26 October 2000 Editorial:
Dead Models in a Time of Confusion

Pr. Larry Kirkpatrick

Roy Adams, in his October 26, 2000 Adventist Review article, "In a time of Confusion," writes that "every crackpot with a computer suddenly has the capability of flooding the market with reams of theological trash." He proposes that instead of listening to these random voices that we do something constructive, like reading Fritz Guy's new book, "Thinking Theologically," and, it seems, following an expert opinion.

Mr. Adams and his liberal contemporaries, now safely ensconced within the institutional hallways of an ever paler and more troubled Adventism, offer us only dead models for dealing with the problems confronting the church.

We will bypass them and move on to sounder solutions.

But since they continue to find their way into print, on occasion we will address them (although doing so becomes more and more tedious with each pass). Adams takes a very favorable approach to La Sierra theology professor and Spectrum magazine editor Fritz Guy's new book "Thinking Theologically." I haven't read Guy's book. There may be something worthwhile in it, but books from La Sierra and Spectrum-type Adventists haven't generally been high on my list of "must read" material. Yet without reading his book we can get a flavor of it in Adams' highly appreciative advertisement for it.

One of the first Guyian quotes is a definition of sanctification (the conventional Adventist view of which is a burr under Adams' skin that runs through the article). Guy states that it "is the behavioral expression of our response to the good news of God's love in Christ." I would like to see more of what Guy has to say on this. Taken as it stands, one notes that it merely echoes the current emphasis on sanctification falling entirely in a "response" category, safely if adroitly removed from the salvation issue itself. Responses are wonderful. And in the current thinking, optional. Is obedience on our part really optional to salvation?

What Guy thinks remains an open question. What Adams thinks does not. His article is littered with repeated attacks and labeling of conservative thinking on our teachings as "downright frightening," "such ideas," "such fallacies," "specious doctrine foisted upon us," "hopelessness," "silliness," "such offbeat ideas," "quirky concerns," "mindless trivialities," "a preoccupation with 'historic Adventism'."

Adams quotes from two letters to the Review that really had bothered him (and which presumably are the kind of thinking he hopes Guy's book will stop). The first one took new GC President Jan Paulsen to task for not rightly teaching the gospel of Adventism. This letter, as quoted in his article is right in essence, although it is difficult to know exactly what the author said, for ellipses litter the quotation as given. An unfortunate wording occurs near the end "keep the Ten Commandments in order to earn your eternal life." However, Adams' issue is not with a miss-wording, but with the conventional Adventist view of sanctification altogether. What he doesn't like, and what editors today are scrupulously cropping out of that which goes out to our people, is reference to a view of salvation in which obedience plays any role at all. There is a staunch moratorium on words like "perfection," unless they have been carefully revamped. It is enough to make one ill in reading it.

Perhaps some might wonder what Ellen G. White said on this?

Obedience to God was required of Adam, and we stand in the same position that he did to have a second trial, to see whether we will listen to the voice of Satan and disobey God, or to the Word of God and obey. RH June 10, 1890.

Obedience was "required" of Adam, and obedience is also "required" of us, who "stand in the same position that he did to have a second trial."

For the record, if you go back and listen or read Paulsen's sermon carefully, you will actually find the letter-writer's concerns borne out. In his inaugural address, our new GC president did indeed present an entirely forensic gospel. Everything he mentioned was external to us and apart from us. I'm glad someone wrote about that. Of course, it was never published in the letters column. It only found its way into this later story as something of which Adams says it is "downright frightening to think that there might be Sabbath school teachers and local elders and even some pastors propagating such ideas in our churches today."

Another "letter to the Review" found its way into his article. The subject? This time, the 144,000. The author of that letter, in the parts we see in this story envisions a people who've undergone a precious sanctification experience, standing with the Lamb on Mt. Zion. He talks of a group of people "qualified" to pass through the time of Jacob's trouble. Again, some of the wording may have been less than ideal. But Adams characterizes such letters and such thinking as "extreme," and "offbeat." Still, he thinks there may yet remain "sufficient resonance for such offbeat ideas in certain sectors of the church" for it to be a significant problem.

Well, Mrs. White is resting in her grave today. But were she yet with us, she would probably repeat this remark originally shared but 99 years ago:

God has given His people positive instruction, and has laid upon them positive restrictions, that they may obtain a perfect experience in His service, and be qualified to stand before the heavenly universe and before the fallen world as overcomers. They are to overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. Those who fall short of making the preparation essential will be numbered with the unthankful and the unholy. RH, October 8, 1901.

Or had she heard the sermon that concerned the first letter writer, might she have written an interesting letter reminding us all that

Satan is engaged in leading men to pervert the plain meaning of God's word. He desires that the world should have no clear idea in regard to the plan of salvation. He well knows that the object of Christ's life of obedience, the object of his suffering, trial, and death upon the cross, was to magnify the divine law, to become a substitute for guilty man, that he might have remission for sins that are past, and grace for future obedience; that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in him -- and he be transformed and fitted for the heavenly courts. ST, March 30, 1888.

One portion of La Sierra professor's book that especially pleased Roy Adams was the solution it offered to polarization in the church. Three competing theological emphases that, taken in an unbalanced fashion and being allowed to exclude everything else, are taken to cause this polarization, are a gospel emphasis, a relevance emphasis, and 'a preoccupation with historic Adventism.'" The solution, he says, is to hold these three poles in tension with one another (the third pole is subtly reformulated as 'our Adventist heritage' rather than as 'historic Adventism.'). In fact, according to Adams, "That one concept, taken seriously, can forever end the enervating polarization within the church."

