Seventh-Day Adventism
Most people know little about the Seventh-Day Adventists
beyond that they worship on Saturdays, not Sundays. But there’s more to
this unique sect.
Adventist History
The Seventh-Day Adventist church traces its roots
to American preacher William Miller (1782–1849), a Baptist who predicted
the Second Coming would occur between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844.
Because he and his followers proclaimed Christ’s imminent advent, they
were known as "Adventists."
When Christ failed to appear, Miller reluctantly
endorsed the position of a group of his followers known as the "seventh-month
movement," who claimed Christ would return on October 22, 1844 (in the
seventh month of the Jewish calendar).
When this didn’t happen either, Miller forswore
predicting the date of the Second Coming, and his followers broke up into
a number of competing factions. Miller would have nothing to do with the
new theories his followers produced, including ones which attempted to
save part of his 1844 doctrine. He rejected this and other teachings being
generated by his former followers, including those of Ellen Gould White.
Miller had claimed, based on his interpretation
of Daniel and Revelation, that Christ would return in 1843–44 to cleanse
"the sanctuary" (Dan. 8:11–14, 9:26), which he interpreted as the earth.
After the disappointments of 1844, several of his followers proposed an
alternative theory. While walking in a cornfield on the morning of October
23, 1844, the day after Christ failed to return, Hiram Edson felt he received
a spiritual revelation that indicated that Miller had misidentified the
sanctuary. It was not the earth, but the Holy of Holies in God’s heavenly
temple. Instead of coming out of the heavenly temple to cleanse the sanctuary
of the earth, in 1844 Christ, for the first time, went into the heavenly
Holy of Holies to cleanse it instead.
Another group of Millerites was influenced by Joseph
Bates, a retired sea captain, who in 1846 and 1849 issued pamphlets insisting
that Christians observe the Jewish Sabbath—Saturday—instead of worshipping
on Sunday. This helped feed the intense anti-Catholicism of Seventh-Day
Adventism, since they blamed the Catholic Church for changing the day of
worship from Saturday to Sunday.
These two streams of thought—Christ entering the
heavenly sanctuary and the need to keep the Jewish Sabbath—were combined
by White, who claimed to have received many visions confirming these doctrines.
Together with Edson and Bates, she formed the Seventh-Day Adventist denomination,
which officially received its name in 1860.
Today the denomination reports that it has 780,000
members in the United States and 7.8 million members elsewhere, many in
Catholic countries.
Adventist Propaganda
White claimed to receive the first of several hundred
visions in December of 1844. She gained recognition in Adventist circles
as a prophetess and became the church’s leader. Over the next few decades,
she provided guidance on almost every.aspect of belief and worship, writing
over fifty books commenting on health, education, finance, and other topics.
Her works are held by her followers to be inerrant on matters of doctrine,
as is the Bible, though they are on a slightly lower plane of honor than
the Bible.
Her most important books, especially The Desire
of the Ages and The Great Controversy, are frequently reprinted
by Seventh-Day Adventist publishing houses in a variety of formats. They
often appear with different covers and titles. For example, The Great
Controversy is often marketed as America in Prophecy. They are
printed whole or in excerpted form. Sometimes Ellen Gould White’s name
appears on the cover, sometimes a less well-known form of her name appears
(e.g., E. G. White), and sometimes her name does not appear on the outside
of the book at all.
This allows Adventists to put White’s works in
the hands of non-Adventists without alerting them that they are reading
an Adventist publication until they are well into the work.
Adventist publishing houses also keep the terms
"Seventh-Day" and "Adventist" out of their names. Typical Adventist and
Adventist-related publishing houses have names including Inspiration Books,
Amazing Truth Publications, Review & Herald Publishing Association,
and Pilgrims’ Press.
This is because Adventists have always been regarded
suspiciously by Evangelicals and have often been viewed as a fanatical
cult (as have some of their offshoots, such as the Branch Davidians). Many
Evangelical leaders even have asserted—incorrectly—that Adventists
are not Christians, even though they believe in Christ’s divinity and use
a valid Trinitarian form of baptism.
