By Zdravko (Zack) Plantak, PhD

Two recent events have made me think anew about the significance of The Present Truth as a great Seventh-day Adventist concept to reckon with in this post-truth era. The first took place at a book club where, with a dozen church theologians, I discussed a book on Last Generation Theology written by another dozen Adventist theologians. The sentiment came out clearly that we are spinning our wheels discussing the very same issues that our fore-bearers discussed before on so many occasions. Have we moved on from the very same discussions our faith fathers and grandfathers discussed? The obvious answer is “No.”

The sentiment at the end of the book club was that we need a new language and new ways to express our Adventist faith if we are to be even remotely relevant to the present day generation of believers, let alone to the non-believers and the young adults who have been leaving our midst month after month, year after year.

The second event took place over the weekend in my local church as we continued to wrestle with “compliance committees” (as per recommendation of the top leadership of the General Conference) and the issues of women in ministry. And again, the striking comments by several participants indicated that our young adults cannot fathom that we are (or why we are) still discussing issues that have been so clearly worked through by the church, and certainly by the society at large, decades ago.

Again, the feeling of spinning wheels in muddy terrain seemed the best photo-metaphor that crossed my mind as I thought about the utter irrelevance of what we do as a community. There seems to be so much “yesterday” in doing church, missing the ever-changing world, its contemporary changes and needs, and our understanding of the Gospel in today’s language and culture.

Our pioneers realized, as one church historian put it, that “the changing times had led to changing emphases. Present truth, as the early Adventists saw it, was progressive.”1 As a very dynamic concept, the present truth was not defined once and for all but had, even through the pen of early church leaders, continued to change in emphasis and in understanding. So, for example, Joseph Bates seems to have been the first to use the phrase “present truth” (as early as 1846), applied in relation to the Sabbath as well as the entire message of Revelation14:6-12.2 Several years later, James White, after noting the apostle Peter’s use of the phrase “present truth” in 2 Peter 1:12, wrote that “in Peter’s time there was present truth, or truth applicable to that present time. The Church have [sic] ever had a present truth. The present truth now,” White continued, “is that which shows present duty, and the right position for us who are about to witness the time of trouble.”3

Ellen White in later parts of her ministry claimed that “there will be a development of the understanding, for the truth is capable of constant expansion. . . . Our exploration of truth is yet incomplete. We have gathered up only a few rays of light.” And earlier she also noted that what is present truth for one generation might not be present truth, or even a “test,” for later generations.4

In a world that is so desperately ignoring the issues of truth overall, a world in which we have been bombarded with all kinds of fake-truths, dishonest claims, and a world in which “post-truth” was labeled a new “word of the year”’ by the Oxford Dictionaries, should we not stand up for a much more rigorous desire for truth to be again an important aspect of our faith and our influence in the world? Should truth still matter? And to what extent can we indeed be the faithful “prophetic community raised to bring the present truth to the contemporary world”?5

If we, as a community of faithful believers, have termed the present truth a “belief in the progressive revelation by which different biblical emphases are seen as essential at different times of human history,”6 we must wrestle with what may indeed be topics of “present,” or immediate and most essential issues of our 21st century human history and then address them in the most honest and relevant ways. In other words, what is desperately needed, as my dear friend and for many years a colleague in teaching ministry, Roy Branson, concluded, is people who speak distinctively and movingly from within Adventism to the larger community; voices who, from the core of Adventist particularity, express a universal message for our time; people who allow the power of the gospel to challenge those who oppress the vulnerable.7

However, when I look at our own conversation in the church today, it seems that we have forgotten our high call- ing to deliver the present truth to the world, or even to each other. It seems that we continue turning the wheels in the same muddy holes and ignore the needs of the society around us which is desperately heading in the direction of lies, manipulations, innuendos, and violence against women, foreigners, refugees, the LGBTQ+ community, and so many other marginalized and vulnerable people, wounded on our contemporary “roads to Jericho” and in dire need of hope and encouragement.

