Elisabet Kirkland Page 32

07 Mar

REFLECTING ON COMMON WORLDVIEW AND DIVIDED RESPONSES

In

I suppose it could be argued that there really is no such thing as a clearly defined, commonly held worldview that is embraced by an overwhelming majority of our members. Maybe in the strictest sense that is true, but I find that, generally, we do have a common worldview. Likely, other articles in this issue are going to address that more directly, but there are truths that we hold dear which inevitably inform our worldview enough to bring consensus on many issues.

For example, we believe there is both good (embodied in the persons of the Godhead) and evil (embodied in Satan and his fallen angels), and that this world is the battleground between them. I can’t imagine a Seventh-day Adventist who would disagree with that statement. That universally accepted concept shapes your worldview in a way that is common among not only other Adventists, but also those outside our faith community. Our worldview is similarly shaped by our belief in creationism, our rejection of eternal torment, our knowledge that loved ones who are deceased are not watching us, being active in our lives, or aware of our movements.

Often our common worldview is such that we have nearly identical reactions to situations. Most of us, if confronted with an evolutionary concept while watching a nature documentary, immediately recoil from the assertion, if only internally. Our concern over losing salvation is not due to a fear of burning forever. We would never entertain the idea of attending a séance. The worldviews that spring from the truth we know result in nearly all Adventists having nearly identical reactions to certain situations.

But …

… it’s not entirely universal. In fact, in some cases, we can have very different reactions that spring from a common viewpoint. I’m not just talking about the fact that some manage to live up to their desired reaction more than others. Our worldview calls on us to be good stewards of our personal finances, but people with equal incomes who support the church equally and have similar expenses don’t always have similar levels of savings. That’s not a matter of different reactions to the world view, that’s a matter of different levels of commitment to our shared value of saving. No, I’m talking about totally opposite behaviors as a reaction to a commonly held worldview.

Let me illustrate: as Adventists, we all believe that the earth was God’s gift to us, and that we have a responsibility to manage it wisely. This is based on the instructions God gave to the first couple when He placed them in dominion over earth. They were to take care of it, and it was to supply for their physical needs (see Genesis 2). We also believe that very soon, at the Second Coming of Christ, the earth will be destroyed (see Revelation 6). Those two truths lead to a worldview that says we are stewards of the earth, and the earth will be destroyed anyway.

I have witnessed very different reactions among my fellow Adventists to that worldview. On the one hand, some are very conscientious environmentalists. They donate to the cause, recycle, reduce their carbon footprint, and support measures to clean up our planet and deter further damage. The opposite reaction is found among those fatalistic folks who feel that such efforts can’t stop or even delay the inevitable. They are profoundly disinterested in what goes into landfills, they don’t adopt sections of roads, install solar panels, or save energy except as a personal economic benefit.

Most folks are not at either extreme end of the spectrum, but the majority of us pretty clearly lean one way or the other. And maybe you haven’t thought of it in terms of a reaction to your worldview of the earth as our current responsibility that faces inevitable destruction, but that is our worldview, and those reactions are both definitely found among our believers. The next time you dispose of a cardboard box in your usual fashion you probably, because I brought it to your attention, will be aware of how your choice is a reflection of your worldview.

The truth is, for all the nearly universal reactions we have to our common worldview, there is still a lot of room for people of good will to have very different reactions in certain circumstances, all still proceeding from that common worldview.

And it’s not always polar opposite choices we make. There are variations and layers and influencing factors. Since we agree that there is both good and evil, we develop a worldview that everyone is on one side or the other (fortunately our worldview there is free will, which means anyone can change sides). An extension of that worldview is the default assumption that politicians, no matter their stripe, land mostly on the same side of the line between good and evil, and I don’t need to tell you which side we assume. How does that worldview inform your choice when it comes to voting?

You might choose not to vote, and for a variety of reasons. You don’t want to be responsible for the inevitable evil that the eventual winner will perpetrate is certainly one I have heard many times. A lesser form would be that you don’t believe it makes any difference in the long run, but that too is a reaction to an Adventist worldview that the end times will unfold as God has foretold.

Or, with the same worldview, you can say that you have a responsibility to resist evil by voting for the person less likely to act in harmony with evil. My professor in graduate school referred to this as choosing the evil of two lessors and voting for his opponent. That may be the opposite of refusing to vote, but now a new layer gets added: which party? Again, Adventists of good will have different answers, and it’s not always one of the big two. Another layer is, do I vote for the party I mostly agree with, or pick the person I think will best lead us? Again, different Adventists will have different reactions, even though their very different choices all sprang from a common worldview: that there is evil in the world, and I am eligible to vote.

All of this is to say that while we can define a common worldview for ourselves, it doesn’t mean we are all going to do the same thing in every situation. And that is getting down to a core value that I pray we can all have as a common Adventist world view.

Tolerance.

There are people who share my worldview in this church whom I would trust with my life. I like to hang out with them, I like to discuss deep issues with them, I like to wash their feet on communion Sabbath. And yet, they don’t vote like me, treat the environment like me, or other things that are more than just matters of preference. The key to being friends with people like that is for both sides to follow the standard Jesus gave us in the Sermon on the Mount, namely, to judge not.

We need to get our heads around the idea that not every deeply held belief that I have, though it is informed by scripture and in harmony with my very Adventist world view, is a salvation issue that is going to condemn my fellow Adventists who conclude differently. I have to walk my path, keeping my eyes on Jesus, and letting Him be the judge.

I should be able to talk about those things with the people who disagree with me and still be friends, not lose my temper, and not condemn. I may not be able to see how their idea is in harmony with God’s ideal, but I need to be humble enough to believe that I don’t see it from God’s perspective. Maybe I’m right and that person is lost, and maybe I do have a responsibility to speak up for what I believe to be right. But there is a big difference between “I don’t agree with you, the Bible seems very clear on this” and “You are going to miss heaven if you don’t do as I do.”

And by the way, tolerance is not just for those who share my worldview but not all my practices. An Arab tradition (remember, Abraham was their father also) talks about a traveler whom the patriarch invited into his tent for a meal. When he did not give thanks to God for his meal, Abraham remonstrated with him about it. When the man indicated he was a worshiper of the sun, Abraham drove him away hungry.

That night God spoke to him in a dream and asked why he treated the man so poorly. “You heard him, Lord; how can I put up with such a man in my tent?”

The Lord replied, “I know all about him. I have put up with him in My world for forty years. Could you not tolerate him for one night?”

As I said, it’s a tradition, not a Bible story, so it’s not likely true. But there is truth in it, namely, that God is very tolerant of a lot of truly evil people. He is longsuffering, hoping that they will exercise their free will and come to His side. Driving away those who don’t practice things like we think they should is no way to bring them to repentance.

My Adventist worldview is something I cherish. It influences the choices I make, just as that same worldview influences you. If we can be tolerant of those within our worldview that make different choices, it’s good practice for reaching out to those who have different worldviews. May God grant us all tolerance of each other.

Douglas Inglish is the RMC vice president for administration. Email him at: [email protected]

07 Mar

DISTINCTIVE ADVENTIST WITNESS

In

When first asked the question: “How do you define the Adventist Worldview?”, I completely misunderstood the question. It was sort of like a goldfish being asked: “How do you define the bowl in which you swim?” I missed the point. Lesson learned.

It helped to expand the question a bit with more detail. How do those of us who were raised within the Seventh-day Adventist Church approach life—and how may we influence culture by who we are—physically, through values, philosophy, attitudes, ethics, our understanding of the “end of time,” and whether life and the world makes sense?

How I understand the question now comes down to examining the specifically Seventh-day Adventist milieu in which we operate. When we understand this, we can translate it into language that our world at large can hear, and we can spread the message in a way that will be much less mysterious to the world at large.

With that clarification, my mind immediately turned to our understanding of the Great Controversy. The Great Controversy, in fact, is our uniquely-Adventist theodicy, which our church developed through the early Advent movement, and most importantly through Ellen G. White and her writings.

Our theodicy posits that God allowed sin to take root in our world so that the Universe at large is able to see the true danger that flows from complete rebellion against God’s plan for healthy and fruitful living. As I see it, this is the way in which we as Adventists make sense of the chaos and complexity of our world. This means, as I see it, the way we live our whole lives, seek God’s will, and interact with the larger world around us all flow from our understanding of the Great Controversy. We use our Adventist theodicy to shape how we live our lives both as Christians and as humans.