Often Adventist-related publishing houses conduct
mass mailings of their literature to every home and post office box in
a community. This has been done regularly with Amazing Truth Publications’
anti-Catholic volume, National Sunday Law.
Adventist Beliefs
Seventh-Day Adventists agree with many Catholic
doctrines, including the Trinity, Christ’s divinity, the virgin birth,
the atonement, a physical resurrection of the dead, and Christ’s Second
Coming. They use a valid form of baptism. They believe in original sin
and reject the Evangelical teaching that one can never lose one’s salvation
no matter what one does (i.e., they correctly reject "once saved,
always saved").
Unfortunately, they also hold many false and strange
doctrines. Among these are the following: (a) the Catholic Church is the
Whore of Babylon; (b) the pope is the Antichrist; (c) in the last days,
Sunday worship will be "the mark of the beast"; (d) there is a future millennium
in which the devil will roam the earth while Christians are with Christ
in heaven; (e) the soul sleeps between death and resurrection; and (f)
on the last day, after a limited period of punishment in hell, the wicked
will be annihilated and cease to exist rather than be eternally damned.
(For rebuttals of many of these ideas, see the Catholic Answers tracts,
The Antichrist, The Hell There Is, Hunting the Whore of Babylon, The
Whore of Babylon, and Sabbath or Sunday?)
Many Adventists insist that, as a matter of discipline
(not doctrine), one must not eat meats considered unclean under the Mosaic
Law (many endorse total vegetarianism), and one must avoid "worldly entertainments"
(card-playing, dancing, smoking, drinking, reading non-religious books,
listening to non-religious music, watching non-religious television, going
to the movies, etc.).
Adventists also subscribe to the two Protestant
shibboleths, sola scriptura (the Bible is the sole rule of
faith) and sola fide (justification is by faith alone). Other Protestants,
especially conservative Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, often attack
Adventists on these points, claiming they do not really hold them, which
is often used as "proof" that they are "a cult." However, along the spectrum
of Protestantism (from high-church Lutherans and Anglicans to low-church
Pentecostals and Baptists), there is little agreement about the meaning
of these two phrases or about the doctrines they are supposed to represent.
Adventist Anti-Catholicism
As is clear from some of the beliefs listed above,
Adventist theology is intensely anti-Catholic. Many Catholics who do not
frequently come in contact with Adventists or their literature do not realize
just how hostile they can be toward the Church.
Trying to give others the benefit of the doubt,
Catholics may suppose that anti-Catholicism is part of Adventism’s radical
fringe. Unfortunately, this is untrue. Adventists who are moderate on Catholicism
are a minority. Anti-Catholicism characterizes the denomination because
it is embraced in White’s "divinely inspired" writings. A few illustrations
help indicate the scope of the problem:
"Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots . . .
is further declared to be ‘that great city, which reigneth over the kings
of the earth.’ Revelation 17:4–6, 18. The power that for so many centuries
maintained despotic sway over the monarchs of Christendom is Rome. The
purple and scarlet color, the gold and precious stones and pearls, vividly
picture the magnificence and more than kingly pomp affected by the haughty
see of Rome" (The Great Controversy, 338).
"It is one of the leading doctrines of Romanism
that the pope is the visible head of the universal Church of Christ . .
. and has been declared infallible. He demands the homage of all men. The
same claim urged by Satan in the wilderness of temptation is still urged
by him [Satan] through the Church of Rome, and vast numbers are ready to
yield him homage" (ibid., 48).
"Marvelous in her shrewdness and cunning is the
Roman Church. She can read what is to be. She bides her time, seeing that
the Protestant churches are paying her homage in their acceptance of the
false Sabbath. . . . And let it be remembered, it is the boast of Rome
that she never changes. The principles of Gregory VII and Innocent III
are still the principles of the Roman Catholic Church. And has she but
the power, she would put them in practice with as much vigor now as in
past centuries. . . . Rome is aiming to reestablish her power, to recover
her lost supremacy" (ibid., 507–8).
