This week (Mon & Tue the 6th & 7th) I am making four presentations to pastors and lay people at West Point School of Evangelism, sponsored by the Pacific Union Conference, Adventist Media Center and other church organizations. Titles are 1) Postmodernism: an Adventist Opportunity; 2) Postmodernism and Ellen White; 3) Postmodernism and the Sanctuary/Judgment; 4) Postmodernism and the Sabbath/2nd Coming. Please pray that everything will be communicated and received in the Spirit!
-- Martin

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“Don’t curse the darkness. Light a candle.”

End-time Adventists can find value in that time-honored advice. As the world’s moral midnight deepens around us—greed, lust, war, unbelief, and so on—it’s easier to condemn the darkness than to strategize about how Christ’s light of truth might shine more brightly through His church.

Consider the DaVinci Code, that bestseller turned blockbuster which assaulted Christ’s deity and the integrity of Scripture. Many Christians counterattacked by damning DaVinci. But some believers recognized an opportunity to dialogue with unsaved friends about Jesus, as Paul did when the gospel was slandered in his day: “Whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice” (Phil. 1:18). While others cursed the darkness, Paul illumined it with the light of truth.

DaVinci is Exhibit A of the postmodern assault upon Christian faith. Before explaining the bad news of postmodernism (and there is much to denounce about it: theistic evolution for starters), let me share some good news: Postmodernism provides Adventists opportunities for evangelism that we’ve never had before. In fact I believe that of all faith groups, Seventh-day Adventism is best positioned to connect with the postmodern world—if we wake up to the opportunity and contextualize our message without compromising it.

That’s quite a statement and I’m prepared to support it. First we must know a bit about postmodernism and its background.

 

Rise of modernism

Let’s travel back to medieval days, when the church told everyone what to believe. If you were born, you were baptized—simple as that. Individual freedom of choice was burned at the stake.

Then came the Renaissance, when the courageous and the curious insisted on thinking for themselves. Ancient literary classics were recovered and translated, including the Scriptures. Armed with the invention of the printing press, an explosion of knowledge resulted. The truth set Europe free from church-state shackles, unleashing the Protestant Reformation. Meanwhile, the world of science experienced its own rebirth through the discoveries of Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and others.

That’s basically how the medieval world gave way to the modern age, which during the last several centuries has been marked by:

1)    Individualism: following personal conscience, making your own choices;

2)    Knowledge focus: facts, not faith, are what matters most, and knowledge is inherently good;

3)    Rationalism: through human powers of reason and observation, we have access to everything worth believing. The scientific method and secular philosophy replaced the Bible and the church as the test of truth.

Faith suffered much under the reign of modernism. For some, the symbolic Goddess of Reason replaced the miraculous virgin Mary. Then Charles Darwin devised a theory of origins that disowned divinity. Many who managed to maintain faith in God during modernism tended to gravitate to one of two extremes: radical liberalism that denied the miraculous in the quest of the “historical Jesus,” or rigid fundamentalism that clung to religious preconceptions whatever the facts might be.

Amid this religious discord, Seventh-day Adventists gave the trumpet of truth a certain sound. Our church has fared well under modernism. In an age of individualism, we’ve challenged people to stand alone for God amid their Sunday-keeping friends. In a knowledge-focused world we launched many churches by winning debates with our amazing facts about Bible truth. During the reign of rationalism we proclaimed a reasonable and convincing system of doctrine that withstood both liberalism and fundamentalism. Adventism was progressive and intellectual enough to flourish amid liberalism yet conservative enough to woo fundamentalists.

No wonder Adventists today tend to be modernists to the core. So how can we meet the challenge of postmodernism? Adventist outreach still thrives, but mainly in places and among people where postmodernism has not yet spun its web. In America, sustainable growth has nearly flatlined among Whites and declined among all but first-generation ethnic groups.

Why?

 

Demise of modernism

Postmodernism undermines our foundations of faith by denying that absolute truth is knowable or even desirable. This mindset did not happen overnight. Some scholars believe modernism began slowly sinking with the Titanic—that floating memorial to human knowledge. One person famously boasted that God Himself couldn’t sink that ship. Yet down it went, and with it the notion that knowledge never fails.

Two years later World War I proved that knowledge is not inherently good. Scientific expertise gave us mustard gas and the machine gun. Millions were efficiently murdered by knowledge gone awry.

Then came World War II, in which the meisters of scientific knowledge invented the Holocaust. After that, the Bomb. Society became disillusioned about the goodness of reason and knowledge. Since the revolution of the ‘60s, the Western world has sought refuge in postmodernism:

1) Individualism is giving way to community because we need to transcend our selfishness and isolation and work together to save society. Interdependence is better than independence. It takes more than a single parent to raise a child; it takes a village—a community.

2) Knowledge is no longer the foundation of reality. Perceptions and even feelings are considered equally valid as facts—which themselves are no longer absolute. Now, “everything is relative.”

3) Rationalism has given way to the realization that we cannot figure out everything. Some things, like a sunset, must be experienced rather than explained.

The bottom line in the postmodern world is that concrete knowledge has succumbed to nuanced insight. “I feel” and “I think” are interchangeable—and beware of saying “I know.” Now one person’s—or denomination’s—view of truth is no more valid than another’s.

Prove the Sabbath from Scripture and your workplace associate shrugs and says, “So what? Explain how it matters. Show me how it makes my world a better place.”

 

Adventism’s power in postmodernism

How can we Adventists make our case for truth amid the challenges of postmodernism?

            The key is in the word narrative. “Tell me your story” is a favorite conversation starter for postmodernists. They care about human experience more than impersonal propositional truth. At first glance that’s bad news for Adventists with our 28 fundamental beliefs. But we also have the story of all stories in our Great Controversy narrative. Every Adventist belief, properly understood, synchronizes with the grand story of Eden lost to the earth restored.

The Great Controversy narrative is uniquely Adventist in both content and scope. Other Christians can tell with us the “old, old story of Jesus and His love,” but they don’t connect Christ’s mission on earth 2,000 years ago with the relevant story of what He is doing now in heaven’s sanctuary on behalf of human suffering. Others may talk about saving our planet, but nobody has our vision of heaven on earth made new for all eternity. Fellow Evangelicals may explain the origin of sin, but they offer no resolution to the sin problem—their doctrine of hell eternalizes sin and suffering. Besides, postmodernists are passionate about social justice; for them the popular notion of endless hell inflicted indiscriminately on unbelievers is abhorrent.

By contrast, our Adventist view of the future provides merciful closure, particularly when we teach the investigative judgment in the context of a God providing answers to the questions of His celestial universe. (Adventism’s much maligned and abused doctrines of investigative judgment and the sanctuary, cleansed of legalism and clothed with narrative, provide our strongest bonding points with postmodernists, as I hope to show in next month’s Outlook.)  Also appealing is our doctrine of the millennium in which we humans get our own questions answered from God before sin and sinners are destroyed. When hell is framed in the context of justice executed upon oppressors and hypocrites, administrated fairly and briefly, postmodernists often embrace it eagerly.

It’s true that most postmodern believers share the age-old misconception of life immediately after death. But they also view humanity holistically, rather than dualistically as did the ancient Persians and the Greeks, who taught false dichotomy between body and spirit. This is an open door for Adventist truth about death (and also an entering wedge for our holistic health message and our health system, which was launched by Ellen G. White with her eight natural remedies). Moreover, Christ’s second coming is in the context of community—we’re not ascending individually at death as disembodied spirits. We are going together when Jesus comes. What a blessed hope for the hopelessness of postmodernism!

And what of the Sabbath? Adventists under modernism emphasized the Sabbath as a Mosaic proposition. But it’s also the climax of the human story of creation. What’s more, the Sabbath is all about community. Other Christians might spare a couple hours for church time before football games, but Adventists value community with God and with each other so much that we give it a whole day every week. That says a lot to postmodernists.

What about God’s law? Well, “love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 8:10). Love fosters good human relations, which makes for a good narrative.

Everything we believe can be framed in the context of story. Everything! Even prophecy is narrative in advance, a spotlight into future events from a loving God who guides the universe.

In summary, no other church can offer what Adventists have for the postmodern world. Our life and death task is to shift emphasis away from presenting doctrine as a series of propositions, which appeals only to modernists. To evangelize a postmodern world, we must show our fundamental beliefs in the context of our unique Great Controversy narrative. Since the Bible itself is basically narrative, this should not be a problem for us.

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         Young King Hezekiah “trusted in the Lord God of Israel, so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor who were before him” (2 Kings 18:5). What was so different about Hezekiah? Godly kings before him had cleansed the temple of pagan worship relics. What Hezekiah did that nobody before him had dared to do is to tear down and destroy Moses’ bronze serpent, which had become an idol for God’s people.