But what is a theodicy?

Throughout history, humans who are monotheists have grappled with the question: “why does a perfectly good, almighty, and all-knowing God permit evil?” The traditional term for this struggle is theodicy.1  The article from Encyclopedia Brittanica has a lot of very interesting information.

In traditional Western Christian thought, there are essentially two main schools of theodicy: Augustinian and Irenaean. My quick and severely simplified summary of the Brittanica article cited above is that Augustinian theodicy posits generally that evil is a direct result of the sin of Adam and Eve, and we live in a world rendered evil through that Fall and must negotiate this set of obstacles to get us back to God. By contrast, Irenaean theodicy posits that God has placed us in this complex world in part so that we can grow into the creatures God always intended us to be, and the evils we confront are challenges that assist us in growing closer to God. (The Britannica article cited in Footnote 1 presents a more detailed version of the overall history of theodicy in Christianity.)

Our Great Controversy theodicy leads us to see spiritual, mental, and physical health as all being a part of God’s holistic plan for us as His creations. This holistic theodicy influences virtually all of the ways our Seventh-day Adventist Christianity influences the rest of the world. The rest of this article meditates on two specific examples of how the Great Controversy worldview shapes how we interact with ourselves and with the larger world.

First, I meditate on how our holistic understanding of the Great Controversy has subsequently developed into a distinctly Adventist way to synthesize spiritual and physical health—the synthesis that we as Adventists call the “Health Message.” In my general interactions with those outside the Seventh-day Adventist Church, our commitment to holistic, healthy living is one of the primary ways the larger world understands us as Seventh-day Adventists.

One concrete example (as we have developed it within our Great Controversy theodicy) of how the holistic synthesis of spiritual and physical health has affected our larger world is a small mountain named “Mount Sanitas” near Boulder, Colorado. Today, many Boulderites think this was a Spanish name. In reality, however, it was named by English speaking individuals, and it referred specifically to the Boulder Sanitarium founded in 1879 at the mountain’s base. The Sanitarium opened a couple years after the University of Colorado also opened in Boulder. The Sanitarium opened in Boulder because Mrs. White and John Harvey Kellogg agreed that holistic Great Controversy theodicy called for health institutions like the Sanitarium.

In many ways, the Boulder Sanitarium was one of the first institutions which helped shape the character of Boulder as a fitness and health obsessed location. What started with the Sanitarium has continued up to the present day, even if the present proponents of fitness in Boulder don’t always know where the stream of health awareness started. In summary, our Great Controversy worldview and its holistic view of spiritual, mental, and physical health was one of the influences that shaped Boulder’s historic and continuing reputation for integrating physical and spiritual health.

Second, I turn to how our holistic Great Controversy theodicy helped re-awaken in me individually the importance of the Sabbath as a sign of living in harmony with God’s principles of spiritual, mental, and physical health. When I was younger, I used to view the Fourth Commandment as something of a buzzkill.

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son, or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore, the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it (Exodus 20:8-11).2

In the Seventh-day Adventist Great Controversy theodicy, the view defying this commandment a quintessential mark of rebellion against God in our world. As a teenager, part of me resented having to show my loyalty by worshiping on Sabbath. I didn’t necessarily see the point.

When I went to law school, however, I began to see the real blessings inherent in both the Great Controversy worldview and Sabbath keeping. When in law school, I intentionally followed the Fourth Commandment, I found that rest on the Sabbath not only kept me in harmony with God’s will, but also refreshed and renewed me for my following week. It wasn’t simply following a commandment—it was also blessing me with the time needed to renew and refresh my mind and heart for a new week. It wasn’t just a negative to be done to avoid wrath; rather it was a net positive to help me grow in mind and body, and in favor with God and humans. The Sabbath enhanced my own holistic health.

In summary, keeping the Sabbath actually made me a better and more rounded human being, and this gave me new appreciation for following our Seventh-day Adventist Great Controversy worldview. From my own experience, therefore, the holistic theodicy found in the Great Controversy worldview reinforces the idea of what true holistic health entails.

In summary, both of these examples are (in a sense) ruthlessly practical examples about how the Seventh-day Adventist Christian Great Controversy theodicy allows all of us to have an impact on our society. Because the idea of the Great Controversy helps inform the way we live and interact with our neighbors, we can show a better way of living as daughters and sons of God. We can exhibit a synthesis of spiritual, mental, and physical health in a way so that people outside the Seventh-day Adventist bubble are able to see practical examples of Christians living holistic health lives.

Leading lives where, in God’s power, we are creating a holistic synthesis of spiritual, mental, and physical health, gives us an incredibly powerful tool that we can share with our hurried unbalanced world. We are translating our Great Controversy theodicy worldview into something that attracts others to join us in holistic living in harmony with God’s plan.

Shawn P. Nowlan, Esq., is an attorney currently working for the federal government in Denver, Colorado. He is a member of the Boulder Adventist Church. Email him at: [email protected]

 

1  Sherry, Patrick. (Accessed 6 February 2024.). “Theodicy”. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/theodicy-theology

2  New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

07 Mar

WAY MORE THAN WORLDVIEW

In

As a general rule—and as something of a language purist, as should be part of the job description for a book editor and proof-reader—I am not a fan of excessive verbification. But, as a writer and someone who enjoys working with words, I can appreciate the opportunities that creatively adapting language can offer. When we make a word that has only previously been used as a noun into a verb—for example, instead of “having an impact,” something might “impact” us—we cause language purists to shudder, but we also have a new way of talking and thinking about how an idea is put into action and affects us and others.

An unusual example of this recently caught my attention in a new translation of the New Testament. I began reading it after hearing scholar Scot McKnight talking about his work on the project, describing the literal-but-sometimes awkward and intentionally alternative nature of his translation choices as a way to help us read the text afresh and to ask new questions of it.1 That seemed a worthwhile way of approaching well-loved and well-known Bible passages—and I have enjoyed beginning to re-read the gospels with some interesting variations of language and expressions.

So far, the verse that has most sparked my imagination and my thinking about faith is Matthew 11:5. It is the list of evidence Jesus gave to the disciple of John the Baptist—or “Yōannēs the Dipper” as McKnight labels him—in response to John questioning whether Jesus was actually the Messiah, as John had previously proclaimed. Jesus’ reply and explanation included various kinds of healing, helping and making whole, and the usual form of the final phrase is expressed as something like “… and the Good News is being preached to the poor.” 2

The alternative translation that has prompted my reflections goes like this: “The beggars are gospeled.” 3 Suddenly we have an invitation to engage the gospel as a transformative act or actions and a calling to enact it in our time and place, in the name of Jesus.

We often hear people talking about a biblical or Christian worldview(s). Often this is employed to argue a particular position, rather than acknowledging the variety of perspectives that we can find even within the biblical text itself. The assumption is that this is a lens through which we are to see and experience our lives and the world around us, and that this should shape our approach to various personal, social, and political issues. But the language of worldview sometimes seems weak in comparison to the realities, claims, and calling of the Christian story.

Yes, Christianity is a worldview. It is a way of seeing the world around us, of understanding something particular about history and stories, and of measuring and making choices in our lives. It is a framework for thinking and believing. It is a message to be preached and proclaimed.

But Christian faith is not merely a worldview, a philosophy, or even a theology. It must never be left as a collection of ideas or even a comprehensive interpretative paradigm. It is not primarily a case to be made or an argument to be won. Christian faith only later became a collection of doctrines, and these are only useful as far as they attempt to explain and point us toward larger truths, movements, and actions.

Anchored in the historical realities of Jesus and His teaching, following Him tells a big story that connects all of us back to Him and a Way of being and living in the world.

While preachers and churches often hark back to the earliest days of the followers of Jesus as a model for the church, this seems to be something that is often skipped over. The sermons recorded in the book of Acts often sound little like much of our preaching today. The apostles’ first sermons focussed instead on the reality and significance of Jesus, particularly His death and resurrection, but also called hearers who might accept these claims made by and about Jesus to follow the Way.

Of course, Jesus used this language to describe Himself: I am the way, the truth, and the life. No-one can come to the Father except through me (John 14:6). But it seems this description also became a preferred self-identification among the early believers, describing themselves as “followers of the Way” (see Acts 18:25; 19:9; 22:4; 24:14, 22) more often than they called themselves Christians (see Acts 11:26). It was also used by those who would persecute them, with Saul (before he became Paul) carrying letters seeking the assistance of the leaders in Damascus for the arrest of any followers of the Way he found there (Acts 9:2) as he set off on his momentous journey to that city.

