“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.

Get SDA For Me blog posts delivered to your inbox!

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

At this time, comments will no longer be accepted. Click here to see why.

Comments Post has no comments. | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

            It’s thrilling when trusted Evangelical scholars vindicate the various aspects of Seventh-day Adventist doctrine. For example, the seventh-day Sabbath is gaining increasing respect. So is our understanding of hell—annihilationism, supported by such theological luminaries as John Stott, author of The Cross of Christ. At the Baptist seminary where I recently completed my doctorate, my major professor was a conditionalist, believing as we do that death is unconscious sleep. The SDA view of Christ’s second coming as post-tribulation and pre-millennial is gaining ground, and our health message is increasingly respected by fellow Christians and even secular society.

            Only Seventh-day Adventists package all these truths together into an integrated whole—that is our uniqueness—but it is so good to see our various doctrines affirmed individually.

            Even our doctrine of heaven’s sanctuary, so ridiculed by many, is winning some affirmation from unexpected places. The core of the controversy is the cleansing of that heavenly sanctuary, which is not only denied but derided by ex-Adventists such as Dale Ratzlaff of Life Assurance Ministries.

            Last night I was exploring the new version of Logos Bible Software, preparing a product review of their Platinum package for the March issue of Outlook magazine. I typed one of my favorite Scripture themes, “Christus Victor,” into the command box, and one of the hits took me right into Hebrews 9 and the cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary.

            Notice this from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, an eminent British Evangelical scholar. Referring to Hebrews 9:23, he says: “We are taught here quite clearly that it was necessary that the heavenly place itself should be purified.” That’s in his 1996 book, God the Father, God the Son, published by Crossway Books. He continues: “And thus, it seems to me, we arrive at a kind of understanding of what is meant here by the necessity to purify even the heavenly tabernacle itself.”

            Amazing! This is very much of what Adventists have been saying all these years. Here is the extended quotation from Dr. Lloyd-Jones:

“I wonder whether you have ever realised that our Lord, by doing His work upon the cross, has even effected a change in heaven? Let me give you my authority. We read in Hebrews 9:23, ‘It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.’ God called Moses up to the Mount and there He gave him instructions about the building of the tabernacle, about the measurements, and how he was to furnish it and exactly what he was to do. And, as the author of Hebrews reminds us, when God had shown Moses everything, He gave him these words of instruction: ‘See … that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount’ (Heb. 8:5). So Moses went down and carried out the instructions. And, as the epistle to the Hebrews reminds us, everything that Moses made had to be purified and it was purified by taking the blood of calves and of goats and water and scarlet wool and hyssop, by sprinkling the book of the law and the people and the various vessels of the ministry and everything in connection with the tabernacle.

“Now this is the author’s argument: ‘It was therefore necessary,’ he says, ‘that the patterns’—in other words, these earthly things; the tabernacle in the wilderness was not ‘the things in the heavens’, it was only something made on the pattern of those things—‘the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these’—the blood of bulls and of goats, water, and so on—‘but the heavenly things themselves [must be purified] with better sacrifices than these.’ And then he goes on, ‘For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us’ (Heb. 9:23–4).

“So his argument can be put like this: the patterns were purified by blood of bulls and goats but that is not good enough to purify the thing itself, the heavenly tabernacle; this must be purified by something better. And it has been purified by something better. It has been purified by the blood of the Son of God Himself. He offered His own blood. I do beg of you to read again this ninth chapter of Hebrews, indeed, read chapter 8 as well! Go further and read the entire epistle in order that you may grasp this argument. It is a most glorious statement and one of the most mysterious statements in the whole of the Bible. We are taught here quite clearly that it was necessary that the heavenly place itself should be purified and that it has been purified by the blood of Jesus Christ Himself.

“Now the question is: What does this mean? Let me be quite frank and answer that there is a sense in which no one can be too dogmatic about the answer to that question. But it seems to me we must say this: in some mysterious way there is a tabernacle in the heavenly places. There are statements about our Lord entering into that heavenly tabernacle, that holiest of all. I do not pretend to understand it but the statements are made and therefore we must believe that what was made on earth was made on the pattern of that which is in heaven.