         Imagine the gall of a 25-year-old, new on the scene, to take away and destroy a centuries-old memorial of the beloved leader of the Exodus. The godly elders no doubt demanded: “What do you think you are doing, young man! God gave us that artifact!”

         Hezekiah protested: “It has become a distraction from worshiping God. Worse, became an idol worshiped in place of God. It lost its purpose—the devil co-opted and corrupted it. It had to be destroyed for true worship to be restored.”

         “Sorry, Hezekiah,” his pious opponents may have retorted. “We could support you when you destroyed the high places and idolatrous images, but this is different. Moses built that according to God’s blueprint. It’s a divine symbol of salvation—‘Look and live,’ remember? God used it miraculously! Who do you think you are, young man, destroying that sacred symbol of salvation from God through our beloved founder! Do you think you are better than Moses? Do you think you are better than God?”

“That artifact was just a symbol of the unseen God whom we are supposed to be worshiping,” Hezekiah tried to explain. “Yes, God established it and worked through it. But then the devil took it over. It had to go.”

And so it went, much to the disappointment and fury of Judah—not only the evil ones who were worshiping it but the good people who were enabling them by preserving their object of idolatry.

Meanwhile, Hezekiah “kept [God’s] commandments, which the Lord had commanded Moses” (verse 6). He knew the difference between obedience and false worship. He had divine discernment about what to keep and what to get rid of. So Hezekiah wasn’t the enemy of Moses. Ironically, he was the only one who truly honored their founder by sustaining his example of obedience rather than corrupting his heritage through religious idolatry.

 But it wasn’t easy for young Hezekiah. The only reason he survived was that “he held fast to the Lord” (verse 6), clinging tenaciously in the face of opposition not only from the evil people but from the religious establishment that thought itself honoring God but in reality was sustaining an idolatrous system. It may have been in those tumultuous early days of Hezekiah’s ministry that his only support came directly from God. Indeed, “the Lord was with him; he prospered wherever he went” (verse 7).

Thought question: What holy artifacts may have become idols for Adventists today?

I asked that of one lady and she replied: “I don’t there is any such idolatry in the Adventist system.”

But let not the church of Laodicea so flatter itself. Can even our God-established institutions themselves become an object of idolatry? If so, how can we preserve what is genuine while cleansing it from what is not?

What about our understanding of Ellen G. White? God obviously led us with her prophetic gift, and that blessing remains in our day. But have idolatrous traditions also developed over the years? I’m thinking specifically of the proclivity of some Adventists who refuse to accept anything the Bible teaches unless it harmonizes with what Ellen White already wrote about that text or topic—thus effectively giving her authority over the Word of God. I’m afraid that those who have succumbed to such extremist and cultic thinking have made Ellen White their idol. They urgently challenge fellow Adventists—do you believe in the Spirit of prophecy?

First, let’s be clear that the Spirit of prophecy is the Holy Spirit who inspired the prophet—not the prophet herself or her writings.

Let’s also emphatically clarify that Ellen White was not God’s message! She was His  messenger. There is a huge difference. And that difference is the distinction between inspiration and idolatry.

Finally, let’s make Jesus Christ is the object of our faith, not any human messenger.

I urge my fellow Seventh-day Adventists to do a searching and fearless theological inventory and then take careful but decisive action, like Hezekiah did, to ensure that no gift from God ever becomes a focus of faith or an object of adoration.

The Pharisees of Christ’s day turned God’s messenger into their message, and in so doing rejected God’s grace and truth. Let us beware of doing the same today.

Martin Weber will be editor of the daily newsletter for global delegates at the upcoming SDA General Conference Session in Atlanta.

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You have much to say about the New Covenant, and we share your enthusiasm for its new life in the Spirit. What we can’t understand is why you feel the New Covenant does away with God’s Law—not as a method of salvation (which would be legalism) but as the test of fully devoted discipleship?

2 Corinthians 3 condemns not God’s Law itself but the futility of having it written on tables of stone, as in the Old Covenant. In the New Covenant, that same Law is “written on the fleshly tables of the heart” (verse 3). It’s not the message that is different but the place where it is written—tables of the heart instead of tables of stone.

If you disagree with that, please tell us which of the Ten Commandments that God’s Spirit of grace won’t write on your heart? The one that forbids disrespecting parents (5^th)?  Murdering (6^th)?  Adultery (7^th)?  Stealing (8^th)?  Lying (9^th)? How about coveting (10^th)? Of course not. Then what about putting false gods before the real God (1^st), debasing His image (2^nd) or taking His name in vain (3^rd)? Certainly not. You’re good with all of those commandments. So where is the problem?