Might there not be a need to discover the present truth on those issues as well as issues of environmental responsibility and economic fairness? This would surely be in line with the pioneers’ idea of the present truth—that truth that is “peculiarly appropriate” in the present conditions in which the church lives and works. James White urged an earlier generation of Adventists in 1857 that “it has been impossible to make some see that present truth is present truth and not future truth, and that the Word as a lamp shines brightly where we stand, and not so plainly on the path in the distance.”8

An analogy comparing the Seventh-day Adventist Church with a new model of car, proposed by one Adventist ethicist, is useful in this context. It was suggested that a new body has been fitted to an old chassis without much having been done to redesign the engineering of the vehicle. The question is whether the car will function efficiently under modern road conditions. Some believe that the future of the car is in the export market, others think that it will become a collector’s item.9

If the church desires to stay effective on the road and does not want to become a collector’s item, or even worse, an item that gathers rust and dirt and eventually falls apart, it must find contemporary relevance. And the only way to get its engineering adjusted to the use of unleaded petrol and other modern essentials to make it fit for the road is to address issues of life and death, and therefore issues of social ethics. “In this way,” as I argued before, “it is in line with the pioneers’ idea of “present truth”—that truth that is “peculiarly appropriate” in the present conditions in which the church lives and works.”10

If we honestly express our deep desire for the present truth for our age, we may not be perfectly correct and we may still need to modify our perspectives in the future in order to realize and accept the leadership of the Holy Spirit to continue to lead us into the clearer truth. But our responsibility is not to bury our heads in the sand as ostriches and ignore the issues that surround us in our day and age.

Worse, it may even be irresponsible of us to continue wheel-spinning on the issues that seem to have considerable relevance to the present and keep on arguing “yesterday’s” issues (such as sinlessness of the last generation, standing before God without a mediator, or whether women should be kept from exercising leadership positions in mission and ministry of the church) with the church’s energy, time, and money as if the Lord’s coming depends on those, while ignoring what may truly be putting back the “present” into The Present Truth.

If we do so, we may be following the desires of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide author (May 2018) who expressed it in the following way: “As Seventh-day Adventist Christians, we believe in the biblical concept of ‘present truth’ (2 Pet. 1:12). It’s basically the idea that God unfolds truth to humanity at the time it is needed, with more and more light being given by the Lord over the ages.”11

May we ask, what is God planning to unfold through us to the world in times such as these?

–Zdravko (Zack) Plantak, PhD, is professor of religion and ethics at the School of Religion at Loma Linda University. Email him at: [email protected].

References

  1. George R. Knight, “Adventists and Change” Ministry, (October 1993): 11. [https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1993/10/adventists-and-change].
  2. Joseph Bates, The Seventh Day Sabbath a Perpetual Sign (New Bedford, Mass.: Press of Benjamin Lindsey, 1846), p. 2; A Seal of the Living God (New Bedford, Mass.: Press of Benjamin Lindsey, 1849), 17.
  3. James White, in The Present Truth, (July 1849): 1. Reprinted in “The Present Truth & The Spirit of Prophecy,” The Sabbath Sentinel 45: 8 (August 1993): 4-7.
  4. Ellen G. White Manuscript Releases, vol. 5, p. 201; vol. 3, 258-259; see Ellen G. White, Testimonies, vol. 2, 693.
  5. Zdravko Plantak, The Silent Church: Human Rights and Adventist Social Ethics, (Macmillan Press, 1998), 206.
  6. Ibid., 154.
  7. Cited by Charles Scriven, “Radical Discipleship and the Renewal of Adventist Mission,” Spectrum 14:3 (December 1983): 11.
  8. James White, “A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Present Truth,” Review and Herald, (December 31, 1857): 61.
  9. Michael Pearson, Millennial Dreams and Moral Dilemmas, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 277-278.
  10. Plantak, 137.
  11. Sabbath School Lesson, Lesson 8, May 19-25, 2018. [https://absg.adventist.org/assets/public/files/lessons/2018/2Q/ SE/PDFs/EAQ218_08.pdf].