"God’s word has given warning of the impending
danger; let this be unheeded, and the Protestant world will learn what
the purposes of Rome really are, only when it is too late to escape the
snare. She is silently growing into power. Her doctrines are exerting their
influence in legislative halls, in the churches, and in the hearts of men.
She is piling up her lofty and massive structures, in the secret recesses
of which her former persecutions will be1
repeated. Stealthily and unsuspectedly she is
strengthening her forces to further her own ends when the time shall come
for her to strike. All that she desires is vantage ground, and this is
already being given her. We shall soon see and shall feel what the purpose
of the Roman element is. Whoever believe and obey the word of God will
thereby incur reproach and persecution" ( ibid., 508–9).
Strong stuff! Unfortunately, most Adventists believe
this. Bear in mind that these quotes are not taken from an obscure work
of White’s that nobody ever reads. They are from what is probably her single
most popular volume, The Great Controversy.
Adventist Eschatology
Seventh-Day Adventism is basically consumed with
the concept of the last days. It was formed from the remnants of the Millerite
movement, which was created to await the world’s end. In White’s end times
view, the Jewish Sabbath and the Catholic Church play prominent roles.
According to her, the papacy is the seven-headed
beast from the sea in Revelation 13:1–10. Accompanying this beast is a
lamb-like beast from the earth (Rev. 13:11–18). The latter causes the world
to worship the former and has an image made of it. White proclaimed that
the second beast is the United States (The Great Controversy, 387–8),
and that it will force people to worship the papacy by "enforcing some
observance which shall be an act of homage to the papacy" (ibid., 389).
This observance, she says, is Sunday worship rather than Saturday worship.
White claims that the papacy changed the day of
worship from Saturday to Sunday, making this change a mark of its authority.
In her view, there will come a time when the United States will establish
a "national Sunday law" and compel its citizens to worship on Sunday and
thus take the mark of the beast. It will not compel them to become Catholics,
but to join a Protestant state-church that is an "image" of the papacy,
and thus, "the image of the beast" (ibid., 382–96).
Seventh-Day Adventism cannot change its views on
the Catholic Church being the Whore of Babylon without admitting that it
was wrong on Sunday worship. It cannot admit that Sunday worship is not
the mark of the beast without changing its views on the Jewish Sabbath.
Seventh-Day Adventism cannot cease to be anti-Catholic without ceasing
to be Seventh-Day Adventism.
There is a "moderate" wing of Adventism that is
more open to Catholics as individuals (though still retaining White’s views
concerning the papacy). In fact, White was willing to concede that—in the
here and now (before the end times)—some Catholics are saved. She wrote
that "there are now true Christians in every church, not excepting the
Roman Catholic communion, who honestly believe that Sunday is the Sabbath
of divine appointment. God accepts their sincerity of purpose and their
integrity before him. But when Sunday observance shall be enforced by law,
and the world shall be enlightened concerning the obligation of the true
Sabbath, then whoever shall transgress the command of God, to obey a precept
which has no higher authority than Rome, will thereby honor popery above
God" (ibid., 395).
Unfortunately, this one tolerant statement is embedded
in hundreds of hostile statements. While this.aspect of her teaching can
be played up by her more moderate followers, it is difficult for them to
do so, because the whole Adventist milieu in which they exist is anti-Catholic.
The group is an eschatology sect, and its central eschatological teaching,
other than Christ’s Second Coming, is that the Second Coming will be preceded
by a period in which the papacy will enforce Sunday worship on the world.
Everyone who does not accept the papacy’s Sunday worship will be killed;
and everyone who does accept the papacy’s Sunday worship will be destroyed
by God.
By virtue of their valid baptism, and their belief
in Christ’s divinity and in the doctrine of the Trinity, Seventh-Day Adventists
are both ontologically and theologically Christians. But Christians, once
separated from the Church our Lord founded, are susceptible to being "tossed
to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine" (Eph. 4:14).
NIHIL OBSTAT:
I have concluded that the materials
presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004
IMPRIMATUR:
In accord with 1983 CIC 827
permission to publish this work is hereby granted.
+Robert H. Brom, Bishop of San Diego, August 10, 2004
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