I wonder if it’s that Sabbath commandment, which just won’t go away. So do you throw away the whole Law of God just to get rid of one inconvenient truth? What a pity, since it’s the Sabbath commandment that keeps us from being legalists when honoring the other nine. The Sabbath means rest, remember? Resting in Christ’s finished works? How can you possibly have a problem with that?

My friends at Life Assurance want me to give them evidence that the 10 Commandments are written in the heart under the New Covenant. I think we just I just did! If I didn’t, please do tell me which one of the 10 you don’t want anymore? Only the one that specifically calls us to rest in Christ.

This seems so strange, I can't understand it. You fulfill the other nine commandments while resting in Jesus, while you reject the one commandment that calls us to rest in Christ’s finished works of Creation and Salvation. What kind of sense does this make?

And it gets even worse when our friends at Life Assurance Ministries deny the clear statement of Romans 8:4 that “the righteousness of the Law is fulfilled in us.” It doesn’t say that the righteousness of the Spirit is written in our hearts; it says that the Spirit writes the righteousness of the Law in our hearts.

Of course this doesn’t happen in a legalistic way by trying to be good enough before God. It only happens when we rest in Christ, which empowers us to live in the Spirit. So that’s how God’s Law is written in our hearts—by His Spirit, who leads us to Gospel rest (which is what the seventh-day Sabbath is all about!).

Dale Ratzlaff speaks of Christ’s two great commandments of Jesus: to love the Lord with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves. Fine. Now which of God’s 10 Commandments do Christ’s two commandments overthrow? Please tell us.

Actually, we already have Christ’s own explanation: “On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:40). The Message Bible puts it this ways; “These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.” So there we have it: Christ’s two commandments support God’s Law instead of negating it.

The apostle Paul puts it this way: “Do we then make void the Law through faith?” Yes, according to Life Assurance Ministries. But the Bible says, “God forbid, we establish the Law” (Romans 3:31). Which brings us back to 1 Corinthians 7:19: “Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing, but keeping the commandments of God is what matters.”

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I’m writing this with a heavy heart, reaching out to my brothers and sisters who suffer insensitivity and arrogance when asking sincere questions concerning Seventh-day Adventist doctrine. If this is your situation, I am so sorry. Please forgive us.

Perhaps you have asked questions that were quietly troubling you about the Sabbath, the judgment, or Ellen White. Although confiding your doctrinal doubts in all sincerity, perhaps you were brushed off, patronized, rebuked or even denounced. Frustrated in getting answers to vital questions, you may have become disappointed and eventually embittered. At that point you felt betrayed and filled with pain and confusion, leaving you wondering whether the time has come to abandon your beloved Adventist heritage.

Before you do that—and even if you have already taken that step—please let me share with you, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, information that I think can be helpful to you.

I acknowledge there is a problem. Just yesterday someone approached me after church seeking help with a friend who had left the Adventist Church under the above circumstances. She had grown up SDA, attended our schools and remained a faithful member. Her crisis began when she read something in the Bible that seemed to directly contradict Ellen G. White. It was something too important to ignore. So she approached her godly mother, who insisted that nothing Ellen White ever wrote contradicted the Bible, and thus her daughter must be mistaken. This elderly saint was unable to explain just how her daughter was mistaken, nor was she interested in searching out the truth. Instead, she admonished her daughter for “harboring doubts about the Spirit of Prophecy” and urged her to drop them. When her daughter said she really needed to get the truth clarified in her mind, the mother lectured her, scolded her, slandered her motives and ultimately denounced her as a doubter of the faith—in danger of being lost.

I believe that this daughter is the victim of spiritual abuse, unintended yet devastating. If you have suffered this yourself from Seventh-day Adventist friends or family, I plead with you again: Please forgive us, for we didn’t know what we were doing. We were only trying to help you by warning you. Don’t forsake us—at least not yet. Give us a chance to answer your questions; that’s what this website is all about.

I know firsthand of what I speak, having suffered spiritual abuse myself from well-intentioned fellow Seventh-day Adventists. I’ve survived it by God’s grace and now have committed myself to do my part in remedying it.

Here’s my story, if I may share it with you. Back in 1979, I was a young evangelist filled with zeal for the message and mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (as I am no less today). I proclaimed from town to town the message of truth as it is in Jesus. I told people that if they belonged to a church that violated Scriptural fundamental beliefs, than please consider joining the Seventh-day Adventist Church, because everything we believe is found in the Bible—and the Bible alone.