As such, the Way is far more than a worldview: “Practicing the Way of Jesus is less like learning quantum physics and more like learning aikido. It’s something you do with your whole body. Love isn’t an intellectual theory; it’s an embodied way of being.” 4 The Way is first Jesus Himself—as He claimed—but then also the orientation and activation of the whole substance of being and the sum of our lives, in whatever we do.

This was how Jesus summarized “the whole Code and the prophets” in response to a question about the greatest commandment—as translated by McKnight: “You will love the Lord, your God, in your whole heart and in your whole self and in your whole intelligence … . The second is comparable: You will love your neighbour as yourself” (Matthew 22:37, 39).5 With heart, body, and mind directed and active in love towards God and others, this is so much more than a worldview.

As whole-hearted, whole-selved, whole-intelligence followers of the Way, the verbified gospel begins to make sense—whatever we might think of the linguistic aberration or awkwardness. Jesus reported that, in His ministry, “the beggars are gospeled.” As those commissioned to continue His ministry in our time and place, what might “the beggars are gospeled” look like here and now? What might it mean to “gospel” our families, our communities, and our world?

The context of Jesus’ ministry and teaching does not allow this to be merely preaching or even friendly sharing. We are not trying to convince others of our worldview, so much as we are seeking to change their realities. This demands practical, wholistic, and often-radical transformation of the lives and circumstances of others, particularly working with those most in need, most marginalized, and most vulnerable.

Rather than defining, assuming, or championing a particular worldview, let’s set about verbifying our faith and activating the gospel. As we care and love, listen and serve, we are gospeling. That is a way of seeing, engaging, and understanding the world around us that not only makes the most sense and the strongest arguments for the truths we claim, but also that makes the most difference and will matter the most to those around us.

Seeking to be a Jesus purist is more important than being a language purist, so may the gospel be verbified and enacted all the more—and may the poor and all in our communities be gospeled. As Jesus did. As Jesus does.

Nathan Brown is a writer and editor at Signs Publishing in Warburton, Victoria, Australia. Nathan recently launched Thinking Faith, a collection of his articles in Mountain Viewsover the past few years, as well as being co-editor of A House on Fire: How Adventist Faith Responds to Race and Racism. Email him at: [email protected]

 

1  Vischer, Phil. (2024, January 10). “599: Paganism Returns & a New New Testament.” Holy Post. https://www.holypost.com/post/599-paganism-returns-a-new-new-testament-with-scot-mcknigh

2  Unless otherwise indicated, Bible verses are from the New Living Translation.

3  McKnight, Scot. (2024). The Second Testament. InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition (p. 14).

4  Comer, John Mark. (2024). Practicing the Way. SPCK (p. 86).

5  McKnight, Scot. (2024). The Second Testament. InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition (p. 28).

06 Mar

THE CURIOUS NATURE OF TINTED SPECTACLES

In

Sunglasses are fascinating.

We wear them for a variety of reasons. To be fashionable. To convince ourselves that we look as awesome as awesome people who wear the same sunglasses. To look tough. To shield our eyes from the sun. To shield our eyes from other people.

Or some combination thereof.

I’m not saying sunglasses are bad. I wear them at times for different reasons. But it is interesting how a hunk of plastic placed upon our face carries so much sense of value and identity.

The idea that we need something external to give us a sense of value and identity is probably worth exploring at some point.

But sunglasses actually do change the way we see things. Both in how we see ourselves and how we see the world. Ourselves in that we have altered our appearance in a way we find an improvement, and the world in that we are filtering out some of the light we would otherwise take into our eyes.

The world looks different when they are on. Tinted. Darker. Not as clear.

And that is just with normal sunglass lenses. What if you go with darker or lighter ones? What if you go with colored ones? Everything we see is filtered through those lenses and our view of the world becomes skewed towards those lenses’ technical make up and intended purpose.

So, whether one wears them for fashion and identity purposes, or whether one wears them because of light sensitivity issues and the need to protect themselves, one is choosing to restrict their view of reality and reduce the accuracy of what they see so that they can fulfill the alternate purpose dictated by the reason they wear sunglasses.

And yet, almost everyone chooses to wear sunglasses at some point for some reason.

As I said, it’s not wrong. But it does make a great metaphor.

Because, if we are talking about worldview, how we see the world matters. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be called “world view.” Our view of the world. How we see things.

Sorry, I can’t resist one more metaphor. I may have a problem. If I’m driving down a highway with the sun at my back, the vision in front of me is pretty clear. If I’m driving directly west as the sun is dropping down, at the right time I am almost blind as I drive. There are some roads near us that I hate driving in a westerly direction as late afternoon turns into evening. I just can’t see anything. So, it is when we look into the sun. It’s just too much to take in.

Back to worldview. So much of how we see the world is dictated by very specific variables. Our age, gender identity, sexual identity, varying health issues, personality, personal needs, fears, joys, desires, frustrations, pains, traumas, social needs, physical needs, and a whole list of others I won’t keep listing because you get the point.

And even some of those variables have variables of their own.

When you start breaking down all the things that go into forming a worldview, you realize that every single worldview is a house of cards waiting to fall. This is because no one is seeing reality clearly and without bias. We simply aren’t capable of doing it. Not truly. We can try, and sometimes we can filter out a lot of the variables that distort our view, but never all of them.

Fortunately, that never applies to our religious and spiritual worldviews, right? The Adventist worldview is never distorted because of such things.

Right? Right …???

*big sigh*

Of course it does. The Adventist worldview is just as prone to bias and distortion and inaccuracy as anyone else’s. Just because our beliefs came through committee over time doesn’t change any of that. Ever sat in a committee? Ever witnessed how messy that gets as decisions are made?

No. We are not immune. We are individuals with a limited perspective on reality trying to tell everyone how reality works. When we try to state that our interpretation of the Bible is the correct one it is nothing more than a statement of our own arrogance and ignorance.

But you might say “but God makes up the difference and will bring truth to those who seek Him and His truth.”

I mean, that sounds pretty great. But, unless one believes that only Adventists have sincerely sought that, it becomes clear very quickly that things do not work that cleanly.

Do we believe that no Catholic has ever sought God and truth with every humble and sincere and loving fiber of their very being? And, at the end of the day, felt the peace of Christ come over them as Catholics to remain Catholic?

Or a Baptist? Or Pentecostal? Or Hindu? Or (insert spiritual worldview here)?

The Adventist world view has some good stuff. The concept of Present Truth, for example. When used correctly, it is a great path for seeking God and learning. It truly is. When used correctly, the idea of a great controversy has value as it speaks of the struggle between good and evil.

When used correctly.

Now for some problems. For starters, no one can really agree on a worldview. Not really. So, for Adventism, ask three Adventists what the Adventist worldview is and you likely get three different worldviews. For that matter, ask three Adventist theologians what the Adventist worldview is and you will likely run into the same problem.

It won’t matter if you ask pastors, administrators, conference presidents, or a group of General Conference presidents, former and not. You won’t get a clean answer.

Does that mean it’s wrong to form worldviews?

Of course not. One can’t help but form a worldview. The problem isn’t the forming of a worldview. The problem is forming a static worldview. Our individual and collective worldviews are so flawed, they have no choice but to be dynamic if one also desires to live with any sort of honesty and integrity at all. As we grow, individually and corporately, our worldview must change because we are endlessly learning and experiencing.

The issues in the Adventist worldview lies in that paragraph. If there is one thing that my cynicism would offer as a major piece of the unspoken, but widely practiced, Adventist worldview it would be a resistance to change and growth.

You remember that thing I mentioned earlier called Present Truth and that it’s awesome when used correctly?

We don’t usually use it correctly.

Adventists like to reinforce their worldview, not expand it, alter it, or allow it to mature and grow. I’m not saying it has never happened, but I am saying it’s exceedingly rare.

Now, to be fair to Adventism, they aren’t really any worse at this than any other group, on average. Every group, every person … everyone, struggles with this in some way at some level.

And, if you look at the history of most religious groups, almost every time one of them had enough internal momentum and push to change their worldview for the better you will find that the outcome was very similar almost every time.

They split. Or, if not an outright split, a splinter group left and formed something that reflected the altered worldview.

This isn’t a bad thing, even if most in the middle of it felt like it was. People need to and are obligated to follow whatever direction God gives them, no matter who likes it. And, if that ends in leaving a group for another, or leaving and starting your own, or a large group splitting off, or a group splitting in half, then so be it.

