The Eschatological Day of Atonement
Stephen Terry
Commentary for the December 7, 2013
Sabbath School Lesson
“He said to me, ‘It will take 2,300 evenings and mornings; then the
sanctuary will be reconsecrated.’” Daniel 8:14, NIV
At the first
Advent of Jesus, also known as The Incarnation, theologians were in great
disarray over the Eschaton. Some like the Pharisees and Zealots conflated the
first advent of the Messiah and the Eschaton and that it would establish a
worldwide dominion of Judaism from Jerusalem. They saw the Messiah as a
conquering King. They found it difficult to see in the poverty-stricken, humble
carpenter’s Son any sort of Deliverer as it did not line up with their
theology. The Gospel of Matthew was written primarily to counter that erroneous
theology. According to tradition, Matthew was slain not long after he wrote his
Gospel.[i]
People are not tolerant of challenges to their theology, especially if that
theology is used to prop up an entity endowed with wealth and power. There were
those who supported other perspectives on the Eschaton, such as the Essenes.
However, without wealth and power, since they had disavowed them,[ii]
they were little more than a historical subtext, not even a footnote to the
four Gospels. Were it not for their description by Josephus,[iii]
and the later discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,[iv]
we would know very little about them.
Throughout
history, dissenters have arisen, challenged established theology, and suffered
for it. Jerome, Jan Hus,[v]
Wycliffe,[vi]
and so many others have paid the price of martyrdom for daring to believe that
the church must progress in its understanding. Martin Luther, a dissident
Catholic cleric, challenged the most imposing ecclesiastical edifice of his day
when he nailed ninety-five theses, conclusions from his reasoned theology, to
the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg on All Hallows Eve in 1517.[vii]
Luther felt compelled to respond to the fund raising efforts of the established
church which sold indulgences, allowing people to escape Purgatory on the basis
of their financial contributions to the church. Feeling its finances and power
threatened, the church responded accordingly and summoned Luther to a trial, where
they demanded he recant. He refused and was whisked into protective exile by
sympathetic supporters. Had this not happened, he very probably would have been
defrocked, excommunicated and martyred. In the end, many embraced the
alternative theology of Luther and subsequent reformers. Other sects and
denominations have also arisen from these reformers when their churches became
more invested in protecting power and privilege than in the progressive advance
in theological understanding that those who founded their denominations
represented.
Forgetting
that their own founders were defrocked and disfellowshipped, they do the same
to those who try to lead them forward. We came very close to such an event
within the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1888.[viii]
The message of righteousness by faith alone was advanced by Alonzo T. Jones and
Earl J. Waggoner. Many at that meeting felt that they were engaging in heresy
and had not the denominational founder, Ellen White, intervened, they may have
been pushed from any positions of authority. As time often does, as it did with
Luther, it allowed for the less heated consideration of what Jones and Waggoner
had presented and the eventual incorporation of righteousness by faith alone as
a mainstream theological current within the denomination. However, the
experience illustrates the difficulty of theological growth and progression
when theology becomes entrenched behind a formidable power structure.
It is the
privilege of those in power to assert that there is no need to re-examine a
previous theological consensus. If the church is growing, if the financial
coffers continue to fill as in the past with some increase each year, there is
little incentive for change. Why threaten the golden stream that has ensconced
generations of some families in positions of power and privilege? Isn’t the
prosperity of the church adequate proof that God is blessing and that we are on
the right track theologically? Is there more of Prosperity Theology[ix]
in our thinking than we care to admit? If we place the prosperity of the
denomination above theological advancement, then perhaps it is so.
What does
all of this have to do with the topic of this week’s lesson? Simply this, we
have been at a crossroads over the theological understanding of issues
surrounding the concept of the Investigative Judgment for approximately half a
century now. That dissonance is highlighted by the chart inserted into this
week’s lesson in the Lesson Quarterly. That chart demonstrates equivalencies
between Daniel, chapters seven and eight. Those equivalencies regarding the
various beasts and symbols are commonly understood. However, the logical
sequence breaks down when the chart implies the same relationship between
“judgment” and “cleansing.” They are simply not the same.
When we
attempt such semantic gyrations, we should admit that there might be a problem
with our perspective. Because we are heavily invested in supporting the
positions of the founders, or at least what we believe their positions were, we
find it hard to admit that they may have made mistakes in their theology. Was
Hiram Edson possibly mistaken in his purported vision? Was Ellen White’s
support of that vision erroneous? Many within the denomination will not even
allow those questions to be aired. Amid cries of “Heresy!” and “Apostasy!”
those who would study such questions find themselves ostracized from mainstream
fellowship, and even defrocked.[x]
At the heart
of this controversy is an understanding of the role of Ellen White in our
theological perspective. Those who would maintain that her writings are inerrant
would have difficulty accepting that she may have been mistaken in her theology
and could have possibly had room for further growth in understanding. They
perhaps fail to understand the actual role of a prophetically inspired person
in spite of Ellen White’s attempts to make clear that a prophet is not
inerrant.
We have an
excellent dissertation on this topic in her introduction to her book, “The
Great Controversy.” She makes clear that God does not dictate word-for-word
what He wants to communicate but does so utilizing the limited perspective of
His representative. In her personal correspondence to her husband, she also
made clear that she did not believe herself inerrant. She wrote, “I do not
claim infallibility, or even perfection of Christian character. I am not free
from mistakes and errors in my life.”[xi]
As a
denomination, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has had to be dragged kicking
and screaming into change. Whether we consider the Merikay McLeod case
regarding equal pay for women in the 1970s or the current theological dust up
over women’s ordination, we are often on the side of oppression and
discrimination instead of compassion, understanding and liberation. Rather than
freeing others from the effects of sin, we too often prefer to keep them bound
by it and assert it is their God ordained role in life to submit to such.
When a woman
gives birth, I am not aware of any man who asserts that a woman should not be
allowed to have pain relief, even though the Bible says she should bear
children in pain.[xii]
But when there is even a hint that the Bible might say the man should be in
charge,[xiii]
any attempt to alleviate that effect of sin is met with stern opposition. Why?
Could it be that one does not threaten power and privilege but the other does?
Maybe we
need to ask ourselves how much of that power and privilege is being played out
in the controversy over the Investigative Judgment and the Heavenly Sanctuary?
If we admit that there is a possibility that we should incorporate some of the
findings produced as a result of Glacier View[xiv]
will it hurt the income of the church? Perhaps it will, as those who have
profited from the status quo express
their displeasure at the upsetting of the apple cart by withholding offerings. But
if the flow of finances is the arbiter of what we can do theologically, aren’t
we in trouble already? If right theology is determined by church membership
size, the number of institutions established worldwide, or the amount of money
flowing through the church’s offering bins, then Catholicism’s heavenly
endorsements are better than ours.
When James
and Ellen White founded the denomination, they endured countless privations.
Few today would endure the scarcity of food, the frequent illnesses, the
primitive travel conditions that they did, often putting their meager finances
into the work rather than caring for their own needs. They did this because
they were moving truth forward, bringing a new theological perspective to the
world. Have we somehow dropped the torch along the way? How did we evolve from
a church, charting new frontiers of understanding, to an organization only
invested in preserving what was discovered almost two centuries ago? Maybe it
is time we became a church that encourages dialectic instead of suppressing it.