I meant that with all of my heart, and scores who attended my meetings responded to my challenge. They left their longtime spiritual heritage to join the Adventist family of believers. Life was great, and I had a fruitful and fulfilling ministry.

Then suddenly I found myself in a great spiritual crisis, facing the same challenge I had brought to others. It happened after some young pastors for whom I was to hold meetings came to me with questions about fundamental SDA beliefs. Specifically they wondered about the investigative judgment and whether it really began in 1844. They asked if it was even appropriate for believers in Jesus to have their salvation threatened—or at least called into question—by being subjected to the scrutiny of judgment.

I opened my Bible with these guys and found that I didn’t have the answers they needed. So I did what everyone who gives Bible studies is supposed to do—promise to look for Bible answers and get back to them. I went to the conference president asking his help in finding answers. He didn’t care to open his Bible with me. Instead, he said: “We already know from the Spirit of Prophecy that the judgment began in 1844. God said it, I believe it, and that settles it for me—and for you. Our job is to go out and preach the SDA message.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing,” I responded. “But these guys have sincere questions, and they are wanting our help. They just want some Bible answers from us.”

The conference president told me that if I really wanted Bible answers, I could get them from Ellen White’s reliable interpretations of Scripture. He urged me to put my faith in her prophetic revelations instead of trusting my own private interpretation.

I told him I had already searched diligently in Ellen White’s writings for the Bible answers, but that these guys were raising questions for which she wasn’t offering any help. The president said they were on dangerous ground and I shouldn’t venture out there with them. He even forbade me from studying the Bible with them.

I asked him: “You’ve assigned me the responsibility of holding meetings with them in their churches, so isn’t it my job to help them? How can I refuse their request to study the Bible? Besides,” I added, “I need to have these questions answered for my own peace of mind. Can you help me?”

The president responded with another dire warning about doubting Seventh-day Adventist truth and the inspiration of Ellen White. He then phoned the Ellen G. White Estate in Washington, DC and set up an appointment for me to visit them and get straightened out.

I willingly went, hoping to find Bible answers. Instead I got platitudes and further admonitions. I went home without the answers I so desperately needed to continue living the life and sharing the message of a Bible-based Christian Seventh-day Adventist.

Meanwhile, some people at conference headquarters started questioning my motives and the state of my heart. They couldn't understand why I needed to see something in the Bible for myself in order to believe it. They thought I was putting my own private interpretation above the wisdom of our current SDA leaders and the pioneers of our past. They didn’t seem to realize that I had no reason to make theological trouble for myself, just when my ministry was beginning to take off. Newly ordained, at 28 I was the conference evangelist, assistant ministerial director and a member of the conference executive committee. It was politically smart for me to keep any questions to myself, especially with two toddlers to feed and a little house in the country to pay for. Causing trouble for my career in ministry was the last thing I wanted to do.

Actually, it was the next-to-last thing I was willing to do. The last thing I could dare to do was to betray my conscience by playing politics instead of searching for truth. Yet things weren’t looking good for me, especially when people my wife counseled with got her alarmed about my spiritual quest—to the point that she was ready to end our marriage if I didn’t stop questioning Adventist truth.

Both of us were victims of first-degree spiritual abuse. A dysfunctional and toxic situation was threatening my ministry, my marriage, and worst of all, my spiritual commitment to submit my faith to God alone through the Bible and the Bible only.

I found myself sinking amid the crisis of my life. Almost panicked now myself, I arranged as a last resort to spend the winter studying at the Andrews University seminary extension in Hinsdale, Illinois. It was a soul-winning institute operated by Mark Finley, an evangelist I respected. I thought that Mark would be willing to take my questions seriously and study with me.

God bless him, he was! He sat down with me and, over our open Bibles, answered my basic questions.

Mark Finley’s explanation of the SDA doctrine of judgment was profoundly deep yet astonishingly simple. The root problem was that we were imposing our Western understanding of judgment upon that biblical doctrine. To the ancient Hebrews, judgment meant first of all vindication, not condemnation. The name “Daniel,” for example, means “God is my judge”—my vindicator and deliverer.  In the book of Judges, you don’t see a bunch of condemners going around; the judges were deliverers of God’s people. To apply this reality to the pre-Advent judgment: God is vindicating His people in heaven’s sanctuary, delivering them from the devil’s accusations. He finds all the evidence He needs to justify us in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior and High Priest.