It isn’t just about people getting what they want. It’s about following the Spirit as it leads. If God causes you to grow, you have to honor that growth.

The problem is that not everyone gets the same leading and growth spurt at the same time about the same thing. Not everyone gets to see what someone else saw in the same way. So, maybe some need to stay where they are, and some need to follow what was given. If this weren’t a true thing, then Adventism wouldn’t even exist in the first place.

When we are able to remove our tinted spectacles long enough to see clearly, even if just for a moment, some piece of reality might just flood in that we hadn’t been noticing.

It was Paul who said that we see now as though through a dark glass, but one day we will see clearly.

To mix and alter my metaphor, it’s past time we clean our lenses and add a prescription and get that laser surgery we’ve been putting off.

There is a lot of light waiting to be seen if we are just willing to see it.

Tony Hunter is a Seventh-day Adventist pastor and a hospital chaplain working for UCHealth. Tony, his wife Nirma, and daughter Amryn live in Firestone, Colorado. Email him at: [email protected]  

06 Mar

AN IMMIGRATION JOURNEY: GOD STILL WRITES STRAIGHT IN OUR UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD

In

José David Rodríguez – Denver, Colorado … The immigration rate has increased to almost 40% in the United States according to 2024 Gallup polls. This means that, currently, the United States is receiving nearly 260,000 immigrants a month.

Such volume creates issues in communities as the local infrastructure cannot support them and they have become viewed as an unwelcome burden: few job opportunities, not enough housing, or not enough “good Samaritans” to sustain that high number.

As a Seventh-day Adventist Church in the United States, we are not ignorant about these issues, Denver, Colorado, notwithstanding. Each Sabbath, the Denver metropolitan and mostly Spanish-speaking churches receive people from Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, and from Venezuela. All are in need of financial help to pay the debts they left behind or the basic needs of now, like simply the need to eat.

Looking at the recent situation, the congregations could help the immigrants with some basic resources: paying for food, providing housing, offering rides, and supplying clothing. However, due to the high demand, churches are struggling with fulfilling their needs. Hispanic pastors and their congregations have been also engaged in allowing some immigrants to stay at their houses, even for months, teaching them how to live in this new land and for eternity.

But lately, we can report good news. It is a pleasure to see new conversions—people that once were desperate but now are living with hope in our Lord Jesus.

Luis and Nancy, a couple from Colombia, after struggling for many years in their native country, decided to take the risk. Luis had built up a savings of 30 million of Colombian pesos (around 7,500 U.S. dollars) enabling them to travel. Together, with their nine-year-old daughter, Luciana, they spent two months crossing through Mexico.

Emmanuel and his five relatives left behind Cuba. They spent five days crossing el tapón del Darién (Darien Gap), which is regarded as a very dangerous jungle. “It is not uncommon to see people dying from exhaustion, others just being abandoned by the group, and yet others drowning in the mud,” reminisces Gerardo. After five months of searching, Emmanuel and his family arrived in the Loveland Hispanic Seventh-day Adventist Church in Loveland, Colorado, and gave their lives to Jesus.

John, Walter, and Christian are three young men of 22, 23, 28 years old, respectively. They were seeking a place to sleep when they were befriended by a pastor and were invited to live in his house for four months. During that time, they learned about Jesus and his love for the humankind. To God be the glory that, while they were eating the spiritual bread, the Creator provided with food, jobs, and everything else according to his promise:

But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all
these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6:33).

It was at South Aurora Hispanic Seventh-day Adventist Church in Aurora, Colorado, named as “El Refugio del Amor” (Refuge of Love), where Luis, Nancy, Luciana, John, Walter, and Christian met one Sabbath of the last summer. Describing their journey with tears and hugs, they gave courage to each other.

José David Rodríguez, lead pastor at El Refugio del Amor Church, recalled one special evening: “Luis met Jesus at Pecos church where, after one night, he finally decided to enter with his wife Nancy. That night when an altar call was made, Luis came to the front, and I could see the Holy Spirit was upon him. That night was his best night yet, and he knew it. I did too.”

It was at the 2023 Rocky Mountain Conference Hispanic Camp Meeting at Glacier View Ranch (GVR) in Ward, Colorado, with no previous arrangements, that Nancy, Luis, and Christian were baptized and became as active part in the kingdom of God.

There are many stories we can witness around us. We certainly know that, even in this upside-down world, God continues to write in straight letters.

—José David Rodríguez is pastor of three Spanish congregations, including El Refugio Denver Metro Spanish Church in Berthoud, Colorado. Photos supplied.

06 Mar

HUMILITY’S ADVENTIST CHILDREN

In

I don’t think I have a worldview. Moses had one, Martin Luther King, Jr., had one. And Jesus had the most comprehensive one. All three views were clear, forcefully stated, and led to action. Mine is cloudy and diffuse. What I have are the influences on me from those I love and those I loathed. Influences form attitudes, attitudes become habits, habits may become virtues by which we navigate life. One powerful and mysterious influence on me is humility, modeled by others and life-changing when witnessed.

I don’t remember when I first weighed the difference between humility and humiliation. It may have been when I’d reluctantly joined a party game, reluctantly because I am not good at party games of any sort. This game involved thinking of a word that everyone else had to guess. The fun part was that you would give clues that would throw everybody off, and if you could hold them off for a certain length of time, you won. [This paragraph was omitted in error in the printed version. We apologize.]

At least I think that was the point. It was a long time ago, and I’ve forgotten almost everything but the part where I leaped to my feet in triumph and shouted that I’d won.

There was silence as everyone stared at me. Gently, a friend explained a crucial bit of information. It took a moment before I realized that, in fact, I had misunderstood the rules from the beginning. I’d been losing all along. No one had had the heart to tell me. But now it was obvious—even to me—and there was nothing to do but wither up and die.

The conversations resumed. Chips and salsa were passed around. Voices rose over laughter. The world righted itself and sailed on elliptically around the sun. I shot myself into space at an oblique angle that would place me in orbit around Pluto sometime in 2030.

I’m convinced that humility is vital to our survival. C.S. Lewis put it succinctly when he said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.” That has the ring of truth, but paradoxically, the humble are more self-aware than the rest of us.

There are many in religion and the religions, who are icons of humility. This is not surprising, since some religions make humility the sine qua non of relationships, both human and divine.

Why was this, I wondered. Was the humble person a convenient patsy for those in power? Does God and the gods require the abject humiliation of humans in order to feel good about themselves? Were humble Christians limp rags, wrung out scraps with no personality, no fight, mere toadies and bootlickers?

In philosophy courses in graduate school, I’d felt the sting of Nietzsche’s scorn for the humble. I remembered my grandfather, a gentle man from Yorkshire, who had raised me. He didn’t seem to fit the bill of Nietzsche’s resentful and craven Christian. He was kind, resolute, stony-lipped when in pain, and uncomplaining. He could also stand his ground on moral matters. He was my exemplar.

I wanted to be humble. I wondered if wanting it was a form of pride. Was it something I should pray for? How would I know if I’d truly become humble?

To examine humility rightly—or perhaps righteously—is to vanish into it past the point of articulation or at least of explanation. The truly humble are those who are pointed out by others. Nobody says, “I do humble right” or even “I am humble.”  To claim it is to refute it in the claiming.

+ + +

Humility is not listed among the classic virtues. Aristotle and Plato would have regarded it with suspicion, if not distaste. In a hierarchical society of elites ruling over a vastly larger population of common people, humility is not only unnecessary, but also socially destructive. It suggests weakness, vacillation, an inability to properly assess one’s position in society.

What threatens one, threatens all. To question the inherent rightness of one’s position is to question the social order that supports and legitimizes that position. Little wonder, then, that those in powerful positions rarely show genuine humility.

+ + +

Is humility a virtue? It does not appear in most lists of virtues, either classical or contemporary. Neither is it part of the fruits of the Spirit that Christians find in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians.

The word itself derives from the French, humilité, which can be traced back to Classical Latin and the word humus, or earth, in the sense of soil. This is the origin of the word human, the creature whom God fashioned by hand out of the dirt, the one who is close to the earth.

I find this earthy quality deeply attractive. It grounds us (pun inevitable) in this world in a manner both direct and graceful. We are here at home, growing up out of the soil that roots us, sustains us, and to which we shall return. To walk upon this earth with grace is to recognize what we owe it—a passage that takes only what it needs, replaces what it can, and preserves the rest.

