Peace with the Adventists

One of the peculiar theological conflicts among U.S. Protestants, who have done lots of internecine fighting in their day, has been between the Fundamentalists and the Seventh-day Adventists. Fundamentalism--the powerful, conservative wing of U.S. Protestantism, which is solid in the Bible Belt and has grown increasingly influential elsewhere in recent years--has long regarded the Adventists as un-Christian cultists, riddled with strange heresies and fringe fantasies that make them dangerous company for the soul. But last week one of the leading organs of Fundamentalist opinion in the U.S. reversed that position. The monthly Eternity, which has an influence among Fundamentalists far beyond its 40,000 circulation, told its readers: "It is definitely possible, we believe, to have fellowship with Seventh-day Adventists."

To expose Adventist anomalies, Eternity Editor Donald Grey Barnhouse, one of the top leaders of U.S. Fundamentalism, two years ago assigned Staff Writer Walter R. Martin to study the sect. Martin, a "research polemicist," who has already excoriated the Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists from a Funda mentalist point of view, set to work and found to his astonishment that he brought not a sword but peace.

As a result of his researches, Fundamentalists have stretched out a hand, and the Seventh-day Adventists have accepted it gladly.

"Investigative Judgment." It has taken a long time to bury the enmities. For the sect labeled Seventh-day Adventist was born in bitter disappointment and with the contemptuous laughter of Protestantism ringing in its ears.

Christ will return and the world will end some time between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844, said William Miller. So did many another European and American Bible scholar. They based their calculations mainly on Daniel 8:14 ("And he said unto me. Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed"), taking the "days" as years and the cleansing of the sanctuary as the end of the world. William Miller, a Baptist minister of Low Hampton, N.Y., was not an educated man, but he was sincere and persuasive; when the dread year came, Millerites from Vermont to Virginia settled their affairs and waited. Scoffers made fun of them by donning white robes and climbing trees and hilltops to look for the Lord's coming, and when the appointed time had passed and the earth was still the same, they jeered.

One day after the "Great Disappointment," a Millerite named Hiram Edson of western New York was seized by a conviction that explained the whole sad mistake. What was meant by Daniel 8:14, he decided, was Christ's entrance into the second chamber of his sanctuary (in 1843-44) to examine the lives of all mortals living and dead, and to dispense the atonement he had paid for with his blood. This "investigative judgment," said Edson, was going on now; when it was completed, the great day of the Second Coming would dawn.

"Soul Sleep." William Miller never subscribed to this face-saving concept, but many onetime Millerites from many Protestant groups drew together around it.

Some brought along pet doctrines of their own, and gradually some of these grew into a new theology. The Seventh Day Baptists contributed the teaching that Christians are observing the wrong day of worship; the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) was enjoined by the Ten Commandments and kept by Jesus himself; Sunday worship, they believed, was a 2nd or 3rd century innovation without Biblical authority. This became a cardinal tenet of the new post-Millerites, and by 1860 they were calling themselves Seventh-day (because they observe the Sabbath) Adventists (because they look for the imminent advent of Christ).

They acquired other special doctrines. Notable among them is that of "soul sleep"--the idea, held at one time or another by such Biblical authorities as Martin Luther, William Tyndale and John Wycliffe, that at death all men remain "unconscious" in the grave, only to rise for judgment on Resurrection Day. (Orthodox Protestants and Catholics today read Paul as meaning that the afterlife begins immediately at death.) Seventh-day Adventists also hold that after the Last Judgment impenitent sinners, and Satan with them, will be annihilated. But orthodox Christianity continues to interpret Christ's words, "These shall go away into everlasting punishment" (Matthew 25:46), to mean literally that rather than annihilation.

"Sincere Believers." Defending their sectarianism in an unfriendly world made Adventists a prickly people; preaching the imminence of the world's end made them a missionizing one. Today there are 1,006,218 baptized (by total immersion) adult Adventists throughout the world (277,162 in the U.S.), with 5,363 ordained ministers and 1,320,883 Sabbath-school members. Members contributed $67,919,368 to their church work in 1955, an average of nearly $200 each;* they give support to 230 medical units (employing 382 physicians), and run 42 publishing houses which turn out 377 periodicals and some 75 books a year.

In the course of such burgeoning success, the prickliness has worn off. Prime evidence of this is the friendly reception Adventist leaders gave Eternity's Reporter Martin when he visited their headquarters at Takoma Park outside Washington, D.C. On issue after issue he found them hewing to the line of conservative Protestantism, not insisting on peculiarly Adventist traditions as necessary for all Christians. Stirred by what he heard, Evangelist Leader Barnhouse held a conference with top Adventists at his Pennsylvania farm. Wrote he: "We are delighted to do justice to a much maligned group of sincere believers, and in our minds and hearts take them out of the group of utter heretics like the Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and Christian Scientists, to acknowledge them as redeemed brethren and members of the Body of Christ."

The Adventists, for their part, announced that they would publish--probably next spring--a new, definitive statement of their faith. Said Roy Allan Anderson, secretary of the Seventh-day Adventist Ministerial Association: "Because of certain features of our belief which have too often been misunderstood and at times misstated by others, some well-meaning Christians have commonly classified us with the non-Christian cults ... It is very possible that we ourselves share in the responsibility for this misunderstanding, because of our failure to state clearly what we believe on these fundamental issues and our failure to place chief emphasis where it really belongs."

*Annual average per capita contribution for all U.S. denominations: $48.81.

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