Book Review:
Christ Our Salvation
by Hans K. LaRondelle

Reviewed by Larry Kirkpatrick

This book made many of the right Adventist noises, but faltered in terms of portraying a crisp explanation of the way of salvation as understood by SDAs. In its favor, it uses Scripture and SOP writings profusely. Unfortunately, it also displays some of the confusion particularly evident in Perfection, published in 1975 containing the views of Maxwell, Douglass, Heppenstall, and LaRondelle. In Christ Our Salvation (COS), he blends into Adventism an undue amount of Calvinism—a project destined for painful failure. Still, he is to be commended for emphasizing human free will and attendant responsibility, while recognizing that he occasionally approaches a predestinarian fatalism (p. 15).

He counters the moral-influence theory from time to time (pp. 25,26). But his Calvinistic tendencies lead him repeatedly to affirm just a bit too much when he presses his own equivalent to original sin (see p. 30 for example which subtley but clearly makes the assertion that we are guilty for Adam's sin in legal terms). Regretably he imposes an alien system upon the tapestry of Scriptural harmony that is authentically Adventist. He does mention conditionalism (p. 32).

On another positive note, he does consider from time to time salvation as process rather than isolated point action. On p. 44 he makes the pivotal mistake of failing to distinguish between merit and non-merit bearing conditions. It is this slipping and sliding about that leads me to conclude not that he presents the reader with an integrated and harmonized view, but rather with a Frankensteinian patchwork combining mutually exclusive concepts that continue to be mutually exclusive. He flip flops back to EGW statements that plainly affirm that "justification is more than a mere legal transaction..." Sanctification in the classic Adventist/Methodist sense is sidestepped (p. 66,70,71). Even on p. 77 he cannot bring himself to include sanctification in the gospel.

Again, I suggest that although the book is laced with many precious statements that, limited to themselves, are sound, they are set in a framework that careful reflection would show to have an overdose of Calvinist orientation. To some readers the book may seem old-line Adventism; yet to persons steeped in the Bible and EGW writings, and aware of some of the baseline issues that wend their way through contemporary Adventist theology, it will be apparent that COS falters miserably in its doctrine of sin and of perfection.

I am convinced that the same book, written by EGW would be substantially different, and get to righter things with less convolution and gyration.