It occurs to me that humility is a form of self-knowledge, the inner eye perceiving oneself from the outside. This measuring, assessing, observing, is the work of the self in dialogue with the Spirit.

It is a sign of moral health to recognize and own up to one’s failings. It is the necessary first step toward metanoia or repentance. Paradoxically, one moves forward in spiritual experience through a reversal, a turning away from plunging over the cliff of despair. Peter found it after betraying the Lord; Judas did not.

Humility acknowledges our limitations. The best we have to offer, said Kant, pales by comparison to the requirements of the moral law. And that is the only comparison we should make, he said. To compare ourselves to others is futile and wrong: we are all equally deserving of respect. We learn humility only when we realize how far short of the moral law we fall.

Humility, then, is a clear-eyed lucidity about ourselves. Far from a weakness, it is a recognition both of our limitations and of the spectrum of our potential—frail, complex, conflicted beings as capable of the sublime as we are of monstrosities.

But Kant’s critique, though right on both counts—that we are deserving of respect, and we inevitably fall short of the law—offers no hint of mercy. And mercy, as the humble well know, is the traveling companion of humility.

+ + +

If humility begins with the recognition that we lack something essential, then it would be a general precondition to learning, an awareness sometimes arrived at only in the wake of humiliation.

It took me a while, but in time I came up with the phrase, “epistemological humility,” by which I meant, as I explained much later to my students, that there is no shame in admitting one’s ignorance. It’s only when we try to brazen it out that we get ourselves entangled. And silence, in those situations, is rarely taken for wisdom. Humility as a prerequisite to learning is not passive but open and alert.

If epistemological humility is one of the gateways to learning, where does it lead one in the realm of the spirit? In religions, notoriously, there is a lot of bowing and prostrating.

The Bible is full of references to bowing before God, some of it ritualized and public and some spontaneous and private. The word in the New Testament translated as “worship” means “to bow the knee,” as before royalty. In the context of kings and generals, sovereign power demanded reverence and awe. To bow the knee in worship was a position of vulnerability exposing oneself to blessing—or decapitation—by the king.

A ritual that is better understood is what we Adventists call “The Ordinance of Humility.” This is the ritual washing of the feet of another person, combined later with the Communion Service or Eucharist.

During Jesus’ time, visits to someone’s home would begin with the washing of the visitor’s feet by the host, a ritual that had both practical and symbolic value where most people wore sandals or were barefoot as they trudged up and down the dusty roads. Today’s ritual, where performed, is almost purely symbolic. No one would ever commit the social faux pas of showing up at church barefoot for the Ordinance of Humility.

Our usual practice when I was younger was for the men and boys to gather in one room of the church while the women and girls found another room. You would ask someone if you could wash their feet, or you’d wash the feet of your father or brother.

We were encouraged to participate with visitors or people we did not know. This resulted in a curious intimacy not usually shared with strangers. For me, the act of going down on one knee before someone else and washing their feet—especially someone I did not know well—was not a lowering of status but a breach of a rather starched etiquette. It had the benefit of breaking down barriers and giving one freedom to reach beyond the familiar and the comfortable. It got one’s attention by challenging the bland expectations of the congregant and forcing him or her to think about the relation of humility to the value of others.

In the New Testament stories, the disciple Peter resists the washing of his feet by Jesus. The reversal of roles—the teacher serving the student—horrifies Peter. But Jesus makes it clear that leadership, especially in religion, calls for humility. I am among you as one who serves, he said, with the clear implication they were to do the same.

+ + +

If there is an entrance point to a human spirituality in these politically and religiously fraught days, it is through humility. Just realizing that we don’t have to know everything, win at everything, or even pretend to anything, is liberating. It’s more than that, of course. Humility reorients our self-identity away from grasping to accepting. “Seek and you shall find. Knock and it shall be opened to you.” To be humans of the earth, without pretense or pride, simplifies one’s life.

Humility clarifies our limitations without crippling the reach of our imagination. And it is humility which liberates us from envy and jealousy. It is not too proud to accept the gift of hope.

Freely given service through humility renders irrelevant the perks of power, levels hierarchies, and cleanses the spirit for the upsets, the reversals, the unexpected in a life. Perhaps the Ordinance of Humility is a foretaste of that, a reminder of what could be if we are strong enough to bow the knee without fear or guile.

If I am to think my way to a sober estimate of myself, as Paul says, it calls me to regard myself without external comparison. This is me standing naked before God and the world, just as I am. The “measure of faith” that God deals to each of us is ours alone, understood by no one but ourselves. The one thing we can be sure of, if we can believe it, is that God’s estimate of us, unclouded by the past tense, is forever forming and reforming out of the deepest, dearest, image of our potential.

Barry Casey has published in Adventist Society for the Arts, Brevity, Faculty Focus, Lighthouse Weekly, Mountain Views, Patheos, Spectrum Magazine, The Dewdrop, and The Purpled Nail. His collection of essays, Wandering, Not Lost: Essays on Faith, Doubt, and Mystery, was published by Wipf and Stock in November 2019. He writes from Burtonsville, Maryland. Email him at: [email protected]

06 Mar

THE STORY OF A GOD WHO IS LOVE

In

A few months ago, I had a clarifying conversation with a young lady who’s been journeying with our church for the last 18 months or so, after she met one of my church members in line at the post office.

Since they both had children around the same age, they soon started getting together for playdates. And the friendship quickly ratcheted up when the young lady—we’ll call her Stephanie—tragically lost her son in a freak accident. My church member immediately provided emotional care and support and recruited others from our church to do the same.

Unfortunately, Stephanie’s bad luck didn’t end there, as the loss of her son led to one series of tragic events after the other. And each time tragedy struck, she kept coming back to the inevitable age-old question: If there truly is a God, why does all this bad stuff keep happening to me?

The reality is, Stephanie’s unsure of the God thing altogether. She was raised in a country where animism was the religion of the land, and though she was adopted by a family here in Maine when she was 12, her adopted family practiced a very strict, fundamentalist version of Christianity, leaving her confused about God and turned off by organized religion altogether.

Despite spending a lot of time, and having lots of open conversations about God, with our church family, she still feels very unsettled about God (which isn’t surprising, considering all she’s been through).

A few months back, however, it seems like we had a bit of a breakthrough. As she and I, along with one of my female elders, sat for a couple hours in her small, dark, upstairs apartment, it seems like the lights flickered on—just around the time that she literally decided to turn the lights on to brighten up the room.

What was it that finally seemed to help things click?

I told her a story.

But not just any story. I told her the biggest, grandest, and most captivating story ever told.

I told her, in short, about the cosmic conflict.

The Story Behind the Story

It was then and there that I realized something—though I’ve had moments of clarity about this before.

It occurs to me that, in our current cultural moment, there are two ways that we as Seventh-day Adventist are uniquely positioned to reach the growing post-Christian and secular population in the West.

The first way is through our storytelling. We live in an age when the power of story trumps just about every other form of communication. People have always loved stories, of course—which is why Jesus never spoke to the masses without a parable—but I think it’s truer today than ever before.

Most people today aren’t interested in propositional ideas; they’re turned off by dogma. But they’re captivated by stories.

And we, as Adventists, for nearly as long as we’ve existed, have understood our theology in the form of a grand story—a great controversy, a cosmic conflict.

We understand the main characters, Christ and Satan, and the basic plotline. We understand how God’s character has been maligned and how He’s seeking to return the universe to a place of eternal safety and security, which can only be accomplished by fully demonstrating His trustworthiness.

We understand Christ’s plans to return, and how we’ll bring us back to heaven for a thousand years, at which point all our questions will be answered and all our doubts will be alleviated. We’ll then return to this earth, where God will set up His eternal home with us, and we’ll live forever with Him in peace, harmony, and love—with trauma, abuse, and hatred never rising again.

We understand that the story truly ends with God and His people living “happily ever after.”

Though I’m omitting a lot of important chapters in the story, this is a broad overview of how we understand the grand story. And it’s what I shared with Stephanie—seemingly helping the “light” turn on for her.

And that’s just it: after spinning our wheels for nearly two hours, with me patiently listening and trying to answer her questions with propositional answers, I finally decided to put it all in story form—and it was then that it started to make sense.

The second way we as Adventists are primed to reach secular minds is something I’ve already hinted at. We have not only a story to tell; we have a theological story to tell.

Indeed, we have a story about God.

