27 September 2001 Guest Editorial:
The October 2001 Ministry: Irony Illustrated

Kevin D. Paulson

In his "Pastor's Pastor" corner of the latest Ministry magazine ("Rumors and Half Truths," Ministry, October 2001, p. 30), Jim Cress rightly debunks a distorted tale which has sadly become popular in some circles of conservative Adventism--the claim that at one point in the recent past, the Seventh-day Adventist Church supposedly gave some medal to the Pope, allegedly bestowing the blessing of our church on the pontiff and his ecumenical agenda. Cress explains what in fact took place, and urges the church to spend less time with gossip and more with the Word of God.

I couldn't agree more.

Cress wonders aloud "why we are so fascinated by rumors and eager to believe the worst about any situation" (Ibid). Sadly, he seems not to understand how the doctrinal chaos so rampant in First World Adventism gives credibility to stories such as the one in question, even if the stories aren't in fact true. The kid in school with a track record of misbehavior might at times be falsely accused. While this is never right, or excusable, unfortunately it is also understandable.

Knowing the conservative wing of Adventism as I do, I also think such words as "fascinated" and "eager" are--for the most part--serious overstatements. Conservative Adventists are by no means a flawless group, and some in their ranks do give credence to some of Cress's observations. But from my many years of experience among them, I sense that the vast majority who tend to believe bad things about their church, do so because of the painful evidence of their own encounter with reality in the contemporary church. They would love to be able to trust leadership again, and their loss of such has occurred not with eagerness, but with great agony.

Ironically, this very issue of Ministry illustrates why some among us tend to believe the worst from the rumor mill regarding leadership in the church.

The cover article, "Looking Back and Moving Forward" (pp. 5-7), is written by one Reinder Bruinsma, who has written elsewhere that the Seventh-day Adventist belief in the Papacy being the end-time Antichrist is an outdated tenet which we should discard (Bruinsma, "Adventists and Catholics: Prophetic Preview of Prejudice?" Spectrum, Summer 1999, pp. 45-52). Many contemporary Adventists throughout the developed world could attest to the fact that Bruinsma is not alone in this blatant rejection of a fundamental Adventist belief (see Seventh-day Adventists Believe, pp. 155-157,168,343).

Jim Cress is quite correct in warning Adventists against accepting false rumors such as the one about the medal to the Pope. But when church members hear voices in official Adventism denying our Fundamental Beliefs in this regard, or listen to pastors year after year who either claim (absurdly) that the Papacy has changed or who consider our prophetic message unimportant, one can see how stories such as the one Cress denies can sound less than far-fetched.

Bruinsma's Ministry article displays his not-so-hidden disbelief in certain fundamentals of the Advent message. He even implies at one point that Ellen White's Early Writings contains theology the church needs to outgrow (p. 6). His attempt to scoff at the "good old days" and those seeking a return to such is utterly beside the point. No one I know of in the ranks of conservative Adventism seeks an "uncritical embracing of the [Adventist] past," as Bruinsma claims (p. 7). Such a caricature of "historic Adventism" is a total fabrication. To recount, as he does, the impoverished days of underpaid workers, uneducated masses, and incurable diseases has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Neither does his reference to the Amish and the Shakers (p. 7), an utterly irrelevant aside since nothing in Scripture or the writings of Ellen White upholds such a withdrawel to the fringes of society.

Nor do any prominent voices in the historic Adventist ranks deny such doctrinal errors from our past as Arianism and non-Trinitarian beliefs. It is the Bible-based, Spirit-of-Prophecy-affirmed doctrines and lifestyle standards that historic Adventists in the contemporary church seek to recover.

His reference at the beginning of his article to the Episcopalians and other churches which have lately decline in membership and influence, is another monstrous irony he seems not to notice. For most of the past thirty years, mainline churchmen and secular reporters have agreed that the mainline denominations are dying because of ambiguity in their doctrinal and lifestyle witness--the very "solution" Bruinsma and others like him think will resolve Adventism's current dilemma!

At the bottom line, Cress is to be commended for seeking to debunk "rumors and half truths." But this doesn't apply simply to the reporting of information. It applies even more importantly to the realm of theology.