14 June 2001 Editorial:
Howling at the Moon

When official Adventist publications keep up their attacks on perfection, something needs to be changed

Larry Kirkpatrick

This week two more attacks on perfection have been published in the official annals of the church.

One piece in the Review takes aim at treasured Adventist truths. You will find the original online at Dangerous Intersection. Another item in the latest Signs magazine, "Obsessively Right" (July, 2001, p. 14) does the same. These are not high-powered intellectual attacks on the teaching, but they are incessant, like the continuous roar of a crowd in the background. Their continuing presence continues to disclose the hatred for this teaching among a certain crowd of Adventists.

In "Dangerous Intersection," this appeal is made: "Here is a call for courage. As a denomination we must move beyond a self-absorbed preoccupation with "perfection," both behaviorally and doctrinally." I don't know whether I would name this a call for courage as the author did (other words come to mind, but let's move on). I do wonder where the author (this is another piece by Chris Blake) gets his ideas. He states that "If holiness means only the absence of sin, Pluto is holy ground." He rails against our having "an antiseptic approach" that avoids sin but refuses holiness.

Has anyone ever heard any Adventist teaching this? I sometimes wish these folk would name names. It is easy to throw darts at straw men and walk away a hero. Straw men don't hit back well.

Blake uses the Moon and Pluto as an illustration. The Moon, he says, was perfect until we fired missiles into it and messed it up. In contrast the planet Pluto remains untouched by human hands, perfect. But then he remembers that the Moon had craters from rock impacts before humanity did anything to it. This illustration does little for his argument. No Adventist has ever advocated we get rid of sin while shutting-off the vaccuum created from the entrance of holiness. As far as the claim that Adventists currently have a self-absorbed preoccupation with doctrinal perfection, it is laughable. Doctrinal laxity and indifference is the order of the day. In these repetitive and poorly supported attacks, antiperfectionism is just howling at the Moon.

In "Obsessively Right," Carol Cannon attacks those whom she thinks are interested in or perhaps obsessed with perfection. Actually, maybe we can cut her some slack on this, as she is a clinical director at a place called "The Bridge," seeking to help people with addictive disorders. She probably has met some folks struggling with personality issues. She says "When people make being right and perfect their sole source of meaning, identity , and value, their primary basis for evaluating their own and other people's worth, perfectionism takes on an offensive quality at best, an addictive quality at worst." But notice that the thrust of her complaint is not against Christian perfection but against perfectionistic attitudes.

Cannon's article refers repeatedly to some book, The Art of Imperfection. Nowhere in the article is there reference to one verse or one quotation from the pen of inspiration. Still, Signs is supposed to be the main missionary magazine outreach for the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It is expected to be a Christian magazine. That's why it is so sad that Cannon does however, say this: "Anything I have to offer another person must be offerred in the context of reality: I am and always will be perfectly imperfect. That's the best I can hope for." In case you're wondering whether this philosophy improves by the time her article ends, hear her closing sentence: "If, on the other hand, you fail to be as ethical as you think you should have been, don't act surprised."

What shall we make of calls that we advance beyond doctrinal and behavioral perfection? Of the insistant and whining refrain that moral failure and imperfection is the best that can be hoped for?

Actually, there is nothing wrong with perfection and everything right with perfection.

I am going to be helpful here. I am going to list, right here, every place in all the Bible that speaks disparagingly of "perfection." O.K. Here we go:

Sorry. No list. There is no place in Scripture at all, from Genesis to Revelation, that speaks disparagingly of perfection. Not one. Hence, no list.

There is one place where Paul says that if perfection were by the Levitical priesthood there would have been no need for the Melchizedek priesthood (Hebrews 7:11). But what does that mean? Simple. That God's plan and purpose for the Melchizedek priesthood is to bring perfection forth in His people through "another priest" (Jesus) after the Melchizedek order. That is, the high priestly ministry of Jesus currently underway in heaven for us is meant to bring us to perfection. This is so evident. Hebrews 6:1 even urges, "Let us go on unto perfection," and the suggested time-frame for the process is not the future, but the present. Paul rebukes his readers for being behind the curve of God's plan, needing to be taught again the basics when already they should be teaching the richness of these truths to others (Hebrews 5:11-12).

But to what are we treated by "our" publications? More and more of the same; namely, the regular almost hypnotic beat of continuous slams against truth. Isn't it telling how it is precisely where Adventism makes a difference--right at doctrine and behavior--that is we are assaulted?

Think about it. If we change our doctrine we will change our behavior. If we weaken our doctrine we will change our behavior. Inseparably, doctrine and behavior are linked. What is the only way Satan can score points--even win the great controversy still? Easy. By making it impossible for God to fulfill Revelation 14:4-5. Those verses say that in the end of time, God will produce a people, who, before probation closes, reach the point where they will follow Jesus wherever He goes obtaining an experience so intense that no guile--none at all--can be found in their mouths, and they stand finally before the throne of God and faultless in the sight of their Maker.

This has to be a reality before probation closes, for the pronouncement at that time is, "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still" (Revelation 22:11). Is it not plain that if you or I are to stand faultless before God's throne, we must co-operate with His efforts to change us before Christ's intercession for us in heaven ends? Because when it ends, if I am still filthy, I will never be made clean, and if I am holy, I will never retrograde to a state of unholiness.

Come on now. What is beyond behavioral and doctrinal perfection? All smoke and mirrors aside, what's up? Isn't it the fact that those who are disquieted by the precious idea of Jesus perfecting a people are really at war with the baseline theology of Adventism? That historically we have always said and taught that obedience to the commandments of God is not merely possible, not only desirable, but a both beautiful and necessary part of heaven's closing work? And that the new-modelers among us are unreconciled to this fact?

Must we, in the pages of these publications, continually be subject to this fare? Is this what is going to get us into heaven? Worse, must the Seventh-day Adventist Church be an agency that subjects non-Adventists to these ideas in our missionary journal? Have we come to the place where, if your viewpoints are politically correct you can just reach up into the sky and grab whatever you want and the church will pay to publish it?

"All things that are reproved are made manifest by the light" (Ephesians 5:13). And speaking of God, His Word says, "In Thy light shall we see light" (Psalm 36:9). John says that what condemns men is when they love darkness rather than light (John 3:19-21). Come now. Is one wrong to think that individuals truly interested in following Jesus will be the first in line to learn His doctrines and the first in line to seek for behavior that will most please Him? And that those opposed to truth will be first in line to try to blur the issues and put a depressive twist upon what is good?

Most thinking Adventists will rightly reject these redefinitions that turn following God into evil. But what is most sinister is that the most regular attacks on perfection, purity of doctrine, and antiworldly behavior come off our presses with the regularity of the tick of a metronome.

It must stop. Jesus stands today in heaven as our Melchizedek high Priest. His purpose is to perfect His people and lead them home. The most dangerous intersection in Adventism today is where the new theology attempts to change the signposts to heaven, to spin what we are into what we are not and invent another pathway to heaven. But no other name is given among men by which we may be saved than Jesus, and no other theology is given among men tuned to the necessities of the last moments in time than what Seventh-day Adventists have sought to live and give for so long. That God's people would stop whining and excusing themselves from obeying God, and move forward is our prayer. We've been here far too long--a reality evident with each passing issue that falls off the press!

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