And I’d humbly submit that this big God-story makes more sense of all the smaller stories than other theological narratives.

I won’t pretend to be an expert on all other versions of the big story. I haven’t exhaustively studied any other religion—nor familiarized myself with every nuance of each version of the story that various Christians tell.

I can just say, purely from anecdotal experience, that the God-story that Adventists tell (properly understood and articulated) seems to resonate a lot more with thinking people today than the way many other Christians tells the story.

Instead of telling a story about a God who predestines some to be saved and others to suffer the eternal torments of hell, we tell a story about a God who loves all equally and desperately wants everyone to live eternally.

Instead of telling a story about a God who’s going to torture people forever in the flames of hell, we tell a story about a God who, despite His deep desire to live eternally with everyone, honors the choices of all, realizing that eternal existence with Him would feel like hell to those who can’t imagine living only ever by other-centered love.

And so, in His mercy, he will gently “pull the plug” on all those who refuse to embrace and be embraced by His love. He won’t torture them eternally.

Instead of telling a story about a God who refuses to be questioned by His creatures, and who pulls a “power-play” by insisting that we’re to blindly follow Him, we tell a story about a God who eagerly opens up his decision-making process and actions, inviting examination and even “judgment” from us as a way to demonstrate His trustworthy character.

I could keep going with this line of thinking, but I trust my point is clear.

In short, we tell a story about a God who is love at His very core—and all that he does stems from and flows out of His character of love.

And I’ve discovered that that story really resonates with thinking people today.

Adventist Worldview

Essentially, what I’m talking about here is the Adventist “worldview.” The way we make sense of the world, the lens through which we see all that exists, is through a story—a theological story.

Indeed, we don’t simply have a worldview. We have a universal view.

As mentioned above, we sometimes refer to it as the “Great Controversy” or perhaps even the “cosmic conflict.”

Oftentimes, when we use the term “Great Controversy” especially, we think of fear-inducing end-times scenarios. We think of “Sunday laws” and the “mark of the beast.” We think of the “time of trouble” and hiding in the mountains.

For some Adventists, this worldview causes them to look suspiciously at every little event, seeing it as a “sign of the times,” and to look suspiciously at other people, seeing a Jesuit behind every bush.

This isn’t the type of “Great Controversy” worldview I’m referring to—it’s not, I’d submit, a healthy lens through which to see the world.

This isn’t to deny the reality of last-day events. But such scenarios and prognostications are too speculative to provide solid footing for us—and often lead us to be unpleasant residents of this world rather than the “aroma of Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:15) that brings healing, wholeness, and happiness to those around us.

What isn’t too speculative is God’s love. What isn’t too speculative is His commitment to freedom and justice and mercy. What isn’t too speculative is his invitation to us to participate in His story—to step into His plan to renew and restore all things, to bring “healing” to the nations (see Revelation 22:2).

When we put on that pair of glasses and look at the world, we don’t look with fear, we look with hope and love. We answer the invitation to participate in God’s redemptive work, while recognizing that our task will ever be incomplete this side of His return.

We see suffering and pain and sin and understand that was never God’s plan—and we rest in the assurance that He will one day, at last, put things to rights, even as we strive to bring that future reality into the present.

Indeed, when we put on those glasses, we recognize that the story ends (or, really, it would be more accurate to say that the story begins) with those lines that come at the end of every great love story: “And they lived happily ever after.”

Shawn Brace is a pastor in Bangor, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter @shawnbrace and sign up for his weekly newsletter at: shawnbrace.substack.com

06 Mar

ROOM WITH A (WORLD) VIEW

In

If you have ever visited England, you may well have made your way to Oxford. You may remember charming buildings of yellowish Cotswold stone. Bookshops and libraries everywhere. A bell sounding somewhere. The feeling that you might just have walked past a future prime minister. Old black bicycles flying in all directions, student gowns flapping in the wind. Arched gatehouses giving on to college quadrangles.

Walk into a quadrangle and you will find student rooms built maybe two or three levels high overlooking a carefully manicured lawn carrying the warning “Keep off the grass.” It is like stepping into another world. If you were to trespass a little and walk past the sign which says “Staircase not open to visitors—residents only” you would find yourself on a rather bare corridor. A few strides and through an open door and you will be in a student room. It has a
window overlooking the quad.

The sun is streaming in. From the window, you can see a few bicycles propped up against the wall. The porter’s lodge at the arched entrance is visible to the right. In the center of the quad is a modern sculpture, roughly in the shape of an “S,” gifted by some wealthy benefactor who wanted to be remembered by future generations.

Wander further into another corridor at right angles to the present one and another open door. This room is not yet touched by the sun. Over to the window and there’s a different view on to the quad. You can no longer see those bicycles. Neither is the gatehouse visible. You can now see the window of the room you were just in. But the sculpture now looks like a kind of fat vertical—nothing more. No shape of an “S.”

Another few strides. Another open door. The sun is slanting across this room. Through this window, yet another aspect of the quad. Everything is somehow familiar but it’s all in a different place. And the sculpture now looks like a back-to-front “S.” The bicycles must be leaning against the wall below this window.

Your wander into the quad has taught you a valuable lesson: that it all depends on which window you look out of as to what you see in the quad.

+ + +

It’s a little like this with our windows on the world. Familiar things look strange under an unfamiliar aspect. And some things are just not visible to us.

Go into the Adventist room, go to the Adventist window, go to your Adventist window, and what do you see from there? Something different from what others see from their own windows.

What can you see? I can only describe what I see from my own window on the world.

+ + +

First, I see a place, the church, where the story of Jesus is kept alive. Where the Living God is part of the reality in which we live. Where God’s unpredictable Spirit moves where the Spirit wills. Where, mysteriously, we can have direct access to God in prayer and worship, and so learn who we really are and who God really is. That is the center piece of the Adventist worldview.

The church is like the Oxford quad in offering a protected space. The noise of the busy street outside is quickly excluded by the old walls. But once in the quad it will not be long before you sniff a sense of privilege. Of exclusivism. Of superiority. One university wit said that the great virtue of Oxford was its tolerance, its great vice was its arrogance. He was not wrong.

Adventism is somewhat similar. Certainly, it can offer a safe place in this conflicted world. Tolerant? Often but not always, and perhaps less so now in this binary world, in this binary church, in which we live. Arrogant? Maybe to some extent. The idea of being “a remnant,” of being a “peculiar people,” of having a unique mission in Christianity, is perhaps not of itself toxic but it easily becomes so. A superior, self-regarding group? The idea of being “special” can easily lead to distorted ideas of entitlement.

But I see other things through my Adventist window.

I see a community which tends to see things in terms of conflict. Its lead story, the “Great controversy,” pits one against another with no middle ground. Battle, competition, strife. This is not an inaccurate description of the world in which we live. At least on the grand scale. The danger is that we take an adversarial spirit into the smaller world in which we go about our daily business. It is dangerous to see the enemy everywhere. It is thus that conspiracy theories breed. Paranoia sets in. The will to see the good in other communities is squeezed.

I see a church which has become so heavily bureaucratized that it appears to differ little from a multinational corporation like Coca Cola. With a worldwide membership of 20 million plus and a multitude of institutions, this is probably inevitable. It is too easy to measure success simply in terms of growing “sales”—baptisms, size, rising tithes and offerings, and other empirical indicators used to measure the unmeasurable. The danger is that at the heart of things is not God, just the concept of God. The church easily degenerates into a mere religious bureaucracy.

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has identified the wider church’s “constant struggle not to become the object of its own faith.” Christ on Trial (Fount, 2000, p. 135). That’s a short but devastating indictment and we Adventists do well to reflect on it.

But the Church wants to be a worldwide family too. It offers warmth and a sense of direction. A home. I see a community of people who have given me a sense of belonging. It is a large family with many different personalities, and so it needs some sort of structure to contain it. And that is where identity problems begin.

Members tend to think of the church either as a family or a multinational corporation as it suits them. Family for warmth and institution for structure. Flesh and bones. But families and corporations are regulated in different ways. When members seek a sympathetic understanding, they think of the church as family. At other times they think of the church as a corporation with procedures and rules. It inevitably creates conflict in our church.

I also see a community where the teaching of the imminent Advent has been in tension with the doctrine of the divine creation. It is strange that Adventists are not especially interested in the well-being of our planet. We say that it makes no sense to protect the Creator’s handiwork when it will soon be destroyed at Christ’s return. A strange logic for creationists. Similarly, I see a community which is more interested in providing social welfare than in seeking social justice. These are expressions of the tension between the now and the not-yet. There are tensions aplenty in this Adventist worldview.