So there you have it. The current Review is pointing to this tremendous solution, by a La Sierra religion professor, a key participant in Spectrum magazine, as the source for this one concept that will "forever end" the present polarization within the church. Um. I don't exactly think so.

Oh yes. There is a tremendous polarization within the church today. And yes, we'll find that the true gospel is always relevant, and that it is a perfect fit for not only our Adventist heritage, but "historic Adventism," (if you want to use that phrase). But the gospel that the Ellen White quotes above point to is not the same one that Adams points to.

What we are offered here are dead models. Dead. As in rigor mortis dead. Go. Take your journey on the river Styx, to the ivory towers of gloom. Find a theological expert from the educational institution renowned for its liberalism and one of the single most toxic publications to see ink. Ah yes. A solution! Publish it far and wide. And dig out a few imprecisely worded letters to the editors from some concerned saints and ridicule them. Demonize those who exist outside of your institutional toadstool. Discredit. And then top it off with a complaint about the anger that is in the church today. Call it "contentious theology" when someone disagrees with your new-modeling of the faith. Call it a "hobbyhorse theology" if someone mentions the nature of Christ. Say that those who believe in these, or in perfection, are lacking in "theological rigor." There you have it.

This is a dead model. Referral to theological experts and demonizing of our members--even members who haven't yet figured out that letters sent to these editors sail directly past them--these are the tactical expressions of an ineffectual and dying system. God has opened up communications in our world. Adams' article of concern because God has stormed the battlements of a small group of new modelers by going around them with the information revolution represented by the newly wired world, is the plaintive cry of a group losing its grip on the control it once had. Instead of seeing what our God is doing, using "simple means" "to bring about and perfect His work of righteousness," (TM 300), the author complains of "flooding the market with reams of theological trash." The Review, over a continuous period of years has so largely alienated its conservative readers, that it sees that which comes into the public not printed by itself as "reams of theological trash."

Can I be blunt? "Reams of theological trash" are what the Review has been publishing for several years. We (and others) are here because that is what they have been doing. They have blunted and revamped and refocused the message so much so, that many of us no longer recognize continuity between the message as we understood it when we read our way into this end-time church through the Bible and Spirit of Prophecy books, and the "kinder and gentler" Adventism presented today. It is as if these writers have taken the authentic message of Adventism, emptied it of its bite and relevance, and then selectively reconstructed as a sanitized version for our (and the world's) consumption. It bothers us. This is part of the dead model. In a time of confusion, all they can offer us is more of the same: "rely upon us. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."

Not so. Not so at all. Some of us are returning We are going back to the Adventism of our pioneers. We will having nothing to do with your dead models. We are going to go forward with truth. We are going to go straight on, looking neither to the right nor to the left. We are going to be Seventh-day Adventists. We are going to live and talk and preach and teach and present everything that's authentic Adventism in its order. We'll teach sanctification, obedience, character perfection, the nature of Christ, or any other disapproved doctrine that you have sought to bury in your reams of theological trash. And weÕll do it from within the structure of the church. We will reestablish the tottering or lost continuity with the Adventism of the past, if God so wills. But we are going to be Seventh-day Adventists in spite of the time of confusion that you have brought upon us by your new-modeling of the faith.

The Review has lost all credibility. In two of the three Adventist higher education facilities that I have attended in recent years, professors have been willing to tell me privately that they cannot recommend the Review as it stands. Yet this magazine is the churches primary means of communicating with its members. There must be a change. The editors at the Review must change. Or the magazine as it blushingly is can remain with the same liberal editors, continuing to conduct the same attacks upon those willing to read the Bible and Spirit of Prophecy writings for themselves and think outside the convenient boxes of the liberal professors down by the river Styx. There is indeed a war underway. But that means it is time to study for ourselves so that we'll know who the light bearers truly are. Unfortunately today there may be more theological light for us over at Motel Six, where they have promised at least to leave the light on for us.

We reject the dead models. We want more than the tired and the threadbare. We want to be a prepared people, ready to be used, yes qualified to stand on the sea of glass. The dead models won't take us there. It is time to be authentically Adventist. Our publications and institutions have so polluted the water that in all likelihood the message will outlive us all. We will pass on and another generation will finish the work (if some of us successfully pass on the torch). We've been too hung up in the old models. We've listened to those who have carried us into a bankrupt time. Some have been allowed to bring in destructive innovations that have utterly polarized the church. The old models have failed.

Never forget. The church is the people. Satan has sought to destroy us with a neutron warhead-like theology; one that leaves the buildings and structures standing but just destroys the people. But in spite of his best shots, we are still here. The message is still alive. It is time to move on and to cast aside the dead models, but to endeavor to wage the war from within the structure. There is still a vitality within the structure. But in some places perhaps there is little if any. These are the end results of pluralism and new modeling and the dead models. The journey home yet remains. If they throw down the banner, then you and I lift it up. Truth is still truth. God will still have a people. Do the work where you are. You don't need anyone's permission. Work evangelistically to make solid Seventh-day Adventists in your sphere. The best days are still ahead for the third angel's message.