Seventh-Day Adventism

views updated

Seventh-Day Adventism

Seventh-Day Adventism emerged out of the Millerite apocalyptic excitement during the latter stages of the Second Great Awakening to become one of the nation's largest indigenous churches. By the end of the twentieth century there were close to nine hundred thousand Adventists in North America and more than ten million worldwide. In their mission of proclaiming the second advent of Christ and a new world to come, Adventists have made a significant impact on the present world through a vast array of health-care, educational, and publishing institutions. Though less well known than fellow nineteenth-century prophets Mary Baker Eddy and Joseph Smith, the church's cofounder, Ellen G. White, exerted an influence that not only inspired the entire Adventist achievement but that also indirectly extends to all Americans who consume breakfast cereal or who believe in "scientific creationism."

William Miller, a New York farmer turned Baptist revivalist, came to prominence in the Northeast by the late 1830s, proclaiming the imminent, premillennial return of Jesus Christ. Rejecting the widespread millennialist gradualism about revival and reform transforming America, the Millerites envisioned total reform through one cataclysmic act of divine intervention—fiery destruction of the present order followed by re-creation at Christ's return. Moreover, Miller believed that apocalyptic prophecy revealed the time of the event—initially estimated at about 1843 and eventually more precisely predicted as October 22, 1844. While belief that the twenty-three-hundred-day prophecy of Daniel 8:14 would somehow be fulfilled in the 1840s was widespread, Miller was distinctive in associating the "cleansing of the sanctuary" referred to in that passage with the literal return of Christ.

After the prophecy failed, the disappointed Adventists split into numerous factions. One of the smaller of these gradually coalesced around the conviction that the prophecy of Daniel 8:14 had indeed been fulfilled in 1844 in a transcendent sense. The "cleansing of the sanctuary," they maintained, referred to a cosmic "Day of Atonement" marked by Christ's final work of mediation and judgment in the "heavenly" sanctuary referred to in the New Testament epistle to the Hebrews. These future Seventh-Day Adventists were led by Joseph Bates, a veteran social reformer and Millerite leader; James White, a young schoolteacher with a background in the Christian Connection; and Ellen Harmon, a teenage former Methodist from Portland, Maine, who received divine guidance and encouragement for the movement through dramatic visions experienced in a trancelike state. White and Harmon married in 1846.

This group found its mission and identity under the apocalyptic rubric of the "three angels' messages" of Revelation 14:6–12. The first two had already gone forth, they believed, but it was their duty to proclaim the third and final message before Christ's return, which called out a people who "keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus." The "commandments of God" included the Sabbath commandment, and they insisted that the Bible mandates observance of the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week—Saturday, not Sunday.

By the early 1850s these Sabbatarian Adventists saw it as their mission to gather a "remnant" in the last days, marked by fidelity to the law of God and Sabbath observance, and the "spirit of prophecy" manifested in the ministry of Ellen White. Other distinctive beliefs included the cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary begun in 1844, conditional immortality, and "annihilationism"—the destruction of sinners in the end, rather than their unending torment in an eternal hell. While focused on preparation for the Second Coming, the Sabbatarian Adventists were very much engaged with the national dilemma over slavery. Passionately antislavery for the most part, they viewed slavery as evidence that the American republic is the "second beast" of Revelation 13, which has a benign, lamblike aspect but "speaks like a dragon."

An era of organization- and institution-building began in the 1860s under James White's leadership. The Seventh-Day Adventist church was officially organized in 1863 with headquarters in Battle Creek, Michigan, and a membership of about thirty-five hundred. Prompted by Ellen White's visions, the church quickly turned its attention to health reform. Adventists came to view physical health as intrinsic to Christian sanctification and preparation for Christ's return, and health care as a leading dimension of their mission to the world. Though generally leery of politics, their interest in health in part motivated them to intensive involvement in the Prohibition movement. Educational institutions and overseas missions were both launched in the 1870s. In calling America's "Protestant empire" to what they regarded as true Protestantism, Adventists stressed not only a biblicism marked by seventh-day Sabbath observance but also individual freedom from coercion in religion. They began publishing the American Sentinel in 1886 (changed to the current title, Liberty, in 1906) and formed the National Religious Liberty Association to advocate religious freedom and separation of church and state.

The years between the late 1880s and World War I were among the most dynamic in the church's history but also saw major crises that did much to determine the direction of the twentieth-century church. A revival uplifting the theme of salvation through faith in Christ alone brought with it a severe controversy between the advocates of the new emphasis (primarily Alonzo T. Jones and Ellet J. Waggoner) and the older leadership worried that the Adventist emphasis on the necessity of observing the law of God was being undermined. Ellen White sided with the "righteousness by faith" advocates—a decisive moment in Adventism's complex relationship to evangelical Protestantism. Adventists, though not unambiguously or without subsequent controversy, would adhere to the Protestant principles of justification by faith and the final authority of Scripture.

