Review's "A Fresh Faith" Troubling

Kevin Paulson

[Note: This is the full text of a letter to the editor of the Review, forwarded to us here and reproduced with permission from its writer. The original article the following letter comments on is found at This link]

To the editors:

In the midst of a refreshing spate of clarity from official church sources regarding the second coming in the wake of the Left Behind delusion, Peter Bath's recent article is a most disturbing change of tone.

One could be forgiven for concluding that this man rejects key features of Adventism's Bible-based prophetic understandings, with his disparaging remarks about "time lines of prophecy, the beasts," "dates, sequences, kingdoms, and charts." If nothing else, he seems to find these aspects of our faith irrelevant at a time, strangely, when our historic views of prophecy are experiencing fulfillment at a pace that is almost dizzying.

What does Bath mean by his reference to "eschatological false gods . . . that need to be overturned"? Which aspects of our prophetic message does he want tossed out? What business does our church paper have printing articles which hang question marks over more than a few of our Fundamental Beliefs?

To interpret Christ's statement about no one knowing the day or hour as meaning, "Don't waste your time on schedules and events," is to belie the Saviour's repeated descriptions of detailed events in the Gospels which His people are to watch for. And Ellen White declares that the Christian "has a chart pointing out every waymark on the heavenward journey, and he ought not to guess at anything" (GC 598). Certainly it is fair to conclude that neither Jesus nor Ellen White would have given us so much detail about the future if it was all, as Bath implies, a waste of time.

Bath promotes a popular though puzzling paradox of contemporary Adventism when he disparages, on the one hand, the idea that "I have to be sinless to make it" through the end times, yet summons the church to "live and love radically" in a "lifetime commitment of service." Sinless obedience sounds to me very much like living and loving radically. What Bath and others like him fail to consider is that a false gospel which teaches salvation by justification alone and denies that sin can be fully overcome, not only produces a relaxation of personal piety, but of social piety as well. Our Adventist pioneers, all of whom taught sinless perfection, were very socially active, as their involvement in the abolitionist movement demonstrates. But from what I've observed, contemporary Adventists who embrace views such as Peter Bath's tend to be far more absorbed in their own pleasures and worldly pursuits than in either the relief of human suffering or the extension of God's kingdom.

Perhaps it is true, as Bath claims, that "people don't care how much we know until they know how much we care." But it is the unchanging truths of Inspiration which give caring its purpose, and help it to endure beyond the passing fads of intellect and fashionable piety. The only way for modern Adventists to truly recover a social as well as an eschatological purpose is to recover faith in that most unpopular of old Adventist beliefs--that "when the character of Christ shall be perfectly reproduced in His people, then He will come to claim them as His own" (COL 69).

Kevin D. Paulson

Redlands, California

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