1571): There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions.
- The Westminster confession (1646): There is but one only living and true God…a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.
- The 1689 London Baptist confession: The Lord our God is but one only living and true God…a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.
Seventh-day Adventism from its very beginnings has been a thoroughly anti-Nicene and anti-Reformational organization. It has more in common with Mormon polytheism than it does with orthodox Christianity.
Creeds and the need for biblical precision
As noted earlier, the reason for the Nicene council was the urgent need to clarify biblical doctrine. In fact, problems with precision in religious language have been a perennial issue in Christianity right down to our time. It turns out that Adventists are indeed the heirs of an ancient tradition that goes back to Nicea—one that involves the twisting of religious language. It was the Arians who were the original masters at manipulating biblical terms. Initially, most of the participants at the council of Nicea wanted the creed that they were formulating simply to use biblical language to express their view. However, as pastor John Piper explains in his recounting of the story of Athanasius:
The Alexandrian [Christians]…confronted the Arians with the traditional Scriptural phrases which appeared to leave no doubt as to the eternal Godhead of the Son. But to their surprise they were met with perfect acquiescence. Only as each test was propounded, it was observed that the suspected party whispered and gesticulated to one another, evidently hinting that each could be safely accepted, since it admitted of evasion. If their assent was asked to the formula “like to the Father in all things,” it was given with the reservation that man as such is “the image and glory of God.” The “power of God” elicited the whispered explanation that the host of Israel was spoken of as dunamis kuriou [“power of the Lord”], and that even the locust and caterpillar are called the “power of God.” The “eternity” of the Son was countered by the text, “We that live are always (2 Corinthians 4:11)!” The [Nicene] fathers were baffled, and the test of homoosion, with which the minority had been ready from the first, was being forced upon the majority by the evasions of the Arians.
Think about the irony at work here. The Nicene council was to discover to its surprise that non-biblical language had to be used in order to safeguard biblical truth. The reason for this was that the Arians were duplicitous and kept smuggling in their blasphemous ideas about Christ while at the same time couching them in ordinary biblical language. Is that not exactly what the Adventist organization continues to do to this very day? One might argue that one of the primary reasons for the 28 fundamental beliefs is to deceive Christians into thinking that Adventism is more orthodox than it actually is. Thus it is that the Nicene creed was formulated in order to clarify biblical doctrine, while Adventist doctrinal statements from the very beginning have obscured what SDAs really believe about the Bible.
In short, when Adventists disavow any creed and profess to only hold to what the Bible teachers, not only are they rejecting what Christians have professed about God for millennia; they are also making room for the manipulation of the Bible’s own language in order to present to the world their novel religious ideas (ideas that are in fact at odds with what the Bible itself teaches about God).
This two-pronged strategy continues to this day, as witnessed by the recent publication of a two-volume work on the Adventist understanding of the Trinity by a team of major Seventh-day Adventist scholars. In their explanations, the Adventist scholars do not hide the fact that their own doctrine is a rejection of Nicea (which they label negatively as being beholden to pagan Greek philosophy). Furthermore, the vagueness of their own formulation allows for the Adventist teaching to sound “biblical,” when it is anything but. This is how they explain the fundamental belief dealing with the Trinity:
The fourth Fundamental Belief, which deals directly with the Trinity, has only this to say about the being of God: “There is one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a unity of three co-eternal Persons.” The [Adventist] statement seems to deliberately attempt to state only the basic facts about God’s nature—one eternal God who has been revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It does not elaborate on the nature of God’s eternity; neither does it address how the one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, nor the nature of the unity amongst them. In comparison with the traditional Christian doctrine, the Adventist statement is significant because in the polemic context of its formulation the traditional doctrine sought to address precisely the very issues that the Adventist statement is silent on. The traditional formula “one essence, three Persons” is an explicatory concept intended to clarify the nature of the unity, identity, and relations of the three Persons. Absent from the Adventist statement is the ontologically pregnant statement of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed, “Light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father.” [emphasis added] (Revisiting the Trinity: Biblical, Theological and Historical Reflections, pp. 146–47)
It is amazing how blithely these scholars dismiss such a classic Christian formulation. It seems that they are almost proud as Adventists to proclaim that they do not believe the Son is “light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father.”
Standing on a legacy
Two religious groups will gather this year to indicate to the world their continuity with a distinctive legacy. Christians will commemorate the Nicene creed, a landmark statement that explains what the Word of God teaches and clarifies about what Christians have always believed. Meanwhile, Seventh-day Adventists will be gathering in St. Louis at their General Conference to perpetuate a new religion that arose along with many other deviant groups in the American religious landscape of the 19th century. Only one foundation will stand, while the other must one day collapse in the light of biblical truth. †
- Battle Creek and Nicea - June 12, 2025
- What’s In a Name? Finding the Real Jesus! - April 10, 2025
- “These Stones Will Cry Out!” - February 6, 2025