Meanwhile, John Harvey Kellogg, director of the church's Battle Creek sanitarium, was earning a reputation as one of the nation's foremost authorities on health matters. Though it was his brother Will who eventually turned breakfast cereal into a financial empire, it was John Harvey who invented the concept with cornflakes and granola. Kellogg saw humanitarianism as the essence of Adventism. In addition to medical work, he promoted a comprehensive outreach to the poor of the nation's cities in the 1890s, particularly in Chicago. Disputes with the clerical leadership over control of the church's thriving "medical missionary" work and his unconventional theology led to Kellogg's removal from the church in 1907 and the church's loss of the Battle Creek sanitarium and program of humanitarian activism in the cities, though the emphasis on health and medicine would remain as a legacy of both Kellogg and Ellen White. In the decades surrounding her death in 1915, the authority of Ellen White's voluminous writings was another hotly debated issue. Though White explicitly denied claiming "infallibility," a large segment of the church held that her writings virtually were just that; at the very least they were regarded as unerring commentary on Scripture. A. G. Daniells, a close ally of White's and president of the church from 1901 to 1922, took a more moderate position, affirming the authenticity of White's spiritual gift but recognizing her fallibility. His ouster from the presidency, in part because of this "soft" view of Ellen White's authority, signaled the victory of the near-inerrantist view, which prevailed until a new round of controversies in the 1970s.

The Adventists of the 1920s identified themselves with fundamentalism and had something of an impact on the fundamentalist movement. Historian Ronald Numbers has shown that Adventist scholar George McCready Price was a major influence behind eventual widespread acceptance in fundamentalist circles of "flood geology"—a cornerstone of "scientific creationism." Price's views on creation and flood in turn were shaped by Ellen White's writings.

In the twentieth century, Adventism has exhibited dynamic growth in membership and expansion of institutions, particularly outside the United States. By 1995 the church was operating more than 5,000 schools and nearly 600 health-care institutions, with assets totaling about $5 billion. Through the Adventist Development and Relief Agency the church had established humanitarian work in 120 countries.

At the same time, the church faces tensions that have become increasingly apparent since the 1960s, all revolving around the question of how to remain unified as one world church amid rapidly increasing diversity—ethnic, national, and theological. By 1990, African Americans constituted 25 percent of the church's North American membership and Latinos 8 percent. Achieving racial justice and harmony in the church remains a challenge, as Adventists struggle to overcome a racism that became deeply entrenched during the early and middle decades of the twentieth century.

With the world church's membership becoming overwhelmingly non-American and nonwhite while North America retains disproportionate financial clout and representation in world leadership, deepening fissures between the United States and the rest of the world church have become increasingly apparent in recent decades. Debate over the role of women has been the most striking issue along this line of conflict. While sentiment in favor of the ordination of women is strong if not overwhelming in North America, opposition from overseas divisions was a major factor in blocking initiatives for women's equality in the ministry at the General Conference sessions of 1990 and 1995.

Increasing diversity in theological outlook also strained the unity of the church in the second half of the twentieth century. The church's decision in 1909 to, at Ellen White's direction, develop a fully accredited medical school in Loma Linda, California, led in turn to gradual accreditation for the church's undergraduate colleges. The church's system of higher education not only became an engine of Adventist upward mobility in society and professionalization of ministry but also required faculty with the requisite graduate degrees from public universities. The result was a liberal stream of Adventism more open to change and progressive development in doctrine and more interested in engaging the wider society. The Association of Adventist Forums and its publication, Spectrum, established in the late 1960s, have given voice to liberal Adventism.

Scholarly study of Ellen White has probably been the most controversial legacy of liberal Adventism. Prophetess of Health (1976) by Ronald Numbers challenged the widespread view of White's writings as virtually infallible divine revelation by showing her usage of the works of other health reformers and that she changed her views on some topics over time. The work of Numbers and others eventually prompted even the denominational leadership to acknowledge that White's writings were far more dependent on literary sources than previously recognized.

At the same time as the church was being shaken by controversy over Ellen White, an increasingly identifiable "evangelical" movement was taking shape within its ranks. The evangelical Adventists stressed justification by faith alone; affirmed the authority of Scripture over that of Ellen White's writings; and rejected a view deeply cherished in some Adventist circles that the church's mission was to develop a "final generation" of perfectly sanctified believers, which would lead to the Second Coming. Evangelical Adventism became particularly controversial when its foremost advocate, the Australian Desmond Ford, publicly challenged the church's teachings concerning 1844 as lacking a biblical basis and as contrary to justification by faith. Ford was defrocked and scores of ministers and teachers also left denominational employment, but the issues have not gone away.

The American Seventh-Day Adventism of 2000 is, overall, arguably more "evangelical" than it was in the 1960s. Teaching in its schools and congregations tends to be more Christ-centered and more focused on basic Protestant doctrine. Evangelical books and CDs accompany Adventist-produced material on the shelves of church-operated bookstores. It is also more "liberal" in that critical scholarship has become a lasting if embattled presence, relations with other denominations are more congenial, there is greater participation in public affairs, and behavioral standards on such matters as entertainment and wearing of jewelry are less rigid and uniform.

Yet the final quarter of the twentieth century has also seen a reinvigoration of traditional Adventism and its unique identity as a "remnant" of exclusive significance in the culmination of the "great controversy." Thus American Adventism enters the twenty-first century with unresolved questions: Will it be a sect, focusing on its singular importance as the agency for God's truth in the last days, a stance favored by the traditionalists? Or will it, under evangelical and liberal influences, be more like a denomination with, to be sure, distinctive emphases, but at home among the larger family of Christian denominations?