+ + +

But enough of things in the shadows. I see other things too out of my Adventist window.

I see a concern for excellence. The charity Oxfam began in Oxford and has become a worldwide force for good. So too is ADRA. It is smaller but the humanitarian impulse is the same. I see some fine academic institutions. I also see institutions which have given a chance to those on the margins. I see vital medical institutions, large and small, where great human need exists. I see a strong musical tradition. I see a church which has been well ahead of the curve when it comes to matters of healthy lifestyle.

Most of all, I see a chain of local church communities which are good at transmitting the love of Jesus not only among their members but often those beyond too. They provide support, warmth, and direction for those who make them their home. I see friendships which last a lifetime sometimes despite barriers of great distance and culture. I see people swimming against the strong tide of changing values. They are an inspiration. I see people who can find some peace amid the frenetic activity of the wider world thanks to the Sabbath rest and all it entails.

+ + +

Perhaps there is no such thing as a single Adventist worldview nowadays. The global spread of the Adventist Church is perhaps also its fragility. When Adventism meets any culture, it will inevitably produce variants. And so today we have many Seventh-day Adventist windows on the world.

But the genius of Adventism is its uniting value of wholeness. A whole mind in a whole body in a whole world. At its best, it creates coherence in a fragmented world. This hunger for wholeness finds different expression in different places in the world. And not just personal wholeness but community wholeness. And not stiff uniformity but organic wholeness. Creating community, generating wholeness is valuable but hard work. It demands no less than our whole self.

To this, we are called.

Michael Pearson is Principal Lecturer Emeritus at Newbold College in the U.K. For many years, he taught topics in ethics, philosophy, and spirituality. He and his wife, Helen, write a weekly blog pearsonsperspectives.com Email him at: [email protected]

06 Mar

DISTILLED ADVENTISM

In

Sometimes I do things I know I shouldn’t do.

It usually feels pretty good. At first. Later, I feel really bad about it.

That’s my worldview.

Well, part of it. From there it goes in some rather bizarre directions. Extraterrestrials battle over the character, government, methods, and motives of the Ruler of the Universe. Unanswerable questions are raised. Questionable answers are offered.

I call what I believe, the distilled Adventist worldview. It’s not a finished view. It’s not the final truth. There is room for growth. It continues to mature. Newfound truths may advance our understanding. It’s not uniquely Adventist. Glimpses of it can be found in the writings of John Milton and Henry Melvill, in Manicheanism, and in stories like The Mandalorian.

Distillation is a process through which impurities are removed. Simple nuisance particles may also be detached. The process is often intense. It calls for heat and transparency. It must be closely monitored. Combustion or even explosions may occur.

I find a clear distinction between the distilled Adventist worldview and both the historic and current Adventist worldviews, which seem more and more undifferentiated to me. Instead of going through this tedious and potentially dangerous distillation process, I see our church “retreating” to a safer, evangelical, fundamentalistic, Reformation-based form of theology. I don’t believe that was the intention of our founders. I believe they are two radically different worldviews.

I see one based in love; the other, based in fear.

I don’t think I was afraid of God when I was six-years old.

That year, my friend, Gayle, and I, saw a dark cloud about half the size of a man’s hand in what she thought might be the eastern sky. She excitedly told me that Jesus was coming! Her father was a pastor. I figured she knew. We ran home and told our mothers. They gave us Graham crackers and milk and told us to calm down.

That’s the last time I can remember being excited about Jesus coming back. Mostly it scares me. Still.

By the time I was eight, my worldview was saturated in fear.

I don’t blame my parents for my fears. They always shared a loving view of God with me. Largely unwittingly, and I think for the most part unintentionally, my pastors, teachers, and Sabbath School leaders somehow instilled in me a fear of God, a fear of my neighbors, a fear of our government, a fear of the Devil, a fear of the Ten Commandments, a fear of The Last Days, a fear of the Judgment, a fear of the Second Coming, a fear of persecution, a fear of Hell, a fear of the General Conference president, a fear of hidden sins, a fear of death, a fear of my body, and a fear of Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity. I feared everything outside of the safe and comfortable confines of the church. Although inside the church it wasn’t always so comfortable, either.

When fear is overwhelming, there are at least three possible responses. You may have a mental health crisis, you may deny the fear and its causes, or you can “whistle past the graveyard.” I chose the latter. I pretended I was not afraid. I was terrified.

I’ve been asked how I can seem to be so critical of our church and yet continue to be a loyal member. My loyalty to Adventism is directly tied to the classes and tape ministries of several Adventist pastors, theologians, and educators that I encountered in the 1970s and 1980s. Through them I finally saw the light of the good news about God and His character. It shines brilliantly in the First Testament in the writings of men like Moses, David, Isaiah,

Jeremiah, Micah, and Hosea. It explodes into vibrant colors through the prism of Christ’s life and death in the Second Testament—most clearly in the works of John, the disciple who so gratefully reveled in the love of Jesus.

Based on the intended audience for this article, I will presume most of you are well acquainted with the current Adventist worldview. As I mentioned above, I do not see it as being significantly different from an evangelical, fundamentalistic, Reformation-informed Christian worldview. Not having the space to expand and contrast the differences between the current and distilled worldviews, I will focus on describing the distilled Adventist worldview. Hopefully, you will be able to see some of the important lines of divergence between the two views.

In distilled Adventist theology, sin is rebelliousness. It is an attitude of self-centeredness, not a collection of behaviors and acts—a vicious inborn character flaw that leads us to fight God and His government. It is less “what we do,” and more “who we are.” Living with this attitude, everything we do, good or bad, is sin. God’s response to our sin is less anger than sorrow. Each time we act out in sin, we hurt both ourselves and others whom He has created. We form scars, and accumulated scar tissue will eventually destroy both our capacity and our desire to be healed.

God has given us at least five “tools” to help us fight against our sinful natures. The first is the enmity he has put between us and our great enemy. This is what makes us want to change for the better. It’s what eventually makes us feel bad about doing those things we know we shouldn’t. God has also given us His Spirit, to help us respond to that enmity against sin and to give us the power to take the steps needed to accomplish a change in our characters.

And He has given us forgiveness.

We often worry about forgiveness, but forgiveness is not a problem for God. We’ve been forgiven. It’s guaranteed. He forgives freely—even before we ask. The father of the Prodigal Son was not waiting for his son to come back with a speech of confession and repentance. The love and goodness of the father drew the son home to himself. He cut his son off with a hug and a family robe when he began his speech of contrition.

The Roman soldiers at the Cross didn’t ask for forgiveness. Christ gave it to them anyway. But being forgiven doesn’t mean being saved. And presuming on God’s forgiveness may callous us to such a degree that we eventually no longer respond to His entreaties.

What we need is a new character. A rebirth. A change of heart. A healing.

To be healed, we must trust God enough to allow Him to heal us. If we do, He can and will heal us completely. While we must confess (admit guilt) and repent of (turn away from) our sin, that doesn’t induce forgiveness. Confession and repentance are but the first steps in the healing process. They make forgiveness efficacious in our lives. They are not down payments to help cover our sins.

The last two gifts, the greatest ones from God, are found in His Son.

Christ’s primary mission to earth was to show us the Father. He, being of the same nature and character of God, could not fail to do this. He was the greatest gift the Trinity could possibly give. Through Him, we receive the fifth gift, a clear representation and revelation of the goodness and righteousness of God.

This Gift was not meant for humanity alone. In that peculiar, “Star Warsian,” extraterrestrial conflict we Adventists have recognized in our reading of Scripture, we find that a defense of the righteousness of God, His goodness, and His trustworthiness, was necessary for the eternal peace and safety of all creation. That defense was most brilliantly displayed on the Cross.

At the Cross, the impure accretions that had formed on the world’s view of God were distilled off in the clearest revelation of the character of God that the universe could ever receive! Lesser nuisances that had accumulated were also removed. Confusing terms such as propitiation, expiation, payment, cost, penalty, and appeasement were clarified and should no longer befog our view. God doesn’t demand sacrifices, nor does He destroy sinners! The death of Christ ultimately and irrefutably verified that God told the truth regarding the natural results of sin and demonstrated His role in the destruction of the wicked.