That key insight was the tipping point for me. I realized that the core Adventist teaching of the judgment was not inherently legalistic at all. Western presuppositions imposed upon Scripture had caused an unnecessary doctrinal dilemma. I was delighted to discover that Ellen White herself began picking up this theme of vindication in heaven’s pre-Advent judgment in her later writings. (Consider the chapter “Joshua and the Angel” in Prophets and Kings, the last-completed book in her “Conflict of the Ages” series.) But it was because of the Bible and the Bible alone that I chose to remain a Seventh-day Adventist.

Mark Finley, by the way, is now a vice president of the SDA world church—which I believe reflects a positive trend in the leadership of our denomination.

Now, to finish out my story: Once I realized the Gospel-based truth about the judgment—based on the Bible alone—everything else started falling into place. It took about a year to get all my questions answered. I recorded my new insights in the book Some Call It Heresy, officially published by the church. In it I explain my 1979 Gethsemane experience, and the exciting discoveries back then that led me out of confusion and continue to inspire me as a Seventh-day Adventist.  The more I delve into the Scriptures, the more thankful I am to be an Adventist. My ongoing learning adventure is chronicled in many other books officially published by the church, most recently in this year’s God Was There: True Stories of a Police Chaplain.

So that’s my story. I think it’s fair to say that I can relate to whatever anyone reading this may be struggling with in your own doctrinal frustrations. I also can assure you that Bible answers about Adventist beliefs are there for you—in fact, right here on this website. I’ve condensed and compiled for you what I’ve written since 1980 about God’s mercy and truth expressed in Seventh-day Adventist fundamental beliefs.

Before giving up on Adventism, then, please entertain the possibility that God may have led you to this website. Give me a chance to explain how SDA fundamental beliefs are soundly Biblical. As God is my witness, everything I believe is based upon the Bible, not the writings of Ellen White. And nothing I believe is motivated by or derived from law—everything is based upon grace.

Consider the seventh-day Sabbath. It’s not some Jewish ritual, as Dale Ratzlaff insists, but rather our weekly expression of resting in the finished work of Jesus Christ. That’s what the word “Sabbath” means—“rest,” literally “cessation.” We cease from trusting in our own works to find rest in the accomplishments of Jesus Christ. Jesus proclaimed Himself “Lord of the Sabbath,” so it doesn’t matter to me what Dale Ratzlaff says about the seventh day.

Dale says that it’s impossible to be a Seventh-day Adventist without being tainted by legalism. I have found that not to be true. For three decades now, I have rejoiced in Gospel freedom while serving in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Rather than being suppressed, my Gospel testimony has been published in more than 20 books (some of them “ghost-written” for Adventist leaders). In 1983 I was invited to join the staff at the Voice of Prophecy radio broadcast, later to be a scriptwriter and assistant to George Vandeman, founder of the It Is Written telecast.

While at the Adventist Media Center I wrote Adventist Hot Potatoes, after which denominational leaders invited me to join the Ministerial Association of the world church and be an associate editor of Ministry magazine. I also was made a member of the General Conference Executive Committee, the world church’s governing body. Currently I’m editor of Outlook, a church magazine serving 62,000 members in the Mid-America Union, where I also am communication director.

Based on my experience and those of so many others I know personally, I don’t see how Dale Ratzlaff can say there’s no room in Adventism for those who stand up for the Gospel and base all beliefs on the Bible alone. I don’t deny the ongoing problem of “old school” legalism, which remains a powerful—but fading—force in the church. My plea is that you stand with all of us in the Seventh-day Adventist Church who treasure God’s mercy and truth, and help us make a difference for the Gospel.

Please don’t follow Dale Ratzlaff out of the frying pan into the fire—literally. He actually teaches a fire of eternal torment for unbelievers. Do you want to subject your children and grandchildren to such horrific doctrine in Sunday school, about a God of “love” who torments lost people for eternity? Isn’t that a type of spiritual abuse all its own?

Please stay with the Adventist Church and help us make a difference. Every SDA doctrine fits a Gospel context and comes from the Bible alone. Hold me accountable on that. I invite you to challenge me publicly by responding to this blog, or you can connect with me privately via e-mail: martin@midamericaoutlook.org.

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Comments

Anonymous commented on 01-Aug-2009 09:01 PM

I like what you have written. Jesus said that men will know that we are his disciples if we love one another. A spirit of love should be the main venue of communication.

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