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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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]