Calvary was Hell. On it, Christ experienced the full wrath of God. No eternal fire. No brimstone. No smoke of torment. No destruction at the Father’s hand. Nothing like the anger we humans possess. Just the overwhelming, fatal pain of separation from the Creator—of being given up (forsaken). “God’s wrath is simply His turning away in loving disappointment from those who do not want Him, anyway, thus leaving them to the inevitable and awful consequences of their own rebellious choice” (A. Graham Maxwell).

We can’t overstate the goodness of God. Everything He does and allows is a manifestation of loving righteousness. This is the distilled Adventist worldview. This should be our message to the world.

Mark Johnson, MD, is a retired public health physician and the chairman of the Boulder Vision Board. Email him at: [email protected]

06 Mar

WHAT DID AND WHAT SHOULD MAKE US DIFFERENT TODAY?

In

We are often told: “You, Seventh-day Adventists, are different from other Christians! You are rather peculiar!” Indeed, many Adventist church members like to cite 1 Peter 5:9 in the King James Version and pride themselves that they are a “peculiar” people. Unfortunately, in many parts of the world many have never heard of Seventh-day Adventists or, if they know of their existence, have a rather negative view of them. In fact, Adventists are often better known for what they don’t do—smoking, drinking alcohol, eating pork—than for what they do!

I must admit that, growing up, I was often quite uneasy about my Adventist background. It was unpleasant to be “different.” This negative feeling did gradually fade away, but I must admit that I still find some of my fellow-believers rather “peculiar” and in the not so positive sense of the word. In this short article I want to highlight a few important aspects of Adventism that in the past have made us different. I will suggest how these features, in fact, have the potential to make us more “peculiar” in a positive way.

1. Adventists have almost everywhere constituted a small minority.

We were the only Adventist family in the village where we lived, some 25 miles north of Amsterdam. The less than 3,000 Dutch Adventists were seen as a small American sect among the different Calvinistic denominations. Undoubtedly, many fellow-Adventists of my generation have similar memories of what being an Adventist was like “when we were young.” Today, Adventists are still a small minority in most places. Worldwide, there is only one Adventist for every 358 persons. In the USA we find one Adventist for every 305 people, and in Europe the ratio is as low as 1:2,049.

But there is another side to the coin. Today, in 2024, we are a minority of over 22 million people. This means that there are now almost as many Adventists as, for instance, there are Sikhs in the world, and the Sikh religion is regarded as the fifth largest world religion! There are more Adventists than Jewish believers, who worldwide number just under 16 million.

We may be a minority, but we are far more numerous than many other religious groups! We have every reason to no longer emphasize our minority position but to claim our rightful role on the ecclesiastical scene. In the past we were “different”—largely because of our minority status. Now the time may have come to tell the world: “Look, we are here! Yes, we are still small when compared with the Catholic Church or the Methodists or the Southern Baptists, but we are not as small as you may have thought.” Moreover, you find Adventists in almost every country of the world. And listen: We have a contribution to make. We have resources and expertise. We deserve a place at the table when important social and environmental issues are discussed.

Our “remnant theology” suggests that we will remain a minority, but we are a minority to be reckoned with. We have something important to say and may have to be much more daring than we have often been in speaking up.

2. Can our enemies become our allies?

In its early history, the Adventist Church often found itself in a hostile environment. Our forms of outreach were not appreciated by other religious communities. Also, the Adventist end-time scenario, in which Sabbath keepers would have to face the fury of a Sunday keeping coalition, did not endear them to other Christians.

Today, Adventists are living in a totally different world. Tragically, quite a few church members seem not to be not aware of this, and, as a result, continue to treat other Christians as their enemies. In reality, institutionalized Christianity has suffered a dramatic decline in the Western world. All churches—Seventh-day Adventists included—are facing the challenge of preaching the gospel in an ever more secular and materialistic society.

The differences between Seventh-day Adventists and other Christians have not been obliterated and Adventists still have a “peculiar” message, but these other Christians are now, in fact, our allies. Together we must stand firm for the gospel of Christ in a world that has largely forgotten its Christian values. Let us not waste energy on fighting other Christians but recognize what other faith communities have done and are doing, while ensuring that our “peculiar” message gets heard.

3. The Sabbath—from being a burden to being a blessing.

Millions of believers have experienced that keeping the
Sabbath holy has been a great blessing. But all too often it was also a burden for many of us. It made us “different.” My place in the classroom of my secondary school remained empty on Saturdays, leaving my classmates wondering about my strange religion. Many church members lost their jobs and missed opportunities for promotion because they refused to work on Saturdays. Even today, in our 24-hour economy, insistence on having Saturdays off can cause serious problems. When sharing the Sabbath doctrines with others, their first reaction tends to be negative. It would upset their life and would mean a significant burden if they were to decide to keep the Sabbath!

But now, with the twenty-first century well under way, the Western World is suffering from an epidemic of stress and burnout. Medication can help people relax and can suppress the symptoms of their mental exhaustion. There is, however, no better antidote for a burnout, and no remedy for the relentless pressure of our society, than the divine prescription of one full day of rest, on the seventh day, after every six days of work. The Sabbath is a day of physical rest—of radically interrupting our daily activities—and a day of spiritual refocus. It is a day of connecting in a special way—with God, our family, and significant others. Far from being a burden it can become a blessing for millions around us. When will Adventists become more cognizant of having this unique selling point?

4. Are we living in the time of the end or in a time of new beginnings?

Adventist preaching about the nearness of the Second Coming was a major factor in the growth of our movement. But, after about 180 years, this theme has lost much of its momentum. As war is tearing its destructive path through Ukraine and the Gaza strip, there is every reason to place the current military and political developments once again in the world in the prophetic timeframe that once was a steady diet in Adventist preaching.

Preaching about the time of the end must, however, be combined with actions that show how the gospel can improve life, even in this final phase of earth’s history. “If I knew that Jesus would come tomorrow, I would plant an apple tree today.” This statement, which is often attributed to Martin Luther, has greatly increased in relevancy. Adventist should do more than they have done so far in showing the world what a healthy, balanced, lifestyle looks like. The link between Adventists and “Blue Zones” should not only be a Loma Linda phenomenon but can be duplicated in many places.

Adventists can do much more in reducing their carbon footprint and can be much more on the forefront in campaigns to reduce the consequences of climate change. They can become much more outspoken (and active) in the fight against poverty, racial discrimination, and gender inequality. They could have a much bigger role in peace projects. While reminding the world that time is short, we must be determined to plant as many apple trees as we possibly can!

5. Turning past “present truth” into today’s “present truth.”

From the beginning, Adventists have referred to their message as “present truth.” They were convinced that some aspects of the biblical prophecies had a special application for the very times in which they lived.

‘Present truth’ is a biblical term, inspired by 2 Peter 1:12 (KJV). Unfortunately, more recently this concept has mostly been restricted to the body of doctrinal truth that we inherited from our Adventist forebears. In other words: This present truth refers to a past understanding of truth, i.e. to aspects of the truth that were considered particularly relevant for the days of the “pioneers” of Adventism. A better interpretation of the text in 2 Peter would be: “truth” that is “made present”—that is actualized in what we (individually and collectively) say and do today.1

We do well to study the historical development of our doctrines. But being an Adventist in 2024 entails more than knowing about our Adventist heritage and preserving the “present truth” of earlier generations. The truth we have inherited can easily become just “past truth,” if we do not succeed in making it present, so that it can continue to speak to us, and to those we seek to reach, in ways that are meaningful in today’s context.

In summary: As we seek to be faithful to our mission, let us critically look at what made us what we are today, and how these characteristics might be re-shaped so that they can help us to share our message in our day and age with greater effectiveness.

Reinder Bruinsma, PhD, has served the Seventh-day Adventist Church in publishing, education, teaching, and church administration in West-Africa, the USA, and Europe. He now lives in his native country, the Netherlands, together with his wife Aafje. Although retired, he is still very active in preaching, lecturing, and writing. Among his latest books is He Comes: Why, When and How Jesus Will Return. Email him at: [email protected]

 

1   For a very informative essay about the concept of “present truth,” see: Roberto Badenas, “Dealing with ‘Present Truth’: 2 Peter 1:12 Revisited,” in: Reinder Bruinsma and Børge Schantz, eds., Exploring the Frontiers of Faith: Festschrift in Honour of Dr. Jan Paulsen (Lüneburg, Germany: Advent-Verlag, 2009), pp. 207-217.

1 … 30 31 32 33 34 … 68