“And, further, we can say this: Satan fell from heaven. Our Lord says, ‘I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven’ (Luke 10:18). Satan, as we saw when we were considering the biblical teaching concerning him, was undoubtedly the brightest of the angels in the presence of God, and when he fell, when he rose up with pride and rebelled against God, he did so in the heavens itself. And thus, it seems to me, we arrive at a kind of understanding of what is meant here by the necessity to purify even the heavenly tabernacle itself. In a way that we cannot understand, and that seems to be inscrutable, evil has affected heaven itself. This vile, this foul thing that first caused the fall of Satan, and then caused the fall of man has, if one may use such language, introduced a kind of impurity even into heaven—into the heavenly tabernacle, at any rate. And according to this teaching, as I understand it, it was necessary for our Lord to purify and to purge the heavenly tabernacle of that taint, and the statement here is to the effect that He has done so.

“This, I think, helps us to understand various statements which we find in Scripture, such as Colossians 1:20 where we read, ‘And having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven.’ Through Christ God is going to reconcile all things unto Himself in heaven as well as on earth. I am not suggesting that that is the only explanation but I am suggesting that that is a part of the explanation. And so we are confronted by this truly amazing and remarkable statement, that our Lord, as it were, had to take His own blood, even into heaven itself to get rid of this taint, this foul smear that was left by the fall of Satan. And so, ultimately, heaven, to use the language of the author of Hebrews, is purified entirely; and all evil and all its effects everywhere in heaven as well as upon earth have been removed.^”[i]

            So there we have it: an amazing affirmation of a much-disputed element of vintage Adventist doctrine—the cleaning of heaven’s sanctuary. Dr. Lloyd-Jones doesn’t get into the prophecies of Daniel, from which SDAs derive the year 1844 as the beginning date for this cleansing. In humility, Lloyd-Jones admits that he doesn’t know what this cleansing is all about—just the fact that it had to happen. He speculates that the heavenly sanctuary became defiled by Lucifer’s sin of rebellion. This is correct in a broad sense, of course, since all defilement originated with Lucifer. But he doesn’t consult the biblical sanctuary system to see specifically how defilement is transferred to the sanctuary.

            Indeed, Lloyd-Jones takes note that Moses’ sanctuary on earth was patterned after the heavenly sanctuary; he just doesn’t follow through on that connection—specifically, that the sanctuary is defiled when we sin, finally to be cleansed by virtue of Christ’s once-for-all-time sacrifice on the cross.

            Meanwhile, of course, “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” (Romans 8:1), since we are “accepted in the Beloved” (Ephesians 1:6).  Even as the heavenly judgment proceeds with its audit of salvation history, all who entrust themselves to Jesus may find refuge within the inner temple (Hebrews 6:19) and come confidently to God’s throne of grace (4:16). There we may rejoice “in full assurance of hope until the very end” (6:11), since “by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified” (10:14).

            After the celestial pre-Advent judgment, during which the sins of believers are blotted out, the devil will bear responsibility for his role in defiling us. God will baptize him in the lake of fire, “prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). Satan had given birth to sin as Lucifer before being cast into the earth, where he seduced the human race. Thus it is appropriate that God will eventually hold him responsible for the whole business of sin.

            So the devil will be the final sin-bearer, in the sense that he must bear responsibility for the entire enterprise of evil. After God’s triumphal verdict in the pre-Advent judgment, all record of evildoing is cleansed from heaven’s sanctuary by authority of Christ’s sacrificial blood. The blame for sin is placed upon its originator and salesman. Satan will be banished as a goat into the wilderness, ultimately to be destroyed in hell with his entourage of rebels. God and His vindicated people will share eternity together on the earth made new.

            To summarize: one by one, the various elements of Seventh-day Adventist doctrine are being affirmed by respected biblical scholarship—even the cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary. The unique theological contribution of our denomination is that we are the only faith community who connects all the dots into a complete picture, so the world can see the truth as it is in Jesus for earth’s last days.

Get SDA For Me blog posts delivered to your inbox!

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

At this time, comments will no longer be accepted. Click here to see why.

Comments Post has no comments. | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink